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By Root 854 0

April evening in 1917 for the Capitol to call on Congress to declare war on Germany. He made the twelve-minute journey without his family, who had gone on ahead, and entered the packed House of Representatives to enthusiastic applause. He began his speech before the joint session of Congress in a quiet, conversational tone. He dryly listed the events that had transpired since the United States had severed diplomatic relations with Germany. He denounced German submarine warfare, which had resulted in the sinking of American cargo ships, as an attack against all humanity. He said that he had once thought armed neutrality would work, but had come to see that it was ineffectual.

“There is,” Wilson said, “one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our Nation and our people to be ignored or violated.”

Chief Justice Edward Douglas White, a veteran of the Civil War who had fought on the Confederate side, was sitting with the other members of the Supreme Court in the front of the Speaker’s stand, and he interrupted with applause that became contagious, spread through the assembly, and soon thundered throughout the chamber.

“With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking,” Wilson went on,and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and the people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it; and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.

Justice White, a staunch segregationist who liked to regale listeners with tales of his personal war heroics that were too fantastic to be credible, at this point let out what to many who were in the chamber sounded like a Rebel yell. The crowd responded and rose to its feet in whoops and cheers. Wilson, who in 1916 had campaigned for reelection on the slogan “he kept us out of the war,” had reversed himself. He had called on the Congress to commit United States troops to the brutal trench warfare and industrial slaughter that was tearing Europe apart and had already consumed the lives of millions of young men. He had done so although America was a fractious, divided nation that remained deeply skeptical about involving itself in Europe’s self-slaughter. The country of one hundred million had 14.5 million people born outside the United States, including 2.5 million born in Germany, and hostility toward England, especially among nationalistic German and Irish immigrants, ran deep. Pacifism, a legacy of the costly fratricide of the Civil War, was championed by popular orators such as William Jennings Bryan and remained widespread. Many Americans who lived in remote, agricultural communities were deeply isolationist, distrustful of government, and ill informed about world affairs. This resistance would have to be overcome.

The decision to go to war, however, was quickly ratified. The Senate voted 82 to 6 for war. The House voted 373 to 50. War was declared on April 6, four days after Wilson’s thirty-six minute address.

World War I ushered in the modern era. The war bequeathed industrial killing—wars fought with machines and sustained by industrial production—as well as vast wartime bureaucracies, which could for the first time administer and organize impersonal mass slaughter over months and years that left hundreds or thousands dead in an instant, many of whom never saw their attackers. Civil War battles rarely lasted more than two or three days. Battles in the new age of industrial warfare could rage for weeks and months with a steady flow of new munitions, mass-produced supplies, and mechanized