Mark Nicko E.

Paquibot January 15, 2019

History 53 – A

1. Why was the U.S involved in World War 1?

When World War I erupted in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United
States, a position that the vast majority of Americans favored. Britain, however, was one of America’s
closest trading partners, and tension soon arose between the United States and Germany over the
latter’s attempted quarantine of the British Isles. Several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or
sunk by German mines, and in February 1915 Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all
ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain. One month later, Germany
announced that a German cruiser had sunk the William P. Frye, a private American vessel. President
Wilson was outraged, but the German government apologized and called the attack an unfortunate
mistake.

On May 7, the British-owned Lusitania ocean liner was torpedoed without warning just off the coast
of Ireland. Of the 1,959 passengers, 1,198 were killed, including 128 Americans. The German
government maintained that the Lusitania was carrying munitions, but the U.S. demanded reparations
and an end to German attacks on unarmed passenger and merchant ships. In August, Germany pledged
to see to the safety of passengers before sinking unarmed vessels, but in November sunk an Italian liner
without warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. With these attacks, public opinion in the
United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany.

In 1917, Germany, determined to win its war of attrition against the Allies, announced the
resumption of unrestricted warfare in war-zone waters. Three days later, the United States broke
diplomatic relations with Germany, and just hours after that the American liner Housatonic was sunk by
a German U-boat. On February 22, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to
make the United States ready for war. In late March, Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships, and
on April 2 President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against
Germany. Four days later, his request was granted.

On June 26, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops landed in France to begin training for combat. After
four years of bloody stalemate along the western front, the entrance of America’s well-supplied forces
into the conflict marked a major turning point in the war and helped the Allies to victory. When the war
finally ended, on November 11, 1918, more than two million American soldiers had served on the
battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives. 1

1
1917 America enters world war I. (2010, February 9). Retrieved January 12, 2019, from
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/america-enters-world-war-i.

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 2. What were the effects of World War 1?

2.1 Woodrow Wilson and America’s liberal internationalism — After winning re-election on a
promise to stay out of the war, Wilson took the doughboys in, effectively launching a new chapter in
U.S. foreign policy that lasts, with variations, to the present day. Sure, the League of Nations was
spurned by the Senate and ended up being a toothless organization that failed to stop World War II, but
the notion that European affairs can threaten the United States took hold, as did the idea of collective
security — which led directly to the creation of the United Nations at the end of WWII.

2.2 1930s Germany — Wilson’s insistence on an end to Prussian militarism meant that Germany’s
socialist government, and not the military dictatorship, was associated with the armistice, which did not
exactly help the Weimar moderates’ reputation and helped fuel the ‘stab in the back’ meme that
simmered for years in Germany. That, coupled with France and the United Kingdom’s insistence that
Germany pay dearly for the war, helped ensure that the Great War was not, in fact, the war to end all
wars.

2.3 All those “little countries” — Wilson loved national self-determination. He loved it so much he
made it one of his 14 Points. And so the American entry into WWI can also be seen as the final nail in the
coffin of Europe’s land empires. Austria-Hungary? Auf wiedersehen. That transformed the map of
Europe and created a quiltwork of smaller, ethnic/nationality-based countries out of the Hapsburg ruins,
like Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. (Self-determination also set the stage for U.S. animosity
toward Europe’s colonial empires, with consequences like the Britain’s Suez Canal debacle decades
later.)

2.4 The importance of oil — Lord Curzon, days after the Armistice, noted that the “Allies floated to
victory on a flood of oil.” That crude was mostly American — as were the trucks that gave Allied armies
an edge over their rail- and foot-bound Central Power rivals. (That same motorized edge would again
pay off in WWII, and help power the Red Army’s eastward march.) U.S. preoccupation with securing an
ample supply of oil for itself and its friends was a key theme after the war — and continues to this day
with the 5th Fleet’s patrolling of the Persian Gulf.

2.5 America started spy-hunting — Two months after the United States entered the war, Congress
passed the Espionage Act, formally criminalizing spying, sharing national security information, or
hampering U.S. war efforts on behalf of a foreign power. The following year, Congress cracked down on
spying further with the Sedition Act, which outlined harsh penalties for a broad array of subversive acts,
from spying to interfering in war efforts, to even insulting the U.S. government or military. Congress
repealed the Sedition Act in 1921, but the federal government wielded the Espionage Act as a blunt legal
instrument to crackdown on socialists, anti-war activists, and later “suspected communists” during the
Cold War’s Red Scare. The act remains in place to this day (it even cropped up this year, when some
constitutional experts warned President Donald Trump could, in theory, pursue criminal charges against
journalists and government leakers under the law). 2

2.6 It foreshadowed the U.S.-Soviet Cold War Face-Off — While the United States was still
wrapping up World War I, Wilson decided U.S. troops needed to intervene in another part of Europe:
Russia. While war was raging on the western front, Wilson deployed two contingents totalling some
2
Tamkin, E., & Gramer, R. (2017, April 6). 7 ways u.s. entry into ww1 changed the world. Retrieved
January 12, 2019, from https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/06/7-ways-u-s-entry-into-wwi-changed-the-world/

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11,000 U.S. troops to northern Russia to shore up imperialist “White Russian” forces fighting Soviet
revolutionaries. It was the first and only time U.S. troops deployed to Russian soil. During their 19 month
stint in the harsh Russian north, some 420 American soldiers died. It’s an oft-forgotten chapter of
American history, but the victorious communist forces didn’t forget. And it didn’t exactly get U.S.-Soviet
relations off to a great start, foreshadowing the U.S.-Soviet standoff that defined the post-World War II
order.

2.7 The start of U.S. global naval supremacy — Washington was still on the sidelines as Britain’s and
Germany’s “steel castles” duked it out in big naval battles like Jutland. But Wilson knew that naval
power was key to American security. The 1916 naval bill, and U.S. entry into the fight against German U-
boats, laid the groundwork for an unmatched U.S. naval supremacy the world still sees today. (When
warned in 1916 building a big navy could anger seafaring power Britain, Wilson replied “Let us build a
navy bigger than her’s and do what we please!” So they did just that.) 3

3. What was the League of Nations?

League of Nations, an organization for international cooperation established on January 10, 1920, at
the initiative of the victorious Allied Powers at the end of World War I.
The terrible losses of World War I produced, as years went by and peace seemed no nearer, an ever
growing public demand that some method be found to prevent the renewal of the suffering and
destruction which were now seen to be an inescapable part of modern war. So great was the force of
this demand that within a few weeks after the opening of the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919,
unanimous agreement had been reached on the text of the Covenant of the League of Nations.
Although the League was unable to fulfill the hopes of its founders, its creation was an event of decisive
importance in the history of international relations.

The central, basic idea of the movement was that aggressive war is a crime not only against the
immediate victim but against the whole human community. Accordingly it is the right and duty of all
states to join in preventing it; if it is certain that they will so act, no aggression is likely to take place.
Such affirmations might be found in the writings of philosophers or moralists but had never before
emerged onto the plane of practical politics. Statesmen and lawyers alike held and acted on the view
that there was no natural or supreme law by which the rights of  sovereignstates, including that of
making war as and when they chose, could be judged or limited. Many of the attributes of the League of
Nations were developed from existing institutions or from time-honoured proposals for the reform of
previous diplomatic methods. However, the premise of collective security was, for practical purposes, a
new concept engendered by the unprecedented pressures of World War I. 4

3
Tamkin, E., & Gramer, R. (2017, April 6). 7 ways u.s. entry into ww1 changed the world. Retrieved
January 12, 2019, from https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/06/7-ways-u-s-entry-into-wwi-changed-the-world/

4
league of nations. (n.d.). Retrieved January 12, 2019, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/League-of-
Nations

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Bibliography

1917 America enters world war I. (2010, February 9). Retrieved January 12, 2019, from
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/america-enters-world-war-i.

league of nations. (n.d.). Retrieved January 12, 2019, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/League-of-

Nations

Tamkin, E., & Gramer, R. (2017, April 6). 7 ways u.s. entry into ww1 changed the world. Retrieved January 12,
2019, from https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/06/7-ways-u-s-entry-into-wwi-changed-the-world/