Abstract
On the outbreak of war in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made his position clear: ‘The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name … we must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as preference of one party to the struggle before another.’2
You must not speak of us … as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the people of the United States … there are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and of interests. (President Wilson to King George V, 1981)1
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Notes and References
A.S. Link (ed.), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. I (Princeton University Press, 1969) pp. 393–4.
Elting E. Morison (ed.), The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, Vol. 8 (Harvard University Press, 1951–4) pp. 829–30.
Charles Seymour (ed.), The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, Vol. I (Houghton Mifflin, 1926) p. 296.
Wilson, speech in Philadelphia, 10 May 1915; Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight (Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 288.
S. Gwynne (ed.), The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, Vol. II (Constable, 1929) pp. 202, 372.
Lloyd George, War Memoirs (Odhams, 1938) p. 397.
Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years Vol. 2 (1925) pp. 85, 107.
R. Lansing, War Memoirs (Bobbs-Menill, 1935) p. 172.
Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed (Macmillan, 1983) p. 334.
Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram (Constable, 1959) pp. 175–6.
W.S. Churchill, The World Crisis (Odhams, 1938) p. 1337.
J.M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Macmillan, 1920) p. 35.
George C. Marshall, Memoirs of My Services in the World War (Houghton Mifflin, 1976) pp. 216–23.
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House, 1987) pp. 227–8.
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© 1996 Sir Robin Renwick
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Renwick, R. (1996). ‘You must not speak of us as cousins’. In: Fighting with Allies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379824_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379824_2
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