Abstract
In the summer of 1914, decades of growing tension over the balance of power in world politics provoked the major European states to mobilize massive armies and march them into battle across the globe. Caught up in the moment, numerous men and women expressed enthusiasm about the outbreak of the conflict. Newspaper editors, generals, and statesmen wrote patriotic articles and gave speeches about the justness of their nations’ decisions to go to war. Hearing the call to arms, young men, fresh from civilian life, signed up to partake in what they perceived as an opportunity to obtain honor for themselves and their countries. Some of the newly minted soldiers walked or rode into battle wearing breastplates and horsehair plumes in their helmets—uniforms of a bygone era. Many of them expected to fight in a war similar to engagements of the past and assumed that the conflict would end in a matter of weeks or, at the most, several months. “It was the glamour of it all,” Len Whitehead recalled years later about his older brother’s decision to join the British Army. “ [N] obody sort of gave a second thought that they might never come back.”1
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Notes
Hew Strachan, The Outbreak of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 132–40;
Richard Van Emden and Steve Humphries, All Quiet on the Home Front: An Oral History of Life in Britain during the First World War (London: Headline Book Publishing, 2003), 9–10;
John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 75.
Robert Lansing, War Memoirs of Robert Lansing (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1970), 35.
Arthur Link, Wilson the Diplomatist: A Look as His Major Foreign Policies (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Paperbacks, 1957), 3–5;
Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace (Berkley: University of California Press, 1991), 133;
H. W. Brands, Woodrow Wilson (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), 41–42.
H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1934).
For arguments that emphasize the influence of economics on Wilson’s foreign policy, see Charles Beard, The Devil Theory of War: An Inquiry into the Nature of History and the Possibility of Keeping out of War (New York: Greenwood, 1977);
Charles Callan Tansill, America Goes to War (New York: Little, Brown, 1963 reprint);
Sidney Bell, Righteous Conquest: Woodrow Wilson and the Evolution of New Diplomacy (New York: Kennikat, 1972);
William Diamond, The Economic Thought of Woodrow Wilson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943);
Jeffrey J. Safford, Wilsonian Maritime Diplomacy, 1913–1921 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978);
William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988);
Carl P. Parrini, Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy 1916–1923 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969);
Ross Gregory, The Origins of American Intervention in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971);
John W. Coogan, The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights, 1899–1915 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).
For arguments by historians who assert that Wilson’s foreign policy was driven by the visionary goal of collective security and a desire to protect and spread democracy around the globe, see Arthur Link, Wilson: The Struggle for Neu trality, 1914–1915 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960);
Kendrick A. Clements, The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992);
John Milton Cooper Jr., Woodrow Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009);
Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992);
Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory andPractice of Liberal Internationalism during World War I (New York: Scholarly Resources, 1991);
George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy: 1900–1950 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951);
Robert W. Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality 1914–1917 (University of Virginia Press, 2007).
For works that focus on national security, see Ross A. Kennedy, The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and Security (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009); and
Daniel M. Smith, The Great Departure: The United States and World War I, 1914–1920 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965).
Historians including Robert Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1919 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Kennedy, The Will to Believe; Coogan, The End of Neutrality; Bell, Righteous Conquest; and Tansill, America Goes to War, assert that Wilson was never neutral or at best made no effort to remain neutral once the war began.
Woodrow Wilson to Associated Press, April 20, 1915, Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 33: 37–41.
Wilson’s speech at the Annual Banquet of the New York Economic Club, May 23, 1912, Ray Stannard Baker, ed., The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925), 471; Diamond, The Economic Thought of Woodrow Wilson, 132–13; Safford, Wilsonian Maritime Diplomacy, 1913–1921,18–20.
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© 2013 M. Ryan Floyd
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Floyd, M.R. (2013). Introduction. In: Abandoning American Neutrality. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137334121_1
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