Now Playing
Safe for Democracy: America's Decision to Enter the War
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In April 1917, Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into the First World War — but the path from neutrality to war had been paved by U-boats, economic entanglement, and a secret telegram that shocked the nation. This chapter traces the full arc of American entry and why Wilson's soaring idealism set the terms not just for the war, but for the peace.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
When the United States entered the First World War in April nineteen seventeen, it didn't just add another army to the Allied side. It changed the entire calculus of the war.
When the war began in the summer of nineteen fourteen, President Woodrow Wilson declared American neutrality almost immediately. The United States was a nation of immigrants, many of them from the very countries now at war with each other.
We covered the naval war in some detail in an earlier episode, but it's worth tracing how that war at sea fed directly into American politics. Germany's submarine campaign was built on a simple logic.
Through nineteen fifteen and nineteen sixteen, Wilson worked to keep America out of the war while simultaneously pressuring both sides to accept a negotiated peace. He ran for re-election in nineteen sixteen on the implicit promise that he'd kept the country out of the fighting.
On April second, nineteen seventeen, Woodrow Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress. His speech is one of the most consequential in American history, not because of its rhetoric alone, but because of what it set in motion.
In April nineteen seventeen, the United States had a standing army of around one hundred and twenty-eight thousand men. That was not a force capable of making a decisive contribution to a war being fought by armies in the millions.
Pershing faced an immediate and contentious dispute with the Allied command. The French and British were desperate for American troops.
The first American troops began arriving in France in the summer of nineteen seventeen. Their appearance generated enormous enthusiasm from French and British civilians, and considerable anxiety among German commanders.
In March nineteen eighteen, Germany launched its great gamble. With Russia knocked out of the war the previous year, German commanders transferred divisions from the Eastern Front and threw everything into a massive offensive on the Western Front.
By August nineteen eighteen, the tide had turned. The Allied counteroffensive, what historians call the Hundred Days Offensive, pushed German forces back across France.
The bigger issue is what this moment tells us about how wars expand. The United States had spent nearly three years insisting it could stay out of a European conflict.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.