This Day in History: U.S. Enters World War I April 6, 1917

The Library of Congress: American Memory ^ | April 6, 2008

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Company I, 102nd Infantry, 2b Division, American Expeditionary Forces,
El Juan Studio, photographer, circa 1919.


Seicheprey the scene of the first American Battle April 20, 1918

On April 6, 1917, the United States formally declared war against Germany and entered the conflict in Europe. Fighting since the summer of 1914, Britain, France, and Russia welcomed news that American troops and supplies would be directed toward the Allied war effort.

Under the command of Major General John J. Pershing, over two million U.S. troops fought on battlefields in France.



"I'm Hitting the Trail to Normandy So Kiss Me Good-bye,"
Charles A. Snyder, words and music, 1917.

For three years, President Woodrow Wilson strove to maintain American neutrality. Anti-war sentiment ran across the political spectrum. Middle class reformers like Jane Addams as well as radicals like Emma Goldman opposed U.S. involvement in the World War.

Although he later supported the war effort, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, resigned over the Administration's failure to remain neutral. However, a series of incidents, including the loss of 128 American lives when German submarines sank the Lusitania, transformed public opinion. On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war, warning that "the world must be made safe for democracy."

The war mobilization effort placed tremendous demands on both American military and civilian populations. In a wartime speech, Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, noted that the U.S. work force was fully committed to victory:

"The World War in which we are engaged in is on such a tremendous scale that we must readjust practically the whole nation's social and economic structure from a peace to a war basis. It devolves upon liberty-loving citizens, and particularly the workers of this country, to see to it that the spirit and the methods of democracy are maintained within our own country while we are engaged in a war to establish them in international relations…

The workers have a part in this war equal with the soldiers and sailors on the ships and in the trenches…They are demonstrating their appreciation and loyalty by war work, by loaning their savings, and by the supreme sacrifice. Labor will do its part in every demand the war makes. Our republic, the freedom of the world, progress, and civilization hang in the balance. We dare not fail. We will win."

American participation in the World War permanently transformed the nation. In order to meet increased demands for goods, the federal government expanded dramatically, taking an unprecedented role in guiding the economy.

Active supporters of the war to preserve democracy, women made a step towards political equality when the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised them shortly after the war. Meanwhile, military service and wartime jobs beckoned African Americans northward. In what is known as the Great Migration, thousands of African Americans left the South and its systems of oppression to face new challenges in Northern cities.



"For Every Fighter a Woman Worker; Y.W.C.A.: Back Our Second Line of Defence"

Ernest Hamlin Baker, artist, 1918

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John J. Pershing, a military commander whose brilliant career earned him the title General of the Armies of the United States, died on July 15, 1948. The first general awarded the title since George Washington, Pershing was given a hero's burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Pershing was born in Laclede, Missouri, on September 13, 1860, the first of six children. His mother taught him at home, helping to inspire in him a love of learning. He realized his dream of attaining a formal college education when he won a scholarship to the U.S. Military Academy.

After graduating from West Point in 1886, Pershing was given command of the 6th Cavalry Regiment in the West, where he participated in the Apache and Sioux campaigns. He was promoted to first lieutenant of the 10th Cavalry Regiment in Montana, one of several segregated regiments formed after passage of an 1866 law authorizing the U.S. Army to form cavalry and infantry regiments of black soldiers. Reflecting the racial prejudices of the era, the law also stipulated that the units be commanded by white officers. Pershing expressed his admiration for the black soldiers under his command forcefully and often, earning for himself the honorary nickname of "Black Jack."

General John J. Pershing

[Petronius]

This should be a national day of mourning. Srdja Trifkovic nailed it in an article in Chronicles a few years ago:

"In reality the Great War was the most important event in the past two thousand years and arguably the most tragic event in all of history. It marked the end of an often unjust but on the whole decent world, and opened the floodgates of hell: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Tito, and countless lesser demons were all its heirs and beneficiaries.

"To have a hint of its human cost it is necessary to walk through some of the cemeteries dotting the gently rolling hills of Picardy and to visit the ossuary at Douaumont with the remains of 130,000 unknown French and German soldiers who fell on the battlefields of Verdun. The ossuary is some 500 feet long and inside it there are 18 alcoves, each containing a pair of tombs covering a vault with six hundred and thirty cubic feet of bones.

"To understand its cultural cost it is only necessary to look around us. As an Islamic deluge threatens to replace rapidly dying Europeans within a century, as America continues its futile quest for global dominance and its cultural suicide at home, it seems incredible that a mere century ago, the European, Christian world dominated the planet. The suicide of 1914 was a catastrophe rooted in an imperial hubris of neoconservative proportions.

"It was not an unintended accident, however: its direct cause was the crisis between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. The shots fired in Sarajevo were seen in Vienna as an opportunity to settle the scores with a small but tough and increasingly assertive adversary while there was still time to do so. With a blank check hastily granted from Berlin, the Monarchy presented Serbia with an ultimatum that contained extravagant demands, and that was not meant to be accepted: Austria-Hungary willed the war, and rushed into it, fuelled by a heady brew of crude Serbophobia that was renewed with gusto in the 1990s. The Monarchy activated the system of alliances and ignited the continent.

"Even before Sarajevo Vienna had sought German support for a "preventive" war against Serbia and it presented the forthcoming conflict as a test of strength with a wider continental significance. The popular Viennese jingle of August 1914, Alle Serben mussen sterben, indicated that the Central Powers' agenda was dictated for once from Vienna something that Bismarck would never have countenanced.

President Wilson's Fourteen Points—the device that was allegedly meant to end the war in early 1918 espoused the principle of self-determination. It threw a revolutionary doctrine at an already exhausted Europe, a doctrine almost on par with Bolshevism in its destabilizing effect. It unleashed competing aspirations among the smaller nations of Central Europe and the Balkans that not only hastened the collapse of transnational empires, but also gave rise to a host of intractable ethnic conflicts and territorial disputes that remain unresolved to this day. But being a good liberal, Wilson did not allow realities on the ground to get in the way of his creativity. His concepts of an "enlarging democracy" and "collective security" signaled the birth of a view of America's role in world affairs which has created and is still creating endless problems for both America and the world. It is Wilson speaking through President George W. Bush who declared, only a week ago, that America not only "created the conditions in which new democracies could flourish" but "also provided inspiration for oppressed peoples."

Two decades after Wilson, burdened by Clemenceau's untenable revenge of Versailles, Europe staggered into a belated Round Two of self-destruction. Before 1939 it was badly wounded; after 1945 mortally so. The result is a civilization that is aborting and birth-controlling itself to death, that is morally bankrupt, culturally spent, and spiritually comatose. We are living if life it is the consequences of what had ended on that November morning at Compiegne."

[ExGeeEye]

To what extent do you consider it possilbe that the Progressive Woodrow Wilson changed his mind about the war when Progressive elements in Russia overthrew the Tsar in February 1917?

At that point, joining GB and France against Germany could be helpful to the new progressive elements in an historically feudal monarchy.

[jamaksin]

It seems that the sense of an "Elephant in the Room" actions and subsequent "unintended" results get lost in the passage of time.

For example, consider as a direct result of madates from Versailles that French troops remained on German soil until late 1923, or the burden of repartitions on the German economy and its people, ...

What followed led to the Weimar Republic falling and the little corporal's rise ...

Fast forward a bit ... WWII starts when Poland is invaded (from the East and the West). At the end of WWII, who "won" - or better, was Poland free?

Was Yalta another Versailles?

[RoadTest]

WW I was created in order to form a world government, which turned out to be the League of Nations, which turned out a flop.

WW II was created to form a world government, which became The United Nations, which is a joke.

But as you can see, the creators of all these things are not easily discouraged. Stay tuned.

[TalBlack]

“The first general awarded the title since George Washington, “

I could swear Grant was given the title or was that just an honor?