enate Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry (the Nye Committee) "of the mid-Thirties gave great vogue to the argument that the United States was pushed into World War I by greedy businessmen." During the early months of the war, according to Tansill, Great Britain and France faced "a glaring deficiency in explosive artillery and in high explosive shells." As the fighting intensified, that dependence grew. According to Ferrell, total American trade with the Allies increased between 1914 and 1916 from $754 million to $2.7 billion. As a result of the British blockade of Germany, American trade to Germany sharply declined. The flood of more than one billion dollars' worth of Allied war orders filled American arms factories and shipyards, swelled American profits and created a wartime boom. Ferrell said that the "war hastened London's decline as the world's financial center, its place taken by New York."
In the 1930s, the Nye Committee and revisionist authors stressed the importance of these economic factors as the primary cause of America's entry into the war. Most subsequent historians have disagreed. However, Tansill in 1938 said that "there is not the slightest evidence that [in deciding to go to war] the President gave any heed to demands by 'big business' that America intervened to save investments that were threatened by possible Allied defeat," but he acknowledged "American economic solidarity with the Allies." DeWeerd said that "war orders . . . caused us to favor Britain and France . . . but one aspect of the complex process of how the United States entered World War I."
In his address to Congress on April 2, 1917 asking for a declaration of war against Germany, Wilson said:
right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight
for the things we have always carried nearest to our
our hearts --for democracy, for the right of those who
submit to authority to have a voice in their own ...