WAR OVERSEAS OR GREATER CONCERN WITHIN AMERICA

There have been many arguments against President Wilson's summoning of Congress to declare war against the Central powers in Europe, thousands of miles from our shores. It was not just an isolationist view that caused many Americans to feel that, even as early as 1914, America had no business to intervene in what was a political power struggle in Europe and in European colonies, mainly in Africa.

The truth for entering the war was not so much as Wilson stated "It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk. American lives taken" (Johnson 2002 193). It was, as Johnson states (102) that the United States was more anxious than ever to rise to become a major power in world affairs. Was Germany and its allied forces really threatening the peace and tranquility of the United States, as Wilson claimed? Or was this, in fact, an economic problem. World markets for American goods were now curtailed both by action on the high seas as well as European peacetime economies turned into wartime activities.

Wilson, it seems, also balanced Prussian autocracy with his nanve assumption that the Russian Bolshevik revolution made the Russian people "free". He considers Russians as "the great, generous Russian people�fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace" (Johnson 2002 104). It was Wilson who was the nanve politician here. The Russian forces under Czarist generals were fighting a dreadful series of

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asons for wanting to enter the war. "These are the gentry who today wrapped up in the American flag, who about their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots" (Johnson 106). It is important, in the context of this question, to understand that the Socialists are on the side of the working class and, for the most part, see capitalism as its enemy. Debs saw America's entry into World War I as a capitalist initiative. The industrialists and capitalists would be safe, sitting in their offices or overseeing their factories, while it is "the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class, who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses" (Johnson 107). As Johnson points out (106) Debs explained that his Socialist party opposed the war not because they were pro-German, but that they were anti-Capitalist. Obviously, Debs cut a little too close to the bone, because this speech was one of the reasons he was arrested, tried, and convicted under the Espionage Act. He served ten years for saying out loud what a lot of working-class Americans surely felt. The points made on these pages is not necessarily to agree with every portion of Debs' Socialist

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