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 ôIt is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk. American lives takenö (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 ôfreeö. He considers Russians as ôthe great, generous Russian peopleàfighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peaceö (Johnson 2002 104). It was Wilson who was the nanve politician here. The Russian forces under Czarist generals were fighting a dreadful series of battles, costing many Russian lives and giving the Germans and their allies some sort of political as well as military victories to brag about. In fact, if one reads histories of that time, and through the Nineteen Thirties, it was Prussia's victories against the Russians, led by General Hindenburg, that put Hindenburg into the position of eventually becoming Germany's president- the only living survivor of the only military rout that the Prussians...