Wilson asks Congress to declare war

On the evening of 2 April 1917 President Woodrow Wilson stood before the joint houses of Congress and asked them to declare the conduct of the German government to be “nothing less than war” against the government and people of the United States. Washington had been waiting for this moment for two weeks, ever since the president summoned Congress to an extraordinary session. The address lasted 36 minutes and contained a sentence that passed into history: “The world must be made safe for democracy.”

A day on Capitol Hill

The new Congress met at noon. First the House of Representatives, in which Democrats and Republicans held almost equal numbers of seats, had to be organised. The Democrat Champ Clark was once again elected Speaker, receiving 217 votes to 205 for the Republican James Mann. When, during the roll call, the name of Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress, was read out, both sides of the chamber gave her an ovation. At about five in the afternoon the House was ready for business and adjourned until half past eight.

Wilson drove to the Capitol in the evening escorted by a troop of cavalry. The House chamber looked different from usual that evening. The justices of the Supreme Court sat in front of the rostrum, and the diplomatic corps in evening dress at the side. The senators entered behind Vice-President Thomas Marshall, almost every one with a small American flag in his hand or his lapel. According to the New York Times report, only a few had no flags, among them Senators Robert La Follette of Wisconsin and James Vardaman of Mississippi. The president was greeted with an ovation such as Congress had never given him before. For two minutes he could not begin to speak.

What the president said

Wilson read from his sheets, hardly raising his eyes. He recalled that on 3 February he had informed Congress of the German announcement that all ships in the zones around Great Britain and France and in the Mediterranean would be sunk without warning. He said that submarines were sending ships of every kind to the bottom, including neutral ones, hospital ships and those carrying relief to Belgium. German submarine warfare against commerce was, in his words, “a warfare against mankind”. The president stressed that he was not thinking of material losses but of human lives, because “property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be”.

He then admitted that his February plan had not worked. Armed neutrality had proved impracticable. A submarine had to be destroyed before it revealed its intentions, and Germany had announced that it would treat armed guards on American ships as pirates. Such neutrality, Wilson said, “is practically certain to draw us into the war without either the rights or the effectiveness of belligerents”. He therefore advised Congress to declare that Germany was already waging war on the United States, formally to accept the status of belligerent thrust upon the country, and to use all the nation’s resources to force the Reich to yield and to end the war.

He also listed what this meant in practice: the closest possible co-operation with the countries fighting Germany, liberal credits for them, the mobilisation of the economy, the equipping of the navy above all with the means of fighting submarines, and the enlargement of the army by at least 500,000 men, chosen “upon the principle of universal liability to service”, and if necessary by further increments of the same size. The war was as far as possible to be financed by taxation, not solely by loans, so as not to cause inflation.

But he devoted most attention to aims. “We have no quarrel with the German people,” he declared. He laid the blame on the government, which had started the war without consulting its subjects and since the beginning of the war had sent spies and conspirators against America. Proof of its hostile intent was the note to the German minister in Mexico, that is, the Zimmermann telegram. In Wilson’s view a lasting peace could be secured only by a partnership of democratic nations, a “league of honour”, and a worthy partner in it had now become Russia, where autocracy had been overthrown a few weeks earlier. Then came the most famous words: “The world must be made safe for democracy. (…) We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves.”

The president deliberately said nothing of Germany’s allies. He merely recalled that because Austria-Hungary had endorsed unrestricted submarine warfare, Washington had been unable to receive the new ambassador, Count Adam Tarnowski, but that Vienna had not so far fought the Americans at sea, and he postponed the question of relations with it. He also gave assurances that the millions of Americans of German origin would remain loyal citizens, while the few disloyal ones would meet “a firm hand of stern repression”. He ended with the words that right is more precious than peace, and with a sentence usually seen as an echo of the words of Martin Luther: America, “God helping her, she can do no other”.

Ovation and silence

Wilson finished at 9.11 p.m. The chamber rose. Justices, diplomats, congressmen and senators applauded and waved flags. The New York Times reporter noticed that La Follette stood motionless with his arms folded high on his chest, so that nobody could be in any doubt about his position. In March the senator from Wisconsin had led the group that blocked the bill on arming merchant ships by a filibuster.

Immediately after the president left, the two houses met separately. In the Senate the Democrat Thomas Martin, and in the House the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Henry Flood, both from Virginia, introduced a draft joint resolution declaring that the state of war with Germany “which has thus been thrust upon the United States” was formally declared, and authorising the president to employ the entire army and navy. The drafts were referred to committees, which were to meet the next morning. That same evening the State Department sent a summary of the address to every diplomatic post in the world.

That same day news reached Washington that on the night of 1 to 2 April the American steamer Aztec had sunk off the coast of Brittany, near the island of Ouessant (PL). She was the first armed American merchant ship to be sunk: she carried guns and a naval guard. After an explosion whose cause the crew could not establish, the ship went down quickly in darkness and squalls. A French patrol boat rescued 19 men, including the commander of the guard, and 28 were listed as missing.

The Senate passed the resolution on 4 April, and the House of Representatives, after an all-night debate, on the night of 5 to 6 April. That day the president signed it, and the United States was at war with Germany.