The Great American U-Turn

In November 1916, US president Woodrow Wilson won re-election on an isolationist ticket. But just a few months later, he was issuing an impassioned call to arms. On the centenary of its entry into the First World War, Adam IP Smith traces America’s journey from neutrality to committed combatant.

- Adam IP Smith

In a committee room on Capitol Hill on 6 April 1917, Senator Thomas S Martin of Virginia was listening to testimony justifying the White House’s astronomically large appropriations request. When the costs of transportation of troops to France were mentioned, Martin sat up with a bolt. “Good Lord!” he spluttered, “You’re not going to send soldiers over there, are you?” A veteran of the Confederate army in the American Civil War, Senator Martin had just voted for President Woodrow Wilson’s war resolution – but his notion of war evidently did not include actual fighting.

Martin’s reaction was not unusual. After all, the US decision a century ago to enter what Americans referred to as ‘the European war’ was one of the most dramatic 360-degree turnabouts in modern diplomatic history and its implications could hardly have been processed in a matter of hours. Martin probably hoped that financial assistance to the Allied powers and a show of naval strength might be enough (though the US navy was hardly, in April 1917, in a position to demonstrate much of anything). And the practical difficulties involved in raising an army seemed overwhelming. Despite the persistent calls for “preparedness” from tub-thumping pro-interventionist former president Teddy Roosevelt, the US had a tiny standing army, and a limited arms industry. Early plans drawn up by the Wilson administration envisaged an American Expeditionary Force arriving in France – but not until sometime in 1919.