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Beside him, another was frightfully mutilated…” Corporal Louis Barthas wrote. “Where the connecting trench joined in, an unfortunate fellow was stretched out, decapitated by a shell, as if he had been guillotined. One French soldier who kept a journal during the fighting described life in the trenches as hellish landscapes of mud and blood. The Battle of the Somme had also recently ended, and British casualties on the first day were over 57,000. The 10-month battle resulted in 800,000 casualties and only strengthened each side’s resolve.
Just a month before Wilson’s speech, the Battle of Verdun concluded. It was an incredibly idealistic vision-and also one largely detached from the reality of how the suffering on the Western front was reshaping European psyches. Not heroic sacrifices, not martyrs for a cause, but gruesome, unnecessary deaths. In other words, the deaths of all the soldiers and civilians in Europe needed to be only that: deaths. “But he also believed, and perhaps even more deeply so, that a peace without victory was indispensable for driving home the lesson to all the belligerents of the ‘uselessness of the utter sacrifices made.’” Whatever his personal feelings were, Wilson firmly believed no peace could last if it favored a victor, writes scholar Robert W. He kept wanting to step in and be a mediator, but it wasn’t clear he had the ability to do that.” had never fought a war in Europe before and it was clear that either side could actually win. “I think on the one hand, Wilson didn’t want the Germans to win, he was an Anglophile,” Kazin says. On December 18, Wilson sent letters to foreign embassies to ask for their respective terms of peace, and he thought those terms could be negotiated. “It wasn’t that they wanted the Germans to win, but they didn’t think this cataclysm was one that American intervention would remedy,” says Michael Kazin, the author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace 1914-1918.
munitions were being shipped to Britain and its allies, all acts that betrayed his personal lack of neutrality over the war.īut anti-war rallies from groups as disparate as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (who argued against children using war toys) and the United Mine Workers (who produced most the coal that powered factories and urban homes) added to Wilson’s ambivalence over sending American troops abroad. He did, however, demand that Germany curtail submarine warfare and allowed American banks to make loans to Britain and U.S. Despite the German attack on the British liner Lusitania in 1915, when 128 Americans died, Wilson declined to declare war in the immediate aftermath. He had witnessed the Civil War firsthand as a boy, which contributed to his desire to avoid sending men to the meat-grinder trenches in Europe. The “peace without victory” speech was the culmination of years of desperate diplomacy on Wilson’s part. Even Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, one of the most vocal isolationists in the legislature, remarked, “We have just passed through a very important hour in the history of the world.” Then there was Senator Francis Warren of Wyoming, whose reaction was one of incredulous dismay: “The President thinks he is president of the world.” And finally, Senator Lawrence Sherman, also a vehement isolationist, who dismissed the speech as outright folly: “It will make Don Quixote wish he hadn’t died so soon.” Those present in the room seemed to feel the gravity of it but reactions varied depending on each senator’s stance on the war. It was perhaps the most memorable speech of Wilson’s presidency. “It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which term of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.” “Victory would mean peace forced upon a loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished,” Wilson said.
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He laid out a vision for a just and peaceful world, a future that included free seas, an international agreement to avoid arms races, a United States that served as a peace broker, and most important of all-peace without victory.
On January 22, 1917, Woodrow Wilson stood before a joint session of Congress and an audience that included his wife, Edith, and one of his daughters, and told the politicians that America must maintain its neutrality in the Great War ravaging Europe at the time.
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