Today's American Minute:
Today, April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I by declaring war on Germany. Within the next two years, America enlisted four million soldiers and spent 35 billion dollars, resulting in an Allied victory. In a National Day of Prayer Proclamation, President Woodrow Wilson stated:In view of the entrance of our nation into the vast and awful war which now afflicts the greater part of the world... I set apart...a day upon which our people should...offer concerted prayer to Almighty God for His divine aid in the success of our arms.
On grounds that he was a Democrat or personally naive, Woodrow Wilson's decision to answer ship sinkings and other Germany perfidy with a declaration of war is an object of a mostly parochialist obsession with the doubly impossible, traveling back in time and averting the inevitable. Books are written on it in all seriousness, capping scores of essays that range from wrong-headed to crackpot. Few of them grapple with what alt-history might have come about if Berlin's final drive — to be the Second Battle of the Marne — happened without Yanks to parry and thrust, and win the day. A despot Germany with Paris in its grasp twenty-two years too soon, minus a nutty Austrian stupid enough to strike at the Russian front closed by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk? The trouble with "shouldn't have" talk that stays strictly in the past is that it goes light on substituted consequences. Wilson's mistakes at war's end are far more morally evident, and their example is applicable to later history as well as our own future — not just do-nothing fantasy.
And, too, indictments of Wilson rarely include the opinion of his predecessor, a man thought by no one to be a dandy. Theodore Roosevelt was put off when the twenty-eighth president's war department denied his request to lead a volunteer division in France.