Re-elect President Woodrow Wilson! An October 18, 1916 cartoon from the British magazine Punch. The German sinking of ships that killed American citizens and sabotage such as the July 30, 1916 attack that destroyed the Black Tom munitions plant in Jersey City, New Jersey, were not enough to make Wilson call for a declaration of war on Germany, much to the distress of Great Britain and the other Entente allies. The date on Wilson's desk calendar is October 8, 1916, a day on which German submarine U-53 sank five vessels — three British, one Dutch, and one Norwegian — off Nantucket, Massachusetts. One of the British ships was a passenger liner traveling between New York and Newfoundland.

Re-elect President Woodrow Wilson! An October 18, 1916 cartoon from the British magazine Punch. The German sinking of ships that killed American citizens and sabotage such as the July 30, 1916 attack that destroyed the Black Tom munitions plant in Jersey City, New Jersey, were not enough to make Wilson call for a declaration of war on Germany, much to the distress of Great Britain and the other Entente allies.

Text:

Bringing it home.

President Wilson. 'What's that? U-boat blockading New York? Tut! Tut! Very inopportune!'

Vote for Wilson who kept you out of the War!

[Calendar date:] October 8, 1916

Other views: Larger

Monday, April 2, 1917

"With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it; and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense but also to exert all its power and all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war."

Quotation Context

The paragraph from President Woodrow Wilson's April 2, 1917 address to the Congress of the United States in which he asks it to declare war on the German Empire in response to that nation's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and the American lives that policy had taken, property it had destroyed, and rights it had restricted. In the next paragraph Wilson summarizes what 'all its power,' 'all its resources' will entail: cooperation with and financing for those governments at war with Germany, the organization and mobilization of material resources of the Unites States, 500,000 or more men raised by conscription, and government funding by 'the present generation,' that is, to the extent possible, by taxation rather than borrowing. Wilson stresses that Germany has struck at all nations, and that America will fight as one among the many nations of the world, and for democracy.

Source

World War I and America by A. Scott Berg, page 315, copyright © 2017 by Literary Classics of the United States, publisher: The Library of America, publication date: 2017

Tags

1917-04-02, 1917, April, Wilson, Woodrow Wilson