feb 10 2009

* Woodrow Wilson made one final, futile attempt to avert war, delivering a moving address that declared that only “peace without victory” would be lasting.
* Germany responded by shocking the world, announcing that it would not be engaging in unrestricted warfare,

* Wilson asked Congress for the authority to arm merchant ships, but a band of Midwestern senators tried to block this measure.
* Then, the Zimmerman note was intercepted and published

* Written by German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmerman, it secretly proposed an alliance between Germany and Mexico, and if the Central Powers won, Mexico could recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona from the U.S.

President Wilson asked for Congress to declare war, which it did four days later; Wilson had lost his gamble

* The Fourteen Points were a set of idealistic goals for peace:
- No more secret treaties.
- Freedom of the seas was to be maintained.
- A removal of economic barriers among nations.
- Reduction f armament burdens.
- Adjustment of colonial claims in the interests of natives and colonizers.
-Other points included: “self-determination,” or independence for oppressed minority groups, and a League of Nations, an international organization that would keep the peace and settle world disputes.

* During the war, Blacks immigrated to the North to find more jobs, and did, but the appearance of Blacks in formerly all-White towns did spark violence, such as in Chicago and St. Louis.

* Blacks were also often brought in as strikebreakers.
* Women also found more opportunities in the workplace, since the men were gone to war.This gained support for women’s suffrage,

* When Wilson decided to go to Europe personally to oversee peace proceedings, Republicans were outraged, thinking that this was all just for flamboyant show*

*When he didn’t include a single Republican, not even Senator Henry Cabot Lodge,

* the Republicans proclaimed that they would not pass the treaty, since to them, the League of Nations was either over-powerful or useless.

* The Treaty of Versailles was forced upon Germany under the threat that if it didn’t sign the treaty, war would resume, and when the Germans saw all that Wilson had compromised to get his League of Nations, they cried betrayal, because the treaty did not contain much of the Fourteen Points like the Germans had hoped

*Lodge now came up with fourteen “reservations” to the Treaty of Versailles, which sought to safeguard American sovereignty.
* Congress was especially concerned with Article X, which morally bound the U.S. to aid any member of the League of Nations that was victimized by aggression, for Congress wanted to preserve its war-declaring power.
*Wilson hated Lodge, and with though he was willing to accept similar Democratic reservations and changes, he would not do so from Lodge, and thus, he ordered his Democratic supporters to vote against the treaty with the Lodge reservations attached.

the treaty was put up for vote 3 times when all three failed for the republicans

U.S. isolationism doomed the Treaty of Versailles and indirectly led to World War II