>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. >> And I'll be the host for today's session. And as you may know, this program is part of a series of webinars connected to the library's exhibition, Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I, which is on view here at the library through January of 2019. Today's presentation will last approximately 30 minutes. There's time after that for our presenter, Sahr Conway-Lanz to answer questions. Please note that you can communicate with us by the chat. If you've already introduced yourself, that's great, and if you haven't please take a minute to tell us who you are and where you're joining from. It's also a chance for you to test out how the chat works. Make sure you're sending to all participants. There's a little chat icon at the top of the WebEx event center that you can click to access the chat. Again, submit questions throughout the session and Sahr will answer them at the end. If you have technical questions, please send a message to Cathy McWiggin who's our technical host for the day. We'll be recording today's session which will then be posted on the library's website once the program has been captioned. So today's presenter, as I mentioned, is Sahr Conway-Lanz. He's a historian in the manuscript division. He holds a PhD in history from Harvard University and is co-curator of the exhibition, Echoes of the Great War, and is also the curator for the Woodrow Wilson papers here at the library. Sahr's talk is titled, Woodrow Wilson Chooses War. Thanks so much, Sahr, for being here and presenting. I'll pass it to you to take over. >> Thank you, Naomi. And thanks to the rest of you for joining us today. As Naomi mentioned, I work as a historian in the manuscript division helping to build and facilitate use of the library's archival collections -- personal, family, and organizational papers of lasting historical value. I specialize -- In the library's Foreign Policy, Military, and International Collections concerning -- The 20th and 21st century American history. Since one of the collections I curate is the papers of Woodrow Wilson, I'm glad to have this opportunity to talk with you about Woodrow Wilson and his decision to lead the United States into World War One. Give me just one second. I'm catching up with the presentation. Alright. There we go. So we know that President Woodrow Wilson chose war in 1917, as the Atlanta Journal shows us here. But you may be surprised that even experts are not terribly confident about why, how, or when Wilson changed his mind and decided to lead the United States from the three-year-long policy of neutrality in the first World War to a a policy of full-fledged belligerency. The entire question of why the United States entered World War I many today have forgotten, and for good reason. The explanations are not easy to understand today, at least not the way historians have often explained them. I want to try and do three things with this talk: explore the mystery of Woodrow Wilson's decision, examine what Wilson and others said was at stake in choosing war, and explain its significance for them, hopefully in terms that will be more easily grasped by us today. I also want to discuss the relation of the collections here at the library and a few of the items in the exhibit -- all items that I'm showing are from the exhibit -- to those larger questions. Let us start with the question of why we don't have more confidence in the answers to the why, how, and when of Wilson's decision for war. After all, the Library of Congress has a very large collection of Wilson's papers -- about 600 feet of them if you line up the files on a shelf. Almost 300,000 documents. Drawing largely but not exclusively from the papers here at the Library of Congress, Princeton professor Arthur Link spent 35 years editing Wilson's papers and published 69 volumes of primary source material on Wilson's life and presidency. With all this source material, how can anyone possibly be unsure about such a momentous decision? Well it has a lot to do with Wilson himself. Wilson rarely reflected on himself and his work in writing, unlike many other well-known figures such as Theodore Roosevelt or George Patton, whose papers we also have here at the library. Most of Wilson's writings -- especially as president -- are public-facing, such as his speeches. Even his official and private letters were often short and contained little explanation of his thinking on major decisions. Moreover, Wilson never gave a detailed account of his decision for war. His health after the war is surely part of this, but he also explicitly refused to write memoirs. In 1920 he said, there are -- quote -- biographies, autobiographies, and ought not to biographies. Whether mine ought to be or not, they will not be. The fact that we don't have obvious answers about Wilson's choice for war makes the question more intriguing for me, and I hope for you too, and I think underlines the importance of the collection to the library and other archives that help us explore this question. After all, what is more important than a country's decision to go to war? So what can we learn from these archival materials about Wilson choosing war? I want to start with this exhibit item, just a page here but it's from Wilson's April 2nd, 1917 war address where the president is urging congress to recognize the state of war between the United States and Germany. So specifically this item is one page of Wilson's reading copy of that address from his papers here at the Library of Congress. The address lays out Wilson's public rationale for war. In the speech, Wilson leads off by condemning the German decision two months earlier in February, 1917, to resume unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson describes it as Germany's -- quote -- purpose to put aside all restaurant of law and humanity. End quote. And he used submarines to sink every ship approaching Britain or any other allied port. Submarine attacks had been an issue for the United States since 1915. Britain during World War I dominated the seas and blockaded Germany and the central powers. Germany viewed its use of submarines as justified retaliation for Britain's -- quote -- starvation blockade. In retaliation, the Germans were trying to blockade Britain with the use of their uboats. However, neutral American shipping or American property and passengers on neutral or allied ships were in danger from these German submarine attacks. Wilson and others insisted on the right of Americans to trade and travel freely without risk of harm from Germany's subs and protested German attacks without warning on shipping that killed passengers and merchant crews and destroyed trade goods. These attacks without warning constituted the so-called unrestricted submarine warfare. In his war address, Wilson then talks about how other alternatives like arming merchant shipping are not workable and that the German government has proven itself untrustworthy, implying that further negotiations are pointless. Wilson's most famous line in this document is, quote, the world must be made safe for democracy. In the page that you see here displayed you can see that very line. But if you read the entire speech closely you will find that Wilson is not clearly calling for a war to spread democracy. I would argue Wilson has often been misunderstood on this point. Wilson's point here is that anti-democratic, autocratic Germany has proven itself a threat to citizens of democracy like the United States through its submarine warfare and other perfidious behavior, and therefore must be fought. While other Americans were advocating at the time a war to create a more democratic world, Wilson was not clearly offering that justification for war in this speech. That left as Wilson's primary public justification for war the right of Americans to travel on foreign ships entering a war zone. Let's explore this justification further. Let's look at the question of why Wilson had become convinced that war was necessary to protect the principle of free travel and trade, often referred to at the time as freedom of the seas or in wartime as the rights of neutrals. Ultimately, the question is, if Wilson was not being entirely frank with the public about his true motivations for going to war, why did Wilson use this principle as his public justification when he really was after something else? Historians have come up with a variety of explanations for Wilson's decision for war. There's an older, economic argument about Wilson's choice which more recently has fallen out of favor and I'm happy to discuss it during questions if anyone is interested. But I'm going to focus on the two currently dominant arguments. Probably the most common explanation offered today for Wilson's choice for war was his vision and ambitions for a new, peaceful, international order, nothing less than a drastic reform of international relations -- essentially American progressivism brought to the world. There are various versions of this argument but it generally goes that Wilson was disgusted with what he saw as a catastrophic world war and the treacherous and selfish politics of the empires and monarchies of Europe. He wanted to change how states behaved in the international system and bring a new era of peace. This is where we get the phrase, the war to end war or the war to end all wars, which is often associated with Wilson even though H.G. Wells was the one to coin the phrase and Wilson did not make much use of the phrase in public speeches or his private writings. Wilson usually talked instead of establishing peace or sometimes permanent peace. Wilson thought a key ingredient to this new world order would be a league of nations which could help resolve conflicts among states and help to maintain the peace. Here being displayed is Wilson's first draft of the League of Nations Covenant, what would be the governing constitution of this new international organization. So the argument goes that Wilson chose war because he finally became convinced that the US could do more to shape the post-war peace and pursue his vision by fighting than by remaining neutral. There's much to this argument. Certainly Wilson did develop a dramatic new vision of international relations and this is one reason he's well remembered today. But the argument has some weaknesses in explaining why Wilson chose war. The big problem is chronology. There simply is not much evidence that Wilson is thinking about going to war for his peaceful ends until after he asks congress to declare war on April 2nd. The day Germany declares unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1st, 1917 (two months before), Wilson is still worrying that going to war will ruin American chances to help establish a post-war peace. Wilson's close advisor, Edward House, in his diary for that day wrote, the president -- quote -- reiterated his belief that it would be a crime for this government to involve itself in the war to such an extent as to make it impossible to save Europe aftward. In fact, the first evidence we have of Wilson making the argument that fighting will allow the US to better influence the peace is from a meeting he has with the peace advocate Jane Adams later that month on February 28th. This is when Wilson already knows about the Zimmerman telegram. Here's a cartoon about the scandal surrounding the telegram. So Wilson already knows about the German intrigues to start a war between Mexico and the United States, and by this time the archival evidence suggests that Wilson has lost all faith in ending the war for negotiating with the Germans. In other words, Wilson loses all faith in the Germans before he starts thinking that fighting could be his best option for creating post-war peace. In addition, Wilson's war address on April 2nd that I was discussing earlier does not lay out Wilson's vision for a post-war order or a scheme for ending all wars, even though it sometimes has been taken to imply this. I would argue the address as a whole, as well as other evidence from the manuscript collections we have here at the library and elsewhere, does not support this interpretation even though today it's popular to think that Wilson went to war to establish a new world order or to end all war. I think it more likely that Wilson made the connection between his ideas about establishing a peaceful order and how fighting could lead to that peaceful, post-war world as an afterthought to choosing war. In other words, he came to view this new global system as the silver lining to the cloud of war and that it was not what motivated him to choose to fight. That brings us to the other major explanation for why Wilson chose war. This is the argument I find most convincing. It's the case he is explicitly making in his war address. It's the argument that Wilson went to war over a principle: the right of Americans and other neutrals during war to travel freely overseas. Now you may be thinking, how could this possibly be the reason the US went to war, a war in which over 100,000 Americans lost their lives? What was Wilson possibly thinking? How could war be worth the right to travel overseas, especially to travel overseas in a war zone? You would think most people would not be clamoring for the right to sail into a deadly war zone swarming with submarines. Well, the first thing to understand is that Wilson's concern was not so much about travel or even abstract rights than that Wilson believed he needed to stand up for a principle that he had laid out publicly and pledged his support for. Wilson had told the Germans as early as 1915 that the US would enforce this principle which most saw as part of established international law and custom. When the British passenger ship the Lusitania was sunk in May, 1915 -- killing over 100 Americans and over 1,000 others -- the headline's here. Although you'll note that initial press reports said that all were saved. But when the Lusitania sunk, Wilson threatened to break diplomatic relations with Germany if the Germans continued with their submarine attacks without warning on passenger and merchant vessels. In effect, Wilson had laid down a red line that he hoped the Germans would not cross -- a warning so likely to lead to war that Wilson's anti-war Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, resigned in protest over Wilson's threat in 1915. Why the United States did not go to war for two more years is because Germany did largely back off from its unrestricted submarine warfare until early 1917. Wilson used this time to try to help negotiate a peaceful end to the war and I think the archival evidence clearly shows his hope was that he would not have to enforce his threat, and the evidence amply demonstrates his reluctance to lead the United States into war. But he also acknowledged that his official warning to Germany basically left the possibility of war up to the Germans. Wilson's Secretary of the Navy recalled the president telling him during the 1916 election -- quote -- I can't keep the country out of war. They talk of me as though I were a god. Any little German lieutenant can put us into war at any time by some calculated outrage. Wilson had helped to create the possibility of war by his resolve to stand up for a principle and this left the coming of war to outside forces. Wilson, in the leadup to war, often expressed himself in public and private as believing that external forces were driving the US toward war. And Wilson seemed to experience the coming of war as out of his control, and eventually, probably, in late February, 1917, as inevitable. But you may still have the question of why did Wilson and other Americans -- because congress did ultimately support going to war -- feel that standing by this principle, even if it was a principle embedded in international law, was important enough to justify the terrible consequences of war? Historians usually characterize the importance of this stand on freedom of the seas and neutral rights to Wilson and others as the importance of maintaining American international credibility, prestige, or honor. That is, if Wilson had not enforced his principled pledge, the United States would have lost influence, especially moral influence, in the world. And I think this is largely the explanation for why Wilson chose war. But I also think that one of the reasons why people today often forget or are confused by explanations for US entry into World War I, which focus on the right to travel and freedom of the seas and neutral rights and American credibility and prestige, is because those intertwined explanations lose sight of why Wilson drew his principled red line in the first place, why he became trapped into feeling compelled to defend US credibility when German subs resumed their indiscriminate attacks. And this brings us back to the Lusitania and the American lives lost there. To Wilson and many Americans, standing up for the freedom of the seas and neutral rights was standing against inhumane attacks on innocent people uninvolved in the European war. Wilson in his war address characterized the primary German offense as, quote, the wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of non-combatants. Men, women, and children engaged in pursuits which have always -- even in the darkest periods of modern history -- been deemed innocent and legitimate. This is an issue that's still very much with us today. And I think it's easier for us to grasp even if we don't agree with Wilson. To Wilson, Germany had committed an atrocity against civilians in violation of humanitarian standards and had to be held accountable for that offense and prevented from committing further atrocities against Americans. This explanation also helps us to understand the power of the enlist poster that you see on the screen with its image of a woman with a child in her arms drowning. This is not to say that Wilson was right to go to war. The war had a terrible toll for the United States. The Allies killed non-combatants as well and the first world war was followed by a second. I will leave that judgment of Wilson's decision up to you but I hope you'll agree that understanding the reasons the United States went to war in 1917 is important and that the Library of Congress' collections, which were the basis for my talk, are essential to that understanding. Thank you. And Naomi, I'll turn it back over to you. >> Great. Thanks so much, Sahr, for that fascinating talk. And for those who are interested, especially in the collections, in some of the images that you've shown, you should know that many of those are available on our website at loc.gov/exhibits. Those are from the exhibition so if you're not able to come here to the library, you can certainly see them in the online exhibition format. So now we'll open it up for questions so please tell us what you'd like to know from Sahr in the chat. Make sure you're sending it to all participants. We're happy to take questions for five or ten minutes. I think I'll begin, though, Sahr, with a general question for you about the library's collection. So how is it that the library came to hold the Wilson papers and then how do researchers generally access them? As the main curator for the Wilson papers, tell us a little bit about the life of those papers here at the library. >> So actually shorter after Woodrow Wilson left office, the Library of Congress embarked on a major effort to collect presidential papers, including Woodrow Wilson's. And so in the early 20th century, a number of presidential paper collections were brought to the Library of Congress. Wilson's were donated by his family and some of them came directly from the White House. And the Library of Congress has been a major repository for presidential papers ever since. We have the papers of 23 American presidents. The most of the 20th century presidents after Calvin Coolidge now have presidential libraries where you can use the presidential papers. And those presidential libraries are run by the national archives. But for presidential collections before Herbert Hoover, most of those papers can be found at the Library of Congress. Now if you're interested in actually using the Woodrow Wilson papers, there are a couple of ways that you can do this. Most of the Wilson papers have been microfilmed and so they are available for use on microfilm. But I know microfilm is not necessarily the easiest thing to use so there are a couple of other options. One is in the not-too-distant future -- in the spring or summer of next year -- the Woodrow Wilson papers will be available online. They're in the process of being digitized and put on the Library of Congress' website. And so they will -- all of the Wilson papers here at the Library of Congress will be available on the website in about six months or so. Another option for using the papers -- you won't get to see the images of the original papers this way, but those 69 volumes of the papers of Woodrow Wilson by Arthur Link that I mentioned in my talk are really the most accessible way today, tomorrow, for the next six months, of getting access to many of the most important papers from the Woodrow Wilson collection. And even though it's 69 volumes, it's not anywhere close to the entire collection, all 300,000 documents that we have at the Library of Congress. But remember that not every document in the Woodrow Wilson papers was written by Woodrow Wilson or gives you a deep insight about him, his life, and his presidency. Does that answer your question, Naomi? >> It does. Thank you. And it's very exciting, as Connie says, to have digital access in the coming months for the Wilson papers. So another question -- and I encourage all of you guys who are listening to also submit one, but I'll give you one more, Sahr, which is to ask you about Wilson's influence on American foreign policy and how or whether it shaped American foreign policy today. Sort of this idea of an international perspective, international bodies, and the United States involvement in those bodies and sort of a frame for American foreign policy the last century or so. Are we moving out of an era of Wilsonism today? How would you talk about that? >> So you know, Wilson is not necessarily the most popular president today but I think he is very important both for domestic policy and foreign policy. In foreign policy, it's really where he made his mark although I think it would have been a surprise to Wilson to think that international relations is where he really would have had the greatest influence. But in international relations, kind of how people often think about Wilson still today is Wilson really embodied this idea of idealism in international affairs. And it's a question that people come back to again and again dealing with today's current events and thinking about the history of American foreign relations and Wilson in particular. I mean, this idea of Wilsonianism, a term that has been used to mean many different things, although generally it's used to mean the idea of pursuing some kind of universal ideals as opposed to narrow American self-interest or narrow national interests. It's also been used to mean the spread of democracy abroad, which in my talk I said I think that's slightly a misreading of Woodrow Wilson, even though he did pick up the chance for self-determination during World War I and follow that through to a certain degree. Although, Wilson certainly wasn't arguing to get rid of imperialism and colonies dominated by the European powers throughout the world. He had somewhat ambivalent views about that. But in terms of whether we're leaving an era of Wilsonianism, I think it's going to be -- I mean, yeah. I'm a historian. One of the last things you want me to do is make predictions about the future but I would say that considering questions about the role of ideals versus interest and international relations is going to be a question that we're going to continue to struggle with for the foreseeable future. >> Alright. Thank you for that. We have had one -- oh, go ahead. Sorry. >> Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. >> Well, just that we had another. We had a question come through, a similar question that also asks you to predict [laughing]. So maybe this is another one that, you know, it's hard to answer. But Trevor asks, on hearing of US entry, Lloyd George said the US had become a superpower. Is this the end of the American century? Well I'm always happy to put on my political science hat and try to make predictions about what is coming. But this is actually a parlor game that -- you know, that end of the American century that's very popular among historians and academics and political scientists in general and, you know, talking heads in the press. And I would just point out -- I mean, I don't have any particular insight in that, I would venture. But I would just point out that the end of the American century has predicted to be coming to an end for about the last 40 years, ever since the 70s. And yet it continues. We may finally with the rise of a powerful China see things change but I think that really has more to do with Chinese history than American history at this point. That would be my personal take on it. I'm not exactly sure what Woodrow Wilson would say. I think he would probably be very optimistic about America's prospects for the future, as many of the American presidents from the early 20th century were, like Theodore Roosevelt. >> Alright. Well we hope that we've at least piqued your interest about Wilson, his decisions, his influence on American history and foreign policy even today. So with that, we're at the bottom of the hour so I think we'll wrap up. And Sahr, if you can pull the slideshow back up, I do want to remind everyone that this is part of a series. So there will be more webinars to come. But also, [inaudible] the Wilson papers when they become available online. But in the meantime, there are two webinars on World War I, one November 28th looking at Joseph Pennell who was a printmaker in World War I and specifically his prints left Liberty Parish an evocative image of New York City destroyed by the enemy which was created for the 4th Liberty Loan Drive of 1918. This will be by Catherine Vlaud of the Princeton Photographs division November 28th at 2:00. And December 12th at 2:00, Sahr's fellow curator of the exhibition and fellow historian in the manuscript division, Ryan Reft, will present Charles Hamilton Houston on World War I, looking at Houston's work experience as a young officer serving in the segregated military and the influence of those experiences on his later work in civil rights, including as chief attorney of the NAACP and a mentor to Thurgood Marshall. And of course you can register for those sessions by the World War I exhibition website at loc.gov/exhibits. I'll put in the chat a few more resources by Sahr if you'd like to read more of his thoughts on the Wilson papers. And we'll also share -- it's on the next slide -- the survey for today's webinar. We hope you'll tell us what you think of today's event. And hopefully you'll join us again for future sessions. And with that we'll wrap up. Thank you all so much for joining us. I hope you enjoy it. [ Background Discussions ] Thanks, Connie. And there's the webinar link. So if you can take a minute, we'd appreciate it. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.