• Greater defense expenditures to prepare for war.
• It was very controversy because many Americans feared that it would soon lead to U.S. involvement in the war.

• After a German torpedo struck an unarmed merchant ship, the Sussex, Wilson threatened to cut off U.S. diplomatic relations with Germany.
• Germany's response, known as the Sussex pledge, promised not to sink merchant or passenger ships without giving due warning.

Germany fired torpedoes and sunk a British passesnger liner, the Lusitania, killing most of is passengers including 128 Americans.

Germany wanted to challenge British power at sea

Held to Washington's tradition of not involving the U.S. in any European war and issued a declaration of U.S. neutrality

Allied Powers: Great Britain, France, and Russia)

vs.

Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire/Turkey

• Great Britain declared a naval blockade against Germany.
• Wilson protested British seizure of American ships was a violation of a neutral nation's right to freedom of the seas.

Organized by a group of business leaders to promote preparedness and to extend direct U.S. aid to the Allies, if needed.

 U.S. economy was closely tied to that of the Allied Powers making it difficult to protect U.S. trading rights and maintain neutrality.

Expansion of the armed forces

The Germans recognized the risk of the U.S. entering the war but believed that, by cutting off supplies to the Allies, Germany could win the war before Americans could react.

• A telegram to Mexico from the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, proposed that Mexico ally itself with Germany in return for Germany's pledge to help Mexico recover lost territories by the U.S.
• Intercepted by British intellignce
• Convinced Wilson that Germany fully expected a war with the U.S.

• Wilson wanted the war to be fought for a worthy purpose: the triumph of democracy.
• One of the Allies, Russia, was governed by an autocratic czar.
• March 15, Russian revolutionaries overthrew the czar's government and proclaimed a republic.

"The world must be safe for Democracy." -Wilson

U.S. navy armed escorts for merchant ships to counteract German submarine warfare.

Commanded by General John J. Pershing

At Chateau-Thierry on the Marne River, Americans stopped the German advance and struck back with a successful counterattack at Belleau Wood.

• Recognition of freedom of the seas
• An end to the practice of making secret treaties
• An "impartial adjustment of all colonial claims"
• Self-determination for the various nationalities within the Austro-Hungarian empire

• "A general association of nations... for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike."
• The point that Wilson valued most

The peace conference following the armistice took place in the Palace of Versailles outside Paris, beginning in January 1919.

• Some nations did not share Wilson's idea of "peace without victory" for they wnated both revenge against Germany and compensation in the form of indemnities and territory.
• Wilson met with them and they came to a compromise on the peace terms.

• Wilson needed to win approval of 2/3 of the Senate for all parts of the Treaty of Versailles
• Senators oppossed League of Nations: irreconcilables and reservationists

Devised by Secretary of War Newton D. Baker as a democratic method for ensuring that groups in the population would be called into service.

As men were drafted into the army, the jobs they vacated were often taken by women, thousands of whom entered the workforce for the first time.

The penalty for speaking out against the government's war policy, or the U.S. government in general, was often a stiff prison sentence.

In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded that the right to free speech could be limited when it represented a "clear and present danger" to the public safety.

Progressive journalist George Creel took charge of a propaganda agency called the Committe on Public Information