How Three American Leaders Viewed Entering World War I

Historian Neil Lanctot discusses America’s pursuit of peace by different means.

President Woodrow Wilson and his war cabinet, 1918. Public Domain

The outbreak and aftermath of World War I is arguably the most significant period of the 20th and 21st centuries. By the end of the war, empires had fallen, new national boundaries were drawn, Russia was fundamentally changed, the precursor to the United Nations (the League of Nations) was created, new methods of warfare had been used to devastating effect, the fragile and ineffective peace treaty quickly fell apart, and as many predicted, the inconclusive War to End All Wars would result in a sequel. Among these many world-shaping factors was the involvement of the United States in the European conflict.

“Our decision to go to war in 1917 had a dramatic effect on the war itself and, of course, the actual course of the 20th century,” said Neil Lanctot, historian and author of “The Approaching Storm: Roosevelt, Wilson, Addams, and Their Clash Over America’s Future,” during an interview on the “The Sons of History“ podcast.

America’s Big Three

After the armistice was signed inside a train car in Compiègne, France, on Nov. 11, 1918, there were three individuals who oversaw the brokering of the peace negotiations in the following summer of 1919 in Paris: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. They were known as the “Big Three.” But before Armistice Day (what Americans call Veterans Day) and well beyond the European continent, there were another “Big Three” in the United States: Wilson, former President Theodore Roosevelt, and social reformer Jane Addams.