100 years ago: What Woodrow Wilson set in motion

The American president was a romantic, a visionary, even a utopian. He was not without flaws; his racial views were offensive for his time, repugnant for ours. But he believed in human rights and the sanctity of human life. And he had a broad view of natural rights, and they included the freedom of the seas and the virtue of national self-determination. It was a toxic brew of ideas and ideals — it would produce rhetorical majesty and personal and national tragedy — but on April 2, 1917, he delivered the most important speech of his life, perhaps the most important speech of his time.

The son of a preacher, the product of Johns Hopkins and Princeton, a scholar and reformer, an introvert and an inveterate golfer, Woodrow Wilson strode to the podium of the House of Representatives that day, summoned every corpuscle of compassion and every calorie of energy he possessed, and bid the United States to abandon a century-and-a-quarter-old tradition of abstinence from the affairs of Europe and to join the Great War.

“It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts — for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”

These were brave words at a time when Russia was in revolutionary tumult, Europe was in exhaustion and despair, and the conflict across the Atlantic seemed far away.The immediate implication was clear. Americans would travel beyond their home regions for the first time, and they, and the country they returned to when the war ended the following year, would be transformed forever: more worldly, more engaged in the world, and more regarded as an essential element in world affairs. World War I, as it came to be known after there was a second one, made a world of difference.

“The war made America more urban, more modern, more devoted to pleasure, licit and illicit,” wrote Will Englund in his new book, “March 1917.” It also made America committed to fighting dangerous foes and ideas on foreign lands, lest their evils — Nazi genocide, Soviet tyranny and aggression, al-Qaida terror — reach our own land.

None of that was known when the 28th president opened his remarks. What was known was that the economic output of the United States had just surpassed that of the British Empire, and the United States was moving to the center of global affairs.

Not everyone wanted to enter this war. The isolationist Sen. William E. Borah of Idaho warned that once the United States was “in the maelstrom of European politics,” it would be “impossible to get out.” The president knew that. He concluded his remarks to Congress this way:

“To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”

The great British historian A.J.P. Taylor once reflected on the European turmoil of 1848 and said that “German history reached its turning point and failed to turn.” The United States reached its turning point in 1917, and turned.