The United States must be neutral
in fact as well as in name....We must be impartial in thought
as well as in action.
President Wilson, 1914
There is such a thing as a
man being too proud to fight.
President Wilson, 1915
It must be a peace without
victory....Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a
victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted
in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and
would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which
terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon
quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.
President Wilson, January,
1917
The present German submarine
warfare against commerce is a warfare against all mankind....Our
motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the
physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right,
of human right, of which we are only a single champion....Armed
neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable. Because submarines
are in effect outlaws when used as the German submarines have
been used against merchant shipping, it is impossible to defend
ships against their attacks as the law of nations has assumed....
Our object...is to vindicate
the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world
as against selfish and autocratic power....We are glad...to fight...for
the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its
peoples, the German peoples included: for the right of nations
great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose
their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe
for democracy....We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire
no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves,
no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make....
It is a fearful thing to lead
this great peaceful people into war....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. 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.
President Wilson's war message,
April, 1917
Never forget that this league
is primarily...a political organization, and I object strongly
to having the politics of the United States turn upon disputes
where deep feeling is aroused but in which we have no direct
interest. It will tend to delay the Americanization of our great
population....We have interests of our own in Asia and in the
Pacific which we must guard upon our own account, but the less
we undertake to play the part of umpire and thrust ourselves
into European conflicts the better for the United States and
the world.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge,
1919, on the League of Nations
To what extent was America's
war a war for business? Did Woodrow Wilson lead America into
war in order to serve the selfish interests of the few? The answer
is determined by looking into the essential facts. In the first
place, Wall Street wanted war.
John Kenneth Turner, 1922
The Hun within our gates is
the worst of the foes of our own household, whether he is the
paid or the unpaid agent of Germany. Whether he is pro-German
or poses as a pacifist, or a peace-at-any-price-man, matters
little....The German-language papers carry on a consistent campaign
in favor of Germany against England. They should be put out of
existence for the period of this war....Every disloyal native-born
American should be disfranchised and interned. It is time to
strike our enemies at home heavily and quickly.
Theodore Roosevelt, 1917
People...ask questions which
involve the reasons for my acts against the "Reds."
I have been asked...to what extent deportation will check radicalism
in this country. Why no ask what will become of the United States
Government if these alien radicals...carry out the principles
of the
Communist Party?
In place of the United States
Government we should have the horror and terrorism of Bolshevik
tyranny such as is destroying Russia now....The whole purpose
of communism appears to be a mass formation of the criminals
of the world to overthrow the decencies of private life, to usurp
property....
A. Mitchell Palmer, 1920, on
the Red Scare
This indictment is founded
wholly upon the publication of two leaflets....The first....says
that the President's cowardly silence about the intervention
in Russia reveals the hypocrisy of the plutocratic gang in Washington....It
says that there is only one enemy of the workers of the world
and that is capitalism....The other leaflet...says..."Workers
in the ammunition factories, you are producing bullets, bayonets,
cannon, to murder not only the Germans, but also your dearest,
best, who are in Russia and are fighting for freedom"....
The United States constitutionally
may punish speech that produces or is intended to produce a clear
and imminent danger that it will bring about forthwith certain
substantive evils that the United States constitutionally may
seek to prevent. The power undoubtedly is greater in time of
war than in time of peace because war opens dangers that do not
exist at other times....
It is only the present danger
of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about that warrants
Congress in setting a limit to the expression of opinion where
private rights are not concerned. Congress certainly cannot forbid
all effort to change the mind of the county....
When men have realized that
time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe...that
the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in
ideas....I think that we should be eternally vigilant against
attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and
believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten
immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes
of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes,
dissenting opinion in Abrams et al. v. U.S.
