The Lion's Pride Lion's Pride Volume 12 (Spring 2019) | Page 29

President Woodrow Wilson’s speech at the beginning of the Great
War in 1914 stressed the importance of neutrality and noninvolvement;
Garrett Peck (2018) quotes Wilson as saying, “we must be impartial in
thought as well as in action” (p. 24). This may be mystifying to modern
Americans, but this was an era when the United States interfering in the
affairs of other countries was the exception rather than the norm. During
the early years of 1914-1915, Wilson offered to be a mediator between
the belligerents. Wilson relied on his envoy, Edward House, to travel to
Europe to make his case (p. 25). However, given that the Americans
were selling weapons to the British, the Germans were especially
unconvinced with the Americans’ stated “neutrality.”
Through language and culture, American sentiment was usually pro-
British, despite many German-Americans who might have been
sympathetic to the German Empire or millions of Irish-Americans who
were vehemently anti-British. President Woodrow Wilson, still bearing
the banner of neutrality, allowed the Entente governments to borrow
large sums of money to finance the war. The expectation among
everyone was that the Great War would be “over by Christmas,” which
turned out to be false; the war devolved into a catastrophic and
expensive slog. These foreign loans were incredibly important to the
Entente; according to Moser (2001), in total, $10.5 billion were
borrowed, of which $3.5 billion was loaned while the United States was
neutral (p. 303). For comparison, Britain and France’s combined