America's Delayed Entry Into the "Great War" Essay

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Isolationism

America was not supposed to enter World War One -- indeed President Woodrow Wilson was re-elected in 1916 on the slogan "He Kept Us Out Of War," which would come to seem richly ironic when Wilson entered the conflict in 1917. However, the reasons for American isolationism in this period are due to a complex tangle of factors. I hope to demonstrate that three of these -- America's historical commitment, via the Monroe Doctrine, to keeping Europe at arm's length, America's population at the time of World War One, and the political situation of the Democratic and Republican parties in the period 1914-1917 -- are enough to account for the strong sense of isolationism that preceded the war, and that would indeed return to haunt Wilson's presidency after the armistice.

If there is a single most important historical focus for the origins of American ambivalence about Europe, it would be found in the Monroe Doctrine.

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It is important to note that the Monroe Doctrine does not specifically endorse American isolationism -- far from it -- but it does endorse an American policy of not tolerating European incursions into the Americas. At the time of World War One, the more recent Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine had insisted that America would actually have the right to intervene in the Americas if a Latin American government was somehow engaged in wrongdoing: it is worth noting that in 1916, while America was still declining to enter World War One, President Wilson was engaged in border warfare and a technical invasion of northern Mexico (as a result of Pancho Villa's actions in the Mexican Revolution). This would seem to indicate a strong interventionist strain in American politics, which was borne out when….....

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