7 March 1988

Dear Dr. Kissinger,

Enclosed is a first installment of my research on the idealist tradition in American diplomatic thought.

As you will see, I have conceived an overall outline and completed research on Woodrow Wilson's public papers. Please let me know if I am on the right track both in terms of project design and in terms of execution. In particular, please comment on 1) my choice of statesmen/historical periods to concentrate on, 2) my decision to rely on primary materials rather than on the secondary literature, 3) the usefulness to you of my grouping the lengthy quotations around central themes rather than of condensing the quotations into my own narrative.

I will proceed to filling in the rest of my outline. As we agreed during our conversation in January, I will submit a large part of the work by April 1 and the completed project by May 1.

3410 39th St., NW
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Washington, D.C. 20016
(202) 244-3415

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<table><tr><td>Introduction</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Purpose of Essay</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Idealism and Realism Defined</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Outline of Essay</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Sources of American Idealism: The Enlightenment Critique of Power</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Early American Disciples of the Enlightenment Critique</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Woodrow Wilson</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>The Ideal Ends of U.S. Diplomacy</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>General Statements of U.S. Selflessness</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>The Selflessness of the United States in Its Hemisphere</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>The Selflessness of U.S. Neutrality</td><td>.10</td></tr><tr><td>The Selflessness of U.S. War Aims</td><td>.15</td></tr><tr><td>The Realization of a New International Order</td><td>.25</td></tr><tr><td>The Triumph of Democracy Over Autocracy</td><td>.25</td></tr><tr><td>A Concert of Power To Replace the Balance of Power</td><td>.33</td></tr><tr><td>Franklin D. Roosevelt and Cordell Hull</td><td>.54</td></tr><tr><td>The Architects of Containment</td><td>.54</td></tr><tr><td>Carter and Reagan: An Idealist Revival</td><td>.54</td></tr><tr><td>Conclusion</td><td>.54</td></tr><tr><td>Comparison/Contrast of Different Strands of American Idealism</td><td>.54</td></tr><tr><td>Concluding Thoughts</td><td>.54</td></tr><tr><td>Bibliography</td><td>.54</td></tr><tr><td>Woodrow Wilson</td><td>.54</td></tr></table>

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Introduction

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# 1: Introduction

## 1.1: Purpose of Essay

The purpose of this essay, which is presented in outline form so that it may most usefully present the primary materials excerpted herein, is to identify the idealist tradition in American diplomatic thought. In this essay the identifying of the idealist tradition is meant to include the sketching of both its intellectual sources and its numerous expressions throughout American history.

## 1.2: Idealism and Realism Defined

The concepts of idealism and realism used in this essay are the traditional interpretations used in the academic study of international relations. These traditional interpretations are summarized below (in the words of Robert Osgood):

"The issue between the Realist and the utopian [or idealist] is fully joined in their views about the role of power in international relations.

The Realist, because he is skeptical of the ability of nations to transcend their self-interest, sees the struggle for national power as the distinguishing characteristic of international relations. He tends to view international conflict as an inevitable state of affairs, issuing from man's tenacious patriotic instincts and conditioned by relatively immutable influences, such as geography or some primordial urge, like the drive to dominate. Consequently, he is skeptical of attempts to mitigate international conflict with appeals to sentiment and principle or with written pledges and institutional devices unless they express the existing configuration of national interests or register the relative power among nations. He believes that if power conflicts can be mitigated at all, they can be mitigated only by balancing power against power and by cultivating a circumspect diplomacy that knows the uses of force and the threat of force as indispensable instruments of national policy.

The utopian, on the other hand, believes that the essence of international relations is spiritual power, which springs from the impact of thoughts and actions upon the supreme arbiter of all human affairs, the individual conscience. Because he is convinced that man's conscience is progressively attuned to immutable principles transcending particular selfish interests, he tends to regard national egoism as a transient phenomenon, and he looks upon the struggle for national power as a kind of social aberration--the consequence of ignorance, unenlightened guidance, the exceptional selfishness of the few, the suppression of the public voice, or faulty institutional

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arrangements. Therefore, he has an abiding faith in man's
ability to direct his conscience and reason toward restraining,
controlling, or overcoming the self-seeking and aggressive
impulses that foul national sentiment and conduct. Through
appeals to the common interest of all men in peace and justice,
through sublimating selfish interests and channeling them toward
social goals, and through declarations, agreements, laws, and
institutional devices, the utopian believes that nations can
subordinate their interests to universal moral precepts. Men
who approach international relations in this manner naturally
tend to distrust the devious art of diplomacy and the
inscrutable machinations of those who are absorbed in the narrow
pursuit of national self-interest or are preoccupied with the
prerogatives and instruments of national power. They tend to
deprecate the calculation of power and the pursuit of strategic
advantage as the manifestations of a sordid and anachronistic
game played by evil leaders at the expense of the multitude."
(Source: Robert E. Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America's
Foreign Relations [University of Chicago Press, 1953], pp. 9-
10.)

1.3: Outline of Essay

The sources and exponents of American idealism to be
covered in this essay are the following:

- Enlightenment critics of power politics,

- early American disciples of these Enlightenment thinkers,

- Woodrow Wilson,

- Franklin D. Roosevelt and Cordell Hull,

- the architects of the U.S. post-WWII containment policy,

- Jimmy Carter,

- and Ronald Reagan.

For each of the above sections, representative excerpts
from primary materials are used to demonstrate the major themes
evident in the thought of each statesman or philosopher.

The concluding section is devoted to a comparing and
contrasting of the various strands of American idealism that
have been identified in the body of the essay.

2: Sources of American Idealism: The Enlightenment Critique of Power Politics

3: Early American Disciples of the Enlightenment Critique

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Idealism and Realism Defined

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4: Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson's idealism can be summarized around two central themes:

- first, that American power should serve ideal (rather than material) ends; and

- second, that a new international order of harmony and justice could be realized through the triumph of democracy over autocracy and through the founding of a concert of nations to replace the balance of power system.

In this section, excerpts from Wilson's public papers are used to demonstrate these two themes.

4.1: The Ideal Ends of U.S. Diplomacy

4.1.1: General Statements of U.S. Selflessness

These excerpts demonstrate President Wilson's general belief that American power should serve ideal ends--in particular, the principles of human liberty and national self-determination.

4.1.1.1: May 16, 1914

"Men Who Think First of Themselves Not True Americans," address delivered at the unveiling of the statue to the memory of Commodore John Barry, Washington, D.C. (5/16/14):

"What does the United States stand for, then, that our hearts should be stirred by the memory of the men who set her Constitution up? John Barry fought, like every other man in the Revolution, in order that America might be free to make her own life without interruption or disturbance from any other quarter. You can sum the whole thing up in that, that America had a right to her own self-determined life; and what are our corollaries from that? You do not have to go back to stir your thoughts again with the issues of the Revolution. Some of the issues of the Revolution were not the cause of it, but merely the occasion for it. There are just as vital things stirring now that concern the existence of the Nation as were stirring then, and every man who worthily stands in this presence should examine himself and see whether he has the full conception of what it means that America should live her own life. Washington saw it when he wrote his farewell address. It was not merely because of passing and transient circumstances that Washington said that we must keep free from entangling

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Woodrow Wilson

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alliances. It was because he saw that no country had yet set its face in the same direction in which America had set her face. We can not form alliances with those who are not going our way; and in our might and majesty and in the confidence and definiteness of our own purpose we need not and we should not form alliances with any nation in the world. Those who are right, those who study their consciences in determining their policies, those who hold their honor higher than their advantage, do not need alliances. You need alliances when you are not strong, and you are weak only when you are not true to yourself. You are weak only when you are in the wrong; you are weak only when you are afraid to do the right; you are weak only when you doubt your cause and the majesty of a nation's might asserted."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 3, pp. 108-109.)

4.1.1.2: September 28, 1915

Democracy No Longer an Experiment, address to the Grand Army of the Republic, Washington, D.C. (9/28/15):

"You set the Nation free for that greater career of development, of unhampered development, which the world has witnessed since the Civil War; but, for my part, I would not be proud of the extraordinary physical development of this country, of its extraordinary development in material wealth and financial power, did I not believe that the people of the United States wished all of this power devoted to ideal ends.

There have been other nations as rich as we, there have been other nations as powerful, there have been other nations as spirited; but I hope we shall never forget that we created this Nation, not to serve ourselves, but to serve mankind.

I hope I may say without even an implication of criticism upon any other great people in the world that it has always seemed to me that the people of the United States wished to be regarded as devoted to the promotion of particular principles of human right. The United States were founded, not to provide free homes, but to assert human rights. This flag meant a great enterprise of the human spirit."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 3, p. 371.)

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May 16, 1914

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4.1.1.3: November 4, 1915

Outline of the Administration's Program of Preparedness for
National Defense, address before the Manhattan Club, New
York (11/4/15):

"Our principles are well known. It is not necessary to
avow them again. We believe in political liberty and
founded our great government to obtain it, the liberty of
men and of peoples--of men to choose their own lives and of
peoples to choose their own allegiance. Our ambition, also,
all the world has knowledge of. It is not only to be free
and prosperous ourselves, but also to be the friend and
thoughtful partisan of those who are free or who desire
freedom the world over. If we have had aggressive purposes
and covetous ambitions, they were the fruit of our
thoughtless youth as a nation and we have put them aside.
We shall, I confidently believe, never again take another
foot of territory by conquest. We shall never in any
circumstances seek to make an independent people subject to
our dominion; because we believe, we passionately believe,
in the right of every people to choose their own allegiance
and be free of masters altogether. For ourselves we wish
nothing but the full liberty of self-development; and with
ourselves in this great matter we associate all the peoples
of our own hemisphere. We wish not only for the United
States but for them the fullest freedom of independent
growth and of action, for we know that throughout this
hemisphere the same aspirations are everywhere being worked
out, under diverse conditions but with the same impulse and
ultimate object. . . .

Here is the Nation God has builded by our hands. What
shall we do with it? Who is there who does not stand ready
at all times to act in her behalf in a spirit of devoted and
disinterested patriotism? We are yet only in the youth and
first consciousness of our power. The day of our country's
life is still but in its fresh morning. Let us lift our
eyes to the great tracts of life yet to be conquered in the
interests of righteous peace. Come, let us renew our
allegiance to America, conserve her strength in its purity,
make her chief among those who serve mankind, self-
reverenced, self-commanded, witness of all forces of quiet
counsel, strong above all others in good will and the might
of invincible justice and right."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 3, pp.
385, 391-392.)

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November 4, 1915

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4.1.1.4: February 26, 1916

European War--"Valor Strikes Only When It Is Right To
Strike," address at the Gridiron Dinner, Washington, D.C.
(2/26/16)

"The point in national affairs, gentlemen, never lies
along the lines of expediency. It always rests in the field
of principle. The United States was not founded upon any
principle of expediency; it was founded upon a profound
principle of human liberty and of humanity, and whenever it
bases its policy upon any other foundations than those it
builds on the sand and not upon solid rock. . . .

... And the infinite difficulty of public affairs,
gentlemen, is not to discover the signs of the heavens and
the directions of the wind, but to square the things you do
by the not simple but complicated standards of justice.
Justice has nothing to do with expediency. Justice has
nothing to do with any temporary standard whatever. It is
rooted and grounded in the fundamental instincts of
humanity.

America ought to keep out of this war. She ought to
keep out of this war at the sacrifice of everything except
this single thing upon which her character and history are
founded, her sense of humanity and justice. If she
sacrifices that, she has ceased to be America; she has
ceased to entertain and to love the traditions which have
made us proud to be Americans, and when we go about seeking
safety at the expense of humanity, then I for one will
believe that I have always been mistaken in what I have
conceived to be the spirit of American history."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 4, pp.
125-127.)

4.1.1.5: June 13, 1916

Let There Be No Taint of Militarism Among You, address at
the military academy, West Point (6/13/16):

"America, fortunately, does know what she wants to do
with her force. America came into existence for a
particular reason. When you look about upon those beautiful
hills, and up this stately stream, and then let your
imagination run over the whole body of this great country
from which you youngsters are drawn, far and wide, you
remember that while it had aboriginal inhabitants, while
there were people living here, there was no civilization
which we displaced. It was as if in the Providence of God a

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February 26, 1916

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continent had been kept unused and waiting for a peaceful
people who loved liberty and the rights of men more than
they loved anything else, to come and set up an unselfish
commonwealth. It is a very extraordinary thing. . . . There
is none other like it in the whole annals of mankind--of men
gathering out of every civilized nation of the world on an
unused continent and building up a polity exactly to suit
themselves, not under the domination of any ruling dynasty
or of the ambitions of any royal family; doing what they
pleased with their own life on a free space of land which
God had made rich with every resource which was necessary
for the civilization they meant to build up. There is
nothing like it.

Now, what we are preparing to do is to see that nobody
mars that and that, being safe itself against interference
from the outside, all of its force is going to be behind its
moral idea, and mankind is going to know that when America
speaks she means what she says. . . . We are not in for
anything selfish, and we want the whole mighty power of
America thrown into that scale and not into any other."
(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 4, pp.
202-203.)

4.1.2: The Selflessness of the United States in Its Hemisphere

These excerpts demonstrate President Wilson's reiteration
of the theme of the Monroe Doctrine--that the United States is
the champion of freedom and self-determination in its
hemisphere.

4.1.2.1: October 27, 1913

A New Latin American Policy, address delivered before the
Southern Commercial Congress, Mobile, Alabama (10/27/13):

"We must prove ourselves their friends, and champions
upon terms of equality and honor. You cannot be friends at
all except upon the terms of honor. We must show ourselves
friends by comprehending their interest whether it squares
with our own interest or not. It is a very perilous thing
to determine the foreign policy of a nation in the terms of
material interest. It not only is unfair to those with whom
you are dealing, but it is degrading as regards your own
actions.

Comprehension must be the soil in which shall grow all
the fruits of friendship, and there is a reason and a
compulsion lying behind all this which is dearer than
anything else to the thoughtful men of America. I mean the

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June 13, 1916

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development of constitutional liberty in the world. Human
rights, national integrity, and opportunity as against
material interests--that, ladies and gentlemen, is the issue
which we now have to face. I want to take this occasion to
say that the United States will never again seek one
additional foot of territory by conquest. She will devote
herself to showing that she knows how to make honorable and
fruitful use of the territory she has, and she must regard
it as one of the duties of friendship to see that from no
quarter are material interests made superior to human
liberty and national opportunity. I say this, not with a
single thought that anyone will gainsay it, but merely to
fix in our consciousness what our real relationship with the
rest of America is. It is the relationship of a family of
mankind devoted to the development of true constitutional
liberty. We know that that is the soil out of which the
best enterprise springs. We know that this is a cause which
we are making in common with our neighbors, because we have
had to make it for ourselves. . . .

In emphasizing the points which must unite us in
sympathy and in spiritual interest with the Latin American
peoples we are only emphasizing the points of our own life,
and we should prove ourselves untrue to our own traditions
if we proved ourselves untrue friends to them.

Do not think, therefore, gentlemen, that the questions
of the day are mere questions of policy and diplomacy. They
are shot through with the principles of life. We dare not
turn from the principle that morality and not expediency is
the thing that must guide us and that we will never condone
iniquity because it is most convenient to do so. It seems
to me that this is a day of infinite hope, of confidence in
a future greater than the past has been, for I am fain to
believe that in spite of all the things that we wish to
correct the nineteenth century that now lies behind us has
brought us a long stage toward the time when, slowly
ascending the tedious climb that leads to the final uplands,
we shall get our ultimate view of the duties of mankind. We
have breasted a considerable part of that climb and shall
presently--it may be in a generation or two--come out upon
those great heights where there shines unobstructed the
light of the justice of God."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 3, pp. 67-69.)

4.1.2.2: December 7, 1915

Third Annual Address to Congress (12/7/15):

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October 27, 1913

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"No one who really comprehends the spirit of the great people for whom we are appointed to speak can fail to perceive that their passion is for peace, their genius best displayed in the practice of the arts of peace. Great democracies are not belligerent. They do not seek or desire war. Their thought is of individual liberty and of the free labor that supports life and the uncensored thought that quickens it. Conquest and dominion are not in our reckoning, or agreeable to our principles. But just because we demand unmolested development and the undisturbed government of our own lives upon our own principles of right and liberty, we resent, from whatever quarter it may come, the aggression we ourselves will not practice. We insist upon security in prosecuting our self-chosen lines of national development. We do more than that. We demand it also for others. We do not confine our enthusiasm for individual liberty and free national development to the incidents and movements of affairs which affect only ourselves. We feel it wherever there is a people that tries to walk in these difficult paths of independence and right. From the first we have made common cause with all partisans of liberty on this side of the sea, and have deemed it as important that our neighbors should be free from all outside domination as that we ourselves should be; have set America aside as a whole for the uses of independent nations and political freemen."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 3, pp. 410-411.)

4.1.2.3: January 29, 1916

Address on Preparedness, Cleveland, Ohio (1/29/16):

"Now in the midst of all this, what is it that we are called on to do as a nation? I suppose that from the first America has had one peculiar and particular mission in the world. Other nations have grown rich, my fellow citizens, other nations have been as powerful as we in material resources in comparison with the other nations of the world, other nations have built up empires and exercised dominion; we are not peculiar in any of these things, but we are peculiar in this, that from the first we have dedicated our force to the service of justice and righteousness and peace.

We have said, 'Our chief interest is not in the rights of property but in the rights of men; our chief interest is in the spirits of men that they might be free, that they might

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December 7, 1915

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enjoy their lives unmolested so long as they observed the just rules of the game, that they might deal with their fellowmen with their heads erect, the subjects and servants of no man; the servants only of the principles upon which their lives rested.' And America has done more than care for her own people and think of her own fortunes in these great matters. She has said ever since the time of President Monroe that she was the champion of the freedom and the separate sovereignty of peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere. She is trustee for these ideals and she is pledged, to keep these momentous promises."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 4, pp. 38-39.)

### 4.1.3: The Selflessness of U.S. Neutrality

These excerpts demonstrate President Wilson's belief that U.S. neutrality in the European war was a reflection not of American self-interest or indifference but of American disinterestedness, dispassion, self-possession, and overall sympathy for mankind. In essence, Wilson wanted U.S. neutrality to portray the "splendid courage of reserve moral force."

#### 4.1.3.1: August 19, 1914

American Neutrality--An Appeal by the President, presented in the Senate (8/19/14):

"Such divisions amongst us [reflecting those of the European belligerents] would be fatal to our peace of mind and might seriously stand in the way of the proper performance of our duty as the one great nation at peace, the one people holding itself ready to play a part of impartial mediation and speak the counsels of peace and accommodation, not as a partisan, but as a friend.

I venture, therefore, my fellow countrymen, to speak a solemn word of warning to you against that deepest, most subtle, most essential breach of neutrality which may spring out of partisanship, out of passionately taking sides. The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men's souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.

My thought is of America. I am speaking, I feel sure, the earnest wish and purpose of every thoughtful American

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January 29, 1916

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that this great country of ours, which is, of course, the
first in our thoughts and in our hearts, should show herself
in this time of peculiar trial a Nation fit beyond others to
exhibit the fine poise of undisturbed judgement, the dignity
of self-control, the efficiency of dispassionate action; a
Nation that neither sits in judgement upon others nor is
disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit
and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly
serviceable for the peace of the world.

Shall we not resolve to put upon ourselves the
restraints which will bring to our people the happiness and
the great and lasting influence for peace we covet for
them?"

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 3, pp. 158-159.)

4.1.3.2: January 8, 1915

Jackson Day Address, delivered at Indianapolis (1/8/15):

"And what a future it is, my friends! Look abroad upon
the troubled world! Only America at peace! Among all the
great powers of the world only America saving her power for
her own people! Only America using her great character and
her great strength in the interests of peace and of
prosperity! Do you not think it likely that the world will
some time turn to America and say, 'You were right and we
were wrong. You kept your head when we lost ours. You
tried to keep the scale from tipping, and we threw the whole
weight of arms in one side of the scale. Now, in your self-
possession, in your coolness, in your strength, may we not
turn to you for counsel and for assistance?' Think of the
deep-wrought destruction of economic resources, of life, and
of hope that is taking place in some parts of the world, and
think of the reservoir of hope, the reservoir of energy, the
reservoir of sustenance that there is in this great land of
plenty! May we not look forward to the time when we shall
be called blessed among the nations, because we succored the
nations of the world in their time of distress and of
dismay? I for one pray God that that solemn hour may come,
and I know the solidity of character and I know the
exaltation of hope, I know the big principle with which the
American people will respond to the call of the world for
this service. I thank God that those who believe in
America, who try to serve her people, are likely to be also
what America herself from the first hoped and meant to be--
the servant of mankind."

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August 19, 1914

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(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 3, pp. 250-251.)

4.1.3.3: April 20, 1915

Call to the Associated Press, address delivered at New York
(4/20/15):

" . . . Our atmosphere is not yet charged with those disturbing elements which must permeate every nation of Europe. Therefore, is it not likely that the nations of the world will some day turn to us for the cooler assessment of the elements engaged? I am not now thinking so preposterous a thought as that we should sit in judgment upon them--no nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation--but that we shall some day have to assist in reconstructing the processes of peace. Our resources are untouched; we are more and more becoming by the force of circumstances the mediating Nation of the world in respect of its finance. We must make up our minds what are the best things to do and what are the best ways to do them. We must put our money, our energy, our enthusiasm, our sympathy into these things, and we must have our judgments prepared and our spirits chastened against the coming of that day.

So that I am not speaking in a selfish spirit when I say that our whole duty, for the present at any rate, is summed up in this motto, 'America first.' Let us think of America before we think of Europe, in order that America may be fit to be Europe's friend when the day of tested friendship comes. The test of friendship is not now sympathy with the one side or the other, but getting ready to help both sides when the struggle is over. The basis of neutrality, gentlemen, is not indifference; it is not self-interest. The basis of neutrality is sympathy for mankind. It is fairness, it is good will, at bottom. It is impartiality of spirit, and of judgment. . . We are the mediating Nation of the world. I do not mean that we undertake not to mind our own business and to mediate where other people are quarreling. I mean the word in a broader sense. We are compounded of the nations of the world; we mediate their blood, we mediate their traditions, we mediate their sentiments, their tastes, their passions; we are ourselves compounded of those things. We are, therefore, able to understand all nations; we are able to understand them in the compound, not separately, as partisans, but unitedly as knowing and comprehending and embodying them all. It is in that sense that I mean that America is a

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January 8, 1915

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mediating Nation. . . . And America is particularly free in
this, that she has no hampering ambitions as a world power.
We do not want a foot of anybody's territory. If we have
been obliged by circumstances, in the past, to take
territory which we otherwise would not have thought of
taking, I believe I am right in saying that we have
considered it our duty to administer that territory, not for
ourselves but for the people living in it, and to put this
burden upon our consciences--not to think that this thing is
ours for our use, but to regard ourselves as trustees of the
great business for those to whom it does really belong,
trustees ready to hand it over to the cestui que trust at
any time when the business seems to make that possible and
feasible. That is what I mean by saying we have no
hampering ambitions. We do not want anything that does not
belong to us. Is not a nation in that position free to
serve other nations, and is not a nation like that ready to
form some part of the assessing opinion of the world?

... But I am interested in neutrality because there
is something so much greater to do than fight; there is a
distinction waiting for this Nation that no nation has ever
yet got. That is the distinction of absolute self-control
and self-mastery. Whom do you admire most among your
friends? The irritable man? The man out of whom you can
get a 'rise' without trying? The man who will fight at the
drop of the hat, whether he knows what the hat is dropped
for or not? Don't you admire and don't you fear, if you
have to contest with him, the self-mastered man who watches
you with calm eye and comes in only when you have carried
the thing so far that you must be disposed of? That is the
man you respect. That is the man who, you know, has at
bottom a much more fundamental and terrible courage than the
irritable, fighting man. Now, I covet for America this
splendid courage of reserve moral force, and I wanted to
point out to you gentlemen simply this."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 3, pp.
303-306.)

4.1.3.4: May 10, 1915

"Too Proud to Fight," address to several thousand foreign-
born citizens after naturalization ceremonies, Philadelphia
(5/10/15):

" . . . If I have in any degree forgotten what America
was intended for, I will thank God if you will remind me. I
was born in America. You dreamed dreams of what America was

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to be, and I hope you brought the dreams with you. No man
that does not see visions will ever realize any high hope or
undertake any high enterprise. Just because you brought
dreams with you, America is more likely to realize dreams
such as you brought. You are enriching us if you came
expecting us to be better than we are.

See, my friends, what that means. It means that
Americans must have a consciousness different from the
consciousness of every other nation in the world. I am not
saying this with even the slightest thought of criticism of
other nations. You know how it is with a family. A family
gets centered on itself if it is not careful and is less
interested in the neighbors than it is in its own members.
So a nation that is not constantly renewed out of new
sources is apt to have the narrowness and prejudice of a
family; whereas, America must have this consciousness, that
on all sides it touches elbows and touches hearts with all
the nations of mankind. The example of America must be a
special example. The example of America must be the example
not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace
because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the
world and strife is not. There is such a thing as a man
being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation
being so right that it does not need to convince others by
force that it is right."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 3, pp. 320-321.)

4.1.3.5: October 5, 1916

America and the Rights of Humanity, address delivered at
Omaha (10/5/16):

"... It is very important that the statesmen of other parts of the world should understand America. America has held off from the present conflict with which the rest of the world is ablaze, not because she was not interested, not because she was indifferent, but because the part she wanted to play was a different part from that.

But Europe ought not to misunderstand us. We are
holding off, not because we do not feel concerned, but
because when we exert the force of this Nation we want to
know what we are exerting it for. You know that we have
always remembered and revered the advice of the great
Washington, who advised us to avoid foreign entanglements.
By that I understand him to mean avoid being entangled in
the ambitions and the national purposes of other nations.

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It does not mean--if I may be permitted to venture an
interpretation of the meaning of that great man--that we are
to avoid the entanglements of the world, for we are part of
the world, and nothing that concerns the whole world can be
indifferent to us. We want always to hold the force of
America to fight for what? Not merely for the rights of
property or of national ambition, but for the rights of
mankind.

Nothing that concerns humanity, nothing that concerns
the essential rights of mankind can be foreign or
indifferent to us. But in fighting for these things, my
fellow-citizens, we ought to have a touchstone. We want to
have a test. We ought to know, whenever we act, what the
purpose is, what the ultimate goal is.

Now, the touchstone is this: On our own part absolute
singleness of heart and purpose in our allegiance to
America, and then a justification of that allegiance to
America by holding the doctrine that is truly American, that
the States of America were set up to vindicate the rights of
man and not the rights of property or the rights of self-
aggrandizement and aggression. Property we have found to be
the indispensable foundation of stable institutions, but the
rights of humanity are the essence of free institutions, and
nothing can take precedence of them."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 4, 346-
347.)

4.1.4: The Selflessness of U.S. War Aims

These excerpts demonstrate that President Wilson based
his conception of American war aims on a liberal vision of
international harmony: peace, equality of all states, self-
determination, government by consent, freedom of the seas,
reduction of armaments, abolition of balances of power, etc.

4.1.4.1: March 15, 1917

Second Inaugural Address (3/15/17):

" . . . The war inevitably set its mark from the first
alike upon our minds, our industries, our commerce, our
politics, and our social action. To be indifferent to it or
independent of it was out of the question.

And yet all the while we have been conscious that we
were not part of it. In that consciousness, despite many
divisions, we have drawn closer together. We have been
deeply wronged upon the seas, but we have not wished to
wrong or injure in return; have retained throughout the

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consciousness of standing in some sort apart, intent upon an
interest that transcended the immediate issues of the war
itself. As some of the injuries done us have become
intolerable we have still been clear that we wished nothing
for ourselves that we were not ready to demand for all
mankind,--fair dealing, justice, the freedom to live and be
at ease against organized wrong.

It is in this spirit and with this thought that we have
grown more and more aware, more and more certain that the
part we wished to play was the part of those who mean to
vindicate and fortify peace. We have been obliged to arm
ourselves to make good our claim to a certain minimum of
right and of freedom of action. We stand firm in armed
neutrality since it seems that in no other way we can
demonstrate what it is we insist upon and cannot forego. We
may even be drawn on, by circumstances, not by our own
purpose or desire, to a more active assertion of our rights
as we see them and a more immediate association with the
great struggle itself. But nothing will alter our thought
or our purpose. They are too clear to be obscured. They
are too deeply rooted in principles of our national life to
be altered. We desire neither conquest nor advantage. We
wish nothing that can be had only at the cost of another
people. We have always professed unselfish purpose and we
covet the opportunity to prove that our professions are
sincere.

There are many things still to do at home, to clarify
our own politics and give new vitality to the industrial
processes of our own life, and we shall do them as time and
opportunity serve; but we realize that the greatest things
that remain to be done must be done with the whole world for
stage and in cooperation with the wide and universal forces
of mankind, and we are making our spirits ready for those
things. They will follow in the immediate wake of the war
itself and will set civilization up again. We are
provincials no longer. The tragical events of the thirty
months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed
have made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning
back. Our own fortunes as a nation are involved, whether we
would have it so or not.

And yet we are not the less Americans on that account.
We shall be the more American if we but remain true to the
principles in which we have been bred. They are not the
principles of a province or of a single continent. We have
known and boasted all along that they were the principles of
a liberated mankind. These, therefore, are the things we
shall stand for, whether in war or in peace:

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That all nations are equally interested in the peace of
the world and in the political stability of free peoples,
and equally responsible for their maintenance;

That the essential principle of peace is the actual
equality of nations in all matters of right or privilege;

That peace cannot securely or justly rest upon an armed
balance of power;

That governments derive all their just powers from the
consent of the governed and that no other powers should be
supported by the common thought, purpose, or power of the
family of nations.

That the seas should be equally free and safe for the
use of all peoples, under rules set up by common agreement
and consent, and that, so far as practicable, they should be
accessible to all upon equal terms;

That national armaments should be limited to the
necessities of national order and domestic safety;

That the community of interest and of power upon which
peace must henceforth depend imposes upon each nation the
duty of seeing to it that all influences proceeding from its
own citizens meant to encourage or assist revolution in
other states should be sternly and effectually suppressed
and prevented.

I need not argue these principles to you, my fellow
countrymen: they are your own, part and parcel of your own
thinking and your own motive in affairs. They spring up
native amongst us. Upon this as a platform of purpose and
of action we can stand together."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 2-4.)

4.1.4.2: April 2, 1917

For Declaration of War Against Germany, address delivered at
a joint session of the two houses of Congress (4/2/17):

"We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because we know that in such a Government [the German], following such methods, we can never have a friend; and that in the presence of its organized power, always lying in wait to accomplish we know not what purpose, there can be no assured security for the democratic Governments of the world. We are now about to accept gage of battle with this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the Nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight

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thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the
liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for
the rights 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. Its peace must
be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

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. We are but one of the champions of the rights of
mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been
made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can
make them.

Just because we fight without rancor and without
selfish object, seeking nothing for ourselves but what we
shall wish to share with all free peoples, we shall, I feel
confident, conduct our operations as belligerents without
passion and ourselves observe with proud punctilio the
principles of right and of fair play we profess to be
fighting for. . . .

It is a distressing and oppressive duty, Gentlemen of
the Congress, which I have performed in thus addressing you.

There are, it may be, many months of fiery trial and
sacrifice ahead of us. 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. 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."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 13-14, 16.)

4.1.4.3: April 16, 1917

"The Supreme Test of the Nation Has Come," an appeal to the
people (4/16/17):

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" . . . There is not a single selfish element, so far as I can see, in the cause we are fighting for. We are fighting for what we believe and wish to be the rights of mankind and for the future peace and security of the world. To do this great thing worthily and successfully we must devote ourselves to the service without regard to profit or material advantage and with an energy and intelligence that will rise to the level of the enterprise itself. We must realize to the full how great the task is and how many things, how many kinds and elements of capacity and service and self-sacrifice, it involves."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, p. 22.)

4.1.4.4: May 30, 1917

"America Was Born to Serve Mankind," Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery (5/30/17)

"When you reflect upon it, these men who died to preserve the Union died to preserve the instrument which we are now using to serve the world--a free Nation espousing the cause of human liberty. In one sense the great struggle into which we have now entered is an American struggle, because it is in defense of American honor and American rights, but it is something even greater than that; it is a world struggle. It is a struggle of men who love liberty everywhere, and in this cause America will show herself greater than ever because she will rise to a greater thing.

We have said in the beginning that we planned this great Government that men who wished freedom might have a place of refuge and a place where their hope could be realized, and now, having established such a Government, having preserved such a Government, having vindicated the power of such a Government, we are saying to all mankind, 'We did not set this Government up in order that we might have a selfish and separate liberty, for we are now ready to come to your assistance and fight out upon the field of the world the cause of human liberty.'

In this thing America attains her full dignity and the full fruition of her great purpose.

No man can be glad that such things have happened as we have witnessed in these last fateful years, but perhaps it may be permitted to us to be glad that we have an opportunity to show the principles that we profess to be living, principles that live in our hearts, and to have a

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chance by the pouring out of our blood and treasure to vindicate the thing which we have professed. For, my friends, the real fruition of life is to do the thing we have said we wished to do. There are times when words seem empty and only action seems great. Such a time has come, and in the providence of God America will once more have an opportunity to show to the world that she was born to serve mankind."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 52-53.)

4.1.4.5: June 5, 1917

"A Day of Noble Memories, A Day of Dedication;" address to Confederate veterans at Washington (6/5/17):

"These are days of oblivion as well as of memory, for we are forgetting the things that once held us asunder. Not only that, but they are days of rejoicing, because we now at last see why this great Nation was kept united, for we are beginning to see the great world purpose which it was meant to serve. Many men I know, particularly of your own generation, have wondered at some of the dealings of Providence, but the wise heart never questions the dealings of Providence, because the great long plan as it unfolds has a majesty about it and a definiteness of purpose, an elevation of ideal, which we were incapable of conceiving as we tried to work things out with our short sight and weak strength. And now that we see ourselves part of a Nation united, powerful, great in spirit and in purpose, we know the great ends which God in His mysterious Providence wrought through our instrumentality, because at the heart of the men of the North and of the South there was the same love of self-government and of liberty, and now we are to be an instrument in the hands of God to see that liberty is made secure for mankind.

At the day of our greatest division there was one common passion amongst us, and that was the passion for human freedom. We did not know that God was working out in His own way the method by which we should best serve human freedom--by making this Nation a great united, indivisible, indestructible instrument in His hands for the accomplishment of these great things. . . .

There are not many things that one desires about war, my fellow citizens, but you have come through war, you know how you have been chastened by it, and there comes a time when it is good for a Nation to know that it must sacrifice

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if need be everything that it has to vindicate the
principles which it professes. We have prospered with a
sort of heedless and irresponsible prosperity. Now we are
going to lay all our wealth, if necessary, and spend all our
blood, if need be, to show that we were not accumulating
that wealth selfishly, but were accumulating it for the
service of mankind. Men all over the world have thought of
the United States as a trading and money-getting people,
whereas we who have lived at home know the ideals with which
the hearts of this people have thrilled; we know the sober
convictions which have lain at the basis of our life all the
time; and we know the power and devotion which can be spent
in heroic wise for the service of those ideals that we have
treasured. We have been allowed to become strong in the
Providence of God that our strength might be used to prove,
not our selfishness, but our greatness, and if there is any
ground for thankfulness in a day like this, I am thankful
for the privilege of self-sacrifice, which is the only
privilege that lends dignity to the human spirit."
(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 55-
56.)

4.1.4.6: August 11, 1917

"Leave Out of Your Vocabulary the Word 'Prudent,'" address
to the officers of the Atlantic Fleet (8/11/17):

"... I cannot say it too often to any audience, we
are fighting a thing, not a people. The most extraordinary
circumstance of modern history is the way in which the
German people have been subordinated to the German system of
authority, and how they have accepted their thinking from
authority as well as their action from authority. Now, we
do not intend to let that method of action and of thinking
be imposed upon the rest of the world. Knowing as some of
us do the fine quality of the German people, we are sorry
that it was ever imposed upon them and we are anxious to see
that they have their glad emancipation, but we intend to see
to it that no other people suffers a like limitation and
subordination. We went into this war because this system
touched us. These people that stopped at nothing paid no
attention to our rights, destroyed the lives of our people,
invaded the dignity of our sovereignty, tried to make
interest against us in the minds of our own people, and the
thing was intolerable. We had to strike, but thank God we
were striking not only for ourselves but for everybody else
that loves liberty under God's heaven, and therefore we are

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in some peculiar sense the trustees of liberty."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, p. 85.)

4.1.4.7: November 7, 1917

Thanksgiving Day proclamation (11/7/17):

"We have been given the opportunity to serve mankind as we once served ourselves in the great day of our Declaration of Independence, by taking up arms against a tyranny that threatened to master and debase men everywhere and joining with other free peoples in demanding for all the nations of the world what we then demanded and obtained for ourselves. In this day of the revelation of our duty not only to defend our own rights as a nation, but to defend also the rights of free men throughout the world, there has been vouchsafed us in full and inspiring measure the resolution and spirit of united action. We have been brought to one mind and purpose. A new vigor of common counsel and common action has been revealed in us."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, p. 111.)

4.1.4.8: July 4, 1918

Four-Minute Men, four-minute address by the President, read by four-minute men in 5,300 community meetings in the United States (7/4/18):

"You are met, my fellow citizens, to commemorate the signing of that Declaration of Independence which marked the awakening of a new spirit in the lives of nations. Since the birth of our Republic, we have seen this spirit grow. We have heard the demand and watched the struggle for self-government spread and triumph among many peoples. We have come to regard the right to political liberty as the common right of humankind. Year after year, within the security of our borders, we have continued to rejoice in the peaceful increase of freedom and democracy throughout the world. And yet now, suddenly, we are confronted with a menace which endangers everything that we have won and everything that the world has won.

... Centuries of subjugation have not destroyed the racial aspirations of the many distinct peoples of eastern Europe, nor have they accepted the sordid ideals of their political and military masters. They have survived the slow

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persecutions of peace as well as the agonies of war and now
demand recognition for their just claims to autonomy and
self-government. Representatives of these races are with
you to-day, voicing their loyalty to our ideals and offering
their services in the common cause. I ask you, fellow
citizens, to unite with them in making this our Independence
Day the first that shall be consecrated to a declaration of
independence for all the peoples of the world."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5., pp.
236-237.)

4.1.4.9: February 24, 1919

At Boston, address on return to America (2/24/19):

"... I have been searching for the fundamental fact that converted Europe to believe in us. Before this war Europe did not believe in us as she does now. She did not believe in us throughout the first three years of the war. She seems really to have believed that we were holding off because we thought we could make more by staying out than by going in. And all of a sudden, in short eighteen months, the whole verdict is reversed. There can be but one explanation for it. They saw what we did, that without making a single claim we put all our men and all our means at the disposal of those who were fighting for their homes in the first instance, but for the cause--the cause of human right and justice--and that we went in, not to support their national claims, but to support the great cause which they held in common. And when they saw that America not only held the ideals but acted the ideals, they were converted to America and became firm partisans of those ideals.

I met a group of scholars when I was in Paris. Some
gentlemen from one of the Greek universities who had come to
see me and in whose presence, or rather in the presence of
the traditions of learning, I felt very young, indeed. And
I told them that I had had one of the delightful revenges
that sometimes come to men. All my life I have heard men
speak with a sort of condescension of ideals and of
idealisers, and particularly of those separated, encloistered
persons whom they choose to term academic, who were in the
habit of uttering ideals in a free atmosphere when they
clash with nobody in particular. And I said I have had this
sweet revenge. Speaking with perfect frankness in the name
of the people of the United States I have uttered as the
objects of this great war ideals, and nothing but ideals,
and the war has been won by that inspiration. . . .

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I do not mean any disrespect to any other great people when I say that America is the hope of the world. And if she does not justify that hope results are unthinkable. Men will be thrown back upon bitterness of disappointment not only but bitterness of despair. All nations will be set up as hostile camps again; men at the peace conference will go home with their heads upon their breasts, knowing they have failed--for they were bidden not to come home from there until they did something more than sign the treaty of peace.

We set this Nation up to make men free and we did not confine our conception and purpose to America, and now we will make men free. If we did not do that all the fame of America would be gone and all her power would be dissipated.

She would then have to keep her power for those narrow, selfish, provincial purposes which seem so dear to some minds that have no sweep beyond the nearest horizon. . . . Think of the picture, think of the utter blackness that would fall on the world. America has failed. America made a little essay at generosity and then withdrew. America said, 'We are your friends,' but it was only for to-day, not for to-morrow. America said, 'Here is our power to vindicate right,' and then next day said, 'Let right take care of itself and we will take care of ourselves.' America said, 'We set up light to lead men along the paths of liberty, but we have lowered it--it is intended only to light our own path.'

We set up a great ideal of liberty, and then we said, 'Liberty is a thing that you must win for yourself.' . . ." (Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 435-439.)

4.1.4.10: July 10, 1919

Presenting the Treaty for Ratification, address to the Senate of the United States (7/10/19):

"The United States entered the war upon a different footing from every other nation except our associates on this side of the sea. We entered it, not because our material interests were directly threatened or because any special treaty obligations to which we were parties had been violated, but only because we saw the supremacy, and even the validity, of right everywhere put in jeopardy and free government likely to be everywhere imperiled by the intolerable aggression of a power which respected neither

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right nor obligation and whose very system of government
flouted the rights of the citizen as against the autocratic
authority of his governors. And in the settlements of the
peace we have sought no special reparation for ourselves,
but only the restoration of right and the assurance of
liberty everywhere that the effects of the settlement were
to be felt. We entered the war as the disinterested
champions of right and we interested ourselves in the terms
of the peace in no other capacity.

... Our participation in the war established our
position among the nations and nothing but our own mistaken
action can alter it. It was not an accident or a matter of
sudden choice that we are no longer isolated and devoted to
a policy which has only our own interest and advantage for
its object. It was our duty to go in, if we were indeed the
champions of liberty and of right. We answered to the call
of duty in a way so spirited, so utterly without thought of
what we spent of blood or treasure, so effective, so worthy
of the admiration of true men everywhere, so wrought out of
the stuff of all that was heroic, that the whole world saw
at last, in the flesh, in noble action, a great ideal
asserted and vindicated, by a Nation they had deemed
material and now found to be compact of the spiritual forces
that must free men of every nation from every unworthy
bondage. It is thus that a new role and a new
responsibility have come to this great Nation that we honor
and which we would all wish to lift to yet higher levels of
service and achievement.

The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come
about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God
who led us into this way. We cannot turn back. We can only
go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow
the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth.
America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon
the path ahead, and nowhere else."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp.
538, 551-552.)

## 4.2: The Realization of a New International Order

### 4.2.1: The Triumph of Democracy Over Autocracy

These excerpts demonstrate President Wilson's general
belief that autocracy was the root of aggression in
international affairs and, hence, that the rise of democracy
around the world would lead to international peace.

#### 4.2.1.1: September 27, 1918

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Fourth Liberty Loan, address opening the campaign for the
fourth liberty loan delivered in New York City (9/27/18):

" . . . it is my mission here to-night to try to make it clear once more what the war really means. You will need no other stimulation or reminder of your duty.

At every turn of the war we gain a fresh consciousness of what we mean to accomplish by it. When our hope and expectation are most excited we think more definitely than before of the issues that hang upon it and of the purposes which must be realized by means of it. For it has positive and well-defined purposes which we did not determine and which we cannot alter. No statesman or assembly created them; no statesman or assembly can alter them. They have arisen out of the very nature and circumstances of the war. The most that statesmen or assemblies can do is to carry them out or be false to them. They were perhaps not clear at the outset; but they are clear now. The war has lasted more than four years and the whole world has been drawn into it. The common will of mankind has been substituted for the particular purposes of individual states. Individual statesmen may have started the conflict, but neither they nor their opponents can stop it as they please. It has become a peoples' war, and peoples of all sorts and races, of every degree of power and variety of fortune, are involved in its sweeping processes of change and settlement.

We came into it when its character had become fully defined and it was plain that no nation could stand apart or be indifferent to its outcome. Its challenge drove to the heart of everything we cared for and lived for. The voice of the war had become clear and gripped our hearts. Our brothers from many lands, as well as our own murdered dead under the sea, were calling to us, and we responded, fiercely and of course.

The air was clear about us. We saw things in their full, convincing proportions as they were; and we have seen them with steady eyes and unchanging comprehension ever since. We accepted the issues of the war as facts, not as any group of men either here or elsewhere had defined them, and we can accept no outcome which does not squarely meet and settle them. Those issues are these:

Shall the military power of any nation or group of nations be suffered to determine the fortunes of peoples over whom they have no right to rule except the right of force?

Shall strong nations be free to wrong weak nations and make them subject to their purpose and interest?

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Shall peoples be ruled and dominated, even in their own internal affairs, by arbitrary and irresponsible force or by their own will and choice?

Shall there be a common standard of right and privilege for all peoples and nations or shall the strong do as they will and the weak suffer without redress?

Shall the assertion of right be haphazard and by casual alliance or shall there be a common concert to oblige the observance of common rights?

No man, no group of men, chose these to be the issues of the struggle. They are the issues of it; and they must be settled,--by no arrangement or compromise or adjustment of interests, but definitely and once for all and with a full and unequivocal acceptance of the principle that the interest of the weakest is as sacred as the interest of the strongest.

This is what we mean when we speak of a permanent peace, if we speak sincerely, intelligently, and with a real knowledge and comprehension of the matter we deal with."
(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5. pp. 253-255.)

4.2.1.2: May 30, 1919

Suresnes Cemetery Speech, Memorial Day address near Paris
(5/30/19):

"You are aware, as I am aware, that the airs of an older day are beginning to stir again, that the standards of an old order are trying to assert themselves again. There is here and there an attempt to insert into the counsel of statesmen the old reckonings of selfishness and bargaining and national advantage which were the roots of this war, and any man who counsels these things advocates the renewal of the sacrifice which these men have made; for if this is not the final battle for right, there will be another that will be final. Let these gentlemen not suppose that it is possible for them to accomplish this return to an order of which we are ashamed and that we are ready to forget. They cannot accomplish it. The peoples of the world are awake and the peoples of the world are in the saddle. Private counsels of statesmen cannot now and cannot hereafter determine the destinies of nations. If we are not the servants of the opinion of mankind, we are of all men the littlest, the most contemptible, the least gifted with vision. If we do not know our age, we cannot accomplish our purpose, and this age is an age which looks forward, not

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backward; which rejects the standards of national
selfishness that once governed the counsels of nations and
demands that they shall give way to a new order of things in
which the only questions will be, 'Is it right?' 'Is it
just?' 'Is it in the interest of mankind?'"

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, p. 505.)

4.2.1.3: April 2, 1917

"We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no
feeling towards them but one of sympathy and friendship. It
was not upon their impulse that their government acted in
entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge
or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to
be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples
were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were
provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little
groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their
fellow men as pawns and tools. Self-governed nations do not
fill their neighbor states with spies or set the course of
intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs
which will give them an opportunity to strike and make
conquest. Such designs can be successfully worked out only
under cover and where no one has the right to ask questions.

Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression,
carried, it may be, from generation to generation, can be
worked out and kept from the light only within the privacy
of courts or behind the carefully guarded confidences of a
narrow and privileged class. They are happily impossible
where public opinion commands and insists upon full
information concerning all the nation's affairs.

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained
except by a partnership of democratic nations. No
autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within
it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor,
a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals
away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what
they would and render account to no one would be a
corruption seated at its very heart. Only free peoples can
hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end
and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest
of their own.

Does not every American feel that assurance has been

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added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the
wonderful and heartening things that have been happening
within the last few weeks in Russia? Russia was known by
those who knew it best to have been always in fact
democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought,
in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke
their natural instinct, their habitual attitude towards
life. The autocracy that crowned the summit of her
political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as
was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in
origin, character, or purpose; and now it has been shaken
off and the great, generous Russian people have been added
in all their naive majesty and might to the forces that are
fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for
peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of Honor."
(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol 5, pp. 11-
13.)

4.2.1.4: June 14, 1917

"This Is A People's War," Flag Day address delivered at
Washington (6/14/17):

"The war was begun by the military masters of Germany, who proved to be also the masters of Austria-Hungary. These men have never regarded nations as peoples, men, women, and children of like blood and frame as themselves, for whom governments existed and in whom governments had their life. They have regarded them merely as serviceable organizations which they could by force or intrigue bend or corrupt to their own purpose. They have regarded the smaller states, in particular, and the peoples who could be overwhelmed by force, as their natural tools and instruments of domination.

The military masters under whom Germany is bleeding see
very clearly to what point Fate has brought them. If they
fall back or are forced back an inch, their power both
abroad and at home will fall to pieces like a house of
cards. It is their power at home they are thinking about
now more than their power abroad. It is that power which is
trembling under their very feet; and deep fear has entered
their hearts. They have but one chance to perpetuate their
military power or even their controlling political
influence. If they can secure peace now with the immense
advantages still in their hands which they have up to this
point apparently gained, they will have justified themselves
before the German people: they will have gained by force

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what they promised to gain by it: an immense expansion of
German power, an immense enlargement of German industrial
and commercial opportunities. Their prestige will be
secure, and with their prestige their political power. If
they fail, their people will thrust them aside; a government
accountable to the people themselves will be set up in
Germany as it has been in England, in the United States, in
France, and in all the great countries of the modern time
except Germany. If they succeed they are safe and Germany
and the world are undone; if they fail Germany is saved and
the world will be at peace. If they succeed, American will
fall within the menace. We and all the rest of the world
must remain armed, as they will remain, and must make ready
for the next step in their aggression; if they fail, the
world may unite for peace and Germany may be of the union.

The facts are patent to all the world, and
nowhere are they more plainly seen than in the United
States, where we are accustomed to deal with facts and not
with sophistries; and the great fact that stands out above
all the rest is that this is a People's War, a war for
freedom and justice and self-government amongst all the
nations of the world, a war to make the world safe for the
peoples who live upon it and have made it their own, the
German people themselves included; and that with us rests
the choice to break through all these hypocrises and patent
cheats and masks of brute force and help set the world free,
or else stand aside and let it be dominated a long age
through by sheer weight of arms, and the arbitrary choices
of self-constituted masters, by the nation which can
maintain the biggest armies and the most irresistible
armaments,--a power to which the world has afforded no
parallel and in the face of which political freedom must
wither and perish."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 62, 64-67.)

4.2.1.5: December 4, 1917

Recommending War with Austria-Hungary, address delivered at
a joint session of the two houses of Congress (12/4/17):

"I believe that I speak for them [the American people]
when I say two things: First, that this intolerable Thing of
which the masters of Germany have shown us the ugly face,
this menace of combined intrigue and force which we now see
so clearly as the German power, a Thing without conscience
or honor or capacity for covenanted peace, must be crushed

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and, if it be not utterly brought to an end, at least shut
out from the friendly intercourse of the nations; and,
second, that when the Thing and its power are indeed
defeated and the time comes that we can discuss peace,--when
the German people have spokesmen whose word we can believe
and when those spokesmen are ready in the name of their
people to accept the common judgement of the nations as to
what shall henceforth be the bases of law and of covenant
for the life of the world,--we shall be willing and glad to
pay the full price for peace, and pay it ungrudgingly. We
know what that price will be. It will be full, impartial
justice,--justice done at every point and to every nation
that the final settlement must affect, our enemies as well
as our friends.

... Let it be said again that autocracy must first be shown the utter futility of its claims to power or leadership in the modern world. It is impossible to apply any standard of justice so long as such forces are unchecked and undefeated as the present masters of Germany command. Not until that has been done can Right be set up as arbiter and peace-maker among the nations. But when that has been done,--as, God willing, it assuredly will be,--we shall at last be free to do an unprecedented thing, and this is the time to avow our purpose to do it. We shall be free to base peace on generosity and justice, to the exclusion of all selfish claims to advantage even of the part of the victors.

... The worst that can happen to the detriment of the German people is this, that if they should still, after the war is over, continue to be obliged to live under ambitious and intriguing masters interested to disturb the peace of the world, men or classes of men whom the other peoples of the world could not trust, it might be impossible to admit them to the partnership of nations which must henceforth guarantee the world's peace. That partnership must be a partnership of peoples, not a mere partnership of governments. ...

The wrongs, the very deep wrongs, committed in this war
will have to be righted. That of course. But they cannot
and must not be righted by the commission of similar wrongs
against Germany and her allies. The world will not permit
the commission of similar wrongs against Germany and her
allies. The world will not permit the commission of similar
wrongs as a means of reparation and settlement. Statesmen
must by this time have learned that the opinion of the world
is everywhere wide awake and fully comprehends the issues
involved. No representative of any self-governed nation
will dare disregard it by attempting any such covenants of

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selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the
Congress of Vienna. The thought of the plain people here
and everywhere throughout the world, the people who enjoy no
privilege and have very simple and unsophisticated standards
of right and wrong, is the air all governments must
henceforth breathe if they would live. It is in the full
disclosing light of that thought that all policies must be
conceived and executed in this midday hour of the world's
life. German rulers have been able to upset the peace of
the world only because the German people were not suffered
under their tutelage to share the comradeship of the other
peoples of the world either in thought or in purpose. They
were allowed to have no opinion of their own which might be
set up as a rule of conduct for those who exercised
authority over them. But the congress that concludes this
war will feel the full strength of the tides than [sic] run
now in the hearts and conscience of free men everywhere.
Its conclusion will run with those tides."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp.
129-131, 133-134.)

4.2.1.6: April 6, 1918

Opening the Third Liberty Loan Campaign, address at
Baltimore, Maryland (4/6/18):

" . . . In such a program [of German expansion] our
ideals, the ideals of justice and humanity and liberty, the
principle of the free self-determination of nations upon
which all the modern world insists, can play no part. They
are rejected for the ideals of power, for the principle that
the strong must rule the weak, that trade must follow the
flag, whether those to whom it is taken welcome it or not,
that the peoples of the world are to be made subject to the
patronage and overlordship of those who have the power to
enforce it.

That program once carried out, America and all who care
or dare to stand with her must arm and prepare themselves to
contest the mastery of the world, a mastery in which the
rights of common men, the rights of women and of all who are
weak, must for the time being be trodden under foot and
disregarded, and the old, age-long struggle for freedom and
right begin again at its beginning. Everything that America
has lived for and loved and grown great to vindicate and
bring to a glorious realization will have fallen in utter
ruin and the gates of mercy once more pitilessly shut upon
mankind!

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Germany has once more said that force, and force
alone, shall decide whether Justice and peace shall reign in
the affairs of men, whether Right as America conceives it or
Dominion as she conceives it shall determine the destinies
of mankind. There is, therefore, but one response possible
from us: Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or
limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make
Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion
down in the dust."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 201-202.)

4.2.1.7: January 25, 1919

Make This League of Nations a Vital Thing," address before
the second plenary session of the peace conference, Paris
(1/25/19):

" . . . We are here to see, in short, that the very
foundations of this war are swept away. Those foundations
were the private choice of small coteries of civil rulers
and military staffs. Those foundations were the aggression
of great powers upon the small. Those foundations were the
holding together of empires of unwilling subjects by the
duress of arms. Those foundations were the power of small
bodies of men to work their will upon mankind and use them
as pawns in a game. And nothing less than the emancipation
of the world from these things will accomplish peace."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, p. 399)

4.2.2: A Concert of Power To Replace the Balance of Power

These excerpts demonstrate President Wilson's belief that
a concert of nations must supplant balances of power as the
guarantor of self-determination and peace in international
affairs. To play its role effectively, this concert of
nations would rely on both the moral and physical force of
humankind. The League of Nations would constitute the "final
enterprise of humanity."

4.2.2.1: May 27, 1916

First Commitment to the Idea of a League of Nations, address
before the League to Enforce Peace, Washington, D.C.

(5/27/16):

"One observation on the causes of the present war we

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are at liberty to make, and to make it may throw some light
forward upon the future, as well as backward upon the past.
It is plain that this war could have come only as it did,
suddenly and out of secret counsels, without warning to the
world, without discussion, without any of the deliberate
movements of counsel with which it would seem natural to
approach so stupendous a contest. It is probable that if it
had been foreseen just what would happen, just what
alliances would be formed, just what forces arrayed against
one another, those who brought the great contest on would
have been glad to substitute conference for force. If we
ourselves had been afforded some opportunity to apprise the
belligerents of the attitude which it would be our duty to
take, of the policies and practices against which we would
feel bound to use all our moral and economic strength, and
in certain circumstances even our physical strength also,
our own contribution to the counsel which might have averted
the struggle would have been considered worth weighing and
regarding.

And the lesson which the shock of being taken by
surprise in a matter so deeply vital to all the nations of
the world has made poignantly clear is, that the peace of
the world must henceforth depend upon a new and more
wholesome diplomacy. Only when the great nations of the
world have reached some sort of agreement as to what they
hold to be fundamental to their common interest, and as to
some feasible method of acting in concert when any nation or
group of nations seeks to disturb those fundamental things,
can we feel that civilization is at last in a way of
justifying its existence and claiming to be finally
established. It is clear that nations must in the future be
governed by the same high code of honor that we demand of
individuals.

... Repeated utterances of the leading statesmen of most of the great nations now engaged in war have made it plain that their thought has come to this, that the principle of public right must henceforth take precedence ober the individual interests of particular nations, and that the nations of the world must in some way band themselves together to see that that right prevails as against any sort of selfish aggression; that henceforth alliance must not be set up against alliance, understanding against understanding, but that there must be a common agreement for a common object, and that at the heart of that common object must lie the inviolable rights of peoples and of mankind. ...

We believe these fundamental things: First, that every

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people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which
they shall live. Like other nations, we have ourselves no
doubt once and again offended against that principle when
for a little while controlled by selfish passion as our
franker historians have been honorable enough to admit; but
it has become more and more our rule of life and action.
Second, that the small states of the world have a right to
enjoy the same respect for their sovereignty and for their
territorial integrity that great and powerful nations expect
and insist upon. And, third, that the world has a right to
be free from every disturbance of its peace that has its
origin in aggression and disregard of the rights of peoples
and nations. . . .

But I did not come here, let me repeat, to discuss a
programme. I came only to avow a creed and give expression
to the confidence I feel that the world is even now upon the
eve of a great consummation, when some common force will be
brought into existence which shall safeguard right as the
first and most fundamental interest of all peoples and all
governments, when coercion shall be summoned not to the
service of political ambition or selfish hostility, but to
the service of a common order, a common justice, and a
common peace. God grant that the dawn of that day of frank
dealing and of settled peace, concord, and co-operation may
be near at hand!

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 4, pp. 185-188.)

4.2.2.2: January 22, 1917

Essential Terms of Peace in Europe, address to the United
States Senate (1/22/17):

"I have sought this opportunity to address you because I thought that I owed it to you, as the counsel associated with me in the final determination of our international obligations, to disclose to you wităout reserve the thought and purpose that have been taking form in my mind in regard to the duty of our Government in the days to come when it will be necessary to lay afresh and upon a new plan the foundations of peace among the nations.

It is inconceivable that the people of the United
States should play no part in that great enterprise. To
take part in such a service will be the opportunity for
which they have sought to prepare themselves by the very
principles and purposes of their polity and the approved
practices of their Government ever since the days when they

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set up a new nation in the high and honorable hope that it
might in all that it was and did show mankind the way to
liberty. They cannot in honor withhold the service to which
they are now about to be challenged. They do not wish to
withhold it. But they owe it to themselves and to the other
nations of the world to state the conditions under which
they will feel free to render it.

That service is nothing less than this, to add their
authority and their power to the authority and force of
other nations to guarantee peace and justice throughout the
world. . . .

No covenant of co-operative peace that does not include
the peoples of the New World can suffice to keep the future
safe against war; and yet there is only one sort of peace
that the peoples of America could join in guaranteeing. The
elements of that peace must be elements that engage the
confidence and satisfy the principles of the American
governments, elements consistent with their political faith
and with the practical convictions which the peoples of
America have once for all embraced and undertaken to defend.

I do not mean to say that any American government would
throw any obstacle in the way of any terms of peace the
governments now at war might agree upon, or seek to upset
them when made, whatever they might be. I only take it for
granted that mere terms of peace between the belligerents
will not satisfy even the belligerents themselves. Mere
agreements may not make peace secure. It will be absolutely
necessary that a force be created as a guarantor of the
permanency of the settlement so much greater than the force
of any nation now engaged or any alliance hitherto formed or
projected that no nation, no probable combination of nations
could face or withstand it. If the peace presently to be
made is to endure, it must be a peace made secure by the
organized major force of mankind.

The terms of the immediate peace agreed upon will
determine whether it is a peace for which such a guarantee
can be secured. The question upon which the whole future
peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the
present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only
for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a
new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee
the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only a
tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not
a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized
rivalries, but an organized common peace. . . .

... it must be a peace without victory. It is not
pleasant to say this. I beg that I may be permitted to put

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my own interpretation upon it and that it may be understood
that no other interpretation was in my thought. I am
seeking only to face realities and to face them without soft
concealments. 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. Only a peace the very
principle of which is equality and a common participation in
a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right
feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace
as is the just settlement of vexed questions of territory or
of racial and national allegiance.

The equality of nations upon which peace must be
founded if it is to last must be an equality of rights; the
guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor imply a
difference between big nations and small, between those that
are powerful and those that are weak. Right must be based
upon the common strength, not upon the individual strength,
of the nations upon whose concert peace will depend.
Equality of territory or of resources there of course cannot
be; nor any other sort of equality not gained in the
ordinary peaceful and legitimate development of the peoples
themselves. But no one asks or expects anything more than
an equality of rights. Mankind is looking now for freedom
of life, not for equipoises of power.

And there is a deeper thing involved than even equality
of right among organized nations. No peace can last, or
ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the
principle that governments derive all their just powers from
the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere
exists to hand peoples about from sovereignty to sovereignty
as if they were property. . . .

And in holding out the expectation that the people and
Government of the United States will join the other
civilized nations of the world in guaranteeing the
permanence of peace upon such terms as I have named I speak
with the greater boldness and confidence because it is clear
to every man who can think that there is in this promise no
breach in either our traditions or our policy as a nation,
but a fulfilment, rather, of all that we have professed or
striven for.

I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should
with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as
the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to

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extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that
every people should be left free to determine its own
polity, its own way of development, unhindered,
unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and
powerful.

I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid
entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions
of power; catch them in a new of intrigue and selfish
rivalry, and disturb their own affairs with influences
intruded from without. There is no entangling alliance in a
concert of power. When all unite to act in the same sense
and with the same purpose all act in the common interest and
are free to live their own lives under a common protection.

These are American principles, American policies. We
could stand for no others. And they are also the principles
and policies of forward looking men and women everywhere, of
every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They
are the principles of mankind and must prevail."
(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 4, pp.
407-411, 413-414.)

4.2.2.3: January 8, 1918

The Fourteen Points Speech, address delivered at a joint
session of the two houses of Congress (1/8/18):

"It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret convenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world. It is this happy fact, now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger in an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of the world to avow now or at any other time the objects it has in view.

We entered this war because violations of right had
occurred which touched us to the quick and made the life of
our own people impossible unless they were corrected and the
world secured once and for all against their recurrence.
What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar
to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to
live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every

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peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its
own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of
justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world
as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of
the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for
our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done
to others it will not be done to us. The program of the
world's peace, th therefore, is our program; and that program,
the only possible program, as we see it, is this:

I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after
which there shall be no private international understandings
of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and
in the public view.

II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas,
outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war,
except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by
international action for the enforcement of international
covenants.

III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic
barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade
conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and
associating themselves for its maintenance.

IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national
armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent
with domestic safety.

V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial
adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict
observance of the principle that in determining all such
questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations
concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims
of the government whose title is to be determined. . . .

XIV. A general association of nations must be formed
under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual
guarantees of political independence and territorial
integrity to great and small states alike. . . .

For such arrangements and covenants we are willing to
fight and to continue to fight until they are achieved; but
only because we wish the right to prevail and desire a just
and stable peace such as can be secured only by removing the
chief provocations to war, which this program does remove. .

We have spoken now, surely, in terms too concrete to
admit of any further doubt or question. An evident
principle runs through the whole program I have outlined.
It is the principle of justice to all peoples and
nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of
liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong

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or weak. Unless this principle be made its foundation no part of the structure of international justice can stand. The people of the United States could act upon no other principle; and to the vindication of this principle they are ready to devote their lives, their honor, and everything that they possess. The moral climax of this the culminating and final war for human liberty has come, and they are ready to put their own strength, their own highest purpose, their own integrity and devotion to the test."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 158-159, 161-152.)

4.2.2.4: February 11, 1918

War Aims of Germany and Austria, address delivered at a joint session of the two houses of Congress, discussing the German and Austrian replies to the statement of Allied war aims (2/11/18):

" . . . After a settlement all around, effected in this fashion, by individual barter and concession, he [Count von Hertling, Chancellor of Germany] would have no objection, if I correctly interpret his statement, to a league of nations which would undertake to hold the new balance of power steady against external disturbance.

It must be evident to everyone who understands what this war has wrought in the opinion and temper of the world that no general peace, no peace worth the infinite sacrifices of these years of tragical suffering, can possibly be arrived at in any such fashion. The method the German Chancellor proposes is the method of the Congress of Vienna. We cannot and will not return to that. What is at stake now is the peace of the world. What we are striving for is a new international order based upon broad and universal principles of right and justice,--no mere peace of shreds and patches. Is it possible that Count von Hertling does not see that, does not grasp it, is in fact living in his thought in a world dead and gone? Has he utterly forgotten the Reichstag Resolutions of the nineteenth of July, or does he deliberately ignore them? They spoke of the conditions of a general peace, not of national aggrandizement or of arrangements between state and state. The peace of the world depends upon the just settlement of each of the several problems to which I adverted in my recent address to the Congress [1/8/18]. I, of course, do not mean that the peace of the world depends upon the acceptance of any particular set of suggestions as to the

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way in which those problems are to be dealt with. I mean
only that those problems each and all affect the whole
world; that unless they are dealt with in a spirit of
unselfish and unbiased justice, with a view to the wishes,
the natural connections, the racial aspirations, the
security, and the peace of mind of the peoples involved, no
permanent peace will have been attained. They cannot be
discussed separately or in corners. None of them
constitutes a private or separate interest from which the
opinion of the world may be shut out. Whatever affects the
peace affects mankind, and nothing settled by military
force, if settled wrong, is settled at all. It will
presently have to be reopened.

... We cannot have general peace for the asking, or
by the mere arrangements of a peace conference. It cannot
be pieced together out of individual understandings between
powerful states. All the parties to this war must join in
the settlement of every issue anywhere involved in it;
because what we are seeking is a peace that we can all unite
to guarantee and maintain and every item of it must be
submitted to the common judgement whether it be right and
fair, an act of justice, rather than a bargain between
sovereigns. ...

This war had its roots in the disregard of the rights
of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the union
and the force to make good their claim to determine their
own allegiances and their own forms of political life.
Covenants must now be entered into which will render such
things impossible for the future; and those covenants must
be backed by the united force of all the nations that love
justice and are willing to maintain it at any cost. ...

... The principles to be applied are these:

First, that each part of the final settlement must be
based upon the essential justice of that particular case and
upon such adjustments as are most likely to bring a peace
that will be permanent;

Second, that peoples and provinces are not to be
bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they
were mere chattels and pawns in a game, even the great game,
now forever discredited, of the balance of power; but that

Third, every territorial settlement involved in this
war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the
populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere
adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival states; and

Fourth, that all well-defined national aspirations
shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be
accorded them without introducing new or perpetuating old

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elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely in
time to break the peace of Europe and consequently of the
world.

... I would not be a true spokesman of the people of the United States if I did not say once more that we entered this war upon no small occasion, and that we can never turn back from a course chosen upon principle. ... Our whole strength will be put into this war of emancipation,--emancipation from the threat and attempted mastery of selfish groups of autocratic rulers,--whatever the difficulties and present partial delays. We are indomitable in our power of independent action and can in no circumstances consent to live in a world governed by intrigue and force. We believe that our own desire for a new international order under which reason and justice and the common interests of mankind shall prevail is the desire of enlightened men everywhere. Without that new order the world will be without peace and human life will lack tolerable conditions of existence and development. Having set our hand to the task of achieving it, we shall not turn back."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 179-184.)

4.2.2.5: July 4, 1918

The Four-Point Speech, address delivered at Mount Vernon
(7/4/18):

"This, then, is our conception of the great struggle in
which we are engaged. The plot is written plain upon every
scene and every act of the supreme tragedy. On the one hand
stand the peoples of the world,--not only the peoples
actually engaged, but many others also who suffer under
mastery but cannot act; peoples of many races and in every
part of the world,--the people of stricken Russia still,
among the rest, though they are for the moment unorganized
and helpless. Opposed to them, masters of many armies,
stand an isolated, friendless group of governments who speak
no common purpose but only selfish ambitions of their own by
which none can profit but themselves, and whose peoples are
fuel in their hands; governments which fear their people and
yet are for the time their sovereign lords, making every
choice for them and disposing of their lives and fortunes as
they will, as well as of the lives and fortunes of every
people who fall under their power,--governments clothed with
the strange trappings and the primitive authority of an age

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that is altogether alien and hostile to our own. The Past
and the Present are in deadly grapple and the peoples of the
world are being done to death between them.

There can be but one issue. The settlement must be
final. There can be no compromise. No halfway decision
would be tolerable. No halfway decision is conceivable.
These are the ends for which the associated peoples of the
world are fighting and which must be conceded them before
there can be peace:

I. The destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere
that can separately, secretly, and of its single choice
disturb the peace of the world; or, if it cannot be
presently destroyed, at the least its reduction to virtual
impotence.

II. The settlement of every question, whether of
territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of
political relationship, upon the basis of the free
acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately
concerned, and not upon the basis of the material interest
or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire
a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior
influence or mastery.

III. The consent of all nations to be governed in their
conduct towards each other by the same principles of honor
and of respect for the common law of civilized society that
govern the individual citizens of all modern states in their
relations with one another; to the end that all promises and
covenants may be sacredly observed, no private plots or
conspiracies hatched, no selfish injuries wrought with
impunity, and a mutual trust established upon the handsome
foundation of a mutural respect for right.

IV. The establishment of an organization of peace which
shall make it certain that the combined power of free
nations will check every invasion of right and serve to make
peace and justice the more secure by affording a definite
tribunal of opinion to which all must submit and by which
every international readjustment that cannot be amicably
agreed upon by the peoples directly concerned shall be
sanctioned.

These great objects can be put into a single sentence.
What we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of
the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of
mankind.

These great ends cannot be achieved by debating and
seeking to reconcile and accomodate what statesmen may wish,
with their projects for balances of power and of national
opportunity. They can be realized only by the determination

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of what the thinking peoples of the world desire, with their
longing hope for justice and for social freedom and
opportunity."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, pp. 232-234.)

4.2.2.6: September 27, 1918

" . . . That indispensable instrumentality [to ensure a
future peace settlement] is a League of Nations formed under
covenants that will be efficacious. Without such an
instrumentality, by which the peace of the world can be
guaranteed, peace will rest in part upon the word of outlaws
and only upon that word. For Germany will have to redeem
her character, not by what happens at the peace table, but
by what follows.

And, as I see it, the constitution of that League of
Nations and the clear definition of its objects must be a
part, is in a sense the most essential part, of the peace
settlement itself. It cannot be formed now. If formed now,
it would be merely a new alliance confined to the nations
associated against a common enemy. It is not likely that it
could be formed after the settlement. It is necessary to
guarantee the peace; and the peace cannot be guaranteed as
an afterthought. The reason, to speak in plain terms again,
why it must be guaranteed is that there be parties to the
peace whose promises have proved untrustworthy, and means
must be found in connection with the peace settlement itself
to remove that source of insecurity. It would be folly to
leave the guarantee to the subsequent voluntary action of
the Governments we have seen destroy Russia and deceive
Rumania.

But these general terms do not disclose the whole
matter. Some details are needed to make them sound less
like a thesis and more like a practical program. These,
then, are some of the particulars, and I state them
authoritatively as representing this Government's
interpretation of its own duty with regard to peace:

First, the impartial justice meted out must involve no
discrimination between those to whom we wish to be just and
those to whom we do not wish to be just. It must be a
justice that plays no favorites and knows no standard but
the equal rights of the several peoples concerned;

Second, no special or separate interest of any single
nation or any group of nations can be made the basis of any

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part of the settlement which is not consistent with the
common interest of all;

Third, there can be no leagues or alliances or special
covenants and understandings within the general and common
family of the League of Nations.

Fourth, and more specifically, there can be no special,
selfish economic combinations within the League and no
employment of any form of economic boycott or exclusion
except as the power of economic penalty by exclusion from
the markets of the world may be vested in the League of
Nations itself as a means of discipline and control.

Fifth, all international agreements and treaties of
every kind must be made known in their entirety to the rest
of the world.

Special alliances and economic rivalries and
hostilities have been the prolific source in the modern
world of the plans and passions that produce war. It would
be an insincere as well as insecure peace that did not
exclude them in definite and binding terms.

The confidence with which I venture to speak for our
people in these matters does not spring from our traditions
merely and the well-known principles of international action
which we have always professed and followed. In the same
sentence in which I say that the United States will enter
into no special arrangements or understandings with
particular nations let me say also that the United States is
prepared to assume its full share of responsibility for the
maintenance of the common covenants and understandings upon
which peace must henceforth rest. We still read
Washington's immortal warning against "entangling alliances"
with full comprehension and an answering purpose. But only
special and limited alliances entangle; and we recognize and
accept the duty of a new day in which we are permitted to
hope for a general alliance which will avoid entanglements
and clear the air of the world for common understandings and
the maintenance of common rights."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp.
256-258.)

4.2.2.7: December 21, 1918

"... That indispensable instrumentality [to ensure a
future peace settlement] is a League of Nations formed under
covenants that will be efficacious. Without such an

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Second, no special or separate interest of any single nation or any group of nations can be made the basis of any part of the settlement which is not consistent with the common interest of all;

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of the world.

4.2.2.8: December 28, 1918

At the Guildhall, London, response to an address of welcome by the Lord Mayor at the Guildhall, London (12/28/18):

"... And as I have conversed with the soldiers, I have been more and more aware that they fought for something that not all of them had defined, but which all of them recognized the moment you stated it to them. They fought to do away with an old order and to establish a new one, and the center and characteristic of the old order was that unstable thing which we used to call the "balance of power"-- a thing in which the balance was determined by the sword which was thrown in the one side or the other; a balance which was determined by the unstable equilibrium of competitive interests; a balance which was maintained by jealous watchfulness and an antagonism of interests which, though it was generally latent, was always deep-seated. The men who have fought in this war have been the men from free nations who were determined that that sort of thing should end now and forever.

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Page 48

It is very interesting to me to observe how from every
quarter, from every sort of mind, from every concert of
counsel, there comes the suggestion that there must now be,
not a balance of power, not one powerful group of nations
set off against another, but a single overwhelming, powerful
group of nations who shall be the trustee of the peace of
the world. It has been delightful in my conferences with
the leaders of your Government to find how our minds moved
along exactly the same line, and how our thought was always
that the key to the peace was the guarantee of the peace,
not the items of it; that the items would be worthless
unless there stood back of them a permanent concert of power
for their maintenance. That is the most reassuring thing
that has ever happened in the world. When this war began
the thought of a League of Nations was indulgently
considered as the interesting thought of closeted students.
It was thought of as one of those things that it was right
to characterize by a name which as a university man I have
always resented; it was said to be academic, as if that in
itself were a condemnation, something that men could think
about but never get. Now we find the practical leading
minds of the world determined to get it. No such sudden and
potent union of purpose has ever been witnessed in the world
before. . . .

It was this incomparably great object that brought me
overseas. It has never before been deemed excusable for a
President of the United States to leave the territory of the
United States; but I know that I have the support of the
judgement of my colleagues in the Government of the United
States in saying that it was my paramount duty to turn away
even from the imperative tasks at home to lend such counsel
and aid as I could to this great, may I not say, final
enterprise of humanity."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 342-344.)

4.2.2.9: December 30, 1918

In Free Trade Hall, Manchester, address at a luncheon
(12/30/18):

"You know that the United States has always felt from
the very beginning of her history that she must keep herself
separate from any kind of connection with European politics,
and I want to say very frankly to you that she is not now
interested in European politics. But she is interested in
the partnership of right between America and Europe. If the

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future had nothing for us but a new attempt to keep the world at a right poise by a balance of power, the United States would take no interest, because she will join no combination of power which is not the combination of all of us. She is not interested merely in the peace of Europe, but in the peace of the world. Therefore it seems to me that in the settlement that is just ahead of us something more delicate and difficult than was ever attempted before is to be accomplished, a genuine concert of mind and of purpose. But while it is difficult there is an element present that makes it easy. Never before in the history of the world, I believe, has there been such a keen international consciousness as there is now. Men all over the world know that they have been embarrassed by national antagonisms and that the interest of each is the interest of all, and that men as men are the objects of government and international arrangements. There is a great voice of humanity abroad in the world just now which he who cannot hear is deaf. There is a great compulsion of the common conscience now in existence which if any statesman resist he has gained the most unenviable eminence in history. We are not obeying the mandates of parties or of politics. We are obeying the mandates of humanity. . . ."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 353-354.)

4.2.2.10: January 3, 1919

Before the Italian Parliament, address on being made a citizen of Rome (1/3/19):

"Therefore, our task at Paris is to organize the friendship of the world, to see to it that all the moral forces that make for right and justice and liberty are united and are given a vital organization to which the peoples of the world will readily and gladly respond. In other words, our task is no less colossal than this, to set up a new international psychology, to have a new atmosphere.

We know that there cannot be another balance of power. That has been tried and found wanting, for the best of all reasons that it does not stay balanced inside itself, and a weight which does not hold together cannot constitute a makeweight in the affairs of men. Therefore, there must be something substituted for the balance of power, and I am happy to find everywhere in the air of these great nations the conception that that thing must be a thoroughly united

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league of nations. What men once considered theoretical and idealistic turns out to be practical and necessary. We stand at the opening of a new age in which a new statesmanship will, I am confident, lift mankind to new levels of endeavor and achievement."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 363-364.)

4.2.2.11: February 14, 1919

Presentation of the Covenant of the League of Nations, address before the third plenary session of the peace conference, (2/14/19):

"And you will notice that this body [the proposed League] has unlimited rights of discussion--I mean of discussion of anything that falls within the field of international relationship--and that it is specially agreed that war or international misunderstandings or anything that may lead to friction and trouble is everybody's business, because it may affect the peace of the world. And in order to safeguard the popular power so far as we could of this representative body it is provided, you will notice, that when a subject is submitted, not to arbitration, but to discussion by the executive council, it can upon the initiative of either one of the parties to the dispute be drawn out of the executive council onto the larger forum of the general body of the delegates, because throughout this instrument we are depending primarily and chiefly upon one great force, and that is the moral force of the public opinion of the world--the cleansing and clarifying and compelling influences of publicity--so that intrigues can no longer have their coverts, so that designs that are sinister can at any time be drawn into the open, so that those things that are destroyed by the light may be properly destroyed by the overwhelming light of the universal expression of the condemnation of the world.

Armed force is in the background in this program, but it is in the background, and if the moral force of the world will not suffice, the physical force of the world shall.

But that is the last resort, because this is intended as a constitution of peace, not as a league of war."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, pp. 425-426.)

4.2.2.12: March 4, 1919

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Metropolitan Opera House Speech, address at a public meeting in New York City (3/4/19):

"It is one of the agreements of this covenant that it is the friendly right of every nation a member of the League to call attention to anything that it thinks will disturb the peace of the world, no matter where that thing is occurring. There is no subject that may touch the peace of the world which is exempt from inquiry and discussion, and I think everybody here present will agree with me that Germany would never have gone to war if she had permitted the world to discuss the aggression upon Serbia for a single week. The British Foreign Office pleaded that there might be a day or two delay so that representatives of the nations of Europe could get together and discuss the possibilities of a settlement. Germany did not dare permit a day's discussion.

You know what happened. So soon as the world realized that an outlaw was at large the nations began, one by one, to draw together against her. We know for certainty that if Germany had thought for a moment that Great Britain would go in with France and Russia she never would have undertaken the enterprise, and the League of Nations is meant as notice to all outlaw nations that not only Great Britain but the United States and the rest of the world will go in to check enterprises of that sort. And so the League of Nations is nothing more nor less than the covenant that the world will always maintain the standards which it has now vindicated by some of the most precious blood ever spilt.

... Mr. Taft was speaking of Washington's utterance about entangling alliances, and if he will permit me to say so, he put the exactly right interpretation upon what Washington said, the interpretation that is inevitable if you read what he said, as most of these gentlemen do not. And the thing that he longed for was just what we are now about to supply; an arrangement which will disentangle all the alliances in the world.

Nothing entangles, nothing enmeshes a man except a selfish combination with somebody else. Nothing entangles a nation, hampers it, binds it, except to enter into a combination with some other nation against the other nations of the world. And this great disentanglement of all alliances is now to be accomplished by this Covenant, because one of the Covenants is that no nation shall enter into any relationship with another nation inconsistent with the covenants of the League of Nations. Nations promise not to have alliances. Nations promise not to make combinations against each other. Nations agree there shall be but one

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international counsels and expedients out of which the sinister designs of Germany had sprung as a natural growth.

" . . . War had lain at the heart of every arrangement of the Europe,--of every arrangement of the world,--that preceded the war. Restive peoples had been told that fleets and armies, which they toiled to sustain, meant peace; and they now knew that they had been lied to: that fleets and armies had been maintained to promote national ambitions and meant war. They knew that no old policy meant anything else but force, force,--always force. And they knew that it was intolerable. Every true heart in the world, and every enlightened judgement demanded that, at whatever cost of independent action, every government that took thought for its people or for justice or for ordered freedom should lend itself to a new purpose and utterly destroy the old order of international politics. Statesmen might see difficulties, but the people could see none and could brook no denial. A war in which they had been bled white to beat the terror that lay concealed in every Balance of Power must not end in a mere victory of arms and a new balance. The monster that had resorted to arms must be put in chains that could not be broken. The united power of free nations must put a stop to aggression, and the world must be given peace. If there was not the will or the intelligence to accomplish that now, there must be another and a final war and the world must be swept clean of every power that could renew the terror. The League of Nations was not merely an instrument of peace; it was the only hope for mankind. Again and again the demon of war had been cast out of the house of the peoples and the house swept clean by a treaty of peace; only to prepare a time when he would enter in again with spirits worse than himself. The house must now be given a tenant who could hold it against all such. Convenient, indeed indispensable, as statesmen found the newly planned League of Nations to be for the execution of present plans of peace and reparation, they saw in it a new aspect before their work was finished. They saw it as the main object of the peace, as the only thing that could complete it or make it worth while. They saw it as the hope of the world, and that hope they did not dare to disappoint. Shall we or any other free people hesitate to accept this great duty? Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?"

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, pp. 541, 547-548.)

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4.2.2.15: September 4, 1919

Address delivered on western tour, Columbus, Ohio (9/4/19):

"... The passions of this world are not dead. The rivalries of this world have not cooled. They have been rendered hotter than ever. The harness that is to unite nations is more necessary now than it ever was before, and unless there is this assurance of combined action before wrong is attempted, wrong will be attempted jsut so soon as the most ambitious nations can recover from the financial stress of this war."

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, p. 594.)

5: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Cordell Hull

6: The Architects of Containment

7: Carter and Reagan: An Idealist Revival

8: Conclusion

8.1: Comparison/Contrast of Different Strands of American Idealism

8.2: Concluding Thoughts

9: Bibliography

9.1: Woodrow Wilson
- Ray S. Baker and William E. Dodd (eds.), The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1927), 6 volumes.

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September 4, 1919

Page 54

7 March 1988

Dear Dr. Kissinger,

["(508) 544-3412\nWashington, D. C. 20001\n\nAbf. E-514\n3410 38th St., NW", "David W. Yand", "Sincerely,", "By April I am the completed project by May 1. During our conversation in January, I will submit a fairly brief part of the work I will proceed to filling in the rest of my outline. We agreed to convene the dragnet into my own narrative, grounding the lengthy dragnet around central theme rather than of rather than on the secondary literature. 3) the mainline to you of my periods to concentrate on. 5) my declaration to rely on primary materials in particular, please comment on 1) my choice of statements/historical the right track both in terms of protect damage and in terms of execution research on Woodrow Wilson's public papers. Please let me know if I am on the right track both in terms of protect

<table><tr><td>Introduction</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Purpose of Essay</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Idealism and Realism Defined</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Outline of Essay</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Sources of American Idealism: The Enlightenment Critique of Power</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Early American Disciples of the Enlightenment Critique</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Woodrow Wilson</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>The Ideal Ends of U.S. Diplomacy</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>General Statements of U.S. Selflessness</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>The Selflessness of the United States in Its Hemisphere</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>The Selflessness of U.S. Neutrality</td><td>10</td></tr><tr><td>The Selflessness of U.S. War Aims</td><td>15</td></tr><tr><td>The Realization of a New International Order</td><td>25</td></tr><tr><td>The Triumph of Democracy Over Autocracy</td><td>25</td></tr><tr><td>A Concert of Power To Replace the Balance of Power</td><td>33</td></tr><tr><td>Franklin D. Roosevelt and Cordell Hull</td><td>54</td></tr><tr><td>The Architects of Containment</td><td>54</td></tr><tr><td>Carter and Reagan: An Idealist Revival</td><td>54</td></tr><tr><td>Conclusion</td><td>54</td></tr><tr><td>Comparison/Contrast of Different Strands of American Idealism</td><td>54</td></tr><tr><td>Concluding Thoughts</td><td>54</td></tr><tr><td>Bibliography</td><td>54</td></tr><tr><td>Woodrow Wilson</td><td>54</td></tr></table>

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

Introduction

Page i

# 1: Introduction

## 1.1: Purpose of Essay

1.3: Outline of Essay

- Woodrow Wilson,

- Jimmy Carter,

- and Ronald Reagan.

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Idealism and Realism Defined

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## 4: Woodrow Wilson

### 4.1: The Ideal Ends of U.S. Diplomacy

#### 4.1.1: General Statements of U.S. Selflessness

##### 4.1.1.1: May 16, 1914

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Woodrow Wilson

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4.1.1.2: September 28, 1915

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May 16, 1914

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4.1.1.3: November 4, 1915

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November 4, 1915

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4.1.1.4: February 26, 1916

4.1.1.5: June 13, 1916

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February 26, 1916

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4.1.2.1: October 27, 1913

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June 13, 1916

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development of constitutional liberty in the world. Human
rights, national integrity, and opportunity as against
material interests--that, ladies and gentlemen, is the issue
which we now have to face. I want to take this occasion to
say that the United States will never again seek one
additional foot of territory by conquest. She will devote
herself to showing that she knows how to make honorable and
fruitful use of the territory she has, and she must regard
it as one of the duties of friendship to see that from no
quarter are material interests made superior to human
liberty and national opportunity. I say this, not with a
single thought that anyone will gainsay it, but merely to
fix in our consciousness what our real relationship with the
rest of America is. It is the relationship of a family of
mankind devoted to the development of true constitutional
liberty. We know that that is the soil out of which the
best enterprise springs. We know that this is a cause which
we are making in common with our neighbors, because we have
had to make it for ourselves. ...

4.1.2.2: December 7, 1915

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October 27, 1913

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4.1.2.3: January 29, 1916

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December 7, 1915

Page 9

4.1.3.1: August 19, 1914

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

January 29, 1916

4.1.3.2: January 8, 1915

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

August 19, 1914

4.1.3.3: April 20, 1915

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

January 8, 1915

Sun, Mar 6, 1988 The Idealist Tradition in American Diplomatic ... Page 13

4.1.3.4: May 10, 1915

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

April 20, 1915

4.1.3.5: October 5, 1916

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

May 10, 1915

Page 14

(Source: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 4, 346-347.)

4.1.4.1: March 15, 1917

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

October 5, 1916

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

March 15, 1917

4.1.4.2: April 2, 1917

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

March 15, 1917

Page 17

4.1.4.3: April 16, 1917

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

April 2, 1917

Page 19

"... There is not a single selfish element, so far as I can see, in the cause we are fighting for. We are fighting for what we believe and wish to be the rights of mankind and for the future peace and security of the world. To do this great thing worthily and successfully we must devote ourselves to the service without regard to profit or material advantage and with an energy and intelligence that will rise to the level of the enterprise itself. We must realize to the full how great the task is and how many things, how many kinds and elements of capacity and service and self-sacrifice, it involves."

4.1.4.4: May 30, 1917

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

April 16, 1917

Page 19

4.1.4.5: June 5, 1917

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

May 30, 1917

Page 20

4.1.4.6: August 11, 1917

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

June 5, 1917

Page 21

4.1.4.7: November 7, 1917

4.1.4.8: July 4, 1918

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

August 11, 1917

Sun, Mar 6, 1988 The Idealist Tradition in American Diplomatic ... Page 23

Page 23

4.1.4.9: February 24, 1919

" . . . I have been searching for the fundamental fact that converted Europe to believe in us. Before this war Europe did not believe in us as she does now. She did not believe in us throughout the first three years of the war. She seems really to have believed that we were holding off because we thought we could make more by staying out than by going in. And all of a sudden, in short eighteen months, the whole verdict is reversed. There can be but one explanation for it. They saw what we did, that without making a single claim we put all our men and all our means at the disposal of those who were fighting for their homes in the first instance, but for the cause--the cause of human right and justice--and that we went in, not to support their national claims, but to support the great cause which they held in common. And when they saw that America not only held the ideals but acted the ideals, they were converted to America and became firm partisans of those ideals.

I met a group of scholars when I was in Paris. Some
gentlemen from one of the Greek universities who had come to
see me and in whose presence, or rather in the presence of
the traditions of learning, I felt very young, indeed. And
I told them that I had had one of the delightful revenges
that sometimes come to men. All my life I have heard men
speak with a sort of condescension of ideals and of
idealis, and particularly of those separated, encloistered
persons whom they choose to term academic, who were in the
habit of uttering ideals in a free atmosphere when they
clash with nobody in particular. And I said I have had this
sweet revenge. Speaking with perfect frankness in the name
of the people of the United States I have uttered as the
objects of this great war ideals, and nothing but ideals,
and the war has been won by that inspiration. . . .

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

July 4, 1918

Page 23

4.1.4.10: July 10, 1919

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

February 24, 1919

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

September 27, 1918

Page 26

Page 27

4.2.1.2: May 30, 1919

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

September 27, 1918

Page 27

Sun, Mar 6, 1988 The Idealist Tradition in American Diplomatic ... Page 28

4.2.1.3: April 2, 1917

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

May 30, 1919

4.2.1.4: June 14, 1917

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

April 2, 1917

Page 29

... The facts are patent to all the world, and nowhere are they more plainly seen than in the United States, where we are accustomed to deal with facts and not with sophistries; and the great fact that stands out above all the rest is that this is a People's War, a war for freedom and justice and self-government amongst all the nations of the world, a war to make the world safe for the peoples who live upon it and have made it their own, the German people themselves included; and that with us rests the choice to break through all these hypocrises and patent cheats and masks of brute force and help set the world free, or else stand aside and let it be dominated a long age through by sheer weight of arms, and the arbitrary choices of self-constituted masters, by the nation which can maintain the biggest armies and the most irresistible armaments,--a power to which the world has afforded no parallel and in the face of which political freedom must wither and perish."

4.2.1.5: December 4, 1917

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

June 14, 1917

Page 30

Page 31

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

December 4, 1917

Page 31

4.2.1.6: April 6, 1918

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

December 4, 1917

Page 32

... Germany has once more said that force, and force alone, shall decide whether Justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of men, whether Right as America conceives it or Dominion as she conceives it shall determine the destinies of mankind. There is, therefore, but one response possible from us: Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust."

#### 4.2.1.7: January 25, 1919

"... We are here to see, in short, that the very foundations of this war are swept away. Those foundations were the private choice of small coteries of civil rulers and military staffs. Those foundations were the aggression of great powers upon the small. Those foundations were the holding together of empires of unwilling subjects by the duress of arms. Those foundations were the power of small bodies of men to work their will upon mankind and use them as pawns in a game. And nothing less than the emancipation of the world from these things will accomplish peace."

#### 4.2.2: A Concert of Power To Replace the Balance of Power

##### 4.2.2.1: May 27, 1916

(5/27/16):

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

April 6, 1918

Page 33

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

May 27, 1916

4.2.2.2: January 22, 1917

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

May 27, 1916

Page 35

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

January 22, 1917

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

January 22, 1917

Page 38

4.2.2.3: January 8, 1918

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

January 22, 1917

Page 38

Page 39

peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its
own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of
justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world
as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of
the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for
our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done
to others it will not be done to us. The program of the
world's peace, therefore, is our program; and that program,
the only possible program, as we see it, is this:

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

January 8, 1918

Page 39

Page 40

4.2.2.4: February 11, 1918

"... After a settlement all around, effected in this fashion, by individual barter and concession, he [Count von Hertling, Chancellor of Germany] would have no objection, if I correctly interpret his statement, to a league of nations which would undertake to hold the new balance of power steady against external disturbance.

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

January 8, 1918

Page 40

... We cannot have general peace for the asking, or
by the mere arrangements of a peace conference. It cannot
be pieced together out of individual understandings between
powerful states. All the parties to this war must join in
the settlement of every issue anywhere involved in it;
because what we are seeking is a peace that we can all unite
to guarantee and maintain and every item of it must be
submitted to the common judgement whether it be right and
fair, an act of justice, rather than a bargain between
sovereigns. . . .

This war had its roots in the disregard of the rights
of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the union
and the force to make good their claim to determine their
own allegiances and their own forms of political life.
Covenants must now be entered into which will render such
things impossible for the future; and those covenants must
be backed by the united force of all the nations that love
justice and are willing to maintain it at any cost. . . .

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

February 11, 1918

Page 41

4.2.2.5: July 4, 1918

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

February 11, 1918

Page 42

Sun, Mar 6, 1988

July 4, 1918