Right Is More Precious than Peace The Great War

On April 6th, 1917,

the United States of America declared war on Germany.

For two and a half years, the most powerful nation in the world

had stood apart from Europe's mortal struggle.

Now at last she was drawn in.

Many months would pass before her soldiers could be ready for battle.

But to the war-weary Allies, she brought a new vision of victory.

CHEERING

America had travelled a long road since August 1914.

The outbreak of war in Europe at first barely touched the American people.

Its coming took a form hardly physical at all.

It came as newspaper dispatches from far away in the distance and even farther away in spirit.

The dispatches were as if black flocks of birds frightened from their rookeries

came darting across the ocean, their excited cries a tiding of stirring events.

In 1914, Europe's quarrels seemed to be no concern of Americans.

They were a nation born out of the need to become and remain separate from Europe.

George Washington had expressed their creed...

Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?

Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe,

entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils

of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humour or caprice?

FAIRGROUND MUSIC PLAYS

The separatism which inspired the first Americans helped to drive forward the new nation's expansion.

In the 19th century, millions of personal decisions by Europeans

to break away from the fetters of the Old World

brought a swift increase of population to America.

Every immigrant fought his private War of Independence

when he took the decision to uproot himself from the land of his birth and cross the Atlantic.

Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.

These Americans wanted no part of Europe.

It was a new world that they were seeking.

They found the fruits of isolationism sweet.

They acquired greater wealth and material power than the world had ever known.

In America, men could make vast personal fortunes with astounding speed.

Andrew Carnegie, when he retired, gave away 350 million.

America was the land of promise.

Poor men could grow rich almost overnight.

They could also remain very poor.

In the Dust Bowl, in the factories of Detroit, Baton Rouge or Chicago,

in the cities with their slums which matched the slums of Europe,

there was squalor, misery, bitterness.

For many immigrants and their sons, it was a poor exchange

to escape servitude to Europe's hereditary princes,

only to find servitude to Wall Street's tycoons.

Tycoons were tough.

The first battles of American trade unions were battles indeed.

32 men were killed in a coalfield strike in Colorado.

A bomb in the printing works of a Los Angeles newspaper killed 19 people.

Then we went to hear Emma Goldman at the Bronx Casino,

but the meeting was forbidden and the streets were crowded.

There were moving vans, said to be full of cops with machine guns.

Everybody was talking machine guns, revolution,

civil liberty, freedom of speech,

but some got beaten up by a cop and shoved into a patrol wagon.

Everyone said it was an outrage. And what about Washington and Jefferson?

Yet America offered abundant space to her people,

with a sense of promise never far away.

By the turn of the century,

the frontier, the legendary, luring frontier of the West, had vanished.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific, the nation was won.

Americans who had confined their expansion within their coasts began to look beyond them.

While Britain was fighting in South Africa, America fought Spain

and became a surprised imperialist.

She freed Cuba and she acquired the rich Philippine Islands and Hawaii.

Spokesman of the extrovert American mood was Theodore Roosevelt, twice Republican President...

Our nation, while first of all seeing to its own domestic wellbeing

must not shrink from playing its part

among the great nations without.

Speak softly

and carry a big stick.

Roosevelt's bounding personal vitality

matched that of a nation whose pioneer days were barely finished,

which recognised no challenge which the human muscle and spirit could not overcome.

After his presidency, Roosevelt departed for a long tour of Africa and South America.

He had made America's voice heard in the world's affairs.

He intervened in the Russo-Japanese War, spoke up when France and Germany quarrelled over Morocco,

seized Latin American territory to build the Panama Canal.

His ideas carried the American people beyond their present understanding of themselves.

In 1914, after 20 years out of office,

the Democrats swept back to power on the rallying cry of "Reform".

President Woodrow Wilson voiced the nation's concerns.

We have been proud of our industrial achievements,

but we have not hitherto stopped to count the human cost.

Our duty is to cleanse,

to reconsider, to restore...

every process of our common life.

When war broke out in Europe,

America's president seemed likely to keep her out of it.

Woodrow Wilson was an austere, withdrawn intellectual, the son of a Presbyterian clergyman.

He had lived in the seclusion of the academic world.

His orderly mind found difficulty in grasping the complex dilemmas of the world outside the campus.

But all his instincts were for peace.

Sometimes people call me an idealist.

Well, that is the way I know I am an AMERICAN.

America is the only idealist nation in the world.

ENTHUSIASTIC CHEERING

The idealism of the American people was often confused

and coloured with the boastfulness of a young and thriving country.

Any American mechanic could see that if the Europeans hadn't been a lot of ignorant, underpaid foreigners

who drank, smoked, were loose about women and wasteful in their methods of production, there'd be no war.

Most Americans were well satisfied when Wilson stated the nation's posture towards Europe's war...

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.

Many Americans of British origin were two ways torn.

It was New England which had first rebelled against King George.

The memory of rebellion, long distrust of British policy,

some irritation at the sight of the Union Jack in Canada,

conflicted with an instinctive condemnation of German aggression.

Affection towards France, which had helped the colonies in their rebellion,

then imitated them by becoming a republic, was another factor.

And 15 million Irish Americans whose forebears had been forced to emigrate by hunger and poverty

could not easily forgive their English oppressors.

There were millions from Russian territories - Poles, Ukrainians, Jews -

with memories of pogroms and the secret police,

who loathed the notion of a Tsarist victory.

There were over 11 million Americans of German descent.

Many were powerful figures, willing to put forward Germany's case.

England's only grudge was that Germany has grown commercially, financially and industrially

to a position which threatens to crowd England into a second rank.

Jealousy appears to control this English attitude.

And what is Germany fighting for? Does she want anything from anybody?

She wants to be left alone.

The delicate balance of American sympathy was soon disturbed.

Germany's invasion of Belgium outraged American opinion.

Life magazine wrote...

If we see anything right at all in all this matter, Belgium is a martyr to civilisation.

Sister to all who love liberty or law, the great unconquerable fact of the Great War is Belgium.

Strict impartiality was easier to proclaim than to preserve.

As the impact of war sank in,

invasion, destruction, atrocity, authentic or not,

American opinion swayed upon a deep underwater tide.

Yet this tide of pro-British sentiment might be reversed

by the exigencies of war itself.

The exercise of British sea power had always grated upon America.

Britain's blockade of Germany meant the searching of American ships, the seizure of contraband cargos.

A flood of protests poured into the White House.

The British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, wrote...

Germany's chief power was on land, Britain's on the sea.

Germany's invasion of Belgium, her devastation of France,

might arouse disinterested wrath in America, but it did not touch American pockets.

On the other hand, Britain's firm measures

to prevent contraband of war from reaching Germany

and her wide and constantly widening interpretation of contraband

caused serious inconvenience to American shipping and direct interference with American business.

Left to itself, this friction might have developed into a fatal sore,

but German action swung the tide of sympathy against her once more.

U-boat attacks on merchant ships,

sunk with their crews aboard or left to die in their boats,

were more shocking than the Royal Navy's blockade.

The loss of America's trade with Germany was not to be such a blow.

She found a new, insatiable market.

The Allies would buy all the munitions that America could make.

A temporary slump turned into an unprecedented boom.

Righteous sentiment might coincide with self-interest after all -

an ideal circumstance for judicious propaganda.

In the field of propaganda, the Allies enjoyed a vast advantage.

The Royal Navy had ripped up the German transatlantic cables from the ocean bed.

Only the Allies now had direct access to America's public ear.

As the months went by,

the Allied version of events loomed ever larger in the American press.

Gradually the true meaning of neutrality was eroded.

Yet, for a while, its outward forms remained.

In May 1915, there were great issues at home to distract American minds from Europe's war.

Prohibition was one of them -

a cause which stepped into every home.

Already 14 states had gone dry

and a nationwide campaign was demanding total prohibition of the sale of alcohol.

There were dissenters.

Campaigners for women's rights were active

and women, on the whole, also supported Prohibition.

In May, the fastest British liner afloat, the Lusitania,

left New York for Liverpool.

Aboard were 2,000 passengers and crew...

and 5,000 crates of ammunition for the Allies.

On the day before, the German Embassy in Washington had published an announcement in the press.

This warned that Allied ships, including passenger liners,

were liable to be sunk by U-boats.

It meant that the Lusitania's passengers travelled at their own risk, but few paid much attention.

On May 7th, Commander Schwieger's U-20 was waiting for her.

She fired two torpedoes.

EXPLOSION

Her commander noted in his log...

Great confusion on board. Lifeboats being cleared and lowered to water.

Many boats crowded, come down bow first or stern first in the water

and immediately fill and sink.

1,153 people went down in the Lusitania,

including 114 American citizens.

Some of the Lusitania's dead were brought to Ireland for burial.

The American press blazed with indignation.

Germany has affronted the moral sense of the world

and sacrificed her standing among the nations.

The sinking of the Lusitania was deliberate murder.

Once more, the pendulum of American sympathy took a violent swing.

It was no longer just a question of which side America favoured.

It became a matter of whether America herself might fight.

Theodore Roosevelt said...

This represents not merely piracy,

but piracy on a vaster scale of murder than old-time pirates ever practised.

It is warfare against innocent men, women and children on the ocean

and our own fellow countrymen and women who are among the sufferers.

It seems inconceivable

that we can refrain from taking action in this matter,

for we owe it not only to humanity, but to our own national self-respect.

Amid all the passion, President Wilson kept his head.

The principles of a lifetime sustained him.

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 being too proud to fight.

Proud, certainly. And rich. America was now the arsenal of the Allies.

HER booming prosperity was closely linked to THEIR fortunes.

If U-boats could not check the flow of vital war material from America to Europe,

Germany must try other ways.

She turned to sabotage.

Warehouses and factories supplying the Allies were burnt down,

bombs were planted, a huge espionage and sabotage ring was uncovered.

It had spent nearly 30m of German government money, disbursed through the military and naval attaches.

America insisted on their recall.

Her relations with Germany deteriorated further still.

Yet the months went by without any definite consequence

of America's ripening hostility towards the Central powers.

The anniversary of the Lusitania's sinking approached. It was April 1916.

Suddenly once more the pendulum took a counter-swing.

The Easter Rebellion in Ireland was suppressed by British forces.

The execution of captured rebels, spread over ten days,

infuriated millions of Irish Americans and revived their ancient hatred.

The British ambassador in Washington reported...

The attitude towards England has been changed for the worse.

Our cause for the present among the Irish here is a lost one.

In America, 1916 was an election year.

The war was the dominant issue.

The election campaigns of the parties crystallised the sway of opinion.

Neutralism, the desire to stay out of the war, still possessed a doughty champion in the President.

Support for this policy was strong in the Midwest and Pacific states.

Europe's war seemed more remote there than on the Atlantic seaboard.

At the Democratic convention, Wilson was renominated presidential candidate.

The chairman quoted from the Sermon on the Mount.

Blessed are the peacemakers

for they shall be called the children of God.

He was applauded to the echo.

Up and down the United States,

Wilson's campaign slogan was, "He kept us out of the war."

The Republican candidate against Wilson was Charles Hughes, strongly backed by Theodore Roosevelt.

Their policy was preparedness.

They wanted a bigger army,

universal military training, more aggressive American leadership.

Roosevelt taunted Wilson with...

The shadows of men, women and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean,

the shadows of babies,

gaping pitifully as they sank under the waves.

The shadows of deeds that were never done.

The shadows of lofty words that were followed by no action.

The shadows...

of the tortured dead.

Woodrow Wilson was re-elected, but his majority fell sharply.

The portents were becoming unmistakable.

Yet Wilson clung to his ideal of peace.

There will be no war. This country does not intend to become involved in war.

It would be a crime against civilisation for us to go into it.

Once again, it was Germany's own acts which swung the balance against her.

On January 31st, 1917, Germany informed America of her intention

to carry out unrestricted submarine warfare.

This meant that all shipping, including neutrals,

whether carrying contraband or not,

would be sunk at sight without warning anywhere in Allied waters.

Stage by stage, President Wilson's campus ideals were battered down by war reality.

Stage by stage, he resisted the evidence and its implications.

I refuse to believe that it is the intention of the German authorities

to do in fact what they have warned us they will feel at liberty to do.

Only overt acts can make me believe it.

Wilson was forced to believe.

As vessel after vessel went down,

Germany's ruthless determination became evident.

The German ambassador in Washington was handed his passport.

America broke off diplomatic relations and drafted a bill to arm her merchant ships.

Now she stood on the brink of war.

The last act needed to drag her in was not slow in coming.

In 1917, four-fifths of America's small army was embroiled with Mexico.

Relations between the US and her Latin neighbour were never easy.

The border along the Rio Grande was rarely quiet.

Mexico's successive revolutions alarmed America,

threatened her commercial interests and the lives of her citizens.

To Germany, this distant preoccupation was a godsend.

If the American army was busy in Mexico, it couldn't come to Europe.

Germany proposed an alliance to the Mexican government.

Germany makes Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis.

Make war together, make peace together,

generous financial support and an understanding that Mexico

is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

We suggest Mexico should invite Japan's immediate assistance

and mediate between Japan and ourselves.

This was the secret Zimmermann telegram,

one of history's most explosive documents.

British naval intelligence had broken the German codes

and selected its moment carefully to inform America of the contents of the telegram.

They came as a thunderclap.

This was a conspiracy to attack the very homeland of the United States.

Isolationism withered away.

The Peace Party collapsed.

The fire-eaters rose in their wrath,

headed by a characteristic bellow of rage from Theodore Roosevelt.

This man Wilson is enough to make the saints and the angels, yes, and the Apostles, swear

and I would not blame them.

My God! Why doesn't he do something?

If he does not go to war with Germany, I shall skin him alive.

This was the end of the President's dream of peace.

While he took his last agonising decisions,

Germany for the last time fortified his resolve

by torpedoing three American merchant ships in one day.

Now there was no choice. The peacemaker must go to war.

On April 2nd, 1917, Woodrow Wilson drove to the Capitol to deliver a momentous address.

The wrongs against which we array ourselves are not common wrongs.

They cut to the very root of human life.

I advise that Congress declare

that it formally accept the status of a belligerent which is thrust upon it.

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war,

into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars,

civilisation itself seeming to be in the balance.

But the right is more precious than peace.

The world must be made safe for democracy.

Wilson spoke for the whole nation,

yet the ecstatic cheers with which it applauded him only filled him with sorrowful wonder.

My message today was a message of death for our young men.

How strange it seems to applaud that.

America was at war at last.

The mood which swept her echoed the passionate violence of Europe in 1914.

Winston Churchill wrote...

Pacifism, indifference, dissent were swept from the path

and fiercely pursued to extermination.

And with a roar of slowly gathered, pent-up wrath,

which overpowered in its din every discordant yell,

the American nation sprang to arms.

CHEERING

All America's competitiveness, all her genius for publicity, were channelled into the war effort.

The first war loan was oversubscribed by 50%.

Anti-German feeling ran riot.

Wagner's music was banned. Dachshunds were stoned.

Sauerkraut was rechristened liberty cabbage.

And Potsdam, Missouri, hurriedly changed its name to Pershing.

Newspapers, magazines and posters

provided constant fuel for the nation's passion.

Even in a prayer before the House of Representatives, Germany was remembered.

Thou knowest, O Lord, that no nation so infamous, vile,

greedy, sensuous, bloodthirsty, ever disgraced the pages of history.

Young men swarmed into recruiting centres.

But with memories of the breakdown of volunteering in the Civil War,

the government rushed through a conscription bill.

Every male between 21 and 30 had to register for military service.

Only 4% of the ten million available failed to do so.

680,000 were selected by ballot for the first draft,

the most America could possibly equip and train at once.

ENTHUSIASTIC CHEERING

American womanhood, determined not to miss this opportunity of proving itself equal in a man's world,

joined the war effort with equal fervour.

The task which faced America was tremendous.

President Wilson said...

It is not an army that we must shape and train for war. It is a nation.

American industry was heavily committed to supplying the Allies.

Now the Secretary for War needed it to arm and supply her own soldiers.

War is no longer Samson with his shield and spear and sword, and David with his sling.

It is the conflict of smokestacks now, the combat of the driving wheel and engine.

The government called in the great business tycoons.

Bernard Baruch was placed in charge of coordinating all the nation's resources.

Private shipping was commandeered and new shipyards were built

for the enormous task of transporting and supplying an army across 3,000 miles of ocean.

Agriculture and food conservation were organised and publicised.

Life magazine urged its readers...

Do not permit your child to take a bite or two from an apple and throw the rest away.

Even children must be patriotic to the core.

Like Britain in 1914, America was a naval power with only a small regular army.

Immediately she placed her fleet at the disposal of the Allies.

On May 4th, 1917, the first American warships reached Britain.

Admiral Beatty welcomed the reinforcement to Britain's fleet.

But it was the American army,

the influx of her inexhaustible manhood, that Europe was awaiting.

It was hard for the Allies to grasp the problems that faced the USA.

The strength of America's army was only 80,000 men

and most of them were on the Mexican border.

To turn this tiny force into a trained army of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions,

was a stupendous task.

Huge camps were built at breakneck speed and men began training in them almost at once.

The peaceful nation adapted itself to war with a speed and efficiency

which the President had grimly prophesied.

Once lead this people into war

and they'll forget there was ever such a thing as tolerance.

A spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life.

BATTLE CRIES

Conflicts arose between America and her allies -

conflict between America's need for munitions and Allied needs,

between the demand of the Allies for immediate reinforcements

and America's determination to build a great army,

as befitted her station among the powers.

Allied missions, headed by Marshal Joffre for France,

and by Mr Balfour and General Sir Tom Bridges for Britain,

pleaded for American soldiers.

The Allies would have to wait.

America was irrevocably determined upon her course.

The Yanks were coming, but they would come as a United States Army with a United States general,

General Joseph Pershing.

They would come in the fullness of time and not before.

Until then, the Allies must make shift to do without them.

But for encouragement, as a token of what would follow,

a handful of Americans headed by Pershing came to Europe to show the flag.

They disembarked at Liverpool to a hero's welcome.

As we stepped off the gangplank onto British soil,

the band struck up The Star-Spangled Banner,

this being the first time in history that an American army contingent

was officially received in England.

BAND PLAYS US NATIONAL ANTHEM

ENTHUSIASTIC CHEERING

They went on to London, followed by the same tumultuous cheering.

MUSIC: Elgar's "Pomp And Circumstance March No 4"

Pershing was greeted by the King.

It has always been my dream that the two English-speaking nations should some day be united

in a great cause.

And today my dream is realised.

Together, we are fighting for the greatest cause for which peoples could fight.

The Anglo-Saxon race must save civilisation.

The triumphal progress continued into France.

# Over there, over there

# Send the word Send the word over there

# That the Yanks are coming The Yanks are coming

# The drums rum-tumming everywhere... #

In Paris, it swelled to a frenzy.

# Send the word Send the word over there... #

All felt that they were present at the magical operation of the transfusion of blood.

Life arrived in floods to reanimate the mangled body

of a France bled white by the innumerable wounds of four years.

At his new headquarters in the Hotel Crillon,

Pershing was called out onto the balcony by the crowd in the Place de la Concorde.

A breeze caught the folds of the French flag and in a spontaneous gesture,

the normally unemotional American pressed it to his lips.

CHEERING

BAND PLAYS "Over There"

No conquering army could have had a more rapturous welcome from its own people than France gave

to this handful of inexperienced, untried, but vigorous and cheerful American soldiers.

As yet, their fighting value was almost nothing, but their moral effect was everything.

To the onlookers in the streets of Paris, it was one of the most poignant moments in history.

The New World was coming to redress the balance of the Old.

# And we won't come back till it's over over there

# And we won't come back till it's over over there. #