The Wilsonian Persuasion in American Foreign Policy By Matthew C ...

In the cities of Europe, crowds gathered spontaneously in the streets to cheer the news, cheering the troops as they marched in the streets, and singing “God Save the King,” or “the Marseillaise,” or “Deutschland Uber Alles.”⁴

Soon, the two sides were dug into hundreds of miles of trench work, with battles raging and innumerable lives lost for tiny swaths of land in a war marked by two modern implements of carnage—machine guns and massive artillery, with siege guns firing shells weighing over a ton each. Adding to the nightmare of trench warfare, in April 1915 the German Army used, for the first time in history, poison gas as a battlefield weapon, dispensing a cloud of chlorine gas five miles wide into the Allied trenches. A report published in the New York Times described the event: “The gaseous vapor which the Germans used against the French divisions near Ypres last Thursday, contrary to the rules of The Hague Convention, introduces a new element into warfare. The attack of last Thursday evening was preceded by the rising of a cloud of vapor, greenish gray and iridescent. That vapor settled to the ground like a swamp mist and drifted toward the French trenches on a brisk wind. Its effect on the French was a violent nausea and faintness, followed by an utter collapse. It is believed that the Germans, who charged in behind the vapor, met no resistance at all, the French at their front being virtually paralyzed.”⁵ Presently, both sides were using chemical weapons. Though gas masks and other precautions were initiated, by war’s end sixty-six million gas shells had been fired, inflicting some 1.3 million casualties. As the fog of war settled over Europe in 1914, Americans witnessed with revulsion the horrors of a new age of technological violence and were not eager to join it. In the United States, public opinion strongly opposed American involvement in the war “over there.”

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856, the son of a Presbyterian pastor. His Christian faith was to be a source of strength throughout his life, and would inform his political vision in both peace and war.