Wednesday 20 March 2013
USA forced out of its isolationism...
On December 8th 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress and the Nation via radio. This address came to be known as the "Day of Infamy" speech (cf. the excerpt below). The Senate responded with a near-unanimous vote in support of war.
The following day, December 9th, Roosevelt talked to the Nation via radio. Here is a quote: "In my message to the Congress yesterday I said that we "will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us." In order to achieve that certainty, we must begin the great task that is before us by abandoning once and for all the illusion that we can ever again isolate ourselves from the rest of humanity."
President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points (1918)
Cartoon supporting the US declaration of war (1917)
Cartoon accusing Wilson's proposal for a League of Nations of being unrealistic (1919)
Cartoon rejecting US involvement in the League of Nations (1919)
A page of the Fourteen Points (1918)
Wilson proposed
a plan intended to prevent another world war:
- No more secret alliances
- Freedom of the seas
- No economic barriers
- Reduction of arms
- Self-government in the colonies
- Evacuation of Russian territory
- Evacuation and restoration of Belgium
- Evacuation and restoration of French territories
- Readjustment of Italy's borders
- Austria-Hungary accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development
- Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated and restored
- The Turkish portion of the Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty
- Polish independence
- Creation of an association of nations
President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points were
delivered to a joint Congress on January 8th 1918. They translated many of the principles of American domestic
reform into foreign policy including free trade, open
agreements, democracy and self-determination. Points 1 to 13 were rejected at the Paris Conference of 1919. Only point 14 was adopted and the League of Nations was set up. The US Congress did not ratify the Versailles Treaty and the USA never became a member of the League of Nations.
Sunday 17 March 2013
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