America & the World
A Century Under Arms
Five times in little more than a century, the United States sent its sons and daughters across oceans to fight. Each war remade the country that waged it.
When Europe marched to war in August 1914, most Americans wanted no part of it. President Woodrow Wilson won re-election in 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war." But neutrality could not survive the machinery of total war. German U-boats sank American ships; the torpedoing of the Lusitania in 1915 killed 128 Americans; and the Zimmermann Telegram—Berlin's clumsy attempt to lure Mexico into attacking the United States with the promise of recovering Texas and Arizona—turned outrage into resolve. In April 1917 Congress declared war, and Wilson reframed the cause in words that would echo for a century: the world must be made "safe for democracy."