Answer:
A group of activists calling themselves the Emergency Peace Federation visited White House on February 28, 1917, to plead with their longtime ally, President Woodrow Wilson. Think of his predecessors George Washington and John Adams, they told him. Surely Wilson could find a way to protect American shipping without joining Europe’s war.
If they had met with him four months earlier, they would have encountered a different man. He had run on peace, after all, winning re-election in November 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Most Americans had little interest in sending soldiers into the stalemated slaughter that had ravaged the landscapes of Belgium and France since 1914. Wilson, a careful, deliberative former professor, had even tried to convince England and Germany to end World War I through diplomacy throughout 1916. On January 22, speaking before the U.S. Senate, he had proposed a negotiated settlement to the European war, a “peace without victory.”
What the peace delegation didn’t fully realize was that Wilson, caught in a series of events, was turning from a peace proponent to a wartime president. And that agonizing shift, which took place over just 70 days in 1917, would transform the United States from an isolated, neutral nation to a world power.
“The President’s mood was stern,” recalled Federation member and renowned social worker Jane Addams, “far from the scholar’s detachment.” Earlier that month, Germany had adopted unrestricted submarine warfare: Its U-boats would attack any ship approaching Britain, France, and Italy, including neutral American ships. The peace delegation hoped to bolster Wilson’s diplomatic instincts and to press him to respond without joining the war. William I. Hull, a former student of Wilson’s and a Quaker pacifist, tried to convince Wilson that he, like the presidents who came before him, could protect American shipping through negotiation.
War is not good war hurts.
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