History 485

Devine

Study Questions

Robert Dallek, “The Progressive Style of Foreign Policy: Woodrow Wilson

1. Prior to the Progressive era, few Americans saw any need for the United States to change or reform foreign governments – to “rescue” them from themselves. Why did this attitude change during the Progressive era?

2. Why did many Americans during the Progressive era find Wilson’s moralistic rhetoric about the United States so comforting?

3. Wilson denounced the interventionist and economically exploitative policies of the Roosevelt and Taft administrations in Latin America. How did he justify his own interventionist policies in that region? What U.S. goals or priorities were these policies intended to achieve or protect?

4. Dallek suggests that behind Wilson’s foreign policies was a “missionary impulse.” What does he mean by this?

5. Why does Dallek believe that defending democracy in Asia had more “symbolic” than “substantive” importance to most Americans? Why did Wilson’s policy toward China, for example, reflect the “inability of progressive America to look outward and free itself from strictly internal concerns”?

6. What links does Dallek suggest between the failure of reform at home and Progressives’ renewed interest in foreign policy?

7. Some progressives feared war would undermine reform and return power to big business. Others, however, thought war would ignite a new crusade for reform. Explain the line of reasoning behind each argument.

8. What were the American war aims? How were they connected to progressive reform at home?

9. What was Wilson’s main concern during the peace negotiations in Paris? Why did he initially have the support of the American public? Why did he later lose that support?

10. According to Dallek, why might Wilson have wanted the Senate to reject the Treaty of Versailles?

Randolph S. Bourne, “A War Diary” (September 1917)

1. According to Bourne, why was the government able to carry on the war even though most Americans were not enthusiastic in their support of it?

2. Why does Bourne believe that “patriotism” is a “superfluous quality in war”? If the government doesn’t need patriotism, hope, or public enthusiasm to wage war, what does it need?

3. Why is Bourne skeptical that liberal reformers can turn the war to their own creative purposes? Why are such “realists” being “utopian” if they believe U.S. involvement in the Great War will advance the liberal agenda?

4. In a key line in his essay, Bourne states, “One keeps healthy in wartime not by a series of religious and political consolations that something good is coming out of it all, but by a vigorous assertion of values in which war has no part.” (43) What does he mean by this?

5. Rather than become wrapped up in the war, what does Bourne urge the younger generation of artists and creative people to do?

6. Why does Bourne resent the war? What does he believe it will do to the nation and to “the American promise”?

Melvin Small, “Woodrow Wilson and U.S. Intervention in World War I”

1. After 1915, what American policies indicated that the Wilson administration was tilting toward the British side in the war?

2. How did Wilson’s response to Britain’s violations of American neutral rights differ from his response to Germany’s violations?

3. Despite the risks it entailed, why did the German High Command resume unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917?

4. By February 1917, what options did Wilson have regarding Germany? Why, ultimately, did he take the United States into war?