In 1914 force and foreign policy were not yet closely associated by most Americans or their president. The future would show that America had more to do with the war than Wilson imagined in 1914. Although the immediate causes of the war could not touch the U.S., its outcome, and the means that the different coalitions employed in waging it, could radically affect America's place in the world. Most of all, the war could and did challenge the traditional understanding of American security in ways that were inconceivable before 1914.
NOTES
1.
David F. Houston, Eight Years with Wilson's Cabinet, 1913 to
1920 ( New York: Doubleday, Page, 1926), I, 118-9; Joseph Grew, Turbulent Era ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 1, 131-3; William A. White
, The Autobiography of William Allen White ( New York: Macmillan, 1946), 506. For an excellent restatement of the World War
as watershed thesis see Stuart Rochester, American Liberal
Disillusionment ( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), 23-7 and passim.
2.
William Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an
American Foreign Policy ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 188-93.
3.
Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight ( New York: Oxford
University Press, 1975), 234-5.
4.
Wilson to
Charles W. Eliot, August 14, 1914,
Arthur Link, et al.
(eds.), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson [hereafter PWW], ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966- 1995), XXX, 452. Sondra Herman, Eleven against War ( Stanford, CA: Hoover Institute Press, 1969), 194-
8.
5.
Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 4 vols.
( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926- 1928), House to Wilson, August 22, 1915; and diary, August 30, 1915, I, 285, 293.
6.
Wilson's offer of his services, and foreign replies, are detailed in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1914
Supplement: The World War [hereafter FRUS], ( Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1928), 42-45. For official German
diplomatic documents see Andre Scherer and
Jacques Grunewald
(eds.), L'Allemagne et les Problémes de la Paix Pendant la PremiéreGuerre Mondiale
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