speech on peace has its own victory
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On January 22, 1917, Woodrow Wilson stood before a joint session of Congress and an audience that included his wife, Edith, and one of his daughters, and told the politicians that America must maintain its neutrality in the Great War ravaging Europe at the time. He laid out a vision for a just and peaceful world, a future that included free seas, an international agreement to avoid arms races, a United States that served as a peace broker, and most important of all--peace without victory.
“Victory would mean peace forced upon a loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished,” Wilson said. “It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which term of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.”
It was perhaps the most memorable speech of Wilson’s presidency. Those present in the room seemed to feel the gravity of it; but reactions varied depending on each senator’s stance on the war. Even Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, one of the most vocal isolationists in the legislature, remarked, “We have just passed through a very important hour in the history of the world.” Then there was Senator Francis Warren of Wyoming, whose reaction was one of incredulous dismay: “The President thinks he is president of the world.” And finally, Senator Lawrence Sherman, also a vehement isolationist, who dismissed the speech as outright folly: “It will make Don Quixote wish he hadn’t died so soon.”
The “peace without victory” speech was the culmination of years of desperate diplomacy on Wilson’s part. He had witnessed the Civil War firsthand as a boy, which contributed to his desire to avoid sending men to the meat-grinder trenches in Europe. Despite the German attack on the British liner Lusitania in 1915, when 128 Americans died, Wilson declined to declare war in the immediate aftermath. He did, however, demand that Germany curtail submarine warfare and allowed American banks to make loans to Britain and U.S. munitions were being shipped to Britain and its allies, all acts that betrayed his personal lack of neutrality over the war.
But anti-war rallies from groups as disparate as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (who argued against children using war toys) and the United Mine Workers (who produced most the coal that powered factories and urban homes) added to Wilson’s ambivalence over sending American troops abroad.
“It wasn’t that they wanted the Germans to win, but they didn’t think this cataclysm was one that American intervention would remedy,” says Michael Kazin, the author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace 1914-1918.
On December 18, Wilson sent letters to foreign embassies to ask for their respective terms of peace, and he thought those terms could be negotiated.
Just a month before Wilson’s speech, the Battle of Verdun concluded. The 10-month battle resulted in 800,000 casualties and only strengthened each side’s resolve. The Battle of the Somme had also recently ended, and British casualties on the first day were over 57,000. One French soldier who kept a journal during the fighting described life in the trenches as hellish landscapes of mud and blood. “Where the connecting trench joined in, an unfortunate fellow was stretched out, decapitated by a shell, as if he had been guillotined. Beside him, another was frightfully mutilated…” Corporal Louis Barthas wrote. “I saw, as if hallucinating, a pile of corpses… they had started to bury right in the trench.” The toll of the war was so high, it seemed inconceivable for the European powers to accept peace without a clear victor.
Kazin says that Wilsonian idealism remained throughout the 1920s and 30s, even though the man himself died in 1924, with attempts at preventing future wars evident in negotiations like the Kellogg-Briand Pact (a 1928 agreement between countries in Europe not to resort to war as a means of solving international issues). But despite the creation of the United Nations, an extension of Wilson’s original idea for the League of Nations, Kazin believes some of that idealism dried up in the years following the Second World War, with the morass of Vietnam and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“I think Americans [today] don’t have the same idealism about our military being an instrument of freedom and democracy,” Kazin says, specifically citing the lack of direct action in the Syrian civil war. “I think Americans are not Wilsonians by and large. They don’t want the U.S. to go saving people, even without force of arms.
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I Hope It's Help You......!!!!
please tick the brainliest answer.
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On January 22, 1917, Woodrow Wilson stood before a joint session of Congress and an audience that included his wife, Edith, and one of his daughters, and told the politicians that America must maintain its neutrality in the Great War ravaging Europe at the time. He laid out a vision for a just and peaceful world, a future that included free seas, an international agreement to avoid arms races, a United States that served as a peace broker, and most important of all--peace without victory.
“Victory would mean peace forced upon a loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished,” Wilson said. “It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which term of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.”
It was perhaps the most memorable speech of Wilson’s presidency. Those present in the room seemed to feel the gravity of it; but reactions varied depending on each senator’s stance on the war. Even Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, one of the most vocal isolationists in the legislature, remarked, “We have just passed through a very important hour in the history of the world.” Then there was Senator Francis Warren of Wyoming, whose reaction was one of incredulous dismay: “The President thinks he is president of the world.” And finally, Senator Lawrence Sherman, also a vehement isolationist, who dismissed the speech as outright folly: “It will make Don Quixote wish he hadn’t died so soon.”
The “peace without victory” speech was the culmination of years of desperate diplomacy on Wilson’s part. He had witnessed the Civil War firsthand as a boy, which contributed to his desire to avoid sending men to the meat-grinder trenches in Europe. Despite the German attack on the British liner Lusitania in 1915, when 128 Americans died, Wilson declined to declare war in the immediate aftermath. He did, however, demand that Germany curtail submarine warfare and allowed American banks to make loans to Britain and U.S. munitions were being shipped to Britain and its allies, all acts that betrayed his personal lack of neutrality over the war.
But anti-war rallies from groups as disparate as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (who argued against children using war toys) and the United Mine Workers (who produced most the coal that powered factories and urban homes) added to Wilson’s ambivalence over sending American troops abroad.
“It wasn’t that they wanted the Germans to win, but they didn’t think this cataclysm was one that American intervention would remedy,” says Michael Kazin, the author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace 1914-1918.
On December 18, Wilson sent letters to foreign embassies to ask for their respective terms of peace, and he thought those terms could be negotiated.
Just a month before Wilson’s speech, the Battle of Verdun concluded. The 10-month battle resulted in 800,000 casualties and only strengthened each side’s resolve. The Battle of the Somme had also recently ended, and British casualties on the first day were over 57,000. One French soldier who kept a journal during the fighting described life in the trenches as hellish landscapes of mud and blood. “Where the connecting trench joined in, an unfortunate fellow was stretched out, decapitated by a shell, as if he had been guillotined. Beside him, another was frightfully mutilated…” Corporal Louis Barthas wrote. “I saw, as if hallucinating, a pile of corpses… they had started to bury right in the trench.” The toll of the war was so high, it seemed inconceivable for the European powers to accept peace without a clear victor.
Kazin says that Wilsonian idealism remained throughout the 1920s and 30s, even though the man himself died in 1924, with attempts at preventing future wars evident in negotiations like the Kellogg-Briand Pact (a 1928 agreement between countries in Europe not to resort to war as a means of solving international issues). But despite the creation of the United Nations, an extension of Wilson’s original idea for the League of Nations, Kazin believes some of that idealism dried up in the years following the Second World War, with the morass of Vietnam and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“I think Americans [today] don’t have the same idealism about our military being an instrument of freedom and democracy,” Kazin says, specifically citing the lack of direct action in the Syrian civil war. “I think Americans are not Wilsonians by and large. They don’t want the U.S. to go saving people, even without force of arms.
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I Hope It's Help You......!!!!
please tick the brainliest answer.
GauravSaxena01:
please tick the brainliest answer.
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Answer:
Peace is valuable, if you find it-try and spread it all around.
Explanation:
Peace is a victory in itself. Truce and peace have a similar meaning but, they are not synonyms. Truce between two enemy countries is a great accomplishment. It means they will tolerate each other and not break out a war. But peace between two enemy countries is even better. It means that they are on friendly terms not just tolerating each other. Establishing peace is hard, not impossible, but hard none the less. A world where there is harmony all around is a world everybody wants to live in. Imagine how peace tastes, how it smells, how it feels. There will be conflicts, yes, but nothing worth a bloodbath.
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