William Jennings Bryan: He Really Tried to Keep Us Out of War
Popular myth says that President Woodrow Wilson kept America out of WWI as long as possible, when in fact he continually sided with the Allies, against the advice of Bryan.
When Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916, the Democratic National Convention offered up a keynote speech that praised the president as the man who “kept us out of war.” This may have provided the narrow margin of victory for Wilson that fall, as notable Republican leaders such as former President Theodore Roosevelt were pounding the war drums. Americans who did not want to get involved in the Great War in Europe no doubt cast their vote for Wilson.
But in less than six months, Wilson would ask Congress to declare war on Germany.
As we shall see, while Wilson had been moving the country toward war for more than two years, making the campaign slogan highly duplicitous, the man who had been his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan (shown), made heroic efforts to keep us out of the European conflict. Bryan argued, “The world would enter a dark and dangerous era if the conflict didn’t end soon,” and he feared the longer the war lasted, the more likely the United States would find itself in it.
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