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I Didn T Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier Analysis

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Was it the United States Job to Step into Foreign Wars? Less than 5 decades after the end of the civil, neither the government nor the public had any appetitive for putting it’s young men and resources at risk to get involved with other nation’s squabbles. In 1912, the United States elected Woodrow Wilson president. He was an anti-war democrat, and a fervent christian, who thought that his election to office was a calling from God (Shi, p. 817). The US public still remembered the pain of losing loved ones in the civil war, and felt quite safe with a huge ocean between themselves and the massive carnage in Europe. Neither the President nor the populace felt the need to act as hegemon. Yet advances in technology made the casualty numbers, …show more content…

This fact is clearly illustrated in the lyrics of the song by Morton Harvey, I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier”. With the advent of steam ships, railroads, telegrams, and photography, came much more graphic and timely reporting on the war. It is not hard to see how frightening it would be to sign up to fight, when there was no possibility of romanticizing such actions. A good example of this is an uncredited photo from the Huffington post, titled, British troops in Trenches Flanders …show more content…

Many of the country’s residents were from Germany, Great Britain, France and Russia. Once the US jumped into the war, many of these groups were mistreated, and in 1917 Congress passed the Espionage and Seditions acts that made it illegal to criticize our government’s or leaders actions in war, or to say anything that might be considered disloyal(Shi, p. 830). All through the first three years, the Germans would use submarines to sink ships, often these were civilian ships with American citizens aboard. These actions began to change the public opinion about getting into the war. The last straw however was the Zimmerman telegram, a telegram from the German government to the Mexican government, encouraging Mexico to invade the US, in exchange, recouping some of the lost southwestern states(Shi, p. 826). The US changed the tide of the war, and gave the Allied forces victory. This allowed Wilson the opportunity to negotiate the peace with his 15 point plan. His major goal was to ensure that this never happen again (Wilson, p. 1, line 7). Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was the creation of the United Nations, for which he made many concessions (Wilson, P. 3, line 15-16). Perhaps if he’d been able to sell his plan as written the world would not have had to fight

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