On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked a special joint session of the United States Congress for a declaration of war against the German Empire.

On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on the German Empire (but, for the moment, not against Germany's allies) in a speech whose transcript[1] reads in part: I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices of policy to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making.

On the 3rd of February last, I officially laid before you the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German government that on and after the 1st day of February it was its purpose to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity and use its submarines to sink every vessel that sought to approach either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of Europe or any of the ports controlled by the enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean...

With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it; and that it take immediate steps, not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the government of the German Empire to terms and end the war...

You cannot distinguish between the principles which allowed England to mine a large area of the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea in order to shut in Germany, and the principle on which Germany by her submarines seeks to destroy all shipping which enters the war zone which she has laid out around the British Isles.

The English mines are intended to destroy without warning every ship that enters the war zone she has proscribed, killing or drowning every passenger that cannot find some means of escape.

We should not seek to hide our blunder behind the smoke of battle to inflame the mind of our people by half truths into the frenzy of war in order that they may never appreciate the real cause of it until it is too late.

[4][5][7] One of the dissenters was Republican Rep. Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who later became the only member of either chamber of Congress to vote against declaring war against the Japanese Empire on December 8, 1941.

One Republican Senator (Nathan Goff of W. Va) did not vote, nor did seven Democrats: John H. Bankhead (Alabama), Thomas Gore (Okla.), Henry F. Hollis (N.H.), Francis G. Newlands (Nevada), John Walter Smith (Maryland), Charles S. Thomas (Colo.), and Benjamin Tillman (S.

So did 33 out of 102 (32%) from the Mid-West:[nb 8] 9 out of 11 members from Wisconsin, 4 out of 10 from Minnesota, 6 out of 27 from Illinois, 4 out of 15 from Missouri, 3 out of 6 from Nebraska, 3 out of 11 from Iowa, 2 out of 3 from South Dakota and 2 out of 8 from Kansas.

Less than an hour later, President Wilson signed it at 1:11 p.m., and the United States was officially at war against the German Empire.