Preparedness Movement

The Preparedness Movement was a campaign led by former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, Leonard Wood, and former President Theodore Roosevelt to strengthen the U.S. military after the outbreak of World War I.

There emerged an "Atlanticist" foreign policy establishment, a group of influential Americans drawn primarily from upper-class lawyers, bankers, academics, and politicians of the Northeastern US, committed to a strand of Anglophile internationalism.

[5] The preparedness movement had a "realistic" philosophy of world affairs—it believed that economic strength and military muscle were more decisive than idealistic crusades focused on causes like democracy and national self-determination.

Preparedness backers proposed a national service program under which the 600,000 men who turned 18 every year would be required to spend six months in military training, and afterwards be assigned to reserve units.

[8] Antimilitarists and pacifists—strong in Protestant churches and women's groups—protested the plan would make the United States resemble Germany, which required two years' compulsory military service from every male citizen.

Criticism from White ethnic circles occasionally argued that "100% Americanism" really meant Anglophilia, as particularly demonstrated by escalating demands for both the "Special Relationship" and for tolerating only the English language in the United States.

In a letter published on 16 July 1916 in the Minneapolis Journal, Edward Goldbeck, a member of Minnesota's traditionally very large German-American community, announced that his people would, "abandon the hyphen", as soon as English-Americans did so.

[13] Underscoring its commitment, the preparedness movement set up and funded its own summer training camps (at Plattsburgh, New York, and other sites) where 40,000 college alumni became physically fit, learned to march and shoot, and ultimately provided the cadre of a wartime officer corps.

It had had little use for the National Guard, which it saw as politicized, localistic, poorly armed, ill trained, too inclined to idealistic crusading (as against Spain in 1898), and too lacking in understanding of world affairs.

According to Blum, his Secretaries of the Navy and War displayed a "confusion, inattention to industrial preparation, and excessive deference to peacetime mores [that] dangerously retarded the development of the armed services.

Congress passed the Naval Act of 1916, which encapsulated the planning by the Navy's professional officers to build a fleet of top-rank status, but it would take several years to become operational.

Antiwar critics such as Wisconsin's Republican Senator La Follette blasted them, saying there was an unnamed "world-wide organization" that was "stimulating and fomenting discord in order that it may make profit out of the furnishing of munitions of war."

In peacetime, War Department arsenals and navy yards manufactured nearly all munitions that lacked civilian uses, including warships, artillery, naval guns, and shells.

Peace leaders like Jane Addams of Hull House and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, redoubled their efforts, and now turned their voices against Wilson because he was "sowing the seeds of militarism, raising up a military and naval caste."

Many ministers, professors, farm spokesmen and labor union leaders joined in, with powerful support from a band of four dozen southern Democrats in Congress who took control of the House Military Affairs Committee.

Congress still refused to budge, so Wilson replaced Garrison as Secretary of War with Newton Baker, the Democratic mayor of Cleveland and an outspoken opponent of preparedness.

[27] Colonel Robert L. Bullard privately complained: "Both sides [Britain and Germany] treat us with scorn and contempt; our fool, smug conceit of superiority has been exploded in our faces and deservedly.

Arguing this battle proved the validity of Mahanian doctrine, the navalists took control in the Senate, broke the House coalition, and authorized a rapid three-year buildup of all classes of warships.