Shall it be Again - 1922 Author:John Kenneth Turner Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill WAS AMERICA EVER IN DANGER? Why, my friends, we ought not to turn to those people [the nations at war] in fear, but in sympathy. We ought to realize th... more »at after this exhaustion they will need us, and that we need not fear them.—Woodrow Wilson, in speech' at Cincinnati, Oct. 26, 1916. The American people were told that they were forced into war by the Kaiser; that America had been attacked, and that there was no other recourse except to defend itself against aggression; that the very sovereignty of the country was imperiled; even that we were threatened with actual invasion and domination by German armies. President Wilson personally gave the signal for this particular note in the official and unofficial propaganda, as for all others. In asking for war he advised: "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 that has thus been thrust upon it." In his message of December 4, 1917, he asserted: "We have been forced into it [the war] to save the very institutions we live under from corruption and destruction." At Urbana, January 31, 1918, he told us: "We are fighting, therefore, as truly for the liberty and self-government of the United States as if the war of our own Revolution had to be fought over again." This doctrine was preached from thousands of platforms, thousands of pulpits, thousands of movie screens, millions of posters, in the daily newspapers, and in every vehicle ofthe propaganda. To carry out the idea, our war councils were called "defense councils," our private patriotic societies "defense societies." The necessity for defense against invasion and outrage became, as intended, a ...« less