President Calls for War Declaration, Stronger Navy, New Army of 500,000 Men, Full Co-operation With Germany's Foes
Must Exert All Our Power
To Bring a "Government That Is Running Amuck to Terms."
WANTS LIBERAL CREDITS
And Universal Service, for "the World Must Be made Safe for Democracy."
A TUMULTUOUS GREETING
Congress Adjourns After "State of War" Resolution Is Introduced- Acts Today
Special to The New York Times
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Washington, April 2 -- At 8:35 o'clock tonight the United States virtually made its entrance into the war. At that hour President Wilson appeared before a joint session of the Senate and House and invited it to consider the fact that Germany had been making war upon us and to take action in recognition of that fact in accordance with his recommendations, which included universal military service, the raising of an army of 500,000 men, and co-operation with the Allies in all ways that will help most effectively to defeat Germany.
Resolutions recognizing and declaring the state of war were immediately introduced in the House and Senate by Representative Flood and Senator Martin, both of the President's birth-state, Virginia, and they are the strongest declarations of war that the United States has ever made in any war in which it has been engaged since it became a nation. They are the administration resolutions drawn up after conference with the President, and in language approved and probably dictated by him, and they will come before the two Foreign Affairs Committees at meetings which will be held tomorrow morning and will be reported at the earliest practical moment.
Unreservedly With the Allies
Before an audience that cheered him as he has never been cheered in the Capitol in his life, the President cast in the lot of American unreservedly with the Allies and declared for a war that must not end until the issue between autocracy and democracy has been fought out. He recited our injuries at Germany's hands, but he did not rest our cause on those; he went on from that point to range us with the Allies as a factor in an irrepressible conflict between the autocrat and the people. He showed that peace was impossible for the democracies of the world while this power remained on earth. "The world," he said, "must be made safe for democracy."
We had learned that the German autocracy could never be a friend of this country; she had been our enemy while nominally our friend, and even before the war of 1914 broke out. He called on us to take our stand with the democracies in this irrepressible conflict, with before our eyes "the wonderful and heartening events that have been happening in the last few weeks in Russia." He reaffirmed his hope for peace and for freedom, and looked to the war now forced on us to bring these about; for, he said, a world compact for peace "can never be maintained except by a concert of the democracies of the world."
The objects for which we fight, he said, are democracy, the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government, the rights and liberties of small nations, the universal dominion of right, the concert of free peoples to bring peace and safety to all nations, and to make the world free. These have always been our ideals, and to accomplish them, we accept the war Germany has made upon us. In fighting it we must not only raise an army and increase the navy, but must aid the Allies in all ways, financial and other, and so order our own preparations as not to interfere with the supply of munitions they are getting from us.
Trouble-making Pacifists Barred
The President delivered this speech before an audience that had been carefully sifted. All day Washington had been in the hands of belligerent pacifists, truculent in manner, and determined to break into the Capitol. They tried to take possession of the Capitol steps, up which the President must go when he entered, and met the same fate that Coxey's rioters fell in with twenty-three years ago at the hands of the police, who dispersed them.
A handful of them fell upon Senator Lodge and assaulted him. Others entered the Vice President's room and were so aggressive that they were put out. But by nightfall the authorities had them eliminated, so far as any possibility of trouble was concerned, and they were not admitted to the Capitol at all.
Two troops of the Second Cavalry guarded the approaches, and admitted nobody who could not be vouched for and the building swarmed with Secret Service men, Post Office Inspectors, and policemen on guard to see that no harm form the lovers of peace befell the President of the United States in his charge of a constitutional duty.
He came at 8:30, guarded by another troop of cavalry. If he had come in the afternoon, as he wished to do, he would have made his entry through thousands of pacifists camped outside the building and parading its corridors and waiting for him. But at night it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a disturber to get within pistol shot of the Capitol, and even those who could get into the building itself could not get into the galleries without special tickets.
President Greeted Cheers
The House an hour before had taken a recess. When it met again it was in a scene that the hall had never presented before. Directly in front of the Speaker and facing him sat the members of the Diplomatic Corps in evening dress. It was the first time any one could remember when the foreign envoys had ever sat together officially in the Hall of Representatives.
Then the doors opened, and in came the Senators, headed by Vice President Marshall, each man wearing or carrying a small American flag. There were three or four exceptions, including Senators La Follette and Vardaman, but one had to look hard to find them and Senator Stone was no exception. It was at 8:32 that they came in, and one minute later the speaker announced;
"The President of the United States."
As he walked in and ascended the Speaker's platform he got such a reception as Congress had never given him before in any of his visits to it. The Supreme Court Justices rose from their chairs, facing the place where he stood, and led the applause, while Representatives and Senators not only cheered, but yelled. It was two minutes before he could begin his address.
When he did begin it, he stood with his manuscript before him typewritten on sheets of note paper. He held it in both hands, resting his arm on the green baize covered desk, and at first he read with out looking up, but after a while he would glance occasionally to the right or left as he made a point, not as if he were trying to see the effect, but more as a sort of gesture- the only one he employed.
Congress listened intently and without any sort of interruption while he recited the German crimes against humanity, his own and his country's effort to believe that the German rulers had not wholly cut themselves off from the path which civilized nations follow, and the way in which the truth was forced upon unwilling minds. It was waiting for his conclusions, and there was no applause or demonstration of any kind for the recital.
But when he finished his story of our efforts to avoid war and came to the sentence "armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable because submarines are in fact outlaws when used as the German submarines are used," breathless silence, so painfully intense that it seemed almost audible.
A Roar Answers No "Submission."
He had told Congress at the outset that the condition which now confronted us was one which he had neither the right nor the duty to cope with alone, and that he had come to ask it to make its choice of ways to deal with it; and now he said:
"There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making. We will not choose the path of submission . . ."
There was more of the sentence, but Congress neither knew it nor would have waited to hear if it had been known. At the word "submission," Chief Justice White with an expression of joy and thankfulness on his face, dropped the big soft hat he had been holding, raised his hands high in the air, and brought them together with a heartfelt bang; and House, Senate, and galleries followed him with a roar like a storm. It was a cheer so deep and so intense and so much from the heart that it sounded like a shouted prayer.
The President completed his sentence,
"And suffer the most sacred rights of our people to be ignored," and Congress relapsed into its intent and watchful silence. But when he asked for the declaration of war, when he urged them to "declare the course of the Imperial German Government to be in effect nothing less than war," the scene was even more striking.
Chief Justice Leads the Cheers
Chief Justice White had the most prominent seat on the floor; the Supreme Court sat apart from all the rest in a little island of chairs in the center of the open space before the Speaker's desk; and as he rose from his seat at the head of the little known men, he was marked out from all, as no one else was except the President himself. The Chief Justice's face wore an expression of pride and relief that was a study, and that attracted the observation of everybody; and though the cheering really needed no leader, he was its leader. At this last utterance of this President's, he compressed his lips close together as if her were trying to keep tears back, and again raised his hands as high as he could and brought his mighty palms together as if her were trying to split them.
Behind him the Senators and Representatives were cheering; and now, after a moment or two, Heflin of Alabama sprang to his feet. In a second the whole Democratic side of the House was up after him, and then Ollie James of Kentucky rose in his turn, followed immediately by the Democratic side of the Senate, and there they all stood cheering at the top of their lungs.
The same scene was repeated when the President a moment later asked Congress to recognize the state of belligerency which Germany had thus forced upon us, and to adopt measures which would bring the German Government to terms as soon as possible and end the war.
The next applause came from his statement that such a prosecution of the war would call for co-operation with the Allies, and there was more when he spoke of making them a liberal financial contribution, "so that our resources be as far as possible added to theirs." Next he took up our own preparation, independent of the Allies, and Congress applauded his proposal for strengthening the navy, for an army of "at least 500,000 men," but the applause turned to great cheering when he added, "it should be chosen, in my judgment, on the principle of universal liability to service."
After declaring that we should order our preparations so as to interfere as little as possible with the duty of supplying the Allies with munitions, which elicited more applause. The President turned to the great causes which called us into the war, and spoke no more of the injuries which Germany had inflicted upon us. It was not for revenge that we were fighting, but because we were enlisted in the battle for democracy.
"We have no quarrel with the German people," he said amid applause, and later he declared that they would be liberated as well as the people of other lands, by the war.
When he came to this part of his address the first big cheer he got was when, painting the battle of democracy an autocracy, and the difference between the two, he said that democracies "do not fill other countries with spies or set upon a course of intrigue" -and would have said more but for the cheering that split his sentence at that word.
"The Russian people have been added to the forces that are fighting for justice and for peace," he said, and they cheered again.
Not in the way of reciting injuries to which we must not submit, as he had done at the beginning but for the purpose of illustrating the differences between self-governed peoples and those that are ruled by a few, he said. "It has filled our unsuspecting communities and even our offices of Government with spies and set criminal intrigue everywhere afoot."
The cheers which this evoked showed again that this is a particularly sore spot with Congress, though the President's object at this point was only the drawing of a contrast between the nations to which we are affiliated and those which are ruled by secret diplomacy and personal government- "a government that did as it pleased and told its people nothing."
His direct charge against the German Embassy, that these plots were directed by "official agents of the Imperial Government, accredited to the Government of the United States," brought another storm of applause.
A World "Safe for Democracy."
But these charges he made only incidentally, and for purposes of illustration. They were all designed to show that "the autocratic German Government can never be a friend," and now he said:
"The world must be made safe for democracy."
This sentence might have passed without applause, but Senator John Sharp Williams was one man who instantly seized the full and immense meaning of it. Alone he began to applaud, and he did it gravely, emphatically- and in a moment the fact that this was the keyword of our war against Germany dawned on the others, and one after another followed his lead until the whole host broke forth in a great uproar of applause.
When he touched on our relations with the German-Americans there was applause for his promises to those German-Americans who "are in fact loyal to their neighbors and the Government in the hour of test," but it was altogether overshadowed by the volume of that which broke out for the antithetical sentence, "If there should be disloyalty it will be dealt with a stern hand and firm repression.
An Ovation Follows Closing Words.
The President ended at 9:11, having spoken thirty-six minutes. Then the great scene which had been enacted at his entrance was repeated. The diplomats, the Supreme Court, the galleries, the House and Senate, Republicans and Democrats alike, stood in their places and the Senators waved flags they had brought with them. Those who were wearing, not carrying flags, tore them from their lapels or their sleeves and waved with the rest, and they all cheered wildly.
Senator Robert Marion La Follette, however stood motionless with his arms folded tight and high on his chest, so that nobody could have any excuse for mistaking his attitude; and there he stood, chewing gum with a sardonic smile.
The President walked rapidly out of the hall, and when he had gone, the Senators and the Supreme Court and the diplomats went their ways. Four minutes after his departure the Speaker called the House to order for the passage of a resolution offered by Chairman Fitzgerald of the Appropriations Committee making it possible to pass the money bills within ten days under suspension of the rules, and the first day's session of the Sixty-fifth congress was at an end.
The War Resolution Now Before Congress
This resolution was introduced in the House of Representatives last night by Representative Flood, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, immediately after the President's address:
JOINT RESOLUTION, Declaring that a State of War Exists Between the Imperial German Government and the Government and People of the United States and Making Provision to Prosecute the Same.
Whereas, The recent acts of the Imperial German Government are acts of war against the Government and people of the United States:
Resolved, By the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that the state of war between the United States and the Imperial German Government which has thus been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared; and
That the President be, and he is hereby, authorized and directed to take immediate steps not only to put the country in a thorough state of defense but also to exert all of its power and employ all of its resources to carry on war against the Imperial German Government and to bring the conflict to a successful termination. |
