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Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest

Speech Opposing War with Germany

by Justus D. Doenecke, PhD

Date: 1917

Author: Robert La Follette

Genre: Speech

Summary Overview

Throughout much of his adult life, Robert M. La Follette was known as “Fighting Bob,” and the appellation was most apt. He was admittedly by nature combative and suspicious. At the same time, he was an indefatigable researcher who could often intimidate opponents with mounds of supporting data. In April 1917, in his Speech Opposing War with Germany, he addressed the Senate when they met to vote on President Woodrow Wilson’s call for a declaration of war. In his address, La Follette sought to parry Wilson’s call for war by denying that the United States had ever been neutral. He cited the extravagant costs of war in terms of its effects on the poor of both countries, and he warns against binding the United States to the war aims and methods of Britain.

Defining Moment

On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. On January 31, the imperial German government had announced that on the following day its submarines would sink without warning all ships, including those belonging to neutral nations, in a broad war zone that covered the seas around Britain, France, Italy, and the eastern Mediterranean. Then, in late February, it became known that Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister, had proposed an alliance with Mexico in the event that Kaiser Wilhelm’s government went to war against the United States. In return, Mexico would receive vast territories lost in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. Wilson sought to keep U.S. involvement limited to “armed neutrality” but found his hand forced on March 18 by the German sinking of three American ships.

On April 4, the Senate met to vote upon Wilson’s call for a war declaration. Debate began at ten in the morning and lasted until late that night. Only five senators spoke against the declaration—the first four being James K. Vardaman (D-Miss.), William J. Stone (D-Mo.), George Norris (R-Nebr.), and Asle Gronna (R-N.D.). Then, in the afternoon, La Follette addressed his colleagues.

Author Biography

Robert Marion La Follette was born on June 14, 1855. At age twenty he entered the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1879. In 1880, after briefly attending law school, he was elected district attorney of Dane County, where Madison, the capital of Wisconsin, is located. In 1884 he was elected as the youngest member of U.S. House of Representatives. The victim of a Democratic landslide in 1890, he resumed his law practice in Madison.

La Follette was elected governor of Wisconsin in 1900 and was reelected in both 1902 and 1904. While still governor, he was chosen in January 1905 by the state legislature to represent Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate, where he would serve until his death in 1925. Although he was nominally a Republican, he broke with the presidency of William Howard Taft over the high Payne-Aldrich Tariff and over alleged corruption in the Department of the Interior. He sought to gain the Republican presidential nomination of 1912, but his major supporters abandoned him once former President Theodore Roosevelt entered the race.

When Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913, La Follette backed such “New Freedom” proposals as the Underwood Tariff and the Federal Reserve System. Always a foe of military intervention, he spoke forcefully against armed involvement in Mexico and the Caribbean. In March 1917 he led a filibuster against Wilson’s proposal to arm American merchant ships in the aftermath of Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare and was equally outspoken in his opposition to American entrance into World War I, conscription, the curbing of the freedoms of speech and the press, the Treaty of Versailles, and entry into the League of Nations. In 1924 he ran for president on an independent Progressive Party ticket, gaining 4.8 million votes. His platform included collective bargaining, public ownership of water power and railroads, aid to farmers, a ban on child labor, and the recall of federal judges. On June 18, 1925, he died of heart failure in Washington, D.C.

Historical Document

Mr. President, I had supposed until recently that it was the duty of senators and representatives in congress to vote and act according to their convictions on all public matters that came before them for consideration and decision.…

For myself I shall support the president in the measures he proposes when I believe them to be right. I shall oppose measures proposed by the president when I believe them to be wrong.…

If, unhappily, on such momentous questions the most patient research and conscientious consideration we could give to them leave us in disagreement with this president, I know of no course to take except to oppose, regretfully but not the less firmly, the demands of the executive.…

The poor, sir, who are the ones called upon to get in the trenches, have no organized power, have no press to voice their will upon this question of peace or war but, oh, Mr. President, at some time they will be heard.

I hope and I believe they will be heard in an orderly and a peaceful way. I think they may be heard from before long. I think, sir, if we take this step, when the people today who are staggering under the burden of supporting families at the present prices of the necessaries of life find those prices multiplied, when they are raised a hundred percent, or 300 per cent, as they will be quickly, aye, sir, when beyond that those who pay taxes come to have their taxes doubled and again doubled to pay the interest on the nontaxable bonds held by Morgan and his combinations, which have been issued to meet this war, there will come an awakening: they will have their day and they will be heard.

It will be as certain and as inevitable as the return of the tides, and as resistless, too.…

In his message of April 2, the president said:

We have no quarrel with the German people—it was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war; it was not with their previous knowledge or approval.…

At least, the German people, then, are not outlaws. What is the thing the president asks us to do to these German people of whom he speaks so highly and whose sincere friend he declares us to be?

Here is what he declares we shall do in this war. We shall undertake, he says—

The utmost practicable cooperation in counsel and action with the governments now at war with Germany, and as an incident to that, the extension to these governments of the most liberal financial credits in order that our resources may, so far as possible, be added to theirs.

“Practical cooperation!” Practicable cooperation with England and her allies in starving to death the old men and women, the children, the sick and maimed of Germany. The thing we are asked to do is the thing I have stated.

It is idle to talk of a war upon a government only. We are leagued in this war, or it is the president’s proposition that we shall be so leagued, with the hereditary enemies of Germany. Any war with Germany, or any other country for that matter, would be bad enough, but there are not words strong enough to voice my protest against the proposed combination with the entente allies.

When we cooperate with those governments we endorse their methods, we endorse the violations of international law, we endorse the shameful methods of warfare against which we have again and again protested in this war.…

Finally when the end comes, whatever it may be, we find ourselves in cooperation with our ally, Great Britain, and if we cannot resist now the pressure she is exerting to carry us into the war, how can we hope to resist, then, the thousandfold greater pressure she will exert to bend us to her purposes and compel compliance with her demands?…

Once enlisted, once in the co-partnership, we will be carried through with the purposes, whatever they may be, of which we know nothing.

Sir, if we are to enter upon this war in the manner the president demands, let us throw pretense to the winds, let us be honest, let us admit that this is a ruthless war against not only Germany’s army and navy but against her civilian population as well, and frankly state that the purpose of Germany’s hereditary European enemies has become our purpose.…

Just a word of comment more upon one of the points in the president’s address. He says that this is a war “for the things we have always carried nearest to our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government.”…

It is a sentiment peculiarly calculated to appeal to American hearts and, when accompanied by acts consistent with it, is certain to receive our support; but in this same connection, and strangely enough, the president says that we have become convinced that the German government as it now exists— “Prussian autocracy” he calls it—can never again maintain friendly relations with us.…

Who has registered the knowledge or approval of the American people of the course this congress is called upon to take in declaring war upon Germany? Submit the question to the people, you who support it. You who support it dare not do it, for you know that by a vote of more than 10 to one the American people as a body would register their declaration against it.…

The espionage bills, the conscription bills, and other forcible military measures which we understand are being ground out of the war machine in this country is the complete proof that those responsible for this war fear that it has no popular support and that armies sufficient to satisfy the demand of the entente allies cannot be recruited by voluntary enlistments.…

I have said that with the causes of the present war we have nothing to do. That is true. We certainly are not responsible for it. It originated from causes beyond the sphere of our influence and outside the realm of our responsibility. It is not inadmissible, however, to say that no responsible narrator of the events which have led up to this greatest of all wars has failed to hold that the government of each country engaged in it is at fault for it.

For my own part, I believe that this war, like nearly all others, originated in the selfish ambition and cruel greed of a comparatively few men in each government who saw in war an opportunity for profit and power for themselves, and who were wholly indifferent to the awful suffering they knew that war would bring to the masses.…

The offenses of Great Britain and Germany against us can not be treated as they might be treated if those nations were not at war with each other. Undoubtedly, if those nations were not at war with each other we could suffer one to violate international law to our injury and make no protest and take no action against the nations so offending and hold the other to strict accountability and compel her to respect to the limit our rights under international law, and if she refused we would be justified in going to war about it.

But when we are dealing with Germany and Great Britain, warring against each other, so evenly balanced in strength that a little help to one or a little hindrance to the other turns the scale and spells victory for one and defeat for the other, in that situation I say the principle of international law steps in which declares that any failure on our part to enforce our rights equally against both is a gross act of un-neutrality.…

There can be no greater violation of our neutrality than the requirement that one of two belligerents shall adhere to the settled principles of law and that the other shall have the advantage of not doing so. The respect that German naval authorities were required to pay to the rights of our people upon the high seas would depend upon the question whether we had exacted the same rights from Germany’s enemies.

If we had not done so we lost our character as a neutral nation, and our people unfortunately had lost the protection that belongs to neutrals. Our responsibility was joint in the sense that we must exact the same conduct from both belligerents.…

Had the plain principle of international law announced by Jefferson been followed by us, we would not be called on today to declare war upon any of the belligerents. The failure to treat the belligerent nations of Europe alike, the failure to reject the unlawful “war zones” of both Germany and Great Britain, is wholly accountable for our present dilemma.

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. I do not believe that our national honor is served by such a course. The right way is the honorable way.

One alternative is to admit our initial blunder to enforce our rights against Great Britain as we have enforced our rights against Germany; demand that both those nations shall respect our neutral rights upon the high seas to the letters and give notice that we will enforce those rights from that time forth against both belligerents and then live up to that notice.

The other alternative is to withdraw our commerce from both. The mere suggestion that food supplies would be withheld from both sides impartially would compel belligerents to observe the principle of freedom of the seas for neutral commerce.

Glossary

autocracy: a political system in which power is concentrated in the hands of a single person

belligerents: warring parties

entente allies: the Triple Entente allies—Great Britain, France, and Russia—opposed to the Central Powers, led by Germany and Austria-Hungary, in World War I

Morgan: James Pierpont Morgan, American financier in the steel industry

Prussian: referring to the leading state in the nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century German empire

Document Analysis

In the record of the speech, La Follette begins by claiming that senators have the duty to vote their convictions, irrespective of whether they are backing the president, saying the he will back the president when he thinks the president is right, and oppose the president when he thinks the president is wrong. He then defends his opposition to the armed-ship bill, claiming that polls revealed strong opposition to entrance into the European war and portraying himself as representing “the poor,” that is, those powerless Americans who would be making the major sacrifices. Once such people experienced 300 percent price increases in life’s necessities and a quadrupling of taxes to enrich J. P. Morgan, they would be heard—though, of course, in a peaceful manner.

La Follette then turns his attention to the President’s April 2 call for a declaration of war against Germany. Citing Wilson’s call for “practicable cooperation” with Germany’s foes, La Follette warns that the United States would thereby be embracing Britain’s “shameful methods of warfare,” against which he had continually protested. Such “practicable cooperation” would, in fact, mean the starving of children, the aged, and the infirm in Germany—people, La Follette points out, that President Wilson has said “We have no quarrel with.” Furthermore, the United States would be binding itself to British war aims, “of which we know nothing.” He was certain, however, of one thing: Britain was a hereditary monarchy based on restricted suffrage and the grinding exploitation of its laborers. Indeed, with the exception of France and Russia (where, he states, democracy had just been established), America’s new allies all represented the old order, one that had not even kept pace with the municipal and social reforms of the new German enemy. Furthermore, the United States had not even made its support of Britain conditional upon home rule for the rebellious nations of Ireland, Egypt, and India. La Follette notes that Wilson had called the war one for democracy, which the president defined as a condition wherein “those who submit to authority” possess “a voice in their own government.” La Follette cynically notes that this is “a sentiment peculiarly calculated to appeal to American hearts.” He also asks if such were really the case, why was the very issue of entering the war not being presented directly to the American people? The senator then answers his own question, claiming that the public would vote ten to one against entering any such conflict. Instead of permitting a popular referendum, the government was considering forced conscription and “espionage” bills, both of which, he asserts, would violate traditional American liberties.

La Follette also, in this portion of the speech, voices a concern about the war that would echo down the decades which followed it, stating his belief that “that this war, like nearly all others, originated in the selfish ambition and cruel greed of a comparatively few men in each government who saw in war an opportunity for profit and power for themselves.”

La Follette points to centuries of American tension with Britain, which he contrasts to long-standing friendly relations with Germany. He blames the outbreak of the current conflict on a small minority of greedy and ambitious men who sought profit and power while being indifferent to any suffering inflicted on the masses. He finds much credence in the German claim that France, Britain, and Russia had long been secret allies. The senator goes on at length, quoting various documents to support his claim that the United States acquiesced in Britain’s continued violation of neutral rights, in particular, British efforts to prevent American goods from reaching Germany. Making an even more serious accusation, La Follette calls the United States itself highly non-neutral, for applying one standard to Britain and a far more rigorous one to Germany. Rather than go to war, he asserts, the United States should demand that both belligerents respect American commercial rights and should furthermore enforce these rights against the two major powers. If the nation did not choose this option, it could withdraw food supplies to both sides, which would force them to honor American commerce.

Essential Themes

La Follette’s argument against American entry into World War I was deeply rooted in his concern for the working classes not only of the United States but of other nations as well. This is in keeping with his career of championing progressive causes and the rights of working people. Several times in his speech, he highlights the dangers to the civilians in Germany and the suffering they face due to the war. At the same time, La Follette presents himself as the voice of America’s working people who would be the ones who would have to fight if Congress declares war. He maintains that, if the decision were put in the hands of the American people, there would be no war.

He also points out the inconsistency of Wilson declaring that the war is being fought to preserve democracy while, at the same time, cooperating with Britain—a nation of whose goals La Follette seems suspicious. “If we cannot resist now the pressure she is exerting to carry us into the war,” he asks, “how can we hope to resist, then, the thousandfold greater pressure she will exert to bend us to her purposes and compel compliance with her demands?” A long tradition of American neutrality in European affairs was at stake and La Follette did not want to see it sacrificed in this manner.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

1 

Drake, Richard. The Education of an Anti-Imperialist Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion (University of Wisconsin Press; 2013).

2 

Miller, Karen A. J., Populist Nationalism: Republican Insurgency and American Foreign Policy Making, 1918–1925 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999).

3 

Doenecke, Justus D. Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America’s Entry into World War I (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011)

4 

Unger, Nancy C. Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Doenecke, Justus D. "Speech Opposing War With Germany." Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest, edited by Aaron Gulyas, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=DDProtest_0101.
APA 7th
Doenecke, J. D. (2017). Speech Opposing War with Germany. In A. Gulyas (Ed.), Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Doenecke, Justus D. "Speech Opposing War With Germany." Edited by Aaron Gulyas. Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed May 30, 2026. online.salempress.com.