Persona Non Grata Addressed the Nation

On this day 90 years ago the Persona Non Grata of this blog addressed his fellow Americans. Two weeks earlier the 28^th President of those United States had asked COTUS for a declaration of war to "make the world safe for democracy." Never mind making the world safe from democracy!

COTUS gave POTUS what he wanted, and the declaration of war was signed on April 6, 1917.

That declaration of war – together with the previous "neutrality" – was a major contributor to bringing the Old European Order to a sad final end. Not to speak of how it helped the April Theses.

Opposition to the declaration came from, amongst others, United States Senators Norris and La Follette. According to Wikipedia, both were progressives. Considering when Norris and La Follette first came to the U.S. Senate, they must have been yet to stand for their first elections under Amendment XVII.

While the intervention certainly affected Europe, the effects weren't exactly absent on the other side of the big pond either. In Joseph R. Stromberg's Remembering With Astonishment Woodrow Wilson’s Reign of Terror in Defense of "Freedom" the late Robert Nisbet is quoted:

The blunt fact is that when [under Wilson] America was introduced to the War State in 1917, it was introduced also to what would later be known as the total, or totalitarian, state.

The Allied position, and what now – with Wilson – had become the war to make the world safe for ochlocracy, kleptocracy, and mobocracy, cemented the fall of the Russian monarchy, adding Communism, brought egalitarian democratic republicanism to even more of Europe, and wasted additional millions of human lives.