03/6/11

Stop Sunking pur ships!

Most of us know that The sinking of the Lusitania was one of the factors to the United States entering the Great War, The sinking was due to  the German U-boat campaign, where Germany declared that all Allied and neutral ship were to be sunk on sight.  They wanted to cut off Britain supplies from America.  By March 1917, Germany U-boat seven American vessels.Woodrow Wilson realized that staying neutral and out of the war could not be avoided, and Declared war on Germany.  I honestly believe that staying out of the war so long is what helped the United stated win.  They entered a war that opposing side and the allies were both decreasing in the number of soldier.  The United states lost over 100,000 soldiers, which sad as it may be was only 1 % of the soldiers that were lost in this Great War!

03/1/11

“The World Must Be Made Safe For Democracy”

This quote was from the speech he gave to congress to declare War against Germany and bring peace to the world in March, 1917. Woodrow Wilson was neutral at the time when the Great War broke out in 1914, he even won the election in 1912 by promising not to send American Soldiers to Europe according to Foner. But as the situation in Europe worsened, the straw that broke America’s stance against joining the war was the sinking of Lusitania by German Submarines where 1,198 people were killed including 124 Americans, eliciting public outrage in America. Woodrow Wilson’s decision to join the Great War was a landmark decision since America was a military superpower and had the power to quickly end the war, which was already going on for 3 years and had claimed the lives of millions. I think Foner was pretty clear and succinct in discussion of this issue where he noted America’s earlier stance of neutrality and then the later shift to joining the war.

02/27/11

The Birth of the Federal Reserve System

The Panic of 1907 was a financial crisis, which almost left the nation’s banks in ruins. Therefore, on December 23, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act. This act established the Federal Reserve System, the nation’s very own bank that would overlook and monitor the nation’s monetary policy. The president has the power to nominate the central board, which in turn would monitor the 12 regional banks spanned across the country. The Federal Reserve has the abillity to issue money, control interest rates, and bail out banks in slump.

02/27/11

Woodrow Wilson


Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the United States, passed a series of laws to reform the nation. He increased the tax on rich people in order to restore the economy. Also, he passed laws to improve employee working condition, such as the Keating Owen Act and Adamson Act. These two acts prohibit child labor and started a limited working hours on railroad workers. In addition, he created two federal systems, The Federal Reverse System and Federal Trade Commission, which expanded government power to interfere in the economy. The first one is to issue currency and aid bank. The other one is an antitrust instruction to prohibit unfair business activities.