President George Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address, recommended that his fellow countrymen avoid “foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues” and “those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
Washington in the waning days of 1918, the echoes of distant guns stilled at last by the armistice of the eleventh hour, the eleventh day, the eleventh month. The Great War was over, its thunderous machines hushed, its trenches left to scar the fields of France. Across the Atlantic, America exhaled—a young giant that had flexed its might, only to find the weight of victory as heavy as the cost of battle.
For President Woodrow Wilson, the silence was not an end but a beginning, a chance to forge a peace as noble as the war had been brutal. Yet, at home, the nation he led stood at a crossroads, its dreams of democracy tangled in the thorns of politics, prejudice, and the restless stirrings of a people eager to reclaim their lives. This was the reckoning, a time when ideals clashed with realities, and the voices of the past vied with the shadows of the future.
Into this moment strode Theodore Roosevelt, the old lion of San Juan Hill, his mane grayed, but his spirit undimmed. On April 10, 1917, just days after Congress declared war, he had marched to the White House, a bombastic fifty-eight-year-old aching to relive the glories of his Rough Riders. Eight years had passed since he’d relinquished the presidency, nineteen since he’d charged up that Cuban ridge, yet the fire still burned.
For months, he’d railed against Wilson’s caution—calling him cowardly for not avenging the Lusitania’s dead—and now he pitched a bold vision: a new volunteer division, a reincarnation of his Spanish-American War cavalry, to storm the fields of France. Wilson greeted him warily, the scholar-statesman and the warrior-showman locked in an uneasy dance. Privately, Teddy Roosevelt had seethed since the 1916 election, and he pressed his case publicly. But Wilson, steely in his resolve, denied him, turning away a legend to chart his own course. It was Roosevelt’s last tilt at martial glory, a footnote to a war that would soon claim younger blood.
Even as Theodore Roosevelt pressed his case for war and glory, a shadow loomed closer than he knew. His youngest son, Quentin, a boy of boundless cheer and reckless courage, had leapt into the fray with the same gusto that once propelled his father up San Juan Hill.
At twenty-one, Quentin joined the 95th Aero Squadron, a pursuit group on the front lines in France, his letters home brimming with the thrill of flight. “These little fast machines are delightful,” he wrote to his fiancée, Flora Whitney, in December 1917 from Issoudun, marveling at the Nieuport 18s that danced beneath his hands, nimble as birds in a sky turned deadly. By June 25, 1918, he crowed to his mother, Edith, “I’m on the front—cheers, oh cheers—and I’m very happy,” a pilot at last in the full vigor of youth.
That joy was fleeting. On July 14, 1918, as the war neared its climax, Quentin’s plane met German fire over Chamery, a fiery crash behind enemy lines snuffing out his life in an instant. The news struck Roosevelt like a thunderbolt. General John Pershing, a friend who knew loss too well—his wife and three daughters perished in a 1915 fire—wrote with a heavy heart: “Quentin died as he had lived and served, nobly and unselfishly… You may well be proud of your gift to the nation in his supreme sacrifice.”
The Germans, honoring a foe they admired, buried him with full battlefield honors, a gallant gesture that pierced the fog of war. Letters poured in—kings and strangers alike—offering solace to a former president whose name still rang across continents. But a note from a Mrs. H. L. Freeland pierced the veil of formality. On August 14, exactly a month after Quentin’s fall, Roosevelt penned a reply from the North Room at Sagamore Hill, his hand trembling with rare candor: “It is hard for [Edith] to answer even the letters she cares for most… I do not mind writing you of the intimate things which one cannot speak of to strangers.”
The grief was unbearable, a wound time could not heal. “Since Quentin’s death,” he confessed that fall, “the world seems to have shut down upon me.” The Rough Rider, once unstoppable, now bore a father’s sorrow, his robust frame diminished by a loss that echoed Pershing’s own.
Five months later, on January 6, 1919, he slipped away in his sleep, the vigor of his sixty years extinguished, some whispered, by a heart broken beyond repair. Quentin’s death was more than a personal tragedy—the final chord in a symphony of valor and sacrifice that marked the Roosevelt name, a legacy sealed in the skies over France and the quiet hills of Oyster Bay.
At home, the war had been more than a call to arms—it was a crusade of conscience, at least in the eyes of Wilson’s progressive allies. As the Selective Service Act of May 1917 summoned millions to the colors, reformers seized the chance to mold soldiers and citizens. Training camps, they decreed, would be crucibles of virtue, turning out men of the highest moral fiber. Soldiers were urged to shun carnal thoughts, their minds fixed on duty rather than desire.
The Military Draft Act of that year went further, banning prostitution and alcohol near these sanctuaries of discipline—a puritanical edict in a nation of rough edges. Yet, when Congress rallied to the flag, most peace advocates followed, their earlier pleas for neutrality drowned by the drumbeat of patriotism. Only a handful stood firm—Jane Addams, the settlement house pioneer, among them, resisting the bellicose fervor that swept the land. For them, the war’s noble aims clashed with its silencing of dissent, a paradox Wilson could neither escape nor resolve.
Wilson had hoped the war might hush partisan rancor, uniting the nation under a single banner. That dream frayed as the conflict wore on. By 1918, with the armistice in sight, Republicans smelled blood. They wielded the war as a cudgel against the Democrats, decrying Wilson’s handling of everything from troop morale to economic controls. In the November elections, their gamble paid off—a narrow victory in both houses of Congress, wresting power from the Democrats and slamming the door on further domestic reform. The triumph divided the nation’s leadership just as its soldiers marched toward victory, a fracture that would haunt Wilson’s grander ambitions. The Progressive tide, already ebbing before the war, now receded further, its promises of equity stalled by the politics of retribution.
Wilson’s vision soared beyond such squabbles. On January 8, 1918, he had laid before Congress his Fourteen Points—a blueprint for a world reborn, a peace rooted in self-determination and crowned by a League of Nations to guard against future strife. The words stirred hearts at home and abroad, a beacon of hope amid the wreckage. Yet, when he sailed for Paris in December, heading the American delegation himself, he gambled his prestige on a foreign stage.
It was a daring, perilous move—leaving domestic foes unchecked and snubbing prominent Republicans like Henry Cabot Lodge, who chafed at his exclusion. Wilson faced Allied leaders hardened by loss at the peace conference, who saw his ideals as naïve. He bent, trading French territorial moderation for a clause pinning war guilt on Germany—a bitter pill for a nation he’d hoped to redeem. Worse still, Wilson balked when Japan pressed for a treaty clause affirming racial equality. His belief in white superiority, honed in the South, and his fear of American backlash led him to quash it, a betrayal of the democracy he preached.
The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919, bore his imprint but not his soul. Back home, the Senate bristled. The “irreconcilables”—a stubborn cadre—decried it as an entanglement in world affairs, while Republicans feared the League would shackle America’s sovereignty. Lodge, Wilson’s archenemy and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, aired his grievances through hearings, crafting amendments to limit U.S. commitment.
Ratification hung on these “reservations,” but Wilson, unyielding, refused them. In September 1919, he took his case to the people—an ambitious, three-week speaking tour across the heartland. The strain proved too much. On October 2, he collapsed, felled by a massive stroke that left him a shadow of himself. When the treaty, unamended, reached the Senate in March 1920, it fell six votes shy of the two-thirds needed—a defeat that kept America from the League’s halls in Geneva, a dream dashed by pride and paralysis.
As Wilson faded, the nation stumbled into peace. The government, eager to shed wartime harnesses, abandoned economic controls and canceled defense contracts worth millions, unleashing chaos. Over three million soldiers flooded home, their return swelling unemployment as factories slowed. Civilians, flush with pent-up desire, went on a spending spree, driving inflation skyward—by 1919, prices soared 75 percent above prewar levels, a dizzying spiral that mocked the working man's wages.
The cost of living nearly doubled from 1916, and in that single year, four million workers joined almost three thousand strikes, their voices a roar of frustration against a peacetime economy that offered plenty to some and penury to most. It was a bitter harvest for a nation that had poured its youth and treasure into the war, a reminder that victory abroad did not guarantee tranquility at home.
In this fractured dawn, America stood poised between what it had been and what it might become. Roosevelt denied his last battlefield, faded into memory, and died in January 1919. His Rough Riders were a ghost of wars past. The progressive zeal that had sought to purify the war effort withered under political reprisal, its moral edicts forgotten in the rush to normalcy.
Broken by his stroke, Wilson lingered in the White House, his Fourteen Points a tattered scroll, his League a monument to what might have been. The Senate’s rejection, the racial clause’s demise, the economic upheaval—all bore witness to a nation wrestling with its soul. Democracy, Wilson had vowed, must be made safe for the world, yet at home, it remained a promise half-kept, its champions scattered, its critics ascendant. The Great War had ended, but its echoes lingered, a call to reckon with the price of peace and the unfinished work of a people still seeking their place in the light.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
"U.S. History." OpenStax, 2016.
The American Yawp. Stanford University Press, 2022.
Schweikart, Larry, and Michael Allen. A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror. New York: Sentinel, 2004.
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.