Rhetorical Analysis of President Woodrow Wilsons War Message

With the status of the country’s belligerency heavily in question, an apprehensive President Woodrow Wilson prepared to request from an unmotivated and unprepared country a declaration of war against Germany. After exerting every attempt possible to retain the peace and honor of the United States, the President was finally forced to choose between the two, in which he opted for the latter (Seymour 26). As he sat down to compose his congressional address proposing war, the uncertainty of his decision overwhelmed him. He confided to a member of his cabinet, Frank Cobb, that he had never been as unsure about anything in his life as the judgment he was making for the nation (Baker 506). Through a rhetorical analysis of Wilson’s points of argumentation and his style in the presentation to the war congress, we can gain a better understanding of the president’s purpose tonot only convince the Congress that American belligerency in the final stages of the war would indefinitely shorten it and provide him with the opportunity to organize the peace for Europe as well as the rest of the world (Ferrell 2), but to sway the American people’s opinion to one of non-isolationism, to warn Germany’s government that “America would ultimately wield a powerful sword to deny them victory” (Parsons 2), to compel German citizens to relinquish the submarine attacks and negotiate peace and his terms (Parsons 2), and to calm his own uncertainty about his decision. The need for Wilson’s speech and the current mindset of the American public were a direct result of a succession of antagonistic events in Europe that were rapidly effecting the United States. As the task of remaining neutral became increasingly unfeasible due to numerous insults by the British and German governments, Wilson was forced to shift his foreign policy into a more internationalist scope, a path which the majority of Americans failed to follow (Boyer 791). The same man who was reelected in 1916 on the platform