Domestic and Global Challenges

1890–1945

7

PART

In a famous speech he made in 1918, amid the horrors of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson outlined his Fourteen Points for international peace. Americans, he argued, must help make the world “fit and safe to live in.” “We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose,” Wilson declared. Fifteen years later, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a similar call for solidarity during the Great Depression. “We face the arduous days that lie before us,” he said, “in the warm courage of national unity.” Soon, even more grit and determination were needed, as Americans faced another looming world war.

In these years, America’s political leaders met major challenges at home and abroad with bold responses. The exception to this pattern was the 1920s, a decade of limited government under Republican presidents who deferred to business interests and to Americans’ isolationist, consumer-oriented mood. During the crises of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, however, American voters called for — and got — what Roosevelt called “action and action now.”

Wilson’s proposals met with failure at the end of World War I, but Roosevelt won immense popularity for his measures to combat the depression, which helped millions of Americans survive unemployment and hardship. FDR, however, had limited success in ending the depression until World War II reignited the American economy. The United States emerged from the war with unprecedented global power, and the federal government with a broad mandate for sustaining the new welfare state. Part 7 addresses these transformations.