Document 2 Gentlemen of the Congress:

I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices of policy to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making…

Property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people can not be. The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind.

It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, but the ships and people of other neutral and friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in the same way…

With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves … I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people of the United States …

Source: Wilson's War Message to Congress, April 2, 1917

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