U.S. at War: Our Reasons, Our Motives, Our Mission

Abstract

When teaching about American involvement in the First World War, I was presented with a problem for which I was unpre pared?my students flatly refused to believe that making the world safe for could ever have really been a true U.S. motivation for participating in the war. At first, I dismissed this disbe lief as twenty-first-century teenage cynicism or even a failure on my part to teach effectively. But, as the discussion continued, I realized that many of my students were simply confronting a set of ideas and a rhetoric completely unfamiliar to them. My nth graders were born in 1988-89. They have grown up in a post cold war world and a United States more dedicated to multiculturalism than earlier generations have known. They simply have not had much exposure to the nationalistic ideas that were part and parcel of the cold war experience of previous generations. During my lesson on World War I, my hope was to spark a discussion on nationalism, patriotism, jingo ism, and xenophobia, and to explore the differences between reasons and rationales, causes and justifications. Instead, I spent most of the hour trying to convince my class that the ideas expressed by President Woodrow Wilson in his call for a declaration of war were not only shared by many Americans but that those ideas drew upon a tradition that has long been a part of our national identity and represented themes which would be repeated throughout the twentieth century. In this lesson plan, students will review nineteenth-century ideas about Manifest Destiny by examining a painting and analyzing the words of two of the concept's proponents. Students then examine ex cerpts of twentieth-century presidential speeches given in times of con flict, evaluating through both written and visual evidence the validity of supporting democracy as a reason to go to war. They end the lesson by connecting these historical issues with evidence about current U.S. involvement in the war in Iraq.