On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to seek a Declaration of War against Germany in order that the world “be made safe for democracy.” Four days later, Congress voted to declare war, with six senators and fifty House members dissenting. “It is a fearful thing,” he told Congress in his speech, “to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.” Wilson did not exaggerate; in 1917 the war in Europe had already lasted two-and-a-half bloody years and had become one of the most murderous conflicts in human history. By the time the war ended a year and a half later, an entire generation was decimated—France alone lost half its men between the ages of twenty and thirty-two. The maimed bodies of millions of European men who survived bore mute testimony to the war’s savagery.