Editing Preparedness Movement (section)

==The movement==
[[File:The Battle Cry of Peace.jpg|thumb|The advertisement of ''[[The Battle Cry of Peace]]'' film]]
{{main|American entry into World War I}}

In 1915, a strong "preparedness" movement emerged. It argued that the United States needed to immediately build up strong naval and land forces for defensive purposes; an unspoken assumption was that the United States would fight sooner or later. General [[Leonard Wood]] (still on active duty after serving a term as Chief of Staff of the Army), ex-president [[Theodore Roosevelt]], and former secretaries of war [[Elihu Root]] and [[Henry Stimson]] were the driving forces behind the preparedness movement, along with many of the nation's most prominent bankers, industrialists, lawyers and scions of prominent families. There emerged an "[[Atlanticist]]" foreign policy establishment, a group of influential Americans drawn primarily from upper-class lawyers, bankers, academics, and politicians of the [[Northeastern US]], committed to a strand of [[Anglophile]] internationalism.<ref>John P. Finnegan, ''Against the Specter of a Dragon: The Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917'' (1975)</ref>

A representative leader was [[Paul D. Cravath]], one of New York's foremost corporation lawyers. For Cravath, in his mid-fifties when the war began, the conflict served as an epiphany, sparking an interest in international affairs that dominated his remaining career. Fiercely Anglophile, he strongly supported US intervention in the war and hoped that close Anglo-American cooperation would be the guiding principle of post-war international organization.<ref>Priscilla Roberts, "Paul D. Cravath, the First World War, and the Anglophile Internationalist Tradition." ''Australian Journal of Politics and History'' 2005 51(2): 194–215. {{ISSN|0004-9522}} Fulltext in Ebsco</ref>

The preparedness movement had a [[realism (international relations)|"realistic"]] philosophy of world affairs—it believed that economic strength and military muscle were more decisive than [[idealism (international relations)|idealistic]] crusades focused on causes like [[democracy]] and [[national self-determination]]. Emphasizing the weak state of national defenses, the movement showed that America's 100,000-man army, even augmented by the 112,000 National Guardsmen, was outnumbered 20 to one by the [[Imperial German Army|German Army]], which was drawn from a smaller population. Reform to them meant UMT or "universal military training", i.e. [[conscription]].  Preparedness backers proposed a national service program under which the 600,000 men who turned 18 every year would be required to spend six months in military training, and afterwards be assigned to reserve units. The small regular army would primarily serve as a training agency.

This proposal ultimately failed, but it fostered the [[Plattsburg Movement]], a series of summer training camps that in 1915 and 1916 hosted some 40,000 men largely of elite social classes, and the later [[Citizens' Military Training Camp]]s that trained some 400,000 men from 1921 to 1940.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ti67SI0n-goC|title=The Plattsburg Movement: A Chapter of America's Participation in the World War|first=Ralph Barton|last=Perry|date=2018|publisher=E.P. Dutton|access-date=4 September 2018|via=Google Books}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Clifford |first=J. Garry |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=K4MXBwAAQBAJ&q=Plattsburg&pg=PT143 |date=1972|title=Citizen Soldiers: The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1913–1920 |publisher=University Press of Kentucky |isbn=0813112621 |oclc=493383 }}</ref>