World War I
Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he was a strong supporter of Britain and France, but also supported the nation's neutrality policy. He called for preparation of a large, powerful army and was active in the privately-funded Plattsburg Training Camp Movement to train potential officers. When war came in 1917 Stimson was one of eighteen officers selected by former President Theodore Roosevelt to raise a volunteer infantry division, Roosevelt's World War I volunteers, for service in France in 1917. President Woodrow Wilson refused to make use of the volunteers and the unit disbanded. Stimson served the regular U.S. Army in France as an artillery officer, reaching the rank of colonel in August 1918.
Read more about this topic: Henry L. Stimson
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.... A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice—is often the means of their regeneration.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)