Preparedness Movement

The Preparedness Movement, also referred to as the Preparedness Controversy, was a campaign led by Leonard Wood and Theodore Roosevelt to strengthen the military of the United States after the outbreak of World War I. Wood advocated a summer training school for reserve officers to be held in Plattsburg, New York.

The movement was originally opposed by President Woodrow Wilson, who believed the United States should be in a position of armed neutrality. Several organizations were formed around the Preparedness Movement and held parades and organized opposition to Wilson's policies. After the Lusitania was sunk by German U-boats on May 7, 1915 and Pancho Villa launched his raid against Columbus, New Mexico, Wilson's attitude changed. Congress passed the National Defense Act of 1916 in June 1916 to authorize an enormous increase in the size of the military, and the Preparedness Movement faded.

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 US 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 Northeast US, committed to a strand of Anglophile internationalism.

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