From Great Hopes to the Great Depression: How Americans Tried to Remake the World

This chapter examines how Americans attempted to reshape the international order during and after World War I and how these ambitions produced new tensions in the understanding of the United States’ global role. President Woodrow Wilson framed American intervention in the war as a moral mission to “make the world safe for democracy” and proposed a new international system based on self-determination and collective security. Although the League of Nations embodied many of these principles, the U.S. Senate rejected participation in the new order, and the country turned back toward isolationism in the 1920s. At the same time, the Russian Revolution offered an alternative global model and provoked the Red Scare within the United States. This chapter argues that the collapse of Wilsonian hopes, the rise of ideological rivalry, and the economic crisis of the Great Depression reshaped both America’s international ambitions and the global perception of the American model.