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agreement for peace on his own Fourteen Points, a list of guiding prin-
ciples for the postwar world that he had presented to a joint session of
Congress on January 8, 1918. Wilson’s Fourteen Points were aimed at
correcting the conditions that had led to a worldwide conflict. “It will
be our wish and purpose,” Wilson announced to Congress, “that the
processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and
that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understand-
ings of any kind.”
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Point One called for an end to the kind of secret
treaties and alliances that were the work of Germany’s nineteenth-
century chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. It was these tangled agree-
ments that had pulled nations into the war in the first place. Point
Crowds in Times Square, NewYork, hold up newspaper headlines that
declare “Germany Surrenders” after news of the armistice reached US
shores. The destruction fromwhat had been the bloodiest war ever left
many politicians and citizens in all countries eager to avert another
global conflict.
