Wilson's Fourteen Points

President Woodrow Wilson was planning a speech to give to Congress. This would be a speech to a joint session of Congress, which meant that members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives would be there.

Like all modern presidents, President Wilson had experts to help him decide just what to say in his speech, but this one still must have taken a lot of thought. The speech that President Wilson was preparing to make on January 8, 1918, would be his plan for ending World War I. Wilson had not wanted to enter the war in the first place, but world events had eventually brought the United States into the war. Now that the war was ending, he hoped for an agreement that would provide world peace in the future. He wanted a plan that would save the world from ever having another world war.

In his speech, Wilson said that "the peoples of the world are partners." He even said that Germany, our enemy in the war, should be treated with fairness and respect. He said, "We wish her (Germany) only to accept a place of equality among the peoples of the world."