Good morning, Whitewater.
We’ll have light snow in Whitewater today with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 7:23 PM, for 12h 50m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 30.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1917, Pres. Wilson asks Congress for a declaration of war against Germany:
Washington, April 2 — At 8:35 o’clock tonight the United States virtually made its entrance into the war. At that hour President Wilson appeared before a joint session of the Senate and House and invited it to consider the fact that Germany had been making war upon us and to take action in recognition of that fact in accordance with his recommendations, which included universal military service, the raising of an army of 500,000 men, and co-operation with the Allies in all ways that will help most effectively to defeat Germany.
Resolutions recognizing and declaring the state of war were immediately introduced in the House and Senate by Representative Flood and Senator Martin, both of the President’s birth-state, Virginia, and they are the strongest declarations of war that the United States has ever made in any war in which it has been engaged since it became a nation. They are the administration resolutions drawn up after conference with the President, and in language approved and probably dictated by him, and they will come before the two Foreign Affairs Committees at meetings which will be held tomorrow morning and will be reported at the earliest practical moment….
Before an audience that cheered him as he has never been cheered in the Capitol in his life, the President cast in the lot of American unreservedly with the Allies and declared for a war that must not end until the issue between autocracy and democracy has been fought out. He recited our injuries at Germany’s hands, but he did not rest our cause on those; he went on from that point to range us with the Allies as a factor in an irrepressible conflict between the autocrat and the people. He showed that peace was impossible for the democracies of the world while this power remained on earth. “The world,” he said, “must be made safe for democracy.”