<P> Britain had significant support among intellectuals, Yankees, and families with close ties to Britain . The most prominent leader was Samuel Insull of Chicago, a leading industrialist who had emigrated from England . Insull funded many propaganda efforts, and financed young Americans who wished to fight by joining the Canadian military, Canada at that time being a Dominion of the British Empire . </P> <P> By 1915, Americans were paying much more attention to the war . The sinking of the Lusitania aroused furious denunciations of German brutality . By 1915, in Eastern cities a new "Preparedness" movement emerged . It argued that the United States needed to build up immediately strong naval and land forces for defensive purposes; an unspoken assumption was that America would fight sooner or later . The driving forces behind Preparedness were all Republicans, notably General Leonard Wood, ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, and former secretaries of war Elihu Root and Henry Stimson; they enlisted many of the nation's most prominent bankers, industrialists, lawyers and scions of prominent families . Indeed, 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, committed to a strand of Anglophile internationalism . </P> <P> The Preparedness movement had what political scientists call a "realism" philosophy of world affairs--they believed that economic strength and military muscle were more decisive than idealistic crusades focused on causes like democracy and national self - determination . Emphasizing over and over the weak state of national defences, they showed that the United States' 100,000 - man Army, even augmented by the 112,000 - strong National Guard, was outnumbered 20 to one by the German army; similarly in 1915, the armed forces of Great Britain and the British Empire, France, Russia, the Austro - Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Belgium, Japan and Greece were all larger and more experienced than the United States military . </P> <P> They called for UMT or "universal military service" under which the 600,000 men who turned 18 every year would be required to spend six months in military training, and then be assigned to reserve units . The small regular army would primarily be a training agency . Public opinion, however, was not willing to go that far . </P>

The role of the united states in world war 1