Carranza's pro-Germanism, or rather anti-Americanism, was hardly disguised during the war, and the confiscatory policy of his Administration in dealing with foreign oil and mineral properties threatened to do much damage to American interests. When the war in Europe had ended, the question of Mexico once more came back to the foreground of attention. Carranza's Administration had not been stained by so much guilt as Huerta's, and the opposition to it was on the scale of banditry rather than revolution; but Mexico was far worse off after years of the war than it had been in 1913, and disregard of American rights was still the cardinal policy of the Government. Carranza's security, however, was illusory. In the Spring of 1920 Presidential elections were announced at last, and Carranza's attempt to force Ygnacio Bonillas, his Ambassador in Washington, into the Presidential chair led to a revolt which eventually attracted the leadership of Obregon. Carranza fled from Mexico City and was murdered on May 22, 1920, and, after the interim Presidency of Adolfo de la Huerta, Obregon came into office in the Fall.
The European War, 1914-1916
When in the last week of July, 1914, a war of unparalleled intensity and magnitude suddenly fell upon a world which for forty years had been enjoying unprecedented well-being and security, the practically unanimous sentiment of Americans was gratitude that we were not involved. The President's first steps, a formal proclamation of neutrality and equally formal tender of mediation to the belligerents, "either now or at any other time that might be thought more suitable," had general approval.
Federal Reserve
We must have a currency, not rigid as now, but readily, elastically responsive to sound credit, the expanding and contracting credits of everyday transactions, the normal ebb and flow of personal and corporate dealings. Our banking laws must mobilize reserves; must not permit the concentration anywhere in a few hands of the monetary resources of the country or their use for speculative purposes in such volume as to hinder or impede or stand in the way of other more legitimate, more fruitful uses.—From the President's Address to Congress, April 23, 1913.
Courtesy New York Times
July 3, 1912: Governor Wilson receiving congratulations from newspaper correspondents on his nomination for the Presidency
But a sharp division of sentiment showed itself when, on August 18, he issued an address to the American people warning against partisan sympathies and asking that Americans be "impartial in thought as well as in action," in order that the country might be "neutral in fact as well as in name." The great majority of the American people, or of such part of it as held opinions on public questions, had already made up their minds about the war, and most of the others were in process of being convinced. Some of them had made up their minds from racial sympathies, but others had thought things out. And among these last, particularly, there was a revolt against the assumption that in the presence of such issues any impartiality of thought was possible.