Woodrow Wilson: An Interpretation

Abstract

A traveler to England in 1946 is speedily made aware of the immense admiration of the British people for the late president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is probable that no other American statesman has evoked quite so warm a regard in the British Isles. Roosevelt early understood the issues of the war which Britain was forced to take up in 1939, and quickly responded when the collapse of France put that country in imminent peril. His intimacy with that great Englishman, Winston Churchill, dramatized the close association of the two English-speaking countries in the struggle that came to a close only a year ago. It would have been strange if he had not been appreciated by the British people. There was, however, another great American president who led his country into war, and stood by the side of Britain in critical days. His name was Woodrow Wilson, and he seems in general to have won far less affection and regard in Britain. Yet he, too, was a great man. It is the object of this paper to make him, as the author hopes, a little better understood, and to demonstrate why he deserves a place amongst the most eminent of the presidents of the United States.