President Wilson, somewhere in this book, is asking the people who are talking to him for a continuation of his ideal: please find an American president who can think of the entire world to come after him. He did not mean that American corporations need to acquire the right to see the whole world as booty in their quest for profits. Personal details on how Wilson actually perceived the world include the Wilsons preparing for "the final longdrawn ceremonies of a dinner at the Elysee Palace:" (p. 482):
(When the invitation came from Poincare Wilson flew off the handle. He vowed he would not sit down at table with the swine. It was as if all the resentment of the frustrations suffered in Paris were focussed into hatred of the stubby little President of the French Republic. It was all House and Henry White could do to convince him that not to accept the invitation would cause an international incident. Perhaps Mrs. Wilson had already clinched the matter by getting a special dress for the occasion designed for her by Worth.) (p. 482).
One of the major characters in this book is Teddy Roosevelt, who became President in September 1901 after President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, in the Temple of Music of the Pan-American Exposition. The assassin declared that he had been inspired by "Emma Goldman who was inciting working people in Chicago to bring about the triumph of right and justice through anarchy. . . . The Chicago police arrested Emma Goldman but the judge turned her loose for lack of evidence. Editorials demanded the deportation of foreign anarchists." (p. 4). This book keeps bringing in T.R. as representative of the politics of these times until he was "too weak to talk." (p. 432). "By Christmas T.R. was thought sufficiently recovered to go home. Two weeks later he died, without a murmur, in his sleep in his own bed at Sagamore Hill." (p. 433). There was a Congressional election campaign shortly before the armistice is 1918. Late in July T.R.'s youngest son, Quentin, "had been shot down fighting a formation of German planes. At first he was listed as missing. Then the Germans reported his death and burial with full honors behind their lines near Cambrai." (p. 432). T.R. made a campaign appearance "in Carnegie Hall, flashing his eyeglasses and clacking his teeth and waving his arms with his legendary zest" (p. 432):
On October 26, before a packed and cheering audience, he hauled the President over the coals for his call for a Democratic Congress. He denounced the arrogance of Wilson's conduct of the war. With his customary combination of wild inflammatory statements and commonsense reasoning he tore the Fourteen points to pieces, crying out that they were shams and would not bring the peace with justice the American people wanted. (T.R. hadn't been able to get Wilson's war away from him: maybe he could carry off the peace.) (p. 432).Photograph number 25 from 1916 shows a campaign truck with a sign on the front that says:
VOTE FOR WILSONPEACE WITH HONORPROSPERITYPREPAREDNESS
On the side: WHO KEEPS US OUT OF WAR?
The captions on the photos are brief, as skimpy as subtitles in a silent movie. By 1916, "on the western front the British had lost half a million men and the French nearer two million, with the gain of only an occasional thousand yards of shellpocked mud on the Flanders front." (p. 156). Wilson's Secretary of War, Lindley Garrison, and Assistant Secretary Breckenridge resigned because they favored universal military service while Wilson still thought "that the Administration could not move faster towards military preparation than the people moved." (p. 160). Eight soldiers and eight civilians were killed in Columbus, New Mexico by several hundred men led by Villa on March 9, which was about the size of any problem an American Secretary of War ought to be able to handle, and "Wilson picked a man after his own heart. Newton D. Baker was a progressive reformer and a Wilson man from long before Baltimore. He was reputed to be an ardent pacifist." (p. 161).
There are some exciting descriptions of the war in France and the confusing situation in Russia at that time. Details like "The growth of war exports, without compensating imports, tended to fill the railroad yards in the east with empty freightcars waiting for a westerly load. On top of that the prolonged cold spell froze up locomotives, trapped barges on rivers and canals and increased the nationwide demand for coal and petroleum products." (p. 297). People couldn't use the internet to plan their trips, back then.