Mentors of Modern Men

Late in 1918, Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th admiral of the United States, was advancing a acknowledgment to presidential politics, assertive that he could accretion the Republican choice for the 1920 election. But on January 6, 1919, he died al of a sudden and accidentally in his sleep.

At that moment the bounden Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, was in Paris, apprehension the basic affairs of the accord appointment that would accompany a adjourned end to the Aboriginal Apple War.

Roosevelt and Wilson could not accept been added altered in agreement of personality and political persuasion: active blowing realist meets abstruse Calvinist idealist. Their accord was accordingly difficult. They had faced anniversary added as contenders for the admiral in 1912, and Wilson had won. In the 1916 acclamation Roosevelt was afresh aghast if the abutment he gave to the Republican applicant was not abundant to defeat Wilson.

All things getting according they would accept faced anniversary added afresh in the next election. But it was not to be for either man. In Colorado in September 1919 Wilson suffered a afraid collapse. He was in the bosom of a speaking bout to accumulate abutment for his admired League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles, both of which accessible U.S. ratification. On his acknowledgment to Washington, D.C., the admiral had a paralyzing achievement from which he never recovered abundantly to run for reelection.

In affairs of adopted policy, Roosevelt and Wilson did allotment some perspectives. It was Roosevelt, however, who fabricated the acclaimed acknowledgment that one care to "speak cautiously and backpack a big stick." True to these realist convictions, in America’s civic absorption Roosevelt managed to access the Panama Canal Zone from Colombia in 1903, acceptance U.S. architecture of the canal to activate a year later. His adept abilities brought an end to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, for which he accustomed the Nobel Accord Cost in 1906, the aboriginal elder to do so.

In 1919, Wilson aswell won the accord cost for his efforts to end the contempo apple conflict. But his adopted action objectives were based added on idealist concepts—that the United States should not use its ability adjoin weaker countries but should exercise affair for the rights of abate powers. Self-determination was a Wilsonian principle.

The access of these two extra-ordinary men alcove down to our day. The differing conceptual frameworks they followed in adopted action abide to ascertain the agitation in the 21st century.