The night before he asked Congress to declare war on Germany, President Wilson met privately

with Frank Cobb, editor of the New York World and presidential confidant. Cobb later described

a glum president, pessimistic over what involvement in the Great War would mean for the American people and for American democracy.

According to Cobb, Wilson said to him,

If there is any alternative, for God's sake, let's take it.

Cobb went on to write, well, I couldn't see any, and I told him so. The president didn't have

illusions about how he was going to come out of it either. He'd rather have done anything else

than head a military machine. All his instincts were against it. He foresaw too clearly, the probable

influence of a declaration of war on his own fortunes, the adulation certain to follow the certain victory,

the derision and attack which would come with the deflation of excessive hopes and in the presence of world responsibility.

But if he had to do it over again, he would take the same course.

It was just a choice of evils.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century. The 20th century. The

The Episode 142. Lafayette, We are here.

Nearly three years have passed since the Great War began, and in the United States, the

President, Woodrow Wilson, has throughout this time been ardent in the cause of keeping

the U.S. neutral.

Just months ago he had campaigned for re-election with the slogan, He kept us out of war.

But war had come anyway, and Woodrow Wilson had become only the fifth president in the history of the United States to lead the nation into a war,

the others being James Madison, James K. Polk, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley.

Of these four, the only one comparable to Wilson in his reluctance to go to war

was Lincoln. Many Americans, perhaps most, in Congress, in the press, and in the broader

...