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I’ve written in several places, including papers on Social Science Research Network (SSRN) posted in 2018, concerning Woodrow Wilson, of how Franklin Roosevelt adopted and applied Wilson’s vision and made it successful.Basically, what Wilson sought in 1918 in the “Fourteen Points” Franklin Roosevelt achieved in 1941 in the “Atlantic Charter.” These are documents of principles, and I judge them more important than comparing Wilson’s failure with the League of Nations to Roosevelt’s success with the United Nations.I can’t say, however, that Franklin Roosevelt was “obsessed” with Wilson. Roosevelt had little close contact with Wilson. I think it more accurate to say that Roosevelt saw Wilson’s vision close-up when Roosevelt was in the Wilson administration, and adopted Wilson’s vision for international relations, and in 1941 found that circumstances had put him into situation where Roosevelt could succeed where Wilson failed.The entire human race is a great beneficiary of the fact that Roosevelt had this vision - which he got from Wilson - and that Roosevelt succeeded.Now for some background.Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated President on March 4, 1913 (the inauguration was moved earlier to January with Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1937). Eight days later, on March 12, 1913, Wilson submitted to the U.S. Senate the nomination of Franklin Roosevelt to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The Senate gave unanimous consent and Wilson appointed Roosevelt. Wilson’s choice for Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, who was confirmed and appointed on March 5, had urged F. Roosevelt for the post.At the time, Roosevelt was a recently-reelected New York State Senator, in the election of 1912, and he had supported Wilson for President. His distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt, the future President, had held the same job early in his career, and having the same name in the same job was attractive to Wilson, but there is no record that the two were close.On Oct. 27, 1913, in Mobile, Alabama, Woodrow Wilson gave a speech before the Southern Commercial Congress, in which he said “the United States will never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest.”Then began World War I, and during it, Wilson made various pronouncements, that caused an American living in Europe, George Herron, a former leader of American socialists, to publish a series of articles extolling Wilson as a visionary.On December 9, 1916, in French, Herron published an article in La Semaine Littéraire that then appeared on December 21 and 28 in the English journal The New Age. In this article, Herron excited the hope of the French, British, and other European intellectuals that Wilson embodied a new vision:“More than any man now living, Woodrow Wilson is likely to receive and to hold the world’s attention. Deeply, and with broad and shrewd kindness, he broods the human problem. He sees far into the future, and he has clear ideas as to some of the things to be done. He knows, too, how to dispense with banners, and how to accord his most revolutionary measures to the “still small voice.” His largest intentions are hid within himself; he tells as little as possible beforehand; he prefers to let his mind be revealed by results rather than by promises. He knows that, in some crises, men are too slow and doubtful, too double-minded, to respond to the great appeal. They must be started in the new direction with a kind of divine stealth, and without being told whither they go. It is only after they enter the better condition, the larger freedom and the fairer faith, that they discover they have been led more wisely than they knew, and are able to perceive the nobler human prospect.” [Dec. 21]“Mr. Wilson has also, in each crisis that Germany has precipitated, looked beyond the present war’s immediate issues. Longingly and hopefully, he peers into a future wherein the questions between nations are settled without war. … He has tried to make every crisis an opportunity for the enunciation and development of a new international righteousness. … Woodrow Wilson does not believe in war as a method of civilization. He does not believe in military might as a mode of justice or progress. He does not believe that things are really settled by war. …. He concedes to the strong nations no right to impose their will upon the weak. He stands for a universal politic so new, so revolutionary, so creative of a different world than ours, that few have begun to glimpse his vision, or to apprehend his purpose. His eyes are fixed upon a goal that is far beyond the present faith of nations. … He declares that it is the business of strong nations to be the saviours and not the exploiters of the nations which are weak or small. He overthrows the whole evil conception upon which Imperialism is based. … [M]y understanding of the man I must proclaim. For I perceive – or certainly seem to perceive – that Woodrow Wilson is not only the greatest statesman that has appeared in the world for many years – great indeed beyond comparison with any save Lincoln: he is also a determined and tremendous radical: he is a redeemer of democracy. He is a revolutionary beyond anything his words reveal, beyond anything his contemporaries have discerned. … Wilson believes in the whole length and logic of democracy – democracy in political relations, democracy in industry, democracy in things intellectual and spiritual. His consuming purpose is to head the people’s international in the democratic direction. … And Woodrow Wilson beholds this vision, he follows this faith, because he is both sturdily and mystically Christian. … This man conceives … that the mind of mutual service, the law of collective love or affection, is the only practicable social basis, the only national security, the only foundation for universal peace. He believes that the Sermon on the Mount is the ultimate and natural constitution of mankind …. He cunningly hopes, he divinely schemes, to bring it about that America, awake at last to her high national selfhood and calling, shall become a colossal Christian apostle, shepherding the world into the kingdom of God.” [Dec. 28]On December 31, 1916, Herron sent his article to a New York lawyer and business leader whom he knew, Charles Ferguson, who was a confidante of Wilson, whom Wilson had sent to Europe to study banking systems. Herron in his cover-letter to Ferguson said:“By a curious and extraordinary chance, I find myself being placed, all at once, in the position of Dr. Wilson’s defender and interpreter in this part of the world. As you may know, I left Florence for Geneva …. I found great misunderstanding of Wilson, and great hostility to him, and a preposterous idealization of [Theodore] Roosevelt. I undertook to explain Wilson to my friends. Then the editor of the old Genevese weekly – “Semaine Littéraire” – somewhat of the nature of a French New York “Nation” – asked me to write about Wilson, which I did, thinking it a very incidental matter, and never expecting to hear of it again. But, for some strange reason, the article attracted immediate and incredible attention all over Europe. It was republished from London to Moscow, from Paris to Vienna, from Berlin to Rome. It came to the attention of governments, and a messenger came from Paris to talk about it. I find myself in the astounding and terrifying position of being treated as an authority on Wilson – all over Europe. … I have only held fast, for years, to a certain ideal of him. I have trusted that it was he who would redeem democracy and organize freedom.”On January 22, 1917, Ferguson sent Herron’s article and cover-letter to Wilson.The same day, also on January 22, 1917, Wilson spoke before the U.S. Senate and said “No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property. … Any peace which does not recognize and accept this principle will inevitably be upset. It will not rest upon the affections or the convictions of man-kind. The ferment of spirit of whole populations will fight subtly and constantly against it, and all the world will sympathize. The world can be at peace only if its life is stable, and there can be no stability where the will is in rebellion, where there is not tranquillity of spirit and a sense of justice, of freedom, and of right.”Herron certainly got Wilson right, as Wilson learned a few days later when he received Ferguson’s transmittal of Herron’s article. It was as if Herron had written Wilson’s January 22, 1917 speech to the Senate, so closely did Herron catch Wilson’s vision.Then, in September 1917, New York publisher Mitchell Kennerley published this Herron article and subsequent Herron articles in a book titled “Woodrow Wilson and the World’s Peace.” Kennerley sent an advance copy to Wilson.On October 1, 1917, President Wilson, from the White House, wrote back to Kennerley (The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, volume 44, page 287; Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, volume 6, pages 288-289):“My dear Mr. Kennerley: May I not thank you for your courtesy in sending me the little volume, ‘Woodrow Wilson and the World’s Peace,’ by George D. Herron? I have read it with the deepest appreciation of Mr. Herron’s singular insight into all the elements of a complicated situation and into my own motives and purposes. Cordially and sincerely yours, Woodrow Wilson”Thus here we see President Wilson confirm that Herron has “singular insight … into my own motives and purposes.”Franklin Roosevelt certainly would have read Wilson’s January 22, 1917 speech to the U.S. Senate, and Herron’s September 1917 book “Woodrow Wilson and the World’s Peace,” which included Herron’s December 1916 article in The New Age.On January 11, 1918, a few months after publication in the U.S. of Herron’s “Woodrow Wilson and the World’s Peace,” a review of Herron’s book appeared in the New York weekly The Public: a Journal of Democracy (on google books). Episcopal Rev. Bernard Iddings Bell, then Dean of the St. Paul’s Cathedral Church of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and Naval Chaplain at the Great Lakes Naval Base, said:“the book as a whole ought to be in the possession of every thinking student of world politics” and then wrote of Herron himself:“It is almost unbelievable that the author has never met Mr. Wilson. It is almost certain that he has interpreted the man as he truly is and has been. Most of us have misjudged nearly everyone this past year. Our fluent writings of January, 1916, would look quite silly this January [1918]. Not so with Mr. Herron. He understood all the while and what he has written still stands. … Mr. Herron explains Mr. Wilson very simply. … [Wilson] is a democrat by conviction. Democracy to him is Christianity expressing itself in life. He therefore has the courage and the wisdom to stand as a prophet, holding out to the world the folly of war fought for anything else than democracy and international peace …. To this end he patiently waited until our self-seeking nation was so exasperated as to send us into a war with Germany which could be spiritualized.”I think it reasonably certain that Franklin Roosevelt not only read Herron’s articles in “Woodrow Wilson and the World’s Peace,” but saw how this vision - which Herron attributed to Wilson - excited and inspired the intellectuals of Europe and of America.On July 9, 1918, Roosevelt sailed to France from Washington aboard the new destroyer U.S.S. Dyer, traveling with a troop convoy, to tour battlefields and meet leaders. Roosevelt left wife Eleanor behind, and took a friend, with whom he “partied hard” while in Britain.Arriving in Britain in July 1918, he met British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, spent 40 minutes alone in audience with King George V, and on July 29, 1918, spoke briefly at a dinner of the War Cabinet, including Winston Churchill, at Gray’s Inn - their first and only meeting until they would meet in August 1941 where now-President Roosevelt would insist that now-Prime Minister Churchill adopt the Atlantic Charter - as we examine below. Here is Churchill in 1918, and Roosevelt at Verdun battlefield in August 1918, looking as they did when they first met (Roosevelt is not wearing a military uniform, just rugged field-clothes and a French helmet):In this August 1941 meeting, Churchill would reveal that he had no recollection of having met Roosevelt once before, late July 1918 - which would rather rankle Roosevelt.Moving to Paris in August 1918, Roosevelt met French President Poincare and French Premier Clemenceau, and Italian Prime Minister Orlando. At the battlefields, he met French Field Marshal Foch, British Field Marshal Haig, and American General Pershing.Roosevelt would certainly have learned of European intellectual opinions of Wilson during this visit in July and August 1918.Roosevelt left Europe on September 8, 1918, aboard the requisitioned German ocean liner Vaterland, now named the U.S.S. Leviathan, serving as a troop-transport, arriving in New York on September 19, 1918. He was very sick on the voyage - some reports say from influenza, others from his hard-partying in Britain with his dissolute drinking-pal. Alerted by telegraph, Eleanor met the ship in New York with an ambulance, took her sick husband home, and then, unpacking his luggage, discovered in the suitcase a ribbon-wrapped trove of scented letters from Franklin’s mistress, Lucy Mercer, Eleanor’s own social secretary since 1914. This discovery forever changed Eleanor’s attitude towards Franklin, from love to the deepest hurt.After the Armistice of November 11, 1918, Wilson on December 4, 1918, sailed for France aboard the former German ocean liner George Washington - named by the Germans for George Washington - now requisitioned and called the U.S.S. George Washington, to be American representative at the peace talks. He arrived on December 13, 1918.Roosevelt was not in Wilson’s staff delegation - Wilson’s close advisor Edward House had assembled a large group of experts, but among political appointees the delegation included only Secretary of State Lansing, plus close advisors House and Henry White and General Tasker Bliss.So Roosevelt undertook to come to Europe on his own, sailing also on the U.S.S. George Washington, leaving Hoboken on January 2, 1919, arriving in Brest, France, on January 10. Wife Eleanor came along - no longer would she trust her husband abroad. Our amazing internet provides excerpts from the journal of a Navy sailor aboard, Dewitt T. McGill, stating “January 2, 1919 - left Hoboken landed in Brest France Jan 10,2019. $2,000,000 in gold for American soldiers, 2000 sacks of mail. Carried a few civilians and passengers - Franklin D Roosevelt, Asst. Sec of Navy.” Here is the George Washington in January 1919:Also aboard the George Washington with Roosevelt was the Chinese Delegation to the peace conference – the same delegation that later would refuse to sign the Versailles treaty, because the treaty honored secret deals with Japan to give German possessions in China to Japan, rather than return them to Chinese control – and also the Mexican Delegation. When the ship arrived at Brest on January 10, Roosevelt hosted a luncheon for the Chinese and Mexican Delegations.Roosevelt’s ostensible mission was to coordinate the wind-down of U.S. naval assets in Europe, including 54 shore bases and 25 port offices.The peace conference convened eight days after Roosevelt arrived, on January 18, 1919.Roosevelt was not part of it. His job was to demobilize the Navy assets. However, with the demobilization work already well-started in France, he moved to London. After two weeks in London, he sailed via U.S. destroyer (skippered by William F. Halsey, later the famous Admiral) back to the continent to visit the American-occupied Rhineland, and to visit some of the battlefields and devastated towns of France.University of Ghent, Belgium, Master of Arts candidate Jens Vermeulen, in his 2015 thesis “Were Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt the True Architects of the United Nations?” (online at Universiteit Gent) states at page 24 that “One day, FDR was invited to join the president [Wilson] for a discussion of the League of Nations and its future. After the initial exchange of ideas, many other informal conversations followed.”However, no date or cite is given, and I have not found evidence of meetings in Paris between Roosevelt and Wilson in my own researches. James F. Simon’s book “The Presidents and the Supreme Court” reports that “Despite having spent six weeks in Europe, much of it in Paris, [Franklin and Eleanor] knew no more about the details of the peace negotiations than the ordinary newspaper reader.”However, Roosevelt did rather cleverly make it appear that he was part of Wilson’s peace-team, by getting himself aboard the George Washington when Wilson made a brief return visit to the U.S., departing Brest, France, on February 15, 1919. The day before, on February 14, Wilson had submitted to the Conference the draft Covenant for the League, and was returning to the U.S. (this time, Boston) for a brief visit to speak in favor of the League and to lobby the Senate. Roosevelt made sure he was on the U.S.S. George Washington with Wilson for this voyage. Also aboard were 2,294 returning soldiers, and a Presidential Honor Guard of 68 marines.You can watch silent film clips of these moments on February 15 on the http://www.criticalpast.com/video website – of Wilson alighting from the train at Brest and shaking hands with dignitaries (“United States President Woodrow and Mrs. Wilson arrive at Brest”), and of Wilson aboard the launch taking him to the ship, waving to people on shore (“President Wilson waves farewell, from a small boat”). Roosevelt was in these locations at the same moments, if not in the films themselves.Aboard the George Washington, Roosevelt did have one private meeting with Wilson to discuss the League of Nations; perhaps this is the meeting that Master Vermeulen meant in his report in his thesis. But there were no follow-on meetings.Roosevelt and Eleanor also attended an onboard luncheon with President Wilson at which the President spoke to the assembled voyagers on the importance of America joining the League. Eleanor Roosevelt recorded in her diary one of Wilson’s striking statements, that“The United States must go in or it will break the heart of the world, for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.”Wilson and Roosevelt docked at Boston on February 24, a day that the city government had declared a holiday. Roosevelt being an Administration appointee, he had to be included in the Wilson party on disembarking and at all subsequent public events.Wilson’s Boston arrival was a major public event. The New York Times of February 25 reports:“[T]he coast guard cutter Ossipee … containing Governor [Calvin] Coolidge of Massachusetts [the future President] … and other dignitaries, poked her nose alongside the George Washington. … [T]he President and Mrs. Wilson, Ambassador Francis, Assistant Secretary of the Navy F. D. Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt … and other members of the party went aboard the Ossipee. …“The President, quickly followed by Mrs. Wilson and the other members of the party, stepped from the boat to the pier and walked over a green carpet to an elevator, which took them to the upper story of the pier, where a fleet of automobiles waited. …“The line of march from the pier to the Hotel Copley Plaza, where the President was scheduled to take luncheon before going to Mechanics’ Hall to make his only speech of the day, was up Summer, Winter, and Park Streets to Beacon, down Beacon to Charles, to Boylston, to Arlington, to Commonwealth and along Dartmouth. … Along the line of march there was a dense crowd. … Every window that afforded any kind of view was filled. …“Boston crowds are said to be noted for their lack of warmth in greeting a distinguished personage. If that is their characteristic, they ran true to form today, for, while practically everyone along the line of march sent up at least one cheer, it was not a continuous salvo of applause. As soon as the President’s carriage had passed the enthusiasm died suddenly. The President, nevertheless, seemed to enjoy the reception hugely. Again and again he stood up in his automobile and waved his hat up and down. …“After luncheon [at the hotel] the President drove through the cheering crowds to Mechanics’ Hall, where he delivered his address. Leaving the hall shortly before 4 o’clock he hurried to South Station …. [H]is train pulled out at 4:30 o’clock. …”The Boston crowds may have been more engaged had they realized they were witnessing on February 24, 1919 not one President, but three, pass before them in the motorcade: Wilson, who would serve two more years, until March 4, 1921; Coolidge, who would serve 5 years 7 months, from August 3, 1923, to March 4, 1929; and Roosevelt, who would serve 12 years 1 month, from March 4, 1933 to April 12, 1945. Passing before them were three who would guide their futures for a total of 19 ¾ years of Presidential service out of the next 26 years – 76% of that period.And I suggest that the speech President Wilson gave that afternoon at the Mechanics’ Hall, heard in person by future Presidents Coolidge and Roosevelt, is thus worth our engagement as well, since it set a marker and a definition of American ideals that affected 19 ¾ years of Presidential leadership in personal hearing, especially F. Roosevelt in his understanding of why Americans fought in World War II, and their successors from Truman all the way through to today.You can read the text in full in the February 25, 1919, New York Times. Wilson wrote this speech during the nine-day voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, February 15 to 24, 1919, in a German-designed, German-built ship, named by the Germans themselves for our first President, George Washington.As you read Wilson’s February 24 statements, keep in mind that just ten weeks later, Wilson would sit unobjecting as Clemenceau on May 7 presented the Versailles Treaty, including the League of Nations covenant, to the Germans as a “heavy reckoning of accounts.” There was not one syllable of Wilson’s February 24, 1919, sentiments that you are about to read reflected in Clemenceau’s May 7, 1919, statement that Wilson implicitly on May 7 affirmed as his own. There is none of this idealism in Clemenceau – only vengeance and punishment. At the moment when it really counted, Wilson stood with Clemenceau – not with what you are about to read.Keep in mind the ambitions of the Italians and the Japanese, the one frustrated, the other fed, and how both ambitions led to violent war-making conquests. Keep in mind the resentments of the Germans and the Chinese, both of them Republics, and both left feeling betrayed in their reliance on Wilson’s words.And keep in mind that the Russians, since November 1917 under the Soviet communists, had no part in any of this. I have authored a paper on SSRN (the “Professor President” paper) focusing on Wilson’s mishandling of the pro-democracy Russian “Provisional Government” that overthrew the Czar, and that adopted all of Wilson’s principles as its own - and of how Wilson spurned them, because he decided to support Britain and France’s demands that the Russians, even under the new democratic provisional government, keep-up offensive attacks on the Germans in the east - the very thing that had provoked such dissatisfaction as to overthrow the Czar.The lesson here is not that idealism is bad; to the contrary, it is great; but idealism incompetently implemented, misled by self-deceptions regarding what the current nature of different peoples really is, thwarts achievement of idealism’s goals.An architect may imagine a beautiful and strong building of vast halls and domes that will, if it stands, protect all the people; but if the available materials to construct it, the beams and stones and bricks, are not each of them strong and sound enough to carry the loads, that building will fall.It will not do simply to assert, by wishful thinking, that all the materials are strong and sound enough, merely because those materials are all that are available to build with. The materials themselves have to be what is needed.Roosevelt would understand this, and act accordingly, in implementing in 1941 the vision that Wilson saw but could not build in 1919.The fundamental flaw in Wilson’s February 24, 1919 speech in Boston is that the European people who cheered Wilson were not actually, in their hearts, the kind of people whom Wilson said they were.Wilson, with Roosevelt sitting near him, hearing it all, began:“I tried at every step of the work which fell to me [meaning: in Europe at the Peace Conference, which was still going on and to which he would soon return] to recall what I was sure would be your counsel with regard to the great matters which were under consideration. …“[T]he cries that came from the great crowds on the other side [meaning: other side of the Atlantic, meaning Europe] … [were] a call of greeting to you rather than to me. ... There was no mistaking the tone in the voices of those great crowds. … [I]t was the calling of comrade to comrade, the cries that come from men who say, ‘We have waited for this day, when the friends of liberty should come across the sea and shake hands with us, to see that a new world was constructed upon a new basis and foundation of justice and right.’ I can’t tell you the inspiration that came from the sentiments that came out of those simple voices of the crowd.“And the proudest thing I have to report to you is that this great country of ours is trusted throughout the world. …“I have received very happy impressions from this [Peace] conference: the impression that, while there are many differences of judgment, while there are some divergences of object, there is, nevertheless, a common spirit and a common realization of setting up new standards of right in the world.“Because the men who are in conference in Paris realize as keenly as any American can realize that they are not masters of their people; that they are servants of their people, and that the spirit of their people has awakened to a new purpose and a new conception of their power to realize that purpose, and that no man dare go home from that conference and report anything less noble than what was expected of it. …”It is important to note at this point that Germany itself was excluded from the Peace Conference, primarily by the will of France and Britain. As I have examined in a paper on SSRN, focusing on George Herron’s role as an intermediary with the Germans in 1918, Germany had in fact transformed its government, while Britain, France, and Italy were exactly the same as they had been before the war.Where Wilson saw change - in Britain, France, and Italy - there had been no change; and where Wilson saw no change - in Germany - there had in fact been change.When Wilson speaks of the “impressions” he got at the conference, he had no access and no exposure to the German people and their leaders.It was this exclusion of the Germans that facilitated the prejudice of the French and British and Italians that there had been no changes in Germany or the German people commensurate with the changes Wilson saw in the other peoples represented at the conference – that facilitated the prejudice that what they were dealing with was still the German Empire and the military autocracy.And it was necessary that Germany be pictured as still being unreformed, because only if Germany was unreformed could the French and British and Italians extract from and impose on Germany by force the economic and political constraints they wanted to take as their reward for winning the war.And this attitude was not a construct imposed by leaders upon their peoples; it was the result of what the British, French, and Italian peoples actually wanted. As Wilson correctly stated, the leaders “realize that they are not masters of their people; that they are servants of their people.”Where Wilson went wrong was in asserting that “the spirit of their people has awakened to a new purpose.” No – the evidence, the history of the conference in April to June 1919, and the history of the world in the 1920s and 1930s, shows that “the spirit of their people” was still fixed upon the same old purpose.Wilson continues:“The settlements of this war affect, and affect directly, every great, and sometimes I think every small, nation in the world, and no one decision can prudently be made which is not properly linked in with the great series of other decisions which must accompany it ….“What we are doing is to hear the whole case; hear it from the mouths of the men most interested; hear it from those who are officially commissioned to state it; hear the rival claims; hear the claims that affect the new nationalities, that affect new areas of the world, that affect new commercial and economic connections that have been established by the great world war through which we have gone.”In this we see every master-planner’s, every professor’s, greatest and most self-flattering dream: to be a person of power at the central table making the plans for the whole human race.When Wilson speaks of himself and the other leaders – by which he means Clemenceau and Lloyd George in substance – “hear[ing] the whole case” from “the men most interested … who are officially commissioned to state it,” he is speaking with the mind and attitude of a judge.Wilson is thinking as one judge on a three-man court that will decide the shape of the world, of the whole human race.Moreover, since America was the only nation not making any claims, the American judge on the court – Wilson himself – is the only truly impartial judge of the three.Wilson’s attitude is that all the peoples of the world are submitting their case to him, and he will decide. This attitude is, in fact, quite arrogant, and very much in error. Yet this is the attitude that marks international conference after international conference, right up to today, whether on “global warming,” “law of the sea,” or on subject after subject. We are seeing in this speech the seed of this attitude. Wilson continues:“And, in the midst of it all, every interest seeks out, first of all, when it reaches Paris, the representatives of the United States. Why? Because – and I think I am stating the most wonderful fact in history – because there is no nation in Europe that suspects the motives of the United States.”When we consider that not only was one President saying these words, but that two future Presidents, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt, were in the audience hearing these words, and that collectively these three Presidents would lead America for 76% of the next 26 years, the statement that “there is no nation in Europe that suspects the motives of the United States” takes on great significance.Wilson was correct in this assertion: no nation did in fact suspect the motives of the United States. And they were correct in this.The issue was not America’s motives, but Wilson’s incompetence in pursuing those motives.Moreover, Wilson himself did have, unrecognized within him, a self-interested motive: to set himself up as judge of all the world’s problems.In the proposal for the League of Nations, he was trying to seduce America as a whole with the temptation of America assuming the power to decide the issues of the world.Thus, ironically, it was America’s refusal to join the League of Nations – America’s rejection of the offer of such world power – that gave the clearest proof that America was in fact disinterested in getting for itself, out of World War I, any increase in power over other peoples of the world.In a motivational political speech such as this, simplifications such as “every interest … first” seeks out the American delegation are to be expected; but we readers ought note that Wilson was factually incorrect.First, the British, French, Italian, Belgian, and Japanese “interests” did not “first seek out” the United States. They first sought each other out, to ensure that the “secret treaties” and the territorial conquest-and-control promises in those treaties were carried out, and to ensure that they got what they wanted out of the Germans.Second, Wilson himself refused to allow any German “interests” to “seek out” the United States, because the Germans – with Wilson’s consent – were excluded from the conference. Wilson continues:“I would not have you to understand that the great men who represent the other nations there in the conference are disesteemed by those who know them. Quite the contrary. But you understand that the nations of Europe have again and again clashed with one another in competitive interest. It is impossible for men to forget those sharp issues that were drawn between them in times past. It is impossible for men to believe that all ambitions have all of a sudden been forgone.”Well, it may have been impossible for anyone else “to forget those sharp issues that were drawn between them in times past … to believe that all ambitions have all of a sudden been forgone” – but it was quite easy for Wilson to both forget the “sharp issues … between them in times past” and to believe “that all ambitions have all of a sudden been forgone.”The only people to whom Wilson did not extend both forgetfulness and belief were the Germans – because he excluded them a fortiori from the chance to show that they had.Wilson’s speech of February 24, 1919, continues - and now impliedly addresses the effect of George Herron’s writings in December 1916 and in 1917:“I have been searching for the fundamental fact that converted Europe to believe in us. Before this war, Europe did not believe in us as she does now. She did not believe in us throughout the first three years of the war. She seems really to have believed that we were holding off because we thought we could make more by staying out than by going in. And, all of a sudden, in a short eighteen months, the whole verdict is reversed. There can be but one explanation for it. They saw what we did – that, without making a single claim, we put all our men and all our means at the disposal of those who were fighting for their homes, in the first instance, but for a cause, the cause of human rights and justice, and that we went in, not to support their national claims, but to support the great cause which they held in common. And when they saw that America not only held ideals, but acted ideals, they were converted to America and became firm partisans of those ideals.”President Wilson deserves great credit here for his intellectual acumen, in (1) recognizing that Europe’s understanding of America’s character had changed, (2) recognizing that this posed a very important question, namely, Why had Europe’s attitude changed, and (3) recognizing the correct answer as to why Europe’s attitude had changed.The world is almost never blessed with the good fortune of having a person in high political office in a “Great Power” nation a person with this kind of analytical mind – a mind that has the instinct to know what questions are raised by the actions of peoples, and the intellect to discern the correct answers. Certainly Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando did not have this kind of mind.The world is extremely fortunate that Franklin Roosevelt was in the audience on February 24, 1919, in Boston, at the head table, when Wilson spoke these words; for this prepared Roosevelt for the role he would perform in World War II, when he was in Wilson’s role in World War I, defining the goals of the war and seeing that America played its proper role.As regards (1), Wilson was quite correct in saying that “Europe … believed that we were holding off because we thought we could make more by staying out than by going in.” After all, that is exactly what Italy and Japan did: they stayed out until Britain and France offered them big enough bribes of territory in the “secret treaties” to induce them to come in. What I have seen in my readings is that Britain felt that the Americans had committed a moral wrong in refusing to come in; after all, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa had all come in (they didn’t have much choice, given their subservient position as Dominions, but they came in enthusiastically so force wasn’t the reason). The Americans, too, had the same Anglo origin, and Britain felt that America owed them.France also felt that the Americans owed them, not only for cultural reasons as a fellow-republic, but because of their role in the Revolution. When America did not come in, Britain, France, and Italy attributed to America the kind of motives that typically actuated themselves in joining into past wars: material gain.As regards (2), Wilson was also correct: Europe’s attitude about American motives had in fact changed, and this presented an important question, Why? And as regards (3) Wilson was also correct: the reason for the change was because of America’s conduct not only America’s words.Wilson’s defects, however, are also revealed in this paragraph. I italicize the errors:“[The Europeans saw that] we put all our men and all our means at the disposal of those who were fighting for … the cause of human rights and justice, and that we went in, not to support their national claims, but to support the great cause which they held in common. And when they saw that America not only held ideals, but acted ideals, they were converted … and became firm partisans of those ideals.”The subsequent events of the Peace Conference, once Wilson returned to it, prove that every italicized word was completely wrong. There was no “conversion” moment in 1917 or 1918 among the people of Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, or Japan.The representatives of every people spoke emotionally of “rights and justice,” but in each case what this meant to them was “our state gets to rule this city or this region, and exclude from this city or this region the power of any other state.”There is not the slightest evidence of a “conversion” among the people of Japan or of Italy; they came into the war for territorial expansion, and expansion they still insisted upon.France and Britain were even then dividing-up the German colonies in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and the Ottoman Empire lands in the Middle East, between themselves, in the form of “Mandates” from the League of Nations, by which France and Britain were supposedly to develop those lands in the direction of ultimate independence. But they were careful to exclude from any such moral burden the colonies they held before the war. The people of Britain and France, and of Belgium and Netherlands which also held pre-war colonies, were not “converted” into feeling that such plans for development and eventual independence ought to apply to the peoples who resided in own colonial holdings.Indeed, even as President Wilson was sailing across the ocean to Boston and giving this speech, Soviet Russian military conscription had produced a Soviet army of some 2 million troops, some of which went west to attack Poland. The first serious fighting between Polish and Soviet armies began in Belarus on February 14, the very day that Wilson delivered the draft plan for the League to the peace conference. On February 27, 1919, three days after Wilson gave this speech, the Soviets declared that the territory of eastern Lithuania and Belarus were a new “soviet socialist republic,” known by the shorthand “Litbel,” which lasted seven months until Polish armies conquered that land.President Wilson went on to praise America’s fighting men in the field, and then returned to the confidence that America now inspired in the world:“And now do you realize that this confidence we have inspired throughout the world imposes a burden upon us, if you choose to call it a burden. …“The Europe that I left the other day was full of something that it had never felt fill its heart so full before. It was full of hope. … [T]he peoples of Europe ...believe that we are at the eve of a new age in the world, when nations will understand one another, when nations will support one another in every just cause, when nations will unite every moral and every physical strength to see that the right shall prevail.”Ah, but when there is substantial and deep disagreement between numerous and powerful peoples on what is “right,” there is no foundation for Wilson’s hope.Just four months and four days after Wilson spoke, he signed a treaty that left tens of millions of Germans, Italians, and Chinese feeling very deeply that “right” had been denied – and denied by Wilson himself; while tens of millions of Japanese came away feeling that conquest by war would succeed in the future as it just had in the immediate past; and while hundreds of millions of still-colonized peoples felt that no “right” had been accorded to them in any way.President Wilson then urged that America, to pursue its ideals and protect the world, must join the League of Nations.Yet in making this case, Wilson unconsciously exposed the central contradiction of his whole approach to reconstruction of the world.If the peoples of Europe truly had been suddenly “converted” to a uniform conception of justice and right, if they truly now shared a common vision of peace, of what need was there for a League of Nations?The story of the failure of Wilson to carry his vision into effect is alluded to above, and need not occupy us now, except to note that Franklin Roosevelt saw it all. Roosevelt was the Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate in the election of 1920, but the Democratic ticket lost to Republican Harding and his Vice Presidential candidate Calvin Coolidge.Roosevelt then contracted polio and lost the use of his legs; which is what it took, I suppose, to make the very immature, indeed juvenile “party boy” Roosevelt of 1918 and 1919 into a thoughtful and mature man.Elected in 1932 and then reelected in 1936, now-President Franklin Roosevelt had no opportunity to put into application any of the Wilson vision for international relations, and for the purpose of war as for protection only and not for conquest - until the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939.The Fall of France in June 1940, and subsequent set-backs for Britain, essentially forced Britain into Roosevelt’s American arms.Woodrow Wilson’s effort failed because America’s allies didn’t want his vision of the world to go into effect; and against this mass of recalcitrant allies America could not prevail. America could not attack its own allies; America could not even contradict them – not if America hoped that its troops would march to cheers in parades in Paris and London, not if it hoped to see the American President applauded in Paris and London.But Franklin Roosevelt in summer 1941 faced a completely different situation. Our moment of examination – the moment of Roosevelt’s key action – came before America was in the war.The constellation of forces was clear. Italy and Japan, instead of being allies, were enemies. Russia, now the Soviet Union, having signed a deal with Hitler in August 1939 and having invaded Poland and Finland by virtue of that deal, was plainly as conquest-minded an enemy as Germany and Japan, and in June 1941 had become a “friend” only by virtue of having been attacked by Hitler.France, conquered in June 1940, was entirely off the board as a political force. So too was Belgium. The neutrals of World War I – Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway – were, along with Belgium, France, and Luxembourg, under Hitler’s rule.The remaining World War I neutrals – Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden – were all content to see Britain fall to Germany as France had done. The prospect of a Nazi-ruled Europe was a prospect that the Swiss, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish peoples were all prepared to accept – and if that meant the end of democracy and freedom in the world, then democracy and freedom be damned.And so, in summer 1941, before America got into the war, Franklin Roosevelt decided to define at the outset the principles for which this war would be fought, and forced each allied power to sign-on those principles. This would be known as the Atlantic Charter.America was not yet in World War II, but was openly helping Britain, including, at the moment Churchill agreed on the Charter, repairing and improving the fighting abilities of the British battleship Warspite and the British aircraft carrier Illustrious in American naval shipyards (Illustrious in Norfolk Virginia from May 12, 1941, Warspite in Bremerton Washington from August 11, 1941). Both of these British capital warships had been seriously damaged in combat by the German Air Force in the Mediterranean (Illustrious in late January 1941, Warspite in late May 1941).And of special importance, in terms of Churchill having to accept the Atlantic Charter, was the fact that on May 10, 1941, the Nazi blitz destroyed the Commons Chamber; Great Britain would not appoint anyone to rebuild it until 1944, and the House would not re-open until October, 1950. The UK Parliament website offers this:“The incendiary bombs which fell on the nights of 10 and 11 May 1941 caused the greatest damage to [Westminster] Palace. … The Commons Chamber was entirely destroyed by the fire which spread to the Members' Lobby and caused the ceiling to collapse. By the following morning, all that was left of the Chamber was a smoking shell.” Here is what the Commons Chamber - the location of so many Churchill’s greatest moments in a decades-long career - looked like when Churchill met Roosevelt in Canada in August 1941:When Parliament next met, on May 13, 1941, the Commons and the Lords both met in a bomb-protection-reinforced Church House. They continued meeting in the Church House for a month. At last, in late June, 1941, two months before Churchill met Roosevelt, the Commons began to meet in the Lords Chamber, while the Lords met in the Robing Room.All of the House of Commons debates that we read today on the excellent Hansard website between late June, 1941, and October, 1950 – nine years’ worth of debates – including the debates we quote below on Parliamentary reaction to the Atlantic Charter - took place in the House of Lords chamber.Roosevelt began to apply the Wilson vision with the only ally left standing: Great Britain. Roosevelt took Wilson’s “fourteen Points” and concentrated those points down to eight, and in August 1941 he put them into a document titled “The Atlantic Charter” and he made Winston Churchill, leader of Great Britain, adopt it.By this action Churchill signed-away the conceptual basis not only of the British Empire, but of the concept of Royal rule itself. Roosevelt by this action made it clear that America would not fight for preservation of colonialism and royalism, but rather, in the words of Lincoln concerning slavery, in the “House Divided” speech of June 16, 1858, and in the debates against Douglas on July 10, September 18, and October 13 and 15, 1858, and again, in Ohio, on September 16 and 17, 1859: America would fight only if by fighting America would put both colonialism and royalism “in [the] course of ultimate extinction.”Here are the key provisions of the 1941 Atlantic Charter that concern us. First, the preamble:“The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.”Right here, in this preamble, we see stated that this war, if America gets into it, will be fought in pursuit not of national glory or national power, or even particular national survival, but in pursuit of “hopes for a better future for the world.”This is Woodrow Wilson’s vision; this is what Franklin Roosevelt heard in Wilson’s Mechanic’s Hall speech in Boston on February 24, 1919, the day Wilson returned to America after his first stint at the Paris peace conference.Now for the first three numbered “common principles in the national policies of their respective countries:”First, “Their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;”Second, “They desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned;”Third, “They respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live …”“They respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” – it is this that is the key.The first point merely means that America and Britain will not fight for conquest.The second point applies merely to “territorial changes” from the pre-war situation – a pre-war situation in which Britain, France, Belgium, and Netherlands all held colonies under rule with no definite intention of every giving any of them freedom.But the third point is a declaration that applies even to those colonies held by Britain, France, Belgium and Netherlands as of mid-1939, before Hitler attacked Poland, before Britain declared war on Germany.In this third point, Winston Churchill, as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, states that the government of King George VI will “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”This applies to the people of India, of Burma, of all the African and Asian colonies of Great Britain.Indeed – and this is where we see not merely colonialism, but royalism too, put “in course of ultimate extinction” – it applies even to the people of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as well.For when we note the words in the second point – about changes in governmental form being in “accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned,” we have to ask: when were the people of Great Britain itself ever given such a change to “freely express their wishes?”The remaining points need merely be summarized. The second half of point three calls for liberty of the Hitler-conquered lands. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh points call for fair and equal treatment of all nations, victor and vanquished, after the war is won. The eighth and last point calls for disarmament not of all nations, but of those “nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers,” pending “establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.” (Of course, the way aggressors get around this is to define their “frontiers” so as to encompass any territory they want to conquer, so that by their definition, the aggression is “inside” their frontiers. This is the strategy China uses with Taiwan and Argentina with the Falklands, and Spain with Gibraltar. As to the “wider and permanent system of general security,” we have had this in-place in the form of the American military, aided by allies, since the victory of 1945; it does not await the formation of some bureaucratic body or any increase in powers to the United Nations.)The “Atlantic Charter” of August 14, 1941, was an act of only two nations, America and Great Britain.But it encountered considerable resistance in a Britain of 1941 that was not overmuch reformed from the Britain of 1919.When Churchill returned to London and reported to the House of Commons on the Atlantic Charter, as we can read on the Historic Hansard website for September 9, 1941, comments included these:“Henry Strauss: I am not going to suggest that there are not good things in what the Prime Minister has called the Atlantic Charter. … But it is very desirable that the Government should have before them the criticisms that are being widely expressed in the country and in this House, and that they should consider with the Government of the United States how some of the dangers could be avoided. …“To any student of the English and American languages who examines the Charter carefully it is quite obvious that it is predominantly an American document. …“Most of us would do a great deal for Anglo-American friendship, but one of the things we ought not to do is too readily to express agreement with magniloquent declarations of principles which have not been very carefully examined and which are put forward by a nation which made very profound mistakes in regard to Europe at the end of the last war [in 1919] and shows every sign of making similar mistakes at the present time. …“I ask the House to notice Point 2 of the Eight-Point Declaration [the Atlantic Charter]. The signatories say: “they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.” How good that looks until you begin to examine what it means. What does it mean? …“The third point says that the signatories respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of Government under which they will live, and that they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them. I welcome the mention of the restoration of sovereign rights. … [B]ut the words with which this is introduced – that they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live – are, as has been pointed out by many commentators, in direct conflict with a later declaration in which one of the principal war aims is stated to be the destruction of Nazi tyranny, which happens to be the form of government under which the German people has chosen to live. …“Major Petherick: Like my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich (Mr. H. Strauss), I would like to speak on the question of the so-called Charter of the Atlantic. In a cogent and well-argued speech he took the points one by one ….“We have in the past had many declarations of a similar character. I seem to remember that in the earlier part of the war of 1914–18 14 points were produced by President Wilson. It cannot be claimed that those points have really been productive of satisfactory results. I remember that much was said at the time about the self-determination of small nations, which was looked upon as the pièce de résistance. A hash was made of that, and now it has been brought out again in the Atlantic Charter. …“Sir Percy Harris: … Coming to the Atlantic Charter, the hon. Member for Norwich (Mr. H. Strauss) did not seem to like it, and the hon. and gallant Member for Penryn [Maj. Petherick] did not seem to be in love with it either. I am amazed to find that there is any section of the House which would quibble about this or that phrase in it. I was convinced that it would have the backing of more or less of the whole House and of all supporters of the National Government. Apparently I am wrongly informed. …“I should like to see the Atlantic Charter inscribed on the records of this House. Of course, we can criticise this or that feature of the Charter or this or that phrase. Some people would like to see the Charter go in one direction and other people less in that direction, but the document, signed by the two greatest statesmen of the world, the two greatest men of our generation, our own Prime Minister and the President of our friends in the United States of America, will remain. I am surprised that some hon. Members have gone out of their way to quibble about phrases and have even suggested that they should not have been published. …“Do hon. Members find fault with the third Clause, which relates to the right of people to choose the kind of government under which they shall live? The hon. Member for Penryn referred to the Polish Corridor, and I agree that that presents a difficulty, but this clause of the Charter states that people should have the right to choose the form of government under which they wish to live. This Mother of Parliaments showed great wisdom in the case of both Canada and South Africa. … In Ireland, the trouble was that we made up our minds too late. If we had been prepared to give the same generous treatment 30 or 40 years ago to the Irish people, they might have been alongside us in this war ….“As I have said, I should have liked to have seen the Charter endorsed by the House of Commons. …“Earl Winterton: … I think the critics of the Declaration have been unfair to the right hon. Gentleman [Churchill] and, indirectly, unfair to the President. … It is not for us to praise or blame the great captain of public opinion in his own country, the President. … I deeply regret any statement by newspapers or other statements which seem to suggest to the United States that it is her duty to enter this war now. Nothing could be more calculated to injure the very delicate machinery of Anglo-American friendship. It is very delicate and, at the moment, very strong, machinery.”There are times when Britain, in its attitude to America, seems like a fly-fisherman beside a river who thinks that the fish have a moral obligation to bite his fly. John Bull is extremely put-out when the big American fish, its back covered in red and white stripes, its head blue with white stars, swims lazily past his fly and ignores it. He bred that fish in his fish-pond, but the damn beast jumped out over the barrier to the river many years before, and has been growing bigger and bigger and bigger ever since. By moral right that fish is mine, thinks fisherman Bull: he owes it to me to bite my fly.Prime Minister Churchill agreed to the Charter when America was not in the war, and he desperately needed America to come in.But Churchill never really believed in the Atlantic Charter - and in 1945 Churchill expressly would reject the Atlantic Charter. Three and two-thirds years later, in April 1945, when the war was obviously won, but before the atomic bomb, Churchill expressly disclaimed the very Charter he had agreed to back in mid 1941.We find this in a dispatch from the American diplomat Patrick J. Hurley dated April 14, 1945, printed in the official U.S. State Department series, Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1945, Volume VII, The Far East [&] China, at pages 229-332 (on google books, in snippet view). Hurley had been in Washington where he was briefed by President Roosevelt shortly before Roosevelt died, and he had a dual mission.First, he was appointed the new Ambassador to China, and he was to travel from Washington to China, via London, Tehran, Moscow, etc., to take up his post.Second, because he was traveling, he would be able to visit with British leaders in London, and act as President Roosevelt’s personal representative to discuss issues of importance with these leaders.Mid-way on his journey, after London but before Moscow, Hurley decided that his discussions with Churchill in London merited a prompt report back to the Secretary of State in Washington. Here, in part, is what Hurley reported that Churchill said in London in early April 1945:“Shocked by news death of President. As you know I am on a special mission directed by President Roosevelt to confer with Churchill and Eden in London and Stalin and Molotov in Moscow. …“I had not intended to report on the mission to London and Moscow until after my conversations in Moscow had been concluded. ... However the turn of events has made it essential that I give you this brief summary of the situation to date.“Had full and informal conferences with Churchill and Eden and the General Staff in London. …“Later in the discussions with Churchill and Eden, questions pertaining to the reconquest of colonial and imperial territory with American men and lend-lease supplies and the question pertaining to Hongkong and other problems were interjected by the British. …“When the subject was broached, I told Churchill I was not authorized to settle the matter of the use of American resources for the reconquest of colonial possessions in Southeast Asia. However, I expressed my own opinion that America should use all her resources for the defeat of Japan rather than dissipate them in the reconquest of colonial territory in the rear. Churchill disagreed most emphatically with my expressed stand. I replied that I felt Britain, France and the Netherlands had enough resources of their own to mop up the enemy in their own empires. The President briefed me regarding Hongkong and authorized me to discuss it if the question were introduced. Churchill flatly stated that he would fight for Hongkong to a finish. In fact he used the expression “Hongkong will be eliminated from the British Empire only over my dead body”. He then said that the British Empire would ask for nothing and would give up nothing and I replied by saying that President Roosevelt had given him the British Empire which, in my opinion, was lost up until the time we entered the war. I added we had given freely of the resources and the lives of America and that I felt that his statement that he would accept nothing and give nothing was logically and factually incorrect. I reminded him that he had already accepted much. I then pointed out that if the British decline to observe the principles of the Atlantic Charter and continue to hold Hongkong that Russia would possibly make demands in regard to areas in North China that would further complicate the situation and nullify most of the principles for which the leaders of the United Nations, especially Roosevelt, had stated that we were fighting.“I said that such a position would also be a complete nullification of the principles of the Atlantic Charter which was reaffirmed by Britain and the Soviet in the Iran Declaration. At this point Churchill stated that Britain is not bound by the principles of the Atlantic Charter at all. He then called for a copy of a speech he made in Parliament subsequent to the promulgation of the Atlantic Charter. I then called his attention to the fact that he reaffirmed the principles of the Atlantic Charter subsequent to his speech in Parliament when he signed the Iran Declaration. Notwithstanding all this he persisted that Britain is not bound by the principles of the Atlantic Charter. …”In fact, the Wilson vision, which Roosevelt embodied in the Atlantic Charter, had very deep roots in America – and so too did British opposition to it, even though originally, Britain had shared America’s vision.Britain originally inspired that heritage, as manifested in all of the colonies it established in America up to 1763. But then in 1766 Parliament decided to assert an imperial British Parliamentary power, embodied in a law called the “Declaratory Act” that remained on the British statute-books until 1964.Of the many American colonial-era declarations similar to that of Wilson and then Roosevelt, we take-up one from 1768. On February 11, 1768, the Massachusetts House adopted a statement that it sent to all other colony assemblies, in what was called a “circular letter,” objecting to Parliament’s claims of power. The letter is at pages 189–191 of my study posted on SSRN in September 2017; a key section is this:“[H]is Majesty’s American subjects, who acknowledge themselves bound by the ties of allegiance, have an equitable claim to the full enjoyment of the fundamental rules of the British constitution; that it is an essential, unalterable right in nature, engrafted into the British constitution, as a fundamental law, and ever held sacred and irrevocable by the subjects within the realm, that what a man has honestly acquired is absolutely his own, which he may freely give, but cannot be taken from him without his consent; that the American subjects may, therefore, exclusive of any consideration of charter rights, with a decent firmness, adapted to the character of free men and subjects, assert this natural and constitutional right. It is, moreover, their [the Massachusetts House] humble opinion, which they express with the greatest deference to the wisdom of the Parliament, that the Acts made there [in Parliament], imposing duties on the people of this province, with the sole and express purpose of raising a revenue, are infringements of their natural and constitutional rights; because, as they are not represented in the British Parliament, his Majesty’s commons in Britain, by those Acts, grant their property without their consent.”On April 21, 1768, on receiving a copy of the Massachusetts “circular letter,” the Colony Minister, Lord Hillsborough, wrote his own “circular letter” to the governors of the American colonies, demanding that every elected representative House of Assembly in America should treat the Massachusetts House’s February 11, 1768, circular letter with contempt, and that if any elected Assembly tried to honor it, the governor was to immediately prorogue the assembly. Lord Hillsborough’s letter is in my study at pages 197–198:“I have his Majesty’s commands to transmit to you the enclosed copy of a letter from the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the colony of Massachusetts Bay [February 11, 1768], addressed by order of that House to the Speaker of the Assembly of each colony upon the continent of North America.“As his Majesty considers this measure to be of a most dangerous and factious tendency, calculated to inflame the minds of his good subjects in the colonies, to promote an unwarrantable combination, and to excite and encourage an open opposition to and denial of the authority of Parliament, and to subvert the true principles of the constitution, it is his Majesty’s pleasure that you should, immediately upon the receipt hereof, exert your utmost influence to defeat this flagitious attempt to disturb the public peace, by prevailing upon the Assembly of your province to take no notice of it, which will be treating it with the contempt it deserves. … [I]f notwithstanding these expectations and your most earnest endeavours, there should appear in the Assembly of your Province, a disposition to receive or give an countenance to this seditious paper, it will be your duty to prevent any proceeding upon it, by an immediate prorogation or dissolution.”Thus the British opposition to the Atlantic Charter in September 1941 had its roots in the demands of Lord Hillsborough in April 1768 - 173 years earlier.The Atlantic Charter of August 1941 did not remain confined to just America and Britain for very long. Less than five months later, on January 1, 1942 – some three weeks after Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war – President Roosevelt led a long list of other nations to commit to these principles. Here is the statement of commitment to what President Roosevelt called the “Declaration by United Nations” of January 1, 1942:“The governments signatory hereto, having subscribed to a common program of purposes and principles embodied in the Joint Declaration of the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, dated August 14, 1941, known as the Atlantic Charter ….”The remainder of the short January 1, 1942 document promises united war effort for victory over Germany, Italy and Japan. But what matters to us is the commitment by each nation “to a common program of purposes and principles embodied in … the Atlantic Charter.” Thus each allied nation committed to “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”What we see here is Franklin Roosevelt forcing the nations that America would support to adopt the Wilson vision before America would fight to support them. This was the key opportunity that Wilson never had, but that Roosevelt not only had, but seized.Here are some of the nations that committed to “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” In addition to Great Britain renewing its commitment, the nations newly committing included the British Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa and the British colony of India, each signing in its own right.Also committing were the colony-holding European nations Belgium and Netherlands.All of these were also Royal-form governments: British and Dominions King and Emperor of India George VI, Belgian King Leopold III (in Belgium under the control of Hitler at the time), and Netherlands Queen Wilhelmina (in exile in London at the time).Other Royal-form, but not colony-holding, nations signing-on to this commitment included Norway (King Haakon VII, in exile in London at the time), Luxembourg (Grand Duchess Charlotte, in exile in London at the time) and Greece (King George II, in exile in London at the time).Of the non-Royal-form European states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia all signed (acting through exile governments).Many South American and Central American governments also signed, as did China and the Soviet Union. Other nations signed later-on, but this roster is sufficient for our purposes.Who did not sign? The Royal-form governments under the Danish and Swedish Kings did not sign: Denmark, having been conquered by the Germans, functioned essentially as a neutral, while Sweden was in fact neutral.Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal did not sign. Self-centeredness remained their hallmark.Most damaging to itself, Ireland did not sign. The Irish people and government never recognized that after Pearl Harbor, with America in the war, the war was no longer a fight between their British oppressors and the Germans, but was now a fight between the Germans and Ireland’s staunch American supporters. Ireland’s short-sighted animosity towards Great Britain led the Irish government even to send condolences to Germany on the death of Hitler – along with the governments of Spain and Portugal.France most notably was absent from the list. The last free government having been conquered in June 1940, the Vichy “French State” was collaborating with the Nazis.But what of Charles de Gaulle, self-proclaimed leader of the Free French? Why did de Gaulle never sign? America, not yet in the war, had recognized Vichy as the legitimate government in June-July 1940, and sent an ambassador. But America’s commitment to Vichy was not very strong; it was mostly a matter of practicalities, because de Gaulle waited a year, until May 1941, to try to establish a presence for his “Free French” in America.In late September-early October 1941, De Gaulle obtained a representative office in Washington, but not legal recognition of him as a government. De Gaulle could on his own have declared his support for the Atlantic Charter, which had been promulgated by America and Britain in August 1941, at any time after establishment of his office in Washington two months later - but he never did.De Gaulle could have declared his support for the Atlantic Charter on or soon after January 1, 1942, when Roosevelt issued his call for other governments to join Britain and America in adopting the Atlantic Charter. But de Gaulle never did.French General Charles de Gaulle had gone to London and on June 18, 1940, proclaimed in advance that the surrender and abdication of power by the prior government would be illegitimate.De Gaulle in June 1940 urged that France fight-on from its colonies, and offered to coordinate the effort, sending telegrams to French colonial administrators in Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, the “Levant” (middle east), Tunisia, Djibouti, and Indochina, but initially none accepted.Since de Gaulle had no legitimacy at all in “metropolitan” France - the homeland - de Gaulle based his entire appeal on the French Empire - which meant, asserting French right to rule over the colonies: rule in his name, however, not Vichy.In October 1940, de Gaulle chose a name for his organization - a name that was emphatically imperialist. The name he chose for his central organizational entity in October 1940 was the Conseil de défense de l’Empire - the Empire Defense Council.We can find many statements by de Gaulle after that in which he and his fellow Free French leaders repeatedly claimed the power of Empire over colonies. However, the clearest and most generally-adopted French statement came in early 1944.During a January-February 1944 La Conférence de Brazzaville of Free French leaders, de Gaulle made the clearest of many statements he made on the subject of French colonialism:“The goals of the task of civilization accomplished by France in her colonies rule out any idea of autonomy, and possibility of evolution outside the French bloc of empire; the eventual creation, even in the distant future, of self-government for the colonies is to be set aside ….”As chair of the conference, de Gaulle said: “Self-government must be rejected - even in the more distant future.”Needless to say, this imperialist priority of de Gaulle would run into opposition from the colonized peoples themselves - a process that accelerated after America entered the war, beginning in 1942, whenever Americans arrived in French or British colonies. The domestic peoples could tell from the way the Americans they met behaved, that the Americans were anti-colonial in attitude and habits.Thus, ironically, to discredit America, not only Vichy accused the Americans of being secret imperialists, plotting to take French colonies - consistent with Vichy’s pro-German, anti-American political goals - but once America was in the war, beginning in 1942, de Gaulle also did, which bewildered and infuriated the Americans, who only came through to fight the Germans, Italians, and Japanese in the war.De Gaulle never realized the depth of Roosevelt’s sincere steeping in Woodrow Wilson’s anti-colonial ideals in 1917–1919, and felt the Americans to be insincere. In the Caribbean, British colonial governors expressed the same hostile and suspicious attitudes towards the Americans, regarding the lend-lease bases.Britain not only supported de Gaulle’s legal position regarding the illegitimacy of the Vichy government, Britain also was pleased to find a fellow-imperialist who mirrored their own intentions regarding their own colonies. The British provided a home and funding for de Gaulle, but as of 1940 into 1944 resisted recognizing de Gaulle’s movement as a legitimate government itself. He was, after all, basically one isolated man.And de Gaulle was just as suspicious and accusatory towards the British as he was towards the Americans, of having designs to appropriate French colonies - which, given the centuries of history between France and Britain, had a lot more justification than the same attitude as directed towards the Americans.After World War II ended September 1945, America thus found itself yet again combating the same British and French colonialism and imperialism that had wrecked Wilson’s efforts in 1919 - and on top of that, also had communist style “imperialism” to contend with: primarily the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.Roosevelt did not live to deal with those times; he died in April 1945. But the foundation Roosevelt laid - and the inspiration he, unlike Wilson, had awakened and disseminated in the American leadership - made it possible for Truman, and then Eisenhower, and then Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush I to carry-through effectively on both parts of that vision: to erode British and French (and Dutch and Belgian) colonialism, and also to erode into dissolution the ideology of communism.We are now in July 2019. The legitimacy of colonialism is ended; the legitimacy of war-for-conquest is ended; the legitimacy of communism is ended (Russia and China both now are essentially mercantilist oligarchy/dictatorships); and, frankly, the legitimacy of Royalty is ended, though the British cannot bring themselves to admit it so long as the most admirable Elizabeth II lives.All of this is the fruit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt being “obsessed,” as the question indicates, with Woodrow Wilson.It is a shift of truly profound human-historical dimensions, that today’s historians have been unable to recognize, because they work within institutions that are too close in time to the events, and thus who cannot examine the events dispassionately without incurring criticism from the still-lingering traces of the old discarded systems.Edit note: I corrected the dates after the destruction of the Commons chamber in May 1940.