I don't think he is a bad man," Clemenceau would sometimes say of Wilson, "but I have not yet made up my mind as to how much of him is good."35 - Arthur Herman

Theodore Roosevelt was less impressed. He wrote that "peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight" — a sideways shot at Wilson's manhood and his naïveté. Roosevelt also reminded Americans that in 1776 it was the Tories, the loyalists to Britain, who had preached "peace without victory," and likewise the Copperheads, or sympathizers with the slave-owning South, who preached the same during the Civil War.

The war was a disease that all the Great Powers of Europe had carried in their political DNA, as it were. Now it was up to America, and Woodrow Wilson, to point the way to the cure.

Petrograd (St. Petersburg's new name since the outbreak of war, when the government decided that "St. Petersburg" sounded Teutonic)