Theodore Roosevelt

From The Paderewski memoirs, 1938 by Ignace Jan Paderewski and Mary Lawton

During that tour [1907-8] I was invited to play at the White House, on which occasion I met President Theodore Roosevelt, who made a deep impression upon me. A strong, Brilliant, and exceptionally well-informed man, knowing a great deal about European conditions, nd particularly acquainted with my own country, which was chiefly due to his love of our remarkable writer, Sienkiewicz, who wrote those world-famous novels, By Fire and Sword, Children of the Soil, and Quo Vadis. He told me that he travelled for years with Sienkiewicz's trilogy. Certain opinions about my country expressed by President Roosevelt were extremely encouraging to me, and I still gladly and gratefully remember every word he said on that subject. He was certainly the 100 per cent American he claimed to be, but do not make the mistake of thinking that he was alone in that attribute. Other Presidents and statesmen were just as patriotic as he—though not as violent in their expression of it.

Grover Cleveland, for example, was just as 100 per cent American was Theodore Roosevelt. President Wilson was just as much of an American as those two, but their temperaments were absolutely different. Cleveland was a great lawyer and administrator. Roosevelt was a hero and a fighter, and President Wilson was a student and an apostle. President Wilson's knowledge of history was really exceptionally great and lofty, and he is still very much misunderstood in America in France. But in France they had particular reasons for that, because still very beginning, right after the War, they believed in his omnipotence. They thought his presence in Paris meant complete fulfilment of his plan during those crucial weeks of struggle and the birth of the League of nations. The French people did not know that without the approval of your Congress, his hands were tied—he could do nothing. they felt he could do anything he wanted, and the feelings throughout Europe even now concerning Wilson are very mixed. For instance, nations which have been reconstructed, or resurrected, if you like,e through Wilson's appeals (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and my own country, Poland), still worship him. France, England, and Italy felt that they were deceived, and Germany, of course, is inflamed when speaking of Wilson.   (Etc.)

London : Collins 1939, pp. 363-4.