Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Tibor Giant: The Role of Calvinism in President Wilsotis Relationship to Hungary during World War 1

lose. Another and hardly less significant reason was that the Englishmen provided machinery for the maintenance of the agreement, and the Magyars did not.

8 This quote does speak volumes but not of Wilson's expertise in the field but of his unconcealed WASP superiority complex; which would reappear in a strikingly similar public statement during the 1912 election campaign.

9 The future President's fourth academic reference to Hungary also fails to show him as an expert. In the fifth and final volume of his A History of the American People (1902) he revealed his views about Hungarian, Polish and Italian immigrants with a then typical arrogance towards New Immigrants, which earned him a lot of trouble in 1912. According to Wilson, after 1890: there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population, the men whose standards of life and work were such as American workmen had never dreamed of hitherto.

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0 8 Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States. (New York, 1908. Reprint New York, 1961): 6. 9 In the opening address of his Connecticut state campaign, on 25 September 1912, Wilson stated: "Why, in that ancient Kingdom of Hungary, for example, contemporary with the great Magna Carta, to which we look back as the source of our constitutional liberties, there was proclaimed upon a notable day the terms of the Great Golden Bull which ran almost in the identical terms of the Magna Carta. But Hungary never could get a foothold for the execution of those principles until she began to send eager multitudes across the ocean to find in America what they had vainly hoped for in Hungary." (

WWPs 25: 256). Thomas Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People. 5 vols. (New York, 1902): 5: 212—13. 38