The Alaska daily empire., 1919-11-28
IDEALLY AMERICAN, BUT NOT DRAMAT.
 IC; STRONG AND BRILLIANT, BUT NOT A GRANDSTANDER

If President Wilson has failed to measure up completely his opportunities popular hero 1t is hot due lack of Amercansm, high ideals, sim cerety and courage ability and foresight, but to his lack of dramatization and grandstanding. He has worked for substantial things and depended upon the results speak for themselves instead of seeking the spotlight and telling what "I did" His weak ness is what individual Americans cherish as strength in their friends. No people individuals admire modest and sincere courage and snglemind ed devotion to duty and principle more than Ameri- cans, but somehow, collectively, they canonize the bizaare, the actor, the who parades
 Ray Standard Baker. the famous writer and jour- naist, who at Paris all through the trying times of the peace conference, who has made close . non-partisan study of American politics and ten dencies any man living, in recent article puts 1t this way:
 Whatever may be said by his enemies
 at home--and he has plenty of thcm-the President upon any occasion whatso-
 ever, no matter how difficult, failed to rep
 resent America and the American people
 with distinction He never represented
 what was cheap or crude in American life. 5 but unfailingly what highest and best; l and he not, less successful in capturing 2, the critical audience at the Sorbonne, where
 he made one of his notable speeches. than he
 was with the mass of the workers who
 swarmed around the Crillon Hotel May
 Day shouting, "vive Wilson vive le Presi-
 dent"
 : In spite. however of all the discussion and inquiry that has been going on at Wash ington during the last three months in
 spite of all the Presidents explanations 5 T and speeches, his service at Paris, so 1t to me, has been properly
 understood vast of facts regard
 ing the conference and the treaty have been poured out before the American peo- ple-one cannot see the forest for the trees but there has been clear definite picture of what the President actually did
 at Paris. why he did it and what his n-
 fluence meant in the deliberations
 For this want of popular understand
 ing and appreciation of his service the
 President himself is no doubt largely re- sponsible.
 There is living in the world to-
 day who is such master of the art of pre- senting ideas indeals, arguments, reasons 4 as President Wilson man more capti- N vating But with all this mastery he has .s no gift at all for dramatizng events that ss neople can see and feel them. 1 think he has never characterized personality in pub he (though sometimes delightfully."- in pri-
 fate) that it caught in mems minds; never hit off specific situation in which sH he had acted so that it could not be forgot ten.
 % He. can eXpress-and better any where--what he thinks; but not what he q did. or why how. Examine his speeches
 and you will find them full of 'I think
 frequently 'I did "I went" "I fought
 He has not the art of presenting a situa-
 ton with all it's heroic aspects-as Roose-
 welt had La Toilette of Wisconsin has
 in still higher measure--the dark forces
 ranged one side and the angels of light
 on the other and himself the leader with
 shining sword Mir. Lloyd George
 day much of his to England to
 this gift of dramatization.