THE APPROACHING STORM

This is the true story of how the three most influential American progressives of the early 20th century - Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jane Addams - split over America's response to World War I.

In the early years of the 20th century, the most famous Americans on the national stage were Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jane Addams: two presidents and a social reformer. Each took a different path to prominence: Roosevelt the Rough Rider and conservationist; Wilson the president of Princeton University and New Jersey governor; Addams the founder of Hull-House and advocate for women's suffrage. Yet all held progressive views on how to guide the United States forward. The three were, if not always friends, then at least allies in the belief that the United States must take better care of its citizens. Which they did: As president, Roosevelt championed his Square Deal, breaking corporate trusts, regulating railroads, and purifying food and drugs. Wilson oversaw the passage of his New Freedom domestic policies that created the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Addams worked to improve the lives of mothers and children, local public health, and lobbied for world peace.

Yet in the increasingly contentious years that led to World War I, the views of these three titans splintered in how to deal with the conflict. Roosevelt, the radical Republican, believed passionately that the United States must play a part in the Great War. Wilson, the Southern-born Democrat, clung staunchly to the concept of American neutrality until he had no other choice but to send American troops to fight in Europe. And Addams, a lifelong pacifist, never wavered from her conviction that the United States must stay out of all conflicts and that war was ultimately a waste of human life and solved nothing.

THE APPROACHING STORM by Neil Lanctot is the true story of three extraordinary leaders and how they agreed, quarreled, and ultimately split apart as they debated the role that the United States should play in the world. By turns a color triptych of three American icons who changed history and an engrossing exploration of the clash between progressivism and the roots of World War I, this is a surprising and important story of how and why the United States emerged onto the world stage for the first time.

This is a new approach to classic history that we haven't read before. Roosevelt, Wilson, and Addams were all forward thinkers and radicals, at various times colleagues and friends. Lanctot gives us vivid portraits that share the personal stories of three complicated people - what they thought, what they felt, and how they lived - against the tense background of World War I.

Neil Lanctot is an award-winning historian and author who teaches at the University of Delaware. He is the author of several books, including Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella, and Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution.