THE WORLD WILSON'S RACISM MADE:

[H]e worked at the Parker House Hotel in Boston, whose guests over the years included Charles Dickens and John Wilkes Booth.

As a cook there, Ho Chi Minh -- the future leader of one of the most violent communist insurgencies the world would ever see -- may well have made some of the hotel's signature dishes, such as the Boston cream pie and the Parker House roll, both of which were invented there. Ho Chi Minh wrote a postcard to a friend in France, mentioning his job there.

It's not clear what he thought about the bitter party politics in America in that era, but he was a huge admirer of American ideology. Some Americans nowadays have this view of the US as a colossal and morally questionable imperial state. They forget that for most of its history, it was the revolutionary underdog. The country's whole narrative was one of resistance to a foreign tyrant -- Great Britain. If any nation was a champion of other colonial underdogs, it was the United States, at least in the popular imagination.

So, the young Ho Chi Minh and other young nationalists around the world admired this and would try to court US public opinion by appealing to that strain of revolutionary anti-colonialism in America.

Back in Paris in 1918-19, Ho Chi Minh hooked up with other Vietnamese nationalists  -- remember, thousands of Vietnamese and other subjects from France's colonies had been brought to Europe for the first time to assist with World War I.

US President Woodrow Wilson had put forth a list of 14 points as a basis for a peace settlement and one of these was the principle of self-determination. It's likely he was directing this at Europe, but colonial peoples everywhere were inspired by this to seek independence from their European colonial masters.

So, Ho Chi Minh and his fellow Vietnamese nationalists petitioned Wilson when he came to France for the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. They wanted help to get their freedom from France, but were ignored.

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