ABSTRACT
William Christian Bullitt was a rarity: a cosmopolitan who remained American to the core. When an American becomes a cosmopolite, his rise in the world often develops together with the—almost always self-conscious—decline of his American mores, standards, beliefs. Bullitt's experience with Woodrow Wilson helped to crystallize his own convictions. He would represent and incarnate a philosophy of American internationalism that was the very opposite of what Wilson bequeathed to America, including Herbert Hoover, whose respect and admiration for Wilson remained constant. In 1932 Bullitt returned to high politics. William Bullitt was a Philadelphian: an eccentric Philadelphian, a self-exiled Philadelphian, a rebel Philadelphian, but a Philadelphian nonetheless. Bullitt lived to see the global application of the philosophy of Wilsonianism, which has marked so much of the foreign policy of the Republic during the last sixty-five years with regrettable and often disastrous consequence.
