Jeff: McLemore, a feisty freshman congressman from Texas, butted heads with Woodrow Wilson on Feb. 17, 1916 over the president’s about-face toward the European war. Though surprised by the violent eruption of ancient antagonisms in 1914, most Americans took only a passing interest in the distant conflict. Above all, they wanted no part of the foreign feud, a consensus that produced the presidential pronouncement the United States “must be neutral in fact as well as name.”