Roosevelt consciously sought to avoid making the sort of more abstract appeal that had been issued by President Woodrow Wilson in his own speech to Congress in April 1917, when the United States entered World War I. Wilson laid out the strategic threat posed by Germany and stressed the idealistic goals behind America's participation in the war. During the 1930s, however, American public opinion turned strongly against such themes, and was wary of, if not actively hostile to, idealistic visions of remaking the world through a "just war". Roosevelt, therefore, chose to make an appeal aimed more at the gut level—in effect, an appeal to patriotism, rather than to idealism. Nonetheless, he took pains to draw a symbolic link with the April 1917 declaration of war: when he went to Congress on December 8, 1941, he was accompanied by Edith Bolling Wilson, President Wilson's widow.