German historians label the First World War the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century. It inflicted 15 million deaths, spawned Adolf Hitler and communism, and led to another, even more cataclysmic world war and the Holocaust 25 years later. President Woodrow Wilson took the United States into the first war to "make the world safe for democracy," the cornerstone of American foreign policy to this day. The assistant secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration was an obscure New York State politician, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Better known in England was the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill.