President Wilson’s trip home was an indifferent success. Landing in Boston he was greeted amiably by a sourfaced little man named Calvin Coolidge, who was the new Republican governor of Massachusetts, and by a crowd that packed Mechanics’ Hall and spread out along Huntington Avenue. They cheered him till the rafters rang. Henry Cabot Lodge, who was already excoriating the League on the Senate floor, took fresh umbrage at the President’s having addressed a Boston crowd. Wilson was trying to undercut him in his own bailiwick.
The President arrived in Washington in time to preside at a White House dinner of thirtysix covers for the members of the Senate and House committees on foreign affairs. He told stories and answered questions with his most disarming smile.
“I never saw Mr. Wilson appear so human or so attractive as that night,” Congressman J. J. Rogers wrote Henry White, who was keeping up a busy correspondence from Paris with his Republican friends in an effort to cozen them into going along with the League idea.
Lodge himself admitted that the dinner had been pleasant, that the President “was civil and showed no temper,” but claimed that he seemed illinformed about the constitution of the League of Nations, particularly on the subject of mandates. “We went away as wise as we came.”
The President’s few days in Washington were largely spent signing his name. However, he found time to review, amid exuberant crowds, a parade of returned soldiers. Newton Baker’s War Department was bringing the doughboys home almost as fast as it got them transported overseas. Every move towards demobilization received universal acclaim. It was remarked that the American public thought war was like baseball. “We won; let’s go home.”
The immediate results of the President’s dinnerparty were unfortunate. Senator Frank Brandegee of Connecticut and Senator Lodge and a group of kindred spirits, alarmed at the influence they feared the President’s declarations might have with the public, immediately introduced a resolution to the effect that the Senate opposed the League of Nations, as at present constituted, and demanded the immediate negotiation of peace with Germany on terms favorable to the United States.
The Wilson Democrats managed to block their resolution. Brandagee and Lodge gave the document to the press in the form of a “round robin.” They secured the signatures of thirtynine senators, enough to prevent ratification of any treaty under the twothirds rule.
When Wilson appeared at the President’s room in the Senate wing to sign the last bills, he found the Sixtyfifth Congress expiring in turmoil and confusion. A Republican filibuster, largely animated by that willful man, La Follette, prevented the passage of essential appropriation bills. The President would be forced almost immediately to call a special session of the new Sixtysixth Congress which was safely in Republican hands.
It was in a defiant mood that the President arrived in New York to go aboard the George Washington. He met some encouragement there. When he went through the streets, protected, so the newspapers said, by the largest contingent of police ever seen in the city, he was greeted by cheering crowds estimated as nearly as large as the crowds on Armistice Day. Al Smith presided over a monster audience gathered in the Metropolitan Opera House to hear the President. Caruso sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Ex-President Taft, who had been wearing out his health on a speaking tour in behalf of the League of Nations, made the introductory address. The two men appeared on the stage arm in arm as the band played “Over There” and the platform committee tried to whoop up an ovation.
“The first thing I am going to tell the people on the other side of the water,” declared Woodrow Wilson, “is that an overwhelming majority of the American people is in favor of the League of Nations.”
The New York Times reporter discerned no overwhelming applause. Certain expressions aroused “short nervous moments of clapping.” He described the audience as intent, attentive to every word.
A large part of the speech was an attack on the President’s critics. “The men who utter the criticisms have never felt the great pulse of the heart of the world.”
Wilson announced for the hundredth time his dedication to the cause the soldiers had given their lives for. He was determined there would be no peace without the covenant: “When that treaty comes back, gentlemen on this side will find the covenant not only in it, but so many threads of the treaty tied to the covenant, that you cannot dissect the covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.”
Freed, for a while, from the sermonizings of the American president, the negotiators in Paris turned eagerly to House. Lip service had been paid to the “noble candeur” of Wilson’s aspirations for a league to abolish war. The time had come to get down to practical business. The colonel expressed understanding of everybody’s problems. Orlando called him “my dear friend.” He was Clemenceau’s chum.
When Lloyd George, facing an uprising in Parliament and suffering daily tonguelashings from the Northcliffe press, went home to trim his fences, he left the absentminded and philosophic Balfour in command. Though skeptical of the perfectability of human affairs, Balfour was a thoroughly humane man. House and Balfour became thick as thieves.
They agreed that before bolshevism made any further inroads the German peace terms must be settled. A bad peace today might be better than a good peace three months later. The League of Nations must temporarily be shelved in favor of a preliminary treaty.
The American and British plenipotentiaries had an appointment for a meeting with Clemenceau on this very topic at House’s office at the Crillon at ten the morning of February 19. The Tiger, so House explained, with perhaps a touch of fatuity, in his diary, “had come around to my way of thinking that it was best to make a quick and early peace with Germany.”
House and Balfour were waiting for him when news came that the French Premier had been assassinated as he left his house on his way to the meeting.
Stephen Bonsal, House’s interpreter in French, reported that Balfour exclaimed “Dear, dear” in his dreamy way, as if someone had spilled a cup of tea; “I wonder what that portends.”
They were soon reassured. Clemenceau was seriously wounded but he was far from dead. A demented young man named Cottin, shouting that he was a Frenchman and an anarchist, had jumped on the runningboard of Clemenceau’s car and shot seven bullets at him with a revolver. Only one took effect but it lodged much too near the lung for safety. The Tiger remained unruffled. He insisted that the madman’s sentence should not be too severe and kept making jokes about how it disgusted him to find that, after four years of war, any Frenchman could be such a bad shot.
The doctors ordered quiet. Clemenceau laughed at the doctors. He was a doctor himself. Three days after the attempt on his life, he was sending Mandel to ask House to call on him. House found him in his apartment, out near Passy, sitting up in an armchair, wrapped in an old army blanket with a soiled silk muffler around his neck. A Sister of Mercy in a big butterfly cap, whom Clemenceau kept teasing unmercifully, hovered over him for a nurse.
“The poor old fellow,” wrote House, “has not been able to leave his chair since he was shot”—when he tried to lie down he started to choke. “He speaks of it as ‘the accident.’ He should not be permitted to see visitors but I suppose he is so insistent that they think it is best to humor him. I was surprised to see the very humble apartment where he lives.”