Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [101]
Messages of sympathy poured in, from Lloyd George and King George in London, from Wilson out on the Atlantic, from Sarah Bernhardt—“just now Clemenceau is France”—and from the thousands of French who regarded Clemenceau as the father of their victory. The pope sent his blessing (the old anticlerical radical sent his own in return) and ordinary soldiers left their decorations on Clemenceau’s doorstep. Poincaré, who had initially been as shocked as anyone, was furious. “Singular collective madness, strange legend which hides the reality and will falsify, no doubt, history.” The day after the attempt, Clemenceau was walking in his garden; a week later he was back at work. He was severely shaken, though. Wilson, among others, felt that he never again had the same powers of concentration. 23
Back in London, Lloyd George was having more success confronting his enemies. He jumped off the train on February 10 and went straight into meetings with Bonar Law and his chief adviser on labor questions. “I saw him a little later,” reported the secretary of the cabinet to Hankey, “and he was extraordinarily cheerful and vigorous and happy about your doings in Paris and full of schemes of dealing with the miners and the railway men should they come out during the next week or two.” In the end he managed to head off the threatened strikes, arranging for commissions of inquiry and bringing management and labor together as he had so often done before. In his four weeks in London he also created a new Ministry of Transport and introduced a whole array of parliamentary bills dealing with social issues. 24
Wilson’s trip home was much less successful. The George Washington ran into bad weather and, as it finally reached the coast of New England, nearly came to grief on a sandbar. And trouble was waiting on land. In Washington the last days of the old Congress were marked by partisan bitterness and a filibuster by Republicans who hoped, among other things, to delay important bills until after the recess when the newly elected Congress, with its Republican majority, would meet. Ominously, the Republicans were increasingly taking the opportunity to attack the League. In the country as a whole, support for the League remained strong but leading members of the influential League to Enforce Peace were privately contemplating revisions to build bridges to moderate Republicans.25
Wilson showed little interest in compromise. He landed in Boston on February 24 and immediately gave a rousing and partisan speech. He and the United States, he said, were carrying out a great work in Paris; those who questioned this were selfish and shortsighted. On their seats the audience found copies of the draft covenant for the League. The senators in Washington had not yet seen it. This was tactless, and it was not Wilson’s only political blunder. Boston was the hometown of his great rival, the Republican senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge.
Lodge, of whom it was once said that his mind was like his native soil, “naturally barren, but highly cultivated,” came from the New England aristocracy. He was short, bad-tempered and a tremendous snob. He shared Wilson’s conviction that the United States had a mission to make the world a better place and was even prepared to contemplate some form of league to keep the peace. But he disagreed with Wilson’s methods and scorned his conviction that the League could solve all the world’s problems. And he loathed the man—not just, as is sometimes said, because they disagreed, but also because he thought him ignoble and a coward.