Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [102]
The two men had been antagonists for years. They had disagreed over the start of the war, when Lodge had been for intervening on the Allied side at once and Wilson had opted for neutrality, and over its end, when Lodge would have marched on to Berlin and Wilson chose to sign an armistice. Now they disagreed over the peace. Wilson put his trust in the League and collective security as a way to end war. Lodge, a pessimist with little faith in the perfectibility of human nature, preferred to trust power. He wanted to hem Germany in with strong states, a renewed Poland, a solid Czechoslovakia and a France beefed up with Alsace and Lorraine and perhaps even the Rhineland. If the United States joined any association at all, it should be one with other democracies, where there was a community of interests, not a league which threatened to draw the country into vague and open-ended commitments. 27
Lodge represented the moderate middle of the Republican party. On one wing stood those, mainly from the Midwest, who recoiled from any contact with wicked Europe, and on the other the internationalists, often from the East Coast, who supported the League enthusiastically. Wilson could have reached out to many in the Republican party but instead he drove them away, with his refusal to take any leading Republicans along to Paris, with his insistence that, in the congressional elections of November 1918, a vote for the Democrats was a vote for peace and a vote for the Republicans something quite different, and now with his actions on his return trip to the United States.
Unfortunately, at the same time he did little to conciliate the doubters in his own party. He refused to talk at all to a Southern senator who he said had been nothing but “an ambulance-chaser” in his law career. Even his little jokes now had a sour edge. His remark when he saw a new grandson for the first time made the rounds: “With his mouth open and his eyes shut, I predict that he will make a Senator when he grows up.”
From Boston, Wilson hurried on to Washington. On February 26 at Colonel House’s urging, he gave a dinner in the White House for the members of the key Senate and House Foreign Relations Committees. The evening did not go well. Lodge, seated next to Mrs. Wilson, had to listen to her happy chatter about the wonderful reception her husband had received in Boston. Some of the guests complained that, after dinner, they were not offered enough cigars or enough to drink. More seriously, they came away thinking that Wilson had hectored them, as one said, “as though they were being reproved for neglect of their lessons by a very frigid teacher in a Sunday School class.” When he saw House again, the president was resentful. “Your dinner,” he told him, “was not a success.”28
As he was to do so often, Wilson found reassurance in telling himself that the people were with him even if their representatives were not. And he was probably right. When a leading American journal asked its readers whether they favored the League, more than two thirds said yes. Unfortunately the public did not vote on treaties but the Senate did—and there a two-thirds majority, which was necessary to ratify a treaty, was not so easily obtained. On March 4, as Wilson was preparing to head back to Europe, Lodge circulated a round-robin rejecting the covenant as it was drawn and asking the negotiators in Paris to postpone any further discussion of the League until the treaty with Germany had been finished. Thirty-nine Republican senators signed, more than a third of the total membership of the Senate. Wilson’s initial reaction was to wonder if he might somehow bypass the Senate altogether. 29
The Congress duly adjourned on March 4, in keeping with its calendar at the