November 20th

I sent this bad news on to House immediately. In his reply he expressed regret but no surprise over the situation that is developing here. Once back in America, he had picked up again his innumerable lines of “grapevine” information. He in New York understood the situation better than I did in Washington.

Perhaps I should mention that in our talk I called Senator Hitchcock’s attention to the fact that Republican criticism, as voiced by the Lodge resolution of last year, and by the letters of Root and Taft to House, while in Paris, did help shape the Covenant and, further, that in carrying out some of these suggestions, the President had run into noisy, loud, and at times very serious opposition. Hitchcock laughed. “I made the same remark to Lodge—not once but at least twice. His only answer was a blank stare. Evidently all that has been wiped off the Republican slate.”

It is amazing, and also not a little humiliating, to hear the wisecracks in circulation here and the nonsense that is talked by some men, Democrats as well as Republicans, many of whom are high in congressional circles, as to what our national policy should be with respect to our international relations. Lodge is reported as saying, “All will be well as long as we do not loosen our present hold on the lunch basket and keep the paws of the bandits with whom we have lately been associated out of it.” And the blatant, preposterous Borah is reported as saying: “League of Nations? A crazy quilt of crazy notions, I call it, hatched out by a man who never sat in a deliberative assembly and shows his want of legislative training every time he opens his mouth.”

Today (November 26th), a week after the vote in the Senate¹ by which the Treaty and the Covenant failed of ratification, Colonel House made to me the following comments on the resulting situation:

“We do not know that the President ever saw the Lodge reservations in the modified form in which he offered them to you on November 2d. We do not know if the President received the numerous letters and petitions, from scores of men who had been his lieutenants and supporters in all the League battles, urging him to accept the Treaty even with important modifications—and so avoid world anarchy. We do not know the date of the President’s letter urging the Democratic Senators to vote against the Treaty in any form but the one in which it was first sent to the Senate—an instruction which they obeyed and so in combination with the Lodge men and the ‘bitter-enders encompassed its defeat.

“We do not know if this instruction was drawn up by the President in September, when the President and many others thought that the Treaty could be ratified in its original form, or whether it was issued later in October or November, when most of its most loyal supporters, men who had stood with the President through thick and thin, recognized that the outcome was doubtful.

“Even more important than answers to these queries is the question that cannot and should not be avoided: who was the President of the United States during these crucial weeks when decisions vital to the security of our country, and to the peace of the world, had to be, and certainly were, made? Who acted in his name in the days and weeks when the President was not in touch with his constitutional advisers? Here is a situation that may occur again under, if possible, even more tragic circumstances. It is to be hoped that congressional action on the matter will not be long delayed.”