Mr. Lodge's favorite private charge uttered in a tone of withering
scorn was that the President failed to respond as a man would to
the national insult offered by Germany in sinking the Lusitania
because there was something womanish about him and he would tell,
to prove it, how Wilson went white and almost collapsed over the
news that blood had been shed through the landing of American
marines at Vera Cruz.
The President hardly failed to hear this. Perhaps it reminded him
of that something in him which he was always trying to forget, that
something which diverted his life toward failure at the outset,
which once betrayed him, with a strange mixture of the arrogance
and inferiority, into his famous words "too proud to fight."
At any rate mutual comprehension and hatred between these two men
was instinctive, each having the opposite choice in the beginning
and neither in his heart perhaps ever having forgiven himself
wholly for his choice. Mr. Wilson could never get Mr. Lodge wholly
out of his mind in the last two years of his Presidency, a
disability which prevented him from looking quite calmly and sanely
at public questions.
The story of the President's appeal for a Democratic Congress in
1918 which has never been fully told, illustrates the bearing this
Lodge obsession had upon Mr. Wilson's later fate. When the
Congressional election was approaching ex-Congressman Scott Ferris,
then acting as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, went
to the President and told him that there was danger of losing both
houses of Congress, the lower house not being important, but the
Senate as a factor in foreign relations, Mr.
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