Party Readjustment
making and reconstruction, President Wilson repudiated the loyal support which the Republicans had given him and in October, 1918 took the unprecedented step of issuing a public appeal to the nation to elect a Democratic Congress which would be subservient to his will. It is possible though not probable that without that astounding performance he might have secured a Democratic Congress. But the last hope of his doing so was destroyed by the issuance of that appeal—which in spirit was in fact an imperious demand. The nation revolted against such a display of despotic partisanship, refused the Democratic government the vote of confidence which the President had solicited and elected a Congress Republican in both Houses.
This body was kept from meeting as long as possible and then was greatly hampered and delayed in its work by the petulant and arrogant unwillingness of the President to co-operate with it, and by his insistence upon the Senate's ratification of his secretly-negotiated Treaty of Peace and Covenant of the League of Nations without any of the amendments or reservations, which the Senate was constitutionally entitled to make, and which were necessary for the protection of American interests and for making the treaty accord with the Constitution and fixed policies of the United States. The desire of the Republican leaders to ratify the treaty with proper reservations, acceptable to the other signatory powers, was finally thwarted by the President who instructed his subservient followers in the Senate to kill the treaty rather than have it ratified with the reservations required by the Constitution and by the overwhelming sentiment of the American people.
The chief legislation before Congress in 1919 and
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