Woodrow Wilson as I Know HimTumulty, Joseph P. (Joseph Patrick)
History
Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him
Tumulty, Joseph P. (Joseph Patrick)
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Wilson, Woodrow, 1856-1924
Now, I think that can be accomplished by many processes.
Unfortunately, the members of Congress have to live in Washington, and
Washington is not a part of the United States. It is the most
extraordinary thing I have ever known. If you stay here long enough
you forget what the people of your own district are thinking about.
There is one reason on the face of things. The wrong opinion is
generally better organized than the right opinion. If some special
interest has an impression that it wants to make on Congress it can
get up thousands of letters with which to bombard its Senators and
Representatives, and they get the impression that that is the opinion
at home and they do not hear from the other fellow; and the
consequence is that the unspoken and uninsisted-on views of the
country, which are the views of the great majority, are not heard at
this distance. If such an arrangement were feasible I think there
ought to be a Constitutional provision that Congressmen and Senators
ought to spend every other week at home and come back here and talk
and vote after a fresh bath in the atmosphere of their home districts
and the opinions of their home folks.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE GREAT ADVENTURE
As we conferred together for the last time before the President left
Washington for the other side, I had never seen him look more weary or
careworn. It was plain to me who had watched him from day to day since the
Armistice, that he felt most keenly the heavy responsibility that now lay
upon him of trying to bring permanent peace to the world. He was not
unmindful of the criticism that had been heaped upon him by his enemies on
the Hill and throughout the country. The only thing that distressed him,
however, was the feeling that a portion of the American people were of the
opinion that, perhaps, in making the trip to Paris there lay back of it a
desire for self-exploitation, or, perhaps, the idea of garnering certain
political advantages to himself and his party. If one who held this
ungenerous opinion could only have come in contact with this greatly
overworked man on the night of our final talk and could understand the
handsome, unselfish purpose that really lay behind his mission to France
and could know personally how he dreaded the whole business, he would
quickly free himself of this opinion. Discussing the object of the trip
with me in his usually intimate way, he said: "Well, Tumulty, this trip
will either be the greatest success or the supremest tragedy in all
history; but I believe in a Divine Providence. If I did not have faith, I
should go crazy. If I thought that the direction of the affairs of this
disordered world depended upon our finite intelligence, I should not know
how to reason my way to sanity; but it is my faith that no body of men
however they concert their power or their influence can defeat this great
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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