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THE I918 FALL ELECTIONS 173
On the day this address was delivered, Woodrow Wilson already was considering the partisan appeal that he actually made a few days before the election, demanding the return of a Democratic Congress.
Reports of great Republican gains began rolling in to headquarters from all parts of the country within a few days of the publication of the Wilson letter and the Republican counterblasts. Colonel Roosevelt and William Howard Taft met on October 31 at the Union League Club in New York, where they prepared and issued a joint statement. While they were writing, Taft said: 'This seems like old times, doesn't it, Theodore?" Colonel Roosevelt chuckled and replied : 'Indeed it does, Will."
In their statement the two former presidents urged all Americans who were Americans first to vote for a Republican Congress; they deprecated extending the unified uncontrolled leadership of a commander in chief to the making of a permanent treaty of peace or to the framing of those measures of reconstruction which must seriously affect the happiness and prosperity of the American people for a century; they called attention to the leadership of Republican members of Congress as contrasted with the failure of Democratic congressional members to co-operate with the administration.
On October 25, 191 8, President Wilson released his fateful letter demanding the return of a Democratic Congress.
Proof of the President's state of mind is found in the diary of his chief adviser, Colonel Edward M. House, which under the terms of the author's will now reposes in a vault at Yale University. This and other important papers were not to be published until twenty-five years after the author's death.
In 1936 the ailing Colonel House, in a letter to Charles Seymour, president of Yale, permitted Wythe Williams to inspect the diary and to make notes therefrom. Excerpts later appeared in Mr. Williams' book, Dusk of Empire, in a chapter on the League of Nations, approved by Colonel House prior to publication. From this the present author has drawn certain quotations which substantiate the fact of Woodrow Wilson's greatest political blunder. These supplement copious quotations from the diary which Colonel House had previously incorporated in his own published memoirs. On September 24, 191 8, appears the following important entrv:
The President spoke of politics in general, and expressed an earnest desire that a Democratic Congress should be elected. He said he intended making a speech or writing a letter about two weeks before the election, asking the people to return a Democratic House. I did not express my opinion of this.
A fact later remarked upon by intimates of Wilson and House should be noted: whenever the colonel advised with the President, his silence