Also on the platform were Secretary and Mrs. Lansing. Wilson had shown Lansing no more respect in Paris than in Washington, but Lansing’s courtesy never flagged. He and his wife had briefly excused themselves from a dinner hosted by the president of Poland in order to send the Wilsons off with good wishes. Despite his troubles with Wilson and his anguish over the treaty, Lansing hoped that it would be ratified so that the world could move beyond the war. But when he considered the opposition that Wilson would meet in Washington, Lansing worried. Congress was filled with men who felt only “vicious spite against the president,” he wrote a friend, and the president was going home with “blood in his eye.”

---

I. In January the Allies had agreed to permit deliveries of food, but the deliveries were delayed until March because of quarrels over whose ships would transport it. The Allies had wanted German vessels to do the job. Germany resisted, fearing that its unarmed ships would be easy prey for the Royal Navy if the Armistice did not hold. The first post-blockade food shipments came from the United States, in American ships. (Sally Marks, “Mistakes and Myths: The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty, 1918–1921,” Journal of Modern History 85, no. 3 [Sept. 2013]: 650–51.)

II. The nine nations created by the Treaty of Versailles: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Yugoslavia. In addition, the Ottoman Empire became known as Turkey.