"Wilson Sure U.S. Will Ratify League ", The Chicago Daily Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, Wednesday, July 9, 1919

transcription/facsimile newpaper article

WILSON SURE U.S. WILL RATIFY LEAGUE

RAPS FOES OF PEACE TREATY;

CALLS IT JUST

`BIG RECEPTIONS FOR HIM AT NEW YORK

AND CAPITAL'

Washington DC July 9- President Wilson returned to Washington late tonight after an absence of four months at the Paris peace conference.

Despite the late hour of arrival from New York, a crowd estimated by Major Pullman, chief of police, at 100,000 greeted Mr. Wilson at the station.

Responding to an address of welcome the president said: " I come home confident that the people of the United States were for the League of Nations but to receive this immediate assurance of it is particularly pleasing to me. It makes my homecoming just that much more delightful. I have never been quite so eager to get back home as this time, and everything I have seen since I sighted land now has made me gladder and gladder that I am home. No country can possibly look so good as this country looked to me".

The trip from New York to Washington was made without incident. No stops were made though there were crowds at the stations in Philadelphia and Baltimore.

`PRESIDENT IN NEW YORK'

New York, July 9 - President Wilson returned to the United States today and in his first speech delivered on American soil since the peace treaty was signed declared that the peace concluded at Paris was a "just peace which, if it can be preserved, will safeguard the world from unnecessary bloodshed".

The only reference the president made to his political opponents was when in referring to the negotiations in Paris he said: "I am afraid some people, some persons, do not understand that wisdom. They do not see it. They have looked too much upon the ground. They have thought too much of the interests that were near them, and they have not listened to the voices of their neighbors..."