Posted Monday night, November 25, 2019.
Henry Cabot Lodge, Senator and Pugilist, known to his fans as Pinky. Via Wikipedia by way of the Boston Review.
Lodge was a United States Senator. A Republican United States Senator. Bannawart was peace activist. I’d bet he threw the first punch. Not because of the irony or the stock character nature of it---the pacifist with a violent temper. Because of what I know of Lodge. He was something of a stock character too: the war-lover who normally left the fighting to others. The hero of the moment, though, was, of course, the telegram delivery boy:
Earlier that Day, a small group of peace activists from Massachusett had called upon their senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, to ask him to reconsider his support for war. Lodge said he had been considering for three years and wasn’t going to consider anymore. The conversation, in a corridor, grew heated, and one of the visitors, Alexander Bannawart, observed that cowards were the ones supporting war. Lodge replied that if Bannawart were calling him a coward, “He was damned liar.” Then one man or the other struck the first blow. In the ensuing melee they both took punches. Bannawart, a form minor league ballplayer and executive, was bloodied and subdued by a passing Western Union messenger boy, and arrested. Lodge, who was 66, felt he had acquitted himself capitally. “At my age there is a certain aspect of folly about the whole thing in wrote in a letter to [his good friend Theodore Roosevelt], “and yet I am glad that I hit him. The Senators all appeared to be perfectly delighted.”
---from “March 1917” by Will Englund.
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