The League of Nations was an international organization, headquartered in
Geneva, Switzerland, created after the First World
War to provide a forum for resolving international disputes. It was first
proposed by President Woodrow Wilson as part of his
Fourteen Points plan for an equitable peace in Europe, but the United States was
never a member.
Cartoon critizing U.S. lack of participation in the League of
Nations
In front of the U.S. Congress on January 8, 1918, President
Woodrow
Wilson enumerated the last of his
Fourteen Points, calling
for a “general association of nations…formed on the basis of covenants designed
to create mutual guarantees of the political independence and territorial
integrity of States, large and small equally.” Many of Wilson’s previous points
would require regulation or enforcement, and thus he distilled the wartime
thinking of many diplomats and intellectuals, on both sides of the Atlantic,
into a call for a new type of standing international organization dedicated to
fostering international cooperation, providing security for its members, and
ensuring a lasting peace. With Europe’s population exhausted by four years of
total war, and with many in the United States supportive of the idea that a new
organization would be able to solve the international disputes that had led to
war in 1914, Wilson’s articulation of a League of Nations was wildly popular.
However, it proved exceptionally difficult to create, and Wilson left office
never having convinced the United States to join it.
David Lloyd George of Britain
The idea of the League was grounded in the broad, international revulsion
against the unprecedented destruction of the First World War and the
contemporary understanding of its origins. This was reflected in all of Wilson’s
Fourteen Points, which were themselves based on theories of collective security
and international organization debated amongst academics, jurists, socialists
and utopians before and during the war. After adopting many of these ideas,
Wilson took up the cause with evangelical fervor, whipping up mass enthusiasm
for the organization as he traveled to the Paris Peace Conference in January
1919, the first President to travel abroad in an official capacity.
Wilson used his tremendous influence to attach the Covenant of the League, its
charter, to the Treaty of Versailles. An effective League, he believed, would
mitigate any inequities in the peace terms. He and the other members of the “Big
Three,”
Georges Clemenceau of France and
David
Lloyd George of Britain, drafted the Covenant as Part I of the
Treaty of Versailles. The League’s main organs were an Assembly of all members
and a Council, made up of five permanent members and four rotating members,
along with an International Court of Justice. Most importantly, for Wilson, the
League would guarantee the territorial integrity and political independence of
member states, authorize the League to take “any action…to safeguard the peace,”
establish procedures for arbitration and create the mechanisms for economic and
military sanctions.
Georges Clemenceau of France
The struggle to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant in the U.S.
Congress helped define the most important political division over the role of
the United States in the world for a generation. A triumphant Wilson returned to
the United States in February 1919 to submit the Treaty and Covenant to Congress
for its consent and ratification. Unfortunately for the President, while popular
support for the League was still strong, opposition within Congress and the
press had begun building even before he had left for Paris. Spearheading the
challenge was the Senate majority leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations
Committee,
Henry Cabot
Lodge.
Motivated by Republican concerns that the League would commit the United States
to an expensive organization that would reduce the United States’ ability to
defend its own interests, Lodge led the opposition to joining the League. Where
Wilson and the League’s supporters saw merit in an international body that would
work for peace and collective security for its members, Opponents feared the
consequences of involvement in Europe’s tangled politics, now even more complex
because of the 1919 peace settlement. More generally, they adhered to the United
States’ traditional aversion to commitments outside the Western Hemisphere.
Wilson and Lodge’s personal dislike of each other poisoned any hopes for a
compromise, and in March 1920, the Treaty and Covenant were defeated by a 49-35
Senate vote. Nine months later,
Warren Harding was elected
President on a platform opposing the League.
Henry Cabot Lodge
The United States never joined the League. Most historians consider that the
League operated much less effectively without U.S. participation than it would
have otherwise. However, even while rejecting membership, the Republican
presidents of the period, and their foreign policy architects, agreed with many
of its goals. To the extent that Congress allowed, the Harding, Coolidge, and
Hoover Administrations associated the United States with League efforts on
several issues. Constant suspicion in Congress, however, that steady U.S.
cooperation with the League would lead to de facto membership prevented a close
relationship between Washington and Geneva. Additionally, growing
disillusionment with the Treaty of Versailles diminished support for the League
in the United States and the international community. Wilson’s insistence that
the Covenant be linked to the treaty was a blunder; over time, the treaty was
discredited as unenforceable, short-sighted, or too extreme in its provisions,
and the League’s failure either to enforce or revise it only reinforced U.S.
Congressional opposition to working with the League under any circumstances.
However, the coming of World War II once again demonstrated the need for an
effective international organization to mediate disputes, and the United States
public and the Roosevelt Administration supported and became founding members of
the new United Nations.
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