In the aftermath of World War I, much of the world signed on to an organization designed to make it impossible to enter another catastrophic war. It was the League of Nations, an ambitious entity established 100 years ago this month that asked its member states to ensure one another’s security and national interests. But though it came into being after an American president’s call to action, the United States itself was never a member—and the League was destined to fail. Both the League’s beginnings and its disastrous end began in the depths of World War I, a conflict that pitted nations against one another long after the armistice. In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson laid out an idealistic 14-point world peace program designed to boost Allied troops’ morale and make war seem untenable for the Central Powers. Wilson blamed secret alliances between nations as the cause of the war, and thought that to maintain a lasting peace, all nations should commit to fewer armaments, reduce trade barriers, and ensure national self-determination. Wilson’s fourteenth point demanded a “general association of nations” to ensure political independence and territorial integrity. The idea of a permanent institution to ensure peace had appealed to intellectuals for centuries. But it took the unprecedented destruction of World War I, in which 8.5 million military members and at least 6.6 million civilians were killed, to make international lawmakers seriously consider the plan. Not everyone shared Wilson’s idealistic view, though, or agreed on his priorities for a lasting peace. To bolster support for the institution, Wilson took his plea on the road to the Paris Peace Conference. During contentious negotiations, other Allied nations prioritized reparations from Germany, which they blamed for starting the war. But though they abandoned many of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, they agreed to the international institution and the league’s charter became Article I of the Treaty of Versailles. When it came time for the U.S. to ratify the treaty and join the League of Nations, Wilson faced an unexpected source of opposition—his own countrymen. The peace deal was domestically unpopular among various communities that felt it either went too far or no far enough. It was just as divisive in the Senate, where Wilson’s arch-rival, Henry Cabot Lodge, chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lodge loathed Wilson and his Fourteen Points, and felt that signing on to the new league could force the United States to act against its own national interests while securing the territorial integrity of other countries. He attempted to defang the treaty, and the League, with reservations that exempted the U.S. from the core tenets of the league. After a political deadlock, the treaty was defeated and the U.S. never joined. Thirty-two nation-states did, however, and the League of Nations launched in 1920. By then, the organization was doomed. Without the U.S. on board, the number of Central and Allied votes on its governing council was equal, and the League faced deadlocks even on its most central tenets, like disarmament. Its members also proved reluctant to follow through on protecting other member nations, and over the years, countries like Japan and Germany simply withdrew from the League to sidestep its governance. Though the organization managed to deescalate some tensions between nations and contributed to the concept of international law, it was unable to prevent member nations from entering another world war. During the interwar period, Wilson’s idealistic vision of a world of “peace without victory” was shattered. But the League of Nations has a continued legacy. After the Second World War, the remaining members of the League of Nations voted unanimously to disband and join the United Nations instead. Wilson’s vision of a worldwide organization devoted to peace and security finally came to pass—but for the at least 60 million people who died in World War II, it came far too late.
NOTE TO READERS
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. Though first proposed by President Woodrow Wilson as part of his Fourteen Points plan for an equitable peace in Europe, the United States never became a member.
 Speaking before the U.S. Congress on January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson enumerated the last of his Fourteen Points, which called for a “general association of nations…formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” Many of Wilson’s previous points would require regulation or enforcement. In calling for the formation of a "general association of nations," Wilson voiced the wartime opinions of many diplomats and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic who believed there was a need 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 optimistic 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.
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 the United Kingdom, drafted the Covenant as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. The League’s main organs were an Assembly of all members, a Council made up of five permanent members and four rotating members, and an International Court of Justice. Most important 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.
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, Lodge and his supporters feared the consequences of involvement in Europe’s tangled politics, now even more complex because of the 1919 peace settlement. They adhered to a vision of the United States returning to its 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.
The United States never joined the League. Most historians hold 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. |
Why was the United States not a member of the League of Nations?
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