The League of Nations and the United States: Wilson's Idea That America Never Joined

The League of Nations, based in Geneva, was created after the First World War as a forum for settling international disputes. It was first proposed by an American president, Woodrow Wilson, but the United States never joined.

A cartoon criticizing the United States for staying out of the League. Image from the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian.

The fourteenth point

Addressing Congress on January 8, 1918, Wilson set out the last of his Fourteen Points: a "general association of nations" formed "for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike." He was voicing the wartime views of many diplomats and thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, who wanted a permanent international body to foster cooperation, protect its members and keep the peace. With Europe exhausted by four years of total war, and many Americans hopeful that such a body could settle the kinds of disputes that had led to war in 1914, the idea was wildly popular.

The League grew out of a broad international revulsion at the war's unprecedented destruction, and out of prewar theories of collective security and international organization. Wilson took up the cause with evangelical fervour and in January 1919 travelled to the Paris Peace Conference, the first president to go abroad in an official capacity.

Written into the peace

Wilson used his influence to attach the League's charter, the Covenant, to the Treaty of Versailles, believing an effective League would soften any unfairness in the peace terms. With the other members of the "Big Three", Georges Clemenceau of France and David Lloyd George of Britain, he drafted it as Part I of the treaty.

Georges Clemenceau of France. Image from the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian.

David Lloyd George of the United Kingdom. Image from the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian.

The League was to have an Assembly of all members, a Council of five permanent and four rotating members, and an international court. Most important to Wilson, it would guarantee members' territorial integrity and independence, allow "any action…to safeguard the peace," set up arbitration, and provide for economic and military sanctions.

Defeat in the Senate

Wilson returned in February 1919 to put the treaty and Covenant before Congress. Public support was still strong, but opposition had been building in Congress and the press. It was led by the Senate majority leader and Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge and many Republicans feared an expensive commitment that would limit America's ability to defend its own interests and entangle it in Europe's politics, and wanted to return to the country's traditional avoidance of commitments outside the Western Hemisphere.

Henry Cabot Lodge. Image from the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian.

Wilson and Lodge disliked each other personally, which poisoned any chance of compromise. In March 1920 the Senate rejected the treaty and Covenant by 49 to 35. Nine months later Warren Harding won the presidency on a platform opposing the League, and Wilson left office without bringing the United States in.

Afterwards

Most historians believe the League worked far less well without the United States. The Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations shared many of its goals and cooperated on some issues as far as Congress allowed, but congressional fear that steady cooperation would mean membership by another name kept Washington and Geneva apart. Tying the Covenant to the treaty proved a blunder: the treaty came to be seen as unenforceable, short-sighted or too harsh, and the League's failure to enforce or revise it hardened opposition in Congress. It took the Second World War to show again the need for an effective international organization; this time the American public and the Roosevelt administration backed it, and the United States became a founding member of the United Nations.

Sources

• U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, "The League of Nations, 1920," Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Images from the Office of the Historian.