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After leading the nation through its first international war, the idealistic Woodrow Wilson fails to secure America’s role as international peacekeeper.
A big part of this story is grounded in the growing disillusion with America’s role in the Great War manifested itself it the rising intolerance towards things “un-American." Each of these topics will be addressed in further detail as we move into our study of the 1920's. Here are some quick summaries:
In our system of government, Presidents NEGOTIATE TREATIES with other countries (through their Secretary of State normally, although in this case Wilson was directly involved in the Paris Peace negotiations). THEN,they have to bring the Treaty back and have it approved by 2/3 of the US Senate (this is called the “Advice and Consent” power of the Senate.)
World War I cartoon shows a gentleman (labeled "U.S. Senate") gazing in some perplexity at an enormous scroll (labeled "Peace Treaty") that has been left on his desk by President Wilson.
Another important aspect to this story is the BREAKDOWN of the Senate that Wilson was dealing with. Essentially, you can divide the 96 Senators this way as far as the Treaty was concerned:
48 (50% of them) were in the INTERNATIONALIST camp – that is, they were supportive of Wilson’s position concerning the Treaty and thought the League of Nations was a good idea.
32 (33% of them) were RESERVATIONISTS that is, they could support the Treaty but had major reservations about it.
16 (17%) of the Senators were IRRECONCILABLE – that is, they were simply not going to support the Treaty no matter what. Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, for example, was in this camp. He had opposed our entry into World War I and, in fact, gave a very famous speech (In Defense of Free Speech During Wartime) after he had been attacked for his anti-war vote.
On September 3, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson embarked on a tour across the United States to promote American membership in the League of Nations, an international body that he hoped would help to solve international conflicts and prevent another bloody world war like the one from which the country had just emerged—World War I. The tour took an enormous toll on Wilson’s health.The tour’s intense schedule–8,000 miles in 22 days–cost Wilson his health.
The Treaty of Versailles was never ratified by the Senate. Instead, Congress passed the Knox-Porter Resolution, formally ending the war with Germany in 1921
"The League of Nations failed to take hold in America because the country was not yet ready for so global a role. Nevertheless, Wilson's intellectual victory proved . . . seminal. . . . For, whenever America has faced the task of constructing a new world order, it has returned in one way or another to Woodrow Wilson's precepts. At the end of World War II, it helped build the United Nations on the same principle as those of the League, hoping to found peace on a concord of the victors. When this hope died, America waged the Cold War ... as a moral struggle for democracy. When communism collapsed, the Wilsonian idea that the road to peace lay in collective security ... was adopted by administrations of both major American political parties."
Henry Kissinger, Harvard professor and secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, Diplomacy, 1994
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