During the opening months of 1919, French, British, Italian, Japanese, and American officials gathered at the Paris peace conference to negotiate terms for the defeated Central Powers at the conclusion of World War I. President Woodrow Wilson led the U.S. delegation. Wilson’s vision for the postwar settlement centered on his concept of a new collective security system—the League of Nations—embodying American hopes for a more liberal world order. According to Article X of the League Covenant, written by the U.S. president himself, every member of this organization promised to defend the territorial integrity and political independence of every other member, worldwide. Allied leaders were skeptical of Wilson’s vision but looked for American support in achieving their own international objectives. After some very hard bargaining, Wilson secured Allied approval for a proposed peace treaty with Germany. Key features included: German reparations and disarmament; the creation of a demilitarized zone west of the Rhine inside the new Weimar republic; de facto British, French, and Japanese control over German colonies in Africa, China, and the Pacific; and implicit recognition of the British stance on freedom of navigation.
Weimar representatives were shocked by this framework but had no choice but to accept. On June 28th, 1919, they signed the terms of surrender at the Palace of Versailles, bringing Germany’s war with the Allies to an end.
When Wilson returned to the United States, he informed the U.S. Senate that the Versailles treaty had “come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God.” Uninterested in compromise, the president insisted: “the Senate must take its medicine.” As a matter of fact, most Senate Republicans—especially conservatives from Northeastern states—wanted some sort of peace treaty to pass. But they resisted the sweeping commitment to a global collective security system specified in Article X of Wilson’s League Covenant. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, took the lead on this matter. Holding the Republican caucus together and organizing Senate hearings to probe weaknesses in the president’s position, Lodge offered a set of reservations to the Treaty of Versailles. The most important reservation, as both sides knew, was to clarify no U.S. obligation to a global collective security system under Article X of the League Covenant. Had Wilson agreed to this compromise, Lodge and Senate reservationists would have probably signed the Treaty of Versailles, ensuring American membership in that organization along with postwar European security arrangements. But Wilson still hoped to force the unrevised treaty through the Senate, and after a series of strokes undermined his health that autumn, he lost all capacity to negotiate. No two-thirds Senate majority ever voted in favor of the treaty, and after the Republican landslide electoral victory of November 1920, incoming President Warren Harding indicated that he viewed the matter as settled.
The defeat of the Versailles treaty meant that America returned to a posture of strict disengagement from European security arrangements. But the real tragedy here was not the defeat of Wilson’s vision. Rather, the problem was Wilson’s utter refusal to compromise. A young Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee in 1920, took note of that failure and resolved to be more pragmatic a generation later when offered the opportunity.
