Treaty of Versailles

What started with an assassination of an Austrian prince unpopular in with royalty in Vienna and plotters in Belgrade ended in war. Four years of artillery, machine guns, and poison gas had ruined the countryside of Europe. Woodrow Wilson put the blame for dead millions at the feet of secret diplomacy, excessive armament, imperialism, and the lack of international cooperation. His plan for a lasting peace was presented to the world in the form of the Fourteen Points, some of which were present in the final plan for peace, the Treaty of Versailles, which faced internal opposition at home. It was the strength of this opposition, from self or fawning-historian labeled “progressives” to conservatives and isolationists, in conjunction with the intractability and incompetence of President Wilson that encouraged the Senate defeat of the Treaty of Versailles.

There were four main ideas present about the treaty at the time: irreconcilables, reservationists both strong and mild, and those who accepted the treaty as is, like Wilson. The first group, the irreconcilables, consisted mainly of conservative and isolationist Republicans. They opposed the treaty mainly because of proposed membership in the League of Nations. The US Constitution gives no explicit power to the federal government to enter into an empowered international organization, since such an action without amendment to the Constitution would either give away powers of the federal government that are in its constitutional purview, thus sacrificing national sovereignty illegally, or would allow such international organization powers in the US not claimed by the federal government, an act unconstitutional under the tenth amendment, which states that all powers not enumerated to the federal government are possessed by the people or their state governments in such fashion as that state’s citizens in convention deem appropriate. Since states are constitutionally blocked from entering agreements with foreign nations, joining the league would require a federal constitutional amendment. Other than constitutional arguments, they also thought joining the League was bad policy, as it would permanently entangle the US in the affairs of other nations, as well as allow some foreign oversight over domestic affairs. This sentiment is expressed in a cartoon from the era, which shows the Senate, with the Constitution in hand, halting the marriage between Uncle Sam and a woman labeled “foreign entanglements”. (Document E)

Various liberal persons also strongly opposed the treaty. William Borah, a progressive senator, worried somewhat conservatively that US problems would be decided by a “tribunal created other than by our own people and [given] an international army subject to its direction and control to enforce its decrees.” (Document A). Other progressive persons or institutions, such as the surprisingly long lasted New Republic and Hero of the Nanny State John Maynard Keynes, held that since the Versailles treaty did not hold up to the idealist goals of the Fourteen Points, it was immoral and not worth ratifying. The future Journal of Andrew Sullivan said, “Liberals all over the world have hoped that a war, which was so clearly the fruit of competition and imperialist and class-bound nationalism, would end in a peace which would moralize nationalism by releasing it from class bondage and exclusive ambitions. The Treaty of Versailles does not even try to satisfy these aspirations.” (Document B).

Other progressives of the day found themselves opposing some portion of the League covenant, as evidenced by Jane Adams’ statement in her work whose title was no-doubt Lenin inspired, Peace and Bread in time of War, “The difference of opinion was limited always as to the existing League and