A World Without Harmony: Why the US
Rejected the League of Nations.
Master GIB Scriptie Damir Lataster, 0411523
Begeleider: dr. Ruud v. Dijk
Introduction
As far as historical “what if?” scenarios go the alternative reality of the United States joining the League of Nations is a hard one to beat. Would the League of Nations not have ended up the largely impotent institution it turned out to be and would, consequently, the Second World War have turned out considerably different – would it perhaps even have been avoided altogether? It is unsurprising then that large amounts of historical research have been devoted to answering the question why the U.S. Senate ended up rejecting the treaty in the course of two rounds of voting, with the first held in November 1919 and the second in March 1920.
The positions of Senators concerning ratification of the peace treaty with Germany – which was made to include the League of Nations on Wilson’s insistence – roughly followed party lines, with most Republicans opposed and most Democrats in favor. The opposition was divided into several blocs that varied in size as the debate progressed, with the “irreconcilables” being opposed to a League of Nations in any form, and “reservationists” being in favor of ratification on the condition that certain special conditions were attached to the US’s admission. These reservationists were furthermore grouped as being either “mild” or “strong” depending on the severity of the special conditions desired. The exact nature of these Senators’ opposition to the League varied as well, ranging from nine “peace progressives”1 who feared it would serve as a tool for imperialism, to extreme conservatives such as a Senator Reed who feared a League would entail “negro domination” of the world, and a Senator Sherman who saw the League as a papist conspiracy due to the way catholic members outnumbered protestant ones.2 Given the stakes involved, the “League fight” – as the debate concerning ratification was quickly dubbed – unsurprisingly didn’t restricted itself to the Senate floor, with prominent political figures
representing all possible positions seeking to tip the balance in their favor using methods ranging from speaking tours to letters written to individual Senators.
In the run-up to the first vote, the leader of the Senate Republicans, Henry Cabot Lodge, managed to rally both the mild and strong reservationists around a set of reservations to be attached to the treaty – the so-called “Lodge reservations”. The most controversial of these
1 R. D. Johnson, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1995, p. 333.
2 L.E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective, New York: Cambridge University Press 1987, p. 139.
reservations declared that the US would assume no “obligation” to comply with any economic or military measures decided upon by the League unless Congress first assented to them. Other reservations were meant to ensure that the Monroe Doctrine – which gave the US the prerogative to limit the influence of any European power in the Western Hemisphere – would remain outside of the purview of the League and that there would be no creation of an International Labor Organization, which would have internationally regulated labor standards.3 During both of the ratification votes in the Senate, the treaty was first put up for a vote with these reservations attached, and next without. Because the irreconcilables opposed both of these proposals and most Democrats wouldn’t accept the treaty any more with reservations attached than most Republicans would without, the treaty was never very close to reaching the required 2/3rds majority needed for ratification.
Because the most important of the Lodge reservations were meant to exclude the US’s national and regional interests from the scope of the League, most early characterizations by historians of the League fight involved nationalists or isolationists opposing Wilson and internationalists supporting him.4 Precisely how jealously Wilson’s opponents wanted to safeguard the US’s national interests of course varied from the more extreme irreconcilables to the more moderate mild reservationists, but they all seemed simply less prepared to sacrifice the US’s national sovereignty to strengthen international institutions than the President was.
Subsequent historians, however, have problematized this picture by pointing out that the opponents of Wilson had their own internationalist visions. The majority of them espoused a conservative brand of internationalism based on institutionalizing the cooperation between great powers and resuscitating the cause of international law, while a minority shared Wilson’s
progressive internationalism and attacked the treaty from the left. Furthermore, just as all sides in the debate had their own internationalist visions, they also believed their own particular brand of internationalism would do most to further the US’s national interests.
3 The International Labor Organization was meant to regulate affairs ranging from child labor to work hours and minimum wages (T. J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order. New York: Oxford University Press 1992, p. 261). Full list of Lodge Reservations can be found in Congressional Record, November 19, 66th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 8873.
4 See e.g. D.F. Fleming, The United States and the League of Nations, 1918 – 1920. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1932 & W.S. Holt, Treaties Defeated by the Senate: A Study of the Struggle between President and Senate over the
Thus, as we’ll see in Chapter One, where I’ll outline the historiography dealing with the League fight, historians have generally come to the conclusion that there was a broad
internationalist consensus in US politics in the sense that all parties agreed that the US should take a more active role in international politics and that isolationism was no longer a viable option. The question facing historians has therefore been why this consensus didn’t translate into an agreement between the different sides in the debate on how to ratify the treaty, whether with or without reservations attached. Why, in other words, did isolationism end up winning the day if all parties involved agreed that the US should assume greater international responsibilities? One type of answer, which has mainly focused on the two unquestionable protagonists of the League fight, namely President Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge, has looked to factors not directly related to questions of international politics. For instance, many historians have stressed the impact of Wilson’s stroke on an already stubborn and uncompromising personality and his intense personal and partisan rivalry with Lodge to explain why compromise never seemed a concrete possibility.
The other type of approach has been to stress the differences between the progressive and conservative types of internationalism involved in the debate. Thus historians have pointed out that the conservatives did not shirk from involving the US in imperialist projects, tended to value the stability of law over the unpredictability of politics in the international arena, and valued international cooperation on a limited, great power basis rather than a more anarchic association with all nations spanning the earth such as the one proposed in the League of Nations.
Progressives, on the other hand, were – at the very least in terms of rhetoric – fiercely anti-imperialist, supportive of political internationalism as being more fluid and conducive to change as opposed to the status quo-favoring statutes of international law, and were more sympathetic and protective of smaller nations exerting their self-determination in the face of great powers seeking to extend their influence over them. These political differences, historians suggest, were simply too great to bridge through compromise.
The seemingly problematic fact that support for and opposition to the treaty seemed often to cross these ideological lines has not remained unaddressed by these historians. For instance, while most conservatives such as Lodge opposed the treaty to varying degrees, conservative ex-President Howard Taft vehemently supported it; conversely, while the progressive Wilson managed to arouse much left-wing support for his League, many other prominent progressives such as the charismatic firebrand Senator William Borah took a hard stand against it. Historians
have sought to explain this by arguing that the reason many progressives opposed Wilson’s project because they felt he had already compromised too much on his left-leaning principles during the negotiations with his European allies. On the other hand, some conservatives could support it because they expected that any progressive elements that still remained in the treaty could be syphoned off after ratification without resorting to amending the treaty beforehand.
In this thesis I will argue that these ways in which historians have attempted to address the problems with the way the League fight has been framed are at best inelegant, and at worst highly problematic. Instead, I will argue for a return to the old framing of the debate in terms of internationalists versus nationalists, but with one important change. Instead of nationalism denoting the desire to safeguard the US’s national interests, which all sides after all argued their particular schemes would best ensure, I will use the term to denote the belief in the existence of a fundamentally pluralist world of unresolvably conflicting national interests. The League’s opponents, whether conservative or progressive, uniformly stressed this as underlying their opposition. By contrast, the League’s supporters, who similarly included both conservatives and progressives, argued that the world had already achieved, or was on the verge of achieving, a monistic harmony of interests supplanting differences of national interest.
Exactly how they interpreted either this monistic harmony or pluralistic difference did, however, depend on whether they were conservative or progressive. Thus progressives perceived either pluralism or monism in strictly anti-imperialist terms, with the monists – discussed in
Chapter Two – arguing that the world’s people were slowly awakening to a democratic
internationalist mindset, and the pluralists – discussed in Chapter Three – arguing that all the nations of the world should be free to pursue their own national self-interests. Both views called for an – eventual – dying off of imperialistic oppression, but differed radically on whether the League of Nations would serve to further this cause. Conservatives, on the other hand, considered the issue through the lens of great power politics, with monists – discussed in Chapter Four – finding that there was a harmony of interests between all great powers in “policing” their spheres of interest and jointly countering more powerful threats, and pluralists – discussed in Chapter
Five – arguing that there was no such harmony of interests and that other great powers would
simply use the League of Nations to undermine the US’s national interests. All conservatives argued that increased great power cooperation was desirable, but differed wholly on whether the League of Nations would accomplish this.
To make my case I will focus exclusively on the public debate – specifically speeches given on the Senate floor or to constituents, and articles written for newspapers or magazines – in the period from the initial announcement of the League’s inclusion in the peace treaty near the end of 1918, to the first round of votes that resulted in a rejection of both the treaty without reservations and with reservations in November 1919. These limitations serve to set this thesis apart from much of the historical research on the debate, which has taken a more “holistic” approach of incorporating both a wider timeframe and private sources such as correspondence and diaries. The reason for this is that I will try to show that this broader scope has resulted in these historians overstressing theoretical disagreements between participants in the debate – such as concerning that of the appropriate implementation of international law – which played a prominent role during the war-years, when the debate was on how to implement international organization in the abstract, and in private correspondence with likeminded internationalists. However, when confronted with the concrete question of joining – or amending – the League as it existed, and when making the case to their colleagues and constituents, such academic
considerations are shown to play a far less prominent role.
The reason for limiting this thesis to the debate in the build up to the first round of voting is simply that the debate, for all intents and purposes, had ceased after that point.5 The two most prominent pro-League voices in the debate, Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, had retreated from it – Wilson because of a debilitating stroke, Taft because he had been embarrassed by the leaking of a set of “compromise” reservations he had drafted.6 The debate had almost entirely shifted from the public to the private, with Lodge’s Republicans and Democrats trying to find a solution to the stalemate behind closed doors. These private talks failed to achieve anything, and it is widely assumed that Lodge was perfectly content with having them fail and having the treaty
5 The sole exception to this was the letter a bedridden Wilson wrote to his chief representative in the Senate, Gilbert Hitchcock, on the eve of the final round of voting in March 1920. The letter caused a brief resurgence of the public League fight on the Senate floor, though no substantially new arguments were presented by either side. Wilson letter to Hitchcock, March 8, 1920, Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 4052 (Hereafter CR: 66: 2, p. 4052).
6 Taft, as leader of the internationalist League to Enforce Peace, should have followed the organization’s stated line of unconditional approval of the treaty. Instead, he was privately trying to find reservations acceptable to both Democrats and Republicans alike and secure the treaty’s passage that way. When this was discovered in July 1919, Taft offered to resign from his position as president of the LEP. This was rejected, but Taft’s role in the debate had definitively ended all the same. See Knock, “To End All Wars”, p. 258.
sink along with it.7 Regardless, the outcome of the second, and definitive, round of voting was almost identical to the first.
Furthermore, I’ll focus exclusively on the following four participants in the debate: the Senators Henry Cabot Lodge and William Borah – representing respectively the conservative and progressive opposition to the treaty –, the ex-President Howard Taft – representing conservative support –, and President Woodrow Wilson – representing progressive support. While few of the historians dealing with the League fight would deny that these were four of the key players in the debate, some would dispute that they were the four key players in it. For instance, more scholarly attention has been paid to the position of former Secretary of State Elihu Root than either Borah or Taft due to the immense influence he exerted on the foreign policy thinking within the Republican Party. However, this influence was mainly exerted in private; it was only sparingly and with great reluctance that Root entered the public debate,8 which is the subject of this thesis. In the following I will explain why I consider these four figures to be the most important
participants in the debate, and why their positions help most to explain its outcome.
Woodrow Wilson
President Wilson was the undisputed focal point of the entire debate concerning the U.S.’s admission to the League of Nations he himself had played such a key role in founding. While he could of course not directly participate in the all-important debates on the Senate floor, he exerted a great influence on the public debate both privately, through his instructions to his Democratic allies in the Senate, and publicly, through an extensive speaking tour on the subject – until it was cut short by Wilson suffering a debilitating stroke. These speeches were all dutifully printed in the Congressional Record after they had been delivered and often became the subject of heated discussions on the Senate floor.
Henry Cabot Lodge
7 E.g.: “It seems clear that Lodge met with the Democrats for appearances' sake only; he approached negotiations not with a genuine desire for compromise but with a determination to surrender nothing of importance whatsoever”. David Mervin, "Henry Cabot Lodge and the League of Nations" Journal of American Studies, nr. 2 (1971), p. 208. 8 Stephen Wertheim, "The League That Wasn’t: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914–1920", Diplomatic History, nr. 5 (2012), p. 827.
As the de facto leader of the Republicans in the Senate – though this position did not yet exist officially – and the chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, Lodge was
instrumental in forging an almost unified Republican opposition to the League as it was presented to them by Wilson. Given the sympathy of many “mild” reservationist Republicans for Howard Taft’s League to Enforce Peace and its stridently pro-League position, this was no mean feat. Lodge’s views of foreign policy were heavily influenced by Theodore Roosevelt, who had considered Lodge his “closest friend, personally, politically and in every other way”;9 this meant he valued above all else a place for the US among the great powers by rivaling them in
imperialistic ambition, and that the great powers should strive to keep order in the world together.
Howard Taft
As a former one-term President of the United States and president of the League to Enforce Peace (LEP), the largest internationalist and pro-League organization in the world, Taft hoped to sway his fellow Republicans in the Senate towards supporting the treaty. To do so he, like Wilson, gave numerous speeches throughout the country,10 with more influence on the debate coming through the writing of frequent articles in prominent newspapers reacting to developments in the Senate. The articles and speeches – like those of Wilson – themselves became the subject of heated discussion on the Senate floor. They were also included in the Congressional Record whenever they became the subject of discussion.
William Borah
Despite being the least well-known of this foursome, Borah certainly wasn’t any less influential in determining the outcome of the debate. As a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Borah was party to all the negotiations with Wilson’s representatives on any possible
compromise between the rivaling parties – which, as the irreconcilables’ “finest spokesman”11, he
9 W.C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1980, p. 88.
10 Wertheim, "The League That Wasn’t”, p. 828.
11 J.M. Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations, New York: Cambridge University Press 2001, p. 5. Brian Rathbun even calls Borah the irreconcilables’ “unofficial
did his best to undermine at all costs.12 Even more important was the way he used his abilities as Congress’s most skilled orator to fervently make the case against the League on both the Senate floor and in a speaking tour rivaling that of Wilson.13 Through his influential speeches and articles, and by threatening to outright quit the Republican Party if Lodge took his compromises too far, Borah played a key role in solidifying the anti-League position of the Republicans in the Senate.
Index
spokesperson.” B. C. Rathbun, "From vicious to virtuous circle: Moralistic trust, diffuse reciprocity, and the American security commitment to Europe" European Journal of International Relations, nr. 2 (2011), p. 333. 12 Borah became the face of the progressive opposition to the treaty to such a degree that Walter Lippmann, one of Wilson’s fellow drafters of the Fourteen Points who was disillusioned with the final product, supplied him with inside information on the negotiations, specifically information relating to the secret Entente treaties, to use to undermine Wilson. Knock, “To End All Wars”, pp. 257 & 259.
13 Drawing crowds reaching as many as 10,000 during speeches in Chicago. Johnson, “The Peace Progressives”, p. 103.
Chapter 1: Historiographical Overview………. 11
Chapter 2: Why Wilson Supported the League……… 20
Chapter 3: Why Borah Opposed the League……… 28
Chapter 4: Why Lodge Opposed the League……… 37
Chapter 5: Why Taft Supported the League………. 43
Conclusion……… 49
Epilogue……… 52
Bibliography………. 55
In this chapter I will outline the way recent historians have characterized the League fight, by focusing on their treatment of the four aforementioned political figures. In 1.1 I will show how historians have put Wilson place in the debate – originally seen as being in the lofty heights of idealistic internationalism opposite purely isolationist opponents – relatively closer to that of his opponents. Then, in 1.2, we will see how historians have explained the opposition of progressives such as Borah to the League on the basis of the compromises Wilson made on his progressive vision. After that 1.3 will deal with how one recent historian has explained Taft’s support for the League by pointing to his hope that it would eventually change to serve legalistic aims. Finally,
1.4 will outline the way most historians have roundly dismissed the sincerity of Lodge’s
opposition to the League, attributing it to his personal and partisan animosity towards Wilson.
1.1
In assessing Wilson’s position in the League fight, most historians have attempted to bypass simplistic categories such as “idealist” – as opposed to “realist” – and “internationalist” – as opposed to “isolationist”. They’ve stressed that despite substantive differences of opinion on the exact course international cooperation should take there was a broad consensus from all sides of the debate that the US should make her presence felt on the world stage. All contenders
additionally shared the belief that such a presence should contain some mix of both “idealism” and “realism”, in the sense that even the most ostensibly cynical imperialist was ingrained with the belief that the world could only stand to benefit from an assertive American presence, and that even someone speaking of the virtues of international cooperation in such lofty terms as Wilson did was motivated in part by the belief that only an far-going association with other nations could guarantee the US’s security and economic interests.14
All parties in the League fight also agreed that the US had a unique political culture that should remain untainted by the “old politics” of Europe and should have, in the hallowed words of George Washington oft-cited by all participants in the debate, “as little political connection as
14 John Cooper in particular has stressed this: “the contenders appealed to two prevailing sentiments. One was Americans' virtually unanimous belief in their country's uniquely virtuous and democratic character. The other was vigilant regard for such national interests as security, prosperity, and sovereignty. [...] The disagreement over values and goals really revolved around the proper mixture of idealism and self-interest. All sides in the League fight insisted that their positions would promote both ends.” Cooper, “Breaking the Heart of the World”, p. 4.
possible” with Europe.15 Even Wilson, ostensibly the least “isolationist” of all participants, was convinced that this should remain the case.16 As Lloyd Ambrosius notes, Wilson thus “fluctuated between isolationist and internationalist alternatives. He attempted to maintain neutrality until 1917; then, leading the United States into the European war, he called for a new order under the future League. [He hoped] either to avoid or redeem the Old World.”17 According to Ambrosius Wilson felt that the US had to either be able to control proceedings or isolation would be the preferred alternative to the US being dragged down in the nationalistic jealousies of the Old World.
Wilson still believed in the successful outcome of the League of Nations because he thought he could use it to bypass the discredited statesmen of Europe and directly address the well-meaning populations of Europe. Authors such as Thomas Knock therefore put an emphasis on letters by Wilson such as one from the summer of 1918 in which he stated that, “Yes, I know that Europe is still governed by the same reactionary forces which controlled this country until a few years ago. But I am satisfied that if necessary I can reach the peoples of Europe over the heads of their Rulers”.18 The way he hoped to do so, historians such as Akira Iriye have stressed, was through the “typically Wilsonian concept” of “world public opinion”, by which Wilson, according to Iriye, meant a “moral force emanating from people everywhere. They, rather than their leaders, were the movers of the world.”19
Conversely, conservative opponents of Wilson such as Lodge, who’d ostensibly belong most firmly in the “isolationist” camp, were far more optimistic about the possibilities of international cooperation with Europe. These conservative internationalists wanted to continue the cooperation between the US and the “righteous” and “civilized” partners that they had fought alongside of during the previous war.20 The least hostile towards traditional European politics were thus the conservative internationalists, who had traditionally favored an alliance with
15 From Washington’s Farewell Address from 1787, quoted in Stewart Patrick, The Best Laid Plans: The Origins of
American Multilateralism and the Dawn of the Cold War, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 2009, p. 3.
16 Thus even Wilson referred approvingly to Washington’s advice in a speech in 1916: "You know that we have always remembered and revered the advice of the great Washington, who advised us to avoid foreign
entanglements." Quoted in Ambrosius, “Wilson and the Diplomatic Tradition”, p. 11. 17 Ambrosius, “Wilson and the Diplomatic Tradition”, p. xii.
18 Knock, “To End All Wars”, p. 162.
19 Akira Iriye, The Globalizing of America, 1913 – 1945, vol. 3, The Cambridge History of American Foreign
Relations, ed. Warren Cohen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993 p. 68.
20 Cooper, “Breaking the Heart of the World”, pp. 11–22; Knock, “To End All Wars”, p. 109; Patrick, “Best Laid Plans”, p. 11.
Britain, had derided Wilson for not bringing the US into the war on the side of Entente earlier, and were generally favorably disposed towards continuing the Entente in some form of post-war Great Powers alliance. For this reason Lodge had been vigorously opposed to Wilson’s attempts to use a vast ship-building program to force the British into concessions on the subject of “the freedom of the seas”, which was meant to limit the way powerful maritime empires such as Britain could use blockades to impose their will, and had been the focus of one of his famous Fourteen Points.21 After all, in the eyes of conservatives, the US should join Britain as its partner in policing the world, not oppose it on behalf of weaker nations.
Thus, historians have by and large stressed that Wilson was less of a pure “idealist” or “internationalist” than he has usually been considered, while his opponents we’re hardly the cynical “realists” or inward looking “isolationists” that they were often depicted as. This has left these historians with the question, however, of why Wilson wasn’t able to achieve a compromise with his opponents if they weren’t as diametrically opposed on the issue of international politics as sometimes believed. To explain this, Wilson is often painted as a stubborn idealist unwilling to compromise with his political opponents even if their suggested alterations were relatively mild,22 and as having been rendered wholly inflexible due to the effects of his stroke.23
21 The entire issue of freedom of the seas and neutrality rights in general was eventually rendered moot by the fact that the League of Nations was meant to eliminate neutrality altogether. After all, whenever a war would break out, the entirety of the League would join hostilities in some capacity against the “aggressor”. See Jerry Jones, “The Naval Battle of Paris”, Naval War College Review, nr. 2 (2009), p. 82.
22 Stewart Patrick thus places the blame for compromise failing on “Wilson’s unwillingness to compromise on his liberal multilateral vision, by accommodating the concerns of the great power internationalists” Patrick, “Best Laid Plans”, p. 2. David Fromkin too stresses that the reservations were essentially minor and that the problem was that “Wilson preferred no League at all to one for which Lodge could take some of the credit.” David Fromkin, "Rival Internationalisms: Lodge, Wilson, and the Two Roosevelts" World Policy Journal, nr. 2 (1996), p. 78. Cooper agrees that it was remarkable “how far, by their lights, [Lodge and other Republicans] went to meet” Wilson’s position with their reservations, which “represented a considerable retreat for many of them”. Cooper, “Breaking the Heart of the World”, pp. 418-9.
23 This is particularly stressed by Cooper, who places the outcome squarely on the shoulders of Wilson, who “[a]t almost any stage… could have brokered a settlement that would have resolved the conflict differently.” He was kept from doing so because “the effects of the illness left him incapable of exercising sound judgment about what he and his supporters should do.” The fact that Wilson was no less uncompromising in the months leading up to the stroke is explained by the fact that “[s]uch strokes cast lengthy premonitory shadows on their victims’ health and behavior. Wilson’s actions particularly during the three months before the stroke likewise need to be judged at least partly in light of his impending physiological catastrophe.” Cooper, “Breaking the Heart of the World”, pp. 2-3. Others, such as Arthur Link, have downplayed the particular effects of the stroke, arguing that it was “probable… that Wilson would have acted as he did even had he not suffered his breakdown, for it was not in his nature to compromise away the principles in which he believed.” A.S. Link, Wilson the Diplomatist: A Look at His Major Foreign Policies. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press 1957, p. 155. Both interpretations thus stress an excessive amount of
1.2
The question why some prominent progressives such as Wilson vigorously defended the treaty, while others such as Borah opposed it so aggressively has been addressed by several historians, particularly Thomas Knock and Erez Manela. The conclusion they’ve reached is that Wilson started out with an internationalist vision for the League that was universally hailed in
progressive circles, but that the many compromises he was forced to make on this vision caused much bad blood among his erstwhile left-wing allies. These historians have stressed the
dissatisfaction of Wilson’s former progressive allies, including Borah’s “peace progressives” in the Senate, with the final draft of the League’s constitution. From Wilson’s original Fourteen Points and the initial draft of the League’s Covenant, which, as Knock notes, had been hailed as “revolutionary” by the Socialist Party of America, the League had slipped too far off the
progressive path in their minds.24 Additionally, historians such as Knock have focused on the way Wilson dialed back his progressivism when it came to domestic politics in his last years in office, cracking down hard on left-wing dissent.25 This hardened progressive opinion against Wilson’s compromises concerning foreign policy as well. As a result, prominent left-leaning newspapers such as the Nation and the New Republic all changed their attitudes from enthusiastically supportive to outright hostile.26 In the words Akira Iriye, the progressive opposition of figures such as Borah was due to them simply being even “more Wilsonian than Wilson”.27
In particular Manela has argued that the core ideal that Wilson had to accept having watered down was that of his famous principle of self-determination. To make this point, Manela has focused on the controversy surrounding Article 10 of the League Covenant, which obliged all member states to protect against “external aggression” each others’ “territorial integrity.”28 In the eyes of progressives, this Article privileged the territorial status quo, and prevented nationalities attempting to exert their right to self-determination from challenging it. According to Manela, Wilson even was one of these progressives, whose original draft of what would eventually become Article 10 stressed not only territorial integrity, but also alteration: “The Contracting
24 Knock, “To End All Wars”, p. 252. 25 Knock, “To End All Wars”, pp. 255-6. 26 Idem, pp. 253-4.
27 Akira Iriye, The Globalizing of America, 1913 – 1945, vol. 3, The Cambridge History of American Foreign
Relations, ed. Warren Cohen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993, p. 69.
Powers unite in guaranteeing to each other political independence and territorial integrity; but it is understood between them that such territorial readjustments […] pursuant to the principle of self-determination […] may be effected.” 29
Under this early draft, a sizeable majority of League members could force a nation to relinquish its territory if its people no longer constituted a majority there or a subject people’s “aspirations” had developed sufficiently to make the principle of self-determination apply to them. However, Wilson was forced by his negotiating partners at Versailles to scrap the sections of Article 10 dealing with territorial alterations, leaving only the status quo enforcing territorial guarantees. As a result, according to Manela, “[w]hat Wilson had conceived as an instrument of managing change in the international system now became a tool designed to preserve the status quo.”30 Many progressives, sharing Wilson’s dedication to self-determination, were outraged – not least of which Borah and his fellow peace progressives.31 Thus, according to historians such as Knock and Manela, it was Wilson’s move towards the ideological center due in great part to the compromises he was forced to make with his European allies that caused his conflict with Borah and the other peace progressives.
1.3
The general view among historians concerning Henry Cabot Lodge’s opposition to the League of Nations is that there was little ideological substance to it. Instead, Lodge supposedly opposed it simply because his rival Wilson happened to support it. Whether it was because Lodge had a personal dislike for Wilson that caused him to want to deny him any type of political victory,32 or because Lodge wanted to use the League fight to allow his Republican party to gain an advantage over Wilson’s Democrats, most historians see few underlying principles concerning international politics in Lodge’s opposition.33 One of the historians to have elaborated on this position more extensively, David Mervin, argues that there was even a third element of animosity between
29 Erez Manela, “A Man Ahead of His Time? Wilsonian Globalism and the Doctrine of Preemption” International
Journal, nr. 4 (2005), p. 1118.
30 Manela, “Wilsonian Globalism”, p. 1141. 31 Idem, p. 1141.
32 Knock for instance stresses Lodge’s “singlemindedness and inexhaustible contempt for his rival.” Knock, “To End All Wars”, p. 265.
33 Lodge’s partisanship is particularly stressed in Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal. New York: Macmillan 1945 & Knock, “To End All Wars”, p. 251.
Lodge and Wilson that had little to do with the League itself directly, namely the struggle between Lodge’s legislative branch of government and Wilson’s executive. Lodge was
supposedly outraged that Wilson had – uncharacteristically, in the tradition of American politics – completely bypassed Congress during the negotiations in Versailles and as a result sought to rein in Wilson’s executive power.34
One of the historians bucking this trend has been William Widenor, who instead has argued that Lodge’s opposition to Wilson’s League was in fact based on substantive reasons relating to his specific brand of internationalism. According to Widenor, Lodge’s view on American foreign policy was based on the belief that the US should pursue a “large policy.”35 What he meant by this was that the US should end its traditional isolation and take its place at the table of the world’s great powers and thus help steer global affairs along proper paths. Widenor notes that, contrary to Wilson, who trusted not in world leaders, but the “world public opinion” of their peoples, Lodge did put his trust in the dealings amongst leaders and abhorred the fickleness of public opinion. Especially the way American public opinion quickly cooled to the
consequences of the US’s initial foray into imperialism after the annexation of the Philippines caused the imperialist Lodge to doubt “that the public could be relied upon to sustain a ‘well-settled policy’.”36What this showed to Lodge was that the American people, with their traditional distrust
of standing armies and government overreach would be hard-pressed to accept the US taking a great power role upon itself.37 As long as his close political and personal friend Theodore Roosevelt held the presidency Lodge did believe in the possibility of an internationalist “Rooseveltian solution”.38 Roosevelt had shared Lodge’s preference for a US foreign policy based on it playing its part in “policing the world” alongside other Great Powers on an equal basis and seemed capable of enamoring the American public with the prospect of greater
34 Mervin, “Henry Cabot Lodge”, p. 214. 35 Widenor, “Henry Cabot Lodge”, p. 111. 36 Widenor, “Henry Cabot Lodge”, p. 139.
37 As Widenor, quoting Lodge from a book on George Washington from 1890, notes: “There was always the question whether a people who had ‘an inborn and a carefully cultivated dread of standing armies and military power’ could attain that ‘social efficiency in war, peace and government without which all else is vain.’” Idem, p. 75. 38 Idem, p. 125.
international adventurism.39 Wilson, on the other hand, embodied all the problematic aspects of “the American proclivity for placing too much faith in laws and panaceas.”40
Still, for Lodge the route to great power status consisted not merely of territorial and military expansion and overcoming the American public’s reluctant attitude towards such
expansions: “Throughout his life he looked to ‘good faith’ and to the reputation of nations rather than to public opinion as a means of providing the continuity of policy and predictability of action conducive to peace among nations.”41 The route the US had to take to great power status entailed not merely enhancing its power, but its reputation as well, which meant honoring its obligations to the letter. For this reason Lodge, who very much would have preferred to annex Cuba in the wake of the war with Spain, did not advocate this course because, as Widenor quotes Lodge from a letter written in 1900, “we made a certain promise to them and that promise must be carried out in the presence of a doubting world.”42 The problem with Wilson’s League was that it obliged the US to make far-reaching commitments – such as Article 10’s universal territorial guarantees – that the US could never be asked to honor in all conceivable scenarios. Inevitably the US would have to shirk on its responsibilities under the treaty it had signed, thus forcing it to commit an act of dishonor and reducing its international status.
1.4
The question why the arch-conservative Howard Taft supported the League while most fellow conservatives such as Lodge didn’t has only very recently been thoroughly addressed by historians, particularly by Stephen Wertheim. In his view, this has to do with the distinction
39 Roosevelt had outlined his take on internationalism most explicitly in May 1910, during his acceptance speech of the Noble Prize for Peace: "those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace, not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others." Quoted in Cooper, “Breaking the Heart of the World”, p. 11. 5 years later Lodge publicly expressed his support for this “Rooseveltian” internationalism in a speech: "The great nations must be so united… as to be able to say to any single country, you must not go to war, and they can only say that effectively when the country desiring war knows that the force which the united nations place behind peace is irresistible." Quoted in Cooper, “Breaking the Heart of the World”, p. 12.
40 Widenor, “Henry Cabot Lodge”, p. 142. 41 Widenor, “Henry Cabot Lodge”, p. 139. 42 Idem, p. 138.
between “legalistic” and political internationalism, with the former stressing an international order based on immutable laws and the latter a more fluid system based on mutable political decisions.43 Unlike his fellow conservative Lodge, Taft’s interest in internationalism was
primarily based on his passion for serving the cause of international law. As Wertheim notes, this would seem to have brought him into conflict with Wilson, who objected to an undue emphasis on international law: “polities emerged and evolved organically. They developed through gradual adaptations to historical circumstance, not through clever arrangements of constitutional
commitments.“44 Law, to Wilson, was inherently conservative: it served to “passively codif[y]“ the status quo and punish those seeking to alter it. Politics was on the contrary inherently – or at the very least potentially – progressive: as peoples developed and learned to exert their desire for self-determination through their elected leaders, the status quo would have to give way. A League of Nations grounded in international law would undermine the entire notion of international social and political progress: “If league commitments were limited to what states would already specifically agree to and likely perform, how would the world transcend its corrupted
condition?“45
According to Wertheim, the main difference between legalists such as Taft and the Wilsonians was that legalism followed what he terms “concrete logic,“ which “entailed clear-cut obligations likely to be followed or compelled. Every single league commitment had to be performed or else the whole system was a sham.“ Wilson’s internationalism, on the other hand, satisfied “aspirational logic“, “which valued broad moral declarations, supposedly expressing the common consciousness of mankind.“46 Legalists adhered to the notion that treaties could not deny the fact that states would always act in their self-interest when the stakes were high enough and thus shouldn’t be asked to relinquish the right to do so. Wilsonians, on the other hand, thought treaties should seek to transcend this self-interested impulse, and commit nations to cooperation in all possible scenarios.
43 The first to stress this distinction was David Kennedy, “The move to institutions”, Cardozo Law Review, nr. 5 (1987). See, e.g. p. 880.
44 Wertheim, “The League That Wasn’t”, p. 801. Put somewhat differently: “’Law in a moving, vital society grows old, obsolete, impossible, item by item,‘ [Wilson] believed. Society advanced. Law lamely ratified.“ Wertheim, “The League That Wasn’t”, p. 829.
45 Idem, p. 829. 46 Idem, p. 802.
The reason why the legalist Taft was in favor of the League despite it having been molded by Wilson and his allies into a primarily political association was, according to Wertheim, that he hoped it could be changed into a legalistic system over time: “Taft viewed League as an
imperfect step forward for international law. The League would, he predicted, eventually convene conferences to codify international law.”47 Thus, whereas Lodge thought the League was
thoroughly incapable of achieving his “Rooseveltian solution” because of the incapacity of Wilson to transcend the limitations of American public opinion, Taft thought that his overriding desire for a strengthened international law could be achieved through the League.
Chapter 2: Why Wilson Supported the League
In this chapter, I will argue against the way Wilson’s position has been characterized by the historians discussed in 1.1. As we saw, these historians argued that Wilson’s political position
was closer to that of his rivals than commonly thought, and that therefore his failure to
accommodate his rivals by achieving a compromise was due to personal or medical failings. In
2.1, I will argue that Wilson’s unwillingness to compromise with the anti-League faction can be
explained without taking recourse to personal rivalries or medical conditions. Then, in 2.2, I will argue that Wilson’s internationalism based on a belief in “world public opinion” was even more radically anti-nationalistic than often assumed.
2.1
According to Wilson, there was but one nation capable of acting in a truly disinterested way and that was the US, due to her multi-ethic and -confessional composition: “this Nation [i.e. the US] was created to be the mediator of peace, because it draws its blood from every civilized stock in the world. […] Every other nation is set in the mold of a particular breeding. We are set in no mold at all.”48 This was the ideal Wilson envisioned: not a focus on ethnicity, but the complete absence of it. The US wasn’t so much multiethnic, Wilson argued, but post-ethnic. The narrow pursuit of national self-interest by peoples had been the cause of wars, and it was the job of the League to help peoples step beyond such motivations.
While this may seem like a very commonsensical statement – Wilson, the quintessential internationalist, was opposed to nationalism – it does beg the question how furthering peoples’ right to self-determination was supposed to further the cause of world peace. During the League fight, Wilson aimed much of his rancor at so-called “hyphenated” Americans – e.g. German-Americans –: those who defined their interests as lying at least partially with their ancestral home, and not solely with America as a uniquely internationalist project, free from national self-interest. Their hyphenated self-identification thus served only “to keep America out of the concert of nations” and perpetuate the conflicts of national self-interest.49 But why wouldn’t this principle apply to other multi-ethnic nations such as Britain? Why would it be in the interest of world peace if here, suddenly, citizens did narrowly define their interests along ethnic lines – say, Irish – rather than as British, or perhaps even world, citizens?
If it was detrimental to world peace, it would certainly seem to be in conflict with
Wilson’s famous espousal of the principle of “self-determination”; at least, if he used that termed
48 Wilson speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, September 9, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 5940, emphasis mine. 49 Wilson speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, September 9, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 5940.
to mean specifically national self-determination. However, Manela has stressed that Wilson didn’t interpret self-determination in this way at all. Manela contrasts Wilson’s concept, which was “vaguer and more elastic” with that of Vladimir Lenin, for whom self-determination was “almost always preceded the term with the adjective ‘national.’” For the internationalist Wilson to espouse national determination, given his opposition to national jealousies and self-interest was of course problematic, which was why “he used the more general, vaguer phrase ‘self-determination,’ and usually equated the term with popular consent, conjuring an
international order based on democratic forms of government.”50
The key for Wilson was thus democracy, not nationality; where democracy promoted peace, nationality, if not necessarily warlike, at least carried with it the constant danger of national competition and thus the potential for war. However, not all nationalities were ready for self-governance in even this sense: most colonial peoples had to first be properly “educated” in the ways of self-governance.51 Many commentators, including Manela, have focused almost exclusively on Wilson’s quite prolific racism to explain this subdivision between peoples worthy of self-determination and those not, 52 but that doesn’t explain why Wilson didn’t do much to advocate the self-determination of certain European nationalities – such as the Irish – either. The reason for this was that Wilson had one overriding concern that trumped even self-determination, namely peace: “America is evidence of the fact that no great democracy ever entered upon an aggressive international policy.”53 Nationalities, especially if still untrained in the art of responsible self-governance, could be warlike, but “great” democracies – i.e. those who have gone beyond national interests such as the US – were necessarily peaceful.
What we can now do is explain Wilson’s arguments for on the one hand compromising extensively on his initial drafts when negotiating with the Allies at Versailles and on the other
50 Erez Manela, "Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1919" American Historical Review, nr. 5 (2006), pp. 1332-3.
51 This was why Wilson appreciated the mandate system so much: by subjecting the former German colonies and Ottoman territories to the internationalist system – even if indirectly –, they would no longer be purely exploited, but helped along the path to prepare for eventual self-determination: “[The German colonies] had not been governed; they had been exploited merely, without thought of the interest or even the ordinary human rights of their
inhabitants.” Wilson address to Senate, July 10, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 2337. The mandate system would put an end to such naked, non-educational exploitation: “Undeveloped peoples and peoples ready for recognition but not yet ready to assume the full responsibilities of statehood were to be given adequate guarantees of friendly protection, guidance, and assistance.” Wilson address to Senate, July 10, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 2337.
52 Manela, “Wilson in Asia”, p. 1344.
hand refusing almost entirely to do so with regards to the Lodge reservations. We saw in 1.2 how Manela argued that Wilson had been forced to compromise on his early draft of Article 10 – which had entailed not just universal territorial guarantees, but provisions for territorial alterations as well – and that this in part explained progressive opposition of figures such as Borah who felt he shouldn’t have compromised so far. Manela sees this as proof that Wilson was never truly invested in the definitive version of Article 10, which merely treated territorial
boundaries as inviolable: “Wilson insisted that the guarantee contained in article [10] was a necessary component of the treaty. But he showed little passion in defending it: it was a necessary component of the peace he had wanted, but not a sufficient one.”54
This isn’t quite true however. Wilson called Article 10 “the heart of the treaty”55, which could admittedly with some rhetorical effort be construed along the lines Manela argues – the heart as a necessary, but not sufficient, element of the human anatomy –, but another metaphor Wilson uses simply cannot: “Article 10 speaks the conscience of the world.”56 For Wilson, like many Americans, the great injustice of the Great War had been a militaristic autocracy –
Germany – overrunning a small democracy – Belgium.57 Article 10 had been devised to stop such a thing from ever happening again, something that had become only more urgent with the
creation of a number of new small democracies in Central- and Eastern Europe. That what was of paramount importance for Wilson was not so much self-determination at any cost, but peace is shown by the final part of Wilson’s early draft of Article 10, which reads: “The Contracting Powers accept without reservation the principle that the peace of the world is superior in
importance to every question of political jurisdiction or boundary.”58 Manela reads this sentiment as applying to one party only, namely the hypothetical imperialist nation jealously seeking to preserve its boundaries despite the wishes of the people residing within or next to these
boundaries. However, it could just as easily be applied to the people seeking self-determination: if addressing their national aspirations would endanger world peace then this simply shouldn’t be
54 Manela, “Wilsonian Globalism”, p. 1121.
55 Wilson speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, September 9, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 5943. 56 Wilson speech in Indianapolis, Indiana, September 4, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 5001.
57 Wilson argued that Article 10 was the “only guarantee against the wars that have ravaged the world”, before specifically referring to the invasion of Belgium by Germany. Wilson speech in Spokane, Washington, September 12, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 5001.
done. National interests, whether originating from stronger or weaker nations should according to Wilson always be considered of smaller importance that the interest of world peace.
The original draft of Article 10, with its radical provisions for territorial alterations was rejected by the British because their delegation argued it “would simply tend to legalize agitation in Eastern Europe for a future war.”59 This way, they appealed to Wilson’s overriding concern for peace: placing too much of a focus on nationality would exacerbate tensions, not diminish them. Given what we’ve just discussed, this argument should have been compelling to Wilson. The Lodge reservations, on the other hand, argued not for a decrease in nationalism, but an increase by introducing exemptions for the US on the basis of its perceived national interest. Whereas most historians have had to resort to reasons of physiology or partisanship to explain Wilson’s intransigence with regard to Wilson’s intransigent attitude towards the Lodge reservations, this shows that the reasons for Wilson’s stance are clear enough without resorting to such
explanations.
2.2
While Article 10 of the League covenant was at all times the focal point of the League fight, Article 11 often came a very close second in terms of controversy. This Article stated that it was “the friendly right” of each of the League’s members to bring anything that could potentially endanger world peace to the attention of the League Council.60 Wilson called it his “favorite Article”, because,
Under the covenant of the league of nations we can mind other people's business, and anything that affects the peace of the world, whether we are parties to it or not, can by our delegates be brought to the attention of mankind. [...] There is not an oppressed people in the world which cannot henceforth get a hearing at that forum.61
Thus, Wilson saw Article 11 as a replacement for the parts of his original draft dealing with territorial alterations: oppressed peoples could, under the sponsorship of the US, bring their case
59 R. D. Johnson, "Article XI in the debate on the United States' Rejection of the League of Nations", The
International History Review, nr. 3 (1993), pp. 505-6fn.
60 R. D. Johnson, "Article XI”, p. 503.
to the League Council and have their demands – if righteous – met. In all likelihood Wilson viewed Article 11 as, if anything, an improvement over his original draft of Article 10. Instead of the chaotic invitation to bellicose nationalism that could have resulted from his original draft, now the precondition of the US “meddling” with other nations was established. The US could now judge on a case by case basis whether a complaining nationality was justified in its appeals or was simply acting out of a non-democratic narrow nationalistic impulse.
The seeming contradiction of inviolable borders under Article 10, and mutable borders under Article 11 was solved by making both subject to the cause of peace: a nation could neither alter, nor attempt to preserve its borders by use of force. We saw in 1.1 that Akira Iriye pointed out the way Wilson thought the League would be able to decide which of these two to apply in a certain situation to further peace: “world public opinion.” World public opinion, we’ll remember, denoted, according to Iriye, “some moral force emanating from people everywhere”. In doing so, Iriye downplays something important however. This is that the operative word world in “world public opinion” should not be taken as loosely as Iriye does as simply “emanating from people everywhere”: it implicitly serves to set it apart from a more narrow national public opinion. National public opinion would do nothing to cement world peace, only a still developing internationalist thinking beyond the narrow confines of national interest could do so.
As we’ve seen, Wilson argued that such a form of world – or, more properly,
internationalist – public opinion only existed in the US, with its multiethnic –even post-ethnic – foundations. But, due to the shock of the Great War, Wilson found that the people he had encountered during his famous tour of war-torn Europe were also starting to develop this internationalist thinking: “It happened that America proposed the principles upon which the peace with Germany should be built. I use the word 'happened' because […] the people on the other side of the water, whatever may be said about their governments, had learned their lesson from America before, and they believed in those principles before we promulgated them; and their statesmen, knowing that their people believed in them, accepted them.”62 Their statesmen might still to a large degree have the same old limited notions of national self-interest, but Wilson believed the League would be able to tap into – and further develop – the budding internationalist feelings of Europeans. Thus, if a future Germany attempting to repeat its imperialistic designs on one of its smaller neighbors the internationalist, democratic and peace-loving – though for
Wilson these three were practically synonymous – people of the member states of the League would compel their leaders to acquiesce to the decision of the League, no matter how
disadvantageous it would prove to their national interest in the short run.
The key to this was the fact that only democratic nations were to be accepted into the League of Nations according to Wilson.63 Whenever statesmen still believed in the power-politics from before the Great War, their people would immediately exert their influence on them through democratic means to rectify their course. After all,
Every true heart in the world, and every enlightened judgment demanded that, at whatever cost of
independent action, every government that took thought for its people or for justice or for ordered freedom should lend itself to the new purpose and utterly destroy the old order of international politics. Statesmen might see difficulties, but the people could see none and could brook no denial.64
This is not to say that Wilson believed these national competitions had already
disappeared and that an internationalist spirit had already triumphed throughout the world. After all, if this were the case there would be no need for a League of Nations in the first place; all nations would cooperate naturally. Using a somewhat curious metaphor in several of his speeches, Wilson explained how he believed the League would further the development of an internationalist world opinion. First, he referred to the old rationalist adage of the 19th century that “mind had become monarch”, which signified that men had conquered their “base” passions and rationality had triumphed – or, in internationalist terms, that national self-interest had been conquered by international cooperation. This Wilson rejected, saying that instead “we were governed by a great representative assembly made up of the human passions, and that the best we could manage was that the high and fine passions should be in a majority, so that they could control the baser passions, so that they could check the things that were wrong.” 65
Thus, there was not – yet – a dominant internationalist spirit of reason dominating the world. Instead, there was a competition of “base” – i.e. those of national interest and aggression – and “high and fine” passions – those of peaceful internationalism. The League, by only admitting
63 “Nobody is admitted except the self-governing nations, because it was the instinctive judgment of every man who sat around that board [in Versailles] that only a nation whose government was its servant and not its master could be trusted to preserve the peace of the world.” Wilson speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, September 9, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 5941, emphasis mine.
64 Wilson address to Senate, July 10, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 2388.
democratic nations and through its design of ensuring peaceful coexistence of nations, would ensure that these higher passions would dominate international politics. These higher passions had, furthermore, received a lift after the ending of the Great War: “There is a concert of mind and of purpose and of policy in the world that was never in existence before. I am not saying that by way of credit to myself or to those colleagues [oversees] to whom I have alluded, because what happened to us was that we got messages from our people.”66
Still, given that Wilson didn’t believe the baser passions of international politics had been completely eradicated yet, there was still the risk that another Germany could arise again and wreak havoc as in the last war. The objection of those opposing the League that the League would oblige the US to intervene – if necessary militarily – under Article 10 thus seemed to have some merit: international politics was not yet perfect and so there was a good chance of America having to use force to protect peace. Wilson, however, denied that this was anything more than a remote possibility due to the League’s methods for non-violently ensuring compliance from even those nations hostile to the internationalist consensus. The basis of the treaty, Wilson argued, was that it ensured that nations seeking to violently achieve their goals on the international stage would first have to submit their actions to the League for approval. This meant they would have to give reasons for their violence to the citizens of the world; and, given that this population was largely and increasingly peace loving, such reasoning would not be accepted: “If there had been nine days of discussion, Germany would not have gone to war. If there had been nine days upon which to bring to bear the opinion of the world, the judgment of mankind upon the purposes of those Governments, they never would have dared to execute those purposes”.67
Offending nations would quite simply be shamed into abandoning their course through the world public opinion united against them: “The one thing that those who are doing injustice have most reason to dread is publicity and discussion, because […] if you give a bad reason you confess judgment, and the opinion of mankind goes against you.”68 The League was thus
66 Wilson speech in Columbus, Ohio, September 4, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 5000.
67 Wilson speech in Columbus, Ohio, September 4, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 5000. As Wilson further explained: “I want to call you to witness that in almost every international controversy which has been submitted to thorough canvass by the opinion of the world it has become impossible for the result to be war. War is a process of heat. Exposure is a process of cooling, and what is proposed in this is that every hot thing shall be spread out in the cooling air of the opinion of the world, and, after it is thoroughly cooled off, then let the nations concerned determine whether they are going to fight about it or not.” The answer of course being that they most likely wouldn’t. Wilson speech in Kansas City, Missouri, September 6, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 5004.
primarily an educational tool, given that all nations had a harmony of interest in cooperating with each other peacefully – something they simply might not have understood fully yet. Wilson even used the example of a “wise schoolmaster from North Carolina” to underscore this point. This schoolmaster had decided that before any fight between students could take place, they would need to discuss jointly the rules of the fight. By the time this discussion had taken place, however, the students had lost their fervor to fight: “That little thing illustrates a great thing. Discussion is destructive when wrong is intended; and [with the League] all the nations of the world agree to put their case before the judgment of mankind.”69
Of course there would still be recalcitrant nations which would continue with their aggression regardless of the world opinion arraigned against them. In this case, Wilson insisted the League would do what any community would do to its most stubbornly asocial members: ostracize them. An economic boycott would teach these nations how much they depended on the world’s cooperation for their well-being and thus teach them the error of their ways. The League would thus serve to slowly bring the entire world around to the proper internationalist way of thinking and conduct, either through discussion or, if absolutely necessary, boycott. The possible exercise of military force was merely an afterthought:
instead of war there shall be the irresistible pressure of the opinion of mankind. If I had done wrong, I would a great deal rather a man would shoot at me than stand me up for the judgment of my fellow men. I would a great deal rather see the muzzle of a gun than the look in their eyes. I would a great deal rather be put out of the world than live in the world boycotted and deserted. The most terrible thing is outlawry. The most formidable thing is to be absolutely isolated. And that is the kernel of this engagement.70
Chapter 3: Why Borah Opposed the League
In this chapter I will argue against the way Borah’s position in the League fight has been characterized by the historians discussed in 1.2. There, we saw his opposition to the League analyzed as emanating from his distaste with the degree to which Wilson had compromised on his progressive ideals, particularly those dealing with his principle of self-determination. In 3.1, I will argue that Borah didn’t argue for the same – albeit uncompromised – concept of
self-determination as Wilson, but rather had a substantively different, and expressly nationalistic,
69 Wilson, speaking in Seattle, Washington, September 15, CR: 66: 1, p. 6234 . 70 Wilson speech in Indianapolis, Indiana, September 4, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 5001.
concept of it. Then, in 3.2, I will argue that Borah was opposed to Wilson’s belief in a monistic “world public opinion”, not his lack of progressive conviction.
3.1
As we’ve just seen, Wilson considered Article 11 his “favorite” part of the treaty because it allowed the US to espouse the cause of oppressed peoples in the name of protecting world peace. Progressive opponents of the treaty like Borah, however, pointed out that the interests of these oppressed peoples might very well not coincide with what the League would consider in the interest of world peace. If the Irish people revolted again against the British as they had in 1916, wouldn’t the British be able to argue to the League that such upheavals threatened world peace and enlist US help in crushing the rebellion – or at the very least force the US to abstain from aiding the Irish rebels?71 For peace progressives like Borah, Article 11 thus endangered any kind of revolutionary activity: “[A]rticle 11 is very much stronger and much more latitudinous than the terms of the treaty made by the Governments which constituted what is known as the Holy Alliance.” The Holy Alliance was a favored example of progressive opponents of the treaty because it raised the specter of reactionary forces organizing internationally to “suppress
insurrections in all the different countries.” 72 According to Borah, the kind of peace the imperial powers of Europe desired had not changed appreciably from the time of the Holy Alliance, and was still based on the fear that “insurrections, spreading, would undoubtedly disturb the
established Governments in which they were interested, and therefore the only safety they could have would be to suppress the insurrection in its beginning, to crush it where it was.”73
Wilson’s defense against progressive objections was that the covenant had been framed in such a way to carefully avoid precluding the right to revolution: “every man who sat at that board [during the Versailles negotiations] held that the right of revolution was sacred and must not be interfered with.”74 Thus, while Article 11 might in theory be used to condemn revolutionary peoples as disturbing to world peace, in practice there wouldn’t be any kind of danger because
71 “If war should break out in Ireland, if a revolution should start and Ireland should declare war upon England, what possible provision could be called into play to prohibit action of the council under article 11?” Borah in Senate, June 30, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 2078.
72 Borah in Senate, June 30, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 2080. 73 Borah in Senate, June 30, 1919, CR: 66: 1, p. 2080.
