William Borah and the League of Nations Debate
One of the Senate's leading opponents of United States participation in the League of Nations, Idaho's William Borah helped defeat Woodrow Wilson's vision of world peace.
Creation of the League of Nations following the end of World War I was the cornerstone of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Believing that the League would stop future aggressions, Wilson stated in Denver (1919), “My clients are the children; my clients are the next generation…” But the United States Senate refused to ratify the Covenant of the League. While the Republican majority balked at fettering the US to “all kinds of entangling obligations and conditions with European Affairs,” [1] it was Idaho’s William Borah who became the most vocal critic.
Opposition to the League
The Republicans had gained control of the Senate by the time the League was introduced in the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge despised Wilson and resented the fact that the President had not taken any Republicans with him to the Versailles Peace Conference. Former President Teddy Roosevelt hated the League, agreeing with Borah, who had written him before he died in January 1919, that the League would place the US in the “storm center of European politics.”
According to Borah, the Great War would not have been prevented had a league existed before 1914. Of particular concern was Article 10 of the Treaty that obligated member states to guarantee “territorial integrity.” Would this mean that the US might be called upon to defend colonial empires? To what extent was United States’ sovereignty at stake? If we joined the League, should we then grant the Philippines independence?
Borah and other Senators also believed that Britain and France were not acting in the spirit of the proposed League, absorbing parts of defeated Germany’s empire and redrawing the map of Europe. Britain was, at the time, brutally addressing an independence movement in Ireland. Borah, who believed that the US should recognize the government of Soviet Russia, wondered how the League would treat Russia.
Referring to interventions in Russia by the Allied powers at the end of the war, Borah questioned if such actions would become common place if the United States joined the League. [2] Finally, Borah postulated that Britain and France were engaging in revenge in terms of the total peace process: “I am in favor of giving Germany…a fair opportunity in the commercial and industrial world…The trouble of it is that most of the people who want them to pay want to put them in a position where they cannot pay.” [3]
Fate of the League
Despite the efforts of the “reservationists” in making the treaty more palatable, the final vote on March 19th, 1920 was to reject US participation. Although it became an issue in the 1920 presidential election, Americans responded to a “return to normalcy” and embraced isolationist policies. One war had been enough.
The League did not stop wars. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Haile Selassie appealed to the League without result. Japan withdrew from the League before launching its invasion of China. Finally, the League was unable to stop Hitler’s European conquests, prompting Russia’s Stalin to make a separate agreement with the Nazi government before which the Soviet leader supposedly remarked that he would not pull “their [Britain and France] chestnuts out of the fire.”
Summary
Taking his case to the people, Wilson asked Americans to, “Stop for a moment to think about the next war, if there should be one.” Had the United States joined the League in 1919 or 1920, would it have been able to preserve a lasting peace and identify the threat of rising fascism in time to avert the next war? Probably not. In debating the League, Senator Lawrence Sherman of Illinois may have been correct when he stated that, “history would forget the reign of Caligula in the excesses and follies of the American government operated under the League of Nations…”
[1] Congressional Record, 65th Congress, 3rd Session, 2425.
[2] Congressional Record, 65th Congress, 3rd Session, 2261.
[3] New York Times, November 12, 1918.
Modern US History is owned by Michael Streich. Permission to republish William Borah and the League of Nations Debate in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment