After the Great War: Isolationism and the Treaty of Versailles

AFTER THE GREAT WAR: ISOLATIONISM AND THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES

The Stage Is Set

As the 1920s began, the United States still struggled to bring World War I to an official end. Although the actual fighting had ceased in November 1918 and peace negotiations had been concluded during the spring of 1919, the U.S. Senate had not ratified the Treaty of Versailles—the peace agreement the Allies forced on a defeated Germany. The Senate's failure to ratify the treaty was testimony to bitter divisions over the controversial peace agreement. President Woodrow Wilson, who had negotiated the treaty, was paralyzed, having suffered two debilitating strokes in late 1919, and was unable to spearhead a campaign for its passage. The fate of the treaty rested with a divided Senate, which had failed to produce the two-thirds majority needed for ratification on its first vote, taken on 19 November 1919.

Wilson's Plan

Wilson had supported the entry of the United States into the European war primarily in the hope of influencing the peace that followed. Yet in January 1919, when he faced his allies—Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, and Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy—at the peace conference in Paris, he learned that they had a vision of a peace radically different from his own. The European leaders planned to reap the traditional spoils of war and punish the perceived aggressor, Germany. Wilson wanted to implement national self-determination, a principle asserted in the president's well-known Fourteen Points, his list of postwar goals. Confronted with overwhelming opposition to his peace plans, Wilson was compelled by necessity to compromise many of his Fourteen Points. "Open diplomacy" gave way to closed-door negotiations. Instead of Wilson's "peace without victory," the treaty made Germany the villain with a "guilt clause," and oppressive reparations accompanied this judgment. Wilson yielded on these and other points to retain his most cherished goal—the League of Nations. With the formation of this international organization committed to settling future disputes among nations, Wilson believed he could accept a less-than-perfect peace. He was depending on the League of Nations to compensate for the shortcomings of the treaty.

Republican Victory of 1918

In the 1918 midterm elections that preceded his negotiations in Paris, President Wilson campaigned for fellow Democrats, hoping to win a mandate for the League of Nations before traveling to Europe, but his party lost. Instead of an endorsement of Wilson's foreign policy, the American electorate handed the Democratic president two Republican-controlled houses of Congress. The Republican triumph signaled serious trouble for Wilson and the League of Nations. Resentful of Wilson's wartime powers and his growing international activism, Republicans were determined to curb his power by preventing American participation in the League of Nations that Wilson worked so hard to create.

Degrees of Dissent

Yet Republicans were not united in their opposition to the treaty or American participation in the League of Nations. Republican dissenters were roughly divided into three groups: "irreconcilables," "mild reservationists," or "strong reservationists." Irreconcilables were extreme isolationists philosophically opposed to any international involvement. By contrast, mild reservationists stood much closer to Wilson's position, agreeing with the underlying principle of the organization but expressing reservations about Article X of the League of Nations Covenant, a controversial section that committed the United States to collective security. Between these two groups was the majority faction, the strong reservationists. These senators, led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, exhibited determination to have the League of Nations on their terms or not have it at all.

Lodge's Opposition

Republican victories in 1918 positioned Lodge, Wilson's most bitter critic, to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a committee he quickly packed with his supporters. Zealous partisanship motivated Lodge to oppose ratification of the treaty in order to prevent Wilson and Democrats from taking credit for it in the November election. Combining his partisan opposition to Wilson with a lifelong passion to defend American freedom of action in foreign affairs, Lodge waged a fierce campaign against Wilson's version of the peace. He led the Foreign Relations Committee to adopt forty-five amendments to the treaty, which he later condensed to fourteen—mimicking Wilson's Fourteen Points. During this struggle over the treaty Wilson suffered his paralyzing strokes. In November 1919, when the Senate voted on the treaty as amended by Lodge's committee, Democrats dutifully opposed the treaty as Wilson had instructed. The combined opposition of Democrats and Republican "irreconcilables" defeated this version of the treaty.

Wilson's Dream Dies

Supporters of the treaty earnestly looked for ways to bridge the differences among the factions and ratify an acceptable treaty. Public opinion grew weary of Senate intransigence. Lodge became the object of much criticism even from fellow Republicans. Yet Wilson and Lodge both remained immovable. The final vote on the treaty with Lodge's amendments came 19 March 1920. This time twenty-one Democrats abandoned Wilson's extreme position and voted for this version of the treaty. Forty-nine senators, a bare majority, voted for passage, but ratification required a two-thirds vote, and the Senate was seven votes short of that goal. Wilson's dreams of postwar peace died with the Senate's rejection of the treaty. The United States never signed the Treaty of Versailles or joined the League of Nations.

THE DAWES PLAN

As Woodrow Wilson had feared, a punitive peace against Germany that required heavy reparations payments proved counterproductive for general European postwar economic recovery, Crippled by runaway inflation and frustrated by its debt burden, Germany stopped paying reparations in 1923. Without German reparations, France, Great Britain, Italy, and other nations were unable to repay their war debts to the United States. The United States compounded the international economic crisis with the highest protective tariff ever: the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, named for its sponsors—Republican representative Joseph Fordney of Michigan and Republican senator Porter McCumber of North Dakota. With limited access to American markets, European nations experienced difficulty raising the capital needed to repay wartime loans.

Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes, preferring an economic to a political solution, invited Charles G. Dawes, a Chicago banker, to represent the United States as head of an international "Committee of Experts to analyze European economic instability and to propose a solution to the current crisis. The Dawes Committee, as it became known, devised an economic plan that addressed the escalating international debt crisis. Completed in April 1924, the Dawes Plan scaled down German reparations payments and called on American bankers to make substantial loans to Germany in order to stabilize its currency and help it meet its reparations obligations to the Allied nations, who in turn would use the money to repay their war debts to the United States. The plan worked as designed for five years. The European press hailed Dawes's committee as "the saviors of civilization. Later that year the Republicans selected Dawes to run as their vice presidential candidate with President Calvin Coolidge. In 1925 Dawes won the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the plan.

Source:

Bascom N. Timmons, Portrait of an American: Charles G. Dawes (New York: Holt, 1953).

Source:

Ralph Stone, The Irreconcilables: The Fight Against the League of Nations (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970).