The Senate Rejects the League of Nations 633a mastery of parliamentary procedure, and, as chair-
man of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a
great deal of power. Although not an isolationist, he
had little faith in the League. He also had a profound
distrust of Democrats, especially Wilson, whom he
considered a hypocrite and a coward. The president’s
pious idealism left him cold. While perfectly ready to
see the country participate actively in world affairs,
Lodge insisted that its right to determine its own best
interests in every situation be preserved. He had been
a senator since 1893 and an admirer of senatorial
independence since early manhood. When a
Democratic president tried to ram the Versailles
Treaty down the Senate’s throat, he fought him with
every weapon he could muster.
Lodge belonged to the strong reservationist fac-
tion. His own proposals, known as the Lodge
Reservations, fourteen in number to match Wilson’s
Fourteen Points, limited U.S. obligations to the
League and stated in unmistakable terms the right of
Congress to decide when to honor these obligations.
Some of the reservations were mere quibbles.
Others, such as the provision that the United States
would not endorse Japan’s seizure of Chinese terri-
tory, were included mainly to embarrass Wilson by
pointing out compromises he had made at Versailles.
The most important reservation applied to Article
Ten of the League covenant, which committed signa-
tories to protect the political independence and terri-
torial integrity of all member nations. Wilson had
rightly called Article Ten “the heart of the
Covenant.” One of Lodge’s reservations made it
inoperable so far as the United States was concerned
“unless in any particular case the Congress... shall
by act or joint resolution so provide.”
Lodge performed brilliantly, if somewhat
unscrupulously, in uniting the three Republican fac-
tions behind his reservations. He got the irreconcil-
ables to agree to them by conceding their right to
vote against the final version in any event, and he
held the mild reservationists in line by modifying
some of his demands and stressing the importance of
party unity. Reservations—as distinct from amend-
ments—would not have to win the formal approval
of other League members. In addition, the Lodge
proposals dealt forthrightly with the problem of rec-
onciling traditional concepts of national sovereignty
with the new idea of world cooperation. Supporters
of the League could accept them without sacrifice of
principle. Wilson, however, refused to agree.
“Accept the Treaty with the Lodge reservations?”
the president snorted when a friendly senator
warned him that he must accept a compromise.
“Never! Never!”
This foolish intransigence seems almost incom-
prehensible in a man of Wilson’s intelligence and
political experience. In part his hatred of Lodge
accounts for it, in part his faith in his League. His
physical condition in 1919 also played a role. At Paris
he had suffered a violent attack of indigestion that was
probably a symptom of a minor stroke. Thereafter,
many observers noted small changes in his personality,
particularly increased stubbornness and a loss of good
judgment. Instead of making concessions, the presi-
dent set out early in September on a nationwide
speaking crusade to rally support for the League. In
three weeks, Wilson traveled some 10,000 miles by
train and gave forty speeches, some of them brilliant.
But they had little effect on senatorial opinion, and
the effort drained his last physical reserves. On
September 25, after an address in Pueblo, Colorado,
he collapsed. The rest of the trip had to be canceled. A
few days later, in Washington, he suffered a severe
stroke that partially paralyzed his left side.
For nearly two months the president was almost
totally cut off from affairs of state, leaving supporters
of the League leaderless while Lodge maneuvered the
reservations through the Senate. Gradually, popular
attitudes toward the League shifted. Organized groups
of Italian, Irish, and German Americans, angered by
what they considered unfair treatment of their native
lands in the Versailles Treaty, clamored for outright
rejection. The arguments of the irreconcilables per-
suaded many citizens that Wilson had made too sharp a
break with America’s isolationist past and that the
Lodge Reservations were therefore necessary. Other
issues connected with the reconversion of society to a
peacetime basis increasingly occupied the public mind.Despite Wilson’s serving as mother hen, the League of Nations
never hatched.