From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (71 page)

During the next two months, the treaty went down to defeat. The speaking tour had been a personal success in many ways, but it changed nothing in the Senate. Wilson could barely function. Although his wife and his physician shielded him from problems and hid from the government and
the nation the extent of his incapacity, he could not provide leadership during the most critical stage of one of the most important political struggles in U.S. history. His illness may have made him less disposed to compromise.
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Ironically, although an overwhelming majority of senators favored a League in some form, friend and foe combined to keep the United States out. While Wilson was on tour, the Foreign Relations Committee submitted a majority report proposing forty-five amendments and four reservations. Democrats and mild reservationists defeated the amendments, but the votes were close, suggesting the difficulties ahead. In October, Lodge reported the treaty with fourteen reservations—the number was not coincidental! Ratification would depend on acceptance by three of the four Allied powers. The most significant reservations excluded the Monroe Doctrine and domestic issues from League jurisdiction, allowed member nations to withdraw, and severely restricted U.S. obligations under Article X. The United States would accept no obligation to defend the territorial integrity or political independence of any country. United States naval or military forces could not be deployed without the explicit approval of Congress. The reservation effectively gutted the key collective security provision. It exceeded what the mild reservationists wanted, but they went along rather than bolt the party on a crucial issue.
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The threat of defeat raised the possibility of some sort of compromise, but Wilson refused to go along. Hitchcock approached him on the eve of the vote and found him unmoveable. He insisted that Article X—what he had called the "king pin of the whole structure"—was essential to the concept of collective security. Without it, there would be no new world order, only a reversion to old-style power politics. He vowed that if the treaty passed with reservations, he would kill it by pocket veto. He seemed almost to welcome defeat. The onus would be squarely on Lodge and the Republicans. Believing that the public still supported him, Wilson speculated that the 1920 election could then be made a "great and solemn referendum" on a noble cause. At times during these weeks, he even toyed with running for a third term. He seemed to have lost touch with the political mood of the nation, even with reality.
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Wilson's adamancy sealed the fate of the treaty. Before packed chambers, on November 18 and 19, among the most dramatic days in the Senate's storied history, thirty-four Republicans and four Democrats voted for
the treaty
with
reservations. The remaining Democrats combined with the Irreconcilables for fifty-five votes against. In a second roll call shortly after, the Irreconcilables joined with the strong reservationists to defeat the treaty as Wilson had presented it, 38 for, 53 against.
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The shock of outright defeat generated pressures in Congress and the country for compromise, but they came to nothing. Wilson had begun to recover from the stroke, but his improvement did not bring a return to full leadership or a willingness to compromise. He saw his opponents as seeking to destroy his internationalist program. The qualified commitment they proposed was completely unacceptable to him. A young and healthy Wilson might have salvaged something of his brainchild, but the first stages of recuperation seem to have heightened his defiance. Denouncing the opposition as "nullifiers," he vowed he would "make no compromise or concession of any kind," leaving with Republicans "undivided responsibility" for the fate of the treaty. In a letter to Hitchcock released to the press on March 8, he insisted that any reservation that weakened Article X "cuts at the very heart and life of the Covenant itself," that any agreement that did not guarantee the independence of members was a "futile scrap of paper."
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The mild reservationists pressed Lodge to compromise, but the Irreconcilables threatened to leave the party and the Massachusetts senator held firm. Some Democrats eventually broke with Wilson, preferring a modified treaty to none at all, but it was not enough. When the final vote was taken on March 19, 1920, the eight dissident Democrats and reservationist Republicans failed by a mere seven votes to get the two-thirds majority needed to pass the treaty with Lodge's reservations.
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At the time and since, blame has been variously cast for the outcome of 1919–20. Lodge and other Republicans have been charged with rabid partisanship and a deep-seated personal animus that fueled a determination to embarrass Wilson. It can be argued, on the other hand, that they were simply doing the job the political system assigned to the "loyal" opposition and that the Lodge reservations were necessary to protect national sovereignty. The Democrats have been criticized for standing firmly—and foolishly—with their ailing leader, instead of working with Republicans to gain a modified commitment to the League of Nations. Wilson himself has been accused of the "supreme infanticide," slaying his own brainchild through his stubborn refusal to deal with the opposition.
There is much truth here also, although as his defenders have pointed out, he passionately believed that the treaty as he had crafted it was the only way to mend a broken world. There has also been much speculation about the way his mental and physical health influenced his actions of 1919–20, even a psychoanalytic study by no less than Sigmund Freud. The ultimate reason appears much more fundamental. Throughout his career and especially in the Great War, Wilson acted with rare boldness in seeking to reshape a war-torn world and educate Americans to a new leadership role. His aspirations are understandable given the gruesome destruction caused by the war. What he sought may indeed have been necessary to avert the disaster that lay ahead. Still, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he aimed too high. In Paris, his European counterparts took the Fourteen Points apart. Americans were simply not ready to undertake the huge break from tradition and assume the sort of commitments he asked of them.
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The defeat of Wilson's handiwork leaves haunting if ultimately unanswerable questions. The Wilson of 1919–20 believed that vital principles were at stake in the struggle with Lodge and that compromise would render the League of Nations all but useless. Would a more robust and healthy Wilson—the artful politician of his first term—have built more solid support for his proposals or found a middle ground that would have made possible Senate approval of the treaty and U.S. entry into the League of Nations? Could a modified League with U.S. participation have changed the history of the next two decades?

Whatever the answers to these questions, it is strikingly clear that the Great War and Woodrow Wilson transformed U.S. foreign policy dramatically. As a result of the war, the United States became a major player in world politics and economics. The more Europe indulged in self-destruction, the greater America's relative power. Americans still did not see themselves as threatened by events beyond their shores and hence remained unwilling to take on the sort of commitments Wilson asked of them. But they began to recognize their changing position in the international system. In trying to establish for his nation a leadership role,
Wilson articulated a set of principles that in various forms would guide U.S. foreign policy for years to come. The venerable Elihu Root observed in 1922 that Americans had "learned more about international relations within the past eight years than they had learned in the preceding eighty years." And they were "only at the beginning of the task," he presciently added.
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Often dismissed as an isolationist backwater, the era of the 1920s in fact defies simple explanation. It lacks an overarching theme and a dominant, Wilson-like figure. United States foreign policy derived from numerous complex and sometimes conflicting pressures, producing a bundle of seeming contradictions. The United States was without question the world's top economic power, but it lacked commensurate military power and was not always inclined or able to use its economic might effectively. Republican officials went far beyond their predecessors in terms of involvement in world problems. The United States assumed a level of leadership quite unprecedented in its history. Still in the absence of a compelling external threat and in light of Wilson's recent experience, the Republican leaders did not defy the nation's long-standing tradition against "entangling" alliances and did not embrace collective security. Wherever possible, they used the private sector to implement solutions developed in Washington. The Republicans might, perhaps should, have done more, especially in the economic realm, but it would have been difficult for them to do so. And there is no guarantee that more decisive action could have averted the economic and political disasters that lay ahead. The 1920s must therefore be considered on their own terms. Involvement without commitment seems the best way to sum up the U.S. approach to the world during that period. The nation vigorously promoted its interests while scrupulously guarding against entanglements. This approach brought remarkable short-term successes that concealed major long-term failures.
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In a strange, almost surreal way, despite the massive bloodletting of 1914–18, the postwar world remained Eurocentric. To be sure, Western Europe was drastically weakened, but its potential challengers, the United
States and Japan, were focused on regional hegemony, and Russia was devastated by war and revolution. Thus during the 1920s, European issues continued to dominate the agenda of world politics. Britain and France maintained leadership roles through traditional diplomacy and the newly formed League of Nations. In a supreme irony, despite the war and Wilsonian rhetoric of self-determination, through the League mandate system the area under imperial control actually increased during the postwar years.

The appearances of Eurocentricity concealed fundamental changes in the international system that left Europe much weaker and less stable. The continent had suffered incalculable destruction. The final casualty list from assorted war-related causes may have been as high as sixty million people, nearly half of them in Russia, with France, Italy, and Germany also suffering huge losses. The economic costs have been estimated as high as $260 billion. Manufacturing and agricultural production dropped sharply in all European nations. The financing of the war through borrowing left massive indebtedness, shifting the center of world financial power from London to New York, undermining the foundations of the world economy, and eventually provoking an economic and political crisis of the first magnitude. The psychological and emotional costs were equally high. The war challenged Europeans' faith in progress and certainty of their own superiority. In part also as a result of the war, mass public opinion assumed a greater role in the diplomatic process, and Europe in the postwar era was riven by deep-seated and volatile passions. Much of the public in the Western democracies recoiled against the horrible suffering of the Great War, producing various forms of escapism. Others, especially those dissatisfied with the results, seethed with anger and lusted for revenge. Among mass publics throughout Europe, ideologies of the extreme right and left gained numerous adherents.

War always leaves difficult problems, and this was especially true in postwar Europe. Despite substantial physical destruction and territorial losses, Germany remained potentially a great power. The Versailles Treaty hemmed in the loser with various restrictions and saddled it with substantial reparations, leaving great resentment and frustration. For many Germans, the essential goal was to restore the fatherland to its rightful place in Europe, exactly what France most feared and sought desperately to prevent. The greatest changes came in eastern and central Europe where the Austro-Hungarian empire gave way to a number of newly independent nations. However admirable their intentions, the peacemakers could not make these new nations ethnically homogeneous, thus
building into them inherent conflicts and weaknesses, creating vulnerable borders, and inviting great power interference.
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In the colonial areas, the Great War accelerated the nationalist revolts that after a second world war would initiate the process of decolonization. The wartime need for people and resources put huge strains on colonial populations and economies, disrupting normal patterns of life and producing need for repayment of sacrifices in blood and treasure. Wilsonian and Leninist rhetoric of self-determination encouraged local nationalisms, and the obvious weakening of the European powers spurred thoughts of revolt. Throughout Asia and the Middle East, nationalist groups formed to demand political and economic concessions. The colonial powers' brutal repression of postwar revolts exposed as sham their talk of justice, fueling rage that further boosted nationalism. The empires remained intact during the 1920s, but growing unrest there distracted European leaders from addressing European problems and caused divisions among the powers themselves.
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Technology continued to shrink the world and change the way people lived and nations interacted with each other. Global application of cable, telephone, and radio dramatically improved communications, providing new means to bring people together. In March 1926, the first news story was transmitted from London to New York by trans-Atlantic telephone—"space rolled up like a cloud," one newspaper proclaimed.
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In the United States, especially, the automobile drastically altered popular lifestyles. By creating insatiable demands for oil and rubber, it also raised new economic and foreign policy concerns. Nothing struck the imagination of people worldwide like Charles Lindbergh's stunning nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927. The effect, the aviator himself observed, was "like a match lighting a bonfire." The wonders of modern communication quickly spread to the far corners of the globe news of the wonders of modern transportation, sparking wild celebrations and exuberant flights of rhetoric. An Indian periodical claimed that Lindbergh's triumph was "a matter of glory, not only for his countrymen, but the entire human race." The flight was widely viewed as a sign of progress, proving with what "proud contempt man can defy the adverse forces of nature." It was hailed for uniting "the hearts of all men everywhere." Less commented
on in the exultation of the moment was the potential military application of what would soon come to be called air power.
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