United States

In his general points Wilson demanded an end to the old diplomacy that had led to wars in the past. He proposed open diplomacy instead of entangling alliances, and he called for freedom of the seas, an impartial settlement of colonial claims, general disarmament, removal of artificial trade barriers, and, most important, a league of nations to promote peace and protect the territorial integrity and independence of its members. On specific issues he demanded, among other things, the restoration of a Belgium ravaged by the Germans; sympathetic treatment of the Russians, then involved in a civil war; establishment of an independent Poland; the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France; and autonomy or self-determination for the subject peoples of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. A breathtaking pronouncement, the Fourteen Points gave new hope to millions of liberals and moderate socialists who were fighting for a new international order based upon peace and justice.

The Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty

With their armies reeling under the weight of a combined Allied and American assault, the Germans appealed to Wilson in October 1918 for an armistice based on the Fourteen Points and other presidential pronouncements. The Allies agreed to conclude peace on this basis, except that the British entered a reservation about freedom of the seas, and Wilson agreed to an Anglo-French demand that the Germans be required to make reparation for damages to civilian property.

U.S. 27th Infantry Division; end of World War IThe U.S. 27th Infantry Division passing through the Victory Arch in New York City in celebration of the end of World War I, March 25, 1919.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

(Left to right) The “Big Four”: David Lloyd George of Britain, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Woodrow Wilson of the United States, the principal architects of the Treaty of Versailles.National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Wilson led the U.S. delegation and a large group of experts to the peace conference, which opened in Paris in January 1919. He fought heroically for his Fourteen Points against the Allied leaders—David Lloyd George of Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy—who, under heavy pressure from their own constituencies, were determined to divide the territories of the vanquished and make Germany pay the full cost of the war. Wilson made a number of compromises that violated the spirit if not the letter of the Fourteen Points, including the imposition of an indefinitely large reparations bill upon Germany. Moreover, the Allies had intervened in the Russian Civil War against the dominant revolutionary socialist faction, the Bolsheviks, and Wilson had halfheartedly cooperated with the Allies by dispatching small numbers of troops to northern Russia, to protect military supplies against the advancing Germans, and to Siberia, mainly to keep an eye on the Japanese, who had sent a large force there. But Wilson won many more of his Fourteen Points than he lost; his greatest victories were to prevent the dismemberment of Germany in the west and further intervention in Russia and, most important, to obtain the incorporation of the Covenant of the League of Nations into the Versailles Treaty. He was confident that the League, under American leadership, would soon rectify the injustices of the treaty.

The fight over the treaty and the election of 1920

Public opinion in the United States seemed strongly in favour of quick ratification of the Versailles Treaty when the president presented that document to the Senate in July 1919. Traditional isolationist sentiment was beginning to revive, however, and a small minority of 16 senators, irreconcilably opposed to U.S. membership in the League, vowed to oppose the treaty to the bitter end. In addition, a crucial controversy developed between the president and a majority of the Republican senators, led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Lodge insisted upon adding 14 reservations to the treaty. The second reservation declared that the United States assumed no obligations under Article X of the Covenant, which guaranteed the integrity and independence of members of the League; moreover it said that the president could not use the armed forces to support the Covenant without the explicit consent of Congress.

Lodge, Henry CabotHenry Cabot Lodge, c. 1898.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: cph.3b25369)