1 gen 1919 anni - Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles

Descrizione:

treaty of versailles: The 1919 treaty that ended World War I. The agreement redrew the map of the world, assigned Germany sole responsibility for the war, and saddled it with a debt of $33 billion in war damages. Its long-term impact around the globe — including the creation of British and French imperial “mandates” — was catastrophic.

The peace conference included ten thousand representatives from around the globe, but leaders of France, Britain, and the United States dominated the proceedings. When Japan’s delegation proposed a declaration for equal treatment of all races, the Allies rejected it. Similarly, the Allies ignored a global Pan-African Congress, organized by W. E. B. Du Bois and other black leaders, and snubbed Arab representatives even though they had been key military allies during the war. Wilson, like his British and French counterparts, could not imagine allowing colonized peoples of color to have an equal place at the table.

The British and French delegations further limited the talks by excluding two key players: Russia, because they distrusted its communist leaders, and Germany, because they planned to dictate terms to their defeated foe. Even Italy’s prime minister — included at first among the influential “Big Four” because in 1915 Italy had switched to the Allied side — withdrew from the conference, aggrieved at the way British and French leaders marginalized him. For Wilson’s “peace among equals,” it was a terrible start.

Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain and Premier Georges Clemenceau of France imposed harsh punishments on Germany. Unbeknownst to others at the time, they had already made secret agreements to divide up Germany’s African colonies and take them as spoils of war. At Versailles, they also forced the defeated nation to pay a staggering $33 billion in reparations and surrender coal supplies, merchant ships, valuable patents, and even territory along the French border. These terms caused keen resentment and economic hardship in Germany, and over the following two decades they helped lead to World War II.

Despite these conditions, Wilson managed to influence the Treaty of Versailles in important ways. He intervened repeatedly to soften conditions imposed on Germany. In accordance with the Fourteen Points, he worked with the other Allies to fashion nine new nations, stretching from the Baltic to the Mediterranean (Map 20.4 and Map 20.5). These were intended as a buffer to protect Western Europe from communist Russia; the plan also embodied Wilson’s principle of self-determination for European states. Elsewhere in the world, the Allies dismantled their enemies’ empires but did not create independent nations, keeping colonized people subordinate to European power. France, for example, refused to give up its long-standing occupation of Indochina; Clemenceau’s snub of future Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who sought representation at Versailles, had grave long-term consequences for both France and the United States.

The establishment of a British mandate in Palestine (now Israel) also proved crucial. During the war, British foreign secretary Sir Arthur Balfour had stated that his country would work to establish there a “national home for the Jewish people,” with the condition that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Under the British mandate, thousands of Jews moved to Palestine and purchased land, in some cases evicting Palestinian tenants. As early as 1920, riots erupted between Jews and Palestinians — a situation that, even before World War II, escalated beyond British control.

The Versailles treaty thus created conditions for horrific future bloodshed, and it must be judged one of history’s great catastrophes. Balfour astutely described Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson as “all-powerful, all-ignorant men, sitting there and carving up continents.” Wilson, however, remained optimistic as he returned home, even though his health was beginning to fail. The president hoped the new League of Nations, authorized by the treaty, would moderate the settlement and secure peaceful resolutions of other disputes. For this to occur, U.S. participation was crucial.\

The outlook for U.S. ratification was not promising. Though major opinion makers and religious denominations supported the treaty, openly hostile Republicans held a majority in the Senate. One group, called the “irreconcilables,” consisted of western progressive Republicans such as Hiram Johnson of California and Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, who opposed U.S. involvement in European affairs. They had the popular support of many Americans, including Irish and German immigrants, who believed the League would not be truly independent but would serve as a diplomatic and political tool for the powerful British empire. Another group, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, worried that Article X — the provision for collective security — would prevent the United States from pursuing an independent foreign policy. Was the nation, Lodge asked, “willing to have the youth of America ordered to war” by an international body?

Some Republican opponents of the treaty were isolationists who wanted to limit U.S. military engagement overseas. Others, like Lodge, strongly favored U.S. expansion and advancement of U.S. overseas interests, both economically and militarily, including interventions in Latin America. His primary concern was that the League of Nations would have the power to call up U.S. troops to protect a vulnerable nation, and might send them to war without approval from U.S. Congress.

Senators proposed an array of amendments, but Wilson refused to accept any of them, especially to placate Lodge, a hated rival. “I shall consent to nothing,” the president told the French ambassador. “The Senate must take its medicine.” To mobilize support, Wilson embarked on an exhausting speaking tour. His impassioned defense of the League of Nations brought audiences to tears, but the strain proved too much for the president. While visiting Colorado in September 1919, Wilson collapsed. A week later, back in Washington, he suffered a stroke that left one side of his body paralyzed.

Wilson still urged Democratic senators to reject all Republican amendments. Lodge brought the treaty to the floor with a set of reservations attached. When it came up for a vote in November 1919, it failed to win the required two-thirds majority. A second attempt, in March 1920, fell seven votes short, as a few Democratic senators joined Republicans in voting against it. The treaty was dead, and so was Wilson’s leadership. The president never fully recovered from his stroke. During the last eighteen months of his administration, the government drifted as Wilson’s wife, his physician, and various cabinet members secretly took charge.

The United States never ratified the Versailles treaty or joined the League of Nations. Though 63 governments joined the new League, headquartered in Geneva, the United States’s absence hampered their work. League members also had to grapple with the issues the U.S. Senate had raised: Canadian delegates, for example, repeatedly sought to weaken the League’s collective security provisions, because they feared the League might drag Canada into another European war. (Ironically, the League’s weakness had the same result: in the 1930s, brazen acts of aggression by Germany, Italy, and Japan exposed the League’s inability to protect its members and created the conditions for World War II.) When Wilson died in 1924, his dream of a just and peaceful international order lay in ruins.

The impact of World War I on future generations can hardly be overstated. Despite bids for power by Britain and France, Europe’s hold on its colonial empires never recovered. The United States appeared to turn its back on the world when it rejected the Versailles treaty. But in laying claim to Hawaii and the Philippines, asserting power in Latin America, and intervening in Asia, the United States had already entangled itself deeply in global affairs. By 1918, the nation had gained too much diplomatic clout — and was too dependent on overseas trade — for isolation to be a realistic long-term option. Future U.S. policymakers, as leaders of a rising world power, inherited many of the problems that resulted from Versailles, not only in Europe but in Palestine, Vietnam, and other locales.

On the home front, the shorter-term effects of World War I were no less dramatic. Wartime jobs and prosperity ushered in an era of exuberant consumerism, while the achievements of women’s voting rights seemed to presage a new progressive era. But as peace returned, it became clear that the war had not advanced reform. Rather than embracing government activism, Americans of the 1920s proved eager to relinquish it.

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