There is no greater gift in international diplomacy than sustainable peace between nations; especially between potentially combative ones. However, in negotiating peace and sustainable relations, it stands to reason that the sovereignty of a nation must always remain protected and never subjected by fiat to an international body. The United States Constitution, in Article II Section 2, made the ratification process for treaties so difficult that it is almost shy of impossible. Any proposed treaty by the President of the United States must gain the consensus of at least two-thirds majority in the Senate before ratification can proceed. In the year 1920, during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson after the cessation of the Great War, the theory of the immense difficulty to get a treaty ratified would be realized in the Senate as President Wilson fought to establish the Treaty of Versailles (which subverted U.S. law under international obligations) as the law of the land. After the intense legislative battle that took place between the Republicans and Democrats over this treaty, it is clear that the eventual failure of the Treaty of Versailles to be made U.S. law was the result of President Wilson’s demagogic refusal to compromise with Congress on ensuring the sovereignty of the United States. Had it not been for the non-negotiable reservations of Senator Henry Lodge [R-MA], which was used as a contingency for Republican support for the agreement, it is most likely that the sovereignty of our nation would have been severely compromised. The Framers of the Constitution were adamant about protecting American sovereignty from dictation by any other nation or governing authority other than what was outlined within the Constitution, and the staunch progressive antics of President Wilson violated this cardinal ethic in trying to establish a treaty that nearly negated that sacred sovereignty.

On March 20, 1920, after an intense legislative battle, the Senate voted down the Treaty of Versailles for the second time along with the new resolution that Senator Cabot Lodge’s 12 reservations would be included in the final agreement. According to a New York Times article outlining the event at that time, the final tally was 45 to 35, forcing the Senate to adopt a resolution that formally returned the treaty to President Woodrow Wilson’s desk to notify him of the ratification’s failure.[1] The entire predication for the conflict itself centered on provisions within the Treaty of Versailles in Article 10 which would potentially force the United States into warfare when member countries are being attacked with or without congressional approval. The Constitution is very clear about Congress’ authority in declaring war, and subjecting the sovereignty of Constitutional law to international obligation was the coup de grace against Republican support. Senator Lodge, however, was never opposed to the ratification of the League of Nations outlined in the treaty, but to the avenue by which the U.S. joined The League, which in its original format willfully slicing out portions of the Constitution to give the president and the international body broad authority to unilaterally declare war.[2]

The lambasting of the balance-of-powers system by President Wilson upon rejection of his treaty was a testament to his globalist sentiments. The American people were already imbued with nativism upon the disastrous outcome of the Great War and rejected the idea of any obligation that would yank the United States into similar conflicts, much less by the determination of an international governing body. President Wilson’s rhetoric seemed to reinforce these reservations of the populace against internationalism and world politics.[3]

This debacle proved the danger of surrendering sovereignty of Congress’ war-making powers to the president, as the balance of power between Congress and the Presidency would essentially be curtailed should the Treaty of Versailles have been signed into law in its then current state. The New York Times immediately lunged on the ratification result by blaming “isolationism” for the treaty’s failure. However, in actuality, whatever good may have come from the treaty died with President Wilson and his Democrat loyalists in Congress because of their immediate refusal for bipartisanship with the Republicans on preserving American sovereignty in the treaty process. Article 10, which was perhaps the most controversial portion of the treaty, ironically was the “heart” of the entire agreement. The rhetoric used in President Wilson’s Western Tour to promote the treaty, however, drew focus on Article XI as being the foundation for the agreement, despite insisting elsewhere that the controversial Article 10 was the “heart” of the entire Covenant (This could have been a deflection away from Article 10’s controversy). As then Senator Irvine Lenroot [R-WI] critiqued as quoted by TheNew York Times in 1920, “The President’s illness has affected either his recollection or his judgment… Has President Wilson changed his mind or has his mind changed him?” It would make sense, then, why Senator Lenroot would accuse the President of being an anti-American internationalist that is more willing to let the treaty die than consent to the bipartisan refusal of the reserved Democrats and Republicans to send American forces by international obligation into foreign conflicts.[4]

Article 10 of the Treaty of Versailles particularly states, “The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League. In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled”.[5]

It is then easy to see from this how such an obligation infringes upon the sovereignty of member states, and why the Lodge Reservations were pertinent to protecting the United States from such provisions. The treaty-making process is an exceptionally delicate one and cannot be taken lightly nor looked over without due diligence. As the Harvard Law Review confirms, “With treaties potentially supplanting federal and state governmental authority, the President and Senate should carefully scrutinize all treaties, as a policy matter. We must jealously guard the separation of powers and state sovereignty if we are to preserve the constitutional structure our Framers gave us”.[6] This cardinal ethic was not achieved in the Wilson administration.

Contrast this with the United Nations Charter, signed into U.S. law 20 years after the Treaty of Versailles in July 28, 1945, which in Article 2 highlights in section 1 that “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members” and in section 7 that “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter…”.[7] The clear difference between the two international agreements is that unlike the League of Nations, the United Nations established the respect of individual state sovereignty in its Charter and that issues within domestic jurisdictions were not to be infringed upon by the international body, including jurisdictional authority of the state over its own war policies.

Not only was the League of Nations in its original format an infringement upon the sovereignty of the state, but it was virtually ineffective in halting the occurrence of future conflicts; most notably World War II. Under Article 8 of the treaty, all member states were required to unilaterally reduce their military strength in accordance with estimates determined by the League Council, but this did not at all inhibit Germany from withdrawing from the League in the 1930s and unleashing military havoc on Europe.[8] As a matter of fact, the vindictive terms of surrender imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles after World War I hyper-stimulated nationalist reactions in Germany. “ Hitler was able to recruit several thousand Nazis. Allied demands for reparations gave Germans incentives to inflate their currency and pay the Allies with worthless marks.”[9] It stands to reason then that had the United States agreed to subjugation and disarmament as determined under the treaty, our military capacity would have been significantly hampered and our ability to intervene militarily in World War II and future conflicts would have been handicapped. We can see why the failure of the Treaty of Versailles in the Senate was a necessary disappointment, lest our ability to determine our own military strength and decide when or when not to intervene in foreign wars be fully compromised.

The New York Times in an adjacent article entitled “America Isolated Without Treaty” outlined the next line of action the Senate would take in order to establish some sort of peace agreement with Germany. Adopting the Senate resolution of Senator Philander Knox [R-PA], which outlined that a state of peace shall exist between the United States and Germany, The New York Times confirmed with certainty that President Woodrow Wilson would imminently ignore it, citing that the Senate can’t force the president to adopt treaty measures that are constitutionally vested in his authority as the Executive.[10] This is true, but likewise the President cannot establish any treaty measures without the consent of the Senate as outlined in Article II, Section II of the Constitution, so it would appear rather egregious that if the ultimate goal was a negotiated peace with Germany that President Wilson would neglect a Senate measure that would establish this while preserving American sovereignty.

The reservations of Senator Henry Lodge, such as the right of the state to decide what questions are within its domestic jurisdiction (Reservation 4), the right to increase armaments against Article 8 of the Covenant should the United States ever be under threat of war (Reservation 10) and the right to continue trade and commerce with any international actor determined to be a Covenant-breaking state in objection to Article 16 (Reservation 11) were imperative to unmasking the dangers behind joining the League under the current Covenant. The President’s unwillingness to work with the Senate to incorporate any of the plausible reservations immediately put a negative spotlight on the entire premise for the Treaty of Versailles and continuously hampered its ability to be passed with a two-thirds majority in the Senate.[11]

Republicans, however, were not the only ones to reject the treaty in its then current format. According to TheNew York Times in 1920, “ Senator Reed of Missouri, a Democrat, one of the irreconcilables whose fight helped kill the treaty, said many Democrats who favored the treaty had told him they were through with it unless the President, in sending it back to the Senate, should express willingness to accept the Lodge Reservations.”[12] This was not the only portion of the article that showed the Democrats agreeing with their Republican colleagues on the importance of preserving American sovereignty. Senator Walsh, a Montana Democrat and a President loyalist who originally voted against the treaty with the Lodge Reservations, surprisingly switched his position to support ratification with the Lodge Reservations. He stated that he and other Democrat loyalists overestimated Article 10’s importance in comparison to other provisions in the treaty. Senator Ransdell and Senator Myers, two other committed Democrat loyalists to President Wilson from Louisiana and Montana, followed suit and switched their votes in favor of ratification of the treaty along with the Lodge Reservations. By the time of the second vote on ratification, a total of twenty-eight Republicans and twenty-one Democrats had reached consensus, despite the fact that they had failed to achieve a two-thirds majority vote outcome.[13]

We can definitely see from this that the hard-lining from President Wilson was perhaps the only significant roadblock to the treaty being passed as Democrats began to rally behind the Lodge Reservations. This is not a matter of internationalism vs. isolationism. In fact, as mentioned earlier, Senator Lodge was actually in favor of the treaty under modified conditions. The struggle was more or less a matter of which kind of League of Nations would the United States be a party to: President Wilson’s League or Senator Lodge’s League or one archetype of internationalism vs. another (one where the United States maintained sovereignty over specific issues that have direct impact on domestic policy). According to Boston University Chairman of the Department of International Relations David Fromkin, “The reservations that Lodge proposed, many of which had been drafted by the pro-League Nobel Peace Prize winner Elihu Root, embodied such principles as that no American troops could be ordered into action abroad without congressional authorization.”[14] Fromkin further noted that the reservations were not amendments and thereby would not change the text nor the purpose of the treaty and wouldn’t require renegotiation. In fact, Fromkin clearly states that the Lodge Reservations were even “…acceptable to Great Britain, America's principal ally in creating the League; and in retrospect they seem quite reasonable. Perhaps the most important issue at stake was not a foreign policy but a constitutional issue: should Congress surrender to the executive branch the power to declare war?”[15]

Submitting the Constitutional sovereignty of the United States in any capacity to an international, unelected body of foreign governments is not only subversive, it is in all senses dangerous in the long run. This reality doesn’t even take into account the danger of a single executive yanking the United States into warfare without the consent of the legislature, which is what analysts like David Fromkin thought to be another underlying issue at stake in the debate. This is not to say that we should not seek cooperative initiatives with neighboring nations, for even pragmatists like Senator Lodge would agree that such measures should be encouraged just as long as the Constitution’s supreme jurisdiction on national policy remains intact. President Wilson, as can be determined by his unrelenting internationalism, can be determined as the culprit for the failure of the Treaty of Versailles. What could have been a monumental success turned into one of the largest foreign policy blunders of the 20^th century. It was the pragmatists who encouraged international cooperation while at the same time remaining loyal to the citizens who elected them to preserve national sovereignty. As Cato Institute’s Jim Powell concluded, “Wilson’s admirers tend to blame postwar troubles on Republicans in Congress who refused to support his beloved League of Nations. Wilson’s arrogance toward Congress and his refusal to compromise had a lot to do with that.”[16] Our sovereignty is a sacred gift entrusted to us by the Framers, which makes it all the more imperative that we protect it in the treaty process, which is exactly what President Wilson failed to do in the Treaty of Versailles.

Joseph Vazquez III.

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Bibliography:

Special to The New,York Times. 1920. LACK 7 VOTES TO RATIFY. New York Times (1857-1922), Mar 20, 1920. http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxygw.wrlc.org/docview/97900718?accountid=11243 (Accessed August 2, 2017).

n.d. Cabot Lodge: Senate Leader, Presidential Foe. United States Senate.https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/People_Leaders_Lodge.htm

Norman A. Graebner and Edward M. Bennett. The Versailles Treaty and Its Legacy: The Failure of the Wilsonian Vision. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011. pp. xi, 273.

N.d. 2008. “The Covenant of the League of Nations”. Lilian Goldman Law Library. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/parti.asp ( Accessed 2 August, 2017).

Cruz, Ted. 2014. “Limits on the Treaty Power.” Harvard Law Review 93-121.

United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, 24 October 1945, 1 UNTS XVI, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3930.html [accessed 2 August 2017]

Powell, Jim. 2014. “Woodrow Wilson’s Great Mistake”. Cato Institute. June. Accessed August 2, 2017. https://www.cato.org/policy-report/mayjune-2014/woodrow-wilsons-great-mistake

Special to The New,York Times. 1920. AMERICA ISOLATED WITHOUT TREATY. New York Times (1857-1922), Mar 20, 1920. http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxygw.wrlc.org/docview/97892340?accountid=11243 (Accessed August 2, 2017)

Record, 66 Cong., I Sess., pp. 8777-8778; 8768-8769, 8781-8784.

Fromkin, David. 1996. Rival internationalisms: Lodge, wilson, and the two roosevelts. World Policy Journal 13, (2) (Summer): 75, http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search-p... (accessed August 2, 2017).

[1] Special to The New York Times, “LACK 7 VOTES TO RATIFY”, New York Times (1857-1922) (New York, NY), Mar 20, 1920. http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxygw.wrlc.org/docview/97900718?accountid=11243 (Accessed 2 August, 2017).

[2] n.d. “Cabot Lodge: Senate Leader, Presidential Foe”. United States Senate.https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/People_Leaders_Lodge.htm

[3] Norman A. Graebner and Edward M. Bennett, The Versailles Treaty and Its Legacy: The Failure of the Wilsonian Vision, New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011. pp. xi, 273.

[4] Special to The New York Times, “LACK 7 VOTES TO RATIFY”, New York Times (1857-1922) (New York, NY), Mar 20, 1920. http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxygw.wrlc.org/docview/97900718?accountid=11243(Accessed 2 August, 2017).

[5] N.d. 2008. “ The Covenant of the League of Nations”. Lilian Goldman Law Library. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/parti.asp ( Accessed 2 August, 2017).

[6] Ted Cruz, “ Limits on the Treaty Power”. The Harvard Law Review. January 8, 2014, 94. https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/pd... (Accessed 2 August, 2017).

[7] United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, 24 October 1945, 1 UNTS XVI, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3930.html [accessed 2 August 2017]

[8] N.d. 2008. “The Covenant of the League of Nations”. Lilian Goldman Law Library. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/parti.asp ( Accessed 2 August, 2017).

[9] Jim Powell, “Woodrow Wilson’s Great Mistake”, Cato Institute, June 2014. https://www.cato.org/policy-report/mayjune-2014/woodrow-wilsons-great-mistake (Accessed 2 August, 2017).

[10] Special to The New,York Times, “AMERICA ISOLATED WITHOUT TREATY”, New York Times (1857-1922) (New York, NY), Mar 20, 1920. http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxygw.wrlc.org/docview/97892340?accountid=11243 (Accessed 2 August, 2017)

[11]Record, 66 Cong., I Sess., pp. 8777-8778; 8768-8769, 8781-8784.

[12] Special to The New York Times, “LACK 7 VOTES TO RATIFY”, New York Times (1857-1922) (New York, NY), Mar 20, 1920. http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxygw.wrlc.org/docview/97900718?accountid=11243(Accessed 2 August, 2017).

[13] Ibid.

[14] David Fromkin, “Rival internationalisms: Lodge, Wilson, and the Two Roosevelts”, World Policy Journal 13, (2) (Summer):75, 1996. http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search-p... (accessed August 2, 2017).

[15] Ibid.

[16] Jim Powell, “Woodrow Wilson’s Great Mistake”, Cato Institute, June 2014. https://www.cato.org/policy-report/mayjune-2014/woodrow-wilsons-great-mistake (Accessed 2 August, 2017).