100 years ago this month, on 19 November 1919, the US Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles. As a result, the US did not join the new League of Nations, although the world’s first global international organisation to a considerable extent owed its existence to its support and promotion by then-President Woodrow Wilson.
Versailles’s rejection had momentous consequences for the development of the League, the predecessor of today’s UN. Indeed, the debate about the US’s place in the world is carried on even today in terms defined by the memory of that event. However, the legacy of this milestone is all too easily misunderstood, as Thomas Bottelier, Lecturer in History at ESHCC, points out in a piece for Origins, an e-zine linking past to present published by Ohio State and Miami Universities.
The essay can be found here: http://origins.osu.edu/milestones/treaty-of-versailles-us-ratification-fight.
- PhD student