The League of Nations, one of President Woodrow Wilson's dreams laid out in his Fourteen Points for Peace, was founded today in 1919. The League never really worked as planned. Because it was tied so closely to the Treaty of Versailles it had problems from the start being perceived as a "Victor's Club." As the Twenties wore on and the Treaty Of Versailles's weaknesses became more evident it was difficult for the League to not get associated with it.
A big problem the League had was that the US never ratified the Treaty of Versailles and so never joined the League. This hurt the League's image because the man who was the driving force behind its creation couldn't even get his own country to join. But more than the image, the United States' refusal to join meant that all that US money wasn't going to be flowing in along with the US military power.
The League faced an uphill battle in the US from the start. In order for the US to join the League the Treaty of Versailles had to be ratified in the US Senate. Standing in the way of that was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the US Foreign Relations committee. Lodge and Wilson didn't like each other and didn't like each other's politics, to put it mildly. Lodge's main sticking point with the League was the requirement that member nations come to the military aid of the other members in the event of an attack. Lodge wasn't an isolationist - in fact, he was quite the little Imperialist - but he didn't want to see the US drawn in to every two-bit bushfire war every time two podunk countries made mean faces at each other. As far as the American people were concerned, they were on Lodge's side. Wilson's high-handed manner of dealing with Congress and refusal to compromise (Vermont readers can see echoes of Wilson in Howard Dean's relationship with the state legislature during his time as governor) didn't help matters any.
Still, Wilson was making progress, both in the Senate and with the American people as a whole. He went on a number of whistle-stop tours of the country giving speeches and making his case. On October 2, 1919, Wilson suffered a massive stoke putting him in bed for the next six months. When the treaty came to a vote in the Senate on November 19, 1919, it went down, hard. Wilson never regained his health enough to have another go and the US never joined.
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The fact that two academic politicians with huge egos could not come together to work on this treaty would contribute to the horror that was WWII.
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