Why was Wilson unsuccessful in gaining United States membership to the League of Nations?

Answer 1

I can't compete with the explanation offered by PBS, but I can give you my own spin. Wilson was an idealist who didn't want to go to war in the first place, but was dragged into it. At Versailles he took a moral position, in contrast to Clemenceau and Lloyd George who were more interested in carving up the Ottoman Empire and getting reparations from Germany.

Wilson got his League of Nations at Versailles, but he was out of touch with the home front. Americans were more interested in bringing the boys home, having done our duty in Europe. America was becoming isolationist, uninterested in European squabbles.

When Wilson returned from France, he had to sell his League of Nations proposal to the people, going over the head of the Senate, but after his stroke, he was unable to do that. Wilson's wife, and his chief of staff Col. Edward M. House, ran the White House during his illness, but that was plainly ineffectual in the battle over ratification. It was handily defeated in the Senate vote.

Answer 2

Here is an explanation from PBS:

Woodrow Wilsonís supreme goal in World War I was to broker an effective and lasting peace. He enumerated his war aims in his famous Fourteen Points speech, with the last point calling for the creation of a League of Nations. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he fought hard, but was not able to incorporate his Fourteen Points in the treaty. He did, however, make sure the League of Nations was an inextricable part of the final agreement. He hoped that once the League was established, it could rectify the treaty's many shortcomings

Of the treatyís 440 articles, the first twenty-six comprise the Covenant of the League of Nations. This covenant describes the operational workings of the League. Article Ten obliges signatories to guarantee the political independence and territorial integrity of all member nations against outside aggression, and to consult together to oppose aggression when it occurs. This became the critical point, and the one that ultimately prevented the treatyís ratification by the Senate.



Senator Henry Cabot Lodge led the opposition. Lodge and Wilson were bitter political foes, but they also had legitimate differences of views on the League and on the covenantís Tenth Article. Lodge believed that the League, under Article Ten, could require the United States to commit economic or military force to maintain the collective security of member nations. Wilson did not share this interpretation of Article 10 - an article that Wilson had written himself. Wilson stated that the veto power enjoyed by the United States in the League Council could prevent any League sanction, but if a unanimous League voted sanctions, the vote amounted only to advice, in any case. The United States would not be, therefore, legally bound to the Leagueís dictates. However, Wilson did declare, that the United States would be morally bound to adhere to the Leagueís resolutions. A moral bond was, for Wilson, infinitely superior to a mere legal one. Article Ten was, for him, "a very grave and solemn obligation."

Wilson and Lodge surely could have found a middle ground. Some sort of compromise language could have been drafted. There were pro-treaty Republicans who could have formed a coalition with the Democrats to win the necessary two-thirds majority. But Wilson blocked compromise after he suffered a massive stroke in October 1919. No accommodation with the opposition was found on either side. The treaty was voted down.

The United States remained officially at war until June of 1921 when President Warren Harding approved a joint congressional resolution proclaiming the war with the Central Powers ended, and later signed a separate peace treaty. The resolution and the treaty specified that although the United States was not a party to the Versailles Treaty, it retained all rights and advantages accorded to it under the pactís terms, excluding the League Covenant. The United States never joined the League of Nations.

Answer 3

The first two answers are very good. I can only add that we were so affected by the war that we became strongly isolationist. We didn't want to have anything to do with international events, so Congress refused to have anything to do with anything which would align us with other countries. After all, it was the alliances between the nations of Europe which caused the war to spread so far. This isolationism is also why we were so reluctant to enter WWII, even though we saw what Germany and Japan were doing.