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the United Nations Treaty of Versailles (named for the French royal palace where the conference was held) finally and officially ended the Great War. It contained among its provisions the League of Nations Covenant, similar to a constitution, for this new world body. In one of the most famous and astonishing treaty rejections in all of American history, the U.S. Senate voted down the Treaty of Versailles in November 1919 and again in March 1920. The Senate’s rebuffs reflected the long-standing American fear of losing sovereignty, or control, over U.S. affairs, to a higher legal and political entity. As a result, the United States never joined Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations.
How the League Was Meant to Work The statesmen at the Paris Peace Conference were starting from scratch. With nothing to work from but their own ideas and visions for how such a novel organization should be built, they struggled with many issues. The founders were also racing against the clock. Because the final document would include both the League of Nations constitution and the peace treaty to end the war, time was running out. The resulting League of Nations Covenant is therefore a brief document of just 26 articles, compared to the later UN Charter’s 111 articles. The covenant accepted the reality of a community of independent countries, and it did not press for a new, “one world” government where individual national governments would disappear. What was groundbreaking, however, was its pioneering call for the way the world’s countries should interact with one another. In the covenant’s preamble, the very first line urges its members “to not resort to war!” The document also calls for states to have “open, just and honorable” relations with one another, be guided by international law, and to respect any written agreements that they have with one another. For centuries, powerful countries did what they wanted when they wanted, including wielding violence, and the weaker countries had to accept whatever came their way. Until World War I came