Essay 22-C: The Battle Over The Versailles Treaty And The Founding Documents
When President Woodrow Wilson helped negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, he intentionally made the League of Nations the keystone of his vision of post-war peace. However, when he submitted the treaty to the Senate in 1919, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge led an effort to attach reservations that would preserve Congressional authority over war. When Wilson rejected those changes and failed in an unusual public campaign for popular support, the Senate refused the treaty.
The constitutional question over the Treaty of Versailles did not primarily concern the terms of the peace settlement. The chief constitutional controversy that animated the dispute between Wilson and Lodge was over who might legitimately bind the American people in matters of war and peace. The first twenty-six articles of the Treaty formed the Covenant of the League of Nations, including, most controversially for Lodge and Wilson, Article X, which required member nations to protect the territorial integrity and independence of other members of the League. While Wilson believed the Covenant was necessary to make and preserve peace, Lodge feared such a commitment would imperil the principled constitutional process that binds sovereignty and popular consent.
Even a cursory review of our founding documents finds clear guidance and antecedents for the Wilson-Lodge dispute. The Declaration of Independence establishes and testifies to the American regime’s understanding of popular sovereignty in plain language: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The signers of the Declaration had lived with and rejected the remote and unrepresentative institutions that had so often committed them to war, conflict, and other forms of coercion without their influence. The Treaty and Covenant did not open a new conflict in American political practice but rather revived an old and foundational dispute.
