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“The League of Nations and Its Many Fathers,” Gary B. Ostrower1

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“The League of Nations and Its Many Fathers,” Gary B. Ostrower1 “The League of Nations and its Many Fathers,” Gary B. Ostrower1 """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 1 This paper appears in the Kanakadea Review, April 2015. Copyright with the author, 2014. 1" " I’ll fess up. I’m going to start this paper with a complaint. I like historian Margaret McMillian. At the dawn of this century, she wrote a great book called Paris: 1919. At least in my not-so-humble opinion, it remains the best account of the Paris Peace Conference (the Versailles Conference) that we have. And she starts her chapter about the League of Nations, a subject about which I’ve spent a bit of my life, this way: “Only a handful of eccentric historians still bother to study the League of Nations. Its archives…are largely unvisited. It’s very name evokes images of earnest bureaucrats, fuzzy liberal supporters, futile resolutions…and, above all, failure.” Wow! Eccentric historians indeed. OK, you stand warned. Even my kids think she’s on the money here. As I prepared to write this paper, I asked my students in a Western Civ survey course and also an American history survey if they knew what the League of Nations was. Only one-third answered in the affirmative. Ouch, I thought. So at the risk of oversimplification, I’ll answer my own question: The League was created in 1919 at the Paris conference to prevent another World War. It’s all more complicated than that, but that’s its essence. It became the heart of a system of collective security. Allow me to explain. In a number of ways, the League is best seen as a child of the nineteenth century. You all know that the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars had devastated much of Europe between 1792 and Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo. When I say devastated, I refer to the fact that perhaps as many as 3.5 million soldiers and civilians (that’s a conservative figure) had died, over a half-million soldiers during a single campaign when Napoleon advanced and then retreated from Moscow in 1812. Not to mention the political dislocation, the thrones lost and recovered, the nationalistic and liberal revolutions loosened on a previously conservative continent. Consequently, you can understand why European diplomats meeting at a post-war conference in 2" " Vienna carefully designed a system, called the Congress System, complemented by another sort of parallel plan proposed by the Russian Czar labeled the Holy Alliance, to preserve the international order. It was a far cry from the post- World War I League, but it got the diplomatic ball rolling. Nor was the ancestry of the League only political. The industrial revolution and its spin-off revolutions such as those in transportation and communication likewise led to organizational efforts to rationalize the developing nation-state system. “Rationalize.” By that, I mean to make the international system more orderly and comprehensible. The 1865 International Telegraph Union, followed soon thereafter by the General Postal Union and organizations to regulate navigation on the Danube River, reflected European uneasiness with inter-state anarchy. Leaders in different areas of Europe life wanted to control things in the interests of progress, a concept that, two centuries earlier, would have seemed quite foreign. Indeed, by the turn of the twentieth-century, this impulse for order was reinforced by at least three other things. For one, the American Civil War, which left somewhere between 620,000 and 800,000 men dead out of a total male fighting-age population of, at most, only 10 million, had reminded Europeans of just how lethal war could be. Indeed, the Civil War had introduced, among other things, a neat firearm invented by a Maine native named Hiram Maxim that could kill soldiers at an astonishing rate. The war also hinted at new developments in naval technology enhanced by huge guns and iron-hulled ships. All this eventually led to things like super battleships of the Dreadnought class, but an alarming naval race between England and Germany. 3" " Secondly, the colonial rivalry of the last third of the nineteenth century resulted in renewed fears about European conflict. And thirdly, in light of the military innovations that I’ve just noted, the decades after 1870 introduced the paradoxical belief that permanent peace was indeed attainable. Remember, there had been no general war in Europe since 1815, and so this idea seemed reasonable. It led to books by people like Norman Angel of Great Britain who argued that modern economics and global interdependence meant that war no longer made sense.2 It also led to the practical work of statesmen in Holland’s capital, The Hague, where two conferences during the first decade of the twentieth century promoted peace through disarmament—or at least arms limitations—and which would include recommendations for such things as mandatory arbitration to resolve disputes. In sum, despite a few small wars and colonial rivalries, many people on both sides of the Atlantic by 1914 believed that general war was a thing of the past. Which is why the First World War came as both a shock and a puzzle. The carnage reminded some writers of the work of yet older writers, for the ideal of permanent peace was not so new. Men like German philosopher Immanuel Kant during the 18th century and American William Ladd during the 19th had flirted with organizational schemes to prevent war. They understood that modern nation-states, which dated from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, were not governed by any higher authority, and that the principle of sovereignty remained sacrosanct. By the same token, they equally understood that the balance of power, indeed the balance–of-power system in which states formed alliances to insure their security-- led to war as often as it prevented war. The system was fluid. Statesmen miscalculated their country’s own power as often as they """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 2 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: The Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage (London, ). 4" " misjudged the military might of their rivals. That is at least partly why, between 1689 and 1815, Europe experienced between seven and fourteen major wars (the number varies depending on whether wars within wars are counted). By the same token, the existence of a balance of power, refined by the Vienna Congress, helps to explain the relative peace between 1815 and 1914. Whatever they understood by 1914, events that followed Sarajevo really gave birth to the system of collective security with the League as its centerpiece. The term “collective security” did not yet exist in 1919. It would not be coined until 1935. Nevertheless, what I will call the “collective-security idea” emerged from the war and helps to define what a number of key statesmen proposed leading up to the peace conference. We owe it to ourselves to understand one thing. While the American president, Woodrow Wilson, was instrumental in fathering the League, he was hardly alone. The League had many fathers (and they really were fathers: women played almost no role in this story, though Jane Addams had become a household name in the peace movement). On this side of the Atlantic even before Wilson became a prominent player in this story, indeed even before 1914 when the Europeans went to war, a number of peace advocates led by publisher Hamilton Holt and newspaper publisher Theodore Marburg were already advocating some kind of organization to insure the peace.3 Holt, Marburg, and their allies helped to organize peace societies and peace conferences. They were energized by White House support for arbitration and conciliation treaties that reinforced their own belief that wars were not an inevitable feature of international life. """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 3 Warren F. Kuehl, Seeking World Order: The United States and International Organization to 1920 (Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 1969, chaps. 6 and 7). 5" " One point, however, is worth noting at this juncture. Even in the pre-1914 years, American peace advocates divided over a critical issue, namely sanctions applied against a country that initiated war. Some of these advocates, led by former Secretary of State Elihu Root and the legalist John Basset Moore, along with the young Marburg, wanted to rely mainly on judicial procedures to resolve disputes. Others, including Marburg as he matured, believed that should states ignore judicial solutions, then sanctions—either military or economic— might legitimately be employed to keep the peace. And it was into this debate that a key American advocate who favored the creation of an international organization to prevent war enters this story. That advocate was William Howard Taft, Wilson’s predecessor in the White House. By 1915, Taft had agreed to head a new organization called the League to Enforce Peace. Remember, this was shortly after the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat and almost two years before the US declared war on Germany. Taft was a big guy, known not only for his physical presence but for his outsize legal skills. Raised in Ohio, he had served Teddy Roosevelt as Secretary of War. TR and Taft were close friends, a factor that contributed to TR’s decision to handpick Taft as his successor in the White House. Taft had been trained as a lawyer, so it’s no surprise that he thought like a lawyer about international issues no less than domestic issues. We remember President Taft as a conservative often out of sympathy with the progressivism of TR himself. Yet he might be better recognized as a nineteenth-century liberal, committed to limited government, the rule of law, international arbitration, and peace.4 As were many others of his generation, he was “dazed” (that’s his word) """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 4 The best political study of Taft is: Lewis L.
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