Current Literature
THE UNITED STATES AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS, 1918-20 By D. F. Fleming, Ph.D.
There is an idea current over here that the rejection by the United States Senate of the Treaty of- Versailles, and with it American membership in. the League of Nations, was due simply to a particularly crass exhibition of party politics or to certain weaknesses in President Wilson himself whieh unfitted him for leadership on such an important occasion. This book (The United States and the League of Nations, 1918-20, Putnam, 21s.) opposes effectually both of these facile. interpretations. The notion of an organized international community which should be the embodiment of the principle of mutual assistance against aggression was. familiar to the great body of American opinion, whether subscribing to the Republican or Democratic ticket. From Theodore Roosevelt, recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1907, who in 1915 declared " what is needed in international matters is to create a judge and then put police power back of the judge," to ex-President William Taft, the Republican Party had been if anything more fervent (cf. the League to Enforce Peace) than the party of the Jefferson tradition. Ex-President Roosevelt did, it is true, relapse into War psychosis and was found in 1918 clamouring for a khaki. Congress, but Taft remained loyal to the end to the idea, and, indeed, spoke in March, 1919, in support of the League of Nations plan as brought back from Paris by the President. The opposition came originally from a small group of Senators of both Parties representing the more conservative social forces in the country, mobilized, however, by a consummate demagogue, Senator Lodge. President Wilson knew what he was up against, and after first taking every precaution through Mr. Henry White, a member of the Peace Delegation, who' was a close friend of both Roosevelt and Lodge, to meet any well-grounded objections, he rightly refused to compromise by admitting reservations which would have wrecked the whole purpose of the Covenant. Dr. Fleming, who has already given us a most useful book on the Treaty veto of the American Senate, here tells the story month by month of that campaign against the League which has done so much to retard the forces of civilized life.
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