What Was Responsible For Thomas Wilson's Failure

The man most responsible for Wilson’s downfall, Senator Lodge of Massachusetts played the president in a game of cat-and-mouse until nothing remained of the League of Nations. As chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations, Lodge was first to review the Treaty of Versailles before the Senate. Known as the “scholar of Washington” prior to Wilson’s arrival, Lodge engaged in an intense partisan rivalry with the Wilson, he the politician with a PhD from Harvard and Wilson the president with a PhD from Princeton. Lodge started his plan in 1919 when the treaty first came to the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations. Carefully examining the treaty word for word for controversial material that would disagree with the American people Lodge intentionally postponed the scheduling of the treaty hearing, and had the treaty read aloud over and over again by the Senate to

Of those 35 senators who voted yes for the revised treaty, 21 were Democrats who had defied Wilson’s instructions. In essence, Wilson had chosen to destroy all hope of the treaty’s ratification in order to prevent the attachment of fourteen mild reservations written by a man he simply could not stand. In doing so Wilson chose infanticide over compromise. Acting on Wilson’s self-righteousness and crippling god-complex, Lodge presented Wilson with a surmountable obstacle, with the understanding that Wilson’s egotism would prevent him from attempting the obvious, seeking out compromise, and would force his hand to commit extremes devoid of the man’s revered intuition. Put simply, Lodge had painted Wilson’s ship black, which contrasted very little from its former grey exterior, but nonetheless, Wilson felt the need to sink his ship just so he could spite Lodge. However, instead of ship, Wilson destroyed the very thing that might have proved a vital deterrent to the outbreak of a second world