Of course treaty ratification became the issue in the Presidential Campaign a year later. President Wilson announced that the election of 1920 should be a solemn referendum. The result was an overwhelming victory for the Republican party, despite the efforts of some eminent Republicans to defend the League of Nations. The new Congress terminated war with Germany and Austria by resolution, which was signed by President Harding on July 2, 1921. Six weeks later a brief peace treaty was signed in Berlin, in which Germany agreed to give the United States all the rights and advantages stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles, with the exception of certain portions specifically mentioned as excluded at the volition of the United States. The repudiated portions were: the Covenant of the League of Nations; the boundaries of Germany; the political clauses for Europe; the sections concerning German rights outside Germany, with the exception of the cession of the German colonies “in favor of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers”; and the provisions concerning the organization of labor. By these omissions the United States dissociated itself from the other signatories of the treaty in regard to the responsibility of the war, the trial of war criminals, and the guarantees for the fulfilment of the treaty. The right was reserved to be represented on the Reparations Commission or any other commission established under the Treaty of Versailles. But “the United States is not bound to participate in any such commission unless it shall elect to do so.”
The defection of the United States was an accepted fact in Paris when the Senate failed to ratify the treaty in November, 1919, a year before the presidential election put the stamp of popular approval upon this action. So when the Peace Conference broke up the United States was already counted out of European affairs. We did not enter at all into the other treaties.
There were three serious consequences of the failure of the United States to ratify the Treaty of Versailles: destroying the authority of the treaty as the basis of a new political and economic order; reducing the League of Nations to impotence as a tool of the Entente Powers; and making the French people realize that the Anglo-American guarantee of security, proposed as the alternative to the Rhine frontier, was worthless. Of the Rhine frontier we shall speak in a later chapter; for the problem of the security of France has dominated all other considerations in post-bellum Europe. At this point we have only to consider the effect upon public opinion throughout the world of the abstention of the United States from any part in enforcing the Treaty of Versailles.