After Versailles: The Rapid End

Abstract

Wilson returned to Washington from Paris on 8 July and faced the task of getting the Senate to agree with the Treaty of Peace and the League Covenant. The British believed he would triumph over his Republican opponents in the Senate, although they could only be spectators in the contest. Throughout his career, he had confounded observers and accomplished that which they had thought impossible. Moreover, the situation in July 1919 was far from black. Wilson’s stature was high in the United States, as he was returning with his cherished League and had been a co-equal in the peace. The Conference had redrawn the map of Europe largely along ethnic lines. It had settled the status of the German colonies and the non-Turkish parts of the Turkish Empire, and it established a framework for settling the principal problem that the Conference could not itself settle, reparations.