The End of a Vision
THE League of Nations was created and held its second meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1920. In spite of failing health and long and strenuous negotiations in Paris, Woodrow Wilson’s efforts seemed to have been crowned with success.
Through the League, Wilson was going to spread his “truth of justice and of liberty and of peace.” In one of his speeches, he stated: “We have accepted that truth and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us [the American people], and through us the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.” Such was the stuff of his vision.
To the U.S. Senate he said: “The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way. . . . We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision.” (Italics ours.) The visionary had spoken again. He still believed he was God’s tool to bring peace to mankind.
Rejected at Home
In Europe, Wilson had been heralded as a savior president. But even before he had gone to the Peace Conference, warning salvos had been fired across his bow in the United States. Author Elmer Bendiner reports: “Theodore Roosevelt handed down the verdict [of the U.S. Congress]: ‘Our Allies and our enemies and Mr. Wilson himself should all understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority whatever to speak for the American people at this time . . . Mr. Wilson and his fourteen points . . . have ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people.’”
Woodrow Wilson made the mistake of selling his vision in Europe while neglecting the doubters in his own country. In March 1920 the U.S. Congress voted to stay out of the League.
Blinded by his cause, Wilson plowed on regardless. In his last public speech, his conviction rang out loud and clear but in vain: “I have seen fools resist Providence before, and I have seen their destruction, as will come upon these again, utter destruction and contempt. That we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.”
With his health recently shattered by a stroke, the negative vote from his own countrymen only made things worse. His League vision became blurred and incomplete. On February 3, 1924, Woodrow Wilson died. His last words were: “I am a broken piece of machinery. When the machinery is broken—I am ready.” He was physically broken and so was his vision of a world-embracing League of Nations.
“The Treaty of Versailles No Longer Exists”!
Although for 15 years no official war was declared again in the world, the League was in its death throes even from its birth. It proved to be impotent to stop Bolivia and Paraguay from going to war in 1933. It failed to impede Mussolini’s rape of Ethiopia in 1935. By destruction and conquest Italy removed Ethiopia from the League’s roster of nations and then abandoned the League itself in December 1937. The following year seven Latin-American nations quit the League. The vision was crumbling.
In 1936 civil war broke out in Spain. The members of the League opted for official nonintervention in that war. However, Germany, which had quit the League in 1933, and Italy both lent material support to General Franco’s rebellion against the Republican government in Madrid. The League was impotent to stop the slaughter on Spanish soil. The Spanish Civil War was the rehearsal for what would be the death knell of the League of Nations—World War II.
In the meantime Hitler had come to power in Germany and was swiftly dismantling the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles, imposed on Germany after the Great War. He wanted Lebensraum (living space) for the German nation. He expanded Germany’s borders by taking over the Saar, the Rhineland, and Austria. In 1939 he completed his occupation of Czechoslovakia. In all these moves, the League was virtually impotent to take action.
Hitler had long been annoyed by the concession to Poland of a corridor through Germany to the Baltic port of Danzig. In August 1939 he brought an end to that. His representative delivered a message to the High Commissioner of the League of Nations in Danzig, stating: “You represent the Treaty of Versailles; the Treaty of Versailles no longer exists. In two hours the Swastika [Nazi flag] will be hoisted above this house.”
On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland. Britain and France retaliated by declaring war on Germany. World War II had started.
The Vision Fades and Dies
Woodrow Wilson made a prediction to the people of Omaha back in 1919 that was to prove that his League was a failure. According to biographer Ishbel Ross, he had said: “‘I can predict with absolute certainty, that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations do not concert the method [the League] by which to prevent it.’ And at San Diego he sounded another prophetic note when he said, ‘What the Germans used were toys as compared with what would be used in the next war.’” Despite the League, World War II became a reality, and the weapons used were no toys.
Why did the League fail? In his book A Time for Angels, writer Elmer Bendiner comments: “The League’s birth arose out of a series of political fantasies: that the cease-fire of 1919 was a peace and not merely a truce; that national interests could be subordinated to world interests; that a government can espouse a cause other than its own.” And the Bible points up one more fantasy—that men can establish through political agencies that which only God’s promised Kingdom rule can bring—true peace and happiness for all mankind.—Revelation 21:1-4.
With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the League lay like a cadaver, awaiting burial. In 1946 “its properties and its heritage of hope and folly,” as writer Bendiner puts it, were handed over to a successor, the United Nations. Would that organization be more successful than the League? Would it turn visions into reality? And what did the Bible predict on that? Our next issue of Awake! will consider those and related questions.
[Pictures on page 10]
The outbreak of World War II in 1939 was the death knell of the League
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U.S. Army photos