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.

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.