Woodrow Wilson won a Nobel for the League his own country refused to join
The American president was hailed as the chief architect of the League of Nations and received the 1919 Peace Prize for it. Yet the United States never became a member. That absence helped doom the first global body devoted to keeping peace, which lasted 26 years and failed to stop another world war.
The League's founding document, its Covenant, was signed on 28 June 1919 as the opening section of the Treaty of Versailles and took effect with the treaty on 10 January 1920. The Council met six days later, the Assembly that November. Its central promise was collective security: members would deter war together, disarm, and settle quarrels through negotiation and arbitration. It also took on labour conditions, trafficking in people and drugs, the arms trade, global health, prisoners of war and minority rights in Europe. Australia's admission as an autonomous member marked an early step onto the world stage for that country.
The weakness was built in. The League had no army of its own and depended on the victorious Allies, with Britain, France, Italy and Japan as the first permanent Council members, to enforce resolutions and sanctions. The great powers often balked, and members feared that sanctions would hurt their own economies. Mussolini mocked the whole arrangement during Italy's war with Ethiopia, quipping that the League worked when sparrows shouted but not when eagles quarrelled.
Membership peaked at 58 between September 1934 and February 1935. After some successes and failures in the 1920s, the League proved unable to check Axis aggression in the following decade. Japan and Germany walked out in 1933, Italy in 1937 and Spain in 1939. The Soviet Union joined only in 1934 and was expelled in 1939 over its invasion of Finland, though not for its earlier move into Poland. Hesitant enforcement, driven by fear of widening conflicts, drained credibility further.
The outbreak of war in 1939 exposed the failure of its core purpose. The League sat mostly idle until the United Nations replaced it in 1945, absorbing several of its agencies, and it formally shut down on 18 April 1946.
Source: League of Nations
