Versailles #59: OTD 28th April 1919 - A League Come True (Patreon)

[PATRONS]

OTD 100 years ago, perhaps the most infamous international organisation in history was officially blessed by the plenary conference of the Paris Peace Conference. This made it essentially impossible to ignore that institution, or to fail to bake it into the final Treaty of Versailles. And so it was done. Yet, at the time, on that eventful day, and in that stuffy room where the minor and major nations debated the pros and cons of the vision, there could be no way of predicting what this League of Nations would mean. It seemed, at its core, to represent hope. In this episode, I examine that moment when it was established. To men like Wilson, who had envisioned some version of this League since he had first left the United States in late 1918, it must have seemed like a dream come true, but even at this early stage, not everyone was convinced...