In March, 1920, the 19^th Amendment made its rounds for ratification among the states, the Senate voted whether to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and join the League of Nations, and Germany fell into in a Soviet-style workers’ revolt. These were heady times for the United States and the world, not unlike today. The old world fell apart and a new world rose in its place.

On Friday, March 19, 1920, Wilson suffered the greatest defeat of his presidency. He fell 7 votes short of ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations in the United States Senate. While Wilson campaigned exhaustively for the passage of the Treaty and the League’s Covenant, Republican Senator from Massachusetts Henry Cabot Lodge waged his own campaign against it. In the second and final attempt to ratify the Treaty, 23 Democrats joined Lodge. The senators had reservations over Article X of the League of Nations Covenant, which required signatory members to defend any treaty nation at the urging of the League. Many senators believed that Article X was unconstitutional, because the United States Constitution gave only Congress the right to declare war.

Lodge chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and from that pulpit declared the League a “mongrel banner” and opposed US engagements abroad. Lodge argued that ratification of the League’s Covenant without exclusion of Article X would transfer Congress’s authority over war to the Executive Branch. He offered a resolution excepting Article X from ratification, but Wilson refused to consider anything but full ratification. Having been felled by a stroke in September 1919, Wilson did not have the strength and energy to oppose Lodge’s resolution in the Senate and to defend the League’s Covenant to the American public. America’s failure to join the League of Nations set in motion a cataclysmic series of events that would shape not only the geography of the modern Middle East, but America’s relationship with it for the next century.

Wilson’s stroke also prevented him from responding to repeated demands by the Europeans for his views on the enforcement of the Treaty and the League of Nations Mandates in the Middle East. Enforcement of the Treaty was made more urgent in March 1920 as German workers lead a Soviet-style revolt, toppling the German government. France and Britain feared that a communist government in Germany would make alliance with the USSR, which would give Germany a stronger position to oppose paying war reparations to the Entente. When the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Treaty and the League a second time, the Europeans determined they could wait no longer.

In order to win his League of Nations, Wilson tied the enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles to the convening of the League of Nations. In other words, in order to obtain the reparations they won against Germany in the Treaty, the Allies would have to convene the League. It was a fateful and unintended consequence of tying the two treaties together, which Wilson surely intended he would be deeply involved with. France and Britain convened the League of Nations without Wilson’s involvement and enforced the Treaty against Germany in March 1920. Later that same month, the League would authorize the mandates in the Middle East agreed to between France and Britain during the War. Based on the outlines made in the so-called Sykes-Picot Agreement, France was granted mandatory control of the territory of Lebanon and Syria, and England was granted mandatory control of the territory of Palestine, including the Transjordan, and Mesopotamia (Iraq).  (Part 3.)

The First Arab Spring is described in historic detail in The Peddler by Stephen Louis Moses.

100 years ago this week, March 8, 1920, the Syrian Congress declared Syria was an independent nation with Emir Faisal as its King. Faisal lead the Arab Revolt against the Turks during WWI and represented the Hijaz (Arabia) at Versailles. In referencing the Declaration of Independence and President Wilson’s 14-Points, the Syrian Congress declared that Syria was not the spoils of war and that it would govern itself as a democratic nation with a King. An odd mix, but not so odd for the time, when the modern system of nation-states was still forming following the collapse of the world’s great empires as a result of the war to end all wars.

To put Syria’s declaration in context, it is helpful to understand its role in the Great War, which is a lesser known, but equally as important as the story of the Arab Revolt. During WWI, the Syrians ardently opposed the Turkish-German alliance and a war against Europe. The eastern Mediterranean was blockaded by the British navy in order to cut-off Germany from the Suez Canal, but it also cut-off Syria, which was not a front in the War.  In response to their lack of support, the Turks brutally suppressed the people of Syria who refused conscription and resisted the Turks at every turn. As a result of the blockade, Turkish oppression, a plague of cicadas (true story) and a freezing winter of 1916-17, Syria fell into a famine that resulted in over 200,000 Syrians dying of hunger. Emaciated corpses littered the roadways as starving Syrians roamed the country looking helplessly for food. The Germans called them serferberlicht, the walking dead. In Syria, it is known as the safir barr, literally “in country travels”, but more accurately translated as internal displacement. No nation outside the theater of war suffered more during WWI than Syria.

Syria’s Declaration of Independence was swiftly condemned by the Entente powers of France and Britain, who had their own designs on the Middle East. But, they were bogged down implementing the Treaty of Versailles in Europe, while at the same time the French military chased the Turks around the Anatolian peninsula. The cries for America’s involvement went without a response as President Wilson had his own troubles trying desperately to obtain the votes he needed in the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations covenant.

Wilson’s silence caused the Syrians and the Europeans fits. He was asked by the Europeans to elaborate on his 14-Points, particularly point XII, where he decreed that the nationalities under Turkish rule would be assured an “undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” France and Britain sought Wilson’s input on the limits of Article XII before finalizing the treaty with Turkey to no avail. In Wilson’s silence, the Syrians concluded that (1) Turkey would be left only with Constantinople and the Anatolian peninsula, if they could keep it amid other nationalist movements by the Armenians and the Kurds, (2) Syria (including Mt. Lebanon), Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia would be left to pay Turkey’s war reparations, and (3) they would be occupied by France and Britain.

The Syrians saw their moment and they seized it. Anticipating that the Ottoman Empire would be broken up and divided between France and Britain as the spoils of war, the Syrians united around independence. As the New York Times reported on March 12, 1920, “Although they cherished the French for their culture and the British for their business, the Syrians cherished more than either their independence, which they insisted on if the Turkish Empire was to be broken up.” (NYT, March 12, 1920, p. 1.)

What followed was the first Arab Spring from March to July, 1920. The First Arab Spring is described in historic detail in The Peddler by Stephen Louis Moses.