Analyze the peace settlement after World War I and the postwar return to isolationism, including Wilson's Fourteen Points, the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations debate, and the Red Scare (Louisiana Student Standards for Social Studies, US History Standard 3: Isolationism through the Great War).

What this topic is asking

The United States helped win the war but then refused to join the peace it had shaped. Standard 3 (Isolationism through the Great War) wants you to analyze Wilson's Fourteen Points, the Treaty of Versailles, the Senate fight over the League of Nations, and the postwar turn back to isolationism, plus the fear-driven Red Scare at home. LEAP often uses a treaty excerpt, a cartoon about the League, or a Red Scare poster as the source.

Wilson's Fourteen Points

Even before the war ended, Wilson set out his vision for the peace in the Fourteen Points, a plan built on principles such as self-determination (peoples choosing their own government), freedom of the seas, open diplomacy, and reduced armaments. Its capstone was a League of Nations, an international organization in which countries would resolve disputes peacefully and stand together against aggression. Wilson hoped to build a peace that would prevent another catastrophic war.

The Treaty of Versailles

At Paris, Wilson's idealism collided with the Allies' desire to punish Germany.

The fight over the League

The treaty then had to be ratified by the United States Senate, and there it failed.

Many senators, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, objected above all to Article X, the League's promise of collective security, fearing it would commit the United States to fight in foreign wars without the consent of Congress. Wilson refused to compromise and toured the country to rally support, collapsing from the strain. In the end the Senate rejected the treaty, and the United States never joined the League of Nations it had helped design. The country signed a separate peace with Germany and stepped back from the world stage.

The return to isolationism and normalcy

The rejection of the treaty marked a broad turn back toward isolationism. War-weary Americans wanted to focus on home, and in 1920 they elected Warren Harding, who promised a "return to normalcy." The United States would largely avoid binding political commitments abroad through the 1920s and 1930s, a stance that shaped its slow response to the crises leading to World War II.

The Red Scare

The anxieties of war did not vanish with the peace.

The first Red Scare (1919 to 1920) was a wave of fear that communism and radicalism, inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, threatened the United States. Labor strikes and a few anarchist bombings fed the panic. The government responded with the Palmer Raids, arresting and deporting suspected radicals, often trampling civil liberties. The Red Scare shows how wartime fear and the drive for conformity carried into peacetime, and it foreshadows the second Red Scare of the Cold War.