League to Enforce Peace

In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt, often in coordination with Republican leaders Henry Cabot Lodge and William Howard Taft, began offering proposals for the formation of a League of Nations to advance world peace.

In his 1905 annual message to Congress, Roosevelt identified the need for some method of control of offending nations, which would ultimately become the responsibility of an international body.

[8] Hamilton Holt published an editorial in his New York City weekly magazine The Independent, "The Way to Disarm: A Practical Proposal", on September 28, 1914, which called for an international organization to agree upon the arbitration of disputes and to guarantee the territorial integrity of its members by maintaining military forces sufficient to defeat those of any non-member.

The ensuing debate among prominent internationalists modified Holt's plan to align it more closely with proposals offered in Great Britain by Viscount James Bryce, a former British ambassador to the United States.

They proposed an international agreement in which participating nations would agree to "jointly use their economic and military force against any one of their number that goes to war or commits acts of hostility against another."

The league's founders included Elihu Root,[10] Alexander Graham Bell, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, and Edward Filene on behalf of the recently founded U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The founders, on the other hand, though varied in their outlooks, expressed a long-established ideal of the civilizing influence of the British Empire and American democracy.

[13] The League of Peace combined enthusiastic support for the American war effort with its proposals for a new international order to follow the defeat of Germany.

The high-minded debate deteriorated until the ideal of international cooperation was, writes one historian, "sacrificed to party intrigue, personal antipathy, and pride of authorship.