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For many Americans, the event which best symbolizes the conclusion of the United States' involvement in World War I is the bitter fight over the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. As the United States and indeed the world community began to grapple with how to regroup in the wake of the war, and how to handle the issues of modern warfare and industrial-colonization, the debate over how to organize and structure a world-wide body to handle these points took on a new significance. The Treaty and League had been, in part, orchestrated and supported by Democratic two-term president Woodrow Wilson. His main adversaries were made up mostly of factions in the Republican party, which held a one-vote majority in the Senate at the time. One of the men who led the way in defeating the Treaty was a little-remembered Republican Senator from Illinois named Lawrence Yates Sherman.
Senator Sherman held considerable power in this debate (far beyond just his one vote as a Senator against ratification), because some Republican leaders were worried that Sherman might be willing to form a third political party in time for the 1920 presidential race if the Treaty passed with Republican help, and because the rules of the Senate require a twothirds majority to ratify any Treaty. Thus a small band of Senators, Sherman among them, could delay or prevent passage of this particular Treaty.
Although his presence is not as often noted as that of some of his contemporaries like Senators Hiram Johnson of California and George Norris of Nebraska, Sherman's input in the charge against ratification of the Treaty, which was led by a group of Senators often referred to as the "Irreconcilables," was great, partially because of his willingness to lead the isolationist charge (sometimes in reckless ways), and because as Ralph Stone noted in his 1963 article "Two Illinois Senators Among the Irreconcilables," Sherman came from a state in which Anglophopia and isolationist tendencies ran deep. These tendencies were especially strong in Chicago, where there were large concentrations of German and Irish voters who had historically been against the British.1
As both John D. Buenker and Thomas R. Pegram have noted in separate works, the tension between largely "old stock...