Covenant of the League of Nations

About the Author

Although the Covenant was a compromise document, it basically had a single author, President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was the leader of the discussions, and it was the last of his Fourteen Points that had called for an international peacekeeping organization. In addition, Wilson's stature as the leader of the United States, which had entered the war in 1917 and thus turned the balance against Germany, placed him in a position in which he could shape this organization and bring it into existence with the support of both greater and lesser allies. Formerly a president of Princeton University and a governor of New Jersey, Wilson was elected president of the United States in 1912. Reelected in 1916 on the basis of his ability to keep the United States out of the conflict, Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany within two months of his second inauguration. As the war progressed, Wilson sounded an idealistic note as he made statements concerning the just treatment of nations in the world after the war as well as calls for an international organization to maintain peace. He went to Paris in 1919 to help create the League of Nations and shape the Treaty of Versailles. Largely on the basis of his efforts to form the League, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that year. He died in 1924.

Wilson's final draft leaned heavily on a book entitled The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion, by General Jan Smuts of South Africa. During World War I, Smuts had led his forces against the Germans in Africa. In the last two years of the war he served British prime minister David Lloyd George as one of five members of the British government's Imperial War Cabinet. In World War II, he acted as a field marshal in the British army and joined Prime Minister Winston Churchill's War Cabinet. He was the only person to sign the peace treaties ending both world wars. Smuts was elected prime minister of South Africa twice; he served from 1919 until 1924 and then again from 1939 to 1948. In May 1945 he represented South Africa in San Francisco at the drafting of the UN Charter. Smuts was the author of the preamble to the charter of the United Nations and was the only person to sign both the League Covenant and the UN Charter. He died in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1950.