[Sovereign12]

On July 8, 1919, Woodrow Wilson returned to the United States and embarked on a nation-wide campaign to secure the support of the American people for their country’s entry into the League. On July 10, Wilson addressed the Senate declaring that “a new role and a new responsibility have come to this great nation that we honor and which we would all wish to lift to yet higher levels of service and achievement.” Positive reception, particularly from Republicans, was scarce at best.

The Paris Peace Conference, convened to build a lasting peace after World War I, approved the proposal to create the League of Nations on 25 January 1919. The Covenant of the League of Nations was drafted by a special commission, and the League was established by Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. On 28 June 1919, 45 states signed the Covenant, including 32 states which had taken part in the war on the side of the Triple Entente or joined it during the conflict. Wilson's efforts to establish and promote the League won him the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1919. Wilson stood firm on his position for entry. It would not be until the scandalous suicide of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, William E Borah;s mistress, that the political wall the Republicans had placed to block the US's entry started to crumble. Further embarassing personal scandals cuased Henry Cabot Lodge and the other Republicans eventually to lose the moral fight. Even though they didn’t want to have the US as members of the League, there was no way for them to fight this battle anymore.

The League held its first council meeting in Paris on 16 January 1920, six days after the Versailles Treaty came into force In November, the headquarters of the League moved to Geneva, where the first General Assembly was held on 15 November 1920 with representatives from 42 nations in attendance.

In 1925 a contest was held world wide for the design of a flag for the League. The eventual winner was a ten year old boy from England by the name of Gerard Herbert Holtom, who would go onto to greater fame after designing the Peace Arch in Moscow following the Second Russian Civil War.

Flag: The flag itself is a field of white representing peace. The central symbol is a soft shade of blue and represents optimism. The symbol itself is made up of the positions for the letters L, O, and N when using Semaphore Flags. There are five lines making up the symbol each representing the continents (six lines if you split the L line into two separate parts representing Europe and Asia individually). The symbol takes the shape of mountains which symbolizes overcoming obstacles or making progress in world peace.

One of the fears of the member states from the beginning was that the power of the supranational organization might supersede their own if a flag was designed and used. After the contest was finished and the flag chosen, it was decided that each member nation would fly the League flag with that nation’s own flag as the canton. This symbolized the place of each individual nation as a sovereign state rather than just a part of empirical super-state. Examples in another post.