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In 1919 Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize for championing the League of Nations, yet the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty and America never joined. The idea reached back to Immanuel Kant’s 1795 sketch for perpetual peace, a community of free republics whose citizens would refuse wars they had to pay and die for, and grew through the Concert of Europe, the Geneva Conventions of 1864, the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the Inter-Parliamentary Union of 1889. In 1915 Jane Addams helped lead a Washington peace conference and Aletta Jacobs helped organize an International Women’s Congress at The Hague, whose delegates crossed a continent at war to lobby Europe’s leaders.

Launched in January 1920 from the Treaty of Versailles, the League took on health, labor, drug trafficking and refugees, with the Rockefeller Foundation funding epidemiological intelligence. It had no army, relied on exhausted Britain and France for muscle and required unanimous votes. Japan and Germany walked out in 1933, Italy in 1937 and Spain in 1939, and weak sanctions that excluded oil failed to stop Italy’s chemical war in Abyssinia. The Palace of Nations in Geneva sat nearly empty through the Second World War before the League dissolved in 1946 and passed its buildings, assets and archives to the United Nations.

• Australia joined as its own autonomous member, a sign of the British Empire’s monopoly loosening.
• Critics branded the organization a League of Victors because the Allied winners at Versailles designed it.
• The Soviet Union joined in 1934 and was expelled in 1939 for invading Finland, while its invasion of Poland went unpunished.
• The mandate system split former Ottoman and German territories into class A, B and C mandates administered by Britain and France.
• The League’s archives are now listed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.