One hundred years ago, on Nov. 19, 1919, Alice Roosevelt Longworth threw a late-night party. Longworth, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt and wife of Nicholas Longworth, the future speaker of the House, was celebrating the defeat in the Senate that day of the Treaty of Versailles, which encapsulated President Woodrow Wilson’s grand project for world peace, the League of Nations. “We were jubilant,” she recalled later, “too elated to mind the reservationists. And by we, I mean the irreconcilables, who were against any League, no matter how ‘safeguarded’ with reservations.”
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