Thomas Lamont

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

Must have had the rarest voting pattern in the history of the US, a one time Democratic Party voter in 1920: "Lamont’s commitment to the league was so strong that in the 1920 presidential contest he voted for James Cox and vice-presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt over Warren Harding and his running mate Calvin Coolidge—the only time the Republican Lamont would ever vote Democratic."

Just stumbled across this when doing research on the 1920 election and found it interesting.

[Fuzzy Bear]

The 1920 election was not a referendum on the League of Nations, per se.  It was a referendum on Woodrow Wilson, who was both ill and unpopular at the time.

A great book on the subject is Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal by Professor Thomas F. Bailey.  It was published in 1943, and I can't find my copy; perhaps one can be found on Amazon.  There were a number of Republicans who were very much supportive of the Treaty of Versailles and American entry into the League of Nations.  Republicans such as Sen. Fortney McCumber were true friends of the Treaty.  What people forget is that it was the Democrats in the Senate, on Wilson's instructions, that voted down the Treaty of Versailles because the GOP majority had attached "reservations" to what Wilson viewed as "his" treaty.  These reservations were, arguably, trivial, but they were rammed through by Henry Cabot Lodge, the Senate Majority Leader, and Wilson's hatred of Lodge was at the kind of deep personal level that caused him to forget where his best interests lay.  Lodge knew that, and imposed the reservations to the treaty simply to get Wilson to act against his own best interests.  The ultimate defeat of the Treaty of Versailles was a remarkable upset; Republican Sen. William Borah called it "the greatest victory since Appomattox". 

Men like Lamont knew that Harding was not going to support the League.  He knew that Harding was a guy who'd go along with whomever spoke to him last.  In Harding's case (as Prof. Bailey pointed out in his book), the people who'd get to him last was the Senatorial cabal who rammed through his nomination, and those men were not friends of international cooperation.  Harding waffled on the League, and he spoke vaguely about creating an "Association of Nations", but it's doubtful that such a proposal existed beyond Harding's own mind.