Woodrow Wilson, "Appeal to the Country,"
October 3, 1920.
This
election is to be a genuine national referendum. . . .
The
chief question that is put to you is, of course: Do you want your country's
honor vindicated and the Treaty of Versailles ratified?
Do you in particular approve of the League of Nations as
organized and empowered in that treaty? And do you wish to see the United
States play its responsible part in it? . . .
[The
founders of the Government] thought of America as the light of the world as
created to lead the world in the assertion of the rights of peoples and the
rights of free nations. . . . This light the opponents of the League would
quench.