Congress, the Harding Administration, and International Policy in the Early Interwar Period

Traditional accounts of American politics depict the United States as adopting an "isolationist" or "introverted" foreign policy immediately after the Senate's dramatic failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, and then the GOP's overwhelming 1920 election victory. I explore this claim by describing how the 67th Congress (1921–1923) handled the first two issues with implications for America's post-war international role: Allied debt repayment and the Four Powers Treaty. By reconstructing of the congressional debate over these topics, and by analyzing votes on legislation directly relevant to each, I describe how preexisting partisan, ideological, or factional conflicts influenced the United States' approach to international politics in the immediate post-war years.