March 4, 1923

Responding to the Senate’s rejection on March 3 of President Harding’s request for U. S. membership in the International Court of Justice, President MacCracken sent a letter to The New York Times. “Yesterday, at Vassar College,” he wrote, “the Faculty Club, at a meeting which included the entire Faculty, took unanimous action as individuals requesting the Senate to favor [President Harding’s] proposal. The Students’ Association of the college, at a meeting, which included at least 1,000 of the 1,100 students, took similar action, and resolutions were forwarded to the United State Senators from the State of New York….

“No project of international co-operation ever presented to the American people has, I believe, such popular support as this. The opposition to it is now confined to the irreconcilable opponents of Wilson, to those who condemn the League for not having solved the problems of Germany and Russia, and to those who look upon the League and its court as the agency of imperialism. These altogether make a very small minority of American citizenship, and certainly politics never made stranger bedfellows….”

The New York Times