In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson was lobbying hard for the Senate to accept the Draft Covenant of the League of Nations, which he had hammered out during peace negotiations in Paris. With scores of allies in Congress and the well-financed League to Enforce Peace, led by former President William Howard Taft, pushing the idea, Wilson seemed unstoppable.

And yet a sizable minority of senators, led by the Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, opposed the treaty. Lodge offered a resolution that urged his colleagues to reject the draft covenant “in the form now proposed by the peace conference.” When a Democratic senator objected to taking up this resolution, Lodge replied with a round robin signed by 37 Republican senators and senators-elect, adding that three more were likely to sign.

Together, they constituted more than the one-third needed to block a treaty. The resolution itself never came to a vote, but it didn’t need to. The round robin, by making the minority view public, did the trick. As Lodge later said, “our purpose had been served.”

Wilson and the draft covenant never fully recovered. In Paris, he had to reopen negotiations over the league in an effort to meet senators’ objections. Back in Washington, he tried to win over senators one by one, then met with the Foreign Relations Committee, and finally took his case to the people with a whirlwind, coast-to-coast speaking tour.

None of his efforts succeeded. Wilson’s health broke down on the tour, and he suffered a crippling stroke that played a major role in the stalemate that kept the United States out of the League.