Two noble experiments:
On January 13th 1920, with the ratification in Paris of the post-Great War Peace Treaty, the League of Nations came formally into existence. The new organisation was early under pressure from Kurdish nationalists who, supported by President Wilson, desired a separate state. The League eventually yielded to British commercial interests and fear of Russian expansion to deny the Kurds. The League's end came when its ineffectiveness was demonstrated in 1935 by the invasion of one member nation, Abyssinia (Ethiopia), by another, Italy.
The Volstead Act, formally the National Prohibition Act of 1919, came into effect in the United States on January 20th, 1920. Prohibition did not last as long as the League, the eighteenth amendment to the US constitution being formally overturned by the twenty-first on 5th December 1933.
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