The enlarged role of the United States in world affairs can be seen in its response to conditions in the Far East during the first year of Warren Harding's administration. A weak and divided China had been despoiled by European imperialism since the nineteenth century The United States had profited from economic concessions wrested from the Chinese, but, unlike other nations, it demanded no "spheres of influence." On April 6, 1927, the tenth anniversary of America's entry into the Great War, French Minister for Foreign Affairs Aristide Briand publicly called on the United States to sign a treaty with France that would "outlaw war" between the "two great democracies." The revulsion to war had spawned numerous peace organizations in the United States during the 1920s. One of the most prominent of these, the "outlawry of war" movement, was headed by a Chicago lawyer, Salmon O. Levinson. US foreign policy during the 1920s was deceptive.