Henry Cabot Lodge: Speech Opposing the League of Nations

Henry Cabot Lodge advocated a militant foreign policy, one based on the premise that the United States was a great power and should always act as such. At the same time he could also urge caution, as when he attacked President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 for engaging in a blundering and destructive intervention in Mexico. The president again met with Lodge’s scorn in February 1917 when Lodge condemned Wilson’s call for “peace without victory” in ending World War I and for seeking to create a binding league to enforce this peace; both policies, he claimed, were utterly unrealistic. Addressing his senatorial colleagues on February 28, 1919, in his Speech Opposing the League of Nations, Lodge critiques the Covenant of the League of Nations that Wilson had brought back from the Paris Peace Conference, stressing the dangers inherent in any indissoluble alliance.