Henry Cabot Lodge: Speech on President Woodrow Wilson’s Plan for a World Peace

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. In January 1917, President Woodrow Wilson gave an address in which he advocated “peace without victory” in World War I. This idea met with Lodge’s scorn in February 1917 when Lodge gave his Speech on President Woodrow Wilson’s Plan for a World Peace, condemning Wilson’s call for such a peace and for seeking to create a binding league to enforce this peace. Wilson’s policies, he claimed, were utterly unrealistic.