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

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

On January 22, 1917, in an address before the Congress, President Wilson endorsed a “peace without victory” in the European war, one that would involve no indemnities or annexations. By this time, however, Germany had abandoned any hope of negotiating peace with the Allies. Just a little over a week after Wilson spoke, Germany announced that on February 1 its submarines would sink without warning all ships bound for enemy waters, whether they belonged to belligerent or neutral powers. American ships could sail through only at their peril.

Lodge begins his speech of February 1 with a call to back the president in the immediate crisis with Germany and then moves on to attack Wilson's “peace without victory” concept as being naive. None of the belligerents, he says, were making “such awful sacrifices” in order simply to return to the conditions of 1914. The senator then criticizes the president's insistence that any lasting peace must be based upon the principle, in Wilson's own words (which he quotes), “that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed” and that no right exists to hand people “from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.” Although he found the tenet admirable in the abstract, Lodge asks how it can possibly be enforced in such diverse areas as Korea, Hindustan, Alsace-Lorraine, and Armenia. Certainly the very history of America's own expansion belied such a principle, for the United States had annexed such major areas as California and the Louisiana Territory without consulting any indigenous population. The senator also questions the president's call for “the freedom of the seas,” which the chief executive saw as part of the free intercourse of nations. Such a proposal, says Lodge, could violate international law, especially because long-honored rules of contraband and blockade would be scrapped. He also sees impracticalities in Wilson's notion that all “great peoples” have access to major bodies of water. By mentioning such landlocked nations as Bolivia, Paraguay, and Afghanistan, Lodge sought to indicate the absurdity of such a proposal.

Wilson's proposal for a league of nations met with Lodge's strong suspicion. Lodge invokes the tenets of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe to bolster his claim that American and European interests are poles apart. To enter into a postwar league for peace would necessitate placing American military and naval forces at the service of other nations. The United States, he claims, is by no means ready for such a commitment. The senator ends his address by calling for a peace based on “righteousness.” Given the fact that he had been sympathetic to Britain and France from the outset of the war, Lodge is claiming that only an Allied victory can create a genuine international order.