Henry Cabot Lodge: Speech Opposing the League of Nations

About the Author

Henry Cabot Lodge was born in Boston on May 12, 1850, the son of a wealthy Brahman merchant and shipowner. After receiving his BA from Harvard in 1871, he enrolled at Harvard Law School, earning an LLB degree in 1874. At the same time, he took up graduate work in medieval history at Harvard under the direction of the historian and writer Henry Adams. In 1876 he received one of the first history PhDs in the United States and published his dissertation under the title Anglo-Saxon Law. From 1873 to 1876 he served as assistant editor of the North American Review, the foremost intellectual monthly in the United States, after which he became coeditor of the International Review. During the academic year 1878–1879 he taught American history at Harvard.

Feeling uneasy concerning a life of pure scholarship, Lodge entered the world of politics. He began his career as a liberal independent, but finding such a reformist stance futile, he quickly became a Republican regular, a position from which he never deviated. In 1879 he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature, where he served two terms. All this time Lodge was writing history—a life of his great-grandfather, the merchant and senator George Cabot (1877); a college textbook on American colonial history (1881); and lives of Alexander Hamilton (1882), Daniel Webster (1883), and George Washington (1889). He also edited the papers of Hamilton in nine volumes (1885–1886).

In 1886 Lodge was elected to Congress, where he served for six years. In addition to promoting civil service, effective copyright legislation, and a high tariff, he took the lead in fighting to protect the voting rights of African Americans in the South. His federal elections bill, commonly known as the Lodge force bill, introduced in 1890, called for federal supervision of elections there. It easily passed the House but was filibustered in the Senate by southern Democrats. In 1893 the Massachusetts legislature elected Lodge to the Senate, where he backed such causes as immigration restriction, hard money, and economic protectionism. Yet when his close friend Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, Lodge went along with most of Roosevelt's more liberal domestic policies. Moderate change, he believed, was preferable to such radical measures as government ownership of public utilities. A believer in noblesse oblige, Lodge had only scorn for the newer breed of millionaires, who ignored law and custom in their ruthless search for wealth. Even so, Lodge fought progressive efforts at instituting a more direct democracy—initiative, referendum, recall, and the popular election of senators. When Roosevelt ran for president in 1912 on a platform that included recall of state judicial decisions, Lodge remained with his party's old guard and its candidate, William Howard Taft. In 1899 Lodge was reelected to the Senate, as he was every six years until his death in 1924.

Lodge was closer to Roosevelt on matters of foreign policy, which was always Lodge's primary focus. A staunch defender of what was called the “large policy” (control of the Caribbean and parts of the Pacific and seizure of strategic islands like Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines), Lodge supported the U.S. navy flag officer Alfred Thayer Mahan in his desire to maximize naval strength. Mahan sought coaling stations (crucial to sustain shipping) in order to expedite major commercial expansion. Lodge also backed the Spanish-American War. He opposed President Woodrow Wilson's handling of relations with Mexico and believed that the favored Mexican leaders Venustiano Carranza and Francisco “Pancho” Villa were no better than the much-scorned Mexican president Victoriano Huerta. When World War I broke out, Lodge strongly supported the allies (Britain, France, Italy, Russia, Serbia, Romania, and Belgium), so much so that in May 1915, when the Lusitania was sunk, he called for severing diplomatic relations with Germany.

Although Lodge backed Wilson's war measures when the United States entered the conflict, he bitterly fought the president once the war ended. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he strongly objected to Article 10 of the League of Nations covenant, which called for members to respect and preserve the independence and territorial integrity of all members. He feared that this would tie America's hands to such a degree that vital decisions would be out of the control of Congress. Lodge insisted on Senate ratification of a series of reservations before the United States could join the League. By the end of 1919 both Wilson's unadulterated league and Lodge's reservations had gone down to defeat. The senator participated in the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1921–1922, which sought to establish a new order in the Pacific similar to the one established by the Versailles Treaty concerning Europe. Lodge died on November 9, 1924, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.