Henry Cabot Lodge: Speech Opposing the League of Nations

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In December 1918, Wilson sailed to Europe to participate in the Paris Peace Conference that would draft treaties with the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria). On February 14 a special commission, over which the president presided, submitted a draft covenant for a proposed League of Nations to the conference's plenary session. Ten days later Wilson briefly returned to the United States, in part to defuse anticipated Senate criticism. Arriving in Boston, he gave a speech in Mechanics Hall in which he claimed that peace could not last a single generation unless it was guaranteed by all the civilized world.

As a result of the 1918 congressional elections, the Republicans had gained control of both houses of Congress. Lodge, who had become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was quick to challenge the president. Addressing his senatorial colleagues on February 28, 1919, Lodge first concedes the universal desire for a lasting peace and then starts critiquing the draft covenant. He points to its loose phrasing and equivocal language, which he finds inappropriate to what of necessity was a legal document.

Far more important, Lodge notes that the covenant reverses the policy of George Washington by committing the United States to a binding alliance. Similarly, the Monroe Doctrine, with its stress upon the settling of American questions by Americans alone, was being violated. Of particular concern was Article 10 of the proposed league, which required members to preserve the integrity and independence of other member nations against acts of aggression. Article 10 frightened Lodge, since it committed the United States to involve itself in questions invoking Europe, Asia, and Africa. At issue for Lodge were matters involving Asia Minor, where there was soon talk of an American mandate for Constantinople and Armenia, and the Balkans, a region so full of ethnic and tribal rivalries that World War I itself had originated there. Similarly, European and Asian nations would be given the right to exercise police powers on the American continent, which authority even extended to the highly strategic Panama Canal. As Lodge saw it, the nation's very sovereignty was at stake.

After he delivered this speech, Lodge fought a rearguard action against Wilson's league. He drafted fourteen “reservations” to the covenant, the most important being one that Article 10 was inapplicable unless Congress were to uphold it by act or resolution Yet Lodge was not irreconcilable on the matter. He favored a society of nations; unlike the one envisioned by Wilson, however, Lodge's lacked coercive powers. Because Wilson refused to accept Lodge's reservations, the entire peace treaty went down to defeat, first in November 1919 and then again in March 1920.