Henry Cabot Lodge
Henry Cabot Lodge was an American politician, historian, lawyer, and statesman from Massachusetts. A member of the Republican Party, he served in the United States Senate from 1893 to 1924 and is best known for his positions on foreign policy. His successful crusade against Woodrow Wilson's Treaty of Versailles ensured that the United States never joined the League of Nations and his penned conditions against that treaty, known collectively as the Lodge reservations, influenced the structure of the modern United Nations.
Lodge received four degrees from Harvard University and was a widely published historian. His close friendship with Theodore Roosevelt began as early as 1884 and lasted their entire lifetimes, even surviving Roosevelt's bolt from the Republican Party in 1912.
As a representative, Lodge sponsored the unsuccessful Lodge Bill of 1890, which sought to protect the voting rights of African Americans and introduce a national secret ballot. As a senator, Lodge took a more active role in foreign policy, supporting the Spanish–American War, expansion of American territory overseas, and American entry into World War I. He also supported immigration restrictions, becoming a member of the Immigration Restriction League and influencing the Immigration Act of 1917.
After World War I, Lodge became Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the leader of the Senate Republicans. From that position, he led the opposition to Wilson's Treaty of Versailles, proposing 14 reservations to the treaty. His strongest objection was to the requirement that all nations repel aggression, fearing that this would erode congressional powers and erode American sovereignty; those objections had a major role in producing the veto power of the United Nations Security Council. Lodge remained in the Senate until his death in 1924.
Early life and education
Lodge was born in Beverly, Massachusetts. His father was John Ellerton Lodge of the Lodge family. His mother was Anna Cabot, a member of the Cabot family, through whom he was a great-grandson of George Cabot. Lodge was a Boston Brahmin. He grew up on Boston's Beacon Hill and spent part of his childhood in Nahant, Massachusetts, where he witnessed the 1860 kidnapping of a classmate and gave testimony leading to the arrest and conviction of the kidnappers. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Lodge's father wanted to ride into battle at the head of a cavalry regiment he had personally put together but missed the chance, possibly due to a riding injury to the knee, and in September 1862 suddenly died. He was cousin to the American polymath Charles Peirce.In 1872, he graduated from Harvard College, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the Porcellian Club, and the Hasty Pudding Club. In 1874, he graduated from Harvard Law School, and was admitted to the bar in 1875, practicing at the Boston firm now known as Ropes & Gray.
Historian
After traveling through Europe, Lodge returned to Harvard, and, in 1876, became one of the earliest recipients of a PhD in history from an American university. Lodge's dissertation, "The Anglo-Saxon Land Law", was published in a compilation "Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law", alongside his PhD classmates: James Laurence Laughlin on "The Anglo-Saxon Legal Procedure" and Ernest Young on "The Anglo-Saxon Family Law". All three were supervised by Henry Adams, who contributed "The Anglo-Saxon Courts of Law". Lodge maintained a lifelong friendship with Adams.As a popular historian of the United States, Lodge focused on the early Federalist Era. He published biographies of George Washington and the prominent Federalists Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, and his great-grandfather George Cabot, as well as A Short History of the English Colonies in America. In 1898, he published The Story of the Revolution in serial form in Scribner's Magazine.
Lodge was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1878. In 1881, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. He was also a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and served as its president from 1915 to 1924. As such, Lodge penned a preface to The Education of Henry Adams when he arranged for this classic autobiography was posthumously published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in September 1918.
Political career
In 1880–1882, Lodge served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Lodge represented his home state in the United States House of Representatives from 1887 to 1893 and in the Senate from 1893 to 1924.Along with his close friend Theodore Roosevelt, Lodge was sympathetic to the concerns of the Mugwump faction of the Republican Party. Nonetheless, both reluctantly supported James Blaine and protectionism in the 1884 election. Blaine lost narrowly.
Lodge was first elected to the US Senate in 1892 and easily reelected time and time again but his greatest challenge came in his reelection bid in January 1911. The Democrats had made significant gains in Massachusetts and the Republicans were split between the progressive and conservative wings, with Lodge trying to mollify both sides. In a major speech before the legislature voted, Lodge took pride in his long selfless service to the state. He emphasized that he had never engaged in corruption or self-dealing. He rarely campaigned on his own behalf but now he made his case, explaining his important roles in civil service reform, maintaining the gold standard, expanding the Navy, developing policies for the Philippine Islands, and trying to restrict immigration by illiterate Europeans, as well as his support for some progressive reforms. Most of all he appealed to party loyalty. Lodge was reelected by five votes.
Lodge was very close to Theodore Roosevelt for both of their entire careers. However, Lodge was too conservative to accept Roosevelt's attacks on the judiciary in 1910, and his call for the initiative, referendum, and recall. Lodge stood silent when Roosevelt broke with the party and ran as a third-party candidate in 1912. Lodge voted for Taft instead of Roosevelt; after Woodrow Wilson won the election the Lodge-Roosevelt friendship resumed.
Civil rights
In 1890, Lodge co-authored the Federal Elections Bill, along with Senator George Frisbie Hoar, that guaranteed federal protection for African American voting rights. Although the proposed legislation was supported by President Benjamin Harrison, the bill was blocked by filibustering Democrats in the Senate.In 1891, he became a member of the Massachusetts Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. He was assigned national membership number 4,901.
That same year, following the lynching of eleven Italian Americans in New Orleans, Lodge published an article blaming the victims and proposing new restrictions on Italian immigration.
Lodge's support for voting rights did not extend to women. He was a leading opponent of women's suffrage. Lodge did not change his position even after the junior senator from Massachusetts, John Weeks, lost his seat in 1918 due to his opposition to equal suffrage.
Spanish–American War
Lodge was a strong backer of U.S. intervention in Cuba in 1898, arguing that it was the moral responsibility of the United States to do so:Of the sympathies of the American people, generous, liberty-loving, I have no question. They are with the Cubans in their struggle for freedom. I believe our people would welcome any action on the part of the United States to put an end to the terrible state of things existing there. We can stop it. We can stop it peacefully. We can stop it, in my judgment, by pursuing proper diplomacy and offering our good offices. Let it once be understood that we mean to stop the horrible state of things in Cuba and it will be stopped. The great power of the United States, if it is once invoked and uplifted, is capable of greater things than that.
Following American victory in the Spanish–American War, Lodge came to represent the imperialist faction of the Senate, those who called for the annexation of the Philippines. Lodge maintained that the United States needed to have a strong navy and be more involved in foreign affairs. However, Lodge was never on good terms with John Hay, who served as Secretary of State under McKinley and Roosevelt, 1898–1905. They had a bitter fight over the principle of commercial reciprocity with Newfoundland.
In a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, Lodge wrote, "Porto Rico is not forgotten and we mean to have it".
Alaska Boundary Dispute
Henry Cabot Lodge was one of the politicians involved in the Alaska Boundary Dispute during 1896–1903. The border was not clearly labelled in southeast Alaska which started a conflict between Canada and the United States. Canada wanted the Alaska Panhold for its direct route from the Klondike Gold Rush to the Pacific, and its resources while the United States wanted it for its vital trading and shipping routes. Although Canada lost, the event is still significant as it distinguished the two countries' political interests.Immigration
Lodge was a vocal proponent of immigration restrictions, for a number of reasons. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, significant numbers of immigrants, primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe, were migrating to industrial centers in the United States. Lodge argued that unskilled foreign labor was undermining the standard of living for American workers, and that a mass influx of uneducated immigrants would result in social conflict and national decline. In a May 1891 article on Italian immigration, Lodge expressed his concern that immigration by "the races who have peopled the United States" was declining, while "the immigration of people removed from us in race and blood" was on the rise. He considered northern Italians superior candidates for immigration to southern Italians, not only because they tended to be better educated, had a higher standard of living, and had a "higher capacity for skilled work", but because they were more "Teutonic" than their southern counterparts, whose immigration he sought to restrict.Lodge was a supporter of "100% Americanism", a common theme in the nativist movement of the era. In an address to the New England Society of Brooklyn in 1888, Lodge stated:
Let every man honor and love the land of his birth and the race from which he springs and keep their memory green. It is a pious and honorable duty. But let us have done with British-Americans and Irish-Americans and German-Americans, and so on, and all be Americans... If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.
He did not believe, however, that all races were equally capable or worthy of being assimilated. In The Great Peril of Unrestricted Immigration, he wrote that "you can take a Hindoo and give him the highest education the world can afford... but you cannot make him an Englishman" and cautioned against the mixing of "higher" and "lower" races:
On the moral qualities of the English-speaking race, therefore, rest our history, our victories, and all our future. There is only one way in which you can lower those qualities or weaken those characteristics, and that is by breeding them out. If a lower race mixes with a higher in sufficient numbers, history teaches us that the lower race will prevail.
As the public voice of the Immigration Restriction League, Lodge argued in support of literacy tests for incoming immigrants. The tests would be designed to exclude members of those races he deemed "most alien to the body of the American people". He proposed that the United States should temporarily shut out all further entries, particularly persons of low education or skill, to more efficiently assimilate the millions who had already come. From 1907 to 1911, he served on the Dillingham Commission, a joint congressional committee established to study the era's immigration patterns and make recommendations to Congress based on its findings. The commission's recommendations led to the Immigration Act of 1917.