Henry Cabot Lodge

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Henry Cabot Lodge
God, guns, and freedom
U.S. Politics
Icon politics USA.svg
Starting arguments over Thanksgiving dinner
Persons of interest

Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) was the Republican Senate Majority Leader during the end of the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson.[1]

League of Nations[edit]

Lodge is most known for his efforts to stop the ratification of a treaty which would have the United States enter the League of Nations. After the First World War, many world leaders were interested in making sure such an event never occurred again, with one of their proposed methods of doing so being a place where the countries of the world could meet up with one another and talk out their issues.[2] Lodge was willing to go along with the treaty on the condition that specific amendments, known as the Lodge Reservations, were added,[1] although these did little more than demand the United States government be given more power.[3] Given that allowing the United States to have special powers would kind of go against the point of creating a place where all nations were on equal terms, President Wilson refused to go along with this idea, causing Lodge to make sure it failed in the Senate.[1]

Isolationist?[edit]

See the main article on this topic: Isolationism

One of the greatest misconceptions regarding this event stems from how Lodge "ultimately came to be regarded as an isolationist."[4] Although this did show Republicans to have little interest in Wilson's foreign policy, eventually leading to the isolationism of the 1920s,[5] Lodge himself was less opposed to the treaty due to some Pat Buchanan-style dislike of international government, but more out of a Dick Cheney-style belief that the United States should be the one who makes all the rules. Remember, he was not opposed to the treaty on principle, he just wanted the United States to be given more power.

Lodge was actually more of a hawk regarding Germany after the war than Wilson was,[6] demanding an unconditional surrender from Germany which Wilson was uninterested in obtaining.[7] On his way to vote for getting the United States involved with the war, he even assaulted a pacifist who protested his doing such.[8] Before that, he had shown a long streak of being fine with imperialism, and even outright supporting it at times, during the Spanish-American War.[9]

References[edit]