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Henry Cabot Lodge
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Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924) was a historian, lawyer, and Republican politician who most famously served as the Senate Majority Leader during the end of the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson.[1]
Civil rights[edit]
Early in his career, he supported the Lodge Bill
that would have protected the voting rights of African-Americans, but the bill failed to pass.[2] Beyond that, though, his record was fairly awful: following the 1891 New Orleans lynchings in which 11 Italian-Americans were killed, he blamed the victims and used the opportunity to advocate against Italian immigration.[3] He was also an opponent of women's suffrage.[4]
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.[5] 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.[6] 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]
One of the greatest misconceptions regarding this event stems from how Lodge "ultimately came to be regarded as an isolationist."[7] Although this did show Republicans to have little interest in Wilson's foreign policy, eventually leading to the isolationism of the 1920s,[8] 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,[9] demanding an unconditional surrender from Germany which Wilson was uninterested in obtaining.[10] On his way to vote for getting the United States involved with the war, he even assaulted a pacifist who protested his doing such.[11][note 1] Before that, he had shown a long streak of being fine with imperialism, and even outright supporting it at times, such as during the Spanish-American War.[12]
Notes[edit]
- ↑ For his part, Lodge never served in the military
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Henry Cabot Lodge
- ↑ The Federal Elections Bill of 1890: The Continuation of Reconstruction in America, Colin McConarty, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2020;19(3):390-405 doi:10.1017/S1537781420000067
- ↑ Lynch Law and Unrestricted Immigration, Henry Cabot Lodge, The North American Review, Vol. 152, No. 414 (May, 1891), pp. 602-612
- ↑ Henry Cabot Lodge Correspondence, Syracuse University
- ↑ League of Nations
- ↑ The Lodge Reservations, 1919
- ↑ Henry Cabot Lodge
- ↑ Isolationism and U.S. Foreign Policy After World War I
- ↑ Henry Cabot Lodge
- ↑ Senate Rejects the Treaty of Versaille
- ↑ 100 years ago, the US entered WWI—and a senator from Massachusetts punched a protester in the face over it
- ↑ Chapter Title: The American Decision to Go to War with Spain, 1898