Henry Cabot Lodge Totally Explained

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ť This article is about Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), a U.S. politician in the early twentieth century.: For his grandson, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (1902-1985), a U.S. politician in the mid-twentieth century, see Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr..

Henry Cabot Lodge (May 12, 1850 – November 9, 1924) was an American statesman, a Republican politician, and a noted historian.

Biography

Lodge was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of John Lodge and Anna Cabot. His great-grandfather was former Senator George Cabot. Lodge grew up on Boston's Beacon Hill. In 1872 he graduated from Harvard College. At Harvard he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and the Porcellian Club. He also was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club and took part in an early show. After traveling through Europe, Lodge returned to Harvard where he became the first student of Harvard University to graduate with a Ph.D. in History. His teacher and mentor during his graduate studies was Henry Adams; Lodge would maintain a lifelong friendship with Adams. Lodge wrote his dissertation on the ancient Germanic origins of Anglo-Saxon government. Throughout his career, Lodge would be a vocal proponent of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. In 1871, he married Anna Cabot Mills Davis, the daughter of Admiral Charles Henry Davis and granddaughter of U.S. Senator Elijah Hunt Mills. His wife's maternal aunt was married to mathematician Benjamin Peirce and the mother of Charles Peirce. Henry and Anna had two sons, the noted poet George Cabot Lodge and John Ellerton Lodge, an art curator. He also graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1874 and was admitted to the bar in 1875. Lodge represented his home state in the United States House of Representatives from 1887 to 1893 and in the Senate from 1893 to 1924.
Lodge was early on associated with the conservative faction of the Republican Party. He was a staunch supporter of the gold standard, vehemently opposing the populists and the silverites, who were led by the left-wing Democrat William Jennings Bryan. 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've 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 a 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'll be stopped. The great power of the United States, if it's 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, comprised of 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. He was a staunch advocate of entering World War I on the side of the Allied Powers, attacking President Woodrow Wilson's perceived lack of military preparedness and accusing pacifists of undermining American patriotism. After the United States entered the war, Lodge continued to attack Wilson as hopelessly idealistic, assailing Wilson's "Fourteen Points" as unrealistic and weak. He contended that Germany needed to be militarily and economically crushed and saddled with harsh penalties so that it could never again be a threat to the stability of Europe.
   As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Lodge led the successful fight against American participation in the League of Nations, which had been proposed by President Woodrow Wilson at the close of World War I. He also served as chairman of the Senate Republican Conference from 1918 to 1924. During his term in office, he and another powerful senator, Albert J. Beveridge, pushed for the construction of a new navy.
   Lodge maintained that membership in the world peacekeeping organization would threaten the sovereignty of the United States by binding the nation to international commitments it wouldn't or couldn't keep. Lodge did not, however, object to the United States interfering in other nation's affairs, and was in actuality a proponent of imperialism (see Lodge Committee for further explanation). In fact, Lodge's key objection to the League of Nations was Article X, the provision of the League of Nations charter that required all signatory nations to deploy troops to repel aggression of any kind. Lodge felt that an open-ended commitment to deploy soldiers into conflict regardless of it being relevant to the national security interests of the United States was unacceptable. Lodge was also motivated by political concerns; he strongly disliked Woodrow Wilson and was eager to find an issue for the Republican Party to run on in 1920.
   Senator Lodge argued in [1919] against the League: ť The United States is the world's best hope, but if you fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations, if you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe, you'll destroy her powerful good, and endanger her very existence. Leave her to march freely through the centuries to come, as in the years that have gone. Strong, generous, and confident, she's nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance; this great land of ordered liberty. For if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.(External Link

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Lodge appealed to patriotism is objecting to what he saw as the erosion of national sovereignty: "I have loved but one flag and I can not share that devotion and give affection to the mongrel banner invented for a league." The League of Nations was established without U.S. participation in 1920. With headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, it remained active until World War II. After the war, it was replaced by the United Nations, which assumed many of the League's procedures and peacekeeping functions, although Article X of the League of Nations was notably absent from the UN mandate. Lodge's grandson and namesake served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 1953 to 1960.
Lodge was also a vocal supporter of immigration restrictions and the assimilation of foreigners. The public voice of the Immigration Restriction League, Lodge argued on behalf of literacy tests for incoming immigrants, appealing to fears 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. Lodge was alarmed that large numbers of immigrants, primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe, were flooding into industrial centers, where the poverty of their home countries was being perpetuated and crime rates were rapidly rising. Lodge observed that these immigrants were "people whom it's very difficult to assimilate and don't promise well for the standard of civilization in the United States." He felt that the United States should temporarily shut out all further entries, particularly persons of low education or skill, in order to more efficiently assimilate the millions who had 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. It should be remembered, however, that Lodge was no rampant xenophobe, remarking once that "It [theU.S. flag] is the flag just as much of the man who was naturalized yesterday as of the man whose people have been here many generations." Lodge, along with Theodore Roosevelt, was a supporter of "100% Americanism." 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's going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.

Lodge died in 1924 of stroke at the age of 74. He was interred in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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