Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Takes a Stand Against the League of Nations, August 12, 1919

n the 12th of August, 1919, esteemed statesman and Senate Majority Leader, Henry Cabot Lodge, rose to his feet on the floor of the Senate to begin his behemoth argument against President Woodrow Wilson’s recent crusade for the United States to join the newly proposed League of Nations.

A New York Times headline from December 15, 1918, updating the public on President Wilson’s Paris reception and pro-League of Nations stance

World War One had just drawn to a bitter close. At the beginning of the year, the “big four” as they became known—consisting of Lloyd George of Britain, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Woodrow Wilson of the U.S.—had met at the Palace of Versailles, just outside of Paris. There they undertook the task of hammering out peace negotiations with a starved and crippled Germany. They were meant to collaborate on a treaty concerning all European powers and then invite their enemies and the classified aggressors of the conflict to join them.

Council of Four—better known as “The Big Four”—at the WWI Paris Peace Conference,
May 27, 1919 (candid photo, L - R): Prime Minister David Lloyd George (Great Britain),
Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando (Italy), Premier Georges Clemenceau (France),
President Woodrow Wilson (USA)

Except, from the very beginning, harmony and consensus could not be reached at Versailles even amongst the allies themselves. Fearing what the presence of German representatives might bring to their discordant effort, the procedural process itself was practically abandoned. An impossibly punitive peace was eventually drafted by the allies and proposed to the German representatives as their only recourse. These representatives were only invited to the negotiating table after having already greatly disarmed and weakened themselves during the mutual armistice declared the previous November—an armistice they now considered a dupe and a trap, but being weakened, they had no leverage to now begin to bargain. There were no negotiations; it was an imposed peace, with an unattainable burden of reparations put in place.

President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 (1856-1924)

Tiring of the demoralizing infighting and squalid European arguments, America’s President Wilson soon became enchanted with a different aspect of the negotiations, one which appealed to his religiously fervent belief that “it is surely the manifest destiny of the United States to lead in the attempt to make this spirit of democracy prevail [in the old world.]”

Of course, the League of Nations had very little to do with democracy, and was far better classified as a mutual security alliance, one that had been embarked upon repeatedly amongst European nations before World War One. In fact, such outdated and intertwined pledges had been pivotal for plunging much of the world into the conflict, instead of it being contained to a few isolated nations. Indeed, such treaties as that being drafted at Versailles and incorporated into the proposed League were so commonplace that British Cabinet Secretary, Colonel Maurice Hankey, sagely predicted:

...any such scheme is dangerous to us, because it will create a sense of security which is wholly fictitious.... It will only result in failure and the longer that failure is postponed the more certain it is that this country will have been lulled to sleep. It will put a very strong lever into the hands of the well-meaning idealists who are to be found in almost every government who deprecate expenditure on armaments, and in the course of time it will almost certainly result in this country being caught at a disadvantage.

A drawing published in the French weekly Le Miroir March 16, 1919. Translation: “What we should never see again”, “The League of Nations shall prevent the recurrence of such massacres.” Hopes for peace in March 1919, during the discussions of the Treaty of Versailles to give birth to the League of Nations. (Note: the numbers of deaths per country are those given in 1919 and have since been redesigned).

These were European considerations against the League, ones that most of their representatives at the treaty talks ignored. For President Wilson—present in Paris and exerting the supreme weight of American influence in foreign affairs—it posed its greatest challenge in winning over the Congress and the Senate.

The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles 1919 by William Orpen

The League, as it was first drafted, essentially bound America to deliver on promises of military aid, bypassing the Constitutional requirement for a Congressional declaration of war, and trampling on America’s long-held position of neutrality in transcontinental disputes. Yet all of this was presented, of course, as being surety against any such future wars.

Delegates leaving the palace after signing the Treaty of Versailles, June 28, 1919

When Wilson brought this proposal home, it was met with great outcry. Yet he also had his supporters: the war had both cemented alliances in American politics and permanently changed the general American attitude towards isolationism. In the middle of this clamor, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge rose to make his argument for American sovereignty—a strange thing to have to defend after his country had been victorious.

A triumphant and jubilant Wilson returns home to the US after the Paris Peace Conference, July 8, 1919

Senator Lodge, according to Dr. George Grant:

...utilized carefully measured phrases and appealed to the mood of his audience, unleashing a storm of applause among the packed galleries. A group of Marines, just returned from France, pounded their helmets against the gallery railing: men and women cheered, whistled and waved handkerchiefs and hats. It was minutes before order could be restored, and when a Democratic senator attempted to reply to Lodge’s arguments, his remarks were greeted with boos and hisses.

Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924)

A portion of the speech reads thusly:

I object in the strongest possible way to having the United States agree, directly or indirectly, to be controlled by a league which may at any time, and perfectly lawfully and in accordance with the terms of the covenant, be drawn in to deal with internal conflicts in other countries, no matter what those conflicts may be. We should never permit the United States to be involved in any internal conflict in another country, except by the will of her people expressed through the Congress which represents them.

Likewise, he struck a balance when acknowledging the horrors of war while at the same time ringing the bell of patriotism:

In the Great War we were called upon to rescue the civilized world. Did we fail? On the contrary, we succeeded, succeeded largely and nobly, and we did it without any command from any league of nations. When the emergency came, we met it, and we were able to meet it because we had built up on this continent the greatest and most powerful nation in the world, built it up under our own policies, in our own way, and one great element of our strength was the fact that we had held aloof and had not thrust ourselves into European quarrels; that we had no selfish interest to serve. We made great sacrifices. We have done splendid work. I believe that we do not require to be told by foreign nations when we shall do work which freedom and civilization require. We are told that we shall ‘break the heart of the world’ if we do not take this league just as it stands. I fear that the hearts of the vast majority of mankind would beat on strongly and steadily and without any quickening if the league were to perish altogether....

Mass demonstration in front of the Reichstag (German government building) against the
Treaty of Versailles, May 15, 1919

The fight did not end there. Wilson lost the midterm elections, and with them control of Congress, including the Senate. Despite this lack of confidence in his piloting of the nation, Wilson had declined the recommendation of sending a bipartisan delegation to deal with the Treaty negotiations, and instead had continued to preside over them himself. Now returned home, Wilson took the League on the campaign trail, traveling 8,000 miles by rail in three weeks, bypassing Congress again and appealing straight to the people.

Woodrow Wilson campaigning by railcar in St. Joseph, MO, 1919

At the end of this arduous endeavor, he suffered a stroke, having already endured one in Paris. Both were kept secret by his physician and associates. Little more than a week later came a third—a massive attack which left his entire left side paralyzed. His physician admitted “he is permanently ill physically, and weakening mentally, and can’t recover.”

The physician refused to pronounce him unfit, the Vice President didn’t press the point, and Wilson’s private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, conspired with Wilson himself and his wife, Edith, to make her President.

She would remain so for seventeen months, sacking and appointing Cabinet member by means of her husband’s forged signature. Had Wilson been declared incapable at this time, all manner of things would have been different.

A weakened and frail Wilson signs a document while his wife Edith holds it steady for him, 1920

As it was, and on the President’s own enfeebled urgings, Senate Democrats refused to support the amended treaty with Lodge’s reservations, and ironically ended up joining forces with the “irreconcilables”—those who opposed the treaty in any form—to defeat it on November 19, 1919. Wilson then submitted the treaty, without Lodge’s reservations, to the Senate a second time in 1920, but that failed to obtain the two-thirds vote needed for approval.

Political cartoon about the absence of the USA from the League of Nations, depicted as the missing keystone of the arch

In the Presidential election of 1920, Wilson’s Democratic Party was severely defeated, and it was considered a repudiation of his European policy in its entirety, as leader of the Socialist Party of America Eugene Debs put it at the time:

No man in public life in American history ever retired so thoroughly discredited, so scathingly rebuked, so overwhelmingly impeached and repudiated as Woodrow Wilson.

Thus Britain and France were left with a League in a shape they did not want, and the man who had thus shaped it was disavowed by his own country. On this day we remember Henry Cabot Lodge and one man’s courage to plead on behalf of the Constitution, to voice the citizens’ convictions with learned precision, and whose proposals were adhered to by all American foreign relations for the rest of the century—in name, at least, if not in spirit.

Henry Cabot Lodge

Image Credits: 1 New York Times (wikipedia.org) 2 “Big Four” (wikipedia.org) 3 Armistice agreement (wikipedia.org) 4 Woodrow Wilson (wikipedia.org) 5 Maurice Hankey (wikipedia.org) 6 French cartoon (wikipedia.org) 7 Hall of Mirrors assembly (wikipedia.org) 8 Delegates departing palace (wikipedia.org) 9 Wilson returning to US (wikipedia.org) 10 Henry Cabot Lodge (wikipedia.org) 11 Reichstag protests (wikipedia.org) 12 Wilson on campaign trail (wikipedia.org) 13 Joseph Patrick Tumulty (wikipedia.org) 14 Edith Wilson (wikipedia.org) 15 President and Mrs. Wilson (wikipedia.org) 16 “The Gap in the Bride” cartoon (wikipedia.org) 17 Henry Cabot Lodge (wikipedia.org)