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Henry Cabot Lodge

1850–1924 · 74 years Tier II

A Boston scholar who broke a president and buried a treaty

Portrait of Henry Cabot Lodge — Harris &amp — Ewing, photographer — 1905 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

At 10 he saw a schoolmate kidnapped at Nahant and gave testimony good enough to convict the men who did it. Henry Cabot Lodge grew up on Beacon Hill with Cabots on one side of the family and a merchant fortune on the other, and lost his father suddenly in September 1862. He took a Harvard degree in 1872, a law degree in 1874, and then a doctorate in history in 1876 under Henry Adams, writing on Anglo-Saxon land law — among the first history PhDs granted in the United States. He edited the North American Review, wrote lives of Hamilton, Webster and Washington, and went to the Massachusetts legislature in 1880 as a scholar looking for a seat.

Lodge sat in the House from 1887 and in the Senate from 1893 until the day he died, 31 years, the last five as the Senate's first designated majority leader and chairman of Foreign Relations. He co-wrote the 1890 federal elections bill to protect Black voting in the South, which a Democratic filibuster killed. He then spent decades pushing literacy tests to cut immigration and said plainly why: he believed some races were lower than others and that mixing them would drag the higher one down. He wanted Cuba, the Philippines and a large navy. In 1919 he took the Treaty of Versailles apart with 14 reservations aimed at Article X, the clause obliging members to defend one another. Wilson refused the reservations. The treaty failed twice and the United States never joined the League of Nations.

He told Theodore Roosevelt he had never expected to hate anyone in politics the way he hated Woodrow Wilson, and the League fight was not only about Article X. On April 2, 1917, the day Wilson asked Congress for war, Lodge struck a pacifist constituent in the Capitol and later conceded in a settlement that he had swung first — the only recorded instance of a senator assaulting a voter. He had lost his son George, a poet, suddenly at 35 in 1909, and he lost Roosevelt, the friend of 35 years, in January 1919, before the fight even opened. Colleagues found him formidable and cold. The historian George Mowry judged that he never made the contribution he should have and blamed Lodge the person: opportunistic, jealous, supercilious, trusted by almost nobody except Roosevelt and Elihu Root.

He died on November 9, 1924 in Cambridge, of a stroke while recovering from gallstone surgery, and was buried at Mount Auburn. For a generation he was the man who kept America out of the League and out of the peace that might have prevented the next war. That verdict has softened. The United Nations Charter of 1945 contains no Article X, gives the United States a permanent seat and an absolute veto, and leaves the war power with Congress — close to what Lodge demanded. Historians still argue whether he wanted a treaty with reservations or no treaty at all. His grandson Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. spent the 1950s as American ambassador to the organization his grandfather had refused.

Lifespan

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Henry Cabot Lodge's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Life and Letters of George Cabot book
His own great-grandfather — the start of a long career in ancestor-tending 1877
Alexander Hamilton book
One of a shelf of biographies he wrote while holding office 1882
Federal Elections Bill law
Written with George Frisbie Hoar to protect Black voting in the South, and filibustered to death 1890
Hero Tales from American History book
Written with Theodore Roosevelt 1895
The Lodge Reservations other
Fourteen conditions attached to the Treaty of Versailles, aimed at Article X 1919
The Senate and the League of Nations book
His own account of the fight, published the year after he died 1925

Life in brief

with age at each point

May 12, 1850 aged 0 Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, into the Cabot and Lodge families
1876 aged ~26 Takes a Harvard doctorate in history under Henry Adams His dissertation on Anglo-Saxon land law was among the first history PhDs in the country.
1884 aged ~34 Meets Theodore Roosevelt and begins a friendship of 35 years Both were Mugwump sympathizers who backed Blaine anyway.
March 4, 1887 aged 36 Enters the U.S. House of Representatives
March 4, 1893 aged 42 Enters the Senate, where he will serve until his death
April 2, 1917 aged 66 Punches a pacifist constituent in the Capitol He later admitted in a settlement that he had struck first.
May 19, 1919 aged 69 Becomes chairman of Foreign Relations and Senate majority leader Both posts in the same week, and both held until he died.
November 19, 1919 aged 69 The Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles with his reservations and without them A second and final rejection followed on March 19, 1920.
November 9, 1924 aged 74 Dies in Cambridge after gallstone surgery A stroke during his recovery. He was 74 and still in office.