Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924)

Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), American statesman, who led the opposition to U.S. membership in the League of Nations after World War I. The great-grandson of the American politician George Cabot, he was born in Boston on May 12, 1850, and educated at Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He lectured (1876-79) on American history at Harvard University and edited (1879-81) the International Review. A member of the Republican Party, Lodge served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1880 and 1881 and in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1887 to 1893. In 1893 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, in which he served until his death. Lodge, ranking high in the Republican Party hierarchy, was chairman of the national conventions of the Republican Party in 1900, 1908, and 1920. During the Spanish-American War he gave his full support to the policies of President William McKinley.

Lodge achieved his greatest prominence as a conservative Republican leader during and after World War I. As a majority leader in the Senate and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee from 1919 until his death, he vigorously opposed the plan of Woodrow Wilson for the combining in a single document of a League of Nations Covenant and the Treaty of Versailles. As a result of his determined opposition, the Senate did not accept the treaty or the covenant, thus preventing United States participation in the League of Nations. Lodge died in Boston on November 9, 1924. His writings include Life and Letters of George Cabot (1877); The Story of the Revolution (2 volumes, 1898); The Democracy of the Constitution and Other Essays (1915); The Senate and the League of Nations (1925); and, in collaboration with Theodore Roosevelt, Hero Tales from American History (1895).