Henry Cabot Lodge
On May 12, 1850, Republican statesman and noted historian Henry Cabot Lodge was born in Boston, Massachusetts. One of the first students at Harvard to graduate with a Ph.D. in history and government (1876), Lodge represented his home state in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1887 to 1893, and in the Senate from 1893 to 1924. As chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he led the successful fight against American participation in the League of Nations, proposed by President Woodrow Wilson at the close of World War I.

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 would not or could not keep.
The digital collection American Leaders Speak: Recordings from World War I includes a recording of Senator Lodge’s 1919 argument against the League. “The United States is the world’s best hope,” Lodge allowed:
but if you fetter her in the interest through quarrels of other nations, if you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe, you will 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 has 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.

The League of Nations was established without U.S. participation in 1920. Headquartered 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. In 1953, Henry Cabot Lodge’s grandson, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., was named U.S. ambassador to the U.N. He left the position in 1960 to run for vice president on the Republican ticket headed by Richard M. Nixon. The duo lost the election to Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, who had taken over Lodge’s Senate seat in 1952.
Learn More
- Search on League of Nations in American Leaders Speak: Recordings from World War I to hear contemporaries of Henry Cabot Lodge voice their opinions on the organization.
- Search on Henry Cabot Lodge to find more than one hundred images in the collections of prints, photographs, and drawings.
- Chronicling America provides access to millions of historic American newspaper pages. Search this collection to locate articles that discuss Henry Cabot Lodge and the League of Nations. Also, the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room has created a series of topics guides to the newspapers included in Chronicling America, including one on the League of Nations.
- The World War I Sheet Music collection contains over twenty songs about the League of Nations.
- Locate additional information about World War I and the League of Nations in Stars and Stripes: The American Soldiers’ Newspaper of World War I, 1918 to 1919.