The Last Time America Turned Away From the World

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/opinion/league-of-nations-lodge-wilson.html

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One hundred years ago, on Nov. 19, 1919, Alice Roosevelt Longworth threw a late-night party. Longworth, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt and wife of Nicholas Longworth, the future speaker of the House, was celebrating the defeat in the Senate that day of the Treaty of Versailles, which encapsulated President Woodrow Wilson’s grand project for world peace, the League of Nations. “We were jubilant,” she recalled later, “too elated to mind the reservationists. And by we, I mean the irreconcilables, who were against any League, no matter how ‘safeguarded’ with reservations.”

Oddly, the party’s de facto guest of honor was the Senate’s reservationist in chief, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, the Republican leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Lodge was critical of the treaty, but not outright opposed — not one of Longworth’s “irreconcilables.” His committee had attached a number of statements — “reservations” — to the Senate’s advice and consent to the treaty, defining and limiting America’s obligations under it.

Still, those reservations were enough to deadlock debate on the treaty, blocking Senate approval. Lodge entered the history books as the man who sank American participation in the League of Nations — and led to a retreat from international leadership, at a time when, many historians argue, the world needed America to take such leadership.

Though Lodge claimed publicly that he was pleased to see the treaty go down in flames, he could not have been happy with the results. Lodge was many things, but he was no isolationist. Across his 40 years in Congress, he had advocated for what he called a “large policy” — an expansive foreign agenda that would allow his nation to assume its proper place as a great power. Early on, he had disparaged the country’s traditional isolation as a “habit” that had outlived its usefulness. Even when he began to reject Wilson’s vision of internationalism, Lodge protested that he had no “superstitious regard” for George Washington’s and Thomas Jefferson’s bans on permanent and entangling alliances.

The best years of his political life had started in the 1890s, when he and his best friend, Theodore Roosevelt, had agitated and conspired for war with Spain and for that momentous break with isolation, the acquisition of the Philippines. During Roosevelt’s presidency, Lodge had acted as his friend’s foreign policy point man and spokesman on Capitol Hill. He also served as the president’s intimate adviser and pushed for ways to get their geographically removed, commercially obsessed and democratically accountable country truly engaged in great-power politics. He indulged in the wishful thinking that Roosevelt’s charismatic leadership and use of his “bully pulpit” could arouse and inspire the public and Congress to the proper pursuit of international duties.

Taken together, the labors of this Roosevelt-Lodge partnership forged the reputation of their Republican Party as the exponent of a more vigorous, forceful and outward-looking foreign policy, in contrast to the Democrats’ narrower horizons and embrace of traditional isolation — horizons that Wilson would do much to expand.

Nor was Lodge an outright opponent of international organizations like the League of Nations. Like Roosevelt, he initially favored a multinational peacekeeping organization, though the one they envisioned consisted of a great-power directorate keeping lesser troublemakers in line. In 1915, Lodge had called such an organization the “united nations.”

What changed? Lodge deeply disliked Wilson personally, and he was partisan enough to attack a policy simply because it came from the other party. But more important, he rejected the president’s aspirations because he believed Wilson went too far with his sweeping internationalist vision, which included equal treatment of all nations, arms limitation, freer trade, wider national autonomy and steps away from colonialism.

Lodge had also resented Wilson’s initial linkage of the league idea with his effort at mediation of World War I in December 1916 and his call for a “peace without victory” — a non-punitive compromise settlement — in January 1917. Soon after the war had broken out, Lodge had joined Roosevelt in favoring the Allies so fervently that they and other like-minded members of the northeastern Republican elite could barely disguise their yearning for intervention. Lodge later viewed the peace settlement as too soft on Germany, and he had disliked the way the president had resisted the harsher terms that the British and French wanted to impose. Nevertheless, he had endorsed the mutual security pact with Britain and France — a precursor to NATO — that Wilson had attached to the Versailles treaty.

When Wilson presented the draft covenant of the league to Congress in 1919, Lodge signaled his early opposition with an unbinding “round robin” letter signed by 38 Republican senators and senators-elect — more than the number needed to block consent — that rejected the document “in its present form.” Then he went to work trying to sway public opinion. He had his committee conduct lengthy public hearings, which offered a sounding board for critics and opponents of the treaty and the league.

Not so coincidentally, Lodge had 14 reservations about the draft — the same number as Wilson’s January 1918 statement of war aims, the Fourteen Points. The subjects included immigration, tariffs, the Monroe Doctrine, British Empire votes in the league and Japan’s seizure of the Chinese province of Shantung (now Shandong).

His most important reservation targeted Article X of the League Covenant, the collective security clause that obligated members to respond when the body’s council called for action against an aggressor — diplomatic censure, boycotts, economic sanctions and, possibly, military force. Wilson called this article the “heart” of the league, without which it would be a mere “debating society.” Critics charged that this article abrogated American sovereignty and violated Congress’s constitutional war-making authority. Lodge’s reservation, as an amendment to the treaty, would require majority approval in both houses of Congress to authorize participation in any collective response by the league.

President Wilson first countered by meeting with individual senators, and then by subjecting himself to a grilling by the Foreign Relations Committee, which he invited to the White House. When these moves failed to budge the other side, he waged his own public opinion campaign with a whirlwind speaking tour that took him to the West Coast and back. He gave more speeches in a shorter time than he had ever done before, even during his presidential campaigns. Wilson’s big crowds and enthusiastic reception rattled Lodge, and some observers speculated about how the president might bargain with the Senate when he returned with a wind at his back.

That was not to be. Wilson’s health broke down two-thirds of the way through the tour, and he was rushed back to the White House, where he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side. The stroke, soon followed by an unrelated but life-threatening infection, left Wilson isolated, physically debilitated, emotionally fragile and incapable of rendering sound political judgments. The White House, at the direction of his wife, Edith, issued misleading reports that the president was suffering from “nervous exhaustion” and would soon recover. Democratic senators refused to negotiate on their own, and when Wilson was able to pay attention, he spurned all compromise.

As a result, on Nov. 19, a coalition of Democrats and 15 irreconcilables voted down consent with those reservations, while the Republicans joined with the irreconcilables to vote it down without reservations. A better sense of how senators stood on the basic question of approving the treaty and league in some form came on a procedural measure to complete the debate. Sixty-three of them — just one short of the two-thirds needed for consent — voted “yea.” Whether any others might have been persuaded to join them by a still-healthy Wilson remains an intriguing question.

“Of course I am sorry to have my reservations beaten,” Lodge said the next day. If he was, he masked his sorrow well. Not just his enjoyment at the Longworths’ party but his course during the coming months seemed to belie any real regrets. He did not initiate but did briefly condone compromise bipartisan talks that might soften the reservations, but he aborted that effort when the irreconcilables threatened a party revolt. Since several of them, such as William E. Borah of Idaho and Hiram Johnson of California, were notorious for their insurgency, this was no idle threat.

Wilson likewise rejected any compromise efforts, calling Lodge and the reservationists “nullifiers.” That word, which harked back to John C. Calhoun and the slaveholding South, was sure to draw blood from Republicans just a little over half a century after the Civil War. Four months after the first votes, on March 19, 1920, the Senate voted a last time on consent with the Lodge reservations and an additional reservation calling for Irish independence. This time, 23 Democrats voted “yea,” for a total of 49 in favor, with 35 against — a majority, but seven votes short of the necessary two-thirds. It was a sad end to what Wilson had called “this great fight for the League of Nations.”

Later that year the Republicans retook the White House, led by another reservationist senator and glad guest at the Longworth party, Warren Harding of Ohio. Harding refused to revisit league membership; on Lodge’s advice, he advocated wiping the slate clean and pursuing a purely Republican foreign policy.

The Republicans under Harding and his successor, Calvin Coolidge, are often depicted in history books as isolationists, but that’s not quite right. The next Republican secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, brought off such diplomatic feats as the naval disarmament treaties of 1921 and the Dawes and Young Plans to aid European economic recovery — forerunners of the Marshall Plan. Hughes’s successor, Frank Kellogg, promoted the “outlawry of war” with the Kellogg-Briand Pact — once characterized as “peace at no price.”

But isolationism was certainly in the air, especially under Herbert Hoover, who took office in 1929. The final Republican secretary of this era, Henry Stimson, tried without success to extend disarmament efforts, and he found himself stymied by Hoover when he sought to resist Japanese aggression in Manchuria.

Even at its most internationalist, Republican foreign policy in the 1920s offered weak a substitute for the American leadership on peace and collective security that Wilson had fought for. It remains a much-debated question whether such leadership through membership in the league might have insured a more robust response to Nazi, Fascist, and Japanese aggression and possibly prevented World War II.

Despite Lodge’s triumph in thwarting Wilson, his last years were not happy ones. He enjoyed some moments in the limelight — he delivered the keynote speech at the 1920 Republican convention, and with his party back in power, he resumed his earlier role of a president’s foreign policy champion in the Capitol. But he barely won re-election in 1922, and he found himself shunted aside from a leadership role among Massachusetts Republicans. In 1924 he was relegated to being a barely noticed rank-and-file delegate to the national convention that nominated Coolidge, a disdained Bay State rival. Lodge died in November 1924, nine months after Wilson and five days after Coolidge’s election victory.

The Lodge family saga in American foreign policy had a final chapter. Twelve years after the senior Lodge’s death, his namesake grandson, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., whom he had helped to raise from childhood, likewise filled a Senate seat from Massachusetts. In his first term, before Pearl Harbor, the younger Lodge opposed the pro-Allies policies of another president named Roosevelt, a Democrat who was married to Theodore Roosevelt’s niece, but in his second term he became a model bipartisan senator who vigorously supported the United Nations, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO. He also took the lead in persuading Dwight Eisenhower to run for their party’s 1952 presidential nomination because he and other establishment Republicans recoiled from what they decried as the isolationism of the other main contender, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio — who was, ironically, the son of Wilson’s strongest Republican supporter in the League of Nations fight.

Despite Eisenhower’s landslide victory, Lodge lost his re-election bid to John Kennedy. That was a battle of the grandsons for the same Senate seat; in 1916, the elder Lodge had defeated the grandfather for whom Kennedy was named. Eisenhower appointed Lodge ambassador to the United Nations, where he served for nearly eight years. In 1960, he was the vice-presidential running mate to Richard Nixon, who also lost to Kennedy, who, in turn, later appointed Lodge to be ambassador to South Vietnam. After making a quixotic run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, Lodge served another tour as ambassador under Kennedy’s Democratic successor, Lyndon Johnson. During his entire time in Saigon, Lodge acted like a proconsul and advocated ever larger American military intervention. For better or worse, his grandfather’s and Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s father’s “large policy” had come full circle.

John Milton Cooper is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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