Henry Cabot Lodge: The Senator Who Sank Wilson's League of Nations Treaty

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Henry Cabot Lodge was born in Boston in 1850 into the Lodge and Cabot families and grew up on Beacon Hill. As a boy in Nahant he testified to help convict the kidnappers of a classmate, and his father died in 1862 after being kept out of the Civil War. After Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he became in 1876 one of the first Americans to earn a PhD in history, studying under Henry Adams and writing biographies of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and his great grandfather George Cabot. He went from the state legislature to the U.S. House and in 1893 to the Senate, where he stayed for the rest of his life, forming a close alliance with Theodore Roosevelt that survived Lodge's decision to back Taft in 1912.

Lodge co-authored the 1890 federal elections bill to protect Black voting rights in the South, yet opposed women's suffrage and led the push for immigration restriction, serving on the Dillingham Commission and supporting the literacy test in the Immigration Act of 1917. He backed the Spanish American War and the annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. As Foreign Relations chairman after World War I, he attached 14 reservations to the Treaty of Versailles, aimed chiefly at Article 10 of the League of Nations charter. After Woodrow Wilson's September 1919 stroke, Wilson told Democrats to vote against the treaty with reservations, and it failed twice. Lodge was a delegate to the Washington Naval Conference and died in November 1924 at 74.

• On April 2, 1917, the 66 year old senator threw the first punch in a fistfight with an anti-war constituent in the Capitol.
• He wrote to Roosevelt that he had never expected to hate anyone in politics as much as he hated Wilson.
• His opposition to suffrage cost fellow Massachusetts Republican John Weeks his Senate seat in 1918.
• In the Alaska boundary dispute he helped secure a result that cut Canada off from direct ocean access to the Klondike.
• The UN Security Council veto reflected his sovereignty demands, and his grandson Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. became U.S. ambassador to the UN.