Henry Cabot Lodge

Massachusetts scholar-senator who built the modern Foreign Relations chairmanship and blocked the League of Nations.

Overview

A Harvard-trained historian and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Lodge served in the House from 1887 to 1893 and the Senate from 1893 to 1924. He championed immigration restriction including the literacy test, wrote the 1890 force bill protecting Black voting, and championed a modern navy. As Foreign Relations chairman and majority leader after 1918 he led Republican reservations to the Treaty of Versailles, refusing League membership on Wilson's terms, and the treaty died in the Senate in 1919 and 1920, the defining battle of his career.