HENRY CABOT LODGE'S 'EVIL HERITAGE'

...Reviewed by Oswald Garrison Villard MR...

...Had he given the ability and time and labor he squandered in the miserable business of machine building...

...Instead, he was early seized with the ambition to have the United States a highly armed and powerful nation bent upon imperialistic ventures over the globe...

...Schriftgiesser brings out clearly the extraordinary, even malevolent ability with which he conducted the battle...

...Massachusetts has erected a statue to him upon the state house grounds...

...If there is any weapon in the arsenal of literary ordnance which he has failed to use I should be glad to be told of it...

...He had won his great fight, but even his party turned against him...

...Schriftgiesser has done...

...our existing war in that section of the world is a direct consequence of that move...

...Schriftgiesser brings out what is perhaps a new fact, or at least one not widely known, that both Lodge and Roosevelt planned the attack upon the Philippines, and that Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy picked Commodore Dewey to head the Asiatic Fleet, and bade him to be ready to take the Philippines if war should come...

...We would not have our country's vigor exhausted, or her moral force abated, by everlasting meddling and muddling in every quarrel great and small, which afflicts the world...

...Never once did they wish to go' deeply under the surface to make this a better world—nothing fundamental had to be changed...

...It is an overwhelming indictment which he has penned without mercy, and it reveals the whole sinister career of this scholar in politics in a way to astonish even those who, like myself, followed his career almost from the outset...

...He was "pitiable" in 1924 at the Republican Convention, at which people in the gallery shouted "put Lodge out...

...His book ought to have a wide circulation if only as a warning to the on-coming generation as to the kind of a career a real statesman and a true patriot ought not to follow...

...He-worked, and worked^ and worked, was not daunted by two defeats, and finally worked his way up...

...and free to do his best for the welfare of the people...

...Finally, Mr...

...Sometimes he uses an axe, sometimes a razor, sometimes a sledgehammer, and usually a dextrous scalpel...

...Among his close friends there were many who thought that he saw himself as the Republican standard-bearer...

...Schriftgiesser says, Lodge wanted to make the League an issue in the 1920 campaign because "he cared more about the political regeneration of his party, and the maintenance of his own leadership, than anything else...

...to the earnest study and treatment of public questions . .. he would then have sat in the Senate with a consciousness of dignity and independence, owing his position to his own worth...

...Yet in his own home and among his intimates he could be warm, charming, and attractive...

...Both Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge were at heart conservatives...

...The cumulative effect is that here is a man who served his country not well but extremely badly, who with his powerful friend, Theodore Roosevelt, headed the country upon its career of imperialism...

...Schriftgiesser gives a clear picture of how Lodge's career came to an end with the election of Harding and later the arrival in the White House of Calvin Coolidge...

...never was there a* leader who threw away such magnificent opportunities to lead his country along the paths of progress and reform, the uplifting of the masses, the road to peace...

...It is really a superb job that Mr...

...In that way he overcame the difficulties of his being a rich young man seeking a Congressional nomination in Nahant when his home was really in Boston, and thus made people forget his cold personality, his dudish ways, and his innate snobbery...

...Never was a statue less deserved...

...AS for Lodge's fight to keep us out-of the Treaty of Versailles, Mr...

...His own daughter stated that his heart was always with the irreconcilables, although at times he stated that he would vote for the treaty with certain reservations...

...Curiously enough, Mr...

...He has left an eyil heritage behind for which the country is partly paying an enormous price today when multitudes of his fellow-Americans, whether rightly or wrongly, hold him responsible for the failure of the League of Nations and the coming of-this war...

...It is startling to think of the power two able, shrewd, determined, and eften unscrupulous men can exercise upon the destiny of a nation...

...He made a great deal of noise in twisting the British lion's tail...

...Thus, when Grover Cleveland sprang lib wholly unexpected and highly belligerent Venezuelan message upon the country Lodge rallied to his support despite his hatred for him...

...Although all his instincts and his aristocratic traits and situation in life naturally would have led him to cooperate strongly with the British, as actually happened in later years, he was at first a determined baiter of Great Britain...

...It was he who more than anyone else hit upon the device of offering amendment after amendment...

...He had the best kind of a Boston background for a great career...

...Our ideal is to make her even stronger and better and finer, because in this way alone, as we believe, can she be of the greatest service to the world's peace and the welfare of mankind...

...That explains why, after Theodore Roosevelt threw the Progressives overboard and declined to run in the second Bull Moose campaign, he actually told his deluded followers at their Chicago Convention that they should vote for Henry Cabot Lodge, who was as far removed from a Bull Mooser or Progressive as any human being could possibly be...

...He died in November of that same year...

...At one point Lodge stepped out of character...

...This, they said, explained wny he fought so hard and worked so valiantly at the tremendously difficult task of keeping the various factions in line...

...But when the great fight occurred to prevent James G. Blaine's being made President, both Lodge and Roosevelt, after saying at first that they would refuse to support him, decided to uphold him, despite his demonstrated bad record...

...Schriftgiesser omits the fact that Theodore Roosevelt actually went into the Cabinet of the United States and demanded that Admiral Cever-as's fleet of warships be attacked and sunk by us while crossing the Atlantic—this before a declaration of war...

...Henry Cabot Lodge was a small man physically and thoroughly repellent to most persons who met him...

...He could have followed in the footsteps of Charles Sumner and George F. Hoar...

...There is no doubt that he would have been willing to go to war against England then, even though we had no Navy and an Army of 25,000 men...

...As George William Curtis pointed out, Lodge "pressed upon the legislature a 'gerrymandering' scheme from the shamelessness of which even his followers recoiled...

...He worked by day and by night...

...From then on he became a regular of the regulars, and in his contests for his seat in Congress and his Senatorship he outdid the professional politicians in machine methods...

...Their only rebellion was against the older leadership of their party, not against the party itself or against anything for which it stood...

...As Mr...

...What he did to build up the Navy, again with the aid of Theodore Roosevelt, is here clearly set forth...

...ONE of the disheartening facts about Sen...

...Lodge is that he began his political career as a reformer, and once in 1876 he cast his ballot for a Democrat for' President—Tilden...

...But Lodge's words in his first speech attacking the treaty are not without point today: "We would not have our politics distracted and-embittered by dissensions from other lands...

...When the treaty was finally defeated, his daughter said, he was like a man from whom a great burden was lifted—yet in 1915 he had wanted a league of nations...

...SCHRIFTGIESSER has done a deadly job on Henry Cabot Lodge...

...He did not hesitate to falsify, as when he' once said that President Wilson never offered to come before the Foreign Affairs Committee—this after the President had publicly offered to appear in his speech of July 10, 191JI...

...That was the turning point in Lodge's career...

...Otherwise the picture is complete of what these two men did to put us into war in Asia...

...he devoted himself to the running of caucuses and conventions like an old machine hand...