The Senate and the League of Nations
by . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1925. viii+424 pp. $4.00.
WHATEVER the American attitude toward the League in the future, it is unlikely that any argument now brought forward can change our various opinions in regard to the controversy of 1919-1920; and Senator Lodge can hardly have expected his book to do so. His posthumous volume is a memorial record of his motives as he understood them: a dossier of pièces justificatives of his conduct in what was by the very nature of things a bitter personal conflict.
In his own view Mr. Lodge’s purpose was ‘to give an account of the opposition and consequent debate which arose in the Senate’ — and there is need of a full and fair statement of the Senate’s case in the contest with the President. But for this the book is a far too fragmentary record, too personal both in the ground covered and in the angle of approach. Not to speak of his opponents, more than one of the Senators who stood beside him would have given a very different outline of the story and revealed quite another spirit. Senator Lodge’s own task of gathering a mass of confused and divergent opinions into some coherent basis of action — the real contribution he could have made to the history of the matter — is set forth in particularly skimpy and unconvincing fashion. His general case in his own behalf is weakened notably by printing Mr. Root’s remarkable letter in regard to the White cablegram: for clear perception and soundness of reasoning it stands out in equally striking contrast to the President’s risky generalities and to Mr. Lodge’s elaborate criticisms (incidentally disposing once for all of Mr. Taft and Mr. Lowell). Above all, Mr. Root deals with the real issue, the substantial end in view, rather than with a tactical opening in the controversy, and faces unpleasant facts without personal animus.
In both these things Mr. Lodge fails. In the end his defense tends to confirm the charge he formally challenges at the outset: ‘that I was actuated in my attitude by a personal hostility to the President.’ He proves easily enough that he was actuated as well by sounder and higher motives, and that the Senate had reason to apply its own judgment to the President’s course rather than follow the procession. The points he makes are no mere after-wisdom: his immediate analyses of the first statement of war-aims and of the later Fourteen Points showed once for all that neither would bear analysis. On the question of the Super-State he fairly corners Mr. Wilson; and to his general criticism he brings acuteness, common sense, and long experience in the practical conduct of foreign affairs. But one political instinct seems lacking. In demolishing his antagonist Senator Lodge cannot resist the impulse to press on his attack until he has demolished himself.
In the question of motive he has hardly bettered his position; and there remains unanswered the old question: Did he in the end strive to put through the Treaty safeguarded by reservations, or did he ‘support’ it in such a way as to ensure its defeat — with the onus upon Wilson?
T. H. THOMAS