Americanism is a word that is on the tongues of a great many people. It is being flippantly tossed about by Republican spell-binders. They utilized it during the last campaign to indicate to the unlearned voters that the Democratic party was about to dethrone the basic principles of the American constitution and the basic ideals of the American people.
They said that former President Wilson was trying to sell out to a super-government in which he was to be the main spring and active head. They foresaw this great nation swallowed up in their imagined world-state, and their sense of duty prompted them to spurn the tasks that Mr. Wilson had consummated and to disregard the ideals which he had set surging through the world.
Since that time the Republican party has indicated that, in the minds of its chieftains, Americanism is a possession over which it stands guard, that it is the only party that understands what the term means and that if the American people expect to preserve their integrity, they must continue to commit their destinies to Lodge and his cohorts.
It is the Lodge view of Americanism that is being followed out now in the matter of our foreign relations. He is the dominant figure in the framing of these relationships and under his regime, it has been decreed that the United States must have as little to do as possible with the other nations of the world.
It makes no difference that we owe these other nations, perhaps, a price that we can never pay in that for three years they stood between America and destruction, that they alone carried the banners of civilization and humanity against the strong German barbarians. When these powers were thus standing guard over everything that we hold to be dear and priceless in this country. Senator Lodge was very happy to announce that “they were fighting for us.”
He probably had consulted the records and found it to be a cold-blooded mathematical fact that the Allies were using their own men and money for a peace in which America was just as vitally interested as they were.
He discovered that in killed and lost in action, England contributed 616,000 men and lost 7,750,000 tons of her merchant marine and spent around $35 billion.
He also found that France lost in battle or died of wounds, 1,385,000 and 998,999 tons of merchant marine and that her war debt is $25 billions; that Italy lost 507,000 men and contributed 846 tonnage in merchant marine.
And that the United States only lost 107,000, including those who died in camp, and 395,000 tons of merchant marine.
And then after looking metallically these facts in the face, Senator Lodge, who back yonder agreed that the Allies were fighting just as much for ourselves as for themselves, and said so, declares that in the matter of peace terms “the other nations will take us at our terms, for without us, their league is a wreck.”
This is his Americanism and if Americanism be so basely ungrateful as that, so steeped in provincialism and so malignantly self-centered, we might as well pray to be delivered from it.
The lead editorial in the Sunday edition of The Charlotte News, May 8, 1921. Henry Cabot Lodge represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate from 1893 to 1924. He was an isolationist and oppoed Woodrow Wilson’s Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations. Photo by Pirie MacDonald - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsc.03676.
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