Politics & Power Quote by Henry Cabot Lodge

Patriotism is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and Lodge knows it. By casting devotion to the American flag as a singular, almost marital vow, he frames international cooperation not as policy but as betrayal. The line turns diplomacy into adultery: you cannot "share" love, you cannot split allegiance, and any attempt to do so is moral weakness disguised as civic virtue.

The real knife is in "mongrel banner". It is a deliberately ugly word, one that treats the League of Nations symbol not as a neutral emblem but as a contaminated hybrid. Lodge borrows the language of breeding and purity to suggest that a multinational project is inherently suspect, a dilution of something supposedly clean and coherent. That rhetorical move matters because it bypasses argument about whether the League could prevent war. It appeals instead to identity anxiety: if your loyalty is pure, you resist mixtures.

Context sharpens the intent. Lodge, the Republican Senate leader, was the central architect of opposition to Woodrow Wilson's League after World War I. The fight wasn't only about idealism versus realism; it was about who would control American power. Under the banner talk sits a constitutional and partisan struggle over treaty commitments, congressional authority, and the fear that collective security would drag the United States into other nations' wars.

It works because it reduces a complicated international architecture to a gut-level image: one flag, one people, one obligation. The elegance is also the con: it makes withdrawal feel like fidelity rather than choice.