Wealth & Money Quote by Henry Cabot Lodge

Lodge’s line is a neat piece of early-20th-century political jujitsu: it turns “internationalism,” a word that can sound lofty and humane, into a two-headed monster made of radicals and profiteers. By pairing “the Bolshevik” with “the men to whom all countries are alike,” he collapses ideological revolution and borderless capitalism into the same moral disgust. The move isn’t analytical; it’s strategic. It frames any weakening of national sovereignty as either subversion or sale.

The intent is defensive nationalism with a patrician edge. Lodge isn’t just rejecting a policy agenda; he’s policing loyalty. “Repulsive” is doing work here: it’s visceral, bodily, meant to make international cooperation feel contaminating rather than merely misguided. The subtext is that the nation is a kind of moral home, and anyone who treats it as interchangeable - whether a communist agitator or a cosmopolitan financier - is suspect.

Context matters. Lodge was a leading Senate voice against Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations after World War I, when fears of Bolshevism spread alongside anxiety about transnational markets, immigration, and shifting power. His rhetoric anticipates a recurring American pattern: global engagement is welcomed when it expands U.S. leverage, condemned when it looks like constraint. The quote works because it offers readers an enemy with two faces and one label, simplifying a complicated moment into a gut-level choice: country first, or chaos.