HENRY CABOT LODGE

With the United Nations at the moment standing in great jeopardy and with Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. representing America in its Assembly, the biography of his grandfather bears a timely parallel. It is also a scholarly, closely documented and impartial portrait. Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. is chiefly famous for his fantastic enmity to Wilson and his ultimate success in preventing America from joining the League of Nations. Because of this, his detractors have lost sight of the able and constructive senate leader who during a long period of Republican control showed great powers of statesmanship, as well as a strong belief in America's manifest destiny. Garraty does not, as he says, wish to remove Lodge from the list of controversial figures, but he has tried to let him make whatever case he can for himself in order that the reader may form his own judgment. He has perhaps succeeded- but he has also been utterly unable to present Lodge as a likeable human figure. Narrow, snobbish, class-minded, partisan and chauvinistic, Lodge is a chilly personality. His life, in Garraty's hands, is both good history and good scholarship- but it lacks a warmth of spirit which could make it good reading. New source material adds to its value for permanent reference, and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.'s introduction, in which he disagrees with Garraty, lends a further spark of controversy.