If they had had the wisdom of their better days they would then have made themselves the champions of the American idea, and would have led the country in the determined effort to free itself once for all from colonial politics, even if…
Henry Cabot Lodge
The Public Record
Henry Cabot Lodge was an American politician, historian, lawyer, and statesman from Massachusetts. A member of the Republican Party, he served in the United States Senate from 1893 to 1924 and is best known for his positions on foreign policy. He voted in favor of American entry into World War I and his successful crusade against Woodrow Wilson's Treaty of Versailles ensured that the United States never joined the League of Nations. His penned conditions against that treaty, known collectively as the Lodge Reservations, influenced the structure of the modern United Nations.
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They proved unequal to the task, and it fell to a younger generation led by Henry Clay and his contemporaries to sweep Federalist and Jeffersonian republican alike, with their French and British politics, out of existence.
In so doing the younger generation did but complete the work of Washington, for he it was who first trod the path and marked the way for a true American policy in the midst of men who could not understand his purposes.
The party of opposition to the government became first ludicrous and then dangerous, in their wild admiration and senseless imitation of ideas and practices as utterly alien to the people of the United States as cannibalism or fire-worship.
McMaster might have added that to no man in our history has greater injustice of a certain kind been done, or more misunderstanding been meted out, than to Washington, and although this sounds like the merest paradox, it is nevertheless…
From the hour when the door of the tomb at Mount Vernon closed behind his coffin to the present instant, the chorus of praise and eulogy has never ceased, but has swelled deeper and louder with each succeeding year.
He has been set apart high above all other men, and reverenced with the unquestioning veneration accorded only to the leaders of mankind and the founders of nations; and in this very devotion lies one secret at least of the fact that…
He has been lifted high up into a lonely greatness, and unconsciously put outside the range of human sympathy.
He has been accepted as a being as nearly perfect as it is given to man to be, but our warm personal interest has been reserved for other and lesser men who seemed to be nearer to us in their virtues and their errors alike.
Such isolation, lofty though it be, is perilous and leads to grievous misunderstandings.
From it has come the widespread idea that Washington was cold, and as devoid of human sympathies as he was free from the common failings of humanity.
He flung aside the suggestion of supreme power, not simply as dishonorable and unpatriotic, but because such a result would have defeated the one great and noble object at which he aimed.