The Ghost of Henry Cabot Lodge

I am not actually going to say much about Henry Cabot Lodge here. He is useful, however, as a symbol of one particular approach to U.S. imperial policy. Lodge was an influential Senator (R., Massachusetts), a crony of Theodore Roosevelt and other high-toned turn-of-the-20th-century Republican imperialists.

He was thus one of the architects of what TR and his circle called "the large policy," that is, a neo-mercantilist strategy of engrossing foreign markets by political-military means so as to overcome allegedly inbuilt defects in American capitalism. Like their economist-spokesmen Charles A. Conant and Jeremiah W. Jenks, these large policy men were, in effect, "right-wing Leninists." Indeed, they invented the Leninist thesis that problems endogenous to the market economy required expansion into overseas markets lest the system run down and stagnate.

Lenin picked up the theory from John A. Hobson, a sort of proto-Keynesian English Liberal and anti-imperialist, who had in turn picked it up from the American pro-imperialist school. For all these theorists, the great bugbears were "overproduction" and "underconsumption," twin evils to be cured by economic empire. The difference was that Hobson and Lenin condemned empire, while their predecessors, the actual founders of this tissue of economic fallacies, embraced it.(1)

As I noted a few weeks ago in a column on the Liberal Imperialism of John Stuart Mill, a similar argument had been knocking around in English circles since the 1830s.(2)