The "Old Money" Dynasty Who Ruled New England Destroyed By The Kennedys: The Cabot-Lodge Family

[00:00:00]Some American families made fortunes.

[00:00:02]The Kabat Lodge family made a governing class. For two centuries, they presided over New England from a rotation of Georgian mansions and Senate offices and Harvard endowment committees, and they did so with the settled certainty of a household that had always occupied the head chair at the dinner table. The original money came from privateeering and slave shipping out of Salem Harbor.

[00:00:24]The next trunch came from opium chests bound for Canton. The political ascent came from federalist senators who presided over secret conventions in Hartford and whispered about seceding from the United States. The intellectual ascent came from Harvard where their sons collected the first doctorates the university ever awarded in political science and their friendships with Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams shaped the direction of American foreign policy for a generation. The social ascent was captured in a verse recited across Boston for 100 years. And the verse held that in this town of the bean and the cod the lolles talked only to kitts and the kittats talked only to God. The fall when it came came at the hands of a family the lodges had spent a decade in Congress trying to keep out of the country. The Kabat Lodge dynasty was dismantled by the Kennedys across three Senate races, one presidential ticket, and 46 years in a generational feud that had begun on the docks of Salem two centuries earlier [music] and ended in a landslide margin of a quarter of a million votes in the autumn of 1962.

[00:01:31]Thus, on today's episode of Old Money Luxury, we trace how the Cabat Lodge family built the most powerful private dynasty New England ever produced. Why the immigrant Catholic families they most feared were the ones who finally ended them and what remains in Beverly and Nahant and Boston of a name that once spoke only to God.

[00:01:55]Being a cabat in 19th century Boston was less a matter of birth than of tenure.

[00:02:00]The Brahmin families that ran the city, its banks, its hospitals, its universities, [music] and its senate seats had all been present at the founding, and they preferred to keep the guest list to the founding. Kabat wealth at its various expressions of maximum ostentation [music] was rendered in a Georgian brick mansion in Beverly built with privateeer money in 1781, a summer estate on the granite peninsula of Nant, a townhouse on Beacon Hill in Boston, hospital wings and library reading rooms funded across the city, an entire wing of Harvard graduating cohorts educated under the family's quiet patronage, and most famously of all, a two-line couplet.

[00:02:42]composed at a Holy Cross alumni dinner in 1910 that circulated across Boston for a century afterward. The Lowels, the couplet had it, talked only to Kats. The Kats talked only to God. It was a joke.

[00:02:55]It was also almost precisely the family's understanding of the local social hierarchy. For two centuries, the Kabat Lodge line supplied a United States senator to Massachusetts across three separate generations. produced the first Harvard doctorate in political science ever awarded, edited the North American Review, [music] wrote biographies of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington and Daniel Webster, argued Theodore Roosevelt into the Vice Presidency, blocked Woodro Wilson's League of Nations single-handedly, and served as ambassador to the United Nations and to Saigon and to the Vatican in the middle years of the Cold War.

[00:03:31]They were the closest thing the American Republic ever produced to a hereditary ruling class. There was, of course, the matter of how the original money had been made. If you want the full ledger of scandals hiding under the Brahman [music] dignity, from the Salem slave ships to the Boston opium chests to the sealed Hartford Convention journal that nearly broke the young Republic [music] in two, our Substack is where those primary sources live in full. This week, we trace the family from privateeer to poet senator and ask why the immigrant Catholic dynasty they most feared was the one that finally ended them. Godfrey Lel Kat funded aviation research and Boston philanthropy from the family's 20th century fortune. Francis Kat Lel built the first integrated textile mill in the country powered by water and modeled on the manufacturing towns of Manchester.

[00:04:21]Arthur Tracy Kat helped found the American Surgical Association and Richard Clark Kat [music] introduced the profession of hospital social work into American medicine. Edward Clark Kat designed the Boston Athanam, the private library at the top of Beacon Hill that was for most of the 19th century the intellectual clubhouse of the entire Brahmin class. Massachusetts General Hospital, MLAN hospital, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Harvard University itself all took cabbat money for wards and endowments and chairs and buildings across a century and a half of civic donation. The official family biographies when they touched the subject of cabbat origins preferred the neutral word merchants.

[00:05:07]The description was technically accurate. The merchandise was Africans and Chinese addicts.

[00:05:14]The warves of Salem Harbor at the turn of the 18th century were stacked with lumber and cod and molasses bound for the Caribbean. and the counting houses behind them ran the arithmetic of a triangular trade whose vertices were Africa, the West Indies, and New England. John Kat arrived in that town from the island of Jersey, a Norman inlected scrap of land wedged between the coasts of England and France in the same year, accompanied by at least one brother and considerable ambition. He and his son Joseph became within one generation what contemporaries described as highly successful merchants running a fleet of ships carrying opium, rum, and slaves.

[00:05:55]Those three commodities were not incidental to the New England economy of the 18th century. They were the economy.

[00:06:01][music] The National Park Service has documented that on the eve of the American Revolution, the slave trade formed the very basis of economic life in New England, and that around it revolved the sugar industry, the rum distilleries, the ship building, the fisheries, the employment of artisans and seamen, and even the region's agriculture.

[00:06:22]Salem's merchants provisioned West Indian sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans, returned with the molasses those plantations produced, [music] distilled the molasses into rum, and shipped the rum to West Africa to purchase more Africans.

[00:06:37]The Cabats did not observe this system from a distance. They ran it. When the family relocated the base of its operations to the neighboring town of Beverly, John Kat and his brothers Andrew and George owned shares in 40 privateeer vessels sailing from what became known locally as the Kabat Warf.

[00:06:56]Privateeers were armed merchant ships licensed to prey on enemy shipping. They were in operational terms government sanctioned pirates.

[00:07:05]John Kat built the first brick mansion in Beverly in 1781 with money accumulated from those voyages, furnished it with elegant furniture and objects collected from around the world, laid Dutch tiles into its floors, and made the house the physical seat of the family's mercantile ascent.

[00:07:25]The building survives today as the home of the Beverly Historical Society. In 1787, John and his brother George established the Beverly Cotton Manufactury, the first cotton mill in the United States, predating the more famous Slater Mill in Portucket, Rhode Island, by 3 years. It was initially powered by horses walking in a circle and used what a contemporary description called new invented carding and spinning machines that could spin 84 threads at a time. In October of 1789, President George Washington visited the mill during his New England tour and recorded in his diary that the hole seemed perfect and that the cotton stuffs which the mill turned out were excellent of their kind. The Kats had made themselves industrialists before the word had been coined and they had done it on capital accumulated from human bondage.

[00:08:16]Joseph Kat's sons, Joseph Jr., George and Samuel all left Harvard partway through to work the family shipping enterprise and accumulated fortunes that dwarfed their father's already considerable estate. By the time the Salem slave trade began collapsing under abolitionist pressure in the first years of the 19th century, the family had already begun cultivating a new and more lucrative source of imported wealth on the other side of the world. Trade imbalance was the first problem. The Chinese empire in the first years of the 19th century held tea and silk and porcelain that Americans desperately wanted. And Chinese emperors demanded payment in silver and America was running low on silver. Boston's solution was opium, specifically Turkish opium harvested in Anatolia and shipped legally out of American ports because the British East India Company held a monopoly on the Bengal opium trade and Boston merchants could not enter that particular market. Turkey they could reach. In 1805, a consortium of Boston traders that included the Kats, the Cushings, the Welds, the Forbes, and the Delano family of the future Franklin Delano Roosevelt shipped their first cargo of Turkish opium around the southern tip of Africa to Canton. The trade was illegal in China, perfectly legal in the United States, and the Boston merchants regarded this asymmetry with serene indifference.

[00:09:40]The prevailing view among the traders about their Chinese customers, according to accounts collected by later historians, held them to be heathen, crafty, dishonest, and marginal members of the human race. The racism was not incidental to the operation. It was the loadbearing beam. When the transatlantic slave trade was formally abolished in the United States in 1808, Boston's merchants pivoted their logistical infrastructure without a break in the schedule. and the captains who had once carried Africans westward across the Atlantic began carrying opium eastward across the Indian Ocean. By 1840, the Boston Opium Fleet was shipping 1428 chests of opium a year into Chinese ports, a volume roughly one quarter of what the British were shipping from Bengal.

[00:10:30]The scale of the addiction Boston helped manufacture is difficult to state without producing numbers that read like a ledger of national catastrophe.

[00:10:39]There were an estimated 10 million opium addicts in China by 1840. There were 13.5 million by 1905, or roughly 27% of the entire adult male population of the country. A level of mass addiction historians have described as never equaled by any other nation.

[00:10:57]A member of the Boston Kat family served on the American diplomatic team [music] that negotiated the peace treaty ending the Second Opium War, a conflict the trade had helped ignite. Then the family did what a certain kind of great American fortune has always done with its foundation of moral compromise. It laundered the money into civic legitimacy.

[00:11:18]Massachusetts General Hospital Mlan Hospital, the Boston Aanium, and a long series of other Boston institutions were funded in significant part by profits derived from the slave trade and the opium trade. Kats, Cushings, Forbes, and Perkins's became in the middle of the 19th century Boston's greatest philanthropists and the founding donors of what the city eventually took to calling itself the Athens of America.

[00:11:45]The word Brahmin was borrowed from the priestly cast of Hindu India and applied to them by Bostononians who understood that no other English word captured the family's blend of hereditary wealth, cultural authority, and quiet contempt for the merely rich. Hospital wards and library reading rooms built on opium money became in time simply the furniture of civilized Boston.

[00:12:08]George Kat born in 1751 and dead in 1823 converted Kat commercial wealth into political consequence. He had gone to sea as a cabin boy at 16 after leaving Harvard. captained vessels for the family firm through the 1770s and retired from commerce in 1794 to devote himself to politics by which point he was already among the wealthiest men in Massachusetts. His firm J and A Kat had built its empire on the Spanish roots running through Bil Bao shipping the catch of Beverly fishermen to Europe and returning with salt and iron and cordage and silks and liquors. Federalism was his political vehicle. the party of Alexander Hamilton and Fischer Ames of centralized government of mercantile New England set against Thomas Jefferson's agrarian Virginia and of a settled conviction that the American republic was safer in the hands of educated gentlemen than the electorate.

[00:13:03]Kat served in the Massachusetts State Senate from 1782 to 1783, attended the state convention that ratified the federal constitution for Massachusetts in 1788, [music] and entered the United States Senate in 1791.

[00:13:18]He became the Senate's recognized authority on economic and commercial matters [music] and one of Hamilton's most trusted allies. He also introduced in 1793 the fugitive slave act, a measure designed to ensure that enslaved Africans who escaped their bondage in the south and reached the free states of the north could be recaptured and returned to their putitive owners. A bill perfectly consistent with the Kat commercial history. Kat was appointed a director of the bank of the United States that same year and president of its Boston branch in 1803. His federalist faction was called the Essex Junto and drew its membership from the merchants and lawyers of Essex County, most prominently Timothy Pickering, Fischer Ames, and Theophilus Parsons.

[00:14:04]The Junto mobilized ferociously against Thomas Jefferson's Embargo Acts of 1807 and 1808, whose ruinous effect on New England shipping the members identified as an existential threat to the regional economy and its opposition helped force the embargo's repeal. Its most fateful act came in December of 1814 with the country deep in the disaster of the War of 1812.

[00:14:30]26 delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire were convened in secret session in Hartford with George Kat presiding as convention president.

[00:14:42]More extreme delegates, including Timothy Pickering, discussed openly the possibility of New England seceding from the Union and negotiating its own peace with Great Britain. Kat steered the convention away from secession and toward a proposed set of constitutional amendments that would have curtailed the federal government's authority.

[00:15:02]The proceedings were held in complete secrecy. No doorkeeper or messenger admitted to the discussion inviable secrecy enjoined on every member at the first meeting and again on every member before they dispersed. Kat later delivered the convention's sealed journal to the Massachusetts state government. And when the journal was opened, it was found to contain only a bare procedural sketch. No speeches, no attributions, no votes.

[00:15:28]Before the Hartford delegates could deliver their proposed amendments to Washington, news arrived of the Treaty of Gent and of Andrew Jackson's victory over the British at New Orleans and the Federalists were regarded thereafter as reactionary and disloyal. The failure of Hartford being one of the events that sealed the party's death.

[00:15:46]George Kat died in Boston on April 18th of 1823 and by the date of his burial, the Kabat family had been in continuous commercial and political prominence in Massachusetts for 123 years. Giles Lodge was a London merchant on a business trip to Santa Domingo in 1791 when the Haitian Revolution erupted around him.

[00:16:08]The revolution was in the long historical accounting the most successful uprising of enslaved people in human [music] history and eventually produced the only black republic ever born of a slave revolt. For the white merchant community watching the plantations of Sandang burn, it was a scene of extraordinary and immediate violence. Giles Lodge found safe passage off the island aboard an American vessel bound for Boston. He might have gone home. He surveyed the commercial energy of Boston Harbor when he stepped off the vessel and elected [music] instead to remain. The record notes that he prospered from that point onward and never returned to England again. His son, John Ellton Lodge, inherited the father's commercial instincts and expanded on them dramatically, building what a contemporary source described as one of the largest fortunes in Massachusetts of the era. The consequential moment came in 1842.

[00:17:05]That year, John Ellton Lodge married Anna Sophia Kat, granddaughter of the late Senator George Kat himself. The marriage fused the lodge and Kabat names for the first time and combined two merkantile fortunes, two lineages of distinction and two networks of Brahmin social connection into a single family enterprise.

[00:17:26]Their son, born on May 12th of 1850 in Boston, was christened Henry Kat lodge.

[00:17:32]The name was a single compressed act of dynastic branding. It carried in five syllables the sea captain who had made the money, the senator who had defended the money, and the fresh lodge line inheriting both. Henry Kat Lodge grew up divided between two houses. The Beacon Hill townhouse in Boston served as the civilized winter residence. Summer was spent at Nant, a rocky peninsula extending into Massachusetts Bay that had become the resort of choice for the Boston mercantile elite.

[00:18:02]Nah was the place he loved most. He later represented the peninsula in the United States House of Representatives and the soil under its clapped summer houses and rose gardens remained the physical seat of the entire subsequent dynasty. He grew up inside a household where his father's friends were the senators and industrialists and Harvard professors of the postbellum republic and where his mother expected the boys to be groomed for public consequence.

[00:18:28]Every element of the boy's early life was calibrated to produce a senator. The Beacon Hill winter, the Nahant summer, the Harvard undergraduate trajectory, the private tutoring in French and German, the family library stacked with the histories of Roman Britain. His younger self was quiet, bookish, and ferociously ambitious in the particular way of a child raised inside a family that assumed he was destined to run the country before he turned 40. His name told him so every time it was spoken out loud in a Boston drawing room. The cabbat, who had converted commercial wealth into political consequence, had died a full generation before this [music] boy was born. The boy assumed correctly that his own name was already engraved on a reserved United States Senate seat.

[00:19:15]Henry Kat Lodge entered Harvard in 1868 and joined immediately the two institutions that most decisively marked a young man of his generation. Delta Kappa Epsilon and the Porcelian Club.

[00:19:28]The Porcelian was the summit of Harvard's social hierarchy, a club whose membership roles read like a directory of Boston's ruling families and whose members were expected to run American public life within 20 years of leaving Cambridge. His mentor at Harvard was the historian Henry Adams, greatgrandson of one American president and grandson of another, who remained a lifelong friend and eventually wrote the biography of Lodg's son. Lodge graduated Harvard in 1872 and then returned under Adams's supervision to earn the university's very first PhD in political science awarded to him in 1876.

[00:20:07]His dissertation examined the Germanic roots of Anglo-Saxon government, an intellectual preoccupation that fed directly into his later campaigns to restrict immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Rather than practicing law, for which he had also qualified, Lodge joined Adams in editing the North American Review and joined the Harvard faculty as a lecturer.

[00:20:31]He wrote serious biographies of Alexander Hamilton and Daniel Webster, [music] a life of George Washington, and early in the sequence, a biography of his great greatgrandfather, George Kat, whose Senate seat he was eventually going to occupy.

[00:20:45]That biography was a personal act of dynastic self-defin disguised [music] as scholarship.

[00:20:52]His political career began in the Massachusetts State Legislature and carried him to the United States House of Representatives in 1887. and he entered the United States Senate in 1893 and remained in that seat until his death 31 years later. He served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, [music] which made him the gatekeeper of all American foreign policy and a Senate Majority Leader.

[00:21:16]Around the family and around the Boston Social Order, he was known always simply as Kat. The Cabat name being the more prestigious of the two family names he carried, the one that connected him to a founding era senator and to a dynasty stretching back to the counting houses of Salem. His most consequential political friendship began in 1884 at the Republican National Convention when he encountered a former Harvard student four years his junior named Theodore Roosevelt.

[00:21:45]The two men recognized in each other something rare in their millure, which was genuine intellectual engagement combined with genuine political ambition. Lodge became Roosevelt's most important political patron during Roosevelt's years in the political wilderness, recommending him for United States Civil Service Commissioner in 1889, championing him for the presidency of the New York City Police Commission, pushing him into the assistant secretary of the Navy Post that put Roosevelt in position to influence the Spanishame War, and finally building the coalition that made Roosevelt's vice presidential nomination in 1900 [music] possible. That nomination placed Roosevelt one heartbeat away from a presidency he assumed the following year. The two men were aligned on a comprehensive vision of American imperial power. From a strong navy to the Panama Canal to the assertion of American authority in the Caribbean.

[00:22:40]Their correspondence published in multiple volumes remains one of the great documents of American political friendship in the historical record. If Lodg's alliance with Roosevelt represented old money ambition at its most expansive, [music] his campaign for immigration restriction exposed the Brahmin world's deepest anxieties about the America being born around it. The irony was almost too clean for scholarly comfort. The Kat family had built its fortune on enslaved Africans and addicted Chinese consumers. And their descendant, sitting in the Senate, was now deploying the language of racial civilization to bar Irish and Italian and Jewish immigrants who had come to America seeking the same economic opportunity [music] his ancestors had seized by force. Lodge had telegraphed his preoccupation with racial origins in [music] his Harvard doctoral dissertation and by the 1890s that preoccupation had become the organizing obsession of his political career. In two articles in the North American Review in 1891, he argued that recent immigration was making its greatest relative increase from what he described as races most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes among those races.

[00:23:54]In 1894, he co-founded the Immigration Restriction League with a set of other Harvard alumni, and the league became the most influential nivist lobbying organization in the country, advocating a literacy test that required immigrants to demonstrate reading ability in any language, a mechanism designed to filter out the peasant masses of southern and eastern Europe, whose formal literacy rates ran lower than the Northern Europeans lodge preferred. He championed his bill through the Senate for two decades. It passed and Grover Cleveland vetoed it in 1896.

[00:24:28]It passed and William Howard Taft vetoed it in 1913. It passed a third time and Woodro Wilson vetoed it in 1915 and again in 1917.

[00:24:38]Finally, in 1917, Congress overrode Wilson's veto by a twothirds majority, and the Immigration Act of 1917 became law, incorporating Lodg's literacy test and laying the direct groundwork for the far more restrictive immigration acts of 1921 and 1924, which established national origin quotas that effectively closed the door on southern and eastern European immigration for four decades.

[00:25:05]Lodg's most determined anti-immigration constituency was the old Protestant New England of the Brahinss and Yankee farmers. The immigrant family he fought hardest to exclude was the Irish Catholic dynasty of John Fitzgerald and the workingclass Catholic families of Boston. And within a single generation, those families organized themselves into a political machine powerful enough to destroy him and his descendants.

[00:25:31]The first direct confrontation came in 1916.

[00:25:36]Lodge stood for his fifth Senate term against the Democratic mayor of Boston, John F. Fitzgerald, known throughout the city as Honey Fitz. Honey Fitz was as Irish and Catholic as Lodge was Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, the son of Irish immigrants, a former mayor of Boston, and the man whose daughter Rose soon married Joseph P. Kennedy Senior and became the mother of the boy who eventually became the 35th president of the United States. The 1916 race was personal before it was political and structurally significant as well. The first Massachusetts Senate race decided by direct popular vote under the 17th amendment and Lodge had to face the Democratic arithmetic of a state where Irish Catholic voters were a large and growing majority for the first time in his career. He survived narrowly, defeating Honey Fitz by approximately 33,000 votes in November of 1916. A margin wide enough to win the seat, but narrow enough to signal that the old order's grip on Massachusetts politics was beginning to loosen. [music] Rose Kennedy, Honey Fitz's daughter, watched her father lose that November evening.

[00:26:47]She did not forget. The defining act of Lodge's Senate career and the one that most directly altered the arc of 20th century global politics was his successful campaign to prevent the United States Senate from ratifying the Treaty of Versailles and its covenant establishing the League of Nations. The personal dimension was crucial. Lodge and President Woodro Wilson loathed each other with the concentrated contempt only two intellectual equals can generate. Wilson the soaring moralist and Lodge the procedural maneuver.

[00:27:19]Wilson the idealist and Lodge [music] the realist. Both were serious scholars and Wilson had further denied Lodg's close friend Theodore Roosevelt the military command Roosevelt craved during the First World War. A slight Lodge took personally on Roosevelt's behalf. When Wilson returned from Paris in 1919, carrying the Treaty of Versailles and its League Covenant, Lodge, sitting as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, deployed a masterwork of procedural obstruction against it. He read the entire 268page treaty allowed in committee, a performance that consumed 2 weeks. He held 60 days of hearings that gave every opponent of the League a platform.

[00:28:01]He attached 14 reservations to the treaty, one for each of Wilson's celebrated 14 points, a deliberately insulting symmetry that curtailed the League's authority over American military commitments and preserved the constitutional war makingaking power of the United States Congress. His stated concern was serious. He refused, he said, to permit an international body to override the American Congress's exclusive right to declare war. His method was unmistakably personal, and he was willing to spend the treaty's political momentum on procedural delay to make Wilson's league fail. Wilson, physically broken by the grueling nationwide speaking tour he had launched to build public support for the league, suffered a devastating stroke in October of 1919 and was left bedridden.

[00:28:48]He instructed Senate Democrats to vote against the treaty with Lodg's reservations attached, an instruction that sealed the League's defeat in the American Senate. The treaty was rejected in two separate votes in November of 1919, and a second attempt at ratification in March of 1920, also failed the two/3s majority required for approval.

[00:29:10]It was the first time the United States Senate had ever refused to ratify a peace treaty concluding an American war.

[00:29:17]Most historians hold that the League of Nations operated less effectively without American participation than it might have with it and that the vacuum Lodge helped create was one of the enabling conditions of the Second World War. Lodge later published the Senate and the League of Nations in 1925, aostuous defense of his own conduct that placed the entire blame on Wilson. The book appeared a year after Lodge himself was dead, leaving Wilson, who had also died in 1924 and had been broken by his stroke, unable to reply.

[00:29:50]Wilson's stubbornness gave Lodge his victory in the Senate. Lodge's victory gave Wilson his vindication in the history books.

[00:29:58]Henry Kat Lodge died on November 9th of 1924 of a cerebravascular accident while still in active Senate service at Charles Gate Hospital in Cambridge. He had held his Senate seat for 31 years, served as Senate majority leader, and beaten his eventual nemesis family's patriarch in 1916.

[00:30:18]He died believing he had secured the dynasty's political legacy for generations.

[00:30:23]The son who was supposed to inherit that legacy had died before him.

[00:30:27]Between the two great Henry Kat lodges stands a haunting and largely forgotten figure. George Kat Lodge, known within the family as Bay, was the son of Lodge senior and the father of Lodge Jr., and he represented everything the dynasty was not equipped to produce. Bay Lodge was a poet, not a gentleman versifier who dabbled between Senate committee meetings, but a serious, tortured, philosophically ambitious artist who chose literature over politics in full knowledge of the cost. He was born at Nahant, Massachusetts on October the 10th of 1873 into the full heat of his father's political ascent. And when Lodge senior was elected to Congress in 1886, the family relocated to Washington where Bay attended the Emerson Institute before entering Harvard in 1891.

[00:31:18]He found his vocation in his friendship with Trumbull Stikny, a classmate who was among the brightest students at the university and who later earned the Sbond's doctorate of letters in 1903, the first American to receive such a degree before a brain tumor killed him at 30. Together, Stikny and Bay Lodge constituted what later scholars called the Harvard pessimists, a small cohort of brilliantly educated and melancholic young men whose work eventually came to be recognized as a bridge between the fading romantic tradition and the modernism that followed. Bay Lodge's intellectual formation was shaped by rigorous engagement with European pessimism from Schopenhau to Nze to Bodilair.

[00:32:01]In 1896, he and Stikny founded what they called the conservative Christian Anarchist Party, a philosophy of heroic defeat whose central tenate was that the poet must revolt against society and eventually be crushed by it and whose membership was exactly two.

[00:32:19]After Harvard, Belge moved to Paris to study French literature at the Sorbon without taking a degree, then to Berlin to absorb German philosophy. He returned to the United States in 1897 and became his father's private secretary. An arrangement that kept him materially supported while exposing him daily to the world of senatorial power he had rejected. And through the position, he came into contact with his father's two greatest friends, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams. He served as a gunnery officer aboard the USS Dixie during the Spanishamean War of 1898.

[00:32:52]He published his first collection, the song of the wave and other poems in 1898 with scribners. He married Elizabeth Freelingheisen Davis in 1900, allying the lodges to the New Jersey Frilling Heisen dynasty, and their two sons, Henry Kat Lodge Jr. and John Davis Lodge were born in 1902 and 1903.

[00:33:14]Bay Lodge's bibliography grew through the early years of the century with two verse dramas Cain in 1904 and Heracles in 1908 that he regarded as his defining statements. He delivered the five beta kappa poem at Harvard in 1906 and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1908. He was working on a volume titled The Soul's Inheritance when he died of heart failure on August 21st of 1909 at 35 while vacationing on Tucken Island off the coast of Nantucket. Henry Adams wrote the biography as one of his own last major works and Theodore Roosevelt wrote the introduction to the collected poems. The loss shattered Lodge Senior as no political defeat ever had and the old senator was left to raise his two grandsons at Nahant. the seven-year-old and the six-year-old on the same rocky peninsula where their father had been born. Henry Kat Lodge Jr. graduated from Harvard in 1924, the same year his grandfather died, and inherited the donastic mantle, at the moment it passed from one generation to none.

[00:34:23]He won a Senate seat as a Republican in 1936 at [music] 33, the youngest senator from Massachusetts in state history, was reelected in 1942, then resigned in February of 1944 to enlist as a combat soldier overseas, the first sitting United States senator to resign for active military duty since the Civil War and won the seat back in 1946.

[00:34:46]In 1952, he committed the fatal political error of his career. Lodge convinced himself that the 1952 Republican presidential nomination belonged to General Dwight D. Eisenhower rather than to Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, and he spent the first 8 months of that year serving as Eisenhower's deacto campaign [music] manager while his own Senate seat sat undefended in Massachusetts.

[00:35:11]His Democratic challenger was a young congressman named John Fitzgerald Kennedy, grandson of the Honey Fitz Fitzgerald, whom Lodie's own grandfather had defeated in 1916. And the Kennedys prosecuted the 1952 race with [music] the methodical brilliance of a military campaign against a general who had stopped watching his flanks.

[00:35:31]Joseph P. Kennedy senior gave the maximum legal limit to campaign committees, bankrolled additional expenses outside those limits, and extended a $500,000 loan to the owner of the debtridden Boston Post shortly before that paper endorsed his son for senator. Robert Kennedy, 26 and managing his brother's campaign, built a parallel network of Kennedy secretaries in each of the Commonwealth's 351 cities and towns.

[00:36:00]Kennedy outperformed Lodge in their single televised debate and the Kennedy women hosted a series of women onlyly tees across the state that at least 70,000 Massachusetts housewives attended. Lodge later rofully summed up the loss. He had not run against a man.

[00:36:16]He said he had run against a family.

[00:36:19]Kennedy won the seat by roughly 70,000 votes in a state that gave Eisenhower a Republican victory of more than 200,000.

[00:36:28]Rose Kennedy said her son had evened the score with the lodges. The account had been open for 36 years.

[00:36:35]Eisenhower appointed Lodge as US ambassador to the United Nations in January of 1953, where Lodge spent nearly 8 years as one of the great American Cold War voices. And the Republican party made him Nixon's vice presidential running mate. In 1960, Kennedy and Johnson defeated the Nixon Lodge ticket in one of the closest presidential elections in American history. Lodge had lost two national elections to the same man in 8 years.

[00:37:03]The final blow came in 1962 when Edward Kennedy ran for the Massachusetts Senate seat his brother John had vacated on becoming president against Republican nominee George Kat Lodge II, Lodge Jr.'s own son. The third lodge faced the third Kennedy for the same seat. Ted Kennedy was 30 years old and had never held a job as the Harvard Crimson noted at the time, but he was the president's youngest brother and he crisscrossed the state on the argument that he could do more for Massachusetts than a lodge could. The incumbent president left an America's Cup race in Newport to cross into Massachusetts [music] and vote. Ted Kennedy won by roughly a quarter of a million votes, three times his brother's margin [music] 10 years earlier. And George Lodge said publicly in the aftermath that he came from a dead dynasty.

[00:37:53]The Kat Lodge line of Massachusetts senators [music] running from George Kat's 1791 appointment to Lodge Jr.'s 1953 departure had been extinguished by the descendants of the Irish immigrant families. The same line had spent 20 years in Congress trying to keep out of the country. The Cabat Lodge family survives today in the form of trust funds, hospital wings, library reading rooms, and the granite houses on Nah, where the last of the senators wrote his memoirs. The Senate seat it held for three separate generations belongs and has belonged for more than 70 years [music] to the descendants of the immigrant families it fought hardest to exclude.

[00:38:34]There is a lesson somewhere in the arithmetic of that outcome.