Air University Review, March-April 1968

Isolationist Critics of American Foreign Policy

A Historical Perspective

Dr. Paul S. Holbo

Those who are responsible for the national security of the United States consider it essential that this country maintain its international commitments and its leading role in world affairs. A majority of Americans, according to the polls, support such policies and might approve more aggressive measures in the Vietnam war. Yet antiwar protesters also make themselves heard; the polls suggest that a substantial minority of the population would avoid “another Vietnam”; and there is relentless criticism of foreign aid programs.

Both those who defend the general course of American foreign policy and the protesters themselves would be well advised to recognize that there has been a tradition in the United States of opposition to foreign involvement and war. Such views of the country’s foreign policy can be characterized as isolationism, if that term is understood properly. No formal definition has much validity because the features of isolationism are not always the same. But isolationism’s typical forms and persistent characteristics can be seen in historical perspective.

Since 1941 there have been derogatory overtones to the term “isolationism,” which conjures up memories of Senators Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert M. La Follette, and the other members of the “Battalion of Death” who helped to defeat Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations in 1919. Or it recalls the efforts made in the 1930s to keep the United States from joining the struggle against Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan.l

Even those persons who cannot remember, or who do not know much about, the controversies over foreign policy of the late 1930s react almost instinctively against the term “isolationism.” For over two decades American schoolchildren have been learning that isolationism is bad. Because of the connotations of the word, it is applied more cautiously today than in the past, which is altogether proper. More important, there has been an increased awareness since 1941 that the United States was not an isolationist nation throughout its history. The fact is that Americans from the Founding Fathers through Theodore Roosevelt generally recognized the importance of Europe to their country and were sometimes adept manipulators of the European balance of power.2

There has always been isolationism in the United States, however, and sometimes it proved a good policy. President John Adams, who distrusted England and France equally, attempted with success around 1800 to free his country from European entanglements. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams insisted in 1823 that the United States should maintain an independent course in foreign policy, an idea that contributed to the making of the Monroe Doctrine. President Abraham Lincoln sensibly filed away a memorandum from Secretary of State William H. Seward suggesting that the United States become involved in a war with England, France, and Spain as a means of reuniting the Union. “Only one war at a time,” the President reminded his able if aggressive Secretary of State. And in 1885, to mention only one more example of wise isolationism, the Cleveland administration rejected the General Act of the Berlin Conference on the Congo, to which the Arthur administration had sent delegates, because it might have involved the United States in the colonial partition of Africa.3

It is not so easy to make a case for the benefits of twentieth century isolationism.4 In the 1920s, for instance, there was an ostrich-like reaction against the First World War. The nation did not withdraw altogether from the world arena after 1920, but even those Americans who still worried about the rest of the world failed to concern themselves with the problems of European security and rising Asian nationalism. Instead they concentrated on plans for international organization and arms limitation and on legal means to avoid war. It is not properly understood that these activities were often isolationism in disguise.

There was, for example, an isolationist aspect to Support in the United States for the League of Nations. Many enthusiasts favored the League as a way to keep the peace without involving the United States in the struggles of the world. This outcome would, indeed, have been the millennium; but neither the Republicans nor the Democrats were quite prepared to bring it about.

The Washington Arms Limitation Conference of 1921-22, which was supposed to be a substitute for the League, for alliances, and for armaments, aroused American enthusiasm. The isolationists of that day seemed to believe that prohibiting preparedness would promote peace. “War,” said Republican Senator Hiram Johnson of California, “may be banished from the earth more nearly by disarmament than by any other agency or in any other manner.” Just before the Washington Conference convened on Armistice Day, 1921, several thousand women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., carrying banners denouncing war. “Scrap the battleship,” their placards read, “and the Pacific problems will settle themselves.” Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, American diplomats, with their naval aides carrying slide rules to calculate “ratios” of warships, tried to scrap the battleship, the cruiser, the carrier, the destroyer, and the submarine.5 They were still at it when the Japanese walked out of the London Naval Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations in 1935.

There was also a scheme for outlawing war, promoted by many of the peace workers, who were numerous in the 1920s, and by a Chicago lawyer named Salmon O. Levinson. If war was legal, Levinson and his followers wanted to declare it illegal; if war was nonlegal, as many authorities contended, they still wanted to declare it illegal. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, which was an outgrowth of the idea of outlawry, provided for the renunciation of war.6 War in self-defense was still permissible, whereupon undeclared wars became fashionable. Manchuria in 1931 was just the first of a series.

There is a lesson to be learned from the history of the 1920s, for three of the essential characteristics of American isolationism are apparent: excessive faith in international organization; a belief that peace can be attained through the limitation of armaments; and a tendency to seek legalistic solutions. These characteristics were to recur in later times. Only a few Americans, including Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, thought of international affairs in terms of diplomacy with power.

After 1928 there was less stress on international organization as a way of avoiding foreign conflicts. The League was already a dead issue, and the World Court would soon be abandoned by its presumed friends. But the idea of disarmament, now in the form of nonarmament, and legalistic means of avoiding intervention became more popular than ever with the onset of the Great Depression. Altogether the 1930s were to comprise the peak period of American isolationism.

The New Deal itself contributed substantially to the isolationist sentiment in the United States during this decade. The outgoing Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, urged that sanctions be imposed against Japan for its aggressions in Manchuria and that the United States consult with the European powers on world problems. He had no luck in persuading either his own chief, President Herbert Hoover, or the incoming president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to adopt these policies, though Roosevelt toyed with the suggestions briefly.7 In 1933 Roosevelt vaguely promised the League of Nations that the United States would not interfere with actions taken to preserve peace. There was an outcry in Congress at even this timid proposal, and Roosevelt quickly retreated. He also gave up his idea of appointing an ambassador to the League of Nations. In the same year he scuttled the London Economic Conference.8 The United States, under the New Deal, would go it alone in economic and political affairs.

For more than a decade before the New Deal, novelists, playwrights, poets, and scholars had been establishing the mood for the isolationism of the 1930s. Such persuasive writers as John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Maxwell Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway chronicled the absurdities and degradation of the World War. Some historians and political scientists contributed to the same attitude by arguing that Russia and France, not Germany, had been responsible for the war; and they made much of the secret, imperialistic agreements between the victorious Allies.

But it was the depression that provided the great impetus for the efforts during the 1930s to isolate the United States from international troubles. Americans commonly traced the origins of the depression to the Great War and mistakenly attributed United States intervention to “warmongering” bankers and businessmen, who were currently in low esteem. Certain spokesmen for conservatism, such as the Chicago Tribune, applauded the isolationist foreign policy of the Roosevelt administration. But the supporters of the New Deal and other liberals and progressives were the leaders in exposing the “causes of war” and pointed the direction to “permanent peace.”

One such man was Senator Gerald P. Nye, progressive Republican and representative of the socialistic North Dakota Nonpartisan League, who headed the Special Senate Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry. The committee had been set up as a result of persistent demands by the pacifist Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, led by Dorothy Detzer. This and other pacifist groups had called for investigation and regulation of the international munitions traffic, which they blamed for causing war.

The so-called Nye Committee met for two years, from 1934 to 1936, with the general endorsement of President Roosevelt. Senator Nye demonstrated that President Wilson had not been candid in 1919 when he stated that he was unaware of the Allies’ secret wartime treaties; the committee charged, too, that American armaments-makers had made huge profits during the First World War and disclosed that the munitions industry had allegedly helped to break up the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1927. The committee did not claim that economic interests had caused the war or led the United States into the war, but this was the popular view9. The legislative result was the Neutrality Laws, a legalistic solution for keeping the United States out of future wars by forbidding the sale of strategic commodities, the lending of money, and travel by Americans during wartime.

Another influential man who thought a great deal about the domestic and foreign problems of the United States at this time was the historian Charles A. Beard. He described his ideas in a series of books and articles, notably The Open Door at Horne, written in 1934, and The Devil Theory of War, which appeared several years later. Beard, too, was a liberal, determined that reform should not be shunted overseas again as it had been in 1917 when so many progressives marched off to war with Wilson. He felt that there was too much to be done at home to let “giddy minds” involve the United States in “foreign quarrels.” Thus he recommended that the United States renounce all “engines of war and diplomacy,” restrict and control foreign trade, reduce its merchant marine, convert the Navy to a coastal defense force, and evacuate the Philippines; then the United States could undertake a kind of super New Deal on the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Professor Samuel Eliot Morison quipped a few years later that it was Beard’s early retirement from Columbia University to his dairy farm in Connecticut that led him to propose such a program. Isolation, said Morison, breeds isolation.10 But many Americans thought much as Beard did during the 1930s.

Other elements added to American isolationism in this decade. Agitators of left and right preached the doctrine. These included Father Charles Coughlin, Senator Huey Long, Dr. Francis Townsend, the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, and Congressman William Lemke.11 Various ethnic elements added distinctive flavors: a few Scandinavian and Irish-Americans, some German-Americans, and after 1935 Italo-Americans.12 Some of these individuals and groups continued to be active up to and even during the Second World War. But the real core of the isolationist movement lay in Congress with the staunchest supporters of the New Deal, such as Senators Burton K. Wheeler, George Norris, Homer T. Bone, Henrik Shipstead, Ernest Lundeen, Gerald Nye, “Young Bob” La Follette, and others whom President Roosevelt often relied on for votes.

Beginning in the late 1930s, however, the progressives who opposed intervention in foreign wars were joined by a number of conservative businessmen and others who opposed President Roosevelt’s domestic program, and by a new, largely younger group of liberals. The businessmen included General Robert E. Wood, William Regnery, Edward Rickenbacker, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, and Joseph P. Kennedy. The liberals included young Chester Bowles, Robert Hutchins, and William Benton as well as the veteran reformers John T. Flynn and Oswald Garrison Villard. R. Sargent Shriver and other college students helped to form the America First Committee, which brought together the isolationists of left and right.13 Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh was the most prominent spokesman of the America First Committee. One of his chief themes and one of the main principles of America First was the idea of impregnable national defense, “Fortress America,” armed against the world. This was isolationism in its most concrete form. Another and more effective argument of the committee was that the President had too much power and was leading the nation into war. Only Congress, the isolationists insisted, could declare war. Such suspicion of the President and the argument that Congress must have charge of foreign policy have been other enduring characteristics of twentieth century isolationism.

The America First Committee was an active and effective organization. It worried President Roosevelt, who often feared the isolationists more than he need have done. He usually dodged when the America Firsters challenged his programs or asked him where the United States was heading. Sometimes he retreated.14 Yet, by the autumn of 1941 there was no doubt that the President expected the United States to go to war against the Axis, but how it would occur was unclear.

The America First Committee held its last meeting on 7 December 1941. During the colossal struggle following Pearl Harbor, isolationism was an ugly word in the United States. Pundit Walter Lippmann, among others, kept up a steady assault on the isolationists. In 1943 he accused them of having succumbed to “mirages,” illusory hopes for peace, disarmament, and collective security, by which he meant excessive faith in agencies such as the League of Nations. The isolationists, he charged, had been too fearful of entangling alliances and had failed to “appreciate the long-established commitments of the United States.”15

The Japanese attack had at last made Americans realistic about international affairs, or so it was claimed. But early during the war Americans again began to stress international organization as the main agency of permanent peace. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, President Roosevelt told Josef Stalin, to the consternation of Winston Churchill, that the United States would not keep its forces in Europe at the end of the war.16 As soon as the war was over, we dissolved our armed forces, so that by April 1946 they had been reduced by seven million men. Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal exclaimed in despair that “we are going back to [sleep] at a frightening rate.”17

While the United States neglected its military strength after the war, it did not retreat altogether. President Harry Truman mustered the fleet in the eastern Mediterranean in 1946 and forced the Russians to withdraw from Iran. In 1947 he proclaimed the Truman Doctrine for aid to Greece and Turkey to combat Communism. Containment and the Marshall Plan of economic reconstruction ensued, to be followed by the Berlin Airlift in 1948-49 and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949.

Many of the old isolationists had been retired from public life by this time; and others, notably Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, were converted to hardheaded internationalism. Vandenberg advised Truman “to scare hell out of the country” to win approval of the Truman Doctrine, and the President followed his advice. Mr. Truman also sounded the tocsin of a worldwide crusade on behalf of freedom.18

That such language was necessary is a reflection of the persistent hold of isolationist thinking throughout the late 1940s. Polls revealed that only 49 percent of the people favored aid to Turkey, and only 56 percent favored aid to Greece. To win the support of the isolationists, advocates of the Marshall Plan had to argue that the plan would be a one-shot way of getting Europe back on its feet, so that presumably we could go our own way and not be touched for further loans.

President Truman came under fire from isolationists of both left and right. Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace, the last of the liberal New Dealers in the Truman administration, spoke out against his chief’s policies. He especially condemned the “Get tough with Russia” policy. “Getting tough,” said Wallace, “never brought anything real and lasting. . . . We must not let our Russian policy be guided or influenced by those inside or outside the United States who want war with Russia.”19 His argument was but a variant of the familiar isolationist plaint that seditious elements were seeking to drag the United States into a foreign war.

A few days later the President wrote to his mother and sister in Missouri: “Well, I had to fire Henry today. . . .”20 But ex-Secretary Wallace continued to charge that the “Martial Plan,” as he termed it, was an attack on the Soviet Union. And he led a revolt of liberals and fellow travelers against the President, accusing him of betraying the ideals of international cooperation laid down by Franklin Roosevelt. The lunatic-fringe and Communist elements in Wallace’s Progressive party weakened his candidacy in the election of 1948, however, and Mr. Truman’s surprising victory dealt a near death blow to left-wing isolationism.21 The idea of general disarmament, which was Moscow’s line through early 1950, attracted only scattered support, largely among the sign-bearing sects.

Conservative isolationism was more influential in the late 1940s. It was characterized by faith in so-called traditional foreign policies, by a distaste for the affairs of distant lands, and by pragmatic calculations, often stated in financial terms. Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, “Mr. Republican,” supported the containment of Soviet expansionism, but he opposed stationing American troops overseas and favored extending the Monroe Doctrine to Europe instead of creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. During the Korean War, while General Dwight D. Eisenhower was trying to make NATO a reality, former President Herbert Hoover spoke in terms reminiscent of Lindbergh’s Fortress America: “I suggest that air power and the navy is the alternative to sending American land divisions to Europe. With our gigantic productive capacity and with our economic strength we can build and sustain overwhelming air and sea forces and hold them on our home ground ready in case of attack. . . . We should not create land armies for expeditions into the quicksands of either Europe or China.”22

Joseph P. Kennedy summed up the conservative isolationists’ thinking in a widely publicized speech in Chicago in 1951. Calling for “disentanglement” from our commitments and programs, Mr. Kennedy stated: “The basic difficulty is . . . a policy that purports to reach for security by reliance on the United Nations, and on alliances with nations from Norway to Australia. It is a policy that builds on the theory that our dollars can buy many things that are not purchasable—the will to resist, the will to re-arm, the will to fight in another man’s cause.” We should save our strength, he added, for no other country would create a Marshall Plan for us.23

Walter Lippmann criticized both the Truman administration and its critics. The President’s mistake, he said, was in adopting the “Wilsonian system of ideas,” a crusading doctrine “generating great popular fervor” and creating the impression that all wars are wars to end wars. This once-and-forever ideology, Lippmann argued in his book Isolation and Alliances (1952), had been widely influential. He conceded that this Wilsonian ideology appealed to the emotions and was the easy way to win the approval of Congress. But he warned that there would be a reaction against the crusading spirit when the American people discovered that there was to be no end of crusades. The making of a new order, he added, was a task “which our generation may hope to see begun but cannot hope to see completed.”24

Lippmann’s warning of future weariness was sensible; but the letdown he predicted did not come, largely because the Communists repeatedly aroused us and stirred our energies. The Berlin blockade, the Czechoslovakian coup, and the Korean War made NATO possible and gave it vitality. The news that Klaus Fuchs had delivered American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union speeded work on the hydrogen bomb. And the United States began to rearm for conventional war. Yet the limited war that occurred in Korea was hard to understand, particularly when the United Nations forces became trapped in truce talks while the Communists strengthened their defenses, and because fear of expanding the war prevented a strike at the aggressors’ sanctuary in Manchuria.

A reaction against the Korean “police action” and the loss of China contributed to the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. But the mood of the nation was to contain Communism wherever it became a danger, not to isolate the United States from the rest of the world. Democratic critics and self-styled realists objected to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s policies of “liberation” and “massive retaliation.” They found the former to be infused with a moralistic desire to end the stalemate of containment, and they charged that the latter overemphasized nuclear weapons instead of conventional armies, allegedly for the sake of economy. But the arguments that ensued had a strongly partisan flavor, and neither the administration nor its critics urged a return to isolationism.25

The first sign of a retreat came in 1957, as the focus of the Cold War again centered on Western Europe. George Kennan, author of the containment policy, contended that settlement of the German problem was essential for a relaxation of tension. Kennan argued that the Hungarian revolution of 1956 had proved that the Communist satellite armies were not reliable and that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was overrated. He also pointed out that the implications of ballistic missiles for the defense of Europe had not been considered fully. The solution that he suggested was disengagement—”a general withdrawal of American, British, and Russian armed power from the heart of the Continent”—and the neutralization of Germany, which might then be united. Kennan proposed in addition the creation of a nuclear-free zone in Europe.26

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev liked the idealistic scheme, and Poland was soon promoting its improved version of disengagement in the Rapacki Plan. But former Secretary of State Dean Acheson protested strenuously against the whole idea. He revealed that Mr. Kennan had proposed disengagement previously, as early as 1949, and that the Truman administration had rejected it at that time. Mr. Acheson scored the “new isolationism” of Kennan and other advocates of disengagement, calling it “utterly fallacious” and dangerous “because the harder course which it calls on us to forego has been so successful.” The struggle of two World Wars, great world leadership, and vast national effort has ended, Acheson lamented, “by bringing back the old yearnings and errors under a new name. ‘Disengagement,’ it is called now; but it is the same futile—and lethal—attempt to crawl back into the cocoon of history.”27 When Mr. Acheson and others finished their scathing commentaries on the new isolationism, the illusions of a diplomatic détente faded away and the hard real world again appeared.

There were further yearnings for isolationism during the last Eisenhower years and the thousand days of John F. Kennedy. These took the form of appeals to end the “international arms race” or for a cessation of nuclear tests. Unfortunately the Soviet Union engaged in what the Kennedy administration termed “nuclear blackmail” on the issue of Berlin and punctuated its appeals for “general and complete disarmament” without international inspection by setting off in 1961 twenty-one atmospheric explosions, ranging up to fifty megatons or more. The tiny claques of nuclear pacifists meanwhile continued to voice their “Better Red Than Dead” slogan.

It is not easy at this time to account for the small but perceptible increase of criticism of American foreign policy in the early 1960s. One factor in the situation seems to have been an overreaction against the excesses of “McCarthyism.” Among certain liberals, at least among the pseudosophisticated, anything anti-Communist became suspect. Charges also were voiced that American policy was based on a mistaken conception of monolithic Communist unity, despite the fact that the Kennedy administration repeatedly spoke of the fractures in the Communist bloc.28 There was in addition a vogue of guilt-ridden fascination with the anticolonialist nationalism of certain newly emerging countries and with Castroite Cuba and Communist China. The feeling that an affluent—some said hopelessly decadent—United States was neglecting its own social problems added to the unease especially among idealistic younger people who had no memory of the Korean War or even of the international crises of the mid-1950s. Certain other persons of pacifist or neo-isolationist inclination suffered from a nuclear-devastation mentality. Faced with the horrors of nuclear war, they asked, what choice could a sane man make? Their answers to the question, while emphatically humane, tended towards vast oversimplification. Catchall peace organizations, such as Turn Towards Peace and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), were formed as umbrellas for the new isolationist spectrum. The number of adherents was small, but they were passionate and outspoken.

The events of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 shattered illusory hopes for a new world order. President Kennedy stood firm against the Russian thrust, all the while keeping diplomatic channels open. The President felt that it was necessary to have a showdown with the Soviet Union, though not to humiliate the adversary, and to combine firmness with flexibility.29

Ironically, when the crisis was past, the new isolationists criticized the President more sharply than the Soviet Union did. Several peace organizations castigated what they termed the “Kennedy system,” calling it a “warfare state.” They contended that Khrushchev’s motives were unimpeachable and that the Soviet missiles in Cuba were harmless. The director of SANE also asserted, at a rally in New York City on the Sunday following the crisis, that the peace movement had prevented war! 30 Few Americans were impressed by the claim. Professor H. Stuart Hughes, running for senator in Massachusetts on a platform of disarmament and disengagement, received only fifty thousand votes. And just one candidate anywhere in the country was elected on SANE’s platform.

Exulting in its victory over Khrushchev, the Kennedy administration relaxed its pressure on Cuba and negotiated the limited nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union. The treaty was reminiscent of several of the international agreements of the 1920s in both its superficial pretensions and its restricted scope; even hard-line anti-Communists in the Senate voted for ratification of the treaty on the grounds of its military insignificance. But zealous agents of the New Frontier proclaimed that a detente with the Soviet Union might now be possible, while books appeared claiming that the Cold War at last was over.31

Most New Frontiersmen who were closer to the center of power worried about the disarray in NATO and the mounting conflict in South Vietnam. President Kennedy himself had been intensely concerned about Southeast Asia almost from the moment he took office in January 1961. Later that year, after careful consultations, he ordered a substantial increase in the American military commitment to South Vietnam, a decision that fit his persistent prior emphasis on conventional military preparedness and counterinsurgency warfare.32 By the time of his death in 1963, large numbers of American troops were engaged in combat in Vietnam.

The crisis there nevertheless received little attention from Americans, perhaps because Cuba, the Congo, and Berlin were more dramatic or because the political situation in South Vietnam was so complex. American domestic issues, particularly involving civil rights, also absorbed the attention of persons who might otherwise have become alarmed over foreign policy. During the Presidential campaign of 1964 the two candidates appeared to stand for abstract principles of restraint or of victory, which again diverted attention from the concrete problem. Consequently it was not until 1965 that the majority of Americans really became aware of the war, by which time it was undoubtedly too late to affect the course of American policy. There probably was never any substantial inclination among the public to do so anyhow, despite some unhappiness over the costs and nature of the war.

After February 1965, though, there was an outburst of antiwar protests, rallies and marches, and “teach-ins,” more substantial than anything of the kind that had occurred since 1948 if by no means rivaling the isolationist activities of the 1930s. It is not possible in the space of this article to evaluate the views of the new critics, who have received such widespread attention. It is nevertheless useful to know that many of their views fit into the tradition of American isolationism. Of course by no means all of the new isolationists would necessarily agree with the isolationists of an older generation; but the patterns of their thought are remarkably similar, and their ideas often identical.

One can, for example, find numerous antecedents in the history of twentieth century isolationism for each of the charges voiced against American policy since 1965: that the President was unnecessarily involving the country in foreign war, allegedly in a futile struggle undertaken against the popular will; that the United States should avoid land warfare abroad; that the civilization or culture of the country where the battle was being waged had traditions that were irreconcilable with American values; that the United States has neglected to rely on international organization to restore peace; that America was supporting a decadent, corrupt foreign government; that we were breaking international law by our activities; that we were suppressing a native nationalist movement, or engaging in another crusade, or searching for absolute victory; that we were dominated by military-industrial thinking; and that we were creating domestic divisions and ignoring problems at home.33 It also appears that the objections to escalation of the war, or to the bombing of North Vietnam, are derived in part from the extreme fear of war that has long been characteristic of the isolationist mind and that has been especially prominent during the atomic era.34

This is not to say that the views of the critics should not be heard merely because they have often been heard before. Nor does it mean that all their arguments are necessarily wrong now. But modem history does not stand convincingly on their side.35

Eugene, Oregon

Notes

1. Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (New York: Macmillan, 1945). Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966).

2. Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), esp. pp. 189-256. Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956). Norman Graebner (ed.), Ideas and Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

3. Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John Adams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957). Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963). David M. Pletcher describes the background of the Congo episode in The Awkward Years: American Foreign Relations under Garfield and Arthur (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962).

4. A general account is Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth Century Reaction (New York: Collier Books, 1961).

5. J. C. Vinson, The Parchment Peace (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1955). Merze Tate, The United States and Armaments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948). Raymond G. O’Connor, Perilous Equilibrium (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1962).

6. Robert H. Ferrell, Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). L. Ethan Ellis, Frank B. Kellogg and American Foreign Relations, 1925-1929 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961), pp. 193-212.

7. Elting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (New York: Atheneum, 1964), chaps. 21, 23, 24.

8. Robert A. Divine, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and Collective Security, 1933,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLVIII (June 1961), 42-59; Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent: American Entry into World War II (New York: John Wiley, 1965), pp. 3-5. Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy in the Great Depression: Hoover-Stimson Policy, 1929-1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 270-77.

9. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 9. Wayne S. Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), pp. 67-121.

10. Charles A. Beard, Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels (New York: Macmillan, 1939). Samuel Eliot Morison, “History Through a Beard,” chap. 15 in By Land and By Sea (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), pp. 328-45.

11. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval, Vol. III in The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 15-125.

12. Louis Gerson, The Hyphenate in Recent American Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 112-23.

13. Wayne S. Cole, America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940-1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953). On Mr. Shriver, see New York Times, 7 March 1961.

14. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, pp. 75 ff. Dorothy Borg, The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938, Vol. XIV in Harvard East Asian Series (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), esp. Pp. 369-442, 536-44. Paul S. Holbo (ed.), Isolationism and Interventionism, 1932-1941 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967).

15. Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1943), pp. 47-81.

16. Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, Vol. VI in The Second World War (New York: Bantam Books, 1962), p.303. 

17. A study of the politics of demobilization is badly needed. Suggestive comments appear in R. Alton Lee, “The Army ‘Mutiny’ of 1946,” The Journal of American History, LIII (December 1966), 555-71.

18. Congressional Record, 80th Congress, 1st Session, 12 March 1947, pp. 1980-81.

19. Vital Speeches, XII (1 October 1946), 738-41.

20. Harry S. Truman, Year of Decisions (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955), I, 560.

21. A sympathetic account of the Wallace movement is by Karl M. Schmidt, Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade, 1948 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1960).

22. New York Times, 10 February 1951.

23. Joseph P. Kennedy, “Our Foreign Policy, Its Casualties and Prospects,” address before Economic Club of Chicago, 17 December 1951, partially reprinted in Robert A. Goldwin et al. (eds.), Readings in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 168-75.

24. Walter Lippmann, Isolation and Alliances: An American Speaks to the British (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952).

25. Dulles’s statement on liberation appeared in his article, “A Policy of Boldness,” Life, XXXII (19 May 1952), 146-60; his speech announcing his views on massive retaliation appears in the New York Times, 12 January 1954, and in Hugh Ross (ed.), The Cold War: Containment and Its Critics (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), pp. 30-41. Professor Ross also conveniently includes a rejoinder by Chester Bowles and a later modification by Dulles.

26. George F. Kennan, Russia, the Atom and the West (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957).

27. Dean Acheson, “The Illusion of Disengagement,” Foreign Affairs, XXXVI (April 1958), 371-82. Khrushchev’s appraisal appears in New York Times, 3 June 1957, and in Ross, The Cold War, pp. 50-52.

28. Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, in Power and Impotence: The Failure of America’s Foreign Policy (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), pp. 131-83, exemplify such thinking and describe an alleged rigidly ideological American foreign policy.

29. A lively account is Elie Abel, The Missile Crisis (New York: Bantam Books, 1966). Theodore Sorensen and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., have written lengthy accounts in their biographies of John F. Kennedy.

30. Henry M. Pachter, Collision Course: The Cuban Missile Crisis and Coexistence (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), p. 90.

31. Charles O. Lerche, Jr., The Cold War. . . And Alter (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 131 ff. Professor Lerche is more optimist than isolationist, however.

32. Jean Edward Smith, “Kennedy and Defense: The Formative Years,” Air University Review, XVIII, 3 (March-April 1967), 38-54. Richard P. Stebbins, The United States in World Affairs, 1961 (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), pp. 203-5.

33. A concise statement of the argument from domestic divisions and neglected problems at home appears in Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1966 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967), Pp. 256-59.

34. An excellent commentary on this mentality is by Robert W. Tucker, “Nuclear Pacifism,” in Charles O. Barker (coordinator), Problems of World Disarmament (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), pp. 158-70.

35. It is argued in a recent study that the majority of Americans are essentially moderate in viewpoint on the Vietnam war, open-minded on policy options, and subject to effective leadership. Sidney Verba, et al., “Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam,” The American Political Science Review, LXI (June 1967), 317-33.

Contributor

Dr. Paul S. Holbo (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in History, University of Oregon. He served with the U.S. Army, 1951-53. He has taught at the University of Chicago and lectured at Reed College, University of Illinois, and Indiana University. He is Chief Reader for the Advanced Placement American History, Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey and Examiner in American History, College Entrance Examination Board, New York. Professor Holbo is editor of Isolationism and Interventionism, 1932-1941 (1967), and his articles and reviews have been widely published in professional journals.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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