Isolationism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Essentially the term “isolationism,” when applied to the foreign policies of the United States, suggests a diplomatic tradition at variance with that of other great nations of the modern world. That American behavior in the external realm has not always followed the established patterns of Realpolitik is demonstrated repeatedly by the record itself. Yet historians have never agreed on either the nature or the degree of that divergence. Like most broad generalizations, isolationism defies any precise definition. Not even as a form of escapism did isolationism create necessarily unique national responses; for the United States, in attempting to hoard its energy by limiting its commitments abroad, pursued principles universally accepted by prudent statesmen.

Isolationism as a foundation of national policy cannot be divorced from the geographical insulation that the American people enjoyed through much of their history vis-à-vis the great powers of Europe. Yet to the Founding Fathers, isolationism was more than a response to geographic factors or the basis of thoughtless preoccupation with inner-directed and self-sufficient pursuits. The United States never sought the solitude of such hermit nations as Japan and Korea; from its republican beginnings, it created and maintained a commercial empire that blanketed much of the globe. American isolationism was always political and military, never commercial or intellectual.

In an effort to limit the political interests of the United States to the Western Hemisphere and to employ the nation’s geographical advantages in the defense of those interests, early American leaders made the avoidance of entangling alliances the keystone of their diplomacy. John Adams, during a conversation with the Englishman Richard Oswald in November 1782, explained his fear of any permanent American commitment to Europe. “It is obvious,” declared Adams (Works, vol. 3, p. 316), “that all the powers of Europe will be continually manoeuvering with us, to work us into their real or imaginary balances of power?. But I think it ought to be our rule not to meddle; and that of all the powers of Europe, not to desire us, or perhaps, even to permit us, to interfere, if they can help it.” In his farewell address, George Washington acknowledged the diplomatic and military benefits that accrue from distance. “Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation?” he asked ([1753–1796] 1948, p. 641). For Washington, such convictions reflected a realistic judgment of European power and the conclusion that the young republic would only waste its energies if it engaged in struggles abroad which it could not control.

In their preoccupation with diplomatic flexibility, the Founding Fathers reinforced the doctrine of no entangling alliances with the principle of complete neutrality in relation to Europe’s wars. No nation could be completely free that had bartered away its right to be neutral. To thoughtful Americans the avoidance of involvement abroad was a less important consideration than preserving the nation’s freedom to carry out the decisions that best defended its interests. If the United States maintained its independence of action more successfully than did the powers of Europe, it did so not because of differences in intent, or even of geographical insulation, but rather because the precise political conditions of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seemed to assure American security. American diplomatists could pursue a policy of isolationism throughout the years 1815 to 1900 because they understood that the European balance of power was adequate for the nation’s needs.

Unfortunately this favorable balance, anchored to British power and diplomacy, was ultimately taken for granted and its relationship to American security all but forgotten. By the 1890s, Americans no longer recognized the nation’s vital stake in traditional European politics. The restoration of the Continent after the Napoleonic wars created such conditions of stability that the average citizen of the United States, enjoying perennial security at relatively little cost, began to put his faith in the fact of geographic isolation itself. This gradual identification of American security with the Atlantic Ocean, rather than with a British-dominated European balance of power, created the foundations of twentieth-century American isolationism, which viewed less involvement in European affairs as the essence of sound policy. Whatever happened in Europe, ran the burgeoning isolationist argument, it could not challenge the historic security of the American people.

This nation’s dramatic entrance onto the world stage at the turn of the century in no way challenged its isolationist habits of thought. The new sense of obligation to expand did not include, except on the part of a brilliant minority of American writers, any gauging of the forces being unleashed by British–German rivalry or any evaluation of the meaning of that rivalry for the American future. Some critics of national behavior, such as Alfred Thayer Mahan, demanded, but in vain, a closer rapprochement with England, if not an actual alliance. Perhaps Lord Bryce (1888, I, p. 310 in 1909 edition) described the prewar attitudes of the American people with precision when he wrote: “America lives in a world of her own.... Safe from attack, safe even from menace, she hears from afar the warring cries of European races and faiths.... But for the present at least—it may not always be so—she sails upon a summer sea.”

That American expansion into the Pacific failed to challenge the nation’s isolationist tradition reflects fundamentally the ease whereby the acquisition of Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines, as well as the establishment of an open-door policy in China, was achieved. Even in the Caribbean, where the nation faced no competing power, the new commitments created the illusion of huge accomplishment at a minimum of financial and military expenditure. Thus the nation could underwrite enthusiastically the policies of expansion into Latin America and the western Pacific while rejecting all involvement in European affairs as an unnecessary and dangerous overcommitment of the resources of the United States. The powerful Asia-first orientation of American isolationism had its inception in the basic conviction, demonstrated by events, that the United States could protect its interests in the Far East at relatively little cost. As late as 1940, when Hitler’us armies were sweeping across Europe, Americans were more fearful of Japan than Germany, more determined to defend the integrity of China than that of Norway, the Low Countries, or France.

From 1917 to 1920, Woodrow Wilson’s crusade for a new world order attempted to commit the United States to the maintenance of a stable world, which would supposedly resolve the pressures for change in the postwar status quothrough representative deliberative bodies. Instead it laid the foundation for the violent isolationist reaction of the 1920s, for it was clear by 1919 that Wilson could not uproot the traditions of European power politics. The League of Nations seemed to obligate the nation to action in undefined and unforeseeable contingencies. Its rejection by the Senate, the result of many factors, reflected basically an American disinclination to commit United States military forces to the defense of the Versailles system. Disillusioned by the apparently meager benefits that accrued to the United States from the great involvement of World War I, many Americans accepted the new watchwords of national purpose, “never again.”

The powerful isolationism of the interwar years has been subjected to endless scrutiny by American scholars. It was a national phenomenon. Yet its chief strength always seemed to lie in the upper Middle West, especially in the prairie states. For many students, this was the simple dictate of geographic reality. It appeared reasonable that isolationism should center in those regions of the country most remote from world events.

For others, interwar isolationism had a clear economic base. Many western agrarians, for example, long regarding eastern bankers and industrialists as their mortal enemies, attributed the American involvement in World War I to the influence of Wall Street. They disliked England because that nation represented the system of international finance and investment that led the great nations to war. Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., in his book Your Country at War and What Happens to You After a War (1917), blamed the war on profiteering and international bankers. Agrarian isolationists attributed the destruction of progressivism to wartime profits.

This form of liberal economic isolationism reached its climax in 1934 with Senator Gerald P. Nye’s investigation of the munitions industry. The public was prepared to hear the worst of the “merchants of death”—those who had profited so handsomely from the war effort. Nye, a former North Dakota newspaper editor, regarded the farmer as the backbone of American society, al-ways beset by the bankers of Wall Street. Gradually, Nye identified the interest of the farmer with those of the citizens of the midwestern villages and even the large midwestern cities, for all such business centers had a clear interest in the welfare of the farmer. All, moreover, were enemies of Wall Street. His investigation of the munitions makers was the logical extension into the field of foreign affairs of his long crusade against the influence of finance capitalism. His conclusions were as much antibusiness as they were antiwar.

In the late 1930s, economic isolationism shifted gradually from liberalism to conservatism. By 1939 many men of wealth stood at the forefront of the American isolationist crusade; they dominated such organizations as the influential America First Committee. Conservatives feared more and more that American involvement in war would further weaken the American free enterprise system. For the isolationist leadership in the Republican party, the program of “America first” was fundamentally an anti-New Deal crusade. Eventually, even Nye discovered that the masses had outbid the farmer for control of governmental policy—that the New Deal spoke largely for the urban dweller. By the late 1930s, he had turned to the conservatives for support in his effort to keep America out of war.

For some Americans, isolationism was largely an expression of the nation’s democratic idealism. Its purpose, in short, was to protect the uniqueness of American society against the corrupting influence of European politics. Traditionally this sense of uniqueness was the essence of an affirmative faith. According to Abraham Lincoln, America was the earth’s last best hope. The achievement of that promise demanded the rejection of Europe. As John Dos Passos once observed, “Repudiation of Europe is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.” By the late 1930s, even the desire to protect the uniqueness of American society had turned conservative. For many isolationists, the concepts of progress and change had retreated before the conviction that American society had matured and that Europe, with its radical tendencies, must be avoided. No longer did isolationists view the United States as the changing society in a reactionary world, but as a stable and accomplished society in a revolutionary world. Isolationism was the means whereby the nation would preserve its economic, social, and political institutions against the dangers of experimentation abroad.

Samuel Lubell, from his studies of the elections of 1920 and 1940, concluded that American isolationism was neither geographic, economic, nor idealistic. In The Future of American Politics (1951, p. 132) he wrote, “This concept of isolationism must be discarded. It is a myth. The hard core of isolationism in the United States has been ethnic and emotional....” The great Democratic setbacks in 1920, when contrasted with the 1916 returns, he discovered, came in Swedish, German, Norwegian, and Irish districts, revealing an ethnic reaction to Wilson’s decision to lead the American people to war against Germany. In 1940 Roosevelt’s majority vote dropped roughly 7 per cent from 1936. In 20 counties the losses exceeded 35 per cent; 19 of these were fundamentally German in background. Another 35 counties showed a Democratic drop of 25–34 per cent; in all but four of these, German was either the first or second strongest nationality of origin. The same ethnic factors were present in another 83 of 101 counties where Roosevelt’s 1940 vote dropped between 20 and 24 per cent. It was, concluded Lubell, the absence of Germans in the South that limited that region’s isolationism.

As war returned to Europe in 1939, the concept of a fortress America became the ultimate intellectual refuge of the nation’s isolationist leadership. American security, ran the argument, did not hinge on Britain or the balance of power, but on the United States’ capacity to guard the sea lanes. Herbert Hoover announced in February 1939 that the hemisphere was protected by a “moat of 3000 miles of ocean on the East, and 6000 miles on the West” (1940, p. 101). By this isolationist doctrine, the course of war in Europe mattered little. Charles A. Beard wrote: “It was one thing to regard Hitler and Mussolini as madmen at Munich ... it was another thing to maintain that the United States should pour out the blood of its sons in restraining the dictators after Great Britain, France, Russia and the other powers of Europe had failed to unite against them in diplomacy and coercion” (Beard & Beard 1939, pp. 499–500).

For such men, the outbreak of war in Europe merely affirmed the notion that the United States was invulnerable. “Actually,” wrote Oswald Garrison Villard in September 1939, “from the purely military point of view, the security of the United States has been increased by the outbreak of war. And the longer war continues, the safer the United States will be, if it ever was in danger. For with each day that passes, the exhaustion of the contestants will become greater” (1939, p. 324). Whatever the logic of such convictions, they failed to preserve American neutrality. Again, as in 1917, it was the nation’s ultimate unwillingness to countenance a British defeat at the hands of Germany that brought it into the European war.

For the vast majority of Americans at mid-century the isolationist tradition was no longer relevant. The disintegration of the alliance with Russia and the acceptance by the United States of a world-wide commitment to the containment of communist power seemed to leave little room for the doctrines of the 1930s. Senator Robert A. Taft, one of the nation’s leading proponents of prewar isolationism, declared in 1950: “I don’t know what they mean by isolationism; nobody is an isolationist today.” Dwight D. Eisenhower observed two years later, “I have long insisted—and do now insist, that isolationism is dead as a political issue.”

Yet isolationism was not dead. World War II had demonstrated its obsolescence, but it had not destroyed the emotions and traditions that underlay it. What remained had changed its emphasis, but its significance for the nation was only partially diminished. Contributing to the rebirth of a powerful conservative American isolationism in the postwar era was the conviction that the Roosevelt administration, through its involvement of the country in World War II, had assured the rise of Russia to a position of power. Past Democratic policies, in short, were responsible for the un- precedented insecurity of the American people. Senator Taft charged quite characteristically (1951, p. 6) that “our leaders failed to foresee that the Soviet Union would turn against us after the defeat of Germany and Japan. They made no attempt to insure our future against that eventuality.” The vast power revolution of the 1940s appeared to demonstrate that the isolationists of the interwar years were correct in their judgment of the national interest after all.

Aggravated by the postwar dread of communism, American isolationism, more than ever before, placed its emphasis on the uniqueness of American society and the need for protecting that uniqueness from its enemies at home and abroad. For many Americans, the containment policies of the Truman administration were nothing but an assault on the nation’s values. The reactionary-nationalist foreign policy elite, as Gabriel Almond (1950) has defined it, attributed American insecurity not to Russian power and aggressiveness, but to the gradual destruction of the traditional American free enterprise system. Beginning with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, ran its argument, socialism, New Dealism, heavy military expenditures, and high taxes had undermined the strength of the nation. If the United States would return to the old Americanism as it existed before 1914, the nation’s external challenges would evaporate. Organizations of the extreme right, such as Merwin K. Hart’s National Economic Council, opposed the Marshall Plan as a scheme to “finance socialism in Europe.” It termed the United Nations an octopus leading to a “statist, collectivist world.” The United States should clear the decks for action “by reducing our government expense and rejecting the whole Truman program for a socialized welfare state.” The American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, led by John B. Trevor, agreed that the danger to American security lay in the “nationalist socialist planners.” When the nation again returned to its nineteenth-century orthodoxy, it would enjoy security without excessive military expenditures.

If few Americans identified American insecurity abroad so completely with the erosion of American values, a significant body of editors and politicians condemned the nation’s commitment to the defense of Europe. Senator Taft, in his book A Foreign Policy for Americans, explained his opposition to NATO: “I do not like the obligation written into the pact which binds us for twenty years to come to the defense of any country, no matter by whom it is attacked and even though the aggressor may be another member of the pact ...” (1951, pp. 88–89). Taft, like other conservative Americans, believed that the essence of American security lay in the domestic economy. He opposed the American commitment to NATO as an overestimation of both the Soviet threat and the defense burden that the American economy could bear. “Just as our nation can be destroyed by war,” he declared (1951, p. 14), “it can also be destroyed by a political or economic policy at home which destroys liberty or breaks down the fiscal and economic structure of the United States.”

American isolationism in the postwar world continued to harbor its Asia-first tendencies. If the United States had failed in its historic effort to preserve the open door in China by permitting the transfer of political power from Chiang Kai-shek to Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese communists, the answer lay not in the nation’s inability to subdue the Chinese revolution but rather in errors of judgment, if not actual treason, within the Department of State. This denial of the vast power revolution in Asia permitted those who favored the reduction of American forces in Europe to demand a show of aggressiveness in Asia without appearing to assume an expensive military burden. The mere return of Chiang to the mainland promised the re-establishment of the open door at little cost.

Perhaps the key development in the history of American isolationism was the shift from a realistic evaluation of both the role of distance from the power centers of Europe and the significance for the nation’s security of the European balance of power, to an assumption that the country’s security had become absolute and rested on the fact of geographic insulation and the supremacy of the nation’s economic and political institutions. So secure did the country appear in the nineteenth century that, according to Abraham Lincoln, it could be injured only from within. Anchored to such assumptions of omnipotence, American isolationism in the twentieth century became identified with a primary concern for the domestic economy, an overestimation of American power, and a belief in the nation’s moral superiority, all of which encouraged the tendency toward unilateralism in diplomacy. Isolationism, although a logical consequence of geography and the national experience, was in fact the creation of several generations of writers, editors, and politicians. It triumphed as a political program and achieved a predominant place in American thought simply because no other course of national action could promise so much at such negligible cost. World War Ii and the events that followed destroyed only the illusion of geographical insulation. The traditional belief that the United States could achieve security at less expense to itself than nations with fewer physical advantages was not destroyed.

Norman A. Graebner

[See alsoForeign policy; National interest; National security.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, JohnThe Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States. 10 vols. Boston: Little, 1851–1856.

Adler, Selig 1957 The Isolationist Impulse. New York: Abelard-Schuman.

Almond, Gabriel A. (1950) 1960 The American People and Foreign Policy. New York: Praeger.

Beard, Charles; and Beard, Mary 1939 America in Midpassage. New York: Macmillan.

Bryce, James (1888) 1909 The American Commonwealth. 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan. ? An abridged edition was published in 1959 by Putnam.

Cole, Wayne S. 1953 America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940–1941. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.

Cole, Wayne S. 1962 Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

De Conde, Alexander (editor) 1957 Isolation and Security: Ideas and Interests in Twentieth-century American Foreign Policy. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press.

Graebner, Norman A. 1956 The New Isolationism: A Study in Politics and Foreign Policy Since 1950. New York: Ronald Press.

Hoover, Herbert 1940 Further Addresses Upon the American Road: 1938–1940. New York: Scribner.

Lindbergh, Charles A. SR. (1917) 1934 Your Country at War and What Happens to You After a War. Philadelphia: Dorrance.

Lubell, Samuel (1951) 1956 The Future of American Politics. 2d ed., rev. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Lubell, Samuel 1956 Revolt of the Moderates. New York: Harper.

Taft, Robert A. 1951 A Foreign Policy for Americans. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Villard, Oswald G. 1939 Issues and Men: The United States and the War. Nation 149:324 only.

Washington, George (1753–1796) 1948 Basic Writings of George Washington. New York: Random House.

Weinberg, Albert K. 1940 The Historical Meaning of the American Doctrine of Isolation. American Political Science Review 34:539–547.