Isolationism or Nationalism?
Promise and Peril focusses on a number of progressive and radical figures who wrestled with questions concerning America's role in world affairs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Far from a limited prosopography, this is a broad study that ranges beyond its central characters. Indeed, the number of moving parts in this book is remarkable, if at times overwhelming. Nichols seeks to develop no less than the following themes and topics: the evolution of isolationist thought between 1890 and 1940; the interrelationship between isolationism and internationalism; the interrelationship between views on foreign affairs and domestic reform; the cultural and intellectual dimensions of isolationism, as well as its political and diplomatic ones; the significance of contested symbols and myths such as Washington's Farewell Address and the Monroe Doctrine; the way in which foreign affairs produced surprising, if limited, partnerships between those at opposite ends of the political spectrum; the ways in which isolationist thought impacted upon American foreign policy and intellectual history. Additionally, Nichols at times provides overviews of important episodes in foreign affairs, contested themes in the historiography, and biographical sketches of significant figures. Along the way the narrative often detours to explore episodes that are related in some way to isolationism.
No one, in other words, can accuse Nichols of lacking intellectual ambition. Indeed, in this era of limited and detailed monographs, the scope and ambition of Promise and Peril is refreshing and Nichols deserves a round of applause for bucking the trend of producing a narrow monograph. But this virtue at points comes at the cost of cogency and clarity. Readers would be well advised to read first the book's conclusion and appendix, which provides a useful description of the various strains of isolationism that appear in the text. The frequent subsections within chapters at times interrupt the narrative flow. Often there is repetition that results from covering the same ground in different places, as well as argumentative ambiguity on specific points.Footnote 1
That said, there is no question that this is an important study that salvages isolationism from the charges that have been levelled at it since the 1940s. Most fundamentally, Nichols demonstrates the diversity of isolationist thought. Far from being a purely reactionary and xenophobic impulse that nearly led to global disaster in the 1940s, isolationism was often embraced by progressives and forward-looking cosmopolitans. Nichols explores how aspects of isolationism have appealed to radicals, such as Eugene Debs; international pacifists, such as Emily Balch; and progressive populists, like William Borah. Nichols shows that it was a pillar, if a contested one, of American political thought at the turn of the century. It attracted the attention of some of the era's greatest thinkers, namely William James and Randolph Bourne. Its power and ubiquity are perhaps most evidenced in how proponents of “large” policies of imperial expansion, such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, were forced to coopt, rather than counter, some of its premises when they formulated their new grand strategies in the 1890s. One of the core themes of the book concerns the versatility and permeability of isolationism. As Nichols puts it, “many thinkers and politicians conceived and debated subtle hybrids of these approaches as the nation emerged as a global power” (2).
The strength of this book lies in how the picture that emerges through the prism of isolationism confounds some of the categories that we use to group the era's politicians and reformers. In a particularly illuminating chapter, Nichols shows the continuity between Debs's critique of the First World War and that of dissenting southerners. The chapter on the “new internationalism” of the 1920s pairs the strange bedfellows of Emily Balch and William Borah, whose isolationism did not prevent him from campaigning for the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 that sought to avoid future wars. Though the personal or institutional links between such unexpected allies were limited and fleeting, Nichols convincingly charts the continuity in their thought. A particularly interesting recurring theme in this study is how isolationism often grew out of economic critiques of monopoly and unrestrained capitalist expansion and exploitation.
Though the book does not focus at length on the formation or implementation of foreign policy, Nichols is certainly onto something when he contends that isolationism shaped American statecraft. Most often Nichols shows how it acted as a brake on expansionist or internationalist policies: the retreat from the “large policy” in the first decade of the 1900s, the rejection of the League of Nations in the aftermath of the Great War, the end of the interventions in Central America and the Caribbean in the 1920s and 1930s were all in some way products of the political pull of isolationism at home. In other instances the policy outcomes were longer-term and unexpected. Nichols finds that one of the legacies of William James's international thought were programs such as the Peace Corps. Indeed, most of the “isolationists” examined in the book advocated international engagement on commercial and cultural levels, opposing only engagement in foreign wars or balance-of-power politics.
In sum, this is an important book that broadens the context of turn-of-the-century isolationist thought and the domestic politics of American foreign relations. Most fundamentally, it demands that historians take isolationism more seriously than we have hitherto. Nichols provocatively prompts us to see it not as a limited and reactive political movement of 1919–20 or of the 1930s, but rather as a malleable and evolving intellectual and political tradition. This is a serious argument that demands further exploration.
One preliminary question to raise in this round table concerns the concept of isolationism itself. Should we group the ideas, politics, and individuals Nichols examines under the isolationist label? By demonstrating the “hybrid” nature of isolationism and the various ways it was intertwined with internationalism, this book prompted me to wonder if isolationism is a particularly useful category for historians to use in the study of this period, at least in the years before the 1920s when a self-consciously “isolationist” political grouping emerged. This is a particularly important question given Nichols's acknowledgement that most of the objects of his study “did not tend to identify themselves as isolationists” (11). If they didn't think of themselves as isolationists and their conception of America's role almost invariably included significant forms of engagement with the wider world (albeit in ways other than formal participation in Old World balance-of-power politics), should historians use the isolationist label? What do we gain by using that label, as opposed to more specific terms such as noninterventionist, pacifist, unilateralist, anti-imperialist, “independent internationalist,”Footnote 2 and so on?Footnote 3 The labels and categories historians have used for the study of anti-slavery – a spectrum ranging from immediate abolitionists to those advocating free soil in the territories to anti-black colonizationists and so on – might provide a model for how historians could grapple with the complexities within “isolationist” thought. It would appear that Nichols is arguing just this, though “isolationism” nonetheless remains a key term in the book.
This point becomes particularly important when one considers the political language of the time. Nichols is surely right when he suggests that “isolationist” entered the political vocabulary in the late nineteenth century and grew in usage thereafter. But I wondered if “isolationist/isolationism” are the key words in the texts that he examines. The quotations in the book suggest that the language of “nation” and “nationhood” also looms large. We often forget how new the “nation” was to post-Civil War Americans. The triumph of the idea of a single nation, unified by a patriotic nationalism and a stronger central state, prompted Americans to reconsider and reconfigure their role in international affairs. Washington's Farewell and the Monroe Doctrine were products of the security requirements of a fragile union of states. Early republican statesmen, in other words, sought to avoid entangling alliances because of their acute awareness of the danger of internal divisions within the union, not because they were dogmatic isolationists. By the late nineteenth century, however, the inviolability of the American nation had been established. Freed from the ball and chain of security imperilment, Americans at the turn of the century could imagine and debate how their newly established nation “fit” in the globe in new ways. If this change was not complete – witness, for example, how the enduring significance of Anglophobia or fears of the loyalty of “hyphenated” Americans factored into early twentieth-century isolationism – it was the prerequisite for the great debates that Nichols examines: should the nation join binding multilateral organizations? Should it restrict immigration? Should it erect protective tariffs? Should it establish overseas colonies? Should it arbitrate disputes with other nations? These questions were all asked before 1861, of course, but Americans of the early republic tended to view them through the prism of the vulnerabilities of their decentralized and loosely federated union. That was no longer necessary by the turn of the century. Was the issue of isolationism, in other words, derivative of a more fundamental debate about how nations should behave in an increasingly globalized world? Are the strains of thought under consideration strains of “nationalism” rather than “isolationism”?
This brings me to Nichols's assertion that the 1890s witnessed the formation of “modern isolationism” (10, 324). If Nichols succeeds in showing how the great debate of 1898 informed what followed in the ensuing decades, he doesn't show how it marked a point of departure from the nineteenth century. One way of developing this argument would be to chart the evolution of American national-security thinking, as outlined above. But questions still remain. Could not Lodge's wedding of isolationist symbols like the Monroe Doctrine to the “large policy” be seen as an outgrowth of the strategic politics of William H. Seward and James Blaine? Were not most of the leading anti-imperialists of 1898 old-timers who viewed the question of colonial acquisition through the lens of the Caribbean ventures of the mid-nineteenth century? This is a cheeky point to make, I know, for intellectual/political traditions can be traced back forever. But I raise it because it seems to me that Nichols might have further emphasized (though, to be fair, he does acknowledge) the external contexts, rather than the internal intellectual traditions, that made the period he examines different from what came before: first, European and British colonial “scrambles” and expansion; second, the rapid advance of what we now call “globalization,” which demolished distance and brought the once distant United States into instant and sustained contact with the wider world. For “modern isolationism” to appear, in other words, both internal and external structures had to change: the nation in America emerged at the very moment when new forms and structures of global politics took root. I think Nichols would agree with this, but the point does not come through as clearly as it might given the narrative structure of the book, which is mostly constructed around how individuals responded to specific events like the Venezuela crisis and the coming of the Great War.
These are not so much criticisms as invitations for further elaboration. Nichols has produced a very fine book that should reopen discussion of American isolationism. He deserves a round of applause. Promise and Peril should be widely read.
Even before the transnational turn became a turn, historians of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States had begun to trace some of the many ways the United States was connected to other parts of the world. In the last decade or so, these trickles of scholarship have turned into a veritable flood. Historians of social reform have investigated the circulation of ideas in the anglophone world, across the North Atlantic, and through colonial networks. Migration historians have studied the relations between empire and mobility, explored transnational lives and cultures, and tracked the connections between immigration history and foreign-relations history. There are ever more studies of missionaries, commercial outposts, imperial enclaves, cultures of imperialism, travelers, exports, military interventions, the transnational production of racial ideologies, foreign investments in the United States, imported consumer goods, geographical knowledge, international nongovernmental organizations, borderlands contacts, US citizens who served as agents of other empires, and anticolonial resistance to US incursions.Footnote 1 In sum, the shelves are brimming with scholarship that illuminates the ways the United States became increasingly connected to the rest of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are good reasons for calling this period “the dawn of a global age,” as Christopher McKnight Nichols does in Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age.
Yet in stark contrast to the general tide, and to what his subtitle might suggest, Nichols takes US isolationism as his theme. This may seem to be an oddly contrarian move, but the transnational turn makes the history of isolationism all the more worth exploring. The greater the attention garnered by border-crossing, the more topics such as border-making, nationalism, exceptionalism, localism, and indeed isolationism invite reconsideration.
Swimming against the current of connectedness, Nichols starts from the premise that ideas about isolation have played a significant role in US culture. He makes his case by considering the isolationist leanings of six public figures – Henry Cabot Lodge, William James, Randolph Bourne, Eugene Debs, William Borah, and Emily Balch – with some consideration of intersecting views expressed by contemporaries such as Theodore Roosevelt, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Mott, and Jane Addams.
What do Nichols's case studies reveal? The first individual he assesses is Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who supported a “large policy” characterized by naval construction, base acquisition, and expansion around the turn of the twentieth century. This may not seem isolationist, but Nichols highlights Lodge's aversion to entangling alliances, neomercantilist pro-tariffs leanings, and anti-immigration sentiments. Although Lodge foreshadowed Wilson's later commitment to global Americanization, he approached the world in a more unilateral way, as seen most notably in his later opposition to the League of Nations.
Next at bat comes anti-imperialist leader William James, who sought domestic regeneration in lieu of costly overseas incursions. Believing in openness and pluralism, James opposed “bigness” of various sorts, including the bigness of American empire. Yet James, like Lodge, did not want to completely wall off the United States – his anti-imperialism was more antimilitarist than antiengagement, as seen in his claims that the US Army was not as good at administering the Philippine Islands as missionaries would have been.
According to Nichols, Randolph Bourne followed in James's footsteps by emphasizing the desirability of engaging with the world via commerce and culture. He also built on James's commitment to pluralism by calling for a “trans-nationality” that embraced multiple ethnic, national, and racial affiliations. Although Bourne lacked James's critical sensibilities when it came to US interventions in Latin America, he echoed some of James's antimilitarism by objecting to US military involvement in World War I. Yet even as he spoke against entangling alliances, Bourne held up the United States as a model for the world and called upon it to take on the role of mediator.
Nichols turns next to Eugene Debs in a chapter on antiwar activism and draft resistance in the South. Debs's isolationism is no less paradoxical than that of his predecessors in this account, because of Debs's commitment to the ultimate triumph of international socialism. Yet Nichols counts Debs as an isolationist because he opposed US participation in World War I and invoked exceptionalist arguments for domestic reform.
Nichols's section on Senator William Borah is one of the most illuminating in the book, for it situates the man best known as the force behind the neutrality acts of the 1930s in a larger intellectual and policy context. Nichols finds that Borah echoed James in opposing bigness, including federal government power. His faith in the local led him to support nonintervention (in both colonial politics and European affairs), protective tariffs, and immigration restriction. Like all of the figures in this book, Borah had exceptionalist leanings. And, like the others, Borah cannot be squeezed into a rigid isolationist mold: he reluctantly went along with the US entry into World War I, endorsed cultural exchanges, advocated an international conference to ameliorate the reparations program decided at Versailles, favored strict policing of the hemisphere in keeping with the Monroe Doctrine, and embraced legal internationalism (as seen in his support for international arbitration and conferences to limit naval power). He also championed the multinational Kellogg-Briand Pact that renounced war as an instrument of national policy, believing that, unlike the League of Nations treaty, it protected an inherent right to self-defense and did not obligate the deployment of force against violators.
Although Emily Balch is known as a pacifist internationalist, deeply involved in the transnational women's peace movement, Nichols situates her in the isolationist camp as well. He finds that her anti-imperialist, pro-neutrality, and pacifistic positions intersected with the isolationist nationalism of the anti-League irreconcilables.
There is much to like in this effort to tease out the various strands of isolationist thought, tangled though they were in seeming inconsistencies. Perhaps most significantly, Nichols locates important roots of modern isolationism in the anti-imperialism of the early twentieth century. Although his focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries makes it hard for him to clinch his point that “at no time were isolationist principles more potent than in the pivotal years when America rose to global power” (323), he does build a case against the idea that the isolationist tradition of the time was “neither serious nor effective” (321), finding instead that it curbed unilateralist action, focussed energies on domestic matters, and reinforced the tradition of “nonentangled” commitments. The book deserves additional praise for endeavoring to show how isolationism evolved over time, in response to the shifting tides of global politics and domestic reform.
Yet what was isolationism? Some currents – such as the political isolationism of nonentanglement and the protectionist isolationism of high tariff barriers – will seem familiar to readers. Others – such as anti-imperialist isolationism, nationalist isolationism, and antiwar isolationism – will make intuitive sense. But some currents are more muddled. In keeping with Nichols's insistence that “isolationism did not entail cultural, economic, or complete political separation from the rest of the world” (2), Nichols refers to “isolationist imperialists” (13) and “unilateralist isolationism” (229). He describes various lines of thought as “hemispheric isolationist” (54), “missionary isolationist” (92), “composite isolationist and socialist internationalist” (191), and “both isolationist and transnational” (145). Adding to the confusion, there is “partial isolation” (163), “cosmopolitan isolation” (146), “refined isolationist anti-imperialism and partial internationalism” (112), an “internationally engaged, belligerent type of isolationism” (332), and, indeed, “isolationist internationalism” (277).
Nichols identifies so many different strains of isolationism that he includes an afterword to help the reader keep them straight. In addition to underscoring the two main strains – political isolationism and protectionist isolationism – this brief guide discusses nine inflections: nonentanglement, neutrality, unilateralism, self-sufficiency, hemispherism, time limitations for treaties, exceptionalism, war minimization, and a rejection of collective security. This section is so helpful that it might be best read first, as a guide to the analysis that follows.
By tracing the many different streams of isolationism, Nichols makes an important analytical point, which is that isolationism was neither a cohesive ideology nor a consistently coherent one. He shows that there were many reasons to avoid collective security and free trade, and that these could congeal in at least as many variations. Yet along with the benefits, there is also a cost to defining isolationism so broadly: clarity. Nichols's efforts to grapple with the paradox of isolationist engagement lead to the question whether there was anybody in the time period who wasn't an isolationist. If expansionists were isolationists for acting unilaterally and anti-expansionists were isolationists for opposing US interventions, what does the term really tell us? If isolationist values could justify humanitarian interventions, if isolationist thought regarded the United States as a model for the world, and if isolationist impulses could somehow be reconciled with hemispheric incursions, then might even Woodrow Wilson – the League of Nations architect – somehow count among the ranks, perhaps as an isolationist internationalist?
Or is the opposite the case? Does the book reveal a growing awareness of the impossibility of isolationism? The only thing that seems truly isolationist in the account is the idea of isolationism itself, which appears in this telling to have developed in strictly domestic conversations. That many of Nichols's subjects didn't consider themselves to be isolationists hints at a struggle to develop new vocabularies that could serve to justify antimilitarist or economically protectionist policies long after George Washington's admonitions to avoid entangling alliances had begun to appear antiquated.
In sum, are all the qualifiers to “isolationism” just as important as the word they appear to modify? By revealing just how fractured and inconsistent “isolationism” was, Promise and Peril suggests the value of a more pointed terminology, one that would help us understand, say, the struggle between unilateralist and collective approaches to security or the foreign-policy consequences of exceptionalism.
What did Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge have in common with civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois? Or William E. Borah, another Republican senator, with Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs? Harvard sociologist William James with missionary John R. Mott? On the surface, not much. But Christopher McKnight Nichols sees an intimate connection that bound them tightly together. Because, he contends in his new book Promise and Peril, they were all isolationists. In addition to Lodge, Du Bois, Borah, Debs, James, and Mott, Nichols also examines settlement house leader Jane Addams, public intellectual Randolph Bourne, and women's leader Emily Balch. He provides a wonderfully concise and cogent biography of each as he introduces them in an analytical narrative covering the period roughly between 1890 and 1930, when the United States became a world power.
Thanks to historians such as Frank Ninkovich, we now also think of it as the era in which American internationalism, which viewed the world as both interconnected and interdependent, came of age.Footnote 1 Following Ninkovich, it has become something of a truism to say that the much older tradition of isolationism collapsed with the emergence of a globalized world in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Because their sensibility so closely resembles our own, because of their cosmopolitanism, and because they wrestled with the dilemmas of globalization much as we still do today, the first internationalists have received a mostly sympathetic reading from historians. By contrast, self-proclaimed isolationists like Borah have been portrayed as provincial and backward, while others, such as Charles Lindbergh, Father Charles Coughlin, and Senator Gerald Nye, have been demonized for their nativism and outright anti-Semitism. Nichols acknowledges the internationalist turn, but he also stresses that we must take the isolationists seriously. Anti-Semitism was one motive for some isolationists, but it should not tar the entire movement and all its ideas. Following in the footsteps of Charles Chatfield, David S. Patterson, Robert David Johnson, and Justus Doenecke, Nichols shows that there was a real debate over the terms of America's engagement with the world and not merely a one-sided contest between visionary internationalists and villainous, racist, reactionary isolationists.Footnote 2
By coincidence, Ninkovich himself has recently published a new study of American internationalism. Global Dawn – the title nicely captures the book's topic and argument – explores America's elite literary culture between 1865 and 1890 and shows that there was a widespread belief that the world was shrinking and enmeshing the United States in its affairs. Thus while Nichols aims to extend the resonance of isolationism into the era of internationalism, Ninkovich attempts to backdate the emergence of internationalism deep into the heyday of a defiant isolationism. Though its source base is narrow, based as it is on a small collection of periodicals such as The Nation, Harper's Weekly, and the Atlantic Monthly, Global Dawn brilliantly traces the outlines of an emergent internationalist consciousness. Ninkovich also makes an incisive and utterly compelling theoretical case for the causal force of culture in explaining the history of American foreign relations (and, indeed, of international history in general). Nineteenth-century Americans saw the world as divided into civilized and uncivilized peoples, with the former spreading at the expense of the latter in a process we now call globalization. To them, “civilization” was “globalization,” and all international relations were inherently intercultural relations.Footnote 3
Other historians, most notably Walter McDougall but also George C. Herring in his recent magisterial survey of American foreign relations, have challenged the very concept of isolationism from a very different perspective. Isolationism, they argue, was not a declining force in the American diplomatic tradition because it had never existed in the first place, except perhaps as an epithet or badge of honour in political debates over foreign policy. Instead, McDougall and Herring prefer the term “unilateralism,” because, they point out, the United States was never isolated but was constantly active on the world stage – just strictly on its own terms.Footnote 4
Either by Ninkovich's internationalism or McDougall's unilateralism, the very concept of isolationism has been steadily washed away. Nichols, then, is not only swimming in swift historiographical waters, he is heading upstream. He acknowledges these challenges but rejects them. Instead, he sees isolationism as a consistent school of thought that prevailed from George Washington's Farewell Address and the Monroe Doctrine until the early twentieth century. He avoids the polemics of isolationism's defenders and critics because he historicizes it through a careful examination of its political, cultural, and social contexts. He convincingly demonstrates that isolationists stood for more than isolation. Echoing Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe, they argued instead that Americans should interact with the wider world, especially economically and culturally, but not entangle themselves in the political or military affairs of other nations, enter into foreign wars where American interests were indirect, or enter into permanent foreign alliances.
According to Nichols, the 1890s were the crucial decade as isolationists grappled with the twin challenges of industrialization and globalization. Here is where he does his best work and offers his most important contribution. Rather than being a nativist reaction against an increasingly cosmopolitan world, he contends that “modern isolationism” was rooted in the Progressive movement (12). Just as the Progressives sought solutions to the problems of industrialism at home, isolationists sought solutions to the problems of global industrialization, especially its tendencies towards competition and war. Nichols's archetypal isolationists are not anti-Semites like Lindbergh or Nye but Progressive intellectuals and peace activists like Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, and Emily Balch. He is especially good when dissecting Borah's views, which were similar to those of the Progressive peace movement but did not share the internationalism professed by most of the peace crusaders.
Grounding isolationism within Progressivism is the strongest element to Promise and Peril, yet this connection also reveals the book's fundamental flaw: too many of its protagonists were not isolationists, even under the capacious terms Nichols has generously laid out for himself. His book superbly provides an intellectual tradition for isolationism, but too often it does so at the cost of exaggeration and misrepresentation. Of his main figures, the views of Lodge, James, Mott, Balch, and Addams simply cannot be considered isolationist, and little of the evidence he cites proves that they were; he is more persuasive on Du Bois, Debs, and Bourne. Not coincidentally, Nichols is at his best when dealing with Borah, who clearly was an isolationist by any standard.
Consider Lodge, an ardent imperialist who ended up championing an American imperium in the Philippines and elsewhere. As Nichols himself acknowledges, Lodge, along with his friends Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan, were advocates of what they called a “large” foreign policy, and they have long been thought to represent the antithesis of isolationism. Nichols insists that the “imperialist advocates of the ‘large policy’ … were not interested in rejecting isolation outright but rather in modifying expansionism and sea power to fit the framework of a refined, new isolationism” (27). But if this “refined” ideology could be stretched as far as indefinite involvement in the Philippines, China, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, how can it possibly be described as “isolationist”? Later, when he comes to World War I and the debate over American entry, Nichols finds himself somewhat boxed in because Lodge, an ardent interventionist, is now actually a foil for the book's other main “isolationist” figures who argued for continued neutrality. Lodge did, of course, lead the fight against the League of Nations, but this did not mean he was an isolationist so much as a realist; indeed, after the war he favoured US membership in a League that did not include Article X and he supported a standing US security guarantee to France.Footnote 5 Here is where McDougall's alternative concept of “unilateralism” seems more accurate, for Lodge and his large-policy allies wanted the United States to be politically involved in the world, albeit purely on America's own terms.
Nichols's contradictory, paradoxical descriptions of his other main figures further belie his isolationist thesis. For example, he says that William James expressed a “refined isolationist vision, which blended peaceful internationalism and an antipathy to all elements of colonialism” (74), though it is difficult to see how an internationalist who promoted the cause of world peace and wanted the United States to play an active role in making it happen could be considered an isolationist, whether refined or not. Similarly, Randolph Bourne outlined a theory of “isolationist pluralism” based on “a soft-power approach to international engagement” (117), while Eugene Debs expressed a belief in “peaceful internationalism over revolution” that was “built on long-standing isolationist views of American neutral global involvement” (182). Nichols's own description of the worldview of Balch, Addams, and other women Progressives is even more confusing:
Emily Balch and Jane Addams had a more comprehensive view of global interconnectedness [than William Borah]. Balch and Addams observed that nationalists as well as militarists took too limited a view of the nation's place in the world in conceptual, geographical, and temporal terms. They did not explore what Balch believed was the essence of international peace, the shared “ground of morality, Christianity, and principle.” Balch and Addams thus aligned themselves with an emerging new internationalist vision and against the “fetish of force,” a term William Borah used often. Both Balch and Borah's opposition to belligerency was woven into arguments for maintaining national autonomy while supporting international peace. (274)
Where Balch and Addams differed from Borah was in the means to promote world peace and prevent American belligerency. The women Progressives supported US entry into the World Court and League of Nations; Borah did not. As Nichols acknowledges, Balch argued that “binding elements to a robust international league were essential to sort out differences among nations” (296). It is therefore difficult to agree that Balch and Addams were isolationists rather than run-of-the-mill internationalists of the early twentieth century. In conjuring up oxymoronic terms such as “isolationist internationalism” (276–77), Nichols unwittingly recognizes the difficulties he has created for himself.
Nichols's portrayal of missionaries is perhaps the most problematic. Missionaries like John Mott, he contends, professed an “isolationism of a sort” (100), even though they professed nothing of the sort. To the contrary, missionaries lived on the cutting edge of globalization and saw themselves first and foremost as citizens of the world. They may have been self-righteous cultural imperialists, but their collective mindset was also inherently internationalist and anti-isolationist. Not only did they live abroad, Mott and others also helped form the leadership of the ecumenical movement, a transnational phenomenon that promoted a global Social Gospel through worldwide church unity and closer ties between the United States and the rest of the world. In missionary conferences and ecumenical councils, they cooperated frequently and intimately with their coreligionists in Europe and Asia and saw themselves as setting an example for the world's politicians and diplomats. As his biographer notes, Mott and his colleagues saw their convening of the World Missionary Conference, which met in Edinburgh in 1910, as a way to foster international cooperation and encourage American global leadership, and they subsequently hailed it as a direct forerunner to the League of Nations.Footnote 6 Later, the ecumenists who laid the foundation of the World Council of Churches in 1938 envisioned it as a precursor and partner to what would become the United Nations and the global human rights regime.Footnote 7 In fact, missionaries were probably the least isolationist of all Americans; more apt is Walter Russell Mead's characterization of them as the first Wilsonians.Footnote 8
Moreover, missionary activity constantly deepened America's political and military ties with the rest of the world. For example, when they provoked a violent local backlash in, say, China or the Ottoman Empire, they had no hesitation in calling for support from US or British warships and soldiers. The most direct example was US direct intervention in the Boxer Rebellion – coordinated with the European powers, which led to the issuing of the second of John Hay's Open Door notes – but there were plenty of others. As one missionary protested during the Boxer Rebellion, “Do not tell us that we must avoid entangling alliances.”Footnote 9 Much of this Chinese and Turkish backlash stemmed from the support missionaries gave to local nationalist and self-determination movements that resisted authoritarian or imperial rule from the capital or metropole; this was also true in Japanese-controlled Korea.Footnote 10 The Taiping Rebellion of 1851–64 was the most tragic episode – the war, which killed upwards of twenty million people, was instigated by a Chinese Christian mystic who had been converted by a Southern Baptist missionary from Shelbyville, TennesseeFootnote 11 – but it was by no means the only one, as generations of Chinese, Armenians, Arabs, Zionists, Indians, and Koreans would attest. American missionaries were, in other words, about as deeply involved in foreign politics as it was possible to be, and they wanted their government to follow suit. While on mission, they feverishly dedicated their lives to building schools, hospitals, and churches in the name of world uplift and global interconnectivity; meanwhile, back home, their allies in mission boards and churches furiously lobbied the federal government for political and material support. Yet according to Nichols, Mott “advocated efforts abroad without significant military or diplomatic connections” (105), even though he spearheaded a partnership between the US government and religious organizations like the YMCA and the Federal Council of Churches during World War I, undertook official diplomatic missions to Russia and Mexico on behalf of his friend Woodrow Wilson, and generally supported a postwar Wilsonian peace. If Mott really was an isolationist, then the term itself is so generic and formless as to be bleached of any true meaning. If missionaries really were isolationists, then so was every American.
This is not to say that Nichols's fundamental premises are wrong, simply that he has, at times, stretched their application beyond the breaking point. He is surely right to argue that isolationism was never a purified worldview of total separationism, and historians are in his debt for his sensitive excavation of different but complementary visions of America's proper world role during a watershed moment. But if historical terms are to have meaning, and with it analytical utility and intellectual coherence, they must be rigidly defined and applied. Thus, while Promise and Peril points us in a much-needed new direction on the subject of isolationism, it only takes us part of the way.
Thanks to the editors of the journal for commissioning and putting together this round table. Many thanks also to Professors Hoganson, Preston, and Sexton for agreeing to participate and for such thoughtful reviews. It is a privilege to have three such accomplished historians respond to my work.
I deeply appreciate that all three reviewers capture with precision much of what I set out to examine and argue in Promise and Peril. Given that and because it is impossible to do justice to the breadth of their discerning commentaries in a brief response, I would like to highlight and combine several aspects of their responses by exploring some of what I hope to be the central contributions and some of the historical and historiographical implications of the book.
The process of researching and tracing the history of isolationist ideas from the 1880s through the 1930s revealed many unexpected connections among key individuals and groups from across the political spectrum who developed hybrid forms of isolationist internationalism. The most recent (re)considerations of America's foreign policy cast the debate in terms of “isolation versus internationalism,” as, for example, John McCain's use of the term to tar noninterventionists who opposed US engagement in Libya and continued efforts in Afghanistan. However, this formulation occludes the far more complicated and interesting history of these issues. Thus my work seeks to understand and contextualize the isolationist and internationalist impulses that shaped the heated debates of the early twentieth century and continue to influence thinking about America's role in the world today.
Each of the focal individuals in Promise and Peril (Lodge, James, Balch, Bourne, Debs, Du Bois, Addams, Mott, and Borah) represents a distinct strain (or strains) of isolationist thought and provides a window onto larger groups of people who followed, opposed, or were influenced by them. Each spearheaded a wider group with a national – and often an international – platform, as they strove to reconcile what they perceived to be America's founding isolationist ideals with the realities of America's increasing affluence, rising global commerce, and multiplying international opportunities for cultural exchange and the protection of rights. Most were prominent progressives and progressive-minded thinkers, largely middle and upper class, and they spanned fields as diverse as mainstream and radical politics, mission and settlement house work, philosophy, and cultural criticism.
Tracing the developing ideas of these diverse figures reveals that isolationism had progressive origins in the imperialist/anti-imperialist disputes of the 1890s, a generation earlier than previous historians have noted. The parameters of the debate and the rising tensions between nationalism and transnationalism became most clear, as Sexton and Hoganson observe, in 1898 and again during World War I. I argue that ideas about isolation generated a vital connection in these debates between internal efforts to direct resources and reform and the construction and management of American foreign power. From the 1920s through the 1930s isolationist positions against belligerent forms of nationalism intersected with idealistically oriented visions of transnationalism and provided crucial touchpoints for politicians, thinkers, and reformers as they framed their understandings of America's proper global role. Shared isolationist principles, for example, helped “irreconcilable” isolationists such as Senator William Borah to find a surprising amount of common ground with internationalists such as Emily Balch and Jane Addams as they sought arms limitations and the withdrawal of American forces from Europe, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, and pushed for the Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw war. Malleable isolationist stances provided the basis for many of the most significant foreign-policy arguments of the era and tended to operate as a brake on international engagement. After World War I, such trends seemed to herald an American “turn inward,” with, for instance, the Senate rejection of the League of Nations and Treaty of Versailles and the movement away from many of the instruments and institutions of global governments as World War II loomed. It was these later developments that generated many of the negative connotations that the term “isolationism” still possesses today. One intervention I aimed to make in this regard is to recover a more contextual and contingent view of isolationist ideas, the better to ground perspectives on what isolationist ideas were – and were not – in various eras and for varied individuals and groups. Modern refinements of isolationist thought called for engaging the world economically and often culturally, yet the concept of isolation also continued to herald avoiding virtually all binding foreign alliances or commitments of military and diplomatic force, except in the nation's “best interest,” an idea often vehemently contested because it was clearly open to interpretation.
What I wanted to elucidate in the book is that in many ways the developing isolationist worldview that arose in the 1880s and 1890s represented less an “it” than a “they” – a cluster of related ideas based on a premise of updating, but limiting, US international involvement while harking back to specific historical precedents. Indeed, my work seeks to recover and better understand the development of the intellectual–political tradition of isolationism and its relationship with both emerging perspectives on internationalism and innovative visions for domestic reform. As Preston aptly puts it, “there was a real debate over the terms of America's engagement with the world and not merely a one-sided contest between visionary internationalists and villainous, racist, reactionary isolationists.” This, in turn, brings up a definitional point addressed to varying degrees in each of the reviews. It is crucial to ask: what is isolationism? Why should we use this charged term at all?
After all, not all calls for prudence in foreign affairs can be cast in the same light. In recent discussions of America's foreign policy the words “isolationist” and “isolationism” have been increasingly used, often as an epithet, to describe opposition to “going abroad” and a preference to “stay at home.” Adhering to narrow binaries of “isolation versus internationalism,” I argue, is what blinds us to the reality of the far more complicated and interesting history of debates over the US role in the world in which isolationist and internationalist issues came to the fore vis-à-vis a Lippmanesque blending and balancing of political positions and coalitions.
As Sexton and Preston emphasize, my work shows that isolationist arguments as they became modern at the end of the nineteenth century reinterpreted a tradition that harked back to George Washington (especially the Farewell Address, 1796) and Thomas Jefferson (especially his first inaugural, 1801), and to the Monroe Doctrine (1823). These foundational figures and ideas were cited to justify and avoid most entangling, binding forms of alliances, wars, and interventions, as well as certain colonial practices. Thus historical isolationist claims were the bedrock upon which often overlapping arguments for their modern, contemporary uses were constructed. These new variations on isolationist political and protectionist points of emphasis included nonentanglement and unilateralism, along with neutrality, self-sufficiency, hemispherism or continentalism, the temporary (ad hoc) nature of alliances and treaties, exceptionalism and specific invocations of America's domestic as well as global mission (another similarly “American,” primordial, and heated debate over national ideals), shadings of laissez-faire economics, and an aim to minimize war. The different strains and variations helped add coherence to the new isolationism, with unilateralism and nonentanglement as central components of these developing views (here Preston is right to draw, as I do in my work, on scholars such as Frank Ninkovich and Walter McDougall, who argue that at times a “unilateral” impulse foregrounded arguments for national autonomy in both foreign and domestic political debates).Footnote 1 Perhaps most significantly, these isolationist points of emphasis appeared in vastly different and sometimes seemingly contradictory cases (as the reviewers point out), such as for progressive and racial reform at home and evangelical missionary efforts abroad, and not just in more narrowly defined diplomatic terms or specific foreign-policy proposals.
As Hoganson and Sexton make clear, the qualifiers to isolationism may be almost as important as the word they modify. The “fractured and inconsistent” nature of isolationism in this period, its political import and its deep resonance, suggest why it has endured to such a significant extent. Given the complex and shifting deployments of isolationist ideas and images, definitional problems are inherent in any attempt to recover isolationism as a useful term. I have an extended essay at the end of the book on “strains of isolationism” which elaborates and defines the major stands of isolationist thought, many of which are laid out in brief above. In lieu of rehashing that further I will simply say that I am pleased that the reviewers cite that essay as a useful analysis. The essay's location in the book was an authorial and editorial choice. I included the definitional section in the conclusion as a reference for readers and as a prompt for further discussion rather than inserting that text in the main body of the book and thereby interrupting the flow of the narrative.Footnote 2
I agree with Hoganson that in some ways the history of US–global engagement and political debates from the late nineteenth century through the early stages of World War II suggests a “growing awareness of the impossibility of isolationism.” Therefore the thinkers, activists, and politicians I studied in the book sought to grapple with, adapt, and update what they deemed useful aspects of isolationism in order to help confront the challenges and changes within modern American society as well as in the US's global relations as they struggled to rethink the very concept of American nationhood. This, in turn, is precisely what Sexton rightly points out when he argues for the growing significance of nation and nationality. As he contends, “for ‘modern isolationism’ to appear … both internal and external structures had to change: the nation in America emerged at the very moment when new forms and structures of global politics took root.” I hope that the book brings readers toward that conclusion.
In recent years, scholars and politicians have emphasized global connections. In so doing, historians, foreign-policy thinkers, and political leaders have done superb work to internationalize the field yet have tended to overlook the significance of ideas about isolation to American history and to the US place in the world. Promise and Peril undertakes an exploration of isolationism in the context of the “international” turn in the study of American history. The vast majority of isolationist arguments I have examined have assumed some degree and type of international engagement; from William James's criticisms of American empire to William Borah's opposition to international leagues and support of nonbinding international peace initiatives, such claims were often as much about border-crossing as about border-making, broadly defined. So, although such a separation from the world is the first proposition that comes to mind when discussing those who favored isolationism, it also is the first conception that must be dismissed.
Recent historical scholarship has not explored isolationism in depth and little new work has engaged in a concentrated analysis from the late nineteenth century through the “interwar” period which is most often associated with isolationist American politics. Thus my book swims “upstream” historiographically, as Preston and Hoganson point out, even as it builds on an excellent body of scholarship including the superb work of William Appleman Williams, Justus Doenecke, Manfred Jonas, and John Milton Cooper Jr., among many others. I am hopeful that in using the term to mean relative isolation, I, along with a host of previous historians and political scientists, have demonstrated conclusively that the American government has never pursued a foreign policy that could be considered purely isolationist. The idea and the term remain very much in the American political vocabulary despite being often applied as epithets largely devoid of serious historical or analytical meaning. I reject the argument that because the term has been misapplied and mangled – and is highly politicized – we as historians should not deploy it.Footnote 3
In response to several of the reviews, I hasten to add that the book carefully differentiates between isolationist-oriented ideas and labeling figures or groups as “isolationist.” In Promise and Peril I aim to depict a highly malleable isolationist political persuasion (à la Michael Kazin's “populist persuasion”) rather than a more singular “tradition.” I emphasize the progressive roots and late nineteenth-century origins that Preston notes were not some simple “nativist reaction” to a globalizing world. In many ways, what developed in the late nineteenth century were forms of cosmopolitan isolationism (rather than the more realist isolationism of the early republic), debated and updated to fit the needs of an increasingly powerful and internationally engaged US global position. In these debates the word “isolation” figured prominently, as did invocations of related foreign-policy traditions stemming from the foundational American past. Thus the utility of the term, it seems to me, lies grounded first and foremost in its conceptual and literal usage by historical actors in a given moment even if they eschewed the label “isolationist” or their efforts at times preceded the rise of an isolationist political bloc. At the same time, the term is significant because it endures so powerfully in the American political imaginary.
In my work I take the role of religion and religious motivations in American policy and foreign relations seriously, which Andrew Preston applauds. However, I believe that Preston's more comprehensive comments about missionaries lacking any aspect of an isolationist worldview misses the thrust of my approach to mission advocacy in terms of broader patterns in isolationist and internationalist ideology from the 1880s through the 1940s. My argument regarding John Mott's work as a leader of the YMCA, for example, attempts to demonstrate how an isolationist opposition to the exercise of national military and diplomatic force abroad was embedded in nongovernmental American worldwide commitments. In the case of Mott and the YMCA in the early twentieth century, as I suspect Preston would agree, we see a group on the “cutting edge of globalization” who endorsed a sort of coercive, cooptive soft-power methodology that they perceived to be unrelated to nationalist American hubris or an articulation of state power abroad. For Mott it was preferable to seek the “evangelization of the world” without flags or nationalities attached to such efforts, thus he decried colonial excesses and preferred private, NGO activities to state-led initiatives abroad. Nevertheless, over time Mott and the YMCA became involved in World War I activities such as on the War Work Council (see chapters 3 and 5) and even took on diplomatic missions; thereafter humanitarian and mission work often fused with political activities, and soft and hard power became increasingly difficult to differentiate from the 1910s through the 1930s (and, one might note, even more intertwined over the course of the twentieth century).Footnote 4
New perspectives on the ability to achieve productive international objectives without direct state applications of power (including an assault on entangling alliances and neocolonial ventures) emerged in the fin de siècle alongside new nationalist visions of expansionism. Various sections of the book explore exactly the point Preston makes. Cooperation, cooptation, and attraction (all soft-power approaches) came to enable as well as constrain modern isolationist beliefs, often by making economic rather than diplomatic or military engagement central to US global involvement from the late nineteenth century through American entry into World War II.
Claims and labels regarding “isolationism” continue to shape American foreign and domestic political disputes. It is incumbent on us, then, to better understand and contextualize what was and was not “isolationist.” As Sexton generously comments – and as I hope – Promise and Peril “demands that historians take isolationism more seriously than we have hitherto” and that we see it “not as a limited and reactive political movement of 1919–20 or of the 1930s, but rather as a malleable and evolving intellectual and political tradition.” Indeed, the historical debates over isolation have been very much about attempts to define and direct the meaning of America – thus their high stakes and resort to historicist interpretation. How can or should purportedly American ideals be achieved or enacted in foreign affairs? What role can or should the US play in a global world? In turn, how do foreign-policy choices influence domestic challenges given limited resources? These have been some of the critical questions and issues at stake in the isolationist and internationalist debates of the past. They are very much with us today – both the promise as well as the peril.
