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brooke l. blower From Isolationism to Neutrality: A New Framework for Understanding American Political Culture, 1919–1941* The concept of isolationism hovers like a pall over histories of American political culture between the world wars. Few historians really believe in the term’s utility anymore, and many simply ignore it in their pursuit of new, internationally oriented studies of the period. Yet others continue to use it halfheartedly for want of a better way to explain Americans’ prickly stance toward foreign affairs before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This article assesses the merits and pitfalls of relying on isolationism, as well as its imagined opposite internationalism, to explain popular thought about foreign relations in the 1920s and 1930s. It argues that as historians move transnational actors to the center of their stories, they should not underestimate important currents in American life that have been traditionally subsumed under the heading isolationism. Simply resurrecting the label isolationism, however, will not do justice to these currents. Instead, neutrality—both as a theory in foreign relations and international law and as it was actually practiced by the United States as well as other nations—offers a more useful framework for understanding those fierce debates about what role Americans should play in a dangerous world. The point here is not to relabel people or groups by substituting, say, neutralists (or noninterventionists or unilateralists) for isolationists. Rather, it is to redirect attention toward the central foreign relations problem that consumed Americans across the political spectrum during the interwar years, namely how the old fail-safe strategy of neutrality should be redefined in an age of total warfare. Textbooks often rely on isolationism to evoke a standard narrative for the period between 1919 and 1941. Beginning with Woodrow Wilson’s failure to ensure the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, this story line highlights * This article was first conceived as a talk for the Organization of American Historians annual meeting in Houston in March 2011. The author wishes to thank the participants of that session, especially commentator Frank Costigliola. For their insightful feedback on subsequent drafts of this essay, she is also grateful to Andrew Bacevich, Christopher Capozzola, David Engerman, Sarah Phillips, Andrew Preston, and John Thompson as well as the anonymous readers for Diplomatic History. Diplomatic History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2014). ß The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. doi:10.1093/dh/dht091 Advance Access publication on May 29, 2013 345
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Page 1: From Isolationism to Neutrality: A New Framework for ... · Framework for Understanding American Political Culture, 1919–1941* The concept of isolationism hovers like a pall over

b r o o k e l . b l o w e r

From Isolationism to Neutrality: A New

Framework for Understanding American

Political Culture, 1919–1941*

The concept of isolationism hovers like a pall over histories of American politicalculture between the world wars. Few historians really believe in the term’s utilityanymore, and many simply ignore it in their pursuit of new, internationallyoriented studies of the period. Yet others continue to use it halfheartedly forwant of a better way to explain Americans’ prickly stance toward foreign affairsbefore the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This article assesses the merits and pitfallsof relying on isolationism, as well as its imagined opposite internationalism, toexplain popular thought about foreign relations in the 1920s and 1930s. It arguesthat as historians move transnational actors to the center of their stories, theyshould not underestimate important currents in American life that have beentraditionally subsumed under the heading isolationism. Simply resurrectingthe label isolationism, however, will not do justice to these currents. Instead,neutrality—both as a theory in foreign relations and international law and as itwas actually practiced by the United States as well as other nations—offers a moreuseful framework for understanding those fierce debates about what roleAmericans should play in a dangerous world. The point here is not to relabelpeople or groups by substituting, say, neutralists (or noninterventionists orunilateralists) for isolationists. Rather, it is to redirect attention toward thecentral foreign relations problem that consumed Americans across the politicalspectrum during the interwar years, namely how the old fail-safe strategy ofneutrality should be redefined in an age of total warfare.

Textbooks often rely on isolationism to evoke a standard narrative for theperiod between 1919 and 1941. Beginning with Woodrow Wilson’s failureto ensure the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, this story line highlights

* This article was first conceived as a talk for the Organization of American Historiansannual meeting in Houston in March 2011. The author wishes to thank the participants of thatsession, especially commentator Frank Costigliola. For their insightful feedback on subsequentdrafts of this essay, she is also grateful to Andrew Bacevich, Christopher Capozzola, DavidEngerman, Sarah Phillips, Andrew Preston, and John Thompson as well as the anonymous readersfor Diplomatic History.

Diplomatic History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2014).� The Author 2013. Published by Oxford UniversityPress on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. doi:10.1093/dh/dht091

Advance Access publication on May 29, 2013

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the maneuvering of the Senate’s blustery “irreconcilables,” vigilantly keepingthe United States distant from the League of Nations and the World Court, aswell as the efforts of other nationalists, who, striving to ward off foreign compe-tition and troubles, pioneered immigration quotas, higher tariffs, and neutralityacts. Isolationism seems particularly apt for explaining the anxieties of the 1930s. Itappears to fit that decade not only in its narrow, traditional definition of describinga reluctance to enter into formal alliances with European powers but also in thebroader sense of capturing a national mood. The economic crisis undercutAmericans’ willingness to extend their resources to others, and, by mid-decade,longstanding annoyance about former allies’ failures to pay their war debts collidedwith the publication of a wave of revisionist World War I histories and the sen-sational findings of the Nye Committee, which brought to an all-time high disil-lusionments about the ability of foreign interventions to accomplish anythingother than the sinister motives of munitions dealers and unrepentant imperialists.1

In the crisis-packed years that followed, at least until the fall of Paris if not thebombing of Pearl Harbor, many Americans had no patience for the problemsbrewing abroad, especially for what Charles Beard called the “mazes and passionsof European conflicts.” Antifascist foreign correspondents fought uphill battles toalert Americans to the dangers of aggression spreading overseas from Manchuria,Ethiopia, and Spain to Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France. What kinds of inter-national commitments and ambitions, writers like Dorothy Thompson andVincent Sheean frequently despaired, could possibly flourish amid such headwindsof apathy? It was, another journalist marveled, as though Americans had come tofancy themselves “collectively a nation of Robinson Crusoes.”2

There is something to this image of the interwar United States as a land litteredwith the editorials of the “obstreperously isolationist Chicago Tribune,” as DavidKennedy calls it, and populated by those of either “indifference to the outsideworld” or else “studied, active repudiation of anything that smacked of interna-tional political or military engagement.” Even scholars who would never describeother eras as isolationist find themselves resorting to it to explain the 1930s. In hissweeping transnational reinterpretation of U.S. history, Ian Tyrrell notes that

1. Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse (New York, 1957); Robert Divine, The ReluctantBelligerent: American Entry into World War II (1965; New York, 1979); Manfred Jonas,Isolationism in America, 1935-1941 (Ithaca, NY, 1966); Warren Cohen, The American Revisionists:The Lessons of Intervention in World War I (Chicago, 1967); Ralph Stone, The Irreconcilables: TheFight Against the League of Nations (Lexington, MA, 1970); Thomas Guinsburg, The Pursuit ofIsolationism in the United States Senate from Versailles to Pearl Harbor (New York, 1982); WayneCole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-1945 (Lincoln, NE, 1983); Justus Doenecke and JohnWilz, From Isolation to War, 1931-1941 (1968; Arlington Heights, IL, 1991); David M. Kennedy,Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York, 1999). For afuller bibliography, see Justus Doenecke, Anti-Intervention: A Bibliographical Introduction toIsolationism and Pacifism from World War I to the Early Cold War (New York, 1987).

2. Charles Beard, “We’re Blundering into War,” American Mercury, April 1939, 288–99;Dorothy Thompson, Let the Record Speak (Boston, MA, 1939); Vincent Sheean, Not Peace Buta Sword (New York, 1939); Michael Williams, “Views & Reviews,” Commonweal, October 6,1939, 536.

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European unrest and the economic downturn “compromised the American ver-sion of internationalism of the 1920s and drove the United States into the shell ofisolation.” George C. Herring similarly finds isolationism fitting for the thirties inhis authoritative volume of the Oxford History of the United States. As Americansturned “sharply inward under the burden of the Great Depression,” he argues,their “passionate 1930s quest to insulate the nation from foreign entanglementsand war fully merits the label isolationist.”3 This notion has staying power, inshort, because it seems to capture a measure of historical truth.

The term isolationism has also endured, however, because of its rhetorical forcein foreign policy battles since World War II. Histories of interwar diplomacywritten shortly after 1945 commonly emphasized regional parochialism andethnic tensions as the roots of resistance to FDR’s pro-Allied foreign policy, aportrait that perfectly suited Cold Warriors, who stood ready to levy the charge ofisolationism against anyone who questioned their plans to lead the country out ofwhat they saw as a shortsighted, divisive prewar era into one of consensus build-ing and responsible world leadership. “To be called an isolationist in the contextof the Cold War,” the historian Michael Hunt recently ventured, “was nearly asbad as being called a communist.” Ever since the Truman years, Democraticand Republican administrations alike have repeatedly raised “the old hobgoblinof isolationism,” as Andrew Bacevich dubs it, in order to discredit those whocriticized ballooning overseas commitments.4

Not just good for mud-slinging, isolationism has also facilitated a reluctantheroes explanation of Americans’ rise to superpower. Americans had not wantedto throw their weight around, the isolationist narrative implies, but had beenforced against their will into the limelight of global affairs. Unlike self-servingEuropean imperialists who grasped for power, Americans had undertaken theirbenevolent reign only after being prodded out of their shell and only because it wasa dirty job that somebody had to do. In the wake of the Vietnam War, interwarisolationists took on the role of sage skeptics, underappreciated in their own daybut worthy of rediscovery. Downplaying the prejudices and extremism of someof FDR’s critics, which had seemed so important to scholars after the war, histor-ians began to rehabilitate the reputations of those once maligned as isolationists,portraying them as populist underdogs or well-meaning anti-imperialists, whose

3. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 390, 393, 404; Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United StatesHistory in Global Perspective Since 1789 (Basingstoke, 2007), 173–74; George C. Herring, FromColony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York, 2008), 486, 502.

4. Michael Hunt, “Isolationism: Behind the Myth, A Useable Past,” UNC Press Blog,http: //uncpressblog.com/2011/06/29/michael-h-hunt-isolationism-behind-the-myth-a-usable-past/ (accessed June 29, 2011) and The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained andWielded Global Dominance (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 123–24, 153; Andrew Bacevich, AmericanEmpire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 8, 22, 75–76,114, 212, quotation p. 100. On early ethnic and regional explanations, see Adler, Isolationist Impulse;and Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (1952; New York, 1956), 140–63.

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reservations had come to seem reasonable, even prescient in light of the protractedmilitary campaigns of the late twentieth century.5 And once again, amid concernsabout American “overreach” in the post-9/11 world, isolationism has crept backinto public debate. Some think a touch of isolationist spirit would make for a“humbler” foreign policy, while others worry that retrenchment will encourageAmericans to back off from important initiatives. Either way, those who keep theterm alive take for granted that isolationism existed before 1941 and serves as alesson to measure contemporary policy against, one way or another.6

Meanwhile, running parallel to this enduring narrative is an entirely differentliterature on the interwar years in which “isolationists” hardly figure if at all. Asearly as 1954, William Appleman Williams pronounced 1920s isolationism as littlemore than a “legend.” Rather than fearfully (or cheerfully) cutting themselves offfrom world politics after the Great War, he argued, Americans busily exerted theirinfluence abroad during a decade “marked by express and extended involvementwith—and intervention in the affairs of—other nations.” Foreign policy under theRepublican administrations of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, according toWilliams and other revisionists in the 1960s and 1970s, continued rather thaninterrupted a longer history of American empire building on the cheap, throughMarine-backed dollar diplomacy in Latin America and open-door strategizing inEast Asia, as well as efforts to make postwar Europe safe for American business.To them, such economic expansion was far more significant than any politicalreticence.7 In the 1980s, historians brought further nuance to this interpretation,situating formal state action within a wider range of economic and cultural insti-tution building that had enticed Americans out into the world in unprecedented,if ambivalent, ways after World War I. Since then, the interwar years have become

5. Thomas Guinsburg, “Humanizing the Isolationist Bogeyman,” Reviews in American History,June 1984, 253–56. Rehabilitations include Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, Robert DavidJohnson, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA, 1995); andChristopher McKnight Nichols, Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age(Cambridge, MA, 2011). On postwar “benevolent supremacy” narratives, see Melani McAlister,Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley, CA, 2001),43–47, 55, 80–83 and on Pearl Harbor as an end of innocence, see Emily Rosenberg, A Date WhichWill Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, NC, 2003), 17–18, 27–30.

6. Andrew Sullivan, “The Isolationist Beast Stirs in America Again,” Sunday Times (London),July 29, 2007, 4; William Astore, “The New American Isolationism,” The Nation, www.thenation.com/article/155725/new-american-isolationism (accessed November 1, 2010); ThanassisCambanis, “Stand Alone: The Case for a New Isolationism,” Boston Globe, February 6, 2011,K1; David Greenberg, “G.O.P. vs. World,” New York Times, June 30, 2011, A27.

7. William Appleman Williams, “The Legend of Isolationism in the 1920’s,” Science andSociety, Winter 1954, 1–20; D. C. Watt, “American ‘Isolationism’ in the 1920s: Is It a UsefulConcept?” Bulletin of British Association for American Studies (June 1963): 3–19; Robert FreemanSmith, “American Foreign Relations 1920-1942,” in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays inAmerican History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (New York, 1968), 232–62; Melvyn Leffler, TheElusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, 1919-1933 (Chapel Hill,NC, 1979). More recent critiques of the term include David Dunn, “Isolationism Revisited: SevenPersistent Myths in the Contemporary American Foreign Policy Debate,” Review of InternationalStudies 31, no. 2 (2005): 237–61; and Baer Braumoeller, “The Myth of Isolationism,” Foreign PolicyAnalysis 6 (2010): 349–71.

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even more “internationalized” by scholars using transnational methods centeredon all kinds of people on the move: progressive reformers plying the oceans forpolicy ideas; capitalists and modernizers striking out across the continents to findmarkets and testing grounds; poets and tourists alike searching for foreign inspir-ation.8 For historians with their eyes trained on the Caribbean, Mexico, or thePacific, isolationism seems an irredeemably Eurocentric term, an explanatorydevice whose main function, wittingly or unwittingly, has been to obscureAmericans’ forceful participation in the affairs of other parts of the world. Forthose interested in political economy and global integration, the policy debates ofthe late thirties—and relics like the neutrality acts—seem less important thanthe expansion of communication and transportation networks, or the spread ofmarkets and technical expertise.9

Is isolationism merely an outmoded myth that should be replaced by moresophisticated, transnational histories? Or, by focusing so much on internationalstory lines, are scholars overlooking the degree to which so-called isolationistimpulses remained a force in American life? One approach to reconciling thisconflicted picture is simply to concede that both currents were vibrant and influ-ential, with internationalism having more weight during the 1920s, only to betemporarily eclipsed by isolationism in the 1930s. But attempting to weigh thewaxing or waning impact of two “sides” of debate, or substituting some otherdichotomy, will not solve fundamental problems with the internationalist-isolationist rubric. The following analyzes the inadequacies of these terms forunderstanding the interwar years and most especially for disentangling thoseforeign policy disputes during isolationism’s supposed high watermark between1935 and 1941. Historians should not overlook trends in American thought thathave been called isolationism, but they do need more precise analytical tools totake account of American attitudes about Europe’s problems at this particularmoment. Framing the interwar years as a period of neutrality rather than isola-tionism places attention squarely on what was actually new—and deeply problem-atic—in this era. Americans have always been divided over foreign policy. Theyhad long worried about the unintended consequences of economic expansionoverseas, and they had wrestled with imperialist ambitions and temptations to

8. Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion,1890-1945 (New York, 1982); Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic,and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919-1933 (Ithaca, NY, 1984); Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity:American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York, 1994); Daniel T. Rodgers, AtlanticCrossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998); Emily Rosenberg, FinancialMissionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930 (Cambridge,MA, 1999).

9. Isolationism, for example, has no place in recent transnational histories about development,imperial rule, or pan-African politics: Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T.Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ, 2010);Anne L. Foster, Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia,1919-1941 (Durham, NC, 2010); and Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans andAfrican Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010).

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become embroiled in European politics before. What was different in the decadesafter World War I, and what lent this debate its special urgency and potency, was asense that one important option in the traditional conduct of international rela-tions—neutrality—had become unhinged from its moorings. Charting this devel-opment offers a new way to narrate the turning points and political alliances of theinterwar years.

***

The most obvious pitfall of using isolationism and internationalism to explain thisperiod derives from the alliances these labels misleadingly imply. Even scholarswho rely on them often concede at the outset of their studies that such sobriquetsconflate too facilely distinct ideas and dispositions. Talking about internationalistsas a group ignores crucial differences between antifascists, who were often highlycritical of empire—both in its European and American varieties—and expansion-ists, who wanted to exert American influence abroad for the purpose of advancingpersonal or national interests. It encompasses, for example, the principles ofcosmopolitan intellectuals such as Jane Addams, Crystal Eastman, and DorothyDetzer who championed peace and arbitration during and after World War I. Butit also describes the desires of others for whom connections abroad were as muchabout power and profit as about cooperation. Entrepreneurs like Henry Ford,carving a plantation out of the Amazon and erecting industrial plants acrossEurope, missionaries proselytizing in the Far East, and American Legionnairescommemorating the Armistice and wreaking havoc while on vacation in Paris wereall interwar internationalists of complicated kinds.10 Even those who celebratedthe idea of “Fortress America” on the eve of World War II had been leadinginternationalists in their own way. Herbert Hoover, after all, was a world-re-nowned humanitarian, who had lived and traveled abroad extensively, spokesome Mandarin, supported the League of Nations, and spearheaded numerousrelief campaigns from Belgium to Soviet Russia. Charles Lindbergh was an ad-venturous aviator, who shrunk the distance between New York and Paris andhelped Pan American Airways stretch its routes across the oceans.11

10. For example, compare the well-meaning, reform-minded “internationalists” in Rodgers,Atlantic Crossings; Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic LiberalReform (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); and John Fabian Witt, Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Historiesof American Law (Cambridge, MA, 2007), chap. 3, to those with mixed motives and checkeredrecords in Victoria deGrazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-CenturyEurope (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Kristin Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Productionof American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Riseand Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York, 2009); Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World:The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2010); and Brooke L. Blower, BecomingAmericans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars (New York, 2011).

11. George Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, 3 vols. (New York, 1983–1996); KendrickClemens, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary, 1918-1928 (New York, 2010); ThomasKessner, The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation (New York,2010).

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The term isolationism, bringing to mind that proverbial ostrich burying hishead in the sand, is likewise misleading. So-called isolationists were usually farfrom apathetic or ill-informed; they were well-versed in current events and knewtheir European history. More important, what is now labeled isolationism wasalmost never an argument for actual isolation. The so-called isolationist position,it is important to remember, was not about keeping the United States out of theworld. It was about keeping it out of war. It was about severing trade or allianceswith “warring” nations not all nations. Even the America First Committee—“iso-lationists” par excellence who rose to prominence in late 1940—advocated aggres-sive action overseas, if the right kind in the right place. One of their platform’slesser-cited planks demanded that Americans “develop Mexico and, if need be, useforce to assure friendly governments there.” Many members likewise endorsed theseizure of European possessions in the Western Hemisphere for repayment of wardebts or for hemispheric security after their metropoles had been overrun. Lots ofAmericans fancied themselves internationalists, but almost no one, including theAmerica First chairman Robert E. Wood, or the senators who dubbed themselvesthe “peace bloc,” wanted to own the distorting title of isolationist.12 Calling some-one an isolationist was a smear, just as antiwar Democrats had been derided as“copperheads” during the Civil War, and thus hardly an ideal moniker for histor-ians to take up.

Historians’ reliance on “isolationism,” moreover, is largely anachronistic.Americans employed it far less regularly during the early twentieth century thannow assumed. Even though the doctrine supposedly traced back to GeorgeWashington’s farewell address, “isolationism” did not appear in the OxfordEnglish Dictionary until 1922, nor in the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, or NewYork Times until the year after that. Commentators resorted to the noun“isolationist” sparingly during the Spanish-American War and World War I,but they did not use it as an adjective until the early 1920s, and then typicallywith negative connotations. In fact, American newspapers invoked isolationismonly sporadically and not in their headlines until the 1930s and not with anyregularity before the outbreak of World War II. “Isolationism” first appeared inthe titles of major magazine articles only in the 1940s, and then usually in thecontext of postwar planning (when its “resurgence” was to be guarded against).This was, in other words, an approach to foreign affairs that policy makers andcritics invented during World War II primarily so that they could declare it “bank-rupt,” a value system to be “spurned” in hindsight as “America’s great mistake,” as

12. Robert Wood to Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, October 15, 1940, box 21 f7,Fight for Freedom, Inc. Records, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and SpecialCollections, Princeton University Library [FFF]; “Phantasy of a Bloodless Sword,” SaturdayEvening Post, October 14, 1939, 30, 152–54; Guinsburg, Pursuit of Isolationism, 8–9; Johnson,Peace Progressives; Justus Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention,1939-1941 (2000; Lanham, MD, 2003).

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Walter Lippmann put it. Isolationism was a cautionary tale for the post-PearlHarbor future, not an accurate description of the past.13

Thus, there is a remarkable disconnect between historians’ reliance on the termand the keywords Americans actually used before 1941. For example, in ManfredJonas’s extensive primary source bibliography for Isolationism in America (1966),“isolation” appears in only one entry (Common Sense put it in quotation marks inthe name of a 1939 essay). Instead, the pamphlet and article titles brim with ref-erences to “war,” “peace,” and “neutrality,” the latter invoked no less than twenty-five times.14 Typing “isolationism” into a research library catalog will likewise turnup a healthy number of books written since the 1950s, but proves less useful formining primary source databases. Indexers never selected “isolationism” as a sub-ject heading for the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature (but between 1919 and1941 they filed 544 articles under “United States—neutrality”). Nor does isola-tionism show up in the online abstracts for Congressional reports published duringthe same period (neutrality appears 113 times). Widening out to a full-text searchand combining “isolationism” and “isolationist” does turn up 115 congressionalsources. With the same parameters “neutrality” yields 1,514 results.

Some have proposed that these terminology problems can be rectified byrenaming the categories. More and more scholars rightly advocate calling thedoctrine that began with Washington’s farewell address “unilateralism” ratherthan isolationism, in order to emphasize independent agency, rather than passiveabstinence, as one of the driving convictions of American foreign policy.Differentiating between “multilateralists” and “unilateralists” also better deline-ates Americans’ varied approaches to international engagement.15 But these termsdo less to illuminate what was at stake in the debates on the eve of World War II.Those who did not want to support the Allies were indeed unilateralists, but sowere many who did. While antifascist idealists made multilateralist arguments thatAmericans had to be involved because they were part of the stream of humanhistory, fated to stand or fall together with the other free peoples of the world,others, such as some businessmen and military planners, remained committed toAmerican independence but argued that joining the war effort was strategically

13. Walter Lippmann, “America’s Great Mistake,” Life, July 21, 1941, 74; “PostwarIsolationism Spurned as GOP Shapes Year’s Strategy,” Newsweek, April 27, 1942, 38; HenryWallace, “Wallace Warns against a New Isolationism,” New York Times Magazine, July 12,1942, 5; “Primaries Show Isolationism a Dead Political Issue,” August 26, 1942, 1021, and“Bankrupt Isolationism: Battle over America’s Postwar Policy,” January 20, 1943, 70–71, bothin Christian Century; I. F. Stone, “F.D.R.’s Victory: Leading the United States Out ofIsolationism,” Nation, November 13, 1943, 546–47; “Why Isolationism Finds Rough Going,”Saturday Evening Post, September 18, 1943, 116; “Isolationism v. Post-War Collaboration,”New Republic, November 8, 1943, 652. See also Manfred Jonas, “Isolationism,” in Encyclopedia ofAmerican Foreign Policy: Studies of the Principal Movements and Ideas, vol. II, ed. AlexanderDeConde(New York, 1978), 496–506.

14. Jonas, Isolationism in America, 292–301.15. Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World

Since 1776 (New York, 1997), 39–56; Andrew Johnstone, “Isolationism and Internationalism inAmerican Foreign Relations,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 9.1 (March 2011): 7–20.

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necessary or simply advantageous. The war was one of history’s “creative oppor-tunities,” Henry Luce rhapsodized; Americans had only to seize the mantle ofworld leadership and the postwar world would be theirs to command.16

Recasting the debate as a battle between “interventionists” and “non-interven-tionists” is likewise an improvement for describing American viewpoints betweenthe outbreak of European hostilities in September 1939 and the American declar-ation of war in December 1941.17 But this dichotomy, too, obscures some faultlines even as it illuminates others. There was an important distinction betweeninterventionists who advocated helping Britain by all means “short of war” and aminority of hawks who wanted to immediately enter the “shooting war.” This issueseriously strained collaboration between Allied supporters, especially after April1941, when activists who championed military participation broke off from theleading interventionist organization, the Committee to Defend America by Aidingthe Allies (CDAAA) and formed the more militant group, Fight for Freedom, Inc.(FFF).18 Anti-interventionism, too, makes strange bedfellows out of CharlesLindbergh and Charles Beard. It lumps pacifist students together with German-American Bundists who were perfectly willing to glorify war, provided it was theright one. Moreover, in a modern, integrated world, not intervening, as everyoneplainly understood from the fate of Ethiopia and Republican Spain, was in effect aform of intervention, which would throw weight to one side of a conflict. Thatlabel, too, is too much of a misnomer.

Binaries simply cannot encompass the confounding issues Americans facedduring these years nor properly illuminate the solutions they entertained. Theycannot capture the back-and-forth between FDR’s administration and an intract-able Congress, nor reveal the competing visions of world leadership emanatingfrom the State Department, nor explain the opposing goals of HenryMorgenthau’s Treasury Department and the President’s top military advisors.19

Their utility falters, moreover, when people and positions are traced over anylength of time. Those who advocated joining the League of Nations in the wakeof World War I might be labeled internationalist or multilateralist, but many ofthose same people, FDR foremost among them, ensured the passage of neutralitylegislation in the mid-thirties, which would earn them the opposite labels of iso-lationist or unilateralist.20 By contrast, Senator William Borah (R-Idaho)

16. Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, 61–65.17. Doenecke does this effectively in Storm on the Horizon.18. Mark Lincoln Chadwin, The Hawks of World War II (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968).19. John Thompson, “Another Look at the Downfall of ‘Fortress America,’ ” Journal of

American Studies 26.3 (December 1992): 393–408 and “Conceptions of National Security andAmerican Entry into World War II,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 16 (2005): 671–97.

20. Robert Divine describes FDR’s seeming conversion as a “drift away from international-ism”: Reluctant Belligerent, 3, 19–24, 31–38. Kennedy says that despite “internationalist gestures”during his first term, Roosevelt “showed every sign of swimming with the same isolationist tidethat had swept up his countrymen”: Freedom from Fear, 388–93. Others suggest that FDRwas always an internationalist, but domestic priorities kept him from advancing the foreignpolicy agenda he wanted, especially as tensions rose with his congressional adversaries: Robert

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vigorously opposed participation in the League of Nations, earning him a spot onanyone’s list of top isolationists, but then also shepherded the Kellogg-Briand Pactthrough committee and criticized the ever-expanding provisions of the neutralityacts for violating international law and constraining American action abroad.Exasperated by this “new Borah,” Hiram Johnson (R-CA) privately worried inthe early thirties that his onetime ally against the League had become the Senate’s“strongest internationalist.” Perhaps Borah might be called a man who spoke hismind and went his own way or “the Senate’s Great Inconsistent,” as Time chris-tened him, but that brings scholars little closer to grasping the essence of populardebate about Americans’ role in a war-bent world.21

The deeper this period is mined the more elusive such understanding seemsto become. Just as the nation’s complicated social terrain did not correspond tobinary labels, it also did not reliably shadow party loyalties or even emergingliberal and conservative platforms. FDR’s foreign policy opponents of coursefound a home in the Republican Party, but so did high-profile figures with grandglobal visions, not least Henry and Clare Boothe Luce and the GOP’s 1940

presidential nominee Wendell Wilkie. Meanwhile the President faced doggedopposition on international matters from progressives in Congress such asSenator Burton K. Wheeler (D-Montana) and old Popular Front allies, whofeared war would roll back New Deal gains and civil liberties, among themthe Socialist Party’s Norman Thomas and the CIO’s John L. Lewis.22 Beyondthe famous rivalries, factions formed and broke apart amid a swirl of ethnic andreligious antagonisms, local controversies, and the vicissitudes of world events.Italian Americans had been gravitating toward the Democratic Party since 1928

when Al Smith ran for President on a wet platform, but many still adorned theirstores and homes with portraits of Mussolini and did not want to go to war withItaly or her allies. Generoso Pope’s pro-Fascist Party Il Progresso enjoyed thenation’s second largest circulation for a foreign language daily after the JewishDaily Forward. Irish American workers, too, had been part of the New Dealcoalition, but they remained unapologetically anti-English and furnished mil-lions of listeners for Father Coughlin’s radio paeans to Hitler as the last bulwarkagainst an international conspiracy of Bolsheviks, Jewish bankers, and WallStreet plutocrats. African Americans, for their part, also swung to FDR duringthe 1930s but for them worrying about fascism overseas often took a back seat tobattles closer to home; some even admired the Japanese for standing up to whiteimperialists, and others were susceptible to soapbox tirades against Jewish

Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York, 1979), 78, 530;Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists.

21. Johnson quoted in Guinsburg, Pursuit of Isolationism, 145; “The Great Fugue,” Time,September 25, 1939, 12–13.

22. In the hawkish Century Group, members who were conservative on domestic issuesoutnumbered progressives two to one: Chadwin, Hawks of World War II, 66.

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storeowners. By 1941, a few African American leaders judged the “anti-Semiticproblem in Harlem” so serious that meetings were called to “deal with the pro-Hitler nonsense.”23 By contrast, white Southerners, usually a thorn in NewDealers’ side on domestic issues, spurned America First and championedBritain’s cause, evoking the empire’s support for the Confederacy during theCivil War. Some Northerners meanwhile cited the same fact to advocateagainst it.24

The arguments and alliances became even more counterintuitive once thewar broke out in Europe and took its bizarre twists and turns. Most famously,left-wing Communists sounded like right-wing America Firsters, decrying the waras a struggle between “rival imperialists,” until Hitler’s invasion of the SovietUnion reversed their position overnight. But there were other pickles. ManyCatholics, for example, had aligned themselves with the European right duringthe 1930s on the supposition that fascism posed less of a threat to religion than“godless” communism, drawing comfort from Mussolini’s Lateran Accords (1929)and Hitler’s Concordat with the Holy See (1933) as well as from both dictators’ aidto Franco during Spanish civil war. But the destruction of Catholic Poland under-mined that argument, which leftists lost no time pointing out. Similarly, for anti-fascists, who viewed the conflict as a good-and-evil battle between democracy anddictatorship, reconciling their principles with the realities of having Joseph Stalinas an ally after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union required careful mental maneu-vering. By summer 1941, the time when intervention could be championed onpurely ideological grounds had already passed. Finland’s alliance with the Nazis topush back against Soviet aggression after the Winter War offered a similar stum-bling block. The hawkish Fight for Freedom Committee announced gravely inNovember 1941 that “in a world where sentiment has little place we must nowpainfully acknowledge that the Finnish government is a full-fledged member of theAxis.” Their opponents pounced on this hard-line thinking. Exactly how, askedone man, are we “going to help the cause of freedom the world over by assistingRussia in the defeat of Finland, one of the finest of democracies, and the bestgoverned peoples”? Others found in Finland a way to salvage religious arguments:“We Americans will not combine with communistic Russia against our Christianbrothers in Finland,” insisted one scholar (Figure 1). The war was a moral and

23. John Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ, 1972), 302–6,342–52; Mike Wallace, “New York and the World,” in Facing Fascism: New York and the SpanishCivil War, eds Peter Carroll and James Fernandez (New York, 2007), 21–29; Ronald Bayor,Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929-1941 (Urbana,IL, 1988); Ulric Bell to Dorothy Parker, October 24, 1941, William Kikens to Edward White,November 8, 1941, and other correspondence in box 28 f9, FFF; Chadwin, Hawks of WorldWar II, 184–86.

24. Joseph Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789-1973 (BatonRouge, LA, 2002), 188–89, 201–7.

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political morass. But trying to sort partisans into isolationist and internationalistcamps only obscures the situation more.25

If isolationism does little to clarify the positions of either famous leaders orfactions on the ground, what about its usefulness for describing the general tenorof public opinion? The surveys of George Gallup and Elmo Roper, after all, con-sistently showed that a majority of Americans hesitated to go to war on behalf ofEurope’s democratic governments. What did that mean if not that Americans werein an isolationist mood? Digging below the polling numbers to develop a morelayered portrait of popular thought suggests that Americans were confused, angry,and indeed hesitant to take up arms on behalf of the Allies—probably even more

Figure 1: Contributing to Chinese, Polish, or Jewish relief campaigns and other causes based ontheir ethnic, religious, or political loyalties, Americans became selectively but wholeheartedlyengaged in the various conflicts that together became “World War II.” By March 1940, antic-ommunists deluged the Finnish legation in Washington with so many donations for the fightagainst the Soviets that it had to increase staff by ten-fold and move to a larger building. Library ofCongress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-hec-28285.

25. Young Communist League, “We Propose Peace,” November 6, 1940, box 25 f6;J. H. Gipson, September 1941, and Martin Sommer, September 9, 1941, box 25 f1; press release,November 1941, box 21 f12, all in FFF; Chadwin, Hawks of World War II, 242–50; Doenecke,Storm on the Horizon, 77–82; George Flynn, Roosevelt and Romanism: Catholics and AmericanDiplomacy, 1937-1945 (Westport, CT, 1976), chap. 5.

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so, in fact, than they admitted to those official-looking interviewers who rang theirdoorbells asking about the war. But this is not to say that they felt no connection tothe war or wanted nothing to do with European affairs. Americans had all kinds ofraw emotions and only whisperable thoughts about the conflict, which they oftenkept from pollsters with their typed ballots and judging eyes but then poured intotheir own private correspondence.26 These thoughts were often extreme, prejudi-cial, and even pro-Axis, a fact downplayed in recent portraits of “isolationism.” Butsuch beliefs comprised an important, if ugly, underbelly to public opinion duringthese years, and understanding them is essential for sketching a full picture ofAmericans’ engagement with foreign affairs.

Letter writing was a thriving practice during the 1930s and 1940s, and thosenow called “isolationists” mastered the art, sending fan mail to Charles Lindberghand the America First Committee as well as anonymous threats to prominentantifascists. One such letter writer, for instance, wished out loud that Americanshad someone to “think as much of as Germany does of her Hitler” instead of the“mental and physical cripple in the white house.” Unlike poll results with theircarefully worded categories, handwritten notes, hastily stashed into their envelops,were brash and bellicose (Figure 2). “If I die I shall gladly do so for America butNEVER UNDER GOD’S WILL SHALL I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR THEBRITISH IMPERIALISTS AND KING GEORGE,” one man wrote the Fightfor Freedom Committee: “Smoke that in your pipes, there war mongers.”Anonymous authors branded advocates for intervention as “Jew lovingBastards,” “stooges for England,” or “Limey Ass Suckers.” “JUST WAITUNTIL WE GO TO WAR, THEN YOU TRAITORS WILL KNOWWHAT ANTI-SEMATISM [sic] REALLY IS,” warned one writer: “WHATHITLER DID TO THE JEWS WILL SEEM LIKE A TEA PARTY INCOMPARISON.” “Lindbergh for President,” exalted another: “Labor campsfor you.” So-called “crank files,” kept by the targets of such hate mail, hardlyproduce a representative picture of what all Americans were thinking, but thesentiments they reveal proved in many ways commonplace and did not even con-stitute the extreme end of popular opinion, as British censors learned by

26. The era’s polls are compiled in Hadley Cantril, Public Opinion, 1935-1971 (Princeton, NJ,1951) and George Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935-1971, vol. 1 (New York, 1972).Opinion polling in this period underrepresented people of color, non-English speakers, and otherswho did not seem to count as much in the quest to find the “average” American opinion. Studieshave also shown that those who were confronted on their doorsteps often moderated their opinionsabout the war out of fear, shame, or an eagerness to please: Adam Berinsky, In Time of War:Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq (Chicago, 2009); Sarah Igo,The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA,2007), chaps 3–4. Interpreting polling results presented another complex problem. Roosevelt’sjoke that his job was to “steer a course” between the seventy percent of Americans who wantedto “keep out of war” and the other seventy percent who wanted to “do everything to breakHitler, even if it means war” ably captured survey’s inconclusive conclusions: Steven Casey,Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War Against NaziGermany (New York, 2001), 30.

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intercepting Americans’ international mail at Bermuda between 1939 and 1942.Those eastbound mailbags contained astonishing declarations from young menserving in the U.S. military or expecting to be called up who expressed reluctanceto fight their “German brothers,” from citizens who reassured friends and relatives

Figure 2: Carefully crafted opinion polls concealed much of the passion running through debatesabout the prospect of war, but “crank” mail, such as this altered piece of interventionist propa-ganda, reveals the extreme but not uncommon prejudices and partisanship found in a nationpopulated by so many European immigrants and their children. Fight for Freedom, Inc.Records, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, PrincetonUniversity Library, box 21 folder 1.

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abroad of their “unbounded enthusiasm for Germany,” and from others who wroteto the Fuhrer directly, floating sabotage ideas and offering their personal services.Among such private confessants was a West Point cadet in love with his Germanfiance, a Long Island man resentful of his Jewish boss, a Montana woman who hadbeen harboring a fugitive from a Canadian POW camp, and a New Jersey armyvolunteer who photographed himself in uniform doing the Nazi salute. He prayedthat Germany would soon conquer “the damned English.”27

If participating in Gallup’s and Roper’s surveys helped Americans to articulatetheir best, most civic and rational selves, private correspondence by contrast gavethem license to work through less socially acceptable beliefs that, at first, theirwriters may not have even wanted to admit to themselves that they had. Letterssent to national spokesmen often began with moderate tones only to descend intodarker corners of the mind. “I have taught American History 15 years, I studiedAmerican government . . . at Kansas University, I spent three months in Europesome years ago. I read the current magazines every day, so I do not think I amignorant on what is going on in this world,” began one Oklahoma City woman’sletter. “I do not want to see our fine young men slaughtered like hogs on foreignsoil to save Communist Russia,” she continued: “I am far more afraid of ourDemocracy being destroyed from within than I am afraid of Hitler invading us,as much as I hate his methods. . ..” Did she agree, however, with his principles?This last statement got her thinking. “We need to drive out the MoneyChangers,” she insisted: “It has been the Christian people of America and theAmerica First Committee that has kept us out of this terrible war so far.”Starting with a modicum of reason, then dipping into thinly veiled antisemitism,she attempted to pull herself back out with a Biblical argument at the end:“BLESSED ARE THE PEACE MAKERS.”28

Lines from sermons, talking points from congressmen, and even sloganspeddled by the representatives of foreign governments filled the mailbags thatpiled up in politicians’ and activists’ offices by the hundreds of thousands, showing

27. “Crank” letters, box 20 f18-19 and box 21 f1-3, FFF; British Postal Censorship Extracts onEnemy Sympathizers in America, 1940-1943, Hamilton Consulate General, Bermuda, Records ofthe Department of State (RG84), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park,Maryland. America First headquarters kept “Crank-Ignore” files sent by leftists and struggled withmounds of unsolicited antisemitic and pro-Nazi mail. Wayne Cole estimates that 85–90 percent ofthe letters that arrived after Lindbergh’s notorious Des Moines speech supported his views. Thosewho wrote Lindbergh directly also heartily agreed, often in inciting language, with the aviator’sclaim that Jews, the British, and the FDR administration were “war agitators” scheming to embroilthe country in the conflict: Wayne Cole, America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940-1941(Madison, 1953), 106–20, 134–6, 150; and Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle against AmericanIntervention in World War II (New York, 1974), chapter 21; fan mail, Charles A. and Anne MorrowLindbergh Papers, box 1 f5-23, box 2 f1-26, and box 3 f1-4, Department of Rare Books and SpecialCollections, Princeton University Library.

28. W. Keever, September 1941, box 21 f1, FFF. On the culture of letter writing and how ithelped Americans articulate their political views, see James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World WarII Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York, 2011).

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the degree to which Americans listened to foreign policy debates and were trying ona series of arguments for themselves. “We have no interest in preserving either aStalinist Russia or a British oligarchy; we don’t care to fight the Finns, the French,the Norwegians, etc.,” one couple characteristically echoed senators like GeraldNye during the summer of 1941. “We believe that the United States CAN dobusiness with anyone in the world,” they wrote: “We wonder if England willever allow peace.” What to make of statements like these, which suggested thatAmericans were sometimes willing to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt, to hearthe Nazis out? The United States “has absolutely no cause for war againstGermany,” concluded another such person tired of “all this hooey” about freedomand democracy; in Europe those “groups of individuals who have engaged in warmongering,” he argued, simply “got what was coming to them.” Feeling bravebehind the nom de plume “Ann Tagonistic,” a Californian similarly condonedNazi aggression in carefully disguised language, encouraging Americans toremain “passively resistant” like Christ, by which she meant not aiding the Allies.She asserted: “The peoples of the world [here she really means Germans] DONOT WANT WAR. And what are the nations of the world [i.e. the Axispowers] fighting for ?” she asked rhetorically. For “FREEDOM from the yokeof the 20%—the international financiers—who make wars to break the peoples ofthe earth . . . to enslave the Christian peoples—and all for gold!” Jews, in otherwords, were the aggressors; Hitler was merely waging self-defense. Yet thiswriter managed to make her argument without mentioning either and by hangingher claims on the concepts of freedom and passive resistance.29 This tactic, morecommon than many would like to admit, no Gallup survey or isolationist epithetcould hope to capture.

Looking beyond the labels and the opinion polls makes it clear that what hasoften been characterized as Americans’ desire to keep the United States isolatedfrom international politics was more accurately a profound ambivalence abouttheir quite well-developed sense of engagement with foreign affairs. Althoughthe public face of popular sentiment slowly began to tilt in favor of aiding theAllies, privately Americans harbored more sympathy for Germany, construed asthe victim of a vengeful peace at Versailles, than often admitted, even if memoriesof the tense atmosphere during World War I make people circumspect aboutexpressing such opinions too loudly. Moreover, during these years widespreadantisemitism plagued cities such as New York and Boston, and it is likewise hardto overestimate the acute nature of anti-British sentiment. How did antifascistsknow “that we ought to be on the side of the democracies?” the old anti-imperialist

29. “Three More Points,” Current History, November 1939, 6–7; Mr and Mrs John Rubnick,August 28, 1941, and illegible to Peter Cusick, June 16, 1941, box 21 f1; Ann Tagonistic, “Food forThought,” The American Way, September 1941, box 27 f8, all in FFF; Berinsky, In Time of War,62–71.

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Oswald Garrison Villard baited his colleagues at The Nation.30 Few Americanswould have desired to see a fascist revolution in the United States of course, butmany considered the Nazi’s New Order perfectly appropriate for unruly contin-ental Europe just as many Americans thought Mussolini served Italy well and that“story-book dictators” suited Latin America. Allied supporters dwelled so muchon the specter of a spiritually bankrupt Nazi empire run on “slave labor,” becausethey were at pains to counter two ideas that Americans seriously entertained—thatthey would be able to “do business” with Hitler in a postwar world and that fascismdid not pose the same thtreat to Christianity as communism.31 On these matters,Americans were not simply pitted against each other, neatly arrayed into opposingcamps. Contemplating their sons and husbands across the dinner table, thinkingabout their shaky small businesses and their own freedoms at home, they foundthemselves internally torn.

Americans found no right or easy answers to the situation they faced afterSeptember 1939. Both those who favored aiding the Allies and those who didnot made arguments that would seem compelling in retrospect. Antifascists’ pre-dictions that an Allied victory would depend on U.S. manpower proved true, as didtheir warnings about the depth of atrocities the Third Reich’s ambitions wouldwreak upon the world. But Americans were entertaining radical measures, rangingfrom the possibility of sanctioning preemptive military engagement to amendingthe Constitution to require a national referendum for a declaration of war.Americans approved and then extended their first peacetime draft and eventuallyinched away from the rules governing neutrality under international law. Many,understandably, found the moment unsettling. The pacifism of clergymen,mothers, and some veterans could be quite poignant. Still rattled by what hehad witnessed during the First World War, one man implored interventioniststo go out into the battlefields “and do as I have done, see men with gas gangrenecough out their miserable lives . . . see the bodies piled up swarming with flies, andstinking under the hot summer sun.” Others could not shake the sense thatAmericans who thought they could be “the moral umpire of the universe” or“go Sir Galahading around the world” were chasing rainbows right into the line

30. Oswald Garrison Villard, “Issues and Men,” Nation, May 1, 1937, 508. Anglophobia iswell-covered in Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon, but this comprehensive work (like Cole’s nearly700-page opus, Roosevelt and the Isolationists) ignores antisemitism, presumably because itsappeal was more obvious at the margins than among leading politicians. Yet prejudiceagainst Jews had a major impact on American policy and political culture: David Wyman,Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (Amherst, MA, 1968); LeonardDinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York, 1994), chaps 6–7.

31. William Castle, “War and Democracies,” Vital Speeches, August 1, 1939, 610–14; DouglasMiller, “You Can’t Do Business with Hitler,” William Donovan, “What Hitlerism Means to theAmerican Businessman,” and Raymond Feely, “Nazism versus Religion,” October 1940, pamph-lets in box 28 f10, FFF; Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 314–16, 333; David Schmitz, Thank GodThey’re On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965 (Chapel Hill, NC,1999); Benjamin Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning theTotalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); Michaela H. Moore, Know YourEnemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945 (Cambridge, 2009).

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of fire. One Kansan characteristically argued that Americans should not be“policing the other billion and one half people” on the earth who had not evenhad “kindergarten lessons” in free government. Such arguments managed to bearrogant and humble, short sighted and prophetic, all at once. Democracy wouldnot “come by a magician’s wand” once the world’s dictators had been overthrown,he insisted: “I vote NO on hunting trouble.”32

At other times, however, those who participated in the debates offered lessestimable rationales. Americans who favored a negotiated truce betweenGermany and Great Britain rarely dwelled on the crimes of Axis powers—which Senator Nye made a point of calling “alleged aggressors”—and they bor-dered on apologism for the Nazi New Order on continental Europe.33 Theiropponents, on the other hand, sometimes betrayed a melodramatic overesti-mation of the virtue, even a glorification of war. Hawks all too easily dismissedpacifists as those who frivolously indulged in “pious shudders about the horrorsof war.” War was “our human privilege” and the “only genuine solution,” FFFwriters claimed. Antifascists also paved the way for regrettable internment poli-cies, constantly airing their fifth-column paranoias about Vichy plotters,“Japanese-American Quislings,” and other “Subversivists.” Fight for FreedomCommittee members proved as intolerant of the war’s gray areas as their detrac-tors, dismissing those who disagreed with them as cowardly Quakers, “primitive”mothers, red-baiters, and “pacifist-appeasers.” In their most controversial stand,the group viciously attacked Hoover’s initiative to feed hungry families in occu-pied territories. No one behind Axis lines was innocent, they insisted. Thewomen, children, cripples, and elderly of Belgium and France had become“part of the Nazi system.”34

Americans may have been at odds over their ideas about foreign affairs, but oncethey are no longer sorted into isolationist and internationalist camps, importantcommonalities in tactics and tone become clearer. Certain ways of arguing andthinking were shared across the political spectrum. Many became shrill and hyper-bolic, stoking popular anxieties and accusing their opponents of being fronts ordupes. America First spokesmen such as Charles Lindbergh became famouslyconspiratorial in their reasoning, but their rivals indulged in it, too, by obsessing

32. Charles Sprague in “What’s YOUR Opinion?” Current History, October 1939, 42–47;Norman Thomas, “We Needn’t Go to War,” Harper’s, November 1938, 657–64; Richard Payne,September 11, 1941 and J. C. Ruppenthal, September 29, 1941, both in box 21 f1, FFF.

33. Gerald Nye, “Alien Imperialism—And America,” Vital Speeches of the Day, July 1, 1939,574–75; America First Committee press release, August 28, 1941, box 31 f3, FFF. On calls fornegotiated peace, Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon, 154–57, 175–76, 186–88, 255–58.

34. Drafts, “Answering America First” and “FOR AS WELL AS AGAINST,” box 21 f7;report on Hoover’s aid proposal, press release, October 27, 1940, Robert Spivack to JamesWarburg, August 5, 1941, Robert Spivack, “Our Visitors from Vichy,” and Hollywood report,July 13, 1941, box 27 fs15-16; reports on Pro-Fascism and Nazi sympathizers, box 27 f8 and box 28

f10; memo, R. G. Spivack to Ulric Bell and press releases, box 25 f6; America First reports andpetition response, summer 1941, box 21 fs 1 and 7, all in FFF; Chadwin, Hawks of World War II, 39,134–43, 227–28.

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over the specter of Nazi “puppets” and “hirelings” doing their sinister work behindthe scenes in Washington and New York. (FFF’s staff lamented that the FBI didnot have a Gestapo-like espionage unit to track them down.) Yet despite the satireand creative name-calling, everyone insisted that “our Western civilization” or“civilization as we know it” was at stake. Likewise, everyone except party membersexcoriated the Communists and claimed to uphold “Christianity” and the“American Way.” 35 In several crucial respects, this presented not a debate ofopposites but a fine-grained battle over who spoke for the nation’s shared history,mission, and values. The daunting question was not will the United States play arole but what role will it play, or more to the point, what kind of neutral—orbelligerent— should the United States be in a world where the old rules of warfare,it was said, no longer applied?

***

If historians do away with isolationism and its tendency to reinforce myths aboutAmericans’ accidental but noble rise to superpower, then how to explain thisbefuddling period of foreign relations? Looking beyond the United States to theexperiences of other nations on the periphery of the original war in Europe sug-gests an answer. Historians do not typically write about the isolationism of theSwiss or the Argentineans, although like Americans they considered noninvolve-ment a way to promote certain ideals and goals without shedding their own citi-zens’ blood or else simply as a means to keep internal ethnic factionalism at bay.Scholars do not consider Italians isolationist for delaying entry into the war untilJune 1940, or call Mexicans or Brazilians isolationists, who also equivocated, liketheir northern neighbors, before joining the Allies. Americans who wanted tointervene would of course argue that they occupied a special position because oftheir nation’s great power status, and since the 1950s it has been widely assumedthat the United States was an “unnatural neutral,” in the words of one pioneeringneutrality historian, which had become “too big to abstain from influencing worldaffairs.”36 Yet possessing the military and economic means to impact foreign affairsbut hesitating to do so had never been cause to label other powerful states isola-tionist, for example Great Britain which had taken a hands-off approach to theJapanese invasion of Manchuria and the Spanish civil war.

The success and duration of a nation’s neutrality would always depend on thecommitment of its leaders, its resources and bargaining chips, as well as the fate ofgeography. But nations struggling with the shifting meanings and ultimately

35. Notes on FBI, box 27 f9, FFF; Conyers Read at FFF luncheon, May 29, 1941, quoted inChadwin, Hawks of World War II, 223; Charles Lindbergh, “Appeal for Isolation,” Vital Speeches,October 1, 1939, 751–52; Jonas, Isolationism in America, 263–65; Leo Ribuffo, The Old ChristianRight: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia, PA, 1983),chap. 5; James Schneider, Should America Go to War? The Debate over Foreign Policy in Chicago,1939-1941 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989).

36. Nils Ørvik, The Decline of Neutrality, 1914-1941 (1953; London, 1971), 9, 15.

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perceived demise of neutrality—including other world powers that intervenedselectively rather than consistently abroad—make far better comparisons for theUnited States during the 1930s and early 1940s than states that have earned thelabel isolationist throughout history, such as Ming dynasty China, Japan before the1860s, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.37 Moving away from excep-tionalist assumptions about the United States and delving into the largely over-looked concept of neutrality offers a new way to understand the interwar years.Since the 1930s, Americans have become more readily embroiled in military con-flicts overseas not because they have given up “isolationism,” but because they havediscredited neutrality.

The modern institution of neutrality grew up out of its trial-and-error practiceover the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then was enshrinedin the rules of war established at the Hague convention in 1907. In exchange forensuring that their territories would not be used for military recruiting, transportof troops, or other belligerent operations, the lands and waters of neutral stateswould be regarded as inviolable. Neutral merchants remained free to trade withwhom they pleased, although belligerents, if they had the capacity, were allowed toblockade contraband, and neutral governments themselves were prohibited fromselling munitions to warring nations. Modern neutrality rested on a set of assump-tions that had fit nineteenth-century European realities: That commerce waslargely a private endeavor while wars were the prerogative of states resorted toin the normal course of protecting or advancing national interests. In the holy warsof the medieval and early modern period, bystanders had been expected to distin-guish between just and unjust perpetrators of violence and offer assistance accord-ingly, but once war became more an instrument of foreign policy than a battleon behalf of God, neutral governments were expected to be capable of dealingimpartially with disputing parties. In the nineteenth century, Americans saw neu-trality as a proper, moral way to safeguard liberty at home, while international lawdesignated it as a perfectly legitimate, even admirable stance to adopt (rather thancause for being branded isolationist). Modern neutrality protected the sovereigntyand economic needs of small or distant states from great power intrigues. It had thevirtue of localizing conflicts that might otherwise spread, of “keeping some people

37. For the increasingly diverse practices and theories of neutrality outside the United Statesduring the era of the world wars, see Ørvik, Decline of Neutrality; Bill Albert, South America and theFirst World War: The Impact of the War on Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile (Cambridge, 1988);Christian Leitz, Nazi Germany and Neutral Europe during the Second World War (Manchester, 2000);Neville Wylie, ed., European Neutrals and Non-Belligerents during the Second World War (New York,2002); Thomas Leonard and John Bratzel, eds., Latin America During World War II (Lanham, MD,2007); Herbert Reginbogin, Faces of Neutrality: A Comparative Analysis of the Neutrality ofSwitzerland and Other Neutral Nations during WWII (Berlin, 2009); Johan den Hertog andSamuel Kruizinga, eds., Caught in the Middle: Neutrals, Neutrality and the First World War(Amsterdam, 2011); Herman Amersfoort and Wim Klinkert, eds., Small Powers in the Age ofTotal War, 1900-1940 (Leiden, 2011).

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out of war when others lose their heads,” as its leading American defender, the Yalelaw professor Edwin Borchard put it.38

But no sooner had this classic form of neutrality been codified than it would facea series of grave challenges. During World War I, the Entente and Central Powersalike brazenly disregarded maritime laws, attacking neutral vessels and confiscatingtheir cargoes. To most Americans, torn in their allegiances, eager to carry onbusiness, and grateful to be far from the carnage “over there,” the virtues of neu-trality remained clear. Indeed, defending their neutral rights against thedepredations of German U-boats, which cost American lives, provided thestated purpose for eventually entering the war. Woodrow Wilson, too, had seenneutrality as a noble posture at the conflict’s start, allowing the United States with“splendid courage of reserve moral force” to rise above power politics as a greatmediator. But the scope and scale of the war so complicated this stance that thepresident and his advisers soon doubted the practice’s long-term relevance.Moreover, Wilson’s failure to effectively protest British violations against U.S.property suggested that the administration was in fact making precedent-settingdistinctions between “good” and “bad” belligerents. More and more, a position ofneutrality did not seem bold enough to convey Wilson’s ambitions to remake theinternational order by spreading progressive American values. “Neutrality is nolonger feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the free-dom of its peoples,” he reasoned in his war address.39

The pursuit of collective security and punishment after the Armistice, embo-died by the punitive peace and the League of Nations charter, further underminedthe concept of neutrality. In an era of common causes and ideological crusades,when it was again incumbent upon states to distinguish between perpetrators andinnocents, standing aside would be more easily recast as selfish, irresponsible, evenimmoral. The notorious Treaty fight in the U.S. Senate, rather than a battle be-tween isolationists and internationalists, is better understood as a local variation onthe debate taking place across the Atlantic world about this proposed departurefrom traditional statecraft.40 Americans had been leading proponents of neutralrights since the passage of the Neutrality Act of 1794, path-blazing legislation thatprovided the groundwork for modern neutrality law by promising to keep

38. Jules Lobel, “The Rise and Decline of the Neutrality Act: Sovereignty and CongressionalWar Powers in United States Foreign Policy,” Harvard International Law Journal 24 (Summer1983): 1–56; William Castle, “American Neutrality,” Vital Speeches, March 1, 1939, 297–300;Edwin Borchard, “The Various Meanings of International Cooperation,” Annals of the AmericanAcademy of Political and Social Science, July 1936, 114–23.

39. John Coogan, The End of Neutrality, the United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights,1899-1915 (Ithaca, NY, 1981); Robert Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: ReconsideringAmerica’s Neutrality, 1914-1917 (Charlottesville, VA, 2007), Wilson quotations, pp. 6 and 14. Ondebates about the nature of American neutrality during World War I, and the question of whetherWilson wanted to uphold traditional neutrality but failed, or deliberately abandoned it in favor of aprogressive international agenda, see the H-Diplo roundtable on Tucker’s Woodrow Wilson and theGreat War, 9.6 (2008), www.h-net.org/�diplo/roundtables (accessed August 1, 2012).

40. Hertog and Kruizinga, eds., Caught in the Middle.

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American territories free from involvement in foreign hostilities in exchange forunfettered overseas trade and movement. Defending neutral rights embroiledAmericans in conflicts with France and Great Britain during the NapoleonicWars (1803–1815), and Unionists momentarily opposed the policy when theBritish invoked their own neutral rights during the American Civil War. Butotherwise this arrangement had greatly benefited Americans. It offered them away to be out in the world without getting run over by Europe’s imperialwars.41 Focusing their ire on the Covenant’s Article X, which assured mutualsecurity for all members, League opponents were not looking to shrink frominternational life. But nor did they want to relinquish the advantages Americanshad enjoyed under the old system or incur a host of new obligations in a disputa-tious world.42

During the years after the Armistice, American foreign policy debates centeredon this disagreement between defenders of traditional neutrality, such as WilliamBorah and Edwin Borchard, and those who were beginning to suspect that theideological burdens and warfare capabilities of the twentieth century would provetoo much for its continued practice. Woodrow Wilson certainly opened the doorfor a new era of moral crusading abroad, but the course was far from pre-determined. Through the mid-twenties, in fact, it looked as though neutralitywould be sufficiently patched up, just as it had been after the excesses of theNapoleonic Wars. Germany declared neutrality toward the Russo-Polish Warin 1920; Soviet Russia completed a series of bilateral treaties ensuring neutralityin the event of certain border conflicts; and at the Washington Naval Conference(1921–1922), the Nine-Power Treaty reiterated China’s neutrality. Despite skep-tics’ dire predictions, neutrality even survived under the collective security auspicesof the League of Nations itself. The London Protocol of 1920 allowed Switzerlandto join as a “differentiated” neutral, exempting it from potential military obliga-tions, and others joined under similar arrangements. Americans were far fromalone in their doubts about Article X at a moment when, by one count, twenty-three armed conflicts were raging in Europe alone. Furthermore, Americans hadno trouble practicing neutrality themselves at this time. Tellingly, the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), Mussolini’s temporary occupation of Corfu (1923),and the Spanish-French expeditions to reconquer Northern Morocco known asthe Rif War (1920–1926) did not spark any great debate or crisis of conscienceabout American involvement as would Mussolini’s Ethiopian campaign and theSpanish civil war in the mid-1930s.43

41. Egon Guttman, “The Concept of Neutrality Since the Adoption and Ratification of theHague Convention of 1907,” American University International Law Review 14.1 (1998): 55–60; NilsØrvik, Decline of Neutrality, 18–23; McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, 42.

42. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York [1959], 1988),111–26; Lloyd Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Economic Tradition: The Treaty Fight inPerspective (New York, 1987), xii, 161–62.

43. Ørvik, Decline of Neutrality, 121–34; Reginbogin, Faces of Neutrality, 25; Louis Clerc, “TheHottest Places in Hell? Finnish and Nordic Neutrality from the Perspective of French Foreign

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Yet even as the practice of neutrality continued, the perception of its vulner-ability, even obsolescence, grew stronger as Americans, and others, developed newunderstandings of what war entailed. Ironically, the opponents of Article X wereamong the first to chip away at Americans’ confidence in neutrality by portraying itduring the Treaty fight as fragile and under siege. Then in the mid and latetwenties, pacifist activists, at a peak of their influence, argued that the GreatWar had ushered in an age when conflicts had reached totalizing, nightmarishproportions. The flouting of maritime law, the extension of submarine and airpower, the proliferation of irregular warfare all threatened to suck internationaltrade routes and neutral territories into the landscape of modern combat. Ratherthan an inevitable feature of international relations, war now seemed, even tosomeone like Reinhold Niebuhr who would later help to revive just war theory,“an unmitigated and unjustified evil.” Revisionist histories, beginning with HarryElmer Barnes’ The Genesis of the World War (1926), and novels such as ErnestHemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and the English translation of ErichMaria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), further underscoredthis emergent common wisdom. “Today war is a battle of whole peoples,”Herbert Hoover summed up a widespread sentiment by the 1930s: “They mustbe mobilized to the last atom of their economic and emotional strength.” Previousdistinctions between combatants and civilians, between private commerce andstate-supported militaries, between forbidden contraband and allowable trade,or between war fronts and neutrality zones no longer made sense in a worldwhere wars were about attrition and “almost anything except ostrich feathers,” itwas often said, might determine the outcome. If war now presented a “deathstruggle between whole economic systems,” then “what is an implement ofwar?” Bernard Baruch asked rhetorically. With all commerce now suspect, withall people instrumental for the war machine and all lands a part of battlegroundstrategy, the problem of “waging neutrality,” one contemporary scholar diag-nosed, had become about as difficult as waging war.44

By revising their narratives about the Great War, and indeed about the natureof war in general, Americans inadvertently began to undermine their own historic

Policy, 1900-1940” and Karen Gram-Skjoldager, “The Other End of Neutrality: The First WorldWar, the League of Nations, and Danish Neutrality,” in Caught in the Middle, eds. Hertog andKruizinga, 139–72; Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson, 161. The United Nations Charter, by contrast,would be far more hostile to neutral powers: Jurg Martin Gabriel, The American Conception ofNeutrality after 1941 (New York, 1988), 211.

44. Walter Millis, “The Last War and the Next,” Nation, January 29, 1936, 125–27;W. Friedmann, “The Twilight of Neutrality,” Fortnightly Review, January 1940, 24–33;Niebuhr, “The Use of Force” (1929) quoted in Charles Chatfield, For Peace and Justice: Pacifismin America, 1914-1941 (Knoxville, TN, 1971), 173; Herbert Hoover, “New Proposal for AmericanAction,” Vital Speeches, July 15, 1939, 582–84; Bennett C. Clark, “Detour Around War,” Harper’s,December 1935, 1–9; Bernard Baruch, “Neutrality—An Uncharted Sea,” Vital Speeches, June 15,1937, 535–38; Amry Vandenbosch, Neutrality of the Netherlands during the World War (GrandRapids, MI, 1927), i. On Niebuhr’s evolving views, see Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit,Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York, 2012), 303–9.

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commitment to neutral rights. If war was to be regarded not as “one of the normalinstrumentalities of human life,” but as an aberrant horror to be avoided at allcosts, then belligerency no longer had a legitimate place in international relations,and neutrals ought no longer treat warlike nations “with the punctilios of theduelist’s code,” as Henry L. Stimson put it. The Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) isoften remembered as merely a token gesture to pacifist ideals, but it had important,unforeseen implications for thinking about neutrality. In its wake, internationallawyers vigorously debated whether, by renouncing the use of war as an instrumentof foreign policy, the Paris Pact had technically outlawed the kinds of wars in whichremaining neutral made sense. “During the last ten years, the status of war hasprofoundly changed,” the international relations expert Raymond Leslie Buellcontended in 1929, and with it the status of neutrality, too, had been “fundamen-tally altered.” In subsequent years, as legal scholars began to pry open the conceptof neutrality, some began to argue moreover that neutrality did not avert war butrather led right into it. Drawing on his experience in the Attorney General’s officeduring World War I, Charles Warren argued in a widely read Foreign Affairsarticle in 1934 that Americans needed to renounce their wartime trade andtravel rights unless they wanted to “run the risk of another Lusitania complication.”There was no use, he convinced many, of “deluding ourselves with internationallaw as it exists in books.”45 Neutrality talk—not isolationist talk—resounded onCapitol Hill and at academic conferences. Exercising neutral rights had alwaysbeen a risky proposition but by the mid-thirties, doing so was widely seen as“unenforceable,” “dangerous,” “disagreeable,” or even, as the economist ErnestMinor Patterson determined, “impossible for us in a world so complex and sointerdependent as that of the twentieth century.” Popular magazines like Harper’sclamored for “new conceptions of neutrality” to meet changing geopolitical rea-lities. Yet in the absence of international agreement on updated protocols—some-thing the League of Nations might profitably have tackled, one critic suggested—nations were left to modernize the rules themselves.46

45. Henry Stimson, “The Pact of Paris,” Foreign Affairs, October 1932, i–ix; “Neutrality andNeutral Rights Following the Pact of Paris for the Renunciation of War,” American Society ofInternational Law Proceedings, 1930, 79–114; Raymond Leslie Buell, “Sea Law under the KelloggPact,” New Republic, May 15, 1929, 349–51; Charles Warren, “Troubles of a Neutral,” ForeignAffairs, April 1934, 377–94; Robert Divine, The Illusion of Neutrality: Franklin D. Roosevelt and theStruggle over the Arms Embargo (1962; Chicago, 1968), 17–22, 57–78, 68–72. On the growinginfluence of international law experts in foreign policymaking in the early twentieth century, seeBenjamin Coates, “Transatlantic Advocates: American International Law and U.S. ForeignRelations, 1898-1919” (Dissertation, Columbia, 2010).

46. Fred Nielsen, “The Future of Belligerent Rights on the Sea,” American Society ofInternational Law Proceedings, 1935, 11–27; Geoffrey Stone, “Neutrality—A Dangerous Myth,”Nation, September 18, 1937, 283–85; Warren, “Troubles of a Neutral”; Ernest Minor Patterson,“Economics of Neutrality,” July 1936, 155–62, and William Castle, “Dangers of Local NeutralityLegislation,” July 1937, 107–12, both in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science;Clark, “Detour Around War.” Again, these debates echoed abroad: Ørvik, Decline of Neutrality,139–53, 173–90.

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Fight as they would over foreign policy, Americans largely agreed by the mid-thirties that they faced a new frontier in international relations that necessitated a“radical departure” from the “passive neutrality of other days.” Modern warfaretechnology had proven the exercise of neutral rights to be impractical, and signingKellogg-Briand had made it ideologically untenable, more and more said, drown-ing out the arguments of those who had defended traditional internationallaw more effectively in the twenties. The Neutrality Act of 1935 and its variousrevisions reflected this emerging consensus. Far from preserving or reaffirmingneutrality, these misnamed acts relinquished neutral rights. Forbidding Americansto trade in munitions with belligerents or sail on their ships and conductother business that was perfectly legal under international law but broughtAmericans into the fray of battle, the neutrality acts aimed to do away with thescenarios that had led the nation to the brink of conflict in 1812, 1898, and 1917.In the “showdown on neutrality” that took place between 1935 and 1939, thematter at hand was not isolation versus intervention. It was a dispute over whospecifically Americans should embargo—only those judged “aggressors” or allbelligerents? Antifascists advocated selective embargoes to send a strong messageto the world’s dictators (not to mention to keep trade lines open for the Ethiopians,Spanish Republicans, and then other democracies). Those who preferred whole-sale embargoes, by contrast, wanted to shut off supplies to all warring nations to“make it plain that Uncle Sam does not intend again to play Uncle Santa Clausto the war lords of the world,” as Senator Bennett Champ Clark (D-Missouri) putit. The latter position prevailed in Congress, but neither policy was technicallyneutrality. Indeed, both stood as indictments against using war as an instrument offoreign policy and punitive measures against those who continued to do so. Toembargo someone who had not violated your rights was to teach a moral lesson. Itwas to decide that right and wrong now had a place in statecraft. Rather thanheralding the culmination of isolationism, in other words, the neutrality actscould be seen as inaugurating a new era when Americans would make liberal useof sanctions and other short-of-war forms of coercion to impact the policies andconflicts of others (Figure 3).47

By the time war erupted in September 1939— with Americans now racked bydoubts about the nobility or workability of neutrality and as all those spirited crank

47. Ernest Angell, “Can We Stay Out of War?” Harper’s, September 1935, 465–76;“Showdown on Neutrality,” Nation, May 13, 1939, 548–49; Bennett Champ Clark,“Neutrality—What Kind?” Vital Speeches, February 1, 1937, 252–53; Harold Hinton, “TheFurther Course of Neutrality,” North American Review (Winter 1937/1938): 216–30; Divine,Illusion of Neutrality, 78–80. “Pacific blockades” remained rare before World War I, and onlysince the 1920s have “sanctions” become a preferred tool to discourage aggression and promotepeace: Lance Davis and Stanley Engerman, Naval Blockades in Peace and War: An Economic HistorySince 1750 (New York, 2006), 387–90, 403. Despite their historically mixed results, Americanshave been leading proponents of such economic warfare tactics, a preference that might be tracedto the “moral embargoes” of the 1930s, which ranged from the neutrality acts to more specificexport controls aimed at Italy, Japan, and Russia (during the Winter War).

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letters poured into Washington—Franklin Roosevelt could not ask, as Wilson hadat the start of the First World War, for Americans to embrace the “true spirit ofneutrality” by being “impartial in thought, as well as action.” “Even a neutral,” heasserted instead, “cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.” Neutralityhad in fact become so confused and uncertain, not only as a personal sentiment but

Figure 3: Herbert Block’s March 1939 cartoon offers a reminder that broad support for neu-trality legislation came from a pipe dream desire to find a way to promote democracy andAmerican interests abroad without the costs of military action. Rather than “isolationist” policies,the neutrality acts might be seen as early experiments with the kind of short-of-war sanctions thathave since become a mainstay of American foreign policy. A 1939 Herblock Cartoon,� The HerbBlock Foundation.

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also as a matter of policy, that FDR was obliged to implement two separate neu-trality regimes for the nation to follow after the invasion of Poland. First, heannounced adherence to traditional international protocols, among them banson conscripting for belligerent armies on American soil and limitations onaccess to American harbors for war ships. Plane manufacturers continued toship their cargoes to France and England, however, until five hours later whenFDR activated the second form of neutrality conjured up by Congress, embargo-ing the sale of war materials to all belligerents. But neither approach inspired muchconfidence that it would ensure safety or respect for the United States in the longterm. “Neutrality is no longer considered by the general public as a natural guar-antee of independence and security,” one journalist reasoned, “but as an abnormalregime which is no longer justified by modern circumstances.” The Nation’s FredaKirchwey concluded that what Americans really wanted, or at least what most ofthem suspected was at this point the best-case scenario, was to find a way to be halfin and half out of the war.48

The meaning of neutrality had been upended in the debates of the interwaryears, and the extent of its new, murky possibilities became only more apparentduring 1939 and 1940 as European states put their own versions into practice. Inaddition to judging the consequences of their own embargo-based neutrality,Americans could also learn from Spain’s pro-Axis neutrality and Vichy’s suspiciousquasi-neutrality as well as from Ireland’s “against everybody” neutrality andPortugal’s beneficial-to-everyone “strict” neutrality. There was the FinnishForeign Minister’s announcement of his nation’s “active neutrality,” the spirituallyguided “pope’s neutrality,” and the Danish Foreign Secretary’s promise that,even if occupied, Denmark would adhere to “neo-neutrality,” or what mightmore accurately be called wishful-thinking neutrality. In a world of such variedneutrals, then, what kind would the United States be? Many researched the policiesof Scandinavian and South American nations during World War I looking formodels, and the conservative Saturday Evening Post, for its part, was “bubblingwith enthusiasm about the Swiss.” In essence, what many so-called isolationistsadvocated was what is now known to be Swiss-style neutrality—the maintenanceof democratic government without relinquishing profitable dealings with dicta-torships and without opening the nation up to an inundation of refugees. Likemany European neutralities, this stance left open the option of making peace with aNazi New Order. Indeed, compelling comparisons can be made between theUnited States and Switzerland during the early years of the war, when transatlanticrefugee traffic was kept below immigration quota limits and American

48. Woodrow Wilson, Message to Congress, 63rd Cong., 2nd sess., Senate Doc. No. 566

(Washington, DC, 1914), 3–4; FDR, “This Nation Will Remain Neutral,” Vital Speeches,September 15, 1939, 712–13; “Preface to War,” September 11, 1939, 13–15, and “Half Out,”September 18, 1939, 10, both in Time; Emile Cammaerts, “Neutrality and its Critics,”Contemporary Review, March 1940, 268–75; Kirchwey, “What Americans Want,” September 23,1939, 307–8, and “Can We Stay Neutral?” April 20, 1940, 503–4, both in Nation.

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businessmen continued to collaborate and trade with their German counterparts(German assets in the United States were not frozen until June 1941, unlike theassets of occupied territories, which were blocked in mid-1940). Since WorldWar II, Swiss politicians and bankers have come under intense criticism fortheir wartime choices, but Americans, styled as isolationist rather than neutralbefore 1942, have escaped similar scrutiny.49

American policy makers also experimented with a form of collective, hemi-spheric neutrality—embodied in the Declaration of Panama (1939) and the Actof Havana (1940)—but the version of neutrality that eventually prevailed in theUnited States was Mussolini’s. Between September 1939 and June 1940, Italymaintained a position of “non-belligerence,” a status that had no basis in inter-national law but nevertheless would be emulated by other states wanting to favorone side while avoiding actual combat. The President, of course, did not borrowIl Duce’s term (though Churchill pleaded for him to do so explicitly after thestart of the blitzkrieg). Instead he called it “national emergency” or “methodsshort of war.” Declaring an emergency in September 1939 granted Rooseveltpowers he would normally have only in wartime, for example, the ability to fixprices and control international exchanges. On this authority, FDR enlarged theFBI, forbade travel to Europe without special approval, and sent troops to thePanama Canal Zone to inspect passing crafts.50 For more than two years thatfollowed, Americans lived in this shadowy space of nonbelligerency, which, likeGiorgio Agamben’s “state of exception,” proved to be a “no-man’s-land betweenpublic law and political fact.” The creation and then expansion of the “neutralitybelt” around North and South America, as well as the extension of the “WesternHemisphere” so that it reached Iceland, dictated the movement of troopsand warships, even though international law guaranteed neither set of borders.Americans violated the spirit of their own neutrality acts as well. The 1939

“cash-and-carry” revisions were obviously designed to benefit the Allies, whilenew rules forbidding American vessels from combat zones were simply maneu-vered around by recommissioning U.S. ships under Panamanian flags.Meanwhile, FDR declined to declare a state of war in East Asia, where oneclearly existed, so that cash and carry did not benefit Japan, a maritime power,

49. “Pro-Fascist Neutrality,” January 9, 1937, 33, and G. A. Borgese, “The Pope’sNeutrality,” May 30, 1942, 621–63, both in Nation; “Active Neutrality!” October 23, 1939,22–24, and “Against Everybody?” June 10, 1940, 36, both in Time; Carol Thompson, “Vichy’sShadow Neutrality,” Current History, November 1942, 210–14; Warren, “Troubles of a Neutral”;Demaree Bess, “How to Be Neutral,” Saturday Evening Post, October 14, 1939, 31, 140; Wylie,European Neutrals and Non-Belligerents; Reginbogin, Faces of Neutrality.

50. Robert Wilson, “‘Non-Belligerency’ in Relation to the Terminology of Neutrality,”January 1941, 121–23, and Edwin Borchard, “War, Neutrality and Non-Belligerency,” October1941, 618–25, both in American Journal of International Law; “Half Out.” On Churchill’s plea for“nonbelligerency,” see Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York,1950), 141. On hemispheric neutrality, Lester Woolsey, “Problems of American Neutrality,”American Society of International Law Proceedings 21 (1940): 21–31; Cole, Roosevelt and theIsolationists, 361–62 and Gabriel, American Conception of Neutrality, 234 fn85 and 235 fn90.

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over China. With American sentiments clearly backing Chinese forces—withloans flowing to Chiang Kai-shek and a tightening embargo pushing Japanto the edge—nonbelligerency rather than isolationism or even old-fashionedneutrality best characterized Americans’ policy in the Pacific as well.51

Even more significant, perhaps, were the multifaceted ways in which Americanpolicies would disregard the Hague’s rules on neutrality. The government’s role intransforming the nation into the “arsenal of democracy,” beginning with the re-lease of surplus military supplies in the summer of 1940 and the destroyer-for-bases deal that September, violated bans on the public sale of war supplies tobelligerents by neutral states (but would be justified under the Kellogg-BriandPact, which allowed states to deny equal treatment to those who violated theirtreaty obligations). Opening the Lend Lease hearings at the start of 1941, CordellHull spoke a language Americans now well understood: “Mankind is today face toface, not with regional wars or isolated conflicts,” he warned, but “forces which arenot restrained by considerations of law or principles of morality.” The Lend LeaseAct dwarfed all aid previously given by a neutral power to a belligerent, but itspassage proved not nearly as controversial as might be expected. A line had alreadybeen crossed. Deprived of arguments based on law or precedent, the policy’soutnumbered opponents could only quibble about the dangers of enlarging presi-dential power. If any doubts remained after the passage of Lend Lease in March,the seizure of Axis ships in American waters, the freezing of Axis funds, and thebehind-the-scenes planning between American and British military officials allmade clear that the United States had relinquished traditional neutrality in favorof a “common-law alliance” with Great Britain and the “creeping involvement”that some had so fearfully predicted. By May 1941, when FDR extended the stateof crisis to an “unlimited national emergency,” few, at least privately, would havedisputed Congressman Roy Woodruff’s (R-Michigan) description of it as a “dec-laration of undeclared war.” Within months, Pan American Airways began usingsecret Presidential funds to forge a supply line from Brazil to Africa to fortifyBritish troops against Rommel’s forces, and the U.S. Navy started skirmishingwith U-boats during its “neutrality patrols.”52

51. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, 2005), 1; RaymondClapper, “America and Neutrality,” Current History, October 1939, 39–42; Lawrence Preuss,“The Concepts of Neutrality and Nonbelligerency,” Annals of the American Academy of Politicaland Social Science 218 (November 1941): 97–109. On the road to war in the East, see Herbert Feis,The Road to Pearl Harbor: The Coming of the War between the United States and Japan (Princeton,NJ, 1950); and Akira Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (New York,1987).

52. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 270–73; Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon, 119–22, 166–68,178–79, Woodruff quotation p. 181; “We Choose Human Freedom,” May 27, 1941, Papers andAddresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 10, 181–95; William Langer and S. Everett Gleason, TheUndeclared War, 1940-1941 (New York, 1953), 262–85, Hull quotation, p. 263; Deborah Ray,“Pan American Airways and the Trans-African Air Base Program of World War II,” NYU dis-sertation, 1973. In light of the United States’s obvious nonbelligerency, the once popularNeutrality Act had become an embarrassment to some Americans by September 1941. TheNew York Post urged Congress to get rid of “this hoary and decrepit antique”; it was just a reminder

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As Americans stepped into this breach, they tried to understand their placein the war by drawing on personal, everyday ethics rather than the dispassion-ate logic of law and traditional statecraft, which had come to seem so inadequate.In all kinds of ways, Americans began to evoke a “neutrality of theGood Neighbor,” as one legal scholar put it, or a way to be the world’s “GoodSamaritan,” as Henry Luce called it. Some, like Hoover, emphasized the virtue ofputting “our own house in order,” of minding “our own business,” as Borchardpointed out that respectful neighbors often did. The war constituted a privatematter “within our own family of nations,” Charles Lindbergh ventured; itwould be different if it was a “question of banding together to defend the whiterace against foreign invasion,” say against “some Asiatic intruder.” But Alliedsupporters most effectively marshaled good neighbor talk. FDR, who celebratedthe concept in his first inaugural address, continued to persuade his listeners in itshomespun, common sense terms. Lend Lease, he said, meant simply loaning a firehose to a neighbor whose house was in flames. Standing up against the Axis, othersreasoned, was like facing off against a bully on the playground. “There is no virtuein pacifism or in neutrality which denies aid to a neighbor in dire distress,” theleading interventionist Herbert Agar made an increasingly common argument;there was merely “inability to distinguish between right and wrong.” Unrestabroad deserved Americans’ attention he insisted, just as “the welfare of thepoor traveler who fell among thieves should have been the business of everypasser-by.” Supporters of the President’s course, moreover, rationalized it as in-evitable for a powerhouse such as the United States. Maybe a small state, geo-graphically distant from the action, could sit out the century’s great clashes, Timewagered, but “every neutral nation that had risen above the level of primitivehandicrafts” could not afford impartiality or disinterestedness. A “simple but un-alterable fact in modern foreign relations,” Roosevelt insisted, even as he re-affirmed the nation’s “neutrality,” was that “every word that comes through theair, every ship that sails the sea, every battle that is fought does affect the Americanfuture.” “Who is our neighbor?” the president of the American Society ofInternational Law had asked as the neutrality debates heated up: “Everybody.”53

***

Reframing the interwar years around the crisis of neutrality will not make it anyeasier to label Americans’ political views. Historians will still have to carefully

of “the whole outworn farce of American neutrality,” agreed the New York Times. Though repealdrew some opposition in Congress, the act’s final revision in November was a “distinct anticlimax,”as Langer an Gleason put it: Undeclared War, 750–52, including New York newspaper quotations.

53. James Scott in American Society of International Law Proceedings, 1935; Luce, “AmericanCentury”; Hoover, “We Must Keep Out,” Saturday Evening Post, October 28, 1939, 8–9, 74–78;Borchard, “Various Meanings of International Cooperation”; Lindbergh, “Appeal for Isolation”;“Roosevelt’s Fight for Peace” Nation, September 2, 1939, 233–34; FDR, 702nd Press Conference,December 17, 1940, Public Papers and Addresses, 1940 vol., 604–15; Herbert Agar, “Can We JustifyNeutrality?” Commonweal, November 22, 1940, 118–20; “Neutrals,” Time, August 14, 1939, 24;FDR, “This Nation Will Remain Neutral.”

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distinguish between antifascist idealists, opportunistic unilateralists, traditionallaw advocates, pacifists, pragmatic businessmen, and those who did not find theNazis all that objectionable so long as they stayed on the other side of theAtlantic. But unlike isolationism, the concept of neutrality pinpoints thecommon ground and specific problems shared by interwar Americans as theydebated their role in world affairs, and it highlights what proved distinctiveabout this turning point moment. Behind the fact that a president sympatheticto the plight of Great Britain and the bombing of Pearl Harbor explain theUnited States’s entry into World War II—beyond Americans’ predilection forviewing themselves before 1941 as “Babes in a pre-war World,” as Time put it—there is a longer, more complex history to how Americans found themselvesdestined for battlefields across the globe.54 What happened after the late twen-ties was not a turning inward, or a drift away from internationalism, but achange in the way Americans understood the causes and conduct of moderncombat. Seeing the United States as a neutral nation, rather than an isolatedone, helps to reveal how, caught up in the difficult ethical dilemmas of the dayand faced with a collapsing faith in international law, Americans, like others,succumbed to new conceptions of war and neutrality with far-reaching andlargely unintended consequences. The stakes of military engagement hadnever been higher, and war by its very nature in modern times, it was nowbelieved, could not be civilized or justified as a normal part of internationalrelations. Therefore, now more than ever, aggressive forces had to be kept incheck. Yet even as Americans became more critical and fearful of war, risinghopes for collective security and arbitration also suggested that the world hadbecome a place where it was only natural, only human to take sides. War hadbecome less tolerable to Americans. But without the old fail-safe refuge ofneutrality, it would also become more likely.

This irony, however, has been eclipsed by the grand narratives about thetrials and triumphs of the Second World War. After 1945, all Americans’ hard-fought battles over neutral rights since the Napoleonic Wars, all the agonizingover their fate during the 1920s and 1930s, were forgotten as new storiesemerged about a good-neighborly nation that had finally overcome its isolation-ism. Before World War II, neutrality had been imagined as “unquestionablyone of the most complex and crucial issues of our time,” as the Nation called it.Little more than a decade later it seemed quaint and irrelevant. Looking backover the old, “endless disputes” about neutral rights from the vantage point ofAmericans’ global ambitions and reach in the midst of the Korean War, GeorgeKennan marveled: “It seems hard to understand how we could have attached somuch importance to them.” Unlike the rules governing the status of refugeesand prisoners of war, international law on neutrality would never be updatedafter 1907. It was not fit for the holy wars of the twentieth century. Content

54. “How to Be Neutral,” Time, July 17, 1939, 17–19.

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with its demise, Americans now thought that “the choice did not necessarilyhave to be made between total peace and total war,” one legal scholar surmisedin 1943. But choosing between war and peace had never really been the dilemmaanyway. For Americans—their nation born amid the Old World’s balance-of-power struggles and formed in an age defined by the bloody work of consolidat-ing modern nation-states and far-flung empires—there had been only times ofwar and times of neutrality. But now, with neutrality “out the window,” as manycheered with noble intentions but also naıve relief, Americans helped to inaug-urate a new era of open-ended “war-but-not-war,” as Mary Dudziak calls it. Ascombat’s kaleidoscopic potential burst forth in all of its varieties—undeclared,covert, proxy, dirty, metaphoric—Americans would discover that without timesof neutrality, war was only a matter of time.55

55. “Can We Be Neutral?”; George Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (Chicago, 1951),64; Robert Wilson, “Some Current Questions Relating to Neutrality,” American Journal ofInternational Law, October 1943, 651–56; Kenneth Crawford, “Goodby Neutrality,” Nation,April 15, 1939, 432–34; Reginbogin, Faces of Neutrality, 2; Gabriel, American Conception ofNeutrality after 1941; Mary Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York,2012), 6. The last attempt to update neutrality in the Declaration of London (1909) failed to beratified by the major powers, making it, one observer lamented, “the tombstone of an epoch”:Friedmann, “Twilight of Neutrality.”

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