American Isolationism Between the World Wars

The Search for a Nation's Identity

Kenneth D. Rose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367742898
• eBook ISBN: 9781000378191
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

American Isolationism Between the World Wars: The Search for a Nation's Identity examines the theory of isolationism in America between the world wars, arguing that it is an ideal that has dominated the Republic since its founding.

During the interwar period, isolationists could be found among Republicans and Democrats, Catholics and Protestants, pacifists and militarists, rich and poor. While the dominant historical assessment of isolationism — that it was "provincial" and "short-sighted" — will be examined, this book argues that American isolationism between 1919 and the mid-1930s was a rational foreign policy simply because the European reversion back to politics as usual insured that the continent would remain unstable. Drawing on a wide range of newspaper and journal articles, biographies, congressional hearings, personal papers, and numerous secondary sources, Kenneth D. Rose suggests the time has come for a paradigm shift in how American isolationism is viewed. The text also offers a reflection on isolationism since the end of World War II, particularly the nature of isolationism during the Trump era.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of U.S. Foreign Relations and twentieth-century American history.

1

America and the Peace Conference

While Europeans had been killing each other for thousands of years, there were several things that made the Great War different from previous conflicts: This was history’s first large-scale mechanized war, and instead of the blessings that Progress was supposed to bring to humanity, industry turned its ingenuity toward producing weapons of greater and greater destructive power. Also different from wars of the past was that the United States abandoned its traditional isolation from the Old World and sent troops to fight in Europe. Certainly this was not a foregone conclusion because at the beginning of the war Americans gaped in horror at the spectacle of “civilized” Europeans slaughtering each other wholesale. President Woodrow Wilson declared the war a “catastrophe,” while his Ambassador to Great Britain, Walter Hines Page, referred to “the deplorable medievalism” that had blossomed on that continent.¹ For Brand Whitlock, American Ambassador to Belgium, the war was an atavistic return to tribalism—a “monstrous anachronism . . . driven by the cruel will of the pagan world.”² The casualties were appalling and unprecedented. In two battles, the Somme and Verdun, almost a million men were killed in five months.³ British Prime Minister David Lloyd George observed that these terrible losses had produced in the United States “a rut of benevolent but horrified neutrality.”⁴

Americans wanted no part of this bloodbath, and President Woodrow Wilson did his very best to keep the United States out of it. Without the provocations of Germany, he might have succeeded. But over the course of two-and-a-half years of Germany’s brutal dismissal of anything outside the parameters of military necessity, and her increasing contempt for any actions the United States might take, Americans became convinced that their basic values were at stake. Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare early in 1917 (described by historian Arthur S. Link as “one of the greatest blunders in history”), was the final outrage that drew America into the war on the Allied side.⁵

The American impact on the war cannot be overstated. The United States was the world’s premier industrial power, and by 1918 was producing 615 million tons of coal compared to Germany’s 161 million tons, 40 million tons of iron compared to Germany’s 12 million tons, and 45 million tons of steel compared to Germany’s 12 million tons.⁶ The German belief that its submarines could win the war before the United States could make its presence felt was a woeful miscalculation. Increased use of escorted convoys dramatically reduced losses to submarines, and the Allies could simply replace ships faster than they could be sunk. American shipbuilding increased by a factor of fourteen from its pre-war level.⁷

The United States also raised an immense army. By July 1918, a million U.S. troops were in France (there would be 2 million in Europe by the end of the war), and 20,000 tons of their supplies were arriving at French ports every day.⁸ When the American Expeditionary Force arrived, under the leadership of General John J. Pershing, the French and British were busily sniping at each other (Georges Clemenceau told Pershing that Britain was finished as a world power, and British General Douglas Haig told Pershing that the French army was a “broken reed”). But when Pershing made it clear that the American army would be fighting as an independent unit, rather than being amalgamated into the British and French armies, the British and French buried their differences and unified under the banner of criticizing American military leaders, and putting impediments in the way of American success.⁹ Especially obstreperous was French general Ferdinand Foch, who never tired of belittling the efforts of American troops, and trying to break the American army into pieces. When Foch criticized Pershing for not having enough artillery, Pershing pointed out that the British and French had insisted that American shipping capacity be used on men rather than on artillery, and that shortfalls in the latter would be made up by the Allies.¹⁰ When Pershing asked Foch for more horses, Foch told him to get them from the United States.¹¹ (Even Georges Clemenceau described Foch as “not superabundant in nuances.”)¹² Pershing concluded that “the fixed purpose of the French, and perhaps the British, [was] that the formation of an American Army should be prevented if possible. Perhaps they do not want America to find her strength.”¹³

The British and French would disparage the contributions of the American army (after themselves being routed in the German offensive in the spring of 1918), but the outcome of the war might have been quite different without the presence of American troops at Château-Thierry and nearby Belleau Wood. Here the Germans had advanced to within forty-five miles of Paris by mid-July 1918. The United States suffered some 10,000 casualties in the grim weeks ahead, but with their French allies they were able first to stop the German drive south, and then launch a combined counterattack (the Second Battle of the Marne). The high number of American casualties was a function of sheer inexperience. When Harper’s correspondent Dorothy Canfield asked a French soldier for his opinion of American troops, he said, “They are remarkably courageous, they really fight like lions,” but “[as] far as really knowing how to make modern war, they are children, just children. They make all the mistakes we made four years ago.”¹⁴

Mistake-prone or not, German General Erich Ludendorff gave credit to the American effort that was frequently lacking among the Allies. “The sheer number of Americans arriving daily at the front,” said Ludendorff, fed the feeling of “looming defeat” that afflicted his army.¹⁵ Referring to the German attack that was repulsed by American troops, Ludendorff claimed that “a German victory at the Marne and near Reims, even in July, 1918, would have been able to change the situation entirely in favor of Germany.”¹⁶ Without the help of the United States, “the Entente would long before have suffered a military defeat . . . .”¹⁷ American participation in the war may have shortened the conflict by as much as a year, and preserved France from annihilation (Winston Churchill made the stark assertion that without the intervention of the United States, “France could not have survived the year . . . .”).¹⁸

By November 1918 an armistice was declared and the fighting was over. What had it all been for? More than any other nation, the United States fought this war on idealism. Those of us who live in a more cynical age might be quick to dismiss the motivational power of such an appeal, but the personal accounts of ordinary Americans who involved themselves in this war are full of idealistic sentiments.¹⁹ Scoffers might also maintain that what drove Americans into this war was to protect American loans and the American prosperity that followed from being the chief supplier of Allied armaments and food. (As we’ll see, this argument would be promoted with a vengeance in the inter-war period.)

Though beloved by some analysts, economic determinism does little to explain why Americans became involved in this war. Indeed, proclaiming that the United States was entering the war to “make the world safe for American capital outlays” is not exactly soul-stirring stuff, and there is little evidence to support the notion that economics was a primary factor.²⁰ As Wilson put it in 1916, the public was not won over by logical appeals but “by the impulses of the heart; it is moved by sympathy . . . .”²¹ It was sympathy for the victims of German aggression that won so many Americans over to the Allied side, but for a very long time those same Americans resisted involvement in the war because of their pacifist views. Pacifism claimed the loyalty of a huge number of Americans, with some forty-five new peace organizations established in the United States between 1900 and 1914. German Ambassador to the United States Johann von Bernstorff concluded that “nine-tenths of the American nation are pacifists.”²² Wilson himself could be counted among their numbers, and German historian Gerhard Ritter has made the intriguing connection between pacifism and the American remove from the Old World: Wilson’s “pacifist ideology,” said Ritter, “which seemed so dogmatic and unrealistic to most Europeans, was American to the core, ultimately the upshot of the centuries-old special situation of the American continent, beyond the quarrels of the European powers.”²³ Among other reasons that Wilson was not especially vulnerable to economic arguments was that unlike the Republican presidents who would succeed him in the 1920s, he came from an academic rather than a business background.

Wilson won reelection in 1916 with the campaign slogan “He kept us out...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 America and the Peace Conference
• 2 The Aftermath of Versailles and the Roots of Isolationism
• 3 American Politics and Internationalism in the 1920s
• 4 History, Literature, and Isolationism
• 5 Feeding the Isolationist Beast: Issues, Fears, and Scenarios
• 6 Isolationists: A Gallery
• 7 Isolationism and Politics in the Roosevelt Era
• 8 The Counterinsurgents, the Perils of Neutrality, and Pearl Harbor
• Conclusion
• Index