Foreign Affairs at 70

By the autumn of 1921 the United States was settling into the postwar era. The conservative Republican administration of Warren G. Harding was taking hold. The Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations had been repudiated by the U.S. Senate. Isolationism was beginning, although the term had not yet been coined.

A number of influential Americans regretted the U.S. refusal to join the League. They believed that one reason for the turn against Wilsonian internationalism was public ignorance not only about the League, but about international affairs in general. This was the background to the formation in July 1921 of the new Council on Foreign Relations. The founding fathers, so to speak, convened in New York City: the honorary president was Elihu Root, a former secretary of state and secretary of war; the president was John W. Davis, a Wall Street lawyer who would run for president of the United States as a Democrat in 1924 against Calvin Coolidge. It was the secretary and treasurer, Edwin F. Gay, former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business and president of The New York Evening Post, who took the lead in urging that the Council publish its own journal.

In January 1922 Gay approached his Harvard colleague, Archibald Cary Coolidge, a distinguished scholar in Russian studies, with the proposition that "you are the man best fitted to act as editor of this publication." Coolidge had served on the American delegation to the Paris peace conference. Gay also recruited as managing editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a young Princeton graduate who had broken into journalism as special correspondent in eastern Europe.

Coolidge was distantly related to the new vice president, Calvin Coolidge, and some who had known the professor in Europe got a little mixed up. A Berlin newspaper commented that the vice president was actually better qualified for leadership than Harding, because of his distinguished academic credentials. Vice President Coolidge took arch delight in forwarding to Professor Coolidge a congratulatory letter from a Hungarian countess who requested that, as vice president, he could make England pay certain claims to her family.