The Myth of American Isolationism -- Reinterpreting the Past

In the nineteenth century, when the United States needed to negotiate on the world stage, as it did during the Civil War, its diplomacy was deft and effective. Europeans find it hard to accept, and most Americans are unaware, that Americans tend to make excellent diplomats because they are thorough and go into matters from the fundamentals upward. I do not know why Fromkin dismisses President Woodrow Wilson's preparations for the Versailles peace negotiations as "amateurish." Colonel Edward House set up this process, know as "The Inquiry," in September 1917 on Wilson's instructions. It consisted of 150 or so experts, mainly academics, under Dr. S. E. Mezes, and was housed in the American Geographical Society building in New York. As a result, Wilson and his colleagues were by far the best briefed delegation at Versailles. They alone had accurate maps and demographic information, describing in detail the many territories the conference was amalgamating or dividing. John Foster Dulles, who was counsel to the U.S. Peace Commission, told me in 1955 that "we Yankees were well ahead of you British and French" when it came to the factual minutiae. Dulles felt that some of the subsequent troubles in central and eastern Europe were the direct result of America's detailed proposals being overridden. Harold Nicolson, who was at Versailles and later wrote the best book on it, insisted, "Had the treaty of peace been drafted safely by the American experts, it would have been one of the wisest as well as the most scientific ever devised."

THE TWENTY?YEAR CRISIS

It is true that the United States appeared isolationist between the wars, and much of the tragedy of the Second World War is attributed to this fact. Fromkin treats this quasi?isolationist period as the norm. His thesis is that the generation born from 1880 to 1890--F.D.R., Eisenhower, Marshall, and others--was able to use the opportunity of the war against Hitler to break away finally from isolationism, "change America's role in the world," and create the epoch in global history he terms "the time of the Americans."

The interwar period, however, is an aberration rather than the norm in America's relationship with the world, the result of accident rather than national will. The blame must rest primarily with Wilson's arrogant obstinacy, and then with his sick state of mind, which together bred his insistence that the treaty he had negotiated at Versailles, including the League of Nations provisions, be ratified unamended. Even before Wilson suffered his first massive stroke, on October 2, 1919, he had told Dulles, whom he had left behind in Paris, that the American delegation must not participate in implementing Versailles until the Senate formally ratified the treaty. Dulles, the very inverse of an isolationist, was refused permission, to his distress, even to assign temporary U.S. delegates to the 35 committees set up to enforce the treaty. This was irrational behavior, but what followed was worse. The American people were not opposed to U.S. participation in the league. Polls taken at the time showed that Americans wanted to join a permanent peacekeeping body by ratios of four or five to one. The Republican majority in the Senate also favored a league of some kind. Fromkin calculates that the true isolationists among the Republicans were not more than a dozen, to which I would add that even some of those might have been won over by well?drafted concessions.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican leader, however he figures in the U.S. mythology, was no isolationist either. Boston Brahmins were internationalists. The senator's great mentors were Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt, both internationalists, and all the evidence suggests he aimed for the kind of league they would have approved. In all essentials, Lodge was at least as good an internationalist as Wilson; better, indeed, since less self?righteous and fixed in his views. His "Fourteen Reservations" to Wilson's Fourteen Points were designed to meet valid objections and so ensure overwhelming Senate ratification. Such reservations would have improved the treaty, on balance, and it is pretty clear that the Europeans would have accepted them (even welcomed them, in some cases) rather than forgo U.S. participation in the league. As Fromkin points out, all kinds of people associated with the peacemaking under Wilson, such as Colonel House, Herbert Hoover, and Democratic leaders like William Jennings Bryan, favored the reservations. The only opponent of any significance was Wilson himself. In March 1920, Lodge controlled 49 senators' votes in favor of the league with reservations. The 23 votes Wilson controlled, added to this 49, were more than enough to secure U.S. membership in the league. But Wilson's 23 supporters voted against the league rather than accept the Lodge reservations. So America rejected membership. An overwhelmingly internationalist country was turned in an isolationist direction as a result of a personal failure of leadership by a dying man.

It can be argued, with more justice, that America was isolationist in the 1930s. A wound?nursing flight from the rest of the world was the mood of the times and was by no means confined to the United States during what the poet W. H. Auden characterized as a "low, dishonest decade." A fear of war that verged on pacifism enveloped Britain and France, too, during these years. Coming after nearly 70 years of dramatic economic expansion had made America the richest and most powerful country on earth, the Depression abruptly reduced half its population to penury. There was an atmosphere of hysteria in parts of the United States during the mid?1930s, not least in Washington, characterized by outbreaks of an intellectual disease to which America is prone: conspiracy theory.