The Geography of Isolationism
America First: The Battle Against Intervention; 1940-41.
by Wayne S. Cole.
University of Wisconsin, 305 pp., $3.50.
This book, the first full-length study of the America First Committee, describes events that took place only a dozen years ago, and in the full blaze of publicity. Yet they read here as if they might have taken place a half century ago. It is amazing how many of the figures who played so important a role in those days are gone; not only Roosevelt and Hopkins and Ickes, but Senators Nye, Wheeler, Borah, and Robert La Follette, Jr., General Hugh Johnson and William Allen White. And of those who remain, how many are now at fiercest odds with their old positions: Chester A. Bowles was a member of the national committee of America First; William Benton, then a vice-president of the University of Chicago, gave advice to R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., its youthful founder; Philip A. Jessup sponsored America First chapters.
The political landscape is so altered as to be unrecognizable: is it conceivable that the lower house of the Texas legislature once voted that Charles A. Lindbergh was unwelcome in that state—and that ten years later the same house listened worshipfully to General Douglas MacArthur?
The points of continuity between that political epoch and our own are no less interesting; the son of America First’s biggest backer, Henry Regnery, now runs a publishing house justifying the isolationist position, and ramifying out to attack contemporary liberalism, Godlessness, and our policy towards our former enemies in the last war. Another backer, C. R. Sheaffer, has recently turned up as a financial backer of Senator McCarthy—and more recently still as Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Eisenhower administration. A more tenuous line may be drawn from R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., the Yale Law School student who started the movement and served as its executive secretary and the new Undersecretary of State for the Eisenhower administration, Donald B. Lourie—who was president of the firm of which the senior Stuart was vice-president.
It is not easy, even with the meticulously collected and reported detail of Mr. Cole’s study, to place America First in the context of American history. What it was not, we know. It was no fascist movement—though certainly fascists joined it and spoke under its auspices. It was not even simply a reactionary political movement. Besides Bowles, Benton, and Jessup, we might point to Norman Thomas, who often spoke from its platforms, and Oswald Garrison Villard, who served on its executive committee. But certainly its support was violently antiRoosevelt and overwhelmingly anti-New Deal. Nor was it an anti-Semitic movement—the notorious speech of Charles Lindbergh was repudiated by the Committee—though, again, anti-Semites flocked to it.
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It Was the expression of Midwest isolationism. But what was Midwest isolationism?
It has had as kaleidoscopic a career as any phenomenon in American history—and is as hard to pin down. At the beginning of the century, when the country was debating whether to take over Spanish colonies and launch into a career of imperialism, it was the Midwest, as a historian writing in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review has pointed out, that supplied the leading protagonists of “internationalism” and a “global” destiny for America—President McKinley, Secretary of State Hay, Albert J. Beveridge, Mark Hanna, and many other spokesmen of the new course were Midwesterners, and the Midwest, from Ohio to the Dakotas, voted for the Spanish-American treaty. Then it was the Democrats who were isolationist. Contemporary Midwest isolationism did not begin to show itself until World War I. That isolationism was in some measure simply a reflection of the unwillingness of German immigrants and their children to fight against Germany, as Samuel Lubell has recently pointed out, and as students analyzing the constituencies of those who voted against our entry into World War I had shown earlier. Yet the South, despite its traditional sympathy for England, pre-dating the Civil War, was as anti-war in World War I as the Midwest. Only in World War II does the present configuration fully emerge: the South becomes the most interventionist section of the country, against a strongly isolationist Midwest.
These larger movements are, unfortunately, quite ignored in Mr. Cole’s study—he keeps his nose pretty close to the grindstone, which in this case admittedly consists of the fascinating store of America First files, and he rarely raises it to consider the larger context and significance of America First. Today, with isolationism again a major historical force, it becomes important to determine just what the enduring elements of Midwest isolationism are.
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During the debate at the turn of the century, the issue in foreign policy was imperialistic expansionism promising unlimited trade, which was enthusiastically taken up by Republican businessmen, Eastern and Midwestern, and suspiciously resisted by Populist and Democratic farmers. In the First World War, the same lines held, with the Roosevelt wing of the Republican party and the pro-British upper-class businessmen being most enthusiastic in favor of the war. The old areas of Populist strength—the Midwest and the South—stuck to their isolationist guns. To anti-business feeling was added a suspicion of England and the pro-English upper classes of the East, which itself had both ethnic and regional roots. But, since anti-England and anti-Eastern feeling had entered the scene, the solid front of “interventionalist” Republican businessmen of McKinley’s time was broken, and the Midwest businessmen began to show a slight tendency to isolationism. In this fight, the Democratic administration was in the middle. But once Wilson got into the war, the character of American overseas interests quite changed—it was transformed from imperialistic to internationalistic, from a Kiplingesque enthusiasm for big armies and navies for the sake of national glory to an idealistic enthusiasm for setting the world right (of course the same size armies and navies would be temporarily required).
This Wilson shift in the nature of America’s overseas concern quite transforms American isolationism. It had been up to then an aspect of the farmer’s suspicion of the businessman, and part of the whole program of socialism and Populism. Now this body of doctrine was undermined by Wilson’s vision of a world of small, peaceful, self-governing states. And this vision was capable of appealing to just those newer ethnic elements which were most indifferent or antagonistic to dreams of national glory. But at the same time this vision repelled many of the expansionist businessmen. The Eastern, pro-English elements among them could support Wilson. The Midwest expansionists, dating from the campaign of 1900, could not—in any case, they were more interested in the Pacific than the Atlantic.
In this fashion, an almost complete turnabout took place in the positions of those elements respectively supporting and opposing an active American foreign policy. The connection between socialist and Populist ideas and isolationism, on the one hand, and business thinking and world-mindedness on the other, was dissolved. For American foreign policy, as for so much else, Wilson’s administrations were a watershed.
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Since the campaign of 1920, it has not been necessary to add much to this picture. The tie-up between progressive thinking and isolationism was not dissolved immediately, of course—the presence of Bowles and Benton in the America First Committee show that. But since the election of 1920, isolationism has been predominantly the expression of the Midwest business and small-town mind, as well as of the resentment in a large bloc of the population of German origin. The former have supplied the leadership for isolationism—the latter, the mass base.
From the campaign against the League of Nations to the time of Nato, the heart of the opposition to any involvement in the concerns of the rest of the world has thus been solidly established in the Midwest, while “internationalist” and “interventionist” feeling has been found in the East, the South, and the West.
This is the geography of American foreign policy for the last twenty-five years—and as far as one can see, America will be divided along these lines for many years to come.
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