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American ‘Isolationism’ in the 1920s: is it a useful concept?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2011

D. C. Watt
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Extract

When I was first told, as a boy, how to keep my petty cash accounts, my instructor, in a rash moment, once let me see her own. The largest single item on the debit side stood opposite the initials “G.O.K.” Intrigued, I asked who the mysterious “Mr. K. was”. “No-one”, was the reply, “it stands for “God only knows”. The money is gone – on what I could not tell you. G.O.K. balances the accounts and takes care of my ignorance”.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies , Volume 6 , June 1963 , pp. 3 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © British Association for American Studies 1963

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References

REFERENCES

1.Adams, James Truslow, The Epic of America, (London 1940), p. 393.Google Scholar
2. My visit to the U.S.A. was made possible by a Fellowship in the Social Sciences from the Rockefeller Foundation, to whom my thanks are due. For a preliminary report on source materials see Watt, D.C., “United States Documentary Resources for the Study of British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939”, XXXVIII, International Affairs, No. 1, January 1962.Google Scholar
3. Scottish Record Office, XI th Marquess of Lothian papers, General Correspondence. Bingham to Lothian, November 18, 1934. The author's thanks are due to the Trustees for permission to examine these records and to quote from them. Lord Lothian's article appears in the Observer of the same date.Google Scholar
4. Scottish Record Office, XI th Marquess of Lothian papers, General Correspondence. House to Lothian, December 13, 1934.Google Scholar
5. The author, as a British historian, has neither the right nor the intention to scoff at his American colleagues, in view of the almost total lack of correspondingly intelligent academic analysis of British foreign policy in the 20th century. He is in fact deeply envious of his American colleagues, to whom he is greatly indebted for both academic and intellectual assistance. But attention should be called to the state and divisions of opinion revealed in, for example, Conde, Alexander de (Ed.), Isolation and Security, (Durham 1957): Norman A. Graebner (Ed.), An Uncertain Tradition, American Secretaries of State in the Twentieth Century. (New York 1961); George L. Anderson, Issues and Conflicts, Studios in Twentieth Century American Diplomacy, (Lawrence, Kansas, 1959). A view similar to the author's is expressed in W. Appleton Williams, ‘The Legend of Isolationism, XVIII, Science and Society, 1954 No. 1.Google Scholar
6. University of Birmingham Library. Austen Chamberlain Papers, Box 51. Chamberlain to Sir Esme Howard, Dec. 22, 1924. The author's thanks are due to the Librarian for permission to quote from these papers.Google Scholar
7. Roland N. Stromberg, “The Riddle of Collective Security”, in Anderson (Ed.) op.cit., p. 164.Google Scholar
8. This has been pointed out in a recent American study by Professor Tillman of M. I. T. See Tillman, Seth W., Anglo-American Relations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Princeton, 1961).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9. See for example Alstyne, Richard van, “Woodrow Wilson and the Idea of the Nation State”, XXVII, International Affairs, No. 3, July 1961.Google Scholar
10. Cited in J. Chalmers Vinson, ‘Military Force and American Policy, 1919–1939’, in de Conde (ed.), op.cit., at pp. 69–70.Google Scholar
11. It is interesting to see that many of the career diplomats of this period were to stand with Hoover against Wilkie and Roosevelt in 1940 in their assessment of the danger to America and the action necessary to circumvent it.Google Scholar
12. This suspicion was so persistent that it was repeated in the opening volume of Professor Samuel E. Morison's History of U.S. Naval Operations - though the idea of Professor Gilbert Murray or Philip Noel-Baker, the Labour M. P., (let alone the indomitable Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt of the Women's Peace Party and the Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, or Mrs. Laura Puffer Morgan of the National Committee for the Prevention of War) being briefed in the Admiralty before embarking on an American lecture tour is an entertaining one. See Rear Admiral Knox U.S.N. (ret.), Preface to Samuel Eliot Morison, A History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War 11, vol. 1 pp. xlii-iv.Google Scholar
13.Foreign Relations of the United States, 1925, vol. 1, pp. 16–19, 19–20; Austen Chamberlain papers, Box 53, Sir Esme Howard to Austen Chamberlain, January 9, 1925.Google Scholar
14. Library of Congress Manuscripts Division; Charles Evans Hughes Papers, Beeritz Memorandum; Vinson, J. Chal, “The drafting of the Four Power Treaty at Washington”, XXV, Journal of Modern History, 1953.Google Scholar
15. The evidence for this statement comes from three civil Ian members of the U.S. delegation; Charles Evans Hughes Papers, Beeritz Memorandum; Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Chandler P. Anderson Diary, Entry of November 26, 1921, recording conversation with Elihu Root, also a delegate; The same; Colonel Theodore Roosevelt Junior Papers, Colonel Roosevelt to Ambassador George Harvey, December 29, 1921. Elihu Root also told Anderson that an additional reason for the U.S. proposals was the desire to make Britain realise the degree to which she was dependent on the United States.Google Scholar
16. See Vinson, J. Chal, The Parchment Peace, The United States Senate and the Washington Conference (Athens, Georgia 1955).Google Scholar
17. Austen Chamberlain Papers, Box 52, Chamberlain to Howard January 28, 1925; Howard to Chamberlain, February 13, 1925.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18. Memorandum of Charles Swem cited in Walworth, Arthur, Woodrow Wilson, (New York 1958), vol. 2, World Prophet, p. 217.Google Scholar
19. See Ferrell, Robert V., Peace in their Time (New Haven, 1952), passim.Google Scholar
20. Though not the Hughes of 1929 who, in his address to the American Society of International Law of April 24, 1929, advocated a consultative pact to supplement the Kellogg Pact.Google Scholar
21. If is worth noting that by 1930 Kellogg could say, “I believe in consultative pacts…I think it is the duty under the Hague Treaty and the Pact of Paris of any nation party to the Treaty to consult with these countries most interested or which would have the most influence in trying to prevent a conflict…I have no sympathy whatever with a certain public opinion here, though I do not think it is dominant, that the United States should not consult about European affairs. War anywhere in the world necessarily touches us”. Lothian Papers General Correspondence. Kellogg to Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian), May 15, 1930.Google Scholar
22. Stimson broached the idea (originally launched by Charles P. Howland of the Foreign Policy Association in an article in the Yale Review, July 1928), to Hoover on October 17, 1931. Sterling Library, Yale, Henry L. Stimson Diary, Entry of October 17, 1931. Both Stimson and Borah held the view that the Kellogg Pact had made the traditional idea of neutrality impossible and untenable. (The author's thanks are due to the trustees of the Stimson papers for permission to quote from this collection).Google Scholar