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Was Charles Beard's Isolationism Hopelessly Naive? Charles Beard’s isolationism was essentially not based on pacifism, but rather on a combination of views, both on history as a whole and the recent history of the US in particular, a deep mistrust of foreign intervention, and a stress on economic rather than ideological or political causation. In later years these were joined by concerns about the power of the executive during wartime and the associated effects on personal freedoms, and finally on a conviction that the US entry into the European sphere of the Second World War had been contrived at and manipulated by Roosevelt. Although there is plenty to disagree with in Beard’s analysis, it seems unfair to term his beliefs as being completely naive - misguided, perhaps, or even, to some extent, immoral, but for the most part at least, somewhat realistic. As Manfred Jonas explains; “[t]he isolationist argument was coherent, logical, and self contained...America’s proper policy was…to insulate itself as well as possible against outside dangers and to attend to its own affairs in its own way.” It should also be noted that before the fall of France and the attack on Pearl Harbour, the vast majority of Americans would have agreed with Beard, over his concerns about Roosevelt and non-involvement in the Second World War, and that in recent years, attempts to revive many of Beard’s ideas by other academics have been met with some success. The most obvious way to analyse Beard’s assumptions is to subdivide them chronologically into the period before 1938, between Munich and Pearl Harbour, during the Second World War itself, and subsequent to that war. In the inter-war years, at least until Hitler’s aggression became apparent in the aftermath of Munich, Beard’s views were regarded as being entirely mainstream and without reproach. The extent of US isolationism in the 1920’s is often exaggerated or overestimated, due primarily to the magnitude of the shift in foreign policy strategy between 1919 and 1921, as a result of the departure of Wilson, and the failure of the US to join the League of Nations. As Republican administrations became increasingly concerned with ‘Old Europe’ they attempted to export seemingly successful practices, such as ending internal trade barriers, mobilising private capital, and encouraging the growth of industry, which was backed up by large amounts of money from Wall Street. Even the USSR was involved, despite official non-recognition and the never-resolved issues of war debts. Ford and General Electric were involved in large-scale development, and even before that Hoover, as a member of the Harding administration, led a non-political drive for aid supplies to mitigate famine and the effects of war in 1922 and 1923. While Hoover later expressed anti-interventionist policies in Latin America, given the remarkably bipartisan support such policies had enjoyed previously, this seems most understandable in the context of the disarmament talks, and hopes for a peaceful global future widespread at the time. Since anti-imperialism could hardly be described as a historically Republican policy, when in fact it was quite the reverse, temporary circumstances, rather than the implied legacy of Wilson (whose anti-imperialism never really embraced its logical rejection of the Monroe doctrine) seem responsible. Nevertheless, it would be accurate to state that the US never adopted a fully isolationist policy during the 1920’s, since it still “consciously took part in world politics...[and]…demonstrated its awareness that genuine isolation was neither possible nor desirable.”Although not as ‘isolationist’ as Beard might have liked, the decidedly ‘non-interventionist’ approach in the 1920’s and early 1930’s was a bipartisan endeavour, and his isolationist outlook was considered as being a customary and logical approach to foreign policy at the time. The failure of the League of Nations, the destruction of the post-war settlement, and ultimately the Second World War can all be identified as stemming from the economic collapse and the Great Depression, which began in 1929 and dominated much of the 1930s. The catalogue of incidents, including Manchuria, Abyssinia, the Rhineland, and Anschluss, which are now seen as demonstrating the failure of the international order and the dangers of isolationism and appeasement, were perceived by many Americans, including Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, as an unfortunate series of events in which the US was powerless to intervene, even if it were inclined to do so. While much has been made of the failure of the League of Nations to act, it should be remembered that Wilson had distanced himself from attempts to apply his internationalist principles in colonial (or indeed non-European) settings, being unable to obtain political independence for the Kurds (the twelfth of the Fourteen Points), much less African and Asian groups. As for the rearrangement of the regions around Germany, it had long been felt that those aspects of the post-war peace were least justifiable, and often contrary to Wilson’s sentiments and wishes outlined in his Fourteen Points. One does not need to go as far as A. J. P. Taylor’s prejudiced claim that “the only thing wrong with Hitler’s foreign policy is that he was German” to understand why American reactions to German irredentism would have met with a similar reaction regardless of presidential inclinations. Even without the Great Depression and the legacy of the First World War it is evident to comprehend why the US population would have been completely uninterested in the fate of minor Central European states. The context of the Great Depression, and the resultant association of American minds in foreign involvement, foreign investment and the resultant economic disaster with active involvement in world trade, only increased support for isolationism, and a large proportion of Americans came to see involvement in the First World War as a mistake - something which Roosevelt himself almost acknowledged in 1935. This sentiment, with clear psychological and cultural explanations, declined as economic circumstances improved as the self-evident impossibilities of an isolationist economic policy became clear, and evaporated completely in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour. In the mid-1930s, however, isolationism was universally accepted, with a Senate Commission in 1934 confirming what many already felt, that Wilson had contrived to lead the US into the First World War at the request of Wall Street bankers and other commercial interests; a group whose failure in the last years of the 1920s made them easy scapegoats. Even the USSR was involved, despite official non-recognition and the never-resolved issues of war debts. It is indicative of the prevalence of anti-war feeling in the US that while in 1917 the sinking of a US merchant ship left Wilson’s cabinet “no choice” but war, in the three months between Roosevelt’s “shoot on sight” order after the attack on the USS Greer and Pearl Harbour, US opinion did not shift decisively in favour of intervention. Before the Fall of France, some 80% of Americans opposed military intervention in Europe, and even after that, only 44% supported such action. Experiences in the later 1930s, most notably deductions made from the bombing of the Spanish market town of Guernica and underestimates of the ability to intercept bombers, which reached their lowest point in Stanley Baldwin’s famous “the bomber will always get through” speech, made it clear that isolationism and “Western Hemisphere” defence was no longer adequate to ensure the safety and survival of the US. The shifting of the debate from a distinct isolationist versus interventionist perspective, to one where the choice of whether America’s actual sphere of military deployment was the mid-Atlantic or the European coasts, is representative of a wider change in foreign policy thinking. In effect, for all the rhetoric of ‘isolationism’, ‘cash and carry’ trade with aggressors, and increasing disapproval of the decision to go to war in 1917; a global conflict was inevitably going to involve the US. Ultimately, even this feature was to prove illusionary since in reality a bomber force cannot be deployed defensively, and could only serve to protect the US by being able to strike at its enemies overseas. Reynolds notes that Pearl Harbour “solved the political problem” of interventionism by mandating US involvement, and as a result decided the strategic questions of where to deploy and how to enforce America’s military might. Well before Pearl Harbour, American military planners envisioned fighting a long-distance war with intercontinental bombers (the B-36 tender was announced in April 1941), and war plans allowing for a separate British peace (not as outlandish as often assumed) envisioned strategic airpower alone as being able to deliver decisive victory. The attack on December 7th 1941 effectively ended these suppositions and confirmed America’s foreign military stance as primarily interventionist. Jonas emphasises the extent to which the Pearl Harbour attack not only initiated a new era in US foreign policy outlook, but also drew to an end a “bitter political and ideological struggle”, indicating that: “The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour…led the United States to change its foreign policy fundamentally, to assume global political and economic commitments, and to accept consciously a large share of the responsibility for the maintenance of world peace.” It should be acknowledged that Beard and other non-interventionist efforts had not been entirely dismissed as the debate over appropriate action to counter the invasion of Poland in September 1939 began. The primary rhetoric used by Roosevelt and other interventionists concerned aiding the allies, which was supported by the inception of the ‘Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies’, compared to previous interventionist policies of redeeming the world through military participation; as was the case with Walter Lippmann and Wilson. Before the Fall of France, some 80% of Americans opposed military intervention in Europe, and even after that, only 44% supported such action.#p#分页标题#e# Up until the attack on Pearl Harbour, the United States were only willing to intervene through a program involving American aid to the Allies rather than military assistance, which was supported by the majority of Americans by the time France had fallen to the Nazis. In great similarity to Churchill, views which Roosevelt advanced, and which were condemned or ignored at the time, became the consensus within a few years, or even less. The process of shifting paradigms, emphasised in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions can be usefully applied in this context, since, increasingly, American power and influence demanded that they accept the consequences of an international role. The peace of the 1920’s and the economic downturn which prevented military expansionism in the 1930’s, allowed conservative elements to avoid this increasingly obvious reality, especially as the true strength of the US armed forces relative to other Powers was not readily apparent, but when circumstances conspired to force the US into a leading global role, the impossibility of returning to isolationism became clear, even to many ‘America First’ and isolationist figures like Charles Lindbergh. The fact that Beard himself was an exception to this trend stems primarily from his conviction of Roosevelt’s malfeasance and manipulation to draw the US into a European war after being embroiled in a Pacific one.Although, as discussed above, such a view was somewhat unrealistic, it can hardly be termed naive. Even before the fall of France, Roosevelt had been making preparations for a war with Germany; in June 1940 he founded the British Security Coordination, and directly influenced popular columnists such as Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson towards anti-isolationist sentiments. Walter Winchell was one of the prominent figures to attack the American First Committee for supporting non-intervention in Europe, claiming they “sympathize with or admire Hitler and Mussolini.” The attack on the USS Greer in September 1941, combined with the attacks on other American ships - the Steel Seafarer, the Sessa, and the Kearny, was merely one episode in what amounted to an undeclared war between American and German naval interests, and consequently led to Roosevelt’s “shoot-on-sight” speech. While the judgment of history has generally been that Roosevelt and Churchill engaged in actions of dubious legality for the greater good, their apparent deception does give Beard some justification for his beliefs. As the Second World War proceeded, Beard increasingly came under fierce criticism from many of his detractors. The main criticisms were aimed at the lack of relevance in his historical analysis to the War, his failure to address the increased vulnerability of the United States to foreign aggression as a result of the industrial revolution, and his inability to grasp strategic matters, particularly in the face of a new type of threat to the world, in the form of Hitler’s fully mobilised industrial Germany. However, the most damning criticism concerned Beard’s “moral indifferentism”, as Brands argues: “How could he stand by - “turn away”…while the goons of the world worked their evil will on the helpless and weak?...Beard…was missing the point, which was the present danger to Europe, and the rest of humanity, from German aggression.” Brands questions Beard’s moral worth, claiming he is selfish and immoral, however that does not necessarily make him naive. In fact, it could be claimed he was quite the opposite, as during the 1930’s, proponents of isolationism facilitated in enforcing a large number of isolationist legislation. This was, in no small part, due to Beard’s ‘Devil Theory of War’, which asserted that a small, powerful group of men, in which a war would be in their best interest, manufactured America’s involvement in the First World War, and could essentially happen again if effective measures are not taken. Munitions makers were the obvious candidates to be blamed, and as a result, isolationist and Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye, led a Senate sponsored investigation into “the nature of organizations engaged in the manufacture or traffic in arms, the methods used in promoting this trade, the volume of it…adequacy of existing legislation and treaties…” This coincided with Congress approving the Johnson Act in 1934 to forbid private loans to nations in default of obligations, as well as a string of neutrality legislation banning loans and credits to aggressors, mandatory embargo on shipments of arms, and other restrictions concerning the transfer of munitions. Consequently, it appears simplistic to describe Beard as being hopelessly naive, since his ideas, and in particular ‘the Devil Theory of War’, was instrumental in setting up the Foreign Relations Committee, which subsequently led to favourable legislation being passed through; although it would be reasonable to question his morality or realism in the context of this period. It is primarily in the post-War period that Beard’s critique of US policy has been both most detested, and ironically, most fitting. While a return to pure isolationism and an avoidance of the Cold War, which cast the shadow of thermonuclear annihilation over the world for almost half a century, are issues that Beard strongly contested, the areas of US policy which were the most culpable over that period included the toppling of democratic governments for political goals, the service of economic interests, and the deception and lack of accountability practised at the very highest levels of government, which are precisely those which Beard most strongly criticised. Bacevich endorses and repeatedly cites Beard’s own scepticism about the value of military intervention abroad to clarify his own policy suggestions and historical analysis, and the events of recent years, especially the seemingly endless US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, seem to vindicate his own position on some level. For this reason Beard’s perspectives on non-intervention has recently been revived by the so-called “paleo-conservative” foreign policy advocates in the post-Cold War era, who have used him to argue for their own positions of reducing US troop presence overseas, withdrawing from mutual-defence pacts (such as NATO), and refraining from further overseas interventions. Despite, immediately after the post-Second World War years, criticism of US foreign policy, and especially of the recently-deceased Roosevelt, was strongly disapproved of, Beard’s denunciation of Roosevelt in the last year of his life did serious damage to his scholarly reputation and influence, particularly after publishing President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941. In light of the half-century since he expressed his isolationist ideals, his views appear, if hardly visionary, than at least in a much more sympathetic light. Although his condemnation of US involvement in the Second World War itself seems both unrealistic and morally reprehensible, the broader implications of his stance and its courageous advocacy in the face of increasingly-fierce opposition are notable and praiseworthy. To regard Beard simply as a naive radical who insisted on a single approach of isolationism, without adequate examination of other options available, would itself be naive. It should be remembered that “Beard supported American entry into the fighting in 1917, believing German militarism a genuine danger to American democracy.” Given the prevalence of instances where US military power was used, not too wisely or too well (even to this day), it is hardly “hopelessly naive” to contemplate a series of strategic doctrines and a conduct of foreign policy with perhaps somewhat less emphasis on military action, as the best course of action. Although his theories were widely criticised as being immoral, Beard’s philosophy struck a chord with many Americans in the 1930’s, and his views are regarded as more humane, intellectually coherent, and less xenophobic than other isolationists at the time. Bibliography Bacevich, Andrew J. American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy, Harvard University Press Beard, Charles A. (1948), President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: A study in Appearances and Realities, New Haven: Yale University Press Brands, H. W. (1998), What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of the Foreign Policy, USA: Cambridge University Press Cole, Wayne S (1953), America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940-1941 New York: Octagon Books Dallek, Robert (1995), Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-45, USA: Oxford University Press Iriye, Akira (2002) The Cambridge History of US Foreign Relations Volume 3: The Globalizing of America, 1913-1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Jonas, Manfred (2000), Isolationism in America, 1935-1941, New York: Cornwell University Press Kuhn, Thomas (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd ed.), Chicago: University Of Chicago Press Reynolds, David (2001) From Munich to Pearl Harbour: Roosevelt's America and the Origins ofthe Second World War, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee |
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