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NOT TO THE SWIFT: The old isolationists in the cold war era

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Representative Roy O. Woodruff of Michigan, while debating the finer points of a multibillion dollar loan to Britain in 1946, asked how "Europe ever passed through over 2,000 years of recorded history without the help of the United States." Congressman Harold Knutson during the same debate quipped, "Uncle Sam has become a glorified Santa Claus. I think it is high time we take the old gentlemen into a barber shop and give him a shave." These comments were only two of the salvos fired by isolationist congressmen in the myriad foreign policy debates during the post-World War II period. Justus Doenecke's "Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era" is a catalog of virtually every important noninterventionist position argued in Congress from 1943 to 1954. Through an impressive use of sources, including newspapers, congressional records, innumerable secondary sources, and personal papers, the author fashions a readable work that shines a spotlight on those individuals who opposed America's increasing presence in international affairs.

This opposition-the author examines the statements and written works of a dozen Senators, nearly ninety Congressmen, and numerous businessmen who all subscribed to noninterventionist ideas-resisted American involvement in affairs springing up in Europe and in Asia. Many of these figures were prominent in the pre-World War II campaigns against American intervention. "By concentrating upon the response of the same group to entirely different events," argues Doenecke, "one can better understand the nature of isolationism itself, as well as the specific issues surrounding both [European and Asian] global controversies." The author rejects in part previous studies on the topic that emphasized ethnic, geographic, economic, and party ties. Instead, the book seeks "to place the ideology of the old isolationists within the context of their own time, and thereby to reveal both their dreams and their fears."

Doenecke's research leads him to the conclusion that the guiding principle of the noninterventionists had little to do with social status or to geographical location, as other scholars have argued, but was an ideology intimately linked to the nation's past. Specifically, isolationists subscribed to the old Jeffersonian ideas of the yeoman farmer. They thought that America's virtues came from the soil, that ruralism could curb the excesses of industry and other forms of technological expansion. Foreign entanglements were inherently bad because they would deteriorate these virtues. Moreover, propping up Britain or Russia would allow for the survival and possible growth of hated European ideals like imperialism and communism. Isolationists, whether from the city or the countryside, "engaged in a rear-guard effort to preserve a rural arcadia from the inevitable onslaughts of modernity."

Cold War noninterventionists jumped into the fray over a number of issues. The United Nations, foreign aid, the Truman Doctrine, the fall of China, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the Korean conflict presented the foes of internationalism with innumerable headaches. The arguments against America's role in these events were many, but they all shared specific themes. According to Doenecke, isolationists feared alliance systems, lamented the loss of Congress' war making powers, and questioned whether the Soviet Union presented a legitimate threat to Europe. Additionally, they worried about America turning into an imperial power, excoriated the Truman administration for using the communist bogey to scare the public into supporting massive aid packages to other countries, and claimed that foreign aid infusions weakened the economy here while fostering corruption in the recipient countries.

Members of Congress were not alone in promoting isolation during the Cold War. Doenecke devotes one chapter in his book to the study of revisionist historians. Conspiratorial reassessments of the First World War helped noninterventionists battle Roosevelt before Pearl Harbor. During the 1940s, a new-and in some instances, not so new-generation of scholars and isolationist publicists began writing tracts about the real causes of American involvement in the Second World War. The old America Firster John T. Flynn reemerged with his "The Truth About Pearl Harbor," a booklet claiming the Japanese attacked America because Roosevelt demanded the Imperial Army withdraw from China. George Morgenstern wrote "Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War" to explain that the war was an attempt to draw attention away from New Deal failures. Eventually, Charles Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes, and Charles Tansill weighed in on the "secret" reasons why the United States went to war. Doenecke convincingly argues that these works, although unable to ultimately prove their accusations, provided congressional isolationists with additional arguments in the fight against internationalist goals.

It is easy to come away from Doenecke's book with a sense that the isolationist politicians had great influence. They did not. After failing utterly to keep the United States out of war in 1941, their power to influence policy waned considerably. America eventually joined the United Nations and NATO, endorsed the tenets of the Truman Doctrine, and greatly expanded foreign aid to nations across the world despite noninterventionist opposition on the Senate and House floors. The revisionist historians' untenable diatribes against Roosevelt's and Truman's foreign policy machinations eventually faded from view, resurrected only briefly by the New Left during the late 1960s in that movement's desperate attempts to end the Vietnam War. This complaint is a small one, one that does not lessen the book in a significant way. The thoroughness of the research and the magnificent organization of the material are the two elements that make this text such an exemplary contribution to the study of American isolationism. Doenecke has identified yet another strand that, woven together with the other themes historians of the topic have identified, construct a better picture of what American isolation was in the middle of the twentieth century.