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Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age

2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jar574

1945-2314

Ballard C. Campbell,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Christopher McKnight Nichols’s Promise and Peril is an ambitious examination of isolationist thought in the United States. Controversies in American foreign affairs between the Venezuela boundary dispute in 1895 and the debate over aid to England during World War II create the backdrop for the study. Nichols concentrates on six people who were prominent in American life—Henry Cabot Lodge, William James, Randolph Bourne, Eugene V. Debs, William Borah, and Emily Greene Balch—to illuminate varieties of isolationist thinking. Interwoven among these portraits are a supporting cast of commentators: Theodore Roosevelt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jane Addams, John Raleigh Mott, and Walter Lippmann. The 1898 conflict with Spain over Cuba as well as World War I necessarily draw Presidents William McKinley and Woodrow Wilson into the story. The non-entanglement and nonalignment doctrines of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the Monroe Doctrine—ideas that gave direction to American foreign affairs for most of the nineteenth century—were policy touchstones for advocates of isolationism. Even Lodge, who championed the extension of American power abroad in the 1890s, paid homage to the Founding Fathers’ principles. Like several other isolationists, Lodge freely mixed support for commercial and cultural forms of internationalism with the doctrine of preserving American autonomy in American foreign policy. Nichols argues that modern isolationist thought developed in the 1890s within the debate over imperialism during the conflict with Spain. The anti-imperialists, he contends, relied heavily on the strictures imposed by the Founding Fathers to oppose colonialism. Numerous Americans opposed involvement in World War I, with some critics contending that intervention into the European war would detract from reform at home.