Pax Economica by Marc-William Palen;

Author:Marc-William Palen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

In 1920s New York City, as Michael Thompson illustrates, liberal Protestantism was becoming more closely aligned with left-wing radical anti-imperialism thanks in no small part to Kirby Page and Sherwood Eddy.77 Like many of the nation’s liberal Protestants, the FCC, the CPU, and YMCA leadership, including Page and Eddy, had become caught up in the patriotic fervour of the First World War. They now sought to do penance. Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, an avowed disciple of Manchester liberalism and son of the famous Presbyterian theologian Joseph Ruggles Wilson Sr., in turn breathed new life into their progressive millenarian mission of creating a peaceful and interdependent world order in the wake of his Fourteen Points speech in 1918.78 Page, working alongside Eddy, was instrumental in connecting liberal organizations such as the YMCA and the FCC with the Quakers’ more radical American FOR and the Socialist Party of America (SPA). From YMCA headquarters in New York City, Page and Eddy oversaw mass pamphleteering campaigns on behalf of Russian recognition and Filipino independence. In The Abolition of War (1924), Page laid the lion’s share of the blame for colonialism and war upon the ‘economic imperialism’ of the ‘industrially advanced nations […] securing control of the raw materials […] and markets in backward nations’ since the 1870s. He criticized economic blockades for being ‘as deadly as war’ and harmful to neutrals as well as belligerents. He also noted with approval that the League of Nations was moving away from the economic boycott as a ‘means of enforcing its decisions’.79

In Imperialism and Nationalism (1925), Page showed that he well understood imperialism’s formal political and informal economic manifestations. The industrializing powers were ratcheting up their economic nationalist policies and their imperial search for raw materials and new outlets for surplus capital. Turkey’s economic woes, for example, had only been ‘aggravated and intensified by extreme nationalism’ by way of ‘drastic tariff regulations’ and ‘heavy taxation’. He also took ‘dollar diplomacy’ in Latin America—a US policy of providing loans with coercive strings attached—to task. In the case of El Salvador, he criticized a US loan of $6 million because it was to be repaid principally from customs duties, making El Salvador’s tariffs a permanent fixture. Drawing directly upon British ‘New Liberal’ J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (1902), Page concluded that ‘international commerce and international finance […] desperately need regulation’ at the international level, and that ‘the whole question of the distribution of the raw materials of the earth deserves serious and immediate attention […] as does also the extraordinarily vital question of tariffs’. ‘The old theory of the absolute sovereignty of the nation needs to be abandoned’, he continued, to establish ‘permanent peace and justice throughout the earth’.80 The following year, Page once again referenced Hobson alongside the New Testament to lay out his vision for a ‘Christian Economic Order’ centred upon social justice, industrial democracy, equality for women, and universal brotherhood. Page had also recently created the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order, which tarred racism, autocracy, and ‘monopoly of natural resources for private gain’ as ‘unchristian’.

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