The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (50th Anniversary Edition) by William Appleman Williams

Author:William Appleman Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

* These conservatives—a minority within a minority—are the only men to whom the term isolationist can be applied with any relevance or accuracy. The term is thus extremely misleading when generalized even to all those who voted against the League Treaty, let alone the policymakers of the interwar years. Its use has thus crippled American thought about foreign policy for 50 years.

† Readers who find this so unusual an interpretation as to be dismissed at the outset are referred to Hoover’s recent volume, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (now in McGraw-Hill paperback edition). It is a moving tribute to Wilson, and also an illuminating review of American foreign policy at the end of World War I. See also the forthcoming study by Joan Hoff Wilson.

‡ Even if this propensity be called conservative, the conservatism involved is temperamental and not ideological.

§ The best efforts to establish this view are by B. M. Unterberger, America’s Siberian Expedition, 1918–1920 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1956); and G. F. Kennan, Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2 vols., 1956, 1958). For a contrary view see: R. D. Warth, The Allies and the Russian Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1954); and this writer’s American-Russian Relations, 1781–1947.

¶ Wilson was more successful in Poland. As in Hungary, Hoover and the President collaborated to use American control of food supplies to bring conservatives to power. The conservatives were then given arms and money during their efforts to extend Poland’s boundaries eastward into Russia, and into the Baltic States.

# Perhaps the most striking evidence of Hoover’s long thought about these problems comes from his early books on mining engineering. See, for example, the discussion of the injustices of corporations and other capitalists, and of the rights and legitimate expectations of labor, in these items: Principles of Mining Valuation, Organization, and Administration (1909); “The Training of the Mining Engineer,” Science (November, 1904); “Economics of a Boom,” The Mining Magazine (May, 1912). Also consult, where available (it is unfortunately something of a rare item), his American Individualism (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1923). This approach to Hoover is developed in more detail in this writer’s Contours of American History, One of the nicest introductory essays to Hoover was prepared by a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Robert E. Treacy, as a seminar paper entitled “Herbert Hoover to 1920.”

** Borah’s analysis was borne out, not only by Russia’s open bid for a nonaggression treaty with China and the United States, but also by its decision, after that overture was declined, to sign with the Japanese. American policy of the years 1904–1912 was thus repeated with the identical results.

†† The orthodox view of Borah can be reviewed in R. Ferrell, Peace in Their Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). The most recent biography is M. C. McKenna, Borah (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961). A stimulating article is O. S. Pinckney, “William E. Borah: Critic of American Foreign Policy,” Studies on The Left (1960). The best volume of Borah’s own remarks is American Problems.

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