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May 1952
The New Isolationism
In the article which follows, ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER,
JR.,National Vice Chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, raises a question
which has been troubling many independent voters: Is Senator Taft an
isolationist? Mr. Schlesinger, an Associate Professor of History at Harvard, is
an Ohioan who grew up in an academic family which migrated from Ohio State
University to the University of Iowa and finally to Harvard. His book, The Age
of Jackson, which appeared after his return from the Army, was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize in American History for 1945. In 1949 he authored a credo for
liberals in The Vital Center.
by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Early this year, when new crisis seemed to impend in Asia, the American people
were exposed to an edifying exercise in the discussion of foreign policy. As
Chinese troops massed on the Indo-Chinese border, Senator Robert A. Taft of
Ohio spoke before a Lincoln Day banquet in Seattle, Washington. Barely
mentioning the first Republican President, in whose honor the banquet was
given, Taft addressed himself to the Far Eastern crisis. "Now that a Communist
assault in southeast Asia is on the horizon," he said, "it should be clear to
our government that the only chance to stop it is by a Chinese Nationalist
invasion of Communist-held territory. An invasion, well organized, might
snowball rapidly." He went on to express his disdain for the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and to announce his intention, after January 20, 1953, of placing General
Douglas MacArthur in a position of high, if unspecified, military authority.
The next day, at Portland, Oregon, that Senator both strengthened and weakened
his China policy. It was "the most idiotic thing in the world not to use the
Nationalist troops," he said, adding anticlimactically, "at least for
diversionary purposes." By this time Taft's grand strategy had begun to alarm
certain fellow Republicans. Governor Warren of California demurred, and Senator
Morse of Oregon flatly denounced "the ugly proposal on the part of this growing
war clique in the United States that we commit an act which constitutes for the
first time in American history an aggressive act of war." In the next few days,
Senator Taft retreated behind a barrage of explanations. He hadn't meant an
invasion of the Chinese mainland, he said; he had meant diversionary raids
against the mainland and an invasion of such "Communist-held territory" as the
island of Hainan (from which the invasion would presumably "snowball rapidly"
into the Gulf of Tonkin). And he hadn't meant this as a means of stopping in
advance a Communist invasion of Indo-China--an impression which unwary readers
drew from his Seattle speech. "I would not advocate an invasion of China," he
soon said at Pocatello, Idaho, "unless the Communist Chinese move into
Indo-China." He was still prepared, however, to advocate action by ourselves in
defiance of our allies.
Except for his faith in unilateral action Senator Taft had now whittled his
original belligerence down to a position indistinguishable from that of Dean
Acheson and Anthony Eden, both of whom had warned Peking that entry into the
Indo-Chinese War would bring retaliation. But more was to come. By the time the
Senator got to Denver, he said that, while he favored sending arms to the
threatened states of southeast Asia, "under no circumstances, unless we were
absolutely sure of winning, would I send American forces to that area." Suppose
the Chinese Communist assault came and no absolute guarantee of victory (a rare
thing in any war, and highly unlikely in a war against Communist China) was
forthcoming; would he then help these nations? "No," said the Senator, "they
would just have to fall."
Robert A. Taft is a man of high ability and considerable intelligence. His
confusions are not to be explained simply in terms of campaign oratory. There
is something deeper here--some essential perplexity of a powerful mind
confounded by events which he cannot quite fit into a consistent scheme of
interpretation. Senator Taft, indeed, is a man in transition, an Old
Isolationist trying hard to come to terms with the modern world.
As doctrine and as program, Senator Taft's isolationism of a decade ago is
surely dead. But the Old Isolationism was, of course, far more than doctrine
and program. It was, above all, a set of intense emotions--emotions deeply
founded in the American experience and sharply etched on the American
psychology. And, in this deeper sense, isolationism has never died. The events
of 1939-45 destroyed the doctrine and the program of the Old Isolationism, but
they did not destroy the emotions which underlay and sustained it. In the last
six months, the old emotions have begun to generate new doctrines and programs.
Today we face a New Isolationism, bent upon what promises to be a fundamental
attack on the foreign policy to which the United States and the free world are
presently committed.
The internationalist euphoria of the past decade should not lead us to overlook
the deep roots which isolationism has in the national consciousness. Americans
have always had a natural and splendid exultation in the uniqueness of a new
continent and a new society. The New World had been called into existence to
redress the moral as well as the diplomatic balance of the Old; we could not
defile the sacredness of our national mission by too careless intercourse with
the world whose failure made our own necessary. Two great oceans fostered the
sense of distance, emphasized the tremendous act of faith involved in
emigration, and, at the same time, spared the new land the necessity for
foreign involvements.
The resulting isolationism--this passionate sense of a unique national
destiny--was, in the beginning, a generous and affirmative faith. We were, as
Lincoln said, dedicated to a proposition; we were engaged in a fateful
experiment. America was conceived to be perfect, not in achievement, but in
opportunity. Our responsibility was not to be complacent about what we had
done, but to rise to the challenge of what there was for us to do. Our nation
had been commissioned--whether by God or by history--to work out on this remote
hemisphere the best hopes and dreams of men. Isolation was a means, not of
confining, but of releasing democratic energy. This was the isolationism of the
younger George Norris, of the early Hiram Johnson, of the Robert La
Follettes.
But American isolationism did not consist only in an affirmation of the
uniqueness of America; it also included--and increasingly so--a rejection of
Europe. In a sense, of course, the very act of migration had represented an
extraordinary act of rejection. "Repudiation of Europe," Dos Passos once said,
"is, after all, America's main excuse for being." Nor could such repudiation be
without passion. America's love-hate relationship with Europe has dominated our
politics as well as our literature. As European struggles began to force
themselves on the American attention, isolationism began to react with ever
more explicit hostility and even hatred. An image of Europe began to haunt the
isolationist consciousness--an image of a dark and corrupt continent, teeming
with insoluble feuds, interminable antagonisms; senseless and malevolent wars.
Europe was morally and politically diseased and scabrous; and contact with it
would bring the risk of fatal infection. No one defined this image with more
precision and loathing than Herbert Hoover:--
"Here are four hundred million people on the continent divided into
twenty-six races. They are crowded cheek by jowl in an area less than
two-thirds of the United States. Suppose each of twenty-six of our states had
its own language, its own racial inheritance, its own economic and political
problems. And suppose through all these races for centuries have surged the
forces of nationalism, of imperialism, of religious conflict, memories of deep
wrongs, of age-old hates, and bitter fears. Suppose each had its own army and
around each of these states was a periphery of mixed populations that made
exact boundaries on racial lines hopeless. The outcries of separated minorities
would be implacable and unceasing cause of war. Suppose they all had different
forms of government and even where it was a democratic form it was class
government. That would be Europe....
And periodically there boils up among these people some Pied Piper with
silver tongue, calling some new Utopia....With a vicious rhythm these malign
forces seem to drive nations like the Gadarene swine over the precipice of
war."
In contrast, said Hoover, we in America have grown steadily apart from the
ideas of Europe. "Freed of European hates and fears...we have developed new
concepts of liberty, of morals and government." We must at all cost save
ourselves from what he called, in a savage phrase, "the eternal malign forces
of Europe."
In time, the old affirmative isolationism of Norris and La Follette began to
give way before the negative isolationism of Hoover. The one was moved by hope
for America, the other by hatred of Europe. The one shunned Europe the better
to change America, the other, the better to keep America from changing. The one
sprang from American progressivism--from a belief that the American experiment
was unfinished; the other, from American conservatism--from a belief that
American society was complete, and that change meant not progress but disaster.
In the end, the abandonment of isolationism by men like Norris before the
Second War, and the younger La Follette after, testified to their conclusion
that its affirmative possibilities had been exhausted.
The progressive and hopeful form of isolationism thus came to a natural end.
What remained was a petulant desire to seal off America from the winds of
change which were blowing through the world. And even this conservative
isolationism seemed increasingly irrelevant as a basis for national policy. The
Second War itself apparently provided a conclusive demonstration of this
obsolescence. For a time, we were all--or nearly all--internationalists. Thus
the Harold Stassen of 1943 presented a detailed plan for world government--the
same Harold Stassen who today opposes association with any nation which
declines to swear eternal loyalty to the capitalistic system. In this mood, the
isolationist doctrine and program perished; and even the underlying emotions
succumbed for a season to feelings of guilt and went underground. But these
emotions only went underground; they did not die.
The queer complex of feeling, fear, and prejudice was too deep to be repealed
in a decade. The emotional core of the Old Isolationism survived--the hatred of
Europe and its age-old troubles; the belief in an American purity which should
not risk corruption in contact with outsiders; the agoraphobic fear of a larger
world; the old, cherished, wistful hope that we could continue to live of
ourselves and by ourselves. And, underground, these emotions have continued to
exercise a paralyzing effect on policy. More than anything else, perhaps, they
have kept America a slumbering giant, unable to export its democratic faith to
the peoples of other nations, unable to play a full and affirmative role in the
world.
In time, a new isolationist formulation was bound to come--a new triangulation
by which the old emotions would try to make terms with the new realities and
issue in the form of up-to-date doctrine and program. But the struggle for a
new formulation was confused and difficult. Herbert Hoover, whose Old
Isolationist fundamentalism has resisted every temptation of novelty, set off
one phase of the discussion with his speech of December, 1950. General
MacArthur, who never was an Old Isolationist, set off another with his speeches
following his recall in April, 1951. At every stage, the confusions were
registered with seismographic accuracy in the stream of consciousness of the
ordinarily logical Senator Taft--as in his singular speech of April, 1951, when
he demanded a cut in the size of projected military forces, a reduction in the
military budget, and a more aggressive war in Asia (adding subsequently that
our reduced forces should be committed to the protection of the Suez Canal).
In the past few months, however, it has become evident that the travail is
over; that the process of crystallization has begun. Today the lineaments of
the new faith are at last visible. Senator Taft has written a book on foreign
policy. General MacArthur has given a series of able and eloquent speeches.
Their many followers have made many other statements. Out of all this it now
becomes possible to construct the broad and comprehensive design of the New
Isolationism.
The first thing to be observed of the New Isolationism is its rejection of the
word "isolationist." Mr. Hoover has even described his policies as the
"opposite" of isolationism. "I don't know what they mean by isolationist,"
Senator Taft says "nobody is an isolationist today....I would say that anybody
is an idiot who calls anybody else an isolationist." The fact that much of the
New Isolationism emerged under the aegis of General MacArthur made this
indignant repudiation of the isolationist name all the more plausible; the
General, of course, had been recalled for being far more interventionist than
the interventionists.
Indeed, it remains difficult at first glance to reconcile this enthusiasm for
General MacArthur with the rest of the New Isolationism. But one is bound to
conclude that General MacArthur's defiance of Truman provided the New
Isolationists with protective coloration; it gave them an air of deep concern
with the outside world. Even more important, perhaps, it provided them with
political capital on which no opposition party could resist drawing. But it did
not provide them with a serious program. Senator Taft, on the subject of the
Far Eastern war, sounded far more like himself when he advocated retreat at
Denver than when he advocated advance at Seattle; if he were President, would
he really reduce the Arms and then expand the Korean war?
As for Mr. Hoover, who shudders at the commitment of a single American to the
"quicksands" of Asia and Europe and believes that Communism "will decay and die
of its own poisons," his praise for MacArthur can surely be no more than a
sentimental gesture toward his former Chief of Staff. MacArthur's first
function has plainly been to provide the New Isolationists with a convenient
club with which to beat the Administration. It is, moreover, a club they wield
with relish, because an appearance of solicitude for the Far East is a natural
outlet for the traditional hatred of Europe. But, if this solicitude is more
than appearance, one wonders at the glassy boredom which overtakes the New
Isolationists when India is mentioned, or Point Four. Isolationism has always
been most interested in the foreign countries that have already been lost to
the enemy.
Still, the new Isolationism can actually make out a stronger case against the
charge of "isolationism" than just its enthusiasm for MacArthur. This case
rests on the fact that, on the surface, its general program does seem much more
like the program of President Truman than it does like the Old Isolationism of
the America First Committee. Senator Taft has concurred in measures which would
have appalled the Taft of a decade ago. His book, in fact, reaches its climax
in a seven-point program of his own; and his points are worth consideration.
They are: 1) rearmament; 2) economic aid to anti-Communist countries; 3)
military aid to anti-Communist countries; 4) warning to the Soviet Union that
aggression beyond certain lines will be regarded as a casus belli; 5) sending
American troops to nations threatened by or actually under attack; 6)
ideological warfare against Communism; 7) subversive war behind the Iron
Curtain. Not only do these seven points seem far from old-style isolationism;
but each one of them is today--and has been for some time--part of the Truman
foreign policy. If we are to take these seven points seriously, they represent
me-tooism with a vengeance. No wonder that the Senator felt constrained to add,
"There is much more agreement on the general character of the strategy to be
adopted than is generally supposed."
But how seriously are we to take these points? The fact that they are imbedded
in a book the rest of which is a bitter attack on the Truman foreign policy
might raise questions in suspicious minds. And additional evidence is
available. As Senator Brien McMahon noted in a skeptical analysis of the Taft
book, there are certain oddities about Taft's proprietary claim to these
policies. "The first is that as the Administration has proposed each of them to
the Congress, Senator Taft has vigorously opposed each of them. The second is
that having now stated the policies, Senator Taft immediately proceeds in this
and subsequent chapters to make clear that he doesn't really mean it."
Behind the virtuous rejection of the term "isolationist," behind the façade of
nominal support for existing policies, the New Isolationism has something quite
different in mind. If the present policy can be briefly defined, in President
Truman's phrase, as "peace through collective strength against aggression," the
New Isolationism boggles at the word "collective," and it recoils from the
whole theory of building "situations of strength." Its supreme emotional link
with the Old Isolationism, for example, is its dislike of allies and its desire
for unilateral action by the United States. "Go it alone," cried General
MacArthur in the hearings; and Senator Taft recently added, "The United Nations
is an utter failure as a means of preventing aggression. We can never rely on
it again." Facts may have destroyed the Old Isolationist policies; it may now
be necessary grudgingly to recognize the existence of the world. But, at least,
let us not get involved in the worry, expense, and danger of intimate
association with other nations.
If the New Isolationism is openly unhappy about "collective" restraint of
aggression, it is only slightly less unhappy in its reaction to the whole
policy of building strength in the free world. It does not disclaim the
objective; but it wants other nations to establish their own strength first in
order to prove themselves worthy of American aid (this rule does not apply,
however, to Chiang Kai-shek or Franco); and it adds that, in any case, the free
world can be built up at half the cost. Hence the persistent campaign to
whittle down every proposal for aid to other free nations; any difference, the
New Isolationists protest, is a difference in degree, not in principle. Yet
differences in degree in this field quickly become differences in principle, as
Senator Vandenberg used to demonstrate with his story of the futility of
throwing a fifteen-foot rope to a man drowning thirty feet from shore. The New
Isolationism is the policy of the fifteen-foot rope.
The difference in degree, of course, is the grudging compromise the Old
Isolationist emotions make with the grim realities of 1952. But it is a
compromise with these realities, not an acceptance of them. Senator Taft, once
again, has given the most lucid expression of the New Isolationist view. "The
policy on which all Republicans can unite," he recently said, "is one of
all-out opposition to the spread of Communism, recognizing that there is a
limit beyond which we cannot go." The editor of the New York Post has dubbed
this the all-out, halfway policy. It is the essence of the foreign policy of
the New Isolationism.
One must say "of the foreign policy" because foreign policy is not the main
concern of the New Isolationism. Indeed, a survey of the New Isolationist
literature quickly discloses the conviction that issues of domestic policy, for
the United States in 1952, are far more important and fateful than issues of
foreign policy. General MacArthur's concern with Korea may have obscured this
fact; but it was MacArthur himself who stated the basic premise of the New
Isolationism with classic simplicity in his speech last summer to the
Massachusetts legislature. "Talk of imminent threat to our national security
through the application of external force," he flatly said, "is pure nonsense."
Taft has frequently made the same point: "I do not believe it is at all clear
that the Russians contemplate a military conquest of the world...I believe they
know it is impossible. It would take them at least a hundred years to build up
their sea power."
From his military estimate, MacArthur marched on to the obvious conclusion. "It
is not of any external threat that I concern myself," he said, "but rather of
insidious forces working from within which have already so drastically altered
the character of our free institutions...those institutions we proudly called
the American way of life." The vital dangers to American freedom and survival,
in short, are not external; they are internal. And of the internal dangers,
two, it develops, are of decisive importance. One of these dangers is excessive
government spending. The other is Communist penetration within our own
country.
Government spending, in the New Isolationist view, is the overriding issue of
national survival. It makes heavy taxation necessary; and "the unconscionable
burden of taxation" in the words of General MacArthur, is destroying the free
enterprise system. "It is just as easy to get to socialism by increased taxes,"
Senator Taft recently remarked, "as it is by the Government taking over
industry." Worse than that, government spending brings the threat of inflation;
and inflation provides one more pretext for the imposition of government
controls. "All-out war and all-out mobilization," as Taft put it, "are an easy
method of socializing a country, and that socializing can easily be made
permanent." Thus government spending under the pretext of mobilization is the
beginning of a perilous road, whose inevitable end is the extinction of free
enterprise and the triumph of socialist regimentation.
If government spending is indeed the main threat, if the Soviet threat is "pure
nonsense," what possible reason is there except for New Deal doctrine and
socialist intrigue to continue spending at our present levels? So let us cut
down the budget--at the expense first of economic aid to free nations, then of
military aid, then of our military strength. The Chicago Tribune has already
drawn the entirely logical conclusion from the MacArthur dictum: "with far less
money for defense than has been appropriated, and probably without resort to
the draft, this country can feel secure. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization
is not needed for our safety." (This editorial was quoted recently at the UN
meeting in Paris with cordial approval by Andrei Vishinsky.)
The spending issue is straightforward enough. The function of the Communist
penetration issue is perhaps less immediately obvious, but on a moment's
reflection it too becomes perfectly clear. The problem the New Isolationism
faces is to disguise the awkward fact that, as we cut our outlays for foreign
aid, we retreat, step by step, from the world wide fight against Communism.
This fact has been favorably noted in Moscow, where the New Isolationist
attacks on American policy received grateful editorial comment. On February 2,
for example, Pravda gave nearly one quarter of its valuable space, ordinarily
reserved for pietistic letters to Stalin from factory workers or collective
farmers, to the most recent speech of Mr. Hoover, praising him for his attack
on United States foreign policy. In a New Year's review of the crisis in
American foreign policy, Pravda could happily invoke Joseph P. Kennedy, William
Philip Simms of the Scripps-Howard press, Karl H. Von Wiegand of the Hearst
press, David Lawrence, the Wall Street Journal, and the Commercial and
Financial Chronicle.
How are the New Isolationists to get around the fact that their proposals are
greeted with loud cheers in the Kremlin? Somehow they must cover their retreat;
and what better way to do so than by raising a great outcry about the supposed
dangers of Communism within our own country? Such a sham battle at home might
well distract attention from the stealthy desertion of our allies abroad. And
the outcry would have the further incidental advantage of putting frightened
liberals out of action and of smearing the whole movement for domestic
reform.
I do not suggest that these affairs arranged themselves in the minds of the New
Isolationists in quite this Machiavellian way. Still, anyone advocating
policies which benefit Communism abroad and win the approbation of
Pravda might
well be tempted to justify himself to his constituents by redoubling his zeal
to extirpate communism at home. This, surely, is the powerful logic of the
alliance between Taft and McCarthy. The simple fact is that Taft cannot
repudiate McCarthy, because he needs him too much. McCarthyism is an
indispensable part of the New Isolationism. Without McCarthyism the New
Isolationism would be almost indistinguishable from a policy of appeasement.
The New Isolationism thus has its plausible façade. Senator Taft has his seven
points: and one can assume that, if nominated, he will talk in an even more
recklessly internationalist vein. He has all the isolationist votes anyway.
But, beneath the facade, there remains the reality--the all-out, halfway policy
abroad, and at home a state which will refrain from intervening in economic
affairs but which will intervene like the devil in the thoughts and opinions of
its citizens. The triumph of this policy could lead abroad only to an overflow
of Soviet power into the regions from which we retreat--until we are forced
back into the Western Hemispheres, or, what is more likely until we perceive
what we are doing and then, having invited Soviet expansion, strike back in the
panic of total war. And at home we will move steadily into a garrison state,
run by men who admire Senator McCarthy and regard his operations as, in Senator
Taft's lapidary phrase, "fully justified."
The words of the New Isolationism count less than the deeds: and the deeds
shape up into a sinister pattern. The consolation is that this is probably a
last convulsive outbreak of an old nostalgia. Once we have exorcised this
latest version of isolationism, we may at last begin to live in the twentieth
century.
Copyright © 1952 by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. All rights
reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; May 1952; The New Isolationism; Volume 189, No. 5;
pages 34-38.
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