NEARING THE END of his second term, a weary George Washington issued a public letter entitled “The Address of Gen. Washington to the People of America on His Declining the Presidency of the United States.” Despite a clamor for him to stand for a third term as president, Washington wished nothing more than to return to his beloved Mount Vernon. Having endured the slings and arrows of the highest office for eight years, he believed it was time to make way for others. By leaving voluntarily, he would establish a tradition of presidents serving no more than two terms that would endure for nearly a century and a half.
Drafted with the help of Alexander Hamilton, the letter was a profound reflection on Washington’s time in office and the first president’s appeal for national unity. Known today as Washington’s “Farewell Address,” the message warned against the foreign intrigue that had threatened domestic harmony during his years in the presidency. Partisans of Britain or France, personified in Washington’s cabinet by Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, respectively, had allowed their preference for one country or the other to affect their political judgment and inflame their political followers. With consummate skill, Washington had steered the young republic through the diplomatic and military storms that raged across the European continent. In time, the United States might develop into a military power capable of contending with the empires of Europe, but Washington believed Americans should focus on their own domestic affairs, and take advantage of the protection provided by the expansive oceans that surrounded them. He wrote:
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.
Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities. . . .
Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?
It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world. . . .
The American people took this advice to heart, and while their isolation in the nineteenth century was never absolute, and the War of 1812 would bring them again into armed conflict with Great Britain, for the most part the United States remained aloof from the affairs of Europe. The population grew exponentially and the republic quickly expanded across the continent, in large part because that champion of limited government, Thomas Jefferson, nearly doubled the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase. America’s original sin of slavery deepened divisions between the North and South, resulting in the conflict the founders had assidously avoided. But while jaded European statesmen watched with interest as the upstart republic began tearing at the seams, and commercial ties between England and the Southern states might have led to foreign intervention in the “vicissitudes of her politics,” the United States continued keeping foreign affairs at the margins of its political concerns.
Jefferson’s warnings from his “Notes on the State of Virginia” that God’s justice would not sleep forever on the issue of slavery were realized in 1861 when a civil war exploded over the issue. The Union’s failure to put down the Confederate rebellion made European intervention in the American conflict a possibility. But deft diplomacy by President Abraham Lincoln and his secretary of state, William H. Seward, discouraged European powers from aggressively exploiting the American tragedy. The peace at Appomattox and the gradual reunification of the country set America on a course of mighty economic expansion, as the energy hitherto poured into sectional conflict was instead devoted to industrial development. Within two decades of the war’s end, that expansion would usher in the Golden Age and a century of explosive economic growth.
Europe looked with wonder at the United States and the loud, clanging vibrancy of its economy and culture. A new aristocracy of American titans guided America’s economy and influenced its politics in a manner that precipitated the development of a new unbridled capitalism. An era of relative peace on both sides of the Atlantic allowed America to further heal the wounds of war without foreign distractions. Only in 1893 did American ministers abroad first become identified as ambassadors, and while distinguished figures such as John Hay enjoyed enhanced status in London and elsewhere, diplomacy remained a leisurely craft that rarely drew attention from the population at large. Affluent Americans began traveling to Europe in far larger numbers, and interest in the Old World increased with Americans’ disposable income. But a newfound interest in European culture and civilization did not translate into political support for a more engaged US foreign policy toward the Continent.
As Dean Acheson observed, “The impingement in the nineteenth century of what the Supreme Court has called ‘the vast external realm’ upon American interests occurred rarely, and usually only when wars between foreign nations interfered with our commerce or when foreign nations intervened in our hemisphere.”
The first cracks in this isolationist resolve began to appear near the close of the century. The heavy-handed efforts of Spain to subdue its restive colony of Cuba inflamed the press and inspired ambitious war hawks in Washington to prepare for battle. Many blamed the explosion of the warship USS Maine in Havana Harbor on the Spanish, and soon war fever gripped America. None celebrated the outbreak of the “Splendid Little War” more than the young assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, who mobilized the US fleet on his own initiative.
PRESIDENT MCKINLEY, WHOM Roosevelt derided for having “a backbone like a chocolate éclair,” was inclined to caution. But the impatient assistant secretary would not be deterred, and the navy was deployed to battle the Spanish fleet. The resulting war was brutishly short, and gave the United States its first taste of possessing an overseas empire with holdings in the Philippines and Guam.
Still, the overwhelming preference of the American people was to look inward. Roosevelt entered the White House three years later, but was more restrained in the realm of foreign affairs as president than he had been under McKinley. Rather than starting wars, he gained international recognition for brokering a peace: After the Russians and the Japanese had come to blows in 1904, Roosevelt offered to mediate an end to the conflict. Thus did the “war hawk” become the first president of the United States to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
The first large-scale American military intervention abroad was its belated entry into the First World War in 1917, after repeated German provocations made neutrality politically impossible. But even that momentous engagement in the cauldron of Europe, which saw three million Americans in uniform and 114,000 killed, was quickly followed by a return to reflexive isolation. President Woodrow Wilson, the reluctant commander in chief, had been transformed into a passionate prophet of international cooperation, and traveled the country to promote American entry into the new League of Nations. Most Americans, and their elected representatives, remained unmoved by his exhortations, and the wartime president only succeeded in offending Republicans and wrecking his health. Wilson finished out his final term a near invalid.
Then as later, the Senate would prove to be an impregnable citadel of isolationism. In a foreshadowing of the events of 1947, a Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would emerge as a key figure in Wilson’s campaign for a more engaged foreign policy. But rather than the bipartisan champion to be discussed later, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., of Massachusetts, opposed Wilson’s draft treaty and allowed only a watered-down version to reach the floor. Inspired by near-religious zeal, Wilson refused to compromise, and instructed his supporters to oppose Lodge’s bill. It was consequently rejected, and the president’s preferred version was then voted down by an even greater margin. Well into the twentieth century, even after America’s participation in a world war, Washington’s admonition held sway.
For Americans, war remained a lamentable interlude, not a way of life. The military establishment that had so quickly expanded during its engagement in the First World War quickly contracted to its customarily modest proportions. The two decades that followed the 1919 Versailles peace agreement saw America’s armed forces in dramatic decline. By 1940, the army was only the eighteenth largest in the world.
When Hitler launched his blitzkreig against Poland on September 1, 1939, Europe again was thrust into war; the United States under President Franklin Roosevelt again adopted a position of neutrality. So adamantly was public opinion against involvement in the latest European cataclysm that even the nightly reports of the merciless German bombing raids on London failed to ignite any martial spirit in the American electorate. The relentless courting of Roosevelt by the British prime minister, Winston Churchill (who succeeded Neville Chamberlain on May 10, 1940), and the ominous threat a triumphant Hitler might pose to the world, moved FDR to quietly favor the Allied war effort. But much to Churchill’s frustration, Roosevelt moved with extreme caution and, as late as November 1940, while campaigning for an unprecedented third term, declared, “The first purpose of our foreign policy is to keep our country out of war.”
His caution was justified. As late as September 1941, former president Herbert Hoover observed that after the First World War, “Europe degenerated into a hell, the brew from which poisons the earth today,” and warned against “sacrificing our sons” in another war resulting from “the eternal malign forces of Europe.” This apocalyptic language from Roosevelt’s predecessor accurately reflected the feelings of millions of Americans about the Old World and its endless conflicts.
But for the Japanese’s attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s foolish declaration of war on the United States four days later, American entry into the Second World War would have come much later, if it came at all. Only Churchill’s deft personal diplomacy persuaded the Americans to focus first on the European theater rather than the Pacific. But the end of neutrality and the mobilization for total war were acts of self-interest on America’s part, and not an altruistic campaign by US soldiers to save the British Empire from collapse. There was every reason to believe that once Germany and Japan were defeated, the United States would retreat once again behind its geographical fortifications and forsake any further involvement in European affairs.
The historic tides created by the pull of World War II, and the scale of tragedy resulting from that great war, demanded a different response from Washington. The Soviet Union, wartime ally of the United States and the United Kingdom, had paid a disproportionate share of the butcher’s bill for victory over Hitler. Nine out of every ten German soldiers who died in the war were killed on the eastern front at the hands of Soviet soldiers, and Russian casualties were horrendous. As many as twenty-nine million Russian citizens perished during the war, while the US and the UK each lost about four hundred thousand souls. Driven by an understandable sense of entitlement to the spoils of war, and an overwhelming ideological drive to spread communism across Europe, the Soviet Union embarked on a policy of expansion.
Having sunk so much blood and treasure into winning a war against fascism, would the United States now leave the field to the equally repellent creed of Soviet communism, and a leader who had killed tens of millions of his own citizens before the war? World War II had also killed millions in Europe, ravaged huge sections of cities, and left masses of people starving amid the ruins; tuberculosis and other diseases were rampant. Such wretched conditions bred communist influence, with false promises of equality and economic justice. The question facing Truman following the war’s end was whether the world’s sole economic superpower would turn a blind eye yet again to an ever-expanding tyrannical regime.