Chapter 4

Imperialism and Internationalism in the 1920s

The long discussion just concluded should make it easier for theorists and historians of African American thought, of Asian American studies, and of colonialism and postcolonial studies to recognize the relevance of the emerging social science of international relations to their own subjects, however insurmountable the distance or unintelligible the reference terms today between them and their colleagues in political science. It really was different once.¹

I turn now to the three most important institutional developments in advancing research and knowledge about international relations in the United States in the 1920s. They were more important than the rebranding of the Journal of Race Development and the monies that the Rockefeller Foundation paid to Harvard to fund its Bureau for International Research. The annual summer Institute of Politics at Williamstown did not survive the economic depression of the 1930s, and the Institute of Pacific Relations was a casualty of the Cold War and McCarthyism. The third, the Social Science Research Council, founded in 1923 to coordinate and support advanced research in a range of disciplines, is still in existence and has had powerful impacts in many areas of the human and behavioral sciences. It created its first committee on international relations in 1926, only three years after its founding.

The directors of the council established its international relations committee, according to its first staff member, James T. Shotwell, Columbia University’s celebrated historian and a member of Wilson’s World War I Inquiry, “in order to deal with the projects of research presented to it by the Institute of Pacific Relations. By reason of these requests, the earliest program of the Social Science Research Council in this field had to do with relations with the Orient.”² The Institute of Pacific Relations was founded during the Conference on Problems of the Pacific Peoples, which the YMCA organized. It was held over two weeks in Hawaii in July 1925. Delegates attended from Australia, Canada, China, Hawaii, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the mainland United States. In order to secure funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the YMCA officials were sidelined and the meeting was given a more disinterested scientific cast.³ Ray Lyman Wilbur, the president of Stanford, agreed to head it; he had just finished a two-year study of race relations on the Pacific Coast. George Hubbard Blakeslee, the editor of the original Journal of Race Development and the country’s best-known expert on American foreign policy in the Far East, served as co-chair. As Lyman recalled decades later, mounting “racial tensions…between the white and other races of the Pacific” motivated the organizers. “It might be too late to avoid an armed conflict between East and West. But we wanted to appeal to intelligent people in the Pacific countries to make an effort to avert such a catastrophe.”⁴ Delegates voted to support a permanent organization, comprised originally of six national councils (this was expanded over the next decades to include England, France, the Netherlands, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and others) and a secretariat that would organize the next conference in Honolulu in 1927 (Thirteen were held in all, the last in Lahore in 1958.).

The founders of the Institute of Pacific Relations viewed a research program, although costly, as vital to the future success of the institute, beginning with the question of the “biological and social effects of race admixture.”⁵ Thus, the first books produced under the institute’s auspices were Oriental Exclusion, that is, exclusion as a modern movement by white nations to control biological and economic competition, and Resident Orientals on the American Pacific Coast.⁶ The creation of an international relations committee within the Social Science Research Council is thus of a piece with the other committees it founded with its earliest partner, the National Research Council: the Committee on Scientific Problems of Human Migration, which was concerned with the postwar “migrational situation” and the “virtual elimination of space as a barrier to racial admixture,” a Committee on Racial Problems, and a Committee on Pioneer Belts that focused, in the words of committee head Isaiah Bowman in an agenda-setting Foreign Affairs article, a “science of settlement” in aid of white peoples’ expansion in northwest Canada, Rhodesia, western Australia, and elsewhere.⁷

The Institute of Politics at Williamstown, which was held each August from 1921 to 1930 on the grounds of Williams College, served as the model for the Institute of Pacific Relations. Contemporaries recognized it as the most influential institutional development in the study of international relations in the United States in the first postwar decade. The New York Times called it the country’s first “school of foreign affairs.”⁸ The first funding requests to the General Education Board, one of the philanthropic organizations founded by John D. Rockefeller, described the project as “a conference or institute closely resembling that of the Williamstown Institute of Politics although…narrower and more specific in its subject” and stated that its goal was “to solve racial conflict in the Pacific through free and frank discussion.” Similarly, the appeal to John D. Rockefeller Jr. for funds named the Institute of Politics at Williamstown as a model for bringing together “men of the East and the West for a thorough discussion of racial problems.”⁹

Political scientist Harry Garfield, the president of Williams College, who served as president of the American Political Science Association the year after he founded the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, explained its design: “To aid in the task of bringing home to our people an understanding of international relations in all their aspects—historical, political, social and economic—indeed, every phase in which nations stand to one another.”¹⁰ Garfield had obtained the approval of the college’s trustees for what was to become the first postgraduate seminar in international relations in 1913, but the outbreak of World War I put the plans on hold. Returning from a stint as U.S. fuel administrator, he obtained the funds to launch the institute in 1921 from Wall Street speculator and Wilson confidante Bernard Baruch, who was not identified in early publicity.¹¹ The University of Virginia’s Bruce Williams, a young assistant professor who reported on the inaugural sessions for the APSA, saw in it a new method for pursuing a “less cloistered and ineffectual” form of “applied political science.”¹²

As Garfield explained in a meeting with the group that wanted to organize the Institute of Pacific Relations, the basic format that had emerged in Williamstown was the closed round table or a small group discussion led by an expert in the subject, a set of larger open round tables for all institute members, and public addresses open to the surrounding community. He emphasized the importance of soliciting a wide range of viewpoints and avoiding resolutions of any kind.¹³ Each of the institutes combined a focus on world regions and issue areas. Round tables routinely focused on Pacific, Near Eastern, Latin American, and European affairs and in the first years covered subjects such as the League of Nations, disarmament, the Dawes Plan, threats to white supremacy, and the struggle for raw materials.

Senior scholars who ten and twenty years previously had introduced the study of colonial administration and race development in the United States played leadership roles in the Institute of Politics at Williamstown. Blakeslee was responsible for the round tables on Far Eastern affairs. Leo S. Rowe, a University of Pennsylvania PhD who in 1900 had been appointed by William McKinley to the new Puerto Rican Code Commission, was another. He led the institute’s annual sessions on inter-American affairs as director general of the Pan-American Union, the precursor to the Organization of American States. The institute also showcased the rising young stars of the field, including Buell and the new University of Chicago professor Quincy Wright; the most highly praised of the young progressives, Edward Mead Earle, who was hired at Columbia after receiving his PhD there for a remarkable dissertation on imperialism in Turkey; and his fellow Columbia PhD, Leland Jenks, who taught first at Amherst and then at Wellesley.¹⁴

Consider two measures of the institute’s impact on the postwar profession. One is the growing shelf of books—twenty-nine volumes in ten years—issued under the institute’s auspices, both with the Macmillan Company and Yale University Press. The premier volume collected James Bryce’s eight lectures as a book titled International Relations, the last book this leading statesman and scholar published before his death in 1923.¹⁵ Professor Achille Viallate of the École Libre des Sciences Politiques (what we now know as Sciences Po) gave the follow-up lectures, issued as Economic Imperialism and International Relations.¹⁶ The subjects of his 1922, 1923, and 1924 roundtables served as the foundation of William S. Culbertson’s compendium of the “the major economic factors in international relations,” International Economic Policies. In it he introduced the idea that a new and dangerous form of mercantilism was underpinning the rivalry for “raw materials, energy resources, and the privilege to export capital,” which he argued not only fueled tensions among capitalistic nations but also created dangers in the case of nonwhite races.¹⁷

A second measure of the influence of the Institute of Politics at Williamstown is the proliferation of institutes based on it, some of which were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education Board. Beyond the Institute of Pacific Relations in Hawaii, there was the Institute of International Relations at Furman University in South Carolina, which moved to the University of Georgia in 1927. Sir Alfred Zimmern copied the model at the University of Geneva, launching the first summer school in international affairs (commonly called the Zimmern School) there in 1924. The University of Chicago launched a smaller, one-round-table version of the institute in 1923 known as the Harris Institute, through the largesse of the heirs of private banker Norman Wait Harris; Quincy Wright was in charge.¹⁸ According to the American Political Science Review, in 1925, the U.S. colonial commission began the Institute of Inter-American Relations at the University of Puerto Rico, another Williamstown-influenced project.¹⁹ In 1926, “a new star in the constellation of international institutes” arose in Riverside, California, at the Mission Inn, focusing heavily on interracial relations.²⁰

Our Legions Are Dollars

The 1928 Williamstown Institute turned more systematically than in previous years to “the growing economic and political interests of the United States in backward countries, the nationalist movements in those countries, and the effect which each of these factors has upon the other.”²¹ The round tables dealt with economic imperialism more than any other topic, according to the New York Times, including the topics of the continued need for “raw materials in the undeveloped areas” and the consequences of “white nations” sending “their surplus capital and engineering, scientific, commercial and banking experts into the regions peopled by the colored races.” The United States was facing the problem of how to avoid “exploitation of colored people,” the spread of the kinds of conflicts that it faced in Latin America and Japan faced in China, and the economic rivalries with other imperial powers that had already dragged the world into war. And it faced these problems more acutely “than any other country,” having assumed a position of “world leadership,” even if today some imagine the time as one of a U.S. return to relative “isolation” and of “withdrawal” from world affairs.²²

Among the firsts that year, Charles W. Hackett, a historian at the University of Texas and future founder of the university’s Institute of Latin-America Studies, led a round table on the Caribbean that was probably the most heated and contested session ever. The New York Times headlined another round table: “First Woman to Lecture.” Halidé Edib Hanum, the Turkish writer, feminist, and exiled opponent of Atatürk, led the sessions on problems of Turkey.

However, the other first went wholly unnoticed by the Times. Rayford Logan, a 1917 Williams alumnus, was the first African American to give a paper at Williamstown. The future Howard school mainstay was then at Virginia Union University, where in addition to teaching foreign languages he created the first courses in African American history, African history, and the history of imperialism. At Williamstown he presented a long, carefully crafted critique of the League of Nations mandate system.²³ The “trusteeship” principle enshrined in Article 22 of the covenant, which Wilsonians held up as the answer to the exploitation of subjugated peoples that characterized the past imperial era, was in fact how whites had justified domination over the same “tribal peoples” at least as far back as the Berlin Conference in 1885 and the passage of the Dawes Act in the United States in 1887.²⁴ The designation of different classes of mandates made tutelage permanent for black people. (Class A mandates were the former Ottoman territories in the Middle East, Class B mandates were the former German colonies in Central Africa, and Class C mandates were the territories in southern Africa and the Pacific that South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand wanted to annex.)

Logan was right, of course. In the original proposal by Smuts, it was the European territories the Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires had lost that would require temporary “mandatary” administration. For the “barbarians” in the African and South Pacific territories, “political self-determination in the European sense” was unimaginable.²⁵ British colonial secretary Lord Milner said that the new African mandates “differ[ed] from colonial possessions possibly only in name.”²⁶ Logan, however, said that ultimately it wouldn’t matter. “One need not be too pessimistic about the coming of age of Africa. The best-devised plans of diplomats have vanished as rapidly as their prophecies. Leagues and Covenants to the contrary notwithstanding, the colonies of Africa, it is believed, will one day be independent countries.” To that end, Logan’s account recognized a positive information-gathering and oversight role for the Permanent Mandates Commission despite the forces of imperialism arrayed against it and despite the commission’s inability to force the mandatory powers to accept its authority. Logan ended by reporting on the recommendation from the fourth Pan-African Congress in 1927 that a Negro member be appointed to the commission, which, needless to say, had gone unanswered.

Raymond Leslie Buell ran four open conferences on problems in Africa during the last week. The New York Times did take note in his case, and these generated almost as much controversy as the Caribbean discussion. Buell argued in step with Logan and counter to prevailing opinion that African national aspirations were real and the prospect of increasing political mobilization for freedom was likely. Therefore the white race could choose either “a great inter-racial war or a great experiment in inter-racial cooperation and the social control of wealth.”²⁷

The record to date showed that the continent’s people bore more of the costs of “development of its resources” and less of the benefits. However, Buell also discussed recent positive (albeit piecemeal) changes in colonial administration. In the Foreign Affairs article from which his talk was drawn, he offered the provisional hypothesis that mandate territories were doing better on various measures than adjoining colonies. This was the question he would guide a young Harvard PhD student, Ralph Bunche, to test just a few years later. (Bunche came to the opposite conclusion.) For Buell, not surprisingly, internationalism in the form of extending the reach of both the mandates commission and the principle of the open door—for capital in all economic sectors and also for missionaries—and encouraging the migration and employment of western doctors, engineers, and teachers was the means by which white governments could shape the inevitable albeit long-term transition (“even if after a hundred years”) to self-rule. Buell had concluded his article with the suggestion that the United States and European governments in particular employ African American professionals in African uplift efforts, arguing that this just might head off their turn instead “to supporting anti-racial and revolutionary movements which will be as disastrous to blacks as to whites.”²⁸

Mordecai Johnson, who two years earlier had become the first African American president of Howard University and whom Locke had recommended for the session, followed Buell with some comments ostensibly on how Africa was viewed by Aframerica.²⁹ He reinforced Buell’s account of the exploitative labor regime on the plantations and in the mines that had decimated communities and lives. The issue, he said, was not between black and white races, but, as in other countries, between “a comparatively small group of capitalists and the great mass of people.”³⁰

Critics pounded both Johnson and Buell with arguments that might have been novel at the time in the U.S. context but have long since become clichés. Economic historian Charles Ryle Fay, who had trained at the London School of Economics, defended England’s honor. It had raised the Gold Coast from “cannibalism to…peace and prosperity” while trying to teach Africans self-government, although it was difficult to even get the idea across to them. University of Washington sociologist Roderick D. McKenzie—whom the New York Times described as an expert on “race relations,” although later histories remember him as a pioneering “human ecologist” and as the person who produced the study Oriental Exclusion, disputed Buell’s estimates of population decline under European rule and mocked Johnson for believing that the white race was a “great octopus” that went to Africa to “strangle the poor colored people.”

Later that night Belgian socialist and Parliament member Louis Piérard gave a speech in rebuttal, reminding critics that whites had “given the natives hospitals, roads, schools, and railways.” He called on the audience to deal realistically with the realities of colonialism. Withdrawal would mean either a new world war or a return to barbarism by the natives.

Buell was undeterred. The next day he took up the resources issue in a conference on Liberia. His research in Monrovia resulted in a series of highly publicized charges against the Firestone Corporation’s one-million-acre rubber concession, which he said was organized as a plantation, unlike the organization of production in the British and French colonies he had visited. One charge he made was that the firm had disguised its role in originating the loan that the Liberian government had been obliged to contract as a condition for Firestone investing there. We know now that Harvey Firestone viewed the loan as an instrument for controlling the Liberian state, precisely as Buell had asserted. The new, higher rate of debt service flowed not to the repaid British and French creditors (thus making interference by the two governments in Liberian affairs less likely), but to the U.S. company, which was overseen by a customs administration that had been reorganized by the U.S. government and was led by Americans.

These terms remained secret until they were exposed in 1931 as an outcome of Buell’s second, more explosive charge. He claimed that the firm depended in part on a government-organized system of forced labor—with the rents flowing to officials and their allies—and in part on direct contracts with and payments to rural elites (“tribal chiefs”) who pressed villagers into service. Buell went even further. The involvement of former commerce secretary Herbert Hoover (who at the time was running for president) and the U.S. state department demonstrated that the United States was engaged “for the first time in economic imperialism outside of the area covered by the Monroe Doctrine.”³² Buell earned a public rebuke from Phillip Marshal Brown, the former diplomat who was teaching international law at Princeton and was a member of the advisory board of the institute, for injecting partisan politics into a discussion of international affairs, while Harry Garfield challenged Buell’s claims. The Wall Street Journal reported the state department’s criticisms of Buell’s numerous “inaccuracies.” Nonetheless, three years later a League of Nations investigation confirmed the existence of virtual slave labor in Liberia, which led to the resignation of the Liberian president and others in his circle.³³

The Institute of Politics at Williamstown also kick-started, ironically enough, the career of the most outspoken critic of the proliferating international relations institutes and of Buell’s brand of internationalism in the 1920s. John Franklin Carter was a widely read columnist (who used the pseudonym Jay Franklin) and a confidante of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He later ran a private intelligence operation for the White House during World War II. In 1922, Garfield hired him to round up speakers in Europe for the next summer’s institute. Carter picked up a reporting job while in Rome that opened the door to work for the New York Times.³⁴ His “descent from the heights of Wilsonian idealism” happened early.³⁵

In his first of more than thirty books, Man Is War (1926), Carter took aim at the peace movement and internationalists who were still seeking to bring the United States into the League of Nations. Efforts to abolish war or scare Americans into joining the league as the means of securing a viable peace rested on a profound misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of the forces that governed international relations in what he called the Atlantic system. The arguments put forward at the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, the Foreign Policy Association, and kindred groups notwithstanding, “wars are entirely thinkable[,]…now in progress, and far from being the downfall of civilization, are being waged in its behalf.” The new wars “will take the style of wars of nationalism,” which nonetheless needed to be understood as an effect of international forces, imperialism chief among them.³⁶

He followed Man Is War with a sequel, Conquest: America’s Painless Imperialism (1928). Attacks on American foreign policy were often wrong-headed because not all empires were alike, he claimed. “American empire is intangible, invulnerable, an influence over the minds and customs of mankind which is confirmed every time the world installs an adding-machine, dances to jazz, buys a bale of cotton, sells a pound of rubber, or borrows an American dollar.”³⁷ This was Carter groping for a strategy to secure what we have since come to describe as domination through consent. In the late 1920s that appeared to him to require accommodation to nationalism in Latin America (anticipating the Good Neighbor Policy of the Roosevelt administration) while resisting interventionist campaigns that promoted democracy in Europe and self-rule in the European dependencies. The United States would lead by example. This position is similar to the one we saw put forward in the 1890s by John W. Burgess and has been revived many times since by conservatives who oppose crusades in the name of decolonization, nation-building, democratization, and the like.

The Origins of the Howard School

One more key institution for the study of international relations in the United States was founded in the 1920s and has gone unrecognized since. The story of the Howard school, in which Alain Locke played a central role, begins, paradoxically, with his firing in June 1925 by an embattled and, it turns out, last white Howard University president on a campus rocked by rising student (“New Negro”) militancy and a faculty fighting for higher salaries. At the height of the crisis with President J. Stanley Durkee and the Howard Board of Trustees, Locke called it “our Bunker Hill days” in a struggle for “the next step of freedom in our Negro colleges.”³⁸ Locke remained institutionally adrift and in ill health while fighting his firing (and editing The New Negro). In the spring of 1926 he submitted a proposal to New York’s Foreign Policy Association for a study of the African mandates system that would make its operations better known among African Americans in particular. He saw the project as one part of a larger research program on Africa for which he sought funding from the Social Science Research Council. (He did not succeed.)³⁹ The idea of funding Locke “shook the executive board [of the Foreign Policy Association] to its depths,” although he got the grant.⁴⁰

The records I consulted don’t spell out the source of the controversy and Locke’s biographers don’t discuss it. The obvious one is that Locke was a black man and thus his objectivity if not his abilities were suspect. Locke had an ally on the board, however: founding member Paul Kellogg, editor and owner of The Survey and Survey Graphic magazines. Locke had edited the themed issue “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” for the latter. At any rate, the decision came just as Raymond Leslie Buell was taking over from a seriously ill Edward Mead Earle as the Foreign Policy Association’s research director. Buell and Locke met for the first time to discuss the project as Locke prepared to set sail for Europe in 1927, and they corresponded periodically over the next months. Mainly Buell sought Locke’s help with sources from or about the latter’s contacts in Paris, including Senegalese deputy Blaise Diagne and Diagne’s most famous antagonist, West Indian writer René Maran.⁴¹ In turn, he provided Locke with an introduction to political scientist (and future American Cyanamid executive) Huntington Gilchrist, a member of the Secretariat of the League of Nations.

It turns out that Buell had doubts about the project (“I am not clear…just what Mr. Locke has in mind”). He warned Foreign Policy Association board member Abbe Livingston Warshuis, who had asked Buell for his appraisal, of a potential problem down the road.⁴² Locke was unlikely to achieve much in Geneva, particularly during the time that the league’s assembly was in session. Buell assumed that the board had fully weighed the “advantages and disadvantages of having a Negro go to Geneva under the FPA name.” He worried that Locke would seek additional funds to continue his work in Africa. In that case, the association would doubtless pay a high price in terms of its reputation and future access, since the colonial powers were notoriously suspicious of blacks from the United States working inside the colonies.⁴³ Were Buell’s fears in this case colored by his new employers’ decision to fund research that seemed to overlap with his own not-yet-completed study (for which he also depended on Locke’s help)?⁴⁴ If so, Buell needn’t have worried.

It took Locke close to two years to deliver his oft-promised and repeatedly postponed written report on the mandates to the Foreign Policy Association. It was an inordinately long delay, even taking into account the vast array of endeavors Locke was pursuing—writing a grant for a study on African arts and culture; founding a museum in Harlem, where he had relocated; a curatorial project; travel; lectures; book reviewing; and so forth.⁴⁵ In addition, Locke had learned on the eve of his Geneva trip that Howard’s new president, Mordecai Johnson, was giving him back his job, and Locke returned to the Howard campus full time that fall.

His mandates report frames the issue in terms of the centrality of imperialism in leading to the recent world conflict and the threat that “the imperialistic world powers, America included” continue to pose to world peace. The question for Locke was whether or not the mandates principle, which he said was “a new code of empire,” could advance effective internationalist solutions to the problems of race development and reverse the exploitative land, labor, and natural resource regimes that had been in place since the 1800s. Unfortunately, the report never resolved the tension between the workman-like recounting of administrative details and the muted recognition of both the “compromises” involved in the mandates’ creation and the continued oppressive conditions under which Africans labored.⁴⁶ His biographers call the memorandum “detached,” but bloodless may be better, especially in comparison to Buell’s and Logan’s essays, the latter of which Locke sought in vain to have the Foreign Policy Association publish in his place. In any event, the Foreign Policy Association requested revisions, offered him some extra remuneration for his troubles, and planned to distribute 9,000 free copies, but Locke never submitted a final version.

As he later told his friend Kellogg, it was “an albatross,” and he knew both his “role” and his “limitations.”⁴⁷ The real value of the mandates research, he said, was in inspiring his plan for an “African studies program” at Howard. To be clear, what he meant by the term was an international orientation to “the race problem, not as a special problem but as a phase of world adjustment.”⁴⁸ The network of race and imperialism scholars he would bring together under this rubric at this juncture rivaled his work as an impresario in African American arts and literature, for which he is most often remembered.

He and his Howard colleagues had already taken the first step by hiring a 25-year-old MA in political theory from Harvard named Ralph Bunche to teach political science.⁴⁹ Bunche covered the entire curriculum, from American politics to theories of imperialism and comparative colonial administration. Locke had his eye on Logan, a specialist on Haiti and sharp critic of the U.S. occupation, to head African studies, and he opened the door for Logan at the Foreign Policy Association, where Buell became a great patron. Unfortunately, the Carnegie Foundation turned down the African studies proposal, and Logan did not join the Howard faculty until 1938.⁵⁰

Buell, as president of the Foreign Policy Association after 1933, was the primary promoter of these black international relations scholars to the government, foundations, and the white academy through World War II. It is no discredit to him that his patronage alone was not sufficient to overcome the racism that the Howard school made a central focus of its theorizing. Locke, in turn, was a key intermediary in Buell’s and the Foreign Policy Association’s efforts to reach out to African American organizations in its various campaigns for the reform of U.S. policies in Cuba, Haiti, Liberia, Puerto Rico, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

The Market Collapse of International Relations

The economic downturn of the 1930s posed an almost insurmountable challenge to institution building in the field of international relations anywhere, let alone at Howard. With the foundations reducing their outlays, the Social Science Research Council closed down its international relations committee and then had to scramble to respond to the outbreak of World War II. James Shotwell, a master internationalist entrepreneur and former head of the Social Science Research Council’s international relations committee, sought in vain for funding for two new institutes, one for Central European and the other for Caribbean affairs along the lines of the Institute of Pacific Relations. Princeton launched its School of Public and International Affairs in 1930 to compete with the Walter Hines Page School of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins, which opened the same year, although “school” in Princeton’s case was an expression of a more hopeful future. It remained until 1948 (when it was renamed the Woodrow Wilson School) what we would now call a “program” for undergraduate majors built mainly on existing courses. Princeton professor John Whitton told Buell, “A man will be added to the Department of History in order to teach Latin-American problems. Another man, probably a Chinaman, will be added to the Department of Politics to cover the Pacific and the Far East. The course in international law will be lengthened to one year. The same will be done with the course on international relations.”⁵¹ Raymond Buell had proposed that he organize an Institute of Interracial Problems at Princeton to anchor advanced study in the discipline, but nothing came of the idea. At Johns Hopkins, the Page School also foundered for most of the decade.

A new and subsequently crucial concept (and identity) for writers and students of international relations—“realism” and “realist”—was introduced in the United States in the 1930s. It was not introduced by one of the “late” repentant Wilsonians of the last half of the 1930s, such as Buell, Edward Mead Earle, Reinhold Niebuhr, or Nicolas Spykman, the latter a specialist on the philosophy of Georg Simmel, who was about to reinvent himself as a student of geopolitik. Nor can we credit, as most now do, the former diplomat who occupied the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics at the University of Wales, Edward Hallett Carr, since the book that matters to the conventional lineage, The Twenty Years Crisis, did not come out until 1939. It was also not Hans Morgenthau, the German émigré lawyer most associated with the concept who did not come to the United States until 1937 and began teaching the subject during World War II. Rather, the honor belongs to Lothrop Stoddard, whose consistent critique of internationalism and imperialism as the twin threats to Anglo-Saxon hegemony had made him one of the most recognized public intellectuals of the interwar era.

When the market for international relations all but dried up during the worst years of the Great Depression, Stoddard returned to writing on world affairs only in 1932 with two books in one year, Europe and Our Money and Lonely America. “Realism” was the wholly unfamiliar concept—and was rendered in italics—in both. Harvard’s Richard Langer lauded Europe and Our Money in Foreign Affairs as a “telling attack upon the uncritical investment of American money in Europe.” In fact, it was the best review he ever gave Stoddard. Lonely America, however, was “like the author’s other productions, well-informed, frank, somewhat sensational…. As the author sees it, we have gotten ourselves into a pretty mess, and are now alone in a predatory world. He prides himself on being a realist and does not hesitate to lay his color on in gobs in order to get the effects he desires.”⁵²

Stoddard analyzed the disjuncture between the reality of the dominion the United States exercised—its paramountcy in Latin America and the Caribbean, the swagger of “Gold and Paper” in Europe, and the jostling with other great white powers for influence in the Pacific—and Americans’ inability to comprehend the dangers let alone craft a coherent national policy to deal with “the likelihood of armed strife” and “war on a grand scale.” Sectional cleavages and the privileged position of banks and other business interests went far to explain the inconsistent and contradictory tendencies in post-Versailles foreign policies that were antagonizing nationalists everywhere and leaving the United States isolated. “We are hated for our tariffs and our immigration laws; for our tourists, our films, and our jazz,” Stoddard said. Uncle Sam had been “rechristened “Uncle Shylock.”⁵³

Internationalists, he claimed, conjured a phantom world out of “ignorance, sentimentalism, cloudy idealism, bumptious conceit, and smug self-righteousness.” He drew on John Carter’s Man Is War for his critique of the small, unfortunately influential minority of Wilsonians who headed pro-league organizations and comprised the core of both the Council of Foreign Relations and the Foreign Policy Association, which continued to press for deepening U.S. involvement in European affairs. It was sometimes hard to tell, he said, where the honorable if misguided concern for America ended and foreign propaganda and the private projects of bankers and brokers began. The “delusion of international cooperation” was of far greater consequence in the case of the pacifist and disarmament movements, with their lunatic fringe and feminist auxiliary. These disparate currents in support of a misguided internationalist project were propelling the country forward to the surrender of sovereignty, the sharing of resources, the decline of living standards, and, ultimately, the “sacrifice of race.”

In the last and most vital matter, he turned to Sir Arthur Keith, the renowned Scottish doctor and anthropologist who warned of the scourge of internationalism: “If all mankind is to sleep under a common tribal blanket, black, yellow, brown, and white must give and take in marriage, and distribute in common progeny the inheritance which each has come by in their uphill struggle.”⁵⁴ Stoddard also echoed Keith’s call to resist. “Head and heart will rise against such a program…. Without competition, mankind can never progress; the price of progress is competition—nay, race prejudice and, what is the same thing, national antagonism, have to be purchased not with gold but with life.”⁵⁵

Lonely America ended like all the other critiques of the “improvisations” after the accident of “finding ourselves the world Colossus” and of our susceptibility to “the hypnotic power of phrases” with proposals that never quite seem up to the job. Stoddard praised the already impressive upgrades in the U.S. diplomatic machinery and called for more. Similarly, he argued that because of the war, U.S. military capacity had vastly improved to the point where it could protect vital interests in the short term, “but not as strong as they should be in so crucial period of world politics.” The real work was to be done in guiding public opinion through an “unremitting campaign of popular education on foreign affairs.” Most important, he admonished his readers, “Become clear-sighted realists—or take the consequences.”⁵⁶