978 1 137 58432 8 PDF

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL THOUGHT
edited by
MOLLY
COCHRAN
CORNELIA
NAVARI
PROGRESSIVISM
AND US FOREIGN
POLICY BETWEEN
THE WORLD WARS
The Palgrave Macmillan History of International
Thought
Series editors
Brian Schmidt
Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
David Long
Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought book series
(HIT) publishes scholarly monographs and edited collections on the intel-
lectual, conceptual, and disciplinary history of international relations. The
aim of the series is to recover the intellectual and social milieu of individual
writers, publicists, and other significant figures in either the field of
International Relations or international political thought more broadly,
and to assesses the contribution that these authors have made to the devel-
opment of international theory. HIT embraces the historiographical turn
that has taken place within International Relations as more and more
scholars are interested in understanding both the disciplinary history of
the field, and the history of international thought. Books that historically
analyze the evolution of particular ideas, concepts, discourses, and promi-
nent, as well as neglected, figures in the field all fit within the scope of the
series. HIT is intended to be interdisciplinary in outlook and will be of
interest to specialists and students in International Relations, International
History, Political Science, Political Theory, and Sociology.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14419
Molly Cochran • Cornelia Navari
Editors
Progressivism and US
Foreign Policy
between the World
Wars
Editors
Molly Cochran Cornelia Navari
Department of Social Sciences University of Buckingham
Oxford Brookes University Buckingham, Buckinghamshire
Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom United Kingdom
The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought

ISBN 978-1-137-58433-5 ISBN 978-1-137-58432-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58432-8
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Series Editor’s Preface
As Editors of the Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought

series, we aim to publish the highest quality research on the intellectual,
conceptual, and disciplinary history of international relations (IR). The
books in the series assess the contribution that individual writers—aca-
demics, publicists, and other significant figures—have made to the devel-
opment of thinking on IR. Central to this task is the historical reconstruction
and interpretation that recovers the intellectual and social milieu within
which their subjects were writing. Volumes have also traced the course of
traditions, their shifting grounds, or common questions, exploring here-
tofore neglected pathways of international theory and providing new
insight and refreshed context for established approaches such as realism
and liberalism. And the series embraces the historiographical turn that has
taken place within academic IR with the growth of interest in understand-
ing both the disciplinary history of the field and the history of interna-
tional thought. A critical concern of the series is the institutional and
intellectual development of the study of IR as an academic pursuit. The
series is expressly pluralist and as such open to both critical and traditional
work—work that presents historical reconstruction or an interpretation of
the past, as well as genealogical studies that account for the possibilities
and constraints of present-day theories.
The series is interdisciplinary in outlook, embracing contributions from
IR, International History, Political Science, Political Theory, Sociology,
and Law. We seek to explore the mutually constitutive triangular relation-
ship of IR, theory, and history. We take this to mean the appreciation of
the importance of the history in the theory of IR, of theory in the history
v
vi SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
of IR, and even of IR in the history of international thought! In this last

case, we hope that the series can become more broadly inter-cultural also,
including scholarship from outside Europe and North America as well as
delving into more of the non-Western context of the development of IR
theory, although we acknowledge that the Eurocentric/ethnocentric
character of the field is presently mirrored in its disciplinary history.
Molly Cochran and Cornelia Navari have gathered together an impres-
sive range of experts to examine the work of a number of contributors to
American progressive thought on IR. Progressivism arose in the first half
of the twentieth century and remains an important facet of American
political and social thinking. In this volume, Cochran and Navari take the
history of international thought forward in a number of respects.
First, the book presents the work of many of the most important early
American thinkers on IR in a systematic way. Many of the names will be
familiar, such as Dewey, Addams, Lasswell, Lippmann, and Morgenthau.
These names appear alongside those who would have been well known in
their time, such as Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler, and also those
whose influence was more behind the scenes, like Leo Pasvolsky.
Second, the book is a complement and important critical antipode to
Long and Wilson’s Anglo-centric Thinkers of the 20 Years Crisis. In the
growing field of disciplinary history, the dominance of American thinking
has long been recognized, but it has rarely if ever been explicated with
such care and attention to its key themes and attendant controversies. We
now have a solid basis on which to construct an assessment of the thinking
on IR in the Anglosphere in the first half of the twentieth century. Of
course, this should make us all eager for more work that goes beyond this
range, but this book is a significant step forward in disciplinary history.
Cochran and Navari mostly eschew the realism against utopianism or
idealism cliché, though the terms do appear in the text on occasion. And
the explicit connection to political thinking in, and about, the domestic
situation in the USA is an important supplement to the common IR over-
concentration on developments in the international arena. The editors
outline a tripartite division among their subjects that serves to organize
the volume. There are what one might call traditional progressives who
continued to rely on international law and organization and who hoped to
see developments in that regard. There are also social progressives who
believed that the nature of democratic politics and social factors were criti-
cal for the future of international order, refusing to rely merely on the
mediation of the interactions of sovereign states. And finally, in Cochran
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
vii
and Navari’s schema, there are the post-progressives, that is, those authors
whose progressive ideas or reactions to such ideas took them beyond the
pale of their colleagues to arguments that foretold versions of realism and
more critical theories of international relations.
There are several fascinating threads that run through the book besides
the main theme. We read about responses to the American rise to power
and explore different views of world order that emerged and were debated.
We see gender, the influence of activist-scholars, and unfortunately also
their continuing marginalization in our telling of the history of interna-
tional theory. There are also lessons in the ways in which scholars, activists,
and officials negotiated the policy-academic relationship. And despite the
individual focus of the various chapters, the volume as a whole brings to
light the mutual influence of these writers and the cross-fertilization of
their ideas.
This superb volume opens the door to more research in this area, and
as such, it is a welcome addition to the History of International Thought
Series. We welcome and encourage further work as we look to broaden
and deepen the range of scholarship in the burgeoning field of disciplinary
history.
Contents
1 Introduction: Progressivism in America Between the

Two World Wars 1
Cornelia Navari and Molly Cochran
Part I Keeping the Faith 21
2 Elihu Root, International Law, and the World Court 23

Greg Russell
3 Nicholas Murray Butler and “The International Mind”

as the Pathway to Peace 49
David Clinton
4 Progressivism Triumphant? Isaiah Bowman’s New

Diplomacy in a New World 73
Lucian M. Ashworth
5 Leo Pasvolsky and an Open World Economy 91

Andrew Williams
ix
x CONTENTS
Part II Unleashing Society 115
6 John Dewey: A Pragmatist’s Search for Peace in the

Aftermath of Total War 117
Charles F. Howlett
7 The “Newer Ideals” of Jane Addams’s Progressivism:

A Realistic Utopia of Cosmopolitan Justice 143
Molly Cochran
8 James T. Shotwell and the Organisation of Peace 167

Cornelia Navari
9 Harold D. Lasswell and the Social Study of Personal

Insecurity 193
Mikael Baaz
Part III Dismantling the Consensus 219
10 The Niebuhr Brothers’ Debate and the Ethics of Just

War vs. Pacifism: Progressivism and the Social Gospel 221
Cecelia Lynch
11 Beyond Hemispherism: Charles Beard’s Vision of

World Order 241
Christopher McKnight Nichols
12 A Lapsed Progressive: Walter Lippmann and US

Foreign Policy, 1914–1945 269
David Milne
CONTENTS
xi
13 Hans Morgenthau’s Pilgrimage Among the Engineers 295

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
Index 315
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Progressivism in America

Between the Two World Wars
Cornelia Navari and Molly Cochran
Since the Iraq war, discussions concerning the content and direction of
American foreign policy have revolved around three fundamental antino-
mies. These are, in no particular order, unilateralism versus multilateral-
ism, regionalism versus globalism, and military engagement versus military
restraint. There was nothing novel in their appearance—they had first
entered into public debate during and after the Spanish American War.
But, their contrapositions were the legacy of the period between World
War I and II, in the context of the Progressive Movement, and the debate
as to how much and what kind of Progressivism should guide American
foreign policy. They were reactions to the progressive program as had
been enunciated by Herbert Croly and The New Republic (TNR) in the
run-up to World War I, which had established the conditions of America’s
entry into the European war. All discussion of the basis of American for-
eign policy between the world wars, and the direction it should take in
C. Navari (*)
Department of Economics and International Studies, University of Buckingham,
Buckingham, UK
M. Cochran
Department of Social Science, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
© The Author(s) 2017 1

M. Cochran, C. Navari (eds.), Progressivism and US Foreign Policy
between the World Wars, The Palgrave Macmillan History of
International Thought, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58432-8_1
2 C. NAVARI AND M. COCHRAN
confronting the fascisms, took off from the progressive program and were
presented either as amendments to it or its necessary overthrow.
Progressivism in foreign policy had been laid down in Woodrow
Wilson’s speech to Congress of April 2, 1917, laying out the direction that
the Democratic administration would take in prosecuting the war. His
avowals represented the conditions that the progressively minded con-
gressmen, who held the balance of power in Congress, had demanded to
secure their support for the war effort—conditions that formed the basis
of the war consensus. It was a hard-won consensus—America was not yet
prepared for an active foreign policy in peacetime, and the war resolutions
had been gained on the promise that the war would conclude with a lib-
eral peace—a peace that would ‘make the world safe for democracy’. That
consensus broke down after the announcement of the provisions of the
Versailles treaty, when it became clear that Wilson could not forge a liberal
peace. Herbert Croly, its leading intellectual, announced in November
1920 that ‘when liberalism shakes hands with war, it is liberalism that is
defeated’, marking the end of the brief-lived progressive orthodoxy on the
war question. After Versailles, the movement split between a reinvigorated
pacifist wing, led by Salmon Levinson and supported by John Dewey, and
a collective security wing, led initially by the Committee on Disarmament,
organized and engineered by James Shotwell.
In other respects, however, the progressive program strengthened—it
became more elaborate and more institutionally specific, and it scored
victories. America committed itself to the new World Court, and support
for international institutions and for the enhancement of the rule of law
came to be backed by a strong popular movement whose leadership was
determined on internationalism and its institutionalization in treaties and
organizations. The scope of the progressive program also widened, nota-
bly in the direction of engagement in a world economy. When America
came to Bretton Woods in 1945 to institutionalize a New World Order, it
was a reformed Progressivism that was speaking.
Progressivism Before World War I

Progressivism had begun as a social movement in America in the late
nineteenth century, gradually developing into a political movement
under the aegis of Theodore Roosevelt, in what became known as the
Progressive Era. The term signified a range of diverse political and social
schemes and political pressure groups, supporting issues from tax reform
INTRODUCTION: PROGRESSIVISM IN AMERICA BETWEEN THE TWO... 3
and conservation to trade unionism and women’s suffrage, not always

united. But progressives generally rejected the prevalent Social Darwinism
of the time and believed that social problems of poverty, violence and
greed, racism, and class warfare could best be addressed by providing
education, a safe environment, and an efficient workplace. They aspired
to a reformed and empowered federal system led by an enlightened and
nationally minded executive. In foreign policy, Progressivism revolved
around the ‘war question’—whether and under what conditions the
United States should join the Allies in fighting Germany during World
War I. The progressives eventually gave a qualified ‘yes’ to the question,
provided that the war effort was directed to reforming the international
system and ending colonialism.
Many progressives, including US President Theodore Roosevelt, had
seen no conflict between imperialism and reform at home. Both were
forms of uplift and improvement. They saw in Puerto Rico and the
Philippines—the new colonies America had acquired in the Spanish
American war—an opportunity to further the progressive agenda around
the world. Others, however, especially after the violence of the 1898
Philippine insurrection (which the US administration refused to term a
war) became increasingly vocal in their opposition to US foreign interven-
tion and imperialism. Still others argued that foreign ventures would
detract from much-needed domestic political and social reforms. Under
the leadership of US Senator Robert La Follette, progressive opposition to
foreign intervention increased under the ‘dollar diplomacy’ policies of
Republican President William Howard Taft and Secretary of State
Philander Knox.
In origins, it was a Christian movement calling for the universal
application of Christian values in everyday life. Published in 1877 by
Anglican pastor Washington Gladden, his book, The Christian Way:
Whither it Leads and How to Go On, was the first national call for such a
universal application. In his Recollections, he declared that the ‘Christian
law covers every relation of life’, including the relationship between
employers and their employees (pp. 252, 292). The Social Gospel pro-
claimed care in the workplace as well as education and healthcare to
needy people in slum neighborhoods. It was Protestant Progressivism,
and it established the Social Gospel movement as well as Gladden’s
leadership of it. Historians consider Gladden to be one of the Social
Gospel Movement’s founding fathers. By the mid-1890s, the Social
Gospel was common in many Protestant theological seminaries in the
United States. Reinhold Niebuhr began his pastoral career in Detroit as

an advocate of Social Gospel.
The actual term ‘progressive’ seems to have originated in 1892, in a
report in The Quarterly Register of Current History, a Detroit journal,
outlining the details of a political battle, ongoing in London between
landlords and their tenants:
The discontent of the workingmen and the mercantile classes in London

against the wealthy titled landlords, has been increasing for several years.
The latter have always succeeded in the past in minimizing the taxes on their
own property, throwing a large part of the burden upon their tenants. The
landlord element style themselves “Moderates”, and the tenant element are
known as “Progressives”.1
Land was untaxed in the America of the open prairies, and American tax
reformers were arguing that tax on land was the most just form of tax as
well as the most rational. By association, the tax reform movement in
America became known as ‘progressive’.
As a political movement, Progressivism was initially associated with the
Republican Party, notably with President Theodore Roosevelt (later to
head the US Progressive Party) and his ‘Square Deal’. He explained his
program in 1910, halfway through his second term in office:
When I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for
fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having
those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of oppor-
tunity and of reward for equally good service.2
It originally revolved around three basic ideas: conservation of natural

resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection. The three
demands were often referred to as the ‘three C’s’. It was aimed essentially
at the middle classes, and involved attacking plutocracy and corporate
trusts that exercised monopoly power while at the same time protecting
business from the more extreme demands of organized labor. A progres-
sive Republican, Roosevelt adopted and promoted the idea of government
action to mitigate social evils, declaring that he ‘always believed that wise
1
Volume 2, 40, History of the Year 1892; https://archive.org/stream/quarterlyregist-
00johngoog; accessed 17 May 2017.
2
Speech, August 31, 1910, Osawatomie, Kansas.
Progressivism and wise conservatism go hand in hand’.3 Upon taking up

his second terms as president in 1908, he denounced ‘the representatives
of predatory wealth’ as guilty of ‘all forms of iniquity from the oppression
of wage workers to unfair and unwholesome methods of crushing compe-
tition, and to defrauding the public by stock-jobbing and the manipula-
tion of securities’, and declared the aim of extending the Square Deal.4 He
was blocked by conservative Republicans in Congress and eventually
denied his third nomination as president—losing it to his former protégé
William Howard Taft, who had become his political adversary.
In response, in 1912, Roosevelt formed the brief-lived Progressive
Party—an American third party. The new party adopted an advanced plat-
form on progressive reforms including strong national regulation of inter-
state corporations and a national health service to include all existing
government medical agencies. The party enunciated a labor program
including social insurance to provide for the elderly, unemployed, and dis-
abled; an eight-hour workday; workers’ compensation; and farm relief. It
proposed a federal securities commission to regulate the securities market
and an inheritance tax to support some mild redistribution.
The platform expressed Roosevelt’s ‘New Nationalism’—an extension
of the Square Deal. ‘T.R.’ called for new restraints on the power of federal
and state judges to stop strikes and for a strong executive to regulate
industry, protect the working classes and carry on great national projects.
The New Nationalism was paternalistic, and was presented as a direct con-
trast to Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson’s ‘New Freedom’
(although the two programs came to resemble one another in practice).
The Progressive Party was nicknamed the Bull Moose Party after journal-
ists quoted Roosevelt saying, shortly after the new party was formed, that
he felt ‘fit as a bull moose’. It ran a full ticket in the presidential elections
of 1912.
Republican politicians and political activists across the country shunned
the Party, with the notable exception of California where the progressive
element had taken control of the Republican Party. Hiram Johnson,
California’s governor, ran as Roosevelt’s running mate. It carried eight
states, and the split enabled Democrat Woodrow Wilson to gain a massive
majority in the Electoral College as well as control of both houses of
Congress. Beset by factionalism and the failure to win many offices, the
3
State of the Union speech, 8 December 1908.
4
Message Communicated to the two Houses of Congress, 31 January 1908.
party went into rapid decline and had virtually disappeared by 1916, while
the split with the progressives allowed conservative elements to take con-
trol of the Republican Party—a control they would maintain for decades.
Progressivism retained its status as a movement, but without the ortho-
doxy that a party platform had, briefly, bestowed upon it.
Behind Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, and the source of many progres-
sive ideas, was Herbert David Croly (January 23, 1869–May 17, 1930)—
the main intellectual leader of the progressive movement who was an
editor, political philosopher, and co-founder of the magazine The New
Republic. His political philosophy influenced not merely Theodore
Roosevelt but other leading progressives including Walter Lippmann,
Judge Learned Hand, and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. His
book, The Promise of American Life (1909), combined Alexander
Hamilton’s ideas of a strong national government with the democracy of
Thomas Jefferson. Croly agreed with Jefferson that democracy was the
defining American trait, but argued that democracy did not mean merely
a government devoted to Jefferson’s equal rights. Government should be
committed to ‘bestowing a share of the responsibility and the benefits,
derived from political economic association, upon the whole community’
(p. 194). Jeffersonian democracy was ‘tantamount to extreme individual-
ism’, suitable only for pre-Civil War America when the ideal Americans
were pioneers pursuing individual wealth (pp. 48–49).
Croly’s contribution to American political thought was to synthesize
the two thinkers into one theory of government. Calling upon Alexander
Hamilton’s concern ‘to giving the magistrate a proper degree of authority,
to make and execute the laws with vigour’,5 he argued that government
could no longer be content with merely protecting negative rights; it
needed to actively promote the welfare of citizens. Hamilton had intended
a stronger federal government to restrain the powers of the various states,
whereas Croly wanted big government to address citizen welfare directly.
In The Promise of American Life, he proposed a three-pronged program:
the nationalization of large corporations, the strengthening of labor
unions, and a strong central government. In addition, there had to be a
reassessment of the role of the president. According to Croly, the presi-
dent should be more than an executive of the congressional will; he should
lead the nation toward a new political consensus that had as its core
5

The Continentalist, No.1, published in The New-York Packet, and the American
Advertiser, 12 July 1781.
nationalism, but with a sense of social responsibility and care for the less
fortunate—he called it the ‘new nationalism’. The book was one of the
most influential in American political history, shaping the ideas of many
intellectuals and political leaders. It is also widely credited with influencing
the New Deal—liberal historians who tout the triumph of New Deal lib-
eralism, as well as Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, routinely cite Croly as
part of the ‘brains trust’ that produced what came to be regarded as the
‘New Liberalism’. More immediately, it attracted the attention of
Theodore Roosevelt; they became friends, and when Roosevelt ran for
president in 1912 as a candidate for the Progressive Party, he took the
slogan ‘New Nationalism’ directly from The Promise of American Life.
But the most quoted progressive tract with the most immediate impact
was Walter Lippmann’s 1915 Drift and Mastery, a swingeing critique of
‘old Republic’ patronage and parochialism. Lippmann argued that
America’s multi-ethnic democracy was adrift, lacking intentionality and
discipline, unable to confront the social problems facing it. What American
democracy required was an extensive social program based on deliberate
and scientific governing, which Lippmann termed ‘mastery’. His recipe
for the ‘new nationalism’ rejected Marxist, Utopian, and Christian think-
ing, and proposed a form of social democracy in which government would
oversee key industries, give votes to women (to widen the consumer basis
of modern industry, he argued), and democratize industry through trade
unions. Strong government with a national program would bring the dis-
parate elements of American society together and forge the new national-
ism. Theodore Roosevelt—who had met and consulted with Lippmann
during the writing—announced that ‘No man who wishes seriously to
study our present social, industrial and political life can afford not to read
it through and through and ponder and digest it.’6 But the religious com-
munity was offended by the rejection of traditional values, and the Jesuit
journal America (1915, 12, 173) charged that Lippmann had arrogantly
ignored the achievements of a Christian past in forging America’s unique
democracy, and underrated the vitality of contemporary religion.
Political Progressivism’s main public voice was TNR—founded by
Herbert Croly, with Walter Lippmann and Walter Weyl through the finan-
cial backing of heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney whose husband, Willard
Straight, a J.P. Morgan banker, maintained majority ownership. The
6
In a widely quoted review joining Croly’s Progressive Democracy with Drift and Mastery;
Outlook, 18 November 1914.
agazine’s first issue was published on November 7, 1914. In foreign

m
affairs, it argued that America had emerged as a great power on the inter-
national scene and should use its power to reform world order. It pro-
moted a strong army and navy and questioned the pacifist stance that
democracy at home and peace abroad was best served by keeping America
weak. Theodore Roosevelt was the star of many early pieces, but, in
December 1914, Roosevelt had a falling out with Croly, Lippmann, and
Weyl over Woodrow Wilson’s Mexican policy. Wilson was aiming at a set-
tlement with post-revolutionary Mexico, entirely to the editors’ approval,
and the magazine had strongly chastised Roosevelt for opposing it.
Throughout 1915 the editors grappled with the war question. Croly’s
pragmatism set the magazine’s early tone—not blaming Germany, whose
strategy and tactics were discussed in an objective manner, while the Allies
were not excused from their share in the antagonisms that had led to the
war. It signaled a non-pacifist and engaged stand in the December 1914
editorial, rejecting any notion of limiting American arms (one of
Progressivism’s objectives), until agreement had been reached on ‘an
international force’, and distinguishing pacifism from ‘passivism’. The edi-
torial, probably by Croly, declared that the ‘newer ideal of peace, whether
in domestic or foreign policy, has to be actively and intentionally pro-
moted’. It charged Lowes Dickinson’s plan for an European League based
on a rising economic sentiment of free trade to be ‘unrealistic’ in its claim
that politics had become irrelevant. In May of 1915 it was still declaring
that ‘our hatred of war is so great that only repeated and extreme provoca-
tion will make us think of fighting.’ (III: 27, 1). In the summer of 1915,
TNR endorsed Norman Angell’s notion of a limited offensive, using tech-
niques like seizing German assets rather than all-out war.
By the autumn of 1916, however, Croly had come around to some of
Wilson’s policies, and used TNR to declare his support of Wilson in the
1916 election. Following his re-election, and influenced by Lippmann,
Croly was won to the argument that organizing for the war would bring
America’s disparate communities together and teach the government to
focus on a higher goal than the distribution of pork barrel. In the April 7,
1917 editorial, aligning the magazine with Wilson’s declaration of war
(and entitled ‘The Great Decision’), Croly presented the Allied war effort
as ‘unmistakably the cause of liberalism and the hope of an enduring peace’
and praised Wilson for ‘having seen this and said it’. When the United
States entered the war, Croly wrote exultingly to Willard Straight, who
bankrolled the magazine, ‘During the next few years, under the stimulus
of the war and its consequences, there will be a chance to focus the thought
and will of the country on high and fruitful purposes such as occurs only
once in many hundred years.’7 In short, the war had become the anvil on
which the New Nationalism would be forged.
Woodrow Wilson’s address to Congress on April 2, laying out America’s
war aims, formed the foundational statement of Progressivism in foreign
policy and could have been lifted straight from the pages of TNR. Wilson
declared (in the following order) that:
Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical
might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of
which we are only a single champion. …
Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in
the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up
amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a con-
cert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of
those principles. …
We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same
standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed
among nations and their governments that are observed among the indi-
vidual citizens of civilized states. …
We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards

them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that
their government acted in entering this war. …
The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon
the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve.
We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves,
no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.
The famous five declarations were, in effect, Croly’s and TNR’s condi-
tions for support of Wilson’s war effort.
When it came to planning the peace, relations became even closer.
Colonel House, charged by Wilson to set up the Inquiry, first called on
Croly to recommend personages. (His first recommendation was Columbia
7
The full text is in D. Seideman, The New Republic (London, Praeger, 1986) p. 49.
historian James Shotwell, followed shortly by Walter Lippmann.)

Lippmann grew especially close to the administration during wartime,
working as an assistant to Newton Baker, the president’s secretary of war,
and with Colonel Edward House, Wilson’s closest adviser. Four of the 14
points were drafted by Lippmann, while Wilson personally drafted the
others—taking what were in essence domestic progressive ideas and trans-
lating them into foreign policy. (These were free trade, open agreements,
democracy, and self-determination).
The Progressive Split

Croly had hoped that war would strengthen a nationalism that put coun-
try ahead of individual, section, and class. Instead, it encouraged chauvin-
ism and xenophobia, culminating in the Palmer Raids in 1919, in which
Wilson’s ambitious attorney general, alleging a plot by Russian and
German immigrants, jailed and deported thousands of labor radicals who
had no criminal records. Enlightened progressives like James Shotwell
were brought to ‘adjusting history’ to serve the war effort with propa-
ganda. Norman Angell, coming to America in 1917, found a population
‘uniformly fanatical’.
Through 1918, Croly’s editorials on the war took on an increasingly
dark tone, culminating in the editorial of May 24, 1919—“Peace at
Any Price”:
IN OUR OPINION the Treaty of Versailles subjects all liberalism …to a

decisive test…It is the most shameless and, we hope, the last of those treaties
which, while they pretend to bring peace to a mortified world, merely write
the specifications for future revolution and war. It presents liberalism with a
perfect opportunity of proving whether or not it is actually founded in posi-
tive moral and religious conviction. If a war which was supposed to put an
end to war culminates without strenuous protest by humane men and
women in a treaty of peace which renders peace impossible, the liberalism
which preached this meaning for the war will have committed suicide…It
will abandon society to an irresistible conflict between the immoral and
intransigent forces of Junkerism and revolutionary socialism.
The issues on which he broke with Wilson were the ‘peace of annihila-
tion’: that is, the terms against Germany; the redistribution of German
colonies to the other imperialist powers, in effect expanding the empires;
and the half-finished ‘structure of peace’ that was the League of Nations,
rendered by the peace terms a likely ‘instrument of competitive imperialist

nationalism’.
The coterie which had sustained Croly split, anticipating the larger
splits in the progressive movement. Judge Learned Hand—one of Croly’s
closest friends (and one of America’s most quoted judges)—broke off
their friendship, arguing that the League was the only internationalist
alternative and that its limitations could be corrected. Walter Lippmann
sided with Croly, primarily on account of the German reparations bill, and
rejected the League because its Article X involved territorial integrity,
which he argued meant sanctioning the Versailles settlement.8
In 1920, Croly worked on another book called The Breach in
Civilization. It was a reflection on the role of religion in the future. The
result was a compilation of the ideals Croly once held but by then believed
were unrealistic positions. He wrote that legislation as a solution for social
issues was unimportant, and abandoned his own core philosophy that cen-
tral government could create human amelioration. He condemned
Progressivism as a failure.9 Herbert Croly died before the election of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal. The baton of Progressivism’s
spirit by then had been handed to John Dewey, and its foreign policy to
the arena of contestation over the Neutrality Acts and what to do about
the League of Nations.
Progressivism Redirected
The contestations between progressives in the 1920s and 1930s, and
Progressivism’s relations with American foreign policy, turned on the rela-
tionship between the law and the use of force, ‘going it alone’ as opposed
to ‘going it with others’ and what democracy required of foreign policy.
Above all, it was about the use of the war instrument and how democratic
wars should be fought. We have identified 12 key thinkers on American
foreign policy between the wars who addressed these questions. They
were not all progressives (although most were), but they all operated
within or were compelled to confront the progressive mindset, in the
course of which they redefined Progressivism, redirected its purposes, and
8
Lippmann’s 14-page analysis was published as a Special Supplement to The New Republic
on 22 May 1919.
9
As the book was on its way to the publisher, Felix Frankfurter persuaded Croly to with-
draw the manuscript; it has never been published.
articulated the choices of role that would guide American foreign policy
making into the mid-twentieth century and beyond. All were public intel-
lectuals as well as policy intellectuals; all put forward systematic proposals
for the direction, aims, and instruments of American foreign policy; all
were listened to, in varying degrees, by the policymakers of the day; all
were influential in policy terms or in setting the terms of contemporary
debate. They are divided into the thinkers who kept faith with the
Progressive agenda, but with new governance techniques (Elihu Root,
Nicholas Murray Butler, Isaiah Bowman, and Leo Pasvolsky); those that
sought to engage society more widely with foreign policy and who saw in
an engaged and active citizenry the key to the accomplishment of the
Progressive agenda (John Dewey, Jane Addams, James Shotwell, and
Harold Laswell); and, finally, those who sought to overturn Progressivism
or to redefine some of its central planks (the Niebuhr Brothers, Charles
Beard, Walter Lippmann, and Hans Morgenthau). These thinkers demon-
strate important continuities, as well as breaks, within Progressivism in
America. In what follows are 12 accounts of the tributaries into which
Progressive thought flowed between and after the world wars.
Keeping the Faith
In ‘Elihu Root, International Law and the World Court’, Greg Russell
analyzes Root’s campaign for the creation of a World Court and his defense
of international law. Root made essential contributions to the understand-
ing of both an international court’s powers and its relevance for the devel-
opment of international law and compliance, but also how it would have
to operate in an international community composed of both great and
small powers. Proposing the two most critical matters for the founding of
an international court—the selection of judges and reservations against
national interests—Root showed how both could be made consistent with
democracy and, indeed, how democracies would, in the end, require an
international court. A World Court had an important moral and n ormative
underpinning but also had to reflect, in Root’s judgment, important polit-
ical realities in a world which had been torn apart by war, unrestrained
arms races, and the vagaries of raison d’état. At the same time, Root’s
defense of the Court illustrated important tensions among peace progres-
sives, some objecting to a Court tied to the League of Nations dominated
by imperial-minded and militaristic nations. Russell also illuminates
another progressive dimension of Root’s work: a long-standing belief in
an obligation of democratic nations to expand education in the field of

international law.
David Clinton explains in ‘Nicholas Murray Butler and “International
Mind” as a Pathway to Peace’ that Butler discussed a number of mecha-
nisms he thought important to building international peace; however, the
success of any new governance techniques that might arise from the expe-
rience of World War I for Butler would require the cultivation of ‘interna-
tional mind’. Butler held that the legalization of international relations
was on the rise and the role of war was in decline, tamed by its subjection
to law. The war reinforced the cogency of these ends, but Butler also advo-
cated the development and use of what today we call the practice of ‘pub-
lic diplomacy’. Butler sought binding arbitration and defended a robust
system of collective security too. However, these instruments rested on a
more fundamental necessity. Engendered by liberal values, the ‘interna-
tional mind’ is best conceived as a cooperative and generous attitude in
the settling of international disagreement. Enlightened world public opin-
ion at work within the nation states of international society would be the
carrier of international mind, its diplomacy working to bolster interna-
tional law by compelling the compliance of nation states. His was a future-
oriented vision, which could not take into account societies in which
public opinion was constrained or less than conciliatory. In a darkening
international climate, he was driven to espouse more far-reaching changes
to defend—and not simply to advance—international society.
Lucian Ashworth outlines in Chap. 4, ‘Progressivism Triumphant?’ the
role of Isaiah Bowman in Progressive thought and policy, arguing that his
vision of new international organizations emerging post-war required US
leadership in managing global cooperation and a global free market. One
of the most important American public intellectuals of the early twentieth
century, he was a major influence on US foreign policy during both the
Wilson and FDR presidencies. A senior member of the Inquiry team, he
advised the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and was a found-
ing member of the Council on Foreign Relations. During the World War
II, he advised President Roosevelt on post-war international policy, and
was involved in both the Bretton Woods and San Francisco conferences.
His two major works on international Affairs—The New World (1921) and
International Relations (1930)—remained key texts in the study of inter-
national affairs in the United States until the 1940s, and his ideas formed
the basis of US grand strategy and geopolitics after 1942. While Bowman’s
worldview was progressive, his response to the post-1919 world was
different from the Progressivism of Herbert Croly and TNR. Bowman

supported the Peace Treaties that he had helped to write, and he remained
a strong advocate of the League. Bowman’s progressive and international-
ist reading of American national interest, coupled with his background in
geography, led him to develop a progressive American Lebensraum that
offered an alternative to the geopolitics of conquest associated with real-
politic and German geopolitics.
In ‘Leo Pasvolsky and an Open World Economy’, Andrew Williams
introduces Pasvolsky—a journalist, economist, State Department offi-
cial, and special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. He was one
of the US government’s main planners for the post-World War II world
and, arguably, the lead author of the UN Charter. During the 1930s,
frequently with Harold G. Moulton—his close ally and collaborator at
the Bookings Institute since the 1920s—he envisioned a stable, open
world economy based on international political cooperation. He
defended, and was a major force in the creation of a successor to the
League of Nations that would be wider than an alliance of democracies
and have international police powers. Where earlier Brookings studies of
the 1920s and 1930s had focused on the importance of worldwide
demand to the American economy, by 1941, Pasvolsky and Moulton
were underscoring the ever-growing dependence of the American econ-
omy on foreign raw materials, binding the US more tightly to the world
economy.
Unleashing Society
Charles Howlett launches the section with ‘John Dewey’s Search for Peace
in the Aftermath of World War’. Disillusioned and dismayed at the failure
of Wilsonian progressive ideals during and following the world war,
America’s pragmatic philosopher converted his energies to peace educa-
tion and pacifism. He became actively involved in the post-war peace
movement, particularly in terms of his strong support for the Outlawry of
War crusade. This campaign, which sought to outlaw war as an instrument
of national policy, witnessed Dewey writing numerous articles and debat-
ing critics of the plan. The Outlawry movement culminated with the sign-
ing of the 1928 Pact of Paris, or Kellogg–Briand Pact as it was called in the
United States, but Dewey was dismayed that it did not fulfill his own pro-
gressive hopes for full citizen participation as part of a global democratic
mandate. Without the involvement of public opinion, diplomats and poli-

ticians were free to render the treaty essentially meaningless, as it kept in
place the long-standing doctrine of self-defense. Dewey continued to press
for public engagement on behalf of world peace through the 1930s, as the
decade witnessed the rise of military dictatorships in Europe and the Far
East, and continued to warn the American public about the dangers of war
as a threat to civil liberties.
In ‘The “Newer Ideals”’, Molly Cochran presents Jane Addams as a
progressive, an internationalist, and an important thinker within the tradi-
tion of American pragmatism. Her pragmatism mirrored that of the edi-
tors of TNR in understanding social institutions to have an important role
in the development of human capacities domestically and globally, and
they shared the belief that the aftermath of World War I presented an
important opportunity to make anew the ‘old diplomacy’ of the European
system, importing America’s democratic ideals. But Jane Addams would
extend or adapt these ideas in ways that were not exactly in step with
mainline Progressivism. Addams’s progressive humanism emphasized
agent-centered, rather than state-centered, means of democratizing world
politics. Her pragmatist method, honed in Addams’s social reform experi-
ence, was feminist and relational. It was at the Hull House settlement in
Chicago, which she co-founded, that she experimented with the idea of
democracy as a way of life, practiced through interaction with diverse oth-
ers in Hull House and its neighboring communities of immigrants and
working poor. She transposed knowledge of her rich, social experience to
the macro-international level, and it informed her international thought
and activism. As President of the Women’s International League for Peace
and Freedom, she and its members worked through the WILPF to bring,
to the League of Nations, women’s knowledge of what living democrati-
cally at the international level required.
James T. Shotwell—professor of history at Columbia University, the
original member of the Inquiry, and the Carnegie Endowment’s resident
historian—drafted the critical section of the Protocol for the Pacific
Settlement of Disputes, which through his provocations was carried into
the Locarno agreements. Cornelia Navari records how he was present at
the birth of every important movement to bring America to international
engagement, as well as his initiation of most of them. A key opponent of
the ‘outlawry of law’ movement, and closely involved in the peace plan-
ning for World War II, in 1927, he went to Paris to convince Briand to
support the collective security position (as against ‘outlawry’). Shotwell

largely drafted Briand’s letter to the American people, proposing a treaty
between the United States and France that initiated what he hoped
would be a continuation of Locarno. Carnegie’s editor of the Social and
Economic History of the War series, he gradually shifted from political
initiatives to social and economic initiatives that marked sections of the
progressive movement after the failure of the United States to ratify the
Versailles treaty and its refusal to be associated with the League.
Increasingly, in the face of the rise of fascism, he argued that institutions
which dealt with economic and social problems were critical to maintain-
ing peace, and he engineered with Clark Eichelberger the first mass
mobilization of a citizenry on behalf of institutionalization—it was aimed
at a revised League of Nations built ‘from below’. He led the consultants
at the San Francisco meeting to draft the UN charter, and it was Shotwell
who presided over the inclusion of human rights provisions in the
Charter.
In ‘Harold Lasswell and the Social Study of Personal Insecurity’,
Mikael Baaz presents Lasswell’s individualist internationalism. A prolific,
intellectual pioneer within American political science, his interdisciplin-
ary work galvanized the ‘behavioral revolution’ in the social sciences,
focused on individual responses to foreign crises. Then, 1935 saw the
publication of Lasswell’s World Politics and Personal Insecurity, which
combined two different but complementary strands of research—propa-
ganda analysis, with a focus on state symbolism, and political psychology,
with a focus on the individual psyche. It is here that Lasswell proposed
the formula, so often associated with his name, that ‘politics is the study
of who gets what, when and how’. After the war, there was a marked and
important shift in his thinking about values in relation to democratic
society. In line with the early influence of John Dewey and pragmatism,
Lasswell argued that social science has a responsibility to examine and
evaluate social objectives in the light of real-world challenges. Originally,
striving to be objective, Lasswell came to believe that future liberal orders
could be engineered in accordance with democratic social values and that
the policy sciences had an important role in this. While Lasswell’s meth-
odological influence declined with the rise of neo-positivism in political
science, it remains significant in the field of international law, where, in
conjunction with Myers McDougal, he developed the idea of interna-
tional law as a practice for realizing human values and reducing personal
insecurity in world politics.
Dismantling the Consensus
In ‘The Niebuhr Brothers (1936) Debate and the Ethics of Just War vs.
Pacifism’, Cecelia Lynch introduces both Reinhold Niebuhr and his
brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, as prominent theologians and thinkers of
their times, presenting H. Richard as at least as well known in theological
circles as Reinhold is in International Relations. The brothers had strong
theological and political disagreements on the ethics of war: H. Richard,
the pacifist, and Reinhold, the Christian realist who would break with
Christian Progressivism to defend wars to extirpate evil. Brought into
focus in a debate on whether the West should intervene to block Japanese
aggression in Manchuria, the brothers’ debate, published in “The Christian
Century,” illustrates different roads that the progressive Christianity of the
Social Gospel could take and the dystopian character of both Christian
pacifism and Christian realism during the interwar period. Reinhold even-
tually ‘won’ the debate in the public arena, giving a Christian gloss to the
forces confronting communism in the Cold War, while also demonstrating
the range of theo-political interpretations of the common good possible in
post-progressive America. Contextualizing the ethical tensions in the
Niebuhr brothers’ debate, Lynch argues, opens up Progressivist and Social
Gospel tensions regarding questions of war, the possibilities of peace, and
the use of force.
Chapter 11, ‘Beyond Hemispherism: Interwar Progressive Foreign
Policy and Charles Beard’s Vision of World Order’ by Christopher Nichols,
reveals the contours of Beard’s policy advocacy of ‘continentialism’ as he
sought to prevent FDR and the United States from further engagement in
the brewing crisis in Europe. Beard trumpeted an isolationist-inflected
desire to keep the United States out of power politics. Often and vigor-
ously invoking the lessons of World War I and the Wilson years, Beard went
beyond ‘hemispherism’ even as he advocated a circumspect, ‘continentalist’
foreign policy stance, echoing lofty Wilsonian aims. Starting in the mid-
1920s and reaching an apex late in the 1930s, Beard developed a series of
historically informed arguments for why the nation should go to war only
‘for grand national and human advantage,’ via open democratic delibera-
tion and debate, unlike the sort of secret and constrained policy debates
and politics beholden to the so-called ‘merchants of death’ of the Wilson
years. In a different context and two decades later, a progressive perspective
on Wilsonianism was used by Beard (along with others) to attack Wilson’s
own policies and the trajectory of ‘progressive’ internationalism.
In ‘A Lapsed Progressive: Walter Lippmann and US Foreign Policy,

1914–1956’, David Milne points out that Lippmann’s first foray into for-
eign affairs, advising President Wilson as part of the ‘Inquiry’, ended
badly, as he fell out with Wilsonian universalism after it became clear that
the Treaty of Versailles was no ‘peace without victory’. Lippmann returned
to the meliorism that William James taught him at Harvard—the idea that
incremental progress is achievable, but perfection is unattainable. While
the historian and political scientist Charles Beard moved purposefully
toward autarky, or ‘continental Americanism’, the rise of fascism in Europe
affected Lippmann differently. Lippmann wrote in 1934, ‘As long as
Europe prepares for war, America must prepare for neutrality,’ a proposal
that ostensibly echoed Beard. However, ‘prepare’, not ‘neutrality’, was the
operative word for Lippmann. He came to believe that a formidable mili-
tary deterrent was the surest way to repel predators. His realism was best
captured in two books—US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic and US
War Aims—which argued that US foreign policy must reject Wilsonianism
and place American interests ahead of unrealizable abstractions. In the
post-war era, this meant maintaining a working relationship with Stalin’s
Soviet Union. Lippmann assumed permanent trends in the structure of
world affairs. He overlearned the lessons of Wilson’s failure at the Paris
Peace Conference. For Stalin was not simply motivated by narrow self-
interest—ideology mattered too.
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson—in considering the Hans Morgenthau of
‘scientific man’ and power politics—writes that Morgenthau, the seminal
IR Realist, was always a thinker of greater philosophical stature than the
numerous decontextualized quotations from his textbook Politics Among
Nations would have us believe. His opposition to Progressivism and other
varieties of liberal reform stemmed not from an insistence on the immuta-
ble laws of power-balancing in anarchy, but from a profound historical pes-
simism with its roots in Nietzsche and Weber. His book Scientific Man
Versus Power Politics, which fits only with difficulty into the IR Realist
canon, contains the clearest expression of his views. The term ‘scientific
man’ is better rendered as ‘the hopeful, progressive scholar’ who was bound
to be overborne by the realities of a deeply compromised human condition.
His critique of Progressivism was the critique of pretentious efforts at sci-
entific planning and arose from a tragic sensibility cautioning against sweep-
ing schematic reforms. Politics was not an arena for the implementation of
ideals, but instead, was inextricably bound up with domination exercised
through a legalized use of force; accordingly, international politics had to
be understood as an inevitable struggle for domination.
Short Bibliography on Progressivism and US Foreign

Policy
The writing on Progressivism is extensive. The best overview, including the major
books, is provided by Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era.
The main works with relevance to foreign policy are:
Dawley, Alan. 2003. Changing the World: American Progressives in War and
Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Howlett, Charles. 1977. Troubled Philosopher: John Dewey and the Struggle for
World Peace. Port Washington: Kennikat Press.
Kuklick, Bruce. 1985. Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to
John Dewey. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Leuchtenburg, William E. 1952. Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive
Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898–1916. The Mississippi Valley
Historical Review 39 (3): 483–504.
Link, A.S. 1963(1954). Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace and the
Progressive Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Manicas, Peter. 1989(1940). War and Democracy. New York: Wiley.
Cornelia Navari is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham,

UK, and Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the University of Buckingham.
She is the author of Internationalism and the State in the 20th Century (2000)
and Public Intellectuals and International Affairs (2012); and the editor of
Theorising International Society: English School Methods (2009), Ethical
Reasoning in International Affairs (2013), and Guide to the English School in
International Studies (with Daniel Green, Wiley Blackwell 2014).
Molly Cochran is a Reader in International Relations at Oxford Brooks

University, currently researching the advocacy of the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom at the League of Nations. She is the author of A
Normative Theory of International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach (1999) and
editor of the Cambridge Companion to Dewey (2010).
PART I
Keeping the Faith

CHAPTER 2
Elihu Root, International Law, and the

World Court
Greg Russell
Studies of the progressive movement in American history, particularly dur-

ing the interwar years, have given far too little attention to the various
strands of progressive international thought. This chapter analyzes Elihu
Root’s campaign for the creation of a World Court, and his defense of
international law, as an important effort in the progressive, and reform-
minded, movement to restrain international conflict and minimize the
prospects for war through law. Root embraced a standard of “legal real-
ism” that had little to do with either classical or structural realism. Root
joined other progressives in emphasizing the moral and rational
components of human nature and stressed an important connection

between societal values and the projection of power. But he rejected
balance-of-power thinking and looked to legal processes and institutions
that would harmonize competing interests in the management of inter-
state rivalries. Another progressive dimension of Root’s work was a long-
standing belief in an obligation of democratic nations to expand education
curricula and university institutes in the field of international law.
G. Russell (*)
Department of Political Science, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA

24 G. RUSSELL
This included a whiff of imperialism. In a recent work that chronicles

the rise of the United States as a world power at the beginning of the
twentieth century, Elihu Root and four other architects are singled out
for the “parentage of American imperialism” following the Spanish-
American War (Zimmerman 2002, 9). Root “reservationists” might
properly detect the suspicious smell of empire associated with the man
who helped create America’s first colonial administration in the
Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba; who virtually authored the Foraker
Act and the Platt Amendment; and who negotiated with Japan a spheres
of influence agreement in Asia and the Pacific. James R. Holmes (2007,
189), characterizing Root and Roosevelt as “international lawmen,”
points out that the two statesmen embedded an “international police
power” in the Monroe Doctrine by means of Roosevelt’s 1904 Corollary
to the Monroe Doctrine.
While Root played an important role in the rise of America as a world
power, his advocacy of national interest was closely tied to an understand-
ing of the limits of power as well as to the importance of that power gain-
ing in strength and prestige by upholding international law and having
colliding interests adjudicated within an international court. Root as
imperialist cannot be properly understood apart from Root as legalist,
whose role as an active public figure and elder statesman (after leaving the
United States Senate in 1915) brought him to the forefront of negotia-
tions (in Washington and at The Hague) to secure the creation of the
Permanent Court of International Justice in 1920–21 and to facilitate
American adherence to the Protocol of Adherence to the Statute of the
World Court. Root played a key role in laying out a compromise for the
election of judges to the Court and, later, in working out a compromise or
agreement on the question of whether, and under what conditions, the
Court might issue advisory opinions that impact the interests of the
United States.
Root and the Idea of a Court

The idea of an international court had its roots in the nineteenth century,
when the United States took a leading part in promoting the judicial set-
tlement of international disputes. The American delegation to the First
Hague Conference in 1899 lent its support to the establishment of the
Permanent Court of Arbitration (of which the United States would be a
member). President Roosevelt submitted to that body its first case—a con-
ELIHU ROOT, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND THE WORLD COURT 25
troversy involving the United States and Mexico. This was only a first,
small step—far from the idea of a permanent court as envisioned by the
American delegates. The court amounted to little more than “a panel of
persons suitable to sit in a court” (usually numbering about 150 names),
“appointed by all the countries taking part, and from that panel may be
selected the members of a tribunal…to try a particular case.” Serious dif-
ficulties would arise about this method when parties with reference to a
particular controversy selected judges. “Human nature being what it is,”
as Root (1923, 4) pointed out, the judges “cannot help…becoming nego-
tiators for the parties that select them, and they negotiate separately
instead of deciding upon legal rights.”
As Secretary of State, Root, with President Roosevelt’s approval, sought
to remedy this shortcoming at the Hague Conference of 1907. Accordingly,
he instructed the American delegation to gain support for “a permanent
tribunal composed of judges who are judicial officers and nothing else,
who are paid adequate salaries, who have no other occupation, and who
are devoting their entire time to the trial and decision of international
cases by judicial methods and under a sense of judicial responsibility.” The
conferees agreed upon and adopted a draft treaty for such a court, albeit
with one conspicuous omission: they omitted any paragraph of the treaty
dealing with the method of electing judges. The court never came into
existence, owing to differences between large and small states over how to
ensure the equitable selection of judges. James Brown Scott (1924, 15),
an expert on international law and adviser to the American delegation at
the conference, summarized the conference outcome:
Arbitration was rendered more effective, and a project had been proposed
and accepted for the establishment of an international prize court, and a
draft convention for the establishment of a permanent court had been
adopted under the name of a Permanent Court of Arbitral Justice. The dif-
ficulty then and now [1924] is that no nation can be hauled before a t ribunal
of arbitration or an international court of justice without its consent, given
in advance, or at the time of the dispute. If nations have taken position—one
insisting upon the settlement of the dispute in accordance with its concep-
tion of justice, the other refusing such settlement—they stand face to face
with force, if the methods of diplomacy and its derivatives…have failed.
Root would sharpen his commentary on the need for an international

court with the onset of the First World War. Charles Francis Adams, in a
26 G. RUSSELL
letter to Root in 1915, worried about the onset of “Paper Blockades” on

the largest possible scale, and “Milan” and “Berlin Decrees,” to be met by
“British Orders in Council.” Adams wondered what “the everlasting prin-
ciples of international law” would mean in terms of “their careful adjust-
ment to existing conditions” (1915, 1). His own conviction was “that we
are tending irresistibly towards Tennyson’s Parliament of man, and
Federation of the world, with a Hague Tribunal and International Police
in reserve” (1915, 1). Root’s account (1915a, 1) agreed with Adams
“about the tendency” but pointed out that, “to put a better scheme of
things into operation, however, will involve solving difficult practical
problems.” Nothing could be worse, Root suggested, than “a lot of fools
who think that difficulties can be solved by refusing to see them.” The
fools Root appears to have had in mind are those well-meaning pacifists
whose “abundant vocabulary…will not be very useful.” On the need for a
court, “that is certain; but if it is to be really a court and not a form of
arbitrary government by plot and counterplot, the court must have a law
which it is bound to apply.” And, if the judgments of the court are to be
respected, then “there must be sanctions for its enforcement, and here we
come to the international police force” (Root 1915a, 1).” Interestingly
enough, the Rough Rider Roosevelt (1914, SM 1), just one year earlier,
endorsed in the pages of the New York Times the creation of an interna-
tional posse comitatus to uphold the rulings of an international tribunal—
one committed to “making the rules of international morality obligatory
and binding.”
Root was less forthcoming in his public commentary about whether
international law could be predicated on the coercive power of interna-
tional institutions. Just how this police force might come about, he was
prepared to leave to the business of “experts who combine technical
knowledge with imagination” (1915a, 1). In another letter to the German
jurist, Lassa Oppenheim, he averred that there could be no court without
a law to guide it and “there can be no police force without the judgments
of a court to enforce” (1915b, 1). In other words, without some sanction
in law, international policemen would amount to little more than “an irre-
sponsible majority reducing all sovereigns to vassalage and destroying
national independence” (1915b, 1). Seeking viable legal sanctions could
not be separated from “agreement upon certain, definite, specific rules of
national conduct, very general and rudimentary at first but capable of
being enlarged by continual additions” (1915b, 1).
On April 11, 1918, Root lunched with Colonel House, joined by

Abbott Lawrence Lowell and William Howard Taft; the four discussed
prospects for the League to Enforce Peace. Root spoke at length; House,
who invited him to put ideas to paper, was favored with a response five
days later. In his memo, Root argued that seeking a legal remedy to any
international breach of peace required moving beyond the existing pre-
sumption “that the use of force by one nation towards another is a matter
in which only the two nations concerned are primarily interested” (Root
1918, 1). Root had in mind the argument advanced by German leaders
that the invasion of Serbia by Austria–Hungary was a matter concerning
only those two states. The carnage of the war dramatized how “an inter-
national breach of peace is a matter which concerns every member of the
Community of nations—a matter in which every nation has a direct inter-
est, and to which every nation was a right to object” (Root 1918, 2). And
how was this to be achieved? Root (1918, 2) explained “at the basis of
every community lies the idea of organization to preserve peace.” In fact,
it was the “gradual growth and substitution of this idea of community
interest in preventing and punishing breaches to the peace which has done
away with private war among civilized peoples” (Root 1918, 2). And Root
(1918, 3) was forthcoming in admitting that adopting this view entailed a
limitation on national sovereignty. He viewed it as a logical (though prob-
lematic) extension of the idea that “individual liberty is…made subject to
the superior right of the civil community to have the peace preserved”
(Root 1918, 3).
International practices prior to the advent of the League of Nations
most often meant that nations resorted to diplomatic conferences, arbitral
panels, and commissions of enquiry to resolve differences that could lead
to war. The drawback of these mechanisms, Root argued, is that they all
depended on the political discretion of individual nations. Root’s concept
of an international community of nations was predicated on the need for
institutions that could command the legal authority to speak for members
of the community by calling upon nations on the verge of war to submit
their claims for consideration. Nations, even those that might have pledged
themselves to a “community interest and right,” could still refuse to
appear before a tribunal; however, to ignore a demand in the name of the
community would put that nation “in the wrong in the eyes of the entire
world” and, he thought with an eye toward the future, it would be “much
more difficult than it is now, and much more improbable” (Root 1918,
5–6). He thought that, if the norms and rules of community had been
28 G. RUSSELL
embraced prior to 1914, Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia “would be com-

pletely destroyed” (Root 1918, 6). In contemplating a future League of
whatever character, Root told House that no world organization should
even be contemplated, much less entered into, if nations are unwilling to
act under the authority of that body in contested cases. International law
would prove to be a dead letter if nations were prepared “to make agree-
ments and break them” (Root 1918, 6). It would be the height of folly for
the United States to enter into an association of nations to enforce peace
if the American people did not recognize the authority of that body to
make decisions binding on them.
Root (1918, 7) did not overlook the practical dilemma of an admin-
istration making a hard and fast decision “to go to war upon the happen-
ing of some future international event beyond the control of the United
States.” Root perhaps sensed the debate that would be prompted a year
later by Article Ten of the Covenant of the League of Nations. He was
not willing to speculate much further, saying the willingness of Americans
to fight in some particular situation “would depend upon the way they
looked at the event calling for their action…when the event occurs”
(Root 1918, 7) Blanket obligations of collective security were, then and
later, a bridge too far. Amid the bitter recriminations generated by the
world war, he would only acknowledge that “it may be that an interna-
tional community system may be developed hereafter which will make it
possible to say ‘We bind ourselves to fight upon the happening of some
particular event,’ but I do not think that system has so far developed that
it is now practicable to make such an agreement” (Root 1918, 7). Root’s
international police force and Roosevelt’s posse comitatus, enforcing
international court rulings and apprehending lawbreakers, were more
prophecy than practicality. What was logical in Root’s mind was not
always the same thing as what was workable in what would remain a
world of jealous great powers. In the decade before the war, Root (1908,
453) reiterated, time and time again, the sanction of international law
was not to be found “in the appeal to force,” but in the power of public
opinion. “The force of law is in the public opinion which prescribes it”
(Root 1908, 453).
Although President Wilson turned a deaf ear on the suggestion that he
ask Root to accompany him to the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris (rely-
ing instead on Chandler P. Anderson and John Bassett Moore as his legal
advisors), an early draft of the League Covenant prompted considerable
discussion by Root and others at an Executive Council meeting of the
American Society of International Law. Root’s fear, as recalled by James

Brown Scott, was that the conference was driven by extreme pressure to
deal almost exclusively with political questions. International law was
mentioned only once in the preamble, and it appeared that “the whole
Hague system was treated as scrapped” (Scott 1924, 29). He reminded his
colleagues that the last Hague Conference had provided for another meet-
ing while “recommending that the countries, through diplomatic chan-
nels…undertake to agree upon the method of selecting the judges” (Root
1923, 5). Root proceeded to author six amendments to the draft that
were circulated before the New York Bar Association. The amendments
were requested by the State Department and cabled to the conference in
Paris. One of the amendments, providing for arbitral or judicial settle-
ment, was ultimately incorporated in Article 12 of the Covenant. Another
amendment calling for a conference on international law was rejected.
Root (1919, 50) proposed to substitute for Article 13 the following
provisions,
The high contracting Powers agree to refer to the Permanent Court of

Arbitration at the Hague, or to the Court of Arbitral Justice proposed at the
Second Hague Conference when established, or to some other arbitral tri-
bunal, all disputes between them (including those affecting honor and vital
interests) which are of a justiciable character, and which the Powers con-
cerned have failed to settle by diplomatic methods. The Powers so referring
to arbitration agree to accept and give effect to the award of the tribunal.
Disputes of a justiciable character are defined as disputes as to the interpreta-

tion of a treaty, as to any question of international law, as to the existence of
any fact which if established would constitute a breach of international obli-
gation, or as to the nature and extent of the reparation to made for any such
breach.
Any question which may arise as to whether a dispute is of a justiciable char-

acter is to be referred for decision to the Court of Arbitral Justice when
constituted, or, until it is constituted, to the Permanent Court of Arbitration
at the Hague.
Root, who admitted to drawing on the language originally crafted

by Lord Bryce’s working group, in Britain, explained the rationale for
the arbitration amendment. The work of the Bryce group had the vir-
tue of recognizing The Hague Court and defined what were justiciable
30 G. RUSSELL
questions. He much preferred the approach of the Bryce group to the

language employed by Taft’s League to Enforce Peace, “for the reason
that the former defines justiciable questions, and the latter does not”
(Root 1919, 52). Uppermost in Root’s (1919, 52) mind was workable
procedure, inasmuch as a stumbling block would remain in any “agree-
ment to submit to any Continental tribunal—any tribunal selected
from the world at large—the question of its own jurisdiction, without
any rule to apply more definite than the words ‘justiciable
questions.’”
The essential question concerned the relationship between a “justicia-
ble” question and a vital American interest. The ensuing exchange between
Root and Professor David Jayne Hill as to whether Root thought the US
Senate would ever consent to submitting disputes of a justiciable character
to arbitration deserves to be reproduced in full.
Root, Well, I should think so, because I found very little difficulty in the
Senate. You will remember I took up Mr. Hay’s treaties, which were based
upon the treaty between France and England, for the arbitration of all ques-
tions of international law arising from the interpretation of treaties (except-
ing honor and vital interests). I found practically no difficulty in the Senate
about that. The only reason why Mr. Hay’s series of treaties failed was that
the Senate did not want to be ousted of its part of the treaty-making power.
There still remained an important treaty-making function, and the Senate
was not willing to be ousted of that. Mr. Hay did not want any of their
interference, and that is where the treaties stopped. I brushed that aside and
left the Senate to continue to discharge its functions as part of the treaty-
making power, and the Senators were perfectly willing to arbitrate those
things. Now the question of national honor is a mere camouflage. I appre-
hend that it found its place in the original treaty to satisfy some special sus-
ceptibilities. As to the question of “vital interests, why, no questions which
can arise upon the interpretation of a treaty, or under the law of nations, can
be a question of vital interest.
Hill, A nation would never jeopardize a vital interest in making a treaty,

therefore it could not involve that.
Root, No. So I think the Senate would agree. I have more doubt as to
whether the Senate would leave the court to decide upon its own jurisdic-
tion. I was opposed to that without the definition, but I am in favor of it
with the definition, which I think practically reduces it to the treaties we

have already made (Root 1919, 54–55).1
The Court and the Law

Root proposed another amendment calling upon the Council of the League
to call a conference of nations for the purpose “of reviewing the condition
of international law, and of agreeing upon and stating in authoritative form
the principles and rules thereof.” Here, Root was reminded of the dilemma
inherent in the Convention for the Establishment of an International Prize
Court adopted at the Second Hague Conference. Article 7 of the conven-
tion provides that, in the absence of treaty provisions applicable to the case,
the Prize Court (which never came into existence) shall apply the rules of
international law or, if no generally recognized rules exist, the Court shall
give judgment in accordance with the general principles of justice and
equity. This was a path to nowhere insofar the appeal to those principles is
little more than an appeal “to what anybody in this world who goes into a
court thinks it is desirable to do” (Root 1919, 55–56). Root (1923, 16)
insisted that the basis and operations for an international court ought not be
argued “out from first principles the rights and wrongs of all these things.”
The only way for peoples and governments to know what is just, “so that
their opinion will crystallize in favor of justice, is by having institutions
under which impartial courts may adjudge what is just and opinion may
crystallize upon their judgment, instead of going this way and that way on
assertions of interested parties” (Root 1923, 16).
Root (1923, 16) studiously avoided wading into debates about the
philosophy of law, but he did not leave the meaning of an international
court to the mechanics of “merely deciding this case and that case and
the other case.” Like many legalists of his day, he viewed the court as an
institution “essential to the progress of civilization towards the rule of
public right by formulated rules of law enforced by impartial judgment,
not mere brute force, which means misery and means tyranny” (Root
1
Article 2 of the Hay arbitration referred to the compromis required by Article 31 of the
1899 convention by using the word agreement, a term that might have permitted a president
or secretary of state to conclude an arbitral compromise with a foreign government by the
simple exchange of diplomatic notes, without seeking advice and consent from the US
Senate. The Senate gave its advice and consent to ratification of ten of the Hay arbitration
treaties, although it formally amended them by substituting the word treaty for agreement in
Article 2. This required an arbitral compromise be submitted to the Senate for its advice and
consent. For more on the Hay arbitration treaties, see Boyle (1999).
32 G. RUSSELL
1923, 16). In addition, the codification of international law is the sine

qua non for building an established legal system “providing for the
determination, by a permanent and competent court, of questions of
legal right arising between nations” (Root 1925, 2). When speaking
about the codification of international law, Root (1925, 6) had in mind
a much broader and open-ended undertaking than “the sense in which
the term is used to apply to municipal law.” In the latter, the codifier
“has to deal with existing law created by the dictum of superior power”
(Root 1925, 6). In the former, codification also encompassed “the mak-
ing of law” in areas of international conduct “where law has not yet
existed, because of a lack of agreement upon what it ought to be” (Root
1925, 6). Root (1925, 6–7) cited the Geneva and Hague Conventions
as having “numerous provisions established between the parties by con-
ventional agreement in reliance upon general acceptance to give them
the quality of law as distinct from mere agreement.” Root endorsed this
conventional method as one “we must now look for the extension of
international law.”
By 1920, as a member of the Advisory Committee of Jurists that
worked out the plan for the Permanent Court of International Justice,
Root endorsed the committee’s recommendation that a new conference
of nations be called for the purpose of restating established rules of law. An
additional contribution to codification would be for the conference “to
consider the subjects not now adequately regulated by international law,
but…[for] the interests of international justice require that the rules of law
shall be declared and accepted” (Root 1925, 7).
There was, in Root’s estimation, another sense in which the codifica-
tion of international law is vital for the existence of democracies. Autocracies
might live without the rule of law but democracies could not. Individual
liberty and the pursuit of equality are at risk unless there is embedded in
the great mass of people “a respect for law.” Otherwise, power goes
untamed, politics becomes overwhelmed by uncompromising ideological
passions, and matters of public right are treated as “matters of expedi-
ency” for makeshift adjustments by fleeting and unstable majorities. So,
too, is it with Root’s community of nations.
There is only one way to keep them straight, and that is to agree on the
principles of law, to formulate rules of action when passions are not excited;
and then when questions arise that are likely to excite passions, to say, ‘This
is the law which you yourselves have agreed upon’; and then the members
of a democracy will bow to law, because that is the habit of their political
existence. (Root 1919, 63–63)
Root’s proposed amendments to the League Covenant must be seen in

the context of, and along with, a resolution adopted by a special commit-
tee of the American Society of International Law that was communicated
to the Secretary of State in Paris. This communication followed upon a
request for suggestions made by the conferees in Paris at the time the
constitution for the League was proposed and first published. Article 13,
in its original form, “didn’t amount to very much” and went no further
than an agreement “to arbitrate questions recognized as being suitable for
arbitration” should diplomacy fail to resolve the dispute (Root 1920a, 4).
Root’s contribution was to provide a definition of justiciable disputes (see
p. 10) that was inserted into the Society resolution and subsequently
incorporated in slightly modified form in the League’s revision of Article
13. This represented “a long step forward,” inasmuch as in the Taft arbi-
tration treaties “the term justiciable was deemed so general and vague,”
lacking “any precedent upon which to draw” that “an agreement to refer
to arbitration all justiciable questions…might involve all sorts of ques-
tions, whether of policy or right” (Root 1920a, 5). In addition, Article 14
was written so as require the League Council to submit to League mem-
bers “plans for the establishment of a Permanent Court of International
Justice” (Root 1920b, 17) The Court would have the competence to hear
and determine any dispute of an international character that the parties
submit to it, and it was entitled to give an advisory opinion referred to it
by the Council or by the Assembly.
The Creation of the Court

Root was to have a central role in the process of creating the Permanent
Court. The League Council invited distinguished jurists from ten coun-
tries to formulate plans for the organization of the Court, and Root rep-
resented the United States on what became the Advisory Committee that
met at The Hague in June 1920. One of the major tasks of the Committee
was to find a way of reconciling the differing positions between large and
small states relative to the appointment of judges to the Court—the very
issue which was left in abeyance at the 1907 Hague Conference. It was
34 G. RUSSELL
Root who put forward what became the basis of an acceptable solution
that, for all practical purposes, mirrored the processes of the US Supreme
Court and the Great Compromise of 1787. Carefully outlining his plan in
remarks before the Committee on June 17, 18, 21, and 22, he identified
the problem as “the unwillingness of the large states to permit the mem-
bers of the court to be named by the majority, which would always be
composed of representatives of the smaller states, and, on the other hand,
the unwillingness of the smaller states to permit the larger ones a prepon-
derance of power and authority” (Root 1920c, 2). The smaller states
would not accept any remedy “inconsistent with the theory of the equal
rights of sovereign states” (Root 1920c, 2). That Root would speak about
equal rights as “theory” is an important clue to how he would proceed in
his argumentation, holding open the possibility of some qualification.
Courtesy, moderation, and a spirit of accommodation in negotiations,
however, meant everything to Root. He stated “that both views are, in a
broad sense, right,” and that “the equal rights of every sovereign state…
is the foundation of the law of nations” (Root 1920c, 3). But, the norm
of equality had to be balanced “with the inequality of practical interests
which depend, not upon the grouping of individuals into states, but upon
their production, their trade, their commerce, their activity” (Root
1920c, 3). He explained to the other jurists “the two do not fully agree
and each has some rights to its view” (Root 1920c, 3). Taking as his point
of departure the cases brought to the Arbitration Court at the Hague,
Root (Root 1920c, 3) pointed out that “only few countries have been
concerned, and doubtless there are many countries whose mode of life
and whose international affairs are such that they will seldom…have
recourse to any court.”
Root could not openly say, even as he clearly understood, that no court
would ever be created without deference to the interests of the great pow-
ers. Yet, progress might be possible if there were some way “to reconcile
these two views…the one coming from the…indisputable point of legal
equality of states, and the other from the practical point of view of a deep
and extensive practical interest in the subject” (Root 1920c, 3). It was
natural, he said, that citizens of free countries would seek to resolve some
issue “because they are equal politically with equal voice in the affairs of
their country” (Root 1920c, 3). At the same time, Root (1920c, 3) had
represented in American courts clients who “have a much greater interest
in the matter which is to be disposed of than” others less directly impacted
in a contentious case. Root was treating the election of court judges as one
of those “practical matters” whereby “the greater practical interest” ought

to factor into a decision that at base was as much political as legal. However
distinct may be the judicial and political powers, “the personnel of the
judiciary must necessarily have its origin in the political power” (Root
1920c, 4). In seeking a just outcome, Root (1920, 6) explained “the task
is one of the adaptation of means to an end; it is that we may recommend
that the proposed court be so constituted that, with the greatest certainty
possible to human nature, it will do justice—a practical adaptation of
human means to secure a divine end.” And, as for the role of state sover-
eignty in constituting the court:
In constituting a court, which is to render judgments limiting the rights of

nations, we shall not be merely exercising the powers of sovereignty. What
sovereign right has France to limit the sovereignty of Italy, of Great Britain?
What sovereign right has Italy to name a judge to say that the power of
France should be limited? Whence does this power come? From the sover-
eignty of Italy? It comes from consent; it has its origin in consent, not in the
theory of sovereignty, not in the law of nations; it is purely conventional.
The right of Italy to name a judge who can give decisions limiting the sov-
ereign rights of France comes, not from the sovereignty of Italy, but from
the consent of France. (Root 1920c, 7)
In determining whether the consent should be given mutually, and upon

what terms, Root (1920c, 7) called attention to “the conditions and cir-
cumstances of the agreement we are proposing to make.”
In thinking of a way to resolve the impasse, Root (1920c, 3–4) returned
to the Federal Convention of 1787 “not for the purpose of proposing that
disposition here, but for the purpose of illustrating the way in which such
a question has been disposed of.” Perhaps anticipating that such an exam-
ple would bring charges of parochialism (especially when voiced by a
citizen from a country that had repudiated the League), he admitted he
had “not yet found any [solution] which is entirely satisfactory to me”
while being confident “that we will reach it by discussion, by compromise
of views, by the enlightenment which comes from hearing the expression
of opinion from different points of view” (Root 1920c, 4). But his apol-
ogy was, in reality, a plea for openness among fellow jurists. The 1787
compromise provided for “the creation of two legislative bodies…one in
which the small states should be predominant” and another “in which the
large states would be predominant, so that each had a veto on the unfair-
ness of the other” (Root 1920b, 19). Could not this structural arrange-
36 G. RUSSELL
ment be applied to the relationship between the League and the formation
of the Court? Root (1920c, 5) suggested “for the consideration of my
colleagues, whether possibly the election of judges by the concurrent vote
of the Assembly and the Council might not point out…the same solution
of this difficult question, which has already been accomplished on the
political side?” Root (1920c, 5) had an answer ready:
The effect of the practical working [of this arrangement] would be that in
the Assembly, where the smaller Powers are in the majority, they would
protect the interests of the smaller states, and in the Council, the larger
Powers having a preponderance, would protect such practical interests of
their greater trade and their greater production as would be submitted to
the court.
By the practical workings of this arrangement (which was adopted by

the Committee), court judges would be elected by the separate concur-
rent votes of the two bodies, thereby requiring each candidate to garner a
majority vote in both. The smaller states, without surrendering any sover-
eignty, “would have a check on the big ones, and each body, one con-
trolled by the great powers, and the other controlled by the small powers,
would be able to prevent the other from doing anything unfair or unjust”
(Root 1920c, 5).
The Committee also incorporated Root’s (1920b, 19) recommenda-
tion of a “conference committee” which (drawing on the American con-
stitutional model) would come into play “if the Assembly and Council do
not agree in the election of judges by a certain time, and after a number of
ballots, a conference committee shall be appointed who shall agree and
report.” Furthermore, the election of judges by the Council and Assembly
would be removed “from the ordinary give and take of politics” insofar as
the names of judges “should be made from lists made up by the old
Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague” (Root 1920b, 19). The
judges of the court were elected in 1921 and, in the course of 1922, the
court itself was installed in the Peace Palace of The Hague, and formally
opened to the world at large.
Root and the Diplomacy of the Fifth Reservation

The original protocol establishing the court (December 16, 1920) con-
tained a provision that it should remain open for the signature of the
United States. In February 1923, President Harding asked the Senate for
consent to the signing of the protocol, having been persuaded to move

forward by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes. The same request
was forthcoming one year later from President Coolidge. On January 7,
1926, the Senate (voting 76 to 17) passed the resolution providing for
American adherence to the court subject to five reservations,
1. That such adherence shall not be taken to involve any legal relation
on the part of the United States to the League of Nations or the
assumption of any obligations by the United States under the treaty
of Versailles.
2. That the United States shall be permitted to participate through
representatives designated for the purpose and upon an equality
with the other states, members, respectively, of the council and
assembly of the League of Nations, in any and all proceedings of
either the council or the assembly for the election of judges or dep-
uty judges of the Permanent Court of International Justice or for
the filling of vacancies.
3. That the United States will pay a fair share of the expenses of the
court as determined and appropriated from time to time by the
Congress of the United States.
4. That the United States may at any time withdraw its adherence to
the said protocol and that the statute for the Permanent Court of
International Justice adjoined to the protocol shall not be amended
without the consent of the United States.
5. That the court shall not render any advisory opinion except publicly
after due notice to all states adhering to the court and to all inter-
ested states and after public hearing or opportunity for hearing
given to any state concerned; nor shall it, without the consent of the
United States, entertain any request for an advisory opinion touching
any dispute or question in which the United States has or claims an
interest [emphasis added] (Lien 1926, 47–48).
The resolution was submitted by the Secretary of State to the signato-

ries of the court statute and also to the Secretary General of the League of
Nations. British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain, at a meeting of
the League Council in March 1926, expressed the concern that the word-
ing of the second half of the fifth reservation might “hamper the work of
the Council and prejudice the rights of the members of the League” while
38 G. RUSSELL
conceding “it is not clear that it was intended to bear any such meaning.”2
The signatories met in conference six months later to consider the
American reservation in order to determine if acceptance of the reserva-
tion would entail modifications of the court statute. The United States,
although invited to the conference, declined to send anyone, with Secretary
of State Frank Kellogg expressing the view that the reservations were clear
and unequivocal.
The conference report ended up accepting unconditionally the first
four reservations, but stipulated that the right of vetoing advisory opin-
ions be the subject to further discussion with the United States. The sig-
natories agreed that the court should not render any advisory opinion
without American consent in any case that the United States was a party.
What had to be clarified was America’s role in objecting to any advisory
opinion in cases where the United States claimed an interest. The Final
Act of the signatories suggested a draft protocol that contains the follow-
ing, “The manner in which the consent provided for in the second part of
the fifth reservation is to be given, will be the subject of an understanding
to be reached between the Government of the United States with the
Council of the League of Nations” (Root 1931a, 4).
More than two years would pass before Senator Frederick Gillett would
introduce a resolution (submitted to the Foreign Relations Committee)
suggesting to the President that an exchange of views be undertaken in
order to establish whether the differences between the United States and
the signatory states could be harmonized. Before the resolution could be
acted on, President Coolidge, on November 24, 1928, announced that he
intended to reopen the negotiations. A little more than two weeks later,
the League Council invited a committee of experts to Geneva to deliber-
ate on the desirability of making changes in the Statute of the Court. Root
was invited to serve as a member of that committee (Jessup 1938, 2/434).
Root, joined by his friend and biographer Philip Jessup, made the
Transatlantic crossing in his eighty-fifth year, arriving in Geneva at the
beginning of March 1929. In his mind, the trip represented maybe the last
opportunity to bring the United States into the World Court. He had no
powers to negotiate with the League Council, the administration prefer-
ring that any agreements be negotiated with the individual signatory
states. Yet, the evidence seems clear that, during the last days of the
2
The full text of Chamberlain’s 1926 statement is published in League of Nations Official
Journal 7 (4), 536.
Coolidge administration and the beginning of the Hoover administration

(revealed in the traffic of cables between Washington and Geneva), Root
would be no idle spectator. He later recalled that “the importance of [the
United States] to the Court was becoming secondary to my instincts as an
old State Department man of the United States,” having “to secure pro-
tection for my own country against a dangerous and incredible situation”
(Root 1929, 14–15).
That situation was as much about the posturing and mixed signals from
Washington than the challenges from signatories of the League. Upholding
American interests (and interest in the Court) was not made easier by “our
dependence in all these things upon the action of a lot of people who
don’t think about the subject or feel responsible for it” (Root 1929, 15).
Lurking behind his efforts to craft together an acceptable formula were
protests that the duty “to render advisory opinions to the Assembly or the
Council makes the Court a Department of Justice for the League” (Root
1929, 1).
In an interview given by Root on May 27, 1929, and marked in his own
handwriting “Very Confidential,” he described his modus operandi in
Geneva. He talked fully with members of the Council for ten days before
the meeting of the Committee of Jurists. The “slender thread” upon
which he based his hopes was an important network of personal relation-
ships; otherwise “I could have been fired” (Root 1929, 15). He “had it
out with Chamberlain, Stresemann, Briand and Adatci, and the represen-
tatives of the Scandinavian and South American states….and got them all
to understand the situation” (Root 1929, 15). One of the members of the
Council even confided to Root (1929, 4) that they had given up asking for
advisory opinions, saying “the authority of the Court is so great that we
would not dare refuse to follow it, and we don’t want an advisory we have
to follow.” Although unable to act as a representative of the United States
with authority, he proceeded to do so anyway, “with the consul’s office…
instructed to carry on all correspondence that I wanted in code, and con-
stant cable correspondence between the State Department and myself at
every time and every stage” (Root 1929, 6).
Sir Austen Chamberlain, in early March, had drawn the attention of the
League Council to a letter from Secretary Kellogg (February 19, 192),
who amended his earlier observation about the reservations being clear
and unequivocal, and called for an exchange of views that might lead to
some agreement by which the interests of the United States could be pro-
tected as an adherent to the Court statute. After Chamberlain particularly
40 G. RUSSELL
cited Root’s membership on the Committee of Jurists, the Council pro-

posed that the Committee’s function be expanded to include the question
of the accession of the United States to the Court. On March 18, the
Committee approved a draft protocol superseding the proposed protocol
in 1926. The revised protocol accepted all five reservations based upon a
formula Root devised on how the reservations would be put into effect.3
We turn now to Root’s formula and his procedural modification of the
second half of the fifth reservation.
By itself, the fifth reservation provides no way by which the Council
could ascertain whether the request for an advisory opinion from the
Court touches upon a dispute for which the United States has or claims
an interest. Root rejected the inference that the United States could
make good on objecting to an advisory opinion by simply going into the
Court and fighting it out as if in a lawsuit. The United States, in this
situation, would be in the position of having to establish its objection on
the record of the Court and of stating what the interest is, as the Court
would then be in the business of having to determine the nature and
limitation of the interest in order to determine whether the question put
to it touches that interest. For example, “if it is a question that inciden-
tally affects the Monroe Doctrine, the Court must say what are the limi-
tations of the Monroe Doctrine, in order to say whether it is justified in
refusing to give an opinion” (Root 1929, 10). The United States, then,
would “have done the very thing the fifth reservation was designed to
prevent” (Root 1929, 10). The Council, upon submitting a request to
the Court for an advisory opinion, would be left in a politically precari-
ous position. In a memorandum submitted by Root to the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee in 1931, Root (1931a, 13) outlined the
predicament,
The Council would…have sent its request without knowing whether the
question was objectionable to the United States, for it had no means of get-
ting direct and authentic information on the subject. It would have no
opportunity to seek from the United States its consent and the Court would
give an advisory opinion on the subject. The result would probably be that
the Council would be rebuffed by the Court, the plans for settlement of an
international controversy…would be frustrated and the whole use of advi-
3
In addition to the reservations protocol with the Root formula, the signatory states in
September 1929 approved amendments to the Court statute and, in December, approved a
protocol of signature of the Statute of 1920.
sory opinions, very important for the prevention of war, especially during the
readjustments following the World War, would be doubtful and uncertain.
Root (1931a, 17) and the other Jurists, in their final report, concluded
that it was impossible “to allay the apprehensions of either side…by the
elaboration of any system of paper guaranties or abstract formulae.” The
better route “is to deal with the problem in a concrete form, to provide
some method by which such questions as they arise may be examined and
views exchanged, and a conclusion… reached after each has made itself
acquainted with the difficulties and responsibilities which beset the other”
(Root 1931a, 17).
Root’s (1929, 10) formula was embodied in Article 5 of the reserva-
tions protocol. What he described as the “only door there is for the appli-
cation of the fifth reservation” is enumerated in the first four paragraphs
of the Article in question (Root 1929, 10). Any proposal requesting an
advisory opinion of the Court, made in either the Assembly or the Council,
would require the Secretary General to notify the United States, “and
thereupon there shall be an exchange of views between the proponents of
the request and us as to whether an interest ours is affected” (Root, n.d.,
The United States And The World Court, 5).
The formula goes on to provide that, in case the Secretary General
should not get the notice around in time, or should there be a special
exigency on the last day of Council, a second notice should be forthcom-
ing from the Registrar of the Court stating a reasonable time limit within
which the United States is afforded the opportunity to advise the Court
on whether its interests are affected. “Further, the proceedings of the
Court shall be stayed for a period sufficient for an exchange of views
between the Council or the Assembly and the United States” (Root 1929,
11–12).
There follows a provision stipulating that, in any case in which the
United States objects to an advisory opinion, there shall be attributed to
that objection “the same force and effect as attaches to a vote for the opin-
ion by a Member of the League of Nations in the Council or in the
Assembly” (Root 1929, 11). If no agreement can be reached, and were
the United States to persist in its objection to an advisory opinion, then,
in the language of the Treaty, “the exercise of the powers of withdrawal
provided for in Article 8 hereof will follow naturally without any imputa-
tion of unfriendliness or unwillingness to cooperate generally for peace
and good will” (Root 1929, 11–12).
42 G. RUSSELL
Root (1931b, 13), testifying for two and a half hours before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee in 1931, could not “envisage a disagree-
ment regarding a question which is likely to lead to the abandonment of
the entire enterprise.” He reminded Senators of the importance of nego-
tiating in good faith. “Cooperation must be between people who treat
each other in a friendly manner. It cannot exist between enemies who treat
each other in a hostile manner” (Root 1931b, 13). A refusal to treat that
acceptance as an acceptance “would require a finding on the part of the
Senate that the United States cannot consent to be frank and truthful and
sincere about its views in the course of its cooperation in support of this
great agency of peace” (Root 1931b, 12).
Although Root was circumspect about the duties of the Senate in his
testimony, he was more explicit in private exchanges with like-minded
friends and associates. The Senate would do itself a cardinal disservice in
the eyes of the world if it were suddenly to depart from the five reserva-
tions, with Root convinced that there was nothing in the protocol for
adherence to the Court that would justify a failure to approve. It would
impair the constitutional authority of the President to negotiate treaties if,
after having the advice and consent of the Senate, “the Senate considers
that it can withdraw its own conditions and propose other and further
conditions” (Root 1929, 13). For the sake of the Senate’s own self-respect,
and “for the exercise of its own power hereafter, it is bound to say that,
‘More sacred than the Constitution is our own word, which we have
pledged here’” (Root 1929, 14).
“Slow and Laborious”
At the close of his testimony to the Senate committee, Root returned to
the relationship between the Court and the development of the law of
nations. He pointed out that, prior to the first Hague conference in 1899,
international law typically was made by the treatment of concrete cases
through the foreign offices. The problem is that these cases “came up
very far apart” and, “as the relations of nations have become so compli-
cated…this slow method of making international law was lagging far
behind” (Root 1931b, 16). His own experience taught him that legal
rules are almost always never agreed to “by the representatives of govern-
ments in the conferences under their own steam” (Root 1931b, 16).
Precedents and customs always had to be studied beforehand by experts,
“and here or there…comes a rule of international law,” although usually
“of an academic variety” (Root 1931b, 16). But what they have really
agreed to is “a conception or rule of international law by students or pro-
fessors” that may not outlive a conference presentation or an obscure
article publication (Root 1931b, 16). By contrast, the World Court would
be called upon frequently “to pass upon rules of international law and
apply them in specific cases,” a process that “follows the course by which
our law was created, the course by which all law must be created”—that
is, “in conformity to the life of the people who are affected” (Root 1931b,
16). Root (1931b, 16), for one, strongly desired that his own country,
“which has certain conceptions of ordered justice …shall have its hand in
this development and do its duty to the future of civilization by bringing
its own conception of justice to bear upon it.”
While Root (1931b, 15) would try to convince reluctant Senators
(and more reluctant than he likely appreciated) that membership in the
Court was in keeping with the best “idealism of America,” and that
nations and ambassadors the world over “are beginning to conform their
feelings toward the existence of new ideas,” he never wavered from his
conviction that improving “foreign relations…is necessarily very slow
and laborious and difficult” (1932, 1) No amount of brilliant speeches,
professional meetings, or impressive books could substitute for “steady,
continuous, and unspectacular labor” (Root 1932, 1). Nothing of last-
ing value would come from reformers “who are impatient, the people
who are in a hurry, and who want everything done at once” (Root 1932,
1). This temperament would have the not surprising outcome of the
excited reformer, once an immediate outcome is not forthcoming, con-
clude, “Oh, well, it does not amount to anything” (Root 1932, 1).
Questions of legal reform, he believed, could not be taken up without
discussing “international feeling, international manners, international
morals”—all of those being “necessary to complete the picture” (Root
1932, 1). Moral improvement in the conduct of nations would not come
from reaching “written or oral agreements…making treaties…[or from]
intellectual reasoning” (Root 1932, 1). What mattered for Root (1932,
1) is “the enlargement and elevation of standards of conduct in all coun-
tries.” Institutionalizing new standards of conduct was not just about
settling controversies. If nothing has been done but settle differences,
“you start the future just where you started years before” (Root 1931b,
16). If international law is to be effective, it must rest upon “concurrent
judgment and condemnation,” and the only way to make general judg-
ment possible in contentious cases “is by bringing them to the decision
44 G. RUSSELL
of a competent court which will strip away the irrelevant, reject the false,
and declare what the law requires or prohibits in a particular case” (Scott
1924, 21).
Reinforcing the progressive dimension of Root’s promotion of inter-
national law, as well as his support for American membership on the
World Court, was the conviction (sustained over long years of public
service) that “the theoretical postulate of all diplomatic discussion
between nations is the assumed willingness of every nation to do justice”
(Root 1912, 7). And, although Root’s discussion of justice centered
most often upon judicial procedures for clarifying rights and obligations,
it figured prominently in his own efforts to promote the popular under-
standing of international law. Serving as the first president of the
American Society of International Law, he wrote, “The increase of popu-
lar control over national conduct, which marks the political development
of our time, makes it constantly more important that the great body of
people of each country should have a just conception of their interna-
tional rights and duties” (Root 1907, 1).
Root tied his discussion of international law to the advancement of
democracy and globalization. “The existence and assured continuance of
development of democracy,” he wrote in 1917, “is the great fact forecast-
ing the future conditions under which the effort to reinstate the law of
nations is to be made” (Root 1917, 5). A law-governed international sys-
tem depended, therefore, on creating a community of democracies. Within
this community of nations, Root (1917, 7) envisaged “standards of con-
duct…being established, and a world-wide public opinion…holding
nations to conformity or condemning them for disregard of the estab-
lished standards.” From this angle, and a view endorsed years later by
Anne-Marie Slaughter (2006, 203), Root was making the case that the
advance and spread of democracy was necessary for international law to
survive. While Root (1917, 7–8) knew perfectly well the “great wrongs”
that democracies are “liable to commit,” law “in a democracy…is an
expression of the people’s own will, self-respect, and personal pride, and
patriotism demand its observance.”
Following the failure of the United States to support the League of
Nations or to adhere to the World Court, Root increasingly emphasized
how international law served as a disciplinary restraint on the parochial
political loyalties and ideological excesses of democracies themselves. Root
questioned whether any society, democratic or otherwise, had a special
claim to universal values or a right to impose such standards (democratic
or otherwise) by force. He grew increasingly skeptical about the rancor

and prejudiced public opinion behind the political process, unconvinced
that democratic societies and their leaders could grasp the complexities of
international relations. According to Anthony Carty (2006, 211), this
skepticism “is the distinctive reason why he wishes to combine democracy
with international law.” Root’s legalism shifted from why democracies
favor international law to why democracies need international law as a
form of discipline and restraint. People’s resentments and sense of injus-
tice suffered from other countries must be disciplined into agreed interna-
tional standards (Slaughter et al. 2006, 15).
The often-shrill opposition of American leaders to the League and
World Court was driven by the “popular assumption, often arrogant,
often ignorant that the extreme claims of one’s country are always right
and are to be rigidly insisted upon as a point of national honor” (Root
1912, 6). Submitting a dispute to the jurisdiction of the Court, far from
sacrificing independence, “admits that in a dispute on which we have
taken a stand we might possibly be wrong; at least, it admits that we are
unable to convince our opponent that we are right; and it yields the deter-
mination to an impartial outsider.” He continued
We are the last nation who should adopt that doctrine, for we think we are
the most powerful of all. We could play the bully, claiming we never could
be wrong…and refuse to submit any quarrel to an impartial tribunal. But
decency, self-respect, American love of fair play, and American tradition and
history would reject any such selfish and obsolete doctrine…If we have,
more than any other nation, advocated this doctrine throughout all the days
of our weakness, shall we abandon it now, in the day of our might? Are we
to submit disputes to courts when we are weak and refuse to do it when we
are strong? (Root, n.d., 15)
To oppose the idea of judicial settlement of international disputes, in Root’s

judgment, meant “going back to barbarism, to ‘the good old plan that he
shall take who has the power, and he shall keep who can’” (Ibid. 15).
References
Adams, Charles Francis. 1915. Letter to Elihu Root. (Manuscript Division, Library
of Congress, Washington, DC, Container 126), February 6.
Boyle, Francis Anthony. 1999. Foundations of World Order, The Legalist Approach
to International Relations, 1898–1922. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
46 G. RUSSELL
Holmes, James R. 2007. Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root, International

Lawmen. World Affairs 169 (4): 189–198.
Jessup, Philip. 1938. Elihu Root. 2 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.
Lien, Arnold J. 1926. The Senate Reservations in Geneva. Washington University
Law Review 12 (1): 47–53.
Roosevelt, Theodore. 1914. International Posse Comitatus. New York Times,
November 8, SM 1.
Root, Elihu. 1907. The Need of Popular Understanding of International Law.
American Journal of International Law 1 (1): 1–3.
———. 1908. The Sanction of International Law. American Journal of
International Law 2 (3): 451–457.
———. 1912. Nobel Prize Lecture. http://www.nobelprize.org
———. 1915a. Letter to Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (Manuscript Division, Library
of Congress, Washington, DC, Container 126), February 11.
———. 1915b. Letter to Lassa Oppenheim. (Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress, Washington, DC, Container 133), March 6.
———. 1917. The Effect of Democracy on International Law. Proceedings of the
American Society of International Law 11: 2–11.
———. 1918. Letter to Colonel House. (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, DC, Container 136), August 16.
———. 1919. Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Council. Proceedings of the
American Society of International Law 12 (13): 39–64.
———. 1920a. Address on the Permanent Court of International Justice.
(Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Container 195).
———. 1920b. Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Council. Proceedings of
the American Society of International Law 14: 5–35.
———. 1920c. The Constitution of an International Court of Justice. (Manuscript
Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Container 195).
———. 1923. The Permanent Court of International Justice. (Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Container 220).
———. 1925. The Codification of International Law. Manuscript Division, Library
of Congress, Washington, DC, Container 220.
———. 1929. Interview with Mr. Root. (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, DC, Container 144).
———. 1931a. Memorandum for Hearing of Protocol for Adhesion to World Court.
(Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Container 195).
———. 1931b. Statement to the Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearing
on World Court. (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC,
Container 195).
———. 1932. It Will Take Time. (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, DC, Container 207).
———. n.d. The United States and the World Court. (Manuscript Division, Library
of Congress, Washington, DC, Container 195).
Scott, James Brown. 1924. Elihu Root’s Services to International Law. Proceedings
of the American Society of International Law at Its Annual Meeting 18: 2–42.
Slaughter, Anne-Marie, Charles N. Brower, Anthony Carty, and Jonathan Zasloff.
2006. Rereading Root. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting—American Society of
International Law 100 (March–April), 203–216.
Zimmerman, Warren. 2002. First Great Triumph, How Five Americans Made
Their Country a World Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Girioux.
Greg Russell, PhD (1987) in Political Science, Louisiana State University, is

Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma. He has published
numerous articles and books on the American diplomatic tradition, including
Hans J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American Statecraft (1990), John Quincy
Adams and the Public Virtues of Diplomacy (1995), and The Statecraft of Theodore
Roosevelt: The Duties of Nations and World Order (2009). He currently is working
on a manuscript entitled Elihu Root, International Law, and the World Court.
CHAPTER 3
Nicholas Murray Butler and “The

International Mind” as the Pathway to Peace
David Clinton
In his day, the name of Nicholas Murray Butler was one to be reckoned
with. The longest-serving president in the history of Columbia University
(1901–1945), he also served as Director of the Division of Intercourse
and Education of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from
its founding in 1910 to 1945 and President of the Endowment itself from
1925 to 1945. With Jane Addams, he shared the Nobel Prize for Peace in
1931. He was the acquaintance of presidents, prime ministers, and popes,
and his speeches, lectures, and articles on international topics filled more
than a dozen volumes. Yet today he is little known and, if known at all, is
remembered as the unnamed but, nevertheless, obvious target of George
Kennan’s attack on the “legalistic-moralistic approach to international
problems” in American foreign policy (Kennan 1951, 82–87).
More a publicist than a scholar of international politics, Butler never
published a sustained book-length analysis of international relations or any
other subject. His many edited volumes, along with his two-volume mem-
oir, do, however, give a picture of his beliefs about the workings of the
society of states and his convictions about the method of solving what he
saw as the greatest problem in international relations—the phenomenon
D. Clinton (*)
Department of Political Science, Baylor University, Waco, TX, USA

50 D. CLINTON
of war. These works show that, in pursuing the goal of protecting the
world against “the havoc and cruel disaster of international war” (Butler
1928, I: vii), Butler considered many alternatives, among them a world
state, international law, international organization, and diplomacy. Some
of these expedients he concluded would be ineffective, at least if relied on
as the sole method of preserving peace; others might hold the risk of posi-
tive harm. The one constant refrain in his analyses of the causes and pre-
vention of war was the education and enlightenment of public opinion,
and, to be more specific, the promotion of a cooperative and generous
attitude toward the solution of all international disputes. Butler termed
this attitude the “international mind,” and, either in combination with
these other avenues to peace or as a superior substitute for them, he advo-
cated for change in the way that populations thought about international
affairs. To this end, he employed every position of influence that he held
to explain and propagate the international mind, including channeling
funds from the Carnegie Endowment into projects that symbolized inter-
national cooperation and influenced public thinking.
Among the three strands of Progressivism that this volume explores,
then, Butler appears to stand squarely with those who continued to
advance the Progressive agenda through the interwar years, emphasizing
the introduction of innovative techniques of governance. His Progressivism
was never radical; he had more in common with those he terms “melior-
ists,” or those who “believe that while the world is not the best possible,
and is not even tending toward absolute perfection, yet it is improving
year by year and generation by generation” (Butler 1926a, viii). In the way
of techniques, for example, he wished diplomats of all democratic coun-
tries to do what he assiduously sought to do as a private citizen—leaven
his private meetings with influential policymakers in other countries with
a multitude of public addresses, interviews, and articles in the press advo-
cating for the international mind. He placed in the background schemes
for the coercive enforcement of international law, while emphasizing his
belief that an educated public opinion would bring states voluntarily to
abide by law and to adopt a view of the world characterized by compro-
mise and conciliation, going beyond the minimum of what international
law required them to do. Still, it must also be said that Butler’s program
had much in common with those who relied on a thoughtful and politi-
cally aware citizenry to bring about progressive change. Reform would, in
this sense, be led by those, like Butler himself, who occupied positions of
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER AND “THE INTERNATIONAL MIND”... 51
influence; but, in the end, its motive power would come from mass opin-
ion and ballots cast by voters imbued with the international mind.
War to Enforce Law

Along with his friend and senior colleague Elihu Root, Butler believed
that the judicial settlement of international disputes was the proper and
preferable alternative to war. This approach, therefore, from the outset,
disavowed any conception of a political realm that would in some fashion
be freed of all conflict. “Differences between nations, like differences
between individuals, will always arise,” he observed. The question was
whether these differences would be resolved according to “the rule of
justice or its alternative, the rule of force (Butler 1930, 6).” If “justice”
was to be equated with law, then Butler certainly advocated the creation
and extension of international legal institutions throughout his career—
from his advocacy of the recommendation of the First Hague Conference
of an international court of arbitration, to his support for the recommen-
dation of the Second Hague Conference of a true international judicial
tribunal, to his interwar endorsement of adhesion by the United States to
the Permanent Court of International Justice. He saw reliance on effec-
tive, known, impartial law as the apogee for the settlement of differences
in civilized societies. He was convinced that the international realm was
such a society, and that it was not fated to constitute a lawless jungle but
was susceptible to being made more civilized through the ever-increasing
scope and sway of law. Further, this law-governed society itself rested on
the acceptance of a common moral code that made states into the holders
of rights and duties and not simply the possessors of power. As Butler told
the Academy of International Law at The Hague in the early interwar
years, “So soon as nations, both great and small, accept the doctrine that
they are moral persons, and as such are bound to conform their conduct
to moral laws, the basis is laid for the recognition of the like personality
of other nations, and a true society of nations begins to appear (Butler
1923, 344).”
International legal regulation of the actions of states, however, has
always raised the issue of law enforcement. One response through his-
tory has been some version of collective security, which in turn has sug-
gested the paradox of a readiness to wage war in order to abolish war
(Hinsley 1963). Butler proposed to avoid the dilemma of finding ways
of coercing states into obeying the law by, instead, relying on processes
52 D. CLINTON
that would bring states voluntarily to accept the authority of an interna-

tional legal tribunal. If one were to group, into very large and rough
categories, thinkers in the early twentieth century on the path to peace,
then one might say that Woodrow Wilson favored diplomacy and con-
ciliation under the auspices of international institutions like the League
of Nations, and Root favored the legalization of international disputes
and the institutional response of the Permanent Court of International
Justice. Either of these courses of action would, in the hopes of its adher-
ents, make possible a significant degree of disarmament, which, by
removing from the hands of governments the instruments of war, would
itself decrease the likelihood of war. Butler (although aligning himself
much more closely with Root than with Wilson) found both of these
solutions inadequate because neither, in his view, approached the heart
of the matter, which was the persuasion of each state that it should itself
wish to adopt justice rather than force as the way of dealing with inevi-
table collisions in the international realm. Relying on either international
organization or international law alone, as with approaching the prob-
lem first through steps of disarmament, would cloud the issue by confus-
ing the sequence of actions. “[T]he path to peace is less likely to be
found through limiting the instrumentalities of war,” Butler told the
National Conference on International Problems and Relations in
New York in 1926, “than by the slow, steady building of that will to
peace which lies behind all instrumentalities and bends them to its high
and convinced purpose (Butler 1926b, 492).” This position was no new
one for him; he had said much the same thing at the Lake Mohonk
Conference on International Arbitration as far back as 1907:
“Disarmament will never come by pressure from without a nation, but
only by pressure from within. If justice is established between nations,
peace will follow as a matter of course. The reign of peace will cause
armaments to atrophy from disuse. Disarmament will follow peace, not
precede it (Butler 1907, 144).”1 Peace, it seemed, came through justice,
and justice would reliably be observed by governments only through
their volition, as opposed to their coercion by external agencies. How,
then, to guide the thinking of governments, as opposed to physically
compelling their actions?
1
Among his many other roles, Butler served as president of the American Branch of the
Association for International Conciliation and presided over the annual Lake Mohonk con-
ferences in 1907, 1909, 1910, 1911, and 1912.
Some Unsatisfactory Alternatives

Butler’s interest in international questions had developed after he had
already established himself as a public figure, in the first decade of the
twentieth century. In this period, he had evolved his critique of the exist-
ing international order, as one systematically prone to war. Centuries of
political development, in Butler’s view, had resulted in the modern nation-
state. The creation of the state had brought many beneficial consequences
domestically, in that it provided a focus for patriotic loyalty and a frame-
work for the slow perfection of free democratic government. Externally,
the results had been far less promising, for there had been no correspond-
ing institutional and ideational progress among these independent politi-
cal units. It was for that reason that the epoch of building nations had
come to an end—and had necessarily come to an end, to be succeeded by
the new stage of nurturing connecting tissues among nations:
This is an era not of nation-building, but of the new intellectual, economic,

political, social co-operation of nations in a peace-loving, an orderly, a
liberal-minded, and a progressive society of nations…We now see that the
purpose of building nations was not to bring them into existence as ends in
themselves, eternally at war, eternally in friction, eternally in some form of
combat and contest, but that the object of this fifteen-hundred-year-old
process was to bring them into existence as citizens of a great international
society. (Butler 1932, 51)
What that society was to be—how it was to be instituted and how it was
to operate—will be discussed below; the point for the moment is that
Butler evolved a far-reaching critique of international politics as it was
practiced in his day, a critique that painted states as unwisely hostile to
international cooperation, particularly in economic matters; irrationally
determined to see such cooperation as inherently corrosive of their sover-
eignty; and immorally reliant on force to deal with the conflicts that arose
among them. The states-system as it existed then failed to serve their true
interest in prosperity, and, even more serious, it was positively dangerous
in an era of increasing destructiveness in the technology of warfare (See
Howlett 1983–1984).
One alternative, of course, to a states-system prone to catastrophe
would be no states-system at all—or in other words, a world government.
Butler often compared the rivalry among states in the international system
to the rivalry that had existed among the states of the United States under
54 D. CLINTON
the Articles of Confederation, and advocated the same kind of compro-

mise and overcoming of differences that had led to the creation of the
Constitution. His statement that sovereignty as traditionally understood
was “as dead as Julius Caesar” could be thought to imply the conclusion
that the solution to the problems of rivalry in both instances was the same:
the establishment of an authority that would become the final arbiter over
these squabbling parochial entities—a general government (Butler 1938,
12). Butler seemed of two minds on this possibility.
In some statements, Butler was willing to countenance, at least as an
interim measure, the internationally directed use of force, noting that
“until a controlling world public opinion is developed, an international
policy may from time to time have to be called upon to prevent what are
in effect criminal outbreaks.” A family of nations existed, but it had yet to
be “organized” so as “to do for the world’s order precisely what the
municipal police force does for the order of the neighborhood.” This
organization was not to be found—or certainly was not to be found
solely—in the existing network of the diplomatic system, but was rather in
the process of being created through the institution of international agen-
cies, each with legal powers and a legal personality. The Permanent Court
of International Justice would, with suitable accretions to its authority and
the adherence of the United States, form a judicial branch of this legally
organized world. The League of Nations, shorn of its unfortunate associa-
tion with the punitive provisions of the Versailles Treaty, would “become
the consultative and legislative center of that form of federal union or
grouping of nations which has simply got to come into being.” The execu-
tive agency that would uphold the decisions of the court and enforce the
legislation of the League would come into existence with the creation of
“an effective police force to preserve order in the world (Butler 1938,
383–84; Butler 1940b, 24–5).”
Butler’s evocation of the tripartite framework of government found in
the United States Constitution was no accident; it was an expression of his
conviction that the route to salutary peace and respected law lay in “the
courage, the vision, and the wisdom to find a new and perhaps a final
adaptation of the great federal principle.” It was not arbitration, nor was it
collective security, that would achieve the ending of war—and it was cer-
tainly not reliance on traditional diplomacy that would take such a bold
step—it was, in some form and for some purposes, world government. In
his repeated affirmation of “a new application of the federal principle,” he
meant the creation of an authority that would stand over the formerly
sovereign states of the world—or at least over the increasing number of

them that would place themselves under its protection—with the legal
right to make laws for them, in the areas of its constitutional competence,
and with the material power to compel them to obey. Both prosperity and
safety counseled acceptance—and indeed promotion—of such a new fed-
eral structure over all states willing to avail themselves of its shelter (Butler
1938, 318, 89, 12).
As it happened, both of these motivations had lain behind the sum-
moning of the convention that had written the American Constitution in
1787, and Butler found in the success of the Constitution a sufficient reply
to those who suggested that states on the global stage would not deprive
themselves of their autonomy. He frequently alluded to the measures of
economic retaliation that the American states had employed against their
neighbors under the Articles of Confederation, to the detriment of all, and
argued that the same enlightened self-interest that had persuaded them to
surrender sovereignty could bring the prostrate combatants in the tariff
battles of the 1930s to take a similar step on an international scale. If “that
type of assault, of arson and of murder which is euphemistically called
war” could be ended only by an international police force at the command
of an international sovereign, so too “the international economic prob-
lem…[could] only be solved precisely as the American states solved their
economic problems when they ratified the Federal Constitution.” The
precedent afforded by the American experience also supplied the answer
to those who feared that a world sovereign would become tyrannical, for
the sovereignty of the American federal government was constitutionally
restrained, and what Butler was proposing was that “the nations …place in
the hands of a duly constituted federal authority certain definitely
prescribed and delegated powers (Butler 1938, 2–67, 362–66; Butler
1940a, 232, 73).”2
Although Butler at times cited other historical precedents, including the
empire of Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the Carolingian Empire,
the Swiss Federation, the Dutch Union, the British Commonwealth, and
2
In the case of the federal framework of the government of the United States, Butler advo-
cated great watchfulness to ensure that the federal government did not slip the constitutional
restraints on its limited powers. He applauded the failure of a constitutional amendment in
the 1920s outlawing child labor, arguing that this matter was a state responsibility and that
there was no evidence that the several states had not fulfilled it (See Butler 1938, 339–46).
Presumably, the states of the world would be equally vigilant in scrutinizing the global fed-
eral government and any dangerous appetite for power that it might develop.
56 D. CLINTON
the creation of the German Empire in 1871, he referred most often by far
to the American experience (Butler 1938, 317, 322; Butler 1940b, 18–20).3
The noteworthy aspect of his analysis is that he never described the
Constitutional Convention as an example of diplomacy—of bargaining,
give-and-take, and compromise among political communities that, while
prizing their separate existence and holding differing interests, found that
their common interests and their inescapable interaction required them to
take some common actions. The instructive lessons of the Convention were
for him, on one hand, the institutional superstructure that resulted from it,
and, on the other, the underlying spirit of national unity that brought the
delegates of several states to eventual agreement.
Yet the Butler of world federalism was not the only Butler who took the
world stage. Along with the hope that a properly limited global legal entity
could solve some world problems, there was the fear that such an institu-
tion could become the vehicle of an ideology that would burst its retrain-
ing framework and threaten both community and individual freedom.
When this fear was his dominant, Butler not only failed to endorse world
federalism, he strongly denounced it. “We are [asked] to displace patrio-
tism,” he told the American Society in London on the sesquicentennial of
the Declaration of Independence, “by a vague internationalism that will
take no account of history or tradition or inheritance (Butler 1932, 334).”
Two possible “extremes of misfortune …might conceivably overtake the
civilized world,” he observed to the Cobden Memorial Association five
years later. One was a continuation and intensification of the present state
of affairs—“a state of selfish struggle for individual and national enrich-
ment.” The other, equally calamitous, would occur if there “spread from
a single center over the whole world, like an irresistible glacier, some single
form of political, economic, and social order and domination,” resulting
in “a fabric so spread out and so brittle that it must shortly crack and break
(Butler 1930, 220–21).”4 It would be brittle and, therefore, stave off col-
3
Butler, thus, tended in these statements to emphasize the aspiration for unity over the
management of diversity.
4
The single ideological model that Butler decried in this case was Soviet Communism,
while the rigidity of the League in the form that he criticized Wilson for proposing was the
basis of Butler’s distrust of a combination of legal forms and coercive enforcement, without
the more supple influence of public opinion. Throughout the interwar period, it seems,
Butler was reacting against events in the latter stages and immediate aftermath of the Great
War, whether the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 or the bitter dispute in the United States
over the League in 1919–1920.
lapse only through dictatorial methods because “any attempted interna-

tional substitute for independent and self-governing, co-operating
peoples” would cast aside the undeniable achievement of the era of nation-
building, the creation of a sense of mutual loyalty and common purpose
among a particular group of people and an institutional framework within
which they might deliberate on their common good. No world govern-
ment could reproduce this precious political inheritance; it would rest only
on force and not on freely given adherence. It would be a cure as bad as
the disease it was intended to eradicate. “Americans,” and by implication
the citizens of other free states, “will tolerate no supergovernment to sup-
plant their own Constitution,” nor should they. (Butler 1920, 239)5
To some degree, Butler’s hopes or fears for international government
appeared tied to the degree that that new global authority would resemble
the United States. If the charter of such an authority adopted the pattern
of the American Constitution—carefully limited in its powers, held in
check by an international judicial body, grounded in the philosophy of
liberalism—it could be an unreservedly beneficial thing for world peace
and prosperity. If, on the other hand, a world executive broke free of the
rule of law, if it adopted an ideology similar to Soviet Communism, if it
spurned the guidance of the world’s civilized powers, then it would
become a curse rather than a blessing for the world.6
5
Butler sometimes attempted to square this circle by suggesting a form of regionalism
under which, through international agreement, the globe could be divided into three areas,
and only for the states within each area would any obligation to enforce collective security
through military action exist. In this plan, while “a single code of principles of international
law and international conduct” would exist throughout the world, the duty to uphold those
principles would—in all cases other than “great and unusual emergencies”—fall on the states
within each of three “administrative areas”: “first, Europe, Africa, and those parts of Asia
immediately adjoining Europe and Africa, or which have for a long time past been directly
dependent upon Europe; second, the American continents; and, third, the Orient, including
Japan, China, and Siam.” With such a scheme, “in the ordinary life of nations” a state would
be called on actively to uphold collective security only within its own area, freeing states from
the risk of being expected to intervene anywhere in the world (see Butler 1923, 20).
6
Butler had long been of two minds about world government. In a statement in 1910 he
conflated prescriptions of an international armed police force and of a voluntary adherence
to law sustained by pacific public opinion. He hoped that “great sovereign nations, like feder-
ated states, may live and grow and do business together in harmony and unity, without strife
or armed conflict, through the habit of submitting to judicial determination all questions of
difference as they may arise, the judicial decree when made to be supported and enforced—
after the fashion in which judicial decrees are everywhere supported and enforced—by intel-
ligent public opinion and by an international and neutral police” (see Butler 1910, 172).
58 D. CLINTON
Butler’s ambivalence about world government meant that, if an answer

to the problem of destructive international competition and war was to be
found, it seemed, it had to be in the context of a system of independent
states, the relations among which were to be purged of such antisocial ele-
ments. At least in theory, this end might be accomplished through the
institutionalization and regularization of diplomatic contacts within an
organization such as the League of Nations. Amid both world wars, Butler
endorsed international organization as an important war aim but, in the
intervening years of peace, he appeared to be less sanguine about its effi-
cacy (See Butler 1920, 125–29; Butler 1946, 13–14).7 Butler regretted
the impasse in the Senate that prevented the United States from joining
the League with his preferred reservations in 1919, and he called for closer
American cooperation with the League throughout the interwar years. He
sometimes spoke of the League as the germ of a kind of legislative body
that could discuss and declare alterations to international law—again,
drawing an analogy to the role of Congress established under the
Constitution. Yet the League, if not the nightmare that an attempt at
world government could become, was still inadequate as a solution to the
problem of peace. It was inadequate because diplomacy itself was inade-
quate. Diplomats, however energetically they endeavored to find areas of
agreement among their governments, nevertheless existed to promote the
ends of those governments, and they would violate the terms of their
appointment if they did anything else. If “a world of free and co-operating
nations, whether great or small, was turned into a world of jealous and
competing nations, each making colossal expenditure to arm itself in prep-
aration for an ultimate appeal to force” as Butler feared was the case, then
diplomacy had no independent ground on which to stand in opposing
such a trend. Diplomacy, in other words, necessarily took on the character
7
Butler had no great admiration for Woodrow Wilson or his works, saying of his fellow Ivy
League president, “We were … never sympathetic, either intellectually or temperamentally.
…I could understand and appreciate his intellect and his power of speech, but I never was
able to feel confidence in his mental processes or in his standards of judgment.” (See Butler
1939a, I: 11–12.) Butler acted as an adviser to the Mild Reservationists during the Senate
struggle over ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, and supported their agenda of ratification
of the treaty with protections for United States sovereignty over a number of issues, includ-
ing most particularly the congressional authority to declare war. If Butler’s memoirs are to be
believed on the episode, he left his meeting with this group of senators on June 11, 1919
“feeling absolutely confident that the Treaty would be ratified with reservations and that the
reconstruction of world order under American leadership would shortly thereafter begin”
(see Butler 1939a, II: 200; Rosenthal 2006, 302–304).
of the international system in which it operated; it was a reflection of the

states-system and neither a brake on its excesses nor a spur to its improve-
ment. Insofar as the League took measured steps toward becoming an
incipient legislative body, it would play a constructive role in international
politics. Insofar as it remained an arena within which traditional diplomacy
was played out—in a new setting but with the same aims—it made itself
irrelevant to the crisis of the states-system. Without further and deeper
reforms, “all schemes for international organization and international co-
operation are futile, and will not long ward off a disaster which takes its
origin in wrong and false ideas planted in the hearts of men and nations
(Butler 1920, 122).”
Butler’s preference for the League as a legislative rather than a dip-
lomatic organization indicates the next avenue to world peace, and one
that Butler took with the utmost seriousness. This route was the legal-
ization or judicialization of international relations through an increased
scope and respect for international law. Even before the Great War,
Butler had believed that international arbitration was inadequate
because it was “semi-diplomatic” and had called for reliance on fully
judicial processes of international law.8 After the war, Butler supported
closer American links with the League; he regularly and enthusiastically
proselytized for American adherence to the Permanent Court of
International Justice (PCIJ). Among the milestones of progress that he
praised in countless contexts were the first Hague Conference in 1899
(which attempted the legal regulation of the means of war), the cre-
ation of the PCIJ in 1919, and the Kellogg–Briand Pact, or Pact of
Paris, of 1928, under which signatory states signed a legal pledge not
to employ war as a tool of their foreign policies, in most contexts. This
binding legal agreement to abjure war was, for Butler, the apogee of
this arc of progress; certainly, he could not be accused of underplaying
its significance:
August 27, 1928, opens a new era in the world’s history, an era quite as
revolutionary as that which opened on October 12, 1492, and of far greater
8
For an early expression of this stance, see Butler’s opening address as chairman of the
Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration in 1907, in which he recommended
that, at the second Hague Conference then assembling, “the Permanent Hague Court [the
Permanent Court of Arbitration, a product of the first Hague Conference in 1899] be trans-
formed from a semi-diplomatic into a truly judicial tribunal. … [and] judges be substituted
for arbitrators” (Butler 1919, 12).
60 D. CLINTON
moral significance …Gone is the fear for national security; gone is the argu-
ment for compulsory military service and huge standing armies; gone is the
plea for the protection of sea-borne commerce and a navy as powerful as any
in the world; gone is the haste to build bombing planes and to store up huge
supplies of poison gas to suffocate the combatant and the non-combatant
alike; gone is the whole gospel of preparedness for a war which is promised
never to be fought. (Butler 1930, 163–64)
With the coming into force of this legal instrument, the major step had
been taken, because the renunciation of force became “the supreme law of
the world and effective everywhere if people will only obey it.” To skeptics
who doubted that governments would, in fact, obey the strictures of the
Pact unless they were threatened with dire consequences if they did not do
so, Butler had a ready answer: “The alternative to war is simple, ordinary,
common honesty: that is all. All that is necessary has been done. We do
not need any more talk, any more declarations. We only need honesty. We
want these men [national leaders] to keep the word to which they have
pledged our governments (Butler 1938, 11–13).” As international legal
instruments were negotiated or legislated or declared by judicial processes
to cover increasing parts of the international agenda, the scope for war
would be correspondingly reduced and eventually eliminated.
Butler wrote his MA thesis on Kant, and he always insisted that his own
ideas on international peace rested directly on Kant’s “Perpetual Peace
(Butler 1939b, vii–ix).” What has been said of Kant might also be said of
Butler: that he “was not a pacifist, but rather a passionate legaliser, or
prophet or evangelist of legalisations, in international relations (Gallie
1978, 20).” The spread of peace was certainly something to be worked for
(as Butler assiduously did), but it was also providential in the sense that it
was inevitable—as economic interdependence and the very destructive-
ness of war itself brought leaders and citizens alike to see that their true
self-interest lay in peace. Nonetheless, law unaided was incapable of
accomplishing the necessary transformation of international relations, in
Butler’s view. “Few proposals could be more futile than that merely to
outlaw war,” he insisted. “Such outlawry would only last until human pas-
sion broke down its fragile barrier…It is quite idle and meaningless to plan
to purge human nature of its less admirable traits by the enactment of any
statute, whether national or international (Butler 1930, 10–11).” A peace
resting solely on international legal agreements would require coercive
enforcement mechanisms to deter or defeat law-breaking states, and this
method of restoring peace could be indistinguishable from waging war.9

By itself, law was sterile—a false hope.
The Butlerian Alternative

Butler did, at times, refer to the provision of an international military force
to stand behind the decisions of any tribunal and coerce or deter potential
violators. In August of 1918, for example, while the Great War was still
going on, he declared that such a force already existed—in the form of the
Allied and Associated Powers. Although “it is important that this league
of nations should begin by not attempting too much,” he wrote in a letter
to the London Daily Chronicle in the later stages of the war, such a league
should not be simply a league to encourage peace, but “A league of nations
that aims to declare and to enforce principles of international law and jus-
tice [—] those foundations upon which alone permanent peace can rest
(Butler 1918b, 235, 236).” After the conclusion of the war, however, and
particularly in the course of the debate over Senate ratification of the
Treaty of Versailles, Butler vigorously opposed American membership in
the League as Woodrow Wilson had negotiated it, in large part because of
his contention that the automaticity of the obligations of collective secu-
rity would undermine the constitutional powers of Congress in declaring
war and undermine prudent American action in the world by potentially
involving the United States in conflicts far from its realistically defined
interests. From this point forward, such references to an international
organization that either controlled its own armed forces or could reliably
call on the armed forces of the member states tended to drop away.10 This
dismissal of collective security—realized through some form of common
resort to the instruments of armed force—of course only returned the
matter to the original dilemma.
What would bring law to life—what would achieve its effective opera-
tion without recourse to a destructive war of enforcement that would be
worse than the ills it was intended to cure—was voluntary compliance
9
Butler held out some hopes for economic sanctions as a coercive substitute for war in
enforcing the pledges under the Pact of Paris to abjure war, but, short of that step, he
granted that law-enforcing states “cannot use armed force against this pledge-breaker, either
singly or unitedly, without re-establishing war as an instrument of policy” (Butler 1935, 92).
10
Such allusions never entirely disappeared from Butler’s public statements, but they
became far less numerous and conspicuous, and less connected to the reasoning of his
arguments.
62 D. CLINTON
with law. “If …laws are to be truly effective, they must be, not enforced,
but obeyed. They are only obeyed, and they only will be obeyed, when
they reflect the overwhelming public opinion of those whom they directly
affect (Butler 1930, 11).”
Here, one turns to a psychological element, which was for Butler the
linchpin of his hopes for “international understanding and international
cooperation.” He acknowledged that “an international police may from
time to time have to be called upon,” but this expedient would be needed
primarily for the interregnum “until a controlling world public opinion is
developed.” Once public opinion in each member state of the interna-
tional federal union had been brought to accept, or, indeed, to demand,
that its government abide by the decisions of those authorized to declare
international law, the need for coercive force applied by the other member
states would largely fade away; it was in this manner that Butler sought to
escape the charge brought by all critics of collective security—that such an
effort to abolish war rested on the threat to launch greater, worldwide
wars against offending states. Butler did accept the logic of collective secu-
rity and, for that reason, he became increasingly critical of the legal and
moral status of neutrality, which he contended represented, at least in the
contemporary world, an abdication of the responsibility owed to fellow
members of international society, but if democratic electorates could
enforce on their own political leaders a respect for the rights and interests
of other states, then the dilemma of war-to-end-war could be avoided
(Butler 1938, xii–xiii, 384).11
Butler’s answer was a free association of nations that would voluntarily
renounce the resort to war among themselves. There were at least two
central elements to this proposal that Butler saw as distinguishing his
method of promoting peace from the plans of others, and made it superior
to them. The first was that this association would have no direct legal
authority over the member states. In such a form of what Butler was later
to term “a nationalistic internationalism”, states would remain the sover-
eign arbiters of their future, for “There is no need to establish a super-
state” or “to displace patriotism by a vague internationalism (Butler 1932,
289–90, 334).” Indeed, as we have seen, Butler found “some single form
of political, economic and social order and domination” exercised “from a
11
Butler’s conception of peace achieved through accountability to pacifically inclined pop-
ular opinion is indicated by the title of the 1937 radio address from which the latter quota-
tion is taken: “The Rule of Morals or the Rule of Force?”
single center over the whole world” an “extreme of misfortune” fully as

undesirable as “a state of selfish struggle for individual and national enrich-
ment” among nations (Butler 1930, 220–21). In his conception of such a
dangerous centralization of power, he included both the totalitarian men-
ace of universalistic ideologies and the overly ambitious role for interna-
tional organizations that he attributed to Wilson.
The second component of Butler’s vision was the voluntary abjuring of
the use of military force by these independent and sovereign states. If
there was one proposition that he claimed was inaccurately attributed to
him, and that he repeatedly sought to deny, it was that he and his political
allies advocated the outlawing of war. Time and again, he contrasted the
“outlawing” of war with the “renunciation” of war, criticizing the former
as impractical and, therefore, dangerous, and extolling the latter as reason-
able and eminently attainable. “Few proposals could be more futile than
that merely to outlaw war,” he declared in the introduction to his annual
report as Director of the Division of Intercourse and Education at the
Carnegie Endowment in 1925. “Such outlawry would only last until
human passion broke down its fragile barriers…Laws must reflect, but
cannot compel, public opinion. It is quite idle and meaningless to plan to
purge human nature of its less admirable traits by the enactment of any
statute, whether national or international.” Instead, Butler praised his pre-
ferred course of renunciation. “The action proposed is something quite
different from that advocated by those who would outlaw war,” he
declared in his annual lecture at the Parrish Art Museum in 1927. “War
cannot be outlawed, if by that is meant disposed of and prevented by reso-
lution or denunciation…On the other hand, war may and can be renounced
between like-minded and advanced people as an instrument of public pol-
icy (Butler 1930, 10–11, 85).”
To seek peace through formally outlawing war through international
legislation and seeking to enforce that prohibition by threatening the
application of coercive force to recalcitrant states, then, was a chimera—
or, perhaps worse, a recipe for either impotence or disaster. A staunch
opponent of the Eighteenth Amendment throughout the interwar period,
Butler often compared the outlawry of war to Prohibition, and the volun-
tary renunciation of war to individual temperance. The former approach
would require so much in the way of coercion that it would ultimately
discredit itself and render itself ineffective, while the latter would rest on
the surer ground of an internal resolve to abstain from an activity danger-
ous to oneself and to society at large.
64 D. CLINTON
In his reliance on the way in which populations thought about interna-

tional relations, Butler was continuing a theme that had preoccupied him
since the years before the war. It was a theme that had formed his concep-
tion of a central war aim for the United States once it had entered the war.
Contending that “the main thing is to remove from the world a notion
and a purpose that compel armaments and that eventually force war,” he
had in 1918 declared that “what we must reach …is the mind, the con-
science, and the heart of the German people.” The real aim of military
action in that war was to convince German citizens to “turn their thought
inward to prepare the way for those same ideas of co-operation between
nations, of the sacredness of treaty obligations, of the rights of small
nations, and of the duties of great powers toward submerged nationalities,
which are now part of the mental furniture of liberty-minded men and
women throughout the world.” Butler saw this change in mental attitude
as both necessary to, and sufficient for, the attainment of lasting peace;
with such a conversion, “it will be easy to establish and maintain an inter-
national organization to keep the peace of the world,” while “without this
condition, all schemes for international organization and international co-
operation are futile and will not long ward off a disaster which takes its
origin in wrong and false ideas planted in the hearts of men and women
(Butler 1918c, 111).”
Hence, the concept that may be more frequently associated with
Butler’s thinking than any other: “the international mind.” Butler had
long stated that whatever influence was exercised by “the reign of law and
the dominance of justice” rested ultimately on “a mind and a conscience,”
and the international expression of this reliance on the acceptance by pub-
lic opinion of “Right” as its guide was the international mind. When asked
to define it, he asserted that it was “nothing else than that habit of t hinking
of foreign relations and business, and that habit of dealing with them,
which regard the several nations of the civilized world as friendly and co-
operating equals in aiding the progress of civilization, in developing com-
merce and industry, and in spreading enlightenment and culture
throughout the world.” The international mind, then, was predisposed to
expect the interests of states to be complementary rather than conflicting,
to view the natural relations among states as amicable rather than hostile,
and to rank high on the international agenda beneficial projects that could
be achieved through collaboration rather than through competition. One
who had developed the international mind would look at other peoples
from the point of view of those peoples and employ the standards of those
peoples, for the international mind was characterized by broadmindedness

and generosity. In conduct, it would counsel self-restraint in publicly voic-
ing opinions about others. It would, in sum, lead any nation toward
“kindly feeling and generous sympathy in our attitude toward foreign rela-
tions (Butler 1919, 4–5, 102, 106–08, 111).”12
In its appeal to public opinion acting within separate states, the interna-
tional mind would constitute anything but the oppressive world govern-
ment that at times so disturbed Butler. It was, in fact, “in sharp antagonism
to that internationalism which would break down the boundaries of
nations and merge all mankind, regardless of differences in tradition, in
law, in language, in religion, and in government, into a single and com-
mon unit (Butler 1923, 344).”13 At the same time, the beneficent influ-
ence of the international mind would call governments away from the
conflict-prone suspicions and the self-defeating reliance on national arma-
ments that characterized the traditional states-system. It promised all of
the benefits of a world of many independent states and none of the costs.
The inculcation of the international mind would be a task of years if not
decades, and it required the efforts of all who could help to shape public
opinion; Butler’s own heavy schedule of public speeches, radio broadcasts,
and articles in newspapers and magazines indicates how seriously he took the
task. From this common effort, diplomats could not expect to be exempt,
and the role that Butler saw for diplomats illustrates Butler’s emphasis on the
importance of enlightening the opinion of the public. The primary employ-
ment for diplomats was certainly not negotiation. It was “public diplomacy”
(though Butler never used that term), it was the promotion of this outlook
of “kindly feeling and generous sympathy” among the population of the
country in which the diplomat was serving, it was the encouragement of
contacts and exchanges of all kinds that would promote understanding
among peoples—it was the spreading of the international mind. His depic-
tion of the “unique position of influence and of opportunity” occupied by
the twentieth-century ambassador is worth quoting at some length:
Between nations in which free public opinion exists and eventually domi-
nates public policy, the most successful ambassador in this twentieth century
12
Butler’s foremost effort to illuminate the term was his opening address as Chairman of
the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration in 1912. Entitled “The
International Mind,” the talk is reprinted in the book of the same title on pp. 97–114.
13
Butler entitled this lecture, “The Development of the International Mind.”
66 D. CLINTON
will be one who becomes ambassador not only to a government but to a

people. If an ambassador confines his activities to formal relations with the
department of foreign affairs of the government to which he is accredited,
he may miss a great part of his opportunity for the highest type of public
service to his own people. If, on the other hand, he finds ways and means to
enter freely and intimately into the unofficial life of the people to whose
government he is accredited, he not only will strengthen himself as ambas-
sador, but also will find ways and means better to understand the people
with whom he is living and better to interpret the institutions and ideals of
the people whose representative he is. (Butler 1940a, 248)14
The spread of the international mind would make populations immune to

the fear-mongering and xenophobia through which selfish interests had
previously misled the people into supporting the policies that had made
the old international system so dangerous. As a phenomenon that would
occur within each national population, it would not require a world gov-
ernment or the deadening uniformity that such a political institution
would bring. It would impart vigor to international organization and law,
through hearty voluntary cooperation from the bottomup rather than dic-
tation from the topdown. In time, it would solve the problem of interna-
tional war.
Butler’s hope was that, as public opinion in each country, and through
its influence the governing authorities of that country, was brought to see
international society as an exercise in cooperation rather than conflict,
each player would begin to “constitute” itself in a new way (in which a
“higher patriotism” would perceive “in one’s nation a moral personality
with a conscience as well as with interests” and would ask “not alone for
opportunity to thrive and to gain but for opportunity to succor and to
serve (Butler 1932, 213).” Likewise, those who acted for each state would
“constitute” the Other in a novel and far less threatening manner than had
traditionally been the case. By looking at others in a different way, states
guided by the international mind would, in fact, remake the world (see
Wendt 1999).15
14
When it is recalled that these remarks constituted part of an address delivered at a dinner
in honor of the Marquess of Lothian, newly arrived as British Ambassador to the United
States in 1939, Butler’s dedication of the propagation of the international mind by diplo-
matic representatives receives new emphasis.
15
The reference here is to the school of thought in international relations known as “con-
structivism”—the contention that what is taken as unalterable “reality” is often a mental
Butler’s prescription of “the international mind” thus rested on consid-

erable confidence that public opinion was indeed peacefully inclined, or at
least was moving in that direction. Certainly, in the case of the United
States, he held this opinion, telling a British audience in 1932 that
American public opinion—“the great body of instructed and increasingly
intelligent public opinion, which is bound in its time and in its own way to
get something better done,” as he called it—“is just now very far in
advance of the recorded action of Government” in international affairs
(Butler 1932, 618–28).16 Of course, such a cooperative attitude could not
be counted on to take root and grow entirely on its own, and Butler had
been clear since before the war that “the aim of all rational and practicable
activity for the permanent establishment of the world’s peace and for the
promotion of justice is and must always be the education of the world’s
public opinion (Butler 1909, 160).” Butler made his own contribution to
this educational effort, not only in the constant stream of speeches and
articles that he produced, but also in his direction from the founding of
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace of its Division of
Intercourse and Education. From that position, he oversaw the publica-
tion of hundreds of publications (including, again, the texts of many of his
own addresses and reprints of many of his own articles) dedicated to the
propagation of the international mind. The Division took the lead in orga-
nizing International Relations Clubs in secondary schools, colleges, and
universities throughout the United States; it hit on the idea of setting up
“International Mind” alcoves in American public libraries. In Europe, it
helped to fund the construction of a municipal library in Rheims and the
restoration of two libraries heavily damaged in the war—at the University
of Belgrade and the University of Louvain. In his memoirs, Butler termed
these projects “evidence of generous interest and sympathy of the American
people with those of their fellows in other nations who might be suffering
or in want.” Such tangible demonstrations of internationalism could fur-
ther the development of the international mind in both donor and recipi-
ent countries, he anticipated (Rosenthal 2006, 243–46; Butler 1935, II:
construct created by assumptions about the nature of one’s relations with other actors in
international life—whether they are assumed to be friends, enemies, or partners. In advocat-
ing the “international mind,” Butler wished to reconstitute these mental images in a more
hopeful, cooperative direction.
16
Butler, “American Public Opinion and International Affairs,” International Affairs
(Royal Institute of International Affairs 1931–1939), 11 (September 1932): 618–632 (618,
628).
68 D. CLINTON
122). In all their work, the staffs of the Division of Intercourse and
Education—and its two Carnegie counterparts, the Division of
International Law and the Division of Economics and History—would
serve as “a veritable faculty of peace (Butler 1911, 155; see also Herman
1969, 22–54; Marrin 1976, 150–55).”
Assessments of the efficacy of this activity have varied. Butler himself
concentrated on the sheer scope and scale of the work of the Division of
Intercourse and Education. In remarks delivered to the Students
International Union in 1934, for example, he described the International
Relations Clubs as groups of people of all ages who met weekly or biweekly
to discuss international affairs, to whom the Division sent “advice, sugges-
tions, courses of readings, topics to discuss, and occasionally …an out-
standing personality.” He reported that “more than six hundred” such
clubs existed in the United States, and “I do not know how many we have
in Europe, in South America and in Asia (Butler 1938, 16).” By the time
he published his memoirs in 1935, Butler increased his estimate of the
number of International Relations Clubs in the United States to “over a
thousand,” but confined their participants to “students and faculty advis-
ers …generally in the smaller institutions of learning, colleges and high
schools.” He added that the Division also sent speakers to address regional
conferences of the clubs, of which there had been 12 in the preceding
academic year. In addition to the counterpart clubs established in the
United Kingdom, Butler pointed to the work of “some hundred and fifty
Clubs in colleges and universities of Australia, Canada, New Zealand,
South Africa, India, China, Japan, the Philippine Islands, and throughout
the Latin-American countries.” As for the “International Mind” alcoves,
Butler counted over 900 “in public libraries in small communities in the
United States” and described them as consisting of books—“thirty, forty,
fifty, sometimes one hundred in number”—of fiction or non-fiction on
other peoples or by authors not from the United States. He gave special
attention to the Inter-American Section of the Division, which “put into
the high schools and colleges throughout Latin America Spanish transla-
tions of standard textbooks on the government of the United States and
works of our American literature,” which he asserted had “made an
immense impression on the rising generation of Latin Americans.” His
one disappointment was that it had not proved “easy or even possible to
organize in France or in Germany or in Italy the International Relations
Clubs,” because the clubs “were obviously suspected by the governments
of the Continental Countries as possible sources of disturbing propa-
ganda,” while by the mid-1930s, conditions in Japan and China had

“made successful prosecution of the Carnegie Endowment’s work increas-
ingly difficult (Butler 1935, II: 92–95).”
It was this very apolitical character of the work of the Endowment
under Butler’s leadership that accounted for much of the criticism of its
effectiveness. When, in 1925, Butler confidentially sounded out some 200
political leaders around the world for their evaluation of the work of the
Endowment, Ramsay MacDonald—then between his two stints as British
Prime Minister—returned a reply almost startling in its frankness: “I doubt
if the Fund has really done a particle of good in the promotion of peace.
It would probably have been difficult enough at best but your failure has
been pre-eminently conspicuous.” Speaking more generally in 1938, Lord
David Davies, campaigner for the League of Nations and funder of the
Woodrow Wilson Chair in international politics at the University of Wales
at Aberystwyth, was equally dubious: “From the purely academic stand-
point no doubt it may be argued that the money has been spent on proj-
ects connected with peace…What of all the peace movements; what have
they done; are they worth a rap? I wonder. What practical results can they
show for all the speeches, literature and money expended in the cause?
Very little, I fear (Rosenthal 2006, 359–63).”
Conclusion
Butler’s conception of the route to world peace was a multilayered one.
He accepted—and in the end endorsed—a world of many sovereign states.
He accepted that, among these states, differing in culture, perspective, and
interests, conflict would occur. He accepted that the resolution of these
conflicts would at times require some form of coercion, although that
coercion might take forms other than armed force, such as economic sanc-
tions or even the pressure of outraged public opinion. He believed that
coercion would be best and most justly applied when it was exercised
through international institutions, but he dismissed institutions that
served merely as the arena of contending national interests. He endorsed
institutions that created and were put at the service of impartial law rather
than those interests, but he was convinced that law was inadequate unless
it reflected and was ultimately enforced by public opinion. He had faith in
the efficacy of enlightened public opinion, but he feared that opinion was
as yet far from the enlightenment of the international mind, and that gov-
ernments were still further. He devoted his career in all its aspects—as
70 D. CLINTON
president of an Ivy League university, as a high official of the Carnegie

Endowment, and as a public figure—to instilling the tenets of the interna-
tional mind.
All of these steps lend an impression of many caveats to Butler’s hopes
for the attainment of peace. Still, his belief in education could at times
lead him into what would later appear an over-reliance on an attitude of
friendly cooperation to deal with those who could not be conciliated.
After all, not every government was subject to the play of a free public
opinion, and national publics were often inflamed rather than concilia-
tory in their assessment of international differences. It is impossible, for
example, to read without unease the rhetorical challenges that Butler
posed to skeptics about the strength, or even the existence, of the inter-
national mind:
We are beginning to see that opportunity to exist peacefully, undisturbed, in

quiet, has nothing to do with great population, great wealth, vast territory,
or huge armaments. Point to me a nation safer and more undisturbed than
Holland! Point to me a nation safer and more undisturbed than Denmark!
And then tell me why they are safe and undisturbed! Why are they not seized
upon, invaded, tormented, conquered, by some of their vast and powerful
neighbors? The answer is that they have made a permanent place for them-
selves in this new society of civilized nations because of their intelligence and
their character. (Butler 1932, 51)
When one recalls that only nine years after Butler spoke these words, these
very countries suffered precisely the fate from which Butler had pro-
claimed that they were safe, the possibilities of the international mind may
begin to appear somewhat more circumscribed than Butler had predicted.
Perhaps there was a reason why Kennan chose Butler as his target.
References
Butler, Nicholas Murray. 1907. An Auspicious Moment for the Cause of
International Arbitration. The Advocate of Peace (1894–1920) 69: 143–145.
———. 1909. The Present Anglo-German Situation. The Advocate of Peace
(1894–1920) 71: 157–161.
———. 1910. The Dilemma which Confronts the World To-day. The Advocate of
Peace (1894–1920) 72: 169–172.
———. 1911. The Carnegie Endowment and International Peace. The Advocate
of Peace (1894–1920) 73: 152–157.
———. 1918b. A Governed World. The Advocate of Peace (1894–1920) 80:

235–237.
———. 1918c. The Road to Durable Peace. The Advocate of Peace (1894–1920)
80: 110–111.
———. 1919. The International Mind: An Argument for the Judicial Settlement of
International Disputes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
———. 1920. Is America Worth Saving? Addresses on National Problems and Party
Policies. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
———. 1923. Toward Higher Ground. Advocate of Peace Through Justice 85:
18–20.
———. 1926a. The Significance of the Conference. Proceedings of the Academy of
Political Science in the City of New York 12: 491–494.
———. 1926b. Preface to Evolution and Optimism, by Ludwig Stein, vii–ix.
New York: Thomas Seltzer.
———. 1927. The Will to Peace. League of Nations Non-Partisan Association.
———. 1928. Introduction to The Drafting of the Covenant, by David Hunter
Miller, I: vii–viii. 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
———. 1930. The Path to Peace: Essays and Addresses on Peace and Its Making.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
———. 1932. Looking Forward: What Will the American People Do About It?
Essays and Addresses on Matters National and International. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons.
———. 1935. Between Two Worlds: Interpretations of the Age in Which We Live:
Essays and Addresses. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
———. 1938. The Family of Nations: Its Need and Its Problems: Essays and
Addresses. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
———. 1939a. Across the Busy Years: Recollections and Reflections. 2 vols.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
———. 1939b. Introduction to Perpetual Peace, by Immanuel Kant, vii–ix.
New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1940a. True and False Democracy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
———. 1940b. Why War? Essays and Addresses on War and Peace. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons.
———. 1946. The World Today: Essays and Addresses. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons.
Gallie, W.B. 1978. Philosophers of Peace and War: Kant, Clausewitz, Marx, Engels
and Tolstoy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Herman, Sondra. 1969. Eleven Against War: Studies in American Internationalist
Thought, 1898–1921. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press.
Hinsley, F.H. 1963. Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the
History of Relations Between States. New York: Cambridge University Press.
72 D. CLINTON
Howlett, C.F. 1983–1984. Nicholas Murray Butler’s Crusade for a Warless World.
The Wisconsin Magazine of History 67: 99–120.
Kennan, George F. 1951. American Foreign Policy, 1900–1950. New American
Library.
Marrin, Albert. 1976. Nicholas Murray Butler. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
Rosenthal, Michael. 2006. Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the
Redoubtable Dr Nicholas Murray Butler. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Wendt, Alexander. 1999. Social Theory of International Politics. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
David Clinton is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at

Baylor University, where he has taught since 2006. His major interests are the his-
tory of international thought, international ethics, and diplomacy. He is the author
of The Two Faces of National Interest (1994) and Tocqueville, Lieber, Bagehot:
Liberalism Confronts the World (2003) and the editor of The Realist Tradition in
Contemporary International Relations (2007).
CHAPTER 4
Progressivism Triumphant? Isaiah Bowman’s

New Diplomacy in a New World
Lucian M. Ashworth
Isaiah Bowman was a strong internationalist and a not inconsiderable

influence on the foreign policies of presidents Woodrow Wilson and
Franklin D. Roosevelt. A geographer as well as a progressive, he applied a
distinctly American interpretation of Lebensraum to the problems of con-
quest, trade and raw materials. Originally a physical geographer—his early
work had been on forest physiography—his work on behalf of the American
delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace conference led him to become one of
the key founders of political geography in the United States. After the war,
he wrote two books that influenced the debates on American foreign pol-
icy. His New World (first published in 1921) was a product of his experi-
ences at the peace conference, and was designed as a guide to international
affairs. His 1931 International Relations was a short textbook commis-
sioned by the American Library Association that provided a summary of
Bowman’s international thought. With America’s entry to the Second
World War in 1941, Bowman once again entered Government service,
becoming an advisor to the Roosevelt Administration on post-war recon-
struction (See Martin 1980; Smith 2003).
L.M. Ashworth (*)

Department of Political Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland,
St. John’s, NL, Canada

74 L.M. ASHWORTH
Although Lebensraum is usually associated with conquest, Bowman’s

conception of an American Lebensraum (see Smith 2003, 27–8) was a
distinctly progressive approach to world problems. Bowman shared the
progressive disquiet with laissez-faire liberalism, while also not being will-
ing to go down the route towards socialism. Bowman remained convinced
that the result of laissez faire globally would not be peace, but rather,
imperial conflicts between states over resources and markets. For Bowman,
a global free market had to be created through global cooperation and US
leadership. Bowman opposed the idea of a natural balance of power.
Indeed, the major premise of his two main books on world affairs was the
importance of a change of mentality towards cooperation and the need for
controls on the old diplomacy associated with the balance of power. Yet,
while he was an internationalist, Bowman shared the view of many pro-
gressives that this internationalism needed American leadership (Dawley
2003, 4–8). The end result was to be a safer and more internationalist
world, but it was one where the United States and American conceptions
of democracy would be paramount.
Of course, in the years after the end of the First World War,
Progressivism was deeply divided on international questions. Both
Herbert Croly and Robert La Follette opposed the peace treaties and
membership of the League of Nations. As a leading member of President
Wilson’s group of advisers at Paris (the ‘Inquiry’), Bowman had helped
write the treaties, and he remained committed to them, despite personal
misgivings about some aspects of the treaties. He also remained commit-
ted to greater American involvement in the League. Thus, in the conflict
between the two wings of Progressivism—Dawley has called one unilat-
eralist and imperialist, and the other multilateralist and internationalist—
Bowman sided firmly with multilateralism and internationalism (Dawley
2003, 27).
Bowman’s alignment with the multilateralist and internationalist wing
of Progressivism represented the American part of his international
thought, but, in his political geography, he remained strongly influenced
by a European (and distinctly German) tradition of looking at the world.
The major influence on American human geography was the German
political geographer Friedrich Ratzel, whose influence was spread through
American geography by Ratzel’s student Ellen Churchill Semple. This
included Ratzel’s concept of Lebensraum, which described the living space
needed by an organism or society. The confluence of American
Progressivism and Ratzelian geography produced Bowman’s distinctly
PROGRESSIVISM TRIUMPHANT? ISAIAH BOWMAN’S NEW DIPLOMACY... 75
American approach to Lebensraum that would become the hallmark of his

internationalism.
The first section of this chapter discusses Ratzel and his influence on
Bowman and the peace treaties. The second section explores Bowman’s
development of his approach to international relations in the interwar
period, while the third will adumbrate how Bowman’s ideas were trans-
lated into the post-war planning of the Roosevelt administration (a pro-
cess in which Bowman was an active participant). Finally, I will end by
assessing the nature of Bowman’s Progressivism, and the relations with
International Relations (IR) theory more generally.
Ratzel Comes to America …and Meets Mr. Wilson

Friedrich Ratzel was one of the leading lights in late-nineteenth-century
geography. Originally a zoologist, he became associated with the develop-
ment of human geography (or, what Ratzel originally called
Anthropogeographie). Central to Ratzel’s work was how the physical envi-
ronment affected and moulded human societies. From this came the con-
cepts of Lebensraum and Heerenvolk (the cultural group best suited to
living off a specific kind of environment). While the use of his work during
the Nazi era has made him a controversial thinker in Germany today (and
his concepts are usually known via their use by the Nazis), his influence on
the development of human geography was particularly strong in America,
where US universities proved receptive to ideas from the new rising power
of Wilhelmine Germany.
The groundwork for the introduction of Ratzel’s thought into America
(and a wider Anglophone audience) was the publication of Ellen Churchill
Semple’s 1911 book Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of
Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography (Semple 1911). Semple took
Ratzel’s argument about the effect of the physical environment on the
development of societies and wove it into an environmental determinist
model in which the physical ecology dictated the forms of successful soci-
ety. Where the environment was a major influence in Ratzel, in Semple it
became an active historical agent that both set problems for human societ-
ies and ‘whispered’ hints to the solution (1911, 2). It was this determinist
interpretation of Ratzel’s work that would influence American human
geography in its early years. A good example of this can be found in the
work of Semple’s student, Ellsworth Huntington, whose work on how
climate affected civilization and scientific research took a particularly
76 L.M. ASHWORTH
determinist line. In Huntington’s work, the environment—and, especially,

climate—became a central explanation for differences between societies
(Huntington 1915).1
Huntington and Bowman had taught anthropogeography together at
Yale, and despite the earlier interest in forest physiography, it was to the
study of the interaction of the human world with the physical that Bowman
increasingly turned. Much of this involved translating Ratzel’s concepts of
space in order to understand American phenomena, such as the pioneer
fringe. Thus, the development and character of the westward expansion of
the United States was explained by the influence of the physical environ-
ment on pioneer society.
On the international scene, the influence of Ratzel on Bowman was
equally clear. Bowman’s view, drawing on Ratzel’s conception of
Lebensraum, was that the problem of the First World War lay in the prolif-
eration of small states each eager to expand (Smith 2003, 38–9, 117).
Increasingly, though, Bowman came to question Semple’s environmen-
tally determinist reading of Ratzel, where nature dictated one best way
(Smith 2003, 47; Martin 1980, 194–5), and it was his exposure to French
geography’s less deterministic reading of Ratzel’s anthropogeography that
was to influence his post-1919 reading of international affairs.2 Rather
than ‘whispering’ a one best way to humanity, Bowman interpreted the
environment as a constraint that allowed several possible alternative routes.
Increasingly for Bowman, the nature of the spread of climate and resources
made two solutions to the problem of international society possible: either
the world remained as an arena for competing empires fighting over
resources, or a new world was brought into being that mitigated the con-
flict over resources through free trade and the mobility of labour. This
theme would merge with Bowman’s Progressivism and his exposure to
Wilsonianism at the Paris peace conference.
Bowman had arrived in Paris as part of the American delegation’s group
of experts referred to as ‘The Inquiry’. Members included both Semple
and the progressive Walter Lippman. It was the Inquiry that had produced
the first draft of Wilson’s Fourteen Points and, throughout the peace
1
Interestingly, Huntington’s work on the ideal climatic temperatures for work was a major
influence on the air conditioning industry in the United States. The ideal temperatures set
for air conditioners used Huntington’s estimates for the best climate. In later life, Huntington
would turn to racial explanations.
2
On the possibilist French geography, see Parker (2000).
conference, it provided both technical information on particular points

and wider ideas about the shape of the post-war order—although Wilson
was actually disappointed in its ability to deliver on the latter point (Smith
2003, 132–5).
Although Bowman was a convinced internationalist before Paris—he
had firmly rejected isolationism—he was a late convert to Woodrow
Wilson’s views on the coming peace. He was to become an enthusiast for
Wilson’s attempt to build a US-led liberal political and economic order,
partially as a result of his participation in the Inquiry. Basic to ‘Wilsonianism’
was a rejection of the notion central to European pre-war imperialism that
there was a direct link between what Smith has called “economic expan-
sion” and “territorial aggrandizement”. This ‘wedding’ of geography and
economics was the main target of the US delegation, which sought to
decouple the economy from territorial control (Smith 2003, 141).
A branch of progressive thought, Wilsonianism has suffered at the
hands of scholars who have searched for simple binaries in the history of
American foreign policy. To be influenced by Wilson is, therefore, to fall
into the category of woolly-headed idealism, and the implication of this is
that you place the idea of global interests ahead of national ones. A clear
statement of this algorithm can be found in Henry Kissinger’s bestseller
Diplomacy, where Wilson is compared with Theodore Roosevelt. While
both are regarded as opponents of isolationism, Kissinger contrasts their
internationalisms, and sets them up as the antimony that defined US for-
eign policy in the decades to come. While Roosevelt is presented as an
internationalist working in the national interest of the United States,
Wilson’s internationalism is interpreted as working for a wider global
interest. Kissinger uses this to describe Wilson in rather disparaging tones
as a “prophet-priest” (Kissinger 1994, Chap. 2).
The Wilson of the Paris Peace Conference, and the one that influenced
Bowman, actually tacked closer to Kissinger’s view of Theodore Roosevelt.
There was no simplistic division between national and global interests,
and Wilson certainly put the national interests of the United States front
and centre of his foreign policy, as did Bowman. The difference lay in the
question of whether the US national interest was served by joining in with
the other great powers in the current world order, or whether American
national interest was best served by changing the nature of the world
order to suit US interests and ideals. This attempt to manage the nature
of the global order in the interests of the United States has been well
documented by Andrew Williams, who has argued that US attempts to
78 L.M. ASHWORTH
create world orders during the twentieth century were driven by the desire
to create a world in America’s image (Williams 2007).
Because imperialism, driven by economic motives of resource and mar-
ket control, was seen by Wilson as the major cause of great power rivalry
and war, decoupling territorial boundaries from economic expansion was
central to the Wilsonian new order. Not only would this remove the eco-
nomic imperative to imperialism, it would also open up opportunities for
American economic expansion beyond state boundaries through free trade
and transnational investments—in other words, an American Lebensraum
to challenge the German Ratzelian one that had been fixated on territory.
Ratzel’s Lebensraum, despite the interest in it amongst geographers from
industrial countries, was to a large extent still wedded to agrarian ideas of
land and territory as wealth and, as a result, fused territory with economic
power (Smith 1980). The concept of Lebensraum that Bowman would
create out of his synthesizing of Ratzel and Wilson was one linked to an
industrial age dependent on hydrocarbons and industrial raw materials.
American Lebensraum would be about transnational industrial and finan-
cial expansion through a world order that allowed capitalist expansion
despite national borders (see Smith 2003, 27–8).
This, though, did not mean that borders were not important. Both
Wilson and Bowman spent much of their time on this issue and, in fact,
according to Shotwell, Bowman was responsible for much of the final
German-Polish border arrived at in Paris (Martin 1980, 92). Borders, and
concepts like national self-determination, have to be seen within a larger
goal of spreading a democratic spirit that would be friendly to American
aspirations. The new peace settlement had to also deal with the continued
threat that Germany might pose to a new order (Martin 1980, 89–90).
The end result for Wilson and the American delegation was to replace the
overly territorial ‘balance of power’ with a ‘community of power’ through
institutions like the League and collective security. This order would be
more susceptible to American economic expansion (Williams 2007, 35).
The new community of power would require a new diplomacy, made
famous by Wilson in the first of his Fourteen Points on ‘Open covenants
of peace, openly arrived at… in the public view’. Bowman would return to
the importance of the new diplomacy in his second major book on inter-
national affairs (Bowman 1930).
As the Peace Conference drew to a close, it was less the new diplomacy
that initially interested Bowman, but rather the relationship of this new
post-war world to the physical and geographical environment. While so
many of the participants at the Peace Conference had come with high
hopes and left disillusioned (Harold Nicolson, J. M. Keynes and Robert
Lansing come to mind amongst those who wrote memoirs of the event),
Bowman seems to have done the opposite. The book that he was to start
in spare moments at the Hotel Crillon in Paris would become his best-
known work. And although he was to tell Shotwell in 1921 that his book
built “no rainbows of hope” (Martin 1980, 100–3), it did keep alive the
tradition of Wilsonian Progressivism, albeit within geographic
constraints.
A New World
Bowman’s The New World is about both limits and possibilities. True to
the spirit of Ratzel, it lays out the environmental limits to human global
action. Yet, true to the spirit of Wilson, it was also a discussion of the new
world of possibilities opened up by the Peace. Its opening line was a nod
in the direction of Wilsonianism, even if the rest owed more to his training
as a geographer: “In the eventual history of the period in which we live, it
is reasonable to think that the greatest emphasis will be put not upon the
World War or the peace treaties that closed it… but rather upon the pro-
found change that took place in the spirit and mental attitudes of the
people that compose this new world” (Bowman 1928, 1).
At the heart of Bowman’s analysis of the world after the peace treaties
was a fundamental problem of political geography: the uneven distribu-
tion of raw materials across the globe. In this immutable fact lay the
causes of both imperialism and war, while it was in our ability to rethink
how we organize our society that the solution to the problems of inter-
national order lay. Here at the heart of his analysis of the world after
1919 was Bowman’s view of a spatial reality that dictated certain forms
of behaviour, though tempered by our ability to use our intellect to
change the form that behaviour would take. A world became new when
changes to ‘spirit and mental attitude’ led to new ways of reacting to the
physical realities we confronted. For modern industrial society—reliant
on a host of naturally occurring, but unevenly distributed, raw materi-
als—the first task was to find new ways to deal with an otherwise destabi-
lizing reality.
In the appendix to The New World, Bowman listed 24 necessary raw
materials produced within the British Empire while, in the main body of
the text, he discussed how the need for raw materials had led to the
80 L.M. ASHWORTH
expansion of the British Empire (1928, 777–8, 37ff). But the British
experience was not singular. The need to guarantee a full supply of materi-
als to modern urban centres, he wrote, led to the growth of colonial
empires in the nineteenth century, and also explained why colonies
remained important to the great powers, and it explained why colonialism
persisted, despite the large deficits that colonial administrations experi-
enced. Although Bowman conceded that national prestige also played its
part in colonial expansion, it was the need to guarantee resources for
industrial production and modern urban living that he saw as largely
responsible for the coercion of colonized peoples into a subservient extrac-
tive labour force (Bowman 1928, 12–14; 1930, 18–21). Thus, the physi-
cal realities seemed to support Ratzel’s earlier pre-war contention that, in
order to be a world power, a state needed to control a colonial empire that
spanned different regions of the globe, and there was something almost
inevitable about the clash between world powers over colonial territories.
Here, though, is where Bowman parted with Ratzel’s logic.
Environmental realities, such as the location of raw materials, could not be
so neatly separated from human social factors in a simple independent-
dependent variable relationship. In fact, the importance of raw materials
was itself the product of rapid social change, rather than some ahistorical
objective factor. A good example of this was the rise of the importance of
oil. Oil had only become important as a result of rapid industrial change
(Bowman 1928, 735–7). He would spend much of the interwar period
laying out the problem posed by raw materials to global security, and
showing how the construction of different international institutions and
relationships could turn a potential for violent imperial conflict into a sta-
ble and prosperous global order. Political geography might illuminate the
problem, but it was in the choices of political order that we would find the
solution.
Bowman was not alone in worrying about the destabilizing role of raw
materials. The subject was prominent in the discussions at the 1937
International Studies Conference (ISC)—the global organization that
coordinated the study of international affairs during the interwar period
(Long 2006). Bowman took part in the deliberations, editing a report on
land settlement for the conference (Bowman 1937). The 1937 ISC
Conference dealt directly with the role of raw materials in war, and
Bowman may have had a hand in the US memorandum to the confer-
ence. “Just as disarmament is a hopeless ideal save through the prior or
concurrent achievement of collective security against aggression”, the US
memorandum stated, “so raw material conflicts between nations are

hopelessly insoluble in a world where each country must depend on its
own strength to meet the menace of war” (quoted in Denis 1938, 81).
The trick, therefore, was to find a way to order global affairs so that these
potential conflicts were eliminated.
Bowman’s New World may have concentrated on providing a picture of
the world as it was, but it also argued a point taken up by his later writings
that physical restraints were not difficult to scientifically describe. The
more important (and difficult) task was finding better ways to deal with
the physical reality. “The World becomes new the moment a new idea is
applied to it and its workings” (Bowman 1927, 63). In order to build that
new world, it was necessary to understand how new ideas were evolving,
and then how they were changing international relations. For Bowman,
the problem of raw materials would find its solution in the new ideas
underpinning the American-led global order that emerged out of Allied
post-war planning in the early 1940s. I will discuss this in more detail in
the next section, but it is worth noting here that, even as early as The New
World, Bowman felt that some form of international control was necessary
to deal with the problem (Bowman 1928, 738).
The problem of raw materials was also related to another more immedi-
ate problem that concerned Bowman in the 1920s and 1930s: the eco-
nomic crises and inequality between societies that often translated into
political competition and instability. Growing economic complexity and
interdependence meant that national boundaries were no longer viable
(Bowman 1928, 735). The problem here was that states had reacted to
this problem not by questioning the role of national boundaries, but
rather by reasserting the role of those boundaries through economic
nationalism. This in turn had damaged business and economic stability
(Bowman 1928, 23). It also, Bowman feared, led to political instability.
Economic nationalism, coupled with the maldistribution of raw materials,
would encourage stronger states to use military force to guarantee sup-
plies of raw materials, which in turn could be the trigger for war (Bowman
1930, 18).
Bowman saw hope in the development of what he and others were call-
ing the ‘new diplomacy’, often contrasted to the old diplomacy that had
led to war in 1914. Particularly important here were the set of global legal
arrangements for diplomatic discourse that Bowman had helped to bring
into being during his tenure at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. These
included, but were not exhausted by, the League of Nations system. These
82 L.M. ASHWORTH
had softened the confrontational element in diplomacy, and meant that

states now approached the problems more as friends than as competitors
(Bowman 1928, 7–9; 1930, 9–10).
This new diplomacy, within its new international legal and institutional
frameworks, was for Bowman an example of a change of spirit, but he did
not see these arrangements as a sufficient cause of peace. The old diplo-
macy of competing states still existed, rubbing shoulders uncomfortably
with the multilateral conference diplomacy of the League and its related
bodies. The new diplomacy of the League was a recent effect of the new
spirit of the age, and it had shallow roots. By contrast, the habits of con-
quest had a long history and were still ingrained in politics. The existence
of these habits meant that even the mechanisms of the old diplomacy
(such as war and the threat of war) might need to play a role in preparing
for wars against potential aggressors (Bowman 1930, 10–13). But while
the old diplomacy might still play a role, on the aggregate Bowman saw it
as impractical in the world that had emerged after 1919. Advocates of the
old diplomacy and of the superiority of military might were victims of a
pseudo-science that failed to grasp that “the only permanent thing in this
world is change” (1928, 4; 1930, 28). Rather, the rules of society were
always changing as the human spirit reacted to the changes in human
interests that were, in turn, reactions to changed global conditions (1930,
29–30).
Such views put Bowman at odds with realists after the Second World
War who argued that the basic laws of politics remained unchanged
because human nature was the same over time. Bowman based his view of
global order on an analysis of a physical reality, but for him that reality was
the physical geography of the planet. As different human societies used the
planet in different ways, and because the human spirit could change how
those physical realities were controlled and managed, this meant that poli-
tics was based upon shifting laws of behaviour. While the old diplomacy
might linger through pseudo-scientific ideas of permanence, and it might
every now and then prove useful against aggressors, its days were num-
bered because its tenets no longer fit with the broader constellation of
human interests.
Throughout his analysis of international affairs and the new diplomacy,
we see that Bowman continues to combine his experience as a physical
geographer with a Progressivism informed by the ideas of Woodrow
Wilson. Environmental constraints are real, and do shape political life. At
the same time, though, human actions and ideas play a crucial deciding
role. While, for example, the availability and location of raw materials are
very real physical constraints, the fact that those raw materials are needed
is a result of the actions of humans who have created a society dependent
on certain products. On top of this, physical realities do not, in and of
themselves, dictate certain courses of action. Rather, changes to the human
spirit give us choices about how we want the physical to influence us. We
can choose to play up the role of boundaries and state institutions, in
which case the distribution of raw materials will lead to imperialism and
conflicts between world powers. We could, though, choose to develop
institutions that would allow these same raw materials to be distributed
peacefully without state conflict. Bowman was clear which he thought was
the more efficient as well as (no small consideration for Bowman) in the
national interests of the United States, and that was the approach associ-
ated with the new diplomacy. The start of this process towards a more
stable and less competitive global order could, for Bowman, already be
found in the concepts and institutions of the new diplomacy.
It was the threat of a violent return of the old diplomacy in the form of
fascism that spurred Bowman on in the 1940s to come up with concrete
ideas for a new global order. His ideas, in turn, came to inform the post-
war planning of the Roosevelt administration as Bowman was, once more,
brought back in to the inner circles of government after 1941. While
Bowman’s ideas were internationalist at their root, they were also about
creating a peaceful order in which the United States (and its interests)
could expand without necessarily threatening other societies. In this sense,
what Bowman was advocating was Lebensraum for the United States, even
if (for sound political reasons) he did not directly use the German word.
Yet, unlike the German Lebensraum associated with Ratzel and Haushofer,
this American Lebensraum would be built into a system of peaceful
cooperation.
American Lebensraum
When the United States entered the Second World War, political geogra-
phers were mobilized for the war effort. For Bowman, this meant advisory
roles for the State Department. From 1942, he was a member of
Department of State Advisory Committee on Post-War Foreign Policy,
and also acted as a special advisor to two wartime secretaries of state. A
member of Secretary Stettinius’ 1944 London mission, he was also a
member of the US delegation to Dumbarton Oaks, and an advisor to the
84 L.M. ASHWORTH
Secretary of State at the 1945 San Francisco Conference (Martin 1980,

159, 169). Other geographers, such as Derwent Whittlesey, were active in
propaganda, writing books and articles that criticized fascist world views
and gave academic bite to the war aims of the Allies (Whittlesey 1941).
Political geography had a clear target for their criticism in the Institut für
Geopolitik in Munich, run by Karl Haushofer. Haushofer and his Institute
were widely seen as the source of the ideas behind Nazi geostrategy. The
academic view of Haushofer’s links to the Nazi regime was given a popular
spin by the Oscar-nominated American film from 1944 Plan for
Destruction, which presented Haushofer as the evil genius planning each
of Germany’s conquests. (The reality was more mundane. Haushofer,
although a Nazi and SS officer, was rarely influential in the Nazi inner
circles once the war started, and his advice not to invade the Soviet Union
was ignored. When American troops eventually entered Munich in 1945,
they discovered that the Institute itself amounted to little more than a
desk.) The perception of a Nazi geopolitics acted as a foil with which
political geographers like Bowman were able to build an alternative (and
internationalist) grand strategy for the United States.3
At the basis of this grand strategy was a fundamental difference between
Bowman’s reinterpretation of Lebensraum within an American-led trans-
national global order and the German idea that linked Lebensraum to ter-
ritorial control. The German tradition of political geography and
geopolitics, flowing from Ratzel, had interpreted Lebensraum as ‘the geo-
graphical surface area required to support a living species at its current
population size and mode of existence’ (Smith 1980, 53). States were
interpreted as organisms, and were, therefore, regarded as being in com-
petition over resources with other states. The implications of this for
expansion were taken up by Haushofer and other fascist geopoliticians,
who saw in the idea of Lebensraum a scientific defence for both conquest
and colonization. At one level at least, Bowman agreed with Ratzel on
Lebensraum: that in order to survive, human societies must expand. In
Ratzel’s agrarian logic, this led directly to arguments for conquest.
Bowman, though, saw society very differently from Ratzel. Societies need
not expand only by territorial growth and, indeed, in an industrial society,
economic and social growth might potentially ignore borders entirely.
Bowman’s Lebensraum was, therefore, essentially one based on ideas of
3
For an analysis of German geopolitics, and the myths surrounding it see Murphy (1997).
For a summary of the story see Ashworth (2014).
industrial society, in which the extent of territory became less important

than patterns of trade and (peaceful) migration. Indeed, as we will see
below, it was in the concepts of trade and free mobility of labour that
Bowman saw a way that a society’s need to expand its Lebensraum could
avoid both imperialism and conquest. Of course, Bowman’s industrial-
based Lebensraum is not without its own problems, specifically its assump-
tions of unlimited industrial growth and global (could we say
‘neo-colonial’?) domination by the US-led Western world. That said,
though, it did provide a clear American liberal alternative to fascist
aggression.
Bowman’s best-known work from his period in the Roosevelt adminis-
tration is his ‘Geography vs Geopolitics’, which both criticized fascist geo-
politics and laid out his own vision of an American-led post-war settlement
(Bowman 1942). Bowman shared with Haushofer and the Nazi geopoliti-
cians the idea that societies must expand to survive, but he rejected the
idea that this expansion needed to be zero-sum. This, for Bowman, was a
form of fatalism that discounted the importance of the human will
(Bowman 1941). This meant looking beyond the boundaries of the terri-
torial state that blinded the analysis of German geopolitics, and concen-
trated instead on an order that would transcend state conflicts by
encouraging the expansion of free trade and population mobility. As long
as trade in vital goods—and colonization by excess population—were in
the hands of states, there would be conflict. If a state no longer had to
control a colony in order to obtain a vital resource, but instead could buy
the product on the open market, then trade and raw materials would cease
to be a source of state conflict. Similarly, if a state like Italy or Germany
had an excess population in need of opportunities for emigration, and if
there was an international regime that allowed for migration across bor-
ders, then the stress of excess population would not result in wars of colo-
nization (Bowman 1942, 655). In Bowman’s view, states would still
compete, but they would do so for economic and industrial development
in a world in which institutional rules allowed for the practice of free trade
and population mobility.
The nature of the institutions that would underpin this new global
order was the subject of Bowman’s day job in the early 1940s. He was
involved in the American delegations at both the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks
and 1945 San Francisco conferences that laid the groundwork for the
United Nations Organization. Although he was not directly involved in
the deliberations, the earlier meetings at Bretton Woods that established
86 L.M. ASHWORTH
the institutions for economic reconstruction went a long way towards

developing the institutional structures required for Bowman’s vision of
the post-war order. Bowman’s earlier concern with the potentially destabi-
lizing issue of raw materials and natural resources even crept into the
Atlantic Charter of 1941, where access to raw materials on equal terms is
an important part of the fourth principle. Although the idea of an
International Trade Organization to regulate free trade was stillborn, the
Western-dominated General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),
signed in 1947, would create an institution along lines that were not dis-
similar to Bowman’s (1930) concept of the new diplomacy.
That this was an order that benefited the United States was something
that was not lost on Bowman. Indeed, Neil Smith’s intellectual biography
of Bowman was entitled American Empire. In this sense, Bowman and the
other American post-war planners in the Roosevelt Administration were
continuing the same ‘national internationalism’ associated with the
Wilsonians at Paris in 1919. This was an order that favoured US national
interests, but it was also avowedly internationalist. It also completed the
goal that the American delegation had set for itself in 1919 of separating
economic expansion from territorial aggrandizement. Andrew Williams,
in his account of the rise of the Anglo-American global order, emphasizes
this connection and indeed sees a direct line between American ideas of a
new world order in 1919, 1945 and 1989 (Williams 2007).
Despite the fact that the post-war order established by the Allies after
1945 quickly collapsed into two competing camps based around the
United States and the Soviet Union, Bowman’s ideas can be readily seen
in the UN and Bretton Woods institutions established in the immediate
post-war period. It can also be seen in the world that emerged out of the
Cold War. Thus, while there was a return to an old diplomacy in super-
power relations, the logic of the world that emerged after the Second
World War conformed, in the longer term, to the ideas laid out by
Bowman. Those ideas, in turn, were an amalgam of Bowman’s training as
a political geographer, and his absorption of progressive ideas through
Wilsonianism.
Progressivism Triumphant
Thanks to people like Bowman, many of the principles of the earlier pro-
gressive generation found their way into the principles of the informal yet
internationalist ‘American Empire’ that emerged out of the Second World
War. Bowman kept the ideas of Progressivism safely wrapped within a

protective blanket of a modified Ratzelian political geography, allowing
them to emerge in a new form triumphant after 1945, and in a position to
dominate the globe after 1989. Perhaps, it was not entirely the world that
Croly and La Follette would have wanted—the proliferation of organiza-
tions and transnational links certainly went further than they were willing
to go on the internationalist front, but it maintained many of the progres-
sive elements of Woodrow Wilson’s thinking. Bowman was one of the
links between the progressives and the post-1945 global order. In this
sense, rather than seeing the progressives at bay after 1919, we might see
the emergence of the post-1945 world as, at least in part, an example of
Progressivism triumphant.
The idea of there being a decline in the influence of progressive ideas
rests partially on the view that the victors in the war of ideas about global
order that took up the three decades after 1919 were the classical realists
such as Hans J. Morgenthau, John Herz, Reinhold Niebuhr and others.
There are two problems with this. First, it draws too fine a distinction
between the classical realists, political geographers like Bowman, and the
progressives. There was actually a fair amount of overlap in their thinking
and, as William Scheuerman has shown, classical realists were often very
supportive of new thinking about global order (2010). Second, rather
than being the dominant approach to IR at the time, it can be argued that,
actually, it was the classical realists that were the minority approach. Unlike
Bowman, they had largely been shut out of the process of post-war recon-
struction, and even though they found the ear of government once the
Cold War had begun, the classical realists themselves felt beleaguered and
isolated (Guilhot 2008). If we take on board the positions of American
practitioners of foreign policy, the behaviouralist assault in the 1960s on
classical realist notions of power, and the decidedly liberal nature of post-
Cold War approaches to foreign affairs, then it is hard not to agree with
the classical realist self-perception of being beleaguered. In fact, it was
Bowman’s interpretations of the world that were the victors in the war of
ideas that shaped the second half of the twentieth century. In this sense,
the work of political geographers like Neil Smith and IR scholars like
Andrew Williams are better guides to the development of American ideas
about the world than are the works that stress a realist ascendency in IR.
Another lesson that emerges out of a discussion of Bowman’s interna-
tional thought lies in our definition of what political geography and geo-
politics means. The word geopolitics, in both journalism and recent IR
88 L.M. ASHWORTH
literature on foreign affairs, is usually used to refer to a physical reality that

makes a particular form of realpolitik foreign policy unavoidable. Thus,
when Robert Kaplan talked about the ‘revenge of geography’ in 2009, he
meant a set of ahistorical and firm principles of politics that emerged out
of the physical reality of the globe (Kaplan 2009). Similarly, Mearsheimer’s
concept of ‘geopolitics 101’ is of timeless principles of great power behav-
iour such as ‘great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near
their home territory’ (Mearsheimer 2014)
Now, while it is true that this is a position that we do find in geopoli-
tics, it is the very old-fashioned determinist geopolitics that American
and British political geographers had firmly rejected by the early twenti-
eth century. Both Kaplan and Mearsheimer are, in that sense, slaves of
long-dead obsolete geographers. Bowman, through his synthesis with
progressive ideas, shows how geopolitics can escape a rather simplistic
and determinist view of the relationship between the physical and social
worlds. In fact, while not totally fusing (as they do in more recent geopo-
litical thought), in Bowman’s hands, the physical is a reality whose influ-
ence can both be altered by social forces, but also takes many different
forms depending on the structures, institutions and ideas at play. The
physical does influence and constrain, but the form that that influence
takes is determined by forces outside of the physical reality of the geo-
sphere. Basically, and mirroring Bowman’s words, those quoting geo-
politics today as some form of steady determining influence of realpolitik
are victims of a pseudoscientific approach that fails to see that ‘the only
permanent thing in this world is change’ (Bowman 1928, 4; 1930, 28).
Bowman’s teaching of geopolitics 101 is very different from
Mearsheimer’s.
Progressive Bowman may be, but we must not confuse him with a
radical. His liberalism is more akin to the older forms found before the
First World War, and certainly has little in common with the more radical
forms found in David Mitrany’s functional approach, or John Burton’s
world society (Mitrany 1943; Burton 1972). Bowman’s preferred shape
for the post-war settlement was, to a large degree, an attempt to return
to the globalized world that had existed before 1914, but with the addi-
tion of a layer of international organizations to support the economic
order and to regulate the political competition of states. In this sense, it
was not necessarily a radical step, and it ran counter to a more radical
tradition in the West that interpreted capitalism and the failure of liberal
free trade as at the root of the problems of the twentieth century
(Ashworth 2014, 213–221). Bowman’s order is internationalist, but is

still a world of nation-states brought together by a need to manage the
world in their collective interests. In this sense, there is some crossover
between Bowman and English school notions of international society,
but little with those like Mitrany who criticized the nation-state as an
organizing principle. Bowman, like Mitrany, was critical of state bound-
aries and favoured transnational links, but once those boundaries had
been made porous by agreements between the states in international
organizations, Bowman saw no need to reform the system further.
Boundaries for Bowman remained important, as his work at Paris in
1919 had shown. In this sense, he was far less radical that Morgenthau.
The latter was deeply critical of nationalism and the mentality of states in
a way that Bowman was not.
At the end of the day, though, whatever we may think about Bowman
and the world that he helped create, he provides a revealing illustration of
how ideas from the progressive era were able to survive into a new world
via a merger with political geography. While the order that Bowman
helped to create has frayed edges now, and represents the conservative
status quo in present global order terms, it was in its day a timely alterna-
tive to the fascist logic that was being pushed by intellectuals and practi-
tioners from the Axis countries in the early 1940s. It also formed the basis
of the American-led global order that replaced the logic of the Cold War
and the era of Détente. For these reasons alone, Bowman deserves our
attention.
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on-Hudson: World Book Company.
———. 1930. International Relations. Chicago: American Library Association.
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———. 1941. Peace and Power Politics. Vital Speeches of the Day 7 (12): 383.
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Denis, Pierre. 1938. International Aspects of State Intervention in Economic Life.

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Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Huntington, Ellsworth. 1915. Climate and Civilization. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Guilhot, Nicolas. 2008. The Realist Gambit: Postwar American Political Science
and the Birth of IR Theory. International Political Sociology 2: 281–304.
Kaplan, Robert D. 2009. The Revenge of Geography. Foreign Policy 172: 96–105.
Kissinger, Henry. 1994. Diplomacy. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Long, David. 2006. Who Killed the International Studies Conference? Review of
International Studies 32: 603–622.
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Archon.
Mearsheimer, John J. 2014. Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault. The
Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin. Foreign Affairs: 441–451.
Mitrany, David. 1943. A Working Peace System. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Murphy, David Thomas. 1997. The Heroic Earth. Geopolitical Thought in Weimar
Germany, 1918–1933. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.
Parker, Geoffrey. 2000. Ratzel, the French School and the Birth of Alternative
Geopolitics. Political Geography 19: 957–969.
Scheuerman, William. 2010. The (Classical) Realist Vision of Global Reform.
International Theory 2: 246–282.
Semple, Ellen Churchill. 1911. Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis
of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography. London: Constable.
Smith, Neil. 2003. American Empire. Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to
Globalization. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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Lucian M. Ashworth is Professor and Head of the Department of Political

Science at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. He has edited New
Perspectives on International Functionalism with David Long (1999) and has writ-
ten A History of International Thought (2014) and International Relations and the
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with Andrew Williams as Editor of the International History Review.
CHAPTER 5
Leo Pasvolsky and an Open World Economy
Andrew Williams
Leo Pasvolsky (1893–1953) played a decisive role in promoting progres-

sive thinking about the future of world order in the period between the
world wars. He was also a key policy-making figure in the United States
throughout the 1930s and 1940s. First, and foremost, he is known for
having been the prime mover, at the effective (but not the actual) rank of
Assistant Secretary of State in the US State Department, for the American
input into what became the United Nations (UN). Second, he was a back-
room boy and analyst of economic policies, especially in the 1920s and
1930s when his cogent analyses of monetary (and especially debt) issues
made a significant impact on US thinking about such matters. He might
indeed be said to have been one of the key fathers of the developing
American idea of the primacy of the economic causes of war under the
three Administrations of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)—
the most obvious evidence for which was the incumbency (1933–1943) of
FDR’s long-standing Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Third, he played a
considerable role in US–Soviet relations, and has been described as ‘point
man’ in the negotiations between FDR and future Soviet Foreign Minister
A. Williams (*)
School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

92 A. WILLIAMS
Andrei Gromyko in the establishment of the UN before the Yalta

Conference of February 1945 (Harbutt 2010, 274). Prominent State
Department official of the 1990s, Richard Holbrooke, has been widely
quoted as saying Pasvolsky ‘was one of those figures peculiar to
Washington—a tenacious bureaucrat who, fixed on a single goal, left
behind a huge legacy while virtually disappearing from history’ (Holbrooke
2003 in Chollet and Power 2012, 258).
Pasvolsky’s role as Research Director of the State Department during
the war put him at the centre of designing an organization, the UN, that
has been variously lauded as both the mechanism for putting the ideals of
the Atlantic Charter of August 1941 into organizational practice, and as
the realist dream of making “an Alliance of the Great Powers embedded in
a universal organization”, by other key British Charter drafter Sir Charles
Webster, or even an attempt to ‘delude’, by his colleague Gladwyn Jebb,
those who believed the Charter was the dawn of a new age of human
rights and freedoms (Borgwardt 2005, cover notes; Mazower 2009, 7).
Pasvolsky’s reputation thus stands or falls on his role in the creation of
what was either a great human experiment of liberation or yet another
confidence trick by the powerful on the weak.
The Origins of Pasvolsky’s Influence

Pasvolsky was a typical American of his time, an immigrant fleeing the
‘old’ Europe—in his case, Russia. He immigrated to the United States in
1905 and attended both City University and Columbia University in
New York. He became the Editor of the Russia Review, as well as the
Russian language review, Rosskoye Slovo [Russian Word] from 1916 to
1920. He worked for another brief period as a freelance writer and spent
a year, 1932–1933, attending the preparations for the World Monetary
Conference in Geneva and in London during the conference itself. He
then became a key advisor to the FDR Administration on monetary policy.
His main focus throughout was working for the Brookings Institution,
from 1922 until his death in 1953. He was thus what we would now call
a ‘policy wonk’, but one who made a disproportionate impact. This was
particularly the case with the establishment of the UN, and this is reflected
in his papers, now in the Library of Congress, which mainly concentrate
on the period 1944–1945. These are the papers that I have concentrated
on in the preparation of this chapter, as well as some of his Brookings
publications. There are a number of good volumes, though less than one
LEO PASVOLSKY AND AN OPEN WORLD ECONOMY 93
would think given its importance, on the writing of the Charter of the UN
(Schlesinger 2004; Hoopes and Brinkley 2000). To give some idea of his
importance in the drafting of the Charter, we can quote the contemporary
Chicago Tribune of July 1944: “he knows more about the new league of
nations to preserve peace than any other person in the world. That’s
because he wrote the first draft of the charter… and attended it… all the
way from the lust (sic) of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference to the last day
of the San Francisco Conference”.
But he also had his detractors, and herein partly lies his interest for a
book that looks for the influences of ‘progressivism’ on American foreign
policy. Pasvolsky was very influenced by what Neil Smith calls the “new
middle-class liberalism that grew out of the Progressive Era, carried
Woodrow Wilson to power and pervaded places like Harvard”. One of
Pasvolsky’s most virulent critics at the heart of the Roosevelt Administration,
Isaiah Bowman, the celebrated geographer and important architect of
American world order thinking in 1919 and the Second World War, was
not so influenced by Wilsonian liberalism but by a more conservative
(Theodore) Roosevelt version. This was partly, says Smith, because he
spent a great deal of time during the height of the Progressive Era before
1914 in South America where he “had to find a way of reconciling his sup-
port for conquest and his embarrassment at the brutality it involved”.
Bowman was a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt’s more muscular liberal-
ism, and was also an advocate of Wilson’s ideas of economic aggrandize-
ment for the United States, what Smith calls “fixing the global geography
of modernity”, and he was at the heart of a liberalism that “reinvented
itself as the antithesis of both communism and conservatism”. But the
chaos Bowman encountered in Paris persuaded him that a lot more than
idealistic progressive liberalism was necessary to achieve that a “global
expansionist vision” was necessary (Smith 2003, 79, 144–145 and 181).
Pasvolsky was also wedded to such a vision, but he disagreed with Bowman
on a number of occasions about how to do it. One area where fireworks
resulted was in Bowman’s increasing belief in the need to have a strong
Western Europe to stand up to Soviet aggression after the war, and
Pasvolsky’s counter-belief in the need to accommodate Russia. This ulti-
mately erupted into a frank mutual dislike, with Bowman on one occasion
accusing Pasvolsky of having “communistic ideas” due to his “foreign
racial origin” (Smith 2003, 385).
But a far more important sub-text to such arguments was inevitably
what role could be given to pure American power politics, and what to a
94 A. WILLIAMS
more Wilsonian belief in a ‘comity of nations’ with an institutional base.

These were two faces of the same coin in American foreign policy, and
they have dominated American foreign policy for most of the period since
1919, or even since 1898, the United States’s first real ‘imperial’ adven-
ture. As the United States timidly put its foot into the water of European
power politics and into the ‘great unselfish task’ that was helping ‘back-
ward peoples’ (such as Mexicans) before 1914, American liberalism came
face to face with its own imperial dilemmas. Walter Millis’s coruscating
1937 analysis of that process shows just how little the American elites
understood what they were letting themselves in for before they joined the
war in 1917 (Millis 1937, 20–22).
After 1919, the failure of a Wilsonian global vision was revealed as
being due, in part, to a lack of real analysis of what was needed. American
foreign policy thinking emerged with a far more formidable organizational
structure than it had before the First World War, often paired with its
British counterparts across the Atlantic. Hence, probably the best place to
study that emergence is in the activities of the ‘think tanks’ that sprang up
after the war. One that saw the key presence of both Bowman and Pasvolsky
was the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), another the Brookings
Institution—where Pasvolsky developed his most interesting ideas and his
main power base in the inter-war period. When the Second World War
erupted in 1939, it was to organizations like the CFR and Brookings that
the State Department had to turn for expertise. That was when Bowman
and Pasvolsky came fully into their own. So, while both Bowman and
Pasvolsky can properly be called American ‘liberals’, they had radically dif-
ferent views about how that should be translated into a vision that was
both global and also wedded to America’s national interest. Roosevelt
encouraged such internal creative dissension among his key advisers, both
to keep them under control though divide and rule tactics and to get the
best out of their thought patterns.
Russia, Reparations and Current Monetary Issues

A key to understanding Pasvolsky’s later interests in reconstruction and
post-war planning more generally lies with his background—and that
background had a Russian root. We have seen that some, like Bowman,
thought that disqualified him from policy making. In the perfervid atmo-
sphere of the 1940s this could lead to baseless accusations of fellow-
travelling with the Soviet Union, or at least an overdose of sympathy.
Pasvolsky was one of what David Engerman points out were very few
‘American Soviet Experts’ in the 1920s and 1930s in American
universities, another being Philip Mosely—before the war a lowly assis-
tant Professor at Cornell, and promoted to a fairly lofty position in the
State Department during the war. He was also to be the Rapporteur on
the CFR’s War and Peace Studies Project after February 1941 and worked
with Ambassador John Winant in London as his Russian specialist on the
European Advisory Commission (EAC) after October 1943. There were
also very few fluent Russian speakers in the State Department before
1940, one obvious exception being George Kennan. Possibly the greatest
Russian expert in the State Department, Robert Kelley, Head of the State
Department’s Division of Eastern European Affairs, was to see his
Division disbanded and himself demoted by FDR in 1937 to be made the
US Ambassador to Ankara (Engerman 2011, Chap. 1; Williams 1992,
174–175). So Pasvolsky also had a use during the ongoing discussions
with the Russians after June 1941—as one of the few high-ranking offi-
cials who spoke Russian.
He was also the author of some works on Russia (recently re-pub-
lished), and in particular on the Soviet economic experiment as it emerged
in the 1920s. In one, ostensibly on Russia’s ‘Far East’, Pasvolsky made a
strong point that Bolshevik Russia’s exclusion from the discussion of it by
the Allies at both Paris in 1919 and at the Washington Naval Conference
in 1922 was a mistake as Russia “had vital and direct interests at stake”,
yet “[w]hat the [Paris] Conference really did was to make every effort to
push the Russian question into the background and leave it there hang-
ing in the air” (Pasvolsky 2016; Pasvolsky 2015, 1–2). In this capacity he
was, albeit in 1921, quite positive about the new Russia. But so were
many others, including impeccable establishment economists like John
Maynard Keynes, who had a Russian ballerina wife. Keynes also wanted
Russia to be included in the ‘comity of nations’ as soon as possible after
the war; both were to be disappointed. Pasvolsky shared Keynes’ view
that to ignore any major player in a peace settlement was to make this
settlement incomplete. In 1940–1945, both men were to have a determi-
nate role on both sides of the Atlantic, trying to make sure that no such
error was repeated.
However, the main obsession of the thinking classes of the West in the
1920s was the twin challenge of the wartime reparations bill that could or
should be handed to Germany to pay for the destruction of the First World
War and the linked question of who should pay the massive inter-Allied
96 A. WILLIAMS
war debts bill (Trachtenberg 1980; Clavin 2000). The collapse of the
German economy, and its attendant hyperinflation (Fergusson 2010) was
to have a profound effect on the generation of American and British econ-
omists who wished to avoid the errors of the 1920s in the post Second
World War discussions. Of course, the French, absent from those discus-
sions after the defeat of 1940, were often conveniently blamed for the
breakdown of European order in the 1920s (Mantoux 1946). The essen-
tial problem, which exculpates none of the main Allies of 1919 was, in a
nutshell, that the United States had loaned huge amounts of money to the
Western Allies (and in particular Britain, France and [Tsarist] Russia) in
their fight against the Axis Powers. These states could not pay the debts
back, partly because Soviet Russia repudiated its debt (see below) and a
deadlock emerged over how to cajole or force Germany to pay reparations
for the cost of the war—which Keynes asserted was an impossibility
(Keynes 1920; Markwell 2006). That was only partly solved by the debt
re-scheduling schemes of the 1920s, notably the Dawes Plan of 1924 and
the Young Plan of 1929. In any event, Adolf Hitler repudiated the remain-
ing German debt in 1933.
Interest in Russia developed, as it did for many in the United States,
Britain, Europe and beyond, out of a conviction that classic liberal think-
ing about economics had failed to make the transition from the ‘normal’
conditions prevailing before 1914 to the post-war realities. But to study
Russia was to study a renegade state. The new state established under
Lenin in 1917 perpetrated what Sean McMeekin has aptly called ‘History’s
Greatest Heist’ (McMeekin 2008), both of its own citizens and of count-
less banks and individuals worldwide who had invested in Tsarist era
Russian railways and other infrastructure. The United States was to refuse
to recognize the Soviet state until 1933, partly because of these egre-
giously unpaid debts, even if the United States and its citizens were far less
affected than were those of France and even Britain (Saul 2006; White
1979). US Secretary for Commerce, and later (1928–32) President
Herbert Hoover, took a diametrically opposed view to Pasvolsky on Russia
in refusing to recognize it until the debts were acknowledged. When
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had tried to involve the new
Soviet state in a programme of European reconstruction at Genoa in Italy
in 1922, Hoover and the American Government refused to attend, and
the Soviet delegates used the opportunity to sign a secret treaty at Rapallo
with the other recent enemy of the West—Germany; a treaty that it trans-
pired had clauses which included military cooperation with the express
intent of circumventing the 1919 Treaty of Versailles (Fink 1984; Williams

1992).
Pasvolsky contributed to this discussion after the dust had settled, in
1924, with a long paper for Brookings written with another staffer Howard
Moulton (Pasvolsky and Moulton 2012). It was the second of the
Brookings’s new ‘International Economics’ series after the war—the first
one also being on debt, in that case, German (Moulton and McGuire
1923). Pasvolsky pursued the theme on other occasions in the 1920s,
notably in a wider ranging study of ‘World War debt settlements’ by point-
ing out that Russia was “unique among the present-day international
debtors …[to] refuse… to acknowledge its liability for the debts contacted
prior to 1918” (Pasvolsky and Moulton 1926, 59). His account of the
state of play by the end of 1925 is fairly conventional, except maybe in its
willingness to stress that Russian debt, although massive at an estimated
$6.9 billion (a figure he and Moulton had arrived at in 1923) had some
counter liabilities that needed to be taken into account, a somewhat aca-
demic point for those owed vast sums. He also expressed some sympathy
for the Russian dilemma—‘the tragic events of the past decade in her his-
tory have wrought so much havoc in her national life that she is in sore
need of foreign credits for the rehabilitation of her economic system’. He
and Moulton felt that Russia had been set back to the development posi-
tion that it had experienced at the end of the nineteenth century, with a
huge need for “rehabilitation… repair and renewal”. Without agreement
from Russia to revise its policy of debt repudiation or an acceptance by the
creditors that Russia could not pay, no progress could be made (Pasvolsky
and Moulton 1926, 69). We can see here a complete agreement with
Keynes about debt and reparations issues. We can also see the beginnings
of Pasvolsky (and FDR’s) later obsession with the need for reconstruction
as a priority over debt collection. Russia can thus be seen as an extreme
case of the rationale for post-war reconstruction through debt relief that
figures so large in the PWP discussions of 1940–1945. The same logic was
then used to justify the US not demanding Germany pay its debts,
although of course the Soviet Union ironically did so demand them and
carried off much of the German industrial capacity to Russia by way of
reparations after May 1945.
As has been noted, other economists—most prominently Keynes—
believed that Russia was necessary for European recovery and that it pro-
vided an interesting alternative model for economic progress. Many
groups of intellectuals visited the country in the 1920s and 1930s, some
98 A. WILLIAMS
of them returning with glowing reports of Soviet progress and efficiency

that increasingly seemed to shame the collapsed Western liberal economies
after 1929. Planning became the watchword for a whole generation of
liberals. The Roosevelt era in the United States was the best d
emonstration
of how Soviet and other forms of planning came to be integrated into
wider thinking about economics and politics, a trend that was to last,
arguably, until the Reagan and Thatcher eras of the 1980s. But to say so
too loudly in the United States, especially after 1945, could easily lead to
accusations that the author was a ‘fellow traveller’ of the Soviet Union. Of
course, those who went the whole distance and either joined a Western
communist party or enthused about Russia too much were to be vilified in
the post 1945 era and even hunted down by the House Un-American
Activities Committee, reluctantly founded by Roosevelt but which took
on a life of its own under the Chairmanship of Senator Eugene McCarthy
in the 1940s and 1950s. Many economists and political activists who
worked with Roosevelt and were prominent ‘New Dealers’ were tarred
with the McCarthy brush and had to either recant their previous beliefs or
lose their livelihoods, or worse.
That risk was not so great in the 1930s, when the Great Depression
made sure that any model could be studied in order to try and palliate the
appalling tragedy that was unfolding worldwide (Kindleberger 1973;
Clavin 2000). As he had led the way through the Brookings series on
debt, so Pasvolsky led the way on the new challenges once Roosevelt was
elected in 1933. His book Current Monetary Issues marked him out as a
key player in the FDR Administrative orbit. As a rather dry statistical and
blow-by-blow account of the collapse of the economic system post-1919,
it is without any contemporary equal. It is an unremitting tale of deflation
in all sectors of production, rising unemployment and the admission that
‘the complex underlying issues involved have not been clearly defined’
(Pasvolsky 1933, 3). This understatement led to FDR’s first ‘Hundred
Days’ monetary and financial programme, possibly the biggest economic
gamble by an American politician since 1776. It was, nonetheless, a very
important statement of the possibilities of what policy decisions taken in
Washington could potentially achieve worldwide.
Pasvolsky worked very closely with Secretary of State Cordell Hull on
many aspects of American monetary and trade policy from 1933
onwards, while remaining a key staffer at Brookings, which had become
a quasi-official bipartisan Government think tank by December 1927
(Woolner forthcoming). As was noted, Pasvolsky attended both the
Preparatory meetings of the World Monetary and Economic Conference

in Geneva in 1932 and the London Economic Conference itself in
1933, where he wrote “there was hope that just ahead lay the possibility
of an international agreement that which would restore order and sta-
bility”. By his own admission “[t]hat attempt failed” (Pasvolsky 1933,
1). What he does not say is that it was widely believed at the time that
the ‘fault’, if fault it was, lay squarely with FDR—with the American
suspension of the Gold Standard, which had the effect of a large reduc-
tion of the value of the dollar. This competitive devaluation has been
depicted as one major aspect of the economic nationalism which was to
bedevil the global economy of the 1930s and a key moment in the dis-
solution of the pre-1914 system of international economic stability. As
a progressive liberal, Pasvolsky could not but regret this development.
Some historians, like Robert Pollard and Richard Gardner, have accused
both Hoover and FDR in his first term in office, of ‘largely spurn[ing]
international cooperation’ and ‘potential self-sufficiency in nearly all
branches of production’ (Pollard 1985, 7; Gardner 1956). The United
States, in other words, stands accused of being autarkic—like say, the
Soviet Union—and selfish, like the British and French had been since
the end of the war.
But that judgement misses other elements that are part of the Pasvolsky,
and indeed of the FDR, story. Perhaps the most important is that both
men recognized that the American actions at the London Economic
Conference, while certainly damaging to international cooperation, were
essential to stop the collapse of the American economy. They were taken
in a spirit of wartime measures, of which going off the Gold Standard was
only one. FDR consciously invoked Woodrow Wilson’s Act of Congress of
6 October 1917 in pushing through his ‘Hundred Days’ legislation. The
broader banking crisis was portrayed as a ‘national emergency’, and the
resulting actions as part of a process of drastic stabilization of the markets,
currency and so on. This was unprecedented in Western capitalist policy-
making (Pasvolsky 1933, 38–39). One reason for this being a unilateral
programme was that the other states in the system seemed totally unwill-
ing to cooperate with the United States in changing the rules of the game.
The British were, in particular, obstructive in the preparatory talks in
Lausanne and Geneva in 1932, insisting on what they must have known
were insuperable conditions, such as an immediate settlement of the war-
time debt problem and a progressive reduction of all tariffs (Pasvolsky
1933, 23–24). In the long run, Pasvolsky and FDR were very keen on
100 A. WILLIAMS
these ideas, but unable to countenance them in a sea of crisis, as the British
were only too aware.
So, FDR was now staking his reputation on being able to lead at home
and abroad, his first act of international leadership and one that was to lead
to American economic hegemony in the Second World War. Cordell Hull
also started, initially timid, attempts at redressing the trade situation after
1934, and also exercised more and more leadership over such matters as
the 1930s wore on, culminating in the discussions at Bretton Woods about
the putative world trade organization. Admittedly, it was not until much
later in the 1930s that this trade liberalization machine really revved up.
But Pasvolsky had seen the beginnings of what a determined President
could do to influence not just American politics in a progressive way, but
also international politics. This was to become most evident in his role
during the Second World War.
Pasvolsky and ‘Post War Planning’

Pasvolsky’s role in the State Department’s ‘Post War Planning’ (PWP) has
given him the greatest claim to immortality. The quote by Richard
Holbrooke above is fairly typical of commentaries on his primordial role in
the design and early implementation of what became the UN. He was
indeed “fixed on a single goal” for the most significant part of his career,
the establishment of the UN.
PWP was of course a vast enterprise (Notter 1949), and Pasvolsky was
but one cog in the machine, though a vital one (Williams 2007; O’Sullivan
2007). PWP originated in the early 1940s, led initially by Under Secretary
of State Sumner Welles, who set up the process formally in early 1942, but
who had already given some thought as to what a post-war world should
look like. This came to be known as FDR’s ‘New World Order’ in con-
scious critical homage to Woodrow Wilson’s version of 1919. The PWP
planners—many of whom, like Pasvolsky himself and geographer Isaiah
Bowman, had been junior or even senior (like Bowman) participants in the
process in Paris, were keen not to get sucked into ‘old world’ arguments
about balance of power and the maintenance of colonial empires, both of
which were anathema to FDR and most of his immediate circle (Smith
2003). FDR blamed the other leaders at Versailles for imposing their vision
of the world on a naïve Wilson; he wanted to be seen as a ‘realistic
Wilsonian’ in the words of David Reynolds (Reynolds 2006, 328). In par-
ticular, FDR did not wish to be constrained by the endless discussions,
documented so accurately by Pasvolsky at the time, about reparations and

war debts.
Brookings in general, and Pasvolsky in particular, were involved from
the outset of informal thinking about the post-war order before PWP was
officially announced nearly two years later. In December 1939, the CFR
set up a ‘War and Peace Studies’ project with which Pasvolsky was also
associated. On 1 May 1940, a group from the CFR met with the State
Department to “establish a little closer contact between the Council and
the Department in view of the special studies which the former has taken
on the effects of the war on the United States and the American interest in
the eventual peace”. This would present the findings of various groups
within the Council, groups that “could be most successful in suggesting
and developing and in assembling background material” (underlining in
original) (Armstrong 1940). The Brookings staffers present, included
Pasvolsky (now with the State Department himself having been appointed
by Hull to represent him at discussions on post-war issues) and Norman
H. Davis of the Board of Trustees, who had been President of the Council
since 1936, as well as a key State Department official in 1919 and at many
subsequent League of Nations related meetings since. This grouping,
later, became more integrated into the State Department and by February
1941, it was formalized with Isaiah Bowman of the CFR and Arnold
Sweetzer of the State Department as main points of contact. Pasvolsky’s
main contribution to this debate was to suggest that memoranda should
always be divided “into two parts: I: Past experience; II: Present situa-
tion”. Both would “change with the passage of time”. This reflected the
dynamic that all involved in PWP felt about the Wilsonian past and the
FDR present; how much of one could be preserved into the second?
At this point in the war, there was an overwhelming concern about
what would happen if Germany won it. What would the trade implications
be? Several startling conclusions emerged from this. One was a seeming
assumption that Britain would accept a German occupation of Europe,
but remain free—not an assumption shared by the US Ambassador to the
UK at that time, Joseph Kennedy. Then, after a period of “economic war-
fare” between Germany and the United States, there would be a rever-
sion—the “liberal idea would come and would have to come”, or there
would be a German European Continent and “a closer knitting together
of the United States and British economies”. France would be “left a pri-
marily agricultural economy, producing of course luxury goods’—a har-
binger of all future American dismissals of French importance within the
102 A. WILLIAMS
PWP process until the end of 1944. An overwhelming impression is that

the group now accepted the primacy of economic factors in the future of
world order, a continuation of CFR (and the British Chatham House)
pre-war obsession with the need to avoid the economic problems that had
wrecked the 1919 peace settlement (Armstrong 1940). Even before Pearl
Harbor, there were extensive discussions about the future within the CFR
in the ‘Group on Peace Aims of the European Nations’ as well as in other
groupings, some involving the British Chatham House.
The ‘Division of Special Research’ was set up within the State
Department in February 1942, with Pasvolsky as Director, a post he also
held when the Division was sub-divided into two Divisions of Political
Studies and of Economic Studies on 1 January 1943, as the complex task
of planning the peace went forward. In a key statement of its aims and
objectives in February 1942, a number of priorities were laid out.
Unsurprisingly, at that stage of the war, the ‘disarmament of enemy
nations’ (Section I) was the first rubric. But even here, economic factors
were key. “Should disarmament be industrial as well as purely military?”
Once military materiel had been confiscated, should it be given to ‘the
international security organization?’, or even, “[s]hould its sale be permit-
ted? Or should it be scrapped and used for reconstruction of peace-time
industry”. The expression ‘swords into plowshares’ (by 1959 the title of a
Soviet Realism piece of metal sculpture outside the UN HQ in New York)
was not being used but it was already strongly implied. For what was to
come after the war, the second and third large rubrics (Sections II and III)
were devoted to an ‘international organization for general security’ and
the ‘possibilities of an international armed force’. The first of these was to
be based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter, but much else remained
in the form of questions, from where it should be based to its membership
criteria. The second was seen as even more tricky, including what their
‘functions’ were to be, prescient given the debates about ‘collective secu-
rity’ and ’peacekeeping’ since 1945. Sections IV and V were older
American concerns about the ‘general limitation of armaments’ and ‘free-
dom of the seas’. Overarching all of this was the question of who was to
accomplish all this. In this first draft, the twin roles of the United States
and Great Britain are several times stated (Armstrong 1942a).
As was suggested earlier in this chapter, this process did not always run
smoothly. The three key officials in the PWP process, Pasvolsky, Welles
and Bowman, were often at loggerheads. Borgwardt is dismissive about
these shenanigans: “Both Sumner Welles’s planning committees and the
“Hull men” under Leo Pasvolsky had been puttering along throughout
1942 and the early Spring of 1943, distracted by their turf wars, and mak-
ing plans on what the veteran peace activist James T. Shotwell diplomati-
cally termed “more of an academic level”” (Borgwardt 2005, 115).
Shotwell was himself a (Columbia) academic, and appropriately himself
engaged in ‘academic’ activity through much of the war, as his papers sug-
gest. ‘The Committee to Study the Organization of the Peace’, was essen-
tially one that urged a use of the market to establish peaceful relations
between states and of “sharing economic sovereignty”. Shotwell worked
very closely with Clark Eichelberger and Sumner Welles on providing yet
more input into what became the United Nations, as well as being a tire-
less publicist for a global organization (Shotwell 1943). But to dismiss
disagreements between such disparate characters who represented such
different approaches to international relations, is to miss the point that
there was no real consensus about these. Bowman’s geopolitical ‘realist’
approach, echoed elsewhere in Nicholas Spykman’s work, (Spykman
1942; Rosenboim 2015) was in stark contrast to those who still believed
in ‘world peace through law’ (like Eichelberger) and the progressive views
of Hull, Pasvolsky, Shotwell and others who had also been marked for life
by the inter-war chaos.
Pasvolsky’s personal contribution to this activity is often swamped in
the archival record. Even in his own papers, there is often little clue as to
what he himself suggested and how it was received, and they are largely
made up of a list of discussion points, with some exceptions, which will be
referred to below. But he did express his views forcefully enough when
necessary. His ‘turf war’ with Bowman was far from being ‘academic’—in
that Bowman was an early advocate of a regional solution to post-war
security issues, while Pasvolsky was in favour, as was FDR, of a more global
approach. In discussions about a ‘Danubian Federation’ in mid-1942 that
was attended by Welles, CFR Chairman Armstrong suggested that it
should be large and primarily economic ‘with an incipient political federa-
tion’, as suggested by Polish leader General Sikorski, though Welles said
another smaller grouping might work. This potential ‘Hapsburg solution’
had obvious problems surrounding a danger of one hegemonic European
actor emerging, probably Poland. Bowman criticized the link between the
‘economic’ and the ‘political connections’, but how otherwise, asked
Armstrong, to make it strong enough? Pasvolsky then issued a “protest
against the whole regional idea.” The issue was not one of making a region
work, but of “the relationship of the group as a whole towards the outside
104 A. WILLIAMS
world. Who was going to determine that?” He felt that “no group of
nations would be better off as a group than they would be individually,
and that the solution is for large countries to follow sound economic poli-
cies and therefore permit and encourage the smaller countries to practice
them also”.
The next meeting saw Bowman suggest a bigger regional grouping
that also included Germany and Austria—a theme that was clearly con-
troversial and might also upset the Russians. Their view said Welles would
depend on whether “Russia decided in favor or against an imperialistic
course after the war.” Maybe they could be persuaded that such a union
“was not a potential menace to her, and that, if it were sufficiently strong,
it would help keep Germany in check. Furthermore, a prosperous area
would be advantageous to her economically for trade purposes.” Pasvolsky
at this point was asked to prepare ‘a memorandum on the question of
Russia’s attitude towards these matters’ as head of the Research Division.
He responded with the astonishing claim that maybe “if a less decidedly
Communist regime came into being in Russia, Estonia and Latvia might
wish to join Soviet Russia of their own accord”. Armstrong’s view was
that “nationalism, properly limited by the membership of sovereign
nations in an international organization, was a natural defense against
international Communism”. Welles concluded a long discussion by saying
he favoured a ‘League’ as a regional grouping, of which there would be
many in the future, and that the “relations of the… [political] and the
[economic] councils was one of the most difficult problems to solve”,
and that all of these “regional groupings might have a functional place in
the world organization”. The last two meetings of this subcommittee
that Armstrong recorded saw Bowman installed as Chairman in Welles’s
absence “due to illness” and the tone turned markedly to security issues
immediately, especially as regarded Eastern Europe, Poland and
Germany’s fate. There was little or no discussion of the links between the
political and the economic, and much more about the United Nations
(by which was meant the Big Three) and the use of military force
(Armstrong 1942b). It was clear that Pasvolsky stood for a gentler
approach that saw cooperation as the goal.
Bowman’s irritation with Pasvolsky was shared by others. By April
1944, Norman Davis, a veteran American diplomat, intimate of Bowman
and by then President of the American Red Cross as well as the CFR, put
far more emphasis on American global assertion after the war than on the
UN project. Pasvolsky was seen by Davis as an impediment to this objec-
tive and told State Department staffer Joseph E. Green, a close aide to
Secretary of State Hull, that “things could not be fully straightened out
without letting Leo [Pasvolsky] go”. Green tried to get Davis to relent, by
arguing “Leo… could be kept fully occupied with speech-writing and
research and the numerous other tasks that the Secretary imposed on
him” (Armstrong 1944). In other words, Pasvolsky annoyed a lot of
people, but was still seen as a hard worker who could be very useful. And
however much, some like Davis and Bowman felt hostile to him, Pasvolsky
was present for some of the most interesting discussions and participated
in the most important meetings that decided the future not only of IO,
but also of global order. He left so much behind for the researcher of these
matters that to summarize them in a brief paper like this would be impos-
sible, but we can try and tease out some of the key moments of this pro-
cess as he saw it.
One such key moment came with the initial decisions about what to
emphasize in the study of ‘Post-war Problems’. In this ‘plan of work’ of
early 1941 (there is no exact date recorded for us) the emphasis was the
need to “not sow the seeds of another war”. Hence it was “essential to
think out in advance, in so far as that is possible, the principles upon which
[the peace] should be based.” They had in particular to avoid “build[ing]
imaginary castles in the air”, but at the same time “the future must be
built on the past”. That required a clear understanding of what had caused
the present war. The clear message was that it was economic forces, includ-
ing demography and business cycles, that had caused it, but mainly “the
tragedy of the last pre-war decade, a decade which began with the financial
collapse in the autumn of 1929”. So, had the League of Nations and its
myriad economic committees helped? Might a ‘different procedure’ in
international conferences have helped? Were these “tendencies and phe-
nomena… likely to repeat themselves”? This would all require detailed
analysis of trade flows and problems since 1919, and “especially of America
and the British Commonwealth of nations” and of Europe. For “Wars
accentuate depressions and depressions in their turn lead to revolution
and war”, so “there is nothing to prevent us proceeding boldly with this
question of policy”. That would then have to be followed by a consider-
ation of why ‘reconstruction’ had failed in the aftermath of 1919, and
draft policies to remedy “whether there were any defects that might be
avoided in the future”. In short, this was a blueprint for what became the
Bretton Woods accords and United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA) (Pasvolsky 1941a).
106 A. WILLIAMS
Pasvolsky was thus not just a note taker, and his interpretation of events
in the notes that became the official record is vital. What was needed, he
thought, was a ‘reorientation of American Foreign Policy’ in a paper of
January 1941, if the United States was to win the ‘ideological conflict’ and
the ‘epochal developments’ that they have engendered. If Britain won the
war, the main need would be ‘economic and political reconstruction’. If
Britain lost, how was the United States to deal with “a new type of inter-
national order dominated by Germany”? Or maybe the British Empire
might survive in a ‘stalemate’? (Pasvolsky 1941b). This was followed by an
important memorandum for Ambassador John Winant who replaced the
arch-appeaser Joseph Kennedy in London in March 1941, again reflecting
the view that Britain was seen at that point as the key collaborator in any
potential new order. Pasvolsky made clear to Winant that the FDR
Administration had to be very careful “as to the nature of international
economic policies which a victorious Britain might decide to pursue”.
Although he wrote that Winston Churchill’s predecessor, Neville
Chamberlain, had made very welcome speeches about the need for multi-
lateral trade agreements after the war, a course pursued doggedly by Hull
throughout the 1930s, it would be “of first-rate importance at this time”
if ‘Mr. Churchill and Mr. Bevin’ made such a ‘restatement’. Pasvolsky
thought the British should make statements about the “rights of all
nations, large and small, to independent existence and to freedom from
intervention”, as well as “to use all its influence toward establishing an
effective international machinery for peaceful settlement of disputes and
for peaceful and orderly adjustment of differences, maybe as ‘part of a
large program of social justice and social progress, of a new order of human
welfare… and by the growth of social responsibility”. This statement pre-
figures both the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, which Winant did much
to organize, and the beginning of both demands for British decoloniza-
tion and the new project of the welfare state (Pasvolsky 1941c).
This need to agree with the British on what the post-war world would
look like dominated the documentary record throughout 1943 and into
1944, whatever may have been the parallel need to accommodate the
Russians and Chinese. Pasvolsky had a great number of contacts with
Arnold Toynbee, the then pillar of the British Chatham House, as he had
been since its inception at the same time as the CFR, the Anglo-American
think tank universe in action (Hall 2014, 23–36). Talks with the British
were pretty well constant, especially in the areas of peace and security, eco-
nomic collaboration (led by John Maynard Keynes) and the “treatment
of dependent areas” (Pasvolsky 1944a). There were of course Anglophile

and Anglophobe voices in Washington, with Secretary for War Henry
Stimson in the former camp, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle and
FDR himself (from time to time) in the latter. But it was well understood
that in the “various aspects of commercial policy’ which Hull and Pasvolsky
both saw as vital areas of post-war stabilization, ‘the crucial problem is a
meeting of minds between ourselves and the British Commonwealth of
Nations, since between them… [they] account for well over one-half of
the world’s total international trade” (Pasvolsky 1944b).
The Four Nation Declaration at the October–November 1943 Moscow
meeting of foreign ministers (and Stalin) which set up the European
Advisory Commission (EAC), the first attempt to try and sketch out the
main elements of a security IO. One major reason for the omission of all
other states was explained by Pasvolsky to the Minister of Foreign Affairs
of Mexico, Ezequiel Padilla. Pasvolsky told him that peace and security
issues “in the future should be viewed primarily from the standpoint of an
inevitable conflict of basic attitudes on the part of the large and of the
small countries.” The ‘large countries’ would be fearful about “placing
their fate in the hands of an international organization comprising many
nations”, while the “small countries are bound to be apprehensive of a
possible resurgence of the ideas of balance of power and spheres of influ-
ence”. This will rule out a ‘world government’, but necessitated a “grad-
ual movement in the direction of a reconciliation of the conflict through a
practical and workable international organization”, this to ensure “a maxi-
mum of democracy”. Pasvolsky spoke to his interlocutor’s well known
pro-American and pan-American views by suggesting “one or two of the
continental countries of Europe, one or two of the American republics,
and one or two of the British dominions” could be involved in planning
the organization. ‘Democracy’ was a not too subtle code for the firm and
constant allies of the United States, as Padilla understood.
As one of the potential ‘continental countries of Europe’, the French
continued to be left out, though Robert Marjolin was consulted about
trade issues in the same period. Before the Moscow Conference, the
British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had suggested in an Aide-
Memoire that what became the EAC could have been called a ‘United
Nations Commission for Europe’, with France a named state “if she
should recover her greatness”. By August 1944 it was being referred to by
Pasvolsky as a ‘European High Commission’. But the European Advisory
Commission had no such seat for the French. This can be seen as a snub
108 A. WILLIAMS
to de Gaulle (FDR was at this point by no means sure that he wanted to

accept the General as the true representative of France, but it could also be
seen as a snub to the idea (also supported by the British) of a regional
series of assembles that would then be subordinated to a global one
(Pasvolsky 1943). The French were only admitted to the EAC in late
1944, and never allowed to properly join in Big Three discussions, so not
invited to either the Yalta or Potsdam Conferences of February and July
1945. That also extended to the UN’s most important conference before
its official institutionalization at San Francisco in 1945, the Dumbarton
Oaks Conference of 21 August and 7 October 1944 in Washington, DC
(Williams 2017; Pasvolsky 1944c).
Dumbarton Oaks was probably the highpoint of Pasvolsky’s influence
on both the UN project and US foreign policy. Hull, his main supporter
in the State Department was by this time too ill to chair the meetings and
that role went to Edward Stettinius Jr, as Under Secretary of State, a rela-
tively inexperienced diplomat. After Dumbarton Oaks, it was easier to ‘let
Leo go’ as Norman David had suggested in earlier 1944 (see above). But
he also proved very useful to the new Secretary of State, when Stettinius
formally succeeded Hull. The talks were tripartite, with only the Americans
(Stettinius, Pasvolsky and James Dunn), British (Sir Alexander Cadogan,
Permanent Under Secretary, and Gladwyn Jebb of the Foreign Office),
and Russians (Soviet Ambassador to Washington Andrei Gromyko) pres-
ent. Alger Hiss acted as Secretary. After a series of ‘Tentative Proposals’ in
July 1944 and a ‘Summary of Official Statements’ on August 1, there were
18 meetings of the Joint Steering Committee from August 21 on—which
culminated in a draft of what was to become the UN Charter, referred to
in the minutes as the ‘Conversations’.
Some decisions were (reasonably) easy with the Russians present.
France was accepted as probable future ‘Permanent Member’ in the dis-
cussion of the ‘Security Council’—a major realist advance on the League
Council at the 6th meeting on 28th August. Cadogan thought this was
acceptable but to go any further would be to “put our head into a hornet’s
nest”. But the Russians dismissed economics as a ‘secondary matter,
though they did allow for the creation of the Economic and Social Council
(ECOSOC) only four days into the Conference at the 5th meeting on
25th August. Pasvolsky wrote a Memorandum to Hull reporting this as
“[t]he most important difference of view that has so far emerged is
whether the scope of the projected organization should include responsi-
bilities with regard to the promotion of international cooperation in the
economic and social fields”. Equally, the Russians could not agree with the
British and Americans about what constituted ‘aggression’, a debate that
is still not properly resolved, and maybe never will be. The Russians also,
unlike the Americans and British, put little emphasis on the Assembly. For
them only hard, security issues counted (Pasvolsky 1944d).
These fundamental disagreements were of course to stymie all mean-
ingful East-West cooperation on such issues as human rights, trade and
other issues in the context of the Cold War. The San Francisco Conference
mainly served to rubber stamp the decisions made at Dumbarton Oaks,
and is a step too far for this chapter.
Conclusions
When Woodrow Wilson’s Progressive help-mate Colonel Edward House
had foreseen a role for the United States as a leader of a more liberal world
and then attempted to develop this role at the Paris Peace Conference in
1919, he would have been unaware that a successor President, a ‘realistic
Wilsonian’ FDR, would achieve much of what he failed to do. Although
others have a good claim on the mantle of that success, Leo Pasvolsky
arguably has the major claim on being the implementer, and in some
respects the creator, of the vision of a Rooseveltian New World Order. As
this chapter has tried to establish, he was the NWO’s back-room boy par
excellence. There is scarcely a document in the archives of the State
Department and the CFR, the two key institutions that did the detailed
work of FDR’s grand design, that does not either bear his name or show
his influence, and usually both. So why has he been forgotten? A key rea-
son must be that the ideals of the UN in 1945 were almost immediately
overtaken by the realities of Containment and the Cold War. That is maybe
one reason why no one has written a biography of Pasvolsky in the style of
the (magnificent) volume on Bowman by Neil Smith. Another is that,
unlike Smith, he left a fairly meagre documentary trail behind him. Apart
from his papers in the Library of Congress, and those of Armstrong of the
CFR (which are far more copious and mostly about himself naturally), he
has not left anything as engaging as, say, Adolf Berle’s, Henry Stimson’s
or Henry Morgenthau Jr’s Diaries—all literary masterpieces in their own
right. While they have been a delight to peruse for many happy hours by
many historians, Pasvolsky’s papers are by comparison dry and largely
impersonal. They need to be decoded to see what he contributed.
110 A. WILLIAMS
Pasvolsky did not leave a legacy that was the one he would have wanted.
But then, neither did FDR and the rest of the PWP complex of organiza-
tions and individuals. He did make a disproportionate impact nonetheless.
His papers are a precious record of what can be achieved in the midst of a
vicious war and they still stand as witnesses to what might have been. Very
few statesmen or bureaucrats can claim as much.
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Andrew Williams is Professor of International Relations at the University of St

Andrews. His most recent books include France, Britain and the United States in
the Twentieth Century: 1900–1940 (2014) with a second volume in preparation to
take the story up to 1970. His other recent works include Liberalism and War: The
Victors and the Vanquished (2006) and Failed Imagination? The Anglo-American
New World Orders from Wilson to Bush (2nd edition 2007). He was Editor of the
International History Review from 2010 to 2016.
PART II
Unleashing Society
CHAPTER 6
John Dewey: A Pragmatist’s Search for Peace

in the Aftermath of Total War
Charles F. Howlett
A philosophy addressing both the needs of the individual and society, one
uniting thought and action, defines the true meaning of progressive
reform. At least that is what America’s foremost philosopher of the twen-
tieth century, Columbia University Professor John Dewey, consistently
argued. He linked his form of philosophy, which he called pragmatism, to
the ideology of Progressivism—the political and social reform movement
to improve the human condition—by describing it as the intellectual
expression of a conflict in culture with the vital function of helping human-
kind understand social change. Creative intelligence and the potentialities
for growth of the human mind through advances in science, technology,
economic development, and social organization were far more significant
than any static conception of the mind as nothing more than a mental
storehouse of past understanding. Pragmatism, according to Dewey, was
an active process for reconstructing society through continual experimen-
tation; it was as important as the ends that such reconstruction aimed to
accomplish. Simply put, the means—creative intelligence—could deter-
mine the ends in the name of progress.
C.F. Howlett (*)

Molloy College, Rockville Centre, NY, USA

118 C.F. HOWLETT
In no instance was Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism put more to the

test than during World War I. Historians and scholars alike have pointed
out that this became a defining moment in his life the moment he became
the nation’s proclaimed intellectual spokesperson uniting a romantic
national idealism with a realistic Progressivism supporting military inter-
vention (Rockefeller 1991; Westbrook 1991; Martin 2002; Dykhuizen
1973; Ryan 1995; Howlett and Cohan 2016). Dewey’s desire to hitch his
wagon to the call for American military intervention was not only a philo-
sophical commitment but one in keeping with the rhetorical dictates sup-
porting democratic ideas as part of a great national service. With war
raging in Europe, there was now an opportunity to employ America’s
military might, not only to test the efficiency of progressive social engi-
neering abroad but also to challenge the collective will of the populace in
order to bring about the kind of international democratic progress needed
to expunge from the Old World its political tyranny and autocracy. This
was a grand experiment Dewey’s pragmatism could get its hooks into:
expanding the current US process of progressive domestic political and
social reconstruction for furthering democratic ideals and now testing it
overseas under the guise of military engagement. Attaching his pragma-
tism to President Woodrow Wilson’s progressive war aims—punctuated
with arousing rhetoric such as “a war to end all wars” and “a war to make
the world safe for democracy”—was part of the much larger goal for estab-
lishing international democracy. Unfortunately, this pragmatic experiment
of using war as the means to achieve the desired ends he envisioned failed
to reach fulfillment. Ultimately, it changed, dramatically, the dynamics of
his thinking about war and peace between the world wars.
World War I and Disillusionment

When it appeared early in 1917 that American military participation could
no longer be avoided, Dewey converted his energies toward “employing
force economically and efficiently, so as to get results with the least waste”
(Dewey 1929c). Dewey called upon all Americans to join the war effort
and work for the construction of a postwar world designed to establish
permanent peace. He endorsed Wilson’s call for an international peace-
keeping organization, recognition of territorial integrity, respect for all
nationalities, and freedom of the seas. Dewey sincerely believed that if the
war was intelligently directed it might be used to achieve worthwhile ends
beyond the defeat of Germany. The real problem was making people
JOHN DEWEY: A PRAGMATIST’S SEARCH FOR PEACE IN THE AFTERMATH... 119
understand this fact before they were overwhelmed by a chauvinistic patri-

otism, thereby losing sight of the real aim of US military involvement
(Dewey 1929f, 637; Dewey 1915, 108–110; Dewey 1916, 262).
During the months of July, August, and September, 1917, Dewey pub-
lished four articles in the New Republic. “Conscience and Compulsion”,
“The Future of Pacifism”, “What America Will Fight For”, and
“Conscription of Thought” all illustrated Dewey’s attempt to unify the
country behind a program of socialized democracy for “binding up the
wounds that had rent the body politic and putting an end to years of aim-
less drift” (Dewey 1929g, 477). It was his initial disposition to believe that
war might strengthen American democracy at home and international
Progressivism abroad. Thus, he felt compelled to show that the method of
intelligence did not exclude the use of force in international relations. The
net result of these four articles was a conscious effort on the part of Dewey
to demonstrate the fundamental compatibility between pragmatism and
war (White 1947, 161–179).1
Clearly, these four articles highlighted the pro-war progressives’ justifi-
cation that this war would serve the new sense of national purpose, one
involving demands for social control and economic planning. Optimistically,
their idealism rested upon the belief that the commitment to community
achieved in time of military crisis could serve as a means for furthering
domestic progress and a new international order. Speaking on their behalf,
Dewey cautioned readers not to be overwhelmed by the forces of compul-
sion but rather allow one’s conscience to develop “the machinery, the
specific, concrete social arrangements … for maintaining peace” (Dewey
1929a, 564). Critical to the mission’s success was the need for a practical
“business-like psychology” that would perceive the ends to be accom-
plished and make an “effective selection and orderly arrangement of means
for their execution” (Dewey 1929b, 569). He also spoke of pragmatism’s
help in enabling people to understand better the progressive social possi-
bilities of the war. The extensive use of science for communal purposes
and the creation of a world organization which “crosses nationalistic
boundaries and interests” added to his conviction that the use of armed
forces might fulfill the desired program of socialized democracy (Dewey
1929d, 579). “American participation”, he gently concluded, “should
White uses the term “destructive intelligence” as distinguished from “creative intelli-
1
gence”. His purpose is to point out Dewey’s ambivalent stand regarding his philosophical
support for the war.
120 C.F. HOWLETT
consist not in money nor in men, but in the final determination of peace
policies which is made possible by the contribution of men and money”.
Here—in these four articles—was the pragmatic manifesto of Dewey’s
philosophy placed at the service of the country at war (Dewey 1929g,
585).
Dewey shared the pro-war progressives’ dream of a world based on
international cooperation and democratic understanding. This military
adventure, he initially felt, provided a means for the development of “a
new social consciousness”, which would unite the collective will of the
populace in favor of democratic reforms at home and abroad (Dewey
1929e, 746). In another article entitled “What Are We Fighting For?” he
argued forcefully that “if we are to have a world safe for democracy and a
world in which democracy is safely anchored, the solution will be in the
direction of a federated world government and a variety of freely experi-
menting and freely cooperating self-governing local, cultural, and indus-
trial groups.” This, according to Dewey, “is the ultimate sanction of
democracy, for which we are fighting” (Dewey 1929h, 559–60).
Not everyone, however, was willing to accept Dewey’s position on mili-
tarism and war. Instead of democracy serving the cause of world peace, it
became the rallying cry for America’s most militant patriots. It became not
an international ideal or domestic social goal, as he had hoped, but an
expression of national value and patriotic fervor. Critics were quick to
point out that military intervention would result in a virulent war psychol-
ogy that would politically incapacitate any chance for rational tolerance
and understanding given demands for national conformity.
Take, for instance, Randolph Bourne. As a former Columbia student,
Bourne was a sympathetic admirer of Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy.
Bourne praised Dewey’s philosophy of progressive education and spread
his ideas on the subject, the core concept of which was instrumentalism:
that the individual pupil was an instrument shaped by the school and the
educational process was the force necessary for changing society and redi-
recting it toward democratic ends. Thus, it was a shock and major disap-
pointment to Bourne when Dewey began arguing for American military
participation in Europe since it seemed to him as an abandonment of the
moral values central to Dewey’s philosophy. Bourne criticized Dewey’s
argument that war might be guided to a constructive conclusion. It was
not so much the pragmatic method of intelligence that irritated Bourne
but the casting aside of values such as nonviolence, social justice, commu-
nal cooperation, and human understanding in the win-the-war rush for
democratic internationalism. What Dewey failed to see, according to

Bourne, was that his pragmatic idealism had caused him to miscalculate
the irrational forces of war. More important, Dewey’s emphasis on utility,
Bourne charged, afforded him no specific program to counteract the pre-
dominant trend of “vagueness” and “impracticality”. To Bourne, it was
obvious that Dewey had no concrete plan in mind as to the specific imple-
mentation of his democratic desires, either nationally or internationally,
once the war was ended. A philosophy of adjustment, Bourne felt, was no
philosophy at all.
Bourne’s most telling criticism appeared in an article under the caption
“Twilight of Idols”, published in the Seven Arts, in October 1917. Here,
Bourne maintained that Dewey’s naïve belief that war might serve a useful
purpose “pointed to two defects in his philosophy”. One was his attitude
of optimism, which led him to misinterpret the influence of intelligence in
wartime. The other was his relation of thought to action, in which he
“overly stressed technique at the expense of value”. Both these views,
Bourne contended, were based on a method of expediency. The distinc-
tion between means and ends, Bourne emphasized sadly, could no longer
be evaluated by a pragmatic method in response to war. Understandably,
the disappointed Bourne thought of pragmatism as a philosophy of tech-
nique, “a philosophy which tells you how to accomplish your ends once
the ends have been established” (Bourne 1964, 60–61).
By the early months of 1919, Dewey was voicing his own disillusion-
ment with the prospects for international peace. In marked contrast to his
wartime opinions, he now reasoned that the war had failed to bring about
either a regeneration of the nation or a lasting advance toward interna-
tional peace. The four-year struggle had been so destructive and wide-
spread that the mere prospect of a future war evoked an overwhelming
sense of dread. Far from ensuring a permanent world peace, the Treaty of
Versailles, he honestly feared, would lay the groundwork for future wars;
it was for all intents and purposes the negotiated establishment of inequal-
ity. He penned his observations under the caption “The Discrediting of
Idealism”. Writing as one of those who though “strongly opposed to war
in general broke with the pacifists because they saw in this war a means of
realizing pacific ideals”, Dewey was now asking for their forgiveness
(Dewey 1929f, 630).2 He surprisingly added his own apologia to that of
Ratner used the title “Force and Ideals” in his edited book but the original title is “The
2
Discrediting of Idealism”.
122 C.F. HOWLETT
his wartime critics: “The defeat of idealistic aims has been, without exag-
geration, enormous. The consistent pacifist has much to urge now in his
own justification; he is entitled to his flourish of private triumphing”
(Dewey 1929f, 631). The defeat of idealism, he sadly concluded, was due
to a failure of intelligence: an optimistic belief that physical energy in uni-
son with morals and ideals could have a self-propelling and self-executing
capacity.
Moreover, his New Republic article “Our National Dilemma” pictured
the country as faced with the dilemma that isolation was impossible and
participation was perilous. Having discredited his own idealism, Dewey
now maintained that the foreign policies of France and England were
completely “non-democratic” and bent upon the destruction of Germany.
The United States had an obligation, Dewey vigorously warned, “not to
engage too much or too readily with them until there is assurance that we
shall not make themselves or ourselves worse, rather than better, by what
is called sharing the common burdens of the world” (Dewey 1929i, 619).
Quite clearly, this line of reasoning would have been more appropriate to
the pragmatist argument at the beginning of the war than at its
completion.
Outlawry of War Movement

However, still wedded to the idea that Progressivism remained a viable
instrument for furthering democratic values and social reorganization—
domestically and globally—Dewey’s pragmatism now attempted to move
the idea of peace as abstract and unattainable into a realistic means ethi-
cally and morally capable of achievement. During the Progressive Era and
prior to American intervention, Dewey shared the optimism of other
advocates of peace. As a practical reform enterprise, the peace movement
achieved an unprecedented level of social respect and was marked by the
appearance of over 40 new peace organizations in the United States alone.
As a national movement, it resurrected belief in the power of human rea-
son, progress, and the effectiveness of peacekeeping machinery, support-
ing the goals of international arbitration and global cooperation. By 1919,
peace as a realistic endeavor adopted a new tactic, which witnessed Dewey
abandoning the uncontroversial establishment peace reform effort marked
by arbitration and government-led plans for international organization of
the prewar period. Instead, he forcefully argued that if the United States
wished to take a leading role in reforming international relations and
ilitarism, it would have to yield to the will of a peace-minded public

m
intent upon challenging the legally accepted custom of war (Marchand
1972, 382).3
In terms of foreign relations, nowhere were Dewey’s efforts more
apparent than his involvement in the Outlawry of War movement in the
1920s. It represented a popular front crusade for world peace, launched
by average citizens in no way officially connected to government circles,
and one quite compatible with Dewey’s vision of progressive democracy.
It was an attempt to awaken official diplomatic channels to the realization
that public participation in the drive for peace should not be ignored.
The principal financier and chief figure of this concept was a wealthy
attorney from Chicago, Salmon O. Levinson. His sensibilities to the
horrors of World War I and his own perception that the League of
Nations would prove ineffective given the continuation of Old World
politics caused him to develop an alternative measure. The measure he
proposed was using the rule of law as a substitute for the customary
diplomatic acceptance of war when addressing international conflict.
Levinson and his followers offered what they considered to be a “purely”
American peace plan—as opposed to the League already in existence—
which would do three things: (a) outlaw war as a legal method of set-
tling international disputes; (b) establish a code of international law
which all nations would adhere to; and (c) create a court of justice simi-
lar to the United States Supreme Court which would encourage each
nation to surrender its own leaders clamoring for war—no matter how
influential—to this international tribunal (Ferrell 1953; Stoner 1943;
De Conde 1959).
Dewey’s attraction to the crusade was based on a genuine desire to
unite Levinson’s legalistic approach to peace with his own moralistic
appeal to humankind’s ethical sentiments (Levinson to Dewey, April 27,
1923, S. O. Levinson Papers). He believed that “a re-organization of
3
Marchand also notes that “The identification of peace with order was not unrelated to the
predominance of conservative and moderates in the peace movement in the prewar years.
Conservatives occasionally carried the precepts of the peace movement back into their dis-
cussions of industrial conflicts, their encomiums of judges and the domestic judicial system,
and their general defenses of constitutionalism and legalism. The more radical social reform-
ers of the period, by contrast, were inclined to ignore the prewar peace movement, finding it
too abstract, too far removed from pressing internal problems, and too much the province of
groups unsympathetic to fundamental social reform” (381–382). See also, Wiebe, 1967,
260–61.
124 C.F. HOWLETT
international relations would serve to harmonize the ethics of nations

with those of individuals and thus help to civilize international life.” He
was committed, moreover, to the belief that a community of enlight-
ened members—using the “method of intelligence”—could actively
participate in their own self-creation. Outlawry of War, as both a pro-
gressive social instrumentality and diplomatic measure, was one means,
indeed the only realistic means, Dewey maintained, whereby the people,
not politicians, could demonstrate their willingness to make world peace
an actuality. According to the late historian Charles DeBenedetti,
“Frustrated by Wilson’s failure to secure a just peace, progressive
spokesmen like John Dewey argued that law alone offered an opportu-
nity for the voiceless masses to achieve social reconstruction and a last-
ing peace. With reactionaries in control of political processes everywhere,
many progressives looked to law as the last reliable means of easing
international tensions and realizing true social democracy” (DeBenedetti
1968, 41).4
Interestingly, Dewey considered the Outlawry movement as an exten-
sion of his social psychology. For Outlawry to take hold, only the right
cultural conditions would have to be established in support of the kinds of
behavior that integrate emotions, ideas, and desires disposed to peaceful
co-existence—educated moral sentiments. Instead of perfecting the art of
war, nations and their peoples need to perfect the art of peace. Outlawry
can assist in establishing a proper image of the world as an interdependent
whole directed by political decisions aided by reasoned psychological, eco-
nomic, and sociological knowledge of the probable reactions of different
political systems capable of waging war.
According to Dewey, the objective of the program was to work on the
minds and dispositions of the people. If more people were taught that war
was a crime against humanity, coercive measures to prevent its recurrence
would no longer be needed. Understanding would replace fear, and agree-
ment would replace distrust. Quite clearly, the problem, as Dewey pointed
out on numerous occasions, was not what reprisals a nation must fear for
DeBenedetti also pointed out that “progressives looked upon law not as a means of social
4
control as much as an instrument for purifying democratic processes and abolishing perni-
cious social institutions. Law provided a regenerative means for expanding democracy’s
opportunity to do good, not for checking its excesses. Law imparted progress to change and
sealed the success of popular reform efforts” (1978, 59). Outlawrists, like Dewey, accepted
the existence within American institutions of a moral framework operating according to
objective norms in the best interests of democratic understanding.
considering acts of blatant aggression but its own failure to acknowledge

and hold in check its own nationalistic ambitions. Certainly, Dewey’s
identification, association, allegiance, and participation in the Outlawry of
War crusade were in complete agreement with his postwar pragmatic
approach to international peace and the direction American foreign rela-
tions must follow. It was also compatible to his progressive outlook on
reform; however, in this case, the instrument would not be war but rather
the law. Perhaps the noted Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Merle Curti
put it best when he wrote: “Dewey’s dedicated devotion to this program…
was…an important testimony to his conviction that war might be elimi-
nated if the world stopped thinking in terms of war and that an unlimited
national sovereignty contradicted both common sense and social and
human needs” (Curti 1967, 1117).
But more telling was that Dewey’s postwar anti-militarist sentiments
would not permit him to support, unequivocally, any type of doctrine of
self-defense. Resorting to pleas of self-defense merely helps to legitimize
the war system. In terms of his own psychology, Dewey linked pleas of
self-defense to the acceptance of violence, thereby justifying the lawlessness
of war. It represented a stunning departure from his rationale during
World War I. In making clear his argument, he made a telling distinction
between abolishing war as a moral proposition and eliminating it as a
legally sanctioned system or institution:
The proposition, then, is not the moral proposition to abolish wars. It is

much the more fundamental proposition to abolish the war system as an
authorized and legally sanctioned institution….To grant the difference
between these two propositions, one simply to do away with war and the
other to eliminate the war system as the reigning system under which inter-
national politics, diplomacy and relations are conducted—to understand the
difference between these two propositions is fundamental. Recourse to vio-
lence is not only a legitimate method for settling international disputes at
present, under certain circumstances it is the only legitimate methods, the
ultimate reason of state. (Dewey 1983b, 90)
Stated succinctly, rather than trying to emphasize the immorality of war-

fare, albeit true, Dewey, instead, chose to attack the long-established belief
that war is a legitimate and ingrained part of the international system and
to counter the public’s general resignation that there was nothing that
could be done about it.
126 C.F. HOWLETT
In supporting the Outlawry movement, Dewey sought to promote the

concept of an applied philosophy capable of responding to problems
within and outside the nation-state system, one exceeding personal ethics
based on individual relationships as well as professional ethics tied to
groups. Instead, despite his own affinity for employing the term “social
ethics”, he insisted that it was time for philosophy to avoid theoretical
abstracts and politically irrelevant reflections by offering up a diagnostic
analysis of a type of ethics specifically applied to relations among people,
in other words, a “political ethics” dictated by legal measures that was
driven by conscientious scruples. With respect to Outlawry, therefore,
the crusade was both a means and an end to the democratization of poli-
tics—the very goal Dewey had in mind. His approach to an applied ethics
was designed to create a political conscience by analyzing the problem
involved (war), how it arises, the resources needed to handle conflicting
claims and values, and, finally, seeking the necessary constructive effort to
resolve it (Howlett and Cohan 2016, 133–35).Not everyone, however,
agreed with Dewey’s position. Walter Lippmann, the journalist and sup-
porter of the League of Nations, promptly penned a 1923 essay entitled
“The Outlawry of War”. Initially, like Dewey, he expressed his own disil-
lusionment with Wilsonianism in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles;
the treaty did not come close to fulfilling the president’s progressive war
aims, marked by the US Senate’s rejection of the treaty and failure to join
the League. Lippmann called to his Atlantic Monthly readers’ attention
the significance of the Outlawry crusade while at the same time criticiz-
ing it as too idealistic because it chose to avoid the role of diplomatic
experts. Lippmann, who initially had warmed up to the Outlawry idea
after contemplating the March editorial for the New York World, then
reversed his position in August, upon reading one of Dewey’s articles.
“What they are relying upon fundamentally”, Lippmann remarked, “is
not their court and their code, but the treaty ‘outlawing war.’ They
believe that this slogan has the power to arouse and then to crystallize
mankind’s abhorrence of war” (Lippmann 1923, 246). Without mincing
words, he continued, “The central fallacy of their argument is this refusal
to acknowledge the necessity of diplomacy for just those war-breeding
disputes which are not within the competence of their code and their
court” (Lippmann 1923, 248).
Lippmann’s principal concern was that the democratic government was
a problematic undertaking. It was up to the politicians, bureaucrats, and
policy makers to inform the public of what needed to be done to keep the
diplomatic process moving forward. The daily lives of citizens were con-
sumed by tasks related to their own survival; it was too much to expect
them to appreciate, too, the complex political issues confronting the
United States and the world. Accurate information and dispassionate
judgment on the part of the elites must guide public opinion. Unlike
Dewey, Lippmann did not believe the public was capable of engaging in a
forum where effective decisions could be made after open debate and
discussion.
Dewey, as Levinson’s acknowledged intellectual spokesman, responded
to Lippmann’s charges. Two articles, published in the New Republic, com-
prised Dewey’s rejoinder. “What Outlawry of War is Not” and “War and
a Code of Law”, subsequently published in pamphlet form as Outlawry of
War: What It Is and Is Not, were ringing defenses of the Outlawry posi-
tion. “It does not say that law and war are the only methods of settling
disputes,” he pointed out in his first article, “but the only way of compel-
ling their settlement-quite a different proposition, and one that I shall
continue to believe until I am shown the contrary”. Conference, concilia-
tion, and mediation, according to Dewey, could be employed more effec-
tively if recourse to war was recognized as a public crime. Here, in this
particular article, it is readily apparent that Dewey was attempting to com-
bine the traditional methods used in international diplomacy with the new
instrument of Outlawry (Dewey 1923, 3–4).
Moreover, a code of law, readers were informed in the second article,
was indeed “manageable”, necessary, and workable if war was to be
declared illegal. Only when people realize the differences between “the
present system of lawless and anarchic international political action and
political action as it would become when associated with law”, he vigor-
ously maintained, could any hope for lasting peace be counted on. Just as
significant, this broadside did not propose to use the threat of force to
produce peace. To Dewey, Lippmann’s argument that Outlawry could
never be enforced was based on a false assumption about the concept of
peace as workable only if backed by use of sanctions or military force.
Peace should become a working disposition of the mind and not consid-
ered achievable only through use of arms—a willingness to use law as the
arbiter for settling international disputes (Dewey 1923, 4–6).
Dewey wanted to highlight the fact that the European powers that
established the League and supported the use of sanctions for enforce-
ment purposes had not entirely abandoned their imperialistic ambitions, as
evidenced by the territorial mandates they had established. Making war
128 C.F. HOWLETT
illegal would be the precedent for the world to follow once the public was
sufficiently educated to that fact; his goal was to unite international pub-
lics as an instrument to shape a more inclusive politics in lieu of leaving it
solely to the discretion of state leaders. Outlawry, being a proactive instru-
ment, would establish a worldly minded citizenship through the rule of
law and moral awareness to prevent autocratic and militaristic regimes
from existing in the future. The old idea of Progressive collectivism, as
political action, would now be at work through a world supreme court,
which would bring to justice—surrendered to it by acclimation of a
nation’s citizenry—any government or leader that ignores the wishes of its
people by choosing military force instead of diplomatic reconciliation
(Westbrook 1991, 452–58).
While Lippmann’s criticisms had to be taken seriously, the matter of
collective security clearly challenged the credibility of the Outlawry move-
ment. This challenge came from a respected and close colleague: James
T. Shotwell, Professor of History at Columbia University and the general
editor of the Economic and Social History of the World War. Shotwell, in
two articles, “The Problem of Security” and “What is Meant by Security
and Disarmament”, advocated armament reduction and support for the
utilization of League sanctions as the most effective means for guarantee-
ing national security and international peace. The use of sanctions,
Shotwell believed, would provide for national security by acting as a deter-
rent to future international conflicts. Equally important, he maintained,
was that aggression and self-defense were terms which had to be defined
and held firm in his position that collective security was the best means
presently available for insuring national security and world peace. The
Outlawrists’ unwillingness to support the use of sanctions, while at the
same time maintaining that their movement was not a pacifist one, proved
extremely perplexing to Shotwell. Outlawing war without any stipula-
tions, Shotwell believed, was not only unrealistic but also very unprag-
matic (Shotwell 1925, 159, 1926, 8, 1961, 190–212).
Adding to Dewey and the Outlawrists’ angst was Shotwell’s decision to
introduce a new twist to the Outlawry idea when he urged that a more
practical proposal for achieving peace would be “to renounce war as an
instrument of policy, not, as some pro-court proponents seemed to imply,
‘to renounce war as an instrument of justice’” (Shotwell 1927, 62). The
idea of renouncing war as an instrument of national policy was a term
whose words were commonly used within diplomatic circles, capable of
practical application. Considering himself a realist and one who believed
that the past must be viewed in terms of current economic and social
issues, including their effects on present-day political institutions, Shotwell
was attempting to inject into the debate some measure of harmony. He
clearly thought he could bridge the intellectual differences between the
two camps—Dewey’s effort to make Outlawry more acceptable to public
sentiment as a “non-defensive war” concept and his own support for the
idea of collective security banning wars of aggression.
Unmoved by Shotwell’s efforts in this regard, Dewey wrote another
article firmly supporting the Outlawrists’ position. “As an Example to
Other Nations” was not only a direct attack upon League supporters but
also an appeal urging all American lovers of peace to back American
Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg’s proposal for a “general treaty of
renunciation of war, and thereby executing the spirit of Briand’s [French
Foreign Minister Aristide Briand] original idea of setting an example to
the nations of the world” (Dewey 1929j, 702).5 Briand, initially, seized on
the idea of Outlawry in an attempt to secure a bilateral security pact with
the United States in order to protect France’s own national interests
against future acts of aggression by other European powers, particularly
Germany.
Finally, on March 28, 1928, Dewey and Shotwell finally came to
sword’s point in an editorial debate in the New Republic entitled “Divergent
Paths to Peace”. The debate centered about what the definition of self-
defense in relationship to acts of aggression and whether or not there is an
obligation to put down aggression. “The enforcement of peace”, Dewey
argued, “is quite another problem from that of defense or aggression”. He
could not accept Shotwell’s argument that there is a distinction between
commitment to a definition and the question of what acceptance of the
definition implies. Calling Shotwell’s argument merely an “academic exer-
cise”, Dewey went on to conclude, “It is part of any realistic devotion to
the cause of international peace to trust to future developments rather
than to any magic inhering an antecedent definitions” (Dewey and
Shotwell 1928, 194–96).
On March 3, Kellogg wrote the following words to Levinson: “I am very glad that men
5
who are giving deep thought to this subject approve of my stand on the Briand proposal. I
cannot bring myself to the position of undertaking to define aggressive warfare or to make
all kinds of exceptions and reservations as to when nations should go to war. I think when we
get into that field we are in an interminable tangle and I thought it best to cut the Gordian
knot and simply say we renounce war for the settlement of international disputes” (quoted
in Levinson to Dewey, February 8, 1928, 1996, electronic edition). See also, Ellis (1961).
130 C.F. HOWLETT
Dewey also took his case directly to the people. In an article entitled
“Outlawing Peace by Discussing War”, which appeared in mid-May,
Dewey gave his own reasons why the public must be well informed if the
treaty was to have any impact on world peace. The public must be edu-
cated as to the possibilities of what Outlawry involves, he told his New
Republic readers. “The American public, and possibly some Senators”,
Dewey contended, “need to be prepared for subsequent efforts that will
have to be made in order to provide the necessary pacific means of
adjustment of disputes. Discussion in terms of what would happen in
case of war distracts attention from the essential need” (Dewey 1929k,
704). The public mind had to be educated, he believed, to offset the
political rhetoric urging support for defensive wars. “If discussion does
not prepare the public mind for the necessity and we are caught unaware,
then when the treaty has been negotiated, we may well be in for another
failure, a failure humiliating to national self-respect and tragic in its con-
sequences for the world” (Dewey 1929k, 706). For Dewey, society
remained a by-product of collective action of rational human beings
composing society. Outlawry represented an educational instrument
designed not for structural change but to inculcate further the habits of
rational, critical, and reflective thought necessary for change. In keeping
with his modality of critical thinking, Outlawry, as a reflection of liberal
internationalist thought, was a method for assimilating “problems of
political power and moral goods to a statement of thinking, of method,
to a model of action and thought” (Mills 1966, 418). Unfortunately,
Dewey’s plea went unheeded. The public, he felt, had not been and was
not being properly informed.
Ultimately, on August 27, 1928, in Paris, the Pact of Paris, or the
Kellogg-Briand Pact, was signed. The day the pact was signed, however,
Dewey sadly told a friend that “he was convinced the Pact would hinder
not help the realization of the Outlawry objective” (Dewey to Levinson,
June 8, 1928, Levinson papers; Ferrell 1953). In Dewey’s opinion, the
Outlawrists had failed to adhere to their abiding principles. In their haste
to sign a treaty, the Outlawrists allowed the politicians to manipulate their
idea, thus, giving further proof that they did not really believe that the
“means” they proposed—educating the moral sentiments of human-
kind—were integrated with the “end” they originally hoped to attain. The
signing of the pact, he felt, which talked of outlawing war as an interna-
tional crime while guaranteeing the “right” to wage defensive wars, was
indeed paradoxical (Ratner 1939, 547).
Dewey’s reservations that the peace pact was too much of an official
diplomatic act without enough previous popular education were subse-
quently borne out with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September
1931. The pact had failed to prevent acts of aggression by military dicta-
torships including Japan, which had been one of the original 15 nations to
sign it. In response to this event, Dewey wrote another article “Peace by
Pact or Covenant”, encouraging all Americans to pledge their support for
the Pact of Paris. Pointing out that the pact had been prematurely adopted
and that it represented the “termination of the maneuvers of diplomats”
instead of the conclusion of “an irresistible public demand”, Dewey cau-
tiously warned that “there has…always been the danger that official adop-
tion of the Outlawry idea would turn out to be an embalming of the idea
rather than an embodiment of it” (Dewey 1932, 145). Japan’s recent
action in Manchuria was clear evidence that “the public’s grasp of and
belief in the Kellogg-Briand Pact is still lamentably superficial” (Dewey
1932, 146). In an impassioned way, Dewey pleaded for lovers of peace to
concentrate their attention upon the peace pact. “They should deny them-
selves”, Dewey reasoned, “the use of all methods of agitation and appeal
which are contrary to its letter and spirit” (Dewey 1932, 146). If this
were done, he believed that the work of public education, “which was
interrupted by the more or less premature official adoption of the Pact”,
could be resumed and undertaken more vigorously than before (Dewey
1932, 147).
In hindsight, however, it is obvious that Dewey’s defense of Outlawry
as a popular democratic mandate presented two contradictory reactions as
seen through a critical historical lens—a lens that labeled the movement
naïve and idealistic. Perhaps the crux of the matter was trying to convince
the public that Outlawry could meet all individual and emotional needs
without imposing any additional intellectual investments. It was because
of its simplicity that the Outlawry idea was supposed to win out, having
the weight of public morality behind it. But according to one Dewey biog-
rapher, “The difficulty of squaring instrumental rationality in the manage-
ment of public affairs with the affective and emotional commitments and
needs of individuals and groups in modern society is a common theme, as
is the search for a kind of ‘intelligence’ in self-government that does not
boil down to economic, cost-benefit calculation on the one hand, or float
up toward an appeal to a Hegelian or Platonic Reason on the other.”
When it came to the matter of making war illegal based on popular will,
moral conviction, and the role of intelligence, it was “hard to repress the
132 C.F. HOWLETT
thought that Dewey may simply have been asking too much of democratic
politics” (Ryan 1995, 217–18).
Dewey’s emphasis on persuading public opinion also accounts for the
other reactions. The question became how to convince the public that
making war illegal by injecting the law with a dose of morality—which
would then immunize nations from relying on the means of enforce-
ment—was a reasonable choice to make. The attempt to push American
foreign policy makers into getting nations to agree not to use instruments
of power led to an unforeseen outcome: peace became associated with
avoiding war instead of an ongoing process of political and diplomatic
accommodation. Relying on the weight of world opinion to make it real-
ity, rather than a means of enforcement for those who violated the pact—
Dewey’s objections aside—and not addressing what constituted
self-defense and when self-defense could be lawfully claimed, proved
insurmountable. Those in the public sector favoring collective security as
part of political and diplomatic negotiations, for instance, disagreed with
Dewey’s logic. Realistically, the only knowledge and experience embedded
in the popular mind was reliance on military measures, in the name of self-
defense, once a nation is attacked (Ryan 1995, 219–220). At that point,
ironically, the conventional diplomatic process to negotiate an end to the
fighting in the name of peace gets underway.
Nevertheless, in keeping with the pragmatic process of experimental-
ism, Dewey considered Outlawry as both an end to the war system and the
means for the democratization of international politics. Philosophically, it
was in Outlawry—the instrument to educate world opinion of its moral
responsibilities to reject war and militarism—that Dewey, the thinker,
placed his hopes for pragmatism’s postwar effectiveness as a working dis-
position of the mind; Outlawry, as a process, would thus enable the public
to reach an intelligent decision forsaking the use of military force perma-
nently. There would be no need then for nations to support the concept
of defensive war or any form of armed combat for that matter. The rule of
world law, as demanded by global opinion and reinforced by moral obliga-
tion, would insure a nation’s security, not the call to arms—this is what
citizens, when educated to the fullest extent, would demand of their dip-
lomats. This process, to him, represented Progressivism’s fulfillment of an
engaged citizenry.
From the very beginning of his involvement in the movement, Dewey
unflinchingly and unreservedly argued that “[t]he outlawing of war pro-
vides a common centre for the expression of this community of moral
emotion and desire. International law against war would produce the same
condensing, precipitating, crystallizing effect for morals with respect to
international relations that law has supplied everywhere else in its historic
development.” Continuing his argument, he went on to insist that “the
existing legal sanction of war inevitably confers upon it a moral sanction
which in the end encourages war. What law authorizes is a powerful influ-
ence in determining moral ideas and aspirations in the mass of men…. [U]
ntil war is outlawed by conjoint international action there is no opportu-
nity for existing moral sentiments to function effectively in international
relations, and next to no hope for the speedy development of a coherent
and widely accepted body of moral ideas which will be effective in deter-
mining international relations” (Dewey 1983a, 63–64).6
Thus, the movement to outlaw war, regardless of its political shortcom-
ings and charges of naiveté, clearly illustrated Dewey’s readiness to reinter-
pret his World War I distinction between force and violence; he finally
admitted that using military force as an instrument for peace was in reality
accepting the employment of violent means. His previous support for the
fulfillment of democratic idealism through the use of force no longer was
pragmatically justifiable. “In arguing for the removal of the sanction of law
from war”, one historian convincingly explains, “Dewey was now banning
war from the realm of efficient means to anything other than morally inde-
fensible ends. In terms of his earlier distinction between force and vio-
lence, war was now inevitably violence” (Westbrook 1991, 274).
The 1930s and Threat of Another World War

In the early 1930s, moreover, as president of the non-partisan action
group advocating a new party to challenge the traditional Democratic and
Republic parties, The People’s Lobby, Dewey continued supporting a
number of foreign policy initiatives such as an investigation of the muni-
tions industry, Philippine independence, postwar debt revision, recogni-
tion of Soviet Russia, and friendlier relations with Latin America; he also
Where the peace pact proved effective as an instrument of American diplomatic policy was
6
when the Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson protested Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria.
Its last application occurred at the Nuremberg war-guilt trials after World War II as a basis
for prosecution; all wars, preventive or defensive, just or unjust, were regarded as illegal only
if waged after the signing of the Pact of Paris. In the last case, a moral c ondemnation was
attached to the legal judgment rendered—a point Dewey all along had encouraged.
134 C.F. HOWLETT
kept up his previous criticisms of US policies in the Caribbean as imperial-

istic. Equally troubling was that military expenditures continued to rise
despite the economic emergency at home. In many of his presidential mis-
sives for The People’s Lobby Bulletin, he pointed out that the national bud-
get for the army and navy was greater than it had been during World War
I. The irony could not be ignored: at present, he observed, 80 percent of
the national budget was being allocated to pay for past and future wars to
the tune of several hundred million dollars a year, a sum larger than the
sum for a “war to end all wars”.
The mid-1930s, in particular, witnessed Dewey focusing his energies
on keeping America out of another world war. He took his cue from the
US Senate’s investigation of the World War I munitions industry led by
Gerald Nye. Although it was not proven that a conspiracy existed between
arms makers and the cause of the Great War, the atmosphere was so highly
charged and suspicions so widespread that the Nye Committee hearings
further reinforced the public’s opinion that war should be avoided at all
costs. In an early February 1935 article “International Cooperation or
International Chaos”, Dewey, capitalizing on this sentiment, pointed out
that “these merchants of death [munitions makers] are but symptoms of
the present disorder and anarchy in international relations.” Better trade
conditions, he mused, would be the only cure for such a disease:
We have heard much of late of the international munitions trade, and of the
fact that international organizations in the armament and munition indus-
tries supply, for a profit, even their potential enemies in war. While we blame
the munition-makers let us recall that these “merchants of death” are symp-
toms of the present disorder and anarchy in international relations. If we
really want to put an end to this one flourishing form of international trade
we must establish that cooperation among nations that will cut the ground
out from under their feet. As long as nations fear each other, and every
nation sees in other nations, and with good reason, danger of lowered stan-
dards of living in their home population, governments will have no difficulty
in persuading even an impoverished nation to buy the arms and munitions
by which the merchants of death wax fat and bloated. (Dewey 1935a, 6–7)
Dewey was convinced that the current economic disorder would inevi-
tably pave the way for a growing martial spirit which would, in a matter of
time, gradually take hold of the American mind. What was needed imme-
diately, he believed, was to establish an international conference to work
on the problems of free trade and world cooperation. The popular notion
that disarmament conferences are the answer, he opined, was unfortunate

since it has done very little to foster the genuine need for international
understanding; such conferences have merely provided a false sense of
security while still allowing traditional views of nationalism to persist. “It
is for us, the people, first to develop a genuine co-operative spirit and sense
of the mutual interests that bind the nations of the world together for weal
or woe-and at the present time so largely for woe,” he contended. “The
principle of good neighborliness is as fundamental in international matters
as in the village and city,” he went on to state. More importantly, though,
“The principle has now ceased by force of events to be simply an ethical
ideal. It has become an economic necessity. We shall refuse to live up to it
at our peril, the peril of depression, unemployment, degraded standard of
living, and of war that will kill millions more and destroy billions more of
property” (Dewey 1935a, 7–8).
Furthermore, in a book published in 1935, Liberalism and Social
Action, which was dedicated to the noted progressive social reformer Jane
Addams, Dewey made absolutely clear his position: “Modern warfare is
destructive beyond anything known in older times. This increased destruc-
tiveness is due primarily, of course, to the fact that science has raised to a
new pitch of destructive power all the agencies of armed hostility. But it is
also due to the much greater interdependence of all the elements of soci-
ety.” It was more than ever crucial to recognize that “The bonds that hold
modern communities and states together are as delicate as they are numer-
ous. The self-sufficiency and independence of a local community, charac-
teristic of more primitive societies, have disappeared in every highly
industrialized country.” Alarmingly, he continued, “The gulf that once
separated the civilian population from the military has virtually gone. War
involves paralysis of all normal social activities, and not merely the meeting
of armed forces in the field.” In alignment with his progressive idealism,
the key to peace, Dewey continued, was through cooperative social action,
both on a national and on an international scale: “Organized social
planning, put into effect for the creation of an order in which industry and
finance are socially directed in behalf of institutions that provide the mate-
rial basis for the cultural liberation and growth of individuals, is now the
sole actions by which liberalism can realize its professed aims” (Dewey
1935b, 54–55).
During this troubling period, he also made it clear that the role that
states have assumed in modern warfare “has led to the ‘increased demor-
alization’ of the institution of war and that voluntary associations ‘do
136 C.F. HOWLETT
not coincide with political boundaries,’ but are transnational” (Cochran

2012, 145). Giving more credibility to the term “internationalism”
from a pragmatic perspective, Dewey insisted that the sovereignty of the
state is not “indivisible or omnipotent” and that its highest priority
should be the welfare of its people in terms of social and economic jus-
tice. As Molly Cochran points out, Dewey now maintained that “the
sovereign state is not an end in itself, deserving of the moral rights con-
ferred on it by a now compromised juridical theory of the state”
(Cochran 2012, 145).
But perhaps more importantly, Dewey’s significance as a critic of
American foreign relations in the late 1930s stemmed from his warning
that American participation in another world war would virtually spell the
end of all hopes for a progressive regeneration of individual liberties free
from the restraining hand of governmental control. Fearful that a dictator-
ship could happen here in America, he told his fellow American citizens:
“It is quite conceivable that after the next war we should have in this
country a semi-military, semi-financial autocracy, which would fasten class
divisions on this country for untold years. In any case we should have the
suppression of all the democratic values for the sake of which we profess-
edly went to war” (John Dewey to James T. Farrell, October 1, 1939,
1996, electronic edition).
Conclusion
Eventually, the United States would be dragged into another world war.
This time, Dewey chose not to unite a romantic national idealism with a
realistic Progressivism as he had done in World War I. The lessons he
learned from that war would serve a more constructive purpose, which he
hoped could still be applied once the current conflict ended. Indeed,
between the world wars, Dewey called for a more civic engagement against
war, noting that democracy is a disposition that seeks to bridge differ-
ences, form common interests, reflect critically on beliefs and values, and
promote knowledge addressing the core challenges of a “global village”.
As a public intellectual, Dewey used his understanding of progressive
reform to separate himself from the application of disciplinary knowledge
and expertise and to insist, instead, that passive communities become part
of the public debate.
That was certainly the message he previously delivered in what many
consider his best interwar political commentary, The Public and Its
Problems. Trying to create the “great community”, he urged, was a prob-

lem because the public had not been able to establish its own identity as
“socially useful”. The public’s inability to transform existing political
structures for useful social purposes remained democracy’s greatest chal-
lenge in the face of war. Organized efforts outside the political main-
stream, in keeping with progressive ideals, were needed to secure world
peace. “One of the most regular activities of the politically organized com-
munity has been waging war” Dewey wrote. “Even the most bellicose of
militarists will hardly contend that all wars have been socially helpful,” he
continued, “or, deny that some have been so destructive of social values
that it would have been infinitely better if they had not been waged”. How
then would it be possible for the public to cure the problem of war? He
offered the following prescription: “We cannot expect the causes of a dis-
ease to combine effectually to cure the disease they create. The need is that
the non-political forces organize themselves to transform existing political
structures: that the divided and troubled publics integrate” (Dewey 1927,
14).
Clearly, after World War I, according to Cochran, Dewey’s political
writings and activism respecting foreign relations focused on three specific
things: (a) the “Old World” Westphalian system of sovereign states was
outmoded and incapable of generating harmony between states; (b) inter-
national cooperation toward the improved management of forces of inter-
dependence through the guiding principle of arbitration had been severely
destabilized by both the war system and “old diplomacy” of Europe; and,
most importantly, (c) international publics must be encouraged and rec-
ognized in order to work to control global events so that a more inclusive,
democratic world politics may finally come to life (Cochran 2010,
309–336). What Dewey so ardently attempted to accomplish after World
War I, Cochran has also pointed out, was to infuse his instrumentalist
theories and political commentaries with a moral outlook in order for
“trans-boundary voluntary associations…[to] unite as international pub-
lics [and] assist in shaping a more inclusive world politics, not leaving it to
states alone” (Cochran 2012, 145). It turned out to be a precursor to the
growing importance of non-governmental organizations for peace we see
in the world today.
Dewey’s progressive-minded contributions to postwar international
thought deserve serious consideration today; they contained elements of
liberal internationalist thinking in which the themes of progress, political
emancipation, grassroots participation, law as a moral instrument, and the
138 C.F. HOWLETT
promotion of human freedom were cast onto the global sphere. His
thoughts and actions were in line with the progressive peace ideology of
the interwar period, which “searched for alternative conceptions of power
that would allow the United States to achieve the foreign policy goals…
without transforming the nation into a militarized state that practiced the
traditional power politics of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe”
(Johnson 1995, 5).
Dewey’s own search for ideological definitions of power, suspicions of
the growth of a garrison state accompanying America’s rise to world
power, and the formal diplomatic practices of the time, one historian has
noted, were representative of the “Peace Progressivism [that] came into
existence as a self-conscious left-wing alternative to Wilson’s foreign pol-
icy agenda,” one advocating an “alternative to corporatism, combining
disarmament and anti-imperialism with elements of American moral, dip-
lomatic, and economic power” (Johnson 1995, 314; Ekirch 1956). And
as Cochran also observes regarding Dewey’s political journalism, “…
Dewey wrote on many themes important to liberal internationalists….
What unifies these writings is an underlying concern that the moral inclu-
sion of individuals be made effective in the relations between states, that a
new diplomacy should arise out the destruction of World War I…[giving]
recognition to the humanity of each individual and assist in the develop-
ment of human capacities, making manifest the idea of democracy in inter-
national affairs” (Cochran 2012, 141). Dewey, the public thinker and
progressive social democrat, recognized the importance of the individual’s
moral commitment to peace and attempted to apply it to the art of inter-
national diplomacy. The time had come to replace traditional political
demands for war with contemporary social needs for democratic
cooperation.
References
Bourne, Randolph. 1964. Twilight of Idols. In War and the Intellectuals, ed. Carl
Resek, 3–14. New York: Harper & Row.
Boydston, Jo Ann, ed. 1969–1991. The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1991. They are cata-
logued as The Early Works, The Middle Works, and The Latter Works.
Cochran, Molly. 2010. Dewey as an International Thinker. In The Cambridge
Companion to John Dewey, ed. Molloy Cochran, 309–336. Cambridge:
———. 2012. Pragmatism and International Relations: A Story of Closure and

Opening. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy IV:
138–158. Accessed January 23, 2014. Inx.journalofpragmatism.eu/wp-
content/uploads/2012/…/8-cochran.pdf
Curti, Merle. 1967. John Dewey and Nationalism. Orbis 10: 1103–1119.
De Conde, Alexander, ed. 1959. Isolation and Security. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
DeBenedetti, Charles. 1968. American Internationalism in the 1920’s: Shotwell
and the Outlawrists. PhD diss., University of Illinois.
———. 1978. Origins of the Modern American Peace Movement, 1915–1929.
Millwood, NY: KTO Press.
Dewey, John. 1915. German Philosophy and Politics. New York: G.P. Putnam &
Sons.
———. 1916. On Understanding the Mind of Germany. Atlantic Monthly 117:
257–262.
———. 1923. Outlawry of War: What It Is and Is Not. Chicago: American
Committee for the Outlawry of War.
———. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
———. 1929a. America and War. In Characters and Events: Popular Essays in
Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Joseph Ratner, vol. II, 561–565. New York:
Henry Holt & Co.
———. 1929b. Conscription of Thought. In Characters and Events: Popular
Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Joseph Ratner, vol. II, 566–570.
New York: Henry Holt & Co.
———. 1929c. America’s Responsibility. In Characters and Events: Popular Essays
in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Joseph Ratner, vol. II, 691–696.
———. 1929d. Conscience and Compulsion. In Characters and Events: Popular
———. 1929e. Elements of Social Reorganization. In Characters and Events:
Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Joseph Ratner, vol. II,
745–759. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
———. 1929f. Force and Ideals. In Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social
and Political Philosophy, ed. Joseph Ratner, vol. II, 629–635. New York: Henry
Holt & Co.
———. 1929g. Force, Violence and Law. In Characters and Events: Popular Essays
———. 1929h. The Social Possibilities of War. In Characters and Events: Popular
140 C.F. HOWLETT
———. 1929i. Our National Dilemma. In Characters and Events: Popular Essays
———. 1929j. As an Example to Other Nations. In Characters and Events:
———. 1929k. Outlawing Peace by Discussing War. In Characters and Events:
———. 1932. Peace by Pact or Covenant? New Republic 70: 145–147.
———. 1935a. International cooperation or International Chaos. People’s Lobby
Bulletin 4: 6–8.
———. 1935b. Liberalism and Social Action. New York: Capricorn Books.
———. 1983a. Ethics and Internatinal Relations. In The Middle Works, ed. Jo Ann
Boydston, vol. 15, 53–64. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
———. 1983b. “Shall the United States Join the World Court” Part II. In The
Middle Works, ed. Jo Ann Boydstoin, vol. 15, 87–104. Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, John, and James T. Shotwell. 1928. Divergent Paths to Peace. New
Republic 54: 194–196.
Dykhuizen, George. 1973. The Life and Mind of John Dewey. Carbondale, IL:
Ekirch, Arthur A., Jr. 1956. The Civilian and the Military. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Ellis, Ethan. 1961. Frank B. Kellogg and American Foreign Relations, 1925–1929.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Ferrell, Robert E. 1953. Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand
Pact. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hickman, Larry, ed. 1996. The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 and the
Correspondence of John Dewey, 1882–1953. Electronic ed. Charlottesville, VA:
Intelex Corp.
Howlett, Charles F., and Audrey Cohan. 2016. John Dewey, America’s Peace-
Minded Educator. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Johnson, Robert David. 1995. The Peace Progressives and American Foreign
Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Levinson, S.O. 1923. Papers, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago,
April 27.
Lippmann, Walter. 1923. Outlawry of War. Atlantic Monthly 132: 245–253.
Marchand, C. Roland. 1972. The American Peace Movement and Social Reform,
1898–1918. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Martin, Jay. 2002. The Education of John Dewey. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Mills, C. Wright. 1966. Sociology and Pragmatism. New York: Oxford University

Press.
Ratner, Joseph. 1939. Editor’s Note. In Intelligence in the Modern World, ed.
Joseph Ratner, 525–561. New York: Modern Library.
Rockefeller, Steven. 1991. John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Ryan, Alan. 1995. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism.
New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Shotwell, James T. 1925. The Problem of Security. Annals of the American
Academy of Political Science 120: 159–161.
———. 1926. What is Meant by Security and Disarmament. Annals of the
American Academy of Political Science 121: 6–8.
———. 1927. The Movement to Renounce War as a Diplomatic Weapon. Current
History 27: 62–64.
———. 1961. The Autobiography of James T. Shotwell. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill
Co.
Stoner, John E. 1943. S.O. Levinson and the Pact of Paris. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Westbrook, Robert. 1991. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
White, Morton. 1947. Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Charles F. Howlett is a Professor of Education Emeritus at Molloy College.

Among his books are Brookwood Labor College and the Struggle for Peace and Social
Justice in America (1993); A History of the American Peace Movement from
Colonial Times to the Present (with Robbie Lieberman, 2008); Books, Not Bombs:
Teaching Peace since the Dawn of the Republic (with Ian Harris, 2010); and John
Dewey, America’s Peace-Minded Educator (with Audrey Cohan, 2016). He edited
Antiwar Dissent and Peace Activism in World War 1 America (with Scott Bennett,
2014).
CHAPTER 7
The “Newer Ideals” of Jane Addams’s

Progressivism: A Realistic Utopia
of Cosmopolitan Justice
Molly Cochran
Jane Addams was born in 1860, to an affluent and political Illinois family1
and died in 1935, winning the Nobel Peace prize in 1931 for her social
reform work as co-founder of the Hull House Settlement in Chicago and
her leadership of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom
(WILPF). Recognizing her symbolic significance to Americans on matters
of social justice, the reform-minded Progressive Party asked Jane Addams
to second Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination for President in 1912. She,
like fellow American progressives—many of whom were children of the
American Civil War—experienced a turbulent era of rapid industrial
change, mass immigration, and the Great Depression as well as global
conflict. Her response was directed involvement and experimental activity
toward improving social, economic, and political conditions—making
better, the lot of ordinary people.
1
Her father, to whom Addams was devoted, was a founding member of the Illinois
Republican Party and an Illinois State Senator, who in that office supported the campaign of
his friend, Abraham Lincoln, to the US Senate.
M. Cochran (*)
Department of Social Science, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

144 M. COCHRAN
She was inspired by a combination of Christian humanism and the phi-

losophy of American pragmatism. The social message of Christianity was
Addams’s lifelong quest. Of Christianity, she writes, “[t]he doctrine must
be understood through the deed. It is the only possible way not only to
stir others into action but to give the message itself a sense of reality”
(1927, 1197). She lost her religious faith when her father died, but not
her spirituality or sense of calling to a social morality. Pragmatism is a prac-
tical philosophy with human problems at its center—it tests ideas in expe-
rience—and the “to and fro” between ideas and experimental social action
was a secular version of her Christianity. Pragmatist philosophy encour-
aged choice, responsibility, and intelligence to be applied in determining
means and ends where the human-felt need existed.
The disintegrative effects of World War I compelled progressives and
pragmatists to believe that the social requirements of their day had little
respect for sovereign boundaries. Thus, ways of adjustment would have to
be found not only in domestic laboratories, but in international ones as
well. Jane Addams was a progressive who was actively engaged in experi-
mentation at the international level, leading the WILPF—one of the first
non-governmental organizations set up in Geneva to hold to account that
new experiment in international organization: the League of Nations.
Addams’s pragmatism mirrored in general terms that of The New
Republic. First, there is the idea that social and political institutions play vital
roles in the development of human capacities, and that humane institutions
are ones that reflect democratic ideals, domestically and globally. She also
shared the belief that the destruction of World War I had brought a unique
moment of opportunity, in which the “old diplomacy” of the European
system could—through directed, cooperative activity—give way to a “new”
diplomacy built on alternative, democratic ideals. And both the editors of
The New Republic and Addams believed that American pragmatism was a
philosophy of democratic life to be applied to human dilemmas of the kind
that defined the Progressive era, the workability of which could only be
found in the application and testing of solutions proposed as problems arose.
These were common starting points, but Addams would direct her
efforts in more radical, democratic directions that were not always in sync
with mainline Progressivist thought, in particular, about US foreign policy.
Addams would not leave it to national states to build international social
institutions, as Croly and Lippmann would. She held that state-centered
thinking compromised important forms of human agency and interna-
tional social change. And while progressives believed that the experience of
THE “NEWER IDEALS” OF JANE ADDAMS’S PROGRESSIVISM: A REALISTIC... 145
World War I would impel the USA to draw upon American national ideals
in remaking the ways international politics would be managed and con-
trolled, Addams disagreed. The most useful aspect of the American experi-
ence was its internationalism, rather than its nationalism, on which to
model a new mode of diplomacy; that is, the immigrant experience, immi-
grant communities, and their integration into American society, which laid
out what an engaging community with all its diversity, demands of a citi-
zenry morally. Finally, Addams held that, what American pragmatism
intended by democracy as a way of life was not in accord with either US
imperialism or its entry into World War I. Whereas Croly would argue that
imperialism was an important phase in the unfolding of America’s poten-
tial as a nation, and Lippmann would offer a geostrategic logic for US
entry into World War I to protect the USA, UK, and France from the
dangers of a German controlled Atlantic, Addams saw these as unworkable
attitudes and institutions, ill-equipped to deliver democratic ends.
This chapter will illuminate Addams’s distinctive progressivism and
pragmatism. It will reveal Addams to be unique among the progressive
thinkers in shaping its humanism into a working cosmopolitan ethos that
met human ills through an “on-the-ground” international activism
across a wide-range of domestic and international social reform issues.
Addams chose to steer “new diplomacy” toward concern for human
social relations rather than the foreign relations of states. In an age of
thought and action for radical social justice at home, Addams outlined a
realistic utopia of cosmopolitan justice, rooted in actually existing inter-
national social relations. However, this nascent internationalism needed
nurturing. Addams would leave it to neither philosophical reasoning,
nor interest-based reasoning anchored in some proposed sense of inter-
national interdependence, to do that work. Primarily, it required motiva-
tion. It needed relational work which focused on sources of
motivation—primitive, emotional, and sentimental—to inspire compas-
sion for distant others and see them as worthy subjects of social justice.2
It is Addams’s take on pragmatist method—inseparable from her lived
2
A recent edited volume by Susan Dieleman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil,
Pragmatism and Justice (2017, 6) addresses the “conspicuous silence” in Pragmatism on
the idea of justice. The editors are convincing on the why of it, writing that its focus on
the concrete over the abstract, its distaste for a priori theorizing, and its “deep and persis-
tent pluralism, both in respect to what justice is and requires, and in respect to how
real-world injustices are best recognized and remedied” all contribute. However, justice
remains a prominent feature of Addams’s thought and activism despite its failure to reso-
nate with what one finds on the concept in the twentieth century literature that John
146 M. COCHRAN
experience as a woman, activist, social worker, sociologist, and philoso-

pher, that set her Pragmatism apart.
Unlike many of her “fellow” pragmatists and progressives, Addams was
part of a generation of white, upper-middle-class women with a new, privi-
leged access to higher education,3 who wished to put that education to
wider social use beyond the household. However, this cadre of women had
to carve out public space and craft their own roles to do so. It took Addams
some time, amidst illness4 and depression in her early life, to find her way
into the Settlement movement. In becoming a national political figure and
one with international stature, she did so not through political election,
occupying a University Chair, or serving as a member of Wilson’s “Inquiry”
or FDR’s “Brain Trust”, but through a lifetime’s work as an advocate of
grassroots democracy and social justice. In the sections that follow, discus-
sion of Addams’s distinctive pragmatist internationalism will include an
account of the historical context of the Progressive era and Addams’s experi-
ence of it, her part in the American Settlement movement, what she took
from American pragmatism especially from her friend John Dewey,5 and
where she herself took it—to a democratic social ethics for which there was
no alternative but its expression at the international level.
Addams, Pragmatist Method and the Settlement

Movement
Pragmatists were especially thoughtful about what critical inquiry requires
in the way of method. As conceived by Dewey and best articulated in his
1908 article, “What Pragmatism Means by the Practical”, Dewey’s idea of
pragmatist method was a generalized scientific method which rejects dog-
Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971) spawned. This chapter will illuminate justice consider-
ations at the center of her radical social ethics.
3
In accordance with her father’s wishes, Addams attended Rockford Seminary, a school
that trained girls for teaching and missionary work. It had been her aim to attend Smith
College and earn a BA. However, a year after her graduation from the Seminary she returned
to be one of the first of its students confirmed with a BA after it became Rockford College.
4
Her lifelong health problems began when she contracted tuberculosis of the spine as a
child, leaving her spine curved and partly rigid (Knight 2005, 36).
5
Dewey named his daughter Jane after Jane Addams and dedicated his 1935 book
Liberalism and Social Action to Addams’s memory. When Dewey’s young son Gordon died
overseas, Addams held a memorial service at Hull House; her eulogy for Gordon is printed
in The Excellent Becomes the Permanent (Addams 1932).
matisms of all kinds, so that inquiry into human problems can be generally
open. What counts as a good idea cannot be determined in advance or
stipulated as a rule or abstract principle. Instead, it is discovered in an
experimental process of social interaction and inquiry which ebbs and
flows and has no natural end, reflecting the contingent nature of truth.
Nonetheless, it will have this essence: an attitude of commitment to
engage one another in solving shared indeterminacies, and inclusively so
amidst all those affected—no matter differences in race, ethnicity, class,
and gender. For Dewey, problem-solving is best done in publics (Dewey
1927), which cohere through the knowledge that individuals are “in it
together”, so to speak; the more inquirers investigating doubts in relation
to shared indeterminacies, bringing their particular experience and knowl-
edge to it, the better for critical inquiry. In other words, pragmatism is
oriented to treating individuals equally as subjects of justice, for both
democratic and epistemic reasons. Addams found value in the link between
democratic virtues and epistemic virtues in pragmatist method.
However, it was Addams’s experience as a woman, and the fact that she
was as much an activist across a range of social issues as she was a thinker, that
generated her contribution to pragmatist method.6 Her method was forged in
the Settlement movement that had its start as a Christian social reform move-
ment in England. Addams found inspiration there when she visited Toynbee
Hall in London’s East end in 1888. The settlement house was something
apart from other charitable organizations working to extend resources to the
poor; instead of charity, college-educated middle- and upper-middle-class
young men7 lived among the poor, engaging them in a range of educational
and cultural pursuits to address the whole person and not just his or her mate-
rial requirements. When Jane Addams took the Settlement idea home to
America and co-founded Hull House with Ellen Gates Star, less than two
years later, it would be staffed by college-educated women rather than men,
with privileges and outlooks—religious and humanist—that generated in
them a sense of social responsibility. Addams’s take on the Settlement house
was less about charitable “improvement” as such. Her unique impact within
the Settlement movement was to conceive of Hull House as an experimental
6
The significance of Jane Addams for her contributions to the intellectual tradition of
American pragmatism has received considerable attention in recent decades. See Deegan
(1988), Mahowald (1997), McKenna (2001), Seigfried (1991, 1996, 1999), and Sarvasy
(2010).
7
These were Oxford and Cambridge graduates typically, since Settlement houses in
England were sponsored by these Universities.
148 M. COCHRAN
site for multicultural exchange that could potentially uplift all through the
sympathetic knowledge imparted by their mutual interaction, feeding demo-
cratic life.
Thus, Addams’s take on pragmatist method was feminist and relational
(Seigfried 1999, Sarvasy 2010), and it was socially radical (Lynd 1961,
Deegan 1988, Hamington 2004). In the context of the Progressive era,
Addams lived the method in Hull House and in the immigrant neighbor-
hoods of the 19th Ward of Chicago,8 inquiring into not only political,
rights-based disparities, but economic, social, and cultural barriers that
impeded effective democratic participation for African-Americans, immi-
grants, women, and the working poor generally. Her concerns with inclu-
sion and exclusion, entitlements, and the cultural and material wherewithal
for democratic participation are justice concerns, and radical for their criti-
cal epistemic and emancipatory social content. Her practical judgments in
relation to this experience led her to the belief that real and wide social
inclusion was necessary for intelligent social inquiry. Dewey would have
agreed, but Addams went further to argue that what generates the requi-
site democratic social ethics—and here she had something to teach
Dewey—was plural and diverse human interaction and the reconstruction
it affects upon our sympathies and attitudes. For Addams, it is through
seeking diverse relational experience in day-to-day living that democracy
better equips itself for adjustment in the face of rapid societal change.
Indeed, Dewey would credit Addams with bringing to pragmatism the
idea of democracy as “a way of life”.9
8
Addams writes that between Halsted Street, where Hull House was located, and the river
“live about ten thousand Italians: Neapolitans, Sicilians, and Calabrians, with an occasional
Lombard or Venetian. To the south on Twelfth Street are many Germans, and side streets are
given over almost entirely to Polish and Russian Jews. Further south, these Jewish colonies
merge into a huge Bohemian colony, so vast that Chicago ranks as the third Bohemian city
in the world. To the northwest are many Canadian-French, clannish in spite of their long
residence in America, and to the north are many Irish and first generation Americans” (1892,
226–7).
9
In his 1902–03 “Lectures on the Sociology of Ethics”, Dewey recommends reading
Addams’s Democracy and Social Ethics for its presentation of “a series of concrete social-
ethical problems, in a very concrete way, and at the same time in a way that presupposes
general principles” (Lecture 9, October 16, 1902, 2303). In Lecture 22, Dewey returns to
the point, saying, “the most original and powerful part of this book is the clear statement, -
which I cannot recall as ever having been stated before so definitely, - that democracy means
certain types of experience, - an interest in experience in its various forms and types…You set out
with an interest in life,—in experience; in life because it is the experience of people. Hence the
The Need for a Democratic Social Ethics

From the mid-1880s, a new social radicalism began to develop rapidly in
response to the ravages of industrialism. A sense of malaise in relation to
society’s organization, feelings about the “perplexities” —as Addams
would say—of contemporary American life and disconnection with the
social order, were challenging individuals to explore what their consciences
and their conduct demanded in relation to conditions of extreme poverty,
poor working conditions, dispiriting work, class division, dislocation,
crime and delinquency. In this, Addams identified an emergent humani-
tarianism. She described a growing concern for human welfare, manifested
around her, that sought to overcome feelings of maladjustment through
meeting others anew in shared activity toward growth and reciprocal rec-
ognition, magnifying “the obligation inherent in human relationships as
such” (Addams 1935, 55).
Addams’s responses were in part cultural and generational. Her own
experience of ennui, evidenced in her autobiographical writing, was one
she read across the newly educated upper-middle-class women of her gen-
eration, women who had degrees but severely restricted access to profes-
sions. Despite attaining further education there was little or no expectation
of women’s roles changing. These women were expected to return to
conventional roles, happy for their intellectual interests to be met and
whatever refinement they might obtain in the domestic sphere. As Addams
wrote, it has “all the elements of a tragedy” (1893, 14). Women were feel-
ing acute, conflicting demands between the old family/domestic claims
and new social/civic claims. Thus, the Settlement movement was a vital
outlet in which these women who were feeling a social call could answer it
in something akin to a domestic setting, capable of mediating old cultural
demands and new forms of individual self-actualization.
Another cultural and generational divide she witnessed in her work at
Hull House and would write about was that between first- and second-
generation immigrants. “We were often distressed by the children of
immigrant parents who were ashamed of the pit whence they were digged,
demand for becoming acquainted,—for making that a part of your experience” (emphasis
added; November 18, 1902, 2379–80). Dewey was well acquainted with democracy as “a
way of life” lived in Hull House, serving on its board and providing lectures there. He wrote
to Addams of his first visit in 1892, “[m]y indebtedness to you for giving me insight into
matters there is great…Every day I stayed there only added to my conviction that you had
taken the right way” (quoted in Davis 1973, 96–7).
150 M. COCHRAN
who repudiated the language and customs of their elders and counted
themselves successful as they were able to ignore the past” (Addams 1923,
37). Here too Addams worked to make Hull House a site for mediation
of this divide. She writes of “an overmastering desire to reveal the humbler
immigrant parents to their own children”, leading to the creation of the
Hull House Labor Museum with Saturday evening exhibits of varieties of
spinning performed by immigrant women and lectures on industrial his-
tory (Addams 1923, 235). The aim was to foster a “sense of relation” and
meaning between the generations through revealing the connection of
traditional crafts with industry of the day. “Could we not interest the
young people working in the neighboring factories, in these older forms
of industry, so that, through their own parents and grandparents, they
would find a dramatic representation of the inherited resources of their
daily occupation” and perhaps, “a foundation for reverence of the past”.10
The general social unease of this era was being shaped not only by cul-
tural and generational change, but also by profound social and economic
changes connected with industrialism: extreme poverty, poor working
conditions, few workers’ rights, uninteresting and dispiriting work, a rise
in consciousness of class divisions, and dislocation, crime and delinquency
connected with urban life in industrial cities. According to Lewis Feuer,
radical intellectuals in America were “discovering sociological determin-
ism, the operation of impersonal historical forces … finding that poverty
had social causes” linked to the social environment and the economic sys-
tem (Feuer 1959, 547). Daniel Levine writes that a new outlook on pov-
erty was emerging in the early twentieth century, which linked it not to
differences between individuals but to an “evil economic system or an evil
social system”, and that not just “the dying needed help, but also those on
the edges of impoverishment” (Levine 1964, 11). Accompanying this out-
look was the idea that there was new scope for human action.
Hull House was, for all intents and purposes, a cooperative of women
sociologists led by Addams, who sought knowledge of, and assisted exper-
imental activity in, the ways of democratic life as they understood it; that
is, as having ethical and radical social intent. As Staughton Lynd writes,
they sought to prove “the scope and exact proportions of their society’s
sickness” (1961, 57). They gathered statistics, investigated factories, con-
10
It is perhaps interesting to note that another interest of Addams’s in relating the story of
this activity is to share, “[t]here has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has
revealed the charm of woman’s primitive activities” (Addams 1923, 243).
ducted health examinations, examined sanitary conditions, lobbied for

legislative and political reform, and social betterment. In 1895, the resi-
dents of Hull House published Hull House Maps and Papers, which Mary
Jo Deegan describes as a “sociological masterpiece”, and which had a
great influence on the Chicago School of sociology that would make ethi-
cal thought central to the discipline in this era (Deegan 1988, 11 and 55).
Addams combined the activity of scientific observation of the communi-
ties of the 19th Ward of Chicago with social, cultural, economic, and
political activism and a “back to the people” ethic11 that sought to apply
democratic principles to all areas of life with a view to building a more just
society. Her passion was what she read as “the social passion of the age…
that nothing will satisfy the aroused conscience of men short of the com-
plete participation of the working classes in the spiritual, intellectual and
material of the human race” (Addams 1912, 136).
For Addams, the integration of immigrant communities, the working
poor, black Americans, and women in all aspects of social life was critical
to meeting the malaise.12 This belief was rooted in her philosophical
anthropology. She understood human nature in evolutionary terms.13
Addams saw the person as a growing organism, organically linked through
an ancient race life of instincts that have evolved over time and acted as
primordial motivations within us (Addams 1893, 10).14 At base, she
thought humans to be “pliable”, capable of adaptation, and inherently
social, with a will to help others. It can be found in the ancient traces on
all of us, what Addams speaks of as the “starvation struggle”, which call
out in us “great opportunities of helpfulness” and use of a fuller range of
11
Addams writes that this idea was associated with the original Settlement movement in
England where inspiration for Hull House was found (1923, 38).
12
Addams was a co-founder with Chrystal Eastman of the American Civil Liberties Union
and a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
13
Dewey and Addams both accepted Darwinism and were influenced by his theory of
evolution. Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist and follower of Darwin who saw in evolution
cooperation as well as struggle, spent time at Hull House in 1901.
14
This was a view consistent with the evolutionary anthropology of her day. More on the
imprint of ancient race memory can be found in her book, The Long Road of Women’s Memory
(Addams 1916). Marilyn Fischer (2004, 87) notes in her review of the 2002 edition with
introduction by Charlene Haddock Seigfried that mention is made in a Los Angeles Times
review of The Long Road of a blurb on its slipcover saying, “[t]he underlying purpose of the
book is to show wherein modern civilization goes back to old tribal customs, to explain, in
other words, the scientific theory of race memory”. Fischer critiques Seigfried for not provid-
ing in her introduction, context for this science known at the time of publication, which is
not as recoverable today for the contemporary reader.
152 M. COCHRAN
human faculties (Addams 1893, 10–11). Thus, it is within the capacity of

society to adapt to change and shape human activity in a direction that
cooperative, creative intelligence chooses.
To release this potentiality, broad recognition of the problem was
needed. As she wrote, “[t]o attain individual morality in an age demand-
ing social morality, to pride one’s self on the results of personal effort
when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend
the situation” (Addams 1907, 2–3). Addams was clear that social moral-
ity emerges from the enlargement experienced by individuals engaged in
a relational practice, and in particular, one that was inclusive and
embraced community in all its diversity. To be “in contact with the moral
experiences of the many” is how one comes to “an adequate social
motive” (1907, 5). For Addams, it was the marginalized—at the bottom
of society—directly experiencing the defects of contemporary social,
political, and economic arrangements from whom we had the most to
learn. Indeed, she claimed that it was an ethical responsibility upon us all
to seek diverse social relationships, and that collaborative efforts were
enriched to the extent we do so. How these interactions were performed
was also important; that is, they should be engaged with humility and a
will to build trust and mutuality, as opposed to charity. Charity, for
Addams, could be overlaid with formations of class, ethnicity, race, and
cultural inequalities and thus, mistrust. Hull House, Addams writes,
“was opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other
is reciprocal” (1892, 226).
As always, Addams began from her own experience, and the clearest
statement of her “genuine emotion” for turning these convictions into
motive can be found in the essay, “The Subjective Necessity of Social
Settlements”. There she writes that three subjective aims motivated her
work at Hull House, and arguably many of those working within the
Settlement movement15: “first the desire to interpret democracy in social
terms” (1893, 21–2). For Addams, democracy of the time was partial, left
only to “political expression” in the ideas of franchise and political equality
15
The essay is based on a lecture Addams gave at a summer school in Plymouth
Massachusetts with those involved in the early days of the American Settlement movement
(Addams 1923, 113). The essay was originally published in Philanthropy and Social Progress,
but much of it is reproduced as Chapter VI of Twenty Years at Hull House she says, because
it was “impossible to formulate with the same freshness those early motives and strivings, and
… it was received by the Settlement people themselves as a satisfactory statement. Here I will
refer to the original published essay” (Addams 1893).
which failed to secure the good of all. “We are forced to acknowledge that
it is only in our local and national politics that we try very hard for the
ideal [of democracy]…We have almost given it up as our ideal in social
intercourse” (1893, 3), where Addams believed it was sorely needed. The
second was Addams’s invocation of the “primordial” motives within us to
assist in the development of our race life; that is, how “[o]ur very organ-
ism holds memories and glimpses of that long life of our ancestors which
still goes on among so many of our contemporaries” (1893, 12), the will
to helpfulness, to act, especially among the youth who are as “yet so undi-
rected” and to her mind was “as pitiful as the other great mass of destitute
lives”; indeed, “[o]ne is supplementary to the other” (1893, 16). Thirdly,
she sees evident “a certain renaissance of Christianity” (1893, 2), a move-
ment resembling Christianity’s early humanitarianism which over the ages
saw that fellowship with others in social relationships had fostered “a deep
enthusiasm for humanity” and in sharing “the common lot that they
might receive the constant revelation” (1893, 18). Writing in a more con-
temporary idiom, Addams says this humanism takes on “simple and natu-
ral expression in the social organism itself” (1893, 19). The Settlement
movement was evidence of a growing humanitarianism for Addams and
arguably, Hull House was a manifestation of realistic utopia as she envi-
sioned it.16
This essay of 1893 anticipates the global turn her thought and action
would take: the exploration of what could generate the dynamic demo-
cratic social ethics needed at this level of interaction too. There she writes
that “the good we secure for ourselves is … floating in mid-air; until it is
secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life” (1893, 7).
With America’s entry into the club of imperial powers and World War I,
social conditions had shifted in another set of troubling directions that
produced in her a will to cultivate a democratic attitude for living globally.
However, our social relatedness in this arena required illumination, and
again she turned her attention to the motivations that might generate a
global ethics of this kind.
16
Drawing upon McKenna (2001, 86), Hamington (2007, 173) identifies Hull House as
a feminist, process utopia. A process utopia is context in which a series of realistic goals are
set out in a manner such that once fulfilled, possibility for the next among the “ends-in view”
to be achieved is enhanced (McKenna 2001, 86).
154 M. COCHRAN
The Need for a Global Democratic Social Ethics

In 1915, Addams traveled to The Hague to serve as chair of an International
Congress of Women to discuss the war in Europe and possible responses
to it. Hosted by the Dutch pacifist and feminist, Dr. Aletta Jacobs, over
one thousand women from neutral and belligerent nations participated,
many of whom—including Addams—were active in the international suf-
frage movement. All attended with the understanding that their cause had
run headlong into global forces beyond their control. The subjective
necessities of their cause meant taking on another—that of peace. It was
decided at The Hague that a permanent international conference was
needed; and the International Committee of Women for a Permanent
Peace (ICWPP) was formed with Addams as International Chairman.
Later, when the ICWPP became the WILPF in 1919, Addams was selected
to be its International President. In that role, she presided over its
International Congresses—where WILPF resolutions were passed, setting
its aims and agendas of advocacy—until its 1929 Prague conference at
which she was given the honorary title of “President for Life”.
As with Hull House and its work, WILPF arose from a collective sense
that inquiry and action on the part of women into the indiscriminate and
harmful effects of social change was needed—in this case, its transnational
effects. WILPF acted to influence the regulation or control of these effects
along lines similar to those set out by Addams domestically—that is
according to global, democratic social ethics. As early as the 1915, Hague
Congress (before WILPF was formed)—a conception of peace as justice
was articulated in its resolutions, but not solely in terms of the political
rights of states to sovereignty, territorial integrity, and self-determination.
Again, it was a radical, social conception of justice working for an authen-
tic progress toward individual autonomy in its political, economic, social,
and cultural dimensions. The imprint of Addams’s pragmatic feminism
can be found in five core, related beliefs expressed in the resolutions of its
International Congresses passed during the years of her leadership: (1)
that conflict cannot be resolved by force; (2) that the means employed to
achieve ends matter; (3) that the most appropriate means to ensure lasting
peace are efforts to realize the democratic autonomy of individuals in both
national and international politics; (4) that women have an entitlement
and a responsibility to enter into and make their views authoritative in
domestic and international political spheres; and (5) the idea of “unity in
diversity”.
WILPF’s work was as relational as Hull House had been. WILPF said
to its membership in 1919, the “importance of a movement like ours is
measured, not by numbers but by moral power and the genuine devotion
of each individual member…. New courage and growing confidence in
and affection for one another are our best assets.”17 That relational work
was conducted over many thousands of miles, with none of the advantages
of social media today. There was interaction within separate national orga-
nizations of WILPF and between national organizations, which were
orchestrated through the National and International Executives. In addi-
tion to cherished time together at bi-annual (or at times tri-annual)
International Congresses—were speaking tours among members—news-
letters linking national sections and educational programs like the WILPF
summer schools. And WILPF too had a house, La Maison Internationale;
its International Headquarters at 6, rue du Vieux College in Geneva, from
which the International Secretary worked in coordinating its lobbying of
the League of Nations, and hosted lectures and events. WILPF members
were always welcome to visit and take rooms when available.
Jane Addams was central to the sense of community WILPF achieved,
and her leadership style infused the organization with her pragmatic
method. Under Addams’s leadership, the first Congress at The Hague put
into effect deliberative and democratic methods of procedure that opera-
tionalized values of inclusivity, openness to difference, critical debate, and
an experimental attitude.18 Resolutions issued at their Congresses and
International Executive meetings were not only deliberatively and consen-
sually arrived at, but they were, in the minds of these women, their best
efforts at knowledge creation in relation to effective solutions to real prob-
lems. They offered themselves as a knowledge community, expert in the
sensibilities that can be derived from women’s experience as mothers,
nurses, social workers, and teachers whose experiences were underex-
plored and who were unrepresented in the international political dis-
courses of the day. The WILPF was an international testing ground for the
pragmatist notion of “pooled intelligence”.19
17
WILPF News-sheet 1, May 26, 1919. Swarthmore College Peace Collection Microfilm
Reel 102:128.
18
Anne Marie Pois (1988) provides a compelling account of the democratic organizational
process exhibited in US WILPF during these years with insights into the workings of its
International Executive as well.
19
As Dewey (1937, 220) wrote of it, “what we call intelligence be distributed in unequal
amounts, it is the democratic faith that it is sufficiently general so that each individual has
156 M. COCHRAN
In addition to their existence as a knowledge community, they con-

ceived of themselves as a moral community—upholding principles of the
inviolability of life; political, social, cultural, and economic human rights
regardless of sex, race, or class; with an orientation to publicness—aiming
to model new forms of international organization along the lines of such
principles. The moral community such interactions generated20 was also a
source of internal strength, especially when the organization met the chal-
lenges of the 1930s, which forced them to grapple with pronounced dif-
ferences between national sections in approach to questions concerning
the levels of “force” their pacifism could embrace, and their relationship to
revolutionary movements in Europe. But no issue of controversy over-
threw the WILPF itself; it cohered as a community, and even though it
ceased its work with the start of World War II, it resumed when the war
concluded.
There were four other major international women’s organizations at the
time, lobbying the League of Nations (See Rupp 1997). However, WILPF
was unique among them for the wide-ranging nature of issues with which it
engaged. This was the nature of Addams’s leadership of WILPF. Her glo-
balized democratic social ethics, shared by like-minded progressive, interna-
tionalist women informed WILPFs conception of peace as justice and its
program of advocacy. Accordingly, action taken by WILPF based on these
principles over the interwar years spanned in wide-ranging directions, since
there was little that their idea of justice did not touch upon.21
On the way to the 1919 Zurich Congress, Addams was handed an
advance copy of the latest proposal for a Covenant of the League of
Nations.22 Despite concerns that the League in many ways reflected the
something to contribute whose value can be assessed only as it enters into the final pooled
intelligence constituted by the contributions of all”.
20
WILPF would grow to 33 countries with national sections. From its early history,
WILPF strived for diversity; however, it was not successful in altering the overwhelming
majority of its white, well-off, and well-educated American and European membership.
21
For example, Emily Balch, International Secretary of WILPF, wrote to President
Franklin D. Roosevelt on 15 November 1934 urging him to use the power of his office to
end lynching in America (Balch to Roosevelt 1934). This was a matter of the peace work of
the WILPF, because as Balch argues in the letter, “every example of lawlessness and violence
in one country reacts in every other” and closes by saying that the Nazis justified their per-
secution of the Jews with reference to the treatment of Negros in America.
22
According to Emily Balch, WILPF was the first international body to issue “considered
criticism” of the Covenant of the League of Nations and condemnation of the Peace Pact
(Balch 1938, 9–10). Their critique is reported in the New York Times, 15 and 16 May 1919.
political terms of the Allied victors, WILPF decided at the Zurich Congress
to work with the new organization. The League was an important resource
for them, since the League employed a rhetoric of democracy consistent
with the liberal internationalism born of the Progressive era, and was, like
the WILPF’s, expansive. The rights of small nations and minorities gained
new acceptance through the League, but also the social and economic
needs of individuals were to be part of its purview. The League’s Social
Section addressed issues such as fair labor standards, the control of disease,
and action in relation to the traffic in women, children, and drugs. WILPF
attached itself to the League offices, catching League officials in corridors
if not in meeting rooms, pressing its views.
WILPF began with food politics, taking up concerns related to food
shortages and relief work. They enjoyed early success in helping to per-
suade the League to take on humanitarian relief work in the case of thou-
sands of Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek women and children who were
being held captive in conditions of slavery and forced prostitution in
Turkey. WILPF also engaged in political democratic reform work, urging
that the League make the Covenant more easily amendable, advocating
German membership, lobbying for the direct representation of peoples,
and keeping channels of communication open with voluntary or non-
governmental organizations. It pressed the League to make good on its
claim to be representative of women, and to protect minorities and native
peoples within its Mandates system. With other international women’s
organizations, it urged that a place on the Mandates Commission be per-
manently reserved for a woman. The first, and only, two women to serve
were WILPF members.
Addams’s approach to the WILPF reflected the three subjective neces-
sities of the Settlement movement, and mirrored the activity at Hull
House. First, Addams insisted that democracy should be interpreted in
social terms for the global realm. This was reflected in her insistence that
the human factor must be brought into the foreground of the relations
between states and any new forms of international organization. Whether
a dynamic social democracy of the nation or for the world, the basic idea
was the same for Addams: an attitude of respect for all persons was
required, motivated through the relations of global neighbors engaged in
the daily practices of life-sustaining activities. Diplomacy that made indi-
viduals and not only states—subjects of justice—and a justice that was
conceived not only in political terms but in its economic, social, and cul-
tural aspects was also a requirement. For Addams, states placed limits on
158 M. COCHRAN
relational activity, obscuring an emergent transnational interest; thus the

potential reach of a global social ethics. A focus on relations that were
inter-societal began by putting the daily needs of existence at the center of
a more expansive welfare community. In “helping relations” the seeds of a
new international order built on cosmopolitan justice could find
foundations.
Secondly, one finds in Addams’s international writing, the theme of
primal instincts as both a motivational source and a relational epistemol-
ogy for building this kind of international society. Accessing the sympa-
thies inherent in these instincts requires imagination, for which Addams
turned in “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements” to Romantic
poetry and mythical figures.23 Wordsworth’s poem, “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality” and the idea he expresses that “[o]ur birth is but a sleeping
and forgetting” is with her as she works to remind us of our longings for
social relations and to assist where we can transnationally.24 The starvation
struggle is, as she writes, “the physical complement of the ‘Intimations of
Immortality’ on which no ode yet has been written”.25 Addams invoked
the myths of feminine spirits such as the Corn Spirit and the Rice Mother
to bring women back to the race memory of their primitive bread labor
(1922, 77–8). Her pragmatic method incorporated aesthetic and rhetori-
cal tools for motivating sentiment and imagination to work at a scale that
could build caring relationships with global reach, lending women’s help-
ing relations a “poetry and significance”.26
23
Addams (1893), 8, writes that literature in general has an important role in motivating
a “desire to know all kinds of life” and fuels belief in the idea that knowing its diversity leads
to “better social adjustment – for the remedying of social ills”.
24
Addams’s book, Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922) is where her international food
politics and idea of peace as global democratic social justice is told through both the ancient
starvation struggle and her work with WILPF during the war and immediate period after.
25
Addams (1893), 11.
26
Addams (1922), 77. Addams’s wish to give “poetry and significance” to this form of
women’s helping does not presume an essentialist relationship between women and nutri-
tion, but more. One intended to lend a general symbolic significance to the experience of
women’s caring in all forms, and to inspire women to find roles for themselves in a global
public sphere. Addams has been charged with gender essentialism in writing of women’s
nurturing roles and peace; however, this does not take sufficient account of the role of expe-
rience in her pragmatism and its method. See MacMullan’s (2001, 95–102) response to this
critique, arguing that she appeals to women to oppose war because women have wider famil-
iarity with the costs of war due to their larger part in raising and caring for those who would
be killed or broken by its effects, and because men, in their experience, have less cultural
scope to oppose it.
For Addams, the moment was ripe for investing women’s experience
and primal sympathies with epistemic authority. War “had forced the
nations to consider together the primitive questions of famine and pesti-
lence” (Addams 1922, 85), enabling new ethical possibilities. The practi-
cal work of women managing global food needs, cross-border health
issues, and the suffering of refugees—as happened in the war years and
immediately after, would make contributions to internationalism like
those she attributed to the networks of immigrants she lived and worked
with at Hull House, which were “interlacing nation to nation with a thou-
sand kindly deeds” (Addams 1916, 132). Thus, Addams transformed the
starvation struggle into a global politics in which she encouraged women
to seek out new inter-societal outlets for fulfilling this age-old
responsibility.
Finally, this new global social ethic was grounded in humanitarian sen-
timent, into which Addams channeled much democratic hope.27 It was a
cosmopolitanism ethos that understood all human beings as linked in
community—regardless of nation, race, religion, or sex—and deserving of
equal moral respect. Judith Green argues that Addams’s “renascent
Christianity” impelled her “expansive social interpretation of the demo-
cratic ideal” (2010, 229). However, this cosmopolitan outlook was, as
Wendy Sarvasy (2010, 297) points out, also part of what Addams believed
to be the college-educated woman’s inheritance—to become, in Addams
words, “a citizen of the world”, taking on the responsibility of “the human
claim” (Addams 1898, 4). Allen F. Davis (1973, 52) argues that Addams’s
decision to start a Settlement house and to live among the working poor
was “essentially a religious act”, despite never resolving her religious
doubts. I believe this holds for her international involvements through
WILPF too. As much might be read from her tombstone which bears the
words: “Jane Addams of Hull House and the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom”. The work of WILPF in Geneva was a
27
I use the words “democratic hope” intentionally to signpost a title by one of the most
important “new” pragmatists, Richard Rorty (2005), who turned to the international—
invoking sentiment and its uses in cultivating a global “human rights culture” (Rorty 1993).
Like Addams, he is looking forward, positing an idea of social justice contingently held, and
sources for affecting understanding in relation to it. There are good reasons to think about
the parallels between the democratic social ethics of Addams’s pragmatism and Rorty’s own,
both locally and globally, and their radical, critical intentions. Rorty credits Dewey’s influ-
ence on his thought, but he forgets Addams’s influence on Dewey. For a comparison of
Addams and Rorty on “ameliorating injustice”, see Voparil (2017).
160 M. COCHRAN
future-oriented experiment, putting in process through trial and error a

remaking of inter-societal interaction guided by cosmopolitan or humani-
tarian intent. Just as the Settlement movement was an example of a revived
Christian humanism on the national scale for Addams, so too was the
potentiality inherent in the League of Nations and the work of organiza-
tions such as WILPF.
Addams’s Newer Ideal for Peace: Cosmopolitan

Justice
Both Addams and Dewey conceived of realistic utopias for an interna-
tional realm with democratic intent. However, when it came to practical
judgment about what democracy as a way of life required at the interna-
tional level, they disagreed on arguably the most significant matter of their
day: the US decision to enter World War I. For Dewey, US participation
was needed to defeat Germany and move on to the important business of
public control of transnational interests and world organization; war was a
necessary means to international democratic ends. Jane Addams, in the
face of harsh public criticism from the public as well as from fellow
progressives, maintained a pacifist stance; democracy as a way of life could
not be realized through such means.28
Disagreements such as theirs are part and parcel of what pragmatic
method generates on the way to realistic utopia. The endpoint cannot be
fixed any more than human nature can be. Practical judgment in relation to
an ideal has no decision rules beyond what epistemic openness requires for
good problem-solving. Testing democracy as a way of life and what it yields
as a guide for international interaction can only be confirmed or denied in
practice, and the interpretation of outcomes can vary with experience.
Pragmatism’s epistemic openness is confirmed in the separate judgments
each took at the fork in the road that was US entry into World War I.
Neither Addams nor Dewey provides a marker, as John Rawls’s The Law
of the Peoples (1999) does, for a realistic utopia. Rawls applies a conceptual
distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory, formulating his “law of the
peoples” as a contractual arrangement under ideal conditions such that
measurement can be taken as to how far we have come or how far we have
left to go. By contrast, Dewey’s and Addams’s is an open-ended process
28
Addams believed that war’s end would be best won by a neutral US brokering peace. See
Addams, Balch, and Hamilton (2003).
that is best fueled and tested through plural and diverse perspectives. It is
in these situations of seeking out diverse perspectives that the mettle of our
ideas gets tested. When our arguments meet opposition, unless blinded by
dogma, we are forced to give pause.29
Addams’s take on pragmatist method aimed to create connections and
explore the sentiments women held, projecting them outward into civic
and international realms, enlarging sympathy and a sense of social respon-
sibility. Her method was both a relational epistemology and a call to dem-
ocratic social advocacy. Making good on this aim meant seeing from the
margins of society—from the vantage point of women, poor, immigrants,
minorities, and native peoples—looking for what spurs a democratic atti-
tude in matters of everyday life—not normally invested with democratic
significance internationally. For Addams, these groups, and the particular
complex of inequalities each experienced, carry a different form of embod-
ied knowledge from which we find alternative ways into knowledge
creation for coping with social change. This knowledge is good in and of
itself, but as a knowledge felt it triggers a sense of responsibility to engage
others in working cooperatively toward not just better coping, but cosmo-
politan justice. As Addams writes in Newer Ideals of Peace, we are changed
through the relational process as we seek “diversified human experience
and resultant sympathy” (1907, 7). It is the thesis of this book, but the
idea is suffused throughout her life’s work as well: that just social institu-
tions are humane institutions built on “sympathetic knowledge” fostered
in immediate relational experience.
Dewey posed the problem of the public, but it was Addams whose
thought and action worked toward assisting publics in finding themselves.
She illuminated at domestic and global levels the nature and scope of shared
social ills, applied and tested what her idea of democratic social ethics might
contribute to alleviating those ills, and looked all the while for what gener-
ates social sentiment and importantly, what turns sentiment into moral
energy and democratic action of this kind. Addams was unique among prag-
matists for the focused attention she gave to the motivations required to
nurture any emergent possibilities for cosmopolitan justice and what associ-
ated feeling and accompanying knowledge can contribute to it.
29
At a speech on the occasion of Dewey’s 70th birthday, Addams said, “[o]nly once in a
public crisis did I find my road taking a sharp right angle to the one he recommended. That
fact, in and of itself, gave me pause to think and almost threatened my confidence” (Addams
1929).
162 M. COCHRAN
Her feminist and relational pragmatic method sought to illuminate

what microlevel social relations could bring to emerging macrolevel inter-
national institutional arrangements lived democratically. In the advocacy
of WILPF, like the helping relations Addams aimed to realize through
Hull House, WILPF sought to uncover the empirical facts at the base of
situations of international concern with a view to using that knowledge.30
However, in international politics there was less scope for women’s action
than in Settlement politics. The WILPF had to fashion its own epistemic
authority and it did so on the basis of women’s experience—as relief work-
ers, food providers in the war, and nurturers in the domestic sphere—as
well as through expertly crafted rhetoric, metaphors of maternal protec-
tion, maternal care for life, and notions of women’s guardianship over
morality. Also, social relatedness required settings in which connection
could be found. WILPF’s La Maison Internationale was a site of such
exchange, as were regular International Congresses of national sections of
WILPF, corridors and meeting rooms of the League, and yearly WILPF
international summer schools. These were the routes to inter-societal
democracy as a way of life.
Arguably, Addams and WILPF did identify an immanent global ethical
idea and made their own contribution to shaping cosmopolitan humani-
tarian sentiment. The idea that welfare provision required global coopera-
tion, and that this functional cooperation would require new socially
democratic institutional structures, putting individual human beings at
their center, anticipates the global politics of today. Addams’s future-
oriented experiment for global justice is still in process. Addams under-
stood that creating and sustaining motivation for the work was vital and
could not be stimulated by practical need alone, nor could it be forced by
command from above. It was key that individuals should come to a social
morality in themselves. Thus, Addams explored the motivations in mod-
ern life, capable of cultivating the democratic practices that could generate
a dynamic social ethics with all the tools in her power: sociological data
gathering; creating fora and institutional outlets for the exchange of social
knowledge and interaction; political lobbying; and sentimental education
through literature, the arts, music, encouraging sympathy through
expertly crafted rhetoric, and the use of autobiographical stories. Our best
30
WILPF, like Hull House, worked as a knowledge community, appointing referents to
become experts in areas of League policy that WILPF wanted to influence; referents would
conduct research, and organize site visits and conferences with relevant experts.
practical judgments are won in involvements with uncommon others,

meeting the challenges of plurality and experimenting with what works
among those affected. This is no small feat—requiring tireless energy—of
which Addams was a model.
References
Addams, Jane. 1892. Hull House, Chicago: An Effort in Social Democracy. In The
Major Works of Jane Addams. Electronic ed., 226–41. Charlottesville: InteLex
Corporation, 2002.
———. 1893. The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements. In The Major Works
of Jane Addams. Electronic ed., 1–26. Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation,
2002.
———. 1898. The College Woman and the Family Claim. In The Major Works of
Jane Addams, Electronic ed., 1–7. Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation, 2002.
———. 1907. Democracy and Social Ethics. In The Major Works of Jane Addams.
Electronic ed. Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation, 2002.
———. 1912. A Modern Lear. In The Major Works of Jane Addams. Electronic
ed., 131–37. Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation, 2002.
———. 1916. The Long Road of Woman’s Memory. In The Major Works of Jane
Addams, Electronic ed. Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation, 2002.
———. 1922. Peace and Bread in the Time of War. In The Major Works of Jane
Addams. Electronic ed. Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation, 2002.
———. 1923. Twenty Years at Hull House. In The Major Works of Jane Addams.
———. 1927. A Book that Changed My Life. In The Major Works of Jane Addams.
Electronic ed., 1196–98. Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation, 2002.
———. 1929. A Toast to John Dewey. In Series 3: Speeches and Publications,
1878–1935, Box 10, Jane Addams Collection, Microfilm, Swarthmore, PA.
———. 1932. The Excellent Becomes the Permanent. The Major Works of Jane
Addams. Electronic ed. Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation, 2002.
———. 1935. My Friend Julia Lathrop. In The Major Works of Jane Addams.
Addams, Jane, Emily Balch, and Alice Hamilton. 2003 (1915). Women at the
Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results. Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press.
Balch, Emily to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 1934. WILPF Correspondence 1934–
1935, Box 1 Fd 4. WILPF Swarthmore Accrual. Special Collections and
Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Library.
Balch, Emily. 1938. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom,
1915–1938: A Venture in Internationalism. Geneva: Maison Internationale.
164 M. COCHRAN
Davis, Allen F. 1973. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Deegan, M.J. 1988. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918.
New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Dewey, John. 1908. What Pragmatism Means by Practical. In The Collected Works
of John Dewey, 1882–1953. In The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1907–1909, ed.
Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 4, Electronic ed., 98–115. Charlottesville: InteLex
Corporation, 2003.
———. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. In The Collected Works of John Dewey,
1882–1953. In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston,
vol. 11, Electronic ed. Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation, 2003.
———. 1937. Democracy and Educational Administration. In The Collected Works
of John Dewey, 1882–1953. In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, ed. Jo
Ann Boydston, vol. 2, Electronic ed., 217–25. Charlottesville: InteLex
Corporation, 2003.
———. 2010. Dewey: Lectures. Electronic ed. Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation.
Dieleman, Susan, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil. 2017. Pragmatism and
Justice. New York: Oxford University Press.
Feuer, Lewis. 1959. John Dewey and the Back to the People Movement in
American Thought. Journal of the History of Ideas 20: 545–568.
Fischer, Marilyn. 2004. Democracy and Social Ethics and the Long Road of
Woman’s Memory Book Review. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18:
85–88.
Green, Judith. 2010. Social Democracy, Cosmopolitan Hospitality, and
Intercivilizational Peace: Lessons from Jane Addams. In Feminist Interpretations
of Jane Addams, ed. Maurice Hamington, 223–254. University Park, PA: The
Pennsylvania State University.
Hamington, Maurice. 2004. Addams’s Radical Democracy: Moving Beyond
Rights. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18: 216–223.
———. 2007. Two Leaders, Two Utopias: Jane Addams and Dorothy Day. NWSA
Journal 19: 159–186.
Knight, Louise W. 2005. Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levine, Daniel. 1964. Varieties of Reform Thought. Madison, WI: The State
Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Lynd, Staughton. 1961. Jane Addams and the Radical Impulse. Commentary 32:
54–59.
MacMullan, Terrance. 2001. On War as Waste: Jane Addams’s Pragmatic Pacifism.
Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15: 86–104.
Mahowald, Mary. 1997. What Classical American Philosophers Missed: Jane
Addams, Critical Pragmatism, and Cultural Feminism. The Journal of Value
Inquiry 31: 39–54.
McKenna, Erin. 2001. The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Pois, Anne Marie. 1988. The Politics and Process of Organizing for Peace: The
United States Section of the Women’s International League for Peace and
Freedom, 1919–1939. PhD diss., University of Colorado at Boulder.
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.
———. 1999. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1993. Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality. In On
Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, ed. Stephen Shute and
Susan Hurley, 111–134. New York: Basic Books.
———. 2005. Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Rupp, Leila J. 1997. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s
Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sarvasy, Wendy. 2010. Engendering Democracy by Socializing It: Jane Addams’s
Contribution to Feminist Political Theorizing. In Feminist Interpretations of
Jane Addams, ed. Maurice Hamington, 293–310. University Park: The
Pennsylvania State University.
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1991. The Missing Perspective: Feminist
Pragmatism. Transactions of the Charles S Peirce Society 27: 405–416.
———. 1996. Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
———. 1999. Socializing Democracy: Jane Addams and John Dewey. Philosophy
of the Social Sciences 29: 207–230.
Voparil, Christopher. 2017. Pragmatism’s Contribution to Nonideal Theorizing:
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WILPF News-sheet 1. 1919. Swarthmore College Peace Collection Microfilm
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Molly Cochran is Reader in International Relations at Oxford Brooks University,

researching the advocacy of the Women’s International League for Peace and
Freedom at the League of Nations. She is the author of A Normative Theory of
International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach (1999) and editor of the
Cambridge Companion to Dewey (2010).
CHAPTER 8
James T. Shotwell and the Organisation

of Peace
Cornelia Navari
James Shotwell had been a member of the Inquiry, almost single-handedly

devised the Geneva Protocol, dubbed “a time of angels” and drafted the
Briand memorandum for the French premier, initiating the diplomacy
that led to the signature of the Kellogg-Briand pact. A fervent supporter
of the League, during the 1930s, he turned the League of Nations (LON)
Association away from reform towards the creation of a new international
organisation and founded and directed the Commission for the
Organisation of the Peace, which foresaw the design of the Security
Council and proposed what became the UN’s Economic and Social
Council. He was present at the birth of every important movement to
bring America to international engagement, and he initiated most of
them. In his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, John D. Condliffe,
the noted economist, wrote: “more than any other single person, he is
responsible for swinging American opinion from isolation to international
co-operation.”1
1
To the Nobel Prize Committee, 26 Nov 1951, Shotwell Papers, Columbia University (JTS
Papers) Box 25 (Josephson, 290).
C. Navari (*)
Department of Economics and International Studies, University of Buckingham,
Buckingham, UK

168 C. NAVARI
His contribution to “international co-operation” was institutionalisation.

Breaking with Croly and The New Republic’s rejection of the League, he
seized upon the nascent International Labor Organization as “the most defi-
nite starting point that the Peace Conference has brought for experimentation
along the lines of … international cooperation”2 and almost single-handedly
won American participation in it. His proposal to French Premier Briand for
an American-French renunciation of the war pact and his promotion of the
Geneva Protocol were designed to secure America’s association with the
League. But more than the League, he sought for “a clearly defined system of
collective security” (Josephson, 117). He called it “the conference method”
and believed that all strategic diplomacy should be bounded by treaty-based
procedures. His aim in the Kellogg-Briand renunciation of war was to commit
states to regularised procedures of arbitration, and Kellogg-Briand and
Geneva were no more than way stations to a wider end, which was a perma-
nent and universal system of international agreements, rules and procedures,
with American participation. All his efforts were directed to building such
security institutions as the United States might commit to.
The second contribution was to “international social justice”, a progres-
sive term he used and promoted. Increasingly, he linked his collective secu-
rity efforts to economic and social issues. He was one of a growing body of
progressives that would gradually move from arbitration of political dis-
putes to concern with economic justice and rights, and he was the first
American thinker to provide a clear rationale for such a movement in terms
of a peace agenda. He buttressed both efforts by a social mobilisation ini-
tially of specialised elites but increasingly of ordinary citizens, employing the
LON Association. He also promoted (and theorised) direct representation
by social and economic groups in international institutions concerned with
social and economic issues. The theory of “tripartism”, which he proffered
in the 1920s, worked its way forward to a concern with human rights in the
1930s, and it entered into the Charter negotiations under his stewardship
as the promise of a permanently standing human rights commission.
Progressivism and the New History

Born in Strathroy, Ontario, in 1874, James Thomson Shotwell was edu-
cated at the University of Toronto and gained his doctorate in history
from Columbia University in 1900, where he began his teaching career in
2
To JP Chamberlain, 13 June 1919, JTS papers Box 113 (Josephson, 94).
JAMES T. SHOTWELL AND THE ORGANISATION OF PEACE 169
1905. Columbia was the home of the “New Historians”, the rising his-
torical school in America that looked to history to provide lessons for
solving present problems—it was Progressivism applied to historical stud-
ies. John Dewey had moved to Columbia in 1904 where he formed the
“X” club, which met weekly. Members besides Shotwell were Lincoln
Steffens, Walter Weyl, to become the editor of The New Republic, H. E.
Barnes, to become the leading revisionist historian on German war guilt,
and Charles Beard, to produce An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution. The lecturers at Columbia were part of the new breed of
“public intellectual”, determined to bring intelligence into government
(see Shotwell 1921).
The technical term for the New History was “presentism”—an
approach by which the past is viewed in terms of present concerns and
treated as a laboratory for political, social and economic experimentation.
The New History focused on economic and social factors as they affected
political institutions. Trained in medieval history, Shotwell’s thesis on the
Eucharist was not in the least theological. It was on the development of a
critical medieval institution and its influence on politics, economics and
philosophy, as well as on literature and art. In philosophy, the New
History was rationalist and utilitarian: lecturing on religion in the latter
years of the war, Shotwell announced that “we are not dealing with the
theological problem of the reality of God, but with the historical and
psychological data of how men react” (Shotwell 2013, 132–33). He
located religion in human psychology—in the reaction of awe to danger
and the unknown, as opposed to science, which emerged from the mental
faculty of curiosity. Science was accordingly bound to circumscribe reli-
gion, as it gradually narrowed the realm of the unknown—as he put it,
“the irrational is henceforth doomed to yield up the command of the
motive forces of conscious conduct.” In his lectures, he taught that
Reason [sic] is “the valid critic of our lives” and “the only critic we have”
(2013, 118, 117).
Presentism was prepared to “adjust history” in its service to current
tasks. During the First World War, Shotwell convened and directed the
National Board for Historical Service, a voluntary organisation which
put itself at the service of the Committee on Public Information—the
Creel Committee, which had over 20 bureaus at the height of the war,
issued a daily bulletin reporting on all aspects of the war effort and made
films, all of which were frankly propagandistic. (The best known is
“America’s Answer to the Hun”.) The Board issued a series of “red,
170 C. NAVARI
white and blue pamphlets”—“The War Message and the Facts Behind it”
was one of its first and more successful efforts and was, in the words of
his historian-biographer, “by no means a sound or an accurate historical
statement” (Josephson, 57).3
A prolific contributor to public histories and historical associations (to
whom he provided the material for teaching “Social History and Industrial
Revolution”), on a sabbatical year in Europe in 1904 (and in need of a
supplement to his income), he offered his services to the new edition then
in preparation of the Encyclopedia Britannica, an offer seized upon by its
new owner4 who appointed him as the managing editor of what became
the famous 11th edition. In London, through the winter of 1904–1905,
he reviewed the whole of the ninth edition, suggesting those changes and
amendments to “bring the Britannica up to recent scholarship” (Shotwell
1961, 62). Shotwell wrote over 250 articles for the 11th edition, creating
much of “the contemporary standpoint” for which the edition became
known. In 1914, he proposed to the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace “something entirely new, a co-operative history of the
impact of the world war on the economic and social life of nations”
(Shotwell 1961, 134).
Shotwell identified the New History with “realism” and called himself
a realist, because in the words of his biographer, “he linked realism with an
objective search after the facts.” In 1928, in “The Slogan of Outlawry”
(718), he castigated “the kind of idealism that prefers to march to its goal
of peace singing a militant hymn, rather than to risk the mental struggle
which confronts it in an analysis of its premises”. Contrasting The Hague
with Geneva, he charged that future historians would find “schooling in
the conference method which is going on at Geneva … a more important
element in the safeguards of peace than the application of juristic methods
at The Hague” (719). He summarised his realism on the present dangers
in “The Problem of Security”: “[t]he French have long been trying to
3
Shotwell argued that if historians did not serve the American public, those of a “journalist
cast of mind” would, with even greater distortions, failing which the American people would
be “forced to accept the prejudicial statements of the various European belligerents”. JTS to
Westerman 21 July 1917 (Josephson, 60–61); Westerman was Professor of History at
Wisconsin, who objected to the NBHS’ readiness to “adjust history” to make it more rele-
vant to the war.
4
The Britannica had been bought by an American publisher who was seeking to
“Americanise” it.
teach us the simple lesson that there must be security before disarma-
ment” (1925, 159). The New History insisted on empirical foundations
for political slogans.
It was Shotwell’s historical understanding that led him to oppose Dewey
on the war question. After 1919, when progressive attention centred on
the League, American internationalists cast the organisation in terms of a
self-standing international court with power to formulate and codify inter-
national law and with very limited sanctions. The position attracted many
progressives, among them John Dewey, who opposed any sanctioning sys-
tem based on the League and proffered America’s adherence to a World
Court “As an Example to Other Nations” (Dewey 1928, 88–89). For
Shotwell, however, the history of war taught that a system was what war
prevention required (Shotwell 1929). The different approaches became
clear when Shotwell debated Dewey in The New Republic on the need for
a definition of aggression (Shotwell 1928a; 1928b). (Although they were
close friends, their friendship was strained by the disagreement.)
The New History and the New Institutionalism

Shotwell embarked upon a career as an institutional architect as adventi-
tiously as that of an editor of encyclopaedias. Herbert Croly, with whom
he had become acquainted during his work on the Historical Board,
recommended him to Colonel House for participation in a small team to
advise President Wilson on peace terms. (It was Shotwell who proposed
the term “Inquiry”; Shotwell also proposed Isaiah Bowman, who
allowed the team to use the offices of the American Geographical Society
in New York.) Intended originally to be the rapporteur, Walter Lippmann
took over that role, somewhat to Shotwell’s chagrin, which left him as a
general historian and librarian of papers. With little to do during the
team’s passage to France, he drafted a memorandum on child labour5
that earned him a minor place on the Labour Commission at Versailles,
intended to draft something with regard to “the working man”. A
British inspiration partly to forestall socialism at home, Samuel Gompers
had been appointed to chair the Commission (to win American support
for the endeavour), and it soon took on the aspect of a permanent organ-
isation. But it became mired in differences on the question of its rela-
tionship to the emerging League and on the legal status of its
5
The text is in his memoirs (Shotwell 1961, 95).
172 C. NAVARI
pronouncements—labour legislation in American belonged to the states

and not to the federal government and hence could not be made the
subject of treaties. Shotwell had friendships in the British delegation,
members of which he had met on his 1904–1905 sojourn in London,
who sensed in him a person sympathetic to the European viewpoint.
Edward Phelan, the British delegate on the labour question, asked if he
could do something to prepare a compromise, a task Shotwell seized
with enthusiasm, assuring Gompers that he could “come up with
something”.
The formula is indebted to “a semester on the history of international
law” taught by the distinguished jurist John Basset Moore, later a judge
on the World Court. (It was the only course on international relations in
the politics department at Columbia at the time, Anderson 2005). After
a good deal of thought on “the problems of social legislation at the
international level”, Shotwell proposed that ILO conferences could pro-
ceed by what he called a “dual track”. They should issue not merely the
“pious opinions” feared by the French but concrete recommendations
and these in the form of legal drafts. These could then be adopted
directly by countries as treaty obligations, while being treated as recom-
mendations by the US federal authorities (Shotwell 1961, 96–98).
Received gratefully by the Labour Commission, the formula became a
standard resource in international social legislation. His other initiative
was “tripartism”, an idea of Phelan deriving from the employer-employee
associations arising in Britain (ibid.). Shotwell contributed the idea of
four delegates from each member state, two representing government,
one from labour and one from an employer’s association. (The ILO’s
rules of procedure were also drafted by Shotwell, eventually to be
adopted by the League as their own.) Shotwell returned to the idea of
direct citizen participation in his recommendations for a permanent
NGO presence at the UN.
His role in the making of the ILO became common knowledge in
Geneva and gave him the status of a specialist on America in League cir-
cles, but it was Carnegie that supplied the opportunity. As Versailles was
closing, he received the formal confirmation that he should edit the
Carnegie Endowment’s economic and social history of the First World
War, which would involve him in the production of 150 volumes on the
social and economic effects of the war, a project that would keep him in
Europe for much of the next seven years. He asked David Mitrany who
had just completed a war-time stint in the British foreign office to edit the
East European volumes and settled him in an office in Malet Street,6 giv-
ing Shotwell a base with easy access to Geneva, where he presented himself
as a “consultant” specialist. He took legal advice on the possible applica-
tion of the Logan Act forbidding private citizens from engaging in diplo-
macy contrary to American official efforts: as Williams remarks, “Shotwell
never showed any modesty about his role” (1998, 117).
The project that followed concerned Article 8 of the League Covenant,
which directed a Commission to make proposals on reducing armaments
to levels compatible with national security; the Commission had worked
up a draft of the Treaty of Mutual Assistance, the Cecil-Raquin draft,
which, in effect, outlawed war: if a country was attacked, all countries of
the League would send troops to defend it. It was discussed at the League’s
Assembly of September 1923. Lt Col Raquin, the leader of the French
group on the Commission, asked Shotwell to prepare a paper on the
American viewpoint, who, immediately on returning to New York that
same autumn, convened a committee to “find a solution to the problem
of disarmament and national security” that would “harmonize US and
European points of view” (Bouchard 2001).
Shotwell copied the Inquiry in setting up the American Committee on
Disarmament and Security—a group of “specialists” who brought knowl-
edge to social and political problems, but he added people of influence.
The members were David Hunter Miller, lawyer of the Inquiry and close
associate of President Wilson, General Tasker H. Bliss of the Supreme War
Council, Isaiah Bowman, Dr Pritchett, President of the Carnegie founda-
tion, Joseph Chamberlain, Professor of Law at Columbia, and John Clarke
of the Carnegie Endowment. (Mitrany served as a “technical assistant”.)
It met for the first time in January 1924. The product was part “group
think” and part Shotwell—as his memoir records, “the drafting was done
by Miller and myself, in fact I think all of it” (Shotwell 1961, 183). At its
first meeting, Miller was musing that if aggressive war was to be consid-
ered a crime, there should be a determination by a court. “As he was talk-
ing”, reports Shotwell, “the thought developed in my mind that this
willingness to go to court or refusal to accept the court’s determination
and resort to force instead, was the key to the definition of aggression. At
once the whole group took it up as a way out of our impasse” (182).
6
Mitrany records both the value of the appointment to him and its chance nature (1975:
38, 65).
174 C. NAVARI
To Miller, he gave credit for the idea of the permissive sanction. Drafted
by Miller, it read that in the event of a contracting party being judged an
aggressor, that party “would cease to be entitled … to any privileges, pro-
tection, rights of immunities accorded by either international law, national
law or treaty”. Countries could thus choose their “sanctioning level”,
avoiding the impasse of Article 16 of the Covenant.7 It was the first exam-
ple of the “facultative” arrangements that Mitrany came to proffer as
“international functionalism”, and it won the support of Eric Drummond
who presented it to the League Council. The Miller-Shotwell draft became
the basis of the definition of aggression used by the famous fifth session to
establish the Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes.
Unlike the Treaty of Mutual Assistance, the Protocol established a kind
of “presumption of aggression” in relation to the parties in a conflict,
reflected in the provision requiring the aggressor state to pay economic
reparations. There was no definition of aggression; rather, the aggressor
was to be judged by whether it would accept arbitration.8 The more dura-
ble legacy was the concept of an international crime: Shotwell and Miller
developed the concept, relating it to a wrongful act and thereby interpret-
ing the war of aggression as a crime committed by a state. The formula
read, “In the absence of a state of war, measures of force by land, by sea or
in the air taken by one State against another and not taken for purposes of
defense or for the protection of human life shall be deemed to be acts of
aggression.” It was published by International Conciliation, Carnegie’s
documents journal, under Shotwell’s authorship as A Practical Plan for
Disarmament (Shotwell 1924) and everywhere hailed as a major break-
through. It died in the League Chamber when it became clear that Britain
would not accept it and was effectively replaced by the Locarno Agreements
between Britain, France and Germany.
7
Article 16 demanded “the severance of all trade or financial relations, the prohibition of
all intercourse between their nationals and the nationals of the covenant-breaking State, and
the prevention of all financial, commercial or personal intercourse between the nationals of
the covenant-breaking State and the nationals of any other State, whether a Member of the
League or not”.
8
“Any signatory which claims that another signatory has violated the terms of this Treaty
shall submit its case to the Permanent Court of International Justice. Any Signatory refusing
to accept the jurisdiction of the Court in any such case shall be deemed an aggressor within
the terms of this Treaty. Failure to accept the jurisdiction of the Court within four days after
submission of a claim or violation of this Treaty shall be deemed a refusal to accept the
jurisdiction.”
Shotwell had proceeded immediately from Geneva to Washington to

interest the American administration in the Protocol, meeting with
Secretary of State Hughes, who greeted him with the threat to impose the
Logan Act and promised little else. It was not so much that the adminis-
tration had come into office on an anti-Wilsonian ticket, more that it was
encountering a growing force within Congress against any international
legal obligations, inspired by the popularity for Levinson’s “outlawing of
war” campaign. Salmon Levinson was a Chicago lawyer who in 1921 had
published a Plan to Outlaw War, under the auspices of an “American
Committee on the Outlawry of War”, and was “outlawry’s” most vocal
spokesman.9 Initially a supporter of the League, he had come to believe
that sanctions confused the outlawry issue, and he had become a leader,
with Senator Borah, of the radical anti-Leaguers. Borah was leading Senate
opposition to both the Geneva Protocol and any development of the
League.
In what might seem a paradoxical move, considering his own devotion
to a system that included some sanctions, Shotwell had agreed in late
1923 to associate his own Committee on Disarmament with Levinson’s
Outlawry Committee. Shotwell considered Levinson the most dangerous
opponent in linking the United States into a formal institutionalised secu-
rity system, but Levinson’s movement was the most organised of all the
“peace” movements in America, and the “institutionalists” needed the
pacifist movement. (Shotwell and Levinson were considered by insiders to
be the two poles of American internationalism during the 1920s.) In late
November, a three-step “joint programme” had been announced, making
the institution of war illegal, codifying international law and establishing
an effective World Court. But it would not improve Congress’ reception
of the Protocol, and the association with Levinson would prove a mixed
blessing, as he would seriously impede Shotwell’s next efforts.
These involved direct influence on the European chancelleries. After
the failure of the Protocol, “peace” diplomacy had moved from the cor-
ridors of the League to European foreign offices, embroiled in the Ruhr
occupation and the reparations question. In February (now 1925),
Stresemann offered to accept the western borders that Versailles had laid
down for Germany, in return for a loosening of reparations and a with-
drawal of French forces from the Ruhr, and the Locarno Agreements had
begun to take shape. Shotwell at once moved to more committee making,
9
See Howlett on Dewey in Chap. 6, this volume.
176 C. NAVARI
initiating both a German and a French committee, made up of political

elites, many in official positions, whose members were in close touch with
their respective delegations, directing them to concentrate on the techni-
cal issues of arbitration and security.10 Recognising that the Protocol had
failed, Shotwell aimed for nothing less than to reintroduce its central pro-
visions as features of Locarno. The committees’, in the event successful,
efforts supported the Shotwell-Miller arbitration-security link, which
became Article 5 of the Locarno pact.11 Austen Chamberlain was awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in working the Locarno pacts, but his
proposal that the Protocol’s guarantees of peace be made the basis of
peace treaties between Germany and her neighbours owed as much to
Shotwell and to the committees as to his own diplomatic skill.12
But Locarno was only the first step. Shotwell moved immediately to
expand the scheme—to generalise it into “a World Locarno” (Shotwell
1961, 201–20313). Full of hope in the “Locarno spirit”, he tried initially
to engage the Germans, using his inaugural address as the first professor
of international relations at Berlin’s newly created Hochschule fur Politik,
where, on 1 March 1927, he outlined a future international security sys-
tem. Before an auditorium filled with dignitaries including the German
Chancellor and his cabinet, the Prussian prime minister, his cabinet and
the German general staff, he drew on social and economic history to argue
that the industrialisation of war had obviated “war as policy” and that the
“new international policy … must be based upon … the accumulating
force of common interest” (Shotwell 1927). Locarno was the evidence of
such an “accumulating force” and should be developed. Armed force was
10
Their importance has been little recognised. The relevant memos are in Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace archive at Columbia University and include the
“Confidential Memorandum of the German Committee on Arbitration and Security” and
the “Memorandum on the Creation of a French Committee of Arbitration and Security”
(Josephson, 131, who notes that they ‘strongly influenced the negotiations’; see also Shotwell
1960).
11
“Where one of the Powers … refuses to submit a dispute to peaceful settlement or to
comply with an arbitral or judicial decision, the other Party shall bring the matter before the
Council of the League of Nations, and the Council shall propose what steps shall be taken;
the High Contracting Parties shall comply with these proposals.”
12
Shotwell did not claim much credit, noting only in his memoirs that “[b]ehind the
Locarno agreements lies an untold story” (Shotwell 1961: 197–98).
13
See also Locarno and the Balkans: The Possibility of a Balkan Locarno by Shotwell and
Mitrany with a foreword by Nicholas Murray Butler, published in the April 1927 issue of
International Conciliation.
however not to be ignored; recalling his 1925 article that defensive war
needed to be accommodated in a security system, he presented the use of
force as an international legal obligation and a common undertaking. In
conclusion, Locarno should be considered the first step in the creation of
a security system that allowed for the use of force within a legal framework
and that promised a sanction for aggression. He repeated the call a few
days later at another large lecture in Cologne hosted by then mayor,
Konrad Adenauer, who had been a member of the German committee,
before a raft of fellow historians.
The lack of enthusiasm (particularly, he noted, among the historians)
led him to conclude that despite the “Locarno spirit”, “Germany was not
in a position to take up this idea.” He then turned to French colleagues,
first to Andre Fontaine, an old friend from the ILO days and administrator
of the mines of the Saar, and then to Albert Thomas, another Frenchman
who first chaired the ILO, presenting the plan in terms of a general renun-
ciation of war. Shotwell presented Thomas with the idea that renouncing
“war as policy” might let France off the hook of being anti-disarmament.
(It had been announced that France would not take part in the 1927
Disarmament Conference.) It was Albert Thomas who arranged the meet-
ing with Briand.14
In addressing Briand, Shotwell adopted what he later described as “a
firm approach”, warning him that France’s disarmament posture “would
make no impression on any foreign national” and how it needed a “deci-
sive step of another kind”. “Outlawing war” had “attained a definite place
in the thinking of the Middle West”, he explained, whereupon he pro-
ceeded to argue the case that “the real outlawry of war lay along the lines
of the Locarno Treaty and that a broad and general acceptance of this
principle specifically inviting the United States to accept the Locarno prin-
ciple without becoming involved in its sanction would be a working basis
for which popular support could be mobilised” (Shotwell 1961, 209). He
proposed in short that Briand entice the United States into the Locarno
system, using the popularity of the anti-war movement in America. (His
initial hesitation to provide Briand with a memorandum “to use as the
basis” was probably genuine, given his recent experience with Secretary of
States Hughes; the meeting ended with Shotwell agreeing to provide
“notes”.)
14
The standard account is in Ferrell 1952.
178 C. NAVARI
Immediately upon Briand’s “Message to America” on 6 April,15

Shotwell undertook his first trial in public mobilisation. He approached
the New York Times who agreed on a letter, to be written by Nicolas
Murray Butler, the President of Columbia, to be accompanied by a sup-
portive editorial.16 (In his memoir, Shotwell reports that Butler was at first
hesitant about the project; an effort to mobilise the Carnegie Endowment
was also initially unsuccessful.) In autumn, to more purpose, he under-
took a lecture tour “at most of the universities and major colleges”17 on
the thesis of the disutility of war (published as War as an Instrument of
National Policy, Shotwell 1929), emphasising the point that outlawry was
not isolationism and that it required international engagement.
Briand’s phrases echoed Shotwell’s notes almost verbatim: that France
would join with America in a “mutual engagement to outlaw war”, that
this was “the outlawry of war” “as the American expression” put it and
that “the conception is familiar to the signatories to the Covenant of the
League of Nations and Locarno” (Shotwell 1961, 210). Though not far
enough for Shotwell, who had hoped that the French premier would put
greater emphasis on sanctions and constraints, it was too far for Salmon
Levinson, who ignoring the latter seized upon the former, and rushed to
London and Paris, reportedly with alternative texts (Ferrell, 91). By
August, Levinson had convinced Senator Borah to support a renunciation
of the war treaty based on renunciation and conciliation alone. In
September, the League passed the “Polish Resolution” stating that (1) all
wars are and always shall be prohibited and (2) that every pacific means
must be used to settle disputes. Shotwell became alarmed that his dream
of a “world Locarno” was falling prey to “outlawry” and turned again to
officialdom. He gained an interview with Undersecretary Olds, a fellow
Carnegie trustee (neither Kellogg nor Coolidge would see him) who sug-
gested that, as in 1924, he draft a treaty, “as an example of what such an
offer [as Briand’s] would mean in terms of America’s obligation”
(Josephson, 165). Within a week, with the assistance of his legal colleague
John Chamberlain, the Shotwell-Chamberlain draft was ready, consisting
of three parts, and disobligingly specific.
15
“Briand Sends Message to America on Anniversary of Entering the War”, New York
Times, 6 April 1927, 5.
16
It appeared in the New York Times of 25 April 1927 under the rubric “When the world
outlawed war”.
17
Twelve universities across the country with six lectures at Dartmouth on the history of
war and six at the University of Virginia.
Shotwell had never aimed at a bilateral pledge between France and the
United States; he wanted America in a system, and a system with some
bite. Opening with references to “second” or subsequent signatories to
prepare the way for a multilateral pact, the draft played to American sensi-
bilities by deliberately excluding wars of self-defence (and the Monroe
doctrine) from the renunciation of war clauses. But Clause 2 deliberately
invoked Locarno in naming as the aggressor the party that broke treaty
pledges, and Article 3 went further than Locarno, requiring signatories to
pledge that in the event of the breach of the treaty “or any other Covenant”,
they would offer no aid to the aggressor, a position that would circum-
scribe neutrality, since it would forbid neutral enterprises from trading with
the named aggressor. Nicholas Murray Butler summarised the three prin-
ciples at the American Club in Paris on 20 June as the renunciation of war
as an instrument of policy, that the United States accept the definition of
aggression embodied in Locarno and third, that “if there is a war of aggres-
sion we will not aid the aggressor” (reported by Shotwell 1961, 214).
Neither the French nor the Americans were prepared to go so far. The
Pact of Paris took shape on the basis of a French draft, based on the Polish
resolution, and it was presented as a multilateral declaration as much at the
insistence of the Americans, who wished to avoid the impression that
America was being constrained by a bilateral treaty relationship as from
any hopes for a wider Locarno. It was signed by 15 nations on 27 August
1928. In his memoirs, Shotwell dismisses the two short articles of the pact
with the reflection that “[h]istory was soon to show that a renunciation of
war without a provision for its enforcement was nothing more than a pious
declaration of good intentions.” And he pledged to continue his efforts to
secure “the organization of peace at Geneva” (1961, 215).
The Mobilisation of Society

By the time of the signature of the Pact of Paris, Shotwell had gathered
around him an extensive network of academic specialists, key eastern sea-
board civic leaders and key state department officials. He had established
a line with America’s most prestigious and influential newspaper and a
personal relationship with its editor, Sulzberger, that was “worth much
more to me with statesmen and men of affairs than any academic position
which I have ever held”.18 To it he had roped in such foreign nationals as
J.T.S to Robert S. Lynd, 11 Dec 1930, J.T.S. Papers Box 241 (Josephson, 189).
18
180 C. NAVARI
Konrad Adenauer, Andre Fontaine and Luigi Einaudi. In 1932, he met

Senator Cordell Hull at the Democratic National Convention; Hull went
on to become Roosevelt’s secretary of state the following year and remained
so through the war, and Shotwell cultivated close relations with him.
Both Columbia University and the Carnegie Endowment were impor-
tant platforms for his activities: the former gave him professional status
and access to a raft of well-placed specialists and the latter enhanced that
status by giving him the aspect of a public spokesman (Shotwell was in
effect Carnegie’s resident historian) as well as providing financial support
for his efforts. But he was more indebted to President Butler’s backing
than to the university as such, and Carnegie initially proved rather reluc-
tant to promote specifically political schemes. (It would “wake up” after
Hitler’s accession to power.)
In 1927, a new platform became available to him in the form of the
Institute of Pacific Relations, a “movement from below” and one of the
first NGOs, set up by two YMCA workers. It had held a successful “discus-
sion” in Hawaii, gathering participants from countries that might be
affected by a possible war between China and Japan, and its 1927 confer-
ence would bring 200 people to Honolulu, including semi-official delega-
tions from Canada, Japan and Britain (Lionel Curtis of Chatham House
fame and William Whyte, specialist on China). Shotwell’s reputation had
become such that he was asked to become its research director, less to
direct research, he records (as he “had little contact with the Orient”), as
to “keep the engine on the rails”. John B. Condliffe, international econo-
mist, then completing a doctorate on industrial organisation in the Far
East, became the research secretary.19 A number of national councils were
established, with Condliffe setting up a New Zealand branch, responsible
for national, regional and local programming. Most participants were elite
members of the business and academic communities in their respective
countries, which combined with their research and contacts in the US
State Department, made it, by the late 1930s, a necessary reference point
for US foreign policy initiatives on East Asia and a powerful advocate for
the American recognition of China after the communist takeover. (It suf-
fered from charges of Communist affiliations as a result, gradually losing
19
The same Condliffe who in 1931 joined the economic secretariat of the League of
Nations, where for six years he compiled its World Economic Survey, on which he based his
argument, influential for decades, that continued expansion of world trade, was a necessary
condition for peace and prosperity.
financial and academic support. It was closed in 1960, many of its func-
tions being taken over by the Association for Asian Studies.) As its research
director, Shotwell undertook an extended three-month tour, engaging
officialdom and lecturing at universities in Japan, Korea and China, partly
with an eye to the 1930 disarmament conference, where he wished to
promote the Locarno formula, and partly to explore Japanese intentions
with regard to Manchuria.
In 1930, after the signature of the Hawley Smoot tariff, and in prepara-
tion for the World Economic summit, he opened a new line of activism,
and a critical one, with the American Chamber of Commerce, through its
chair Thomas Watson, a close friend and fellow trustee in the LON
Association. It represented America’s major industries and business lead-
ers. The joint effort resulted in a formal link between the Chamber and
the Carnegie Endowment. Shotwell organised the joint conference of the
International Chambers of Commerce and the Carnegie Endowment, in
November 1935, “World Peace Through World Trade” (which a young
Dag Hammerskjold, a Swedish monetary expert, attended), following
which the Carnegie Endowment initiated an Advisory Economic
Committee, with Shotwell as chair and John Condliffe, then at Berkeley,
as the editor. It published 12 studies under the Carnegie imprint, on the
relevance of imports for the American economy and the gains from trade.
Shotwell used the link to support his security efforts with the administra-
tion, getting “the United States chamber of Commerce to poll their local
chambers on the question whether they would support an international
sanction against an aggressor … and the response was over 60 per cent in
the affirmative”. He took it immediately to Hull, the then secretary of
state (Shotwell 1961, 304).
Shotwell was a member of the LON Association, serving on the
Council, but it had been of little use to him during the 1920s, being
largely dominated by “Wilsonians” and pacifists. “Wilsonians” objected
to any efforts to redraft the organisation and Shotwell barely mentions it
in his memoirs. With the growing crisis of the depression, however,
together with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the fateful League
Council of 1931 (when the Chinese appealed in vain to the League
Council under Article 11), he lost patience with its conservatism. In the
autumn of 1932, he went to the Democratic Convention to personally
lobby the party for a resolution on joining the League, and at the
December LON Association Council meeting, he began a vocal cam-
paign, insisting the leadership press more strongly for US membership of
182 C. NAVARI
the League. More significantly for the future of the organisation, he

threatened to resign if the Council continued to refuse to consider revi-
sion of the Covenant, a potent threat considering his by then considerable
reputation and critical to an already developing crisis in the movement. It
led to the resignation of Raymond Fosdick, a former League undersecre-
tary and a die-hard conservative with regard to revision. Clark Eichelberger,
the leader of the Chicago branch took over the role of the executive sec-
retary; he was one of Shotwell’s fellow trustees at Carnegie, and he
brought Shotwell in as president in 1935.
Under the Eichelberger-Shotwell leadership, the LON Association
became the leading organisation pushing Shotwell’s brand of internation-
alism in America. It mobilised the “state the terms” movement, aiming to
raise a million signatures on a petition to Congress demanding that it state
the terms for US adherence to the Versailles treaty; it presented the four
draft principles in a 1936 Plan for the Reorganisation of the LON,20 dyna-
mising the movement to reform the League. In 1939, William Allen White,
the editor of the Gazette of Emporia, Kansas, along with Eichelberger and
Shotwell, established the Non-Partisan Committee for Peace Through
Revision of the Neutrality Acts, to which Shotwell acted as the honorary
president, while Eichelberger took on the national leadership of its succes-
sor, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, associating it
with the LON Association. (The CDAA was based at the League’ New York
office; it advocated empowering the president to sell, transfer, lend or lease
war supplies, achieving success with the Lend-Lease Act of 1941.)
Eichelberger explains in his memoirs (1977) that he left programming
to Shotwell, the ideas man and the man with contacts in government and
in the Eastern establishment, while Eichelberger “looked after the details”,
meaning administration and bureaucracy. Among the latter was the large
network of the LON Association’s local offices, which Eichelberger began
to use not only to distribute pamphlets from headquarters but as agents of
mobilisation, turning the local branches into “units of the CDAA” in
1939. The partnership between the Committee and the LON Association
became the basis of the Commission to Study the Organization of the
Peace (CSOP). The CSOP sent all its memos and proposals out to the
local LON Association branches to raise local support.
20
The revised League would be organised around (1) the Kellogg-Briand treaty, (2) peace-
ful change, (3) graded obligations (4) and the extraction of the Covenant from the Versailles
Treaty (Josephson, 216).
Shotwell and the CSOP
Shotwell and his cohorts set up the Committee (later Commission) to
Study the Organization of the Peace (CSOP) in November 1939, six weeks
after Britain mobilised and days after the passage of the first revision of the
neutrality acts.21 The onset of the Second World War “had left nothing of
the structure of peace … so we began over again” (Shotwell 1961, 311).
The administration seems to have felt the same: four weeks later, Cordell
Hull on a recommendation of his assistant Leo Pasvolsky (see Williams
above) created the Committee on Problems of Peace and Reconstruction
within the State Department chaired by Undersecretary of State Sumner
Welles to “draft a post war policy” in Shotwell’s understanding; to consider
“problems of peace and reconstruction” and to consider the fundamental
principles of a “desirable world order” (it took on several names: Advisory
Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations and Advisory Committee
on Post-war Foreign Policy) (Josephson, 245). Shotwell and Eichelberger
were invited to sit on the small committee as “civilians” and specialists, and
they fed it with CSOP studies, reports and recommendations. The CSOP
acted in effect as a research bureau for the several Advisory Committees,
with a direct link to Pasvolsky, who was to draft the organisational recom-
mendations that the United States put forward at Dumbarton Oaks. (It
also served as a link between the work proceeding in the State Department
and the public; for 15 minutes every Sunday evening from January 1940,
90 Columbia Broadcasting System stations broadcast “Which way to last-
ing peace” at which CSOP people presented their views.)
The CSOP agenda reflected how far thinking on the problems of a
post-war world and on war and peace had developed since Versailles. The
Inquiry, influenced largely by Lippmann’s reading of Mahan and political
realism (see Milne below), had brought what was in essence a geo-political
reading to the problem of containing Germany within a post-imperial
Europe, whereas the CSOP ignored geo-politics and focused instead on
the nature of political systems, political ideas, social conditions and eco-
nomic requirements. The Commission’s Preliminary Report, published in
1940 (CSOP 1941), raised immediately and directly the question of the
political organisation of a post-war world, which the administration did
not want to touch and something which not even the LON mission at
21
The 1939 revision allowed belligerents to buy arms, which meant that the United States
could aid the allies.
184 C. NAVARI
Princeton felt able to do.22 Twenty-eight monographs appended to the

Preliminary Report considered the implications for post-war reconstruc-
tion of the “interplay of cultures”, economic interdependence, population
factors, and social and economic justice, all laying out the problems that
would have to be dealt with at the war’s end and reflecting the shifting
focus of the peace movement (and, of course, the progressive agenda). It
explicitly supported limitations of sovereignty (mainly with regard to the
use of arms) and proposed international institutions with juridical and
administrative as well as security functions. It used the term “federation”23:
the new world order was to be an institutionalised world order that would
raise domestic jurisdictions to an international level.
During the first year, the cohort met monthly at Shotwell’s house (he
reports up to 100 participants, but these were not all present at the same
time) but it soon settled to a more formal presence at offices at 84th street
in New York, by Carnegie providing it with offices and secretarial services. A
rough organisation was established in the form of Shotwell as chair and
Eichelberger as director, an executive committee and a studies committee,
chaired initially by Clyde Eagleton. Quincy Wright left Chicago on a tempo-
rary sabbatical from 1943 to join the CSOP.24 The papers were prepared by
individuals or groups of individuals on the basis of their technical expertise,
and published annually from 1940 to 1946, under the signatures of all mem-
bers of the Commission, some hundred by the third report. They appeared
in pamphlet form for distribution through the LON Association system as
well as in Carnegie’s journal, International Conciliation; the sets of individ-
ual papers were proceeded by a report indicating the import of the various
papers, and their contribution to the overall purpose of the Commission,
stated in its preliminary report as: “to exert what influence it can to ensure
that the United States … shall not again fail to play its part in any opportu-
nity which may offer to organise a durable peace” (CSOP 1941, 195).
22
In September 1940, eight employees of the economic and financial section (EFO) of the
League arrived at Princeton’s Advanced Institute for Study, under the directorship of
Alexander Loveday, British economist and long-time member of the EFO, to become a “mis-
sion” of the League to the United States. But it had no official status other than that which
the US administration wished to give it, and the administration did not want to receive any
plans for a revived League from it. It was an important source of technical information that
led to the IMF and the World Bank (Clavin 2013).
23
Possibly drawn from Clarence Streit’s Union Now, published the previous year and call-
ing for a federation of the democracies.
24
It was this place that was taken by Morgenthau, initially on a temporary appointment
(see Jackson below).
The care with which the Commission worded its “mission statement”
had not a little to do with its relations (or more accurately Shotwell’s and
Eichelberger’s) to the State Department. As America was still neutral in
1939, the Advisory Committee was instructed by Welles to keep all its
reports and transactions strictly secret, and “still more important”,
Shotwell recorded in his memoirs, “was the fact that every time Mr. Welles
came back from the White House he warned us against planning anything
like a revival of the League of Nations” (1961, 312). But Shotwell did not
perceive this as a limitation, as his intervention over the idea put forward
by Welles and Bowman that Germany be dismembered after the war makes
clear.25 For Shotwell, the American government was finally on track; the
idea now was to steer it. Thus, the CSOP should not pull ahead of the
State Department but rather anticipate it, guided by intelligence and
opportunism.
Accordingly, the work of the Commission tended to shadow what was
proceeding in the State Department. Thus, the publication of the Atlantic
Charter of August 1941 was followed shortly by the second report,
worked through July and August of 1941 and published after America
had entered the war, which covered “the practical problems which must
be faced from now” and calling up a “transitional period” dealing with
migration, food shortages and economic dislocation (CSOP 1941). The
third report appeared shortly after the Moscow Conference of November
1943 (at which the three powers had agreed to a permanent international
organisation) and was given over entirely to possible transformational
routes from the UN as a war-time coalition to the UN as a permanent
organisation. (The report makes it clear that the CSOP supported
Pasvolsky’s view that a new UN should be a universal organisation, as
opposed to Hull’s and occasionally Welles’ support for a set of regional
bodies loosely joined together: see Williams above.) The fourth report
contrasted the League method of creating a political organisation, a top-
down method beginning with a constitutional statement, to “a second
method”—“something that must be more than a mere enlargement of
the scope of the League”. It recommended a “bottom-up” approach,
where great power guarantees of the peace “must be built upon eco-
nomic and social as well as political justice” (CSOP 1944, 8). At the time,
the State Department was rapidly evolving immediate functional bodies,
25
Shotwell stated flatly that “a lasting peace” would be impossible, implying that the job
of the committees was to search out such a peace (Shotwell 1961, 312).
186 C. NAVARI
the UNRRA for relief and rehabilitation and a Food and Agriculture pro-
gramme, and contemplating other transitional arrangements on currency
controls, along with the administrative bodies that would be required by
them. The fourth report was essentially a contemplation on how these
might be knit together with the existing international organisations (pri-
marily the Permanent Court and the ILO) into a coherent whole. The
process came to a head in May 1944 with the Design for a Charter of the
General International Organisation.
The Design was classic Shotwell, anticipating the policy trend, in this
case, by a fair amount. The previous November, the Senate had passed
its resolution authorising an “international authority with the power to
prevent aggression”, the Conally Resolution, opening the door to
American participation in a post-war international organisation. As a
result, the design process in the administration had begun to move for-
ward, and Roosevelt had signed off on a “tentative draft”, generally
credited to Pasvolsky, that proposed a unitary rather than regional
organisation (see Williams above). It went so far as to propose a Great
Power Council responsible for security and a General Assembly with
responsibility for everything else but had not got much further
(Hearden, 160). In the meantime, Hull had reconvened the Advisory
Committee, with civilians Shotwell and Eichelberger again in atten-
dance and a tentative date for a conference among the big three to agree
to the main provisions of a “Charter” that had been set for late August,
at Dumbarton Oaks. If the CSOP, Carnegie and the LON organisations
were to influence the process at Dumbarton Oaks, they would have to
move quickly.
The main issue, as the Design was to make clear, was the ordering
among the new bodies and their precise legal relationships. The legal
issues had been brought to the fore with considerable éclat by the publica-
tion in April of “The International Law of the Future” by 200 American
and Canadian lawyers, judges and political scientists, under the initiative
and leadership of Manley Hudson, whose initial meeting in February
1942 had been sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment (Hudson 1944).
Their draft was ready in February, and Shotwell seized upon it and Manley
Hudson to convene another committee. This was “the New York Group”
under Hudson’s directorship, which was to apply the lessons of “the law
of the future” to the Design for a Charter of an International Organisation
with multiple purposes. The group in New York was mostly a sub-
committee of the CSOP (with members Boudreau, Davis, Eichelberger,
Nash, Shotwell, Slausson, Sweetser and Wright) joined by some of the ILF
group members (Hudson, Jessup and Rublee) (Design 1944, 524–26).
The New York group must have had knowledge of Pasvolsky’s “tenta-
tive draft”, since the Design followed his basic architecture closely, but it
widened the conception and clarified the relationships. There was to be a
single organisation made up of a Security Council “in which a relatively
small number of states would be represented”, some of them “continu-
ously”, to “deal with any specific situation in which the peace is threat-
ened” (Design 1944, 522). The detail specified 11 and suggested duration
for those with “chief responsibility for the maintenance of peace” (529).
An Assembly “in which all states would be represented” would “not be
bound by the traditional rule of unanimity”. A “General Commission”,
control of which would be vested in the Assembly, would deal with eco-
nomic and social matters and to it would be assigned the ILO as well as
“other existing organisations”, with the Assembly controlling their bud-
gets. The Assembly would be empowered to create special agencies in vari-
ous fields; it could move on disarmament. But the Council had full powers
in respect of keeping peace, and every state would have the “general obli-
gations to keep the peace which the Charter ordains”. The Charter was
not to propose solutions to problems. “Instead, it would create agencies,
procedures, and methods by which solution might be sought” (Design
1944, 524).
The details anticipated much of what would appear in the UN Charter.
A secretary general could present before the relevant bodies “any interna-
tional matter which he may deem appropriate”. The Assembly should
require “a special majority vote with regard to certain matters”. The
Council could take cognisance, on its own initiative, “of any dispute
between States which is not pending before the court”. A state should not
have a vote in the Council on “any occasion in which its unauthorized use
of force is in question”. The Charter should proclaim the duty of each
state to cooperate in measures “for the extension of human freedom and
for the satisfaction of human needs”. It foresaw some that lay far into the
future, such as the “duty of each State to treat its own population in a
manner which will not violate the dictates of humanity and justice”
(Design 1944, 539). The Charter should prevail over all agreements
between states.
A month before Dumbarton Oaks, Pasvolsky, credited with most of
the drafting of the Charter (see Williams above), prepared a paper com-
paring the tentative proposal circulating in the State Department with
188 C. NAVARI
“significant unofficial proposals” of which there were “only three”. His

file on “Permanent International Organisation: Functions, Powers,
Machinery” contains “Hudson’s Draft”, as he called the International
Law of the Future, the Design and Robert Cecil’s “Draft pact for a Future
International Organisation”, which differed from the other two in being
mainly concerned with direct elections to a world federal body.26 The
Design is more direct to purpose than The International Law of the Future,
and it would be fair to suggest that it served as the architectural source in
Pasvolsky’s drafting, while the ILF would have served as the conceptual
source.
Postscript on the CSOP in New York

In April 1945, the State Department announced to great excitement the
official list of consultants to the UN Conference in New York. They rep-
resented the major civil society organisations in America, among them the
League of Women Voters, the Congress of Industrial Organisations, the
US Chamber of Congress, the American Legion, the American Bar
Association, the National Lawyers Guild, the NAACP and the Rotary,
Lions and Kiwanis clubs.27 Shotwell represented the CSOP, was asked to
chair the consultants and brought 47 members of the CSOP with him as
his consultants, the largest single body there. It represented not merely a
singular honour but actually the role that he had played throughout the
entire inter-war period.
It would be considered by the British a brilliant public relations exercise,
to engage the public directly in government policy-making with a view to
its future support, and it was no doubt intended as such by the US
administration. But it also reflected the degree to which foreign policy had
been politicised during the inter-war years and the extent of public
engagement in questions of war and peace. That engagement included
intense polemics on which institutions “peace” would require in a post-war
world as well as detailed peace planning, which actually continued through
the conference, notably with regard to human rights but also in regard to
26
The three “significant unofficial proposals” are in Pasvolsky Papers Box 4 Folder 8;
Pasvolsky’s comparison is in Pasvolsky Papers Box 4 folder 7 (Shinohara, 185).
27
The Official List of Consultants, Department of State Bulletin 22 April 1945, 724–25;
there were 42 official consultants, each representing one organisation but few came entirely
alone.
education, where some ideas emerging from the consultants were attached
to the Charter as aspirations for future action.
Accounts of these initiatives sometimes give the impression that they
emerged suddenly out of the heat and excitement of the moment. The
case of human rights is illustrative: the story is often told of the Jewish
delegate Proskauer’s impassioned plea to Stettinius, who had succeeded
Hull as the secretary of state and who agreed to carry it “with all my
heart” to the rest of the US delegation (e.g. Loeffler 2013). Shotwell
himself credited the account. But it was Shotwell adjusting history and not
Shotwell the participant-observer. He knew probably better than anybody
among the consultants that human rights first appeared in international
policy-making as the rights of the worker within the ILO, which he him-
self had stressed when editing the official account of the negotiations in
1934. And the person probably most responsible for the emerging inter-
national legal understanding of human rights was Quincy Wright, who
had chaired the political committee of the CSOP and had written “Human
Rights and World Order” for the CSOP in 1943, outlining the problems
of procedure and definition such an endeavour must confront (also in
Pasvolsky’s files and noted by him as the “most extended treatment of the
subject”28). The concern with human rights would be carried forward in
1944 by the American Law Institute in a project,29 which explored the
different ways that human rights were understood globally and would
eventually influence the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. There are
numerous ways to understand such engagements, but not least would be
as democratic intelligence applied to government.
References
Anderson, Lisa. 2005. James T. Shotwell: A Life Devoted to Organising Peace.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Winter2005/llshotwell.
html
Bouchard, Carl. 2001. Le “Plan Américain” Shotwell-Bliss de 1924: Une initiative
méconnue pour le renforcement de la paix. Guerres Mondiales Et Conflits
Contemporains 202/203: 203–225. Accessed May 10, 2017. http://www.
jstor.org/stable/25732757
Pasvolsky Papers Box 4 file 8 (Shinohara, 180).

28
To appear as the 1946 “Statement of Essential Human Rights” (Committee of Advisors
29
1946).
190 C. NAVARI
Clavin, Patricia. 2013. Securing the World Economy. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Committee of Advisers on Essential Human Rights, American Law Institute.
1946. Statement of Essential Human Rights. The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 243: 18–26.
CSOP. 1941. Preliminary Report. International Conciliation 369: 195–202.
———. 1942. Second Report: The Transitional Period. International Conciliation
379: 149–167.
———. 1943. Third Report: The United Nations and the Organisation of Peace.
International Conciliation 389: 203–235.
———. 1944. Fourth Report: Fundamentals of the International Organization.
International Conciliation 396: 5–29.
Design. 1944. Design for a Charter of the General International Organisation. By
Manley O. Hudson et al. International Conciliation, Documents for the Year
1944 402: 521–42.
Dewey, John. 1928. As an Example to Other Nations. The New Republic 54:
88–89.
Eichelberger, Clark. 1977. Organizing for Peace. New York: Harper and Row.
Ferrell, Robert H. 1952. Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand
Pact. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Heardin, Patrick J. 2001. Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order
During World War II. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press.
Hudson, Manley O. 1944. The International Law of the Future. American Bar
Association Journal 30 (10): 560–591.
Josephson, Harold. 1975. James T Shotwell and the Rise of Internationalism in
America. London: Associated University Presses.
Loeffler, James. 2013. The Conscience of America: Human Rights, Jewish Politics,
and American Foreign Policy at the 1945 United Nations San Francisco
Conference. Journal of American History 100 (2): 401–428.
Mitrany, David. 1975. The Functional Theory of Politics. London: Martin
Robertson.
Shinohara, Hatsue. 2012. US International Lawyers in the Interwar Years: A
Forgotten Crusade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shotwell, James T. 1921. Intelligence and Politics. New York: The Century Co.
———. 1924. A Practical Plan for Disarmament. International Conciliation 201:
343–351.
———. 1925. The Problem of Security. Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 120: 159–161.
———. 1927. Are We at a Turning Point in the History of the World. Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace Yearbook 16: 101–112.
———. 1928a. Divergent Paths to Peace. The New Republic 54 (March): 194–196.
———. 1928b. The Slogan of Outlawry. Century 116 (October): 713–719.
———. 1929. War as an Instrument of National Policy: And Its Renunciation in

the Pact of Paris. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
———., ed. 1934. The Origins of the International Labor Organization. New York:
Columbia University Press.
———. 1960. Reflections on War and Peace. In Perspectives on Peace 1910–1960,
ed. J.T. Shotwell et al., 15–30. New York: Praeger.
———. 1961. The Autobiography of James T Shotwell. New York: Bobbs-Merrill
Co.
———. 2013 [1913]. The Religious Revolution of To-day. London: Forgotten
Books.
Williams, Andrew. 1998. Failed Imagination? New World Orders of the Twentieth
Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Cornelia Navari is a honorary senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham,

UK, and Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the University of Buckingham.
She is the author of Internationalism and the State in the 20th Century (2000) and
Public Intellectuals and International Affairs (2012) and the editor of Theorising
International Society: English School Methods (2009), Ethical Reasoning in
International Affairs (2013) and Guide to the English School in international
Studies (with Daniel Green, Wiley Blackwell 2014).
CHAPTER 9
Harold D. Lasswell and the Social Study

of Personal Insecurity
Mikael Baaz
The productivity of American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell

(1902–1978) was legendary. He has written, co-authored, edited, and co-
edited about 60 books. He has also contributed to more than 300 articles
on a diverse range of subjects and has written several hundred reviews and
comments to a variety of different academic journals. In total, his scholarly
writing, which spanned over some five decades, resulted in no less than
four million published words (see Muth 1990). It is possible, as argued by
Arnold A. Rogow (1969, 127), that Lasswell has written more than any
other political scientist in history—at least up until the time of his death.
He has been described both as a “kind of Leonardo da Vinci of the social
sciences” and as a “one-man university”, whose “competence in, and con-
tribution to, anthropology, communications, economics, law, philosophy,
psychiatry, and sociology are enough to make him a political scientist in
the model of classical Greece” (McDougal 1979, 676; Smith 1969, 41).
Lasswell also held the position of Chief of the Experimental Division for
the Study of War Time Communications during the Second World War.
This division analyzed, by applying quantitative content analysis, print and
broadcast communications circulated by Germany and Japan to
M. Baaz (*)
Department of Law, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

194 M. BAAZ
identify various propaganda strategies to demoralize and divide the enemy,

as well as educated and trained governmental personnel for different
assignments in intelligence and propaganda analysis (Sproule 2008, 165;
Postelnicu 2008, 395).
Already in his 20s, Lasswell planned and carried out an “interdisciplin-
ary” research program that emphasized the significance of culture, social
structures, and personality in order to understand various political phe-
nomena. In a discipline, at the time still dominated by historical, legal, and
philosophical methods, he was an innovator, who developed various meth-
odologies during the course of his work, qualitative as well as quantitative
ones, including traditional and non-experimental methods, such as con-
tent analysis and in-depth interviews, but also different experimental and
clinical methods as well as various statistical techniques. All in all, Lasswell
was truly an intellectual pioneer. Not only did he function as a prime
mover in the “behavioral revolution” in the social sciences (McDougal
1979, 675), but also he was genuinely creative in the ways that he per-
formed this role. In a collection of essays that were published in 1969 in
honor of Lasswell, entitled Politics, Personality and Social Science in the
Twentieth Century, Heinz Eulau concluded that “[t]here are few ideas in
contemporary political science that cannot be found in [his] early work”
(p. 16).
On the other hand, Lasswell was not a mainstream figure in American
political science, and fellow political scientists heatedly criticized his
research program. Aside from the general problems encountered by inter-
disciplinary work, the chief objection to Lasswell’s work was his underly-
ing assumption that Freudian psychology represented a kind of intellectual
“philosopher’s stone” that provides infallible truth.1 Also, his research was
considered “elitist”, and the proposal that the politics of the future should
be run by political scientists—or perhaps more correctly “policy scien-
tists”—in a kind of modern version of Plato’s “philosopher kings” was
scarcely uncontentious (Encyclopedia of World Biography 2004). The
ideal of the “policy sciences”, a field that he strongly contributed to and
developed after the end of the Second World War, was to bring together
various social sciences and practical policy-making in order to solve public
1
For a detailed critique of Lasswell’s Freudian approach to politics, see, for example,
Horowitz (1962 ). In this essay, Horwitz characterizes Lasswell as a propagandist for “social
control through science”. Put somewhat differently, as an early advocate of what today con-
stitutes a “bio-political” approach to the social sciences.
HAROLD D. LASSWELL AND THE SOCIAL STUDY OF PERSONAL INSECURITY 195
problems—with the aim of ultimately replacing politics with science

(Turnbull 2008, 73).
In the construction of the future, which he strongly believed could be
socially engineered, Lasswell reserved a unique role for political science.
Until the end of the 1930s, he considered political science to be the most
important of the policy sciences and believed that the discipline would
eventually come to be practiced like law—as a free profession rather than
an “isolated” academic pursuit (Marvick 1980, 220). The societal role
Lasswell gave political science and, later on, other disciplines—in particu-
lar law—was controversial and met with (deep) disbelief and resistance ab
initio. Sometimes Lasswell was before his time, while at other times he was
simply out of step. Put somewhat differently, Lasswell “was hailed as a
pioneer but ignored by most as a mentor” (Marvick 1980, 219).
His (dramatic) research career can, analytically speaking, be divided
into three phases. The first phase occurred between 1918 and 1938 at the
University of Chicago. The second phase, the war years, meant a geo-
graphical relocation to Washington, DC, and ended in 1946. After the
Second World War, he was appointed Professor of International Law at
Yale University and settled permanently in New Haven, Connecticut,
which began an entirely new third phase of Lasswell’s research career,
which more or less lasted until his death in late 1978.
The Chicago Years

Lasswell was born in the small town of Donnellson, Illinois, on February
13, 1902, the son of a Presbyterian clergyman and a schoolteacher. He
spent his early family life in Decatur, Illinois, and moved around with his
family to many other similar small towns throughout Illinois and Indiana.
Contrary to what such an environment (small town) might indicate,
Lasswell was not raised in an intellectual backwater. His childhood and
adolescence were, in fact, rich and included several important individuals,
who exercised a profound influence on him, introducing him to various
ideas that later came to shape him intellectually (Rosten 1969, 6).
His parents were both “symbol analysts”—that is, they made their liv-
ing by thinking, teaching, and giving advice. Other early mentors included
his uncle, a physician who made him familiar with the works of Sigmund
Freud, and some of his high-school teachers. Prominent among the latter
was Lucy H. Nelson who introduced him to the political thinking of Karl
Marx and the progressive ideas of the English physician and social
196 M. BAAZ
reformer Havelock Ellis. It was Nelson who arranged a meeting between

Lasswell and John Dewey, not only a key figure of philosophical pragma-
tism but one of the founders of “functional psychology” and an impor-
tant educational reformer who was in favor of “experimental learning”.
Dewey argued that knowledge should be closely linked to “reality” as well
as being useful, and he (eventually) had a strong influence on Lasswell’s
thinking about “contextuality”, realism and, not least, “problem-solv-
ing”. Another important inspiration was William C. Casey, who was a
high- school civics instructor and later became Professor of Social
Sciences—first at the University of Chicago and then at Columbia
University. Casey stimulated Lasswell’s curiosity and skepticism in various
ways over decades (Almond 1987, 249–50; Muth 1990, 1–3; Smith
1969, 42, 48). He acknowledged Casey’s influence in November 1934,
in the preface to World Politics and Personal Insecurity, recording his
“obligation to an inimitable friend of the last twenty years, William
Cornell Casey … whose great acumen and tempered sensitivity are liber-
ating and fructifying respites from an epoch heavy-laden with rancorous
sterility” (Lasswell 1935, vi).
After completing high school, Lasswell was awarded a scholarship to
the University of Chicago. He entered the University in 1918, at the age
of 16, and completed his bachelor’s degree in Economics and Philosophy
in 1922. Immediately, Lasswell began to work on a PhD in Political
Science, which he completed in 1926. During these important years,
Charles Merriam—the head of the vibrant Political Science Department at
the University of Chicago as well as an active civic reformer—not only
advised him but also served as his (intellectual) mentor in a more general
manner. He was, in terms of “personal solicitude, professional guidance,
and all-around helpfulness, the most important influence upon Lasswell in
his student years” (Smith 1969, 44–54).
Merriam, who in 1903 had written A History of American Political
Theories, an important analysis of various political movements that strongly
supported the emerging Progressive movement in the USA, was, at the
time, in the forefront of efforts to direct political science away from its
political theoretical and legal orientation toward “behavioralism”—an
approach that emphasized the importance of empirical work, based on
rigorous methodological considerations and elaborate methods, often
borrowed from other disciplines. More concretely, he proposed that the
psychological and sociological bases of political behavior should be
explored and that the political phenomena should be analyzed quantitatively.
The overall aim was to make the study of politics more scientific (see fur-
ther Almond 2002, Ch. 3). Merriam’s profound influence on his young
student is clearly displayed in Lasswell’s doctoral dissertation, Propaganda
Technique in the World War, which was published in 1927. It was his inter-
est in the importance of morale, propaganda, and civic training in the
exploration of political behavior that triggered Lasswell to write on the
topic (Almond 1987, 250–52; Merriam 1921, Muth 1990, 3–8; Smith
1969, 49, 52–57).
The dissertation is a systematic effort to place the experience of war
propaganda between 1914 and 1918 in the context of a theory of politics.
The work is partly based on field research in Europe—in London, Berlin
and Geneva—where Lasswell had interviewed governmental officials as
well as scholars on various aspects of this propaganda experience. By this
book, with its combination of intellectual innovation and realism that is
characteristic for all of his later work, Lasswell basically invents “propa-
ganda analysis”, that is, a set of techniques for studying manifest and latent
content of collective communication flows. This initiative later grew into
the greater fields of “content analysis” and “communication theory”. The
book was widely recognized by his contemporaries and, today, is still con-
sidered to be an important study in communication theory (Almond
1987, 252; Smith 1969, 56–57). Many years later, Lasswell described his
dissertation as:
a modest spinoff of an initial plan so grand that obtaining a Ph.D. would

have become a life work. The original project was to devise a theoretical
scheme for the study of “international attitudes” and to survey the literature
for plausible hypotheses and pertinent data. The scheme has never been
executed in detail. It has, however, been an important topic-selector in sub-
sequent research. (Lasswell 1972, ix, quoted in Muth 1990, 8–9)
In 1927, Lasswell was appointed Assistant Professor in Political Science at

Chicago. He then started to do research in “political psychology” and
embarked upon collaboration with two individuals, psychiatrist Harry
S. Sullivan and anthropologist Edward Sapir, whom he would come to
work with for many years. Lasswell was granted a postdoctoral fellowship
in 1927 and spent most of the following academic year in Berlin undergo-
ing psychoanalysis by Theodor Reik, who was a first-generation disciple of
Freud and a well-known scholar on psychoanalytic theory. During this
year, he also visited other leading psychiatrists and scholars in Vienna,
198 M. BAAZ
Budapest, and Prague. This experience cemented his psychological

approach to political science. He then returned to the USA and continued
to examine psychological aspects of political behavior—in late 1928 and
1929—by consulting the psychiatric directors of some of the most impor-
tant mental institutions on the American east coast in order to, among
other things, get access to the personality records of individuals who had
been treated for various mental conditions. In addition to this, he also
made in-depth interviews with a number of volunteers who were not
treated for any mental condition (Almond 1987, 253–54; Muth 1990,
9–11; Smith 1969, 57).
A number of papers published between 1925 and 1929 display his
interest in political psychology and political personality. In one, “The
Problem of Adequate Personality Records: A Proposal” (1929a),
Lasswell argues—by reflecting on some of the difficulties he had experi-
enced in getting hold of the empirical material that he needed for his
research—that psychiatrists should keep adequate records of their work
and make them available to bona fide researchers. In another paper,
“The Study of the Ill as a Method of Research into Political Personalities”
(1929b), he argues the case for the use of data on mentally ill persons
who have some involvement in politics as a method of analyzing the
relationship between personality and politics. These two articles, which
were directly based on his European and American inquiries, and
included the usage of in-depth interviews as well as clinical experiments,
were essential in preparing his next work: Psychopathology and Politics
(1930) (Almond 1987, 253).
Best considered as a companion to his doctoral thesis, it was the first
relatively systematic and empirical study of the psychological aspects of
political behavior. It adopts various psychoanalytic methods to political
analysis, by examining private motives and personality disturbances that
spur political actors and give vitality to political movements. The publica-
tion of Psychopathology and Politics coincided with the very beginning of
the culture and personality movement in anthropology and psychiatry and
it contributed strongly to making his early reputation as a behaviorally
oriented theorist. It established him as the founder of “political psychol-
ogy” as well as signaled his “commitment to political science as therapeu-
tic enterprise”, prefiguring his future contribution to the “politics of
prevention” (Almond 1987, 253–54; Muth 1990, 11; Smith 1969,
59–63; See also Clark 1973; Clarke and Donovan 1980; Eulau 1968;
Roazen 1987). What Lasswell presented as a (provisional) theoretical
framework and set of hypotheses in Psychopathology and Politics, in fact,

became a starting point for his research during the 1930s.
In 1932, Lasswell was promoted to Associate Professor in Political
Science. This was in the same year that the article “The Triple Appeal
Principle: A Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Political and Social Science”
was published. In this article, he attempted to work out some political and
sociological equivalents of Freud’s divisions of the personality into id, ego,
and superego components, arguing that “institutions, relationships, and
behaviors of all sort relate to id, ego, or superego demands, and to a very
large degree derive their strength and survival capacity from their ability to
gratify such demands” (Rogow 1969, 133).
In order to develop and further implement the methodological com-
ponent of his research program, Lasswell established a model laboratory
in his own offices in the Social Science Research Building at the University
of Chicago. In collaboration with the earlier mentioned Sullivan and
another psychiatrist, William A. White, he now developed a “procedure”
under which various physical characteristics—including “skin conductiv-
ity”, respiration, pulse rate, and body movements—of individuals being
interviewed were measured as the spoken word and recorded. This ini-
tiative was one the earliest efforts seeking to link psychological, behav-
ioral, and autonomic variables with communication and personality
processes. The (preliminary) results from these clinical experiments were
reported in three pioneering articles that were published in various psy-
choanalytic journals from the mid-1930s onward (see Lasswell 1935,
1936a, 1937a).
If his clinical research was carried out in order to strengthen the meth-
odological point of departure that is expressed in Psychopathology and
Politics, then the book World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935) was
an elaboration of the (provisional) theoretical approach that is spelled out
in the last chapters of the very same book. Not only Lasswell himself but
also many other scholars consider it to be his most important work (see
e.g. Muth 1990, 12; Merelman 1981, 479).
In World Politics and Personal Insecurity, Lasswell fuses his two different
but complementary strands of research (of this time)—on the one hand,
propaganda analysis, with a focus on state symbolism, and, on the other
hand, political psychology, which concentrates on the individual psyche—
into a comprehensive working model, which he labels “configurative anal-
ysis”. The model, in which “the political process is defined as a conflict
over the distribution of the dominant social values—income, deference,
200 M. BAAZ
and safety—by and among elites”, allowed for making inquiries into every
aspect of the activities of individual human beings in world social process,
political as well as other (Almond 1987, 257). Based on lectures given at
the University of Chicago in 1932 and 1933, it is in this book that he
proposes the formula that is so closely associated with his name—“politics
is the study of who gets what, when, and how” (1935, v, 3, italics added). A
much briefer book, Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How, was pub-
lished a year after, in 1936. As the title indicates, it presents the key argu-
ments from World Politics and Personal Insecurity in a more concise and
schematic form and is the closest Lasswell ever came to writing a
textbook.
The four books—(1) Propaganda Technique in the World War; (2)
Psychopathology and Politics; (3) World Politics and Personal Insecurity; and
(4) Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How—were written over a period
of ten years and constitute Lasswell’s most important contribution to
political theory (cf. Almond 1987, 259).
During this productive first phase of his research career, Lasswell also
did a number of other things. While in China as a visiting professor at
Yenching University in 1937, he published the article “Sino-Japanese
Crisis: The Garrison State Versus the Civilian State” (1937b; Muth 1990,
13). He returned to the idea of the garrison state—that is, a state that is
organized to primarily serve its own needs for military security—in a well-
known article from 1941 entitled “The Garrison State”. It considered the
possibility that the world was moving toward a world of “garrison states”,
that is, “a world in which the specialists on violence are the most powerful
group in society”, leaving the specialist on bargaining, “the businessman”
(and also by extension the diplomat) behind, and moving toward the
supremacy of “the soldier” (Lasswell 1941a, 455).
Beyond this, he carried out two bigger projects from the mid-1930s
onward. On the one hand, in 1935, Lasswell consolidated his earlier inter-
est in propaganda research and published Propaganda and Promotional
Activities: An Annotated Bibliography, together with Ralph D. Case and
Bruce L. Smith. On the other hand, in an effort to further develop the
ideas that were elaborated in World Politics and Personal Insecurity, he,
together with some of his graduate students, undertook a thorough field
study of Communist propaganda and political agitators and organizers
among the unemployed in the city of Chicago between 1929 and 1934.
This research was reported in World Revolutionary Propaganda: A Chicago
Study, which Lasswell co-authored with Dorothy Blumenstock. At the
time of its publication in 1939, he had already resigned from his associate
professorship at the University of Chicago and left the city (Almond 1987,
259–60).
The War Years in Washington

There are several reasons why he left the University of Chicago. Lasswell—
together with various practitioners and administrators as well as academ-
ics, including the earlier mentioned Sullivan and Sapir—had spoken for a
long time about establishing a research institute that would not only com-
bine the study of culture, society, and personality but would also contrib-
ute to making the world a better place. Also, Robert M. Hutchins, who
became the president of the University of Chicago in 1929 in the face of
the Great Depression, grew skeptical of the ability of empirical research in
the social sciences for solving various practical problems and Merriam’s
department was criticized on grounds of “psychologizing” and “number
crunching”. Hutchins’ understanding of political science was humanistic
and deductive, not to say Aquinian. By consequence, the hospitality of the
university to the empirical social sciences had notably declined by the end
of the 1930s (Almond 1987, 260–61).
Not only did the group’s fund-raising plans for the institute fail, but the
relationship between Lasswell and Sullivan also faded for various reasons,
and Sapir had died in early 1939. Together, this contributed to Lasswell
proceeding to Washington DC, to be near the center of policy-making
but also facing a somewhat uncertain future. Over the next few years, he
held various posts from his base in Washington. In 1938, he had assumed
a position with the Washington School of Psychiatry, as well as a visiting
lectureship in the Law School at Yale University, where he taught at semi-
nars in association with Myres S. McDougal, whom he had met a few years
earlier. He only held the post in Washington for a year. In contrast, he
stayed at Yale University until his death in 1978.
In 1940, the Rockefeller Foundation invited Lasswell to apply for
research funding so as to set up an organization, administratively housed
in the Library of Congress. The aim of the organization, the Experimental
Division for the Study of War Time Communications, was, drawing on
Lasswell’s experience with First World War propaganda, twofold. On the
one hand, the organization would perfect quantitative content analysis,
survey research, as well as experimental small-group research and, on the
other hand, it would directly apply these methods to the immediate
202 M. BAAZ
analysis of organizations (for the benefit of the Department of Justice)

and to the training of personnel for various assignments in propaganda
analysis (Sproule 2008, 165). In consequence, Lasswell played an active
role as a consultant to the Office of Facts and Figures and its successor
organization, the Office of War Information, as well as the Office of
Strategic Services, the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service of the
Federal Communications Commission, and the Army’s Psychological
Warfare Branch. In addition, he also gave expert testimonies in a num-
ber of trials during the war years and was instrumental in the effort to
have quantitative content analysis admitted as evidence in federal courts
(Almond 2002, 84).
The methodological and substantive pay-off of Lasswell’s wartime
research regarding propaganda/communication—understood as: who says
what to whom through which channel and with what effect? (Lasswell
1948a)—was reported in several publications, including The Language of
Politics: Studies in Quantitative Semantics (1949). This volume, which
was edited together with Nathan Leites, Almond (2002, 84–85) writes,
“places mass communications content in the context of domestic and
international politics, offers solutions for the principal methodological
problems of quantitative content analysis, both as a judicial tool and as a
technique of intelligence gathering”. On an overall level, the position as
Chief of the Experimental Division for the Study of War Time
Communications at the Library of Congress allowed him to further elabo-
rate on his “conceptual framework within which inquiry into the political
process may fruitfully proceed” as well as linking knowledge to reality and
using it as a problem-solving means (Almond 1987, 260–62; Muth 1990,
14–15).
During the Second World War, it was Lasswell’s ambition to set up
continual quantitative analysis of the content of the most important print
and broadcast media of the major nations—enemy, neutral, or friend. This
project, which he termed “world attention survey” (Lasswell 1941b), was
vast and not possible to realize during the war. A much more modest proj-
ect on the theme on propaganda analysis was carried out in the Office of
War Information and the Federal Communications Commission (Almond
2002, 85). But after the end of the Second World War, he carried out a
number of comparative studies of political symbols and elites. Volumes
reporting the findings of this research were published during the 1950s,
the most important one being The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in
Scope and Method (1951), which Lasswell co-edited with Daniel Lerner.
One profound transformation that occurred during the war years was
that Lasswell changed his thinking about values in relation to democratic
society. Before 1940, he was, David Easton (1950, 452) writes, “reluctant
as a social scientist to state that he preferred one political system or set of
goals to another”. After 1940, on the contrary, “he believes passionately
that the social sciences are doomed to sterility unless they accept the con-
temporary challenge and say something about our ultimate social
objectives.”
Progressive Political Science

Lasswell grew up during the “Progressive Era”, a period of widespread
social activism and political reform in the USA, which culminated in
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the “New Deal”. During his youth, Lasswell
was influenced by the prevailing zeitgeist in general but also, as indicated
above, the Presbyterianism of his family, in particular the challenging
question of how evil can be turned into good, Freudian psychoanalysis,
which deals with the confrontation of neurosis with psychotherapy, and
the Marxist-sociologist idea that the traditional and reactionary should be
confronted with “revolution” (Almond 1987, 256).
Considering his early influences, the fact that he met Dewey when he
was young and given the general social and political milieu of the time it
is not very surprising that Lasswell was receptive to and also became heav-
ily influenced by the pragmatism that was taught at the University of
Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s, especially as put forward by Dewey
and George H. Mead. Put more straightforwardly, pragmatism came to
serve as the philosophical point of departure for his entire research
program.
In order to generate knowledge, pragmatist-inspired social scientists
utilize methods and approaches that understand and combine the strengths
and limitations of different research traditions and methods and which
combine and adapt—through translation as well as other techniques—dif-
ferent parts “while being fully attentive to their moorings in different
descriptions of the world” (Kratochwil 2009, 13). Lasswell’s research pro-
gram, which focuses on individual human beings in world social processes,
is an interesting example in this regard—seeking to translate pragmatism
into operative social sciences research.
From the very beginning of his research career, Lasswell focused on
interactions between individual human beings in a (world) political and
204 M. BAAZ
social arena. But his ideas developed from the individual first and then to
the collective. Lasswell’s doctoral dissertation, Propaganda Technique in
the World War (1927), was a study of collective communication in relation
to the experience of war propaganda. In his next book, Psychopathology
and Politics (1930), Lasswell adapted psychoanalytic methods to political
analysis, in contra-posed dimension, and brings the study of individual
personalities to touch on inquiry in collective political behavior. In the
preface to the book, he writes:
An understanding of political life can be sought by examining collective pro-

cesses distributively or intensively. In my Propaganda Technique in the World
War … I undertook to analyze the factors which modified collective atti-
tudes by examining symbols to which many millions of people had been
exposed, without paying heed to the order under which these symbols
entered into the experience of any particular person. In this preliminary trea-
tise on Psychopathology and Politics, I am likewise concerned with the factors
which impinge upon collective attitudes, but the method is radically different.
It is no longer a question of inspecting the symbols to which innumerable
individuals have been exposed; the present starting-point is the lengthy scru-
tiny of the histories of specific individuals. (1930, xxiii, emphasis added)
Psychopatholgoy and Politics focused on political leaders. By making use of

Freudian psychology, he believed that the psychoanalysis of political lead-
ers would uncover important knowledge about politics in general. Among
other things, Lasswell thought that knowledge about the childhood sexual
experiences of political leaders would disclose why some were conserva-
tives and others were radicals and why some were administrators and oth-
ers were agitators. This sort of knowledge, he argued, would have
important implications for future politics. As the use of psychoanalysis was
accepted and thus became more widespread, the “social psychiatrist”
would replace the “social philosopher”. In consequence, the politics of the
future could become “preventive” rather than restorative in nature; prob-
lems would be solved less by discussion and more by psychoanalytical
therapy. This rather radical redefinition of the problem of politics is what
Lasswell termed the “politics of prevention” (Almond 1987, 254; Your
Dictionary 2016).
Chapters 6–9 in Psychopathology and Politics present the empirical mate-
rial of the book, which is mainly in-depth interviews and clinical material
that Lasswell collected in Europe and the USA during the latter half of the
1920s. The material would give rise to clinically supported hypotheses
regarding the personality, etiological bases of recruitment to different

kinds of political attitudes and roles, regarding who would become a con-
servative and who would become a radical, who would become an admin-
istrator and who would become an agitator, and so on. In addition to the
above, the empirical material also clarifies the relationship between per-
sonality variables and ideological tendencies, such as anarchism, socialism,
pacifism, internationalism, and ultra-patriotism (Almond 1987, 254–55).
The methodological issues discussed in the book include the following:
(1) the usage of “life histories” in political science; (2) the usage of the
abnormal or the deviant for the understanding of the normal; (3) the in-
depth interview as a mode of research in the psychological bases of politi-
cal behavior; (4) the technique of free association as a method of collecting
data on politically relevant attitudes and feelings; and (5) the dimensions
used in typologies of politicians (Almond 1987, 255). Lasswell derived his
general theory of political behavior from Psychopathology and Politics. He
expressed it as a formula: p}d}r = P, “where p equals private motives; d
equals displacement onto a public object; r equals rationalization in terms
of public interest; P equals political man; } equals transformed into”
(Lasswell 1930, 75–76).
Lasswell held on to this basic formulation of political personality for the
rest of his life. In the book Power and Personality (1948b), which analyzes
power seekers who “sublimate” their personal frustrations into power, he
specified among the necessary causal conditions severe childhood depriva-
tions, self-blame for deprivation, indulgences sufficient enough to coun-
teract deprivations to some degree, and a history of past indulgences
secured due to the exercise of power. In the book he also advances a typol-
ogy of political personality. The actors in the typology, including agitators,
administrators, as well as theorists, are all driven by the underlying person-
ality configuration he describes.
Lasswell’s conception of politics is, as noted by Richard M. Merleman
(1981, 473), quite “anti-political”. This has to do with the fact that he
understands power in functional rather than institutional or positional
terms. To Lasswell, power is simply “the exercise of influence by the
threatened use of severe sanctions” (Ibid). From this follows that “politi-
cal types (who specialize in power) may be found in domains not conven-
tionally understood as ‘governmental’, while government itself may (and
hopefully will) recruit many who are not themselves political types” (Ibid.,
italics added). His hostility to the political should therefore not be seen
as being anti-governmental, but rather as a hope that conflict and
206 M. BAAZ
destructive politics that is created by “political men” could be mitigated

by psychotherapy and, ultimately, exorcized from democratic societies
(Almond 1987, 255; Merelman 1981, 473).
In World Politics and Personal Insecurity, Lasswell elaborates on the
theoretical perspectives developed in Psychopathology and Politics as well as
merges them with ideas initially developed in Propaganda Technique in the
World War to formulate a theory of collective behavior; the result is “con-
figurative analysis”—a model that combines state symbolism and the indi-
vidual psyche in order to analyze politics and political processes. In the
first chapter of World Politics and Personal Insecurity, he writes:
Political analysis is the study of changes in the composition of the values

patterns of society. Representative values are safety, income, and deference.
Since a few members of any community have the most of each value, a dia-
gram of the pattern of distribution of any value resembles a pyramid. The
few who get the most of any value are the élite; the rest are the rank and file.
An élite preserves its ascendancy by manipulating symbols, controlling sup-
plies, and applying violence. Less formally expressed, politics is the study of
who gets what, when, and how. (Lasswell 1935, 3, italics in original)
Lasswell (1935, 4) continues: “The analysis of world politics therefore

implies the consideration of the shape and composition of the value pat-
terns of mankind as whole.”
From the idea that political analysis is the study of changes in the com-
position of power patterns in society and, by extension, that composition
depends on power, Lasswell argues that research in political science
demands the analysis of the social origins, skills, personal traits, attitudes,
values, and assets of world elites, as well as the changes in these over time.
Correct understanding of political processes, according to Lasswell, calls
not only for a combination of “equilibrium” and “developmental analysis”
but also for the adoption of “contemplative” and “manipulative” attitudes
toward political change (Lasswell 1935, Ch. 1).
Having introduced the method of configurative analysis, Lasswell turns
to a discussion of “symbols”:
The role of … justifying symbols in politics is one of the principal topics of

analytic inquiry. With which acts are particular symbols connected? How are
justifying symbols grouped geographically throughout the world? How are
they related to one another and to the whole context of political change?
(Lasswell 1935, 29)
In Chaps. 2–6, Lasswell then relates conflicts among and within nations
not only to human aggressive tendencies but also to the structural condi-
tions of international relations, as well as domestic societies. Chapters 7–9
discuss “conditions”—in particular the consequences of economic and
class structure as well as the media of communication. The next chapter
examines personality, politics, and culture in relation to trends in American
society, including “the possibilities of the emergence of right-wing extrem-
ism and fascism and the approach of political psychiatry in a politics of
prevention”. In Chap. 11, which is entitled “In Quest of a Myth; The
Problem of World Unity”, Lasswell, in psychoanalytical and sociological
terms, discusses the prospects of social justice and peace.
Over and above everything, the book is an illustration of the Lasswellian
approach to politics. He concludes this, in several respects, important
book as follows:
Clearly, insofar as politics is the management of symbols [e.g. “God”, “coun-

try”, “civilization”, “humanity”, “International law”, “a war to end war”,
and a “lasting peace”] and practices related to the shape and composition of
the value patterns of society, politics can assume no static certainty; it can
strive for dynamic techniques of navigating the tides of insecurity generated
within the nature of man in culture. (Lasswell 1935, 29, 286, italics added)
The book has been portrayed as “a systematic, multidisciplinary study in

the general historical sociology, or the sociological history, of the entire
world in recent centuries” (Smith 1969, 69, italics added).
Only a year after the publication of World Politics and Personal
Insecurity, in 1936, did Lasswell, as indicated above, elaborate the less
formal definition of politics that is presented in the first paragraph of this
complex and somewhat inaccessible book in Politics: Who Gets What, When
and How (1936b). It presented more or less the same argument, however,
in a (much) more concise and schematic way. Gabriel Almond has
described the Lasswell’s idea of the political process as:
the struggle among elite groups over such representative values as income,
deference, and safety. The actors in these conflictual processes are groups
organized around skill, class, personality, and attitude characteristics; they
employ in different ways and with different effects the political instrumen-
talities of symbol manipulation, material rewards and sanctions, violence,
and institutional practices. (Almond 1987, 259)
208 M. BAAZ
On publication, World Politics and Personal Insecurity received a mixed

reception. It was generally met more enthusiastically in Europe than in the
USA (see e.g. Catlin 1935). In the latter, it was met with deep disbelief
and disappointment in several quarters. Princeton Professor Walter Lincoln
Whittlesey delivered one of the most hostile reviews ever printed in the
American Political Science Review.
In this excellently printed, tempestuous, and obstreperous volume, Dr.

Lasswell leaps about the cosmos of sociological-psychobiological-obstetrical-
psychiatric political science with the abandon of a flock of sparrows at a
horse-show. The title may seem to include everything from here to there, but
the book actually does so, and with a rattling fusillade of partially related
footnotes—What this book contributes is the author’s modernist-cubist
anfractuosities of dialectical metaphysics. It is hard to see how universities can
help our laboring, lumbering democracy by telling people what they know in
a language they will not understand, and burdened by a cluttering universal-
ity of casual allusion. There is an adequate index. (Whittlesey 1935, 500–501)
The heavy criticism from some fellow-American political scientists, who

argued that Lasswell’s approach to politics was too broad and incompre-
hensible, did not prevent him from employing the same ideas for the (fur-
ther) development of the policy sciences.
Progressivism as Policy Science

From 1940 onward, when Lasswell changed his thinking about values in
relation to democratic society, he moved from being “amoral” to arguing
that the social sciences should concern themselves with the preservation of
democracy, and he nourished a grand vision that the policy sciences should
bring together the social sciences, in particular, political science and law,
with practical policy-making and address fundamental problems, national
as well as international, reaching from employment to world peace (Easton
1950,455, 459; Torgerson 1995, 238; Turnbull 2008, 74).
Lasswell explicitly framed his vision of the policy sciences as an adaption
of pragmatism—in particular, Dewey’s general approach to public policy
in general and the Deweyan conception of knowledge as “problem-
solving” (Torgerson 1995, 236; Turnbull 2008, 75; see further Lasswell
1951, 1971). The “problem-orientation” should, he argued, be the
distinctive outlook of the practical policy sciences. Lasswell also adopted
Dewey’s understanding of problems and solutions in terms of experience.
In the book, A Pre-View of Policy Sciences (1971), acknowledging that

problems vary enormously in range and scope, he writes that “[b]y defini-
tion a problem is a perceived discrepancy between goals and an actual or
anticipated state of affairs” (p. 56). The policy sciences as a distinct field,
Lasswell (1951a) argued, should be characterized by a particular focus on
problems, problems that are to be addressed with the goal of realizing
“human dignity” (see further Lasswell 1951a, 15; 1951b, 5; 1971,
41–43). In short, the policy sciences should be “the policy sciences of
democracy” (Dryzek 1989; Easton 1950; Farr et al. 2006).
But opposed to Dewey’s aim to separate practical from abstract science,
Lasswell believed that the policy sciences had much in common with logi-
cal Positivism. Despite his “scientific outlook”, Lasswell, in contrast to
other positivists, did not, at least not after 1940, make any distinction
between questions of facts and values. He argued that the policy sciences
do involve values because the goals of policy-making should be to produce
the type of human relations that is the most desirable. He understood
values as categories of preferred events: high levels of productive employ-
ment rather than mass unemployment, peace rather than war, and, ulti-
mately, democracy rather than dictatorship. But even though values
introduce an element of subjectivity to science, which Lasswell acknowl-
edged, this does not undermine the “objectivity” of science, since non-
objective values could be considered in advance when determining the
goals of policy inquiry, after which the “scholar proceeds with maximum
objectivity and uses all available methods” (Lasswell 1951a, 11). In spite
of including values when choosing problems, the “process scientific policy-
making”, Lasswell argued, required “scrupulous objectivity and maximum
technical ingenuity in executing the projects undertaken”. Setting valuable
questions is thus, he believes, something completely different from scien-
tifically solving them in practice. Lasswell was deeply convinced that politi-
cal philosophy, with its specific methods, was no better equipped than the
social sciences in setting the goals for society (Lasswell 1951a, 14).
However attractive this idea may be, it is by no means unproblematic.
Already in 1950, David Easton, when discussing whether political science
or any other of the social sciences can say if “the goals of a democratic
society are superior to those of dictatorial communism” (p. 450), remarked
that Lasswell:
is a scholar divided against himself. The traditional social scientist in him fights
for the positivistic conception of values as objects of desire: the emerging
210 M. BAAZ
social scientist of the future, in a sense, make statements that lead in the direc-
tion of a scientific validation of values. The futurist seems to be defending the
thesis that social science can indicate whether, for example, the ultimate goals
embodied in the western tradition are superior to those of fascism or of dicta-
torial communism. (p. 453)
Easton concludes by arguing that:
[i]n the writings of Lasswell there is adumbrated the most extreme claim
that social science can make. The suggestion appears that to convert political
science to a policy science, a discipline contributing to the solution of social
problems, new referential principles are required; there appears in embryo
the further claim that even the goals upon which social policy must be based
can be established with the procedures of a fully developed science of man—
The claim is broad and perhaps arrogant and premature, but it has a history
in the last three centuries that cannot be ignored. It is a challenge to the
social sciences that they cannot avoid or escape. (1950, 476–77)
Even though Lasswell’s influence has declined significantly in the social

sciences since his death, contemporary scholars continue to draw upon his
ideas and repeat his key themes—particularly the challenges concerning
public problems, democracy, and the policy sciences.
Postscript: Yale and the Progressive Legacy

in International Law
Of particular interest in Lasswell’s wartime production is the article enti-

tled “Legal Education and Public Policy: Professional Training in the
Public Interest”, which was written together with Myers McDougal and
published in 1943. Starting from the idea that lawyers were the principal
policy-makers in a modern democratic society, Lasswell and McDougal
(1943, 206) argued that “[t]he proper function of our law schools is, in
short, to contribute to the training of policy-makers for the ever more
complete achievement of the democratic values that constitute the pro-
fessed ends of American polity.” Besides being the first article co-authored
with McDougal, it also, in very concrete terms, portends Lasswell’s future
research interest—namely to further theorize the policy sciences. The article
foresees that in future, he would consider law rather than political science
to be the most important of the policy sciences.
Lasswell and McDougal came together partly because Lasswell was, as

he wrote almost 40 years later, “on the lookout for a colleague learned in
the law and highly motivated to execute the much-touted but little-
realized aspiration toward a valid integration of ‘law and the social sci-
ences’” (Lasswell 1976, xiii, xvi). At the time, Yale Law School was the
center of (American) “Legal Realism” defined as a diversified jurispruden-
tial movement, most of whose members sought to annihilate Positivism,
expose rules as camouflage, and reveal law as no more than decisions of
human beings who responded, with varying degrees of consciousness, to
political, economic, psychological, and even organic stimuli, (Falk et al.
1998, 728–29). Such an approach to the law, quite obviously, appeared
attractive to Lasswell:
Lasswell’s insistence on contextuality, his wide-ranging and creative use of

social science methodology, his psychoanalytic applications, and his sophis-
ticated conception of power, combined with his problem-solving orienta-
tion, provided myriad points for common interests and collaboration. (Falk
et al. 1998, 729)
Ultimately, the two scholars were attracted to one another other due to
dissatisfaction with their own separate disciplines, Lasswell with political
science and McDougal with law. They were both convinced, if on some-
what different grounds, that the law could not be understood in isolation
from the context in which it appeared and also that the law could play a
crucial role in social engineering (Hathaway 2007, 553). In 1946, Lasswell
was appointed Professor of International Law at Yale and moved to New
Haven, Connecticut.
By this, the third phase of his research career had begun. During this
phase, the focus of his work changed (Marvick 1980, 226). From propos-
als for reform in legal education to studies in world public order and
human dignity, the Lasswell-McDougal collaboration culminated in the
“creation” of the so-called New Haven School of International Law (see
further e.g. Duxbury 1995; Lasswell and McDougal 1992). In “Legal
Education and Public Policy”, which is today still one of the most quoted
and cited American law review articles ever published, the two associates
presented a new legal theory, which they describe as “configurative” and
“policy-oriented” (Falk et al. 1998, 729–730; Hathaway 2007, 554).
Their process-oriented policy science inspired an approach to jurispru-
dence that was truly interdisciplinary and sought to integrate law with
212 M. BAAZ
various social sciences, as well as to bring all available tools and skills to
solving legal problems with the ultimate goal of constructing a “world
community of human dignity”.
In contrast to the, then dominant, theory of legal Positivism, the juris-
prudence developed by Lasswell and McDougal does not view law as a
“body of rules” but rather as a process of authoritative decision-making
about how preferred values—“power, wealth, enlightenment, skill, well-
being, affection, respect and rectitude”—are to be produced and distrib-
uted in society. For a follower of legal Positivism, who defines a “problem”
as basically a conflict between two or more parties, the main objective of
legal analysis is to separate the legal aspects of a conflict (situation) and
then to look for answers on how it can be solved by reference to the given
rules, applied by means of logical derivation. The role of the legal scholar
is thus, put simply, to understand and apprise, not to influence the produc-
tion and distribution of values in society (see Falk et al. 1998, 730).
Lasswell and McDougal started from completely different premises and
argued that the law should serve human beings and promote a public
order of “human dignity”—that is, a public order that “approximates the
optimum access by all human beings to all the things they cherish”. The
aim is not simply to understand the way the world works but rather “to
shape it” (Hathaway 2007; Reisman et al. 2007, 576).
Even though Lasswell and McDougal (1943) initially envisioned the
comprehensive application of their theory to reform the entire law school
curriculum, it rapidly came to focus on international law. The ultimate aim
of the NHS of International Law, the name that Lasswell and McDougal’s
theoretical approach and its proponents now generally refer to, is to pro-
duce and distribute a “universal order of human dignity”, which reduces
individual insecurity in world politics by securing the widespread enjoy-
ment of the preferred values (Scobbie 2010, 71).
Conclusion
The research program that Lasswell developed in Chicago under the
supervision and influence of Charles Merriam during the 1920s and 1930s
was questioned, criticized, and resisted by traditional political scientists
from the very beginning. But from late 1940s onward, Lasswell found
new supporters in a younger generation of scholars who argued in favor of
a behavioral revolution. By the 1950s he was a giant within political sci-
ence—in many eyes “the most original and productive scholar of his day”
(Almond 1987, 1). Lasswell was elected to the presidency of American

Political Science Association (APSA) in 1955 at the height of his influence.
Although the behavioral influence of political science remained through-
out the 1970s and Lasswell continued to write for more than two decades,
until just before his death in 1978, his methodological influence gradually
declined during the 1960s and 1970s (Farr et al. 2006, 579).
If Lasswell’s methodological influence on political science has gone
from gradual decline to almost non-existent, the opposite is true in terms
of international law. After the end of the Cold War, the influence of the
NHS of International Law increased profoundly—and in particular since
Bill Clinton became the president in 1993. Clinton, who was a former
student to McDougal at the Yale Law School, aimed precisely to reduce
personal insecurity in world politics, in the true spirit of the NHS of
International Law, by promoting democracy worldwide, the practice of
“humanitarian intervention”, and the practice of “regime change”. US
foreign policy as formulated by Clinton, which aimed to promote human
dignity, has not been substantially altered by either the George W. Bush or
the Barack Obama administrations (see also Baaz 2013, 2015).
Lasswell perhaps failed to revolutionize political science by turning it
into a policy science, but in spite of disbelief and resistance, he has defi-
nitely transformed the “American” view of international law—what it is
and what it is for, not only in theory but also in practice (cf. Baaz 2013,
2016).
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———. 1951a. The Policy Orientation. In The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments
in Scope and Method, ed. Daniel Lerner and Harold D. Lasswell. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
———. 1951b. The World Revolution of Our Time: A Framework for Basic Policy
Research, Hoover Institute Studies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 1971. A Preview of Policy Sciences. New York: Elsevier.
———. 1976. Introduction. In Toward Order and Human Dignity: Essays in
Honor of Myres S. McDougal, ed. Michael Reisman and Burns H. Weston.
New York: Free Press.
Lasswell, Harold D., and Dorothy Blumenstock. 1939. World Revolutionary
Propaganda: A Chicago Study. Santa Barbara: Greenwood-Heinemann.
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Policy: Professional Training in the Public Interest. Yale Law Journal 52 (2):
202–295.
Lasswell, Harold D., Nathan Leites, and Associates. 1949. Language of Politics;
Studies in Quantitative Semantics. New York: George W. Stewart, Publisher,
Inc.
Lasswell, Harold D., and Myres S. McDougal. 1992. Jurisprudence for a Free
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Merriam, Charles. 1921. The Present State of the Study of Politics. American
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Miscellaneous
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7, 2016. www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Harold_Dwight_Lasswell.aspx
Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal: Jurisprudence for a Free Society.
London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal: Jurisprudence for a Free Society.
London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
Lasswell, Harold D., Ralph D. Casey and Bruce L. Smith. 1935. Propaganda and
Promotional Activities: An Annotated Bibliography. Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press.
Mikael Baaz is Associate Professor of International Law and Associate Professor

of Peace and Conflict Studies. He is working as Senior Lecturer in International
Law at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg,
and as Senior Lecturer in Political Science, University West. His articles have
appeared in e.g. Journal of International Relations and Development, International
Studies Review, Journal of Political Power, Asian Politics and Policy, Leiden Journal
of International Law, Law and Society, and International Journal of Constitutional
Law.
PART III
Dismantling the Consensus

CHAPTER 10
The Niebuhr Brothers’ Debate and the Ethics

of Just War vs. Pacifism: Progressivism
and the Social Gospel
Cecelia Lynch
The turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries witnessed not only
the burgeoning of the Progressive Era in American and British social and
political thought but also the heyday of the Social Gospel as Progressivism’s
theological companion. Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, brothers, aca-
This chapter draws on chapter four of my book-in-progress, Wrestling with God:

Christian ethics and violence in the modern west. I have also discussed the Niebuhr
brothers’ debate in several other publications, including “Christian Ethics,
Actors, and Diplomacy: Mediating Universalist Pretentions,” International
Journal, special issue on Changing Diplomacies edited by Iver Neumann,
Vincent Pouliot, and Ole Jacob Sending (summer 2011), 613–628; the book
chapter of the same name in Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot, and Iver
B. Neumann, eds. Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015: 168–194; and “Realism and Religion in a
World Come of Age,” in Jodok Troy, ed., “Religion and the Realist Tradition,”
New York: Routledge, 2013. However, this chapter differs from each in
developing the relationship between each of the Niebuhr brothers and
Progressive as well as Social Gospel thought.
C. Lynch (*)
Department of Political Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

222 C. LYNCH
demics, and theologians who wielded enormous influence on twentieth-

century Christianity and international relations, each embraced aspects of
both Progressivism and the Social Gospel, but also distanced themselves
from them in important ways. Reinhold’s break was chronological, politi-
cal, and in some ways “secular”; H. Richard’s was strongly theological, yet
each was also formed by and shared components of Progressive and Social
Gospel social analysis. This chapter details how the brothers grappled with
the progressivism of their times, culminating in their most public debate
in 1932 over the use of coercion against the Japanese for invading and
establishing the puppet state of Manchukuo in Manchuria.
Reinhold Niebuhr has long been heralded as one of the “founding
fathers” of international relations theory and one of the most influential
theologians in foreign policy circles. “A whole generation of distinguished
American politicians, including such people as Adlai Stevenson, Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., McGeorge Bundy and Hubert Humphrey acknowledged
him not only as a prime influence on their own lives but on the whole
American approach to politics. ‘Niebuhr is the father of us all’ said George
Kennan.”1 But most students of international relations do not know that
his brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, is extremely significant as an iconic fig-
ure in many facets of twentieth-century Christian theology (Thieman
1991). His theology centered on a radical affirmation of God’s presence
in the world, and the requirement for the Christian to put one’s faith
entirely in God’s hands. As one of his students, Hans Frei, put it, “[i]n
H. Richard Niebuhr we had…a fiercely radical monotheism which was at
the same time an equally positive affirmation of God’s active lordship in
our midst” (Frei 1991, 23: see also Niebuhr 1951, 1956, 1963/1978).
The debate about what to do in Manchuria highlights in particular how
each of the brothers kept Progressivism at bay while arguing the merits of
particular versions of just war and pacifist positions. Ultimately, neither
brother could reject Progressivist faith in progress completely, though
each turned those hopes into something unique that could only fit into
the Progressivist mold with considerable difficulty. For Reinhold, an over-
arching pessimism regarding the sinfulness of “man,” combined with a
conviction that the world could not be perfected, resulted in his develop-
ing a “Christian realism,” which insisted that the ills of the world could
not be eradicated and should be stopped by coercive power. For
1
R. Harries, “Introduction,” in R. Harries, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr and the Issues of Our
Time, London: Mowbray, 1986:1.
THE NIEBUHR BROTHERS’ DEBATE AND THE ETHICS OF JUST WAR.... 223
H. Richard, Christianity and communism shared an important faith in

ultimate goodness and possibility for change, up to a point, but the
Christian had to subsume all other hopes to trust in God to right the
world’s wrongs. Reinhold ultimately broke with many of his Progressivist
and Socialist fellow travelers after 1932, and H. Richard developed a form
of Christian pacifism that was increasingly distant from those of
Progressives.
Background of the Niebuhr Brothers and Their

Times
The Niebuhr brothers were born in a German enclave of eastern Missouri
in the late 1890s and soon moved to another German enclave in western
Illinois. Reinhold (1892) and H. Richard (1894) grew up in a comfort-
able environment with a strong-willed father, Gustav Niebuhr, who was
also a well-known pastor in the German Evangelical Synod of North
America (Fox 1985, 2). The German Evangelical Synod focused on
“inner spirituality and practical results,” especially in terms of church
expansion, and declined to take a position on (or care much about)
theological disputes between Lutherans and Calvinists (Fox 1985, 4).
This background would influence, but not determine, the trajectory of
each brother’s thought during the interwar period. Each brother bene-
fited from an Ivy League seminary education (Yale); each was ordained
as a minister in the Evangelical and Reformed Church (an antecedent of
the United Church of Christ); each was sought after by Yale at different
times to join its faculty. Reinhold, however, spent the better part of his
academic career at Union Theological Seminary in New York City rather
than Yale, which had initially pursued him. H. Richard ended up taking
the endowed chair initially offered to Reinhold, which was one illustra-
tion of their close but complicated relationship (Fox 1985, 117, 146–7).
H. Richard had a more introspective personality; Reinhold’s ambition
was generally in plain view. The Niebuhrs, like other Christians during
the Progressive Era, grappled with the dislocations of industrialization,
the often violent repression of labor, huge and growing economic dis-
parities, and the post-Reconstruction racial oppression and inequality
that characterized politics and society in the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century America. Like many other Christian academics, cler-
ics, and activists, they were drawn to the Social Gospel movement’s focus
on social and economic justice.
224 C. LYNCH
Before, during, and immediately after World War I, the Social Gospel
movement represented the theological expression of Progressivism
(Rauschenbusch 1945). The Social Gospel movement, like Progressivism,
stemmed from the economic dislocations of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century capitalism and embraced the idea that science and pro-
fessionalization could help society progress, eventually curing the ills of
poverty and militarism. Both movements represented the apex of liberal
modernity, the desire for a kind of rationalization and systematization of
social and political life (in Weberian terms) that would equalize, to a
degree, gross social and economic inequalities. Labor and progressive
movements brought attention to growing economic inequities as a result
of industrialization and the concentration of wealth in their home coun-
tries and worked to bring organizing strategies and disciplinary knowledge
to bear on virtually all social, economic, and political questions. Progressives
attacked poverty (e.g., through Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago)
and advocated for political inclusion (e.g., the women’s suffrage move-
ment) and access to education for all. They also attacked militarism: World
War I had been the “unnecessary” war, fueled by a fruitless naval arms
race, ethnic divisions and discrimination, leaders’ intransigence and hubris,
and weapons merchants’ greed. A related problem concerned the ever-
expanding types of aggressive weapons: some weapons clearly transgressed
the just war requirements of proportionality and last resort. Bombing
planes, especially those that could drop chemical weapons, topped the list.
Still, World War I’s perceived irrationality did not eliminate the Progressive
belief that education, professionalization, logic, and rational action could
ameliorate the human condition; instead, it expanded the focus on ratio-
nalization to correct the irrationality of the behavior of nation-states, mili-
taries, and weapons manufacturers who traded on the possibility of future
wars.
Finally, Progressivism included divergent and extremely problematic
views on race, racial oppression, and racial progress. Imperialist apologists
continued to insist that colonization brought civilization (and hence,
“progress”) to the non-European world, while anti-imperialists vocifer-
ously resisted this construction of moral duty to focus on the unjust use of
indigenous labor, appropriation of indigenous lands, and continuing vio-
lence employed by imperialist elites in power. Similarly, some components
of Progressivism developed views and practices that resulted in extremely
racist forms of experimentation that were supposed to result in scientific
progress, including the improvement of allegedly “inferior” ethnic groups

(called “races”), both in the USA and abroad (Willoughby-Herard 2015).
Social Gospel teachings articulated responses to industrialization and
growing poverty that paralleled Progressivist theories. These responses
focused on making both economic and spiritual progress through orga-
nizing for social justice and economic equality. Some commentators view
the Social Gospel as a “secular” movement; at a minimum, it encompassed
for many Christians the tensions between Christianity and secularism
within the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theology. For
thinkers and activists like Reinhold Niebuhr, the line between Christian
and secular traditions was thin at best. For others, like H. Richard, the
prophetic nature of Christology required separating worldly from reli-
gious logics regarding the pressing issues of the time. Indeed, by the
1930s, the dominant problem for Christian theology, as articulated by
German theologian (and Reinhold Niebuhr’s student) Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, had become the question of how to act as a Christian in a
modern, secular world (Bonhoeffer 1972, 326–327).
For Bonhoeffer, more specifically, the urgent problem was how to inte-
grate Christian responsibility into life in this world, rather than trying to
separate the immanent from the transcendent. This concern differed in
kind from those of both of the Niebuhr brothers, but also in degree from
most Progressives and Social Gospel adherents. In other words, whether
and how not only to talk about but also to act according to a faith in God’s
action “in history,” as opposed to viewing God as distant from the ills of
the world, became matters of immediate and pressing concern through
successive early twentieth-century crises. If God was distant, then ethics
became more a matter of human engineering than divine direction.
Reinhold and H. Richard would develop very different responses to the
conundrums raised by these developments, which became evident in their
1932 debate. While Reinhold developed what many analysts consider to
be a secularized theology of Christian action in the world, H. Richard’s
understanding remained strongly Christological and centered on a divine
knowledge and promise that could only be grasped by humans through
faith. Reinhold, as a result, relativized the possibility of ethical action in
the world, while H. Richard (sometimes) deferred it.2
2
Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the necessity of following Christ even when it was unclear
what Christ himself would do, in contrast, returned to Germany from the USA to take part
in a plot to assassinate Hitler and was executed after spending several years in prison.
226 C. LYNCH
A second pre-occupation of the interwar period concerned the nature

of evil and the causes and perpetrators of sin. While the question of how
to live in a secular world at first glance concerned the duties of the indi-
vidual Christian, the Social Gospel movement emphasized the idea of sin
as a social evil. Social Gospel reformers articulated a concept of collective
sin as a way of explaining the social dislocations and suffering engendered
by slavery, war, and the costs borne by the poor in periods of rapid indus-
trialization. Sin in this sense was rooted not in the endemic failings of the
individual but rather in social structures and processes taken over by greed.
This definition of sin was critical to the Social Gospel’s faith in progress, as
well as its similarities and differences with the Niebuhrs. The social nature
of sin was correctable through the application of scientific methodologies
along with the Christian disposition to do good in the world.3 In contrast,
H. Richard displayed little faith in the rationality of scientific methods
without the guidance of the divine. And while Reinhold would also draw
an important distinction between the morality of individuals and that of
societies, he was never persuaded by the idea that the nature of “man” was
good enough to achieve lasting progress.
Finally, the Social Gospel movement, like Progressivism, has a compli-
cated and problematic legacy of racism. Recent work is recovering the
origins of the Social Gospel in black churches during the 1870s, even
though it became better known through white promoters such as Walter
Rauschenbusch in the early twentieth century (Dorrien 2015).
Rauschenbusch himself lauded Josiah Strong, who advocated colonialist
missionizing, for giving “a wider vision and a more statesmanlike grasp to
the foreign mission enterprise” (Rauschenbusch 1945, 2). But a wide
range of variants existed among both black and white proponents, includ-
ing those in the black churches who found inspiration in the accommoda-
tionism of Booker T. Washington, versus others who insisted on the more
radical vision of W. E. B. DuBois, and those in the white churches who
advocated the “civilizing mission” of colonization, versus others who
focused increasingly (as the twentieth century progressed) on economic
justice (Dorrien 2015, 5–7; Curtis 1991).
The Niebuhrs, however, were both strong proponents of racial equality
in theory and in their preaching and writing, although neither was at the
3
Susan Curtis also argues that doing good was, ultimately, compatible with the material
progress that Progressive, secular liberalism also promised. Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The
Social Gospel and Modern American Culture, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1991.
forefront of efforts to further racial integration. Fox, for example, recounts

Reinhold’s hesitation to push for full integration of his former church in
Detroit (Fox 1985, 94, 118–120). In their debate, Reinhold would also
criticize those (including H. Richard) who cited imperial sins as a reason
for not intervening in Manchuria or to counter subsequent Axis aggres-
sions. These issues with Progressivism and the Social Gospel might also
help to explain why each brother was also drawn to European ideologies
of communism and socialism, although in different ways and to different
degrees. H. Richard’s theology connected to the eschatological promise
of successful communist egalitarianism, while Reinhold ran unsuccessfully
for office as a Socialist Party candidate in the early 1930s but then dis-
tanced himself from the party in later years (Fox 1985, Chaps. 6 and 7,
passim).
By the early 1930s, the Great Depression and the rise of fascism made
the political situation more dangerous and demoralizing, and theological
certainties more difficult to articulate. Each of the Niebuhr brothers
would take exception to important components of Progressivist and Social
Gospel hopes and projects.
The Debate on Just and Unjust Wars4

In 1932, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold was then teaching
at Union; H. Richard at Yale) held their famous debate on the justice of
intervention in the pages of The Christian Century. A self-defined “pro-
gressive, ecumenical [Protestant] magazine” which “explores what it
means to believe and live out the Christian faith in our time,” The Christian
Century was known to publish pieces by both Reinhold and Jane Addams,
among other luminaries of the era.5
The debate concerned the necessity and morality of intervention in the
Sino-Japanese conflict of 1932. Japan invaded Manchuria in September 1931,
setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo through considerable violence and
bloodshed. In the first salvo, “The Grace of Doing Nothing,” H. Richard
Niebuhr wrote, “the greatest moral problems of the individual or of a society
4
The Debate appeared as the following series of articles: H. Richard Niebuhr, “The grace
of doing nothing,” the response by Reinhold Niebuhr, “Must we do nothing?” and the final
summation by H. Richard Niebuhr, “The only way into the kingdom of God.”
5
The Christian Century, “About Us,” https://www.christiancentury.org/about, accessed
15.5.17. The magazine was founded in the late 1880s under a different name, taking on its
current name in 1900.
228 C. LYNCH
arise when there is nothing to be done.” He emphasized that doing nothing,

or not intervening in the Sino-Japanese conflict, was not an easy decision for
Christians like himself, but rather that “we seem to be condemned to doing
nothing” (emphasis mine). This was because the USA and its allies were
already compromised and could not claim the moral high ground:
The Christian reflects upon the fact that his inability to do anything con-
structive in the crisis is the inability of one whose own faults are so apparent
and so similar to those of the offender that any action on his part is not only
likely to be misinterpreted but is also likely—in the nature of the case—to be
really less than disinterested.
As a result, H. Richard posed a difficult question, “How shall we do noth-

ing?” (emphasis again mine). The fact of being “condemned” to inaction,
and also of needing grace to “do nothing,” each reflected H. Richard’s con-
sistent, radical allegiance to divine will. Nevertheless, adding the question of
“how” not to act also demonstrated his recognition that such an allegiance
required explanation for early twentieth-century Progressive moderns.
H. Richard Niebuhr explored several types of pacifism, rejecting most
on ethical grounds for insufficient or problematic justification. For exam-
ple, he asserted that the proper way of “doing nothing” was not that of
the pessimist, or the “conservative believer in things as they are,” or the
“morally indignant pacifist.” In rejecting both the first and second, he
agreed with Progressive thinkers who retained faith in human and political
advancement. In critiquing the third, he agreed with those Progressives
and Social Gospel adherents who rejected the structural sins of both mili-
tarized greed and the use of force. But, unlike this group, he did not claim
moral superiority in doing so. Rather, H. Richard argued, “there is another
way of doing nothing,” which was founded on his unbending faith in
God’s action in history. H. Richard agreed that “the American Christian
realizes that Japan is following the example of his own country…He may
see that his country, [the U.S.] for which he bears his own responsibility
as a citizen, is really not disinterested and that its righteous indignation is
not wholly righteous.” But his way of “doing nothing” was founded on
both the realization of the individual’s participation in social sin and the
belief in a God that was both transcendent and immanent, operating
actively in history: righting the transgression was up to God. In asserting
that the inactivity he advocated was one that believed in worldly redemp-
tion, he drew on both the millenarianism of the early Christians and the
faith in the future of contemporary Communists. He concluded, “Like

early Christianity and like communism today radical Christianity knows
that nothing constructive can be done by interference, but that something
very constructive can be done in preparation for the future.”
Nevertheless, H. Richard also departed from the communists, arguing,
“There is a new element in the inactivity of radical Christianity which is
lacking in communism.” Communists did not recognize sin, or individu-
als’ complicity in it. As a result, H. Richard required his kind of inactivity
to be “profoundly active in rigid self-analysis.”
In sum, H. Richard decried those who ignored Japan’s incursion, those
who accorded moral superiority to non-combatants or other forms of
inaction, and those who did not act to relieve suffering. Instead, for him,
The inactivity of radical Christianity is not the inactivity of those who call
evil good; it is the inaction of those who do not judge their neighbors
because they cannot fool themselves into a sense of superior righteousness.
It is not the inactivity of a resigned patience but of a patience that is full of
hope and is based on faith. It is not the inactivity of the noncombatant, for
it knows that there are no noncombatants, that everyone is involved, that
China is being crucified (though the term is very inaccurate) by our sins and
those of the whole world. It is not the inactivity of the merciless, for works
of mercy must be performed though they are only palliates to ease present
pain while the process of healing depends on deeper, more actual and urgent
forces.
Such “inactivity,” according to H. Richard, was in fact a kind of activity

that entailed repentance for such sins, which allowed the Christian to do
“something very constructive” in the end to prepare for a more egalitarian
future. But H. Richard argued strenuously that such preparation must be
led by God. In fact, he acknowledged, “if there is no God,” or if God is
up in heaven and not in time itself, it is a very foolish inactivity.”
This is the opening that Reinhold seized upon to home in on what he
perceived to be the weakness of his brother’s argument and develop his argu-
ment against both Progressivism and his brother’s style of pacifism. Sin,
Reinhold agreed, was social as well as individual; he also agreed that the West
was culpable in fostering aggression. “It is true that we have helped to create
the Japan which expresses itself in terms of materialistic imperialism.”
Moreover, Reinhold asserted, “The insult we offered her in our immigration
laws was a sin of spiritual aggression.” Yet his brother’s argument, he charged,
gave in to the worst excesses of modern religion. This was not a lack of faith,
230 C. LYNCH
but rather a too strong belief that salvation was possible on earth. Instead, he
argued, modern Christianity (like Progressivism and the Social Gospel move-
ment) lacked “appreciation of the tragic character of life,” and accorded with
the naïve, Progressive “assumption that the world will be saved by a little
more adequate educational technique.” The technique in question was what
Reinhold calls a “pure love ethic,” which he countered by questioning the
idea that God would intervene in history. In a powerful exposure of the con-
tradictions of his brother’s theodicy, he wrote,
What makes my brother’s eschatology impossible for me is that he identifies

everything that is occurring in history (the drift toward disaster, another
world war and possibly a revolution) with the counsels of God, and then sud-
denly, by a leap of faith, comes to the conclusion that the same God [who]
uses brutalities and forces, against which man must maintain conscientious
scruples, will finally establish an ideal society in which pure love will reign.
Reinhold then outlined the basis of his own Christian realism, which por-
trayed human nature as a mixture of the ability to reason and selfishness: “I
find it impossible to envisage a society of pure love as long as man remains
man.” Regarding the relationship between faith and theology, Reinhold
acknowledged H. Richard’s theological strength, admitting, “I realize quite
well that my brother’s position both in its ethical perfectionism and in its
apocalyptic note is closer to the gospel than mine.” But he argued that such
ethical perfectionism was in the end irresponsible: while he could not com-
pletely “abandon the pure love ideal…I cannot use it fully if I want to assume
a responsible attitude toward the problems of society.” As a result, Reinhold
resolved the problem of theodicy by developing his strong distinction between
“this world” and “the absolute,” and by resorting to tragedy:
Perhaps that is why it is inevitable that religious imagination should set goals
beyond history.…Man cannot live without a sense of the absolute, but nei-
ther can he achieve the absolute. He may resolve the tragic character of that
fact by religious faith, by the experience of grace in which the unattainable
is experienced in anticipatory terms, but he can never resolve in purely ethi-
cal terms the conflict between what is and what ought to be.
The Sino-Japanese conflict became, for the Niebuhr brothers, a major

“case” from which to examine and reinforce their theological assump-
tions. Reinhold Niebuhr’s major treatise, Moral Man and Immoral Society
(1932b/1960), for example, explored many of his arguments against his
brother in more detail.6 In the book, Reinhold appealed to both Augustine

and Freud, incorporating modern thought into his interpretation of
Christian tradition. He developed his understanding of human nature as a
combination of God-given reason and pre-human impulses. Humans
must use their reason to transcend natural selfishness and will to power.
Reinhold located sin in both the individual as well as the group, equating
each with the will to power. Yet, selfishness and the consequent motives of
self-interest were natural for nation-states, and so for Reinhold, they nei-
ther could nor should be overcome. International relations was formed
from, and thus could not escape, its inherent sinfulness, in the form of
struggles over power and self-interest.
Given this foundation, Reinhold Niebuhr then took up the problem of
absolute versus relative, and individual versus group moral possibility,
arguing that Christian morality could not be reconciled with the imperfec-
tions of the world. Augustine’s City of God and City of Man were two
different spheres of moral action and moral possibility that could not be
fused into one. The binary for which he would become famous repre-
sented, then, a decisive break with Progressive analysis and projects for the
future.
Despite the brothers’ disagreement on the ethical legitimacy of using
force, one extremely significant issue on which they agreed at this time was
the problem of economic injustice and class inequality. H. Richard’s anal-
ogy between communism and Christianity, and Reinhold’s conclusion
that Christianity could never resolve the problems of inequality, are
extremely pertinent. H. Richard compared Christianity favorably to com-
munism’s analysis of injustice and the hope it ultimately proffered. The
inactivity he advocated was, “rightly understood…preliminary to a radical
change which will eliminate the conditions of which the conflict is a prod-
uct. It is the activity of a cynicism which expects no good from the present
evil world of capitalism, but also the inactivity of a boundless faith in the
future.” Reinhold gave his brother credit for his social analysis, stating his
appreciation for H. Richard’s attempt to disassociate “a rigorous gospel
ethic of disinterestedness and love from the sentimental dilutions of that
ethic which are current in liberal Christianity.” Reinhold agreed that:
6
Niebuhr’s later works continued to develop these themes. See, for example, Christian
Realism and Political Problems (1953).
232 C. LYNCH
The hope of attaining an ethical goal for society by purely ethical means,
that is, without coercion, and without the assertion of the interests of the
underprivileged against the interests of the privileged, is an illusion which
was spread chiefly among the comfortable classes of the past century. My
brother does not make the mistake of assuming that this is possible in social
terms. He is acutely aware of the fact that it is not possible to get a sufficient
degree of pure disinterestedness and love among privileged classes and pow-
erful nations to resolve the conflicts of history in that way. He understands
the stubborn inertia which the ethical ideal meets in history.
Both brothers, then, agreed with Progressive and Social Gospel critiques
of economic inequalities to a point, but each critiqued the liberalism of
their projects and moved to more radical solutions of their own that
focused on the recognition of class conflict. H. Richard, once again, put
his faith in a rigorous analysis that produced “cynicism” in the present, but
a “boundless faith” in a future in which God would realize the kingdom.
Reinhold again criticized his brother’s faith in bringing the transcendent
into the immanent: “At this point his [H. Richard’s] realistic interpreta-
tion of the facts of history comes in full conflict with his insistence upon a
pure gospel ethic, upon a religiously inspired moral perfectionism, and he
resolves the conflict by leaving the field of social theory entirely and resort-
ing to eschatology.” Reinhold later wrote about the possibility that force
would be necessary to overcome the sins of both economic oppression and
racism, but stopped short of spelling out his meaning on either (Fox 1985;
Harries 1986).
Religious Debates About Force and Justice

The connection or lack thereof between social and political analysis and
theological interpretation, then, was critical for how the Niebuhr brothers
interpreted the possibilities of their world. But their thought and action
(or inaction) was also situated in the midst of a range of additional
responses to the just war/pacifist conundrum, imperialism, and economic
inequality. Their debate, therefore, begged additional questions about
whether (a) force was necessary to right economic injustice and (b) “doing
nothing” articulated the sole pacifist argument against intervention. Other
pacifists, for example, taking cues from Gandhi in South Africa and India,
were in the process of articulating methods of active nonviolence. These
broader debates illustrated tensions in Progressive and Social Gospel
thought, demonstrating both the staying power of Progressivist and Social

Gospel hopes and more radical departures from their liberal projects for
improvement.
For example, leaders such as A. J. Muste in the Fellowship of
Reconciliation (FOR) and Dorothy Day in the Catholic Worker movement
rejected Reinhold’s Christian realism on ethical and theological as well as
political grounds. The FOR was founded in 1914 to advocate on behalf of
conscientious objectors to the war. Comprising activists informed by the
Social Gospel, socialist parties, and labor union organizing, it refused to
join parties of the left in supporting the war effort. After World War I, the
FOR became a small but influential center of Christian thinking and action
that merged anti-militarism, a critique of colonialism and imperialism, and
support for labor as the means to achieving the common good. One of its
best-known leaders, A.J. Muste, gave up both Christianity and pacifism in
the early 1930s out of the belief that the injustices of capitalism were the
primary evils that had to be eradicated. Yet he returned to his Christian
and pacifist roots in 1936, again convinced that war, capitalism, racial
injustice, and economic inequalities were interconnected evils that had to
be addressed and overcome simultaneously.
Muste deplored Reinhold’s ethical relativism. Both shared a disdain for
optimistic, liberal pacifism. But perhaps the most striking difference
between this type of prophetic pacifism and Christian realism lay in their
opposing views of the role of state power in history. Reinhold was in the
end more of an optimist for whom the state retained the ability to achieve
social goods through constructive use of its power, but Muste dissented,
accusing him of “providing a pseudo-Christian cover for the sterile sophis-
tication of power politics” (Commins 1991, 64). Muste, while differing
from many Progressives, stated his points of agreement and disagreement
with Reinhold as follows:
I am more hopeful than Niebuhr that we can achieve a social revolution

through changing human beings as well as their institutions by making them
aware of both the sin and the grace they contain. But I agree with Niebuhr
that simply advocating “love” won’t do it. (Quoted in Hentoff 1982, 23)
Reinhold Niebuhr appeared not quite to know what to make of Gandhi’s

nonviolent actions in India. Gandhian methods challenged both Reinhold’s
critique of his brother’s pacifist inactivity and his own rigid separation
between the morality of states and individuals. Reinhold spent a surpris-
234 C. LYNCH
ingly large amount of time describing and critiquing Gandhi’s project in

Moral Man & Immoral Society, attempting to reinforce his assertion that
the coercion underlying Gandhian tactics was of the same mold as the
coercive rights he gave to the state. Gandhi’s methodology, for Reinhold,
did not provide a moral high ground. “Psychic coercion is dangerous, as
all coercion is. Its ultimate value depends upon the social purpose for
which it is enlisted” (Niebuhr 1932b/1960, 246). Elsewhere, he argued,
Once we admit the factor of coercion as ethically justified, though we con-

ceded that it is always morally dangerous, we cannot draw any absolute line
of demarcation between violent and nonviolent coercion.…Gandhi’s boy-
cott of British cotton results in the undernourishment of children in
Manchester, and the blockade of the Allies in war-time caused the death of
German children. It is impossible to coerce a group without damaging both
life and property and without imperiling the interests of the innocent with
those of the guilty. (Niebuhr 1932b/1960, 172)
Reinhold’s solution to this problem was to give moral preference to coer-

cive projects which had as their aim “equality,” or “equal justice,” because
this represented “the most rational ultimate objective for society. If this
conclusion is correct, a social conflict which aims at greater equality has a
moral justification” lacking in uses of force “which aim at the perpetuation
of privilege. A war for the emancipation of a nation, a race or a class is thus
placed in a different moral category from the use of power for the perpetu-
ation of imperial rule or class dominance” (Niebuhr 1932b/1960, 234).
Ironically, however, despite Reinhold’s theoretical justification for those
oppressed on racial or class grounds to challenge their oppressors, he
remained vague regarding the means such challenges might take. In Moral
Man & Immoral Society, for example, he wrote, “Violent conflict may not
be the best means to attain freedom or equality” (1932b/1960, 234–5),
but elsewhere he continued to demur instead of condone specific instances
of resistance (e.g., Halliwell 2005, 229).
Reinhold’s attempt to understand the meaning of Gandhian methods
for Christian tradition and worldly ethics is a laudable one, but fell short
nonetheless of capturing the full implications of nonviolence as an impor-
tant theological as well as political development. His Christian realism
drew distinctions between the political and the ethical that tended to jus-
tify his own binary constructions of the political versus the ethical while
discounting those of others. He admired Gandhian nonviolence to a
degree and understood that it represented something different from the

inactivity of his brother or the liberalism of the Anglo-American hierarchy.
But Reinhold also missed a major part of the prophetic element of the
nonviolent action practiced not only by Gandhi but also by Christian paci-
fist groups who were experimenting with nonviolent resistance. In “Why
the Christian Church is Not Pacifist” (1940), Reinhold issued a strong
declaration against these Christian pacifists:
the pacifists are just as guilty as their less absolutist brethren of diluting the
ethic of Jesus for the purpose of justifying their position. They are forced to
recognize that an ethic of pure non-resistance can have no immediate rele-
vance to any political situation, for in every political situation it is necessary
to achieve justice by resisting pride and power. They therefore declare that
the ethic of Jesus is not an ethic of non-resistance, but one of non-violent
resistance, that it allows one to resist evil provided the resistance does not
involve the destruction of life or property.
His conclusion, that “There is not the slightest support in Scripture for
this doctrine of non-violence,” was problematic in terms of its theology as
well as its scriptural hermeneutics, according to numerous commentators,
and many theologians came to an opposite conclusion (Brown 1987, 107;
Harries 1986).
Reinhold’s view of politics gave an increasingly central role to state
power, which also built in a temporal component. As Gary Commins
argues, this gave an opening to Muste, who “insightfully accused Niebuhr
of smearing the pacifist as an ‘absolutist’ while [he, Niebuhr] made the
present order ‘eternal and absolute’” (Commins 1991, 64). Yet, despite
writing this critique in The American Scholar in the late 1930s, Muste’s
arguments did not reach as wide an audience as Niebuhr’s Christian real-
ism, much to his chagrin. Their debates represented “a thirty-year battle
for the soul of American Christendom,” but while Muste continues to be
celebrated by advocates of nonviolent resistance, Niebuhr’s career, posi-
tions, and connections made him by far the more famous of the two.7
Reinhold’s views, and perhaps confusion, regarding nonviolent resis-
tance has been more widely discussed than those of his brother. Still,
H. Richard’s pacifism might be compared to that of activists such as either
Muste or Dorothy Day. Day, a former communist, atheist, and journalist,
7
Gary Commins, Spiritual People, Radical Lives: spirituality and justice in four twentieth
century American lives. San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1996, Ch. 1.
236 C. LYNCH
converted to Catholicism and devoted her life to living with the marginal-
ized and destitute in New York City’s Bowery neighborhood. She, like
Muste, insisted on developing forms of nonviolent action against war,
militarism, and weapons build-ups that could be construed as moving
beyond H. Richard’s pacifist “inaction” while also maintaining his faith in
the possibility of divine intervention in history. Each of these examples
demonstrates the range of ethical perspectives on the use of force that
could both draw from the hope of Progressivism and the Social Gospel
while differing from the nature of its faith in social engineering.
Conclusions
Both Progressive reformers and Social Gospel proponents in the early
twentieth century attempted to come to grips with the inequalities as well
as what they perceived to be the promise of the modern era. Progressives
promoted the creation of new institutions in the form of global interna-
tional organization, while Social Gospel adherents articulated a major
turning point in conceptualizing both the cause and the solution to sin
and evil in social and institutional terms. Trying to address the poverty and
suffering bred by rapid industrialization, the legacy of slavery, and World
War I, Social Gospel adherents reflected the recognition of social disloca-
tions and the belief in improvement characteristic of the Progressive Era.8
Each of the Niebuhr brothers embraced aspects of the critique advanced
by Progressives and Social Gospel adherents, while rejecting many of their
solutions.
During the 1930s, for example, Reinhold Niebuhr’s incipient Christian
realism redirected the concept of collective sin to the institutional failings
embodied in an “immoral society.” In Reinhold Niebuhr’s ethics, the
world was an imperfect place first and foremost for structural reasons—
society could never be held to the same ethical standards as the individual,
and while Christians had a duty to try to lessen the effects of war and
greed, they could not eliminate societal imperfections. Rather, they had to
reckon, realistically, with the world as it was in their attempts to grapple
with suffering and violence (Niebuhr 1953). Reinhold Niebuhr’s solution
differed from that of Progressives in dichotomizing the absolute and the
relative, individual and group sin and ethics, and the moral differences
between the City of God and the City of Man. As Gary Dorrien, named
8
Curtis, A Consuming Faith, 1991.
the Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at Union in 2007, notes,

“Niebuhr absorbed the social justice ethic of the Social Gospel but turned
against the idealism and rationalism it shared with the Progressive move-
ment; he believed that the Social Gospel took too little account of conflict
and human sinfulness” (Steinfels 2007).
Perhaps not surprisingly, Reinhold preferred to be known as a social
ethicist rather than a theologian. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, upon his arrival at
Union Theological Seminary, critiqued Reinhold’s theological knowledge
in finding that his “lectures on religion and ethics…[were] refreshingly
lively but deplorably shallow” (Fox 1985, 125). Still, Reinhold and
Bonhoeffer, formerly teacher and student, remained friends, and
Bonhoeffer even wrote to Reinhold from prison, though their views of
Christian responsibility differed radically.
H. Richard Niebuhr, unlike Reinhold, consistently probed theologi-
cal questions. He emphasized Christians’ responsibility to place total
faith in God’s will, both in the immediate and the long term, while
Reinhold reserved his faith in divine perfection for the next world. After
their 1932 debate, Reinhold published, first, Moral Man and Immoral
Society, then in 1940, Christianity and Power Politics. H. Richard devel-
oped his thinking about the necessity of Christian love, ultimate faith in
God, and relationship to history in Christ and Culture, and The
Responsible Self. Nevertheless, the brothers continued to influence each
other: some commentators credit H. Richard with helping his brother
develop a more theologically sensitive approach to social ethics after the
publication of Moral Man, and H. Richard attempted a more philosoph-
ical rather than theological rendition of Christian ethics in The Responsible
Self (Fox 1985; Gustafson 1963, 6).
Reinhold Niebuhr eschewed liberal as well as Christian idealism, yet
exhibited a belief in his own form of cosmopolitan (universalizable) ratio-
nalism. This is why Robert McAfee Brown calls him a “pessimistic opti-
mist” (and insists that he cannot legitimately be termed the inverse, an
“optimistic pessimist”) and why he continues to have resonance for politi-
cal debates about the possibilities of progress. Similarly, H. Richard’s insis-
tence on a life on earth centered on divine promise and love continues to
inspire theological debates about the role of God in Christian decisions
and actions (Thieman 1991).
For the purposes of this volume, examining the Niebuhr brothers’
views on intervention broadens our understanding of Progressivism and
its critics. In particular, it demonstrates the tensions inherent in both.
238 C. LYNCH
More specifically, a review of H. Richard and Reinhold’s debate opens

up Progressivist and Social Gospel tensions regarding questions of war,
the possibilities of peace, and the use of force. As Gary Dorrien says of
Reinhold, “[i]n various phases of his public career, Niebuhr was a liberal
pacifist, a neo-Marxist revolutionary, a Social Democratic realist, a cold
war liberal and, at the end, an opponent of the war in Vietnam. He
zigged and zagged enough that all sorts of political types claim to be his
heirs” (Steinfels 2007). The concerns and debates of the Progressive
Era, as well as those among adherents of the Social Gospel, continue to
reverberate in the discipline of international relations as well as in
Christian theological circles. The Niebuhr brothers provide complex,
important, and yet incomplete answers to the conundrums of faith,
force, race, class, and inequality confronted during both the Progressive
period and today.
References
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 1972. Letters & Papers from Prison. New York: Macmillan.
Brown, Robert McAfee, ed. 1987. The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays
and Addresses. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Commins, Gary. 1991. Spiritual People, Radical Lives: Spirituality and Justice in
Four Twentieth Century American Lives. San Francisco: International Scholars
Publishers.
Curtis, Susan. 1991. A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American
Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dorrien, Gary. 2015. The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social
Gospel. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Fox, Richard Wightman. 1985. Reinhold Niebuhr, A Biography. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Frei, Hans W. 1991. H. Richard Niebuhr on History, Church, and Nation. In The
Legacy of H. Richard Niebuhr, Harvard Theological Studies, ed. Ronald
F. Theimann, 1–23. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.
Gustafson, James M. 1963. Introduction. In The Responsible Self: An Essay in
Christian Moral Philosophy, ed. H. Richard Niebuhr, 6–41. San Francisco:
Harper Collins.
Halliwell, Martin. 2005. The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr & American
Intellectual Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Harries, R., ed. 1986. Reinhold Niebuhr and the Issues of Our Time. London:
Mowbray.
Hentoff, Nat. 1982. Peace Agitator: The Story of A. J. Muste. New York: A. J.
Muste Memorial Institute.
Lynch, Cecelia. 2011. Christian Ethics, Actors, and Diplomacy: Mediating

Universalist Pretentions. International Journal, special issue on Changing
Diplomacies edited by Iver Neumann, Vincent Pouliot, and Ole Jacob Sending
(Summer 2011), 613–628; the book chapter of the same name in Diplomacy
and the Making of World Politics, ed. Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot, and
Iver B. Neumann, 2015: 1681–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2013. Realism and Religion in a World Come of Age. In Religion and the
Realist Tradition, ed. Jodok Troy, 80–92. New York: Routledge.
——— n.d. (unpublished ms). Wrestling with God. Wrestling with God: Christian
Ethics and Violence in the Modern West.
Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1932a. The Grace of Doing Nothing. In The Christian
Century.Accessedthroughhttp://www.ucc.org/beliefs_theology_the-grace-of-doing-
nothing
———. 1956. The Kingdom of God in America. Hamden, CT: The Shoe String
Press.
———. 1963/1978. The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy.
San Francisco: Harper.
———. 1951. Christ and Culture. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1932b/1960. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in
Ethics and Politics. New York: Scribners.
———. 1932c. Must We Do Nothing? In The Christian Century. Accessed
through http://www.ucc.org/beliefs_theology_must-we-do-nothing
———. 1940/1969. Christianity and Power Politics. Hamden, CT: Archon
Books.
———. 1953. Christian Realism and Political Problems. New York: Scribners.
Rauschenbusch, Walter. 1945. A Theology for the Social Gospel. Nashville and
New York: Abingdon Press.
Steinfels, Peter. 2007. Two Social Ethicists and the National Landscape. New York
Times, May 26, B6.
Thieman, Ronald F., ed. 1991. The Legacy of H. Richard Niebuhr, Harvard
Theological Studies. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.
Willoughby-Herard, Tiffany. 2015. Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie
Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Cecelia Lynch is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California,

Irvine. Her books include Interpreting International Politics (2014); Strategies for
Research in Constructivist International Relations (with Audie Klotz, 2007),
Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics
(1999), and Law and Moral Action in World Politics (co-edited with Michael
Loriaux, 2000). She co-edits the blog, “Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism
in Africa,” the CIHA blog, at www.cihablog.com
CHAPTER 11
Beyond Hemispherism: Charles Beard’s

Vision of World Order
Christopher McKnight Nichols
After World War I (WWI), historian Charles Beard joined other disillu-
sioned liberal intellectuals, such as John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, in
mounting a critique of American militarism. In their dissent, they echoed
wartime critics Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Emily Balch, and Randolph
Bourne, who decried the war’s limitation of civil liberties, evisceration of
democratic ideals, and attenuation of progressive reform, all of which
demonstrated Randolph Bourne’s observation that “war is the health of
the state.” Scholars such as Manfred Jonas, Selig Adler, Thomas Kennedy,
Ellen Nore, Jackson Lears, David Milne, and Ronald Radosh have rightly
suggested that Beard’s economic criticisms lay at the heart of his foreign
policy analysis and dissent. As years passed after WWI, Beard increasingly
characterized militarized hard foreign policy as impossible to direct, argu-
ing that it exhausted the capacities of the United States, made it less safe,
and shifted focus from more important domestic concerns. “Only in rela-
tively recent times has the wholesale interference with foreign quarrels and
disturbances become a major concern of the intelligentsia, the press and
professional politicians in the United States,” Beard wrote in a Harper’s
C.M. Nichols (*)

School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, Oregon State University,
Corvallis, OR, USA

242 C.M. NICHOLS
Magazine essay in 1939 (338). Pointing to origins at the end of the nine-
teenth century, Beard went on to add that by the late 1930s “advocacy of
American interventionism and adventurism has become a huge vested
interest.” Though Beard was wrong that Nazi Germany and Imperial
Japan did not represent much of a threat to the United States, he astutely
apprehended the likely internal political, economic, and social repercus-
sions of expanded US–world relations with an enlarged and permanent
military capacity.
As part of the diverse New York America First Committee (AFC) lead-
ership, which included socialist Norman Thomas and former President
Herbert Hoover, Beard hoped to enhance national morality through
reform and to achieve greater equality of citizens and workers (more New
Deal, rather than less) and generally rejected all forms of military pre-
paredness (unlike famed aviator Charles Lindbergh’s “Fortress America”
vision that is often associated with the hawkish isolationism of the AFC).
Though Beard acknowledged that altruistic or defensive wars could be
justified, he maintained that, even with new modern technologies,
America’s national security primarily rested on the nation’s unique geo-
graphic position. Unlike most America Firsters who also rejected the for-
eign policies of the Roosevelt administration, Beard looked inward toward
social justice and a progressive sort of exceptionalism by late 1940
(Stenehjem 1976; Doenecke 2003; Nichols 2013).
Of course, Beard and his contemporaries could not have envisioned the
twenty-first-century dynamics of the global “war on terror”—policies
based on ideological and moral universalisms, and complex global eco-
nomic partnerships. But these were the sorts of entanglements Beard
warned about, particularly with respect to the “lessons learned” from the
United States’ entry into WWI and broader patterns of imperialism as they
impacted American domestic and foreign policy. Indeed, recent polling
and the startling results of the 2016 election seem to indicate a Beardian
renaissance, or backlash of sorts, against the active military, diplomatic,
and commercial engagement that the United States has pursued since the
terrorist attacks on US soil on 9/11. After 16 years, nationalism and pro-
tectionism, if not more rigid forms of isolationism and retrenchment, have
become ascendant in US politics. In light of these recent developments, it
seems particularly worthwhile to excavate the historical foundations upon
which this brand of isolationism rests. The rise of nationalism, trade pro-
tectionism, and unilateralism mirrors the attitudes of WWII revisionist
scholars and isolationists, a group into whose ranks Beard fit, though
BEYOND HEMISPHERISM: CHARLES BEARD’S VISION OF WORLD ORDER 243
uneasily. Yet, the historical development of such notions in the life and
thought of Charles Beard, one of the most prominent historians and pub-
lic intellectuals of his time, suggests the possibility that isolationist and
nationalist impulses might support progressive, instead of reactionary,
political agendas.
Focusing on Beard, this chapter examines the specific terms and con-
cepts at the intersection of foreign policy and domestic politics at a pivotal
stage in US and world history between the world wars. The major transi-
tion in Beard’s thought and writing involved a shift away from a Wilsonian
progressive perspective that emphasized interconnection, interdepen-
dence, and the United States’ ability to enact meaningful change around
the world. In the years following WWI, Beard’s nationalist liberalism cen-
tered around an ideal US “continentalism,” which he rooted in anti-
imperialism and premised on achieving a vibrant and largely self-sufficient
domestic economy. By turning its attention inward, he argued, the United
States would achieve more equal distribution of wealth and a broader basis
for popular rights and participation. Situated within a strong Western
Hemispheric sphere of influence and with few inextricable international
economic or political commitments, the United States would remain
unbound to the vicissitudes of European or Asian turmoil. The process by
which Beard arrived at this set of circumspect quasi-isolationist positions
largely from a close reading of historical precedents), the degree to which
these ideas extended previous perspectives, and responded to contempo-
rary exigencies expose the long-standing salience of ideas about isolation
in American foreign policy.
Hemispherism and Isolationism, Key Words, and Proxy

Arguments
This chapter analyzes and employs Beard’s thought in the context of
broader US intellectual, political, and foreign policy developments to
tackle a particular permutation of isolationism, namely its “hemispheric”
formulation. Code words like “isolationism,” a fundamental and hotly
contested term, have power as organizing principles even when they do
not appear directly. As Daniel Rodgers suggests, key words are influential
precisely because of their malleability. “Every powerful political meta-
phor has a long and active half-life. That is what distinguishes a keyword
from a passing phrase of the moment” (Rodgers 1982, 15). This may
be especially the case with respect to US foreign policy rhetoric, shot
244 C.M. NICHOLS
through as it has been with foundational metaphors and invocations such

as George Washington’s Farewell Address and Constitutional “values.”
Foreign policy ideologies have been “peppered with widely understood
code words,” such that in “speeches, school texts, newspaper editorial,
and songs to liberty, providential blessings, destiny, and service to man-
kind have been fraught with meaning shared by author and audience”
(Hunt 1987, 16). Tracking concepts like “isolationism” through key
words and proxy arguments reveal the permutations of “isolationist”
thought over time and expose the process by which particular (and espe-
cially controversial) ideas shift and are reassembled to make new cases.
Although Beard did not directly employ “isolationism,” his terminology
of “continentalism” and “hemispherism” took on strong isolationist
inflections as he developed his critique of American foreign policy and his
distinct brand of “Americanism” in the interwar period, including his
well-known criticism of the Roosevelt administration’s maneuvers lead-
ing into WWII.
Early in the twentieth century, isolationist viewpoints emerged as a
potent constellation of ideas rather than a single principle or policy posi-
tion (Nichols 2011, 2013). Isolationism is best understood as a plural,
rather than a singular set of policy positions on international relations,
economics, and ideology, often with significant domestic corollaries to
foreign policy positions. Three main isolationist tenets tended to unify
such arguments: (1) preservation of US autonomy (unilateralism), (2)
opposition to US intervention in war beyond the Western Hemisphere,
(3) rejection of all binding military and political alliances and commit-
ments (non-entanglement). Other concepts fed into these positions,
including self-sufficiency, neutrality, minimizing war, aspects of
anti-imperialism, the temporary (ad hoc) nature of alliances and treaties,
exceptionalism, and domestic mission. Influential among the
“Irreconcilable” opponents of the League of Nations in 1919 and 1920,
including Idaho Republican Senator William Borah, California Senator
Hiram Johnson, Nebraska Senator George Norris, as well as their later
allies and ideological traveling companions, isolationism did not entail cul-
tural, economic, or complete political separation from the rest of the
world. In fact, as in Beard’s case and that of Borah and others, an isola-
tionist continentalist stance embraced limited commercial and cultural
engagement with the world (Nichols and Doenecke 2013).
While highlighting the conceptual complexity of isolationist foreign
policy, this chapter argues that Beard’s thought and advocacy retained two
key consistencies. First, he maintained a generally optimistic view that the

will of the people could and should be channeled through policy, princi-
pally and most importantly toward progressive reform and internal
improvement, but also in foreign relations. Second, he offered a sustained
economic critique of American society and politics, aimed primarily at his-
torical precedent, that he hoped would undercut the role of elites, trusts,
and industry in contemporary society.
Against these fairly consistent analytical frameworks, Beard’s percep-
tions of international relations, conflicts, and crises, as well as the United
States’ “proper” foreign policy, changed dramatically over the course of
his career. In light of US involvement in WWI, Beard pivoted toward a
more cohesive “hemispherism,” reorienting his analysis toward the logic
of the Monroe Doctrine, which assumed that continental economic
growth and reform best served US interests while keeping the security of
the hemisphere sacrosanct. As he researched and wrote new chronicles of
US history, Beard increasingly emphasized the United States’ turn toward
expansionist and imperialist policies in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, detailing the dangers and damages they risked, including
war, territorial acquisitions, international legal commitments (what one
recent scholar has termed the rise of “legalist empire”), and deepening
economic interchanges that drove a relentless pursuit of new markets
(Coates 2016). Beard’s disillusionment redoubled with the conditions of
the Depression, as it did for many Americans. In the 1930s, his critique of
US world involvement centered on a rejection of the world-transforming
universalism of Wilsonian idealistic internationalism and the profiteering
of war industries and financial elites, as well as a new focus on the ways in
which foreign “adventurism” (as Beard liked to term it) had undermined
American democracy by promoting intolerance, superficial commercial-
ism, and inequality, all while undercutting major progressive reforms.
On New Roles: Republic or Empire?

The period from 1930 to 1941 was the heyday of isolationism, though
public figures tended to eschew the term, and the United States remained
very much engaged with the world. A glance at press coverage from the
era reveals that political rivals most often hurled the term as an epithet to
tar their opponents, regardless of accuracy or policy specificity. Beard him-
self took great pains in his writing to distinguish his views from those that
he thought could be labeled “isolationist.” Instead, he became perhaps
246 C.M. NICHOLS
the chief proponent of continentalism, hemispherism, and a liberal pro-

gressive form of “Americanism” (as distinguished from narrower hyperpa-
triotic nationalist forms). Sometimes, he combined these constructs, as in
“continental Americanism.” In fact, all of these terms reflected charged
and crucial inflections of a long-standing set of foreign policy ideas about
non-entanglement and unilateralism. Contemporary writers traced these
ideas back to George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address and Thomas
Jefferson’s 1801 First Inaugural, both of which pledged versions of “no
entangling alliances” and “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with
all nations.” In turn, they revolved in their updated forms upon what
Beard and most political thinkers considered the crucial 1823 Monroe
Doctrine, in which James Monroe asserted the United States’ hemispheric
dominance and warned off European powers while adhering to a view of
having no natural interests in Europe or elsewhere, deploying bluster and
bluff over hard power (Adler 1957; Jonas 1966; Nichols 2011, 2013).
Even in the immediate aftermath of WWI and the election of 1920,
these “traditional” approaches remained widely popular, with broad polit-
ical and public support. For example, arch-isolationist William Borah (a
progressive Republican senator from Idaho) considered the resounding
Republican victories and the Senate rejection of the League of Nations a
“judgment of the American people against any political alliance or combi-
nation” and declared that “the United States had rededicated itself to the
foreign policy of George Washington and James Monroe, undiluted and
unemasculated” (Guinsberg 1982, 52). Though Beard rejected some
branches of that policy—such as Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the
Monroe Doctrine (1904) asserting the United States prerogative to exer-
cise police power and intervene unilaterally in the hemisphere—he
primarily concerned himself with updating these notions to meet contem-
porary challenges.
Vitally, Beard’s proxy arguments for isolation focused on anti-
imperialism as a fundamental American foreign policy ideal. In his histo-
ries, he often explored the populist notion of “continental Americanism”
(fashionable at the turn of the century), as well as the concepts of expan-
sion, national security, and issues of vital national interests (i.e. the debate
over whether a republic could or should have colonies). It is worth noting
that the phrase “little Americanism” was a derisive expression often leveled
at populists and anti-imperialists who opposed an enlarged US interna-
tional role, while “Americanism” in the nineteenth-century sense carried
connotations of nativism, that is, “Native Americanism.” Beard’s histories
offer clear conceptual frameworks that underscored this history and the
ideas that undergirded these terms and debates. The sense that emerges in
his historical writing is that elites and financial powers corrupted American
democracy, particularly by embroiling the United States in a search for
markets and global economics that then necessitated a larger navy, more
ports, a larger army, and, eventually, military force abroad (as in the 1898
Spanish-American War and the 1900 Boxer Rebellion). According to
Beard, American anti-imperialism played out in strikingly similar debates
historically, even in starkly different eras, recurring in battles over expan-
sion (which Beard opposed beyond the confines of the continent), large-
scale foreign trade and investments (opposed), and principles of local
autonomy and popular sovereignty (which Beard supported so long as it
did not deviate from core Constitutional values or threaten the federal
government, a la secession).
Progressive History, Progressive Foreign Policy

Current scholarship tends to characterize Beard by his “continental
Americanism,” a phrase that does not appear in any of Beard’s major pub-
lished works until A Foreign Policy for America (1940), but nonetheless
speaks to his connection with anti-imperialists such as William Jennings
Bryan and to their advocates and supporters. During the pivotal 1900
presidential election, the Milwaukee Journal in an editorial, entitled “A
Democratic View of William J. Bryan,” characterized “Mr. Bryan’s rise
into national power” as the “last protest of old-fashioned continental
Americanism against the new order of the things represented by
McKinleyism, trusts and imperialism” (September 6, 1899). Though
Bryan lost the election (in 1900 and, again, in 1908), scholars like Beard,
who sought to stick to the foreign policy tradition of Washington,
Jefferson, and Monroe, continued to carry on his “continentalist” mantle.
Beard, in particular, echoed Bryan’s reform, anti-trust, anti-corruption,
and foreign policy stances in his US histories, shaping them into commen-
taries on the political fate of Bryan’s brand of progressive
anti-imperialism.
Starting in the 1890s, Beard argued, the United States shifted toward a
vested-interest foreign policy, driven by industrialization, modernization,
and a compulsion for continental conquest. In turn, sea-power advocate
Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan alongside expansionist Republican politi-
cians Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Albert Beveridge
248 C.M. NICHOLS
pushed for a larger navy and new markets. Eventually, the US ascent in
world commercial and military power propelled the United States into
hemispheric conflict and war with Spain in 1898. According to Beard, this
extraordinary shift toward outward expansionism ignited the United
States’ extra-continental empire (beginning with annexations of territory
in both the Caribbean and the Pacific). He also argued that it made the
United States vulnerable to foreign aggression while simultaneously
undercutting Bryan’s populism and diluting democratic attempts for sig-
nificant domestic reforms (which Beard’s use of scare quotes in his histo-
ries signal that he preferred).
A close reading of Beard’s histories opens new vistas on his changing
views about the nature of international relations and United States’ proper
place within the world system. Beard deployed a progressive and expanded
understanding of the past to interpret patterns and events both as an his-
torian drawing on primary sources and also as a public intellectual who
shaped the historical narrative to support his claims for the best course for
present and future policy. The connections between the rise of progressive
thought and the development of a progressive orientation in foreign pol-
icy go beyond a shared historical era; they are indicative of new ways of
understanding, of creating and evaluating knowledge, and of effecting
change. In a classic definition, William Leuchtenberg has depicted this as
a view toward the perfectibility of man and his institutions based on “posi-
tive government, of a national government directing the destinies of the
nation at home and abroad” (1952, 483). And in more recent evaluations,
this general definition holds up well as a way to encapsulate an enormous
number of progressivisms.
When configured into foreign relations, their core premises tended to
default to a form of anti-imperialism, reminding the nation that it was
born in revolution against monarchy and oppression and therefore the
United States should not rule alien peoples against their wills. In assess-
ing the annexation of the Philippines, for example, most self-described
progressives urged rapid independence, at the very least, if not outright
independence and anti-imperialism (Kramer 2006). At the same time,
progressive reformers, politicians, and intellectuals disagreed on the pro-
cess or expedience of inculcating progressive reform into US foreign
policy, and whether their attempts to reform the sanitation, hygienic,
agricultural, and educational systems in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the
Dominican Republic, and elsewhere manifested a progressive social sci-
ence managerial ethos, or if they merely amounted to a thinly veiled
neocolonial policy. Some of these claims were far from noble to the mod-
ern eye or ear, founded as they were on racist visions of a hierarchy of
civilizations in which the United States was modeled as Anglo-Saxon,
white, and highly civilized and thus should not be contaminated by other
groups and lesser races. Others made racially liberal cases for the sover-
eignty of states and peoples and their capacities for self-government. For
others, there was a more radical social critique at work. In assessing these
options, Beard tended to caution against meddling in the affairs of other
nations—in keeping with his vision of the Washington-Jeffersonian tradi-
tion—unless they directly threatened US security. Along similar lines,
progressive reformers and intellectuals, and their immediate heirs,
remained wary of the use of force—what William Borah termed the
“fetish of force”—that came with a large navy and military capacity than
were likely to tempt leaders and citizens alike (Johnson 1995; Renda
2001; Dawley 2005; Lears 2009; Nichols 2011).
Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic platform in 1912 had been an amal-
gam of progressive causes, as was Theodore Roosevelt’s. Both men
loomed large in the history and historiography of foreign policy in the
Progressive Era, and both were themselves authors well versed in US his-
tory. In fact, both had read Beard’s work and knew him personally. Beard’s
world-view can be best understood as progressive and historically
informed. Indeed, he likely agreed with Walter Lippmann, who remarked
in 1943 that “We can best separate appearance from the reality, the tran-
sient from the permanent, the significant from the episodic, by looking
backward whenever we look forward. There is no great mystery why this
should be … the successive generations of men tend to face the same
recurrent problems and to react to them in more or less habitual ways”
(Hunt 1987, 1). Wilson, however, who trained at John Hopkins, held
that there was more of a precise science to the study of history (and to
statecraft) (Milne 2015).
In contrast, Beard pioneered the “New History,” alongside fellow
Columbia University Professor James Harvey Robinson. This school
aimed to unmoor history from the German model of scientific history
associated with Leopold von Ranke, modeled on telling history from pri-
mary sources wie es eigentlich gewesen (“how things actually were”).
Instead, these so-called Progressive Historians aimed at faithful interpreta-
tion, challenging the very notion of objectivity and traditional specializa-
tions of history in politics and military affairs while expanding the range of
lenses of analysis and subjects available to historians to do their work. As
250 C.M. NICHOLS
Peter Novick has shown, Robinson and the New Historians (as well as
progressive historians such as V. L. Parrington, Frederick Jackson Turner,
and Beard) sought interdisciplinary techniques and insights, including
economics, sociology, and psychology, and pushed to broaden the scope
of historical scholarship and teaching (Novick 1988; Hofstadter 1968).
Ultimately, they asserted that historical study should elucidate the present
and generate progress not just in knowledge production but in social and
political conditions, a contentious claim starkly evident in Beard’s later
work.
Beard’s histories from the 1910s clarified the importance of the alterna-
tive represented by Bryan’s populist, reform-minded cause and how it
provoked, in part, the heightened “selling” of the hyperpatriotic cause for
war with Spain, and in the Philippines, for the large navy, and more. Beard
played with such themes as early as his 1914 Contemporary American
History, describing the United States’ 1895–96 meddling in the British
dispute over the boundaries of the Venezuelan Republic as “an echo of the
time-honored Monroe Doctrine … without any deeper economic signifi-
cance.” Although US perseverance in hemispheric advocacy seemed just,
Beard warned, there were “signs that the United States was prepared eco-
nomically to accept that type of imperialism that had long been dominant
in British politics and had sprung into prominence in Germany, France,
and Italy during the generation following the Franco-Prussian War”
(Beard 1914, 203). Even if a single instance of intervention belied eco-
nomic significance, it signaled the US willingness to step into power poli-
tics, and it required a military and economic infrastructure that would
compel continuous global engagement. After American interests fomented
revolution in Hawaii, and despite fits and starts, Beard determined, the
“Spanish War and the acquisition of the insular dependencies” brought
“imperialism directly into politics as an overshadowing issue” (Beard
1914, 205).
According to Beard, these competitive conditions brought about the
WWI. Because “newer imperialism does not rest primarily upon a desire
for more territory, but rather upon the necessity; for markets in which to
sell manufactured goods and for opportunities to invest surplus accumula-
tions of capital,” it drove countries inexorably toward conflict. The “pres-
ent economic system” propelled countries in “search for trade” and “safe
investment opportunities” to intervene in foreign territories to protect
their trade interests, to take those countries on as protectorates when
intervention failed to reap stable rewards, and, “finally, to annexation.”
Economic conditions forced “overstocked” “older countries” into this

“new form of international rivalry,” drifting “inevitably in the direction of
the economically back ward countries: Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South
America.” In the same way, Beard concluded that “Economic necessity
thus overrides American isolation and drives the United States into world
politics” (1914, 203). Like other New Republic liberal intellectuals, Beard
perceived the positive potential of global interconnection, but he sensed a
negative driver that undercut its beneficial capacity. That is, “the relative
importance of its world operations was slight until manufacturing and
commerce gained their ascendancy over agriculture” (Beard 1914, 204).
In the United States, economic interests—not national or popular inter-
ests—“demanded” the “new emphasis on world policy” and, reciprocally,
the new global turn in US policy served those economic interests (Beard
1914, 205).
Beard returned to these themes in his widely read American Government
and Politics, evaluating the role of traditions and precedents in the United
States’ relations with the hemisphere and with the world, in terms of iso-
lationist ideas, ideology, and policy. In the third updated version of the
book published in 1920, Beard established that it “is an American tradi-
tion that the United States enjoys a splendid isolation from the rest of the
powers of the world—especially of Europe.” Because “this tradition of
isolation runs back to the beginning of our history as an independent
nation,” he asserted, “the entrance of the United States into ‘world poli-
tics’ since the Spanish War is quite commonly regarded as a violation of
our historic policy.” In assessing the relationship between the US foreign
policy tradition and its present place in the world, Beard acknowledged
that George Washington had “urged his countrymen” to develop
“commercial interests” in the “world’s markets,” but observed that “from
the beginning” these interests had drawn the United States “more and
more into the current of world politics; and at no time has the United
States refused to defend American commercial enterprise in any part of the
globe.” In a change from the previous versions of the book, Beard
addressed the “menace to American interests threatened by the terrible
military power of the German Imperial Government and the depredations
committed by the German submarines” that “inevitably drew the United
States into the sphere of the great European conflict that opened in 1914.”
With US entry into WWI, “Isolation, never complete, now became more
impossible than ever” (Beard 1920, 332). It had become “apparent” to
Beard that the “splendid isolation” of the United States had “never been
252 C.M. NICHOLS
possible in practice.” Ultimately, he resolved “no political doctrines with

regard to our independence from the rest of the world are strong enough
to overcome forces which are linking our destinies to those of the world at
large” (Beard 1920, 333). This, of course, was a position he would recant
in the mid-1930s—and would entirely reject by the end of 1940—in favor
of a view that, through appropriate policies, the United States could be
sufficiently isolated and protected from war and conflict even as it remained
a part of global, and especially hemispheric, networks.
In another almost simultaneous work, co-authored with political sci-
entist Frederic Ogg, Beard assessed the problem of international govern-
ment after the war, cautioning that the US entrance into the League of
Nations might mean the “complete abandonment” of its “traditional
policy of isolation,” while conceding that modern technology and the
reality of international markets appeared to make such a development
irresistible. Ogg and Beard’s fatalism regarding international involve-
ment after WWI extended in part from their understanding that the
United States had already irreversibly implicated itself in world affairs.
During the war, they noted, President Wilson and his associates had
tricked even figures like Borah (who later regretted his pro-war vote in
1917) into believing that the United States would participate as an
“Associated Power,” and not a formal ally, in keeping with long-standing
precedents. Though they officially alluded to the “other Powers” as
“associates in war” or “co-belligerents,” however, “this was merely a
matter of punctilious terminology.” In fact, not only had the United
States “abandoned the policy of isolation” and “acted in practical alli-
ance with the nations fighting the Central Powers,” it “took the initia-
tive in making the general alliance stronger through a united command
and in numerous other ways.”
Even if the United States “had not already abandoned her isolation,”
however, “the conditions obtaining in the modern world would sooner or
later have compelled her to do so.” Although “Isolation was a natural,
wise, and almost inevitable policy when the Atlantic was a great gulf
between the Old World and the New,” the wrote, “in these days, when
cables flash news instantly from one continent to another, when goods
cross to England or France in a week, when the trade and the very life of
each nation depend on materials derived from other nations, when the
United States is grown large and rich and strong, isolation is no longer
possible” (Ogg and Beard 1919, 590–591). The League would simply
recognize the absoluteness of international interconnection:
The world has become one great body, and neither the United States nor
any other nation can live to itself or refuse to bear its share in the common
tasks of civilization. Far from meaning the entrance of the country into an
‘entangling alliance’ of the kind which Washington wisely warned against,
and whose probable consequence would be to involve us in war, accession
to the League of Nations means, for the moment, insurance against war,
and, for the future, a step toward cooperative world organization, and there-
fore toward an enduring world peace. (Ogg and Beard 1919, 590–591)
Drawing the connection to the United States of the post–Civil War era,
Ogg and Beard observed that today’s nations occupied the same position
as “frontier settlements in America half a century ago, before orderly gov-
ernment was set up.” Like those settlements, these nations “are, in the
main, well disposed. But in the absence of an authority that can enforce
order, they feel obliged to look out for their own security by arming them-
selves against possible insult or attack” (Ogg and Beard 1919, 585). In
these conditions, international law might provide a restraint with which
the League could assist, but only, in Beard’s view, if it was a league of “free
nations.”
After the Great War

Coming into—and even immediately out of—the Great War, Beard
remained hopeful that this war would end all wars. The destruction had
been terrible. But to make it worth the price, Beard expressed his hope for
the prospects of something great, for a “peace without victory,” as Wilson
had promised; he also anticipated a progressive “plastic juncture,” as
Dewey had put it, for sweeping progressive reforms along the lines pro-
posed by New Republic liberal intellectuals.
The harsh peace terms as negotiated at Versailles and the League of
Nations mandate system rapidly prompted Beard to back off from the
Wilsonian project. With the Senate’s rejection of the League, a renewed
global business model, and still relatively hefty defense appropriations (for
the United States in peacetime), Beard became increasingly disillusioned
with politics, like many of his counterparts in liberal intellectual circles.
His brief trip to Europe in the early 1920s (and particularly Yugoslavia)
reinforced these views. As he struggled to work on peace issues abroad, he
gained a firmer sense of the limits of the United States’ ability to be a
major agent of change. Bolstered by his professional understanding of the
254 C.M. NICHOLS
economic costs of imperialism under McKinley and Roosevelt, Beard con-

structed a foreign policy axiom in his historical writing throughout the
1920s and into the 1930s: given limited resources, a clear trade-off existed
between US commitments abroad (often promulgated by business inter-
ests) and duties to democratic reform and social change at home. The
more the United States invested internationally (in time, energy, money,
political capital), the less it had to invest at home.
Even though Beard strongly adhered to this historical lesson of limits
and the delicate balance of foreign and domestic and though he often
manifested strong doubts in his writing about world peace—and the
United States’ role in it—during the mid-1920s, the cosmopolitan “con-
sciousness” that Jane Addams and other peace internationalists were tap-
ping into seemed to hold utopian potential. Beard, too, was briefly swept
away with this spirit. The seeming advances of world peace and disarma-
ment, without anywhere near as much formal US diplomatic support as
Wilson had envisioned, were awe-inspiring for most of the war-weary
world, combatants and noncombatants alike. From the Washington
Naval Conference (1920–21) naval arms limitations to the Kellogg-
Briand Pact to Outlaw War (1928), these efforts cheered, and were
cheered by, Beard. Given affluence at home and evident potential for
peace abroad, he reasoned (for the last time) that the resources and indi-
cators existed to justify modest enhanced American involvement. In 1925
he made this argument about avoiding war with Japan (Beard 1925). By
1928 he summarized his mildly “internationalist” position best by noting
that if “the devastations of war are to be prevent, then nations must asso-
ciate themselves in understandings and guarantees.” Yet, he went on the
remark that, “No doubt, the magnitude and difficulties of this undertak-
ing are immense, but the League of Nations and treaties of renunciation
[of war] already indicate what the strategy of peace may be” (Beard 1928,
407–408).
The series of international crises beginning with the Great Crash of
1929, followed by Japan invading Manchuria in 1931, and culminating in
the events that led to WWII exposed the fallacies of Republican interna-
tionalism without reviving the idealistic internationalism of Wilsonianism.
The era that historian George Herring characterizes as one of US “involve-
ment without commitment” came crashing down during this decade
(Herring 2008, 436). Within and between states, competing nationalisms
transformed fellow citizens and allied countries into enemies and making
international friendships difficult, if not impossible. In the scramble of the
Depression, international relationships seemed a zero-sum game; each

country did what it could to make socioeconomic progress, often by pro-
tecting domestic markets against foreign competition. Here, protectionist
isolationism took hold in certain American policies designed to address
the Depression, building on the long-standing US tradition of restrictive
tariffs. The most notable such move was the Smoot-Hawley Act (1930),
applauded by Beard, which increased tariffs on more than 20,000 goods
and exacerbated destructive international escalation and retaliatory pro-
tectionist legislation (Rosenberg 2012; Reynolds 2014; Tooze 2014;
Nichols 2011).
When considering foreign policy positions toward the end of the 1930s,
scholars must distinguish between more aggressive advocates of
continentalist-isolationism, such as Borah and Hamilton Fish Jr., who
called for full neutral trading rights, and more cautious noninterventionist-
oriented isolationists such as Beard, Charles Tansill, and Senators Gerald
Nye and Arthur Vandenberg, who would willingly forgo traditional neu-
tral trading rights in global commerce to prevent war. During this period,
Beard focused his concern on overspending on armaments (especially at a
time of national economic need when those resources should go to job
growth), the role of industry and financial elites in lobbying for entangle-
ments that might lead to war, and the ways in which narratives of excep-
tionalism and individualism might be amplified or leveraged by leaders in
problematic, bellicose ways in times of crisis. These aspects of Beard’s
thought are demonstrated particularly clearly in the articles “The Myth of
Rugged Individualism,” Harper’s Magazine (December 1931); “Our
Confusion over National Defense: Shall We Listen to the Pacifists or the
Admirals?” Harper’s Magazine (February 1932); and “Giddy Minds and
Foreign Quarrels: An Estimate of American Foreign Policy,” Harper’s
Magazine (September 1939). When set alongside his numerous books
and revised editions from this era, particularly The Idea of National Interest
(1934), The Open Door at Home (1934), Devil Theory of War (1936),
America at Midpassage (1939), and A Foreign Policy for America (1940),
these articles clarify Beard’s sophisticated responses to the challenges of
the worst economic cataclysm in US history and the prospect of global
disorder. His progressive liberal isolationist position moved from his late
1920s connection with peace internationalism to a command-control ver-
sion of “continentalism” and, finally, to a strategic and ideological “hemi-
spherism” that he hoped would save the United States from the ravages of
another world war.
256 C.M. NICHOLS
Over all other considerations, domestic social and economic progress

remained paramount for Beard. Unlike most public figures in the progres-
sive (usually Republican) ranks of isolationists, Beard argued that the New
Deal’s inward focus did not go far enough. Instead of military planning
and foreign “adventures,” Beard made a case for a new conception of
national interest, limited to the continent. By “domestic planning and
control,” he argued, “the American economic machine may be kept run-
ning at a high tempo supplying the international market without relying
primarily on foreign outlets for ‘surpluses’ of goods and capital” (Beard
and Smith 1934a, 552).
In The Idea of National Interest and even more in Open Door, both co-
authored with political scientist George H.E. Smith, Beard observed that
the probability that the United States would be pulled into a major conflict
varied in direct proportion to the nation’s international economic interests,
especially extragovernmental investments held by American individuals and
corporations. He made a provocative and detailed case for the public con-
trol of most foreign trade and for a program of limiting international
exchange so as to reduce ties binding the United States to nations that
might be implicated in conflict or become otherwise unstable. Such a pol-
icy seems hard to envision passing muster, even at the heyday of isolationist
popularity. Still, in pursuing this stratagem, there were obvious merits: such
a course of action likely would prevent the conditions that led to WWI.
It is important to understand Beard’s views of foreign policy and poli-
tics at this time, not just to grasp the phases of Beard’s career but also to
get a sense of how Beard deployed his expertise as an historian to interpret
patterns and moments in the past to support his claims for the best course
of policy in the present and future. His brief but powerful The Devil Theory
of War (1936), for example, began with the findings of a series of Senate
committee investigations run by North Dakota Republican Senator Gerald
Nye, which aimed to get to the bottom of how and why the United States
entered WWI. Based on the Nye Committee findings, Beard argued that
it is impossible to “conceive the cause of the war in terms of some person
or persons and some action or actions standing alone” (Beard 1936, 14).
Still, he sided strongly with their central assessment that the so-called
“merchants of death”—industrial and financial elites such as the Du Pont
Company and J.P. Morgan—profited from the war and helped plunge the
United States into the conflict through programs of lending and selling
weapons that committed the nation to the war in fundamental ways even
before the formal declaration of war.
In his Devil Theory, Beard advanced a nuanced causal argument, sug-

gesting that they could not blame the war on a simple cabal: no clear
“devil” causes the war. As he popularized elements of the Nye findings,
however, Beard painstakingly sought to revisit his progressive commit-
ment to foreign relations to show how “war is our own work.” Though
Wilson and Wilsonian internationalist diplomacy and economic relations
exacerbated the US role in the war, Beard maintained that the main chal-
lenge for past, present, and future foreign policy lay with a lack of public
debate and the insidious, often subterranean influence of money and
wealthy elites in defining “vital” national interests. In short, economic
pressures made war possible. In many ways, this historical interpretation
represented a logical extension of his analysis of the Constitution and the
American Revolution. Thus, Beard’s politics and progressive worldview
deeply influenced his history (Beard 1913, 1936).
In America in Midpassage—the third volume of Charles and his fre-
quent co-author, collaborator, and wife Mary Beard’s epic The Rise of
American Civilization—they deftly attempted to distinguish between iso-
lationists (a label he rejected) and continentalists (a label he embraced).
According to the Beards, continentalists centrally concerned themselves
with a realistic view of the relationship between capitalist and military
interests: that inefficient distribution of wealth and overall social-political
inequality operated as the primary drivers of international competition,
which, in turn, produced international conflict. Unlike idealistic interna-
tionalists, this position held little room—or hope—for denationalization
through supranational organizations (like the League) or decolonization
on a large scale. On the other hand, it also avoided repudiating interna-
tional cooperation and trade. “What [continentalists] objected to was
lecturing other nations, constantly stirring up, in effect, warlike emptions,
and using the power of the United States to force any scheme of politics
or economy on other peoples,” they asserted. Those in the Beardian con-
tinentalist camp rejected the “propagation of the idea that any mere for-
eign policy could in any material respect reduce the amount of degrading
poverty in the United States, set the American economy in full motion, or
substantially aid the well-being of the American people.” Unlike the
Wilsonians and the Theodore-and-Franklin Rooseveltians, the Beards
wrote, the continentalists remained clear-eyed about “foreign policy,”
which “they held, could easily be made the instrument to stifle domestic
wrongs under a blanket of militarist chauvinism, perhaps disguised by the
high-sounding title of world peace” (Beard and Beard 1939, 455).
258 C.M. NICHOLS
By 1940, Beard’s version of continentalism broadened slightly into a

more direct advocacy of hemispheric Americanism. That is, he had begun
asserting a red-line defensive boundary, along with a clearly established
diplomatic, military, and commercial sphere of interest, in the Western
Hemisphere. This logic brought Beard to argue that those who sought to
modify American neutrality laws, including intellectuals like former
Columbia colleague James Shotwell and renowned journalist William Allen
White (who had formed the Non-Partisan Committee for Peace Through
Revision of the Neutrality Acts), were being led by the same sorts of seem-
ingly lofty yet ultimately ephemeral Wilsonian internationalist positions
that generated the United States’ WWI crusade. In his 1939 “Giddy
Minds” piece, Beard suggested that Roosevelt was motivated in his shift
from the New Deal toward world relations by his inability to solve the chal-
lenges of the Depression. In that piece, in an essay entitled “We’re
Blundering into War” (1939) and especially in A Foreign Policy for America,
Beard’s analysis slipped from being historically grounded to being more
conspiratorial. He argued that Roosevelt’s effort to “quarantine” aggressor
nations was premised on a false view of the national interest; Beard lam-
basted Roosevelt as aiming to reform the world (a la Wilson) and yet doing
so pulled by special interests and domestic political concerns rather than
principles, and all without sufficiently reckoning with the United States’
limited ability to enact moral and economic transformation of the world
system, particularly in a time of such acute crisis. To Beard, the world order
by 1940 was one of disorder (Beard 1939, 1940), (Radosh, 1975).
Turning away from the distant crisis of Nazi armies ravaging Europe,
Beard trained his gaze inward to the imminent needs of US citizens.
“Plunging and lunging” into that world system, as American imperialists
had 40 years before, would be a terrible mistake, he argued, especially
given the pressing needs of Americans at home. Just as McKinley and
Theodore Roosevelt had thwarted the country’s vital focus on jobs, rights,
and reform at the turn of the century, vested economic interests and
national compulsion to act on an international stage conspired to under-
mine the same unfinished efforts in the mid-century. As a pragmatic his-
torical critique of both formal and informal empire, Beard remained spot
on, but in generalizing from that history his arguments attenuated. As it
had been in 1898 and in 1917, now was the time for the United States to
“till our own garden” regardless of what happened in other nations. Thus,
Robert Osgood argued not long after Beard’s death, “one powerful factor
in the preoccupation of liberal isolationists like Beard with domestic
reform and the shortcomings of democracy was the pessimistic belief,

born, in part, of the bitter memory of wartime repression of civil liberties,
that American democracy would inevitably perish by its own sword if it
undertook another war” (Osgood 1953, 374). To prevent that prospect,
Beard would go to almost any length to make the case for continental
Americanism, his desired form of inward-focused nationalism that prized
self-sufficiency and policies that promoted, safe-guarded, and advanced
democratic ideals at home (Beale 1954; Kennedy 1975; Nore 1983; Craig
2001).
The 1944 edition of the Basic History encapsulated Beard’s presentist
criticism of early-twentieth-century imperialism. We see here the use of
the term “grand strategy” applied to the United States, and especially to
Republican imperialists as being jealous of European powers (with Great
Britain at its head). Similarly, Charles and Mary Beards’ historical account
suggests that GOP expansionists and their allies sought “world power”
for a variety of reasons (principally, an envy of the increase in navies,
increasing armies, increasing territories, secret alliances, and diplomacy in
European powers). The US impetus to acquire markets, coaling stations,
war ships, and the trappings of “world power,” according to the Beards,
also provided a diversion from domestic discontent and progressive and
populist reform causes, which themselves resulted from an empowered
plutocracy and state of poverty induced by unregulated and underregu-
lated industrialization. The Beards cast this history as one founded on
arguments for world power by dint of superiority and toward the acquisi-
tion of moral virtue through conflict and empire (a la Theodore Roosevelt’s
admiration for martial masculinity and the “strenuous life”). In turn, the
Basic History set up “imperialists” and “annexationists” in direct
opposition to advocates of “altruistic moral war.” In this case, the

Philippines stood as the archetypal example; US intervention there had
been premised on supporting the democratic revolution of Philippine
anti-colonial nationalists against Spain, but came to be rationalized
through “duty to spread American civilization among the natives” (Beard
and Beard 1944, 344).
Linking the Philippines to WWI, and beyond, perhaps with an eye to
FDR’s lofty “Four Freedoms” transformational vision for the post-war
world, the Beards characterized arguments for “national honor” or inter-
national “rights” and “reform” as excuses for imperialist and commercial
empire and engagement. Ultimately, they argued that the historical rise of
the United States to world power came with enormous costs—it undercut
260 C.M. NICHOLS
Progressive Era domestic reform efforts by taking away resources, energy,

and manpower; it created the illusion of patriotic unity without any of the
benefits of a patriotic public; and it reconfigured reformers as disinterested
in national honor and success, at best or at worst, as unpatriotic for not
pursuing war and empire (Beard and Beard 1944, 350–351; Nichols
2011, 22–112).
According to the Beards, William Howard Taft’s policy of “dollar
diplomacy” was at root a means of seeking out and defending American
business opportunities in foreign countries and securing markets and
regions for American bankers to make profitable foreign loans. Such a
policy floated on the surface of a harsher proposition than Roosevelt’s—
that of “dollars for bullets.” Taft’s policies thus supported local strong
men and autocrats so long as they made their debt payments and guaran-
teed US access. This policy paradigm was deep-rooted. Followed by
Wilson in practice, but not in rhetoric, it required the US government to
extend support to virtually every legitimate and beneficial American enter-
prise abroad, effectively expanding the boundaries of hemispheric “pro-
tectorates” (Beard and Beard 1944, 353). Mustering great evidence and
moral high ground, the Beards pointed out that Wilson’s adherence to
such policies in Mexico, Haiti, Santo Domingo, and beyond justified
occupation in “sanctimonious” McKinleyesque assertions, even as he
renounced formal imperialism (Beard and Beard 1944, 354). The Beards
even claimed that Wilson—in refusing to recognize Victoriano Huerta’s
revolutionary government in Mexico—“took a position, revolutionary in
history of American foreign policy, that it was his duty to withhold recog-
nition any government which did not measure up to the moral, political,
and commercial standards of the United States” (Ibid). In this claim,
many readers likely would have recognized a Beardian twist too far. Of
course, it was not unprecedented for the United States to withhold recog-
nition in this manner.
In all of these historical accounts by Beard, and in the developments of
interwar US foreign policy and politics, it was Woodrow Wilson and
WWI that encapsulated the United States’ changed orientation to the
world. As Beard evocatively opined, “By one of the ironies of history it
fell to the lot of Wilson, whom Theodore Roosevelt hated like poison, to
mount the world stage and outdo Roosevelt in using the power of the
United States to set the whole world aright” (Beard 1939, 340). Beard,
who had supported Wilson and the war effort in 1917, rejected the
effort to “make the world safe for democracy” through a “creed of world
interventionism and adventurism.” He rebuked the Wilsonian project of
high-minded freedom of seas and trade as founded on self-serving lower-
ing of trade barriers and promoting constitutional government in part by
force, preparing for war, and transforming “backward places into man-
dated trusts for civilization” (Beard 1939, 340). Indeed, as historian
Erez Manela has shown, such a critique and disillusionment were imme-
diately felt around the world in 1919 and 1920. Anti-colonial nationalists
such as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Syngman Rhee, and Jawaharlal
Nehru looked to the Wilsonian rhetoric of self-determination and were
thwarted in invoking it toward nationalist ends. Ultimately they, too,
were shaped by the disillusionment wrought by the empty promise of
Wilsonianism and the lack of US support, all in the wake of a war that the
United States had purportedly entered to support democracy worldwide
(Manela 2007).
Over time, Beard became one of the most prominent intellectuals
seeking to prevent FDR and the United States from further engagement
in the brewing crisis in Europe. After the war, he was reviled as an isola-
tionist revisionist. Still, like other renowned historians of the day such as
Charles Tansill and Henry Elmer Barnes, Charles Beard (and Mary Beard
must be included) made the case for the United States’ course of
financially-and-materially-involved “neutrality” from 1914 to 1917, and
its history as useable and urgent in the 1930s (Dallek 1979; Cohen
1987). To support the Neutrality Acts and press for binding the hands
of the president against rapid preparedness, they trumpeted an isolation-
ist-inflected, historically based case to keep the United States out of
power politics. Like other interwar foreign policy skeptics, Beard often
and vigorously invoked the lessons of WWI and the Wilson years.
“Neutrality” became the watchword of a policy based on historical
insight, and some scholars argue neutralism, not isolationism, best fit
such a view (Johnstone 2011; Blower 2014). It is worth noting that, at
the time, this view of history’s lesson (be it “isolation” or “strict neutral-
ity”) was persuasive and the positions it reinforced were popular
(Doenecke 2003). Gallup polls in 1937 consistently suggested roughly
three out of four Americans wanted to keep the United States out of the
Spanish Civil War. By 1940, half of the population wanted no formal
part in the European war or the Asian conflict (Johnson 1995; Nichols
2011; Reynolds 2014; Milne 2015).
262 C.M. NICHOLS
Conclusion
Beard’s politics and progressive worldview deeply influenced his history.
But his was no static progressivism. Beard’s policy advocacy really began
as his history matured; he came to understand the development of the
United States from the imperial adventurism and excess at the turn of the
twentieth century to the Wilsonian project of world-making in entering
WWI in 1917. By the 1930s, Beard supported much of the New Deal as
essential but not sweeping enough in its changes. Indeed, in his Open
Door at Home, Beard consistently argued for greater state control and
centralized planning, noting historical examples of crises that required
strong progressive collectivization and central organization (Beard and
Smith 1934b, 305–320). In this emphasis on crisis and the conditions of
the Great Depression, Beard perceived the potential for gain or ruin.
In the “interwar years,” Beard developed and escalated his historically
informed arguments for why the nation should go to war only “for grand
national and human advantage,” via open democratic deliberation and
debate, and unlike the sort of secret and constrained policy debates and
politics beholden to the so-called merchants of death of the Wilson years.
Thus, Beard and a number of others turned Wilsonianism against Wilson.
They mounted a progressive, pragmatic attack on Wilson’s policies and
the recent history of a purportedly “progressive” internationalism to reject
the possibility of tying the United States to Europe as another war loomed.
In the 1930s, as Beard moved purposefully toward what we might
assess now to be a form of autarky—his “continental Americanism”—fig-
ures such as Lippmann tended to agree about the need to steer clear of
foreign entanglements but equivocated on how much “retrenchment”
and military “preparedness” was necessary to achieve national security.
Lippmann disagreed with Beard about the potential role for the people.
Lippmann was skeptical. In keeping with his observations in Public
Opinion (1922), Lippmann argued that the masses of people can be m isled
and their consent easily “manufactured” through propaganda. In contrast,
Beard was optimistic; he deemed an educated “plain citizen” best able to
direct democracy. By the late 1930s, their differences were manifest.
Lippmann ultimately came to support “preparing” for neutrality and
accepting the United States’ “decisive influence in the affairs of the world”
(Lippmann 1939, 47). Beard, on the other hand, rebuked Lippmann’s
claim of American “preponderant power” as an “illusion … anywhere out-
side of this hemisphere” (Beard 1939, 349). Beard pushed against military
appropriations and preparations. For Beard, the proper US course was

near-absolute neutrality and non-entanglement. He feared the fiscal costs
as well as the signals that significant mobilization and an arms race might
produce (Milne 2015).
Beard ended the 1939 essay with which I began this chapter with an
optimistic view of the lessons the American public had taken—or might
come to understand—from US history since the late nineteenth century.
“Experience has educated them,” he affirmed, “and made them all the
more determined to concentrate their energies on the making of a civiliza-
tion within the circle of their continental domain.” Beard went on to
argue that, “They do not propose to withdraw from the world, but they
propose to deal with the world as it is and not as romantic propagandists
picture it. They propose to deal with it in American terms, that is, in terms
of national interest and security on this continent” (Beard 1939, 351). His
new definition of national interest and this vision of it being prismed
through the people’s new historical insights reflected a related develop-
ment in American political thought about neutrality. In the congressional
debates over the Neutrality Acts, a new interpretation of neutrality
emerged to block future paths to war along the lines of WWI, reversing
even the traditional Washingtonian perspective on neutral rights, by
embargoing all arms and war material trade with belligerents. It also
declared that Americans who traveled on combatant nations’ ships did so
at their own peril. “Building on this legislative reasoning, it became impor-
tant not to insist on neutral rights, but to resist them, as had not been
done in 1914–1917, so as to minimize the risks of war, to turn toward
domestic economic relief and reform as primary goals, and in commerce,
to emphasize noncombatant markets” (Nichols 2011, 333).
Beardian reactions to such developments built on progressive concep-
tions that linked democratic reform and foreign relations. He rejected the
old neutral logic along with the sorts of arguments made by Lippmann,
Croly, and the remains of The New Republic’s WWI-interventionist
worldview. That war and the attendant liberal internationalist arguments
that undergirded the American project to “make the world safe for democ-
racy” framed much more than Beard’s later writing and policy analysis.
Competing perceptions of the people and their role in what Wilson had
seemingly championed as public diplomacy came to the forefront of
1930s’ liberal isolationist ideas. Lippmann, Croly, and (to a lesser extent)
Dewey, and their fellow travelers tended toward more technocratic, pro-
gressive, expert visions of the demos and models for “mastery over drift”
264 C.M. NICHOLS
(to borrow from Lippmann) as they pursued reform and governance.

Beard’s confidence depended on the people; if properly informed, he
believed they would do right and could see the merits of a hemispherical
approach. He even came to support efforts such as Indiana Democratic
Representative Louis Ludlow’s proposed Amendment in the 1930s to the
Constitution to vest the war-making power in the people through referen-
dum, rather than limiting it to Congress.
Most interwar debates over the proper US role in the world revolved
around a question of the intellectual foundations for US foreign policy as
a democratic republic. In turn, as the “ghost of Wilson” haunted policy
debates and historical analysis, so too did Wilsonianism loom as the posi-
tion against which most other diplomatic approaches were measured. The
direction the United States should take in confronting the economic cata-
clysm of the Great Depression followed by renewed attempts at imperial
conquest and the challenges of fascism thus turned on questions of WWI
causation, on contested definitions of progressivism, and, ultimately, on
disputes over the meaning of America as it might be channeled through
foreign relations. Beyond Beard’s hemispherism lay an optimistic but cau-
tious progressive view of history, of the people’s will as expressed in poli-
tics, and of the tenuous nature of the United States’ experiment with
democracy.
Acknowledgment Work on this chapter was supported by an Andrew Carnegie

fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The author would like to
also thank the editors of the volume and Danielle Holtz for her superb research
and editing assistance.
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CHAPTER 12
A Lapsed Progressive: Walter Lippmann

and US Foreign Policy, 1914–1945
David Milne
Throughout his long career, Walter Lippmann was primus inter pares as a
journalist and foreign policy analyst who combined quality of insight with
quantity of readership. The most read, revered, and trusted print journalist
in America, from Calvin Coolidge to Lyndon Johnson, Lippmann was a
strong supporter of Woodrow Wilson during the First World War but
moved sharply away from his universalist worldview when it became appar-
ent that the Treaty of Versailles was no “peace without victory”. This chap-
ter traces the evolution of Lippmann’s thinking on foreign affairs from the
First World War to the end of the Second World War. The quality of his
journalism was consistently high but he was no mere distant observer of
events. Lippmann helped Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) formulate a persua-
sive rationale for providing Great Britain with material support—so much
so that a journalist from the St Louis Post Dispatch threatened to investigate
Lippmann’s role in “this plot to get America into the war”.1 From 1939,
he identified through his syndicated “Today and Tomorrow” columns a
See “The Reminiscences of Walter Lippmann,” Columbia University Rare Books Library,
1
New York City (hereafter CURBL), 178.
D. Milne (*)
School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

270 D. MILNE
compelling strategic rationale for facing down Germany and Japan. Then,
in 1943, Lippmann published U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, a
book that sold close to half a million copies (Lippmann 1943).
Rationalizing and encouraging American participation in the Second
World War was something that Lippmann worked toward skillfully, but
so too was ensuring that President Roosevelt did not botch the peace in
the fashion of Woodrow Wilson. To avoid this from happening,
Lippmann advised that America should work with the world’s other
powerful nations to ensure post-war stability—not through vesting any
serious hope in the League of Nations’ successor. Roosevelt should cer-
tainly resist making grandiose claims from connecting the spread of
democracy to the maintenance of peace. And while the president should
disagree with Moscow where necessary, he should always keep an eye on
the ultimate goal of avoiding another global war, to which contentious
issues of smaller stake—such as Soviet domination of Eastern Europe—
could be sacrificed.
Shedding his earlier Wilsonianism, Lippmann came to believe that
peace was best achieved through strength, that idealism should be stripped
from policymaking, that the arbitration of disputes was impossible to
achieve, and that the nation-state remained the principal actor in world
politics. The Progressivism of his early years gave way to something far
more hardheaded. It disappointed Lippmann that so many of his recom-
mendations went unheeded in the first few post-war years as ideological
hostility, not a dispassionate calculation of respective interests, soured
US-Soviet relations. Yet, Lippmann overestimated the ability of the United
States and Soviet Union to maintain a credible and workable post-war alli-
ance. It turned out that ideological differences between the two nations
mattered.
Lippmann’s 1943 thesis that “a foreign policy consists in bringing into
balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s com-
mitments and the nation’s power” was a classic expression of realism, but
its assumptions were scientistic—that he had discerned a fundamental and
systematic truth about the way in which states interact. (Lippmann 1943,
9). Lippmann’s theory held that Josef Stalin was a rational actor acutely
conscious of his nation’s strengths and weaknesses, which meant the
Soviet leader was unlikely to overstep the mark in projecting power if dis-
passionate analysis flagged the dangers of such a course. Yet, Lippmann
was only partly right. While Stalin’s goals in the early Cold War were not
as expansionary as some have portrayed, ideology did play a causal role in
A LAPSED PROGRESSIVE: WALTER LIPPMANN AND US FOREIGN POLICY... 271
shaping Soviet foreign policy.2 This made a modus vivendi between the
two nations difficult to achieve.
While this assessment was flawed and overconfident in certain respects,
there can be no doubt that Lippmann was a remarkably insightful observer
of international affairs in a tumultuous era and that he appropriately con-
tinues to command the interest of historians and scholars of international
relations. His worldview evolved and changed with the time; his intellec-
tual concerns were multifaceted. A clear strain of pragmatism is evident
throughout the entirety of his career. But it is with Lippmann’s
Progressivism—his first sustained political passion—that we must begin.
In October 1913, Herbert Croly invited Walter Lippmann to dine with
him at Players, a private club in New York City. Croly had published The
Promise of American Life to glowing reviews in 1909. An influential pro-
gressive tract, Croly argued that the United States’ affirming story of soci-
etal progress, and vast latent potential, might combine to perfect not just
America but other nations, like Panama, where “order and good govern-
ment” could be established with the right kind of tutelage (Croly 2001,
303). In respect to improving America, Croly believed that the govern-
ment must play a larger role in managing the economy, and redistributing
wealth, so as to ensure the nation’s continued vitality: “The Promise of
American life is to be fulfilled—not merely by the maximum amount of
economic freedom, but by a certain measure of discipline; not merely by
the abundant satisfaction of individual desires, but by a large measure of
individual subordination and self-denial” (Croly 2001, 28). Lippmann
admired Croly’s ambition to approach good governance and politics in
the scientific fashion.
When Croly invited him to join the editorial staff of a new progressive
weekly, funded by Willard and Dorothy Straight, he a Morgan banker and
she a Standard Oil heiress, Lippmann accepted on the spot. The magazine
was generously funded, strongly associated with Bull Moose Progressivism,
and afforded Lippmann a gilt-edged opportunity to interact with the most
powerful figures in the city. Thrilled by his new job, Lippmann wrote to
his friend Van Wyck Brooks, a prominent literary critic, to explain the
magazine’s purpose:
Vladislav M. Zubok’s Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to
2
Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2008) is particularly effective in
tracing the way in which ideology influenced Stalin’s ambitions. Geoffrey Roberts’ Stalin’s
Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)
lends support to Lippmann’s portrayal of Stalin as a pragmatic and rational actor.
272 D. MILNE
We’re starting a weekly here next fall—a weekly of ideas—with a paid up

capital—god save us—of 200,000. The age of miracles, sir, has just begun
… If there is any word to cover our ideal, I suppose it is humanist, somewhat
sharply distinguished (but not by Irving Babbitt) from humanitarianism.3
Croly captured the magazine’s essence more succinctly when he remarked,

“We shall be radical without being socialistic and our general tendency will
be pragmatic rather than doctrinaire” (Steel 1980, 62). Lippmann, who
had been taught by and became close to William James at Harvard, was
always likely to warm to such a mission statement.4
The first edition of The New Republic hit the newsstands on November
7, 1914. A magazine created to proselytize for progressive domestic
reform was now compelled to address alliance-driven bloodletting in
Europe. Walter Lippmann was in England—with H.G. Wells, Sidney and
Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw—when the chain reaction of
ultimatums and mobilizations that led to the First World War commenced.
Progressives and British Fabians were intellectually blindsided by the con-
flict. Beatrice Webb told Lippmann that “We don’t form opinions on for-
eign affairs. We don’t know the technique.”5 Neither did Lippmann. He
wrote to Felix Frankfurter that “nothing can stop the awful disintegration
now. Nor is there any way of looking beyond it: ideas, books, seem too
utterly trivial, and all the public opinion, democratic hope and what not,
where is it today? Like a flower in the path of a plough.”6
To further develop his knowledge on foreign policy, Lippmann decided
to write a book on the subject. Published in 1915, The Stakes of Diplomacy
observed that conflict arose from an emotional nationalism hardwired into
human nature: “It is the primitive stuff of which we are made, our first
loyalties, our first aggressions, the type and image of our souls … They are
our nationality, that essence of our being which defines us against the
background of the world.” “We have all been educated to isolation,”
wrote Lippmann, “and we love the irresponsibility of it. But that isolation
Walter Lippmann to Van Wyck Brooks, February 5, 1914, Papers of Van Wyck Brooks,
3
University of Pennsylvania Rare Books Library, Folder 1662.

On pragmatism and foreign policy, see Molly Cochran, “A pragmatist perspective on ethi-
4
cal foreign policy”, in Karen E. Smith and Margot Light, Ethics and Foreign Policy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Ibid., 72.
5
Walter Lippmann to Felix Frankfurter, August 2, 1914, Box 10, Folder 418, Yale
6
University Library (hereafter YUL).

must be abandoned if we are to do anything effective for internationalism

… The supreme task of world politics is not the prevention of war, but a
satisfactory organization of mankind” (Lippmann 1915a, 67, 224). The
United States needed to assume its responsibilities as a leader of the inter-
national order, but do so without illusion.
Yet, aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy vision also struck
Lippmann as logical and necessary. The president had invited Lippmann
to the White House in early 1916, and the young journalist had been
impressed. On Mexico, for example, Lippmann recalled that, “I remem-
ber Wilson’s talking about how he believed in the Jeffersonian principle of
the sacred right of revolution. It’s something that no president would say
today [in 1950]. He was defending his own policy and his belief that
Huerta was a counter-revolutionist. He believed in the Madero revolu-
tion.”7 A second meeting with Wilson, in the summer of 1916, moved
Lippmann firmly into his camp of supporters. Aware that Lippmann’s pur-
pose was endorsement reconnaissance, he welcomed him into the Oval
Office with the words, “So you’ve come to look me over?” The president
delivered what Ronald Steel has described as “a dazzling monologue cov-
ering virtually every issue, from the Mexican imbroglio to German designs
on Brazil, from TR’s [Roosevelt’s] ambitions to dilemmas of neutrality”.
Mightily impressed by Wilson’s range, and the absence of any obvious idée
fixe, Lippmann persuaded his colleagues at The New Republic that sup-
porting Wilson’s re-election was the only sensible course in the midst of
war. “I shall not vote for the Wilson who has uttered a few too many noble
sentiments,” Lippmann wrote in an editorial, “but for the Wilson who is
evolving under experience and is remaking his philosophy in the light of
it” (Lippmann 1916). Lippmann had identified in Wilson a pragmatic sen-
sibility to which he clearly related.
In December 1916, Lippmann wrote a column titled “Peace without
victory”, which evenhandedly examined the peace overtures the president
had made to the European belligerents, alongside the reasons for their
rebuttal. Two weeks later, Wilson delivered a speech declaring his strong
support for achieving “peace without victory”, a rationale and compli-
ment to Lippmann’s phrase making that the journalist was quick to appre-
ciate.8 Yet, there were clear differences between Wilson’s and Lippmann’s
conception of the national interest—over what American aims should look
“The Reminiscences of Walter Lippmann,” CURBL, 89.

7

8
274 D. MILNE
like if war should come. After Germany’s declaration of unrestricted sub-

marine warfare, for example, Lippmann penned an influential article, enti-
tled “The Defense of the Atlantic World”, which identified a virtuous
“Atlantic Community”, consisting primarily of the United States, Britain,
and France, which were all threatened by German domination of the
Atlantic:
A victory on the high seas would be a triumph of that class which aims to
make Germany the leader of the East against the West, the leader ultimately
of a German-Russian-Japanese coalition against the Atlantic world. It would
be utter folly not to fight now to make its hopes a failure by showing that in
the face of such a threat the western community is a unit.9
Lippmann wanted Wilson to present his war aims with the clarity that was
his own journalistic hallmark. The war should serve America’s vital inter-
ests in preventing German naval domination of the Atlantic.
Lippmann performed significant wartime service for his nation. He first
served as a special assistant to the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker,
second as the executive secretary of the president’s “Inquiry”, and finally
as a member of the Inter-Allied Propaganda Board in London, where he
drafted propaganda leaflets to be dropped behind enemy lines. Lippmann
played an important role in drafting the Fourteen Points. Here, Lippmann
was sympathetic to Wilson’s idealism, which chimed with The New
Republic’s perspective. Yet, once the war ended, and peace negotiations
commenced in Paris, Lippmann recalled a distinct sense of foreboding:
I remember very well Wilson’s arrival in Paris. It was a great event—one of

the greatest spectacles. I had the most gloomy feeling all day. Everybody was
rejoicing, but I had an ominous feeling that something was wrong already.10
Lippmann observed Wilson’s performance despairingly as a little-used

member of the American delegation. While conceding that the League of
Nations could prove useful in providing “a temporary shelter from the
Walter Lippmann, “The Defense of the Atlantic World,” The New Republic, February 17,
9
1917. The historian Mary Beard recorded her appreciation for the article in a warm letter to
Lippmann. She wrote that it “is superb. Better than ever before you have proved your leader-
ship. I have been liking the New Republic immensely recently”. Mary Beard to Walter
Lippmann, February 19, 1917, Box 3, Folder 125, YUL.
10
storm”, Lippmann could not fathom how the president could mortgage
“peace without victory” for an untried international organization yet to
clear the significant hurdle of Senate confirmation (Ikenberry et al. 2009,
41). The pragmatic Wilson Lippmann had earlier identified seemed to
have disappeared from view. In a letter to Norman Hapgood, Wilson’s
unofficial press liaison, Lippmann observed pointedly and accurately that
the president had “bought the League from France and Britain with a bad
peace instead of selling it to France and Britain for a good peace” (Steel
1980, 158, 161). Wilson had become dogmatic, which was the major
political deficiency in Lippmann’s view.
When the Treaty of Versailles emerged into the harsh light of public
view, Lippmann felt an acute sense of betrayal. Usually so accurate when
judging the character of his interlocutors, Lippmann had erred in identify-
ing Wilson as a supple thinker. Lippmann was so riled by what had trans-
pired in Paris that he provided William Borah and Hiram Johnson, and
other “irreconcilables” in the Senate, with insider anecdotes and evidence
that helped undermine the peace accords.
Though let down by Wilson, Lippmann was less than enthused by his
presidential successors, however. He wrote to Graham Wallas, “Harding is
elected not because anyone likes him or because the Republican Party is
particularly powerful, but because the Democrats are inconceivably
unpopular.”11 On Calvin Coolidge, Lippmann recalled that his laconic
reputation regrettably did not tally with his own experience:
I … saw quite a lot of Calvin Coolidge in that period between 1922 and
1931, although we were opposing him rather strenuously. I used to go to
lunch with him alone and we had long interminable talks with him in his
study. He did all the talking. He was far from a silent man…. I had a strong
impression with Coolidge that he really had nothing very much to do—that
he was not at all a busy man. He always took a nap in the afternoon. His idea
was, “Let the government drift.”12
Yet, in the sphere of foreign policy, Lippmann was relaxed about drift—
compared to the misdirected energy of the war years at any rate. Though
never strictly isolationist, he welcomed US detachment from the League
of Nations. He also denigrated the “Dollar Diplomacy” that undergirded
Walter Lippmann to Graham Wallas, November 4, 1920, Box 33, Folder 1246, YUL.
11
“The Reminiscences of Walter Lippmann,” CURBL, 19–20.

12
276 D. MILNE
Harding’s and Coolidge’s policies toward Latin America. In an article in

Foreign Affairs, Lippmann examined “the conflict between the vested
rights of Americans in the natural resources of the Caribbean countries
and the rising nationalism of their peoples”. The worst of all policies
would lead to the “realization in Latin America that the United States had
adopted a policy, conceived in the spirit of Metternich, which would
attempt to guarantee vested rights against social progress as the Latin peo-
ples conceive it” (Steel 1980, 237–238). Lippmann did not dispute that
economic interests were present—he simply wanted them handled with
greater sensitivity and sense of proportion.
Lippmann left The New Republic for The New York World—the city’s
most important liberal daily—at the beginning of 1922. He wrote for the
World for the next 9 years, drafting 1200 editorials, of which about one-
third focused on foreign affairs—a notably high proportion given the
parochialism of the American public sphere through the 1920s. It was
during this time that Lippmann developed a truly national reputation. His
profile was further enhanced by the publication of two books, Public
Opinion and The Phantom Public, which together caused a considerable
stir.
In Public Opinion, Lippmann contended that the American people
could not be trusted to make political decisions of high importance and
that more power should be placed in the hands of an administrative elite
in respect to the framing of both domestic and foreign policy. In
Lippmann’s pessimistic view, democracy could only function effectively if
politicians dismissed the “intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of
us must acquire a competent opinion about public affairs” (Lippmann
1922, xiv). It was a brilliant and unsparing dissection of participatory
democracy which garnered glowing endorsements. John Dewey described
Public Opinion as “perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as
currently conceived ever penned” (Fink 1997, 31). Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes observed that “there are few living, I think, who so discern and
articulate the nuances of the human mind” (Steel 1980, 183).
Published in 1925, The Phantom Public pursued Public Opinion’s elitist
logic to an even more discomforting degree. Disregarding populist nice-
ties, Lippmann wrote that viewing the average voter as “inherently com-
petent” was a “false ideal” that had caused great damage (Lippmann 1927,
20). The American polity was in fact divided between elite “insiders”, with
detailed contextual knowledge of salient political issues, and uninformed
“outsiders”, whose interests did not extend far beyond the everyday com-
bination of work, sleep, family, and leisure. Lippmann had first trialed this
distinction in The New Republic in 1915, when he wrote that “Only the
insider can make the decisions, not because he is inherently a better per-
son, but he is so placed that he can understand and can act” (Lippmann
1915b, 13). His ideal “democracy” would give insiders free rein to make
important decisions, permitting the mass of “outsiders” to exercise a veto
only if they felt the decision would unfairly injure the majority—a utilitar-
ian calculation that few were capable of making. Hence, Lippmann antici-
pated useful apathy.
Lippmann’s purpose in The Phantom Public was to ensure that “each
of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd”
(Lippmann 1927, 155). It was a post-mortem on the corpse of his earlier
idealism and progressive faith in the capacity of people to self-govern and
pursue a sage foreign policy. He had lost faith in Wilsonianism and the
universalist optimism that justified the attempt to make “the world safe
for democracy”. Democracy in the United States was clearly not safe in
itself. Considerably more bracing and pessimistic than Public Opinion, the
book met with an icy reception among reviewers and readers. Lippmann
anticipated this when he observed that he was likely to be “put on trial for
heresy by my old friends on The New Republic” (Steel 1980, 213). John
Dewey’s 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems, was conceived as a
response to Lippmann, noted persuasively that the “world has suffered
more from leaders and authorities than from the masses” (Dewey 1927,
365).13
On foreign policy, Lippmann equivocated on the necessary dimensions
of diplomatic retrenchment. Intellectually, he was in flux. He became close
with Senator William Borah, the pseudo-isolationist chair of the Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations from 1924 to 1933. The two men col-
laborated in supporting naval disarmament, its attendant international
agreements, and in opposing military intervention in Latin America. Yet,
they also joined forces in calling for a renegotiation of Allied war debts and
supporting diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union. Their endeavors
sometimes echoed internationalist goals and sometimes tended toward
diplomatic insularity. Borah even professed faith in the Kellogg-Briand
pact to outlaw war, which Lippmann found ludicrous in its detachment
Dewey, Beard, and Lippmann are expertly discussed in Thomas Bender, New York
13
Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our
Own Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).
278 D. MILNE
from reality. That “Europe should scrap its whole system of security based
on the enforcement of peace,” wrote Lippmann in the World in 1927,
“and accept in its place a pious, self-denying ordinance that no nation will
disturb the peace” was nonsensical. The support that Borah extended
toward such folly represented an “extraordinary spectacle”, in light of his
own well-recorded contempt for the League of Nations (Steel 1980,
253–254). Yet, by 1930, Lippmann’s foreign policy views appeared as
illogical in their entirety as Borah’s. Ronald Steel captures this well:
During the 1920s, and much of the 1930s as well, Lippmann was neither
consistent nor persuasive in his prescriptions for preventing war.
Simultaneously espousing disarmament and American naval strength, inter-
national cooperation and an Anglo-American domination of the seas,
American freedom of action and a ‘political equivalent of war,’ he reflected
the confusions of the age. (Steel 1980, 255–256)
It took the onset of the Great Depression, the presidency of Franklin

Roosevelt, and the rise of Germany and Japan to instill in Lippmann’s
diplomatic thought a realist consistency.
Lippmann left The New York World for the International Herald
Tribune in the summer of 1931. The Tribune was a national Republican
newspaper rather than a metropolitan Democratic one, and the switch
provided Lippmann a much larger audience and salary. Lippmann’s first
“Today and Tomorrow” column—or T&T as it became known among
the cognoscenti—first rolled off the press in September 1931. A year later,
the column was syndicated to 100 papers with a combined circulation in
excess of 10 million (Steel 1980, 271, 280). Lippmann remained at the
Tribune for the next 36 years. The column became a journalistic phenom-
enon and its author a trusted explanatory voice in a world changing fast
for the worse. A rival of Lippmann’s, the journalist Arthur Krock, observed
bitterly that “to read, if not to comprehend, Lippmann was suddenly the
thing to do” (Carnes 2002, 181).
One of Lippmann’s best remembered columns cast a critical eye on
FDR: “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the
office, would very much like to be president”.14 Lippmann had kept a
close eye on FDR since the Wilson administration and had arrived at a
Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” International Herald Tribune, August 1,

14
1932.
mixed conclusion. While admiring his rhetorical facility and keen political
antennae, Lippmann found the generality and vagueness of FDR’s policy
interests unsettling, concluding that he was unqualified for high office.
“The two things that about him that worry me”, Lippmann wrote to
Felix Frankfurter after FDR secured his party’s nomination, “are that he
plays politics well and likes the game for its own sake and is likely to be
ultra-political to show his own virtuosity. The other fear I have is that he
is such an amiable and impressionable man, so eager to please, and, I
think, so little grounded in his own convictions that almost everything
depends on the character of his advisers.” Roosevelt’s forceful presidency
proved Lippmann to be wide of the mark on this second point. Nonetheless,
in the absence of any better options, Lippmann placed his reservations to
one side, stating his intention come Election Day to “vote cheerfully for
Governor Roosevelt” (Steel 1980, 295–296). Dire domestic circum-
stances suggested to Lippmann that change was essential.
Lippmann met President-Elect Roosevelt at a dinner in New York in
honor of the retiring President of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell. Conscious
of Lippmann’s rapt national readership, Roosevelt brushed off the earlier
criticism and invited Lippmann to visit him in Warm Springs, Georgia,
where doctors attended annually to the paralysis caused by polio. It was a
remarkable encounter by all accounts. “The situation is critical, Franklin,”
Lippmann observed darkly, “You may have no alternative but to assume
dictatorial powers.” According to Ronald Steel, “the starkness of the
phrase, particularly from Lippmann, took Roosevelt aback” (Steel 1980,
300). Over the space of a few months, Lippmann had gone from casting
serious doubt on Roosevelt’s suitability for high office to advising him to
assume the necessary role of an enlightened despot. Lippmann’s 1920s’
mercurialness continued well into the 1930s.
Lippmann was enthralled by the executive energy of the early stages of
Roosevelt’s presidency, writing that the nation “had regained confidence
in itself” and that “by the greatest of good fortune which has befallen this
country in many a day, a kindly and intelligent man has the wit to realize
that a great crisis is a great opportunity.”15 His vote against Hoover had
been vindicated in a short time. On foreign policy, Lippmann celebrated
President Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” enunciated in his inaugu-
ral address—which promised non-interference in the affairs of Washington’s
Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” International Herald Tribune, April 6,

15
1933.
280 D. MILNE
Latin American neighbors—as a “radical innovation” and a “true substi-

tute for empire” (Herring 2008, 555).
Yet, after the honeymoon period ended, Lippmann began to find fault
with his president, primarily in regard to the outsized statist ambitions of
the New Deal. On domestic issues, Lippmann turned rightward as the
president led the nation purposefully to the left. His disenchantment was
such that in the presidential election of 1936, Lippmann endorsed
Roosevelt’s opponent, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas. Many liberals
were appalled by Lippmann’s strong move against Roosevelt and the New
Deal. Writing in The Nation, Amos Pinchot dismissed Lippmann as an
“obfuscator … who can be quoted on almost either side of almost any
question”. Denigrating Lippmann’s close links to lawyers and bankers,
Pinchot described him as “an ambassador of goodwill of the philistines”
(Syed 1963, 9). Unruffled by this assault, Lippmann welcomed The
Nation’s approbation as proof that his rightward track was correct. In
1937, Lippmann published The Good Society, a frontal assault on what he
viewed as Roosevelt’s socialistic collectivism, which bore comparison to
Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Influenced by the conservative
Austrian economist, Friedrich von Hayek, Lippmann’s polemic was criti-
cized by previously supportive voices. John Dewey thought the book gave
“encouragement and practical support to reactionaries” (Steel 1980,
325).
Reflecting on Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and the bellicosity displayed
by irredentist Italy, Lippmann wrote in 1934, “As long as Europe prepares
for war, America must prepare for neutrality.”16 The operative word in
Lippmann’s sentence was “prepare”, not “neutrality”—an important dif-
ference in emphasis from many isolationists. Lippmann believed that
building a formidable American military was the surest way to repel preda-
tors. He harbored few illusions about the diabolical nature of the Nazi
regime. Yet, Lippmann believed that Hitler would pay little heed to
professions of neutrality that were unsupported by serious military power.
Avowedly, neutral nations must also possess a big stick.
While Lippmann believed that much more should be spent on military
procurement, he did detect some cause for hope in Europe. In a bracingly
amoral column of May 1933, Lippmann discerned two forces—well, one
force and one persecuted minority—that might collectively restrain
Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” International Herald Tribune, May 17,
16
1934.
Hitler’s territorial ambitions. The first was the French Army, which still
commanded respect from learned individuals steeped in Napoleonic his-
tory, oblivious to the hollowness of its contemporary military capabilities.
The second phenomenon that Lippmann believed might localize German
ambitions was the persecution of its Jewish population. In the spring and
summer of 1933, Nazi thugs organized the burning of books written by
Jews (and liberals) and visited violence and intimidation on a national
scale. The repression of Germany’s Jews, Lippmann wrote, “by satisfying
the lust of the Nazis who feel they may conquer somebody and the cupid-
ity of those Nazis who want jobs, is a kind of lightning rod which protects
Europe”.17 Here, Lippmann displayed considerable callousness and badly
underestimated the extent of Hitler’s ambitions. Felix Frankfurter
recorded his understandable dismay about the “implications and attitude
of feeling about that piece” (Steel 1980, 330).
Lippmann also called for the United States to retreat from those Pacific
interests that clashed most obviously with Tokyo’s regional ambitions. In
December 1936, Lippmann wrote that the “vital interests of Japan and
the United States do not conflict”, that war would be a “monstrous and
useless blunder” and that this might be a “very opportune moment for the
United States to withdraw gracefully from its Far Eastern entanglements”.
Uttering a sentiment that clashed with those of certain isolationists—that
Europe was beyond hope but that China was very much a wronged
party—Lippmann declared “we can well afford to say plainly that the
Chinese must defend their own country, and that we have no political
interests whatever in Asia.”18 Retrenchment became imperative. Lippmann
worried that the Philippines could become a source of contention with
Japan.
A visit to the European continent in the summer of 1937 had left
Lippmann despondent about Anglo-French complacency regarding the
scale of the German threat. He was far ahead of his high-powered inter-
locutors in his understanding of the nature of Nazism and on the particu-
larities of Hitler’s psyche. In a far-sighted T&T column, Lippmann
observed perceptively that Hitler’s continued dominance of German
politics depended “not upon receiving tangible benefits by grace of his
Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” International Herald Tribune, May 12,
17
1933.
Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” International Herald Tribune, December
18
24, 1936.
282 D. MILNE
opponents, but upon taking things by the exercise of his own power … He
cannot be placated by gifts; he must appear to conquer what he seeks”.19
If France and Britain continued on the track of denial and ignorance,
Lippmann observed bleakly, “then the future of the Old World is in the
hands of warrior castes, and the civilian era, which began in the renais-
sance, is concluded”.20 In February 1938, during a meeting with Joe
Kennedy, the appeasement-inclined US Ambassador to the UK (and father
of a future president), Lippmann insisted that “democracies must not
delude themselves with ideas that there is any bloodless, inexpensive sub-
stitute for the willingness to go to war…” (Steel 1980, 370).
Lippmann’s prescience on the extent of Hitler’s ambitions, and his cri-
tique of Anglo-French irresponsibility in the face of this threat, became
more pointed between 1938 and 1939. Lippmann continued to make a
case to the American people that military preparedness was the number-
one political priority. The Assistant Secretary of War, Louis Johnson,
thanked Lippmann in December 1938 for his journalistic efforts to eluci-
date the national (Atlanticist) interest and his lucid warnings to Americans
to reject the type of complacency and wishful thinking that so consumed
Britain and France:
Your views on this vital subject are so eminently sane and sound and your
presentation of them is so forthright and so clear that I am impelled to the
belief that if the country does not realize the situation as you have so ade-
quately presented in your column, I greatly fear that bitter days may be in
store for us….21
Increasingly reconciled to the possibility of war, and of the likely necessity

of material support for Britain and France, Johnson was delighted to have
a journalistic ally as powerful as Lippmann.
In June 1939, Lippmann met Winston Churchill for the first time. The
art historian Kenneth Clark had arranged a supper with a guest list that
included the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, diplomat Harold
Nicolson, and his wife Vita Sackville-West, the author, poet, and bisexual
Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” International Herald Tribune, December 2,

19
1937.
Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” International Herald Tribune, October 16,
20
1937.
Louis Johnson [Assistant Secretary of War] to Walter Lippmann, December 22, 1938,
21
Box 80, Folder 1160, YUL.

lover of Virginia Woolf. Clark had convinced Churchill—suffering at that

time from the periodic depression which he labeled the “black dog”—to
attend with the promise of Lippmann’s attendance and attention. As
Churchill sat laconically at dinner, Lippmann recounted the grim details of
a meeting with Joe Kennedy earlier in the day. The gist of the ambassador’s
message was that Britain stood no chance of winning a war against
Germany. Kennedy had observed cuttingly to Lippmann that “All
Englishmen in their hearts know this to be true, but a small group of bril-
liant people has created a public feeling which makes it impossible for the
government to take a sensible course” (Steel 1980, 376).
Churchill was roused from his ennui by Lippmann’s précis of the
encounter. Harold Nicholson recounted that Churchill, “waving his
whisky and soda to mark his periods, stubbing his cigar with the other
hand”, growled that while it was inevitable that “steel and fire will rain
down upon us day and night scattering death and destruction far and
wide”, the British would endure the German assault stoically and return
the “destruction” with interest. And in the unlikely event that Kennedy’s
“tragic utterance” was proved correct, Hitler would still have to pacify or
defeat the world’s most powerful nation. Churchill fixed Lippmann with a
purposeful stare, imploring him to advise his fellow Americans to “think
imperially” and continue its tradition of holding aloft the “torch of lib-
erty” (Steel 1980, 376). Lippmann was mightily impressed by Churchill’s
bearing and eloquence.
Lippmann was not surprised when Hitler’s actions forced Britain and
France to declare war in September 1939. Yet, he understood that Allied
military psychology was much more fragile than in 1914, when soldiers
volunteered in droves to fight Germans to the backdrop of bunting and
street parades. In February 1940, Lippmann met with General Maurice
Gamelin during a tour of the Maginot Line. He asked France’s military
leader what might happen if Germany ignored Maginot and attacked
through undefended Belgium. “Oh”, exclaimed Gamelin, “we’ve got to
have an open side because we need a champs de bataille. We’re going to
attack the German army and destroy it. The Maginot Line will narrow the
gap through which they can come, and thus enable us to destroy them
more easily” (Steel 1980, 381). Gamelin’s failure of imagination showed
up a few months later when German troops poured through Belgium,
little concerned by the narrowness of their route and routed the French
army soon after.
284 D. MILNE
After the fall of France, President Roosevelt, unshackled from his usual
caution, declared that it was a “delusion” to believe that America might
remain “a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force”
(Zelizer 2010, 45). Lippmann reveled in the speech’s force and clarity. In
his column, Lippmann further developed the president’s reasoning by
observing that isolationists had been “duped by a falsification of history”.
President Wilson failed to identify the primary reason America went to
war: because the “safety of the Atlantic highway is something for which
America should fight.” To shirk in this task 20 years later would be to
invite German aggression.22 And Lippmann was at pains to ridicule isola-
tionists who believed that the Atlantic was some form of magical barrier
that no belligerent nation could cross.
Lippmann played a major role in assuring Congressional passages of the
destroyers-bases deal, and he offered strong support for its more ambi-
tious successor, Lend-Lease. Acknowledging that sophistry and loopholes
were no longer required in rationalizing significant material support for
Great Britain, Lippmann wrote, “With aid to Britain, this country passes
from large promises carried out slightly and partially by clever devices to
substantial deeds openly and honestly avowed.”23 Unlike destroyers-bases,
Lippmann “had nothing to do with the idea, except by writing articles
explaining the need of making a contribution to aid the Allies”. Yet, a
national syndicated audience of ten million of America’s wealthiest and
most influential readers meant that his persuasive role was significant.
Having opposed FDR through the New Deal, Lippmann became
become a staunch supporter of his diplomacy during the Second World
War. Lippmann admired FDR’s deft and purposeful leadership over the
course of the Second World War. Roosevelt’s keen political skills—his cau-
tion, optimism, and eloquence—allowed him to prepare the American
public for participation in a world war and for a pivotal role in world
affairs thereafter. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the president
responded stirringly to this shocking turn of events, identifying “a day
which will live in infamy” that America would never let stand. His priori-
tization of defeating Germany first was sound and his appointment of
senior Republicans to his administration was tactically adroit and appro-
Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” International Herald Tribune, June 15,
22
1940.
Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” International Herald Tribune, December
23
19, 1940.
priate in the circumstances. Aside from Roosevelt’s hostile views toward

the grandstanding leader of the “Free French”, Charles de Gaulle—whom
Lippmann regarded as a major figure in world affairs—Lippmann viewed
the president’s management of American participation in the Second
World War favorably. Indeed, Lippmann even spurred and supported
Roosevelt’s most controversial action in wartime: the internship of
Japanese Americans. In an infamous T&T column on February 12, 1942,
Lippmann warned of “imminent danger of a combined attack from within
and from without” if a fifth column of Japanese descent was allowed to
roam free.24 On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt authorized the
War Department to remove and intern any citizen of Japanese descent it
deemed a threat: some 120,000 people in total. Lippmann cheered this
mutilation of habeas corpus—sustained by a notorious ruling by the
Supreme Court—in subsequent columns. His earlier Progressivism was
becoming harder to discern.
Yet, Lippmann’s views on the Republican Party were scathing. Writing
to Congressman John M. Vorys (R-Ohio) in February 1941, Lippmann
observed that “there is nothing in the record of the Republicans, either on
questions of national defense or on our relationship to the Allies, to justify
any belief that they have had foresight. If they had had it, they would now
be compelled to reverse themselves so completely that the only issue left
between them and the Administration is one of procedure…”25 Wendell
Willkie had proved a major disappointment during the 1940 campaign,
declining to adopt a clear pro-Allied position, instead accusing FDR of
harboring cynically concealed interventionist goals. Willkie had refused to
follow Lippmann’s earlier advice that “You have nothing to lose … by
being the Churchill rather than the Chamberlain of the crisis, and by
charging Roosevelt with being the Daladier, the weak man who means
well feebly and timidly.”26 But Lippmann detected graver problems with
Willkie than his refusal to emulate Churchill.
After his election defeat in 1940, Willkie showed admirable grace in
supporting President Roosevelt’s foreign policies. It was too late to make
a political difference, but Willkie had surmised that Lippmann’s campaign
advice to him had been sound: US support for Great Britain was a just
Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” International Herald Tribune, February 12,
24
1942. Also see Steel, Walter Lippmann, 394–395.

Walter Lippmann to John M. Vorys, February 17, 1941. In Blum, Public Philosopher,
25
404.
Walter Lippmann to Wendell Willkie, July 30, 1940. In Blum, Public Philosopher, 395.
26
286 D. MILNE
cause and Churchill was the exemplar for statesmanship in tumultuous

times. Willkie thus gave his strong support to Lend-Lease, before going
one step further in calling for the unlimited supply of Britain’s war effort
in the summer of 1941. Delighted to have his support, FDR asked Willkie
to travel the world on a goodwill mission as the president’s personal envoy.
Willkie agreed, visiting Great Britain, the Middle East, the Soviet Union,
and China between 1941 and 1942. Impressed by the commonality of
human experience he encountered in these diverse nations and regions,
Willkie surmised that it was possible and preferable to govern the post-war
world through a global peacekeeping organization. Woodrow Wilson had
been correct, Willkie decided, to believe that human progress had no geo-
graphical limits and that universal peace was attainable if the right kind of
multilateral organization was established to lead the way.
Willkie began the process of writing up his travel experiences in a book,
published in 1943 under the revealing title: One World. Willkie contended
that the altruistic, sociable traits that unite humanity are far stronger than
those that divide it. Under these circumstances, imperialism must be
rejected, racial divisions should be addressed as a priority at home, and all
nations must cede some sovereignty to live in one world—not many—in
which mature, open diplomacy would eliminate the bloodletting that had
so scarred human affairs (Willkie 1943). The book captured a transitory
moment of multilateral idealism in the history of United States diplomacy.
Willkie had channeled Woodrow Wilson and then some. An opinion poll
in 1942 had found that 73 percent of Americans believed that Wilson had
been correct about joining the League of Nations, up from 33 percent in
1937 (Zelizer 2010, 19).
Having recanted such idealism through painful experience during the
First World War, Lippmann was adamant that the Unites States should
avoid repeating the blunder of substituting concrete goals for platitudes
born of wishful thinking rather than comprehension of history. Lippmann
wrote that “I felt that the One World doctrine was a dangerous doctrine
… I felt it wasn’t possible to make one world, and the attempt to do it
would produce a struggle … that the right line was to recognize the plu-
ralism of the world and hope for an accommodation among many sys-
tems.”27 There were certain geopolitical phenomena that could not be
transcended: nationalism and the naked pursuit of commercial self-interest
to name but two.

27
Lippmann decided to reply with a book of his own. He halved the fre-
quency of his weekly column to write the book in just four months, aware
of the advanced stage of his adversary’s book in progress. While “Willkie’s
One World helped to educate the people of this country to a participation in
world affairs,” Lippmann wrote, “it also helped … to miseducate them to an
expectation about things which caused a furious resentment when it didn’t
come true…”28 America’s world position would be gravely harmed by the
unchallenged dissemination of such ignorance. Lippmann’s contribution to
public education, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, was published in
the spring of 1943, at the same time as One World. Rarely have two foreign
policy books combined so perfectly to capture the public’s imagination.
U.S. Foreign Policy was Lippmann’s best book on diplomacy. Lippmann
interrogated foreign policy with a sharpness and accessibility that few writ-
ers before or since have achieved. Consider Lippmann’s presentation of his
core thesis:
The thesis of this book is that a foreign policy consists in bringing into bal-
ance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commit-
ments and the nation’s power. The constant preoccupation of the true
statesman is to achieve and maintain this balance. (Lippmann 1943, 9–10)
The essence of realism has rarely been captured so well.

A central target in U.S. Foreign Policy is Woodrow Wilson, who
Lippmann lambasts for failing to enunciate America’s war aims clearly—a
familiar theme through his interwar journalism. In Lippmann’s opinion,
Wilson had entered the First World War “without a foreign policy” and
that “it was made to seem that the new responsibilities of the League
flowed from President Wilson’s philanthropy and not from the vital neces-
sity of finding allies to support America’s vast existing commitments in the
Western Hemisphere and all the way across the Pacific to the China coast”
(Lippmann 1943, 39). The root cause of this diplomatic naivety was mis-
comprehension of the Founding Fathers’ views and actions. George
Washington only decried “entangling alliances” because fixed allegiances
did not suit the young republic at that time. “Though Jefferson had some
off ideas about the navy”, Lippmann wrote, “the Founders never thought
of making unpreparedness for war a national ideal” (Lippmann 1943, 47).
Thinking otherwise was America’s original diplomatic sin.

28
288 D. MILNE
It was the dawn of the twentieth century that compelled the United
States to reconsider its foreign policy responsibilities with a clearer head:
“As soon … as Britain no longer ruled all the oceans—which was after
about 1900—our own strategic doctrine ceased to be adequate”
(Lippmann 1943, 97). Lippmann developed one instead: “we are com-
mitted to defend at the risk of war the lands and the waters around them
extending from Alaska to the Philippines and Australia, from Greenland to
Brazil to Patagonia” (Lippmann 1943, 109). That this represented a
major commitment—nearly half the world’s surface—was not lost on
Lippmann. But hostile encroachment into any of these areas could pose a
serious threat to the nation’s independence. Germany’s quest for hege-
mony in Europe, for example, made the continental United States consid-
erably more vulnerable:
The fall of France laid Spain and Portugal open to the possibility of invasion
and domination. This in turn opened up the question of the security of the
Spanish and Portuguese island stepping-stones in the Atlantic. The fall of
France gave Germany the sea and air bases from which Britain was besieged
and American shipping along our Eastern shore and in the Caribbean sub-
jected to a devastating raid. (Lippmann 1943, 131)
It was this reality of American vulnerability—little appreciated across a

parochial continent—that Lippmann believed compelled US participation
in the Second World War.
The book’s other purpose was to identify the alliances best likely to
sustain a stable post-war world. In this respect, Lippmann expected the
core relationship between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet
Union—the “Big Three”—to prove as indispensable in peacetime as it had
proved in fighting Germany. To maintain cordial relations with Moscow,
it was imperative that Washington accept that the land to the east of
Germany was firmly with the Soviet sphere of influence: “To encourage
the nations of Central and Eastern Europe to organize themselves as a bar-
rier against Russia would be to make a commitment that the United States
could not carry out … the region lies beyond the reach of American
power, and therefore the implied commitment would be unbalanced and
insolvent” (Lippmann 1943, 149). Ensuring peace after the defeat of the
Axis depended on acceptance by the great powers in general—and America
in particular—that traditional diplomatic cooperation was a surer way to
avoid war than vesting faith in a world parliament.
U.S. Foreign Policy was a work of stark political realism, but it struck a

resonant chord across the United States—a nation prone to gazing admir-
ingly at its innocent self-image. Lippmann is better than anyone in captur-
ing the reasons for its remarkable popular success:
I think U.S. Foreign Policy has had by all odds the greatest circulation of
anything I’ve ever written. It’s been translated into almost every language.
Its virtue was that it had certain very simple and fairly obvious ideas which
just happened to be apropos. It was a time when people were beginning to
take foreign affairs seriously.29
This short volume of “simple and fairly obvious ideas” sold close to half a
million copies. A condensed version was published in Reader’s Digest,
while the Ladies Home Journal published a remarkable rendering of
Lippmann’s thesis in the form of seven pages of cartoon strips—testament
to his accessibility. The US Army distributed a version to its troops, priced
at 25 cents. (Steel 1980, 406) Yet, in spite of the global attention and
review plaudits, Lippmann viewed the book as a failure. In the final
calculation, U.S. Foreign Policy simply did not make good on its ambition
of educating Americans out of their tendency to view the world immod-
estly through an idealistic lens. As Lippmann noted:
The theory that the nation’s commitments and its power must be in balance
is really an obvious idea, but it was a new one. It’s one we haven’t learned of
course. The book is a complete failure in that respect, because we proceeded
right away to make more commitments than we had power to fulfil after the
war.30
Through the spring and summer of 1943, the first rumblings of grand
alliance fracture had become audible. Stalin believed that Britain and the
United States had been purposefully tardy in refusing to sanction a cross-
channel invasion to carve open a second front and relieve pressure of the
Red Army, which bore the overwhelming burden of fighting Germany.
For his part, Churchill had grave misgivings about the Soviet Union’s ter-
ritorial intentions in Eastern Europe. The prime minister had no desire to
sacrifice Polish independence—for which Britain had declared war on
Germany in the first place—for the sake of hypothetical post-war unity. At

29

30
290 D. MILNE
this stage, Churchill did not view Eastern Europe as a sacrificial lamb. At
the Tehran Conference of November-December 1943, Churchill and
Roosevelt agreed to launch a cross-channel invasion the following spring.
But Stalin was relentless in holding the line that Moscow would assume a
“special” stake in the nations the Red Army occupied on its path to Berlin.
At Tehran, the disagreements that lurked beneath Allied bonhomie pre-
saged new rivalries, which Lippmann was keen to foreclose. Concerned
that US-Soviet post-war cooperation might founder on the marginal issue
of Polish or Czech independence, he began writing a follow-up to
U.S. Foreign Policy.
The sequel, U.S. War Aims, was published as Allied troops poured onto
Normandy’s beaches, establishing with considerable bravery, and grave
human cost, the second front promised at Tehran. It was a propitious
moment for the book to appear, as the Second World War in Europe was
entering its endgame. As with U.S. Foreign Policy, Lippmann criticized:
The Wilsonian principles [are] … prejudices formed in the Age of Innocence,

in the century of American isolation. Wilson wished America to take its place
in a universal society. But he was willing to participate only if the whole
world acted as the United States had acted when it enjoyed isolationism dur-
ing the nineteenth century. (Lippmann 1944, 175)
Lippmann believed Roosevelt should closely examine Wilson’s diplomatic

performance during the First World War and then do the exact opposite.
Driven forward by abstract Kantian theories, Wilson forgot about the fun-
damental Hobbesian nature of the world. Victorious nation-states, not
untested world peacekeeping institutions, should make and keep the
peace. People live for “their families and their homes”, Lippmann wrote,
“their villages and lands, their countries and their own ways, their altars,
their flags, and their hearths—not charters, covenants, blueprints, and
generalities…” (Lippmann 1944, 182). It was vital that America should
secure something concrete from hard-won victories on the battlefield.
“We shall not squander this victory,” Lippmann wrote, “as we did twenty-
five years ago, if we hold fast to this simple idea: that the fundamental task
of diplomats and public men is to conserve what is being accomplished by
the war” (Lippmann 1944, 5–6).
To “conserve” the fruits of war—the final and decisive defeat of mili-
tarism in Germany and Japan—Lippmann proposed that international
affairs should henceforth stem from “a nucleus around which order can
be organized”. This nucleus would consist of four great power combina-

tions, comprising “The Atlantic Community”, spearheaded by the
United States, Britain, and France, the “Russian Orbit”, including a
Soviet sphere in Central and Eastern Europe, and two other nuclei: one
formed around China and the other focused on “the Hindu and the
Moslem worlds, but that is more distant” (Lippmann 1944, 65).
Constituent nations were free to join the United Nations, but peace was
served best by Lippmann’s transnational alliance system, not through
countless, atomized nation-states arguing their selfish case to an impo-
tent deliberative body.
In dispensing instruction on how best to shape the post-war world,
Lippmann was prescient on some issues but unduly pessimistic on a host
of others. Insightfully, Lippmann observed that Germany should be
weaned off notions of autarky and encouraged to forge a new economic
identity as an exporting nation: “It would be safer for all of Europe, and
also for Russia, if Germany becomes dependent on maritime commerce.
The less self-sufficient Germany is, the better for her neighbors whom she
has sought to dominate, and for the Atlantic nations which will emerge
from this war with the command of the seas” (Lippmann 1944, 121–122).
Channeling Germany’s formidable economic potential in this export-led
direction made sound geopolitical sense and anticipated the nation’s
remarkable journey from militarized, authoritarian aggressor to war-
averse, export-led superpower. On Japan, conversely, Lippmann’s usual
perspicacity was hindered by a failure of imagination. He wrote, “The
American objective will have been attained if Japan is incapable of recover-
ing the military force to strike again. The reform and reconstruction are
beyond our ken, and we shall be wise to solidify our relations with China
by being in these matters her second … we cannot manage a Japanese
revolution” (Lippmann 1944, 105). America has enjoyed few foreign
affairs successes comparable to its occupation of Japan.
On potential sources of conflict with Moscow, Lippmann appeared
blithe. He downgraded the significance of ideology and focused instead
on the positive aspect of geographical remoteness. “The two strongest
states in the world will be as widely separated as it is possible to be,”
Lippmann wrote. “The core of the Soviet power is in the Urals in the deep
interior of the Eurasian continent; the American power is in the Mississippi
Valley in the heart of the island continent of North America. Not since the
unity of the ancient world was disrupted has there been so good a prospect
of settled peace” (Lippmann 1944, 132). Here, Lippmann is guilty of
292 D. MILNE
thinking through a nineteenth-century paradigm, failing to anticipate that

a divided Europe would become a source of considerable friction between
Moscow and Washington and that liberal-capitalism and Marxism-
Leninism represented not just antagonistic ideologies in theory but proac-
tive rationales for intervening across the world to steer “progress” in the
right direction.
The important thing to note is that Lippmann’s realism was a theory. It
assumed permanent trends in the structure of world affairs. It held that
the “true statesman” balances resources and commitments and eschews
reckless adventurism, in pursuing policies that redound to the nation’s
advantage. It was a social scientific insight. But Stalin was not simply moti-
vated by material concerns. Soviet foreign policy required a wider ideo-
logical purpose; it was bound tightly into the nation’s raison d’être. In a
pugnacious speech delivered at the Bolshoi theater in 1946, Stalin
observed that the First and Second World Wars had broken out “as the
inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces
on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism”. He pondered
whether such wars were avoidable in future but concluded that only the
universal victory of Marxism-Leninism made this possible:
Perhaps catastrophic wars could be avoided if it were possible periodically to

redistribute raw materials and markets among the respective countries in
conformity with their economic weight by means of concerted and peaceful
decisions. But this is impossible under the present capitalist conditions of
world economic development.31
In holding that Stalin’s rationality outweighed his ideological convictions,

Lippmann similarly failed to see that the latter was a critical driver of Soviet
foreign policy.
To conclude, it is clear that Lippmann’s views on foreign policy from
1914 to 1945 evolved in fascinating ways. This was a period when
Lippmann’s Progressivism became increasingly marginal to his conception
of what constituted sound US statecraft, which came to resemble classical
realism—cogently presented but not without flaws. Lippmann’s career
during the Cold War is perhaps best remembered for his critique of George
Kennan’s containment doctrine and his strong opposition to the
Pamphlet Collection, J. Stalin, Speeches Delivered at Meetings of Voters of the Stalin
31
Electoral District, Moscow (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950), 23.
Americanization of the Vietnam War. On the latter subject, he became

something of a hero to many college students in the 1960s who were
driven by progressive impulses similar to his own at a similar age. Yet,
Lippmann endorsed Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey in the elec-
tion of 1968, believing (wrongly) that the former was more likely to
swiftly withdraw from the Vietnam quagmire than the latter.
Following his retirement from journalism in 1968, an interviewer asked
Lippmann if the world of today was a better place to live than the one of
his youth. Lippmann replied that he thought it a “much less pleasant
world to live in” but it was one in which the right of human equality was
more firmly entrenched: “Anything that makes the world more humane
and more rational is progress; that’s the only measuring stick we can apply
to it. But I don’t wish to imply that I think this is a great progressive age.
I don’t” (Steel 1980, 592). But did Lippmann believe that such an age
ever existed? Beyond his youthful admiration for FDR and Woodrow
Wilson—fiercely recanted, post-Versailles—Lippmann’s writings seldom
suggested that he viewed Progressivism as a useful driver of foreign
policy.
References
Bender, Thomas. 1987. New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in
New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf.
Blum, John Morton, ed. 1985. Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter
Lippmann. New York: Ticknor and Fields.
Carnes, Mark, ed. 2002. Invisible Giants: Fifty Americans Who Shaped the Nation
but Missed the History Books. New York: Oxford University Press.
Croly, Herbert T. 2001. The Promise of American Life. Rev. ed. New York:
Adamant.
Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and its Problems. New York: Holt.
Fink, Leon. 1997. Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic
Commitment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Herring, George. 2008. From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since
1776. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ikenberry, G. John, Thomas J. Knock, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Tony Smith.
2009. The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First
Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lippmann, Walter. 1915a. The Stakes of Diplomacy. New York: Henry Holt.
———. 1915b. Insiders and Outsiders. The New Republic, November 13.
294 D. MILNE
———. 1916. The Case for Wilson. The New Republic, October 14.
———. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
———. 1927. The Phantom Public. New York: Macmillan.
———. 1943. U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic. Boston: Little Brown.
———. 1944. U.S. War Aims. Boston: Little Brown.
Roberts, Geoffrey. 2008. Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Smith, Karen E., and Margot Light. 2001. Ethics and Foreign Policy. Cambridge:
Steel, Ronald. 1980. Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Boston: Little
Brown.
Syed, Anwar Hussein. 1963. Walter Lippmann’s Philosophy of International
Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Willkie, Wendell. 1943. One World. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Zelizer, Julian. 2010. Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—
From World War II to the War on Terrorism. New York: Basic Books.
Zubok, Vladislav M. 2008. Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from
Stalin to Gorbachev. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
David Milne is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of East

Anglia. He is the author of Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American
Diplomacy (2015) and America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War
(2008) and is a senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and
Diplomatic History, with Christopher Nichols and editor in chief Timothy J. Lynch
(2013).
CHAPTER 13
Hans Morgenthau’s Pilgrimage Among

the Engineers
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
“Pilgrimage” in contemporary English likely brings to mind an image of

religious believers on a journey to some sacred site, seeking enlightenment
or transformation at the end of their road. A quick glance at the Oxford
English Dictionary entry for the word quickly reveals a richer heritage:
deriving from the French pilegrin and the Latin peregrinus,1 the word
“pilgrim” has associations with foreigner or alien, as well as with wanderer
and traveler. These have not always been specifically religious associations.
As such “pilgrimage” and “exile” have a lot in common, as both point to
a condition of being a stranger in a strange land; the primary difference is
that the exile is simply trying to live in the foreign place, while the pilgrim
retains some hope of eventually passing out of it and reaching a more
comfortable destination.
I start here because most accounts of Hans Morgenthau’s relationship
to his adopted country operate under the sign of exile rather than that of
pilgrimage. The basic outlines of the story have been often told, perhaps
best in Christoph Frei’s biography (Frei 2001): Morgenthau grew up the
1
As in a peregrine falcon, so-called because it is migratory and caught while on migration
instead of being taken from the nest.
P.T. Jackson (*)

School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, USA

296 P.T. JACKSON
only Jew in his hometown school in Germany, continued to suffer from

anti-Semitic discrimination in formal and informal ways as he pursued an
academic career in Geneva and Madrid, and ended up a refugee in the
United States in 1937, eventually making it to the University of Chicago
in 1943 and then publishing some of the foundational texts of US inter-
national relations and ending his career in New York City teaching at the
New School and the City University of New York. He did not relocate
back to Germany or anywhere else in Europe after the war, so the charac-
terization of his path as one of exile seems apt. And exile also fits nicely
into the narrative of Morgenthau’s scholarly contribution to the develop-
ment of US international relations, where his role is usually conceived as a
prophetic one: against naïve idealism, Morgenthau and his fellow expatri-
ates brought the European and especially German tradition of Realpolitik
to the young and inexperienced world power and in so doing helped to
place the whole discipline of political science on a firmer footing.
Despite the obvious limitations of this narrative—Morgenthau’s ambiv-
alence about both Realpolitik and science is readily apparent to anyone
pursuing more than a cursory reading of his work, and recent disciplinary
histories have significantly complicated the picture of the “indigenous tra-
dition” of the study of politics in the United States (Schmidt 1998; Long
and Schmidt 2006; Vitalis 2015)—the notion of Morgenthau as an exile
does illuminate certain aspects of his life and career quite well. In particu-
lar it highlights the extent to which Morgenthau and his fellow expatriates
were placed in the challenging position of having to translate their ideas
from a European philosophical context into an intellectual and social envi-
ronment constituted by a very different set of basic assumptions about
almost everything, but especially about the proper relationship between
ethics, politics, and scholarship. The formation of US international rela-
tions might thus be better understood as involving a series of compro-
mises (Jackson 2014) or gambits (Guilhot 2008, 2011) by expatriates and
other dissidents trying, ultimately unsuccessfully, to stem the rising tide of
behaviorist, neopositivist US political science in favor of a less liberal
alternative.
What that account does not capture, however, is the substantive vision
of international affairs that scholars like Morgenthau brought to their
transactions with interlocutors in the United States and how radically that
vision differed from the one on offer in the bulk of US political science.
Morgenthau was not simply trying to make space for himself in his adopted
country; he was instead hoping to make a contribution to political thought
HANS MORGENTHAU’S PILGRIMAGE AMONG THE ENGINEERS 297
in the United States as well as globally, through scholarly writing and

teaching, but also through guest professorships and an extensive guest
lecturing schedule (Frei 2001, 75–76). His contribution is not just the
preservation of a world he was forced out of but also the articulation of a
different way of “worlding”—different, that is, from the default US pre-
sumptions against which much of his mature vision was articulated. Chief
among those assumptions were the twin “progressive” pillars of a faith in
the perfectability of human society through reason and a brash optimism
that all problems were susceptible to technical solution; against these
Morgenthau deployed a strict sense of the limits of reason and a tragic
sensibility cautioning against sweeping schematic reforms. Morgenthau’s
pilgrimage was thus not to a happy place of perfect contentment, but to a
place which had as its chief virtue the preservation of politics as an autono-
mous aspect of human social life.
Morgenthau’s 1946 book Scientific Man Versus Power Politics expresses
this negative vision quite cleanly. I refer to this as a negative vision because
it emerges mainly thorough a criticism of the progressivist approach to
politics Morgenthau likely found throughout his sojourn around the
United States, but perhaps encountered in its most concentrated form
after he moved to the Department of Political Science at the University of
Chicago—the very home of Charles Merriam’s kind of social science
“modeled after the natural sciences” (Frei 2001, 71). In a certain delicious
historical irony, Morgenthau initially came to Chicago as a short-term
replacement for Quincy Wright, who was himself one of the chief expo-
nents of extending that same sensibility into the study of international
affairs. Morgenthau’s whole approach was considerably different but no
less systematic and rigorous, albeit in a different key: not “science” in the
restricted English-language sense where it is often equated with the natu-
ral sciences exclusively, but Wissenschaft in the German-language sense
(Molloy 2004, 6–7), where it made as much sense to talk about what in
English would be “the humanities” as forms of science (Geisteswissenschaften).
The “scientific man” of Morgenthau’s title isn’t so much a scientist in that
broader sense as an engineer, someone who believes that all problems are
capable of a rational solution. And “power politics” isn’t a realm divorced
from reason so much as the condition of practical action, beyond the limits
of such rational solutions. The sin of the progressivist approach, for
Morgenthau, is precisely that it converts the world into a rationalist uto-
pia, instead of engaging with the world as it is in order to provoke more
adequate ways of going on.
298 P.T. JACKSON
Against Idealism
To grasp the stakes of Morgenthau’s discomfort with Progressivism, it is
useful to follow recent revisionist studies of Morgenthau’s thinking and
relate his position to the disputes in German intellectual and political life
in which the young Morgenthau participated before ending up in the
United States. Chief among these disputes were a series of controversies
over the status and implications of the Weimar Republic’s constitution,
relating to the broader question of whether law was purely a question of
the formal dictates of the sovereign or whether law was a tool of gover-
nance with social implications beyond its official character. On the former
side stood legal “positivists” who wanted to confine the study of the law
to “the exegesis of positive law” and who regarded questions about legal-
ity as fundamentally technical or logical questions; on the other side stood
“realists” who wanted to incorporate “the sociology of law” into their
study and legal practice and take the social context of law into account in
their determinations of legality (Scheuerman 2009, 18–22). Morgenthau,
like his mentor Hugo Sinzheimer, was firmly on the “realist” side of this
dichotomy, skeptical of the notion that the challenges facing the Republic—
or the challenges facing any regime—could be adequately addressed
purely through formal, legal arrangements. Instead, analysis had to begin
with social and political arrangements as they actually existed, rather than
as they were envisioned to exist in positive law (Frei 2001, 117–19).
The legal positivist/legal realist dichotomy, in turn, was linked to a
number of other operative distinctions in German intellectual life, all of
which ultimately stemmed from various efforts to deal with the legacy of
Immanuel Kant’s philosophical labors (Friedman 2000, 27–28). Kant had
distinguished between “noumenal” and “phenomenal” realms, with the
former populated by things-in-themselves that could never be known
directly, and the latter populated by things as they were known and know-
able by us in terms of the basic intuitions that we knowers bring to our
perceptions. Philosophical reason could elucidate the shape of those basic
intuitions and thus reveal the transcendentally necessary a priori condi-
tions of knowability: notions like space, time, and causation. In Kant’s
system philosophical reason could also determine the contours of ethical
action, by elucidating the pure moral duties incumbent on people as ratio-
nal beings. The resulting ethical precepts would not be contingent empiri-
cal facts, but categorical rules without exceptions, rationally grounded in
a way that relates them to our noumenal rational selves rather than our
phenomenal actual situations.2 The key here is that whether we are dealing
with knowledge of physical objects or knowledge of ethical duties, that
knowledge is based not on any direct connection we have with the object,
but instead is based on assumptions we cannot help but make; claims
about those assumptions are logically prior to experience, and in turn
those assumptions set up any empirical claims that we might subsequently
advance.
As such, the distinction between legal positivism and legal realism was
first and foremost fraught with philosophical tension. Which is not to say
that German legal positivists like Hans Kelsen were precisely Kantians, but
they did sharply distinguish between the “pure” analysis of law and the
empirical sociology of law in a markedly neo-Kantian manner (Paulson
1992). For legal positivists, the logical analysis of existing legal norms
functioned in a way analogous to the Kantian and neo-Kantian elucidation
of the logically necessary prerequisites of empirical knowledge and allowed
a non-empirical account of law as a set of legal norms nested within a series
of ever-more-general norms until one reached the constitutional
Grundnorm for that particular legal system. The analysis of law thus estab-
lished the conditions of validity for actual or potential laws, in much the
same way that the analysis of pure reason established the conditions of
intelligibility for actual or potential phenomenal knowledge. In its syste-
maticity and in its rejection of normative notions derived from natural law
or divine command—knowledge of such supersensible standards would
not be commensurate with the notion that logical and philosophical analy-
sis could elucidate the most basic necessary presuppositions of knowledge
per se—legal positivism, therefore, sought to be a science of law, with
strong family resemblances not so much to Kant’s account of ethical
duties, but rather to Kant’s account of the physical sciences.
For legal realists, on the other hand, questions about the abstract logi-
cal validity of a given law or legal norm were somewhat beside the point.
Operating in the same intellectual landscape but taking a different tack,
legal realists like Sinzheimer were more concerned with the functional
2
Note that Kant never actually says that we can know anything for sure about our noume-
nal, rational selves; rather, as with other noumenal objects, we can transcendentally infer
certain basic things about them (such as their existence) from the phenomenal facts that we
construct as our a priori intuitions permit. In Kant’s system, the presumptions of rationality
and freedom of choice are transcendentally necessary for us, and this is as close to knowledge
of our noumenal selves as we can get. But in Kant’s view, this is sufficient to give us positive
moral duties.
300 P.T. JACKSON
consequences of actually existing law, which meant circumscribing the

merely legal with a broader account of the social context. This meant not
that the technical details of the law were unimportant—Sinzheimer in par-
ticular “insisted that his legal apprentices undergo a rigorous schooling in
the intricacies of the black letter of the law and relatively traditional posi-
tivistic ideas about legal interpretation” (2009, 17)—but that they were
insufficient, precisely because jurisprudence wasn’t a science on the model
of the physical sciences. Instead, analyzing the law required an apprecia-
tion of what Morgenthau, in his 1932 inaugural lecture at the University
of Geneva, called “the political realm, understood as the state’s reality”
(quoted in Frei 2001, 119). In the physical sciences, valid/invalid was a
sufficient dichotomy to apply to claims about objects, but in jurispru-
dence, how laws regardless of their formal validity interacted with the
broader political environment was much more important. That in turn
necessitated something that legal positivists could and did do without: a
definition of politics, an account of the concept of “politics” and of what it
might mean for something to be “political.”
Morgenthau endeavored to provide such an account in several places,
but perhaps nowhere more clearly than in his 1934 post-Habilitation
book, which has only recently been translated from French into English.
In that book Morgenthau rejects efforts to isolate any specific essence to
“political” matters, arguing that “political” is instead “a quality, a tone,
which can be peculiar to any object and which attaches itself with some
preference to certain objects, but which does not by necessity attach itself
to any of them … any matter can acquire a political nature following cir-
cumstances external to its object” (Morgenthau 2012, 100–101).3 But it
is not sufficient to say that anything that the state concerns itself with is
thereby made “political,” even though this follows the etymological mean-
ing of “politics.” The political sphere, as an empirical matter, does consist
of those matters to which the state devotes particular attention and there-
fore “makes them into the preferred object of its will” (ibid., 120). But
what makes such matters “political” is not merely that the state is inter-
ested in them; what matters is that contests of power are involved. When
we consider some matter between persons to be “political,” “we mean by
3
Carl Schmitt is the clear target here, as Morgenthau devotes the better part of a chapter
of the book to criticizing Schmitt’s position that the friend-enemy distinction suffices to
define “the political.” Indeed, given Morgenthau’s skepticism about any such definition of
political matters based on content, I wonder whether “The Concept of ‘Politics’” might not
have been a better English title of a book that was titled in French La notion du ‘politique’.
this that this activity is the expression of their will to power,” which in turn
can mean maintaining power already acquired, increasing one’s power, or
“manifesting” and demonstrating power (ibid., 106).
Morgenthau extends this analysis of politics into an explicit criticism of
legal positivism by distinguishing between “disputes” and “tensions,” par-
ticularly although not exclusively in the international realm.4 Positive law,
Morgenthau observes, treats controversies as disputes: disagreements
about which legal norm applies or which party is in the right. Such dis-
putes can be resolved by a rational legal process. But some controversies
are not disputes, but tensions: conflicts between political objectives, such
as two states’ desire to possess the same coveted territory. Because each
state wants to prevail in the controversy, the tension ends up being expressed
as a dispute, since this is “a form susceptible to be recognized by the inter-
national community” (ibid., 129), but it is a tension nonetheless and thus
the apparent submission of the entire controversy to legal adjudication is
doomed to fail:
…the parties are not in a position to submit political disputes … to the deci-
sion of an international legal body, even though these disputes could in
themselves be susceptible to a legal solution. For the international legal
body would then have to adjudicate, in addition to the dispute, the tension
which is at the base of the dispute, and the body does not possess norms
susceptible to general application with which to make such a decision. (ibid.,
134–135)
Hence, the real problem with legal positivism as an approach is that it

fails to recognize that human beings are not fully rational creatures, and
are incapable of, or perhaps unwilling to, conform their actions to the
dictates of reason—in this instance, the “legal solution” would involve
such conforming, and precisely this is what Morgenthau questions. Key
here is Morgenthau’s acknowledgment that even if the controversy could,
as a matter of logic, be resolved though legal means—even if there were
general and valid legal norms that could be applied to the case—it won’t
be so resolved in practice if there is political tension, because “the existing
legal situation” supporting the technical validity of the specific legal deci-
sion will be rejected by the state on the losing side of the dispute (ibid.,
4
Morgenthau suggests that in the international realm, because of the involvement of mul-
tiple states with multiple objectives, political issues are even more prevalent and obvious than
in domestic life (2012, 119).
302 P.T. JACKSON
128). Legal positivism sought to answer the question of why anyone

ought to obey the law through the reasoned analysis of how specific laws
related to one another and to the constitutional Grundnorm that was pre-
sumptively binding on everyone participating in the legal order
(Scheuerman 2012, 458–59), but this would obviously not suffice to
ensure compliance if that legal order itself were contested or even rejected.
Something stronger than a technical determination divorced from any
ethical imperative5 would be required to deal with actual tensions between
actual human beings and between their actual institutions and
organizations.
Morgenthau’s account of politics clearly resembles the depiction pro-
vided by Max Weber, most famously in his 1919 lecture “Politics as a
Vocation.” This is not because Morgenthau was in any formal sense a
Weberian, but rather because when Morgenthau encountered Weber’s
thought in a 1926–1927 seminar in Munich, he found reassurance that
someone else was “on the same wavelength, so to speak” (Frei 2001,
109), sharing some of the same basic sensibilities. Morgenthau cited
Weber as a source of the trichotomy of action (maintaining, increasing, or
demonstrating power) that figured into his analysis of politics, but it is
likely that Morgenthau actually got this trichotomy from the same place
that Weber did: from Nietzsche (ibid., 130). Regardless of the specific
extent of Weber’s intellectual influence on Morgenthau, it remains the
case that Morgenthau, like Weber, considered politics not to be an arena
for the implementation of ideals, but instead to be inextricably bound up
with domination and the legitimate use of force—“legitimate” in this con-
text referring not to technical legal correctness but to the perception of
legitimacy by those over whom rule is exercised (Weber 2004, 33–34).
This tight connection between rule and the use of force ensures that polit-
ical action will inevitably involve immoral and evil means, even if the out-
come is ethically desirable:
No ethic in the world can ignore the fact that in many cases the achievement
of “good” ends is inseparable from the use of morally dubious or at least
dangerous means and that we cannot escape the possibility or even probabil-
5
In vintage neo-Kantian fashion, legal positivists like Kelsen invariably began their analyses
with a sharp separation between what is and what should be, and located their own arguments
in the sphere of the “is.” Thus, the irony of their legal realist opponents insisting on the
determination of what is, as against what they understood to be the prescriptive idealism of
the legal positivists, is that both sides of the argument claimed to be “realistic.”
ity of evil side effects. And no ethic in the world can say when, and to what
extent, the ethically good end can “justify” the ethically dangerous means
and its side effects. (ibid., 84)
Weber’s response to this predicament is his famous distinction between

an “ethics of conviction” that rejects all talk of consequences as long as the
action in question comes from pure motives, and an “ethic of responsibil-
ity” that accepts the predicament and nonetheless strives to do as much
good as possible. The person with a vocation for politics, following an
ethic of responsibility, is neither an idealist seeking to impose her vision on
others at all costs because of its intrinsic rightness, nor an amoral power-
seeker striving only to dominate others as an end in itself. Instead, she is a
tragic figure, unable to remain perfectly true to her own highest ideals,
but nonetheless able to continue the “strong slow boring of hard boards,
with passion and proportion at the same time.”6 Politics is no place for
purity or clarity, because those values either have to be sacrificed in order
to achieve results, or the people adhering to them become “chiliastic
prophets … unable to tolerate the ethical irrationality of the world” (ibid.,
85) and thus feel themselves justified in using any means necessary—with-
out any sense of proportion—to achieve their goals. Weber’s efforts in the
lecture are thus intended to preserve politics as a sphere of action separate
from others, in particular as separate from the imperatives of ethics: sepa-
rate, but not entirely divorced from.
Morgenthau’s understanding of politics is decidedly similar to
Weber’s, although Morgenthau’s target is not the armed prophet as
much as the supposedly apolitical legal technician.7 But their arguments
proceed in the same way: in both cases, the problem is the importation
of standards of certainty from outside of politics, and a refusal to
acknowledge the pronounced role of power in political contests. The
6
I have modified the English translation, which is “a slow, powerful drilling through hard
boards, with a mixture of passion and a sense of proportion” (Weber 2004, 93). The use of
“powerful” to translate “starkes” seems confusing because what Weber is talking about here
is not the politician’s power to persist, but her inner strength. And “slow boring of hard
boards” is so much a part of the vernacular now that modifying it without just cause seems
unwarranted. I also retained Weber’s original word order, which works as well in German as
it does in English.
7
The difference in targets can probably be explained by the circumstances each scholar was
writing in. For Weber in 1919, armed prophets were a present danger; for Morgenthau in the
1930s, the problem was making his readers recognize the inescapability of political tensions
despite an elaborate technical legal apparatus.
304 P.T. JACKSON
solution is to recognize the autonomy of politics, and not to reduce it to

some different system of evaluation. In so doing, the putatively non-
political or supra-political incursion is revealed to be either political—
just as concerned with power as any other faction—or feckless, unable to
practically accomplish any of its goals. These insights in turn are gener-
ated by a highly systematic set of reflections, a typological approach to
the study of human social action that participated in a set of neo-Kantian
debates about the proper relationship between reason, ethics, knowl-
edge, and action. Weber and Morgenthau are on the same side of those
debates, maintaining that action—especially political action—is neither
exhausted by reason nor unequivocally constrained by ethics.8 Against
the idealism of efforts to impose a different standard on politics, both
thinkers argued for a clearer grasp of how actual politics functioned, and
in that sense both were “realists.” And although both shared a tragic
sensibility about or vision of politics (Lebow 2003), due in large part to
the gap both saw between universal categorical imperatives and the prac-
tical exigencies of power struggles, neither embraced a completely cyni-
cal valorization of those struggles as ends in themselves.
Among the Engineers
In many ways the aims and methods of the progressive movement in the
United States couldn’t be further away from Morgenthau’s understanding
of politics. The idea of providing technical solutions to political problems,
bolstered by an approach modeled on the natural sciences and seeking the
same degree of precision, was in many ways just what Morgenthau had
been arguing against before arriving in the United States in 1937. But
some of the categories had been shuffled around: the neo-Kantian context
that equated reason and universality was not dominant in the United
States, where the practical inventor rather than the theoretical scientist was
the cultural hero of the day (Luckhurst 2005, 21–24). So in Germany, the
turn to the social sciences was part of a critique of the idealist rationalism
of legal positivism, while in the United States, it was the social sciences
that upheld the banner of rationalism against the conservative and corrupt
actuality of machine politics and corruption.
8
Of course, methodologically Morgenthau and Weber also shared quite a bit in common
(Turner and Mazur 2009).
As such, the social sciences in the United States were reformist from the
start.9 “Social scientists could offer counsel not in the guise of wise, inter-
ested elites but as mere mouthpieces for a disembodied science. They
could disarm suspicions that their advice was self-interested by intoning
the phrase scientific method” (Porter 1994, 148). As John Gunnell (1993,
23) put it:
Social science in many of its dimensions began as a reform movement.

Lacking political authority, it sought purchase in the authority of knowledge
which in turn led to specialization, differentiation, and gravitation toward
the university to ensure its claim to science.
Reason, not power-laden struggle, was to be the arbiter of political deci-

sions, and the ills of actual social and political life could be addressed in a
scientific manner (Ross 1994, 181). As Woodrow Wilson—who was
President of the American Political Science Association (APSA) before he
went on to become President of the United States—put it in his APSA
presidential address of 1910, the task of political science was to articulate
the common rational interest that underlay particular controversies, “not
a mere task of compromise and makeshift accommodation, but a task of
genuine and lasting adjustment, synthesis, coordination, harmony, and
union of parts” (1911, 6). According to this conception, science and rea-
son could contribute to political reform by putting mere politics to rest, in
favor of progressive and technocratic certainties. Contrary to the situation
in German intellectual life, in the United States, the social sciences were
not so much attempts to look at how things were, but efforts to change
them.
Wilson was no outlier. Of the 39 APSA presidential addresses given
between the Association’s founding in 1903 and the end of the Second
World War, 17 of them took up the theme of how a scientific study of
politics can contribute to political reform and progress. APSA’s second
president, Albert Shaw, used his 1906 address to characterize the
Association as “made up of men who are both willing and eager to see the
results of their scientific study of political life and conditions converted to
the practical ends of statesmanship” (Shaw 1907, 180), while Jesse Macy
used his 1916 presidential address to call for a new “spirit” in politics that
would allow it to follow the path of medicine and be “revolutionized,
9
This discussion draws heavily on Jackson (2014, 274–76).
306 P.T. JACKSON
changed from the occult and the empirical to the scientific” (Macy 1917,
4). So political science in the United States was, from its earliest begin-
nings, animated by a commitment to providing a scientific corrective to
political practice. Remaining apart from the day-to-day press of politics
itself, and remaining firmly located in the university setting, was a means
to that end: a means to exerting some measure of influence over the course
of political controversies, by standing outside of them and pronouncing
their “scientific” resolution.
To Morgenthau, this kind of “faith in the scientific method” (Frei
2001, 190) which treated politics as merely a series of technical problems
to be resolved by experts must have looked just like a resurgence of legal
positivism outside of the legal sphere. Despite the claims of US political
scientists to be analyzing the reality of things in an effort to generate ratio-
nal prescriptions for improvement, the very fact that the entire approach
was premised on immense confidence in scientific reason’s capacity to
resolve all controversies placed mainstream US political science not on the
side of realism but on the side of idealism: the quest for rational progress
looked just as naïve as the quest for a non-ethical legal imperative, as poli-
tics per se was subordinated to the dictates of reason. Only if human
beings were fully rational creatures would such quests succeed, because in
that case the demonstration that some course of action was more rational
than another option would be sufficient to produce the former rather than
the latter. By contrast, in actual political life, considerations of power were
omnipresent, so the rationality of a course of action could not possibly be
decisive in bringing it about. The most quantitatively precise study of
human behavior could provide neither an ethical prescription for action
nor a reliable depiction of the context in which such action might take
place, and thus could contribute to neither component of a Weberian
“ethic of responsibility.”
Scientific Man Versus Power Politics is Morgenthau’s initial attempt to
make these points in English. Although he had started working on the
book while at the University of Kansas City in the early 1940s, the working
conditions there were so abysmal that he was unable to get much writ-
ten—between his teaching load, the fact that he had to teach two subjects
he had never taught before (American jurisprudence and contemporary
European politics), and the fact that his “office” was a converted bath-
room, it is no wonder that Morgenthau began looking for other positions
in earnest after only a year or two (Frei 2001, 66–68). In the summer of
1943, he was offered a short-term position at the University of Chicago,
the headquarters of progressivist political science under the direction of

Charles Merriam and his colleagues—including the man Morgenthau was
hired to replace, Quincy Wright. Wright was the consummate engineer, in
many ways, relying on systematic quantitative data about a myriad of
international conflicts to provide the foundation for the elimination of
war; his scholarship thus directly manifests the progressivist impulse
applied to international affairs. And Wright was absent from Chicago
because he was in Washington, advising the US government on postwar
planning—further enacting the progressivist program of rationalizing
politics.
Morgenthau couldn’t have been further intellectually from the man he
was replacing, and his obvious need to distinguish himself from Wright
and from the rest of his colleagues at Chicago almost certainly sharpened
the tone of his first English-language book. One imagines him debating
not merely with abstract figures in his head but with people down the hall,
laying out in broad strokes an almost completely different way of thinking
about international affairs—and about politics in general. In Scientific
Man Versus Power Politics, against his Chicago colleagues, Morgenthau
claimed that politics
is an art and not a science, and what is required for its mastery is not the
rationality of the engineer but the wisdom and moral strength of the states-
man. The social world, deaf to the appeal to reason pure and simple, yields
only to that intricate combination of moral and material pressures which the
art of the statesman creates and maintains. (Morgenthau 1946, 10)
The statesman in Morgenthau’s depiction must have both “wisdom”

and “moral strength”; this is essentially the Weberian dichotomy of pro-
portion and passion, and holding both simultaneously produces the “ethic
of responsibility” that prevents the person with a vocation for politics from
turning into either an armed idealist or a domineering monster.
Morgenthau’s fear is that this distinctive quality of politics is being
obscured by an excess of scientific rationalism; the book is thus a warning,
an attempt to change the course of things before they run aground.
But there is a semantic ambiguity here, underpinned by the conceptual
mismatch between the English word “science” and the German word
“Wissenschaft.” Morgenthau is not opposed to Wissenschaft; far from it,
he is instead calling for a clear-headed and systematic investigation of the
actual conditions of contemporary politics and the potentials for action
308 P.T. JACKSON
afforded by those conditions. Rather, his opposition is to what we might

call “scientism”: the belief that every problem is amenable to a rationalist,
technical solution of the sort delivered on a regular basis by the contem-
porary natural sciences (Scheuerman 2009, 41). Such a belief makes pos-
sible the stance that “if not now, at least ultimately, politics can be replaced
by science” (Morgenthau 1946, 4), so that the need for judgment and
prudence can be done away with: fundamental uncertainty transformed
into calculable risk (Kirshner 2015). Morgenthau traces this development
from the seventeenth-century achievements in the natural sciences that
gave a real impetus to a rationalist approach to politics hoping to employ
the same techniques and achieve the same results, through the political
philosophy of liberalism, to its flowering in the nineteenth-century “sci-
ence of peace” that “endeavored to put foreign policy as a whole on a
scientific basis … with the purpose of solving all international problems
through scientific methods” (Morgenthau 1946, 94). The program of
eliminating politics is Morgenthau’s real target throughout the book.
In English, however, Morgenthau frequently sounds like an opponent
of science rather than an opponent of scientism. When he talks about “sci-
entific methods,” he means the search for simple, single causes and univer-
sal laws connecting them to inevitable effects: the extension of a model of
the physical sciences into the social sphere, and the accompanying pre-
sumption that the social world is structured in a way that is fundamentally
similar to the natural world. That this simple clockwork model of the nat-
ural world is itself called into question by “the new physics of relativity and
quantum” (ibid., 144) presents no special challenge to scientism, because
the central issue for scientism is the model of the social world and not the
fact of its actual grounding in the natural sciences. But Morgenthau’s
opposition to the application of this (admittedly outdated) model of the
natural world to the social world comes out as a criticism of “the extension
of the scientific approach to international affairs” (ibid., 103) rather than
as a criticism of the scientistic approach that would make such an exten-
sion appear to make sense in the first place. This semantic ambiguity means
that Morgenthau’s actual goal in the book—to identify the contours of an
appropriately social-scientific approach to international affairs, against the
inappropriately rationalist and scientistic version on offer in both US polit-
ical science and in legal positivism—is easy to miss, because most of the
positive things that Morgenthau has to say about the kind of social science
he prefers require the reader to perpetually remember that when
Morgenthau writes “science” and critiques it, he means something like
scientism or rationalism, and when he writes “science” and has positive

things to say about it, he means Wissenschaft (systematic inquiry).
Near the beginning of the book, Morgenthau contrasts those two sorts
of “science” in a passage that is remarkable both for its clarity of concep-
tualization and for its infelicity of expression (Morgenthau 1946, 32). It is
worth quoting the paragraph in full, with additional subscripts on several
instances of the word “science” to distinguish between scientism (sci-
ence1) and Wissenschaft (science2):
This scientific element has become the dominating mode of political thought
in the Western world. Where, in times past, the irrational lust for power
pursued its violent games, now reason would reign supreme through the
medium of the political scientists, the economist, the sociologist, the psy-
chologist, etc. This political philosophy thus ends in a scientific1 theory of
society where politics has, at best, a place as the evil finally overcome. This
mode of thought has permeated the thinking of friend and foe alike. Whereas
the conservative of the modern age turns to the historic past and expects
from the science2 of history the answer to the riddle of the present, the lib-
eral sees in history only a process through which reason realizes itself in time
and space. The scientific2 approach is common to both. For the liberal, sci-
ence1 is a prophesy confirmed by reason; for the conservative, it [here he
means Wissenschaft] is the revelation of the past confirmed by experience.
In a way, what Morgenthau is suggesting here is that it is no longer pos-

sible not to be “scientific” in at least some sense. The initial reference to
“this scientific element” is ambiguous, although as the paragraph unfolds,
it is relatively clear that understood as a “political philosophy,” the kind of
“scientific element” that has become “dominating” is science1 or sci-
entism. But what is notable here is that Morgenthau’s response is not a
rejection of science, but its reformulation as science2 or Wissenschaft—and
that is the kind of scientific approach that he believes is “common to both”
the liberal rationalist reformer and the as-yet-underspecified “conservative
of the modern age.”
Much of the remainder of the book is devoted to chronicling the sins
of scientism, particularly the duplicitous way that exponents of that phi-
losophy imagine themselves to be leaving power politics behind when they
proclaim a rational end to violence (ibid., 47–49) or hypocritically engage
in wars to end all wars (ibid., 51–53). Because the scientistic worldview
proclaims an essential harmony of interests lying behind controversies
(ibid., 75–76) that themselves largely arise from misunderstandings and
310 P.T. JACKSON
can be resolved through rational compromises (ibid., 105–108), there is

only a need for properly rational expertise in order to sort these issues out.
But this is a false and misleading picture, because even when it appears that
reason has carried the day, “the triumph of reason is, in truth, the triumph
of irrational forces which succeed in using the processes of reason to satisfy
themselves” (ibid., 155). In important ways echoing Carl Schmitt (2007),
Morgenthau’s critique of the liberal antipolitical philosophy made possible
by scientism turns on that philosophy’s blindness to its own character, and
its unwillingness to accept that it too is engaging in political
contestation.
But Morgenthau was not Schmitt, and his target here is not liberalism
itself, but the scientism that supported it in the context of the time.
Indeed, on those few occasions when Morgenthau bothered to spell out
his ethical commitments, they were quite liberal, “liberal in the classical,
European sense of the term” (Frei 2001, 170). Schmitt’s prescription for
a more authentically antagonistic politics of friend-enemy distinctions and
existential threats that could only be met by pure ungrounded sovereign
decisions had no traction in Morgenthau’s thinking, and it would be fair
to characterize Morgenthau’s ire as directed against the mismatch between
classical liberal values and the antipolitical engineering mentality that
would ultimately prove itself unable to defend those values. By refusing to
acknowledge the inextricably power-laden character of political contests,
scientism was unable to admit that “all political actions needs must fall
short of justice” and therefore “political ethics is indeed the ethics of
doing evil … the endeavor to choose, since evil there must be, among
several possible actions the one that is the least evil” (Morgenthau 1946,
202). This is a Weberian ethic of responsibility once again, and not a turn
to irrational decisionism; what is needed to facilitate this kind of respon-
sible decision-making is not science1’s technical analyses, but science2’s
grasp of the practical realities of politics, derived from historical
experience:
It is in the insight and the wisdom by which more-than-scientific man ele-

vates his experiences into the universal laws of human nature. It is he who,
by doing so, establishes himself as the representative of true reason, while
nothing-but-scientific man appears as the true dogmatist who universalizes
cognitive principles of limited validity and applies them to realms not acces-
sible to them. It is also the former who proves himself to be the true realist;
for it is he who does justice to the true nature of things. (Ibid., 220)
Morgenthau’s “universal laws” here are something quite distinct from

the well-validated empirical patterns sought by the mainstream US political
science establishment.10 Methodologically, they are more akin to what
Weber (1999) called Erfahrungsregeln, “rules of experience,” that help
guide the scientific2 analysis of particular cases and inform the scientific2
explanation of specific outcomes. Their logical generality should not be con-
fused with any empirical generality, as they are not falsifiable propositions
but ideal-typical depictions. The systematic study of political history, par-
ticularly using ideal-typical notions like “the national interest” to make sense
of state action, could provide not universal generalizations about behavior
but recurrent insights that could keep a responsible politician properly sus-
pended between the competing demands of ethical imperatives, on one
hand, and practical necessities, on the other (Scheuerman 2009, 105). In
that way, Morgenthau’s response to the “scientific spirit” (Morgenthau
1946, 30) of the era was, with Weber, to articulate an alternative to the nar-
row and provincial version of science—science1, scientism—on offer in the
United States, and to elucidate what it might mean to engage in systematic
investigation without succumbing to the temptation of regarding the world
to be fundamentally a rational place inhabited by human beings who were
themselves fundamentally rational creatures.11
Morgenthau’s position was thus implacably opposed to those progres-
sivist elements of US society and academia that sought to transform poli-
tics into a domain for technical problem-solving; he was no engineer, and
no advocate of engineering as a paradigm for political life. Instead,
Morgenthau’s alternative science preserved politics as an autonomous
sphere of social life, rather than letting politics be dominated by rational-
ism. This is not merely a different theory about the substance of politics,
10
Although Morgenthau does reserve a place for such analyses in his expanded science2 of
politics: they can help the decision-maker forecast consequences and anticipate contingencies
(Morgenthau 1946, 148–52). What they cannot do is replace politics with calculation.
11
Note that I am glossing over Morgenthau’s pronounced and sustained effort to ground
his notion of politics, and the implications of that notion for the question of just what a social
science could be other than a species of scientistic rationalism, in a philosophical anthropol-
ogy centered on inherent selfishness and the will to dominate others (Morgenthau 1946,
191–96). While this is clearly a different “model of man” (Moon 1975, sexism in original)
from that common in scientistic liberalism, I do not think that model is fundamental to
Morgenthau’s opposition to US progressivism. Indeed, I would suggest that the model itself
is co-constituted with Morgenthau’s skepticism about rationality, rather than serving as the
source of that skepticism—but this would take a much more elaborate reading to
substantiate.
312 P.T. JACKSON
but an entirely different approach to the issue of the proper relationship

between politics and academic or specialist knowledge: a different method-
ology, a distinct way of worlding that had as its goal the self-limiting of
scientific reason that would otherwise run amuck and transmute every-
thing into something calculable. Such a self-limitation makes space for
politics in a way that progressivism did not.
But it preserves politics not just as a realm of unfettered fights to the death
devoid of any higher purpose and unable to accomplish anything of lasting
value. The alternative to a rationalist antipolitics is not a Hobbesian war of
each against all, or the absence of ethics. In a scientific age, moral values may
indeed have been eroded, but in Morgenthau’s estimation, the solution to
that crisis was not to overthrow politics in the name of technical administra-
tion; that was the root progressivist sin. Instead we should strive to restore the
imperative character of ethical precepts precisely by keeping ethics rigorously
separated from both politics and science, so that an ethical evaluation of goals
could sit alongside scientific analysis of means and consequences, and both
could together inform the actions of those participating in politics in an
authentic and meaningful manner. Politics is preserved as an arena for judg-
ment, for necessarily imperfect attempts to approximate ethically defensible
outcomes—as a space for the possible emergence of workable solutions to the
serious and urgent practical problems confronting us.
Morgenthau was certainly no critical theorist in the contemporary sense
(Levine 2013), but he was certainly concerned—in his specifically neo-
Kantian, similar-to-Max-Weber way—to open space for both ethics and
politics by limiting scientific reason. That project remains in some ways as
unpopular as ever in mainstream US political science, for many of the same
reasons that Morgenthau originally opposed that mainstream. No guaran-
tee of progress is offered; Morgenthau’s sense of the tragic in human
history far outweighed the “historical optimism” (Frei 2001, 186–87)
with which he was presented in the United States. But paying closer atten-
tion to Morgenthau’s pilgrimage might help us recognize those elements
of progressivism that continue to haunt our contemporary scene, and
being “realistic” about those ghosts might just help to engender a more
responsible politics.
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Index1
NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS advisory opinion, 24, 33, 37–41

14 points, 10 aggression, 17, 80, 85, 93, 109, 125,
1898 Philippine insurrection, 3 128, 129, 131, 174, 177, 186,
1919 Paris Peace conference, 73 227, 229, 248, 272, 284
1919 Treaty of Versailles, 97 aggressive weapons, 224
1927 disarmament conference, 177 America, vi, 1, 24, 38, 73, 75, 78, 94,
1930 disarmament conference, 181 105, 117–20, 134, 136, 138,
145, 147, 148n8, 150, 153,
156n21, 167–9, 171, 172, 175,
A 177–9, 181, 182, 185, 188, 223,
the absolute, 50, 230, 231, 234, 236 242, 253, 264, 269–71, 274,
accommodationism, 226 280, 284, 287, 288, 290, 291
active nonviolence, 232 America First Committee (AFC), 242
Addams, Jane, vi, 12, 15, 49, 135, American Bar Association, 188
143, 143n1, 145n2, 146n3, American Chamber of Commerce, 181
146n5, 147n6, 148n8, 148–9n9, American Christendom, 235
150n10, 151n11, 151n12, American Committee on Disarmament
151n13, 151n14, 152n15, and Security, 173
158n23, 158n24, 158n25, American Committee on the Outlawry
158n26, 159n27, 160n28, of War, 175
161n29, 224, 227, 254 American foreign policy, 1, 11, 12, 73,
Advisory Committee on Problems of 77, 94, 243
Foreign Relations, 183 American Geographical Society, 171
1
Note: Page number followed by ‘n’ refers to notes.

International Thought, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58432-8
316 INDEX
Americanism, 18, 244, 246, 247, 258, Big Three, 104, 108, 186, 288
259 black churches, 226
American Law Institute, 189 Bliss, General Tasker H., 173
American Legion, 188 blockade, 234
American Society of International Law, bombing planes, 60, 224
29, 44 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 225, 225n2,
America’s Answer to the Hun, 169 237
Angell, Norman, 8, 10 Borah, William, 175, 178, 244, 246,
Anglo-American hierarchy, 235 249, 252, 255, 275, 277, 278
anti-imperialism, 138, 243, 244, Bourne, Randolph, 120, 121, 241
246–8 Bowery, 236
appeasement, 282 Bowman, Isaiah, 12–14, 73, 93, 94,
arbitration, 13, 25, 29, 30, 31n1, 33, 100–5, 109, 171, 173, 185
34, 51, 52, 54, 59, 59n8, 65n12, brains trust, 7, 146
122, 137, 168, 174, 176, 270 Bretton Woods, 2, 13, 85, 86, 100,
Armstrong, Hamilton Fish, 103, 104, 105
109 Briand, Aristide, 14–16, 39, 129, 131,
Article 16, 174 167, 168, 177, 178
Assembly, League of Nations, 33, 36, British Commonwealth of Nations,
37, 39, 41, 109, 173, 186, 187 107
Association for Asian Studies, 181 Brookings, 14, 92, 94, 97, 98, 101
Atlantic Charter of 1941, 92, 102, Bull Moose Party, 5
106, 185 Burton, John, 88
Atlantic Monthly, 126 Bush, George W., 213
Augustine, 231 Butler, Nicolas Murray, vi, 12, 13,
Axis aggressions, 227 49–70, 178–80
B C
Baker, Newton D., 10, 274 Calvinists, 223
balance of power, 2, 23, 74, 78, 100, capitalism, 88, 224, 231, 233, 292
107 Caribbean, 134, 248, 276, 288
Balch, Emily, 156n21, 156n22, Carnegie Endowment, 15, 50, 63, 69,
160n28, 241 70, 172, 173, 178, 180, 181, 186
Barnes, Henry Elmer, 169, 261 Carnegie Endowment for International
Beard, Charles, 12, 17, 18, 169, 241 Peace, 49, 67, 170
Beards, Mary, 257, 259–61, 274n9 Casey, William, C, 196
behavioralism, 196 Catholic Worker movement, 233
behavioral revolution, 16, 194, 212 CFR in the ‘Group on Peace Aims of
Berkeley, 181 the European Nations’, 102
Berle, Adolf, 107, 109 Chamberlain, Austen, 37, 38n2, 39,
Beveridge, Albert, 247 176
INDEX
317
Chamberlain, Joseph, 173 Commission for the Organisation of

Chamberlain, Neville, 106 the Peace, 167
charity, 147, 152 Commission to Study the
Charter of the UN, 14, 16, 57, 92, Organization of the Peace
93, 108, 168, 186, 187, 189, 290 (CSOP), 182–6, 188, 189
Chatham House, 102, 106, 180 Committee for Peace Through
chemical weapons, 224 Revision of the Neutrality Acts,
child labour, 171 182, 258
China, 57n5, 68, 69, 180, 181, 200, Committee on Disarmament, 2, 175
229, 281, 286, 287, 291 Committee on Public Information,
Christ and Culture, 237 169
The Christian Century Sino-Japanese Committee to Defend America by
conflict of 1932, 227, 228, 230 Aiding the Allies, 182
Christian humanism, 144, 160 common good, 17, 233
Christian idealism, 237 communication theory, 197
Christianity, 17, 144, 153, 222, 223, communism, 17, 56n4, 57, 93, 104,
225, 229–31, 233 209, 210, 223, 229, 231
Christianity and Power Politics, 237 communism and socialism, 227
Christianity and secularism, 225 communists, 98, 104, 180, 200, 227,
Christian pacifist groups, 235 229
Christian realism, 17, 222, 230, 233–6 the Conally Resolution, 186
Christian responsibility, 225, 237 Condliffe, John D., 167, 181
Christian theology, 222, 225 configurative analysis, 199, 206
Christian tradition, 231, 234 conflict, 230
Christology, 225 Congress, 2, 5, 9, 37, 58, 61, 92, 99,
civilizing mission, 226 109, 154–7, 162, 175, 182, 201,
Clarke, John, 173 202, 264
class conflict, 232 Congress of Industrial Organisations,
class inequality, 231 188
Clinton, Bill, 213 conscientious objectors, 233
Cochran, Molly, vi, 15, 136–8, 272n4 conservation, 3, 4
coercion, 52, 63, 69, 80, 222, 232, consultants, 16, 173, 188, 189, 202
234 consumer protection, 4
Cold War, 17, 86, 87, 89, 109, 213, containment, 109, 292
270, 292 content analysis, 193, 194, 197, 201,
a cold war liberal, 238 202
collective security, 2, 13, 16, 28, 51, continentalism, 243, 244, 246, 255,
54, 57n5, 61, 62, 78, 80, 102, 258
128, 129, 132, 168 continentalist, 17, 244, 247, 257
Colonel House, 9, 10, 109, 171 Coolidge, Calvin, 37–9, 178, 269,
Columbia University, 15, 49, 92, 117, 275, 276
128, 168, 180, 196, 249 corporations, 4–6, 256, 264
318 INDEX
cosmopolitanism, 159 destroyers-bases deal, 284

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Detroit, 4, 227
94, 95, 101–4, 106, 109 Dewey, John, 2, 11, 12, 14, 16,
Covenant of the LON, 28, 29, 33, 78, 117–38, 146–8, 146n5, 148–9n9,
131, 156, 156n22, 157, 173, 151n13, 155n19, 159n27, 160,
174, 178, 179, 182, 290 161, 161n29, 169, 171, 196,
Creel Committee, 169 203, 208, 209, 253, 263, 276,
Croly, Herbert D., 1, 2, 6–11, 11n9, 277, 280
14, 74, 87, 144, 145, 168, 171, diplomacy, 287
263, 271, 272 disarmament, 52, 80, 102, 128, 135,
Curti, Merle, 125 138, 171, 173, 177, 187, 254,
277, 278
divine intervention in history, 236
D divine knowledge and promise, 225
Danubian Federation, 103 Division of Special Research, 102
Davis, Norman H., 101, 104, 105 dollar diplomacy, 3, 260, 275
Dawes Plan of 1924 and the Young “do nothing” policy, 228, 229, 231,
Plan of 1929, 96 233, 235
Day, Dorothy, 233, 235 Dorrien, Gary, 226, 236, 238
debate on the justice of intervention, DuBois, W. E. B, 226
227 Dumbarton Oaks Conference, 85, 93,
DeBenedetti, Charles, 124, 124n4 108, 109, 183, 186, 187
Debs, Eugene, 241
debt, 91, 96–9, 101, 133, 260, 277
defensive war, 130, 132, 177, 242 E
definition of aggression, 171, 173, EAC. See European Advisory
174, 179 Commission (EAC)
de Gaulle, Charles, 108, 285 Eagleton, Clyde, 184
democracy, 2, 6–12, 14, 15, 32, 33, East Asia, 180
44, 45, 74, 107, 118–20, 123, Easton, David, 203, 208–10
124, 124n4, 136–8, 146, 148, Economic and Social Council
149n9, 152, 153, 157, 160, (ECOSOC), 108, 167
208–10, 213, 245, 259, 261–4, economic and spiritual progress, 225
276, 277, 282 economic reparations, 174
democracy as a way of life, 15, 145, Edward, Colonel House, 10, 109
160, 162 Eichelberger, Clark, 16, 103, 182–6
democratic social ethics, 146, 148, Eichelberger-Shotwell leadership, 182
149, 153, 154, 156, 159n27, 161 Electoral College, 5
depression, 105, 135, 146, 181, 245, Ellen Churchill Semple, 74, 75
255, 258, 283 Ellis, Havelock, 196
Design for a Charter of the General emancipation, 137, 234
International Organisation, 186 Encyclopedia Britannica, 170
INDEX
319
English school, 89 Frankfurter, Felix, 6, 11n9, 272,

equal justice, 234 272n6, 279, 281
eschatology, 230, 232 Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), 11,
ethical relativism, 233 13, 17, 91, 92, 95, 97–101, 103,
ethics, 17, 124, 126, 146n2, 151, 106–10, 259, 261, 269, 278,
153, 159, 162, 221–38, 296, 279, 284–6, 293
302–4, 310, 312 Freud, Sigmund, 195, 197, 199, 231
ethnic divisions and discrimination, functional psychology, 196
224
Eucharist, 169
Europe, vi, 15, 17, 18, 57n5, 67, 68, G
92, 96, 101, 105, 107, 118, 120, gains from trade, 181
137, 138, 154, 156, 170, 172, Gandhian methods, 233, 234
183, 197, 204, 208, 246, 251, Gandhi, M. K., 232–5
253, 258, 261, 262, 272, 278, garrison state, 138, 200
280, 281, 288, 290–2, 296 General Agreement on Tariffs and
European Advisory Commission Trade (GATT), 86
(EAC), 107, 108 Geneva, 32, 38, 39, 99, 144, 159,
Evangelical and Reformed Church, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175, 197,
223 296
Geneva Protocol, 167, 168, 175
geopolitics, 13, 14, 84, 85, 87, 88,
F 183
Fabians, 272 German Evangelical Synod of North
fascism, 2, 16, 18, 83, 207, 210, 227 America, 223
FDR. See Franklin Delano Roosevelt German-Polish border, 78
(FDR) German war guilt, 169
FDR’s “brain trust”, 146 Germany, 3, 8, 10, 68, 75, 78, 84, 85,
Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), 95–7, 101, 104, 106, 118, 122,
233 129, 160, 174–7, 183, 185, 193,
fifth reservation, 36–42 225n2, 242, 250, 270, 274, 278,
First World War, 1–3, 13, 15, 17, 88, 280, 281, 283, 284, 288–91,
118, 123, 125, 133, 134, 136–8, 296, 304
224, 233, 236 Gladden, Washington, 3
Fontaine, Andre, 177, 180 global democratic social ethics, 154
Food and Agriculture, 186 global international organization, 236
Fosdick, Raymond, 182 globalism, 1
Fourteen Points, 76, 78, 274 God, 169, 222, 223, 225, 228–32,
France, 16, 30, 35, 68, 96, 101, 107, 236, 237, 272
108, 122, 129, 145, 171, 174, Goldman, Emma, 241
177–9, 250, 252, 274, 275, Gold Standard, 99
282–4, 288, 291 Gompers, Samuel, 171, 172
320 INDEX
“Good Neighbor Policy”, 279 human nature, 23, 35, 60, 63, 82,
The Good Society, 280 151, 160, 230, 231, 272, 310
grand strategy, 13, 84, 259 human rights, 9, 16, 92, 109, 156,
Great Depression, 98, 143, 201, 227, 168, 188, 189
262, 264, 278 Human Rights and World Order, 189
great power, 8, 28, 34, 36, 64, 77, 78, human rights commission, 168
80, 88, 92, 185, 288, 291 Hundred Days, 98, 99
Great War, 56n4, 59, 61, 134, 253–64 Huntington, Ellsworth, 75, 76, 76n1
Green, Joseph E., 105
I
H idealism, vi, 77, 118, 119, 121, 122,
The Hague, 24, 29, 32–4, 36, 51, 133, 135, 136, 170, 237, 270,
59n8, 154, 155, 170 274, 277, 286, 296, 298–304,
Hague Conference 1899, 1907, 24, 302n5, 306
25, 33, 42, 59, 59n8 Illinois, 143, 143n1, 195, 223
Hamilton, Alexander, 6 ILO, 172, 177, 186, 187, 189
Hammerskjold, Dag, 181 immanent from the transcendent, 225
Hand, Judge Learned, 6, 11 imperialism, 3, 24, 77–9, 83, 85, 145,
Hawley Smoot tariff, 181 229, 232, 233, 242, 247, 250,
hemisphere, 245, 246, 251, 262 254, 259, 260, 286
hemispherism, 17, 241–64 imperialist apologists, 224
Herz, John, 87 India, 68, 232, 233
history, v–vii, 7, 15, 23, 45, 49, 51, industrialization, 223–6, 236, 247, 259
56, 59, 77, 79, 82, 92, 97, 150, inequality, 34, 81, 121, 152, 161, 223,
156n20, 168–72, 189, 193, 205, 231, 232, 236, 238, 245, 257
207, 210, 228, 230, 232, 233, injustice, 45, 145n2, 231–3
237, 243, 245, 247, 259–64, Inquiry, 13, 15, 18, 74, 76, 77,
281, 286, 309, 311, 312 146–8, 154, 198, 200, 202, 204,
Hitler, Adolf, 96, 180, 280–3 206, 209, 309
Ho Chi Minh, 261 Institute of Pacific Relations, 180
Hoover, Herbert, 39, 96, 99, 242, Institut für Geopolitik, 84
279 interdependence, 60, 81, 135, 137,
Howard Taft, William, 3, 5, 27, 260 145, 184, 243
Howlett, Charles, 14, 53, 118, 126 inter-disciplinary, v, 16, 194, 211, 250
Hudson, Manley, 186–8 International Conciliation, 174, 184
Huerta, Victoriano, 260, 273 international court, 12, 24, 25, 28, 31,
Hull, Cordell, 14, 91, 98, 100, 180, 51, 171
183 internationalism, 2, 16, 17, 56, 62,
Hull House Settlement, 143 65, 67, 74, 75, 77, 121, 136,
human dignity, 209, 211–13 145, 146, 157, 159, 175, 182,
human engineering, 225 205, 245, 254, 255, 262, 273
INDEX
321
International Labor Organization, 168 Japan, 24, 57n5, 68, 69, 131, 180,
international law, vi, 12, 13, 16, 23, 181, 193, 227–9, 242, 254, 270,
50, 52, 57n5, 58, 59, 61, 62, 278, 281, 290, 291
123, 133, 171, 172, 174, 175, Japanese invasion of Manchuria, 131,
207, 210, 212, 213, 253 181
The International Law of the Future, Jebb, Gladwyn, 92, 108
188 Jeffersonian, 6, 273
international mind, 13, 49 Jefferson, Thomas, 6, 246, 247, 287
international organization, 13, 50, 52, Jennings Bryan, William, 247
58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 88, 89, Jesus, 235
102, 104, 107, 122, 134, 144, Johnson, Hiram, 5, 244, 275
156, 157, 275 journalism, 5, 14, 126, 235, 258, 269,
international relations (IR), v–vii, 13, 273, 278
17, 18, 45, 49, 59, 60, 64, justice, 9, 25, 31, 32, 35, 43, 44, 51,
67n15, 75, 81, 87, 103, 119, 52, 61, 64, 67, 106, 123, 128,
122, 124, 133, 134, 172, 176, 143, 145–6n2, 168, 185, 187,
207, 222, 231, 238, 244, 245, 232–6, 276, 310
248, 255, 271, 296 Just War, 17, 221
International Relations Clubs, 67, 68
international social justice, 168
International Studies Conference K
(ISC), 80 Kaplan, Robert, D., 88
internship (of Japanese Americans), 285 Kellogg, Frank B., 38, 39, 129, 178
intervention, 3, 106, 118, 120, 122, Kennedy, Joe, 282, 283
185, 227, 232, 237, 244, 250, Kennedy, Joseph, 101, 106
259, 277 Keynes, J. M., 79, 95–7, 106
interventionism, 242 Kindleberger, Charles, 98
interwar, 17, 23, 50, 51, 56n4, 58, Kissinger, Henry, 77
63, 75, 80, 136, 138, 156, 223, Krock, Arthur, 278
226, 244, 260, 261, 264
IR. See international relations (IR)
Iraq war, 1 L
irrationality rational action, 224 La Follette, Robert, 3, 74, 87
isolation, 122, 167, 211, 243, 246, Lansing, Robert, 79
251, 252, 272, 290 Lasswell, Harold D., vi, 16, 193–213
isolationism, 77, 178, 242–5, 290 League of Nations, 10–12, 14–16, 27,
28, 37, 44, 52, 54, 58, 69, 74,
81, 101, 123, 125, 126, 144,
J 155, 156, 160, 167, 180n19,
James, William, 18, 272 185n, 244, 246, 252–4, 270,
Jane Addam’s Hull House, 15, 146n5, 274, 275, 286
147–9, 148n8, 149n9, 151–4, Levinson, Salmon, O., 2, 123, 175, 178
151n13, 157, 159, 162, 224 Levinson, Samuel, 2
322 INDEX
liberal pacifist, 238 Monroe doctrine, 24, 40, 179, 245,

Lindbergh, Charles, 242 246, 250
Lippmann, Walter, vi, 6–8, 10–12, Monroe, James, 246, 247
11n8, 18, 126–8, 144, 145, 171, Moore, John Basset, 28
183, 241, 249, 262–4, 269 morality, 26, 131, 132, 144, 152, 162,
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 247 227, 231, 233, 242
Lowell, A. Lawrence, 27, 279 morality of individuals and that of
societies, 226
Moral Man and Immoral Society, 230,
M 237
Maginot Line, 283 moral problems, 227
Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 183, 247 Morgenthau, Hans J., 12, 18, 87,
Manchester, 234 295–312
Manchukuo, 222, 227 Morgenthau, Henry, 109
Manchuria, 17, 131, 181, 222, 227, Moscow Conference, 107, 185
254 Moulton, Howard, 14, 97
Mandates system, 157 multilateralism, 1, 74
Mao Zedong, 261 Muste, A. J., 233, 235, 236
Marx, Karl, 195
McDougal, Myres S., 16, 193, 194,
201, 210–13 N
Mead, George H., 203 NAACP, 188
Mearsheimer, John, 88 The Nation, 280
mercy, 229 National Board for Historical Service,
Merriam, Charles, 196, 197, 201, 212, 169
297, 307 nationalism, 7, 10, 11, 81, 89, 99,
methodology, 211, 234, 312 104, 135, 145, 242, 259, 272,
methods, 5, 15, 25, 29, 32, 41, 42, 276, 286
49, 50, 57, 61, 62, 119–21, National Lawyers Guild, 188
123–5, 127, 130, 131, 155, 158, national security, 60, 128, 173, 242,
158n26, 160–2, 170, 185, 187, 246, 262
194, 196, 198, 201, 203–6, 209, national self-determination, 78
226, 232–4, 304, 308 nature of man, 207, 226
Mexico, 8, 25, 107, 251, 260, 273 naval arms race, 224
Middle West, 177 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 261
militarism, 120, 123, 132, 224, 236, Nelson, Lucy. H., 195, 196
290 a neo-Marxist revolutionary, 238
millenarianism, 228 neutrality, 18, 62, 179, 244, 258,
Miller, David Hunter, 173, 174 261–3, 273, 280
Miller-Shotwell draft, 174 neutrality acts, 11, 182, 183, 258,
missionizing, 226 261, 263
Missouri, 223 New Deal, 7, 11, 203, 242, 256, 258,
Mitrany, David, 88, 89, 172–4 262, 280, 284
INDEX
323
new diplomacy, 73, 138, 144, 145 Paris Peace Conference, 13, 18, 76,
New Freedom, 5 77, 81, 109
New Haven School (NHS) of Pasvolsky, Leo, vi, 12, 14, 91–110,
International Law, 211 183, 185–9
New History, 168–79, 249 peace movement, 14, 69, 122, 123n3,
new nationalism, 5–7, 9 175, 184
The New Republic (TNR), 1, 6–9, The People’s Lobby Bulletin, 134
11n8, 14, 15, 119, 122, 127, permanent court, 25
129, 130, 144, 168, 169, 171, Permanent Court of International
251, 253, 263, 272–4, 274n9, Justice (PCIJ), 24, 32, 33, 37,
276, 277 51, 52, 54, 59
new world order, 2, 86, 100, 109, 184 The Phantom Public, 276, 277
the New York Group, 186, 187 Phelan, Edward, 172
New York World, 126, 276, 278 Philippine independence, 133
Nicolson, Harold, 79, 282 Philippines, 3, 24, 248, 250, 259,
Niebuhr, Gustav, 223 281, 288
Niebuhr, H. Richard, 17, 221, 222, Plan for Destruction, 84
227, 228, 237 policy science, 16, 194, 195, 208,
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 4, 17, 87, 222, 210, 211
225, 230, 231, 233, 236, 237 Polish resolution, 178, 179
Nobel Peace Prize, 143, 167, 176 political psychology, 16, 197–9
non-combatants, 60, 229 political realism, 183, 289
non-entanglement, 246, 263 political science, v, 16, 194–9, 201,
nongovernmental organizations 203, 208–13, 296, 297, 305–8,
(NGO), 137, 172, 180 311, 312
non-resistance, 235 political scientist, 18, 193, 194, 208,
Norris, George, 244 212, 252, 256, 306, 309
Nye Committee, 134, 256 politics of prevention, 198, 204, 207
Nye, Gerald, 134, 255–7 post-Reconstruction racial oppression,
223
post war planning (PWP), 75, 81, 83,
O 94, 97, 100–10
Obama, Barack, 213 poverty, 3, 149, 150, 224, 225, 236,
one world, 286, 287 257, 259
optimistic, liberal pacifism, 233 power, vii, 2, 4–6, 8–10, 12, 14, 18,
outlawing war, 63, 126, 128, 130, 177 23, 24, 26, 28–30, 32, 34–6, 38,
Outlawry of War, 14, 63, 122–33, 41, 42, 45, 51, 54, 55, 55n2, 57,
175, 177, 178 58n7, 61, 63, 64, 74, 75, 77–80,
83, 87, 88, 93, 94, 122, 126,
127, 129, 130, 132, 135, 138,
P 153, 155, 156n21, 162, 171,
Pact of Paris, 14, 59, 61n9, 130, 131, 180, 185–7, 205, 206, 211, 222,
179 224, 231, 233–5, 243, 246–8,
324 INDEX
251, 257, 259, 260, 264, 270, propaganda, 10, 16, 68, 69, 84, 194,
276, 280, 282, 287–9, 291, 296, 197, 199, 200, 202, 204, 262,
300–6, 309, 310 274
power politics, 17, 18, 93, 94, 138, prophetic pacifism, 233
233, 250, 261, 297, 309 proportionality and last resort, 224
A Practical Plan for Disarmament, Proskauer, Jacob, 189
174 protectionism, 242
pragmatic feminism, 154 Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of
pragmatism, 8, 15, 16, 117–19, 121, International Disputes, 174
122, 132, 144–8, 145n2, 147n6, proxy arguments, 243, 244, 246
158n26, 159n27, 160, 196, 203, psychic coercion, 234
208, 271 psychoanalysis, 197, 203, 204
pragmatist method, 15, 145–8, 161 The Public and Its Problems, 136, 137,
Presbyterianism, 203 277
presentism, 169 public opinion, 13, 15, 28, 44, 45,
primordial motivations, 151 50, 54, 56n4, 57–8n6, 62–7,
privilege, 146, 147, 174, 232, 234 69, 70, 127, 132, 262, 272,
privileged classes, 232 276
problem-solving, 147, 160, 196, 202, Puerto Rico, 3, 24, 248
208, 211
professionalization, 224
progressive, vi, vii, 1–7, 10–15, 17, Q
18, 23, 44, 50, 53, 73, 74, 76, The Quarterly Register of Current
77, 86–8, 91, 93, 99, 100, 103, History, 4
117–20, 123–6, 128, 135–8,
143–6, 156, 160, 168, 171, 184,
195, 203–8, 210, 222–5, 227, R
228, 230–3, 236, 238, 241–3, racial equality, 226
245–53, 255–7, 259, 262–4, racial integration, 227
269–93, 297, 305 racist, 224, 249
progressive era, 2, 89, 93, 122, 144, radical Christianity, 229
146, 148, 157, 203, 221, 223, Ratzel, Friedrich, 74–80, 83, 84
236, 238, 249, 260 Rauschenbush, Walter, 224, 226
progressive movement, 1, 6, 11, 16, Rawls, John, 145n2, 160
23, 196, 224, 237, 304 raw materials, 14, 73, 78–81, 83, 85,
Progressive Party, 4, 5, 7, 143 86, 292
progressives, 171 realism, v–vii, 18, 23, 102, 170, 196,
progressivism, vi, 1–18, 50, 73–89, 197, 222, 230, 233–6, 270, 287,
93, 117–19, 122, 132, 136, 138, 292, 299, 306
143, 168–71, 208–10, 221, 248, realistic utopia, 143
262, 264, 270, 271, 285, 292, realists, 82, 87, 298, 299, 304
293, 298, 311n11, 312 realpolitik, 14, 88, 296
INDEX
325
reason, 30, 45, 53, 62, 70, 83, 89, 99, 248, 249, 296, 297, 299, 300,
107, 109, 122, 125, 130, 131, 304–12, 311n10, 311n11
134, 147, 159n27, 169, 201, scientific progress, 224–225
227, 230, 231, 236, 259, 273, Scripture, 235
289, 297–9, 301, 304–7, 309, Second World War, 73, 82, 83, 86, 93,
310, 312 94, 96, 100, 183, 193–5, 202,
recognition of China, 180 269, 270, 284, 285, 288, 290,
redemption, 228 292, 305
regionalism, 1, 57n5 Secretary of States Hughes, 177
Reik, Theodor, 197 Secretary Stettinius, 83
relational epistemology, 158, 161 “secular” movement, 225
renunciation of war, 63, 129, 168, secular world, 225, 226
177, 179 security, 54, 57n5, 60–2, 78, 80,
reparations, 11, 29, 94–7, 101, 175 102–4, 106, 107, 109, 128, 129,
Republican Party, 4–6, 143n1, 275, 132, 135, 168, 171, 175–7, 181,
285 184, 186, 200, 245, 249, 253,
The Responsible Self, 237 263, 278, 288
Rhee, Syngman, 261 Security Council, 108, 167, 187
Robert, Hutchins, M., 201 self-analysis, 229
Robinson, James Harvey, 249, 250 self-interest, 55, 231, 286
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 11, 73, selfishness, 230, 231, 311n11
91, 156n21, 203, 278 Senate Committee on Foreign
Roosevelt, Theodore, 2–4, 6–8, 77, Relations, 277
93, 143, 246, 247, 249, 258–60 sentimental education, 162
Root, Elihu, vi, 12, 23–45, 51, 52 Settlement movement, 15, 146, 147,
Rotary club, 188 149, 151n11, 152, 152n15, 153,
157, 160
Seven Arts, 121
S Shaw, George Bernard, 272
salvation, 230 Shotwell, James Thomson, 2, 10, 12,
sanctions, 26, 28, 61n9, 69, 120, 127, 15, 16, 79, 103, 128, 129,
128, 133, 171, 174, 175, 177, 167–89, 258
178, 181, 205, 207, 289 Shotwell-Chamberlain, 178
San Francisco conference, 13, 84, 85, Sidney, Webb, 272
93, 109 sin, 226–9, 231–3, 236, 287, 297,
Sapir, Edward, 197, 201 309, 312
Scheuerman, William, 87, 298, 302, slavery, war, 226, 236
308, 311 The Slogan of Outlawry, 170
science, 16, 117, 119, 135, 151n14, Smoot-Hawley Act, 255
169, 193–8, 194n1, 201, 203, a Social Democratic realist, 238
205, 206, 208, 210–13, 224, social and economic inequalities, 224
326 INDEX
social and economic justice, 136, 184, Supreme Court Justice Felix
223 Frankfurter, 6
social and political analysis, 232 Sweetzer, Arnold, 101
Social Darwinism, 3
social evil, 4, 226
Social Gospel, 3, 4, 17, 221 T
Social Gospel movement, 3, 223, 224, Tansill, Charles, 255, 261
226, 230 techniques, 8, 12, 13, 50, 121, 194,
socialist, 223, 227, 233, 242 197, 202, 203, 205, 207, 230,
social morality, 144, 152, 162 250, 272, 308
social psychiatrist, 204 Tehran Conference, 290
social revolution, 233 theodicy, 230
social structures, 194, 226 theological interpretation, 232
sociological determinism, 150 Thomas, Albert, 177
South Africa, 68, 232 TNR. See The New Republic (TNR)
sovereignty, 27, 35, 36, 53–5, 58n7, Today and Tomorrow, 269, 278,
103, 125, 136, 154, 184, 247, 279n15, 280n16, 281n17,
249, 286 281n18, 282n19, 282n20,
Soviet Russia, 96, 104, 133 284n22, 284n23, 285n24
Soviet Union, 18, 84, 86, 94, 97–9, Toynbee, Arnold, 106, 147
270, 277, 280, 286, 288, 289 transcendent and immanent, 228
Spanish American war, 1, 3, 24, 247 Treaty of Mutual Assistance, 173, 174
spirituality, 144, 223 Treaty of Versailles, 10, 18, 37, 58n7,
square deal, 4, 5 61, 121, 126, 269, 275
The Stakes of Diplomacy, 272 tripartism, 168, 172
Stalin, Josef, 18, 107, 270, 271n2,
289, 290, 292, 292n31
starvation struggle, 151, 158, 158n24, U
159 UN Charter, 14, 16, 187
the State Department, 14, 29, 39, 83, Under Secretary of State Sumner
91, 92, 94, 95, 100–2, 105, 108, Welles, 100
109, 179, 180, 183, 185, 187, 188 unilateralism, 1, 242, 244, 246
state power, US, 233, 235 Union Theological Seminary, 223,
state the terms movement, 182 237
Steffens, Lincoln, 169 United Nations (UN), 86, 91–3, 100,
Stettinius, Edward, Jr., 83, 108, 189 102–4, 108, 109, 167, 172, 185,
Stresemann, 39, 175 188, 291
Strong, Josiah, 226 United Nations Relief and
structural sins, 228 Rehabilitation Administration
suffering, 67, 159, 226, 229, 236, 283 (UNRRA), 105, 186
Sullivan, Harry S., 197, 199, 201 United States, 3, 24, 51, 73, 91, 122,
Sulzberger, 179 168, 241, 270, 296
INDEX
327
United States and League of Nations, Washington Naval Conference in

31, 37, 41, 61, 74, 185, 244, 1922, 95
252, 253, 270, 286 Watson, Thomas, 181
and Permanent Court, 24, 51, 54 weapons merchants, 224
and sovereignty, 14, 55, 56, 58n7 Webb, Beatrice, 272
United States Constitution, 54, 57 Weberian, 224, 302, 306, 307, 310
University of Chicago, 195, 196, Webster, Charles, 92
199–201, 203, 296, 297, 306 Welles, Sumner, 102–4, 183, 185
U.S. and its allies, 228 Wells, H. G., 272
US Chamber of Congress, 188 Weyl, Walter, 7, 8, 169
US foreign policy, 1, 11–13, 18, 49, white churches, 226
73, 77, 93, 94, 106, 108, 132, White, William Allen, 182, 199, 258
144, 180, 213, 243, 244, 246, Whittlesey, Derwent, 84
248, 251, 255, 260, 264, 269 “Why the Christian Church is Not
U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Pacifist” (1940), 235
Republic, 18, 270, 287 Williams, Andrew, 14, 77, 78, 86, 87,
US Senate’s investigation of the World 183, 185–7
War I munitions industry, 134 Willkie, Wendell, 285, 285n26, 286
US Senator Robert La Follette, 3 will to power, 231, 301
US–Soviet relations, 91, 270 WILPF. See Women’s International
U.S. War Aims, 18, 290 League of Peace and Freedom
(WILPF)
Wilsonian, 14, 17, 18, 78, 79, 86, 93,
V 94, 100, 101, 109, 175, 181,
Vandenberg, Arthur, 255 243, 245, 257, 258, 261, 262,
Versailles, 2, 11, 16, 54, 100, 171, 290
172, 175, 182, 183 Wilsonianism, 17, 18, 76, 77, 79, 86,
126, 254, 261, 262, 264, 270,
277
W Wilson’s Inquiry, 9, 18, 74, 76, 146,
Wallas, Graham, 275, 275n11 171
war, 138 Wilson, Woodrow, vi, 2, 5, 8–10, 13,
War and Peace Studies’ Project, 95, 17, 18, 28, 52, 56n4, 58n7, 61,
101 63, 69, 73–5, 79, 82, 87, 93, 99,
war as an instrument of national policy, 100, 109, 118, 124, 138, 146,
14, 61n9, 128, 179 171, 173, 249, 252–4, 257, 258,
war as an instrument of policy, 128 260–4, 269, 270, 273–5, 278,
war as policy, 177 284, 286, 287, 290, 305
war of aggression, 174, 179 Winant, John, 95, 106
Washington, Booker T., 226 Women’s International League of
Washington, George, 244, 246, 251, Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 15,
287 143, 144, 154–7, 155n18,
328 INDEX
156n20, 156n21, 156n22, 256, 258–64, 269, 272, 286,

158n24, 159, 160, 162, 162n30 287, 290
women’s suffrage, 3, 154 World War II (WWII), 1, 13, 15, 73,
women’s suffrage movement, 224 82, 83, 86, 93, 94, 96, 100, 156,
World Court, 2, 12, 23, 171, 172, 175 183, 193–5, 202, 242, 244, 254,
World Economic summit, 181 270, 284, 285, 288, 290, 292, 305
world government, 53, 54, 57, 57n6, Wright, Quincy, 184, 187, 189, 297,
58, 65, 66, 107, 120 307
World Monetary and Economic
Conference in Geneva in 1932,
99 X
World Monetary Conference, 92 ‘X’ club, 169
World Peace Through World Trade,
181
World War I (WWI), 1–10, 13, 15, 17, Y
25, 74, 76, 88, 94, 95, 118–23, Yale, 76, 201, 210–12, 223, 227,
125, 133, 134, 136–8, 144, 145, 271n2
153, 160, 169, 172, 224, 233, Yale Law School, 195, 201, 211, 213
236, 241–3, 245, 246, 250–2, YMCA, 180

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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL THOUGHT

More information about this series at

The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953555

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

As Editors of the Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought

of IR, and even of IR in the history of international thought! In this last

1 Introduction: Progressivism in America Between the

Part I Keeping the Faith 21

2 Elihu Root, International Law, and the World Court 23

3 Nicholas Murray Butler and “The International Mind”

4 Progressivism Triumphant? Isaiah Bowman’s New

5 Leo Pasvolsky and an Open World Economy 91

Part II Unleashing Society 115

6 John Dewey: A Pragmatist’s Search for Peace in the

7 The “Newer Ideals” of Jane Addams’s Progressivism:

8 James T. Shotwell and the Organisation of Peace 167

9 Harold D. Lasswell and the Social Study of Personal

Part III Dismantling the Consensus 219

10 The Niebuhr Brothers’ Debate and the Ethics of Just

11 Beyond Hemispherism: Charles Beard’s Vision of

12 A Lapsed Progressive: Walter Lippmann and US

13 Hans Morgenthau’s Pilgrimage Among the Engineers 295

Introduction: Progressivism in America

© The Author(s) 2017 1

Progressivism Before World War I

and ­conservation to trade unionism and women’s suffrage, not always

United States. Reinhold Niebuhr began his pastoral career in Detroit as

The discontent of the workingmen and the mercantile classes in London

It originally revolved around three basic ideas: conservation of natural

Progressivism and wise conservatism go hand in hand’.3 Upon taking up

­ agazine’s first issue was published on November 7, 1914. In foreign

We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards

historian James Shotwell, followed shortly by Walter Lippmann.)

The Progressive Split

IN OUR OPINION the Treaty of Versailles subjects all liberalism …to a

rendered by the peace terms a likely ‘instrument of competitive imperialist

an obligation of democratic nations to expand education in the field of

different from the Progressivism of Herbert Croly and TNR. Bowman

mandate. Without the involvement of public opinion, diplomats and poli-

support the collective security position (as against ‘outlawry’). Shotwell

In ‘A Lapsed Progressive: Walter Lippmann and US Foreign Policy,

Short Bibliography on Progressivism and US Foreign

Cornelia Navari is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham,

Molly Cochran is a Reader in International Relations at Oxford Brooks

Keeping the Faith

Elihu Root, International Law, and the

Studies of the progressive movement in American history, particularly dur-

© The Author(s) 2017 23

This included a whiff of imperialism. In a recent work that chronicles

Root and the Idea of a Court

Root would sharpen his commentary on the need for an international

letter to Root in 1915, worried about the onset of “Paper Blockades” on

On April 11, 1918, Root lunched with Colonel House, joined by

embraced prior to 1914, Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia “would be com-

American Society of International Law. Root’s fear, as recalled by James

1 Introduction: Progressivism in America Between the

Part I Keeping the Faith 21

2 Elihu Root, International Law, and the World Court 23

3 Nicholas Murray Butler and “The International Mind”

4 Progressivism Triumphant? Isaiah Bowman’s New

5 Leo Pasvolsky and an Open World Economy 91

Part II Unleashing Society 115

6 John Dewey: A Pragmatist’s Search for Peace in the

7 The “Newer Ideals” of Jane Addams’s Progressivism:

8 James T. Shotwell and the Organisation of Peace 167

9 Harold D. Lasswell and the Social Study of Personal

Part III Dismantling the Consensus 219

10 The Niebuhr Brothers’ Debate and the Ethics of Just

11 Beyond Hemispherism: Charles Beard’s Vision of

12 A Lapsed Progressive: Walter Lippmann and US

13 Hans Morgenthau’s Pilgrimage Among the Engineers 295

and conservation to trade unionism and women’s suffrage, not always

agazine’s first issue was published on November 7, 1914. In foreign

conference, it provided both technical information on particular points