The Historical Alternation of Moods in American Foreign Policy

1952 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank L. Klingberg

There seems little doubt that the defense and strengthening of the “free world” in our time depends largely upon American leadership. Confidence that America will continue to play this role in world affairs is weakened by the memory of America's political isolation following World War I, and by certain currents of American opinion noted by observers since World War II.1 Barbara Ward warns the peoples of the West that “we shall certainly fail unless our effort is at once sustained, calm and supremely positive.”

Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 42-63
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe

Modern dance and music for percussion are linked through the works of musicians who studied with the iconoclastic composer Henry Cowell. This chapter highlights the work of numerous artists who were involved in the dance and music scene along the West Coast of the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Cowell’s early publishing venture New Music helped launch the careers of composers Johanna Beyer, William Russell, Lou Harrison, John Cage, and others. The latter two composers, Harrison and Cage, also studied with the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg whose use of the twelve-tone technique became central to the music of the twentieth century. The chapter ends with a summary of percussion music’s development from the decades before World War I to the compositional hiatus caused by World War II.


Worldview ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-11
Author(s):  
Donald Brandon

For a generation now, America has played a significant role in world affairs. Until Pearl Harbor a reluctant belligerent in World War II, this country was also slow to respond to the challenge of the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of that gigantic conflict. But for almost twenty-five years American Presidents have been more or less guided by the policy of “containment.” Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson all introduced variations on the multiple themes of the policy adopted by Harry Truman. Yet each concluded that the world situation allowed no reasonable alternative to an activist American foreign policy in most areas of the globe.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth McKillen

This book explores the corporatist alliance between President Woodrow Wilson and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and how it sparked debates over his foreign policy programs within labor circles. During World War II, Wilson pledged to make the world “safe for democracy.” For Wilson, the cooperation of the United States and international labor movements was critical to achieving this goal. To win domestic and international labor support for his foreign policies, Wilson solicited the help of AFL's conservative leaders. This book traces the origins of the partnership that developed between the Wilson administration and AFL leaders to promote U.S. foreign policy, from its tentative beginnings during policy deliberations over how the United States should respond to the Mexican revolution, through World War I, to its culmination with the creation of the International Labor Organization (ILO). It details the significant opposition to the Wilson–AFL collaboration that arose among U.S., transnational, and international labor, Socialists, and diaspora Left groups and how this opposition affected Wilson's efforts to create a permanent role for labor in international governance.


1997 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clyde W. Barrow

In 1916, Charles A. Beard was denouncing Germany as “a danger to civilization” and calling for American participation in World War I on the side of the Entente Allies. Like John Dewey and other social-democrats, Beard saw the Great War as an opportunity to advance the interests of the European working class by breaking “the union of the Hohenzollern military caste and the German masses whose radical leaders are Social Democrats”. Even after the Versailles Treaty, Beard continued to embrace the Wilsonian theme that the Great War had been fought to make the world safe for democracy. However, by the mid–1980s, he was staunchly opposed to war with Germany and Japan, had come to embrace the revisionist history of World War I, and even testified before Congress against the Lend-Lease Act. Thus, intellectual historians agree that somewhere between the end of World War I and the 1930s, Beard shifted from internationalism to isolationism and, indeed, a few critics have referred to him as a pacifist in his later years. Within the umbrella of this consensus, debates among biographers, intellectual and diplomatic historians, have come to center largely on identifying the timing and the reasons for Beard's “conversion” to isolationism. Not coincidentally, during the 1960s and 1970s, Beard's writings on foreign policy and diplomatic history enjoyed a resurgence among many on the New Left who were constructing their own revisionist history critical of America's political and military involvement in various Third World countries. Today, Beard's views are still cited in international relations and history textbooks as an example of isolationist theory in American foreign policy.


1980 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Thompson

The theologian Reinhold Neibuhr oftentimes warned that moralists who entered the foreign policy sphere were likely to be more destructive of a nation's ideals than were cynical realists. Evidently he feared that those who lacked a sense of the limits of foreign policy would proceed as if the values and goods which were attainable in the more intimate communities of the family, the locality and the nation were attainable in the international community as well. Whatever Neibuhr's quarrels and debates with classical Greek thought, he was at one with Plato and Aristotle and their present day followers in believing that justice could be more effectively pursued by the smaller communities, such as the city states. He insisted on a recognition of the differences between such communities and the major present day world powers. From World War II until his death, he wrote more about foreign policy than any other aspect of public policy. He wrote scores of articles, some published in less prominent journals, about American foreign policy and its moral basis.


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