American Politics; 9; Politics Stop at the Water's Edge

This is National Educational Television. This is National Educational Television. Washington University and KETC Channel 9, the St. Louis Educational Television Station, present... American Politics, of course, for television. With Professor Thomas H. Elliott, chairman of the Department of Political Science of Washington University. In this lecture and the next one, we will look at some party voting on issues involving foreign policy and national defense. The two subjects are really inextricably intertwined, so we might as well treat them as one.

Both now and in the next lecture, therefore, we will be discussing America's international relations, truly a matter of life or death. The title of this lecture is Politics stops at the water's edge. That's a statement of a goal, not a fact. Actually, foreign policy is inevitably and always a political issue. Though because we often want to turn a united front to the rest of the world, once in a while it's less of a partisan issue, then it might be. In our own time, the real heyday of peacetime bipartisanship, or as Cordell Hall preferred to call it non-partisanship, was the period from roughly 1943 to 1949. The period when the late Senator Arthur Vandenberg was exerting great influence over his fellow Republicans in the Congress.

In 1945, the early part of that period, we joined the United Nations, you will remember, by a virtually unanimous vote of the Senate. In the period from 1945, the end of the war, until Vandenberg fell ill, that a part of 1948. On 11 major foreign policy issues, about 84% of the Congress stood together, generally supporting what we might classify as an internationalist policy, which led us to assume a leading position in the free non-communist world. I want to pause for a moment about this word internationalist, I've got to use that, I've got to use a word nationalist or isolationist, as words of classification. I think, probably, I've justified in doing this with respect to a large number of different issues. I think most people know in general what I mean when I say that one position is the internationalist position, and the other is the isolationist or nationalist position.

Although there would be some people who actually voted, who might say why I didn't take an internationalist position, I was doing this for America. But in general, scholars and practitioners in the field of foreign policy would, I think, agree pretty generally on the broad meanings of those terms. Even in those years of 1945 to 1948, as much as, many as 22% of the Republicans in the Congress, usually with the late-centred taft as their spokesman, adhere pretty steadily to the strictly isolationist or nationalist position. With Vandenberg's illness and death, beginning, say, period of 1949, the bipartisan shift of foreign policy showed a marked decline in the 83rd Congress, that's the one just before the present one, in the first two years of Mr. Eisenhower's presidency. We find that judging by their votes on, I think it's 15 selected issues involving foreign policy in the Senate of that Congress, the 83rd Congress, 1953 to 1954, here is how the parties stacked up.

The Republican Party had 38% of its senators on the internationalist side of these issues. 31% of them could safely be classified, let's call them nationalists, or isolationists. With the remaining 31%, rather unclassifiable as a matter of fact, we can only call them doubtful. In contrast, the Democratic Party in the same Congress had 60% clearly on the internationalist side, 12% so-called irreconcilable isolationist, and the remaining 28% in the doubtful category. Now, these figures not only show something in the terms of party differences in our own, very much our own time, they also perhaps conceal something of geographical patterns that affect these records.

The center still, we cannot be too sweeping about this, but the center still of this nationalist feeling here seems to lie as it used to, largely in the middle west, by which I mean primarily the states that the geographers would classify as north, central, west, central, and perhaps the mountain states of the middle west. As a matter of fact, a study recently by Bradford Westfield indicates that there is an increasing proximity between the Republicans here and the Democrats here. These coming mainly from the Atlantic coast, these people in a rather unclassifiable, ambivalent position, who seem to not clearly have made up their minds which side of the fence they fall, and these, in increasing number, are coming from the ranks of the representatives, senators from the solid south. Whether that trend will continue or not, it's too early to say. Before looking at any more figures, let's consider the factors which contribute to this geographical pattern and to the party's positions on foreign affairs and national defense.

I'd like to discuss with you four factors that seem to me important. I doubt whether I'll have time in this lecture to deal with more than two. First and perhaps most significant is an imponderable, insubstantial thing. Our individual attitudes toward the proper ordering of human society. To good many Americans, there have been handed down to the generations traditional assumptions about society and government, which seem to stand from ancient Greece, and which perhaps have developed most understandably to us in England during the last three centuries. These are the basic unwritten assumptions underlying what we loosely call Western civilization, and which we might more practically define as the ancient values, ways and customs of the Western Europe, and particularly England. They include a theoretical belief in equality, and often a practical rejection of it, a sharp distaste for disorder or drastic change, a realization that when the freedom of one is threatened, the freedom of all is threatened.

And a conviction, I think, that the wise and honest should rule, while the mass of the people who may be honest but are not necessarily wise, retain the power through the ballot to turn out the irresponsible ruler and thus prevent tyranny. Behind all these is an enduring assumption that there is a so-called natural law, some ultimate code which is above all written constitutions and statutes, and represents the gourd and the true, the consensus of the wise and just and disinterested men of this and former ages on what individual and social conduct ought to be. Now, what in the world has all this got to do with American foreign policy? Just this, Americans seems to me who have been brought up consciously in this tradition, tend to think about international affairs primarily in terms of Europe, especially England, and they're greatly concerned when the civilization, based on this tradition, is endangered by dissolution within or barbarians without.

The traditionalists with this conscious sense of the values of Western culture live, of course, all over our country, but I think mostly in the east, the Atlantic coast is after all the natural place where you would expect to find them. Presumably, most of them are people of some means and intellectual interest or intellectual background or both. You could expect many of them, most of them perhaps to have English names. They may be Democrats or Republicans, depending upon whether they live in the south or the north. They see an American destiny inextricably mixed up with the destiny of the Western world, and hence believe that world affairs are our affairs. In World War II, they sang the white cliffs of Dover with much more enthusiasm than they sang. Remember Pearl Harbor, perhaps to be sure, because it was probably a somewhat better song.

And in any necessary choice, if they had to face it between sacrificing the east or the west, they would prefer to save the west. They admire Churchill more than Chiang Kai-shek. Now let's examine briefly the attitude of a much larger group of people, larger in number, but perhaps no greater in power and influence. These are either all-out Democrats, perhaps unconscious of that fact, but all-out Democrats with a little D, I don't mean the partisan Democrats, believing that the people as a whole are fit to rule. Or they are people submerged in the struggle for economic and social status and resentful of that fact, mostly the former. They're not concerned with the past. Western traditions are all very well, but this is America. A new nation formed by a revolution against the old ways. These people find the true romance, not in the Acropolis and Buckingham Palace and the Higher Law, but in the individual struggle for success and in the humming tribards and in the building of a great and free country.

They're more articulate, spokesmen, in times past, have apostipized old pioneers. They preach the glories of democracy. They've sung of beating a thoroughfare through the wilderness. They are Karl Sandbergs, the people, yes. Because this group's first concern is America, here and now, and maybe tomorrow. They are likely to react instinctively against our participation to any great degree in world affairs. They seize firmly on the warnings of Washington and Jefferson that we must avoid entangling alliances oblivious of the facts that, of course, when Washington and Jefferson spoke, they were referring to distant events into which our intervention could not have any good foreseeable end for this country. These people were the isolationists. They are inclined to be. They are, or still, the isolationists, or, if you prefer, the nationalists of whom I was speaking, a moment ago.

Now, the break with Western traditions, or at least their modification, in the direction of the greater popular rule, believed in by this great mass of Americans, stemmed cheaply in the beginning from the frontier and the frontiersmen, the equalizing push across the Alleghenies, into the Mississippi Valley, and beyond. Being, therefore, mainly Middle Western, isolationism has been most significant politically. In whichever party was dominated by the Middle West at a given time, the Democrats and the days of William Jennings Bryan, the Republicans, if you will, in the 1930s. Now, we've roughly divided Americans into two groups, in accordance with their most natural responses to world events. But, of course, this division is altogether too arbitrary and unrefined. Each of us has, within him, seeds of good and evil, and in the same way. Each of us is likely to react to foreign affairs, particular events, with decidedly mixed emotions. It's the primary and usually prevailing reaction of which we've been speaking.

Now, there are other groups and other factors too, which dictate or modify these individual responses. The other groups, and this is my second factor for discussion now, the other groups are the national origin or ethnic groups, whose own traditions may not be primarily Western liberal or even American. Even where they have such traditions, their own ancestors frequently been embroiled in internal and civil strife that has made them turn away from what the old European civilization, from which they came, represented. Or, if it wasn't that, the inherit bring over here and pass down to their children and their children's children, resentment and suspicion of particular countries. Thus, still, the Irish-American, many an Irish-American, is likely to seem almost instinctively when the chips are now anti-bridge.

Some Polish-American centers led the race to register vehement opposition to the Soviet. Jewish voters, a religious group perhaps, but in this political sense remarkably like a national origin group, back Franklin Roosevelt, largely because they felt or had kinship with the victims of German persecution, and Roosevelt was out to smash the German power. A very acute analyst, Samuel Lubell, gives first place to ethnic origin as a source of isolationism. In fact, he argues that isolationism is quite specifically a manifestation of a pro-German feeling. Lubell claims that the whole attitude is based primarily on a desire for revenge, a deep, incoherent resentment against our having entered World War I, against the Germans. He does show, I mentioned him, he's a well-known writer and he's one prize for the book in which he elaborates this thesis,

he does show that beginning in 1920, the vote in the presidential elections in a number of heavily German-American counties has fluctuated between elections more sharply than elsewhere, apparently in response to foreign policy issues. Well admittedly, this indicates that ethnic origin, a specific German ancestry, is an important political factor, but I don't think it really proves anything more than just that, but we have been saying. And this ethnic factor applies all across the board with the various national origin groups that make up a considerable part of our voting population. I don't think it disproves the significance of either geography or of the existence or lack of Western traditionalism. Now we have time for just a few examples of these two factors of which I've been speaking and remember there are a couple more factors which have to be considered which I'll deal with later. First let's look at the concern or lack of it with the traditions of Western civilization, what one writer is called the Western traditions of civility.

There are countless examples of this concern. Read the letters of Walter Heinz Page, our ambassador to the Court of St. James in London in the first part of World War I. Mr. Page was a Democrat from North Carolina. From the outbreak of that war, he felt that this was our struggle because it was a struggle by the British primarily to preserve the traditions of civility which to him made life worth living. At the same time, Theodore Roosevelt, a New York Republican, brought up in the same atmosphere, was expounding the same views urging that we fight to save allegedly Western civilization. In World War II, some of us will remember there was a campaign under the heading of bundles for Britain and there was an American poet who wrote in a world without an England, I would not wish to live. Because the Eastern traditionalists were the leaders of the Republican Party in the man in 1916, these leaders who wanted to save British civilization, they bitterly opposed President Wilson's neutrality policy in the first part of World War I.

Conversely in 1916, the Democrats appeared as the peace party even though Wilson hadn't made any promises of peace. The militant South might not have supported him except that he was a Democrat and so were they and that was paramount even above their feelings about peace and war. The Middle West, despite Mr. William Jennings Bryan's defection from Wilson, was convinced that after all by the facts, we had not gone to war. They deserted many of them, deserted their traditional Republican allegiance and voted Democratic in that year, sufficiently to bring Wilson back into office. At the end of the war, the battle over the Treaty of Versailles, and I think this is a really important point in this whole discussion, the battle over the Treaty of Versailles marked the beginning of the party conflict over foreign policy which endures to this day. We've concerned the extent and nature of our commitment to try to preserve the peace of the world.

Orientation toward the West was fitted against orientation toward the East, specifically Britain versus China. The Republican Party anxious not to repeat its defeat of 1916 and braced a policy of isolationism which endured almost unbroken until December 7, 1941 and certainly deeply influences Republican policies today. Conversely, the League of Nations debate labeled the Democrats less irrevocably as the internationalist party. And finally, it taught the leaders of both parties a lesson which they never forgot, a lesson of the pitfalls of partisanship in foreign affairs. And sometimes, if the League covenant hadn't been defeated in a party battle in 1920, what the United Nations have been virtually unanimously approved without a party fight in 1945. The defeat of the League, as a matter of fact, is a remarkable example of the mobilization of group interests and personal motives in the field of foreign policy.

There was the party interest, Wilson favoured the League, Wilson was a Democrat that Republicans had a free election to oppose it. But could they dare to do so? A number of their own leaders have been advocating League of Nations. In fact, and this is often forgotten, as late as 1918, while the war was just coming to an end. The Republican Party in New York, in its platform that year, specifically called for American adherents to a League of Nations. How then, in face of this, seeking victory as a political matter in 1920, could the real powers in the Republican Party have managed to defeat the League and put the party on a distinct course of isolationism? Well, I think we can measure that in terms of the factors that I've been discussing already. First, they had to deal with the people brought up in the Western tradition. The people in their own party, in the North, men like Roosevelt, Fedor Roosevelt, like President, former President Taft, like Charles Evans Hughes, Ali Hulroot, President Lowell of Harvard, President Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia, and many more.

Influential and distinguished figures who were at the top in this old traditional Western civilization and wanted to see it preserved and had been talking for League of Nations. How could they keep them in the fold? They could load the League covenant as it came up for ratification in the Senate, where the tremendous flock of amendments, which President Wilson would not approve of, and then they could blame Wilson for keeping us out of the League. This ruse worked so successfully that Mr. Taft and the others in the campaign of 1920 were telling the American voters that they should vote for Harding, the Republican candidate, if they wanted to get into the League of Nations. And Mr. Taft really meant this as late as May 1921 after Harding was in office. I've seen a private letter that he wrote saying confidently that now that Harding was elected, we could get into the League of Nations. He was decidedly mistaken, but this was the kind of appeal that kept that group in line. Second, a very frank and outright appeal was made to the ethnic origin groups of which I have spoken before.

The covenant of the League was part of the Treaty of the general peace treaty of Versailles, and the peace treaty had made certain settlements that deeply disappointed or angered a number of European nations, the Italians, the Irish, Poles, and so on. Great deal was made by the campaigners in 1920 to stir up violence against the League, against Wilson, against the whole course of internationalism, on the basis of their old and ancient loyalties to their former countries, or to the countries of their fathers and their grandfathers. And finally, there was a frank and outright appeal to the people who are the descendants of the Jacksonian Frontiersman, I suppose. An outright arousing of the old American sentiment to the Dickens with Europe, let's go our own way as we want to do without interference from outside. This atavistic kind of appeal gained a radio response, perhaps, because it came just at the time of the tremendous emotional letdown after the orgy of World War I, of winning the war to end war, making the world safe for democracy.

The voters who in the Midwest particularly had backed Wilson in 16 because he had kept us out of war could now be told that not only had he got us into war, but that he was preparing to commit future generations of Americans to fighting wars in all kinds of nameless foreign fields. The bargaining at Paris could be portrayed as typically unprincipled European for name, and also British, finagling, a game at which poor old simple uncle Sam was always going to lose his shirt. This is a stereotyped incidentally, it's come down to our own day in good many places, I don't quite know why we lack so much confidence in our own diplomats, but this is an old American tradition, we always think we're going to lose at the bargaining table, there's no reason why we should. The differences between American and European values were played up and their common heritage ignored.

And this I emphasized, because as I say, this was kind of a turning point in our political history as relates to our parties as well as to the general course of events, leaving a lasting imprint on the Republicans and on the Democrats. Let me illustrate that, if I may, by giving you a few more figures of a somewhat more up-to-date variety. In another lecture I'll try to bring it still more up-to-date. I'm still back before World War II, but the pattern was, as I say, I think set in 1920. And let's look now at the continuation of that pattern in the interwar years. In the House in the 1930s, the great issue, very largely, was around neutrality. A great wave of dissolution came along. People began saying that we had got into World War I through the machinations of the bankers and the munitions makers, and that we at all cost must stay out of another war.

And neutrality legislation, post-rich legislation, embargo legislation, was the order of the day. Even with that wide public feeling indicated by polls that showed that 70% of the American people wanted this, even then there was a clear-cut party difference in the attitude towards such legislation. On the neutrality issues, in the 1930s, the Democrats voted 40%, 40% of the Democrats voted on the so-called nationalist or isolationist side. At the same time, the Republicans 87% on the nationalist pro-neutrality or isolationist side. Let's look for just a moment at... You guys, stop those figures. At three other particular votes in that general 1933-1941 period. Here are the Democrats and here are the Republicans.

The first issue is the World Court. 1935, whether we should join the World Court or not, a pretty clear-cut issue of internationalism versus isolationism. The Democrats divided 70, this is percentage, in the Senate, 70 to 30 in favor of joining. The Republicans almost exactly opposite 39 to 61, the 61 representing the isolationist side. Then came the outbreak of World War II, and they designed on the part of the president to repeal the arms embargo neutrality legislation. Arms embargo repeal. The Democrats dividing 79 to 21 for the internationalist side for the repeal of the embargo. And the Republicans opposing the repeal 30 to 70. Finally, 1941 came Lindley's, the tremendous program, to give economic and even military short of war aid to Great Britain later to Russia. 80 to 20 on the Democratic side, 36 to 64 on the Republicans.

So you can see what I mean by the pattern having been set and having been continuing. I've mentioned these two factors that I think are important in setting that pattern. There are other factors that have to be discussed. Economic factors, political factors, we have not time to do that now. I'll try to tend to those in the next lecture. This is National Educational Television.