Tomorrow, the World The Birth of US Global Supremacy in World War II Stephen Alexander Wertheim

318 Pages·2015·1.68 MB·English

Tomorrow, the World

The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy in World War II

Stephen Alexander Wertheim

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2015
© 2015
Stephen Wertheim
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT

Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy in World War II

Stephen Wertheim

This dissertation contends that in 1940 and 1941 the makers and shapers of American
foreign relations decided that the United States should become the world’s supreme political
and military power, responsible for underwriting international order on a global scale. Reacting
to the events of World War II, particularly the Nazi conquest of France, American officials and
intellectuals concluded that henceforth armed force was essential to the maintenance of liberal
intercourse in international society and that the United States must possess and control a
preponderance of such force. This new axiom constituted a rupture from what came before and
a condition of possibility of the subsequent Cold War with the Soviet Union and of U.S. world
leadership after the Soviet collapse.
Thus this dissertation argues against the teleological interpretations of two opposing sets
of scholarship. The first set, an orthodox literature in history and political science, posits a
longstanding polarity in American thinking between “internationalism” and “isolationism.” So
conceived, internationalism favored global political-military supremacy from the first, needing
only to vanquish isolationism in the arena of elite and popular opinion. The second, revisionist
camp suggests the United States sought supremacy all along, driven by the dynamics of
capitalism and the ideology of exceptionalism. By contrast, this dissertation uses methods of
intellectual history in order to show that policy elites scarcely envisioned U.S. supremacy prior
to 1940. Instead they widely identified with “internationalism,” understood then as the
antithesis of power politics, not of isolationism. Prewar internationalists, in short, sought to
replace armed force with peaceful intercourse in world affairs.
The narrative begins, in Part I, with the decline of traditional ideas of internationalism,
at first gradually in the 1930s and then decisively eight months into World War II in Europe.
When the Nazis steamrolled France in May 1940, stunning the world, they swept away the old
order and with it the assumptions of American internationalism. Now peaceful intercourse, far
from replacing armed force, seemed paradoxically to depend upon armed force to undergird it.
In official and especially semiofficial circles, American postwar planners scrambled to map the
international area required to safeguard U.S. geopolitical and economic interests. They
swapped continents in and out before concluding, by the autumn, that America’s living space
spanned the globe. Simultaneously, the Axis powers shattered the fundaments of British
imperial power, presenting the opportunity for the United States to take the lead. Out of the
death of nineteenth-century internationalism and British world leadership, U.S. global
supremacy was born.
In 1941 policy elites conceived how to achieve world leadership, the subject of Part II.
At first they hardly wished to set up a new world organization to replace the failed League of
Nations. They preferred a permanent partnership with Great Britain and its white Dominions,
a vision that President Franklin D. Roosevelt endorsed. Projecting a postwar cold war between
the Anglosphere and a Nazi-dominated Europe, planners thought the “English-speaking
peoples,” America chief among them, would police most of the world. Soon, however, planners
perceived a problem. U.S. supremacy, especially in partnership with Britain, sounded
imperialistic. If asked to play power politics, the American people might refuse to lead.
Preoccupied with domestic public opinion, policy elites launched a campaign to
legitimate U.S. political-military preeminence. From 1942 to 1945, as Part III recounts, they
achieved what they conceived. They popularized a narrative that turned armed supremacy into
the epitome of “internationalism,” redefined in opposition to their newly coined pejorative
“isolationism.” Then they revived world organization after all, less to eliminate war or promote
law than to cleanse U.S. power in the eyes of the American public as well as foreign states.
Harnessing the resonance of prior efforts to end power politics in the name of internationalism,
the United Nations Organization became an instrument to implement power politics.
Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations................................................................................................ ii

Acknowledgements................................................................................................. iii

Dedication............................................................................................................... vi

Introduction............................................................................................................. 1

I. WORLD LEADERSHIP EMERGENT

Foreign policy elites adopt supremacy as an objective

Chapter 1: Internationalism before “Isolationism,” 1815-1940........................... 27

Chapter 2: World War for World Order, May-December 1940.......................... 83

II. THE WILL TO LEAD THE WORLD

Foreign policy elites conceive how to achieve supremacy

Chapter 3: The Anglo New Order of 1941......................................................... 129

III. LEGITIMATING SUPREMACY

Foreign policy elites achieve what they conceived

Chapter 4: Instrumental Internationalism, 1941-1943........................................ 182

Chapter 5: The Debate that Wasn’t, 1942-1945................................................. 227

Conclusion........................................................................................................... 271

t
Bibliography......................................................................................................... 275

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List of Abbreviations

AB Adolf Berle Papers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library
AJT Arnold J. Toynbee Papers, University of Oxford
AS Arthur Sweetser Papers, Library of Congress
AW Arnold Wolfers Papers, Yale University
CDA Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies Papers, Princeton
University
CFRP Council on Foreign Relations Papers, Princeton University
CFRWPS Studies of American Interests in the War and the Peace, Council on Foreign Relations
Library, New York, NY
CW Charles Webster Papers, London School of Economics
EB Edwin Borchard Papers, Yale University
EME Edward Mead Earle Papers, Princeton University
ER Elihu Root Papers, Library of Congress
FFF Fight for Freedom Papers, Princeton University
FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States
HFA Hamilton Fish Armstrong Papers, Princeton University
HH Harry Hopkins Papers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library
HN Harley Notter Files, National Archives II
HRL Henry R. Luce Papers, Library of Congress
JFD John Foster Dulles Papers, Princeton University
JS James Shotwell Papers, Columbia University
LP Leo Pasvolsky Files, National Archives II
ND Norman H. Davis Papers, Library of Congress
PJ Philip Jessup Papers, Library of Congress
PPF President’s Personal File, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library
PSF President’s Secretary’s File, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library
QW Quincy Wright Papers, University of Chicago
RLB Raymond Leslie Buell Papers, Library of Congress
SW Sumner Welles Papers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library
WL Walter Lippmann Papers, Yale University
WS Whitney Shepardson Papers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library
WWF Woodrow Wilson Foundation Papers, Princeton University
YIIS Yale Institute for International Affairs Papers, Yale University

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Acknowledgements

In certain lights, this dissertation looks like the one I vaguely envisioned writing when I
entered graduate school. Mostly, it is nothing like that dissertation. Thank goodness. More
precisely, thanks are due to many people at Columbia and beyond. They begin with my
committee. I am inordinately fortunate that Matt Connelly, my supervisor, brought me to
Columbia. He provided tireless support throughout my studies and in every way — personal,
professional, intellectual. As promised, he also picked up the tab: my turn now. Duncan Bell
gave me a bounty of stimulating comments and oriented me to the University of Cambridge.
Mark Mazower’s influence appears everywhere in these pages, or those worth reading. We
pieced through the history of internationalism at a formative moment, and I am particularly
grateful for his intellectual companionship. Anders Stephanson encouraged and challenged me
in the right ways, at the right times. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I possess no better
writing device than: “what would Anders say.” Marilyn Young provided exceedingly generous
and incisive guidance. Especially in the closing months, her careful editing and boundless
encouragement were indispensable. I also want to thank, from my college training, Robert
David Johnson, Erez Manela, Ernest R. May, and Daniel Sargent: they made me a historian
and continue to inspire my interest in American diplomatic history.
Many thanks to those who read and commented on chapters or related papers, including
Alan Brinkley, Ted Fertik, Anne L. Foster, Arunabh Ghosh, Michaela Hoenicke-Moore,
Andrew Kinney, Joris Larik, Philippa Levine, Rebecca Lissner, Andrew Liu, Mario Del Pero,
and Amy Sayward. I inflicted more than my fair share of drafts on Volker Berghahn, Daniel
Immerwahr, Ira Katznelson, and Samuel Moyn, and they responded with extensive comments
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that helped me reconceive my work. Special thanks to Trent MacNamara, Oliver Murphey,
and Simon Stevens; as Matt’s students, we read, edited, and commiserated together in our
writer’s club.
I have gained important insights from conversations with too many people to remember
(apologies in advance), but among them are Jeremy Adelman, Charles Armstrong, Emily
Baughan, Betsy Blackmar, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Elisheva Carlebach, Benjamin Coates,
Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, Nick Cullather, Christopher Dietrich, Susan Ferber, Luke Fletcher,
Eric Foner, Aimee Genell, Michael Geyer, Tony Greco, Nicolas Guilhot, Ryan Irwin, Andrew
Johnstone, Wallace Katz, Jeremy K. Kessler, Stephen Kotkin, Paul Kramer, Charlie
Laderman, Sam Lebovic, Jamie Martin, William McAllister, Dirk Moses, Christopher
McKnight Nichols, Alanna O’Malley, Chris Parkes, Inderjeet Parmar, Susan Pedersen,
Andrew Preston, Katharina Rietzler, Simon Rofe, Noah Rosenblum, Mira Seigelberg, Joyce
Seltzer, Timothy Shenk, James Sparrow, John A. Thompson, and Adam Tooze. Thanks also
for feedback from participants at talks or conferences of the American Historical Association
and its Pacific Coast Branch; the Center for the Cold War and the United States, New York
University; the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS; the European
University Institute; the Intellectual and Cultural History, International History, History Across
Borders, and U.S. History workshops, all at Columbia; the Interdisciplinary Center for
Innovative Theory and Empirics at Columbia; King’s College, University of Cambridge; the
National History Center’s International Seminar on Decolonization; and the Princeton
Program in American Studies.
Funds from foundations, universities, and the government enabled the activities of the
subjects of this dissertation as well as its author. Providing crucial fellowships and grants were
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the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Columbia University, where Sandra Peters helped me a
great deal; the Doris G. Quinn Foundation; King’s College, Cambridge; the Jacob K. Javits
Fellowship of the U.S. Department of Education; and the John Anson Kittredge Educational
Fund. I am thankful to a long list of archivists, especially Virginia Lewick at the FDR Library
for assisting my research and keeping the documents intact.
For a labor of love, a dissertation has a way of accentuating the wrong half of the
equation. Friends and family helped me to endure the labor and rediscover the love. Chats,
drinks, email, and Skype with Seth Anziska, David Jackson-Hanen, Ana Isabel Keilson, and
Natasha Wheatley sustained my spirit and shaped me well beyond this project. The same goes
for Thomas Meaney, Justin Reynolds, and Simon Stevens, in whom I had and have the best of
all possible collaborators. My parents, Alex and Linda, were there for me at every turn, sharing
in my happiness, smoothing out the dips, and fixing me on the way forward. Finally, I have
been working on this dissertation for as long as I have known Kristen Loveland. It was a
fortuitous conjuncture. Kristen was my closest and most insightful reader and my foundation of
support. To the last hour, she read and reread, critiqued and reassured, held my hand and got
me to finish what I started. There is no labor in her love.

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