Wayne S. Cole (1922–2013)

Wayne Cole was a historian who specialized in studying isolationism in the years leading up to the Second World War. Over the course of his career he wrote books on the America First movement, Senator Gerald P. Nye’s role in shaping American foreign relations, and Charles Lindbergh’s campaign to keep the United States out of the war. In many ways this was all a prelude to this work, which channeled his lifetime of scholarship into a history of the isolationists’ opposition to President Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policies from the late 1930s to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

As Cole explains in his opening chapter, the isolationists’ views often have been misinterpreted to the point of caricature, both at the time and in the decades since. Neither pacifists nor opponents of international engagement, what they sought was a strong military and an anti-interventionist foreign policy free from entangling commitments. Though a broad cross-section of Americans shared these views throughout most of the 1930s, their numbers were greatest in the Midwest and among Americans of Irish, German, and Italian ancestry. Their ranks included prominent members of Congress from both the Democratic and Republican parties, many of whom sponsored legislation designed to preclude involvement in future wars.

This was not an issue during Roosevelt’s first term. Though Roosevelt himself held moderate internationalist views, foreign policy was a political afterthought while the country coped with the effects of the Great Depression, and many prominent isolationists were supporters of his New Deal program. Relations deteriorated over the course of Roosevelt’s second term, however, as the growing threat of war abroad played an increasingly prominent role in national politics. After the fall of France in June 1940, the isolationists’ desire to avoid war at all costs clashed with the growing popular desire to support Great Britain over Nazi Germany, with Roosevelt’s efforts towards that end leaving the isolationists increasingly marginalized in their support even before Pearl Harbor brought the nation into war once again.

Because of the war and its outcome, the isolationist movement has long been derided for their obtuseness. One of the merits of Cole’s book is that he treats his subject with respect by presenting their views sympathetically and without the contempt that its members received then and since. Yet for a movement that enjoyed the support that it did his book is frustratingly narrow in its focus, as he largely ignores the larger campaign for isolationism in favor of an extended examination of a half-dozen or so isolationist senators and their attempts to influence American foreign policy. Nor is his book helped by his clunky style of writing, which is often awkward and repetitive. While there is still much of value in Cole’s book despite these issues, his book remains required reading about isolationism in 1930s America primarily in the absence of the more comprehensive study the cause deserves.… (mais)