Between 1913 and 1945, the two terminal years of this book, US foreign relations saw a remarkable transformation. During those 32 years the old verities of her foreign policy were overturned. America emerged as a big player on the world scene – but it happened bit by bit. Now just for a minute, use your imagination. Suppose through a magical piece of time travel that in 1913 an audience of leading politicians sitting in a darkened room in Washington had been shown a newsreel about America's world position 30 years later – at the point of her final victory over Hitler's Reich. They would have been amazed at what they saw, and some of them no doubt, appalled. Robert La Follette, the radical member for Wisconsin, would have had a fit.
The old America which they had known before the Great War was an expanding power rapidly moving from the second division to the first. Its economy was overtaking Britain's and rivalling Germany's. It had some foreign economic interests and a growing navy. But it main orientation was still inward and it remained wary of “foreign entanglements”, determined to take George Washington's warning to heart. It traded widely but it had no colonies in the strict sense of the word, and no allies. Our audience of political grandees would have been horrified by any suggestion that the USA should have become the centre of an empire or that it might join the interlocking alliances of the European powers.
Jumping forward to 1945, what do we find? The United States was now a colossus. It produced half the world's industrial goods. It was the chief banker of western capitalism and its economic and strategic interests were on a global scale. It was the dominant military power, the sole possessor of nuclear weapons and the only country able to mount a serious challenge to the Red Army. Its rivals from thirty years before had almost been erased from the world scene: Britain was half bankrupt and in desperate need of renewal, Germany was defeated and in ruins.
America's old policy of neutrality and non‐interference had been somewhat eroded between the wars; now it was unthinkable. Powerful sections of America's ruling elite and the business community wanted to re‐organise the world according to American interests. It seemed that a new blockbuster had appeared: America the World Power. It was the irresistible next step in her ascendancy: “Manifest Destiny 2”. Given that fact, amity with the Soviet Union could not have lasted long. Both sides were ambitious for self‐aggrandizement and each one was determined on the “containment” of the other.
Messrs Folly and Palmer have tried to encompass all this is their Historical Dictionary of US Diplomacy from World War I through World War II. As with the other dictionaries in the Scarecrow series, they are the sole authors of the book and they appear to have done a pretty thorough job. The organization of the work is simple and straightforward: a chronology, a 30‐page historical introduction and then the Dictionary proper – exactly 400 pages of entries. This is followed by the appendices: a list of international conferences and various key officeholders relevant to foreign affairs. The book is topped off with a substantial and well‐arranged bibliography, fifty pages long – a key part of the book.
The authors give us a mixture of biographies, treaties, commissions, reports, legislation, conferences and diplomatic incidents. The entries are liberally sprinkled with bold type: they indicate cross‐references to other related entries. This practice goes some of the way to make up for the lack of an index, a point I make every time I review a Scarecrow book. But it is no substitute for one.
All the big names are here: Cordell Hull, Harry Hopkins, Colonel House, Henry Stimson. But there are plenty of lesser ones as well: Ambassador Jay Moffat, Joel Clark, a senator and judge, Norman Davies, campaigner for disarmament and the League of Nations and an array of diplomats and foreign service people. It is always a difficult call to decide which foreign figures should be included: Hitler, Stalin and Churchill could hardly be ignored but others are more debatable: What about Batista of Cuba and Sun Yat‐sen, Peron of Argentina and Vargas of Brazil? The first two are included, the second two are not.
It is important to realise that foreign policy is not concerned solely with strategic and military affairs; there is an important economic component to it as well. In fact any attempt to separate foreign economic policy from the political side is wholly artificial. Folly and Palmer recognise this and supply the relevant entries: the Young Plan of 1929, the Hoover Moratorium of 1930 (covering war debts and reparations), the Lausanne Conference of 1932 (ditto) and the London Economic Conference of 1933. In the turmoil of the economic crisis, many of these get‐togethers were abortive but that fact in itself makes them worth a mention. Among the other issues covered is the peace movement and its leading lights, Jeannette Rankin, Lillian Wald, Emily Balch and Abraham Muste, a Dutch‐born American Quaker. The War Resisters' League of 1923 and the Women's Peace Party of 1915 receive attention too.
For convenience, one can divide this field into three geographical areas: Europe, the Far East and Latin America. The great events of European and Far Eastern politics are well covered by Folly and Palmer although they miss a few things: amazingly there is no entry on the Munich Agreement of 1938. America's role in this was minimal but it caused FDR to focus more intensely than before on the threat of war. The attack by Japan on the USS Panay in 1937 is included but not the German torpedoing of the Athenia, in 1939 – a British ship which sank with the loss of 28 American lives. However, these blips are exceptions.
Events in the Caribbean must of necessity receive lots of attention because the US intervened so frequently and so heavy‐handedly in Caribbean politics. Occupations, unequal treaties and forcible customs agreements abound. It was quasi‐imperialism. The authors cover the main subject countries: the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and of course the main playground for American business (and businessmen!) Cuba – that was before the start of the deep freeze in 1959. There are entries on the big conferences (Lima, Buenos Aires, Montevideo) and on FDR's fresh approach, the Good Neighbour Policy. Some of the presidents are included as well and what a gruesome collection of rogues they are: Batista, Trujillo, Machado; the one bright spot, Lazaro Cardenas of Mexico, in not mentioned.
This is another good entry in the Scarecrow series and it seems difficult to fault it on content – not in any serious way. I make my usual plea to the publishers for an index. It would enhance the value of the book enormously. Why Scarecrow have set their face against providing indices I cannot understand. I would also have liked a list of entries at the front – alphabetical or classified, preferably both. The book is quite well printed and produced but there are no pictures and it is glued, not sewn. It also comes as an e‐book.
