Farewell to Internationalism

• Main Author: Dallek, Robert
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York, NY 1995
• Subjects: Greenland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195097320.003.0005; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52567960/isbn-9780195097320-book-part-5.pdf

Abstract CONTRARY TO TRADITIONAL BELIEF, the 1930s were not a time of un relieved isolationism in the United States. During the first two years of his presidency, Roosevelt met not intense isolationism in the country but a general indifference to outside events which left him relatively free to seek expanded American ties abroad. Indeed, in 1933-34, Roosevelt’s policies of economic self-protection and political detachment from other nations represented only one side of his foreign policy. At the same time that he charted a separate economic and political course for the United States, he also moved toward greater cooperation abroad. In the fall of 1933, when domestic and foreign constraints seemed to put international cooperation temporarily out of reach, he channeled his desire for world harmony into improving Soviet-American relations. Strong support for the idea came from American business leaders who hoped that recognition would reopen Russian markets to American manufactured goods. To Roosevelt, there was the additional appeal that recognition might discourage rumored Japanese aggression against the U.S.S.R. But opposition from Catholic and labor leaders and conservative groups like the D.A.R. gave him pause. Though one conservative newspaper publisher belittled the danger of Bolshevism in the United States as “about as great as the menace of sunstroke in Greenland or chilblains in the Sahara,” Roosevelt felt compelled to resolve Soviet-American differences and as sure a consensus before recognizing the Soviet Union.