A FOREIGN POLICY FOR AMERICA—Charles A. Beard—Knopf ($1.50).
ISOLATED AMERICA—Raymond Leslie Buell—Knopf ($3).
That spectacular piece of reporting, American White Paper by Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, declared last month that U. S. foreign policy—in conception at least—is neither hare-brained nor haphazard but determined and clean-cut (TIME, April 29). But difficulties in its application and debate on its course still remain. Last week and this, two books by distinguished students of the problem were rushed into print. Each was primarily concerned with the protection of U. S.
interests; each recognized that foreign and domestic policies are inseparable. Otherwise their points of agreement were few.
Fundamentalist. White-headed, eagle-beaked old Charles Beard has developed the most profoundly ironic mind of any U. S. historian. Because irony has value in a period of emotionalism, his new book is a timely astringent. Disavowing "Isolationism" as an impossibility, Beard argues, as he has before, for a "Conti-nentalism" consistent with the ideas of the Founding Fathers. Sonorous and bland, he mocks both the ambitious Imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt and the lofty Internationalism of Woodrow Wilson.
In The Rise of American Civilization, Beard has already jabbed at Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, the 19th-Century theorist of naval power. He here repeats the performance at greater length, with more savage relish. The navy man's Moses, it appears, was a thoroughly incompetent historian, his imperialist strategy "the rationalized war passion of a frustrated swivel-chair officer who had no stomach for the hard work of navigation and fighting." As for Roosevelt I, whose election was a "tragedy of politics," and Secretary of State John Hay, who "as Lincoln's secretary had become a treasure of the Republican tradition," they and their friends "built up in the State Department a bureaucracy and a tradition absolutely opposed to historic continen-talism."
Reviewing the history of U. S. efforts at internationalism, Historian Beard does not spare the rod. Neither foreign trade nor foreign lending, he observes, has been a dazzling success for the U. S.; U. S. internationalism has not availed to prevent war. But he insists that whenever the issue has been put to them directly, the U. S.
people have rejected internationalism. His deductions are that: 1) this invariable rejection meant "a recognition of the hard fact that the United States, either alone or in any coalition, did not possess the power to force peace on Europe and Asia, to assure the establishment of democratic and pacific governments there, or to provide the social and economic underwriting necessary . . ."; 2) the President and State Department should therefore be less ambitious in their conduct of foreign relations.
Charles Beard's last two points are his best. His deflationary swipes at internationalism make good reading but remain mostly rhetoric. He does not examine how much "historic continentalism" is now U. S. policy, or what actual commitments are involved in it (e.g., for hemisphere defense). He says practically nothing about the concrete situation in 1940.