Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

On the whole, the neo-isolationist discontent was a revolt of the ignorant against the informed or educated, of the nineteenth century against the insoluble problems of the twentieth, of the Midwest of Tom Sawyer against the cosmopolitan East of J. P. Morgan and Company, of old Siwash against Harvard, of the Chicago Tribune against the Washington Post or The New York Times, of simple absolutes against complex relativisms, of immediate final solutions against long-range partial alleviations, of frontier activism against European thought, a rejection, out of hand, of all the complexities of life which had arisen since 1915 in favor of a nostalgic return to the simplicities of 1905, and above all a desire to get back to the inexpensive, thoughtless, and irresponsible international security of 1880.

This neurotic impulse swept over the United States in a great wave in the years 1948-1955, supported by hundreds of thousands of self-seeking individuals, especially peddlers of publicity and propaganda, and financed no longer by the relatively tied-up funds of declining Wall Street international finance, but by its successors, the freely available winnings of self-financing industrial profits from such new industrial activities as air power, electronics, chemicals, light metals, or natural gas, which, although utterly dependent on government spending or government-protected exploitation of limited natural resources (such as uranium or oil), pretended to themselves and their listeners that their affluence was entirely due to their own cleverness. At the head of this list were the new millionaires, led by the Texas and southwest oil and natural-gas plungers, whose fortunes were based on tricky tax provisions and government-subsidized transportation systems.

This shift occurred on all levels from changing tastes in newspaper comic strips (from “Mutt and Jeff” or “Bringing Up Father” to “Steve Canyon” or “Little Orphan Annie”), to profound changes in the power nexus of the “American Establishment.” It was evident in the decline of J. P. Morgan itself, from its deeply anonymous status as a partnership (founded in 1861) to its transformation into an incorporated public company in 1940 and its final disappearance by absorption into its chief banking subsidiary, the Guaranty Trust Company, in 1959. Incorporation reflected the need to escape the incidence of the inheritance tax, while its final disappearance was based on the relative decrease in large security flotations in contrast to the great increase in industrial self-financing (best represented by du Pont and its long-time subsidiary General Motors, or by Ford).

The less obvious implications of this shift were illustrated in a story which passed through Ivy League circles in 1948 in connection with the choice of a new president for Columbia University. This, of all universities, had been the one closest to J. P. Morgan and Company, and its president, Nicholas Murray Butler, was Morgan’s chief spokesman from ivied halls. He had been chosen under Morgan influence, but the events of 1930-1948 which so weakened Morgan in the economic system also weakened his influence on the board of trustees of Columbia, until it became evident that Morgan did not have the votes to elect a successor. However, Morgan (that is, Tom Lamont) did have the votes to preserve the status quo and, accordingly, President Butler was kept in his position until he was long past his physical ability to carry on its functions. Finally, he had to retire. Even then Lamont and his allies were able to prevent choice of a successor, and postponed it, making the university treasurer acting-president, in the hope that a favorable change in the board of trustees might make it possible for Morgan, once again, to name a Columbia president.

Fate decreed otherwise, for Lamont died in 1948 and, shortly afterward, a committee of trustees under Thomas Watson of International Business Machines was empowered to seek a new president. This was not an area in which the genius of IBM was at his most effective. While on a business trip to Washington, he confided his problem to a friend who helpfully suggested, “Have you thought of Eisenhower?” By this he meant Milton Eisenhower, then president of Penn State, later president of Johns Hopkins; Watson, who apparently did not think immediately of this lesser-known member of the Eisenhower family, thanked his friend, and began the steps which soon made Dwight Eisenhower, for two unhappy years, president of Columbia.

In the face of the public opinion of 1950-1952, the Truman Administration had to make some concessions to the power of neo-isolationism. The loyalty program to ferret out subversives was established in the government; during the MacArthur hearings of May 1951, Dean Acheson promised that, under no circumstances, would Red China be accepted into the community of nations; aid and support to Chiang was increased; and John Foster Dulles was brought into the State Department. None of these changes helped the Truman Administration’s popularity, as was clearly shown in the election of 1952, but they had major repercussions on history. One of these was Dulles’s success in obtaining a peace treaty for Japan (September 8, 1951).

Dulles, like the Columbia presidency, was a former Morgan satellite which had been lost, about the same time and for the same reasons. As a partner in Sullivan and Cromwell, one of the Wall Street legal firms closely associated with Morgan, Dulles operated very much in the Morgan vineyard until the late 1940’s. An early advocate of bipartisanship in foreign affairs (a Wall Street specialty), he was first brought into Democratic State Department circles, largely under Morgan sponsorship, in 1945, as adviser to Secretary of State Stettinius at the San Francisco Conference. These associations continued, at various meetings and conferences, mostly at the United Nations and at the four postwar Foreign Ministers’ conferences of 1945-1949.

But in 1948 a change occurred when Dulles’s naturally exaggerated personal ambition got out of hand at the same time that he drifted out of the Wall Street constellations with which his whole career had been associated. Apparently he decided he could get further on his own, especially by adapting himself to the swelling tide of neo-isolationism. The marks of this change were his appointment to the United States Senate by Governor Dewey of New York in July 1949 and his resignation from Sullivan and Cromwell at that time. In the election of November 1949, Dulles was defeated for the full senatorial term by ex-Governor Herbert Lehman, also of a Wall Street background. In the campaign Dulles tried to portray Lehman as having Communist inclinations and went so far as to say that the election of Lehman would permit the Communists to “chalk up another victory in their struggle to get into office here.”

In retirement after this electoral defeat, Dulles continued his movement toward isolationism and unilateralism, a process which was completed by his article “A Policy of Boldness” in Life magazine May 19, 1952, and in his subsequent efforts to keep President Eisenhower from standing up against McCarthyism. This movement was marked by increasing neglect of Europe and opposition to our chief allies there and increasing concern with the Far East and the curative powers of strategic nuclear bombing.

The Japanese peace treaty was one of the last constructive achievements of Dulles and was reached without support of the Soviet Union, which refused to sign it. Communist China was also excluded. The treaty’s chief aim was to end the Pacific war within a larger security structure which bound the previous enemies into a mutual security system. It had three parts: the peace treaty with Japan, which accepted its loss of the already detached areas and islands; the ANZUS Treaty, which allied Australia, New Zealand, and the United States; and a bilateral mutual defense pact between Japan and the United States.