Empire Without Tears: America's Foreign Relations 1921-1933

Warren I. Cohen

Temple University Press

1987

Preface

 

I wrote this book to meet a need I perceived as a teacher. I teach a course on the foreign relations of the United States since 1919 and devote two to three weeks to events between 1919 and 1933. With classes too large to assign readings in the library, what are the students to read? I have found Robert A. Divine's Reluctant Belligerent and Walter LaFeber's America, Russia, and the Cold War, both in this series, extremely useful for the 1930s and the Cold War. The several paperbacks I tried for the 1920s simply did not work. The treatment of the "Republican era" in standard texts does not seem informed by the literature of the last twenty-five years and especially of the last decade. So I took time from my work on American-East Asian relations to prepare a short book for my class. I hope other teachers will find it as useful as I have.

My emphasis on the extensive involvement of the United States in the world affairs of the 1920s may offend the sensibilities of a generation educated in the 1940s and 1950s—perhaps even some of those trained in the 1960s. I realized in writing my first book, The American Revisionists, that the 1920s were too important to be dismissed as an isolationist interlude separating the internationalism of Woodrow Wilson from that of Franklin Roosevelt. The reader will find no reference to isolationism in this book. I trust my interpretation of the period will be greeted with a healthy skepticism and the kind of debate we all love in the classroom. I hope some readers will be tempted to explore a few of the books mentioned in the bibliographic essay.