The Rise and Fall of a Wilsonian Dream

Abstract

This book represents an archive based, original, and in-depth study or biography of the Williamstown Institute of Politics (IOP) and its inspiration Harry Garfield, son of the assassinated U.S. President James A. Garfield. Harry Garfield’s principal claim to historical recognition is described and to some extent explained in this interesting study. Garfield established an interwar-years center for the study and discussion of international affairs with a view to educating the U.S. public about the world and reducing nationalist feeling, in favor of a Wilsonian League of Nations vision of international order. Ultimately, the IOP project lasted just over a decade, shone quite brilliantly in the transatlantic elite consciousness, and passed away suddenly in August 1932 with Garfield’s own retirement as President of Williams College. Although the author does not venture to suggest this, nor so classify the IOP and its organizers, funders, networks, and leading speakers, the Institute in effect represented elite U.S. and British, and some other, organic intellectuals at a time of global power shifts. These shifts occurred on a global scale in the aftermath of World War I, the Russian revolution, the Amritsar massacre, ferment in China, Africa, and the Middle East, and rising democratic movements among workers and women. Public opinion—unchained and untutored—stalked the land. Massive change was in the air, colonialism had led the world to the deadliest war in human history, and the British empire’s reformist wing looked to their Anglo-Saxon cousin to save the empire from obsolescence. The book shows how a specific group, long-neglected by historians, played a key role in airing ideas and debates and differences at a time of anxiety about the direction of world affairs. Complementarily, this was also the coming of age of east coast U.S. foreign policy elites, looking for their place in the sun, armed with a new ideology—liberal internationalism—to replace moribund colonialism. The future belonged to the U.S. elite—but the American people were not convinced. It was to educate them in the new realities that the IOP came into being, to realize U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s progressive mission. Indeed, no less a figure than Antonio Gramsci himself, had lavished praise on Wilson’s internationalism, despite the limitations and great power politics of the proposed League of Nations.