• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

For the Founders, and for the generations that followed them, here was the basis of a distinctively American approach to leadership, informed by a conviction that self-mastery should take precedence over mastering others. This Founders’ credo was neither liberal nor conservative. It transcended partisanship, blending both idealism and realism, emphasizing patience rather than immediacy, preferring influence to coercion. Until the end of the nineteenth century, this conception of America as exemplar, endorsed by figures as varied in outlook and disposition as George Washington and John Quincy Adams, commanded widespread assent.

In his farewell address to the nation, a document that for decades enjoyed a standing akin to divine scripture, President Washington urged his countrymen to chart an independent course, enabling the United States “to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.” Washington had an acute appreciation of the extraordinarily fortunate circumstances in which the young republic found itself. “Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation?” he asked.

Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?3

In a presentation to the House of Representatives on July 4, 1821, Secretary of State Adams elaborated on Washington’s theme. The United States, he insisted, “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.4

For most Americans, most of the time, the policies prescribed by Washington and Adams defined the nation’s proper orientation toward the outside world, a view that prevailed throughout the nineteenth century.

America’s impulsive if abbreviated fling with European-style imperialism in 1898 signaled the impending demise of this tradition. “We used to believe . . . that we were of a different clay from other nations,” Harvard’s William James reflected when contemplating the resulting American empire. But this had turned out to be “pure Fourth of July fancy, scattered in five minutes by the first temptation.”5

U.S. entry into World War I at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson in 1917 dealt a mortal blow to the belief that Americans were made of different clay than the warring peoples of Europe. Dissenters remained, but now they seemed to lag behind in their understanding of history’s summons. Prominent among those dissenters was the radical journalist Randolph Bourne, who offered this impassioned defense of America’s true mission in a world consumed by violence:

If America has lost its political isolation, it is all the more obligated to retain its spiritual integrity. This does not mean any smug retreat from the world, with a belief that the truth is in us and can only be contaminated by contact. It means that the promise of American life is not yet achieved . . . and that, until it is, there is nothing for us but stern and intensive cultivation of our garden.6

With the advent of World War II, the tradition of America as exemplar—now widely and erroneously characterized as isolationism—stood almost completely discredited, finding favor with only a handful of cranks, malcontents,