The Varieties of American Patriotism: Americans Debate Their Country's Role in the World from the 'Good War' to Vietnam

FAIN: FEL-282783-22

Michaela Hoenicke Moore
University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA 52242-1320)

Completing a book on American public opinion about U.S foreign policy from 1938 to 1975.

How does our understanding of US foreign policy debates change if we take the people, that is citizen voices, into account? My primary-source-based study seeks to answer this question by examining foreign policy views at the grassroots level and interpreting them in the context of official rhetoric, policies, and expert discourse. Broadening our conception of domestic arguments over military interventions and America's role in the world, and re-integrating citizen voices, brings underexposed and unsettling questions about the nature of American democracy and its compatibility with military globalism into clearer focus. It reveals wider and deeper controversies over issues long debated by foreign policy experts: what purpose and whose interests does US foreign policy serve?

Associated Products

“It is not too late, heed your people”: Citizen Dissent in the Early Cold War (Article)
Title: “It is not too late, heed your people”: Citizen Dissent in the Early Cold War
Author: Michaela Hoenicke Moore
Abstract: Examining foreign policy views at the grassroots level from the end of World War II through the early Cold War shows that citizens vigorously contested the rise of the military globalism during a period conventionally understood as the triumph of internationalism. Widespread hopes for peace were mainly expressed in a religious vernacular and focused on an "international organization to keep peace." During this period "communism" began to be cast by conservative critics as a domestic rather than a geopolitical threat, an American peculiarity that would dominate the anti-war protest during the Korean War. Much of the dissent between 1945 and 1948 focused on UMT (Universal Military Training) which was seen as un-American, un-Democratic and un-Christian. This fuller range of sentiments and arguments on US foreign policy, reveals a complex, multi-dimensional opinion landscape that defies conventional binaries of isolationism vs internationalism or left vs right.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: http://https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-american-history
Primary URL Description: Modern American History
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Modern American History
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (Core)

"Are we going to fight wars in all these nations?" Grassroots Skepticism about U.S. Interventions in Korea and Vietnam (Article)
Title: "Are we going to fight wars in all these nations?" Grassroots Skepticism about U.S. Interventions in Korea and Vietnam
Author: Michaela Hoenicke Moore
Abstract: Using citizen mail, and contextualizing it with polls, this article revises our understanding of public opinion during the United States' wars in Korea and Vietnam. Ordinary Americans participated in foreign policy debates to a much larger extent than previously recognized. Critiques and preferences at the grassroots level diverged from the official Cold War national security policies of containment and rollback and instead congealed around two poles: multilateral, cooperative internationalism, centered on the United Nations and allied burden-sharing, on the one hand; and a focus on national well-being, perfecting democracy at home, and a rejection of going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Self-identified Democrat and Republican voters reflected on their country's domestic economic, racial, and political order and drew on their own religious beliefs to articulate critiques of what many understood as imperial overreach and rejected as acting as the world’s police force. Facile opposites, like isolationist nationalism and liberal interventionism, not only misrepresent the state of public opinion in the 1950s and 60s, they obscure salient features of the national debate at these critical junctures from cold war to limited war to quagmire.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: http://brill.com/view/journals/jaer/jaer-overview.xml
Primary URL Description: Journal of American East Asian Relations
Access Model: subscription mostly
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of American East Asian Relations
Publisher: Brill

Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories
Author: Michaela Hoenicke Moore
Author: Christopher McKnight Nichols
Author: Penny von Eschen
Author: Mary Dudziak
Abstract: Ideology drives American foreign policy in ways seen and unseen. Based on their just-published book Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations, Christopher Nichols and his collaborators argue that, for example, hotly contested conceptions of civilization and freedom have helped to drive U.S. foreign policy since the 18th century; racialized notions of subjecthood and civilization underlay the political revolution of eighteenth-century white colonizers; and neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and unilateralism propelled the post–Cold War United States to unleash catastrophe in the Middle East. In contrast to the Obama Administration's explicitly anti-ideological approach, Nichols and co-editor David Milne observe that ideologies order and explain the world. Ideologies project the illusion of controllable outcomes, and often are vital to perceptions of success and failure. This talk and conversation will draw on cutting-edge findings and a new field defining project to explore how the history of U.S. foreign relations appears differently when viewed through the lens of ideology.
Date: 11/24/2022
Primary URL: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/ideology-us-foreign-relations-new-histories
Primary URL Description: Wilson Center
Conference Name: Washington History Seminar

The Varieties of American Patriotism: Americans Debate Their Country's Role in the World (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: The Varieties of American Patriotism: Americans Debate Their Country's Role in the World
Author: Michaela Hoenicke Moore
Abstract: Americans contested their country's militarized cold war expeditions more vigorously than previously acknowledged. Presidents, secretaries of state, senators and congressmen were inundated with letters of protest and doubt from across the country during the early Cold War, the "police action" in Korea as well as the deepening "quagmire" in Vietnam. Offering contextualized interpretations of this qualitative data, this presentation revises the conclusions of quantitative public opinion analyses that foreground partisan and elite cue models. Instead, self-identified Democrat and Republican voters reflected on their country's domestic order - economic, racial, and political -- and drew on their religious beliefs to articulate critiques of what many understood as imperial overreach and rejected as "acting as the world’s police force." Studying foreign policy ideas and debates from the bottom up brings into view the full range of American sentiments and arguments on war, democracy, communism, national values and international responsibilities, revealing a complex, multi-dimensional opinion landscape that defies conventional binaries of conservatives vs. progressives, hawks vs doves, and unilateralism vs multilateralism. Indeed, these dichotomous labels float uneasily atop a much wider, deeper and more entangled body of public opinion that, examined in greater detail, provides us with crucial information about contemporary expressions of American nationalism, ideas about democracy and hopes for the U.S. role in the world.
Date Range: 22 November 2022
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Primary URL: http://https://www.ibei.org/en
Primary URL Description: Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI)

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