American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

12. Settling Affairs with the Old World: Dismembering Germany?

When on 17 March 1944 Bowman was summoned to the White House to consult with Roosevelt over his impending State Department mission to London, it was a familiar routine for him. But this time the press corps at the White House gates buzzed with excitement. Since U.S. entry into the war, Roosevelt had fastidiously avoided public comment on the question of postwar territorial arrangements, trying to keep public attention firmly on the military dimensions of war. He feared that public reaction to such arrangements, real or imagined, might tie his hands or compromise his dealings with Churchill and Stalin. But with a highly publicized White House visit by this renowned geographer and veteran of the Paris Peace Conference , here seemed to be incontrovertible evidence that, whatever the president might be saying publicly, discussions of territorial plans were indeed afoot. At a press conference after the meeting, FDR was bombarded with questions about the significance of Bowman’s inclusion in the State Department ’s London team. Resplendent in a green St. Patrick’s Day suit, the president toyed with the huddle of reporters. Now boys, he replied, just because Dr. Bowman was here does not mean that we are talking about postwar territorial arrangements or that the mission’s purpose is to raise such questions with Churchill. “They might,” the president added, “talk about bananas and if they did Dr. Bowman would know where they grew.”1 The global reach and nationalist internationalism of The New World ratified a U.S. globalism, but it was mute on the blunter question of how such 12 SETTLING AFFAIRS WITH THE OLD WORLD: DISMEMBERING GERMANY? expansive interests might be pursued. If the Wilsonian presumption of a detached moral geography took a beating in the 1930s, it still shrouded the more practical ambitions of Roosevelt’s wartime State Department. Apart from Roosevelt himself, the senior members of the State Department had largely cut their diplomatic teeth at Paris or in its shadow: as a senator from Tennessee, FDR’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, had watched balefully the Senate rejection of Wilson. The vision of a global Monroe Doctrine was therefore alive and well, if far from uncontested, and it was the Wilsonian in Hull who addressed the Pan American Union in 1943: the liberty that is today the “right of every American nation, great and small, is the same liberty which we believe should be established throughout the earth.”2 Formulating postwar plans after 1939, State Department leaders thought themselves to be making Wilson’s vision practical under sterner circumstances . Wilson was the baseline from which they departed. Bowman congratulated Hull on his “reenforcement of the foundations” of U.S. foreign policy in the Pan American address while clarifying his divergence from Wilson: “I had great admiration for Woodrow Wilson. But he couldn’t translate his idealism and perfectionism into an effective program because, for him, the deed was performed when the word was spoken.”3 For this practical idealist, World War II became a kind of political crucible in which a revised Wilsonianism was recast as flint rather than chalk. A “new world order” was glimpsed again in Washington in 1939, opening a second formative moment of the American Century. But the vision had evolved significantly from that of the Paris conference. In the first place, the geography of this order would be negotiated on the basis of overwhelmingly economic, more than geopolitical, considerations as the United States outreached its European competitors.This new economic geography was established only via intense political struggles pitting ruling-class global ambitions against a gamut of opponents: the rulers of declining European empires, the expansionism of Soviet state-centered capital accumulation, insurgent working-class, populist, and anticolonial movements from Greece to Indochina, and at home a feisty working class. Yet ambitions for an effective global political structure, dashed after the failure of the League of Nations, were rekindled in the slouch toward war. If ideas and demands for a new world order emerged differently in diverse locations, the crucible of the new global political and economic geography lay in Washington, D.C., and especially in the nexus connecting the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House. The idea of a “Pax Americana”—a successor to the nineteenth-century Pax Britannica, which had dimmed with World War I—attracted wide cur318 / settling affairs with the old world rency in this...