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1 i n t r o d u c t i o n Transnational Circulation in the Age of Realism and Progressivism World history did not always exist; history as world history is a result. —Karl Marx, “Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy” (1857) O n April 20, 1915, as the First World War continued to divide most European nations into armed camps, Woodrow Wilson justified his administration’s commitment to U.S. neutrality in a speech deliveredattheannualAssociatedPressluncheonattheWaldorf-Astoria. The power of his audience, with its ability to disseminate his words throughout the world, was apparently not lost upon Wilson. In its account of the speech, the New York Times noted, “The importance attached to his clear statement of the neutrality policy of his Administration was reflected in a request . . . that all newspaper reports of the President’s speech be based on the verbatim copy to be taken by a stenographer and supplied to all of the newspapers and news-gathering associations represented.”1 Such care in ensuring that the press had access to an accurate transcription of his speech was perhaps due to a fine distinction Wilson makes about the purpose of U.S. neutrality. For Wilson, isolationism is not desirable in itself; however, remaining disentangled from the war allows the United States to continue improving its domestic affairs and thus to be in a stronger position to help Europe arbitrate peace and rebuild once the war ends. Wilson also seems to have wanted his audience to pick up on the subtle polysemy that serves as the principal rhetorical strategy of the speech. He refers to the United States as “the mediating Nation” three times, attaching new and increasingly complex meanings to the phrase each time. At first, he uses it to emphasize the nation’s growing economic power: “We shall some day have to assist in reconstructing the processes of peace [because] we are more and more becoming by the force of circumstances the mediating Nation of the world in respect to its finance.”2 Then, briefly staking 2 Introduction out a role for the United States as an international arbiter, which a double negative halfheartedly disavows, he explains his vision more fully: We are the mediating Nation of the world. I do not mean that we undertake not to mind our own business and to mediate where other people are quarreling. I mean the word in a broader sense. We are compounded of the nations of the world; we mediate their blood, we mediate their traditions, we mediate their sentiments, their tastes, their passions; we are ourselves compounded of those things. We are, therefore, able to understand all nations; we are able to understand them in the compound, not separately, as partisans, but unitedly as knowing and comprehending and embodying them all. It is in that sense that I mean that America is a mediating Nation.3 At its most basic level, this argument rests upon the illusory notion of the period that the United States was a “melting pot” where the racial and ethnic tensions that led to war elsewhere could resolve themselves and serve instead to produce complementary frames of reference for understanding the world. According to Wilson, the United States is unique among the community of nations because its population and culture are “compounded” of all other nations, by which he is almost certainly referring to the physical presence of various ethnic groups and their diverse cultural practices within U.S. borders. This concern for the corporeality of the body politic and the affective ties of nationhood is reflected in the speaker’s choice of words. Instead of casting the United States’ relationship with other countries in terms of economic interests, alliances, or trade routes, as his first, economic definition of “mediating” would lead one to expect, Wilson talks primarily about “blood,” “traditions,” “sentiments,” “passions,” and “tastes.” In other words, he offers an idealistic definition of American identity as something that is ethnically and culturally composite. The historical contradictions are obvious. For one thing, events would force Wilson to change his rhetoric and foreign policy. Anti-German sentiment was already strong, and less than a month after Wilson delivered this speech, the German submarine U-20 torpedoed the Lusitania, killing over one hundred Americans and helping to elicit greater public support for France and Great Britain. More troublingly, Wilson’s vision stands in stark contrast to his own dismal record on civil rights. Even...

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