Herbert Feis, Wilsonian internationalism, and America's technological-democracy

Herbert Feis, by his own admission, was a participant, witness, and chronicler of American foreign policy from 1916 to 1970. Feis, also by his own admission, had come under the influence of Wilsonian internationalism during his graduate student days during World War I, and this Wilsonian internationalism more or less held his mind until his death in 1971. Although Feis served as Economic Adviser to the State Department from 1931 to 1943, Feis was probably better known as one of America's foremost diplomatic historians during the 1950s and 1960s. His five volume series on World War II, The Road to Pearl Harbor, Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin, The China Tangle, Between War and Peace, and Japan Subdued still represents one of the more complete histories of World War II.; This dissertation examines Feis the historian and explores how the premises which underlay America's technological-democracy (of which Wilsonian internationalism was a global manifestation) became a paradigm through which he filtered his historical evidence. Although many of his reviewers alluded to his works as historical truth, Feis's works were influenced and biased by his paradigm of Wilsonian internationalism. Feis saw a Wilsonian Open Door world as representing the greatest benefit for humankind. Feis's Wilsonian internationalism, however, prevented Feis from understanding that America's Open Door world was as much of a form of power politics as that which he believed the Soviet Union practiced. As a result Feis's Open Door world caused him to evaluate the Cold War in a dichotomous rigidity of good versus evil.; Feis's scholarly struggle with America's dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, caused Feis to begin questioning the premises which underlay America's technological-democracy. Although Feis would insist that America's dropping of the bombs were militarily justified, Feis did come to conclude that the dropping of the bombs also represented power politics in its most blatant form. Feis's disillusionment with this realization caused him to write his finest critical work in his writing career. It would also be his last historical work: From Trust to Terror.