The ‘20s: Culture, Consumption, and Crash 161to be “outraged” in the process of imposing American power upon them. So,
in this so-called time of isolation, the U.S. was deeply involved all over the
globe. Even Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who more than anyone killed U.S.
participation in the League of Nations, admitted that “never [was there] a
period when the United States [was] more active and its influence more felt
internationally than between 1921 and 1924.”
To be clear, there were in fact sincere isolationists in this era. The memory
of the Great War was strong and most Americans lamented becoming involved
and wanted to avoid further conflict; in fact, a senate investigation [conducted
by the Nye Committee] later officially concluded that the U.S. joined the war
as a way to create business, and profits, for weapons manufacturers, not to
make the world safe for democracy. Many of the senators who opposed
Wilson’s treaty continued to reject most forms of American involvement
abroad. The most prominent were Senators William Borah of Idaho and
Hiram Johnson of California, often called “Sons of the Wild Jackass” because
of their contrarian views and their western roots. They, along with other
isolationists genuinely feared that the U.S. would again be drawn into conflict
as it had in 1917, that American sovereignty needed to be secure, that wars
were started to benefit corporations who would profit from military produc-
tion, and that foreign affairs would lead to a suppression of civil liberties at
home, as during the Red Scare after the Great War [and repeatedly since then
in U.S. history, as with the PATRIOT Act today]. The Wild Jackasses want-
ed to emphasize national prosperity and saw no reason to try to make the
world safe for democracy when there were problems at home to be solved.
Johnson in fact was angry that U.S. money was used to “maintain dictators in
power” abroad. Johnson and Borah were both smart men, and they under-
stood what Hay, Taft, Wilson, Hoover and others were trying to do—create
a new global system based on economic power and frequent and easier trade
as a way to avoid war and keep radical groups at home, meaning labor, from
causing trouble. To some degree, the Jackasses accepted those ideas—they
promoted better relations with the Soviet Union, for instance, because it
would make the world safer and might become a profitable trading partner.
But they did not envision the world Wilson and Hoover and others did, that
world of the corporate state with its emphasis on order, stability, cooperation,
and harmony. They were not men who believed in state intervention to
“rationalize” the market, or who created trade associations to make business