Is anyone an avowed isolationist? If anyone claimed the label, you might expect it to be Col. Robert E. Wood—a visionary Midwestern retailer, the driving force behind America First, an anti-Semite, and an all-around nasty piece of work. But Wood said:
To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a real isolationist, one corresponding to the definition of an isolationist generally attributed to that word by the easterners.
It is not literally true that no one ever called themselves an isolationist. But historians have overwhelmingly agreed with Col. Wood that the terms is misleading, at best. It’s almost always used as a pejorative, which makes it more emotive (“I disapprove of this person’s foreign policy”) than analytical. Proponents of specific foreign policy interventions were being polemical, and obviously not accurate, when they said that isolationists would “compel us to confine all activities of our people within our own frontiers” (to quote the influential internationalist, Cordell Hull). As historian Brooke Blower has written, the idea of “isolationism” cannot survive even brief contact with the real people it supposedly describes:
Herbert Hoover, after all, was a world-renowned humanitarian, who had lived and traveled abroad extensively, spoke some Mandarin, supported the League of Nations, and spearheaded numerous relief campaigns from Belgium to Soviet Russia. Charles Lindbergh was an adventurous aviator, who shrunk the distance between New York and Paris and helped Pan American Airways stretch its routes across the oceans.
Most likely, you (like me) abhor the foreign policy visions of “isolationists” like Wood, Hoover, and Lindbergh. But even if you think they deserve to be stuck with pejorative labels, the term is also just misleading. It obscures the fact that the “isolationists” had (and, to the extent they still exist, have) their own visions of global order. Here again is Col. Wood of America First:
Our true mission is in North America and South America…With our resources and organizing ability we can develop ... a virgin continent like South America. The reorganization and proper development of Mexico alone would afford an outlet for our capital and energies for some time to come.