Wilsonian Visions: The Williamstown Institute of Politics and American Internationalism after the First World War

By James McAllister

In Wilsonian Visions, James McAllister recovers the history of the most influential forum of American liberal internationalism in the immediate aftermath of the First World War: The Williamstown Institute of Politics. Established in 1921 by Harry A. Garfield, the president of Williams College, the Institute was dedicated to promoting an informed perspective on world politics even as the United States, still gathering itself after World War I, retreated from the Wilsonian vision of active involvement in European political affairs.

Located on the Williams campus in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, the Institute's annual summer session of lectures and roundtables attracted scholars, diplomats, and peace activists from around the world. Newspapers and press services reported the proceedings and controversies of the Institute to an American public divided over fundamental questions about US involvement in the world. In an era where the institutions of liberal internationalism were just taking shape, Garfield's institutional model was rapidly emulated by colleges and universities across the US.

McAllister narrates the career of the Institute, tracing its roots back to the tragedy of the First World War and Garfield's disappointment in America's failure to join the League of Nations. He also shows the Progressive Era origins of the Institute and the importance of the political and intellectual relationship formed between Garfield and Wilson at Princeton University in the early 1900s.

Drawing on new and previously unexamined archival materials, Wilsonian Visions restores the Institute to its rightful status in the intellectual history of US foreign relations and shows it to be a formative institution as the country transitioned from domestic isolation to global engagement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501759956

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WILSONIAN VISIONS

THE WILLIAMSTOWN INSTITUTE OF POLITICS AND AMERICAN INTERNATIONALISM AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR

JAMES MCALLISTER

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

To the memory of Fred Greene, Williams College professor of international relations and lifelong liberal internationalist, 1923–2020

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Career Opportunities

2. The Irony of Fate

3. Professor at War

4. The New England Versailles

5. Glory Days

6. The Gathering Storm

7. A Summer Sewing Circle?

8. Lost Visions

Notes

Archival Collections

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book can trace its deepest origins back to the summer of 1998. I probably would have remained blissfully unaware of Harry Garfield and the Institute of Politics were it not for Cheryl Shanks, a new colleague in the political science department at Williams College. She told me that I should look into the history of the Institute, which she said played an important role in the development of international relations in the interwar era. Since I had never heard of the Institute and E. H. Carr never referred to it in The Twenty Years’ Crisis, I was very skeptical of the claim, but I went downstairs to the archives to find out for myself. It turned out that the Institute records at Williams were completely unprocessed and off limits to researchers, but a kind librarian mistakenly allowed me unfettered access to the entire collection, an error for which I will be eternally grateful.

The debts that I have accumulated over the course of writing this book are substantial. The first round of appreciation must go to all of the archivists who have provided indispensable assistance and kindness. The biggest thanks go to Sylvia Brown and the wonderful staff at the Williams College archives. In addition to all of her work in making the Institute records and the Harry Garfield papers accessible to researchers, Sylvia played an invaluable role in helping find images for the book. I also need to thank Jennifer Comins at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library for her assistance in locating materials related to the Institute in the records of the Carnegie Corporation.

I have had the remarkable good fortune to have Cornell University Press publish both of my books. In both cases, Robert Jervis played an indispensable role in the process. I will never forget his encouragement at a time when I was quite unsure if anyone would be interested in the Institute of Politics and the origins of postwar American internationalism. Roger Haydon provided equal doses of needed encouragement and tough love both times around. After Roger’s retirement in September 2020, Michael McGandy played a crucial role in making it possible to publish the book in time for the centennial of the first session of the Institute in 2021. I would also like to thank Ellen Labbate, Susan Specter, and Mary Ribesky for all of the hard work they put in to the editing and production of the final version of the manuscript.

I was incredibly fortunate to have David Ekbladh and John A. Thompson as outside reviewers for this book. Their perceptive comments were greatly appreciated and resulted in a vastly improved final manuscript. Dusty Griffin, who has written a great deal about various aspects of the history of Williams College, generously read and commented on the entire manuscript within a few days of receiving it from me. Katie Sibley, who I had the great pleasure of working with on the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, deserves special thanks for her comments on the manuscript. For his perceptive comments on the manuscript, as well as the model of his own scholarship, I would like to thank David Kaiser for all of his support.

I am especially grateful to all of my colleagues in the Department of Political Science at Williams College. I might have finished this book a few years earlier if I had spent less time discussing current political issues and college affairs with Justin Crowe, Galen Jackson, Darel Paul, Michael MacDonald, and Mason Williams, but I don’t regret that tradeoff for a second. I also want to thank my departmental colleagues Sam Crane, Cathy Johnson, Jim Mahon, Mark Reinhardt, and Cheryl Shanks for putting up with me for so long. Finally, I owe a real debt to Sarah Campbell-Copp for all of the assistance she provided when I served as chair of the department. Special thanks also go to Paul MacDonald and Stacie Goddard, who for many years have been my partners in running the Summer Institute in American Foreign Policy program at Williams. Paul and Gordon's support has had a tremendous impact on the lives and career paths of countless Williams students over the last two decades.

Many students at Williams have provided invaluable research assistance on this book over the years. I thank all of them deeply, but a few students provided help that went above anything that I could reasonably expect. Emily Hertz spent an entire summer going through the voluminous scrapbook records of the Institute. Will Hayes did tremendous work documenting newspaper coverage of Harry Garfield’s service as Fuel Administrator. More recently, Asher Lasday, Gieben Na, and Zia Saylor have helped me in preparing the manuscript for publication. Zia’s superb efforts in helping prepare the index saved me a great deal of time and aggravation.

Finally, my extended family deserves recognition for all of the sacrifices they have made over the years that allowed me to finish this book. I thank Carrie, Catherine, and DJ for all of their love and support, as well as the encouragement I have always had from my parents, Maureen and Steve Tuck, and from my two sisters, Carol and Linda.

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

A Wilsonian Life

European statesmen, Asiatic men of letters, South American Ambassadors are travelling from the uttermost parts of the earth toward a little village in the Berkshire foothills, where at the end of this month is to assemble a miniature Versailles—a Genoa, a Hague, a Lausanne, rolled into one.

—Margaret de Forest Hicks, Nations Compare Notes under Berkshire Skies, New York Times, July 22, 1923

The little village in the Berkshire foothills is Williamstown, Massachusetts, home of Williams College since 1793. The physical beauty of the town and the surrounding mountains, as well as the isolation from the numerous distractions presented by a more urban environment, provides a nearly perfect setting for an elite liberal arts college. Henry David Thoreau, who traveled through the area in the summer of 1844, was memorably inspired by the sight of Williamstown as he stood at the top of Mount Greylock, the highest elevation in the state of Massachusetts. In words often quoted by Williams alumni, Thoreau proclaimed that it would be no small advantage if every college were thus located at the base of a mountain.¹ Even though a few things have changed since Thoreau’s visit, Williamstown remains the quintessential small New England village. The population is well below ten thousand people, and the town still gets by with a single traffic light. Relative isolation from the outside world continues to be one of the area’s distinguishing features: students and faculty at Williams, most affectionately, still refer to Williamstown as the purple bubble and as a place where all world news is lost.

Of course, the very qualities that have long made Williamstown an ideal location for a liberal arts college would appear to be less than fertile soil for establishing a thriving political and intellectual community for scholars, statesmen, military officials, diplomats, feminists, peace activists, and anti-imperialists from around the globe. But in the aftermath of the First World War, at a crucial moment when liberal internationalists inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s vision were figuring out how to move forward after the United States Senate’s decisive rejection of the League of Nations, Williamstown became the most important American counterpart to internationalist havens such as Geneva or The Hague. That claim may seem like a wild exaggeration today, even for historians of American foreign policy and the interwar origins of the burgeoning discipline of international relations, but in the 1920s and early 1930s, it would have been a bland and uncontested truism. Favorable comparisons of Williamstown to the great internationalist cities of Europe were commonplace on both sides of the Atlantic in this era. European internationalists who spent time in Williamstown during this era were particularly enthusiastic about their experience. William Rappard, a highly influential Swiss diplomat, League of Nations official, and scholar of the interwar era, argued that a citizen of Geneva is more at home in Williamstown than in Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, or Paris.² Count Carlo Sforza, a prominent Italian anti-fascist who would later become his country’s foreign minister after the Second World War, wrote in 1927: What Bayreuth is to music, The Hague to applied international law, Wall Street to international finance, Williamstown is to discussions of … international politics.³ After his highly controversial visit in 1923, Harry Graf Kessler, the German diplomat and famous arts patron, stated that Williamstown was undoubtedly unique. Anything similar would unfortunately be impossible in Europe … as one of the most helpful steps towards a close understanding between the two Continents it seems to me not only of American but also of European importance.⁴

What brought prominent European internationalists like Rappard, Sforza, and Kessler to a remote corner of western Massachusetts throughout the 1920s and early 1930s was neither the mountains nor the college but the annual summer sessions of the Williamstown Institute of Politics (IOP). The brainchild of Harry Garfield, president of Williams College, the Institute’s primary purpose was to educate the American people about all facets of international relations. Garfield conceptualized the basic format of the IOP in April 1913, before the outbreak of the Great War, but the horrors of that conflict, combined with the seeming collapse of Wilson’s postwar vision, endowed the Institute with an urgency and importance he could not have imagined at its conception. The IOP would eventually be overshadowed in the early 1930s by its more financially secure and better situated peers—the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Foreign Policy Association (FPA)—but the Institute arguably had a more influential role in the early interwar period. The first public session of the IOP was held in July 1921, over a year before the CFR published the first issue of Foreign Affairs and at a time when even elite American universities devoted little attention to the formal study of world politics. As one foreign journalist correctly noted in the Washington Post in 1927, The era of scientific debate of international questions had begun in Williamstown in 1921 and is now in full swing throughout the United States.⁵

In his pathbreaking account of the origins of the American study of international relations, White World Order, Black Power Politics, Robert Vitalis reaches a similar conclusion about the importance of the Institute in the 1920s: Contemporaries recognized it as the most influential institutional development in the study of international relations in the United States in the first postwar decade.⁶ The origins of American liberal internationalism in the 1920s are too often recounted as largely analogous to the early operations of the CFR, but Vitalis is correct to note that the public renown and influence of the IOP was greater in the early interwar period. Its inspiration for other internationalist organizations in the 1920s was both national and global. The IOP was the acknowledged forerunner and model for all of the other international relations programs that later emerged in the 1920s, such as the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Norman Wait Harris Institute at the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia’s Institute of Public Affairs, the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver, and the Institute of International Relations at the University of Southern California.⁷ The influence of the IOP even extended to Europe, where new institutions such as the Geneva Institute of International Relations were described as the European equivalent of the Williamstown Institute of Politics.⁸

Given the clear relevance of the IOP to an understanding of American and global perspectives on the world politics of the 1920s and early 1930s, as well as the central role it played in the disciplinary origins of the study of international relations, it would be fair to assume that there already exists an extensive body of scholarship devoted to exploring its history. However, the Institute has almost completely escaped the attention of historians and political scientists. Even the finest historical surveys of American liberal internationalism in the interwar period devote, at best, a few paragraphs to the Institute.⁹ Despite the enduring and sometimes obsessive interest among some political scientists in the origins of Wilsonianism and the birth of the discipline of international relations, the IOP has never been the subject of a book or even a journal article.¹⁰ No book before this one has ever attempted to provide a complete history of the Institute, based on the voluminous material available at the Williams College archives or in Garfield’s personal papers at the Library of Congress.¹¹

This book also presents the first scholarly examination of Harry Garfield’s improbable emergence as one of America’s most significant liberal internationalists during and after the Great War. The IOP could not have been established and maintained without the use of the facilities and grounds provided by Williams College or without the substantial funds given him by the financier Bernard Baruch, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, but its creation was almost entirely the product of Garfield’s own complex history and intellectual vision, albeit a vision and history decisively influenced by his warm personal and professional relationship with Woodrow Wilson. It was not at all an accident that Garfield became one of America’s most prominent Wilsonians in the interwar era or that the IOP became synonymous with the internationalist ideals of the late president. Nearly two decades earlier, as the president of Princeton University, Wilson had decisively changed the entire direction of Garfield’s life when he persuaded him to give up his thriving law practice and long-standing political ambitions to join the faculty. Wilson would eventually move from academia to politics, but Garfield would largely remain committed to changing the world through education for the rest of his life. While he served as the president of Williams for over twenty-five years, Garfield viewed the Institute as by far the most important contribution he ever made to public life.

Unfortunately, Garfield’s life as a progressive reformer and Wilsonian internationalist has almost completely escaped the sustained attention of historians.¹² As Robert Cuff points out, part of the reason for his obscurity can be attributed to the fact that he showed remarkably little appetite for power or capacity for self-promotion—a tribute, perhaps, to character, but a barrier, apparently, to recognition.¹³ Present at the Baltimore and Potomac train station when his beloved father and the newly inaugurated president of the United States was fatally wounded by a deranged office seeker on July 2, 1881, Garfield’s entire life was shaped by the tragedy of that day. After graduating from Williams in 1885 and Columbia Law School in 1888, he and his brother James both returned home and set up a law practice in Cleveland, Ohio. Focusing their practice on corporate law, the two Garfields eventually became involved in many successful business ventures, but their true passion was always the cause of political reform and public service rather than the accumulation of wealth. A moderate progressive in both ideology and temperament, Garfield founded and led the Municipal Association of Cleveland, a reform organization that attacked the corruption of urban political machines by investigating and publicizing their misdeeds. Along with his childhood friend and State Department official Gaillard Hunt, Garfield also spearheaded the national movement for consular reform on behalf of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce. His efforts on behalf of consular reform brought him into direct contact with President Theodore Roosevelt, Secretary of State Elihu Root, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and business elites looking to more effectively promote American commerce around the world.¹⁴

At the dawn of the new century, Garfield’s law practice was thriving financially and his leadership role in municipal and consular reform movements earned him a national reputation. It is interesting to speculate about where both of those paths might ultimately have taken him in the political arena, but Garfield made the radical decision in 1903 to abandon both his law practice and political activities in Cleveland at Wilson’s behest, despite the fact that he had never demonstrated any interest in becoming a scholar or professor. Ironically, the fact that Garfield did not have a traditional academic background was precisely what made him a highly attractive candidate to Wilson. As early as 1886, at the beginning of his own academic career, Wilson had argued that the effective study of politics required merging the man of the world’ and the man of books. What he wanted Garfield to bring to Princeton was precisely his practical knowledge derived from participation in municipal and national reform politics; Wilson explicitly noted that he would hesitate to entrust teaching in such fields to men wholly academic in their training and point of view."¹⁵ Although Garfield enthusiastically embraced Wilson’s argument that universities had a critical role to play in advancing American political life in a positive direction, he clearly saw his move to Princeton as one that would inevitably end his own aspirations for political office and any active involvement in national politics. He would never have imagined at the time that his association with Wilson at Princeton would later facilitate his involvement with national and international political affairs at the highest levels.

Garfield and Wilson quickly became close friends and colleagues, despite the fact that one was a Republican loyalist and the other a staunch Democrat. Speaking before the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce in November 1907, Wilson told the audience that he felt a certain peculiar acquaintance with them because it has been my privilege and pleasure for the last four years to be associated with a man who knew a great deal about you and whom I have learned to love, as I know you learned to love him—I mean Harry Garfield.¹⁶ The close friendship of two college presidents would amount to little more than historical trivia were it not for the remarkable and unanticipated ascendance of Wilson to the White House in 1912. Even though contact between the two men understandably became less frequent after June 1908, after Garfield left Princeton to assume the Williams presidency, a strange twist of fate brought them into regular contact after Wilson became president of the United States: in 1913, his daughter Jessie married Francis Bowes Sayre, a Williams graduate, valedictorian of the class of 1909, and a personal assistant to Garfield. The remote location of his daughter and the birth of two grandchildren enticed Wilson to make several trips to Williamstown during the course of his presidency; in fact, it was only while he was en route to visit Jessie and her family that it finally became clear that he had narrowly defeated Charles Evans Hughes in the 1916 presidential election. The first public celebration of Wilson’s reelection took place that evening in Williamstown.¹⁷ In turn, Garfield and his wife, Belle, were also now routinely invited by Wilson to events at the White House, a place where he had resided for a very short time before the tragic assassination of his father.

Watching his friend and colleague in command of the nation undoubtedly stirred some of his dormant political passions, but it took the outbreak of the European war in August 1914 to finally end Garfield’s growing estrangement from active political involvement. Traveling with his family in Germany in July 1914, Garfield was stranded in Munich for several weeks before he was able to make his way back to the United States. The experience of being caught up in the war mobilization in Munich, as well as his central role in organizing transportation out of Germany for thousands of his fellow citizens, was a transformative one. A long-standing Anglophile before his vacation, Garfield initially supported the German cause because he accepted the regime’s claim that it was fighting a necessary and defensive struggle against a reactionary Russia. After his departure from Munich, the sobering realization that almost all of his friends, colleagues, and the general public held a vastly different perspective on the war made it difficult for him to put political activism on a lower pedestal than college affairs. Although he would remain the president of Williams for nearly another two decades, it is undeniable that after August 1914, broader questions about international relations and American foreign policy assumed an importance in his life that gradually surpassed his commitment to the college.

Garfield had little knowledge of or interest in the world of European power politics before August 1914. Even though he discussed aspects of the war with Wilson on several occasions, Garfield largely forged his own independent stance toward the conflict and about what needed to be done to prevent future wars. His vision of liberal internationalism ran parallel to the one Wilson eventually formulated in response to events, but it was one he arrived at independently and was to the left of his former colleague. Garfield became an informed and passionate critic of the growing military preparedness movement in 1915–1916, a position that he maintained even after Wilson himself became more favorable to the adoption of greater preparedness following the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915. Garfield strongly supported Wilson’s defense of America’s neutral rights against Germany but was critical of what he saw as the president’s unwillingness to be equally tough on British violations. In public speeches and private letters to Wilson, he vigorously opposed American entrance into the war until the very moment the president asked Congress for a declaration of war in April 1917. However, despite his lingering concerns about the consequences of American military intervention, undoubtedly intensified by the fact that two of his sons would soon be going abroad to serve, Garfield subsequently became a fervent supporter of the war almost entirely because of his faith that Wilson entered the conflict primarily in order to establish the League of Nations and move toward a more supranational and less nationalistic world order.

Of course, before a liberal world order could be established, America first had to win the war. Despite his religious convictions and pacifist leanings, Garfield came to play a crucial role in the American war effort. In August 1917, after working with Herbert Hoover on the very controversial matter of setting agricultural price levels, Wilson appointed him to the newly created post of U.S. Fuel Administrator established by the Lever Act. Many contemporary observers and later historians have found the appointment of Garfield by Wilson as almost completely inexplicable. Unlike Hoover, a famous engineer and businessman appointed to head the U.S. Food Administration, Garfield’s relevant qualifications to become the chief administrator of the vitally important and hopelessly dysfunctional American coal industry were not as readily apparent. The combination of coal shortages, high demand, historically brutal weather conditions, and tough conservation measures such as lightless nights and heatless Mondays, soon made Garfield one of the most controversial and hated officials in America. His decision to order the shutdown of all manufacturing east of the Mississippi in January 1918, which was intended to both conserve coal and help resolve crippling transportation bottlenecks, sparked one of the gravest political crises of the entire Wilson administration. The New York World, in an editorial calling on Wilson to fire Garfield, declared that the shutdown order was nothing less than the greatest disaster that has befallen the United States in this war.¹⁸ Despite all of the political and editorial criticism directed at him in the winter of 1918, Garfield never came close to losing the unflinching support of the only person who mattered.

Garfield was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal for his service as Fuel Administrator, but his greatest contribution to furthering the Wilsonian cause came after the war. Obviously impressed by his experience working with Garfield during the war, as well as by their shared commitment to Wilson’s internationalist ideals, Bernard Baruch agreed in December 1919 to sponsor Garfield’s dream of bringing prominent academics and men of affairs to Williamstown. Armed with Baruch’s ample resources, and the advice of a distinguished board of advisers that included former President William Howard Taft and Harvard’s Archibald Cary Coolidge, Garfield was able to hold the first session of the IOP in July 1921. His guiding premise, expressed at the opening session of the Institute, was that the American people would come around to internationalist ideals once they learned more about the world and were exposed to non-nationalist perspectives.¹⁹ With appearances by such distinguished men of affairs as Taft, Root, and James Bryce, as well as several other distinguished European statesmen, the first session of the IOP generated significant national interest and editorial praise. The Saturday Evening Post called for the emulation of Garfield’s model around the world: If similar gatherings were held once a year in every civilized country on the globe for the public airing of international affairs by statesmen of note, the cause of peace would be strengthened mightily.²⁰

The basic structure of the Institute established in 1921 remained largely the same for the following eleven years. All of the month-long sessions were built around a set of lectures by anywhere from four to six leading scholars or men of affairs, largely but far from exclusively drawn from Great Britain and continental Europe. As a matter of principle, which he maintained throughout the IOP’s history, Garfield reserved the lecture stage only for non-American speakers. Katharina Rietzler correctly notes that Williamstown acted as an important transatlantic meeting-place and its list of speakers and guests reads like a roll-call of European internationalism.²¹ For example, the first lectures at the IOP in 1921 were delivered by Bryce, one of the most important and famous scholar-diplomats of the era. The following year, lectures would be delivered by Lionel Curtis, the founder of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and Philip Kerr, later the British ambassador to the United States. Although the passage of time inevitably obscures some of the prominence of the international visitors to Williamstown in this period, noted European scholars and statesmen such as Richard Henry Tawney, Graham Wallas, Robert Michels, Arnold Toynbee, Moritz Bonn, Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Harry Graf Kessler, Josef Redlich, Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, Ernest Dimnet, William Rappard, Carlo Sforza, André Siegfried, Halide Edib, and Sir Paul Vinogradoff all delivered a series of lectures at the Institute. Many of these sets of lectures would subsequently be published by Yale University Press. In fact, no American university produced a comparable volume of scholarly material on international relations in the 1920s and early 1930s.

The primary intellectual work of the Institute largely took place in roundtable seminars and open conferences rather than lectures. Roundtables were essentially small and private seminars that met several times a week and, in theory, they were only open to those judged to be able to intelligently contribute to the discussion. Open conferences were more or less like an academic conference panel held before the entire membership and the press corps. Both the roundtables and open conferences at Williamstown exerted a great attraction for American and European academics in the 1920s and early 1930s. Renowned scholars such as Charles Beard, George Blakeslee, Edwin Borchard, Philip Marshall Brown, Raymond Leslie Buell, Archibald Cary Coolidge, Percy Corbett, Edward Mead Earle, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, Edwin Francis Gay, Samuel N. Harper, David Hunter Miller, Bernard Pares, Leo Stanton Rowe, Bernadotte Schmitt, James Shotwell, F. W. Taussig, Jacob Viner, and Quincy Wright, among many others, all led or participated in roundtables or open conference sessions. Quite a few academics, such as Blakeslee and Rowe, regularly chaired roundtables and conferences at Institute sessions. Schmitt, who would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for his historical research on the origins of the First World War, spent several summers attending and leading roundtable conferences in Williamstown.

It is not hard to understand why leading academics and internationalists came to the IOP throughout its existence. In addition to offering its members the ability to meet and interact with internationalists from many different places and professions, Williamstown provided a platform whose reach was national and international. Institute sessions would have been far less consequential if they were held by and for the benefit of a narrow and exclusively academic audience. But Garfield had little or no interest in the organizational model pursued by the CFR, where discussions were largely private, membership was strictly limited to a narrow segment of wealthy elites, and all women were excluded from participation.²² If bringing the general American public out of its state of ignorance about the wider world was the crucial problem facing liberal internationalists, as Garfield believed, the solution could not be found in just publishing academic books or creating a journal like Foreign Affairs. The average American of the time could not be expected to read and absorb every word of the complex lectures and conferences held in Williamstown or to purchase the book that was later compiled from those lectures. But journalists and editorial writers could and did make the themes of those lectures accessible to a wider audience. Although not all lectures or roundtables received extensive press coverage or editorial commentary, quite a few of them did, and some newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, religiously covered the daily events at the Institute. The local and national press coverage of the IOP, both laudatory and critical, provide a fascinating window into competing perspectives on international relations and the conduct of American foreign policy throughout the early interwar era.

The IOP was also noteworthy for the connections it fostered between academic specialists and policymakers. Drawing on Wilson’s conception that the ideal student of politics should be both an academic and a practitioner, a view that he fully shared, Garfield strove to ensure that IOP sessions were scholarly as well as policy relevant. Contemporary students of international relations, who often lament the ever-widening gap that separates the work of scholars from the practice of policymakers, would be amazed at how narrow that gap was in the functioning of the Institute during the 1920s and early 1930s.²³ To an extent that would be unthinkable today or at any point during the Cold War, American diplomats and military officials were an important presence in Williamstown. Officials from the State Department were permitted to attend Institute sessions without it counting against their annual leave. Department division chiefs such as Stanley Hornbeck, Dewitt Clinton Poole, and John Van Antwerp MacMurray actually chaired formal roundtables at the Institute in the early years. The line between the government and the Institute in the early years occasionally became quite hazy. For example, Garfield sponsored two lectures at the 1925 session by Aleksander Skrzyński, Poland’s foreign minister and soon-to-be prime minister, in order to help facilitate diplomatic discussions and a meeting with President Calvin Coolidge that might otherwise have been politically difficult to arrange. Perhaps as a token of appreciation, William R. Castle, the chief of the Western European Division at the State Department delivered an address at the 1925 session that served as the definitive public statement of the Coolidge administration’s policy toward Western Europe and the League of Nations. Relations between the Institute and the State Department cooled after the 1925 session but improved again with Herbert Hoover’s election in 1928. Hoover and Garfield, who worked closely together during the war years, would even discuss at the White House specific topics the administration wanted to see featured at the 1930 IOP session.

Military officials, both active duty and retired, were a constant and often controversial presence at the IOP. Almost every member of the United States Navy’s General Board in 1921 attended a session of the Institute over the course of the 1920s. Rear admirals attended virtually every session, often as a fairly large group, and they invariably garnered national headlines for their militaristic pronouncements and disdain for naval disarmament and arms control. Even though these naval officers were certainly unable to overcome the generally Wilsonian spirit of the proceedings, it was certainly not due to a lack of effort on their part. Several Institute sessions would feature heated and widely publicized incidents involving high-level naval officials pushing back against what they saw as the extreme pacifism or anti-Americanism prevalent in Williamstown. As one newspaper dryly noted, the IOP was the only place in America where belligerent admirals could "declare war without doing any harm to the country."²⁴ To be fair, even nonbelligerent admirals, such as William Veazie Pratt, Hoover’s influential Chief of Naval Operations, participated in the proceedings at Williamstown on more than one occasion.

What happened in Williamstown during IOP sessions was not just of interest to American political actors. Embassy officials and diplomats from all around the world attended Institute sessions. In his efforts to recruit lecturers, Garfield would meet with European elites such as Winston Churchill, John Maynard Keynes, and Gustav Stresemann. The postwar revisionist powers of the era cared deeply about how their cause was represented at the IOP. European governments, particularly those in Germany and Italy, actively intervened in facilitating invitations for lecturers whom they believed would effectively represent their position. Garfield’s invitation to Harry Kessler in 1923 marked a symbolically important moment in Germany’s political rehabilitation after the war. German lecturers and diplomats would be a constant presence in Williamstown for the following decade, and embassy officials even monitored Institute sessions to make sure that perceived anti-German messages were combated.²⁵ The Italian government was even more interested than Germany in shaping what went on at the IOP. Prime Minister Benito Mussolini would personally receive speakers after their return from Williamstown, and the Italian Embassy in Washington protested to the State Department when Garfield invited anti-fascists. Garfield would even be granted a personal audience with Mussolini in 1931 to receive his appreciation for all of the invitations and courtesies extended to Italian nationals in Williamstown. Beginning in the mid-1920s, Japanese liberals and diplomats also maintained an extensive and constant presence at the IOP as they sought to combat the arguments of both Chinese nationalists and American navalists. Two of the most prominent Japanese liberals of this era, Inazo Nitobe and Yusuke Tsurumi, also delivered lectures at Williamstown. Garfield’s stature in Japan due to his leadership of the IOP was even great enough to warrant him a personal audience with Emperor Hirohito in 1934.

Although this book certainly hopes to focus attention on Garfield and the IOP’s role in the development of Wilsonian internationalism, it is by no means an uncritical or triumphalist account. Of course, much of what Garfield stood for and sought to promote throughout the 1920s was and remains laudable. In addition to his efforts to help educate Americans about world politics by exposing them to international actors and diverse perspectives, he vigorously opposed the xenophobia behind the Immigration Act of 1924, the adoption of high tariff barriers in the late 1920s, and Japan’s aggression against China in the early 1930s. Decades before the CFR admitted women to participate in its proceedings, Garfield welcomed the presence of female scholars and activists at the Institute. But it is also true that he and the Institute made some highly questionable decisions on topics related to race, gender, imperialism, eugenics, and fascism. Even before the Great Depression helped make it financially difficult to continue hosting sessions of the Institute, the continuing viability of the educational model Garfield had established in 1921 was in serious doubt. Although popular claims that the IOP became little more than a summer sewing circle in its later years are demonstrably false, Garfield’s creation faced insurmountable challenges by the early 1930s.

Williamstown is still the home of Williams College, and it remains a beautiful village, but it stopped being the New England Versailles after the Institute’s session in the summer of 1932. To the consternation of many devotees unaware of the significant financial and institutional challenges he had faced for several years, Garfield announced in August 1932 that further sessions of the IOP would cease unless a substantial permanent endowment were raised. Although he may have had faint hopes that a financial savior or two would emerge and save the day, it is much more likely that he had already accepted that his attempt to create a lasting liberal internationalist haven in Williamstown was over. Despite the tremendous national and international attention and praise the Institute brought to the college, Garfield’s project was far from universally beloved by many important constituencies at Williams. The IOP barely touched the lives of the undergraduates or the regular faculty, but some influential alumni correctly thought that it took Garfield’s time and attention away from leading the college. Indeed, even if Garfield had been able to raise the money