Manfred Jonas
The term "isolationism" has been used—most often in derogation—to designate the attitudes and policies of those Americans who have urged the continued adherence in the twentieth century to what they conceived to have been the key element of American foreign policy in the nineteenth century, that is, the avoidance of political and military commitments to or alliances with foreign powers, particularly those of Europe. It was most nearly applicable to American policy between the two world wars, especially after 1935, when the U.S. Congress attempted to insulate the country from an increasingly dangerous world situation through the enactment of so-called neutrality laws. Since World War II, efforts to limit or reduce the vastly increased American commitments abroad have sometimes been called neoisolationism.
The term itself is of relatively recent origin. Its first known application to the foreign policies of the United States was by Edward Price Bell, the London correspondent of the Chicago Daily News. In an article entitled "America and Peace" (Nineteenth Century, November 1922), Bell was critical of what he called the essentially negative attitude of the United States toward international cooperation, but noted that the country was nevertheless in the process of moving gradually "from isolation into partnership." Pointing out that the United States had, despite strong misgivings, ultimately declared war on Germany in 1917, he concluded: "Her isolationism, such as it was, discovered that the strain of a formidable advance against freedom was more than it could bear."
The word "isolationist" was listed for the first time in the 1901 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, although without any indication as to when or where it had been used in its political sense. Standard American dictionaries did not incorporate the word until 1922, and the 1933 supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary cites no political use of it before 21 April 1921, when it appeared in the Glasgow Herald. Mitford M. Matthews, in A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (Chicago, 1951), makes a logical but erroneous inference from the listing in the 1901 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (it remains unchanged in the current edition) and traces "isolationist" in a political sense to an article in the Philadelphia Press of 25 March 1899. This article, however, uses the word in a medical sense in connection with a smallpox epidemic in Laredo, Texas.
See also ALLIANCES, COALITIONS, AND ENTENTES; INTERNATIONALISM; INTERVENTION AND NONINTERVENTION; NEUTRALITY; WILSONIANISM.