A summary of Benjamin O. Fordham's Revisionism Reconsidered: Exports and American Intervention in World War I
John L. Clark <>
2012-09-18
An early thesis explaining the entry of the United States into World War I held that national economic interests, particularly a trade boom with the Allied powers, gradually led the United States into a position of diplomatic opposition to and then open warfare with Germany in order to protect that trade. With Revisionism Reconsidered, Benjamin Fordham notes that this interpretation—the “revisionist” position—has been all but rejected in formal academic circles, and he challenges that rejection as a mistake. “Although the incorrectness of the revisionist position is conventional wisdom, specific efforts to debunk their central arguments are difficult to find.” (284) In this clear and well-reasoned essay, Fordham returns a powerful analytical tool to the study of the progression of World War I, as well as to the framework for studying war in general.
Fordham is immediately interested in both the reasons for United States involvement in World War I as well as the way that historians have interpreted that involvement in the decades that have followed. He emphasizes that studying the forces that led to such a conflict can help to understand why states wage war on each other in general. With that as his motivation, he goes on to outline a concise historiography of United States engagement in World War I, emphasizing the shifting motivations of successive generations of historians. Fordham does see a strong case to be made for the critical role that economic forces played in pressuring political and military decisions during the war, and he takes previous historians to task for not properly considering the available evidence.
Fordham uses two converging lines of reasoning to emphasize the significance of trade on decision-making within the United States. He starts with a descriptive political economic argument and reinforces this with a statistical analysis that combines economic and political data in order to consider how the situation as summarized by that data corresponded to diplomatic and military events. As he describes it, President Wilson felt strong domestic pressure from manufacturers to protect the dramatically expanding trade with the Allied powers. Indeed, he was aware that he would need broader political support to win the 1916 election after the intensely circumstantial victory that won him the presidency in 1912.
Wilson could not afford to ignore the interests of states that benefited from the export boom. … Because of the success of his diplomacy through the November 1916 election, Wilson was able to run as the candidate who “kept us out of war” while maintaining the booming American trade with the Allies. (287)
Though this analysis is compelling on its own, Fordham goes on to show that domestic economic interests affected political decisions in general by demonstrating a correlation between regional benefits from the trade boom and Congressional votes during the period leading up to the war. The combination of economic and political data, linked through geography, provides a powerful picture of the direction of US interests with respect to Europe during this critical period.
In his historiography, Fordham clearly approves of the more nuanced views of the “revisionist” historians over those who wielded the “merchants-of-death” argument. This latter argument attempts to blame solely the merchants and bankers who invested heavily in European trade for orienting United States power towards war with Germany. It is certainly more compelling to note that the entire nation had an economic stake in war that broke out in Europe, even as this stake was unevenly distributed around the country. Still, the individual actions of industrialists and financiers at the time both contributed to and vividly illustrate these larger trends. The merchants-of-death argument can apply both to individual merchants as well as an entire nation interested in trade and wealth—even if it meant war—and to the officials who represented them.
Reference
Fordham, Benjamin O. “Revisionism Reconsidered: Exports and American Intervention in World War I”. International Organization 61, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 277-310.
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