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Other real historian accounts of the prewar era belie our hopes of finding something better. Treat argues that Japan was less villainous than American policy supposed and China was less worthy of our open door support. Tyler Dennet found the roots of the Open Door policy deep in the nineteenth century and noted that it worked only when pursued cooperatively (with other Western powers). Samuel Flagg Bemis considered 1898 and subsequent American open door interventions in Asian affairs a “great aberration” from our traditions of nonintervention.
Several Institute of Pacific Relations studies written in the 1930s and early 1940s caught the importance of the radical nationalism developing in China, but they principally dealt with warnings against Japanese aggression, lacked the long range perspective of Griswold, and contained no hint of America’s future Pacific appetite.
Ironically, for a generally correct reading of one of the main currents—that of American Pacific expansion—we must turn to a would-be professor who was fired from the University of Pennsylvania for radicalism and who was not wanted in any university thereafter: Scott Nearing. In 1925 Nearing, in collaboration with Joseph Freeman, published a socialist view of U.S. foreign relations under the title, Dollar Diplomacy: A Study in American Imperialism. Proceeding from a Hobsonian analysis of the development of capitalism through commercial, industrial, and financial stages into imperialism, the study traces “American Economic Expansion” (chapter I) into “American Imperial Diplomacy” (chapter IX). The treatment, though global, sees eastern Asia, especially the Philippines, and Cuba, looming large, and the forces and tactics operating therein presented as similar to those bringing the Caribbean and Latin America into the economic and eventually the political net of the United States. With “the State Department as a business solicitor” old-style territorial acquisition had been supplemented by “the steady penetration of American finance into the industrially undeveloped countries of Latin American and Asia, and even into the highly developed countries of Europe,” argued Nearing and Freeman. “The penetration proceeds through the export of capital. The State Department support for investments expresses itself through the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America, the open door in Asia, and various forms of the Dawes plan in Europe. The Washington Arms Conference (1922) openly marked the emergence of the United States as a dominant Far Eastern Power.”