|
|
As for The Far Eastern Policy of the United States, Griswold’s 1938 conclusion was that “the open door and the territorial integrity of China were ideals for which the American people would not fight…Even Henry L. Stimson regarded ‘any suggestion of sending armies to Asiatic ports or any other warlike action as not only politically impossible but as a futile and wrong method of procedure.’?” But less than three decades later Americans fought Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, and Vietnamese, and not merely in “Asiatic ports.” For what? For some kind of “open door”? Or some kind of territorial integrity”? Or had that “mood of imperialist expansion,” which Griswold identified as lying behind the annexations of Hawaii and the Philippines in 1898, but concluded to be “long since passed,” somehow returned?
“The Far East was still, relatively, as remote from the United States in 1938 as it had been in the era of sail,” further concluded Griswold, and as for China, “her complete domination by Japan or by any other single power nation seemed unlikely. There were slight grounds for believing that the open door in all China would be entirely closed.” And the whole story “offered many reasons for believing that the United States should understand its Far Eastern destinies in their true proportions.”
We are shaken. How could a historian, and a great one, be so blind to the direction of the currents of the history he was writing? How could he have failed even to hint at the emergence of the Red Chinese giant on the one hand and an American Pacific power running all the way to Korea’s 38th parallel and encompassing half of Southeast Asia on the other? We turn again to his title page and find with relief that Griswold was an “assistant professor of government and international relations,” not a historian. But we can take small solace in that, knowing that his book became standard fare in history courses throughout the nation and remained such for thirty years, and that any history department would have hired him gladly.