Introduction THIS VOLUME DERIVES from a conference held at the Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., in May 1981. Several of us were con- spiring to put together a volume of essays in honor of Dorothy Borg, the guiding spirit of the field of American-East Asian relations. She in turn wanted us to hold a workshop to examine our field, with particular reference to the achievements of the 1970s. As always, her views prevailed. Although much had been written before on American relations with East Asia, the field as now conceived dates back only to the early 1960s. At Harvard a small group of historians—John King Fair- bank, Emest R. May, and Oscar Handlin—formed a committee, which was headed by May. Dorothy Borg lived in Cambridge from 1960 to 1962 and helped that committee formulate its program. Its goal was to develop scholars who would have a dual competence, in American and East Asian history—scholars able to use sources written in the languages of both sides of the Pacific. These scholars would tran- scend ethnocentrism and see issues as they were perceived by Amer- icans and Asians alike. The quality of their work would surpass that of the more narrowly conceived works of the past and might lead to a more enlightened foreign policy. In retrospect, the committee was overly optimistic about the possibility of training people who could handle two or more languages readily. Such scholars, however, were found eventually, as the essays herein by Akira Iriye, Michael H. Hunt, and Bruce Cumings will reveal. In 1968 the American Historical Association, on the advice of a group of American diplomatic historians and specialists in Chinese and Japanese history, appointed the Committee on American-East Asian Relations (AEAR), to be chaired by Ernest May.* That same •The committee is now affiliated with SHAFR (the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations). xii Introduction year John Fairbank used his presidential address to the AHA to de- clare the study of American-East Asian relations to be our "Assign- ment for the '70s." Support from the Ford Foundation allowed the AEAR Committee to maintain a modest program of graduate fellow- ships, research grants, and conferences. Borg found May to be a kindred soul, a man who shared her penchant for historiography. One of the first actions of the committee was to convene a conference to survey the work of the past: to iden- tify the most valuable writings, analyze interpretations, and chart a course for the future. Out of that conference, held in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1970, came American-East Asian Relations: A Survey, edited by May and James C. Thomson, Jr. Comparable to the Cuernavaca conference in importance was a conference that Borg helped organize at Kawaguchiko, Japan, a few months earlier. Here a second approach to the field emerged. Focus- ing on the years 1931 to 1941, Japanese scholars and their American counterparts wrote parallel papers examining institutions in their own countries. After a week of intense discussions, facilitated by simul- taneous translations by day, liquid refreshment and a few bilingual participants in the evenings, everyone present gained new insight into the problems of the 1930s. Perspectives never before considered be- came apparent. The result was the superb, prize-winning volume, Pearl Harbor as History, edited by Borg and Shumpei Okamoto. A third approach was evident in a conference Borg organized in 1978, at Seven Springs in Mt. Kisco, New York. On this occasion American scholars who were specialists in American foreign policy joined with other Americans specializing in Chinese policy to exam- ine Chinese-American relations in the Truman era. From that confer- ence came Borg and Waldo Heinrichs, Uncertain Years: Chinese- American Relations, 1947-1950. All of these approaches—the ideal of dual competence, the bi- national or multinational conference, and the bringing together of Americanists and Asianists—have led to an explosion of new work and new interpretations in the field of American-East Asian relations. Behind much of this activity has been Dorothy Borg. Fairbank, Iriye, May, James Crowley at Yale, and others have launched a variety of similar efforts. In the late 1970s generous support from the Henry xiii Introduction Luce Foundation fueled many AEAR projects. The May 1981 con- ference was designed to assess these accomplishments. To comprehend historiographic developments of the last quarter century, it is worth recalling how long prewar works by Tyler Den- nett and A. Whitney Griswold dominated the field.* Few realize the impact of Griswold in particular on George Kennan and Tang Tsou, men whose ideas were enormously influential in the 1950s and 1960s. One of Dennett's books, first published in 1922, was reprinted as recently as 1963. Griswold's book, published in 1938, was reprinted in 1964. The point, stated most simply, is that apart from intrinsic merit, works as many as forty years old had to be used because noth- ing else was available—despite an enormous wealth of new material and a radically changed climate of opinion. Dennett wrote when the study of diplomatic history was rela- tively new. There had been but a handful of general accounts of American foreign policy, and, in the absence of a scholarly history of American activity in East Asia, anyone interested was forced to rely on John W. Foster's apologia, American Diplomacy in the Ori- ent (1903). Dennett undertook the first systematic survey of the doc- umentary record, intending to edit a book of source materials on American relations with China to 1870. The Department of State in- terrupted his work with an offer he found irresistible: privileged ac- cess to its archives to prepare a history of American policy in East Asia for the use of the American delegation to the Washington Con- ference (1921-1922). The resulting study, an extraordinary job of controlling a great mass of material, provided the basis for Dennett's Americans in Eastern Asia, which carried the story to the close of the nineteenth century. Dennett reported in that book that the United States had dem- onstrated a single consistent goal—the expansion of trade, especially with China. To achieve this goal, Americans had since the 1840s •The following discussion of Dennett and Griswold is based upon Dorothy Borg, "Two His- torians of the Far Eastern Policy of the United States: Tyler Dennett and A. Whitney Gris- wold," in Borg and Okamoto, eds., Pearl Harbor as History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973). xiv Introduction demanded most-favored-nation treatment for its merchants and had supported the development of independent Asian states strong enough to protect American rights. The only issue argued in the nineteenth century was strategic: should the United States act alone or in concert with other powers? For Dennett, the answer was manifest. On the eve of the Washington Conference, he demonstrated that past Amer- ican activity in East Asia had succeeded only when the United States pursued a cooperative policy. The book was an appeal for coopera- tion with Great Britain and Japan as the best means of serving Amer- ican interests, of expanding trade and preserving the peace of the Pacific. Dennett's thoughts about the open door policy and America's role in world affairs underwent rapid transformation in the years that followed. By 1933, when his prize-winning biography of Hay was published, the collapse of the interwar peace system and the miseries of the Great Depression had thoroughly embittered him. Events around the world, and especially in Manchuria, had led to widespread disil- lusionment in the United States and a determination to avoid involve- ment with foreigners determined to plunge the globe into another world war. Even in the peace movement, there was greater emphasis on keeping America out of war than on working for world peace. Peace activists and historians, like most other Americans, became more na- tionalist, less internationalist. Charles Beard's The Idea of National Interest (1934), Open Door at Home (1934), and many of his other writings in the 1930s articulated the prevailing view that involvement in foreign affairs benefitted a privileged few but was contrary to the national interest. For Beard the answer was to stay at home, forget foreign trade in particular, and practice autarky. To hell with all those Asians and Europeans who wanted to kill each other. Dennett's work reflected similar sentiments. Hay had endan- gered the nation by involving the United States in an area of periph- eral interest. Dennett depicted past American policy in East Asia in cycles of coercion and retreat. Intervention was wrong, and his grow- ing mistrust of Franklin Roosevelt led him to fear that the United States was entering a new cycle of coercion, of unnecessary and mis- taken involvement in East Asian affairs. Work by A. L. P. Dennis and Paul Clyde, sympathetic to Japan's role, may have helped persuade him that it would be wrong for the United States to oppose Japan. XV Introduction Dennett's writings of the 1930s had less direct influence on post- World War II scholarship than Americans in East Asia but were nonetheless of tremendous importance for their influence on Samuel Flagg Bemis and A. Whitney Griswold—and through them, on George Kennan and Tang Tsou. Here were the seeds of the "great aberra- tion," of the muddle-headed Hay who betrayed American interests to the British. Griswold was a Yale graduate who went off to Wall Street to seek his fortune in 1929. It was quickly apparent that he was safer at Yale, to which he returned in 1930, never to leave again. The history department provided shelter and Bemis, who arrived in New Haven a few years later, taught him about the great aberration: the series of events between 1898 and 1905 that allegedly involved the United States needlessly and dangerously in the affairs of East Asia.