[A Review: Every Citizen a Statesman: The Dream of a Democratic
Foreign Policy in the American Century, by David Allen, Harvard
University Press]
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MASS DESTRUCTION  
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Daniel Bessner
March 27, 2023
Boston Review
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_ A Review: Every Citizen a Statesman: The Dream of a Democratic
Foreign Policy in the American Century, by David Allen, Harvard
University Press _

Real democratic participation in foreign policy is almost
unimaginable today—but this wasn’t always the case., Library of
Congress

 

Americans live in a very limited democracy. I don’t tell the Federal
Reserve to raise interest rates; I don’t decide where the government
puts my money; and I sure as hell didn’t vote to go to war in Iraq.
Many of the most consequential decisions lie outside the purview of
ordinary Americans, who have few means by which to make their voices
heard in the corridors of power. This is by design. As numerous
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historians
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have shown
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in the twentieth century’s second half U.S. elites constructed a
state that intentionally restricts the ability of ordinary people to
shape policy. Though they might disagree about a lot, the powerful in
both political parties agree that, on most things, the public cannot
be trusted.

This attitude is especially entrenched when it comes to foreign
policy. Since World War II, elites have insisted that U.S. foreign
affairs are simply too complex, and the public too volatile and too
ignorant, for average Americans to have a say in its formation. As
political scientist Gabriel Almond declared
[[link removed]] in 1950, “the gravest general
problem confronting policy-makers is that of the instability of mass
moods,” which made it very difficult to promote a stable foreign
policy. Moreover, as Almond clarified
[[link removed]] several years later, when it
came to world affairs “often the public is apathetic when it should
be concerned, and panicky when it should be calm.” For Almond and
many who came after him, a public-directed foreign policy was
guaranteed to be a foolish and ineffective one.

Today, one rarely hears members of the foreign policy establishment
discuss the idea that ordinary Americans should have a significant say
in the U.S. role in the world. A major reason for this is that
Almond’s generation institutionalized a system that ensured ordinary
people were kept far away from foreign policy. It’s not for nothing
that the National Security Act of 1947, which created the modern U.S.
security state, established government bodies like the National
Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency, both of which have
no connection to public opinion. And beyond the official organs of
state, after World War II think tanks like the RAND Corporation, which
oftentimes operate outside public view, began to exert significant
influence on U.S. foreign affairs. When foreign policy is made and
they disagree with it, the best Americans can do is participate in
mass protests, like those that erupted during the Vietnam and Iraq
Wars. Even Congress hasn’t declared war since 1942.

According to those who run the U.S. national security state, foreign
policy must be an elite, expert-driven affair. But this wasn’t
always the case. In the early twentieth century, some Americans sought
to establish a system that would give the American public a say in
foreign policy decision-making. In his revelatory _Every Citizen a
Statesman: The Dream of a Democratic Foreign Policy in the American
Century_, historian David Allen tells the story of the Foreign Policy
Association (FPA), the most important group to attempt to develop a
public ready and able to make foreign policy.

The FPA’s story allows readers to return to a moment very unlike our
own, when some elites sought to reconcile democracy with expertise. It
brings us back to an era when certain well-heeled Americans, less
alienated from their fellow citizens, believed that public discussion
could shape how decision-makers made policy. And it enables us to
trace past efforts to educate an inchoate public and make it a crucial
actor in U.S. policymaking.

But most important, if most depressing, the FPA’s total failure to
accomplish any of its goals highlights the difficulty, perhaps
impossibility, of creating a democratic foreign policy in a country
whose rulers are fundamentally skeptical of the public they deign to
rule.

The contemporary story of democratic foreign policy in the United
States begins in World War I, when the nation, bucking centuries of
tradition, resolutely entered a European conflict. With this decision,
President Woodrow Wilson made clear that the United States would no
longer stand apart from the Old World but would instead take its place
among the nations as a so-called great power. This new global role
raised a novel question Americans had mostly ignored since their
nation’s founding: Who decides how the United States acts in the
world?

For many Progressive Americans who took an interest in foreign
affairs—journalists like Herbert Croly and Frank U. Kellogg,
academics like Charles Beard, Stephen Duggan, and Alvin Johnson,
philanthropists like Florence Lamont and Dorothy Payne Whitney—the
answer was clear: the “public” should determine U.S. foreign
policy. But when these Progressives employed the term “public,”
they had a specific definition in mind; they were never referring,
Allen notes, to “the unfiltered will of the people,” as they
believed the actually existing _demos_ was not yet mature or educated
enough to make wise foreign policy choices. Instead, democratic-minded
Progressives insisted, only a “properly instructed” public could
ever gain the capacity to make U.S. foreign policy. For these
Progressive elites, a period of tutelage was necessary before the
reins of policymaking could be handed over to the hoi polloi.

The question, then, was how to educate a “mass public” that only
recently emerged as a political force. The very notion of “mass
politics” was an artifact of the _fin de siècle_, when urbanization
combined with cheap print media to bring something called the “mass
public” into being. In the 1920s, the impact and import of the
so-called masses remained open questions. Should the masses be
ignored, or should they become a core element of politics and
policymaking? Democratic-minded Progressives insisted that politics
had to be organized around a mass public whose energies were
channeled, through education, toward productive goals (which were, of
course, defined by the Progressive elite).

But how best to educate the masses? Luckily for democratic-minded
Progressives, there was an obvious institutional means to accomplish
this task: the voluntary association. In the period after World War I,
Americans spent a significant portion of their time hanging out with
each other at a diversity of civic organizations, from churches to
Elks lodges, from VFWs to women’s clubs. As political scientists
Gerald Gamm and Robert D. Putnam have shown
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about four such associations for every 1,000 Americans. In this
climate, Progressive elites concluded that the best way to educate the
public about foreign policy was to form a voluntary association
charged with doing so.

In March 1921 a number of Progressives founded the FPA out of the
extant League of Free Nations Association. The group included the
history professor-turned-bureaucrat James G. McDonald (the FPA’s
first head), the Christian ecumenicist Robert H. Gardiner (its first
treasurer), and the suffragette Christina Merriman (its first
secretary). For the next fifty years, the FPA would serve as the
single most important institution dedicated to producing an informed
public able to guide the United States as it rose to global hegemony.

Headquartered in New York City, the FPA started out as bog-standard
Progressive: its members desired for the United States to join the
League of Nations, supported general disarmament, and harshly
criticized imperialism. From the beginning, the tension between the
association’s interest in educating a mass public and its actual
practice was evident; throughout its first years, the group focused
primarily on hosting luncheons during which experts would give a talk
and then be subject to audience questioning. While these events were
often compelling and dynamic, only the well-to-do had the time and
money to attend them. In effect, the FPA’s luncheons functioned as
high-society gatherings, where interested parties from the upper
classes—many of them women—came to learn about global affairs and
give an expert or two a piece of their mind.

The FPA was remarkably successful; in the Great War’s aftermath,
Americans, especially elites, had started to care about the world. By
1928, the New York headquarters oversaw fourteen branches located in
cities across the country, including Cincinnati, Columbus, Hartford,
Philadelphia, Providence, Rochester, and Springfield. The group’s
success was embodied in the fact that, in 1930, about 37,000 people
attended an FPA-associated meeting. While those who participated in
the FPA were hardly the unwashed masses, they did embody a group that
had previously been disconnected from international affairs.

Besides educating a bourgeois elite, the FPA also devoted itself to
producing _Foreign Policy Reports_ whose most important readers worked
at the State Department. Indeed, the early FPA’s influence in the
corridors of power highlights the relatively small size of the U.S.
state before World War II, including its foreign policy apparatus. In
1920, the State Department employed
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paltry 1,222 people; in 1930 that number had risen to only 1,347.
There was simply not enough staff at State to manage the United
States’ ever increasing international interests, let alone to
research all the information officials needed to make foreign policy.
The FPA, in effect, served as State’s research department, which
provided the group with a direct line to power and foreshadowed the
types of “public-private” partnerships that would come to
characterize U.S. foreign policymaking for the twentieth century’s
remainder.

In fact, to solidify its relationship with Washington, D.C., Allen
highlights how the FPA founded a “liaison office” in the capital
and appointed the journalist William T. Stone to lead it. Stone
rapidly became a resource for both State Department officials and
congressmen, who at the time, Allen notes, “lacked significant
personal or committee staffs.” As early as the 1920s and 1930s,
then, the peculiar nature of the national security state, which
outsources many functions that one might consider properly
governmental, from research to warfighting, was already evident. The
line between public and private was blurry at best.

Despite its growing influence in Washington, the FPA retained its
commitment to public education. In the 1930s, this commitment was
embodied primarily in two forms: the discussion group and mass media,
both of which attempted to expand beyond the high-society set the
group had focused on in its first decade.

In the period between the two world wars, “discussion theory”
swept the Progressive imagination. This theory, Allen highlights, was
premised on the Deweyan idea that knowledge needed to be
“democratized rather than merely popularized.” The best way to
democratize knowledge, adult education specialists insisted, was in
“discussion groups”: expert-led, small-group discussions in which
a leader taught a group but also imbibed its participants’ ideas.
For example, a discussion leader might ask participants to debate
whether the United States should join the League of Nations. The
leader was then responsible, Allen describes, for “ensuring the
facts were kept to, challenging prejudices but not taking sides, and
insisting that no participant dominate while not talking too much
themselves.” Beyond this, leaders were also required to consider
seriously the participants’ “experience as a contribution to their
expertise.”

The hope was that participating in discussions would accomplish two
things: instill in ordinary Americans “the skills and confidence to
do more than shop among products of expertise” and remind experts
themselves that citizens were the source of their power and
potentially founts of good ideas. In this way, Progressive education
theorists intended to reconcile democracy with expertise. The FPA, for
its part, enthusiastically supported discussion theory and created
programs that attempted, as Allen puts it, “to inculcate discussion
techniques among teachers, clubwomen, and students.”

In addition to the discussion group, the FPA also started to try to
speak directly to the mass public it had come into being to educate.
To do so, the group published a series of easily readable and cheap
“Headline Books” with titles
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like _Billions for Defense_, _The Puzzle of Palestine_, _Shadow over
Europe_, and _Battles without Bullets_, which sought to educate
ordinary people about a diversity of foreign policy and security
issues. Furthermore, the association partnered with NBC to broadcast a
radio show titled _America Looks Abroad_ that provided fifteen minutes
of current events analysis every week and whose slogan—“foreign
affairs are your affairs”—embodied the FPA’s mission.

In these ways, the FPA became the most important group to attempt to
resolve the tensions between mass democracy and elite expertise, even
if, as Allen underlines, it was not clear whether the association’s
experiments in mass education were “genuinely reaching a different
kind of American or just expanding its reach to the same sorts of
people in new areas of the country.” Still, at the least the FPA
tried.

Beyond its educational efforts, by the late 1930s the group had
successfully developed a working relationship with the federal
government. The FPA, in fact, was as, if not more, influential than
its better-known competitor, the Council on Foreign Relations, whose
members insisted that an expert elite alone should guide U.S. foreign
affairs. The FPA was ascendant, even though it had not yet established
the educated mass public it imagined.

Unfortunately for the association, World War II would change all that.

In July 1939 Major General Frank R. McCoy, a protégé of Secretary of
War Henry Stimson, became the FPA’s president, and under him the
organization abandoned the commitment to foreign policy debate
displayed in its luncheons and discussion groups; instead it began
parroting the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration’s view that
the United States needed to become involved in World War II (which
erupted in September). From this moment on, the FPA would, in effect,
promote U.S. “primacy”—the notion that both American and global
peace and prosperity depended on the United States becoming the
world’s military and economic hegemon.

Yet even this alignment with the state would not ensure the FPA’s
lasting influence. Most immediately, throughout the war the U.S. state
poached many members of the FPA and its branches. More important,
though, was the fact that the war and its aftermath transformed the
ideology and structure of the U.S. state. In terms of ideology, most
policy elites emerged from the war convinced that it demonstrated that
the very idea of a public-directed foreign policy was not only
chimerical but dangerous, especially because the advent of nuclear
weapons made the stakes of foreign policy literally existential. Hans
Speier, an influential sociologist and member of the RAND Corporation,
crystallized this view in 1950 when he affirmed
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Since the end of the first World War . . . the faith in the power of
public opinion to render world politics reasonable has been shaken.
There are many events which contributed to this demoralization: the
failure of the League of Nations; disillusionment concerning the lofty
war aims of the Allies and the general distrust of propaganda which
spread between the two world wars; the rise of fascism and national
socialism in countries of old civilization and with no lack of liberal
traditions; the absence of inspiring peace aims during the second
World War; the sterility of the resistance movements in the realm of
political ideas; the use of weapons of mass destruction in the
attainment of victory; and the quick transformation of the wartime
coalition into intense hostility between its main partners even before
peace was formally established.

“Do we still maintain,” Speier asked rhetorically, “the belief
in the perfectability [sic] of man, faced, as we are, with the
overwhelming experiences of the twentieth century . . . and with the
advances in both the technology of destruction and moral apathy?”

A more damning indictment of the FPA’s _raison d’être _could
hardly be imagined.

But more significant than any individual’s perspective was the fact
that Speier’s criticism of public opinion was institutionalized in
the emergent national security state. To ensure that ordinary people
had no say in the corridors of power, elites within and outside
government created novel institutions that insulated foreign
policymaking from the public. Among them was the National Security
Council, which centralized decision-making in the White House; the
Central Intelligence Agency, which mostly operated in secret; and the
RAND Corporation, which, like the FPA before it, served as an
unofficial but influential research arm of the government. Beyond this
process of state-making, the administration of Harry Truman instituted
a byzantine program for classifying information that made it ever
harder for the public, or even Congress, to know what the national
security state was up to.

These efforts, in turn, were bolstered by research that appeared to
demonstrate that the very idea of an informed public opinion was
ridiculous. Allen reports how in the winter of 1946–47 the American
Association for the United Nations and the United Nations Association
of Cincinnati initiated “a six-month blitz of 2,800 speeches, the
printing of 59,588 pieces of literature, and the placement of ads”
about international relations with the intent of demonstrating that
average Americans could be made interested in foreign affairs. But as
Allen relays, the National Opinion Research Center found that at the
end of this study the groups discovered that their effort “did not
stir the interest of those who were not interested in the first
place.” Moreover, in the early Cold War social scientific analyses
by thinkers like Speier and Gabriel Almond seemed to confirm that it
was very difficult, if not impossible, to educate the public about
international relations. By the 1950s, most foreign policy elites had
concluded that the project to create an interested foreign policy
public was a relic of a more naïve moment that needed to be
abandoned.

After World War II, then, the FPA and its mission were clearly out of
step with the times. In 1950, the Rockefeller Foundation—the FPA’s
longtime benefactor—stopped funding the group, having determined,
Allen recounts, that what the United States needed was “expert
knowledge to lead a world that even the most educated Americans knew
little about.” The FPA went into decline; sales of its publications
fell as its membership sank and some branches closed. Whereas FPA
leaders used to be welcome in the corridors of power, they now found
themselves on the outside, looking in. In 1951, the group’s board
even considered liquidating it.

The FPA would have likely shuttered were it not for the Ford
Foundation, which in the late 1940s emerged as the nation’s
wealthiest philanthropy. In 1949, the foundation released a report
that identified five “program areas” it would heavily invest in:
“The Establishment of Peace,” “The Strengthening of
Democracy,” “The Strengthening of the Economy,” “Education in
a Democratic Society,” and “Individual Behavior and Human
Relations.” The FPA’s work fit into several of these program
areas, and the group quickly established connections with the
foundation, which became its primary funder.

The most important and long-lasting innovation to emerge as the result
of the Ford Foundation’s support was the “Great Decisions”
program. Created in Oregon in early 1955, the program, Allen explains,
“claimed to offer Portlanders a chance to lead the world from their
living rooms.” Great Decisions was a significant effort, consisting
of “eighty to ninety discussion groups of a dozen or so men and
women [who met] in living rooms, school halls, and public libraries
for about three to four hours a week” to discuss questions like
“does U.S. security, prosperity, and freedom depend on the rest of
the world?” and “how shall we deal with the U.S.S.R.?” Though
similar in some ways to the earlier discussion groups, Great Decisions
differed in that it expected more from its participants. As Allen
notes, those who took part in sessions were “supposed to have either
tuned in to a dedicated radio or television program before attending
their discussion group or, preferably, to have read one of the fact
sheets the Association wrote to give the minimum necessary to
contribute.” Instead of the average American, Great Decisions
implicitly targeted itself to those already concerned with world
affairs. In this way, the FPA attempted to fit in with the anti-mass
public tenor of the era.

The FPA used Great Decisions to promote U.S. primacy. For instance,
Allen observes that “the fact sheet for the [program’s] session
dealing with the U.S.S.R.” announced that all the United States was
doing in the Cold War was giving “assistance to Western European
countries where economic instability and Communist tactics threatened
democratic governments.” The Soviet Union, in contrast, was
described as engaging in “constantly shifting attacks on Europe and
Asia” that were defined by “subversion, propaganda, trickery,
obstruction, sabotage, and plotting through communist cells.” Such
“facts” did not exactly set the stage for a balanced debate of the
type the early FPA would have endorsed.

Though Great Decisions was a smashing success and rapidly spread
across the country, it had little impact on the FPA’s overall
trajectory. Things came to a head in the 1960s, when Samuel P. Hayes,
Jr., a social psychologist who agreed with the critics of public
opinion, took over the organization. Hayes insisted that the FPA
should focus its efforts solely on the Americans whom it determined
could actually be educated about U.S. foreign affairs—citing social
scientific research, Hayes concluded that this was only about 12
million people. But even this narrowing couldn’t save the
association. By the late 1960s, many nonprofits had begun to refocus
their attention on domestic issues, and the Ford Foundation was no
different. Under its new leader McGeorge Bundy, a prominent foreign
policymaker in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson
administrations, the foundation, Allen notes, dedicated itself to
addressing “racial justice and the urban crisis.” Bundy, perhaps
guilty about his involvement in the disastrous Vietnam War, had little
interest in either foreign policy or the FPA, and eliminated all of
the foundation’s support for the latter.

The FPA thus continued its long decline, cutting programs,
publications, and regional offices. Today, it survives as a rump
organization that concentrates primarily on Great Decisions, which
remains its most popular offering.

The FPA failed to achieve its major goals: create an educated public
able to help guide U.S. foreign affairs and develop mechanisms through
which that public (when it came into existence) would be heard by
policy elites. After the 1960s, as Allen rightly emphasizes, “the
idea that foreign policy could be forged in popular participation . .
. disappeared; there would be attempts to remake the
‘establishment,’ but little more.”

The de-democratization of U.S. foreign policy was rapidly followed by
the de-massification of U.S. war. Specifically, the Vietnam War and
the backlash it engendered impelled a broader shift in U.S.
warfighting away from a citizens’ military and toward an
“all-volunteer force,” which emerged when the draft ended in 1973.
Since then, most Americans have not directly felt the consequences of
their nation’s wars.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the intertwined processes of
de-democratization and de-massification led policy- and war-making to
become entirely elite affairs, ruled over by an establishment whose
members hailed from an ever-narrower subset of the meritocratic elite.
This establishment pursued a variety of wars with only tangential
connections to any possible construal of the “national interest,”
from the Gulf War to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to the
interventions in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. Despite periodic outbursts
of mass protests, especially in the run-up to the second war in Iraq,
the U.S. public has been quiescent, allowing its elites to basically
do what they wanted. The FPA and its dream of creating a democratic
foreign policy are today nothing but a memory, and a fading one at
that.

Though Allen spells out numerous proximate causes of the FPA’s
decline, its failure was overdetermined, the result of problems
endemic to liberal democracy itself. Since liberalism’s advent in
the French Revolution’s aftermath, liberal elites have been
fundamentally skeptical of the public and its opinion. While this
skepticism has waxed and waned over time, it became especially
strong—and, more important, was institutionalized—during the early
Cold War, when nervous liberals concluded that ordinary Americans
could not be trusted with the responsibilities of foreign
policymaking. Once this anti-public opinion became a structural
feature of the U.S. state, it became very difficult for the public to
shape international affairs. Simply put, any attempt to create a
democratic foreign policy faces two significant obstacles: an
ideological distrust of ordinary people and a state designed to ensure
they have little impact on foreign relations.

What, then, is to be done?

The answer is old and unsatisfying: build public power through
organizing and transform (maybe even transcend) the anti-democratic
liberalism that has defined U.S. governance since World War II. This
is the only way that Americans can begin to democratize their foreign
policy.

But not every story has a happy ending, and I doubt this one will.
While there have been a variety of recent proposals
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to re-democratize U.S. political life, it is difficult to imagine a
world in which these efforts succeed. Most Americans don’t fight and
die in our nation’s wars and, beyond this, many have rightly
concluded that they can’t affect policy, so why try. Moreover, the
material degradations of the last two generations have made it so that
Americans simply don’t have the time or capacity to focus on making
foreign policy more democratic. Without massive transformations in the
U.S. state, economy, and society, there is little to be done.

Allen’s book might therefore be best interpreted as a message in a
bottle, waiting to be picked up in a generation or two by people who
hopefully live in a less undemocratic and unequal world. It will be up
to them to begin the process of taking control of the state as they
attempt to realize one of democracy’s highest aims: a policy by the
people, not merely just for them.

_We’re interested in what you think. Send a letter to the editors at
[email protected]_. Boston Review _is nonprofit,
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Daniel Bessner is Associate Professor at the Henry M. Jackson School
of International Studies at the University of Washington and cohost of
the podcast _American Prestige_.

===

Reprinted with permission from the Boston Review.
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