HISTORY AND THE COUNCIL
P
resident George Washington, in his Farewell Address to the People of
the United States on September 17, 1796, established a foreign policy
which became traditional and a main article of faith for the American people
in their dealings with the rest of the world.
Washington warned against foreign influence in the shaping of national af-
fairs. He urged America to avoid permanent, entangling alliances with other
nations, recommending a national policy of benign neutrality toward the
rest of the world. Washington did not want America to build a wall around
herself, or to become, in any sense, a hermit nation. Washington's policy
permitted freer exchange of travel, commerce, ideas, and culture between
Americans and other people than Americans have ever enjoyed since the
policy was abandoned. The Father of our Country wanted the American
government to be kept out of the wars and revolutions and political affairs
of other nations.
Washington told Americans that their nation had a high destiny, which it
could not fulfill if they permitted their government to become entangled in
3 DAN SMOOT
the affairs of other nations.
Despite the fact of two foreign wars (Mexican War, 1846-1848; and Spanish
American War, 1898) the foreign policy of Washington remained the policy
of this nation, unaltered, for 121 years-until Woodrow Wilson's war message
to Congress in April, 1917.
Wilson himself, when campaigning for re-election in 1916, had unequivo-
cally supported our traditional foreign policy: his one major promise to the
American people was that he would keep them out of the European war.
Yet, even while making this promise, Wilson was yielding to a pressure he
was never able to withstand: the influence of Colonel Edward M. House,
Wilson's all-powerful adviser. According to House's own papers and the
historical studies of Wilson's ardent admirers (see, for example, Intimate
Papers of Colonel House, edited by Charles Seymour, published in 1926 by
HoughtonMifflin; and, The Crisis of the Old Order byArthurM. Schlesinger,
Jr., published 1957 by Houghton Mifflin), House created Wilson's domestic
and foreign policies, selected most of Wilson's cabinet and other major ap-
pointees, and ran Wilson's State Department.
House had powerful connections with international bankers in New York.
He was influential, for example, with great financial institutions represented
by such people as Paul and Felix Warburg, Otto H. Kahn, Louis Marburg,
Henry Morgenthau, Jacob and Mortimer Schiff, Herbert Lehman. House
had equally powerful connections with bankers and politicians of Europe.
Bringing all of these forces to bear, House persuaded Wilson that America
had an evangelistic mission to save the world for "democracy." The first ma-
