"The Problem of Economic Nationalism in the Mid-20th Century United States, 1929-1968"

The Problem of Economic Nationalism in the Mid- 20th Century United States, 1929-1968
My proposed paper explores the emphasis on economic nationalism in U. S. trade and immigration policy from the late 1920s through the early 1950s, and increasing pressure thereafter to change course in those areas. The paper grows out of research that I have done over many years on politics, public policy, and the business-government relationship in the mid-20th century United States.
Economic nationalism was, of course, not something truly new in America by the late 1920s, especially with respect to trade policy. Even the military and economic catastrophe of the First World War did not persuade American business leaders and public policy makers to abandon that basic orientation, despite new, compelling arguments to do so. Economic nationalism in the realm of immigration policy is a more complicated story, but even there that approach had deep, though narrower, roots. There was a long history of immigration restriction with respect to Asia, but not Europe, generally speaking, until the 1920s.
The advent of the Great Depression and the rise of the American middle class that followed tended to intensify already existing economic nationalism in the USA. Despite a steadily deteriorating international economic and security environment in the 1930s, which argued for less economic nationalism rather than more, the United States intensified its existing patterns of resistance to foreign competition and immigration, with far-reaching consequences. Only the return of broad prosperity in the mid to late 1940s combined with intensifying Cold War concerns began to place serious pressure on the USA to rethink its economic nationalist orientation. That pressure led to a gradual shift in public policy directions during the 1950's and '60's. This story is one example of how conceptions of public interest can change when one moves from a narrowly nationalistic perspective to a more global one.