Introduction

The book’s emphasis is on Americans who in private capacities went overseas between 1935 and 1941. The quandaries faced within the United States and around its geostrategic edges are here probed with less reference than is usual in World War II historiography to holders of high office, military authority, or diplomatic responsibility. This approach allows two related things. First, the reader and I can contend with the churning national identity as it had evolved when the United States skirted around but then plunged into the Second World War. Albeit a nebulous concept, tied to eternal scholarly wrangles on “imagined communities” or Abraham’s Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory,” my use of national character/identity functions as shorthand for the contradictory US mood and attitudes of 1935-1941: earnest, avaricious, high-minded, sour, naive, shrewd, indecisive, provincial, universalistic. Second, this assemblage of expats is valuable in that it reflected, and lets us elucidate, the fault lines of political allegiance and personal preference that ran through the country before Pearl Harbor. In an important sense, this book destabilizes the notion of “American.”