Dang Weiyu is a PhD candidate in American Studies at NYU. His dissertation on US-China relations from 1898-1953 examines how the management of race and frontiers through education and intelligence projects impacted US empire building at home and abroad. He received a BA in English and History and an MA in East Asian Studies from McGill University. His research is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council’s Doctoral Fellowship.

Developing the Paradigmatic Settler: Frontier Solidarities and the Uncertain Boundaries of US-China Relations in the 1940s

Abstract: This paper examines the uncertain boundaries of liberal internationalism in the anti-racist and anti-imperialist rhetoric of defeated 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940-44 Vice-President Henry Wallace. As the US debated the scope of its global power upon entering World War II, Willkie and Wallace were popular symbols of a progressive liberal internationalism as they respectively undertook goodwill tours in 1942 and 1944 to promote a progressive, internationalist U.S. that advocated for global unity, post-war reconstruction, and cooperative investment through indictments of imperialism and racism. On these trips, China’s contested multi-ethnic boundary with the Soviet Union was a key site of intrigue for an incipient US empire keen on expanding its oceanic holdings in the Pacific to better account for continental struggles in Asia as both men saw in various frontier projects a romantic resonance with US westward expansion.

While historians have largely seen their trips and ideologies as utopic possibilities foreclosed by the Truman Doctrine, I argue that their visions of internationalism were not entirely alternatives to the Cold War’s security-focused political geography, but pivotal to its articulation. While Truman represented a more chauvinistic form of global leadership, Willkie and Wallace blurred the lines between anti-colonial and hegemonic internationalism through their fixation with uplifting frontier peoples, especially in China and the Soviet Union. They envisioned a global frontier, led by the US, that crossed conventional racial, cultural, and geographic boundaries as US “know-how” and “goodwill” uplifted colonized and racialized peoples configured as paradigmatic American settlers aspiring toward liberal freedom. Though both figures fell out of favor in the early Cold War years, their vision of internationalism endure through modernization and development projects in which the racialized and colonized other became understandable to the white liberal primarily as heirs to the settlers and pioneers of the American West.