No Right to Leave the Nation: The Politics of Passport Denial and the Rise of the National Security State

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 170-193
Author(s):  
Sam Lebovic
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
National Security ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
World War ◽  
State Action ◽  
Travel Policy ◽  
National Security State

This article provides an institutional and legal history of passport denial in the United States from World War I to the early Cold War. Identifying the Passport Division as a central institution of the national security state, the article shows that the state was deeply invested in regulating the international movement of people and in monopolizing international connections in a globalizing age. It also analyzes the rise of the Passport Division as an authoritative and autonomous bureaucracy to provide new insight into the institutional development of the national security state. It emphasizes particularly the ways that the executive branch, the Congress, and the Passport Division mutually constituted travel policy as a field of state action in a decades-long process stretching from World War I to the Cold War. It explores the centrality of the reputation of the Passport Division, as personified by its head, Ruth Shipley, in facilitating its rise as an authoritative institution in the field of travel policy. And by analyzing the ways that the Passport Division was able to survive civil libertarian challenges in the 1950s, it explores the surprising longevity of national security bureaucracies.

scholarly journals “I did It for The Uplift of Humanity and The Navy”: Same-Sex Acts and The Origins of The National Security State, 1919–1921

2018 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-306
Author(s):  
Sherry Zane
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
National Security ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
National Security State ◽  
The Cold War

This essay explores U.S. national security interests on the World War I home-front from 1917-1921 in Newport, Rhode Island when Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt's covert operatives attempted to restrict same-sex acts through methods of entrapment. It argues that World War I provided government officials new opportunities to expand security concerns as it policed and punished gender and sexual non-conformity well before the Cold War.

US-Italian Relations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leopoldo Nuti ◽  
Daniele Fiorentino
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Political Alignment

Relations between Italy and the United States have gone through different stages, from the early process of nation-building during the 18th and the 19th centuries, to the close diplomatic and political alignment of the Cold War and the first two decades of the 21st century. Throughout these two and a half centuries, relations between the two states occasionally experienced some difficult moments—from the tensions connected to the mass immigration of Italians to the United States at the end of the 19th century, to the diplomatic clash at the Versailles Peace Conference at the end of World War I, culminating with the declaration of war by the Fascist government in December 1941. By and large, however, Italy and the United States have mostly enjoyed a strong relationship based on close cultural, economic, and political ties.

Anti-Imperialism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert David Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
World War ◽  
Progressive Movement ◽  
Major Powers ◽  
Policy Alternatives ◽  
The Relationship

The birth of the United States through a successful colonial revolution created a unique nation-state in which anti-imperialist sentiment existed from the nation’s founding. Three broad points are essential in understanding the relationship between anti-imperialism and U.S. foreign relations. First, the United States obviously has had more than its share of imperialist ventures over the course of its history. Perhaps the better way to address the matter is to remark on—at least in comparison to other major powers—how intense a commitment to anti-imperialism has remained among some quarters of the American public and government. Second, the strength of anti-imperialist sentiment has varied widely and often has depended upon domestic developments, such as the emergence of abolitionism before the Civil War or the changing nature of the Progressive movement following World War I. Third, anti-imperialist policy alternatives have enjoyed considerably more support in Congress than in the executive branch.

Argentina-US Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Hoyt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Southern Cone ◽  
World War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Developed Nations

Relations between the United States and Argentina can be best described as a cautious embrace punctuated by moments of intense frustration. Although never the center of U.S.–Latin American relations, Argentina has attempted to create a position of influence in the region. As a result, the United States has worked with Argentina and other nations of the Southern Cone—the region of South America that comprises Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, and southern Brazil—on matters of trade and economic development as well as hemispheric security and leadership. While Argentina has attempted to assert its position as one of Latin America’s most developed nations and therefore a regional leader, the equal partnership sought from the United States never materialized for the Southern Cone nation. Instead, competition for markets and U.S. interventionist and unilateral tendencies kept Argentina from attaining the influence and wealth it so desired. At the same time, the United States saw Argentina as an unreliable ally too sensitive to the pull of its volatile domestic politics. The two nations enjoyed moments of cooperation in World War I, the Cold War, and the 1990s, when Argentine leaders could balance this particular external partnership with internal demands. Yet at these times Argentine leaders found themselves walking a fine line as detractors back home saw cooperation with the United States as a violation of their nation’s sovereignty and autonomy. There has always been potential for a productive partnership, but each side’s intransigence and unique concerns limited this relationship’s accomplishments and led to a historical imbalance of power.

Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvyn P Leffler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
National Security ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
National Security Policy ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Global War

This book gathers together decades of writing by the author, to address important questions about U.S. national security policy from the end of World War I to the global war on terror. Why did the United States withdraw strategically from Europe after World War I and not after World War II? How did World War II reshape Americans' understanding of their vital interests? What caused the United States to achieve victory in the long Cold War? To what extent did 9/11 transform U.S. national security policy? Is budgetary austerity a fundamental threat to U.S. national interests? The wide-ranging chapters explain how foreign policy evolved into national security policy. The book stresses the competing priorities that forced policymakers to make agonizing trade-offs and illuminates the travails of the policymaking process itself. While assessing the course of U.S. national security policy, the author also interrogates the evolution of his own scholarship. Over time, slowly and almost unconsciously, the author's work has married elements of revisionism with realism to form a unique synthesis that uses threat perception as a lens to understand how and why policymakers reconcile the pressures emanating from external dangers and internal priorities.

Loyalty and Liberty

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Goodall
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Mccarthy Era ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Depression Era

This book offers the first comprehensive account of the politics of countersubversion in the United States prior to the McCarthy era. The book traces the course of American countersubversion over the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the rise of McCarthyism and the Cold War. This sweeping study explores how anti-subversive fervor was dampened in the 1920s in response to the excesses of World War I, transformed by the politics of antifascism in the Depression era, and rekindled in opposition to Roosevelt's ambitious New Deal policies in the later 1930s and 1940s. Varied interest groups such as business tycoons, Christian denominations, and Southern Democrats as well as the federal government pursued their own courses, which alternately converged and diverged, eventually consolidating into the form they would keep during the Cold War. Rigorous in its scholarship yet accessible to a wide audience, this book shows how the opposition to radicalism became a defining ideological question of American life.

The Allure of Independence

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-59
Author(s):  
Anand Toprani
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
World War ◽  
British Experience ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
War Aims ◽  
Oil Company

This chapter discusses the origins of Britain’s postwar oil strategy, which aimed at making Britain independent of imports from other great powers, especially the United States. It begins by reviewing Whitehall’s increasing preoccupation with oil as a matter of national security before 1914, including the Royal Navy’s shift to oil and the government’s purchase of a majority of shares in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. It then examines the British experience during and immediately after World War I, when officials began pursuing two of the key objectives of British strategy—securing British majority ownership of Shell and the oilfields of Mesopotamia. The chapter concludes with an assessment of how oil influenced Britain’s war aims in the Middle East and Anglo-American competition over the region’s oil.

Effects of War

2020 ◽  
pp. 160-180
Author(s):  
Robert F. Zeidel
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
World War ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
Governmental Agencies ◽  
Effects Of War

This chapter addresses how the onset of World War I raised questions about if and how the United States should prepare itself for a military confrontation with a “foreign” enemy, and gave added implications to any talk of armed class conflict, especially if it involved immigrant workers. Americans everywhere increasingly championed the need to provide adequate defense against a potential attack from abroad. But this bulwark alone would not suffice. Dangers to national security also emanated from domestic sources, especially those deemed foreign or un-American. Millions of immigrants, already under scrutiny for their involvement in labor unrest, became potentially dangerous internal enemies. Business leaders would use this heightened tension to portray strikes, and the agitators who allegedly fostered them, as threats to national security. Alleged perpetrators became saboteurs and traitors. In pursuit of their eradication, what had been tacit connections between business interests and governmental agencies in the pursuit of labor tranquility became more direct and the results more draconian.

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