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This book is centered on Americans who in private capacities went overseas in the unsettled years before the United States became embroiled in World War II. Some of these men and women were notable in their time and have been remembered since. Others were obscure and everlastingly unremarked but nevertheless vivid. Collectively, they mirrored the range of US aspiration and actions on the eve of violence that had already scorched nations in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Many people here reviewed were searchers for promised lands that they imagined brimmed with justice, community, and safety. Others, belonging to the company of committed, hoped to further what they felt were lofty causes, an attitude in secular form near to that of contemporaneous Christian missionaries. Most persons treated in this volume blended – proportions varying – elements of political pilgrim and righteous crusader.

Whether seeker, partisan, or combination, these people constituted a cross-section of the US population, 132 million souls in 1940. Between the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the 1941 Pearl Harbor surprise, American artists (broadly defined), dissenters (of leftist and rightest stripe), feminists, Black activists, humanitarians, clergymen, a famed proponent of the disabled, journalists, and aviators (the era’s heroes) ventured abroad to participate in presumptively high calling or absorb superior civilizations. Some of these people took up multiyear residences, others only for months. Irrespective of tenure, none was on Washington errand to promote US diplomatic goals, but from personal convictions offered labor to distant countries and doctrines. At the same time this collection of characters – many being self-styled outsiders disillusioned with American life and entertaining preferences more extreme than upheld at home – sought answers to US problems: frayed political institutions, racial tensions, class inequities, economic distress.

Millions of Americans in 1940 were stuck in unemployment (more than a quarter of the nonfarm working population), financial shambles, foreclosures, food insecurity, and a decrepit public health infrastructure, against which workers’ unions (automobile, steel, mining) and the New Deal’s swarm of relief agencies was unavailing. Whether an Appalachian or New York City dweller, resident of small town or suburb or countryside, the Great Depression was interminable to everyone who survived it. Aggravating the predicament, ameliorative New Deal schemes were tailored to white advantage, which resulted in deepening the racial divide and prolonging Black financial liability for decades past 1940.²

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Nearly everyone scrutinized in this book was born during the decades between the fratricide of 1861–1865 and US intervention in the Great War. All appeared on the scene in the shadow of Appomattox and in a country buffeted by Jim Crow reaction, Gilded Age profligacy, large-scale immigration and concomitant nativist reaction, galloping industrialization, demographic shift from rural to urban sites, burgeoning city slums, colonial expansion (Philippines, Hawaii, Caribbean islands), and a crescendo of suffragette agitation, climaxing in the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

As possessors of US passports, the persons featured in the book enjoyed a modicum of protection while overseas. Reminders and proofs of citizenship, the passports rooted their holders – even if they sought to pull away – in the larger US society, its shifting condition a counterpoint to their choices abroad. From a class standpoint, these individuals ranged widely, from those born into affluence to ones reared in hard-up circumstances. Overall, the center of gravity lay closer to comforts familiar to the middle and professional classes than to the Great Depression’s impoverished.

This group of American rovers had fewer encumbrances of spouses or children than counterparts at home, where in 1940 of all races/ethnicities 60 percent of people were married and the fertility rate was two children per woman. None of the women highlighted in this book, at the time of their foreign ventures, had borne a child. Overall, they enjoyed greater sexual liberty, and freedom from prescribed roles, than afforded in the United States. Several of the men’s marriages failed to thrive. (In 1940, the divorce rate was 2 per 1,000 people.)³

The seekers and partisans also deviated from the educational midpoint. In 1940, nearly 65 percent of the US population had not finished high school. Fewer than 6 percent held a bachelor’s degree. The percentages of college credentialed women (3.8 percent) and Blacks (1 percent) were still lower. By contrast, the majority of dramatis personae here had been exposed to tertiary education, including W. E. B. Du Bois, the first Black person awarded a PhD at Harvard.⁴

Although Black searchers did not find racial paradise abroad, they breathed more easily away from the United States. Of Stalin’s USSR, for example, Black émigré Homer Smith believed that persons of color could dispense with worry about smothering prejudice and would “stand taller,” having escaped “all the hurts” that America generated.⁵ Virginia-born agronomist Joseph Roane recalled after a British stopover with friends: “The wonderful thing about London was that we could do whatever we wanted, go wherever we wanted. There was no back of the bus.”⁶

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In their dual quests, aiding faraway causes and assimilating lessons for home, the seekers here joined a venerable line. Thomas Paine, one-time agitator for American independence (Common Sense), installed himself in Paris in the 1790s and cheered the French revolution (Rights of Man). Along with philhellenes from Germany, France, Italy, and Britain, legendarily Lord Byron, a few Americans – among whom Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and George Jarvis – sailed to Greece in the early 1820s to assist the anti-Ottoman rebellion.⁷ During the Mexican–US War of 1846–1848, John Riley organized the San Patricio battalion. Composed of Irish-Catholic and German-Catholic newcomers to the United States, as well as Black escapees from plantation bondage, this outfit in solidarity with Mexican co-religionists fought under General Santa Anna against Yankee aggression.⁸ During the Crimean War (1853–1856), three-dozen young doctors, drawn from either side of the Mason–Dixon line, lent their surgical skills to the Russian army, an experience that stood them well when they served as medical officers (with Union and Confederate forces) in the Civil War.⁹ Irish American republicans, affiliated with the Fenian Brotherhood, conducted ill-fated raids (1866, 1870–1871) along the Canadian frontier, pursuant to Ireland’s struggle against the British Empire. In the twentieth century, Irish American members of Clan-na-Gael (John Kenny, John Devoy) aided the 1916 Easter Uprising with weapons, funds, and German connivance.¹⁰ Other parts of the sprawling British domain attracted the post-1918 interest of American Zionists. They saw in Palestine a place to create a society free of Judeophobia. Golda Meir and her husband left Milwaukee in 1921 for Mandate Palestine.

The Great War and the Bolshevik revolution engaged the imagination of Americans. Before the United States became a belligerent in April 1917, thousands of its citizens had flocked to Europe. Most identified with the Allied side, but not all, such as the iconoclast H. L. Mencken. He trailed alongside German soldiers marching through Lithuania. One hundred and eighty volunteer pilots enrolled in the fabled La Fayette Escadrille. These men served under French command; fifty-one died in combat or accidents.¹¹ Edith Wharton, already residing in Paris before the war, undertook philanthropic work and wrote for US audiences on behalf of the French effort – Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belport.¹² In the year before his 1916 death, another literary titan, Henry James in London, renounced his citizenship to protest US neutrality and became a British subject. In November 1914, he had insisted, “We Americans are … for any action, of whatever kind, that affirms life and freshly and inventively exemplifies it.”¹³ In elegiac mood, Missouri-born T. S. Eliot, a firm Anglophile (and British subject as of 1927), pondered the human cost: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”¹⁴ No pictorial representation of the war surpassed that painted by portraitist John Singer Sargent, who in summer 1918 visited the Western Front. Sargent’s massive canvas, Gassed, depicted British solders devastated by clouds of mustard poison. Ernest Hemingway drove a Red Cross ambulance in Italy; care for wounded Italian soldiers won him Rome’s Silver Medal of Military Valor.¹⁵ As for Bolshevik Russia, it captivated John Reed and Louise Bryant, who went to celebrate a new regime arising on czarist rubble. Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World and Bryant’s Six Months in Russia still stir appreciation for a better order once thought to dawn.¹⁶

As with all pilgrims and partisans, from Paine’s Paris to Leninist Moscow, the careers of people examined in this book raise a bundle of questions. Why quit US shores for the uncertainties, unfamiliarity, and (often) physical risks entailed by involvement in far-off places? What impact, intended and not, did the Americans have on the scenes into which they stepped? How were the individuals affected and in what way, if at all, were their earlier commitments rearranged? How were the deeds of these people perceived – applauded, repudiated, or ignored – by US officialdom and the public?

However armored in confidence, or chastened by experience, the people who went overseas before Pearl Harbor led a twofold existence, straddling both the United States and other lands. Some embraced cosmopolitanism or felt themselves cultural refugees from a raucous commercial society; they placed a “valuation” (James’s term) on Europe’s textured modes, subtleties, and accumulated wisdom. Other wanderers were self-seeking. Most recited a vaguely defined democratic mantra. Each had faith, with allowance for differing denominations, that proper action could save a careening world and that the social pathologies afflicting Depression-era America were correctable.

More than a compilation of profiles in expatriation, this book links US histories on race, class, feminism, and competing ideologies to the annals of World War II. The quandaries faced within America and around its geostrategic edges are here probed with less reference than is usual in World War II historiography (or my previous books) to holders of elected office, military authority, and 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 but then plunged into World War II. 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, naïve, shrewd, indecisive, provincial, universalistic.¹⁷ 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.”

This book’s pilgrims were caught in the mesh of history, encased in hoary social structures, at the mercy of unforeseen contingencies, and tugged at by rival philosophical conceptions. No pretense is made here to evaluate all Americans who roamed internationally. My findings are not encyclopedic, which anyway would be impossible and analytically futile. I am not interested in creating a data set. Instead, my method is to treat representatives good of their kind. Admittedly, this principle of selection is tinged with less impartiality than is ideal. Yet the people treated in these pages constituted an authentic group, culturally/politically restless or troubled by the place allotted them in society. At the same time, while wanting to preserve the connective tissue between them, I have tried not to homogenize these pilgrims or reduce them to sociological specimens but to uncover each person’s distinctiveness. Indeed, a main point of this book is to retrieve the lives of individuals amid domestic crisis and as America teetered on the brink of global war. From it, the United States emerged preeminent among world powers but unconfident about national purpose, as Cornelius Engert, a Cold War-era ambassador, perceptively commented:

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The book is divided into three parts, the first pegged to warfare in the years just before the Pearl Harbor attack on 7 December 1941: Ethiopia, Spain, China. Part II deals with the revisionist powers: Italy, Japan, Germany. Part III concentrates on the principal non-Axis countries: France, Great Britain, USSR. The temporal focus is always on 1935–1941, but occasionally blurred by asides to the years before and after.

Every chapter in the book, except for the last one, adheres to a pattern: survey of the domestic and international situations faced by the country in question; review of US policy toward it; account of seekers and partisans in said country; ramifications and implications. Some chapters are centered on only one or two characters; in other chapters, the reader encounters several who played significant roles. A few people quoted here used jarring vocabulary, particularly vile in reference to Blacks and Jews. I have decided to leave this offensive language alone to recapture pertinent mentalities.

Part I: Wars

1. 1. The Lure of Ethiopia: This chapter rests on Emperor Haile Selassie’s resistance to the Italian invasion of 1935, which among its impacts disturbed African Americans. They perceived in the lopsided contest an extension of their own struggle against white supremacy. Despite forbidding obstacles, Black aviation pioneer John Robinson went to Ethiopia. Robinson there commanded its small air force in battle against Italian conquest. In fighting for an African nation, he also advanced the cause of civil rights in the United States. Woven into this chapter are concepts advanced by W. E. B. Du Bois, which are helpful in framing the Robinson saga.

2. 2. Quixotic Calling: The study here falls on people who went to Spain in 1936–1939 to aid the Republic against the Franco-led insurgency. Of Americans – collectively remembered as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade – who joined for the Republic, I have selected these as illustrative: James Yates, a Black Mississippian; Oliver Law, a Black veteran of the US Army; Salaria Kea, a Black nurse; Hank Rubin, a Jewish undergraduate at UCLA; Alvah Bessie, a Jewish man of letters; Robert Hale Merriman, a PhD student at University of California-Berkeley and believer in the Marxian promise; and Marion Merriman (later Wachtel) who, married to Robert, not only played a part in Spain but later kindled the legacy and spirit of the brigaders. Ruminations and writings of Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway thread through this chapter. The Hemingway references, principally from For Whom the Bell Tolls, relate to Robert Merriman who loomed large among Americans in Spain.

3. 3. Chinese Maelstrom: This chapter covers the Sino-Japanese war, begun in July 1937, and traces it through December 1941 when the United States allied with Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi). Until then, despite American sympathies for China and limited assistance, that country stood forlorn against Imperial Japan. During this time a number of private US citizens worked on behalf of China to prevent its defeat. Most prominent among the would-be rescuers was a washed-out Army Air Corps officer, Claire Lee Chennault, and a freelance revolutionist, Agnes Smedley.¹⁹ Their Chinese careers involved military boldness – Chennault’s mercenary air force, the Flying Tigers – and radical zeal in Smedley’s case. These lines from Smedley’s autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, published before she knew the Far East well, help explain her China passion: “I have no country … my countrymen are the men and women who work against oppression – it does not matter who or where they are. With them I feel at home – we understand each other. Others are foreign to me.”²⁰

Part II: Axis

1. 4. Apologia for Mussolini: This chapter considers Benito Mussolini’s foremost American backer, poet Ezra Pound, who won recognition in his lifetime as one of the avant-garde’s elect. Pound perceived in Fascism a solution to Europe’s moral laxity and Italy’s congenital political-economic instability. To him, Mussolini was a species of savior who promised civilization’s redemption. Enthusiasm for the Duce led Pound to write and speak on Fascism’s behalf throughout the 1930s and beyond. In service to wartime Italy, Pound beamed broadcasts on Radio Rome to US and British audiences. He had hoped that the United States would abstain from European hostilities, to which end he lobbied Washington congressmen. Adulation of the Duce sullied the poet’s legacy and cost him more than ten years in confinement.

2. 5. Japan Forays: For diverse reasons, a handful of Americans in the 1930s looked to Japan. The country radiated racial hopefulness for Du Bois, opponent of the white empires and exponent of pan-Asian–African solidarity. To Helen Keller, people in Japan who lived with physical disability, particularly those denied sight and hearing, deserved support. To Bishop James Walsh and Father James Drought, Roman Catholic priests, the unraveling of Japanese–US relations might yet be checked. This conviction led them to undertake a private diplomatic mission, its goal – premised on preserving the peace – being to safeguard Christian proselytizing in East Asia. None of the people featured in this chapter stayed long in Japan. Yet collectively their forays illuminated aspects of Japanese–US relations on the eve of the Pacific war. In late 1936, before she visited the country, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lay in the undisclosed future, Keller wrote: “The order of nature will always necessitate pain, failure, separation, death; and these will probably become more menacing as the complexities and dangerous experiments of a vast world civilization increase.”²¹

3. 6. Chasing after Strange Gods: No consensus existed among Americans in the 1930s as they contemplated Germany’s role in the world or the nature of Nazi society, as shown by Philip Johnson and Mildred Fish-Harnack. Destined to become one of America’s chief architects, Johnson was in the 1930s enamored of the Third Reich. Visits to Germany inspired him, to the point that he hoped a version of Adolf Hitler’s regime might be tacked onto the United States, to which end he expended energy. In contrast to Johnson stood Fish-Harnack, a scholarly minded Wisconsinite. She loved Germany as Das Land der Dichter und Denker (land of poets and thinkers). With her husband, a German national, she made her home in Berlin in the late 1920s. By 1935, this brave couple was immersed in the anti-Nazi underground.

Part III: Survival

1. 7. In Vichy France: Marshal Philippe Pétain’s France occupied an intermediate position in US calculations: neither friend nor foe. Albeit subservient to Germany and antagonistic toward Great Britain, Vichy officials worked to preserve Washington ties. This suited FDR’s government, eager to discourage France from developing an exclusive dependence on Germany. Not until Anglo-US armies invaded French North Africa in November 1942 did relations between Washington and Vichy snap. Even then, despite opposition to the Allied landings by Vichy forces, the United States and Pétain’s France never declared war on each other.

   The ambiguities inherent in Vichy–US relations were evidenced in two celebrity expatriates: writer Gertrude Stein and entertainer Josephine Baker. They belonged to opposite sides of the Vichy question. Stein admired much in Pétain’s regime, which position she maintained in public prints and private correspondence. Baker worked undercover for Charles de Gaulle’s Free France.

   Unlike Stein and Baker, Varian Fry knew little of French life before war’s outbreak in 1939. Yet his involvement in France between its 1940 capitulation and Pearl Harbor was intense. He helped spirit out of the so-called free zone 2,000 people hunted by Germany and its Vichy accomplices.

2. 8. Defense of the Islands: Germany’s defeat of France deprived Great Britain of a major continental ally, which circumstance obtained until June 1941, when Hitler launched his Soviet invasion, Barbarossa. Even so, most military analysts in London and Washington doubted that the USSR could withstand Germany. Following the predicted surrender of the Soviets, Berlin presumably would resume unfinished business: subduing the British Isles. Feeling in America ran high for Britain. Measures short of war and grants of moderate aid won favor on Capitol Hill. The majority view in Washington and the public, though, held that the United States should avoid anything like the Great War intervention. A few thousand Americans (in their late teens to late twenties), in defiance of US neutrality laws, nonetheless made their way to Britain to join the anti-German fight. These people enrolled in civilian or armed services: the Royal Navy, for instance, or more often the Royal Air Force. Other Americans eager for action got to Britain as members of the Canadian forces, particularly the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). One such youngster was John Gillespie Magee, inducted into the RCAF in 1940. The degree to which he has been remembered since his death at nineteen in 1941 stems from writing a sonnet popular with Anglophone aviators, “High Flight.” More urgent than the poem was Magee’s dedication to British well-being, sustained by personal ties and affection for that country’s cultural traditions.

   Virginia Hall lacked sentiment comparable to Magee’s. Rather, Britain attracted Hall because it opposed German aggression and Nazi brutality, which she had witnessed first-hand on the continent. She enlisted in Britain’s clandestine Special Operations Executive to work in France (and later signed with the US equivalent, the Office of Strategic Services). Britain in extremis in 1940 initiated Hall into a remarkable career, hitherto unanticipated during years of clerical assignment in a hidebound State Department.

3. 9. Soviet Crucible: The American imagination in the decade before Pearl Harbor held mutually exclusive images of the USSR. To numerous pundits, clergymen, and businessmen, the USSR was anathema. The country promoted gory revolutions, asserted as superfluous categories of people – the bourgeoisie, aristocrats – and preached atheism. It repudiated financial obligations and mocked norms, laws, and customs refined over centuries.

   Conversely, to legions of people estranged from US life, the Soviet Union was the harbinger of a radiant future. Class justice, racial harmony, gender equality, and modernization unencumbered by rapacious capitalism and liberal cant would reign. Despite inklings that not all was right, Anna Louise Strong devoted intellect and vigor to the USSR, from the 1920s onward. To Strong, the triumph of the proletarian republic in World War II vindicated Stalin’s leadership, which had already steered the country through collectivization, rapid industrialization, purge of traitors, and the shenanigans of foreign capitalists.

4. 10. Coming Home: The last chapter makes explicit what is implicit elsewhere in the book, bringing seekers and partisans of the World War II era into conversation with each other and later Americans. That dilemmas in the twenty-first century are confounding, the book’s pilgrims would have concurred. But these people, being so dissimilar to each other, would point us in disparate directions. On balance, I believe, Helen Keller was right for our day, as well as hers, when she said: “To be sure, American democracy is far from what it should be, but it would be a grievous calamity if its daring faith was lost to mankind.”²² Yet in this season when the “bonds of affection” between citizens have run demonstrably thin, Henry James’s words (lifted from another context) also apply: “Life at home has never been strikingly agreeable” for many people.²³ Therefore, “we shall probably for a long time continue to see numbers of Americans absenting themselves from the United States.”²⁴