Preview and synopsis of Associate Professor Dr. DJ Cash's forthcoming book, The Forgotten Debate: Political Opinion Journals, the Korean War, and the Roots of America’s Ideological Divisions, to be published by University Press of Kansas in 2024.
The Korean War was one of the most important, if underappreciated, moments in modern American history. As Korea was the first “hot war” of the Cold War era, American intervention in Korea raised profound questions about America’s new role as global superpower and “leader of the free world”—issues that continue to reverberate well into the 21st century. Though we often think about the 1950s as the period of “liberal consensus,” the reality is that liberals and conservatives had very different ideas about what America’s global role should be, both in Korea and in the rest of the world in the wake of the North Korean invasion of its southern neighbor and, perhaps more significantly, Communist Chinese intervention in the conflict. What were the most important of those ideological differences, and what significance do they hold for the development of modern liberalism and conservatism?
The Forgotten Debate makes a twofold argument. First, far from there having been a “liberal consensus,” my research demonstrates that liberals themselves were quite divided about the proper course of action in Korea and in the Cold War more generally. Left liberals supported containment policy and its manifestation as a limited war in Korea, whereas hawkish liberals favored a much more aggressive strategy, particularly vis-à-vis Communist China, that was largely indistinguishable from the position taken by avowed conservatives. In this way, the debate among liberals during the Korean War prefigured the split between dovish liberals and hawkish neoconservatives that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. The seeds of neoconservatism, the ideology that was largely responsible for taking the US into Iraq in 2003, were thus sown much earlier than is typically appreciated.
Second, conservative voices were galvanized by what they perceived to be American timidity (and ultimately failure) in prosecuting the Korean War. Korea, for conservatives, was a potential turning point in the Cold War where America failed to turn. Their frustrations about Korea and American weakness toward China led them to develop a unilateralist/”America First” foreign policy and coalesce into a coherent movement several years prior to the founding of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review in 1954, which is generally considered to be the genesis of modern conservatism. In short, the debates that took place during the Korean War began to expose many of the ideological fault lines that have plagued American culture and politics ever since and, indeed, have only widened over time.
I first conceived of this project in the midst of the national debate about the Iraq War (2003-2011), when partisan media outlets like Fox News and msnbc laid bare America’s political and ideological divisions on a nightly basis. With no cable news, blogs, or twitter feeds, the media landscape was of course quite different during the early 1950s, but I found myself wondering what the debate about Korea might have looked like had there been some approximation of Fox News and msnbc at the time. Fortunately, The Forgotten Debate reveals that we have just such an approximation in America’s leading political opinion journals.
On the left were The Nation and The New Republic, publications which continue to advocate for the liberal/progressive viewpoint today. There was also Commonweal, a lay Catholic journal, that proved a curious blend of what we might call the Christian Left and the Christian Right. Further to the right was The New Leader, a liberal journal that generally took the expected liberal line on domestic issues but was exceptionally hawkish on foreign policy. There was indeed much overlap between these hawkish liberal writers and the contributors to avowedly conservative journals like The Freeman and The American Mercury. The Freeman, as it began publication four years prior to Buckley’s National Review, is perhaps best remembered as the “John the Baptist” to National Review’s Jesus. And Buckley himself was on staff at the Mercury during the years under study. Taken together, many writers and editors at these two conservative publications wound up working with Buckley to later unify the conservative movement in the latter half of the 1950s.
The Forgotten Debate chronicles the various issues that divided left liberals from hawkish liberals, and liberals from conservatives, during the crucible of the Korean War. These issues include how the US should respond to the outbreak of war, how the US should respond to Chinese intervention, to what extent should the US work through multilateral institutions like the UN vs. act unilaterally on the world stage, who was correct in the Truman-MacArthur controversy, what would the outcome of the 1952 election mean for US foreign policy, and were truce negotiations a farce or principled and ultimately successful? In the end, the debates the book chronicles shed new light on how the Korean War helped lay the groundwork for many of our enduring ideological divisions, as manifested most recently during the Iraq War and Trump-era “America Firstism.”