Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 240
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-1-5381-4308-7 • Hardback • December 2020 • $133.00 • (£102.00)
978-1-5381-7117-2 • Paperback • August 2022 • $38.00 • (£30.00)
978-1-5381-4309-4 • eBook • December 2020 • $36.00 • (£30.00)
Roger B. Jeans Jr. is Elizabeth Lewis Otey Professor of History Emeritus at Washington and Lee University. His books include The Letters and Diaries of Colonel John Hart Caughey, 1944–1945: With Wedemeyer in World War II China; The CIA and Third Force Movements in China during the Early Cold War: The Great American Dream; andTerasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied Japan.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Isolationism, Japan, and the FBI, 1939–1941
1 O. K. Armstrong and the Pro-Japan Isolationists in Prewar America
2 Businessmen and Generals
3 The Professoriat
4 Pacifists and Former Missionaries
5 Journalists
6 “We Plan to Prevent War, If Possible, with Japan”: The Committee on Pacific Relations
7 The FBI and Pro-Japan Isolationists
Conclusion
Epilogue: The Afterlife of an Isolationist
Bibliography
About the Author
While the story of Charles Lindbergh and America First with its isolationist, pro-German leanings is a familiar one, less well-known is the smaller pacifist, pro-Japanese movement. Roger Jeans admirably fills the gap with this important new work. Jeans focuses on O. K. Armstrong, a Missouri politician, who tried to get prominent intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and missionaries to join his Committee on Pacific Relations. Because of his contacts with the Japanese Embassy before Pearl Harbor, he drew the attention of the FBI, whose reports Jeans mines for his richly detailed study.
— Parks Coble, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
This fascinating book brings to life the diverse group of Americans who attempted to create a pro-Japan isolationist organization before Pearl Harbor. Roger Jeans’s original study reveals the group’s naïveté, growing unpopularity, and unrealistic proposals as it follows the meanderings of an intriguing range of pro-Japan sympathizers whose activities made them targets for Japanese diplomats and FBI agents.
— Edward Drea, author of Japan's Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1868-1945
American Isolationists is an invaluable contribution that answers the question of who struggled to head off a war between the United States and Japan…[I]t is well researched, and its documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act make it a major contribution on par with Wayne Cole’s multiple works covering anti-interventionists Senator Gerald Nye, Charles Lindbergh, and the America First Group.
— Pacific Historical Review