In this stimulating study, Elizabeth McKillen seeks to expand the boundaries of diplomatic history by inserting class and labor into a discussion of Wilsonian foreign policy in the World War I era. McKillen argues that US working-class opposition to World War I—not only from Socialists and Wobblies, but also from rank-and-file AFL members—played a larger role in influencing Wilsonian internationalism than previous scholarship has recognized. In doing so, McKillen also aims to insert national history, through a foreign policy lens, within a transnationalist framework.
Importantly, McKillen brings borderlands history into the conversation, locating the genesis of leftist disillusion with Woodrow Wilson’s international intentions in the turbulent years of the Mexican Revolution, when US military involvement across the border signaled to many on the Left that Wilson’s proclaimed goals for peace were a disguise for rank imperialism. At the same time, the opposition of Socialists and anarcho-syndicalists to US foreign policy...
