Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again!

I’ve been reading Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism in which Radosh discusses the views of the “isolationist” conservatives of the World War I & II eras. The book, a sympathetic portrayal of its subjects, was written during Radosh’s “New Left” phase, before he went neocon and started writing for David Horowitz’s Front Page Mag. Radosh even collaborated for a while with libertarian isolationist Murray Rothbard on the short-lived journal Left and Right. The book jacket actually has a postivie blurb from Horowitz (still in his New Left phase at the time) and Horowitz’s bête noire Noam Chomsky!

Anyway, in the chapter on historian Charles Beard, Radosh writes:

Beard supported Herbert Hoover’s definition of national defense: the armed forces existed only to prevent an invasion of the mainland. The armed forces had to protect the nation’s continental heritage, not move to defend the American dollar wherever it happened to be threatened. (p. 21)

That Herbert Hoover! What was he, some kind of America-hating peacenik?