Fighting World Government: Revisiting the Grassroots Campaigns Against the UN and Liberal Internationalism in Postwar America

This talk recovers the history of a grassroots American “sovereigntist” movement that battled against US involvement in the UN and other liberal internationalist institutions and agreements during the postwar era. With its origins in the period after WWI and its ideological inspirations from Christian fundamentalism and constitutional nationalism, the sovereigntist movement developed a unique imaginary of foreign policy and launched political battles battle against “World Government.” The history of the sovereigntist movement offers a new vantage point on the politics of the US role in the world after WWII.

Jennifer Mittelstadt is Professor of History at Rutgers University, where she studies the twentieth-century United States, with broad interests in the state and social policy, politics, women and gender, social movements, the military, and foreign affairs. She is the author of From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1964 (University of North Carolina, 2005) and The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Harvard University Press, 2015). Her work has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; and she has served as the Harold K. Johnson Chair in Military History at the US Army War College. She is currently working on a book about grassroots right-wing participation in US foreign policy in the twentieth century.

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