Jim Crow Foreign Policy:
The Racial Underpinnings of America's Global Rise

Abstract

As a rising power in the 20th century, the United States had opportunities to expand territorially beyond North America but refrained. Popular discourse credits republican norms, while recent scholarship points to xenophobia. This article introduces a different explanation through a textual ethnography of official records, periodicals, and personal papers of policy elites. It argues that Jim Crow Senators influenced U.S. foreign policy to refrain from large colonial projects. Their motivation stemmed from fears that such projects would strengthen the U.S. Army, which could jeopardize the Jim Crow political economy if the North intervened again in the South. An auxiliary statistical analysis in the appendix corroborates the foundations of this analysis. This article adds to the growing research on race in international relations by documenting that domestic race relations influenced U.S. foreign policy beyond prejudice and highlighting the value of interpretivism in unveiling how racial projects work.