The influence of immigrant groups upon American foreign relations has been recognized in most standard American diplomatic histories, but reference is usually made in passing, and is rarely adequately documented. The administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Taft are cases in point, and the influence of Jewish-Americans on certain of their decisions is the subject of this paper. No attempt has been made to exhaust the subjects of Jewish-American activities, Russo-American relations, or the Jews in Russia during the period analysed, but an effort has been made to illustrate, briefly, the general principle that immigrant minorities can exert an immense amount of pressure on American governments. Attention is focussed not upon the organization of a Jewish lobby, most notably the American Jewish Committee, but upon foreign policy decisions made in the light of what each President and Congress felt were demands and pressures from the potent Jewish minority.

Historians, as they search the mounting wave of assisted emigration from Britain to North America during the 1830s and 40s, naturally expect the quantity of surviving record to vary with the source of assistance. The wealth of their material, that is to say, is likely to differ according as the emigrants' sponsor was (e.g.) the government, a Poor Law Union, a co-operative society, a trade association, a private philanthropist or a calculating landlord. As a rule, a small number of men and women banding together to leave these shores, and being neither a true group migration nor an experimental community, would leave behind few traces outside the folios of family correspondence. To this the British Temperance Emigration Society was no exception. We cannot be sure what its members really had in common; whether temperance, or Primitive Methodism, or small shopkeeping, or artisanship in distress. Its very existence is discernible this side of the Atlantic only by a few short items in a handful of mid-century provincial journals.

Recent work on American foreign policy between the two world wars has shown some dissatisfaction with the term “isolationism” as a tool for the historian. The immediate reasons for this dissatisfaction are two. First, it is remarkably difficult to identify an individual statesman firmly as an isolationist or an interventionist. Lodge, Hughes, Kellogg, Hoover, Stimson, Roosevelt, Hull – the list could be extended – all move embarrassingly from positions which can be called isolationist to others which seem to strain the term past recognition; nor are these shifts in one direction only. Second, a specific policy which can be identified as isolationist is often justified by remarkably various arguments, so that support for the policy makes some curious allies, while dividing men from others with whom they seem, in general, to have far more in common. If the term can be used neither to identify a man throughout his career, nor to identify a group of attitudes, a cast of political mind, its usefulness is certainly diminished

Blake cursed “the single vision and Newton's sleep”. Thomas Hood delineated the effects of industrialization with indignant pity. The Georgians, in their own more limited fashion, carried on the good work with poems like Gordon Bottomley's To Iron-Founders and Others. But today an enthusiastic ode to an aeroplane propeller or to the hypothetical explosion of the universe would arouse no surprise, and it is generally accepted that whether a writer sees science and its technological offspring as a juggernaut or as a beaming sunrise has no direct bearing on the value of his work.

In 1877 a thirty-one year old Wesleyan minister was returning, after twelve months at home in England, to the missionary work in China which he had begun in 1868. This time he decided to sail to New York, travel across the continent to San Francisco, and conclude his journey thence by sea. He was the Reverend Thomas Gunn Selby, son of a Nottingham lace manufacturer, and he recorded some of his impressions of the overland route in the journal entries reproduced below. Despite the inevitable brevity of some of his comments, the journal may be of interest to our readers for its first-hand and often graphic account of travel conditions, its reference to places familiar in another light to more recent visitors, the aspects of American religious activities on which it touches, and for many other details that emerge pleasantly ond spontaneously from his writing. This was Mark Twain's America, but not quite as Twain saw it. To Mr. Selby's account I have added only such notes as may clarify for the modem reader some ot his aliusions, but no attempt has been made to identify all the people he met.