The Good Neighbor Theory of American Literature

Abstract Drawing on long-ignored essays, poems, and radio plays, this chapter demonstrates that the eminent writer and administrator Archibald MacLeish articulated a complex, if often disappointing critique of US power during the early to mid-1940s. I argue that MacLeish sought to resist US jingoism by locating in hemispheric American texts of first contact the source of a new internationalism. A Western humanist, MacLeish did not fully acknowledge the racist violence endemic to European imperialism and colonialism in the Americas, but he did at times define early American literature as a valuable record of intercultural conflict and communication. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to analyses of MacLeish’s controversial essay “The Irresponsibles” (1940) and his multi-lingual radio series The American Story (1944). The chapter ends by connecting these works to MacLeish’s framing of the United Nations as a `new world’ of internationalist possibility in a 1945 speech for Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr.