Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s

by Barbara J. Keys

Overview

The American commitment to international human rights emerged in the 1970s not as a logical outgrowth of American idealism but as a surprising response to national trauma, as Barbara Keys shows in this provocative history. Reclaiming American Virtue situates this novel enthusiasm as a reaction to the profound challenge of the Vietnam War and its tumultuous aftermath. Instead of looking inward for renewal, Americans on the right and the left alike looked outward for ways to restore America’s moral leadership.

Conservatives took up the language of Soviet dissidents to resuscitate a Cold War narrative that pitted a virtuous United States against the evils of communism. Liberals sought moral cleansing by dissociating the United States from foreign malefactors, spotlighting abuses such as torture in Chile, South Korea, and other right-wing allies. When Jimmy Carter in 1977 made human rights a central tenet of American foreign policy, his administration struggled to reconcile these conflicting visions.

Yet liberals and conservatives both saw human rights as a way of moving from guilt to pride. Less a critique of American power than a rehabilitation of it, human rights functioned for Americans as a sleight of hand that occluded from view much of America’s recent past and confined the lessons of Vietnam to narrow parameters. It would be a small step from world’s judge to world’s policeman, and American intervention in the name of human rights would be a cause both liberals and conservatives could embrace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674724853
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	02/17/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Barbara J. Keys is Associate Professor of U.S. and International History at the University of Melbourne.

Editorial Reviews

10/28/2013
This timely, well-reasoned study demonstrates why Americans from across the political spectrum embraced international human rights as a foreign policy goal. Historian Keys (Globalizing Sport) argues that timing was everything; Americans needed a way to move beyond the drama and the trauma of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. The promotion of human rights provided a moral, idealistic way for Americans to accomplish something positive in the world while making them feel good in the process. The 1976 presidential campaign publicly foregrounded the issue; the victor, Jimmy Carter, had insisted on making human rights a core component of his foreign policy agenda. But years before, liberal Democratic congressman Donald Fraser had been working to promote the idea that the way a government treated its citizens was more important than whether or not that government was communist. The U.S., he believed, should help other countries achieve democracy by establishing governments that acknowledge human rights. During the early 1970s, conservative Sen. Henry Jackson, a staunch anticommunist, also supported human rights as a way of destabilizing the Soviet regime. Unfortunately, for all the important ideas and background Keys offers, her book lacks an engaging narrative thread to sustain the interest of nonacademic readers. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Today, human rights and global interdependence are accepted as an essential basis for national and international affairs. Barbara Keys shows precisely when, where, and how this complete reconceptualization of America’s role in the world came about. A major contribution to the growing body of literature in human rights history.

Akira Iriye

A genuine masterpiece of the historian’s craft, Reclaiming American Virtue shows how human rights were a tonic for the country’s self-confidence. America’s fusion of moral principle and global violence in today’s world no longer looks the same after this revelatory book.

Samuel Moyn

The most comprehensive account of a central issue of U.S. foreign policy during an exceptionally important decade, Reclaiming American Virtue is clearly a major achievement.

Lars Schoultz

Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s is a vigorous and engaging account of the emergence of the concept and its non-linear journey from lip-serving political piety to an integral, if contradictory, component of the foreign policy of the U.S.

Times Higher Education - Marilyn B. Young

2013-12-22
A genealogy of America's crusade to advance human rights in the world, its origins "an antidote to shame and guilt." The idea of human rights went beyond sloganeering and mere diplomacy, writes Keys (American and International History/Univ. of Melbourne; Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s, 2006). In the years following the Vietnam War, it reinforced ideals that had been compromised by the war and the Watergate scandal. One facet was the reframing of foreign policy to reward those few nations that were generous with human rights, particularly with respect to dissidents, and to exert pressure on those that were not. Détente between the Soviet Union and the United States helped open the discussion from the old Cold War tensions to new concerns, just as, thanks to advances in communications, "[i]t became possible to collect information about victims of repression abroad more cheaply, easily, and rapidly than before." The presidency of Jimmy Carter became known for the centrality of human rights, if rather vaguely defined and with a moral dimension that verged on idealism; Keys wonders whether that emphasis favored building civil liberties at the expense of other considerations, such as feeding the population. In whichever instance, the late 1970s saw the establishment or flourishing of many human rights organizations that pressed specific causes, such as the Human Rights Watch, "founded in 1978 to monitor Soviet-bloc adherence to the human rights and human contacts provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Accords." Interestingly, the cause of human rights was slow to catch on among leftist and even liberal groups--Morris Udall scarcely mentioned the matter when he was running for the presidency--while neoconservatives began to cloak their arguments for intervention in places like Iraq in the language of civil liberties. An accessible, searching study of an idea that seems to have been forgotten in favor of the steely, cost-cutting pragmatism of today.

Kirkus Reviews