| Summary/Abstract |
Recently, historians have started to consider the role and evolution of secrecy in American foreign affairs in the post-1945 period. A special issue of this journal was even devoted to it in 2011.1 Yet historians have never meaningfully considered secrecy’s role in U.S. international relations prior to the Second World War. International historians have neglected to appreciate that the United States’ present institutionalized culture of official secrecy concerning foreign affairs is, uniquely among the nineteenth century’s great powers, wholly a creature of the twentieth century and would be profoundly alien to any of the State Department’s occupants in the years leading up to the First World War. Whereas the publication of State Department cables in 2010 on WikiLeaks provoked paroxysms of official panic, during the second half of the nineteenth century such publications were not only routine but undertaken annually by the department itself. Secrecy simply was not integral to how the nation went about its business abroad.
|