America and Leading by Example: Peonage, Totalitarianism, and the Second World War

• In Event: Economy and Foreign Policy

Brief Overview

This paper explores the grand strategy of leading by example, unpacking its logic and exploring how policy elites employed it in the early 1940s to end peonage (debt servitude) as the US sought to lead the “free world” against totalitarianism.

Author

• James Joseph Marquardt, Lake Forest College