War & Peace Quote by W. Averell Harriman

A chill runs through Harriman's breezy "almost overnight": it captures how catastrophe can do what diplomacy, commerce, and idealism often fail to accomplish. As a statesman who moved easily between boardrooms and embassies, Harriman isn't marveling at a cultural awakening so much as admitting that World War II forced Americans out of their provincial comfort. "International" here isn't a passport stamp; it's a rewiring of priorities. The old idea that the Atlantic and Pacific were protective moats died under the pressure of global supply chains, mass mobilization, and the blunt fact that threats could arrive faster than debates.

The line's power is its compressed timeline. "Overnight" is a rhetorical shortcut that makes institutional transformation feel like a personal epiphany, flattening the messy reality of reluctant alliances, propaganda, rationing, and grief into a single pivot point. That simplification is strategic: it legitimizes the postwar order Harriman helped build - permanent alliances, aid programs, an expanded national security state - as not merely policy choices but common-sense responses to a new world.

There's subtext, too, in "everybody's attitude". It's democratic on the surface, but it also smooths over who did the changing and who did the persuading. Elites like Harriman were already internationalists by necessity; war gave them the leverage to make that stance mainstream. The quote is less a memoir note than a quiet justification: history didn't just happen to us, it corrected us.