From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (46 page)

Still, after the Civil War, U.S. business became more involved internationally. Government and business sponsored participation in expositions and world fairs to attract immigrant laborers and foreign capital and peddle their wares. For the first time, the nation had surplus capital to export. American entrepreneurs exploited mines and built railroads in other countries, especially in such friendly environs for foreign investors as Porfirio Diaz's Mexico. With the backing of J. P. Morgan & Co., James Scrymers linked the United States to much of South America by cable. United States companies dominated Russian markets in such diverse areas as farm machinery and life insurance. No firm exceeded John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil in the breadth of its overseas operations. From the outset, Rockefeller set out aggressively to capture "the utmost market in all lands." Assisted by U.S. consuls who even bought lamps with their own funds and distributed them to create demand, his oil and kerosene found a huge market in a rapidly industrializing Europe. According to a Standard Oil representative, the corporation "forced its way into more nooks and corners of civilized and uncivilized countries than any other product in business history emanating from a single source." Throughout East Asia, Standard Oil's blue tin cans were a mainstay of the local economies, used to make tile roofs, opium cups, and hibachis. As late as the 1940s, "Rockefeller lamps" were status symbols in Vietnam.
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America's Gilded Age foreign policies reflected these crosscurrents. Statesmen devoted relatively little time to foreign policy because there was no need to do so and because domestic issues were generally more pressing. "The President has rarely leisure to give close or continuous attention to foreign policy," Englishman James Bryce observed.
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Most leaders understandably hesitated to take on major commitments abroad. As far as Europe was concerned, they absolutely refused to do so. What has been called "old paradigm" foreign policy generally consisted of improvised and ad hoc responses to developments abroad.
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But that was only one side of the picture. Many younger Americans, especially offspring of the elite, shared a growing sense of the nation's rising power and status in the world. Some warned of dangers in a changing international situation and urged reconsideration of traditional foreign policy principles. Some saw domestic imperatives as demanding more active policies. There was no master plan or grand design, to be sure, but many Americans agreed upon the need to expand foreign markets and increase U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific. Some even expressed interest in acquiring territory.

In an era when political parties were fragmented and nearly equal in strength and when domestic issues held center stage, party positions on foreign policy were not sharply drawn. Republicans and Democrats agreed that the United States should abstain from involvement in Europe's politics, alliances, and wars. Most Americans supported expanding their nation's influence in the Western Hemisphere.

Composed of diverse regional and socioeconomic interests, the Democratic Party remained true to its Jeffersonian roots in supporting laissez-faire, limited government, and public frugality. Most Democrats advocated free trade and opposed protectionism. Some like Alabama's Morgan kept alive the expansionism of southern Democrats in the 1850s, advocating aggressive pursuit of foreign markets, a large modern navy, and construction of an isthmian canal to help free the South from "foreign" oppression at the hands of British creditors and northern reconstructionists. Morgan even endorsed the acquisition of overseas territory to boost the South's political power and provide a haven for colonized blacks. The great majority of southerners, on the other hand, opposed policies that might result in the absorption of non-white peoples, strengthening of the federal government, and competition with their agricultural products.
Most Democrats viewed commercial and territorial expansion as contrary to American traditions and principles. Some like Georgia's James Blount saw colonial acquisitions as all too reminiscent of the North's imposition of outside rule on the defeated South.
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The Republican Party had in many ways outlived the anti-slavery platform that brought it into being. Most Republicans still believed in a strong central government and subsidizing economic growth through a protective tariff. Some clung to cautious Whiggish notions opposing expansion. Others followed Seward in pushing for a more assertive foreign policy, a large navy, and a canal. The party was changing from its Whig roots to outright support of expansion and even imperialism.

Because the times did not demand it (and probably would not have permitted it), no Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, or Seward arose among Gilded Age diplomatists, and efforts on the part of historians to make one of James G. Blaine remain unconvincing. Secretaries of State William Evarts (1877–81), Frederick Frelinghuysen (1881–85), and Thomas Bayard (1885–89) were in most matters cautious. They managed American diplomacy without bravado but with quiet competence.
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President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, was stubborn, unimaginative, and insular in his thinking, but he was not afraid to make tough foreign policy decisions. He displayed on occasion an admirable tendency to do the right thing for the right reason, injecting an element of morality into an area of endeavor and political climate where it was normally absent.

Blaine served at the beginning of the 1880s and 1890s and was far and away the most colorful, controversial, and important of the lot. Charming, energetic, and hugely ambitious—"When I want a thing, I want it dreadfully," he once said—the "Plumed Knight" was a total political animal and a rabidly partisan Republican.
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Intense, suspicious, and given to intrigue, he was often linked with the corruption that marked the age. If he
was
involved, he was too clever to get caught. As secretary of state, he was much more inclined to project American power abroad than the lawyers who preceded and followed him. He pursued with characteristic energy the expansion of U.S. trade and influence in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific. He shared with earlier generations of Americans a sense of the nation's greatness and destiny. He developed a vision of empire
that included U.S. preeminence in the hemisphere, commercial domination of the Pacific, an American-owned canal, and even the acquisition of Hawaii, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Especially in his first term as secretary of state, "Jingo Jim," as he was called, could be impulsive, heavy-handed, and insensitive to other peoples. His diplomacy was also sometimes marked by demagoguery.
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He was denied greatness in part because of such deficiencies in his leadership but even more because his tangible accomplishments were few and because the times did not provide the sort of foreign policy challenges faced by his more illustrious predecessors. At the same time, his "blueprint" for U.S. expansion and his mentoring of such future leaders as William McKinley and John Hay establish him as a major link between antebellum expansionism and late nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism.
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The instruments of Gilded Age foreign policy reflected more the nation's insular past than its global future. The State Department escaped the worst abuses of the era of spoilsmen, but its staff of eighty-one people remained small for an incipient world power. Work hours were a leisurely 9:00
A.M
. to 4:00
P.M
.; the pace was very slow.
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State's methods of operation dated to John Quincy Adams. Much of the work was done by a single person, the legendary Alvey Adee, a bureaucrat par excellence who served nearly forty years as second assistant secretary of state. The State Department's institutional memory and a master of diplomatic practice, Adee drafted most of its instructions and dispatches. "Why there isn't a kitten born in a palace anywhere on earth that I don't have to write a letter of congratulation to the peripatetic tomcat that might have been its sire," Theodore Roosevelt would later joke, "and old Adee does that for me!"
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The rank of ambassador was still considered too pretentious for a republic, and U.S. diplomats were often outranked by representatives of much smaller nations. All were political appointees. Some such as James Russell Lowell in England and Andrew Dickson White in Germany distinguished themselves. Most of the "foreign service" consisted of "second-rate personnel frequently forced to live in third-rate surroundings," provoking John Hay to compare the diplomatic vocation to the " 'Catholic Church, calculated only for celibates.' "
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In places like Japan, because of
recurrent attacks on foreigners and devastating fires, diplomatic service could be life-threatening. A remarkable informality and ease of movement characterized the diplomatic community. Ebenezar Don Carlos Bassett became the first U.S. minister to Haiti and the first African American to hold a diplomatic position. When his term expired, he entered the Haitian foreign service and subsequently became consul-general in the United States.
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The number of consulates had grown to two hundred by this time, supplemented by four hundred agencies in less important areas. Some consulates provided respectable pay; most compensated scant money with an exotic place to live.
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The state of the military reflected the mood of a nation without major external threat and still suffering from the fallout of a long and bloody war. The mighty army that had defeated the Confederacy was demobilized. A tiny remnant scattered in posts across the West occupied itself with eliminating Indian resistance. The once proud U.S. Navy was also scuttled, by the 1870s ranking below the "fleets" of Paraguay and Turkey. "The mention of our Navy only excites a smile," a shipbuilder snarled. "We have not six ships that would be kept at sea in war by any maritime power," the future high priest of sea power Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan protested.
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Even in the Gilded Age, however, there were signs of the institutional changes that would mark America's rise to world power. Substantive reform of the State Department awaited the twentieth century, but the consular service was upgraded and focused toward finding markets. The army sought to improve the quality of its enlisted personnel and better educate its officers, created an intelligence arm, and in 1885 conducted its first large-scale maneuvers. The real focus of Gilded Age reform was the navy. Spurred by aggressive and sometimes alarmist naval officers and by a war scare with Chile, the Chester A. Arthur administration in the early 1880s initiated major efforts to build a modern fleet, establishing a Naval War College and the Office of Naval Intelligence and commissioning three new armor-plated cruisers to protect merchant ships in remote areas. Cleveland continued the naval building program. Modernization was well under way by the 1890s.

Symbolic of an emerging nation—if still way ahead of the upgrading of the agencies it housed—was the completion in 1888 of the State, War, Navy Building just west of the White House. Built at a cost of more than $10 million, this masterpiece of Victorian excess had a total floor area of ten acres and almost two miles of corridors. Some Americans boasted that it was the largest and finest office building in the world. At the very least, a Washington newspaper proclaimed, it was the "finest in the United States, and in every way worthy . . . [of] the uses to which it is to be devoted."
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Immigration strikingly reshaped U.S. society in the late nineteenth century, and some of the most complex problems for Gilded Age diplomacy stemmed from the increasing number, size, and diversity of ethnic groups in the United States. The pattern of immigration during the Gilded Age shifted from northern to eastern and southern Europe and Asia, bringing to U.S. shores millions of so-called new immigrants much less familiar in terms of their ethnicity, language, religion, and culture. The presence of immigrants from exotic races provoked growing internal tensions and in different ways sparked conflict with other countries. The harsh treatment of the new ethnic groups by bigoted Americans provoked diplomatic crises with the nations of their origin. The involvement of immigrants or naturalized Americans with revolutions in their homelands brought the United States into conflict with the threatened governments. Anticipating one of the major problems of twentieth-century foreign relations, some ethnic groups sought to get the U.S. government to defend their compatriots from oppression. The emergence of such problems in the Gilded Age highlighted the uniqueness of the American political system, the changing nature of U.S. foreign relations, and the nation's increasingly close connections with the outside world.

An old standby, the Irish problem, flared up anew in the late nineteenth century. Naturalized Americans played an increasingly prominent role in the ongoing Irish rebellion against British rule. The United States became a leading source of arms and explosives for Irish terrorists. The British Parliament sought to contain the flare-up in 1881 with a Coercion Act that permitted detention without trial of suspected revolutionaries. Some U.S. citizens were imprisoned under the act and appealed to Washington for help. The British also pressed Washington to shut down the Irish-American newspapers that encouraged arms shipments. A notorious
Anglophobe, Blaine at first demanded release of the Americans. His successor, the usually calm Frelinghuysen, stood firmly for freedom of the press. Long-standing tensions in Anglo-American relations and Britain's traditional role as a whipping boy of U.S. politics created the potential for a crisis.

Sanity eventually prevailed. Some of the arrested Americans turned out to be shady characters, not the sort of persons causes célèbres are made of. It became increasingly obvious that they were using U.S. citizenship to protect themselves from British law. Blaine dismissed one who had falsified passport information as "a pestiferous fellow" who "deserved what he got."
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Generally, he came to regard the agitators as "the scum of Europe." Some Americans continued to protest the treatment of their fellow citizens and the government's apparent indifference. "Oh, that we only had as much protection given to a live American citizen as . . . a dead Cincinnati hog!" a Brooklyn congressmen protested, an obvious reference to the simultaneous dispute with Britain and other European countries over U.S. exports of pork.
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Most Americans sympathized with Irish nationalism, but not to the point of sparking a crisis with Britain. The increasingly overt and brazen activities of Irish nationalists in the United States and the explosion of bombs in the House of Commons and several English railroad stations provoked a backlash in America. Protest subsided. The Arthur administration took forceful measures to reduce illegal arms shipments. The British adamantly refused to modify the Coercion Law, but in time for reasons of their own released some Americans. The crisis eased, but similar disputes would recur in various forms as the Irish question festered over the next century.
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