From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (77 page)

The United States at first responded hesitantly to these events. China was far away and by no means an area of major concern. Events there were impossibly confusing. The Coolidge administration initially followed the advice of diplomats who argued that concessions would only produce more demands and insisted that "order" must be restored before negotiations could begin. Americans were slow to comprehend the dynamic force of Chinese nationalism and the legitimacy of its demands. They feared Communist influence in the Kuomintang. They took a firmer position in response to the outburst at Nanking, joining the British and Japanese in demanding apologies, reparations, and punishment for the perpetrators.
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United States policy gradually shifted toward accommodation. In 1927, Chiang turned on his Communist allies, eliminating those who did not flee, moved on Beijing, and in a classic maneuver to play the barbarians against each other openly sought U.S. support. American officials had little faith in Chiang, whom they considered at best a warlord, at worst a militarist and potential dictator. They had no illusions that his group actually controlled the country. They were confounded by the turmoil. On the other hand, Kellogg began to develop a vague sense of the strength of Chinese nationalism and to conclude that the unequal treaties were outdated. Gunboat diplomacy was out of fashion in the 1920s; there was little inclination to uphold the treaties by force. "It is impossible to make war on four hundred million people," Kellogg wisely observed, "and in my judgment you cannot longer parcel out China in concessions or by spheres of commercial influence by armed force." Hoping to win over the Chinese, the United States was the first power to extend tariff autonomy
to China, hedging its bets by doing so on a most-favored-nation basis, which delayed actual implementation until 1933.
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With the confusion and violence, no one considered terminating extraterritoriality. Under Kellogg, the United States broke with the powers, becoming the first nation to abandon even part of the unequal treaties.

The Republicans significantly altered the means, if not the ends, of U.S. Latin American policies in the 1920s, shifting away from the gunboat diplomacy and military interventionism that had marked the previous twenty years. The elimination of any immediate foreign threat to the hemisphere as a result of World War I eased concerns about the security of the region. The excesses of Wilsonian interventionism had produced a backlash at home, raising demands for the liquidation of military occupations and abstention from future interventions. Muckraking journalists produced damning exposes of the torture and murder carried out by occupation forces in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Throughout the 1920s, moreover, the so-called Peace Progressives in Congress, led by the indomitable Borah, insisted that the United States practice what it preached in terms of self-determination. The tone was set in the campaign of 1920. Making a case for entry into the League, Democratic vice presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt confidently reassured the electorate that the United States could depend on the votes of the Central American republics. He then planted foot firmly in mouth by gratuitously boasting that he personally had written the constitution of Haiti. Harding seized the opening. Seeking to discredit his opponents and win African American votes, he condemned the "rape" of the Dominican Republic and Haiti and promised that his administration would not "cover with a veil of secrecy repeated acts of unwarranted interference in domestic affairs of the little republics of the Western Hemisphere."
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As in other areas, business interests had precedence in Latin America in the 1920s, providing another incentive for the velvet glove. Europe's economic exhaustion left the hemisphere open for U.S. economic expansion. In the aftermath of war, capital poured into Latin America in unprecedented quantities, and trade soared. Americans sought oil in Venezuela and Colombia to meet the needs of the automobile society, exploited critical raw materials, and took over utilities and banking.
Gunboat diplomacy had given the United States a bad name in the hemisphere. It seemed important for the sake of business to repent for past sins and refrain from new ones.

At the same time, the Republicans could not go too far. Protection of property and investments more than ever required stable societies and responsible governments that would respect foreign business interests. Defense of the canal still demanded order in a notably volatile region. U.S officials—especially the "experts" in the State Department's Latin American division—still looked upon their southern neighbors as childlike and backward, hopelessly prone to violence, and inherently incapable of self-government. The Russian and Mexican revolutions aroused an exaggerated fear of Bolshevik influence in the hemisphere. Thus while scrapping direct military intervention, the Republicans sought new means of control to balance the need for a lighter touch with the continued requirement of order and protection of property rights.

A familiar device was to work through private financial agents, using loans to force reforms that would stabilize Latin economies and politics and in turn promote U.S. trade and investment. The first such arrangement, worked out by the peripatetic Kemmerer with Bolivia, provided for the direct involvement of the State Department and U.S. bankers and provoked protest at home and in Latin America. The Republicans then shifted to a less intrusive and blatantly exploitative model where Latin American countries would voluntarily seek help from private financial advisers. As applied first in Colombia and later in Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador, the new arrangement called for bankers to lend money to Latin American governments that sought the help of a "private" financial adviser. Kemmerer would then draw up plans for financial and currency reform. Members of a nominally private mission would remain to supervise the program after he had gone on to the next stop. Thus was created the new profession of international financial advisers, a quasi-colonial substitute for traditional relationships. "Kemmerized" countries appeared to do well in the 1920s. They drew sizeable U.S. investments, and the State Department's hand was much less visible. On the other hand, these arrangements promoted dependency on U.S. foreign trade and capital and led to overborrowing, with disastrous long-term economic results, provoking a nationalist backlash in the very different milieu of the 1930s.
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The United States also sought to win friends by conciliating the anger and wounded pride of its southern neighbors. Americans were eager to move into Colombian oil fields. With the old Rough Rider now snugly in the grave, the Republicans could do what they had kept Wilson from doing. Leaving out the apology that had helped defeat Wilson's 1913 treaty with Colombia, they approved a new pact providing "heart balm" of $25 million for the theft of Panama. Hughes went out of his way to show respect for his Latin counterparts. He sought to resurrect the spirit of Pan-Americanism first enunciated by Henry Clay and promoted by James G. Blaine, speaking eloquently of a "common sentiment that makes us neighbors in spirit." With varying degrees of success, he tried to assist in the resolution of border disputes that for years had plagued relations among the South American nations themselves. Although not a glad-hander by nature, he met with Latin American diplomats in his office, dined with them, and sought to make them feel like representatives of important nations.
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He also initiated a change in the interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine of considerable long-range significance. Without entirely disavowing the right of U.S. intervention, he set out in the doctrine's centennial year to separate the two. In a Rio de Janeiro speech celebrating one hundred years of Brazilian independence, he declared that we "assert no rights for ourselves that we do not accord to others." In several 1923 speeches, he limited intervention to the region near the canal and vowed it would be used only as a "last resort." "I utterly disclaim as unwarranted . . . ," he affirmed, "a claim on our part to supervise the affairs of our sister republics, to assert an overlordship, to consider the spread of our authority beyond our own domain as the aim of our policy, and to make our power the test of right in this hemisphere."
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As a major part of their new approach, Harding and Hughes began to liquidate the Central American protectorates created by Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. Certain that blacks were not capable of self-government and that a premature withdrawal would lead to barbarism, even cannibalism, the administration stopped short of pulling out of Haiti. Ignoring Borah's protests that the Haitians "may not be capable of self-government as we understand it, but it is their government," they contented themselves with reorganizing the occupation government and seeking to make it more responsible. They did, however, terminate military occupation of the Dominican Republic. The process had actually begun under Wilson but had run afoul of conflicts over the terms of
withdrawal. Hughes unilaterally broke the deadlock. Troops were withdrawn in 1924. The United States maintained substantial leverage through its continued control of the customs house. Americans congratulated themselves on the improvements brought to the Dominican polity; normality returned soon after the marines left. The occupation had little positive impact.
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In the Dominican Republic, the United States stumbled onto a device that helped solve the problem of how to maintain stability without direct intervention. In the last stages of the occupation, U.S. officials created a domestic constabulary, the Guardia Nacional, to promote internal order. The aim was to establish an apolitical force that would provide security while the electoral process worked. In this way, Americans applied their own values and institutions to a very different political culture with quite different results. The Guardia Nacional quickly became politicized and in time assumed dominant power. One of its early leaders, the notorious Rafael Trujillo, used his position with the organization to assume absolute political control. For the next thirty years, he ran the country in the most brutal and authoritarian fashion while carefully respecting U.S. interests. "He may be a sonofabitch," Franklin Roosevelt is supposed to have remarked, "but at least he's our sonofabitch." The Dominican model enabled the United States to reconcile its conflicting interests in the Caribbean and Central America.
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The Republicans found extrication from Nicaragua much more difficult. They brought the marines home in August 1925, but Nicaragua immediately erupted in civil war. The Coolidge administration faced a dilemma. It did not want to reimpose a military government, but neither could it permit a nation so close to the canal to descend into anarchy. Coolidge and Kellogg saw Nicaragua as a "test case" for U.S. control in a vital region. State Department officials warned that by dabbling in Nicaragua, Mexico, acting at the instance of the Soviet Union, was seeking to "drive a 'hostile wedge' between the United States and the Panama Canal." In August 1926, the administration sent the marines back into Nicaragua. In April 1927, Coolidge dispatched New Yorker Henry Stimson to Nicaragua with instructions to "clean up that mess."
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Stimson cleaned up only part of it. Viewing free elections as the solution to Nicaragua's political woes, he persuaded the combatants to lay down their arms and agree to U.S.-supervised elections. Under the able direction of Brig. Gen. Frank McCoy, the elections held in 1928 and 1930 were widely viewed as fair, but they did not bring peace to Nicaragua. The self-appointed "general" César Augusto Sandino rebelled against the U.S.-imposed settlement, fled to the rugged mountains of northwest Nicaragua, and for five years waged a brutal and effective guerrilla war against the marines, making himself a hero to anti-American Nicaraguans, other Latin Americans, and anti-imperialists in the United States. The marines pursued the guerrillas relentlessly and bombed villages suspected of harboring them, but they could not capture the elusive Sandino.
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Ultimately, a Dominican-type solution emerged in Nicaragua. Reintervention and the costly, nasty, and unsuccessful war against Sandino provoked widespread and noisy agitation in Congress and among activist citizens' groups to get out of Nicaragua once and for all, and the Peace Progressives managed to secure a cutoff of funds for further operations. Having trained a Guardia Nacional to maintain order, the marines left in early 1933 with Sandino still at large. Guardia leader Anastasio Somoza, who spoke fluent English and impressed Stimson as "very frank, friendly [and] likable," lured Sandino to Managua and arranged to have him gunned him down on an airstrip. Within a short time and despite rules designed to prevent a military takeover, Somoza assumed control of the presidency and then the country, establishing a brutal dictatorship through which he and his family would rule with an iron hand and U.S. complicity until 1979.
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The Coolidge administration's peaceful resolution of a mid-1920s dispute with Mexico also demonstrated how the United States in a very different way could employ new methods to achieve old aims. Under President Venustiano Carranza and his successors, Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Calles, the Mexican Revolution turned sharply to the left after 1917. The decidedly nationalist constitution of that year sought to regain for Mexico the land and natural resources generously dispensed to foreigners by Porfirio Díaz. Article 27 in particular specified that land and rights to subsoil deposits belonged to the Mexican people, threatening the vast holdings of Americans who owned more than 40 percent of Mexico's land and
60 percent of its oil. The constitution also included a progressive statement on labor policy that alarmed American businessmen.
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These measures provoked a conflict that would fester for more than a decade and once more spark talk of war. Oilmen naturally feared the threat to their interests and insisted that concessions to Mexico might provoke attacks on U.S. property throughout the hemisphere. Harding and Hughes at first backed the oilmen, withholding recognition from Obregón, who took power in May 1920 after the assassination of Carranza. An empty sleeve gave graphic demonstration to Obregón's revolutionary credentials, but he also desperately needed U.S. recognition, money, and arms to stabilize his regime. He thus offered private assurances not to rigorously enforce Article 27, but Washington held out for a formal treaty. Eager to end the dispute so that Mexico could repay its substantial debts and contract new loans, banker Lamont in 1923 helped broker a deal, the so-called Bucarelli Agreement, excluding from the provisions of Article 27 those lands on which some "positive acts" had been taken toward development. Overriding Hughes on one of only several occasions, Harding insisted on acceptance, clearing the way for recognition and a loan. The United States displayed its gratitude by providing arms to Obregón and lending him aircraft and pilots to bomb rebel troops.
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