From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (81 page)

FDR's handling of the World Economic Conference in London in the summer of 1933 reveals not only his "putting of first things first" but also a cavalier and feckless diplomatic style that would become something of a trademark and in this case would have baneful consequences. During the frantic first Hundred Days of the New Deal, Roosevelt deluged Congress with a flood of domestic legislation attacking the depression from various directions. To make sure international problems did not intrude on his domestic agenda, he delayed the long-proposed conference until June.
He made sure that the still-divisive issue of World War I debts stayed off the agenda. He sent to the conference a bizarre assemblage of delegates ranging from the drunken isolationist Senator Key Pittman of Nevada to the Wilsonian internationalist and free trader Hull, virtually ensuring no agreement. As the conference was about to convene, he blithely sailed away for an extended vacation. And when the conferees finally agreed on a plan for international currency stabilization, he fired off to London his infamous "Bombshell Message"—appropriately dispatched from the cruiser USS
Indianapolis
—making clear his rejection of such schemes and his determination to find economic solutions at home. Roosevelt's salvo ended the conference without any agreement. Published on July 4, 1933, and hailed by some Americans as a second declaration of independence, it destroyed the last vestige of international cooperation in dealing with the worldwide depression.
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Roosevelt has been rightly criticized for his handling of the London conference. Economists disagree in assessing the conference itself, many concluding that currency stabilization would not have worked and that since the domestic market remained the key to U.S. prosperity FDR was right to focus on homegrown solutions. Scholars also agree, however, that he erred by encouraging the conferees to believe he supported their work and Hull to believe that he was committed to tariff reduction. His views toward the deliberations exposed facile national stereotypes: "When you sit around the table with a Britisher," he observed during the deliberations, "he usually gets 80% of the deal and you get what's left."
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FDR later admitted that the rhetoric of his Bombshell Message was overblown and destructive, but at the time he boasted that it might persuade Americans that their country did not always lose in international negotiations. Whatever the economic consequences, of course, the failure of the conference and FDR's role in it had a devastating diplomatic impact, especially on relations with Britain.
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Roosevelt's personal imprint also marked another early foreign policy initiative: recognition of the Soviet Union. The policy of non-recognition had long since become outdated, of course, and the ever pragmatic FDR abandoned it because he believed it served no useful purpose. Hard-core anti-Communists such as patriotic organizations, the Roman Catholic Church, and some labor unions still passionately opposed recognition, but in the depths of the depression it was no longer a hot-button issue.
Some Americans, FDR and many business leaders included, hoped that diplomatic relations would bring increased trade. Roosevelt may also have hoped that the mere act of recognition would give pause to expansionists in Germany and Japan.
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Properly wary of State Department hard-liners, Roosevelt centered negotiations in the White House, and over nine days in November 1933 he and Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov hammered out a badly flawed agreement. FDR was sufficiently sensitive to his domestic critics to seek concessions in return for recognition—unusual if not indeed extraordinary in diplomatic practice. The agreement itself took a convoluted form: eleven letters and one memorandum addressing a range of issues. Unsurprisingly, given the vast gulf of culture and ideology that separated the two nations, the negotiations proved difficult. Roosevelt focused on securing diplomatic relations. He gained vague Soviet guarantees of religious freedom for Americans in the USSR and promises to stop Comintern propaganda in the United States. Unable to agree on the crucial issues of possible loans and debts owed by the prerevolutionary governments, the two sides settled for sloppy language that would cause much future wrangling.
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Establishment of diplomatic relations was the only tangible result of the Roosevelt-Litvinov agreements. FDR pleased the Soviets by naming their onetime advocate William C. Bullitt the first U.S. ambassador to Moscow. Bullitt set about his task with customary zeal, in his spare time seeking to teach the Russians baseball and the Red Army cavalry the decidedly unproletarian sport of polo. Plans to construct on the Moscow River a U.S. embassy modeled on Jefferson's Monticello evoked positive responses from FDR and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
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For both nations, the warm glow of expectations quickly gave way to disillusion. Stalin seems to have hoped for active U.S. cooperation in blocking Japan. When this did not happen and the Japanese threat appeared to wane, his interest in close relations slackened. From the U.S. standpoint, the Soviets did not live up to their commitments to stop propagandizing in the United States. Negotiations on loans quickly stalled, and Litvinov took vigorous exception to U.S. demands for payments of old debts. "No nation today pays its debts," an incredulous foreign minister insisted with
more truth than diplomacy.
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The anti-Semitic Bullitt found dealing with the Jewish Litvinov especially vexing, and life in the Soviet police state took its toll on American diplomats. Baseball and polo never caught on; there was no Monticello on the Moscow. Relations quickly soured. In 1936, a disenchanted Bullitt departed the Soviet Union a confirmed and virulent anti-Communist.
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The one sentence of FDR's inaugural address devoted to foreign policy included that memorable if also notably vague line "In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor." Meant to apply generally, it became identified with the Western Hemisphere and was one of Roosevelt's most important legacies. A product of self-interest and expediency along with a strong dose of idealism and more than a smattering of genuine goodwill, the Good Neighbor policy in its initial stage terminated existing military occupations and disavowed the U.S. right of military intervention without relinquishing its preeminent position in the hemisphere and dominant role in Central America and the Caribbean. In time, it extended beyond policy into the realm of cultural interchange.
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Hoover laid the foundations. Shortly after the 1928 election, the president-elect carried on the tradition of personal diplomacy begun by Charles Evans Hughes by taking a two-month goodwill tour of Latin America, where he publicly used the phrase "good neighbor." In office, he removed the marines from Nicaragua and promised to get them out of Haiti. He stopped short of publicly repudiating the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, but he explicitly disavowed intervention to protect U.S. investments. He adopted a new and more flexible policy toward recognition. He came very close to apologizing for the U.S. occupation of Haiti and Nicaragua. Building on Wilson's ideas, he sought through commercial and financial arrangements to promote stability in Latin America and thereby create in the Western Hemisphere a model for world peace. His unwillingness to adjust tariff and loan policies to the harsh realities of hard times doomed his economic program. His broader ambitions were subsumed when he became totally absorbed in and ultimately rendered impotent by the Great Depression.
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With his usually keen eye for public relations, Roosevelt made the good neighbor phrase part of his political vocabulary and expanded the policy and the spirit, winning praise at home and respect throughout the hemisphere. In the absence of any immediate threat to the Americas and with trade expansion a high priority, it was expedient to conciliate peoples the United States had often demeaned. The rise of dictators in Central America produced stability and eliminated pressures for U.S. intervention. Roosevelt understood that because of its wealth and power the United States would be an object of resentment among many Latins, but he felt it "very important to remove any legitimate grounds of their criticism."
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The sources of Good Neighborism went much deeper. As it turned away from Europe and Asia in the 1930s, the United States devoted greater attention to its own hemisphere. More important, the depression helped peoples of very different continents identify with each other in ways they had not before. Latin Americans could view their northern neighbors as victims of the same poverty and want they had long endured. As they lost faith in their own exceptionalism, North Americans were less inclined to impose their will and values on others. The easing in the United States during the 1930s of deep-seated racial and anti-Catholic prejudices also made possible greater acceptance of Latin Americans. There was much cross-fertilization of ideas among intellectuals on both continents. In the United States, Latin American and especially Mexican art came into vogue. Latin subjects and stars gained popularity in movie theaters.
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Scarcely had Roosevelt taken office before yet another revolution in Cuba put his good intentions to the test. The depression hit Cuba very hard, sparking an uprising by students, soldiers, and workers against President Gerardo "Butcher" Machado. When Machado responded with state-sponsored terror, FDR sent his friend Welles to Cuba as ambassador to handle the crisis. Welles helped unseat Machado, but two changes of government later the ambassador grew alarmed at the radical turn taken by the revolution. President Ramón Grau San Martin, a stubbornly independent physician and university professor, sought to institute sweeping reforms while workers went on strike and seized the sugar mills. The aristocratic Welles was appalled by the ascendancy of the rabble and worried about Communist influence among the workers. He viewed Grau as well-meaning but fuzzy-minded and hopelessly ineffectual. Although he sought to disguise it as a "temporary" and "strictly limited" intervention,
he acted very much in the mode of his predecessors, on several occasions in the fall of 1933 appealing for U.S. troops to restore order and replace Grau with a more dependable government.
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In contrast to
his
predecessors, FDR refused, an important first step in the Good Neighbor process. Welles withheld recognition from Grau, a powerful weapon by itself. FDR authorized him to use political means to undermine the government and dispatched warships to display U.S. power. But he adamantly rejected repeated appeals for troops. He was influenced by his former Navy Department boss, Josephus Daniels, then ambassador to Mexico, who pooh-poohed Welles's fears of Communism and firmly advised against military intervention. More important, the United States was soon to meet with other hemispheric nations at Montevideo, where intervention was expected to be a key issue, and Roosevelt did not want to carry there the stigma of yet another Cuban intrusion. The urgent need for expanding trade with Latin America put a premium on the velvet glove approach. Ultimately, Welles achieved his goals without use of military force. With his encouragement, a group of army plotters headed by Fulgencio Batista overthrew the Grau government. In time, Batista established a dictatorship that, like Trujillo's in the Dominican Republic, produced order without U.S. occupation or military intervention.
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The issue of military intervention was at the top of the agenda of the Montevideo Conference in September 1933. That gathering was a landmark in that Kentuckian and University of Chicago professor Sophonisba Breckinridge became the first woman to represent the United States at an international conference. Following Hughes's precedent, Hull attended and used his down-home Tennessee political manner to cultivate the Latin delegates, popping in on gatherings to extend a warm handshake and "Howdy do" to sometimes startled diplomats, unpretentiously introducing himself as "Hull of the United States." When the Latin American nations sought from U.S. delegates a firm and unequivocal agreement that "no state has the right to intervene in the internal and external affairs of another," Hull strode boldly to the podium and proclaimed that "no government need fear any intervention on the part of the United States under the Roosevelt administration," winning warm applause from the assembled conferees.
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The agreement that was subsequently signed
modified the commitment to exclude treaty obligations. To appease still-uneasy neighbors, FDR shortly after the conference firmly declared that "the definite policy of the United States from now on is one opposed to armed intervention."
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The administration followed with tangible steps. A 1934 agreement with Cuba abrogated the obnoxious Platt Amendment, ending the first phase of the special U.S. relationship with that nation. That same year, the last marines departed Haiti. Two years later, a new agreement was negotiated assigning to Panama a larger share of canal revenues and eliminating the clause in the 1903 treaty giving the United States the right to intervene in its internal affairs.

As part of its shift to non-intervention, the United States in the 1930s also changed its policy on recognition. Washington had frequently withheld recognition to deter revolutions or eliminate governments that had taken power by military means, most recently, of course, in Cuba. A coup by Guardia Nacional commander Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua in 1936 provided the test case for change. Some Latin American observers even at this point foresaw the sort of brutal dictatorship Somoza would impose. A U.S. diplomat lamented that creation of the Guardia Nacional had provided Nicaragua "with an instrument to blast constitutional procedure off the map," offering "one of the sorriest examples . . . of our inability to understand that we should not meddle in other people's affairs."
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On the other hand, the United States had no enthusiasm for further interference in Nicaragua. Many Latin Americans watched closely to see what U.S. pledges of non-intervention really meant when put to the test. Like Stimson earlier, some U.S. officials concluded that at least a Somoza dictatorship could bring stability to a chronically troubled land. As with many other instances in the world of diplomacy, neither intervention nor non-intervention seemed entirely satisfactory. In this case, the United States chose to err on the side of inaction.