This week in class we discussed the first two decades of the twentieth century, an era of "gunboat diplomacy" for the United States in the Caribbean Basin and Latin America, and one that culminated in the awful conflagration of the World War, otherwise known as the Great War, otherwise known (now) as World War I. I explained to students (well, I really couldn't convey this adequately, but I told them about it) how shattering the wartime experience was to so many Europeans. This was the first major war, involving numerous belligerents and lasting a long time, in Europe since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Britain lost more men than it would in World War II - not even to mention the traumatic experiences of the French and the Germans. The war destroyed empires, spawned revolutions, redrew maps in large areas of the world.
The drama of America's step-by-step motion into a combatant role in the European war, ending its long period of proud abstention from European conflicts, is well narrated in Akira Iriye's volume in the Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, from which students read several chapters this week. Iriye is rather sympathetic to Woodrow Wilson, seeing him as a genuine idealist and internationalist liberal who desired a new system of free trade and peaceful resolution of conflicts between states. Actually, many close scholars of this subject likewise see Wilson as sincere and truly reluctant to get involved in the war, even though skeptics and antiwar critics long have viewed him more cynically.
"He kept us out of war": Wilson's reelection slogan in 1916. Very nice, yes?
But let's back up a minute. What about the years between the Spanish-American War and the World War? What was the United States up to in its foreign dealings in this fifteen-year period?
This is an editorial cartoon from 1913-14, when Wilson ordered U.S. troops to seize positions in the Mexican port of Veracruz, supposedly to bring order and protect U.S. personnel who had been abused. There was a revolution in Mexico that had started a few years previous. Wilson was not entirely happy with the possible outcomes of this turbulence. He had no personal involvements in Mexico, but several high-ranking members of his administration, specifically those from Texas - Hello, Texas! - were closely tied to U.S. interests that had bought large landholdings and mineral exploration rights in Mexico in recent years (this means oil), as John Mason Hart documented extensively in his eye-opening book, Revolutionary Mexico. So Wilson not only sent the troops to Veracruz. They then turned over large weapons caches stored there to the more conservative forces in the ongoing Mexican struggle. In 1916, Wilson again ordered U.S. forces into Mexico, this time in the country's north, in a failed effort to punish or capture Francisco "Pancho" Villa, the famed revolutionary leader of northern Mexico, who had attacked a town inside the U.S. as part of the border skirmishes that had been occurring. This is Villa:
Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson ordered U.S. military forces (usually the marines) to "intervene" in and occupy various countries in the Caribbean Basin - Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, etc. - about twenty times in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Sometimes this was a matter of putting the U.S. thumb on the political scales to determine who would run the show, sometimes it was a matter of taking over another country's customs and tariff administration, sometimes it was more full-blown "nation-building." So, an isolationist power? No. But the question of whether the pattern of U.S. intervention in the Western Hemisphere is really distinctive and exceptional within the larger history of U.S. foreign relations remains salient. But, you know, when you start adding the Philippine conquest, U.S. armed intervention in China to help repress the Boxer rebellion in 1900, and other things - well, that's a lot of exceptions.
I talked to students yesterday about the famous "Open Door" notes of John Hay, McKinley's secretary of state, which ultimately asserted that China's territorial integrity needed to be respected (long story), but which focused on the U.S. desire for a free-trade regime in Asia and, by implication, everywhere else. This is a major American tradition, the demand for free trade. I explained that traditionally a central part of the U.S. critique of European empires has been that they tend to form closed trading systems, that this has been more consistent and has a longer history as an American anti-imperialist argument than does an humanitarian or democratic argument. Students found this intriguing, but asked whether the U.S. did not, in the period in question, maintain its own protective tariffs against imported manufactured goods?
Yes, it did.
We also focused on the challenge posed by the Bolshevik revolution to Wilson's ideas of "good" and responsible nationalist revolutions, of the kind he was willing to countenance in Mexico or China (where the Qing were overthrown and the monarchy abolished in 1911). I talked about the decision by the Bolsheviks, once they seized power in Russia in 1917, to get out of the Great War - keenly disappointing the Allied powers - to accept a highly punitive separate peace with the Germans, and to publish the secret treaties they found in the government archives, which showed that the Allied governments had been planning to slice up, and help themselves to, conquered territories after the war (as Britain and France ultimately did, at least informally, in the old Ottoman lands of the Middle East). But most of all, the forthright anti-imperialist position taken by the Bolsheviks in 1917, despite any future compromise or contradiction of it, was a direct challenge to Wilsonian liberalism, since Wilson hedged in a big way on this issue. He came to the Versailles peace conference following the war trumpeting his call for "self-determination," but this seemed in the event only to apply to Central and Eastern Europe. Despite Wilson's disappointment of many nationalists in Asia and other colonized areas of the world, the popular and wide-ranging enthusiasm for him as an idealistic leader was quite genuine at the war's end, and it was not entirely damaged by his compromises and failures. A long future rivalry between American liberalism and Communist internationalism and anti-imperialism was in the offing.
Oh, and after the Bolsheviks seized power and were fighting a desperate civil war with conservative forces in their own country, Wilson sent several thousand U.S. troops there in another failed intervention, along with Japanese troops in Siberia and with others in Russia's North. There were some circumstantial justifications offered - keep the Germans from getting their hands on munitions in the North, help ferry stranded Czechs (don't ask) out of the East - but the Bolsheviks, of course, saw this as an effort to help their enemies strangle their revolution in its crib. Not that much action, really. Americans soon forgot about it. The Russians, not so much. Funny how that works.
Also, I talked with students about the "qualifying paper" that they are going to write. Quite an interesting idea! More about that another time.
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