Empire Without Tears: Chapter 1

Empire Without Tears: America's Foreign Relations 1921-1933

Temple University Press

1987

1. Warren Harding's America—As Received

Writing about the government of the United States as it appeared at the turn of the century, the historian Robert Wiebe was struck by its failure to respond to "external reality." The apparatus for managing foreign problems was primitive, and initiatives were left to private interests and foreign powers. The Department of State was an amateur operation, and its overseas posts were a dumping ground for hungry politicos and wealthy young men indulging in brief resistance to joining the family business. The most obvious instruments of power, the army and navy, were decrepit. Wiebe found that "the paraphernalia for action simply did not exist." ₁

The apparatus Warren Harding inherited in March 1921 was radically different. It included a professional foreign service; a Department of Commerce geared to meet the needs of booming overseas trade and investment; a modern army (complete with general staff) more than twice the size of any force the United States had ever before fielded in peacetime; and a navy at least arguably the most powerful in the world.

Demand for an efficient, first-class foreign service was generated by those elements in American society most eager to assert American influence and power in the world. Businessmen, who began to organize in the 1890s, believed that improvement in American representation abroad would facilitate the expansion of trade. Others, associated with Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Brooks Adams, and the large policy group, viewed the quality of their country's diplomats and the buildings in which they worked abroad as indications of America's will to compete in the international race for glory. Roosevelt's ascent to the presidency allowed the process of reform to begin. Before he left office, the number of personnel within the Department of State had doubled, the number of foreign secretaries was growing rapidly, examinations were required for admission, and merit became the basis for promotion. Shortly afterward, in the Taft administration, the foreign service was completely reorganized. The reforms included the introduction of a training period for new officers, the establishment of geographic divisions, and a student interpreter corps for China and Japan. Congress not only funded all these changes, but appropriated additional sums for the first purchases of embassy and legation buildings. The United States was creating the "paraphernalia for action" of which Wiebe wrote.

World War I contributed further to the growth and professionalization of the foreign service. At the war's end there were five times as many diplomatic secretaries abroad as there had been in 1898, and five times as many people—officers, clerks, messengers, and janitors—working for the Department of State in Washington. Academic training for careers in international relations, including the foreign service, spread across the country. In 1906 no major American university offered specialized courses in world affairs or found much space in its curriculum for the study of countries outside Europe. By 1909 a wide range of such courses was offered at leading American schools. Nearly thirty such programs existed in 1916, and there were seventy by 1921.

All through the 1920s and into the early 1930s, the process of preparing young Americans to administer the world more efficiently continued. The first separate school of world politics was established by Georgetown University in 1919, followed by the Williamstown Summer Institute in 1921, the Johns Hopkins University School of International Affairs in 1925—the same year the Foreign Service opened its own school—and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1932. The marketplace indicated a need for more experts on foreign policy, and the universities proved responsive.

In 1922, Charles Evans Hughes, Harding's secretary of state, contended that the department's workload had doubled since 1917. Much of the new burden involved economic affairs rather than issues of war and peace. American overseas trade and investment increased in quantity and complexity. Greater economic, military, and political power enabled the United States to cast an enormous shadow on the affairs of the world in the development of international communication networks, in the reconstruction of war-ravaged economies in Europe, and in the development of the resources of undeveloped economies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The Foreign Service was compelled to cope with such issues, especially in Europe, where governments intervened increasingly in matters most Americans believed best left to the private sector. But the Department of State had help—indeed competition—in the handling of economic diplomacy from a revamped Department of Commerce.

The Department of Commerce, like State, was deeply indebted to turn of the century concerns among businessmen fearful of being unable to compete with Great Britain and especially Germany in world markets. Indeed, the very existence of the Department of Commerce, created in 1903, derived from a perceived need to rationalize American efforts by facilitating greater cooperation between business and government. By 1912, the department had established a Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. Woodrow Wilson's aggressive secretary of commerce, William C. Redfield, had been president of the American Manufacturers Export Association. He lobbied successfully with Congress for additional appropriations, opened branch offices around the country, and created a corps of commercial attachés—all steps designed to expand opportunities for foreign trade.

During World War I, major American businessmen mobilized to move enlarged capital reserves into areas long dominated by European interests. A leading historian of American business, Mira Wilkins, called the war "a watershed in the history of multinational enterprise." ₂

New direct investments poured into less developed regions, especially in Latin America, and especially through export-oriented firms. The American International Corporation, created in 1915, involved giants such as U.S. Steel; General Electric, the National City Bank of New York, and the Rockefeller family. Initially created to lend to the Allies, the organization also planned for postwar investment and export development, with encouragement from Redfield and his most illustrious successor, Herbert Hoover. Congress was responsive to such efforts, passing the Webb-Pomerene Act in 1918 and the Edge Act in 1919. The first allowed exporters and the second banks to enter into combinations, exempt from antitrust laws, to facilitate foreign trade.

When Harding appointed Hoover secretary of commerce, which the association of government and dared war, business would proceed was already clear. Hoover reorganized the department, with special attention to the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, and quickly gave businessmen the efficient service they had come to expect of him. Hoover saw exports as essential to business stability and national prosperity, but he was no less alert to problems faced by importers of commodities whose source was controlled by foreign governments. Like Hughes at State, Hoover provided his department with superb leadership. In economic as in political foreign policy, the nation was better prepared for taking on the world than it had ever been.

The American military was not to prosper in the 1920s like the nation's diplomatic and commercial apparatus. In general, neither American leaders nor the people were willing to use force to expand the empire. Expansion would come by peaceful means, especially economic. Nonetheless, Harding inherited a formidable military establishment—large, modern, and combat hardened. The traditional pattern of rapid return to peacetime status and dismantling of the military machine did not prevail after World War I. To be sure, the army was demobilized rapidly, but the National Defense Act of 1920 left the general staff with a sufficient number of officers for planning and provided the first permanent assignment to plan for industrial mobilization in time of war. Army leaders now thought in terms of total war and had to consider the possibility of sending troops overseas again. General John J. Pershing's appointment in 1921 as chief of staff enhanced the staff's prestige and he developed a War Plans Board for operations planning. By 1923 the army had its first peacetime mobilization plan and an Army Industrial College designed to prepare officers for the problems of industrial mobilization.

In the initial postwar years, the navy fared even better. Before the United States intervened in the war, Wilson's attitude toward naval building programs changed radically. By December 1915 he was advocating the creation of a fleet second to none. The office of Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) was also established in 1915. In 1916 Congress passed a Merchant Marine Act containing subsidies designed to stimulate the growth of the merchant fleet. After the United States declared war, the navy quickly found itself with more men than any fleet in existence. And apparently, wartime practices proved habit-forming. When the war was over, Wilson asked Congress to continue naval building and offered a new supplementary program that, if completed, would have given the United States a navy more powerful than all existing navies together. Congress stinted a bit, but gave Wilson enough so that he left to Harding a navy which in ships built and in process was considerably larger than the British in capitalships, destroyers, and submarines. The naval historian George T. Davis has noted that "the United States built in the three years after the Armistice many more ships of war than the rest of the world combined." ₃

Harding even inherited an air force. It was not much and to it suffered disproportionately during the postwar demobilization, but it had grown from one pilot in 1910, to 8 in 1911, to 20,000 army and navy pilots at the end of the war. As part of the army, in the early 1920s the Air Service dropped to about 10,000 officers and men working with nearly 3,000 planes, mostly obsolescent. Nonetheless, the nucleus for creating modern air power was there when Congress became more responsive to the arguments of men like Billy Mitchell in the late 1920s.

The point, of course, is that when the Harding administration took office, the United States was the leading power in the world, with the accoutrements of power and the wealth and apparatus to expand it. The nation was geared for the expansion of American influence and interests abroad and in the 1920s precisely that occurred, on an enormous scale, unprecedented in American history.

In 1914, American investors surpassed the efforts of their British competitors only in Mexico, Cuba, Panama, and at times elsewhere in the Caribbean basin. Throughout the rest of the world, wherever foreign business was present, the British or occasionally other Europeans were dominant. The pattern changed radically in the 1920s, setting the stage for American economic hegemony before World War II. In 1914 the United States was a debtor nation, owing foreign investors $3.7 billion more than was owed to Americans investing abroad. By 1919, a sharp reduction in foreign investment in the United States and wartime loans to the Allies had transformed the United States into a creditor nation, with a favorable loan balance of approximately $3.7 billion.

The growth of private economic power, of surplus capital in the United States, was not lost on President Wilson. In 1915 he was troubled by his inability to aid China during the crisis occasioned by the notorious Twenty-one Demands Japan presented to the Peking government. Realizing that the demands were designed to give Japan political as well as economic control, Wilson tried to persuade American bankers to invest in China's modernization. With the president's support, his minister to China, Paul Reinsch, worked frenetically to interest American businessmen in Chinese projects, hoping to spare China the consequences of dependence on Japanese loans-to which political strings were always attached.

In 1916, Wilson realized that one aim of the Paris Economic Conference of that year was European and especially British retention of control of the postwar international economy at the expense of the United States as well as those powers that found themselves among the vanquished. Wilson and his advisers objected to British plans for preferential systems that would deny American businessmen access to markets or raw materials not only within the British Empire, but also among sterling bloc traders like Argentina. Denied equal opportunity to compete, Americans could hardly be faulted for seizing wartime opportunities to replace British dominance with American.

While the president's desire for national prosperity and the businessmen's quest for corporate profit appeared congruent, other engines drove American economic expansion after 1914. As the United States prepared for war and then fought, the government needed "strategic" commodities, like rubber and nitrates, and urged businessmen to find and develop assured sources. Similarly, alarms about an oil shortage at the end of the war prompted government support for overseas exploration and concessions. The result was a dramatic challenge to European dominance throughout the world which Congress tried to facilitate with legislation like the Webby Pomerene and Edge acts and to which the executive branch gave diplomatic support-most clearly in the demand for unconditional most-favored-nation treatment for Americans everywhere. The early successes of the challenge led American businessmen to realize that Europe's hold could be broken-feeding corporate imaginations, and probably greed as well.

Some prominent American businessmen and President Wilson stressed the interdependence of world economies and had reservations about a purely competitive model for American involvement in the postwar world. Wilson had always favored cooperation on reasonable terms and the League of Nations, as he conceived it, was fundamentally an instrument for international economic and political cooperation. His approach had strong support on Wall Street, particularly among the partners of J. P. Morgan and Company. Morgan had branches in London and Paris, had worked well with Allied financiers during the war, and had every intention of continuing cooperative arrangements. In 1919 and 1920, Thomas W. Lamont, J. P. Morgan, Jr.'s public persona, was asked by the Wilson administration to create a new four-power banking consortium to enable the United States to cooperate with Great Britain, Japan, and France in the financing of China's modernization. Presumably the agreement which Lamont succeeded in negotiating would enhance the possibility of in East Asia while protecting China from Japanese extortion and increasing opportunities for American investment.

By 1919, American foreign direct (as opposed to portfolio) investments had increased to an estimated $3.9 billion, an increase of nearly 50 percent over 1914. American investors were moving toward a leading role in the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, where British investors fell behind for the first time in 1922. But Africa and Asia remained out of reach, and critical raw materials like nitrates, rubber, and tin were still controlled almost exclusively by Europeans. There was much to be accomplished in the 1920s.

When Harding took office, a worldwide depression had dampened investor ardor. Nonetheless, the pattern for creating American hegemony in the 1920s was clear. When possible, the United States would cooperate with other nations in the development of the resources of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and of markets throughout the world. Where Europe or Japan tried to exclude American interests, superior American economic power would be brought to bear. The main instrument of economic expansion, whether cooperative or independent, would be private business. It would have the support of government in protecting home markets, gaining access to scarce raw materials, and forcing doors for trade and investment.

Harding's advisors, especially Hughes and Hoover, were alert to the dangers and the opportunities. They—particularly Hoover—differed from Wilson primarily in their greater reluctance to use political or military means to maintain and expand the empire. Wilson had created a powerful military to complement America's new wealth, and that military was implicitly a club which would assure American leadership in the new world order. In the 1920s, military power was allowed to atrophy. There would be few American boys fighting for the empire: it would be an empire without tears. (I use "empire" throughout to encompass two very different manifestations of American wealth and power. First, I use the term in the traditional sense of territories controlled, directly or indirectly, by the government of the United States, including China, where the privileges of empire were shared with other powers through the multilateral imperialism of the treaty system. Second, I use "empire" in the less than universally accepted sense of "informal empire," to include cases in which the principal instruments for the control of other peoples or their resources are private, generally economic, and profit-motivated, in which the role of the U.S. government is secondary or nonexistent. Those who are its objects rarely distinguish between the exercise of official and private American power.)

III

If the informal economic empire did not penetrate the consciousness of Americans quick to condemn European or Japanese imperialism, the United States also maintained extensive holdings in the form of colonies, protectorates, and territories. In these more obvious evidences of imperialism, American government officials ruled openly as in the Philippines or less formally as in most of the Caribbean protectorates. Like the other symbols of American power, most of the physical empire had been acquired since the late 1890s. But the process had begun much earlier.

Of all the empire as Warren Harding inherited it, Alaska had come first—a frozen wasteland inhabited by an alien race and remote from the contiguous and united states, with little prospect of ever gaining statehood. Military government gave way to civil government in the 1880s. The Klondike Gold Rush in 1896 resulted in sufficient permanent American settlers to gain territorial status by 1912. Perhaps someday Alaska might be a state after all.

Congress and the public resisted further expansion for most of the rest of the nineteenth century. The major turning point was the Spanish-American War, after which the question of whether the United States would become an openly imperialist power was widely debated and answered in the affirmative. Hawaii, a focus of annexationist efforts since the 1850s, became American territory in 1898 and was granted local self-government in 1900. Its racially mixed population was anathema to most Americans, and its chances of entering the union on a basis of equality with the continental states were slim indeed. Before the year was out, the United States had added Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to its noncontiguous possessions. Guam was placed under naval jurisdiction, and the army fought to suppress the Filipinos until 1902. Puerto Rico immediately obtained civil government, power resting with a governor appointed by the president of the United States. U.S. citizenship was granted during the Wilson years, as was a greater degree of self-government, but there was no indication of future autonomy or independence. The Philippines were promised eventual independence, but power to govern remained in the hands of men appointed by the president of the United States.

The empire continued to grow, but public and congressional opposition or indifference precluded the systematic development of a colonial administration or colonial office within the American government. Moreover, traditional anti-imperialism required that the empire be disguised and rationalized. Hints of eventual statehood for Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico would ease some consciences, however remote the reality. The promise of eventual independence for the Philippines, after appropriate tutelage, soothed others. Finally, the concept of "protectorate," clearly not a colony, facilitated American hegemony in the Caribbean.

Beginning with Cuba, the administrations of McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson established American protectorates throughout the region. Panama, which would not have existed without American support, fell into this category in 1903. Roosevelt, assisted by U.S. Marines, added the Dominican Republic in 1905, and Taft acted similarly with Nicaragua in 1910. Wilson, contemptuous of the imperialism of Roosevelt and Taft, maintained American control over all their acquisitions, and used American marines to include Haiti in 1915. Although the practices of imperial management differed from place to place, in each instance there was a diminution of the sovereignty of the country involved and special rights and privileges for the United States. An American military presence and control of the customs houses was common.

By 1921 the United States also possessed Tutuila in the Samoan Islands of the Southwest Pacific and the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, the former obtained by treaty dividing the spoils with Germany in 1899 and the latter purchased from Denmark under threat of seizure in 1916. American garrisons could be found throughout the empire, most notably in the Caribbean where the marines maintained some semblance of order in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua. Bases were being developed at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and the Canal Zone in Panama. A chain of bases and military installations, some admittedly more potential than real, existed across the Pacific in Hawaii, Tutuila, Guam, the Philippines, and on the mainland and in the territorial waters of China. The flag may not have been as omnipresent as the dollar, but it was getting around.

During the World War, the American government, through the efforts of the Creel Committee (Committee on Public Information), undertook an unprecedented campaign to sell to the world the cultural values dominant in the United States. Shortly after the war ended, the government ceased to play a role, but American cultural involvement continued to expand. The missionary goal of the "Christianization of the world in this generation" may have fallen significantly short of the mark, but the Americanization of the world in this century did not seem incredible in 1921.

Beginning in 1919 and continuing to the mid-1920s, there was an enormous increase in the number of Americans who volunteered to serve abroad as missionaries and an equivalent increase in contributions to support missionary activity. Missionary-supported universities flourished. If the war had taught little else, it had persuaded some Americans that the rest of the world was in desperate need of the progressive values that had catapulted the United States into a position of world leadership. Young and old, Americans stepped forward to sacrifice the comforts and safety of home to teach Africans, Arabs, Asians, Latin Americans, and even the French about the blessings of Protestant Christianity, democracy, free enterprise, and modern sanitation. Many eventually returned with a better understanding of the outside world and of the national aspirations of the people among whom they worked.

Similar sentiments led to the creation of the great Amen-can philanthropic foundations and to their overseas programs. Shortly before the war, Andrew Carnegie had created the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and financed the building of the Peace Palace at the Hague. He committed his trustees to ending war and then to doing whatever else was necessary to "aid man in his upward march to... perfection even here in this life." The Carnegie Endowment financed peace organizations at home and abroad and ran a center for European peace in Paris. Not to be outdone, John D. Rockefeller created the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913 and ultimately financed an American cultural presence around the world, notably the Peking Union Medical College in China.

On another level was the spread of organizations like Rotary International, a service organization for businessmen. Originating in Chicago in 1905, it opened hundreds of chapters across the country and then, after the war, expanded rapidly abroad. Its 1921 convention was held in Edinburgh, Scotland. By 1929 it had nearly as many chapters outside the United States and Canada as it had altogether in 1920. Everywhere it propagated the idea that the businessman, dedicated to service, could bring peace and prosperity where politicians and diplomats had failed.

Rather a different set of American ideas were offered around the world by itinerant scholars. As America emerged as the leading world power, developing countries eager to find the key to wealth and power turned increasingly to it. At Peking University, Chên Tu-hsiu, subsequently founder of the Chinese Communist party, invited John Dewey to lecture. For a year, Dewey's ideas had the opportunity to capture the imaginations of Chinese intellectuals who would lead their nation in the decades to follow.

Perhaps the most effective overseas cultural involvement of the United States was the motion picture. During the war, American filmmakers shot far ahead of potential European competitors and dominated mass markets in the years that followed. In the early postwar years, in Great Britain and France as well as in Canada and Latin America, Hollywood portraits of American life and Hollywood's canned values prevailed. From 70 to 90 percent of the movies shown in those areas were made in America.

In the churches, hospitals, universities, and movie theaters around the world, the American presence was felt as Woodrow Wilson prepared to vacate the White House in honor of Warren Harding. These were symbols of American wealth and power and, more to the point, symbols of American interest in projecting American ideas and values to the rest of the world.

The political culture of the United States in 1921 also reflected an interest and involvement in international affairs unprecedented in peacetime America. The war had stirred the peace movement to greatly intensified and increasingly sophisticated activity. The struggle over ratification of the Treaty of Versailles had focused much of the historic tension between executive and legislative branches on foreign policy issues. Participation in the war and in the peacemaking bred a group of experts on world affairs who formed the foreign policy "establishment." Harding's cabinet contained at least two men, Hughes and Hoover, who had spoken for their party on foreign affairs issues in the past and perceived a leadership role for the United States. For all Harding and his constituency's longing to return to "normalcy," there could be no retreat from the rest of the world for the generation of the twenties. The search for order, so pronounced in the Progressive era, had become a search for world order.

The American peace movement consisted of a score or more organizations committed to the vision of a world at perpetual peace. Some of the organizations dated well back into the nineteenth century; others emerged in the course of the Great War. A few had substantial memberships, but most consisted of a director or executive secretary, a few office assistants, and, with luck, an impressive board of directors to list on the letterhead. Some had strong religious doctrines to guide them; others were secular. Most of the organizations accepted the existing international system of nation-states, but a few pressed more radical programs for world federation. Almost all had offered strong support for the idea of a League of Nations. By 1921, however, the same fissures that divided the Senate divided the peace movement. Agreement could not be reached on sanctions, although there was considerable acceptance of economic as opposed to military sanctions. Some pacifists could accept no form of coercion.

In the battles over the League in 1919 and 1920, peace movement leaders and their followers divided over Article X of the League Covenant. Even within the League to Enforce Peace, the organization most closely associated with the idea of an international organization, members divided along party lines. The majority, who were Republicans, supported Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's reservations to the Democratic president's treaty. With the third defeat of the Treaty of Versailles in May 1920, however, all the peace organizations were committed to finding a way for the United States to take the lead in organizing the world for peace. In particular, many movement leaders were apprehensive about the rapid growth of the U.S. Navy and fearful of militarism in the United States. Something had to be done to divert funds from military spending to more humane and progressive ends. Disarmament and particularly naval arms limitation interested most of the peace groups. Some were attracted particularly to the idea of membership in the World Court. A few hoped to be able to outlaw war, and the League of Nations Association was created to keep alive hope of American membership. All seemed persuaded that the United States had a special mission to lead a benighted world in an age without war.

The peace movement found allies in Congress, notably Senator William Borah of Idaho. One of the Irreconcilables, villains in the League fight, Borah was a bundle of inconsistencies on foreign policy issues, but the staunchest congressional supporter of arms limitation and outlawry of war efforts, as well as a fierce critic of most aspects of American imperialism. With Borah dominating debate on foreign policy issues, as well as succeeding Lodge as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, the possibility of American membership in the League vanished. On the other hand, the administrations of the 1920s faced restraints in military spending and the use of force in dealings with foreign countries that delighted peace activists. Borah's extraordinary presence was clearly a mixed blessing for the peace movement, but together they shaped the milieu in which policy was formulated in the 1920s. No president, no secretary of state could act without an eye on Borah and the movement.

Another organization indicative of increased interest and involvement in world affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations, was incorporated in 1921. Its founders, including Thomas Lamont, welcomed the rise in public interest in world affairs, hoped to foster it during the postwar years, and to provide expert knowledge—leadership—to a people traditionally occupied with domestic concerns. Elitist in conception and membership, the council functioned apart from the peace movement, although council members often shared the goals of peace organizations and contributed to them. The council represented what came to be known as the "foreign policy establishment"—bankers, lawyers, academics with professional interest in world politics, collectively with access to presidents and secretaries of state far greater than that of the peace organizations. Many of its members were "in-and-outers"-men whose careers alternated between government and private sector positions. In general, council members worked with the executive branch and peace groups found it easier to influence congressmen. Probably the most important distinction between the Council on Foreign Relations and the peace movement was the willingness of most council members to countenance the maintenance and use of American power. There were few if any pacifists among them.

The generation of American leaders that experienced the World War was determined to prevent another such atavistic explosion. The men who came to power in March 1921 differed little from the Wilsonians in their commitment to peace. But in rejecting the League, Wilson's device, the Harding administration would have to sustain its commitment in some new way. Harding, in his campaign and in his inaugural address, had spoken vaguely of "an association of nations," presumably an alternative to the League, but nothing ever came of that vapid idea. Hughes and Hoover had promised that a vote for Harding was the surest path to the League, but had not the power to make good the promises. Harding's most valuable contribution was his sensible deference to Hughes, with whom Hoover competed modestly.

Hughes was the most prestigious member of the Harding cabinet, overshadowing even the president. He was a distinguished lawyer, associate justice of the Supreme Court, and had been only narrowly defeated for the presidency in 1916. He had favored American membership in the League, but it had not been his cause. Other means of having the United States play a responsible role in world affairs could be found. He considered himself a progressive and was convinced that order was fundamental to progress. As a lawyer and jurist he had an intellectual and emotional commitment to legal approaches to maintaining order at home and abroad. While not unaware of the role of power in the affairs of nations, he may have underestimated its importance. His own disinclination to build and use national power was reinforced by the postwar public mood in America. Hughes was sensitive to public opinion, particularly as a source of limits on the government 5 power to act effectively. Without public support, the government could not long sustain any given policy. He thought in terms of a need to educate the public, as did his friends on the Council on Foreign Relations. Others thought him occasionally timid, fearing to take appropriate action lest Borah or the peace movement be provoked.

In this setting, there emerged what the historian Richard Leopold has called the "interwar compromise." ₄ The central question for the 1920s was how to stay out of war, preferably while increasing the benefits Americans enjoyed from expanding involvement in world affairs. A minority, strongly represented by the Council on Foreign Relations and the League of Nations Association, argued that the United States could not avoid being drawn into a second world war. Once such a war started, American participation was inevitable. The only way to keep the United States out of war was to cooperate with other nations for the preservation of peace, most obviously through membership in the League or at minimum, cooperation with Britain and France.

Most people with views on American foreign policy in the 1920s had a simpler solution: The United States could stay out of future wars as an act of will. It had intervened voluntarily in 1917—next time it would not, even if all of Europe and Asia were at war. Borah, representative of much of this thinking, was convinced that the key to peace for America was to avoid obligations or commitments that might lead to war. He and many of those who shared his outlook were unwilling to surrender the overseas interests of the United States, but insisted on looking after those interests independently. They favored a course another historian, Joan Hoff Wilson, has labeled "independent internationalism." ₅ When foreign policy was an issue in the 1920s, there were few advocates of an American retreat from world affairs. Rather, the debate was between a minority that advocated collective security and a majority that rejected collective security as the best means to preserve the American empire without war.

In the 1920s the United States attempted to pursue an independent policy, compromising frequently to cooperate with other nations for specific purposes. The policies of the era were epitomized by agreements with other nations on an ad hoc basis, to solve specific problems. Commitments, except to consult, were carefully avoided, as were provisions for enforcement, for sanctions if the agreements were violated. A generation aware of the tendency of post-1945 America toward overcommitment might see the policy of the 1920s as timid, but what is really striking is the increased participation of the United States in major developments around the world, compared with the role the nation played prior to 1917.

Endnotes

Note 1: Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1967), 227. Back.

Note 2: Mira Wilkins, The Maturing of the Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (1974), viii. Back.

Note 3: George T. Davis, A Navy Second to None: The Development of Modern American Naval Policy (1940), 268. Back.

Note 4: Richard W. Leopold, The Growth of American Foreign Policy (1962), 405-6, 426-427. Back.

Note 5: Joan Hoff Wilson, American Business and Foreign Policy 1920-1933 (1971), x. Back.