American Experiment (222 page)

Even with “their own people”—immigrants, ethnics, workers settled in communities—socialist leaders were often unable to penetrate the family, neighborhood, religious, linguistic, recreational, and political party worlds in which the workers actually lived most of their lives. These persons were not blank pages for radicals to write on. Among the workers’ worlds might be a trade union that ignored talk of class war and concentrated on immediate benefits. Class consciousness, Lenin was saying, could only be brought to workers from without; left to themselves, the working class would “develop only trade-union consciousness.” To transform all those workers’ “consciousnesses”—union, family, religious, and the like—would
have taken a far more powerful organizational effort and psychological understanding than the socialists were able to achieve.

Ultimately, the towering problem for American socialists was more intellectual even than organizational. Their leaders failed to establish a clear and convincing case for reconstruction rather than mere reform, for some kind of revolution rather than the usual gradualism, for a central and disciplined political strategy rather than the familiar trial-and-error, one-step-at-a-time, by-guess-and-by-God tactics. Not only were the political means unclear; even more so were the goals. The socialists collectively were not agreed as to what the grand new commonwealth would be like—whether more socialist or syndicalist, how governed, how heavily egalitarian, committed to what values and to what priorities among those values. In the absence of clear guidelines, these questions of both means and ends were left to criteria of practicality—what might work today or tomorrow for narrow and specific ends. Thus inarticulate premises of common sense, pragmatism, and practicality hung over the thought and actions of socialist leaders who might never have read William James or John Dewey.

The socialists offered the workers pie in the sky, and that was all right: it was an old American custom. But just as American thinkers had so often propounded specific short-term steps on the one hand and vague long-term goals on the other, skipping over the vital linkages of interrelated ends and means, so did the radicals. They offered pie, and a future of lots of pie, but they rarely told the worker what she wanted to know—how baked, with what ingredients, how to be distributed—and whether it would really be Mom’s apple pie or a confection with a strange and alien flavor.

Woodrow Wilson’s early efforts to translate into policy the ideology of the New Freedom took place against a background of turmoil and conflict on the international scene. Foreign affairs had figured little in the three-way debate of the 1912 campaign; at most it was a tangential issue, raised by Pujo Committee charges that the Taft Administration had favored bankers and investors in its diplomatic dealings. Aside from echoing these attacks on the “Money Trust,” Wilson shied away from any debate on America’s role in the world. “It would be the irony of fate,” he noted after his election, “if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.”

Wilson had very firm ideas about America’s interests abroad, however. Like most of his thinking, these ideas grew out of his deep moral
commitment to justice, democracy, and Christian values. Wilson revived the Jeffersonian theme of America as a beacon star of democracy for the world, an exemplar and—with its newfound power in the twentieth century—promoter of human rights and social development. “We are chosen,” he declared in 1910, “to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.” Yet this moral thrust had a practical self-interested side. Wilson’s graduate study under Frederick Jackson Turner had left him convinced that America must seek new frontiers abroad to replace the western frontier that had disappeared. One form that moral duty could take was the responsibility of empire, in the Caribbean and the Far East—for empire, notes Sidney Bell, was in Wilson’s eyes “an engine of liberty.”

That engine was to be economic as well as ideological. Wilson, as much as Taft or Roosevelt, believed that America’s foreign trade and investment should be encouraged to grow. In his official acceptance address, delivered more than a month after the Baltimore convention, Wilson declared that “our industries have expanded to such a point that they will burst their jackets if they cannot find a free outlet to the markets of the world.” On the one hand, he and the Secretary of State-designate, William Jennings Bryan, denounced the alleged machinations of investment bankers and called for a “war for emancipation from … the concentrated and organized power of money.” Yet, on the other hand, Wilson viewed the pursuit of what he called the economic “Star of Empire” as being vital to both prosperity at home and efficacy abroad.

China posed the first test of Wilson’s faith that he could reconcile these two conflicting tenets. Economics had long played a key role in shaping America’s policy toward the Celestial Kingdom. As the European powers and Japan proceeded to extract concessions and spheres of influence from the Chinese at the end of the nineteenth century, Secretary Hay had responded with a series of diplomatic notes calling for an “open door”; America’s desire, Hay asserted, was to “safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire.”

The powers paid lip service to Hay’s Open Door doctrine while continuing to undermine the independence of China. When the Emperor’s government was forced to pay the Europeans—and the United States—a large indemnity after Chinese mobs attacked foreigners in the abortive Boxer Rebellion, Western bankers agreed to fund the debt in return for further concessions. Foreign control in the various spheres of influence grew; the Japanese in Manchuria, for example, collected taxes, appointed police, and supervised the population all along the railroads they operated. Meanwhile America’s share of China’s imports dwindled from 10.4 to 7.5 percent.
Rather than selling vast quantities of American manufactured goods, merchants found a market for only modest amounts of U.S. lumber, tobacco, unbleached cloth, and Standard Oil kerosene.

President Taft had endeavored to reverse, with vigorous diplomacy, the decline of American commerce and influence in China. Drawing upon his own experiences in Manila and Shanghai, he wanted a Peking embassy that would employ “force and pluck” to counter the other powers and promote U.S. interests. His plan was to expand substantially American investment in China, on the theory that increased trade would follow. To Prince-Regent Chun, Taft wrote of his “intense personal interest in making the use of American capital ... an instrument for the promotion of the welfare of China.” The United States would join the Europeans in their game of economic imperialism and try to beat them at it, to the alleged benefit of both America and China.

The Taft Administration launched a series of investment projects, offering funds for railroad construction, currency reform, and reorganization of Peking’s finances. Edward H. Harriman, the great magnate of western railroads, was enlisted to incorporate Manchuria into his scheme for a global network of railways and steamships. But Harriman died in the first year of Taft’s presidency. Secretary of State Philander Knox undermined several loan proposals by making unacceptable political demands on the Chinese, while other ventures were hamstrung by disputes with and among the European co-investors. Overall, American bankers were reluctant to risk their capital to promote the schemes of Taft and Knox; only persistent pressure from Washington kept “dollar diplomacy” moving at all.

The Chinese people, however, were also on the move. Reacting to increasing foreign influence, the population of the southern provinces rose in protest and toppled the Peking monarchy in 1911. Secretary Knox would neither recognize the rebel forces of Sun Yat-sen nor continue loans to Yuan Shih-kai’s self-styled republic newly organized in the capital; the entire question was left as the first foreign crisis for the Wilson Administration.

From the very beginning the incoming Democrat took a longer view of American interests in China. Political development, he concluded, was essential to economic growth; thus the United States should make its first goal the advancement of a free, democratic China. To Sun Yat-sen Wilson cabled his “strongest sympathy with every movement which looks towards giving the people ... of China the liberty for which they have so long been yearning and preparing themselves.” Bryan, meanwhile, sent congratulations to Yuan—along with a copy of the works of Thomas Jefferson. When the two Chinese leaders reached a precarious compromise and formed a
united government, Wilson made America the first major power to recognize the new republic.

For Wilson the “awakening of the people of China” was the “most significant … event of our generation.” The Peking embassy, Wilson and Bryan believed, should go to an ambassador who would work closely with the American missionaries and Young Men’s Christian Association activists who were penetrating the country in increasing numbers. When Henry Morgenthau asked for the appointment, Wilson demurred, replying that the post had to go to an “evangelical Christian.” The choice fell on Professor Paul Reinsch, a former editor of La Follette’s journal. To Reinsch, Wilson emphasized that education and political example should take precedence over economic involvement. Indeed, the President noted in a letter to Harvard’s Charles Eliot, American diplomacy had to be reordered across the board to put “moral and public considerations” ahead of the “material interests of individuals.”

Early on, Wilson was presented with an opportunity to put those principles into practice, when a group of American bankers applied for government permission to continue in an international loan to Yuan’s regime. Noting that the terms of the loan called for foreign control of tax collection and of expenditures, Wilson pulled the American firms out of the consortium. The United States, he declared, would take an independent course to aid China without undermining her national sovereignty.

The public greeted the rejection of the bankers’ consortium with applause. Henry George (Jr.) declared that Wilson had prevented the “prostitution of our State Department by our princes of privilege.”
Outlook
foresaw the triumph of progressive reform, with American guidance and trade helping to build a “New China” of “parks, and sewers, and filtered water, and war on rats and mosquitoes.” The New York
World
ran a cartoon entitled “Leaving the Firm,” that showed Uncle Sam turning his back on J. P. Morgan & Company. Wilson himself, however, was aware that the Taft Administration had dragooned the bankers into their Chinese loans in the first place. Now that the new President had reversed the government’s policy, freeing Morgan and his associates from an imbroglio of which they were “dead sick,” the bankers were glad to see meddling Uncle Sam take his leave.

How apply “moral considerations” much closer to home—to Mexico and other restless, poverty-racked nations of Latin America? The approach of Wall Street and Washington was mainly financial. In 1912, Americans sold more than $130 million worth of manufactured goods south of the Rio
Grande and bought $250 million in foodstuffs and raw materials. Long-term investments in the region passed the $1 billion mark. In Mexico alone, Americans were estimated to own 43 percent of the invested property.

Alongside American trade, exploitation and tyranny still flourished too; could Wilson, in the spirit of the New Freedom, promote the former while combating the latter? He had little enough freedom himself, for the actions of previous Administrations narrowed his choices in dealing with the southern nations. Taft’s Latin American policy, modeled on the quasi-protectorate that TR had established over the Dominican Republic, put American experts in charge of the finances of various Caribbean republics. The system had seemed to work splendidly in Santo Domingo, where U.S. control of the customs revenues ushered in a period of political calm and economic growth. But elsewhere Taft had encountered obstacles to his paternalistic policies. The prickly Philander Knox alienated many of the Latin American diplomats who tried to work with him; Taft himself failed to get several key treaties through the Senate; and revolutionary upheavals on the scene threatened to sweep away fiscal solutions that seemed promising in Washington. Taft had characterized his policy as one of “substituting dollars for bullets,” but in Nicaragua he had to rely on both, sending in U.S. troops to prop up an unpopular government friendly to American investment.

Thus Wilson entered office bound by a series of commitments in’ Latin America: a historical commitment to the Monroe Doctrine; a strategic one to the defense of the Panama Canal, just now being completed after a decade of work; a military one to the American soldiers already stationed in Nicaragua, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Guantanamo. And finally there was a financial commitment: fully one-half of America’s investments abroad were in Latin America. Old foreign policy hands wondered how these practical considerations would interact with Wilson’s underlying moral precepts.

Wilson did not hesitate to protect American interests with vigorous action. August 1914: Nicaragua yields control of a naval base and the alternate isthmian canal route to the United States. July 1915: American Marines land in Haiti to quell bloody disorders. November 1916: the United States establishes military control over the Dominican Republic. January 1917: Wilson purchases the Danish Virgin Islands in order to secure the approaches to the Panama Canal. February 1917: more U.S. troops land in Cuba to block a revolt against the Menocal government.

Morality had its place too in a lingering crisis in American relations with Mexico. Two years of political turmoil in that country had climaxed on
February 22, 1913, when President Francisco Madero was killed, allegedly by the forces of his opponent, General Victoriano Huerta. Taft’s ambassador in Mexico City advised the newly inaugurated Wilson to accept Huerta’s coup, for the general had disavowed the murder of Madero, ended the fighting that had gripped the capital, and won the support of key European envoys. The American President, however, was unmoved. To his Cabinet, Wilson exclaimed that he would not deal with “a government of butchers”; publicly he announced that “morality and not expediency” would guide American policy.