From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (72 page)

The only nation except Japan to benefit from the Great War, the United States emerged unquestionably the world's greatest economic power. The population increased by 30 percent between 1900 and 1920 to more than 106 million people. The United States was the world's largest agricultural and manufacturing producer and during the 1920s, remarkably, produced more industrial output than the next six powers combined. The war solidified the nation's position as a creditor. It was the world's leading financial power and had a large supply of gold. Its productivity, wealth, and standard of living were the envy of people across the globe.

The Republicans would be sharply criticized after World War II for unilaterally disarming the United States during the 1920s, but in truth they maintained a military establishment entirely adequate for the times. The overriding fact in determining national security policies was the absence of any serious threat to U.S. security. Europe was exhausted from war, Japan in a cooperative mood, and Soviet Russia preoccupied with internal development. In this strategic context, the United States was properly content to maintain a small regular army of about 140,000 men to be supplemented in war by the mobilization of a reserve of citizen soldiers. The officer corps remained at twice the prewar level; army appropriations even during the Great Depression were more than double what they had been before 1914. Army leaders worked significant qualitative improvements, including the beginnings of armored forces and an air corps. The United States came out of the war with the world's largest navy, and sea-power enthusiasts hoped to maintain naval supremacy, but such a goal made no sense in an era of peace and security. The Republicans initiated significant disarmament and settled for parity with Great Britain in capital ships, while developing heavy cruisers and aircraft carriers. Post–World War II internationalists (mainly Democrats) criticized them for not maintaining adequate military power. In reality, it was quite appropriate for the United States during these years to be economically powerful and only moderately strong militarily.
⁶

Far more important than America's military strength during the 1920s was what scholar Joseph Nye would later label its "soft power," the global influence deriving from its economic might, technological superiority, and cultural sway.
⁷
At the end of the war, the United States stood above
the rest of the world, youthful, dynamic, and prosperous, the city on a hill Puritan leader John Winthrop had spoken of three hundred years earlier. Especially to war-weary Europeans seeking to make the transition to peace, America's values of optimism, pragmatism, and efficiency and its high standard of living appeared worthy of emulation. Long scorned by Europeans for its lack of high culture, the United States in the 1920s became a center for the global export of mass culture. Its artists and writers flooded Europe and became trendsetters for the decade. Its films took over European markets, establishing fashions, spreading the American way of life, and selling U.S. products. "Your movies and talkies have soaked the French mind in American life, methods, and manners . . . ," ambassador Jean Claudel observed, "bringing a new vision of power and a new tempo of life . . . . More and more we are following America." Such soft power naturally provoked resentment, especially among proud, aristocratic Europeans. But it also enabled the United States to pursue its foreign policy aims in Europe with minimal commitment.
⁸

American attitudes toward the outside world were marked by turbulent crosscurrents during the 1920s. The patriotism drummed up for the Great Crusade produced powerful nativist and chauvinist sentiments that persisted well into the decade, leading to attacks on those branded "un-American" at home, suspicion of involvement abroad, and limits on immigration, especially of Orientals. Even among many of the elite who played an important role in the war and the peace negotiations, the experience reaffirmed old suspicions of Europe and convictions of U.S. superiority. "The more I learn to know the Old World, the stronger my love for America . . . ," Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote from Paris in 1919. "The more I breathe the foulness of European intrigue, the sweeter and purer becomes the air of my native land."
⁹
His young nephew Allen Dulles expressed similar views. "Notwithstanding all the pious utterances of European statesman, the policy of most of these governments over here is just as devious as it was a hundred years ago," the future CIA director wrote his father.
¹⁰

At the same time and paradoxically, the war and Wilsonianism boosted popular interest in the outside world. The 1920s brought another explosion of missionary activity abroad, as large numbers of Americans departed
for Asia, Africa, and Latin America to spread the Gospel and American values. The experience probably had more effect on developing their own worldliness than on serving the people they worked among. American volunteer groups set up schools and hospitals in areas as remote as Albania. Tourism skyrocketed in the 1920s, especially in Europe, where an estimated 251,000 travelers spent upwards of $300 million in 1929 alone. The flood of tourists helped to heal Europe's balance of payments problems; on occasion, Americans provoked such resentment abroad with their wealth and arrogant behavior that President Calvin Coolidge felt compelled to intervene.
¹¹

American universities gave growing attention to the study of world affairs. The number of international programs doubled between 1916 and 1921. Shortly after the war, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins, and Tufts created separate schools of world politics. In 1921, a group of East Coast businessmen, bankers, lawyers, and academics, some closely connected to the government, organized the Council on Foreign Relations, a decidedly elitist group committed to promoting public interest in foreign policy issues and providing expert advice to government. With prominent names on its roster like statesmen Elihu Root and Henry Stimson and banker Thomas Lamont, the council held monthly black-tie dinners to discuss current issues and began publishing its signature journal,
Foreign Affairs.
It vigorously promoted internationalism and became a breeding ground for the "establishment" that would shape U.S. foreign policy through much of the twentieth century.
¹²

African Americans, the most oppressed minority group in American society, also looked abroad. Leaders like Walter White, W.E.B. DuBois, and the singer Paul Robeson increasingly appreciated that the problems of people of color were international in scope and that global solutions might be necessary. White's association with the Pan-African Congress in 1921 revealed to him the international dimensions of issues of race and white supremacy, and the connections between racism and imperialism, white supremacy, and global capitalism. Some like Marcus Garvey sought foreign solutions to U.S. race problems by advocating a mass exodus of African Americans back to Africa. Others like DuBois pushed for considering the problems of people of color in their international dimension.
¹³

Traditionally, after wars Americans have rebelled against strong presidential leadership, and this was especially true after World War I. McKinley, Roosevelt, and Wilson had significantly expanded the presidency, and Americans neither wanted nor got that sort of leader in the 1920s. Warren Harding was a weak and amiable nonentity, precisely what party stalwarts sought. Ultimately, he was the tragic victim of the corruption of the men around him. He came to despise his job. It's "hell," he told a friend. "There is no other word to describe it."
¹⁴
A dour and flinty Vermonter, "Silent Cal" Coolidge reveled in presidential inactivity. Both came from provincial backgrounds and showed little interest in and much ignorance of the world. Harding had traveled extensively but apparently learned very little. Coolidge flaunted his provincialism, telling friends he did not need to go to Europe because he could learn what he needed at home. Elihu Root snarled that Coolidge did not have an international hair in his head; Coolidge admitted that his intellect was not a "gushing fountain."
¹⁵
Their inattention and lack of boldness may have been especially costly in terms of addressing crucial global economic issues. The best that can be said about them is that they had the good sense to leave the conduct of foreign policy in the generally capable hands of their secretaries of state.

During the 1920s, the secretaries of state resumed the preeminent role in policymaking they had played before McKinley and Roosevelt. The New York lawyer and unsuccessful presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes was one of the ablest ever to hold the post. An indefatigable worker, utterly devoted to the job, he filled the sizeable void left by Harding and Coolidge and was perhaps the last secretary to personally manage U.S. foreign policy. Hughes ably presided over a department with a budget of $2 million and a staff of six hundred people. He won the loyalty of his aides with his dedication and warm, outgoing personality. Blessed with a brilliant mind, he was also politically astute. Keenly aware of Wilson's fate, he shied away from grand schemes and bold initiatives, but through careful study and preparation steered seventy-one treaties through a contentious Senate. In perfect keeping with the times, he sought a "maximum of security with a minimum of commitment."
¹⁶
His successor, Frank B.
Kellogg, matched him only in dedication to and hours spent on the job. A Minnesota farm boy without formal education, Kellogg in best Horatio Alger fashion had become a prominent lawyer, Republican politician, and ambassador to Great Britain. Cautious to a fault, he was a classic workaholic who often became bogged down in minutiae and whose working habits produced the anxious, sometimes bad-tempered demeanor that earned him the nickname "Nervous Nellie." His major accomplishment, the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war, won him a Nobel Peace Prize—and the derision of subsequent generations of internationalist pundits and historians.
¹⁷

Developments in the diplomatic corps reflected the crosscurrents of the age. On the one side, the foreign service became increasingly professionalized, "a pretty good club," in the words of one of its members, of upper-class white males from the most prestigious prep schools and Ivy League universities who shared the same values, a taste for "old wines, proper English and Savile Row clothing," and a deep commitment to converting a traditionally amateur operation into a permanent profession. On the other side, the consuls and their business and congressional allies pushed for a higher status for the less effete, more "manly," and more typically American consular service to more effectively promote U.S. business abroad. After years of consular agitation, Congress forced the two services into an uneasy merger with the 1924 Rogers Act. Three years later, the apparent favoritism of the snobbish diplomats for themselves over the "hard-working" consuls provoked a backlash in Congress and the press that resuscitated the traditional American disdain for diplomacy and diplomats. One outraged critic insisted that the diplomats should be sent to consular posts "where they would do some real work." The result was a setback for professionalization of the foreign service and additional legislation to force closer integration with the consuls.
¹⁸

The new world of the 1920s brought intrusions on the State Department's traditional domination of U.S. foreign policy. For his interference in this area as in others, Herbert Hoover was known as secretary of commerce and undersecretary of everything else. The Republican administrations eagerly farmed out key tasks to private experts such as industrialist Owen D. Young, Lamont, and Johns Hopkins economist Edwin Kemmerer. Private lobbying groups also exerted growing influence, especially the organized peace movement, which consisted of a variety of
organizations—working sometimes together but often at cross-purposes—and exerted powerful pressure for disarmament and the outlawing of war.
¹⁹

Flushed with its "victory" over Wilson and in full rebellion against three decades of executive domination, Congress was more assertive in foreign policy in the 1920s than at any time since the Gilded Age. It mattered not who was secretary of state, Senator Boies Penrose boasted, "Congress—especially the Senate—will blaze the way in connection with our foreign policies."
²⁰
Penrose's rhetoric aside, of course, Congress was not well suited to "blaze the way." As an institution, it was too big and unwieldy to actually frame and implement policies. Most legislators were interested mainly in domestic issues. They were divided on the basis of party, and the two parties were sharply divided internally, limiting their ability to agree on anything. Congressional influence was mainly negative. Vivid memories of Wilson's humiliating defeat undoubtedly inhibited initiatives among executives not prone to activism in any event, leading Hughes and Kellogg to frame cautious policies and carefully cultivate congressional support for them. On numerous occasions, Congress played an obstructionist role.
²¹

A power unto themselves in the Congress were the so-called Peace Progressives, a small but tightly unified and vocal bloc that exerted an influence far disproportionate to its numbers. Composed mainly of midwestern and western radicals, most of them Republicans, the Peace Progressives kept up a drumfire of criticism of U.S. foreign policy throughout the 1920s. Often wrongly dismissed as isolationists, they took a keen interest in foreign policy issues, articulated a global vision sharply opposed to that of mainstream Republicans, and ardently promoted the use of U.S. influence to build a better world. Foes of big business in domestic policy, they also objected to the overarching influence of business in foreign policy. They were staunchly anti-imperialist and anti-militarist. They denounced U.S. military intervention in the Caribbean and advocated support of nationalism in areas long dominated by outside powers. They urged recognition of the Soviet Union, not out of sympathy for Bolshevism but from the belief that engagement with Communism would help reform it. They worked closely with peace groups to push radical disarmament measures and the outlawing of war. Led by Senator William Borah, the so-called Lion of Idaho, a powerful figure of leonine countenance, stentorian voice,
and indomitable will, they helped end the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua, cut off funds for naval construction, and avert war with Mexico.
²²