From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (74 page)

Although deemed a political albatross, the League issue would not die easily. During the 1920s, almost despite itself, the United States drew closer to the organization its president had once championed. Wilsonians continued to press for full membership. Peace advocates such as Frederick J. Libby of the National Council for the Prevention of War and James T. Shotwell of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace lobbied relentlessly and effectively for some kind of U.S. association with the world organization. Once the League was a going concern, the United States had little choice but to deal with it. From the early 1920s, diplomats began to correspond with League officials; U.S. representatives met unofficially with League commissions dealing with economic and social questions. The Republicans in time assigned some of their best people to Geneva, where they sat in on meetings concerning arms limitations and European reconstruction. From 1925 on, the United States had official representation. Obviously such limited involvement was not the equivalent of full membership, and the League's prestige and influence probably suffered accordingly. Yet to go this far represented a significant departure for a nation whose cardinal principle for 150 years had been avoiding Europe's "broils."
⁴⁰

Abstention from the World Court, the product of executive timidity and dilatoriness and Senate obstructionism, exposed the less savory side of Republican "internationalism." From the turn of the century, Republicans such as Root and William Howard Taft had promoted the expansion of international law. Harding, Coolidge, Hughes, and Kellogg all favored membership in the World Court. But the executive branch did not assign the issue high priority. Aware that mere discussion of joining the Court would raise the specter of League membership (which was not required), the politically sensitive Coolidge was prepared to "let it set."
⁴¹
While voting for U.S. membership in 1926, a still hyper-suspicious Senate loaded down its approval with conditions (some of them even drafted by American John Bassett Moore, a sitting judge on the Court), the most obnoxious of which would have prevented the Court from giving advisory opinions on matters
in which the United States claimed an interest. Such unilateralism—all too typical of America's approach to the world—obviously met strong opposition from other members. The eighty-four-year-old Root eventually helped redraft the Court protocol to meet Senate objections. In 1929, Hoover submitted it to the Senate. Bogged down in the Great Depression, however, he did not push it, and when it finally came up for consideration in 1935 it failed by seven votes. The United States never joined the World Court, a blunt reminder of the limits of Republican internationalism.
⁴²

By contrast, the United States assumed unprecedented and indispensable leadership in promoting international arms limitations. Reduction of armaments was an integral part of the Republicans' broader diplomatic and economic strategy. It would reduce government expenditures, permit a lowering of taxes, and promote the sort of peaceful and stable environment in which international trade and investment could flourish. After some initial hesitation, Harding and Hughes in 1921 jumped on an already speeding bandwagon. At a conference in Washington, the secretary of state pulled off a diplomatic tour de force, the first major international agreement on arms reduction ever negotiated.

By the time Harding took office, pressures for disarmament had mounted. Two years after the armistice, the United States, Great Britain, and Japan were planning major expansions of their already sizeable navies. In December, Peace Progressive and former Irreconcilable senator Borah proposed that the three nations reduce their navies by 50 percent over five years. The Borah Resolution struck a responsive chord among war-weary peoples in the United States and across the world. Arms reduction could permit much-needed tax relief and head off a looming arms race. Many commentators believed that the European arms race had been a major cause of the Great War, and disarmament could ease the threat of another devastating conflict. For some Americans, Borah perhaps included, U.S. leadership in arms reduction could compensate for refusal to join the League. Disarmament was a cause behind which virtually every individual and group could rally. The indefatigable Libby mounted a huge lobbying campaign. He was joined by other organizations in the burgeoning postwar peace movement, churches, and newly empowered women's groups such as the League of Women Voters and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. With this sort of popular backing, the Borah Resolution passed Congress easily in July 1921—ironically, as part of that year's Naval Appropriations Act.
⁴³

The great powers responded quickly. With characteristic vagueness, Harding had already endorsed arms reduction. Although Hughes was reluctant to appear to be following Congress's lead, he found the popular pressures irresistible and the need to address rising tensions in East Asia compelling. He thus issued an invitation for a conference to meet in Washington. Caught between popular pressures for disarmament and demands from his admirals to maintain Britain's traditional dominance of the seas, Prime Minister David Lloyd George found Hughes's proposal a convenient way out. He recognized, moreover, that the war-depleted British treasury could not match that of the United States in a long-term competition. The Foreign Office worried about the budding rivalry in East Asia. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, long an irritant for the United States, was up for renewal. Lloyd George thus saw a chance to accommodate Washington and shed dangerous treaty obligations without alienating an important ally. The British therefore proposed a conference with a broader agenda to include all nations with interests in East Asia. The United States quickly assented.

The U.S. invitation to confer in Washington came as a "bolt from the sky" to Tokyo. Japanese leaders feared that the United States and Britain might be ganging up on them. Moderates seized the opportunity to promote cooperation with the West without sacrificing vital interests in Manchuria. Facing serious economic and political problems at home and dangerously overextended abroad, the government sought to contain its own military leaders and break out of the diplomatic isolation in which Japan found itself after World War I. Wasting no time, the wary but willing conferees agreed to meet in Washington in late 1921.
⁴⁴

Hughes handled the conference with consummate skill. He prepared with the utmost care, mastering the technicalities of complex weapons systems without getting bogged down in detail. He kept U.S. naval officers on board without letting them take control. Avoiding Wilson's mistakes, he made Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge part of the solution, thus preventing him from again becoming the problem. He developed a full-fledged plan for sizeable reductions in the tonnage of battleships, the ultimate weapon of the era, and kept his proposals secret until the conference opened. On November 11, 1921, Armistice Day, the delegates attended a moving ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. The following day, in what journalist William Allen White called "the most intensely dramatic
moment I have ever witnessed," Hughes unveiled his plan in what became known as his "bombshell speech" before a stunned audience at Washington's Constitution Hall. Addressing a packed house including prime ministers, admirals, the entire U.S. Congress, and some four hundred journalists from across the world, he insisted that competition in armaments "must stop!" He proceeded to call for the scrapping of sixty-six ships, including four British super-dreadnoughts authorized but not yet under construction and a Japanese battleship, the
Mutsu,
built in part with collections from schoolchildren. "Hughes sank in thirty-five minutes more ships than all of the admirals of the world have sunk in a cycle of centuries," an admiring journalist wrote. Caught completely off guard, a British admiral "turned several colors of the rainbow and behaved as if he were sitting on hot coals." The crowd rose to its feet in a "tornado of cheering."
⁴⁵

After nearly three months of arduous negotiations, the conferees in early 1922 reached a series of agreements dealing not only with arms limitation but also with some of the delicate political issues that had prompted the arms race. Hughes negotiated with Tokyo a separate agreement giving the United States cable rights on the Japanese island-mandate of Yap and an agreement with Britain and Japan ending their alliance. A Four-Power Treaty replaced the alliance and committed the parties to respect each other's possessions in the Pacific and consult in case of conflict among themselves or external threat from some other nation. Although later denounced as toothless and essentially meaningless, the agreement significantly eased tensions in the Pacific and facilitated major reductions in armaments.
⁴⁶

Following the broad outlines sketched by Hughes at the opening of the conference, a Five-Power Treaty dealt with capital ships. "For the first time in recorded history," historian Warren Cohen has written, "the Great Powers voluntarily surrendered their freedom to arm as they pleased."
⁴⁷
The treaty established a ratio of 5:5:3 in battleship tonnage for the United States, Britain, and Japan; France and Italy accepted 1.67. It eliminated thirty U.S. ships built or under construction, twenty-two British, and fifteen Japanese. Britain accepted equality with the United States, no small concession. Japan grudgingly agreed to a position of inferiority, in part
because it was permitted to keep the symbolically powerful
Mutsu
and also because of a vital clause in which the United States and Britain agreed to maintain the status quo in fortifications and bases in the Pacific and East Asia. In contrast to the United States and Britain, Japan only had to "defend" one ocean. Most important, its leadership recognized it could not win an arms race with the United States. Hughes negotiated effectively in part because Herbert Yardley, a talented U.S. cryptologist, broke Japan's diplomatic code and could reveal before each day's meeting the position its delegates would take and how far they could be pushed.
⁴⁸

A third agreement, the Nine-Power Treaty, attempted to stabilize great-power competition in China. The signatories refused to address the obnoxious unequal treaties, especially on tariff autonomy and extraterritoriality, another crushing blow to Chinese seeking to regain their nation's sovereignty. On Manchuria, Hughes reverted to Theodore Roosevelt's pragmatic approach and indeed used veteran diplomat and TR confidant Root to work behind the scenes with Japan. The Nine-Power Treaty thus resembled the Root-Takahira (1908) and Lansing-Ishii (1917) agreements, an ambiguous compromise implicitly recognizing Japan's special interests in Manchuria. Rather than pressing Japanese delegates on the still-sensitive issue of Shandong, Hughes encouraged private discussions with China, even holding the last meeting in his home. Japan voluntarily agreed to return the former German leasehold to China while retaining some railroad concessions, and did so later in the year. The Nine-Power Treaty itself was notably and unsurprisingly non-substantive, once again calling on the signatories not to interfere in China's internal affairs or to seek exclusive concessions and to respect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. It sought to freeze the status quo rather than alleviate the inequities under which China suffered.
⁴⁹

The Washington agreements were much criticized after World War II. The United States alone adhered to the naval arms limitations, it was argued, leaving itself vulnerable to Japanese attack. The agreements lacked enforcement provisions and were therefore essentially worthless. Such arguments reflect ex post facto and ahistorical reasoning. The Senate would never have accepted the sort of enforcement clauses critics later insisted were necessary. As it was, a leery Senate microscopically examined the treaties for hidden commitments and approved the Four-Power Treaty by only four votes over the necessary two-thirds. To be sure, the
treaties were not without serious deficiencies. Russia and Germany were left out. The naval arms limitations did not go beyond capital ships, freeing nations to move in other directions. China would not forget yet another affront at the hands of the imperial powers. This said, the Washington treaties stabilized a dangerous arms race and dramatically eased great-power tensions. The United States gave up only ships and bases Congress would likely not have funded. By conceding Japan its long-sought due as a major power, they established a basis for cooperation in the Pacific and initiated a Japanese-American rapprochement. Most important, this first example of arms limitation eased the enormous burden of arms on people throughout the world, helping make possible recovery from a devastating war. In all, it was an enormously significant event, making clear the new role of the United States in the world.
⁵⁰
The United States took the initiative in calling the conference and hosted it in Washington. Its secretary of state spearheaded the negotiations and achieved most of his nation's major objectives.

In European reconstruction, as in disarmament, the United States played a key role, although in this area it was not as eager or decisive in taking the lead. Republican leaders were not indifferent to Europe's postwar plight, as has often been charged. They recognized all too clearly the extent to which the war had shattered the European economic order; they were keenly aware of the importance of a stable, prosperous Europe to America's economic and political well-being. They also perceived that their nation's altered economic status required a more active role in resolving European problems, a harsh reality underscored by the recession of 1919–21. Some, like Hoover, even believed that the United States should employ its vast economic power and influence to save the world from "misery and disaster worse than the dark ages."
⁵¹
Here, however, formidable domestic political constraints blocked the way. As a consequence, Republican administrations relied on economic rather than political methods, and on unofficial and private emissaries to negotiate and implement solutions.