Belligerents, Brinkmanship, and the Big Stick: A Historical Encyclopedia of American Diplomatic Concepts

Belligerents, Brinkmanship, and the Big Stick This page intentionally left blank Belligerents, Brinkmanship, and th...

Author: John Dobson

79 downloads 1124 Views 4MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Belligerents, Brinkmanship, and the Big Stick

This page intentionally left blank

Belligerents, Brinkmanship, and the Big Stick A Historical Encyclopedia of American Diplomatic Concepts

John Dobson

Copyright 2009 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dobson, John M. Belligerents, brinkmanship, and the big stick : a historical encyclopedia of American diplomatic concepts / John Dobson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59884-131-2 (alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-59884-132-9 (ebook) 1. United States—Foreign relations—Encyclopedias. 2. United States—Foreign relations— Philosophy—Encyclopedias. I. Title. E183.7.D59 2009 327.73003—dc22 2009022938 13

12

11

10

09

1

2

3

4

5

ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116–1911 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an e-book. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Preface, xi Acknowledgments, xiii

Section 1: Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830, 1 Key Concepts, 3 Alliance, 3 Diplomats, 6 Embargo, 7 Impressment, 11 Jay’s Treaty, 13 Legitimacy, 15 Louisiana, 17 Mercantilism, 19 Monroe Doctrine, 21 Most Favored Nation, 25 Neutrality, 26 Nonimportation, 28 No-Transfer Principle, 30 Paper Blockade, 32 Pinckney’s Treaty, 34 Plan of 1776, 35 Plenipotentiary, 37 Quasi-War with France, 39 Ratiﬁcation, 42 Recognition, 44 Rule of 1756, 46 Transcontinental Treaty (Florida), 48

v

vi | Contents

Treaty (Treaty of Paris, 1783), 50 Uti Possedetus (Treaty of Ghent, 1814), 55 War Hawks, 57 XYZ Affair, 59 Biographies, 61 Deane, Silas, 61 Franklin, Benjamin, 61 Gallatin, Albert, 63 Genêt, Edmond, 63 Jay, John, 64 Livingston, Robert, 65 Logan, George, 66 Rush, Richard, 66 Symmes, John Cleve, 67 Wilkinson, James, 67

Section 2: Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880, 69 Key Concepts, 71 Alaska, 71 Arbitration (Alabama Claims), 73 China Market, 75 Filibustering, 77 First Shot Tradition, 79 Japan, Opening of, 82 Joint Resolution (Texas), 84 King Cotton Diplomacy, 87 Manifest Destiny, 89 Mexican War, 91 Natural Boundaries, 95 Oregon Claims, 98 Oregon Fever, 100 Ostend Manifesto (Cuba), 103 Recognition as a Belligerent, 106 Santo Domingo, 109 Texas Revolution, 110 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 112 Biographies, 114 Adams, Charles Francis, 114 Astor, John Jacob, 115 Bidlack, Benjamin A., 116 Burlingame, Anson, 116 Calhoun, John Caldwell, 117 Clayton, John Middleton, 118

Contents | vii Cushing, Caleb, 119 Gadsden, James, 120 Harris, Townsend, 120 Kearny, Stephen Watts, 121 Perry, Matthew Calbraith, 121 Scott, Winﬁeld, 122 Seward, William H., 123 Slidell, John, 125 Stockton, Robert Field, 126 Trist, Nicholas, 126 Upshur, Abel, 127 Van Buren, Martin, 127 Walker, William, 128 Webster, Daniel, 128 Wilkes, Charle, 129

Section 3: Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914, 131 Key Concepts, 133 Algeciras, 133 Anti-Imperialism, 134 Big Stick, 137 Boxer Rebellion, 141 Cuban Rebellion, 143 Dollar Diplomacy, 146 Gunboat Diplomacy, 149 Hawaii, 151 Jingoism, 154 Mediation (Russo-Japanese War), 156 Mission, 159 Neutralization, 161 New Manifest Destiny, 163 Olney Corollary, 165 Open Door Policy, 168 Panama, 171 Pan-Americanism, 173 Platt Amendment, 175 Protectionism, 178 Punitive Expedition, 181 Rapprochement, 183 Spanish-American-Cuban War, 185 Sugar, 188 Biographies, 191 Adee, Alvey, 191 Blaine, James Gillespie, 191

viii | Contents

Bryan, William Jennings, 192 Dewey, George, 193 Hay, John Milton, 194 Olney, Richard, 195 Root, Elihu, 195 Shufeldt, Robert Wilson, 196 Stevens, John Leavitt, 196 Teller, Henry Moore, 197 Wood, Leonard, 198

Section 4: The World Wars, 1914–1945, 201 Key Concepts, 203 American Expeditionary Force, 203 Atlantic Charter, 205 Atomic Diplomacy, 208 Disarmament, 211 Four Policemen, 214 Fourteen Points, 215 Good Neighbor Policy, 220 Grand Alliance, 222 Great War, 226 Island Hopping, 229 Isolationism, 231 Kellogg-Briand Pact, 233 League of Nations, 235 Lend-Lease, 238 Neutrality (1914–1917), 242 Neutrality Acts, 244 Non-recognition, 246 Pearl Harbor, 249 Quarantine, 252 Red Scare, 254 Second Front, 256 Siberian Expedition, 259 Stimson Doctrine, 261 United Nations, 262 Unrestricted Submarine Warfare, 266 Yalta, 268 Biographies, 271 Hopkins, Harry, 271 Hughes, Charles Evans, 272

Contents | ix Hull, Cordell, 273 Kellogg, Frank B., 274 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 275 Nye, Gerald P., 276 Pershing, John J., 276 Stimson, Henry L., 277

Section 5: The Cold War and After, 1945–, 279 Key Concepts, 281 Bay of Pigs, 281 Berlin, 283 Brinkmanship, 286 Bush Doctrine, 291 Cambodia, 294 Containment, 296 Détente, 298 Free Trade 302 GATT, 304 Gulf War, 306 Hostage Crisis 309 Iran-Contra, 311 Israel 314 Land for Peace, 316 Liberation of Eastern Europe, 319 Limited War (Korea), 321 Marshall Plan, 323 Massive Retaliation, 326 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 328 NSC-68, 332 Red Scare Again, 334 Shuttle Diplomacy, 337 Sputnik, 338 Tet, 340 Tonkin Gulf Incident, 343 Truman Doctrine, 346 U-2, 349 War on Terror, 352 Biographies, 354 Acheson, Dean, 354 Dulles, John Foster, 355 Kissinger, Henry, 356

x | Contents

Marshall, George C., 358 McNamara, Robert Strange, 358 Rumsfeld, Donald, 359 Chronology, 363 Index, 369 About the Author, 397

Preface

My initial conception for this volume was to delve backward in time to identify the source or initial statement of an American foreign policy and then describe how it inﬂuenced subsequent actions. Many of the broader concepts, such as mission and manifest destiny, took shape over time without a speciﬁc triggering incident. Others clearly represented responses to real or perceived threats, as was the case when President George Washington issued his Proclamation of Neutrality to avoid taking sides in the Anglo-French wars. Whether general sentiments or reactions to speciﬁc events, these attitudes became key elements in the vision that Americans had of their nation and, more particularly, in the image of it that they wished others to accept. The original plan for the book also envisioned entries that deﬁned and then described the implementation of common and less common diplomatic processes. Thus entries such as arbitration, containment, détente, and protectionism discuss instances in which American policy makers utilized these techniques. As the project moved forward, it became apparent that much more than lofty principles or applications of diplomatic techniques has affected the course of U.S. foreign policy. Sometimes, particular geographic locations, such as Hawaii or Israel, have riveted the attention of Americans and spawned new approaches. And, as the famous nineteenthcentury military tactician Carl von Clausewitz noted, wars represent an extension of diplomacy. Consequently, the book includes coverage of the major international conﬂicts in which the United States participated. Along the way, many individuals contributed their own nuances to U.S. foreign relations. Because the Constitution assigns responsibility for articulating and implementing foreign relations to the executive branch, presidents appear frequently in the following pages. For example, the names of several presidents are associated with doctrines of one sort or another. Moreover, phrases such as the “big stick,” “dollar diplomacy,” or the “Good Neighbor Policy” are associated with particular chief executives. But many other people have inﬂuenced or even developed independent policy xi

xii | Preface

formulations. The biographical entries provide many details about who these people were and why and how they became signiﬁcant actors in U.S. diplomatic history. The ﬁnal elements included in this book are the actual words used to announce or conﬁrm a U.S. foreign policy objective. Sprinkled throughout the volume are excerpts from key documents that deﬁned the conception that the United States has of itself in the international arena. Some are famous in their own right, such as Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which was designed to end one war, or the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which formally began another. Other documents dictated or tuned ongoing policy developments. I chose a chronological framework for presenting all of these elements. Each of the ﬁve sections of the book contains concepts, events, people, and documents that relate to a particular time period. Every section begins with a brief survey of diplomatic events during that period, to provide a historical context for the individual entries. The book also provides a chronology, or time line, that dates events or policies that can be linked to a particular starting point. Those interested in further exploration of the topics included in this book may consult the references listed after each entry. If additional references are desired, readers may want to consult the comprehensive bibliographic work that Robert L. Beisner edited for the Society of Historians of Foreign Relations, titled American Foreign Relations since 1600: A Guide to the Literature, 2nd. ed. Santa Barbara, CA: ABCCLIO, 2003.

Acknowledgments

My interest in diplomatic history and foreign relations received its initial impetus from a total immersion experience during my high school years. It began when my father signed on as a technical advisor in the recently formed Point Four program, which later evolved into the U.S. Administration for International Development (USAID.) An expert on soils and irrigation in arid southwestern states like my native New Mexico, he was well equipped to assist the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture in planning how best to use the water to be stored by the projected High Aswan Dam. As a result, my family spent a thoroughly delightful two years in Cairo. The Suez Canal crisis cut short our stay when it led to the cancellation of U.S. support for the dam project. My family remained committed to assisting people in other countries, however, so I completed my high school education in Ankara, Turkey. Although I then returned to the United States to attend college, my family spent another nine years overseas, living and working in Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, and Colombia, and their example reinforced my own strong interest in international affairs. That, in turn, encouraged me to complement my study of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a second major in history. I then pursued doctoral study at the University of Wisconsin, specializing in American political and diplomatic history. There Professor William Appleman Williams served as an outstanding teacher and role model. Shortly after I earned my PhD, I decided to put that expertise to practical use by serving as a foreign service ofﬁcer in Washington. My true calling, however, was as a teacher and writer, so I returned to academe and a career as a history professor. Throughout those years, I taught, researched, and published books and articles about diplomatic history. I beneﬁted greatly from my interactions with compatible colleagues at both Iowa State University and Oklahoma State University. A particularly inﬂuential mentor was Iowa State diplomatic historian Richard Kottman, who provided me with new perspectives and constructive criticism as I broadened my understanding of international relations.

xiii

xiv | Acknowledgments

Among my most enlightening teaching experiences were those that occurred overseas. I taught American diplomatic history as a Fulbright senior lecturer at University College, Dublin, and as a visiting faculty member at the University of Glasgow on two different occasions. I also delivered invited lectures in Belfast, Moscow, Bukara, and Samarkand. Wherever I spoke, those in attendance raised questions about the conduct of and rationalizations behind U.S. foreign policy that were quite different from those of my American students. I am pleased to acknowledge the assistance of all those, both here and abroad, whose intelligent queries encouraged me to rethink my own analyses of diplomatic history. Their insights have deﬁnitely inﬂuenced how this book was conceived and written. Having published several more focused historical studies, I had long wanted to create a comprehensive history of American foreign affairs. When I suggested the idea to Steven Danvers, my editor at ABC-CLIO, he enthusiastically worked with me to sharpen my approach and sketch out the format for the present volume. My research beneﬁted from the able assistance of two outstanding librarians at Oklahoma State University, John B. Phillips and Barbara Miller. As the book took shape, I received helpful support from ABC-CLIO’s Editorial Development Manager Holly Heinzer and the perceptive reviews of Submissions Editor Kim Kennedy White. The professional assistance of Christian Green, production editor; Ellen Rasmussen, media editor; and Publication Services, Inc. smoothed the way through the ﬁnal stages of production. Finally, I am pleased to extend my thanks to my supportive family. My wife, Cindy, has graciously tolerated my frequently egocentric absorption in books and ideas. Even more important, as a fellow professor, she has enriched my professional thinking and writing with her intelligent insights and practical advice.

SECTION 1

INVENTING A FOREIGN POLICY, 1776–1830

plenipotentiary powers to Europe. Three of these envoys negotiated an alliance with the French government that not only recognized the nation’s independence but promised full-scale military assistance in achieving the goals of the American Revolution. Simultaneously, they agreed to a commercial treaty that accorded most-favored-nation status to the new nation. In 1781, the British government concluded that the war’s costs were no longer supportable. They opened discussions with American diplomats in Paris that ultimately led to a treaty of peace containing provisions quite favorable to the United States. Although they suffered from a deep economic depression after the war, Americans continued to expand their peacetime foreign relations. That all changed in the early 1790s when the French Revolution set off more than two decades of warfare with conservative European governments. Having fought long and hard to attain independence from just such entanglements, the United States announced that it would pursue a policy of neutrality. That decision, however, did

The colonists who lived along the Atlantic Coast in the 18th century were subject to the policies of Great Britain and, to a lesser extent, those of its trading rivals and wartime enemies. Mercantilism was the underlying purpose of the British Empire, and the American colonies both beneﬁted and suffered from mercantile policies. In the 1760s and, even more dramatically, in the early 1770s, many colonists concluded that the British government’s actions did them more harm than good. Both individuals and groups resorted to nonimportation, hoping it would starve the British economy enough to convince the government to relax or eliminate detrimental policies. By July 4, 1776, the delegates to the Continental Congress had concluded that a clean break was necessary, so they signed a declaration of independence. Now the American people were in a position to conduct their own foreign policies. The ﬁrst, essential step was an effort to gain external recognition of the new nation’s independence. In pursuit of that goal, Congress sent diplomats with 1

2 | Section 1

not alter the fact that the nation’s economy was intricately interwoven with those of the warring nations. Some years earlier, Americans had developed the Plan of 1776, an attempt to deﬁne the rights of neutral nations in a time of war. But the British government, in particular, refused to recognize such rights, especially when American trade with the French and Spanish West Indies seemed to be beneﬁting the very countries that the British were ﬁghting in Europe. Relying on a unilateral decree of their own, the British asserted that American actions violated the Rule of 1756. Hoping to ﬁnd a middle ground, President George Washington sent John Jay to London, but Jay’s Treaty did little other than preserve a tenuous peace, and it nearly failed to win ratiﬁcation by the U.S. Senate. Fortunately, a diplomatic mission to Spain the following year produced Pinckney’s Treaty, which contained some support for the neutral rights doctrines that Americans championed. Having staved off a war with Great Britain and developed an understanding with Spain, the United States then fell into an extended dispute with France. In an effort to resolve differences between the two countries, President John Adams sent a commission to Paris. The unfortunate result was the XYZ Affair, which further inﬂamed anti-French passions. Within weeks, the United States was involved in a Quasi-War with France that dragged on until 1800. The European war entered a lull shortly afterward, but by 1803 France was once again ﬁghting a strong coalition of European nations—led by its archenemy, Great Britain. Any hope that Americans might have had about asserting their rights as a neutral disappeared when both Great Britain and France

imposed paper blockades. Even more galling, Great Britain’s Royal Navy aggressively pursued a policy of impressment that disrupted trade even as it forced thousands of Americans into involuntary naval service. President Thomas Jefferson imposed an embargo that he hoped would force both of these nations to rescind their anti-American policies, but its negative impact on the U.S. economy more than outweighed any international beneﬁts. Soon an energetic and vocal group of War Hawks was goading President James Madison into a direct confrontation with Great Britain. The War of 1812 fulﬁlled almost none of the American goals. Worse yet, it raised the possibility that the British government would exploit the doctrine of uti possedetus to amputate some territory from the United States. Skillful negotiations staved off that eventuality, and the 1814 Treaty of Ghent left things pretty much the way they had been before the war. A key War Hawk objective had been to expand the size of the United States. The remarkable success and popularity of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase fed these expansionist impulses. Before and during the War of 1812, American settlers and adventurers had used Louisiana as a base for gobbling up the western portions of Spain’s colony of Florida. By 1819, the Spanish government had accepted the inevitability of American expansionism, so it signed the Transcontinental Treaty that formally surrendered all of Florida to the United States. During those same postwar years, the dominant powers in Europe insisted that legitimacy should determine who governed. The French, for example, ousted a republican government in Spain and

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 3 restored the legitimate Bourbon king to the throne. This raised concerns that France might then attempt to extend its power to the Western Hemisphere. The United States had, by that time, established a ﬁrm commitment to the NoTransfer Principle, insisting that a weak nation, such as Spain, should not be permitted to transfer its colonial claims to a stronger one, such as France. In 1823, President James Monroe incorporated the No-Transfer Principle as one of the key elements in his famous proclamation. The Monroe Doctrine was a forthright statement of the U.S. belief that the Western Hemisphere should be left to develop independently of further European interference. By 1830, the size and economic strength of the United States were such that the American people could pursue independent foreign policies relatively free of outside inﬂuences.

KEY CONCEPTS Alliance The military alliance with France in 1778 was the ﬁrst signiﬁcant diplomatic triumph for the Revolutionary United States. France duly implemented its part of the arrangement by declaring war against Great Britain, and French soldiers and sailors played crucial roles in achieving the ﬁnal U.S. victory. Ironically, the French Alliance became extremely controversial and unpopular in the 1790s. The perceived negative aspects of the pact ultimately meant that the United States signed no other alliance for a century and a half. When the Americans declared their independence from Great Britain, France

was a logical place to look for support. France and England had been quarreling for centuries and had engaged in several major conflicts that affected both Europeans and their American colonies. Most recently, the French and Indian War (1754–1763) had ended with a treaty in which France ceded Canada to the British and, subsequently, Louisiana to the Spanish. The loss of all of their North American possessions in this humiliating defeat haunted French statesmen. They were naturally cheered when their traditional enemy’s own North American colonies rose up in rebellion. Nothing that occurred during the opening months of the Revolutionary War gave assurance that the Americans had any chance of success. France therefore prudently offered only minor assistance in the form of loans and supplies. In October 1777, however, renowned British general John Burgoyne surrendered his entire army at Saratoga to a mix of Continental Army units, state militiamen, and local volunteers. Overnight, optimism about an ultimate victory in the Revolution spread throughout the United States and across the Atlantic. The United States had already created a three-man commission charged with developing formal relations with France. Silas Deane, Arthur Lee, and Benjamin Franklin were expected to cooperate in this venture, but Franklin, an internationally renowned scientist and philosopher, quickly emerged as the commissions’ leading spokesman. He adopted a folksy, rustic style in sharp contrast to the formality of Louis XVI’s court, but it was extraordinarily effective in charming his French hosts. He had already been lobbying the Comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister, for a formal

4 | Section 1

commitment to the American cause for months. Shortly after the new year, Vergennes agreed to draft two treaties, both of which he signed on February 7, 1778. One, a “Treaty of Amity and Commerce,” established reciprocal trading rights for both parties. The other agreement, the Treaty of Alliance, was even more crucial. It included a statement that France recognized the independence of the United States, the ﬁrst international acknowledgment of that fact. In addition, it committed the French to make common cause with the Americans in their continuing struggle. Vergennes promised that his government would continue ﬁghting until the British, too, acknowledged the independence of the United States. Far from an empty pledge, the French Alliance generated immediate assistance—in the form of financial grants, loans, and additional military supplies. In the late spring, French and British ﬂeets clashed, the ﬁrst in a series of battles between the two nations. These bled Great Britain’s military resources and distracted attention from the battleﬁelds in America. More signiﬁcantly, they threatened to expand the conﬂict into a full-blown world war. A traditional ally of France, Spain cleverly exploited its position. The Spanish held lengthy talks with the British, hoping to extract a promise that they would relinquish control of Gibraltar, which they had captured in an earlier conﬂict. When the British proved unwilling to do so, Spain sought the same objective by allying with France. Although their agreement did not directly include the United States, the Spanish government also extended support and sent money to aid the American cause.

The summer and fall of 1781 represented the high point of the French Alliance. Having carried out a lengthy and largely successful campaign through the southern states, British general Lord Cornwallis found his forces weak and in need of resupply. The general headed for the Virginia port city of Yorktown, expecting the Royal Navy to refurbish his army. But French admiral Comte de Grasse had managed to prevent a British ﬂeet from sailing into Chesapeake Bay, and his sailors and marines joined the rapidly expanding American and French Army units besieging Yorktown. In October, Cornwallis surrendered in the last major military event of the Revolutionary War. Two-thirds of those ﬁghting on the American side were French. Franklin immediately began working on a peace treaty. The British seemed willing to concede American independence at last, in no small part to avoid a continuation and possible expansion of the costly war. Vergennes papered over the Spanish insistence on Gibraltar and allowed Franklin to draft the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. For the next several years, FrancoAmerican relations remained generally friendly. By 1793, France had become deeply involved in her own democratic revolution, provoking Great Britain and other more conservative European powers to take up arms. Did the French Alliance mean that the United States must ﬁght for France? After a good deal of consideration, President George Washington answered that question in the negative by issuing his Proclamation of Neutrality. Part of his rationalization was that France had provoked the war and the alliance was only meant to apply to defensive wars.

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 5 Even so, some British spokesmen insisted that, simply because the alliance existed, the United States was aiding their enemy. The Americans were whipsawed by charges and countercharges from both sides. By 1798, the Federalist administration of President John Adams had become involved in an undeclared war with France. Most of the action took place at sea, but it further soured relations on both sides. When the world war ebbed after the turn of the 19th century, U.S. negotiators took advantage of the lull to negotiate a new treaty with the French. Among other provisions, the Treaty of Mortfontaine (1801) speciﬁcally abrogated the alliance of 1778. Although the United States could not avoid being affected by the global warfare that

persisted for another decade and a half, the nation steadfastly refused to enter into any formal alliances. Indeed, the consequences of the 1778 alliance were so unsettling that the United States developed a strong aversion to any sort of military alliance. This tradition had become so ingrained that the United States participated in both of the 20th-century world wars without ever signing an alliance. Only the perceived Soviet threat to Western Europe overcame U.S. distaste for alliances. In 1949, the United States joined 11 other nations in forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), only the second alliance in its history, coming nearly a century and a half after the nation extricated itself from the ﬁrst alliance.

TREATY OF ALLIANCE BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND FRANCE: FEBRUARY 6, 1778 . . . ART. 1. If War should break out betwan france and Great Britain, during the continuance of the present War betwan the United States and England, his Majesty and the said united States, shall make it a common cause, and aid each other mutually with their good Ofﬁces, their Counsels, and their forces, according to the exigence of Conjunctures as becomes good & faithful Allies. ART. 2. The essential and direct End of the present defensive alliance is to maintain effectually the liberty, Sovereignty, and independence absolute and unlimited of the said united States, as well in Matters of Gouvernement as of commerce. ART. 3. The two contracting Parties shall each on its own Part, and in the manner it may judge most proper, make all the efforts in its Power, against their common Ennemy, in order to attain the end proposed. . . . ART. 8. Neither of the two Parties shall conclude either Truce or Peace with Great Britain, without the formal consent of the other ﬁrst obtain’d; and they mutually engage not to lay down their arms, until the Independence of the united states shall have been formally or tacitly assured by the TREATY or Treaties that shall terminate the War. . . . Source: Bevans, Charles I., ed. Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949. Washington, DC: GPO, 1971, 7:777–780.

6 | Section 1 See also: Franklin, Benjamin; Neutrality; Quasi-War with France; Recognition References

Dull, Jonathan R. Franklin the Diplomat: The French Mission. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1982. Hoffman, Ronald, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Diplomacy and Revolution: The FrancoAmerican Alliance of 1778. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981. Stinchcombe, William C. The American Revolution and the American Alliance. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1969. Stourzh, Gerald. Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Diplomats Several different kinds of diplomatic agents have carried out U.S. foreign relations. To handle political matters, ministers, commissioners, and eventually even ambassadors were dispatched as representatives to foreign governments. To promote and facilitate trade relationships, consular ofﬁcials were identiﬁed and often stationed in key overseas ports. These diplomats received instructions from the home government that deﬁned the breadth of their authority and often stated speciﬁc goals or objectives. Because of the slowness of overseas communication right through the 19th century, these individuals enjoyed wide latitude. The United States had to hope that those it chose to serve as diplomats were truly diplomatic. The United States initially relied on informal diplomatic contacts. Arthur Lee was already in Europe conducting personal business when the Continental Congress tapped him to represent its interests. Shortly afterward, a member of the Congress named Silas Deane became the ﬁrst American formally dispatched to

serve as a diplomatic agent. Within a few months, Congress ordered these two to collaborate with Benjamin Franklin when he arrived in Paris with the goal of gaining French assistance and support for the Revolutionary War effort. Until the French government ofﬁcially recognized the United States as an independent nation, however, formal relations could not occur. The two treaties the American commission negotiated in 1778 provided the recognition essential to opening the door for an exchange of high-level envoys. But the United States was considered a minor country at that point, so the representatives on both sides were designated as ministers who operated out of legations. For more than 100 years, U.S. ministers remained the highest-ranking diplomats overseas. Similarly, the top diplomats resident in Washington, D.C., were heading up legations of their own. Where lower-level representation seemed appropriate, an individual might be named as chargé d’affaires, a title that authorized that person to handle more routine matters for the United States. By the 1890s, the size and inﬂuence of the United States had risen to a level that the other great powers considered worthy of ambassadorial status. Thomas F. Bayard, a former secretary of state under President Grover Cleveland, became the ﬁrst U.S. ambassador when he was accredited to the Court of St. James in London. Over the next few years, the United States transformed many of its legations into embassies and exchanged ambassadors with the major powers. By the mid-20th century, virtually all diplomatic missions overseas were called embassies. Today even a tiny country can receive an ambassador from the United States.

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 7 Regardless of whether they were ministers or ambassadors, many of these diplomats were plenipotentiaries, meaning that they had full authority to speak for and negotiate agreements with their opposite numbers, usually the foreign ministers of their host countries. The plenipotentiary designation survives today, but it means far less than it did when thousands of miles of ocean separated national capitals. Sometimes an issue arose that required special diplomatic action. A common example involved the negotiation of a peace agreement following a war. In such instances, the U.S. government usually followed the precedent it had established with Franklin and his friends in 1777 by naming one or more individuals as peace commissioners. To end the War of 1812, for example, President James Madison sent ﬁve commissioners to the Belgian city of Ghent. Two of them were already overseas: John Quincy Adams, the U.S. minister to Russia, and Jonathan Russell, the U.S. minister to Sweden. The other three— Henry Clay, Albert Gallatin, and James A. Bayard—were selected primarily as representatives of domestic political factions in the United States. To handle commercial rather than political relations, nations exchange consular officers. If the relationship is important enough, a consul-general may be named to oversee the work of other consuls who handle affairs in other cities of the host country. Consular relations can actually precede ofﬁcial recognition. Edward Stevens served as the U.S. consul-general on the island of Hispaniola after a slave revolt had overwhelmed French colonial control in 1798. Although the United States did not formally establish diplomatic relations with

China until 1844, consular ofﬁcials had been in place for half a century. In the 1780s, Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay had named Samuel Shaw as the ﬁrst American consul. A member of a prominent New England merchant family that traded through the port of Hong Kong, Shaw devoted most of his time to his family’s business affairs and had only very limited inﬂuence over the other American traders or with the Chinese government itself. The division between consular and legation affairs often remained quite distinct. In a great many cases, the consuls were, like Shaw, businessmen who were as much or more interested in pursuing their own dealings as in serving their fellow Americans abroad. The 1924 Foreign Service Act regularized the relationships among the various categories of diplomats. It created a career Foreign Service that assigns individuals to political, economic, and consular posts abroad. Although political appointees often serve as ambassadors or consuls-general, career ofﬁcers handle most routine diplomatic and consular affairs. See also: Plenipotentiary References

Engelman, Fred L. The Peace of Christmas Eve. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962. Hulen, Bertram D. Inside the Department of State. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939.

Embargo An embargo prohibits certain types of trade. It can ban all forms of commerce or it can target speciﬁc commodities or products. In the early years, the United States thought embargoes would have

8 | Section 1

positive results. Imposed primarily to coerce European nations into modifying or eliminating policies that were inimical to the United States, none of these embargoes proved successful. Consequently, U.S. leaders largely abandoned the use of this technique after 1815. In one sense, an embargo is a more comprehensive application of nonimportation. Americans had successfully exploited nonimportation before and during the American Revolution, so it was natural for them to consider embargoes when trading difﬁculties developed in the 1790s. The underlying cause for all of the trouble was the outbreak of war between England and France in response to the French Revolution. For more than two decades, these nations fought one another, often drawing allies into the conﬂict as well. Through it all, the United States tried desperately to pursue a neutral course, favoring neither one side nor the other, with the goal of proﬁting from Europe’s distress. The United States possessed an extraordinarily large merchant ﬂeet and had beneﬁted enormously from the carrying trade, so it was hardly surprising that Americans objected when both England and France announced policies that would interfere with or even halt such trade. The British were particularly incensed when American merchants took the place of French shippers in handling trade to and from the French West Indies. Maintaining that it violated their selfproclaimed Rule of 1756, the British began seizing American vessels engaged in that trade. The French responded by attacking American ships carrying English goods. Hoping to convince one or both of these European nations to alter its policies, President George Washington

urged Congress to impose a temporary embargo in 1794. Even when it was extended by another month, this shortlived attempt to prevent either American or European trading vessels from using American ports had little effect. Trading opportunities for Americans ebbed and ﬂowed until 1807 when hostile and contradictory policies issued by both Great Britain and France became so annoying that pressure for relief could no longer be ignored. When a British naval vessel attacked a U.S. Navy ship, the Chesapeake, in 1807, war spirit ﬂared up and down the Atlantic Coast. But President Thomas Jefferson, motivated by what he called his “passion” for peace, sought to frame a policy that would prevent war. He turned to an embargo, hoping it might achieve that goal. Along with a great many of his countrymen, Jefferson believed that U.S. trade, both imports and exports, was absolutely vital to the economic health of the major European nations and their American colonies. After all, the United States purchased one-third of all British exports, and her remarkably productive agrarian sector provided vital raw materials, such as cotton, to the entire world. If the United States imposed an embargo that stopped all imports and exports, Jefferson reasoned, both Great Britain and France would essentially be starved into submission and forced to rescind their obnoxious maritime restrictions. Because his Republican party controlled Congress, it duly imposed a nationwide embargo on December 22, 1807. No U.S. ship could legally leave port for a foreign destination; no foreign ship could legally dock at any U.S. port. Coastal trade was exempted, although someone planning to engage in such trade

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 9

EMBARGO ACT, DECEMBER 22, 1807 Be it enacted . . . , That an embargo be, and hereby is laid on all ships and vessels in the ports and places within the limits or jurisdiction of the United States, cleared or not cleared, bound to any foreign port or place; and that no clearance be furnished to any ship or vessel bound to such foreign port or place, except vessels under the immediate direction of the President of the United States: and that the President be authorized to give such instructions to the ofﬁcers of the revenue, and of the navy and revenue cutters of the United States, as shall appear best adapted for carrying the same into full effect: Provided, that nothing herein contained shall be construed to prevent the departure of any foreign ship or vessel, either in ballast, or with the goods, wares and merchandise on board of such foreign ship or vessel, when notiﬁed of this act. SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That during the continuance of this act, no registered, or sea letter vessel, having on board goods, wares and merchandise, shall be allowed to depart from one port of the United States to any other within the same, unless the master, owner, consignee or factor of such vessel shall ﬁrst give bond, with one or more sureties to the collector of the district from which she is bound to depart, in a sum of double the value of the vessel and cargo, that the said goods, wares, or merchandise shall be relanded in some port of the United States, dangers of the seas excepted, which bond, and also a certiﬁcate from the collector where the same may be relanded, shall by the collector respectively be transmitted to the Secretary of the Treasury. All armed vessels possessing public commissions from any foreign power, are not to be considered as liable to the embargo laid by this act. Source: Act of December 22, 1807, Chapter 5, 2 Statutes at Large (10th Congress), 451–453.

had to post bond set at twice the value of the ship and its cargo to ensure that it did not stray to some foreign port instead. Those who abided by the embargo suffered a good deal. Northeastern harbors became choked with idle ships and awash with unemployed seamen. Southerners and westerners also suffered when unsold agricultural commodities piled up on wharfs and caused a nationwide decline in the market price of all products. As the months passed, protests against the embargo became increasingly vocal in the Northeast where the Federalist political party enjoyed an unexpected rejuvenation. Some even advocated seceding from the Union to escape from the hated policy.

At the same time, the economic impact on overseas customers of the United States fell far short of the level that Jefferson had anticipated. Bumper crops in Europe in 1808 partially substituted for the cut off of U.S. grain shipments. The French emperor Napoléon Bonaparte had recently begun promoting what he called the Continental System, a broad economic policy designed to reduce European dependence on colonial and imported goods. To that extent, the U.S. embargo actually played into his hands. Widespread evasion of the embargo also limited its effectiveness. Smuggling across the long, largely unpatrolled U.S.–Canadian border surged to levels

10 | Section 1

The 1807 Embargo Act roused bitter criticism like this political cartoon in which the turtle named “ograbme” (embargo spelled backward) impedes international trade. (Lossing, Benson J. The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812, 1868)

comparable to those that occurred in the 1920s during the Prohibition Era. Because shipowners could make huge proﬁts from vessels that actually completed a transatlantic voyage, many ships that slipped out of harbor, supposedly to engage in coastal trade, forfeited their bond and sailed overseas anyway. The embargo also exempted whaling ships, a good many of which came home loaded with anything but whale oil. The embargo effectively destroyed Jefferson’s credibility and popularity, and Congress revoked it three days before his term ended in March 1809. His successor, James Madison, had to develop an alternative. Still convinced that denying access to U.S. trade was a potent economic weapon, Congress issued the Nonintercourse Act early in Madison’s term.

It lifted the general embargo but prohibited trade with either France or Great Britain. U.S. ships immediately set sail for the four corners of the globe, but many of them soon diverted to highreturn trading with the two super powers. When the largely ineffective Nonintercourse Act expired in 1810, Congress approved an even looser variation called Macon’s Bill Number 2. It permitted unrestricted trade with all nations including Great Britain and France. But the law stipulated that if either of those nations formally cancelled its restrictive trading policies, the United States promised to reimpose nonimportation against the other. The French falsely claimed to have met this requirement, and President Madison duly imposed nonimportation on Great

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 11 Britain. The British government objected strenuously, pointing out the duplicity of the French move, but, at that point, Madison had become convinced that war was the only solution to this longrunning problem. Although he drafted a war message, the British government ﬁnally recognized that, after ﬁve years, Jefferson’s original conception had been correct. The British economy had become depressed, starved of vital U.S. raw materials, and hugely overstocked with goods for which the only logical market was the United States. Consequently, in the spring of 1812, Parliament ﬁnally revoked many of the restrictive policies that had so angered Americans. Unfortunately, news of this development arrived in the United States a few days after Congress had voted in favor of what became known as the War of 1812. The unsatisfactory outcome of Jefferson’s embargo and the enormous unpopularity it provoked in the United States undermined faith in embargoes as an element of its foreign policy. Never again would the nation impose a blanket embargo, relying instead on aggressive tariff legislation and other economic policies to shape international trade. In the end, an embargo proved to be too crude a tool to use effectively. See also: Nonimportation; Paper Blockades; Rule of 1756 References

McDonald, Forrest. The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976. Perkins, Bradford. Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961.

Spivak, Burton I. Jefferson’s English Crisis. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979.

Impressment During the series of wars that ran from the early 1790s through 1815, Great Britain’s Royal Navy was in constant need of seamen. Conditions on its warships were so harsh, however, that thousands of sailors deserted, many of them subsequently ﬁnding berths on U.S. ships. Whenever they located such “deserters,” the British claimed the right to “impress” them back into service, regardless of U.S. protests. Impressment became a major point of friction between the United States and Great Britain, contributing to the breakdown in relations that culminated in the War of 1812. Both the army and the navy in Great Britain relied on “press gangs” to ﬁll their ranks. These gangs rounded up unemployed or unlucky men and forcibly enlisted them in military service, whether or not they had any interest or desire to participate. With large percentages of their crews serving against their will, the Royal Navy developed increasingly strict discipline, which included ﬂogging and even hangings. Not surprisingly, many oppressed seamen were eager to escape. British naval vessels frequently called at U.S. ports and, even when on blockade duty, visited U.S. cities for provisions. Resentful crew members could take advantage of these opportunities to slip away. U.S. shipowners frequently hired these skilled seamen to ﬁll out their crews. Life aboard a cramped U.S. merchantman may have been far from idyllic, but it was much less stressful than being

12 | Section 1

subject to Royal Navy discipline. The British government considered anyone who left its naval service a deserter. If a deserter was recaptured, he might be hanged to discourage others from attempting to escape. Between 1790 and 1815, British authorities admitted that some 20,000 men had deserted from the Royal Navy. As early as 1791, the U.S. government began formally protesting what it saw as cavalier actions by the Royal Navy in pursuing deserters. At its most basic level, Americans considered impressment an insult to their nation, and they denied that the British had a right to stop U.S. ships and remove their crew members. The U.S. government found the practice unacceptable even if some of those impressed were undeniably deserters from the Royal Navy. But many of the men impressed off U.S. ships were not deserters. The British espoused the concept of “inalienable allegiance,” meaning that if you were born in England, you remained an Englishman even if you underwent a naturalization process in another country. The United States was ﬁlled with immigrants from the British Isles and elsewhere, most of whom either had obtained U.S. citizenship or were in the process of naturalization. Even if they had not previously seen service in the Royal Navy, British ofﬁcials contended that they were subject to impressment just like any other British citizen. To make matters worse, the British also impressed native-born Americans. If a man spoke English and looked like an Englishman, British naval ofﬁcers might sweep him up in an impressment raid as well. Over the 25-year period ending in 1815, the United States claimed that some 10,000 men had been taken off

U.S. ships and pressed into British service. Of that total, only one-tenth of them were actual British deserters, so the United States had ample reason to complain about impressment. On June 22, 1807, U.S. rage reached the boiling point when the HMS Leopard stopped a U.S. Navy ship a few miles off the coast of Virginia. The USS Chesapeake was a 40-gun frigate on its way to ﬁght the Barbary pirates of North Africa. Just before sailing, it had enlisted four men who were lingering at the docks in Norfolk. The captain of the Leopard claimed they were British deserters and demanded their return. When the U.S. captain refused, the Leopard ﬁred a broadside at the Chesapeake, killing three men and injuring 18 others. The U.S. ship managed to get off a single shot in protest before striking its colors. Only one of the four men was actually a British deserter and he was later hanged. Two of the others were eventually released, but the third man died in prison. President Thomas Jefferson might have exploited the nationwide outrage over the Chesapeake Affair as an excuse to declare war. Instead, he decided to impose a national embargo that lasted through the rest of his term. Five years later, however, the tolerance of Americans with British policies and actions had reached an end. President James Madison highlighted impressment as a key justiﬁcation in the war message that he sent to Congress in June 1812. Impressment remained a major bone of contention right through the war, so the U.S. delegates who were sent to negotiate a peace treaty in 1814 were instructed to demand an end to the practice. Realizing that the British would never abandon a system so vital to their

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 13 maritime dominance, the U.S. delegation ﬁnally asked for and received permission to drop the issue. It was not mentioned in the Treaty of Ghent that ended the war. Shortly after that treaty was ratiﬁed, the Napoleonic Wars ended as well, ushering in nearly a century of general world peace. That, in turn, reduced the need for naval force, effectively ending the British need to maintain its impressment policies. Anglo-American relations improved considerably as a result of this change. See also: Embargo; Plan of 1776; Uti Possedetus (Treaty of Ghent, 1814) References

Horseman, Reginald. The Causes of the War of 1812. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962. Tucker, Spencer C., and Frank T. Reuter. Injured Honor: The Chesapeake-Leopard Affair. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996. Zimmerman, James F. Impressment of American Seamen. New York: Columbia University, 1925.

Jay’s Treaty Jay’s Treaty ranks as one of the most controversial international agreements ever presented to the U.S. Senate for ratiﬁcation. The United States and Great Britain were on the brink of war in 1794 when President George Washington sent John Jay to London to work out an agreement to prevent conflict. The resulting treaty contained many provisions that were repugnant to various sectional and political groups in the United States. It also failed to address many controversial issues. In the end, however, it achieved Washington’s major goal: maintaining peace with Great Britain and delaying a resort to war until 1812.

The Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War, left several issues unresolved. For example, the British agreed to withdraw all of their military forces from the territory ceded to the new United States, but they continued to man posts in the North and West that Americans claimed were encouraging Indian hostility. Another unfulﬁlled provision was a treaty pledge that Americans would pay their preRevolutionary War debts to British creditors. Local and state courts had routinely protected U.S. citizens at the expense of foreigners. Some Southerners, meanwhile, demanded compensation from the British government for the 3,000 slaves that its armies had freed during the conﬂict. Unmentioned in the 1783 Treaty was any sort of commercial agreement. Although Americans could trade directly with English importers and exporters, access to lucrative markets in the British West Indies was denied. To replace that, Americans took advantage of loosening French and Spanish restrictions on trade with their Caribbean colonies, especially after war broke out between Great Britain and France in the early 1790s. British authorities reacted by issuing a series of orders-in-council that caused Royal Navy vessels to stop, seize, and even sink U.S.owned ships that were conducting what they considered to be illegal trade. Americans in all sections of the United States had reasons for concern. Northeasterners protested British interference with U.S. ocean-going trade. Westerners objected to what they saw as British provocation of Indian raids on their settlements. Southerners remained peeved at the “theft” of their property in the form of slaves. Sensitive to the calls for war with Great Britain coming from all quarters, President George Washington decided to

14 | Section 1

try to defuse the tension by negotiating a settlement. The Federalist faction, headed by Alexander Hamilton, favored such an approach, seeing good relations with Great Britain and maintenance of active Anglo-American trade as essential to the prosperity of the new nation. Rather than send the ambitious Hamilton, however, Washington dispatched Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay as his emissary. Fortunately for Jay, British military resources were fully engaged against France, so Great Britain had no interest in taking on an additional opponent. At the same time, British statesmen were unwilling to grant exceptions or exemptions to the upstart Americans. The only major bargaining lever Jay had was a threat to join Sweden and Denmark in a newly formed Armed Neutrality. Hamilton successfully torpedoed that argument by assuring the British minister in the United States that Washington’s cabinet had already voted against such an action. Jay’s Treaty therefore accomplished little other than to preserve peace between the two countries. The one positive British concession was a pledge to fulﬁll its earlier promise and withdraw all of its forces from the Northwest Territory of the United States. U.S. claims regarding minor boundary disputes and potential compensation for shipping losses were assigned to future arbitration panels. The treaty completely ignored the slave issue. The agreement’s trading provisions reconﬁrmed U.S. access to ports in the British Isles proper and opened British colonial ports in the Far East as well. On the crucial West Indies issue, however, the treaty allowed for trade only on ships displacing 70 tons or less, far too small to handle bulk agricultural commodities. George Washington was disheartened when the text of the treaty arrived in

Philadelphia, but, because he saw it as achieving his primary purpose—peace with Great Britain—he decided to submit it to the Senate for ratiﬁcation. Debating in stormy secret sessions, the senators ﬁnally approved the treaty with a 20 to 10 vote, the bare minimum the Constitution prescribed. The Senate’s action did nothing to defuse the enormous burst of popular unrest with Jay’s Treaty. Newspapers, public meetings, and private citizens all complained bitterly about what they saw as a sellout of U.S. interests. John Jay personally became the symbol of this betrayal, and he was burned in efﬁgy and otherwise denigrated from North to South. Reﬂecting this outrage, opponents in the House of Representatives tried to deny the funding needed to implement the treaty. Although they did manage to strip off the humiliating West Indies trade provision, President Washington lobbied effectively enough to win a slim three-vote margin in favor of the appropriations bill. For years afterward, Jay and the Federalists who had backed his efforts remained prominent targets for critics of the administration. Fortunately, the treaty did prevent the outbreak of war between the two countries. It allowed the United States to grow and mature considerably before another collection of issues and grievances—some of them quite similar to those that had arisen in the early 1790s—arose to provoke the outbreak of the War of 1812. See also: Mercantilism; Pinckney’s Treaty References

Bemis, Samuel Flagg. Jay’s Treaty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962. Combs, Jerald A. The Jay Treaty. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 15 Ritcheson, Charles R. Aftermath of Revolution. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1969.

Legitimacy In the late 18th century, virtually all European countries had “legitimate” monarchs, rulers whose family linkages and authority extended back in time, often for centuries. The French Revolution that overthrew King Louis XVI, the reigning member of the Bourbon dynasty, generated an enormous and long-lasting negative reaction. The United States had earlier cut its ties with a legitimate monarchy in Great Britain, so the American people continually faced challenges to their political and social beliefs. As an outsider that had foresworn legitimacy, the United States had to navigate a difﬁcult course in international affairs. The Bourbon rulers of France had intermittently engaged in conﬂict with the British government for decades when the Americans signed the Declaration of Independence. Although the French king had no particular sympathy for the democratic, rights-of-man principles that document proclaimed, he was more than willing to assist anyone, including American rebels whose actions might damage or humiliate his perennial archenemy. France therefore provided extensive military and ﬁnancial support, as well as an alliance and a favorable commercial treaty signed in 1778. Even though the American Revolution concluded successfully from the patriots’ point of view, it failed to alter the worldwide political tradition of legitimacy. Americans cheered when republican ideals similar to their own ignited a revolution against the monarchy in France.

By 1793, it had gone so far as to execute the king himself. Many Americans considered that step excessive and they were even more unnerved by the succeeding Reign of Terror. The various phases of the French Revolution presented the United States with a number of complex diplomatic problems. These even included an undeclared or quasiwar in the late 1790s over trading practices between the world’s only two democratic nations. Napoléon Bonaparte’s rise to power in France assumed many characteristics of a top-down, authoritarian government. When he named himself emperor, his regime seemed to resemble the legitimate monarchies far more than it mirrored the egalitarian United States. The Europeans nations that formed coalitions to ﬁght against revolutionary France nevertheless considered Napoléon illegitimate, and warfare continued until his ﬁnal defeat at Waterloo. The victorious European nations met at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to sort out past issues and lay the groundwork for the future. Support for legitimacy fundamentally shaped the actions of the Congress. For example, it restored the grandson of the executed king to the French throne as Louis XVIII. A Bourbon monarch also replaced Joseph Napoléon in Spain. To preserve peace, the great powers that had defeated Napoléon agreed to meet periodically. Great Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia formed a quadruple alliance that became known as the Concert of Europe. This group met for the ﬁrst time at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, and the main action it took there was to invite legitimate France into the alliance. British foreign minister Lord Castlereagh was the major architect of

16 | Section 1

what had now become a Quintuple Alliance. Representing a constitutional rather than an absolute monarch, however, his motives and goals often differed substantially from those of the other members of the Concert of Europe. The most conservative of them was Russian czar Alexander I. An absolute monarch in his own right, he was committed to preserving and strengthening the authority of legitimate rulers. He was also something of a mystic who allowed his deep-seated religious beliefs to inﬂuence both his domestic and foreign policies. To implement the latter, he established the Holy Alliance, and virtually every Christian nation signed on. The key exceptions were the Prince Regent of Great Britain, the Pope, and, for obvious reasons, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The conservative European establishment was dismayed when democratic movements continued to threaten legitimacy. Simón Bolívar and his associates had already been successful in rousing revolutionary sentiments in South America. Venezuela, Argentina, and other former colonies took advantage of the distractions of the Napoleonic Wars to declare independence from Spain. The United States welcomed this development, which Americans saw as a ﬂattering copy of their own revolution, but the government in Washington did not immediately recognize the new republics. Willing to ignore legitimacy for ﬁnancial gain, Great Britain was willing to accept new regimes in Latin America because of the trading opportunities they presented. When the Concert of Europe restored Bourbon rule in Spain, some thought that the monarchy might attempt to recolonize South America.

But democratic stirrings within Spain itself weakened the king’s authority and ﬁnally resulted in his being ousted. At that point, the Concert of Europe met again and, following Russia’s lead, authorized France to invade Spain and restore the monarchy. Meanwhile, Austrian military units were restoring a legitimate monarch in the Kingdom of Naples. These circumstances provoked British foreign minister George Canning to propose that the United States cooperate in issuing a joint declaration of support for the Latin American republics. Instead, the United States produced its own independent statement in the form of the Monroe Doctrine in December 1823. During this period, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams did much to publicize the concept of the “Separation of the Spheres.” Drawing inspiration from both Washington and Jefferson, he emphasized that the New World had a set of interests and political ambitions far different from those in the Old World. Although trade would keep them economically connected, Adams favored a clean political separation between the Eastern and the Western Hemisphere. In Adams’s view, legitimacy had no place in the West. There were no traditional ruling dynasties; democratic republics modeled after the United States were increasingly becoming the norm in the Americas. In the long run, the inﬂuence of European-style legitimacy continued to decline in the Western Hemisphere. Perhaps the most notable exception was when the French government invited Maximilian of Austria’s ruling Hapsburg family to serve as emperor of Mexico in the 1860s. Even the distractions of the American Civil War did not prevent Secretary of State William Seward from

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 17 stating strong and effective diplomatic objections to the French plan to establish a puppet government south of the border. The very real possibility of a U.S. expedition to oust Maximilian helped convince France to withdraw its support and demonstrated that legitimacy was irrelevant to the Americas. See also: Monroe Doctrine; Quasi-War with France References

Davis, David Brion. Revolutions: Reﬂections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Parsons, Lynn Hudson. John Quincy Adams. Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998. Perkins, Bradford. Castlereagh and Adams. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961.

Louisiana The purchase of Louisiana in 1803 was the most dramatic and unexpected success of President Thomas Jefferson’s administration. France’s decision to sell the territory came after a convoluted series of events and changing strategies. The United States took advantage of the continuing worldwide conﬂict, appearing on the scene ready to buy just when France decided to sell. Even so, the Louisiana Purchase was not universally popular at home, and it tested the authority of both the president and the Senate in the realm of foreign relations. A vast wilderness area west of the Mississippi River and stretching all the way to the Canadian border, Louisiana had first come to the attention of Europeans through the efforts of French explorers like Father Jacques Marquette and Sieur de La Salle. Administered as a remote offshoot of French colonial

possessions in eastern Canada, the area remained largely undeveloped and unknown through the middle of the 18th century. When the governor of colonial Virginia selected George Washington to lead a military force to contest French expansion into the Ohio Valley in 1754, it turned out to be the opening campaign of the French and Indian War. Two years later, Great Britain and France took up arms in Europe, where each assembled allies for the so-called Seven Years’ War. Spain sided with France in this struggle, and British forces achieved a deﬁnitive victory over both of these enemies in the early 1760s. Disappointed and demoralized, France withdrew completely from North America. At the 1763 Treaty of Paris, it relinquished all of its claims of Canada to Great Britain and transferred Louisiana to Spain. Simultaneously, Great Britain took control of Spanish Florida. Even when Spain retrieved possession of Florida in 1783, it found the costs of administering that territory and the much larger Louisiana to be extraordinarily high. It may have served as a buffer between Mexico and the United States, but Louisiana remained untamed and unproductive. American settlers heading West and South put increasing pressure on the Spanish colonies. Moreover, American farmers along the western river network needed to use the Mississippi and the Spanish port of New Orleans as outlets for their bulky agricultural produce. Pinckney’s Treaty (1795) between Spain and the United States guaranteed free access and deposit for U.S. goods using that river highway. Meanwhile, inﬂuential French statesmen like Foreign Minister Talleyrand nourished a dream of reincorporating

18 | Section 1

Louisiana into their nation’s empire. When Napoléon Bonaparte assumed control of France, he responded positively to this concept. And he had a compelling rationalization for doing so: to help sustain the French colony of St. Dominique (present-day Haiti). Located on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, it had been an extraordinarily proﬁtable producer of sugar and other exotic tropical products, but it had also come to rely increasingly on food shipments from the United States. During wartime, such shipments were subject to interruption. If France absorbed Louisiana into its empire, Napoléon believed, it could serve as a secure “bread colony” for St. Dominique. This plan suffered a serious setback when a slave rebellion swept the island in the late 1790s. A former slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture proclaimed the colony’s independence. The United States had sent an enterprising consular ofﬁcer named Edward Stevens to the island, and he encouraged the new government and intrigued with the British for joint trading privileges. The QuasiWar with France played a part as well, pitting the United States against France. As the undeclared war drew to a close, French imperial ambitions revived. On October 1, 1800, the day after it signed a peace treaty with the United States, Napoléon’s government completed the Treaty of San Ildefonso, in which Spain restored the Louisiana Territory to France, although that retrocession was supposed to be kept secret for some time. Shortly afterward, a brief lull occurred in the series of European conﬂicts. Temporarily free of a threat from Great Britain, Napoléon dispatched a 20,000-man expeditionary force to St. Dominique, charged with putting down

the rebellion and reestablishing French control. Black guerrillas and yellow fever decimated the French Army, however, and subsequent expeditions were equally unsuccessful. Then Great Britain and the members of the so-called Third Coalition once again took up arms against France, forcing Napoléon to rethink his whole strategy for the Western Hemisphere. President Thomas Jefferson was keenly interested in these developments. Even though France had kept Spanish administrators in place in New Orleans, Jefferson quickly learned of the retrocession. Realizing that France would probably be a more effective and aggressive colonial administrator than Spain had ever been, the U.S. president concluded that he should, at the very least, attempt to gain control of New Orleans, a port that Americans now considered absolutely vital to their western trade. When the French ordered their Spanish agents to cancel the right of free deposit that had been in place since Pinckney’s Treaty in 1795, Jefferson’s concern rose even higher. He obtained congressional authorization early in 1803 to send a special envoy, James Monroe, to France to seek a resolution of these issues. Monroe was instructed to buy New Orleans and to make an offer for Florida as well. If the French proved reluctant, Monroe was to threaten to go to London and seek an alliance with Great Britain, something France certainly did not wish to happen. Before Monroe arrived, Napoléon had already concluded that the failure of his Caribbean ventures had fatally damaged his North American empire concept. Embroiled in the revived European war, he realized Louisiana would be impossible to defend. Therefore, his government contacted the U.S. minister to France,

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 19 Robert Livingston, and offered to sell not only New Orleans but all of Louisiana. When Monroe arrived a few days later, the U.S. emissaries quickly concluded that they should pursue this opportunity, even though neither had speciﬁc orders to do more than purchase the port city. When the Americans asked French ﬁnance minister Barbé Marbois about price, he gave a ﬁgure of 100 million French livres, even though Napoléon had suggested half that amount. Monroe and Livingston were so eager to conclude the purchase that they counted themselves fortunate to settle on a ﬁnal price of 80 million French livres, equivalent to $15,000,000. Three-fourths of that total would be paid in cash and the rest distributed to Americans who had earlier ﬁled claims for damages against France. When news of the proposed purchase reached Washington, Jefferson became concerned about procedural issues. He had always been a strict constructionist of the U.S. Constitution, and he knew that document contained no authorization for the federal government to buy new lands. He toyed with the idea of calling for an amendment to the Constitution to permit it, but his advisors suggested that he simply present the deal in the form of a treaty. If two-thirds of the senators agreed to ratify the treaty, the deed would be done. Some senators opposed the arrangement, but it easily won more than the two-thirds vote required. The purchase ran into more trouble when the House of Representatives debated an appropriations bill for the money needed to complete the transaction. The eventual success of both the ratiﬁcation and the ﬁnancial authorization set a precedent

for expanding the territory of the United States through the treaty process. A lingering problem, however, was that no one was absolutely certain just where the boundaries of the Louisiana Territory lay. Did it include Florida? Did it include part of Texas? These questions would generate continuing controversy long after Jefferson left ofﬁce. Wanting to know more about what he had bought, he sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on an extended exploratory mission all the way to the Paciﬁc Coast. Not incidentally, having Americans physically walk through the territory helped conﬁrm U.S. ownership of it. See also: Pinckney’s Treaty; Plenipotentiary References

DeConde, Alexander. This Affair of Louisiana. New York: Scribner, 1976. Labbe, Dolores Egger, ed. The Louisiana Purchase and Its Aftermath, 1800–1830. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1998. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Mercantilism The various European nations that founded colonies in America gradually developed an economic philosophy that became known as mercantilism. In an ideal mercantile empire, the colonies produced exotic or otherwise valuable raw materials and commodities that the mother country would otherwise have to import. Meanwhile, the European nation could exploit its colonies as markets for its surplus goods. A successful ideal mercantile empire would be self-sufﬁcient, requiring no external trade. Although

20 | Section 1

mercantilism never achieved such perfection, it presented many problems for American diplomats and statesmen once independence had been achieved. Until 1776, however, Great Britain’s mercantilist policies provided many benefits to its American colonists. Beginning in the mid-17th century, Parliament enacted legislation that dictated increasing control over colonial trade. The so-called Navigation Acts, for example, stipulated that certain American products, such as tobacco, cotton, copper, and indigo, must be marketed exclusively in Great Britain. These policies were designed to provide a reliable and protected source of raw materials for British manufacturers and processors. They also guaranteed American colonists a market for their output, even if, as in the case of tobacco in the 18th century, they produced so much that it created a persistent surplus. Other aspects of the American bounty also strained mercantilist policies. For example, New Englanders were so successful at harvesting the rich ﬁshing grounds off Newfoundland that they had to ﬁnd an alternative market. Spain and Portugal ended up buying thousands of tons of New England salt ﬁsh to satisfy the needs of those Catholic countries that forbid the eating of meat on Fridays and holy days. Similarly, South Carolina’s rice plantations became so productive that they ended up feeding slaves working sugar plantations on many West Indies islands, regardless of which European nation claimed them as colonies. In 1776, Scottish economist Adam Smith published a critical evaluation of mercantilism titled The Wealth of Nations. Ironically, just as Smith was cataloging the features of a mercantile empire, Americans had decided to throw

off rule from London. The success of their political revolution, however, left in its wake a number of persistent economic problems. The pre-Revolutionary American economy had been so geared to supplying British customers that, as quickly as possible, American diplomats tried to reestablish mutually beneficial trade relations with the former mother country. Although British manufacturers were more than willing to see this trade relationship restored, the royal government refused to countenance open trade between the United States and its remaining colonies in the Western Hemisphere. Although some of the British reluctance was simply pique at the American Revolution, advocates of mercantilism insisted that the British Empire should remain isolated and insulated from outside inﬂuences. In 1794, John Jay went to England, hoping to break down British resistance. But the U.S. bargaining position was so weak that the resulting agreement only allowed very small U.S. ships—of 70 tons displacement or less—to trade with the British West Indies. Americans had no more success in subsequent negotiations aimed at regaining broader access to Great Britain’s mercantile empire. Indeed, it was not until the late 1820s that the major restrictions were lifted. Ironically, this change actually benefited British home and colonial agents as much as it did the Americans who had worked so hard to achieve the change. Operating as an independent economic entity, the United States also encountered problems with other mercantilist empires. Both the Spanish and the French were reluctant to allow U.S. trade with their colonies, hoping instead

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 21 to keep them comfortably within their own imperial control. From time to time, however, especially once the French Revolution set off two decades of European warfare, the U.S. carrying trade was seen as an advantage to nations that were focused on war at home. Both Spain and France modiﬁed their mercantile regulations to allow direct trade between their colonies and U.S. shippers when it suited their larger purposes. Great Britain objected to these arrangements on several grounds. They wanted their enemies’ colonies to suffer economically, not to beneﬁt from U.S. trade. They also hoped to capture some of the more valuable West Indian possessions for themselves. The British government therefore championed its Rule of 1756. It objected to nations opening their mercantile empires to external, usually neutral, traders when a war interfered with the home country’s ability to nurture its colonies. The Rule of 1756 seemed especially arbitrary to Americans after the Revolution. Closed out of their traditional Caribbean markets by British mercantile policies, they considered it only reasonable to take advantage of French or Spanish troubles to open trade with their colonies. But Great Britain’s powerful Royal Navy stood ready to enforce its insistence on the Rule of 1756. In another unpopular provision of Jay’s 1794 treaty, the United States formally acquiesced to the British position. Well into the 19th century, the U.S. economy retained its traditional emphasis on producing agricultural surpluses for export. Fortunately, especially after the British government adopted a free trade policy in the 1840s, U.S. farmers and planters could usually ﬁnd ready customers for their surpluses in England.

There seemed to be no limits, for example, to the European appetite for U.S. cotton. Over time, the edges of mercantilism became blurred enough to leave plenty of opportunities for U.S. economic expansion. See also: Embargo; Nonimportation; Rule of 1756 References

Kammen, Michael. Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970. McCusker, John J., and Russell R. Menard. The Economy of British America, 1607–1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Monroe Doctrine President James Monroe included three statements in his annual message in 1823 that profoundly inﬂuenced subsequent U.S. policy. Collectively called the Monroe Doctrine, it discouraged future European colonization in the Americas and insisted that Europeans should not attempt to reconquer Latin American republics that had become independent. In return, the president promised that the United States would avoid intervening in European affairs. By the close of the 19th century, the Monroe Doctrine had become a fundamental principle of U.S. diplomacy, which many considered a justiﬁcation for U.S. dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Dominance was neither considered nor possible in the early 1820s. Instead, President Monroe was responding to disturbing external events and perceived threats. At that point, the United States maintained a very small standing army and a small war ﬂeet, neither of which was capable of aggressive or, for that

22 | Section 1

The statements President James Monroe included in his 1823 Annual Message regarding United States supremacy in the Western Hemisphere became known as the Monroe Doctrine. (Library of Congress)

matter, truly effective defensive action. The president’s statements therefore reﬂected U.S. concepts and hopes rather than threats or intentions. The prospect of European expansionism provoked U.S. concern. Russia seemed the most threatening along the Northwest Coast. The czar’s government had already established a rather diffuse colonial control over Alaska and appeared to be extending its authority farther south. A wooden stockade called Fort Ross, just north of the San Francisco Bay, represented the southern extent of Russian expansion. In 1821, to counter British and U.S. penetration of the Oregon Territory, the czar issued a ukase declaring all of the Paciﬁc Coast and adjacent waters down to the 51st parallel off-limits to non-Russians. This decree conﬂicted with both U.S. and British claims to territory up to 54° 40’.

Other European statements and actions appeared equally threatening. After the Napoleonic Wars, most of the European countries reverted to very conservative governmental structures, with monarchy being the preferred form of rule. The republican revolutions that swept the Spanish colonies in Latin America were quite disconcerting to autocratic European governments. They were even more upset when similar revolts ousted kings in Portugal, Spain, and Italy. Austrian armies invaded and reestablished monarchical control in Naples; French troops did the same in Spain. At that point, it seemed possible that either France or a revived Spanish monarchy would attempt to reconquer the republican governments that ruled Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, and other former Spanish colonies. At least one European nation was particularly opposed to that possibility. Great Britain’s merchants were proﬁting handsomely from the opening of trade with the former colonies in Latin America; the British government certainly did not want to see them drawn back under Spanish or French imperial control. British foreign minister George Canning decided to take action, and he invited U.S. minister Richard Rush to join him in issuing a statement opposing any restoration of colonial control. Rush had no authority to do so, however, so he referred the matter to his government in Washington. There, President James Monroe was inclined to go along with the idea, but Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was bitterly opposed. He wanted his nation to assert its own authority, not to be perceived as “a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war” (Adams, Memoirs, VI, 179).

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 23 Monroe eventually agreed with Adams and decided to include his thoughts in the annual message he submitted to Congress on December 2, 1823. The two statesmen carefully crafted language that would be assertive but would not commit the United States to any particular action. Although they appeared in separate sections of the long message, three key points emerged as the heart of what became known as the Monroe Doctrine.

To counter the Russian threat, Monroe asserted that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition, which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers” (Richardson, Compilation, 778). This statement was hardly as bold as it sounded. Adams knew that negotiations with Great Britain and Russia were well along the path toward an agreement,

MONROE DOCTRINE: DECEMBER 2, 1823 [From President Monroe’s Seventh Annual Message to Congress] In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense. With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers. The political system of the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective Governments; and to the defense of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens, and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted. We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States. In the war between those new Governments and Spain we declared our neutrality at the time of their recognition, and to this we have adhered, and shall continue to adhere, provided no change shall occur which, in the judgement of the competent authorities of this Government, shall make a corresponding change on the part of the United States indispensable to their security. Source: Richardson, J. D., ed. Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1917, 1–2:776–790.

24 | Section 1

signed by all three powers in 1824, reafﬁrming the 54° 40’ line as the northern boundary of the Oregon Territory. With regard to the possibility of European reassertion of control over former colonies, the U.S. doctrine was careful to state that the United States would not interfere with any existing colonies. But, relying on historical precedents, such as the 1811 No-Transfer doctrine, Monroe stated that his country would view “as dangerous to our peace and safety” any attempt by Europeans to reestablish control over independent nations or to transfer ownership from a presumably weaker to a stronger colonial power. As a sort of quid pro quo, Monroe included a third principle: a pledge not to interfere in internal European affairs. This was, of course, a rather empty promise at the time, given the weakness of U.S. armed forces, the 3,000 miles that separated them from Europe, and the lack of enthusiasm at home for another foreign war. In subsequent years, the three principles of the Monroe Doctrine—no new colonization in America, no transfer of colonial claims, and no U.S. intervention in Europe—became widely respected elements of U.S. foreign policy. This happened in part because these principles never seemed to be challenged. It was not, however, U.S. force or threats that accomplished that goal. Instead, the existence of a balance of power in Europe and, even more important, Great Britain’s undisputed control of the seas kept European ambitions in check. Foreign Minister Canning had no intention of allowing the U.S. president to steal his thunder. When Rush refused to agree to a joint declaration, Canning began negotiating with the French

ambassador to London, Prince Jules de Polignac, eventually obtaining a promise that France would neither establish new colonies in America nor assist Spain in retaking her former colonies. Canning then publicized the so-called Polignac Memorandum, to reassure Great Britain’s valued trading partners in Latin America. He also pointed out that the memorandum had been signed fully two months before Monroe delivered his message to Congress. In the long run, however, the Monroe Doctrine dwarfed Canning’s astute diplomacy. It became a shibboleth of U.S. policy, brought up as a justiﬁcation for a number of assertive moves on the part of the United States. When President James K. Polk was preparing for aggressive action against Mexico in the 1840s, he used the doctrine as a justiﬁcation, adding his own interpretation or corollary to this now-hallowed belief. Secretary of State Richard Olney reinterpreted it again in 1895, and President Theodore Roosevelt used it as a justiﬁcation for extending U.S. administrative authority in the Caribbean in 1905. Together the Polk, Olney, and Roosevelt corollaries to the Monroe Doctrine added weight and meaning to what had been a carefully drafted and cautious statement of values by an infant republic. See also: No-Transfer Principle References

Adams, C. F. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1874–1877. Dozer, Donald M., ed. The Monroe Doctrine: Its Modern Significance. New York: Knopf, 1965. Perkins, Dexter. A History of the Monroe Doctrine. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 25 Richardson, J. D., ed. Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1917, 1–2:776–790.

Most Favored Nation Many international trade agreements include most-favored-nation provisions that beneﬁt both parties. If the United States, for example, were to negotiate a new agreement with France that included a most-favored-nation provision, France would gain the same privileges that the United States has granted to whatever nation has the most favorable relationship. In other words, a mostfavored-nation agreement ensures that one country automatically enjoys the best arrangement that its treaty partner has with any other nation. The very ﬁrst trade treaty that the United States negotiated contained a most-favored-nation provision. The 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the United States and France awarded both nations that status. This was a remarkably generous concession to the new nation because it gained trading privileges that were identical to those that, in some cases, had only been granted to others after long and tortured negotiations. By including a most-favored-nation statement in the agreement, France also underlined its commitment to recognizing the United States as a fully independent political entity. Most-favored-nation agreements are quite common in international relations, and many U.S. treaties contain such language. U.S. relations with China provide a case in point. In the late 1830s, Great Britain and France fought a war against the Chinese Empire, hoping to wring commercial concessions from China—

with speciﬁc attention to permitting Europeans to import opium. Having suffered a humiliating defeat in the socalled Opium Wars, China signed a treaty with the victors that greatly expanded their access to Chinese ports. In 1844, U.S. commissioner Caleb Cushing built on that framework in negotiating the Treaty of Wangshia with the imperial government. The treaty included a mostfavored-nation provision, which gave Americans the same access to trade opportunities that the British and French had won on the battleﬁeld. It is easy to see why the United States promoted a most-favored-nation agreement, but Chinese motives may not be so obvious. Perhaps the most credible explanation is that the imperial government decided to extend broad trading privileges to other nations in order to defuse or limit the dominance of Great Britain and France. A similar rationale appears to have inﬂuenced the drafting of the Treaty of Tientsin in 1858. Once again, successful British and French military action forced additional concessions from China. Even though the United States had not taken part in the ﬁghting, it participated in the postwar treaty negotiations and won mostfavored-nation status. U.S. trade with China remained relatively minor through the rest of the 19th century, but not because of lack of opportunity. A more recent example of the mostfavored-nation principle at work occurred in the 1930s. During and after the Civil War, the United States maintained high, protective tariffs on most imports. Because Congress jealously guarded its prerogative in setting tariffs, alterations came about only after intense lobbying and compromise. When the Great Depression set in, however, most Americans

26 | Section 1

realized that the high-tariff policy was hampering a revival of international trade. President Franklin Roosevelt therefore pushed Congress to approve the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in 1934 to facilitate the reduction of tariff levels. In a reciprocal trade agreement, each nation commits to lowering tariffs on the other’s imports. The 1934 Act authorized the executive branch to initiate bilateral tariff-reduction talks with dozens of other nations and permitted the rates to be lowered by as much as 50 percent. Most of these agreements either included or paralleled other treaties that contained most-favorednation language. That meant that a reduction included in any bilateral agreement was equally applicable to all trading partners with most-favored-nation status. By the late 1930s, tariff rates around the world had fallen considerably as a result of these negotiations. After World War II, the United States joined with dozens of other nations in complex multinational negotiations that led to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Here again, mostfavored-nation agreements among the various signatories smoothed the process of developing a global trade structure. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the successor of the GATT system, and most-favored-nation provisions continue to help make international trading practices uniform and fair for all participants. See also: Alliance; China Market; Protectionism References

Fairbank, John K. The United States and China. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Gardner, Lloyd C. Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.

Hoffman, Ronald, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Diplomacy and Revolution. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981.

Neutrality No foreign policy question generated more controversy in the early years of the United States than that of which, if either, side the new nation should take in the Anglo-French confrontation. This was hardly a passing problem, given that the confrontation continued with only minor breaks from 1792 to 1815. President George Washington stated what became the standard approach in 1793 when he issued his Proclamation of Neutrality. His executive action, fortiﬁed by congressional endorsement in the following year, staked out an independent course for the United States. Both internal and external pressures made pursuing a policy of neutrality difﬁcult, but in the long run it seemed to serve the nation well. One of the American Revolution’s key goals was to make a clean break from Europe and its persistent quarrels. From the mid-17th century on, British American colonists had been drawn into and sometimes suffered substantial harm from the string of wars that pitted Great Britain against France and from the changing set of allies that they attracted. The Revolution itself became yet another in this series of conﬂicts after the American alliance with France brought French military and naval forces into play against Great Britain. Less than a decade after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Great Britain and France again took up arms against each other. The chief cause was British dismay at the republican revolution that swept France, eventually deposing and then executing the Bourbon king. Many

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 27 Americans cheered this democratic overthrow of an autocratic regime, seeing it as a conﬁrmation and endorsement of their own recently concluded revolution. Indeed, the more rabid Francophiles insisted that the United States had a duty to implement its alliance responsibilities and to jump in to support France. President George Washington and his circle of advisors disagreed. The cabinet debated many strategies, but Washington ﬁnally decided to issue a proclamation in the spring of 1793 announcing that the United States would aid neither side. The president’s Neutrality Proclamation raised a storm of protest from the proFrench faction, but cooler heads recog-

nized the wisdom of keeping the United States disengaged from European nations that were pursuing selﬁsh goals. Federalists in Congress agreed and engineered the passage of the Neutrality Act in 1794, which conﬁrmed Washington’s decision. The retiring president reiterated his advocacy of neutrality in his Farewell Address in 1796. These documents drew intense criticism from committed internationalists inside the United States as well as strong objections from both French and British diplomats. For example, “Citizen” Edmond Genêt’s actions, which included commissioning army ofﬁcers and privateers in America, drew a stern rebuke

WASHINGTON’S PROCLAMATION OF NEUTRALITY: APRIL 22, 1793 Whereas it appears that a state of war exists between Austria, Prussia, Sardinia, Great Britain, and the United Netherlands, of the one part, and France on the other; and the duty and interest of the United States require, that they should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent Powers. . . . The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulﬁlled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artiﬁcial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efﬁcient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel. Source: Richardson, J. D., ed. Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1917, 1:148–149.

28 | Section 1

from the Washington administration. Subsequent French politicking became so blatant that it contributed to President John Adams’s decision to take the actions that led to the Quasi-War with France in 1798. During these stressful years, the United States was not alone in championing neutrality. From time to time, various European coalitions announced the formation of “armed neutralities” that were dedicated to preserving their own political neutrality at the same time as they hoped to continue proﬁtable trade with the warring parties. None of these ultimately had much impact on the belligerents, however, and the interpretation of neutrality on the part of the United States essentially ruled out U.S. participation in them. When Thomas Jefferson, a long time admirer of France, won the presidency in 1800, many expected him to abandon neutrality. His inaugural address deﬁnitively ended such speculation. In measured tones, he echoed Washington’s arguments that the United States had a set of interests that were far different than those of the European nations. He advocated a continuation of what was already becoming a tradition of neutrality. By 1812, dismaying actions on the part of both Great Britain and France so stirred passions among Americans that they felt they had to act. At that point, Great Britain seemed the worst offender in abusing U.S. attempts to pursue neutral trading rights, so Britain became the target of U.S. reprisal. The United States accomplished almost none of its objectives in the War of 1812. Even so, the country emerged from the conﬂict with a strong and continuing dedication to remaining neutral in world affairs. Only

minor or regional conﬂicts occurred throughout the rest of the 19th century, allowing the neutrality tradition to become a deeply ingrained principle of U.S. foreign policy. When the Great War, World War I, broke out in 1914, the neutrality tradition reinforced President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to keep the United States out of the conﬂict. His advocacy of remaining neutral in “thought, word, and deed” helped the United States avoid being drawn into the war for more than two and a half years. By the spring of 1917, however, even Wilson had become convinced that the United States must take a stand. U.S. entry on the side of the British and French and their allies was the ﬁrst major break with the century-old tradition of neutrality. See also: Genêt, Edmond; Paper Blockade; Quasi-War with France References

DeConde, Alexander. Entangling Alliance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1958. Kaufman, Burton I., ed. Washington’s Farewell Address. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969. Spaulding, Matthew, and Patrick J. Garrity. A Sacred Union of Citizens. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 1996.

Nonimportation Even though it might have negative economic effects at home, from time to time, Americans attempted to halt imports. The goal of nonimportation was to convince a trading partner, in almost all cases Great Britain, to desist from what Americans saw as destructive or unfair trading practices. Usually imposed against a speciﬁc trading partner, nonimportation differs from an embargo,

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 29 which typically forbids trade with all other countries. The ﬁrst and, in many ways, one of the most effective applications of a nonimportation policy occurred in 1767. After failing to raise revenue from the American colonies with the unpopular Sugar and Stamp Acts, Parliament adopted the suggestion of Chancellor of the Exchequer Robert Townshend and imposed a new set of import duties. The Townshend Acts taxed commodities that colonists had customarily imported from the home islands, such as paper, glass, tea, and lead paint. Although many colonists continued to buy such items and to pay the import tax, a substantial protest arose over what was increasingly referred to as “taxation without representation” by the British Parliament. Throughout the colonies, protestors simply refused to import

goods that were subject to the Townshend duties. By 1770, this economic rebellion had cost British exporters so much revenue that they prevailed on Parliament to rescind the levies. Three years later, the Tea Act revived the taxation issue when it granted the British East India Company a monopoly of all tea shipped to America. The fact that the legislation included an import tax did not escape the attention of radicals like Samuel Adams. He and his fellow Sons of Liberty staged the so-called “Boston Tea Party” by boarding some East India Company ships that were docked in Boston. Throwing overboard all of the tea chests that they found enabled the protestors to impose unilaterally an effective nonimportation process. Parliament reacted to this civil disturbance with the “Coercive Acts,” which

Nonimportation was one of the most effective economic weapons Americans used against Great Britian. This drawing depicts the 1773 Boston Tea Party in which patriots dressed as Mohawk Indians dumped hundreds of chests of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor to prevent its importation. (National Archives and Records Administration)

30 | Section 1

American patriots insisted were actually “Intolerable Acts.” These included closing the port of Boston to all trade and imposing martial law on the citizens of the Massachusetts colony. In response to these and other affronts, delegates from all 13 colonies assembled in Philadelphia at the First Continental Congress. Among its other actions, the Congress urged the adoption of a nonimportation approach throughout the colonies. The hope was that the same sort of economic pressures that had forced cancellation of the Townshend Acts would convince the British government to modify its harsh policies. Although Parliament subsequently took some steps to lessen its trade restrictions, too many Americans had committed themselves to ﬁghting for full independence. The Revolutionary War began in the spring of 1775, but only the American victory over Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781 caused the royal government to begin serious peace negotiations. Interestingly enough, by that point, British ofﬁcials were being pressured by domestic manufacturers and exporters whose livelihoods had been severely damaged during seven years of American nonimportation. For better or worse, the citizens of the new nation concluded that nonimportation was an extraordinarily powerful tool. Conﬁdence that American trade, both imports and exports, was vital—to Great Britain and, increasingly, to other European countries—continued to motivate future policy makers. In the early 1790s, President George Washington announced an embargo on U.S. trade, hoping to duplicate the apparent success of the earlier nonimportation programs. Not until the failure of the extended embargo that President

Thomas Jefferson had imposed in 1807 did Americans recognize the limitations of a nonimportation policy. See also: Embargo; Neutrality; Plan of 1776 References

Barrow, Thomas C. Trade and Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Kammen, Michael G. Empire and Interest. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970. Thomas, Peter D. G. The Townshend Duties Crisis. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1987.

No-Transfer Principle In the early 1800s, the United States began voicing opposition to the possible transfer of colonies in the Western Hemisphere from one Europ ean country to another. The No-Transfer Principle was applied to both Florida and Cuba, and it occupied a prominent place in the Monroe Doctrine as well. Over a century later, fear that Nazi Germany might attempt to extend its inﬂuence in the Americas revived interest in the NoTransfer Principle. At no time, however, did U.S. application of the doctrine forestall the possibility that the United States itself might annex additional territories in the New World. The most obvious example of just what the Americans did not want to happen was the retrocession of Louisiana from Spain to France in 1800. Conﬁdent expansionists in the United States considered Spain a weak and overextended colonial power at that point, and they eagerly anticipated the moment when their country would take over loosely held Spanish colonies. When Napoléon’s government reestablished French control of Louisiana, it threatened to stiﬂe U.S. expansionism. France was one of the

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 31 most powerful nations in the world, and President Thomas Jefferson immediately reacted with a number of initiatives aimed at weakening or eliminating the threat of a powerful European colonial empire to the south and west. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 accomplished that goal far more deﬁnitively than he had anticipated. Other nearby Spanish colonies intrigued U.S. expansionists. In 1808, for example, the Jefferson administration went on record as opposing a possible British or French takeover of Cuba. Although that possibility faded away, Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, became concerned that a similar fate might befall East Florida. The fact that it had been under British control for the two decades between 1763 and 1783 gave credence to fears that another transfer might take place. The elections of 1810 enabled stridently Anglophobic War Hawks to become a highly inﬂuential faction in the U.S. Congress. They responded promptly to a request from President Madison for a formal announcement of U.S. opposition to any such transfer. A joint resolution articulating the NoTransfer Principle with regard to Florida swept through Congress in 1811. It authorized the president to use tactics up to and including temporary occupation, if necessary, to prevent Spain from relinquishing control. This resolution and Madison’s policies in general were based, of course, on the undisguised U.S. intention to annex all of Florida to the United States as soon as possible. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams achieved that objective eight years later in the Transcontinental Treaty. At almost the same time, the possibility of other colonial transfers arose

again, this time as a result of the actions of the so-called Concert of Europe. The ﬁve major European powers, acting as members of the Quintuple Alliance, authorized France to invade Spain in order to reinstall a Bourbon monarch on the throne. Both British and American statesmen worried that this might encourage France to assume control of some of Spain’s American possessions. One of the three major points of President James Monroe’s famous doctrine in 1823 was a restatement of the No-Transfer Principle. By enshrining the No-Transfer Principle in the Monroe Doctrine, the president ensured that it would continue to be a key element in U.S. attitudes about the Western Hemisphere. It certainly played a part in Secretary of State William Seward’s reaction to a French attempt to install a puppet regime in Mexico in the early 1860s. The United States would no more countenance the transfer of an already independent nation into a dependency of a European nation than it would an existing colony. The Civil War demonstrated the military power of the United States and enhanced its inﬂuence in the Western Hemisphere. By then, as well, most of the people in the region had severed their colonial ties to Europe. The few exceptions, such as Belize and the Guianas, were of comparatively little concern to the United States. The only major transfers that took place subsequently involved Americans assuming control of areas such as Puerto Rico and the Danish West Indies. When Hitler’s armies invaded and conquered France in 1940, concern arose that France’s few remaining Caribbean colonies might fall under German control as well. Should that occur, they could

32 | Section 1

become staging areas for subversion by the Axis powers. Foreign ministers from the American republics met in Cuba and promulgated the Act of Havana. The heart of that declaration was a strong multinational statement of support for the No-Transfer Principle, which had been a traditional policy of the United States for more than a century. See also: Monroe Doctrine References

Logan, John A. No Transfer: An American Security Principle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961. May, Ernest R. The Making of the Monroe Doctrine. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975.

Paper Blockade During the protracted warfare between Great Britain and France in the early 19th century, both sides resorted to increasingly desperate measures. Among them were paper blockades, arbitrary proclamations designed to restrict various sorts of seaborne trade. As the most active trading nation not engaged in the war, the United States suffered more than any other country from these paper blockades. After several attempts to neutralize their effects, the United States went to war against Great Britain in 1812 in part as a protest over its use of paper blockades. A blockade is usually considered an act of war. During a conﬂict, a nation with a large navy may decide to place its ships outside its enemy’s ports to prevent the import or export of vital resources. To blockade a nation as large as France with an extensive coastline along the English Channel, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean, literally thou-

sands of ships would be needed. Even the mighty Royal Navy lacked the resources to impose a conventional blockade of France. An alternative way of interrupting trade was needed. In May 1806, the British government announced what came to be called the Fox Blockade. An ofﬁcial decree, called an order-in-council, instituted a partial blockade of the French coast that authorized Royal Navy vessels to stop any merchant ship intending to call at a French port anywhere in the world. British ships could hover just off the U.S. coast—beyond the threemile limit, for example—and intercept vessels that they suspected of hauling cargo destined for France. In practice, any merchantman leaving port anywhere might be stopped at sea, its cargo searched, and a decision made that it was carrying either outright contraband or other goods that might be useful to the French war effort. The U.S. government bitterly protested the arbitrariness of this policy, particularly complaining about the very broad deﬁnition of contraband that the British insisted on employing. As bad as the British policy appeared, in November the French went a step further when Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte issued an imperial decree at Berlin. Although his ﬂeets were far too small to mount an effective blockade, the decree declared that the British Isles were “in a state of blockade.” In effect, the Berlin Decree gave French navy vessels and privateers free rein to stop any ship anywhere in the world to search it for “lawful prizes,” which could be and were often interpreted as anything manufactured in Great Britain. Virtually every ship in the world had, at the very least, a British sextant or some other essential

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 33 item that could be used to justify a seizure. The blizzard of paper blockades had only begun. In January and November 1807, the British issued more orders-incouncil. These were designed to assert complete control of external trade with all of Europe, an effort aimed at breaking open the so-called Continental System that Napoléon had created. His goal was to make Europe so self-sufﬁcient that it would require no imports at all, thereby rendering Great Britain’s control of the seas irrelevant. Napoléon responded with another imperial decree, issued from Milan, stating that France would consider any vessel that touched the British Isles as a British, that is, as an enemy vessel, thus subject to capture. U.S. shippers were caught in an impossible situation. If they tried to trade with France, the British would stop them. If they conﬁned their trading activities to British ports, they risked capture or sinking by French corsairs. Even so, the global trade turmoil was so intense and disruptive that if a U.S. shipowner sent out three vessels and lost two of them, the proﬁts on the third ship more than offset the investment in all three. U.S. merchants may have been willing to take such risks, but President Thomas Jefferson was not. In his view, the U.S. carrying trade was absolutely vital to the economic viability of both France and Great Britain. He chose, therefore, to impose a total embargo on all shipping in and out of all U.S. ports. He anticipated that, within a few months, Great Britain or France or both would be so desperate for U.S. goods that they would cancel their paper blockades. Instead, it was the U.S. economy that withered away. Great Britain saw the

U.S. embargo as strengthening its control of world trade; Napoléon saw it as shoring up his Continental System. As a ﬁnal insult, he issued yet another decree, this one at Bayonne, stating that any U.S. ship that had somehow evaded Jefferson’s embargo must, in fact, be British and therefore subject to French capture. The unsuccessful embargo terminated when Jefferson left ofﬁce in March 1809. The two succeeding U.S. trade policies, the Nonintercourse Act and Macon’s Bill Number 2, also failed to ease European trade restrictions. Great Britain’s paper blockades remained in force and became a central factor in President James Madison’s decision to declare war in 1812. Ironically, at that point, the British economy had sunk into a deep depression, in large measure because of its inability to import U.S. raw materials or export manufactured goods to the United States. While the American Congress was debating whether or not to go to war, the British government concluded that it must cancel its paper blockade policies. Unfortunately, news of that decision took too long to reach the United States to stave off the war. By the time commissioners from both sides met to discuss peace terms in 1814, the issue of paper blockades had virtually ceased to exist. Great Britain and its allies had defeated Napoléon’s armies on the battleﬁeld. Although the deposed emperor would escape from exile on the island of Elba and brieﬂy present a renewed threat, the world was essentially at peace for another 100 years. Neither paper blockades—nor actual blockades, for that matter—were needed in such a world, so what had loomed as a major disruptive issue for so long just faded away.

34 | Section 1 See also: Impressment; Rule of 1756; War Hawks References

McDonald, Forrest. The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976. Spivak, Burton I. Jefferson’s English Crisis. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979. Stagg, J. C. A. Mr. Madison’s War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Pinckney’s Treaty In 1795, Thomas Pinckney negotiated a treaty with Spain that fulﬁlled almost all U.S. desires at that point. The chief provisions of the agreement included a ﬁxed southern boundary for the United States, open trade along the whole length of the Mississippi River, and a pledge on both sides to prevent Indian depredations from either direction. Pinckney’s Treaty was very popular in the South and West, and it helped offset dismay in those regions over Jay’s Treaty, which had been negotiated the previous year. U.S. relations with Spain remained unsettled after the Revolutionary War. Although Spain had provided some assistance to the American patriots, it was slow to recognize a new nation that might serve as a model for revolutionaries in its own American colonies. Florida presented additional complications. Great Britain had taken control of that area as a prize of its victory over Spain and France in 1763. But Florida was of little use to the British once they had granted independence to the United States, so they returned it to Spanish control in 1783. The actual boundaries of what they had returned remained in dispute. Great Britain had maintained a northern boundary of West Florida that ran along

the 31st parallel, but prior Spanish claims reached up to 32° 28’. Basing its position on the British treaty concessions, the United States insisted that 31° was the correct boundary. Spain refused to recognize the American claim. Another complication in the 1783 Treaty of Paris between Great Britain and the United States was a provision that granted citizens of the new nation the right to free navigation along the Mississippi River from its source to its mouth. Although no one disputed American shipping along the river that deﬁned the nation’s western border, several hundred miles of the river’s ﬁnal course ran through Spanish-held Louisiana Territory. Spain naturally questioned Great Britain’s authority to grant trading rights through territories that it did not control. A major American objective in the Revolutionary War had been to control the Ohio Valley region. To develop its full agricultural potential, however, settlers streaming into that area needed to ship bulk goods down the river network and, ultimately, to an ocean port, such as New Orleans. The federal government found itself under considerable pressure to ensure American rights to that passage. President George Washington clearly did not wish to foment a war with Spain in the late stages of his second term. Fortunately, at that point, the Spanish government had become concerned that the United States and Great Britain might make common cause, especially after the signing of Jay’s Treaty in 1794. To offset this potential alliance, Spain asked the United States to send a diplomatic representative. Washington ordered Thomas Pinckney, then serving as U.S. minister in England, to go to Spain; Pinckney was fully authorized to negotiate a wideranging treaty.

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 35 A compliant Spain acceded to almost all of Pinckney’s requests. The treaty deﬁned the 31st parallel as the boundary between the United States and Florida. Spain also agreed to allow Americans to use the Mississippi River route all the way to New Orleans. Once there, they were granted the right of “free deposit” at the port, absolving them of the need to pay import or export duties for goods that were destined to be loaded on ocean-going vessels. This provision had a three-year term, but the right to free deposit was routinely extended in the future. The ﬁnal major provision was a mutual promise to work to prevent Indian or criminal raids on each other’s territories. Pinckney’s Treaty was enormously popular back home. Particularly appreciated by Southerners and Westerners, even Americans living in the Northeast considered it to be a positive balance to Jay’s Treaty. The Senate ratiﬁed Pinckney’s Treaty unanimously, signaling a major achievement for the Federalists who had come to dominate the Washington administration. For the next several years, the United States and Spain enjoyed reasonably amicable relations. Only when Napoléon Bonaparte decided to retake Louisiana did the situation deteriorate. By 1803, the French had cancelled the U.S. right to free deposit in New Orleans. President Thomas Jefferson therefore had ample motivation to negotiate a new arrangement with France, a step that ultimately led to the Louisiana Purchase. See also: Louisiana; Transcontinental Treaty (Florida) References

Bemis, Samuel Flagg. Pinckney’s Treaty. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926.

Whitaker, Arthur Preston. The Spanish American Frontier, 1783–1795. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1927.

Plan of 1776 Two months after they signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, delegates at the Continental Congress decided to lay out some principles to guide the new nation’s foreign policy. The main focus of the Plan of 1776 was articulating trading rights for a country that was not allied with any other. If the United States hoped to plot a neutral course in the world, it needed to chart that journey. The principles of the Plan of 1776 were frequently discussed in future negotiations, and they remained fundamental U.S. desires right through the War of 1812. The plan’s basic principle was that “free ships make free goods.” In this context, a free ship was one registered in a neutral country, as the United States intended to be. If such a free ship took on cargo anywhere in the world, the plan argued, the ship’s neutrality effectively neutralized the cargo as well. A typical case in the 1790s would be a U.S. ship that called at a French colonial port and loaded tropical products. According to the doctrine that “free ships make free goods,” those products ceased to be French and thus could be carried anywhere in the world. An exception to this rule were goods deﬁned as contraband. During wartime, it was generally acknowledged that guns, ammunition, explosives, and the like would be useful in combat. They were categorized as contraband, goods that naval vessels of warring countries could legitimately seize in order to deny them to their enemies. In the Plan of 1776, the

36 | Section 1

United States recognized the concept of contraband but argued that the list should be limited only to those items clearly related to warfare. A third basic element in the Plan of 1776 was insistence that ships from neutral countries should be able to trade directly with countries at war, even if such trade had previously been discouraged. That put the American plan into direct opposition to Great Britain’s Rule of 1756. Not surprisingly, the British had no intention of agreeing to what they considered a contradictory policy. In a revision of the Plan of 1776 eight years later, the Confederation Congress added a fourth principle. Fully aware that a nation engaged in war might wish to restrict trade by blockading enemy ports, the Americans claimed that such a blockade had to be effective enough to threaten “eminent danger” to those who hoped to breach it. This stand put the United States in stark opposition to what became known as “paper blockades” during the ensuing Napoleonic Wars. When they could not physically close off their enemy’s ports, both the British and the French issued decrees or executive orders declaring that a blockade existed. Those who, like the Americans, were exercising their right to neutral shipping strenuously objected to such declarations. The Plan of 1776 received its ﬁrst foreign endorsement in the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce that Benjamin Franklin negotiated with France. The French government may have been willing to accede to the American plan primarily to tweak the noses of their perennial enemies, the British. The treaty contained provisions supporting neutral rights doctrines such as “free ships make free goods” and a short list of contraband.

Shortly afterward, other neutral nations, such as Russia and the Baltic States, formulated their own set of principles similar to those laid down in the Plan of 1776. These countries attempted to join together into “armed neutrality,” with the goal of defending their right to trade where and when they chose. The initiative proved to be rather weak and ineffective, however, so Great Britain, the chief target of the policies, largely ignored them. When Benjamin Franklin negotiated the peace agreement with England in 1783, he failed to convince the British government to include elements of the Plan of 1776. Fortunately, the world remained generally peaceful for the next few years, rendering the issues moot. When the French Revolution triggered the ﬁrst of a long series of world wars, however, Americans once again found themselves in the awkward position of neutrals hoping to take advantage of the disturbances to expand trade opportunities. Once again, Great Britain was the chief opponent of neutral trading rights. The British refused to acknowledge U.S. desires in Jay’s Treaty in 1794. Spain accepted some parts of the Plan of 1776 in Pinckney’s Treaty the following year. Even more important was France’s willingness to include neutral rights provisions in the Treaty of Mortefontaine, which ended the Quasi-War with France in 1801. None of this mattered as much as Great Britain’s refusal to countenance the concept. For the next 20 years, the United States vainly cited the principles of the Plan of 1776 in defending its role in international commerce. British rejection of those concepts played a key role in fueling the hostility that led the United

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 37 States to declare war in 1812. Ironically enough, however, the United States found itself in the opposite camp in 1861, opposing all European trade with the Confederate states and arguing against the very principles that it had ﬁrst articulated in 1776. See also: Jay’s Treaty; Neutrality; Paper Blockades; Quasi-War with France; Rule of 1756 References

Bemis, Samuel Flagg. The Diplomacy of the American Revolution. 3rd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957. Madariaga, Isabel de. Britain, Russia, and the Armed Neutrality of 1780. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962 Stetser, Vernon G. The Commercial Reciprocity Policy of the United States, 1774–1829. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937.

Plenipotentiary Prior to the era of instantaneous international communication, many diplomatic envoys sent overseas possessed full authority to negotiate. The term “plenipotentiary,” of which the etymological roots stem from “full of” and “power,” applied to such individuals. The home country could, of course, disavow or fail to ratify any agreements that a plenipotentiary emissary negotiated, but, in most cases, carefully worded instructions prevented diplomats from straying too far outside the expectations of the governments that had dispatched them. When the American Revolution began, the Continental Congress relied on private citizens like Arthur Lee, already in London, to provide intelligence. Benjamin Franklin and other members of Congress advocated sending out official representatives, carefully

instructed by the Committee of Secret Correspondence, to act as spokesmen for American interests and desires abroad. New Yorker Silas Deane was the ﬁrst to accept such an assignment, traveling to Europe and calling on foreign ofﬁcials with the goal of obtaining supplies, loans, grants, and, it was hoped, formal recognition for the new nation. Other prominent Americans, including John Jay, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin himself, took on diplomatic missions for the United States. Of all of these, Franklin was granted the widest latitude. He clearly merited the plenipotentiary designation, in part because he had been one of the most inﬂuential leaders managing foreign relations in Philadelphia before he headed for France. With tact, charm, and cleverness, he laid the groundwork for a more formal French relationship with the United States. Capitalizing on news of the American victory at Saratoga in October 1777, he, along with Deane and Lee, negotiated and signed two treaties with the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes. Congress duly ratiﬁed the Treaties of Amity and Commerce and of Alliance without alteration in 1778. Even in the best of times, messages could take two months or more to cross the Atlantic by sailing ship, so American envoys simply had to be trusted enough to operate on their own. John Jay was only marginally successful in his mission to Spain, but John Adams achieved remarkable success in gaining both recognition and expanded financial support from the government of the Netherlands. The situation became much more complex when Congress authorized these two men to collaborate with Franklin on peace negotiations with

38 | Section 1

Great Britain after the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. Each of them was a plenipotentiary, but they did not always agree with one another on how the talks should be conducted or on what objectives should be considered nonnegotiable. Far older and more experienced than his fellows on the delegation, Franklin took the lead in laying out U.S. demands for the British negotiator, Richard Oswald. The other American commissioners ultimately accepted the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that Franklin had engineered. After the Revolution, the president and his secretary of state frequently granted plenipotentiary status to the ministers and other diplomats they sent abroad. Some, like Thomas Pinckney in Spain in 1795, did very well indeed. John Jay, on the other hand, failed to obtain in his negotiations with Great Britain many of the objectives that his instructions had outlined. A striking example of the importance of plenipotentiary status came in 1803 when President Thomas Jefferson sent James Monroe to France, charged with gaining U.S. control of the island of New Orleans and a portion of West Florida. Robert Livingston was already in Paris, serving as U.S. minister to Emperor Napoléon’s court and lobbying for the same goal. Even before Monroe arrived, French foreign minister Talleyrand suddenly offered Livingston an opportunity to buy all of the Louisiana Territory. When Monroe arrived, he and Livingston quickly decided to ignore the limitations in their instructions. The treaty ceding all of Louisiana, including New Orleans, was the most remarkable diplomatic achievement of the Jefferson administration, and it would not have occurred if the U.S. negotiators had

failed to exercise their plenipotentiary authority. A later instance proved equally fortuitous. At the height of the Mexican War, President James K. Polk sent the clerk of the State Department, Nicholas Trist, to Mexico with plenipotentiary authority to negotiate a peace treaty with that country. Polk soon abandoned hope of a successful negotiation and ordered his envoy to return to the United States. Trist stayed on, however, and signed an agreement, which became known as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, early in 1848. Polk ultimately decided that he could do no better, so he submitted the treaty for Senate ratiﬁcation. In modern times, a top envoy to another country may hold the title “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary,” but that elaborate phrase is often a relic of past practices. In almost all cases, a U.S. ambassador or negotiator receives daily or even minuteby-minute instructions and advice from desk ofﬁcers and higher level ofﬁcials at the State Department in Washington. Although the character and personality of an individual ambassador can be vital in opening doors to discussion and lobbying for support, the fundamental operating procedures prevent him or her from exerting the wide-ranging authority that earlier envoys exercised. See also: Franklin, Benjamin; Jay, John; Louisiana; Pinckney’s Treaty; Treaty (Treaty of Paris, 1783); Trist, Nicholas References

DeConde, Alexander. This Affair of Louisiana. New York: Scribner, 1976. Dull, Jonathan R. A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 39 Morris, Richard B. The Peacemakers. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Van Alstyne, Richard W. Empire and Independence. New York: Wiley, 1965.

Quasi-War with France The quasi-war, or undeclared war, that dominated the presidency of John Adams represented the ﬁnal breakdown of relations between France and the United States in the 1790s. Conducted almost exclusively at sea, the damage to both sides was relatively minor, but the confrontation stirred enormous passions among Americans. After several botched diplomatic initiatives on both sides, Adams responded positively to a French proposal for renewed negotiations, which ultimately led to a mutually satisfactory resolution. When the French Revolution deposed the most powerful monarchy in Europe, it understandably dismayed the leaders of other monarchical governments. By 1793, France had been drawn into the

ﬁrst of a series of conﬂicts with various coalitions of its European neighbors that would last nearly a quarter of a century. In these circumstances, the status of the French alliance with the United States, dating to 1778, became the subject of a number of interpretations. If the French had hoped for direct military assistance from the United States, President George Washington’s 1793 Neutrality Proclamation and subsequent neutrality legislation effectively ruled it out. Complicating the picture, however, was Jay’s Treaty, negotiated in 1794 and ratified shortly afterward. Regardless of both American and British interpretations of the document, the French government chose to assume that it made the United States a subordinate of its archenemy, Great Britain. From time to time, French and American ships tangled, primarily in the Caribbean, as hotheads on both sides responded to rising international tensions. Polarized viewpoints festered within the United States as well. President

WASHINGTON’S FAREWELL ADDRESS: SEPTEMBER 17, 1796 Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? . . . It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it. . . . Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies. . . . There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard. Source: Richardson, J. D., ed. Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1917, 1:213–214.

40 | Section 1

Washington was nominally allied with the Federalist faction, but the real leader of that partisan group was Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. Even after he left that ofﬁce, Hamilton and his allies continued to insist that close, friendly ties with Great Britain were essential to U.S. prosperity. Those who disagreed coalesced into the Republican Party, whose able leaders were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. True to their party designation, they tended to support the republican revolution in France, even when it took less admirable turns. Hoping to convince the American people to support the Republicans and elect Jefferson to succeed Washington as president, French diplomats engaged in active politicking. This maneuvering

culminated in their decision to break diplomatic relations entirely in 1796. Federalist John Adams won the presidency anyway, and he tried to patch up this breach by sending a three-man commission to France. The unexpected result was the XYZ Affair, which convinced Americans that France had insulted their country. A huge tidal wave of antiFrench, or at least pro-American, sentiment swept the nation. To placate the warmongers in his own party, Adams put the United States on a war footing. Although never formally declared, a quasi-war rapidly took shape. Adams called for greatly increased naval expenditures, including the building of major war ships, such as the Constellation and the Constitution, which, to this day,

The Quasi-War with France took place almost exclusively at sea and included this confrontation between the USS Constellation and the French frigate L’Insurgente early in 1799. (Naval Historical Foundation)

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 41 ride at anchor in Baltimore and Boston. While awaiting their planning and construction, smaller U.S. Navy vessels and privateers captured or sunk more than 80 French ships. The army received attention as well, with an initial call for a 10,000-man ﬁghting force. Adams called George Washington out of retirement and named him lieutenant-general, but Washington then designated his old comrade-inarms, Alexander Hamilton, to lead the forces in the ﬁeld. Well aware of how dangerous it would be to give the ambitious Hamilton such an opportunity for glory, Commander-in-Chief Adams avoided ordering this army into action. The quasi-war created a different sort of casualty, however. In 1798, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed a Sedition Act and three acts directed at noncitizens. The so-called Alien and Sedition Acts created a storm of vituperative controversy and led to the trial and imprisonment of a number of critics of the war and of the Adams administration. Fortunately, French foreign minister Talleyrand realized that no one was beneﬁting from this situation. Moreover, he wanted to restore friendly relations with the United States, in part to support his growing interest in reestablishing a French empire in Louisiana and Canada. He sent a message to William Vans Murray, U.S. minister in Holland, promising to treat a new commission from the United States with the respect that is due representatives of an independent nation. Adams, too, understood how disruptive the quasi-war had become. Without consulting his cabinet, he nominated Murray to be minister to France. Congress and his advisors were shocked, but the most they could do was add two others to the mission: Oliver Ellsworth and William R.

Davie. True to his promise, Talleyrand greeted the new commissioners warmly and, more to the point, without any implication that they should provide a bribe. Even so, negotiations went slowly. The Americans demanded a $20 million payment to their country for French depredations on U.S. trade. But French citizens had suffered substantial losses as well, and Talleyrand rejected any consideration of paying compensation. While the discussions languished, Napoléon Bonaparte emerged as a new, much more authoritative leader of France. Talleyrand somehow managed to remain in ofﬁce through this transition, so an agreement still seemed possible. To demonstrate how important he considered the matter, Napoléon named his brother Joseph to head the French negotiating team. When the U.S. commission dropped its monetary claims, the two delegations were able to draft a mutually beneﬁcial document. In a key provision, France released the United States from the 1778 Alliance. The Americans in return agreed to a broader interpretation of neutral rights than Jay’s Treaty had included. Napoléon personally attended the gala celebration of the resolution of negotiations at Joseph Bonaparte’s estate at Mortefontaine. Both sides signed the Treaty of Mortefontaine on September 30, 1800. However, news of the peace treaty failed to reach the United States until after the November presidential election in which Thomas Jefferson defeated the incumbent. Adams had no regrets. He believed that achieving peace had been his most important presidential accomplishment. He was no doubt justiﬁed in doing so: the United States and France never again engaged in either war or quasi-war.

42 | Section 1 See also: Alliance; XYZ Affair References

DeConde, Alexander. The Quasi-War. New York: Scribner, 1966. Ferling, John E. John Adams. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Hill, Peter P. William Vans Murray, Federalist Diplomat. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971.

Ratiﬁcation Because those who negotiate agreements are often subordinate members of a government, most governments reserve the right to review their work. If a treaty or agreement appears beneﬁcial, the government will ratify it. Until the ratiﬁcation process has been completed on both sides, however, the terms of a diplomatic arrangement are not necessarily binding on either party. The U.S. Constitution grants responsibility for ratiﬁcation to the Senate, where at least two-thirds of the members must vote in favor. It was hardly surprising that the drafters of the Constitution assigned ratiﬁcation to the Senate. After all, until at least two-thirds of the states had accepted that document, the Continental Congress had retained the right to ratify international agreements. The most important early case of ratiﬁcation came in 1778, when Congress speedily endorsed the two treaties that Benjamin Franklin and his associates had hammered out with the French government. Although the French alliance ultimately became quite unpopular, it appeared vital to the cause of independence at the time of its ratiﬁcation. After the war, the United States suffered a major depression, in part because Spain cut off American trade to its Caribbean islands once the peace treaty

was signed in 1783. Secretary for Foreign Affairs John Jay took up the question with Don Diego de Gardoqui, Spain’s ofﬁcial envoy to the United States. The Spaniard’s instructions did not permit him to allow American trade through the lower Mississippi and the port of New Orleans; the Confederation Congress would not allow Jay to surrender the American claim to free passage. Jay finally concluded that he could obtain American access to the Spanish West Indies if he gave way on Mississippi transit. Congress considered his request, but ﬁve southern states voted against approval. The Articles of Confederation required a positive vote of least 9 of 13 state delegations to take any action, so Jay’s initiative failed. When the Philadelphia convention drafted the Constitution in 1787, the delegates recalled the vote on the JayGardoqui issue. They decided to retain the two-thirds rule for treaty ratiﬁcation and assigned the responsibility to the Senate, the body that effectively represents the member states of the Union. The Constitution simultaneously granted the president broad-ranging responsibility for conducting foreign relations, and, over time, executive agreements became a common method for presidents to strike deals with overseas counterparts. Even so, the ratiﬁcation power was, and remains, a powerful mechanism for the Senate to influence and, ultimately, approve or disapprove of a president’s policies. The ﬁrst treaty to be submitted to the Senate for ratiﬁcation was the one that John Jay negotiated with Great Britain in 1794. President Washington had grave doubts about its acceptability, given the wide unpopularity of some of the provisions of Jay’s Treaty. In the end, the

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 43 Senators voted 20 to 10 in favor of ratifying it. Pinckney’s Treaty with Spain, signed the following year, proved much more popular, receiving unanimous support on a ratiﬁcation vote. To ensure popular approval and legislative backing for initiatives, a president is wise to provide the Senate with opportunities to ratify foreign policies. Some treaties that might have seemed noncontroversial nevertheless generated opposition when presented for ratiﬁcation. When President Thomas Jefferson sent the 1803 Louisiana Purchase agreement to the Senate, it triggered a rebellion among strict constructionists of the Constitution in his own party. They pointed out that nothing in the document authorized a president to expand the size of the United States. Eager expansionists, on the other hand, welcomed the initiative and were numerous enough in the Senate to ensure ratiﬁcation. U.S. reluctance was often only partially responsible for delays. The Spanish Cortez dithered for more than two years before it ratiﬁed the 1819 Transcontinental Treaty, in which Spain transferred control of Florida to the United States. Even though the U.S. Senate had approved the agreement instantaneously, the delay allowed for objections to gain a hearing in Washington. The Senate therefore had somewhat more difﬁculty reratifying the document once Spanish approval had taken place in 1821. A couple of decades later, another expansionist treaty failed completely. John C. Calhoun was perhaps the nation’s most outspoken advocate of the expansion of slavery into new territories. Even so, President John Tyler appointed the South Carolinian his secretary of state in 1843. Calhoun then

publicly stated that expanding slavery was a major purpose of the annexation treaty that he had worked out with the Republic of Texas. The Senate handed Calhoun an embarrassing defeat when it voted two to one against ratiﬁcation. After careful consideration and extended negotiations, Tyler presented a different agreement to Congress, one that carefully avoided emphasizing expansion of slavery. Certain he could never get a two-thirds Senate majority for ratiﬁcation, he asked for and received a joint resolution in favor of annexing Texas. Each house easily generated the simple majority needed to approve the resolution. Over time, the United States became more sophisticated at foreign relations and presidents became more astute at judging what the Senate would or would not approve. That being the case, the defeat of the Versailles Treaty in 1919 appears to be truly remarkable. President Woodrow Wilson personally went to Europe as head of the U.S. delegation to ensure that the resulting treaty would reﬂect U.S. desires. Back home, restive senators found dozens of reasons to object to the treaty that Wilson ﬁnally presented for their ratiﬁcation. Although some of their carping was pure partisan politics, fundamental questions about the right of nations to pursue independent foreign policies were never successfully answered. By then, many Americans had become thoroughly disillusioned with the Great War and the chaos that it had left in its wake. Isolation from European and even world affairs seemed very appealing. When Wilson suffered a paralyzing stroke while on a speaking tour in favor of ratiﬁcation, it stilled the most eloquent and persuasive voice

44 | Section 1

supporting the treaty. In November 1919, the Senate voted on ratiﬁcation twice; neither time did it win even a simple majority. A third vote in March 1920 did better but still fell well short of the required two-thirds in favor. The Senate’s rejection of the Versailles Treaty stands as an important landmark and precedent for future negotiations. Routine agreements may win routine ratiﬁcation, but controversial initiatives are always in jeopardy of rejection. U.S. diplomats have signed several recent international agreements, but presidents have been loath to submit them to certain rejection. Controversial topics, such as global warming and human rights, simply have no chance of attracting the necessary endorsement. For good or ill, the ratiﬁcation instrument remains highly effective, even today. See also: Calhoun, John Caldwell; Fourteen Points; League of Nations; Louisiana References

Adler, David Gray, and Larry N. George, eds. The Constitution and the Conduct of American Foreign Policy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Glennon, Michael J. Constitutional Diplomacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Henkin, Louis. Foreign Affairs and the United States Constitution. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Recognition Formal relations among nations can only occur if their governments recognize each other as having validity. No one accorded the United States such recognition in 1776. The ﬁrst formal acknowledgment of the new nation’s independent existence came when the French signed

two treaties in 1778. Far more important was the Treaty of Paris in 1783, in which the former colonial overlord, Great Britain, ofﬁcially recognized the existence of the independent United States. Seeking recognition and granting it have subsequently remained extraordinarily important diplomatic tools for the United States and the nations with which it chooses to interact. The Founding Fathers who pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honors to the United States on July 4, 1776, were the only ones who had formally recognized the existence of the new nation. Even before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, American agents in Europe were contacting other governments—seeking military assistance, money, and even more important, recognition of the United States as an independent nation. Not until Benjamin Franklin led the negotiation of two treaties with French foreign minister Vergennes in early 1778 did any other nation actually recognize the United States. Once those treaties were ratiﬁed, both countries exchanged high-level diplomatic representatives, and the French government greatly increased the level and types of assistance that it provided the embattled revolutionaries. Through persistent and patient diplomacy, John Adams persuaded the government of the Netherlands to follow suit, recognizing the United States as a legitimate, independent nation in 1782. None of that would have mattered in the long run if Great Britain had failed to grant similar recognition. When Franklin met with British negotiator Richard Oswald after the British defeat at Yorktown, he insisted that British recognition of the United States was an indispensable

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 45 requirement for any peace treaty. Moreover, he made sure that the ﬁnal agreement deﬁned boundaries that conﬁrmed the territorial integrity of the new nation. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 contained these essential provisions. Within a few years, other European nations also recognized the independent United States, allowing for diplomatic exchanges and trade negotiations. The dramatic success of revolutionary forces in France in the early 1790s abruptly reversed the situation. The treaties between the United States and France had been negotiated by statesmen representing the government of King Louis XVI. When the king was executed in 1793, the succeeding French government sent a staunch republican, Edmond Genêt, to serve as its representative in the United States. President George Washington consulted with his cabinet as to whether he should accept “Citizen” Genêt as a legitimate envoy of France. In the end, the United States recognized the government that currently held power, that is, the de facto government, without attempting to decide whether or not it was a legitimate, or de jure, government. Washington’s decision set a precedent for the United States to recognize de facto governments in almost all future situations. Sometimes, however, it seemed prudent to wait until a government had proven itself capable of sustained rule before extending recognition. A series of revolutions swept through Latin America in the early 1800s, as charismatic leaders like Simón Bolívar stirred anticolonial sentiment. Eager to extend trading relations to areas where Spanish mercantile policies had previously prohibited it, U.S. traders pressured the government to regularize relations. Full recognition was

President George Washington accepts the credentials of French minister Edmond Genêt in 1793. Although the United States had extended full diplomatic recognition to France, Genêt’s interference in American domestic politics and other provocations severely undermined relations between the two nations. (Library of Congress)

delayed until President Monroe had promulgated his doctrine in 1823. Great Britain and other nations followed the U.S. lead. If the United States encouraged recognition of new governments in the Western Hemisphere, it found itself opposed to that same phenomenon in 1861. When South Carolina led several other states in seceding from the Union, the federal government took strenuous steps to discourage foreign recognition of the Confederacy. These efforts proved successful, although Great Britain and France did extend a restricted form of recognition. By recognizing the Confederate States of America as a belligerent,

46 | Section 1

Europeans hoped to exploit trade opportunities. A massive and ultimately quite comprehensive Union Navy blockade of the South made that almost impossible. Because other nations regarded the United States as a minor player on the world scene throughout the 19th century, U.S. decisions to grant or withhold recognition had relatively limited importance. After the turn of the twentieth century, however, U.S. stature had risen considerably. President Woodrow Wilson broke with precedent when a revolution in Mexico took a turn that he considered reprehensible. He announced a policy of “watchful waiting,” hoping that an American-style democratic government would emerge. He ﬁnally acceded to the ﬂow of events in 1917, extending formal recognition to the government of the Constitutionalists led by Venustiano Carranza. Wilson reacted more quickly to similar events in China. When Sun-Yat-Sen’s republican-inspired followers succeeded in overthrowing the imperial government in 1911, the United States rather quickly granted recognition. This reﬂected both U.S. empathy with republican-style revolutionaries and a continuing insistence that the territorial integrity of China be maintained under whatever form of de facto government held sway. The Russian Revolution in 1917 precipitated quite a different reaction. Whereas the Wilson administration recognized the authority of the provisional government early in that year, it withheld its approval when the Bolsheviks took over a few months later. The U.S. government refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Soviet Union for another 16 years, granting recognition only when President Franklin Roosevelt reassessed the state of the world in 1933.

In contrast to this 16-year delay, President Harry S Truman needed only 11 minutes to recognize formally the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Even though Jewish and Arab forces continued fighting for another year, Truman’s instantaneous response to a telephone call from Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion legitimized his settlements in Palestine in the eyes of much of the world. Solid U.S. support for Israel has persisted ever since, regardless of which internal political faction is in control or what Israel’s Arab neighbors think or do. Just as recognition by major European nations was essential to legitimizing the U.S. government in the revolutionary period, U.S. recognition of governments in other nations has come to have major symbolic importance in recent decades. A great many positive beneﬁts can ﬂow from recognition—including trade, tourism, and amity. Granting or withholding recognition therefore remains a major diplomatic tool for all nations. See also: Alliance; Mission; Monroe Doctrine; Recognition as a Belligerent References

Bemis, Samuel Flagg. The Diplomacy of the American Revolution. 3rd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957. Gilderhus, Mark T. Diplomacy and Revolution. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977. Wilson, Evan M. Decision on Palestine: How the U.S. Came to Recognize Israel. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1979.

Rule of 1756 During the opening stages of what Europeans called the Seven Years’ War, Great Britain announced a policy destined to complicate U.S.–British relations for

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 47 generations. Fully aware of how important colonial trade was to their enemies— Spain and France—the British unilaterally proclaimed that no nation could open its colonial trade to outsiders during wartime. The principle could be expressed in the phrase “trade that is illegal in peace is illegal in war.” The same principle was repeatedly invoked in future conﬂicts, leaving little room for neutral nations such as the United States to take advantage of new trade opportunities. U.S. objections to the Rule of 1756 helped precipitate the War of 1812. By the mid-18th century, Great Britain, Spain, and France had established large mercantile empires. Colonies on the American mainland and scattered through the productive islands of the Caribbean were integral and valuable elements in these empires. During peacetime, all three imperial nations attempted to restrict trade to and from their colonies to traders afﬁliated with the mother country. As the French and Indian War (1754–1763) broadened into a world war in 1756, however, the superiority of the British Royal Navy enabled it to disrupt normal colonial trade. When France and Spain attempted to circumvent this problem by inviting other neutral nations to step in, Great Britain announced its rule that such trade was not acceptable. British American colonists achieved some beneﬁts from this policy, because the royal government did not object to ships from its own colonies calling at foreign Caribbean ports. In fact, enforcement of exclusive trading rights within empires was so lax that, long before the American Revolution, vessels hailing from New York, New England, and other Atlantic ports had become accustomed to participating in this trade.

A few years later, the Americans celebrated their own independence, but they recognized that they might now be excluded from the favorable trading relations that they had enjoyed as colonists. Moreover, when the Revolutionary War ended, so did Great Britain’s conﬂict with Spain and France. As all these nations reinstituted their exclusive mercantile trading practices, the United States was left outside. The Rule of 1756 came into play again when Great Britain and France went to war in the early 1790s. As British warships captured or sunk enemy vessels, France softened its restrictions, allowing U.S. traders to ﬁll the gap. Citizens of a neutral country, they hoped that the Royal Navy would not interfere with their activities. By 1794, however, British annoyance resulted in a demand that the United States abide by the Rule of 1756. Jay’s Treaty, signed and ratiﬁed in 1794, included a U.S. endorsement of this policy. Over the next several years, wily U.S. traders found a way to skirt these restrictions. The British did not object to U.S. ships calling at the Caribbean ports of their enemies or even loading cargo, provided that its ultimate destination was a port in the United States. There the cargos were subjected to U.S. customs duties. Goods might even be off loaded for a few days to “neutralize” them before the same ship or another U.S. carrier reloaded the cargo and set sail for France or Spain. In most instances, all or a substantial part of the duties collected were refunded to a ship’s owners. Although technically a violation of the Rule of 1756, British authorities did not immediately halt these so-called broken voyages. In a landmark case involving a U.S. ship, the Polly, the

48 | Section 1

British admiralty courts concluded that a broken voyage did not violate the Rule of 1756. Five years later, British forbearance ended abruptly when another court decision, this one dealing with the ship Essex, overturned the Polly decision on the basis that refunding U.S. customs duties clearly proved it was a “continuous” and not a “broken” voyage after all. Even before news of the Essex decision reached the United States, the Royal Navy seized dozens of U.S. ships in the Caribbean. Shortly thereafter, Admiral Horatio Nelson’s ﬂeet defeated a combined French and Spanish force at Trafalgar off the coast of Spain. That victory ensured British control of the seas for more than a century and left Americans with little alternative but to adhere to the Rule of 1756 or stop trading altogether. Even so, U.S. statesmen and diplomats continually defended the principle that “free ships make free goods.” Regardless of where a cargo originated, they insisted, a carrier from the neutral United States should not be subject to capture. From time to time, other neutral nations adopted similar stands, but the principle was far more important to the United States, with its enormous trading ﬂeet and lack of colonies. By 1812, annoyance at the Rule of 1756 had combined with other factors such as impressment, land hunger, and patriotism to motivate a U.S. declaration of war against Great Britain. Fortunately, at the close of the conﬂict in 1815, the whole world settled into an extended era of peace, rendering the issue of neutral trade during wartime essentially moot. U.S. traders still faced some restrictions from the bilateral trade arrangements that their government had made with

other countries, but irritation about the Rule of 1756 faded away. See also: Plan of 1776 References

Christie, Ian R. Wars and Revolutions: Britain 1760–1815. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Spivak, Burton I. Jefferson’s English Crisis. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979.

Transcontinental Treaty (Florida) In 1819, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and Spanish minister Luis de Onís signed a landmark treaty that resolved a number of longstanding issues between their countries. The most important element of the treaty was Spain’s agreement to cede all of Florida to the United States. In return, Adams dropped a dubious U.S. claim to parts of Texas. He insisted, however, that the Adam-Onís Treaty deﬁne ﬁxed boundaries between the United States and all Spanish possessions from the Atlantic to the Paciﬁc, thus justifying historians’ decision to call it the Transcontinental Treaty. One issue that Adams and Onís had to sort through was that of the contradictory claims to the area known as Florida. At one time or another, it included not only the present state of Florida but also a relatively narrow strip of land stretching west along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico all the way to New Orleans. Some maps distinguished between West and East Florida, and, at least in U.S. eyes, the United States had solid justiﬁcations for believing that West Florida had become U.S. territory as early as 1803.

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 49 At one time or another, this disputed region was under the control of France, through its ownership of Louisiana; Spain, through its management of East Florida; and Great Britain, which temporarily controlled all of Florida for an extended period after the end of the French and Indian (Seven Years’) War in 1763. The Americans rested their claims to West Florida on the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, in which Napoléon’s government left the boundaries of the territory ill-defined. Although unknown to the Americans at the time, Spanish authorities had governed much of West Florida as an integral part of Louisiana when they held the territory in the late 18th century. In early 1804, the U.S. Congress passed the Mobile Act, which asserted U.S. authority over that crucial gulf port. Although this legislative action had no immediate effect, over the next several years U.S. settlers and adventurers streamed into the disputed territory, effectively occupying the westernmost segment by 1810. Two years later, similar settlements altered the balance of power in the rest of West Florida enough to allow President James Madison to insist that it, too, was now U.S. territory. Although Spain could not prevent the U.S. takeover of West Florida, it held on to the much larger East Florida. Some U.S. adventurers claimed to have Madison’s authority to conquer the area, but the president disavowed their actions when they proved unsuccessful. John Q. Adams and Luis Onís began serious talks in 1815, and Spain’s control over East Florida still remained ﬁrm. Whether the U.S. statesman could have changed that simply through negotiations or not remains unknown because an impetuous military man pursued his own agenda.

Andrew Jackson had distinguished himself as the general who won the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, and he was also notorious as an Indian ﬁghter. Members of the Seminole tribe and other Indians, as well as escaped slaves, frequently raided into Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, only to slip back across the international border to Florida for refuge when pursued. In Pinckney’s Treaty (1795), Spain had pledged to prevent such activity, but its military commitments in other regions left Florida nearly defenseless. Although President James Monroe disputed the story, Jackson claimed to have received secret presidential orders authorizing him to chase raiding parties in hot pursuit into Florida proper. Jackson implemented this plan in 1818, eventually capturing several forts and villages that he claimed Indians were using as havens. In the process, he also ran across a couple of British citizens whom he accused of assisting the raiders. After a brief court martial, the two men were executed. Jackson reluctantly withdrew his forces from Florida, but the international incident that his actions had sparked seemed likely to blossom into a full-scale war pitting the United States against Spain and Great Britain. Secretary of State Adams surprised his fellow cabinet members by stoutly defending Jackson’s actions. He even managed to convince British authorities to disavow the two unfortunate victims of Jackson’s frontier justice. With Great Britain effectively neutralized, the Spanish government realized that the U.S. conquest of Florida was inevitable, so it authorized Onís to get the best deal that he could in ceding the area to the United States.

50 | Section 1

In the resulting treaty, Spain relinquished its claims to all of the Florida territories, a good deal of which had already been incorporated into the state of Louisiana and the Mississippi Territory. In return, Adams dropped a demand for some $5 million in U.S. claims against the Spanish government, some of which extended all the way back to the quasiwar with France in the late 1790s. The U.S. government later audited the claims and paid appropriate compensation. Onís needed some concession from Adams before he would agree to the Florida provision. Therefore, the secretary of state formally abandoned a very weak claim to parts of Texas. To conﬁrm that decision, the two diplomats delineated a border between the United States and Spanish possessions to the southwest. At Adams’s insistence, Onís agreed to extend the line all the way to the Paciﬁc, setting the boundary at 42 degrees north latitude between California and the Oregon Territory. The major advantage here was that Spain dropped all claims to Oregon, leaving the territory with only two claimants, the United States and Great Britain. Signed on February 22, 1819, the treaty appeared so favorable that the U.S. Senate ratiﬁed it almost immediately. The Spanish government was in a chaotic state, dealing with the consequences of revolutionary movements in its Latin American colonies and suffering internal divisions as well. More than two years passed before the Spanish Cortez ratiﬁed the Transcontinental Treaty. That delay gave critics of Adams’s diplomacy plenty of time to complain. The most outspoken was Kentucky senator Henry Clay, who objected to the treaty’s “sellout” of the U.S. claim to Texas. In fact, that claim was far more

tenuous than anything associated with Florida, and Onís would never have been authorized to surrender additional territory to the Americans. Adams had skillfully won the maximum concessions that Spain was willing to make at that point, and he deserves full credit for engineering an agreement that added territory to the United States at the same time as it strengthened its claim to Oregon. See also: Louisiana; Oregon Claims; Pinckney’s Treaty References

Brooks, Philip C. Diplomacy and the Borderlands: The Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939. Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars. New York: Viking, 2001. Weeks, William Earl. John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992.

Treaty (Treaty of Paris, 1783) A treaty is usually a formal agreement between two governments. It can include general statements or very speciﬁc provisions. It can deal with major issues such as war and peace or with the minutia of tourism and import-export restrictions. Regardless of who actually negotiates or signs a treaty, the home government usually must ratify it before it goes into effect. Under the Constitution, the U.S. Senate is the body designated to ratify treaties, and the treaties must win a two-thirds vote of approval. As soon as the United States declared its independence, it sought international recognition and support through the negotiation of treaties. More than two centuries later, treaties remain essential elements in the nation’s foreign relations.

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 51 France was the ﬁrst treaty partner of the United States. Benjamin Franklin took the lead in negotiating two agreements early in 1778: a treaty of alliance and a separate commercial agreement. A key provision in the ﬁrst treaty was formal recognition of the United States as an independent nation. Over time, other nations agreed to recognize the new nation as well, paving the way for more extensive treaty negotiations. Franklin was also the major player in negotiating the most important treaty of all. After the American victory at Yorktown in 1781, the British government concluded that ending the Revolutionary War was in its own best interest. To that end, it sent Richard Oswald to Paris to open discussions with Franklin. Both gentleman were elderly, experienced in the ways of the world, and apparently had quite compatible personalities. A couple of stumbling blocks prevented these two men from immediately producing a document. The 1778 Alliance required Franklin to obtain French permission before proceeding with peace negotiations. France, meanwhile, had agreed to accept peace terms only if Great Britain surrendered Gibraltar to Spain. Fortunately, French foreign minister Vergennes ignored the Spanish commitment and allowed his American friend to proceed with negotiations. The second problem Franklin faced was that the Continental Congress had named four other Americans to work with him on the treaty. Two, John Jay and John Adams, arrived in Paris and began noisily staking out positions, some of which were antithetical to those the pragmatic Franklin had adopted. A fourth peace commissioner, Henry Laurens, had been captured at sea and was in custody in London. He was well

treated, however, and helped smooth rufﬂed feathers on the British end of the negotiations. The ﬁfth commissioner, Thomas Jefferson, failed to make the trip to Europe and so played no direct part in the peace negotiations. Benjamin Franklin deserves full credit for the successful outcome of these discussions. He managed to tone down the rhetoric that Jay and Adams produced and present reasonable and cogent points to Oswald. He divided American desires into two groups. The ﬁrst, he maintained, were essential and nonnegotiable. If they were not included in the treaty, the Americans would continue ﬁghting. The second group of issues that he raised were less vital to the outcome, but Franklin wanted to give the British a full understanding of American attitudes. The ﬁrst essential was British recognition of the United States as an independent nation. No treaty could succeed without it. To reinforce that recognition, Franklin made sure the treaty contained language that deﬁned speciﬁc boundaries for the new nation. He also insisted that those boundaries include not only the 13 former colonies but territories to the west and south, extending all the way to the Mississippi River and up to the Great Lakes. In recognition of how vital the ﬁshing industry had become to the New England states, Franklin’s final nonnegotiable demand was that Americans be allowed to continue casting their nets off the coasts of British-held Newfoundland and Labrador. As the clever negotiator he was, Franklin produced a second list of requests. He indicated, for example, that the American people would appreciate an apology from the British Parliament for the harsh and unreasonable policies it

52 | Section 1

had imposed on them during both the colonial period and the Revolution. If such an apology was forthcoming, Franklin suggested, it would only be fair for the British government to pay compensation or reparations to those its policies had harmed. Recognizing how expensive that compensation might be, the American diplomat suggested that Great Britain consider instead simply transferring Canada to the United States. His ﬁnal request was a treaty provision to allow Americans to continue trading as they had before the war with the British West Indies. To no one’s surprise, the government in London summarily rejected these requests. Parliament certainly would never apologize or pay compensation to the upstart Americans. The British had ably defended Canada from American incursions during the Revolutionary War, and they had no intention of tamely handing it over at that point. Regarding Caribbean trade, the British government considered it a critical element in its mercantilist imperial system. The Americans who had chosen to withdraw from the British Empire did not deserve to retain the trade advantages that they had formerly enjoyed. From the British viewpoint, these requests were so outrageous that they made the other American demands seem comparatively reasonable. Oswald and Franklin therefore moved ahead, drafting language for the treaty that would satisfy the Americans’ essential demands. While they were doing so, news arrived in Europe of a great British naval victory over a French ﬂeet in the Caribbean. That success encouraged the British to push their own agenda forward. They wanted the ﬁnal treaty to include a promise that the United States would not

punish those who had remained loyal to Great Britain during the Revolution. In addition, they wanted assurance that any debts Americans had run up prior to the war would be paid in full. The final treaty combined these British demands with Franklin’s four nonnegotiable provisions: recognition, deﬁned boundaries, western territories, and northeastern fishing rights. The Treaty of Paris (1783) was thus a remarkably concise and straightforward document, considering that it brought to a close eight years of intensive warfare. Franklin’s negotiating skills had achieved the basic American objectives without giving too much away. The Continental Congress quickly ratiﬁed the Treaty of Paris, and the world as a whole settled back into a period of general peacefulness. In the long run, state governments and individual lawsuits largely nulliﬁed the provisions about loyalists and prewar debts, but American independence stood the test of time. The Treaty of Paris was a remarkable achievement for a brand-new country that was negotiating with one of the world’s most powerful empires. It is hardly surprising that succeeding treaties sometimes fell short of this high standard. An attempt to coerce Great Britain to halt depredations against U.S. trade failed in 1794, and the resulting Jay’s Treaty was enormously unpopular. In the following year, Pinckney’s Treaty drew a positive response because it defended and even extended U.S. inﬂuence at the expense of Spain. After descending into an undeclared war in 1798, the United States signed the Treaty of Mortfontaine (1800) with France, effectively extricating itself from an unpopular alliance. The Treaty of Ghent

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 53

TREATY OF PEACE BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN: SIGNED IN PARIS, SEPTEMBER 3, 1783 Article I. His Britannick Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz. New Hampshire, Massachusets Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to be Free, Sovereign, and Independent States; that he treats with them as such; and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the fame, and every part thereof. Article II. And that all disputes which might arise in future on the subject of the boundaries of the said United States may be prevented, it is hereby agreed and declared, that the following are, and shall be, their boundaries, [a detailed description of the boundaries follows.] Article III. It is agreed, that the people of the United States shall continue to enjoy, unmolested, the right to take ﬁsh of every kind on the grand bank and on all the other banks of Newfoundland: also in the gulph of St. Lawrence, and at all other places in the sea where the inhabitants of both countries used at any time heretofore to ﬁsh. . . . Article IV. It is agreed, that creditors on either side shall meet with no lawful impediment to the recovery of the full value, in sterling money, of all bonâ ﬁde debts heretofore contracted. Article V. It is agreed, that the Congress shall earnestly recommend it to the legislatures of the respective states, to provide for the restitution of all estates, rights, and properties, which have been conﬁscated belonging to real British subjects: and also of the estates, rights, and properties, of persons resident in districts in the possession of his Majesty’s arms, and who have not borne arms against the said United States: and that persons or any other description shall have free liberty to go to any part or parts of any of the Thirteen United States, and therein to remain twelve months unmolested in their endeavours to obtain the restitution of such of their estates, rights, and properties, as may have been conﬁscated: and that Congress shall also earnestly recommend to the several states, a reconsideration and revision of all acts or laws regarding the premises, so as to render the said laws or acts perfectly consistent not only with justice and equity, but with that spirit of conciliation which, on the return of the blessings of peace, should universally prevail. . . . Article VI. That there shall be no future conﬁscations made, nor any prosecutions commenced against any person or persons, for or by reason of the part which he or they may have taken in the present war; and that no person shall, on that account, suffer any future loss or damage either in his person, liberty, or property; and that, those who may be in conﬁnement on such charges at the time of the ratiﬁcation of the treaty in America, shall be immediately set at liberty, and the prosecutions so commenced be discontinued. Article VII. There shall be a ﬁrm and perpetual peace between his Britannick Majesty and the said States, and between the subjects of the one and the citizens of the other, wherefore, all hostilities, both by sea and land, shall from henceforth cease: all prisoners on both sides shall be set at liberty, and his Britannick Majesty shall, with all convenient speed, and without causing any destruction, or carrying away any negroes, or other property of the American inhabitants, withdraw all his armies,

54 | Section 1

(Treaty of Peace Between the United States and Great Britain, Continued ) garrisons, and ﬂeets, from the said United States, and from every port, place, and harbour within the same; leaving in all fortiﬁcations the American artillery that may be therein: and shall also order and cause all archives, records, deeds, and papers, belonging to any of the said States, or their citizens, which in the course of the war may have fallen into the hands of his ofﬁcers, to be forthwith restored and delivered to the proper states and persons to whom they belong. Article VIII. The navigation of the river Mississippi, from its source to the ocean, shall for ever remain free and open to the subjects of Great Britain, and the citizens of the United States. . . . Source: Bevans, Charles I., ed. Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949. Washington, DC: GPO, 1974, 12:1–5

(1814) ended another war with Great Britain but did nothing to improve the U.S. trading position. Only in the 1820s did the British ﬁnally relent on the West Indies trade that Franklin had lobbied for some 40 years earlier. Over time, the United States has managed to negotiate a number of favorable treaties. Several added territory to the United States, including the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the acquisition of Florida (1819), the conquest of California and New Mexico (1848), and the colonization of the Philippines (1898). Other treaties expanded trade opportunities, such as those with China (1844) and Japan (1858). Occasionally, the United States signed a treaty promising cooperation with another nation, as it did in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (1850) regarding the potential construction of a canal in Central America. By and large, however, the United States pursued an independent course in its foreign policies. The threat of the Cold War ﬁnally overcame the nation’s traditional aversion toward alliances and motivated the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, which created NATO in 1949. On rare occasions, a treaty would fail. The Senate’s refusal to ratify the

Treaty of Versailles (1919) stands as the most dramatic example. To avoid such a humiliation, presidents have withdrawn or renegotiated controversial agreements. Issues such as human rights, genocide, or global warming have been so contentious that the United States has either refused to sign international agreements or neglected to submit them for Senate ratiﬁcation. Such caution, however, emphasizes how important treaties can be. At best, they can bring great beneﬁts to the nation; treaty making remains a key tool of diplomacy. See also: Jay’s Treaty; Pinckney’s Treaty; Ratiﬁcation References

Dull, Jonathan R. Franklin the Diplomat. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1982. Hoffman, Ronald, and Peter J. Alert, eds. Peace and the Peacemakers: The Treaty of 1783. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986. Morris, Richard B. The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Stourzh, Gerald. Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 55

Uti Possedetus (Treaty of Ghent, 1814) When a nation has seized control of territory through invasion or other means, it may claim the right to retain it. The Latin expression uti possedetus means that one has the right to what one possesses. In diplomatic negotiations, the nation in possession of conquered territory may use this principle to justify its refusal to withdraw. It played a key role in the negotiations at Ghent, Belgium, when U.S. commissioners were attempting to hammer out a resolution to the War of 1812 with British representatives. The conﬂict had long roots and multiple causes, including maritime issues between the United States and Great Britain, perceptions that the British were fomenting Indian resistance in the Ohio River valley, and a desire on the part of the United States to extend the nation’s boundaries north into Canada. In the ﬁrst year of conﬂict, the United States succeeded only in losing control of the Michigan peninsula. The efforts of Oliver Hazard Perry and William Henry Harrison in the following year led to its recapture. Despite several forays into the lower Canadian provinces, U.S. forces failed to retain any major British territory. British prospects brightened considerably in 1814. Napoléon had been sent into exile on the island of Elba, enabling Great Britain to focus additional men, resources, and attention on the nagging conﬂict on the other side of the Atlantic. They mounted three major initiatives. U.S. naval forces halted the ﬁrst of these in Lake Champlain in the north. The second British assault was far more successful. British naval and army units scoured the East Coast of the United

States, temporarily capturing and burning the national capital. Moreover, they successfully blockaded virtually all Atlantic trade. The ﬁnal initiative, an assault on the port of New Orleans, was delayed until early in the following year. A protracted series of diplomatic initiatives, which began with the intervention of the Russian czar, ﬁnally led to face-to-face treaty negotiations in Belgium. Because British forces occupied the city of Ghent at that point, the venue was hardly neutral. The ﬁve-member U.S. delegation included two diplomats, John Quincy Adams and Jonathan Russell, and three prominent politicians, Henry Clay, Albert Gallatin, and Thomas Bayard. The three men representing Great Britain were far less inﬂuential, because British foreign minister Lord Liverpool intended to manage the negotiations directly from nearby London. Inevitable delays in receiving news from the far-off American continent meant that the British government was never fully or timely informed of the progress its troops were making. On the assumption that at least one of the British initiatives would be successful, Liverpool instructed his negotiating team to hold out for uti possedetus. If the Americans agreed, Great Britain would be assured that whatever territory they captured would remain in their hands. If the northern initiative had succeeded, for example, it could mean an expansion of British control into New England and upper New York State. Even more attractive to British planners was the prospect that they might end up controlling the valuable port of New Orleans. For its part, the U.S. delegation had neither the intention nor the authority to cede any territory at all. Instead, it held out for a restoration of the status quo

56 | Section 1

antebellum. Regardless of what might or might not develop along the battle lines, the Americans insisted, no territory should change hands as a result of the war. For some time, the British insistence on uti possedetus and the U.S. refusal to accept any territorial change stalemated the discussions. Other issues, such as a British proposal to create an Indian buffer zone out of U.S. lands in the Ohio Valley, were equally unacceptable. By the late fall, news had reached London of the British defeat at the naval Battle of Plattsburgh in Vermont and the failure of the British to retain control of any territory along the Chesapeake Bay. Perhaps even more important was the news that Napoléon Bonaparte had escaped from Elba, bent on raising new armies in France.

With all of that in mind, Lord Liverpool told his delegation to drop its demand for uti possedetus and to accept the U.S. plan of a restoration of the status quo that had existed prior to 1812. The delegates signed the Treaty of Ghent on December 24 and news of the Peace of Christmas Eve sped off across the Atlantic. A ﬁnal major event ensured that both sides would ratify the treaty. General Andrew Jackson had taken charge of the defense of New Orleans and, in a remarkably lopsided victory in early January, decisively ended any British threat to U.S. soil. If the British had won, they might well have revived their insistence on uti possedetus. As it was, both sides ratiﬁed the Treaty of Ghent and the war was over.

The Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812 was signed on December 24, 1814, by British negotiator Henry Goulburn (third from left) and American commissioners (from left to right on the right side) John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin, James Bayard, Christopher Hughes, Jonathan Russell, and Henry Clay (seated). (Bettmann/CORBIS)

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 57 Although the archaic phrase has largely fallen into disuse, the concept that it encompasses has certainly inﬂuenced subsequent diplomatic negotiations. Whether it was Nicholas Trist arranging for a cession of thousands of square miles of Mexico in 1848 or Japanese diplomats demanding that Russia relinquish control of Sakhalin Island in 1905, diplomatic acceptance of the military conquest of territory has frequently changed the map of the world. See also: War Hawks References

Dangerﬁeld, George. The Era of Good Feelings. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952. Engelman, Fred L. The Peace of Christmas Eve. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962. Updyke, Frank A. The Diplomacy of the War of 1812. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1915.

War Hawks At various times in U.S. history, certain people or groups have become rabidly in favor of war. A bellicose group that rose to inﬂuence in 1810 became known as the War Hawks. They complained about a number of British actions and eventually proved crucial to the decision on the part of the United States to go to war in 1812. Although that conﬂict fulﬁlled almost none of the objectives of the War Hawks, it also did nothing to discourage other groups from succumbing to war fever in the future. From the late 1700s into the early 1800s, British policies managed to outrage almost all Americans one way or another. Shocked at what it saw as an Armageddon—with the forces of evil personiﬁed by French emperor Napoléon

Bonaparte—the government in London ignored international agreements, the normal rules of war, and even common decency in pursuing its aims. The United States’ desire to remain strictly neutral in this global conﬂict was of no interest or importance to Great Britain. Many American protests involved seizures and impressment at sea. Aggressive enforcement of arbitrarily imposed trade restrictions and blockades added to the list of grievances. American shipping suffered directly, but American farmers throughout the nation felt the impact of Great Britain’s restrictive naval policies. That motivated Westerners and Southerners to complain about British actions, which they saw as insulting to the American ﬂag, as well as economically costly to all Americans. But Westerners, particularly those who had settled in the former wilderness areas along the frontier, faced a more personal and present danger from the Indians whom they were displacing from their traditional hunting grounds. Here again, Americans found reason to blame the British. Rumors spread that ofﬁcials in British Canada encouraged Indian depredations with weapons, supplies, and even bounties on American scalps. If evidence of British involvement had been scarce earlier, the confrontation at Tippecanoe Creek in November 1811 put those doubts to rest. Indiana’s territorial governor, General William Henry Harrison, assembled a large force of regular soldiers, local militiaman, and other hangers-on to attempt to drive out Indian rabble-rousers. Harrison’s force became involved in a pitched battle at an Indian village at Tippecanoe Creek, a confrontation that the Americans barely succeeded in winning. The victors found brand-new British-manufactured guns in

58 | Section 1

MADISON’S WAR MESSAGE TO CONGRESS: JUNE 1, 1812 [Impressment] British cruisers have been in the continued practice of violating the American ﬂag on the great highway of nations, and of seizing and carrying off persons sailing under it, not in the exercise of a belligerent right founded on the law of nations against an enemy, but of a municipal prerogative over British subjects. British jurisdiction is thus extended to neutral vessels in a situation where no laws can operate but the law of nations and the laws of the country to which the vessels belong, and a self-redress is assumed which, if British subjects were wrongfully detained and alone concerned, is that substitution of force for a resort to the responsible sovereign which falls within the deﬁnition of war. . . . The practice, hence, is so far from affecting British subjects alone that, under the pretext of searching for these, thousands of American citizens, under the safeguard of public law and of their national ﬂag, have been torn from their country and from everything dear to them; have been dragged on board ships of war of a foreign nation and exposed, under the severities of their discipline, to be exiled to the most distant and deadly climes, to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors, and to be the melancholy instruments of taking away those of their own brethren. . . . [Paper Blockades] Under pretended blockades, without the presence of an adequate force and sometimes without the practicability of applying one, our commerce has been plundered in every sea, the great staples of our country have been cut off from their legitimate markets, and a destructive blow aimed at our agricultural and maritime interests. . . . Not content with these occasional expedients for laying waste our neutral trade, the cabinet of Britain resorted at length to the sweeping system of blockades, under the name of orders in council, which has been molded and managed as might best suit its political views, its commercial jealousies, or the avidity of British cruisers. . . . [Indian Problems] In reviewing the conduct of Great Britain toward the United States our attention is necessarily drawn to the warfare just renewed by the savages on one of our extensive frontiers a warfare which is known to spare neither age nor sex and to be distinguished by features peculiarly shocking to humanity. It is difﬁcult to account for the activity and combinations which have for some time been developing themselves among tribes in constant intercourse with British traders and garrisons without connecting their hostility with that inﬂuence and without recollecting the authenticated examples of such interpositions heretofore furnished by the ofﬁcers and agents of that Government. We behold, in ﬁne, on the side of Great Britain a state of war against the United States, and on the side of the United States a state of peace toward Great Britain. . . . Source: Richardson, J. D., ed. Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1917, 1:485–490.

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 59 the enemy’s camp, and the War Hawks claimed that they proved British complicity in the Indian troubles. The national elections of 1810 resulted in a major, generational shift in the membership of Congress. Dozens of young, outspoken new senators and representatives arrived in Washington. They shared a belief that the United States should end what they saw as groveling to the British government. Beyond the maritime and western grievances, these young men nursed a strident nationalistic patriotism that would countenance no further insults to their nation’s ﬂag. The solution to their grievances, they felt, was war with Great Britain, the enemy that their fathers and grandfathers had fought in the Revolution. More speciﬁcally, the War Hawks intended not just to defeat the British in land and sea battles, but to force the empire to surrender its primary U.S. possession, Canada. As Kentuckian Henry Clay insisted, the War Hawks were convinced that taking that vast dominion would be “a mere matter of marching.” By 1812, Spain was ﬁghting the French alongside Great Britain, so the War Hawks included Florida in their intended conquests as well. President James Madison had devoted much of his ﬁrst term to attempting to ﬁnd a way for the United States to obtain redress from Great Britain’s harassing maritime practices. By the spring of 1812, he, too, had concluded that only by defeating Great Britain on the battleﬁeld could that objective be achieved. His war message on June 1, 1812, met with immediate enthusiasm in the War Hawk-rich House of Representatives, winning approval by a vote of 79 to 49. The more conservative Senate debated

the measure for two weeks before acceding to war in a vote of 19 to 13. Except for Andrew Jackson’s remarkable defense of New Orleans, the war fulﬁlled almost none of the War Hawks’ optimistic expectations. Canada remained ﬁrmly in British hands: only a portion of West Florida fell under U.S. control. The termination of the European wars by 1815 rendered moot virtually all of the hated British naval and trading policies. The one true beneﬁt of the war was the nationwide sense of patriotism and pride that the United States enjoyed in the succeeding years, known as the Era of Good Feelings. See also: Impressment; Paper Blockade References

Brown, Robert H. The Republic in Peril: 1812. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. Pratt, Julius W. Expansionists of 1812. New York: Macmillan, 1925. Stagg, J. C. A. Mr. Madison’s War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

XYZ Affair In the spring of 1798, President John Adams responded to a congressional demand for speciﬁc information regarding a failed mission to France. In an early attempt to control information relevant to national security, U.S. commissioners had referred to the French agents whom they encountered as X, Y, and Z. Press reports of the XYZ Affair stimulated a growing partisan split between the Federalists that Adams represented and the DemocraticRepublican faction. Worse yet, the popular outrage justiﬁed belligerent steps that led to a quasi-war with France. After President George Washington issued his Proclamation of Neutrality in

60 | Section 1

1793, relations between the United States and its Revolutionary War ally, France, continued to deteriorate. The Anglo-American agreement, known as Jay’s Treaty (1794), convinced many in France that the United States had become a de facto ally of Great Britain, with whom the Republic of France was now at war. When President Washington announced his retirement in 1796, the Federalist faction that had been most supportive of his policies swung its support behind Vice President John Adams. Opponents like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had coalesced into the DemocraticRepublican coalition, known contemporaneously as Republicans but later to evolve into the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson. In addition to differences over domestic issues, the two groups disagreed violently about foreign poli cy. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, advocated continued good relations with Great Britain. The DemocraticRepublicans were much more sympathetic to the republican revolution that had engulfed France. These divergent views were quite apparent in the 1796 election. Hoping to draw support away from Adams, the French minister broke diplomatic relations with the United States on the eve of the election. Adams won a slim victory in the electoral college anyway, but Jefferson collected the second highest number of votes and became vice president for the next four years. He refused to take an active part in government, however, returning to Virginia and preparing for a second run for the presidency in 1800. The election also strengthened Federalist control of Congress, and the legislators waited expectantly for Adams to take strong action against France. He

called for major military preparations but also requested authorization to send a diplomatic delegation to Paris, charged with restoring amicable relations between the two nations. He selected two Federalists, Charles Coatsworth Pinckney and John Marshall, and a Republican-leaning Elbridge Gerry to represent the United States. When the commissioners arrived, French foreign minister Talleyrand refused to meet with them. Instead, he sent a Swiss banker named Hottingeur, who demanded a bribe of $250,000 and a loan of several million more. The French expression for a bribe was douceur, or sweetener, and such sweeteners were a common feature of European diplomacy. The U.S. commissioners had neither the authority nor the funds to meet these demands, let alone any desire to do so. A second agent, named Bellamy, then appeared, urging them to reconsider. Still unable to speak with Talleyrand directly, they also received a visit from a third agent, named Hauteval. At one point, Pinckney expressed his outrage at the repeated demands for a douceur by saying “No, no, not a sixpence.” [American State Papers, Foreign Relations (Oct. 27, 1797) II, 161] In the United States, this statement morphed into the more strident slogan “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute.” Pinckney and Marshall concluded that their mission was futile and departed for home. Gerry stayed on for a time in the forlorn hope that Talleyrand would ﬁnally meet with him. As the two Federalist commissioners headed back across the Atlantic, Congress demanded an explanation. President Adams reluctantly sketched out the general circumstances, but disbelieving Republicans in Congress demanded full

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 61 disclosure of the commissioners’ reports. Adams duly provided it, using the commissioners’ designations of X, Y, and Z for Hottingeur, Bellamy, and Hauteval. Outraged Federalist congressmen supplied the information to their own partisan press. News of the so-called XYZ Affair reinforced Federalist hostility toward France, and it even convinced many Republicans to reconsider their support of France. The public reaction was even more dramatic. Inﬂuenced by partisan newspapers, Americans throughout the country demanded a swift and deﬁnitive response to what they saw as an insult to their sovereign nation. With war fever sweeping the nation, President Adams called for additional military preparations. Simultaneously U.S. Navy ships and privateers began laying waste to French trade in the Caribbean. The quasi-war with France had begun. See also: Alliance; Quasi-War with France References

Bowman, Albert H. The Struggle for Neutrality: Franco-American Diplomacy during the Federalist Era. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974. Stinchcombe, William C. The XYZ Affair. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981.

BIOGRAPHIES Deane, Silas (1737–1789) Connecticut merchant and politician Silas Deane had the distinction of being the ﬁrst ofﬁcial U.S. diplomatic envoy. Representing his state in both the First and Second Continental Congresses, he proved to be adept at rounding up supplies for the Continental Army. The

Committee of Secret Correspondence decided that his expertise might be equally valuable in Europe, so it sent him to France. There he worked with a colorful courtier and playwright, Caron de Beaumarchais, who obtained military supplies and equipment directly from the French government. Deane also explored the possibility of formal diplomatic relations and eventually was named, along with Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee, to serve on a special commission for that purpose. Franklin led this group in negotiating an alliance and a commercial treaty in 1778. Unfortunately, Arthur Lee subsequently charged that Deane and Beaumarchais had pocketed funding that Congress had provided for equipment the French had meant as a gift to the United States. Some also claimed Deane had turned traitor to the revolutionary cause. Although these allegations were largely refuted after his death, Deane spent the last years of his life in a desperate and largely unsuccessful attempt to restore his reputation. See also: Treaty (Treaty of Paris, 1783) Reference

James, Coy Hilton. Silas Deane, Patriot or Traitor? East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1975.

Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790) None of the other Founding Fathers seems more deﬁnitively American than Benjamin Franklin, yet he spent fully 25 years living abroad. He was, therefore, remarkably well prepared and informed for the crucial diplomatic assignments that he undertook for the new nation. His life represented a storybook rise from humble origins to a

62 | Section 1

position as one of the most well-known and respected gentleman of his age. Born into a working-class family in Boston, he apprenticed with his older brother in a print shop before heading to Philadelphia while still a teenager. He became the most prominent printer and publisher in his adopted city and was so successful that he was able to retire from active participation in business at the age of 42. That gave him ample time to participate in a dazzling array of public service and intellectual endeavors, as well as to conduct path-breaking scientiﬁc experimentation. Franklin’s writings and his scientiﬁc discoveries earned him international respect. Meanwhile, he became increasingly involved in politics. He had already lived in England for a couple of years in his twenties, and he began an extended stay in 1757, when he agreed to serve as a representative of the Pennsylvania Colony. As tensions between the colonies and the royal government intensiﬁed, Franklin acted as an honest broker, explaining American attitudes and desires to the authorities in London and interpreting Parliament’s actions for his countrymen. Several other colonies identiﬁed him as their agent in London as well. Benjamin Franklin eventually became so disillusioned with the monarchy’s patronizing treatment of America that he returned to his homeland in 1775 as a ﬁrm proponent of independence. He was immediately asked to represent Pennsylvania in the Second Continental Congress. In addition to being one of ﬁve delegates chosen to draft a declaration of independence, Franklin’s international experience earned him a position on the Committee of Secret Correspondence. It sent one of its members, New Yorker Silas Deane, to be the first diplomat abroad. When

Deane reported from Paris that the French government might be willing to negotiate, the committee named Benjamin Franklin as one of three Americans charged with opening talks with France. His international stature and fame, as well as his remarkable diplomatic skills and tact, resulted in his being named the sole American plenipotentiary at the French court. Foreign minister the Compte de Vergennes got along extraordinarily well with the homespun yet brilliant intellectual, and they took the lead in negotiating the 1778 Treaty of Alliance and a parallel commercial treaty. That achievement alone would have marked Franklin as a major diplomatic ﬁgure, but he pulled off another great diplomatic coup ﬁve years later. Despite carping and obstructionism from the other American commissioners who joined him in Paris, Franklin persevered in hammering out the terms of a peace agreement with his British counterpart, Richard Oswald. Franklin then capitalized on his good personal relationship with Vergennes to convince the French government to accept his handiwork. The 1783 Treaty of Paris fulﬁlled all reasonable American objectives and ensured that the two greatest European nations, Great Britain and France, acknowledged the unlimited independence of the United States. When he returned to America in 1785 after almost a quarter of a century abroad, Benjamin Franklin continued to make important contributions. As a member of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Franklin often expressed doubt about particular provisions of the document while they were being debated, but he threw his considerable persuasiveness and reputation behind its ratiﬁcation. All in all,

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 63 Franklin’s contributions as a politician and, especially, as a diplomat dwarfed those of anyone else in his generation. See also: Alliance; Treaty (Treat of Paris, 1783) Reference

Bloom, Harold. Benjamin Franklin. New York: Chelsea House, 2008.

Gallatin, Albert (1761–1849) Born in Geneva to a distinguished Swiss family, Albert Gallatin was offered an ofﬁcer’s commission with the Hessian troops that King George III hired to put down the American Revolution. The 18year-old Gallatin did, in fact, sail to America, but in a private capacity, and he took no major part in the war. Instead, he joined forces with a land speculator and spent several years on the western Pennsylvania frontier in a very disappointing venture. In the late 1780s, he entered politics, where he demonstrated special capabilities in public ﬁnance. He won several elective ofﬁces before gaining a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1795. As a member of the DemocraticRepublican minority, he established the forerunner of the House Ways and Means Committee to ensure effective congressional oversight of the Federalists who were handling Treasury Department affairs. That experience convinced President Thomas Jefferson to name him Secretary of the Treasury, a position that he held for 14 years. With less drama but no less capability than Alexander Hamilton, Gallatin managed the Treasury Department and the nation’s ﬁnances with great skill. Foreign complications that led to the War of 1812 interfered with his longrange planning, however, so he gladly accepted President James Madison’s appointment to participate in peace talks

in Russia in 1813. The site of the talks eventually migrated to Belgium, where Gallatin joined four other U.S. commissioners. They negotiated the 1814 Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war. Gallatin received well-deserved credit, both for his drafting talents and his ability to keep the fractious commissioners on track. After the war, Gallatin went to Paris as the U.S. minister to the court of the restored Bourbon monarchy. His best efforts over the next seven years failed to resolve outstanding Franco-American differences, many of which dated back to the era of the Napoleonic Wars. Gallatin enjoyed far more success working with Richard Rush, U.S. minister in London, on commercial and territorial questions. In 1823, Gallatin left Europe, only to be sent back to London three years later. He conducted extensive and successful negotiations with British foreign minister George Canning, the most important of which assured a continuation of the Anglo-American joint occupation of Oregon. Gallatin retired from public service in 1827 and spent the rest of his long life in business, educational pursuits, writing, and charitable work. His negotiating abilities, even temperament, and excellent writing skills made him one of the new nation’s most effective diplomatic representatives. See also: Oregon Claims; Uti Possedetus (Treaty of Ghent, 1814) Reference

Aitken, Thomas. Albert Gallatin: Early America’s Swiss-Born Statesman. New York: Vantage, 1985.

Genêt, Edmond (1763–1834) When the Girondin faction seized control of France in 1793, it dispatched

64 | Section 1

“Citizen” Edmond Genêt to the United States as its diplomatic envoy. He prudently made his first landfall in South Carolina, a hotbed of pro-French sympathy. Then he slowly traveled north toward Philadelphia, where he hoped to convince President George Washington to activate the 1778 alliance between the two countries. Genêt’s presence stirred political currents in the United States. Thousands of Americans joined “democratic societies” modeled after those that had overthrown the French monarchy. Not incidentally, the members of these societies were often rabidly opposed to the pro-British policies that the Federalists surrounding the president advocated. Even before the popular French envoy arrived at the nation’s temporary capital, Washington announced his intention to preserve U.S. neutrality in the spreading conflict between France and her European neighbors. He also objected to Genêt’s distribution of commissions to U.S. officers, authorizing them to fight for France. In many cases, the ship captains whom he selected were to be privateers, staging raids on British trading vessels. Genêt’s disruptive activities so alienated Washington that he eventually asked Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson to request the French government to recall Genêt. By that time, vengeful Jacobins had wrested control from the Girondins, and they were eager to send Genêt to the recently invented guillotine. Genêt prudently decided to seek asylum in the United States. He married the daughter of the governor of New York and spent the rest of his life as an obscure gentleman farmer.

See also: Alliance; Neutrality Reference

Ammon, Harry. The Genêt Mission. New York: Norton, 1973.

Jay, John (1745–1829) With the notable exception of Benjamin Franklin, John Jay was the most active of the Founding Fathers in foreign affairs. Born into a prominent New York City family, it was hardly surprising that John Jay held conservative views throughout his life. Educated at Kings College (now Columbia University), he read law and passed the bar in 1768, but the American Revolution permanently ended his law career. As a conservative delegate to the Continental Congresses, he initially opposed independence. Once the Declaration had been signed, however, he devoted his considerable talents to the revolutionary cause. In late 1778, Congress elected him its president, but he resigned the following fall to serve as America’s minister plenipotentiary to Spain. His two years in Madrid were exceedingly frustrating, because the royal government never seriously considered recognizing American independence and only reluctantly provided funds to the revolutionary cause. Jay gladly set off for Paris in 1782, to join John Adams and Benjamin Franklin as peace commissioners. By the time Jay arrived, Franklin was putting the ﬁnishing touches on a draft treaty that he had negotiated with his British counterpart, Richard Oswald. Jay nearly derailed the whole process by insisting that the American delegation should not negotiate unless Great Britain ﬁrst recognized

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 65 its members as representatives of an independent nation. Fortunately, Franklin was able to keep the process moving toward its conclusion with the Treaty of Paris in the fall of 1783. Because of Jay’s now extensive diplomatic experience, Congress appointed him its secretary of foreign affairs when he returned to the United States. He remained in that position, which evolved into that of the ﬁrst U.S. secretary of state, until Thomas Jefferson took over in 1790. His most signiﬁcant negotiations during those years involved Spain, a country that Jay well understood. Even so, his talks with Spanish minister Don Diego de Gardoqui over border and trade issues in the southern United States ended inconclusively. Jay recognized that the weakness of the Articles of Confederation government itself forestalled any hope of a settlement, so he became a vocal advocate for the new constitution. He even contributed to the Federalist Papers, newspaper articles written in conjunction with James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, to publicize and explain the proposed constitutional system. Jay’s diplomatic career appeared to be over when President Washington chose him to be the first chief justice of the Supreme Court. As international tensions rose, however, the president asked the seasoned diplomat to go to London to negotiate a treaty with Great Britain. Jay’s Treaty of 1794 preserved the peace between the two nations, but only at the price of signiﬁcant U.S. concessions. The agreement was so unpopular at home that Jay was burned in effigy. Surprisingly, when he returned home, he found that he had been elected governor of New York.

After serving two terms in that position, he retired from public life. Many of Jay’s diplomatic endeavors proved disappointing, but not because of his lack of ability or commitment. To a large degree, they were bound to fail because he represented a revolutionary government that was very different from the traditional, conservative European monarchies that had dominated international affairs during his lifetime. See also: Jay’s Treaty; Treaty (Treaty of Paris 1783) Reference

Brecher, Frank W. Securing American Independence: John Jay and the French Alliance. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.

Livingston, Robert (1746–1813) A leading member of a prominent New York family, Robert Livingston held many political and governmental positions in his home state. He also served as a delegate to the Continental Congress on several occasions and was one of the ﬁve members charged with drafting a declaration of independence. He considered such a move premature, however, so he played only a minor role and was absent from Philadelphia when the document was signed. On the other hand, he was quite effective in organizational and ﬁnancial matters, an expertise that won him appointment as head of the newly established Department of Foreign Affairs in 1781. In that position, Livingston selected and instructed the commissioners who were sent to negotiate a peace treaty with Great Britain. He resigned from federal service shortly

66 | Section 1

after the Treaty of Paris was ratiﬁed in 1783. President Thomas Jefferson recalled him in 1801 to serve as U.S. minister to France, where he attempted to reverse, or at least limit, the danger of the retrocession of Louisiana. When French Foreign minister Talleyrand suddenly offered to sell the territory to the United States, Livingston responded enthusiastically and then worked closely with James Monroe to negotiate an attractive purchase agreement. In 1804, Robert Livingston returned to private life at Clermont, his country residence. There he formed a partnership with Robert Fulton to promote his steamboat, the Clermont, and to establish monopoly control over all steam navigation in New York. See also: Louisiana; Treaty (Treaty of Paris, 1783) Reference

Dangerﬁeld, George. Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960.

Logan, George (1753–1821) At the height of the Quasi-War with France, a Philadelphia doctor, George Logan, paid his own way to France. As a Quaker, he was naturally interested in promoting peace between the two countries. Arriving in 1798, he received a warm welcome from high government ofﬁcials, including Talleyrand. Indeed, the French foreign minister was eager to reverse the bad publicity that the XYZ Affair had generated. Federalist secretary of state Timothy Pickering, on the other hand, was furious at Logan’s unauthorized attempt to conduct diplomacy. In January 1799, he encouraged Congress to pass legislation outlawing such unilateral

behavior. Called the Logan Act, it stipulated that anyone who took part in a diplomatic mission without State Department authorization would be subject to a $5,000 ﬁne and up to a year in prison. No one has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act, but it remains on the books as a detriment to independent initiative. See also: Quasi-War with France; XYZ Affair

Rush, Richard (1780–1859) Like many lawyers, Philadelphian Richard Rush became active in politics. He held influential state-level posts before President James Madison chose him to serve, ﬁrst as comptroller of the currency and then as attorney-general in 1814. When James Monroe succeeded Madison as president, he asked Rush to act as secretary of state until John Quincy Adams returned from Europe. In the few weeks during which he headed the State Department, Rush made his most important diplomatic contribution: a disarmament agreement with Great Britain. The Rush-Bagot Agreement (1817) imposed strict limits on each nation’s naval presence in the Great Lakes, restrictions that paved the way for the establishment of the undefended border between Canada and the United States. Rush then became the U.S. minister in London, where he dealt with several other issues that had been left unresolved after the War of 1812. It was Rush whom British foreign minister George Canning approached about a joint statement regarding the U.S. republics, but the United States envoy wisely referred the issue to his home government. His insights, however, proved valuable in the drafting of the Monroe Doctrine. He returned to the

Inventing a Foreign Policy, 1776–1830 | 67 United States to serve as secretary of the treasury when Adams became president, but he lost to John Calhoun when he ran for the vice presidency on the ticket that Adams headed in 1828. Late in life, Rush returned to diplomacy, serving a stint as U.S. minister to France. See also: Monroe Doctrine

found any holes at the poles, it discovered a vast, unexplored tract of land at the South Pole, which is now known as the continent of Antarctica. See also: Wilkes, Charles Reference

Goetzmann, William H. New Lands, New Men. New York: Viking, 1986.

Reference

Powell, John H. Richard Rush: Republican Diplomat. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942.

Symmes, John Cleves (1742–1814) John Cleves Symmes pursued a variety of endeavors, including ﬁghting as a colonel in the Revolutionary War and serving as a member of both the New Jersey legislature and the Continental Congress. Exploiting his political inﬂuence, he obtained from Congress a huge land grant in the Ohio Territory, but he and his partners were unable to make it proﬁtable. His vision of an expanding United States led him to put his faith in another land scheme, this one based on a belief that the world was actually a series of concentric spheres with spaces in between. Convinced that access points existed in the polar regions, he convinced Congress to appropriate $2,500 to outﬁt an expedition to locate the “holes at the poles” and claim all of the land so discovered. The Lewis and Clark Expedition distracted attention from his proposal, however, but it was revived in more expanded form in 1838. Leading a four-year U.S. Navy exploratory mission, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes’s squadron made extensive surveys of both the north and south polar regions. Although the Wilkes Expedition never

Wilkinson, James (1757–1825) The Revolutionary War produced no character more colorful or controversial than James Wilkinson. He abandoned medical studies in Philadelphia in 1776 for a commission as a captain in the Continental Army. He participated in several battles and rose quickly in rank to the position of adjutant-general under Horatio Gates. When Gates defeated General Burgoyne at Saratoga, he dispatched Wilkinson to Philadelphia to report the victory. A grateful Congress promoted him on the spot to the rank of brigadier general. After the war, he used the prestige of his war record and military rank to impress Westerners. He played a prominent part in the creation of the state of Kentucky out of western Virginia. In the mid-1780s, he became involved in the “Spanish Intrigues,” ambiguous and fanciful scheming that may have included plans to invade Mexico, to break off the western states from the United States to form a separate republic, and to promote Spanish interests in Florida and Louisiana. At one point, Wilkinson swore allegiance to the king of Spain, and he received periodic payments and pensions for his services from the Spanish government for many years. He used his inﬂuence with the Spanish authorities to lead a group of Americans who had obtained special

68 | Section 1

trading privileges through the port of New Orleans long before Spain extended the right of free deposit to all Americans in Pinckney’s Treaty (1795). In the 1790s, Wilkinson revived his military career, ﬁghting Indians in the West, accepting the transfer of British holdings in Michigan, and eventually being named military governor of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory in the early 1800s. During that period, he became involved in further intrigues, this time with the discredited vice president, Aaron Burr. Wilkinson played a double game, both encouraging Burr and later testifying against him at his treason trial

in 1807. Wilkinson himself survived several investigations and courts-martial, but his military career ﬁnally ended when he commanded a disastrous and unsuccessful campaign against Montreal in 1813. He retired to a plantation near New Orleans, but he was still engaged in dubious dealings with the Mexican government right up to the moment of his death. Reference

Hay, Thomas Robson, and Morris Robert Werner. The Admirable Trumpeter: A Biography of General James Wilkinson. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1941.

SECTION 2

EXPANSION AND CIVIL WAR, 1830–1880

Lord Ashburton in 1842. The WebsterAshburton Treaty resolved a series of festering border disputes between the United States and Canada and allowed U.S. statesmen to focus their attention on the South and West. Two areas attracted particular U.S. attention: the Oregon Territory and the underpopulated lands of northern Mexico. The United States began establishing its Oregon claims as early as the 1790s. They often resulted from a personal initiative, such as that of Robert Gray, a merchant ship captain who explored the Columbia River, and of John Jacob Astor, a fur trader who established a trading post on the south bank of the river’s mouth. But for over half a century, most Americans exhibited only modest interest in the far-off land. That all changed in the early 1840s when Oregon Fever swept the nation, setting in motion a series of diplomatic actions that ultimately resulted in the annexation of the southern half of the original Oregon Territory to the United States. Twenty years earlier, American settlers had begun swarming into Texas, the northeasternmost Mexican state. A

By 1830, the United States was in the fortunate position of being able to initiate the foreign policies that it chose for itself rather than simply reacting to outside forces. Americans increasingly believed that their political system was an ideal that should serve as a model for other nations. At the same time, this belief could be used to justify an American urge to bring adjacent lands into their Union. Although the sentiment had long roots, it gained popular recognition as Manifest Destiny in the mid-1840s. The concept was that God had made clear that the United States and its political system should spread across the North American continent. This inevitable expansion should only stop when it encountered natural boundaries such as oceans or other continental limits. The Manifest Destiny impulse set in train or served as the rationalization for energetic diplomatic moves and population migrations that added considerable territory to the Union. The 1840s expansionism began after Secretary of State Daniel Webster negotiated a settlement with British minister 69

70 | Section 2

decade later, they objected to administrative changes imposed from Mexico City so strenuously that they set off a fullscale Texas Revolution. Its success enabled the Texans to form an independent republic in 1835, but they eagerly sought annexation to the United States. The growing conﬂict between North and South over slavery complicated the process so much that a resort to a joint resolution of Congress in 1845 was necessary to add Texas to the Union. Postannexation issues caused so much antagonism between the United States and its southern neighbor that, just a year later, the Mexican War broke out. U.S. military victories in that conﬂict forced the Mexican government to cede both New Mexico and California to the United States, fulﬁlling many Manifest Destiny objectives. Although a growing sectional crisis in the 1850s distracted attention from further territorial expansion, it failed to discourage some adventurers from engaging in ﬁlibustering expeditions in Central America and the Caribbean. A good many Southerners favored adding Cuba to the United States, an objective that prompted the issuance of the Ostend Manifesto in 1854, but nothing came of it. More successful were private and governmental actions in the Far East. The prospect of exploiting the China Market had fascinated U.S. merchants for decades before Caleb Cushing signed the ﬁrst formal treaty between the United States and the Chinese Empire. Far less was known about Japan, which had deliberately sealed itself off from outside contact for two centuries. Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry pried open the door to Japan in 1854; four years later, Consul-General Townsend Harris swung that door wider,

enabling traders from the United States and other nations to establish broad commercial relations with the secretive empire. By 1861, however, the people of the United States had become almost totally focused on their internal differences. When several Southern states seceded, President Abraham Lincoln realized that war was likely. Keenly aware of the nation’s ﬁrst shot tradition, he delayed his call for volunteers until the Confederate government had ordered its batteries to ﬁre on the federal outpost of Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. Immediately afterward, the Confederacy sought international recognition as an independent nation, but the major European powers cautiously extended only recognition as a belligerent to the breakaway regime. Undaunted, the rebel government set about to exploit its control of the world’s most valuable industrial resource, but king cotton diplomacy brought none of the anticipated beneﬁts. The only major Confederate diplomatic success was buying and arming commerce-destroying naval vessels abroad. Great Britain, which had provided the CSS Alabama, finally agreed to submit the claims for damages from these raiders to binding international arbitration in 1871. A postwar focus on reconstructing the Southern states kept U.S. interests so concentrated on internal issues that only a couple of external initiatives bubbled to the surface. One was an opportunity to buy Alaska from Russia, and Secretary of State William Seward took the lead in arranging the purchase. Another was an opportunity to annex Santo Domingo, the eastern section of the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. In this case, President Ulysses Grant seized the

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 71 initiative. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed and the Senate refused to ratify the annexation treaty that he presented. That in no way signaled an end to U.S. interest in the Caribbean, and it would peak once again in the era of New Manifest Destiny that characterized the closing years of the 19th century.

KEY CONCEPTS Alaska The initiative for purchasing Alaska in 1867 came from one man: Secretary of State William Seward. The sectional crisis and the ensuing Civil War had drained enthusiasm for Manifest Destiny and expansionism; Seward was virtually alone in hoping to revive it. His only opportunity for a major territorial acquisition came when Russia decided to sell Alaska. Seward pounced on the opportunity and coerced a reluctant U.S. government into completing the purchase. In the late 1700s, Russian adventurers hunting sea otters and other fur-bearing animals had headed east across the Bering Strait. As Russian trappers depleted northern areas, they pushed south along the Alaskan coast. Up until that time, both the United States and Great Britain insisted that the northern boundary of the Oregon Territory lay along the line marked by 54° 40’ north latitude. By 1821, the Russians had crossed well south of the 54° 40’ line, clearly impinging on territory that the two English-speaking nations claimed as their own. At that point, czar Alexander I issued a formal decree, or ukase, that had the effect of extending the Russian claim south to 51° north latitude, and warned all non-Russian vessels to remain at least

100 miles off the coastline. In fact, Russian influence extended even farther south, all the way to Fort Ross on the Russian River, just 70 miles northwest of San Francisco. Because both Great Britain and the United States had strong claims to Oregon, they had agreed to “occupy” the territory jointly. They thus had good reason to protest Russia’s aggrandizement. This concern played into the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. The following year, Great Britain and the United States separately negotiated agreements with the Russian government in which Russia agreed to withdraw its claim to land south of 54° 40’. In 1846, Great Britain and the United States ended their joint occupation and divided the Oregon Territory along the 49th Parallel. British Columbia, the Canadian province that lay between 49° and 54° 40’, remained remote and underpopulated. With the exception of errant New England-based whalers and a handful of fur traders, few Americans knew anything at all about the vast wilderness that stretched to the Arctic Circle and beyond. Even though neither the British nor the Americans had shown any substantial interest in Alaska, czar Alexander II’s government decided to dispose of it. Recent events helped convince Russia that the United States would be the safer recipient. The Crimean War in the mid1850s had pitted Great Britain and several other European nations against Russia. The Russians feared that Great Britain, with its huge navy, might stage a diversionary attack on Alaska, diverting resources from the main battle front. During the American Civil War, Russia was the only major European power that steadfastly supported the Union government,

72 | Section 2

citing the fact that Alexander II had ended serfdom in 1861 just as President Lincoln was in the process of abolishing slavery. Americans were ﬂattered when Russian ﬂeets paid “friendly” visits to New York and San Francisco in 1863— not realizing that Russia’s main motive was to keep its vessels safe from possible attack should the British decide to support a Polish rebellion against Russian dominance. By 1866, the czar’s imperial government had concluded that Alaska had not only lost its value to the empire but had, in fact, become an indefensible liability. The Russians were also convinced that the United States would ultimately attempt to control the area because of its abundant natural resources. Although gold had yet to be discovered, if it was, an expected California-style gold rush would swamp any residual Russian inﬂuence. Why not sell the region instead, to cash in on an asset that might soon be completely worthless to Russia? While visiting Moscow, Baron Stoeckl, the Russian minister to the United States, was told to offer Alaska to the United States for a minimum price of $5 million. At that point, only one American was likely to respond enthusiastically. Fortunately for Stoeckl, that man was William Seward, whom President Andrew Johnson had retained as secretary of state after Abraham Lincoln’s death. Tentative steps toward annexing Alaska had been taken as early as 1854, but the pre–Civil War expansionism had primarily been associated with the discredited Democratic Party. Seward had a far broader international perspective than his fellow Republicans. Although he eagerly pursued other expansionist opportunities, except for annexing Midway Island, none had succeeded.

When Stoeckl returned to Washington in 1867, Seward urgently pressed him to sell Alaska. With such an eager prospective buyer, Stoeckl raised his sales price to $7 million. Seward accepted on the spot and even agreed to pay an additional $200,000 for the property and equipment of the Russian-American Company. Even so, Seward worried that Stoeckl might not have ofﬁcial authority to complete the sale, so he insisted that the minister contact his home government for assurance. Stoeckl duly reported back to Moscow and, not surprisingly, won hearty approval for a deal that would bring in 40 percent more money than anticipated. On the very evening that he received Stoeckl’s conﬁrmation, Seward rushed to Charles Sumner’s house to plead his case. Sumner chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. During his tenure, everything Sumner supported gained Senate approval and anything he opposed failed. Fortunately for Seward, Sumner agreed to sponsor the Alaska purchase. Despite a spate of negative press comments ridiculing “Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’s Icebox,” Sumner obtained a positive vote of 27 to 12 to ratify the purchase treaty. The battle was hardly over. The House of Representatives had just issued articles impeaching President Johnson, and every one of his administration’s policies was subjected to critical comments and assessment. Not until the summer of 1868 did the House ﬁnally appropriate the $7.2 million required for the purchase of Alaska. A return on that investment was slow in coming. Alaska remained an unsettled, remote wilderness for many years. But, just as the Russians had anticipated, gold was discovered in the Klondike region,

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 73 attracting tens of thousands of fortune hunters to the Far North in 1898 and after. Many other valuable natural resources have been exploited since then, repaying the initial purchase price a hundred times over. Seward’s foresight and enthusiasm were thus amply justiﬁed. See also: Manifest Destiny; Monroe Doctrine References

Chevigny, Hector. Russian America: The Great Alaskan Venture, 1741–1867. New York: Viking, 1965. Holbo, Paul S. Tarnished Expansion: The Alaska Scandal, the Press, and Congress, 1867–1871. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Jensen, Ronald J. The Alaska Purchase and Russian-American Relations. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975.

Arbitration (Alabama Claims) If two countries cannot reach an agreement, they may ask a third party to arbitrate. In the case of binding arbitration, the two sides must agree in advance to accept whatever decision the arbiter makes. That aspect of arbitration makes it risky for both sides, so only rarely do governments agree to use it to resolve differences. The most noteworthy case of arbitration in the 19th century concerned the Alabama Claims, U.S. demands that Great Britain pay compensation for allowing its shipyards to build commerce-destroying vessels for the Confederacy during the Civil War. From the Confederate perspective, obtaining warships overseas was essential; no Southern port had facilities that were capable of building such vessels. Lacking a preexisting navy, the Confederacy initially commissioned shipowners as privateers and encouraged them to disrupt Northern trade. That strategy

failed because the Confederate government could not guarantee that any prizes captured could be sold to pay the privateers’ expenses and no foreign government would do so either. In 1862, the Richmond government sent Captain James D. Bullock to England, armed with the authority to buy a war ﬂeet. Despite strong objections from U.S. minister Charles Francis Adams, the British government ignored its own neutrality laws and allowed Bullock to contract for the new ship, which became the CSS Alabama. Although it took on cannons and crew in the Azores, Confederate Navy ofﬁcers commanded this commerce destroyer on its remarkably destructive voyage. Along with a couple of other Confederate raiders, the Florida and the Shenandoah, the Alabama ultimately captured or destroyed vessels and cargo worth more than $15 million. In 1869, U.S. minister Reverdy Johnson negotiated an agreement with British foreign minister Lord Clarendon that submitted the U.S. claims to arbitration. The powerful head of the Foreign Relations Committee, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, convinced his colleagues not to ratify the JohnsonClarendon Convention. Then Sumner delivered an impassioned speech, insisting that the harm to the United States was far greater than the speciﬁc Alabama claims. In addition to $15 million in direct damages, Sumner claimed that the Confederate raiders had frightened off, or driven to other countries, U.S. carrying trade worth $110 million. Moreover, he charged, British support for the Confederate naval ventures strengthened the rebels’ resolve sufﬁciently to extend the Civil War by two years. The fouryear war had cost the Union government $4 billion, so, Sumner maintained, the

74 | Section 2

Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner’s outrageous demands on Great Britain encouraged the country to accept international arbitration of the Alabama Claims in 1871. (National Archives)

British government should pay half that amount, or $2 billion. He concluded with the suggestion that Great Britain could cancel the whole debt by ceding Canada to the United States. The British naturally objected to these outrageous assertions, and fortunately President Ulysses Grant’s secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, was a true diplomat. He decided to bundle the Alabama claims with other Anglo-American disputes, including a controversy over ownership of some of the San Juan Islands in the Paciﬁc Northwest, a revived ﬁshing rights dispute in the Northeast, and British claims against the Union Navy for allegedly illegal blockading practices. Fish then invited the British to send commissioners to Washington, D.C., to work out an agreement. The resulting Washington Treaty (1871) submitted the outstanding disputes to bind-

ing arbitration. The U.S. Senate ratiﬁed this treaty because, in it, the British government admitted responsibility for letting the commerce destroyers loose. That meant the arbitration panel would only be charged with evaluating the damages, not assessing guilt. The German kaiser arbitrated the San Juan Islands controversy, upholding the Canadian claim to the disputed territory. The ﬁshing dispute went the other way, with the arbiter conﬁrming that U.S. ﬁshermen had a right to haul in catches off Newfoundland and Labrador but awarding the Canadian government $5.5 million in compensation. A three-person arbitration panel certiﬁed $2 million worth of British claims against the U.S. Navy for blockade violations. The most important arbitration, of course, involved the Confederate Navy. The issue was taken up by a five-man arbitration panel meeting in Geneva, which included representatives from the United States, Great Britain, Brazil, Italy, and Switzerland. The American member of the panel was Charles Francis Adams, the same man who had protested the British policy in 1862, when he was the U.S. minister in London. The panel was stunned when the team presenting the U.S. position reiterated Charles Sumner’s extravagant formula for compensation. Acting in concert with the more rational Fish, however, Adams convinced the Geneva tribunal to state that it had no authority to consider contingent claims and that, even if it had, it would throw them out. That move paved the way for a realistic assessment of direct damages. Because Great Britain had already admitted its responsibility, the panel

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 75 endorsed the $15.5 million in U.S. claims as valid. When the balance sheet for all of the elements of the Washington Treaty arbitrations was drawn up, however, the United States received quite a bit less. If the $2 million for blockade violations and the $5.5 million for ﬁsheries compensation were subtracted, the United States ended up only $8 million to the good. Although the ﬁnal settlement may have disappointed some Americans, Hamilton Fish’s decision to arbitrate the issues was an excellent way to reduce Anglo-American tensions and help move the nation beyond the Civil War. See also: Recognition as a Belligerent References

Cook, Adrian. The Alabama Claims. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Hollett, David. The Alabama Affair. Cheshire, UK: Sigma Press, 1993. Robinson, Charles M., III. Shark of the Confederacy: The Story of the CSS Alabama. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995.

China Market Throughout the 19th century, Americans dreamed of exploiting the China market. Especially after the United States expanded to the West Coast, prospects for a lucrative and expanding Far Eastern trade energized U.S. merchants and manufacturers. The fact that hundreds of millions of China’s potential customers lived in a stagnant society and were, by and large, extremely poor, did nothing to diminish U.S. interest in the China market. A number of political and diplomatic obstacles limited access to that market. Hoping to prevent foreign penetration of its realm, China’s imperial government

took steps to discourage international trade. When U.S. merchant ships ﬁrst began arriving in the Far East in the 1780s, they were restricted to trading only through Hong Kong, on the South Coast of China. That restriction persisted for another half century, preventing the China trade from rising above a tiny percentage of U.S. global commerce. During that period, the U.S. government demonstrated little interest in the China market. Although it routinely ﬁlled the post of U.S. consul in China, the position typically went to a member of a merchant family that had established a warehouse or “factory” in Hong Kong. Samuel Shaw, the ﬁrst such consul, was appointed in the 1780s. Despite holding a formal title, the U.S. consul’s authority was not ofﬁcially recognized by the Chinese government and, often, not even by other U.S. traders. An alleged murder case in 1821 demonstrated the consul’s inherent weakness. An American sailor named Terranova was implicated in the death of a Chinese ﬂower seller who had brought her boat alongside his ship. The local authorities wanted to execute him, so the U.S. consul and other U.S. captains held a hearing on board one of their ships. In the end, however, they could do nothing to protect their fellow citizen and reluctantly turned Terranova over to the Chinese authorities. He was convicted of murder in a one-day trial and executed. Meanwhile the trade that developed between the United States and China proved valuable to both parties. Americans loved the tea, porcelains, and silks that the Chinese produced. In return, U.S. ships initially found a ready market for furs from the West Coast and Antarctica and sandalwood harvested in Hawaii. By

76 | Section 2

the 1830s, cotton cloth from New England mills had become popular as well. Some Americans even joined French and British merchants in the lucrative opium trade. That trade particularly upset the Chinese government. In the late 1830s, it attempted to halt the importation of opium, but the British and French governments resorted to military force to keep it open. To their surprise and chagrin, the Chinese lost every battle and skirmish. At the end of the Opium Wars, the Chinese acquiesced to a humiliating treaty that not only failed to eliminate the opium trade but opened four additional Chinese ports to British and French traders. Worried that Great Britain’s success, in particular, might foreclose or further limit their access, Americans interested in the China market urged the federal government to take action in the early 1840s. Congress responded by appropriating funds for a major diplomatic mission, and President John Tyler named Massachusetts congressman Caleb Cushing to command a small naval squadron to emphasize U.S. strength. Cushing found the Chinese government willing to sign a treaty with the United States, which included a most-favorednation provision. The Treaty of Wangshia (1844) gave Americans the same rights of access and trade that China had already granted to England and France. Among those rights was authority to deal directly with any Americans accused of crimes in China. This principle is known as extraterritoriality, and it remained a major bone of contention between China and the United States well into the 20th century. The extended access that the treaty granted to Americans whetted the prose-

lytizing zeal of missionaries. Arriving in China in the late 1840s, they converted a good many Chinese to Christianity. One of the converts, who became convinced that he was the brother of Jesus, attracted a large band of followers known as the Taipings. China’s imperial government fought to suppress the Taipings, and, for more than a decade, it was not clear which side would prevail. Although many Americans sympathized with a rebellion that voiced democratic principles, others worried that if the Taiping Revolt succeeded, the beneﬁcial trading privileges that they currently enjoyed would disappear. In 1853, U.S. commissioner Humphrey Marshall began personally collecting the tariffs and forwarding them to China’s central government, to make sure that the U.S. relationship would remain stable. In the following year, Marshall’s successor as commissioner, Robert McLane, took the lead in institutionalizing this procedure. The result was the formation of the Imperial Chinese Customs Service, staffed by foreigners who collected revenue from all trading activities and transferred it to the imperial government. This mechanism remained in operation throughout the remainder of the 19th century. The Treaty of Wangshia was scheduled for review in 1856, and many Americans thought their staunch support of the imperial government would earn them new concessions. It quickly became apparent that the Chinese did not share that view. A former missionary named Peter Parker had become U.S. commissioner, and he boldly proposed that the United States seize the island of Formosa as a hostage to force concessions. The State Department refused to back its overzealous envoy and doubtless

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 77 would have refused, even if naval and military units had been available to accomplish his plan. In the end, Parker’s demands were unnecessary because Great Britain and France also faced revision or cancellation of their favorable treaty provisions. As they had in the Opium Wars, they mounted a major military campaign, and the Anglo-French War was equally successful. A chastened Chinese government signed the Treaty of Tientsin in 1858 with the victorious governments and the United States. It included provisions for diplomatic missions to reside in the capital of Peking (Beijing) and opened much greater access to foreigners throughout the empire. At that juncture, the United States possessed broad and comprehensive trading and traveling privileges that should allow Americans to exploit the China market fully. But the outbreak of the American Civil War a couple of years later focused the nation’s attention inward. During the conﬂict, the Confederate Navy sent out several very effective commerce destroyers that wreaked so much damage to the U.S. merchant marine that it never fully recovered. The China market thus remained a minor element of the nation’s international commerce until interest revived at the time of the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th century. See also: Cushing, Caleb; Open Door Policy References

Cohen, Warren I. America’s Response to China. 4th ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Dulles, Foster Rhea. The Old China Trade. New York: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1930. Fairbank, John K. Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of

the Treaty Ports 1842–1854. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953–1956. Hunt, Michael H. The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Filibustering From time to time, U.S. adventurers mounted unofﬁcial, often illegal forays into neighboring countries or colonies. They were called ﬁlibusters, a word derived from the Spanish term for freebooters or pirates. Unlike stereotypical pirates, whose chief motivation was to obtain booty, many 19th-century ﬁlibusters saw themselves as pursuing noble goals. These might include drawing new territories into the United States or “freeing” oppressed people from despotic governments. Filibustering was quite popular in some parts of the United States, even though federal neutrality laws prohibited it. Florida attracted a number of ﬁlibusters. After the Louisiana Purchase, Americans cast hungry eyes on the fertile lands lying along the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans. Spain’s control over its colony of West Florida was so weak that U.S. adventurers could conﬁdently move into the region. Their goal was to convince the United States to annex the area. A few years later, George Mathews claimed to have received and destroyed secret correspondence from President James Madison that ordered him to lead a filibustering expedition into East Florida. The president disavowed any responsibility for the unsuccessful foray, even though his administration clearly hoped that U.S. penetration of Florida would eventually succeed.

78 | Section 2

Beginning in 1809, one Latin American colony after another sought independence from Spain, and Americans generally applauded these supposedly democratic revolutions. A few individuals went much further, directly aiding the rebel cause as soldiers of fortune or privateers. U.S. ﬁlibusters were especially active in Mexico prior to its independence in 1821. New Orleans and Baltimore served as convenient bases where ﬁlibusters and privateers could collect ﬁnancial support, recruit followers, or sell captured cargoes. In 1818, Congress responded by passing neutrality legislation that outlawed ﬁlibustering by Americans. Dedicated adventurers blithely ignored these restrictions. The rise of Manifest Destiny sentiment in the 1840s encouraged even more filibustering. Expansionist enthusiasm spilled over into the next decade, although many ﬁlibusters in those years appeared to have less interest in adding territory to the United States. Narciso López, for example, was a Cuban nationalist who ﬁtted out three ﬁlibustering expeditions in the United States. His ambition was to free Cuba from Spanish control, but his activities failed to arouse local support, and the colonial government eventually executed him for treason. William Walker had even grander ambitions. He ﬁrst attempted to foment a revolution in the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja California, but he failed to attract a signiﬁcant following. In 1857, he switched his ﬁlibustering focus to Central America and, for a time, actually controlled the Nicaraguan government. He planned to expand his dictatorial rule to encompass all of Central America in hopes of proﬁting from the lucrative isthmus trade. He ran afoul

of the U.S. neutrality laws, however and, like López, later faced a ﬁring squad in Honduras. Although George W. L. Bickley never managed to mount an invasion, his goal was equally grandiose. As the selfappointed president general of the American Legion, Knights of the Golden Circle, he planned to use this secret lodge as a mechanism to obtain control of northern Mexico. Once in charge, Bickley planned to follow the Texas precedent and apply for annexation to the United States. He insisted that as many as 25 slave states could be carved out of his anticipated domain. The Civil War interrupted his plans for what would have been the largest ﬁlibustering expedition in U.S. history. In subsequent years, other visionaries attempted to gather men and supplies for interventionist ventures. One such incident in 1873 involved the Virginius. Spanish naval forces captured this ship flying the U.S. flag in international waters and took it to Santiago de Cuba. There the crew and passengers were accused of treason and 51 of them were executed as ﬁlibusters. Despite widespread U.S. outrage, the U.S. government concluded that the Virginius was not legally a U.S. vessel, thereby avoiding a direct confrontation with Spain. Similar actions evoked a much different response in 1895. José Martí and his fellow Cuban Americans collected arms and money in the United and used them to mount an invasion of Cuba from U.S. ports. Like their ﬁlibustering antecedent, Narciso López, their goal was to throw off Spanish rule. The Cuban rebellion became an extraordinarily popular cause in the United States and ultimately led President William McKinley to declare war on Spain.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 79 See also: Ostend Manifesto (Cuba); Transcontinental Treaty (Florida); Walker, William References

Bowen, Charles H. Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Owsley, Frank L., Jr., and Gene A. Smith. Filibusters and Expansionists. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Warren, Harris Gaylord. The Sword Was Their Passport: A History of American Filibustering in the Mexican Revolution. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943.

First Shot Tradition The United States maintains a traditional belief that it has never gone to war without ample provocation. The nation resorts to conﬂict only when it has been attacked, that is, after the other side has ﬁred the ﬁrst shot. Whether it was Redcoats ﬁring on New England colonists, Confederates bombarding Fort Sumter, or Japanese sinking ships at Pearl Harbor, the United States has typically responded only after suffering a ﬁrst shot. Sometimes that shot is a surprise, as it was at Pearl Harbor; sometimes considerable political or diplomatic maneuvering precedes the ﬁring of a ﬁrst shot. Over time, the ﬁrst shot tradition has signiﬁcantly inﬂuenced presidential and congressional decisions. Although they had taken many subversive steps, such as sponsoring nonimportation and stockpiling arms and ammunition, the patriots who assembled at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 insisted that British soldiers, not they, ﬁred the “shot heard round the world.” This event energized those who believed that independence was the only solution

to colonial problems and that only winning a war could obtain it. The ﬁrst shot tradition thus began with the Revolutionary War itself. A number of maritime grievances and expansionist ambitions inﬂamed U.S. War Hawks in the early 1800s. In 1807, they could point to a clear-cut case in which the British ﬁred the ﬁrst shot. A Royal Navy vessel ﬁred a broadside at the USS Chesapeake when its captain refused to surrender four men whom the British claimed were deserters. In this instance, President Thomas Jefferson chose to respond with an embargo rather than immediately declare war. Five years later, his successor, James Madison, alluded to the Chesapeake Affair in his call for a declaration that triggered the War of 1812. As soon as he took ofﬁce, President James K. Polk began feeling intense pressure from Southern expansionists who wanted the United States to annex large parts of northern Mexico. He then provoked a ﬁrst shot by ordering General Zachary Taylor to station his army in a contested area between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande in southeast Texas. In the spring of 1846, Taylor reported that Mexican soldiers had crossed the Rio Grande and attacked a contingent of U.S. dragoons. Polk cited that ﬁrst shot as an excuse for a full-scale military response that ultimately led to U.S. soldiers and marines occupying Mexico City. Interestingly enough an obscure, ﬁrstterm Whig representative from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln was one of the most outspoken critics of this rationalization. He repeatedly introduced what were called “spot resolutions” demanding that the president identify to Congress the exact spot where the attack

80 | Section 2

occurred. If it was not indisputably U.S. territory, the argument went, the ﬁrst shot excuse for going to war was not justiﬁed. When Lincoln himself became president in 1861, he was therefore well aware of and sensitive to the ﬁrst shot tradition. Seven Southern states had seceded from the Union even before his inauguration, and Lincoln realized that if he precipitously declared war, eight more slave states would likely join the Confederacy. Searching for a credible rationale for a call to arms, in early April he ordered an unarmed supply ship to reprovision Fort Sumter. That federal post lay in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, the most impassioned of all the secessionist

states. Confederate president Jefferson Davis decided that he could not allow the fort to remain in federal hands, so he ordered General P. T. G. Beauregard to have his shore batteries initiate a sustained artillery barrage on the island. The Confederacy thus ﬁred the ﬁrst shot, allowing Lincoln to call for 75,000 volunteers to defend the Union. In the end, only half of the remaining slave states chose to secede. President William McKinley’s situation in 1898 resembled the dilemma that Polk had faced. His party was ﬁlled with outspoken “jingoists” calling for U.S. intervention in the Cuban rebellion. Like Polk, McKinley ordered U.S. servicemen into harm’s way by sending a second-class battleship, the USS Maine,

A Northern attempt to resupply Federal soldiers at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor in South Carolina provoked the Confederacy into ﬁring the “ﬁrst shot” of the Civil War, allowing President Abraham Lincoln to justify the Union response as a defensive measure. (Ridpath, John Clark. Ridpath’s History of the World, 1901)

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 81 to Havana Harbor. On February 15, the Maine blew up, killing 260 Americans. Although it has since been demonstrated that the explosion resulted from spontaneous combustion of coal stored adjacent to a powder magazine, the jingoists blamed the explosion on Spain. A few weeks later, McKinley cited this “ﬁrst shot” in his message to Congress, which initiated the Spanish-American War. Although President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed a policy of neutrality after the Great War began in 1914, U.S. trade with Great Britain and France continued at ever higher levels. Early in 1917, the German government concluded that it could starve its enemies into submission if it disrupted their transatlantic supply lines. The German ambassador told Wilson’s government that his country would henceforth target all ships trading with Great Britain and France, including U.S. vessels. By the time that Wilson submitted his war message in April, a number of U.S. ships had been sunk and lives lost in German U-boat attacks. Unrestricted submarine warfare thus served as the first shot that projected the United States into the war. The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, ranks as the most unanticipated ﬁrst shot in U.S. history. Even though Japan had staged preemptive naval attacks against China in 1895 and Russia in 1904, the United States seemed wholly unprepared for a similar assault. Historians have engaged in a good deal of debate over whether President Franklin Roosevelt either manipulated the Japanese into attacking or, at the very least, knew in advance that the attack would occur. What mattered in the short run, however, was that the United States had sustained a stunning

ﬁrst shot that justiﬁed its entry into the World War II. Like Lincoln, President Lyndon Johnson clearly understood the first shot tradition. As the conﬂict in Vietnam intensiﬁed, he knew that only a shocking event would convince the American people to support full U.S. military participation. In August 1964, reports circulated that North Vietnamese vessels had ﬁred on U.S. Navy ships in neutral waters. Even at the time, questions arose about what the U.S. ships were doing there and why North Vietnam would risk giving the Americans an excuse to ﬁght. Johnson played up this ﬁrst shot on U.S. forces to press Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which authorized him to escalate U.S. participation in the conﬂict. It is now clear that the reported incidents were highly exaggerated, if they occurred at all, and that Johnson had prepared the wording of his message to Congress some two months before the purported attacks took place. The most recent U.S. war is also a response to a shocking ﬁrst shot—the terrorist attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center in September 2001. President George W. Bush cited these attacks to obtain approval for leading a multinational force into Afghanistan, the presumed sanctuary of the Al Qaeda leadership that had orchestrated the attacks. He also cited 9/11 to justify invading Iraq a year later, despite the lack of concrete evidence that Iraq, or its leader, Saddam Hussein, had any connection at all with those who carried out the suicide mission in New York. Nevertheless, Bush was certainly aware of and acting consistently with the ﬁrst shot tradition when he ordered the U.S. counterattacks.

82 | Section 2 See also: Bush Doctrine; Jingoism; Manifest Destiny; Pearl Harbor; War Hawks References

Bauer, K. Jack. The Mexican War. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Current, Richard N. Lincoln and the First Shot. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963. Dobson, John M. Reticent Expansionism: The Foreign Policy of William McKinley. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988. Moïse, Edwin E. Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Japan, Opening of Only rarely did the United States ﬁnd itself ahead of other major powers in the 19th century. If the exception proves the rule, Japan was the exception. The United States was the ﬁrst foreign nation to “open” Japan to outside trade and inﬂuence in the modern era. Although pursuit of trade opportunities played some part in motivating U.S. interest in Japan, other factors were equally or even more important. Japan very consciously decided to close itself off from outside inﬂuences in the early 1600s. One reason was the Japanese experience with the Dutch and Portuguese who had sent exploratory voyages to the Far East. Some of these carried Jesuits who were intent on converting “heathens” to Christianity. In Japan, the emperor was considered divine, so Christian missionary activity called into question the basic belief structure of the island nation. Internal structural developments also contributed to the decision to close off external contact. The chief military leader in Japan, the shogun, held a hereditary position that had gradually

become strong enough to control not only the government apparatus but the emperor himself. As the shogunate’s power became institutionalized, the shogun concluded that further change might unravel the system that guaranteed his authority. That meant keeping things just as they were and, especially, preventing external or foreign concepts and contacts as much as possible. The ultimate result was a decision to allow only a single foreign ship from Holland to call at the remote island of Deshima once a year. When the Dutch became absorbed in the European wars associated with the French Revolution, the Dutch could not fulﬁll this obligation from 1797 to 1807, so private U.S. vessels maintained the very limited external contact with Japan. In subsequent years, U.S. interest in the isolated empire grew, on both intellectual and practical levels. New England whaling vessels, for example, discovered that the cold waters off Japan’s East Coast teemed with their prey. On more than one occasion, a whaler ran short of water or fuel and tried to replenish these crucial supplies at a Japanese port. Although very restricted access was sometimes allowed, foreigners had to leave immediately after their needs had been fulﬁlled. Unfortunate individuals who were shipwrecked or stranded on Japanese territory experienced even harsher treatment. Because it was illegal for foreigners even to be in Japan, they were treated like criminals. The lucky ones were transported, often locked in irons in cramped sedan chairs, to Deshima, where they could transfer to the foreign ship making its annual visit. The stories they told of their captivity and treatment aroused calls for government action.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 83 Americans made several attempts to regularize relations. In 1837, for example, the USS Morrison sailed into the harbor at Edo, present-day Tokyo, with 11 shipwrecked Japanese ﬁshermen on board. The U.S. vessel was immediately surrounded by small craft while shore batteries ﬁred warning shots. None of the Japanese passengers made it home. Subsequent attempts were slightly more successful, but no one could ever be sure just what reception a foreign visitor might encounter.

President Millard Fillmore decided to take concerted action by choosing U.S. Navy commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry to lead a small squadron to Japan. Perry’s ships sailed into the harbor at Edo early in 1854 and delivered a letter to local authorities. It demanded that they negotiate with him when he returned shortly with more ships. Fortunately for the Americans, inﬂuential Japanese had concluded that outside contact needed to be established, so they pressured the shogunate to open relations. As a result,

TREATY OF PEACE, AMITY, AND COMMERCE BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND JAPAN: SIGNED AT KANAGAWA, MARCH 31, 1854 ARTICLE I. There shall be a perfect, permanent, and universal peace, and a sincere and cordial amity between the United States of America on the one part, and the Empire of Japan on the other part, and between their people respectively, without exception of persons or places. ARTICLE II. The port of Simoda [in Yedo harbor], in the principality of Idzu, and the port of Hakodade, in the principality of Matsmai [Hokkaido], are granted by the Japanese as ports for the reception of American ships, where they can be supplied with wood, water, provisions, and coal, and other articles their necessities may require, as far as the Japanese have them. . . . ARTICLE III. Whenever ships of the United States are thrown or wrecked on the coast of Japan, the Japanese vessels will assist them, and carry their crews to Simoda, or Hakodade, and hand them over to their countrymen, appointed to receive them; whatever articles the shipwrecked men may have preserved shall likewise be restored, and the expenses incurred in the rescue and support of Americans and Japanese who may thus be thrown upon the shores of either nation are not to be refunded. ARTICLE IV. Those shipwrecked persons and other citizens of the United States shall be free as in other countries, and not subjected to conﬁnement, but shall be amenable to just laws. . . . ARTICLE IX. It is agreed that if at any future day the Government of Japan shall grant to any other nation or nations privileges and advantages which are not herein granted to the United States and the citizens thereof, that these same privileges and advantages shall be granted likewise to the United States and to the citizens thereof, without any consultation or delay. . . . Source: Bevans, Charles I., ed. Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949. Washington, DC: GPO, 1972, 9:777–780.

84 | Section 2

the Japanese agreed to talk when Perry’s ships returned in February. The commodore left nothing to chance. He threatened to return in 20 days with 100 ships if meaningful discussions failed to develop. The Japanese had no way of knowing how empty that threat was, so they grudgingly opened negotiations. The result was the Treaty of Kanagawa, completed on March 31, 1854, establishing formal relations between the two countries. Its key provisions permitted U.S. vessels to take on wood and water from Japanese ports, so the agreement is sometimes known as the “Wood and Water Treaty.” It also allowed the United States to station consular ofﬁcers at two Japanese ports. These ofﬁcials would be able to monitor treatment and arrange safe passage for any U.S. citizens who had become stranded in Japan. The agreement also included a most-favorednation clause. Although a huge celebration greeted the signing of the treaty, it was only a slim opening wedge to the secretive empire. Far more important in the long run was the treaty worked out by Townsend Harris, the U.S. consul-general who took up his station near the imperial capital. In 1858. He was able to sign a much broader agreement than the one Perry had negotiated in 1854. The new treaty permitted freedom of trade between the two countries, allowed Americans to reside at designated ports, and established tariff provisions for both nations. Very quickly, Great Britain, France, Russia, and Holland negotiated similar trade agreements with Japan, based on the document that Harris had developed. The United States thus led the way in opening Japan to the wider world.

See also: China Market; Harris, Townsend References

Dulles, Foster Rhea. Yankees and Samurai. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Sakamaki, Shunzo. Japan and the United States, 1790–1853. Tokyo: Asiatic Society of Japan, 1939. Schroeder, John H. Matthew Calbraith Perry. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001.

Joint Resolution (Texas) When Thomas Jefferson sent the Louisiana Purchase Treaty to the Senate in 1803, he established a precedent for using a treaty to annex territory to the United States. Sectional politics, abolitionist agitation, and bumbling statesmanship combined to make it impossible to obtain a twothirds majority vote in the Senate for ratiﬁcation of a treaty annexing Texas. Casting about for an alternative, President John Tyler settled on a joint congressional resolution. Although it required only a simple majority of votes in both houses, the annexation of Texas came only after considerable politicking and compromise. During his term, President Andrew Jackson scrupulously avoided proposing the annexation of Texas, a move that would expand the inﬂuence of the slave states. His successor, New Yorker Martin Van Buren, was no abolitionist, but he, too, realized how divisive the Texas issue had become. When Sam Houston, the hero of the Texas war for independence, became president of the republic in 1841, he was convinced his nation could not survive on its own. Houston therefore urgently requested U.S. president John Tyler to begin negotiations on an annexation treaty.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 85

Having failed to obtain Senate ratiﬁcation of a treaty annexing Texas, lame-duck president John Tyler championed approval of a joint Congressional resolution to accomplish that goal in early 1845. (Library of Congress)

A pro-slavery Virginian, Tyler was more than willing to move ahead. Elected vice president on the Whig ticket headed by William Henry Harrison, Tyler became president one month after the inauguration when the old general died. Tyler had joined the Whig coalition primarily because of his differences with Democrat Andrew Jackson, and he disagreed with most of the Whig party’s policies that Kentucky senator Henry Clay had articulated. After Tyler had vetoed several of Clay’s pet projects, the angry senator arranged for Tyler to be ofﬁcially read out of the Whig party. Isolated and ostracized, Tyler seized upon the Texas annexation issue as one that might save his career and improve the prospects for his reelection in 1844. He discussed the issue with his cabinet members and found most of them

supportive. But Daniel Webster, the Massachusetts native who was secretary of state, refused to move forward on a policy that might expand the inﬂuence of the slave states. When he resigned in early 1843, Tyler appointed fellowVirginian Abel Upshur to head the State Department. Upshur quietly began working with the Texans on an annexation treaty. British attitudes lent a sense of urgency to these negotiations. Great Britain had abolished slavery in all of its possessions in the early 1830s and had become the world’s leading advocate of abolition. The royal government therefore proposed that France, the United States, and possibly Mexico collaborate in guaranteeing the independence of Texas if it abolished slavery within its borders. When the U.S. government sought clariﬁcation of the British position, the reply came in the form of a letter from Lord Pakenham, the British minister in Washington. Upshur decided to ignore the letter and push ahead on his treaty negotiations. They were cut short when an accident aboard a navy vessel killed the secretary of state. Few would consider joining Tyler’s discredited administration, so he rather desperately offered the State Department post to South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun. As secretary of state, the former senator, vice president, and author of the nullification doctrine, made no secret of his pro-slavery views. Shortly after he delivered a completed annexation treaty to the Senate for ratiﬁcation, news spread of his deﬁnitive reply to the Pakenham Letter. Calhoun had used the British communication as an excuse to state his outspoken support for slavery. His response insisted that the United States was annexing Texas

86 | Section 2

principally as a means of extending the U.S. slavery system. No Northern senator could vote in favor of treaty for that purpose, and many Southerners found Calhoun’s assertions too bold to support as well. The treaty was voted down 35 to 16, more than two-thirds against ratiﬁcation. Even so, the issue was not completely dead. In the 1844 presidential campaign, Whig candidate Henry Clay announced that he did not favor the annexation of Texas at that time. A splinter abolitionist faction called the Liberty Party nominated James G. Birney, who naturally came

out in opposition as well. Democratic candidate James K. Polk, however, hailed from the slave state of Tennessee, and his party’s platform reﬂected the increasingly popular expansionist sentiments that were shortly to be called Manifest Destiny. The Democrats forthrightly called for the annexation of both Texas and the Oregon Territory, a balance that they hoped would gratify both North and South. On election day, Birney captured just enough popular votes in New York State to give Polk a plurality. The state’s electoral votes, in turn, won him the presidency.

THE PAKENHAM LETTER Response of Secretary of State John C. Calhoun to British minister Edward Pakenham’s request for information regarding the proposed annexation treaty with Texas on April 28, 1844. . . . It was not possible for the President [John Tyler] to hear, with indifference, the avowal of a policy so hostile in its character and dangerous in its tendency to the domestic institutions of so many States of this Union, and to the safety and prosperity of the whole. . . . The United States in concluding the treaty of annexation with Texas, are not disposed to shun any responsibility which may fairly attach to them on account of the transaction. The measure was adopted with the mutual consent and for the mutual and permanent welfare of the two countries interested. It was made necessary in order to preserve a domestic institution [slavery], placed under the guaranty of their respective constitutions, and deemed essential to their safety and prosperity. Whether Great Britain has the right, according to the principles of international law, to interfere with the domestic institutions of either country, be her motives or means what they may; or whether the avowal of such a policy and the exertions she has made consummate it in Texas do not justify both countries in adopting the most effective measures to prevent it, are questions which the United States willingly leave to the decision of the civilized world. They conﬁdently rest the appeal on the solid foundation, that every country is the rightful and exclusive judge, as to what should be the relations, social, civil, and political, between those who compose its population; and that no other country, under the pleas of humanity or other motive, has any right whatever to interfere with its decision. . . . Source: Clyde N. Wilson, ed. The Papers of John C. Calhoun. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988, 18:350–351.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 87 President Tyler still had four months left in his term after the election, and he chose to interpret Polk’s victory as a mandate to complete the annexation process. Recognizing that it would be impossible to reverse the two-thirds negative vote in the Senate, he decided instead to seek a joint resolution from Congress. The expansionist mood was sufficiently powerful to convince a majority in each house to approve the resolution, provided that the annexation of Texas was paired with statehood for the Wisconsin Territory. That would preserve the Union’s equal balance between free and slave states that had prevailed since the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Polk inherited this arrangement when he was inaugurated on March 4, 1845. After a short delay, he consulted with his cabinet, which urged its acceptance, and Polk instructed the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Texas to proceed. A local convention approved the arrangements, and Texas entered the Union ofﬁcially when Congress reconvened in December 1845. That action provoked controversy outside the United States as well. Mexico had never formally recognized the independence of Texas and took umbrage at what it saw as the United States illegally seizing control of its property. The annexation of Texas thus planted the seeds for the Mexican War. See also: Manifest Destiny; Texas Revolution; Upshur, Abel References

Peterson, Norma Lois. The Presidencies of William Henry Harrison and John Tyler. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989. Sellers, Charles Grier. James K. Polk, Continentalist, 1843–1846. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.

Smith, Justin H. The Annexation of Texas. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1941.

King Cotton Diplomacy Cotton was the most vital industrial raw material in the mid-19th century, and more than two-thirds of it came from the U.S. South. Most Southerners believed that cotton was king, and they were convinced that the world simply could not survive without it. When the slave states seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy in 1861, their leaders assumed that the industrialized European nations would quickly come to their aid to ensure continuing access to supplies of cotton. The attempt to exploit king cotton for diplomatic purposes involved several strategies, none of which succeeded in the long run. Southern conﬁdence was not completely unfounded. From 1800 to 1860, the annual production of U.S. cotton rose from 2 million pounds to more than 1.6 billion pounds. On the eve of the Civil War, cotton grown in the slave states represented 66 percent of the world’s production. Great Britain was the chief consumer. One-ﬁfth of its economy and more than 5 million textile workers were employed milling and weaving cotton cloth. This massive industrial engine needed access to a steady supply of raw cotton to remain healthy. France was the second ranking buyer of U.S. cotton, so it, too, was extremely interested in maintaining a source of supply. Southern leaders conﬁdently expected both England and France to extend immediate diplomatic recognition to the Confederate States of America to ensure their access to cotton. After all, the aristocrats who dominated the governments of both of these European countries appeared to

88 | Section 2

be generally sympathetic to the ambitions of the landed class in the South with their extensive plantations. Napoléon III, in particular, having reestablished the French empire after disconcerting experimentation with various forms of republican government, had little empathy for the Union government’s democratic principles. So what went wrong? Economic factors lay at the heart of the failure of king cotton diplomacy. The war itself created enormous obstacles to the overseas shipment of cotton. The Union government quickly established a blockade of the major Southern ports, a blockade that grew stronger through the course of the war, almost completely choking off all imports and exports. The blockade runners that managed to sneak through were typically small, swift ships with very limited cargo capacity. Transporting bulk cotton simply was not economically feasible on such vessels. Ironically, the South’s enormous production capability turned out to be something of a liability. Bumper crops in 1859 and 1860 had ﬁlled European warehouses with ample supplies to keep the mills running for more than two years. No one knew how long the Civil War would last, but, if it ended quickly, there would be no need for additional raw cotton until the overstock was depleted. The Confederate government’s misguided policies also contributed to the failure of king cotton diplomacy. Like their revolutionary predecessors, the Confederates initially imposed an embargo on exports and deliberately destroyed more than 2 million bales of cotton sitting in warehouses. The goal was to create a shortage that would boost the world price from its traditional level of less than 10 cents a pound. Optimists believed the price might climb as high as

50 cents a pound when cotton-starved European buyers bid for scarce supplies. Despite the eventual development of wartime shortages, the price for cotton never came near that level. One reason prices remained lower was that alternative sources of supply became available. Although production costs in India and Egypt were substantially higher than in the U.S. plantation South, those areas could produce fine quality cotton in relatively large amounts and sell it for far less than 50 cents a pound. The American Civil War actually benefited these alternative suppliers over the long term, creating strong, relatively stable demand that persisted through the rest of the century. Hampered by a global glut, discouraging price levels, and foreign competition, the Southern strategy seemed doomed to fail. In 1863, the Confederacy’s minister to France, John Slidell, engaged in a last, desperate attempt to make cotton pay by engineering a major loan. A French ﬁnancier named Emile Erlanger agreed to sell bonds in Europe using Southern cotton as collateral. Erlanger collected large commissions on his sales and inﬂated prices quite effectively, but those who bought the bonds lost everything. There was simply no way to cash in on collateral that remained locked up behind the Union blockade. All of these factors delayed the onset of a serious cotton shortage in Europe for more than two years. By that time, the Battle of Gettysburg and the capture of Vicksburg had occurred, providing convincing proof that the Confederate cause would eventually be lost. No European nation was willing to commit major support to the South,

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 89 regardless of how desperate it might be to obtain cotton. King cotton diplomacy thus proved to be a huge disappointment to the Confederacy, failing to achieve any of the advantages that the Southerners had conﬁdently anticipated in 1861. See also: Adams, Charles Francis; Recognition as a Belligerent; Slidell, John References

Ball, Douglas B. Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Hubbard, Charles M. The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998. Owsley, Frank. King Cotton Diplomacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.

Manifest Destiny The Manifest Destiny phenomenon peaked in the mid-1840s, setting the stage for major expansionist moves into Oregon, Texas, California, and New Mexico. A number of environmental and technological factors helped nourish a belief that God had clearly made evident that the United States should expand all the way to the Paciﬁc Coast and in other directions as well. Manifest Destiny complemented the widespread conviction that the people of the United States and their experiment in democratic nation-building were especially blessed. The term Manifest Destiny apparently ﬁrst appeared in a magazine article written by John O’Sullivan in 1845, but the sentiments and emotionality that lay

In 1872, John Gast produced this painting called American Progress as an allegorical representation of the Manifest Destiny concept. (Library of Congress)

90 | Section 2

behind it had long historical roots. When the Founding Fathers declared independence from Great Britain in 1776, they justiﬁed their action by stressing that they had “been endowed by their creator” with inalienable rights. These rights, in turn, promoted the kind of democratic self-government that the states and, ultimately, the nation as a whole exercised. With few exceptions, the world clung to older, monarchial forms of government in succeeding decades, but that in no way weakened the faith of Americans that their unique form of government was superior. From time to time, this faith received forceful expression. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine, for example, praised the uniqueness of the American republics in contrast to Europe. About the same time, John Quincy Adams articulated the “separation of the spheres” concept: that the New World was distinct from the Old World and should pursue its own noble agenda. It was only a short step to a belief that Americans should extend their beneﬁcent government and society as far as possible. That conviction represented the heart of Manifest Destiny: that God had clearly chosen the United States to dominate the Western Hemisphere. Many Americans felt obliged to extend the boundaries of their nation to the North, the West, and the South. Evidence of a divine plan was the fact that a sparsely populated British colony lay to the North, a feeble and changeable government ruled Mexico to the South, and weak and dispersed Indian tribes occupied lands to the West. Several developments at the time strengthened U.S. belief in Manifest Destiny. The ﬁnancial Panic of 1837 had set off a devastating economic depression

that affected people in all walks of life including farmers. Many of them believed that all of the good land had already been plowed and that the nation could only continue to develop if new, fertile lands were added to the Union. It was high time, therefore, for the United States to annex underutilized lands beyond its current borders. Americans conﬁdently claimed that they, and they alone, could occupy and use the land effectively. Neither Indians nor Mexican peons nor backwoods Canadians were capable of maximizing the output of these areas. A couple of technological breakthroughs energized Manifest Destiny. Samuel F. B. Morse demonstrated his telegraph system in the 1830s, and wires were strung up and down the Eastern Seaboard in the next decade. Instantaneous communication over great distances was now a reality, making the extension of U.S. inﬂuence from coast to coast far more possible than before. Moreover, the experimental, primitive steam railroads of the 1830s had evolved into far more efﬁcient and reliable systems. From a room in the U.S. Capitol building, a visionary named Asa Whitney had been championing the idea of a transcontinental railroad for years. Communication and transportation revolutions already well under way made a much larger nation not only feasible but logical. Advocates of Manifest Destiny found other divinely inspired justiﬁcations for their ambitions. One was federalism. Individual states in the Union had remarkably different forms of government and societies, yet all functioned under the umbrella of the federal government. That umbrella ought to be able to accommodate additional communities with different traditions and conceptions.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 91 To the extent that these people might be ill-equipped for immediate annexation, Americans had conﬁdence that education and training could “regenerate” them into model citizens. In the case of those living in the Canadian provinces, the degree of regeneration required would be relatively minor. Engulﬁng the mixed Indian and Hispanic populations to the South and West might well require longer and more determined tutelage. Perhaps no factor was more important in building enthusiasm for Manifest Destiny than the maturation of a new generation. A good many people coming of age in the 1840s were second- or thirdgeneration Americans. Their fathers had participated in the War of 1812; their grandfathers had fought in the Revolution. The new generation envied the legendary patriotism and heroism that their forebears had demonstrated. Younger men sought an opportunity to exhibit their own manliness. Going off to war in Mexico or striking out to settle in new lands in Oregon provided just the sort of fulﬁllment that this group imbued with youthful vigor desired. Was there, after all, anything to prevent the United States stretching from sea to sea and from the Arctic to the isthmus of Panama? Perhaps fortunately for the citizens of Canada, Mexico, and Central America, the United States contained within its existing borders a highly controversial institution that increasingly colored every aspect of the nation’s life and government. Very few people in the North favored expanding the nation into Southern regions, where slavery might become even more prevalent. And very few Southerners were eager to promote expansion in the North, where the addition of new free states would inevitably

undermine the delicate political balance between North and South that had existed since the 1790s. So it was that Manifest Destiny had a sort of self-limiting nature. Texas was its ﬁrst fruit. Annexing Oregon was a logical next step in that it added slave-free lands to the nation. But President James K. Polk settled for only half of that territory before declaring war on Mexico. Here again, although the United States ended up annexing thousands of square miles of territory in California and New Mexico, antipathy toward the spread of slavery imposed limits. The impeding crisis over slavery that dominated the 1850s effectively punctured the balloon of Manifest Destiny. It would revive again in the late 19th century, sometimes called the New Manifest Destiny, but with a very different set of motivations and objectives. See also: Mexican War; New Manifest Destiny; Oregon Fever; Texas Revolution References

Graebner, Norman A. Empire on the Paciﬁc. New York: Ronald Press, 1955. Hietala, Thomas R. Manifest Design. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Merk, Frederick. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Weinberg, Albert K. Manifest Destiny. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935.

Mexican War The Mexican War began in 1846 as a natural outgrowth of the Manifest Destiny spirit that had swept the nation. Triggered by a border dispute between Texas and Mexico, the war brought a string of military success for the United States even as it provoked widespread dissent at home. President James K. Polk ultimately

92 | Section 2

concluded that pursuing a broader war raised the prospect of disunion, so he endorsed the results of a dubious diplomatic mission to end the ﬁghting. His decision was made easier because the United States achieved virtually all of Polk’s initial objectives in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. When Polk was inaugurated in March 1845, the United States was already in the process of annexing the Republic of Texas. The Mexican government, however, had never recognized the independence of Texas, nor did it approve of U.S. annexation. A key sore point was the insistence on the part of the Texans that the Rio Grande was their nation’s southwestern border. When Texas had been a state in Mexico, its border had run along the Nueces River, some distance north of the Rio Grande. Even if the Mexican government were to acquiesce to U.S. annexation, the location of that border remained unresolved. In addition to the boundary dispute, other factors inﬂuenced Polk’s attitude toward Mexico. U.S. claims amounting to millions of dollars had resulted from outlaws who allegedly used Mexico as a refuge. Manifest Destiny sentiments were running high, generating calls for U.S. expansion to its natural boundaries. Many Americans believed that the Paciﬁc Coast should ultimately be the nation’s western boundary. That would mean incorporating California into the Union, something that Mexico would certainly oppose. Polk initially attempted to resolve these issues through diplomacy. He sent John Slidell, a prominent Louisiana politician, to Mexico with a commission authorizing him to negotiate all issues. At a minimum, he was to obtain Mexican agreement on the Rio Grande border. In

addition, he could offer up to $25 million to buy California and the intervening New Mexico Territory. The Slidell Mission failed in part because of the Mexican government’s instability, but a stronger government would have been unlikely to grant everything the United States wanted in any case. After several frustrating months, Slidell reported that only a show of force would convince the Mexicans to negotiate. Polk had anticipated just such an eventuality, but he waited until his envoy returned to Washington to report in person. Slidell met with the president on Friday, May 8, 1846. Polk began preparing a war message to be delivered to Congress on the following Monday. On Sunday, however, he learned that warfare had already begun. Based on earlier discouraging reports from Slidell in January, the president had ordered General Zachary Taylor to station his army in the area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. If occupying the disputed area were not provocative enough, Taylor compounded the tension by positioning his artillery across the mouth of the Rio Grande, aimed at the Mexican port of Matamoros. These steps understandably triggered a reaction. Taylor reported that Mexican soldiers had crossed the river and attacked U.S. dragoons, capturing 60 of them and killing 3. Polk included this information in his war message, using it effectively as a “ﬁrst shot” that justiﬁed U.S. military action. War fever ran rampant among Southerners, and most Northern senators and representatives were moved to avenge this insult to the U.S. ﬂag. The war declaration passed with a vote of 40 to 2 in the Senate and 174 to 14 in the House. Polk had adroitly seized the initiative at

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 93

WILMOT PROVISO: AUGUST 8, 1846 Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall ﬁrst be duly convicted. [Passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, 1846 and 1847, never passed by the U.S. Senate] Source: U.S. Congress, Congressional Globe, 29th Cong., 1st Sess., 1846: 1217.

the height of the nation’s emotional outpouring. Within a matter of days, doubts began to surface that the president had deliberately provoked a confrontation. They continued to escalate as the war dragged on. Northern politicians were increasingly critical of “Mr. Polk’s War” when they concluded that the Democratic president’s chief goal was to add more slave territory to the United States. A Whig Party representative from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, attached a proviso to a military appropriations bill stating that none of the territory captured could be opened to slavery. The Senate stripped the Wilmot Proviso off the bill, but it energized the antislavery opposition. The political struggles in Washington were, in many ways, more intense than the military moves. Polk ordered Taylor to cross the Rio Grande and engage the Mexican Army in northeastern Mexico. The Americans prevailed at Buena Vista, Saltillo, and Monterey, forcing the remnants of the Mexican Army to retreat into central Mexico. Expecting the defeated Mexican authorities to sue for peace, Polk ordered Taylor back across the river. Meanwhile, General Stephen Kearny led a 1,600-man force from Kansas to

Santa Fe, where, encountering only token opposition, he established U.S. control over the New Mexico Territory. He then headed west to California where other U.S. agents had already been active. Army explorer John C. Fremont had staged the short-lived Bear Flag Revolt in Sonoma, only to be chased out by Mexican forces. Farther south, Commodore Robert Stockton’s naval forces seized San Diego. Kearny and Stockton eventually linked up, and the United States effectively controlled all of the territory Slidell had been authorized to buy. Frustrated at the Mexican government’s continuing refusal to negotiate, Polk ordered General Winﬁeld Scott to land a sizable force at Vera Cruz. From there, Scott’s army fought its way west, up onto the central plateau, and all the way to the outskirts of Mexico City itself. There Scott paused, again expecting the Mexicans to seek peace. To encourage them to do so, Polk sent Nicholas Trist, a State Department ofﬁcial, down to join Scott. But, like Slidell before him, Trist found no one willing to deal with him. After a series of intrigues, Scott ordered his troops to invade the city proper, allowing the U.S. Marine Corps

94 | Section 2

U.S. general Winﬁeld Scott’s army occupied Mexico City in September 1847, setting the stage for Nicholas Trist to negotiate the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ceded one-third of Mexico to the United States. (Library of Congress)

to add the “Halls of Montezuma” to its battle hymn. Still there was no progress toward peace. The U.S. president despairingly sent Trist a letter canceling his commission and ordering him to return home, but the commissioner had ﬁnally established contact with Mexican authorities who were willing to talk. Ignoring his recall, Trist proceeded with negotiations that led to a general peace agreement. He signed the treaty in the suburb of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, and sent it off to Washington. Polk was furious at Trist for ignoring his recall. At the same time, the internal strife in the United States had reached a fever pitch. Opposition Whigs were outspokenly critical of the war. Meanwhile, enthusiastic expansionists in the Democratic Party called for the conquest of all of Mexico. Polk viewed this All-Mexico group as dangerous to the stability of the

Union as the antiwar Whigs. Therefore, he carefully reviewed the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and found that they fulﬁlled his major prewar objectives. To stiﬂe further partisan debate, in March he submitted the treaty to the Senate, where it won ratiﬁcation by a vote of 38 to 14. Trist had done his job well. In the treaty, Mexico agreed to recognize the Rio Grande boundary and to cede both New Mexico and California to the United States. In return, the United States pledged to compensate those with prewar claims and to pay Mexico a total of $15 million. To that extent, the United States could maintain that it had actually purchased New Mexico and California, although the deal clearly would never have occurred without U.S. success on the battleﬁeld. The Mexican War left a number of difﬁcult political complications in its

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 95 wake. Although the Wilmot Proviso had failed, slavery was ultimately excluded from both New Mexico and California. Shortly after the treaty was completed, gold was discovered in California. News of the ﬁnd attracted more than 100,000 U.S. fortune hunters in the next year alone. To the extent that a gold rush was inevitable, Mexico may well have done better by selling the area to the United States for a sum of money rather than losing it to an onslaught of U.S. settlers. See also: Manifest Destiny; Natural Boundaries; Slidell, John; Trist, Nicholas References

Bauer, K. Jack. The Mexican War. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Harlow, Neal. California Conquered. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Johannsen, Robert W. To the Halls of Montezuma. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Mahin, Dean B. Olive Branch and Sword. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997. Walker, Dale. Bear Flag Rising. New York: Forge, 1999.

Natural Boundaries Looking west across a sparsely populated continent, Americans naturally favored expansion. But how far to expand and where to stop were not always clear. One solution was to halt at a natural boundary. Rivers, coastlines, or even continental limits could be considered “natural” places to delineate a nation’s borders. The Manifest Destiny sentiment that encouraged the annexation of Oregon and California in the late 1840s represented the fulﬁllment of the natural boundaries impulse. Natural boundaries seemed less relevant in a more densely settled continent

like Europe. The ebb and ﬂow of civilizations and medieval warfare frequently redrew the European map. One example of a nation that stretched to its natural boundaries was the British Isles, where the English government had subdued Welsh, Scottish, and Irish peoples to create the United Kingdom. But Great Britain did not stop at its natural boundaries. British soldiers and sailors spread all around the world, eventually creating the most extensive colonial empire in world history. Some of that expansion included planting colonies along the Atlantic Coast of North America. When they revolted in the 1770s, Americans fought not only to free the established colonies but also to control adjacent lands lying to the West, the North, and the South. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, Great Britain recognized the independence of the 13 colonies-turned-states and also ceded control of the Ohio River Valley all the way to the Mississippi River. Americans quickly began thinking about expanding their nation’s territory even farther. Spain’s Florida colonies were a logical target and, by 1819, the Transcontinental Treaty had ensured U.S. expansion to the natural boundary of the Gulf Coast. No such obvious natural boundary existed in either the North or the West. Earlier, many Americans believed that the crests of the Appalachian Mountains served as a natural boundary. River basins and their surrounding hinterlands seemed to constitute more “natural” geographic entities. In the early 1800s, Vice President Aaron Burr conspired with General James Wilkinson and others in a plan to establish an independent nation incorporating the Mississippi Valley and the tributary Ohio River

96 | Section 2

region. President Thomas Jefferson leapfrogged these plans by purchasing the Louisiana Territory for the United States in 1803. Never again was serious consideration given to creating a separate, central, river-based nation beyond the Appalachians. Technological developments in the early 19th century strengthened the hands of U.S. expansionists. The first railroads appeared in the 1830s; a decade later, long-distance telegraphy became operational. Instantaneous electronic communication across vast distances and rapid, reliable land transportation systems stimulated thinking on a much grander scale. Asa Whitney conceived of a transcontinental railroad and set up a museum describing his vision in the U.S. Capitol building itself. Simultaneously, Americans became convinced that God had set the stage for them to expand. Manifest Destiny sentiment swept the nation in the 1840s. Should there be any limits at all on U.S. expansionism? In the 1790s, Alexander Hamilton had envisioned a nation extending up to the North Pole and down at least as far as the isthmus of Panama. But Great Britain’s trenchant control of its Canadian provinces created an effective barrier to the North. The independence movements that swept Central and South America proved detrimental as well. Invading and conquering an independent, democratic republic seemed hardly compatible with U.S. moral and ethical principles. Hemmed in on the South and the North, Americans focused their expansionist attention on the West. They saw no reason why they should halt at the Continental Divide, the western bound-

ary of the Louisiana Territory. Pushing the nation’s borders on to the Paciﬁc Coast made sense because it was an indisputable natural boundary. Such thinking motivated the expansionists who inﬂuenced the policies of President James K. Polk. His 1844 campaign platform had called for engulﬁng Oregon and ensuring the annexation of Texas. It was a short step from obtaining these objectives to a call to extend U.S. control through northern Mexico all the way to California. In his annual message in December 1845, Polk praised the Monroe Doctrine and added his own corollary to it. He put Europe on notice that the United States alone intended to determine where and how it might expand in the North American continent. In that sense, it turned the rather passive, defensive Monroe Doctrine into a much more aggressive statement of the U.S. intention to expand to its natural boundaries. This motivation helped trigger the Mexican War in 1846. Success on the battlefields and skillful diplomatic negotiations resulted in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the treaty, the Mexican government agreed to abandon its claims to any part of Texas and to cede both the New Mexico and California Territories to the United States in return for a payment of $15 million. By the mid-19th century, the United States had expanded from a string of states clinging to the Atlantic Coast into a huge nation that cut a wide swath across the center of the North American continent. Expansionist sentiment continued to sputter in the 1850s, but an emotional dispute over whether slavery should be allowed to extend into new territories stymied further action. The

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 97

THE POLK COROLLARY TO THE MONROE DOCTRINE: DECEMBER 2, 1845 [From President Polk’s First Annual Message to Congress] . . . The rapid extension of our settlements over our territories heretofore unoccupied, the addition of new States to our Confederacy, the expansion of free principles, and our rising greatness as a nation are attracting the attention of the powers of Europe, and lately the doctrine has been broached in some of them of a “balance of power” on this continent to check our advancement. The United States, sincerely desirous of preserving relations of good understanding with all nations, can not in silence permit any European interference on the North American continent, and should any such interference be attempted will be ready to resist it at any and all hazards. . . . The nations of America are equally sovereign and independent with those of Europe. They possess the same rights, independent of all foreign interposition, to make war, to conclude peace, and to regulate their internal affairs. The people of the United States can not, therefore, view with indifference attempts of European powers to interfere with the independent action of the nations on this continent. The American system of government is entirely different from that of Europe. Jealousy among the different sovereigns of Europe, lest any one of them might become too powerful for the rest, has caused them anxiously to desire the establishment of what they term the “balance of power.” It can not be permitted to have any application on the North American continent, and especially to the United States. We must ever maintain the principle that the people of this continent alone have the right to decide their own destiny. Should any portion of them, constituting an independent state, propose to unite themselves with our Confederacy, this will be a question for them and us to determine without any foreign interposition. We can never consent that European powers shall interfere to prevent such a union because it might disturb the “balance of power” which they may desire to maintain upon this continent. Near a quarter of a century ago the principle was distinctly announced to the world, in the annual message of one of my predecessors, that– The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for colonization by any European powers. This principle will apply with greatly increased force should any European power attempt to establish any new colony in North America. In the existing circumstances of the world the present is deemed a proper occasion to reiterate and reafﬁrm the principle avowed by Mr. Monroe and to state my cordial concurrence in its wisdom and sound policy. . . . Source: Richardson, J. D., ed. Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1917, 5:2248–2249.

sectional crisis blossomed into a devastating civil war in the 1860s, which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, absorbed vast amounts of resources, and utterly destroyed large

tracts of the Southern states. The subsequent Reconstruction process continued to focus U.S. attention on internal troubles, to the extent that no serious expansionist policies were

98 | Section 2

pursued. The United States had to be content with natural boundaries only where it met the oceans. The Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf Coasts were indisputably natural boundaries. But the arbitrary lines drawn between Canada, west of the Great Lakes, and Mexico, west of the Rio Grande, remain as proof that the nation ultimately failed to complete its expansion to natural boundaries. See also: Manifest Destiny, Mexican War References

Goetzman, William H. When the Eagle Screamed. New York: Wiley, 1966. Leckie, Robert. From Sea to Shining Sea. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Merk, Frederick. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Weinberg, Albert K. Manifest Destiny. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935.

Oregon Claims The story of how the United States obtained and then defended its claims to the Oregon Territory is ﬁlled with hairsbreadth escapes. At any moment, a misstep could have nulliﬁed or at least severely undermined the U.S. claim. At the same time, Great Britain, the other major claimant to Oregon, was equally adept at missing opportunities and taking counterproductive steps. In the long run, the decision to divide the disputed territory was probably reasonable for both parties. Spain actually possessed the first external claim to the Oregon Territory, dating all the way back to 1494. In that year, the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the new lands that Christopher Columbus had discovered between Spain and

Portugal. Spain beneﬁted most in this arrangement, receiving everything that lay west of the Line of Demarcation that the Pope had defined as lying 350 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Portugal exploited her award by settling Brazil; most of the rest of the Americas remained available for Spanish exploration and settlement. Although Spain expanded aggressively into the New World, it failed to settle the Paciﬁc Coast north of San Francisco Bay. In 1789, however, a Spanish task force encountered British ships and crews planning to establish an outpost at Nootka Sound, an inlet on present-day Vancouver Island. As both sides prepared for war, Spain discovered that her traditional ally, France, was in the throes of a republican revolution and unable to assist. Meanwhile, U.S. president George Washington discussed with his advisors which side, if either, the United States should aid, especially if the British requested permission to cross U.S. territory to reach the West. The crisis ended when Spain reluctantly signed the Nootka Sound Convention (1790), in which it dropped its exclusive claim to the area. Both British and U.S. groups quickly seized the opportunity to explore the region. Royal Navy captain George Vancouver sailed a two-ship squadron to the Northwest Coast, hoping to locate western access to an all-water route to the Lake of the Woods. He discovered the mouth of a wide river on his way north, but his large ship could not cross the sandbar that protected it. Instead, he headed farther north, eventually exploring the Strait of San Juan de Fuca and discovering that they only separated a large island from the mainland. His tour did establish a ﬁrm claim to that area, which he named Vancouver Island.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 99 Along the way, he had encountered a U.S. merchant vessel, the Columbia, under the command of Robert Gray. They exchanged information, and Gray immediately sailed south to the river that Vancouver had described. Gray’s lighter-draft vessel slipped easily over the sandbar, enabling him to explore quite far up the river. He named the river the Columbia after his ship. Vancouver learned of Gray’s success and later returned to explore the river himself, but Gray had managed to stake a prior U.S. claim to the river and its environs. Neither country did much to exploit its claims for sometime. In 1805, Simon Fraser established a trading post for the British Northwest Company on the river that now bears his name. A couple of years later, he explored farther south, only to learn that, once again, Americans had been there before him. Meriwether Lewis and George Clark had arrived at the mouth of the Columbia in 1805, reinforcing by land the claim Gray had made by sea several years earlier. Responding to favorable reports from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, John Jacob Astor, the nation’s wealthiest fur trader, decided to establish a trading post in the Paciﬁc Northwest. In 1811, his company built Astoria, on the south bank of the Columbia River’s mouth. Astor intended to harvest furs from the hinterland and ship them directly to China, where they could be sold at a substantial proﬁt. The experiment failed to meet Astor’s expectations partly because of the area’s remoteness and because of the very real possibility of war with Great Britain. He therefore decided to sell his holdings to agents of the British Northwest Company who took over and established a headquarters at what they now called Fort George.

When the War of 1812 broke out, both the United States and Great Britain hoped to expand their holdings in North America. A Royal Navy ship, the HMS Racoon, sailed up the West Coast with orders to seize the U.S. outpost there. When the ship arrived, its captain found British citizens already in charge. But he had his orders and intended to follow them, so he insisted that the group at Fort George formally surrender the fort to the British Navy. The Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812 was based on the principle of status quo antebellum. That meant that both Great Britain and the United States were obligated to restore any captured territory. Citing the actions of the Racoon, President James Madison insisted that Fort George/Astoria be returned to the United States, even though Astor himself had no intention of maintaining it. Finally, in 1817, the U.S. Navy got around to implementing Madison’s pronouncement. The USS Ontario, under the command of James Biddle, set off with diplomat John B. Prevost on board. The two had a falling out, however, so Biddle left Prevost behind in Santiago de Chile while he sailed north to the Columbia River. Carefully avoiding any contact with either the British or the Indians in the area, he hammered a couple of signs on trees announcing that the United States was reclaiming the territory. Prevost meanwhile struck up a friendship with Royal Navy captain Frederick Hickey of the HMS Blossom. Hickey had orders to leave Santiago for the Oregon Territory, so he took Prevost with him. When they arrived at Fort George, Prevost, with Hickey’s assistance, convinced the locals to raise the U.S. ﬂag formally. Back in Washington,

100 | Section 2

British minister George Bagot protested bitterly, but, because no one at Fort George had expressed any reservations, the U.S. claim to the area remained ﬁrm. It was further strengthened when Spain signed the Transcontinental Treaty (1819) with the United States, explicitly surrendering its claim to all territory north of the 42nd Parallel. The question of how to handle Oregon cropped up frequently in AngloAmerican discussions. Several times over the next decade, the United States proposed splitting the territory along the 49th Parallel. The same proposal had been included in a failed agreement in 1807, called the Monroe-Pinkney Treaty, and it remained the U.S. baseline in all subsequent talks. The British were loath to abandon their claim to the whole territory. The two countries settled on a joint occupation arrangement in which neither side relinquished its claims to all of Oregon. The United States and Great Britain both objected when the Russian czar issued a ukase in 1821, unilaterally extending his claim to Alaska south to the 51st Parallel. The British and Americans had now ﬁrmly established claims to the Paciﬁc coastline, from the 42nd Parallel in the south all the way up to 54° 40’ north latitude. Both claimants eventually signed separate agreements with Russia that cancelled its claim below 54° 40’. In 1826, U.S. minister Albert Gallatin discussed a possible division of Oregon with British foreign minister George Canning. Canning suggested running the line west along the 49th Parallel until it reached the Columbia River and then following its course to the Paciﬁc Coast. When Gallatin complained that would leave the United States without a decent Paciﬁc port, Canning offered a small tri-

angle of land on the Olympic Peninsula as a potential port. Gallatin refused, so the two countries agreed to renew the joint occupation. In 1842, during discussions between British minister Lord Ashburton and U.S. secretary of state Daniel Webster, Ashburton again offered the 49th Parallel/Columbia River line without even throwing in the Olympic Peninsula piece. When the U.S. negotiator declined, the two men once again extended the joint occupation arrangements in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842). Webster believed U.S. settlers would ultimately move into the area in such numbers that the British would be forced to withdraw. Because the British apparently held a similar view of their future prospects, both sides bided their time. Neither realized how quickly and deﬁnitively Oregon fever would ﬁnally tip the balance. See also: Astor, John Jacob; Oregon Fever; Transcontinental Treaty (Florida) References

Merk, Frederick. The Oregon Question. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Rakestraw, Donald A. For Honor or Destiny: The Anglo-American Crisis over the Oregon Territory. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Stuart, Reginald C. United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775–1871. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Oregon Fever After remaining largely ignored and unsettled, the Oregon Territory suddenly emerged as a focus of intense interest and patriotic posturing. In the early 1840s, thousands of U.S. pioneers began

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 101

In the early 1840s, Oregon Fever encouraged thousands of Americans to head west over the Oregon Trail in wagon trains like this one that snaked through the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains. (Library of Congress)

streaming west along the Oregon Trail, and politicians fervently debated the question of who owned or should own Oregon. A key issue in the 1844 presidential election campaign was whether the United States should transform its joint occupation of Oregon with Great Britain into strictly U.S. ownership. Complex diplomatic steps were necessary to answer that question. The United States had claimed an interest in the Oregon Territory since the 1790s, but that claim frequently threatened to collapse. As long as no signiﬁcant settlement took place, however, the nation appeared content to abide by the joint occupation agreement it had worked out with Great Britain early in the 19th century. Tendrils of direct U.S. involvement appeared in the 1830s. Christian missionaries, the most prominent of whom

was Marcus Whitman, headed west to spread the gospel among the Indians living along the Paciﬁc Coast. To support their missionary work, they returned to the United States to solicit funding from various congregations. In the process, they rhapsodized about the attractive potential for farming in the region, particularly in the Willamette River Valley. The nation fell into a deep economic depression after the Panic of 1837, rendering a good many farmers destitute. The prospect of moving to new, more fertile lands exerted a strong appeal. By 1843, wagon trains were carrying thousands of people along the Oregon Trail toward the Willamette Valley. In conjunction with this upsurge of western migration, Americans were responding to the exhortations and justifications embodied in the Manifest Destiny concept. In part because of the

102 | Section 2

depression, Americans became convinced that they had a God given right to expand westward all the way to the “natural boundaries,” which, in the case of Oregon, meant the Paciﬁc Ocean. Manifest Destiny sentiments motivated politicians from both the North and the South to campaign for expansion into Oregon, Texas, and even California. When James K. Polk emerged as a dark horse candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1844, he faced strong competition from the popular and talented Whig candidate Henry Clay. A splinter group motivated by abolitionist sentiments nominated James Birney. Although both Birney and Clay seemed equivocal on expansionism, the Democratic Party forthrightly called for the “reannexation” of Texas and the “reoccupation” of Oregon. Although Polk never personally endorsed it, the slogan some of his fervent party members adopted was “Fifty-four-forty or Fight.” By that they meant the United States should annex all of the Oregon Territory from the 42nd Parallel in the south to 54° 40’ north latitude. Birney’s splinter group won just enough votes in New York State to deliver its electoral votes to Polk and to hand him the presidency. Even though he

had failed to receive a majority of the popular vote nationwide, Polk behaved as though he had a mandate to carry out his party’s expansionist platform. He immediately gave Great Britain notice that the United States was terminating the joint occupation agreement. At the same time, Polk took the less confrontational step of inquiring whether Great Britain would be willing to do what U.S. diplomats had been suggesting for decades: split the territory along the 49th Parallel. George Pakenham, the British minister in Washington, rejected this proposal without even consulting his home government. In fact, that government barely existed. Parliament was in turmoil, in part because the powerful and outspoken Lord Palmerston criticized almost everything anyone proposed. In a desperate effort to move forward, the Conservative Party renominated Sir Robert Peel as prime minister and obtained a pledge from Palmerston to stop interfering. The Peel government took the last word of the “Fifty-four-forty-or-Fight” slogan seriously; it had no desire to provoke a war over Oregon. Consequently, it sent word back to the United States that it would, after all, accept the 49th Parallel solution, provided that all of Vancouver

DEMOCRATIC PARTY PLATFORM Resolved, That our title to the whole of the territory of Oregon is clear and unquestionable; that no portion of the same ought to be ceded to England or any other power; and that the re-occupation of Oregon and the re-annexation of Texas at the earliest practicable period are great American measures, which this convention recommends to the cordial support of the Democracy of the Union. . . . Source: Kurian, George Thomas. The Encyclopedia of the Democratic Party. Armonk: NY: Sharpe Reference, 1997, 453–454.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 103 Island remain in British hands. However, the London government confessed that it could only obtain approval at home if the United States could be seen as proposing the compromise. Because Polk thought he had already done that and been turned down, he had publicly committed himself to holding out for the 54° 40’ line. Fortunately, his advisors were less rigid. Someone suggested a method for resolving the issue amicably, without undermining the president’s credibility. It involved asking the Senate whether it would consider a treaty that drew the line along the 49th Parallel. When a straw poll on that proposition won approval by 38 votes to 12, Polk submitted a formal treaty to that effect. It drew 41 positive votes and only 14 against, a comfortable margin over the required two-thirds majority for ratiﬁcation. On the positive side, Polk appeared to have avoided a war. But considerable grumbling arose in the North and in the Midwest shortly afterward, when the United States went to war anyway. That conﬂict, however, was with Mexico, and its chief objective was expansionism. Why, critics wondered, had Polk been willing to ﬁght for land that might well become slave states even though he had compromised away more than half of the “free” territory in the Paciﬁc Northwest? Thus, as with every major political issue in this era, Oregon fever became infected by the sectional antagonisms between North and South. See also: Manifest Destiny; Oregon Claims References

Haynes, Sam W., and Christopher Morris, eds. Manifest Destiny and Empire. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1997. Merk, Frederick. The Oregon Question.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Pletcher, David M. The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973.

Ostend Manifesto (Cuba) Many Americans, particularly those who subscribed to the Manifest Destiny concept, believed that the annexation of Cuba to the United States was inevitable. That certainly was the message conveyed in the Ostend Manifesto, a declaration of intent from three key U.S. diplomats in Europe in 1854. Ironically, the negative publicity surrounding the Manifesto generated so much antipathy that it helped undermine the likelihood of annexation. Like almost every other political and diplomatic issue in the decade prior to the Civil War, Cuba became a pawn in the increasingly frenetic sectional debate over slavery. As early as the 1820s, prominent U.S. statesmen like Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams expressed interest in annexing Cuba. Nothing came from their proposals, however, and Cuba remained the most loyal of the many colonies Spain had established in the Western Hemisphere. Half of the island’s population were slaves, many of whom toiled on the sugar plantations that made Cuba a valuable colonial possession. This slavery also made Cuba attractive to Americans living in the South. Bringing Cuba into the Union as a state or as a grouping of states would offset the growing free-state inﬂuence in the United States. The Manifest Destiny impulse enhanced interest in the annexation of Cuba in the 1840s. If the United States were going to fulﬁll its God given mission of engulﬁng Canada, Mexico, and

104 | Section 2

OSTEND MANIFESTO: OCTOBER 15, 1854 Signed by James Buchanan, John Y. Mason, and Pierre Soulé at Aix-la-Chapelle We have arrived at the conclusion, and are thoroughly convinced, that an immediate and earnest effort ought to be made by the government of the United States to purchase Cuba from Spain at any price for which it can be obtained. . . . It must be clear to every reﬂecting mind that, from the peculiarity of its geographical position, and the considerations attendant on it, Cuba is as necessary to the North American republic as any of its present members, and that it belongs naturally to that great family of states of which the Union is the providential nursery. . . . Indeed the Union can never enjoy repose, nor possess reliable security, as long as Cuba is not embraced within its boundaries. . . . Self-preservation is the law of states as well as with individuals. All nations have, at different periods, acted upon this maxim. Although it has been made the pretext for committing ﬂagrant injustice, as in the partition of Poland and other similar cases which history records, yet the principle itself, though often abused, has always been recognized. The United States have never acquired a foot of territory except by fair purchase, or, as in the case of Texas, upon the free and voluntary application of the people of that independent state, who desired to blend their destinies with our own. Even our acquisitions from Mexico are no exception to this rule, because, although we might have claimed them by right of conquest in a just war, yet we purchased them for what was then considered by both parties a full and ample equivalent. . . . After we shall have offered Spain a price for Cuba far beyond its present value, and this shall have been refused, it will then be time to consider the question; does Cuba, in the possession of Spain, seriously endanger our internal peace and the existence of our cherished Union? Should this question be answered in the afﬁrmative, then, by every law, human and divine, we shall be justiﬁed in wresting it from Spain, if we possess the power; and this upon the very same principle that would justify an individual in tearing down the burning house of his neighbor if there were no other means of preventing the ﬂames from destroying his own home. But this course cannot, with due regard to their own dignity as an independent nation, continue; and our recommendations, now submitted, are dictated by the ﬁrm belief that the cession of Cuba to the United States, with stipulations as beneﬁcial to Spain as those suggested, is the only effective mode of settling all past differences, and of the securing the two countries against future collisions. Source: U.S. House, The Ostend Conference, etc. . . . 33rd Cong, 2nd Sess. H. Exec. Doc., 1855, 93:127–132.

even Central America, Cuba simply could not be excluded. At the height of the expansionist fervor, President James K. Polk authorized his minister in Spain to offer up to $100 million for the island

colony. The Spanish government rejected this offer out of hand. Another strategy for bringing Cuba into the United States was to provoke a revolution like the one in Texas and

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 105 then annex the area after it had cut its ties to Spain. Cuban exile Narciso López, a leading advocate of rebellion, mounted three ﬁlibustering expeditions to free Cuba from Spain. Federal authorities halted his first attempt before it left New York. The second expedition involved 700 men who managed to capture a garrison in Cuba, but the local population showed no interest in joining the rebellion. The third attempt in 1851 ended when the Spanish captured and killed several invaders, including López. Although these executions provoked outrage in the Southern states, Whig President Millard Fillmore was unwilling to countenance any more ﬁlibustering. The Spanish meanwhile tried to enlist support from France and Great Britain for their position. They, in turn, approached the United States with a proposal for a three-way guarantee that none of them would attempt to annex Cuba, but the United States was unwilling to agree. When Franklin Pierce won the presidency at the head of a Southern-dominated and outspokenly expansionist Democratic Party, he made clear his intention to add Cuba to the Union. His secretary of state, William Marcy, sent a rabid expansionist, named Pierre Soulé, to Spain. A native of Louisiana and a vocal supporter of slavery, Soulé made every effort to convince Spain to relinquish Cuba. Meanwhile, a large and well-funded force, led by former Mississippi governor John A. Quitman, prepared for an invasion. In late February 1854, an event occurred that could have been seen as a historic ﬁrst shot justifying war. Spanish authorities conﬁscated the cargo of a U.S. ship, the Black Warrior, as a punishment for illegal trading practices in

Havana. President Pierce asked Congress for authority to use force to avenge this affront to the U.S. ﬂag. Soulé simultaneously demanded $300,000 in compensation from the Spanish government, a sum it later paid to the ship’s owners. Subsequently, Pierce authorized Soulé to offer $130 million for the island, but Spain once again demurred. To increase the pressure on Spain, Secretary of State Marcy ordered the U.S. ministers to Great Britain and France, James Buchanan and John Y. Mason, to confer with Soulé in the Belgian city of Ostend. The three diplomats met there to work out the language of a statement that became known as the Ostend Manifesto. The thrust of the document was a complaint that Spain had failed to sell Cuba to the United States and a threat that the Americans would take it, by fair means or foul. Someone leaked the supposedly conﬁdential diplomatic note to the press. Universally condemned in the Northern states as an attempt to expand the area open to slavery, the Ostend Manifesto played a major role in the elections of 1854, weakening the Democratic Party’s position in Congress and forcing Pierce and Marcy to abandon their expansionist agenda. Governor Quitman had to cancel his filibustering plans. Cuba would remain a Spanish colony for another half century, in large measure because of the squabbles over slavery that eventually led to the American Civil War. See also: Manifest Destiny; Spanish-AmericanCuban War References

Brown, Charles H. Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

106 | Section 2 Ettinger, Amos A. The Mission to Spain of Pierre Soulé. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932. Rauch, Basil. American Interest in Cuba, 1848–1855. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948.

Recognition as a Belligerent When the Southern states seceded from the Union, they hoped that the major world powers would respond by recognizing the Confederate States of America as an independent nation. Such recognition would presumably certify the Confederacy’s legitimacy and, not incidentally, enhance its opportunities for foreign aid and trade. In May 1861, the British and French governments took a ﬁrst step in that direction by ofﬁcially recognizing the Confederacy as a belligerent in the developing Civil War. Just what that limited recognition meant and how it would affect the outcome of the war became deﬁning questions for Union diplomats and statesmen. Ironically, President Abraham Lincoln’s decision to declare a blockade of Southern ports shortly after the ﬁring on Fort Sumter appears to have helped convince the European governments to act as they did. Because a blockade is considered an act of war, the argument went, there must be at least two parties in the conflict. Therefore, recognizing the Confederacy as a belligerent was a logical step. That designation allowed the European nations to trade with the Confederacy if they could evade the blockading Union ﬂeet. But this reaction fell far short of what the government in Richmond desired. Had Great Britain and France granted full diplomatic recognition to the Confederate States of America, it would have signiﬁcantly elevated the international stature of the

secessionist government. It would also have opened the way for an exchange of ministers, diplomats, and consular ofﬁcers and created the possibility of formal trade agreements or even alliances. Although the decision to grant recognition as a belligerent did not create these possibilities, the Union government still considered it an unwelcome interference in U.S. affairs. President Lincoln had earlier named Charles Francis Adams as minister to the Court of St. James and charged him with preventing any form of recognition. But Adams arrived in London a few days after the British announcement, so he was left to try to undermine or whittle away at the impact of Queen Victoria’s recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent. Even if his arrival had been better timed, it is doubtful that Adams could have prevented this action. Two longtime critics of the United States held key positions in the British government. Lord Palmerston was prime minister and Lord John Russell headed the foreign ministry. As members of the upper class, they were far more sympathetic to the aspirations of the aristocratic Southern planters than to the democratic values of the Northern states. Their attitudes paralleled those of Emperor Napoléon III in France, who had reestablished a monarchy in his country in opposition to republican sentiments. Buoyed by the Europeans’ actions, the Confederate government hastened to upgrade its diplomatic representation abroad. It named John Slidell of Louisiana and James M. Mason of Virginia to be its ministers to France and Great Britain, respectively. They took passage on a British mail steamer, the Trent, only to be captured on the high seas by U.S. Navy captain Charles

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 107

Although Great Britain and France had recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent in the American Civil War in the summer of 1861, they considered extending full diplomatic recognition after Union Navy captain Charles Wilkes ordered his men to remove Confederate emissaries James M. Mason and John Slidell from the British mail ship Trent in November. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

Wilkes. Although Wilkes’s action was highly popular in the North, fiery speeches in Parliament called for all-out war to avenge this insult to the British ﬂag. Recognizing how damaging the affair was to their foreign policy objectives, President Lincoln and his secretary of state, William Seward, agreed to release the Confederate envoys and formally apologize for the incident. Once in Europe, Mason and Slidell were unable to exploit king cotton diplomacy to convince their hosts to take further steps toward full recognition. The Union blockade that had triggered all of this commotion remained an issue in its own right. Some Europeans dismissed it as a “paper blockade.” However, because Great Britain and France

had utilized paper blockades extensively in earlier conﬂicts, both nations were more or less forced to observe the U.S. restrictions. Moreover, within a few months, the Union government had converted enough merchant vessels and expanded its navy sufﬁciently to make the blockade a concrete detriment to Southern commerce. The Confederacy tried to counter it by building or buying blockade runners: small, swift, often heavily armed and armored vessels that could easily slip past the clumsy wooden sailing ships that had been pressed into blockade duty. Recalling the use of the island of St. Eustasius as an entrepôt for transferring supplies to the patriots during the Revolutionary War, Caribbean ports

108 | Section 2

stockpiled goods for transshipment by blockade runners. Again, using precedents established and stoutly defended by the British government, the United States invoked its right to halt this trade. That interference might even take place on the high seas as long as the Americans could claim, as had the British prior to the War of 1812, that the goods seized were essentially on a “continuous voyage” destined for the Confederacy. Union warships often captured cargos headed for the Mexican port of Matamoros, even though the last stage of the “voyage” might be over a land route. To mount an offensive, the Confederacy attempted to utilize privateers to disrupt the Union’s oceangoing trade. As long as the European powers withheld full recognition, however, they could not ofﬁcially open their ports to privateers for the adjudication of prizes and distribution of booty to the crews. A more successful strategy was to purchase vessels from foreign shipyards or owners and commission them as Confederate Navy vessels. Minister Adams mounted a trenchant campaign with the British government aimed at preventing this sort of activity. He based his arguments on Great Britain’s own Foreign Enlistment Act, which prohibited British citizens from aiding those involved in foreign wars. Even so, Adams failed to prevent the launching of the CSS Alabama, which went on to wreak havoc among U.S. merchant ships worldwide. He was able, however, to convince the British government not to release the so-called Laird rams to the Confederate government. After the war, Adams played a major role in adjudicating the resolution of claims resulting from the depredations of the Alabama and its sister ships.

During the conﬂict’s early months, several European nations, led by France’s Napoléon III, seriously proposed European mediation. One of the emperor’s suggestions was that the two sides lay down their arms for six months while diplomatic negotiators attempted to resolve the issues. President Lincoln quite naturally had no interest whatsoever in such outside meddling. The Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862 permanently ended all talk of European mediation. Antietam also provided President Lincoln with an opportunity to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, ofﬁcially putting the Union government on record against slavery. Although his ﬁrst announcement drew skeptical comments in Europe, the formal proclamation, which went into effect on January 1, 1863, and subsequent actions convinced doubters of Lincoln’s sincerity. Both Great Britain and France had long since outlawed slavery; strong reservations about the institution’s morality ran deep in both countries, so Lincoln’s emancipation program signiﬁcantly weakened European empathy for the Southern cause. Ultimately, of course, the Confederacy’s battleﬁeld losses were crucial to undermining its credibility with other nations. The nearly simultaneous capture of Vicksburg and the Battle of Gettysburg in early July 1863 ended all hope that any other nation would recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation. Although the war continued for almost two more years, the Southerners— locked up behind an effective blockade, starved of vital resources, and lacking any external allies—were doomed to defeat. Recognition as a belligerent thus

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 109 produced almost no long-term beneﬁts to the lost cause. See also: Adams, Charles Francis; Arbitration (Alabama Claims); King Cotton Diplomacy; Paper Blockade; Slidell, John References

Crook, D. P. The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861–1865. New York: Wiley, 1975. Monaghan, Jay. Diplomat in Carpet Slippers: Abraham Lincoln Deals with Foreign Affairs. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1945. Nevins, Allan. The Statesmanship of the Civil War. New York: Collier Books, 1962. Taylor, John M. William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Right Hand. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Santo Domingo The Santo Domingo affair was a pale postscript of the Manifest Destiny spirit of the mid-19th century. Although the area had never been high on the list of U.S. annexation targets, it fascinated President Ulysses Grant. The efforts of several questionable individuals led to an annexation treaty, which failed to win ratiﬁcation, and the whole affair gave overseas colonization a bad name. The large island of Hispaniola, which lies east of Cuba in the Caribbean Sea, had long been divided between France and Spain. By 1869, the western area was known as Haiti and the eastern region as Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic. Its recent political history included a series of misadventures under the leadership of Bonaventura Baez. At one time or another, Baez had attempted to convince France to annex the country, suggested to Great Britain that it administer it as a protectorate, and cooperated when Spain brieﬂy reestablished control.

Reinstalled as president by 1869, Baez became convinced that selling the place to the United States was now the most attractive option. Two U.S. adventurers encouraged that scheme. President Franklin Pierce had sent a hero of the Texas revolt, General William L. Cazneau, to Santo Domingo as an ofﬁcial U.S. representative in the 1850s, and he had stayed on. During the Civil War, Colonel J. W. Fabens, a New Yorker, arrived. In cahoots with Cazneau, he hatched schemes to sell land and resources to U.S. speculators. Fabens met with President Grant shortly after his inauguration and touted the country’s beauty and potential for annexation to the United States. The president sent his private secretary, Orville Babcock, to survey the situation ﬁrsthand. He also ordered the U.S. Navy to support Babcock’s mission. The resourceful envoy negotiated two treaties with President Baez in November 1869. One proposed the outright annexation of all of Santo Domingo. If it failed, the second treaty would establish a longterm U.S. lease of Samaná Bay. Grant knew that Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, would have a key role in the ratiﬁcation process. The president burst in unannounced on Sumner one evening and went away thinking that he had obtained the senator’s endorsement. The annexation treaty reached the Senate on December 10, 1870, but a series of odd occurrences took place before it was reported out to the Senate ﬂoor. Baez requested that the U.S. Navy help him prepare for an unlikely invasion from Haiti. He then staged a plebiscite on the treaty, which produced an improbable vote of 15,169 in favor and only 11 opposed. A U.S. investor named Davis

110 | Section 2

Hatch was arrested and imprisoned, apparently because his business dealings interfered with those of Fabens and Cazneau. Babcock refused to use his inﬂuence to free Hatch, who managed to escape anyway and who testiﬁed before a Senate committee about the questionable activities of the other Americans in Santo Domingo. When Sumner’s committee reported the treaties out, with a negative recommendation of 5 to 2, Grant was furious. At about the same time, Fabens arrived in Washington as the designated Dominican minister to the United States and created a furor when he presented his dubious credentials to Grant rather than to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish. The ﬁnal Senate ratiﬁcation vote was evenly split, nowhere near the two-thirds required. Grant never forgave Sumner and did everything in his considerable power to destroy his political inﬂuence. Given the suspect behavior of the parties involved, however, Sumner appears to have done the nation a great service. The negative publicity surrounding the Santo Domingo affair discredited U.S. expansionism for many years. See also: Manifest Destiny References

Nelson, William Javier. Almost a Territory. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. Tansill, Charles Callan. The United States and Santo Domingo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1938.

Texas Revolution In retrospect, the annexation of Texas to the United States appears to have been preordained, but enough complications cropped up, most importantly the rise of

abolitionist sentiments in the North, to direct the process down an unexpected path. Americans had been settling in Texas since the early 1820s, but only after these immigrants had become thoroughly disillusioned with the Mexican government did they take bold action. Rather than immediate annexation to the United States, they engineered a revolution that created an independent country. The future status of that country would remain unknown for another decade. In negotiating the Transcontinental Treaty in 1819, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams conceded to Spanish minister Don Luis de Onís a very weak U.S. claim to part of Texas. Although bitter protests greeted that decision, it remained U.S. policy into the mid1840s. The process of U.S. expansion into Texas therefore remained in private hands. Both the Spanish colonial authorities and the Mexican government that succeeded them recognized that the state of Texas was a vast, underpopulated corner in northeast Mexico that would inevitably act as a magnet to land-hungry settlers from the United States. In an effort to control immigration, government ofﬁcials encouraged both Americans and Europeans of good character to move into Texas. The hope was that this mixed population would be loyal to the government in Mexico City and act as a buffer against less desirable ﬁlibusters and desperadoes who might otherwise move in. Moses Austin was eager to seize this opportunity, so he began negotiating with Spanish authorities. When the Mexican Revolution intervened, he switched his focus to the new government. He died before his plans came to fruition, but his son, Stephen Austin,

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 111 inherited the dream. Mexico designated him an emperasario, authorized to lead other settlers across the Sabine River from Louisiana into attractive agricultural lands in East Texas. Some 300 families signed on with Austin, and other emperasarios brought in additional settlers during the next few years. To qualify for admittance, these Americans had to acknowledge Catholicism as the established religion and to forswear ownership of slaves. These provisos were easily evaded or ignored. New arrivals might pay tithes to Church ofﬁcials, but they held private Protestant services. The land was ideally suited to cotton cultivation, so they naturally brought their agricultural labor force with them. These people, who had been slaves in the United States, were redeﬁned as “indentured servants” to avoid Mexican reprisal. No one doubted that their indentures would extend throughout their lives, and they lived and worked just as they had in slavery across the border. Mexico’s efforts to recruit European settlers were so disappointing that transplanted Americans ended up greatly outnumbering any other group in Texas. Fortunately, these “Texicans” exhibited loyalty to their adopted country for some time. When the Edwards brothers lost their emperasario grant in the mid1820s, they rounded up followers and proclaimed the formation of an independent country called Fredonia. Stephen Austin and his associates sided with Mexican efforts to put down this rebellion. After John Quincy Adams became president in 1825, he took steps to reverse the concession that he had made earlier. He sent Joel Poinsett to Mexico as the U.S. minister, arming him with

authority to pay $1 million for Texas. Adams’s successor, President Andrew Jackson, raised the offer to $5 million, but the Mexican government still refused to consider selling. Jackson then sent a much more aggressive and outspoken envoy, Anthony Butler, to Mexico City and urged him to use any means at his disposal to extract Texas. Resorting to bribery and blackmail, Butler proved so obnoxious that the Mexican government requested his recall. Throughout all of this diplomatic maneuvering, however, neither president ever suggested or implied using military force. That was not true of the man who became dictator of Mexico in the early 1830s. General Antonio López de Santa Ana was a respected and popular military leader when he took control of the country. Intent on demonstrating his authority and leadership, he chose Texas as one place to do so. The ﬁrst blow to the Texicans was a decision to annex Texas administratively to its neighboring state, creating a new entity called Coahuila-Texas. This move created a political unit in which the U.S. immigrants were a distinct minority. Determined to ﬁght back, a group of Texicans captured a fort near Galveston in June 1835. To make an example of these rebels, Santa Ana led a large army into Texas. This, in turn, stimulated a stream of volunteers from the United States who rushed to assist the beleaguered Texicans. The first major confrontation occurred in what is present-day San Antonio at the Alamo, an old mission that had been converted into a fort. Fewer than 200 men, a preponderance of whom were not actually Texicans, inﬂicted 1,500 casualties on Santa Ana’s 5,000-man force before being killed to a man.

112 | Section 2

Santa Ana moved on to Goliad, where he won another battle and captured some 400 prisoners, all of whom were summarily executed. The future looked bleak until Texas general Sam Houston’s army caught the Mexican troops taking a siesta at San Jacinto. The surprise attack quickly routed the Mexicans, and Santa Ana himself was captured. He agreed to acknowledge the existence of an independent Texas, including the fateful decision to deﬁne the Rio Grande as its southeastern boundary. Santa Ana subsequently insisted that he had conceded under duress, justifying the Mexican government’s refusal to recognize the independence of Texas for many years. The Republic of Texas immediately sought annexation to the United States. President Andrew Jackson had carefully steered clear of the controversy, although his administration had done nothing to enforce federal neutrality laws that prohibited U.S. volunteers from participating in an external war. Jackson was all too aware that Texas was slave territory. Adding it to the Union would destroy the balance between free and slave states that had prevented a wider sectional crisis for many years. Moreover, he was convinced that the Texas issue could torpedo the chances for his handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, in the upcoming presidential election of 1836. Not only did the United States fail to annex Texas, Jackson did not even formally recognize the new republic until the closing days of his administration in early 1837. Unless the United States could ﬁnd a way to defuse sectional tensions regarding slavery, Texas would have to languish outside the Union. France recognized the republic in 1839, as did Great Britain and Holland a year

later. Their motives were rather transparent. They all hoped that Texas would limit U.S. expansionism in the Southwest and, simultaneously, they planned to exploit Texas as an independent source of low-cost cotton. As it turned out, these economic motives and fear of greater British inﬂuence played a major part in the ultimate U.S. decision to annex Texas with a joint resolution in 1845. See also: Filibustering; Joint Resolution (Texas); Manifest Destiny References

Binkley, William. The Texas Revolution. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1952. Lowrie, Samuel H. Culture Conﬂict in Texas, 1821–1835. New York: Columbia University Press, 1932. Smith, Justin H. The Annexation of Texas. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1941.

Webster-Ashburton Treaty The treaty that Secretary of State Daniel Webster worked out with British minister Lord Ashburton in 1842 contains no very remarkable provisions. It did, however, amicably settle several issues that had troubled U.S., British, and Canadian relations for many years. Webster was extraordinarily proud of this diplomatic achievement, which helped preserve peace along the nation’s northern border. The trouble actually started back in 1783 when Benjamin Franklin and Richard Oswald described that border in the Treaty of Paris. They used Mitchell’s Map as a reference, unaware of its many inaccuracies. In an age long before GPS and satellite imagery, the mapping of remote and unpopulated areas was more an art than a science.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 113 The treaty associated the boundary between Maine and Canada with a river that ran nowhere near the intended line. In 1831, Great Britain and the United States asked the king of the Netherlands to arbitrate the issue, but the line that he drew satisfied neither party, so the boundary remained in dispute. A mapping discrepancy well to the west also meant that the northern boundary of what is present-day Minnesota was impossible to determine. A series of recent confrontations across the long, unguarded border added to U.S.–Canadian tensions. One incident began in 1837, when a group of Canadians set out to foment a revolt against British authority. They found sympathizers across the border who were willing to provide them with a U.S. ship, the Caroline, to transport guns across the St. Lawrence River. Canadian authorities responded by sending 50 men to search for the vessel. When they located it, even though it was docked at a U.S. port, the Canadian party swarmed aboard, killed one crew member, injured another, and set the ship adrift, to break up and sink down the river. Although President Martin Van Buren contented himself with sending diplomatic protests to London, U.S. rowdies took more deﬁnitive action. In May 1838, they boarded a British-owned river boat and set it on ﬁre. Again, Van Buren took the high road, emphasizing that all Americans should abide by U.S. neutrality laws. Soon another incident stoked patriotic ﬁres on both sides. The British government decided to construct a road linking Nova Scotia and the St. Lawrence, selecting a route that ran through the remote Aroostook Forest in northern Maine—or was it southern New

Brunswick? No one really knew which country actually owned the area. When Canadian lumberjacks began felling trees in the disputed area, however, Americans armed themselves to ﬁght back. President Van Buren sent General Winﬁeld Scott’s army to the area to keep the antagonists separated and to enforce a tenuous truce in the as yet bloodless “Aroostook War.” Almost simultaneously, two other issues complicated Anglo-American relations. One involved a Canadian citizen who was arrested in New York State and tried for participating in the raid on the Caroline. Despite British protests, the federal government did nothing to intervene. Tensions eased only when the local jury acquitted the man after deliberating for only 20 minutes. The other incident was far more serious. Slaves being transported on a U.S. ship named the Creole staged a mutiny, killed a white crew member, and sought refuge at Nassau in the British-owned Bahama Islands. Great Britain had abolished slavery throughout its empire in 1833 and had become the world’s most impassioned advocate of abolition. After the authorities in Nassau hanged those found guilty of the murder, they set all the rest of the mutineers free, causing the United States to protest over the “theft” of U.S. property. When President John Tyler took office in 1841, he named former senator Daniel Webster as secretary of state, hoping that he could resolve these issues. Fortunately, Lord Aberdeen had become Great Britain’s foreign minister at about the same time, and he, too, wanted to reduce Anglo-American tensions. He sent a longtime friend of the United States, Lord Ashburton, to Washington as

114 | Section 2

minister, charged with working out a comprehensive agreement. The two men quickly reached accord on the Maine Boundary issue, agreeing to a division that assigned to the United States about two-thirds of the disputed territory. That decision did not satisfy Maine or Massachusetts politicians, however, and, in a test vote only 21 senators expressed approval compared to 20 opposed, far fewer than the twothirds required to ratify a treaty. Webster earned his pay at that point. A prominent Massachusetts politician himself, he used a variety of techniques, including promises of federal grants of $150,000 to each state, to convince his fellow New Englanders that the proposed arrangement was the best that they could expect. The negotiators encountered little public opposition in other areas. They agreed, for example, to leave the joint occupation of Oregon in place because neither felt that the territory was currently of any great importance. They split the difference in the Minnesota border dispute, drawing a line that, as it turned out, left the iron ore-rich Mesabi Range wholly within the United States. The negotiators also included wording regarding extradition that was designed to facilitate the handling of cross-border incidents. Recognizing Great Britain’s opposition to the importation of slaves from Africa, Webster emphasized the fact that the United States had outlawed that practice in 1808. To reinforce the nation’s commitment, the treaty contained a promise that the United States would maintain a squadron of navy vessels patrolling the African coast to stop slavers. Neither the Caroline nor the Creole was mentioned speciﬁcally in the document, but the British government

ultimately agreed to provide $110,000 to compensate the owners of the freed slaves. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty was signed on August 9, 1842. The secretary of state persuasively defended his accomplishment, and the Senate approved it with a vote of 39 to 9. The agreement ran into some trouble in England, but it ultimately won ratiﬁcation there as well. The treaty proved to be the only major diplomatic achievement of President Tyler’s administration other than the steps that he took to annex Texas. Hailing from virulently antislavery New England, Webster simply could not support that initiative, so he resigned from the cabinet in 1843. See also: Joint Resolution (Texas); Van Buren, Martin References

Carroll, Francis M. A. A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the CanadianAmerican Boundary, 1783–1842. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Remini, Robert V. Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. Stevens, Kenneth R. Border Diplomacy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989.

BIOGRAPHIES Adams, Charles Francis (1807–1886) As the son and the grandson of presidents, Charles Francis Adams naturally pursued a political career. Young Charles spent much of his childhood overseas while his father, John Quincy Adams, held various diplomatic posts. He

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 115 returned in time to graduate from Harvard and qualify as a lawyer. Despite his father’s trenchant abolitionism, the younger Adams took a slower, more intellectual approach to the issue of slavery. By 1848, however, he was sufﬁciently outspoken to earn the vice presidential nomination on the Free-Soil Party ticket. His service in Congress in the 1850s earned him the respect of New York senator William Seward, whom President Abraham Lincoln later chose as his secretary of state. At Seward’s urging, Lincoln named Adams as U.S. minister to Great Britain. Having attended a British public school for a couple of years and being a member of a distinguished U.S. political dynasty, Adams proved extraordinarily capable at dealing with the aristocratic statesmen who headed the British government. Adams spent his ﬁrst four years in London tirelessly supporting the Union cause and attempting to throttle Confederate initiatives. His biggest disappointment was failing to prevent the sailing of the British-built ship that became the CSS Alabama, the most destructive weapon in the Confederate Navy. On the other hand, his most important victory was convincing his hosts to halt the Confederate effort to purchase the Laird rams, state-of-the-art commercedestroying vessels that could have devastated the Union blockade. Adams completed his tour in London in 1868, only to be called back into service in 1871 as the U.S. representative on the arbitration panel that dealt with the Alabama Claims. His judicious behavior on that panel helped it settle highly charged issues and reinforced Adams’s reputation as one of the most effective diplomats ever to represent the United States abroad.

See also: Arbitration (Alabama Claims); Recognition as a Belligerent Reference

Durberman, Martin B. Charles Francis Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1961.

Astor, John Jacob (1763–1848) John Jacob Astor is one of a select number of Americans whose foresight and initiative personally promoted the expansion of the United States. A German immigrant, he arrived in New York City with seven ﬂutes and the goal of selling musical instruments. He parlayed his success in that venture into other enterprises, most prominently the fur trade. Astor’s supplies came from upper New York State, the Ohio country, and even Canada. In 1800, he sent a shipload of furs to China, where they sold at an enormous proﬁt. That stimulated his interest in the Paciﬁc Northwest as both a supply point and a more convenient shipping base for the Asian market. In 1811, he established a trading post named Astoria in the Oregon Territory just south of the mouth of the Columbia River. The looming threat of war with Great Britain convinced him to sell the outpost to the British Northwest Company in 1812. He later used his vast wealth to engage in proﬁtable real estate ventures, primarily on rapidly growing Manhattan Island, and left a $20 million estate to his heirs, the largest fortune yet accumulated in the United States. Even more important for the future, however, was the fact that the United States capitalized on his short-lived Oregon venture to reinforce its claim to the territory after the War of 1812, a claim that ultimately led to the annexation of much of the region in 1846.

116 | Section 2 See also: Manifest Destiny; Oregon Claims

See also: Panama

Reference

Reference

Madsen, Axel. John Jacob Astor: America’s First Multimillionaire. New York: Wiley, 2001.

McCullough, David. The Path between the Seas. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.

Bidlack, Benjamin A. (1804–1849)

Burlingame, Anson (1820–1870)

After practicing law and serving in Congress as a representative from Pennsylvania, Benjamin Bidlack obtained a diplomatic appointment as chargé d’affaires in Bogota, the capital of New Granada. That country controlled the northwestern corner of South America, as well as the isthmus of Panama. Bidlack arrived in Bogota in late 1845 and quickly became concerned about rumors that both Great Britain and France were contemplating the construction of a railroad or highway across the isthmus. Hoping to obtain exclusive U.S. rights to any such passage, Bidlack sought authorization from Washington to work out an agreement with the government of New Granada. He never received it, but he chose to proceed with negotiations anyway, signing a treaty to that effect in 1846. This unauthorized document arrived in Washington at the height of the Mexican War, but President James K. Polk eventually decided to move it forward. The Senate ratified Bidlack’s Treaty early in 1848. Bidlack died the following year, but his treaty definitely strengthened the U.S. bargaining position with Great Britain. The two countries signed the ClaytonBulwer Treaty of 1850, which required prior approval from both countries before either could build an isthmian canal.

Harvard law school graduate Anson Burlingame entered politics ﬁrst as a FreeSoiler and then as a founding member of the Republican Party. Having lost his seat after three terms as a congressman from Massachusetts, he was named U.S. minister to China in 1861. Three years earlier, the Treaty of Tientsin allowed foreign diplomats to reside in the Chinese capital for the ﬁrst time. Although he had no previous diplomatic experience, Burlingame quickly assumed leadership of the foreign representatives residing in Peking (Beijing.) At that point, inﬂuential European merchants were attempting to work out separate trading relationships with provincial governments. Burlingame strongly opposed these efforts, defending the nationwide authority of the imperial government and the treaty provisions that it had approved in 1858. His position served as a precedent for the U.S. policy later articulated in the Open Door Notes. His views were also so attractive that the imperial government hired him as its own envoy when he resigned from U.S. service in 1867. In that role, he negotiated the Burlingame Treaty in 1868 with U.S. Secretary of State William Seward as well as similar agreements for China with other nations. Except for its controversial handling of immigration issues, the provisions of the Burlingame Treaty guided ChineseAmerican relations through the end of the 19th century.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 117 Reference

Anderson, David L. Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861–1898. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Calhoun, John Caldwell (1782–1850) No one was more nationalistic than John C. Calhoun in his early career, yet no American became as identiﬁed with the slave-holding South as his life drew to a close. Born in rural South Carolina, young John Calhoun had an atypical education. He spent time in Connecticut, including a couple of years at Yale, before returning to study law in his home state. He married well and owned a profitable plantation with many slaves, but he found his true calling in politics. After honing his parliamentary skills in the South Carolina Legislature, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1810. There he became a leading member of the youthful cadre known as the War Hawks. In addition to playing a key role in convincing Congress to declare war against Great Britain in 1812, Calhoun worked hard to raise and equip the troops. His nationalistic fervor and proven organizational talents convinced President James Monroe to name him secretary of war. Calhoun ably served in that cabinet post for more than seven years. In 1824, he nursed presidential ambitions, but he had to settle for the vice presidency under John Quincy Adams. Over the next four years, he became increasingly critical of high tariffs, even though he had earlier advocated protectionism. The so-called Tariff of Abominations in 1828 was the ﬁnal straw. Reelected vice president on a Democratic Party ticket headed by

Andrew Jackson, Calhoun devoted strenuous efforts aimed at getting the 1828 tariff act revoked or modiﬁed. When that appeared unlikely, Calhoun resigned from the vice presidency, went home to South Carolina to agitate for nulliﬁcation, and then returned to Washington as a senator. There he worked closely with Henry Clay on a gradual reduction in tariff levels that rendered the nulliﬁcation controversy moot. The tariff battle completed his transition from nationalist to Southern spokesman, however, and he subsequently focused much of his attention on defending the institution of slavery. The old War Hawk was also a strong advocate of expansion, and he urged the annexation of Texas as soon as it gained independence from Mexico. Ironically, Calhoun did more to derail that process than anyone else when President John Tyler named him secretary of state in 1843. Calhoun completed negotiations on an annexation treaty with Texas, but then he justiﬁed it as a means to promote the expansion of slavery, which, in turn, would preserve the institution in the existing slave states. A majority of senators could not accept this rationalization, so the treaty was never ratiﬁed. Only after Calhoun left the State Department was President Tyler able to engineer annexation through a joint congressional resolution. Calhoun completed his political career in the Senate, where he strongly supported the expansionist Mexican War and never compromised on his commitment to the preservation and extension of slavery. See also: Joint Resolution (Texas); Texas Revolution; War Hawks Reference

Bartlett, Irving H. John C. Calhoun: A Biography. New York: Norton, 1993.

118 | Section 2

Clayton, John Middleton (1796–1856) John Clayton’s support of Zachary Taylor’s successful run for the presidency in 1848 earned him an appointment as secretary of state. It was a logical choice. Clayton had grown up in Delaware and become a successful lawyer there before holding several state-level political positions. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1828 and again in 1845, he was well known in Washington.

During the Mexican War, Americans had explored the isthmus of Tehuantepec to see if it might provide a feasible canal route between the Atlantic and Paciﬁc Oceans. Meanwhile, Benjamin Bidlack negotiated a treaty granting the United States exclusive rights to passage across the isthmus of Panama. This ﬂurry of activity stimulated British interest in potential canal routes. Great Britain had established a colony of its own in what is present-day Belize, as well as a protectorate over the Mosquito Indians, whose

CLAYTON-BULWER TREATY Convention between the United States of America and Her Britannic Majesty; April 19, 1850 ARTICLE I. The governments of the United States and Great Britain hereby declare, that neither the one nor the other will ever obtain or maintain for itself any exclusive control over the said ship canal; agreeing that neither will ever erect or maintain any fortiﬁcations commanding the same or in the vicinity thereof, or occupy, or fortify, or colonize, or assume or exercise any dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito coast, or any part of Central America; nor will either make use of any protection which either affords or may afford, or any alliance which either teas or may have, to or with any State or people, for the purpose of erecting or maintaining any such fortiﬁcations, or of occupying, fortifying, or colonizing Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito coast, or any part of Central America, or of assuming or exercising dominion over the same; nor will the United States or Great Britain take advantage of any intimacy, or use any alliance, connection, or inﬂuence that either may possess, with any State or government through whose territory the said canal may pass, for the purpose of acquiring or holding, directly or indirectly, for the citizens or subjects of the one, any rights or advantages in regard to commerce or navigation through the said canal which shall not be offered on the same terms to the citizens or subjects of the other . . . ARTICLE IV. The contracting parties will use whatever inﬂuence they respectively exercise with any State, states, or governments, possessing, or claiming to possess, any jurisdiction or right over the territory which the said canal shall traverse, or which shall be near the waters applicable thereto, in order to induce such states or governments to facilitate the construction of the said canal by every means in their power; and furthermore, the United States and Great Britain agree to use their good ofﬁces, wherever or however it may be most expedient, in order to procure the establishment of two free ports, one at each end of the said canal. . . . Source: Bevans, Charles I., ed. Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949. Washington, DC: GPO, 1974, 12:1–5–8.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 119 amorphous territory included parts of Nicaragua. By 1850, British and U.S. agents had negotiated several treaties with various local authorities in the vicinity of a possible Nicaraguan Canal, and the two nations appeared headed for a full-scale confrontation. British foreign minister Lord John Russell hoped to defuse the tensions by naming Sir Henry Bulwer as minister to the United States. He and Secretary of State Clayton worked out a mutually acceptable agreement called the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (1850). In the treaty, both parties pledged to consult with one another before developing an isthmian canal, a provision that effectively prevented either side from taking unilateral action. The treaty also promised that any canal built would never be fortiﬁed nor closed to the ships of either nation. Clayton resigned from the State Department when Taylor died shortly afterward, and he returned to the Senate, unaware that the treaty he had negotiated would quickly become one of the most unpopular diplomatic agreements of the 19th century. Among other perceived ﬂaws, it seemed to violate the principles of the now sacrosanct Monroe Doctrine, which had proclaimed the Western Hemisphere off limits for European interference. Worse still, it represented a truckling to Great Britain, and no nation was more despised in the United States. Self-righteous Americans certainly objected to an agreement that appeared to grant Great Britain veto power over U.S. expansionism in the Western Hemisphere. Finally, even though the project was well beyond the technical capability of the United States at that point, patriotic Americans were already convinced that the proposed isthmian canal simply had to be built and

defended by the United States. That conviction only grew stronger as the century drew to a close, creating still further disappointment and anger about the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. See also: Bidlack, Benjamin A.; Panama Reference

Bauer, K. Jack. Zachary Taylor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

Cushing, Caleb (1800–1879) A brilliant Harvard-trained scholar and lawyer, Caleb Cushing grew up in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where his father owned a merchant ﬂeet that often sailed to China. The younger Cushing devoted his life to the law, diplomacy, and politics. He won election to Congress as a Whig in the 1830s, but his support of President John Tyler in the early 1840s cost him his seat. Tyler then named him U.S. commissioner to China. Cushing commanded a small squadron that sailed east and arrived in China just after the British and French had successfully prosecuted the Opium War and forced the imperial government to sign a treaty that opened ﬁve ports to their commerce. Capitalizing on this event and the Chinese government’s desire to dilute the inﬂuence of the European powers, Cushing negotiated the Treaty of Wangshia (1844). It contained a most-favoredprovision that ensured that the United States had the same trading and diplomatic privileges that the British and French had won in war. During the Mexican War, Cushing formed a volunteer regiment and eventually rose to the rank of brigadier general, even though he missed most of the key battles. Now firmly in the Democratic Party, he

120 | Section 2

became President Franklin Pierce’s attorney-general, and, in 1860, he presided over the chaotic Democratic Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, which ended when Southerners walked out to nominate their own pro-slavery presidential candidate. Cushing’s intelligence and skill were such that Republican president Ulysses Grant nominated him to be chief justice of the Supreme Court, but Cushing failed to win conﬁrmation. He completed his federal service with a three-year tour as U.S. minister to Spain. See also: China Market; Most Favored Nation Reference

Fairbank, John K. Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953, 1956.

Gadsden, James (1788–1858) Although he graduated from Yale, Charleston-born James Gadsden spent most of his life promoting Southern causes and Southern economic development. He served in the U.S. Army as an engineering ofﬁcer, eventually earning the rank of colonel, before he resigned in 1822 to run a plantation in Florida. In the 1830s, he returned to Charleston. Like many trained engineers, he was naturally attracted to railroading and soon became president of what evolved into the South Carolina Railroad Company. In the 1840s, he devoted much of his energy to promoting direct trade between the Southern states and both Europe and Asia. He ultimately concluded that a transcontinental railroad running along the Gila River might help him realize his dream of linking the South with West

Coast ports that were engaged in shipping goods to the Orient. A friend, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, helped convince President Franklin Pierce to name Gadsden minister to Mexico in 1853. Despite his defeats in the Mexican War, General Santa Ana was once again running his country as a dictator and, as usual, was desperately in need of money. Gadsden obtained authorization from Pierce to spend up to $50 million for all of the land that he could get from Mexico. In the end, the U.S. minister was only able to purchase a narrow strip along the southern border of the New Mexico Territory, for a ﬁnal ﬁgure of $10 million. The Southern Paciﬁc Railroad eventually laid its tracks through the Gadsden Purchase sometime after the visionary diplomat’s death. See also: Mexican War Reference

Garber, Paul N. The Gadsden Treaty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1923.

Harris, Townsend (1804–1878) A New York businessman with experience in the China trade, Townsend Harris became the ﬁrst ofﬁcial U.S. envoy to Japan. In 1854, Matthew Calbraith Perry’s small naval squadron had arrived hoping to “open” Japan to the rest of the world. The so-called Wood and Water Treaty that he eventually worked out was a limited, bare bones agreement that allowed U.S. ships to stop in Japan only to restock essentials needed to continue their voyages. But the treaty did, at least, provide for an exchange of consular ofﬁcers. Shortly afterward, President Franklin Pierce nominated Townsend Harris to serve as the U.S. consul

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 121 general. He moved into an abandoned temple at Shimoda, near Edo (presentday Tokyo), and patiently began petitioning the imperial government for permission to negotiate a broader agreement. Not until 1858 did the emperor ﬁnally grant Harris an audience, opening the way for full negotiations. A few months later, Harris was able to sign a full commercial treaty that legitimized trade between the United States and Japan. This document served as a model for the representatives of other foreign governments who also wished to trade with Japan. In that sense, Townsend Harris may truly be credited with “opening” Japan to worldwide commerce. See also: Japan, Opening of; Perry, Matthew Calbraith Reference

Statler, Oliver. Shimoda Story. New York: Random House, 1969.

Kearny, Stephen Watts (1794–1848) The outbreak of the War of 1812 convinced New Jersey-born Stephen Kearny to drop out of Columbia College and enlist in the army. He remained a soldier for the rest of his life. He spent most of his time after the war exploring in the West and helping establish new forts ahead of the line of settlers pushing into hostile country. When the war with Mexico began in 1846, Kearny’s skill and experience earned him appointment as the brigadier general commanding the Army of the West. His mission was to lead a 1,600-man force from Ft. Leavenworth to Santa Fe, where the local authorities quickly surrendered. Mistakenly informed that California was already in U.S. hands, Kearny enlisted

frontier legend Kit Carson to guide him and a small contingent of 100 dragoons to the Paciﬁc Coast. They encountered stiff opposition near San Diego, before linking up with naval forces under Commodore Robert Stockton. The two men quickly took control of southern California, only to become involved in a heated dispute with John C. Fremont. Nicknamed “the Pathﬁnder,” Fremont had been assigned to head a small exploratory mission into northern California before the United States declared war on Mexico. Once the conﬂict broke out, the overconﬁdent ofﬁcer misconstrued both his orders and other information that he had received to conclude that he had been designated to serve as the U.S. governor of California. This contention conﬂicted with Kearny’s position, and the general ultimately prevailed. Fremont was court-martialed and resigned from the army. Kearny then headed down into Mexico, only to contract a fatal disease at the port of Vera Cruz. But his 1,500-mile trek along the Santa Fe Trail and on through the trackless region to the west had established a strong U.S. claim to the territories that Mexico ceded to the United States in 1848. See also: Mexican War Reference

Walker, Dale L. Bear Flag Rising: The Conquest of California, 1846. New York: Forge, 1999.

Perry, Matthew Calbraith (1794–1858) Matthew Calbraith Perry’s success in convincing the Japanese Empire to open itself to outside contact was the most important diplomatic achievement of a

122 | Section 2

U.S. Navy ofﬁcer in the 19th century. Perry was an obvious choice for the assignment, given his reputation and experience. His ﬁrst active naval service came under his equally famous brother, Oliver Hazard Perry, the commander who defeated British naval forces on Lake Ontario in 1813. Matthew Perry participated in many other naval skirmishes in the War of 1812. Afterward, he played a major role in establishing what became Liberia, the African refuge for freed U.S. slaves. His midcareer experiences included interactions with Greeks, Turks, Italians, Russians, and many others, so he was no stranger to international negotiations. At home, he helped frame the curriculum for the Naval Academy, superintended the New York naval yard, and was a prominent advocate of steampowered ships. In 1847, he commanded the naval squadron that supported General Winﬁeld Scott’s army in capturing Vera Cruz. Five years later, President Millard Fillmore appointed him commodore of the squadron that was sent to open relations with Japan. Perry’s ships arrived in Edo Bay in July 1853. He refused to speak to anyone of lesser rank than himself, and his stubbornness enabled him to deliver the president’s letter personally to two Japanese princes. Perry’s squadron then departed, promising to return early the following year. When the Americans arrived in February 1854, they found Japanese ofﬁcials willing to negotiate. The Treaty of Tanagawa was so limited in scope that it is often referred to as the Wood and Water Treaty because its major provision only allowed U.S. vessels to restock needed supplies at Japanese locations. The treaty did open consular relations between the two countries, however, enabling the ﬁrst U.S. consul-general, Townsend Harris, to negotiate a much broader-ranging com-

mercial and diplomatic treaty four years later. But it was Perry who had started the process that would ultimately lead to Japan’s full participation in world affairs and earn the United States international kudos for astute diplomacy. See also: Japan, Opening of; Harris, Townsend Reference

Morison, Samuel Eliot. “Old Bruin”: Commodore Matthew C. Perry. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.

Scott, Winﬁeld (1786–1866) A lifelong professional soldier, Winﬁeld Scott performed a number of sensitive and successful diplomatic missions. Born and raised in southern Virginia, Scott read law, but he never practiced as an attorney. When the Chesapeake Affair stirred patriotic sentiments up and down the Atlantic seaboard in 1807, Scott volunteered for service in the local militia. A large and powerful man, he quickly earned respect and rapid promotion. After switching to the regular army, Scott took part in several major actions during the War of 1812. Although generally disheartened at how poorly the army performed in the ﬁeld, he earned accolades for his personal leadership in key encounters, such as the Battle of Lundy’s Lane in July 1814. Having won promotion to the rank of brigadier general by the end of the war, Scott chose to remain in the peacetime army. A strong advocate of technical and tactical training, he encouraged the development of a more professional ﬁghting force. After Scott had handled several assignments dealing with Indian troubles in the 1830s, President Martin Van Buren sent the general as a peacemaker

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 123 along the Canadian border. Scott showed remarkable tact and empathy in his dealings with emotional participants on both sides, and his presence was crucial in preventing an outbreak of hostilities. As general-in-chief of the U.S. Army in 1841, Scott had become prominent enough to be considered for the presidency. But Henry Clay won the Whig Party nomination in 1844, and Scott enthusiastically endorsed him. When James K. Polk won, relations initially were frosty between the Whiggish general and the Democratic president. After some initial success, it became clear that General Zachary Taylor’s actions were unlikely to end the Mexican War, so Polk turned to seasoned veteran Scott to lead an assault on Vera Cruz. Having secured that objective, the general proved to be a brilliant tactical commander as his column climbed onto the central Mexican plateau. With minimal loss of both civilian and military lives, his force arrived at the gates of Mexico City. There he paused, hoping for a peaceful capitulation but eventually having to engage in two brief but bloody battles to gain control of the city. During the ensuing occupation, Scott demonstrated the same diplomacy and tact that he had used effectively along the Canadian border. Swallowing his initial outrage at the arrival of State Department envoy Nicholas Trist, Scott paved the way for Trist’s ultimately successful peace negotiations, which brought the war to a close. Complaints from jealous ofﬁcers and Democratic politicians led to an inquiry into Scott’s performance in Mexico, but he was eventually cleared of all charges. The Whig Party nominated the war hero for the 1852 presidential race, but the general suffered a humiliating

loss to Democrat Franklin Pierce. Scott remained on active duty through the outbreak of the Civil War, now honored with the rank of lieutenant general, which only George Washington had held before him. President Lincoln urged the elderly and ailing Scott to retire to make way for younger ofﬁcers, and he did so in October 1861. Although Winﬁeld Scott is remembered most for his military successes, he deserves substantial credit for his thoughtful and effective contributions to U.S. diplomacy. See also: Mexican War; Van Buren, Martin Reference

Peskin, Allan. Winﬁeld Scott and the Profession of Arms. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003.

Seward, William H. (1801–1872) William H. Seward naturally gravitated to politics after graduating from Union College and practicing as an attorney in upstate New York. Thurlow Weed’s Whig Party political machine elected Seward to positions as a state legislator and later governor of New York. He won a U.S. Senate seat as a Whig in 1849, but he transitioned to the newly formed Republican Party in the late 1850s. He quickly became one of the most prominent senators, and his abolitionist views enhanced his reputation throughout the North. Although Abraham Lincoln defeated Seward’s bid for his party’s presidential nomination in 1860, when Lincoln won the election, he did what many other presidents have done and named his closest rival as secretary of state. Many, including Seward, believed that he would be the real leader of the administration. Frustrated at Lincoln’s

124 | Section 2

failure to take deﬁnitive action in the secessionist crisis, Seward wrote a memorandum on April 1, 1861, proposing that the United States declare war on much of the world in order to generate patriotism and draw together all Americans, North and South, in a com-

mon cause. He even offered to handle the war personally. Lincoln rejected most of Seward’s plan but did move ahead on resupplying Fort Sumter, a decision that provoked the Confederacy to begin the Civil War. A chastened Seward remained in his post

WILLIAM H. SEWARD TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN: APRIL 1, 1861 Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration . . . I am aware that my views are singular, and perhaps not sufﬁciently explained. My system is built upon this idea as a ruling one, namely, that we must CHANGE THE QUESTION BEFORE THE PUBLIC FROM ONE UPON SLAVERY, OR ABOUT SLAVERY, for a question upon UNION OR DISUNION: In other words, from what would be regarded as a party question, to one of patriotism or union. The occupation or evacuation of Fort Sumter, although not in fact a slavery or a party question, is so regarded. Witness the temper manifested by the Republicans in the free States, and even by the Union men in the South. I would therefore terminate it as a safe means for changing the issue. I deem it fortunate that the last administration created the necessity. For the rest, I would simultaneously defend and reinforce all the ports in the gulf, and have the navy recalled from foreign stations to be prepared for a blockade. Put the island of Key West under martial law. This will raise distinctly the question of union or disunion. I would maintain every fort and possession in the South. FOR FOREIGN NATIONS I would demand explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once. I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico, and Central American to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence on this continent against European intervention. And, if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, Would convene Congress and declare war against them. But whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it. For this purpose it must be somebody’s business to pursue and direct it incessantly. Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while acting in it, or Devolve it on some member of his cabinet. Once adopted, debates on it must end, and all agree and abide. It is not my especial province: But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility. Source: Williams, William Appleman. The Shaping of American Diplomacy. Chicago: RandMcNally, 1956, 296.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 125 and adroitly handled the Union’s diplomatic initiatives. He advised Lincoln to disavow the Trent Affair and release the captured Confederate emissaries. He and U.S. minister Charles Francis Adams worked very effectively together to reduce the threat of European interference in the American Civil War and to prevent the Confederacy from obtaining substantial foreign assistance for its war effort. It was Seward who took the bold, uncompromising stance against French meddling in Mexico that helped convince Emperor Napoléon III to drop his support for Maximillian Hapsburg’s regime there. The same night that Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theater, Seward was stabbed in his bed. He recovered, however, and agreed to remain in Andrew Johnson’s cabinet. He spent his last years as secretary of state pursuing expansionist projects, but the purchase of Alaska was his only major achievement. Historians have generally considered Seward to have been one of the most able and effective statesmen ever to have served as secretary of state. See also: Adams, Charles Francis; Alaska; Recognition as a Belligerent Reference

Van Deusen, Glyndon B. William Henry Seward. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Slidell, John (1793–1871) Although he was born in New York and educated at Columbia, John Slidell moved to New Orleans after the Panic of 1819 torpedoed his business ventures. Practicing law and pursuing more successful enterprises, he became one of the most inﬂuential Democratic politicians in Louisiana. After Slidell had served a

couple of terms in the House of Representatives, President James K. Polk appointed him as the U.S. commissioner to Mexico. Charged with sorting out the Texas boundary dispute and possibly purchasing other territories from Mexico, Slidell’s mission proved extraordinarily frustrating. No properly authorized Mexican officials would negotiate with him, and the instability of the leadership in Mexico City would probably have invalidated any agreement that he might have been able to obtain. Early in 1846, he informed the president that only a show of military force would convince Mexico to come to terms. Elected to the U.S. Senate in the early 1850s, Slidell also served as campaign manager for James Buchanan’s successful bid for the presidency in 1856. Although he was not a radical secessionist, Slidell resigned from the Senate in 1861. His diplomatic experience convinced the Confederate government to send him as its minister to France. He and John M. Mason, the designated minister to Great Britain, were captured at sea from the British mail steamer Trent and brieﬂy imprisoned in Boston. President Abraham Lincoln concluded that the Trent Affair was causing more harm than good, so Slidell and Mason were freed to continue their trips to Europe. Although Emperor Napoléon III seemed very sympathetic to the Confederate cause, Slidell was unable to obtain recognition, naval vessels, or trade agreements from the French government. He remained in France until his death. See also: Mexican War; Recognition as a Belligerent Reference

Sears, Louis Martin. John Slidell. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1925.

126 | Section 2

Stockton, Robert Field (1795–1866) Like many other prominent naval ofﬁcers, Robert Stockton’s career included important diplomatic achievements. A member of a wealthy New Jersey family, he entered the U.S. Navy as a midshipman at the age of 16 after completing a course of study at the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. He participated in a number of key naval battles during the War of 1812 and then spent four years in the Mediterranean, dealing with the Barbary pirates, and another lengthy tour of duty chasing pirates and slavers in the Caribbean. After an extended stay on his inherited estate at Princeton, he returned to active duty in 1838. He played a major role in the construction of the USS Princeton and was serving as its captain in 1844 when an experimental gun on board exploded, killing Secretary of State Abel Upshur and Navy secretary Thomas Gilmer. The pinnacle of his naval career came during the Mexican War, when he was assigned command of the Paciﬁc squadron. In the summer of 1846, he landed at Monterey and assumed command of all land and naval forces in California. Stockton combined his sailors and marines with John C. Fremont’s small contingent of soldiers, and they moved south, extending U.S. control all the way to San Diego. Early the next year, Mexican forces succeeded in reversing some of these gains, so Stockton collaborated with General Stephen Kearny to recapture Los Angeles and end the ﬁghting in California. Stockton resigned from the navy in 1850, and, after a brief term in the U.S. Senate, he served as president of a canal company until his death.

See also: Kearny, Stephen Watts; Mexican War Reference

Walker, Dale L. Bear Flag Rising: The Conquest of California, 1846. New York: Forge, 1999.

Trist, Nicholas (1800–1874) Nicholas Trist was serving as chief clerk of the U.S. State Department in 1847 when President James K. Polk dispatched him to Mexico. Trist carried a commission authorizing him to negotiate peace terms with the Mexican government, an assignment that General Winﬁeld Scott believed should be his responsibility. After an initial period of hostility, the two men began cooperating. Unfortunately, no Mexican authorities were willing to risk meeting with either American. Frustrated with the lack of progress, especially in light of increasing opposition to the war at home, Polk cancelled Trist’s authority to negotiate and ordered him to return to Washington. But Trist ignored these new orders because Mexico ﬁnally appeared willing to discuss peace terms. This led to the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. Because the treaty contained everything that Polk had desired, he overcame his annoyance with Trist and submitted it to the Senate for ratiﬁcation. The treaty ended the conﬂict and included the cession of California and New Mexico to the United States in exchange for $15 million. Trist thus has the distinction of successfully negotiating a major treaty without proper diplomatic credentials. Reference

Ort, Wallace. Deﬁant Peacemaker. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 127

Upshur, Abel (1790–1844) Whig Party nominee William Henry Harrison won the 1840 presidential election, but he died a month after his inauguration in the following March. Vice President John Tyler became president, but he so alienated the Whig leadership that it read him out of the party. Among the few allies that he could call upon was the secretary of the navy, fellow Virginian Abel Upshur. Tyler named Upshur secretary of state in 1843 and charged him with negotiating a treaty with the Republic of Texas that would bring the area into the Union. The major stumbling block to annexation was growing Northern opposition to adding any territory to the United States that might include slaves. Hoping to embarrass Upshur, British minister to the United States Lord Pakenham sent a letter requesting a statement about the slavery issue. Upshur prudently filed the letter without responding and continued his negotiations. In early 1844, he was invited aboard the USS Princeton to observe the test firing of an experimental cannon. The overloaded weapon exploded, killing Upshur instantly. Tyler then named an outspoken advocate of the expansion of slavery, John C. Calhoun, to succeed him. Calhoun retrieved Pakenham’s letter and wrote a blistering defense of the expansion of slavery, a move that effectively killed any chance that an annexation treaty would win Senate ratification. See also: Joint Resolution (Texas) Reference

Smith, Justin H. The Annexation of Texas. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1941.

Van Buren, Martin (1782–1862) Statesmen seldom get credit for not doing something. What President Martin Van Buren did not do was to succumb to persistent calls for military action against Great Britain and, especially, its Canadian provinces. It may seem odd that a man from New York would be opposed to expansion into adjacent territory, but Van Buren was, ﬁrst and foremost, an astute politician. That talent had enabled him to work his way up to leadership of the so-called Albany Regency, the leading Democratic Party organization in his home state, and his support had done much to get Andrew Jackson elected president in 1828. Jackson rewarded Van Buren by naming him secretary of state, but personality conﬂicts soon led all of Jackson’s original cabinet to resign. The president later chose Van Buren to be his vice presidential running mate in 1832. That gave the New Yorker the inside track to the Democratic nomination and, ultimately, the presidency in 1836. Shortly after he was inaugurated, the Panic of 1837 sent the country into a depression that persisted throughout Van Buren’s four years in office. Many Americans blamed British trade policies for causing the depression. Others, particularly those out of work or barely surviving on worn-out farms, readily supported the idea of invading and possibly annexing all of Canada to the United States. Several border incidents could have touched off a war, but President Van Buren remained calm. He did order General Winﬁeld Scott to deploy his troops along the northern border on a couple of occasions, but this action was designed as much to defuse

128 | Section 2

or dilute U.S. aggressiveness as it was aimed against any real or imagined Canadian threats. Although Van Buren’s paciﬁc policies undermined his popularity in his own party and may have been crucial to his failure to win reelection in 1840, he could comfort himself with the knowledge that he had served his nation’s larger interests well by pursuing peace rather than war. See also: Webster-Ashburton Treaty Reference

Wilson, Major L. The Presidency of Martin Van Buren. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984.

Walker, William (1824–1860) A flamboyant filibuster, William Walker was a man of many talents. A native of Tennessee, he attended college and medical school but gave up the practice of medicine to pursue law and journalism in California. Combative, energetic, and visionary, he convinced himself that the citizens of Baja California and Sonora wanted him to “liberate” them from Mexico. With a small band of well-armed adventurers, Walker landed in Baja and proclaimed its independence in late 1853. Mexican authorities managed to chase his group back to California, where Walker was tried but never convicted of violating U.S. neutrality laws. Two years later, Walker led another ragtag set of followers into Nicaragua, where they collaborated with the U.S.–owned Accessory Transit Company, which owned ships and a railroad across the isthmus. In short order, Walker became Nicaragua’s top military commander and then inaugurated himself as the country’s president. His regime collapsed

in part because he backed the losing side when rival business interests competed to control the Transit Company. In May 1857, he surrendered to the U.S. naval forces sent to restore peace. An attempt to return to Nicaragua failed, but he did succeed in reaching Honduras in 1860. Captured by the British Navy, he was turned over to Honduran authorities, who courtmartialed and executed him as a foreign agent in 1860. Interestingly enough, unlike other American filibusters, Walker apparently never intended to ask the United States to annex any territories that he might ultimately control. See also: Filibustering; Ostend Manifesto (Cuba) Reference

Carr, Albert H. Z. The World and William Walker. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

Webster, Daniel (1782–1852) Daniel Webster’s long and distinguished public career included two stints as secretary of state, during which he dealt more than competently with complex international issues. A New Hampshire native, he attended Dartmouth College and practiced law in Portsmouth for many years. In 1813, his eloquent opposition to the war with England gained him a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Federalist. He left Congress in 1816 to establish a law practice in Boston, where he continued to build a national reputation by successfully arguing several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1822, he returned to the House, this time representing Massachusetts, and moved up to the Senate ﬁve years later.

Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880 | 129 There he abandoned his earlier lowtariff proclivities and became a leading advocate of protectionism, reﬂective of the growing importance of manufacturing in New England. An outspoken defender of the Bank of the United States, he inevitably allied with the Whig Party after Democratic president Andrew Jackson killed the bank. Hoping to win the presidency himself in 1836, Webster ran unsuccessfully as one of three regional Whig candidates. One of the others, William Henry Harrison, did win in 1840, and he promptly selected Webster to be his secretary of state. When Vice President John Tyler took over a month later, he retained the distinguished New Englander in his cabinet. Webster more than justiﬁed his appointment by resolving a number of Anglo-American differences, including a long-standing Maine boundary dispute in negotiations with British minister Lord Ashburton. He followed up with an equally masterful campaign to convince the U.S. Senate to approve the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. His opposition to slavery and the annexation of Texas prevented him from remaining in Tyler’s cabinet. He returned to the Senate, where he opposed the Mexican War, voted in favor of the Wilmot Proviso, and continued to oppose the expansion of slavery. In the summer of 1850, he accepted President Millard Fillmore’s invitation to return to the State Department. Once again, he conducted its affairs with intelligence and rectitude, hoping that his party would ﬁnally nominate him for the presidency. That honor went to Mexican War hero General Winﬁeld Scott, however, and Webster died just a few weeks before the election. His achievements as secretary of state more

than matched his many other contributions to U.S. history. See also: Webster-Ashburton Treaty Reference

Dalzell, Robert F. Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism, 1843–1852. New York: Norton, 1972.

Wilkes, Charles (1798–1877) Charles Wilkes demonstrated an early aptitude for science, navigation, and languages, all of which proved to be valuable assets in his long naval career. After a brief stint in the merchant marine, Wilkes accepted a commission as a midshipman in the U.S. Navy in 1818. During the succeeding 20 years, he conducted naval surveys and laid the foundations for both the Naval Observatory and the Hydrographic Ofﬁce. Although still only a lieutenant in 1838, he jumped at the chance to command a four-year exploratory expedition that charted the West Coast and hundreds of Paciﬁc islands, discovered the continent of Antarctica, and produced extensive and informative scientiﬁc reports. Holding the rank of captain when the Civil War began, he was assigned to picket duty in the Caribbean. On November 8, 1861, his ship overhauled the British mail steamer Trent, and he arrested two of its passengers, John Slidell and James M. Mason, the Confederate commissioners who were on their way to diplomatic posts in Europe. Although this action earned kudos from the public, President Abraham Lincoln concluded that it had signiﬁcantly harmed the Union government’s relationship with the European governments at a time when they might be considering support for the Confederacy. So the president formally apologized

130 | Section 2

and ordered the prisoners released, to complete their journeys to England and France. Having failed to distinguish himself in subsequent assignments, Wilkes retired with the rank of rearadmiral in 1863. Charles Wilkes was a complex man, whose brashness and quick temper led to courts-martial even

as he was performing valuable service to his country. See also: Slidell, John; Symmes, John Cleves Reference

Henderson, Daniel. The Hidden Coasts: A Biography of Admiral Charles Wilkes. New York: William Sloane, 1953.

SECTION 3

RISE OF A GREAT POWER, 1880–1914

domination of the region’s economic and political systems. That belief was supported by a U.S. tariff policy that emphasized protectionism, the imposition of high customs duties that were likely to discourage imports and correspondingly beneﬁt domestic producers. Even when protective tariffs were canceled, as in the case of sugar, U.S. actions profoundly affected outsiders. Nowhere was this impact more keenly felt than in Hawaii, which moved from a monarchy to a republic and then to a colony of the United States in less than a decade. The steps leading to Hawaiian annexation involved little violence, but some Americans were eager to engage in conﬂict. As a legacy of the Civil War, many younger men developed an aggressive spirit called jingoism. Jingoes actively sought opportunities to demonstrate their manliness in war. Mission, the new manifest destiny, and jingoist sentiments combined to make U.S. participation in the Cuban revolution nearly inevitable. Although the Spanish-American-Cuban War

During the Civil War and Reconstruction, U.S. attention focused primarily on domestic affairs. As those disturbing events receded, the nation once again looked outward. What Americans observed in the late 19th century was a new age of imperialism, in which European countries incorporated much of the rest of the world into their colonial empires. A predictable U.S. response was a revival of expansionist ambitions in what historians call the New Manifest Destiny. This impulse relied heavily on the traditional sense that the United States had a mission to promote and protect democracy around the world. Occasionally, the U.S. Navy was utilized to pursue gunboat diplomacy. In the 1880s, mission sentiment encouraged Secretary of State James G. Blaine to promote Pan-Americanism, the creation of a more formal set of linkages and interrelations among the nations of the Western Hemisphere. His efforts bore little fruit, in part because Latin Americans worried that his initiative stemmed primarily from selfish motives that would promote U.S. 131

132 | Section 3

involved relatively little actual ﬁghting, its diplomatic consequences left the United States in a much more complex international position. The ﬁrst major postwar problem was deciding what to do with Cuba once it was freed from Spanish colonial control. After considerable thought and debate, the United States developed a plan that was stated in the Platt Amendment. U.S. military forces occupied the island until the Cuban people accepted this plan, which essentially made their country a protectorate of the United States. Another nation that fell under direct U.S. control was Panama. The U.S. decision to construct a canal through that country also increased U.S. dedication to preserve political and economic stability in its environs. President Theodore Roosevelt’s big stick diplomacy emphasized political initiatives, but his successor, President William Howard Taft, favored an economic approach. Called Dollar Diplomacy, it produced mixed results in Nicaragua, Mexico, and the Caribbean. President Woodrow Wilson publicly emphasized the nation’s traditional democratic mission in his Latin American policies, but in practice they resembled what had gone before. The situation in Mexico became so confused that the president eventually ordered the U.S. Army to conduct a punitive expedition, which brought both nations to the brink of full-scale war. U.S. predominance in the Western Hemisphere allowed the United States to be far more intrusive there than it was in the Far East. The center of interest was China, where Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan all vied for inﬂuence. In an effort to rein in

these ambitions, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay announced the Open Door Policy in 1899. It urged all foreign powers to preserve China’s territorial integrity and guarantee equal trading privileges to merchants from any nation. A few months after Hay distributed his Open Door Notes, the Boxer Rebellion swept China, endangering all foreigners living there and threatening to slam the door shut. By cooperating with other nations, the United States not only rescued its beleaguered citizens but also reafﬁrmed its commitment to the Open Door Policy. A few years later, the Russo-Japanese War jeopardized the balance of power that helped support that policy, so President Roosevelt agreed to coordinate the mediation of the conﬂict. When he took ofﬁce in 1909, President Taft decided to apply dollar diplomacy in China, developing what was called the “neutralization scheme,” to limit the economic inﬂuence that other nations exercised in China. Although the bulk of U.S. diplomatic action occurred in the Far East and in Latin America during this period, Americans kept a wary eye on Europe. In 1895, Secretary of State Richard Olney issued a brash, antiBritish statement. Interestingly enough, the Olney Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine ultimately improved relations between the United States and Great Britain. Over the next several years, a series of events, negotiations, and decisions led to a full-scale diplomatic rapprochement between the two countries. This warming of AngloAmerican relations proved to be of crucial importance when Europe imploded into what contemporaries called the Great War in 1914.

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 133

KEY CONCEPTS Algeciras President Theodore Roosevelt took great pride in superintending U.S. participation in a major international conference in the Spanish city of Algeciras in 1906. The chief topics discussed were economic and political relations with Morocco, a country perched on the northwest corner of Africa. Several European countries had developed substantial ﬁnancial and industrial interests in Morocco, and each had its own ideas about how the region should be managed. The U.S. representatives at the conference implemented policies that Roosevelt had formulated, often in ignorance of the European nations’ underlying ambitions and objectives. The United States therefore made a rather naïve debut as a great world power at Algeciras. The major European nations with interests in Morocco had agreed, at an international conference in Madrid in 1880, to an approach similar to what became the U.S. Open Door Policy in China. It permitted relatively free external exploitation of Morocco but did not prevent a number of nations from obtaining concessions for mining, trade, and other activities. No single foreign power exercised pervasive control in this formulation. While sorting out its many competing interests in Africa, Great Britain agreed in 1902 to recognize France’s sphere of inﬂuence in Morocco. France and Spain subsequently divvied up responsibilities in the Muslim region. In late 1904, the French government told Morocco’s sultan that it intended to make his realm a protectorate of France. Germany strongly objected to this imperialistic move and went so far as to send

the kaiser himself to visit Tangier to urge the local population to resist any restrictions on Moroccan independence. Germany simultaneously sought support and assistance from the United States. President Roosevelt seized upon the Moroccan Crisis as an opportunity to promote the open door principle. He therefore endorsed Germany’s 1905 call for an international conference to deal with the issues. This proposal made several other powers quite uncomfortable. Great Britain and France had recently formed a secret entente directed against Germany, and Italy had been holding conﬁdential talks with France in violation of her long-standing alliance with Germany. The conference proposal was so unpalatable to the French that it forced Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé to resign. The sultan responded positively to Germany’s suggestion, however, so all parties agreed to send representatives to Algeciras in southern Spain in early 1906. The kaiser’s government assured Roosevelt that it would follow his lead, but the president was primarily interested in gaining international support for an open door policy in Morocco. Which foreign power managed affairs in which part of Morocco was of little concern to him as long as all promised to support free trade throughout the region. Other nations were far more concerned about who would control the local police forces. In the Moroccan context, they included infantry, cavalry, and even artillery units, obviously more like armies than civilian peacekeeping organizations. Germany suggested that each interested foreign power be granted police authority in a particular region of Morocco. Roosevelt objected to that

134 | Section 3

approach, which he considered a ﬁrst step toward partition, which might swing the open door shut. After extended discussion and consultation, the conferees agreed to allow France predominance in four key cities, assign Spain similar authority in three others, and leave Casablanca as a neutral port. When Roosevelt agreed, Germany felt that it had no choice but to do so as well. The U.S. president’s foray into great power diplomacy in Europe demonstrated that he either was not aware of or misunderstood the deep currents that ﬂowed beneath the surface. For example, he did not realize that the German government had proposed the conference in part to help it assess just how close relations among the other powers had become. Only Austria, Germany’s longtime alliance partner, had voted in favor of the original German proposal. The kaiser’s government concluded that, except for the Austrian alliance, it had become diplomatically isolated. The outcome of the conference so damaged the credibility of Germany’s leading foreign policy expert, Friedrich von Holstein, that he lost his position of inﬂuence. Algeciras also convinced the kaiser’s government that Germany must immediately begin planning for the possibility of a two-front war in Europe. The presumption was that Great Britain, France, and her ally, Russia, would line up against Germany and Austria. Military strategists therefore devised the Schlieffen Plan in 1906, and it remained the basic blueprint for what Germany now increasingly saw as an inevitable European war. Modiﬁed and updated, the essentials of that plan were implemented in 1914, helping solidify the very alliance that Germany feared would attack it. Although President Woodrow

Wilson immediately exhorted his fellow Americans to remain neutral, his predecessor’s naïve behavior at Algeciras had deﬁnitely helped lay the groundwork for the Great War. See also: Great War; Neutrality (1914–1917) References

Anderson, Eugene N. The First Moroccan Crisis, 1904–1906. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930. Beale, Howard K. Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of American to World Power. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956. Hall, Luella J. The United States and Morocco, 1776–1956. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1971.

Anti-Imperialism Although expansionism was quite popular in the United States in the 1890s, a number of prominent individuals spoke out stridently against U.S. imperialism. Early in the decade, President Grover Cleveland’s anti-imperialism halted the annexation of Hawaii. The issue that drew the sharpest line between expansionism and its opponents, however, was President William McKinley’s decision to annex the Philippine Islands in 1898. It caused the formation of the Anti-Imperialist League, but the United States ultimately ignored its sentiments to create an overseas U.S. empire. Enthusiasm for what historians call the New Manifest Destiny reached a remarkable peak in the early 1890s. Many Americans believed that the United States was equally if not more qualiﬁed than European nations to manage an overseas empire. Which geographic regions might be included in a U.S. empire remained unclear at ﬁrst, but

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 135

President Grover Cleveland was so opposed to colonialism and imperialism that he withdrew a Hawaiian annexation treaty from the Senate in 1893. (Library of Congress)

when opportunities arose in Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines, expansionists eagerly advocated their annexation. Given the strong and deep support for expansionism, it may seem surprising that a six-year delay occurred between the ﬁrst attempt to annex the Hawaiian Islands and the ﬁnal U.S. takeover. To a large degree, the delay was a result of the very strong antiexpansionist views of Democrat Grover Cleveland. He was elected to his second presidential term in the fall of 1892, just as Republican president Benjamin Harrison’s administration was putting the ﬁnishing touches on a Hawaiian annexation package. But the lame-duck session of Congress early in 1893 failed to complete the process, giving Cleveland a free hand to reconsider or cancel the takeover.

Conservative and cautious, Cleveland had no intention of rushing annexation. He used delaying tactics, such as sending a special commissioner to the islands to evaluate sentiments on all sides. The more that he learned, the more the president became convinced that there was no justiﬁcation for U.S. annexation. He summed up his attitude by stating, “The mission of our nation is to build up and make a greater country out of what we have, instead of annexing islands” (Allen Nevins, The Letters of Grover Cleveland, 492). A major ﬁnancial panic and depression undermined Cleveland’s popularity and paved the way for a Republican victory in 1896. The new president, William McKinley, appeared to be a thoughtful conservative on foreign policy issues in the early months of his administration. For example, he did not push for immediate Hawaiian annexation, allowing it to be delayed until the Spanish-American War made it seem inevitable. That war developed out of a jingoist reaction to a rebellion in Cuba. Spain’s suppression of the rebel movement inﬂamed public opinion, and many leading Republicans called for the United States to “assist” the rebels in throwing off Spanish rule. More than any other individual, McKinley was responsible for reining in the enthusiastic War Hawks in his party, hoping that a diplomatic solution could be found. The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in February 1898 effectively overwhelmed McKinley’s ability to prevent U.S. entry into the conﬂict. Anti-imperialist attitudes remained signiﬁcant even so. Among the many Americans who did not favor the idea of the United States replacing Spain as Cuba’s colonial overlord was Colorado

136 | Section 3

senator Edward Teller. To reassure those who were uncomfortable with imperialism, he added a proviso to the war declaration in April 1898. The so-called Teller Amendment pledged that the United States would not annex Cuba when Spain was ousted. That promise helped persuade wavering legislators that they could safely vote to authorize war without simultaneously committing the nation to expansion. The war turned out to be too easy. Within a matter of weeks, the United States and the Cuban rebels succeeded in forcing a Spanish surrender in Cuba. Along the way, U.S. troops captured Spanish outposts, such as Puerto Rico and Guam, but they were such minor acquisitions that they failed to arouse the anti-imperialists. The Philippine Islands were quite another matter. Situated 7,000 miles away in the Eastern Hemisphere and containing a large, diverse population, the Philippines looked like just the kind of colony that England, France, and Germany had been adding to their overseas empires for several years. McKinley had not initially considered extending the war to the Philippines, but impulsive subordinates orchestrated a relatively swift and low-cost victory over Spain there as well. Armistices in Cuba and the Philippines halted combat in the Spanish-AmericanCuban War and set the stage for peace negotiations in Paris. McKinley stacked the U.S. delegation with expansionists, so he could hardly have been surprised when they advised the annexation of the Philippines. After conducting his own survey of domestic opinion, the president approved their recommendation. A number of rationalizations involving power vacuums and the U.S. sense of

mission were cited to justify his decision, but none of them convinced the anti-imperialists that annexation was a good idea. Opposition to the treaty crossed political party lines. One leading Republican anti-imperialist was Missouri senator George Vest. He introduced a resolution in December, shortly after the peace conference concluded, claiming that the federal government had no constitutional authority to annex distant lands. Another Republican, George Hoar of Massachusetts, later delivered the most impassioned anti-imperialist speech in the entire debate. Opposition to Philippine expansion spread well beyond Capitol Hill. The newly formed Anti-Imperialist League enrolled two former presidents, Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republican Benjamin Harrison; leading industrialist Andrew Carnegie; and literary giants Mark Twain and William Graham Sumner. Ironically, Sumner was the nation’s most outspoken exponent of the Social Darwinist philosophy that had motivated many to urge an expansion of U.S. inﬂuence around the world. Many of the arguments against annexation were frankly racist. They raised the specter of “little brown” people being given rights equal to those of white Anglo-Saxons. Filipinos were derided as incapable of comprehending the democratic process, a circumstance that would inevitably condemn them to remain second-class citizens at best or, worse yet, impoverished dependents who would drain away U.S. wealth. At the height of the Senate debate, Emilio Aguinaldo’s Filipino rebel force began ﬁghting against the U.S. troops occupying Manila. Thus began an incredibly bloody war that only ended when Aguinaldo himself was captured

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 137 two years later. Rather than aiding the anti-imperialist cause, however, the rebellion appears to have strengthened the resolve of annexationists, who portrayed the ﬁght as one between the forces of righteousness and the agents of disorder. The ﬁnal vote in the Senate in favor of the Treaty of Paris, which included the annexation provision, was 57 to 27, just one more than the twothirds majority required for ratiﬁcation. After this defeat, the anti-imperialist movement lost momentum. Bitter criticism of colonialism continued to appear from time to time, but the United States had clearly crossed a major threshold. It had seized control of an area that everyone, including the expansionists, knew would never be allowed to join the Union on an equal footing. At the same time, the United States was actually a latecomer to the Age of Imperialism that characterized the late 19th century. Perhaps, after all, the anti-imperialist strain in U.S. attitudes had helped prevent a broader, potentially much more dangerous expansionism than might otherwise have occurred. Although the term anti-imperialism is most closely identified with late 19th-century events, the broader concept that Americans should stay home and uninvolved overseas is a strong traditional undercurrent. Expressed in Washington’s Farewell Address, Jefferson’s Inaugural Address, and the Monroe Doctrine, it had become a familiar, widely accepted viewpoint long before the 1890s. It cropped up in 1914, helping keep the United States out of the Great War, and surged again in 1919, preventing the United States from joining the League of Nations. Particularly evident in the 1930s, it helped delay U.S. entry into World War II for some time. The

anti-imperialists of 1898 could thus take some comfort from the thought that they were acting in line with traditional U.S. foreign policy principles. See also: Cuban Rebellion; Jingoism; New Manifest Destiny References

Beisner, Robert L. Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900. Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1992. Dobson, John M. Reticent Expansionism: The Foreign Policy of William McKinley. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1988. Nevins, Allen, ed. The Letters of Grover Cleveland. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1933. Tompkins, E. Berkeley. Anti-Imperialism in the United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970.

Big Stick Speaking at the Minnesota State Fair a few days before an anarchist shot President William McKinley, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt quoted an old proverb: “Speak softly and carry a big stick and you will go far.” This concept seemed to sum up his approach to international relations when he took over as president. In practice, Roosevelt’s big-stick diplomacy meant being well prepared for conﬂict but working hard to avoid it. The approach was most evident in Latin American affairs. Ironically, the ﬁrst major application of big-stick diplomacy in 1902 did not involve direct U.S. participation. Venezuelan leader Cipriano Castro borrowed heavily from foreign sources but failed to develop a plan to repay the loans. The German ambassador in Washington told President Roosevelt that his nation intended to stage a naval

138 | Section 3

demonstration to convince Venezuela to fulﬁll its ﬁnancial obligations. Great Britain and Italy joined the demonstration in December 1902, and the combined European naval task force sank several of Venezuela’s gunboats and blockaded its Caribbean ports. Throughout the incident, the Roosevelt administration urged Castro to submit the issue to arbitration, a move that eventually ended the naval confrontation. Although Roosevelt’s “soft speaking” helped resolve the problem, even more important was the presence of a sizeable U.S. Navy ﬂeet maneuvering off the nearby Puerto Rican coast. Publicized as a peacetime war game, the

presence of a U.S. ﬂotilla that far outclassed the small European force helped convince all sides to settle their differences peaceably. Shortly afterward, Roosevelt played a leading role in initiating the building of a canal across Panama. Here again, U.S. naval vessels strategically located at both ends of the projected canal route encouraged Panamanian rebels to throw off Colombian control. Once the United States had concluded a canal treaty with Panama and begun constructing the canal, the U.S. president took a keen interest in promoting stability in the Caribbean and resisting any encroachment from European nations that might

This cover of Harper’s Weekly dated February 3, 1906, graphically illustrates President Theodore Roosevelt’s adage about speaking softly but carrying a “big stick,” while striding through the Caribbean. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 139 threaten U.S. control of the projected waterway. That concern encouraged a very active U.S. response when another nation stumbled into ﬁnancial difﬁculties. Like Venezuela, the Dominican Republic became mired in foreign debts that it had no means to repay. A U.S. company responded by forcing the government through arbitration. It resulted in the appointment of a U.S. agent to take over a Dominican customs house to collect what the company was owed. European creditors objected to this apparent favoritism and threatened to send naval vessels to pressure the government. Roosevelt would have none of it. He was now committed to preventing actions that might threaten the territorial integrity of any Western Hemisphere nation, and he had the naval resources to impose his will. Instead of deploying this big stick, however, he employed astute diplomacy to reduce tensions. Using the recent arbitration arrangements and the long-standing Imperial Chinese Customs Service as models, he developed a customs protocol for the Dominican Republic. Under it, U.S. experts organized and administered a service that collected all customs revenue and routinely diverted 45 percent of the proceeds to a fund that was earmarked to pay off outstanding debts. The service was far more efﬁcient than what it replaced, so that, even after the set-aside, the Dominican government received more revenue than it had previously. The president drew plenty of criticism for his unilateral action. Senators in particular objected to his failure to seek their advice before setting his plan in motion. In his defense, Roosevelt issued

a number of statements, the most memorable of which became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It stressed that the United States had no territorial ambitions that might threaten existing Latin American nations. If those nations behaved properly, they need have no fear of U.S. intervention. But if they failed to act prudently and honestly, the United States might be forced to exercise “an international police power.” Roosevelt’s message was designed to prevent European nations from taking matters into their own hands; at the same time, it put other Western Hemisphere governments on notice that they should behave in accordance with U.S. perceptions of probity and democratic government. Unfortunately, the ﬁrst nation that failed to live up to these standards was Cuba. The government of President Tomás Estrada Palma roused opposition for allegedly ﬁxing elections, leading to widespread instability. Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Elihu Root, reluctantly dispatched U.S. troops to Cuba, where they remained for some time. To restore tranquility, Roosevelt encouraged the establishment of a professional customs service that was similar to the one that he had advocated for the Dominican Republic. His administration also acceded to many of the reasonable demands of those who had objected to Palma’s government, allowing the troops to withdraw in 1909. Fortunately, the U.S. assertions of authority and interventions in Latin America were accomplished without bloodshed, exemplifying the “softspeaking” aspect of Roosevelt’s bigstick diplomacy. The president pursued a similar course in the Far East, but he eventually resorted to a dramatic show of

140 | Section 3

ROOSEVELT COROLLARY TO THE MONROE DOCTRINE [Annual Message to Congress: December 6, 1904] It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efﬁciency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in ﬂagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt Amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all question of interference by this Nation with their affairs would be at an end. Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical. They have great natural riches, and if within their borders the reign of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure to come to them. While they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. It is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America or anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence, must ultimately realize that the right of such independence can not be separated from the responsibility of making good use of it. Source: Richardson, J. D., ed. Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1917, 15:6923–6924.

force late in his term in a campaign to relieve U.S.–Japanese tensions. The trouble was due in part to the Japanese government’s blaming the U.S. president for its failure to achieve some of its diplomatic objectives after Roosevelt mediated an end to the RussoJapanese War. Relations soon worsened when California school boards prevented Japanese immigrants from attending

classes. Unable to alter local education practices, Roosevelt tried to reduce Japanese hostility by working out a convoluted arrangement referred to as the Gentlemen’s Agreement. It promised that the United States would impose no legal restrictions on immigration from Japan provided the Japanese government denied its citizens the right to leave for the United States.

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 141 Meanwhile, high-level negotiations produced two diplomatic agreements. In the 1904 Taft-Katsura Agreement, both nations agreed to respect each other’s rights in their respective areas of inﬂuence: Japan’s in Korea and those of the United States in its colony of the Philippines. Four years later Secretary of State Elihu Root confirmed these pledges in his talks with Japanese minister Kogoro Takahira. The actions of the American battleship fleet significantly strengthened Root’s diplomatic position. With tensions between Japan and the United States rising, President Roosevelt decided to wield the biggest stick at his disposal. The United States had recently completed construction of 16 ﬁrst-class battleships, the heart of what was then the second largest modern navy in the world. Over objections from cooler heads, the president personally ordered this fleet to steam across the Paciﬁc. Its arrival in Japan had exactly the effect that Roosevelt anticipated. Overnight, the Japanese government became far more willing to emphasize diplomacy. Of course, another important consequence of this dramatic show of force was that it convinced Japan that it, too, should massively increase its own naval power. The U.S. ﬂeet anchored at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 received a long-delayed payback for Roosevelt’s impulsive action. At the time, however, the dramatic 42,000-mile, round-the-world cruise of the U.S. battleship ﬂeet convincingly demonstrated that the United States possessed a very big stick indeed to support its foreign policy initiatives. Roosevelt’s successors were far less adept than he had been at backing thoughtful diplo-

macy with the implication—but not the application—of force. Whether it was William Howard Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy or Woodrow Wilson’s fumbling response to the Mexican Revolution, both resorted to the direct use of U.S. military combat, a policy that Roosevelt had avoided. See also: Cuban Rebellion; Dollar Diplomacy; Panama; Platt Amendment References

Beale, Howard K. Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power. New York: Collier Books, 1962. Dobson, John M. America’s Ascent: The United States Becomes a Great Power, 1880–1914. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1978. Healy, David F. Drive to Hegemony: The United States in the Caribbean, 1898–1917. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

Boxer Rebellion In 1900, the United States participated in an international military expedition to put down the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxers were virulently antiforeign rebels who were intent on cleansing China of all outside inﬂuences. Although relatively short-lived, the Boxer Rebellion seriously threatened not only the lives of Americans and other foreigners in China but also the Open Door Policy that the United States had successfully promulgated only a few months earlier. In Chinese, the word tuan referred to a militia-style band, one of many that had existed for centuries. The late 19th century saw the rise of the I-ho Tuan, the “Righteous and Harmonious Band,” dedicated to eliminating foreign intervention in China. Someone deliberately or mistakenly substituted the word

142 | Section 3

chaun or “ﬁst” when reporting on the group, so it became known around the world as the Society of Harmonious Fists, or the Boxers for short. By 1900, the group had grown quite large, and it had tacit support from China’s imperial government. The rebels routinely attacked or assaulted Christian converts and some foreigners, but world attention focused on the Boxers when one of them fatally shot Baron von Kettler, the German minister in Beijing. Foreign governments scrambled to develop a response, and they quickly concluded that military action was necessary. President William McKinley’s secretary of state, John Hay, found himself in a very awkward position. The U.S. minister in China, Edwin H. Conger, pleaded for permission to collaborate with his diplomatic peers in opposing the Boxers. But Hay had just announced the Open Door Policy, which proposed limitations on the actions that foreign nations could or should take in China. Moreover, Hay was acutely aware of his nation’s century-old tradition of maintaining an independent foreign policy. In his view, this ruled out any alliance, even an informal one. When the Boxers surrounded the Legation Quarter in Beijing, Conger decided that he had to act. He ordered his staff and the other U.S. citizens in the area to join the refugees from several nations who were seeking protection within the well-fortiﬁed British compound. The group included a contingent of U.S. Marines who had earlier been sent ashore to protect U.S. lives and property. Abruptly, all communication between those huddled in the compound and the outside world was cut off. No one knew whether the refugees survived or had been killed by rampaging Boxers.

In a desperate attempt to protect his Open Door Policy, Hay obtained McKinley’s approval to send a second round of notes to the major powers. It reiterated the principle of the open door—unlimited trading opportunities for all throughout China—but it also insisted that, no matter what occurred inside the country, China’s territorial integrity must be preserved. The U.S. hope was that no other country would use the Boxer disturbances as an excuse to impose colonial control over any part of China. To Hay’s relief, jealousy and suspicion of their competitors’ motives helped convince the other powers to accept this expanded statement of the U.S. policy. No diplomatic posturing would have been effective had the United States failed to participate in the subsequent military engagement. U.S. armed forces were already in the vicinity, locked in a bitter guerilla war in the Philippines. Field commanders there naturally opposed any diversion of soldiers to China, but President McKinley decided to authorize the deployment of as many as 10,000 U.S. troops to collaborate with an international force assembling to rescue the besieged diplomats and their charges. In the end, only 2,500 Americans joined the relief force that assembled at the port city of Tientsin in July 1900. They joined 2,500 troops from Great Britain, 4,000 from Russia, and more than 8,000 from nearby Japan. On August 14, the relief column fought its way into Beijing and found that the embattled British compound had survived with relatively few casualties. Minister Conger reported that only seven U.S. Marines had died during the 55-day siege. The relatively speedy success of the relief force meant that Germany’s

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 143 contingent had not even arrived by the time the refugees were rescued. The military achievement in no way resolved the complexities of the Boxer Rebellion. Conger insisted that the imperial government was largely to blame for the rebels’ actions. Many members of that government, however, including China’s minister in Washington, Wu Ting Fang, had worked hard to maintain good relations with outsiders. Ambiguities in the levels of ofﬁcial support for the rebellion helped Hay prevent additional, perhaps even more draconian, punishment of the imperial government. Indeed, the threat to U.S. interests from the other powers often seemed more serious than China’s behavior. For example, Russia suggested that all foreign troops be withdrawn immediately after the relief expedition succeeded, a move that would strengthen Russia’s position in the northern province of Manchuria. Apparently even Hay and McKinley toyed with the idea of cutting off a slice of China for the United States during the rebellion’s confusing aftermath. Fortunately, England and Germany announced a joint agreement that would, in essence, preserve open-door privileges within their spheres of interest, strengthening the preferred position of the United States. Because of the Chinese government’s complicity in the rebellion, however, 10 foreign governments demanded compensation. Veteran U.S. diplomat William W. Rockhill represented his country at the meetings convened to assess costs. Throughout the deliberations, the United States favored restraint, hoping to keep the ﬁnal reckoning low enough to prevent the bankruptcy of the imperial government. The

resulting Boxer indemnities for all nations totaled $333 million, of which the U.S. share amounted to $25 million. Despite the size of the ﬁnal ﬁgure, Hay considered the result to be a victory because the cost was less than half of what had originally been demanded. The United States set aside much of its share to pay educational expenses for Chinese citizens who were studying in the United States. This gesture helped reinforce the generally positive relationship between the two nations. Although the Boxer Rebellion was hardly a major world event, it fundamentally altered the U.S. position in the Far East. Participation in the military engagements boosted U.S. status as a world power. And, because each nation’s troops remained under the command of its own ofﬁcers, the United States preserved its traditional independence of action. Most important of all, the United States remained committed to—and had successfully defended—the territorial integrity of China, a fundamental tenet of U.S. policy in the Far East. See also: Open Door Policy References

Hunt, Michael H. The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Varg, Paul A. Open Door Diplomat: The Life of W. W. Rockhill. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952. Young, Marilyn Blatt. The Rhetoric of Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Cuban Rebellion The rebellion that broke out in Cuba in 1895 quickly became something of a

144 | Section 3

fixation for Americans, particularly those interested in foreign relations. Several of its characteristics seemed tailor-made to match long-standing U.S. traditions and recent international ambitions. For example, it took place in the Western Hemisphere, which the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and subsequent corollaries had proclaimed a U.S. responsibility. The rebellion’s declared goal of throwing off autocratic Spanish colonial control meshed well with the longstanding U.S. dedication to pursing a democratic mission. Perhaps most important, however, the rebellion offered increasingly selfrighteous exponents of expansionism an opportunity to act on their beliefs. For these so-called jingoes, who advocated a bold, militaristic response to external troubles, the rebellion emerged as an ideal excuse for implementing their belligerent philosophy. Almost heedless of the responsibilities and dangers that it might entail, many Americans increasingly called for a bold and definitive response to the tragedy unfolding just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Although Cuba was the most loyal and long-lasting of Spain’s major colonies in the Western Hemisphere, it was a troubled land. A bloody rebellion between 1868 and 1878 ended only when Spain promised to introduce reforms, including abolishing slavery. Thousands of disappointed rebels immigrated to the United States, where they maintained a steady drumbeat of opposition to Spanish control. The Cuban Junta in New York was the most active element in the effort to keep the revolutionary pot boiling. U.S. economic policy played into the junta’s hands. In 1890, the McKinley

Tariff Act canceled the U.S. duty on imported sugar. Overnight, the Cuban economy prospered as it never had before. U.S. investment poured in, plantations and mills became highly profitable, and at least some of the wealth generated percolated down to the peasants who labored in them. But a business panic in 1893, followed by a depression in the United States, damaged Cuba’s economy. The ﬁnal blow was the reimposition of a sugar tariff in 1894. CubanAmerican exiles exploited the resulting disillusionment to mount a new, anticolonial drive. In 1895, Cuban exile José Marti led an armed group from the United States back to Cuba, only to become one of the first martyrs in the rebellion. The junta in New York actively publicized the efforts of those whom it portrayed as patriots fighting for democracy and independence. These themes resonated with the U.S. public, and newspapers often reprinted junta press releases without checking facts or sources. Two newspapers went even further. Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal were engaged in a circulation war. To boost its sales, each paper printed increasingly sensational stories about the conﬂict in Cuba. Many of these highlighted Spanish “atrocities,” and there was more than a grain of truth behind these allegations. The Spanish governor-general, Valeriano Weyler, instituted a policy that forced tens of thousands of rural peasants, or reconcentrados, into concentration camps, to make it easier for his soldiers to comb guerilla ﬁghters out of the depopulated countryside. Unfortunately, thousands of reconcentrados died of malnutrition

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 145 and disease in the poorly managed camps. Even as sensational journalism was generating public sympathy for the rebels, the federal government pursued a restrained policy. Democratic president Grover Cleveland and his Republican successor, William McKinley, had no desire to lead the United States into war. Both pressured the Spanish government to ﬁnd a peaceful solution. By 1897, however, McKinley had become convinced that only independence for Cuba would end the conﬂict, so he pushed Spain even harder to accept that eventuality. No one will ever know whether McKinley’s strategy would have succeeded in the long run, because two dramatic incidents in February 1898 signiﬁcantly undermined the president’s ability to combat the jingoist pressures on him. The ﬁrst was the New York World’s publication of a private letter

that the Spanish minister to the United States, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, had written to a friend in Havana. It implied that McKinley was weak willed and indecisive. Americans considered the de Lôme letter to be an unacceptable insult to their leader. The emotional response to the letter had hardly dissipated when, a week later on February 15, the USS Maine blew up and sank in Havana Harbor. A second-class battleship, the Maine had been dispatched to Cuba ostensibly to provide protection for U.S. citizens residing there. During the three weeks that it had remained docked in Havana, no violence or other trouble occurred. Although a contemporary naval board of inquiry blamed an external mine or torpedo for causing the explosion, it now appears that spontaneous combustion in a coal bunker in the ship’s hold ignited an adjacent powder magazine.

The explosion and sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, made an American declaration of war against Spain virtually inevitable. (Marine Corps Art Collection)

146 | Section 3

As a practical matter, the actual cause of the explosion was irrelevant. It killed more than 260 ofﬁcers and men and made “Remember the Maine” the nation’s battle cry. It was a “ﬁrst shot” that justiﬁed a resort to war. Even so, McKinley delayed deﬁnitive action for several weeks in the faint hope that Spain would free Cuba. That hope had faded by early April, so he sent a war message to Congress. Both houses approved a declaration of war on April 25, 1898. The stated objective of the war was to free Cuba from Spanish control, and the resolution included the so-called Teller Amendment, which promised that the United States would not make Cuba a colony of its own. That pledge provided some reassurance to the Cuban rebels, who had neither anticipated nor wanted direct U.S. interference in their independence campaign. So it was that the United States joyously marched off to war. Fortunately, the material and human costs of the Spanish-American-Cuban War that ensued were remarkably low. The conﬂict not only gave the jingoes a chance to demonstrate their manly resolve, but it transformed the United States from a minor player into a major world power. See also: Jingoism; Mission; New Manifest Destiny; Spanish-American-Cuban War; Teller, Henry Moore References

Crompton, Samuel Willard. The Sinking of the USS Maine: Declaring War against Spain. New York: Chelsea House, 2008. Dobson, John M. Reticent Expansionism: The Foreign Policy of William McKinley. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1988. Morgan, H. Wayne. America’s Road to Empire: The War with Spain and Overseas Empire. New York: Wiley, 1965.

O’Toole, G. J. A. The Spanish War: An American Epic: 1898. New York: Norton, 1984.

Dollar Diplomacy President William Howard Taft’s interventionist policy earned the somewhat unﬂattering title of Dollar Diplomacy. Although it often included the creditable goal of helping poorer nations manage their economies, many in Latin America and elsewhere saw it as chieﬂy a mechanism for extending U.S. authority and inﬂuence. Dollar Diplomacy therefore often simply seemed to be a variation of what its recipients traditionally viewed as “Yankee imperialism.” No one could deny that persistent economic difﬁculties plagued various Latin American nations. President Theodore Roosevelt had grappled with such problems, both in Cuba and in the Dominican Republic. In both cases, the United States helped install professional customs collection mechanisms that funneled more of each nation’s tariff revenues to its central government. Roosevelt viewed the Dominican Customs Protocol as one of the signal achievements of his administration’s foreign policies. At the same time, Roosevelt attempted to downplay U.S. responsibility by working closely with the Mexican government of President Porﬁrio Díaz. In 1906, the two countries offered their good offices to Mexico’s southern neighbors, hoping to promote stability in Central America. A positive outcome of this initiative was the establishment of the Central American Court of International Justice to handle disputes in a less confrontational setting.

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 147 José Santos Zelaya, the combative president of Nicaragua, strenuously objected to this “outside” interference. He nursed an ambition to extend his control over other Central American nations—by force if necessary, a goal that the United States certainly did not support. In addition to blaming the U.S. government for interfering with his plans, Zelaya also objected to the inﬂuence that U.S. businessmen exercised in his country. This all came to a head in 1909, with the outbreak of a rebellion centered in the coastal city of Blueﬁelds. Zelaya blamed U.S. ﬁnanciers for provoking

this disturbance, a claim that seemed justiﬁed when his troops captured two U.S. citizens that the rebels had hired to lay dynamite. These two men were summarily executed, causing the administration of the newly installed President Taft to break relations with Zelaya’s government and order U.S. Marines to land at Blueﬁelds, ostensibly to protect U.S. lives and property. The U.S. intervention was a crucial factor in the subsequent overthrow of Zelaya’s government. At that point, Secretary of State Philander C. Knox took the lead in formulating the policy that became known as Dollar Diplomacy. The ﬁrst step was

PRESIDENT TAFT DEFINES DOLLAR DIPLOMACY [Annual Message to Congress: December 1912] . . . The diplomacy of the present administration has sought to respond to modern ideas of commercial intercourse. This policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets. It is one that appeals alike to idealistic humanitarian sentiments, to the dictates of sound policy and strategy, and to legitimate commercial aims. It is an effort frankly directed to the increase of American trade upon the axiomatic principle that the government of the United States shall extend all proper support to every legitimate and beneﬁcial American enterprise abroad. How great have been the results of this diplomacy, coupled with the maximum and minimum provision of the Tariff Law, will be seen by some consideration of the wonderful increase in the export trade of the United States. Because modern diplomacy is commercial, there has been a disposition in some quarters to attribute to it none but materialistic aims. How strikingly erroneous is such an impression may be seen from a study of the results by which the diplomacy of the United States can be judged. . . . It is not possible to make to the Congress a communication upon the present foreign relations of the United States so detailed as to convey an adequate impression of the enormous increase in the importance and activities of those relations. If this government is really to preserve to the American people that free opportunity in foreign markets which will soon be indispensable to our prosperity, even greater efforts must be made. Otherwise the American merchant, manufacturer, and exporter will ﬁnd many a ﬁeld in which American trade should logically predominate preempted through the more energetic efforts of other governments and other commercial nations. Source: Richardson, J. D., ed. Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1917, 17:7364–7365.

148 | Section 3

to ensure that the new Nicaraguan government was sympathetic to U.S. interests. That was accomplished with the installation of President Adolfo Díaz, who had earlier been employed by a U.S. company. Díaz and his minister in Washington, Salvador Castrillo, were more than receptive to U.S. overtures, especially because the survival of their regime seemed reliant on a continuing U.S. presence. Hardly a disinterested observer, Knox had interests in companies operating in Nicaragua. To reassure U.S. investors, he negotiated a bilateral agreement that was designed to shore up the Díaz government by establishing a Dominican-style customs service. It also promised a U.S. government-guaranteed loan to further strengthen the relationship. Signed in 1911, the Knox-Castrillo Convention failed to win ratiﬁcation from the U.S. Senate, forcing Knox to seek private investment funding from U.S. ﬁnanciers. Worse still, the convention provoked a groundswell of opposition in Nicaragua, where many saw it as a sellout to the United States. President Díaz requested U.S. assistance, and, in 1912, 2,700 U.S. Marines arrived. With only a minor break, U.S. troops maintained a presence in Nicaragua for the next 20 years. Frustrated by the Senate’s attitude, Knox cited another justiﬁcation for his policies. He argued that a European power might gain control over a possible Nicaraguan canal route and use it to compete with the Panama Canal, which was currently being constructed with U.S. funds. He urged broader U.S. investment in the country as a way to drive out or reduce the inﬂuence of other nations, particularly Great Britain. In 1912, Knox negotiated a new agreement with the Díaz government, in which the

United States would pay $3 million for an exclusive U.S. right to any potential canal route. Again, the Senate refused to ratify this arrangement. When Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913, he abandoned the Dollar Diplomacy rhetoric. Although neither he nor his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, had any interest in Nicaraguan investment opportunities, they were sensitive about the canal route. In 1914, therefore, Bryan negotiated another agreement with Nicaraguan general Emiliano Chamorro, which would give the canal rights to the United States. In addition to a $3 million grant, the Bryan-Chamorro Agreement included several provisions that were reminiscent of the Platt Amendment governing U.S.–Cuban relations. It would treat Nicaragua as a sort of protectorate of the United States. Once again, the Senate balked, only to grant approval in 1916, in the midst of World War I. Although Nicaragua was the main focus of Latin American Dollar Diplomacy, similar initiatives—involving either private or government investment to promote stability—occurred in other Central American and Caribbean nations. And, as in Nicaragua, despite President Wilson’s discomfort with such capitalistic moves, many of his policies resembled those of his predecessor. For example, he sent U.S. troops and promoted ﬁnancial and political initiatives in both the Dominican Republic and its neighbor Haiti to restore stability during the war years. To a degree, much of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century resembled a direct or indirect application of Dollar Diplomacy. Even though the so-called neutralization scheme that Knox had developed for China failed, a form of

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 149 Dollar Diplomacy continued to play a major role in Sino–U.S. relations right through the 1930s. A far more dramatic example was the Marshall Plan of the late 1940s. It may have been couched in noble, philanthropic language, but it had much the same goal as Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy: to stabilize economies and governments, in this instance in Europe, through the infusion of massive numbers of U.S. dollars. See also: Big Neutralization

Stick;

Marshall

Plan;

References

Coerver, Don M., and Linda B. Hall. Tangled Destinies: Latin America and the United States. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Coletta, Paolo E. The Presidency of William Howard Taft. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973. Scholes, Walter V., and Marie V. Scholes. The Foreign Policies of the Taft Administration. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970.

Gunboat Diplomacy Using a navy in pursuit of foreign policy goals is sometimes called gunboat diplomacy. The United States was hardly unique in resorting to gunboat diplomacy. Great Britain’s Royal Navy was the world’s largest in the 19th century, and its ofﬁcers and men often provoked or reacted to overseas events. The United States maintained a far smaller peacetime ﬂeet, and, in line with the nation’s more limited foreign policy desires, it operated on a more circumscribed scope. As the century drew to a close, however, Americans began constructing modern, all-steel, steam-powered warships that enhanced the ability of the United States to engage in gunboat diplomacy.

Fighting the Barbary pirates after the Revolutionary War is an early example of gunboat diplomacy. The goal was to prevent corsairs lurking along the African coast of the Mediterranean Sea from seizing U.S. merchant ships. U.S. naval vessels patrolled the area, either to scare off or capture pirates. Onshore, consular ofﬁcers tried to convince local ofﬁcials to restrain attacks on commercial vessels. The Barbary Wars did eventually reduce the threat to U.S. trade. As in the Barbary Wars, a desire to protect commerce motivated many other U.S. naval exercises in the early years. Sometimes, the exercises went well beyond passive demonstrations. Commodore Matthew Perry used his small squadron to intimidate the Japanese in 1854. He threatened to return with 100 ships if the government failed to negotiate. It was an empty threat, of course, but Perry’s skill as an envoy and Japan’s growing willingness to open its doors to the outside world precluded a more bellicose confrontation. Gunboat diplomacy continued after the American Civil War. One example involved Samaná Bay on the Dominican side of the island of Hispaniola. President Ulysses Grant authorized his diplomatic agent, Orville Babcock, to issue orders to the captains of U.S. Navy vessels standing off shore. None of that ultimately mattered, however, because Grant’s pet project of colonizing Santo Domingo ran into stiff congressional opposition back home. Samoa became the target of gunboat diplomacy involving three nations. When the U.S. Navy’s Exploratory Expedition stopped at the island of Tutuila in 1839, its commander, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, wrote enthusiastically about its protected harbor at Pago Pago.

150 | Section 3

In succeeding years, various U.S. agents worked with local leaders to promote U.S. trade in the Samoan archipelago. Although some Americans made their home on the islands, they were greatly outnumbered by German settlers, who soon controlled most of the productive lands. In 1878, Samoan leaders eagerly signed a treaty with the resident U.S. consul, granting his country the right to establish a coaling station at Pago Pago. In return, the United States was expected to prevent a hostile European takeover. Although the agreement was never ratified, it remained the basis for U.S.–Samoan relations into the 1880s. In 1884, Germany’s chancellor Otto von Bismarck reluctantly agreed to overseas colonization. With its comparatively large German population, Samoa became a prime objective. At the urging of the native government, U.S. secretary of state Thomas F. Bayard called for an international conference to negotiate an agreement that would be satisfactory to all parties. Germany’s delegation demanded partition or even total control, so the conference ended inconclusively. The breakdown of talks opened the door for aggressive gunboat diplomacy. The United States sent three ships, Germany dispatched three of its own, and they all joined the Royal Navy’s HMS Calliope in Pago Pago’s now very crowded harbor. The warships’ crews were preparing for possible combat, when a terriﬁc cyclone swept the archipelago. The Calliope managed to get up steam and reach safer waters in the open ocean, but the storm sank or grounded the other six ships with considerable loss of life. The potential conﬂict gave way to an international rescue effort. With the gunboats out of commission, diplomats decided to make one more

effort. Meeting in Berlin in 1889, they worked out a tripartite governing scheme, which remained in force for 10 years. In the wake of U.S. colonization of both Hawaii and the Philippines in 1899, the United States agreed to a partition arrangement that gave it complete control over eastern Samoa. The desire for a U.S. coaling station there was one of many similar ambitions. U.S. Navy captain Alfred Thayer Mahan published his famous book, The Inﬂuence of Seapower on History, in 1890. Among many other forward-looking ideas, Mahan championed the idea of establishing coaling stations around the world. These could encourage U.S. trade while providing the navy with convenient fuel depots. Some coaling stations were established with minimal political complications. Others could be seen, as in Samoa, as preliminary steps toward colonization. The Hawaiian Kingdom is a case in point. In 1887, it granted the United States the right to maintain a naval base at Pearl Harbor in exchange for reciprocal trade policies that canceled the U.S. duty on sugar imports from Hawaii. This arrangement did not prevent economic and political turmoil from reaching a peak ﬁve years later. U.S. consul-general John L. Stevens in Honolulu exploited gunboat diplomacy to aid an Americanborn group of planters attempting to depose Hawaiian queen Liliuokalani. Stevens ordered the U.S. Navy captains moored in Pearl Harbor to send their sailors and marines ashore to promote “public safety.” The naval force helped install a provisional government, which worked out an annexation treaty with the United States some ﬁve years later. Although the rebellion engulﬁng Cuba in 1898 had far different causes, the

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 151 United States did send a rather impressive gunboat into Havana Harbor. The USS Maine was a 6,500-ton second-class battleship, and its arrival deﬁnitely impressed the Spanish authorities. The underlying motive for sending the ship to the embattled capital was to protect U.S. citizens residing there. Ironically, although they never suffered any threat, the ship itself exploded and sank, killing more than 260 ofﬁcers and crew. That tragedy helped convince the United States to declare war on Spain a few weeks later. As the case of the Maine illustrates, naval deployments could have unexpected consequences. Commodore George Dewey found himself on the wrong end of gunboat diplomacy shortly after his small squadron destroyed the Spanish ﬂeet in Manila Bay in May 1898. His one-sided victory created a potential power vacuum in the Philippines, one that quickly attracted naval forces from both Germany and Great Britain. At one point, Dewey signaled to his superiors that the German ﬂeet anchored in the bay far outclassed his own modest squadron. If the United States did not assume colonial control of the area, Dewey implied, the Germans were well equipped to move in on their own. The possibility of a German takeover of the Philippines helped motivate the U.S. government to demand that Spain relinquish control of its colony to the United States. Gunboat diplomacy spilled over into the 20th century. German and British ships staged a naval demonstration off the coast of Venezuela in 1902 that convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to boost U.S. inﬂuence in the Caribbean. U.S. warships just happened to be anchored off Panama City and Colón, on the opposite sides of the isthmus, when

the Panamanian Revolution broke out in 1903. President Woodrow Wilson’s intrusive policy during the Mexican Revolution reached a peak when U.S. naval vessels captured the port of Vera Cruz in 1914. In different forms, and often with unanticipated outcomes, gunboat diplomacy continues to occur. For example, the United States has maintained a major war ﬂeet, including aircraft carriers, in the Persian Gulf for many years. In addition to supporting coalition troops in Iraq, they present a continuing challenge to Iran. One can only hope that these provocative gestures will ultimately have beneﬁcial diplomatic outcomes. See also: Dewey, George; Hawaii; SpanishAmerican-Cuban War References

Dobson, John M. America’s Ascent: The United States Becomes a Great Power, 1880–1914. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1978. Hagan, Kenneth J. The People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power. New York: Free Press, 1991. Kennedy, Paul. The Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-German-American Relations, 1878–1900. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974. Long, David F. Gold Braid and Foreign Relations: Diplomatic Activities of U.S. Naval Ofﬁcers, 1798–1883. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988.

Hawaii Despite their remote location some 2,000 miles off the West Coast of North America, the Hawaiian Islands became an early focus of U.S. expansionism. Between 1838 and 1842, the naval exploratory mission led by Charles Wilkes visited Hawaii several times.

152 | Section 3

Glowing descriptions of the archipelago in his reports stimulated both missionary and commercial interest. As early as the 1850s, expansion-minded Americans were calling for the United States to annex the islands, but almost half a century passed before that goal was achieved. No other region better illustrates the struggle between enthusiastic expansionists and equally determined anti-imperialists. Some of this equivocation stemmed from the uniqueness of Hawaii itself. Native Polynesians had established a kingdom on the islands and had lived there for generations. When U.S. missionaries arrived in substantial numbers in the 1840s and 1850s, many of them settled there and abandoned proselytizing for farming. Pineapples, sugar, and other tropical crops ﬂourished. Whereas the Hawaiians had owned only small tracts of land, enterprising Americans acquired large tracts to manage as plantations. To perform the grueling ﬁeld work on their estates, they hired Chinese and Japanese immigrants. By 1890, the island boasted a highly diversified population consisting of only about 2,000 Americans, some 40,000 native Hawaiians, 30,000 Asian immigrants, and 9,000 others, largely of Portuguese and other European extraction. Despite their relatively small number, Americans controlled the economy and employed thousands of others. The government technically remained in the hands of the native Hawaiians, but King Kalakaua clearly acknowledged the inﬂuence of those from the U.S. mainland. For example, he personally traveled to Washington to negotiate improved trade relations with the United States. The key feature of these arrangements was reciprocity. Both the United States

and the Hawaiian Kingdom agreed to grant each other favorable trade opportunities, the most important of these being tax-free U.S. importation of Hawaiian sugar. The most important concession from the other side was an 1887 agreement to grant the United States an exclusive right to establish a naval base at Pearl Harbor. Early in the next decade, these mutually beneﬁcial relationships suffered two shocks. The ﬁrst was passage of the McKinley Tariff by the U.S. Congress. It put sugar on the free list, wiping out the reciprocity advantage that Hawaiian sugar had enjoyed. To subsidize U.S. sugar producers, Congress created a 2-cent-per-pound bounty to offset

Initially portrayed in the American press as delicate and gentle, Hawaiian queen Liliuokalani was such a dedicated and forceful advocate of native rights that an American-led cabal deposed her in 1893, setting the stage for the subsequent annexation of the islands to the United States. (Hawaiian Historical Society)

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 153 their higher production costs. Hawaiian sugar growers were now motivated to seek annexation to the United States in order to take advantage of the bounty. The second shock was the death of King Kalakaua and the ascendance of Queen Liliuokalani. Determined to restore unadulterated native Hawaiian rule, she revoked the constitution that had beneﬁted the U.S. planters. They responded by forming a Committee of Public Safety, which, with the assistance of conveniently deployed U.S. sailors and marines, wrested control from the queen. The committee then reformulated itself into a provisional government, with Sanford Dole as its president and immediate annexation to the United States as its primary objective. President Benjamin Harrison’s administration was keenly interested in accomplishing that goal. Secretary of State John Foster met with a delegation from the provisional government in February 1893 to draft an annexation treaty. It languished in the lame-duck Senate, however, in part because of the strong anti-imperialist sentiments of some prominent Republicans. The issue thus remained unsettled when Democrat Grover Cleveland, a dedicated anti-expansionist, became president again early in 1893. On the advice of his cabinet, Cleveland withdrew the treaty from Senate consideration. Many expected him to modify a few of its provisions and resubmit it as his own, but they underestimated just how opposed the president was to overseas expansion. Instead, he sent James H. Blount, a retired Georgia congressman who had headed the House Foreign Relations Committee, to Hawaii to investigate. Blount quickly learned that Klaus Spreckles, head of the American Sugar Refining Trust, was a major

behind-the-scenes proponent of annexation. In return for his support, the Hawaiian planters had agreed to give his trust half of any bounty that they might receive after annexation. As news of these ﬁndings leaked out, enthusiasm for annexation waned. That left the Cleveland administration with the awkward problem of how to proceed. It ﬁnally decided that it should undo the results of the revolution and restore the queen. The new U.S. consulgeneral in Honolulu, Albert S. Willis, was instructed to obtain a pledge from the deposed monarch that she would not retaliate against the rebellion’s leaders. In his ﬁrst interview with Liliuokalani, however, she stated her intention to impose traditional sanctions, including the beheading of those who had staged the revolt. Willis gradually talked her out of that extreme position, but when he informed the leaders of the provisional government of his plans, they refused to step down. At that point, Cleveland threw up his hands and ignored Hawaii for the rest of his term. In the 1896 presidential election campaign, the Republican Party platform included a call for Hawaiian annexation. When William McKinley became president, he set about fulﬁlling that pledge. A new annexation treaty was sent to the Senate meeting in a special session in 1897. It took no action on the treaty, however, because the president’s main objective for the session was to raise the tariff rates that the Democrats had lowered under Cleveland. That delay gave everyone time to examine the proposed treaty thoroughly. It quickly became clear that obtaining a two-thirds majority in the Senate might be impossible, given the strong views of both Democratic and

154 | Section 3

Republican anti-imperialists. McKinley therefore decided to utilize the mechanism that President John Tyler had pioneered in annexing Texas a half century earlier. The administration repackaged the annexation proposal in the form of a joint congressional resolution, which would only require simple majorities in each house. The annexation drive remained stalled. The Cuban Rebellion and the U.S. decision to go to war with Spain distracted attention from Hawaii. But wartime events facilitated annexation. Particularly after Commodore George Dewey’s spectacular naval victory at Manila Bay in the far-off Philippines, Americans saw Hawaii as a natural stepping stone to the Far East. Arguments that Pearl Harbor would provide a defensive bastion for the West Coast won converts, as did persistent rumors that Japan might attempt to engulf Hawaii if the United States did not. The ﬁnal vote came at the height of the Spanish-American War in the summer of 1898. The resolution sailed through the House of Representatives with a comfortable 209 to 91 vote. In the upper house, three weeks later, 42 senators voted for annexation and 21 against. This enabled expansionists to claim that even a treaty would have won ratiﬁcation. In the long run, the annexation of Hawaii proved to be a rational decision. Despite early concerns about their polyglot population, the islands gained statehood in 1959, achieving coequal status with the other former territories that had become full members in the Union. See also: Anti-Imperialism; Sugar; SpanishAmerican-Cuban War References

Pratt, Julius W. Expansionists of 1898. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1936.

Russ, William Adam. The Hawaiian Revolution, 1893–94. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1959. Tate, Merze. The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965.

Jingoism In the late 19th century, many Americans seemed eager to fight in a war. They proudly called themselves “jingoes,” just as people with similar attitudes in more recent years have been known as “hawks.” Jingoism became a common expression for any warlike sentiments that cropped up in newspaper stories and political speeches. A variety of factors underlay this phenomenon. In the end, jingoism played a major part in propelling the United States into the Spanish-American-Cuban War in 1898. The term “jingo” ﬁrst became associated with bellicosity in the late 1870s. A potential Russian threat to British interests in the Middle East led to the writing of a popular song with this chorus: We don’t want to ﬁght but by Jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too, We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true, The Russians shall not have Constantinople. (G. W. Hunt, Macdermott’s War Song, 1877) Americans soon began using the term “jingo” to refer to anyone who expressed aggressive foreign policy attitudes or who favored military or naval actions. The popularity of jingoism in that era is somewhat more understandable because, with very few notable

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 155 exceptions, such as the American Civil War, 19th-century conﬂicts tended to be relatively brief. For example, the 1866 Austro-Prussian War lasted only seven weeks. Four years later, Prussia defeated the French empire’s armies in just six weeks of ﬁghting. Conﬁdent in their nation’s prowess and power, U.S. jingoes expected any conﬂict involving the United States to resemble those wars. A few weeks of maneuvering and a couple of pitched battles or decisive naval engagements should do the trick. No one anticipated a protracted conﬂict resulting in millions of casualties like the one that took place from 1914 to 1918. Jingoes conﬁdently expected the beneﬁts of a brief, victorious war to far outweigh its costs. Prominent among those anticipated beneﬁts was the opportunity to demonstrate that the United States was one of the world’s great powers. Defeating another great power in a military encounter should convince doubters around the world that the United States had truly arrived. Most Americans believed that their nation deserved such recognition, and a good many felt that a decisive war would signiﬁcantly boost the international prestige of the United States. A desire to convince other nations of U.S. superiority deﬁnitely motivated jingoes like Theodore Roosevelt and Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Personal ambitions also played a role. A whole generation of young men had grown to maturity after the Civil War. Almost every family contained someone who had participated in that conﬂict. Americans generally accorded their veterans great respect, sometimes bordering on worship. Boys growing up in that era naturally wanted to emulate their fathers,

uncles, and grandfathers. Participating in a war would enable them to demonstrate their manliness and, not incidentally, earn the respect of their countrymen. Here again, Theodore Roosevelt is a case in point. A couple of uncles on his mother’s side had served in the Confederate Navy. One was Captain James D. Bullock, who went to England and arranged for the building of what became CSS Alabama, the most famous ship in the Southern ﬂeet. Roosevelt freely admitted his admiration for the exploits of his relatives and eagerly volunteered for service in the war with Spain. He was hardly alone. Some 300,000 other young men rushed to enlist in 1891, hoping to seize their own moments of glory. The existence of new, all-steel, steampowered naval vessels provided another source of jingoism. Although the decision to build modern warships came in 1881, the United States faced no external threat at that point that would justify major naval expansion. In 1890, however, Navy captain Alfred Thayer Mahan published a remarkably inﬂuential book titled The Inﬂuence of Sea Power on History. This volume and Mahan’s other writings convinced his fellow Americans of the beneﬁts of a great navy and encouraged Congress to fund it. As one new ship after another joined the ﬂeet, naval advocates searched for excuses to use them. Serving as assistant secretary of the Navy in 1897, Theodore Roosevelt even suggested to a friend that shelling a few Spanish cities would provide the new ships with valuable practice. Like the Western lawman who strapped on his six-shooter before heading out to face a desperado, the United States seemed to be aching for a chance to use its new naval ﬁrepower in combat.

156 | Section 3

Jingoist sentiments deﬁnitely inﬂuenced President William McKinley’s decision to seek a war declaration from Congress in April 1898. Ironically, Major McKinley was no jingo, having experienced the horrors of combat in the Civil War. But a good many of his advisors and supporters were eager to take up arms against the Spanish—or anyone else who disrespected the United States. Fortunately for those who did participate, the Spanish-American-Cuban War turned out to be just the sort of limited engagement that the jingoes anticipated. Only one U.S. sailor died in the thrilling naval triumphs in the Philippines and Cuba. Army combat deaths totaled 384, slightly more than just 0.1 percent of those who had enlisted. A truce came less than three months after the U.S. war declaration. Cheering throngs and the stirring strains of John Philips Sousa’s marches greeted the soldiers and sailors when they returned to the United States. They had achieved the recognition and respect that they had sought. Jingoism faded rather quickly after the war ended. The complexities of colonial administration were an unanticipated consequence of the conﬂict. Worse yet, tens of thousands of U.S. troops remained mired in a bloody guerilla war in the Philippines, a conﬂict that killed more than 10 times as many soldiers as had died in the Spanish-AmericanCuban War. The United States imposed strict censorship on war news from the far-off islands, and those who returned from the conﬂict received little recognition. The United States thus entered the 20th century with a much more rational view of the consequences of warfare and of the jingoism that gloriﬁed it.

See also: New Manifest Destiny; SpanishAmerican-Cuban War References

Hagan, Kenneth J. This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power. New York: Free Press, 1991. Jeffers, H. Paul. Colonel Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt Goes to War, 1897–1898. New York: Wiley, 1996. Pratt, Julius W. Expansionists of 1898. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1936.

Mediation (Russo-Japanese War) Subjecting an international problem to mediation is often considered only as a last resort, and it therefore occurs only rarely. Mediation seemed appropriate in 1905, however, when both Russia and Japan realized that the war they were ﬁghting had strained their capabilities to the limit. Seeking an honorable way out, they turned to U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt as an honest broker. Roosevelt responded by arranging for negotiators to meet in New Hampshire in the summer of 1905. The resulting Treaty of Portsmouth ended the war and won Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize, but it left a number of disconcerting aftereffects in its wake. The question of who would control southern Manchuria helped trigger the Russo-Japanese War. After a multinational force had put down the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, most nations withdrew their troops. Russia, however, continued to maintain a large military presence in the northern Chinese province of Manchuria, where Russia seemed poised to force concessions from Korea as well. The Japanese, too, left thousands of soldiers in place to prevent Russian mastery of a region that they had long desired to dominate.

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 157

The Russian delegation arrives at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in response to President Theodore Roosevelt’s offer to mediate a peaceful conclusion to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. (Library of Congress)

The two major powers initiated highlevel talks, supposedly aimed at working out a mutually satisfactory agreement. On February 8, 1904, even as the talks proceeded, the Japanese Navy attacked without warning the Russian ﬂeet anchored near the headquarters of its Chinese sphere of inﬂuence at Port Arthur, now known as Dalian. The Russians should hardly have been surprised because Japan had staged a similar preemptive attack a decade earlier, setting off the SinoJapanese War. Of course, the United States should have been even more sensitive to the possibility of such a surprise attack in 1941.

Each nation began the war conﬁdent that it would win easily, and Japan, at least, followed up its devastating naval attack with a series of battleﬁeld victories that demoralized the Russian government and roused discontent to the point of revolution against the czar’s regime. But the Japanese successes were not without cost. Only four months after the war began, Japan sent tentative feelers to the U.S. government indicating its willingness to consider a diplomatic settlement. At that point, Russia still hoped to recoup and so had no interest in such an arrangement. To offset its devastating naval losses in the Far East, Russia sent its

158 | Section 3

Baltic ﬂeet steaming all the way down the Atlantic Coast, around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, and up toward China. There it fell victim to a Japanese naval ambush that quickly rendered it helpless. Now Russia, too, hoped for peace, especially given the domestic turmoil and political crises that its people faced at home. The United States was the only major world power that could be considered neutral. France and Russia had forged a strong military alliance in Europe in 1894, so the French could not be objective. Similarly, Great Britain and Japan had established close ties in 1902, effectively ruling Great Britain out as a gobetween. The only other external power with major interests in the Far East was Germany, whom no one trusted not to pursue its own expansionist self-interest. For Roosevelt, the opportunity to mediate seemed an ideal way to further U.S. interests. He had been relying on a balance of power among the six major external rivals who were interested in China to preserve the Open Door Policy that Secretary of State John Hay had developed a few years earlier. Roosevelt initially cheered Japan’s success in thwarting Russian ambitions in the area. When Japan defeated one enemy army or navy after another, Japan, not Russia, seemed to be unbalancing the Far Eastern power equilibrium in its favor. If Roosevelt could mediate a RussianJapanese settlement, it would strengthen the overall balance of power and, by extension, the Open Door Policy of the United States as well. Even after destroying the Baltic ﬂeet, the Japanese realized that they could hardly continue to ﬁght, so they once again asked Roosevelt to sound out the Russians about peace talks. He did so secretly and received a positive reply.

When he told Japan that its enemy was ready to negotiate, the Japanese government insisted that Roosevelt act as though calling for a conference was his own idea. The president then publicly invited the two countries to send negotiators to the United States. Japan readily agreed; the Russians initially gave an obtuse response but eventually decided to participate as well. To avoid the stiﬂing summer heat in Washington, the conferees met at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Although Roosevelt did not personally attend the conference, he remained constantly in touch with developments. The two parties quickly reached agreement on most of the outstanding issues, but the talks stalled over two additional Japanese demands: that Russia pay reparations for causing the war and that Russia cede control of Sakhalin Island, a narrow strip of land that stretched north of the Japanese archipelago. Recognizing that Russia was completely broke, Roosevelt advised Japan to drop its demand for reparations. He was equally convinced that Russia would refuse to sign an agreement giving the whole island away, so the president suggested a compromise that would split the territory in half and give Japan the southern section. Both sides accepted this advice and included it in the treaty that they signed on September 5, 1905. Roosevelt’s prudent and nonpartisan mediation thus played a major role in restoring peace in the Far East. Although his actions won him a Nobel Peace prize and a congressional commendation, Roosevelt had in no way solved all of his Far Eastern problems. To placate internal public opinion, the Japanese government insisted that the president had independently chosen to

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 159 intervene in the war, torpedoed any hope for reparations, and restricted Japan to half of the conquered island that it deserved. Roosevelt found this amusing until he realized that it reﬂected much deeper Japanese resentment against the United States. A series of minor incidents kept the pot boiling until, against congressional advice, Roosevelt sent all 16 of the nation’s new, all-steel, steampowered battleships to Japan. This show of force put a damper on Japanese carping. The round-the-world voyage of the “Great White Fleet” impressed a good many other people as well, dramatically demonstrating that the United States was fully qualiﬁed for membership in the exclusive club of great world powers. See also: Boxer Rebellion; Open Door Policy References

Esthus, Raymond A. Double Eagle and Rising Sun: The Russians and Japanese at Portsmouth in 1905. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988. Esthus, Raymond A. Theodore Roosevelt and Japan. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967. Trani, Eugene P. The Treaty of Portsmouth. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969.

Mission From colonial times onward, most Americans thought of themselves as unique people with superior political and moral standing. The American Revolution established a democratic government that was unlike any other in the world. In succeeding decades, Americans ﬂattered themselves that their example, their model republican system, was a positive inﬂuence on global political development. By the late 19th century, Americans were no longer content simply to have their

nation serve as a passive model of democracy. Instead, they assumed the role of missionaries, actively spreading knowledge of their beliefs and institutions around the world. A democratic mission impulse remains a leading justiﬁcation for U.S. foreign policy initiatives even today. The U.S. sense of mission sprouted with the planting of the earliest British colonies. It deﬁnitely helped motivate the pilgrims and the puritans who settled in the New World in the early 1600s. According to the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s governor John Winthrop, they believed that God had selected them for an errand in the wilderness, the objective of which was to build a city on a hill. They expected this perfect Christian community to serve as a model and a beacon for all. Although the Puritan Commonwealth in Massachusetts quickly became self-absorbed and intolerant, the concepts of a new beginning, a fresh start, and a break with traditional autocratic Europe continued to inﬂuence colonial endeavors. Belief in their uniqueness and supreme self-conﬁdence were crucial elements in motivating the patriots who fostered the American Revolution. The democratic rights-of-man principles that the Declaration of Independence expressed shaped succeeding political developments. The Constitution reinforced the Revolution’s democratic ideals and established a government that was far different from any other. For the next half century, the system that the United States had pioneered served as a model for other republican revolutions, whether they occurred in France or in Spain’s Latin American colonies. Issued in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine contained an assertive expression of a

160 | Section 3

more active missionary sentiment. It praised democratic developments in the New World and warned those in the Old World not to attempt to impose or reimpose their systems. Mission sentiments fed the ﬂames of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s. At that point, the main focus of the democratic mission was on adjacent lands that could be and eventually were annexed to the United States itself. The sectional controversy over slavery threw a dark shadow over the U.S. democratic experiment, and national self-absorption continued during the protracted Reconstruction. By the 1880s, however, Americans once again looked outward. What they saw was a new age of imperialism, with European nations gobbling up underdeveloped areas in Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. If, as Americans believed, they possessed the best political system ever created, it made sense that the United States, not these old-fashioned Old World countries, should be leading the way. At that point, the passive mission as a model of democratic republicanism gave way to an active mission that aggressively sought to spread its principles worldwide. That, in turn, suggested that the United States take colonies of its own. The Manifest Destiny corollary of regeneration resurfaced. It advocated active training in democratic principles and practices, under the tutelage of U.S. missionaries. If everything worked according to plan, the colonists who experienced this instruction would eventually be capable of enlightened selfgovernment. Regardless of any selﬁsh or economic motives that might underlay a particular foreign policy initiative, it could always draw widespread public support if it was

framed as an implementation of the democratic mission. For example, the democratic mission justification helped convince the many Americans who were averse to colonialism per se that it could have positive outcomes. Whether it was Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, or even the virtual protectorate of Cuba that had been established in the early 20th century, Americans felt ennobled to be spreading the democratic gospel to less fortunate peoples. After nearly two and a half years of neutrality, President Woodrow Wilson justiﬁed the U.S. entry into World War I by proclaiming that it would help promote democracy. A common theme in his Fourteen Points plan for the postwar world was U.S.–style self-determination for all peoples, whether they were in colonial or liberated European settings. To that extent, Wilson was the leading exponent of the democratic mission in his era. Ever since, presidents and statesmen have cited the U.S. democratic mission to justify their foreign policies. It animated Franklin Roosevelt’s postwar planning at the Yalta Conference, it underlay Harry Truman’s response to the Cold War, and it allowed Lyndon Johnson to justify U.S. participation in the Vietnam War. More recently, it provided an explanation for why George W. Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq in 2003. Unfortunately, spreading democracy does not automatically lead to desired or desirable results. “Free” elections sometimes produce leaders who are outspokenly against the United States, such as Fidel Castro in Cuba or Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Imposing democracy by force seems an inherent contradiction, but it has often been attempted. Nevertheless,

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 161 Americans seemingly remain as dedicated to the democratic mission now as they were in earlier generations. See also: Manifest Destiny; New Manifest Destiny References

Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. Merk, Frederick. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Smith, Tony. America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Neutralization President William Howard Taft’s administration promoted the concept of Dollar Diplomacy. Although primarily directed at Latin America, it was also applied in China. There, so many other foreign nations were involved that the U.S. strategy was focused less on gaining U.S. predominance than on preventing other great powers from taking over. Called neutralization, the approach involved using U.S. dollars to limit the inﬂuence of other economic interests in the region. Willard Straight developed his interest in promoting U.S. investment in China while serving as U.S. consul-general in Mukden, the administrative center of the Chinese province of Manchuria. In that position, Straight could see close up the growing inﬂuence in Manchuria of both Japan and Russia. Russia had obtained, late in the 19th century, a concession to construct the Chinese Eastern Railway, which served as a vital shortcut for the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Trains could save two full days by cutting across

Railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman’s ambition to establish close trading relations with China lay the groundwork for the Taft Administration’s Neutralization Policy. (Library of Congress)

northern Manchuria to reach Vladivostok on the Paciﬁc Coast. Japan’s focus lay to the south. By winning the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the Japanese had strengthened their position in Korea. A decade later, victories in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) won them control of the Liaoning Peninsula as well. The South Manchuria Railway, which Russia had built to link the Chinese Eastern Railway with its sphere of interest that was centered at Port Arthur at the southern tip of the Liaoning Peninsula, fell under Japanese control as well. Meanwhile U.S. tycoon Edward H. Harriman hatched the visionary plan of linking his substantial rail holdings in the western United States with Paciﬁc steamship lines that would tap the China market. In 1905, he visited the Far East with the objective of purchasing a controlling

162 | Section 3

interest in the South Manchuria Railway to complete his trans-Paciﬁc transportation network. After defeating Russia in war, Japan refused to sell, intending to use the railroad in pursuing its own expansionist aims in Manchuria. Consul-General Straight enthusiastically championed Harriman’s plans, but the business Panic of 1907 limited the availability of investment funds. Harriman died two years later, removing the major U.S. entrepreneur from the scene. Straight had by that time been reassigned to the State Department in Washington, however, where he was better able to advocate U.S. investment in China. He found a sympathetic audience in Secretary of State Philander C. Knox, the architect of President Taft’s Latin American Dollar Diplomacy approach. In June 1909, Great Britain, France, and Germany negotiated a concession with the Chinese government authorizing them to finance and build the Hukuang Railway, a major trunk line through central China. Straight resigned from his government post to work with U.S. businessmen who were interested in obtaining a share of this concession. With Knox’s backing, U.S. agents convinced the other nations to let them participate. U.S. investors were assigned one section of the railroad as their responsibility, and U.S. contractors eventually completed it in the 1920s. Straight continued to champion U.S. control over the Manchurian railroad system. Secretary of State Knox expanded the scope of the neutralization scheme when he proposed that an international banking group buy the properties and operate them for the beneﬁt of all nationalities. This scheme gained popularity at home because it appeared to be an extension of the now traditional Open Door

Policy. Although Great Britain and its ally Japan seemed willing to consider the plan, it alienated other nations and ultimately made it more difﬁcult for U.S. bankers to become involved. Events in China then took an unexpected turn. Partly because of its decision to grant foreigners control over the Hukuang project, the Chinese imperial government found itself under siege. On November 11, 1911, nationalists led by Sun Yat-Sen ousted the emperor and established the Chinese Republic. This change invalidated all previous concessions. The new government, however, was so short of money that it agreed to accept ﬁnancial support from an international consortium, which eventually included all of the powers with major interests in China: Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United States. To a degree, this Six-Power Consortium actually represented a success for the neutralization policy because no single nation had a dominant interest. But it was an uneasy coalition, containing several nations that were soon ﬁghting each other in World War I. Shortly after the Chinese Revolution, the United States got a new government as well, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson became president. Wilson was no friend of big business. Even so, he was surprised when he met with a group of inﬂuential U.S. bankers and discovered that they were unwilling to continue investing in China unless the president promised to go to war if the Chinese government failed to meet its obligations. Wilson had no intention of providing such a guarantee, so he effectively canceled federal sponsorship of the investment schemes. Instead, he extended full diplomatic recognition to the new Chinese regime, making the

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 163 United States the ﬁrst major nation in the world to do so. At that point, Wilson was far more inﬂuenced by the long-standing U.S. democratic mission sentiment than he was concerned about economic matters such as the neutralization scheme. See also: Dollar Diplomacy; Open Door Policy; Stimson Doctrine References

Cohen, Warren I. America’s Response to China. 4th ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Hunt, Michael H. Frontier Defense and the Open Door, Manchuria in ChineseAmerican Relations, 1895–1911. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973. Israel, Jerry. Progressivism and the Open Door: America and China, 1905–1921. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971.

New Manifest Destiny In the late 19th century, a vibrant expansionist mood that some historians have called the New Manifest Destiny swept the United States. Like the earlier Manifest Destiny spirit of the 1840s, the new version was ﬁrmly grounded on a belief that the United States was unique among all nations and particularly favored by God. The divine spirit apparently once again had opened the way for the United States to exercise ever-broader inﬂuence. By the 1890s, this inﬂuence had even jumped continental boundaries. Advocates of the New Manifest Destiny credited it with ensuring the nation’s rise to the status of a great world power. In the 1840s, Manifest Destiny spirit helped justify expansion into adjacent regions, such as Oregon, California, and Texas. Occupation of those relatively empty and poorly administered areas enabled Americans to believe that they

were fulﬁlling their democratic mission to those who lived in the annexed territories. The blessings of a political and social system that Americans viewed as ideal were thus shared as broadly as possible. The 1840s expansionism faded as the sectional crisis worsened in the following decade and ultimately fomented the Civil War. Postwar Reconstruction continued to focus the nation’s energies inward. When Americans ﬁnally began looking outward again in the 1880s, they discovered that they were living in a new age of imperialism. France was colonizing Indochina and West Africa. Great Britain was creating its Cape-toCairo hold over central and eastern Africa. Germany was demanding its fair share of Africa, and even diminutive Belgium had taken control of the vast Congo River Basin. In the Far East, Japan had shucked off its earlier isolation and was now competing with Russia for influence in northeastern China. It was hardly surprising that Americans would become interested in overseas expansion as well. While all of this imperialism moved forward, Americans held a ﬁrm conviction that their democratic traditions and institutions made their nation superior. They rationalized the Civil War as a sort of annealing process that had strengthened the righteousness of the American way. If that were true, expansion of international inﬂuence and colonization ought to be carried out by the progressive and modernizing United States, not by tired, autocratic European governments. Belief in Christian Social Darwinism was a component part of the New Manifest Destiny. Like biological Darwinism, it accepted the evolution of humankind as an inevitable, positive outcome, but Social Darwinism looked

164 | Section 3

beyond individual human beings to focus on whole societies. Its advocates insisted that some nations had achieved higher levels of social and political evolution than others. Self-consciously believing in the nobility of democratic ideals, Americans asserted that the United States represented the pinnacle of human evolution. A logical extension of this assertion was that, having seen to the creation of this model society, God would expect it to spread its beneﬁts to others who were less fortunate. Economic changes and material progress complemented the nation’s political and social evolution. The U.S. industrial system matured during the Civil War era. By the 1880s, U.S. factories were capable of producing enormous amounts of goods, far too many for the nation alone to absorb. Simultaneously, expansion and industrialization of the nation’s farms significantly increased agricultural output. U.S. producers came to believe that they could prosper only if they could export their surpluses. The New Manifest Destiny thus included a strong economic component. To pursue its new destiny, the United States needed adequate tools. In 1881, the United States began constructing an all-steel, steam-powered navy. By the end of the 19th century, its size had far surpassed what was needed for selfdefense, encouraging overseas adventurism. In the late 1870s, the nation began exporting much more than it imported each year, reversing a historical trend of negative trade balances. Positive trade balances brought increasing amounts of gold into the nation’s coffers, gold that encouraged U.S. investment abroad. It also provided the wherewithal for political expansion.

Equipped with a modern war ﬂeet and ample ﬁnancial resources, expansionminded Americans began to develop speciﬁc overseas goals. Because Africa and Southeast Asia were already largely colonized, Americans focused their attention on Latin America and the Far East. Many Americans favored outright colonization, but after 1898, unsettling experiences in Cuba and even more disconcerting developments in the Philippines undermined enthusiasm for colonialism. Instead, the United States focused most of its expansionist energies in the early 20th century on trying to promote stable governments that would provide markets for U.S. products. That was the goal of the Open Door Policy in China. It also motivated President Theodore Roosevelt to issue his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which was designed to promote stability in the Western Hemisphere. When that proved elusive, Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, proudly announced the even more intrusive policy of Dollar Diplomacy, basically hoping to buy stability and market access. In the long run, the New Manifest Destiny concept helped the United States achieve another major international objective. As U.S. influence abroad expanded, other major nations began to recognize the United States as something of an equal. Some, like Great Britain, welcomed the United States into the elite company of the world’s great powers. Others, like Germany and Japan, were less thrilled at the rise of so wealthy and increasingly powerful a rival. Regardless of these attitudes, the United States achieved what many considered to be its inevitable destiny as a leading member of the world community of nations.

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 165 See also: Jingoism; Mission; SpanishAmerican-Cuban War References

Beisner, Robert L. From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1986. Dulles, Foster Rhea. Prelude to World Power: American Diplomatic History, 1860–1900. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Healy, David F. US Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Olney Corollary In 1895, Secretary of State Richard Olney issued a strident note to Great Britain reafﬁrming the principles of the Monroe Doctrine and asserting U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere. The note was designed to encourage Great Britain to arbitrate the boundary of its colony of Guiana with neighboring Venezuela. Although the Olney Note could have provoked further hostility between the United States and Great Britain, it ultimately had quite the opposite effect, clearing the air between them and setting the stage for improved relations in the 20th century. Anglophobia was a common U.S. attitude in the 19th century. Like many other Americans, President Grover Cleveland objected to the fact that the British seemed dismissive of other viewpoints, treating Latin American nations and even the United States itself as minor or irrelevant. He was more than willing, therefore, to take actions that would reverse that perception. The issue that provided an opportunity to do so in the mid-1890s was a boundary dispute between Venezuela

and British Guiana, a colony that lay just to the east. Two other outposts tucked in next door, Dutch and French Guiana, were remnants of earlier colonization drives. Together, these three colonies were the only parts of the South American continent that had not shaken off European control. The boundary between Guiana and Venezuela had never been settled deﬁnitively. The region in dispute was a wild and underpopulated area that encompassed the many mouths of the Orinoco River. Great Britain commissioned Sir Robert Schomburgk to map the area, and the royal government insisted that the line he drew was the correct one. The Venezuelan government never accepted the Schomburgk Line or any other, but a sense of urgency arose when someone emerged from the jungle with a 507-ounce gold nugget, the largest ever discovered. Both sides suddenly became very intent on making sure that they controlled the maximum territory possible. The Venezuelan government appealed to the United States for help in urging Great Britain to submit the matter to arbitration. President Grover Cleveland knew virtually nothing about Latin America and even less about the speciﬁc dispute. The fact that Great Britain’s administration of its colony was far more humane and progressive than that of the regime in Venezuela had no bearing on his behavior. Instead, Cleveland had been fending off accusations of being pro-British, a charge that undermined his support among the millions of Irish Americans who normally supported his Democratic Party. The president was also being blamed for the depression that had followed the Panic of 1893, and he was eager to distract Americans from their troubles at home.

THE OLNEY COROLLARY TO THE MONROE DOCTRINE: JULY 2, 1895 [Secretary of State Richard Olney to Ambassador James F. Bayard] That America is in no part open to colonization, though the proposition was not universally admitted at the time of its ﬁrst enunciation, has long been universally conceded. We are now concerned, therefore, only with that other practical application of the Monroe doctrine, the disregard of which by an European power is to be deemed an act of unfriendliness towards the United States. . . . The rule in question has but a single purpose and object. It is that no European power or combination of European powers shall forcibly deprive an American state of the right and power of self-government and of shaping for itself its own political fortunes and destinies. . . . Is it true, then, that the safety and welfare of the United States are so concerned with the maintenance of the independence of every American state as against any European power as to justify and require the interposition of the United States whenever that independence is endangered? The question can be candidly answered in but one way. The states of America, South as well as North, by geographical proximity, by natural sympathy, by similarity of governmental constitutions, are friends and allies, commercially and politically, of the United States. To allow the subjugation of any of them by an European power is, of course, to completely reverse that situation and signiﬁes the loss of all the advantages incident to their natural relations to us. . . . Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its ﬁat is law upon the subjects to which it conﬁnes its interposition. Why? It is not because of the pure friendship or good will felt for it. It is not simply by reason of its high character as a civilized state, nor because wisdom and justice and equity are the invariable characteristics of the dealings of the United States. It is because, in addition to all other grounds, its inﬁnite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers. All the advantages of this superiority are at once imperiled if the principle be admitted that European powers may convert American states into colonies or provinces of their own. The principle would be eagerly availed of, and every power doing so would immediately acquire a base of military operations against us. What one power was permitted to do could not be denied to another, and it is not inconceivable that the struggle now going on for the acquisition of Africa might be transferred to South America. If it were, the weaker countries would unquestionably be soon absorbed, while the ultimate result might be the partition of all South America between the various European powers. The disastrous consequences to the United States of such a condition of things are obvious. The loss of prestige, of authority and of weight in the councils of the family of nations, would be among the least of them. Our only real rivals in peace as well as enemies in war would be found located at our very doors. Thus far in our history, we have been spared the burdens and evils of immense standing armies and all the other accessories of huge warlike establishments, and the exemption has largely contributed to our national greatness and wealth as well as to the happiness of every citizen. But, with the powers of Europe permanently encamped on American soil, the ideal conditions we have thus far enjoyed can not be expected to continue. We too must be armed to the teeth, we too must convert the ﬂower of our male population into soldiers and sailors, and by withdrawing them from the various pursuits of peaceful industry we too must practically annihilate a large share of the productive energy of the nation. . . . Source: U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States. Washington, DC: GPO, 1895, 545–562.

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 167 In his December 1894 annual message, Cleveland announced his intention to push Great Britain toward arbitration. When the British government demurred, Congress responded with a resolution supporting his position, which gave Cleveland an added impulse to press the issue. When Secretary of State Walter Q. Gresham died, the president replaced him with his tough-minded attorney general, Richard Olney. The note that Olney sent to Great Britain in July 1895 was doubtless even more emphatic than Cleveland had anticipated. In the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine, Olney began with a criticism of European “interference” in Western Hemisphere affairs. After asserting that his nation was the preeminent power in the New World, Olney noted that the United States considered itself the defender of all independent peoples in the Western Hemisphere. He warned that the United States would not hesitate to use its considerable military power to prevent European nations from mistreating or attempting to subjugate them. Regarding the boundary dispute, Olney took the position that the British were bent on expanding the limits of their colony, an objective that he considered no different from outright colonization. Olney concluded not with a request but a demand that Great Britain submit the boundary dispute to arbitration or face the prospect of war with the United States. The tone of the note shocked U.S. ambassador James Bayard in London, and he tried to downplay its aggressiveness. British prime minister Lord Salisbury sent off a brief response, which rejected Olney’s assertion that his nation’s American possessions were inappropriate and denied that the United

States had any right to intervene in the boundary dispute. Meanwhile, Olney and Cleveland developed a new proposal and submitted it to Congress. It called for establishing a U.S. commission that would determine the proper boundary. If Great Britain refused to accept its ﬁndings, the United States would go to war. When Congress appropriated $100,000 to fund the commission, the British government ﬁnally took the U.S. assertions seriously. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain sent mollifying notes and even proposed that an international body be assembled to endorse the Monroe Doctrine. The outbreak of trouble in Great Britain’s South African colony alienated Germany, so the British had even more reason to court U.S. friendship. Working directly with Venezuela, they ﬁnally agreed to arbitration. The ultimate ruling in 1899 closely paralleled what the British had claimed all along. The whole affair ended up reducing rather than increasing Anglo-American hostility. Olney’s assertions and the British response revived and strengthened the Monroe Doctrine. Perhaps equally important for the future, Great Britain had treated the United States as a peer. The Olney Corollary thus took the nation down the path toward recognition as one of the great world powers. See also: Monroe Doctrine; Rapprochement References

Eggert, Gerald G. Richard Olney: Evolution of a Statesman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974. Hood, Miriam. Gunboat Diplomacy 1895–1905: Great Power Pressure in Venezuela. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1983.

168 | Section 3 Welch, Richard E., Jr. The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988.

Open Door Policy In 1899 and early 1900, Secretary of State John Hay sent various governments a series of communications intended to discourage colonization or exclusive trade restrictions in China. The main principle of the Open Door Policy was that no foreign power should prevent ships of other countries from enjoying free access to existing trade relationships with the Chinese government. This effort to keep the door open to all traders was eventually applied to other regions, and Hay’s policy initiatives remained the fundamental tenets of the U.S.–Chinese relationship into the 1930s. U.S. participation in the China trade began in 1782, when a Boston-based ship aptly named Empress of China dropped anchor at Hong Kong. In succeeding years, U.S. merchants and sea captains established regular trading relationships at that port, the only one where Chinese imperial authorities allowed contact with foreign vessels. Until the 1840s, however, the U.S. government had no signiﬁcant formal relations with the empire. The so-called Opium Wars that ended in 1842 changed all that. British and French army and naval forces soundly crushed a Chinese effort to shut out foreign inﬂuences. The defeated imperial government ended up signing treaties that allowed much greater foreign penetration. In 1844, Massachusetts congressman Caleb Cushing commanded a U.S. naval expedition that was sent to gain similar concessions for the United States. The Treaty of Wanghsia granted

virtually identical privileges, based in part on the Chinese desire to extend most-favored-nation status as broadly as possible. Their objective was to dilute the inﬂuence of any one nation, particularly Great Britain. Subsequent conﬂicts and negotiations opened ever greater freedom and access to foreigners at the expense of China’s authority. In each instance, even when the United States had played no signiﬁcant role in forcing concessions from China, imperial negotiators continued to grant it most-favored-nation status. U.S. trade remained relatively minor through the 1890s, never amounting to much more than 2 percent of all U.S. exports and imports. Even so, a strong conviction grew in the United States that access to the China market should be a major goal of U.S. foreign policy. By the late 1890s, that objective seemed threatened when other powers established spheres of inﬂuence based in speciﬁc Chinese ports. Many considered the establishment of a sphere of inﬂuence to be merely a precursor to full-blown colonization. If China became divided into colonies, U.S. traders might well be excluded from all Chinese commerce. Adding to the urgency of U.S. concern was the recently concluded Spanish-AmericanCuban War, which had ended with Spain conceding its control of the Philippine Islands, right next door to China. President William McKinley implicitly trusted his secretary of state, so John Hay was left virtually on his own to develop a U.S. response to these perceived threats. He turned for advice to two other people: W. W. Rockhill, a U.S. career diplomat and “old China hand,” and his friend Alfred Hippisley, late of the Imperial Chinese Customs Service. Both of these gentlemen viewed recent events in the Far

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 169

John Hay served as secretary of state under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay’s Open Door Notes deﬁned American policy toward China for another 40 years. (Library of Congress)

East as a substantial threat to the China that they had known. At their urging, Hay sent a note to each major power with a sphere of inﬂuence in the fall of 1899. It acknowledged the existence of the spheres but insisted that they should in no way interfere with or render moot the long-standing principle of open trade for all foreigners in the designated treaty ports. Eager to ensure its own access across the board, Great Britain readily endorsed the Open Door principle. Other parties were more or less reluctant to agree, and many of them indicated that they would do so only if all promised to abide by the principle. Russia was the least forthcoming, but Hay chose to interpret its evasive reply as a positive one. He issued a second round of notes in the spring of 1900,

reporting that all parties were in agreement with the Open Door Policy. Almost immediately the Boxer Rebellion ﬂared up, threatening foreigners from all countries in China and encouraging strong retaliatory measures. The United States sent thousands of troops to participate in an international relief force that was charged with rescuing trapped diplomats and foreign nationals in Peking. Hay worried that once military action had occurred, the combatants would make additional, perhaps territorial demands. At the height of the crisis and while the foreigners were still trapped in the British Legation, Hay issued another series of notes to the major powers. This time around, he urged them not to make additional territorial demands on the Chinese when the rebellion was quelled. In line with his earlier notes, he insisted that China’s territorial integrity not be compromised. That should ensure that the open door to trade would continue to operate as before. This new initiative drew even more ambiguous responses, but once again Hay asserted that all parties generally agreed with the U.S. position. Both Russia and Japan, however, were slow to withdraw their military forces, even after the Boxer Rebellion had ended. In 1904, these two Asian powers became involved in a conﬂict known as the Russo-Japanese War. Theodore Roosevelt had inherited the presidency from McKinley at that point but had retained John Hay as head of the State Department. Roosevelt hoped that a balance of power could be reestablished in the region, a balance that would bolster the open door concepts. To that end, he personally stepped up to mediate the Russo-Japanese conﬂict and ultimately won a Nobel Peace

170 | Section 3

THE FIRST OPEN DOOR NOTE: SEPTEMBER 6, 1899 [Secretary of State John Hay to Ambassador White in London] Earnestly desirous to remove any cause of irritation and to insure at the same time to the commerce of all nations in China the undoubted beneﬁts which should accrue from a formal recognition by the various powers claiming “spheres of interest” that they shall enjoy perfect equality of treatment for their commerce and navigation within such “spheres,” the Government of the United States would be pleased to see [the British government] give formal assurances, and lend its cooperation in securing like assurances from the other interested powers, that each, within its respective sphere of whatever inﬂuence— First. Will in no way interfere with any treaty port or any vested interest within any so-called “sphere of interest” or leased territory it may have in China. Second. That the Chinese treaty tariff of the time being shall apply to all merchandise landed or shipped to all such ports as are within said “sphere of interest” (unless they be “free ports”), no matter to what nationality it may belong, and that duties so leviable shall be collected by the Chinese Government. Third. That it will levy no higher harbor dues on vessels of another nationality frequenting any port in such “sphere” than shall be levied on vessels of its own nationality, and no higher railroad charges over lines built, controlled, or operated within its “sphere” on merchandise belonging to citizens or subjects of other nationalities transported through such “sphere” than shall be levied on similar merchandise belonging to its own nationals transported over equal distances. Source: U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States. Washington, DC: GPO, 1899, 129–130.

Prize for helping bring it to a conclusion. Because neither party emerged dominant in the region, the United States could continue to espouse the Open Door Policy. In one of the treaties signed during the Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922), the other great powers formally acknowledged the U.S. initiative. It remained a fundamental tenet of the nation’s Far Eastern policy until Japan invaded China in the late 1930s. The concept of free and fair trading opportunities for all seemed consistent with U.S. principles in general. For example, Roosevelt championed the concept when questions arose over foreign control of various ports in Morocco

in 1906. At the Algeciras Conference, the United States took the position that it mattered less which nation controlled a port so long as trade through it remained open to all. In this instance and in others, the U.S. position often seemed naïve to practitioners of realpolitik. All the same, the Open Door Policy had the beneﬁt of serving U.S. interests without the necessity of U.S. military intervention. As long as a balance of power prevented any one nation from colonizing a territory or preventing free trade, the policy worked effectively. It was a very low-cost method for supporting U.S. commercial interests and was, therefore, extremely popular throughout the United States.

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 171 See also: Boxer Rebellion; Hay, John Milton; Spanish-American-Cuban War References

Dobson, John. Reticent Expansionist. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1988. McCormick, Thomas J. China Market. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967. Young, Marilyn B. The Rhetoric of Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Panama Visionaries began dreaming of punching a canal through the isthmus connecting North and South America as soon as Balboa reached the Paciﬁc Ocean in 1513, but four centuries passed before the dream was realized. By the turn of the 20th century, the United States was not only the dominant political power in the Western Hemisphere but also the world’s leading industrial nation, with the resources and technical capability to build the canal. Even so, a number of complex diplomatic issues had to be resolved before U.S. steam shovels could begin digging. Preliminary steps had begun in the 1840s, when Benjamin Bidlack had negotiated a canal treaty with the government of New Granada (Colombia.) The 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty between the United States and Great Britain superseded Bidlack’s Treaty. It pledged that neither country would independently begin work on a canal or colonize lands with that objective. France was not a party to that agreement, however, and it was a French company that began construction work in the late 1870s. Ferdinand de Lessups had just completed the Suez Canal, so French investors trusted him to do the same in the isthmus. Despite persistent protests from U.S. secretary of state James G.

Blaine, de Lessups’s canal company sold more than a quarter of a billion dollars worth of shares. Tropical diseases and far more rugged topography than he had encountered in Egypt soon derailed de Lessups’s effort. To salvage something from one of the most devastating ﬁnancial debacles in French history, speculators formed the New Panama Canal Company, hoping to sell its assets to whoever might revive the canal project. U.S. interest in doing just that peaked during the Spanish-American-Cuban War. The USS Oregon had to make a perilous and time-consuming voyage from Puget Sound all the way around Cape Horn to join the ﬂeet that was blockading Cuba. Experts and laymen alike considered this proof that U.S. national security required a canal to enable the speedy transfer of naval strength from coast to coast. The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty stood in the way. President William McKinley’s secretary of state, John Hay, opened negotiations with British minister Julian Pauncefote shortly after the war ended. The ﬁrst agreement that they reached left several restrictions in place, such as a prohibition against fortifying any canal built. When the U.S. Senate rejected that effort, the diplomats returned to the negotiating table to draft the Second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty in 1902. In it, the British government conceded all points in an effort to promote friendly relations between the two countries. Theodore Roosevelt succeeded McKinley as president in 1901, and he was eager to move forward. The next step was to decide where the projected canal should be constructed. A U.S. engineering survey had concluded that a route across southern Nicaragua had many advantages over the Panama route

172 | Section 3

that de Lessups had selected. A major drawback was the New Panama Canal Company’s $100 million price tag for its abandoned equipment and for preliminary digging along that route. Philippe Bunau-Varilla took charge at that point. A French citizen serving as treasurer of the New Panama Canal Company, he immediately reduced the asking price for the company’s property to $40 million. Shortly afterward, a major volcanic eruption shook Nicaragua. Bunau-Varilla sent Nicaraguan stamps depicting a spewing volcano to every member of the U.S. Congress to suggest how dangerous any construction project would be in an unstable land. The French company also hired U.S. lawyer William Nelson Cromwell to lobby Congress. He distributed campaign contributions and other sweeteners so successfully that the 1902 Spooner Act authorizing the U.S. canal project identiﬁed the Panama route as the most desirable and included an appropriation of $40 million to buy the company’s assets. For many years, Panama had been administered as a dependency of Colombia. Secretary of State John Hay therefore opened negotiations with the Colombian ambassador, but his home government tried to delay them by recalling its envoy. Undaunted, Hay pushed ahead on discussions with the Colombian chargé d’affaires, Tomás Herran. The two men signed a treaty that would lease to the United States control over a six-mile-wide strip through Panama for an initial payment of $10 million and $250,000 in annual rent. The Colombian government disliked several provisions of the 1903 HayHerran Treaty. It was understandably suspicious of granting the United

States full control over such a wide swatch of territory. The authorities in Bogotá also objected to a provision that prohibited them from negotiating with the New Panama Canal Company. When Colombia’s senators learned that the French company’s lease would expire in 1904, they refused to ratify the treaty, expecting to be able to sell the company’s abandoned assets to the United States for a substantial amount. Colombia’s intransigence outraged President Roosevelt. He had been advised that the 1846 Bidlack’s Treaty could be interpreted as validating U.S. plans even without the approval of the current government in Bogotá. Before the president could act on that assumption, however, Panamanian revolutionaries ended Colombian control. Although many were convinced that Roosevelt fomented this rebellion, there is little evidence of ofﬁcial U.S. participation. It is clear, however, that BunauVarilla and Cromwell were intimately involved in triggering the revolt. Headquartered in New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Bunau-Varilla entertained Dr. Manuel Amador, who later became the ﬁrst president of the Republic of Panama. The Frenchman supplied Amador with money, a draft constitution, a secret code, and a letter naming Bunau-Varilla as Panamanian minister to the United States should the rebellion succeed. The wily conspirator later claimed that he learned from newspaper reports that U.S. naval vessels were going to be visiting both Colón, on the west coast of the isthmus, and Panama City, on its east coast, early in November 1903. He relayed that information to Amador. Cromwell, who also represented the Panama Railroad and

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 173 Steamship Company, helped manipulate transit across the isthmus to the advantage of the rebels. Resistance collapsed almost immediately, in part because of widespread bribery of Colombian soldiers and officials. When the rebels proclaimed independence, Minister Bunau-Varilla initiated negotiations with Hay. The terms of the agreement that they worked out were almost identical to the Hay-Herran arrangements, except that the width of the proposed canal zone was expanded from 6 to 10 miles. The U.S. Senate duly ratified the HayBunau-Varilla Treaty. Banker J. P. Morgan handled the transfer of $40 million to the French company’s coffers, and Cromwell presented a bill for $800,000 to compensate him for his services. Digging began in 1904 and the canal opened full operations 10 years later. Theodore Roosevelt took credit for initiating the project, as well as implying responsibility for the Panamanian revolution. His statements ultimately embarrassed Republican Party leaders so much that, in 1921, they arranged a federal government payment of $25 million to Colombia. The canal deﬁnitely achieved the strategic goals that its U.S. advocates had anticipated, but the intrusion of U.S. inﬂuence in Central America disturbed and angered many of those living in the region. See also: Bidlack, Benjamin A.; Clayton, John Middleton; Pan-Americanism References

Collin, Richard H. Theodore Roosevelt’s Caribbean. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. McCullough, David. The Path between the Seas. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.

Mellander, G. A. The United States in Panamanian Politics. Danville, IL: Interstate, 1967.

Pan-Americanism In the 1880s, Secretary of State James G. Blaine actively promoted stronger economic and political relationships among the nations in the Western Hemisphere. Called Pan-Americanism, the concept envisioned elements such as a common monetary system, favorable tariff treatment, and perhaps even some sort of overarching political structure. Blaine initiated a call for an international conference to discuss these issues, but the meeting was delayed for several years. When it ﬁnally did occur, it produced few tangible results. Not until World War II posed a common threat to the Western Hemisphere did Pan-Americanism assume a more concrete structure. In winning the 1880 Republican Party’s presidential nomination, dark horse candidate James A. Garfield thwarted the ambitions of Maine senator James G. Blaine, the most prominent member of his party. In a conciliatory move with numerous historical precedents, when Garﬁeld won the election, he appointed Blaine to head his cabinet as secretary of state. That position provided Blaine with an ideal opportunity to promote his expansionist, almost imperialistic vision for the United States. In the ﬁrst few months, Blaine stridently criticized Ferdinand de Lessups’s efforts to construct a canal across the isthmus of Panama. In Blaine’s view, this sort of project should be done by people from the Western Hemisphere, not by a Frenchman who was answerable to ﬁnancial backers in his home country. The secretary of state also saw

174 | Section 3

the project as a European encroachment in the New World, something that the Monroe Doctrine and Polk’s subsequent corollary had specifically argued against. The fact that neither the United States nor any other Western Hemisphere nation was capable of building a canal at that point in no way lessened Blaine’s determination to keep the French out. The issue dissipated when de Lessups failed because he had underestimated both the engineering challenges and the devastating impact that tropical disease would have on his workforce. The episode only whetted Blaine’s interest in broadening U.S. inﬂuence throughout the hemisphere. He hoped to convert the sentiments expressed in the Monroe Doctrine into an action plan for hemispheric hegemony. That desire led to some misguided tinkering in the War of the Paciﬁc between Chile and Peru. But it also encouraged him to call for an international conference of all Latin American nations to discuss various proposals that might solidify their unity. Fate intervened. Blaine and Garﬁeld were standing in Union Station in downtown Washington on July 2, 1881, when Arthur J. Guiteau shot the president point-blank. Garﬁeld lingered for more than two months before dying. Guiteau was a member of the Stalwart faction in the Republican Party, bitter enemies of so-called Half-Breeds like Blaine and Garﬁeld. His stated motive was to vault Vice President Chester Arthur, a Stalwart, into the presidency. In return, Guiteau anticipated that a grateful Arthur would reward him with a major diplomatic post, preferably as minister to the Austrian Empire. Instead, Guiteau was tried, convicted, and executed.

Half-Breed Blaine remained in Stalwart Arthur’s cabinet but became increasingly uncomfortable and prepared to resign. Just before he did, he convinced Arthur of the wisdom of inviting representatives from all of the American nations to a conference in Washington. Arthur appointed Frederick T. Frelinghuysen to succeed Blaine, but the new secretary of state had no interest in pursuing the Pan-American initiative, so he scrapped the conference plans. Blaine won the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1884, but he lost in a very close race to Democrat Grover Cleveland. Late in Cleveland’s term, interest in a Pan-American conference revived and new invitations were dispatched. When Cleveland lost his reelection bid to Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888, the new president invited James G. Blaine to resume his position as head of the State Department. Blaine was therefore back in place when his long-delayed Pan-American Conference met in October 1889. Business interests dominated the agenda. The delegates spent a month and a half touring industrial and other sites to observe U.S. economic capabilities ﬁrsthand. The objective was to demonstrate that the United States was fully capable of supplying all of their countries’ trading needs so that they would reduce or even eliminate commercial ties to Europe. When the delegates returned to the conference table, Blaine proposed that they consider creating a kind of common market, modeled after the recently established Zollverein in Germany. It would allow free trade among all members. The conferees were unwilling to go that far, voting instead to endorse a round of bilateral trade talks to reduce tariffs on a reciprocal basis. Reciprocity was an approach that

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 175 Blaine personally favored, but it was unlikely to receive much support in the protectionist-minded Congress. Other unlikely proposals emerged as well. One was to create a common silver coinage to serve as legal tender in all American nations and, presumably, facilitate trade among them. Another suggestion was that all parties sign a multinational arbitration treaty. Then, if a dispute arose between signatories, it would automatically be submitted to arbitration rather than create the risk of conﬂict. Despite Blaine’s energetic support, none of these ideas came close to being ratiﬁed in the United States or anywhere else. No nation was willing to surrender any of its sovereignty to an international body, especially one in which the United States would be far and away the most powerful and dominant member. When Blaine stepped down as secretary of state in 1892, he had little to show for his efforts at Pan-Americanism. The only concrete result of the conference was the establishment in Washington of the largely symbolic International Bureau of the American Republics. Its chief purpose was to promote cultural and social interactions in the Western Hemisphere. The Bureau later evolved into the PanAmerican Union, an organization that continued to support people-to-people programs. Not until the 1940s and the formation of the Organization of American States did the nations of the Western Hemisphere implement some of the more important elements of the Pan-American philosophy that Blaine had championed. See also: Panama References

Crapol, Edward P. James G. Blaine: Architect of Empire. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000.

Gilderhaus, Mark T. The Second Century: U.S.-Latin American Relations since 1889. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000. Healy, David F. James G. Blaine and Latin America. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.

Platt Amendment The 1898 Treaty of Paris ended the war between the United States and Spain, but it failed to resolve the status of Cuba. The U.S. declaration that began the Spanish-American War included the Teller Amendment, a pledge that the United States would not annex or colonize Cuba. That forced President William McKinley’s administration to concoct a policy for future relations between the United States and Cuba that avoided either of those outcomes. The Platt Amendment provided an acceptable alternative, and it strongly inﬂuenced U.S. relationships with other Latin American nations as well. U.S. military and naval units remained in place after the Spanish authorities in Cuba agreed to a truce on July 17, 1898. This continuing U.S. presence disappointed the Cuban rebels, who had begun ﬁghting for independence three years earlier. They hoped that the United States would honor its own pledge in the Teller Amendment’s pledge not to colonize the island. Throughout the fall of 1898, the McKinley administration considered many alternatives for Cuba’s future, but the president chose not to include any speciﬁc promises in the treaty that his envoys in Paris negotiated with the Spanish government. The absence of any deﬁnitive statements in the Treaty of Paris encouraged expansionist Americans who were interested

176 | Section 3

in the full annexation of Cuba despite the Teller Amendment pledge. To manage affairs in the interim, General Leonard Wood took charge of the U.S. occupation force. He had been colonel of the volunteer regiment that was nicknamed the “Rough Riders” because it included cowboys like those in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. The second in command was Theodore Roosevelt, but unlike the impetuous New Yorker, Wood had served for many years as a doctor in the army and was cognizant of its capabilities. As a medical man, he was also keenly aware of the importance of sanitation and health issues. He ordered his subordinates to institute broad-scale reconstruction efforts aimed at improving the public health and living conditions of all Cubans. As part of this initiative, another army doctor, Walter Reed, conducted research that led to the discovery of the linkage between malaria and mosquitoes. Many believed that Wood’s ultimate goal was to improve conditions on the island so much that, even if the Cubans were granted full independence, they would eagerly seek annexation to the United States to ensure the continuation of these economic and social beneﬁts. By the summer of 1900, an intractable war in the Philippines and an international crisis caused by the Boxer Rebellion in China were undermining U.S. desire to annex Cuba. Even Leonard Wood had reservations, but he was equally convinced that the Cuban people were incapable of creating and operating a stable, democratic government. If that was true, restrictions or limitations should be attached to any decision on U.S. withdrawal. External factors inﬂuenced U.S. attitudes as well. The United States was

preparing to construct a canal to link the Atlantic to the Paciﬁc and wanted to make sure that the eastern access to the canal would be secure. Although no other nation had taken deﬁnitive steps toward extending its inﬂuence in Cuba, there was concern that either Germany or Great Britain might step in if Cuba failed to maintain a stable government. The McKinley administration intended to be very cautious and deliberate in orchestrating a U.S. disengagement. Elihu Root, an astute lawyer, had become secretary of war, and he took the lead in drafting a policy. He obtained approval from McKinley’s cabinet early in 1901 for the package of proposals that he had created. Root then sent it on to Ohio senator Orville Platt, who added it as an amendment to an army appropriations bill then under consideration. The Platt Amendment was included in the ﬁnal legislation that Congress approved early in March. The Platt Amendment contained several provisions, the most controversial of which authorized the United States to intervene if it concluded that Cuban independence was threatened from outside aggression or from the breakdown of internal order. It also prohibited Cuba from entering into any international agreements that might limit its independence. The document urged Cuba to continue the sanitation and public health reforms that Wood had initiated. The Platt Amendment further insisted that Cuba grant the United States the right to maintain naval bases on the island, a provision that has allowed the U.S. Navy to occupy Guantánamo Bay ever since. The United States agreed to withdraw its occupying force and allow the Cuban people to establish their own government only if they included the Platt

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 177

PROVISIONS OF THE PLATT AMENDMENT, 1901 I. That the government of Cuba shall never enter into any treaty or other compact with any foreign power or powers which will impair or tend to impair the independence of Cuba, nor in any manner authorize or permit any foreign power or powers to obtain by colonization or for military or naval purposes or otherwise, lodgment in or control over any portion of said island. II. That said government shall not assume or contract any public debt, to pay the interest upon which, and to make reasonable sinking fund provision for the ultimate discharge of which the ordinary revenues of the island, after defraying the current expenses of government, shall be inadequate. III. That the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the Treaty of Paris on the United States, now to be assumed and undertaken by the government of Cuba. . . . V. That the government of Cuba will execute, and, as far as necessary, extend, the plans already devised or other plans to be mutually agreed upon, for the sanitation of the cities of the island, to the end that a recurrence of epidemic and infectious diseases may be prevented, thereby assuring protection to the people and commerce of Cuba, as well as to the commerce of the southern ports of the United States and the people residing therein. . . . VII. That to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its defense, the government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations at certain speciﬁed points, to be agreed upon with the President of the United States. VIII. That by way of further assurance the government of Cuba will embody the foregoing provisions in a permanent treaty with the United States. Source: U.S. Statutes at Large 31, 1901, 897–898.

Amendment in a bilateral treaty between the two nations and in the constitution that Cuba would develop. Not surprisingly, many Cubans objected to both of these dictates, and they attempted to amend or add reservations to the provisions of the Platt Amendment that they found most objectionable. But the United States simply would not withdraw unless all of its provisions were met, so the constitutional convention delegates voted to include the unamended Platt Amendment in their ﬁnal document on June 12, 1901.

The United States duly pulled its troops out the following summer. In essence, Cuba remained a protectorate of the United States, and many Cubans resented the patronizing attitudes of their northern neighbor. Root hoped that the existence of the Platt Amendment would motivate the Cuban people to maintain a stable, democratic government, which would preclude the need for any U.S. action. By 1906, however, Root, now serving as secretary of state under President Theodore Roosevelt, reluctantly concluded that

178 | Section 3

governmental stability had deteriorated to such a degree that intervention was necessary. U.S. troops once again landed on the island, where they remained for another three years. The Platt Amendment had a broader impact on U.S. foreign policy. Many of its concepts seemed applicable to other Caribbean and Central American nations as well, so similar provisions were incorporated into U.S. initiatives in nations such as Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. Not surprisingly, the condescension implicit in the U.S. approach kept alive resentment against the United States. Not until President Franklin Roosevelt developed his Good Neighbor Policy in the early 1930s did the United States agree to release Cuba from the constraints of the Platt Amendment. Even so, residual bitterness over “Yankee Imperialism” continues to color U.S. relations with its neighbors to this day. See also: Big Stick; Spanish-AmericanCuban War References

Benjamin, Jules R. The United States and Cuba. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977. Healy, David F. The United States in Cuba 1898–1902. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963. Pérez, Louis A., Jr. Cuba under the Platt Amendment, 1902–1934. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986.

Protectionism As soon as it became an independent nation, the United States adopted tariffs designed to protect U.S. manufacturers and producers from foreign competitors. Tariff rates on speciﬁc commodities were set relatively high, so that items produced overseas would cost more than those

made in the United States, giving U.S. producers a price advantage. Although protective tariffs were popular with U.S. manufacturers, many other citizens found ample reason to object. If they were farmers whose products were frequently exported, they saw no need for import levies. Consumers of all types were aware that high customs duties increased the prices of goods, whether produced in the United States or overseas. Nevertheless, protectionism remained a dominant theme of U.S. foreign relations well into the 20th century. Tariffs are taxes levied on imports. Also known as customs duties, these taxes are usually assessed for two purposes. The ﬁrst is to raise revenue for the central government. Until the introduction of the income tax in 1916, tariffs and sales of public lands were the chief sources of revenue for the federal government. The need to use tariffs to generate revenue often competed with a second objective, that of erecting a tax wall around the country. Protective tariffs were designed to be high enough to discourage importation, often at the expense of revenue, and were favored by domestic producers of goods that might otherwise be imported. High tariffs were justiﬁed as being needed to protect “infant industries.” This rationalization was plausible enough in the early decades when U.S. entrepreneurs struggled to build spinning and weaving factories that could compete with technologically advanced British mills. In 1815, for example, British shippers and merchants dumped huge amounts of ﬁnished woolen and cotton cloth on the U.S. market that sold, even after customs duties were collected, at prices far below the production costs of similar, U.S.–made goods.

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 179 The “infant industries” justiﬁcation lost credence as the U.S. industrial revolution proceeded in the 19th century. After the Civil War, the manufacturing capacity and the sophistication of many U.S. production techniques outstripped those used anywhere else in the world. Even so, protectionists continued to insist on high tariffs. Republican Party politicians in particular considered protectionism a fundamental article of faith, regardless of international trade realities. Opponents of protectionism sometimes won modest victories. In 1846, for example, the Walker Tariff Act, approved by a Democratic Congress and president. lowered many rates. The onset of the Civil War reversed that trend. Republicans controlled the federal government, and, arguing quite reasonably that escalating war costs required more tax revenue, they boosted tariff rates across the board to unprecedented levels. The Republican Party remained in power after the war, and its members were loath to reduce tariff rates, once again citing the importance of protecting domestic manufacturers. Rates continued at generally high levels, despite several assaults by low-tariff advocates. Some Americans even favored the concept of free trade that had been pioneered by the British, who had canceled many of their tariffs completely in 1846. Although inﬂuential manufacturers complained about potential damage to their livelihoods if rates fell, protectionism gave many of them enormous profits. At one point, Andrew Carnegie, the nation’s leading steel monger, owned mills so efﬁcient that they produced high quality steel rails for less than $20 per ton. The contemporary U.S. tariff on imported steel of the same quality

stood at $45 per ton. Even if British factories could match Carnegie’s efﬁciency, and few could, imported British steel sold for at least $65 per ton in the United States once the tariff was added to production costs. Carnegie could sell his entire output for slightly less than $65 per ton and collect a 200 percent proﬁt. This sort of advantage enabled him to amass an enormous fortune. Less efficient U.S. producers obviously netted lower returns. Why did support for protectionism remain so strong? One reason was that business-backed Republicans generally dominated the national government, right through the onset of the Great Depression. On the few occasions when Democrats seized control, managing the complexities of revising tariff schedules listing literally hundreds of individual rates was a daunting task. Moreover, protectionists argued that high tariff rates also protected U.S. workers. Wage rates in the United States, so the logic ran, remained higher than those abroad because of the cushioning effect of high tariffs on imports. Consequently, many Democrats with industrial workers as constituents were reluctant to dismantle the tariff wall. Occasionally, even Republicans acknowledged that protectionism had gone too far. In 1890, the federal government was collecting far more revenue than it could wisely expend. Embarrassed by this imbalance, President Benjamin Harrison urged his fellow Republicans to revise the tariff schedules. Ohio representative William McKinley headed the House committee charged with this task. Special interest groups bombarded him with requests for continued protection, so the resulting McKinley Tariff Act

180 | Section 3

closely resembled the preexisting structure. McKinley’s major change was putting sugar on the free list. Because sugar tariffs generated almost one-fifth of the government’s annual revenue, that single change alone almost solved the “surplus problem.” In 1892, Democratic president Grover Cleveland staked his successful election campaign on the promise of comprehensive tariff reduction. The resulting 1894 Wilson-Gorman Act reduced overall rates by more than 10 percent but restored the tariff on imported sugar— with remarkable consequences for both Hawaii and Cuba. Immediately after his election as president, William McKinley convened a special session of Congress to reverse the mischief that the Democrats had done. The 1897 Dingley Tariff Act reset most rates to levels similar to those of the earlier McKinley Tariff. A dozen years later, Republican strategists again realized that they needed to tone down their increasingly unpopular protectionism. President William Howard Taft followed McKinley’s example by convening a special session of Congress in 1909. New York representative Sereno Payne pushed through the House a bill with relatively mild reductions, but it ran into concerted opposition in the Senate. Rhode Island senator Nelson Aldrich and his protectionist colleagues added 847 amendments to the Payne Bill, virtually all of them restoring or raising rates that had been reduced. The main achievement of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909 was its inclusion of a proposed amendment to permit the imposition of an income tax. Another seven years passed before the Sixteenth Amendment won ﬁnal ratiﬁcation.

Democratic President Woodrow Wilson superintended a major tariff reduction program in 1913, but the outbreak of the Great War a year later so confused the international situation that no one could conﬁdently assess the effects of this modest retreat from protectionism. As part of what President Warren G. Harding called a return to normalcy, Republican majorities resurrected high tariff walls in the 1922 Fordney-McCumber Act. When the nation tumbled into the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover prescribed the standard Republican panacea for economic ills by urging passage of an even more protectionist measure. The resulting Hawley-Smoot Act of 1930 contributed to an almost total collapse of international trade, seriously undermining U.S. faith in the wisdom of protectionism. In 1934, Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt encouraged the passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. It allowed the executive branch to negotiate mutually beneﬁcial reductions of individual tariff rates with other countries. The operation of mostfavored-nation provisions in dozens of bilateral treaties pushed U.S. tariff rates downward by as much as 50 percent over the next few years. Reciprocity thus replaced congressional tariff-setting as the nation’s main international trade policy. As the 20th century drew to a close, the world approached the free-trade ideal that the British had been championing for a century and a half. See also: GATT; Sugar References

Dobson, John M. Two Centuries of Tariffs. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1976.

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 181 Ratner, Sidney. The Tariff in American History. New York: Van Nostrand, 1972. Terrill, Tom E. The Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 1874–1901. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973.

Punitive Expedition President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to send General John J. Pershing into northern Mexico with more than 6,000 troops in 1916 was the last of a series of unfortunate U.S. policy initiatives. Pershing’s Punitive Expedition was charged with rounding up bandits who were crossing the border, but his troops eventually penetrated as far as 300 miles into the neighboring country. Wilson wisely ordered a withdrawal early in 1917, but the sequence of events leading up to the expedition strained the U.S. relationship with Mexico for years to come. The trouble began when revolutionaries ousted longtime Mexican president Porﬁrio Díaz in 1911. The United States had maintained a positive relationship with the Díaz government, which had allowed Americans to invest more than $1 billion in Mexican mines, ranches, and natural resources. When Francisco Madero succeeded Díaz, U.S. ambassador Henry Lane Wilson worried that the new regime would interfere with or even drive out U.S. entrepreneurs. Consequently, he sympathized with revolutionary general Victoriano Huerta’s successful drive to supplant Madero. Without checking with his superiors in Washington, Ambassador Wilson quickly recognized the Huerta government as legitimate. The diplomat’s unilateral action did not sit well with President Woodrow Wilson, who took ofﬁce in March 1913. Madero had died under questionable

circumstances, and Wilson assumed that Huerta had had a hand in his murder. The U.S. president was ﬁrmly committed to encouraging democratic governments around the world; when Huerta refused to adopt a constitution and strengthened his hold over the country, Wilson withdrew U.S. recognition. In August 1913, he described his policy as one of “watchful waiting,” hoping that democracy would soon assert itself in Mexico. By October, the president was ready to abandon that passive approach for a more active search for an alternative to Huerta. Venustiano Carranza led a group of revolutionaries who called themselves “Constitutionalists.” A historian with an abiding belief in the beneﬁts of constitutional democracies, Woodrow Wilson was naturally attracted to them. But when he offered to assist Carranza, the rebel leader rejected any type of direct U.S. military intervention. He did, however, indicate a desire to purchase arms and equipment from the United States. The president lifted an arms embargo that his predecessor, William Howard Taft, had imposed, but that change seemed to help Huerta more than it did the Constitutionalists. A naval confrontation provided Woodrow Wilson with an excuse to take more deﬁnitive action. Several U.S. sailors rowed a gig ashore at Tampico, a port on Mexico’s east coast, intending to ﬁll water casks. Mexico’s federal soldiers arrested the Americans as trespassers, but Huerta’s government quickly ordered them freed. Even so, Admiral Henry T. Mayo, commander of a U.S. ﬂeet monitoring events along the Mexican coast, demanded a full apology and a 21-gun salute to the U.S. ﬂag. Huerta agreed, but only if the United States would reciprocate with a 21-gun

182 | Section 3

salute to his nation’s ﬂag. President Wilson rejected this demand because it might be interpreted as de facto recognition of the legitimacy of Huerta’s regime. In April 1914, Wilson obtained authority from Congress to use force against Huerta and his supporters, although not against the Mexican people themselves. Admiral Mayo’s ﬂeet then invaded and captured the Mexican port of Vera Cruz, ostensibly to prevent a German ship from landing military supplies. The U.S. occupation roused such domestic and international criticism that Wilson had to refer the issue to a mediation panel made up of representatives from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Not surprisingly, the mediators concluded that the United States should immediately withdraw.

Meanwhile, Carranza and his allies, Francisco “Pancho” Villa and Emiliano Zapata, succeeded in forcing Huerta to resign. Although Wilson had earlier favored the Constitutionalists, he had become disenchanted with Carranza, so the United States did not immediately recognize the new leadership. This response encouraged Villa and, ultimately, Zapata to break with Carranza, a move that temporarily made Villa the president of Mexico. Carranza quickly rallied his supporters and, after a brief struggle, reestablished his control over the country. In October 1915, the Wilson administration formally recognized his regime as the legitimate authority in Mexico. Pancho Villa retreated into the desert country of northern Mexico, bent on carrying on his resistance. He apparently

U.S. general John J. Pershing’s intervention in northern Mexico in 1916 was called the Punitive Expedition, but it failed to achieve its chief objective of capturing rebel leader Francisco “Pancho” Villa. (Clendenen Papers, Hoover Institution)

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 183 thought that if he could provoke the United States into intervening militarily, its forces might ultimately overthrow Carranza. Villa’s supporters stopped a train carrying 17 U.S. engineering students and summarily executed all but one of them. When the United States response fell short of his expectations, Villa ordered a cross-border raid on the town of Columbus on March 9, 1916. The assault on this community, located in the extreme southwestern part of the state of New Mexico, inﬂicted 19 deaths and burned many buildings. Wilson immediately reinforced the troop presence along the southern border of the United States and negotiated an ill-deﬁned agreement with the Carranza government. It permitted U.S. army units to enter northern Mexico to capture the “bandits” who had attacked the United States. Pancho Villa deftly evaded General Pershing’s large Punitive Expedition, drawing it farther and farther south into Mexico. The U.S. soldiers inevitably encountered Mexican troops under orders from Carranza. After a couple of minor skirmishes, U.S. units ran into bloody resistance from Federalista who were defending the town of Carrazal. Wilson immediately began drafting a war message but was dissuaded when he learned that the Americans had been the aggressors in the encounter. At that point, Carranza and Wilson agreed to convene a Joint High Commission to resolve their differences. The commission met from September 1916 through January 1917, but its conclusions satisﬁed neither party. By then, the German government had initiated its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, which was certain to draw the United States into the war raging in Europe. President Wilson had no

choice but to withdraw Pershing and his command from the minor distraction of Mexico to prepare them for service in what became known as the American Expeditionary Force across the Atlantic. The U.S. withdrawal eased tensions between the United States and Mexico, but the distrust that Wilson had exhibited from 1913 on left permanent scars on the relationship between the two nations. See also: American Expeditionary Force; Mission References

Cline, Howard F. The United States and Mexico. New York: Atheneum, 1963. Knight, Alan. U.S.-Mexican Relations, 1910–1940. La Jolla: Center for U.S.–Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1987. Stout, Joseph A., Jr. Border Conﬂict: Villistas, Carrancistas, and the Punitive Expedition, 1913–1920. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1999.

Rapprochement Like many other diplomatic terms, rapprochement comes from the French language, meaning “approaching again.” In the U.S. context, it has been applied to the gradual easing of tensions between the United States and Great Britain that occurred early in the 20th century. The “coming together” of the two nations’ attitudes toward international issues was very timely for the British, because it helped President Woodrow Wilson rationalize his decision to ask for a war declaration on the side of Great Britain and France in 1917. Such a move would have been far less likely at almost any point in the 19th century. The general U.S. attitude toward Great Britain could be summed

184 | Section 3

up in one word: Anglophobia. This negative attitude had long roots, stretching all the way back to the Revolution and the War of 1812. The fact that the United States and Great Britain maintained extraordinarily beneﬁcial commercial ties did nothing to prevent Americans from being suspicious and critical of British policies, especially when they involved the Western Hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine articulated some of that feeling, and the Polk and Olney corollaries were even more pointedly anti-British. Domestic interest groups played a large role in stoking the hostility. Millions of Irish immigrants poured into the United States, particularly after the potato famine devastated Ireland in the 1840s. Most were ﬁercely anti-British, having lived on an island that was dominated by British landlords and politicians. German Americans constituted another sizable group that was naturally less than sympathetic to the British. Had rebellious Irish and loyal Germans dominated U.S. politics in 1914, the decision about which side to support in World War I might have been quite different. As it turned out, however, several relatively minor accommodations and agreements between the two governments in the previous couple of decades had facilitated a true rapprochement. Ironically, one of the earliest of these occurred in the mid-1890s, when the United States took Great Britain to task for its attitudes in the Venezuela boundary dispute. Despite the strident, aggressive tone of Secretary of State Richard Olney’s note that stated his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the British government responded judiciously, sidestepping a potentially dangerous confrontation. A key factor in the changing relationship was Great Britain’s acknowledg-

ment of the rising power and inﬂuence of the United States. No other nation seemed willing to welcome the Americans into the small circle of great world powers, but the British could see real advantages to doing so. They were quite complimentary of the swift and deﬁnitive U.S. success in the war against Spain in 1898 and were sympathetic about the turmoil and continuing conﬂict that developed in the Philippines afterward. At almost the same time, the longsimmering opposition of Boer settlers in South Africa boiled over into a full-scale war. Standing almost alone in empathizing with the British in their colonial struggle, the United States had returned the compliment. These more reﬂective attitudes helped resolve a tense dispute involving Canada. The discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1896 attracted a ﬂood of prospective miners, most of whom were Americans. The quickest access to the mining camps was on ships sailing the inside passage along the Alaskan coast. The boundary between the southern extension of Alaska and British Columbia had never been settled. When the Russian government turned Alaska over to the United States, it indicated that its claims extended 30 miles inland from the coast. But that coast was highly irregular, with dozens of deep inlets. The Americans claimed that the 30 miles began at the deepest penetration of the ocean; the Canadians insisted that it began at the farthest extension of the land. In 1898, both sides agreed to submit the question to a Joint High Commission in Québec, but that body failed to resolve the matter. The United States stubbornly refused to accept the initial arbitration proposal that Great Britain favored. Tensions mounted in 1902, when President

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 185 Theodore Roosevelt ordered U.S. troops into the disputed territory. Fortunately, his secretary of state, John Hay, was able to negotiate a new arbitration treaty, which subjected the issue to an international panel of “six impartial jurists,” three chosen by each side. The treaty won Senate approval when the U.S. nominees were named: two senators and Secretary of War Elihu Root. The Canadians chose two equally partisan arbitrators, but Great Britain ﬁlled its slot with the chief justice of England, Lord Alverstone. He voted with the Americans on each point, so the United States gained its maximum objectives. Alverstone’s action helped convince Americans of Great Britain’s good faith and friendship. Three other issues were settled amicably as well. One was a revival—or, perhaps more accurately, the persistence—of controversy over U.S. ﬁshing rights off the Canadian coast. A mutually satisfactory agreement was hammered out in 1912. Despite its lack of appeal to protectionist congressmen, the United States also agreed to grant trade reciprocity to Canada, a move that actually beneﬁted both countries. The ﬁnal controversy involved a congressional decision to exempt U.S.–owned ships from paying tolls on the nearly completed Panama Canal, a decision that clearly violated the 1902 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. In this instance, President Woodrow Wilson was able to convince the members of his party, who controlled both houses of Congress, to fulﬁll the treaty obligations. On the eve of the outbreak of World War I, therefore, Great Britain and the United States had found peaceful and, in many cases, mutually beneﬁcial ways to resolve their outstanding disagreements. The rapprochement process was complete.

Throughout the rest of the 20th century, the United States and Great Britain almost always found common ground for their international initiatives and actions. See also: Olney Corollary; Panama References

Campbell, Alexander E. Great Britain and the United States 1895–1903. London: Longmans, 1960. Perkins, Bradford. The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914. New York: Atheneum, 1968. Tansill, Charles Callan. Canadian-American Relations, 1875–1911. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1943.

Spanish-American-Cuban War The U.S. decision to intervene in the war between rebels and Spanish colonial authorities in Cuba in 1898 was more than a little rash. Fortunately, U.S. participation in the conﬂict ended in just over three months, with relatively few casualties. Secretary of State John Hay expressed a widely held U.S. sentiment when he referred to it as “a splendid little war.” Although that may have been a valid assessment of the combat phase, it understated the broader implications and consequences of the conflict. The Spanish-American-Cuban War profoundly altered the international status and responsibilities of the United States. When Congress approved President William McKinley’s request for a declaration of war on April 25, 1898, the U.S. Army was hopelessly unprepared for an international conﬂict or, indeed, almost any sort of military action. Fortunately, the new, all-steel, steampowered naval vessels that had recently been commissioned offset the army’s

186 | Section 3

many inadequacies. That became evident almost immediately, when the U.S. Navy achieved a stunning victory more than 7,000 miles away from Cuban shores. It took place in the Philippine Islands, where the Spanish had maintained colonial control for centuries. The U.S. Navy had included the Philippines in its contingency planning for several years. The concern was that the Spanish might assemble a ﬂeet there and send it across the Paciﬁc to attack the West Coast of the United States. Commodore George Dewey had recently taken command of the navy’s small Pacific squadron. When he received word of the war declaration, he followed prearranged orders to steam into Manila Bay. His squadron’s guns raked the decrepit Spanish ships anchored there, sinking or disabling all of them in short order. Dewey reported his victory by telegraph and was instantly rewarded with promotion to the rank of admiral. Even so, he could do little more than wait for army reinforcements to arrive from the United States. The army was in turmoil. The prewar regular army consisted of only 25,000 men; they were dispersed throughout the nation, many of them in Western forts, charged with watching out for Indian attacks. To supplement this inadequate force, 300,000 men immediately volunteered for service. The War Department was ill-equipped to handle even a small fraction of that number of new recruits. With great effort and many missteps, it managed to transfer enough units to Florida to train and prepare for landings in Cuba. If the U.S. Navy had distinguished itself in the Philippines, it performed less brilliantly in the Caribbean. It hastily assembled a blockading ﬂeet to close off

access to a couple of Cuba’s northern ports but failed to prevent a Spanish ﬂeet from crossing the Atlantic and slipping into the southern port city of Santiago. When this ﬂeet was discovered, the U.S. Navy rounded up more vessels to establish a blockade there as well. In late June, the navy assembled a slow moving transport ﬂeet to carry eager soldiers to the center of the action. Along the way, 600 marines captured Guantánamo Bay without opposition. Other men, equipment, and horses were unloaded in heavy surf off the rebel-held coast east of Santiago. The Americans ﬁrst encountered enemy forces when they headed west toward the city. The Spanish inﬂicted substantial damage at a couple of points along the way before retreating to the crest of the line of hills

The United States Navy established an effective blockade outside the harbor at Santiago de Cuba. Its one-sided victory when the trapped Spanish ﬂeet tried to ﬂee in July 1898 was the last major battle of the Spanish-AmericanCuban War. (Ridpath, John Clark. Ridpath’s History of the World, 1901)

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 187 surrounding Santiago. Theodore Roosevelt led one of the U.S. volunteer regiments that charged up these hills. Reinforcements moved in behind and positioned U.S. artillery ready to shell the city and the ships that were anchored in the harbor. The Spanish admiral received orders to escape if he could, but the U.S. blockading ﬂeet picked off the Spanish vessels one by one as they left the harbor’s mouth. At that point, General William Shafter realized that his troops were running short of ammunition and on the verge of collapse from dysentery and other ailments. He decided to negotiate and hammered out a truce with the Spanish authorities on July 17. Meanwhile, an independent U.S. command captured the Spanish colony of Puerto Rico without opposition. In the Paciﬁc, Guam came under U.S. control when some of the ships ferrying troops to the Philippines stopped by. When the reinforcements arrived at Manila Bay, they encountered only minor resistance from the Spanish Army in taking control of Manila. During that engagement, the Americans learned that Spain and the United States had extended the Cuban truce worldwide. The U.S. forces suffered only 385 combat deaths in the war, although many more succumbed to disease. Now it was up to the diplomats to sort things out. Of the five men that McKinley chose for his negotiating team, four were avowed imperialists who favored U.S. expansion and even colonization. The U.S. commissioners met with Spanish envoys in Paris in October. Spain apparently thought that if it conceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam, the Americans might return the Philippines. Instead, the U.S. team

notiﬁed Washington of its desire to force Spain to relinquish its claims there as well. The topic had become quite controversial in the United States, where outspoken anti-imperialists noisily protested any move toward colonization. The president conducted his own survey of public opinion, delivering a series of speeches to assess the popular will before endorsing his commissioners’ recommendation. The Spanish were powerless to reject the U.S. demands, although they did obtain a $20 million payment for the lost territories. Both sides signed the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898, and McKinley submitted it to the Senate for ratiﬁcation early in the following year. There it encountered stiff opposition from anti-imperialists in both parties. Some of them worried that the Filipino people might react violently to a U.S. takeover. That threat became real on February 4, 1899, when Emilio Aguinaldo’s 15,000-man army became engaged in open conﬂict with the occupying forces. Ironically, the outbreak of violence appears to have convinced some of those on the fence that the United States had a duty to put down the rebellion. The ﬁnal Senate vote on February 6 was 57 to 27, just one more than the required two-thirds majority. The Filipino insurrection persisted for more than two years, caused 4,000 U.S. combat deaths, and cost $170 million. Although the Teller Amendment had foresworn U.S. colonization of Cuba, U.S. troops continued to occupy the island for another three years. The complexities of extracting the United States from this commitment did not end with Cuba’s acceptance of the Platt Amendment. It effectively kept the island as a protectorate of the United

188 | Section 3

States, ensuring continuing emotional and ﬁnancial costs for years to come. On the positive side of the ledger, the war had fulﬁlled many U.S. prewar objectives. It provided a stimulating and relatively inexpensive way for the nation to exhaust its jingoist energies. Americans might be far less enamored of war for its own sake in the future. The conﬂict also gave the new U.S. Navy a trial-by-ﬁre that exposed both strengths and weaknesses. It provoked a major shipbuilding frenzy that created the second largest navy in the world by 1908. More important than these military aspects, the Spanish-Cuban-American War enhanced U.S. prestige around the world. It forced other great powers to recognize the United States—if not as an equal, at least as a major player. That, in turn, guaranteed that U.S. policy initiatives would receive more serious consideration in the future. At the same time, the war gave the United States a somewhat more mature and rational international perspective. It effectively slaked the U.S. desire for colonies and demonstrated the pitfalls of rash action. Thus, the war and its aftermath left the United States better prepared to deal with the crises and confrontations that it would encounter in the 20th century. See also: Cuban Rebellion References

Freidel, Frank. The Splendid Little War. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958. McCartney, Paul T. Power and Progress: American National Identity, the War of 1898, and the Rise of American Imperialism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Schoonover, Thomas David. Uncle Sam’s War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization.

Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. Trask, David F. The War with Spain in 1898. New York, Macmillan, 1981.

Sugar Although we are currently well aware of how important oil is to the global economy and that international conﬂicts and controversies surround its recovery and shipment, few realize that sugar played a major role in U.S. foreign policy in earlier times. Both before and after the American Revolution, trade with the sugar-producing Caribbean islands was highly proﬁtable. In the 19th century, the duties on sugar imports sometimes provided as much as 20 percent of all federal tax revenue. Complications with offshore suppliers like Hawaii and Cuba led to major foreign policy decisions that profoundly shaped the future. The importance of sugar and its less reﬁned form, molasses, was widely recognized in the colonial era. British, French, Spanish, and Dutch colonists settled in the Caribbean to establish cane sugar plantations. To work the ﬁelds, the Europeans imported thousands and thousands of slaves from Africa. So vital were the sugar islands that some insisted that Barbados alone was of more value to the British empire than all of its North American colonies combined. The people living in those colonies beneﬁted from the trade as well, collecting sugar and molasses from the islands and transporting it either to Great Britain or to their home ports in New York and New England. Rhode Island developed an extremely proﬁtable distilling industry based on converting molasses into rum for domestic consumption and export. To control the sugar trade, the British

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 189 government passed the Molasses Act in 1733 and the Sugar Act in 1763, both of which levied high taxes on any product imported from non-British sources. But the American appetite for sugar was so strong that Americans legally or illegally continued to bring in large amounts of “foreign” sugar and molasses from other nation’s Caribbean colonies. This trade continued to ﬂourish after the Revolution and into the 1790s. At that point, the British government objected to Americans supporting its wartime enemies, France and Spain. The U.S. trade violated Great Britain’s Rule of 1756 and, later, its orders-in-council, setting the stage for a series of diplomatic confrontations. These ultimately helped trigger the War of 1812. After that conﬂict, U.S. shippers continued to exploit Caribbean trading opportunities that were primarily focused on obtaining and transporting sugar. Because sugar was a desirable product that was imported in great quantities, it was a natural target for customs duties to raise revenue. The very ﬁrst tariff passed in the First Congress included a tax levy on imported sugar. It was modiﬁed up or down in subsequent years, but it remained a key source of funding for federal government operations. When Americans began settling in Louisiana and other Gulf Coast locations, many established cane sugar plantations, just like the ones in the Caribbean, with slaves handling the ﬁeldwork. These domestic producers had an advantage over offshore growers because they did not have to pay any import taxes. Later in the 19th century, sugar beet planters in Western areas, such as Colorado and Utah, enjoyed the same market advantage. Domestic sugar growers pressured their congressmen to maintain protective

tariffs on foreign sugar to help offset their higher costs of production. When Americans began settling in Hawaii, they took advantage of the tropical climate to establish cane sugar plantations. As in the Caribbean, they had to import laborers to work their ﬁelds, in this case drawing them from China and Japan. But Hawaii was an independent kingdom during this period, so planters who shipped their product to the United States were subject to import duties. To ease this situation, diplomats on both sides worked out a series of reciprocity arrangements between the kingdom and the United States. They reduced or eliminated the U.S. tariff on Hawaiian sugar in return for similar cuts in Hawaiian import taxes on U.S. products. When Ohio representative William McKinley took up the challenge of drafting a new tariff schedule in 1890, he had to solve the problem of embarrassing surpluses. The protective tariff system’s existing rates were so high that they generated far more revenue than the government at that point had any need or desire to spend. But McKinley was a dedicated Republican protectionist, so the new legislation left most of the protective rates in place but canceled the sugar duty entirely. Because sugar taxes had been responsible for about one-ﬁfth of the nation’s overall tariff revenue, putting sugar on the free list effectively solved the surplus revenue “problem.” The legislation also established a bounty for domestic sugar producers to enable them to compete with foreign growers. Hawaii felt the impact of this change immediately because it rendered the reciprocity arrangements irrelevant. The island economy headed into a depression that fomented political instability and, ultimately, a revolution led by the small

190 | Section 3

minority of Americans residing in the kingdom. Their goal was to gain immediate annexation to the United States, a step that would enable sugar growers in Hawaii to qualify for the sugar bounty. A series of missteps delayed annexation for another ﬁve years, forcing the Republic of Hawaii to cope with its internal problems without a subsidy from the United States. Annexation was ﬁnally achieved in 1898, almost as an afterthought of the Spanish-American-Cuban War. The McKinley Act had the opposite effect on the other major supplier of foreign sugar to the United States. Cuba was a Spanish colony, in which almost half of the economic activity was focused on the export of sugar that was grown in its bountiful cane ﬁelds. For decades, the island’s economy had suffered ill effects from the import taxes charged by its most important customer, the United States. When sugar suddenly moved to the free list in 1890, the Cuban economy blossomed accordingly. For four years, Cubans enjoyed an unprecedented level of prosperity. In his successful run for the presidency in 1892, Grover Cleveland promised a major reform of the nation’s tariff structure. In 1894, his fellow Democrats in the Congress rammed through a revision of the McKinley Act. The new legislation was called the Wilson-Gorman Act, and it dramatically lowered the tariff rates on many traditionally protected domestic products. To replace the revenue that would be lost from those changes, the legislation revived a tariff on imported sugar. The Cuban economy immediately nose dived. Prosperity vanished overnight when its sugar exports once again had to leap the U.S. tariff barrier. By 1895, the Cuban people were so restive and

discontent that they responded positively when a rebellion began in the western part of the island. The rebels intended to end the Spanish control that had lasted 400 years. Unlike the Hawaiian revolutionary leaders, however, the Cuban patriots had no interest in a U.S. takeover; in fact, they positively feared it. They were none too pleased, therefore, when the United States intervened in 1898 and subsequently engineered a new government and economic framework for Cuba. After 1900, sugar declined as a critical resource and ceased to be a major influence on U.S. foreign policy. It became even less important with the passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in 1934. That legislation set in motion a series of bilateral agreements that reduced tariff rates on both sides, and sugar tariffs, in particular, were dramatically reduced around the world. Yet sugar remained a key factor in some instances. For decades, the Soviet Union paid premium prices for the Cuban sugar crop as a part of its effort to shore up the Communist government there. The U.S. embargo against that government has effectively prevented Cuban sugar from reaching what had historically been its most important market. See also: Hawaii; Spanish-American-Cuban War References

Dobson, John M. Two Centuries of Tariffs. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1976 Pletcher, David M. The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865–1900. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. Tate, Merze. Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1968.

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 191

BIOGRAPHIES Adee, Alvey (1842–1924) New Yorker Alvey Adee served 8 years at the American Legation in Spain and 47 more at the State Department in Washington, D.C. He stumbled into his remarkably long diplomatic career rather by accident. A generous inheritance allowed him to live as a dilettante who never earned a college degree. Even so, he read widely, engaged in scientiﬁc studies, and ultimately published a deﬁnitive edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear. As a young man, he also traveled widely, an experience that recommended him to General Dan Sickles, a law client of one of Adee’s uncles. When President Ulysses Grant named his former comrade-in-arms to be minister to Spain in 1869, Sickles invited Adee to accompany him as a private secretary. The young man spoke Spanish ﬂuently and proved to be an extraordinarily competent administrator, often serving as the legation’s chargé d’affaires. He gained prominence for arranging to have William Marcy Tweed returned to custody after the notorious New York City political boss had escaped from prison and ﬂed the country. When Adee’s tour in Spain ended, Secretary of State William Maxwell Evarts offered him a supposedly temporary post at the State Department. Over the years, Adee won promotion to third and then second assistant secretary of state, the position he held until a week before his death. Adee deliberately avoided seeking further advancement, to escape being subject to the rotation of political appointees. His accumulated experience, wide knowledge, and writing skills proved invaluable to succeeding secretaries of state. In

addition to serving as a living archive of past diplomatic actions, Adee drafted or revised virtually all major policy statements and documents emanating from the State Department for nearly half a century. For example, it was he who drafted the famous Open Door Notes that his longtime friend, John Hay, distributed in 1899 and 1900. Adee also participated in modernizing the department, introducing typewritten communication in the 1880s, a dramatic break from traditional handwritten diplomatic notes. Adee superintended the editing of the Foreign Relations series, the ofﬁcial record of U.S. diplomacy. A modest, self-effacing man, Adee was content to make his behind-the-scenes contributions to the rise of the United States to world power status, but everyone who worked with him and relied on his judgment and communication skills readily acknowledged the centrality of his inﬂuence. See also: Hay, John Milton; Open Door Policy Reference

DeNovo, John A. “The Enigmatic Alvey A. Adee and American Foreign Relations, 1870–1924,” Prologue 7 (Summer 1975): 69–80.

Blaine, James Gillespie (1830–1893) Like other unsuccessful 19th-century presidential candidates, including Henry Clay, William Seward, and John Calhoun, James G. Blaine took consolation in serving as secretary of state. Born and educated in Pennsylvania, Blaine married Harriet Stanwood in 1850. Some of her extended family lived in the state of Maine, so the young couple moved to Augusta, a decision that established Blaine’s political base of operations for

192 | Section 3

the rest of his life. An early Whig convert to the Republican Party, he quickly rose to prominence during the Civil War. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1863, Blaine became Speaker six years later. When the Democratic Party captured control of the House in the 1875 elections, Blaine moved over to the Senate. An astute politician and enthralling orator, he managed to chart a prudent course through the mineﬁelds of war and Reconstruction, emerging as the leader of the so-called Half-Breeds in competition with the Republican Party’s Stalwart faction. The Stalwarts repeatedly tried to get Ulysses Grant renominated after he completed his second term in 1876. Blaine’s supporters were equally committed to putting the man from Maine in the White House. Stymied by Stalwart intransigence, the Half-Breeds turned to compromise candidates Rutherford B. Hayes and James A. Garﬁeld in 1876 and 1880. Grateful for Blaine’s support, Garﬁeld named him secretary of state. Garﬁeld’s death at the hands of an assassin cut Blaine’s tenure short after less than a year. After his own unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1884, Blaine threw his support behind General Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Like Garﬁeld before him, President Harrison reinstalled Blaine in the State Department. Anglophobia was a major factor in Blaine’s policies in both periods. He worked hard to undermine Great Britain’s commercial inﬂuence in Latin America and replace it with a revived U.S. merchant marine. He also promoted Pan-Americanism, fully expecting the United States to be the undisputed leader of the Western Hemisphere. This ambition caused him to intervene ineffectively in the War of the Paciﬁc between Chile and Peru, to oppose French efforts to

construct a canal through the isthmus of Panama, and to invite delegates from all Latin American nations to a conference in Washington. After several years of delay, the conference took place in 1889, but it failed to fulﬁll Blaine’s larger ambitions. He completed his term at the State Department with an aggressive annexationist policy directed at Hawaii. Blaine was able to pursue an active agenda as secretary of state in part because relatively few Americans paid much attention to international affairs while he was in ofﬁce. See also: Panama; Pan-Americanism Reference

Crapol, Edward P. James G. Blaine: Architect of Empire. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000.

Bryan, William Jennings (1860–1925) Like many other secretaries of state, William Jennings Bryan earned that position not as a recognition of any international expertise or experience, but because he had been a presidential candidate. Born in Illinois, Bryan studied law and eventually established his practice in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1890, he won the ﬁrst of two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, the only government position he held prior to heading the State Department. In 1896, Bryan captured the Democratic Party presidential nomination on the basis of his articulate advocacy of the free coinage of silver. He lost to Republican William McKinley that year and again in 1900. Although he remained the most prominent Democrat, his party nominated Alton B. Parker, who ran unsuccessfully against Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. The

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 193 Democrats returned to Bryan in 1908, only to see him lose for a third time to William Howard Taft. Even so, Bryan retained sufﬁcient support within his party to give him considerable inﬂuence at the 1912 Democratic Convention. His switch to endorsing New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson triggered a sizable swing in Wilson’s direction that ultimately led to his nomination. As a reward, President Wilson offered Bryan his choice of cabinet posts, and the Nebraska warhorse selected the State Department, traditionally recognized as the most important. Pacifism was a major character trait that influenced Bryan’s behavior as secretary of state. For example, he negotiated some 30 bilateral arbitration treaties with other countries. They stipulated that if a dispute arose between the signatories, they should give an international commission up to a full year to arbitrate its resolution. Only if the arbitration failed could either side consider resorting to military action. A U.S. arbitration treaty with Germany had yet to be ratiﬁed when World War I broke out in 1914, but Bryan hoped that its spirit would forestall U.S. entry into the conﬂict. In Bryan’s view, the United States was violating its own neutrality policy in allowing U.S. ships and passengers to travel freely to Great Britain. When 122 Americans aboard the British liner Lusitania died in May 1915, Bryan found himself to be the only member of the Wilson administration counseling an even-handed approach. He chose to resign rather than be associated with the second bitter protest note that Wilson sent to Berlin. Bryan nevertheless continued to support Wilson in his 1916 reelection bid and even volunteered for service, although he never saw action, when the United

States ﬁnally entered the war in the following spring. See also: Neutrality (1914–1917); Unrestricted Submarine Warfare Reference

Leinwand, Gerald. William Jennings Bryan: An Uncertain Trumpet. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 2007.

Dewey, George (1837–1917) George Dewey’s training, personality, and competence all helped prepare him for his moment of destiny in Manila Bay. The son of a Vermont doctor, young George was a childhood troublemaker who eventually enrolled in Norwich College, a military institution. Unable to obtain a position at West Point, Dewey settled for the U.S. Naval Academy as a consolation. After graduating in 1858, he took the required two-year cruise prior to being commissioned a lieutenant just a few days before the Civil War began. He served under Admiral David G. Farragut during the Union Navy’s capture of New Orleans, and Dewey always cited the crusty, resourceful Farragut as his role model. Dewey completed several other war assignments and emerged from the conﬂict with the rank of lieutenant commander. For the next three decades, he stubbornly remained in the peacetime navy, even though he had to compete with a huge surplus of naval ofﬁcers for often boring assignments. In the late 1880s, however, Dewey landed administrative posts that provided him with up-to-date knowledge of the rapidly developing allsteel, steam-powered navy. By 1897, his record and experience had come to the attention of assistant secretary of the navy Theodore Roosevelt, who personally arranged for Dewey to take command of

194 | Section 3

the Asiatic squadron. As war fever rose early the next year, Roosevelt sent an unauthorized message ordering Dewey to keep his ships full of coal and ready for offensive action against Spain. When war was declared in late April, Dewey implemented a preplanned attack on the Spanish defenses at Manila Bay. Within a few hours, his squadron completely destroyed the enemy ﬂeet without the death of a single American. The situation remained tense, however, as powerful foreign navies assembled to threaten Dewey’s authority in the bay. By August, enough U.S. soldiers had arrived to capture the city of Manila. The newly promoted admiral remained in the Philippines for another year before returning to one of the most thunderous popular receptions that any U.S. war hero has ever received. After toying brieﬂy with the idea of a run for the presidency, Dewey returned to more routine naval positions until his death, on the eve of U.S. entry into World War I. See also: Spanish-American-Cuban War Reference

Spector, Ronald. Admiral of the New Empire: the Life and Career of George Dewey. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

Hay, John Milton (1838–1905) A literate, scholarly, and gentlemanly Midwesterner, John Hay distinguished himself as both a diplomat and a statesman. He spent his early years in Illinois and, after graduating from Brown University, returned to establish himself as a lawyer in Springﬁeld. His law ofﬁce was located next door to Abraham Lincoln’s. Recognizing the young man’s intelligence and amenable personality, Lincoln

invited Hay to accompany him as his private secretary when he was elected president. In the nation’s capital, Hay’s responsibilities ranged from door keeping to letter writing and all the way to a position as Lincoln’s military aide in the late stages of the Civil War. Hay and his friend John Nicolay, another Springﬁeld lawyer who served under Lincoln, later published an outstanding 10-volume biography of the president. When Secretary of State William Seward became aware of Hay’s talents, he sent the young man on diplomatic assignments to France and Austria. Hay held other diplomatic positions from time to time in succeeding decades, even as he pursued his interests in journalism and letters. He published novels and poetry, as well as insightful newspaper columns. An active participant in Republican Party politics and frequent international traveler, Hay was an obvious choice for President William McKinley to send to London as the U.S. ambassador. His astute and genteel behavior during the SpanishAmerican-Cuban War did much to improve Anglo-American relations. When McKinley chose Secretary of State William R. Day to lead the peace negotiating team in Paris, he recalled Hay from London to head the State Department. There Hay announced and defended the Open Door Policy regarding China, negotiated successful treaties with Great Britain and Panama to allow the United States to dig the isthmian canal, and smoothed relations with Canada over the Alaskan boundary dispute. In every instance, Hay was the soul of tact and thoughtfulness, qualities that made him a distinguished statesman for his country. These same qualities earned him respect and enhanced his ability to work effectively with representatives of

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 195 other countries. Although Theodore Roosevelt retained Hay as secretary of state when he became president, the two men had markedly different personalities. The young president tended to be decisive and forceful in both his opinions and his interactions with others, and he often took the lead in articulating and implementing foreign policies on his own. As a result, Hay played a less prominent role in his ﬁnal years as secretary of state, although he did provide an experienced and rational counterbalance to the more assertive president. Throughout his long career, Hay served his nation well, both at home and abroad, and ranks as one of the better secretaries of state in the 19th century. See also: Boxer Rebellion; Panama; Rapprochement Reference

Clymer, Kenton J. John Hay: The Gentleman as Diplomat. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975.

Olney, Richard (1835–1917) A Harvard-trained lawyer who practiced corporate law in Massachusetts, Richard Olney had only brieﬂy dabbled in politics before Democratic president Grover Cleveland appointed him to be attorney general in 1893. Despite his political inexperience, Olney quickly emerged as the most dynamic member of Cleveland’s cabinet. He gained national prominence when he ordered federal troops to crush the so-called Pullman Strike in 1895, but he ultimately empathized with the plight of labor leader Eugene Debs, who had called the strike. When Secretary of State Walter Q. Gresham died in 1895, Cleveland named Olney to replace him. In that position,

Olney exhibited far more energy and aggressiveness than his gentlemanly predecessor had. His most pugnacious move was issuing a strongly worded defense of the Monroe Doctrine. The Olney Corollary explicitly stated that the United States considered itself preeminent in the Western Hemisphere. Olney also grappled with revolutions in Hawaii and Cuba, where, in both instances, he deﬁnitely sided with those opposed to any attempt at U.S. colonization. Although he retained strong Democratic Party loyalty for the rest of his life, he never again sought public ofﬁce. See also: Olney Corollary Reference

James, Henry. Richard Olney and His Public Service. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1923.

Root, Elihu (1845–1937) Born in upper New York State, Elihu Root graduated from Hamilton College before attending the New York University Law School. He quickly established himself as one of the nation’s leading lawyers, with a largely corporate clientele. His professional activities naturally led him to associate with New York Republicans, the most important of whom was Theodore Roosevelt. President William McKinley wanted a creative lawyer to handle the many military and legal issues following the Spanish-American War, so he invited Elihu Root to serve as his secretary of war in 1899. It was Root who chose Leonard Wood to head the occupation of Cuba and who personally drafted the provisions of the Platt Amendment that led to the end of the U.S. occupation. Root also efﬁciently deployed more than 70,000 troops to deal with the Filipino insurrection and, in consultation with William Howard Taft,

196 | Section 3

wrote the Organic Act of 1902, which established the U.S. colonial regime for the islands. After carrying out a major modernization and reorganization of the army, Root stepped down in 1903. Two years later, President Roosevelt asked him to rejoin his cabinet as secretary of state to succeed John Hay. In that ofﬁce, he cultivated friendly relations with leaders and governments in Latin America and helped reduce the festering antagonism between Japan and the United States with the Root-Takahira Convention in 1908. In 1912, Root received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his enlightened diplomatic and colonial policies. He resigned from the cabinet in 1909 to become a senator from New York. During his six years in the Senate, he continued to inﬂuence foreign policies. His commitment to President Taft while presiding over the 1912 Republican National Convention permanently alienated his old friend Roosevelt. After his retirement in 1915, Root continued to serve as an inﬂuential Republican spokesman and advisor. See also: Platt Amendment Reference

Jessup, Philip C. Elihu Root. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1938.

Shufeldt, Robert Wilson (1822–1895) R. W. Shufeldt devoted his life to the sea. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1839 and served on a number of ships before resigning his commission in 1853. For the next several years, he commanded commercial steamships on the Atlantic run. Appointed consul-general in Cuba at the outbreak of the Civil War, he secretly slipped into Mexico as an observer during the French

invasion. He rejoined the navy in 1862 and saw plenty of action through the end of the war. Afterward, he remained on active duty and even served a term as one of the U.S. Navy’s eight bureau chiefs in Washington. His real interest lay in emulating Matthew Calbraith Perry, who had opened Japan and expanded U.S. trade and diplomatic interests in the Far East. Shufeldt’s focus was on the secretive kingdom of Korea, which had recently established diplomatic ties with Japan. Shufeldt headed for the Far East in 1880, stopping off in China and Japan to assess the possibilities. He concluded that Chinese ofﬁcials would be more helpful than the Japanese, who seemed intent on dominating Korea’s international relationships. Shufeldt returned to China in 1882 as a naval attaché who was authorized to negotiate a treaty, which he concluded on May 22. It was a comprehensive agreement that established formal diplomatic relations, including extraterritoriality, provided for the exchange of consular ofﬁcials, and authorized commercial and residence privileges for Americans trading directly with Korea. Although Korea never became an important U.S. trading partner, Shufeldt had succeeded, at least temporarily, in lessening Japan’s inﬂuence over the Hermit Kingdom. See also: Japan, Opening of; Harris, Townsend; Perry, Matthew Calbraith Reference

Lee, Yur-Bok. Diplomatic Relations between the United States and Korea, 1866–1887. New York: Humanities Press, 1970.

Stevens, John Leavitt (1820–1895) John L. Stevens began his career as a Universalist clergyman, serving in

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 197 several churches in his native state of Maine and nearby New Hampshire. A committed abolitionist, he joined James G. Blaine in purchasing a newspaper in Kennebec to express antislavery views. Stevens edited the paper until 1869. With Senator Blaine’s patronage, Stevens then began a long diplomatic career, serving as U.S. minister in Paraguay, Uruguay, Norway, and Sweden. In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Blaine as secretary of state. Blaine then sent Stevens to the Kingdom of Hawaii as U.S. minister, elevating his status to minister plenipotentiary just in time for him to participate in the Hawaiian Revolution. When the local U.S. planters formed a Committee of Public Safety and ousted the Hawaiian queen, Stevens immediately extended U.S. recognition to the new government. He also ordered the U.S. Navy commander on the scene to land sailors and marines to shore up the new government. When anti-imperialist Grover Cleveland won the presidency for a second time in 1892, he quickly put a halt to any moves toward colonization. Instead, he commissioned James H. Blount to go to Hawaii and make a full report on what had occurred there. Not surprisingly, Democrat Blount’s report was highly critical of Republican policy in general and of John Stevens’s actions in particular. It charged the U.S. envoy with acting in an unauthorized and precipitate manner during the revolutionary turmoil, but Stevens maintained to his death that he had acted appropriately. See also: Hawaii Reference

Tate, Merze. The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom: A Political History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965.

Teller, Henry Moore (1830–1914) Henry Moore Teller became an attorney in his home state of New York before moving ﬁrst to Illinois and then to the Colorado Territory. There he quickly rose to the rank of major general of militia during the Civil War. As with many other high-ranking veterans, Teller’s war record opened doors for him in his pursuit of successful postwar legal and business enterprises. His prominence then won him a seat as a Republican in the U.S. Senate when Colorado became a state. He served four terms, interrupted only brieﬂy for a stint as secretary of the interior during President Chester Arthur’s administration. A dedicated proponent of the monetization of silver, he eventually broke with his party to become a silver Democrat in 1896. Although he had previously spoken in favor of overseas expansion, he took a different stand when President William McKinley asked Congress for a war declaration in 1898. Many Americans opposed imperialism and worried that U.S. military involvement in Cuba would inevitably lead to U.S. annexation of the island. To assuage such doubts and to encourage reluctant fellow senators to vote in favor of the war declaration, Senator Teller proposed an amendment that was ultimately approved. The Teller Amendment stated unequivocally that the U.S. goal in the war was an independent Cuba. Its inclusion in the war declaration ultimately disarmed those who favored annexation of the island after the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American-Cuban War. It was no ﬂuke or political expedient. Senator Teller consistently criticized

198 | Section 3

TELLER AMENDMENT [One of four resolutions adopted unanimously by both houses of Congress, April 20, 1898] Fourth. That the United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Island [Cuba] except for the paciﬁcation thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the Island to its people. Source: U.S. Statutes at Large 30, 1889: 739.

international adventurism, as he did, for example, in delivering a bitter indictment of U.S. policy in the Philippine Islands in 1902. He devoted the closing years of his Senate career to domestic issues that were important to his Colorado constituency, such as reclamation, Indian affairs, and public land policy. But his enduring contribution to U.S. foreign policy remained his ﬁrm stand against the tide of colonial enthusiasm that was sweeping the United States in 1898. See also: Spanish-American-Cuban War Reference

Smith, Duane A. Henry M. Teller: Colorado’s Grand Old Man. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002.

Wood, Leonard (1860–1927) General Leonard Wood was intimately involved with the U.S. rise to world power at every step of the way. A Massachusetts native, he worked his way through Harvard Medical School and, rather than entering private practice, sought a commission in the Army Medical Corps. His ﬁrst assignment involved chasing down and capturing the Apache chief Geronimo, action that won him a Congressional Medal of Honor. In the

late 1890s, he was on assignment in Washington, where he found a kindred spirit in assistant secretary of the navy Theodore Roosevelt. These two jingoes organized the First United States Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, the “Rough Riders,” who fought with distinction in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. After the truce, Wood stayed on as head of the occupation of the city of Santiago and, ultimately, as the U.S. military governor-general of Cuba. He introduced comprehensive sanitation programs, worked effectively with Cuban leaders, and was a key player in smoothing the transition from U.S. to Cuban control in 1902. Subsequently, he served as commander of the Philippine division of the army and as an ambassador to Argentina. In 1910, he returned to the United States to assume the position of army chief of staff, where he did much to prepare the poorly organized army for its eventual participation in World War I. His politics and his friendship with now ex-president Roosevelt made him unpopular with Democratic president Woodrow Wilson’s administration, which passed over him and chose John J. Pershing to command the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. Wood had to content himself with making

Rise of a Great Power, 1880–1914 | 199 credible though unsuccessful runs for the Republican Party presidential nominations in 1916 and 1920. In his last decade, he returned to the Far East as governor-general in the Philippines.

See also: Platt Amendment Reference

Lane, Jack C. Armed Progressive: General Leonard Wood. San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1978.

This page intentionally left blank

SECTION 4

THE WORLD WARS, 1914–1945

aid the embattled Allies in Europe. To clarify the U.S. position in January 1918, Wilson announced the Fourteen Points, a blueprint for a postwar settlement that he hoped would ensure an end to all wars. After the defeat of Germany and Austria, Wilson’s formula served as the starting point for negotiations. Many alterations and compromises were made in the course of drafting the ﬁnal peace treaty at Versailles, but it did include a Covenant for a League of Nations. Wilson optimistically believed that this international collective security organization would preserve world peace. Among the many issues that the Versailles Conference failed to resolve was the status of the Soviet Union. Two revolutions had swept the Russian Empire in 1917, and the second installed a dedicated communist regime that most Americans considered antithetical. In the closing months of the war, President Wilson authorized the deployment of U.S. military units into the strife-torn region, with the Siberian Expedition being the most substantial. These forays did nothing to improve U.S.–Soviet

When relations among the major European nations broke down in the fall of 1914, their confrontation quickly became known as the Great War. It was only after World War II broke out in the late 1930s that the earlier conflict became known as World War I. That designation was appropriate, because several of the warring nations possessed extensive overseas colonies. The ﬁghting quickly spread to Asia and Africa, but for some time the Americas appeared to be immune. A key reason was that the United States, the most powerful nation in the Western Hemisphere, immediately announced a policy of neutrality. That assertion did not prevent economic ties from drawing Americans into a major supporting role for Great Britain and France. Emotional and historical factors strengthened the transatlantic bond, but Germany’s announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare early in 1917 proved to be the tipping point. In April, President Woodrow Wilson obtained a war declaration from the U.S. Congress and began planning the dispatch of an American Expeditionary Force to 201

202 | Section 4

relations. Instead, Wilson and his Republican successors unapologetically pursed a non-recognition policy. Meanwhile, U.S. distaste for what had happened in Russia triggered a full-blown Red Scare in 1919 and 1920. Fortunately, popular anxiety about communism waned, allowing U.S. statesmen to pursue other initiatives. One was international disarmament, a principle that Wilson had included in his Fourteen Points. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes pulled off a major diplomatic coup at the Washington Naval Conference by limiting the construction of new, large warships. Even so, a strong spirit of isolationism prevailed, preventing U.S. participation in the League of Nations and frustrating those who hoped for international leadership. The United States managed to avoid making a unilateral commitment to France by insisting that other nations be invited to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which supposedly outlawed war. Although Secretary of State Frank Kellogg won the Nobel Peace Prize for this initiative, his successor, Henry Stimson, found it of little use. The pact failed to discourage Japan from making demands on China in the early 1930s. Unable to prevent the extension of Japanese power, the exasperated U.S. statesman chose formally to ignore any Japanese claims. This non-recognition policy became known as the Stimson Doctrine. The same principle was applied to other international developments in subsequent years because it accorded with U.S. isolationism. The only bright note in the 1930s was an improvement in Western Hemisphere relations after President Franklin Roosevelt implemented what he called the Good Neighbor Policy.

At the same time, conditions were deteriorating in Europe. The rise of expansionist fascism disheartened internationalists and encouraged the U.S. Congress to pass several neutrality acts designed to prevent U.S. participation in another European conﬂict. As conditions worsened both there and in East Asia, President Roosevelt tried to prepare his country for the inevitable. One example was a speech calling for an international quarantine of nations whose values differed markedly from those of the United States to prevent them from spreading their inﬂuence or even invading other countries. When World War II engulfed Europe in 1939, the beleaguered Allies once again turned to the United States for material support. To evade neutrality law restrictions, Roosevelt devised the Lend-Lease program. As it strengthened the ﬂow of U.S. support to Europe, the president decided to announce his nation’s objectives. He did so in August 1941 in the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration with British prime minister Winston Churchill. The unanticipated Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor deﬁnitively canceled the appeal of isolationism. Within a matter of days, the United States had become a member of what Winston Churchill called the Grand Alliance, linking U.S. efforts with those of Great Britain and the Soviet Union. From the very beginning, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin urged his counterparts to establish a second front in Western Europe to relieve the pressures on his forces on the eastern front. One reason for the delay in fulﬁlling that request was the simultaneous U.S. desire to halt Japan’s expansion. The United States found an effective way to do so by island hopping, a strategy that allowed

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 203 U.S. forces to bring the war home to Japan far more quickly than otherwise might have been the case. As victory became more likely, President Roosevelt appears to have believed that superpower collaboration could continue after the war and provide a mechanism for ensuring world peace. He embodied these sentiments in his Four Policemen proposal. His concept of allocating signiﬁcant authority to the major powers ﬁghting against Germany was incorporated into the United Nations organization in the form of its Security Council. Unfortunately, as early as the Yalta conference in February 1945, the ideological cracks in the Grand Alliance were all too evident. These ﬁssures became gaping chasms when the United States unilaterally used atomic diplomacy against Japan to end the war. U.S. atomic capabilities played a major role in transforming the victorious Allies into bitter enemies in a Cold War that was to persist for almost half a century.

KEY CONCEPTS American Expeditionary Force The United States was poorly prepared to enter the Great War in 1917. By the fall of 1918, however, more than 2 million Americans were engaged in combat operations in Europe. Most were members of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) under General John J. Pershing’s command. Although the AEF made its major contributions to the ﬁghting only in the last few months of the four-year war, it was crucial in convincing Germany to surrender under the terms of the Fourteen Points that

President Woodrow Wilson had announced in January 1918. Wilson had initially anticipated that U.S. participation in the war would be limited to ﬁnancial, naval, and material support. He hoped to avoid sending ground troops into the grueling trench warfare that had devastated men and morale on both sides since 1914. Even before U.S. entry into the war, the president had urged all participants to accept “peace without victory,” and he continued to believe that completely defeating Germany would not be in the best interests of either the United States or the balance of power in Europe. Another reason that Wilson wanted to abstain from direct combat was the sorry state of the U.S. Army in 1917. It ranked seventeenth largest in the world and, for decades, had mainly been conﬁned to garrison duty in the West or messy guerilla campaigns in Cuba and the Philippines. Neither constituted ideal training for modern, mechanized war. The only man with recent major command experience was General Pershing, who had led the controversial Punitive Expedition in northern Mexico. Wilson skipped over several senior-ranking generals to choose Pershing to head the AEF in Europe. In a broader sense, the United States was better prepared. Congress had begun approving major army and navy appropriations bills in 1916, in anticipation of future contingencies. It also authorized military conscription, in which young men were drafted to serve in the army. Although many others continued to enlist voluntarily, once the United States entered the war, half of the soldiers on active duty were draftees. Most of these ended up serving tours ranging from one to two years. Hastily arranged training programs had to deal

204 | Section 4

with a massive inﬂux of manpower. After several false starts, the War Industries Board, under ﬁnancier Bernard Baruch’s astute leadership, did a good job of controlling, managing, and stimulating industrial production for both U.S. and European needs. As soon as Pershing arrived in France with the ﬁrst small contingent of troops, he became engaged in a diplomatic as well as a strategic conﬂict. France and Great Britain desperately wanted to send individual U.S. soldiers to ﬁll vacancies in their existing units who were already in the trenches. Pershing insisted on maintaining an independent U.S. force. President Wilson reinforced his general’s position by pointing out that the United States had signed no formal agreements with those already engaged in combat. Instead, he asserted that his country was only an “associated power.” That position preserved the long-standing U.S. tradition of avoiding all military alliances. Battle lines on the Western Front had changed little in four years. In 1916, German general Erich Ludendorff had sacrificed hundreds of thousands of troops in a futile attempt to capture the fortiﬁed French city of Verdun. Great Britain and France suffered similar staggering losses later that year in an unsuccessful attempt to capture territory along the Somme River. In the summer of 1917, British general Alexander Haig initiated another disastrous offensive near Ypres in Belgium. He had hoped to defeat Germany quickly and thereby evade U.S. diplomatic and political pressures. Equally interested in ending the war before the United States became fully engaged, German general Ludendorff mounted a series of drives along the

eastern end of the trench lines in the spring of 1918. He drew reinforcements from units that had been transferred from the Eastern Front, where a GermanSoviet peace agreement had just been signed. His armies suffered more than 800,000 casualties but netted only minor territorial gains. The ﬁrst major U.S. action occurred during Ludendorff’s third offensive, on May 28, 1918, when U.S. troops captured the village of Cantigny. This success encouraged the Entente powers and profoundly disheartened the Germans, who had never anticipated that the United States would be capable of any signiﬁcant action in 1918. A second morale-building victory occurred a couple of days later, when U.S. troops participated prominently in the capture of Chateau-Thierry and in a drive through the Bellau Wood. By midJuly, tens of thousands of fresh, reasonably well-equipped U.S. soldiers were arriving in France, about half of them having been transported on British vessels. Because French marshal Ferdinand Foch had recently distinguished himself, the British and Americans accepted his appointment as supreme commander. Pershing continued to develop his independent force, however, consolidating twelve divisions into the U.S. First Army. The U.S. general received Foch’s permission in mid-September to send it to capture the St. Mihiel Salient, which Germany had held since 1914. That campaign succeeded in part because German forces were already withdrawing from the area. Although Pershing believed that his units could have made further progress in that area, Foch developed an alternative strategy that involved U.S., British, and French collaboration. This massive initiative became known as the

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 205 Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Begun on September 26, it eventually included more than 1.2 million U.S. troops. Although Pershing had confidently expected to push ahead 10 miles on the ﬁrst day, his troops had moved just 34 miles closer to the German border after six weeks of intense combat. Despite this disappointing progress on the ground, German resistance was collapsing. Whole army units defected behind the lines, and the German Navy suffered a ﬂeetwide mutiny. On October 4, six weeks into the offensive, German officials contacted Wilson’s government, hoping to arrange an armistice based on the Fourteen Points. A key factor was the president’s stated willingness to allow Germany to survive as a nation rather than face possible dismemberment. Great Britain and France were reluctant to accept this formula, but the United States had sufﬁcient diplomatic clout to make it work. The German kaiser abdicated on November 9, succeeded by a government that styled itself as republican. That political change helped convince Wilson that the U.S. democratic mission had been fulﬁlled. The guns fell silent at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918. The armistice rendered Pershing’s detailed plans for a 1919 offensive moot. U.S. military force may have been late in arriving, but no one doubted that it was poised to continue expanding rapidly. The AEF’s battleﬁeld successes certainly played a major role in convincing Germany to stand down. Equally important was the prospect of additional healthy, well-trained, and equipped U.S. dough boys who were set to embark for Europe in 1919. To that extent, U.S. participation was crucial in bringing the Great War to a close.

See also: Fourteen Points; Pershing, John J. References

Coffman, Edward M. The War to End All Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. James, D. Clayton, and Anne Sharp Welles. America and the Great War, 1914–1920. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1998. Stallings, Laurence. The Dough Boys. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Trask, David F. The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917–1918. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993.

Atlantic Charter By the summer of 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt had become resigned to the prospect that his country would probably enter the war to defeat Nazi Germany. But isolationism still exerted a strong inﬂuence in the United States, so the president had to proceed cautiously. An important step in preparing the public was to outline the principles on which he intended to take action. The Atlantic Charter did just that. World War II began in 1939 and, for two years, the United States remained on the sidelines. That did not prevent Americans, and the Roosevelt administration in particular, from admiring and empathizing with the efforts that Great Britain and France exerted against Germany. In addition to providing emotional and psychological support, the United States implemented concrete steps, such as the destroyers-for-bases arrangement and the Lend-Lease program, and coordinated navy operations to protect Atlantic commerce. These and related efforts drew Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill into frequent contacts, through intermediaries or by overseas

206 | Section 4

electronic communication. As the crisis in Europe expanded, the president decided he needed face-to-face talks with his British counterpart. His desire became even more pressing after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. The two leaders met for the ﬁrst time in August on a Royal Navy vessel in Placentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland. Most of the discussions at the so-called Atlantic Conference were strategic ones involving issues such as Lend-Lease, the German submarine threat, and the advisability of joint action against Japanese imperialism in the Far East. The public learned few details about these secret discussions, but the two statesmen issued a press release outlining mutual policy and principle goals. It became known as the Atlantic Charter.

The charter enabled Roosevelt to proclaim U.S. objectives prior to any direct involvement in the war. Many of its statements echoed the Fourteen Points that President Woodrow Wilson had issued almost a year after U.S. entry into World War I. In that respect, the Atlantic Charter was a wise move. It articulated U.S. attitudes, which put other nations on notice, as well as reassuring people in both the United States and Great Britain of what they could expect from U.S. diplomatic and military initiatives. None of the eight points in the Atlantic Charter were a surprise; they all accorded with long-standing U.S. traditions and foreign policy positions. For example, they championed democracy and democratic governments as the ideal way to resolve domestic and international controversies. On a more objective plane, the charter called for freer trade, global

President Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill met on board the HMS Prince of Wales to negotiate and then sign the Atlantic Charter on August 14, 1941. (Corel)

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 207

THE ATLANTIC CHARTER: AUGUST 14, 1941 The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world. First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other; Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned; Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them; Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity; Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic ﬁeld with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security; Sixth, after the ﬁnal destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want; Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance; Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measure which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments. Source: Bevans, Charles I., ed. Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949. Washington, DC: GPO, 1969, 3:686–687.

economic advancement, improved labor standards, and other concepts that were reminiscent of Roosevelt’s domestic New Deal programs. Other points had direct links to Woodrow Wilson’s policies: freedom of the seas, international disarmament, and an effective collective security system.

Events were moving so swiftly at that point that the Atlantic Charter received only passing attention. Some isolationists bitterly criticized the whole concept, even as liberals took comfort in the fact that their nation was taking a principled stand. Perceptive people on all sides recognized that the Atlantic Charter was essentially a

208 | Section 4

statement of purpose, designed to justify U.S. military action against German and Japanese aggression. Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye took particular notice. A comparative moderate in an increasingly militaristic nation, Konoye proposed that he and President Roosevelt hold their own face-to-face meeting. He may have hoped that a Paciﬁc Conference would produce a Paciﬁc Charter, perhaps based on previous Japanese-American understandings, such as the 1908 RootTakahira and the 1917 Lansing-Ishii agreements. These had assured each nation of a free hand in its Far Eastern spheres of interest and colonies. Had such an agreement been reached in the fall of 1941, it might have prevented the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December. Nothing came of the suggestion. The United States summarily rejected the idea of a Paciﬁc Conference, and General Hideki Tojo, a conﬁrmed militarist, soon replaced Konoye in Tokyo. Although never as prominent as the Fourteen Points, the Atlantic Charter played a role in subsequent developments. It provided impetus toward the formation of the United Nations as a successor institution to the League of Nations. The charter’s advocacy of democracy was mentioned speciﬁcally in the Declaration on Liberated Europe that the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union approved at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. In the long run, however, it became just one of a number of viewpoints and proposals that appeared during and after World War II. They often overshadowed the Atlantic Charter’s gentlemanly, academic principles. As with so many other idealistic statements, the realities of

postwar reconstruction, both political and economic, and the development of the Cold War, consigned the Atlantic Charter to a relatively minor place in world history. See also: Fourteen Points; Lend-Lease References

Lash, Joseph P. Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939–1941. New York: Norton, 1976. Wilson, Theodore. The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

Atomic Diplomacy Use of the atomic bomb in the closing days of World War II was controversial at the time and has become even more so in succeeding years. President Harry S Truman made the decision, relying on advice from many others, including some of the leading scientists who were involved in developing the superweapon. No one at the time fully understood either the enormous collateral effects of an atomic explosion or how central atomic weapons would be to the diplomacy of the postwar era. Thousands of experimental weapons proposals had surfaced before and during World War II. Some of them, like radar and advanced aircraft design, were put to immediate use. Others either failed to work as anticipated or lost out to alternatives. Still others were as fanciful as strapping tiny incendiary bombs on the feet of bats and releasing them over Japanese cities in the hope that they would roost under eaves and set ablaze the predominantly paper and wooden buildings. Deriving immense explosive power from the manipulation of invisible atoms initially seemed even

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 209 less credible than the incendiary bat project. The U.S. program began in 1939, when a group of prominent physicists encouraged Albert Einstein to write a letter urging President Roosevelt to fund basic research that was aimed at harnessing atomic energy. A key inducement was knowledge that German scientists were already working toward that same objective. But Germany subsequently diverted substantial resources to rocketry and jet-propelled aircraft, allowing the United States to emerge with the most advanced atomic energy initiative. Major funding for the program, called the Manhattan Project, began in 1941. Congress eventually appropriated more than $2 billion for secret development efforts, which employed as many as half a million people at one time or another. Plutonium and uranium were puriﬁed at other locations while J. Robert Oppenheimer supervised bomb assembly work at Los Alamos in the remote mountains of New Mexico. Delays and disappointments were inevitable in such a pathbreaking research and development effort. Strategists had initially hoped to deploy the weapon in France to clear the way for the D-Day invasion, but not until July 16, 1945, did the ﬁrst of three completed bombs explode in a blinding ﬂash at a White Sands test site. Although President Franklin Roosevelt was well aware of the development program, knowledge of it was so closely guarded that even Vice President Harry Truman was kept out of the loop. After Roosevelt died in mid-April, Secretary of War Henry Stimson informed the newly sworn-in president of the secret project. As long as it remained untested, however, other diplomatic and military strategies had to be pursued.

The war in Europe ended just a few weeks later, but ﬁghting in the Paciﬁc Theater of Operations remained intense. In recent months, U.S. forces had encountered increasingly stubborn resistance as they got closer to Japan’s home islands. Japanese propaganda warned that Americans would inﬂict unspeakable torture on anyone who fell into their hands. In Iwo Jima and Okinawa, U.S. forces took relatively few prisoners because Japanese soldiers continued ﬁghting long after their defeat was inevitable or chose to commit suicide rather than surrender. These experiences convinced U.S. leaders that a long, drawn-out war of attrition would be necessary to conquer the home islands of Japan proper. Although capturing isolated islands on the perimeter of the Japanese Empire had been discouragingly costly, U.S. military planners believed that both Japanese armed forces and civilians would put up even stronger resistance if U.S. troops invaded their own cities and countryside. Rational estimates suggested that such a campaign would last at least 18 months, cause 1 million U.S. casualties, and wreak untold damage and death on the Japanese. Such discouraging estimates inevitably inﬂuenced the president and his advisors. For some time, Americans had been urging the Soviet Union to enter the war in the Paciﬁc. At the Yalta Conference, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin assured President Roosevelt that he would do just that within three months of a victory in Europe. Soviet intervention remained a key element in U.S. planning as late as July, with General Douglas MacArthur insisting that the participation of at least 60 Soviet divisions was essential. In mid-July 1945, President Truman met with Stalin and the British prime

210 | Section 4

minister at Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. When the talks opened, the United States was still counting on Soviet assistance against Japan. Shortly afterward, Truman learned of the successful atomic test in New Mexico. He immediately reconsidered the U.S. position. He told Stalin that the United States had developed a superweapon but provided few details about it. Stalin reportedly took the news in stride and wished the Americans success in deploying it. Truman received conﬂicting advice about how to do that. Some, particularly in the scientiﬁc community, advocated inviting international press representatives to a demonstration in a remote location. Others wanted to keep the weapon a secret for possible future conﬂicts. Truman selected a middle course. Convinced that its use in an all-out war was justiﬁed, the president sent an ultimatum to the Japanese government on July 26, warning of “prompt and utter destruction” if it did not surrender immediately. Having received no deﬁnitive response, Truman authorized the dropping of an atomic bomb over the industrial city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Much of the central core of the city was completely leveled and as many as 70,000 people died immediately. By the end of the year, the casualty ﬁgure had doubled as a result of deaths from injuries sustained or from sickness that developed as the result of exposure to the bomb’s radiation. The shocked Japanese government quickly contacted Stalin, hoping that he would help them work out a deal with the Americans. Instead, the Soviet leader announced that his country was entering the war in Asia. The date was August 8, exactly three months after Victory in Europe (VE-) Day. Some believe that Stalin’s decision convinced Truman to

order the dropping of a second atomic bomb on another industrial city, Nagasaki, on the following day. It was somewhat less destructive, killing some 40,000 people outright. No one knew that the United States had no more bombs in its arsenal at that point, but the Japanese government could not risk another devastating attack. It immediately opened direct negotiations with the U.S. government and signed an armistice on Victory in Japan (VJ-) Day, August 14, 1945. General MacArthur superintended the signing of formal surrender documents on September 2 on board a battleship, the USS Missouri, which was anchored in Tokyo Bay. Any hope that Truman might have had that his actions would stymie Soviet ambitions in the Far East were disappointed. In just a few days, Soviet troops occupied substantial parts of Manchuria and the northern half of Korea. The latter set the stage for the Korean War ﬁve years later. The Soviets continued to implement their expansionist plans in Europe as well, apparently unconcerned about the demonstrated U.S. atomic capability. Revisionist historians have advanced a number of interpretations of Truman’s policy. The most cogent is that of Gar Alperowitz, who argues that the United States deliberately kept Japan in the war long enough to have a target for demonstrating its atomic weapons. In this formulation, the real purpose of the U.S. bombings was to frighten the Soviets into contrition. It did not do so, Alperowitz concedes, but, in his view, this cynical use of atomic diplomacy makes the United States responsible for starting the Cold War. Other analysts are more willing to accept that Truman believed the bombs

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 211 were an effective way to end ﬁghting that might otherwise continue for more than a year. The weapons were used at the end of a long, increasingly brutal conﬂict. A conventional bombing raid on Tokyo in March had killed more than 100,000 Japanese citizens, more than died immediately at Hiroshima. In the context of the war and the times, the atomic bomb could be viewed as escalating the level of destruction one more notch. In retrospect, however, the development of atomic bombs and their nuclear successors is viewed as both dangerous and unfortunate. Many Manhattan Project scientists expressed remorse for their parts in promoting the escalation of international confrontations. Perhaps in the end, however, the universal revulsion generated by the U.S. bombings has had one positive effect: no other atomic or nuclear weapon has been used since 1945. See also: Island Hopping; Yalta References

Allen, Thomas B., and Norman Polmar. Code-Name Downfall: The Secret Plan to Invade Japan and Why Truman Dropped the Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Alperowitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Pluto Press, 1994. Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

Disarmament One of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points called for worldwide disarmament. The topic was discussed at the Versailles Peace Conference, but the resulting treaty did little to advance the

idea. Two years later, however, the United States hosted an international conference in Washington to set down speciﬁc limits on naval warships. Although the Washington Naval Conference only halted new construction, it proved to be the closest that international statesman would come to implementing Wilson’s plea for disarmament. Ships were far easier to catalog than the tanks, artillery, and riﬂes common in land warfare. Elements of ﬂeets, ranging from huge battleships to tiny dispatch boats, could rather easily be assessed and compared to one another. In one instance, virtually total disarmament did occur. The victors in World War I insisted that Germany’s war ﬂeet be sunk at Scapa Flow off the Orkney Islands. What had been the second largest navy in the world ceased to exist. The greatest naval power, Great Britain, had emerged on the winning side in the war but faced very straitened circumstances afterward. Its war-depleted economy generated inadequate funds to enable Great Britain to maintain its traditional naval superiority. Consequently, the British urged the United States to take steps to prevent or hinder other nations from mounting ambitious navalbuilding programs. Japan appeared most likely to do so. It had not participated in the war, its economy was booming, and it had major international ambitions. While much of the rest of the world was absorbed in the Great War, Japan had made aggressive demands on China. The United States managed to limit the impact of these demands somewhat, particularly with the signing of the Lansing-Ishii Agreement in 1917. But Japan’s ambitions threatened to overwhelm its pledges,

212 | Section 4

particularly if it substantially increased the size of its navy. The United States had its own reasons for responding to Great Britain’s entreaties and Japan’s aggressiveness. The U.S. Navy had emerged from the war nearly as large as Great Britain’s. If the building plans announced for the 1920s were implemented, the U.S. ﬂeet would quickly have become the largest in the world. Domestic political constraints made that outcome less certain. Americans generally favored isolating themselves from international problems after the war. That pressured the federal government to reduce rather than expand its military and naval commitments. President Warren G. Harding coined the word “normalcy” to describe what he thought Americans desired in 1920, and

that deﬁnitely implied a lower international proﬁle. To manage the U.S. retreat from global responsibilities, Harding appointed Charles Evans Hughes to be his secretary of state. A former attorney, judge, and presidential candidate, Hughes was an ideal choice. Having astutely assessed British desires and Japanese ambitions, he invited representatives of several nations to convene in Washington to discuss naval matters and related issues. It was no coincidence that the conference opened on November 11, 1921, three years to the day after the armistice that had ended World War I. In a virtually unprecedented and, for that matter, almost never duplicated diplomatic move, Hughes devoted his welcoming address to the delegates to a detailed U.S. plan for limiting shipbuilding.

President Warren G. Harding posing with members of the Women's Committee for World Disarmament in 1921. He subsequently asked Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes to host the Washington Conference of 1921–1922 to limit the international naval arms race. (Library of Congress)

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 213 Everyone else had come expecting to engage in back and forth negotiations before reaching a conclusion. Remarkably, the treaty, signed on February 6, 1922, contained a limitation framework that was identical to the one that Hughes had announced at the outset of the talks. The Hughes plan set a quota on the number of battleships that each nation could possess. The five nations included in the scheme were the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy. Hughes’s ratio for these nations was 5 : 5 : 3 : 1.6 : 1.6. The relationship began with the assumption that the United States and Great Britain intended to maintain 15 35,000-ton battleships in their active ﬂeets. Japan was restricted to only nine such ships, representing three-ﬁfths of the allocation for the other nations. Hughes’s ratio permitted Italy and France just ﬁve battleships each. The same ratio applied to aircraft carriers. The Hughes plan relieved Great Britain of the need to build more ships and allowed the isolationist United States to abandon its plans for additions to the ﬂeet. Japan objected to the proposed limitations, but Hughes used a convincing argument to encourage its acquiescence. He pointed out that both the United States and Great Britain had to maintain two-ocean navies, whereas Japan’s naval forces were concentrated only in the Paciﬁc. Its nine battleships assured its naval superiority in the vicinity of Japan’s major international interests. In addition to the naval limitations treaty, the Washington Conference produced two other major agreements. One treaty formalized international support for the U.S. Open Door Policy in China, and it won approval from nine nations in all. The other treaty involved

four nations, the United States, Japan, Great Britain, and France. It pledged the signatories to respect one another’s established interests in the Far East. Both of these agreements were popular in the United States because they seemed to ease tensions among the great powers and to preserve China’s position without specifying any enforcement commitments. Unfortunately, that deﬁciency rendered the treaties completely impotent when Japan initiated a series of power plays directed against China in the 1930s. The naval limitations of the Washington Conferences were popular as well, at least for a time. In 1927 delegates attended another naval conference, this one in Geneva, that was charged with developing limitations on cruisers and other smaller vessels. These talks ended acrimoniously. The British government remained ﬁscally strained, however, so it hosted a third conference in London in 1930. It ended with an agreement among the United States, Great Britain, and Japan to abide by a ratio of 10 : 10 : 6 for cruisers. That commitment proved short-lived. Soon afterward, Japan began building new ships of all sizes. Many Americans who had earlier praised the Hughes program now complained bitterly that the United States had missed its opportunity to get ahead. Perhaps a more rational view is that the disarmament initiative had, at least, stiﬂed a decade’s worth of naval construction that would otherwise have occurred. No one in the 1920s anticipated the remarkable developments that were to lead the world inexorably into another world war. See also: Fourteen Points; Open Door Policy References

Buckley, Thomas H. The United States and the Washington Conference, 1921–1922.

214 | Section 4 Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970. Fanning, Richard W. Peace and Disarmament: Naval Rivalry and Arms Control, 1922–1933. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Goldman, Emily O. Sunken Treaties: Naval Arms Control between the Wars. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

Four Policemen President Franklin Roosevelt developed his concept of the Four Policemen during World War II. He optimistically believed that the great powers united in fighting against fascism would continue to cooperate afterward. He hoped that cooperation would, in turn, enable these powers to ensure international stability in the postwar world. Although British prime minister Winston Churchill characterized his nation’s collaboration with the United States and the Soviet Union as “the Grand Alliance,” no actual agreements or treaties linked these nations together. The United States had a traditional aversion to alliances of all sorts, and it had just emerged from an intensely isolationist phase in the 1920s and 1930s. Well aware of these circumstances, President Franklin Roosevelt realized that any postwar arrangements would have to be carefully conceived. His secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was an old Wilsonian who believed strongly in the concept of collective security. He devoted much of his wartime efforts to establishing the United Nations as a successor to the League of Nations, which the United States had never joined. For some time, Roosevelt remained unconvinced that such a large, diverse

body could provide the United States with effective security. Instead, he was impressed by the success of the cooperation between the United States and the other two Allies, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. He had also become convinced that China must be revived as an independent great power once Japan had been defeated. Roosevelt saw this quartet as constituting the Four Policemen, who would patrol the world and impose order. Although the details were never fully clarified, his fundamental idea was that representatives of the four great powers would meet on a regular basis and cooperate in solving or resolving international squabbles and preventing aggression among nations. Few U.S. officials were as optimistic as Roosevelt about the benevolence of the Soviet Union, and fewer still were convinced that China could become an effective, independent collaborator in this venture. Moreover, the liberation of France in the summer of 1944 saw the emergence of Charles De Gaulle as an articulate and effective leader for what had been the second largest imperial power in the world. That suggested that his nation, too, should have a prominent place in the postwar equation. All of these considerations began to merge as Cordell Hull diligently moved forward with his plans for the United Nations. It would include a general assembly, with representatives of all the member nations. And, like the League of Nations Council, it would also contain a smaller grouping of representatives from leading countries. Hull convinced Roosevelt that his Four Policemen should be permanent members of

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 215 the UN Security Council, and that France should be granted a ﬁfth permanent seat. The General Assembly would then select, on a rotating basis, six additional members to ﬁll spaces on the council. To reinforce the authority of the ﬁve permanent members, the United States insisted that each hold the power to veto any Security Council resolution that they disliked. Interestingly, it was the Soviet Union that most objected to the veto power, but President Roosevelt felt that it was essential. He was well aware that the U.S. Senate had refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty in 1919 because it appeared to give the League of Nations authority to order U.S. forces into action. Veto power at the United Nations could prevent that from occurring and make the whole arrangement more palatable to senators voting on ratiﬁcation. The Four Policemen concept thus became embodied in the UN Security Council. Unfortunately, the postwar cooperation that President Roosevelt had anticipated quickly evaporated. The ﬁve permanent members of the Security Council have almost always been at odds with one another on major initiatives, and each of the permanent members has, at one point or another, exercised its right to veto resolutions. Cooperation is possible only on less controversial issues or in rare instances, such as reactions to conﬂict in the Middle East, when the great powers ﬁnd common ground for agreement. See also: Hull, Cordell; United Nations References

Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970.

Divine, Robert A. Roosevelt and World War II. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969.

Fourteen Points In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson issued a blueprint for a peace settlement to follow World War I. The document listed 14 points, or categories of issues, and proposed a resolution for each. Although none of the other nations ﬁghting alongside the United States fully endorsed the Fourteen Points, the proposal helped motivate Germany to agree to a cease-ﬁre in November. Wilson personally participated in the postwar peace conference at Versailles, hoping to ensure that his 14-point program would be implemented. Although some of the points were compromised away, either before or during the negotiations, the fourteenth point—calling for the creation of an international collective security system—was embodied in the League of Nations. The United States entered the war in April of 1917 on the side of the Entente powers, led by Great Britain and France, but Wilson did not fully articulate U.S. war aims until the following January. Prior to the announcement of Wilson’s 14-point proposal, the other participants had expressed their intentions for the postwar world, either openly or in secret. For example, Great Britain and France had held extensive clandestine talks that led to bilateral accords, such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1915. A major focus of this agreement was a proposal for redistributing much of the prewar Ottoman Empire. The British were eager to gain imperial control of the oil-rich areas of present-day Iraq, for example, and the French had similar

216 | Section 4

ambitions with regard to Syria and Lebanon. As a wartime ally of Great Britain and France, Russia had also negotiated postwar arrangements. The czar’s government fell in the spring of 1917, and the Bolshevik faction seized control and established the Soviet Union in the fall. The new regime had promised the Russian people that it would withdraw from the conﬂict, and the Soviet government signed a humiliating treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. The Treaty of BrestLitovsk effectively canceled all previously negotiated promises and postwar plans related to Russia. Soviet foreign minister Leon Trotsky had already stunned the world in the

preceding December by publishing the so-called Secret Treaties. He had found copies of earlier diplomatic correspondence in the czar’s ﬁles, including the clandestine agreements among other Entente countries. Trotsky’s goal was to convince working-class people in all of the warring nations that they were ﬁghting for goals that would beneﬁt the wealthy and powerful, not their fellow members of what the Soviets called the proletariat. To a degree, Trotsky’s plan had the desired result. Publication of the Secret Treaties provoked consternation and criticism among the European combatants. When U.S. president Woodrow Wilson announced his own plans a month later, many Europeans on both sides of the

FOURTEEN POINTS: JANUARY 8, 1918 Delivered at a Joint Session of Congress by President Woodrow Wilson I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view. II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants. III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance. IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety. V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined. VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 217

need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselﬁsh sympathy. VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore conﬁdence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired. VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly ﬁfty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all. IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality. X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development. XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into. XII. The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees. XIII. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant. XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under speciﬁc covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike. Source: Richardson, J. D., ed. Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1920, 18:8421–8426.

conﬂict saw them as attractive and noble. Although no other government ofﬁcially endorsed Wilson’s Fourteen Points, many people around the world became convinced that the plan would provide a fair and rea-

sonable framework for any peace settlement that could be worked out if the Entente powers and theirAllies won the war. Wilson’s plan included three distinct types of proposals. The ﬁrst group,

218 | Section 4

consisting of Points 1 through 5, listed general principles for international relations that the president hoped would discourage future resorts to war. To discourage secret diplomacy, for example, the ﬁrst point would prohibit clandestine negotiations (“open covenants openly arrived at”). The other general principles within this group were freedom of the seas, reduction of trade barriers, international disarmament, and reassessment of colonial claims with an emphasis on self-determination. As a former history professor, Wilson was well aware that a series of speciﬁc grievances and perceived inequities within Europe itself had played major roles in igniting the Great War. Consequently, Points 6 through 13 proposed resolution of many of these sore points, to reduce tensions and eliminate causes of international bickering. Wilson advocated the creation of an independent Poland, restoration of an independent Belgium, readjustment of Italy’s borders with the old Austrian empire, and preservation of an independent Russia. He also called for German withdrawal from occupied France and the restoration of the two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, that the German government had retained as spoils of its victory in the 1870 Franco Prussian War. Finally, Wilson called for democratic self-determination for the peoples of the Balkans and the AustroHungarian Empire. The U.S. president realized that something tangible was needed to enforce the general principles and to administer the realignment of European territories that he proposed. Point 14 therefore advocated the establishment of an international body to be charged with mutually guaranteeing “political independence and territorial integrity to great

and small states alike.” In his view, this “league of nations” would act collectively to ensure implementation of the ﬁrst 13 points, as well as deal with any potential future conﬂicts. In the long run, Wilson became convinced that creating the League of Nations was the most important of all of his proposals. Various parties began quibbling over some of the points as soon as they were announced. Ever since Admiral Horatio Nelson’s definitive victory over the French at Trafalgar in 1806, Great Britain’s Royal Navy had enjoyed virtually unchallenged control of the seas. Despite heavy losses during the war, British ofﬁcials were loath to abandon their preeminent position to Wilson’s rhetorical stance. Disarmament might be a ﬁne idea as well, but four years of intensive war production had created such a plethora of weapons that any attempt to control their distribution was likely to be futile. The French meanwhile expected compensation from their enemies for the damages that the war had inflicted. Whereas Wilson wanted to look toward the future, people in war-torn France and Belgium firmly believed that the defeated Germans should provide reparations to help restore and rebuild their economies and infrastructure. Great Britain and France also found fault with Wilson’s ﬁfth point regarding colonization. These nations controlled the two largest global empires and had no intention of casually giving them up. Instead, they anticipated fulﬁlling the colonial ambitions that had been envisioned in the Sykes-Picot Agreement and other secret treaties, particularly with regard to the Middle East, now that the Ottoman Empire had been reduced to a mere shadow of its former size. T. E.

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 219 Lawrence and General George Allenby had been quite successful in expanding British inﬂuence in Arab lands during the conﬂict. When Wilson arrived in Europe as head of the U.S. delegation, in early 1919, many treated him as a sort of messiah who had brought peace to the world. That heady feeling quickly evaporated once the delegates sat down to negotiate at the Versailles Palace outside Paris. Wilson had already compromised his position on freedom of the seas. He soon gave in to French and Belgian entreaties for reparations. Wilson retreated on colonial issues as well. He eventually agreed to allow the British into Iraq, the French into Syria, and other colonialstyle transfers, but he insisted that they be framed as “mandates” from the League of Nations. This device had two advantages: it fulﬁlled the ambitions of the victorious Allies and, at the same time, it emphasized the authority of the collective security system that Wilson hoped to establish. In February 1919, the president returned brieﬂy to the United States to deal with pending legislation. However, he learned that many Americans, including an especially inﬂuential group of Republican politicians, had become quite critical of his personal negotiating style and his idealism in general. With his plans under ﬁre at home, Wilson returned to France convinced he had to interweave his 14-point principles inextricably with the League of Nations and the ﬁnal peace treaty as a whole. Unfortunately, his determination to do so made him all the more vulnerable to Europeans who were insisting on modiﬁcations or changes in his original proposals. Personally guiding the drafting of the Covenant of the League of

Nations, Wilson hoped that its authority would ultimately outweigh any compromises he accepted on the rest of the Fourteen Points. One very positive outcome of the conference, however, was that, once they had achieved much of what they had proposed in the secret treaties, the Allies stepped back and allowed Wilson a great deal of latitude in “redrawing” the map of Europe. In consultation with a group of U.S. academic experts he called “The Inquiry,” Wilson and his fellow diplomats created nine new nations in Europe: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. To that extent, at least, Wilson’s commitment to self-determination was fulﬁlled. The Versailles Treaty was signed on June 18, 1919, but it met a skeptical reception in the United States. Throughout the summer, the Republicancontrolled Senate Foreign Relations Committee held exhaustive hearings on the treaty prior to scheduling a vote on ratiﬁcation. Opponents were particularly concerned about Article X of the Covenant of the League of Nations because they felt it implied that U.S. military forces might be called into action by the international body without congressional approval. Wilson mounted an aggressive publicity campaign to counter these negative sentiments, making a number of appearances throughout the country. After a speech at Pueblo, Colorado, on September 25, he suffered a massive stroke that left him partially paralyzed and unable to function as president for many weeks. Although he had somewhat recovered by November, he was unable to convince enough senators to vote in favor of his master plan for

220 | Section 4

European realignment and collective security. The Senate brought the matter to another vote in the spring of 1920, but, once again, supporters failed to muster the required two-thirds majority for ratiﬁcation. The Fourteen Points thus left a mixed legacy. The League of Nations functioned more or less effectively without U.S. representation for the ﬁrst few years. Its authority waned in the 1930s, however, and the collective security concept it embodied had to be reanimated in the United Nations during the closing months of World War II. In 1921, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes chaired an international disarmament conference that temporarily halted the expansion of war ﬂeets. Many Europeans beneﬁted in the interwar years from the self-determination that Wilson’s plans had assured them. In the long run, however, the retreat of the United States into isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s fatally undermined the inﬂuence that Americans might have had. Wilson’s failure to adhere to his own principles gave internationalism a bad name at home and did much to destroy the popularity of Democratic Party liberalism, paving the way for the restoration of “normalcy” and conservative Republican Party control. See also: Kellogg-Briand Pact References

Bailey, Thomas A. Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace. New York: Macmillan, 1944. Boemeka, Manfred F., Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser, eds. The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Mayer, Arno J. Politics and Diplomacy at Peacemaking. New York: Knopf, 1967.

Tillman, Seth P. Anglo-American Relations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.

Good Neighbor Policy In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt took great pride in promulgating a Good Neighbor Policy for Latin America. The move toward neighborliness had begun under President Herbert Hoover and his secretary of state, Henry Stimson. But Roosevelt made the policy a centerpiece of his international approach, and it continued to evolve during his administration. Just how neighborly the policy was remained debatable. Although it seemed to rule out military intervention, U.S. political and economic inﬂuence continued to expand throughout the region. To give the policy its due, U.S. interventionism did decline markedly in the 1930s. U.S. Marines had been stationed in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. With minor breaks, they remained in place right through the 1920s. For example, President Calvin Coolidge recalled them from Nicaragua in 1925 but sent them in again to quell instability less than a year later. By the end of the decade, even U.S. businessmen with interests in those countries complained that the U.S. military presence often did more harm than good. President Herbert Hoover took positive steps to reduce North-South tensions. He repudiated the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that had asserted a U.S. right to intervene wherever it chose to protect U.S. lives and property. The Hoover administration also began reducing the existing occupations. The succeeding Roosevelt administration

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 221 completed the withdrawal of U.S. military units from all Latin American areas. That did not necessarily guarantee unalloyed freedom for the people there, because the United States retained strict controls over ﬁnancial affairs in nations like the Dominican Republic. It also used loans from the Export-Import Bank to strategically maintain an ofﬁcial economic inﬂuence. Private U.S. investment continued to grow once the initial impact of the Great Depression had eased. An unfortunate consequence of the new approach was that the U.S. government proved reluctant to relinquish control to anyone it did not trust. As a result, U.S.–backed dictators sometimes established themselves when U.S. troops pulled out. In Nicaragua, for example, Samoza García defeated popular peasant leader Cesár Augusto Sandino and eventually had him executed. The Samoza family retained control over Nicaragua from 1936 to 1974. This pattern was duplicated in the Dominican Republic, with the emergence of Rafael Trujillo, and in Haiti, where, after a long period of instability, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier proclaimed himself president for life. All of these dictators relied on national guard forces that the United States had trained and equipped. The situation in Cuba was particularly complex. Gerardo Machado governed the island with an iron ﬁst from 1924 to 1933. President Roosevelt sent a personal friend, Sumner Welles, to Havana as ambassador in 1933, and he arrived just when internal opposition and economic crises had weakened Machado. Although Roosevelt refused to implement Welles’s call for U.S. military intervention, the ambassador was inﬂuential enough to help persuade Machado to go into exile. At that point, an internal

military coup boosted left-leaning Ramón Grau San Martin into the presidency. The United States refused to recognize the Grau administration, fearing that it might be communist inspired, but it did endorse the government that Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar installed to replace Grau early in 1934. Shortly after the new regime was in place, Roosevelt formally abrogated the Platt Amendment, except for retaining the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo. This action ofﬁcially ended the U.S. protectorate of Cuba that had existed since the Spanish-AmericanCuban War. Either as president or kingmaker, Batista controlled Cuba for a quarter of a century until Fidel Castro ousted him in 1959. Dropping the Platt Amendment was one of several elements of the Good Neighbor Policy. In 1933, for example, Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, voted in favor of a nonintervention resolution at the Seventh Pan American Conference in Montevideo in 1933. Although Hull attached an ambiguous caveat to his vote, it did conﬁrm a U.S. commitment to avoid military intervention in neighboring states. Shortly afterward, Hull initiated a series of bilateral talks utilizing the authority that Congress had granted in the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934. These resulted in a comprehensive reduction in U.S. tariff rates and reciprocal concessions from trading partners that proved mutually beneﬁcial. None of these steps, however, signiﬁcantly weakened U.S. economic and political inﬂuence in Latin America. Mexico presented a unique set of problems. An enormous amount of U.S. investment had taken place there, but Article 27 of the Mexican constitution, adopted in 1917 under President

222 | Section 4

Venustiano Carranza, claimed that all of the country’s natural resources belonged to Mexico. It also prohibited non-Mexicans from buying land. For a time, purchases completed prior to 1917 remained untouched, but the Mexican government increasingly hinted at a desire to expropriate all foreign-owned properties. President Calvin Coolidge sent an old college friend, Dwight Morrow, to Mexico City in 1927. An urbane and wily diplomat, Morrow negotiated an agreement that officially confirmed the pre1917 exemption. It survived until 1938, when President Lázaro Cárdenas went ahead and expropriated the holdings of all foreign oil companies. Resisting calls for U.S. intervention that would have invalidated his Good Neighbor Policy, Roosevelt behaved with restraint, and U.S. companies eventually had to accept a token payment of $25 million for what they had lost. By 1938, the Roosevelt administration was far more worried about possible German or Italian penetration into the Western Hemisphere than which local ruler or faction held power. The Good Neighbor Policy provided a reasonably friendly environment in the hemisphere that enabled the United States to convince Latin Americans to cooperate in regional security arrangements. Although a few nations, such as Argentina, were less than sympathetic to these admonitions, they enabled the United States to focus its efforts in Europe and the Far East, free of complications closer to home. See also: Big Stick; Platt Amendment References

Black, George. The Good Neighbor. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Dozer, Donald M. Are We Good Neighbors? Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1959. Gellman, Irwin F. Good Neighbor Diplomacy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1979.

Grand Alliance When the United States entered World War II, British prime minister Winston Churchill began praising the formation of a Grand Alliance. Its members were the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—the three world powers that were at war with the fascist governments of Germany and Italy. Although the heads of state of the three powers consulted and collaborated in a broad spectrum of activities, they frequently disagreed on fundamental issues and never entered into a formal alliance. Nevertheless, the concept that there was a grand alliance arrayed against common enemies encouraged the participants’ citizens and inﬂuenced their leaders’ behavior. Close ties had bound the United States and Great Britain long before President Franklin Roosevelt called for a war declaration. The two countries had fought side by side in World War I and had remained friendly in the intervening years. When World War II began, in the fall of 1939, Roosevelt did not, like his predecessor Woodrow Wilson, announce that the United States would be strictly neutral. In succeeding months, he pursued policies that inexorably led his nation down the path to war on Great Britain’s side. During that period, Roosevelt and Churchill became increasingly close. They carried on a lively correspondence long before their ﬁrst face-to-face meeting off the coast of Newfoundland in

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 223 August 1941. There they issued the Atlantic Charter, a high-minded statement of purpose that linked their countries in opposition to fascism. Military planners and strategists from both countries were working closely together, anticipating that the United States would soon join in the ﬁghting. Meanwhile, Great Britain relied on the United States for billions of dollars worth of assistance through the Lend-Lease program and other avenues. When Congress approved a declaration of war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, joint military planning moved to much higher levels. In late December, Churchill traveled to the United States, reinforcing the linkage between the two nations. A strong sense of common purpose clearly existed between the two English-speaking countries. Even so, President Roosevelt never considered negotiating a formal agreement that would violate the longstanding U.S. tradition of joining no alliances. Churchill was particularly interested in promoting cordial relations with the other great power fighting against Germany. When the United States entered the fray, the Soviet Union was engaged in a furious defensive battle against massive German armies deep inside its territory. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin therefore had ample reason to welcome a new participant in the ﬁght against Hitler’s regime. Fortunately, President Roosevelt had personally superintended the restoration of normal diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1933. Although tensions and suspicions continued to cloud their relationship, the Americans and the Soviets found common cause in the current global conﬂict. Indeed, even before his country entered

the war, Roosevelt had begun sending Lend-Lease assistance to Moscow and increased it substantially in 1942. Because Churchill and Roosevelt considered Germany their most dangerous enemy, they were pleased to have the Soviets on their side. Both of the Western powers, however, were continually distracted by their fight against the Japanese in East Asia. That was just one of the many differences among the members of the grand alliance. The Soviets were completely focused on driving the Germans out, so they chose to stay out of the conﬂict with Japan. Their concentration on the European front clearly inﬂuenced what the Soviets desired from the other members of the grand alliance. From Stalin’s perspective, getting the Americans and the British to establish a second front in Western Europe had the highest priority. France had fallen under German control in the summer of 1940, stranding hundreds of thousands of British troops who had to be rescued from Dunkirk shortly afterward. Hitler could then focus the bulk of his resources on the eastern front, and his armies invaded Russia in June 1941. Even while trying to push the Germans out of his country, Stalin nursed territorial ambitions that would restore the traditional czarist boundaries of Russia as well as build a protective wall against the German menace. U.S. objectives were quite different. Although Americans, too, saw defeating Hitler as the primary objective, they had no interest in helping the Soviet Union extend its influence to neighboring regions. Like all U.S. presidents, Roosevelt was dedicated to encouraging democracy, not imperial expansion. He made no secret of his desire to see colonial peoples granted independence.

224 | Section 4

Even though he agreed that a second front in Western Europe was desirable, the unrelenting warfare in the Paciﬁc lessened his ability to pursue that objective. Great Britain’s goals also differed from those of its partners. Like the Americans, the British were distracted by events in the Far East, where Great Britain traditionally had major territorial holdings and trade inﬂuence. And, like their Soviet counterparts, the British hoped to maintain control of their extended colonial empire in Africa, the Middle East, and India—objectives far different than those of the Americans. Partially because of that goal, Churchill consistently proposed focusing on Southern Europe rather than the West. He used the image of a crocodile, insisting it would be far easier to attack the “soft

underbelly” of Europe than the hardened defensive positions that the Germans had established along the Atlantic Coast. These conﬂicting and sometimes even contradictory national ambitions complicated the crafting of agreements whenever alliance members met. Churchill served as the main personal link in the grand alliance, traveling to Washington and Moscow on several occasions. Roosevelt’s paraplegia made him less comfortable traveling, but he believed that he must make the effort. He also wanted to meet with Joseph Stalin directly rather than rely exclusively on Churchill as a go-between. In January 1943, the ﬁrst major international conference took place in Casablanca, Morocco, shortly after U.S. forces had landed in North Africa.

President Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill, leaders of the Grand Alliance, held their ﬁrst overseas meeting at Casablanca early in 1943. Here Roosevelt reads his “unconditional surrender” statement. (Library of Congress)

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 225 Roosevelt and Churchill discussed many other issues, but the most noteworthy outcome of the Casablanca Conference was Roosevelt’s pledge to continue ﬁghting until the enemy agreed to “unconditional surrender.” This stand recalled the one that Union general Ulysses Grant had taken during the American Civil War some 90 years earlier. Later that year, Churchill and Roosevelt convened in Washington and then in Québec before heading overseas again. The two Western leaders stopped ﬁrst in Cairo in late November 1943, where they met with nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek to discuss the future of China. Then they headed for face-to-face talks with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in Teheran, Iran. A Soviet law that prohibited the head of state from leaving the nation during wartime dictated the unusual choice for a meeting site. The Red Army had moved in and occupied northern Iran when British troops had taken control in the south. That brought Teheran into the Soviet sphere of control, enabling Stalin to attend the meeting. The Teheran Conference was the pinnacle of the Grant Alliance. At that point, Soviet forces were slowly pushing German troops out of their territory, and British and U.S. units had reclaimed North Africa and Sicily and were moving north through Italy. The Big Three discussed the future of Germany, Poland, and Eastern Europe, as well as the structure and purpose of the planned United Nations organization. Stalin pressed the others on when they might establish a second front in Western Europe, and Roosevelt promised that it would occur early in 1944. Certain that they were on the road to victory in Europe, Roosevelt successfully lobbied the Soviet leader

for a promise to enter the war against Japan in due course. The U.S. president also managed to meet privately with the Soviet leader. He used that opportunity to inform Stalin of his lack of commitment to preserving the British Empire. More important, these conversations apparently convinced him that he could inﬂuence the Soviet leader and perhaps even control his territorial ambitions. Neither Churchill nor most of Roosevelt’s advisors shared the president’s optimism. Although it came several weeks later than Roosevelt had promised, the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, established a dynamic western front at last. In a matter of months, British and U.S. forces had liberated both France and Italy and were heading east toward Germany, just as Soviet troops were closing in from the opposite direction. From a military standpoint, the Grand Alliance appeared to be well along the path to achieving its goals. Battleﬁeld successes were only one aspect of the collaboration, however. Although the leaders of the Grand Alliance held two more meetings, one at Yalta and the other at Potsdam, the three nations advocated radically different policies. Political and ideological disagreements among the three powers created ﬁssures in the Alliance, ﬁssures that would ultimately destroy any hope for postwar cooperation. Although the Alliance won the hot war, its disintegration set the stage for a long and bitter Cold War. See also: Atlantic Charter; Atomic Diplomacy; Second Front; United Nations; Yalta References

Beitzell, Robert. The Alliance: America, Britain, and Russia, 1941–1943. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

226 | Section 4 Edmonds, Robin. The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Peace and War. New York: Norton, 1991. Lane, Ann, and Howard Temperley, eds. The Rise and Fall of the Grand Alliance, 1941–1945. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Sainsbury, Keith. The Turning Point: Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and ChiangKai-Shek, 1943. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Great War Even today, Europeans wonder why the United States waited so long before entering what was called the Great War in 1914. Two and a half years passed before President Woodrow Wilson abandoned neutrality and requested Congress to approve a war resolution. U.S. reluctance was understandable, because the causes for and objectives of the war had no intrinsic relevance to U.S. international interests or policies. A review of those underlying causes demonstrates why Americans had no desire to rush into the ﬁghting. The Great War that erupted in 1914 was the ﬁrst major European conﬂict since the 1815 Congress of Vienna had ended the era of the Napoleonic Wars. It established an enduring balance of power among the major European states that discouraged anything but minor conﬂicts during the 19th century. Even the Crimean War (1856–1858), which involved several major powers, had the limited objective of preventing Russia from expanding further into the Balkans. In the mid-19th century, the balance of power began to deteriorate, in large part as a result of nationalism. Giuseppe Garibaldi united the Italian states and principalities into a coherent nation by

1860. Otto von Bismarck became prime minister in the Kingdom of Prussia in 1862, with the goal of unifying dozens of small, competing German political units. His ﬁrst success was fomenting a dispute that led to a war with the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1866. Prussia’s modern, well-equipped army defeated the Austrians in just seven weeks, allowing Bismarck to draw together several contiguous German principalities into his North German Confederation. French emperor Napoléon III viewed consolidation of the German states as a threat to the balance of power and to France’s position as the leading military force on the continent. Bismarck doctored information to provoke France into declaring war in the summer of 1870. Six weeks later, Napoléon surrendered his armies, after losing the Battle of Sedan. His government also fell, allowing the Germans ultimately to invade Paris and impose a harsh peace settlement on the republican government that succeeded the empire. In addition to demanding reparations for war damages, Germany annexed the northeastern French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine into its greatly expanded empire. Having accomplished his goal of unifying Germany, Bismarck became chancellor of the newly created Second Reich. No one knew better than Bismarck that France would harbor deep resentment over its losses. The so-called Iron Chancellor spent the next 20 years negotiating a complex set of alliances that prevented France from finding Allies to help it recapture its pride and lost provinces. Bismarck’s ﬁrst coup was establishing a Triple Alliance linking Germany, Austria, and Russia. Called the dreiKaiserbund, or Three Emperor

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 227 Union, it was essentially a defensive pact. If any other nation—in other words, France—were to attack an alliance member, the other two agreed not to assist the aggressor. Because the three empires frequently disagreed with one another on a variety of issues, Bismarck repeatedly had to recast or revive his arrangements. In 1890, a young and self-conﬁdent Wilhelm II became kaiser of the German Empire. Trained to rule, he refused to take dictation from the aging Bismarck and dismissed the chancellor to pursue his own policies. A major casualty was Germany’s linkage with Russia. By 1894, France and Russia were crafting an alliance of their own, directed against the German Empire lying between them. The kaiser responded by reinforcing his alliance with Austria and attempting to strengthen the German links that Bismarck had initiated earlier with Italy. Meanwhile, the greatest naval power in the world, Great Britain, took pride in remaining in “splendid isolation” from these European intrigues and devoting its energies to expanding its global empire. In 1898, however, Cecil Rhodes’s visionary plan of establishing a line of colonies in Africa—from the Cape of Good Hope in the south to Cairo in the north—encountered opposition in the Sudan. France had been pursuing its own expansionist plan of extending its line of colonies across Africa from west to east. Advance agents of the two colonial empires met at Fashoda on the upper Nile River. After intensive negotiations, the French stepped aside and allowed Great Britain to pursue its goals. The peaceful resolution of the Fashoda Incident led to a broader, worldwide set of accommodations between Great Britain and France. By 1904, the two

countries had become friendly enough to form a secret Entente Cordiale. In part to assess the strength of the Anglo-French relationship, Germany stirred up trouble in Morocco. This mischief led to the Algeciras Conference in 1906, where only Austria supported Germany’s proposals. The conference convinced the German government that the ties among Great Britain, France, and Russia were very strong indeed. The Germans felt that they had no choice but to prepare for a possible two-front war in Europe. The leading strategist was Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, whose ideas shaped German military planning for the next decade. The Schlieffen Plan called for Germany to invade and defeat France in one month, while Russia ponderously mobilized. Then Germany could throw the bulk of its military resources into a campaign to defeat the greater Russian menace. Just when the anticipated war might begin remained unknown, but a series of confrontations in the Balkans sent tremors through all of Europe. The Balkan crises usually pitted Austria, on one side, against Russia, on the other. Conﬁdent of solid German backing, Austria usually achieved its goals. In 1914, for example, it incorporated the Balkan provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina into its sprawling multinational empire. Serbs formed the primary ethnic group in these provinces, so the Austrian takeover naturally aroused resentment in the neighboring country of Serbia. A secret patriotic terrorist organization, called the Black Hand, was based there, but it hoped to provoke a pro-Serbian revolt in Bosnia-Herzegovina. To welcome the newly acquired territories into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the government

228 | Section 4

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, moments before they were assassinated. Their deaths lit the fuse that set off the Great War a month later. (The Illustrated London News Picture Library)

in Vienna sent Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on an ofﬁcial visit. On June 28, 1914, a Black Hand assassin named Gavrilo Princip shot and killed the visiting dignitaries at Sarajevo. The Austrian government was shocked at the assassination of the designated heir to the Austrian throne. Before responding, however, Austria checked with Germany to make sure of its ally’s backing. The German government agreed to support Austria’s aggressive intentions, even though it realized that they might ignite the long-anticipated European war. The Austrian government then delivered an ultimatum to Serbia in late July. Among other points, it demanded that the Serbians allow Austrian forces to enter their country to root out the rebels who were responsible for the assassination. Some years earlier, Serbia had negotiated an alliance with Russia. Now Russia agreed to implement its defensive

alliance if Austrian troops entered Serbia. Serbia then boldly rejected the ultimatum, triggering a war declaration from Austria. The Russian government immediately began the formidable task of mobilizing an army that was scattered throughout its vast empire. Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote his cousin, czar Nicholas II, pleading with him not to take such a step, but the Russian leader claimed that he was powerless to halt the process. The German government now had to fulﬁll its commitment to Austria, but it had only the current version of the 1906 Schlieffen Plan with which to work, and it called for an immediate invasion of France if Russia began mobilizing. Germany therefore felt that it must declare war on France, Russia’s alliance partner. In sweeping down on France from the north, German armies passed through Belgium. Great Britain had a long-standing defensive alliance with Belgium, so, when Germany invaded,

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 229 Great Britain responded by declaring war as well. The Great War had begun. In addition to Germany and Austria, on one side, confronting Great Britain, France, and Russia, on the other, several smaller nations soon entered the fray. The United States did not. Instead, Americans responded with shock and disbelief. None of the warring nations had provided rational explanations for their behavior, so no one could be certain what their true objectives were. Clearly, the United States had no reason to get involved in a titanic clash of arms taking place 3,000 miles away. Neutrality was the most sensible policy for Americans to pursue. Besides, everyone expected it to end quickly. A few stirring victories should bring the enemy to the peace table. Such optimism soon evaporated. Defying German projections, Russia managed to send two sizable armies into East Prussia within a couple of weeks of the war declaration. In response, Germany withdrew substantial forces from the western front, enabling France and Great Britain to halt the German advance there. Both sides started digging trenches and settling in for what became four years of largely static warfare. The stalemate on the western front gave U.S. attitudes plenty of time to mature. By 1917, the United States had invested heavily in French and British war bonds, been inﬂuenced by one-sided anti-German propaganda, and lost citizens to German submarine attacks. At that point, neutrality in the Great War no longer seemed acceptable. See also: Algeciras; Neutrality (1914–1917) References

Joll, James. The Origins of the First World War. 2d ed. New York: Longman, 1992.

Kennan, George F. The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Lee, Dwight E. Europe’s Crucial Years: The Diplomatic Background of World War I, 1902–1914. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1974. Tuchman, Barbara. The Guns of August. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Island Hopping When the United States declared war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans activated contingency plans that they had developed in the late 1930s. A key premise of this planning was the near certainty that Japan’s aggressiveness would be able to sweep U.S. and British inﬂuence completely out of the Western Paciﬁc. Recapturing all of that conquered territory would present formidable challenges. Instead, the United States adopted island hopping, choosing to attack a few, carefully selected targets from the hundreds that Japan occupied. These islands could then serve as bases to enable U.S. military forces to leapfrog all the way to the home islands of Japan. The Japanese plans for protecting those home islands involved erecting a defensive perimeter around them by invading and subduing neighboring countries and colonies. Simultaneously with or shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, well-prepared Japanese army and navy units carried out coordinated assaults on the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Burma, Siam, French Indochina, and Dutch Indonesia. At the same time, they used their prewar Paciﬁc colonies, many of which were held under League of Nations mandates

230 | Section 4

as bases from which to spread their inﬂuence and control well to the south and east. For the United States, the most disheartening move was the Japanese invasion of the U.S. colony of the Philippine Islands. More than 70,000 American soldiers were captured and forced to walk on foot to detention camps along the Bataan Peninsula west of Manila. Thousands died in the “death march.” U.S. general Douglas MacArthur barely managed to escape from his headquarters on Corregidor Island. His pledge to return to the Philippines would complicate strategic planning down the line. Encouraged by its swift advance, Japan decided to push on and establish an outer ribbon of defense, extending from Australia all the way to the Aleutian Islands, part of the U.S. colony of Alaska. U.S. admiral Frank Fletcher learned that the Japanese were moving toward Port Moresby, an Australian outpost on the island of New Guinea. He hastily assembled a ﬂeet in the Coral Sea and engaged Japanese vessels in a pitched battle. Although neither side could claim victory, the desperate action halted Japanese expansion to the south. Now determined more than ever to push farther east, Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto gathered an enormous fleet and headed for Midway Island. U.S. intelligence agents had cracked the Japanese military codes, so Admiral Chester Nimitz was able to prepare a reception. The three-day Battle of Midway, in early June 1942, ended in a stunning success for the U.S. Navy. It halted Japanese expansion to the east and north and so damaged the enemy navy that it could never again mount a victorious offensive attack.

The victory at Midway also transferred the initiative in the Paciﬁc War to the United States, allowing the Americans to implement their islandhopping strategy. The ﬁrst confrontation came at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands chain northeast of Australia. It took U.S. forces eight months to gain full control and clear the way for building a major airbase, called Henderson Field, on the neighboring island of Bougainville. General MacArthur commanded the land forces that used this strategic base and others in nearby New Guinea as staging areas for a drive that slowly forced the Japanese north toward the Philippines. Simultaneously, Admiral Nimitz initiated an island-hopping campaign from the east. His marines captured outposts such as Tarawa, Kwajalein, and Eniwetok. Using these as stepping stones, the U.S. Navy then headed for the Mariana Islands chain. Before Japan moved in, the chain’s largest member, Guam, had been a U.S. colony since the Spanish-American-Cuban War. Even more important strategically were two smaller islands to the north, Tinian and Saipan. The U.S. attack, which began in June 1944, triggered a major naval battle in the Philippine Sea. Once again, the Americans prevailed and quickly began constructing airfields on the recaptured islands. From these, newly designed long-range B-29 bombers could carry out missions on Japan’s home islands. At that point, Nimitz favored heading for Formosa to bring China more directly into the conﬂict, but MacArthur insisted that liberating the Philippines should be the next priority. MacArthur won the debate, and the U.S. Navy received orders to facilitate his landings

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 231 on Leyte Island in October. Hoping to prevent those landings, the Japanese Navy staged its last naval campaign. Faulty execution caused the three separate arms of the Japanese ﬂeet to reach U.S. admiral Bull Halsey’s defenders one at a time rather than simultaneously. The Americans knocked out each wave and then returned to supporting the landings. MacArthur’s conﬁdence proved illfounded, however, because stubborn Japanese resistance tied his troops down for another eight months. The U.S. Navy resumed island hopping, with a bloody, month-long assault on Iwo Jima in February 1945. The capture of that tiny island, located halfway between Saipan and Japan, allowed the Americans to build an airﬁeld to provide ﬁghter escorts for their longer-range bombing runs. The Japanese increasingly resorted to kamikaze tactics, in which Japanese pilots tried to crash their own bomb-laden aircraft on U.S. vessels. First used at Leyte Gulf, these desperation attacks peaked when the Americans landed at Okinawa in April. In all, kamikazes sank 38 ships and damaged 368 others. Having brought the Philippines and Okinawa under control by June, the United States completed its island-hopping campaign. The Americans now faced the dilemma of what to do next. The incredible resistance that they had met in offlying locations convinced them that a full-scale invasion of Japan’s home islands would be extraordinarily costly. Estimates of as many as 1 million U.S. casualties and another year and a half of heavy combat convinced the United States to pursue two risky alternatives. One was to convince the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan. The other was to deploy an experimental atomic bomb. In the end, both of these alternatives were

implemented, with far-reaching consequences. See also: Atomic Diplomacy; Pearl Harbor; Yalta References

Keegan, John. The Second World War. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Morison, Samuel Eliot. History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. 15 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1947–1967. Spector, Ronald H. Eagle against the Sun: The American War with Japan. New York: Free Press, 1985.

Isolationism In the 1920s, the United States retreated into isolationism, deliberately avoiding international connections and obligations. Isolationism had long roots in U.S. diplomatic history, but contemporary events and perceptions intensiﬁed the isolationist impulse after World War I. In the long run, this ostrich-like behavior failed to protect the United States from becoming deeply involved in global affairs. During his campaign for the presidency in 1920, Republican candidate Warren G. Harding struck a sensitive chord when he spoke of returning the United States to “normalcy.” A good many Americans were eager to do just that, to retreat to the less complicated lives that their rose-colored memories recalled from the late 19th century. A central aspect of that normalcy was a United States that was politically isolated from European affairs and content with its own relatively modest expansionist ambitions in the Western Hemisphere. Consequently, a retreat to isolation in the 1920s appeared very attractive.

232 | Section 4

Isolationist sentiments drew on popular historical traditions, beginning with President George Washington’s declaration of neutrality in 1793. Thomas Jefferson reinforced that concept when he became president in 1801. A key provision of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine was a U.S. pledge to steer clear of European entanglements. These and other precedents made isolationism respectable and easy to defend. The American people’s experience in World War I strengthened their desire to retreat into isolation. Although the United States was directly involved for only 20 months, the death and devastation of trench warfare in northern France was truly horrifying. It bore little resemblance to the last U.S. war, when eager volunteer soldiers gaily set off to put things right in Cuba and returned a few months later with a swagger and a sense of accomplishment. The experiences of the American Expeditionary Force under General John J. Pershing were far grimmer, the costs far higher, and, perhaps most discouraging, the results far less satisfying. All of this made it quite understandable that many would favor turning inward to avoid such unsatisfactory consequences in the future. Plenty of support came from what some historians have called “natural isolationists.” At that point, prominent politicians in both major parties favored Progressivism, a political impulse focused on domestic issues. Senators like George Norris of Nebraska and Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had opposed U.S. entry into the war in 1917, certain that it would distract the nation’s attention from their uncompleted Progressive agenda. They were right. The war effectively killed the Progressive impulse. Allied with antiwar Progressives were millions of Americans who traced their

family roots to nations on the “wrong” side in the war. German-Americans and Irish-Americans had little sympathy for Great Britain and France to begin with, and many of them suffered blatant discrimination or fell afoul of sedition laws during the war. Retreating from international affairs seemed like an ideal way to avoid such problems in the future. Progressives and hyphenate Americans were prevalent in the Midwest, so isolationist sentiments were particularly evident there. Isolationism became increasingly popular as internationalists and liberals became disillusioned with the consequences of the war. Some had found their internationalism waning when President Wilson announced his Fourteen Point program. Not only would it involve the United States in the emotional responsibility of redrawing the map of Europe, but the collective security concept that was inherent in Wilson’s call for a League of Nations threatened to entwine Americans in a continuing series of intractable problems overseas. The Versailles Treaty’s inclusion of reparations, compromises on many of Wilson’s points, and clear-cut collective security provisions further disillusioned Americans. The U.S. Senate’s failure to ratify the treaty discouraged even those who had remained hopeful of a positive U.S. role in preserving world peace. The failure of the League of Nations to resolve many of the issues that it was designed to handle delivered a ﬁnal blow to liberal optimism. The fact that the United States had refused to join the organization had much to do with its impotence, but the league’s disappointing record only strengthened isolationist sentiments among Americans.

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 233 Although no one favored restricting international trade, political isolation became entrenched during the conservative presidential administrations of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. It severely complicated U.S. efforts to work with other countries. Even after Democrat Franklin Roosevelt became president, isolationism remained a powerful force. It encouraged the passage of neutrality acts in the late 1930s, and, like the acts themselves, left the United States extraordinarily unprepared when World War II began. See also: Fourteen Points; (1914–1917); Neutrality Acts

Neutrality

References

Adler, Selig. The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth-Century Reaction. New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1957. Guinsburg, Thomas N. The Pursuit of Isolationism in the United States Senate from Versailles to Pearl Harbor. New York: Garland, 1982. Jonas, Manfred. Isolationism in America, 1935–1941. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.

Kellogg-Briand Pact In 1928, representatives from 15 nations met in Paris to sign a pledge outlawing the use of force. The Pact of Paris had evolved from negotiations between U.S. secretary of state Frank B. Kellogg and French foreign minister Aristide Briand. For a brief period, internationalists and peace advocates around the world celebrated what they saw as a fundamental watershed in the conduct of international relations, but, within a matter of a few months, the Kellogg-Briand Pact had proven to be impotent.

An inﬂuential U.S. lawyer, Salmon O. Levinson, gained widespread attention in 1921 when he ﬂoated a plea for an international commitment to what he called the “outlawry of war.” The concept drew favorable support from Nicholas Murray Butler and James T. Shotwell, academic leaders associated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The chief political advocate of the concept was Idaho senator William Borah. Shotwell enthusiastically championed the concept in 1927, when he visited Aristide Briand, the French foreign minister. Briand had been diligently creating a network of alliances with other European countries, similar to those that had existed prior to the Great War. Having failed to draw the isolationist United States into that network, he seized upon Shotwell’s proposal as a way to overcome U.S. reluctance to make a commitment to France. He began his campaign by sending an open letter that Shotwell drafted directly to the American people. He followed up with a properly framed diplomatic proposal shortly afterward, inviting the United States to sign a bilateral agreement with France that would forswear war between them. President Calvin Coolidge and his secretary of state, Frank B. Kellogg, immediately recognized it for what it was—a backdoor way of linking French and U.S. foreign policies. Briand’s strategy seemed to be working very well; it generated widespread popularity for the proposal among the American people. Senator Borah suggested an ingenious way out for the Coolidge administration by urging Kellogg to open the treaty to all comers. If more nations came on board, it would

234 | Section 4

signiﬁcantly dilute the inﬂuence of the U.S.–France relationship. Kellogg adopted this approach and presented it to Briand. Even though it would undermine his original objective, the French statesman could hardly refuse. With great fanfare, representatives of 15 major powers met in Paris on August 27, 1928, to sign a brief statement of commitment. The ﬁrst article renounced war “as an instrument of national policy,” and the second pledged the signatories to settle their disputes “by paciﬁc means.” By the end of the year, 31 additional countries had added their signatures to the document. Kellogg won the Nobel Peace Prize for his initiative and, apparently, became convinced that the pact was truly signiﬁcant. In fact, it was nothing more than a paper pledge. It contained no enforce-

ment structure or mechanism, and it failed to designate any individual or body to administer it. Worse still, many nations appended convoluted hedging statements when they signed, which weakened its authority. For example, the U.S. proviso included a statement that the United States reserved the right to defend itself from external attack and further insisted that the pact in no way altered the Monroe Doctrine’s assertion of U.S. supremacy in the Western Hemisphere. With these carefully drafted caveats attached, the pact won ratiﬁcation in the U.S. Senate by a vote of 85 to 1. The paciﬁsts could not have been more pleased. In the very next year, an incident in Manchuria, a province in northern China, demonstrated how quixotic and empty the pact really was. When

Signed in Paris on August 27, 1928, universal optimism greeted the Kellogg-Briand Pact “outlawing” war, but the pact quickly proved meaningless. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 235

KELLOGG-BRIAND PACT (PACT OF PARIS): AUGUST 27, 1928 ARTICLE I The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another. ARTICLE II The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conﬂicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by paciﬁc means. . . . Source: Bevans, Charles I., ed. Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949. Washington, DC: GPO, 1969, 2:732–735.

Chinese authorities attempted to assert control over the Russian-built and Russian-maintained North Manchurian Railroad, the Soviet government refused to acquiesce. Fearing that both sides were on the point of conﬂict, U.S. secretary of state Henry Stimson “invoked” the Kellogg-Briand Pact, urging China and Russia to honor their pledges to avoid war. He also asked the other signatories to support his declaration, and more than 30 did so. None of this fazed the Russians, who sent units of the Red Army into Manchuria to preserve their control of the railroad, a vital link in the TransSiberian Railroad. After only two weeks of turmoil, the Chinese and the Russians negotiated a diplomatic resolution of the confrontation. But the Kellogg-Briand Pact had been fatally wounded. It had failed to prevent this extremely minor war, and Stimson’s premature invocation of the pact demonstrated its ineffectiveness. The pact was cited several more times in future crises, but never with any lasting or substantive impact.

See also: Stimson Doctrine References

Ferrell, Robert H. Peace in Their Time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952. Vinson, J. Chal. William E. Borah and the Outlawry of War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1957.

League of Nations President Woodrow Wilson was the most enthusiastic supporter of the League of Nations and did more than anyone else to ensure its creation and to shape its structure. Ironically, the United States not only failed to join the league in 1919 but, for many years, acted as though the organization did not even exist. Even without U.S. participation, the league remained the preeminent international organization in the 1920s, but its inﬂuence deteriorated considerably in the following decade. Whether U.S. membership would have or could have significantly altered that trajectory remains unclear. Earlier international organizations had provided models for the league. In the late

236 | Section 4

19th century, groups such as the International Telegraphic Union, the Red Cross, and the Universal Postal Union had demonstrated the usefulness of collaboration for speciﬁc purposes. In the early 20th century, advocates of international law had praised the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague. Americans beneﬁted from their participation in such organizations, even though they sometimes seemed inconsistent with the U.S. isolationist tradition. As a historian, Woodrow Wilson had a broad understanding of international affairs that enabled him to analyze the causes of World War I. He became convinced that secret treaties and alliances had created the preconditions for that catastrophe. After the United States was drawn into the conﬂict, Wilson laid out a 14-point plan for resolving the issues that had caused the war and for establishing an international body that he hoped would prevent another one. He considered the last of his Fourteen Points the most important—creating an international political organization to provide collective security. As head of the U.S. delegation at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference,

President Wilson insisted that establishing his organization, now identiﬁed as the League of Nations, should be the first issue discussed. He personally chaired a committee of delegates from 14 nations, which drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations. The heart of the new organization would be a general assembly, in which each member nation had a single vote. A league council would include permanent seats for the so-called Big Five—the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan—as well as rotating seats for other assembly members. The lengthy document outlined a series of responsibilities for the league, including the granting of mandates to colonial or dependent areas, mechanisms for applying international law, and other collaborative activities. Article Ten of the Covenant contained an operational deﬁnition of the collective security concept. Wilson believed that war could be avoided if any country considering aggression knew that all of the other nations would team up in opposition. Although the article failed to promise military action explicitly, it stated that the league members would “undertake to

ARTICLE X, LEAGUE OF NATIONS COVENANT INCORPORATED IN THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES, SIGNED JUNE 28, 1919 ARTICLE 10. The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League. In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulﬁlled. Source: Bevans, Charles I., ed. Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949. Washington, DC: GPO, 1969, 2:51.

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 237 respect and preserve as against external aggression” all member states. The Versailles Peace Treaty that Wilson subsequently submitted to the U.S. Senate for ratiﬁcation contained the League Covenant. Opponents claimed that Article Ten might draw the United States into a conﬂict, a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s granting to Congress the responsibility for declaring war. Although many other objections to the treaty and the league arose, Article Ten was most inﬂuential in convincing a majority of senators to reject the document. In doing so, they also guaranteed that the United States would not become a member of the league. Republican senator Warren G. Harding participated in the ratiﬁcation debates prior to his election as president in 1920. Even though Charles Evans Hughes, the man whom he named secretary of state, and other prominent Republicans advocated league membership, Harding bowed to pervasive isolationist pressures and refused to consider it. That presented Hughes with a problem when he received letters from the league, now established in Geneva, Switzerland. He initially chose to have no contact at all with the organization and refused even to acknowledge its existence. Within a few years, the U.S. position eased. The State Department began formally acknowledging league communications. When the organization took up issues such as the international trade in slaves and opium, the United States sent nonvoting delegates to observe the proceedings. For some time, these representatives did not even speak at meetings, but, by the late 1920s, Americans were taking active roles in discussions of nonpolitical matters, such as communications, trade, and counterfeiting, that

affected all nations. The delegates took great pains, however, to avoid committing the United States to any action that might be seen as direct cooperation with league initiatives. Former Secretary of State Elihu Root had participated in the creation of the World Court, a permanent legal body that operated under league auspices. As a prominent and highly respected Republican, Root’s advocacy of U.S. membership in the World Court helped persuade many congressmen and senators to open that door to international cooperation. In 1924, the platforms of both major political parties advocated membership, and substantial majorities in both houses of Congress supported the idea. President Calvin Coolidge was less enthusiastic. When Congress added reservations to its approval, Coolidge used them as an excuse not to move forward. President Franklin Roosevelt revived the question of membership in the World Court in the mid-1930s, but once again isolationist sentiments torpedoed the proposal. Even without the participation of the world’s most powerful county, the League of Nations accomplished a good deal in the 1920s. It mediated several postwar boundary and territorial disputes. It superintended a worldwide mandate system that assigned member nations responsibility for colonial or dependent areas. The United Kingdom, for example, controlled Palestine and Iraq under league mandates, ensuring subsequent British inﬂuence in the Middle East. The league added many new members to the original 41, including Germany in 1926 and the Soviet Union in 1934. The league proved far less effective in dealing with serious political challenges. The Second Manchurian

238 | Section 4

Crisis in 1931–1932 did much to discredit the organization. Japan used a trumped-up excuse to expand its military control in Manchuria, the northernmost province of China. Secretary of State Henry Stimson hoped that the League Council would develop a strong response. Great Britain’s Lord Lytton headed a league commission that eventually produced a report critical of Japan. The Japanese delegate then dramatically withdrew from the league in the spring of 1933. The United States meanwhile issued its own Stimson Doctrine, which denied recognition of Japan’s newly installed puppet government in Manchuria. Japan’s decision to withdraw no doubt encouraged German chancellor Adolf Hitler to do the same shortly afterward. More postwar constraints had been imposed on his country than on any other, including the demilitarization of German territory west of the Rhine River. The league was unable to prevent Hitler from reasserting control over the Rhineland in 1933, and Germany’s withdrawal freed it from other league restrictions. The league did take some steps when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, but its call for an international embargo against the aggressor had only limited effects. Substantial assistance from Germany helped fascist leader Benito Mussolini impose colonial control over Ethiopia in the spring of 1936. Even though the league then cancelled its embargo, Italy withdrew from the organization. Several other nations left the league as well, and, in 1939, the organization took positive action in expelling the Soviet Union after its troops invaded Finland. Clearly, the league had failed to preserve the peace and to punish aggressors. The world plunged into a second war

that was even more extensive and deadly than the ﬁrst. The league continued to function at a much reduced level until 1946, when the United Nations absorbed many of its remaining activities and institutions. Despite its disappointing record, the league served as a model for the much stronger and more effective postwar organization. The structure of the United Nations, with its assembly and Security Council, closely resembles that of the league. Many of the international institutions and responsibilities that the league had fostered continued under United Nations management. Regrettably, the league had failed to accomplish Woodrow Wilson’s most heartfelt desire: preventing a recurrence of global conﬂict. See also: Fourteen Points; Isolationism; Stimson Doctrine References

Cooper, John Milton. Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Dunne, Michael. The United States and the World Court, 1920–1935. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Northedge, F. S. The League of Nations: Its Life and Times, 1920–1946. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986. Otrower, Gary B. Collective Insecurity: The United States and the League of Nations during the Early Thirties. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979.

Lend-Lease To sidestep restraints such as the 1937 Neutrality Act and strong U.S. isolationist sentiments, President Franklin Roosevelt developed the lend-lease concept. It allowed warring nations to “borrow”

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 239 U.S. military goods and other needed resources if they could not pay for them. The program expanded after the United States entered World War II. In the long run, lend-lease distributed more than $50 billion worth of material to Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and many other nations ﬁghting against Nazi Germany. Some historians consider the lendlease program to be the most important in the series of steps that Roosevelt took leading to U.S. entry into World War II. The ﬁrst of these occurred almost immediately after Germany invaded Poland. The existing neutrality legislation called for the United States to impose an arms embargo on all participants in a conﬂict. Roosevelt convinced Congress that it was wiser to avoid an embargo in order to assure Great Britain and France access to U.S. equipment in their ﬁght against Hitler’s armies. In succeeding months, Americans exhibited highly contradictory attitudes toward the war. As late as the eve of the Pearl Harbor bombing, most Americans did not want the United States to become directly involved in the global conﬂict. At the same time, a similar substantial majority desperately hoped both German and Japanese aggression could be halted. With Roosevelt’s blessing, popular newspaperman William Allen White strongly advocated U.S. support for Great Britain and France. In May 1940, White helped found the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and it quickly spawned 600 local branches. The president formally endorsed its basic tenets in a speech delivered at Charlottesville, Virginia, on June 10, 1940. His pledge to “extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation,” was welcome news to those battling fascist armies.

Legal and statutory constraints stood in the way of fulﬁlling that pledge immediately. Throughout the summer, British prime minister Winston Churchill repeatedly requested concrete assistance. In August, he noted that German submarines had been particularly effective in weakening the Royal Navy’s ﬂeet of destroyers. President Roosevelt responded with an executive order that transferred 50 “surplus” U.S. destroyers to Great Britain. In return, the British invited the United States to establish military outposts on their Caribbean island colonies. The destroyers-for-bases arrangement obviously moved the United States closer to direct involvement in the war. For that reason, the deal aroused vigorous protests from isolationist Americans. In September, some of them coalesced into the American First Committee. Its most prominent advocate was Charles Lindbergh, the man who had won universal acclaim for completing the ﬁrst solo transatlantic airplane ﬂight. Like White’s committee, America First established hundreds of local branches. Both groups favored military preparedness, however, making it easier for the Roosevelt administration and Congress to advance various programs, such as a massive naval building initiative and the institution of the nation’s ﬁrst peacetime draft program to strengthen the army. After winning his campaign for a third term, President Roosevelt felt free to increase U.S. aid to the Allies short of war. Well aware of the problems that had persisted long after World War I ended, he looked for an approach that would avoid postwar debt obligations for the Allies. Rather than lend money that they would then be obligated to repay,

240 | Section 4

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S CHARLOTTESVILLE ADDRESS Delivered June 10, 1940 at the University of Virginia’s Commencement Ceremonies . . . Perception of danger to our institutions may come slowly or it may come with a rush and shock as it has to the people of the United States in the past few months. This perception of danger—danger in a world-wide arena—has come to us clearly and overwhelmingly. We perceive the peril in this world-wide arena—an arena that may become so narrow that only the Americans will retain the ancient faiths. Some indeed still hold to the now somewhat obvious delusion that we of the United States can safely permit the United States to become a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force. Such an island may be the dream of those who still talk and vote as isolationists. Such an island represents to me and to the overwhelming majority of Americans today a helpless nightmare, the helpless nightmare of a people without freedom. Yes, the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, hand-cuffed, hungry and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents. It is natural also that we should ask ourselves how now we can prevent the building of that prison and the placing of ourselves in the midst of it. Let us not hesitate—all of us—to proclaim certain truths. Overwhelmingly we, as a nation, and this applies to all the other American nations, we are convinced that military and naval victory for the gods of force and hate would endanger the institutions of democracy in the Western World—and that equally, therefore, the whole of our sympathies lie with those nations that are giving their life blood in combat against those forces. . . . On this 10th day of June 1940, in this university founded by the ﬁrst great American teacher of democracy we send forth our prayers and our hopes to those beyond the seas who are maintaining with magniﬁcent valor their battle for freedom. In our unity, in our American unity, we will pursue two obvious and simultaneous courses; we will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation and, at the same time, we will harness and speed up the use of those resources in order that we ourselves in the Americas may have equipment and training equal to the task of any emergency and every defense. . . . Source: U.S. Department of State, Bulletin, June 1940, 3:635.

Roosevelt chose the alternative of lending them supplies and material. In a Fireside Chat, he used the analogy of a ﬁre in someone’s home. His neighbor would readily lend the victim a garden hose to help douse the ﬂames, expecting only that the hose be returned later. The United States anticipated that those who took advantage of the lend-lease program would feel obligated to return or

replace any borrowed equipment after the ﬁghting had ended. Submitted to Congress in January 1941, the proposal ignited an emotional two-month debate. Opponents quite reasonably characterized the program as an irreversible step toward U.S. entry into the war. Many of the bill’s supporters agreed but considered supplying the Allies to be crucial to U.S. security.

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 241

American-made .38 caliber revolvers being unpacked at an English ordnance depot, an early shipment of the ultimate distribution of $50 billion worth of materials through the United States' Lend-Lease program. (Library of Congress)

Eventually, solid majorities in both houses of Congress voted in favor of “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States.” It authorized the president to “sell, lease, or lend” not only arms and munitions but also food and any other goods that he considered essential to the defense of the United States. For some time, the neutrality law’s prohibition against U.S. ﬂag vessels carrying such goods to belligerent nations remained in force. By September, however, Roosevelt had approved the arming of U.S. merchant vessels, the establishment of protective naval convoys, and extensive air and sea monitoring of German submarine activity in the North Atlantic. Denouncing German actions as equivalent to piracy, he authorized the U.S. Navy to “shoot on sight” any German or Italian warships

found in a broadly deﬁned U.S. patrol zone. To all intents and purposes, the United States had become involved in an undeclared war. Despite increasing incidences of human and material loss at sea, the U.S. public remained strongly opposed to a formal entry into the war. It took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, to alter U.S. attitudes dramatically and to propel Congress to approve a declaration of war. Once that occurred, the Lend-Lease program expanded quickly. Any nation fighting against the Axis Powers— Germany, Italy, or Japan—could apply for and receive U.S. material support. The value of Great Britain’s share exceeded $31 billion. The Soviet Union received the next largest allocation, more than $11 billion, and France and China received $3.6 billion and $1.6 billion, respectively. Although some of these expenditures were offset by compensation such as rent payments for U.S. facilities, the United States received almost none of what it lent back. In retrospect, Lend-Lease appears to be little more than a subterfuge for outright grants to other nations. But, given the strong isolationist attitudes of many Americans at the time, such window dressing was absolutely essential to achieve the goal of aiding the Allies. Like so many other Roosevelt administration programs, Lend-Lease was an experimental, somewhat ad hoc method for achieving a politically sensitive goal. See also: Atlantic Charter; Neutrality Acts References

Dobson, Alan P. US Wartime Aid to Britain, 1940–1946. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.

242 | Section 4 Heinrichs, Waldo H. Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Kimball, Warren F. The Most Unsordid Act: Lend-Lease, 1939–1941. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969.

Neutrality (1914–1917) When the Great War engulfed Europe in the fall of 1914, President Woodrow Wilson urged his fellow Americas to be neutral in thought, word, and deed. For two and a half years, the United States managed to avoid being drawn into the conﬂict. That delay, however, in no way proves that the United States remained strictly neutral. Economic and emotional decisions undermined the neutrality that Wilson maintained was his chief objective. The events that led to a series of war declarations in late August and early September 1914 had no direct relationship to the United States, its international policies, or the desires of the American people in general. Even the governments that were engaged in the war often failed to explain, even to their own citizens, why they were ﬁghting and what they hoped to achieve. Not until 1915 did France and Great Britain hold clandestine talks to deﬁne their war objectives, and the resulting Sykes-Picot Agreement remained a state secret until its exposure early in 1918. Lack of clarity over the causes and objectives of the war made neutrality a rational policy. Equally important was the widespread belief that the ﬁghting would soon end. The German High Command conﬁdently expected to carry out its plans in just three months, one to defeat France and two more to dispose of Russia. The French and British had less

explicit timetables, but they, too, expected to bring their enemies to the negotiating table before the year ended. But the German army’s drive into northern France quickly bogged down, and a grinding, debilitating trench warfare set in. Although more movement occurred on the eastern front, neither side could deliver a knockout blow. As the war dragged on, pressure increased on the United States to take more deﬁnitive action, to choose sides, perhaps even to enter the conflict. Urging the American people forward were a series of economic, philosophical, and emotional factors that appeared to grow more compelling over time. Some contend that economic factors were preeminent. In the late 1920s, Americans who were critical of internationalism blamed bankers and businessmen for luring the United States into the war. In the 1930s, North Dakota senator Gerald Nye headed a congressional committee that investigated whether businessmen had exerted undue inﬂuence in keeping the war going and promoting U.S. participation. The term “merchants of death” became associated with those suspected of war proﬁteering. Although some economic and political decisions were cited as proof of that rather simplistic explanation, there was little evidence of a detailed, preconceived plan. By 1914, the U.S. economy was so large and comprehensive that it seemed inevitable that U.S. resources would be drawn into the global conﬂict. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was a rural Democrat with Populist attitudes, however, and he, far more than President Wilson, advocated strict neutrality. Fully aware that his nation’s substantial ﬁnancial resources would be very helpful to any of the European

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 243 combatants, Bryan tried to discourage them by stating that money was a form of contraband. In the early weeks of the war, President Wilson seemed to agree, telling the J. P. Morgan banking ﬁrm that he would not approve any U.S. loans to the nations at war. Wilson’s resolve weakened when he detected signs that the U.S. economy might be lapsing into a recession. European demand for U.S. goods was declining, in part because both France and Great Britain, traditionally the best U.S. customers, were running out of money. In October, still anticipating a quick end to the war, Wilson allowed the U.S. banking community to extend credit to overseas buyers. That would allow them to continue buying U.S. goods, but to delay payment until their ﬁnancial situations improved. By the summer of 1915, U.S. lenders had reached the limit of their willingness to extend credit. At that point, Wilson permitted U.S. citizens to lend money directly to Great Britain and France by buying their bonds. Half a billion dollars worth of foreign bonds were immediately sold in the United States, and purchases continued at a steady pace. This investment paid quick dividends when the embattled governments spent the money on U.S. manufactured goods and agricultural products. Not surprisingly, the German government complained that this activity violated the U.S. neutrality policy. Wilson responded by pointing out that Germany itself had made funds and material available to participants on both sides in earlier conflicts. But a comprehensive British blockade of Germany’s ports severely limited its access to imports from abroad. By the spring of 1917, the Entente powers, led by Great Britain and

France, owed $2.3 billion to U.S. citizens, whereas Germany’s indebtedness amounted to just $100 million. If the Entente powers lost the war, their loans might never be repaid. No nefarious machinations by merchants of death were necessary to convince Americans of the economic beneﬁts of going to war on the side of their debtors. Economic motivations alone would have been insufﬁcient to make the United States abandon neutrality in the absence of other factors. Propaganda was one. Early in the war, the British cut the Atlantic cable connecting the United States to continental Europe, so virtually all news passed over British-controlled communication links. The British government severely censored all news from the battleﬁelds, even for home consumption, so the stories reaching the United States were undeniably biased against Germany. Many Americans did not need onesided news reports to sympathize with the plight of the Entente nations. The British-American rapprochement that had occurred early in the 20th century disposed many Americans to empathize with the British plight. Some, like expresident Theodore Roosevelt, outspokenly advocated going to war immediately on the side of Great Britain and France. The cumulative effect of slanted news from Europe and strident Anglophiles in the United States inevitably pushed the Wilson administration closer to war. By the summer of 1916, Congress had responded to increasing U.S. bellicosity by funding major naval and military buildups that increased the likelihood of U.S. participation. It sometimes appeared that Woodrow Wilson was the American who was the most reluctant to get involved. He personally had little interest in the

244 | Section 4

welfare of ﬁnanciers as such, nor was he overly sensitive to political exhortations. Instead, Wilson viewed himself as a thoughtful academic, devoting his presidency to pursuing and strengthening his nation’s traditional values. Prominent among those values was a historical sense of democratic mission. When Wilson looked at Europe, he saw republican governments in Great Britain and France locked in a death struggle with autocratic, monarchical regimes in Austria and Germany. Russia presented something of a problem, however, because it was arguably the most autocratic nation of all. Suddenly, everything changed. In March 1917, a provisional government espousing democratic principles toppled the czar’s reactionary government. Now all of the “democratic” governments were on the same side in the war—and that clearly was the side that the United States would join if it went to war. By April 1917, economic, emotional, and mission sentiments were all aligned. The United States was ready to enter the conﬂict on the side of righteousness, provided that a ﬁrst shot occurred to justify U.S. action. Germany’s decision earlier in the year to initiate unrestricted submarine warfare provided that justiﬁcation. Remaining neutral had no appeal if one side was killing Americans with torpedo attacks. The United States thus went to war not only to promote democracy but in response to an outright attack. See also: Great War; Rapprochement; Unrestricted Submarine Warfare References

Cooper, John Milton, Jr. The Vanity of Power: American Isolationism and the First World War, 1914–1917. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1969.

Devlin, Patrick. Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Ferrell, Robert H. Woodrow Wilson and World War I. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Smith, Daniel M. The Great Departure: The United States and World War I. New York: Wiley, 1965.

Neutrality Acts In the mid-1930s, Americans were increasingly uneasy about the possibility that they might be drawn into another major European war. The desire to avoid becoming involved that had developed after World War I became so strong that Congress approved a neutrality act in 1935 that was designed to wall the United States off from any international conﬂict. As disturbing changes took place overseas, politicians reconsidered how best to accomplish that goal. The result was two additional Neutrality Acts, each slightly modifying its predecessor. In the end, none of them insulated the United States from the consequences of World War II. Isolationism was strongly embedded in the U.S. psyche prior to 1930, and the onset of the Great Depression did nothing to change it. As their economies unraveled, people in many countries focused their attention on deteriorating conditions at home. Introspection was particularly prevalent in the United States. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs contained very little of relevance to foreign affairs. Even though the whole world suffered from the depression, pervasive isolationist sentiments caused few Americans to advocate international initiatives to deal with its impact.

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 245 Those who did look outward found little reassurance. The rise of fascism in Spain, Italy, Germany, and even Japan seemed ominous indeed. Which nation or incident might trigger a major conﬂict remained unclear, but what was obvious was the U.S. desire to avoid becoming involved. Revisionist studies by respected historians like Charles Beard and Charles Tansill concluded that British propaganda and the ambitions of ﬁnanciers and manufacturers who profited from the conflict had hoodwinked the United States into participating in World War I. They also noted that the deaths of U.S. passengers riding on belligerent ships like the Lusitania helped propel the United States into the war. The Nye Committee provided ofﬁcial conﬁrmation of some of these interpretations. North Dakota senator Gerald Nye

North Dakota senator Gerald Nye was a committed isolationist whose investigations and speeches were key elements in convincing Congress to pass the Neutrality Acts in the 1930s. (Library of Congress)

headed a congressional inquiry into why and how the United States had become involved in World War I. The committee concluded that manufacturers and ﬁnanciers who reaped large proﬁts from the war effort had wanted it to continue as long as possible and had urged U.S. entry to increase their beneﬁts. The report implied that these so-called merchants of death had inﬂuenced President Woodrow Wilson’s decisions and had a primary role in drawing the United States into the war. In addition, the report noted that the extensive loans to Great Britain and France that preceded U.S. entry had made it all but certain that the United States would become involved. With these conclusions in mind, Congress passed a joint resolution in August 1935 that became known as the First Neutrality Act. Its purpose was to discourage Americans from trading with any nation at war. If a war broke out, the act authorized the president to proclaim the existence of the conﬂict, impose an impartial embargo on the warring parties, and warn U.S. citizens they would be personally responsible if they chose to ride on ships belonging to the belligerent nations. The latter provision was specifically aimed at discouraging Americans from taking passage on ships like the infamous Lusitania that were owned or operated under the ﬂag of a country engaged in a war. Shortly after the resolution was approved, Italian troops invaded Ethiopia. President Roosevelt duly proclaimed the existence of the war and imposed an embargo on both sides, a move that severely weakened Ethiopia’s ability to avoid an Italian takeover. Even as that war continued, Congress approved the Second Neutrality Act in February 1936. It stiffened the embargo

246 | Section 4

provisions of the ﬁrst act and added a prohibition, inspired by the Nye Committee, against U.S. loans to those engaged in war. Congress had not envisioned a civil war like the one that began in Spain in 1936, when fascists under Francisco Franco attacked a democratic popular front government. Hastily approved special legislation authorized Roosevelt to apply the neutrality acts’ restraints on this conﬂict. Once again, the U.S. policy beneﬁted the fascist side, which ultimately extended its control to all of Spain in 1938. In part because the earlier legislation had produced undesirable outcomes, Congress modiﬁed the U.S. policy somewhat in the Third Neutrality Act, passed in April 1937. It included an outright prohibition rather than an admonition against Americans traveling on belligerent ships. At the same time, the new act softened the economic strictures. It would allow warring nations to buy whatever they chose from the United States as long as they paid cash and provided transportation for the goods. The “cash and carry” concept ruled out loans and would presumably keep U.S.–owned vessels from being attacked. This ﬁnal neutrality legislation was in place when Japan invaded China in the summer of 1937. Because the United States clearly sided with China, Roosevelt avoided applying U.S. neutrality sanctions by simply failing to proclaim the existence of a war. That left Americans much greater ﬂexibility in responding to changing events in the Far East. The outbreak of war in Europe in the fall of 1939 put even greater pressure on the administration to assist its friends. Roosevelt therefore called for a special session of Congress, which quickly agreed to cancel many of the restrictive provisions of the Neutrality Acts.

This series of events and reactions to them provides an interesting case of applying the lessons of history. U.S. attitudes were so colored by what had happened previously in World War I that Congress created a policy based almost exclusively on trying to avoid the “mistakes” made during that period. To that extent, the neutrality legislation of the 1930s might very well have proven effective in keeping the United States out of a war—as long as it was World War I. But 20 years later, the world had changed dramatically, the rise of aggressive fascism posed direct threats to the U.S. democratic system, and the United States simply could not insulate itself from this danger. By December 1941, the United States had provided France and Great Britain, in particular, with far more material support for their war efforts than it had between 1914 and 1917. Concrete U.S. participation in the war thus existed long before Japanese war planes dropped their bombs on the U.S. ﬂeet moored at Pearl Harbor. See also: Isolationism References

Cole, Wayne S. Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–1945. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Coulter, Matthew Ware. The Senate Munitions Inquiry of the 1930s: Beyond the Merchants of Death. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Guinsburg, Thomas N. The Pursuit of Isolationism in the United States Senate from Versailles to Pearl Harbor. New York: Garland, 1982.

Non-recognition Soon after gaining its own independence, the United States began granting formal

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 247 recognition to any government that assumed de facto control over another country. That century-old tradition received a major jolt in 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson refused to recognize the revolutionary government in Mexico because, in his view, it did not represent a truly democratic substitute for the dictatorship that it replaced. A far more important case of non-recognition occurred four years later, when the Bolshevik faction seized power in Russia. Wilson made his decision not to recognize this change in the midst of World War I, but it deﬁned the U.S. position for the next 16 years. An even longer period of non-recognition began in 1949, when communist leader Mao Zedong ousted the Nationalists from power in China. In the case of Russia, Wilson initially expressed satisfaction when the czarist government collapsed early in 1917. Alexander Kerenski emerged as head of a provisional government that voiced democratic principles. Five days after Kerenski took charge, the United States formally recognized the provisional government as the legitimate authority in Russia. Shortly afterward, the United States loaned $187 million to the new leadership, to encourage it to continue ﬁghting against Germany. Wilson was particularly gratiﬁed that the new regime appeared to subscribe to democratic ideals. He took it as evidence of the success of his nation’s traditional democratic mission to convince the whole world to emulate the U.S. system. He also considered a transition from autocracy to democracy as a positive change, because it meant that all of the major powers ﬁghting against autocratic Germany and Austria were now democratic. When Wilson led the United States into the war a month later, he

could proudly claim that his goal was to “make the world safe for democracy.” The war itself, however, had been a major cause, if not the most important cause, of the Russian Revolution. War weariness had spurred opposition to the czar, and it continued to inﬂuence public opinion when Kerenski promised to stay in the conﬂict. Hoping that it might force Russia out of the war, Germany arranged for a group of radical Russian exiles, including Nikolai Lenin and Leon Trotsky, to return to their homeland. Very quickly, this group gathered a following that referred to itself as the Bolshevik, or “majority,” faction. Promising peace and bread, Lenin’s group toppled Kerenski’s government and set its sights on halting the ﬁghting in Russia. The Bolshevik assault on an ostensibly democratic government infuriated Wilson. Like most other outsiders, he anticipated that this ultraradical Marxist faction would quickly give way to a more moderate, centrist regime. Wilson therefore withheld U.S. recognition, just as he had in Mexico, hoping for the situation to improve. It never did. The Bolsheviks reorganized the huge country into a union of Soviet Socialist Republics, established highly centralized, top-down rule, and ruthlessly stamped out any opposition to their authority. Worse still in U.S. eyes, the Soviets established the Communist International (Comintern), which welcomed sympathizers from all over the world and had the stated objective of promoting anticapitalist revolutions everywhere. After the Soviets signed a separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, Wilson approved the dispatch of relatively small expeditionary forces into Russia, in Archangel and Murmansk to the North and Siberia in

248 | Section 4

the Far East. None of these expeditions impeded the Soviet drive to eliminate anyone who attempted to counter the revolution. The last U.S. soldier left Russia in the summer of 1920. Wilson had meanwhile settled on a policy of diplomatically isolating the Soviets. He considered them an outlaw group, citing their failure to repay the U.S. war loan as an excuse to treat them as pariahs. The only major softening of U.S. attitudes came from Herbert Hoover, who had headed the U.S. Food Administration for several years. He arranged massive shipments of food to Russia, to counter the widespread starvation that followed World War I. Despite the absence of formal relations between the two nations, some tentative interactions took place. With Wilson’s approval, Charles E. Bullitt went to Moscow hoping to promote better relations, but he came home empty-handed. In the 1920s, a few businessmen pursued commercial opportunities. The most prominent of these was President Warren G. Harding’s secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall. At the urging of oilman Harry Sinclair, Fall made a secret trip to the Soviet Union to explore opportunities for tapping its huge petroleum reserves. Whatever possibilities there were evaporated when Harding died shortly afterward and Fall was subsequently convicted and jailed for blatant corruption in the Teapot Dome Scandal. Throughout the 1920s, the conservative, isolationist Republican presidents in the United States made no serious effort to modify the non-recognition policy that they had inherited from Wilson. When Russia and China became enmeshed in the First Manchurian Crisis in 1929, however, rational statesmen recognized the drawbacks of a policy that prevented

the United States from inﬂuencing what was, after all, undeniably a major world power. Shortly afterward, the Second Manchurian Crisis raised U.S. anxiety about Japan’s aggressiveness. Reviving U.S. relations with the Soviet Union might impede Japanese imperialism. President Franklin Roosevelt took the ﬁrst step by sending Charles Bullitt on a second mission to Moscow. He found the Kremlin leaders much more forthcoming than on his ﬁrst visit. In November 1933, Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov made a return visit to the United States. Negotiating with the Roosevelt administration, he indicated that his government would treat religious minorities less harshly, muzzle the Comintern, and make arrangements to repay the U.S. war loan. In return, the United States formally recognized the Soviet government and sent Bullitt to be the U.S. ambassador in Moscow. He quickly became disillusioned with his hosts. No money was ever repaid, and, at its 1935 meeting, the Comintern stridently revived its anticapitalist crusade. In the long run, however, the reestablishment of normal diplomatic relations proved beneﬁcial. Most important, it helped the United States and the Soviet Union ignore their differences in the early 1940s when they faced a common enemy. The so-called Grand Alliance of Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, which was arrayed against Hitler’s Germany, might never have been forged without Roosevelt’s initiatives a decade earlier. Interestingly enough, throughout the ensuing Cold War years, the United States continued to recognize the Soviet government. None of that prevented the United States from reviving its trenchant anticommunist stance when Mao Zedong’s armies defeated and exiled Nationalist leader

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 249 Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949. The installation of a communist regime in a nation that, at least in U.S. eyes, had always had a special relationship with the United States simply could not be tolerated. The United States stubbornly refused to recognize the People’s Republican of China for several decades. Instead, it maintained the ﬁction that the Nationalist regime conﬁned to the island of Formosa (Taiwan) represented the “legitimate” government of China. Formal relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China were ﬁnally restored in 1979. In neither the Russian nor the Chinese case did U.S. non-recognition necessarily improve international relations. Deliberately refusing to deal with governments that represented hundreds of millions of people limited international trade and understanding. The continuing U.S. nonrecognition of Fidel Castro’s communist regime in Cuba has similar drawbacks. In retrospect, the more traditional U.S. decision to recognize de facto governments may have been the wiser policy. See also: Mission; Punitive Expedition; Red Scare; Siberian Expedition References

Bennett, Edward M. Recognition of Russia. Waltham: MA: Blaisdell Publishing Co., 1970. Bishop, Donald G. The Roosevelt-Litvinov Agreements. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1965. Hoff, Joan. Ideology and Economics: U.S. Relations with the Soviet Union, 1918–1933. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974.

Pearl Harbor The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor stunned the American people. Analysts

have suggested a variety of often contradictory explanations for the attack and for how culpable President Franklin Roosevelt was—either for provoking it or being unaware that it was about to occur. Regardless of the interpretation, the attack unquestionably served as a deﬁnitive ﬁrst shot that overwhelmed traditional U.S. isolationism and propelled the United States into full participation in World War II. In the previous decade, three factors diverted U.S. attention from dangerous developments in the Far East. The ﬁrst was the Great Depression, which kept U.S. attention riveted on domestic rather than international concerns. Related to that self-absorption was a rampant isolationism, which became increasingly vocal as the decade advanced. Finally, to the extent that Americans did look beyond their shores, they were far more disturbed by the rise of aggressive fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, which threatened to ignite a second world war. As it turned out, that conﬂict began not in Europe, but in the Far East. Japan had long nursed ambitions to expand its economic and political control over nearby China. The Second Manchurian Crisis ended with the establishment of a Japanese puppet government in much of northeastern China. The U.S. response was the Stimson Doctrine, a refusal to recognize ofﬁcially that any change had taken place. Americans were equally unwilling to acknowledge the fratricidal contest within China between the nationalists and the increasingly popular communists under Mao Zedong. Even well-informed Americans believed that communism would play only a minor role in China’s future. Moreover, the internal dispute took a back seat when Japan mounted a full-scale invasion of China.

250 | Section 4

World War II in the Far East began on July 7, 1937, when Japanese troops clashed with Chinese soldiers at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing. What Westerners called the China Incident escalated three weeks later when Japan mounted major military operations along the Chinese coast. These attacks clearly violated the Nine-Power Treaty that had been signed at the Washington Naval Conference in 1922, but neither the United States nor any of the other signatories were willing or able to prevent the unilateral Japanese assault. Worse yet, Japan could rely on two key supporters. Earlier negotiations with Germany had produced the Anti-Com-Intern Pact directed against Russia. Italian leader Benito Mussolini’s fascist government signed the pact in November. Even when Japanese aircraft bombed and destroyed U.S. property in Nanking, including the gunboat Panay, the United States contented itself with a Japanese apology and ﬁnancial compensation. President Roosevelt tested the mood in October of that year with his Quarantine Speech and concluded that Americans had no stomach for aggressive responses to situations like the growing Japanese dominance of China. Nationalist leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek retreated to the central Chinese stronghold of Chungking, allowing Japan to execute tens of thousands of Chinese civilians in the process of establishing its own governmental authority in Nanking, the nation’s capital at that point. Not surprisingly, the United States responded with a reiteration of the Stimson Doctrine’s non-recognition policy. By the summer of 1939, however, the Roosevelt administration had become concerned enough to warn Japan that it might restrict exports of strategic materi-

als that it needed to pursue its war. The U.S. Navy also relocated its Paciﬁc ﬂeet headquarters from California to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly afterward, Germany’s invasion of Poland set off the war in Europe, a catastrophe that clearly distracted U.S. attention from the continuing conﬂict in the Far East. To offset a potential loss of access to U.S. war materiel, in the summer of 1940, the Japanese announced the creation of a Co-Prosperity Sphere of Interest in Greater East Asia. They rationalized it as a way of strengthening their stand against the spread of communism, but the real goal was to tap the rich resources of nearby French Indochina and Dutch Indonesia. Because the home governments of both of these colonial areas had fallen under German domination, Japan knew that it would meet minimal resistance if it extended its military and political authority over these regions. To reinforce their cooperation, Japan joined Italy and Germany in signing the Tripartite Pact in late September 1940. A key provision of the pact was a commitment that all three signatories would cooperate should any of them be attacked by a power not already engaged in war. This provision was obviously directed toward the United States, the only major power currently at peace. The Roosevelt administration could hardly ignore this development, especially when it included the European fascist powers whose actions had deeply disturbed the American people. The United States tightened its trade restrictions against Japan and, for the ﬁrst time, diverted a substantial ﬂow of U.S. aid to the nationalist government in China. Even so, both sides perceived advantages in continuing to talk rather than take up arms against each other, so

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 251 diplomatic relations between the United States and Japan remained in operation. When Japanese troops invaded IndoChina in late July 1941, however, the United States cut off all trade. That effectively created an economic war between the two countries, but diplomatic talks continued. Prince Fumimaro Konoye, who had been in and out of ofﬁce in recent years, brieﬂy returned to the position of Japan’s prime minister in August. He proposed a personal meeting with Roosevelt, similar to the one that the president had just had with British prime minister Winston Churchill to hammer out the Atlantic Charter. The Americans refused to consider such a meeting, and, shortly afterward, Konoye lost his position to an unequivocal militarist, General Hideki Tojo. That change substantially increased the tension between the two countries. The United States had cracked the Japanese diplomatic code in the summer of 1941, so the administration was aware that Japan had set November 26 as a date when events would begin that could not be reversed. Although Tokyo’s ambassador continued to hold desultory talks with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Japan’s armed forces implemented their plans to conduct a surprise bombing mission on U.S. naval vessels docked at Pearl Harbor. Just as they had against China in 1894 and Russia in 1904, they hoped that their preemptive attack would neutralize enemy naval power in the Paciﬁc, clearing the way for them to expand so rapidly and so far that the United States would never be able to dislodge them. Astounding intelligence lapses occurred on the U.S. side. Some people knew something was about to happen, but what, where, and exactly when

President Franklin Roosevelt signing the declaration of war against Japan on December 8, 1941, the day after the surprise Japanese attack on the American naval station at Pearl Harbor. (National Archives)

remained unclear. Some critics insist that President Roosevelt had full prior knowledge of both the timing and the objective of the Japanese attack but did nothing because he knew it would galvanize war spirit among the American people. Countering that theory is the fact that allowing the Japanese to wreak such extensive damage on the Paciﬁc ﬂeet was a devastating blow to U.S. capabilities. Fortunately, several vessels, including some aircraft carriers, were on sea maneuvers on the morning of December 7, 1941, and they managed to escape the otherwise extraordinarily effective Japanese assault. The U.S. reaction was swift and predictable. Public opinion made a complete U-turn. Just prior to the attack, the vast majority of Americans expressed opposition to the United States entering World War II anywhere. On December 8,

252 | Section 4

four of ﬁve people polled agreed that U.S. participation was now vital. Shortly after Congress approved a war resolution against Japan, its Tripartite Pact partners, Italy and Germany, declared war on the United States. Had Roosevelt deliberately engineered the Japanese attack to achieve this result? The preponderance of evidence suggests that he was as surprised as most Americans when it occurred. At the same time, his government had taken steps—such as cutting off Japan’s access to U.S. strategic resources and increasing military support to China—that the president must have known would dramatically increase the likelihood of war with Japan. Moreover, even if the Pearl Harbor catastrophe had not occurred, the United States would almost certainly have found another justification or rationalization for joining the global ﬁght against fascism. See also: Lend-Lease; Stimson Doctrine References

Feis, Herbert. The Road to Pearl Harbor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950. Lafeber, Walter. The Clash: A History of U.S.-Japan Relations. New York: Norton, 1997. Prange, Gordon W. Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986. Trefousse, Hans I. Pearl Harbor, The Continuing Controversy. Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1982.

Quarantine In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a speech suggesting that the United States might consider imposing a quarantine on international troublemak-

ers. The object of his concern was Japan, which had recently launched a full-scale undeclared war against China. His proposal involved reducing or even cutting off all economic and political intercourse with the imperialist nation in an effort to limit its ability to fulﬁll its expansionistic ambitions. The Quarantine Speech provoked such a storm of criticism from isolationists that Roosevelt abandoned the idea. Roosevelt faced a vexing dilemma in the summer of 1937. A clash between Japanese and Chinese soldiers at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing on July 7 lit the fuse for a much broader conﬂict. Within a few weeks, Japan sent hundreds of thousands of troops into northern China, clearly intending to establish full control. The ﬁghting soon spread southward to Shanghai and Nanking. There, Japanese bombs aimed at a Standard Oil Co. storage facility also sank the USS Panay, a navy gunboat that had been detailed to rescue stranded U.S. citizens. The president felt that he must respond, even though Japan had deliberately refrained from issuing a formal declaration of war. The escalating military confrontation was referred to as the China Incident. The Japanese apparently hoped that the absence of a war declaration would insulate them from international criticism. Although that hope proved unfounded, the ambiguous status of the conﬂict allowed Roosevelt to avoid strictures in recently passed U.S. neutrality legislation. It called for him to recognize formally the existence of a war. Had the president done so, the neutrality act then insisted that he impose an impartial embargo on trade with all combatants. Recent experience with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia suggested that such an embargo would be far more

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 253 harmful to the Chinese than to the wellprepared, militaristic Japanese. Americans almost universally sympathized with the embattled Chinese, long considered special friends of the United States and now clearly victims of a vicious assault from a traditional enemy. The absence of an embargo allowed the United States to direct military and economic aid to China. The magnitude of that assistance remained quite small. The United States also considered canceling its reciprocal trade agreements with Japan. Such a move would prevent Japan from obtaining vital war-related resources, such as steel and oil, from the United States. In part to test the public’s willingness to support more forceful action, Roosevelt delivered a speech on October 5,

1937, in Chicago, deep in the heartland of U.S. isolationism. Read today, the eloquently worded speech sounds remarkably similar to contemporary statements about international terrorism. Roosevelt described the effects of the Japanese invasion and noted that it had roused nearly universal opposition. Had he stopped at that point, he might have avoided a negative reaction. But his last sentence concluded that “There must be positive endeavors to preserve peace.” Advocates of an active response to international threats and supporters of the collective security concept praised the president’s implicit call for action. But isolationist sentiment was running very strong in 1937, and those who hoped to avoid international responsibilities were quick to condemn Roosevelt, even for

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT’S “QUARANTINE” SPEECH: OCTOBER 5, 1937 The political situation in the world, which of late has been growing progressively worse, is such as to cause grave concern and anxiety to all the peoples and nations who wish to live in peace and amity with their neighbors. . . . It began through unjustiﬁed interference in the internal affairs of other nations or the invasion of alien territory in violation of treaties. It has now reached the stage where the very foundations of civilization are seriously threatened. The landmarks, the traditions which have marked the progress of civilization toward a condition of law and order and justice are being wiped away. Without a declaration of war and without warning or justiﬁcation of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air. In times of so-called peace, ships are being attacked and sunk by submarines without cause or notice. Nations are fomenting and taking sides in civil warfare in nations that have never done them any harm. Nations claiming freedom for themselves deny it to others. Innocent peoples, innocent nations are being cruelly sacriﬁced to a greed for power and supremacy which is devoid of all sense of justice and humane considerations. . . . The peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of human instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality. . . .

254 | Section 4

(Quarantine Speech, Continued ) It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. And mark this well: When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease. . . . War is a contagion, whether it be declared or undeclared. It can engulf states and peoples remote from the original scene of hostilities. We are determined to keep out of war, yet we cannot insure ourselves against the disastrous effects of war and the dangers of involvement. We are adopting such measures as will minimize our risk of involvement, but we cannot have complete protection in a world of disorder in which conﬁdence and security have broken down. If civilization is to survive, the principles of the Prince of Peace must be restored. Shattered trust between nations must be revived. Most important of all, the will for peace on the part of peace-loving nations must express itself to the end that nations that may be tempted to violate their agreements and the rights of others will desist from such a course. There must be positive endeavors to preserve peace. Source: U.S. Department of State, Press Releases, 1937, 17:275.

suggesting that the United States might engage in “positive endeavors” regarding the troubles in the Far East. The protests were so unnerving and so strong that Roosevelt hastily abandoned any idea of imposing restrictions on Japan at that point. For another three years, the United States ofﬁcially remained neutral, although it continued to provide China with some aid. Perhaps Roosevelt’s critics were not altogether misguided in opposing forceful action in 1937. When the United States ultimately did suspend Japan’s trading privileges in the summer of 1941, it pushed the two nations well down the road to the clash at Pearl Harbor. The delay provided an opportunity for recruiting, training, and equipping a much larger U.S. military force. See also: Neutrality Acts; Pearl Harbor References

Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.

Herzberg, James R. A Broken Bond: American Economic Policies toward Japan, 1931–1941. New York: Garland, 1988.

Red Scare A Red Scare is an emotional response to real or perceived communist threats. A major Red Scare swept the United States in 1919. The immediate cause for alarm was widespread fear that communist radicals in the United States might try to achieve the same sort of revolution that the Bolsheviks had engineered in Russia two years earlier. Strikes, riots, bombings, and other disturbing events in the wake of World War I fueled this paranoia. Although the ﬁrst Red Scare had burned itself out by 1920, another one ﬂared up in the late 1940s. In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published their criticisms of capitalism, claiming that it exploited industrial workers whom they

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 255 called the proletariat. As an antidote and alternative, the theorists urged the establishment of a socialist or communist system, in which the government rather than private enterprise would control the means of production. In their view, workers in such a system would suffer less exploitation and gain a fair share of the wealth that their labor produced. In the United States, advocates of socialism, like Eugene Debs, developed a substantial following among disgruntled workers, but far fewer rallied around those who championed the more extreme approach of communism. Estimates of the actual number of communists in the United States in 1919 range as low as 10,000 to no more than 100,000, even if all of those who vaguely sympathized with the goals of the small, organized communist movement are included. Together, they constituted a tiny fraction of all working-class Americans, and, in normal times, they would have been tolerated or simply ignored. That all changed when impassioned revolutionaries called Bolsheviks ousted the democratic-leaning provisional government that had supplanted the czar in Russia. The success of this radical revolution surprised and dismayed most Americans. The threat posed to U.S. values became more tangible in the summer of 1919 when the newly installed Soviet government created the Communist International or Comintern. Its stated purpose was to promote communism all around the world, even if that meant the violent overthrow of institutions and governments. Despite the minuscule number of truly dedicated communist revolutionaries in the United States, disturbing events in 1919 convinced many Americans that a

revolution might actually take place. The ﬁrst of these was a general strike in Seattle in January. Some 60,000 workers left their jobs even though the nature of their grievances and their objectives remained ambiguous at best. Seattle mayor Ole Hanson charged that Bolsheviks, or Reds, had inspired the walkout and ordered police and soldiers to quell the strike. The conservative American Federation of Labor had initially supported the strikers but quickly realized how badly its actions were being misinterpreted and urged its members to return to their jobs. The general strike planted the seeds of a Red Scare, and subsequent events nourished it into maturity. A popular stereotype of a Bolshevik was a cloaked ﬁgure holding a lighted bomb. In late April, someone mailed more than 30 package bombs to high-ranking government officials and prominent businessmen. Although only one person was seriously injured before the bombs were discovered and defused, the action heightened the American sense that radicals were willing to take any steps to promote their agenda. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy stumbled into a severe postwar recession, and, by the summer of 1919, many wage earners were feeling the pinch. It was natural, therefore, for them to strike for higher wages. But with the nation in the throes of a full-blown Red Scare, any strike could be and was interpreted as the work of radicals and anarchists. For example, the grossly underpaid and overworked Boston police force formed a social club and applied for an American Federation of Labor charter. When city ofﬁcials refused to recognize this organization or consider its complaints, three-fourths of the police force went on strike. Rioting and looting on a

256 | Section 4

grand scale ensued until Governor Calvin Coolidge deployed Massachusetts National Guard units to restore order. A steel workers’ strike in September and a coal miners’ strike in November met the same sort of concerted resistance. President Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, publicly charged that communist agents were behind all of this disorder. In August, he appointed J. Edgar Hoover to head the General Intelligence Division within the Justice Department. In November, the division’s agents rounded up several hundred purported Red agitators and loaded 249 of them onto “the Ark,” ofﬁcially named the USS Buford, for deportation to the Soviet Union. Many of those on the ship were native-born citizens of the United States whose only crime was having political beliefs at odds with those of the majority. Palmer’s campaign to root out Red spies and agents was so popular that he mounted an even larger nationwide raid on January 1, 1920. Although it netted more than 4,000 alleged radicals, fewer than 600 of them were found guilty enough for Palmer’s agents to deport them. Palmer’s overreaction to what was now being recognized as an almost nonexistent threat marked the effective end of the Red Scare. Americans came to their senses and realized that their economic problems had nothing to do with radicals or international agitators. When a huge bomb exploded on Wall Street in September 1920, killing more than 30 people, few believed it was part of a Comintern plot. Americans would again respond to perceived communist threats after World War II, egged on by demagogues like Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, but fortunately the ﬁrst Red scare quickly faded in the 1920s.

See also: Non-recognition; Red Scare Again References

Coben, Stanley. A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Murray, Robert K. Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980. Preston, William, Jr. Aliens and Dissenters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Second Front No U.S. initiative generated more diplomatic and military interest in World War II than the establishment of a second front in Europe. The ﬁrst front was the confrontation between the Soviet Union and German armies that penetrated deep into Russian territory. As soon as the Grand Alliance was established, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin asked the United States and Great Britain to establish a second front by attacking Germany from the west. Although President Franklin Roosevelt agreed in principle with the beleaguered Stalin, political, economic, and strategic factors delayed the creation of a second front until June 6, 1944. Even though it occurred far later than originally planned, the second front proved to be a key factor in forcing Germany to surrender less than a year later. Before the United States entered World War II, Germany had enjoyed great success in Western Europe. For several months after it invaded Poland, nothing much happened. The Phony War ended in the spring of 1940, when the armies of German chancellor Adolf Hitler went on the offensive. They used a tactic called Blitzkrieg, or Lightning War, to overwhelm their opponents. After subduing Denmark and Norway, they turned

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 257 south to assail Holland, Belgium, and France. By mid-summer, they had forced the French government to sign a humiliating surrender document, in the vintage railway car that Chancellor Bismarck’s government had used for the same purpose at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Germany treated northern and western France as occupied territories and installed a puppet government at Vichy, under Marshal Henri Pétain, to govern the southeastern provinces. The British forces dispatched to defend France managed to execute a dramatic withdrawal from Dunkirk, using every conceivable kind of water craft. For the next several months, Germany waged a relentless air assault across the English Channel, but Great Britain’s Royal Air Force gradually achieved dominance and won the Battle of Britain. Hitler then abandoned his plans to invade the British Isles and devoted his energies to preparing for an invasion of the Soviet Union for the following summer. Hundreds of thousands of German troops in occupied France established heavily fortiﬁed positions all along what became known as the Atlantic Wall. The existence of this barrier discouraged any thought of an immediate invasion from the west. Moreover, during 1942, German submarine warfare was remarkably effective at destroying seaborne supply lines and preventing the mass transport of U.S. troops and equipment. In the following year, U.S. and British naval convoys and sophisticated tracking mechanisms, such as radar and sonar, shifted the balance in their favor. At that point, large-scale U.S. deployments across the Atlantic became feasible. Diplomacy determined where they would take place. Despite Stalin’s repeated calls for a second front in north-

western Europe, British prime minister Winston Churchill was equally persistent in requesting United States assistance in North Africa. German and Italian troops had spilled into that region in huge numbers under the command of German ﬁeld marshal Erwin Rommel. His objective was to capture the Suez Canal and thereby cut Great Britain’s links with its colony of India. President Franklin Roosevelt agreed to send assistance at an early meeting with Churchill, and a major British victory at El Alamain, in the desert west of Cairo, encouraged both Allies. U.S. troops therefore entered the war with landings at North African ports in Morocco and Algeria. Their arrival emboldened the Free French under General Charles De Gaulle and revived French participation in the war against Germany. Although that might seem to encourage a direct attack on German-occupied France, pushing the Axis forces completely out of North Africa emerged as the immediate priority. U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower and his able second-in-command, Omar Bradley, drove eastward and eventually joined forces with the army of British general Bernard Montgomery, coming west from Egypt. Not until May 1943, however, did the allied armies capture the last Axis strongholds in Tunisia. With so many troops at hand, it seemed expedient to send them across to nearby Sicily. Montgomery and his U.S. counterpart, General George S. Patton, wrested the island from Axis control in a little over a month. Once again, expediency dictated the next step. British and U.S. forces decided to use Sicily as a springboard for a jump to the Italian Peninsula. The allied move convinced Italian leader

258 | Section 4

Benito Mussolini to abdicate, but the Germans quickly moved in and propped him up again. They also sent many divisions south, where they presented unanticipated resistance. The United States staged amphibious landings at Salerno, near Naples, in the early fall and at Anzio, near Rome, in December, but not until June 1944 was the enemy driven out of the Italian capital. Although some allied troops were slogging their way north through the rugged Italian mountains, many others were preparing at last for the longawaited second front. U.S. and British bombers carried out round-the-clock raids on German targets, aimed at destroying the nation’s productive capability and morale. Meanwhile more than 1.5 million U.S. soldiers crossed the

Atlantic to participate in Operation Overlord, the code name for the crosschannel invasion. A bewildering array of tricks and falsiﬁed rumors confused the German High Command about where and when the assault that it knew was inevitable would occur. General Eisenhower ordered the invasion of beaches in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. More than 50,000 men and thousands of vehicles went ashore on the ﬁrst day, joined by another 300,000 troops in succeeding days. Even though the Germans continued for some time to anticipate a major assault at Pas de Calais, they were discouragingly effective at resisting the allied push. On July 25, General Bradley’s First Army ﬁnally managed to break through German lines at St. Lo, opening

On June 6, 1944, Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy in northwestern France, establishing the long-anticipated second front in the European theater of operations in World War II. (National Archives)

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 259 the ﬂood gates for hundreds of thousands of allied troops to swarm into northwestern France. By mid-August, they had reached Paris, where General De Gaulle led the liberating troops through l’Arc de Triomphe. Overextended supply lines now presented General Eisenhower with a dilemma. A second amphibious assault had begun in August along the Riviera in southern France, and allied forces were making their way north. Simultaneously, General Patton’s Third Army was driving eastward toward the German border. He lobbied Eisenhower for fuel and supplies to continue his advance. British field marshal Montgomery insisted instead that an invasion of Holland would pay larger dividends. Unable to support both, Eisenhower acceded to the British request. The airborne attack on the Dutch city of Arnhem was an unmitigated disaster. Meanwhile, Patton quite literally ran out of gas and had to halt his offensive as winter set in. Even though Russian armies were pinning down millions of German soldiers in the east, Hitler found 24 reserve divisions to throw into a desperation attack on the Allies in eastern France. For a few weeks, their momentum carried them well to the west, creating a bulge in the allied defensive lines. The Battle of the Bulge raged for several weeks before the German drive ran out of steam. Shortly afterward, the Allies discovered that retreating German units had failed to destroy a key railroad bridge across the Rhine River at Remagen. It allowed allied armies to pour into Germany proper. In accord with earlier diplomatic agreements, Eisenhower halted his advance at the Elbe River. That allowed Soviet Red Army units to

swarm into German territory well to the west of Berlin. On April 30, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker. A week later, remnants of his government agreed to the unconditional surrender that President Roosevelt had insisted on at the Casablanca Conference more than two years earlier. The celebration of VE-Day, May 8, 1945, proved that the second front had, indeed, been crucial to ending Axis domination of Europe. See also: Grand Alliance References

Ellis, John. Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War. New York: Viking, 1990. Murray, Williamson, and Allan R. Millett. A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000. Weigley, Russell F. Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944–1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Wilson, Theodore A., ed. D-Day 1944. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994.

Siberian Expedition Few Americans are aware that U.S. troops were active in the Soviet Union in the late stages of World War I. One group assisted French and British units that were already engaged in Murmansk and Archangel. A much larger contingent of Americans entered from the Far East and remained in Siberia for almost two years. A number of explanations for these activities have been advanced, but Soviet leaders repeatedly referred to them as proof of a U.S. intention to infiltrate and even overthrow their regime.

260 | Section 4

These unusual U.S. initiatives occurred during a period of great uncertainty and stress. The Bolshevik faction had taken charge of Russia in late 1917 and signed a separate peace agreement with Germany in March 1918. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk allowed Germany to concentrate its forces on the western front, where the United States was only beginning to be engaged. Great Britain and France cited the Russo-German peace agreement as a justification for sending troops into Murmansk and Archangel, two port cities in northwestern Russia. They had shipped substantial amounts of war materiel to those cities when czarist Russia was their wartime ally. Now they worried that Germany would seize this equipment and use it against them. To assist in the recovery effort, President Wilson agreed to send three battalions of fresh U.S. troops in June 1918. They soon discovered that whatever equipment might have been there was long gone. The Americans ended up manning defensive lines around besieged Archangel until they could withdraw in the following summer. The U.S. intervention in Siberia was much larger and longer lasting. One possible justiﬁcation for this move was a report that 55,000 Czech soldiers who had been held behind Russia’s front lines were willing to be transported to the western front to fight against the Germans. Wilson authorized the dispatch of 7,000 U.S. soldiers to inﬁltrate Siberia from the east, in hopes of establishing contact with the Czechs and facilitating their redeployment. The existence of the Czech legions in no way explains why Japan sent 72,000 troops of its own into Russia’s far eastern expanses. Japan was not a participant in

World War I, so its activities could only be based on a desire to expand its inﬂuence in East Asia. Some historians argue that the United States sent its troops into Siberia primarily to try to counter Japan’s inﬂuence. Other historians claim that the U.S. Siberian Expedition was a thinly disguised attempt to help Russians who were ﬁghting to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. By 1919, Admiral Alexander Kolchak had gathered in Siberia a sizable opposition force that was ﬁghting the Red Army and hoping to overthrow the Soviet system. Two factors weaken the argument that the United States was seriously intending to help Kolchak. The ﬁrst is the relatively small size of the expeditionary force; 7,000 troops simply could not exert any meaningful impact in what was a massive military confrontation. Second, the U.S. soldiers actually had very little contact with Kolchak, whose opposition movement began to collapse in the fall of 1919. Shortly afterward, Wilson ordered the troops withdrawn, and the last of them left Siberia in April 1920. The Czech soldiers who had earlier established effective control of the Trans-Siberian railroad remained inside the Soviet Union for some time. Japan also left its troops in Soviet territory until 1922 and maintained a strong presence in adjacent Manchuria for another three years. Whatever motivated two U.S. interventions into the Soviet Union, they had no major impact on the outcome of World War I or the ultimate success of the Soviet revolution. Perhaps, in the end, the Czech legions, Kolchak’s struggles, and the missing war materiel had little to do with Wilson’s decision. When he ordered these deployments in the summer of 1918, the United States was

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 261 totally dedicated to ﬁghting on the western front and therefore willing to consider any action that might weaken Germany. The ill-considered moves into Siberia and northwestern Russia were minor missteps that had been taken in the heat of a global conﬂict. See also: Non-recognition; Red Scare References

Fogelsong, David S. America’s Secret War against Bolshevism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Kennen, George. Soviet-American Relations. Vol. 2: The Decision to Intervene. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958. Unterberger, Betty Miller. America’s Siberian Expedition, 1918–1920. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1956.

Stimson Doctrine In 1932, Secretary of State Henry Stimson refused to recognize Japan’s military achievements in northern China. Japan subsequently installed a satellite government in Manchuria, calling the new regime Manchukuo. Stimson reiterated his non-recognition policy, and the United States never acknowledged the change in government. This non-recognition stance became known as the Stimson Doctrine, and it was applied to other situations as well. Stimson was not the ﬁrst secretary of state to resort to non-recognition in East Asia. During the early months of World War I, Japan presented the Chinese government with Twenty-One Demands that would effectively have made China a dependency of Japan. Chinese authorities appealed for help from the United States, and U.S. diplomatic intervention caused the Japanese to drop some of the most intrusive demands. In addition,

President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, announced that the United States would not recognize any attempts to infringe on the territorial integrity of China. Japanese ambitions were hardly slaked, however, and when the worldwide depression set in after 1929, the nation’s leadership became increasingly militant. One strategy proposed for relieving economic distress at home was to expand Japan’s resource base by taking control of nearby territories on the mainland of Asia. Korea had effectively become a Japanese colony as a result of the Sino-Japanese War (1895). Now Japan set its sights on the vast, temperate, and very productive province of Manchuria, which lay beyond Korea. An excuse for action came in September 1931, when Japan claimed that Chinese forces had attacked and destroyed a section of the Japanesecontrolled South Manchurian Railway near the city of Mukden. At post–World War II trials, Japanese ofﬁcials admitted that the Mukden Incident had never actually happened. But, in 1931, they cited it as a justification for allowing their 10,400-man Kwan-tung Army to assault Chinese military forces and gradually expand their sphere of occupation in Manchuria. Americans had long sustained a belief that the United States had a special interest in and relationship with China. A key factor was the U.S. issuance of the Open Door Notes in 1899 and 1900, which, among other provisions, called for continued recognition of China’s territorial integrity. Although China’s imperial government had fallen in a revolution in 1911, the United States took the lead in recognizing and encouraging the evolving Chinese

262 | Section 4

regimes as the appropriate governing authority for all of China. In the late 1920s, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek had emerged as leader of the dominant nationalist movement. It was his army that the Japanese were ﬁghting in Manchuria. Secretary of State Stimson had recently been badly burned when he had attempted to invoke the Kellogg-Briand Pact’s prohibition against war in an earlier Manchurian incident involving Russia. He was understandably unwilling and, realistically, hardly able to do much more than hope that the League of Nations would deal with the situation. The League Council did dispatch an investigative commission, led by British Lord Lytton. After nine months, the Lytton Commission reported its unsurprising ﬁndings, which were quite critical of Japan. The Japanese chose to ignore the league and eventually withdrew from the organization altogether. When they announced the formation of a new, independent government for Manchuria, they renamed it Manchukuo and installed Henry Pu Yi as its titular head. Because he was a member of the deposed Manchu Dynasty, Japan could claim that it was merely restoring the region’s traditional and proper ruling family. In fact, the young man was nothing more than a Japanese puppet. President Herbert Hoover was grappling with the onset of the Great Depression, and the United States was entering an even more isolationist phase than it had exhibited in the 1920s. That severely limited Stimson’s options. With the president’s approval, he announced that the United States would not recognize any changes in government that violated the long-standing U.S. commitment to the territorial integrity of China. This non-recognition

policy had no perceptible effect on either the Japanese or the Chinese citizens of Manchukuo. Atlases published in the United States in the 1930s do, however, note the U.S. non-recognition of Japanese control. The Stimson Doctrine was a safe, relatively popular response to an international crisis that the isolationist people of the United States had no interest in resolving. Indeed, President Hoover was quite annoyed that his secretary’s name was associated with the policy. The relationship between Hoover and Stimson became quite strained in the aftermath of what the president insisted should properly be called the Hoover Doctrine. See also: Kellogg-Briand Pact; League of Nations References

Ferrell, Robert H. American Diplomacy in the Great Depression. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957. Langer, Robert. Seizure of Territory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947. Smith, Sara R. The Manchurian Crisis, 1931–1932. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948.

United Nations As World War II drew to a close, the United States became the primary sponsor of a new international organization to promote collective security. This development may seem surprising because Americans had steadfastly avoided involvement in the League of Nations. It also seems odd given the league’s poor record of fulﬁlling President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic goals for it. In the end, however, the United Nations was enormously popular with the American

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 263 people when it came into existence in 1945. Both the league and its successor organization were designed to promote collective security. To do so, the organizations should ideally be equipped with tools—ranging from mediation all the way to military intervention—to resolve crises. If they could rely on collective security, individual member nations would be relieved of the necessity of maintaining substantial independent military capabilities. Collective security would also obviate the need for bilateral or multilateral defense agreements. Instead, a nation threatened with aggression could appeal to the international organization for protection. On several occasions, appeals of that kind had reached the League of Nations, but it often lacked the inﬂuence or power to respond effectively. The internationalists planning a successor organization hoped to remedy that weakness. One of the most dedicated proponents of a new, stronger organization was President Roosevelt’s longserving secretary of state, Cordell Hull. He had been an ardent Wilsonian during World War I, and he continued to have abiding faith in international collective security. His boss in the White House was less enthusiastic, even though Franklin Roosevelt had supported Wilson’s initiatives when he served under him as assistant secretary of the navy. Like most Americans and many others around the world, Roosevelt had found the impotence of the League of Nations disillusioning. Once he had been drawn into full participation in World War II, however, the president developed a renewed belief that international cooperation could produce great beneﬁts.

The so-called Grand Alliance of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union shaped Roosevelt’s optimism. He hoped that the great powers would continue cooperating after they had defeated their current enemies, and that hope underlay his concept of the Four Policemen. In this formulation, the three wartime Allies plus China would be the preeminent political authorities and military powers after the war. No international organization could successfully offer collective security if it failed to include the great powers. Cordell Hull agreed but wanted the organization to be much more than a continuation of collaboration of great powers. After laying careful diplomatic groundwork, Hull invited representatives from China, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States to Dumbarton Oaks, a secluded estate in the District of Columbia, in the fall of 1944. The assembled delegates mapped out the basic design for the organization. The League of Nations served as a model and, like the league, the new organization would have a general assembly for open debate and discussion among the representatives of all member nations. The assembly would not, however, have administrative or enforcement powers. They would be lodged instead in the Security Council. In line with Roosevelt’s vision, the council would contain permanent seats for representatives of the Big Three and China. Because British prime minister Winston Churchill considered China a dependency of the United States, he sponsored the inclusion of liberated France as a ﬁfth permanent member on the council. The Dumbarton Oaks Conference left key issues unresolved, anticipating that the Big Three leaders would deal with

264 | Section 4

The second meeting of the leaders of the wartime Grand Alliance took place in February 1945 at Yalta in the Soviet Union. British prime minister Winston Churchill, American president Franklin Roosevelt, and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin worked out the basic structure of the United Nations organization at this meeting. (National Archives)

them at their upcoming meeting in Yalta early in 1945. There, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed to grant veto power to each of the permanent members. Stalin argued for extending that authority to procedural issues, but the Western leaders insisted that it apply only to substantive actions that the council might consider. The Yalta Conference also resolved a membership controversy, by allowing both Ukraine and White Russia to have separate seats in the General Assembly along with the Soviet Union. The next step was an organizational meeting, set to convene in San Francisco on April 25, 1945. President Roosevelt

died on April 12, but newly sworn-in President Harry S Truman insisted that the meeting be held as planned. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius chaired the San Francisco Conference, which included delegates from the great powers and from 46 other nations who were currently at war with Germany and Japan. The U.S. delegation also included key political ﬁgures like Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, whose support would be crucial in assuring Senate ratiﬁcation. The conference lasted right through VE-Day, when the war in Europe ended, on May 8, 1945. Many of the delegates were reluctant to see the major powers

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 265 retain so much prominence and authority, but they could do little to prevent it. The conference completed the drafting process that had begun at Dumbarton Oaks. The resulting charter created the General Assembly and the Security Council, with ﬁve permanent members and six additional members to be elected to rotating two-year terms. To overcome a key weakness of the League of Nations organization, the San Francisco conference created a third branch called the Secretariat. Its Secretary-General would handle routine administration of the organization but could take no concrete action without Security Council authorization. Article 52 of the UN Charter allowed for regional arrangements, such as the Organization of American States, which were a key factor in assuring widespread support. The delegates also established the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to provide humanitarian assistance and information for the global community, the ﬁrst of several UN agencies dealing with nonconfrontational issues. Of these, the UN Trusteeship Council was of immediate importance to the United States. At considerable cost, U.S. forces had driven Japanese troops out of hundreds of islands in the South Paciﬁc. Most of their residents would probably have welcomed direct annexation by the United States, but President Roosevelt had repeatedly stated that his country had no territorial ambitions. An acceptable alternative was for the Trusteeship Council to delegate authority over the islands to the United States, allowing U.S. inﬂuence to prevail without formal annexation. The American people’s reaction to the UN declaration was far different from their hostility to the League of Nations.

President Truman sent a treaty embodying the UN Charter to the Senate on July 2, 1945; before the end of the month, it sailed through with a deﬁnitive 89 to 2 ratiﬁcation vote. Public opinion polls reported greater than 90 percent popular approval as well. Unfortunately, hopes that the Big Three would make a smooth transition from war to peace were quickly dashed. When he met with Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov just prior to the San Francisco Conference, President Truman chided the Soviet government for failing to promote democratic government in Poland. The United States subsequently prevented Poland from obtaining a seat in the General Assembly. Some analysts mark this as the opening move in what was to become the Cold War. Although it fell far short of its optimistic advocates’ dreams, the United Nations did perform a number of valuable functions in subsequent years. Its economic and social programs were universally praised, and the General Assembly provided a forum for smaller nations to air their grievances. And, more than once, the Security Council did take deﬁnitive action, most effectively in areas or issues outside the bounds of the bitter East-West confrontation. To that extent, the United Nations has proven to be a more substantial international organization than the League of Nations. See also: Four Policemen; League of Nations; Yalta References

Campbell, Thomas M. Masquerade Peace: America’s UN Policy, 1944–1945. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1973. Divine, Robert A. Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America

266 | Section 4 during World War II. New York: Atheneum, 1967. Hoopes, Townsend, and Douglas Brinkley. FDR and the Creation of the U.N. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.

Unrestricted Submarine Warfare Germany’s decision to initiate unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917 convinced President Woodrow Wilson to bring the United States into the Great War. Prior to that decision, many U.S. lives had been lost when German submarines sank passenger-carrying ships, but the president obtained promises and pledges from Germany that seemed to limit the threat. Once its submarines began sinking all ships, including U.S. merchant vessels in February, however, it served essentially as a ﬁrst shot, enabling Wilson to insist that the United States was entering the conﬂict only after being attacked. When the Great War broke out in August 1914, President Wilson captured the prevailing U.S. view when he announced that the United States would remain neutral. That position was remarkably similar to the U.S. response to European wars a century earlier. Prior to the War of 1812, the United States repeatedly claimed that, as a neutral nation, its ships should not be stopped, captured, or sunk by those at war. Both Napoléon’s France and Great Britain, with its superior navy, pursued policies that undermined or denied U.S. attempts to champion neutral rights. When President James Madison led his nation into war against Great Britain in 1812, he justiﬁed his action by citing a number of British maritime policies that Americans considered unacceptable.

Ironically, British actions and policies in 1914 and after resembled the same behavior that had outraged Americans more than 100 years earlier. Royal Navy vessels stopped U.S. merchant ships at sea to search for contraband goods, and, even if none were found on board, they might impound the ships and cargos anyway. The Wilson administration directed a stream of protests to London. In almost all cases, the royal government eventually compensated the owners of captured goods and vessels. Even more signiﬁcantly, British actions caused no U.S. deaths. Early in the war, Germany showed relatively little concern about events at sea, because it had amassed huge stockpiles in anticipation of a conﬂict that everyone assumed would last no more than a few months. As the ﬁghting dragged on, however, the German government realized that interfering with Great Britain’s ocean-borne trade could seriously weaken its enemy. The Royal Navy had successfully blockaded virtually the entire German war ﬂeet in Kiel Harbor, however, so the only maritime weapon that Germany could utilize was an untested ﬂeet of some 30 unterseeboots, which English speakers referred to as U-boats. The U-boats initially preyed on enemy merchant and naval vessels in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, actions that had no direct impact on Americans. In February 1915, the British extended its list of contraband to include food stuffs and stepped up its attempts to limit external trade with its enemy. Germany responded by warning everyone to keep clear of a war zone that encircled the British Isles. President Wilson then issued a warning of his own that the United States would hold Germany

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 267 strictly accountable for any U.S. lives or property that it might endanger. The cruise liner Lusitania was the ﬁrst and most prominent U-boat casualty. It sailed from New York with 1,959 crew and passengers, including more than 200 Americans aboard, as well as 4,000 cases of riﬂe cartridges that the Germans considered contraband. As the liner approached Great Britain on May 7, 1915, a German U-boat unleashed a couple of torpedoes that sank the Lusitania in just 18 minutes. Among the nearly 1,200 killed were 128 Americans, including 37 women and 21 children. The event so shocked and aroused the American people that Wilson could justiﬁably have declared war right then. Instead, he dispatched strongly worded diplomatic notes to Germany, threatening to cut off relations, typically a ﬁrst step to war. The German government responded with an agreement to compensate the U.S. loses and, simultaneously, secretly ordered its submarine captains never again to ﬁre on any large passenger ships. Even so, in August, a German torpedo sunk another British liner, the Arabic, with the loss of two lives. Wilson’s angry reaction convinced the German ambassador in Washington to reveal his government’s secret orders. Wilson grudgingly accepted this Arabic Pledge as proof that Germany was attempting to prevent further loss of life. Compensation for Lusitania victims and their families came through in February 1916, but tensions ratcheted up the following month, when a French channel steamer, the Sussex, was torpedoed in late March, severely injuring several U.S. passengers. Realizing that U.S. patience was nearly exhausted, the German government publicly promised that its U-boats

would refrain from attacking any commercial vessels without advance warning. Because issuing a warning from a submarine was unfeasible, particularly when many merchantmen were heavily armed themselves, this Sussex Pledge effectively curtailed all commerce destruction. Germany tied this pledge to a demand that Great Britain abide by recognized international rules of maritime war, a proviso that Wilson conveniently ignored. U-boats continued to hit the enemy’s naval vessels, but no further incidents involving civilians occurred throughout the remainder of 1916. Well into the third year of war, in January 1917, with no apparent prospect of victory, Germany took up a proposal advanced earlier by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the man who had masterminded the creation of the submarine ﬂeet. He had resigned his post in disgust in 1916 when the kaiser’s government had rejected his plan. The German High Command now reconsidered the proposal. The submarine ﬂeet had more than doubled in size and had become far more experienced and effective. Von Tirpitz insisted that if his U-boats were unleashed, they could quickly cripple the overseas trade on which Great Britain’s island kingdom depended. Within six months, the admiral promised, the enemy’s economy would be so devastated that its government would have to sue for peace. This strategy would inevitably wreak devastation on U.S. vessels trading with Great Britain as well, a consequence that would surely force the United States to take countermeasures. The German leaders knew that would be likely but discounted its importance. The U.S. Army was a negligible force of around 100,000 ill-trained and poorly equipped troops, who would have to be transported at great cost and risk across the ocean,

268 | Section 4

which was patrolled by German U-boats. In the best of circumstances, the German High Command concluded, more than two years would pass before the United States could have any signiﬁcant impact on the European battlefront. By then, Great Britain would long since have been forced out of the war. On January 31, 1917, the German ambassador in Washington informed the U.S. government of his country’s decision to initiate unrestricted submarine warfare. The Wilson administration immediately severed diplomatic relations with Germany and sent the ambassador home. Within a few more days, U-boat assaults were killing Americans at sea. Germany had clearly ﬁred the ﬁrst shot, one that the United States could use as full justiﬁcation for entering the war against it. More than two months of frenetic planning and diplomatic activity intervened, however, before President Wilson sent his request to Congress for a declaration of war. Germany’s risky calculation had failed to take into account two immediate factors, as well as another that exerted inﬂuence far sooner than anticipated. First, the U.S. Navy was a formidable force, nearly as large as the German ﬂeet that remained penned up behind the British naval blockade. The U.S. Navy and the even larger British war ﬂeet quickly developed an effective convoy system that provided substantial protection for merchant ships crossing the Atlantic. Equally important was an immediate infusion of billions of U.S. dollars into the depleted war coffers of Great Britain and France, money that substantially increased their ability to carry on the ﬁght. Finally, the United States mounted a massive mobilization that enabled it to dispatch some 2 million

fresh, well-equipped troops to Europe by the summer of 1918. Their presence proved crucial in defeating the exhausted, overstrained German forces within a matter of months. See also: Neutrality (1914–1917) References

Bailey, Thomas A., and Paul B. Ryan. The Lusitania Disaster. New York: Free Press, 1975. Birnbaum, Karl E. Peace Moves and U-Boat Warfare. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1958. Devin, Patrick. Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Herwig, Holger H. Politics of Frustration: The United States in German Naval Planning, 1889–1941. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.

Yalta The ﬁnal meeting of the original leaders of the Grand Alliance took place at Yalta in early February 1945. They discussed four main issues: Poland, Germany, the United Nations, and the war against Japan. President Franklin Roosevelt had not been eager to attend another tiring overseas conference. He had just completed an exhausting reelection campaign, winning an unprecedented fourth term in the White House. But encouraging news from the front lines in both Asia and Europe made it seem essential to consult with the leaders of the major U.S. war partners on what steps they should take next. The president took three major desires to the Russian province of Crimea. Viewing the United Nations as the key to postwar collective security, he wanted to resolve remaining differences on its membership and opera-

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 269 tions with Joseph Stalin, head of the Soviet Union. In line with the Atlantic Charter and traditional U.S. mission sentiments, he also wanted the Big Three to go on record as favoring democracy and self-determination. The most pressing military issue was the continuing war in Asia, so Roosevelt sought a pledge of Russian support at the conference. As at earlier meetings, the other leaders came with different agendas. British prime minister Winston Churchill feared that the United States would not have the stomach for continuing military involvement in Europe, so he wanted the other leaders to recognize liberated France as a great power. The postwar status of Poland was another key concern of the British government. Ultimately, Churchill wanted assurance that the Allied success in eliminating the threat of a Europe dominated by fascism would not open the way for a communist takeover. Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party, greeted his guests at Yalta with his own set of desires. His nation’s Red Army now occupied much of Eastern Europe, and Stalin intended to use that strength to install pro-Russian governments wherever possible. He also wanted the other leaders to join him in demanding substantial indemnities, including monetary reparations and forced labor, from defeated Germany. Some of the contradictory desires that the leaders brought to the Yalta Conference were fulﬁlled in principle. For example, all three endorsed Roosevelt’s call for democratic elections by signing the Declaration on Liberated Europe. It quickly became apparent, however, that any election that took place under the

guns of a foreign army would most likely result in a government that was friendly to that of the occupying force. Thus elections in Italy and France produced open, democratic governments. In Eastern Europe, elections took place only when the Soviets were certain that those countries would install communist governments. Poland was a case in point. Winston Churchill had already concluded that the Western Allies could do nothing to prevent Soviet control of Poland. Therefore, when the three leaders met, the main topic of debate was where to establish the boundaries of the country. Stalin insisted on reclaiming the eastern region, which had once been part of czarist Russia. The Allies therefore agreed to shift Poland’s western boundary to the Oder and Niesse rivers, incorporating much of the prewar German province of Prussia. Roosevelt and Churchill also allowed the Soviet-supported government at Lublin to serve as the core for extending Polish authority throughout the reconstituted country. The Polish question inﬂuenced decisions regarding postwar Germany. The three leaders agreed to deﬁne occupation zones in what remained of German’s prewar home territory. Churchill and Roosevelt successfully argued that France should be assigned a zone of its own. In a fateful decision, they also agreed to allow the Russian zone to extend from the western border of Poland well past Berlin, a city which itself would be segmented into four occupation zones. As they did for other occupied areas, the leaders established Allied Control Commissions to coordinate affairs in both Berlin and Germany. Roosevelt and Churchill neither accepted nor ruled out the Soviet demand for up to $20 billion in

270 | Section 4

DECLARATION ON LIBERATED EUROPE (Agreed to at the Yalta Conference, February 13, 1945) . . . [Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin] jointly declare their mutual agreement to concert during the temporary period of instability in liberated Europe the policies of their three Governments in assisting the peoples liberated from the domination of Nazi Germany and the peoples of the former Axis satellite states of Europe to solve by democratic means their pressing political and economic problems. The establishment of order in Europe and the rebuilding of national economic life must be achieved by processes which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice. This is a principle of the Atlantic Charter—the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live—the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived to them by the aggressor nations. To foster the conditions in which the liberated people may exercise these rights, the three governments will jointly assist the people in any European liberated state or former Axis state in Europe where, in their judgment conditions require, (a) to establish conditions of internal peace; (b) to carry out emergency relief measures for the relief of distressed peoples; (c) to form interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population and pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of Governments responsive to the will of the people; and (d) to facilitate where necessary the holding of such elections. The three Governments will consult the other United Nations and provisional authorities or other Governments in Europe when masters of direct interest to them are under consideration. . . . Source: Bevans, Charles I., ed. Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949. Washington, DC: GPO, 1969, 3:1008–1009.

reparations, choosing instead to refer that issue to a reparations commission to meet in the future. The United States intended to structure the United Nations as a far more effective collective security body than the League of Nations had been. Apparently assuming that cooperation among the victorious Allies would continue after the war, Roosevelt favored assigning them permanent seats on the proposed Security Council. At the same time, he knew that winning U.S. Senate approval for U.S. participation would

require some constraints on the international organization’s authority. To that end, he favored granting each of the permanent members a veto over council actions. Membership issues also had to be resolved. Stalin’s opening gambit was to demand a separate seat in the General Assembly for each of the 16 Soviet Socialist Republics that constituted the USSR. The Americans brieﬂy considered a counterdemand for 48 seats, one for each state in the union. The ﬁnal compromise allowed the USSR three assembly

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 271 seats, one each for the Ukraine, White Russia, and the Soviet Union. The most controversial decision made at the Yalta Conference stemmed from President Roosevelt’s belief that the United States needed Soviet assistance to defeat Japan. The president had raised the issue at the Teheran Conference more than a year earlier. During pre-Yalta negotiations in Moscow, Stalin expressed a willingness to turn his attention to the east within two or three months of the anticipated victory in Europe. At Yalta, Stalin conﬁrmed that promise, but only after laying down several conditions. In the 1905 peace agreement that ended the Russo-Japanese War, Russia had surrendered the southern half of Sakhalin Island to Japan. Now they wanted it restored. Stalin also insisted that the former Russian sphere of interest in China be revived as well, including the right to reestablish a Russian naval base at Port Arthur. Other demands in the Russian package were a major role in controlling railroads in Manchuria and increased inﬂuence in Korea. On the other hand, Stalin recognized Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek as the legitimate authority in all of China and agreed to forswear Soviet support for Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. Roosevelt returned home from Yalta tired and ailing. He died two months later, several weeks before VE-Day, the celebration of victory in Europe. One possible explanation for his behavior at Yalta is that he thought he would be personally able to modify or moderate Soviet actions after the war. Critics maintain that Roosevelt was too ill at Yalta to realize just how dangerous Soviet intentions were. In fact, he and Churchill both favored postponing many difﬁcult decisions. Equally clear,

Joseph Stalin had no intention of delaying his assertion of total dominance over Eastern Europe in anticipation of future agreements. Roosevelt may implicitly have been acknowledging that his actions might be faulted when he insisted that some of the Yalta agreements be kept secret. Not until 1946 were the concessions to the Soviet Union on China and Japan publicized. These seemed particularly questionable, given how quickly Japan surrendered. As he had promised at Yalta, Stalin entered the war two days after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, exactly three months after VE-Day. Even though the Japanese capitulation occurred just eight days later, the Soviets had ample time to expand their inﬂuence in China and Korea and to demand the restoration of pre-1905 territories. For better or worse, decisions and agreements made at Yalta laid the groundwork for the ensuing Cold War. See also: Grand Alliance; United Nations References

Buhite, Russell D. Decisions at Yalta: An Appraisal of Summit Diplomacy. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1986. Clemens, Diane Shaver. Yalta. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Laloy, Jean. Yalta: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Theoharis, Athan G. The Yalta Myths. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970.

BIOGRAPHIES Hopkins, Harry (1890–1946) After ably managing several New Deal relief programs, Harry Hopkins became

272 | Section 4

President Franklin Roosevelt’s most intimate foreign policy advisor and emissary during World War II. Hopkins was born in Iowa and attended Grinnell College. After graduating, he moved to New York City and found employment as a social worker in settlement houses. His administrative talents soon won him leadership positions in various city relief programs. After the 1929 stock market crash, Hopkins established a dynamic Red Cross relief operation that New York governor Franklin Roosevelt used as a template for the state’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. Hopkins moved over to head that organization and distributed millions of state dollars to the needy. It was only natural, then, that President Roosevelt would select Hopkins to manage the broad-ranging Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) in 1933. Later, Hopkins also ran the Civil Works Administration and it successor, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), as well as helping shape the social security legislation that was passed in 1935. Roosevelt named him secretary of commerce in late 1938, and Hopkins became intimately involved in assessing the military production and manpower capabilities of both the United States and Great Britain. In 1940, he resigned from his cabinet post and moved into a White House apartment to serve as assistant to the president. Although the position lacked a prestigious title, it placed Hopkins at the center of all major diplomatic initiatives. He made frequent trips to meet with Winston Churchill and also visited with Joseph Stalin. On his return from Moscow, he convinced Roosevelt to extend Lend-Lease support to the Soviet Union. Beginning with the Atlantic Conference, Hopkins was always at

Roosevelt’s side in his meetings with other Grand Alliance leaders. He spoke with the authority of the president on all diplomatic matters, exercising far greater inﬂuence than any other civilian, including Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Even though he suffered very poor health during the last decade of his life, Harry Hopkins made major contributions to the United States during its greatest foreign policy challenge as a trusted go-between and advisor to the president. See also: Lend-Lease Reference

McJimsey, George T. Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Hughes, Charles Evans (1862–1948) The son of a minister, Charles Evans Hughes developed strong respect for legal and moral principles at a young age that would shape his long life. After some early home schooling in his native New York, Hughes attended several educational institutions before graduating from Brown University. He then completed his studies at the Columbia University Law School and opened a thriving private law practice. It brought him to the attention of Republican Party Progressives, who encouraged him to attack public corruption. His success made him a popular icon, so his party nominated him for the governorship of New York. Hughes eked out a slim victory over newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in 1906 and won reelection four years later. His formality and stiff adherence to principles undermined his political effectiveness; Conse-

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 273 quently, in 1910 he gladly accepted an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, where his talents were far more appreciated. The Republican Party nominated Charles Evans Hughes to run against the popular Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, in 1916. He resigned from the Supreme Court but ran a clumsy and ultimately unsuccessful campaign. Back in private life, Hughes remained prominent in political circles, where he expressed strong support for Wilson’s internationalism. When President Warren G. Harding selected Hughes to be secretary of state in 1921, he had to drop his advocacy of the League of Nations. Hughes insisted that the United States should participate in the work of the Reparations Committee, and he was a key player in the creation of the Dawes Plan to restart the ﬂow of stalled international ﬁnance. Hughes’s greatest achievement was his forceful diplomacy at the Washington Conference in 1921–1922. He convinced the other delegates to adopt his original plan for limits on naval construction and superintended two other treaties that were designed to preserve peace in the Far East. Hughes also improved Latin American relations by advocating a reduction in U.S. interventionism, a stand that presaged the development of the Good Neighbor Policy in the 1930s. Although many of his achievements, such as his disarmament efforts, failed to stand the test of time, they were rather remarkable, given the strength of the isolation sentiments that the American people and Presidents Harding and Coolidge shared. After leaving the State Department, Hughes once again took up his law practice, but President Herbert Hoover decided in 1930 that Hughes could make more important contributions as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Hughes

held that post for 11 stressful years, adroitly guiding the court through the highly charged controversies that President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives generated. See also: Disarmament; League of Nations Reference

Pusey, Merlo J. Charles Evans Hughes. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1951.

Hull, Cordell (1871–1955) Born in a log cabin in Tennessee, Cordell Hull eventually read law at the Cumberland Law School. He entered politics almost immediately as a Democrat, winning a seat in the Tennessee state legislature, where he served until volunteering for service in the Spanish-AmericanCuban War. Although he arrived in Cuba after the armistice, his overseas adventure generated a lifelong interest in Latin America. Hull won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1906 as a strong advocate of lower tariffs. After moving up to the U.S. Senate in 1930, he devoted much of his energy to promoting Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential bid. Roosevelt then named Hull secretary of state in part to strengthen his support in the South. Cordell Hull headed the State Department for 12 years, during which it expanded enormously. Even so, Hull had little interest in organizational or administrative issues. A methodical thinker, he focused on relatively few policy areas whereas the president and other cabinet ofﬁcers played far larger roles in articulating and implementing foreign policy before and during World War II. Even so, Hull is remembered for three successful initiatives. The ﬁrst came at an interAmerican conference in Montevideo in 1933, where he supported a resolution

274 | Section 4

stating that no nation had the right to intervene in the affairs of another. Fortunately, Roosevelt agreed, and the two men cooperated in developing the Good Neighbor Policy for Latin America. Hull’s lifelong interest in tariff reduction helped shape the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934. The secretary of state then used its provisions to initiate dozens of bilateral trade negotiations in order to take advantage of the ﬂexibility reciprocity offered to lower tariff rates across the board. This approach ultimately led to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in the late 1940s. The ﬁnal major cause that Hull championed was the United Nations. Loyal to Wilsonian ideals, Hull favored collective security and worked hard to create a new international framework to promote it. His advocacy won him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1945, a year after he retired. Cordell Hull thus made several positive contributions to U.S. foreign policy over his long career, even though his inﬂuence was overshadowed by the monumental developments of the World War II era. See also: Good Neighbor Policy; United Nations Reference

Pratt, Julius W. Cordell Hull, 1933–44. Vols. 12–13, The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy, edited by Samuel Flagg Bemis and Robert H. Ferrell. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1964.

Kellogg, Frank B. (1856–1937) Shortly after his birth in New York, Frank Kellogg immigrated with his family to rural Minnesota. Denied all but the most rudimentary schooling, Kellogg

eventually read law and was able to establish a successful practice as an attorney. In the early 20th century, he won national fame by successfully prosecuting high-proﬁle trust-busting cases that were targeted against individuals such as railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman and corporations such as the Standard Oil Trust, which was broken up in 1911. After supporting Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive bid for the presidency in 1912, Kellogg returned to his traditional Republican roots and won election to the U.S. Senate in 1916. There, he supported the collective security concept and handled a diplomatic assignment for President Warren G. Harding before losing his seat in the 1922 elections. President Calvin Coolidge considered his diplomatic experience sufﬁcient to send him to London as U.S. ambassador, where he played a key role in the development of the Dawes Plan. Coolidge then recalled Kellogg to Washington in 1924 to succeed Charles Evans Hughes as secretary of state. Serving after such a distinguished predecessor, Kellogg’s tenure at the State Department seemed rather mundane. He was constantly drawn into bureaucratic inﬁghting resulting from the passage of the 1924 Rogers Act, which combined the consular and diplomatic services. Kellogg objected strongly when Mexico threatened to expropriate U.S. interests, but the decision to name Dwight Morrow as ambassador smoothed relations. Another persistent issue was the U.S. relationship with China. Kellogg eventually resolved it by supporting the government of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek and modifying U.S. trade policy in his favor. Submerged in the isolationism of the 1920s, Kellogg initially declined to sign

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 275 a nonaggression treaty with French foreign minister Aristide Briand. He then managed to dilute its bilateral impact by welcoming all nations to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which theoretically outlawed war in 1928. This achievement won him the 1929 Nobel Peace Prize but had almost no long-term positive impact. Kellogg’s public service ended the same year that Coolidge left the White House. See also: Kellogg-Briand Pact Reference

Ellis, L. Ethan. Frank B. Kellogg and American Foreign Relations, 1925–1929. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1961.

Lodge, Henry Cabot (1850–1924) The spirited and articulate criticisms that Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge directed at the Versailles Treaty in 1919 fundamentally altered the course of world affairs. His stubborn isolationism at that point seemed somewhat surprising in someone who had enthusiastically supported U.S. expansionism in the late 19th century. At heart, however, Lodge was a conservative, born into and imbued with old-fashioned New England virtues. As the son of a wealthy Boston merchant and a descendent of the distinguished Cabot family, it was only natural that Lodge would attend Harvard College. Having graduated with no clear plans, he decided to return to Harvard to study law and pass the bar. Still casting about for a career, he accepted an invitation from Henry Adams to work at the North American Review, a leading literary journal. Over the next few years, Lodge wrote articles,

earned a doctorate in political science at Harvard, and published several books, all of which prepared him for a career in politics. In 1879, he ran successfully as a Republican for a place in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the ﬁrst of a series of electoral victories that culminated in a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1893. He and Theodore Roosevelt became acquainted at the Republican National Convention in 1884, and their friendship matured into a lifelong collaboration. Senator Lodge sponsored Roosevelt for a position on the U.S. Civil Service Commission and later abetted him in urging dynamic action at the time of the Spanish-AmericanCuban War. As an outspoken jingo, Henry Cabot Lodge was a leading advocate of the United States assuming a much more prominent position in world affairs, even to the extent of taking colonies. Like many other Americans, however, Lodge gradually became disillusioned with international affairs, particularly when Europe descended into World War I. As a staunch Republican conservative, Lodge nursed an abiding hatred for Progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a bitterness that was reciprocated. In 1919, Lodge chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the body responsible for reviewing the documents prepared at the Versailles Peace Conference. As head of the U.S. delegation in Paris, President Wilson had interwoven the League of Nations into the ﬁnal peace treaty so thoroughly that they could not be separated. Although Lodge did not oppose peace as such, he did harbor severe reservations about the League Covenant. He particularly objected to the implication in its 10th article that the league might order U.S. military forces into action

276 | Section 4

without congressional approval. Criticism of that provision became the centerpiece of Lodge’s ultimately successful campaign to convince the Senate not to ratify the treaty. As a result, the United States never joined the league and retreated into isolationism in the 1920s, fatally weakening its ability to inﬂuence European developments and related global issues. Lodge never regretted his action, convinced to his dying day that his stand had been best for the United States.

had inﬂuenced U.S. policy before and during World War I. The Nye Committee ﬁndings deﬁnitely inﬂuenced the passage of the Neutrality Acts in the late 1930s, legislation that Nye strongly favored. His unwavering commitment to isolationism long after World War II broke out marginalized his inﬂuence. He lost a reelection bid in 1944 and held a couple of minor federal posts in his ﬁnal years.

See also: Fourteen Points; League of Nations

Reference

Reference

Garraty, John A. Henry Cabot Lodge, A Biography. New York, Knopf, 1953.

Nye, Gerald P. (1892–1971) A lifelong dedicated Progressive, Gerald Nye honed his political beliefs in his native Wisconsin before moving to North Dakota in 1916. An inﬂuential newspaper publisher and advocate of farmers’ rights, Nye was an obvious choice when the Progressive Republican governor needed to appoint someone to a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate in 1925. Nye quickly gained national fame by using his position on the Public Lands Committee to head the investigation that exposed the Teapot Dome scandal. His home-state supporters regularly reelected him with wide margins, even though Nye often found himself out of step with the business-oriented Coolidge and Hoover administrations. He was even more outspokenly opposed to Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Increasingly concerned with international threats, he headed a Senate investigation of how the munitions industry

See also: Neutrality Acts

Cole, Wayne S. Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980.

Pershing, John J. (1860–1948) In conjunction with his extensive military experience and expertise, John J. Pershing’s intelligence and diplomatic skills made him a logical choice to command U.S. ground forces in World War I. After graduating from West Point, Pershing served in the black Tenth Cavalry in the frontier West. His command of African American troops earned him his lifelong nickname of Black Jack. In the 1890s, he headed the ofﬁcer training program at the University of Nebraska and earned a law degree. He returned to teach at West Point briefly before serving in the Spanish-American-Cuban War and then spent several years in the Philippines. His assignment as military attaché in Tokyo in 1905 gave him an intimate view of the Russo-Japanese War. Promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the following year, he subsequently served as military governor of Moro Province, the most rebellious area in the Philippines. President

The World Wars, 1914–1945 | 277 Woodrow Wilson selected him to lead the Punitive Expedition into Mexico in 1916–1917 and promoted him to major general. Wilson then chose him to command the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. There, he grappled with daunting logistical and training problems, prevented the dispersion of U.S. troops to other countries’ units, and led the First Army in several successful operations. Even so, he earned some criticism for advocating tactics that were inappropriate to trench warfare and for sometimes failing to prevent unnecessary casualties. He disagreed with President Wilson’s decision to settle for an armistice in November 1918. Instead, he favored a march to capture Berlin, to demonstrate to the German people just how completely they had been defeated. Congress created the superrank of General of the Armies for Pershing in 1919, and he completed his active military career by serving as the army’s chief of staff. See also: American Expeditionary Force; Punitive Expedition Reference

Smythe, Donald. Pershing, General of the Armies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Stimson, Henry L. (1867–1950) Few Americans have enjoyed a longer and more distinguished public career than Henry Stimson. A native New Yorker who was educated at Yale University and the Harvard Law School, he began his legal career in New York City as a member of Elihu Roots’s law ﬁrm. Root remained a lifelong mentor and model of legal astuteness and public

service. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt named Stimson the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York. That position gave Stimson ample opportunity to distinguish himself in successful, high-proﬁle antitrust prosecutions. Although he sought and failed to win elective ofﬁce, President William Howard Taft named him secretary of war in 1911. His organizational and administrative skills were vital in laying the groundwork for the modern U.S. army. When the United States entered World War I, Stimson went to France to ﬁght as a lieutenant colonel in the ﬁeld artillery. He returned to his law practice for a time, but President Calvin Coolidge sent him on a diplomatic mission to Nicaragua and then appointed him governor of the Philippines. That experience prepared him for service as secretary of state under President Herbert Hoover in 1929. During his four years heading the State Department, Stimson worked hard to ease the international impact of the Great Depression, engineered new naval limitations at the 1930 London Conference, but he failed to ﬁnd an effective way to prevent Japanese advances in China. The Stimson Doctrine, calling for non-recognition of any territorial changes in the Far East, was a feeble and ultimately inadequate response to a persistent and growing crisis. Returning to private life in 1933, Stimson continued to attract attention by insisting that the United States could not avoid the impending global conﬂict. His position was hardly popular in an isolationist decade. When his dire warnings proved all too correct, President Franklin Roosevelt asked the experienced and capable Stimson once again to head the War Department in the summer of 1940. As he had earlier, Stimson

278 | Section 4

proved remarkably adept at organization, administration, long-range thinking, and, perhaps most important, building a conﬁdent and capable leadership team for the U.S. Army. He was intimately involved in the development of the atomic bomb and served as President Harry S Truman’s chief advisor on its use after it was successfully tested in July 1945. Stimson retired from the War Department later that

year, at the age of 78. He was universally lauded as a conscientious and honest man, who demanded the same qualities in those with whom he worked so effectively. See also: Non-recognition Reference

Morison, Elting E. Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1960.

SECTION 5

THE COLD WAR AND AFTER, 1945–

Western access. A yearlong airlift preserved Western authority. To further contain Soviet expansionism, the United States sponsored the formation of a multinational mutual defense arrangement called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Soviet Union successfully tested its own atomic bomb in 1949, the same year Communist leader Mao Zedong took control of mainland China. In response, American planners developed a strategic plan designated NSC-68. Among other proposals, it called for a tripling of American military expenditures. This occurred almost simultaneously with North Korea’s invasion into South Korea, even though the United States settled for a limited war that essentially reestablished the status quo. These distressing developments, meanwhile, plunged the United States into a Red Scare Again. When Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952, he and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, announced a more aggressive foreign policy, threatening massive retaliation on the Soviet

The American people hoped that winning World War II would guarantee a peaceful future. But the members of the Grand Alliance began squabbling with one another even before they defeated fascism in Europe and Japanese imperialism in Asia. The proven destructive power of atomic weapons made everyone leery of using them, so the ensuing rivalry between capitalist and communist systems never escalated into a “hot” war. Instead, the Cold War persisted for almost half a century. Containment was the premier U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. It began with the Truman Doctrine, which provided military and ﬁnancial support to countries directly threatened by Soviet expansion. To protect other European nations from an economic collapse that might encourage a swing to the left, the United States disbursed billions of dollars of economic recovery aid through the Marshall Plan. Neither of these programs affected the city of Berlin. The victorious Allies had agreed to occupy the city jointly, but in 1947, the Soviets attempted to cut it off from 279

280 | Section 5

Union should communism appear to be gaining ground anywhere in the world. Dulles also promised American support for the liberation of Eastern Europe. The United States did nothing concrete to implement either policy before the 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, which seemed to shift the East-West balance of power. In fact, U-2 spy planes provided evidence that reassured the Eisenhower administration that the United States still had a substantial lead in Cold War weaponry. Closer to home, Fidel Castro engineered a successful revolt in Cuba in 1959. By 1961, American-Cuban relations had deteriorated to the point that President John Kennedy unwisely approved an anti-Castro raid at the Bay of Pigs. Among other negative consequences, the unsuccessful foray increased Soviet inﬂuence in Cuba. By 1962, Russia was preparing to install nuclear-tipped missiles on the island, forcing Kennedy to resort to daring brinkmanship to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis. Half way around the world, the United States remained deeply committed to the survival of Israel. Periodic confrontations between Israelis and their Arab neighbors eventually convinced Israel to stage a preemptive strike that blossomed into the Six-Day War in 1967. It doubled the territory under Israeli control. A few months later, the United Nations called upon Israel to trade its occupied land for peace. Another war and frenetic shuttle diplomacy had to take place before the 1978 Camp David Accords brought about the ﬁrst implementation of the land-forpeace formula. No other Cold War confrontation proved more costly and disappointing

than American involvement in Vietnam. The U.S. commitment to South Vietnam was limited to economic support and military training until the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Incident led to a congressional resolution authorizing the deployment of combat troops. Escalation continued until the 1968 Tet Offensive undermined American faith in a purely military approach. Peace negotiations were already underway when President Nixon authorized a cross-border raid into Cambodia in 1970. That incursion proved so unpopular that Nixon eventually agreed to withdraw all American forces in early 1973, ending the longest war in American history. Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, was the chief architect of the Vietnam peace talks. He also advocated the détente that led to U.S. recognition of the communist government in China and better relations with the Soviet Union. The Cold War ﬁnally faded away in the late 1980s. Throughout this period, the United States pursued a successful international economic policy. In 1948, it promoted the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Over succeeding decades, the free world continually revised tariff barriers under the auspices of GATT. By the 1990s, the United States was ready to adopt a free trade approach with its North American neighbors, which paralleled its membership in GATT’s successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Middle East remained a major trouble spot as the century drew to a close. The Iranian hostage crisis almost immobilized the administration of President Jimmy Carter. His successor, Ronald Reagan, became involved in the murky Iran-Contra conspiracy that tested the limits of executive authority.

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 281 President George H. W. Bush developed a measured response to an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that culminated in the short, successful Gulf War in 1991. Concurrently, anti-American sentiments ﬂourished. Terrorist attacks on Americans and American institutions both at home and abroad convinced President George W. Bush to declare a war on terror. He also promulgated the Bush Doctrine that included a major military effort in Iraq, one of the most controversial international actions in American history.

KEY CONCEPTS Bay of Pigs The failure of the Bay of Pigs assault in 1961 was a major Cold War embarrassment for the United States. It reﬂected the exaggerated fear of communism Americans experienced after World War II. The fact that communism spread to Cuba, just 90 miles off the Florida coast, put pressure on federal agencies to do something dramatic in response. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Central Intelligence Agency collaborated to plan a response and encouraged a reluctant President John Kennedy to implement it. The Bay of Pigs ﬁasco not only tarnished the image of the United States in Latin America and around the world, but it also laid the groundwork for an even more dangerous U.S.–Soviet confrontation the following year. In a sense, the Bay of Pigs assault represented a last, desperate attempt to alter the course of Cuban history. In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy canceled the demeaning Platt Amendment restrictions on the island nation, helping to blunt

anti-Yankee hostility among the Cuban people. The resulting warmer relations encouraged ever more American investment, generating wealth that seldom ﬁltered down to the vast majority of impoverished Cubans. Cuba’s dictatorial governments also failed to promote prosperity. The key ﬁgure after 1934 was Fulgencio Batista, a former soldier who served as both kingmaker and president from time to time. In the early 1950s, Batista established an oppressive dictatorship in Havana, relying on support from wealthy, right-wing Cubans and prosperous Americans. Unfortunately, many of them were prominent members of the U.S. underworld. Exploiting Cuba’s lax laws and permissive government, they invested profits from criminal enterprises in nightclubs, hotels, and plantations. Tourists ﬂocked to the island to sample illicit pleasures, enjoy elaborate entertainment, and gamble for high stakes. The U.S. government did almost nothing to stiﬂe this activity. Instead it provided military training and equipment for the Cuban armed forces that reported to Batista. Not surprisingly, disgruntled Cubans saw little distinction between the Cuban dictatorship and the Americans who seemed in league with it. This alliance, coupled with long-standing bitterness about U.S. policies dating back to the Spanish-American-Cuban War, encouraged opposition to the Batista regime. In the early 1950s, Fidel Castro emerged as the most popular rebel leader. A middle-class law graduate in his late twenties, Castro took up arms against the entrenched Batista regime. His ﬁrst effort misﬁred badly. He spent two years in a Cuban jail, and then lived in Mexico for a time, absorbing revolutionary rhetoric and techniques.

282 | Section 5

Castro returned to Cuba in the late 1950s and established his headquarters in a remote jungle area. His followers carried out raids that included burning sugarcane ﬁelds and destroying foreignowned property. Batista’s Americantrained military was no match for the wily guerrilla leader, and each success drew new recruits to his rebellion. As Castro’s myth grew, it attracted some young Americans to the jungle along with dedicated communist revolutionaries like Argentinian-born Ché Guevara. With Castro’s forces closing in on Havana, Batista and his retinue abruptly ﬂed on January 1, 1959. Overnight, Castro found himself in charge of all of Cuba. Although he had been a remarkably successful guerrilla chieftain, he seemed less comfortable with the details of governing. As a result, Marxist and socialist members of his rebel force quickly assumed key positions in the government. This helped convince critics that his regime was, at heart, a communist one. Although President Dwight Eisenhower formally recognized Castro’s takeover just six days after it occurred, CubanAmerican relations rapidly deteriorated. One unnerving development was the new government’s staging of show trials that condemned many of Batista’s supporters to death. Moreover, Castro cited his intention to redistribute wealth to the underprivileged to justify expropriating over $1 billion worth of Americanowned property. The Cuban leader took obvious delight in tweaking the United States diplomatically. For example, he proclaimed 1959 the “year of revolution,” and his agents and admirers in other Latin American countries seemed to be making inroads on existing governments.

Castro even urged Puerto Ricans and Black Americans to consider overthrowing the U.S. government. All of this fed the belief among American commentators and policy makers that Castro was not only a communist but, worse yet, a pawn of Soviet expansionism. In 1960, he warmly greeted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations. Hoping to humble the increasingly hostile Cuban leader, the United States gradually cut its trade with the island. The Soviet Union quickly stepped in, signing advantageous trade agreements with Castro’s government and becoming by far its most important trading partner. The inevitable break came in January 1961 when Castro gave the United States 48 hours to reduce its embassy staff in Havana from 130 to 11. Instead, the Eisenhower administration withdrew all representation and broke relations. John F. Kennedy inherited this awkward situation when he was inaugurated as president a couple of weeks later. The Eisenhower administration also bequeathed secret plans for an assault on the island. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had earned undeserved credit for its role in an anticommunist coup on Guatemala in 1954, and many now expected the agency to do the same in Cuba. Cubans who had ﬂed Castro’s regime seemed eager to participate in its overthrow. The CIA provided rudimentary training for about 1,500 Cuban exiles and prepared to send them ashore. The underlying premise for the plan was the belief that most Cubans viewed Castro and communism as negatively as did the United States, and, given proper encouragement, they would eagerly join the exile force and rise up en masse. In fact, many of the Cubans who had not ﬂed

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 283 the island still hoped the new government would be better than the dictatorship it had replaced. Even if the basic premise for the invasion had not been ﬂawed, the assault was carried out so ineptly that it was bound to fail in any case. Castro’s intelligence network told him when and where the assault was to take place, enabling him to station Cuban armed forces in defensive positions. The invaders who waded ashore at the Bay of Pigs on the remote Isle of Pines found themselves mired in swampy land. An earlier U.S. air strike had failed to inﬂict much damage on Cuban defenses. Castro’s men quickly surrounded the ill-equipped invasion force, killing several hundred and capturing the rest. President Kennedy earned severe criticism for refusing to authorize a second air strike when the assault appeared to be in trouble. He reasoned that it might transform the poorly planned operation into an international conﬂict that no one desired. The president was outraged at the feebleness of the assault force, the overly optimistic thinking that underlay the plan, and its inept execution. The Bay of Pigs ﬁasco made Kennedy distrustful of his own intelligence and military advisors from then on. Castro trumpeted his success around the world, emerging from the incident stronger in Cuba and far more respected among disgruntled Latin Americans. Thus, the Bay of Pigs invasion had precisely the opposite effect its planners had anticipated. The United States ultimately paid Cuba $50 million to “ransom” the surviving raiders who had been captured. The most important consequence by far was the fact that the raid made Cuba ever more dependent on the Soviet Union. The following year, that dependency led

directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the moment when the Cold War came closest to ﬂaring into an all-out international war. See also: Brinkmanship; Good Neighbor Policy; Spanish-American-Cuban War References

Parmet, Herbert S. JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy. New York: Dial Press, 1983. Patterson, Thomas G. Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Welch, Richard E. Jr. Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1961. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Berlin Berlin was the focus of international attention on three different occasions during the Cold War: the dramatic airlift mounted by the Western allies in 1948 and 1949, the series of missteps that led to the erection of a wall between East and West, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Tensions emanating from Berlin deeply affected American policy makers, often pushing them into positions that intensiﬁed the Cold War. In 1945, the United States apparently did not consider Berlin itself particularly important. General Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied commander in Europe, advised against sacriﬁcing American lives to assault the German capital, and President Harry S Truman agreed. The Soviet army ended up capturing the city and much of the surrounding countryside all the way to the Elbe River. Postwar agreements addressed the status of Berlin. At the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the victorious

284 | Section 5

Allies ﬁrmed up the details of a four-way division of both Germany and Austria that established a similar division of both Berlin and Vienna. As with other joint occupations, an Allied Control Commission administered Berlin with representatives of each of the four powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France. The fact that the Soviet-occupied zone in northeastern German completely surrounded the Berlin metropolitan area inevitably led to controversy. The Soviets immediately began conﬁscating manufacturing equipment and skilled manpower from their zone and even convinced their wartime allies to allow some transfers from other zones. In 1946, General Lucius Clay, the U.S. general in charge of the American zone, shut off this ﬂow and implemented a plan to restore Germany’s traditional industrial might. His next step was to promote the formation of “Bizonia,” a merging of the British and American zones. Shortly afterward, France joined in, creating “Trizonia,” the forerunner of the Federal Republic of Germany. In response, the Soviets began to strengthen rather than loot the economy in their zone. Berlin remained a sore point, however, serving as an inviting avenue to the West for East Berliners uncomfortable under Soviet occupation. As the Western allies moved ahead with creating a strong West Germany, Soviet authorities instituted a provocative countermeasure. In June 1948, they cut off Western access to Berlin on any road, railroad, or canal that ran through East Germany. The move was apparently designed to convince the Westerners to modify or even halt their plans for rebuilding West Germany.

The Truman administration now confronted what many consider the most dangerous moment in the early years of the Cold War. If the president backed down, it might be seen around the world as a Soviet victory and encourage communists and socialists in Western Europe. The United States had just initiated the Marshall Plan to prevent that sort of ideological deterioration. On the other hand, a U.S. attempt to use military force to restore land-based access to Berlin could provoke a massive Soviet response, possibly setting off a third world war. To avoid either unsatisfactory outcome, the Western allies exploited an existing four-power treaty that guaranteed all parties unrestricted air access to Berlin. The Soviets decided to honor that agreement, no doubt believing that an airborne supply system was economically and practically insupportable. American air transports began arriving almost immediately at Berlin’s Templehoff Airﬁeld, and the airlift grew to unprecedented proportions over the next year. To meet the besieged city’s basic needs, at least 4,000 tons of goods, including food, coal, and many other items, had to be transferred every day. At the peak of the airlift in the spring of 1949, a supply plane landed every 90 seconds, a pace that enabled the ﬂeet to transport as much as 9,000 tons in a single day. The Soviet leadership could not halt the airlift without provoking a major conﬂict. Reinforcing that conclusion was the ﬂeet of B-29 bombers the United States Air Force had stationed in East Anglia in the British Isles. This strategic move definitely discouraged counter measures because the Russians did not know that no atomic bombs were actually available to arm the bombers. Not only did the airlift maintain West Berliners’ morale, it broadcast a

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 285

When the Soviets abruptly cut off land access to the city of Berlin in 1948, the Western allies responded with a massive airlift of goods through the beleaguered city's Tempelhof Airﬁeld. (Library of Congress)

soul-stirring image around the world. It undermined left-wing sympathies and improved the prospects for an independent West Germany. In the summer of 1949, the Soviets concluded that the negative publicity the airlift gave their regime had turned the blockade into a liability. They reopened limited land-based access, and the showdown over Berlin gave way to other Cold War confrontations. For almost a decade, Berlin remained on the back burner. In 1957, however, the Soviet Union orbited its Sputnik satellite, giving Premier Nikita Khrushchev conﬁdence he could be more demanding. Even while promoting his concept of “peaceful coexistence” between the United States and the Soviet Union, he issued an ultimatum in 1958. He demanded that the Western allies renegotiate the Berlin occupation agreement and turn it into a

free, nonaligned city as Vienna had become three years earlier. If they refused, the Soviet Union would sign a separate peace treaty with its East German satellite, the German Democratic Republic. The implicit threat was that the GDR would then unilaterally take over the whole city with full Soviet backing. President Dwight Eisenhower had no intention of allowing either of those events to occur. Khrushchev visited the United States in 1959, met with the president, and urged him to relent. Nothing concrete came from the talks. Everyone expected Berlin to take center stage at the 1960 summit meeting scheduled for Paris in mid-May, but the U-2 Incident torpedoed it. Just a few days before the conference opened, a Soviet missile shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Russia. Eisenhower refused to offer the

286 | Section 5

abject apology Khrushchev demanded. The Soviet premier therefore delivered a scathing criticism of U.S. policies and then dramatically stormed out of the Paris conference. He apparently concluded he might make more progress discussing Berlin with the man who succeeded Eisenhower in the presidency. The ominous shadow over Berlin was just one of several troubling foreign policy problems John F. Kennedy inherited when he was inaugurated in January 1961. Shortly afterward, he stumbled into the Bay of Pigs ﬁasco in Cuba, an embarrassment that encouraged Khrushchev to press ahead with the postponed summit conference. The resulting meeting in Geneva between the two leaders was tense and ultimately unproductive, however, in part because the new American president proved to be a much tougher negotiator than Khrushchev had anticipated. Frustrated at the failure of his Berlin ultimatum, Khrushchev pursued an alternative strategy. By the summer of 1961, an estimated 3 million East German citizens had escaped to the West through the Berlin portal. They included some of the nation’s most talented and productive citizens, constituting a major drain on the Soviet satellite. On August 13, without prior notiﬁcation, the Soviets began constructing what soon became a solid, concrete block wall separating East Berlin from West Berlin. The wall included posts for sentries with orders to shoot to kill anyone who attempted to cross the wall without ofﬁcial approval. Although the wall effectively reduced the westward population ﬂow to a tiny trickle, it proved embarrassing to both parties. It was an embarrassment that the Soviets had essentially to imprison people to prevent them from leaving. But it

also embarrassed the Western allies because they could do nothing to prevent it from being built. Two years later, President Kennedy made an emotional visit to Berlin where he stood beside the wall and proclaimed enduring U.S. support for freedom. The wall did succeed in relegating Berlin to a minor position in the Cold War for a quarter of a century. By 1989, Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev was rapidly losing his authority and inﬂuence both within and outside the Soviet Union. Protests in Berlin gained momentum, but Gorbachev refused to provide East German chancellor Honecker with military backing. East Berliners broke through the wall on November 9. Within a matter of days, the brooding symbol of East-West division was reduced to rubble, opening the way for the reuniﬁcation of East and West Germany a few months later. Although the United States had no direct responsibility for the demolition of the Berlin Wall, it did represent a major milestone in ending the Cold War. See also: Containment; Marshall Plan References

Miller, Roger G. To Save A City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2000. Schick, Jack M. The Berlin Crisis. 1958–1962. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Tusa, Ann, and John Tusa. The Berlin Airlift. New York: Atheneum, 1988. Zelikow, Philip D., and Condoleezza Rice. Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Brinkmanship Secretary of State John Foster Dulles deﬁned brinkmanship as “The ability to

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 287 get to the verge without getting into the war” (Life, January 16, 1956). Although Dulles’s name is the one most often associated with this strategy, many other leaders have taken their nations to that awesome brink. The true test of one’s ﬁnesse at brinkmanship is the ability to teeter on the edge without falling into the abyss of conﬂict. Brinkmanship became especially dangerous when a war might include the use of nuclear weapons. In 1952, the United States exploded its ﬁrst thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb, and the Soviet Union matched that achievement a little over a year later. Although the very existence of these super weapons made it vital to keep the Cold War cold, they imposed severe limits on the maneuverability of those who hoped to pursue aggressive foreign policies. On at least three occasions President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles engaged in brinkmanship. The ﬁrst occurred when Eisenhower personally traveled to Korea shortly after his election in 1952. He brought with him an implication that the United States might resort to the use of superweapons if an effective armistice in the Korean War could not be negotiated. The second instance was a similar warning to the Chinese communists to temper their support for North Vietnam’s efforts to take over South Vietnam. China also ﬁgured in perhaps the most trivial instance of brinkmanship. The islands of Quemoy and Matsu lie between the Chinese mainland and Formosa, the island where Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek retreated with his followers in 1949. The Nationalists insisted on occupying these tiny dots of land even though they were far closer to communist China than to the country

that became Taiwan. Many believed that the occupation was maintained to provide a staging area for an eventual Nationalist invasion of the mainland. The communist Chinese were understandably annoyed at this provocation. To end the occupation they began shelling Nationalist positions in 1954. In response, the United States signed a more comprehensive defensive pact with Chiang’s government and implied it might use nuclear weapons if the Chinese communists continued their attacks. Such a doomsday threat seems out of proportion to the issues involved, but Dulles took particular pride in having gone to the brink and forcing his adversaries to retreat. Fortunately, none of these confrontations with China produced anywhere near the level of anxiety that arose when the United States and the Soviet Union marched toward the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962. A contributing factor to this confrontation was a persistent U.S. clandestine effort to destabilize or even overthrow the communist government in Cuba. In the wake of its embarrassing failure at the Bay of Pigs, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency concocted a number of schemes, even including plots to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. To support what had become a client state, the Soviet Union expanded its trade and provided military backing for Castro’s regime. It included almost 50,000 troops and a broad array of weaponry and equipment including armored personnel carriers and MIG ﬁghter planes. In the summer of 1962, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev approved a startling escalation in this support: the dispatch of nuclear-tipped missiles and nuclearequipped bombers to Cuba.

288 | Section 5

That decision raised the stakes far beyond adequate strategic support for Cuba. The underlying reason for the move was the Soviet Union’s failure to match the size and ﬁrepower of American intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). These ICBMs had a 5,000mile range, enabling them to reach targets throughout the Soviet Union from United States territory. To offset that advantage, the Soviets decided to station intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMS) in Cuba. Their 1,200 to 2,100mile ranges were sufﬁcient to place the eastern United States effectively under the gun from Cuban launch pads. Preparations for the deployment began in September 1962, and American U-2 spy planes quickly spotted the activity. The Russians tried to rationalize their actions as a counter to similar missiles and bombers the United States had stationed in the territories of NATO allies like Great Britain and Turkey, but President John F. Kennedy simply could not accept the Cuban missile threat on any basis. He had very little time to respond, so he quickly assembled a top-ﬂight team. Prominent members included his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy; Secretary of State Dean Rusk; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; and former ofﬁcials such as Dean Acheson, President Truman’s secretary of state. This group considered alternatives ranging from an all-out invasion of Cuba, an air assault to destroy the launching sites, a direct counterstrike against the Soviet Union, or an embargo. Although the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff favored military action, Kennedy’s crisis team opted for a less confrontational approach. On October 22, he appeared on nationwide televi-

sion to deliver a somber report on the crisis. He reviewed the alternatives, including nuclear war, to resolve the situation, but ended by announcing the imposition of an embargo of Cuba. Because an embargo is technically an act of war, the American Navy was ordered instead to “quarantine” Cuba to prevent the importation of any more Soviet military equipment. Tensions inside the White House and around the world continued to escalate. All U.S. armed forces were put on full alert with the crews of underground missile silos, bombers, and submarines rehearsing procedures for launching their nuclear weapons. On October 24, the president received an encouraging report that two Soviet cargo ships had stopped dead in the water well beyond the quarantine’s 500-mile boundary. Meanwhile all sorts of mixed messages poured in. One American diplomat reported that the Soviets might reverse course if the United States pledged never to invade Cuba. Others suggested removing superannuated Jupiter IRBMs from their Turkish emplacements on the border of the USSR as a bargaining lever to encourage Soviet removal of the Cuban weapons. On October 26, the president received a direct communication from the Russian premier that raised the possibility of compromise. Khrushchev’s rambling note seemed to suggest that he would cancel the installation of a nuclear arsenal if the United States publicly promised not to invade Cuba. The next day, the Soviet government issued a strongly worded ofﬁcial statement that included a demand that the United States remove its missiles from Turkey. Several disconcerting incidents occurred

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 289

PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY’S CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS ADDRESS TO THE NATION October 22, 1962 Good evening, my fellow citizens: This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere. . . . . . . This action also contradicts the repeated assurances of Soviet spokesmen, both publicly and privately delivered, that the arms buildup in Cuba would retain its original defensive character, and that the Soviet Union had no need or desire to station strategic missiles on the territory of any other nation. . . . Neither the United States of America nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small. We no longer live in a world where only the actual ﬁring of weapons represents a sufﬁcient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril. Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a deﬁnite threat to peace. . . . Our policy has been one of patience and restraint, as beﬁts a peaceful and powerful nation which leads a worldwide alliance. We have been determined not to be diverted from our central concerns by mere irritants and fanatics. But now further action is required, and it is under way; and these actions may only be the beginning. We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth; but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced. . . . . . . To halt this offensive buildup a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. This quarantine will be extended, if needed, to other types of cargo and carriers. . . . I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination, and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and to transform the history of man. He has an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of destruction by returning to his government’s own words that it had no need to station missiles outside its own territory, and withdrawing these weapons from Cuba by refraining from any action which will widen or deepen the present crisis, and then by participating in a search for peaceful and permanent solutions. . . . The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are; but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have

290 | Section 5

(Cuban Missile Crisis Address, continued) always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission. Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right; not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved. Source: U.S. Department of State, American Foreign Policy Current Documents, 1962. Washington, DC: GPO, 1966, 399–403.

as well, including the shooting down of an American U-2 spy plane over Cuba, a violation of Soviet airspace by an American ﬁghter, and a Russian submarine commander arming his nuclear weapons. As both nations teetered on the brink, Kennedy decided to ignore the second letter and “accepted” Khrushchev’s offer to stand down and remove the nuclear weapons from Cuba. The implication was that the president was also acceding to the Russian leader’s demand never to invade Cuba. The Soviets acquiesced, started disassembling the missiles and, a few days later, began withdrawing a bomber force they had deployed as well. The crisis ended without either nation falling over the brink. Had the United States achieved its objectives without a major concession? In fact, the Jupiter missiles in Turkey were demobilized shortly afterward, a move many in the administration had been urging for months. That the United States managed to get through the crisis without issuing a formal promise not to invade Cuba seemed signiﬁcant at the time. In the long run, however, the issue is moot, since no such invasion has taken place. Two key bilateral decisions quickly followed the Cuban Missile Crisis. One

was the installation of a so-called hotline between Washington and the Kremlin in acknowledgment of the need for accurate and direct communication between the leaders of the superpowers. In 1963, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to a limited nuclear test ban that ended their detonation of experimental weapons except in underground bunkers. In a broader sense, Kennedy’s brinkmanship had more positive benefits for the United States than for Russia. The president’s reputation as a statesman received a boost both inside the United States and abroad, a welcome reversal of his humiliation over the Bay of Pigs ﬁasco. For Premier Khrushchev the consequences were decidedly negative. He drew severe criticism from his compatriots and was ousted from his leadership position a couple of years later. Fortunately for all, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the last major application of brinkmanship by the United States. See also: Bay of Pigs References

Allison, Graham T., and Philip D. Zelikow. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. 2nd. ed. New York: Longman, 1999.

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 291 Hilsman, Roger. The Cuban Missile Crisis: The Struggle over Policy. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996. Kennedy, Robert F. Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Norton, 1969. Stolper, Thomas E. China, Taiwan, and the Offshore Islands. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985.

Bush Doctrine In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush promulgated a set of policy initiatives that collectively became known as the Bush Doctrine. Applied first against terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, the doctrine was subsequently used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq early in 2003. From the very beginning, some complained that its principles were inconsistent with longestablished American and collective security traditions. As the conﬂict in Iraq persisted inconclusively, the Bush Doctrine became increasingly controversial. Although several elements have been ascribed to the Bush Doctrine, three factors appear fundamental. First is a willingness to act unilaterally to redress international grievances rather than wait for collective action or for the United Nations to sanction military engagement. A second precept justiﬁes preemptive or preventative military action even if the target of that action neither has initiated an attack nor appears ready to do so. Capsulated in the phrase “regime change,” the third element calls for replacing dictatorial or autocratic leaders with democratic governments. The Bush administration proclaimed these precepts as essential for dealing with 21st-century threats to American security. Unlike earlier “conventional”

confrontations, terrorist activities can occur at any time or place without prior warning. And, because terrorist organizations have no defined territorial boundaries or governmental structures, they fall outside the purview of traditional international law and practices. The Bush Doctrine therefore proposed using nontraditional methods for dealing with nontraditional international threats. An early formal statement of the Bush Doctrine appeared in a 2002 national security strategy report. At that point, the administration was engaged in a concerted effort to obtain international authorization and support for extending its war on terror beyond Afghanistan. The focus of that effort was Saddam Hussein, the dictatorial leader of Iraq. His regime relied on the Ba’ath Party, which was almost exclusively populated by Iraqi Muslims belonging to the Sunni Sect. Because Sunnis constituted a minority of Iraq’s population, Hussein’s rule was even harsher than it might otherwise have been. The leader had to contend with opposition both from the much larger Shiite population as well as from a substantial Kurdish element, neither of which would willingly have acquiesced to a less dictatorial Sunni overlordship. President George W. Bush had a personal reason for wanting to bring down the Iraqi leader. Conservatives had harshly criticized his father, President George H. W. Bush, for leaving Saddam Hussein in power at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Encouraged by advisors such as Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the younger Bush was determined to make a case for American intervention. Among the many justiﬁcations advanced was an implication that Saddam Hussein bore some responsibility for the Al Qaeda

292 | Section 5

attack on New York’s World Trade Center. This charge lacked validity since the Iraqi leader had always been hostile to Al Qaeda and none of the terrorists had ties to Iraq. A more persuasive claim was that Saddam Hussein’s armed forces had stockpiled “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs), including biological and chemical weapons. Moreover, the Bush administration maintained that Iraq was on the verge of creating, or might already possess, nuclear weapons. Administration ofﬁcials including Secretary of State Colin Powell repeatedly warned that Iraq’s WMDs posed a major threat not only to its neighbors, but to the world as a whole. The possibility of an attack by Iraqi WMDs allowed President Bush to rationalize a preemptive U.S. invasion of the country. Yet another motive lay behind the decision to invade Iraq. The Bush administration convinced itself that Saddam Hussein’s regime was so unpopular that the Iraqi population would joyfully welcome U.S. intervention. Once the Ba’ath Party had been ousted from power, the Americans expected Iraq to become a capitalist, democratic state. As such, it could serve as a model for other Arab peoples in the region, one that might convince other oppressed people to overthrow their own autocratic leaders. The regime change proposed for Iraq could, therefore, be the ﬁrst step in the widespread adoption of American-style democracy. To that extent, the Bush Doctrine harked back to the traditional American democratic mission policy. By early 2003, the Bush administration was ready to implement two of the core precepts of the Bush Doctrine: a preemptive war and a commitment to regime change in favor of democracy.

Although the doctrine also included a willingness to go it alone, the administration hoped to round up allies and gain United Nation approval of its plans. Great Britain was the only major nation to commit resources to what Bush called “the coalition of the willing.” Several other countries, including some newly admitted NATO members from Eastern Europe, dedicated small contingents. The United States ran into trouble at the United Nations. The United States based its case on charges that Iraq had not complied with UN resolutions dating back to the Gulf War requiring the destruction of all WMDs. Meanwhile, the UN weapons inspection teams conducting repeated visits to Iraq found no evidence of current stockpiles. President Bush impatiently ordered an invasion of Iraq anyway on March 20, 2003. Faced with this fait accompli, the UN Security Council two days later approved a resolution recognizing the United States, Great Britain, and the other coalition members as legitimate occupying forces in Iraq. That mandate was ultimately extended through the end of 2008. The pending expiration of the UN authorization forced the Bush administration and the Iraqi government to work toward a bilateral agreement in the fall of 2008 to allow American troops to remain in place. The invasion began very well. Iraq’s defenses quickly crumpled in the face of the better-equipped coalition forces. Fortunately, they encountered no WMDs. Indeed, none have ever been discovered. On May 1, President Bush stood before a banner on a U.S. aircraft carrier that proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” He was careful to disassociate himself from such a deﬁnitive assertion, a prudent decision given that the conﬂict persisted year after year.

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 293

President George W. Bush implemented the Bush Doctrine by ordering the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. On May 1, he announced the end of major ﬁghting on board the U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, but the war actually intensiﬁed after this announcement. (AFP Photo/Stephen Jaffe)

What went wrong? The administration clearly underestimated the deep hostility among the three major Iraqi groups: Sunnis, Shiites, and, in the northwestern portion of the country, Kurds. Bloody sectarian struggles persisted long after Saddam Hussein was deposed. Contributing to the instability were two decisions American administrators made shortly after they occupied Baghdad. One was to demobilize and dismiss the remaining units of Iraq’s armed forces, thus eliminating an organization that might have been able to counter the ensuing internal strife. The other blunder was to oust all Ba’athists from positions in the governing structure. In doing so, the United States alienated the Sunni faction and denied positions to people with more relevant administrative experience than anyone else in the country.

After many months of turmoil, elections produced a successor government headed by Nouri al Maliki, a Shiite. The parliament, made up of contending Shiites, Sunni, and Kurds, struggled for years trying to reach consensus on key issues. Independent militias complicated any attempt to provide basic security within Iraq. Meanwhile, the country was repeatedly rocked by the unpredictable actions of disruptive individuals and groups, some of them willing to use suicide bombs to destroy tranquility. As late as 2008, the United States was maintaining nearly 150,000 troops in Iraq, a commitment that strained the American military establishment to the extreme. Despite the presence of this substantial occupying force, Iraq remained extraordinarily tense with numerous unresolved problems.

294 | Section 5

As a full-dress application of the Bush Doctrine, the war in Iraq clearly illustrated its inherent dangers and contradictions. Instead of lessening the threat of global terrorism, the invasion appears to have stimulated greater instability and anti-Americanism than existed before the conﬂict. Any hope that a responsible democratic government would emerge from the ashes of the war has long since vanished. Along the way, the American penchant for going it alone has alienated many former allies. Presumably, a successor administration will significantly modify or abandon the tenets of the Bush Doctrine. See also: Gulf War References

Caleche, Lamont. Crusading Realism: The Bush Doctrine and American Core Values after 9/11. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008. Dolan, Chris J. In War We Trust: The Bush Doctrine and the Pursuit of Just War. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Jervis, Robert. American Foreign Policy in a New Era. New York: Routledge, 2005. Kaufman, Robert Gordon. In Defense of the Bush Doctrine. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008.

Cambodia No event during the long involvement of the United States in Vietnam crystallized public opposition more dramatically than did the 1970 Cambodian Incursion. Several demonstrators were killed on college campuses when hundreds of thousands staged protests. Although President Richard Nixon had authorized the incursion to demonstrate American resolve, it was widely interpreted as yet another futile step in a failed policy. Negative reactions to the incursion

substantially altered U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. France had colonized the kingdom of Cambodia in the 19th century, but French control ended in the early 1950s. As U.S. intervention in Vietnam escalated in the 1960s, Cambodia’s royal government under Prince Norodom Sihanouk pursued a neutralist strategy to avoid being drawn into the conﬂict next door. But Sihanouk was unable to prevent North Vietnamese soldiers from establishing a network of supply lines in the jungle just inside the borders of Cambodia and Laos. This amorphous conduit became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail after North Vietnam’s leader. It facilitated the movement of troops and supplies directly to South Vietnam, bypassing the heavily fortiﬁed demilitarized zone that divided north from south. In late 1969, President Nixon approved U.S. Air Force bombing missions across the Vietnamese border aimed at destroying or interdicting trafﬁc along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Over 3,600 bombing runs took place, although ofﬁcial reports were forged or altered to conceal the true targets. But the aerial assault failed to halt the largely foot and bicycle trafﬁc along the trail’s overgrown pathways. Nixon considered the ﬂow of resources from the north as a key factor undermining his Vietnamization policy of replacing American combat troops with well-trained and equipped elements of the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN). When a pro-American general named Lon Nol ousted Sihanouk from power in Cambodia, the Nixon administration quickly responded to his appeals for assistance. It had managed to conceal the high-level bombing campaign from the press and the public but realized it

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 295 could not so easily bury the story of a major ground action. The president therefore made a nationally televised announcement of a joint U.S. and ARVN incursion from South Vietnam into eastern Cambodia on April 30, 1970. Its goal was the same as that of the unsuccessful bombing campaign: to close the Ho Chi Minh Trail and halt the ﬂow of men and materiel from the north. Despite the administration’s optimistic reports, trafﬁc along the network of trails recovered quickly after the troops withdrew on June 24th. Worse yet, the American action stimulated support within Cambodia for the Khmer Rouge, a communist revolutionary group that ultimately supplanted Lon Nol’s regime. The domestic reaction in the United States had more immediate effects. The Vietnamization policy and the draft lottery the Nixon administration had introduced had caused a signiﬁcant drop in the level of opposition to the war. The Cambodian Incursion changed all that. Hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life participated in demonstrations against what they perceived to be a major expansion of a very unpopular war. Antiwar protests had swept college campuses earlier, and they burst forth again immediately after the president’s announcement. On May 4th, National Guard troops summoned to control a demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio ﬁred into the crowd, killing four and wounding nine other people. A couple of weeks later, police gunﬁre killed two student demonstrators at Jackson State College in Mississippi. These civilian deaths only intensiﬁed public outrage. Congress responded with legislation that explicitly prohibited American combat in Cambodia. It also voted to rescind the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution that

President Lyndon Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, had used to justify their continuing involvement in the Vietnam War. Nixon chose to ignore this rebuff, however, claiming he had a responsibility as commander in chief to protect American troops wherever they were including Vietnam. In fact, Nixon realized his Cambodian adventurism had exposed a boundary to American patience that even he could never again cross. In February 1971, therefore, he issued strict orders that prohibited American ground troops from participating when the ARVN staged another cross-border raid, this one into Laos, the nation lying north of Cambodia. The Laos incursion was designed to showcase the success of the Vietnamization policy. But the poorly equipped, ill-trained, and lowmorale South Vietnamese units suffered an appalling 50 percent casualty rate before withdrawing and leaving the Ho Chi Minh Trail barely affected. In the United States, demonstrations against the invasion of Laos and the administration’s war policy in general broke out once again, although they were less violent and widespread than those that had followed the Cambodian Incursion. Nevertheless, President Nixon now knew he had to reduce American involvement in Southeast Asia substantially if he hoped to win reelection in 1972. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger redoubled his efforts to work out a settlement with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho. Although Kissinger publicly claimed that “peace was at hand” in October, not until after Nixon was safely reelected was the Paris peace agreement ﬁnalized. The American public had largely forgotten about Cambodia when that country once again captured the headlines

296 | Section 5

in the summer of 1975. The Khmer Rouge had established a repressive and ruthless government in the country they now called Kampuchea. Meanwhile, U.S. president Gerald Ford felt a sense of humiliation over the fact that the last Americans had been forced out of South Vietnam in March 1975. He responded rashly to news that Kampuchean naval vessels had captured an American freighter, the Mayaguez, sailing in international waters just off the country’s south coast. Ford authorized an almost comic-opera countermove in which 41 American servicemen lost their lives assaulting an island where the captured freighter’s crew were reportedly being held. The Kampuchean authorities later released both the ship and its crew. The United States relationship with Cambodia has remained strained ever since, even though a coalition of Vietnamese and Cambodian troops deposed the Khmer Rouge in 1979. In addition, the violent domestic response to the Cambodian Incursion in 1970 remains an indelible marker of the degree of public disillusionment with U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. See also: Kissinger, Henry; Tet References

Kimball, Jeffrey. Nixon’s Vietnam War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. Small, Melvin. Johnson, Nixon and the Doves. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Wells, Tom. The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Containment In 1947, the administration of President Harry S Truman adopted a policy known

as containment. Its objective was to prevent the spread of communism from the Soviet Union to its neighbors and beyond. Steps including the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and ultimately the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were taken with the goal of containing Soviet inﬂuence within the limits it had reached during and immediately after World War II. Some historians consider the containment policy a provocative step that ignited the Cold War. Although it did provide a rationalization for an aggressive American foreign policy, others see containment as a logical reaction to Soviet aggrandizement. During the closing months of World War II, Red Army forces numbering in the millions had pushed westward, driving out Germany’s occupying troops and establishing or reestablishing Soviet authority in the lands they “liberated.” The postwar political conﬁguration of Europe reﬂected this realignment. For example, the area that had constituted the prewar Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania was deﬁnitively returned to its historic subservience to Russian authority. The three prewar independent nations were transformed into Soviet Socialist Republics within an expanded USSR. Few in the West held out any hope that this restoration of Russian dominance could be reversed. Even more disheartening was Soviet success in installing “friendly” governments in areas that had more signiﬁcant historical claims to independence. In Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other Eastern European regions, the presence of the Red Army ensured that the governments within those areas were transformed into communist-dominated

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 297 organizations. Although these countries were not directly incorporated into the USSR like the Baltic republics, they were clearly subject to directives from the Kremlin and functioned as satellites of the Soviet Union. These developments discouraged American leaders, especially as the Declaration of Liberated Europe, signed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, had called for self-determination. Even more frightening was the prospect that additional territory might soon fall under communist control, areas like Greece and Turkey in the south and Czechoslovakia, and even Italy and France, in the west. Implementation of the containment policy was designed to prevent such expansion of Soviet inﬂuence. The architect of the policy was career foreign service ofﬁcer George F. Kennan. He had studied the Soviet Union intensively in the 1920s and later served in increasingly important diplomatic posts in Moscow. In January 1947, Kennan sent his State Department superiors what became known as the “Long Telegram” from Moscow. With ofﬁcial encouragement, Kennan then publicized his views in an article titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” under the pseudonym “X” that appeared in the June issue of Foreign Relations. The thinly disguised attempt at anonymity was designed to avoid restrictions on public ofﬁcials commenting independently on policy matters. The ruse failed almost immediately, however, when a journalist revealed the identity of Mr. X. Both the Long Telegram and the “X” article reviewed the historical sources of Soviet power and conduct, recalling among other factors the tradition of Russian territorial expansionism that dated back to the czars. Kennan saw the

current extension of Russia’s political reach far beyond the borders of the USSR as a natural, even inevitable, phenomenon. Because it was unlikely to be limited from within, Kennan argued, the United States and its Western allies must take external steps to contain Soviet expansionism. The core of Kennan’s strategy was his belief that “Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points” (Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” 575). The containment policy Kennan proposed was, therefore, a ﬂexible one that would require constant readjustment and rethinking on the part of those who would implement it. The initial applications of the containment policy ﬁt this dynamic model. In response to Kennan’s long telegram and advice of others both inside and outside the administration, President Truman asked Congress to approve funds for military assistance to Greece and Turkey. Both were under internal and external communist pressures that threatened to draw them into the Soviet orbit. The 1947 Truman Doctrine proclaimed that the United States had a responsibility to protect “free peoples” from such threats. Congress quickly approved the proposed aid, and Greece and Turkey used it to remain independent of the Soviet Union’s inﬂuence. Another example of a ﬂexible response was the Marshall Plan, announced just prior to the publication of the “X” article. Here the perceived threat was economic. War-torn nations like France, Italy, and Great Britain were mired in deep depressions by the summer of

298 | Section 5

1947, economic crises that strengthened left wing socialist and communist advocates in those countries. The American decision to supply billions of dollars in direct ﬁnancial aid to strengthen these struggling economies helped them recover and ultimately avoid communist takeover. By 1949, the military threat to Western Europe appeared strong enough to convince the United States to abandon a century and a half of neutrality. It not only joined but led the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It brought the military forces of 12 member nations under a common command, directed at preventing, by force if necessary, the further expansion of Soviet inﬂuence in Europe. As time passed, serious questions arose about the wisdom of the containment policy. Some critics claimed containment was ineffective because it was primarily reactive, doing nothing to reverse or roll back Russian inﬂuence where it already prevailed. Even more disconcerting was the policy’s apparent failure to completely contain communism, the ideological element that had animated American hostility to Soviet expansion. In 1949, Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong succeeded in capturing control of the most populous nation in the world. Ignoring the clear doctrinal and geopolitical differences between China and the USSR, many Americans saw this change as a frightening expansion of the Soviet sphere, the very phenomenon containment was supposed to prevent. By 1952, containment had become so discredited that the Republican Party portrayed it as one of three major failures of the Democratic administrations, along with the fall of China and the unresolved conﬂict in Korea. Promising to ﬁnd a

substitute for containment, Dwight Eisenhower easily won election on the Republican ticket that year. As it turned out, the alternatives that emerged, like brinkmanship and massive retaliation, were no more effective than containment in reducing U.S.–Soviet hostility. Despite the Eisenhower administration’s avoidance of the term, it remained dedicated to the objective the containment policy had pursued: limiting the spread of Soviet inﬂuence anywhere in the world. See also: Marshall Plan; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Truman Doctrine References

Harlow, Giles D., and George C. Maerz, eds. Measures Short of War: The George F. Kennan Lectures at the National War College, 1946–1947. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1991. Kennan, George F. (“X”). “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Foreign Affairs. 25 (1947): 566–582. Rose, Lisle A. The Cold War Comes of Main Street. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999. Woods, Randall B., and Howard Jones. Dawning of the Cold War: The United States’ Quest for Order. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.

Détente Like many diplomatic terms, détente is a French word, and it refers to a relaxation of tensions. President Richard Nixon’s national security advisor and later secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, popularized the policy of détente. Among other beneﬁts, he hoped it would help the United States extricate itself from the Vietnam War. For a time, it appeared that détente would supplant the older containment policy, but it failed to produce the global peace Kissinger anticipated.

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 299 When Nixon and Kissinger took charge in Washington in 1969, the United States was deeply mired in a seemingly endless conﬂict in Vietnam. The new team believed that Russian and Chinese support for North Vietnam was a key factor in prolonging the war. If they could lessen or even halt that support, Ho Chi Minh’s government might be more likely to agree to a negotiated settlement, one that would enable Nixon to avoid having to acknowledge defeat. The potential beneﬁts of a policy of détente ranged far beyond Southeast Asia. The Nixon administration deﬁned five major centers of international power: the United States, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Japan, and the rapidly integrating economic and political community in Western Europe. An astute student of history, Kissinger viewed favorably the balance of power system the Congress of Vienna had established in 1815 at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. With minor exceptions, that arrangement had assured nearly a century of world peace. If he could craft a new international balance of power structure in the 1970s, Kissinger believed it might have similar long-term positive consequences. The United States maintained normal if not always friendly diplomatic relations with three of the other four power blocs. China was the exception. The U.S. government refused even to recognize the People’s Republic that communist leader Mao Zedong had established in 1949 on the Chinese mainland. Instead, succeeding administrations in Washington had consistently claimed that the Nationalist Chinese regime, conﬁned to Taiwan after 1949, was the legitimate government of China. No American political leader had been

more outspoken in opposing the recognition of Mao’s ascendancy than Richard Nixon. Once he became president, Nixon modiﬁed his position. He recognized that any friendly ties that might once have existed between China and the Soviet Union had become badly frayed. The two superpowers shared a long common border, and each maintained substantial armed forces along it. As President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, had proposed much earlier, Nixon and Kissinger now decided they might proﬁtably play one side off against the other. Kissinger took the lead in contacting communist China. He secretly visited Beijing in 1971 and held extended conversations with Zhou Enlai, Mao’s second in command. The Chinese appeared interested in improving relations with the United States, so Kissinger brought home an invitation for the president himself to visit. Nixon’s dramatic tour in February 1972 actually did little more than open the door slightly to allow for future interactions. These interactions included the United States dropping its opposition to UN membership for the People’s Republic, opening limited trade opportunities, and, finally, in 1979, establishing full diplomatic relations with the government in Beijing. Nixon’s China trip was the pinnacle of détente if for no other reason than it promoted improved American relations with the Soviet Union. Unsure what Nixon had promised Mao, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev immediately invited the American president to come to Moscow for a summit meeting. Aware of how well his globe-trotting was playing at home during an election year, Nixon headed for Moscow in May 1972.

300 | Section 5

The most dramatic success of President Richard Nixon's détente policy occurred when he ﬂew to Beijing to meet with Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong in 1972. (National Archives)

The timing was far from auspicious. The United States had just stepped up major military action against North Vietnam, including the bombing and mining of Haiphong Harbor. The assault sunk four Russian cargo ships, causing the Nixon administration to worry that Moscow might rescind its invitation. But Brezhnev apparently considered direct talks with the American leader too important to cancel. Unlike the largely ceremonial encounter in China, the Moscow Summit produced concrete diplomatic agreements. Most important was the signing of a Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT) that had been under negotiation for some time. The major focus of SALT-1, as it

came to be called, was the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defensive systems both super powers had under development. Although no one was certain what level of protection an ABM system could provide, if it did succeed it could enable a devastating “second strike.” A nation rash enough to initiate a nuclear exchange might well suffer even more horrendous damage in a second round. Cost was also a major drawback. The two rivals were engaged in a rapidly escalating weapons buildup neither could really afford. Moreover, fear that the enemy might be able to create an effective ABM system stimulated additional pressure for weapons development. The United States, for example, was already

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 301 moving toward replacing its single-strike nuclear arsenal with Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs). These payloads might contain a dozen or more warheads, each capable of being aimed at a different target. Even though Congress speedily ratiﬁed SALT-1, it did little to reduce costs because the rival nations continued to add new weapons and warheads to their stockpiles. Fortunately, the fact that the Cold War’s chief adversaries were holding serious talks had other beneﬁts. Within a of couple years, both sides came to accept a divided Germany. The Soviet Union formally recognized West Germany and the United States and its allies did the same for the German Democratic Republic, which remained a Soviet satellite. In this case at least, détente did clear the air and reduce East-West tensions. The Nixon-Kissinger approach proved less effective in other areas. Although Soviet and Chinese support for North Vietnam did decline after Nixon’s overseas visits, nothing weakened Ho Chi Minh’s resolve to control of all of Vietnam. With the 1972 election day looming, the Nixon administration made a major concession to move the peace negotiations forward: it dropped its demand that all North Vietnamese troops be withdrawn from the South. Early in 1973, Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, signed an agreement that resulted in the withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops by the end of March. Equally disappointing to its architects, the détente policy did little to ease tensions in other parts of the world. Nationalism and ancient hostilities continued to be far more important than great-power posturing in the Middle East and Africa. For example, the internal dynamics of the

Arab-Israeli confrontation set off the socalled Yom Kippur War in 1973, and no amount of American politicking in Moscow or Beijing could forestall it. That was only one factor in reducing the appeal of the Nixon-Kissinger policy. Democratic President Jimmy Carter emphasized human rights to the detriment of realpolitik approaches like détente. Another grueling round of strategic arms limitations talks had produced a more comprehensive set of agreements called SALT-2. But when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Carter halted action on SALT-2 and took other steps designed to “punish” Russia. With the election of Republican Ronald Reagan as president in 1981, the United States moved further away from détente. It had never been popular with many of the Republican Party’s conservatives who favored a more confrontational attitude, one that recalled the discredited containment approach. Reagan basically abandoned détente in favor of massive increases in the number of ships in the navy, continuing deployment of nuclear warheads, and advocacy of a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The goal of the SDI was to develop a spacebased system for intercepting enemy missiles, an aim that seemed quite contrary to the spirit of the ABM treaty. By the end of Reagan’s second term the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, an outcome his political backers found far more gratifying than any beneﬁts détente had brought. See also: Cambodia; Massive Retaliation; Shuttle Diplomacy References

Ashton, S. R. In Search of Détente: The Politics of East-West Relations since 1945. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

302 | Section 5 Goldman, Marshall I. Détente and Dollars: Doing Business with the Soviets. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Isaacson, Walter. Kissinger: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Thornton, Richard C. The Nixon-Kissinger Years Reshaping America’s Foreign Policy. New York: Paragon House, 1989.

Free Trade In the early 1990s, the United States, Canada, and Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It permitted citizens of the signatory countries to sell goods anywhere within the three-nation region without paying customs duties. The regional trade agreement is part of a broader framework that includes the World Trade Organization (WTO). Both NAFTA and the WTO represent remarkable deviations from the United States’ traditional support of protectionism and economic isolationism. The ﬁrst major nation to promote free trade on a large scale was Great Britain in the mid-19th century. Activists such as John Bright and Richard Cobden insisted that Great Britain’s rapidly industrializing economy would beneﬁt from unlimited trade with other nations. It could, for example, stimulate the ﬂow of cheaper agricultural imports from trading partners like the United States and, presumably, encourage them to reduce their levies on industrial products exported from the British Isles. Two natural disasters in the late 1840s, the Irish potato blight and a ﬂood that destroyed the wheat crop, made gaining access to inexpensive overseas foodstuffs all the more pressing. In 1849, Parliament canceled the import duties on grain as part of a broader adoption of free trade on other goods.

During the same period, the concept of freer trade gained support in the United States, especially among Democrats. The newly formed Republican Party soon became a stalwart supporter of high tariffs ostensibly designed to protect American producers from foreign competition. Republicans dominated the federal government with few exceptions right through the outbreak of the Great Depression in 1930. As international trade stagnated, many came to believe nationalistic tariff barriers were a primary cause for the deterioration. In 1934, Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress for, and received, authority to negotiate reciprocal trade agreements that could lower existing protective tariff rates by as much as 50 percent. The process continued through World War II, culminating in the creation of a multilateral arrangement called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Subsequent rounds of negotiations continued to reduce trade barriers around the world. The GATT structure allowed for regional trade arrangements like the Common Market in Europe. Over time, the Common Market evolved into a much broader organization, the European Union (EU), which encompassed political as well as economic collaboration among its member states. It even developed an international monetary system based on the Euro, which most members of the EU agreed to use instead of their national currencies. Growing prosperity in Europe encouraged other countries to form similar regional trade arrangements. On the other side of the Atlantic, American president George H. W. Bush, Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, and Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari championed

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 303 the concept of a regional free trade zone. Each anticipated beneﬁts for his own country. For example, Americans would be able to export agricultural surpluses to Mexico tax-free, Canadians would beneﬁt from lower prices for American manufactured items like automobiles, and Mexico anticipated higher wages for industrial workers producing goods attractive to their northern neighbors. Linking the three nations together economically would create a huge economic bloc that could better compete with the EU and other nations around the world. The three leaders signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992. For a time, its ratification remained in doubt because Democrat Bill Clinton defeated Republican George Bush’s reelection bid. Clinton decided to move ahead, however, and lobbied Congress to approve the agreement even though it did not have universal support. The House eventually approved NAFTA with a 234–200 vote, and the Senate did the same by a tally of 61–38. The nation’s ﬁrst comprehensive free trade program took effect on January 1, 1994. Paralleling this development was a major restructuring of GATT. Over the years, the multinational trade organization had continued to add members and renegotiate tariff rates, almost always to lower levels. In addition to resetting tariffs, the so-called Uruguay Round of negotiations (1986–1994) generated a call for a more comprehensive entity. The World Trade Organization became a reality on January 1, 1995. As a successor to GATT, the WTO continues to sponsor negotiations leading to the modiﬁcation or elimination of trade barriers. By the early 21st century,

the average tariff rate for all commodities had dropped to around four percent. Although short of unlimited free trade, it is a vast reduction of 19th-century tariffs that could exceed 100 percent on some items. In addition to dealing with trade in commodities, the WTO assumed responsibility for two other aspects of international commerce: services and intellectual property. As with commodities, its goal is to promote exchanges that do not disadvantage any member nation or its people. By 2008, the WTO had 153 active members. A relatively recent addition was the People’s Republic of China. Leading nations remaining outside the WTO are the Russian Federation, Iran, and Iraq. The WTO operates by consensus. Every two years, the ﬁnance ministers of each nation meet to resolve overarching issues. To handle more routine matters, every member names a delegation headed by an ambassador. Although talks sometimes take place among small groups, no changes can be imposed on a member state without its agreement. This consensus model protects individual nations from exploitation, but it inevitably limits the scope of the policies approved. Both NAFTA and the WTO have many critics in the United States. Some claim that free trade with Canada and Mexico has facilitated the export of jobs. Along the U.S. Mexican border, NAFTA has encouraged the establishment of maguiladoras, factories producing inexpensive products for the American market. These often import raw materials from the United States and then export ﬁnished products. More recently, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) generated even more opposition, but it ﬁnally won congressional

304 | Section 5

approval by a very narrow margin in the summer of 2008. The WTO is also seen as making it more attractive for American companies to rely on offshore factories and facilities that increase U.S. unemployment. It draws particular criticism for creating a ﬂood of imports from China and other countries with much lower wage levels than American workers require. Some see free trade and the reduced global tariff structure as major contributors to the substantial negative trade balance the United States has generated in recent years. It appears highly unlikely, however, that the world will ever retreat to the sort of nationalistic protectionism the United States had stubbornly pursued into the 1930s. See also: GATT; Protectionism References

Colin, Theodore H. Governing Global Trade: International Institutions in Conﬂict and Convergence. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. Dunkley, Graham. The Free Trade Adventure. New York: Zed Books, 2001. Zeiler, Thomas W. Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

GATT The signing of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) at Geneva in 1948 represented a major step toward easing restrictions on international trade. Its extensive addendum listed speciﬁc tariff rates for the dozens of nations that had participated in the negotiations. It also marked the ﬁrst time the United States had approved a comprehensive multinational trade agreement. One remarkable aspect of GATT was how far it deviated from traditional

American trade policies. The United States had been one of the world’s most dedicated advocates of protectionism right through the 1920s. Although Congress occasionally lowered tariff rates on speciﬁc commodities or products, U.S. import duties generally remained high. The 19th-century justiﬁcation that domestic producers needed the “protection” of high customs duties to discourage imports had long since lost its credibility. Although few Americans favored unfettered free trade, many realized that rigid protectionism hurt both importers and exporters. As in most economic areas, the Great Depression forced a major rethinking of trade policy. The first, knee-jerk response was the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. It generally raised rather than lowered tariff levels, harking back to the traditional belief that the U.S. economy needed protection from cheap imports. In conjunction with similar defensive moves abroad, the U.S. policy intensiﬁed the economic crisis by contributing to a precipitous decline in international trade. Recognizing that Congress would balk at undertaking a complete rewrite of the tariff structure, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed an alternative. He requested authority for representatives of the executive branch to negotiate mutually beneﬁcial rate reductions directly with overseas trading partners. The 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act did just that. Secretary of State Cordell Hull immediately opened bilateral negotiations with dozens of other countries. The goal was for each side to reduce its own tariff levels in return for corresponding concessions from the other. By the end of the decade, a large number of bilateral reciprocal trade agreements had been signed, lowering

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 305 taxes on 40 percent of American imports by up to one-half of their Smoot-Hawley levels. These two-way concessions had broader impact because the United States followed the principal supplier approach. That meant that the key bilateral agreement on a particular product was negotiated with the nation supplying the largest percentage of imports of that product. Perhaps even more important than the principal supplier element was the operation of most-favored-nation provisions in the treaty structure. Any nation with such an agreement was obligated to extend the same trade concessions it granted one nation to all others. Therefore, the most favorable treatment any nation granted on a particular commodity immediately applied to any other countries with most-favored-nation clauses in their trade agreements. The operation of this system created a more uniform international trade structure. It was only a short step from that piecemeal approach to the more comprehensive and coordinated GATT system. The United States emerged from World War II as an enthusiastic proponent of international organizations. Either alongside, or as an integral part of, the United Nations structure, the American government participated in efforts to promote global understanding and progress. This desire became even more pressing when the Cold War dawned, dividing East and West into rival political and economic systems. In part to strengthen the noncommunist bloc, President Harry S Truman requested authorization to further reduce U.S. tariff rates. Congress approved another round of up to 50 percent in reciprocal reductions to then current tariff rates. This time, however, the goal

was a general, multinational agreement that would cement ties among the socalled free world nations. Dozens of nations sent negotiating teams to Geneva. Although the goal was a common document, virtually all discussions of speciﬁc items followed the bilateral approach the United States had used before the war. Here again, the principal supplier model prevailed, ensuring that the most important trading partners in a particular area would be comfortable with the results. By 1948, this frenetic round of discussions had produced agreements on customs duties for 47,000 items. The participating nations then signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and appended the list of agreements to it. Everyone seemed to beneﬁt from the new system, so Congress extended the president’s negotiating authority a couple of times. By 1952, however, conservative Republican majorities controlled both houses of Congress and, like their 19th-century predecessors, they were leery of further reductions. Although additional agreements were hammered out during the Eisenhower administration, they were far less extensive than those of the previous decade. When John F. Kennedy became president, he managed to convince slim Democratic margins in both houses of Congress to authorize a new set of negotiations. The so-called Kennedy Round, begun in earnest only after his death, reinforced the multinational approach and further facilitated trade. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, American politicians and businessmen complained that these trade concessions might be detrimental to American producers. A number of restrictions on trade negotiations were proposed and many implemented,

306 | Section 5

all with the classic justiﬁcation that they would protect domestic industries. Even so, progress seemed unstoppable. After the Cold War ended, the United States was willing to open the trade system to an ever broader clientele. GATT gave way to the World Trade Organization (WTO), which added new members and continued the process of lowering trade barriers around the world. At almost the same time, the United States even went so far as to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that essentially eliminated all tariff barriers between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Many Americans remain convinced that NAFTA was a step too far, and politicians have had to carefully choreograph their positions on international trade policy. It seems unlikely, however, that the United States will ever again retreat behind protectionist redoubts. To that extent, GATT was a major turning point in the history of international commerce. See also: Free Trade; Protectionism References

Dobson, John M. Two Centuries of Tariffs: The Background and Emergence of the United States International Trade Commission. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1976. Ilgen, Thomas L. Autonomy and Interdependence: U.S.-Western European Monetary and Trade Relations, 1958–1984. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985. Zeiler, Thomas W. Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Gulf War Iraq’s unexpected invasion of neighboring Kuwait in 1990 provoked a remarkable global response. President George

H. W. Bush rallied international public support and assembled a multinational military force to deal with the aggression at the head of the Persian Gulf. The ensuing counterattack restored pride in American military prowess, but the longterm consequences of the Gulf War proved disappointing. Several motives underlay Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s decision to order his soldiers to invade Kuwait. For example, he claimed the area had once been a province of Iraq, although administrative boundaries within the Ottoman Empire had never anticipated the rise of modern nation-states. The takeover was designed to “restore” greater Iraqi access to the Gulf. Gaining control of Kuwait’s enormous petroleum reserves was doubtless a strong motivating factor as well. It was especially so for Hussein because Kuwait’s output had helped ﬂood the global market, undercutting world oil prices and correspondingly reducing the value of Iraq’s own oil exports. Not incidentally, Hussein desperately needed money in the wake of his costly, six-year war against Iran. Tapping Kuwait’s resources could generate much-needed funds. Saddam Hussein also apparently believed his bold action would elevate his stature as a leader in the Middle East, a prospect that troubled many Arabs in the region. In addition to occupying Kuwait, substantial Iraqi forces were deployed along the Iraqi-Saudi border. If Hussein’s ambitions remained unchecked, he might be tempted to expand south into the Arabian Peninsula. The Saudi government had long maintained friendly ties to the United States, so it naturally turned to the U.S. government for assistance. President Bush did not respond rashly or unilaterally. When the American

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 307 delegation raised the issue at the United Nations, they found widespread support. Even the Soviet Union, a former backer of Saddam Hussein’s regime, was unwilling to condone an unprovoked attack on a neighboring nation. Taking full advantage of the ending of the Cold War, the Bush administration obtained solid support for a UN resolution demanding that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait. The international body also imposed a comprehensive embargo that reduced Iraqi imports and exports to a trickle. Equally important was the formation of a U.S.–led coalition that ultimately included nearly 50 nations willing to participate in a counterattack. As in the Korean War, American ofﬁcers occupied the top command positions in the international force, and the United States eventually dispatched half a million troops to the region. Coalition partners sent another 200,000. Their ﬁrst move was Operation Desert Shield, the deployment of some 200,000 troops in northern Saudi Arabia to prevent any further Iraqi expansion. The United Nations set January 15, 1991, as the deadline for Iraqi withdrawal. The next day, General Colin Powell, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, initiated a massive air assault code-named Operation Desert Storm. Bombs and rockets rained down on targets in both Kuwait and Iraq for the next ﬁve weeks. The Iraqi government refused to retreat, however, and Saddam Hussein bragged that his soldiers were prepared for the “mother of all battles” should the coalition be so foolhardy as to stage a ground assault. On February 23, U.S. General Norman Schwarzkopf ordered a massive invasion anyway, sending hundreds of thousands of coalition troops into

Kuwait and eastern Iraq. Believing that Saddam Hussein’s military had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons, the invading force took extensive precautions. The most surprising development, however, was how quickly and completely the Iraqi defenders gave way. They did manage to set hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells on ﬁre and wreak extensive damage on other facilities before ﬂeeing toward Baghdad. Less than 100 hours after the assault began, Iraq agreed to a UN-brokered cease-ﬁre. More than 25,000 Iraqis died in combat compared to just 148 Americans killed. A large percentage of the international force did come into contact with poisonous sarin gas, however, and that exposure continued to affect tens of thousands of soldiers long after the ﬁghting ended. The use of such a weapon was just one of a number of highly criticized aspects of the Iraqi defense. For example, Iraq launched Scud missiles into Israel, hoping to provoke a response that would galvanize pan-Arab support for Iraq. The Bush administration worked hard to hold the coalition together and discourage any reactions that might broaden the scope of the conﬂict. The dramatic and speedy victory in the Gulf War momentarily pushed the president’s approval ratings to unprecedented heights. Very quickly, however, questions arose over his decision to suspend the assault rather than drive all the way to Baghdad and depose Saddam Hussein. The president had chosen to limit the war for several reasons. One factor was continuing uncertainty about just how extensive the enemy’s biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons capabilities were. Moreover, the UN resolutions did not envision actions beyond restoring the prewar boundaries.

308 | Section 5

Recognizing defeat was imminent in the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein ordered his retreating troops to set ﬁre to Kuwait's oil ﬁelds. Fortunately, these ﬁres were extinguished soon after allied forces occupied Kuwait. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Pursuing a broader objective might have weakened, or even disintegrated, the coalition assembled to rescue Kuwait. Bush also realized that an Americanengineered regime change could be very unpopular in the Arab world. Besides, like many others, he anticipated that the humiliating defeat the Iraqis had sustained would motivate them to oust the dictator on their own. That never happened, even though the United Nations imposed severe sanctions on Hussein’s government. For example, it designated all of northern Iraq a no-ﬂy zone. For years afterward, American warplanes patrolled the area to prevent Iraqi use of that airspace. The UN also insisted that its personnel be given free reign to search out and destroy

any remaining stocks of chemical or biological weapons. Dozens of Scud missiles and other weapons were scrapped as well. Perhaps most important, UN inspections neutralized Iraq’s nuclear weapons development projects, which some estimated might have produced a bomb within two years. The Gulf War marked a pinnacle of post–Cold War international cooperation. Very quickly, familiar controversies and confrontations retook center stage in the Middle East: Palestinian Arabs demanded independence from Israel, hostility between Jews and Arabs continued to prevent the development of better relations, and disputes between Shiite and Sunni Muslims created further instability. In addition, the

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 309 continuing Western desire for, and dependence on, the region’s oil limited the amount of inﬂuence the United States and other customer nations could exert. Although no one at the time anticipated it, the seeds of another United States military confrontation with Iraq were already germinating. President Bush’s son, George W. Bush, apparently considered his father’s failure to oust Saddam Hussein as unﬁnished business. In the wake of the 9/11 attack, the administration of the second President Bush advanced every possible justiﬁcation for a second round. The disappointing American experience in the most recent Iraqi war suggests that the ﬁrst President Bush had been wise to settle for a quick and limited victory in the Gulf War. See also: Bush Doctrine References

Brune, Lester H. America and the Iraqi Crisis, 1990–1992. Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1993. Freeman, Lawrence, and Efraim Karsh. The Gulf Conﬂict, 1990–1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Gordon, Michael R., and Bernard E. Trainor. The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conﬂict in the Gulf. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. Khaddure, Majid, and Edmund Ghareeb. War in the Gulf, 1990–91. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hostage Crisis In 1979, radical militant students invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the capital of Iran. They rounded up 66 Americans inside the compound and held most of these unfortunate people hostage for more than a year. The Iranian

hostage crisis paralyzed the administration of president Jimmy Carter and played a major role in the failure of his 1980 reelection bid. For the American people, the crisis proved especially discouraging, coming in the wake of the U.S. humiliation in Vietnam and seeming to symbolize a precipitous decline in American prestige around the world. Shortly after World War I, the Pahlavi family established a royal government in Iran. During World War II, Soviet armies occupied the northern section of the country while British troops did the same in the south. Because Iran shared a long border with the Soviet Union, many Westerners worried that communist influences might bleed across that boundary. To forestall Russian aggrandizement, the United States staged a naval demonstration in the Persian Gulf in 1946 and extended Truman Doctrine assistance to Iran in 1947. Internal instability in succeeding years set the stage for a Central Intelligence Agency sponsored coup in 1953 that restored the monarchy. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi seemed an ideal choice to govern the nation because he was ardently anticommunist and pro-American. Beginning in 1963, the Shah announced a “White Revolution” designed to modernize the country. But many of its reforms, such as expanded women’s rights and Westernization in dress and culture, alienated traditionalists, particularly those with fundamentalist Muslim beliefs. Another cause of dissension was the Shah’s heavy dependence upon the United States as a military supplier. Billions of dollars of oil-generated income went for the purchase of state-of-the-art weapons systems and aircraft. Iran developed the most advanced and powerful armed force in the Middle East outside of

310 | Section 5

Israel. The Shah justiﬁed his militarism as necessary to make Iran a bastion against communism, and the U.S. government considered Iran a powerful, stable ally in a troubled region. Appearances were deﬁnitely deceiving. With CIA guidance, the Shah established a powerful secret police organization, SAVAK, that ruthlessly clamped down on dissent or even mild criticism. Thousands of Iranians were executed or imprisoned. By the late 1970s, opposition to the Shah’s regime had spread throughout all classes of Iranian society. The most outspoken critic was the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shiite cleric living in Paris. Even operating from exile, the ayatollah was able to superintend a broad-ranging opposition movement within Iran. It drew particular strength from traditionalists and fundamentalists who despised the Shah’s secular reforms. Widespread rioting broke out in 1978. The Shah imposed martial law, but it only served to energize opposition to his regime. His ﬂeet of U.S.-built jet ﬁghters and missiles provided no protection at all against domestic resistance. On January 16, 1979, the Shah ﬂed into exile, forced to move like a pariah from one country to another. The confusion following his departure began to ease when Khomeini returned to his homeland and took steps toward establishing an Islamic-based government. His movement maintained a constant barrage of criticism of both the deposed Shah and his American allies. Many Iranians feared the United States might be planning a repeat of the 1953 coup to restore the despised Shah to power. In fact, the exiled leader was dying of cancer. In late October 1979, he requested permission to get medical care

at a New York hospital, and the Carter administration agreed to let him enter the country. This move stimulated a fervent outcry in Iran along with demands that the Shah be returned to stand trial. At the height of this emotional outburst, radical students assailed the American Embassy in Teheran on November 4. Occupation of an embassy violates all traditional diplomatic protocols, but the ayatollah did nothing to prevent it. Televised images of handcuffed, blindfolded Americans were beamed around the world. These pictures haunted no one more than President Carter himself. He froze $8 billion in Iranian assets and imposed other economic sanctions to try to coerce the Iranian authorities to free the hostages. The only success came when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) served as a clandestine intermediary and obtained the release of 13 of the hostages, mostly women and African Americans. After another secret diplomatic effort failed in April 1980, the United States formally broke relations with Iran, and a major debate raged within Carter’s inner circle. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance defended diplomacy as the best strategy, but National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was equally insistent that a military response was the only viable alternative. Carter came down on Brzezinski’s side and ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to launch a rescue mission. Eight huge helicopters left the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz, positioned in the Persian Gulf, while six C-130 transport planes took off from an Egyptian base. They were to rendezvous in the desert south of Teheran. Three of the helicopters developed engine trouble in an intense sand storm. Even after the ill-fated mission had been scrubbed, a cargo plane

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 311 and a helicopter collided, killing eight American servicemen. The botched rescue mission further undermined Carter’s credibility and U.S. prestige. The hostages remained imprisoned, and Vance quietly resigned from the administration that had ignored his rational advice. The situation seemed hopeless until the Shah died in Mexico in July, ending any threat of a coup and relieving some anti-American pressure in Iran. Shortly afterward, Khomeini’s bloc won outright control of parliament, reducing the hostages’ political value to his backers. When a bloody war between Iraq and Iran broke out in September, the Iranian government found itself largely friendless and underprepared. Almost all of its military equipment had originated in the United States, and the continuing break between the two nations prevented Iran from obtaining spare parts and replacements. Moreover, the frozen assets would have been very helpful to a nation at war. The ﬁnal key to resolving the hostage crisis was the election of Republican Ronald Reagan to replace Carter in November. There is some speculation that secret arrangements with Iran had been made to leave the Americans imprisoned to keep Carter on the defensive until after the election. In any event, the ordeal ended on January 19, 1981, the day before Reagan’s inauguration and 444 days after the initial assault on the embassy. U.S. relations with Iran have remained strained ever since. American sympathies in the Iran-Iraq war largely favored Iraq despite doubts about its leader, Saddam Hussein. The only exception was the controversial Iran-Contra operation that deeply scarred the Reagan administra-

tion. More recently, the Iranian government’s alleged role in training and arming anti-American agents to inﬁltrate Iraq has kept tensions high. Finally, concern that Iran may be attempting to develop nuclear weapons has kept it high on the list of U.S. adversaries. Much of that might well have occurred in any case, but the humiliation and helplessness Americans felt during the hostage crisis still casts a long shadow over U.S. attitudes toward Iran. See also: Iran-Contra References

Bakhash, Shaul. The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1990. Christopher, Warren, and Paul H. Kreisberg, eds. American Hostages in Iran: The Conduct of a Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Sick, Gary. All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran. New York: Random House, 1985.

Iran-Contra The Iran-Contra Affair was one of the most improbable diplomatic episodes in American history. No obvious linkage between troubles in the Middle East and Central America existed until individuals in the administration of President Ronald Reagan developed a creative and highly suspect operation to solve two very different problems. Revelations about the Iran-Contra Affair exposed some of the seamier inner workings of the Reagan administration and ruined the careers of several of the principal participants. Symptomatic of how convoluted the affair was, the Iranian aspect actually began in Lebanon. In the early 1980s, terrorists with ties to Iran kidnapped

312 | Section 5

several American citizens in Beirut. The United States had frequently publicized its refusal to pay ransom or bow to blackmail to free political hostages. The Lebanese hostages remained imprisoned month after month. President Jimmy Carter’s administration had become dysfunctional as a result of the much larger Iranian hostage crisis just prior to Reagan’s election, and the Republican president had no desire to repeat Carter’s unfortunate experience. Iran, however, appeared to be the only outside element that might be able to convince the kidnappers to free the hostages. The fact that the United States currently had no formal relations with Iran certainly complicated the prospects for resolving the hostage dilemma. Meanwhile, Iran was mired in a devastating war with its neighbor, Iraq. The government in Teheran was very interested in obtaining supplies and parts for the U.S.-supplied military equipment it had inherited from the deposed Shah’s government. Hoping to win friends in Teheran, Reagan administration insiders hit upon a plan to sell desperately needed armaments to “moderates” in Iran. Because reliable direct contacts between the two nations did not exist, the Americans asked Israeli agents to extend the offer and handle the sales. Implementing this scheme raised a host of difﬁculties at home as well. Publicly, the U.S. government leaned toward supporting Iraq in the conﬂict. Providing weapons to Iran would certainly seem inconsistent with that position. Moreover, the long-standing U.S. tradition of refusing to negotiate with politically motivated kidnappers ruled out any open contacts. Still another difﬁculty was financing arms shipments

since Congress had never approved such activities. The last problem triggered the surprising link with events halfway around the world in Central America. In the late 1970s, Central America hosted a wave of communist-inspired rebels and reformers. One of the most dynamic revolutionary movements arose in Nicaragua where Daniel Ortega headed a faction known as the Sandinistas. The group took its name from Augusto Sandino who had fought against U.S. domination of Nicaragua until he was killed in 1934. The Sandinistas developed strong popular support among the poverty-ridden citizens of Nicaragua and captured control of the government in 1979. Because Ortega had friends in communist Cuba and his programs were unabashedly socialistic in orientation, the Reagan administration considered the Sandinistas nothing more than Cuban or Soviet agents. An avid anticommunist, Reagan appeared far more disturbed by this apparent subversive expansion than his predecessors had been in the age of détente. Not content with exerting political and economic pressure on the Sandinistas, the Reagan administration encouraged Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other clandestine support for a group of right-wing Nicaraguans who despised the Ortega government. Because they constituted an opposition force, they became known as “Contras.” CIA and U.S. military agents provided training, funding, and supplies for the Contras, many of whom operated from bases outside of Nicaragua proper. From their camps across the border, the Contras unleashed deadly, guerilla-style raids on the civilian population living in rural areas of Nicaragua.

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 313 Congress became increasingly uneasy with the U.S. support for such a destructive initiative. In 1982, it prohibited the use of U.S. funding to promote the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. When the Reagan administration continued to ﬂout this ban, Congress approved the so-called Boland Amendment in 1984 that explicitly forbade the use of appropriated federal funds to aid the Contras. Again, the administration secretly continued its support, even going to the extreme of soliciting funds from private citizens to ﬁnance what Congress had speciﬁcally forbidden. Here the divergent threads of the story became intertwined. Because selling arms to Iran was also prohibited, American agents did not have to ofﬁcially account for the money they received from the sales. Therefore, the proﬁts could be transferred directly to the Contras without technically violating the Boland Amendment. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was charged with coordinating this top secret operation, operating directly under the National Security Council (NSC). Encouraged ﬁrst by Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s national security advisor, and then by his successor, Admiral John Poindexter, North managed a complex web of contacts that provided arms to Iran and money to the Contras.

Momentarily at least the scheme produced a positive result. Apparently responding to orders from Teheran, the Lebanese kidnappers released some of their hostages. Shortly afterward, however, other Americans in Beirut were captured, which meant that the number of Americans held hostage remained virtually unchanged despite the weapons transfers. At the same time, the money from the sales was funneled through clandestine channels to Central America, where it ﬁnanced increasingly elaborate Contra activities, such as the construction of a huge airﬁeld in Costa Rica. Congressional investigators began piecing the story together in 1986. A key question was just how directly President Reagan himself had been involved. Republican Senator John Tower of Texas headed a commission charged with investigating the affair. Its verdict regarding the president was equivocal, in part due to Reagan’s claims of forgetfulness. Although the Tower Commission never completely unraveled the complexities of the Iran-Contra affair, North, McFarlane, and Poindexter all eventually stood trial for their parts in the scheme. The ﬁrst two were found guilty and given suspended sentences, but Poindexter actually served time in prison. Despite dogged and illegal U.S. efforts to strengthen the Contras, the

BOLAND AMENDMENT During ﬁscal year 1985, no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose or which would have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, movement or individual. Source: U.S. Statutes at Large 98, 1984: 1935–1937. Public Law 98–473.

314 | Section 5

rebels never substantially weakened popular support for the Sandinistas. Daniel Ortega remained in power until a peaceful election in 1991 installed Violeta Chamorro. Early in the 21st century, Ortega returned to the presidency of Nicaragua, although in a far less dogmatically socialistic incarnation. The Iran-Contra Affair also had little longterm impact in the Middle East. The Iran-Iraq war burned itself out after nearly a decade of ﬁghting and a million deaths. Although one American hostage died in captivity, the rest were ultimately released. The most important consequences occurred in the United States. Iran-Contra revealed just how unrepentantly anticommunist Reagan and his advisors were, and how far they were willing to go beyond the law to support that agenda. Congress ultimately succeeded in thwarting this blatant abuse of executive power, but many Americans were appalled at the investigation’s revelations. It led to an unhealthy rise in cynicism about foreign affairs in general and the Republican Party in particular. See also: Hostage Crisis References

Burns, E. Bradford. At War in Nicaragua: The Reagan Doctrine and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. Emerson, Steven. Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era. New York: Putnam, 1988. North, Oliver, with William Novak. Under Fire: An American Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Israel On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion telephoned President Harry Truman to

inform him that Israel had declared its independence. A few minutes later, Truman extended full U.S. diplomatic recognition to the new country. That speedy decision reﬂected a willingness to go to almost any lengths to support Israel, a position that has inﬂuenced and complicated U.S. foreign relations with the Middle East, and the world, ever since. A number of factors and historical events reinforced this commitment, even though the United States was relatively late in developing a Mideast policy. The concept of an independent Israel arose in the 19th century with a group of Jewish nationalists known as Zionists. They cited Old Testament evidence that God had granted the land of Palestine to the Jewish people. The fact that Jews had not controlled the area for centuries in no way discouraged the Zionist movement. The concept had no chance of implementation as long as the area remained under Ottoman control. Turkish Muslims in Istanbul managed a vast empire containing a confusing array of ethnic and religious groups. Jews constituted a small minority in the largely Arab population of Palestine well into the 20th century. A key moment in the prehistory of Israel came in 1917 when Zionists leaders discussed their goal with British foreign minister Arthur Balfour. Inclined to support any group that opposed Great Britain’s enemies in World War I, Balfour issued a declaration stating his country’s support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration became something of an embarrassment after the war ended and the League of Nations granted Great Britain mandates over both Palestine and Iraq. In 1939, the government in London issued a white paper formally disavowing the Balfour Declaration.

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 315 U.S. interest in the area was slow to develop until its vast deposits of oil began being tapped. American companies were eager to exploit this valuable resource, so the federal government ramped up its diplomatic relationships with many of the leaders Great Britain had installed in the region. The Saud family in Arabia and the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan, for example, developed friendly relations with the United States. Although the World War II Allies knew about the anti-Semitic campaigns Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime had pursued, the full enormity of what would be known as the Holocaust only became clear in the last stages of the conﬂict. Millions of European Jews had died, many in inhuman concentration camps. Most of those who had avoided that fate ended up as displaced or stateless persons. These people desperately wanted to ﬁnd new homes, and the Zionist vision of a “return” to Palestine gained increasing popularity. Meanwhile, the United States had become disenchanted with colonialism, either for itself or for anyone else. After the war, Palestine technically remained under British authority, but nationalistic ambitions were strengthening among the Arab peoples of the region. The British attempted to control Jews eager to migrate to the area by holding them in camps on the island of Cyprus. Some residents of those camps secretly made their way across the narrow arm of the Mediterranean to Palestine. There they joined forces with native-born “Sabras,” Jewish people whose families already resided in the area and often had done so for many generations. Not surprisingly, Palestinian Arabs objected to what they saw as a threat to their own patrimony. The United Nations struggled to develop a reasonable solution to this

growing crisis. By 1947, it had drafted a partition plan assigning separate parts of Palestine to Muslims and Jews. A major sticking point was Jerusalem, a holy city for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The Partition Plan envisioned Jerusalem as a nonaligned city, open to all. The UN scheme won little support from any of the parties. Arab resentment eventually boiled over. Palestinian Arabs and supporters from neighboring countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Syria teamed up to drive out all Jews. To their surprise, the Jews proved to be ﬁerce ﬁghters, aided by weapons and financial support from friends in Europe and the United States. The latter was especially important because Jewish Americans constituted an inﬂuential voting block, capable of putting considerable pressure on the U.S. government to support their side in the struggle. This persuasion was all the more effective because no countervailing Arab lobby existed in the United States. While putting up a remarkably effective defense, the Jewish leaders in Palestine decided to bypass the United Nations altogether and create their own nation, Israel. President Truman’s instantaneous recognition of the new country further undermined United Nations initiatives. Even so, six days after the American recognition, the UN Security Council appointed a highly respected Swedish diplomat, Count Folke Bernadotte, to mediate the ongoing conﬂict between Arabs and Jews. Bernadotte made some progress on truce arrangements modeled after the original partition plan, but he ignored the proposal to make Jerusalem an international city. When it became clear he intended to assign it to the Arab sector, members of an extremist Jewish group

316 | Section 5

assassinated him. The ﬁghting continued unabated until the UN sent another mediator, U.S. citizen Ralph Bunche. He worked out a new truce arrangement in which Jerusalem would be divided between Arabs and Jews. The proposal won support from many of the combatants, although Egypt proved reluctant. When the Egyptian government ﬁnally accepted Bunche’s armistice in February 1949, it left the Arab population of the Gaza Strip cut off from their traditional farmlands. The end of the ﬁghting in no way ended the controversy. The conﬂict had driven tens of thousands of Arabs out of their homes and into relocation camps. These quickly changed from temporary to permanent facilities, dependent upon UN relief support. Although the United States remained committed to the survival of Israel, the new nation received somewhat less attention than it might have if it had been threatened by communism. Paranoia about Soviet ambitions so colored U.S. policy at that point that the Middle East muddle retreated to the back burner. See also: Land for Peace References

Benson, Michael T. Harry S Truman and the Founding of Israel. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. Cohen, Michael J. Palestine and the Great Powers, 1945–1948. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Louis, William Roger. The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Land for Peace In 1967, the United Nations Security Council approved American-sponsored UN Resolution 242. It laid out a formula

for restoring balance in the Middle East after the so-called Six-Day War. The fundamental concept was that Israel would exchange lands it had captured in the conﬂict for assurance of recognition and nonbelligerency from its Arab neighbors. The land-for-peace formula has remained a fundamental element of U.S. foreign policy ever since. The war that resulted in the conquest of Arab lands was the third conﬂict between Israel and its neighbors. The ﬁrst ran from 1947 to 1949 and produced two key results: an independent Israel and a UN-brokered peace agreement that left a good many questions unanswered. One was whether Israel’s Arab neighbors would ever recognize the existence of the Jewish state. The second conﬂict stemmed from a dispute over control of the Suez Canal, a dispute whose roots extended back at least to the year 1952 when a military coup in Egypt ousted King Farouk, a remnant of former British rule. One of the colonels who masterminded the change was Gamal Abdel Nasser, a dedicated nationalist. By 1954, Nasser was not only ﬁrmly in charge in Cairo, but was also a rising star in the Pan-Arab movement arrayed against Israel. His most ambitious domestic plan was to build a huge dam on the Nile River upstream from the one already in place at Aswan. Nasser anticipated that the High Aswan Dam would provide electric power and irrigation water for his country’s farmlands. The U.S. government initially took a keen interest in this project. It dispatched development teams from its International Co-operation Administration, a predecessor of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The American experts

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 317 advised their Egyptian counterparts on the irrigation and community-building beneﬁts the dam could produce. Their positive reports convinced Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to promise increased American technical support and substantial ﬁnancial contributions to pay for building the High Aswan Dam. Nagging Arab resentment over Israel complicated the picture. Since the 1949 cease-ﬁre, periodic border clashes had taken place between Israel and its neighbors. Committed to being recognized as the Pan-Arab leader, Nasser requested military assistance from the United States. When the Americans refused, the Egyptian government contracted with suppliers in the Soviet satellite of Czechoslovakia to provide arms. Cold warrior Dulles then rescinded the American offer of help for the dam project to punish Nasser for trading with a communist nation. Nasser decided to raise the money he needed to build his dam by exploiting a resource close at hand. In late July 1956, he nationalized the Suez Canal that ran through Egypt. Both the French, who operated the canal, and the British, who maintained armed forces to “protect” it, were outraged. Even though Nasser promised to pay reasonable compensation to the former owners, neither European country was willing to admit Egypt was capable of operating this vital transportation link. A military effort to reestablish foreign control of the canal began with an Israeli invasion of the Sinai Peninsula on October 29, 1956. The next day Great Britain and France sent Egypt and Israel an ultimatum demanding that they withdraw all of their troops from within 10 miles of the canal. Only Egyptian

troops were anywhere near the canal at that point, so Nasser rejected the ultimatum. When French and British aircraft began bombing Egyptian positions, the United Nations Security Council took up the issue. With the Soviet Union offering to support Egypt up to and including the use of atomic weapons, the United States worked feverishly on a resolution to end the confrontation. Faced with implacable American opposition to their policies, the European powers and Israel reluctantly stood down. To preserve the resulting armistice, a United Nation’s Emergency Force (UNEF) stationed troops along Sinai’s Egypt-Israel border. The Soviet Union immediately stepped in to exploit Arab hostility to the West. Within a few months thousands of Soviet military advisors had arrived in Egypt and Syria, bringing with them new weapons and tactics. Equally momentous was the Soviet offer to assist in building the High Aswan Dam. The United States responded by stepping up its already substantial economic and military support for Israel. The broader effect of these developments was precisely what Dulles had hoped to avoid: drawing the Arab-Israeli dispute directly into the Cold War, with each side dependent upon one of the superpowers. Cease-ﬁre violations and border incidents continued to occur. A key focus of this activity was the Golan Heights, Syrian territory ideal for harassing Israeli settlements in the adjacent lowlands. The situation spiraled out of anyone’s control in the spring of 1967. Frustrated by the growing American presence in Vietnam, the Soviet leadership decided to heat up the Middle East cauldron. They secretly warned Nasser’s government that Israel was beginning to mobilize for a full-scale

318 | Section 5

confrontation. This information was not only false, but rather comical since Israel was so well organized it could fully mobilize in 24 hours. Nasser apparently felt he would lose stature with his fellow Arabs if he failed to act. He ordered his own armed forces to mobilize and demanded the removal of the UNEF peace keepers. UN Secretary General U Thant duly recalled them without consulting any one else. Israel understandably interpreted these moves as threats to its survival. On June 5, 1967, Israel’s armed forces staged simultaneous preemptive attacks on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. In almost no time at all, Israeli forces occupied the Sinai Peninsula, Arab lands west of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights.

Frantic efforts at the United Nations brought about a cease-ﬁre in less than a week, but the Six-Day War had completely redrawn the Middle Eastern map, leaving Israel with more than twice its original territory. Complex negotiations continued at the United Nations. The aggrandizement of Israel was particularly embarrassing to the United States with its long-standing commitment to the right of peoples to self-determination. Millions of Arabs suddenly found themselves trapped in a hostile foreign country. At the same time, Israel was reluctant to withdraw unless it won assurance that its neighbors would leave it in peace. At that point the land-for-peace formula came into play. UN Security Council Resolution

UN SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 242 November 22, 1967 The Security Council, Expressing its continuing concern with the grave situation in the Middle East, Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security, . . . 1. Afﬁrms that the fulﬁllment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles: Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conﬂict; Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force; 2. Afﬁrms further the necessity For guaranteeing freedom of navigation through international waterways in the area; For achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem; For guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political independence of every State in the area through measures including the establishment of demilitarized zones. Source: United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations 1967. New York: United Nations, 1969, 257–258.

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 319 242 called upon Israel to withdraw from the recently occupied territories in return for Arab promises to recognize its right to exist. Israel still occupies the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Does that mean the land-for-peace formula has failed? A fourth round of warfare, the so-called Yom Kippur War, in 1973, did nothing to change the redrawn map. But later in that decade, President Jimmy Carter superintended a major implementation of UN Resolution 242 when he met with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at his retreat in Maryland. The Camp David Accords represent the most important application of the land-for-peace formula. Egypt promised to recognize Israel’s right to exist and Israel returned control of the Sinai Peninsula to its former enemy. See also: Israel; Shuttle Diplomacy References

Kingseed, Cole C. Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. Kyle, Keith. Suez. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Neff, Donald. Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days that Changed the Middle East. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Oren, Michael B. Six Days of War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Liberation of Eastern Europe The 1952 Republican Party platform roundly criticized containment, the Truman administration’s response to communism. Rather than pursue such a static policy, the Republicans advocated active efforts to free Russia’s Eastern European satellites. The chief proponent of this new approach was John Foster Dulles, an experienced diplomat and

statesman. When Dwight Eisenhower won election as president, he named Dulles his secretary of state, thus placing the architect of the liberation policy in charge of implementing it. Eisenhower and Dulles faced a discouraging situation in Eastern Europe. Although the Big Three leaders at the 1945 Yalta Conference had approved the Declaration on Liberated Europe, its call for free elections had been ignored. With its Red Army units occupying much of the region, the Soviet Union could demand that “friendly” governments be installed in countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Romania. These governments became Soviet puppets, and the Iron Curtain became a rigid barrier between East and West. The United States acknowledged this division and may well have reinforced it by adopting its containment policy. It included military (NATO) and economic (Marshall Plan) support for those countries that remained outside the Soviet sphere. By 1950, the Americans and their allies created West Germany as another bulwark against Russian expansion. Two events within Europe itself reinforced the division between East and West. In 1948, the Soviet Union suddenly extended tentacles that drew Czechoslovakia behind the Iron Curtain. At about the same time Yugoslavia’s communist leader, Josip Broz Tito, stunned the world by extricating his country from Soviet control. Although Yugoslavia maintained its communist ideology, it was not a Russian satellite. If one nation could wrench itself free from Soviet inﬂuence, others might well be able to do so. Both Eisenhower and Dulles spoke positively about the prospects for “liberation,” and many

320 | Section 5

interpreted these remarks as pledges of U.S. assistance. But when workers in East Germany rioted in 1953, neither the United States nor its allies did anything to forestall a Soviet crackdown. That same year saw the death of Joseph Stalin, the autocratic and dictatorial leader of the Soviet Union. For a time, exactly who would rule the Soviet empire remained unclear. Nikolai Bulganin assumed the post of premier, but a wily Ukrainian named Nikita Khrushchev increasingly dictated Soviet policy. In 1958, Khrushchev became premier. It was Khrushchev who called for a summit conference of the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Although Eisenhower seemed willing, Dulles was dead set against it. He worried that such a meeting could enhance the international prestige of the Soviet leaders. He also worried that the president might be more ﬂexible than Dulles believed prudent. To prevent the summit from taking place, the secretary of state insisted his country would not participate unless the Soviets made a concession he was certain they would reject. Dulles demanded that they agree to terminate the fourpower occupation the Allies had maintained in Austria since the end of World War II. Like Germany, both the country itself as well as its capital, Vienna, were still managed by Allied Control Commissions. Dulles was taken completely by surprise when the Soviet government agreed to his stipulations. All occupying forces withdrew when the Austrians agreed to remain essentially disarmed and aligned with neither bloc. When the 1955 Geneva Summit took place, it produced no signiﬁcant agreements. Dulles and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov met after their

leaders had adjourned, but both were such conﬁrmed antagonists that nothing emerged from that meeting either. When the Russian returned to Moscow, Dulles traveled to Belgrade. From the Yugoslav capital he delivered a radio broadcast aimed at the people in the Eastern European satellites that urged them to seek liberation. More encouraging than U.S. exhortations were developments within the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev delivered a “secret” address to a Communist Party Congress early in 1956 that bitterly criticized many of Stalin’s policies. The secret quickly came out, and it encouraged some relaxation of authority in the Soviet Union, such as the release of many political prisoners. Restiveness in Poland forced the Soviets to accept a new leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka. He was a dedicated communist as well as an astute politician. Although Gomulka permitted some limited steps toward liberalization, he remained ﬁrmly committed to the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-led defensive arrangement directed against NATO. That assurance was enough to keep Poland among the “friendly” nations in Russian eyes. The leader of adjacent Hungary, Imre Nagy, tolerated much greater freedom. He ultimately accepted in principle the concept of free elections. The Soviets knew that the Communist Party would inevitably lose control if they occurred. When rioters in Budapest pulled down a statue of Stalin, Red Army tanks rolled in. Some 20,000 Hungarians lost their lives in the ensuing clamp down, although 192,000 did manage to make their way to freedom through now neutral Austria. The brutal suppression of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters evoked

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 321 strident rhetoric from the Eisenhower administration but no tangible support. One rather lame excuse for the U.S. failure to intervene was that the Soviets had timed their actions to coincide with the messy resolution of the Suez Canal crisis. Because the British and French had played major roles in creating that crisis, they were incapable of action. And, although the United States obviously had a major interest in achieving a Middle Eastern peace agreement, that in no way absolved Dulles and Eisenhower from failing to take concrete steps in support of the liberation policy they had so vociferously championed. In fact, there was almost nothing they could have done short of threatening nuclear retaliation against the Soviet Union. Such a response would have been a dangerous overreaction that could have turned a minor crisis into a devastating war. Instead, the United States failure to aid Hungary demonstrated conclusively just how hollow the liberation policy was. The people of Eastern Europe had to wait another 30 years before the internal deterioration of the Soviet Union allowed them to take meaningful steps toward independence. And even then, the United States essentially stood by while the citizens of those countries developed the will and strength to free themselves. See also: Containment; Dulles, John Foster, Yalta References

Immerman, Richard H. John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999. Korvig, Bennett. Of Walls and Bridges: The United States and Eastern Europe. New York: New York University Press, 1991.

Krebs, Ronald R. Dueling Visions: U.S. Strategy Toward Eastern Europe Under Eisenhower. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001.

Limited War (Korea) In the spring of 1951, President Harry Truman removed General Douglas MacArthur as head of the United Nations Command engaged in the Korean War. The chief reason was a fundamental difference of opinion between the two men over how to conduct that war. The general wanted to invade China proper, claiming he could defeat the communist regime that had seized power two years earlier. The president was determined to limit the war’s geographic area, its strategic objectives, and the type of weaponry involved. While MacArthur railed against the concept of limited war, Truman imposed restraints that, in the long run, appear to have been prudent. Long a Japanese dependency, Korea became a focus for post–World War II planning when the Soviet Union tardily entered the conﬂict in the East. American and Soviet ofﬁcials agreed to jointly occupy the Korean Peninsula once Japan surrendered. As in Germany and Austria, this occupation involved the Allies creating a temporary division with Russian inﬂuence paramount north of the 38th parallel while American forces controlled the south. Like other Cold War boundaries around the world, the division between North and South Korea had hardened considerably by 1948. Although both the United States and the Soviet Union withdrew their occupying troops, they left military training and advisory units in place. The Soviets ensured the installation of dedicated communist Kim Il-Song in the North, while

322 | Section 5

the United States accepted rightist Syngman Rhee as leader in the South. Unfortunately, Rhee was so unpopular he utilized much of his continuing U.S. military and economic aid to defend his authority against internal enemies. Kim maintained a strong, disciplined, communist dictatorship in the North. Few paid much attention to either leader before 1950. The containment policy in Europe dominated American thinking, a preoccupation many thought had hastened the “fall” of China to Mao Zedong’s communist revolution. In early 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson made a well-publicized address deﬁning the extent of U.S. interests in Asia. Signiﬁcantly, he did not include South Korea in that assessment. On June 25, 1950, 75,000 North Korean soldiers ﬂooded south across the 38th parallel. When Rhee’s forces began folding in face of this onslaught, President Truman reacted decisively. Without asking for congressional authorization, he ordered the general in charge of the U.S. occupation of Japan, Douglas MacArthur, to provide American naval and air support to the beleaguered South Koreans. Simultaneously, Secretary of State Dean Acheson prepared a resolution for the United Nations Security Council condemning North Korea’s move and calling for UN action to reverse it. The resolution passed easily because the Soviets were boycotting the Security Council in protest over its refusal to replace the Nationalist Chinese delegate with one from the newly established People’s Republic of China. Thirty UN members responded to the call, assigning troops and support units to what became known as the UN Command. General MacArthur assumed the top position in this multinational organi-

zation, a predictable move given that the United States funded over 90 percent of its costs and provided the vast majority of its military forces including ground troops. The North Koreans easily captured Seoul, the South Korean capital, and swept southward all the way to a feeble defensive line around the southeastern city of Pusan. MacArthur realized that breaking out of that restricted area would be almost impossible, so he obtained permission to stage a risky amphibious landing at Inchon Harbor just south of Seoul. Two divisions landed successfully and quickly liberated the capital, isolating tens of thousands of North Korean troops from their supply and command lines. The limited objective of reversing the North Korean invasion had been accomplished. It had gone so well, in fact, that MacArthur gained UN authorization to cross the 38th parallel with the goal of unifying all of Korea under a single government. For several weeks, the drive went well as allied forces pushed increasingly demoralized North Korean soldiers backward. In October, the UN Command began capturing Red Chinese soldiers. MacArthur dismissed these as “volunteers” and insisted China would never stage a major response. His own troops had became seriously overextended by December, however, as they occupied an ever larger area. Then the general was forced to report that some 300,000 regular Chinese troops had crossed the northern border. They not only blunted the UN drive, but also recaptured most of North Korea and spilled into the South. Reacting to this serious turnaround, the Truman administration readjusted its objectives. Simply restoring the prewar

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 323 border now seemed a reasonable outcome. U.S. general Matthew Ridgeway achieved that goal by March, but MacArthur was outraged. He publicly criticized the switch to a limited war objective. He even wrote a letter detailing his views to Joe Martin, the minority leader in the House of Representatives. Representative Martin read MacArthur’s diatribe into the Congressional Record. At that point, President Truman dismissed MacArthur from his command for insubordination. The general returned to a hero’s welcome in the United States. Ticker tape parades and cheering crowds turned out everywhere he stopped. Although Truman refused to meet with him, Congress invited MacArthur to speak at a widely publicized joint session. His message was clear: the United States should abandon the limited war strategy and push ahead with a full-scale assault on Red China. Cooler heads prevailed. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, defended the limited war concept in testimony before Congress. He warned that expanding the land war in Asia would be “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy” (qtd. in Michael D. Pearlman, Warmaking and American Democracy, p. 293). Yet controversy over the wisdom of settling for a limited war continued to swirl even after the Soviet delegate to the United Nations agreed, in June 1951, that negotiations were preferable to a wider conﬂict. Those negotiations dragged on for two more years, and bloody ﬁreﬁghts continued to ﬂare up along the uneasy truce line established just north of the 38th parallel. The Republican Party presidential platform in 1952 pointed to Korea as a major failing of the Democratic Party’s foreign

policy approach. The Republican candidate, Dwight Eisenhower, promised to go to Korea personally if elected to sort things out. He did visit the battle-scarred region in December, and his tour may have helped move the negotiations toward their conclusion the following July. More than half a century later, a demilitarized zone still divides Korea between the two heavily-armed adversaries. The costly limited war had merely restored conditions to essentially what they had been prior to the invasion from the north. The alternative might have been far worse. Long after his dismissal, MacArthur wrote about his plans. He stated that he would have dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs on Chinese targets and considered creating a highly radioactive no-man’s-land to prevent any Chinese ground forces from crossing into northern Korea. If indeed that is what pursuing a broader conﬂict entailed, then the world clearly is better off because the Truman administration accepted a limited war objective. See also: Acheson, Dean; Marshall, George C. References

Bailey, Sydney D. The Korean Armistice. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Lowe, Peter. The Origins of the Korean War. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 1997. Wainstock, Dennis D. Truman, MacArthur, and the Korean War. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. Weintraub, Stanley. MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero. New York: Free Press, 2000.

Marshall Plan In implementing the Truman Doctrine’s pledge of military assistance to other nations, the United States acknowledged

324 | Section 5

the onset of the Cold War. Shortly afterward, the Truman administration concluded that economic recovery and stability in Western Europe might be as effective as military assistance in slowing the spread of communism. Secretary of State George Marshall announced this new approach in a commencement address at Harvard University on June 5, 1947. That gave the program its popular name, the Marshall Plan, but it was based on a broad consensus among President Harry Truman’s advisors. By the spring of 1947, the United States no longer doubted that the Soviet Union intended to spread its system as broadly as possible. Wherever Red Army units remained in occupation, communist governments took control. Responding to British anxieties regarding Greece, Turkey, and Iran, the president promulgated the Truman Doctrine, promising military support for nations under communist threat from internal or external forces. Having committed itself to combating Soviet expansion, the administration analyzed the reasons communism might succeed even in areas outside of Red Army occupation. For example, communist agitators in Italy and France seemed to be gaining popularity. Both nations were mired in postwar depressions that encouraged people to consider more extreme ideological solutions. The Truman administration concluded that restoring economic stability would lessen the attractiveness of socialism and communism. Secretary of State Marshall’s speech invited European leaders to work out a regional recovery program the United States could support. The initial announcement of the Marshall Plan contained few speciﬁcs other than the

prospect of a substantial U.S. ﬁnancial contribution. Unlike the 1924 Dawes Plan that focused primarily on solving Germany’s problems, the Truman administration’s conception was for a much broader-based recovery effort. Although Marshall’s announcement drew little immediate attention at home, Great Britain and France responded enthusiastically. Their ﬁrst step was to invite Soviet Foreign Minister V. I. Molotov to Paris to discuss the idea. He quickly made clear that his country would never consider accepting U.S. aid and stormed out of the meeting. Great Britain and France then felt free to issue invitations to 22 other nations, including many chaﬁng under Soviet occupation, to discuss the U.S. proposal. Not surprisingly the Soviet Union prohibited its satellite countries from participating in the conference or accepting U.S. aid. In the summer of 1947, representatives from 14 other countries joined those from Great Britain and France at the Conference for European Economic Cooperation. Lengthy discussion and negotiation produced a proposal for an integrated economic recovery program. The projected cost for the ambitious plan was $17 billion over four and a half years. In December 1947 President Truman conveyed this proposal to Congress. It appealed to American humanitarian sentiments, and the plan was also popular with both agricultural and industrial groups who anticipated it would promote beneficial trade. The chief motive, of course, was to undermine support for communism in the recipient nations. American opponents objected to the price tag, insisting the United States had already contributed billions of dollars in earlier aid packages. They

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 325 also complained it would affront the Soviets and further divide Europe. As if to prove these critics correct, the Soviet Union responded by creating two organizations. One was the Comecon, an economic program targeted at the Soviet Socialist Republics and their satellites. The other was the Cominform, a propaganda organization similar to the Comintern that had existed in the 1920s and 1930s. Neither of these moves roused nearly as much concern as a Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia in February. The Czechs had been straddling the edge of the Iron Curtain that divided East from West, but the Soviet government ruthlessly ousted their popularly elected government and installed a repressive communist regime. The U.S. Congress responded to this disturbing development by authorizing a peace-time draft program and a major increase in air force appropriations. It also moved forward on the proposed Marshall Plan under its ofﬁcial title: the European Relief Program. Rather than settling a multiyear ﬁgure, Congress allocated $4 billion for the ﬁrst year. If the program proved effective, additional appropriations could be anticipated in subsequent years. News of the U.S. action seemed to have immediate positive effects. The Italian Communist Party had appeared on the verge of winning nationwide elections, but the prospect of substantial U.S. ﬁnancial support helped convince voters to resoundingly defeat the ultraleftists. Anticommunist victories in other Western European elections followed. To that extent the Marshall Plan was a resounding success, prompting Congress to provide additional funding. The ﬁnal cost ran to more than $12 billion.

Among other positive aspects, the Marshall Plan stimulated the formation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation to distribute the U.S. funds. This, in turn, led to other steps that culminated in the formation of the European Community by the close of the 20th century. Economic recovery did take place in recipient countries, with both industrial and agricultural production benefiting. American producers proﬁted as well because the legislation required that some of the Marshall Plan money must be spent in the United States. Although most considered the plan a success, it did have some negative consequences. It stimulated unhealthy inﬂation in many countries and encouraged continuing dependence on U.S. charity. Some European critics objected to what they characterized as U.S. economic imperialism. And at least one recipient, France, directed substantial amounts of Marshall Plan assistance to its efforts to retain colonial control in Indochina, a policy that set the stage for later U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Some analysts saw the Marshall Plan as stimulating the East-West division, hardening the lines drawn in the Cold War. It deﬁnitely helped rebuild West Germany, a development the Soviet Union found particularly alarming. Even so, it is not clear that these divisions would not have occurred in the absence of the U.S. economic recovery program. In fact, there is every reason to believe that more countries might have been drawn behind the Iron Curtain had it never been implemented. The Marshall Plan thus served as a key element in the containment policy the United States pursued in the early stages of the Cold War.

326 | Section 5 See also: Containment; Truman Doctrine References

Arkes, Hadley. Bureaucracy, the Marshall Plan, and the National Interest. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. Gimbel, John. The Origins of the Marshall Plan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976. Hogan, Michael J. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Massive Retaliation As the Korean War drew to a close, President Dwight Eisenhower and his forceful secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, formulated a new approach to the Cold War. A key element was to threaten enemies with massive retaliation in response to expansionist or subversive actions. Fortunately, massive retaliation remained a threat that was never implemented. Several factors played into the Eisenhower administration’s reevaluation of U.S. defense operations. Some of them were political. Eisenhower had criticized what was increasingly seen as the Democratic Party’s reactive policy of containing communism. The Republican Party complained so loudly about the “failures” of containment that the new administration simply had to put forward different initiatives. American experience in the Korean War also inﬂuenced policy planners. The conﬂict resembled a replay of World War II: conventional arms, bombers and ﬁghters, and infantry soldiers slogging through muddy battleﬁelds. That sort of warfare was expensive in both manpower and dollars. Annual U.S. defense expenditures rose from a peacetime level of less

than $15 billion to more than $50 billion during the conﬂict. The Republican Party has traditionally favored reducing federal expenditures, so ﬁnding a less expensive way to wage the Cold War was a major goal of the Eisenhower administration. Of course, the most important factor shaping the new approach was the development of thermonuclear bombs. Popularly known as fusion or hydrogen bombs, these superweapons dwarfed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1952 a three-megaton bomb ripped apart Eniwetok Island in the South Paciﬁc. Two years later a 15-megaton bomb devastated Bikini Island. These awesome weapons featured prominently in U.S. planning, even though the Soviet Union successfully tested its own hydrogen bomb in 1953. The Eisenhower administration proudly rolled out a “New Look” for defense: a mix of conventional and nuclear weaponry. By 1954, research and testing programs had progressed to the point that the administration could claim that emphasizing superweapons would actually be less expensive than maintaining a substantial array of conventional armed forces. The U.S. Air Force benefited most from the new approach, increasing its percentage of defense appropriations at the expense of the army and navy. Secretary of State Dulles repeatedly promised that the United States would use its growing arsenal of nuclear weapons if sufﬁciently provoked. Just how large a provocation it had to be to trigger massive nuclear retaliation remained unclear. A self-proclaimed proponent of brinkmanship, Dulles claimed to have unsheathed the threat of nuclear response on at least three occasions: in Korea, in Vietnam, and in a confrontation

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 327 over the Chinese islands of Matsu and Quemoy. Although the primary target of these warnings was China rather than the Soviet Union, the United States certainly did not consider the USSR blameless. Commentators and policy makers had long insisted that communism was a single, international movement. What came to be called monolithic communism was presumably headquartered in the Kremlin in Moscow. No one doubted that Russia dominated and dictated to the Communist Party ofﬁcials who managed Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. When China fell to communists led by Mao Zedong in 1949, most Americans viewed it as a success of Soviet expansionism. Belief in monolithic communism was not only ﬂawed but dangerous. Rural peasants dominated the Chinese communist movement, in contrast to the industrial workers who had backed Lenin in Russia. The rationales and goals of these very different political groupings inevitably led to differing worldviews. The two major communist nations frequently pursued international policies detrimental to those of the other. Nationalistic ambitions also inﬂuenced the behavior of communists in other nations like North Korea, North Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Cuba. Astute American statesmen like President Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, were well aware of these differences and hoped to use them to limit the inﬂuence of communism around the world. No such subtlety was possible once Senator Joe McCarthy fomented a major Red Scare. In his myopic view, all communists were the same. Although the Eisenhower administration carefully distanced itself from

the red-baiting senator, it never abandoned its belief in the monolithic nature of communism. The combination of monolithic communism and massive retaliation created an interesting dynamic. If one believed the Kremlin truly controlled all communists worldwide, then any communist-sponsored uprising or subversion anywhere must stem from Soviet initiatives. As long as massive retaliation remained the chief response to communist expansion, it made logical sense to threaten the Soviet Union with massive retaliation if communism appeared to be gaining ground anywhere in the world. And there lay the crux of the problem. The Soviet Union was engaged in a huge, and quite successful, effort to build up its own stock of nuclear weapons. A country so equipped was far more capable than any other to respond to a U.S. assault with a devastating counterattack. By the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had passed the point where Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was a likely outcome of a nuclear attack by either country. That development fatally undermined the credibility of the U.S. threat to employ massive retaliation. The ﬂaws inherent in both massive retaliation and monolithic communism had become apparent by the end of Eisenhower’s term as president. Not surprisingly, his successor, John F. Kennedy, immediately ordered a reshaping of U.S. defense capabilities. Among other changes it emphasized “ﬂexible forces,” like the Green Berets, trained to conduct more conventional warfare. Massive retaliation was still possible, but it receded from its position as the nation’s primary foreign policy initiative.

328 | Section 5 See also: Brinkmanship; Dulles, John Foster; Red Scare Again References

Craig, Campbell. Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Marks, Frederick W. III. Power and Peace: The Diplomacy of John Foster Dulles. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993. Wenger, Andreas. Living with Peril: Eisenhower, Kenney, and Nuclear Weapons. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 1997.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) In response to a perceived threat of Soviet expansion into Western Europe in 1949, the United States and 11 other nations created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It linked its members in a military alliance, creating a common defensive posture to forestall Soviet aggression. Despite the apparent consensus among the original signatories, NATO was, and has remained, highly controversial. Even so, it not only survived the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, but continues to add members in the 21st century. The alliance was one of several steps the administration of President Harry S Truman took to implement its containment policy. To prevent the spread of communism in Europe, it delivered military supplies and funding to Greece and Turkey under the Truman Doctrine. The administration also initiated the Marshall Plan to help European economies recover and mounted an airlift to beleaguered Berlin. By the spring of 1949, the administration was ready to expand on its commitment to

Western Europe by joining a multinational military alliance. In doing so, Truman and his advisors broke with a long established precedent in U.S. foreign policy. The Revolutionary War alliance with France had become so unpopular by the time it was canceled in 1800 that the United States steadfastly refused to commit itself to any other peacetime military alliances for a century and a half. But the Soviet threat seemed sufﬁciently menacing at the outbreak of the Cold War to require abandonment of the nonalignment tradition. Several European countries had already worked out similar arrangements with one another before the United States invited 11 of them to sign the NATO agreements on April 4th, 1949. (The founding members of NATO were the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Canada, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, Germany in 1955, and Spain in 1981.) The agreement’s key provision appeared in Article V: a statement that an attack on any member would be considered an attack on them all. The signatories pledged to take any actions including “the use of armed force” to defend themselves. The proposed treaty provoked all too familiar opposition. Recalling the 1919 Senate criticisms of the League of Nations, opponents protested that NATO could plunge the United States into war without any congressional consultation or approval. Others objected to what they correctly saw as the huge price U.S. participation would entail. Many Americans felt their government had already provided more than adequate foreign assistance around the world and wanted

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 329

Representatives from 12 nations convened in Washington on April 4, 1949, to sign the North Atlantic Treaty, the ﬁrst military alliance the United States participated in since 1800. (NATO Photos)

no part of a seemingly open-ended military commitment. Despite these qualms, paranoia about Soviet intentions and emotional opposition to the spread of communism helped clear the way for Senate approval of the treaty, by a vote of 82–13, on July 21. As opponents had predicted, two days later President Truman submitted a Mutual Defense Assistance Bill to Congress, requesting over $1 billion to implement the new U.S. commitment. It, too, quickly received positive approval, although it proved to be only a down payment on the continuing and ever increasing costs of NATO. One focus of the alliance was to assemble enough conventional armed forces to prevent, or at least slow down, a Soviet incursion. NATO members immediately began assigning army and navy

units to the alliance. Dwight Eisenhower came out of military retirement to go to Brussels to head the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE). By 1952, the NATO Council had approved plans for placing some 50 divisions under his command. More divisions were added to this total in succeeding years, along with substantial numbers of aircraft and support units. By 1974, for example, the American deployment included 300,000 army, 70,000 air force, and 40,000 navy personnel. Fortunately, these troops avoided combat, in large part because of the atomic and nuclear capabilities NATO also maintained. A linchpin of the initial agreement was the U.S. monopoly of the atomic weaponry arrayed in the defense of Europe. The value of that asset suffered some deterioration when Truman

330 | Section 5

THE NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY Signed in Washington D.C., April 4, 1949 The Parties to this Treaty reafﬁrm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments. They are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. They seek to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area. They are resolved to unite their efforts for collective defense and for the preservation of peace and security. They therefore agree to this North Atlantic Treaty: Article 1. The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. . . . Article 3. In order more effectively to achieve the objectives of this Treaty, the Parties, separately and jointly, by means of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack. Article 4. The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened. Article 5. The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. . . . Article 10. The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty. Any State so invited may become a Party to the Treaty by depositing its instrument of accession with the Government of the United States of America. The Government of the United States of America will inform each of the Parties of the deposit of each such instrument of accession. Source: Bevans, Charles I., ed. Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949. Washington, DC: GPO, 1970, 4:828–831.

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 331 announced a few months later that the Soviet Union had exploded its own atomic device. That seemed to make it even more imperative to equip the alliance with expanded U.S. atomic ﬁrepower. No other feature of NATO was as controversial as the deployment of increasingly powerful nuclear weapons in Western Europe. The United States technically retained control of the missiles and bombs with nuclear warheads that it distributed to its allies. Complicating factors were British and French desires to develop and maintain their own, independent nuclear arsenals. Worse yet, the proliferation of nuclear arms understandably provoked a similar build-up by the Soviet Union, locking both East and West into a costly and dangerous arms race. Here again, neither side ever actually used these weapons. Organizational issues complicated interallied collaboration. The United States was ﬁrmly committed to bringing West Germany into the alliance, a move that would only be meaningful if it were rearmed. The British favored this approach, in part to force the increasingly prosperous Germans to pay a reasonable share of the alliance’s mounting defense costs. For historic reasons, France was far less enthusiastic about remilitarizing its traditional enemy. French Premier René Pleven proposed that a European Defense Community (EDC) be created with each nation contributing individual troops to an internationalized military force. His goal was to prevent Germany from ﬁelding large units answerable only to the government in Bonn. The United States initially opposed the Pleven Plan, until it appeared to be the only way to incorporate Germany into the overall defensive structure. President Dwight Eisenhower’s secre-

tary of state, John Foster Dulles, therefore became an outspoken advocate of the plan. Indeed, in 1953 he warned that the United States would be forced to conduct an “agonizing reappraisal” of its commitments to European defense if the EDC plan was not implemented. Embarrassingly, the French National Assembly then overwhelmingly voted down the EDC approach, and a rearmed Germany entered NATO on the same basis as the other members. Germany’s NATO membership coincided with a tripartite agreement among the United States, France, and Great Britain to end their occupation and grant West Germany full political independence. The Soviet Union responded to these developments by creating its own defensive coalition, signed in Warsaw, Poland, in 1955. The Warsaw Pact included the following member states: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the USSR. It served as a mirror organization to NATO, with the Soviet Union dominating its policies and providing the bulk of the resources just as the United States did on the NATO side. Relations among the allies remained rocky right through the 1960s. French Premier Charles de Gaulle was particularly feisty. In 1966, he withdrew French military participation from the alliance and forced the relocation of over 25,000 American troops to other European posts. In the early 1970s, Greece and Turkey became enmeshed in a conﬂict over the island of Cyprus, and each threatened to use NATO resources against the other. For all of its faults and internal bickering, the alliance apparently achieved its major objective when the Soviet Union disintegrated in the early 1990s. One of

332 | Section 5

the more bizarre post–Cold War phenomena has been NATO’s continued expansion. Three former Soviet Socialist Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, have qualiﬁed for membership. The Czech Republic and Slovakia joined separately. Former Soviet satellites Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania have also entered the Western alliance. Ironically, NATO’s ﬁrst true military action did not take place until 1995, and it occurred in Kosovo, which was not a member of the alliance. The Western leadership responded to a crisis that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia. Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic ordered troops into the neighboring territory after Kosovo declared its independence. NATO responded with an air campaign that was effective enough to end the Serbian incursion. It is hardly surprising that the Russian Federation has objected strongly to the continued existence of NATO and especially to its incorporation of former Soviet dependencies. A related aggravation is a U.S. desire to place antimissile defensive facilities in former Soviet satellites. Like so many other relics of past foreign policy initiatives, however, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization appears likely to endure. See also: Containment; Dulles, John Foster; Marshall Plan References

Cook, Don. Forging the Alliance: NATO, 1945–1950. New York: Arbor House, 1989. Ireland, Timothy P. Creating the Entangling Alliance: The Origins of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981. Kaplan, Lawrence S. NATO and the United States: The Enduring Alliance. New York: Twane Publishers, 1994.

Powaski, Ronald E. The Entangling Alliance: The United States and European Security, 1950–1993. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994.

NSC-68 Early in 1950, the National Security Council circulated a key policy document numbered 68. NSC-68 linked the Soviet Union and communist China together as elements in a consolidated communist drive for world dominance. The U.S. policy statement recommended a substantial increase in containment activities and their extension to all parts of the world. NSC-68 ultimately became the fundamental blueprint for U.S. behavior in the early stages of the Cold War. Coordination among the U.S. armed services and the diplomatic establishment had often broken down during World War II. To solve that problem, as well as to streamline administrative authority, President Harry Truman asked former president Herbert Hoover to chair a commission to develop an improved organizational framework. Among the Hoover Commission’s recommendations was consolidation of the three armed services—Army, Navy, and a separate Air Force—within a Department of Defense. Similarly, the commission advocated coordination of intelligence activities under an independent Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The National Security Act of 1947 implemented many of these recommendations, including the establishment of a National Security Council (NSC). The NSC brought the top administrators of the Defense and State Departments together with the Director of the CIA, creating a focused group to advise the president on all foreign relations

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 333 matters. At that point the NSC had no independent staff, as it would during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Instead, it relied on those who worked within the collaborating agencies for advice and planning. In 1949, the United States suffered two severe shocks: the Soviets exploded their ﬁrst experimental atomic bomb and Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong took control of mainland China. Seeking a way forward in light of these changes, President Truman asked the NSC to analyze the new world situation and propose appropriate policy directions. The assignment initially fell to the State Department’s Ofﬁce of Policy Planning, headed by George F. Kennan, the primary exponent of the containment policy. But Kennan had reservations about a more aggressive stand, so he resigned from the post, allowing Paul Nitze, a zealous anticommunist, to take the lead in articulating a new approach. The resulting document was NSC-68, delivered to the White House in April 1950. Hard-line anticommunism provided the ideological basis for its recommendations. In Nitze’s view, both the Soviet Union and communist China were determined to spread communism world wide. NSC-68 thus treated Soviet and Chinese initiatives as subsets of the same overarching ambition. Moreover, the document contended, the threat of communist “subversion” existed everywhere in the world. It insisted that the United States take the lead in protecting the “free world” from that insidious virus wherever and however it seemed to be spreading. Implementing this demanding agenda would require a quadrupling of U.S. defense expenditures from the $13 billion originally appropriated in 1950. Some of

the increased funding would build additional atomic bombs. At the same time, the United States scientiﬁc community would be encouraged to develop a thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb that would be enormously more powerful than the weapons dropped on Japan in 1945. The scope of NSC-68 was very broad, encompassing any region or nation not currently within the Soviet orbit. For example, communist subversion could crop up in Latin America or Africa, so the existing focus on Europe and Asia was seen as too narrow. According to NSC-68, American policy makers should be alert to any governmental change or threatened revolution anywhere that might allow communism to expand. To that extent, the policy proposals built on the containment concept but vastly expanded where it should be applied. The White House did not immediately embrace the tough-minded, unrepentantly right-wing proposals in NSC-68. President Truman worried that the increased defense costs it demanded would undermine his administration’s ability to implement his Fair Deal domestic agenda and require unpopular tax increases. Although the document was highly classiﬁed and made public only by error in the 1970s, its proposals were widely discussed in the executive branch. Their stridently ideological nature disturbed many, and for some time it was unclear whether NSC-68 could escape the fate of so many other ignored policy proposals. That all changed on June 25, 1950, when North Korean troops crossed into the South and quickly established control over much of the Korean peninsula. The Truman administration’s response was immediate and forceful. It determined to

334 | Section 5

do everything it could to halt and roll back this expansion of communism. Within a matter of months, Defense Department appropriations had ballooned to $50 billion on an annual basis, almost exactly the same level NSC-68 had envisioned. For better or worse, the policies the document proposed followed this funding curve. The United States ratcheted up its global response to the perceived threat of communist expansion. Whether true or exaggerated, its fundamental premises of monolithic communism, a global threat to the free world, and the necessity of unstinting American military, economic, and ideological reaction against them won almost universal acceptance in the United States. NSC-68 thus served as a roadmap for the hard-line, uncompromising approach the nation pursued in the Cold War for many years. See also: Containment; Limited War (Korea) References

Leffler, Melvyn P. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Reardon, Steven L. The Evolution of American Strategic Doctrine: Paul H. Nitze and the Soviet Challenge. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984. Talbott, Strobe. The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Red Scare Again The onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s raised tensions that spilled over into domestic politics in the form of a second Red Scare reminiscent of the one that followed World War I. Many questioned how

loyal some citizens were to the United States. This concern quickly expanded to include charges that some Americans had sold out their country’s interests to communists overseas. The Red Scare reached its zenith when Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy began a ruthless witch hunt for communists and communist sympathizers. The Red Scare profoundly inﬂuenced both domestic and foreign policies in the early 1950s. The Great Depression of the 1930s encouraged a search for governmental solutions. The New Deal policies of President Franklin Roosevelt expanded the scope and size of domestic federal programs, causing critics to portray them as a swing toward socialism or even communism. Meanwhile, communist and other left-leaning groups attracted new members. Most Americans quickly abandoned their radical associations, but even the most peripheral contact with such groups could have major consequences when a Red Scare reemerged after World War II. By 1947, most Americans had lost any affection or respect they might have had for their wartime ally, the Soviet Union. President Harry Truman was a major contributor to this disillusionment. In promoting the Truman Doctrine, his program to aid those in other nations to stave off communism, he deliberately played up the threat of communist subversion. Along the same line, the Truman administration instituted a comprehensive domestic loyalty program. Thousands of federal employees refused to comply with its directives and many were fired. Investigations and background checks led to the dismissal of many more. International incidents help stoke anticommunist emotionalism. One was the

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 335 communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948. More upsetting was the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949. Perhaps most disappointing of all was Chinese communist rebel leader Mao Zedong’s deﬁnitive victory over proAmerican Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek in the same year. Many Americans apparently came to believe that subversives within the United States had helped bring about these communist successes. Back in 1939, Congress had established the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to investigate domestic support for both fascism and communism. In the late 1940s, HUAC revived its interest in ferreting out Americans who might be communists

or communist sympathizers. Its most well-publicized target was Hollywood. The committee demanded that directors, actors, and writers testify about their political activities. Ten who refused were imprisoned. The film industry attempted to avoid further harassment by developing a list of 300 professionals whom no one dared hire for fear of being added to the list of communist sympathizers. Many of those blacklisted had done nothing more than attend a few socialist meetings in the 1930s, but the Red Scare had become so virulent that even tangential association with left-leaning organizations could destroy a career. Although the activities of entertainers might seem minor, other Red Scare

Journalist Whittaker Chambers testiﬁes before the House Un-American Activities Committee that diplomat Alger Hiss was a communist spy. This investigation in 1948 was the opening act of what became a six-year Red Scare. (Library of Congress)

336 | Section 5

targets appeared more dangerous. For example, newsman Whitaker Chambers admitted to HUAC that he had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s and that high-ranking diplomat Alger Hiss had supplied him with copies of classiﬁed documents. Hiss denied the charges, but Chambers supported his allegations when he took members of the committee, including Richard Nixon, to his farm in Maryland. There he produced a hollowed-out pumpkin containing microfilms of classified materials. Although the connection between this evidence and Alger Hiss remains disputed to this day, Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury and sentenced to a ﬁve-year prison term. Many Americans simply did not believe the Russians could have developed an atomic weapon as quickly as they did without help from the West. British physicist Klaus Fuchs fed that belief in 1950, when he confessed that he had transmitted information he had obtained from the Los Alamos Laboratory to the Russian government. Shortly afterward, two American scientists, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were found guilty of similar espionage and condemned to die in the electric chair. Russian documents publicized in the 1990s suggest that the contributions espionage made to the Russian weapons program were minimal at best, but few were willing to believe that at the height of the Red Scare. The communist takeover of China implicated a different group. A number of American ofﬁcials were accused of “selling out” Chiang Kai-Shek, or aiding his communist adversaries. The State Department became a particular focus of inquiry. Career China expert John Service survived more than half a dozen

security investigations before being forced out of his position. McCarthyism infused new energy into the Red Scare. The junior senator from Wisconsin, Republican Joseph McCarthy, had failed to develop much of a record after four years in Washington. On the advice of a priest in 1950, he decided to exploit anticommunism to generate support for his reelection bid in 1952. McCarthy grabbed national headlines two days after the Fuchs’s story broke by telling a West Virginia audience he possessed a list of 205 communists in the State Department. The number on this purported list ﬂuctuated wildly. The next day it was 57 and later still it was 81. McCarthy never made his list public so it may not have existed at all. His unsupported and undocumented charges had the desired effect of drawing national attention. When he ﬁnally did provide a single name, it was to implicate State Department official Owen Lattimore. Maryland Senator Millard Tydings conclusively proved McCarthy’s allegations to be unfounded. At that point, McCarthy charged Tydings with being soft on communism. The Marylander lost his own reelection bid in 1950, having failed to realize how potent Red Scare tactics could be. Riding the crest of his notoriety, McCarthy raised his sights to more prominent administration ofﬁcials including Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense George Marshall. No Democrat could be sure of avoiding McCarthy’s tar brush, and his tactics made many Republicans nervous as well. When the Republican Party nominated ex-General Dwight Eisenhower for the presidency in 1952, it emphasized strongly anticommunist attitudes.

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 337 Both before and after the election, Eisenhower scrupulously avoided associating himself personally with McCarthy’s extremism. The new president did, however, make it far easier to ﬁre federal employees suspected of being vaguely deﬁned security risks. The 1952 election also produced a Republican majority in the Senate. Resoundingly reelected, McCarthy insisted on being named chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Government Operations to pursue his campaign against communist subversion. His staffers broadened the scope of the inquiry to include targets like Voice of America broadcasts and books in U.S. Information Agency overseas library collections. By 1954, McCarthy was even challenging officials in the Eisenhower administration. His assault on the army led to his undoing. His committee held televised hearings that clearly demonstrated how minor army personnel’s alleged infractions actually were and how vicious McCarthy could be. The Army-McCarthy hearings destroyed the senator’s credibility. He served another three years in the Senate before his death in 1957 but exercised no major inﬂuence after the dramatic hearings ended. The Red Scare destroyed the careers of thousands of people, subjected thousands of others to unjust accusations, and frightened still more. The singlemindedness of the anticommunist crusade reinforced the widespread belief in monolithic communism. That, in turn, severely limited the opportunities for Americans to pursue more rational, less doctrinaire foreign policies. In the long run, the Red Scare may well have done more to damage the U.S. standing in the world than any external subversion could have.

See also: Limited War (Korea); Red Scare; Truman Doctrine References

Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Grifﬁth, Robert. The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970. Powers, Richard Gid. Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. New York: Free Press, 1995. Wicker, Tom. Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2006.

Shuttle Diplomacy Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is most closely identiﬁed with the term “shuttle diplomacy.” After the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Kissinger undertook a series of visits to key Middle Eastern capitals, attempting to ﬁnd terms for a settlement acceptable to all. The long-standing hostility of the opposing groups in the Middle East made shuttle diplomacy essential. None of the Arab governments bordering Israel recognized its right to exist in the 1970s, making direct negotiations impossible. The impasse dated back to the late 1940s when the State of Israel announced its independence in the midst of a war with Arab residents of Palestine and their allies in neighboring countries. United Nations Special Envoy Ralph Bunche, an American national, managed to hammer out a cease-ﬁre in 1949, but the Arabs remained hostile to the new nation in their midst. None of them recognized the existence of Israel and open conﬂict broke out in both 1956 and 1967. Although the latter war lasted

338 | Section 5

only six days, it resulted in a huge expansion of territory for the Jewish state. Israel now controlled all of the lands west of the Jordan River, as well as the Sinai Peninsula, which had been part of Egypt for centuries. The United Nations Security Council issued Resolution 242 in the fall of 1967, calling on Israel to give back the territories it had occupied in exchange for a guarantee of peace and recognition on the part of the Arab nations around it. Despite continuing efforts on the part of the United States and other interested parties, no major progress in that direction had occurred by 1973. Instead, an Arab coalition including Egypt, Syria, and Jordan attacked Israel from all sides in October 1973 on the Jewish high holy day of Yom Kippur. Frantic diplomatic action by the United Nations halted the conﬂict in a matter of days, but the festering underlying causes for hostility remained unresolved. Interestingly enough, this was the ﬁrst conﬂict in which the United States did not unequivocally support Israel. President Richard Nixon was impressed that the Egyptians had thrown out their Soviet advisors during the previous year, and he wanted to act as a moderating force between the longtime enemies. It fell to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to implement the new U.S. policy. The basis of his approach remained the land-for-peace formula enunciated in U.N. Resolution 242. Because the Arab governments had never recognized Israel, there was no chance for face-to-face meetings among the antagonists. Kissinger thus began a wearying series of visits, shuttling between Jerusalem, Cairo, Damascus, and Amman, trying to ﬁne-tune a formula that all could accept.

Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy never did achieve its main objective, but it did have two positive outcomes. First, as long as he continued his travels, the adversaries remained at peace, waiting for some sort of resolution. Even more important was the gradual wearing down of resistance that it represented, laying the groundwork for a major breakthrough under President Jimmy Carter. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat ﬁnally made a personal visit to Jerusalem, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin reciprocated with a trip to Cairo. Under Carter’s personal mediation, the two leaders hammered out an agreement at Camp David in 1978. The Camp David Accords ﬁnally implemented the policy that both the UN Resolution and Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy had sought. Egypt formally recognized Israel’s existence and Israel, in turn, restored the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt over the next several years. See also: Israel; Land for Peace References

AlRoy, Gil Carl. The Kissinger Experience: American Policy in the Middle East. New York: Horizon Press, 1975. Sheehan, Edward R. F. The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger. New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1976.

Sputnik On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s ﬁrst man-made Earth satellite named Sputnik, or “fellow traveler.” Although the launching rocket’s payload weighed only 184 pounds and the satellite itself was no larger than a grapefruit, the Soviet achievement momentarily reordered Cold War perceptions. The United States

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 339 responded quickly and paranoically to Sputnik, which many Americans saw as evidence their nation had, for the ﬁrst time, fallen behind its Cold War rival not only in science and technology, but also, far more ominously, in weaponry. Sputnik was the culmination of a Soviet response to the U.S. atomic bombs unleashed on Japan in 1945. The Soviet Union immediately began a determined and costly effort to develop similar or superior weapons. In 1949, the Soviets tested their ﬁrst atomic bomb. In 1954, just 13 months after the Americans detonated the world’s ﬁrst hydrogen, or fusion, bomb, the Soviets matched that achievement with an H-bomb of their own. Paralleling the development of these weapons, both nations ramped up research and development of delivery systems. One result was that the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC), headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, kept nucleararmed bombers constantly in the air. Meanwhile, both nations worked to develop long-range rockets capable of carrying nuclear warheads across the North Polar region to their rival’s heartland. In doing so, both nations relied heavily on German scientists familiar with Hitler’s successful rocket development program. Wernher von Braun was the most prominent German expert involved in the U.S. program. Through the mid-1950s, most people around the world believed the United States was well ahead of the Soviet Union in developing both sophisticated weapons and delivery systems. The ﬁrst event to shatter that belief came in September 1957 when the Soviets launched the world’s ﬁrst long range intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of carrying a nuclear warhead from the Soviet Union to a target in the continental United States.

Two months later, they attached the Sputnik payload to one of these experimental rockets and launched it into earth orbit. The fact that the missile was powerful enough to achieve earthescape velocity seemed convincing proof that the Soviets had pulled well ahead of their Cold War rivals. To prove it was no ﬂuke, shortly afterward they launched a second satellite large enough to carry a live dog. The U.S. response took many forms. One was an over-hasty attempt to match the Soviet rocketry achievement. It quite literally misﬁred. American television viewers were shocked to see one rocket after another explode on their launching pads. Not until January 31, 1958, did a U.S. Army Juno rocket manage to orbit Explorer 1, a 10-pound satellite. President Dwight Eisenhower and his advisors were far less worried than their countrymen because they had access to secret intelligence. Much of it came from clandestine observation ﬂights of stratospheric U-2 spy planes. This information reassured the administration that the Soviet’s grandstand displays did not actually signal major progress or serious threats to the United States. But the president could not publicize this information to restore conﬁdence without revealing its highly sensitive source. Indeed, when the U-2 program was inadvertently revealed in 1960, the Soviet Union turned it into a major public relations embarrassment for the United States. In addition to pushing ahead with its own missile development program, the United States took other steps in the aftermath of the Sputnik launch. One was to pass the National Defense Education Act in the summer of 1958 to increase funding for scientiﬁc and technological

340 | Section 5

training programs for Americans. A longer-lasting change was the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in October 1958 to ﬁnance and coordinate American missile and space research. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, meanwhile, made much of his nation’s achievements. He had earlier proposed that “peaceful coexistence” should replace Cold War rivalry, and he used his country’s space triumph to lobby for wider acceptance of the concept. At the same time, he pressured the Western allies regarding the future of divided Germany. Although that strategy ultimately failed and led to the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, it deﬁnitely stirred trouble in the immediate post-Sputnik years. Sputnik inﬂuenced domestic American politics as well. Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy cited a “missile gap” in campaigning for the presidency in 1960, implying that Republicans had allowed the nation to fall behind the Soviet Union. After winning an extraordinarily narrow victory over Republican Richard Nixon, Kennedy adopted a more realistic view. He did, however, inspire his countrymen with a vision of putting an American on the moon by the end of the decade; in 1969 a NASA program actually met this optimistic deadline. In one sense, Kennedy had been correct: there really was a missile gap. But it favored the United States by a factor of more than two to one. The Soviet Union had failed to build upon its highly publicized achievements with solid progress. Khrushchev was well aware that the United States had far more high-quality ICBMs aimed at Russian targets than were pointed the other way. To offset that disadvantage, the Russian leader decided to station

Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) in Cuba. His decision led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most dangerous moment in the 40-year-long Cold War. We now live in an era when literally thousands of artiﬁcial satellites perform an enormous variety of functions, like spying, global positioning, weather reconnaissance, communication, and entertainment. No one could have predicted just how substantial the legacy of the unsophisticated and primitive Sputnik would be. See also: Berlin; Brinkmanship; Massive Retaliation; U-2 References

Clowse, Barbara Barksdale. Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981. Divine, Robert A. The Sputnik Challenge. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Levine, Alan J. The Missile and Space Race. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994.

Tet On January 31, 1968, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers attacked hundreds of targets in South Vietnam, including its capital, Saigon. This unexpected assault began on Tet, the ﬁrst day of the Asian new year. The Tet Offensive marked a key turning point in American conduct of the war in Vietnam, a moment when escalation gave way to protracted efforts to extricate the United States from an increasingly unpopular war. Although U.S. backing for the South Vietnamese government had been growing for years, Congress’s nearly unanimous endorsement of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in August 1964

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 341 authorized far greater direct U.S. participation. At that point, however, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson was engaged in a heated reelection campaign against Republican Barry Goldwater. Goldwater, a conservative senator from Arizona, advocated a major escalation of U.S. action in Southeast Asia, perhaps including the use of atomic weapons. Johnson disagreed, claiming he did not favor sending “American boys” to defend South Vietnam. His less strident war policy contributed to his landslide victory in November. Johnson’s pledge apparently did not include halting the ﬂow of American “advisors” to Vietnam, but they technically remained in noncombat roles. In February 1965, an enemy attack on an airbase at Pleiku killed nine Americans. The Johnson administration reacted by stepping up its plans for greater American involvement. In March, two U.S. Marine battalions landed at Da Nang, the ﬁrst Americans ofﬁcially sent into combat to aid the South Vietnamese government. By the end of the year, the U.S. military presence had expanded to 180,000, and it doubled in the following year. From one perspective, the campaign was successful: U.S. forces won every formal battle against the enemy. But this string of tactical victories had little impact on the overall direction of the war. Even though Nguyen Van Thieu’ s South Vietnamese government achieved reasonable stability and effectiveness by 1965, its authority continued to fray at the edges. As in the American Revolutionary War, people living in remote areas were less hostile to their revolutionary countrymen than to foreign soldiers. The United States attempted to offset this

hostility by dispatching “paciﬁcation” teams of diplomatic and economic experts to create a friendlier American presence in the countryside. But these efforts failed to achieve their anticipated benefits, especially when American bombers continued dropping tons of defoliants and napalm on the heavily forested countryside. The Johnson administration seemed obsessed with pursuing, and even expanding, the same initiatives that had failed in the past. Well aware that hundreds of thousands of communist Chinese operatives were directly supporting North Vietnamese efforts, the United States felt some constraints. To avoid provoking more direct Chinese countermoves, the United States conducted a measured, step-by-step escalation until the deployment exceeded more than half a million military personnel by 1968. Some 30,000 Americans had died in combat by that point. At home, the war provoked increasingly vocal opposition. The ﬁrst university “teach-ins” took place in 1965, the initial phase of growing campus protests. Although the administration chose to ignore these demonstrations, it was far more difﬁcult to dismiss the antiwar sentiments of major political ﬁgures like Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, and New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the slain president. By 1967, some of the most trenchant early supporters of the war effort, like Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, had become disillusioned enough to resign. Clark Clifford, the highly respected foreign policy expert who replaced McNamara, became concerned over the apparent inability of the nation’s military

342 | Section 5

leadership to propose any alternative to further escalation. Early in 1968, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, requested an additional 206,000 troops. Clifford rejected he request even before the Tet Offensive occurred. Although North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap advised against such a bold step, Ho Chi Minh overruled him. Tens of thousands of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers conducted simultaneous attacks throughout South Vietnam. Because the offensive began on a holiday, half the soldiers in the Army of South Vietnam (ARVN) were on vacation. The drive’s most spectacular success was the capture of Hue, the old imperial capital just south of the line dividing the two Vietnams. For Americans, the most unnerving event was an invasion of the supposedly impregnable U.S. Embassy grounds in Saigon itself. Only 19 Viet Cong managed to get inside, but they were able to kill several defenders before a helicopter-borne team of paratroopers landed on the embassy roof and ended the assault. The chastened American forces collaborated with the embarrassed ARVN in a massive counter attack that killed some 50,000 enemy soldiers and recaptured control of Hue and other key locations. Although the North Vietnamese were shocked at the magnitude and speed of the reversal, the Tet Offensive’s most important consequences occurred half a world away in the United States. Press coverage did nothing to minimize the horror of the offensive that completely discredited the administration’s claims that real progress had ﬁnally been taking place. The offensive also conﬁrmed Defense Secretary Clifford’s decision that escalation was hopeless. He helped con-

vince a reluctant President Johnson that an alternative strategy must be developed. That conviction was reinforced when Senator Eugene McCarthy, an outspoken critic of the war, won 42 percent of the votes in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary a few days later, nearly matching the 49 percent for the incumbent president. Johnson announced a new approach at the end of March. He suspended the massive, yet seemingly ineffective, U.S. bombing campaign on North Vietnamese targets and ordered only a token increase in troop deployments. He also made the stunning announcement that he was abandoning his reelection campaign to devote the remaining months of his presidency to seeking a negotiated peace with North Vietnam. Still, it took several months to work out preliminary steps for peace talks. Senator Robert F. Kennedy had jumped into the presidential race just after the New Hampshire primary. His antiwar message resonated with the American people, and he seemed well on his way to capturing the Democratic nomination when he was assassinated in June. Vice President Hubert Humphrey ultimately became the party’s nominee, only to lose in a very close race to Republican Richard Nixon in November. During the fall campaign, Nixon had claimed he knew how to end the war. Once in ofﬁce, however, he redeﬁned his position. It now appeared that he intended to reduce the level of U.S. participation in the war without abandoning the goal of a South Vietnamese victory. To that end, he announced a policy of “Vietnamization,” stepping up U.S. training programs for the ARVN so it could replace American troops in the ﬁeld. This move was part of a broader

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 343 reduction of direct U.S. involvement in Asia, which the president heralded as the Nixon Doctrine. Another step was the introduction of a lottery system for the draft, which relieved the anxieties of the majority of young men about their prospects of being sent off to die in Vietnam. The draft lottery reduced opposition to Nixon’s policies and gave him breathing room to proceed with Vietnamization and pursue less energetically the peace negotiations Johnson had initiated. Nixon’s fateful decision to invade Cambodia in 1970, however, quickly revived the antiwar sentiments and led to further complications down the line. See also: Cambodia; McNamara, Robert Strange; Tonkin Gulf Incident References

Ford, Ronnie E. Tet 1968: Understanding the Surprise. Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1995. Heineman, Kenneth J. Campus Wars. New York: New York University Press, 1993. Hoopes, Townsend. The Limits of Intervention. New York: Norton, 1987. Kaiser, David. American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Tonkin Gulf Incident In early August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb North Vietnam in retaliation for two attacks on American destroyers. Within three days, Congress overwhelmingly approved the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving the president virtually unlimited authority to pursue a war to defend South Vietnam. The response was very much inline with the long established tradition that the United States only initiated combat if someone else ﬁred the ﬁrst shot. Johnson

was well aware of that tradition and had struggled to ﬁnd a way to justify his plans for expanding the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam. As with other Cold War confrontations, hasty decisions at the end of World War II sowed the seeds for future troubles. Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh had long dedicated himself to trying to shape the future of his homeland. He had led a group called the Viet Minh in an effective guerrilla campaign against the Japanese, who had captured control of the French colonies in Indochina in 1941. Because he was on the “right” side, that is, ﬁghting the same enemy the United States was, American soldiers and intelligence operatives collaborated with Ho even though he had become a dedicated communist in the 1920s. When the Japanese departed in 1945, Ho proclaimed the establishment of an independent nation with Hanoi as its capital. The victorious Allies generally ignored his pronouncements. Instead, they delegated postwar occupation authority to China in the north and Great Britain in the south. Neither did much to discourage Frenchmen from returning to their former colony and reasserting prewar property rights. Ho Chi Minh continued to hope for reconciliation with France, but relations between the two broke down completely in 1947 when French naval vessels shelled Haiphong, Hanoi’s seaport, over a customs dispute. Ho reluctantly retreated to the jungles, revived the Viet Minh, and directed its guerrilla warfare against France. When the United States became involved in an anticommunist struggle in Korea, the French campaign against a communist rebellion in Asia seemed consistent with the U.S. containment policy. In the early 1950s, U.S.

344 | Section 5

dollars sent to France through the Marshall Plan were often redirected to its war effort in Vietnam. That effort ended disastrously in 1954 when the Viet Minh besieged a French fort at Dien Bien Phu in the far northwest corner of Vietnam. U.S. Air Force Secretary Nathan Twining urged President Eisenhower to authorize the use of atomic weapons to relieve the beleaguered Europeans, but the president wisely ignored his advice. Instead, the United States stood by while the two adversaries hammered out a diplomatic agreement in Geneva. The Geneva Accords established a supposedly temporary division between North and South Vietnam. The Accords also called for an election to be held within two years to determine the future government for all of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh’s allies gathered in the North where the communist leader reestablished his control in Hanoi. At about the same time, Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic who had been living in Paris for many years, returned to Saigon, the southern administrative capital. Once in power, Diem made no move to implement the Geneva Accords, which he personally had never signed. He had no doubt that Ho would win a substantial majority of support in a general election. The United States never signed the Geneva Accords, either. In 1954, President Eisenhower articulated a disturbing metaphor for Southeast Asia. He compared the countries there to dominoes standing on end. If one of those dominoes fell to communism, he warned, it could knock all of them down. The Domino Theory gained widespread credence and persuaded the United States to enter into a number of security agreements, including one with South Vietnam. The Eisenhower administration

began funneling military and economic aid to the Diem government. When the election deadline set by the Geneva Accords passed, Ho Chi Minh decided once again to revive his guerilla campaign. Virtually all members of the newly created National Liberation Front (NLF) were southerners dedicated to ousting the Diem regime. Diem portrayed them as communist agents, however, a strategy that induced the United States to make ever greater commitments. The NLF’s combat arm became known as the Viet Cong. When John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, he viewed the Viet Cong as a serious enough threat to justify sending American military advisors to South Vietnam. Unfortunately, they were assisting an increasingly unpopular government. The most dramatic examples of widespread disillusionment were Buddhist monks who set ﬁre to themselves to protest the Diem regime. A group of South Vietnamese generals eventually staged a coup, with U.S. connivance, that culminated in Diem’s ouster and death. Just a few weeks later, President Kennedy himself was assassinated. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. advisors had grown from an initial contingent of 400 to over 16,000 men, and included land, sea, air, and political elements. Even so, the Viet Cong continued to expand their inﬂuence. President Lyndon Johnson did not want to be remembered for failing to prevent another communist takeover in Asia. As early as June 1964, his advisors were urging him to seek congressional authorization for more direct participation in the conﬂict. Johnson even drafted some of the language he would use in his request to Congress a full two months before an incident occurred that he could exploit.

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 345 On August 2, 1964, U.S. Navy destroyer Maddox was just off the coast of North Vietnam in the Tonkin Gulf monitoring North Vietnamese communications and relaying information to South Vietnamese naval vessels attacking the coastline. It was hardly surprising, then, that North Vietnamese gunboats would approach the ship and shoot at it. The Maddox returned ﬁre and called for help from navy ﬁghters on a nearby aircraft carrier. The skirmish ended quickly and without any American casualties. Such an isolated, minor incident was hardly sufﬁcient to justify a full-scale mobilization. But two nights later, jittery American naval personnel responded to what they thought was a second North Vietnamese attack. In fact, no evidence has ever conﬁrmed that an attack took place on August 4.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Tonkin Gulf Resolution on August 10, 1964, authorizing him to take whatever measures he deemed necessary to deal with communist aggression in Vietnam. Congress repealed the resolution in late 1970. (National Archives)

TONKIN GULF RESOLUTION (Joint Resolution of Congress H.J. RES 1145, August 7, 1964) To promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia. Whereas naval units of the Communist regime in Vietnam, in violation of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law, have deliberately and repeatedly attacked United Stated naval vessels lawfully present in international waters, and have thereby created a serious threat to international peace; Whereas these attackers are part of a deliberate and systematic campaign of aggression that the Communist regime in North Vietnam has been waging against its neighbors and the nations joined with them in the collective defense of their freedom; and Whereas the United States is assisting the peoples of southeast Asia to protect their freedom and has no territorial, military or political ambitions in that area, but desires only that these people should be left in peace to work out their destinies in their own way: Now, therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression. Section 2. The United States regards as vital to its national interest and to world peace the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia.

346 | Section 5

(Tonkin Gulf Resolution, continued) Consonant with the Constitution of the United States and the Charter of the United Nations and in accordance with its obligations under the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, the United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom. Section 3. This resolution shall expire when the President shall determine that the peace and security of the area is reasonably assured by international conditions created by action of the United Nations or otherwise, except that it may be terminated earlier by concurrent resolution of the Congress. Source: U.S. Department of State, American Foreign Policy Documents 1964. Washington, DC: GPO, 1967, 991–992.

Press reports of both incidents circulated widely, however, and President Johnson did nothing to counter them. Instead, he delivered a nationwide television address urging Congress to authorize U.S. military action in light of the “further deliberate attacks against U.S. naval vessels operating in international waters.” Congress responded hastily to this “ﬁrst shot.” The Tonkin Gulf Resolution won unanimous approval in the House of Representatives and gained an 80–2 majority in the Senate. It authorized the president to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” The president had already ordered American bombers to attack North Vietnam, the ﬁrst step in what eventually became the deployment of over half a million members of the U.S. armed forces to South Vietnam. Even more fatefully, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution focused American efforts on attacking North Vietnam, even though the Viet Cong were essentially homegrown in the South. Thus the rush to war in 1964 had far reaching consequences, drawing the

United States into what ultimately became known as the Vietnam quagmire. See also: Cambodia; Containment; Tet References

Berman, Larry. Lyndon Johnson’s War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam. New York: Norton, 1989 Moïse, Edwin E. Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Patti, Archimedes L. A. Why Viet Nam? Prelude to America’s Albatross. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Tourison, Sedgwick. Secret Army, Secret War. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995.

Truman Doctrine To limit Soviet expansion in southern Europe in the spring of 1947, President Harry Truman called for substantial, direct U.S. military and economic aid to countries under threat of communist takeover. The Truman Doctrine was the ﬁrst major U.S. initiative in what became known as the Cold War. Congress appropriated some $400 million that eventually helped stabilize the governments of Greece and Turkey. Subsequent steps

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 347 included the Marshall Plan, Point Four Program, and, eventually, the establishment of a major western mutual defense pact creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). During World War II, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union cooperated in defeating the Axis powers. What British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called “the Grand Alliance” was always a loose and strained collaboration, however, and no topic was more controversial than planning for postwar Europe. Although the leaders of all three nations signed the “Declaration on Liberated Europe” at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, each nation interpreted it differently. The declaration called for “free elections” in the areas extricated from Axis domination, but in each case, the presence of the occupying forces of the victorious Allies heavily inﬂuenced the government that emerged. In much of Eastern Europe, therefore, outright communist regimes took control under the watchful eyes of the Red Army. In Western Europe, the new governments espoused variations of liberal democratic principles modeled after British, French, and American examples. As early as 1946 the lines of demarcation between these two political blocs had sufﬁciently hardened for ex-Prime Minister Churchill to call U.S. attention to an “Iron Curtain” descending through the heart of Europe. Had no international complications existed, the United States would likely have followed its historical precedents and retreated into the sort of isolationism that had prevailed after World War I. Even Churchill’s dramatic language did little to stir U.S. action.

By 1947, however, a disturbing ideological struggle had developed in two southern European countries. In Greece, the British supported the rightist monarchy that had ruled the nation prior to the war, but they were opposed by rebel guerrillas. These rebels, in turn, received encouragement, weapons, and ﬁnancing from communist sources funneled through Yugoslavia. Turkey had carefully stayed out of the war until the spring of 1945 and joined then primarily to obtain membership in the United Nations. But in the postwar confusion, British observers noted that committed communists were encouraging dissent and rebellion against the republican government. If Greece fell to communism, it would put enormous pressure on Turkey to follow a similar path. Another weak link at this point was Great Britain itself, which had emerged from World War II with major economic shortages at home and far too many overseas commitments. It simply could not continue to support the two governments ﬁghting communism. British diplomats brought these facts to the attention of the U.S. government early in 1947, indicating that if British support collapsed, both nations would likely be drawn behind the Iron Curtain. President Harry Truman, Secretary of State George Marshall, and other administrative leaders recognized and understood the nature of the crisis. But the conservative Republicans, who had done well in the 1946 elections and now dominated Congress, were less convinced. Truman personally lobbied Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and he agreed to cooperate, provided that the president “scared the hell out of the American people.”

348 | Section 5

Harry Truman set out to do just that. He even agreed to testify in person before Congress on March 12, 1947. In what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, he outlined the existing situations in Greece and Turkey. Looking beyond the two current hot spots, he insisted that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by

outside pressures.” In a sense, his assertions represented the opening salvo in what would become known as the Cold War. Even though Truman had “scared” the American people, it took two months of strident debate and negotiation to implement his request for $400 million in economic and military support for those opposing communist aggression. Senator Vandenberg was crucial in

THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE President Harry S Truman’s Address to a Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947 . . . One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations. To ensure the peaceful development of nations, free from coercion, the United States has taken a leading part in establishing the United Nations. The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members. We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States. . . . I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and ﬁnancial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes. . . . The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive. The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation. Great responsibilities have been placed upon us by the swift movement of events. I am conﬁdent that the Congress will face these responsibilities squarely. Source: Congressional Record, 80th Cong. 1st sess., 1947, 93:1999.

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 349 engineering a “bipartisan” response to the crisis, and the ﬁnal bill passed both houses of Congress by wide margins. The infusion of U.S. aid enabled the existing governments to neutralize the communist drives. Both Greece and Turkey ultimately became vital southeastern European bulwarks of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The philosophical and political debates that Truman’s initiative triggered were the ﬁrst in a continuing evolution of U.S. political thought. His generalized call for American support for “free peoples” clearly threw down the gauntlet to Soviet expansionism. Within a matter of a few months, the administration proposed several related initiatives like the Marshall Plan, the Point Four Program, and, ultimately, an unprecedented multilateral mutual defense pact, NATO. The Cold War was well under way. See also: Marshall Plan; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) References

Acheson, Dean. Present at the Creation. New York: Norton, 1969. Donovan, Robert J. Conﬂict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1945–1948. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977. Frazier, Robert. Anglo-American Relations with Greece. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

U-2 High altitude spy planes called U-2s began flying in the mid-1950s and played key roles in two major Cold War confrontations. The so-called U-2 Incident sabotaged a 1960 summit meeting, and the publication of U-2 photographs

focused world attention on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The aircraft’s designation was a shorthand version of Utility–2, a deliberately bland and misleading identiﬁer because the airplane’s existence and capabilities remained highly classiﬁed. U-2 missions represented the pinnacle of American aerial intelligence gathering and profoundly inﬂuenced U.S. and Soviet behavior during the Cold War. When the U.S. Air Force showed little interest in the concept, the U-2 became a project of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Although he had initial doubts, CIA director Allen Dulles, brother of the secretary of state, became an enthusiastic advocate. The project’s goal was to develop an airplane capable of ﬂying so high that it would be beyond the reach of the most sophisticated antiaircraft weapons. Lockheed engineer Clarence Johnson began with the fuselage of an F-104 jet ﬁghter. To it he attached wings three times longer than normal and as thin and light as possible. The U-2’s ﬁnal silhouette resembled that of a glider since the aircraft needed to soar in very thin air at 70,000 feet or higher. A single jet engine tweaked to perform in an oxygen-starved atmosphere gave the airplane an operational speed of over 450 miles per hour. To carry out its spying mission, it needed cameras capable of producing high-resolution photographs from that altitude. Edwin Land, founder of the Polaroid company and creator of the most successful instant photograph camera, was a major contributor to the camera design project. U-2 cameras used mile-long, ultrathin Mylar ﬁlm rolls and highly advanced lenses to produce remarkably detailed images of the landscape 12 or more miles below.

350 | Section 5

Lockheed completed its ﬁrst operational U-2 in six months at a cost of just over $1 million. It proved extremely tricky to ﬂy, but did meet the CIA’s performance standards. Over the years, Lockheed produced a number of variations and updates of the specialized aircraft. The CIA carefully screened the pilots chosen for missions and insisted that all of them be civilians rather than military ofﬁcers. The presumption was that if news of the missions leaked out, having civilians at the controls would prevent them from automatically drawing military retribution. To deploy its spy planes around the world, the United States had to negotiate special agreements with other countries. Pakistan’s location made it a logical choice and, to obtain basing rights, the United States agreed to broader defense commitments with Islamabad. A questionable result of this deployment was that the United States then felt obligated to provide support and equipment when Pakistan subsequently became embroiled in a war with India. Once the U-2s were operational, they began ﬂying over the Soviet Union and photographing military and industrial facilities. Some claim that the 23 surveillance ﬂights conducted by 1960 provided 90 percent of the hard military intelligence the U.S. collected about its Cold War rival. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was well aware of these overﬂights, but he could not complain about them publicly without revealing the embarrassing fact that the Soviets were incapable of shooting the aircraft down. The secrecy cut both ways. Largely on the basis of U-2 photographs, the Eisenhower administration knew that Soviet defensive capabilities were less

than impressive. For example, at one point they showed that the USSR had only 14 bombers capable of delivering nuclear weapons to distant targets, far fewer than the U.S. and NATO air forces possessed. Equally important, U-2 pictures proved that the United States had little to fear from Soviet missiles. American leaders recognized that the dramatic launching of Sputnik and subsequent Soviet rocketry achievements did not signal that the USSR was ahead in the space race. In the late 1950s, the United States had far more advanced ballistic missiles on hand and in development than did its rival. A dramatic incident on May 1, 1960, stripped away the cloak of secrecy. While ﬂying from Pakistan to Norway, U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers encountered technical problems that forced him to descend. He was about 1,200 miles inside Soviet territory when a surface-toair missile (SAM) knocked the wings off his airplane. Powers managed to eject safely, only to be immediately captured on the ground. The Soviets also retrieved much of the downed aircraft, including its camera. The U.S. government initially claimed Powers had mistakenly strayed over Soviet territory while conducting a civilian weather reconnaissance ﬂight. When confronted with U-2 photos of Russian industrial installations, the U.S. duplicity was revealed for all the world. Rather than apologize, President Dwight Eisenhower defended his nation’s right and responsibility to learn as much as possible about its adversary. After all, both sides were deeply involved in spying on each other. One of the most bizarre methods involved a carving of the great seal of the United States that had been installed in the U.S. Embassy

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 351

Russians view the wreckage of Francis Gary Powers's U-2 spy plane shot down over Soviet territory on May 1, 1960. The resulting U-2 Incident torpedoed plans for a U.S.–Soviet summit meeting and hardened Cold War positions. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

in Moscow. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations showed his colleagues that the eagle contained a hidden microphone that Russian intelligence agents used to eavesdrop on conversations in the embassy. Eisenhower did promise that no more U-2 ﬂights would take place during his administration, but that pledge did not satisfy Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. When the leaders met at the Paris summit conference on May 14, Khrushchev bitterly criticized the United States and its president before dramatically walking out of the conference after a single day. The so-called U-2 Incident thus wrecked any hope of productive East-West diplomatic dialogue for some time. Another U-2 spy mission shook up Cold War relationships two years later. In July 1960, U-2 photos revealed a signiﬁ-

cant increase in Soviet shipping to Cuba. In August, they also produced evidence of a major Soviet military buildup on the island. Then, on October 14, a U-2 camera took detailed pictures of Soviet missile bases being constructed in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy publicized these photographs as indisputable proof of Soviet intentions. The U-2 spy planes thus played a critical role in provoking the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ironically, a Soviet SAM shot down a U-2 ﬂying over Cuba a couple of weeks later. Fortunately, that incident did not derail the accommodation Kennedy was working out with Khrushchev. U-2 ﬂights occasionally made headlines in subsequent years. In 1970, for example, they revealed that the Soviets were building a submarine base in Cuba, an activity U.S. diplomacy managed to discourage. Some U-2s were transferred

352 | Section 5

to Taiwan for use by Nationalist Chinese pilots to conduct overﬂights of the People’s Republic, and Red Chinese rockets shot down at least ﬁve of them. During the Gulf War in 1991, U-2 planes ﬂew dozens of reconnaissance missions over Kuwait and Iraq to help direct American actions and assess their impact. As recently as 2000, U-2s were still conducting weather and climate evaluation around the world. One of the reasons President Eisenhower was willing to suspend further missions in 1960 was that alternative technologies were already beginning to replace U-2 overﬂights. While the Soviet Union was publicizing showy space exploits, the United States was engaged in a more focused, and ultimately successful, effort to launch spy satellites. As these became increasingly sophisticated, they were able to provide reliable alternatives to U-2 photographs. Spying quite literally rose to new heights in the wake of the U-2 Incident. See also: Berlin; Brinkmanship References

Beschloss, Michael. MAYDAY: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. Burrows, William E. By Any Means Necessary: America’s Secret Air War in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Strodes, James. Allen Dulles: Master of Spies. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1999.

War on Terror Early in the 21st century, President George W. Bush declared a war on terror that is remarkably different from earlier conﬂicts. The enemy is elusive, difﬁcult

to identify, and distressingly resilient. Massive military moves, the deployment of the most sophisticated weaponry, and enormous expenditures seem to have had little effect. Indeed, there may never be a deﬁnitive victory in this war. Although other terrorist attacks have victimized Americans, incidents in Beirut in 1983 marked a discouraging evolution in the nature of terrorism. The stage was set when Israeli troops crossed over to attack Palestinian refugees in camps in southern Lebanon. The Israeli justiﬁcation was that they had to protect their citizens from refugee attacks. The invasion soon developed into a broader conﬂict that ultimately involved Syrian troops and the collapse of the Lebanese government. President Ronald Reagan felt he must take action. The United States joined France, Italy, and Great Britain in deploying small military contingents, hoping they would calm the crisis. But the presence of U.S. Marines did nothing to stem the violence and seemed to increase anti-American sentiment. In April, an assault on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut killed 60 people, including 17 Americans. Six months later, someone drove a bomb-laden truck into American-occupied barracks at the Beirut Airport. A total of 241 marines, many of them sleeping at the time, were killed. Shortly afterward, all the U.S. forces were withdrawn, having failed to calm the situation in Lebanon. The Reagan administration did, however, order quick military action shortly after the bombing. On October 21, 1983, 6,000 American troops invaded the Caribbean nation of Grenada, which the president claimed had become a satellite of communist-led Cuba. It was true that Fidel Castro’s government was helping

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 353 to construct a huge airﬁeld on the island. Over 100 people died as a result of the invasion, which “rescued” about 1,000 American students, many of them attending medical school. The patriotic feeling that swept the United States somewhat offset the despair over the Beirut bombing. Twenty years later, President George W. Bush would duplicate the tactic of attacking another nation in retribution for a terrorist attack somewhere else. Beginning in 1993, a series of terrorist attacks were attributed to the Al Qaeda movement led by Saudi-born Osama bin Laden. First, a car bomb detonated in the garage of one of the World Trade Center towers killed 6 and injured more than 1,000 others. Five years later, simultaneous terrorist attacks on U.S. Embassy buildings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killed a dozen Americans and hundreds of local citizens. In October 2000, the USS Cole, a navy destroyer refueling at the port of Aden, suffered extensive damage and the loss of 17 lives when an explosive-laden boat rammed into it. As disconcerting as these incidents were, they in no way prepared the United States for the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001. Americans had great difﬁculty understanding the concept of suicide bombing. Like the truck driver in Beirut, however, some terrorists are prepared to sacriﬁce their lives for a cause. In the late 20th century, the United States established increasingly strict security procedures to prevent terrorists from hijacking aircraft. Experience with previous hijackings suggested that temporarily acceding to perpetrators’ demands could have positive outcomes. Prior to September 11, no one anticipated that the hijackers themselves

might be suicide bombers. Consequently the passengers and crew on board four hijacked domestic commercial ﬂights that morning were unprepared to cope with this new escalation of terrorist strategy. In this instance, the aircraft, ﬁlled with highly ﬂammable aviation fuel, were transformed into the suicide bombers’ weapons. Two smashed into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and one crashed into the Pentagon near Washington, D.C. Passengers and crew members on the fourth hijacked jetliner learned of these attacks by cell phones and chose to sacriﬁce their own lives to save others. That airplane plummeted to earth in Pennsylvania. Intensifying Americans’ sudden sense of dread and vulnerability were several anthrax-laced letters sent to politicians and business leaders. The perpetrator of this biological attack has never been identiﬁed deﬁnitively. The administration of President George W. Bush quickly concluded, however, that members of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization had planned and executed the destruction of the World Trade Center. It also maintained that the Taliban, an Islamic extremist group ruling Afghanistan, was shielding the terrorist leader and his followers. Less than a month after the New York catastrophe, the Bush administration collaborated with the government of Great Britain in launching the ﬁrst phase of the war on terror. Its objective was to oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and to seek out and destroy the Al Qaeda organization. The capture of Osama bin Laden was a primary objective. The assault began with an extensive aerial bombing campaign,

354 | Section 5

followed by the deployment of ground troops. The Taliban government collapsed in November, but Osama bin Laden evaded capture. Other nations sent troops and support as the conﬂict continued. In 2006, a NATO force took responsibility for much of the ﬁghting. Along the way, the foreigners helped install a replacement government headed by Hamid Karzai. Taliban attacks persisted through 2008, however, and no end to the nation’s instability was in sight. Even more disconcerting, the Al Qaeda organization also persisted and its leader remained at large, probably in northwestern Pakistan. The war on terror fundamentally affected the American people both at home and abroad. Heightened airport security is an obvious manifestation. The Bush administration cited the war on terror to justify expanded internal and external intelligence activities, some of which may have violated basic constitutional protections. In that sense, the war on terror has come to resemble the Red Scare of the 1950s. Even as it has raised Americans’ anxieties and fueled unhealthy xenophobia, its effectiveness in protecting the United States from international terrorism remains in question. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the war on terror was its extension to Iraq. The Bush administration conducted a concerted publicity campaign, for both domestic and foreign consumption, linking the regime of Saddam Hussein to international terrorism. In fact, there is no conclusive evidence that either the Iraqi government or the Iraqi people had any part in the 9/11 attacks or any sympathy with Al Qaeda or its objectives. The enormously costly effort to change the regime in Iraq and establish stability there diverted resources and attention

from the war on terror. But, as with the Grenada invasion 20 years earlier, Americans initially cheered the deployment of U.S. forces overseas despite the lack of any clear relationship between Iraq and international terrorism. See also: Bush Doctrine; Red Scare Again References

Kellner, Douglas. From 9/11 to Terror War. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 2003. Rogers, Paul. A War on Terror: Afghanistan and After. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2004. Valdez, Angela. We the People: The U.S. Government’s Response Against Terror. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.

BIOGRAPHIES Acheson, Dean (1893–1971) Of the many targets of McCarthyism, few sustained as much criticism as President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson. He presented a very tempting target because he epitomized the foreign policy elite. He attended Groton, Yale University, and then Harvard Law School. Standing six feet, eight inches tall, he was a commanding presence in any group, and he used his stature and erudition to humble others. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and pursing a successful private law practice, he was appointed undersecretary of the treasury in 1933. He knew little about ﬁnance and disagreed with some of President Franklin Roosevelt’s initiatives, so he resigned after only a few months. Interestingly enough, when he returned to federal service in 1941 as assistant secretary of state, he emerged as a leading policy maker in international economic affairs,

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 355 participating in the creation of the International Money Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). After World War II, he moved up to the department’s number two position, undersecretary of state, where he worked closely with General George Marshall, who headed the State Department during Truman’s ﬁrst term. Marshall and Acheson were the chief architects and publicists for the administration’s containment policy, and Acheson’s role was especially important in the development of the Truman Doctrine, the Point Four Program, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). When Marshall became secretary of defense, Truman named Acheson to replace him as secretary of state. He began his tenure at the State Department pursuing what turned out to be an unpopular approach to China. He publicly attributed communist leader Mao Zedong’s victory in 1949 to weakness on the part of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek. After the communist takeover, Acheson proposed that the United States extend recognition to the new regime and exploit its hostility to the Soviet Union to further U.S. Cold War goals. When Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy began his virulent anticommunist campaign, he seized upon Acheson’s views as evidence that he was “soft on communism.” McCarthy also maintained that the secretary of state was responsible for stafﬁng the State Department with communists or communist sympathizers. Early in 1950, Acheson took another step that provided fodder for his critics. Addressing the National Press Club, he identiﬁed a “defensive perimeter” in Asia that the United States was committed to defend. Signiﬁcantly he left both Formosa and South Korea outside the

perimeter. When North Korean troops invaded the South in June 1950, however, Acheson strongly urged President Truman to respond militarily. Some also charge Acheson with convincing Truman to initiate American involvement in Vietnam. Despite continuing criticism from rightwing commentators, Truman retained Acheson as his secretary of state through the end of his administration in 1953. Acheson retired from public ofﬁce and wrote a Pulitzer Prize–winning account of his service. He also acted as an informal policy resource. For example, he was one of the group that advised President John F. Kennedy during the critical 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. See also: Containment; Marshall Plan; Marshall, George C.; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Reference

Acheson, Dean. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. New York: Norton, 1969.

Dulles, John Foster (1888–1959) As both a grandson and a nephew of former secretaries of state, John Foster Dulles seemed destined to hold that position as well. He was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Princeton University, spent a year at the Sorbonne, and then returned to the District to study law at George Washington University. While still a student he began participating in high-level international affairs. His grandfather, former secretary of state John W. Foster, invited him to attend the 1907 Hague Peace Conference. As a commissioned army ofﬁcer during World War I, Dulles worked in the United States at the War Industries Board. That experience,

356 | Section 5

and the fact that his uncle, Robert Lansing, was secretary of state, paved the way for him to participate in the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. For the next two decades Dulles practiced law in New York City, building an enviable reputation as an expert in international law. That expertise brought him to the attention of fellow New Yorker Thomas E. Dewey. With every expectation that he would head the State Department if his candidate won, Dulles served as chief foreign policy advisor for both of Dewey’s unsuccessful presidential campaigns. Despite his partisan identiﬁcation, his encyclopedic knowledge and analytical talents convinced President Harry Truman to invite John Foster Dulles to participate in the San Francisco conference that established the United Nations. Governor Dewey appointed Dulles to replace Senator Robert Wagner when he stepped down in 1949, but Dulles lost the seat in a special election held that fall. His record of participation in bipartisan affairs convinced President Truman to give him sole authority to negotiate a postwar peace treaty with Japan. The resulting document was Dulles’s ﬁnest diplomatic achievement. By 1952, Dulles had abandoned bipartisanship to become the Republican Party’s most knowledgeable critic of the Truman administration’s containment and Korea policies. When Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952, he immediately installed Dulles in the position he had long coveted: secretary of state. He remained in that post almost until his death in 1959. As secretary, Dulles attached memorable names or phrases to the Eisenhower administration’s policies. For example, he called for the “liberation” or “rollback” of Soviet authority in Eastern Europe, advocated “massive retaliation” against the Soviet Union,

championed “open skies” to allow aerial monitoring of nuclear weapons testing, and warned of an “agonizing reappraisal” of U.S. relations with its European allies. He not only advocated “brinkmanship” but took great pride in claiming to have exercised it several times in the 1950s. Perhaps overly sensitive to the Red Scare paranoia about communism, Dulles behaved as the epitome of a committed Cold Warrior. That may also have led to a rigidity in his thinking and actions that contributed to several failed or ineffective policy initiatives. It proved especially counterproductive, for example, in his relations with Middle Eastern nations. Contemporary critics complained that President Eisenhower too often allowed Dulles to call the tune in international affairs, but subsequent analysts have concluded that the president exerted considerable restraint on his energetic subordinate. In his defense, Dulles served as secretary of state during a period when the United States was forced to adapt to the rapidly changing Cold War and the rise of strident nationalism around the world. Dealing with these issues proved extraordinarily challenging, even to a man with Dulles’s impeccable foreign policy credentials. See also: Brinkmanship; Land for Peace; Liberation of Eastern Europe; Massive Retaliation Reference

Immerman, Richard H. John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999.

Kissinger, Henry (1923–) Like many other Jews, Heinz Alfred Kissinger ﬂed Nazi Germany to come to the United States in 1938. He

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 357 attended the City College of New York, became a naturalized U.S. citizen, and then joined the army as an intelligence ofﬁcer in 1943. After leaving the service with the rank of captain in 1949, he enrolled in Harvard University where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. His alma mater then hired him to join the faculty in both the Department of Government and the Center for International Affairs. His scholarly books and articles won him wide respect, and Republican Nelson Rockefeller relied on his advice on international affairs. Kissinger left Harvard in 1969 to become President Richard Nixon’s national security advisor. After his reelection in 1973, the president named Kissinger secretary of state, a position he retained through the end of President Gerald Ford’s term in 1977. Both Nixon and Kissinger took pride in pursuing concrete foreign policy objectives rather than the vaguer, idealistic approaches of earlier administrations. They inherited a discouraging war in Vietnam. Even though candidate Nixon had claimed to know how to end American involvement in the war, it continued for almost ﬁve years after his election. As national security advisor, Kissinger was intimately involved in the twists and turns of Nixon’s war policy. Some believe Kissinger was the chief proponent of such actions as the ill-fated Cambodia incursion. Meanwhile, he was the lead negotiator in protracted talks with representatives of the North Vietnamese government. Just before the U.S. presidential election in October 1972, Kissinger announced that “peace was at hand,” but South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu objected to the arrangements. Only after a massive

U.S. bombing campaign on Hanoi and Haiphong, did Kissinger and his counterpart, Le Duc Tho, agree to ﬁnal terms for a cease-ﬁre. Both men were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts, but the North Vietnamese statesman refused to accept it. Kissinger is also credited with developing and implementing the policy of détente. He personally paved the way for Nixon’s dramatic visit to Beijing in 1972 and was a key negotiator of the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty the president signed in Moscow later that year. Kissinger’s involvement in Latin American affairs was less laudable. Nixon assigned him the task of responding to the election of communist Salvador Allende as president of Chile, and the result was U.S. encouragement and complicity in a military coup that resulted in Allende’s death. Kissinger did work hard to resolve differences between Israel and its Arab neighbors after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He engaged in exhausting shuttle diplomacy, repeatedly visiting the capitals of the countries involved and trying to smooth rufﬂed feathers. Henry Kissinger apparently hoped Ronald Reagan would reappoint him to head the State Department in 1981, but he had to settle for less prestigious assignments. He has continued to participate in an advisory capacity on both government and corporate boards and commissions. He remains a leading exponent of an aggressive U.S. foreign policy, one that is particularly popular with conservative Republicans even though his attitudes and actions as secretary of state generated considerable criticism both at home and abroad. Henry Kissinger was one of the most influential secretaries of state in

358 | Section 5

American history, so it is hardly surprising that he was, and remains, a controversial character. See also: Détente; Shuttle Diplomacy; Tet Reference

Dallek, Robert. Nixon and Kissinger, Partners in Power. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Marshall, George C. (1880–1959) General George C. Marshall’s distinguished career encompassed both military and diplomatic service. Although born in Pennsylvania, he graduated from the Virginia Military Institute and was commissioned in the regular army. Early in his career, he exhibited remarkable talent at organizational and staff work. General John J. Pershing took Marshall to France with the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) and relied on him for tactical planning as well as liaison with the commands of other nations. In the late 1920s, Marshall served as head of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, which trained many of those who would distinguish themselves in World War II. Although he was only a brigadier general when the war began in 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt installed him as army chief of staff. For two years he superintended the training and equipping of a rapidly growing army and laid the groundwork for even more dramatic expansion should the United States enter the war. After Pearl Harbor, Marshall became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff where he served as Roosevelt’s leading military advisor. Marshall attended all of the Allied summit conferences. Although he had much to do with planning the D-Day invasion,

Roosevelt considered him too valuable a conﬁdant to send him to lead the invasion. Congress awarded him ﬁve stars as General of the Army in 1944. Perhaps his most frustrating assignment came next; he spent nearly two years in China trying to prevent a civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. President Harry Truman brought Marshall back to Washington as secretary of state in 1947, just in time for him to play a key role in developing the U.S. response to the Cold War. His most famous initiative, the Marshall Plan, earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. In 1950, Truman named Marshall secretary of defense, responsible for managing the Korean War. He backed Truman when the president removed controversial general Douglas MacArthur from command, a move that brought Marshall into the crosshairs of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade. Marshall’s reputation for sound advice, selﬂess service, and outstanding organizational skill easily survived this ideological onslaught. He was a dedicated and able statesman whose reliable and invaluable performance in trying circumstances won universal respect. See also: Limited War (Korea); Marshall Plan; Second Front Reference

Stoler, Mark A. George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

McNamara, Robert Strange (1916–) Born in San Francisco and educated at the University of California at Berkeley, Robert S. McNamara headed east, where he earned a business degree and

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 359 then taught at Harvard University. He accepted a commission in the U.S. Army in 1943 and resigned with the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1946. Hired by the struggling Ford Motor Company, McNamara became one of the so-called wonder boys who used modern management and cost accounting methods to restore the company to prominence. In late 1960, the company acknowledged his contributions by naming him its president, the ﬁrst chief executive who was not a member of the founding Ford family. Just ﬁve weeks later, McNamara resigned to join President John F. Kennedy’s cabinet as secretary of defense, a position he occupied for the next seven years. One of his ﬁrst acts as secretary was to encourage the president to authorize the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs assault. Although he deeply regretted that decision, McNamara was quite proud of his participation in the advisory group that shaped Kennedy’s response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. From his ﬁrst days at the Pentagon, McNamara applied many of the same management methods he had used at Ford to analyze systems, encourage efficiency, and cut costs. McNamara rethought U.S. nuclear strategy, criticizing the Eisenhower administration’s doctrine of massive retaliation and working toward a policy eventually called assured destruction. It involved a nuclear weapons capability formidable enough to deter any potential nuclear threat from the Soviet Union or China. Once the Soviet Union had built up its own nuclear arsenal, the concept became known as mutual assured destruction (MAD). Secretary McNamara also favored a “ﬂexible force” approach that emphasized counterinsurgency training for conventional and limited conﬂicts. An example of this new direction was

the formation of special forces units like the Green Berets. For better or worse, this emphasis equipped the United States to defend South Vietnam from the guerilla warfare Ho Chi Minh was waging. After Congress approved the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, President Lyndon Johnson relied on McNamara’s proven administrative and management skills to implement the escalation of the U.S. military commitment in Southeast Asia. The secretary of defense was not uniformly popular with military professionals, however, and he became increasingly disillusioned at their unending requests for more troops and equipment in a war that seemed interminable. As early as 1966, McNamara’s growing doubts about the escalation and the war itself became known, so few were surprised when he tendered his resignation early in 1968. Johnson accepted it only to appoint McNamara to the position of president of the World Bank. McNamara remained at the bank for the next 12 years. Of all the ofﬁcials intimately involved in planning and executing U.S. policy during the Vietnam Era, Robert McNamara has subsequently expressed the most profound skepticism and doubts about the goals and conduct of the longest war in American history. See also: Bay of Pigs; Brinkmanship; Tet; Tonkin Gulf Incident; Reference

McNamara, Robert S., with Brian VanDeMark. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.

Rumsfeld, Donald (1932–) When Donald Rumsfeld resigned his position as secretary of defense after

360 | Section 5

Democratic Party victories in the midterm elections of 2006, he had become one of the most controversial ﬁgures associated with the administration of President George W. Bush. It was a disappointing conclusion to a long career in public service. Naval ROTC scholarships helped fund Chicago native Rumsfeld’s education at Princeton University, and he served as a navy pilot and ﬂight instructor for three years after graduating with a degree in political science. In 1957, he joined the staff of an Illinois congressman and then dabbled in banking before winning his own seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican in 1962. After four terms in Congress, he resigned in 1969 to work in various positions in President Richard Nixon’s administration. In 1973, the president named him ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Rumsfeld’s only major diplomatic assignment. When Nixon resigned, Rumsfeld returned to Washington to participate in Gerald Ford’s transition team and then to serve as the new president’s chief of staff. In 1975, Ford elevated Rumsfeld to the position of secretary of defense and chose Dick Cheney to replace him at the White House. Rumsfeld was the youngest person ever to head the Defense Department, but he had relatively little time to shape the institution because Democrat Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976. After leaving Washington, Rumsfeld continued to serve on government commissions and panels, but he devoted his major efforts to heading various businesses, including a long stint as CEO of G. D. Searle, a pharmaceutical giant. During this period, he remained very active in the neoconser-

vative political movement, an association that helped convince President George W. Bush to reinstall him as secretary of defense in 2001. In his ﬁrst few months, Rumsfeld’s elaborate plans for restructuring the armed serves stirred resentment among military professionals, but the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, changed the national security landscape far more fundamentally than Rumsfeld’s bureaucratic proposals. The secretary of defense emerged as the leading cabinet advocate of the Bush Doctrine. Military operations in Afghanistan began almost immediately, and Rumsfeld was one of the most outspoken proponents of extending them into nearby Iraq. Although the initial phases of the Iraq war went reasonably well, Rumsfeld rapidly came under ﬁre from both left and right-wing commentators. Hardly alone in the Bush administration in anticipating a brief, successful war, his position made him a natural target as the conﬂict persisted and changed into a bitter battle among contending factions inside Iraq. Meanwhile, it became increasingly clear that the Defense Department had failed to provide American troops with adequate equipment and training to deal with an insurgency. Even more embarrassing to Rumsfeld were revelations of inappropriate behavior by those involved in dealing with inmates in facilities like the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. Many expected President Bush to replace his controversial subordinate at the start of his second term, but Rumsfeld remained in ofﬁce. His reputation continued to deteriorate until his resignation two years later. When he left ofﬁce, American armed forces were strained to the limit, and U.S. prestige around the

The Cold War and After, 1945– | 361 world had reached a very low ebb. With the exception of the president himself and Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld is the man most widely seen as responsible for the U.S. failure to achieve its objectives in Iraq.

See also: Bush Doctrine; War on Terror Reference

Cockburn, Andrew. Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy. New York: Scribner, 2007.

This page intentionally left blank

Chronology

Eighteenth Century 1756

Great Britain promulgates its Rule of 1756.

1775–1883

Revolutionary War between the United States and Great Britain.

1776

The Continental Congress develops the Plan of 1776.

1778

Benjamin Franklin negotiates a Treaty of Alliance with France.

1783

The Treaty of Paris between the United States and Great Britain ends the Revolutionary War.

1792

Captain Robert Gray establishes the ﬁrst of many U.S. Oregon claims.

1793

George Washington issues his Proclamation of Neutrality.

1794

John Jay’s Treaty is signed with Great Britain.

1795

Thomas Pinckney’s Treaty is signed with Spain.

1796

George Washington’s Farewell Address urges continued neutrality.

1797

The XYZ Affair raises tensions between the United States and France.

1798–1800

Quasi-War between the United States and France.

Nineteenth Century 1803

Thomas Jefferson arranges the purchase of Louisiana.

1807–1809

Thomas Jefferson imposes the Embargo Act on all shipping to and from the United States.

363

364 | Chronology

1810

War Hawks elected to Congress call for war against Great Britain.

1811

The No-Transfer Doctrine regarding Florida sets a precedent for the Monroe Doctrine.

1812–1814

War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain.

1814

The Treaty of Ghent ends the War of 1812 on the principle of uti possedetus.

1819

John Quincy Adams negotiates the Transcontinental Treaty, in which Spain cedes Florida.

1823

James Monroe’s Doctrine asserts U.S. preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.

1836

Texas Revolution.

1841

Oregon fever sweeps the United States.

1842

The Webster-Ashburton Treaty resolves boundary issues between the United States and Canada.

1844

Caleb Cushing signs a trade treaty that opens the China market to Americans. John Calhoun defends slavery in the Pakenham Letter.

1845

John Tyler signs a congressional joint resolution admitting Texas to the United States. James Polk’s Corollary reafﬁrms the Monroe Doctrine. John O’Sullivan coins the phrase “manifest destiny”.

1846–1848

Mexican War between the United States and Mexico.

1846

James Wilmot’s Proviso calls for the exclusion of slavery from new territories.

1854

Matthew Calbraith Perry signs the Treaty of Kanagawa opening Japan to outside contact. American diplomats in Europe issue the Ostend Manifesto asserting a U.S. claim to Cuba.

1861–1865

Civil War between the United States and the Confederacy.

1861

Great Britain and France extend recognition as a belligerent to the Confederacy.

1867

William Seward purchases Alaska from Russia.

1871–1872

The United States and Great Britain resolve the Alabama Claims through international arbitration.

1889

James Blaine promotes Pan-Americanism.

1893

American planters revolt in Hawaii, setting the stage for U.S. annexation in 1898.

Chronology | 365 1895

Richard Olney’s Corollary restates and strengthens the Monroe Doctrine.

1895–1898

Cuban Revolution against Spain.

1898

Spanish-American-Cuban War. Anti-imperialists oppose U.S. colonization.

1899

John Hay promulgates the Open Door Policy for China.

Twentieth Century 1900

The Boxer Rebellion sweeps China.

1901

Orville Platt’s Amendment dictates Cuba’s relationship to the United States.

1903

Panama revolts from Colombia and signs a canal treaty with the United States.

1904

Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine is based on his big stick policy.

1905

The Algeciras Conference in Spain determines the international status of Morocco. Theodore Roosevelt’s mediation helps end the Russo-Japanese War.

1909

The United States proposes a neutralization scheme to limit foreign inﬂuence in China.

1912

William Howard Taft extends Dollar Diplomacy to Latin America.

1914–1918

The Great War, later called World War I.

1914–1917

The United States declares neutrality regarding the war in Europe.

1916–1917

John Pershing leads the U.S. Punitive Expedition in Mexico.

1917

Germany begins waging unrestricted submarine warfare (January). The Russian Revolution overthrows the czarist government (March). The United States enters World War I (April). The United States institutes a non-recognition policy regarding the Soviet government (October).

1917–1918

John Pershing leads the American Expeditionary Force in France.

1918

Woodrow Wilson announces his Fourteen Points plan for a postwar peace settlement.

366 | Chronology

1918

U.S. armed forces undertake a Siberian expedition in the USSR.

1919

The U.S. Senate fails to ratify the Versailles Treaty creating the League of Nations.

1919–1920

An anticommunist Red Scare sweeps the United States.

1927

The Kellogg-Briand Pact is signed to outlaw war.

1930s

The United States retreats into isolation from international affairs. Franklin Roosevelt promulgates the Good Neighbor Policy for Latin America.

1932

Henry Stimson’s Doctrine refuses to recognize Japan’s expansion in China.

1937

Franklin Roosevelt unsuccessfully proposes a quarantine of aggressive nations. Japan invades China, opening the ﬁrst phase of World War II.

1939–1945

World War II expands to Europe, Africa, and Asia.

1940

Franklin Roosevelt’s Charlottesville Address promises material support to allied war efforts.

1941

Franklin Roosevelt implements the Lend-Lease program to aid Allied war efforts. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill issue the Atlantic Charter. Japan attacks the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The United States declares war on Japan, Germany, and Italy.

1941–1945

The Grand Alliance of the United States, the USSR, and Great Britain ﬁghts fascism.

1942

Franklin Roosevelt proposes his Four Policemen plan for the postwar world.

1944

The United States and Great Britain establish a second front, with a cross-channel invasion of France.

1945

Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin meet at the Yalta Conference. Allied leaders sign the Declaration on Liberated Europe at the Yalta Conference. The United States engages in atomic diplomacy, with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United Nations is established.

1947–1989

Cold War between the United States and the USSR.

1947

George Kennan advocates containment of the USSR.

Chronology | 367 1947

Harry Truman’s Doctrine justiﬁes aiding peoples ﬁghting against communism.

1948

George Marshall’s Plan extends economic and reconstruction aid to Europe. The United States recognizes the independence of Israel. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is signed in Geneva.

1948–1949

The United States, Great Britain, and France carry out the Berlin Airlift.

1949

The United States and 11 other nations form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

1949–1954

The United States is swept by a Red Scare again.

1950

The National Security Council develops the NSC-68 plan for ﬁghting the Cold War.

1950–1953

The Korean War, a limited war, ends with restoration of prewar boundaries.

1950s

Eisenhower’s administration unsuccessfully promotes the liberation of Eastern Europe.

1956

John Foster Dulles deﬁnes brinkmanship.

1957

The Soviet Union orbits Sputnik.

1960

A U-2 spy plane from the United States is shot down over the over the USSR.

1961

Central Intelligence Agency–backed Cuban exiles engage in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.

1962

The Cuban Missile Crisis ends when the USSR withdraws its nuclear weapons from Cuba.

1964

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizes escalation of U.S. participation in the Vietnam War.

1964–1973

The United States is engaged in direct combat in the Vietnam War.

1967

UN Resolution 242 calls for Israel to exchange occupied land for peace.

1968

North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive convinces the United States to seek a negotiated settlement.

1969

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger promulgate a policy of détente.

1970

U.S. troops participate in an incursion into Cambodia.

1973–1976

Henry Kissinger engages in shuttle diplomacy in pursuit of Middle East peace.

368 | Chronology

1979–1980

The Iranian Hostage Crisis results from the invasion of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran.

1984

Ronald Reagan’s administration becomes entangled in the Iran-Contra affair.

1991

George H. W. Bush conducts the Gulf War to free Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.

Twenty-ﬁrst Century 2001

George W. Bush announces a war on terror as the United States invades Afghanistan.

2003

The George W. Bush Doctrine justiﬁes a preemptive invasion of Iraq.

Index

Note: Italics indicate illustrations. An italicized d following a page number indicates a document. Hawaii and, 152 Jay’s Treaty and, 14 New Manifest Destiny and, 164 trade and, 21 Aguinaldo, Emilio, 136–137, 187 Al Qaeda, 81, 291, 353, 354 Alabama, C.S.S., 70, 73–75, 108, 109, 115, 155 Alamo, 111 Alaska, 22, 70, 71–73, 125, 184–185, 230 Albany Regency, 127 Alberstone, Lord, 185 Aldrich, Nelson, 180 Alexander I, Czar, 16, 71 Alexander II, Czar, 71, 72 Algeciras Conference, 133–134, 170, 227 Alien and Sedition Act, 41 Allenby, George, 219 Allende, Salvador, 357 Alliances basics, 3–6 France, with, 1, 5–6, 39, 41, 42

Aberdeen, Lord, 113 Abu Ghraib, 360 Acheson, Dean, 288, 299, 322, 327, 336, 354–355 Act of Havana, 32 Adams, Charles Francis, 73, 74, 106, 108, 114–115 Adams, John basics, 37–38, 60 France and, 2, 5, 28, 39, 40, 41 recognition and, 44 Treaty of Paris and, 51 See also XYZ Affair Adams, John Quincy expansionism, 22, 103, 111 Monroe Doctrine and, 22, 23–24 separation of the spheres and, 16, 90 Treaties, 7, 31, 48, 49, 50, 56 Adams, Samuel, 29 Adee, Alvey, 191 Afghanistan, 81, 291, 353 Africa, 227, 257, 301, 333 Agriculture embargoes and, 9

369

370 | Index

Alliances (continued) Great War and, 204, 228–229 Spain with France, 4. See also Geneva Accords; Grand Alliance; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Treaty of Alliance Alperowitz, Gar, 210 Alsace and Lorraine, 217, 218, 226 Amador, Manuel, 172 Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, 38 America First, 239 American Expeditionary Force, 201, 203–205, 277, 358 American Federation of Labor, 255 “American Progress” (Gast), 89 Anglo-French Wars, 77 Anglophobia, 184, 192 Annexations, 30, 31, 128, 265. See also speciﬁc territories Antarctica, 67, 129 Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABM), 300 Anti-Com-Intern Pact, 250 Antietam, Battle of, 108 Anti-imperialism, 134–137, 152, 153, 187. See also Imperialism Arabic (ship), 267 Arab-Israeli conﬂict, 301 Arabs, 315–316, 318, 337, 338. See also Land For Peace Arbitration, 70, 73–75, 185, 193, 236 Argentina, 198, 222 Armed neutrality, 14, 36 Aroostook War, 113 Arthur, Chester A., 174, 197 Ashburton, Lord, 100, 113–114. See also Webster-Ashburton Treaty Asian trade, 115, 116. See also speciﬁc countries Astor, John Jacob, 69, 99, 115–116 Aswan dams, 316–317, 317 Atlantic Charter, 202, 205–208, 207d, 223 Atlantic Wall, 257

Atomic Diplomacy, 203, 208–211, 278, 284, 287, 317, 323, 329, 331 Eisenhower and, 344 Soviet response, 339 Vietnam and, 341 See also Massive Retaliation Austin, Moses and Stephen, 110–111 Austria, 15, 16, 22, 134, 219, 227, 228, 284, 320 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 218, 226 Axis powers (WWII), 32, 241 Babcock, Orville, 109, 149 Baez, Bonaventure, 109 Bagot, George, 100 Balance of Power, 158, 170, 226, 299 Balfour Declaration, 314 Balkans, 218, 227 Baltic republics, 296 Barbados, 188 Barbary Wars, 149 Baruch, Bernard, 204 Batista y Zaldívar, Fulgencio, 221, 281, 282 Battle of Britain, 257 Battle of the Bulge, 259 Bay of Pigs, 280, 281–283, 359 Bayard, James A., 7, 56, 167 Bayard, Thomas F., 6, 150 Beard, Charles, 245 Beauregard, P. T. G., 80 Begin, Menachem, 319, 338 Beirut, 352 Belgium, 163, 218, 219, 228 Belize, 31 Ben-Gurion, David, 314 Berlin, 269, 279, 283–286 Berlin Wall, 340 Bernadotte, Folke, 315–316 Bickley, George W. L., 78 Biddle, James, 99 Bidlack, Benjamin A., 116, 171 Big Stick Diplomacy, 132, 137–141 Bin Laden, Osama, 353–354 Birney, James G., 86, 102

Index | 371 Von Bismarck, Otto, 150, 226 Bizonia, 284 Blaine, James Gillespie, 131, 171, 173, 174–175, 191–192, 197 Blockades, 74, 106, 107–108, 115, 138, 186, 187, 243, 266. See also Paper Blockade Blount, James H., 153, 197 Boers, 184 Boland Amendment, 313d Bolsheviks, 247, 255, 260 Bonaparte, Joseph, 41 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 9, 15, 18, 32, 33, 41 Borah, William, 233 Borders. See Boundaries, U.S. Bosnia, 227 Boston Tea Party, 29 Boundaries, U.S. Canada and, 66, 96, 113 Cold War, 321 embargoes and, 9–10 Mexican War and, 92, 94, 112 Scott and, 123 Treaties and, 50, 51, 69, 112–114 Webster and, 129 See also Expansionism; Natural Boundaries Boxer Rebellion, 132, 141–143, 169, 176 Bradley, Omar, 257, 258, 323 Von Braun, Werner, 339 Brazil, 98 Brezhnev, Leonid, 299–300 Briand, Aristide, 233, 275 Bribes, 60 Bright, John, 302 Brinkmanship, 280, 286–291, 298, 356 Bryan, William Jennings, 147, 192–193, 242–243, 261 Bryan-Chamorro Agreement, 147 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 310 Buchanan, James, 105 Bullitt, Charles E., 248 Bullock, John D., 73, 155

Bulwer, Henry, 119. See also ClaytonBulwer Treaty Bunau-Varilla, Philippe, 172, 173 Bunche, Ralph, 316, 337 Burlingame, Anson, 116–117 Burr, Aaron, 68, 95 Bush, George H. W., 281, 291, 302–303, 306, 307. See also Gulf War Bush, George W., 160, 293, 309, 361 ﬁrst shot tradition and, 81 See also Bush Doctrine; War on Terror Bush Doctrine, 281, 291–294 Butler, Anthony, 111 Calhoun, John Caldwell, 43, 85–86, 117–118 California, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 121 Cambodia, 280, 294–296, 343, 357 Camp David Accords, 280, 319, 338 Canada basics, 3, 41, 52 boundaries and, 55, 66, 96, 98, 113, 127 disputes with, 69, 184–185, 194 ﬁshing arbitration and, 74 free trade and, 303 Manifest Destiny and, 90, 103 NAFTA and, 302, 303, 306 NATO and, 328 war hawks and, 59 See also individual leaders Canals, 118–119, 132, 138, 147, 230, 321. See also Panama Canal Canning, George, 16, 22, 24, 63, 66, 100 Capitalism, 254 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 222 Career ofﬁcers, 7 Caribbean basics, 71 Dollar Diplomacy and, 132, 147 Gunboat Diplomacy and, 151 Monroe Doctrine and, 24 no-transfer principle and, 31–32 Panama Canal and, 138

372 | Index

Caribbean (continued) Rule of 1756 and, 47, 48 Treaty of Paris and, 52 See also Sugar Carnegie, Andrew, 136, 179 Carolina Railroad Company, 120 Carranza, Venustiano, 181, 182, 183, 222 Carson, Kit, 121 Carter, Jimmy, 301, 309, 310, 311, 312, 319 Casablanca Conference, 224–225, 259 Cash and carry, 246 Castlereagh, Lord, 15–16 Castro, Cipriano, 137, 138 Castro, Fidel, 221, 280, 281–282, 352–353 Catholicism, 111 Cazneau, William L., 109 Censorship, 156, 243 Central America Dollar Diplomacy and, 146–147 ﬁlibustering and, 78 Iran-Contra and, 311–314 See also speciﬁc countries Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 303–304 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 282, 283, 287, 312, 332. See also U-2s Chamberlain, Joseph, 167 Chambers, Whittaker, 335, 336 Chamorro, Emiliano, 148 Chamorro, Violeta, 314 Chargé d’affaires, 6, 191 Charlottesville Address (F. Roosevelt), 240d Cheney, Richard, 291, 361 Chesapeake Affair, 12 Chiang Kai-shek, 225, 249, 250, 262, 271, 274, 287, 355 Chile, 174, 192, 357 China basics, 132 Burlingame and, 116 Civil War and, 77

Cushing and, 119 diplomats and, 7 Dollar Diplomacy and, 147–148 France and, 25, 76, 77, 162, 168 Gadsden and, 120 Germany and, 142, 143, 162 Great Britain and, 25, 76, 77, 142, 143, 162, 168, 169 Japan and, 142, 161, 162, 163, 169, 202, 211, 249, 250, 252–253, 260, 261–262 Kellogg-Briand Pact and, 233–234 Lend-Lease and, 241 McKinley, William and, 142, 143, 168 non-recognition and, 248–249 recognition and, 46 Red Scares and, 336 revolutions, 162 F. Roosevelt and, 214, 225, 246, 254 Russia and, 142, 143, 161, 163, 169, 248, 271 Russo-Japanese War and, 156–158 Shufeldt and, 196 Soviet Union and, 299 sugar and, 189 tariffs and, 76 trade and, 25, 70, 75–77, 274, 303, 304 United Nations and, 263, 299 Wilson, Woodrow and, 162–163. See also Boxer Rebellion; Nationalist China; Neutralization; Open Door Policy; People’s Republic of China; individual leaders China Incident, 250, 252 Chinese Revolution (1911), 162 Christian Social Darwinism, 163–164 Christians, 315 Chronology, 363 Churchill, Winston, 202, 224, 257, 347. See also Atlantic Charter; Grand Alliance; Yalta Conference

Index | 373 Civil War basics, 131, 163 China and, 77 consequences of, 78, 97, 163, 164, 179 First Shot Tradition and, 70 no-transfer principle and, 31 recognition and, 45 Russia and, 71–72 slavery and, 96–97 trade and, 25, 37, 179 See also Confederacy; Recognition as a Belligerent; individual leaders Clarendon, Lord, 73 Clark, Clifford, 341–342 Clark, George, 99 Clay, Henry basics, 7 Cuba and, 103 Oregon fever and, 102 tariffs and, 117 Texas and, 86 treaties, 50, 56 Tyler and, 85 War of 1812 and, 59 Clay, Lucius, 284 Clayton, John Middleton, 118–119, 119 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 54, 116, 118d, 171 Cleveland, Grover Cuba and, 145 expansionism and, 134, 135, 136, 153, 197 Great Britain and, 165, 167 tariffs and, 180, 190 Clinton, Bill, 303 Coahuila-Texas, 111 Coal, 150 Cobden, Richard, 302 Coercive Acts, 29–30 Collective security Bush Doctrine and, 291 Hull and, 214, 274 League of Nations and, 214, 220, 232, 236

F. Roosevelt and, 207, 253 United Nations and, 262, 263, 270 See also North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Colombia (New Granada), 22, 116, 171, 172–173 Colonialism British, 167, 224, 227, 237, 315 Fourteen Points and, 218–219 Japanese, 229–230, 261 League of Nations and, 237 Marshall Plan and, 325 mission, democratic, and, 160 Root and, 196 sugar and, 188 U.S., 230 See also Expansionism; Imperialism; Open Door Policy Colorado, 189 Comecon, 325 Cominform, 325 Commerce. See Trade Committee of Secret Correspondence, 37, 62 Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, 239 Common Market, 302 Communism basics, 201, 202, 280, 281, 327 Central American, 312 Europe and, 324, 325, 327, 328, 329 Granada and, 352 Greek/Turkish, 347, 348, 349 Korea and, 322 Middle East and, 309, 310, 316 Republican Party and, 319, 326, 336 Yalta Conference and, 269, 271 See also Bay of Pigs; Communist International (Comintern); Containment; McCarthy, Eugene; Red Scares; individual leaders; speciﬁc communist countries Communist International (Comintern), 247, 248, 255

374 | Index

Concert of Europe, 15, 16, 31 Confederacy, 70, 73, 87, 88, 106–109, 124, 125. See also Civil War; CSS Alabama; King Cotton Diplomacy; individual leaders Conference for European Economic Cooperation, 324 Conger, Edwin H., 142, 142–143 Congress of Vienna, 15, 226, 299 Conquest of territory, 55–57 Conscription, military, 203–204, 239, 295, 343 Consensus, 303 Constitution, U.S., 19, 42 Constitutional Convention, 62 Consuls-general, 7, 70, 75, 84, 120–121, 122, 150, 153, 161, 162, 196 Containment, 279, 296–298, 319, 325, 343 Contras, 312–313 Coolidge, Calvin, 220, 222, 233, 237, 256 Co-Prosperity Sphere of Interest in Greater East Asia, 250 Coral Sea, 230 Costa Rica, 313 Cotton, 112. See also King Cotton Diplomacy Crimean War, 226 Cromwell, William Nelson, 172, 172–173, 173 CSS Alabama, 70, 73–75, 108, 109, 115, 155 Cuba Atomic Diplomacy and, 287–288 Cold War and, 280 communism and, 327 expansionism and, 164 ﬁlibustering and, 78 Gunboat Diplomacy and, 150–151 non-recognition and, 249 Olney and, 195 Roosevelt, F. and, 221 Roosevelt, T. and, 139

Root and, 195 Soviets and, 340 sugar and, 188, 190 tariffs and, 180 Teller Amendment and, 197 U-2s and, 351 Cuban Missile Crisis, 283, 287–288, 289d–290d, 349, 351, 359 Cuban Rebellion, 30, 78, 143–146, 154 Cushing, Caleb, 25, 70, 76, 119–120, 168 Customs services, 139, 147, 178 Cyprus, 331 Czechoslovakia, 219, 260, 319, 325, 335 Danish West Indies, 31 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 353 Davie, William R., 41 Davis, Jefferson, 80 Dawes Plan, 273, 274, 324 D-day, 225 De facto governments, 45. See also speciﬁc governments De jure governments, 45 Deane, Silas, 3, 6, 37, 61 Debs, Eugene, 195, 255 Declaration on Liberated Europe, 208, 269, 270d, 297, 347 Delcassé, Théophile, 133 Democratic Party basics, 60 expansionism and, 72 Hawaii and, 154 League of Nations and, 237 neutrality and, 242 platform of 1844, 102d tariffs and, 179, 180, 190 Texas and, 86 Van Buren and, 127, 128 W. Wilson and, 220 See also individual Democrats Democratic Republicans, 60 Denmark, 14 Department of Defense, 332

Index | 375 Depressions, economic, 90, 101, 127, 135, 144, 165, 189–190. See also Great Depression Détente, 280, 298–302, 357 Dewey, George, 151, 154, 186, 193–194 Díaz, Adolfo, 147 Díaz, Porﬁro, 146, 181 Dictators, 221 Dingley Tariff Act, 180 Diplomats, 6–7. See also Plenipotentiaries Disarmament, 202, 211–214, 218, 220 Dole, Sanford, 153 Dollar Diplomacy, 132, 146–149, 161, 164 Dominican Republic, 109, 139, 147, 178, 220, 221 Domino Theory, 344 Dulles, Allen, 349 Dulles, John Foster, 279, 286–287, 317, 319, 320, 331. See also Massive Retaliation Dumbarton Oaks meeting, 263 Dunkirk, 257 Dutch Indonesia, 250 Duties (on goods), 47–48 Duvalier, François (“Papa Doc”), 221 East Germany, 320 Eastern Europe, 280, 296–297, 319–321, 324, 332. See also Declaration on Liberated Europe; speciﬁc countries Eastern front, 223 Egypt, 315, 316–317, 319, 338. See also individual leaders Eisenhower, Dwight D. Cuba and, 282 Korea and, 287, 323 McCarthy and, 337 NATO and, 329 Soviet Union and, 279, 285, 298, 320 tariffs and, 305 Vietnam and, 344

World War II and, 257, 258, 259 See also Massive Retaliation Ellsworth, Oliver, 41 Embargo Act (1807), 9d Embargoes basics, 2, 7–11, 28–29, 30 cotton, 88 Cuba and, 288 Ethiopia and, 238, 245 Lend-Lease and, 239 neutrality and, 252, 253 sugar, 190 Embassies, 6 Emperasarios, 111 Empire. See Anti-Imperialism; Imperialism Empress of China (ship), 168 England. See Great Britain Entente Cordiale, 227 Entente Powers, 216, 217, 243. See also speciﬁc countries Era of Good Feelings, 59 Erlanger, Emile, 88 Estonia, 219, 296 Ethiopia, 238, 252–253 European Defense Community (EDC), 331 European Relief Program. See Marshall Plan European Union (EU), 302 Evolution, human, 164 Expansion and Civil War, 1830–1880, 69 Expansionism American, 30–31 Anti-imperialism and, 137 Astor and, 115 Blaine and, 173 Calhoun and, 117 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and, 119 Hawaii and, 151–152 Iraqi, 306 Japanese, 162 Mexican War and, 94 natural boundaries and, 96

376 | Index

Expansionism (continued) New Manifest Destiny and, 163 Oregon fever and, 102 Polk and, 103 ratiﬁcation and, 43 Seward and, 125 Soviet, 210, 282, 296–298, 319 Soviet Union and, 223 Texas and, 86–87 Treaty of Paris and, 175–176 See also Annexations; Colonialism; Imperialism; Jingoism; Manifest Destiny; Monroe Doctrine; New Manifest Destiny; speciﬁc countries and territories Extradition, 114 Extraterritoriality, 76 Fabens, J. W., 109, 110 Fall, Albert B., 248 Far East basics, 132 Hughes and, 273 Jay’s Treaty and, 14 T. Roosevelt and, 139–140 Washington Naval Conference and, 213 Yalta Conference and, 269, 271 See also Boxer Rebellion; RussoJapanese War; speciﬁc countries Fascism, 202, 222, 223, 245, 246, 249, 252, 269, 279, 335. See also individual leaders Fashoda Incident, 227 Federal Republic of Germany, 284 Federalism, 90–91 Federalists basics, 59–60, 63 embargoes and, 9 France and, 5, 40 Great Britain and, 14 neutrality and, 27 Pinckney’s Treaty and, 35

Sedition Act and, 41 XYZ Affair and, 61 54º 40’, 22, 24, 71, 100, 102, 103 Filibustering, 70, 77–79, 105, 128 Fillmore, Millard, 83, 105 Financial aid, 298. See also Lend-Lease Finland, 219 First Continental Congress, 29, 30 First Manchurian Crisis, 248 First Neutrality Act, 245 First shot tradition basics, 79–82 Civil War and, 70 Cuba and, 105, 146 Great War and, 244, 266, 268 Mexican War and, 92 Vietnam and, 343 World War II and, 249 Fish, Hamilton, 74, 75 Fletcher, Frank, 230 Florida, 17, 30, 31, 34, 43, 49, 59, 77, 95. See also Transcontinental Treaty Foch, Ferdinand, 204 Ford, Gerald, 296 Fordney-McCumber Act, 180 Foreign Enlistment Act, 108 Foreign Relations (periodical), 191, 297 Foreign Service Act (1924), 7 Formosa, 76–77, 249, 287, 355 Fort George, 99–100 49th Parallel, 71, 100, 102–103 Foster, John, 153 Four Policemen, 203, 214–215, 263 Fourteen Points, 160, 201, 202, 211, 215–220, 216–217d, 232, 236 Fox Blockade, 32 France 1776–1830, 1, 2, 3–5, 6, 8, 10 Berlin and, 284 Caribbean and, 109 China and, 25, 76, 77, 162, 168 Confederacy and, 106 cotton and, 87–88 Cuba and, 105

Index | 377 Eastern Europe and, 321 Egypt and, 317 expansionism, 22 Fourteen Points and, 215, 216, 218, 219 Franklin and, 37, 44 Germany and, 226, 227, 257 Great War and, 204–205, 242, 243 imperialism of, 163 Lebanon and, 352 Lend-Lease and, 241 Louisiana and, 17, 30–31 Marshall Plan and, 324, 325 Morocco and, 133–134 most-favored-nation provisions and, 25 navy, 213 no-transfer principle and, 31 Panama Canal and, 171, 173–174 paper blockade and, 32–34 Plan of 1776 and, 36 Quasi-War with France and, 39 recognition and, 45–46 Rule of 1756 and, 46, 47 Russia and, 158, 260 Spain and, 16 sugar and, 188 Texas and, 112 Transcontinental Treaty and, 49 United Nations and, 263 World War II and after, 215, 257, 269, 331, 343, 344 See also French Revolution; Neutrality; Seven Years’ War; XYZ Affair; individual leaders of France Franco, Francisco, 246 Franklin, Benjamin biography, 61–63 boundaries and, 112 plenipotentiary, as, 37–38 recognition and, 44–45 treaties with France and, 3, 4, 6, 36, 51 Franz Ferdinand, 228

Fraser, Simon, 99 Fredonia, 111 Free deposit, right of, 35 “Free ships,” 35, 36, 48 Free Trade, 174, 179, 180, 280, 302–304 Free-Soilers, 115, 116 Frelinghuysen, Frederick T., 174 Fremont, John C., 93, 121, 126 French and Indian War, 3, 47 French Indochina, 250 French Revolution, 15, 26–27, 45 Fuchs, Klaus, 336 Fumimaro Konoye, 208, 251 Fur trade, 115 Gadsden, James, 120 Gallatin, Albert, 7, 56, 63, 100 García, Samoza, 221 Gardoqui, Diego de, 42 Garﬁeld, James A., 173, 192 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 226 Gast, John, 89 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs), 26, 280, 302, 303, 304–306, 355 De Gaulle, Charles, 214, 259, 331 Gauntánamo naval base, 176, 186, 221 General Agreement on Tariffs (GATT), 26, 280, 302, 303, 304–306, 355 Genêt, Edmond, 27–28, 45, 63–64 Geneva Accords, 344 Geneva arbitration, 74 Geneva naval conference, 213 Geneva Summit, 320 Genocide, 54 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 140 German Americans, 184, 232 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 285 Germany arbitration and, 74 atomic bomb and, 209 China and, 142, 143, 162

378 | Index

Germany (continued) Cuba and, 176 détente and, 301 Far East and, 250 Fourteen Points and, 218 France and, 226, 227, 257 Great Britain and, 167 Great War and, 204–205, 227, 228, 229 Gunboat Diplomacy and, 151 imperialism of, 163 Japan and, 250 League of Nations and, 238 Morocco and, 133–134 navy, 211 neutrality/trade and, 243 New Manifest Destiny and, 164 Samoa and, 150 Soviet Union and, 340 Venezuela and, 137–138 World War II and after, 256–257, 269 See also Berlin; Fascism; German Democratic Republic (GDR); Great War; Nazi Germany; Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; Unrestricted Submarine Warfare; West Germany; World War II Geronimo, 198 Gerry, Elbridge, 60 Gettysburg, Battle of, 108 Global warming, 44, 54 God, 69, 89, 90, 96, 102, 103, 159, 163, 164, 314. See also Religion Gold, 95, 165 Goldwater, Barry, 341 Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 320 Good Neighbor Policy, 178, 202, 220–222, 273, 281 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 286 De Gortari, Carlos Salinas, 302–303 Grand Alliance, 202, 203, 214, 222–226, 248. See also Declaration on Liberated Europe; Yalta Conference Grant, Ulysses, 70–71, 109, 149

Gray, Robert, 69, 99 Great Britain, 106–109 1776–1830, 1, 2, 3–5, 8, 10–11, 57 Berlin and, 284 Blaine and, 192 boundaries and, 95, 113 G.W. Bush and, 292 canals and, 118–119 China and, 25, 76, 77, 142, 143, 162, 168, 169 Concert of Europe and, 15 Confederacy and, 106 cotton and, 87–88 Cuba and, 105, 176 Eastern Europe and, 321 Egypt and, 317 Fourteen Points and, 215–216, 218–219 Franklin and, 38, 44, 62 free trade and, 302 Great War and, 204–205, 228–229, 242, 243 Gunboat Diplomacy and, 150, 151 imperialism of, 163 impressment by, 11–13 Japan and, 158 Lend-Lease and, 239, 241 Marshall Plan and, 324 mercantilism and, 20 Middle East and, 133–134, 237, 309, 315, 352 navy, 213, 257 New Manifest Destiny and, 164 Oregon and, 98–101, 102 Panama and, 171 paper blockade and, 32–34 Pinckney’s Treaty and, 34 Plan of 1776 and, 35, 36 protectionism and, 178 recognition and, 44, 45 Rule of 1756 and, 46–48 Russia and, 260 sugar and, 188 tariffs and, 179 Texas and, 85, 112

Index | 379 Transcontinental Treaty and, 49 treaties and, 51–52 Truman Doctrine and, 347 20th century, in, 183 United Nations and, 263 Unrestricted Submarine Warfare and, 266–268 Van Buren and, 127 Venezuela and, 138 Vietnam and, 343 War on Terror and, 353 West Germany and, 331 World War II and, 202, 205–206 See also Arbitration; Grand Alliance; Jay’s Treaty; Neutrality; Nonimportation; Rapprochement; Seven Years’ War; War of 1812; individual leaders Great Depression, 25–26, 180, 221, 244, 249, 261, 304, 334 Great War anti-imperialism and, 137 basics, 132, 201, 203–205, 226–229 democratic mission and, 160 ﬁrst shot tradition and, 81 isolationism and, 232 Nye committee and, 245 rapprochement and, 183, 185 Russia and, 247 tariffs and, 180 U.S. Army and, 203–205 See also Siberian Expedition; Unrestricted Submarine Warfare; individual leaders Greece, 297, 328, 331, 346, 347, 348, 349 Grenada, 352 Gresham, Walter Q., 195 Guadalcanal, 230 Guam, 136, 187, 230 Guatemala, 282 Guevara, Ché, 282 Guianas, 31, 165 Guiteau, Arthur J., 174 Gulf War, 281, 306–309, 352

Gunboat Diplomacy, 131, 149–151, 159 Haig, Alexander (British), 204 Haiti, 18, 109, 147, 220, 221 Half-Breeds, 174, 192 “Halls of Montezuma” addition to U.S. Marine Corps battle hymn, 94 Halsey, Bull, 231 Hamilton, Alexander, 14, 40, 41, 96 Hanson, Ole, 255 Harding, Warren G., 180, 212, 231, 233, 237 Harriman, Edward H., 161–162, 274 Harris, Townsend, 70, 84, 120–121 Harrison, Benjamin, 135, 136, 153, 174, 179, 192 Harrison, William Henry, 55, 57, 59 Hatch, Davis, 110 Havana, Act of, 322 Hawaii annexation of, 134, 135, 190, 192 basics, 131, 151–154 Olney and, 195 revolution, 197 Stevens and, 197 sugar and, 188, 189–190 tariffs and, 180 Hawley-Smoot Act, 180 Hay, John Milton, 132, 142, 143, 168–169, 171, 172, 173, 185, 194–195 Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, 173 Hayes, Rutherford B., 192 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, 171, 185 Hearst, William Randolph, 144 Henry Pu Yi, 262 Herran, Tomás, 172 Herzegovina, 227 Hickey, Frederick, 99 Hideki Tojo, 208, 251 Hippisley, Alfred, 169 Hispaniola, 7, 18, 109, 149 Hiss, Alger, 336 Hitler, Adolf, 31, 223, 238, 259, 315 HMS Blossom, 99

380 | Index

HMS Calliope, 150 HMS Prince of Wales, 206 HMS Racoon, 99 Ho Chi Minh, 301, 342, 343, 344. See also Geneva Accords Ho Chi Minh Trail, 294–295 Hoar, George, 136 “Holes at the poles,” 67 Hollywood, 335 Holy Alliance, 16 Honduras, 128 Hong Kong, 75 Hoover, Herbert, 180, 220, 233, 248, 262, 332 Hoover, J. Edgar, 256 Hoover Commission, 332 Hopkins, Harry, 271–272 Hostage Crisis, 280, 309–311 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 335 Houston, Sam, 84, 112 Huerta, Victoriano, 181 Hughes, Charles Evans, 202, 212–213, 220, 237, 272–273 Hughes, Christopher, 56 Hull, Cordell, 214–215, 221, 251, 263, 304 Human rights, 44, 54, 301 Hungary, 219, 296–297, 319, 320–321 Hussein, Saddam, 291–292, 354 I-ho Tuan, 141–142 Imperialism, 146, 160, 163, 178, 187, 197, 248, 325. See also AntiImperialism Impressment, 2, 11–13 Income tax, 180 Independence, 1 Indians (Native Americans) British and, 57, 59 Florida and, 49 Manifest Destiny and, 90, 91 Mosquitos (tribe), 118–119 Pinckney’s Treaty and, 34, 35 Scott and, 122–123

Indochina, 250, 251, 325. See also speciﬁc countries Industrialization, 164, 179, 254–255, 302 The Inﬂuence of Seapower on History (Mahan), 150, 155 Intelligence agencies, 283 Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 339, 340 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs), 340 International Bureau of the American Republics, 175 International Monetary Fund, 355 Internationalism, 27, 220, 232, 235–236, 242, 305. See also United Nations Intolerable Acts, 30 Intolerance, 159 Iran, 151, 280, 281, 303, 306, 309. See also Iran-Contra Iran-Contra, 311–314 Iran-Iraq War, 314 Iraq G. W. Bush and, 291–294, 309, 354, 360 democratic mission and, 160 ﬁrst shot tradition and, 81 Great Britain and, 215–216, 219, 314 Gulf War, 281, 306–309, 352 Iran and, 311 League of Nations and, 237 United Nations and, 307, 308 Irish Americans, 184, 232 Iron Curtain, 319, 325, 347 Island hopping, 202, 229–231 Isolationism basics, 202, 220, 231–233 Great Depression and, 244 League of Nations and, 237 Lend-Lease and, 239, 241 Lodge and, 275, 276 NAFTA/WTO and, 302 Nye and, 276 Pearl Harbor and, 249

Index | 381 F. Roosevelt and, 252, 253–254 Stimson and, 262 Israel, 280, 314–316, 319, 337, 338, 352. See also individual leaders Italy alliances, 133 expansionism and, 22 Far East and, 250 Fourteen Points and, 218 League of Nations and, 238 Lebanon and, 352 Lend-Lease and, 241 Marshall Plan and, 325 navy, 213 Venezuela and, 138 World War II and, 257–258 See also Fascism; individual leaders Iwo Jima, 231 Jackson, Andrew, 49, 56, 84, 111, 112 Jackson State University, 295 Japan Atlantic Charter and, 208 Atomic Diplomacy and, 209–210 Big Stick Diplomacy and, 140–141 China and, 142, 161, 162, 163, 169, 202, 249, 250, 252, 261–262 Germany and, 250 Grand Alliance and, 223, 224 Great War and, 260 Harris and, 120 Hawaii and, 154 Korea and, 196 League of Nations and, 238 navy, 211–212, 213 New Manifest Destiny and, 164 opening of, 70, 82–84 Root and, 196 Second Manchurian Crisis and, 248 Soviet Union and, 223 sugar and, 189 Vietnam and, 343 World War II and after, 202–203, 271 See also Harris, Townsend; Island Hopping; Pearl Harbor; Perry,

Matthew Calbraith; Quarantine Speech; Russo-Japanese War Jay, John, 20, 37–38, 42, 51, 64–65 Jay’s Treaty, 13–15, 21, 34, 39, 42–43, 47, 52, 60 Jefferson, Thomas embargoes and, 2, 8, 10, 12, 30 expansionism and, 31, 35, 43 France and, 38 Inaugural Address, 137 isolationism and, 232 Louisiana and, 18, 19, 31 natural boundaries and, 96 neutrality and, 28 paper blockade and, 33 politics and, 60 Quasi-War with France and, 40, 41 See also Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase Jerusalem, 315 Jews, 315. See also Israel Jingoism, 131, 144, 154–156, 188, 275 Johnson, Lyndon, 81, 160, 295, 341, 342, 344–346. See also Tet Johnson, Reverdy, 73 Johnson-Clarendon Convention, 73 Joint Resolutions, 84–87, 154 Jordan, 315, 318, 338 Kalakaua, King, 152, 153 Kamikaze tactics, 231 Kampuchea, 296 Karzai, Hamid, 354 Kearny, Stephen Watts, 93, 121–122, 126 Kellogg, Frank B., 202, 233, 274–275 Kellogg-Briand Pact, 202, 233–235, 234d, 275 Kennan, George F., 297, 333 Kennedy, John F. Berlin and, 286 Cuba and, 280, 281, 282, 288, 355 massive retaliation and, 327 Sputnik and, 340

382 | Index

Kennedy, John F. (continued) trade and, 305 U-2s and, 351 Vietnam and, 344 Kennedy, Robert F., 288, 341, 342 Kennedy Round, 305–306 Kent State University, 295 Kerenski, Alexander, 247 Kettler, Baron von, 142 Khmer Rouge, 295, 296 Khomeini, Ruhollah, 310, 311 Khrushchev, Nikita, 282, 285, 287, 288, 320, 340, 351 Kim Il-Song, 321 King Cotton Diplomacy, 70, 87–88, 107 Kissinger, Henry (Heinz Alfred), 280, 295, 298–299, 301, 337, 338, 356–358 Knox, Philander C., 147–148, 162 Knox-Castrillo Convention, 147 Kolchak, Alexander, 260 Konoye, Fumimaro, 208, 251 Korea Acheson and, 355 Japan and, 161, 261 massive retaliation and, 326 NSC-68 and, 333 Russia and, 156 Shufeldt and, 196 See also Korean War Korean War, 210, 271, 279, 287, 321–323 Kosovo, 332 Kurds, 291, 293 Kuwait, 306, 307, 308, 352 Bin Laden, Osama, 353–354 Laird rams, 108, 115 Land for Peace, 280, 316–319, 338 Lansing-Ishii Agreement, 211 Laos, 294, 295 Latin America Big Stick Diplomacy and, 137, 139 Blaine and, 192 containment and, 333

Dollar Diplomacy and, 146 1880–1914, 131 expansionism and, 22, 164 ﬁlibustering and, 78 France and, 24 Hughes and, 273 legitimacy and, 16 Monroe Doctrine and, 21 recognition and, 45 Root and, 196 See also Good Neighbor Policy; Platt Amendment; speciﬁc countries Lattimore, Owen, 336 Latvia, 219, 296 Laurens, Henry, 51 Lawrence, T. E., 219 Le Duc Tho, 295, 301, 357 League of Nations basics, 137, 201, 202, 215, 232, 234–237, 275–276 enforcement of, 218, 219–220, 236d, 262, 314 See also Fourteen Points Lebanon, 216 Lee, Arthur, 3, 6, 37 Legations, 6, 7 Legitimacy, 2–3, 15–17, 25 Lend-Lease, 202, 206, 223, 238–242, 240d, 272 Lenin, Nicolai, 247 De Lessups, Ferdinand, 171 Levinson, Salmon, 233 Lewis, Meriwether, 99 Liberation of Eastern Europe, 319–321 Liberia, 122 Liberty Party, 86 Liliuokalani, Queen, 150, 153 Limited War (Korea), 321–323 Lincoln, Abraham, 70, 79–80, 124, 129–130, 194. See also Civil War Lithuania, 219, 296 Litvinov, Maxim, 248 Livingston, Robert, 19, 38, 65–66 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 155, 275–276

Index | 383 Logan, George, 66 Logan Act, 66 De Lôme, Enrique Dupuy, 145 Lon Nol, 294 London naval conference, 213 Long Telegram, 297 López, Narciso, 78, 105 Louisiana, 17–19, 30, 34, 35, 68, 189 Louisiana Purchase, 2, 35, 38, 43, 66, 84 Ludendorff, Eric, 204 Lusitania, 193, 245, 267 Lytton, Lord, 238, 262 MacArthur, Douglas, 209, 230–231, 321, 322–323, 358 Machado, Gerardo, 221 Macon’s Bill Number 2, 10, 33 Madero, Francisco, 181 Madison, James basics, 2 embargoes and, 10–11 expansionism and, 31 ﬁlibustering and, 77 Florida and, 49 impressment and, 12 Oregon Claims and, 99 paper blockade and, 33 party of, 60 Quasi-War with France and, 40 War Message to Congress, 58d See also War of 1812 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 150, 155 Maine, 113, 114, 129 Malaria, 176 Manchukuo, 261, 262 Manhattan Island, 115 Manhattan Project, 209 Manifest Destiny Alaska and, 71 basics, 69, 89–91 Cuba and, 103–104 democratic mission and, 160 ﬁlibustering and, 78 natural boundaries and, 95

Oregon fever and, 101–102 Santo Domingo and, 109 Mao Zedong, 248–249, 271, 298, 299, 300, 322, 327, 333, 335 Maps, 112–113 Marbois, Barbé, 19 Marcy, William, 105 Marshall, George C., 336, 347, 355, 358–359. See also Marshall Plan (European Relief Program) Marshall, Humphrey, 76 Marshall, John, 60 Marshall Plan (European Relief Program) basics, 149, 279, 284, 296, 297–298, 323–326, 347 Eastern Europe and, 319 Vietnam and, 344 Martí, José, 78, 144 Marx, Karl, 254–255 Mason, James M., 106–107 Mason, John Y., 105 Massachusetts, 29, 30, 114, 159 Massive retaliation, 326–328 Mathews, George, 77 Matsu and Quemoy, 326 Maximilian, 16, 17 Mayaguez, 296 Mayo, Henry T., 181, 182 McCarthy, Eugene, 342 McCarthy, Joe, 327, 334–337, 356, 358 McKinley, William China and, 142, 143, 168 Cuba and, 145, 146, 175, 176, 185 ﬁrst shot tradition and, 80–81 Hawaii and, 135, 153 jingoism and, 156 Philippines and, 134 Spain and, 78 tariffs and, 144, 152, 153, 179–180, 189, 190 McKinley Tariff Act, 144, 152, 179–180, 190 McLane, Robert, 76

384 | Index

McNamara, Robert Strange, 288, 341, 358–359 Mediation (Punitive Expedition), 182 Mediation (Russo-Japanese War), 156–159 Mercantilism, 1, 19–21, 47 Mexican Revolution, 78, 141, 151, 181 Mexican War, 38, 70, 79, 87, 91–95, 121, 123, 126 Mexico basics, 16–17 Dollar Diplomacy and, 132 expansionism and, 22 ﬁlibustering and, 78 free trade and, 303 Good Neighbor Policy and, 221–222 Manifest Destiny and, 90, 91 Monroe Doctrine and, 24 no-transfer principle and, 31 recognition and, 46 T. Roosevelt and, 146 Slidell and, 125 Texas and, 110 Walker and, 128 Wilkinson and, 68, 69 W. Wilson and, 132, 247 See also Mexican Revolution; Mexican War; Punitive Expedition; individual leaders Middle East, 301, 317, 337. See also speciﬁc countries Midway Island, 72, 230 Ministers, 6 Minnesota, 114 Mission, democratic, 159–161, 244, 247, 297. See also Manifest Destiny; New Manifest Destiny; Regime change Missionaries, 76, 82, 101, 152 Mississippi River, 34, 35 independent nation and, 95–96 Mobile Act, 49 Molasses, 188 Molasses Act, 189 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 265, 320, 324

Monroe, James, 18, 38, 45, 49 Monroe Doctrine anti-imperialism and, 137 basics, 3, 16, 21–24, 23d, 66 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and, 119 corollaries, 96–97d, 132, 139, 140d, 164, 165–168, 195 Cuba and, 144 democratic mission and, 159 Great Britain and, 184 isolationism and, 232 Manifest Destiny and, 90 no-transfer principle and, 30, 31 Roosevelt Corollary to, 220 Russia and, 71 Monroe-Pinckney Treaty, 100 Montgomery, Bernard, 257, 259 Morgan, J. P., 173, 243 Morocco, 133, 170, 227, 257 Morrow, Dwight, 222 Morse, Samuel F. B., 90 Moscow Summit, 300 Most Favored Nation, 1, 25–28, 84, 180, 305 Mukden Incident, 261 Mulroney, Brian, 302–303 Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs), 301 Murray, William Vans, 41 Muslims, 133, 315 Mussolini, Benito, 250, 258 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), 327, 359 Mutual Defense Assistance Bill, 329 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 302, 303, 306 Nagy, Imre, 320 Nairobi, Kenya, 353 Napoléon III, 88, 106, 108, 125, 226 Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 316, 317, 318 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 340 National Defense Education Act, 339–340

Index | 385 National Liberation Front (Vietnam), 344 National Security Act of 1947, 332 National Security Council, 279, 332–334 Nationalist China, 249, 250, 287, 299, 322, 352, 355 Native Americans. See Indians (Native Americans) NATO. See North American Free Trade Agreement Natural Boundaries, 95–98. See also Boundaries, U.S.; Manifest Destiny Navigation Acts, 20 Nazi Germany, 30, 31–32, 315. See also Hitler, Adolf Netherlands, 37, 44, 112, 188 Neutrality Alabama claims and, 73 basics, 26–28, 266 Cambodia and, 294 China Incident and, 252 Cold War and, 298 ﬁlibustering and, 77, 78 ﬁrst shot tradition and, 81 French Revolution and, 1–2 Russo-Japanese War and, 158 1776–1830, 8 trade and, 35, 36, 48 Walker and, 128 war and, 46–48 World War II and, 233 Neutrality (1914–1917) basics, 28, 193, 201, 229, 242–244 W. Wilson and, 134, 203, 204, 247 Neutrality Acts, 202, 238, 241, 244–246, 276 Neutrality Proclamation, 4, 26, 27d, 39 Neutralization, 132, 161–163 New Deal, 244, 272, 276, 334 New Granada (Colombia), 22, 116, 171, 172–173 New Manifest Destiny, 131, 134, 163–165

New Mexico Gadsden Purchase and, 120 Manifest Destiny and, 89, 91 Mexican War and, 70, 92, 93, 94, 96 Villa and, 183 New Orleans, 17, 18, 35, 38, 55, 56, 193 New York Journal, 144 New York World, 144, 145 Ngo Dinh Diem, 344 Nguyen Van Thieu, 341, 357 Nicaragua, 78, 119, 128, 132, 147, 171–172, 178, 221, 312–314 Nicholas II, 228 Nicolay, John, 194 Nimitz, Chester, 230 9/11 attacks, 353, 354, 360 Nine-Power Treaty, 250 Nitze, Paul, 333 Nixon, Richard, 298–301, 336, 338, 342–343. See also Cambodia Nixon Doctrine, 342–343 Nobel Peace Prizes, 156, 169–170, 196, 202, 234, 275, 357, 358 Nonimportation, 1, 8, 10–11, 28, 28–30 Nonintercourse Act, 10, 33 Non-recognition, 246–249, 261, 262. See also Stimson Doctrine Nootka Sound Convention, 98 Normalcy, 231 Normandy, 258 North, Oliver, 313 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 302, 303, 306 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) basics, 5, 54, 279, 328–332, 330d, 347, 355 Bush Doctrine and, 292 containment and, 296, 298 Eastern Europe and, 319 Poland and, 320, 331 War on Terror and, 354 No-Transfer Principle, 3, 30–32 Nouri al Maliki, 293

386 | Index

NSC-68, 279, 332–334 Nuclear weapons, 292, 308, 326, 333, 335. See also Atomic Diplomacy Nye, Gerald P., 242, 245, 276 Nye Committee, 245, 246, 276 Ohio, 34, 95 Oil, 215–216, 248, 306, 307, 308, 309, 315 Oil companies, 222, 252, 274 Okinawa, 231 Olney, Richard, 24, 132, 165, 184, 195 Olney Corollary, 132, 164–168, 165–167, 166d Onís, Luis de, 48, 49, 50 Open Door Notes, 116, 132, 191, 261 Open Door Policy, 142, 158, 162, 164, 168–171, 170d, 194, 213 Operation Overlord, 258 Opium Trade, 76, 237 Opium Wars, 168 Oregon, 91, 114, 115 Oregon Claims, 63, 69, 71, 98–100 Oregon Fever, 69, 100–103 Oregon Trail, 101 Organic Act, 196 Organization for European Economic Cooperation, 325 Organization of American States, 175 Ortega, Daniel, 312, 314 Ostend Manifesto (Cuba), 70, 103–106 O’Sullivan, John, 89 Oswald, Richard, 38, 44–45, 51, 52, 112 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 18 Paciﬁc Conference, 208 Paciﬁsm, 193, 233–234 Pact of Paris, 233–235 Pakenham, George, 102 Pakenham Letter, 85–86d, 127 Pakistan, 350, 354 Palestine, 237, 314 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 310

Palestinians, 315 Palma, Tomás Estrada, 139 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 256 Palmerston, Lord, 102, 106 Panama, 132, 138, 151, 171–174 Panama Canal, 116, 171–174, 176, 185, 192, 194 Pan-American Union, 175 Pan-Americanism, 131, 173–175, 192 Paper Blockade, 32, 32–34, 107 Paris peace agreement (1972), 295 Parker, Alton B., 192 Parker, Peter, 76 Patton, George S., 257, 259 Pauncefote, Julian, 171 Payne, Sereno, 180 Payne Bill, 180 Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, 180 Peace commissioners, 7 Pearl Harbor, 81, 141, 152, 154, 202, 241, 249–252 Peel, Robert, 102–103 People’s Republic of China basics, 248–249, 327, 332–334 détente and, 299 Japan and, 250 U-2s and, 352 Vietnam and, 287, 341, 343 See also Ho Chi Minh; individual leaders Perry, Matthew Calbraith, 55, 70, 83–84, 120, 121–122, 149 Perry, Oliver Hazard, 55, 122 Pershing, John J., 181, 182, 183, 203, 204–205, 276–277. See also American Expeditionary Force; Punitive Expedition Persian Gulf, 151, 306, 309, 310. See also Gulf War Peru, 174, 192 Pétain, Henri, 257 Philippine Islands basics, 134, 135, 136, 141, 230 Cuba and, 176

Index | 387 Dewey and, 151 1899 insurrection, 187, 195 expansionism and, 164 guerrilla war and, 156 Hawaii and, 154 Pershing and, 276 rapprochement and, 184 Teller and, 198 U.S. Navy and, 186 Wood and, 198, 199 See also Dewey, George Pickering, Timothy, 66 Pierce, Franklin, 105, 109 Pinckney, Charles Coatsworth, 60 Pinckney, Thomas, 34–35, 38 Pinckney’s Treaty, 2, 17, 34–35, 43, 49, 52 Pirates, 108, 126, 149 Plan of 1776, 2, 35–37 Platt, Orville, 176 Platt Amendment, 132, 175, 175–178, 177d, 187, 195, 221 Plenipotentiaries, 7, 37–39 Pleven, René, 331 Pleven Plan, 331 Poindexter, John, 313 Poinsett, Joel, 111 Point Four Program, 355 Poland, 218, 219, 265, 269, 296–297, 319, 320 Polignac Memorandum, 24 Polk, James K. basics, 102 Cuba and, 104 ﬁrst shot tradition and, 79 Manifest Destiny and, 91 Mexican War and, 91–93 Monroe Doctrine and, 24, 96–97d, 184 Oregon fever and, 102, 103 plenipotentiaries and, 38 South America and, 116 Texas and, 86 Trist and, 126 Portugal, 22, 98

Potsdam Conference, 283–284 Powell, Colin, 292 Preemptive military action, 291, 292 Presidents, 42. See also individual presidents Prevost, John B., 99 Privateers, 108 Proclamation of Neutrality, 26, 27d Progressivism, 232, 276 Propaganda, 209, 229, 243, 245, 325 Protectionism, 129, 131, 178–181, 189–191, 302, 304 Protectorates, 187–188 Protestantism, 111 Prussia, 15, 226 Pu Yi, Henry, 262 Puerto Rico, 31, 136, 187 Pulitzer, Joseph, 144 Pullman Strike, 195 Punitive Expedition, 181–183 Al Qaeda, 81, 291, 353, 354 Quarantine, 288 Quarantine Speech, 250, 252–254, 253d–254d Quasi-War with France, 39–42, 59, 61 Quintuple Alliance, 16, 31 Quitman, John A., 105 Racism, 136 Railroads, 90, 96, 120, 161–162, 234, 260, 271 Rapprochement, 183–185 Ratiﬁcation, 42–44, 54 Reagan, Ronald, 280, 301, 311, 313, 314, 352. See also Iran-Contra Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (1934), 26, 190, 221, 304 Reciprocity, 152, 174–175, 180, 185, 189, 302 Recognition, 44–46, 51, 261–262, 282. See also Non-recognition Recognition as a belligerent, 70, 106–109 Reconcentrados, 144–145

388 | Index

Reconstruction, 97–98 Red China. See People’s Republic of China Red Scares, 202, 254–256, 279, 327, 334–337, 354 Reed, Walter, 176 Regime change, 291, 292, 354 Religion, 16, 20, 39, 111, 248, 314. See also God; speciﬁc religions Republican Party basics, 40, 60, 63, 116 communism and, 336 containment and, 301, 319 Hawaii and, 153–154 Iran-Contra and, 314 Korea and, 323 League of Nations and, 237 non-recognition and, 248 protectionism and, 179 tariffs and, 179–180, 302, 305 Truman Doctrine and, 347 See also individual Republicans Retaliation, 298, 326–328 Revolutionary War (American), 1, 3, 26, 30, 79, 341 Rhode Island, 188 Rhodes, Cecil, 227 Righteous and Harmonious Band, 141–142 Rocketry, 339 Rockhill, William W., 143, 168 Rogers Act, 274 Romania, 296–297, 319 Rommel, Erwin, 257 Roosevelt, Franklin Canada and, 185 Casablanca, at, 224 Cuba and, 178 democratic mission and, 160 ﬁrst shot tradition and, 81 free trade and, 302, 304 isolationism and, 233 League of Nations and, 237 most-favored-nation provisions and, 26

Pearl Harbor and, 250–252 Russia and, 248 Soviet Union and, 46 tariffs and, 180 United Nations and, 263 World War II and, 205 See also Atlantic Charter; Four Policemen; Good Neighbor Policy; Lend-Lease; New Deal; Second Front; Yalta Conference Roosevelt, Theodore basics, 132 Caribbean and, 138, 151 Cuba and, 187 Dewey and, 193–194 Dollar Diplomacy and, 146 Great War and, 243 Hay and, 195 jingoism and, 155 mediation and, 156 Monroe Doctrine Corollary, 24, 139, 140d, 164 Morocco and, 133–134 Panama and, 171–173 Root and, 196 Rough Riders and, 176, 198 Russo-Japanese War and, 169 See also Big Stick Diplomacy Roosevelt Corollary, 139, 140d, 164, 220 Root, Elihu, 139, 141, 176, 177–178, 185, 195–196, 237 Root-Takahira Convention, 196 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 336 Rough Riders, 176, 198 Rule of 1756, 2, 8, 21, 46–48, 189 Rumsfeld, Donald, 188, 291, 359–361 Rush, Richard, 22, 63, 66, 66–67 Rush-Bagot Agreement, 66 Rusk, Dean, 288 Russell, John, 106, 119 Russell, Jonathan, 7, 56 Russia Alaska and, 71 armed neutrality and, 36 China and, 142, 143, 161, 163, 169

Index | 389 Concert of Europe and, 15, 16 democratic mission and, 244 expansionism, 22 Fourteen Points and, 216, 218 Gallatin and, 63 Germany and, 227, 259 Great War and, 134, 204, 228, 229, 242, 247 Kellogg-Briand Pact and, 234 Monroe Doctrine and, 23 non-recognition and, 247–248 Oregon Claims and, 100 recognition and, 46, 247 W. Wilson and, 247 WTO and, 303 See also Bolsheviks; Russo-Japanese War; Soviet Union; Treaty of Ghent Russian Federation, 332 Russo-Japanese War, 132, 140, 156–159, 161, 271 Sadat, Anwar, 319, 338 Sakhalin Island, 158 Salisbury, Lord, 167 Samoa, 149–150 Samoza family, 221 San Juan Islands, 74 San Martin, Ramón Grau, 221 Sandinistas, 312, 314 Sandino, Cesár Augusto, 221 Santa Ana, Antonio López de, 111–112 Santo Domingo, 70–71, 109–110, 149 Satellites, 352 Saudi Arabia, 306, 315 Schlieffen Plan, 134, 227 Schomburgk, Robert, 165 Schomburgk Line, 165 Scott, Winﬁeld, 55, 93–94, 113, 122–123, 126, 127–128 Second Front, 202, 256–259 Second Manchurian Crisis, 237–238, 249 Second Neutrality Act, 245–246 Second Reich, 226

Secret Treaties, 216 Secretaries of State, 173. See also speciﬁc Secretaries of State Security Council, UN. See United Nations Security Council Sedition Act, 41 Senate ratiﬁcation, 42–43 Separation of the spheres, 90 Serbia, 227, 228 Service, John, 336 Seven Years’ War, 17 1778 Alliance. See Treaty of Alliance Seventh Pan American Conference, 221 Seward, William H., 16–17, 31, 70, 72, 107, 115, 116, 123–125, 124d Shafter, William, 187 Shaw, Samuel, 7, 75 Shiites, 291, 293, 308 Shotwell, James T., 233 Shufeldt, Robert Wilson, 196 Shuttle Diplomacy, 280, 337–338, 357 Siberian Expedition, 201–202, 259–261 Sihanouk, Norodom, 294 Sinclair, Harry, 248 Sino-Japanese War, 161 Six-Day War, 280, 316, 318 Six-Power Consortium, 162 Sixteenth Amendment, 180 Slavery Adams (C.F.) and, 115 boundaries and, 113 Calhoun and, 117 Cuba and, 103, 105 expansionism and, 43, 96–97 Haitian, 18 Jay’s Treaty and, 13, 14 League of Nations and, 237 Manifest Destiny and, 91 mercantilism and, 20 Mexican War and, 93, 95 recognition of belligerents and, 108 sugar and, 188, 189 Texas and, 85–86, 111, 112 Webster and, 129 Webster-Ashburton Treaty and, 114

390 | Index

Slidell, John, 88, 92, 106–107, 125 Smith, Adam, 20 Smoot-Hawley Act, 304 Smugglers, 9–10 Social Darwinism, 163–164 Soulé, Pierre, 105 “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (Kennan under pseudonym X), 297 South Africa, 167, 184 South America, 16, 116. See also speciﬁc countries Southeast Asia, 294. See also speciﬁc countries Sovereignty, 175 Soviet Union China and, 299 Cuba and, 280, 287–290 Eastern Europe and, 319, 320 Egypt and, 317 expansionism, 328, 346, 349 Gulf War and, 307 Iran and, 309 Korea and, 321, 323 League of Nations and, 238 Lend-Lease and, 239, 241 Marshall Plan and, 324, 325 massive retaliation and, 327 nuclear weapons, 209–210, 279, 330, 333, 335, 336, 339 sugar and, 190 United Nations and, 263 Versailles Treaty and, 201–202 World War II and, 202, 206 See also Bay of Pigs; Berlin; Bolsheviks; Containment; Grand Alliance; Siberian Expedition; Sputnik; U-2s Spain 1776–1830, 4 Adee and, 191 American trade and, 42 Caribbean and, 109 civil war, 246 Cuba and, 103, 104, 105, 144, 145, 146 expansionism and, 22

ﬁlibustering and, 78 Florida and, 49 France and, 16 Gunboat Diplomacy and, 151 Jay and, 64, 65 Morocco and, 133–134 no-transfer principle and, 30–31 Oregon and, 98 Pinckney’s Treaty and, 34–35, 38 Plan of 1776 and, 36 Rule of 1756 and, 46, 47 South America and, 16 sugar and, 188 Texas and, 110 Transcontinental Treaty and, 43 Wilkinson and, 67–68 See also Fascism; Ostend Manifesto (Cuba); Pinckney’s Treaty; Seven Years’ War; SpanishAmerican-Cuban War; Transcontinental Treaty; Transcontinental Treaty (Florida) Spanish-American-Cuban War basics, 131–132, 135–136, 146, 156, 175, 185–188 ﬁrst shot tradition and, 81 Hay and, 194 jingoism and, 154 Panama and, 171 results of, 184 Wood and, 198 See also Dewey, George; Ostend Manifesto (Cuba); Platt Amendment; individual leaders Spheres of inﬂuence, 168–169 Spooner Act, 172 Spreckles, Klaus, 153 Sputnik, 280, 338–340, 350 Spying, 282, 285–286, 288, 290, 335, 339, 340, 349–352 St. Dominique, 18 Stalin, Joseph, 202, 209, 223, 225, 256, 264. See also Yalta Conference Stalwart faction, 174, 192

Index | 391 Status quo antebellum, 99 Stettinius, Edward R., 264 Stevens, Edward, 7, 18 Stevens, John Leavitt, 150, 196–197 Stimson, Henry L., 202, 209, 220, 238, 262, 277–278 Stimson Doctrine, 202, 238, 249, 250, 261–262, 277 Stockton, Robert Field, 93, 121, 126 Stoeckl, Baron, 72 Straight, Willard, 161, 162 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT-1 and -2), 300, 301, 357 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 301 Strikes, labor, 255–256 Submarines, 201, 241, 244, 257, 266–268 Sudan, 227 Suez Canal Crisis, 321 Sugar, 131, 144, 150, 152, 180, 188–190 Sugar Act, 189 Sugar Reﬁning Trust, 153 Sumner, Charles, 72, 73–74, 109, 110 Sumner, William Graham, 136 Sun Yat-Sen, 162 Sunnis, 291, 293, 308 Superiority, belief in, 89–91 Sussex, 267 Sweden, 14 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 215–216, 218, 242 Symmes, John Cleves, 67 Syngman Rhee, 322 Syria, 216, 219, 315, 317, 318, 338 Taft, William Howard, 132, 146, 147, 161, 164, 180, 195, 196 Taft deﬁnes Dollar Diplomacy, 147d Taft-Katsura Agreement, 141 Taiping Rebellion, 76 Takahira, Kogoro, 141 Taliban, 353–354 Talleyrand, 17–18, 38, 41, 60 Tansill, Charles, 245 Tariff of Abominations, 117

Tariffs basics, 11, 131, 178–179 Calhoun and, 117 China and, 76 Japan and, 84 Latin America and, 221 most-favored-nation provisions and, 25–26 Pan-Americanism and, 173, 174 reduction of, 180, 221, 274, 305 sugar, 144, 189–191 See also Free Trade; General Agreement on Tariffs (GATT); McKinley, William; North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); Protectionism; speciﬁc tariff acts; speciﬁc tariffs Taxes, 178, 180, 189 Taylor, Zachary, 79, 92, 93, 118 Tea Act, 29 Teapot Dome Scandal, 248, 276 Teheran Conference, 225, 271 Telegraph, 90, 96 Teller, Edward, 136 Teller, Henry Moore, 197–198 Teller Amendment, 136, 146, 175, 187, 197, 198d Terrorism, 81, 291, 294. See also War on Terror Tet, 280, 340–342 Texas, 43, 70, 84, 91, 96, 110–112, 117, 127. See also Mexican War; Transcontinental Treaty Texas Revolution, 110–112 Texicans, 111 Third Coalition, 18 Third Neutrality Act, 246 Von Tirpitz, Alfred, 267 Tito, Josip Broz, 319 Thant, U, 318 Tojo, Hideki, 208, 251 Tonkin Gulf Incident/Resolution, 280, 295, 340–341, 343–346, 345d–346d

392 | Index

Tower Commission, 313 Townshend, Robert, 29, 30 Townshend Acts, 30 Trade Africa and, 133 Asian, 75–77, 115, 116 basics, 7 Cuba and, 282 France and, 4 Hawaii and, 152 Japan and, 82–84, 250–251 Louisiana and, 18 Marshall Plan and, 324 neutrality and, 2, 243 New Manifest Destiny and, 164 Oregon Claims and, 99 Pan-Americanism and, 174–175 Pearl Harbor and, 250, 254 recognition and, 45–46 recognition of belligerents and, 106, 107–108 Rule of 1756 and, 46–48 Spain and, 42 treaties and, 13, 14, 54 war and, 21 See also Blockades; Embargoes; Free Trade; Mercantilism; Nonimportation; Open Door Policy; Plan of 1776; Protectionism; Sugar; Tariffs Trafalgar, 48, 218 Transcontinental Treaty (Florida), 2, 31, 43, 48–50, 95, 100, 110 Transportation. See Railroads Trans-Siberian Railroad, 234, 260 Treaties, 50. See also speciﬁc treaties Treaty of Alliance basics, 3, 5d, 42, 51 France and, 39, 41, 64 legitimacy/recognition and, 4, 15, 44 negotiators, 61, 62 See also individual negotiators Treaty of Amity and Commerce, 4, 25, 36, 37 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 216, 260

Treaty of Ghent, 2, 7, 13, 52, 54, 55–57, 99 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 38, 92, 94, 96, 126 Treaty of Kanagawa, 84 Treaty of Mortfontaine, 5, 36, 41, 52 Treaty of Paris (1763), 17 Treaty of Paris (1783) basics, 13, 45, 50–54, 53–54d, 62 Franklin and, 38, 44 Jay and, 64–65 natural boundaries and, 95 Pinckney’s Treaty and, 34 Webster-Ashburton Treaty and, 112 See also individual negotiators Treaty of Paris (1898), 175, 187 and annexation of Philippines, 137 Treaty of Peace, Amity and Commerce, 83d Treaty of Portsmouth, 156, 157, 158 Treaty of San Ildefonso, 18 Treaty of Tanagawa, 122. See also Wood and Water Treaty Treaty of Tientsin, 25, 77, 116 Treaty of Tordesillas, 98 Treaty of Versailles, 43–44, 54. See also individual negotiators Treaty of Wangshia, 25, 76, 119, 168 Trent affair, 125, 129 Tripartite Pact, 250 Triple Alliance, 226–227 Trist, Nicholas, 38, 93, 94, 123, 126 Trizonia, 284 Trotsky, Leon, 216, 247 Trujillo, Rafael, 221 Truman, Harry S Atomic Diplomacy and, 208, 209–211 Berlin and, 284 democratic mission and, 160 Israel and, 46, 314, 315 MacArthur and, 321 NSC-68 and, 333 tariffs and, 305 United Nations and, 264, 265

Index | 393 See also Containment; MacArthur, Douglas; Marshall Plan; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Truman Doctrine Truman Doctrine basics, 279, 324, 328, 346–349, 348d, 355 Iran and, 309 Red Scares and, 334 See also Containment Turkey, 297, 331, 346, 347, 348, 349 Twain, Mark, 136 Tweed, William Marcy, 191 Twining, Nathan, 344 Tydings, Millard, 336 Tyler, John, 43, 84–87, 113, 127 U Thant, 318 U-2s, 282, 285–286, 288, 290, 339, 340, 349–352 U-boats, 266 Ukraine, 264, 271 UN Resolution 242, 316, 318d, 319, 338 UN Security Council Resolution 242, 318d United Kingdom. See Great Britain United Nations basics, 203, 208, 214–215, 225, 262–265 G. W. Bush and, 291, 292 Far East and, 299, 322 Gulf War and, 307 Hussein and, 308 League of Nations and, 238 Yalta Conference and, 268, 269 See also Land For Peace; United Nations Security Council United Nations Security Council basics, 203, 215, 238, 263, 264, 265, 270 G.W. Bush and, 292 China and, 322, 332 Middle East and, 315, 316, 317, 318d, 319, 338

Unrestricted Submarine Warfare, 266–268 Upshur, Abel, 85, 127 U.S. Air Force, 284, 294, 326, 339, 343, 344, 349 U.S. Army 18th century, 41 19th century, 122, 185, 186 20th century, 196, 198, 307, 331, 341, 346 9/11 and, 360 Great War and, 203, 204–205, 267–268 NATO and, 329 World War II and, 258–259 See also speciﬁc ofﬁcers U.S. Constitution, 19, 42 U.S. Marines, 93–94 U.S. Navy arbitration and, 74 Cuba and, 176, 185–186, 188 Great War and, 268 Hawaii and, 197 Iran and, 310 Japan and, 141 Japanese and, 230–231 jingoism and, 155 New Manifest Destiny and, 164 1914–1945, 212–213 Panama and, 171 Pearl Harbor and, 251 Quasi-War with France and, 41 Venezuela and, 138 Wilkes and, 129 World War II and, 257 See also Gunboat Diplomacy; Washington Naval Conference; individual ofﬁcers USS Black Warrior, 105 USS Buford, 256 USS Caroline, 113, 114 USS Chesapeake, 8 USS Cole, 353 USS Columbia, 99 USS Constellation, 40 USS Creole, 113, 114

394 | Index

USS Maine, 80–81, 135, 145–146, 151 USS Ontario, 99 USS Oregon, 171 USS Panay, 250, 252 USS Princeton, 126, 127 Utah, 189 Uti Possedetus (Treaty of Ghent), 2, 7, 13, 52, 54, 55–57, 99 Van Buren, Martin, 84, 112, 113, 127–128 Vance, Cyrus, 310 Vancouver, George, 98 Vandenberg, Arthur, 264, 347, 348–349. See also Yalta Conference Venezuela, 22, 137, 151, 165 Vergennes, Comte de, 3–4, 37, 44, 51 Versailles Treaty, 43–44, 201, 211, 215, 219, 232, 236–237, 275. See also Fourteen Points; individual negotiators Vest, George, 136 Vicksburg, Battle of, 108 Viet Cong, 344, 346 Vietnam War, 81, 160, 280, 298–299, 301, 326, 355, 359. See also Cambodia; Tet; Tonkin Gulf Incident/Resolution Villa, Francisco “Pancho,” 182–183 Virginius (ship), 78 Vo Nguyen Giap, 342 Walker, William, 78, 128 Walker Tariff Act, 179 War Hawks, 57–59, 79, 117, 135 War of 1812 basics, 2, 11, 28 Calhoun and, 117 causes of, 32, 37, 47, 57, 189 ﬁrst shot tradition and, 79 Oregon Claims and, 99 peace agreement, 7 Perry brothers and, 122

Scott and, 122 See also Treaty of Ghent War of the Paciﬁc, 174, 192 War on Terror, 281, 352–354 Warsaw Pact, 320, 331 Washington, George embargoes and, 8 Farewell Address, 39d, 137 Great Britain and, 13 isolationism and, 232 neutrality and, 26, 27, 64 Oregon Claims and, 98 recognition and, 45 treaties, 2, 13–14, 34 wars, 17, 40 See also Neutrality Proclamation Washington Naval Conference, 170, 211, 212–213, 273 Washington Treaty, 74 The Wealth of Nations (Smith), 20 Weapons of mass destruction, 292 Webster, Daniel, 69, 85, 100, 128–129. See also Webster-Ashburton Treaty Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 69, 100, 112–114 Welles, Sumner, 221 West Germany, 325, 331 West Indies, 13, 14, 31, 42, 54. See also speciﬁc countries Western Front (Second Front, World War II), 225, 256–259 Western Hemisphere, 131, 139. See also Monroe Doctrine; PanAmericanism Westmoreland, William, 342 Weyler, Valeriano, 144 Whalers, 10, 71, 82 Whigs, 79, 85, 86, 93, 94, 102, 105, 119, 123, 127, 129, 192 White, William Allen, 239 White Russia, 264, 271 Whitman, Marcus, 101 Whitney, Asa, 90, 96

Index | 395 Wilhelm II, 227, 228 Wilkes, Charles, 107, 129–130, 149, 151–152 Wilkinson, James, 67–68, 95 Willis, Albert S., 153 Wilmot Proviso, 93d Wilson, Henry Lane, 181 Wilson, Woodrow Bryan and, 193 China and, 162–163 democratic mission and, 160, 163 Dollar Diplomacy and, 147 ﬁrst shot tradition and, 81 Gunboat Diplomacy and, 151 Latin America and, 132, 220 Mexico and, 247 neutrality and, 28, 243–244 rapprochement and, 185 recognition and, 46 Russia and, 247–248, 260–261 Unrestricted Submarine Warfare and, 266–267 Versailles Treaty and, 43–44

See also Fourteen Points; Great War; League of Nations; Punitive Expedition; Wilson-Gorman Act Wilson-Gorman Act, 180, 190 Winthrop, John, 159 Women’s Committee for World Disarmament, 212 Wood, Leonard, 176, 198 Wood and Water Treaty, 84, 120, 122 World Bank, 355 World Court, 237 World Trade Center bombings, 353, 354 World Trade Organization (WTO), 26, 280, 302, 303–304, 306 World War I. See Great War World War II, 81, 137, 202, 205–208, 208–211, 250. See also Pearl Harbor; individual generals Wu Ting Fang, 142–143 XYZ Affair, 2, 40, 42, 59–61, 66 Yorktown, 4, 30

This page intentionally left blank

About the Author

John Dobson is professor emeritus of history at Iowa State University and at Oklahoma State University where he also served as dean of the College of Arts and Science. Dr. Dobson is the author of several books, including ABC-CLIO’s Bulls, Bears, Boom, and Bust.