The Ghost at the Feast E-Book

Robert Kagan

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1469

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

An NPR Book of the Year At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States was one of the world's richest, most populous, most technologically advanced nations. It was also a nation divided along numerous fault lines, with conflicting aspirations and concerns pulling it in different directions. And it was a nation unsure about the role it wanted to play in the world, if any. Americans were the beneficiaries of a global order they had no responsibility for maintaining. Many preferred to avoid being drawn into what seemed an ever more competitive, conflictual, and militarized international environment. However, many also were eager to see the United States taking a share of international responsibility, working with others to preserve peace and advance civilization. The story of American foreign policy in the first four decades of the twentieth century is about the effort to do both - "to adjust the nation to its new position without sacrificing the principles developed in the past," as one contemporary put it. This would prove a difficult task. The collapse of British naval power, combined with the rise of Germany and Japan, suddenly placed the United States in a pivotal position. American military power helped defeat Germany in the First World War, and the peace that followed was significantly shaped by a U.S. president. But Americans recoiled from their deep involvement in world affairs, and for the next two decades, they sat by as fascism and tyranny spread unchecked, ultimately causing the liberal world order to fall apart. America's resulting intervention in the Second World War marked the beginning of a new era, for the United States and for the world. Brilliant and insightful, The Ghost at the Feast shows both the perils of American withdrawal from the world and the price of international responsibility.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY ROBERT KAGAN

The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World

The World America Made

The Return of History and the End of Dreams

Dangerous Nation: America in the World, 1600–1898

Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order

Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in America’s Foreign and Defense Policy

A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977–1990

First published in the United States in 2023 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Robert Kagan, 2023

The moral right of Robert Kagan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

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, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 80546 305 4

E-book ISBN: 978 1 80546 306 1

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For Leni and David

The ghastly suspicion that the American people would not honour the signature of their own delegates was never mentioned between us: It became the ghost at all our feasts.

Harold Nicolson1

CONTENTS

Maps

Introduction

1.      A Tale of Two Wars

2.      Empire Without “Imperialism”; Imperialism Without “Empire”

3.      Collapse of the Nineteenth-Century World Order

4.      The European War and American Neutrality

5.      Schrechlichkeit and the Submarine War

6.      “He Kept Us Out of War”

7.      The Path to War

8.      America Declares War

9.      America and the “War to End All Wars”

10.    The Great War Ends

11.    America and the European Peace

12.    Wilson and the League Fight

13.    A Return to “Normalcy”?

14.    The Collapse of Europe and the Rise of Hitler

15.    Toward a New Order in Asia

16.    The Manchurian Crisis

17.    The Fascist Challenge

18.    Franklin D. Roosevelt: Isolationist

19.    The United States and Appeasement

20.    Kristallnacht and Its Effect on American Policy

21.    Blitzkrieg and America’s “Great Debate”

22.    Accelerating Toward War

23.    The United States Enters the War

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

She sails upon a summer sea . . . safe from attack, safe even from menace, she hears from afar the warring cries of European races and faiths, as the gods of Epicurus listened to the murmurs of the unhappy earth spread out beneath their golden dwellings . . .

—James Bryce, 18881

POWER CHANGES everything. The United States at the end of the nineteenth century was in many respects the same country it had been a century earlier. Its system of government was shaped by the same Constitution, albeit modified by the Civil War. Its guiding principles were still based on those articulated in the Declaration of Independence, which Americans revered if not always practiced. America’s favorable geography was the same, although American dominance of the North American continent was more complete. Yet America’s power relative to that of other nations in the world—measured in wealth, land and resources, population, and potential military capability—had grown so great as to change completely the way the rest of the world viewed the United States. It also changed the way Americans viewed themselves, though less completely. William McKinley declared the era of isolation over. But most Americans were not much interested in change and, at the end of the nineteenth century, still held to old ideas about themselves. They still saw their nation standing apart from the rest of the world, different and also superior, and by and large they liked it that way.

This perception was understandable. America did stand apart, even in 1900, a virtual distant island in geopolitical terms, on a huge continent surrounded on two sides by vast oceans, thousands of miles from all the other great powers of the world. Americans’ physical location had long given them unique advantages and a unique perspective. First and foremost, it had given them both wealth and a remarkable degree of economic independence. The United States by 1900 had grown into the world’s largest and most dynamic economy. Some of this success was due to the particular American style of capitalism, the open and highly mobile nature of its society, compared to the more rigid and inhibiting traditions and class structures of Europe. American patent and commercial laws fostered invention, innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment, both domestic and foreign. But modern economists judge that the biggest factor behind America’s breathtaking economic growth in the last decades of the nineteenth century was simply the availability of abundant natural resources. Americans led the world in the production of copper, coal, zinc, iron ore, lead, and other valuable minerals. They produced half the world’s oil and a third of its pig iron, silver, and gold.2 They had raced ahead of the British in the production of steel and coal, the two greatest measures of economic power at the time, as well as in industrial manufacturing. They produced more than half of the world’s cotton and corn.3 They were also largely self-sufficient. Although Americans traded with the other large economies, they did not depend on that trade in the way that the other top economies, Britain and Germany, did. They had the land and resources to feed themselves. Their homegrown businesses produced the goods they needed and wanted, and the large population was rich enough to buy more than 90 percent of domestic production. The other advanced economies depended on access to foreign markets and foreign sources of supply, and these requirements shaped their foreign policies. Americans believed that they did not have to rely on anyone but themselves, and they were mostly right.4

This relative economic self-sufficiency complemented a historically unique geopolitical independence. Of the large, industrializing nations of the world—Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Japan—the United States was the only one surrounded only by much smaller, weaker powers and by oceans. The European great powers all lived on top of each other and therefore in a constant state of insecurity. The Asian powers, either the formerly great, like China, or the aspiring to be great, like Japan, competed for control of land and resources with each other and also with the British, French, Russian, and, more recently, German empires. Only Americans did not live in a highly contested strategic environment. This was not due simply to fortune or to the allegedly “free security” afforded by Britain’s Royal Navy. Americans had once shared the continent with the powerful empires of Britain, France, Spain, and Russia, but over the course of a century they had driven or bought them out and compelled their acceptance of U.S. hegemony through stubbornness, belligerence, and occasional aggression. The task had been made easier by enduring geopolitical facts, however. The other great powers’ main concerns were generally closer to home, thousands of miles from the New World. Thus Americans at the end of the nineteenth century found themselves enjoying a level of security that others could never share, or even comprehend. On the eve of World War I the British ambassador, Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, had to explain to his puzzled colleagues that Americans lived on a continent that was “remote, unconquerable, huge, without hostile neighbors.” They therefore enjoyed an “unvexed tranquility,” free from the “contentions and animosities” that were part of the everyday existence of Europeans.5

These unique circumstances had an impact not only on America’s foreign policies but on American society and governance. The other powers had no choice but to spend large portions of their national incomes arming themselves for the constant possibility of war. Russia’s peacetime army numbered almost 2,000,000 at the turn of the century; Germany had 600,000 men under arms; France had 575,000; Austria-Hungary, a second-rank power, had 360,000; and even the British, who lived on an island and relied almost entirely on their navy, had over 200,000 men in their standing army. The United States inhabited a territory almost as vast as Russia’s, and had the world’s third-largest population, yet its regular army at the end of the nineteenth century numbered only in the tens of thousands, a “corporal’s guard,” as Theodore Roosevelt called it, barely sufficient to deal with Native American tribes on the western plains, the U.S. Army’s main post–Civil War mission.6 Yet it seemed adequate for the nation’s defense because, as British intelligence officers judged at the time, whatever the size of the American army, “a land war on the American Continent would be perhaps the most hazardous military enterprise that we could possibly be driven to engage in.”7

Americans had recently invested more in their naval forces. In the early 1880s their navy had been no bigger than that of Chile, and they had launched a sizable peacetime naval buildup—but again they built less and spent less than the leading naval powers. The “New Navy” consisted of a handful of armored cruisers and eventually 7 modern battleships. By comparison, in 1901 Britain’s Royal Navy had 50 battleships cruising the oceans, France had 28, Germany had 21, and even Italy had 15. Like the army, the U.S. Navy was small in proportion to the nation’s wealth and size, even though it had to operate in two vast oceans and the Caribbean and protect thousands of miles of coastline. Had there been any real challenge from another great naval power, the American fleet would have been dangerously inadequate. But in the world as it was configured, the other powers were reluctant to expose themselves to their neighbors by sending their fleets thousands of miles away to take on the United States. Even in the age of steam, distances still mattered. Americans enjoyed far greater security than other great powers, therefore, even though they spent barely 1 percent of their national income on defense, a small fraction of what the great powers of the day spent.8

Low defense costs meant Americans could spend their money elsewhere and keep taxes relatively low. It also meant less need for strong central government, less military bureaucracy, and less need for speedy and efficient decision-making. Americans had less need to take foreign policy very seriously, and generally they didn’t. Henry Cabot Lodge, who wished it were otherwise, admitted that “our relations with foreign nations” filled “but a slight place in American politics” and most of the time excited “only a languid interest.”9 The political parties saw foreign policy problems as chiefly opportunities to score points, while Congress saw foreign policy chiefly as a constitutional struggle with the executive.

British officials liked to tease their American colleagues that the United States was most fortunate “in being untroubled by any foreign policy.”10 But as James Bryce, the British historian and long-serving ambassador to the United States, observed, this was a luxury Americans seemingly could afford. The great powers of Europe had no choice but to maintain their systems of government “in full efficiency for war as well as for peace.” But Americans could tolerate “the want of unity and vigour in the conduct of affairs by executive and legislature” because they lived in a world of their own and sailed “upon a summer sea.”11

The United States also stood apart ideologically. It was a young, democratic republic in a world still dominated by ancient hereditary monarchies and aristocracies. At the turn of the century, Russia was ruled by Nicholas II, latest in the line of Romanov tsars going back to 1613; Wilhelm II, of the eight-hundred-year-old House of Hohenzollern, was emperor of Germany and king of Prussia; Franz Joseph I, a descendant of the eight-centuries-old House of Habsburg, was emperor of Austria, king of Hungary, and king of Bohemia; Abdul Hamid II, the Sublime Khan and thirty-fourth Ottoman sultan, ruled in Turkey; the Empress Dowager Cixi, former concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor of the Qing dynasty, ruled as regent in China; the Emperor Meiji was the 122nd emperor of Japan; Italy, a constitutional monarchy, was ruled by King Umberto I and then by his son Victor Emmanuel III, of the thousand-year-old House of Savoy. In this world, the United States, a little over a century in existence, remained a revolutionary upstart. The kaiser could still appeal to the other crowned heads of Europe to show the American democratic “rascals” that “Europe’s kings really stand together,” as he did in the lead-up to the Spanish-American War in 1898.12 The kaiser’s grandmother agreed. Queen Victoria was in her sixty-third year on the British throne. Her father was born ten years before the American Revolution. Her grandfather was George III.

The United States was not only governed differently; it was not even a “nation” in the way that the other great powers were. Americans shared neither common blood nor an ancient rootedness in the soil. All they shared, at least in theory, was a common allegiance to their written Constitution and a theoretical fidelity to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. This universalistic, ideological nationalism had been revolutionary when it first erupted on the scene in the late eighteenth century, and it remained revolutionary a century later. It would continue to shape Americans’ choices in foreign policy.

And Americans had choices. That, too, set them apart from most great powers. In Europe the leaders of a rising Germany worried about encirclement because Germany was, in fact, surrounded by great powers that had banded against it in the past and might do so again in the future. Germans believed that they had to build a large navy if their growth as a nation was not to be blocked by British naval and commercial dominance, and that they needed overseas colonies if they were to assume the place of a “world power” alongside the other great empires. France and Russia engaged in imperial competition with Britain and other powers because they feared the consequences of falling behind. Germany’s rising power also scared them, and they built up their armies to deter it and preserve their influence in the face of an exploding German economy and population. The British had to respond constantly to the encroachments of all these other powers when they threatened access to India and other vital components of the empire. In Asia, Japan and China were locked in competition with each other and with the British and other European empires. Great-power rivalries, old and new, tended to determine and constrain the foreign policy choices of the other strong nations in the world. They did what they had to do to survive and flourish.

For Americans, the question was less what they had to do than what they wanted to do, or what they felt they should do. At the end of the nineteenth century, Americans could choose one of two paths in the world. One was to confine themselves chiefly to matters within their own borders, or at most within their own hemisphere, and to focus on improving their own society. This approach, mislabeled then and later as “isolationism,” had a long tradition. Washington had laid down his “great rule” in his Farewell Address in 1796, to have with foreign powers “as little political connexion as possible.” Jefferson in his inaugural address in 1801 called for “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.” As the German émigré politician Carl Schurz put it, in “our compact continental stronghold we are substantially unassailable . . . we can hardly get into a war unless it be of our own seeking.”13

Since the United States did not have to act out of necessity, many argued, what was the justification for any foreign action? Why put at hazard America’s remarkably beneficial circumstances? And what right did the United States have to involve itself in the affairs of others? Because every overseas action seemed optional, moral and ideological questions loomed larger for Americans than for other nations acting out of perceived necessity. Those Americans who argued for rigid fidelity to Washington’s “great rule” believed the only motives for an active foreign policy were greed, unseemly ambition, a desire for domination, or even a desire for conflict, or what many in the late nineteenth century called “jingoism.” To pursue further expansion, for financial gain or for glory, as all the other powers of the world did, was, for many Americans, a sign of bad character. As Grover Cleveland’s secretary of state, Walter Q. Gresham, put it in 1894, a strong nation like the United States had to be “conscious of an impulse to rush into difficulties” that did not concern it “except in a highly imaginary way.”14 Those who favored restraint also warned against the stronger central government, the large federal expenditures, and the “imperial,” anti-democratic mentality that a more vigorous foreign policy would require.15

Americans were also plagued by fears of the different races and ethnicities that came to their shores as immigrants and refugees. Many among the shrinking white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority feared the effects of an active foreign policy on the nation’s complexion. Some were already unhappy at the way immigrant groups had grasped the foreign policy tiller. By the late nineteenth century, Irish Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans, Jews, and Catholics had begun to have a significant impact on relations with Britain, Russia, Germany, and other nations. In addition, many of the activist foreign policies pushed by “expansionists”—usually in Republican administrations—entailed the acquisition of various islands with large non-white populations, such as Hawaii or assorted islands in the Caribbean. White supremacists in the South and even many northern liberals objected to adding more darker-skinned people to an increasingly non–Anglo-Saxon Protestant population. As Gresham put it, if Americans did not “stay at home and attend to their own business,” they would “go to hell as fast as possible.”16

But were Americans capable of staying home? Was abstention from the world consistent with American universal principles or with the American character as a people? By 1900 an increasing number of leading Americans thought the answer to those questions was no.

In fact, for all their professed desire to remain aloof from the world, Americans had never been very good at minding their own business. They may have wanted to be left alone but they had never left anyone else in their vicinity alone. They had expanded territorially, commercially, and ideologically almost continually since before the nation was even founded. Although the United States did not need foreign trade to flourish, Americans regarded trade as both normal and desirable, and as a critical right of sovereignty. As John Adams once observed, their “love of commerce, with its conveniences and pleasures,” was as “unalterable as their natures.” Americans had fought a war against the world’s strongest empire in 1812 largely over their neutral rights to trade, refusing to cooperate with the British embargo against Napoleon’s France.17 Even in their state of “isolation” in the nineteenth century, Americans were quick to express their opinions about the behavior of other states, cheering for liberal revolutions in Spain, Greece, Italy, and Hungary and, of course, in the Western Hemisphere, condemning tsarist persecution of Jews, British persecution of the Irish, standing up, rhetorically, for the rights of the Chinese against their imperial oppressors. Americans had never been shy about judging others against their own standards.

Nor had Americans ever been shy about their ambitions. Even as a weak, vulnerable, and barely unified string of states along the Atlantic Seaboard, the founding generation’s leaders had spoken of their new republic as a “Hercules in a cradle,” the “embryo of a great empire.” Washington himself had foreseen the day when, thanks to the “increase of population and resources,” the United States would be able to “bid defiance to any power on earth.”18 A second generation of leaders, buoyed by the heady experience of fighting the British to a draw in the War of 1812, envisioned the United States as the leader of an entire hemisphere of republics. This “American system,” as Henry Clay had called it in the 1810s, would marshal the powers of the New World, with the United States at its head, to defy the Old. Territorial ambition persisted well into the nineteenth century, as many Americans looked north in anticipation of eventually taking all of Canada, while others looked south in the expectation of planting an American flag in Mexico City.

Americans talked a great deal about peace, but they had never been a tranquil or pacific people. Nor was the “historic American propensity toward violence,” as the historian Russell Weigley called it, limited to “Jacksonians” of Scotch-Irish stock.19 Jefferson and John Quincy Adams were no less expansionist than Andrew Jackson, and no less willing to employ force when necessary to achieve their objectives. From the Massachusetts Puritans’ massacre of the Pequot in the 1630s to the Trail of Tears two centuries later, Americans of all backgrounds had taken the lands they coveted, forcefully and usually in violation of treaties they had negotiated with the inhabitants. The French and Spanish pushed out of Florida and Louisiana in the early nineteenth century warned of Americans’ “warlike” nature.20 America itself had been forged in war, first in the Revolution and then in the war to end slavery and preserve the Union. The Civil War had left 600,000 dead and another 470,000 wounded in “a conflict of peculiarly intense destructiveness, of peculiarly unrestrained military means deployed in pursuit of notably absolute objectives.”21 In 1900, northerners still remembered the war as a glorious moral crusade, and the South celebrated it as a noble “lost cause.” Americans from both sides lionized their military heroes, built statues to them, threw annual celebrations in their honor, and elected them to high office.

The illusion of American restraint in foreign policy emerged during the long struggle between the North and South over slavery, when Americans turned their expansiveness, ambition, and belligerence inward against themselves. The internal conflict produced westward and southward expansion as the North and South raced each other to acquire new lands and new states. The ten years of Reconstruction after the war also focused the nation’s attentions inward. But it was not long before old ambitions returned and people like William Henry Seward and James G. Blaine again dreamed, like the founders, of the United States becoming “the great power of the earth.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, with such dreams largely fulfilled, some Americans insisted that, under the new circumstances, Washington’s dictum was no longer relevant. It may have been wise counsel for the weak nation that the young republic had been, but not for the strong nation it had become. President Benjamin Harrison argued that “we are great enough and rich enough to reach forward to grander conceptions” than those entertained by “our statesmen in the past.”22

The unanswered question, however, was what did “great” mean? With the continent conquered and all but invulnerable to foreign attack, few Americans at the dawn of the twentieth century yearned for more territory or for any other tangible acquisitions. The economy boomed in the late 1890s, such that Americans now needed less from the world beyond their greatly expanded borders than at any time in their history. For many Americans, greatness was to be measured not by wealth or territory but by such intangible factors as morality, principle, honor, and responsibility. They believed the United States should assume new responsibilities commensurate with its new power.

At the turn of the century, the political home for this way of thinking was the Republican Party—“the party of progress that fought slavery standing across the pathway of modern civilization,” as Henry Cabot Lodge liked to describe it. Republicans sought to replicate that great moral victory on a larger stage. Resistance to this expansive and moralistic view of America’s role in the world came chiefly from Democrats. The party still dominated by the South remained the defender of states’ rights, small government, and, therefore, what traditionally accompanied them: a restrained foreign policy. As was so often the case in the United States, therefore, foreign policy became yet another area of partisan division, along with the tariff and the role of the federal government. To those, like Gresham, who argued that the United States had no business involving itself in the affairs of other nations, Lodge responded that “the proposition that it is none of our business is precisely what the South said about slavery.” He and Roosevelt constantly drew comparisons between events in their own time and the Civil War struggle. Every Democratic president they opposed was “another Buchanan,” every great foreign policy challenge was a “second crusade.”23

For most of the three decades after the Civil War the evenly balanced parties tended to cancel each other out and produce stasis in both domestic and foreign policy.24 The United States was like a crewed boat in which one side was rowing in one direction and the other side was rowing in the other, with the result that the boat went nowhere. The stalemate ended when the balance of political power shifted decisively in the Republicans’ favor. The Democrats lost 113 seats in the House in the congressional elections of 1894, and in the 1896 presidential contest, William McKinley defeated the populist William Jennings Bryan by a substantial margin. Republicans, with their more expansive and moralistic views of foreign policy, were in charge.

By the end of the nineteenth century, various forms of “internationalism” had gained adherents across the political, ideological, and social spectrum, from Republicans like Roosevelt and Lodge to Democrats like Bryan, religious leaders like Lyman Abbott and Josiah Strong and academics like Stanford’s David Starr Jordan, Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson, and Harvard’s Charles W. Eliot.25 Nor were internationalist views confined to the “elite.” The populist Bryan, accepting the Democratic nomination in 1900, envisioned the United States “solving the problems of civilization,” “a republic gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor in the world’s progress and the accepted arbiter of the world’s disputes.”26 Even the Boy Orator of the Platte saw a historic international role for the United States. These “internationalists” differed on many issues, sometimes violently. Their ranks included both proponents and opponents of retaining the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, for instance. But they agreed that the United States could no longer stand apart from the rest of the world. Many Americans understood that the world was shifting around them, creating both new opportunities and new dangers. Technological revolutions in transportation and communications—the wireless telegraph, transoceanic cables, and oceangoing steamships—eliminated the time and distance that had separated peoples, cultures, and civilizations since the dawn of history. Some hoped they would also erase the social and cultural boundaries that had long divided nations and caused the wars between them. The political scientist Paul Reinsch asserted that the transmission of news in a single day, “from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Cape Town to San Francisco,” could produce a “psychological unity of the world.”27 McKinley, in his last speech before being assassinated in 1901, set forth the increasingly common view that “God and man have linked the nations together. . . . Isolation is no longer possible or desirable. . . . The period of exclusiveness is past.”28

While most expected the new technologies to bring unity and comity among peoples, some worried about increasing competition. Technology brought armies and navies closer together, too. New battleships projected unprecedented power over thousands of miles and diminished the strategic protection of oceans and distances. The increasingly interdependent global economy forced the great powers into more intense competition for land and markets.

The United States, some feared, would increasingly be drawn into this global fracas. While Americans depended less on international trade at the end of the century than before, the rest of the world depended more than ever on access to American goods and consumers.29 By the end of the nineteenth century, the British population was so dependent on the importation of American foodstuffs that one British official worried that “we should be face to face with famine” if the supply was ever cut off. European finance ministers were “beginning to recognize more and more the influence of American commercial policy upon their revenues.”30 By the turn of the century, the United States had joined Britain as the world’s banker. Foreign companies became increasingly dependent on American finance, a reversal of the flow of investment in the mid-nineteenth century. As John Hay observed in 1902, the “debtor nation” had become the “chief creditor nation.” The “financial center of the world, which required thousands of years to journey from the Euphrates to the Thames and Seine, seems passing to the Hudson between daybreak and dark.”31 The world’s increasing dependence on the American economy meant that the United States would be a critical factor in any war between great powers, should the peace break down.

It also made for a certain resentment and hostility. The “Americanization of the World,” as the British journalist W. T. Stead called it, was not welcome everywhere. The United States “loomed so gigantic on the horizon of industrial and diplomatic competition,” one contemporary observed,” that “talk of European combination to oppose her advance was in the air.”32 Some of the hostility was cultural. Many Europeans did not want their societies polluted by the invasion of America’s crass capitalist individualism. After a tour of the United States, Prince Albert of Belgium remarked, “Alas, you will eat us all up.”33 While many across Europe decried Americans’ frenetic acquisitiveness, however, the British political leader Lord Rosebery suggested that if Britons hoped to keep up, they would do well to “inoculate” themselves “with some of the nervous energy of Americans.”34

To many Germans, the United States looked like a dangerous competitor and a potential obstacle to Germany’s growth and rise as a world power. German industrialists demanded tariff barriers against American goods and yearned for a new Bismarck to rise up and save Europe from “the American peril.”35 The kaiser tried to convince the British to link arms against the new threat from across the Atlantic. It was only a matter of time, he warned, before the Americans, “swollen by prosperity and pride and unweighted by any of the responsibilities which enforce caution on other States, would inevitably come into collision . . . with the present Mistress of the Seas.”36

The British had other ideas. The alliance they sought was with their Anglo-Saxon “cousins.” Indeed, it was out of concern for Germany’s growing power, as well as the pressure exerted on British interests by both Russia and France, that the British increasingly looked to the United States to lighten the Royal Navy’s burden in East Asia and the Pacific. The British were not alone in seeing the influential Americans as useful partners in their own struggles. The Japanese reached out, hoping the United States might back them in their competition with Russia. The French would have been delighted to have the United States on their side as a balance against Germany. Even the kaiser sometimes thought he could turn the Americans into an asset in his dealings with the other European powers. Whether as a friend or a foe, the United States could no longer be ignored.

Nor could Americans themselves ignore the imperial competition that increasingly shaped international affairs at the end of the nineteenth century, the struggle among the European powers for control in parts of Africa and the Middle East, and in Asia, where they competed for spheres of influence in a weak and prostrate Chinese empire. How long before this global competition brought them “into contact with American interests”? Lodge asked. What was to keep the European empires from carving up the Western Hemisphere too?37 By the mid-1880s, American officials were becoming concerned about German ambitions in particular. As Cleveland’s secretary of state Thomas F. Bayard put it, the Germans were entertaining “schemes of distant annexation & civilization in many quarters of the globe,” including the Western Hemisphere.38

Such concerns partly explained the increasing prickliness and occasional belligerence Americans showed in response to relatively minor European encroachments in the Western Hemisphere. In 1895, even the normally cautious and restrained Cleveland practically threatened war when Britain at first refused to submit a long-simmering border disagreement with Venezuela to arbitration. Cleveland’s action was partly a response to political pressure from Republicans, who accused him of weakness in defending the Monroe Doctrine, and from Irish constituents who hated the British. But it also revealed his own administration’s increasing concern that America’s tranquil cruise on the “summer sea” was in danger of coming to an end.

No Americans in these years called for global imperial expansion. Even the more aggressive internationalists like Roosevelt and Lodge limited their goals to defense of the Western Hemisphere. They and others wanted to build a canal across the Central American isthmus linking the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a desire Americans had harbored since completion of the Suez Canal in 1869. Like most Republicans since the days of Seward and Blaine, they wanted to acquire bases in the Caribbean—the Danish West Indies, in particular—to control and defend the approaches to an eventual canal. Like many American administrations of all parties going back to the 1840s, they also wanted to annex Hawaii to the United States, to protect the approaches to the Pacific Coast from attack, to protect the planned canal, and to promote commerce with Asia. Their aim was not to enter the United States into the global great-power competition but to shield the United States from that competition. Lodge did not want the United States to “entangle itself in the questions of Europe or Asia.”39 He had no interest in “a widely extended system of colonization.” He and Roosevelt wanted control of “the outworks” of America’s defenses, nothing more.40 Lodge and Roosevelt did worry about whether the American character was up to the challenge of a more competitive world in which it would be harder for the United States to hide behind two oceans. A common theory of the day, recently popularized by Brooks Adams, was that great civilizations fell because they became decadent and “effete,” too enamored of luxury and comfort, too lacking in the “barbarian” virtues necessary to preserve their civilization. There was much talk about what Alfred Thayer Mahan called the “masculine combative virtues,” which presumably were being lost in all the money-making. The great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., worried that Americans in their “snug, over-safe corner of the world” worshiped only “the man of wealth.”41 The United States had to be more than a “successful national shop,” Lodge insisted.42

“Responsibility” was an increasingly common theme of the late-nineteenth-century American discourse about foreign policy. Most internationalists believed the United States had a role to play in preserving peace and advancing civilization, even if this meant abandoning Washington’s great rule. The present international order, characterized by a general peace and a relatively open trading system, and dominated by the liberalizing governments of Britain and France, was so well suited to American interests that it was only right that a newly powerful United States take some share of the burden of supporting it. John Hay thus imagined the United States joining Great Britain, Russia, and Germany “in a grand design to stabilize the existing distribution of power, and call a halt to the race for commerce and armaments.”43 Americans did take a leading role in the arbitration movement on both sides of the Atlantic. When McKinley urged Congress to ratify the first arbitration agreement, with Britain, he declared it a “duty to mankind” for the sake of “advancing civilization.”44 (Congress, naturally, rejected it.) McKinley authorized the negotiation of more than a dozen treaties of reciprocity, abandoning his earlier support for high tariffs, on the theory that “good trade insures good will.”45 When Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II called the world’s great powers together at The Hague in the spring of 1899 to discuss mechanisms for peace and limits on armaments, McKinley sent a distinguished bipartisan American delegation with detailed instructions to establish an international court of arbitration. The Republican Elihu Root hoped the gradual creation of international rules and institutions would eventually bring a lasting peace among the “civilized nations”—a “ ‘Parliament of man, and Federation of the world.’ ”46

Beyond helping establish the international mechanisms for preserving the peace, many Americans also wanted their nation to take a larger part in advancing and protecting the rights of other peoples and helping to alleviate human suffering. Such impulses had roots in the religious and progressive reform movements of the nineteenth century. The influx of immigrants and refugees over the course of the century added to the pressures on American officials to condemn repression and persecution in the new arrivals’ homelands. Irish Americans influenced American policy toward Britain in solidarity with their oppressed brethren back home. Jewish refugees from Russia and parts of eastern and central Europe remained interested in the fate of those still trapped under anti-Semitic despotisms. As governor of the state of New York and later as president, Roosevelt repeatedly denounced Russian pogroms and official anti-Semitism. In 1902 John Hay filed a protest with Romania for tolerating and encouraging anti-Semitism and similar “wrongs repugnant to the moral sense of liberal modern peoples.”47

By 1900, there were twice as many American missionaries serving overseas as all the missionaries of Europe combined.48 Their goal was not only conversion but the provision of aid and education to better people’s lives. Josiah Strong, one of the leaders of the Social Gospel movement, preached the motto “The whole world a neighborhood and every man a neighbor.”49 By the 1890s, Americans were engaging in famine relief in Russia and India, sending money and grain through the American Red Cross, saving thousands from starvation.

The greatest show of humanitarianism came in response to the genocidal slaughter of Armenians in Turkey beginning in 1894. The mass butchery of Christians by their Muslim overlords, sensationally reported in American newspapers, pained and angered readers. Nationwide appeals led by John D. Rockefeller, Jacob Schiff. and other prominent Americans raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for relief (the equivalent of $10 million today). Clara Barton took her Red Cross team out of the country for the first time to help the victims in Turkey. Americans even debated whether the United States should intervene with force to help end the horrors. Josiah Strong, William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe, and other prominent rights advocates signed a petition calling for immediate U.S. intervention, and the Cleveland administration dispatched two naval cruisers to Turkish waters, ostensibly for the purpose of rescuing American missionaries but also as an expression of American concern.50 For many, that was not enough. Church groups asked why their Christian leaders could not “force the Government to remove the swords from the hands of Islam?”51 Many blamed the European powers, chiefly Britain and Germany, for allowing the massacres. Lodge commented that British financial interests did not care “how many Armenians are butchered.” American progressives like the feminist leader Charlotte Perkins Gilman pleaded for some nation to take the lead and “usher in the new age of global consciousness.”52

This was the America that greeted the new century, a nation divided along numerous fault lines and with aspirations and concerns pulling in different directions. It was a nation unsure about the role it wanted to play in the world, if any. Americans were the beneficiaries of a world system they had no responsibility for maintaining. Many preferred to continue sailing on the summer sea and avoid being sucked into what seemed an ever more competitive, conflictual, and militarized international environment. But many also were eager to see the United States taking a share of international responsibility, working with others to preserve the peace and advance civilization. The story of American foreign policy in the first four decades of the twentieth century is about the effort to do both—“to adjust the nation to its new position without sacrificing the principles developed in the past,” as one contemporary put it.53 As the nineteenth century came to a close, Americans had no grand international plan and no clear direction.

CHAPTER ONE

A Tale of Two Wars

Now, we have fought a righteous war . . . and that is rare in history . . . but by the grace of that war we set Cuba free, and we joined her to those three or four free nations that exist on this earth; and we started out to set those poor Filipinos free too, and why, why, why that most righteous purpose of ours has apparently miscarried I suppose I never shall know.

—Mark Twain1

THE WAR with Spain that began in April 1898 is generally regarded as a great turning point in the history of American foreign policy, the moment when the United States became a “great power,” a “world power,” an “imperial” power. The great majority of Americans who supported the war, however, had no such ambitions. Intervention in Cuba did not seem to them a great deviation from their previous path. Cuba was an old issue, almost as old as the nation itself. Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and other American statesmen of the early republic saw Cuba as a natural appendage of the growing country and assumed the island would eventually fall “like ripe fruit” into American hands. In the 1850s, southerners tried to purchase Cuba from Spain and make it the heart of a new slave empire in the Caribbean. During the long Cuban rebellion of the 1860s and ’70s, known as the Ten Years’ War, the U.S. government winked as private American citizens, many of them naturalized Cubans, lent financial and military support to rebels fighting to liberate the island from Spanish colonial rule. In 1873 the United States almost went to war when Spanish forces captured a retired Confederate warship, the Virginius, running guns to Cuba. When the Spanish executed the American captain and dozens of passengers, the Grant administration assembled the Atlantic fleet in the waters around Florida. Eventually, the Spanish government apologized, and Grant was not eager to go to war with the decrepit, outgunned American fleet of the time. The memory of the Virginius lingered in the popular imagination, however.2 Failed Cuban rebellions in 1879, 1883, 1892, and 1893 ensured that the struggle made news with some regularity.

The fighting that erupted in Cuba in 1895 caught Americans’ attention because it was especially brutal and destructive. This time the rebels, seeking to shake the pillars of Spanish colonial rule, went after the island’s economy, burning plantations and factories and driving thousands out of work. The Spanish government, with little money and too few troops to crush the rebellion, responded with measures as harsh as they were ultimately unproductive. A new general, Valeriano Weyler, inaugurated a counterinsurgency strategy aimed at isolating the rebels from the rural population.3 Farmers and their families were driven from their homes and herded into fortified towns and “reconcentration” camps with only what they could carry on their backs. Anyone found outside the camps was presumed a subversive and arrested or shot. Spanish soldiers scoured the countryside, burning villages and fields, destroying food stocks, slaughtering livestock, and razing homes. Eventually Weyler decreed a halt to all sugar production to prevent producers from paying bribes to the rebels. The Cuban economy ground to a halt.

The worst was yet to come. By the end of 1896, as the Cleveland administration was ending, Weyler’s reconcentration policies created a humanitarian catastrophe. The influx of some 300,000 displaced persons into the designated towns and makeshift camps overwhelmed municipal authorities and camp operators who lacked the food, supplies, medicine, sanitation, and manpower to care for them. Thousands lived on daily rice rations meant to feed hundreds. Cubans began to starve and succumb to disease.4 Hospitals were overwhelmed, lacking adequate staff, beds, and medicines. In the cities, bodies lay unburied in the streets; small children with bloated stomachs died searching garbage heaps for food. Over the course of a year at least 300,000 Cubans died—about one-fifth of the island’s population—and the deaths continued to mount.5

Most Americans were on the rebels’ side from the beginning. From early 1896 on, Congress was flooded with petitions from peace groups, church groups, labor unions, and farmers’ associations calling for aid to the rebels and recognition of Cuban independence.6 When reports arrived of the mass starvation and disease, the popular outcry matched the response to the Armenian genocide two years before. Cuba was “our Armenia,” the editors at the San Francisco Examiner insisted.7 Even the conservative New York Times wrote that the “civilized world” had an interest in preventing such inhuman behavior “in Cuba as well as in Armenia.”8 Many Americans insisted that the United States must not “share the blood-guiltiness of Europe.”9

Some hoped the United States could end the suffering by mediating between Spain and the Cubans, but many were prepared to use force if diplomacy failed. The newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer competed for readers by stirring up outrage with lurid and sometimes fanciful stories of Spanish barbarity, but the call for intervention also came from religious publications with an even broader circulation than the “yellow press.”10 The Christian theologian and editor Lyman Abbott saw it as a necessary act of Christian charity, “the answer of America to the question of its own conscience: Am I my brother’s keeper?”11 The suffragist and social activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton observed, “Though I hate war per se, . . . I would like to see Spain . . . swept from the face of the earth.”12 An editorial in The Evangelist proclaimed that if it was the “will of Almighty God” that only war could sweep away “the last trace of this inhumanity of man to man,” then “let it come!”13 William Jennings Bryan, the choice of six million voters in the 1896 election and the closest thing to a pacifist ever chosen to lead a major national party, led the cry for intervention. War was “a terrible thing,” he declared, but sometimes it was necessary when “reason and diplomacy” have failed. “Humanity” demanded that the United States act.14

The popular response to the humanitarian catastrophe in Cuba did not fit the usual stereotypes. The foreign policy or establishment “elite” generally opposed intervention.15 The business community and its influential supporters in Congress worried that war would stall the economic recovery that had begun to gather steam at the end of 1896.16 The big investors in Cuban mines and plantations relied on the Spanish colonial authorities to protect their investments and rightly feared what the rebels would do to their investments if they won.17 President Cleveland himself regarded the rebels as “the most inhuman and barbarous cutthroats in the world.”18 The most enthusiastic support for intervention came from the “Bryan sections of the country,” from the populists and progressives who tended to view the Cuban conflict as a class war, akin to the struggle between workers and government-backed plutocrats in the United States. To them it made perfect sense that the Cleveland administration, which had ordered the U.S. Army to kill striking railroad employees during the Pullman strike in 1894, was now supporting the Spanish government as it killed farmers and workers in Cuba.19

In his last two years in office Cleveland maintained strict neutrality as the conflict exploded, coolly ignoring the pro-Cuban resolutions emanating from Congress. He was aware of the breadth and depth of popular sentiment, however. In his last days as president, he urged the Spanish government to get control of the situation, warning that American patience was not infinite and that if Spain did not either bring the war to an end or stop its brutal policies, America’s desire to remain neutral in the conflict could be “superseded by higher obligations.”20 His secretary of state, Richard Olney, advised the Spanish government to make good on its promises of reform and grant Cuba some form of autonomy; he offered to help mediate. When Spanish officials refused, insisting that talks could only begin after the rebels surrendered, Cleveland privately predicted that the United States would be at war within two years.21

This was the last thing the new president, William McKinley, wanted when he entered the White House in 1897. The long-serving member of Congress and, most recently, governor of Ohio had never taken a great interest in foreign policy except on matters of trade and had said little about it during his campaign. His overriding concern was the U.S. economy. He had run as the “advance agent of prosperity,” and, luckily for him, the economy had already begun to take off when he took office. In 1897 the stock market rose, business investment increased, farm prices climbed, farm exports rose, and iron and steel production reached new heights.22 War was a big risk to what still seemed a fragile recovery.23 In his inaugural address, McKinley said pointedly that “wars should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed.”24

As the full magnitude of the humanitarian disaster among the reconcentrados began to unfold in 1897, however, McKinley found himself drifting toward conflict.25 He implored the Spanish government “in the name of common humanity” to change its tactics and relieve the island’s misery. He would have been content if the Spanish had simply put down the rebellion—like Cleveland, he had little sympathy for the Cuban rebel leaders and no interest in Cuban independence—but it was becoming clear that Spain simply lacked the capacity to end the war.26 The problem was compounded by the fact that the Madrid government also did not believe it could survive politically if it made any concessions either to the rebels or to the United States. Although a liberal government was temporarily in power, even Spanish liberals did not believe they could be seen giving away the “jewel in the crown” of the declining empire without a fight. As the American minister reported, they preferred “the chances of war, with the certain loss of Cuba, to the overthrow of the Dynasty.”27

This left McKinley with two options: step back and let the war continue indefinitely, with all that entailed in terms of ongoing death and suffering; or step in and compel an end to the conflict. After several diplomatic go-rounds, in which Madrid yielded tactically but not on the main point of offering the Cubans a clear path to autonomy, McKinley decided he had no choice but to intervene.28 Two events increased public pressure for action. The first was the tragic explosion of the Maine in Havana harbor, which killed 260 American seamen on board and was widely if erroneously attributed to Spanish agents. The other was an insulting letter to Madrid from the Spanish ambassador, which was leaked to the Hearst press. McKinley insisted he would not go to war over either of these incidents—the Civil War veteran told friends he had already “seen the dead piled up” in one war and believed he had an obligation to resist pressure for an “avenging blow”29—but he was pushed into declaring war sooner than he might have preferred.30

On April 11, 1898, to thunderous applause in the House chamber, McKinley declared that “in the name of humanity, in the name of civilization, in behalf of endangered American interests which give us the right and the duty to speak and to act, the war in Cuba must stop.” In phrases redolent of the North’s justification for war with the South, he declared that it did not matter that the horrors were occurring “in another country, belonging to another nation.” It was, he insisted, “specially our duty, for it is right at our door.”31 In articulating a moral obligation to relieve suffering so close to American shores, the president at that moment spoke for the overwhelming majority of Americans—Republicans and Democrats, progressives, populists, labor leaders, and, at the very end, even conservatives and most businessmen.

Modern historians have tended to treat the American decision for war with a certain cartoonish condescension—Americans were “mad for war,” “lashed to fury,” falling “over each other . . . with a whoop and a holler” through “the cellar door of imperialism in a drunken fit of idealism.”32 Some argue that Americans were suffering from a mass “hysteria” brought on by some “psychic crisis,” that they went to war to relieve pent-up emotions, to distract themselves from economic difficulties or status anxieties, to resolve the North-South conflict, or to prove their manhood.33

Yet Americans did not actually rush to war, and in the end it was not mass “hysteria” but a shift among conservative and moderate opinion that tilted the United States toward intervention. The turning point for many conservatives was not the sinking of the Maine but a speech on the Senate floor by the Vermont Republican Redfield Proctor. A successful businessman and former governor known for moderate views and for his close relationship with the president, Proctor traveled to Cuba in early March 1898 to see things for himself. He went “with a strong conviction that the picture had been overdrawn” by the yellow press, but what he saw changed his mind: thousands living in huts unfit for human habitation, “little children . . . walking about with arms and chest terribly emaciated, eyes swollen, and abdomen bloated to three times the normal size,” hundreds of women and children in a Havana hospital “lying on the floors in an indescribable state of emaciation and disease.”34 What moved him to support intervention, he said, was “the spectacle of a million and a half of people, the entire native population of Cuba, struggling for freedom and deliverance from the worst misgovernment of which I ever had knowledge.”35 After Proctor’s speech, even the nation’s more conservative newspapers came around to the view that the situation in Cuba was “intolerable,” and that it was America’s “plain duty” to intervene.36

On April 25, the United States Congress authorized McKinley to use force. The war was over in ten weeks. Although there was hard fighting on land, the war began and ended with dramatic and decisive naval battles. On May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey, commanding the U.S. Asiatic Squadron, defeated a Spanish squadron at Manila Bay in a few hours with virtually no American losses. Two months later, on July 3, two American squadrons defeated a Spanish squadron in the battle of Santiago Bay. With both its fleets destroyed and the Spanish coast vulnerable to American attack, the Madrid government sued for peace. American losses were not insignificant for such a short war—385 men died in battle and another 2,000 died from disease, mostly contracted in poorly equipped training camps in Florida—but for a nation that could still remember losing that many soldiers in one hour of fighting during the Civil War, it felt like a low-cost affair.

John Hay called it a “splendid little war,” therefore, but not only because it was won so handily. It was also “splendid” because it had been fought for “the highest of motives.”37 Although it is impossible to measure how many lives were saved by American intervention, a reasonable guess would put the number in the tens of thousands.38 Nor did the humanitarian crisis end with the war. The Cuban population was in a desperate condition. Disease and famine were rampant. Municipal services, from medical care to sanitation, were nonexistent. Cities had been left “full of sick and starving people, the streets littered with dead horses and dogs,” stinking of human waste, while the island’s interior, according to American military observers, had become “almost a wilderness.”39 The U.S. Army worked to address the continuing humanitarian crisis in its role as an occupying force. Army distribution centers provided food to 20,000 Havana residents, and over the course of 1899 the army distributed more than five million daily rations to the Cuban population across the island.40 Army sanitation teams cleaned up the major cities—those tasked with cleaning up Havana, which they found almost unimaginably filthy and disease-ridden, took great satisfaction in making it “cleaner than any other city had ever been up to that time.”41 Army medical officers joined Cuban doctors to treat the sick. A Cuban physician, Carlos Finlay, working with the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed and other American doctors, identified the mosquito responsible for transmitting yellow fever and began the long fight against a disease that had killed more than seven hundred people every year in Havana alone.42 Like the Union army in the South, veterans of which were now in charge of the occupation, U.S. forces carried out sweeping reforms in the way Cuba was governed. Influenced by progressive ideas, they overhauled the court system, penal institutions, health and sanitation services, and the operation of municipal governments. They even instituted an eight-hour workday, which had yet to be enacted in the United States. They built hundreds of new schools, and Harvard University’s president, Charles W. Eliot, raised funds to bring more than a thousand Cuban teachers to Cambridge for training.43 Few Americans doubted the good that had been accomplished. Massachusetts senator George Frisbie Hoar, who would soon become a leading “anti-imperialist” over the question of the Philippines, called the intervention in Cuba “the most honorable single war in history,” one that Americans began “for the single and sole purpose that three or four hundred thousand human beings within ninety miles of our shores” should not be “deliberately starved to death.”44

The intervention in Cuba would many decades later be described as an example of American “imperialism,” but that was not how Americans saw it, either at the time or even in the decades that followed. Prominent anti-imperialists of the day, like the philosopher William James, believed that war had been the product of “perfectly honest humanitarianism, and an absolutely disinterested desire on the part of our people to set the Cubans free.”45 Mark Twain, among the most coruscating critics of American foreign policy in general, and of American imperialism in particular, had not opposed the intervention in Cuba. On the contrary, he believed that in Cuba the United States had “occupied the highest moral position ever taken by a nation since the Almighty made the earth.”46 Even the anti-imperialist and antiwar standard-bearer of the 1910s and 1920s, Wisconsin senator Robert M. La Follette, never included Cuba in his list of America’s sins. “When we did ‘intervene’ in Cuba,” he recalled, “it was to help a people struggling for liberty.”47

Where the anti-imperialists objected was to the unanticipated acquisition of the Philippines. In fact, the Philippines had never been part of anyone’s plan prior to May 1898.48