Foreign policy

The victory of the United States in the war with Spain in 1898 was a turning point in American foreign policy. Until 1898, American officials thought that their government should stay out of foreign entanglements, and they restricted expansion to territories on the North American continent. By the late 19th century, however, American presidents argued that the country needed to expand into foreign territories to search for new markets. At the turn of the century, the United States reorganized its military system and built up its naval power to ensure access to foreign markets and to meet the needs of the expansion of American capitalism and culture. Although 80 percent of American exports went to Europe and Canada in the late 19th century, the United States competed with the great industrial powers for markets in Asia and Latin America.

Leaders in the United States used two reasons to justify the expansion of American capitalism and culture around the world. First, the American business community had reached a consensus that, by expanding into foreign markets, the country could solve its economic, social, and political problems that stemmed from the Industrial Revolution. Second, American leaders increasingly believed that the country needed strategic naval bases to compete with European countries in Asia and Latin America. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890) had a significant influence on American elites. Mahan had argued that the United States would need naval supremacy and control of the seas to maintain its national power. His theories inspired the Great White Fleet as a policy tool under Theodore Roosevelt.

The Spanish-American War of 1898, which began as an intervention for humanitarian reasons in a civil war in Spanish Cuba, became a contest for colonial expansion. After the United States took possession of the Philippines in the war with Spain, a revolt broke out against the new colonial power under Emilio Aguinaldo. Although Americans saw themselves differently than the previous European imperial rulers, the United States found that subjugating other people required military force and brutality. After four years of fighting, 4,300 Americans had died and about 50,000 Filipinos were killed in the Philippine War. By 1902, American troops under John Pershing finally suppressed the Philippine insurrection.

The American presence in Asia increased with the acquisition of the Philippines. In particular, the U. S. administration sought to expand trade with China. At the turn of the century, the major European and Asian powers had begun to carve up China in a rapid imperialist expansion. Wanting to protect American interests in China, President William McKinley stated in 1898 that, although the United States sought no special advantages, he encouraged the European and Asian powers to maintain an “open door” in China. Secretary of State John Hay translated McKinley’s message into the Open Door notes, addressing it to England, Germany, Russia, France, Japan, and Italy. The major powers ignored the Open Door Policy until the United States participated in an international expeditionary force that suppressed the nationalist Boxer Rebellion in China. England and Germany agreed to abide by the Open Door policy after the rebellion was crushed in 1900.

Although the United States won the war with Spain and acquired Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, the war illustrated obvious inadequacies in the American armed eorces. President McKinley appointed Elihu Root, a corporate lawyer from New York, as secretary of war to reorganize the entire military system. Between 1900 and 1903, Root transformed the military system into a modern one. The reforms enlarged the regular army, established federal army standards for the National Guard, created officer training schools, and organized a central planning agency to coordinate military operations.

The United States assumed a more active role in international affairs between 1901 and 1917. Theodore Roosevelt became president after McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Roosevelt brought stability to Asia and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his efforts at negotiating the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. He also agreed to the Japanese presence and territorial status quo in the Pacific under the Root-Takahira Agreement of 1908.

Despite his work as a peacekeeper, Roosevelt extended American military power and dominance in the Western Hemisphere. In 1904 the president added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. He claimed the right to intervene in the domestic affairs of Latin American countries if they were not able to maintain order themselves. This policy expanded on the right under the Monroe Doctrine of the United States to oppose European intervention in the region. Using the Roosevelt Corollary, the United States intervened in the Dominican Republic when the country was unable to make payments on its $22 million debt. In 1905, the United States took control of the nation’s finances for three decades.

The United States intervened in other Caribbean countries as well. In exchange for granting Cuba independence, the United States required that the country put the Platt Amendment of 1901 in its constitution, which maintained the right of the United States to intervene in Cuba to prevent a foreign power from having undue influence there. In 1903 Roosevelt prevented the Colombian government from suppressing a revolution in its province of Panama. Immediately after Roosevelt recognized the independent nation, the Panamanian government agreed to a Panama Canal treaty. In 1911, three years before construction of the canal was completed, Roosevelt had claimed, “I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate.”

Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, attempted to preserve the economic interests of the United States in the world. Using policies termed as dollar diplomacy, Taft’s secretary of state, Philander C. Knox, worked to extend American investments throughout the world. The value of American exports increased from $800 million in 1895 to $2.3 billion in 1914, an increase of close to 240 percent. Taft resorted to military force when economic influence proved insufficient. In 1909, when revolution broke out in Nicaragua, the Taft administration sent troops to support the government’s opponents and to seize the country’s customs houses. Two years later, Taft sent troops to Nicaragua again to protect the pro-American government. The American troops occupied the country for over a decade.

When Woodrow Wilson entered the White House in 1913, he continued the interventionist policies of earlier presidents. Although Wilson opposed dollar diplomacy, which he thought forced weaker countries into inequitable financial relationships, he agreed with the importance of promoting economic development overseas. In addition,

Frank Kellogg defending U. S. intervention in Nicaragua before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; chairman of the committee Senator William E. Borah is on the left (Library of Congress)

He sought to conduct a foreign policy that followed democratic principles. In particular, he wanted to extend constitutional liberty to the country’s neighbors in Latin America. Having taken control of the Dominican Republic’s finances in 1905, the United States set up a military government there in 1916. Wilson sent the U. S. Marines to Haiti in 1915 to crush a revolution, and American troops occupied that country until 1934.

In 1914 Wilson sent troops to the Gulf of Mexico port of Veracruz after the Mexican army had arrested American sailors who had gone ashore in Tampico. Wilson expected to establish a pro-American government in a bloodless intervention, but the two countries came to the brink of war. Nineteen Americans and 126 Mexicans were killed in skirmishes, and the Wilson administration backed off. When the military intervention helped to strengthen the position of Venustiano Carranza, the United States decided to back the opposition led by Pancho Villa. However, when Villa appeared to be losing the power struggle, the United States abandoned him and granted preliminary recognition to the Carranza government. To retaliate, Villa killed 16 Americans on a train in northern Mexico; later his forces crossed the border into Columbus, New Mexico, killing 17 more Americans. Wilson then ordered an expeditionary force into Mexico to find Villa. Although the U. S. troops never found Villa, the two countries engaged in battles that killed 40 more Mexicans and 12 Americans. The United States finally withdrew its troops and formally recognized the Carranza government in 1917.

In the 1920s the U. S. government encouraged economic expansion in Latin America. Between 1924 and 1929, U. S. investments more than doubled in Latin America as the U. S. military maintained a presence in several countries there. At the same time that the United States intervened in the affairs of Latin American countries, public opinion wanted to sustain American neutrality in the European conflict.

When World War I broke out in Europe, the United States attempted to stay neutral. However, as British and German warfare gradually restricted American trade and freedom of the seas, President Wilson became involved in the conflict. When the British imposed a naval blockade on Germany, the United States was able to withstand an interruption of its trade with the Central Powers (Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire); but abiding by any embargo of the Allies (Britain, France, Italy, and Russia) would harm the U. S. domestic economy, especially when war orders increased dramatically from Britain and France after 1914. Defense production helped to bring about one of the most expansive economic booms in American history.

By 1915, the United States had sided with the Allies by supplying them with war materials. Meanwhile, the

Germans resorted to a new tactic, submarine warfare, to cut off the flow of supplies to England. A German submarine sank the British passenger liner, Lusitania, on May 7, 1915, killing 1,198 people, 128 of whom were Americans. After the incident, the Germans agreed to Wilson’s demands that the Central Powers affirm their commitment to neutral rights and promise not to launch more attacks.

By 1917, the Germans had decided that the advantages of unrestricted submarine warfare outweighed the risk of American entry into the war. By then, Wilson had concluded that, if provoked to enter the war, the United States could use the war as a means of creating a new democratic world order. In a speech to the Congress in January 1917, Wilson presented a plan for a postwar order and “peace without victory.” The United States would help to maintain peace through a League Of Nations, a world organization of nations that would arbitrate conflicts and ensure the self-determination of nations.

Meanwhile, a number of events made American entry into the war nearly inevitable. In February, the British gave Wilson an intercepted telegram from the German foreign minister to the Mexican government. In the Zimmermann telegram, the foreign minister proposed that the Mexicans ally with the Germans if the United States joined the war. In exchange, when the war was over, Mexico would reacquire Texas and much of the American southwest. Publication of the telegram helped to create popular support in the United States for entry into the war.

In the following month, a republican government replaced the czarist regime in the Russian Revolution. When the Bolsheviks took control in the October Revolution of 1917, Wilson refused to recognize their new government. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were not restored until 1933. The possibility—and eventual reality—of Russia withdrawing from the war put additional pressure on the Wilson administration to join the Allied war effort.

In April 1917, the United States entered the war as an ally of Britain. Within months of the arrival in 1918 of American troops in Europe, Germany agreed to an armistice. By the time war had come to a close, the European population and economy were decimated. In contrast, the United States emerged from the war relatively unscathed and as a global power; and the nation’s economy experienced an industrial boom that stretched into the 1920s.

The Treaty Of Versailles, which formally ended the war, differed significantly from what Wilson had hoped for. He was unable to win approval for most of his proposals, such as freedom of the seas, free trade, and the principle that the negotiations should result in “open covenants openly arrived at.” The Paris agreements were negotiated in secret. Rather than gaining support for the “impartial mediation” of colonial claims, Wilson had to accept a transfer of German colonies in the Pacific to Japan, which Britain had promised in exchange for Japanese help in the war. In addition, the economic and strategic demands of the Allies undermined his promise of “national self-determination” for all peoples.

The major difference between the American and Allied agendas for peace was the demand that the Central Powers pay reparations to the Allied governments to compensate for their losses. Wilson opposed the idea. When the Allies refused to compromise, he reluctantly accepted the principle of reparations. A commission in 1921 determined that Germany had to repay $56 billion to the Allies. Germany eventually paid only $9 billion, but the amount was still far more than the decimated economy of Germany could afford.

Although the treaty was far from Wilson’s hopes for peace based on the principles of justice and democracy, it provided for a League of Nations, which Wilson believed would create a new international order. Even though Wilson lobbied passionately for the passage of the treaty, the Senate refused to ratify it. Its defeat at the hands of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other Republicans signaled an end to Wilsonian internationalism.

Having rejected Wilsonian diplomacy and its promises of a new world order, the United States retreated from European affairs for two decades after World War I. In a policy of what historian Joan Hoff Wilson has called “independent internationalism,” American policymakers in the 1920s hoped to create protective measures against future wars without restricting the nation’s freedom of action in the world. When Warren G. Harding took office, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes secured a series of agreements at the Washington CoNfERENCE on Naval Disarmament of 1921-22 from the major European and Asian powers to curb the destabilizing naval arms race. In 1927, the major powers attempted unsuccessfully to extend the disarmament measures of the Naval Disarmament conference in Geneva. In 1928, 62 nations signed onto the Kellogg-Briand Treaty, which outlawed war. Unfortunately, these peace and disarmament measures contained loopholes and lacked enforcement measures so that they became meaningless.

Although the Kellogg-Briand Treaty was unenforceable, it was seen as a victory for the peace movement, which had come together as a loosely organized coalition. The most active groups included the World Peace Foundation, the Foreign Policy Association, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Social Science Research Council, and the Institute of Pacific Relations. Having a significant influence on foreign policy, the members of these organizations included mostly American elites who shared a vision of Wilsonian internationalism, a liberal new world order, and collective security. In fact, James T. Shotwell, a professor at Columbia University who headed the Carnegie Endowment, had helped to develop the Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928. Meanwhile, other groups that lobbied for the outlawry of war but emphasized pacifism rather than collective security, included the Women’s International League eor Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the Fellowship for Christian Social Order. While the members of the pacifist groups were skeptical of the potential for peace, most of them supported a Christian pacifism.

Even though the United States retreated from the Wilsonian vision of a new world order in the 1920s, American policymakers sought to ensure the economic redevelopment and stability of Europe, a continent devastated by World War I. The Allies had to repay $11 billion in loans to the United States. In addition, the reparations Germany was required to pay the Allies under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles weighed down the German economy. In 1924, Charles Gates Dawes, an American banker and diplomat, negotiated an agreement among France, Britain, Germany, and the United States. American banks provided loans to Germany so that it could pay the reparations and invest in its economy. Meanwhile, Britain and France agreed to reduce the amounts of the reparations if the Germans made their payments. Debt repayment fueled American economic expansion in Europe until the international financial system broke down after 1929. However, the Dawes Plan did not solve the economic troubles in Europe. In fact, the circular flow of debt repayments helped to destabilize international finance, one of several factors that brought on a world economic depression in the 1930s.

The political chaos around the world sparked by the Great Depression, and the rise of fascist governments and military regimes in Europe and Asia intent on territorial expansion, severely undermined the fragile international system created after World War I. These powerful international forces gradually pushed the United States to greater involvement in international affairs.

In 1929 President Herbert Hoover faced a looming international economic and political crisis. He attempted to protect American farmers from international competition by raising agricultural tariffs with the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930. Rather than helping farmers in the United States, the tariffs, at the highest level in American history, only exacerbated the international economic crisis. Other governments retaliated by enacting their own trade restrictions, thus shrinking the market for agricultural goods from the United States.

By the time that Hoover left office in 1933 the international system had collapsed. The system of the 1920s that failed had been based on voluntary cooperation among nations and a refusal by the United States to restrict its freedom of action by establishing international obligations. Continued investment and intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean were not seen as contradictory solutions but rather as protecting America’s sphere of interest. Under the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the United States gradually moved from a position of isolationism to intervention in the European and Asian conflicts that culminated in World War II.

See also Clark Memorandum.

Further reading: Michael J. Hogan, Ambiguous Legacy: U. S. Foreign Relations in the “American Century” (Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Gordon Martel, ed., American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890-1993 (London: Routledge, 1994); Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, new ed. (New York: Norton, 1988).

—Glen Bessemer

Foster, William Zebulon (1881-1961) union organizer William Z. Foster was a radical trade unionist and working-class activist in the first half of the 20th century. He created new forms of worker organization in mass production industries and served as general secretary of the Communist Party. Born to Irish immigrants in Taunton, Massachusetts, in 1881, Foster stopped attending school at the age of 10 when he apprenticed himself to a die sinker. After three years of apprenticeship, Foster traveled across the nation, working at various jobs. His experiences as a migrant worker led Foster to embrace the ideals of socialism. He joined the Socialist Party in 1901. For the rest of his life, Foster remained deeply committed to working-class movements and politics.

Foster participated in the Industrial Workers oe the World’s (IWW) free speech fight in Spokane, Washington, in 1909. As a result, he joined the IWW and became an organizer. Foster’s political views and approach to organizing the working class changed dramatically when he visited Europe in 1911. After participating as the international representative for the IWW in an international labor conference in Budapest and observing the successful organizing of France’s syndicalist labor federation (CGT), Foster returned convinced that the IWW needed to change its organizing strategy, “boring from within” the established trade unions of the American Federation oe Labor rather than organizing competing unions. Unable to convince other Wobbly leaders to champion his strategy, Foster left the organization in 1912. He formed a rival, the short-lived Syndicalist League of North America.

In 1914 Foster moved to Chicago to take a position as business agent for the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen. There, he began another campaign to convert the AFL into a syndicalist organization. In 1915 Foster became a general organizer for the AFL and founded the International Trade Union Educational League (ITUEL). The ITUEL’s goal was to use education and propaganda to steer the AFL to a syndicalist position.

As World War I erupted, Foster shifted his energies to organizing large industries. He proved to be an effective labor organizer by founding the Stockyards Labor Council (SLC), which served to align Chicago’s many unions organizing in the yards and coordinate efforts to unionize meatpacking workers. His success in organizing the ethnically diverse and divided stockyard workforce led to new gains in wages and working conditions during the war, but employers would not extend union recognition to the workers. Racism, internal fragmentation, and employer repression, however, doomed the SLC; and by 1922 it disbanded. It would be more than 20 years before the meatpacking industry was unionized.

In 1918 Foster developed the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers to organize the steel industry. Initial strikes in Gary, Indiana, and South Chicago proved successful. The Steel Strike Of 1919 drew more than 350,000 workers into its ranks. Ethnic, racial, and skill divisions among workers, limited support from the American Federation of Labor, and severe business and government repression combined to undermine the strike and led to the collapse of the National Committee.

After these organizing setbacks, Foster shifted back to political and educational activities. In 1921 he headed to Moscow and attended the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern) and joined the Communist Party. He also founded the Trade Union Education League, modeled after the ITUEL, with the aim of promoting syndicalism among trade union workers, which became an arm of the Profintern in 1923.

Foster quickly became one of the most important leaders in the American Communist Party. He ran as its candidate for president of the United States in 1924, 1928, and 1932. Yet, imprisonment, internal party factionalism, and a heart attack in 1932 led to Foster losing influence in the movement. In 1945 Foster reemerged as party leader, after his key rival, Earl Browder, was expelled from the party. Foster remained in this position until he retired in 1956. He died in Moscow in 1961. Although his political career in working-class politics had limited success, Foster’s innovative approaches to organizing labor in the meatpacking and steel industries were later adopted by the CIO, which successfully organized the nation’s industrial workers in the 1930s.

See also LABOR and labor movements; radicalism.

Further reading: James Barrett, William Z. Foster: The Tragedy of American Radicalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Edward P Johanningsmeier, Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

—Jacob Hall

Fourteen Points See Versailles, Treaty of.