He acted quickly. Someone at the press conference on April 23 recalled that Wilson looked “preternaturally pale, almost parchmenty. … The death of American sailors and marines owing to an order of his seemed to affect him like an ailment. He was positively shaken.” The president gave no hint of his intentions, except when a reporter asked whether he regarded his moves in Mexico “as in the nature of a private act”—meaning not an act of war—and he responded, “Yes, sir, so far as they have gone.”16 He had already decided that military action would go no further. He scrapped plans for the naval blockade and a possible military expedition against Mexico City. On April 25, he eagerly accepted an offer by the ambassadors of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile to mediate the affair. The “ABC” mediators convened a conference at Niagara Falls, New York, in May. Tortuous negotiations ensued—with Carranza refusing to participate—before a face-saving formula emerged in the form of a mutual withdrawal from Veracruz by Huerta and the American forces. Huerta resigned and went into exile in July, and a triumphant Carranza rode on horseback into Mexico City on August 20. It was a good outcome from Wilson’s standpoint, but he would soon learn that his imbroglio in Mexico had not ended.
Why Wilson reversed himself so abruptly and completely has prompted various explanations. Some observers have agreed that the deaths of the servicemen woke him up to the gravity of what he had done, a view that has merit, up to a point. Then and later, sending young men to die in combat affected Wilson profoundly. After Veracruz, he would never again seem so cavalier and enthusiastic about military intervention. This marked the end of that part of the Rooseveltian tendency in his foreign policy thinking. But Veracruz did not convert Wilson to pacifism. Instead, he would cling to another part of his Rooseveltian tendency. He still believed that the United States, as one of the great powers, must take an activist, involved part in world politics, a part that included potential use of armed force. Hereafter, Wilson might be more chastened in his ardor for America to play such a role, but his basic thought did not change.
Other interpreters have maintained that near-universal condemnation of the Veracruz incursion at home and abroad forced Wilson to change course. Republicans such as Taft and Elihu Root were particularly scathing in their denunciations of the president and his secretary of state as a pair of bungling clowns, while peace and socialist groups condemned Wilson as an aggressor.17 Wilson was as sensitive to public opinion as the next politician, but he did not retreat before a barrage of criticism: he had changed course before he had any chance to gauge reactions. His about-face stemmed, instead, from self-criticism. He knew he had blundered. He had expected Huerta’s forces to crumble, and discounting strong evidence to the contrary, he had expected their opponents to welcome a decisive move to bring him down. His response to the Veracruz affair marked the beginning of a diplomatic self-education that would intensify in response to the world war.
From this time on, Wilson did not waver in his resolve to aid revolutionary and democratic forces in Mexico and keep American hands off if at all possible. In May, he had resisted appeals by Garrison to send more troops to Veracruz, and he had given an interview to the New York World in which he again condemned Huerta and his privileged backers and praised Emiliano Zapata and others for seeking economic justice. During the negotiations at Niagara Falls, despite Carranza’s noncooperation, he had insisted on terms that would favor the Constitutionalists. In August, he told Garrison, “There are in my judgment no conceivable circumstances which would make it right for us to direct by force or by threat of force the internal processes of what is a profound revolution, a revolution as profound as that which occurred in France. All the world has been shocked ever since the time of that revolution in France that Europe should have undertaken to nullify what was done there, no matter what the excesses then committed.”18
Coming from a self-proclaimed disciple of Edmund Burke, those were remarkable words. They did not mean Wilson had renounced his adherence to Burke’s organic, anti-ideological approach to politics, but they did mean that what he called the “progressive Democrat” in him was shaping his views not only at home but abroad as well. Mexico was giving him and the world the first experience in dealing with revolutions among downtrodden peoples, with attendant mixtures of nationalism, radicalism, and violence. The experience would stand him in good stead when he confronted a more cataclysmic revolution of this kind in Russia.19
The same strengths, virtues, and defects that Wilson showed with Mexico marked the rest of his pre-world war diplomacy. Mexico did not eclipse attention to the rest of Latin America. Bryan in particular wanted to strike an idealistic note there that offered a shining contrast to previous Republican interventionism and “dollar diplomacy.” In August 1913, he had talked to Wilson about America’s being “a Good Samaritan” toward Central America and helping its nations. As proof of the administration’s good intentions, Bryan negotiated with Colombia over the secession of Panama in 1903 and the alleged American part in the “revolution” that led to Panama’s cession of the Canal Zone. After some haggling, a treaty emerged that included a $25 million indemnity to Colombia and a statement by the United States of “sincere regret” over past incidents. That statement infuriated Roosevelt, who had long felt touchy about his role in the Panama affair. The ex-president denounced this treaty as “a crime against the United States, an attack on the honor of the United States, which, if true, would convict the United States, of infamy.” His friend Henry Cabot Lodge spearheaded opposition in the Senate, and together with fellow Republicans, he prevented the treaty from coming to a vote.20
Wilson wholeheartedly endorsed both the gesture toward Colombia and the idea of a new look in Latin American policy. In October 1913, he went to Mobile, Alabama, to speak to the Southern Commercial Congress, which was attended by Latin American diplomats. “The future, ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “is going to be very different for this hemisphere from the past.” Regretting past insults and depredations suffered by countries to the south, he admitted, “We must prove ourselves their friends and champions upon terms of equality and honor.” He called for solidarity in the hemisphere, based upon rising above material interests, and he pledged that the United States would “never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest.” He was promising to follow the same policies at home and abroad, and he linked his vision for the hemisphere to his New Freedom program: “I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty. But we shall not be poor if we love liberty, because the nation that loves liberty truly sets every man free to do his best and be his best.”21
This vision soon bore fruit in the project for a Pan-American pact. Originally the brainchild of a Democratic peace activist, Representative James L. Slayden of Texas, the project came to Wilson’s attention through Colonel House, who suggested at the end of 1914 that such a pact could serve as a model for a broader plan to enforce world peace. House noted that the idea excited Wilson, who proceeded to type a draft for a pact that covered four points: a “solemn covenant” of mutual guarantee “of undisturbed and undisputed territorial integrity and of complete political independence under republican forms of government;” arbitration of current disputes by three-nation panels; exclusive government manufacture and control of armaments; and, in the case of future disputes not affecting “honour, independence, or vital interests,” a one-year delay together with investigation and arbitration. Negotiations later foundered on opposition from Chile, which had long-standing border disputes, and fears by other Latin American nations of United States domination and aggression. Although nothing came of the Pan-American pact, its provisions contained language and ideas that Wilson would use in the Covenant of the League of Nations, and it pointed the way for Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy in the 1930s and hemispheric security pacts at the outset of World War II.22
The vision of hemispheric solidarity and a Pan-American pact presented the benign fac
e of Wilson’s Latin American policy. That policy also had less attractive features. In Central America and the Caribbean, the president showed few, if any, qualms about intervention. Nor, surprisingly, did his secretary of state. As the nation’s leading opponent of imperialism since 1898 and a persistent critic of Republican incursions in that region, Bryan could and should have acted—as he did in Mexico—as a brake on intervention, but he did not. In fact, during his two years at the head of his department, he showed equal or greater relish than his chief for going forcibly into countries there.
The issue of intervention first arose in Nicaragua. The Taft administration had sent marines there to quell chronic unrest, but matters remained unresolved when Wilson came into office. Bryan quickly decided to continue the previous policy, explaining to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the country would otherwise fall into chaos. He also asserted, “Those Latin republics are our political children, so to speak.” Bryan negotiated a treaty that included the right to intervene, a provision that was later withdrawn in the face of Senate opposition. Eventually, under strong prodding from the United States—which included sending in more marines and posting warships off its coasts—Nicaragua settled into a brief interlude of stability. But the whole business stirred resentment in the other Central American countries and stymied efforts to build better relations.23
The Nicaraguan intervention was smaller and shorter lived than other similar moves in the Caribbean. Two countries on the island of Hispaniola, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, witnessed the administration’s largest and longest-lasting actions in the Western Hemisphere. The United States had occupied the Dominican Republic for four years under Roosevelt and intervened again briefly under Taft. Wilson faced a confusing situation there, which he and Bryan spent months trying to figure out. Bryan’s rewarding “deserving Democrats” with diplomatic posts hurt most in that nation because American diplomats provided both inadequate information and poor representation. In July 1914, the president laid down what came to be called the Wilson plan for the Dominican Republic. It called for an immediate cease-fire between warring groups and the formation of a provisional government with free elections under American supervision. At first, the plan seemed to work, but fighting soon resumed. In May 1916, the United States mounted military operations that escalated into a full-fledged occupation and protectorate that would last until 1924. These actions could not have gone forward without the president’s approval, but Wilson was not much involved in them.24
The administration found itself simultaneously entangled in neighboring Haiti, where total anarchy appeared imminent. After some hesitation, Bryan proposed, and Wilson approved, an American takeover of Haitian customhouses at the middle of 1914. This limited intervention did not solve the problem. Wilson then proposed American-supervised elections, but local complications prevented them. When fresh violence erupted in July 1915, claiming American lives, the president’s patience ran out. “I suppose there is nothing for it but to take the bull by the horns and restore order,” he said privately.25 This decision set in motion steps toward an even more thoroughgoing military occupation and even longer control than in the Dominican Republic. American marines would not leave, and Haiti would not regain full sovereignty, until 1934.
These incursions into Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti formed the high-water mark of United States intervention in the Caribbean. Why did the nation reach this point under the professed idealist Woodrow Wilson, aided and abetted by the arch anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan? At the time, socialists and some progressives denounced these moves as imperialistic and explained them as the workings of the same nefarious forces that Wilson himself had feared in Mexico—the influence of big business and finance. Later critics would deride him as a woolly-headed idealist and starchy moralist, with the leading historian of the Wilson administration dubbing these moves “missionary diplomacy” and maintaining that they sprang from a religious-based mania to spread democracy abroad—a mania that impelled the president to try to foist American-style institutions on other nations.26
Both of those lines of criticism miss the mark in explaining Wilson’s interventionism in Latin America. This president, who deeply and sometimes unfairly suspected “material interests,” was not listening to them and was not about to do their bidding. Likewise, his idealism was like his religious faith, deep-seated and ever-present but also largely taken for granted. Particular circumstances counted more than grand designs in his decisions to go into Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. What later critics would fault Wilson for slighting—security considerations—weighed heavily in his mind. Protecting approaches and territory adjacent to the soon-to-be-opened Panama Canal appeared to leave few options other than trying to impose stability in the region. Those considerations gained added gravity after the outbreak of the war in Europe in August 1914, an event that largely explained why he paid so little heed to the later phases of operations in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In addition, Veracruz did not seem to have totally quashed his interventionist urge. At bottom, Wilson and Bryan shared with the vast majority of their countrymen a callousness toward and an ignorance of their neighbors to the south, but those flaws were not products of their religiosity and idealism.
In other parts of the world, such as Asia, the president and the secretary of state behaved with more restraint and consistency. Despite their early enthusiasm for the semblance of democracy in China and their disavowal of “dollar diplomacy” there, Wilson and Bryan largely followed their Republican predecessors in not seriously challenging Japanese influence. They did break with the past in the Philippines. In every election since 1900, Democratic party platforms had pledged Philippine independence. Wilson had doubts about that pledge in 1912, but he chose not to buck the party. Once in office, he backed away from setting a deadline for getting out, but he did stick by the promise to grant autonomy and eventual independence. In October 1913, he announced that Filipinos would immediately have a majority in the appointive upper house of their legislature as well as in the elective lower house, an action that gave them a much larger share in their government.
The New Freedom legislation crowded the Philippines off the legislative agenda until October 1914, when the House overwhelmingly passed a measure to grant independence, but Republicans blocked Senate approval during the short session after the 1914 elections. Congress took up another measure in 1916, but Republicans, who had increased their numbers in the 1914 elections, stood virtually unanimous in opposing any deadline for independence. Catholic interests, fearing confiscation of church property under an independent Philippine government, persuaded thirty Irish American Democrats to join the Republicans in blocking any deadline. Stripped of a date for independence, the measure won final passage in both houses at the end of August 1916. Satisfied with the outcome, Wilson declared that it was “high time that we did this act of justice which we have now done.” This law—known as the Jones Act, after the chairman of the House Insular Affairs Committee—marked one of the biggest milestones on the road to Philippine independence.27
Europe offered an example of restraint and consistency where Wilson did choose to buck his party. When he took office, he found a diplomatic dispute simmering over tolls to be levied when the Panama Canal opened. In 1912, Congress had passed, and Taft had signed, a law that exempted from all tolls American vessels engaged in shipping between American ports, and authorized lower tolls for all American ships. The British, who had the world’s largest merchant fleet, had immediately protested, maintaining that this law violated the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of 1901, under which they had ceded to the United States exclusive rights to maintain and fortify a canal in return for equal treatment of ships of all nations. Wilson and the Democrats had endorsed the tolls exemption during the campaign, but the president quickly repented. Soon after taking office, he told the British ambassador, his old acquaintance James Bryce, that he planned to take up the matter after the tariff was out of t
he way. He did not mention the tolls issue in his State of the Union speech in December 1913, but shortly afterward he told Ambassador Page that he would ask Congress to repeal the exemption, “and I am not without hope that I can accomplish both at this session.”28
In February 1914, he publicly called the tolls exemption “a very mistaken policy” that was “economically unjust,” benefited “only a monopoly,” and violated the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. The situation grew tense when House Democratic leader Underwood announced that he would oppose repeal as a breach of the party’s campaign pledge. The president responded by going to the Capitol on March 5 to speak to a joint session of Congress. “No communication I have addressed to Congress carried with it graver or more far-reaching implications to the interest of the country,” he declared, and he asked for repeal “in support of the foreign policy of the administration. I shall not know how to deal with other matters of even greater delicacy and nearer consequences if you do not grant it to me in ungrudging measure.” Making this an issue of loyalty was a risky strategy, which seemed to backfire when Speaker Clark joined Underwood in opposing him. Wilson refused to compromise and instructed Burleson to use patronage to bring wavering Democrats into line. The strategy worked. On March 31, the House approved a repeal bill, 247 to 162, with only Clark, Underwood, and some big-city Irish American Democrats breaking ranks. The Senate followed suit on June 11, approving the measure by a vote of 50 to 35.29
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