Richard A. Silocka
John Hay, McKinley’s Secretary of State, followed up the new American gains in the Pacific by active intervention in Chinese affairs. In 1899, in diplomatic notes to Russia, England, and Germany, he enunciated an “Open Door’ policy to be followed by Western powers in their relations with the Chinese empire. Each of the three recipients of the notes already had territorial concessions and special trading rights in China. By these means they discriminated against other foreign traders and ignored the Chinese customs laws. The Chinese government was weak and corrupt and could not prevent the foreign powers from acting as they wished. In his note Hay declared that European powers active in China should support the Chinese tariff collectors. This policy would be of advantage to the United States because the Chinese had already granted concessions on duties to American imports. The other powers accepted Hay’s position in principle, especially since it did not involve any restriction on their acquisition of territory in China. In 1900 a rebellion, known as the Boxer Rebellion, broke out against foreign control of China. The United States participated with the other European powers and Japan in suppressing it and in forcing the payment of an indemnity by the Chinese government. The Americans agreed, however, that their share of the indemnity should be used to promote Chinese education.
In 1901 President McKinley was assassinated. Theodore Roosevelt became President and under him the imperial movement quickened. In 1904-05, Japan and Russia fought a war in which Japan was speedily victorious. Afraid that Japan might move to exclude the United States from the China Sea trade, Roosevelt accepted a Japanese request to mediate between the belligerents. Thus the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War was concluded by negotiators meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Treaty of Portsmouth also heralded the expansion of Japanese power in the Pacific. This ominous development induced Roosevelt to send the American navy on a “training cruise” around the world, as an exhibition of power. Nevertheless, the President arranged an agreement in 1908 in which Japan and the United States agreed to uphold the Open Door principle in China and to recognize the integrity of China and each other’s interests in the Pacific .
At home, Roosevelt moved quickly to consolidate United States control of the Caribbean and to construct a canal through the Isthmus of Panama. In 1901 Secretary of State John Hay turned to good use the growing willingness of Britain to cooperate with the United States by concluding a treaty by which Britain accepted the American plan to build a canal under United States authority. The route selected by the United States lay through the province of Panama, part of the Republic of Columbia.
Hay negotiated a treaty with Columbia by which that country granted to the United States a strip of land across the isthmus in return for ten million dollars and an annual payment of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The Colombian Senate, however, refused to ratify the treaty. Rather than be held up by this obstruction, Roosevelt gave clandestine support to several groups who wished to foment a rebellion in Panama and to detach that province from Colombia. On November 3, 1903, the U.S.S.
Nashville
anchored off Panama and on the following day a “spontaneous” rebellion began. Other American ships joined the
Nashville
and prevented Colombia from suppressing the revolt. On November 6 the State Department recognized the rebel government and within a week Roosevelt received the chief organizer of the revolt as Ambassador of the new Republic of Panama. At once a treaty was arranged by which Panama granted the United States a permanent zone across the isthmus in return for the ten million dollars and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars annuity proposed to Colombia. In later years Roosevelt reminisced, “If I had followed traditional conservative methods, I should have submitted a dignified state paper of probably two hundred pages to the Congress and the debate would be going on yet, but I took the Canal Zone and then left Congress—not to debate the canal, but to debate me, and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.”
The Panama Canal, completed in 1914 after heroic engineering efforts, added greatly to the naval capability of the United States, and stimulated the economy of the entire West Coast. But the method of its acquisition strained relations between the United States and Latin America for a long period of time. Although the United States made a compensation payment of twenty-five million dollars to Colombia in 1921, the payment did little to soothe outraged Latin American opinion. Roosevelt’s motto was that in diplomacy one should “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
In 1905, asserting the right of the United States to intervene in the affairs of the Dominican Republic, Roosevelt proclaimed a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. When the Latin republic defaulted in its foreign debt payments Roosevelt intervened in order to prevent a European creditor nation from employing forcible means of collecting. In cases of “chronic wrong-doing” by an American nation, said Roosevelt, the United States must itself act as policeman, since by the Monroe Doctrine it denied to European nations the right of intervention in the Americas. Following this doctrine under Roosevelt and the next two Presidents, Taft and Wilson, the United States intervened with her armed forces in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and other nations. Indeed, between 1900 and 1930, most of the Caribbean republics were little more than American protectorates. The period from 1909 to 1913 saw a particularly emphatic phase of imperialism, sometimes described by the term “dollar diplomacy.” Philander Knox, President Taft’s Secretary of State, induced American banking houses to extend their investments in Latin America and then to act as virtual government agencies. President Wilson professed aversion to “big stick” methods, but such procedures continued to be used after he became President in 1913. In Mexico, where American investment in railways, oil wells, mines, and cattle had reached the impressive figure of over a billion dollars by 1913, Wilson intervened both indirectly and directly in support of the opponents of the “strong man” Huerta, who was a threat to the stability required by United States investors. While Wilson insisted that his motives were liberal, the argument failed to impress Latin Americans.
By the time World War I broke out in Europe, the United States had become a major world power. Its imperial interests reached across the Americas and to the Orient. Americans had participated in the important European conferences at the Hague (1899) and Algeciras (1906). While many Americans were increasingly critical of imperialism and of any diplomatic connection with European powers, the involvement of the United States in world trade and politics was to make it more and more difficult for America to remain aloof from world affairs.