American World Policies Part 2

Even in our churches we made the same unconscious boast. On Sunday, October 4, 1914, at the request of the President of the United States, millions of Americans went down on their knees, and prayed G.o.d no longer to scourge the peoples of Europe. It was a sincere prayer, evoked by real compa.s.sion. Yet nothing could more clearly have revealed our moral detachment, our obliviousness to the fact that the pa.s.sions which brought forth this war were human, not European pa.s.sions. We, the virtuous, interceded for the vicious; our prayer was "deliver them from evil." With malice toward none, with charity towards all, envying no nation its treasures, content to enjoy in peace what G.o.d had given us, America folded its hands in prayer.

To a sceptical European, accustomed to the cant of international protestations, this boasted peacefulness of ours seems suspicious.

"Have you," he might ask, "always been peaceful? Did you not fight England, Mexico and Spain? Have you not taken advantage of your neighbours' necessities?" Such a European might not regard {34} Americans as a nation, divinely appointed to bring peace to a world rent by war. He might not acknowledge that we are more law-abiding than other peoples, freer from race hatreds, gentler towards the unfortunates of our own race. He might point to our lynchings and riots; to our unpunished murders of Chinese, Italians and Mexicans; to the system of repression, by which the Southern whites terrorized the freedmen after the Civil War. If Europe did not solve the Balkan problem in peace, did Americans end slavery without resort to arms?

We may not like these imputations, but it would be hard to deny that in certain national crises we have not been impossibly virtuous. We have not always subordinated our national interests to the ideal of setting a righteous example. What we wanted and could get we got, whether it was Florida, Texas, California or Panama. We were not above the twisting or even the breaking of a treaty, we did not discourage filibustering expeditions too rigorously, and we were never, never meek. Thus in 1818, to take a single example, we addressed to Spain a polite communication in which we a.s.serted that "the United States can as little compound with impotence as with perfidy, and that Spain must immediately make her election, either to place (an adequate) force in Florida or cede to the United States a province, of which she retains nothing but the nominal possession." Many of our communications to Mexico, Chile, Spain, and even England were equally arrogant.

The truth is that our peace has been a peace of circ.u.mstances, due to a favouring geographical and economic situation. Our peacefulness came down to us like our rivers, farms and cities, a heritage of exceptional conditions. We were inaccessible to European armies. We were supreme on a fertile, spa.r.s.ely settled continent. We could afford peace. Our resources were immensely great and if {35} we did not reach out for more, it was because we already had as much as we could handle. What we did need we could take from weak peoples, and a nation which fights weak peoples need not be martial, just as a man who robs orphans need not be a thug.

It might have been different. Had our Westward progress been opposed by millions of Indians, had France been able to resist our march beyond the Appalachians, or Mexico stood like a disciplined Germany between us and the Westward Ocean, we should have developed a military civilisation. As our growing population pressed upon our narrow frontiers, we should have had our war scares, our border conflicts, our national hatreds, our huge standing army, and the whole paraphernalia of militarism.

Still another element, besides our geographical isolation and our economic self-sufficiency, contributed to our intactness and security and permitted us to indulge in the luxury of pacifism. Europe protected us from Europe. We were one and the European Powers many.

So delicate was the balance that the European nations could not hazard a really serious trans-Atlantic venture. They had little to gain and much to lose by fighting us, as we had nothing to gain by fighting them. Our interest in such European affairs as the independence of Greece, Hungary and Poland was purely sentimental. Towards Europe we were peaceful as we were peaceful towards Mars. True, our safe orators delighted in twisting the lion's tail and upbraiding the Czar of all the Russias. During the eighty-three years between 1815 and 1898, however, we were never at war with a European nation.

It was not that we loved Europe too well. England we detested and hardly a decade pa.s.sed without some acrid boundary dispute. We thought her arrogant, greedy, supercilious, and she thought us arrogant, greedy and {36} coa.r.s.e. Millions of Irish immigrants intensified this animosity and our national vanity did the rest. But though we hated England she was too formidable to be attacked. Therefore we bluffed and she bluffed, and in the end we compromised.

With other countries it was still easier to keep at peace. Prussia, Austria and the smaller German states were too distant to affect our interests. For Russia we had a vague attachment, and except on one occasion, she never threatened our ambitions. With France we were on good terms except during our Civil War. We disliked Spain and despised her, but events prevented our going to war with her.

It was because it paid that we kept at peace; any other policy would have been wasteful, even suicidal. Our future depended upon our ability to keep out of war. A spa.r.s.e population on the edge of a vast continent, our hope of national success lay in an isolation, which would give us strength for future struggles. Our mission was to settle the empty lands to the West before other nations could pre-empt them.

To embroil ourselves with strong powers was to court disaster, while even to interest ourselves in European politics would divert our mind from our own imperative task.

Our first American foreign policy, therefore was disentanglement. We often speak as though America pa.s.sively abstained from entering European politics. We were, however, already a part of the unsteady balance of power, and warring France and England sought our aid, much as the two coalitions might seek the aid of a Bulgaria, not loving her but needing her help. It was a bold and above all a positive policy that Washington established when he broke the French treaty and declared our neutrality. Though denounced as dishonourable, this policy was {37} essential to our welfare and peace, for the country was more dangerously divided in 1793 than in 1916.

How intimately our peace has depended upon our economic development is revealed by the early failure of this policy of disentanglement. Prior to 1812 our immediate economic interests overhung our territory and transcended our sovereignty. All Europe being at war, we were the neutral carriers of the world. Our ships brought merchandise to France from her colonies and allies, and goods from the West Indies and South America to all parts of Europe. In the decade ending 1801 our foreign trade, which was dependent upon the indulgence of Europe, more than quadrupled. The profits on our carrying trade were immense. Our shipbuilding industry increased, and not only were orders filled for our own foreign trade but many ships were manufactured for export. The prices of agricultural products almost doubled and our meat, flour, cotton and wool found a ready market in Europe. Our prosperity depended upon this newly created foreign trade. Sail-makers, ship-builders, draymen, farmers, merchants were dependent upon a trade which menaced the commercial supremacy of Great Britain and upon which even France looked with jealous apprehension.

It was this conflict of our interests with those of a stronger nation that brought on the bitter controversies with Great Britain, and resulted in the tedious war of 1812. We were more dependent upon Europe than Europe upon us, as was shown by the fiasco of our Embargo policy. England, determined to kill our commerce, would have fought many years to accomplish this purpose. But it did not prove necessary.

Our commercial progress, that had been merely an incident in a European war, lessened after the peace. For us this was fortunate. Our future lay in our own continent, and not on the high sea where as {38} a relatively weak nation, we should have been forced to compete with the world and war continually with England.

To-day, one hundred years later we are still pacific, because of the direction taken by our economic development since 1815. While we developed agriculture, constructed turnpikes, ca.n.a.ls and railroads, manufactured for the home market, and filled up the country from the Appalachians to the Pacific, our American-borne commerce and our shipbuilding declined; by 1846, our American tonnage in foreign trade was less than in 1810. But the profits of this carrying trade were no longer necessary, since in exchange for our imports from Europe we could now export cotton. We were no longer compet.i.tors with Europe, but had become contributors to European prosperity. Prior to 1815 England looked upon us as a commercial rival; after 1815 we became the unconscious economic allies of all the industrial nations.

The extent to which our economic system had become complementary to the European economic system is ill.u.s.trated by a study of the statistics of our foreign commerce. Of our exports one-half was raw cotton, and upon a steady supply of this fibre a great European industry depended.

Later we shipped huge quant.i.ties of food which was also needed by the manufacturers across the sea. As our cotton area extended, as our wheat and meat exports increased, European, and especially British, industry profited. At the same time, despite our high tariffs we furnished an increasing market for wares manufactured in Europe, while our own manufactures did not largely compete in the world markets.

Moreover the rapid development of our internal resources furnished lucrative investment opportunities to European capital. A source of raw material, a market for manufactured products, a field for profitable investment, {39} America was Europe's back-yard, an economic colony, though politically independent.

In the midst of this almost colonial development, there occurred one startling interlude. About 1840 we developed a new type of sailing vessel, the American clipper ship. Soon we had control of the China trade and by 1861 our shipping (including domestic trade and the fisheries) about equalled that of Great Britain. After the Civil War, however, our chance of competing with Great Britain either in ship-building or carrying disappeared. The iron steamship had arrived, and, in the manufacture of such vessels, we were no match for the English. Even without the Civil War we should have been beaten; the Southern privateers, outfitted in English ports, merely hastened an inevitable decay. We were not yet to enter upon a compet.i.tion with England for commercial supremacy.

There being thus no economic basis for war our outstanding questions with European nations, and with England especially, were peacefully settled. The Canadian fisheries and the Maine boundary dispute gave rise to much bitter feeling but were not worth a war. Even the Monroe Doctrine did not bring on a clash. Though Great Britain hated its a.s.sumptions she was content with its practical workings. What the United States gained was immunity from the settlement of Latin America by powerful military nations; what England gained was a profitable trade (denied her by Spain) together with opportunities for investing capital. The immediate force behind the Monroe Doctrine was the self-interest and naval power of a nation, which did not recognise the doctrine.

Our westward expansion, which obliterated boundaries and overran the possessions of other powers, also failed to bring war with Europe.

Doubtless this expansion was not {40} entirely welcome to France, England and Spain. But just as Napoleon, though dreaming of a French Empire on our western border, had been compelled to sell us Louisiana to prevent its falling into British hands, so later England resigned herself to our almost instinctive growth. It was believed in the forties that England not only wished to prevent our acquiring California but desired the territory for herself, and it was known that her interests in Oregon were in the sharpest conflict with American claims. England would also have preferred that Texas remain politically independent of the United States and commercially dependent upon herself. Fortunately for us, however, an aggressive colonial policy, such as that which during the last forty years has part.i.tioned Africa, was not yet popular in Europe. England was thinking in terms of free trade and commercial expansion, of a world rather than a colonial market. At bottom, moreover, this American expansion was to the relative advantage of Europe. When Spain was cajoled and worried into selling Florida; when Texas, and later California, Arizona and New Mexico were taken from a nation too weak almost to feel resentment, the result was a better use of the territory and a greater production of the things which Europe needed. If Europe was not to control these regions, it was at least better for her to have them pa.s.s to us rather than remain with Mexico. So long as we held politically aloof, sold Europe cotton and wheat, bought from her manufactured products and gave her the chance to invest in our railroads, so long as we did not compete on the sea or in the world markets, Europe, though she envied us our easy expansion, had no interest in opposing it by war. England would possibly have fought us had we taken Nicaragua and almost certainly had we taken Canada, but she was less concerned about the fate of Mexico, the chief victim of our expansion.

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This complementary relation of ours with European nations was as useful to us as to them. Besides furnishing us with necessary capital Europe sent us immigrants, who made our march across the Continent rapid and irresistible. In the end this immigrant population contributed to our peaceful att.i.tude. As the number of our alien stocks increased, the desirability of going to war with any European nation diminished. To get the immigrant's vote, we spoke highly, and in the end almost thought highly, of the nations from which they had come. By admitting the children of Europe we had given hostages to peace.

In the main, however, we paid no attention to Europe. We forgot about her. Lost in contemplation of our own limitless future, we turned our eyes westward towards our ever receding frontier. In foreign, as in home relations, we developed a frontier mind, and even to-day, long after our last frontier has been reached, we are still thinking of Europe, as of so many of our internal problems, in terms of this great colonising adventure. The individualist, who pushed his way across the continent, left on America the impress of a simple philosophy, a belief that there was a chance for all, that it was better to work than to fight, that arbitration and the splitting of the difference were the best policy. To the average American, with his frontier mind, wars seemed unnecessary, and all the cla.s.s distinctions, inseparable from militarism, a mere frippery. Wars, he held, are for the crowded old peoples of Europe, with their dynastic superst.i.tions, their cheating diplomacy, their ancient rancours, their millions of paupered subjects, condemned to a life of subordination. Wars are not for the free and equal Americans who live in the wide s.p.a.ces of a continent and, having no neighbours, hate no man and fear no man.

It is out of this frontier mind that we have evolved our {42} present American notion of war and foreign policy. Peace is common sense; war, foolishness, a superst.i.tion like the belief in Kings, Emperors and Potentates, a calamity caused by the refusal of the petty European nations to join into one great United States. For it must be remembered that Americans, whatever their sentimental attachments, are really more contemptuous than are Germans of little nations that insist upon surviving. We ridicule the European customs barriers, which the express train strikes every few hours, and a.s.sociate national greatness with territorial size. Even Great Britain, France, Germany and Austria are ignorantly regarded as "little nations," which would be all the better for a wholesome amalgamation. The frontier mind believes stubbornly that short of such a union, these "little" peoples should develop their own resources in peace. In other words, our att.i.tude towards Europe, which is a result of our elbow room and our economic self-sufficiency, is vaguely missionary, with not the slightest tinge of hypocrisy. We have no concern with Europe and no duty to interfere, beyond expressing our belief in our own superior inst.i.tutions and the hope that Europe will learn by our example.

The development of our manufacturing industries, until recently at least, did not alter these views concerning our proper att.i.tude to Europe. The new industries, chiefly designed for a home market, made on the whole for peace. Nor did we need a foreign outlet for capital.

No one wished to go to war for the dubious privilege of investing in Peru or China when our own iron mills, cotton factories and railroads were clamouring for capital, to say nothing of our farmers in Oklahoma and the Dakotas.

Psychologically, also, this self-poised industrialism, this domestic stay-at-home business of ours, which prevailed until a few decades ago, worked powerfully for peace. {43} We became a highly individualistic manufacturing nation, composed of millions of self-seeking, money-making men. As "business men" we hated wars as we hated strikes and whatever else "interfered with business." Our ideal was a strenuous life of acquisition, in which dollars were added to dollars, and the prosperity of all depended upon the bank account of each. Wars were like earthquakes and other interruptions of the ordained process of acc.u.mulation; you could no more win a war than you could win an earthquake. America's manifest destiny was to multiply and increase.

We were to mind our own business and live in peace with neighbours, whom we did not know and rather despised. Since everything worth exploiting was in our own country, since Europe left us alone and had nothing that we were willing to fight for, we were free to ignore all foreign relations.

The diplomacy which accompanied and aided this development, though not heroic, was at least successful. It enabled us to grow strong and hold strong enemies away. Not always consistent, not always able, not always honest, our diplomacy maintained a certain unity, kept us aloof from European quarrels, guarded us from threatened intervention during the Civil War crisis, warned Europe against the conquest of Latin America, and above all--permitted us to grow. From 1815 to 1898 our population increased from eight to seventy-two millions, while that of the United Kingdom increased only from some twenty to forty-one millions and that of France from twenty-nine to thirty-nine millions.

Our wealth increased at a more rapid rate than that of any other nation.

Small wonder that in the last decades of this period our diplomacy sank to the lowest level of incapacity. Having grown strong without Europe's aid or hindrance, having reached that pleasant degree of independence in which {44} diplomacy seemed a mere international formality, we came to believe that the best diplomacy was none at all.

We did not require in our amba.s.sadors knowledge or astuteness; any fool would do. Our diplomats were often despised, but since we were not dependent upon Europe's favour, it did not matter. Economic forces, stronger than the diplomats of all the world, were making for peace between America and Europe.

But even while we were sending political adventurers to some of the great capitals of Europe, a change was impending. All at once the United States found itself at war with a European power, and, a few months later, in surprised, not to say embarra.s.sed, possession of tropical Asiatic Islands. Suddenly we discovered that we were feared and disliked; that there were points of controversy between us and various European countries; that Europe somehow did not regard the Monroe Doctrine as a divine dispensation, which it would be impious to oppose. We heard talk of international compet.i.tion, World Power, "the American Menace." Beneath the surface there appeared indications that our long mutuality of economic interest with Europe was no longer complete. The easy instinctive peace which had enabled us to attain our ends without considering Europe seemed about to end.

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CHAPTER IV

AN UNRIPE IMPERIALISM

It was in the year 1898 that the United States made its earliest plunge into imperialism. Then for the first time we secured "dominions beyond the sea"; dominions too thickly populated to be adapted for purposes of colonisation. By our earlier conquests and purchases (Louisiana, Florida, Texas, California, New Mexico), we had secured relatively empty territories which a flow of emigrants from our Eastern States could rapidly Americanise. But in Porto Rico, the Philippines and Hawaii, there was neither prospect nor intention of colonising. The impulse that led to their taking was the desire to possess their wealth, to rule and "civilise" them, and above all not "to haul down the flag." It was an impulse not very different from that which led to the European part.i.tion of Africa.[1]

The change in our policy was startling. We had seemed, after the Civil War, to have reached a stage of satiety, to be through with expansion.

Henceforth the ocean was to be our boundary; we were not, like the slave-owners before the war, to scheme for new lands in Central {46} America and the Caribbean. When in 1867 Russia offered us a territory almost three times as large as Germany for a sum about equal to the value of the Equitable Building, we accepted only to oblige Russia and because we believed that we were in honour bound to buy. We refused to purchase St. Thomas and St. Johns, although Denmark offered to sell cheap, and we declined to annex San Domingo or to entertain Sweden's proposal to purchase her West Indian possessions. Again in 1893, instead of annexing Hawaii, we vainly sought to bolster up the sovereignty of a native Queen. Then suddenly Porto Rico, the Philippines and Guam were annexed; Hawaii was incorporated and Samoa was divided up with Germany.

In part this change in foreign policy was due to military considerations. The possession of Hawaii, Panama and Guantanamo in Cuba was obviously necessary for the defence of our coasts. Just as the Monroe Doctrine was intended to protect us from the approach of great military powers, so these new acquisitions were desired to pre-empt near-lying bases, from which, in enemy possession fleets might a.s.sail our trade or cut off our communications.[2]

Such strategic considerations, however, do not explain the whole of our new imperialistic policy. Economic motives played their part. We changed our foreign policy because at the same time we were undergoing a commercial and industrial revolution.

As a result of this industrial change our merchants had begun to think in terms of foreign markets and our financiers in terms of foreign investments. We had pa.s.sed {47} through the stage in which our industrial life was completely self-sufficing. We were becoming a manufacturing nation, requiring markets for the disposal of surplus products. We were, it appeared, being drawn into a great international compet.i.tion, in which markets in China, South America and backward countries were the prizes. Simultaneously our foreign commerce had changed. Our growing population had made increasing demands upon our food products, leaving less to be exported, and at the same time our exports of manufactures had increased. In 1880 we exported manufactures (ready for consumption) to the value of ninety-three millions of dollars; in 1898 to the value of two hundred and twenty-three millions.

Other industrial factors tended also to bring about a change in our national ideals. We were beginning to believe in the economic efficiency of trust organisation, and our industry, conducted on a larger scale, was being increasingly concentrated. A new cla.s.s was in financial control of our great industries. The trust magnate, the new conductor of vast industrial enterprises, was looking forward toward a strong unified banking control over industries and a definite expansion of American trade in foreign countries. American capitalists were beginning to believe that their economic needs were the same as those of the European capitalists, who were enticing their nations into imperialism.

Psychologically, also, we were ripe for any imperialistic venture, for we enormously exaggerated the progress we had made towards industrialisation, and were thinking in terms of Europe. We suddenly believed that we too were over-filled with capital and compelled to find an outlet for investments and trade. Innumerable editorials appeared, presenting the arguments for imperialism that had been {48} urged ad nauseam in Europe. We could not resist, it was argued, the ubiquitous economic tendency toward expansion. In all countries, including America, capital was to become congested. An over-saving of capital, invested in manufacturing plants, produced far in excess of the possible consumption of the people. We had reached a stage of chronic over-production, in which increased saving and increased investment of capital would permanently outstrip consumption.

Everywhere wealth was being heaped up; the savings-banks overflowed; the rate of interest fell and capital sought desperately for new investments. The capitalist system must either expand or burst.

Certain superficial developments in the United States formed the groundwork of these gloomy prophecies. We had just pa.s.sed through a commercial depression, during which prices and interest rates fell and great numbers of workers were left unemployed. These facts were exploited by political leaders and industrial magnates, who thought in terms of the subordination of American foreign policy to the needs of big business. It is not surprising therefore that they became infected with the new imperialism, which in Europe had been growing steadily for over fifteen years, and that they came to the conclusion that America could not hold hands off while the markets and investment fields of the world were divided up among her rivals.

"The United States," wrote Charles A. Conant, one of the intellectual leaders of this movement (in 1898), "cannot afford to adhere to a policy of isolation while other nations are reaching out for the command of new markets. The United States are still large users of foreign capital, but American investors are not willing to see the return upon their investments reduced to the European level. Interest rates have greatly declined here within the last {49} five years. New markets and new opportunities for investment must be found if surplus capital is to be profitably employed."

Like so many of the pamphleteers of 1898, Mr. Conant was convinced that imperialism offered the only cure "for the enormous congestion of capital." No civilised state, he contended, would accept the doctrine that saving should be abandoned. And while human desires were expansible, he doubted whether the demand for goods could possibly increase with sufficient rapidity to absorb the new productive capacities of the nation. "There has never been a time," he writes, "when the proportion of capital to be absorbed has been so great in proportion to possible new demands. Means for building more bicycle factories than are needed, and for laying more electric railways than are able to pay dividends, have been taken out of current savings within the last few years, without producing any marked effect upon their amount and without doing more, at the most, than to stay the downward course of the rate of interest."

It therefore follows conclusively that the American conquest of markets and fields for investment must go on. The method of such a conquest is of little importance. "In pointing out," he says, "the necessity that the United States shall enter upon a broad national policy, it need not be determined in just what manner that policy shall be worked out.

Whether the United States shall actually acquire territorial possessions, shall set up captain generalships and garrisons, whether they shall adopt the middle ground of protecting sovereignties nominally independent, or whether they shall content themselves with naval stations and diplomatic representations as the basis for a.s.serting their rights to the free commerce of the East, is a matter of detail."

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I have quoted Mr. Conant at length because he is so largely typical of the state of mind of the American plutocracy in the year 1898. It would have been easily possible, however, to have presented any amount of confirmatory material of exactly the same nature. An article by W.