Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  The United States was already trying to counter rising Japanese influence in the Far East, which led to complications with Britain. The British, in conformity with their customary policy of organizing and operating a balance of power, had been something of a sponsor of Japan, for which country it had (very profitably) built a substantial navy, until the Japanese felt able to design and build their own ships. The British had been in the habit of looking on Russia as a potential intruder on their vast Indian empire, and were commercial rivals of the United States in the Far East, so the arrival of Japan as a major indigenous power with which Britain had no natural rivalry was a welcome development. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance resulted, and was a demonstration of the astuteness of the British Foreign Office, as Britain was the first of the Great Powers to recognize the geostrategic potential of Japan.

  The rise of Germany, and its abrupt and relentless pursuit of a naval construction competition that constituted the greatest and most sustained threat to British naval supremacy since the Spanish Armada three centuries before, changed that, and all other British strategic considerations. Russia had allied itself with France, in response to Austria-Hungary’s effort to bar Russian advances in the southern Slavic nations that tentatively emerged after the forcible retirement of the Turks, and Britain had allied itself to France to contain the Germans. Since the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and loosely, Italy) were so closely balanced, and as has been evident in other matters, the British opened a long campaign of appeasement of the United States, presciently based on the possibility that the great and soaring weight of America could be necessary to repulse Germany in the end; British strategic thinking and practice were reconfigured to meet the direst threat. The patronage of Japan would have to yield to truckling to the Americans and the new intimacy with Russia, warming to its highest point since both powers were in the death grips of war with Napoleon a century before.

  When the Anglo-Japanese Alliance came up for renewal in July 1911, the British inserted the clause that neither party would be bound to engage in war with a third party with which it had a general arbitration agreement. With commendable alacrity, Knox negotiated, in less than a month, general arbitration agreements with Britain and France, who welcomed any enhanced cordiality with America and were not going to be drawn into war with it in any conceivable circumstances. The correlation of forces had changed unrecognizably since the agonies of Jefferson and Madison a century before over impressments of American sailors and seizure of American ships and the imposition of blockades on the United States by both Britain and France (Chapters 2, 3, and 4). These agreements were ratified by the Senate in March 1912, after Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s, agitated for exclusion of certain Oriental sensibilities and a reservation to allow for the now immensely broad official interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine that effectively gave the United States suzerainty over the entire hemisphere except Canada. Lodge added to this, in a resolution of August 1912, what became known as the Lodge Corollary, viewing with “grave concern” acquisition or occupation of strategically important areas, as defined by the U.S. Senate, anywhere in the Americas, by any entity the Senate judged to be inconveniently close to any government from outside the Americas. This was directed at the proposed Japanese acquisition of a large area with sea access in the Mexican province of Lower California, and the proposed acquisition was abandoned as a result. Trans-Pacific Japanese-American tensions had already begun, and would escalate sharply over the next three decades.

  In domestic affairs, Taft had a respectable reform record; he prosecuted twice as many anti-trust cases as Roosevelt had (90 to 44), and had a more aggressive attorney general in George Wickersham than the oligarchic fellow-traveler Philander Knox had been. Taft attacked Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company and James Buchanan Duke’s American Tobacco Company, and took another swing at Carnegie’s old United States Steel Corporation, alleging, in effect, that in the Panic of 1907 Roosevelt had been swindled by Morgan into allowing the acquisition of a distressed competitor by U.S. Steel. This was an insane political initiative by Taft, who did not enjoy a fraction of the public support of Roosevelt, though he did enjoy more support from the barons of the Republican Party, who had always been more comfortable with the Hayes-Garfield-Harrison-McKinley conservatives than with the populist, uncontrollable, and often brilliant Roosevelt. Early in his term, Taft supported the tariff increase in the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, and in a speech at Winona, Minnesota, on September 17, 1909, called it “the best bill that the Republican Party ever passed.” This was another ham-handed slap at Roosevelt, to whom Taft owed his elevation to the cabinet, and nomination and election to the presidency. Wisconsin’s reform Republican senator Robert M. La Follette became an anti-Taft, pro-Roosevelt insurgent and led the adoption of tariff reductions from 1911 to 1913, which Taft vetoed.

  Taft set up a Commission on Efficiency and Economy (in the federal government) and reduced federal spending by over $40 million in his first year in office. He proposed a disciplined budget procedure that was decades ahead of its time. Taft reverted to almost Cleveland-like resistance to some categories of patronage, and offended the Rooseveltians as a result. He also reviewed federal government expenses personally and meticulously, which saved money but also offended many claimants on his support. In the last year of his term, he submitted a detailed budget that was unprecedentedly comprehensive, but that the Senate, controlled by Democrats and inhabited by Republicans who were led by Rooseveltians like Lodge, ignored. His recommended methods were widely emulated in the more intelligently governed states, and led to the Budget Act of 1921, and subsequent reforms.

  Taft also allocated telephone, telegraph, cable, and wireless operations to the Interstate Commerce Commission (Mann Elkins Act); set up a postal savings bank (deemed to encourage savings in a risk-free place by making mail collection and bank deposits a one-stop shop); made the transportation across state lines of underage women for immoral purposes a federal felony via the Mann Act; and required the publication of campaign contributions to congressional candidates. These all gave a patina of reform to his regime, but he had blundered into needless quarrels with the mighty ego of Roosevelt, who returned from one of his adventurous overseas trips in June 1910 and announced in an address at Osawatomie, Kansas, on August 31, 1910, a “New Nationalism,” which included the view that private property was subject to the requirements of the public interest.

  The next bone of contention was that Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger disputed the legality of Roosevelt’s closing of the sale of some hydroelectric generation sites. Roosevelt’s director of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, publicly accused Ballinger of harming the conservation program in favor of private financial interest, and Taft fired him in January 1911. The Democrat-controlled Senate inquiry absolved Ballinger of wrongdoing but gave him a very rough ride, and he resigned in March 1911. The 1910 elections produced some noteworthy results, including the election of one of America’s foremost educators and political scientists, the first non-clerical president of Princeton University (1902–1910), Thomas Woodrow Wilson, as governor of New Jersey.

  8. THE TAFT-ROOSEVELT SCHISM AND THE 1912 ELECTION

  The Taft-Roosevelt split was now irreconcilable and revealed the weaknesses of both men, but not their strengths. Roosevelt was an irrational egotist who sought opportunities for fault-finding and offended sensibilities. Taft had never run for elective office before, had no political skills, was guilty of ingratitude to his benefactor, and had no idea how to avoid abrasions with him. In January 1911, the Progressive Republicans met in Washington and virtually withdrew from the Republican Party, demanding direct election of U.S. senators; choice of presidential candidates by primary and not boss-dominated conventions; a comprehensive system of referendum and midterm recall by plebiscite; and tighter laws against corrupt practices. The goal was acknowledged to be the nomination
of La Follette in place of Taft. This was not going to work, but it illustrated Taft’s incompetence at keeping a political coalition together. In December 1911, Roosevelt let it be known that he would seek the Republican nomination against Taft, and in February he confirmed that he was a candidate. He won primaries in six states, and won the conventions in four others. The governing party was severely divided between Taft and Roosevelt supporters, with La Follette’s followers and the Wisconsin senator himself having declared for Roosevelt. But the majority of delegates were controlled by party bosses and were chosen arbitrarily.

  The Republicans met at Chicago in mid-June and seated Taft delegates over Roosevelt ones in many states where Roosevelt’s partisans were in the majority. Taft and Sherman were renominated on a complacent platform that lauded the administration’s record and promised continuity. Roosevelt said the nomination was fraudulent and declared: “We are at Armageddon and I fight for the Lord.” Six weeks later, the insurgents met again in Chicago and nominated Roosevelt for president and Governor Hiram W. Johnson of California for vice president, on a platform that replicated that of La Follette of the previous year, and added tighter anti-trust regulation, the vote for women, improved working conditions by legislation, popular referendary reversal of judicial decisions, and a reduced tariff.

  In the interregnum between the two Republican conventions, the Democrats had met in late June in Baltimore aware that they were almost certainly choosing the next president, given the disarray among their opponents. William Jennings Bryan stood again for the fourth time, against Woodrow Wilson and the Speaker of the House, Beauchamp “Champ” Clark of Missouri. When it became clear that Bryan could not do it again, he threw his support to Wilson as the more reform-minded candidate, and in one of the great ironies of American politics, the thrice-defeated nominee effectively named the next president. (If he had sat out 1908, when he had little chance, he would have been elected in 1912 and the world would be different, though probably not better.) The Democratic platform was distinct from Roosevelt’s only in Wilson’s advocacy of a more drastic tariff reduction and his condemnation of all monopolistic trusts, which he held could not be cured of their damaging effects by regulation alone, as they were inherently harmful. Foreign policy was scarcely mentioned. Wilson was selected on the 46th ballot, and Indiana governor Thomas R. Marshall, a witty and engaging but otherwise unexceptional politician, was nominated for vice president. The Socialists again nominated Eugene V. Debs and the Prohibitionists again chose Eugene W. Chafin. It was a lively campaign. Vice President Sherman became the seventh holder of his position to die in office, on October 30, 1912.

  Wilson won, 6.29 million to 4.13 million for Roosevelt to 3.48 million for Taft. Debs’s vote ballooned to 897,000 and Chafin’s was 206,000. It was 42 percent for Wilson to 27 percent for Roosevelt to 23 percent for Taft to 8 percent for the others, and three-quarters of that for Debs; the electoral vote was 435 for Wilson, 88 for Roosevelt (Johnson was vital in winning for them the key state of California by a hair’s breadth), and only 8 for Taft. Though he would be a minority president, given that he was running against two previously elected presidents and a very strong fourth-party candidate, Wilson did well, and ran several points ahead of Lincoln’s vote in a four-candidate race against less serious opponents in 1860. If Roosevelt’s and Taft’s votes, and also Wilson’s and Debs’s, had been combined in a straight two-party race, the Republicans would have won their narrowest victory since Harrison in 1888. Roosevelt was the strongest third-party candidate in history, but he was also the only previously elected and undefeated ex-president to head a third party.

  Taft, a little like John Quincy Adams and U.S. Grant, had suffered from comparative lack of partisan political experience, and was tactically inept. But he was a tolerably capable president, though in foreign policy he and Knox had been caricatures of money-seeking allies of American business, rather than astute internationalists like Roosevelt, Hay, and Root, or at least a competent opportunist like McKinley, or tenacious idealist like Cleveland. He had had no national strategy at all, despite his service abroad as a proconsul and in the War Department, and unlike the two presidents who bracketed him.

  If Roosevelt had just left Taft alone, he could have easily succeeded him in 1916; he was as impatient and egocentric as Taft was insouciant and clumsy. As Taft’s presidency ebbed away, the Constitution received its Sixteenth Amendment, authorizing a federal income tax, and shortly after the installation of the new administration (in May 1913), the Seventeeth Amendment was adopted, providing for the election of U.S. senators by direct popular vote in the states, taking that power from the state legislatures. Roosevelt would be a formidable leader of the opposition and Taft would return with distinction to the judiciary and become the only person in American history to be both president and chief justice of the United States, and the founder of a political dynasty.

  Wilson prepared to govern, and in return for his having served the party as nominee (and helped Wilson invaluably to the nomination), Wilson named William Jennings Bryan, who was otherwise completely unqualified, secretary of state. More important, as time would reveal, and presaging the greatest American political dynasty of all, Wilson named as assistant secretary of the navy, a position the nominee’s cousin had held, the 31-year-old New York state assemblyman Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The young Roosevelt would absorb all there was to learn from his cousin (and uncle-in-law), Theodore, and from his own president, and add volumes to that, in the next third of the century, when the whole world would hang in the balance on his decisions and their execution.

  9. WOODROW WILSON’S FIRST TERM—DOMESTIC REFORMS, AND MEXICO

  Woodrow Wilson was the son, as well as, on his mother’s side, the grandson, of Presbyterian ministers; a graduate of Princeton and Johns Hopkins; and a formidable academic and educator, acclaimed professor, political and governmental historian, reform president of Princeton University, and reform governor of New Jersey. He was not as great a polymath as Jefferson, nor a linguist like John Quincy Adams, but he was a prodigious intellect, a powerful writer, and, unlike the other two, a formidable orator. And despite Theodore Roosevelt’s endless lampooning of him as a feeble and waffling theoretician, he was a forceful and imaginative executive. Though his presidency would end in tragedy and infirmity, he remains a great historic figure, denied his honor and largely unheeded, but impossible to minimize or ignore, who looms hauntingly in the modern history of America and of the whole world.

  His inaugural address called for the reinforcement of free competition, better treatment of the disadvantaged, conservation, and more efficient and businesslike administration of government, a combination and extension of the better policies of Roosevelt and Taft. On April 8, 1913, he became the first president since John Adams in 1800 to appear in person at the Congress, and advocated tariff revision. Wilson was an authority on comparative government and was not an unambiguous admirer of every aspect of the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. In coming, as head of the executive government, to address the legislators, he was in some measure emulating an aspect of the parliamentary system that he admired, that the executive sat in the legislature. (Wilson has paid a price in the opinion of subsequent historians, for insufficient cheerleading for the Constitution.)

  In December 1913, after six months of debate, and fierce opposition from the commercial banking system, the Congress approved the Federal Reserve Act, the first comprehensive reform of American banking since the Civil War, and reestablishment of a central bank after Jackson’s abolition of the charter of the Bank of the United States in 1836. Twelve district banks were set up in regional centers around the country as depositories for nationally chartered banks that were required to join the system, and for whichever state banks chose to join. The Federal Reserve Board set the discount rate (the rate at which money was loaned to the banking system), which controlled credit in the country. The district banks rediscounted the paper of local banks, which subscribed to
the capital of the district banks and participated with the Federal Reserve in choosing directors of the district banks. The district reserve banks issued commercial paper that was counted as part of the money supply, against deposits by adhering banks and backed by a 40 percent reserve of gold. It was a comprehensive and very successful organization of the banking system, which put the United States, with Great Britain and the Bank of England, at the forefront of sensible monetary policymaking and credit administration. Most of the balance of Wilson’s reform program was contained in the Federal Trade Commission Act and Clayton Anti-Trust Act of September and October 1914. The Federal Trade Commission was a bipartisan body empowered to enforce and monitor anti-trust rules, and the Clayton statute substantially expanded, clarified, and made more enforceable the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.

  In foreign relations, Bryan opened his tenure in the State Department, in keeping with his unworldly, evangelical idealism, with the pursuit of treaties with the nations of the world assuring that all disputes would be referred for settlement to a permanent investigative commission, which would report within a year, during which there would be an obligatory (but completely unenforceable) “cooling off” period. Twenty-one such treaties were ratified, almost all of them with Latin American and Caribbean satellite states of the U.S.