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

by Conrad Black

  His presidency ended pitifully, with him shrunken and delusional. But he remains a haunting and compelling figure, courageous, eloquent, without opportunism, and stricken with misfortune, as well as flawed by impolitic hubris. He was a prophet; he was the first person to inspire the masses of the world with the vision of enduring peace, and though several of his most distinguished predecessors had vaguely referred to America’s vocation to lead and the world’s eventual dependence on it, it fell to him to try to effect that immense change in America and the world. He was a very able war leader and a decisive influence in preventing German victory. That he did not win the peace does not deny him the great homage he deserves for seeing so clearly the need for American intervention and for a new structure of international relations. America was briefly struck by infelicity. Without the breakdown of his health, Wilson might have got America into the world; and a healthy Theodore Roosevelt would have led America into the twenties to a very different and more observant drummer than Warren Harding.

  For the world, this sudden appearance and withdrawal of America opened a long era of blaming the United States for every conceivable ill in the world. America was perceived and represented as a great cuckoo bird that might fly out of its hemisphere at any time making loud and portentous noises and then abruptly return, slamming the door behind it. It conformed to European desires to imagine that, despite its undoubted power, it was a silly, vulgar, and irresponsible place. The Wilson interlude on the world stage had been brief and had ended badly, but without it, the Allies would not have won the war, and the United States would not so surely and capably have come to the rescue of the Old World when it blundered, by its own errors, into war again, after, as Foch predicted, “a twenty-year armistice.” Wilson failed, but he was the co-victor of World War I and, in a way, of World War II, and no one else, except possibly Winston Churchill, can make such a claim.

  Western Front in WWI. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History

  Wilson permanently altered American foreign policy from the bantam rooster, Yankee Doodle rodomontade it had been under Jackson and in Daniel Webster’s letter to Hülsemann in 1850 (Chapter 7), and the hemispheric prowling and growling that had gone on from the expulsion of the French from Mexico in 1867 to Wilson’s own ludicrous punitive mission in Mexico nearly 50 years later. Its appearance among the Great Powers, though fleeting, showed the more astute observers, such as British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, that America was “a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it can generate.” The Republicans through the twenties pretended that they could substitute the sonorous espousal of peace and disarmament in place of contributing usefully to the correlation of democratic, stabilizing forces. Nothing would happen in the twenties while Germany and Russia were pulling themselves together, but if democracy failed in Germany and a nationalist government resulted, Communist Russia would hold the balance in Europe, an event that could cause almost all Europeans to become rather nostalgic for the Americans.

  9. WARREN G. HARDING AND CALVIN COOLIDGE

  The Harding administration made its first symbolic enactment of its anti-League substitute for pursuit of the peace process by responding to Irreconcilable senator Borah’s resolution requesting a conference to discuss naval disarmament. It invited all the major powers except the German and Russian pariahs to Washington for that purpose, and also to discuss Pacific and Far Eastern questions. The American delegation was headed by Hughes, Root, and Lodge. Hughes was elected conference chairman and proposed not only a limitation of naval construction but the scrapping of large numbers of warships. Since the German fleet had already destroyed itself and the Russians were not invited, it was an orgy of self-enfeeblement by the victorious Allied powers. The U.S. agreed to scrap 645,000 tons, Britain 583,000 tons, Japan 480,000 tons, and so forth, and ratios of capital ships (over 10,000 tons and guns of more than 10-inch diameters) were to be 5 U.K, 5 U.S., 3 Japan, and 1.67 each for France and Italy. There was to be a 10-year moratorium on new capital-ship construction. There were separate treaties governing use of submarines, banning asphyxiating gases at sea, recognizing reciprocally rights in the Pacific, abrogating the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, and pledging all against the aggression of any power; there was the usual claptrap about guaranteeing Chinese independence and territorial integrity and the Open Door, which was itself a mockery of Chinese sovereignty; restoration to China of some control over her customs and of Shantung and Kiachow from Japan; and there were some agreements governing trans-Pacific cables. U.S. Senate ratification was heavily conditionalized. (The Chinese attended and had a ragtag of assets in what they called their “water force.” They successfully rebutted the sarcasm of the upstart Japanese at the conference.)

  The Pacific and Chinese provisions were ignored, as was Japan’s pledge to naval moderation. The net effect was simply to deprive the major Western powers of 1.3 million tons of warships, including more than 20 capital ships that could have been useful in future conflicts, such as in convoy protection and support for amphibious landings. Nor should the British have been in such a hurry to allow the United States parity with it in naval forces. The initial American reaction was prideful euphoria that it was contributing importantly to world peace without surrendering sovereignty to the League. Of course, this was a mirage.

  The next great issue was war debts. The United States was owed $10,950,000,000 from the various European powers, and the British and the French early proposed that they cancel their debts in exchange for their cancellation of debts from others, including German reparations. Wilson and his successors refused. The American attitude was summed up in Coolidge’s rhetorical question: “They hired the money, didn’t they?” However, financial realities imposed themselves very inconveniently. The World War Foreign Debt Commission was set up in February 1922, and a 62-year payback with an interest rate of 2.135 percent was agreed. In 1924, Italy arranged the elimination of 80 percent of its debt and an interest rate reduction to 0.4 percent. In 1926, the French achieved a 60.3 percent reduction, and a rate of 1.6 percent.

  A parallel process governed German reparations. The Treaty of Versailles had set up the Allied Reparations Commission, which in 1921 fixed German reparations at 132 billion gold marks. The Germans severely devalued their currency, and the commission granted moratoria in 1923, but Germany was twice declared in default. On January 11, 1923, the French and Belgian armies occupied the Ruhr, and by late 1923, the German currency was worthless and the French franc had declined by 25 percent. At the end of the year, General Charles Gates Dawes of Chicago was named as head of a German Reparations Commission, and the following year he produced the Dawes Plan, which Germany accepted. It provided for reorganization of the Reichsbank under Allied supervision, and staged payments, from 1 billion gold marks in the first year to 2.5 billion in the fifth year, and an 800-million-mark international loan was arranged for Germany. The Allies were lending Germany much of the money to be repaid to them. It was agreed that the United States would receive a quarter of German reparations (a grossly exaggerated sum, compared with the claims of other powers, especially France). It was part of the naïve spirit of the time that Dawes achieved great popularity and prestige for this plan, which was not really enacted, though it at least punctured the balloon of immense reparations that would repay the Allies every cent they had expended.

  In domestic affairs, Mellon cut taxes and the country snapped out of its recession; there were some reforms in the meat-packing industry, and Mellon followed the Taft administration’s lead in setting up a serious budgetary process. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 drastically raised tariffs on manufactures and agricultural products, and brought instant retaliation. Harding pardoned the Socialist leader, Debs.

  Warren Harding, an amiable man, completely unqualified for his office, died of a pulmonary embolism in San Francisco on August 9, 1923, on his way back from a trip to Alaska. He was 57, and was widely lamented as a pleasant and go
od-natured personality. Vice President Calvin Coolidge succeeded him. About six months after Harding died, it came to light that his administration had been immersed in some widespread scandals, especially the secret leasing of the Teapot Dome and Elk’s Hill oil fields to private interests, when they were supposedly reserved to the navy. There were other problems, and the secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall, and the attorney general, Harry M. Daugherty, were indicted, and Fall was convicted, of taking a bribe. The amounts were not substantial, and there was certainly no suggestion of wrongdoing by Harding himself. Like U.S. Grant, he didn’t have good judgment about how to manage politicians in charge of large flows of cash and the distribution of great financial preferments.

  Woodrow Wilson died on February 5, 1924, having never recovered any ability to concentrate or remain active for more than a few minutes. Though not immensely popular personally, he was widely admired and his death was observed with respect. Of the main protagonists in the great contest of 1912, the only survivor was Taft, who, robust despite his immense girth, would remain a well-respected chief justice until he died in 1930, aged 72, and was succeeded by Charles Evans Hughes.

  There was peace and prosperity and the Republicans were popular. Coolidge was quiet but emphatic in his terse remarks, and notoriously uncommunicative. The Republicans met in Cleveland in June 1924, and nominated President Coolidge and, for vice president, Charles G. Dawes, recognizing the prestige he had supposedly earned for his short-lived reparations deal with Germany. The platform supported continued reduced taxes and spending, high tariffs, and vague platitudes about international action for the avoidance of war.

  The Democrats met in New York later in June and the party split between the governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, a self-made, self-educated reform governor and the first Roman Catholic to make a serious challenge for the presidency, and William Gibbs McAdoo of Tennessee, Wilson’s son-in-law and a former secretary of the Treasury. The racist Ku Klux Klan endorsed McAdoo, who did not renounce its support, and it made for a stormy convention in Madison Square Garden, where the forces of Governor Smith had packed most of the hall. Smith frankly renounced Prohibition as nonsense, and McAdoo stood as the Prohibitionist candidate. The most electrifying moment of the convention was the nomination of Smith by Franklin D. Roosevelt, as “the happy warrior of the political battlefield.” Roosevelt had been stricken by polio in 1921, and lost the use of his legs. He approached the microphone on crutches, his legs in stiff braces, in a hushed stadium, and received a huge ovation, as did his ringing address putting Smith in nomination.

  The convention went 103 ballots before settling on the rather conservative John W Davis of West Virginia, former solicitor general and ambassador to Great Britain. The platform denounced the Ku Klux Klan and the corruption of the Republicans, and supported the League of Nations and a lower tariff, but was otherwise non-committal. It dissembled on the Prohibition question. In a final gesture to the bimetallists, William Jennings Bryan’s brother Charles was chosen as vice presidential candidate.

  Disgusted with the conservatism of both parties, and especially the Democrats, as well as by the Democrats’ internationalism, the Conference for Progressive Political Action, a grouping of agrarian and labor interests, met at Cleveland in July and nominated Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin for president and Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana for vice president. Their platform called for nationalization of railroads and electric power, an unrestricted right to strike, collective bargaining by farmers and workers, tighter securities regulation, and improved working conditions, and condemned Republican corruption and Mellon’s pandering to the wealthy. It was a peppy left-wing program, but if the Democrats had not been so fragmented, they should have corralled most of these votes.

  It was clearly going to be another big Republican year, and Coolidge won 15.7 million and 382 electoral votes to 8.4 million and 136 electoral votes for Davis and 4.8 million votes and 13 electoral votes for La Follette—54 percent to 29 percent to 16 percent. The country was booming, but it was uneven, and increasing amounts of family stock market and consumer spending was borrowed. For the time being, the country was happy with the Roaring Twenties as they unfolded, a national commitment to the good life, and abroad, gestures of pacific intent in a world still exhausted by the Great War and without animosity to America, which under the influence of the motion picture was becoming the constant spectacle of the whole world.

  Very little happened in the Coolidge administration. Immigration was abruptly curtailed. This would have tragic consequences a decade and more later, when persecution of minorities, especially Jews, would force millions to try to flee Europe. The United States had admitted over a million immigrants in six separate years before World War I, and had admitted between 300,000 and 800,000 in each of the first five years of the twenties. Until huge numbers of undocumented Latin Americans began flooding into the country decades later, immigration after 1930 would not exceed 200,000 again for 20 years. One of the great engines of American growth was being shut down. There were further tax cuts in 1926 and 1928.

  William Jennings Bryan, the old war-horse of bimetallism, pacifism, and resistance to Darwinian teaching (in the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee about the teaching of evolution, in early 1925), died on July 26, 1925, aged 65. His time had certainly passed (although his brother Charles had been the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate the year before), but he was seen as a great populist and folkloric figure who, except for Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, had stirred American public life more than anyone since Lincoln.

  Frank B. Kellogg, former senator and ambassador to Great Britain, became secretary of state in 1925. Here again, almost nothing happened. It was, in all things, an era of misplaced overconfidence. All through the twenties, the United States continued to vacillate and dither on the issue of the world court. Harding, Coolidge, and their successors favored it, and Root even produced an admission formula that virtually made American adherence conditional on not having an adverse judgment, but still it was blocked by Borah and others in the Senate. The great accomplishment of the Kellogg regime in the State Department was the Kellogg-Briand Pact, of 1927, in which France and the United States agreed to “outlaw war as an instrument of national policy”; this agreement was subscribed to by virtually every government in the world (62 nations), and there was the usual drenching shower of euphoria. (Aristide Briand, one of the Third Republic’s champion politicians, had 11 terms as prime minister between 1909 and 1929, and served seven consecutive years, ending with his death in 1932, as foreign minister.) The sole sanction for the outlawry of war was the power of moral opinion in the world against violators. Of course, it was nonsense.

  It continued to be the conventional wisdom among Republicans that prosperity was permanent, peace was inviolable, and America’s existence was serendipitous. Herbert Hoover even revived Clay’s phrase “the American System” to describe America’s almost unique prosperity, the exclusion of African Americans and 20 percent of the white population being overlooked. It was still a generalization of prosperity that only a few countries with much smaller populations, such as Canada, approached. In strategic terms, there was no strategy; America had the key to prosperity and was far from potential conflict. It had no enemies and had a strong navy to keep undesirables at a distance. Everything would just continue to improve; it was the American way, the American system.

  The 1928 election campaign took place in this halcyon atmosphere. Coolidge declined to run again and at the Republican convention in Kansas City in June, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, of Iowa and California, widely identified with the great boom of the twenties, was nominated for president, with Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas for vice president. The platform envisioned federal assistance to farm prices and retention of high tariffs, and promised greater prosperity than ever, “a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage.” Prohibition and abstention from the League were strongly supported.

  The De
mocrats met in Houston later in June, and Franklin D. Roosevelt again nominated the now four-term governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith. He was chosen on the first ballot, and Senator Joseph T Robinson of Arkansas was selected as vice presidential candidate.99 The Democratic platform made noises similar to the Republicans about farm prices, supported increased powers of collective bargaining for labor, and pledged to enforce Prohibition while seeking its repeal, an artless straddle that offended everyone. It also sought increased federal control of hydroelectric power and the immediate granting of independence to the Philippines. The real issues were that Smith was a Roman Catholic and the Democrats opposed Prohibition. Smith had a flamboyant New York manner of dress, with rather loud suits and a derby hat. He had a large red nose, indicating perhaps his liking for prohibited drink, prominent gold fillings in his teeth, and a broad, Lower East Side New York accent. He had been a brilliant governor and had a rapport with urban dwellers, but he was a localized candidate in a time when there was great suspicion in Protestant America of the Roman Catholic Church as sinister, stuffed with hyphenated Americans, and directed by obscurantist Italians.