by David Milne
As the transitional period between Election Day and the inauguration had yet to be shortened, Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as the twenty-eighth president of the United States on March 4, 1913. It was an overcast but uncommonly mild day, with the first floral signs of spring making their appearance. A jovial President Taft welcomed the Wilson family to the White House graciously and with good humor—relieved perhaps not to have to vacate the premises to Roosevelt’s tender care—before he accompanied Wilson to the inaugural dais on Capitol Hill in a grand horse-drawn carriage. As the president and president-elect surveyed the crowds from the stand, Wilson beckoned the audience, positioned some distance away, closer. “Let the people come forward,” he declared, before taking his oath of office and delivering his inaugural address:
This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men’s hearts wait upon us; men’s lives hang in the balance; men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!44
The address was pitch-perfect for an incoming president who lacked a plurality of the popular vote. Wilson’s focus was entirely domestic, covering issues such as tariff reduction, banking reform, and antitrust legislation, which the new president planned to move quickly through a Democratic-controlled Congress. Foreign policy was a lacuna in the speech, just as it was throughout the campaign.
In many respects Wilson remained true to his academic background in viewing the office of the presidency as possessing a vital “didactic function,” in respect to both domestic politics and international affairs.45 The aspects of Theodore Roosevelt’s career he admired most related to his persuasive gifts, rendered more potent by utilizing the majesty afforded to the office of the presidency—that unique vantage point he described memorably as the “bully pulpit.” Wilson was similarly inclined to Roosevelt, and his speechmaking style was more elegant if less insistent. One of his first actions as president was to reinstitute the practice of delivering the State of the Union address in person, rejecting Thomas Jefferson’s rationale for ceasing the speeches in 1800 that they echoed British political hierarchies. He was the second-to-last American president (Herbert Hoover being the last) to write all his own speeches. No American president before or after Wilson has spoken more to Congress. No president held more press conferences, then or since, or spoke to the media in such an unvarnished fashion. Few presidents come close to Wilson in the frequency and urgency with which he traveled the nation and appealed directly to the people. His presidency was the most rhetorical (literally) in history, and this emphasis helps us to better understand his successes and failures. President Wilson believed that just about anything was possible by appealing directly to his people.
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The first foreign-policy crisis the new president confronted could not have been closer to home. Just three weeks before Wilson’s inauguration, a coup occurred in Mexico—memorialized in that nation as the Ten Tragic Days—in which a ruthless army general, Victoriano Huerta, ordered the overthrow and assassination of the moderate, reform-inclined incumbent president, Francisco Madero. The official U.S. reaction was one of studied indifference. President Taft’s ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, was relaxed about the coup as Madero’s progressive agenda had threatened American business interests—particularly those organizations with significant landholdings. Indeed, he was indirectly complicit in the whole affair. With only a brief time left in the Oval Office, Taft left to his successor the decision of whether to support Henry Wilson’s pro-business advice. Oblivious of the pleas by representatives of big business for swift recognition, Wilson stood strong on principle, upending the conventional wisdom, again established by Jefferson, that held that any government able to uphold existing treaty commitments was worthy of recognition, regardless of whether its founding was violent. On March 12, Wilson issued a policy statement affirming that his sincere feelings of friendship toward the “sister republics of Central and South America” was predicated on the “orderly processes of just government based upon law, not upon arbitrary and irregular force.” Without identifying Huerta by name, Wilson made clear that his government would “have no sympathy with those who seek the power of the government to advance their own personal interests or ambitions.”46 When quizzed on his broad approach by a British diplomat, Wilson remarked, “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.”47
Wilson’s condescending tone toward feckless Latinos reminded some observers of the paternalistic approach set out in Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. But the most interesting aspects of Wilson’s statement were his insistence on commitment to representative democracy and his unwillingness to recognize a brutal regime that would have boosted the profits of big business. Both of these motivations ran directly counter to Mahan’s writings, which were deeply skeptical on the utility of spreading democracy and driven primarily by economic self-interest—pursuit of commercial advantage should be the principal focus of any nation’s foreign policy. A potent strain of idealism was emerging in Wilson’s foreign-policy approach, which sought to make a clean break with past practice by dismissing the diplomatic foundations of the McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft administrations. The new president was testing out some new ideas on raison d’état.
This shift in emphasis was driven by Wilson’s view of a president’s foreign-policy power as “very absolute,” and he had been unimpressed by the passive, nepotistic State Department, whose entrenched practices he distrusted and whose garbled diplomatic dispatches offended his literary sensibilities.48 But while Wilson viewed the State Department warily, and was intent on directing foreign policy from the White House, he did respect the man he nominated as his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, with whom he shared many characteristics.
Just like Wilson’s, Bryan’s worldview was shaped by his Christianity—even more so, in fact. And, like Wilson, Bryan was an idealist who believed diplomacy served a higher function than pleasing big business; U.S. behavior should be exemplary, to persuade other nations to follow its example. Yet Bryan was pacific in temperament, regarding peace, pursued at virtually all costs, as the ultimate goal of diplomacy. He was sanctimonious, dogmatic, and ascetic to a degree that made Wilson—who at least savored single-malt whiskey in small measures—appear bacchanalian in comparison. (Bryan banned alcohol at State Department functions, a practice that was duly mocked by Republicans as “grape juice diplomacy.”49) Bryan’s views were anathema to the diplomatic verities that Mahan and Roosevelt considered sacrosanct: that war was sometimes necessary and always ennobling, and that power projection, through territorial acquisition, was vital to facilitate commercial expansion. Roosevelt made no effort to hide his scorn for Bryan, describing him to Henry Cabot Lodge as “the most contemptible figure we have ever had as Secretary of State, and of course Wilson must accept full responsibility.”50
Although Wilson had private misgivings about Bryan’s moral fervor, he shared his hostility toward the way corporate interests had been privileged previously in foreign policymaking. Bryan was contemptuous of the “dollar diplomacy” practiced by previous Republican administrations and sought to undermine the role played by Wall Street banks in promoting investment in Latin America and the Far East. With his president’s blessing, Bryan pulled the plug on the American contribution to an international syndicate of bankers that had been established to fund railroad construction in China and that was certain to make vast profits. In announcing the pullout, Wilson criticized the loan for appearing to “touch very nearly the administrative independence of China itself; and this administration does not feel that it ought, even by implication, to be a party to those conditions.”51 This decision ran directly counter to Mahanian precepts. Critics later alleged that Wilson’s high-mi
ndedness opened the door for Japan to further expand its influence in China, with dismal consequences for the balance of power in East Asia.
The secretary of state was as determined as Wilson to guide Latinos—“our political children,” as Bryan described them—toward liberty and democracy, and was aware that Washington’s success in effecting such change depended upon reputational rehabilitation.52 To assist Pan-American relations, Wilson and Bryan negotiated a treaty with Colombia that offered a formal apology and financial compensation to the tune of $25 million, for the brutish manner in which President Roosevelt had detached Panama from Bogotá’s control. This well-intentioned maneuver infuriated Roosevelt, who described it as “a crime against the United States,” and it led to an almighty battle in the Senate, in which Henry Cabot Lodge worked successfully to deny ratification.53 In a speech in Mobile, Alabama, in October 1913, an undeterred Wilson repudiated economic imperialism, connecting the battle against “degrading” business practices overseas with his own Progressive political agenda at home.54 He added that the “United States will never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest.”55 Wilson’s aversion to anything that smacked of imperialism was shaping his geopolitical agenda. In his idealism and ambition, the president was opening a new chapter in the history of America’s foreign relations.
While a strong measure of altruism informed Wilson’s hostility toward the Huerta regime in Mexico, there was a clear divergence between his views and those of his secretary of state on the best means forward. The president had applied a series of diplomatic pressures to Huerta, including the threat of sanctions, to facilitate free and open elections to anoint a leader with a clear mandate. These efforts had failed, however, and Huerta—clinging to power with an obstinacy that Wilson could not help but respect—further tightened his control by arresting opposition members of what was already a neutered Congress. Actions that went beyond diplomatic censure and economic sanctions were clearly required.
Wilson was presented with an opportunity to force the matter when in April 1914 Mexican officials in Tampico mistakenly arrested a group of American sailors who had ventured from their ship to secure provisions. This damaging error was quickly remedied, the sailors were released, and expressions of regret were extended for hurt feelings. But unsatisfied by this more or less reasonable Mexican response, the admiral of the ship, with Wilson’s backing, demanded a formal apology and a twenty-one-gun salute, which he contended were necessary to fully restore American dignity. Huerta balked at this request before proposing simultaneous salutes to allow both sides to emerge with self-esteem intact. Wilson rejected the compromise and secured congressional authorization to deploy U.S. troops to Mexico to right this wrong and, more important, get rid of Huerta. Regime change was Wilson’s primary purpose. The president believed that deploying American troops would encourage Huerta’s opponents to take up arms against their oppressor. It was a pugnacious ploy that caused a great deal of discomfort for his conflict-averse secretary of state. But this incursion into Mexican territory failed to satisfy Henry Cabot Lodge, who expressed a clear preference for all-out war and military occupation, and whose ambitions were ultimately frustrated by the commander in chief, who kept the military on a tight leash. As it turned out, Lodge was more realistic than Wilson about the number of troops required.
At the time of the military incursion into Vera Cruz, “Colonel” Edward House (the title was an honorific, not an actual rank), who had established himself as Wilson’s most trusted confidant and adviser, observed that if “Mexico understood that our motives were unselfish she should not object to our helping adjust her unruly household.”56 This “unselfish” invasion was met with strong objections, however, in the form of fierce nationalist resistance. Two hundred Mexicans and nineteen Americans were killed in the initial stages of the fighting. In several of Mexico’s cities, American consular offices were attacked by mobs. Rather than welcoming Americans as liberators, the leader of the main opposition group to Huerta, Venustiano Carranza, demanded a prompt withdrawal to restore Mexico’s sovereignty. The rationale for the deployment of troops had disintegrated as quickly as it had been cobbled together.
When Argentina, Brazil, and Chile offered to mediate the conflict, Wilson gratefully embraced this prospective exit strategy. Matters improved in the months that followed. As negotiations stalled inconclusively, and the civil war worsened, Carranza regrouped and was eventually able to force Huerta to concede defeat in the summer of 1914. Wilson’s policy now appeared vindicated. A brutal leader had been dispatched and a better one had taken his place. Speaking at a press conference on November 14, he outlined his rationale for the initial incursion in refreshingly candid terms: “A situation arose that made it necessary for the dignity of the United States that we should take some decisive step; and the main thing to accomplish was a vital thing. We got Huerta. That was the end of Huerta. That was what I had in mind. It could not be done without taking Vera Cruz.”57
Yet Huerta’s demise and Carranza’s ascension were far from the end of the story. Two populist leaders, Emiliano Zapata and Francisco “Pancho” Villa picked up and dusted off Huerta’s nationalist mantle and began the fight against Carranza’s unstable government, whose founding had been so tainted by association with the gringo invaders. With great success, Villa was able to impugn Carranza’s patriotism in permitting “the sale of our country” to the Americans. President Wilson was another easy target, whom Villa dismissed as an “evangelizing professor” determined to reduce Mexico to “vassal” status. Soon these harsh words were joined by bullets, and the situation grew bloodier. Villa’s foot soldiers began to target American business interests in Mexico, confiscating William Randolph Hearst’s well-appointed ranch in a particularly daring move. In January 1916, seventeen American engineers were killed on a train traveling through northern Mexico. As Villa informed his ally Zapata, his primary intention was to communicate to Wilson that his homeland was a “tomb for thrones, crowns and traitors.”58 Growing bolder by the month, five hundred Villa supporters crossed the border to attack Columbus, New Mexico, resulting in seventeen more American deaths.59 Such was the chaos that followed a well-intentioned move to depose a despot to whom Wilson took exception.
An attack on American territory demanded a strong response, and Wilson duly obliged. The president assembled a force of fifty-eight hundred men, which subsequently rose to ten thousand, under the command of General John J. Pershing. Its purpose was described ominously as a “punitive expedition.” The force pushed some 350 miles into Mexico, encountering hit-and-run guerrilla-type resistance from Villa’s army, which again successfully attacked U.S. territory at Glen Springs, Texas. The prospect of full-scale war with Mexico was fast materializing. Yet Wilson pulled back from the brink, reassuring Jane Addams—the Progressive reformer and peace activist—that “my heart is for peace.”60 The expedition withdrew in January 1917, and Mexico was more or less left alone to resolve the myriad political and socioeconomic problems that had been exacerbated by conflict with the United States.
Wilson’s Mexican intervention inaugurated a tradition in U.S. foreign policy—a militarized approach to “bad” or “evil” regimes in the name of democracy promotion—that endures to this day. It is difficult to view Wilson’s policies toward the Mexican Revolution, and subsequent civil war, as anything but maladroit, leaving a legacy of distrust and animosity in U.S.-Mexican relations that still lingers. While Wilson resisted calls made by Lodge, Root, Roosevelt, and the Hearst press for all-out war, his Mexican intervention was a case study in how fine-sounding intentions can go badly awry. It was ironic that Wilson drew from the military engagement in Mexico a skepticism about the ability of the United States to effect regime change and produce a stable aftermath. This experience colored his later desire to avoid a large-scale intervention in the Russian Civil War. Wilson’s caution in this instance is often lost on his modern-day devotees on both sides of the political divide.
Foresee
ing problems at the end of 1913, Mahan had dismissed Wilson’s democracy-promoting rationale for toppling Huerta as “amateurish diplomacy,” which failed to “recognize that self-government is not practicable for all peoples, merely because the English-speaking peoples have made it work.”61 This was precisely the type of adventure that the United States should shun, Mahan’s geopolitical philosophy held, as it depleted resources, undercut business, and constituted something of a blow to America’s global reputation—for the conflict ended not in victory but in stalemate. Mahan feared the negative, unpredictable repercussions that accompanied leaps into the unknown. He felt that Wilson had departed from historical precedent with these ambitious plans to democratize and improve other nations. The president was leading with theory rather than framing policy on the basis of observed reality and an appropriately sober view of what constituted America’s core interests.
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In an address in Cincinnati on October 26, 1916, President Wilson offered a succinct account of the origins of the First World War: “Nothing in particular started it, but everything in general.” Later in the campaign speech, he distilled the essence of the disastrous alliance system that led to a conflict that few of the great powers really wanted but that none believed they could escape without losing critical diplomatic face: “There had been growing up in Europe a mutual suspicion, an interchange of conjectures about what this government and that government was going to do, an interlacing of alliances and understandings, a complex web of intrigue and spying, that presently was sure to entangle the whole of the family of mankind on that side of the water in its meshes.”62 War came to Europe because its powers were fixed in an alliance system that precluded flexibility and thus portended disaster.63 Yet there were more specific grievances that caused the balance-of-power system—devised by Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Viscount Castlereagh, and Prince Metternich at the Congress of Vienna in 1814—to tumble down after a century of relative stability. First, France and Germany were still engaged in a dispute over the status of Alsace-Lorraine, the border region wrested from Paris following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 (an action that the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck opposed in anticipation of inspiring French antipathy). Second, there was the continuing crisis in the Balkans provoked by the efforts of various ethnic groups to secure independence from either the Habsburg (Austro-Hungarian) or Ottoman (Turkish) Empire. Third, there existed a long-standing dispute among the major European powers over competing colonial aspirations in the Third World, particularly in Africa, the only continent with much land still available to grab. Finally, Germany and Great Britain were engaged in a hotly contested naval race to outdo each other in the provision of dreadnought-class battleships. Here it is possible to identify the influence of Mahan’s theories on the centrality of naval dominance, even though he was personally slow to appreciate the revolution in military affairs catalyzed by these technological advances. For the influence exerted by his belief in vigilant military preparedness, the British diplomat and historian Sir Charles Webster opined that “Mahan was one of the causes of the First World War,” which does seem unduly harsh.64