Colossus
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Just where such a policy might lead became suddenly clear to the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey in 1913, when Wilson declared his intention not to recognize the government of General Victoriano Huerta, who had seized power in Mexico following the assassination of the liberal premier Francisco Madero. After Walter Page, the American ambassador in London, had explained his government’s position to Grey, the following conversation ensued:
GREY: Suppose you have to intervene, what then?
PAGE: Make ’em vote and live by their decisions.
GREY: But suppose they will not so live?
PAGE: We’ll go in and make ’em vote again.
GREY: And keep this up 200 years?
PAGE: Yes. The United States will be here for two hundred years and it can continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote and to rule themselves.99
Thus was born the paradox that was to be a characteristic feature of American foreign policy for a century: the paradox of dictating democracy, of enforcing freedom, of extorting emancipation.
It should be said at once that, alongside this “new principle,” the older imperialist impulses continued to work. Economic and strategic considerations, plus the usual assumptions of racial superiority—all these played their part in U.S.-Latin American relations. Indeed, the Wilsonian approach was in many ways simply grafted onto preexisting policies in the region.
The strategic crux of American policy was the Central American isthmus and the long crescent of islands–stretching from the Straits of Florida to the island of Trinida–that separate the Caribbean from the Atlantic, what Henry Cabot Lodge called the “outwork essential to the defense” of the continental “citadel.”100 The countries that therefore mattered most in the region were Nicaragua and Panama as well as the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, divided since 1844 between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.101
What seemed the vital question of control over the projected canal across the isthmus was resolved by military means in 1903. The U.S. Marines had in fact been sent to Colombia on two previous occasions (in 1885 and 1895), but it was their third intervention, this time in support of Panamanian separatists, that proved to be decisive. In essence, Roosevelt used the U.S. Navy to establish Panama as an independent state after the Colombian Senate refused to ratify an agreement leasing land for the construction of the canal.102 Within ninety minutes of the secessionists’ coup, the United States formally recognized the Republic of Panama, which obligingly granted Washington a ten-mile-wide strip of territory through which the canal would be built.103 This was achieved with an almost laughably small show of force. The sole reported casualties were “a Chinaman in Salsipuedes Street and … an ass.”104
The Panama Canal was opened in 1914 and remained under direct American control until 1979. But plans had also existed to build a canal farther north through Nicaragua; indeed, before volcanic eruptions there in 1902 caused consternation in the U.S. Senate, that country had seemed to offer the more likely route (via Lake Nicaragua).105 American business interests in the country were scarcely enormous: total U.S. investment there amounted to no more than $2.5 million in 1912, compared with $1.7 billion for Latin America as a whole.106 However, when the Nicaraguan dictator José Santos Zelaya appeared to be flirting with an Anglo-French syndicate—and when two Americans were executed for their part in a rebel attack—the United States broke off diplomatic relations. Zelaya was forced to resign, and a new government was installed, with American backing, under Adolfo Díaz, former treasurer of the La Luz and Los Angeles Mining Company.107 In 1912, at his request, three thousand marines were sent to quell a revolt against him; a small detachment of a hundred remained there for thirteen years, propping up his regime.108 The fruit of this intervention was the 1916 Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, which, in return for $3 million, gave the United States exclusive rights to build a canal through Nicaragua as well as a naval base on the Gulf of Fonseca.109
In Cuba too business interests and strategic calculation pointed to recurrent intervention rather than annexation—dependence but not occupation. Though the defeat of Spain in 1898 had offered the opportunity to take over the island, American troops were there only briefly. McKinley had talked merely of “ties of singular intimacy and strength” between Cuba and the United States.110 The form these would take was specified in Senator Orville H. Platt’s Amendment, incorporated in the Cuban Constitution in 1902, which gave the United States the right to intervene if necessary “for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty.”111 The amendment precluded any bilateral strategic arrangement between Cuba and a rival foreign power, thus giving the United States an effective veto power over the island’s foreign policy. It circumscribed the country’s future borrowing. And it entitled the United States to establish naval bases on the Cuban coast; the first to be leased was Guantánamo Bay on the eastern tip of the island.112 It was not long before the right of intervention in Cuban political life was exercised. When a revolt threatened to topple a newly elected president in September 1906, a force of marines was deployed and a provisional government established under an American governor-general. But even the once-bullish Roosevelt now professed to “loathe the thought of assuming any control over the island such as we have over Puerto Rico and the Philippines.” By now he had largely lost his faith in the idea that “thickly peopled tropical regions” like Cuba could be run “by self-governing northern democracies.”113 Two and a half years later the American troops left, having installed a new president.114 They returned briefly to the island in 1912, to quell a revolt by former slaves, and again from 1917 until 1922, when the losing side refused to accept the election of President Mario Menocal. It was no coincidence that Menocal was the managing director of the Cuban-American Sugar Company.115
The Dominican Republic was placed in a comparable condition of political and economic dependence, just short of outright conquest. “I have,” declared Roosevelt, “about the same desire to annex it as a gorged boa-constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to.”116 Instead the tried-and-tested imperial method was adopted of controlling the collection of customs, the government’s principal source of revenue. Under the modus vivendi of 1905, the United States was empowered to retain up to 55 percent of customs receipts for the purpose of debt service. What Lord Cromer was to late-nineteenth-century Cairo, Professor Jacob H. Hollander of Johns Hopkins University became to Santo Domingo, determining the size of its debt and the allocation of its customs revenues.117 As in Cuba and Nicaragua, however, finding suitable puppets proved problematic. The assassination of President Ramón Cáceres in 1911 plunged the country’s government into confusion, prompting the United States to oust one would-be successor and install another.118 In 1914 a new Dominican president defied American demands for yet more stringent fiscal controls; when a revolution broke out, there seemed no alternative but once again to send in the marines. Finally, in November 1916, the country was placed under American military government, and it remained in that condition for six years. It was, said Wilson solemnly, “the least of the evils in sight in this very perplexing situation.”119
To the west, in neighboring Haiti, the story was similar. Between 1900 and 1913 the United States dispatched small detachments of troops no fewer than sixteen times, but still the island’s politics lurched from crisis to crisis; there were no fewer than six presidents in the four years from 1912 to 1915. When President Guillaume Sam was murdered in the latter year, Wilson once again dispatched the marines, who established order after considerable bloodshed.120 That September a new president was installed on condition that he accept a treaty similar to the Platt Amendment. In this case Haiti’s finances, police, press and public works were put under American supervision. The American naval commander in charge of the operation imposed de facto military rule in coastal towns.121
Thus began a history of spasmodic intervention in Central Ameri
ca and the Caribbean that has continued to the present day. As a policy it has been, to put it mildly, disappointing. Indeed, when one compares the two territories in the region that the United States formally annexed—Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (purchased from Denmark in 1916)—with the countries it sought to control by indirect means, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that annexation might have been better for all these places. Between the wars American enthusiasm for the Roosevelt Corollary faded; the Wilsonian belief that the people of the region could somehow be “taught … to elect good men” lost credibility. In 1924 the marines pulled out of the Dominican Republic.122 Any pretense of interest in democratic government in Honduras was abandoned in the course of the 1920s; by 1932 the United Fruit Company, which dominated the country’s banana production, was content to coexist peacefully and profitably with the authoritarian Tiburcio Carías Andino, who ruled the country until 1948.123 “Intervention,” Herbert Hoover told reporters shortly after being elected president, “is not now, never was, and never will be a set policy of the United States.” 124 In fact, his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, lost little time in intervening in Cuba; the upshot, however, was another military dictatorship under a young sergeant named Fulgencio Batista. In 1934 the Platt Amendment was effectively torn up; all that survived of American control over Cuba was the Guantanamo Bay base. That same year Roosevelt pulled the American troops out of Haiti too.
Perhaps the most dispiriting case of all was Nicaragua, which by the mid-1920s was in the grip of civil war between rival Liberal and Conservative factions. In went the marines once more, this time to thwart a coup attempt by Emiliano Chamorro, back went Diaz to the presidential palace and along came Henry L. Stimson to broker some kind of settlement. In the summer of 1927 he might have succeeded, but for the obstinate resistance of one Liberal commander, Augusto César Sandino.125 Elections were held in 1928, and again in 1932, but the marines found themselves embroiled in a grueling guerrilla war against the Sandinistas, whom not even the precocious use of airpower could dislodge from their mountain fastnesses. By 1932 the question being asked by many Americans was: “Why are we in Nicaragua and what the hell are we doing there?”126 One correspondent to the New York Times sounded a note that has proved especially resonant: “We ought to go down there and clean up that situation or get out of there and stay out. There’s no use us sending a handful of our boys down there to be butchered.”127 (In fact, total U.S. fatalities were 136.) In January 1933 the last marines were withdrawn. Thirteen months later Sandino was executed by the first Nicaraguan-born commander of the U.S. trained National Guard, Anastasio Somoza Garcia, who two years later installed himself as president. The Somoza dictatorship was to endure for two generations, until 1979.
This was not the way Wilson had planned it. The dream of using American military force to underwrite American-style governments in Central America had failed miserably. There was only one true democracy in the entire region by 1939, and that was Costa Rica, where the United States had never intervened. In some respects, to be sure, the United States had succeeded in establishing itself as the hemispheric hegemon it had for so long claimed to be. As an investor it grew in importance, gaining on (though not quite surpassing) the previously dominant British. As a diplomatic arbiter between the quarrelsome republics of the south it also played an influential role, particularly in the 1920s.128 But as a liberal empire, seeking to export its own political institutions to Latin America, it had achieved precious little. All that Franklin Roosevelt could do was to dress up failure as “good neighborly” tolerance. Somoza might, alas, be a “son of a bitch,” but as Roosevelt’s secretary of state is said to have pointed out, he was nevertheless “our son of a bitch.”129 The most damning verdict of all on American policy came from General Smedley D. Butler, the most decorated marine of his generation, in an article he wrote for the magazine Common Sense in 1935:
I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. 1 helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903…. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.130
This would always be the most damaging allegation against American imperialism: that for all its high-minded statements of intent, it boiled down to a Wall Street racket.
And what of Mexico, which had inspired Wilson’s doctrine of democratic intervention? In 1914 American patience with the Huerta regime ran out, and a small force of marines was sent to seize control of the key port and oil terminal of Veracruz and prevent the importation of German arms. Doubly beset by U.S.-backed rebel forces and a tax strike by the U.S. oil companies, Huerta resigned, surrendering power to the rebel leader Venustiano Carranza.131 The Carranza regime was nothing if not a product of American policy. Yet within two years the United States acted in a way that seemed calculated to undermine Carranza’s authority, by sending American troops across the Mexican border in pursuit of Pancho Villa, a former Carranza ally turned renegade.132 Before long General John J. Pershing’s “punitive expedition” was deep inside Mexican territory, failing to find Villa, but skirmishing with the regular Mexican Army.133 Alarmed at the prospect of a full-scale American-Mexican war, Wilson drew back, and Pershing was forced to “sneak home under cover like a whipped cur with his tail between his legs.”134 Not for the last time in its history, the United States had embarked on a manhunt, had failed to catch the man and had ended up alienating an erstwhile ally.135 The endemic violence of Mexican politics meanwhile continued unabated.136 And before long a new and portentous word began to be applied to the heirs of the Mexican Revolution: American observers began to detect symptoms of the “Bolshevik virus” (though at this stage the influence of nationalists like Carlos Calvo was unquestionably greater than that of Lenin).137 Article 27 of the new Mexican Constitution of 1917 asserted that all subterranean mineral rights belonged to the Mexican nation, posing an implicit threat of nationalization to American oil companies.138 It was bad enough that Smedley Butler had tried to “make Mexico… safe for American oil interests in 1914.” What was perhaps worse was the possibility that he might have failed.
“We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people,” Herman Melville wrote in White Jacket, “the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of liberties of the world.”139 In the course of the twentieth century American leaders were to resort ever more frequently to such biblical language in their efforts to dignify, if not to sanctify, U.S. foreign policy. In doing so, they were following the example of earlier empire builders, not least McKinley. The extension of American values, both economic and political, beyond the frontiers of the United States seemed as much a matter of “manifest destiny” as the expansion of the frontier itself. Yet there was a chronic problem of execution. The farther into the tropics the United States sought to reach, the weaker its grip proved to be. The “empire of liberty” plainly had much to offer places like Cuba, Nicaragua and Mexico, to say nothing of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. But the will to make them permanent components of a greater American Republic turned out to be lacking; Hawaii and Puerto Rico alone were retained, not least because they were the most docile of the candidates for colonial status. The rest were offered a combination of sermons about political and fiscal rectitude and occasional military raids. The discrepancy between high-minded ends and means—“shoot[ing] men… till they learn to vote and to rule themselves”—was perfectly encapsulated in Mexico. The antics of General Pershing, as he galloped around Mexico in an obsessive pursuit of Pancho Villa, resembled nothing more than a burlesque of Melville’s Moby Dick—without the final, climactic confrontati
on.