U. S.

Foreign Policy, 1901-1941

Kyle Wilkison
United States foreign policy between 1901 and 1941 can be characterized as
generally confident, sometimes aggressive and, occasionally, even
cautious. The first twenty years of the century saw the U.S. leadership pursue
confidently interventionist strategies in dealing with other countries. The
next decade-a-half witnessed a clear modification toward cautious nonentanglement if not outright isolationism. With the election of Franklin
Roosevelt to the White House a gap grew between the isolationist American
public and an increasingly internationalist policy. This gap temporarily
disappeared with Japans attack on Pearl Harbor and Americas entry into
World War II.

Period of Confident Intervention, 1901-1919

Theodore Roosevelts arrival as president could not have been less
auspicious, coming as it did at the hands of an assassin who ended the life of
President William McKinley. While others may have doubted Roosevelt's
abilities, the new president gave no indications that such doubts ever troubled
his over-sized self-confidence.
He moved aggressively to realize the long-held U.S. goal of building (and
controlling) an inter-oceanic canal through Central America. For U.S. policymakers the best choice lay through the northern end of the Republic of Colombia;
the Colombian government, however, proved resistant to the notion of surrendering
territory to the American government. Roosevelt promptly supported a highly
suspect independence movement within the northernmost Colombian state of
Panama and hastily recognized the government of a pro-canal American
sympathizer there. Panama began its fight for independence from Colombia on
November 3, 1903. Read the preamble and first three articles of the Hay-BunauVarilla Treaty granting the U.S. the rights to the Panama Canal. Note the date the
treaty was originally negotiated as well as the remarkable statement in Article I.
Alarmed at the prospect of European intervention in the internal affairs of Latin
American nations, Roosevelt also toughened and extended the historic Monroe
Doctrine (1824) with his Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. After
clicking on the following link, first read the editors note then scroll down and read
the text of the "Roosevelt Corollary" as delivered to Congress in 1904. (See the
section entitled "Policy Toward Other Nations of the Western Hemisphere.") What
did Roosevelt promise would happen if Latin American countries invited foreign
aggression? What assumptions does he make regarding the relative status of the
U.S. in comparison with its Latin American neighbors?

Roosevelt further confidently intervened in world affairs by practicing a unique

form of presidential diplomacy. In 1905 he personally led negotiations to end a war
between Japan and Russia, resulting in his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
A year later he successfully handled a similarly explosive colonial conflict between
France and Germany. Overall, Roosevelt sought to strengthen the U.S. Navy and
solidify previous gains in the Pacific.
His successor, President William Howard Taft, more or less continued the
Roosevelt strategy, minus some of the bluster and impetuousness. Generally aimed
at protecting American corporate interests around the globe, Taft called his
policy "Dollar Diplomacy."
President Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy was much like his predecessors but
informed more by paternalism than aggressiveness and opportunism. Much of
Wilsons concerns focused on Asia where the rising Japanese Empire competed
with the old European empires for dominance in China. Seeking to maintain an
open door for American trade with China, Wilson, like both his predecessors and
successors in the White House, struggled to balance the dangers of either European
or Japanese dominance in that region.
Wilson preferred to characterize his Roosevelt Corollary style interventions as
being in the best interest of the particular Latin American nation involved. Often
that conveniently mirrored U.S. commercial interests. Such was the case in
revolutionary Mexico where American investors (mainly oil companies) owned
over forty percent of the nations property, according to diplomatic historian Walter
LaFeber. Convinced that Mexico and her neighbors needed to be properly
directed toward stability, if not democracy, Wilson sent to or retained U.S. troops
in Mexico, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Cuba and Nicaragua. The largest such operation
involved General John J. Pershings 6,000 troops fruitlessly pursuing Mexican
revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa across northern Mexico, 1916-1917.
In early 1917 Wilson pulled Pershing and his troops out of Mexico for an even
greater act of confident intervention to make the world safe for democracy with
U.S. entry into World War I. Despite Wilsons hopeful Fourteen Points and his
proposed peace-keeping League of Nations, the U.S. Senate chose not to allow
American membership in the League by refusing to ratify the Treaty of
Versailles. Driven by a variety of motives, the Senate was at least partially
responding to a new sense caution among influential Americans.

Period of Cautious Non-entanglement, 1920-1937

Traditionally historians have assigned the label of isolationist to American
foreign policy in the 1920s and early 1930s. Clearly the mood of the American
people became more and more isolationist as the years went by. The decision to
reject the League of Nations certainly gave the appearance that U.S. policy was

isolationist, as well. Yet, recent historians have emphasized the continued role
America played in world affairs. What best describes the policy of the period,
then, is cautious non-entanglement. Policymakers sought not isolation but a free
hand to operate, according to diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber. Two notable
foreign policy achievements from the era tend to bolster this view.
The Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22 sought to slow the rise of the
intense rivalry between the great Pacific powers. President Warren G. Hardings
Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes shocked the international gathering of
diplomats by announcing that Britain, Japan and the U.S.should each scrap dozens
of warships to end the dangerous Pacific arms race. The resulting treaty probably
did stabilize the region temporarily; however, the Japanese were not as pleased
with the outcome of the treaty as were the British and Americans, a circumstance
that would come back to haunt the Pacific rim years later.
The Herbert Hoover Administrations Kellogg-Briand Pact serves as another good
example of the hit-and-run diplomacy that characterized the 1920s. The
ambitious Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) outlawed war by having each of the
eventually five dozen signatory nations promise never to wage offensive war
against each other. All of the major belligerent powers of the Second World War
signed this document. Notice that Kellogg-Briand was not an isolationist
document and that the U.S. took the lead in negotiating it. Yet, unlike the League
of Nations, this pact required no definite commitment, no continuous engagement
(entanglement) on Americas part.

The dangerous 1930s

The international economic collapse of the 1930s helped to create an ever more
dangerous world. Beginning in the 1920s, totalitarian fascist parties rose to power
throughout Europe promising both economic resurgence and protection from the
communists. Benito Mussolini in Italy, Adolf Hitler in Germany and Francisco
Franco in Spain each rose to power by exploiting fears of the left. In the case of
Germany and Italy, a combination of calculation, ideology and megalomaniacal
leadership would drive those nations toward ever more explosive confrontations
with nearby states. Meanwhile, a similarly militaristic coterie gained power in
Japan and set that increasingly powerful nation down the path of imperialism.
The American publics steady isolationism received a huge boost from the
sensational Nye Committee findings. Sen. Gerald P. Nye investigated the role of
business in bringing America into World War I. His committees reports,
especially as simplified and exaggerated by the media, strengthened the public's
determination to never be misled into another foreign war. Catching the public
mood, the Congress responded with the Neutrality Acts of the late1930s. In their
various versions the laws forbade American businesses from loaning money to,
selling war material to or carrying goods aboard American ships to nation's at war.

The last few years of the 1930s, then, saw a battle for public opinion between
President Franklin D. Roosevelt who watched the rise of fascism in Europe with
growing alarm and zealous isolationists just as strongly committed to making sure
America stayed out of European conflicts.

Franklin Roosevelts Struggle to Return to Internationalism, 19371941

The American people remained staunchly isolationist although the president tried
to rouse them with the famously cautionary "Quarantine speech" of 1937.
Meantime, facing equally ant-war public sentiment, the governments of Britain and
France charted a diplomatic path of appeasement in order to keep peace with
Hitler. The low point of this policy of appeasement arrived with the Munich Peace
Conference with Hitler, 1938. Desperately gambling for peace at any price, the
British and French countenanced the take-over of western Czechoslovakia under
the terms of the Munich treaty. The folly of appeasement became undeniably clear
the following year when Hitler's war machine roared into Germany's neighbor to
the east, Poland, starting World War II in Europe.
At first Roosevelt proclaimed U.S. neutrality while doing what he could to assist
the French and British. In 1939 the president persuaded the Congress to pass the
"cash and carry" amendment to the earlier, tougher neutrality laws preventing the
U.S. from getting any material to the Allies. Then, as the rest of the world looked
on in shock, the Germans (having already disposed of Poland and Belgium)
knocked France completely out of the war in June of 1940. Realizing that Britain
stood alone against the Nazis in Europe, under Roosevelt's leadership U. S.
"neutrality" became "measures short of war." Just after the fall of France,
Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed an agreement to
lease British naval bases in the Caribbean to the U.S. in exchange for fifty older
American naval destroyers in the so-called "bases for destroyers deal." Early the
following year (1941) FDR managed to get appropriations through the Congress
for a "Lend-lease" program to funnel war supplies to the British. In June, 1941,
the Germans made the unwise decision to attack the Soviet Union, thus bringing
the Red Army into the war against Hitler. Thereafter, both the British and Russian
war efforts benefited from America's "Lend-lease" assistance. A few weeks after
Germany widened the war to include the Russians, Roosevelt and Churchill met
and signed the Atlantic Charter, a most remarkable step for a "neutral" nation. The
Charter outlined America's overall attachment to the ideal of self-determination
and freedom but more pointedly declared that the "disarmament of [aggressor]
nations is essential." The leaders signed the Charter in August, the same month
that a poll showed that less than twenty percent of the American people supported
entering the war. Yet, more telling, that same month nearly seventy percent
reported being "willing to risk war with Japan" rather than allow the Japanese
Pacific expansion continue unchecked. The Japanese High Command would
provide the final decisive event with the surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Afterward, President Roosevelt led a

determinedly unified people to war.