Transcript Safe for Democracy: The United States and World War I

Chapter 19
Safe for Democracy:
The United States and World War I, 1916–1920.
PART 1 (through the end of WW1)
The United States and World War I, 1916–1920
• The Spanish-American War made the United States an
international empire. America’s empire was not territorial
so much as it was economic and cultural. By 1914, the
year World War I began, the United States made more
than a third of the world’s manufactured goods, and its
steel, oil, agricultural equipment and consumer goods
inundated European markets.
The United States and World War I, 1916–1920
• America’s increasing economic and cultural connections
with the world led to elevated American military and
political involvement. Between 1900 and 1920, many of
the principles that guided American foreign policy for the
rest of the twentieth century were formed, such as the
“open door” policy that American trade, investment,
information, and culture should flow freely to other
nations and markets. Americans discussed their
foreign policy in terms of freedom.
The United States and World War I, 1916–1920
• Rhetorically, this was expressed in a widespread belief
that America spread its power and influence in the world
not out of narrow economic or strategic interests, but to
promote universal ideals of liberty and democracy.
Woodrow Wilson and his policy of “liberal
internationalism” best represented this tendency, as
Wilson believed that political freedoms would follow
wherever American trade and investment flowed. World
War I became the test for Wilson’s ideas and the
Progressives who supported him and sought to make the
war an opportunity to reform America and the world.
Map 19.3 Colonial Possessions, 1900
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
An Era of Intervention: “I Took the Canal Zone.”
• Progressive-Era presidents who expanded government
power at home did so abroad as well. Initially, their
interventions occurred in the *Western Hemisphere*,
which the United States had made its *sphere to
oversee in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823*. Between
1901 and 1920, U.S. Marines landed in Caribbean
countries more than twenty times, usually to secure a
better economic environment for American companies
that wanted safe access to raw materials or bankers who
wanted to ensure that loans were repaid.
An Era of Intervention: “I Took the Canal Zone.”
• Roosevelt divided the world into “civilized” and
“uncivilized” nations, and he believed the former were
obliged to establish order in a chaotic world. Roosevelt
was far more engaged in international diplomacy than
his predecessors, and while he disclaimed any American
interest in acquiring overseas territory, he ordered
*multiple interventions in Central America*. His first
major action was engineering the *separation of
Panama from Colombia in order to build a canal
linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.*
An Era of Intervention: “I Took the Canal
Zone.”
In 1903, when Colombia refused to cede land for the canal,
*Roosevelt helped to launch an uprising in Panama*,
and he deployed American gunboats to prevent the
Colombian army from suppressing it. Having secured
Panamanian independence and a treaty giving the United
States the right to construct and operate a canal and
sovereignty over the Canal Zone, Roosevelt launched
one of the greatest construction and engineering projects in
history. “I took the Canal Zone,” he later exclaimed. The
project, finished in 1914, facilitated American and world
trade by drastically cutting shipping times.
Map 19.1 The United States in The Caribbean, 1898-1934
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Map 19.2 The Panama Canal Lone
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
An Era of Intervention: The Roosevelt Corollary
• *Roosevelt’s **interventionist foreign policy** came
to be known as the **Roosevelt Corollary** to the
Monroe Doctrine*. This policy expressed the right of
the United States to exercise “*an international
police power*” in the Western Hemisphere, allowing
it, not just to prevent European intervention in the
Americas, as the Monroe Doctrine specified, but also
**forcibly to intervene whenever it deemed it
necessary**
An Era of Intervention: The Roosevelt Corollary
• Roosevelt feared that financial instability in the Americas
simply invited European powers to intervene whenever
they felt their investments were threatened. So, in 1904,
Roosevelt invaded the Dominican Republic to ensure
that its customs houses repaid debts to European and
American investors. In 1906, he sent troops to Cuba to
ensure stability after a disputed election; they stayed
until 1909.
An Era of Intervention: President Taft and ‘Dollar Diplomacy’
• Even President William Howard Taft sent Marines to
Nicaragua to protect a government friendly to American
economic interests, but he emphasized **economic
investment and loans from banks*,* rather than
direct military intervention, as the best means to
spread American influence. This policy, known as
*Dollar Diplomacy*, took shape in Taft’s efforts to
shape the economies of Honduras, Nicaragua, the
Dominican Republic, and even Liberia.
An Era of Intervention: Moral Imperialism
• The highly moralistic Woodrow Wilson brought a
missionary zeal and sense of his own and America’s
righteousness to foreign policy. He repudiated Taft’s
Dollar Diplomacy and promised to respect Latin
American independence and free it from economic
domination. But Wilson believed the United States had a
duty to instruct other nations in democracy and that
American exports and investments spread American
political ideals
An Era of Intervention: Moral Imperialism
• For Wilson, American economic influence
served a purpose higher than profit, and
his “moral imperialism” made for more
military interventions than any president
before or since. He sent Marines to Haiti in
1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916
to protect American financial interests;
they stayed in the latter country until 1924,
and in the former, until 1934.
An Era of Intervention: Wilson and Mexico
• Woodrow Wilson was most involved in Mexico, where a
1911 revolution led by Francisco Madero overthrew
Porfirio Diaz’s longstanding dictatorship. In 1913,
without Wilson’s knowledge but with the support of the
U.S. ambassador and America companies controlling
Mexico’s oil and mines, military commander Victoriano
Huerta assassinated Madero and seized power. Wilson
was outraged, would not extend recognition, and vowed
to *“teach” Latin Americans “to elect good men.”*
When civil war erupted and Wilson sent troops to
Vera Cruz to prevent arms shipments, they were met
as invaders and attacked by Mexican troops
Woodrow Wilson and Intervention in Mexico
• In 1916, after Mexican troops led by
Pancho Villa killed Americans in a New
Mexico town close to the border,
Wilson ordered 10,000 American troops
to invade northern Mexico to
apprehend Villa.
America and the Great War: Wilson, Neutrality and Preparedness
• *In June 1914, the assassination in Bosnia of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, started a chain of events
that engulfed Europe in the most devastating war the
world had yet seen.*
America and the Great War: Wilson, Neutrality and Preparedness
• After initial German victories, the war became mired in a
long stalemate of bloody and indecisive battles. New
technologies, such as submarines, airplanes,
machine guns, tanks, and poison gas, produced
unprecedented slaughter. In the five-month battle of
Verdun in 1916, some 600,000 French and German
soldiers died.
America and the Great War: Wilson, Neutrality and Preparedness
• 10 million soldiers and uncounted civilians, perished in
the conflict, which was immediately followed by a global
influenza epidemic that killed 21 million more.
• The Great War inflicted a blow on the optimism and selfconfidence of western civilization, whose philosophers
and statesmen had long celebrated reason and
progress.
• The war also shocked the socialist and labor
movements, which had valued international workingclass solidarity over nationalism, only to see workers of
different nations kill each other for their national
governments.
America and the Great War: Wilson, Neutrality and Preparedness
• **Americans were deeply divided over the war.**
• Many Americans sided with Britain, associating it with
liberty and democracy and Germany with repressive and
aristocratic government. Others, particularly German
and Irish-Americans, opposed supporting the British.
Immigrants from Russia, especially Jews, also did not
want America to support Russia and its czar, and the
despotic Russia’s alliance with Britain and France made
it hard to believe that the war was a conflict between
democracy and autocracy
• Many feminists, pacifists, and social reformers believed
peace was necessary for reform at home, and they
opposed American involvement.
America and the Great War: Wilson, Neutrality and Preparedness
• Wilson at first proclaimed U.S. neutrality, but naval
warfare disrupted American commerce and threatened
America’s neutral stance.
• In May 1914, German submarines sank the British liner
*Lusitania*, killing nearly 1,200 passengers, including
124 Americans.
• Wilson protested strongly, and Americans were outraged,
giving support to those who urged America to prepare for
war. Advocates of preparedness including Theodore
Roosevelt and businessmen with ties to Britain,
America’s greatest trading partner and recipient of more
than $2 billion in wartime loans from U.S. banks. Wilson
was strongly pro-British and called Germany a natural
enemy of liberty, and by the end of 1915 ordered
preparedness to begin.
America and the Great War: The Road to War
• In May 1916, Wilson’s preparedness policy seemed to
have worked, as Germany suspended submarine
warfare against noncombatants, allowing Americans to
trade and travel freely without requiring military action.
•
• “He kept us out of the war” became Wilson’s
campaign slogan in the 1916 presidential election.
America and the Great War: The Road to War
• In fact, Wilson acted quickly. On January 22, 1917,
Wilson called for “peace without victory” in Europe,
and expressed his vision of a world order including
freedom of the seas, restrictions on armaments, and
self-determination for all nations, large and small.
• However, Germany soon *resumed its submarine
warfare against ships sailing to or from Great Britain
and sunk several American merchant ships,
gambling that it could starve Britain into submission
before America intervened militarily.*
America and the Great War: The Road to War
• Also, in March 1917, British spies made public the
**Zimmermann Telegram**, a message by German
foreign secretary Arthur Zimmerman to Mexico
asking it to declare war against the United States
and regain its territory lost in the Mexican War.
• So on April 2, 1917, President Wilson asked the
Congress to declare war against Germany (which it did
with a small minority of dissenters), in order to make the
world “safe for democracy.”
America and the Great War: The Fourteen Points
• By the spring of 1918, when American troops arrived in
Europe, the communist revolution led by Vladimir Lenin
in Russia the previous November had led to the
withdrawal of Russia from the war.
America and the Great War: The Fourteen Points
• In January 1918, Wilson reassured the public that the
war was a righteous cause by issuing the Fourteen
Points, stating war aims and providing his vision of a
new international order. This involved 1- selfdetermination for all nations, 2- freedom of the seas,
3- free trade, 4-open diplomacy, 5- the adjustment of
colonial claims with the colonized, and 6-the
establishment of a “general association of nations”
to preserve peace.
• Wilson believed this organization, which became the
*League of Nations*, would act like the kinds of
commissions Progressives had established in America
for ensuring social harmony and protecting the weak.
America and the Great War: The Fourteen Points
• By September 1917, nearly 1 million
Americans helped turn the tide of the war
and pushed German forces in retreat. On
November 9, the German kaiser abdicated
the throne, and two days later, Germany
sued for peace. Over 100,000 Americans
died, only 1 percent of the 10 million killed
in the war.
Map 19.4 World War I: The Western Front
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company