Global Disorder
Herbert Hoover was the last American president to take office with no conspicuous need to pay attention to the rest of the world. Europe was convalescing. Asia was dormant. “It seems to me,” he told his secretary of state, Henry Stimson, as they began to work together, “that there is the most profound outlook for peace today that we have had at any time in the last half century.” But Hoover was not a lucky president. While grappling with the Great Depression, he had the misfortune of encountering a second crisis on his watch: the breakdown of the world order created at Versailles.
Aghast at the prospect of a return to the carnage in the trenches, statesmen in the period after the Great War had negotiated a number of accords. British prime minister Stanley Baldwin asked, “Who in Europe does not know that one more war in the West and the civilization of the ages will fall with as great a shock as that of Rome?” The Nine-Power Treaty of 1922 pledged signatories—among them Japan—to respect the territorial integrity of China, and committed them, if an alleged violation arose, to engage in “full and frank” discussion. Considerably more encompassing, at least in its pretension, was the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. In putting their names to this multilateral treaty, the nations of the world—almost all of them—pledged to renounce war “as an instrument of national policy” and to settle “all … conflicts of whatever
nature” amicably. Just two problems: the Nine-Power Treaty and accompanying naval agreements had no provision for inspection, the Kellogg-Briand Pact no mechanism for enforcement.
These deficiencies did not trouble Hoover in the least, for he was convinced that moral suasion would deter aggressors and that it was “contrary to the … best judgment of the United States to build peace on military sanctions.” Indeed, he believed that the New World had a calling to teach that lesson to the Old. On Armistice Day, November 11, 1929, Hoover declared that “the European nations have, by the covenant of the League of Nations, agreed that if nations failed to settle their differences peaceably then force should be applied … . We have refused to travel this road. We are confident that at least in the Western hemisphere public opinion will suffice to check violence. This is the road we prepare to travel.” Hoover had no perception of how fragile was the fabric of this “parchment peace.”
Earlier in 1929, a squabble between China and the Soviet Union had exposed the Alice-in-Wonderland universe in which the Hoover administration conducted diplomacy. Stimson feared that the dispute would result in war, but he could not ask the League of Nations to resolve it because the United States was not a member. (Nor was the USSR.) The Nine-Power Treaty was inapplicable since Russia had not been a party to that agreement. So Stimson turned to the weak reed of the Kellogg-Briand Pact as a medium for admonishing the two powers, only to realize that he could not send a note to Moscow because the United States refused to recognize the Soviet regime.
Hoover sought to introduce rationality into international affairs by curbing expensive arms races—with the initial steps taken at a conference of five great powers in London in 1930. After three months of discussion, the parties agreed to scuttle some battleships and halt construction of capital ships for five years; safeguard merchant vessels from undersea attacks; and cap the tonnage of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines—the first time auxiliary vessels had ever been restricted. The historian Arnold Toynbee categorized the
treaty as the “great outstanding international success of the year 1930.”
In fact, the London conference fell far short of “success.” When neither Hoover nor the British would agree to a consultative pact if France were attacked, the French bolted, as did the Italians—so the treaty was only a three-power document. Its main consequence was to strengthen chauvinism in Japan. Though the Japanese delegates extracted concessions on lesser vessels, they reaffirmed a 5–5–3 ratio for Britain, America, and Japan on capital ships. Hence, in signing the pact, they were acknowledging that in the most critical area their country was not the equal of the two great Western powers. When Admiral Takeshi Takarabe returned to Japan, a political science student went to his home, read a protest against the treaty, then drew out a hidden dagger and committed hara-kiri. That fall a young fanatic shot Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi.
Despite the shortcomings of the London meetings, Hoover had nearly visionary expectations of the World Disarmament Conference that convened in Geneva early in 1932. (Disarmament was an extravagant term for arms reduction.) He urged a one-third cutback in “armies in excess of the level required to preserve internal order,” as well as “abolition of certain ‘aggressive’ arms”; advocated cuts of 25 percent in aircraft carriers, cruisers, and destroyers, and of 33 percent in battleships and submarines; and demanded the elimination of tanks, poison gas, bombers, and heavy mobile artillery. Hoover thought that outlawing tanks would help national economies by cutting needless expenses. In scolding France for devoting a large proportion of its budget to arms, Hoover was looking only at cost sheets with no sensitivity to why the French, having twice within memory been invaded from the east, might think it prudent to erect defenses against the prospect of a resurgent Germany—particularly since Nazis had made alarming gains in recent elections. When Hoover left office, the delegates had gotten nowhere. The Geneva conference, wrote the diplomatic historian Robert Ferrell later, was “an unmitigated nuisance.”
The president felt more in his element in the Western Hemisphere. On November 19, 1928, only two weeks after the election, he set off on a voyage of friendship to ten Latin American nations. From Amapala, Honduras, to Montevideo, Uruguay, he repeatedly expressed his desire to be a “good neighbor”—more than four years before FDR used that phrase. In Nicaragua, Hoover told the leaders of two hostile factions that he planned to end Uncle Sam’s military presence in their country. Holding true to that pledge, he refused to send forces into the interior—even when incursions by the anti-American rebel August Sandino, who Hoover thought “a bandit beyond the pale,” took American lives. On January 2, 1933, the last detachment of marines pulled out of Nicaragua.
Hoover’s policies implied a revised conception of the Monroe Doctrine. This reconsideration had been foreshadowed shortly before he took office in a memorandum prepared by Undersecretary of State J. Reuben Clark repudiating the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, which justified intervention in Latin American republics guilty of “chronic wrongdoing.” The Monroe Doctrine, Stimson declared, was a “declaration of the U.S. versus Europe—not of the U.S. versus Latin America.” Rejecting Wilson’s requirement that governments must meet certain moral standards in order to be granted recognition, Hoover dealt with any de facto regime that established its authority.
The more than twenty insurrections that erupted in Latin America during Hoover’s four years strongly tested his resolve. So, too, did regimes that repeatedly angered U.S. investors by defaulting on bonds. But Hoover, for the most part, exercised restraint. His administration recognized an insurgent junta in Bolivia despite its anti-American tendencies, and when the U.S. minister to Costa Rica, in the midst of an uprising, asked for two warships, he was turned down. Hoover did not even blink an eye when a revolution flared up in Panama near the indispensable canal. Mundo al Día of Bogotá rejoiced that the Monroe Doctrine, “a historical relic,” had
become no more than an “irritating anachronism,” and La Prensa in Buenos Aires commented, “Mr. Hoover differs from other American Presidents in not proclaiming any God-given mission over the rest of the continent.”
Neither Hoover nor the State Department wholly abandoned paternalism, however. Historians have made more of the Clark memorandum, which got little notice during his presidency, than Hoover did. On three occasions the Hoover administration used the threat of intervention to compel Dominican leaders to behave, and Stimson, at one point, referred to Bolivia and Paraguay as “those two little nonsensical republics.” Early in his presidency, Hoover resolved to end U.S. control of Haiti as well, but he could not quite pull it off. The State Department dragged its feet, and the Haitian national assembly unanimously rejected a treaty that retained some American financial authority. Hoover did replace the U.S. military commissioner with a civilian and in other actions speeded withdrawal. But when he left office, American troops still garrisoned Haiti. As a consequence, Franklin Roosevelt got the credit for terminating the occupation, though Hoover had gone a long way toward making that possible.
By recognizing despots who repressed dissent, Hoover eliminated any need for intervention in civil strife and fostered a business climate congenial to American investors. In El Salvador, following an army coup that provoked what Stimson termed “a rather nasty proletarian revolution,” Hoover sent three warships to support the government, which enjoyed his backing even after it massacred thirty thousand peasants. In Nicaragua, Stimson endorsed the strongman Anastasio Somoza, who was friendly toward U.S. corporations in the banana republic. (In 1934, during FDR’s presidency, Somoza arranged for the cold-blooded murder of Sandino, and as late as 1979 the Somoza family was still running Nicaragua as a fiefdom—with U.S. acquiescence.) Ironically, Nicaragua had free elections just once—when marines, agents of the overbearing yanquis, monitored polling places. Liberals, who had been vocal opponents of imperialism, wound up finding fault with Hoover not for
meddling, but for failing to take advantage of American might to dislodge brutal dictators.
The president met with only partial success south of the border. The Hawley-Smoot tariff engendered bitter resentment, and intellectuals raged against the financial towers of Manhattan. Latin America would be better off, said a Mexican philosopher, “if the blast of a cataclysm should sweep away the skyscrapers and the Island were to return to the ploughing of its smiling meadows in the period of the Dutch engravings.” Yet Hoover’s policies did mark a departure. If he was not the creator of the Good Neighbor Policy, he was, at least, its godfather.
Hoover found Asia much more difficult terrain. Though the United States was committed to preserving the territorial integrity of China, he shared the sentiments of a friend who wrote him, “I think the Japs are our first line of the defense in the Far East; and I am certainly glad they are well armed.” Hoover looked much less favorably on China, for which he had developed contempt in his mining days, than on Japan—an advanced industrial country that could impose order on the fractious Orient. It was not unreasonable, he told his cabinet, for the Japanese to believe that they needed to safeguard their land from “a Bolshevist Russia to the north and a possible Bolshevist China” to the west.
A clash between Japanese and Chinese soldiers north of Mukden in Manchuria on the night of September 18, 1931, has come to be perceived as the opening shot of World War II—much like Sarajevo in 1914—but initially neither Hoover nor anyone else saw reason for concern. Details were murky, and the conflict over the South Manchurian Railway Line did not measure up to a clear-cut invasion of China by Japan: the Chinese had not established sovereignty over the region, and the Japanese owned the railroad. Furthermore, since Japan regarded this area as within its sphere of influence—much as Western powers laid claim to the Caribbean—the United States could view the episode from the perspective of
realpolitik. “President Hoover and his Cabinet were becoming more and more absorbed in the domestic economic situation,” an American diplomat later recalled. “They felt very sincerely that it was no time for the Chinese to be shrieking bloody murder under their windows.”
Not until Japan moved toward devouring all of Manchuria did Hoover recognize that “the Mukden incident” had evolved into “the Far Eastern Crisis,” and even then he moved circumspectly. With militarists poised to take over the government in Tokyo, Stimson concluded that “the situation is in the hands of virtually mad dogs,” but Hoover counseled forbearing. His years in Asia had taught him that China swallows its invaders—or disgorges them. Instead of threatening economic sanctions, he favored assuring Tokyo that they would not be imposed, because he did not want to do anything that might bolster Japanese jingos. Boycott, he believed, was “the surest way into war.”
The Manchurian quagmire offered by far the greatest challenge that had ever been posed to the Versailles system, but the Western powers showed no disposition to take it on. Suspecting that the League of Nations—and more particularly Britain and France—wanted to burden the United States with the responsibility of confronting Japan, both Hoover and Stimson were determined not to permit “anybody to deposit that baby on our lap.” The president did authorize the American consul at Geneva, Prentiss Gilbert, to be an observer when the League Council discussed Manchuria, but Gilbert’s participation was as rigidly prescribed as that of a thespian in a tableau. After first instructing Gilbert to hunker along the wall, Stimson relented and let him sit at “the damned table,” but he was still ordered to “keep his mouth shut.”
Unwilling to approve either military or economic sanctions, Hoover still sought some way to compel Tokyo to relent. In November 1931 he proposed to Stimson an announcement that the United States would not recognize any territorial acquisition resulting from aggression—an idea borrowed from former secretary of state William Jennings Bryan, who had first employed the tactic
in response to a Japanese ultimatum to China in 1915. Subjected to “the searchlight of public opinion” and to “moral influence,” Japan, Hoover explained, would be told that if she did not desist, “she’ll be an outlaw nation.”
In January 1932 Stimson, with Hoover’s approval, sent identical notes to Japan and China announcing that the American government did not “intend to recognize any … agreement … which may impair the treaty rights of the United States or its citizens in China, including those which relate to the … territorial … integrity of the Republic of China, or to … the open door policy.” Nor did it “intend to recognize any … agreement … brought about by means contrary to the covenants” of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Thus was born what came to be known as the “Stimson Doctrine.”
Stimson underscored this message with public letters in February and September to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William Borah, and in August with an address to the Council on Foreign Relations. In his first communication to Borah, he stated that if Japan persisted in violating the Washington treaties of 1922, including the Nine-Power Pact, the United States would no longer be bound by any commitments it had made in these agreements and would feel free to fortify bases in the western Pacific and to enlarge its navy.
The Stimson Doctrine has had a curious afterlife. Hoover subsequently wrote that Stimson was more a “warrior than a diplomat,” and Stimson asserted that Hoover had been enfeebled by his Quaker upbringing. But both men—and the historians who followed these leads—were exaggerating their differences. The secretary of state was more willing than the president to try to bluff the Japanese by threats and to give some consideration to sanctions, but neither favored unilateral steps that might lead to war. Partisans also differed over authorship of the nonrecognition notes, which Hoover claimed “would take rank with the greatest papers of this country.” His champions contended that, given the president’s role in their origin, the appropriate nomenclature was “the
Hoover-Stimson Doctrine.” Ironically, they were bickering over which man deserved “credit” for a procedure that was a manifest failure. The Japanese treated Stimson’s protest with contempt.
The bankruptcy of policy in Asia provides an important explanation for why a 2007 poll of more than one thousand international relations faculty across the United States and Canada ranked Hoover as the worst president of the twentieth century on foreign affairs. By failing to draw the line in Manchuria, historians have said, he gave aggressors in Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo a green light. He had floated into office on a sea of tranquillity and departed with Adolf Hitler in power, the Reichstag in ashes, and the Japanese careening unhindered down the road that would dead-end at Pearl Harbor. Hoover has even been accused of paving the way to World War II.
This arraignment is tendentious, even overwrought. True, Hoover did not do well abroad. On one occasion, Stimson noted in his diary, “The President is so absorbed with the domestic situation that he told me frankly that he can’t think very much now of foreign affairs.” Hoover’s concentration on economic considerations—almost to the total exclusion of political and strategic concerns—was myopic, and his reliance on public opinion as a deterrent was naive. Yet no president during the interwar years—no matter how internationalist his perspective—could diverge very far from the ingrained and all but immobilizing isolationism of the American people, as Franklin Roosevelt was to discover. (More generous than some scholars, FDR thought “old Hoover’s foreign policy has been pretty good.”) Disillusioned by participation in the Great War, battered by the Great Depression, the nation would never have supported a war on behalf of Manchuria.
Furthermore, narrow though his conception of foreign policy was, Hoover had good reason to be engrossed in economic predicaments—especially a financial meltdown in the heart of Europe. On May 11, 1931, Kreditanstalt, the greatest bank in Austria, buckled. The announcement from Vienna that the mainstay of the valley of the Danube had been drained of its resources sent shock waves through Mitteleuropa. German president Paul
von Hindenburg, fearful that cascading bank failures would precipitate a Communist or Fascist coup in his country, sent a personal plea to the American leader. “All possibilities of improving the situation by domestic measures without relief from abroad are exhausted,” he wrote Hoover. With major U.S. banks having invested close to half their capital in German securities, Wall Street became frantic. “Apprehension,” Hoover later said, “began to run like mercury through the financial world.” Hoover’s own mood, Stimson noted, was “pure indigo.” After one White House meeting, the secretary of state set down in his diary: “The President … went through all the blackest surmises … . It was like sitting in a bath of ink to sit in his room.”
Hoover, however, rebounded with the boldest initiative of his presidency. On June 20, 1931, at a time when J. P. Morgan was saying that the American government needed to toss “a life-saver for the world,” Hoover recommended a one-year moratorium on payment of the war debts European powers owed the United States, with the understanding that during this period they, in turn, would suspend collection of the annual reparations from Germany imposed at Versailles. He embarked on this course despite strenuous opposition from Secretary of the Treasury Mellon and warnings that he was encroaching on the constitutional prerogatives of Congress. “This is perhaps the most daring statement I ever thought of issuing,” he confided to his press secretary. To supplement his action on intergovernmental debts, Hoover also dragooned bankers into accepting a “standstill” agreement that they would not, for a time, demand payment on private loans to Germans.
Though Hoover’s endeavor earned him plaudits in unlikely quarters, it failed to stanch the crumpling of the international financial system. The Nation, often unfriendly to Hoover, called his intervention “probably … the most far-reaching and … praiseworthy step taken by an American President since the treaty of peace.” With a vigor Washington had not seen from him before, Hoover pressed members of both parties to support the moratorium. “For the first time since he has been president,” Senator Norris said, “he has communicated
with me.” But in July the second biggest bank in Germany folded, and in September, to Hoover’s consternation, Great Britain abandoned the gold standard.
London’s momentous decision had serious repercussions across the Atlantic. At a time when America badly needed anti-deflationary measures, the Fed abruptly tightened credit in order to halt the flow of gold out of the country, and the president’s determination to slash government spending drastically became an obsession. Hoover had hoped that the moratorium would win a year “to help free the recuperative forces already in motion in the United States from retarding influences abroad.” The main impact of the Kreditanstalt crisis, however, was not that it led to Hoover’s commendable engagement abroad, but that it rigidified government policies, worsening the Great Depression at home.