The Federal Reserve Act was signed at six o’clock in the evening on December 23, and by ten, Wilson and his family (minus Jessie, who had just married) were aboard a train bound for Pass Christian, Mississippi. Congress adjourned, and the president was at last free to take the long vacation he had denied himself during the summer. He intended to loaf for three weeks.
The Wilsons would have a sedately merry Christmas and mark Woodrow’s fifty-seventh birthday on December 28, but there would be no exulting over the birth of the New Freedom. A few weeks before Christmas he had written Mary that his life as president was a path with “few flowers but some grim satisfactions.” The gray cloud that hung over Wilson’s triumphs has been variously attributed to his exacting father, his chronically unhappy mother, and the rigors of Calvinism, but his emptiness at the end of 1913 is more readily accounted for: he was worn out. Despite Dr. Grayson’s constant attention and their thrice-weekly golf outings, Wilson was far from robust, and while waging the long, strenuous fight with Congress, he had also had to cope with a series of foreign problems that caused him enormous anxiety.
The most dangerous erupted two weeks before his inauguration, with a military coup in Mexico. After a long siege of the capital, General Victoriano Huerta had captured the National Palace, forced the president and vice president to resign, then sent them under armed guard to the penitentiary. En route they were shot dead, allegedly in an attempt to escape. Virtually everyone in Mexico suspected Huerta of ordering the murders. The first great revolution of the twentieth century, the Mexican upheaval had begun in 1910 and would last until 1920. If the violence had taken place an ocean away, it would have stirred little interest in the United States. But a revolution next door was a security threat, and Mexico in 1913 was home to forty thousand U.S. citizens, nearly all of whom were associated with American companies extracting Mexican oil and minerals or operating large agricultural enterprises. By the time Wilson took office, scores of American civilians had died at the hands of the rebels, and the American residents of Mexico were seeking $500 million in damages from the Mexican government.
Wilson made the revolution in Mexico and rumors of revolution elsewhere in the region the subject of his first statement on foreign policy. The United States wished to cultivate the friendship of her sister republics in Latin America but only if the ties were supported by the rule of law, he said. Americans could not sympathize with those who overthrew constitutional governments and installed themselves as dictators. While most Americans applauded Wilson’s position, a few skeptics wondered what he intended to do if the autocrats did not fall in line with his ideals. To show the skeptics the kind of thing he had in mind, he refused to recognize Huerta’s government.
John Bassett Moore, a scholar of international law and counselor of the State Department, explained to Wilson that the U.S. government, itself the product of a revolution, had always acted on the principle of de facto recognition—acknowledging that a new government existed whether the United States approved of it or not. “We regard governments as existing or not existing,” Moore wrote to Wilson. “We do not require them to be chosen by popular vote.” Deplorable as the assassinations had been, Huerta seemed to be in control, and the need for the United States to deal with Mexico had not disappeared, Moore added. Wilson stuck to his decision but asked the State Department to assure the world that Huerta had not been singled out. Henceforth the United States would deny recognition to any government that forced its way into power. The U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, a Taft appointee (and no relation to Woodrow), tried to persuade Washington that failure to extend recognition would merely prolong the violence. He admitted that Huerta fell short by every measure of statesmanship but maintained that no other rebel faction was powerful enough to pacify the country.
For the most part, Wilson’s predecessors had heeded the advice in Washington’s Farewell Address (1796), which urged the United States to approach the rest of the world without stars in its eyes. Self-interest was the only sure guide, Washington wrote. “Nations as well as individuals act for their own benefit, and not for the benefit of others, unless both interests happen to be assimilated.” He urged the United States to build its trade with other nations but keep political connections to a minimum. Why forgo the advantages bestowed by geography? he asked. “Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.” But in a rarely quoted passage of the address, Washington showed that he was not without the idealism that burned so bright in Woodrow Wilson: “Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct, and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened and, at no distant period, a great nation to give mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.”
In 1823, Americans fortified their natural geographic advantage with the Monroe Doctrine, which declared the Western Hemisphere off limits to further colonization. By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States was in a truly enviable position: no powerful rivals north or south and thousands of miles of ocean east and west. By another stroke of good fortune, Britannia ruled the waves, and Britannia’s strong friendship with America spared the U.S. government the expense of a large navy.
The great departure from Washington’s ideas came at the close of the nineteenth century, when the United States acquired its first outposts in the Pacific, Hawaii and Samoa, and emerged from the Spanish-American War with three new possessions (Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico) and one protectorate (Cuba). In a book called The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1895), Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan of the U.S. Navy had made a cogent case for the idea that the British Empire owed its might to its naval supremacy. He also argued that if a great nation did not wish to have an empire, it could extend its global power and influence simply by building naval bases in strategically significant locations. Mahan’s book convinced Theodore Roosevelt and his advisors that the United States could not be a world power without a great navy. The American acquisitions in the Pacific were made with U.S. power in mind, as were the decisions to build a canal through the Isthmus of Panama and to gain control of the Caribbean.
Such was the portfolio handed to Woodrow Wilson, and he hoped that it would not require much attention. He was fairly well grounded in European political history and in recent international developments affecting the United States, but he was a novice at diplomacy. He would have done well to choose an experienced international lawyer as secretary of state, but instead he gave the post to William Jennings Bryan, a personable man with keen political instincts but scant knowledge of foreign affairs and no patience with complex ideas. Bryan had been appointed for political reasons: as a member of the administration, he could not easily challenge Wilson for the next Democratic presidential nomination, and as a former party leader who still enjoyed the affection of Democrats in Congress, he was helpful in securing votes for Wilson’s legislation.
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The U.S. Department of State in 1913 had one pinstriped leg in the twentieth century, the other in the nineteenth. Roosevelt and Taft had professionalized the Foreign Service with entrance exams and a merit system for promotions, but the department’s so-called specialists were responsible for preposterously vast swaths of the world. On the Near East desk, for example, the specialists managed relations with the present Middle East plus Greece, Italy, and the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The two largest of the four bureaus dealt with Latin America and the Far East, a mirror of the main U.S. strategic concerns of the early twentieth century: a desire to dominate the Western Hemisphere and a fear of Japanese expansion in the Pacific. The department’s minuscule staff and low salaries summed up a common feeling among Americans: when it came to foreign affairs, they didn’t want any.
Wilson hoped to end the practice of awarding embassies to rich men who had contributed generously to the victor’s presidential campaign. “I must have the best men in the nation!” he told a friend. But when he offered Great Britain to Charles W. Eliot, former president of Harvard, Eliot excused himself on the grounds that he was nearly seventy and busy with other endeavors. The polite refusal turned out to be for the official files; privately he told Wilson that he could not see himself as an errand boy for Bryan.
Walter Hines Page, a progressive editor and successful publisher who had known Wilson for many years, wanted to accept when asked to represent the United States in Britain, but initially demurred because he could not afford the grand house and lavish entertaining expected of an ambassador. Page’s appointment was made possible by an annual subsidy of $25,000 from Wilson’s friend Cleveland Dodge. Paris was the post Wilson had in mind for William F. McCombs, and while McCombs liked the idea, he could not afford it. Wilson left Taft’s appointee in place in Paris and forced himself onto the usual path of appointing rich supporters to serve in the other capitals of Europe.
Soon after joining the cabinet, Bryan met with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to propose a series of bilateral treaties that could be invoked if the two parties found themselves in a quarrel they could not resolve through diplomacy. Under the terms of these “cooling-off treaties,” as Bryan called them, the adversaries would refrain from going to war for a least a year, presumably long enough for an impartial commission to determine the facts of the case and recommend a solution. Although neither country would be bound by the recommendation, Bryan and other peace activists believed that the commission’s findings and the passage of time would, nine times out of ten, enable the contending parties to reach a peaceable settlement. The scheme was generally well received, and within six weeks, twenty nations announced plans to negotiate cooling-off treaties with the United States.
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Wilson came to the presidency well informed about China. American Presbyterians funded a major missionary effort there, and Wilson, as a Presbyterian and president of the leading Presbyterian university in the United States, had numerous connections with missionaries. They recruited at Princeton’s divinity school, and he often heard from former students who joined the clergy and served in China. Wilson was also an admirer of the Open Door policy, which the United States had initiated at the turn of the century to prevent the Great Powers from carving up China and parceling it out among themselves, as they had done with Africa. When the Qing dynasty fell to Chinese revolutionaries, Sun Yat-sen, the provisional president of the new republic, wrote Woodrow Wilson, and Wilson sent a warm reply, saying that he had long sympathized with the Chinese people and their desire for a democratic government. Wilson was the first head of state to welcome the Republic of China to the family of nations.
The Wilson administration was only a few days old when a pair of bankers from the House of Morgan turned up at the State Department to ask Secretary Bryan whether the Wilson administration wanted American banks to remain involved in an international loan consortium that was about to lend $125 million to the new Chinese government. It was an odd question. The loan had been several years in the making, and it had taken Taft’s secretary of state months to persuade the other powers to include American lenders.
It does not appear that Bryan asked his visitors if they had worries about the transaction, but he had one: what if China defaulted? In that case, the Morgan men said, the American banks might ask the U.S. government to use its army and navy to protect their interests. As a pacifist and a vocal critic of Wall Street, Bryan was appalled. Where the Taft administration took it on faith that private American capital lent to foreign governments would enhance U.S. influence, Bryan feared that a China beholden to the largest banks of the world’s most powerful nations would have no independence worth having. When he reported the conversation to the cabinet, his fellow secretaries unanimously agreed that the administration should not support the loan. Wilson followed up with an announcement that the administration would not ask American banks to remain in the consortium.
If Wilson and Bryan had consulted the State Department’s file on the loan, they would have realized that they were being used to extricate the House of Morgan from a deal it no longer found attractive. The Chinese loan was an enormous gamble, the new republic’s fragile hold on the country was causing delay after delay, and the other powers in the consortium were at swords’ points over control of various aspects of the loan. But rather than ask a favor of Bryan, who had risen to fame on his denunciations of Wall Street, they posed their question in a fashion calculated to stir his antipathy to imperialism.
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Wilson’s first full-blown foreign crisis happened on American soil. In the spring of 1913, as the state of California prepared to pass a law barring Japanese residents from acquiring more farmland, the government of Japan filed a vigorous protest through its ambassador in Washington. California was acting on a prejudice that had taken hold in the Gold Rush, which brought the first big influx of Chinese immigrants. Working for pennies, they were the bane of white laborers, whose complaints led to the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Japanese immigrants, most of whom arrived later, found themselves lumped with the Chinese, and in 1906, San Francisco’s board of education decreed that Asian and white children could no longer attend school together. Japan’s protests and its negotiations with the United States in 1907–1908 culminated in the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement: Japan stopped issuing passports to citizens wanting to work in the United States, and San Francisco stopped segregating Asian schoolchildren.
Reinforced by a federal law denying Asian immigrants the opportunity to become citizens, the racial prejudice persisted, and when Japanese farmers began outproducing their white neighbors in central California, white farmers clamored for protection. Despite the fact that the Japanese cultivated less than one-half of one percent of California’s arable land, pleas for common sense went unheard. Explaining the situation to Woodrow Wilson during the 1912 campaign, one of the state’s leading Democrats, James D. Phelan, likened the Japanese presence to an invasion. The success of Japanese farmers was lowering the standard of living for members of the white race, Phelan said, “and ultimately the same race question which arose in the South will arise.” Candidate Wilson replied that he favored the exclusion policy and hoped that a new “race problem” could be avoided. “[S]urely we have had our lesson,” he said.
The news of California’s intention to ban Japanese ownership of farmland triggered huge anti-American demonstrations in Tokyo. Thousands cheered as speakers demanded that Japan defend its honor by declaring war on the United States. When Japanese officials called for restraint and an amicable resolution, the protesters accused them of servility.
Phelan sent Wilson a telegram: THE TIDE MUST BE CHECKED, OTHERWISE CALIFORNIA WILL BECOME A JAPANESE PLANTATION. But President Wilson was not as free as Candidate Wilson had been. He had spoken with the Japanese ambassador, Baron Sutemi Chinda, who was profoundly upset. The government of Japan viewed the proposed ban as a violation of its commercial treaty with the United States, and while Japanese officials had no desire for war, Chinda said, they feared that they might not be able to contain the militarists.
Hoping to calm Tokyo, Wilson sent Bryan to Sacramento, but there was little that the administration could do, because the commercial treaty had not mentioned farmland. In early May, a few days after Bryan reached Sacramento, both houses of the California legislature voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Alien Land Act, which limited the right to buy agricultural land to aliens eligible for citizenship and deprived those Japanese who already owned farms of the right to leave them to their families. All that remained was the right to lease farmland for up to three years. “We have accomplished the big thing,” the governor boasted to the press. “We have prevented the Japanese from driving the root of their civilization deep into California soil.”
Ambassador Chinda reported Japan’s “painful disappointment” to Bryan and questioned the equity of a law that did not treat all aliens alike. Bryan, like Wilson a stout defender of states’ rights, replied that the federal government could not interfere in the matter. When Chinda protested again, Bryan suggested that Japan take its case to the federal courts. To the Japanese the idea of having to sue for rights enjoyed by other aliens seemed yet another humiliation. In Tokyo the walls of the U.S. embassy were defaced, and signs reading GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH summoned Japanese patriots to public protests. One newspaper urged Japan to demand the Philippines as compensation for the mistreatment of Japanese aliens in the United States. Another called for an end to the ruling “White Man’s Clique,” by force if necessary.
In Washington the Joint Board of the Army and Navy, forerunner of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, began considering the possibility of war with Japan. At a meeting on May 13, the army’s chief of staff informed the board that he had quietly begun moving men and matériel to Hawaii and the Philippines. One of the board’s admirals wanted the navy to make similar preparations, but Wilson and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels resisted, Wilson because he believed that any show of force would further inflame the Japanese, and Daniels because he doubted that the U.S. Navy could win even a small skirmish in the Pacific. With the fleet concentrated in the Atlantic and the Panama Canal still a year away from completion, Japan could seize the Philippines and Hawaii long before a single American battleship could round Cape Horn.
At a cabinet meeting on May 16, Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison spoke up in favor of shifting a handful of U.S. naval vessels from Chinese waters to Manila. That was the recommendation of the Joint Board, he said, and he respected its judgment. Bryan lost his temper, grew red in the face, and thundered that while the president had been trying to keep the United States out of a war, the generals and admirals had been making plans to get in. In Bryan’s opinion, the army and navy should not have taken such steps until called upon to do so by the commander in chief. Half the cabinet agreed with Garrison, seeing no reason why the United States could not move its own vessels to its own ports without provoking a war. Daniels sided with Bryan, partly because of his own pacifism but also because the U.S. ships in China, poky old tubs with antiquated guns, were no match for the modern Japanese navy. When Garrison insisted that the Philippines had to be protected, Daniels lost his temper. In his view, the situation proved that the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines in the peace treaty signed after the Spanish-American War had been stupid as well as immoral. The sooner the United States repaired the wrong done in the treaty and granted independence to the Philippines, the sooner the United States would return to true democracy, he said.
Wilson let the debate run on and then, rather than risk a vote that might not go his way, adjourned the meeting. Garrison and Daniels were invited to return to the White House after lunch for more discussion. When they arrived, the president took them out into the sunny warmth of a spring afternoon and let them spar till they had nothing left to say. Only then did Wilson say that he wanted the problem with Japan settled by diplomacy, not war. The crisis subsided on its own, but the refusal of the White Man’s Clique to accept the Japanese as equals would continue to rankle.
