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World War I, Wilsonianism, and Challenges to U.S. Empire

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World War I, Wilsonianism, and Challenges to U.S. Empire emily s. rosenberg World War I, Wilsonianism, and Challenges to U.S. Empire In 1918, as the military fighting in the Great War ended, the political and rhet- orical struggle over the shape of the postwar world began. For years, former presi- Downloaded from dent Theodore Roosevelt had a face–off against the now-president Woodrow Wilson over foreign policy issues. Roosevelt had bitterly excoriated Wilson for trying to remain neutral during 1915 and 1916 rather than rallying the nation to fight. Now with peace in view, he again took to the hustings with a refreshed critique. This time, in an editorial published in the Kansas City Star and reprinted http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ in newspapers around the country, he excoriated Wilson’s “glittering words” about internationalism, self-determination, and the League of Nations. “Our con- tinuing action in Santo Domingo and Haiti makes it hypocritical for us to lay down any universal rules about self-determination for all nations.... We have with armed force invaded, made war upon, and conquered the two small republics, have upset their governments, have denied them the right of self-determination, and have made democracy within their limits not merely unsafe but nonexistent.” It was not possible to judge whether these two U.S. military occupations were at University of Central Florida on February 7, 2015 “right or wrong,” Roosevelt argued, because of Wilson’s “inveterate predilection for secret and furtive diplomacy.” He concluded that Wilson’s idealistic “phrase- mongering” on behalf of open diplomacy, self-determination, and a League of Nations not only bred impractical policies but made the country look blatantly 1 hypocritical. Roosevelt was hardly alone in noting the irony that the Wilson who talked of spreading democracy and self-determination was also the Wilson sustaining two draconian military occupations and domination over several colonies and depen- dencies. People whose countries were subjugated by what they considered to be U.S. imperial power also noted the contradictions. By many measures, Wilson had been America’s most interventionist president. His administration had sent troops to China and maintained America’s colonial presence in the Philippines and the territory of Hawai’i. It had invaded Mexico and, even during World War I, U.S. officials retained control over the customs houses of that country’s major port of 1. “Roosevelt Flouts League of Nations,” Washington Post,August4, 1918. Roosevelt con- tinued to denounce the League in these terms in other speeches and writings; see “Roosevelt Drafts League of Nations,” New York Times,December14, 1918. Diplomatic History, Vol. 38,No.4 (2014). ! The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. doi:10.1093/dh/dhu034 852 World War I, Wilsonianism, and U.S. Empire : 853 Veracruz. It consolidated U.S. domination over the Caribbean and Central America—an area in which the United States held one colony in Puerto Rico; possession of the Virgin Islands; two protectorates, Cuba and Panama, over which strict controls were expanded; and dependencies in Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, and Haiti that were held through ever-tightening regimes of economic control and, in the case of the latter two, by U.S. military governments and armies of occupation. Wilson did not view this U.S. sphere as an empire. Imperial centers almost always justify their actions in terms of spreading enlightenment and civil- ization. But others certainly labelled the processes of U.S. domination with the Downloaded from words “empire” and “imperialism.” Wilson’s lofty rhetoric, mixed together with his vigorous exercise of control over U.S. colonies and dependencies, raised major questions in 1919 and after: Would the postwar order swing the world away from the Great Power imperialism that had marked the era before 1914? How might the Wilsonian proposals about http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ self-determination and a League of Nations change a world that was still carved into imperial spheres—including the one subjugated by the United States? The relationship of the Great War to the question of European empires has held understandable fascination for historians. Generally, World War I can be considered as marking the twilight of empire, as German colonies were stripped away and what Erez Manela has called the “Wilsonian moment” spread a rhetoric of self-determination and helped spark opposition to colonial regimes in many parts of the world. But the war can also be viewed as a fairly minimal break with the at University of Central Florida on February 7, 2015 imperial past, as League “mandates” remained in a subdominant, quasi-colonial status, and the major empires—Britain and France—in many cases redoubled their efforts at maintaining control over their realms. Historians of Europe have long 2 explored this ambiguous nexus between war and empire. A similarly robust scholarship exploring the connection between World War I and the early twentieth-century colonies and dependencies of the United States, however, has hardly developed. Perhaps it may not seem too surprising that his- torians of European empires have ignored the question of the war’s impact on U.S. empire. Scholarship on comparative empires has long had a European orientation in which U.S. processes of domination, if they figure at all, mostly emerge as a story 3 of nineteenth-century settler colonialism on the North American continent. Much more surprising, however, is the relative invisibility of the topic of World War I and empire in research by historians of the United States. U.S. histories, after all, have expended a prodigious amount of ink on explaining why and how the 2. Michael Adas, “Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology,” Journal of World History 15,no.1 (2004): 31–63, and Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2009) provide a good introduction to these issues. 3. Examples are: A sampling of contents from the past decade of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History; Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, 2006); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2011). 854 : diplomatic history United States acquired an overseas empire around the turn of the century. Indeed, the reasons for this U.S. imperial expansion constitute one of the most studied and taught topics in U.S. history. U.S. historians, however, have devoted far less at- tention to the aftermath of America’s prewar imperial seizures or to the ways in which a war supposedly fought to advance democracy highlighted the contradic- tions that Roosevelt and an array of anti-imperialists at home and in dependencies pointed out. In most narratives of U.S. history, the “imperial debate” over whether or not the United States should hold colonies and dependencies occupies a central place in framing the pre–World War I era, but both U.S. empire and the debate Downloaded from over it appear to evaporate with the Great War. They did not. At the centennial of World War I, it should be worth asking: Just as the “Wilsonian moment” that popularized the concept of self-determination brought greater visibility and voice to anti-imperialism around the world, how did it res- onate in Wilson’s own imperial backyard? How did the war to “save the world for http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ democracy” and Wilson’s championing of self-determination intersect with the structures and justifications that supported America’s own imperial sphere? The answers to these questions are elusive: first, because they have really not been researched in any systematic way; and second, because U.S. empire took such diverse forms that there may be no clear generalization that fits all. What follows does not pretend to offer an adequate or comprehensive examination of the topic of World War I and U.S. empire, but it is a plea for more attention to the topic. One may start with the proposition that the Wilson administration did not at University of Central Florida on February 7, 2015 repudiate the U.S. empire that his predecessors had accumulated. Instead, he ex- panded its scope and style both before and during the war. I will argue that this tightening grip on America’s colonies, protectorates, and dependencies in the Caribbean and the Pacific, clashing as it did with the President’s own reputation as a champion of democracy, sparked a “Wilsonian moment” in the American empire—one directed at Wilson’s own administration. In this “Wilsonian mo- ment,” anti-imperialist leaders in America’s sphere not only stepped up their ad- vocacy for self-determination but participated in the broader transnational currents that were energizing anticolonial movements everywhere. As Manela pointed out, Wilson’s message stood independently of the man, and it could be 4 used without regard, sometimes in conscious disregard, of his intent. CHALLENGING THE MILITARY OCCUPATION OF THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC AND HAITI Roosevelt’s attack on Wilson’s policies in late 1918, which centered on the on- going military occupations of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, provides one context for understanding the renewed postwar debate over U.S. imperialism. At first, Roosevelt’s bombast might seem disingenuous. After all, Roosevelt was the president who used military force to coerce Cubans into accepting their status as a 4.Manela,Wilsonian Moment, 34. World War I, Wilsonianism, and U.S. Empire : 855 protectorate of the United States and granting U.S. rights to a naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
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