Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom

When Woodrow Wilson took over the White House in March 1913, he promised a less expansionist approach to American foreign policy than Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft had pursued. Wilson did share the commonly held view that American values were superior to those of the rest of the world, that democracy was the best system to promote peace and stability, and that the United States should continue to actively pursue economic markets abroad. Instead, he proposed an idealistic foreign policy based on morality, rather than American self-interest, and felt that American interference in another nation’s affairs should occur only when the circumstances rose to the level of a moral imperative.

Figure 2. While Wilson strove to be less of an interventionist, he found that to be more difficult in practice than in theory. Here, a political cartoon depicts him as a rather hapless cowboy, unclear on how to harness a foreign challenge, in this case, Mexico.

For many leaders and citizens, American attitudes toward international affairs would ideally follow the advice given by President George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address, 120 years before America’s entry into World War I. He had recommended that his fellow countrymen avoid “foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues” and “those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.” ^[1].

To this end, Wilson appointed former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, a noted anti-imperialist and proponent of world peace, as his Secretary of State. Bryan undertook his new assignment with vigor, encouraging nations around the world to sign “cooling off treaties,” under which they agreed to resolve international disputes through diplomacy, not war, and to submit any grievances to an international commission. Bryan also negotiated friendly relations with Colombia, including the payout of a $25 million apology for Roosevelt’s actions during the Panamanian Revolution, and worked to establish effective self-government in the Philippines in preparation for an eventual American withdrawal. Even with Bryan’s support, however, Wilson found that it was much harder than he anticipated to keep the United States out of world affairs. In reality, the United States was interventionist in areas where its interests—direct or indirect—were threatened.

U.S. Diplomatic Idealism vs. Reality

Wilson’s greatest break from his predecessors occurred in Asia, where he abandoned Taft’s “dollar diplomacy” and revived diplomatic efforts to keep Japanese interference in the Pacific at a minimum. But as World War I, also known as the Great War, began to unfold in Europe after 1914, Japan demanded that China succumb to a Japanese protectorate over their entire nation. In 1917, William Jennings Bryan’s successor as Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, signed the Lansing-Ishii Agreement, which recognized Japanese control over the Manchurian region of China in exchange for Japan’s promise not to exploit the war to gain a greater foothold in the rest of the country.

Japan in world war i

Figure 3. The Japanese seaplane carrier Wakamiya, which was used for the world’s first naval air raids. The ship carried four seaplanes, which were placed into the water by a crane on deck. The planes would then take off from the water and be retrieved by the ship after their mission.

Figure 4. The type of seaplane carried by the Wakamiya.

Although we usually think of Japan in terms of its role in World War II and the attack on Pearl Harbor, during the First World War it was allied with the Entente just as the U.S. was. Japan entered the war in 1914 after Britain offered all of Germany’s colonial holdings in the Pacific in exchange for Japanese assistance against the German navy in Chinese waters. In September 1914, the Japanese navy performed the first naval-launched air raids on German-held islands in the Pacific.

The Japanese Imperial Navy also protected Allied targets in South Africa and the Mediterranean, bringing seven German U-Boats back as prizes.

Japan experienced an industrial boom toward the end of the war because European nations desperately needed war materials. Because of its support, Japan was included in the Paris Peace Conference and was given a seat on the Council of the League of Nations, although disagreements during the drafting of the Covenant of the League of Nations led to increased Japanese isolationism and militarism by the mid-20th century.

Furthering his goal of reducing overseas interventions, Wilson had promised not to rely on the Roosevelt Corollary, Theodore Roosevelt’s explicit policy that the United States could involve itself in Latin American politics whenever it felt that the countries in the Western Hemisphere needed policing. Once president, however, Wilson again found that it was more difficult to avoid American interventionism in practice than in rhetoric. Indeed, Wilson intervened more in Western Hemisphere affairs than either Taft or Roosevelt. In 1915, when a revolution in Haiti resulted in the murder of the Haitian president and threatened the safety of New York banking interests in the country, Wilson sent three hundred U.S. Marines to establish order. Subsequently, the United States assumed control over the island’s foreign policy as well as its financial administration. One year later, Wilson again sent Marines to the Caribbean, this time to the Dominican Republic, to ensure prompt payment of a debt that nation owed. In 1917, Wilson sent troops to Cuba to protect American-owned sugar plantations from attacks by Cuban rebels and the troops remained there for four years.

Intervention in Mexico

American capitalists invested enormous sums of money in Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the long reign of the corrupt yet stable regime of the modernizing president Porfirio Diaz. But in 1910 the Mexican people revolted against Díaz, ending his authoritarian regime and also his friendliness toward the business interests of the United States. In the midst of the terrible destruction wrought by the fighting, Americans with investment interests pleaded for governmental help. But the U.S. government tried to control events and politics that could not be controlled. More and more American businessmen called for military intervention. When the brutal strongman Victoriano Huerta executed the revolutionary, democratically elected president Francisco Madero in 1913, newly inaugurated American president Woodrow Wilson put pressure on Mexico’s new regime. Wilson refused to recognize the new government and demanded that Huerta step aside and allow free elections to take place. Huerta refused.

When Mexican forces mistakenly arrested American sailors in the port city of Tampico in April 1914, Wilson saw the opportunity to apply additional pressure on Huerta. Huerta refused to make amends, and Wilson therefore asked Congress for authority to use force against Mexico. In April 1914, American intelligence learned of a German ship allegedly preparing to deliver weapons to Huerta’s forces and Wilson ordered the U.S. Navy to land forces at Veracruz to stop the shipment.