Learning Objectives
- Explain Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy and the difficulties of maintaining American neutrality at the outset of World War I
Figure 1. Timeline of major events during WWI.
Unlike his immediate predecessors, President Woodrow Wilson had planned to shrink the role of the United States in foreign affairs. He believed that the nation needed to intervene in international affairs only when there was a moral imperative to do so. But as Europe’s political situation grew desperate, it became increasingly difficult for Wilson to insist that the conflict growing overseas was not America’s responsibility. Germany’s war tactics struck most observers as morally reprehensible, while also putting American free trade with the Triple Entente (Great Britain, France, and Russia) at risk. Despite campaign promises and diplomatic efforts, Wilson could only postpone American involvement in the war, not avert it completely.
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.
Figure 3. Pancho Villa, a Mexican rebel who Wilson supported, then ultimately turned from, attempted an attack on the United States in retaliation. Wilson’s actions in Mexico were emblematic of how difficult it was to truly set the United States on a course of moral leadership.
On April 22, 1914, a fight erupted between the U.S. Navy and Mexican troops, resulting in nearly 150 deaths, nineteen of them American. Although the forces of Venustiano Carranza, Madero’s legitimate successor, managed to overthrow Huerta in the summer of 1914, most Mexicans—including Carranza—had come to resent American intervention in their affairs. Carranza refused to work with Wilson and the U.S. government and instead threatened to defend Mexico’s mineral rights against all American oil companies established there. Wilson then turned to support rebel forces who opposed Carranza, most notably Pancho Villa. However, Villa lacked the strength in number and weapons to overtake Carranza and so, in 1915, Wilson reluctantly authorized official U.S. recognition of Carranza’s government.
While the raid on Veracruz might seem like a relatively minor event in America’s history, it foreshadowed the eventual U.S. entrance into World War I and emphasized the continued reliance on naval forces and the difficulty in modernizing the military during a period of European imperial influence in the Caribbean and elsewhere.
As a postscript to the Veracruz incident, an irate Pancho Villa turned against Wilson, and on March 9, 1916, led a fifteen-hundred-man force across the border into New Mexico, where they attacked and burned the town of Columbus. Over one hundred people died in the attack, seventeen of them American. Wilson responded by sending General John “Black Jack” Pershing into Mexico to capture Villa and return him to the United States for trial. With over eleven thousand troops at his disposal, Pershing marched three hundred miles into Mexico before an angry Carranza ordered U.S. troops to withdraw from the nation. Pancho Villa was never captured. When President Carranza was ousted from power in 1920, Pancho Villa negotiated an amnesty with interim President Adolfo de la Huerta and was given a landed estate, on the condition he retire from politics. He was assassinated in 1923. Although his faction did not prevail in the Mexican Revolution, he is one of its most charismatic and prominent figures of the period.
Wilson reluctantly ordered the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Mexico in 1917, avoiding another war with Mexico. Again, as in China, Wilson’s attempt to impose a moral foreign policy had failed in light of economic and political realities.
Watch It
This video summarizes the significance of Pancho Villa, the raid on Veracruz, and the attack in Columbus, New Mexico.
Try It
Review Question
Glossary
Pancho Villa: a Mexican revolutionary who was involved in the political upheavals of the early 20th century. Villa attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico in retaliation for U.S. support of his rival and in an attempt to provoke another Mexican-American War. The U.S. was never able to bring Villa to justice and he was assassinated in 1923.
Triple Entente: the alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia which formed one of the primary groups of belligerents in WWI
William Jennings Bryan: President Wilson’s Secretary of State from 1913-1915; Bryan was a staunch anti-Imperialist and was later involved in the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial,” where he argued against the teaching of evolution in schools.
Woodrow Wilson: Democratic President of the U.S. from 1913-1921; he initially promoted a non-interventionist foreign policy, but was eventually forced to bring the U.S. into WWI. Wilson was one of the founders of the League of Nations and is largely considered one of the first Progressives, despite his support for racial segregation.
- George Washington, Farewell Address, Annals of Congress, 4th Congress, 2869–2870 ↵
- John S. D. Eisenhower, Intervention! The United States and the Mexican Revolution, 1913–1917 (New York: Norton, 1995) ↵
- Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) ↵