Developmg Diplomacy
Sands, William Franklm
IN MANY decades there has been no time more appropriate for a restatement of first principles of American foreign policy. After the initial forging and tempering of American diplomacy^ in the...
...of Kipling's India and of empire building and of Cecil Rhodes...
...Roosevelt led American youth, the grandsons of pioneer fathers and clipper ship skippers, to our boundaries, and looked beyond them, and he filled with them our public services...
...During this period there appeared new focal points of internal interest...
...They are only beginning to realize the concrete existence of America, of a government of the United States...
...Our principles of policy have been sound...
...army, navy— and State Department...
...Roosevelt marked the beginning of another age...
...After the initial forging and tempering of American diplomacy^ in the period of the Revolution, and its testing during our subsequent struggle not to be restricted to a comparatively small area of the Atlantic coast by England, our antagonist —and France, our not wholly disinterested ally, and Spain, our unwilling ally and principal competitor for the trans-Mississippi West—came ani era of exultant expansion, of boundless and unlimited vistas, north, south and west...
...They are we...
...It is not a sordid record, however...
...It cannot fail to strike any teacher of history very forcibly that there is little knowledge of the history of the United States among present-day Americans...
...that such a small corps d'elite is not in fact responsible to anyone—and that in consequence the interests of the United States may suffer...
...Then came another ten years and another generation, a generation very different from that of the 'nineties...
...revolutionary crises from 1815 to 1848...
...of the simple "open door" policy, a sober American doctrine from early years...
...but history in the making should be watched most carefully, and history-makers who resent watching should have double guards put about them, or responsible citizens set in their place...
...It is a new public grown up within the boundaries beyond which our youth has looked with understanding so many times in the past...
...that a secretary of state quite easily becomes dependent upon a small body of "experts" completely segregated and protected against all contact with the realities of American life...
...One woud not have it otherwise...
...they were left to the experts, those whom we paid to keep us out of trouble with "foreigners," or to see to it that "foreigners" did not harm us in the back while our faces were turned to the West and opportunity...
...There will be inconsistencies in the historians also...
...What is the State Department doing in Nicaragua with marines...
...Streams of new citizens flowed to the West, America was the second home, the birthright of every European, the remedy for and refuge from any hardship of European life...
...These the world war took and hammered together and made of them a new nation...
...The guardians of our national policies with regard' to other nations do not realize that condition...
...Roosevelt, with something of Kipling's imperialistic mysticism, something of Mussolini's fire and magnetism, called to youth and the youth of older America responded freely, thinking of the China coast, and clipper ships, of the Panama trail, of Walker...
...6.00...
...It is not clear for instance what Mr...
...men in the prime of life, middle-aged men who had broken prairie sod...
...again, in an address at St...
...during many decades we looked in, not out or beyond our boundaries...
...Rapid and more commodious transportation made possible an endless variety of sources of individual wealth, and both fell in opportunely to relieve the new restlessness of Europe after the continent-wide...
...Now comes Professor John H. Latane, of Johns Hopkins, with a very badly needed review* of the whole course of our policy development, from Washington to Coolidge, from 1774 to "the Rogers Act" of 1924, covering 150 years and drawing the events of that period into sequence and relation with each other and with the present...
...whose pioneer lives were becoming crowded by newcomers from the Atlantic seaboard...
...Latane means, in speaking of Soviet Russia, by "the denial to others of the right to revolution on which our government was founded . . . ," but that also, one would not have otherwise...
...who were restless- once more...
...In discussing the post-Revolution war debt settlement, he goes rather searchingly into the free gifts to the insurgent colonies by the king of France, amounting to 11,000,000 livres (including remission of approximately 2,000,000 livres of interest on loans to us by the king of France) and replies thereby categorically to the insistence of the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate that these free gifts of money to help us establish ourselves had been "transferred into loans and repaid" (Senators Bruce and Borah colloquy, Congressional Record, January 22, 1925...
...Spain's necessarily incoherent policy (assisting with money, in our Revolution, while fearing its effect on her own American colonies, and while laying the foundations of an extension of her empire to Florida, Louisiana and all trans-Mississippi) follows through our relations with Cuba, with the Caribbean region, with Mexico and Central America, merging with the remnants of the colonial rivalries of France and England to give impulse and direction to our own policy, first in self-protection, then in protection of the small states of Central America against Europe, and finally against themselves...
...In discussing our early attempts to alleviate war by proposing immunity of unfortified towns from attack, proscription of paper blockades, "free ships, free goods," protection of enemy private property, etc., he points out very truly that Jefferson's liberal ideas (and it might be added, Franklin's) "have practically all entered into the permanent policy of the United States, though some have not yet been realized...
...The war with Spain marked the end of that period—Spain, who had helped our independence but who had helped ungraciously— Spain, whose enmity was a tradition of our childhood days...
...No one should place boundaries to us...
...We felt explosive...
...New York: Doubleday, Page and Company...
...Roosevelt could have led that youth far afield and into strange places...
...a blending of vigorous, joyous acceptance of Kipling's hymns of empire, the willing shouldering of "the white man's burden," with John Hay's resuscitation...
...They are the nation today, but to them the origins of thel nation must be restated, clearly and patiently, with no assumption of any previous knowledge from school or from tradition...
...What is happening in China...
...He further predicted "that the city of Mexico, the ancient Aztec capital, would be "the ultimate central seat of power of the North American people...
...That is hypocrisy in the exact measure that ordinary human conduct is hypocritical...
...Our population," said Seward, in 1848, "is destined to roll its resistless waves to the icy barriers of the North and to encounter Oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific...
...the way things got to be as they are, told over and over again, for unlike any other nation in the world, we have a new public every year...
...They are America...
...Both have run concurrently, but the "open door," with us and for us...
...Our record, set forth in historical sequence, is full of inconsistencies...
...This war-youth and middle age is a wide-spread but a local folk, the sons of those who paid the experts to keep "foreigners" off our backs while our faces were turned to the Wests and opportunity...
...a generation of those whose fathers followed the pioneers, and pressed upon their heels and drove them over the hills beyond...
...All this that he relates is now being strongly questioned by the new generation, at least as to the methods we have used to accomplish our purpose, and, by some, as to the first principles of our, rights and duties in the matter and in those places...
...Then came the great internal problems culminating in the Civil War...
...They are the ones who are asking what caused the'war...
...In response to that realization, several excellent books have appeared for' general reading, treating special perlodsj or certain tendencies In our history...
...Expansion is built on youth, is part of youth...
...The professor shows himself in this matter, however, to realize the truth of the situation more clearly than the realist professional diplomat...
...Foreign" affairs became distinctly foreign, and distasteful to the majority of citizens...
...History is absorbed, not taught...
...most emphatically not...
...Paul, in i860: "I can look southwest and see, amid all the convulsions that are breaking the Spanish-American republics, and in their rapid decay and dissolution, the preparatory stage for their reorganization in free, equal, self-governing members of the United States of America...
...That is not the solution, however, of a real unrest with regard to "foreign" affairs...
...Latane states very positively: "The sums advanced as gifts from the king of France were, of course, not included in the above settlement...
...It is well known that even two eye-witnesses hardly can agree on all details...
...They do not know these places...
...It is necessary for the policies of the nation to be analyzed...
...there is an uneasy feeling that a President of necessity devolves to his secretary of state the guardianship and execution of policy...
...Repayment of them was not expected, never demanded, and never offered...
...It is a popular, semi-jocular cant phrase that the professor is visionary and unpractical...
...Foreign affairs had not yet become international affairs...
...no more...
...Contrasting the use of force in China with the alleged "weak policy" of the United States "in relying on the promises and good faith of China without fully realizing that the imperial (or central) government could exercise little effective control over local conditions at the treaty ports," he quotes Humphrey Mar* American Foreign Policy, by John H. Latane...
...That was Lincoln's secretary of state speaking, and he was speaking to men who knew what expansion meant...
...Europe had attempted to confine us within boundaries, on our own continent...
...We are beginning, through the efforts of our historians, to have a consecutive recital of the development of those policies in what might be called popular form, accessible, that Is, and intelligible to the annual new public...
...shall (a relative of the Chief Justice) writing to Secretary Maroy in 1853 : "It is my opinion that the highest interests of the United States are involved in sustaining China—maintaining order here, and gradually engrafting . . . the healthy principles which give life and health to governments, rather than to see China become the theatre of wide-spread anarchy and ultimately the prey of European ambition...
...What we now need is a clear, convincing restatement of first principles In foreign policy by those responsible for its guardianship, formulation and execution...
...Our method, not always...
...reciprocity, respect for neighbors, consideration for weaker nations, from the beginning have been held to be sound American doctrine...
...the readjustment of American life upon a new basis, a federal basis for the first time— almost an imperial basis, with constant growth of the central power and constant lessening of thei centrifugal urge...
...They seem to think that they are being heckled, when in reality people do not know why things are happening and honestly wish to know, and feel that since' they pay the bills they are entitled to know...
...That is a very good way to put it, and is true...
...he might have filled Lincoln's forecast to his Springfield audience of what an ambitious and temperamental President might still do, in spite of checks and balances...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 6
