From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (48 page)

The Arthur trade offensive met insuperable obstacles at home. The tariff was the most contentious political issue of the age. Democrats who preferred broad and general tariff reductions and Republicans who supported protection both opposed reciprocity. The tariff brought to the fore the competing interests of farmers, manufacturers, and consumers, and any specific proposal could draw fire from a range of groups. Critics of the
Mexican treaty complained it would subsidize foreign investors and favor railroad interests. American cigar makers and sugar interests fought the Cuban treaty. In any event, the Arthur treaties were completed as Cleveland took office. A throwback to Jefferson and Jackson, he doubted the validity of the "glut thesis" and sought to reduce tariffs to lower consumer prices and eliminate special privileges for business. Viewing reciprocity as a "conspiratorial device to prevent passage of a general tariff reduction act," he scrapped the treaties negotiated by his predecessor.
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The so-called Pork War with Europe exemplified America's concern with markets and its growing assertiveness and produced better results. A horrible famine on the Continent in 1879 proved a bonanza for the United States, leading to massive exports of agricultural products and full recovery from the Panic of 1873. Alarmed at the flood of American imports, European nations began to limit and then ban them. American meats were probably no less safe than European, but rumors of disease were used to justify what was economically and politically expedient. The British consul bemoaned the fate of one poor victim who found worms "in his flesh by the millions, being scraped and squeezed from the pores of his skin." Britain limited imports of U.S. pork and beef. France and Germany banned all imports even though America's meats had been certified safe by the French Academy of Medicine and its pork was reputedly safer than German.

The European measures provoked fury in the United States. Outraged farmers and producers urged retaliation by banning imports of French and German wines. The
Chicago Tribune
denounced the "rule or ruin" policies of the European aristocracy. The
New York Herald
urged "avenging the American hog."
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Responding to domestic pressures, Blaine protested vigorously, but he also proposed that all meat products be inspected before exportation and offered to lower tariffs if the Europeans would rescind their bans. Arthur and Frelinghuysen also handled the matter cautiously. Arthur created an independent commission to study American meat-producing methods. He endorsed "equitable retaliation" but refused to act, fearing that a trade war might hurt the United States more than Europe. Their stopgap measures avoided a dangerous conflict while keeping some European markets open.
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A more assertive United States in 1890 launched all-out war on European restrictions. The issue was of more than passing political importance.
"It does not comport with the self-respect and dignity of this government to longer tolerate such a policy," Secretary of Agriculture Jeremiah Rusk advised President Benjamin Harrison. The United States established mechanisms to inspect meat to be exported, thus presumably removing the rationale for European bans. The Harrison administration also threatened to ban imports of German sugar and French wines (known, in some cases, to be adulterated), and Congress in 1890 provided the means to retaliate. When the German government proposed lifting the ban if the United States agreed not to shut off imports of German sugar, Blaine urged acceptance, but a determined Harrison demurred, making clear his readiness to retaliate. In the face of this determination, Germany lifted its ban in return for American promises to keep sugar on the free list. Other European nations followed suit. Exports of U.S. meat products doubled between May 1891 and May 1892.
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In areas of traditional concern such as the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific basin, the United States during the Gilded Age mounted a concerted effort to expand its influence. Americans harbored vague and generally unfounded fears that Europeans might use their strong existing position to extend their colonizing tendencies to the Western Hemisphere. Certain of the superiority of their institutions and conscious of their rising power, they increasingly claimed that their rightful place was at the head of the American nations. They believed they could assist their southern neighbors to be more stable and orderly. For reasons of both economics and security, they sought to roll back European influence and increase their own.

Part of the work was done by individuals without direction or even encouragement from government. Following the devastation of the Ten Years' War, U.S. entrepreneurs bought up sugar estates, mines, and ranches in Cuba. By the 1890s, they dominated the island's economy. Exploiting the generous subsidies and tax breaks offered foreign investors by dictator Porfirio Diaz, Americans came to view Mexico as a "second India, Cuba, Brazil, Italy, and Troy all rolled into one." U.S. capital poured across the border into railroads, mines, and oil, totaling $500 million by 1900, transforming Mexico into a virtual satellite of the United States, and causing growing alarm among Mexican nationalists.
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Some Central
American rulers also welcomed U.S. capital as a means to modernize their economies, boost their nations' wealth, and uplift their people. They too granted generous concessions, permitting North Americans to buy up mines and plantations, control great wealth, and wield enormous power.
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For the first time, the United States came out openly and insistently for an American-owned and -controlled isthmian canal. From the outset, some Americans had demanded that they must build and operate such a canal. The 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty had provoked bitter opposition on precisely such grounds. By the 1880s, a canal had assumed greater importance to the United States. Central American nations sought to exploit its anxieties. Nicaraguan overtures to British bankers and Colombia's deal with Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, to construct a canal across Panama, stunned a complacent Washington into action. Former Union general Ambrose Burnside pronounced a French-built canal "dangerous to our peace and safety"; Congress responded with a flurry of resolutions. In terms of commerce and security, the normally laconic Rutherford B. Hayes declared, a canal would be "virtually a part of the coast line of the United States." The "true policy" of the United States must be "either a canal under American control, or no canal." Hayes did not stop the de Lesseps venture, but he did secure from the French government an affirmation that it was a private venture without official support.
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Hayes's successors went further. Blaine and Frelinghuysen stood firmly for an American-owned and -controlled canal and made sporadic efforts to modify or abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. Blaine called an isthmian canal as much a "channel of communication" between the East and West coasts of the United States as "our own transcontinental railroad." It was "strictly and solely . . . an American question, to be dealt with and decided by the American governments." Rejecting such claims, the British firmly retorted that any Central American canal concerned "the whole civilized world."
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To counter de Lesseps, Frelinghuysen negotiated a treaty with Nicaragua permitting the United States to build and operate a canal in return for a promise to defend that nation's sovereignty. The treaty was one-sided, the
New York Times
explained, because the "will of a mighty nation of 55,000,000 of homogenous, progressive and
patriotic people is of course irresistible when it runs counter to the wishes of feeble and unstable governments like Central and South America."
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As with so many other Arthur-Frelinghuysen initiatives, the incoming Cleveland administration junked the treaty because it viewed the commitment to Nicaragua as an entangling alliance.

To reduce foreign influence in the hemisphere and increase its own, the United States claimed for itself a new leadership role and initiated a habit of "paternalistic meddling" that would persist far into the future. Blaine was the ringleader in both areas. His efforts reflected his assertive personality but also his conviction that exposure to the United States would have a positive "moral influence" and raise "the standard of . . . civilization" of peoples he regarded as congenitally quarrelsome and contentious, thus eliminating any excuses for European intrusion.
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He first intervened in a boundary dispute between Mexico and Guatemala in 1881, foolishly encouraging Guatemala, which had the weaker claim, and thereby delaying a settlement. His intervention in the War of the Pacific the same year was even more clumsy in execution and harmful in results. Spying Britain's sinister hand behind Chile's efforts to gain territory disputed with Peru, he dispatched two singularly inept diplomats to the scene. One got involved in a shady scheme from which he stood to profit handsomely. Together, the two undercut each other's efforts and alienated both sides, Peru counting on U.S. support that was not forthcoming, Chile correctly viewing the United States as thwarting its ambitions. The British minister dismissed the U.S. intervention as "pretentious incapacity." Frelinghuysen liquidated it as quickly as possible. But it left a deep legacy of suspicion and anger on the west coast of South America.
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The pace of U.S. overseas activity quickened from 1889 to 1893 under the aggressive leadership of President Benjamin Harrison and Secretary of State Blaine. Defeated by Cleveland for the presidency in 1884, Blaine declined to run four years later. The Republicans nominated instead the Indiana lawyer, U.S. senator, and grandson of President William Henry Harrison. As a Senate mentor, Blaine had helped convert the Indianan to expansionism. The cold, aloof president and his dynamic, charismatic adviser never formed a close working relationship; their collaboration was often beset with rivalry and tension. But the two pursued an activist, sometimes belligerent foreign policy that jump-started a decade of expansionism, energetically reasserting U.S. leadership of the hemisphere,
pushing reciprocity with renewed vigor, escalating a minor crisis with Chile to the point of war, aggressively pursuing naval bases in the Caribbean and Pacific, and even giving the green light to a coup d'état in Hawaii. Small of stature with a high-pitched voice, "Little Ben" was especially bellicose and on several occasions had to be restrained by the man known as "Jingo Jim."
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Under Blaine's direction, the United States in 1889 hosted the first inter-American conference since the ill-fated Panama Congress of 1826. Concerned that interhemispheric conflict might invite European intervention, the secretary of state had first proposed such a meeting in 1881 so that the hemisphere nations could find ways to prevent war among themselves. The invitations were canceled after Garfield's assassination, partly to spite Blaine. Appropriately, the Plumed Knight was back in office when the conference finally convened in 1889. By this time, the focus had shifted to trade issues. The delegates were immediately whisked off on a six-week, six-thousand-mile tour of U.S. industrial centers, a crude brand of huckstering that annoyed some Latin visitors. Blaine's ambitious agenda for the six-month conference included such things as arbitration of disputes, a customs union, and copyright agreements. It produced little except the resolve to meet again and establishment of a bureaucracy based in Washington that would evolve into the Pan-American Union. Blaine's efforts brought few immediate, tangible gains, but they made clear U.S. determination to assume hemispheric leadership and initiated "the modern era of an institutionalized hemispheric community."
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Given broad authority by a measure Blaine had included in the tariff bill of 1890 to negotiate agreements without congressional oversight, the Harrison administration also mounted a new drive for reciprocal trade treaties in Latin America. Food and raw materials would be permitted to enter duty free, but if other nations did not respond with similar generosity the United States would reimpose duties. The administration used the first treaty with Brazil to pressure Spain into new agreements with Cuba and Puerto Rico. Of the former, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie observed, Cuba "hereafter will be of as little good to Spain as Canada is to Britain."
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As with many other Republican initiatives, however, the Democrats' return to power in 1893 and passage of the Wilson-Gorman
tariff in 1894 undercut Harrison's efforts, leaving little to show for two decades of effort.

The Harrison administration's assertiveness was most blatantly manifested in its handling of a minor dispute with Chile. During a drunken brawl in a seedy part of Valparaiso in late 1891, two sailors from the USS
Baltimore
were killed, seventeen wounded, and thirty-six jailed. The incident quickly escalated. As nationalistic as Americans, Chileans saw themselves as a rival to the United States for hemispheric leadership. Relations between the two nations had been strained since Blaine's ill-conceived intrusion into the War of the Pacific and worsened in 1889 when the United States openly interfered in Chile's internal politics. The
Baltimore
's captain insisted that his sailors had been "properly drunk," the victims of an unprovoked attack. Blaine was ill, and therefore not involved in the negotiations. A notably bellicose Harrison far exceeded traditional U.S. practice by demanding not only an apology but also "prompt and full" reparation. Still furious at the United States for its earlier meddling, Chile at first denied the charges and accused Washington of lying, but it subsequently expressed "very sincere regret for the unfortunate events." Unappeased and very much in keeping with the mood of the time, Harrison exclaimed that "we must protect those who in foreign ports display the flag or wear its colors." He continued to demand a "suitable apology" and reparation and threatened to break relations. As the two nations edged toward an especially foolish war, Chile blinked first, offering an apology and $75,000 in reparations. Belying his reputation for bellicosity, Blaine persuaded Harrison to accept. To Adm. Bancroft Gherardi, the incident made clear that the United States was "no longer to be trifled with."
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