From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (49 page)

Harrison and Blaine employed economic and diplomatic pressure and gunboat diplomacy in a futile effort to secure naval bases in the Caribbean. The more U.S. leaders talked of a canal, the greater the perceived need for bases to protect it. Haiti's Môle St. Nicolas was especially attractive, and Blaine exerted strong pressure against a government threatened by revolution to acquire it. When that government balked, the United States permitted arms shipments to the rebels, hoping that its generosity would be repaid. After the rebels took power, the administration dispatched the distinguished African American leader Frederick Douglass, himself an ardent expansionist, to negotiate with Haiti. When those negotiations stalled, Blaine sent Admiral Gherardi to take over; when he also failed to budge Haitian leaders, the United States conducted a naval
demonstration off its shores. Haiti refused to be cowed. Santo Domingo was no more obliging. The United States' efforts to use the leverage provided by a reciprocity treaty to acquire Samana Bay produced nothing. Blaine resigned in June 1892 and died the following year without realizing his dream of a Caribbean naval base. To the end, he remained confident that the United States would acquire Cuba and Puerto Rico within a generation.
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The Harrison administration also sought to strengthen the U.S. position in the Pacific basin. Through a bizarre set of circumstances, not at all atypical for this turbulent era, the United States assumed a quite remarkable role on Samoa. Shortly after the 1878 treaty, the U.S. consul had signed an agreement neutralizing the town of Apia and establishing a multilateral governing body composed of himself and the British and German consuls. The agreement was never submitted to the Senate, but it operated anyway, "an unprecedented collaboration with European countries on a distant South Sea archipelago."
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Such cooperation soon embroiled the United States in a mini-crisis with Germany. When German naval officers seized Apia in 1885 and then asserted their intention to take control of Samoa, the Cleveland administration balked. On his own, the U.S. consul launched a preemptive strike by declaring an American protectorate over all Samoa. An embarrassed secretary of state Bayard beat a hasty retreat, disavowing the overzealous consul and temporarily easing tensions. In 1887, however, Germany sent warships to Samoa and deported the pro-American king. Claiming sanctimoniously that the United States' "first allegiance" was to the "rights of the natives in Samoa," Cleveland and Bayard also sent warships. Already annoyed with Germany over the Pork War, the American press expressed outrage. Congress appropriated funds to defend U.S. interests on that distant isle.
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The Samoan crisis eased as quickly as it had flared up. The master diplomatist Bismarck did not want war with the United States over a faraway Pacific island and invited America and Britain to discuss the issue at a conference in Berlin. A timely hurricane, along with tidal waves, struck Apia in March 1889, sinking or disabling all German and U.S. warships and killing 150 men. This act of God diverted attention from the great power conflict, removed the instruments of war, and cooled tempers. The Berlin conference later that year, in which the United States was a full participant, quickly reached an agreement declaring Samoa independent
but establishing a complex mechanism for what was in effect a tripartite agreement dividing power among the great powers while leaving Samoa nominally autonomous. At Blaine's insistence, the United States retained control over the superb harbor of Pago Pago. Some Americans cheered that their secretary of state had stood up to Germany's Iron Chancellor. For the first time in its history, the United States was formally committed to govern an overseas people. It was also a participant in an entangling agreement with two European nations in an area where it had scant interests.
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In Hawaii, Blaine and Harrison almost pulled off a replay of the methods used to secure Florida, Texas, and California. The reciprocity treaty of 1875 had done its job. By the 1880s, Hawaii was a virtual satellite of the United States, and any foreign challenge met a firm rebuff. When the British and French sought to defend their dwindling interests by insisting on most-favored-nation status, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proclaimed Hawaii a part of "the physical and political geography of the United States." Blaine called it part of an "American Zollverein," the name given to a contemporaneous German customs union. In 1884, the two nations renewed the treaty for an additional seven years. Even Cleveland went along, although he opposed reciprocity in principle, insisting that Hawaii was essential to U.S. commerce in the Pacific.
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Because of opposition from domestic sugar producers, Senate approval came only after three years and after an amendment giving the United States exclusive right to a naval base at Pearl Harbor. The British consul correctly predicted that the base agreement would "lead to the loss of Hawaiian independence."
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Indeed, upon taking power in 1889, Blaine and Harrison negotiated with the American serving as Hawaiian minister to the United States an agreement making Hawaii a U.S. protectorate. The king resisted the provision permitting the United States to use military force to protect Hawaii's independence. The idea died—momentarily.

An abortive move to annex Hawaii made clear the lengths the Harrison administration would go to achieve its expansionist aims. The McKinley tariff of 1890 deprived Hawaiian sugar of its privileged position and spread economic distress on the islands. Along with the determined efforts of the new Queen Liliuokalani to regain the royal powers squandered to the Americans by her late brother and to restore "Hawaii for the Hawaiians," it threatened the economic well-being and political power of U.S.
planters. In early 1892, the Americans formed a secret "Annexation Club," sounded out U.S. minister to Hawaii John L. Stevens, an old friend and business partner of Blaine, and instigated a plot to overthrow the queen. Harrison carefully maintained what would later be called plausible deniability. Neither he nor Blaine encouraged Stevens's actions, but they presumably agreed with the plan and did nothing to stop it. Indeed, in June 1892, the administration assured a Stevens crony that if the Hawaiian people applied for annexation the United States could not say no. When the queen proclaimed a new constitution, the conspirators made their move. In January 1893, on orders from Stevens, the USS
Boston
landed sailors to preserve order, a step crucial to the outcome. The plotters seized power in a bloodless takeover. Stevens declared the new government under U.S. protection. "The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it," he advised the State Department.
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Hawaiian representatives hustled to Washington, where, with embarrassing speed, a treaty of annexation was negotiated, signed, and submitted to the Senate. Disclaiming responsibility for the coup, Harrison nevertheless denounced the queen as "effete," warned that the United States must act decisively lest the ripe pear fall into the waiting lap of some rival nation, and urged annexation. Like other expansionist moves, this effort to acquire Hawaii would die—at least temporarily—at the hands of a second Cleveland administration, but it made quite clear the new commitment to expansionist goals and the willingness to use extraordinary means to achieve them. One hundred years later, without acknowledging United States responsibility, Congress would pass a bill formally apologizing to the people of Hawaii for the overthrow of its government.
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F
OREIGN POLICY WAS NOT A HIGH NATIONAL PRIORITY
in the Gilded Age. There was no threat to the nation's security. The Pork War was the closest thing to a real crisis; the overblown war scares with Italy and Chile, so typical of an age of flag-waving nationalism, patriotic posturing, and inflated concern with honor, were not far behind. Gilded Age diplomatists have been dismissed for not being "internationalists," but there was no need for them to be nor any reason to expect that of them. Dull and plodding they may have seemed, sometimes clumsy in the execution of policies, but they took their jobs seriously. They began to develop the
accoutrements of national power. Although the results would not be seen until later, they vigorously pursued new outlets for trade. They defended the nation's interests. They had no master plan or fixed agenda, but the goals they pursued and the decisions they made reflected their commitment to the extension of American power.
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They achieved few tangible results, but in the Caribbean and the Pacific, areas of greatest U.S. interest, they shored up the nation's already strong position. They provided a springboard for another burst of expansionism in the 1890s.

The great transformation in U.S. foreign relations that began in the Gilded Age culminated in the 1890s. During that tumultuous decade, the pace of diplomatic activity quickened. Americans took greater notice of events abroad and more vigorously asserted themselves in defense of perceived interests. The war with Spain in 1898 and the acquisition of overseas colonies have often been viewed as accidents of history, departures from tradition, "the great aberration," in historian Samuel Flagg Bemis's words, "empire by default," according to a more recent writer.
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In fact, the United States in going to war with Spain acted much more purposefully than such interpretations allow. To be sure, the nation broke precedent by acquiring overseas colonies with no intention of admitting them as states. At the same time, in its aims, its methods, and the rhetoric used to justify it, the expansionism of the 1890s followed logically from earlier patterns, built on established precedents, and gave structure to the blueprint drawn up by James G. Blaine in the previous decade.

During the 1890s, Americans became acutely conscious of their emerging power. "We are sixty-five million of people, the most advanced and powerful on earth," a senator observed in 1893 with pride and more than a touch of exaggeration.
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"We are a Nation—with the biggest kind of N," Kentucky journalist Henry Watterson added, "a great imperial Republic destined to exercise a controlling influence upon the actions of mankind and to affect the future of the world."
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Acknowledgment of this new position came in various forms. In 1892, the Europeans upgraded their ministers in Washington to the rank of ambassador, tacitly recognizing America's status as a major power.
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One year later, Congress without debate scrapped its republican inhibitions and the practices of a century by creating that rank within the U.S. foreign service, a move of more than symbolic importance. United States diplomats had long bristled at the lack of precedence accorded them in foreign courts because of their lowly rank of minister. They viewed the snubs and shabby treatment as an affront to the prestige of a rising power. An ambassador also had better access to sovereigns and prime ministers, it was argued, and could therefore negotiate more easily and effectively.
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The Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 both symbolized and celebrated the nation's coming of age. Organized to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of America, it was used by U.S. officials to promote trade with Latin America.
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Its futuristic exhibits took a peek at life in the twentieth century. It displayed high culture and low, the latter including Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, the first Ferris wheel, and the exotic performances of belly-dancer Little Egypt. It highlighted American technology and the mass culture that would be the nation's major export in the next century. Above all, it was a patriotic celebration of U.S. achievements, past, present, and to come. Frenchman Paul de Bourget was "struck dumb . . . with wonderment" by what he saw, "this wonderfully new country" in "advance of the age."
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Wonder and pride were increasingly tempered by fear and foreboding. During the 1890s, Americans experienced internal shocks and perceived external threats that caused profound anxieties and spurred them to intensified diplomatic activity, greater assertiveness, and overseas expansion. Ironically, just a month after the opening of the Columbian Exposition, the most severe economic crisis in its history stunned the nation. Triggered by the failure of a British banking house, the Panic of 1893 wreaked devastation across the land, causing some fifteen thousand business failures in that year alone and 17 percent unemployment. The
depression shook the nation to its core, eroding optimism and raising serious doubts about the new industrial system.
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Social and political concerns combined with a malfunctioning economy to produce confusion about the present and anxiety for the future.
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Close to a half million immigrants arrived in the United States each year in the 1880s. The ethnic makeup of these newcomers—Italians, Poles, Greeks, Jews, Hungarians—was even more unsettling to old-stock Americans than their numbers, threatening a homogenous social order. The sprawling, ugly cities they populated produced fears for the survival of a simpler, agrarian America.

Democracy itself seemed in jeopardy. At first enthusiastically hailed for their productive capacity, giant corporations such as Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel, and the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the huge banking houses such as J. P. Morgan and Co. that financed them, became increasingly suspect because of the allegedly corrupt and exploitative practices used by the so-called robber barons to build them, the enormous power they wielded, and their threat to individual enterprise. At the Chicago exposition, historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented a paper attributing American democracy to the availability of a western frontier. Coming at a time when demographers were claiming (incorrectly, as it turned out) that the continental frontier had closed, Turner's writings aroused concerns that the nation's fundamental values were in jeopardy. Such fears produced a "social malaise" that gripped the United States through much of the decade.
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