We May Dominate the World by Sean A Mirski

Author:Sean A Mirski [A., Sean Mirski]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2023-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chastened by his failed interventions, Wilson had started musing in late 1918 on the need to let foreign peoples “work out their own salvation, even though they wallow in anarchy for a while.” Electing good men was no longer his priority, and he refused to intervene to stop a coup in Costa Rica, election rigging in Cuba, or new outrages from revolutionary Mexico. In late 1920, Wilson also announced his intent to end the occupation of the Dominican Republic. The State Department explained that the status quo was untenable, citing “the increasing agitation among the Dominicans” and “the anxiety expressed by the governments of other American republics.”24

Characteristically, however, Wilson doubted whether his opponents had also seen the light. “If Harding is elected,” he scowled, “the prospects that we shall have war with Mexico [are] very great.”25

But Harding’s administration was even less interested in new adventures abroad. Harding appointed eminent Republican statesman Charles Evans Hughes as his secretary of state. Roosevelt had once called Hughes “a whiskered Wilson,” but the former Supreme Court justice displayed little of Wilson’s interest in hemispheric emancipation. On the Monroe Doctrine’s centennial year, Hughes reaffirmed Washington’s interest in regional stability but “utterly disclaim[ed]” any intent “to superintend the affairs of our sister Republics, to assert an overlordship,… [or] to make our power the test of right in this hemisphere.”26

Such promises were by now a rite of passage for secretaries of state, but Hughes was determined to live up to his words. He tried to repair the United States’s damaged reputation in numerous ways, including by paying Colombia $25 million in reparations for Panama’s secession. But he would ultimately make ending Washington’s many occupations the calling card of his regional policy.27

Sumner Welles was the junior diplomat who masterminded the withdrawals. Born in 1892, Welles was an American aristocrat by both breeding and belongings. As a child, he showed up to playdates wearing white gloves; as a State Department official, he pierced his black cravats with jeweled stickpins, marched with a gold-headed Malacca cane, and was tailed by a British valet surnamed (alas) Reeks. Educated at Groton and Harvard, Welles acquired a haughtiness that tried the patience of everyone he met. “He conducts himself with portentous gravity,” observed one cabinet secretary, “as if he were charged with all the responsibilities of Atlas.” Even a British earl’s son lamented how Welles must have inadvertently “swallowed a ramrod in his youth.”28

Chief of the Latin American Division Sumner Welles: “Welles is a man of almost preternatural solemnity and great dignity. If he ever smiles, it has not been in my presence.”

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