The Master Architects by Werking Richard Hume;

Author:Werking, Richard Hume; [Hume Werking, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

By supplying such expertise, the divisions allowed the department to give intense and sustained attention to important matters, which resulted in the sale of battleships to Argentina and Turkey, United States participation in the Hukuang loan to China, construction by American firms of grain elevators in Russia, the dispatch of five Americans to serve as financial advisors to the Persian government, and other vaunted accomplishments of the Taft-Knox years.56

“DOLLAR DIPLOMACY”

Between 1909 and 1913 the Taft administration gave wide publicity to a campaign for promoting exports, particularly to the non-European world. It also aggressively pushed the investment of private American capital in the Caribbean (to increase the physical security of the continental United States and the Panama Canal and to develop more extensive markets for American producers) and in China (to help that country retain its territorial integrity and thereby preserve the commercial open door). The administration pursued these policies with a heavy-handed activism, prompting first contemporaries and then historians to call these the years of “dollar diplomacy” and contrast them with what had gone before.57

There were, to be sure, differences between the Roosevelt and Taft regimes in their conduct of foreign policy. The American government’s use of private capital as a foreign policy tool was much greater under Taft than ever before. Moreover, the personalities of the principals helped set a different tone for the Taft years. The president himself had none of Roosevelt’s appreciation of the European balance of power. He appears to have taken little active part in framing foreign policy, preferring to leave that responsibility to his secretary of state and the State Department. Philander Knox also differed markedly from his predecessor. Although Root had privately referred to the Latin Americans as “dagos,” he assiduously cultivated their respect and friendship. Knox, on the other hand, made no effort to hide his contempt for them. In State Department matters, he dealt principally with the broader questions, delegating responsibility for much of the policy implementation. This practice brought to center stage Huntington Wilson, who ran the department much of the time and drafted many foreign policy speeches for Taft and Knox. Wilson’s temper was short, and he often expressed contempt of the “rotten little countries” in the Caribbean who refused to keep their houses in order. He was fond of stressing American “rights,” including the “right” of the United States to determine its own immigration policy while insisting on its “right” to participate in commercial and financial ventures in Manchuria, and he labeled as “absurd” Roosevelt’s careful handling of Japanese sensitivities on these related issues.58

Finally, one cannot escape the impression that the very existence of the new foreign affairs machinery gave a double impetus toward greater activism during the Taft years. For one thing, the geographic divisions were staffed principally with younger men who sometimes shared Wilson’s lack of judgment. Hugh Gibson, Wilson’s deputy and occasionally acting chief of the Latin American division, likened the nations of that region to children who refused to remain in bed where they

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