0.2 The great war (part i)  (Page 4/14)

Woodrow Wilson, not unlike his predecessors, was intimately more involved in Latin America than any other part of the world. Wilson’s intervention in the affairs of many Latin American nations was disingenuous and hypocritical; prior to becoming president, Wilson was highly critical of Theodore Roosevelt’s heavy-handed imperialism and interventionist policies in the Western Hemisphere and pledged he would eschew such an approach. Within months of his inauguration, he sent Marines into Nicaragua, ostensibly to protect American interests. Such a move reflected a policy no different than Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy or TR’s interventionist pursuits. In fact, Wilson invoked the Roosevelt Corollary to justify US occupation of Nicaragua. The Marines remained in Nicaragua until President Franklin Roosevelt ordered their removal in 1933. Wilson sent William Jennings Bryan to negotiate a treaty with that nation’s most powerful controlling family, Chamorro, led by General (and future dictator) Emiliano Chamorro. The Bryan-Chamorro Treaty gave the US sole right to build and maintain a canal through Nicaragua. The US Senate passed the Nicaraguan Canal Treaty in 1916. It appeared that when it came to canal building Wilson wanted to leave a legacy equal to that of his rival TR.

Wilson sent the US Marines into Haiti in 1915 and the following year into the Dominican Republic. In both instances, Wilson’s believed the Marines were necessary to bring stability to the hemisphere by ending the civil wars and endemic violence that seemed to plague both of those countries. Naturally Wilson hoped that with US “help” both Haiti and the Dominican Republic would be transformed into pro-US democratic and capitalistic national governments. The US failed in both instances. Haitians and Dominicans until recently lived under corrupt and brutally oppressive dictatorships and consequently suffered through constant civil war. The U.S. rarely succeeded in creating democratic, capitalistic, pro-US regimes as a result of military intervention (As will be seen in a later chapter, post-World War Japan and Germany proved to be the exceptions).

Throughout most of its history the United States traditionally expanded its frontiers and spread its political and economic values through the acquisition of territory by purchase or peaceful negotiation: the Louisiana Purchase (1803); Florida (1819), the Oregon country (1846), southern Arizona and New Mexico—the Gadsden Purchase (1853), Alaska (1867), and Guam (1899), to name a few. Thus in 1917 Wilson, with the consent of Congress, purchased the Virgin Islands from Denmark.

Closer to home, and much more problematic for Wilson, was the issue of the Mexican Revolution, which erupted in 1910 when lawfully elected presidential candidate Francisco Madero triumphed at the polls over one of Mexico’s longest-standing dictators, Porfirio Diaz. Although Diaz had agreed to the election and had promised to step down if defeated, he reneged, largely because he succumbed to foreign capitalist pressure led by the United States to remain in power. Foreign investors were weary of Madero, who had pledged during the campaign that he would nationalize all foreign-owned enterprises, which by 1910, controlled most if not all of Mexico’s most important industries—railroads, telegraph, telephone, mining, and oil. Foreigners also controlled either directly or indirectly the bulk of Mexico’s land. For example, American newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, owned ten million acres in the northern state of Chihuahua. As a result Diaz’s close ties with foreign capitalists, if Madero wanted to become Mexico’s president, he unfortunately had to take office by force. Thus began the military aspect of the Mexican Revolution, a ten-year-long bloodbath in which thousands of Mexicans died or fled across the Rio Grande to the United States for safety.