Teddy Roosevelt's Hidden Legacy

How an "imperialist" president's record makes the case for military restraint.

Michael McMenamin from the June 2003 issue

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� Based directly on those experiences, Roosevelt told Congress in 1904 that the U.S. would intervene under similar circumstances. But as Zimmermann writes, the "Roosevelt Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine "was born of a specific need and hedged with limiting words like 'chronic,' 'ultimately,' 'flagrant,' and 'reluctantly.' Roosevelt took pains to disclaim aggressive intent: 'It cannot be too often and too emphatically asserted that the United States has not the slightest desire for territorial aggrandizement at the expense of any of its southern neighbors, and will not treat the Monroe Doctrine as an excuse for such aggrandizement on its part.'"

Cato's Chapman inaccurately portrays the Roosevelt Corollary as "Manifest Destiny on an international scale," wrongly claiming that the president had thereby announced, "It was America's duty...to bring the backward nations into the fold of democracy and Protestantism, by force if necessary." In fact, three years later -- as a direct consequence of the Venezuelan and Dominican incidents, and on the initiative of Argentina with U.S. support -- the Hague Conference of 1907 banned the use of force to collect debts, thus formally incorporating into international law the arbitration that Roosevelt had persuaded the British, Germans, and French to agree to earlier.

� Having inherited the occupation of Cuba from his predecessor, William McKinley, Roosevelt pulled all American troops out in 1902, leaving behind both an elected representative democracy and America-supplied public works. Troops returned in 1906 at the Cuban government's request, in the face of a rebellion by the losing party in a recent election. Roosevelt pulled the troops out again two years later, leaving behind even more public works, schools, and hospitals than the U.S. had placed there in its earlier occupation.

� Chapman complains that "as president, Roosevelt tried to get Colombia to sign a treaty on the construction of the Panama Canal (Panama was then a province of Colombia). The Colombian government said no, and a group of Panamanians, with U.S. help, declared themselves a republic. T.R. sent gunboats to protect the new 'nation,' and shortly thereafter construction of the canal began."

Not exactly. The Colombian president actually signed the treaty, but its Senate refused to ratify. The U.S. already had a treaty with Colombia, signed in 1846, giving it free transit across the isthmus "upon any modes of communication that now exist, or that may hereafter be constructed" -- which, at the time, was a railroad designed, built, operated, and protected by Americans. Armed revolts in Panama against distant Colombian rule had been common during the previous 50 years. Although it is true that America had helped put down 13 such revolts in the past, there was nothing in the treaty that obliged it to do so.

In the face of the Panamanian revolt in 1903 over the possibility that the canal would now go to Nicaragua, the U.S. landed 50 Marines at Colon to guard the railroad from any disruption during the rebellion. There was no conflict or confrontation between Colombian and American forces, and rebel bribes to the commander of the Colombian garrison in Panama City played a larger role in the revolt's success than the Marines did.

� In 1905, through skillful personal diplomacy, Roosevelt negotiated a peace in the protracted and bloody Russo-Japanese War. "The Portsmouth negotiation was a masterpiece of classical diplomacy," Zimmermann writes. "As a mediator and negotiator Roosevelt was informed, focused, understanding, sympathetic, firm when he had to be, trustworthy, and decisive."

� France and Germany almost went to war over Morocco in 1905. The kaiser, having admired Roosevelt's skill in handling his cousin the czar, asked Roosevelt to mediate between the two great powers. While not becoming personally involved in face-to-face negotiations as he had with the Russians and Japanese, Roosevelt authorized American mediation and was intimately involved in the details of the eventual resolution.

� Chapman criticizes Roosevelt's decision to dispatch all 16 U.S. battleships -- the Great White Fleet -- on a tour around the world in 1907, arguing that the display happened "largely to show off American's military power." But such criticism is superficial. Roosevelt wasn't "showing off." Rather, he was sending a direct message to the Japanese that the U.S. battle fleet, entirely concentrated in the Atlantic, could be transferred intact as a fighting force from one ocean to the other if the need arose, something Roosevelt knew the British and Germans (and presumably the Japanese as well) did not believe possible.

His reason for doing this was a diplomatic crisis earlier that year occasioned by the San Francisco Board of Education's decision to segregate Japanese schoolchildren. Roosevelt persuaded the school board to back down, but the crisis flared anew that summer when anti-immigration riots broke out in San Francisco and immigrant Japanese workers were beaten by mobs.

This unrest led opposition leaders in Japan to call for war. Privately, Roosevelt was advised that Japan's war party really believed it could prevail in a fight with the U.S. Moving the fleet from the Atlantic around Cape Horn to San Francisco was done at the recommendation of Adm. George Dewey. The world tour was not announced until after the fleet had reached San Francisco and the message to the Japanese war party had been delivered.

You can't even begin to compare this record to Woodrow Wilson's, though Zimmermann tries. "As president Wilson practiced a classic Rooseveltian diplomacy," he writes, "seeking to remove threats close to American shores and to protect the sea routes to the Panama Canal, which opened for business in his first term. In 1914 he unsuccessfully sought Senate approval for a U.S. protectorate over Nicaragua that was designed to protect an alternate canal route from foreign incursions. Out of fear that Germany would exploit Haiti's endemic violence in order to gain control of sea access to Panama, Wilson landed troops in 1915, and Haiti became an American protectorate for nineteen years. A year later American marines occupied the Dominican Republic and installed a U.S. dictatorship that lasted for eight years. Wilson also intervened repeatedly in Mexico."

There are ways to characterize Wilson's foreign policy, but it is more than a stretch to suggest it was "classical Rooseveltian diplomacy." Roosevelt's former Secretary of State Elihu Root certainly didn't see it that way. As a senator from New York during Wilson's first term, he actively opposed the president's interventionist foreign policy in Latin America.

Wilson's foreign policy is one long litany of failure and incompetence. There was his interventionist Latin American policy, in which force was used at the slightest provocation. There were his unsuccessful efforts in 1915 and 1916 to mediate a peace among the Great Powers. There was his postwar failure to achieve a just peace in the Treaty of Versailles, and his refusal to accommodate reasonable amendments to that treaty in the U.S. Senate.

These sometimes terrible flubs were due largely, if not entirely, to Wilson's rigid personality and outsized ego. An otherwise sympathetic Auchincloss suggests in his short book Woodrow Wilson (2000) that strokes in 1896 and 1906 "may have had a permanent after effect in intensifying [Wilson's] natural irritability and stubbornness." Elsewhere Auchincloss writes of Wilson as a "self-assured idealist who could hardly conceive, much less admit, that he could be wrong in judging matters that he deemed within his peculiar sphere of expertise....This Wilson, with God and his angels presumably ranked behind him, tended to regard opposition as malicious betrayal."