[The following is a paper written for my American Foreign Policy class which I am currently taking for credit toward an undergraduate degree in Political Science, History, and International Political Studies. It goes over the reasons that the Warren Harding administration's foreign policy - led mostly by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes - came to be what it was through the historical developments of U.S. foreign policy during the preceding Progressive Era. It largely bypasses the intricacy of the Congressional activity going on at the time, which had a substantial and at times larger influence in the matter than the executive branch did, but my intention was to look on more of a macro scale to see what influenced Harding and Hughes and what the trajectory of American foreign policy was in 1918-23.]
The early 20th century saw the United States taking on a rapidly more international approach to governance. Improvement in commerce and trade, involvement in regional disputes, and innovation in travel and communications technology practically necessitated a new method of American interaction with the world. American imperialism and progressivism grew up side by side, and they overlapped in the minds of many notable politicians. Progressive foreign policy took Americans into Cuba and the Philippines to liberate the oppressed from colonialism – or, from another point of view, to save the investments of corporate America and control groups of “lesser” men. Years later, after America’s entanglement in World War One, Wilsonian idealism involved Americans in a zealous quest to make the world safe for democracy; however, some alleged that British, French, and U.S. business interests had the final say in how Wilson and his progressives acted abroad. Progressive foreign policy had moved between the parties, but it still had its ironies and contradictions. By the election of 1920, the incumbent Democrat president’s image had been maimed by Republicans looking to take back the executive branch following their successes at the legislative level in 1918. There was a people’s mandate in the election of 1920 to reverse the Wilson style of governance in foreign affairs; it was unclear if this was also a mandate to remove progressive foreign policy from the table altogether. The mandate of 1920 could also be viewed as a recall of a failed reformer in hopes of gaining a new one. The unlikely Republican candidate Warren G. Harding of Ohio would have to be the one to decide this. He had said during his campaign that “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.”[1] Few could be sure what those words meant then, and whether he had decided himself is highly questionable. Regardless, alongside other important Republican policymakers like his Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, Harding would respond to that mandate in American foreign policy by partially pacifying a cracked and bruised party and an ailing international vision through moderation, conciliation, and compromise.
The earliest clear roots of the Harding-Hughes foreign policy emerged during the era of rising Republican international bravado exemplified in differing ways by the presidencies of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. The traditional stance of the United States in foreign affairs prior to the Spanish-American War can be summed up by the words of President John Quincy Adams: “[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”[2] In other words, America was fiercely independent and avoided the entangling international treaties and groups which she saw as one of the primary reasons for Eurasia’s incessant wars. However, as one 21st century political pundit made a habit of saying, “politics is downstream from culture.”[3] In the 1890s, a rapidly changing world reflected itself in rapidly changing political priorities for U.S. leaders. The disorienting rise of industrial capitalism would radically affect politics; the interests of the business class as well as the interests of the toiling worker or the farmer left in the dust made their mark, and the ‘Progressive Era’ was born. America’s involvement abroad became far more notable and intrusive. President William McKinley began to use the language of a nascent progressive internationalism. When calling for war with Spain over Cuba, McKinley defended human rights and fat-cat business interests in almost the same breath. One of his declared grounds for foreign intervention was to support “the cause of humanity and to put an end to the barbarities, bloodshed, starvation, and horrible miseries now existing [in Cuba,]” while another was to avoid “very serious injury to the commerce, trade, and business of our people.”[4]
Warren Harding’s career as a politician was just starting as McKinley’s was ending. Harding would give a eulogy before the Ohio Senate when the President was murdered in Buffalo, New York in 1901.[5] McKinley’s successor Theodore Roosevelt would firmly place himself in the progressive camp on domestic policy while advocating for a continuation and extension of the Monroe Doctrine abroad, wielding his “big stick” diplomacy for what he claimed were the interests of both America and those she took an interest in: “In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to circumscribe the theater of war in the Far East, and to secure the open door in China, we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity at large.”[6] William Howard Taft would continue down a similar road as Roosevelt, but he was less progressive at home, angering populist progressives in the Republican Party and eventually drawing Roosevelt out of the literal and figurative jungle. Warren Harding, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate, would take the side of Taft, who had told Ohioans in 1910 that “a vote for Harding is a vote for Taft.”[7] Harding found the progressive backlash to Taft’s administration unfortunate, and he foreshadowed his eventual presidential leadership style in foreign and domestic policy when he wrote an editorial supporting party unity and cohesiveness in the face of the massive rift that grew in 1911 and 1912.[8] Charles Evans Hughes may have been chosen as Harding’s Secretary of State at least in part for his support for the internationalist, commerce-based order that Taft had pushed as president known as “Dollar Diplomacy.”[9] The basic premise of the doctrine was to create a highly profitable and less violent system of foreign affairs based on nations’ mutual desire for trade instead of the costly and demoralizing practice of military conquest, or in short, “substituting dollars for bullets.”[10]
The party split left the Republicans reeling for the first term of Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s administration. It was Charles Evans Hughes who challenged Wilson in the presidential election of 1916, losing by a slim margin; he had been “one of the few nationally known Republicans who was respected by progressives and conservatives alike,”[11] yet come election day it appeared that not enough of the progressives of the party had been corralled back into the party mainstream, even though many had remained as Republicans in name. Hughes may have run as a compromise candidate, but compromise would not come until Harding improved the strategy. Harding would even take language from Hughes’ nomination speech for his own 1920 campaigning. Hughes had entitled his speech “America First and America Efficient,”[12] and Harding would eventually declare the need to “safeguard America first, to stabilize America first, to prosper America first, to think of America first, to exalt America first, to live for and revere America first.”[13]
The 1920 presidential election was centered on questions of American foreign policy. The issues at hand were determined by numerous powerful Republican Senators who had been engaged in a grand struggle between three fairly distinct factions,[14] all arguing about the League of Nations and America’s postwar role in world affairs, but particularly in European drama. Every faction had its conservatives and its progressives, but it is possible to find general stereotypes based on the leadership of each. Internationalists - those who supported entry into the League of Nations - tended to be mildly liberal and could be expected to side either with Wilson Democrats or with the “reservationists” headed up by the Senate Majority Leader and Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. This second group was open to joining the League of Nations, but only if the “Lodge Reservations” were included in the final rules. The reservationists were the largest and the most diverse of the three factions. The third faction was somewhat large – large enough to cause Lodge substantial issues – and could easily trace its political lineage back to the progressive populists who split the party in 1912. They were called the “irreconcilables” for their unyielding stance of staying out of the League of Nations.
Irreconcilable progressives like William Borah and Hiram Johnson, who spearheaded the movement against the League, were not the same kind of progressive that Woodrow Wilson or Herbert Hoover were, at least regarding American foreign policy. In a strange way, the contentions of the irreconcilables regarding the League were quite inward looking and traditional, especially for progressives. They used arguments hearkening back to the noninterventionist Washington foreign policy and the jealous hemispheric sovereignty policy of the Monroe Doctrine. Predictably, some conservatives like George Moses of New Hampshire joined with the irreconcilable faction; however, the nationalist sentiments of Republican progressives also make sense if one sees them as defense mechanisms against the autocratic tendencies of the Wilson administration, in support of the democratic voice of the people and its perceived outlet in Congress. A hatred of secret diplomatic dealings, a distaste for European colonialism, and a deep-seated lack of trust in bankers, industrialists, and other wealthy capitalists characterized many of the irreconcilables. This outlook was seen even at the start of the war when populist progressive George Norris spoke in opposition to American entry. “It is now demanded that the American citizens shall be used as insurance policies to guarantee the safe delivery of munitions of war to belligerent nations,” he explained. “The enormous profits of munition manufacturers, stockbrokers, and bond dealers must be still further increased by our entrance into the war. This has brought us to the present moment, when Congress urged by the President and backed by the artificial sentiment, is about to declare war and engulf our country in the greatest holocaust that the world has ever known.”[15] Not every irreconcilable had opposed the war like this, but by the time of the proposal of the League of Nations they had joined in the chorus of autonomy, peace, and anti-Wilsonianism.
The primary cause for concern about the League and its potential effect on the United States’ legislative authority came from Article X of the Covenant of the League of Nations. The language of Article X read: “The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League. In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.”[16] Reservationists and irreconcilables could agree that the League heralded danger for America’s independent decision making on foreign policy; Republicans in Congress were keen on holding tight to their constitutional authority to declare war and make treaties. Regardless of these similarities, no faction could get the others on board in any lasting coalition. Irreconcilables found the reservationists to be useful as a last resort, lesser evil kind of ally, but they also used the internationalist Pro-League faction to keep reservationists from getting too close to a major victory. The only way that the party could present a united message in November would be by following the vanguard of an extremely likeable candidate free from controversy or strong factional affiliation.
The complex foreign policy needs of the day were somehow met by the acceptance of Warren G. Harding as the Republican presidential nominee. The senator’s broad language and reconciliatory attitude were exactly what Republican leaders were looking for to maintain party unity. In May of 1920, Henry Cabot Lodge expressed in writing his desire for an extremely broad foreign policy plank in the Republican National Committee’s Platform; the progressive and conservative wings of the Republican Party could not be allowed to repeat the disaster of the 1912 presidential election.[17] Focusing the intraparty discussion on foreign policy kept Republican progressives at Wilson’s throat instead of attacking conservatives on their pro-business domestic policy positions; Henry Cabot Lodge was able to work on consolidation in the Senate while Harding’s nationalist campaign rhetoric and simple porch-based appearances pleased the general public and coaxed the more stubborn irreconcilables out of their holes.
The political change produced by the rejection of the Wilson vision at the ballot box was not as reactionary as it sounded in the campaign speeches of Senator Harding. The Republican victory in 1920 across the board came as a result of careful moderation and compromise between conservatives and progressives as well as between internationalists and nationalists. The incoming President did not by any means wish to cripple himself politically and become a replica of his friend, William Howard Taft. Whether entirely purposeful or not, Harding was able to keep progressive Republicans from causing a major uproar while appeasing internationalist and moderate forces more to his own liking through many of his top-level cabinet appointments. For example, President Harding finally took a firm stance on staying out of the League of Nations in his first address to Congress, and he emphasized that the new relationship of his executive branch with the legislative branch would be one that respected preservation of Senatorial constitutional powers.[18] This assuaged fears held by irreconcilables, which had no doubt grown after the appointments of internationalist types like Charles Evans Hughes and Herbert Hoover to major cabinet positions, along with a host of conservative lackeys from Harding’s connected past. With Hughes in the executive branch, Harding would not be eclipsed by Senator Lodge’s ambition in the legislative; instead, the two Republican-controlled branches could cooperate. This was the opposite of the Wilsonian style of executive leadership, which had been thoroughly denounced by progressive and conservative Republicans alike.
The goals of President Harding were often domestic in nature: he wished to open the floodgates of financial success in America through fewer taxes and regulations. However, since defense spending was eating away much of the federal budget, conservative economics and foreign policy desires of Congressmen collided in the short Harding era’s major foreign policy event. The Washington Naval Conference was the result of calls from the varied Republican factions to get America on the proper footing in the postwar world. Harding may have been the necessary man for compromise during an election season, but as historian Karen Miller points out in Populist Nationalism, “Harding’s commitments were not a suitable foundation for foreign policy … vague passivity was not a viable diplomatic solution.”[19] It was time for his chosen man Hughes to make his mark. Hughes was particularly concerned by the postwar naval arms race primarily occurring between Britain, Japan, and the United States. It was gobbling up resources and attention on the international stage, and it would only increase the potential for flare-ups of violence and future imperial messes. Hughes had a progressive “vision of an international system where conflict was resolved rationally.”[20] A conference between the major powers, preferably in the U.S. capital, would show American global leadership in a new world order of internationalist progress. Interestingly, major irreconcilable and nationalist William Borah had been advocating for naval disarmament, so Hughes could kill two birds with one stone by arranging a conference which addressed the power of navies.[21] When the Washington Conference opened in November 1921, with the nations of Britain, Japan, France, China, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, and Portugal attending, Harding and Hughes gave speeches and impressed both their internationalist allies and their opponents in the nationalist wing with their bold calls for disarmament and a new path to lasting peace. Hiram Johnson, William Kenyon, and William Borah were among the well-known populist irreconcilable types to voice support for the administration’s Conference, particularly the ideas proposed by Hughes.[22]
An internationalist, Harding-backed Hughes foreign policy emerged as a separate entity from McKinley or Roosevelt’s more militaristic stances, and, because of misgivings by the still-influential irreconcilable Congressional bloc, it did not have the same level of capitalist intensity that Taft’s “Dollar Diplomacy” ended up amassing. In Theodore Roosevelt’s Fourth Annual Message to Congress, he expressed beliefs which would have placed him at the head of opposition to the Conference had he lived to see it. “It would be a wicked thing for the most civilized powers … to disarm,” he said. “If the great civilized nations of the present day should completely disarm, the result would mean an immediate recrudescence of barbarism in one form or another[;] … until international cohesion and the sense of international duties and rights are far more advanced than at present, a nation desirous both of securing respect for itself and of doing good to others must have a force adequate for the work which it feels is allotted to it as its part of the general world duty.”[23] Hughes and the rest of the American delegation[24] may have thought that the world’s cohesion had reached said point, and it should be pointed out that Roosevelt’s example was of complete disarmament, but the general idea presented by Roosevelt was far more reliant on peace through strength than the liberal goals of the Americans at the Conference.
There were some aspects of prior American foreign policy strategy which were retained into the Harding years due to pragmatism and the needs of the time. In 1900, Indiana Republican Albert Beveridge had declared: “The Pacific is our ocean… China is our natural customer … The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East.”[25] Staying ahead of the Japanese navy via the Washington Naval Conference’s 10:10:6 ratio agreement on navies (Britain 10; United States 10; Japan 6) allowed this to remain a reasonable claim in theory. Locations such as the Philippines and the Aleutian Islands were far closer to Japan than they were to the American mainland, so Pacific dominance was certainly key if America wished to maintain her burgeoning empire. This could only happen if the Americans were not in fear of British naval power and could restrict Japan’s ability to rapidly produce a larger navy, both of which happened to some extent as a result of the Conference’s Five Power Treaty.[26] The policy of the “open door” to China was stressed by the Americans during the Conference as well. Japan, on the other hand, hoped to maintain their newfound hold over the Shantung Peninsula. The Americans did succeed in at least granting limited autonomy in utilities back to China such as railroads and radio. It was “not comprehensively enforced, [but] it did constitute a clear commitment to the support of an independent Chinese nation-state.”[27] This fit with United States interests for the past several decades.
When looking at the Washington Naval Conference as a whole with its fairly new goals and results emphasizing a multinational order of peace, it is hard to see how such an event fits with a return to “normalcy,” or with other Harding campaign points from the same speech; “not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality,” for example.[28] Admittedly, Harding’s personal definition of the term normalcy as a political concept – “[not] the old order, but a regular steady order of things … normal procedure, the natural way, without excess,”[29] – allows for a bit more nuance and space for shifting position. Still, without an understanding of the role played by Warren Harding as candidate and as president, it appears somewhat ridiculous. Nevertheless, knowing that Harding needed to appeal to wayward nationalist elements in his party and a war-weary public in order to win allows one to appreciate his leniency in allowing his Secretary of State Hughes to take a course for the betterment of America’s foreign policy. Harding was no expert or academic, so it is probably for the best that the Washington Naval Conference had little interference from him. As president, Harding truly took on the ‘presiding’ part of the role, letting cabinet members like Hughes do their best (though his less impressive friends would greatly disappoint the nation). As Miller notes in Populist Nationalism,[30] the end of the Harding era closely lines up with the end of Republican party foreign policy compromise as a necessity. It appears that Harding had, by his death, done an admirable amount of work toward preventing a cataclysmic party split like that of 1912. That Coolidge was in power going into the election of 1924 made little difference to this development in the political scales. Any adequately known conservative Republican would have very likely won the 1924 election, and this is the essence of why it signaled change. Harding had done in 1920 what Hughes had been unable to do in 1916 thanks in large part to party unity driven by help from Henry Cabot Lodge and Harding’s own charisma and cooperation with the forces of faction; however, had it been a Hughes or a Lowden on the ticket in 1924, a Republican victory would have still most likely occurred. An irony of history is that the worst scenario for the unified party Harding had helped make may have been a Harding reelection run. Had he lived, he may have been forced out anyways due to allowing the corruption of the Veteran’s Bureau and the Navy Department. Coolidge was unharmed by the scandal because he was not in the inner circle of Harding friends in Washington.[31] The factions of the Republican party had cooled to a level where party split was not a death sentence – as seen by the rebellion of Wisconsin’s Robert LaFollette, Sr., who ran on a third-party ticket in that year’s election. Due in great part to the devotion to compromise by Harding and Hughes in the executive branch and influential leaders such as Henry Cabot Lodge in the legislature, Republican internationalists and nationalists were united long enough to change American foreign policy in a way that was distinctive from what came before. While the Republicans swept to victory in 1920 on promises of “normalcy,” what the nation got was the charting of a new course without simply pure internationalism and certainly without an isolationist withdrawal.
Bibliography
[1] Harding, Warren G. “Readjustment,” May 14, 1920. Accessed 9/21/20 from <https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/may-14-1920-readjustment> [2] “Excerpt from John Quincy Adams’s Fourth of July Address (1821),” in Readings in American Foreign Policy, ed. John Moser. [3] This phrase was popularized on the political right by the late pundit Andrew Breitbart, but it has since become diffused into the political language of a host of people. [4] “William McKinley’s War Message,” April 11, 1898. In Readings in American Foreign Policy, ed. John Moser. [5] Dean, John W. Warren G. Harding (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 24-25. [6] “Excerpts from Theodore Roosevelt’s Fourth Annual Message to Congress (1904),” in Readings in American Foreign Policy, ed. John Moser. [7] Dean. Warren G. Harding, 28. [8] Ibid. [9] Miller, Karen A.J. Populist Nationalism: Republican Insurgency and American Foreign Policy Making, 1918-1925 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 99-100. [10] “Excerpt from William Howard Taft’s Fourth Annual Message to Congress (1912),” in Readings in American Foreign Policy, ed. John Moser. [11] Miller, Populist Nationalism, 14. [12] Ibid, 15. [13] Harding, Warren G. “Americanism,” January 20, 1920. Accessed 9/21/20 from <https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/january-20-1920-americanism> [14] Miller, Populist Nationalism, 44-45 [15] “Address before the Senate by Sen. George Norris (R-NE) (1917),” in Readings in American Foreign Policy, ed. John Moser. [16] “The Covenant of the League of Nations (1919),” in Readings in American Foreign Policy, ed. John Moser. [17] Miller, Populist Nationalism, 86. [18] Miller, Populist Nationalism, 101. [19] Miller, Populist Nationalism, 101-102. [20] Ibid, 113. [21] Ibid. [22] Ibid, 122-124. [23] “Excerpts from Theodore Roosevelt’s Fourth Annual Message to Congress (1904),” in Readings in American Foreign Policy, ed. John Moser. [24] An ideologically similar group which was comprised of, in addition to Hughes: Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and Oscar Underwood. Much can be said of each’s individual efforts toward shaping 1910s and 1920s foreign policy, but this is beyond the scope of this essay. [25] “Excerpts from a Speech by Sen. Albert Beveridge on the Philippines (1900),” in Readings in American Foreign Policy, ed. John Moser. [26] Miller, Populist Nationalism, 155. [27] Ibid, 140. [28] “Excerpts from a Campaign Speech by Warren G. Harding (1920),” in Readings in American Foreign Policy, ed. John Moser. [29] Murray, Robert K. The Politics of Normalcy: Governmental Theory and Practice in the Harding-Coolidge Era (Toronto: George J. McLeod Ltd, 1973), 15. [30] Miller, Populist Nationalism, 177-178. [31] Ibid, 168-169.