|
|
|
The United States was uncomfortable as a colonial power. It began rule in the Philippines by appointing Filipinos as officials, and because Americans were seen as conquerors and unpopular, these Filipinos were in danger. But the U.S. was eager to leave Filipinos to run their own local governments - in a land of many islands and a great variety of people and languages. And with this and the United States helping the Filipinos economically, Filipino hostility toward the U.S. faded. American benevolence in the Philippines alarmed some business concerns in the United States - businesses that wanted little competition from Filipino producers of sugar, tobacco, fats and other products. And unionized labor in the U.S. feared competition and a bidding down of wages from an influx of immigration from the Philippines.
By the time of the administration of Warren Harding (1921-23), the granting of full independence to the Philippines was being discussed in the United States. President Harding sent a commission to the Philippines for a quick study of the issue, and the commission returned with the conclusion that granting independence would be premature, the commission claiming that the United States still had responsibilities there. The report sounded British, and indeed there was among the commissions - as there had been with President Theodore Roosevelt - an admiration for the British Empire.
Through the Twenties, in the Philippines the United States pursued social and economic advances in the Philippines. Wrote Dean C. Worcester, a former Governor General in the Philippines:
Never before in the history of the world has a powerful nation assumed toward a weaker one quite such an attitude as we have adopted toward the Filipinos. I make this statement without thought of disparaging the admirable work which Great Britain has done in her colonies.
In 1929 Worcester wrote of the Americans giving Manila a modern sewer system, supplying city dwellers with "comparatively pure drinking water" and wiping out diseases such as small pox, cholera and bubonic plague. Worcester wrote of skilled medical and surgical services being sent to the Philippines. He wrote about teaching boys and girls "the elements of good sanitation," about overcoming Filipino prejudice against hospitals, about new care for lepers and a more humane care for the insane "who were previously chained to floors or posts." Girls, he wrote, are being taught to cook and to sew, and boys are learning woodworking, iron working and other useful trades. And he wrote of the U.S. policy of denying liquor to tribal peoples.
Worcester boasted of U.S. inspired economic advances in the Philippines, of road building, an improved mail service, more and better wharves and harbors for inter-island and international shipping. He spoke of the need for improvements in the rice industry in the Philippines, for better irrigation and better seed selection. He spoke of lifting the Filipinos out of "primitive production methods" in its sugar industry, without which, he said, the Filipinos will not be able to compete successfully in the world's sugar market. And he criticized U.S. sugar interests for conspiring to prevent advances in the Filipino sugar industry.
Worcester boosted of the U.S. giving the Philippines "religious liberty, free speech and a free press." He wrote of a determined U.S. effort to break up slavery and peonage, something he claimed the "easy-going Spaniards" had never done. He wrote also of the all-Filipino legislature, which he described as a premature blessing from the United States, but a blessing nevertheless. Worcester favored going slowly toward independence but he saw its eventuality. "Both of our great political parties," he wrote, "are committed to the policy of granting independence when the Filipinos are ready for it."
By the 1920s, the number of full-blooded Polynesian in Hawaii was only 25,000, down from 40,000 in 1900 and 300,000 in 1800. It stood as an example of support for Hitler's Darwinistic view of the world - in other words, what would happen to the Germans if they did not maintain themselves as a people of great power, preventing their being overrun by their neighbors.
By the 1920s, whites were in political control of the Hawaiian Islands. The descendants of the missionaries had become owners of large tracts of land and had become dominate in sugar growing. It was they who in 1893 had engineered the coup that overthrew Hawaii's last ruling monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, and it was they who had crushed the armed uprising by Hawaiians that soon followed.
The official U.S. annexation of the Hawaiian Islands had come on June 14, 1900. Hawaii had become a U.S. territory and Hawaiians had become U.S. citizens, with full civil rights, including the right to vote for anyone over twenty-one who could speak, read and write either English or Hawaiian.
With the right to vote having been granted, a Hawaiian political party developed - the Home Rule Party - whose slogan was "look to the skin," and soon after the annexation they became the overwhelming majority in both houses of Hawaii's legislature. Acting to preserve Hawaiian culture, they passed a law that would have made the Hawaiian version of witch doctors licensed physicians. But the U.S. appointed governor-general of Hawaii, Sanford B. Dole, vetoed it.
The powerful white establishment fought against Hawaiian power in other ways. Using wine and women, they overcame the shame of their missionary forebears and managed to seduce a Hawaiian prince, Jonah Kuhio (called Prince Cupid by the whites) to switch from the Home Rule Party into the Republican Party. Prince Kuhio had a darker skin than the leader of the Home Rule Party, Robert Wilcox, who was half white, and Prince Kuhio enjoyed the prestige of being Hawaiian royalty. Wilcox lost to Kuhio in appealing for support from the Hawaiians, and Prince Kuhio succeeded Wilcox as Hawaii's delegate to Washington and as the nominal political leader in Hawaii. Prince Kuhio was able to lead enough Hawaiian voters from the Home Rule Party to the Republican Party that the Republican Party became dominant in the islands, controlling Hawaii's legislative and executive branches of government - a success aided by workers on plantations having been intimidated into voting solidly Republican.
Prince Kuhio was naïve in his hope to build Hawaii's Republican Party into a political instrument for Hawaiians. His slogan was "Hawaii for the Hawaiians," but by 1920 the Hawaiian islands were filled with Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese and Filipinos - brought by whites to work on their plantations. The Hawaiians had not wanted to work on the plantations. In the eyes of the plantation owners the Hawaiians were "indolent and lazy" because they preferred to cultivate their own little taro patches in the coolest hours of the day and pursue swimming, fishing and other pleasures the rest of the day.
By the twenties, sugar imports had increased, pineapple growing had become a part of the economy, and tourism had grown. Hawaiians had been doing well enough on their diminished properties, but many had migrated away from their fishing villages into urban areas - mainly to Honolulu's poorest neighborhoods. Some of them worked at government jobs or as stevedores. And some of them contacted those diseases common in the poorer areas of town, diseases such as tuberculosis and syphilis, and the death rate of these Hawaiians was twice that of Hawaiians living outside the city.
The influx of white tourists and a few white settlers made old white establishment nervous. But tourism was good business and tourist money most welcome - for buying luxuries from the mainland and necessary for a balance of payments with the mainland. In 1925, at Waikiki Beach, the pink Royal Hawaiian Hotel was built, eclipsing a couple of smaller hotels at the beach. Honolulu now had paved streets. Pineapple canneries were along its waterfront. What had been a small port town during the nineteenth century was now a center of trans-Pacific commerce between the Americas and the East.
There had been a belief in the white establishment in Hawaii that the Japanese migrants would never assimilate - part of an old belief that the East was East and the West was West and never would the twain meet. But the sons and daughters of immigrant labor, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and others, had become Americanized by attending public schools, creating a generation gap with their parents. What Hitler did not want for his beloved Germans would now increase in Hawaii - an interbreeding among people of different races. Hawaii, and Hawaiians, were becoming a blend of peoples.
World War I curtailed sugar production in Europe, resulting in a boom in sugar production in Cuba and a boom in Cuba's economy. There, virgin lands were put into sugar production and numerous new sugar mills were built, some of them funded by U.S. investors. Cuban politics, meanwhile, was in turmoil. The Conservative Party had won the elections of 1916 using violence and other undemocratic methods. The rival political party, the Liberal Party, had rejected the results of the elections, and civil war had erupted. The United States looked upon this with distaste, and although it had a treaty with Cuba that allowed it to intervene to protect lives, property and individual liberty, it did not do so. In 1917, the Conservatives crushed the Liberals militarily, and the Conservative Party's leader, General Mario G. Menocal, began his second term as Cuba's president.
By 1920, Menocal's administration was being denounced in the Cuban press as a "classic and vulgar dictatorship," and it was being accused of having abandoned the maintenance of roads and other public services and having let education decline. (Only a minority of Cuba's children were receiving any formal education.) U.S. spokesmen spoke to Cuba's conservatives about their desire for a return to democracy in Cuba, and the Conservative Party, apparently fearing U.S. intervention, listened. And in anticipation of elections that were to be held in 1920, the Conservatives invited the U.S. to Cuba to establish new election laws.
In the new elections, a conservative-popular alliance ran Alfonso Alfredo Zayas. And, despite U.S. efforts, the conservative-popular alliance ran a corrupt campaign. Zayas won, but barely. The Liberal Party appealed to the U.S., protesting that their candidate, José Gómez, was the real winner of the elections. Disliking elections with intimidation and fraud, the U.S. intervened, and new elections were scheduled. But by now economic bad times had fallen upon Cuba, and there were labor strikes and demonstrations, and many unhappy Cubans were scapegoating the United States. Liberal Party leaders joined the rising tide of hostility toward the United States and decided that the new elections would be rigged to suit U.S. interests. The Liberal Party charged that no one could become President of Cuba without the endorsement of the United States. The Liberal Party called on their supporters to stay away from the polls. Their candidate for the presidency withdrew. And in the new elections victory went to the Conservatives.
The Cubans had mismanaged their economy, and from the United States came loans. And for help in organizing the economy the Cubans invited to Cuba an advisor, Enoch Crowder - a man respected by all for his honesty and integrity. In 1923 a substantial sugar harvest and a return of a better price for sugar helped bring economic recovery. Zayas, meanwhile, was involved in graft, and in anticipation of the presidential elections to be held in 1924 the Conservatives replaced him as their candidate. Unlike 1920, the Liberal Party ran a candidate, and won. Gerardo Machado was the new president, taking office in 1925. And he was re-elected in 1928.
After the outbreak of World War I, investments and loans from the United States into Honduras increased. U.S. investors were replacing Germans as the dominate investors in Honduras, while there remained in Honduras the investments of Syrian, Lebanese and others from the Middle East who had migrated to Honduras. A company called United Fruit, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, had grown from trading in Honduras to owning land and growing bananas in the northern part of the country. United Fruit contributed Honduras' foreign-exchange earnings. It supplied Honduras with tax revenues. United Fruit provided its Honduran workers with relatively good pay, and it built schools, hospitals and housing for the Hondurans. And United Fruit, along with the U.S. government, developed an interest in political stability in Honduras.
Politics in Honduras involved rival cliques among the nation's well-to-do families. It was from these families that the nation's educated came, and these families were supposed to be the nation's practitioners of refinement. The well-to-do had their social clubs, which excluded Arabs and Jews. The well-to-do varied in their degree of conservatism, and they grouped themselves around one or another military general, one general being perhaps more liberal in outlook or younger and more idealistic than an older general. Politics in Honduras had been a history of periodic war, leaving an empty national treasury. To end its most recent war, the United States had sent in the Marines, bringing an end to fighting that had killed about 1,000 people.
In this last civil war, those called Liberals emerged victorious. In 1919, the leader of the Liberals, General Rafael López Gutierrez, became President of Honduras. In the elections of 1923 none of the candidates for president won a majority of the votes, and General López tried to extend his presidency to another term. But he was assassinated, and civil war erupted again in another scramble for political power. The United Fruit Company supported a conservative, General Tiburcio Carías Andino, better known as General Carías, and the United States sent in its Marines again - to protect the U. S. legation and as a force for mediation. This war between the Hondurans left 5,000 dead, and the alliance to which Carías belonged emerged as victors. But in keeping with its policy toward leaders of coups, the United States declared that it would not recognize Carías if he were made president. A conservative ally of Carías became President, while Carías remained the dominant political figure in the country and in control of the country's military. Then in 1928 elections were held again, and the elections were honest enough that the incumbent conservative lost. And a member of the Liberal Party became president.
Nicaragua was another Central American nation that had frequent civil wars between so-called Liberals and Conservatives. In 1912 the United States responded to an invitation from the Conservative president, Adolfo Díaz, and sent in a small contingent of Marines - a hundred men - to protect the property of U.S. citizens and the lives of people not Nicaraguan. The Marines became involved in combating rebel forces, and, to help maintain peace and stability, the Marines stayed in Nicaragua into the twenties.
An election in 1924 brought to power a coalition that had been engineered by the United States, and with some hope of peace in the country the Marines - except for the embassy guard - returned home. Nicaragua's new president, Carlos Solórzano, was a Conservative, while the new vice president, Juan B. Sacasa, was a member of the Liberal Party. Soon this coalition broke apart, largely the result of Solórzano's brother in-law letting his soldiers shoot up a Liberal Party reception and arrest the guests. Civil war erupted again. A conservative military general, Emiliano Chamorro took power. The United States stood by its policy of not recognizing the power of men who came to power by coup. It refused to recognize Chamorro's regime. And the war between the Conservatives and the Liberals intensified.
Sacasa remained as the leader of the Liberal forces, and he found support in Mexico's President, Plutarco Calles, Mexico giving Sacasa military supplies and recognizing him as the leader of Nicaragua's constituted government. The United States was hostile to Mexico's move, and it backed its old friend, the Conservative Adolfo Díaz, as president - although Díaz was one of the more hated men in Nicaragua. The United States promised Díaz loans, and Díaz described Mexico's aid to Sacasa as a "world-wide Bolshevik plot." Again the U.S. landed Marines, and sailors, with the U.S. Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, announcing that the U.S. was doing so merely to establish places where no fighting was to be allowed.
Opposition to the U.S. intervention was expressed in the conservative Argentinean newspaper, La Nación, and protest meetings were staged from Buenos Aires to Paris, and from southern Chile to the Rio Grande. Costa Rica's congress threatened to hold up banana contracts with the United Fruit Company (which had holdings there as well as in Honduras and Guatemala). Some spoke of Nicaragua as the "Little Belgium of our Hemisphere." And Kellogg retaliated by lashing out at Mexico's "Bolshevistic activities."
Forces supporting the Liberals took the town of Chinandega after days of bloody fighting. Then they were driven off by bombardment from airplanes flown by U.S. mercenaries - followed by reports of the bombing leaving hundred of civilians lying mutilated in the streets and half of the town destroyed. More Marines and a large supply of arms were rushed to Nicaragua. And, in a move friendly to U.S. policy, the British sent a cruiser into the waters off Nicaragua.
By April 1927 the United States was advocating discussions between the warring sides in Nicaragua, and the U.S. promised that for the sake of a peaceful settlement it would manage Nicaragua's elections for 1928, and the U.S. stated that disarmament would be forced on those unwilling to lay down their arms. A conference between the Liberals and Conservatives produced a settlement in May, 1927. And the fighting ended.
The election in 1928 gave an overwhelming victory to the Liberals, and a former general of the Liberal forces, José Moncada, became President. The U.S. backed Conservatives had lost, but in keeping with its traditional respect for honest elections, the U.S. abided by the results. And, content that the civil war had ended, the U.S. began to withdraw its Marines - whose place they understood was to be taken by a Nicaraguan national guard. Meanwhile, still in Nicaragua's jungle was a recalcitrant general, Augusto Sandino, who had fought on the side of the Liberals in the civil war and refused to lay down his weapons.
In the twenties, the U.S. was not interested in controlling any country in Latin America the way that Britain and France were controlling portions of Africa and Asia. The belief in the Manifest Destiny of the United States was not what it had been in the late 19th century. In no Latin American country were people from the U.S. exercising the kind of power that the descendants of missionaries had been experiencing in Hawaii. In the twenties, the United States wanted good relations with the whole of Latin America, and it wanted to protect U.S. business interests in Latin America and the lives and property of U.S. citizens.
The U.S. had withdrawn its Marines from the Dominican Republic, but it believed it was necessary to keep its contingent of Marines in Haiti. In Guatemala, capital from the United States had been pouring in, as it did over much of Latin America. But there was to be no intervention there - for the time being - as Guatemala remained politically stable and its currency sound. The same could be said for El Salvador, and especially the most stable of Central American nations, Costa Rica.
During the twenties the United States moved to patch up its differences with Mexico, with much of Latin America looking at U.S. policy towards Mexico as a measure of U.S. attitude toward the whole of Latin America. Mexico responded favorably to the U.S. move, and the two powers began discussions on the status of property in Mexico owned by U.S. citizens - largely oil and mining concerns that had been confiscated during Mexico's revolution.
A conference of American nations assembled in Havana in 1928 - attended by the U.S. President, Calvin Coolidge - a conference seen as a showdown between Latin American nations and the United States. The expressed aim of the conference was to prevent the Americas from repeating the conflicts that had marked Europe and Africa. The first order of business at the conference was settling the long-lasting border war between Chile and Peru. The conference established new treaties that demanded arbitration in disputes between American nations. And an agreement was reached that led a formal end to the war between Chile and Peru.
In February 1929, the U.S. moved to counter "misunderstandings" with Latin American nations that had arisen from its intervention in Nicaragua. It revoked the Theodore Roosevelt corollary to Monroe Doctrine - Roosevelt having assumed for the United States the right to intervene in Latin American nations in order to forestall the possibility of a European intervention. The February 1929 announcement included a claim that the Monroe Doctrine was not originally intended as an instrument of aggression against Latin American nations and was not to be used as such.
to the top |
1901-World War II | The
United States in 1919
Copyright © 1998-2005 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch14us.htm