Panama Canaclass="underline" Gaillard (Culebra) Cut constructionWorkers on the Panama Canal dug by hand through the 1907 Cucaracha landslide in Gaillard (Culebra) Cut.Corbis
Concern over what Americans regarded increasingly as their “lifeline” increased in proportion to progress in the construction of the canal. An early manifestation of that concern came in 1902–03, when Britain, Germany, and Italy blockaded Venezuela to force the payment of debts, and particularly when the Germans bombarded and destroyed a Venezuelan town; so agitated was American opinion that Roosevelt used a veiled threat to force Germany to accept arbitration of the debt question by the Hague Court. When the Dominican Republic defaulted on its foreign debt to several European countries in 1904, Roosevelt quickly established an American receivership of the Dominican customs in order to collect the revenues to meet the country’s debt payments. Moreover, in his annual message to Congress of 1904, the president announced a new Latin-American policy, soon called the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—because the Monroe Doctrine forbade European use of force in the New World, the United States would itself take whatever action necessary to guarantee that Latin-American states gave no cause for such European intervention. It was, in fact, a considerable extension of the Monroe Doctrine, not a correct historical interpretation of it, but it remained the cornerstone of American policy in the Caribbean at least until 1928.
Actually, Roosevelt was reluctant to interfere in the domestic affairs of neighbouring states; his one significant intervention after 1904—the administration of the Cuban government from 1906 to 1909—was undertaken in order to prevent civil war and at the insistence of Cuban authorities. Roosevelt’s successor, however, William Howard Taft (see U.S. presidential election of 1908), had more ambitious plans to guarantee American hegemony in the approaches to the Panama Canal. Adopting a policy called Dollar Diplomacy, Taft hoped to persuade American private bankers to displace European creditors in the Caribbean area and thereby to increase American influence and encourage stability in countries prone to revolution. Dollar Diplomacy was a total failure; its one result was to involve the United States in a civil war in Nicaragua with the effect of perpetuating a reactionary and unpopular regime. (Similar initiatives by the Taft administration in the Far East—most notably a plan for the internationalization of the railroads of Manchuria—also failed.)
Taft, William Howard: inspection of Panama CanalWilliam Howard Taft (centre) at an inspection during construction of the Panama Canal.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The accession of Woodrow Wilson in 1913 (see U.S. presidential election of 1912) seemed to augur the beginning of a new era in Latin-American relations; the new president and his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, were idealists who had strongly condemned interventions and Dollar Diplomacy. But, although Wilson did negotiate a treaty with Colombia to make reparation for U.S. complicity in the Panamanian revolution, it was defeated by the Senate. Wilson also tried hard to promote a Pan-American nonaggression pact, but it foundered on the opposition of Chile, which had a long-standing border dispute with Peru.
Wilson, Woodrow: first inauguration Pres. Woodrow Wilson speaking at his first inauguration on the east portico of the U.S. Capitol, March 4, 1913, Washington, D.C. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (cph 3a16546)
When crises threatened the domestic stability of the Caribbean area, however, Wilson revealed that he was just as determined to protect American security as Roosevelt and Taft had been and that he was perhaps even more willing to use force. Frequent revolutions and the fear of European intervention led Wilson to impose a protectorate and a puppet government upon Haiti in 1915 and a military occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1916. He concluded a treaty with Nicaragua making that country a protectorate of the United States. Moreover, he purchased the Danish Virgin Islands in 1916 at the inflated price of $25,000,000 in order to prevent their possible transfer from Denmark to Germany.
The Progressive era
The character and variety of the Progressive movement
The inauguration of Pres. McKinley" class="md-crosslink">William McKinley in 1897 had seemed to mark the end of an era of domestic turmoil and the beginning of a new period of unparalleled tranquility. Prosperity was returning after the devastating panic of 1893. The agrarian uprising led by Bryan in the election of 1896 had been turned back, and the national government was securely in the hands of friends of big business. The Dingley Tariff Act of 1897 greatly increased tariff rates; the Gold Standard Act of 1897 dashed the hopes of advocates of the free coinage of silver; and McKinley did nothing to stop a series of industrial combinations in defiance of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Origins of progressivism
Never were superficial signs more deceiving. Actually, the United States already was in the first stages of what historians came to call the Progressive movement. Generally speaking, progressivism was the response of various groups to problems raised by the rapid industrialization and urbanization that followed the Civil War. These problems included the spread of slums and poverty; the exploitation of labour; the breakdown of democratic government in the cities and states caused by the emergence of political organizations, or machines, allied with business interests; and a rapid movement toward financial and industrial concentration. Many Americans feared that their historic traditions of responsible democratic government and free economic opportunity for all were being destroyed by gigantic combinations of economic and political power.
Actually there was not, either in the 1890s or later, any single Progressive movement. The numerous movements for reform on the local, state, and national levels were too diverse, and sometimes too mutually antagonistic, ever to coalesce into a national crusade. But they were generally motivated by common assumptions and goals—e.g., the repudiation of individualism and laissez-faire, concern for the underprivileged and downtrodden, the control of government by the rank and file, and the enlargement of governmental power in order to bring industry and finance under a measure of popular control.
The origins of progressivism were as complex and are as difficult to describe as the movement itself. In the vanguard were various agrarian crusaders, such as the Grangers and the Populists and Democrats under Bryan, with their demands for stringent railroad regulation and national control of banks and the money supply. At the same time, a new generation of economists, sociologists, and political scientists was undermining the philosophical foundations of the laissez-faire state and constructing a new ideology to justify democratic collectivism, and a new school of social workers was establishing settlement houses and going into the slums to discover the extent of human degradation. Allied with them was a growing body of ministers, priests, and rabbis—proponents of what was called the Social Gospel—who struggled to arouse the social concerns and consciences of their parishioners. Finally, journalists called “muckrakers” probed into all the dark corners of American life and carried their message of reform through mass-circulation newspapers and magazines.