On the Consequences of Elections

June 30, 2013August 12, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / 1 Comment

Calvin Coolidge, writing his column after the midterm elections of 1930 were known on November 4 of that year, observed, “Some people will be disappointed and some will be elated. But there will be enough representatives of different parties holding office during the next two years so that no very violent change in policy will be made…We make our own government. If we fail it is our own fault. Under our system a nation of good citizens cannot have a bad government.” The keyword for Mr. Coolidge was good. If citizens are doing what they are supposed to do — exercising their responsibilities seriously — no bad government would stand a chance of being elected. As he would say at other times, “government is what we make it.” It was a more profound way of saying elections have consequences. While Coolidge was largely correct that “no very violent change” would take place in the next two years, 1932 would transform everything. Burton Folsom, in New Deal or Raw Deal?, and Amity Shlaes, in The Forgotten Man, document the upheaval in domestic policy with the election and inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Foreign policy was no less submitted to drastic overhaul. Three instances illustrate this point.

First, the “Good Neighbor Policy” of “religious adherence” (as Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, would describe it in his Memoirs, p. 310) to nonintervention enabled ambitious and unscrupulous men to overthrow their native institutions and establish dictatorships, like the Somozas in Nicaragua. Preceding administrations, including the policy of President Coolidge, did not take American involvement off the table. Coolidge recognized that America possessed great moral responsibilities to others, especially in our hemisphere through the Monroe Doctrine. It was not justification for involvement in every dispute to come down the pike, as in Wilson’s call to make the world safe for democracy, but if her citizens were not defended and law and order not respected, especially in her backyard, the heritage of government by laws not men would be conceded away. Might would make right after all. The great accomplishment of 1776, shared by the younger republics of Latin America, was too valuable an inheritance to withhold help entirely.

When the Nicaraguan government petitioned for assistance in November 1926, Coolidge would inform Congress that Marines (2nd Battalion, 5th Regiment) were redeployed, landing January 10, 1927. Over the next few months, with reinforcements, the force of 2,000 Marines fought their way through to protect towns and rail lines from further attacks. In March Coolidge dispatched Henry L. Stimson to resolve the situation. In his first two weeks, he devoted his time to learning from all parties what was happening. In a month, by granting the request from both sides of the conflict for America to intervene, peace was renewed. Both sides agreed to allow the current President to finish his term according to law. Their laws also required an election occur in 1928. Stimson and Frank R. McCoy were commissioned to supervise the election, insuring a secret ballot and fair proceedings. By reaffirming law and administering medical help to those harmed in the conflict, Americans left the country on peaceful terms with only Sandino refusing to lay down arms.

Henry L. Stimson, Coolidge’s representative to Nicaragua, 1927.

The last Marines were withdrawn in January 1933 after the election of Sacasa. It was in March of that year that conditions began to descend again. With the commitment not to intervene determined by the “Good Neighbor” Policy, there was little U.S. Minister Arthur Lane could do as Somoza would kill Sandino the following year and solidify his power by 1936.

Cordell Hull, Secretary of State to Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1944)

Second, the commitment to nonintervention accepted the false premise of Argentina. When the diplomatic delegations of twenty Latin American countries met in Havana with the United States delegation led by Charles Evans Hughes in 1928, their instructions explicitly included the refusal of nonintervention. That point was not negotiable. The tension in the air was felt by all. President Coolidge would come down to speak, commending respect for law and pursuit of peaceful means of resolution between sister nations.

The next day, however, with the President gone, the simmering conflict boiled over in conference. Argentina was displeased that their beef, failing sanitary standards for importation, was being turned away by the United States. Citing the premise that America was improperly involved in Nicaragua, Mexico and Chile, however, combined with the past year of “anti-imperialist” sentiment, nonintervention came to the floor. The Argentine delegation led the way with the resolution, “No state has the right to intervene in the internal affairs of another.” A flurry of chaotic cheers, cries and rhetoric followed. The Americans, trying to avoid confrontation, sat increasingly apprehensive until Chairman Hughes stood to speak. The room went silent. Hughes began by reviewing the discussion of nonintervention in committee, the agreement that it would be discussed at the next Conference five years in the future, then laid out directly the reasons for each “intervention” in Latin America. While these were discussions best reserved between the U.S. and each nation concerned, Hughes methodically outlined the requests for intervention, the help provided by Americans and the threats to life and property when respect for law is discarded.

Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of State under both Harding and Coolidge (1921-1925), who came out of private life to lead the American delegation at the Pan-American Conference in Havana, Cuba, 1928.

As he finished, he appealed,

“I am too proud of my country to stand before you as in any way suggesting a defense of aggression or of assault upon the sovereignty or independence of any State. I stand before you to tell you we unite with you in the aspiration for complete sovereignty and the realization of complete independence.

“I stand here with you ready to cooperate in every way in establishing the ideals of justice by institutions in every land which will promote fairness of dealing between man and man and nation and nation.

“I cannot sacrifice the rights of my country but I will join with you in declaring the law. I will try to help you in coming to a just conclusion as to the law, but it must be the law of justice infused with the spirit which has given us from the days of [Hugo] Grotius this wonderful development of the law of nations, by which we find ourselves bound.”

The room sounded with applause from every delegation. Support for the resolution evaporated and the Conference closed with a better understanding between nations. By removing intervention entirely from United States’ relations in Latin America, the “Good Neighbor” Policy (adopted from 1933 onward) accepted the short-sighted premise that had been refuted by Hughes so powerfully five years before. It demonstrated that elections can change the world and not necessarily for the better, when it hamstrings the protection of lives, possessions and law.

Third, the commitment to withhold recognition of the Soviet Union was abandoned without meeting America’s longstanding criteria. Since the Revolution of 1917, the United States (through Presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover) had withheld official recognition from the new communist regime. As long as Moscow funded, trained and encouraged activities that subverted our institutions, our laws and our government, the Coolidge administration would continue to refuse recognition. The revolutionaries, in confiscating properties owned by Americans living in Russia as well as failing to repay debts owed to the United States, the Soviet Union would not be received. Such were the requirements the United States required for sixteen years, until 1933, when the simple promise to stop interfering, either overtly or covertly, in the “internal affairs” of the United States, its citizens and its possessions, was accepted by the Roosevelt administration. While, as Hughes noted in 1944, “All the aims of Stalin’s diplomacy” were “not yet fully known,” the Venona Transcripts and seventy plus years of subterfuge and violence reveal what the regime was enabled to accomplish thanks to this official recognition of “Uncle Joe” Stalin’s regime.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and “Uncle Joe” Stalin, meeting at Yalta in February 1945.

These are all reminders that good intentions alone do not make good policy. The mistakes of each administration are not only felt at home but around the world. A fundamental strength of the Coolidge era policy rested on the preeminent importance of law and order. The law presides over us all, in conflict and in peacetime alike. If we disrespect that law and turn away when our neighbors call for our aid, how is the principle of might does not make right discredited? By abandoning neighbors to ambitious and violent people who flout the law, how is the policy of nonintervention, at the expense of law and order, helping anyone?

The Coolidge administration reaffirmed the Monroe Doctrine in this hemisphere. It was not a universal call to police the world. It was a call to adhere to government by law and order. In contrast, Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” Policy was a plan intended for every continent. The removal of American leadership from the world scene articulated by this posture did more to encourage the storms of the twentieth century than anyone could have possibly intended.

Under Coolidge, we deferred to the authority of the sovereign nations of Europe to govern their own sphere. It is what independent nations do. As Coolidge understood well, every benefit carried with it an equal responsibility. The responsibility of Europe was to meet their obligations from the war and rebuild free and peaceful nations in their sphere. Shirking that obligation is how the matter of war debts and reparations became a burden largely assumed by the United States instead of responsibly paying it back as promised. Like the League of Nations did with Mussolini in 1935 and Hitler in 1938, however, Europe found it generally easier to shift their responsibilities to American shoulders. By placing constitutional law and orderly liberty as secondary to nonintervention, the Roosevelt administration illustrates the heavy costs of bad citizenship. Good policy starts with good citizens.

Ironically, “Ding” Darling had been skeptical of Coolidge’s policy of intervention in Latin America. Cartoon published in A Ding Darling Sampler: The Editorial Cartoons of Jay N. Darling. Mt. Pleasant, SC: Maecenas Press, 2004.

References

Bemis, Samuel Flagg. The Latin-American Policy of the United States: An Historical Interpretation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1967. pp. 242-255.

Hughes, Charles Evans. The Autobiographical Notes. Eds. David J. Danelski and Joseph S. Tulchin. Cambridge: Harvard, 1973. pp.261-279.

Hull, Cordell. The Memoirs of Cordell Hull. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1948. pp.292-351.

Stimson, Henry L. American Policy in Nicaragua. Princeton: Markus Weiner, 1991.

Stimson and McGeorge Bundy. On Active Service in Peace and War. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948. pp.111-116.

On Open Doors and Isolation

June 29, 2013August 12, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

When one approaches the literature that has accumulated over the years about the 1920s, it is found that narrow templates and hostile stereotypes have been allowed to define the decade. This is not honest scholarship, especially when those definitions are passed down as the final word on the matter. Repeating approved doctrines deprive us and future generations of the wealth of insight taught by the Coolidge era. By skipping over Coolidge far too many refuse to acknowledge that a profound and successful political philosophy exists outside the limits and failures of the “New Deal” and all of its legislative offspring. The 1920s are simply not worth studying, it is asserted, because they were an era of greed, hyper-capitalism, “underconsumption,” American isolationism and worship of “big business” (as if none of those conditions ever existed in the administration that swept to office in 1932). Any attempt to return to the primary sources and reappraise the time period is simply “reactionary” or “revisionist,” as if Schlesinger and the long train of “historians” after him were merely reporting the facts without a shred of bias for the policies of F. D. R.

Chief among those accepted templates forced onto the 1920s are: (1) Isolationism and (2) Alliance with “Big Business.” A return to the original sources written by those who developed policy and implemented it during the Harding and Coolidge years, such simplistic frames of reference do not hold. A fascinating letter written to President Coolidge by none other than Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, on November 8, 1923, illustrates a far different policy underway at the time. Secretary Hughes is explaining the distinct difference of America’s “Open Door Policy” regarding America businesses abroad. The President’s approach, expressed in giving complete confidence to his Secretary to direct the Department, makes clear that Hughes was acting entirely with Coolidge’s authority.

Secretary Hughes writes, “From time to time there has been some dissatisfaction expressed in business circles because this Department’s attitude toward American business interests in the foreign field differs somewhat from the attitude in similar matters of the British, French and other European governments. The latter are not loath to interfere politically in support of the business interests of their nationals to a degree which is not followed by this Department.” Hughes was articulating an avowed refusal to thrust American businesses on other countries to the chagrin of several of our own businessmen, despite the potential fallout at the polls. He goes on, “Our position is that we are always ready to give appropriate support to our nationals in seeking opportunities for business enterprise abroad, but we do not undertake to make the government a party to the business negotiations or use political pressure for the benefit of private interests in order to obtain particular concessions, or intervene in favor of one American interest as against another. We are persistent in our efforts to maintain the open door policy, or equality of commercial opportunity, but we do not attempt to assume obligations for the government, expressed or implied, which under our system we could not undertake to discharge.” The open door was not for forcing American business on the world, it was for other nations to maximize opportunity for commerce without government favoritism, ours or theirs.

The Turkish government’s patronage of national petroleum companies was closing that open door for opportunity and hindering a free market. Instead of deploying the pressure of politics, however, the Coolidge administration strove to keep that door open to any and all, without negotiating favoritism for American businesses. It was the exact opposite of what Burton Folsom calls “political entrepreneurship.” Under this policy, “big business” had no special advantages to get established overseas. There were no “secret deals” between government and business with Hughes at the helm. Businesses were to approach one another and negotiate as equals with the strength of their own resources and if they failed to persuade foreign investors, the door remained open for someone else to succeed without government there to “strong-arm” a deal.

Disappointing as it was for some in business, Hughes commended the advantages of keeping the door open. “American companies which might prefer a policy of more direct interference on their behalf by the government are inclined, in my opinion, to overlook the fact that American prestige and reputation for fairness has been enhanced, and consequently business opportunities of our nationals have been increased, by the correct policy which this government has followed. I find that in many parts of the world, American business is welcomed largely because foreign countries realize that they can deal with American interests on a business basis without fearing political complications.” The “political intrigues” and “difficulties” that would ensue through closing the door to opportunity, whether by rewarding favored companies or by punishing undesirable industries, vindicates the wisdom of this policy.

The conferences that pervaded the decade on a host of foreign relations problems combined with the direct lines of friendship rebuilt by men like Dwight Morrow in Mexico, Charles Dawes and Frank B. Kellogg in Europe, Henry Stimson in Nicaragua and the Philippines, Sumner Welles and Secretary Hughes toward the Latin American states and many others help to correct the grossly mistaken belief that America retreated from the world under Coolidge. It was as involved as ever. Instead of embracing aggression and propaganda as its weaponry, however, these leaders of the Coolidge era demonstrated what patience, impartiality, service and understanding, with the resolve to protect America’s ideals, can accomplish.

On Deportation

April 26, 2013April 28, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Our republic was framed with power separated between distinct and equal branches of government. Defined limits to the authority of each ensured that autonomy, jealously guarded, would restrain the ambitious from consolidating all the powers from the people and the states into the control of an elite minority. To combine the power to legislate with the power to enforce or the power to interpret and judge would overturn the wisely crafted framework laid down in the Declaration and built upon by the Constitution.

The sovereignty of a self-governing people would, through elected representatives, enact laws that disclose the existence of certain rules for the healthy growth and productive advance of the nation. It was exercised by civilized countries for centuries until the right of nations to set standards for citizenship became illegitimate in recent decades. Instead of respecting law and responsible citizenship, borders are decried as “xenophobic” and naturalization “oppressive” to what the current Attorney General considers the “civil right” of illegal immigration. Emotion, too often, counters the need for careful deliberation of our laws to preempt bad policies. Immigration and basic standards of citizenship are no exception. We are experiencing now the effects of a nation in denial of itself, its laws and its institutions. A nation that renounces standards for admittance is not a nation at all, but has become an amorphous tract of territory that owes all to everyone regardless of character, conduct or intentions without anything required in return. This is a recipe for very real chaos.

President Coolidge defended the motives of immigration standards when he said, “Restricted immigration is not an offensive but purely a defensive action. It is not adopted in criticism of others in the slightest degree, but solely for the purpose of protecting ourselves. We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America be kept American.” Some, succumbing to emotion, hear racism and “white supremacy” in such remarks. They completely misunderstand Coolidge.

He reminds us that by upholding certain rules, everyone is protected and those with no regard for law will be prevented from bringing harm, economic and otherwise, to those who respect the rights of others. If a person enters in disregard of the law, on what basis will he or she respect the laws that protect those already here? If laws are arbitrarily applied or selectively enforced, it tells the law-abiding there is no protection under law at all. The law has become the preferences of those in power, instead of an impartial rule fairly obligating everyone alike and observed for the good of society. When that happens, no law is strong enough to hold back the consequences. This is why Coolidge defended the wisdom of an incremental, legal immigration. He did so in order to ensure people are not forced to bear more than can be borne to care for and help assimilate those who come here to become Americans. The exercise, at times, of a nation’s right to deport becomes just as essential when individuals come here to reject assimilation, break the law and make trouble, as both Marcus Garvey and Lothar Witzke did.

As the former President heard of immigration in the news again, he wrote, “A few years ago we were discussing Americanization of our residents of foreign birth. Not being an appropriate word, it aroused considerable antagonism among those we desired to help…What we really intended was a course of helpful education to instruct new arrivals to the United States in the meaning of our laws and customs, so that they might better avoid the perils and secure the advantages of being here…The great proportion of immigrants duly become desirable citizens. But those who fail to respond to the privileges of our country, who fall into evil ways and violate our laws, should be punished for their crimes and then deported. We have all we can do to take care of deserving people without being burdened with those who demonstrate their unfitness to enjoy our liberties.”

Such is felt to be unfeeling and devoid of compassion today. What is really missing is today’s lack of concern for the costs of policies passed while haste in implementing legislation on emotion alone prevails. How many people have been hurt by the good intentions of feeling rather than thinking through our nation’s challenges? Electoral politics cannot be the impetus for crafting future immigration law. As Coolidge observed, “As a nation, our first duty must be to those who are already our inhabitants, whether native or immigrants.” Of course, Coolidge meant legal immigrants. He did not indulge in the politically correct game with which we now call illegal inhabitants, “undocumented workers.” It is a hard truth to digest but no less necessary if we are to retain freedom with responsibility.

The Italian Republican League of New York presents President Coolidge with an original parchment of the Gettysburg Address, February 12, 1927 (Library of Congress photo).