R2.8 Emergence of the Americas in global affairs (1880–1945)

Between 1880 and 1945 the Americas moved from the edge of world politics to its centre. The USA became an imperial power, a decisive force in both world wars and, by 1945, the strongest state in the world. Canada and several Latin American states also took on new international roles, and the two world wars changed life at home across the hemisphere.

The timeline of 1880–1945 shows the main phases. Before 1898 Americans argued about whether to expand overseas at all. From 1898 to the First World War the USA built an empire and intervened repeatedly in its neighbours’ affairs. After 1919 it refused to join the League of Nations or make alliances, while remaining active in world trade and diplomacy. In the 1930s it gave up armed intervention in Latin America, and from 1941 it fought a global war.

Reasons for US expansionist foreign policy, 1880–1914

In 1880 the USA had a small army, a navy of ageing wooden ships and no colonies. Its expansion so far had been across the North American continent, at the expense of Mexico and of Indigenous nations. By 1900 it ruled territory from the Caribbean to the western Pacific. Historians explain this change through four groups of reasons, which worked together and carried different weight for different people.

The diagram of the four groups of reasons sorts the causes of expansion into political and strategic, economic, social and ideological.

Political and strategic factors

The most influential strategic thinker was Alfred Thayer Mahan, a US naval officer and lecturer at the Naval War College. In The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890) he argued that great powers rose through command of the sea, which needed a large battleship fleet, overseas bases where ships could take on coal, a canal across Central America and a strong merchant marine. Mahan’s ideas were widely read in Britain, Germany and Japan as well as the USA.

Having therefore no foreign establishments, either colonial or military, the ships of war of the United States, in war, will be like land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores. To provide resting-places for them, where they can coal and repair, would be one of the first duties of a government proposing to itself the development of the power of the nation at sea.

Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, 1890. Mahan wrote as a naval professional, partly to persuade Congress to fund a modern navy, and he drew his lessons from British history. The passage explains why naval strategists wanted Hawaii, Pacific islands and Caribbean bases: the navalism he advocated led directly to demands for colonies.

Mahan’s readers included a small group of politicians who promoted what they called the “large policy”: Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Theodore Roosevelt (assistant secretary of the navy in 1897–1898) and the diplomat John Hay. The Naval Act of 1890 funded the first modern US battleships, and by 1898 the navy was strong enough to defeat Spain.

European competition sharpened these arguments. The partition of Africa after the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 and the scramble for concessions in China in 1897–1898 suggested that the world was being divided up, and that a state without colonies and bases would be shut out. Germany’s interest in Samoa and the Caribbean worried US strategists, and in 1899 Samoa was divided between Germany and the USA.

The USA also asserted its old claim to leadership in the hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had declared the Americas closed to new European colonisation. In 1895, during a boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana, Secretary of State Richard Olney demanded that Britain accept arbitration and wrote that the United States was “practically sovereign on this continent”. Britain, facing problems in South Africa, agreed to arbitration in 1896. The crisis showed that the USA was ready to enforce the doctrine itself.

Economic factors

The US economy grew enormously after the Civil War, and by the 1890s the USA was the world’s largest industrial producer. Many business leaders and politicians feared that farms and factories now produced more than Americans could buy. The Panic of 1893 began a depression in which about one in six workers lost their jobs, which seemed to confirm the fear of overproduction and led to calls for new export markets.

Most US trade and investment went to Europe and Canada, but some sectors had direct interests overseas. US investors had about US$50 million in Cuban sugar, mines and railways by 1895, a commonly cited estimate. In Hawaii, American-descended sugar planters dominated the economy. The McKinley Tariff of 1890 removed Hawaii’s special access to the US sugar market, causing a depression on the islands that pushed planters to seek annexation.

Secretary of State James G. Blaine called the first Pan-American Conference in Washington in 1889–1890 to expand trade with Latin America and settle disputes by arbitration. Its practical results were small, though it created the body that later became the Pan American Union. In Asia, Secretary of State John Hay’s Open Door notes of 1899–1900 asked the great powers to keep China open to the trade of all nations, which became the classic statement of a policy of markets without colonies.

Social factors

The census of 1890 reported that there was no longer a continuous line of frontier settlement in the West. In 1893 the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier had shaped American democracy and character. If the frontier had closed, some Americans asked where the nation’s energy and its surplus population would go, and overseas expansion offered one answer.

The 1890s were also a decade of social strain: depression, violent strikes such as the Pullman Strike of 1894, the farmers’ revolt of the Populists, and mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Some historians argue that an aggressive foreign policy offered an outlet for these anxieties and a cause that could unite a divided nation.

Mass-circulation newspapers turned foreign affairs into popular drama. William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World competed for readers with sensational stories of Spanish cruelty in Cuba. This yellow journalism did not cause the war of 1898 by itself, but it made it hard for politicians to resist demands for action. Protestant missionaries, active in China, Hawaii and the Pacific, added a religious voice in favour of overseas involvement.

The role of ideology

Expansion was justified by ideas about race, religion and national destiny. Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845, held that Americans had a God-given mission to spread across the continent; in the 1890s supporters extended it overseas. Social Darwinism applied ideas of the “survival of the fittest” to nations and races and suggested that strong nations must expand or decline.

Many Americans believed in Anglo-Saxonism, the idea that English-speaking peoples were racially superior and destined to spread their institutions. The Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong’s best-selling Our Country (1885) predicted that the Anglo-Saxon race would spread over the earth. In February 1899 the British poet Rudyard Kipling published “The White Man’s Burden”, addressed to the USA as it debated the Philippines, urging Americans to take up the duty of ruling “new-caught, sullen peoples”. These ideas presented colonial rule as a duty to “civilise” others.

The same ideas could also argue against empire. The Anti-Imperialist League, founded in Boston in June 1898, included the writer Mark Twain, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, former president Grover Cleveland and the philosopher William James. Some members objected on principle that ruling people without their consent betrayed the Declaration of Independence. Others, especially Southern Democrats, opposed annexation because they did not want non-white peoples to become part of the nation.

We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. We regret that it has become necessary in the land of Washington and Lincoln to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League, adopted in Chicago, October 1899. The League wrote during the Philippine–American War and appealed to American founding principles to argue that empire would corrupt the republic itself. Its language shows that the debate over expansion was a debate about what kind of nation the USA should be.

Hawaii: a case of expansion, 1887–1898

Hawaii shows several factors working together. American planters forced King Kalākaua to accept the “Bayonet Constitution” of 1887, which limited royal power and the votes of most Native Hawaiians. When Queen Liliʻuokalani tried to issue a new constitution, a committee of mainly American businessmen overthrew her on 17 January 1893, with the support of US Marines landed from a warship. President Grover Cleveland called the overthrow wrong and refused to annex the islands.

Annexation came only in wartime. The war with Spain made Pearl Harbor valuable as a naval base on the route to the Philippines, and Congress annexed Hawaii by joint resolution on 7 July 1898, avoiding the two-thirds Senate vote a treaty would have needed. Economic interests made the planters seek annexation, but it was strategy and the war that persuaded Congress.

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The war of 1898 and its consequences

The war that Americans call the Spanish–American War grew out of a Cuban war of independence. Its consequences, an overseas empire and a protectorate over Cuba, set the pattern of US relations with the Caribbean for a generation.

Cuba’s war of independence, 1895–1898

Cuba was one of Spain’s last colonies in the Americas. A first war of independence (1868–1878) had failed. In February 1895 a new rising began, organised from exile by the poet and journalist José Martí, who was killed in battle in May 1895, and led in the field by Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo. The rebels burned sugar plantations to ruin the colonial economy, including American-owned estates.

In 1896 the Spanish commander Valeriano Weyler ordered the rural population into fortified towns so that the rebels could not draw on them for food and recruits. This policy of reconcentration killed huge numbers through hunger and disease; estimates range from about 100,000 to more than 170,000 deaths. The yellow press called Weyler “the Butcher”, and American sympathy for Cuba grew.

Why the USA went to war in April 1898

President William McKinley, elected in 1896, at first tried diplomacy, and a new Spanish government recalled Weyler and offered Cuba limited autonomy. Two events in February 1898 ended this phase. On 9 February Hearst’s Journal published a private letter by the Spanish minister in Washington, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, that called McKinley weak and a seeker of popular approval. On 15 February the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbour, killing 266 American sailors.

A US naval court of inquiry in March 1898 concluded that a mine had destroyed the ship, and the slogan “Remember the Maine!” spread through the press. The cause has never been settled. A study led by Admiral Hyman Rickover in 1976 concluded that a fire in a coal bunker had probably set off the ship’s own ammunition, though other investigations since have not ruled out a mine. In 1898, however, most Americans blamed Spain.

On 11 April McKinley asked Congress for authority to intervene. Congress demanded Spain’s withdrawal from Cuba and passed the Teller Amendment, which promised that the USA would not annex the island. War was declared on 25 April, backdated to 21 April. Historians weigh several reasons for McKinley’s decision: humanitarian outrage, pressure from Congress and the press, the damage to US trade and investment, the strategic risk of disorder ninety miles from Florida, and McKinley’s fear that the Cuban rebels might win on their own, leaving the USA with no say over the island’s future.

A “splendid little war”

The fighting was short. On 1 May 1898 Commodore George Dewey’s squadron destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in the Philippines, an action prepared by Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the navy. In Cuba, US troops, including Roosevelt’s volunteer cavalry, the “Rough Riders”, and African American regulars of the 9th and 10th Cavalry, the “Buffalo Soldiers”, took the heights of San Juan around Santiago on 1 July. On 3 July the US navy destroyed Spain’s Caribbean squadron off Santiago. Puerto Rico was occupied in late July, and an armistice was signed on 12 August.

The US ambassador in London, John Hay, called it a “splendid little war”. About 385 Americans died in battle, but more than 2,000 died of disease, especially typhoid and yellow fever. The Cuban army, which had fought Spain for three years, was excluded from the surrender of Santiago and from the peace talks.

The Treaty of Paris and the debate over empire

By the Treaty of Paris (1898), signed on 10 December 1898, Spain gave Cuba its independence and ceded Puerto Rico and Guam to the USA. It also ceded the Philippines in return for a payment of US$20 million. McKinley later explained that he had decided to keep the whole archipelago because the alternatives, returning it to Spain, leaving it to a rival power or granting independence, all seemed worse.

Ratification set off a fierce national debate. Supporters such as Senator Albert Beveridge spoke of commerce, destiny and duty; anti-imperialists warned that the republic would become an empire. The Senate approved the treaty on 6 February 1899 by 57 votes to 27, only one more than the two-thirds needed.

The Philippine–American War, 1899–1902

Filipino nationalists led by Emilio Aguinaldo had declared independence from Spain in June 1898 and expected the USA to recognise their republic. Fighting between Filipino and US forces broke out on 4 February 1899, two days before the Senate vote. The war became a long guerrilla conflict. US forces burned villages, moved civilians into guarded zones, as Weyler had done in Cuba, and used torture such as the “water cure” on prisoners.

Aguinaldo was captured in March 1901, and on 4 July 1902 Roosevelt declared the war over, although resistance continued in some areas, especially in the Muslim south, for years. About 4,200 US soldiers and about 20,000 Filipino soldiers died. Estimates of civilian deaths from violence, famine and disease range from about 200,000 to far higher, and remain disputed because records are poor and disease killed many.

Governing the new empire

The table of territories acquired shows how quickly the USA built an overseas empire, and how varied its forms of rule were. In the Insular Cases of 1901 the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution did not fully apply to “unincorporated” territories such as Puerto Rico and the Philippines, so their peoples could be ruled without the full rights of citizens.

Cuba and the Platt Amendment

The Teller Amendment ruled out annexing Cuba, but the USA occupied the island from 1898 to 1902 under General Leonard Wood, who built schools and sanitation works and supported Walter Reed’s research proving that mosquitoes carried yellow fever. Before withdrawing, Washington made Cuba write the Platt Amendment (1901) into its new constitution. It limited Cuba’s right to make treaties or take on debt, obliged Cuba to lease naval stations (the origin of the base at Guantánamo Bay, leased in 1903) and gave the USA a right to intervene.

That the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the treaty of Paris on the United States, now to be assumed and undertaken by the government of Cuba.

Article III of the Platt Amendment, passed by the US Congress in March 1901 and included in the Cuban constitution in June 1901. The wording presents intervention as a way to protect Cuban independence, but in practice it allowed the USA to decide when a Cuban government was “adequate”. The USA used it to send troops in 1906–1909, 1912 and 1917–1922.

The Big Stick and the Roosevelt Corollary, 1901–1909

Theodore Roosevelt became president after McKinley’s assassination in September 1901. He liked to quote a West African proverb, “speak softly and carry a big stick”, and the phrase gave its name to a style of Big Stick diplomacy: negotiation backed by the open threat of force, above all naval force, in the Caribbean and Central America.

The Venezuela crisis and the Roosevelt Corollary

In December 1902 Britain, Germany and Italy blockaded Venezuela’s ports to force its dictator, Cipriano Castro, to pay debts owed to their citizens. German ships shelled Venezuelan forts. Roosevelt pressed for arbitration, and the blockade was lifted in February 1903. The episode convinced him that European creditors might use debts as an excuse to occupy territory in the Americas, as France had done in Mexico in the 1860s.

When the Dominican Republic could not pay its foreign debts in 1904, Roosevelt set out a new principle in his annual message to Congress on 6 December 1904. The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine claimed that, because the USA would not allow Europeans to intervene in the Americas, it must itself act as policeman when a Latin American state failed to keep order or pay its debts.

Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.

Theodore Roosevelt, annual message to Congress, 6 December 1904. Roosevelt wrote for Congress and the American public, and for European governments, presenting intervention as a reluctant duty. The language of “civilized” nations shows the racial and cultural assumptions behind the policy: the USA, not Latin Americans, would decide who had failed.

The corollary turned the Monroe Doctrine, originally a warning to Europe, into a claim of a US right to intervene in Latin America. In 1905 US officials took over the collection of Dominican customs revenue and used it to pay the country’s creditors, an arrangement formalised by treaty in 1907. Latin American lawyers such as the Argentine foreign minister Luis María Drago had argued in 1902 that no state should use force to collect public debts; the corollary claimed for the USA the very right the Drago Doctrine denied to Europeans.

Panama and the canal

A canal across Central America had been a US goal since the 1840s, and the voyage of the battleship Oregon round South America in 1898, which took over two months, showed its strategic value. The Hay–Pauncefote Treaty of 1901 freed the USA from an earlier agreement with Britain to build any canal jointly. Congress chose a route through Panama, then a province of Colombia, and bought the rights of a failed French company for US$40 million.

In August 1903 the Colombian Senate rejected the Hay–Herrán Treaty, which offered US$10 million for a canal zone, hoping for better terms. Panamanian separatists, encouraged by Philippe Bunau-Varilla, an engineer of the French company, declared independence on 3 November 1903. The US warship Nashville stopped Colombian troops from landing to crush the revolt, and Roosevelt recognised Panama within days.

On 18 November 1903 Bunau-Varilla, acting as Panama’s representative, signed the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty. It gave the USA a zone ten miles wide “in perpetuity”, to be ruled as if it were US territory, for US$10 million and US$250,000 a year. No Panamanian signed it. The canal opened on 15 August 1914, after a construction effort in which thousands of workers, most of them from the West Indies, died of disease and accidents.

Roosevelt boasted in a speech in 1911, “I took the Isthmus.” Colombia’s anger lasted for years; in the Thomson–Urrutia Treaty, ratified by the US Senate in 1921, the USA paid Colombia US$25 million in compensation. For Latin Americans, Panama became the clearest example of the Big Stick.

Dollar diplomacy, 1909–1913

William Howard Taft, president from 1909 to 1913, and his secretary of state, Philander Knox, a corporate lawyer, tried to replace military threats with financial influence. Under dollar diplomacy the US government encouraged American banks to lend to unstable governments in the Caribbean and Central America, often taking control of their customs houses to repay the loans. In his final annual message (December 1912) Taft noted that the policy “has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets”.

In practice the dollars often needed bullets. In Nicaragua the USA helped rebels overthrow the nationalist president José Santos Zelaya in 1909, and US bankers took control of the national bank, railways and customs. When a revolt threatened the pro-US government of Adolfo Díaz in 1912, Taft sent about 2,700 Marines. A small Marine legation guard then stayed in Nicaragua almost continuously until 1933. The Bryan–Chamorro Treaty (signed 1914, ratified 1916) gave the USA the exclusive right to build a canal through Nicaragua.

Taft and Knox applied the same idea to Honduras, where a loan treaty failed in the US Senate, to Haiti, where US banks bought into the national bank in 1910, and to China, where they tried to force US banks into an international consortium financing railways in Manchuria. The Chinese scheme failed in the face of Russian and Japanese opposition. Dollar diplomacy increased US economic control of the Caribbean, but it tied US policy to unpopular governments that depended on US support.

Moral diplomacy, 1913–1921

Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat and former president of Princeton University, criticised dollar diplomacy as a policy for bankers. In a speech at Mobile, Alabama, in October 1913 he promised that the USA “will never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest”. His moral diplomacy, carried out at first with his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, aimed to promote constitutional, democratic government and to refuse recognition to governments that took power by force.

Mexico: non-recognition and intervention

Wilson’s principles met their first test in Mexico, then in revolution. In February 1913 General Victoriano Huerta seized power, and the elected president, Francisco Madero, was murdered. Wilson refused to recognise Huerta’s government, which he regarded as illegitimate, and is reported to have told a British diplomat that he would teach the South American republics to elect good men.

In April 1914, after the arrest of US sailors at Tampico, Wilson sent forces to occupy the port of Veracruz, partly to stop a German arms shipment reaching Huerta; about 150–200 Mexicans and about 20 Americans died. Huerta fell in July 1914. In March 1916, after Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, Wilson sent General John J. Pershing on a Punitive Expedition of more than 10,000 troops deep into Mexico. It failed to catch Villa and was withdrawn in February 1917. The Mexican Revolution itself is a separate regional study; here these episodes show how moral diplomacy turned into armed intervention.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Wilson intervened more often in the Caribbean than Roosevelt or Taft. After the Haitian president Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was killed by a crowd in July 1915, US Marines landed and began an occupation that lasted until 1934. The USA took control of Haiti’s customs and finances, wrote a new constitution in 1918 that allowed foreigners to own land, and revived the corvée, a system of forced unpaid labour on roads. Haitian resistance, led by the cacos under Charlemagne Péralte, was crushed by 1920; estimates of Haitians killed range from about 2,000 to more than 3,000.

In 1916 Marines occupied the Dominican Republic, where they ruled through a US military government until 1924. In 1917 the USA bought the Danish West Indies, now the US Virgin Islands, to stop Germany acquiring a base near the canal, and the Jones Act of 1917 granted US citizenship to Puerto Ricans, which also made them liable to the wartime draft.

The table comparing the three policies shows that their stated aims differed more than their results. Each president claimed to be bringing order or democracy, and each sent troops. Many Latin Americans who lived through the occupations saw a single policy of US hegemony. The Nicaraguan general Augusto César Sandino, who fought the Marines from 1927 to 1933, became a symbol of resistance across the region.

The USA and the First World War: from neutrality to war, 1914–1917

When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, Wilson declared the USA neutral, and on 19 August he asked Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as in action”. Most Americans agreed that the war was not their concern. Yet the USA was not equally connected to both sides. Many Americans had British ancestry and read British news, while about eight million German Americans and many Irish Americans sympathised with the Central Powers or opposed Britain.

Trade, loans and the British blockade

As a neutral, the USA claimed the right to trade with both sides. In practice the British blockade of Germany stopped most American goods reaching the Central Powers, while Britain and France bought huge quantities of munitions, food and raw materials. The bar chart of US exports in 1914 and 1916 shows the result: trade with the Allies nearly quadrupled while trade with the Central Powers almost disappeared.

To pay for these goods the Allies borrowed in the USA. Bryan at first discouraged private loans to warring states as inconsistent with neutrality, but the administration allowed them from 1915. By April 1917 US lenders had lent about US$2.3 billion to the Allies and only about US$27 million to Germany, figures commonly cited from the investigations of the 1930s. The war lifted the US economy out of a recession, and many businesses had a strong interest in an Allied victory.

Submarine warfare

Germany answered the blockade with submarines. Unlike surface warships, a U-boat could not easily stop a ship and rescue its crew, so it often sank merchant ships without warning. On 7 May 1915 a U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania off Ireland; 1,198 people died, 128 of them Americans. The ship was also carrying rifle ammunition, which Germany used to justify the attack.

Wilson sent strongly worded protests. Bryan, who thought the protests risked war while Britain’s blockade went unpunished, resigned in June 1915. After the sinking of the Arabic in August 1915, Germany promised not to sink passenger liners without warning, and after the attack on the ferry Sussex in March 1916 it promised, in the Sussex pledge, not to sink merchant ships without warning and without saving lives. Wilson had won his point, but he had also tied US neutrality to German restraint.

In 1916 Wilson was re-elected narrowly on the slogan “He kept us out of war”. He also accepted a programme of military preparedness: the National Defense Act (June 1916) enlarged the army and the National Guard, and the Naval Act of 1916 funded a navy “second to none”. In January 1917 he called for a “peace without victory”, a compromise settlement guaranteed by a league of nations.

The decision for war, 1917

The German high command decided in January 1917 that it could starve Britain into surrender before American troops arrived in strength. On 1 February 1917 Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, and two days later the USA broke off diplomatic relations.

In January the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, had sent a coded telegram to the German minister in Mexico. British naval intelligence intercepted and decoded it and passed it to the US government, which published it on 1 March 1917.

We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal [of] alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

The Zimmermann Telegram, sent by Arthur Zimmermann to the German minister in Mexico, January 1917 (English translation used by the US government). A secret diplomatic instruction, it was never meant to be read by Americans, which made its publication especially damaging. It turned opinion in the West and South-west, where the war had seemed remote, and seemed to prove that Germany threatened the Americas themselves. Mexico’s president, Venustiano Carranza, rejected the proposal.

In March 1917 U-boats sank several American merchant ships, and the revolution in Russia overthrew the Tsar, so that all the main Allies could now be presented as democracies. On 2 April Wilson asked Congress to declare war.

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.

Woodrow Wilson, address to a joint session of Congress, 2 April 1917. Wilson needed to unite a divided country and win over progressives who suspected that bankers and arms makers wanted war. By presenting the war as a crusade for democracy with no selfish aims, he answered that suspicion and committed the USA to a peace based on principle. The Senate voted for war by 82 to 6 on 4 April and the House by 373 to 50 on 6 April 1917.

The chain of events from 1914 to 1917 shows how economic ties and submarine warfare combined. Trade and loans made strict neutrality impossible and gave Germany a reason to attack Allied shipping; Wilson’s insistence on neutral rights at sea then left him little choice once Germany broke its pledges. Historians weigh these factors differently: some stress loans and trade, others submarine warfare and Wilson’s principles.

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US participation in the First World War, 1917–1918

The USA entered the war as an “associated power”, not a formal ally, so that it kept its freedom over war aims. Its army in April 1917 numbered only about 128,000 regular soldiers. The Selective Service Act of 18 May 1917 introduced conscription; about 2.8 million men were drafted, and about 4.7 million Americans served in all.

The navy’s contribution came first. US destroyers helped the British convoy system defeat the U-boats in 1917–1918, and US loans and supplies kept the Allied economies going. The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) under General John J. Pershing, which Pershing insisted should fight as a separate American army, reached France slowly. By the armistice of 11 November 1918 about 2 million US soldiers were in France.

US troops helped stop the German spring offensives at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood in June 1918. In September they took the Saint-Mihiel salient, and from 26 September to 11 November 1918 more than a million Americans fought in the Meuse–Argonne offensive, the largest battle in US history up to then, in which about 26,000 Americans were killed. About 116,500 US servicemen died in the war, around 53,000 in combat and most of the rest from disease, above all the influenza pandemic of 1918.

US losses were small compared with those of France, Britain, Germany or Russia, each of which lost more than a million soldiers. The American contribution was decisive less in battles won than in the certainty it gave the Allies in 1918 that fresh troops and supplies would keep arriving, while Germany’s reserves were exhausted.

Wilson’s peace ideals and the rejection of the League, 1918–1920

The Fourteen Points

On 8 January 1918 Wilson set out US war aims in the Fourteen Points. He wanted a peace that removed the causes of war, as he saw them: secret alliances, trade barriers, arms races, imperial rivalry and the denial of national rights.

The table of the Fourteen Points shows a mix of liberal principle and specific settlements. They rested on self-determination and on collective security: the idea that all members of a league would together resist aggression against any one of them. Germany asked for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points in October 1918, but Britain rejected freedom of the seas and France wanted security and reparations.

Wilson at Paris

Wilson went to the Paris Peace Conference in person in December 1918, the first serving president to travel to Europe, and was greeted by huge crowds. He made two political errors before leaving. He had appealed to voters to return a Democratic Congress in the midterm elections of November 1918, and the Republicans won both houses; and he took no senior Republican with him to Paris.

At the conference Wilson compromised on many points to secure his main aim, the Covenant of the League of Nations, which was written into the Treaty of Versailles. He accepted reparations and a war-guilt clause, Japan’s claim to the former German rights in Shandong, and the allocation of German colonies as mandates to the victors. Article X of the Covenant committed members to respect and preserve the territory and independence of all members against external aggression.

The Senate fight, 1919–1920

A treaty needs the approval of two-thirds of the US Senate. Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican leader of the Senate and chairman of its Foreign Relations Committee, disliked Wilson personally and believed the treaty threatened US sovereignty. He delayed the treaty with long hearings and proposed fourteen reservations. The most important stated that the USA accepted no obligation under Article X unless Congress approved it, so that no international body could commit Americans to war.

I can never be anything else but an American, and I must think of the United States first, and when I think of the United States first in an arrangement like this, I am thinking of what is best for the world, for if the United States fails, the best hopes of mankind fail with it.

Henry Cabot Lodge, speech to the Senate, 12 August 1919, in the wording of the sound recording of the passage that Lodge made in 1919 (punctuation differs between transcriptions). Lodge was a partisan Republican and Wilson’s rival, but the speech shows that his case rested on a serious argument: that the USA served the world best by keeping its freedom of action, not by binding itself to defend every frontier in Europe.

The diagram of the four Senate groups shows why the treaty failed. Between about twelve and sixteen irreconcilables, led by William Borah of Idaho and Hiram Johnson of California, opposed any League. Lodge’s Republicans wanted strong reservations, and a group of mild reservationists would have accepted small changes. Most Democrats followed Wilson in demanding the treaty as he had signed it.

In September 1919 Wilson set out on a speaking tour of the West to win public support. He collapsed in Colorado on 25 September and suffered a serious stroke on 2 October, after which his wife, Edith Wilson, and his doctor controlled access to him. He told Democrats to vote against the treaty with Lodge’s reservations. On 19 November 1919 the treaty failed both with and without the reservations. On 19 March 1920 it won 49 votes to 35 with the reservations, seven short of two-thirds, as many Democrats again followed Wilson.

The Republican Warren Harding won the presidential election of November 1920 on a promise of a “return to normalcy”. The USA made a separate peace with Germany in the Treaty of Berlin (August 1921) and never joined the League.

Independent internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s

The USA after 1920 is often called isolationist, but the word fits only part of its policy. It refused the League and any alliance, and the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 sharply restricted immigration. Yet the Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922) set limits on the battleship fleets of the great powers, the Dawes Plan (1924) and the Young Plan (1929) used US loans to manage German reparations, and the Kellogg–Briand Pact (1928) renounced war as an instrument of policy. US banks and businesses invested heavily abroad, including in Latin America.

In the 1930s, as aggression grew in Asia and Europe, Americans became more determined to stay out of war. The Senate’s Nye Committee (1934–1936), chaired by Gerald Nye of North Dakota, investigated the profits of bankers and arms makers in 1914–1917, suggesting that they had pulled the USA into war. Congress passed the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936 and 1937, which banned the sale of arms and loans to countries at war and travel by Americans on their ships.

The Good Neighbor Policy and inter-American diplomacy, 1928–1945

Why US policy changed

By the late 1920s the costs of intervention were plain. The occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic and the war against Sandino in Nicaragua were unpopular in the USA and bitterly resented in Latin America. At the Sixth Pan-American Conference in Havana in 1928, Latin American delegates pressed for a ban on intervention, and the US delegation only narrowly blocked it.

The shift began under the Republicans. President-elect Herbert Hoover made a goodwill tour of Latin America in 1928. The Clark Memorandum, written by Under-Secretary of State J. Reuben Clark in 1928 and published in 1930, argued that the Monroe Doctrine concerned the USA and Europe and did not justify intervention in Latin American states, which in effect set the Roosevelt Corollary aside. The Great Depression added economic reasons: US trade with Latin America collapsed after 1929, and occupations were expensive. The last Marines left Nicaragua in January 1933.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, inaugurated on 4 March 1933, gave the new approach its name.

In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, first inaugural address, 4 March 1933. The speech was almost entirely about the Depression at home, and the phrase referred to world policy in general; only later did the Good Neighbor Policy come to mean policy towards Latin America. Its value as a source lies in the principles it set out, mutual respect and keeping agreements, against which later US actions could be judged.

Non-intervention in practice, 1933–1938

The timeline of Good Neighbor diplomacy shows how the policy developed. At the Seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo in December 1933, Secretary of State Cordell Hull signed the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States.

No state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another.

Article 8 of the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, signed at Montevideo, 26 December 1933. The principle had been demanded by Latin American states for decades, and Hull signed it with a reservation that kept US rights under international law. Its acceptance by the USA shows how far policy had moved since the Roosevelt Corollary, though the reservation shows the limits of that change.

Cuba soon tested the promise. In 1933, when a revolution overthrew the dictator Gerardo Machado, the US ambassador Sumner Welles refused recognition to the reformist government of Ramón Grau San Martín, and US warships waited offshore. Grau fell in January 1934, and the army sergeant Fulgencio Batista became the real power in Cuba. No Marines landed, but the episode showed that the USA could still shape a Latin American government without using troops.

The USA then gave up its legal rights of intervention. A new treaty with Cuba abrogated the Platt Amendment on 29 May 1934, although the USA kept the Guantánamo base. The last Marines left Haiti in August 1934, and the protectorate over Panama was ended by treaty in 1936. At the Buenos Aires conference of December 1936, which Roosevelt attended in person, the USA accepted a protocol banning intervention “directly or indirectly, and for whatever reason”, this time without reservation.

Trade and the Mexican oil test

Economic policy was part of the Good Neighbor approach. The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (1934) allowed the president to cut tariffs by up to half in return for similar cuts by other countries, and agreements followed with Cuba (1934), Brazil (1935), Colombia and other states. The Export-Import Bank, founded in 1934, lent money to finance trade. These measures helped US exporters recover, and critics argue that they tied Latin American economies even more closely to the USA as exporters of raw materials.

The hardest test came on 18 March 1938, when the Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas nationalised the oil industry, including US and British companies. The companies demanded intervention and organised a boycott of Mexican oil. Roosevelt and the US ambassador, Josephus Daniels, refused to use force and pressed for compensation through negotiation; a settlement was reached in 1941–1942. With war approaching in Europe, a friendly Mexico mattered more to Washington than the oil companies’ losses.

Hemispheric security, 1938–1945

As war approached, Good Neighbor diplomacy became a system of hemispheric defence. The Declaration of Lima (December 1938) committed the American states to consult if any of them was threatened. After war broke out in Europe, foreign ministers meeting in Panama in October 1939 declared a neutrality zone about 300 miles wide around the Americas south of Canada. When Germany conquered France and the Netherlands in 1940, the Act of Havana (July 1940) declared that their colonies in the Americas could not be transferred to another non-American power.

After Pearl Harbor, the foreign ministers met in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942 and recommended that all American states break relations with the Axis; all except Argentina and Chile soon did so. The USA supplied about US$475–500 million of Lend-Lease aid to Latin America, most of it to Brazil, and bought strategic raw materials such as Bolivian tin, Chilean copper and Brazilian rubber. The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, led by Nelson Rockefeller from 1940, ran propaganda and cultural programmes, including Walt Disney’s film Saludos Amigos (1942).

At the Chapultepec conference in Mexico City in February–March 1945, the American states signed the Act of Chapultepec, which declared that an attack on any one of them would be treated as an attack on all. It led to the Rio Pact of 1947 and the Organization of American States in 1948, which belong to the history of the Cold War in the Americas.

How far did the Good Neighbor Policy change US policy?

The table of change and continuity shows why historians disagree. The end of armed intervention was a real change, welcomed across Latin America. But several of the dictators who rose in the 1930s, such as Anastasio Somoza García, head of the US-trained National Guard in Nicaragua, whose men killed Sandino in February 1934, kept US support because they guaranteed order. A remark often attributed to Roosevelt about Somoza, that he was a bad man but “our” bad man, has no reliable source and is probably invented.

The USA in the Second World War, 1939–1945

From neutrality to “aid short of war”, 1939–1941

The timeline of 1934–1941 shows how US neutrality was dismantled. Roosevelt warned in his “quarantine” speech of October 1937 that aggressor nations should be isolated, but the reaction was so hostile that he did not press the idea. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Congress passed a fourth Neutrality Act in November 1939, which allowed warring states to buy arms if they paid in cash and carried them in their own ships. This cash and carry rule favoured Britain and France, which controlled the Atlantic.

The fall of France in June 1940 left Britain alone. In September 1940 Roosevelt gave Britain fifty old destroyers in exchange for leases on bases from Newfoundland to British Guiana, and Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, the first peacetime draft in US history. After winning a third term in November 1940, Roosevelt called on the USA to become “the great arsenal of democracy” in a radio broadcast on 29 December.

When Britain could no longer pay cash, the Lend-Lease Act of 11 March 1941 allowed the president to lend or lease war materials to any country whose defence he judged vital to the USA. Lend-Lease aid eventually totalled about US$50 billion, mostly to Britain and, after June 1941, the Soviet Union. In August 1941 Roosevelt and Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, a statement of shared war aims. By the autumn, US warships were escorting convoys and an undeclared naval war had begun; the destroyer Reuben James was sunk by a U-boat on 31 October 1941.

Pearl Harbor

War came from the Pacific. Japan had been at war with China since 1937 and in July 1941 occupied southern French Indochina. The USA froze Japanese assets and, with Britain and the Netherlands, cut off Japan’s oil supplies. Negotiations failed when the USA demanded Japan’s withdrawal from China. On 7 December 1941 Japanese aircraft attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing 2,403 Americans. Congress declared war on Japan the next day, and on 11 December Germany and Italy declared war on the USA.

Fighting a global war

About 16 million Americans served in the armed forces, and about 405,000 died. The Allies agreed to defeat Germany first. US forces landed in North Africa in November 1942, invaded Italy in 1943 and, with British and Canadian forces, landed in Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944. In the Pacific, the naval victory at Midway (June 1942) and the long campaign on Guadalcanal (1942–1943) stopped Japan’s advance, and island-hopping campaigns brought US forces to Iwo Jima and Okinawa by 1945.

US industry was the decisive Allied asset: by 1944 the USA was producing about 40 per cent of the world’s armaments, a commonly cited estimate. Roosevelt met Churchill and Stalin at Tehran (1943) and Yalta (February 1945), and the USA led the creation of the United Nations at the San Francisco conference of April–June 1945, which the Senate approved by 89 votes to 2, in sharp contrast with 1919–1920.

The atomic bomb

In August 1939 the physicists Leó Szilárd and Albert Einstein warned Roosevelt that Germany might build an atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project, organised under General Leslie Groves from 1942, with its weapons laboratory at Los Alamos directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, cost about US$2 billion and employed well over 100,000 people. Britain and Canada took part under the Quebec Agreement of August 1943, and Canada supplied uranium from mines at Great Bear Lake.

The first bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, during the Potsdam Conference. The Potsdam Declaration of 26 July demanded Japan’s unconditional surrender and threatened “prompt and utter destruction”; Japan did not accept it. On 6 August a bomb destroyed Hiroshima, killing about 70,000–80,000 people at once and about 140,000 by the end of 1945. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August, and on 9 August a second bomb hit Nagasaki, killing about 40,000 at once and about 70,000 by the end of the year. Japan announced its surrender on 15 August and signed it on 2 September 1945.

The diagram of reasons for using the bomb shows why the decision is debated. Truman and his advisers wanted to end the war quickly and avoid an invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall), planned for November 1945. Japan’s leaders had not accepted unconditional surrender, and its army was preparing to fight on the home islands. The bomb had been built at great cost to be used, and no senior official seriously proposed not using it. Some advisers, notably Secretary of State James Byrnes, also hoped that the bomb would make the Soviet Union more cooperative after the war.

The perspectives of decision-makers, survivors and later commentators on the bombings are a subject of their own; here the bomb matters as the clearest sign of the USA’s new global role. In 1945 the USA alone possessed atomic weapons, had the world’s largest navy and air force, produced about half of the world’s manufactured goods, and stood at the centre of the new United Nations and the Bretton Woods financial system.

Canada’s changing regional and global role, 1914–1945

In 1914 Canada was a self-governing dominion of the British Empire. It ran its own domestic affairs, but Britain controlled its foreign policy: when Britain declared war, Canada was at war. By 1945 Canada made its own foreign policy, had fought the Second World War as an independent ally, and was closer economically and militarily to the USA than to Britain.

The decision to fight in 1914

When Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, Canada was automatically a belligerent. Canada did, however, decide how much to contribute, and the response was enthusiastic in English Canada, where many people had been born in Britain. Prime Minister Robert Borden’s Conservative government passed the War Measures Act (August 1914), which gave it sweeping emergency powers, and promised troops. About 620,000 Canadians enlisted out of a population of about 8 million, about 424,000 served overseas and about 61,000 were killed.

The Canadian Corps earned a reputation as one of the most effective Allied formations. Canadian troops held the line during the first German gas attack at the Second Battle of Ypres (April 1915). On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme, the Newfoundland Regiment (Newfoundland was a separate dominion) lost most of its men at Beaumont-Hamel. At Vimy Ridge in April 1917 the four Canadian divisions, attacking together for the first time, took a position that earlier Allied attacks had failed to capture. Canadians fought at Passchendaele (October–November 1917) and led the advance in the Hundred Days of 1918, starting at Amiens in August.

In 1917 the Canadian Corps came under a Canadian commander, General Arthur Currie, and Vimy became a symbol of national achievement. Many Canadians came to see the war as the moment when Canada became a nation, although French Canadians, whose experience of the war centred on the conscription crisis of 1917, did not share this memory.

A voice in imperial and world affairs

Borden argued that a country making such sacrifices must have a say in how the war was run. In 1917 the dominion prime ministers joined the Imperial War Cabinet in London. At the Paris Peace Conference Borden won separate representation for the dominions, and Canada signed the Treaty of Versailles in its own name, though as part of the British Empire delegation. Canada became a founding member of the League of Nations in its own right in 1920.

The chain of steps to the Statute of Westminster shows how wartime status turned into legal independence in foreign policy. William Lyon Mackenzie King, Liberal prime minister for most of 1921–1948, built on Borden’s gains for different reasons. In the Chanak crisis of September 1922, when Britain asked the dominions for troops against Turkey, King replied that Parliament would decide, and no troops were sent. In 1923 Canada signed the Halibut Treaty on fishing with the USA without a British co-signature, the first such treaty.

The Imperial Conference of 1926 adopted the Balfour Declaration, which described Britain and the dominions as equal in status and in no way subordinate to one another. The Statute of Westminster of 11 December 1931 gave this legal force: British laws no longer applied to a dominion unless it asked for them. Canada opened its own legations in Washington (1927), Paris (1928) and Tokyo (1929).

Canada and the League of Nations

Canada used the League to show its new status, but it distrusted collective security. Canadian delegates repeatedly tried to delete or weaken Article X, arguing that Canada, safe beside the USA, should not be committed to defend frontiers in Europe; the Canadian delegate Raoul Dandurand told the League Assembly in 1924 that Canada lived in a fire-proof house, far from any source of fire. Canada was elected to the League Council in 1927.

The limits of Canada’s commitment were shown during Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The Canadian representative in Geneva, Walter Riddell, proposed adding oil and other key goods to the League’s sanctions against Italy. King’s government publicly disowned the proposal, saying Riddell had acted on his own. The Riddell incident showed that Canada would not lead collective action, especially since French Canadian opinion opposed any commitment that might lead to war.

The decision to fight in 1939

In the 1930s King avoided commitments, supported appeasement and insisted that “Parliament will decide” whether Canada went to war. When Britain declared war on 3 September 1939, Canada waited. Parliament met, and Canada declared war on Germany on 10 September 1939, a week later than Britain, a delay that showed in practice that the decision was Canada’s own. King promised that there would be no conscription for overseas service, to keep Quebec’s support.

Canada’s contribution was much larger than in 1914–1918. About 1.1 million Canadians, out of a population of about 11.5 million, served in the armed forces, and about 45,000 were killed. Canada hosted the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (agreed in December 1939), which trained about 131,000 aircrew. The Royal Canadian Navy grew from a handful of ships to several hundred and carried a large share of convoy escort in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Canadian soldiers fought in the defence of Hong Kong (December 1941), where nearly 2,000 were killed or captured, and in the disastrous raid on Dieppe on 19 August 1942, in which about 900 Canadians were killed and nearly 2,000 captured. They fought through Sicily and Italy (1943–1945), landed at Juno Beach on D-Day, cleared the Scheldt estuary in 1944 and liberated much of the Netherlands in 1945.

Economic and trading relations: from Britain to the USA

Before 1914 Canada’s economy looked to Britain for capital and markets. The First World War began a shift towards the USA. By about 1922 US investment in Canada exceeded British investment, as US companies built branch plants in Canada and invested in mining, pulp and paper. Trade agreements with the USA in 1935 and 1938 cut tariffs, and the 1938 agreement was linked to a British–American one, reflecting a North Atlantic triangle of trade.

The Second World War completed the move. After the fall of France, King and Roosevelt signed the Ogdensburg Agreement (August 1940), which set up a Permanent Joint Board on Defence: Canada’s first defence alliance with a country other than Britain. The Hyde Park Declaration (April 1941) coordinated war production so that the USA bought Canadian goods to pay for the US parts Canada needed. By 1945 Canada saw itself as a “middle power”, prosperous, independent and closely tied to the USA.

Brazil, Mexico and Argentina: war, neutrality and national interest

Latin American states had less power than Canada but more freedom of choice, since none was legally bound to a European empire. Their decisions in the two world wars show how governments weighed relations with the USA against trade with Europe, domestic politics and national pride. In 1917 Cuba, Panama and several Central American states, all closely tied to the USA, followed it into war (Cuba on 7 April, the day after the USA), while Peru, Uruguay and others only broke off relations; in 1941–1945 almost every Latin American state eventually declared war on the Axis.

Brazil: the ally

Brazil was the only Latin American country to send military forces overseas in both world wars. After German U-boats sank Brazilian merchant ships, starting with the Paraná in April 1917, Brazil declared war on Germany on 26 October 1917. It sent a naval division to patrol the Atlantic, a medical mission to France and aviators to train with the Allies. As a signatory of Versailles, Brazil was a founding member of the League and sat on its Council, but it left the League in 1926 when it failed to obtain a permanent Council seat.

In the 1930s Getúlio Vargas, who ruled Brazil from 1930 to 1945 and as a dictator under the Estado Novo from 1937, bargained between the USA and Germany, which had become a major buyer of Brazilian cotton and coffee. Vargas’s price for joining the Allies was US help to build a national steel industry: in 1940 the Export-Import Bank lent US$20 million for the Volta Redonda steel works. Brazil broke relations with the Axis in January 1942 and declared war on 22 August 1942, after U-boats sank several Brazilian ships.

Brazil allowed US air bases in the north-east, above all Natal, which became the main air route for supplies to Africa and the Mediterranean. The Brazilian Expeditionary Force (Força Expedicionária Brasileira, FEB), about 25,000 troops, fought in Italy in 1944–1945 and took Monte Castello in February 1945. Brazil received most of the Lend-Lease aid sent to Latin America, and its alliance with the USA strengthened its claim to regional leadership.

Mexico: from neutrality to partnership

Mexico stayed neutral in the First World War. Its government under Carranza was in conflict with the USA over the Punitive Expedition and rejected the Zimmermann proposal, aware that a war with the USA would be disastrous. Mexico was not invited to join the League of Nations, partly because of its revolutionary government and conflict with the USA, and joined only in 1931.

In the Second World War Mexico became a close partner of the USA, once the oil dispute had been settled. After German submarines sank the Mexican tankers Potrero del Llano and Faja de Oro in May 1942, President Manuel Ávila Camacho led Mexico into war from 22 May 1942. Mexico supplied raw materials and labour, sent the fighter squadron Escuadrón 201, which flew combat missions in the Philippines in 1945, and signed the agreement of August 1942 that created the Bracero Program, which brought Mexican workers to US farms and railways.

Argentina: the neutral

Argentina stayed neutral in both wars. In the First World War President Hipólito Yrigoyen kept Argentina out despite the sinking of Argentine ships, because neutrality protected its lucrative exports of grain and beef to Britain. In the League Argentina withdrew from the Assembly in 1920 after its proposals for universal membership were rejected, and returned only in 1933.

In the Second World War Argentina’s ties to Britain, its rivalry with the USA for leadership in South America, its large Italian and German communities and pro-Axis sympathies among army officers kept it neutral. After a military coup in June 1943 led by a secret group of officers, the GOU (in which Colonel Juan Perón was prominent), the USA denounced Argentina as a centre of Axis influence and froze its assets. Argentina declared war on Germany and Japan only on 27 March 1945, to qualify for membership of the United Nations.

The table comparing the four countries shows that membership of an empire, economic ties and relations with the USA decided their choices. Canada fought from the start of both wars; Brazil and Mexico joined once German attacks on their shipping combined with US pressure and the offer of US aid; Argentina, economically tied to Britain and politically rival to the USA, held out longest.

Domestic impact of the First World War: the USA

The USA fought for only nineteen months, but the war reached deep into American society. It expanded the federal government, boosted industry and farming, restricted civil liberties, changed the position of women and set off large movements of people.

Economic and social impact

The war economy was organised through new federal agencies. The War Industries Board, reorganised under the financier Bernard Baruch in March 1918, set production priorities, allocated raw materials and fixed some prices. The Food Administration under Herbert Hoover encouraged “wheatless” and “meatless” days instead of rationing, and the government took over the railways in December 1917. Farm prices and incomes rose sharply. The drive to save grain, and hostility to brewers, many of them German American, helped Congress pass the Eighteenth Amendment for national prohibition in December 1917; it was ratified in January 1919.

The war was paid for by borrowing and taxes. Four Liberty Loan campaigns and a Victory Loan raised about US$21.5 billion through Liberty Bonds sold to the public. Income tax, made possible by the Sixteenth Amendment of 1913, was raised steeply on high incomes, and the federal debt rose from about US$1.2 billion in 1916 to about US$25.5 billion in 1919. Prices roughly doubled between 1914 and 1920, and strikes multiplied as workers tried to keep up.

The war also brought the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, which spread through army camps and troop ships and killed about 675,000 Americans, far more than died in battle.

Political impact: propaganda and repression

Wilson’s government set out to unite a divided population behind the war. The Committee on Public Information (CPI), created in April 1917 under the journalist George Creel, produced posters, films and pamphlets and sent tens of thousands of volunteer “Four Minute Men” to give short patriotic speeches in cinemas and halls. Much of its propaganda portrayed Germans as barbaric “Huns”.

Dissent was punished. The Espionage Act (June 1917) made it a crime to obstruct recruitment or the draft, and the Sedition Act (May 1918) punished “disloyal” language about the government, the flag or the armed forces. More than 2,000 people were prosecuted. The Socialist leader Eugene Debs was sentenced in 1918 to ten years in prison for a speech against the war, and in Schenck v. United States (1919) the Supreme Court upheld the Espionage Act, ruling that speech creating a “clear and present danger” could be punished.

German Americans faced suspicion and violence. Schools dropped German, towns and foods were renamed, and in April 1918 a German-born man, Robert Prager, was lynched by a crowd in Collinsville, Illinois. After the war, fear of revolution fed the Red Scare of 1919–1920, when the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, organised raids that arrested thousands of suspected radicals, many of them immigrants, and deported hundreds.

Experiences of women

About one million women joined the industrial workforce during the war, a commonly cited estimate, many moving from domestic service or textile work into munitions factories, railways and offices. Most returned to lower-paid work or left paid work when the men came back. About 21,000 women served as army nurses, and the navy and marine corps enlisted about 13,000 women as clerks and yeomen, the first women other than nurses to serve in the US armed forces.

The war helped win the vote. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Carrie Chapman Catt, supported the war effort and used it to argue that women had earned the vote. The more radical National Woman’s Party under Alice Paul picketed the White House from January 1917 with banners asking how the USA could fight for democracy abroad while denying it to women at home. Many of these “Silent Sentinels” were arrested and, when they went on hunger strike in prison, force-fed. On 30 September 1918 Wilson asked the Senate to pass the suffrage amendment as a war measure.

We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?

Woodrow Wilson, address to the Senate on the woman suffrage amendment, 30 September 1918. Wilson had long avoided the question, and he spoke when the Senate vote was close and the war was at its height. He presented suffrage as a reward for women’s war service and as proof of US democracy to the world, a framing that suggests wartime need, not principle alone, changed his position. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in August 1920.

Experiences of marginalised groups

About 380,000 African Americans served in the army, most of them in labour and supply units under white officers. The 369th Infantry Regiment, the “Harlem Hellfighters”, fought under French command and spent longer in front-line combat than almost any other US unit; many of its men won the French Croix de Guerre. At home, about half a million African Americans moved from the South to northern industrial cities between 1916 and 1919, in the first wave of the Great Migration, to take war jobs.

Their arrival was met with violence. A white mob attacked Black residents of East St Louis, Illinois, in July 1917, killing dozens. In Houston in August 1917, Black soldiers of the 24th Infantry, provoked by local police, rioted; nineteen were hanged after courts-martial. In the Red Summer of 1919 race riots broke out in more than two dozen cities, including Chicago, where 38 people died. Returning Black veterans, who had fought for democracy abroad, were among the targets, and the war strengthened the determination of a new generation of activists.

Other groups had mixed experiences. About 12,000 Native Americans served, although many were not yet citizens; Choctaw soldiers used their language to pass messages in France in 1918. Mexican Americans and Mexican workers were recruited for farms and railways, while also facing suspicion after the Zimmermann Telegram. About 4,000 men declared themselves conscientious objectors, and some, especially Mennonites and Hutterites, were brutally treated in military prisons.

Domestic impact of the First World War: Canada

Economic and social impact

The war brought Canada an industrial boom. The Imperial Munitions Board, set up in 1915 and run by the businessman Joseph Flavelle, placed orders worth about 1 billion dollars for shells, ships and aircraft with Canadian factories. Wheat exports soared. To pay for the war, the government borrowed through Victory Bonds and introduced a “temporary” income tax, the Income War Tax Act of 1917, which became permanent.

Prices rose faster than wages, and resentment of profiteering grew. At home, most provinces introduced prohibition of alcohol. On 6 December 1917 a French munitions ship collided with another vessel in Halifax harbour and exploded, killing about 2,000 people in the largest man-made explosion before the atomic bomb. After the war, labour unrest culminated in the Winnipeg General Strike of May–June 1919, which was broken by the federal government and the police.

Political impact: the conscription crisis of 1917

Voluntary enlistment fell sharply by 1916 while losses mounted, especially after Vimy Ridge. Borden, back from Britain in May 1917, decided on conscription. The Military Service Act became law on 29 August 1917. French Canadians, led by the nationalist journalist Henri Bourassa, opposed it bitterly: they felt little attachment to Britain or France, and resented Ontario’s restrictions on French-language schooling (Regulation 17, 1912). Farmers in English Canada also objected to losing their sons’ labour.

To win the election of December 1917, Borden formed a Union Government with pro-conscription Liberals and changed the franchise. The Wartime Elections Act (September 1917) gave the vote to the wives, mothers and sisters of soldiers, and took it away from citizens born in enemy countries who had been naturalised after 1902. The Union Government won the election of 17 December 1917 overwhelmingly, but won only three of Quebec’s 65 seats. In Quebec City, riots against conscription at Easter 1918 ended when troops fired on a crowd on 1 April, killing four civilians.

Conscription produced about 124,000 conscripts, of whom about 24,000 reached France before the armistice. Its political cost was lasting: the Conservative Party was weak in Quebec for decades, and the memory of 1917 shaped every later debate about Canada’s role in war.

Experiences of women and marginalised groups

About 2,800 Canadian nursing sisters served with the armed forces, and thousands of women took jobs in munitions factories, offices and farms. Women gained the vote in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1916; the Wartime Elections Act gave it to some women in 1917, and the federal vote was extended to most women in 1918, though Asian Canadian and most Indigenous women were still excluded. Quebec women did not vote in provincial elections until 1940.

Under the War Measures Act about 8,579 “enemy aliens” were interned in camps, most of them Ukrainians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and about 80,000 more had to register and report regularly to the police. Many internees were made to work on roads and in national parks.

About 4,000 Indigenous people enlisted, including the sniper Francis Pegahmagabow, one of the most decorated Canadian soldiers of the war, yet they returned to a country where they could not vote in federal elections without giving up their legal Indian status. Black Canadians who tried to enlist were often turned away; in 1916 they were allowed to form a segregated labour unit, No. 2 Construction Battalion. Japanese Canadian volunteers had to travel to Alberta to be accepted.

Latin America and the war

The war also changed economies that did not fight. The closing of European markets and shipping at first caused a slump across Latin America, followed by high demand for raw materials such as Chilean nitrates, Argentine beef and Brazilian rubber and coffee. With European manufactured imports cut off, local industries such as textiles and food processing grew. Rising prices fed labour unrest: a general strike paralysed São Paulo in July 1917, and in Argentina’s Semana Trágica (Tragic Week) of January 1919 the army and armed civilian groups crushed a strike in Buenos Aires, killing hundreds of people, many of them Jewish immigrants accused of being revolutionaries.

Domestic impact of the Second World War: the USA

Economic and social impact

The Second World War ended the Great Depression in the USA. Federal spending rose from about US$9 billion in 1940 to more than US$90 billion in 1944, and the gross national product roughly doubled between 1939 and 1945. The War Production Board (January 1942) converted car plants to tanks and aircraft, and new industries such as synthetic rubber were built almost from nothing. The Office of Price Administration controlled prices and rationed sugar, coffee, meat, petrol and tyres.

The bar chart of unemployment shows how quickly the labour surplus of the 1930s became a shortage. Taxes reached ordinary workers for the first time: the number of people paying income tax rose from about 4 million in 1939 to more than 40 million by 1945, and withholding from wages began in 1943. The federal debt rose to more than the whole national income.

War work moved Americans on a vast scale. About 15 million civilians moved to another county, many to the shipyards and aircraft factories of the West Coast and the South, beginning the growth of the “Sun Belt”. The GI Bill of Rights (June 1944) gave returning veterans loans for homes and businesses and paid for millions to go to college, which helped create the post-war middle class.

Political impact

Roosevelt won unprecedented third and fourth terms in 1940 and 1944. The war greatly enlarged the federal government and created lasting links between the armed forces, universities and industry, which President Eisenhower later called the “military-industrial complex”. Strikes were limited by a no-strike pledge from the unions, but a coal strike in 1943 led Congress to pass the Smith–Connally Act, which allowed the government to seize plants threatened by strikes. Bipartisan support for the United Nations in 1945 showed that the USA had abandoned the policies of 1920–1941.

Experiences of women

The number of women in paid work rose from about 12 million in 1940 to about 18–19 million in 1944–1945, and the share of married women working rose sharply. Women worked in shipyards and aircraft plants as welders and riveters, symbolised by the fictional “Rosie the Riveter”. About 350,000 women served in uniform, in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), the navy’s WAVES, the coastguard and marines, and the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), who ferried military aircraft.

The gains were real but limited. Women were usually paid less than men for the same work; childcare centres funded under the Lanham Act served only a fraction of working mothers; and most women in heavy industry were laid off in 1945 to make room for returning men. Many stayed in paid work in offices and services, however, and historians debate whether the war was a turning point for American women or a temporary interruption of older patterns.

Experiences of marginalised groups

In 1941 the labour leader A. Philip Randolph threatened a march of 100,000 African Americans on Washington to protest against discrimination in defence industries. Roosevelt responded with Executive Order 8802 (25 June 1941), which banned discrimination in defence industries and government and set up the Fair Employment Practices Committee. The Pittsburgh Courier, a Black newspaper, launched the Double V campaign in 1942: victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home.

About 1.2 million African Americans served in the armed forces, still in segregated units; the Tuskegee Airmen flew as fighter pilots in Europe. More than a million moved north and west for war work in a second Great Migration. Racial tension led to riots in Detroit in June 1943, in which 34 people died. Membership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) grew about tenfold during the war, and the war laid foundations for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Mexican Americans served in large numbers, perhaps 350,000 to 500,000, yet faced discrimination at home. In June 1943 sailors and soldiers in Los Angeles attacked young Mexican Americans wearing “zoot suits” in the Zoot Suit Riots, and the police arrested the victims. The Bracero Program brought Mexican workers to US farms and railways under contracts that promised fair pay and treatment but were often broken. About 25,000 Native Americans served, including the Navajo code talkers, whose code based on their language was never broken by Japan.

Japanese Americans

After Pearl Harbor, fear, racism and pressure from West Coast politicians and farmers led Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 9066 on 19 February 1942. Under it, the army removed about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, about two-thirds of them US citizens, and held them in ten War Relocation Authority camps such as Manzanar in California and Heart Mountain in Wyoming. No Japanese American was ever convicted of espionage or sabotage. In Hawaii, where people of Japanese descent were over a third of the population, there was no mass removal.

In Korematsu v. United States (18 December 1944) the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion order by six votes to three as a military necessity. Justice Frank Murphy dissented.

This exclusion of ‘all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien,’ from the Pacific Coast area on a plea of military necessity in the absence of martial law ought not to be approved. Such exclusion goes over ‘the very brink of constitutional power’ and falls into the ugly abyss of racism.

Justice Frank Murphy, dissenting opinion in Korematsu v. United States, 18 December 1944. A dissent is written to record disagreement and to address future courts. Murphy’s words show that the racial basis of the policy was recognised at the highest level at the time, which weakens the claim that the injustice is visible only with hindsight. On the same day, in Ex parte Endo, the court ruled that loyal citizens could not be detained, and the camps began to close.

About 33,000 Japanese Americans served in the forces, many from the camps; the 442nd Regimental Combat Team became one of the most decorated units in US history. In the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 the US government apologised and paid US$20,000 to each surviving internee.

Domestic impact of the Second World War: Canada

Economic and social impact

Canada’s war economy was run by C. D. Howe, minister of munitions and supply, who used government-owned companies and huge contracts to build ships, aircraft, vehicles and explosives. The gross national product roughly doubled between 1939 and 1945. Wage and price controls introduced in 1941 kept inflation low. The war completed Canada’s move from a resource economy to a modern industrial one.

The government also prepared for peace with social reforms intended to avoid a return to the Depression: unemployment insurance (1940) and family allowances, the “baby bonus” paid to mothers (1944). These measures were partly a response to the rise of the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), which led some opinion polls in 1943 and won power in Saskatchewan under Tommy Douglas in 1944.

Political impact: conscription again

Mindful of 1917, King had promised in 1939 that there would be no conscription for overseas service. The National Resources Mobilization Act (June 1940) introduced conscription for home defence only. As pressure from English Canada grew, King held a national plebiscite on 27 April 1942 asking voters to release the government from its promise. About 64 per cent of voters said yes, but about 73 per cent of voters in Quebec said no. King then described his policy to Parliament as “not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary”.

After heavy losses in Normandy and Italy in 1944 created a shortage of infantry, King’s defence minister, J. L. Ralston, demanded conscripts for overseas service. King dismissed him in November 1944, but then agreed to send 16,000 home-defence conscripts overseas, of whom about 2,500 reached the front lines. Because King had delayed so long and limited the numbers, the crisis of 1944 did far less damage to national unity than that of 1917, and the Liberals kept most of their support in Quebec.

Experiences of women

About 50,000 women served in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, the RCAF Women’s Division and the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service, and about 1 million women were in paid work by 1944, many in munitions plants. The government set up day nurseries in Ontario and Quebec and relaxed tax rules to draw married women into work. After 1945 the nurseries closed and many women left industrial jobs, but women’s wartime work strengthened later demands for equal pay.

Experiences of marginalised groups: Japanese Canadians and others

After Pearl Harbor and the fall of Hong Kong, the federal government used the War Measures Act to remove about 21,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them Canadian citizens, from a 100-mile zone along the British Columbia coast in 1942. Men were sent to road camps, and families to crowded settlements in the interior, such as Slocan and Kaslo, or to sugar-beet farms on the prairies.

The notice of the British Columbia Security Commission shows how the policy was carried out through orders that applied to an entire “race”. Canadian policy was in some ways harsher than that of the USA. In 1943 the government sold the confiscated homes, farms and fishing boats of Japanese Canadians without their consent. After the war they were made to choose between moving east of the Rockies or “repatriation” to Japan, a country many had never seen, and about 4,000 were sent there in 1946. They were not allowed to return to the coast until 1949. In 1988 the federal government apologised and paid 21,000 dollars to each survivor.

Several hundred Italian Canadians and German Canadians suspected of fascist or Nazi sympathies were interned, as were some communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. About 3,000 Indigenous people served in the forces, but on return many were denied the benefits given to other veterans. Black Canadians served in all three services, and the war began to challenge the colour bar in some units.

Domestic impact of the Second World War elsewhere in the Americas

The war also affected people of Japanese descent in Latin America. At US request, about 2,264 people of Japanese ancestry from thirteen Latin American countries, about 1,800 of them from Peru, were arrested and shipped to internment camps in the USA, such as Crystal City in Texas. Some were exchanged for American civilians held by Japan. Mexico moved its Japanese Mexican population away from the coasts and the US border to Mexico City and Guadalajara, and Brazil restricted its large Japanese Brazilian community, closing Japanese-language schools and newspapers.

For Latin American economies the war brought high demand for raw materials and a push to industrialise, since imports of manufactured goods were scarce. In Mexico the war began two decades of rapid industrial growth, and the Bracero Program sent hundreds of thousands of workers north; about 4.6 million contracts were signed between 1942 and 1964. In Brazil the Volta Redonda steel works began production in 1946. The FEB’s veterans returned from fighting fascism in Italy to a dictatorship at home, and the contradiction helped bring down the Estado Novo: Vargas was deposed by the army on 29 October 1945.

Historians’ perspectives on the emergence of the Americas in global affairs

Why did the USA expand?

Historians have explained US expansion in the 1890s in four main ways. In Expansionists of 1898 (1936), Julius Pratt showed that most business leaders opposed war with Spain until early 1898, fearing it would harm recovery from the depression, and argued that the drive for empire came from intellectuals, politicians and the press. From the late 1950s the “Wisconsin school” challenged this. William Appleman Williams, in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), and Walter LaFeber, in The New Empire (1963), argued that policymakers consciously sought foreign markets to escape overproduction and social unrest, producing an “Open Door” empire of trade more than colonies.

Other historians stress culture and ideas. Richard Hofstadter argued in an essay of 1952 that the war of 1898 was an outlet for a “psychic crisis” among middle-class Americans in the troubled 1890s. Kristin Hoganson, in Fighting for American Manhood (1998), shows how politicians presented war and empire as tests of manliness at a time when the women’s movement and economic change seemed to threaten male authority. Louis A. Pérez Jr., in The War of 1898 (1998), writes from a Cuban perspective, arguing that US accounts erased the Cuban struggle and that the USA intervened partly to stop a Cuban victory it could not control.

US policy in Latin America

Samuel Flagg Bemis, in The Latin American Policy of the United States (1943), called US intervention a “protective imperialism”, mainly driven by the need to keep European powers away from the canal and the Caribbean. Dana Munro, a former State Department official, also stressed strategy and the wish for stability in Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in the Caribbean, 1900–1921 (1964). Lars Schoultz, in Beneath the United States (1998), argues that the constant feature of US policy was a belief that Latin Americans were inferior and could not govern themselves, which explains why intervention survived every change of president.

On the Good Neighbor Policy, Bryce Wood, in The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy (1961), sees a genuine change of method, in which the USA learned to accept losses, such as the Mexican oil nationalisation, for the sake of good relations. David Green, in The Containment of Latin America (1971), argues that the policy replaced military control with economic control and prepared the ground for Cold War policy. Fredrick Pike, in FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy (1995), examines the policy through the cultural attitudes and stereotypes that Americans and Latin Americans held of each other.

Why did the USA enter the First World War?

In the 1930s, writers such as Charles Tansill, in America Goes to War (1938), and the Nye Committee argued that loans and trade with the Allies, and the pressure of bankers and munitions makers, drew the USA into the war. Later historians, notably Arthur Link in his multi-volume biography of Wilson (1947–1965) and Ernest May in The World War and American Isolation (1959), placed the decisive cause in Germany’s submarine campaign and Wilson’s commitment to neutral rights and to shaping the peace. More recent work, such as Ross Kennedy’s The Will to Believe (2009), stresses Wilson’s concern for US security in a world dominated by militarism, and his belief that only a seat at the peace conference would let him build a league of nations.

Why did the USA reject the Treaty of Versailles?

Thomas A. Bailey, in Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (1945), blamed both Lodge’s partisanship and Wilson’s stubbornness, and argued that Wilson’s refusal to accept reservations killed the treaty. John Milton Cooper, in Breaking the Heart of the World (2001), stresses Wilson’s stroke: before October 1919 Wilson had shown he could compromise, and his illness made him rigid at the decisive moment. Other historians give more weight to genuine constitutional objections to Article X, which many senators believed would take away Congress’s power to declare war.

Why was the atomic bomb used?

The orthodox view, set out by Henry Stimson in Harper’s Magazine in February 1947, holds that the bomb was used to end the war and save the lives that an invasion would have cost. Gar Alperovitz, in Atomic Diplomacy (1965), argued in a revisionist account that Japan was close to surrender and that the bomb was used mainly to impress the Soviet Union and limit its role in Asia. Most later historians reject the strongest form of this claim. J. Samuel Walker, in Prompt and Utter Destruction (1997), concludes that the main aim was to end the war quickly, with diplomatic advantage as a bonus, and that the bomb was probably not needed to avoid an invasion, although it shortened the war. Richard Frank, in Downfall (1999), uses decoded Japanese messages to show that Japan’s military leaders were not ready to surrender. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, in Racing the Enemy (2005), argues that the Soviet declaration of war on 8 August shocked Japan’s leaders as much as the bombs did.

Canada’s place in the world

Canadian historians have debated whether Canada exchanged one dependence for another. C. P. Stacey, in Canada and the Age of Conflict (1977–1981), traces the steady growth of Canadian control over foreign policy. Norman Hillmer and J. L. Granatstein, in Empire to Umpire (1994), describe Canada’s path from imperial loyalty to a role as a mediating “middle power” after 1945, while noting that close defence and economic ties with the USA from 1940 limited its independence. On conscription, Granatstein and J. M. Hitsman, in Broken Promises (1977), show how both conscription crises divided English and French Canada and shaped national politics.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Question 1: the reasons for US expansion

Question 2: the impact of US policy in Latin America

Question 3: the USA and the League of Nations

Question 4: women and the Second World War

Question 5: the role of one country of the Americas

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain the political, economic, social and ideological reasons for US expansion between 1880 and 1914, and weigh them against each other.

• To do:

  I can explain how Mahan’s ideas, the Panic of 1893, the yellow press and Social Darwinism each encouraged expansion.

• To do:

  I can describe the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani and the annexation of Hawaii, and explain why annexation came in 1898.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes, course and results of the war of 1898, including the Treaty of Paris, the Philippine–American War and the Platt Amendment.

• To do:

  I can explain the Roosevelt Corollary and the Big Stick, using the Venezuela crisis, the Dominican customs receivership and Panama.

• To do:

  I can explain dollar diplomacy and moral diplomacy, with examples from Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and judge how far they differed from the Big Stick.

• To do:

  I can explain why the USA moved from neutrality in 1914 to war in April 1917, and assess the role of trade, submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram.

• To do:

  I can describe the US contribution to the Allied victory in 1917–1918.

• To do:

  I can explain Wilson’s Fourteen Points and why the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles in 1919–1920.

• To do:

  I can explain why the Good Neighbor Policy was adopted, how it worked from Montevideo (1933) to Chapultepec (1945), and how far it changed US policy.

• To do:

  I can explain how the USA moved from neutrality to war in 1939–1941 and describe its role in the Second World War.