160 ChaPter 3
that description a legend, a myth, a convenient explanation that lacks evi-
dence? Actually, the U.S. was intricately involved in global affairs in the 1920s
to a great and expanding extent; isolationism was an easy way to describe the
avoidance of war, but it was not an accurate description of America’s role in
the world.
As noted in several places already, the American economy was growing
with more investment, more trade, more production, more external economic
arrangements. Given the importance of the data already seen, it is useful here
to consider this entire issue—global economics—in a section by itself. This is
worth noting not just because the economy of the 1920s was a pivot point
between affluence and depression but, more importantly actually, the eco-
nomic decisions made by the ruling class in this period had decisive long-term
consequences, ultimately creating the conditions for the U.S. to emerge as the
world’s biggest economy in the second half of the 20th Century. In the early
1900s the U.S. opened doors, practiced diplomacy using dollars, and outraged
sovereign nations—all as part of a much larger systemic plan to create a
global empire based on trade and investment, not on armies and occupation,
as we discussed with regard to the events of 1898. The ideas and tactics
developed while invading and occupying Hawai’i, Cuba, the Philippines, and
elsewhere grew stronger and more complex as American power rose to glob-
al stature. The open door, the pursuit of trade, investment, resources and labor
everywhere without barriers or unfair advantages to empires, remained the
dominant goal throughout the administrations of Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson
and into the 1920s. William Howard Taft tweaked that a bit with his idea of
“dollar diplomacy,” the idea that the U.S. would use investment rather than
war, send bankers and industrialists abroad rather than soldiers, that it would
be “substituting dollars for bullets” in the quest for more global power. Soon-
to-be President Woodrow Wilson even more candidly described these goals in
1907, boasting that “since... the manufacturer insists on having the world as
a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of nations
which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained
by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state even if the sovereign-
ty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process.” Wilson could not have
been more clear. The U.S. government, and its navies, had a responsibility to
protect American investors and commercial traders as they sought new areas
for business, even if those areas were unwilling and their independence had