162 ChaPter 3
work together and end destructive competition. They were not capitalist
visionaries with a dream and a plan to conquer the globe.
So, to be frank, they were men of a bygone era, passed by in the rapid
expansion of capitalism all over the globe in the early 1900s and especially
the 1920s. Republican Presidents Herbert Hoover, Warren Harding and
Calvin Coolidge, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, and well-connect-
ed financiers and politicians like Henry Stimson, Bernard Baruch, and Charles
Dawes could see the future, and it was not isolationist. “Free” and expanding
trade would create more profit, and thus political power, keep global aggres-
sion down, and prevent the Bolsheviks from becoming a legitimate political
alternative because prosperity would be so widespread. Hoover, in 1924,
echoed Woodrow Wilson’s claims from decades earlier when he claimed that
exports were so crucial to the American economy [both because it was way
to sell goods and to get currency in exchange] that the government had to
provide “protection and support to Americans interested in the development
of American enterprise abroad.” Coolidge already believed that American
capitalism now required global connections to survive and grow. “Our invest-
ments and trade relations are such,” he explained, “that it is almost impossible
to conceive of any conflict anywhere on earth which would not affect us
injuriously.” Wars and turmoil in areas where there was U.S. investment
would de-stabilize American corporations and banks—as the Great War had
done—so had to be avoided. Foreign economic policy also sought to solve
the problems of surplus. Hoover simply said, “we must find profitable markets
for our surplus,” sounding much like McKinley or Roosevelt in 1898. John
Foster Dulles, a well-connected lawyer who had helped develop the Dawes
Plan and was influential in the Republican Party, went even further. “We must
finance our exports by loaning foreigners the where-the-with-all to pay for
them,” he argued “Without such loans we would have the spectacle of our
neighbors famishing for goods which were rotting in our warehouses as unus-
able surplus.”
Dulles’s ideas about sending loans abroad so that the poor countries receiv-
ing American funds could then turn around and buy U.S. goods was widely
accepted, and would be a core part of American economic policy for the
entire century—a form of welfare for the military and corporations as it were.
Hoover and Dawes believed that such loans were the biggest path to eco-
nomic success. If the U.S. loaned adequate amounts of capital to other places,