Peace without a Sword 671(^1) Coolidge was physically delicate, plagued by chronic stomach
trouble. He required ten or eleven hours of sleep a day.
bloc, the Socialist party, the American Federation of
Labor, and numbers of intellectuals, entered the race
as the candidate of a new Progressive party. The
Progressives adopted a neopopulist platform calling
for the nationalization of railroads, the direct election
of the president, the protection of labor’s right to
bargain collectively, and other reforms.
The situation was almost exactly the opposite of
1912, when one conservative had run against two lib-
erals and had been swamped. But times had changed.
Coolidge received 15.7 million votes, Davis 8.4 mil-
lion, La Follette 4.8 million. Conservatism was clearly
the dominant mood of the country.
While Coolidge reigned, complacency was the
order of the day. “Mr. Coolidge’s genius for inactivity
is developed to a very high point,” the correspondent
Walter Lippmann wrote. “It is a grim, determined,
alert inactivity, which keeps Mr. Coolidge occupied
constantly.”^1 “The country,” the president reported
to Congress in 1928, “can regard the present with
satisfaction, and anticipate the future with optimism.”
Peace Without a Sword
Presidents Harding and Coolidge handled foreign
relations in much the same way they managed domes-
tic affairs. Harding deferred to senatorial prejudice
against executive domination in the area and let
Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes make policy.
Coolidge adopted a similar course. In directing for-
eign relations, they faced the obstacle of a resurgent
isolationism. The bloodiness and apparent senseless-
ness of the Great War convinced millions that the
only way to be sure it would not happen again was to
“steer clear” of “entanglements.” That these famous
words had been used by Washington and Jefferson in
vastly different contexts did not deter the isolationists
of the 1920s from attributing to them the same
authority they gave to Scripture. On the other hand,
far-flung American economic interests, as well as the
need for both raw materials for industry and foreign
markets for America’s growing surpluses of agricul-
tural and manufactured goods, made close attention
to and involvement in developments all over the
world unavoidable.
Isolationist sentiments, therefore, did not deter
the government from seeking to advance American
interests abroad. The Open Door concept remained
predominant; the State Department worked to
obtain opportunities in underdeveloped countries
for exporters and investors, hoping both to stimulate
the American economy and to bring stability to
“backward”nations. Although this policy sometimes
roused local resentments because of the tendency of
the United States to support entrenched elites while
the mass of peasants and city workers lived in
poverty, it also resulted in a further retreat from
active interventionism.
The first important diplomatic event of the
period revealed a great deal about American foreign
policy after the Great War. During the war, Japan had
greatly increased its influence in East Asia, especially
in Manchuria, the northeastern province of warlord-
dominated China. To maintain the Open Door in
China, it would be necessary to check Japanese
expansion. But there was little hope of restoring the
old spheres of influence, which the mass of Chinese
people bitterly resented. In addition, Japan, the
United States, and Great Britain were engaged in
expensive naval building programs, a competition
none of them really wanted but from which all dared
not withdraw unilaterally.
In November 1921, hoping to reach a general
agreement with China, Japan, and the Europeans
that would keep China open to the commerce of all
and slow the armaments race, Secretary of State
Hughes convened a conference in Washington. By
the following February the Washington Conference
had drafted three major treaties and a number of
lesser agreements.
In the Five-Power Treaty, the United States,
Great Britain, France, Japan, and Italy agreed to stop
building battleships for ten years and to reduce their
fleets of battleships ships to a fixed ratio, with Great
Britain and the United States limited to 525,000 tons,
Japan to 315,000 tons, and France and Italy to
175,000 tons. The new ratio was expected to produce
a balance of forces in the Pacific.
The Four-Power Treaty, signed by the United
States, Great Britain, Japan, and France, committed
these nations to respect one another’s interests in the
islands of the Pacific and to confer in the event that
any other country launched an attack in the area.
All the conferees signed the Nine-Power Treaty,
agreeing to respect China’s independence and to
maintain the Open Door. On the surface, this was of
monumental importance to the United States since it
seemed to mean that Japan had given up its territorial
ambitions on the Asian mainland and that both the
Japanese and the Europeans had formally endorsed
the Open Door concept.
By taking the lead in drafting these agreements, the
United States regained some of the moral influence it
had lost by not joining the League of Nations. The
treaties, however, were uniformly toothless. The signers
of the Four-Power Treaty agreed only to consult in case
of aggression in the Pacific; they made no promises to
help one another or to restrict their own freedom of