The Totalitarian Challenge 673suspicious of international commit-
ments, ratified it eighty-five to one.
The Good Neighbor Policy
The conflict between the desire to
avoid foreign entanglements and
the desire to advance American eco-
nomic interests is well-illustrated by
events in Latin America. In dealing
with this part of the world, Harding
and Coolidge performed neither
better nor worse than Wilson had.
In the face of continued radicalism
and instability in Mexico, which
caused Americans with interests in
land and oil rights to suffer heavy
losses, President Coolidge acted
with forbearance. The Mexicans
were able to complete their social
and economic revolution in the
1920s without significant interfer-
ence by the United States.
Under Coolidge’s successor,
Herbert Hoover, the United States
began at last to treat Latin American nations as equals.
Hoover reversed Wilson’s policy of trying to teach
them“to elect good men.”The Clark Memorandum
(1930), written by Undersecretary of State J. Reuben
Clark, disassociated the right of intervention in Latin
America from the Roosevelt Corollary. The corollary
had been an improper extension of the Monroe
Doctrine, Clark declared. The right of the United
States to intervene depended rather on“the doctrine
of self-preservation.”
The distinction seemed slight to Latin Americans,
but since it seemed unlikely that the existence of the
United States could be threatened in the area, it was
important. By 1934 the marines who had been occu-
pying Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic
had all been withdrawn and the United States had
renounced the right to intervene in Cuban affairs.
Instead of functioning as the policeman for the region,
the United States would be its“good neighbor.”
Unfortunately, the United States did little to try to
improve social and economic conditions in the
Caribbean region, so the underlying envy and resent-
ment of “rich Uncle Sam” did not disappear.
The Totalitarian Challenge
The futility and danger of isolationism were exposed
in September 1931 when the Japanese, long domi-
nant in Chinese Manchuria, marched their army in
and converted the province into a puppet state
The League of Nations covenant, the Kellogg Pact, the Nine-Power Treaty—all were mere
scraps of paper. They did nothing to prevent Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931.named Manchukuo. This violated both the Kellogg-
Briand and Nine-Power pacts. China, now controlled
by General Chiang Kai-shek, appealed to the League
of Nations and to the United States for help. Neither
would intervene. When League officials asked about
the possibility of American cooperation in some kind
of police action, President Hoover refused to con-
sider either economic or military reprisals. The
United States was not a world policeman, he said.
The Nine-Power and Kellogg-Briand treaties were
“solely moral instruments.”
The League sent a commission to Manchuria to
investigate. Henry L. Stimson, Hoover’s secretary of
state, announced (the Stimson Doctrine) that the
United States would never recognize the legality of
seizures made in violation of American treaty rights.
This served only to irritate the Japanese.
In January 1932 Japan attacked Shanghai, the
bloody battle marked by the indiscriminate bombing
of residential districts. When the League at last offi-
cially condemned their aggressions, the Japanese
withdrew from the organization and extended their
control of northern China. The lesson of Manchuria
was not lost on Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor
of Germany on January 30, 1933.
It is easy, in surveying the diplomatic events of
1920–1929, to condemn the United States and the
European democracies for their unwillingness to stand
up for principles, their refusal to resist when Japan and
later Germany and Italy embarked on the aggressions