The Rise and Decline of the American Century

William O. Walker

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501726156
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 1941 the magazine publishing titan Henry R. Luce urged the nation's leaders to create an American Century. But in the post-World-War-II era proponents of the American Century faced a daunting task. Even so, Luce had articulated an animating idea that, as William O. Walker III skillfully shows in The Rise and Decline of the American Century, would guide United States foreign policy through the years of hot and cold war.

The American Century was, Walker argues, the counter-balance to defensive war during World War II and the containment of communism during the Cold War. American policymakers pursued an aggressive agenda to extend U.S. influence around the globe through control of economic markets, reliance on nation-building, and, where necessary, provision of arms to allied forces. This positive program for the expansion of American power, Walker deftly demonstrates, came in for widespread criticism by the late 1950s. A changing world, epitomized by the nonaligned movement, challenged U.S. leadership and denigrated the market democracy at the heart of the ideal of the American Century.

Walker analyzes the international crises and monetary troubles that further curtailed the reach of the American Century in the early 1960s and brought it to a halt by the end of that decade. By 1968, it seemed that all the United States had to offer to allies and non-hostile nations was convenient military might, nuclear deterrence, and the uncertainty of détente. Once the dust had fallen on Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency and Richard M. Nixon had taken office, what remained was, The Rise and Decline of the American Century shows, an adulterated, strategically-based version of Luce's American Century.

Part 1

THE RISE OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

1

PURSUING HEGEMONY

Building the American Century commenced as World War II drew to a close. Although the United States aspired to global leadership, how it would lead was not clear. More was needed than military power and economic might. Whether the UN would contribute to stability remained unknown. Moreover, how would the global economy fare under the Bretton Woods system? Was the creation of an international society, one reflective of Washington’s interests, even possible? And, after Roosevelt’s death, how would the Truman administration engender support for its foreign policy? As they began to consider such questions, policymakers had to figure out, in Acheson’s portentous words, how to run the show. In concurrence with Luce’s imperative to lead, they chose to pursue hegemony.

Inauspicious Beginnings

What friends and allies wanted from Washington was shared decision-making. Over time, the record of give-and-take in meetings both indicated how well the United States led and helped establish Washington’s credibility. The issue of consultation suffused the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace at Chapúltepec Castle in Mexico City from February 21 to March 8. The early contours of hegemony emerged from the deliberations. Heading the U.S. delegation was Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., former vice president of General Motors and chairman of the board at United States Steel. Stettinius, Dean Acheson later acidly wrote, “had gone far with comparatively modest equipment.” Most important to the work of the delegation was Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs William L. (Will) Clayton, cofounder of Anderson, Clayton, and Company, one of the world’s leading cotton export firms.¹ The Department of State wanted to use the conference, which began shortly after Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta, to get support for the United Nations at its initial meeting, set to begin April 25 in San Francisco. Turning wartime solidarity in the hemisphere, Argentina excepted, into common cause after the war became a major goal of the Latin Americans.²

Convening a conference at Chapúltepec Castle was highly symbolic because it was there on September 13, 1847, during the Mexican-American War, that U.S. troops seized the castle from a band of boys and young men, Los Niños Héroes, after defeating the Mexican army under the command of General Antonio López de Santa Anna. Representing his Latin American counterparts, Mexico’s foreign minister Ezequiel Padilla worked with the State Department to set the meeting’s agenda. Despite agreement on the importance of the UN to peace and collective security, there remained one issue generalities could not finesse: economic relations. Padilla wanted to negotiate arrangements with the United States in order to improve “the economic and social conditions of the people of America for the fundamental purpose of raising their standard of living.”³ Such a sentiment meant pushing for industrialization, which guaranteed a clash with Washington’s priorities.

The economic question alarmed U.S. officials, who acknowledged the transition from war to peace would disrupt production and trade. The State Department’s Merwin L. Bohan, a member of the U.S. delegation, explained what was at stake. “Our minimum responsibility,” he wrote prior to the conference, “is to cooperate in solving current and future problems affecting the well being of this hemisphere.” The United States must not abandon Latin America to the vagaries of postwar markets in which foreign exchange surpluses might be rapidly depleted; it should accept commodity agreements for “essential exports of Latin America at equitable prices.” The alternative meant a return to the economic nationalism and protectionism of the 1930s. Also, wartime procurement programs should continue for a time. The Export-Import Bank, Bohan argued, should see to the need for investment capital. Taken as a whole, these measures should preclude the return of depressed economic conditions.⁴ They did not, however, directly address Latin America’s major concerns.

That task was left to Will Clayton, who sought to prevent the signature document of the meeting, “An Economic Charter of the Americas,” from compromising Washington’s interests. Clayton, speaking on February 27, warned about the grave dangers of economic nationalism and the persistence of state-controlled commerce. He made it clear that preferential commodity procurement would stop: “Markets are extremely sensitive to the existence of large surpluses and until such surpluses are absorbed their presence inevitably acts as a depressing influence on prices, on initiative, and on enterprise.”⁵ Clayton declined to promise that future purchases of security-related commodities, even for the defense of the Americas, would come from Latin America. He did hold out hope that Europe might serve as a market for Latin American goods. As for the prickly issue of foreign-exchange surpluses, he declared that protecting them would be difficult after the war.

Regarding support for economic development, Clayton made a couple of salient points. He noted, “It must be admitted right off that we face an extremely difficult problem.” Europe would have first claim on capital goods produced in the United States. The other point emerged from his defense of the Export-Import Bank as the financial institution to which Latin Americans should look for development capital. In practical terms, this meant that Washington would not support the creation, long advocated in Latin America, of an inter-American bank.⁶ The Export-Import Bank and the new World Bank would have to suffice.

This turn of events signified the transformation of wartime partnership into a postwar relationship of secondary importance. Clayton explained the inevitability of this change in general terms: “The United States … is definitely committed to a postwar policy looking to a substantial expansion in the world economy.… It is our intention to work actively for international agreements to remove all discriminations in trade, to reduce tariffs and other barriers to trade.…” Simply put, intra-hemispheric consultation was losing its urgency, whereas European recovery was Washington’s commercial and financial priority. To think otherwise might jeopardize the economic rationale for an American Century.⁷

If the final version of the economic charter was not as limiting as Clayton, described by one scholar as “an economic ideologue of the first order,” desired, it also failed to meet Latin American expectations. Even beyond Clayton’s “shock therapy,” Chapúltepec—despite initiating the reintegration of Argentina into regional affairs—disappointed Latin American delegates who hoped to sustain the spirit of reciprocity that marked FDR’s wartime Good Neighbor policy.⁸ The turn outside of the Dominican Republic and part of Central America toward democracy and political participation by organized labor across Latin America in 1944 and 1945 was striking, so much so that many Latin Americans thought relations with Washington were certain to improve. That was not the case, at least in economic terms. Meanwhile, on strategic and political matters Latin American states were expected to follow the U.S. lead. As the traditional forces of order reined in social progressives and leftists after mid-1945, Washington did not actively protest. Stability early in the postwar era, it seems, was preferable to the prospect of radical change.⁹

It is worth noting that Bohan, in words evocative of Luce’s 1941 essay, closely linked the outcome of Chapúltepec to U.S. standing in the world. “The conference,” he warned, “will not only be a test of the sincerity of the United States with respect to the inter-American system, but a test of the ability of the United States to assume practical and constructive leadership.” In that sense, the Act of Chapúltepec, suggesting there were many paths to common goals, papered over critical differences between regionalism and the nascent globalism of U.S. foreign policy.¹⁰

Latin American endorsement of the UN at Chapúltepec created a problem for those who would build an American Century. The United States was staking out a global economic and political presence in Roosevelt’s final months as president, yet the pull of regionalism remained strong. Bohan, who mostly agreed with Clayton, articulated the worrisome dilemma: “It would be a great mistake if the United States failed to meet the practical problems of Latin America because of vague fears that such action might complicate plans for economic cooperation on a world-wide scale.”¹¹ Try as he might, Bohan could not bridge the gap between Pan Americanism and globalism. He later lamented, “We were going to have this one beautiful world. They [sic] had great doubts that regionalism had any importance whatsoever.” Bohan, however, seemed to acknowledge that European reconstruction might help Latin American development, though his thinking on the issue lacked clarity.¹²

Indications of the limits to substantive consultation with friends and allies also came through in Thomas C. Mann’s assessment of Chapúltepec. Mann, then a young State Department official who would later serve as assistant secretary for inter-American affairs (most famously under Lyndon Johnson), attended the conference as a technical adviser. He recalled in 1974 the vexing presence of the regionalism-globalism divide at the conference but downplayed the gulf between U.S. officials and Latin Americans over economic issues. Maybe Mann forgot that in a plenary session Ezequiel Padilla had defined economic growth as “vital,” asserting that Latin America would not revert to a state of economic “semi-colonialism.”¹³ His words reflected in part the frustration Latin Americans were feeling about condescension by U.S. delegates.¹⁴

The founding conference of the United Nations did not assuage the worries of Latin Americans about their place in the postwar world. True, Article 51 recognized the importance of regional interests to major powers, especially the United States and the Soviet Union. Delegates from Latin America realized, though, that the veto power held by the five permanent members of the Security Council could trump their concerns. An effort to place a permanent Latin American representative on the Security Council failed. Stettinius, whatever his limitations, was carrying on FDR’s work in bringing to life an organization in which the United States expected to play the dominant role.¹⁵ At the same time, the hubris present in the early construction of Luce’s project was increasingly evident.

Beyond the Americas, building an American Century began in Europe in mid-1945. Allied forces had vanquished Nazi Germany; with the defeat of Imperial Japan a matter of time, a new internationalism seemed to be at hand. The Truman-Molotov contretemps of April at the White House aside, disputes among the Big Three allies appeared to be manageable.¹⁶ A test of that assumption came with discussions about Germany’s fate at the Potsdam Conference in July. There, Harry Truman and James F. Byrnes, Stettinius’s successor, began to reassess relations with Moscow after Winston Churchill’s departure at mid-conference following his government’s electoral loss to the Labour Party and Clement Attlee.¹⁷

Social decay and economic chaos loomed over Europe as Truman and Joseph Stalin were meeting. The resuscitation of Germany’s coal production might help fix such conditions even though reneging on FDR’s pledge to internationalize the Ruhr would raise suspicions in Moscow about U.S. and British intentions. As the Potsdam Conference began, the economic rehabilitation of Germany’s western zones was already under way. Although the touchy issues of unification and remilitarization would arise later, this development constituted a major step on the road to building a free-world society. Industrial recovery in areas of Western occupation was nonnegotiable by August, making Stalin’s hope for a unified, left-leaning Germany unrealizable.¹⁸

American leadership depended on a strong world economy, one in which industrial and agricultural production, extraction of subsoil resources, and the relatively unfettered movement of capital fostered a trading regime that rejected prior nationalist tendencies. Simply put, markets were the key to leadership and global prosper...