The Roosevelt Corollary

Foreign intervention in Latin American resurfaced as an issue in U.S. foreign policy at the turn of the century as European governments began to use force to pressure several Latin American countries to repay their debts. For example, British, German, and Italian gunboats blockaded Venezuela’s ports in 1902 when the Venezuelan government defaulted on its debts to foreign bondholders. Many Americans worried that European intervention in Latin America would undermine their country’s traditional dominance in the region. As part of his annual address to Congress in 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt stated that in keeping with the Monroe Doctrine the United States was justified in exercising “international police power” to put an end to chronic unrest or wrongdoing in the Western Hemisphere. This so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine contained a great irony: whereas the Monroe Doctrine had been sought to prevent European intervention in the Western Hemisphere, the Roosevelt Corollary justified American intervention throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Questions for understanding:
How does Roosevelt justify American intervention in the Western Hemisphere? What national interests are involved?

The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
Theodore Roosevelt’s Annual Message to Congress
6 December 1904

To the Senate and House of Representatives:

The Nation continues to enjoy noteworthy prosperity. Such prosperity is of course primarily due to the high individual average of our citizenship, taken together with our great natural resources; but an important factor therein is the working of our long-continued governmental policies. The people have emphatically expressed their approval of the principles underlying these policies, and their desire that these principles be kept substantially unchanged, although of course applied in a progressive spirit to meet changing conditions.

….
Foreign Policy
In treating of our foreign policy and of the attitude that this great Nation should assume in the world at large, it is absolutely necessary to consider the Army and the Navy, and the Congress, through which the thought of the Nation finds its expression, should keep ever vividly in mind the fundamental fact that it is impossible to treat our foreign policy, whether this policy takes shape in the effort to secure justice for others or justice for ourselves, save as conditioned upon the attitude we are willing to take toward our Army, and especially toward our Navy. It is not merely unwise, it is contemptible, for a nation, as for an individual, to use high-sounding language to proclaim its purposes, or to take positions which are ridiculous if unsupported by potential force, and then to refuse to provide this force. If there is no intention of providing and keeping the force necessary to back up a strong attitude, then it is far better not to assume such an attitude.
The steady aim of this Nation, as of all enlightened nations, should be to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail throughout the world the peace of justice. There are kinds of peace which are highly undesirable, which are in the long run as destructive as any war. Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace. Many times peoples who were slothful or timid or shortsighted, who had been enervated by ease or by luxury, or misled by false teachings, have shrunk in unmanly fashion from doing duty that was stern and that needed self-sacrifice, and have sought to hide from their own minds their shortcomings, their ignoble motives, by calling them love of peace. The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war. The goal to set before us as a nation, the goal which should be set before all mankind, is the attainment of the peace of justice, of the peace which comes when each nation is not merely safe-guarded in its own rights, but scrupulously recognizes and performs its duty toward others. Generally peace tells for righteousness; but if there is conflict between the two, then our fealty is due first to the cause of righteousness. Unrighteous wars are common, and unrighteous peace is rare; but both should be shunned. The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise of that right can not be divorced. One of our great poets has well and finely said that freedom is not a gift that tarries long in the hands of cowards. Neither does it tarry long in the hands of those too slothful, too dishonest, or too unintelligent to exercise it. The eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty must be exercised, sometimes to guard against outside foes; although of course far more often to guard against our own selfish or thoughtless shortcomings.

If these self-evident truths are kept before us, and only if they are so kept before us, we shall have a clear idea of what our foreign policy in its larger aspects should be. It is our duty to remember that a nation has no more right to do injustice to another nation, strong or weak, than an individual has to do injustice to another individual; that the same moral law applies in one case as in the other. But we must also remember that it is as much the duty of the Nation to guard its own rights and its own interests as it is the duty of the individual so to do. Within the Nation the individual has now delegated this right to the State, that is, to the representative of all the individuals, and it is a maxim of the law that for every wrong there is a remedy. But in international law we have not advanced by any means as far as we have advanced in municipal law. There is as yet no judicial way of enforcing a right in international law. When one nation wrongs another or wrongs many others, there is no tribunal before which the wrongdoer can be brought. Either it is necessary supinely to acquiesce in the wrong, and thus put a premium upon brutality and aggression, or else it is necessary for the aggrieved nation valiantly to stand up for its rights. Until some method is devised by which there shall be a degree of international control over offending nations, it would be a wicked thing for the most civilized powers, for those with most sense of international obligations and with keenest and most generous appreciation of the difference between right and wrong, to disarm. If the great civilized nations of the present day should completely disarm, the result would mean an immediate recrudescence of barbarism in one form or another. Under any circumstances a sufficient armament would have to be kept up to serve the purposes of international police; and until international cohesion and the sense of international duties and rights are far more advanced than at present, a nation desirous both of securing respect for itself and of doing good to others must have a force adequate for the work which it feels is allotted to it as its part of the general world duty. Therefore it follows that a self-respecting, just, and far-seeing nation should on the one hand endeavor by every means to aid in the development of the various movements which tend to provide substitutes for war, which tend to render nations in their actions toward one another, and indeed toward their own peoples, more responsive to the general sentiment of humane and civilized mankind; and on the other hand that it should keep prepared, while scrupulously avoiding wrongdoing itself, to repel any wrong, and in exceptional cases to take action which in a more advanced stage of international relations would come under the head of the exercise of the international police. A great free people owes it to itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil.

Arbitration Treaties–Second Hague Conference
We are in every way endeavoring to help on, with cordial good will, every movement which will tend to bring us into more friendly relations with the rest of mankind. In pursuance of this policy I shall shortly lay before the Senate treaties of arbitration with all powers which are willing to enter into these treaties with us. It is not possible at this period of the world’s development to agree to arbitrate all matters, but there are many matters of possible difference between us and other nations which can be thus arbitrated. Furthermore, at the request of the Interparliamentary Union, an eminent body composed of practical statesmen from all countries, I have asked the Powers to join with this Government in a second Hague conference, at which it is hoped that the work already so happily begun at The Hague may be carried some steps further toward completion. This carries out the desire expressed by the first Hague conference itself.

Policy Toward Other Nations of the Western Hemisphere
It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt Amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all question of interference by this Nation with their affairs would be at an end. Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical. They have great natural riches, and if within their borders the reign of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure to come to them. While they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. It is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America or anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence, must ultimately realize that the right of such independence can not be separated from the responsibility of making good use of it.

In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to circumscribe the theater of war in the Far East, and to secure the open door in China, we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity at large. There are, however, cases in which, while our own interests are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made to our sympathies. Ordinarily it is very much wiser and more useful for us to concern ourselves with striving for our own moral and material betterment here at home than to concern ourselves with trying to better the condition of things in other nations. We have plenty of sins of our own to war against, and under ordinary circumstances we can do more for the general uplifting of humanity by striving with heart and soul to put a stop to civic corruption, to brutal lawlessness and violent race prejudices here at home than by passing resolutions and wrongdoing elsewhere. Nevertheless there are occasional crimes committed on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror as to make us doubt whether it is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The cases must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There must be no effort made to remove the mote from our brother’s eye if we refuse to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases in which we could interfere by force of arms as we interfered to put a stop to intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily very few. Yet it is not to be expected that a people like ours, which in spite of certain very obvious shortcomings, nevertheless as a whole shows by its consistent practice its belief in the principles of civil and religious liberty and of orderly freedom, a people among whom even the worst crime, like the crime of lynching, is never more than sporadic, so that individuals and not classes are molested in their fundamental rights–it is inevitable that such a nation should desire eagerly to give expression to its horror on an occasion like that of the massacre of the Jews in Kishenef, or when it witnesses such systematic and long-extended cruelty and oppression as the cruelty and oppression of which the Armenians have been the victims, and which have won for them the indignant pity of the civilized world.

Theodore Roosevelt

The Philippine-American War

Philippine-American War

“After the Treaty of Paris ended the Spanish-American War, a curious situation existed in the Philippine Islands. The U.S. occupation force of 11,000 men (mostly volunteers) was in Manila completely surrounded by about 20,000 Filipino insurgents. The Americans, led by Major General Ewell S. Otis (“Colonel Blimp”) and the insurgents, led by Emiho Aguinaldo, had lived through two months of an unofficial cease-fire. On the night of February 4, 1899, the itchy trigger finger of a 1st Nebraska Volunteer Infantry private set the Insurrection in motion.

“General Otis had several immediate problems: The most pressing was the fact that, by law and Army Regulations (now that the Spanish-American War was officially over) he had to send home all his volunteer troops, almost 75% of his available force. Surprisingly, however, almost all the volunteers chose to stay until regular Army replacements arrived. Tropical diseases were also taking their toll of the Americans. At times, nearly one-third of the U.S. troops were on the sick lists.

“Nevertheless, Otis and his subordinates, Major General Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas) and Brigadier General Thomas N. Anderson, began preparing for a campaign against the insurgents. MacArthur’s command consisted of the 1st Montana, 10th Pennsylvania, 1st South Dakota, 1st Colorado, 1st Nebraska, 20th Kansas, 3rd U.S. Artillery (acting as infantry), and two batteries of the Utah Light Artillery. General Anderson’s troops were the 1st Washington, 1st Idaho, 1st California, 14th U.S., 1st North Dakota, two batteries of the 6th U.S. Field Artillery, and the 4th U.S. Cavalry (on foot).

“The volunteers were armed with the single-shot, black powder, breech-loading .45-caliber Springfield rifle. The U.S. Regulars carried the.30-caliber Krag-Jorgensen repeater, using smokeless powder. The artillery had some 3.2 inch breech-loading quick-fire cannons and a few three-inch mountain guns. There were also several Gatling and Hotchkiss machine guns with the infantry units. Some additional fire support came from the shallow-draft gunboat Laguna de Bay. She was covered with bullet-proof plating and was armed with two 3-inch guns, two 1.65-inch Hotchkiss revolving cannons, and four Gatling guns. The U.S. Navy monitor Monadnock thundered in the distance and threw an occasional 10-inch armour-piercing shell at the enemy lines. The noise was usually more effective as the shells tended to bury them-selves in the ground without exploding. The insurgents were armed with rifles varying from modern Mausers to ancient muzzleloaders. All men carried the bob, a 20inch long jungle knife described as “a cross between a butcher knife and a hatchet”. Aguinaldo’s men had few artillery pieces, a couple of Krupp guns captured from the Spanish and some old muzzle-loaders. They had no machine guns, and ammunition was scarce and unreliable.

“By March of 1899, the Americans had cleared the insurgents from the vicinity of Manila and had captured the rebel capital of Malolos. Aguinaldo’s “government” had fled northward into the mountains. Several other minor skirmishes occurred between June and October, but no major battles. By October of 1899, all the volunteers had been replaced by the 24th (Negro), 16th, 34th, and 22nd U.S. Infantry; a cavalry brigade consisting of eight troops of the 3rd, and nine troops of the fourth U.S Cavalry; and an artillery battery of four Hotchkiss l2pdrs manned by two companies of the 37th U.S. Infantry. To this force was added the 6th U.S. Field Artillery, the 3rd U.S. Artillery (still acting as infantry), and the 14th U.S. Infantry which were already in the Philippines. These last three units comprised the experienced core of the new all-regular Philippine field army. Other units which arrived during the next year included the 6th, 13th, 15th, 17th, 19th, 20th, 23rd, 25th, 27th, 29th, 33rd, 35th, and 43rd Infantry Regiments.

“On October 19, 1899, some 900 insurgents were routed at San Isidoro. In November, a captured message revealed the location of Aguinaldo’ new “capital” at Bayombong. A forced march with few supplies was made by Brigadier General Samuel Young’s cavalry brigade in an attempt to corner the rebel leader. A blunder by an American officer, however, allowed Aguinaldo to escape. Most of his troops, however, were killed, captured, or scattered into the jungles. One final pocket of resistance was cleaned up and the formal insurrection was over. Otis was so confident of his success that, in December of 1899, he sent three gunboats, two infantry regiments, and some artillery to the south to open up the hemp ports for commerce

“Aguinaldo, still at large, had declared a guerrilla war against the Americans in a secret society. The Katipunan (“Worshipful Association of the Sons of the People”), was formed and practiced ritual terror against the U.S. troops and their Filipino friends for 18 months. As an example, in the first four months of 1900, 442 guerrilla skirmishes cost the Americans over 450 men killed or wounded. Finally, on March 22, 1901, after a rather suspenseful undercover infiltration of Aguinaldo’s headquarters in the mountains near Palanan had succeeded, the insurgent chieftain was captured.

“One final flare-up of resistance occurred in September of 1901 when 48 men and officers of Company C, 9th U.S. Infantry, were chopped to pieces by bolo-wielding villagers in Balangiga. The U.S. Army was outraged and reacted by burning villages, capturing or killing suspected insurgents, and confiscating crops. Several U.S. officers were court-martialed for their ruthlessness during this final campaign. By July of 1932, all the Christian areas of the Philippines had been pacified. U.S. troop strength was reduced from 70,000 to 34,000 and the newly formed Philippine constabulary took over many of the police duties. On July 4, 1902, President Roosevelt proclaimed an end to hostilities

“The Insurrection cost the U.S. about $8,000,000. More than 100,000 men had been used, fighting in 2,811 actions, losing 4,243 killed and 2,818 wounded. Filipino losses have been estimated at about 16,000 killed in combat and, perhaps, another 100,000 dying of famine and disease.”

“Uniforms of the Campaign:”

“U.S. Troops – Khaki campaign (slouch) hats, dark blue “sack” coat, light blue or khaki pants. Brown or grey belts and equipment. Later in the campaign the all khaki “tropical service” uniform with brown belts began to appear.

“Insurgents – Straw hat or sometimes a grey or white felt hat with black band, long loose fitting jacket, usually white. Pants were of many colours, but rust red and grey seemed most prevalent. The only equipment was a leather haversack for ammunition, rations, and personal items.”
Sources:

Dupuy, Colonel R. Ernest and Baumer, Major General William H., The Little Wars of the United States, Hawthorne Books, New York, 1968.

Scruby, Jack, “Asiatic Colonial Wargames”, The Miniature Parade, Volume 11, Number II, October 1968, pp 3-6.

Wolf, Leon, Little Brown Brother, Doubleday, Garden City, 1968.