Calvin Coolidge Frontpage

American President Frontpage

Not very interested in world affairs, Calvin Coolidge looked to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, and Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes to manage international relations, all holdovers from the Harding cabinet. He subscribed to the idea that America should seek out world markets, collect its World War I loans, and refrain from entangling alliances and participation in the League of Nations.

In 1928, Coolidge supported the Kellogg-Briand Pact an agreement that was initiated by France and signed by all but five nations in the world. Named for the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and American Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg (who had replaced Hughes in 1925), the pact renounced war as a means of settling international differences. This proclamation carried with it no means of enforcement and was little more than a novel statement of little consequence. Indeed, although the Coolidge administration called for a new disarmament conference to expand the limits on naval ships agreed to in the Washington Conference of 1922, no agreement had been reached by 1928 on the maximum size of cruisers and battleships.

During Coolidge's term in office, America continued to maintain a strong presence and assert influence in Latin America. Direct investments, which rose from $1.26 billion in 1920 to $3.52 billion in 1928, inextricably tied the economies of those countries to America. For example, the United Fruit and Standard Fruit companies controlled most of the revenue of Honduras, and U.S. firms dominated Venezuelan oil production. Control of the Panama Canal, and a policy of using of troops, when necessary, to safeguard U.S. interests also worked to give America the upper hand in the region. In a direct show of influence, U.S. troops trained and maintained a pro-American National Guard in the Dominican Republic and occupied Nicaragua and Haiti with a peacekeeping force of U.S. soldiers throughout the decade. Americans also controlled Cuban politics and the Cuban economy, and the U.S. nearly came to blows with Mexico over the ownership of Mexican oil fields by American companies.

So embittered were most Latin American countries over America's imperialistic policies that the republics of the Western Hemisphere assembled for their triennial conference in Havana in 1928 eager to denounce and confront the United States. Coolidge personally traveled to Havana to address the conference, hoping to lessen the rage. It took all the eloquence of former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, now a justice of the United States, to persuade the gathered delegates from passing a strong anti-United States resolution. Even so, the bitterness toward American policy would not be assuaged until Franklin Roosevelt announced a "Good Neighbor Policy" of nonintervention in 1933