October 25

Reordering Empire
New Mexico senator Albert Fall, the most outspoken advocate of US military intervention in post-World War I Mexico. As Warren Harding's secretary of the interior, he was forced to resign as part of the Teapot Dome scandal.
In September 1919, while touring the country in a futile effort to increase public support for the League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson suffered a serious stroke that left him incapacitated for the remainder of his presidency.  At the same time, controversy flared anew between the United States and Mexico, and conservatives led by Albert Fall opened a congressional investigation that attempted to trigger a military intervention. A small group of anti-imperialists checked them, a story we read about in the Woods article, and a pattern that replicated itself, with somewhat less promising results, in Haiti during the early 1920s.

READING:

                Calder, Impact of Intervention, 236-267. Here are reading notes

                Woods, Samuel Guy Inman

DOCUMENTS:

                Ernest Gruening, "Haiti and Santo Domingo Today," part 1

                                                                                              part 2

Gruening was a Harvard-trained M.D. who abandoned medicine for a career as a political activist. He was at the vanguard of the anti-imperialist movement during the 1920s; we'll encounter him again in this course as a key player in the Good Neighbor Policy and then as a critic of the Alliance for Progress.