Chapter Two: Debt, Debt, and Unpaid Debt
Discussions of building a canal, through Nicaragua or the Panamanian region, were brought up since the election of 1896. McKinley would support the idea in some aspects, but it was not a priority.
In December of 1902, a crisis emerged in South America. The fleets of Germany, Britain, and Italy were deployed to blockade Venezuela. President Castro refused to pay foreign debt, and hoped that the Monroe Doctrine would urge the US to intervene. However, the interpretation by McKinley, and Congress, was that the Doctrine only referred to the seizure of land, not a blockade.
McKinley sent his Secretary of State, John Hay, to Caracas, to convince Castro to back down in some respect. However, the President refused, and the respective European leaders made it clear to America's ambassadors that neither will they.
Roosevelt urged the President to display force, in the form of deploying a fleet of their own to Venezuela and confronting their European counterparts. McKinley, while an imperialist, did not wish to escalate a crisis which was hardly theirs.
So, the blockade lasted into 1903. One of the President's aides told a reporter, "those sailors are going to have to return home eventually." many in Congress, who originally gave little thought to the matter, joined in calls to deploy a fleet to Venezuela and exercise the Doctrine.
McKinley decided to hold a conference between official representatives of the European and Venezuelan leaders. They met at a hotel in Annapolis, but results were slow to come in the first week. and even Hay begun to see the whole process as futile.
Finally, on the eleventh day, McKinley
hinted that military force, in defense of Venezuela, was a "viable option." the Germans were furious, the Italians confused, and the British were not in the room, but the message was clear.
Caracas agreed to commit 23 percent of Venezuelan customs to European claims, and the Europeans withdrew their fleets by late February. McKinley regarded it as a success, as did a large portion of the American public, but the hawks were still hungry.
The same thing happened in the Dominican Republic, when France, Germany, Italy, and the Dutch sent warships to Hispaniola. Roosevelt, again, urged the President to assume the Republic's debt or force the Europeans to back down.
One of the problems in that regard was that McKinley simply refused to expand the Navy. Roosevelt and his hawks imagined a "big white fleet," asserting American power. McKinley did not see an urgent need, and did not involve himself in that project.
When the Panamanians revolted against Colombia in 1903, Roosevelt
again urged McKinley to take action. He refused, despite the prospect of low fees in the construction of a Canal. It appeared that McKinley was abandoning the ideologies when he liberated Cuba and the Philippines from Spanish despotism, that he was allowing the European, or any hostile power, to threaten American interests in the Hemisphere as they pleased.
