100 YEARS AGO IN THE SARATOGIAN
Monday, March 4, 1918. The United States is setting the new world standard for international diplomacy through its openness and commitment to altruism, a Union College lecturer tells a Saratoga Springs audience tonight.
Professor Charles N. Waldron continues his series on American government with a history of “How We Deal With Other Nations” at the Saratoga High School auditorium. “That America, led by President [Woodrow] Wilson, has not only counseled, but has followed a real policy of altruism toward other countries has amazed European diplomats,” Waldron claims.
Until 1876, the U.S. followed a policy of isolation, concerned only with enforcing the Monroe Doctrine in the western hemisphere. The doctrine “means just what every new president wishes it to mean,” Waldron notes.
American attitudes toward the world started to change with the 1876 centennial exposition in Philadelphia, when “much to our amazement we found that foreign countries were manufacturing articles a great deal better than some we were making. Americans soon learned that they had their faults and that one of them was the carrying out of the policy of isolation to the extreme.”
Under President Wilson, Waldron asserts, the U.S. has made its greatest contribution by practicing “open diplomacy.” American diplomats discuss their activities “openly and simply, as any business man would have done – much to the wonder of the old world.” By comparison, 19th century Europe with its selfishness nations and secret treaties “was marked by a sordidness that was indescribable.”
Waldron reminds his audience that the president has sweeping power over foreign policy, but can be checked by Congress’s power to ratify treaties.
“Publicity is also another check,” the professor adds, “It is practically impossible for the President to carry out any policy of which the people disapprove, as they will soon hear of it through the press.”
During the world war, Waldron insists, the President’s policies deserve public approval. Woodrow Wilson “is voicing the real spirit of our foreign policy – altruism,” he says, “it is in keeping with the American spirit that this should be a policy of helping the downtrodden people of the whole world.”