West Across the Pacific: American Involvement in East Asia from 1 ...

Griswold (1938), its premier analyst, subscribed to this general view, and so did most other students of Far Eastern problems before the Pacific War. The open door was not a great thing, but it was a good thing. Of course, it could not perform miracles, as some seemed to expect. Thus, Griswold characterized the Taft-Knox effort to promote the open door by dollar diplomacy as one of the “least fruitful provinces” of that era’s efforts at systematic promotion of American commerce and investment, a scheme that “sadly miscalculated the European factors in Far Eastern politics” and resulted in “abysmal failure” for Knox’s diplomacy. He felt that Wilson’s judgment in taking the United States out of consortium loan propositions in 1913 “was vindicated by the storm of protest from all factions in Chinese politics,” when the loan agreement was eventually announced.¹

He was kinder to Theodore Roosevelt’s policy of “retrenchment on the principle of the territorial integrity of China” in line with Teddy Roosevelt’s “old frontier maxim, ‘Never draw unless you intend to shoot.’” “No one,” said Griswold, “could speak from experience more authentically than he [Roosevelt] when he wrote, ‘Our vital interest is to keep the Japanese out of our country and at the same time preserve the good will of Japan. The vital interest of the Japanese, on the other hand, is in Manchuria and Korea. It is therefore peculiarly to our interest not to take any steps as regard Manchuria which will give the Japanese cause to feel, with or without reason, that we are hostile to them.”²

Griswold had read, but rejected, Tyler Dennett’s seemingly revisionist article on “The Open Door as Intervention” (1933). In this, Dennett argued that John Hay had given out the open door pronouncements as quid pro quo to Britain for her withdrawal from the Caribbean area, but Griswold obtained a letter from the aged coauthor of the open door note, Hippisley himself, calling this idea “the product of lively but ill-balanced imagination” in refuting it. Dennett’s revisionism was all in the title anyway; the intervention he was talking about had nothing to do with China.³