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

Although the Japanese attitude was critical, let us delay our consideration of that briefly to explore European views a bit further. The circulation of Hay’s first open door note of September 6, 1899, seems to have taken the French government somewhat unawares because their chargé in Washington, A. M. Thiebaut, reacted perhaps overly acutely in his analysis of the situation. Indeed, he anticipated later economic interpretations, not in the broad sense of linking the open door idea to the general outlook of the American business community, but in the specific sense of pointing to cotton manufacturing in South Carolina. He made an acute observation, as anyone who reads Charles S. Campbell’s study, Special Business Interests and the Open Door Policy, will appreciate. Campbell shows quite clearly that South Carolina cotton spinners did indeed urge on Washington the importance of the China market.²¹ But Thiebaut, too smart and too specific, told Foreign Minister Delcasse that the open door note “must have been provoked by the efforts which M. Tilman and MacLaurin, Senators from South Carolina, have made to the Federal Government at the instigation of the cotton manufacturers in their state.” He proceeded to launch into an analysis of the shift of the cotton industry from New England to South Carolina and of the relationship of South Carolina to the China market, all of which was informed and observant, but so specific as to be misleading.²²

At any rate, Foreign Minister Delcasse had more weighty things on his mind than the South Carolina cotton market in China, and he tried to put off the American ambassador to Paris, General Porter, with a rather vague oral approval of the general porte ouverte idea. But General Porter would not be put off, and by December, Delcasse was plagued by the assertion that Britain and Germany had responded favorably; and why didn’t France?

Thiebaut now reported from Washington that Hay claimed to have satisfactory replies from Britain and Germany and was surprised to learn from General Porter that France had some scruples about her spheres of interest. Hay had read a passage from the British reply “which seemed very categorical” and one from Germany “more vague but satisfactory.”