From that point many authors begin the final phase of Bryan's career,1 in which he slowly drifted towards the edge of American public life. His tenure as Secretary of State was thus a bitter experience for him, a deep blow to his ideals. To us, it is likely to appear deeply contradictory: Bryan, the antiimperialist idealist, was highly prone to U.S. military interventions in Latin America. Yet in foreign as in domestic policy, Bryan was in many ways ahead of his time.

Woodrow Wilson was himself an idealist among statesmen, but he did not appoint Bryan as Secretary of State with the intent of launching a moral crusade. The appointment was in fact thoroughly political.2 Bryan was a leader of a wing of the Democratic Party, and a sometime rival of Wilson. Giving him the highest post of the Cabinet wa

On racial issues, however, party relationships were different. The Democrats were the party of the segregationist South, and they had no difficulty in supporting "states' rights" when it came to state laws imposing discrimination. This would prove to be significant in the shaping of U.S. policy towards Japan.3

The affirmative side of his Latin American policy was something else again, however. Bryan's overall pacifism and his rejection of econonic neoimperialism in Latin America did not lead him, as we might expect, to noninterventionism in the region. Instead, he became the advocate of moral reform in Latin America, imposed if need by at the point of U.S. Marine bayonets. He proposed making Nicaragua a U.S. protectorate.11 He interfered with politics in the Dominican Republic, giving heavyhanded assurances of support to an elected president, Jose Bordas Valdez, who showed every sign of establishing himself as a presidentforlife.12 Eventually the U.S. was forced to acquiesce in Bordas' overthrow.

When Bryan came into office in 1913, the items he found on top of his desk were relations with Japan and with Central America. The cause of contention with Japan was a difference over some international issue, but the domestic American politics of immigration and racism. Japanese immigrants were not welcome in West Coast states. In California, Progressive Governor Hiram Johnson signed legislation restricting Japanese immigrants from owning land. All of these discriminatory measures were deeply resented in Japan, and naturally they were strenuously objected to by the Japanese government.