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In this interval Welles remarried, this time Mathilde Townsend, who had been the wife of Senator Peter Goelet Gerry of Rhode Island. He moved into a magnificent mansion at Oxon Hill, Maryland. Here he formed an ambition that still smolders: of all things, Sumner Welles would like to be Senator from Maryland.
In the first days of his New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt recalled the stiff, gangling young man who used to hang about his office during World War I days, and who in 1932 had contributed fatly to the Democratic campaign. Welles was made Assistant Secretary of State. On the night of April 11, five days after he had been confirmed, Welles took one paragraph out of the President's first inaugural address, expanded it into the Good Neighbor policy. His reward: a delighted Roosevelt sent him packing to Cuba, where revolt was simmering.
In his first Ambassadorial post Welles tried out his ideas, working with extraordinary patience and tact. But in six months he was recalled to the U.S., his mission accounted a failure by the U.S. press. Three Cuban Administrations blew up, Welles had been hanged in effigy, blood had been shed. Both the nationalist revolutionaries and the dictator Governments had turned to Welles for help.
Scrupulously he had refused to use U.S.
force to solve the political impasse. He tried friendly mediation. (He once prevented a battle by icily ordering soldiers out of the lobby of the Hotel Nacional.) By consistently appealing to intelligence on each side he had averted much more bloodshed, but only dispassionate Cubans knew that, and there were not many of them.
But he had won a greater victory for Cuba, one for which he is now hailed: he had engineered the death of the reactionary Platt Amendment, greatest obstacle to progress in Cuba, and the hated symbol throughout Latin America of dollar diplomacy and U.S. military intervention in local affairs. The Platt Amendment was a U.S. statute which had been rammed into the Cuban Constitution, forever granting the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuba.
Abandonment of this, in May 1934, was the most convincing possible proof to Latin America of the good faith of their new Good Neighbor.
Down this new pathway Welles and U.S.
diplomacy have gone with a progressive success that almost no American fully appreciates. The series of five Hemisphere conferences—Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Lima, Panama and Havana—have resulted in a defensive alliance without diplomatic parallel in the world's history; in effect, a Hemisphere League of Nations organized on practical lines.
Refrigerator. For years certain New Dealers and their columnist outlets have pictured Welles as an appeaser, a Munich-minded gentleman who plays high politics with the ruling castes. The continued wide circulation of this false picture is partly Welles's fault. Long ago he should have learned: 1) to trust the press; 2) to unbend. The trouble begins with his appearance.
To newspapermen and the great unwashed public, Sumner Welles seems too impressive to be real. His 6 feet 3 inches is plumb-line-straight, ramrod-stiff. Physically, he almost always talks down to others, and even his voice seems oppressively impressive, like Cinemactor Basil Rathbone's.