The Truman Doctrine and the Open Door policy
On march 6, 1947, President Truman made a speech at Baylor University on foreign economic policy laying down what we called the Truman Doctrine. In his speech, Truman announced united States planetary crusade for : (1) rule of freedom of enterprise and (2) Containment of communism. Truman tried to explain that freedom of enterprise was more important than peace and that freedom of speech were dependent on freedom of enterprise. State trade or planned economy should be considered as contrary to both peace and freedom. For Truman, the Government of the United States had to fight both for markets and for raw materials and what was serious enough but more ominous in Truman’s speech that « the whole world should adopt the American system » and that « the American system could survive in America only if it became a world system.
Baylor speech was the pursuit of the American ideology of industrial Manifest destiny and it fell into line with the old American open Door policy which can be traced back according to William Appleman Williams to James Madison’s federalist#10 but it really began at the end of the nineteenth century from McKinley onward and John Hay’s China-oriented declarations of 1899 and 1900;
