Between 1929 and 1945 the United States experienced a global depression and another world war. During this time of grave calamity almost everywhere, economic collapse called forth political instability and nationalist movements. In Europe and Asia the rise of Italian fascism, German Nazism, and Japanese militarism intensified economic competition over markets and scarce resources, resulting in conflict and war. In the countries of Latin America the Great Depression led to commercial breakdowns and political difficulties, the consequences of which encouraged the United States to respond in distinctive ways by fashioning a Good Neighbor policy.
The term “good neighbor,” a kind of commonplace in diplomatic language, took on actual meaning during the presidencies of Herbert C. Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. For Latin Americans the term signified the end of an era of direct intervention by the United States in Latin American affairs. For the Roosevelt administration the Good Neighbor policy also functioned significantly in other ways: It served as an international counterpart of the New Deal by attacking the economic effects of the Great Depression and later as a means of mobilizing resistance among the nations of the New World against the Axis powers during the Second World War. As the historian Robert Freeman Smith explains, taken together the various components formed “a massive, although ill-defined government effort” under U.S. direction to create “an integrated hemisphere system” characterized by high levels of “political, economic and military cooperation.”1
Though often as paradoxical and contradictory as the New Deal itself, the Good Neighbor policy introduced important changes. Notably, the United States sacrificed its self-proclaimed international police power for economic reasons and for “hemispheric solidarity” against the Nazis. The main ingredient of Good Neighborliness consisted of nonintervention and other initiatives to promote commercial expansion and regional collaboration. Historians still debate whether the effects constituted a partnership with Latin Americans or a subtle means of imperial domination. David Green, for example, published the book The Containment of Latin America in 1971; Professor Green adopted an economic/dependency approach (very much in vogue at that time, in academic circles) to understanding the relationship between the United States and Latin America and his conclusions focused attention on trade, investment, economies of scale and other metrics, all of which tended to benefit the United States at the expense of the Latin American republics.
Herbert C. Hoover, the former secretary of commerce, won election to the presidency as a Republican in 1928. While claiming, ironically as it turned out, that his party best understood the means of ensuring prosperity for the future, Hoover pledged his support to traditional Republican positions in favor of high tariffs, low taxes, and minimal government spending. During his career as an engineer working in other countries, he had acquired more international experience than any president since John Quincy Adams. During the campaign, he upheld the values of his Quaker ancestors by affirming his preference for peaceful solutions in the conduct of world affairs. He also espoused an interest in Latin America.
A few weeks after his election, Hoover undertook a goodwill tour into Central and South America. As he explained, “Our trip . . . was conceived for the purpose of paying friendly calls upon our neighbors to the south.” He saw the venture as “the first step in what was to be a reorientation of policy toward Latin America.” After departing from San Pedro, California, on November 19, 1928, aboard the battleship USS Maryland, Hoover’s ten-week journey took him to Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. In a speech at Amapala, Honduras on November 26, he declared as his purpose “the friendly visit of one good neighbor to another.” In other public orations, he emphasized the importance of common welfare, mutual respect, and shared understanding among the nations of the Western Hemisphere. For example, before an audience of skeptical Argentines in Buenos Aires, Hoover criticized the condescension typically built into U.S. policy toward Latin America, especially the stereotype depicting his country as “big brother.” He affirmed his belief in the principle of equality among states. Such words, followed by actual deeds, established some claim for Hoover as a founder of the Good Neighbor policy.2
Once inaugurated as the president, Hoover reaped the whirlwind. Contrary to Republican expectations the Great Depression descended upon the United States and the rest of the world, causing economic crisis, chaos, and calamity. As a consequence, the international political order as conceived by the Republicans in the 1920s entered into a process of disintegration, signaled initially by Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931–1932. Herbert Hoover, in some ways a tragic figure, served only one term in the presidency as a result; nevertheless, historians have described his policies in the Western Hemisphere as “highly successful.” According to Martin Fausold, Hoover produced positive changes by advocating nonintervention; and according to Robert Freeman Smith, under Hoover “the government came closer to a truly nonintervention policy than at any other time in the 20th century.” During this period the United States disengaged militarily from Nicaragua and developed similar plans for Haiti. Moreover, when uprisings and revolts swept Latin America between 1929 and 1933, “the administration refused all requests for armed intervention and constantly admonished diplomats and businessmen to refrain from political meddling.” On one occasion, secretary of state Henry L. Stimson “bawled out” the head of the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica for allowing his subordinates to interfere in politics.3 Unwilling to wield a big stick like Theodore Roosevelt, neither Hoover nor Stimson intended to use the marines in foreign interventions. They wanted to establish no parallels with Japanese military actions in Asia. As Stimson observed, to land “a single soldier among those South Americans now . . . would undo all the labor of three years” and “would put me in absolutely wrong in China.”4 As peace proponents, Hoover and Stimson also tried—unsuccessfully, as it turned out—to settle border disputes in South America between Paraguay and Bolivia over the Gran Chaco and between Peru and Colombia over Leticia.5
The Great Depression, of course, had many bad effects and economic dependence on trade made Latin America particularly vulnerable. Although the larger countries had moved toward industrialization and diversification in the 1920s, heavy reliance on the export sectors remained characteristic. According to the economic historian Victor Bulmer-Thomas, “the composition of exports by the end of the decade was very similar to what it had been on the eve of the First World War.” Nearly all export earnings resulted from the sale of primary products, such as coffee, sugar, bananas, tin, and oil. Moreover, almost 70 percent of the foreign trade involved only four countries—the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany—which meant that Latin America was acutely susceptible to shifts in the world market.
For Latin Americans, economic difficulties began before the Wall Street crash in October 1929. Heavy demand for credit and high interest rates during the boom years in the 1920s had had the effect of “raising the cost of holding inventories” and “reducing demand for many of the primary products exported by Latin America.” The crash compounded such problems, further diminishing demand in the world market. The result was that exports fell between 1928 and 1932, in some instances by more than 50 percent. To be sure, import prices for foreign finished goods also fell but, in Latin America, neither as fast nor as far. Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, and Cuba ranked among the hardest hit. Venezuela, protected by oil, suffered somewhat less.6
Political changes soon followed. The destabilizing effects of the depression overturned incumbent regimes and installed new parties and personalities in power, sometimes by violent means. In Ecuador, Chile, and Cuba, such political transitions took place after periods of near anarchy; in Peru and El Salvador, they came about through sudden coups. Typically, the new governments moved toward nationalistic, centralized, and authoritarian alternatives. Strongmen such as Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and Jorge Ubico in Guatemala stood out. An exception, the Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez maintained his regime until his death in 1935. Similarly in Mexico, the ruling Partido Nacional Revolucionario, later called the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, retained its hold on power, featuring behind-the-scenes maneuvers by former president Plutarco Elías Calles.7
For Latin Americans, rejuvenation of the export sector encountered formidable obstacles. To safeguard domestic markets against foreign competition the Great Powers resorted to protection, that is, high tariffs and other such barriers. Under Hoover the Republican-controlled Congress enacted the Hawley-Smoot tariff of 1930, the highest in U.S. history. Similarly under the “imperial preference” system the British discriminated against outsiders such as Latin Americans, and under the Nazis the Germans introduced the aski mark—nonconvertible currency that provided a means of paying foreign sellers for goods and services but could apply only to the purchase of German goods.
Latin Americans had few alternatives. In better times, international borrowing on credit might have gotten them out of trouble but not in this instance; as a consequence of the depression surplus capital dried up in the United States and Europe. The unavailability of additional loans by 1931 forced a cruel choice upon Latin American governments. While export earnings went into decline, the interest payments on existing debts remained the same, placing ever larger demands on shrinking sources of national income. At first, Latin Americans tried to make payments on their debts, hoping to retain access to international money markets. But to reduce growing deficits as the squeeze continued, they reluctantly accepted default on international interest payments as a necessary resort and then stopped making them. When Roosevelt and the New Dealers took office early in 1933, stringent economic conditions existed everywhere.8
For Roosevelt and the Democrats the presidential victory in 1932 turned principally on domestic issues. In his comments on foreign relations, Roosevelt suggested his opposition to high tariffs and a personal preference for friendly relations with other countries. His inaugural address underscored a popular theme: “In the field of world policy,” he would “dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.”9 This bland formulation implied nothing specific, but in later years the term “good neighbor” acquired very special meanings for Latin Americans.
Cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and well-to-do, Roosevelt engaged in the practice of politics throughout his adult life. He served first as a New York state legislator and then as assistant secretary of the navy under Woodrow Wilson. In 1920, he ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic candidate for the vice presidency and in 1928 won election as governor of New York state. In 1921 he had become ill with infantile paralysis, or polio, a dread affliction that left him dependent upon heavy leg braces and a wheelchair.
In foreign affairs, Roosevelt’s views initially took shape during the Wilson presidency. During the First World War, he supported Caribbean interventions, worried about German intrusions, and favored order and stability within the U.S. sphere of influence. Later, he shifted his ground as a consequence of misgivings over the Nicaraguan intervention. His 1928 article “Our Foreign Policy” in the journal Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, contained recommendations reminiscent of Wilson’s Pan American treaty. Roosevelt too favored broadly conceived definitions of international police power and preferred cooperative approaches with Latin Americans. Speaking as president before the Pan American Union on April 12, 1933, he called for a multilateral understanding of the Monroe Doctrine, in this way asserting his preference for group action and the avoidance of unilateral enforcement.
In Latin American affairs, Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, and Sumner Welles, the assistant secretary of state, played important roles. Hull, a diplomatic amateur from Tennessee, had served in the Congress, where he possessed a strong political base. A champion of low tariffs and free trade, he had strong ideas about combating the depression with an expanding commerce. In contrast, Welles had aristocratic antecedents. A diplomatic professional and a Roosevelt family friend, he had joined the Foreign Service in 1915, consciously picking Latin America as his regional specialty. In 1928 he published a two-volume history of the Dominican Republic titled Naboth’s Vineyard, in which he advised that the United States identify “its interest both political and material, on a basis of absolute equality, with the interests of its sister republics of the continent.” Often rivals, Hull and Welles competed for Roosevelt’s favor. According to the historian Irwin Gellman, Roosevelt had a preference for Welles because of his “brilliance, penetrating analysis, and quick reactions” but also appreciated Hull because of his “circumspection” and his “patience” while seeking “a complete examination of the issues.” Hull also knew how to cultivate support in the Congress.10
When the new administration took over, an impending revolution in Cuba caused immediate concern. The first U.S. protectorate in the Caribbean, Cuba also ranked among the first Latin American countries to experience the effects of economic depression. Beginning in the mid-1920s, sugar prices went into eclipse, producing widespread distress among sugar workers, professionals, merchants, and white-collar employees. In response, president Gerardo Machado negotiated loans from international bankers and employed strong-arm techniques to keep order while he sought reelection in 1928. Calamity ensued nevertheless. Because of the Hawley-Smoot tariff, Cuban sugar exporters lost 25 percent of the U.S. market. Consequently, Cuban sugar production dropped by 60 percent, and Cuban exports declined by 80 percent. As businesses failed, wages fell, and unemployment soared, Cuban dissidents in growing numbers came to regard Machado as expendable.
U.S. citizens had invested over a billion dollars in Cuba. They wanted protection, but under Hoover, nonintervention prevailed. The administration justified inaction, supposedly, out of respect for Cuban sovereignty. But in this instance, nonintervention hardly differed from intervention. In the view of most Cubans, Louis A. Pérez suggests, U.S. support sustained Machado’s authoritarian regime. Ironically, “political repression and economic depression” in combination arrayed “vast sectors of the Cuban population against a government that seemed to be supported only by foreigners.”11
In the spring of 1933, Roosevelt sent Sumner Welles as a special emissary with instructions to halt the turmoil through “friendly mediation.” In the process, Welles came to view Machado as a liability and hoped for a replacement candidate among “responsible leaders” in the opposition parties. At first defiant, Machado resisted the pressure to leave office until other Cuban political and military leaders also withdrew their support. Unwilling to risk another U.S. military intervention, the Cuban army on August 12, 1933, forced Machado into exile. As Pérez explains, Welles’s role “set in motion a realignment . . . that released Machado’s backers to seek a new arrangement with the United States to guarantee their own survival in post-Machado Cuba.”
A provisional government then took office under Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a friend of Sumner Welles. Representing a tenuous compromise among contending groups, this administration lasted only three weeks. On September 3, 1933, army factions consisting of noncommissioned officers and enlisted men under sergeant Fulgencio Batista seized control of the headquarters at Camp Columbia in Havana. Calling for better pay and working conditions, the “Sergeants’ Revolt” rallied the antigovernment opposition. Together, soldiers and other dissidents proclaimed a Provisional Revolutionary Government headed by Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín, a physician and university professor. His government was the first in Cuba to take power since 1898 without official sanction from the United States.
Embracing the slogan “Cuba for Cubans,” Grau endorsed ambitious reforms: the eight-hour day, protection for rural workers, women’s suffrage, and the abrogation of the Platt amendment. Much alarmed, Sumner Welles warned of communist influences and advocated military intervention. U.S. naval contingents were already positioned in Cuban waters, but the Roosevelt administration refrained from sending in the marines. Instead, the leaders withheld diplomatic recognition, thereby sending signals to Batista, now a colonel and the army chief of staff. Encouraged by Welles, Batista, working behind the scenes, shifted military support to Carlos Mendieta at the end of January 1934 and created a new government more acceptable to the United States. A decision in favor of diplomatic recognition followed only five days later.
In this instance the Roosevelt administration avoided military intervention, in part because of public relations. Late in November 1933 a Pan American conference had assembled at Montevideo, Uruguay. As always, nonintervention became an issue. Headed by Secretary Hull, the U.S. delegation preferred a discussion of peace and trade, whereas the Latin Americans wanted to take up such matters as the cancellation of foreign debts and the Cuban question. When Argentina assumed the lead, U.S. officials reacted negatively to foreign minister Carlos Saavedra Lamas—perceived as haughty and condescending in his criticism of the United States—but other Latin Americans joined him in pressing for an endorsement of nonintervention. By insisting that “no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another,” they forced a tactical change upon U.S. leaders. On this occasion, Secretary Hull accepted the idea in principle; in his words, “no government need fear any intervention on the part of the United States under the Roosevelt administration.” At the same time, he employed a kind of diplomatic double-talk by attaching a reservation that could have rendered the commitment meaningless: He retained for the United States a right to intervene militarily if the defense of U.S. citizens and property required it in compliance with treaties or international law.12
The qualification notwithstanding, the Roosevelt administration adhered strictly to the pledge. The United States engaged in no more armed interventions and in fact eradicated some of the remnants of previous actions. An executive agreement in August 1933 provided for the withdrawal of U.S. Marines from Haiti but retained financial control until 1941; similar arrangements already existed in relations with the Dominican Republic. A new treaty with Cuba in 1934 eliminated the Platt amendment but preserved for the United States the naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Finally, an agreement with Panama in 1936 produced another modification by affirming joint responsibility for defending the canal.13
The United States accepted the principle of nonintervention unconditionally at the Buenos Aires conference in December 1936. Escalating the prestige, Roosevelt himself attended. Mexico introduced the nonintervention resolution, affirming that in the Western Hemisphere the various states regarded as “inadmissible the intervention of any one of them, directly or indirectly, and for whatever reason, in the internal or external affairs of any other.”14 To be sure, the phrase “any one of them” suggested a loophole, leaving open the possibility of collective measures, but the provision conformed with Roosevelt’s stated preferences by disallowing unilateral acts.
The principle of nonintervention undergirded the Good Neighbor policy. By embracing it, the Roosevelt administration sanctioned equality among states in the Western Hemisphere and reduced the reasons for Latin American mistrust of the United States. At the same time, nonintervention implied, among other things, readiness to let Latin Americans take charge of their own political destinies. When U.S. military forces subsequently withdrew from the former protectorates, they left behind police contingents, or constabularies, created by U.S. occupation authorities supposedly for purposes of upholding constitutional order. In Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, such organizations later served the dictators Anastasio Somoza and Rafael Trujillo as institutional foundations for authoritarian rule. Whether these corrupt, repressive regimes came into existence because of inadvertence or conscious design on the part of the United States is an important question. In Somoza’s case, the historian Paul Coe Clark, Jr. absolves the United States of primary responsibility. In his view, Somoza stayed in power not so much because of U.S. support as because of his own ruthless political skills. According to this analysis, acceptance of nonintervention entailed an unintended consequence: The Roosevelt administration would have to put up with Somoza.15
U.S. economic diplomacy in Latin America sought commercial expansion through the negotiation of reciprocal trade agreements. To obtain larger market shares, the Roosevelt administration paid the political price for Latin American cooperation by abandoning obsolete forms of military intervention. Viewed in economic terms, the Good Neighbor policy functioned as part of the New Deal’s larger attack on the Great Depression.
In the United States the debate over causes, cures, and consequences pervaded political discourse. Divergent views proposed various alternatives.16 For economic conservatives and Marxists the explanation for the depression resided in the cyclical boom-and-bust patterns inherent in capitalist economies. Economic conservatives saw no ready solutions; the crisis must run its course and bottom out before prosperity could return. Marxists and other radicals thought some kind of anticapitalist revolution could clear the way. According to Herbert Hoover, the problem originated in Europe and then spread to the rest of the world. For the New Dealers, in contrast, the depression was homegrown, a disastrous manifestation of the traditional imbalance between overproduction and underconsumption, rendered all the worse in this instance by Republican policies in the 1920s. According to this view, high tariffs, low taxes, and reduced government spending were to blame. The ensuing maldistribution of income meant that financiers, manufacturers, and industrialists, the main beneficiaries of Republican policies, accumulated too much wealth and too much capability to expand production too rapidly. Lesser folk with smaller incomes—farmers, wage earners, salaried employees—who shared unequally in the wealth were unable to keep up the pace as consumers. Consequently, glutted markets in crucial sectors, notably the construction and automobile industries, generated catastrophic deflation. When producers cut back, slashed wages, and fired workers, they worsened conditions by diminishing purchasing power. Under President Hoover, unemployment reached unimaginable levels during the winter of 1932–1933. An estimated twelve to fourteen million people—about a quarter of the workforce—had no jobs.
Under Roosevelt the New Deal attacked the depression in various ways through trial and error, employing a scattergun approach. The programs that took shape typically relied heavily on centralized planning, government paternalism, and a host of new federal agencies. One such experiment, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), called for cooperation among producers in basic industries to limit output and cut down on overproduction. The effort failed. Well-intended but clumsy, the NRA resulted in a bureaucratic monstrosity, judged unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935. Another initiative, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), withstood the test of the Supreme Court and authorized farm subsidies in return for crop reductions—in effect, paying farmers to grow less. Last, a welfare system, a vital New Deal component, made relief payments to the poor and the unemployed. Denounced by Republicans as a “dole,” the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Public Works Administration (PWA), and other such programs put federal monies into the pockets of destitute people, turning them into low-level consumers.17
The New Deal also sought customers in foreign markets but sometimes had difficulty reconciling interest groups with competing aims and priorities. Economic nationalists, many of them Republicans, preferred to boost sales in domestic markets through the use of protective tariffs. In contrast, economic internationalists, often Democrats, wanted to promote foreign trade through tariff reductions. Financial and commercial groups also disagreed. The former, including lenders and bondholders, regarded timely payments on international debts as important. The latter, including foreign trade expansionists, preferred to defer debt collection until world economic recovery made payment possible. Another difficulty was bureaucratic competition within the U.S. government, producing discord and confusion between the State and Treasury Departments.
As secretary of state, Cordell Hull often bore the brunt.18 During the fall of 1933 the Roosevelt administration initiated a series of steps. On November 11, the president convened an Executive Committee on Commercial Policy. Consisting of officials from the State and Treasury Departments, the Tariff Commission, and other New Deal agencies, this body advised that Congress allow the downward modification of tariff duties under presidential authority. Subsequently, the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of March 2, 1934, addressed the tariff question piecemeal by allowing for the negotiation of tariff reductions with individual countries by as much as 50 percent. Another innovation, the Export-Import Bank, created in the spring of 1934, provided the means for extending government credit to American businesses in foreign counties where commercial banks had closed down or curtailed services. Later, this agency also extended credit to foreign countries.19
To U.S. leaders an expanding trade in Latin America became significant for various reasons. For assistant secretary of state Francis B. Sayre, Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law and a former law professor from Yale University, the implications went beyond mere commerce. He feared the collapse of political and social systems, making Latin Americans dangerously susceptible to “anti-foreign and nationalistic programs.” For U.S. critics the Latin American default on foreign debts appeared as confirmation. In response, financiers asked for help from Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, both of whom responded cautiously. As Roosevelt explained, the issue was a private matter “between those republics and . . . the bondholders.” Consequently, in December 1933 the latter formed a lobby, the Foreign Bondholders Protective Council, seeking to block new loans and other concessions to those countries already in default.
Overall, the Roosevelt administration attached more importance to trade expansion than to debt collection. Nevertheless, bureaucratic competition over priorities and preferences resulted in confusion and inconsistency, impairing the workability of economic diplomacy. In one episode, Treasury officials promised a loan to Brazil for establishing a central bank and a currency stabilization fund and then encountered obstruction from the State Department, pending an agreement for paying interest on U.S. loans. Such divisiveness also revealed personal antagonism between the two secretaries, Henry J. Morgenthau, Jr. of the Treasury Department and Cordell Hull of State. According to Gellman, the “bickering” interfered with otherwise laudable efforts to pursue “a united approach.”
In Latin America, Sumner Welles took charge of reciprocity programs under Cordell Hull’s supervision. Described by Gellman as “less dogmatic than his chief” on trade matters, Welles wanted to construct “a firm hemispheric alliance” and looked upon improved economic relations as an appropriate means toward that end. Gellman argues that reciprocal trade agreements with Latin American nations failed to advance commercial expansion very much but in his view “unquestionably moved the signatories toward greater understanding in other endeavors.” For example, the effects heightened levels of cooperation during the Second World War.20
The first reciprocal trade agreement, signed with Cuba in August 1934, reduced tariff rates and established quotas for Cuban sugar and tobacco. In effect, it provided a guarantee of access to the U.S. market. Though advantageous for Cuba in the short term, the long-term consequences have become the object of controversy. For Cuban nationalists, reciprocity inhibited the economic diversification of their country by perpetuating external economic dependence upon the United States. As Gellman states, “the agreement . . . bound the island’s commercial activity closer than ever before to American-made decisions over which Cubans had no control.” Other authorities agree, suggesting that the incorporation of Cuba within the protective system of the United States in effect replaced the Platt amendment as a means of wielding influence. Henceforth, U.S. officials could administer rewards and punishments by raising or lowering the import quota, with direct effects upon Cuban well-being.21
Brazil, a country more difficult to control, initially engaged in economic maneuvers, playing off one foreign interest against another. In 1930, president Getúlio Vargas, a paternalistic authoritarian, took charge, supported by the military, and engaged both Germany and the United States in commercial relationships. A trade agreement with Germany in 1934 permitted tariff reductions and barter arrangements. A reciprocal trade agreement with the United States in 1935 also reduced tariffs. State Department officials subsequently objected to Brazilian practices, regarding them as double-dealing. They especially disliked barter arrangements with the Germans, claiming that reciprocity with the United States disallowed them, and suggested a penalty, such as increased duties on Brazilian coffee. But Hull resisted because punishing Brazil might have adverse political consequences: Perhaps the country would side more closely with Germany, Italy, and Japan. Meanwhile, Vargas accepted calculated risks. An opportunist, he sought trade with both Germany and the United States, reasoning correctly that the Roosevelt administration would not jeopardize political relations by resorting to commercial retaliation. The published works of the historians Frank D. McCann and Stanley E. Hilton provide full accounts.22
As McCann warns, historians should not interpret this “prewar maneuvering” too exclusively in ideological terms. For him, the competition was not so much a matter of “totalitarianism versus democracy” as “a struggle for raw materials and markets” at a time of global depression. Brazilians acted on the basis of economic imperatives. Following the establishment of the Estado Nôvo, or New State—a centralized, personalistic, and authoritarian entity created with the support of the Brazilian army in 1937—Vargas for a time became dependent on Germany for various purchases, including weapons. The United States, meanwhile, courted Brazil with offers of assistance in national defense, economic development, and foreign debt. Finally, after the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940, the United States outbid the Germans by making money available for Brazil’s construction of the Volta Redonda steel mill. As McCann notes, this most significant agreement “signaled the beginning of Brazil’s industrial coming of age” and “marked the end of the period in which Brazil could gain by playing Germany and the United States against each other.” Thereafter, Brazil had “no choice but to enter completely the economic sphere of the United States.”23
Between 1933 and 1945 the United States signed fifteen Latin American reciprocity agreements, eleven of them before 1940, which served the important purpose of drawing Latin Americans toward U.S. policies at a critical time. Sumner Welles regarded them as “the greatest positive achievement of the first Roosevelt Administration in the realm of international cooperation.” In Welles’s view, they contributed “greatly . . . in establishing a good neighbor policy in the Western Hemisphere.”24 For many Latin American nationalists, however, the reciprocity agreements had the negative consequence of functioning as impediments to economic diversification, providing yet another means of perpetuating economic dependence on the United States.
No Latin American country escaped the effects of the Great Depression. To stimulate recovery the governments employed various devices, including the promotion of foreign exports; the adoption of import-substitution strategies to diversify production in domestic markets; and the use of public works, road building and the like, to bolster demand at home. Such responses encouraged recuperation in eight countries. By 1934, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela were experiencing economic upswings. Others lagged behind. For most of Latin America, the export sector was critical. As Bulmer-Thomas explains, Latin Americans benefited from a world trade revival after 1932, in part because of U.S. reciprocity. As total foreign sales in U.S. markets grew by 137 percent between 1932 and 1937, Latin Americans obtained a share of the increase. Indeed, their “surprisingly robust” performance followed from traditional commitments to the export sector, viewed in most countries as “the engine of growth in the export-led model.”
Germany also presented opportunities for Latin Americans. Based on barter arrangements and the aski mark, usable only in the purchase of German goods, German trade practices attracted a growing share from Latin America. In 1938, the last year unaffected by the Second World War, Germany absorbed 10.3 percent of Latin America’s exports and sold 17.1 percent of the imports. These figures compared favorably with 7.7 percent and 10.9 percent respectively in 1930. To an extent, Latin American sales in Germany expanded because of higher prices, calculated as inducements for accepting the aski mark. Beneficiaries included Brazil, Colombia, and Costa Rica. Each country found new outlets for coffee sales in Germany but lost them after the outbreak of the war in 1939.25
Meanwhile, economic nationalism in Latin America posed other problems for U.S. leaders. First sanctioned in 1917 by article 27 of the Mexican constitution, the principles of expropriation and nationalization threatened traditional conceptions of private property, especially mineral resources. The danger became acute late in the 1930s when the governments of Bolivia and Mexico actually carried out such procedures. For Latin American reformers and radicals, such forms of economic nationalism implied greater hope for modernization and economic growth than the traditional export-led models. Economic nationalism was also a means of combatting foreign domination through assertions of state sovereignty. In contrast, such doctrines impressed U.S. leaders as examples of predatory lawlessness.
In The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy, first published in 1961, the historian Bryce Wood develops a discerning analysis. He sees the leaders in the Roosevelt administration as repeatedly displaying their intention to implement a policy of nonintervention. As they understood the term, it meant a refusal “to employ armed force . . . to secure any policy objectives” in Latin America. They also endorsed a parallel effort to uphold a policy of noninterference, signifying their reluctance “to influence in any way the course of domestic political affairs in Latin American countries.” Nevertheless, contrary tendencies sometimes got in the way. Seeking some kind of balance, most officials perceived no need for the United States to give up “all methods of influencing all aspects of the foreign relations of its neighbors,” especially in defense of U.S. lives and property.
To obtain the requisite leverage, they accepted various techniques as part of the Good Neighbor policy. These included traditional diplomatic instruments—such as “financial inducements, protests, discriminatory practices of an economic or ceremonial character”—and others “to create positive collaboration among the American states.” Wood regards “the idea of reciprocity” as central. In this context, the term refers to something broader than New Deal trade policy, suggesting “a neighborly response to neighborliness.” Described as “an essential assumption of the new spirit,” reciprocity presumed mutual respect for rights and obligations among states and called for new forms of common understanding. Problems, of course, resided in definitions. What U.S. leaders regarded as a neighborly consideration, that is, a high level of equitable treatment for U.S. citizens and property, sometimes impressed Latin Americans as preferential treatment for foreign interests in their own countries. Diplomatic difficulties arose in dealings with Bolivians and Mexicans who refused to grant the United States unilateral authority to define the term “Good Neighbor”; in their view the United States had to accept “the elimination of what they regarded as an equally offensive interference in their internal affairs” in order to qualify. This position meant abandonment of “that measure of support from Washington” that enabled “certain types of North American business enterprise to maintain the power and status they had secured before 1933.”26
The Bolivian dispute arose over the holdings of a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. For more than a decade the government and the company had squabbled over taxes and royalties. The problem worsened in the mid–1930s during the Chaco War against Paraguay. To obtain revenues the Bolivians asked for a loan that would be, in effect, an advance payment on future taxes. In refusing this request the company also announced plans to shut down the operation and to leave the country. The Bolivian government responded on March 13, 1937, by annulling Standard Oil’s contract and confiscating its holdings. The official explanation alleged various illegalities, including nonpayment of taxes, as justification for denying compensation to the company.
Unprecedented in Latin American relations, this convoluted, drawn-out case took on special importance as a test of the Good Neighbor policy. In response to appeals for help from company officials the State Department first advised reliance on Bolivian legal remedies. In the U.S. view this approach failed when Bolivian judges showed hesitation to rule against the preferences of their own government. The United States then applied discreet pressure by withholding loans and achieved some measure of success. Bolivians wanted simultaneously to deny compensation to Standard Oil and to qualify for U.S. aid and credits.
A settlement finally took place in July 1941 after the failure of an allegedly pro-Nazi plot to overthrow president Enrique Peñaranda del Castillo. To stop German encroachments the United States offered economic and military assistance, signaling a shift in priorities: The European war, regional security, and hemispheric solidarity took precedence over the defense of property rights. A negotiated agreement subsequently provided that Bolivia pay $1.5 million to Standard Oil as compensation and also receive $25 million in U.S. aid. All parties could thus claim some satisfaction. Moreover, the Good Neighbor policy had passed the test. The Roosevelt administration had complied with the requirements of nonintervention, resisted the German threat, and blunted the effects of economic nationalism in Bolivia.27
Mexico introduced higher stakes on March 18, 1938, when president Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated the holdings of Dutch, British, and U.S. petroleum companies valued at some $500 million. The U.S. interest amounted to $200 million in land and $60 million in drilling equipment. By taking on foreign-owned oil corporations, Cárdenas accepted exceedingly high risks, the consequences of which he could not accurately predict. As Bryce Wood notes, oil company officials, characterized as “influential and uncompromising,” might secure “effective support” from their governments.28 In politically charged Mexico, moreover, a large-scale failure could arouse strong opposition against Cárdenas, possibly even a revolt.
In 1938, Cárdenas occupied a precarious position. Elected to the Mexican presidency in 1934, he was an authentic revolutionary hero and a former state governor of Michoacán. He was also the protégé of the former president, el jefe máximo Plutarco Elías Calles. As president, Cárdenas gradually liberated himself from Calles’s tutelage, eventually forcing the former president into exile. Once in control of his own regime, Cárdenas presented himself as a committed heir of the revolution of 1910. Among his goals, he championed the redistribution of land to landless campesinos, the country people, by forming agricultural cooperatives known as ejidos; he sought better wages and working conditions for the laboring classes by favoring unions, especially the Confederation of Mexican Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores Méxicanos) under Vicente Lombardo Toledano; and he promoted literacy through advances in secular education. But then a resumption of economic crisis in 1937 threatened Mexico with bankruptcy and collapse.
The emergency had many bad effects. Cárdenas resorted to deficit spending to rescue his government but possessed limited resources for reform. Discontent mounted among country people, workers, and the business classes. Moreover, the Spanish civil war beginning in 1936 conjured “a terrifying preview of Mexico’s future.” What if Mexico should follow Spain’s example and disintegrate into mayhem and violence? For enthusiasts among Mexican conservatives and reactionaries, Spanish general Francisco Franco, a leader of the revolt, personified Hispanic traditions of authority and hierarchy. As William H. Beezley explains, Cárdenas embraced programs of economic nationalism “to unite a people deeply splintered by the economic disruption of the Great Depression” and by “the inability of the government to continue the social programs of the revolution.”29
A labor-management issue ignited the oil controversy. In May 1937, seventeen thousand petroleum workers went on strike, demanding improvements in wages, working conditions, housing, medical care, and education. When an arbitration decision went against the oil companies, the leaders took the case to the courts, where they experienced another setback: The Mexican Supreme Court ruled in favor of the workers, depriving the companies of further legal remedy. Unreconciled, company officials then escalated the issue by rejecting the outcome and challenging the sovereignty of the Mexican government.
Unable to tolerate such defiance, Cárdenas announced expropriation proceedings against the companies in a national radio address on March 18, 1938. As justification, he invoked not article 27 of the constitution, the restriction on property, but article 123, the labor provision. In his view, the rights of working people and the jurisdictional integrity of the Mexican Supreme Court allowed room for no compromise: he had to defend them at all costs. Patriotic Mexicans rallied in his support. They applauded Cárdenas for his resolve, in effect, declaring economic independence from foreign control. The oil producers, in contrast, issued protests. They depicted the expropriation as a crime against private property, a despicable act probably inspired by Bolsheviks. To combat it, they gave a strong impression of inviting military intervention.30
Put to the test in Mexico, the Good Neighbor policy compelled measured responses. As Bryce Wood describes it, U.S. policy unfolded in four phases. First, within a few weeks the United States accepted the expropriation as legal but expected Mexican compensation to the companies for their losses. Second, for the next two years, until April 1940, negotiations went nowhere, culminating in a Mexican refusal of arbitration. Third, discussions until November 1941 revolved around Mexican counterproposals for a joint commission. Fourth, during the spring of 1942 the joint commissioners at last concluded an agreement, leaving the oil companies no choice except acquiescence.
Wood carefully establishes the key propositions. From the outset a dangerous possibility existed. What if a “peremptory” response by the United States ruled out negotiations by forcing Cárdenas into breaking diplomatic relations? U.S. ambassador Josephus Daniels played an indispensable role in heading off any such outcome through the exercise of “a remarkable combination of insubordination and suppression of information.” A North Carolina reformer who had served as secretary of the navy under Wilson, Daniels had ordered the occupation of Veracruz in 1914 with Franklin Roosevelt as his assistant secretary. Now an advocate of Good Neighborliness, he toned down State Department objections during the early stages and assured Washington of Cárdenas’s “sincere intention” to offer compensation. His role established some measure of mutual understanding. Indeed, Daniels in “his unique and unorthodox fashion . . . had imposed on the Department of State his own judgment of the way the United States should deal with Mexico as a Good Neighbor.”
Wood also contends that the State Department never seriously considered the use of armed force. Though oil company press releases and propaganda introduced such possibilities, no doubt causing worry in the Cárdenas government, ambassador Francisco Castillo Nájera of Mexico affirmed his faith in June 1938 in the credibility of the nonintervention commitment. Later, the Roosevelt administration refrained from interjecting the petroleum issue into the Mexican presidential election of 1940. After the victory of the official candidate, general Manuel Ávila Camacho, Roosevelt indicated good faith by sending vice president Henry A. Wallace to the inauguration ceremonies in November 1940.
At the same time, the United States employed economic pressure to encourage prompt settlement. Reduced purchases of Mexican silver inflicted some distress; the oil companies impeded Mexican exports into world markets by denying tankers, pipes, and essential machinery and by discouraging other countries from purchasing Mexican petroleum. Never distinguished by much success, these undertakings also entailed risks: What if Mexico should embrace Germany, Italy, and Japan in bids for overseas markets? The U.S. government also withheld loans from August 1937 until November 1941. But none of these policies ever took the “drastic” form, for example, of denying the legality of the expropriation. The U.S. aim was settlement between the oil companies and Mexico through some kind of compensation.
One possible means of resolution, arbitration proceedings, possessed the sanction of international law. The oil companies and also the governments of Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States initially favored this approach. But Mexican leaders regarded arbitration as a function of Great-Power domination, a device more likely to uphold foreign interests than Mexican sovereignty. They preferred to establish a joint commission in which each government would appoint one member and from which no appeal could take place. Once the Roosevelt administration accepted this plan as the best means available to the United States, a settlement followed in the spring of 1942.
U.S. concerns for regional defense and hemispheric solidarity thus assumed priority over property rights, much as in the earlier Bolivian case. Put succinctly, the onset of the Second World War encouraged U.S. officials to perceive “the national interest” as “different from” and “superior to” oil company interests. For example, by the spring of 1941 the War Department urgently wanted access to Mexican air bases as links to Panama. In Wood’s words, such considerations became “crucial.” Consequently, an agreement on November 19, 1941, approved the use of a joint commission. It also allowed for broad discussion of other issues, including U.S. agrarian property claims against Mexico, the purchase of Mexican silver, the negotiation of a reciprocal trade agreement, and the extension of loans through the Export-Import Bank. The terms fixed the compensation for U.S. oil companies at $24 million. Lacking other recourse, the oil companies grudgingly accepted this outcome. At least they got something out of the deal.31
The episode had great importance. In the 1930s, Mexico had become a preferred model for Latin American nationalists, and the Cárdenas regime possessed high prestige. As a result, some U.S. leaders worried about the dangers of “socialism,” “extreme radicalism,” and “communism” in other countries. They also feared Axis influence. In this context, as noted by the historian David Green, oil company “intransigence” had the ironic effect of making Germany, Italy, and Japan potential outlets for Mexican oil exports. To avoid “serious consequences,” the United States needed “some kind of rapprochement with Latin American nationalists.”
Roosevelt acknowledged as much on January 12, 1940, in a statement before newspaper reporters. In uncharacteristically disarranged syntax, he said, “There is a new approach that I am talking about to these South American things . . . Give them a share. They think they are just as good as we are, and many of them are.” Whatever the degree of condescension, the president’s observation signaled a certain readiness to bestow upon Latin Americans “a share of decision-making authority in inter-American economic concerns” and “a share of the wealth being developed from Latin America’s vast resources by private and public capital.” Otherwise, as Green observes, private firms might risk the loss of everything, since Latin American strategies for economic development required increasingly national control of economic resources.32
A similar issue appeared strikingly in relations with Venezuela. In 1935 the death of long-time dictator Juan Vicente Gómez introduced a period of change. Under Gómez, the head of state since 1908, companies such as Standard Oil of New Jersey, Royal Dutch Shell, and Gulf had obtained easy access to Venezuelan resources while enjoying low taxes and high profits.33 Subsequently, when a new regime headed by Eleazar López Contreras introduced reforms, including the eight-hour day and collective bargaining, oil company officials worried about the implications. What if Venezuela should follow the Mexican example? By this time the country ranked as the leading petroleum exporter in the world, and U.S. investments in Venezuelan oil in 1940 amounted to $375 million.
For reasons of their own, Venezuelans followed a different model. Less radical in approach, the Venezuelan constitution of 1936 contained no equivalent of article 27 in the Mexican constitution of 1917. Conducting a kind of cost-benefit analysis, Venezuelan leaders recognized their dependence on petroleum exports and chose to avoid the crippling effects of cutting too heavily into the profits. In Venezuela, then, petroleum resources remained under private control but subject to higher taxes and royalty payments. During the Second World War a policy of collaboration with Latin American governments willing to share their resources became for the United States its best means of assuring access.34
The Second World War occasioned unprecedented diplomatic cooperation among the nations of the Western Hemisphere. Seeking to coordinate regional responses, the United States first tried to uphold neutrality while providing safeguards against other consequences. The participants at a series of inter-American conferences in Lima, Panama, Havana, and Rio de Janeiro proclaimed “continental solidarity,” the existence of a war-free zone, and the applicability of the “no transfer” clause. After Pearl Harbor, all the Latin American nations except Argentina and Chile supported the United States, either by declaring war on the Axis nations or by severing diplomatic relations with them. Among other things, U.S. access to Latin American resources was at stake. In the words of the historian R. A. Humphreys, “In 1939 Latin America was the richest raw material producing area in the world free from the control of any Great Power.”35 At a time of global conflict, the prize was well worth having.
Competition over markets and resources had figured prominently in the destabilization of world politics in the 1930s. Economic imperatives drove Japanese expansion in Asia, contributing to the Manchuria crisis in 1931–1932 and to “the China incident”—really a full-scale invasion—in 1937. Similarly, German ambitions in Europe, the incorporation of German-speaking peoples into the Third Reich, and the eastward move into the Slavic domain precipitated confrontations in the middle and late 1930s. These encounters culminated in the onset of the war over Poland in September 1939. U.S. leaders, meanwhile, espoused neutral policies but increasingly embraced pro-British positions.
Beginning in 1935 the U.S. Congress passed a series of three Neutrality Acts. Based on the experience of 1914–1917, these measures disallowed certain practices. They denied loans and arms sales to warring nations and imposed a cash-and-carry provision to reduce the risk of submarine attacks on U.S. merchants ships: Belligerents had to pay “cash” for U.S. goods and “carry” them away in their own vessels. After the fact, these acts ruled out U.S. participation in the First World War. They also hamstrung President Roosevelt by permitting no aid for the victims and no penalties for the aggressors.
U.S. responses to the Axis threat compelled careful maneuvers. Roosevelt presided over a divided country and could not move too far or too fast. One identifiable group, the “internationalists,” functioned as Woodrow Wilson’s heirs, championing a conception of world organization and collective security. They favored strong measures by the Western democracies in defense of liberal-capitalist institutions but encountered a classic dilemma: How could they calculate the effects of such measures? Would tough policies deter aggression or precipitate a conflict? The internationalists also faced strong opposition from the so-called isolationists, who resisted commitments in defense of other countries and insisted upon “America First.” Some feared the consequences of participating in another European war; for them the U.S. entry into the First World War had accomplished no good purpose and was a mistake that did not bear repeating. The disinclination of others to stand against the Axis powers followed from pro-fascist and anti-Semitic proclivities.
These swirling tides within the two parties and the Congress created immense difficulties for Roosevelt. Increasingly, he saw Axis aggression in Europe and Asia as security threats. He defined the issue less as a danger of invasion than as a menace to fundamental interests and ideals or, put another way, to sets of assumptions and commitments upon which larger purposes depended. In modern historiography, some scholars have used the term “Open Door” as a characterization. Understood symbolically, this phrase conveys an impression of the sort of world preferred by U.S. policy makers in the twentieth century and implies fundamental goals and aims, involving some form of obligation—at least rhetorical—in support of liberal capitalism. The goals included free trade, private ownership of property, national self-determination, and representative democracy. U.S. leaders favored such conventions and usages as affirmations of core values, supposedly appropriate for adoption by other peoples and also the means of serving national objectives, which included high levels of prosperity, safety, and ideological integrity. According to this view, the United States could function best in an open world organized much like itself. Conversely, these objectives called forth resistance to the division of the world into spheres of influence, the creation of exclusive trading blocks, and the depredations of militaristic dictatorships.36
Franklin Roosevelt’s twists and turns, moving the United States toward a policy of aiding Great Britain by measures short of war, have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Many historians have noted that for him the shortest distance between two points was seldom a straight line. According to Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt often “moved two steps forward and one back before he took the giant step ahead.” Keeping his own counsel, the president employed devious, secretive methods sometimes verging on outright deception. According to vice president Henry A. Wallace, he performed as a juggler who “could keep all [the] balls in the air without losing his own.” An important book by Warren F. Kimball employs the same metaphor in its title.37 Following the outbreak of war over Poland in September 1939, Roosevelt’s policies tilted by increments toward the Allies. In response, the Congress in November 1939 changed the Neutrality Acts so that France and Great Britain could purchase arms and supplies in the United States on a cash-and-carry basis. The French defeat in June 1940 and subsequently the Battle of Britain created new concerns, leading to a destroyers-for-bases deal in September 1940. Devised as an executive agreement between Roosevelt and prime minister Winston Churchill, it allowed a swap of fifty U.S. destroyers in return for U.S. leases on British bases in the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt defended this profoundly unneutral act as the means of keeping the United States out of the war and Britain in it. Later, he upheld the Lend-Lease proposal on similar grounds. This measure set off a fierce fight in Congress. Once accepted in March 1941, it permitted the United States to lend or lease instruments and commodities of war to Britain and “any country [such as the Soviet Union] whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.”38 It also exposed U.S. merchant ships to German submarine attacks. During the fall of 1941 an undeclared naval war got under way against the Germans in the North Atlantic.
Between 1938 and 1941, apprehensive leaders in the New World tried to insulate their region against the worst effects. After the failure of the British and French experiment with appeasing Germany at Munich in September 1938, assistant secretary of state Sumner Welles called for vigilance against aggression “from whatever source” and urged the United States “to join with our fellow democracies of the New World in preserving the Western Hemisphere safe from any threat of attack.” Considerations of “hemispheric solidarity” figured prominently at the Eighth International Conference of American States at Lima in December 1938, where, happily for U.S. policy makers, the northern power no longer looked quite so much like Latin America’s natural enemy. Cordell Hull again led the U.S. delegation and stopped along the way in Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador, focusing attention on unity and friendship. In Lima, he encountered dissent from Argentine foreign minister José María Cantilo, who cautioned against overreaction. Cantilo recalled Argentina’s traditional European ties, especially with Italy and Germany, and opposed a regional alliance against either one. In the end, compromises muted Argentine objections and allowed for the Declaration of Lima on Christmas Eve. This statement affirmed continental solidarity against foreign intervention in the Western Hemisphere but refrained from designating any nation as a specific threat.
It also allowed for conferences of foreign ministers to coordinate future policy. After the outbreak of war in Europe on September 1, 1939, the First Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the American Republics assembled in Panama on September 23. This time Sumner Welles headed the U.S. delegation. In a speech on September 25, he advocated Pan American uniformity in establishing neutral policies. In a sequence of sessions lasting eight days the participants formed committees, discussed common interests, and drafted the Declaration of Panama. This measure—unenforceable, as it turned out—erected a shield against acts of war by establishing a three-hundred-mile security zone around North and South America and instructing the belligerents to keep out. The question was whether the warring countries would abide by the prohibition.
Naval contingents displayed disinclination to do so. In December 1939 the German pocket battleship Graf Spee entered the South Atlantic and engaged three British cruisers in battle off the Uruguayan coast. Forced by heavy damage to seek refuge in port at Montevideo, the German captain, Hans Langsdorff, asked for two weeks for repairs; the British stipulated one day, and the Uruguayans settled on seventy-two hours. Faced with an impossibility, Langsdorff scuttled his vessel, arranged for his crew’s internment in Argentina, and committed suicide.
How to safeguard the neutrality zone became a source of contention. Diplomatic representations to the Germans and the British had scant effect. Indeed, the United States accepted British “hot pursuit” when German commerce raiders sought safe haven in the zone. Other U.S. practices further bent neutrality in Britain’s favor: They allowed the capture of German merchant ships within the zone by the Royal Navy and, in the spring of 1941, aided British operations by providing radio information on German locations. Roosevelt nevertheless kept up a public masquerade, depicting U.S. actions as purely defensive. Ironically, the security zone, initially a function of neutrality and hemispheric solidarity, turned into a cover for aiding the Allies by methods short of war.
Another issue became acute. What if the Germans acquired bases in the Western Hemisphere from conquered countries? Following the French collapse in June 1940 the United States could not rule out such possibilities. To guard against them the State Department formulated a resolution, later endorsed by Congress, based on the “no-transfer” principle. Traditionally associated with the Monroe Doctrine, this tenet withheld U.S. recognition of “any transfer” of “any geographic region of the Western Hemisphere from one non-American power to another non-American power.” Though mocked by German officials as delusionary and pretentious, the no-transfer resolution won support from Western Hemisphere diplomats at a conference in Havana on July 26, 1940. In this way, they ruled out the possibility of Germans occupying Dutch, Danish, and French possessions in the New World.39
U.S. leaders also worried about Nazi subversion. By 1940 a million German colonists were living in Latin America, most of them in southern South America. Reputedly, the Germans resisted assimilation and affirmed their national identities through schools, newspapers, radio broadcasts, and expatriate organizations. The question of whether they functioned as political affiliates of the Third Reich and promoted Latin American fascism became a source of much discussion. German economic penetration also produced apprehension; for example, the rivalry over Latin American routes between Lufthansa and Pan American Airlines had military implications for air power. Consequently, influential writers such as the journalists Carleton Beals and John Gunther and the historian Samuel Flagg Bemis drew attention to such matters, calling for appropriate safeguards. President Roosevelt, meanwhile, used allegations of aggressive design as justification for British aid. According to his Pan American Day address on May 29, 1941, “Adolf Hitler never considered the domination of Europe as an end in itself”; therefore, “unless the advance of Hitlerism is forcibly checked now, the Western Hemisphere will be within range of the Nazi weapons of destruction.” One such disaster scenario imagined German moves from Africa to Brazil to the Caribbean, imperiling the Panama Canal. In another speech on October 27, 1941, Roosevelt claimed to possess a map showing secret Nazi plans for Latin American conquests. When pressed by reporters to display it, he refused, invoking confidentiality to protect his sources. Such statements, unsubstantiated by evidence, underscored his growing pro-British convictions.40
Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the Second World War. Best understood as a desperate act, the attack followed a period of fruitless negotiation in the course of which neither country showed much interest in accommodation. Japanese leaders insisted upon a free hand in what they called a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, described as an equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine. Unconvinced, Secretary Hull defended the sanctity of the Open Door. To the Japanese, this meant either accepting a status of dependency upon the United States or affirming national prerogatives as a Great Power. Taking a big risk, Japan inaugurated hostilities against the United States with a surprise attack. In a war message to Congress the next day, Roosevelt referred to December 7, 1941, in a famous phrase as “a date which will live in infamy.” Following the U.S. declaration of war, Germany and Italy honored the Tripartite Pact with Japan four days later by declaring war on the United States. The undeclared conflict in the North Atlantic had turned into a full-scale shooting war on two fronts.41
For other Western Hemisphere nations the U.S. declaration of war entailed pressing urgencies. In December 1941, nine Central American and Caribbean republics declared war on Japan, later on Germany and Italy; Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico severed relations. In response, Adolf Berle, an assistant secretary of state, set forth an assessment later endorsed by many historians: “The heartening thing . . . is the swift and virtually unanimous support from all the republics of this hemisphere. If ever a policy paid dividends, the Good Neighbor policy has. So far, they are sticking with us with scarcely a break.”
Following the procedures established at Havana, the Western Hemisphere nations again assembled for consultations, this time at Rio de Janeiro on January 15, 1942. Given the disaster at Pearl Harbor the delegates had to take into account an act of aggression actually committed against an American state. In preparation, the U.S. State Department sought compliance with Secretary Hull’s preferences. The agenda included a resolution requiring all American republics to sever relations with the Axis powers but not necessarily to declare war. The distinction was based on an understanding of limited capability. The United States could not defend the entire Western Hemisphere.
On this occasion, Hull, worn out from the Japanese negotiations, had allowed Sumner Welles to take over as head of the U.S. delegation. Welles understood Hull’s objective but anticipated resistance. Chile reportedly feared Japanese hit-and-run attacks along the coast, and Argentina favored neutrality. Welles hoped for support from Brazil but could not accomplish Hull’s goal. Neither Chile nor Argentina would sever relations. On his own authority, Welles accepted a compromise, recommending but not requiring a break in relations with the Axis. In a fury, Hull upbraided Welles for sabotaging State Department policy, but Welles had Roosevelt’s support; the recommendation stood. Soon afterward, Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, and Ecuador broke relations, making the total eighteen. As a consequence, most historians bestow high marks on the Roosevelt administration for achieving multilateral cooperation with Latin America during the Second World War.42
Latin American leaders supported the United States during the Second World War for various reasons. Usually, their decisions centered on questions of political and economic advantage more than on abstract notions of hemispheric solidarity. Latin American governments feared for their own security if the Nazis or the Japanese made a move into the Western Hemisphere, but more significantly, they recognized the U.S. capacity to reward and punish. By severing ties or declaring war, Latin Americans might secure the means for coping with inimical circumstances. The Axis powers controlled Europe, and the Allies dominated the high seas. Taken together, these geopolitical configurations cut off Latin Americans from the continent and accentuated dependencies upon the United States. In response, Mexico and Brazil accepted high risks and declared war, whereas Chile and Argentina for much of the war stayed neutral for reasons of their own.
Specific judgments varied from country to country. Overall, the Caribbean and Central American republics fashioned their responses to please the United States. Among other things, they wanted economic outlets and political support against internal dissidents. By declaring war, they advanced each goal. In Cuba, colonel Fulgencio Batista, formerly the power behind the scenes, won the presidential election of 1940, depending on the army as a base of support. As president, he qualified for U.S. economic and military assistance from the Export-Import Bank and the Lend-Lease Program. In Haiti, president Élie Lescot’s government acted on ideological imperatives by going on record in opposition to Nazi racial doctrines, and in the Dominican Republic, generalissimo Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina somewhat fantastically depicted his dictatorial regime as a bastion of liberty in defense of the Western Hemisphere. In these countries, war declarations meant modest U.S. economic and military aid.43
Central American reactions developed similarly. In Costa Rica, president Rafael Calderón Guardia aligned his democratic country with the United States on ideological grounds. Elsewhere, the authoritarian regimes of presidents Maximiliano Hernández Martínez of El Salvador, Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, Tiburcio Carías Andino of Honduras, and Jorge Ubico of Guatemala went along with the United States in anticipation of assistance for their economies and their police forces. The United States especially prized order in regions close by the Panama Canal Zone. In Panama itself, sensitive questions of national sovereignty complicated U.S. efforts to secure air bases and other installations. In return for granting access to them, president Arnulfo Arias required various forms of compensation and also assurances in defense of Panamanian national prerogatives.
When obliged to pick between Germany and the United States, most Latin American leaders opted for the latter. In politically factionalized Mexico after the election of 1940, president Ávila Camacho wanted to consolidate his country politically and also to develop more regular relations with the United States. The petroleum issue presented a potential obstacle; nevertheless, a wartime alliance took shape between the two nations. Consequently, Mexico permitted the use of air bases in its territory; the United States purchased Mexican products and strategic materials at high prices; and on May 30, 1942, after German submarine attacks on Mexican tankers, the Mexican government formally entered the war. Later, in March 1945, the Mexican air force participated in attacks against the Japanese in the Philippines and Formosa.
Most South American countries also developed pro-U.S. policies by cutting ties with the Axis. Their reasons included economic advantage and national security. In Venezuela the defense of oil exports compelled such action from president Isaías Medina Angarita. In Colombia, president Eduardo Santos believed that the national interests of his country corresponded with those of the United States. Similar perceptions prevailed in the governments of Carlos Arroyo del Río in Ecuador, Manuel Prado y Ugarteche of Peru, Enrique Peñaranda del Castillo of Bolivia, Higinio Moríñigo of Paraguay, and Alfredo Baldomir of Uruguay. They all broke relations with the Axis powers.
Brazilian leaders actually declared war. Under authority of the Estado Nôvo, Getúlio Vargas constructed an “entirely personal” dictatorship. Described by R. A. Humphreys as “a master of the arts of political manipulation and persuasion,” Vargas employed “a Machiavellian astuteness” to maintain “a delicate balance” between civilian and military interests. Supposedly standing above partisan strife, he presented himself with some measure of accuracy as “a paternal statesman devoted to his country, the development of its resources, and the welfare of its people.” The most comprehensive study of the complex Vargas regime remains Robert M. Levine’s Father of the Poor? Vargas and His Era published in 1998.
For Latin Americans during the war, adherence to pro-U.S. policies generally paid some kind of dividends. For Brazil a “steady” economic recovery in 1941 reflected “the great expansion of trade with the United States,” regarded by Humphreys as “the prime cause.” Various economic devices contributed. For example, the Inter-American Coffee Agreement in April 1941 halted “ruinous competition among the coffee-producing countries” and guaranteed Brazil “a fair share of the North American market at enhanced prices.” Other agreements channeled the sale of strategic materials to the United States, increasing Brazilian mineral exports.
The country also possessed geopolitical significance. The great Brazilian “bulge” extending eastward from Natal and Recife made the Atlantic narrows the shortest route to the New World from Africa. Because this largely defenseless region appeared as a potential invitation to German invasion, the United States constructed air bases in Brazil and developed other forms of military and naval cooperation. Though reluctant to admit U.S. troops, Vargas did want military aid through Lend-Lease. Consequently, Brazil broke Axis relations on January 28, 1942, and declared war in August. In 1944, Brazilian army contingents took part in the Italian campaign, the only Latin American military force so engaged in Europe.
Different considerations governed decisions elsewhere. In Argentina, neutrality functioned as the guide. According to Humphreys, pro-Axis sympathies affected the officer corps in the German-trained Argentine army. Moreover, fascist and ultranationalist doctrines appealed, as Humphreys explains, “to arch-conservatives, to upper-class young men-about-town, to right-wing intellectuals, and others who sought to rehabilitate the reputation of the greatest and worst of Argentine tyrants”: that is, the nineteenth-century strongman Juan Manuel de Rosas. Nevertheless, “the majority of Argentines, if they feared that Britain would lose, hoped that she would win.” The “public mind was confused”; the “barometric pressure tended to move up and down according to events in Europe,” suggesting a large measure of “uncertainty.” British markets absorbed large quantities of Argentine beef and mutton but could not compensate for the loss of continental sales. Mounting surpluses heightened economic insecurity, and the succession of military officers moving in and out of high political offices suggested impending instability. After Pearl Harbor the civilian president, Ramón S. Castillo, officially declared neutrality as “the best and the safest policy.” Unlike Vargas, who decided that “he must stand or fall with the United States,” neither President Castillo nor the Argentine foreign minister, Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú, invested much faith in the credibility of Pan American alignments under U.S. leadership. Moreover, neither one anticipated an Allied victory at the end of the war.
Chile also stayed neutral at first. Beset by “strikes, rising living costs, and administrative incompetence,” a Popular Front government dissolved in January 1941, ripped to pieces by the competition among Radical, Conservative, Socialist, and Communist parties. Deeply divided, the country tried to avoid international complications. At the same time, as Humphreys notes, “there was little doubt where the preponderance of Chilean sympathies lay in 1941.” Characterized as “hard-headed, cautious and independent,” Chileans favored the Allies but feared an outbreak of war in the South Atlantic and the possibility of an Allied defeat. They also worried about Japanese raids along their lengthy, exposed coastline. Chile consequently remained neutral until January 20, 1943, when at last president Juan Antonio Ríos embraced a pro-Allies position by breaking off diplomatic ties with the Axis powers. At this point, he feared the effects of political and economic isolation in the Western Hemisphere more than the Germans and the Japanese.44
Although during the Second World War the United States forged closer military, cultural, and economic links with Latin America than ever before, questions of interpretation pose a problem. Some historians argue that the establishment of close ties ranked as a significant form of Pan American achievement, part of a praiseworthy effort to transform “the Western Hemisphere idea” into reality.45 More skeptical historians depict the wartime Pan American partnership as something of an illusion, perhaps even a deception to obscure hegemonic designs. According to this interpretation, U.S. leaders used the war as a means of consolidating previous gains under the Good Neighbor policy, thereby guaranteeing access to Latin American resources and perpetuating U.S. dominance.46
In the years before the war, military collaboration between the United States and Latin America hardly existed at all. Latin American armies typically relied on European professionals and arms suppliers for training and equipment. As late as 1939, German advisers were operating in about half the countries of Latin America. (Brazil, an exception, had hosted small U.S. military and naval missions since the First World War.) During the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. officials displayed little interest in cultivating Latin American military connections. When in support of the Good Neighbor policy Sumner Welles argued in favor of such measures, he encountered mainly indifference and prejudice toward Latin Americans among the U.S. military, naval, and foreign policy elites.
Following the catastrophic French defeat in June 1940, an abrupt change took place in U.S. thinking. The so-called Rainbow strategic war plans anticipated the possibilities of fighting on various fronts and in different combinations in the Atlantic, the Pacific, or both. The planners assumed a vital interest in defending the Western Hemisphere region, especially the Caribbean, and, for such purposes, assigned the primary responsibility to U.S. military and naval forces. Other parts of the plans called for the cultivation of Latin American cooperation to assure access to strategic materials and the acquisition of land, sea, and air bases. U.S. officials showed scant appreciation for Latin American sensitivities over issues of national sovereignty; they wanted long-term leases with full jurisdiction but typically settled for less, since few host governments wanted U.S. troops stationed outright in their countries. As a subterfuge in Brazil, the authorities described them as unarmed technicians who would manage U.S. bases for the duration and get out once the war ended.
The early German successes elicited alarm and pessimism. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, U.S. observers fully expected German attacks in the New World if British forces should suffer a defeat. Although the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, dissipated the immediacy of that fear, defensive preparations took many forms. The U.S. Navy kept close watch by multiplying the number of seagoing patrols in the Atlantic; the U.S. Army courted military counterparts in Latin America by developing new means of cooperation such as the Inter-American Defense Board created at the Rio conference early in 1942; and the distribution of aid and supplies in conjunction with the Lend-Lease Program proffered an assortment of rewards for compliant Latin Americans. The Panama Canal, vulnerable to either sabotage or air attack, posed special problems in defense. U.S. officials never fully solved them but used air patrols to guard against surprises.47
Following Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States in December 1941, German submarines inaugurated deadly assaults against merchant ships in the Caribbean. Oil tankers moving precious cargoes from Mexico and Venezuela became favorite targets. The sinkings escalated in number from twenty-four in February 1942 to sixty-six in June of the same year. Such attacks concentrated in the sea-lanes around Trinidad, the Panama Canal, the Yucatan Channel, and the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, where a total of 336 ships went down. The worst of the carnage ended early in 1943, once U.S. authorities had learned how to minimize the effects through the proper use of naval convoys, air patrols, and other forms of antisubmarine warfare.48
The defeat of the German U-boats extinguished the enemy naval presence in the Western Hemisphere and raised other questions. At a time of fierce fighting around the world, some U.S. leaders, such as secretary of war Henry Stimson, wondered why Latin American countries that were uninvolved in actual combat should qualify for military assistance under Lend-Lease. In the State Department, Sumner Welles raised the same issue and worried about the effects of an impending Latin American arms race. Also causing criticism was the belief that dictators such as Somoza, Trujillo, and Ubico were using military aid to keep themselves in power. Irwin F. Gellman observes that only small amounts—about 1.1 percent of all Lend-Lease aid—went to Latin America, mainly to Brazil and Mexico. In his view the “hemispheric despots,” though admittedly beneficiaries of U.S. military aid, relied more heavily on other means to maintain their control. Paul Coe Clark, Jr.’s study of the United States and Somoza arrives at a similar conclusion, showing that the dictator’s survivability depended more on his own unscrupulous political skills than on U.S. support.
For the United States, military cooperation with Latin American officials paid off in various ways. The Inter-American Defense Board advanced a sense of goodwill and common purpose. As Gellman explains, it functioned something like “a hemispheric war college” in which Latin Americans could acquire instruction in the use of U.S. methods and equipment. Such forms of military collaboration also had political significance. Although under the terms of most agreements the United States would lose access to Latin American bases at the end of the war, the War Department intended “to extend inter-American comradeship into the postwar era” through the cultivation of the Latin American officer corps. For proponents of U.S. air power the maintenance of bases in Latin America had particular significance.49
The Roosevelt administration also employed cultural diplomacy to combat the Nazis. Wartime propaganda emphasized likenesses and affinities with Latin Americans. Its purpose was to underscore “the mythical ideological unity of the nations of the New World” and draw sharp distinctions between totalitarian powers and the “democratically oriented nations of the Western Hemisphere.” A typical State Department memorandum in September 1939 listed the “distinguishing ideals and beliefs which bind us together,” including “faith in republican institutions, loyalty to democracy as an ideal, reverence for liberty, acceptance of the dignity of the individual, . . . aversion to the use of force [and] adherence to the principles of equal sovereignty of states and justice under international law.” Such formulations played down the prevalence of authoritarian regimes. If necessary for purposes of public relations, U.S. leaders could depict Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, and Ubico as old-fashioned military strongmen who differed in important ways from the European totalitarians.50
Negative stereotypes everywhere distorted popular perceptions on all sides. In the United States, pervasive images depicted Latin American males as indolent and licentious. In political cartoons, they took long naps under enormous sombreros during the siesta hour or lustily pursued long-haired, dark-eyed señoritas. Similarly flawed, Latin American renditions depended too heavily on clichéd versions of the Yankee capitalist, notable for his greed and crass materialism. To combat misconceptions and promote goodwill, the Roosevelt administration became “culture conscious.” U.S. government officials believed that “economic and political cooperation” would follow from “intellectual and cultural understanding” and consequently emphasized “a sympathetic understanding of tradition, history, literature, and the arts.”51 On August 6, 1940, the Roosevelt administration created the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA). Headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller, the talented and ambitious scion of an oil-rich Republican family, this agency assumed the responsibility of promoting a coherent Pan American system, seeking thereby to attain an omnibus purpose “to prevent revolutions in the Americas, fight Axis agents, and increase United States trade.” In order to work the OCIAA had to avoid the impression of “interfering in any way with the internal affairs of those sovereign states.” Rockefeller devised “a multifaceted program of ideological, cultural, and financial persuasion.” Budgeted initially at $3.5 million from Roosevelt’s emergency fund, the OCIAA by 1942 became a $38 million operation, attempting to present the United States to Latin America as “the beneficent, philanthropic, understanding, yet humble sister nation in the hemispheric family of free and equally idealistic republics.”
As distribution outlets the agency employed radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, and motion pictures, all the while encouraging favorable, upbeat treatment of the United States and Latin America. The office would not sanction criticism of imperfections in the U.S. political system and blocked the distribution of the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in Latin America because it reflected negatively on the activities of the U.S. Congress. Similarly, the office compelled changes to eliminate offensive stereotypes in the film Down Argentine Way: a smarmy Argentine gigolo who spoke with a Mexican accent and a crooked horse race rigged by elites at the Buenos Aires Jockey Club. In contrast, the Walt Disney Studio in conjunction with OCIAA produced an animated film called Saludos Amigos. Properly perky, it featured a peppy little anthropomorphic airplane with human characteristics and a dapper Brazilian parrot, José Carioca, who swapped wisecracks with Donald Duck.52
Wartime economics initially played havoc with Latin Americans. Actually the third in a sequence of external shocks to strike them in twenty-five years, the Second World War entailed consequences that “were quantitatively and qualitatively different” from those of the First World War and the Great Depression. The war not only devastated the traditional Latin American export trade by cutting off the markets of continental Europe and diminishing the British demand but hastened “growing disillusionment” with the export-led model of economic growth in Latin America. The result was “a growing sense of nationalism in a number of Latin American republics” and “a greater commitment” to “an inward-looking” approach to economic development and industrialization. Such tendencies, already present in Bolivia and Mexico during the 1930s, accelerated during the war years. According to Bulmer-Thomas, “State intervention in support of industry, particularly in the larger republics, now became direct, with important investments in basic commodities as well as in the infrastructure needed to support a more complex industrial system.”
The Roosevelt administration, “more sensitive to Latin American needs than its predecessors,” understood “the importance of avoiding economic collapse in the region,” if for no other reason than “to secure supplies of raw materials and strategic commodities.” Consequently, a system of inter-American economic cooperation took shape after the outbreak of war in September 1939. For example, the Inter-American Development Commission (IADC), established in 1940, sought to stimulate trade between the United States and Latin America, to promote trade among the Latin Americans, and to encourage industrialization. Because access to strategic materials was a priority for the United States, in 1940 the Roosevelt administration originated the Metals Reserve Company and the Rubber Reserve Company to stockpile essential supplies. As it turned out, Latin America became the prime beneficiary. After the Japanese conquered raw materials–producing regions in Asia, the United States relied on its southern neighbors for a vast range of materials such as abaca, antimony, asbestos, cinchona, industrial diamonds, kenaf, mica, quebracho wood, quartz crystals, rubber, and zirconium. Direct U.S. foreign investment in Latin America, much of it in strategic materials, “soared during the war to levels not seen since the late 1920s,” and “official U.S. loans through the Export-Import Bank and Lend-Lease—though not restricted to the extraction of strategic materials—became increasingly important.” Cooperation developed in other areas as well. Recognizing “the crucial role played by coffee exports in a dozen republics,” the United States promoted the Inter-American Coffee Convention (IACC) in 1941. By establishing quotas, higher prices, and guaranteed market access, it became “a lifeline for the smaller republics and a great boon for the larger republics—many of which had become heavily dependent on the German market in the 1930s.”
Still, although U.S. purchases of Latin American exports became critically important, they “could not fully compensate for the loss of Japan, continental Europe, and the shrinking British market.” Latin Americans increasingly sought trade with one another to sustain the volume of exports. Previously, this kind of commerce had never amounted to much; in 1938 it had accounted for only 6.1 percent of the region’s exports. As Bulmer-Thomas notes, “All this changed as a result of both war and the system of inter-American economic cooperation.”
Indeed, proliferating bilateral agreements reduced economic barriers and allowed for a significant expansion of interregional trade, amounting to 16.6 percent of the total in 1945. Inter-American cooperation was “the major factor preventing a collapse of exports after 1939.”
The war also encouraged industrial growth in the larger republics for three main reasons. First, “the sharp decline in the volume of imports after 1939 allowed domestic manufacturers to expand production even with an unchanged level of real consumption.” Consequently, the adoption of an import-substitution plan permitted modest increases in the growth of manufacturing in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Second, intra–Latin American trade allowed manufacturers to sell their products in neighboring countries. As examples, Brazil increased textile exports; Argentina sold more manufactured goods; and Mexico expanded industrial sales in the United States. Third, “the rise of firms not dependent on consumer demand” also provided a stimulus. They produced capital goods for other productive sectors and the state. For example, the U.S.-financed Brazilian steel mill, Volta Redonda, sold its output to construction and manufacturing enterprises, thereby providing a substitute for previously imported steel. Similarly, in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, cement works, chemical plants, oil refineries, and operations in plastics, rayons, and machinery relieved existing dependencies upon imports.
Such changes in the industrial sector had links with “the rise of a more interventionist state in Latin America.” As Bulmer-Thomas notes, “Even deeply conservative governments could not avoid an increase in state responsibilities during the war years.” For one thing, “free markets could not handle the problems posed by dollar inflation, import shortages, and unsold agricultural surpluses.” For another, the war effort placed “additional demands on the state through the need for infrastructure and public works.” Such developments had huge implications for the immediate postwar period and ran counter to U.S. preferences by moving away from reliance on private capital and free enterprise as the means of economic development. In the short term the Second World War marked a transition from the traditional export-led model of growth toward an alternative, inward-looking approach based on import-substitution industrialization. This change “weakened the link between the external sector and aggregate economic performance,” “increased the importance of the nonexport sectors,” and “shifted the composition of industrial output toward intermediate and capital goods.”53 In combination, the effects altered important parts of the traditional economic relationship between the United States and the countries of Latin America.
How should historians evaluate the impact of the Good Neighbor policy, the depression, and the war? This large, difficult, and multifaceted question allows for no single answer. Much depends on angles of vision and value systems. In a book published in 1943, Samuel Flagg Bemis praises the wartime partnership with Latin America, claiming that creative changes in the 1930s made it possible. Irwin F. Gellman’s 1979 account follows Bemis in looking upon the political achievements of Good Neighbor diplomacy as beneficial. In contrast, David Green underscores the importance of U.S. economic interests and the difficulty of reconciling them with the demands of Latin American nationalism. George Black, in 1988, focused on advertising, travel and tourism, and cultural relations between the United States and Central America and the Caribbean in his assessment of the Good Neighbor policy.54 Too often, according to Green, U.S. leaders displayed arrogance and insensitivity toward legitimate Latin American concerns.55
Such differences are probably irreconcilable. Michael Grow explicitly addresses the problem in The Good Neighbor Policy and Authoritarianism in Paraguay. Using familiar categories, he characterizes the leaders in the Roosevelt administration as “heirs of Woodrow Wilson’s ‘liberal internationalist’ world vision” and explains their behavior on the basis of such convictions. For them, a “world order of capitalist democracies,” led by the United States and “linked interdependently through mutually profitable free trade,” would constitute “the surest path to international peace and prosperity.” From a liberal perspective the expansion of U.S. power and influence during the period might appear as the consequence of “an altruistic and pragmatic campaign to construct a prosperous, stable new hemispheric order mutually beneficial to the United States and the nations of Latin America.” But for Grow, any such conclusion would be an error. He endorses a more skeptical view, depicting Roosevelt’s Latin American policy less as an example of “liberal inter-nationalism” than as a product of “liberal imperialism,” that is, “a concerted drive to achieve informal United States hegemony” for reasons of “national economic self-interest.”56
Frederick B. Pike’s important work, FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos, provides a more sympathetic account. Pike begins by asking a fundamental question: Have we been good neighbors? His brutally realistic reply says yes, some of the time, but really “no better . . . than we had to be.” For him, “that seems the most one could expect. We might, after all, have been a good deal worse.” That sage point establishes a main theme, emphasizing that whatever its shortcomings, the Good Neighbor policy did rank in some ways as a success. Pike intriguingly and effectively depicts Roosevelt as a “trickster,” a kind of political magician who obtained successes through the reconciliation of opposites. In this case, he brought together the defense of vital U.S. interests with some kind of regard for the requirements of Latin American sovereignty. Roosevelt, according to Pike, will always be “an enigma and a source of controversy.” Nevertheless, his “enigmatic qualities served him well as a hemispheric statesman.” Roosevelt earned respect and admiration from Latin Americans. He was in Pike’s account “a gringo in the Latin mold, a man they could understand . . . as a projection of their own political and social style.” He was “aristocratic,” “patronalistic,” “personalistic,” and also an affable “populist” who supposedly could intuit the people’s will. He was seldom preachy, condescending, or racist in his treatment of Latin Americans and seemed willing to let them count for something by giving them a share. His death on April 12, 1945, deprived the Good Neighbor policy of an essential part. His successor, Harry S. Truman, “an archetypical gringo” in the White House, possessed none of the skills and sensitivities necessary to maintain it.57
1. Robert Freeman Smith, “The Good Neighbor Policy: The Liberal Paradox in United States Relations with Latin America,” in Watershed of Empire: Essays on New Deal Foreign Policy, ed. Leonard P. Liggio and James Martin (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles, 1976), 66–67.
2. Alexander DeConde, Herbert Hoover’s Latin-American Policy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1951), 13–15, 18–24; Martin L. Fausold, The Presidency of Herbert Hoover (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 32.
3. Fausold, Presidency of Herbert Hoover, 183; Smith, “Good Neighbor Policy,” 66–67.
4. Bryce Wood, The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy (New York: Columbia University Press), 45.
5. Fausold, Presidency of Herbert Hoover, 185–86; Bryce Wood, The United States and Latin American Wars, 1932–1942 (New York: Columbia University Press. 1966).
6. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 194–99.
7. Peter H. Smith and Thomas E. Skidmore, Modern Latin America, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 3; Rosemary Thorp, ed., Latin America in the 1930s: The Role of the Periphery in World Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984).
8. Bulmer-Thomas, Economic History, 208–09, 216–17.
9. Irwin F. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy: United States Policies in Latin America, 1933–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 11.
10. Gellman, 14, 17, chap. 2; Gellman, Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), chap. 1.
11. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 180, 183, 185.
12. Pérez, Cuba and the United States, 186, 191–92, 194, 200–1; Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 25.
13. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 33; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, I992), chaps. 6, 8; G. Pope Atkins and Larman C. Wilson, The Dominican Republic and the United States: From Imperialism to Transnationalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), chap. 2; Michael L. Conniff, Panama and the United States: The Forced Alliance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), chap. 5.
14. Gordon Connell-Smith, The United States and Latin America: An Historical Analysis of Inter-American Relations (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), 167.
15. Paul Coe Clark, Jr., The United States and Somoza, 1933–1956: A Revisionist Look (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), esp. chaps. I, II.
16. Arthur A. Ekirk, Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of the New Deal on American Thought (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), chaps. 1–2; William E. Leuchtenberg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); chaps. 1–2.
17. William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), chaps. 3–4.
18. Dick Steward, Trade and Hemisphere: The Good Neighbor Policy and Reciprocal Trade (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975), 10; Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), chaps. 2–3, 6, 10.
19. Frederick C. Adams, Economic Diplomacy: The Export-Import Bank and American Foreign Relations, 1934–1939 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976), 65–66, chaps. 5, 7.
20. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 40, 43, 47.
21. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 47–49; Pérez, Cuba and the United States, 122–23; David Green, The Containment of Latin America: A History of the Myths and Realities of the Good Neighbor Policy (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 20.
22. Frank D. McCann, The Brazilian-American Alliance, 1937–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); Stanley E. Hilton, Brazil and the Great Powers, 1930–1939: The Politics of Trade Rivalry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975).
23. Frank D. McCann, “Brazil, the United States, and World War II: A Commentary,” Diplomatic History 3 (Winter 1979): 63–64, 66–67; Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 48; R. A. Humphreys, Latin America and the Second World War, 2 vols. (London: University of London Athlone Press, 1982), 113–46, chap. 1.
24. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 48.
25. Bulmer-Thomas, Economic History, 201, 212, 217, 219–20, 222–23.
26. Wood, Making of the Good Neighbor Policy, 159–60, 162.
27. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 49–50; Wood, Making of the Good Neighbor Policy, chap. 7.
28. Wood, Making of the Good Neighbor Policy, 203.
29. William H. Beezley and Colin M. MacLachlan, El Gran Pueblo, 2 vols. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1994), 309, chap. 2.
30. Beezley and MacLachlan, El Gran Pueblo, 309–11, 322–24; Friedrich E. Schuler, Mexico between Hitler and Roosevelt: Mexican Foreign Relations in the Age of Lázaro Cárdenas, 1934–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), chaps. 4–5; E. David Cronon, Josephus Daniels in Mexico (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), chaps. 1, 7, 8–10; Lorenzo Meyer, Mexico and the United States in the Oil Controversy, 1917–1942, trans. Muriel Vasconcellos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), chaps. 8–10.
31. Wood, Making of the Good Neighbor Policy, 205–6, 208–9, 213, 222, 233, 249, 253, 258–59; Cronon, Josephus Daniels, chaps. 7–8; Schuler, Mexico between Hitler and Roosevelt, chaps. 5–6.
32. Green, Containment of Latin America, 38.
33. B. S. McBeth, Juan Vicente Gómez and the Oil Companies in Venezuela (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chaps. 2–3; Judith Ewell, Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe’s Hemisphere to Petroleum’s Empire (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), chaps. 5–6.
34. Wood, Making of the Good Neighbor Policy, 263–65, chap. 10.
35. Humphreys, Latin America, 1, chap. 1.
36. Thomas G. Paterson, J. Garry Clifford, and Kenneth J. Hagan, American Foreign Relations: A History, 2 vols., 4th ed. (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1995), chaps. 4–6; William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, rev. ed. (New York: Delta, 1962), chaps. 4–5; Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1979), pts. 2, 3; Gardner, Economic Aspects, chaps. 7, 8.
37. Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 37; Paterson, Clifford, and Hagan, American Foreign Relations, 209–10, chap. 2; Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
38. Paterson, Clifford, and Hagan, American Foreign Relations, 2:213.
39. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 74–79, 83–85, 88–92, 95.
40. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 109–15; Stanley E. Hilton, Hitler’s Secret War in South America, 1939–1945: German Military Espionage and Allied Counterespionage in Brazil (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Leslie B. Rout, Jr. and John F. Bratzel, The Shadow War: German Espionage and United States Counterespionage in Latin America during World War II (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1986); Robert C. Newton, The “Nazi Menace” in Argentina, 1931–1947 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992).
41. Waldo H. Heinrichs, Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
42. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 121, 124–26.
43. Humphreys, Latin America, 92–96, chap. 2.
44. Humphreys, Latin America, 97–100, 105, 117–19, 136, 138, 143–44, 149–50, 158–59.
45. Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Latin-American Policy of the United States (1943; reprinted, New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), chaps. 22–23; Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, chaps. 10–13.
46. Green, Containment of Latin America, chaps. 4–5; Gardner, Economic Aspects, chap. 10; Adams, Economic Diplomacy, chaps. 5, 7; Michael Grow, The Good Neighbor Policy and Authoritarianism in Paraguay: United States Economic Expansion and Great-Power Rivalry in Latin America during World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1981), 113–15.
47. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 128–29, 134–35, chap. 10; John Major, Prize Possession: The United States and the Panama Canal, 1903–1979 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 12.
48. Humphreys, Latin America, 2–4, chap. 2.
49. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 138–39.
50. Gerald K. Haines, “Under the Eagle’s Wing: The Franklin Roosevelt Administration Forges an American Hemisphere,” Diplomatic History 1, no. 4 (Fall 1977): 373–74.
51. Haines, “Under the Eagle’s Wing,” 378–79; Frederick B. Pike, The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), chap. 8; John J. Johnson, Latin America in Caricature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); J. Manuel Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplomacy, 1936–1948 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 1976), chaps. 3, 9–10.
52. Haines, “Under the Eagle’s Wing,” 380, 382–83.
53. Bulmer-Thomas, Economic History, 239, 241–48.
54. See George Black, The Good Neighbor: How the United States Wrote the History of Central America and the Caribbean (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
55. Bemis, Latin-American Policy, chap. 22; Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, chaps. 10–13; Green, Containment of Latin America, chap. 4.
56. Grow, Good Neighbor Policy and Authoritarianism, 113–15; Abraham F. Lowenthal, “United States Policy toward Latin America: ‘Liberal,’ ‘Radical,’ and ‘Bureaucratic’ Perspectives,” Latin American Research Review 8 (Fall 1973): 3–25.
57. Frederick B. Pike, FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), xi, 138–62, 350–53.