The Second Century is about U.S. relations with Latin America during a period bounded by the advent of the New Diplomacy late in the nineteenth century and the end of the Cold War about one hundred years later. The main themes center on the political and economic aspects of the relationship, taking two approaches. The first explores U.S. goals and tactics, that is, the nature of hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. The second examines Latin American responses, often nationalistic reactions to unwanted dependencies upon the “Colossus of the North.” To mitigate any tendency toward national self-centeredness, this work looks at reciprocal interactions between the two regions, each with distinctive purposes, outlooks, interests, and cultures. It also suggests the place of U.S.-Latin American relations within the larger context of global politics and economics.
Most historians accept the view that international behavior is determined by shifting combinations of security needs, economic interests, domestic politics, pressure groups, ideological and cultural commitments, bureaucratic configurations, personality structures, and psychological states. Some argue that international relations form a system with incentives and deterrents all its own. Yet scholars disagree upon the points of emphasis and the overall effects. The ambiguities of historical evidence are often subject to multiple interpretations, compelling historians to regard their discipline as consisting of ongoing debates over the meaning of human experience.1
For an earlier generation, Arthur P. Whitaker’s conception of “the Western Hemisphere idea” obtained a large measure of interpretive power. Whitaker described a distinctive community of nations characterized by similar political values and aspirations, all shaped by common experiences. For him, the republican rebellions in the New World against the monarchies of the Old during “the age of democratic revolutions” assumed a special importance.2 This view, implying that the countries of the Western Hemisphere acted on the basis of certain uniform beliefs and practices, took on particular poignancy during the Second World War when, in a sense, such a community of nations actually existed. In more recent times, notions of hemispheric solidarity have impressed scholars as harder to sustain. Instead, researchers have underscored the significance of an unequal distribution of wealth, power, and influence, sometimes depicted as a consequence of the capitalist proclivities and hegemonic purposes of the United States.
As a point of reference in this debate, Samuel Flagg Bemis’s classic work, The Latin American Policy of the United States, still holds importance. First published in 1943, it incorporates traditional views from the time of the Second World War and presents the kind of interpretation usually characterized as “nationalist.” More often than not, this account endorses the legitimacy and good intentions of U.S. goals and purposes and presumes common interests with other Western Hemisphere countries. For Bemis, such international compatibilities came about when Latin Americans practiced deference by following the U.S. lead in the defense of regional security and republican ideology. Otherwise, Latin American behavior typically impresses him as misguided, perverse, or malevolent. Although he acknowledges the reality of U.S. imperialism around the turn of the twentieth century, Bemis regards it as a mistake, a “great aberration,” and downgrades its significance over the long term. He also argues against economic interpretations, claiming that interventionist practices in the Caribbean region served mainly as strategic defenses of Latin America against European threats and functioned as a form of “protective imperialism.” He sees Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy as having accomplished good purposes by eliminating the Caribbean and Central American protectorates and, in a culminating moment during the Second World War, allowing for the development of high levels of inter-American cooperation against the Axis powers.3
Although forceful and erudite, Bemis’s work aroused criticism because of its strong opinions and self-congratulatory judgments. In 1974, for example, Gordon Connell-Smith, a British historian, anticipated contemporary historiographical tendencies. In the United States and Latin America he charges that Bemis projected ethnocentric and nationalistic biases into his writings. More specifically, in Connell-Smith’s view, Bemis attributed un-warranted benevolence to the United States and presumed the existence of strong political and ideological bonds with Latin America when in actuality few existed. Seeking to set the record straight, Connell-Smith proposes to depict more faithfully the techniques of U.S. domination, control, manipulation, and exploitation.4
The issue retains importance. A variety of more recently published syntheses, although distinct in approach and conception, illustrate the point by emphasizing the effects of competition, inequality, and strife. For example, Lester D. Langley’s provocatively personalistic America and the Americas employs a version of the idealist/realist distinction, arguing that diplomatic relations in the Western Hemisphere have featured an ongoing contest between the particularistic interests of the United States (America) and the more idealistic concerns within the collectivity (the Americas). Langley hopes for transcendence over national self-centeredness through a triumph of the larger good.5 Less optimistic in outlook, Robert Freeman Smith’s “Latin America, the United States, and the European Powers, 1830–1930” situates regional diplomacy within the context of Great-Power political and economic rivalry. Stressing the clash of divergent aims and purposes, he underscores the unlikelihood that rhetorical devices will ever overcome “basic conflicts of interest” through ritualistic “professions of Pan American harmony.”6 Another recent account, a polemic by Frank Niess, a German Marxist, appears in A Hemisphere to Itself. This book develops an unsubtle economic interpretation by highlighting the capitalist insatiabilities of the United States for markets and resources.7 By contrast, in Talons of the Eagle, political scientist Peter H. Smith draws on international relations theory by arguing that “the inter-American relationship” is “a sub-system” within the larger, global system, subject to distinctive “tacit codes of behavior.” According to Smith, compatibilities of interest among the nations of Latin America and the United States may or may not come about, depending upon incentives emanating from the global system.8 Finally, Lars Schoultz, another political scientist, finds no reason for assuming that common endeavors are possible. In Beneath the United States, he argues that “a pervasive belief that Latin Americans constitute an inferior branch of the human species” constitutes “the essential core” of U.S. policy toward Latin America and “determines the precise steps” taken by the United States to protect its interests.9
This work explores U.S. efforts to manage affairs within the Western Hemisphere, often by seeking to arrange for order and predictability. To such ends, U.S. policy makers have sometimes resorted to Pan American enticements, inviting Latin Americans to take part in a regional system for settling disputes, expanding trade, and rolling back European influences. In this way, according to the governing assumptions, the participants could advance the vital interests common to all of them by obtaining conditions of peace, prosperity, and security. Consequently, my approach describes U.S. initiatives but does not construe Latin American diplomacy as passive or inert. On the contrary, Latin Americans reacted, resisted, and pursued their own aims. Often they perceived a kind of reality different from that assumed by their northern neighbor. Indeed, the skeptics among them typically denounced the Pan American elaborations of the United States as dangerous snares and deceptions, presumably designed as a subtle means of establishing political and economic controls over Latin America.10
In my usage the term “Latin America” refers to a group of independent countries south of the Rio Grande in which many of the inhabitants speak languages derived from Latin, that is, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. These countries include the ten republics of South America, the six republics of Central America, and also Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. In eighteen of the twenty, Spanish is the dominant language; in Brazil, Portuguese; in Haiti, a French-based kreyol (creole). In Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, various native peoples still use their traditional languages. Latin American countries feature Spanish and Portuguese institutional legacies from colonial times, emphasizing hierarchy and authority, and also the economic developmental patterns of the nineteenth century. These patterns stressed the export of raw materials and foodstuffs to the industrializing European countries and to the United States. The consequences have shaped relations with the outside world in significant ways.
I have tried to avoid the use of the term “Americans” as a designation for the inhabitants of the United States. Obviously, all people who dwell in the Americas are Americans. The term “North American” is equally imprecise, since a literal application would have to include Mexicans and Canadians, and the Spanish estadounidense allows for no effective translation into English. Although it may be possible to make too much of this issue, I have attempted to deal with it by using terms such as “U.S. citizens.”
The rise of the New Diplomacy in the United States late in the nineteenth century and its consequences for the rest of the Western Hemisphere is the focus of chapter 1. The following chapter offers a description of revolution and war during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency and its aftermath in the 1920s. Chapter 3 examines the era of the Great Depression and the Second World War, focusing on U.S. efforts to enlist Latin Americans in collaborative undertakings. Next is a look at the onset of the Cold War and the implications for Latin America. The fifth chapter observes the impact of the Cuban Revolution on U.S. policy during the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, chapter 6 [now chapter 7] explores Central American involvements after 1979 and concludes with a brief resume of ramifications when the Cold War ended between 1989 and 1991. On this matter, I follow Peter H. Smith’s lead, seeking a suggestive but not a comprehensive account.
1. See Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Mark T. Gilderhus, History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction, 3d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1996).
2. Arthur P. Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954).
3. Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Latin American Policy of the United States: An Historical Interpretation (1943; reprinted, New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), chaps. 8, 20; Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States, 5th ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), chaps. 26, 38, 39; Jerald A. Combs, American Diplomatic History: Two Centuries of Changing Interpretations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 156–62, 248, 272–74, 289–90; Gaddis Smith, “The Two Worlds of Samuel Flagg Bemis,” Diplomatic History 9 (Fall 1985): 295–302; Mark T. Gilderhus, “Founding Father: Samuel Flagg Bemis and the Study of U.S.-Latin American Relations,” Diplomatic History 21 (Winter 1997): 1–14.
4. Gordon Connell-Smith, The United States and Latin America: An Historical Analysis of Inter-American Relations (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), ix–xviii.
5. Lester D. Langley, America and the Americas: The United States in the Western Hemisphere (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989).
6. Robert Freeman Smith, “Latin America, the United States, and the European Powers, 1830–1930,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 4, c. 1870–1930, ed. Leslie Bethell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 91.
7. Frank Niess, A Hemisphere to Itself: A History of U.S.-Latin American Relations, trans. Harry Drost (London: Zed Books, 1990).
8. Smith, Talons of the Eagle, 5, 7.
9. Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), xv.
10. See Mark T. Gilderhus, Pan American Visions: Woodrow Wilson in the Western Hemisphere, 1913–1921 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986).