We are pleased to present this updated version of Mark Gilderhus’s critically acclaimed work on United States-Latin American relations, which appeared in 2000 under the title The Second Century. For nearly two decades, students, scholars, and policy makers have studied Gilderhus’s text and commented on its lucid prose, clear organizational structure, and remarkable synthesis of a long, often contentious, and changing relationship.
Like many in the academic community, we were saddened to learn of Professor Gilderhus’s death in 2015, but grateful for the opportunity to work on a new edition of a book we’re titling The Third Century. The work before you, therefore, represents the efforts of three historians, spanning three generations of scholarly engagement. Mark Gilderhus was a diplomatic historian who wrote and worked in collaboration with the great revisionist historians of U.S. foreign policy, including Walter LaFeber, William Appleman Williams, and David Green. His voice joined theirs in critical reflection of the role of the United States in Latin America. The actions, policies, priorities, and economic determinism of the United States in Latin America were subject to intense criticism and “revision” starting in the 1960s. Unlike the foundational generation of diplomatic historians in Latin America, that is, Samuel Flagg Bemis and others, the revisionists refused to accept the prevailing narrative of a benevolent, democracy-bearing United States, acting (almost always) altruistically in Latin America. Bemis’s 1943 work, The Latin-American Policy of the United States generally supported the actions of the United States in Latin America; Professor Bemis objects to the U.S. intervention at Colombia and the creation of Panama in 1903, but qualifies his criticism by remarking that the canal became “indispensable” to U.S. interests.
For a variety of reasons, diplomatic history fell out of fashion in the second half of the twentieth century. The Asian and Latin American surprises of 1949 and 1959 (China’s takeover by Communists and Cuba’s takeover by Fidel Castro) caught American policy makers off guard, and Washington insiders, American scholars, journalists, and others called for a much more robust, reflective, and systematic study of foreign places. The diplomatic cables and musings of a few well-intended American diplomats abroad seemed, after 1949, wholly inadequate to explain the totality and complexity of a place like China, or even Cuba, for that matter. Thus, funding, interest, and intentionality turned toward the development of interdisciplinary “area studies” programs shortly after the Second World War, with important growth and a funding push during the 1950s and 1960s. Private foundations, such as Ford and Rockefeller, stepped in to support a more systematic, interdisciplinary study of “society” abroad, not just policies and politics.
We have been influenced by the “new social history” of the late 1970s and 1980s—particularly Michael LaRosa who earned his doctorate in 1995 at the University of Miami and who studied with extraordinary social historians Robert M. Levine and Steve Stein, as well as diplomatic historian of Latin America, Michael Krenn, in conjunction with Brazilian social historian José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy. David LaFevor’s doctoral work at Vanderbilt University—completed in 2011—was shaped by the emergent cultural history of the past twenty years. He studied with cultural historian of Mexico, Edward Wright-Rios, and others who form a team of superb historians of Latin America in Nashville, including Brazilianist Marshall Eakin and Atlantic World scholar Jane Landers.
Our book—The Third Century—brings the story of the relationship between the United States and Latin America up to 2016. Gilderhus’s chronology stretches from 1889 into the final days of the twentieth century. In addition to updating and editing throughout the text, we’ve restructured two of Mark’s chapters and added two new chapters; thus, we’ve expanded the original book by about 20 percent. Chapter 6 is a new study of U.S.-Cuban relations, written in the spirit of détente that developed with the December 17, 2014, announcement of normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. Chapter 8 is a new chapter that studies some of the cultural factors that shape the relationship between the United States and Latin America. That chapter not only focuses on film, food, literature, and sport but also addresses some of the conflict (political and economic) that has defined interactions between the two regions over the past quarter century—since the implementation of NAFTA in 1994. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, has dramatically influenced trade patterns, commerce, and wealth distribution in the three signatory nations (Canada, Mexico, and the United States). Chapter 8, additionally, studies the free trade agreement frenzy that emerged in the 1990s at a time when the “Washington Consensus” seemed inevitable and irreproachable.
Much scholarly work has emerged since 2000, since the publication of The Second Century. A few titles that have influenced our thinking include Stephen Kinzer’s 2013 “dual” biography of the Dulles brothers, titled The Brothers. The book demonstrates the immense power of two unelected persons (Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, and John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State) in the period between the Second World War and the early 1960s. Allen’s reign at the CIA ended with the Bay of Pigs in 1961—a complete fiasco in the early days of the Kennedy administration driven by faulty intelligence and Washington bumbling (among other factors), leading to a failed invasion of Cuba which embarrassed the nation and emboldened the Castro regime. Kinzer looks “globally” for examples of United States’ misunderstandings and maladaptation abroad, with specific focus on six examples: Cuba, Guatemala, Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, and the Congo. We have studied Greg Grandin’s trenchant work from 2006 Empire’s Workshop, which suggests that Latin America served as a sort of “test case” for some of the unsavory tactics of American imperialism, including support for coups d’état, the training of death squads, paramilitary insurgencies—and torture. None of which makes for pleasant conversation but we live in the post–Abu Ghraib era and, as such, Grandin’s book, ten years after publication, seems almost prescient. The 1998 work Close Encounters of Empire, edited by Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore, has helped us to study the cultural significance of U.S. policy and actions in Latin America. Many other works have been consulted and appear in notes and in our revised and updated bibliography.
This book includes a photo essay that appears between chapters 4 and 5. Most of the photos are original works shot by David LaFevor, published here for the first time. The photos, and captions, can be read as a sort of “chapter” of the book, and the images help students visualize the region, the people of Latin America, and the indescribable beauty of the culture and landscape/cityscape. We would like to see students view Latin America as more than a series of diplomatic cables and policy options. As educators, we want to encourage students to study Latin America in its totality—to see and experience the richness and vibrancy of the culture, to travel there, study there, meet the people, and learn the languages of Latin America. “We must try,” said the visionary senator from Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, “to expand the boundaries of human wisdom, empathy and perception and there is no way of doing that except through education.”