*In 1927 ER wrote a front-page article in the Women’s Democratic News called “Banks and Bayonets in Nicaragua,” with the question “Do We Deserve the Hatred of the World?” It was a blistering protest against Calvin Coolidge’s military invasion of Nicaragua to destroy the popular independence movement led by Augusto Sandino, the charismatic hero who struggled to create a Nicaragua “unpolluted” by U.S. military control and ownership. For decades, from her uncle TR’s “big stick” policy to Taft’s “dollar diplomacy” through Coolidge’s escalated marine presence, Nicaragua had been a strategic military base and occupied colony. Finally on 3 January 1933 the twenty-year occupation ended when President Hoover pulled U.S. troops out of Nicaragua. Sandino called for peace and national unity. But on 21 February 1934 Sandino and his brother Socrates were brutally murdered, and hundreds of unarmed families in the Sandinista community were massacred. When civil war broke out in May 1936, the State Department refused to “interfere.” With military efficiency and stunning corruption, Somoza and his family would control Nicaragua “as a private fiefdom” until the Sandinista uprising of 1979.