Download America as a World Power: U - Dorman-Data

America as a World Power: U.S. Involvement in Latin America
by Curtis Cole
In the early 21st century, it is very difficult to imagine a United States that was not a global military and economic superpower. However,
that role is relatively recent—dating only from World War II. Prior to the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States was an
isolationist nation. In the first half of the 20th century, national public opinion and even official foreign policy alternately and sometimes
concurrently supported both isolationism and internationalism—an ambivalence that delayed American entry into both World War I and
World War II. That era of ambivalence began as the 19th century drew to a close, when U.S. foreign policy initially focused on Latin
America.
As the 20th century approached, some influential Americans began to argue that the country should begin to turn outward and play a
larger international role. Those were people who sensed that U.S. power was increasingly dependent on expansion into the hinterland
of the Caribbean basin, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. They believed, in particular, that the international rivalries of the
1890s—including the European nations' carving up of Africa—required that the United States acquire its own imperial status in order to
survive and compete internationally.
The Spanish-American War was perhaps the most dramatic event of the newly expansionist U.S. policy in Latin America, but in the first
two decades of the 20th century, U.S. forces intervened in internal affairs in Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic,
Mexico, and Haiti. In the process, U.S. officials took over local customs houses to control tariff revenues, trained national guards, and
ran elections. The governing assumption in all those actions was the Monroe Doctrine, which held that it was an American responsibility
to oversee the Western Hemisphere. In James Monroe's time, the doctrine was intended as a warning to the European powers not to
expand their age-old conflicts into what the United States considered its backyard. By the early 20th century, however, economic
considerations were as important as geopolitical ones. U.S. incursions into Latin America were justified as enforcing order for the
benefit of local populations and U.S. economic interests.
The Spanish-American War, which was fueled by U.S. economic and diplomatic interests as well as a newspaper circulation war in
New York, ostensibly began in support of Cuban independence. Cubans had begun to agitate for greater autonomy from Spain in the
1860s and mounted a full-scale revolt in the mid-1890s. Spanish colonial authorities responded with a vicious crackdown that brought
more suffering to the Cuban population than to the rebels. Interested in restoring stability to an island—and region—that was of both
economic and strategic importance, Washington tried to pressure Madrid to negotiate with the rebels and bring about peace.
In the fall of 1897 and winter of 1898, American sentiment in favor of a military option grew. War fever reached a pinnacle in February
1898, when the U.S. battleship Maine exploded and sank in Havana harbor, with the loss of 260 crew members. Although the cause of
the sinking of the Maine was never determined, many blamed it on Spanish sabotage, and there were cries for war. On April 24, U.S.
forces met their ill-prepared Spanish counterparts not only on land in Cuba but also on the sea in the Philippines. The end, which came
in August, gave the United States colonial acquisition of the Philippines and Guam in the Pacific and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. In
addition, U.S. troops remained in Cuba even though the war was supposedly fought in support of Cuban independence. The United
States then pressured Cuba into including a clause known as the Platt Amendment in its 1903 Constitution. The clause not only
permitted U.S. troop deployment on the island whenever Washington felt it necessary to ensure order, but it also prohibited Cuba from
entering into international agreements without U.S. approval.
The acquisition of new territories from Spain gave the U.S. a new position in world affairs after 1898, and President Theodore
Roosevelt was determined to build on that position and make the United States a world power. He told Congress in his first State of the
Union address, "Whether we desire it or not, we must henceforth recognize that we have international duties no less than international
rights." He strongly believed that the country had to abandon its tradition of isolationism in favor of an expanded doctrine of manifest
destiny. That doctrine, in his view, gave the United States a kind of inevitable and natural right to expand as much as was necessary for
freedom and republican government to prosper and survive.
Roosevelt employed the doctrine to justify U.S. expansion into the Caribbean and the Pacific as well as a greater presence in Central
and South America. The most important enterprise in that expansion was the digging of a canal across Central America to allow the
U.S. Navy and merchant marine passage between the Atlantic and Pacific. Panama, the site eventually chosen for the project, was
then a province of Colombia, which was not willing to grant the United States the right to build the canal on Roosevelt's terms. A
complicated round of diplomacy and intrigue ensued, and on January 22, 1903, Secretary of State John Hay and Thomas Herran, the
Colombian minister in Washington, negotiated the Herran-Hay Treaty.
Under the treaty, the New Panama Canal Company, which was to construct the canal, would receive $40 million from the United
States, and Colombia would receive $10 million and an annual subsidy of $250,000 from the United States. Perhaps most significantly,
the treaty also granted complete sovereignty in the three-mile-wide Canal Zone to the United States in perpetuity. However, the
Colombian dictator, José Manuel Marroquin, rejected the treaty and proposed several alternative arrangements, all involving
recognition of Colombian sovereignty over the Canal Zone. When further negotiations with Marroquin failed, a furious Roosevelt
decided to take by force what he couldn't get by negotiation. He gave tacit support to the efforts of investors in the New Panama Canal
Company to foment a secessionist revolution in Panama. On the tenuous legal foundation of an 1846 treaty with Colombia, in which
both countries had guaranteed the right of transit across the isthmus, he was prepared to recommend to Congress that the United
States occupy the Canal Zone. That became unnecessary, however, when Panamanian revolutionaries, inspired by American support,
declared Panama an independent nation in November 1903. Washington immediately recognized the new state, and the new
Panamanian government quickly signed a treaty to grant canal rights to the United States in return for the same $10 million deal and
$250,000 annual subsidy that Roosevelt had originally offered to Colombia.
Acquisition of the former Spanish colonial territories and the start of construction on the Panama Canal meant for many in the United
States a responsibility to maintain stability in Latin America and the Caribbean basin. In 1904, Roosevelt unilaterally announced that the
United States would serve as the "policeman" of the region. That policy became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine. Where Monroe's policy had expressed a general U.S. opposition to European interference in Latin America, Roosevelt was
now declaring a U.S. right to regulate internal affairs in the nations of the region.
Under the new policy, in 1905, U.S. officials took over internal revenue and debt management in the Dominican Republic; they did the
same in Nicaragua in 1911 and Haiti in 1916. In support of those efforts, U.S. troops were stationed in the Dominican Republic from
1916 to 1924, in Nicaragua from 1909 to 1910 and again from 1912 to 1925, and in Haiti from 1915 to 1934.
That new role for the United States was not universally accepted at home. Although most welcomed the expanded commercial
opportunity it offered, many worried about the European-style imperialism it seemed to represent—and especially about the indigenous
resistance it would inevitably engender. President Woodrow Wilson demonstrated that ambivalence in his policy toward Latin America.
Although he supported the economic development behind the new imperialism, he believed that it should be fostered by the principles
of national self-determination on which the United States was founded. Almost as soon as Wilson took office in 1913, however, his
commitment to those principles was tested in Mexico.
Mexico, which gained its independence from Spain in the 1820s and lost a significant portion of its northern territories to the United
States in the Mexican-American War in the 1840s, suffered through yet another period of revolutionary upheaval beginning in 1910.
The dictatorial government of Porfirio Díaz fell in a coup led by Francisco Madero, who promised democratic reform and
constitutionalism. His experiment in democracy ended with his murder in February 1913. The new government, headed by Gen.
Victoriano Huerta, quickly received diplomatic recognition from most of the major powers, but Wilson's new administration in
Washington refused to follow suit. To Wilson, Huerta was a murderer who would place Mexico back under absolutist rule, and the
president threatened to remove Huerta by force. Ironically, Wilson took that stance despite the opposition of U.S. commercial interests,
who believed that Huerta would bring stability to Mexico.
Wilson favored the opposition forces led by Venustiano Carranza's Constitutionalist movement, which held portions of northern Mexico.
Although Carranza himself refused to accept direct U.S. aid, Wilson sent in U.S. troops to occupy the port of Vera Cruz in April 1914.
By August, Carranza was able to defeat Huerta, but that brought neither stability nor friendly relations with the United States. In 1916,
Carranza was again being challenged in the north, this time by his own former general Pancho Villa. Villa was stirring up unrest near
the U.S. border and even made an incursion across the border to attack a town in New Mexico. That prompted Wilson to send Gen.
John J. Pershing into Mexico in pursuit of Villa, and his troops clashed with Mexican regular forces but had no luck finding the Mexican
revolutionary. Pershing's wild goose chase brought the two nations to the brink of war, until Wilson finally recalled Pershing in early
1917. Washington officially recognized Carranza's government later that year.
America's ambivalent feelings about isolationism and internationalism, both fueled by conflicting elements of idealism and economic
self-interest, continued during the Roaring Twenties. As the Great Depression gripped the nation in the 1930s, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt steered the United States toward nonintervention in Latin America in the so-called Good Neighbor Policy in 1933. In
December that year, his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, renounced American armed intervention in other Western Hemisphere nations
when he proclaimed at a Pan-American Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay that "no state has the right to intervene in the internal or
external affairs of another." That declaration was followed a few months later by the symbolic repeal of the Platt Amendment.
Discussion Questions:
1.
Why did the United States aggressively seek to expand its involvement in Central America at the turn of the 20th century?
2.
What was the Monroe Doctrine? How did it influence U.S. involvement in Central America in the early 20th century?
3.
What controversial event led to the Spanish-American War? Was the United States justified in starting the war?
4.
How did the outcome of the Spanish-American war affect U.S. involvement in Central America?
5.
What was Colombia's involvement in Panama in the early 20th century? How did the United States interfere in that relationship?
6.
How did the United States react to the Mexican Revolution of 1910? What incident prompted President Wilson to send a military
expedition into Mexico?
7.
Did the United States cease intervening in Latin American affairs after the announcement of the Good Neighbor Policy? Do you
think that policy remains in effect today?
8.
Do you think the United States should be more isolationist or more internationalist? Do you think it should ever interfere in the
governments of other nations? Why or why not?