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The world at large might perhaps do well to remember the culmination of this imperialistic frenzy in the "amazing proposition" put forward in 1868 by President Johnson in his last message to Congress :

Comprehensive national policy would seem to sanction the acqui-. sition and incorporation into our Federal Union of the several adjacent continental and insular communities as speedily as can be done peacefully. . . . Foreign possession or control of these communities has hitherto hindered the growth and impaired the influence of the United States. The conviction is rapidly gaining ground in the American mind that with the increased facilities for intercommunication between all portions of the earth, the principles of free government, as embraced in our constitution, if faithfully maintained and carried out, would prove of sufficient strength and breadth to comprehend within their sphere and influence the civilized nations of the world.*

Thus early we have the Wilsonian policy foreshadowed, the policy of extending the Monroe Doctrine to all the world. For President Wilson this meant-though he was careful to keep the deduction for home consumption-that the fiat of the United States would be law in all the world, a very dry prospect, and one which the Latin-Americans would have been the last to welcome.

It was the " unjust war" of 1846 which, as Mr. Inman and Mr. Bushnell Hart agree, marked "the dividing line between North and Latin America." In more recent years the expansive policy of the United States threatened to widen this dividing line into a gulf. The Latin-American peoples saw, with growing wrath, the "acquisition without annexation" of Cuba; the annexation of Porto Rico; the armed interventions in San Domingo and Nicaragua and, to cap all, the establishment of North American control over the Isthmus of Panama and its approaches. Terrified by the advancing shadow of the northern colossus, they saw in the Monroe Doctrine no longer a shield of defence against the European Powers, but a camouflage to cover the ambition of the United States to dominate the Americas and a pretext for excluding any outside interference with the realization of this ambition. The Doctrine had become for them a protean monster thing, full of undefined terrors. Its indefiniteness was, and is, indeed, the most terrifying thing about it; for the one thing certain about this "regional understanding" is that nobody has ever understood it.

*Hart, p. 158.

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"Has the so-called Monroe Doctrine been a permanent policy," asks Professor Bushnell Hart," or is it simply a succession of declarations, each serving an immediate purpose? " * Since 1849," he says elsewhere," the number of doctrines is about the same as the number of Secretaries of State." It was the later variations, more especially, that created the most alarm and indignation among Latin-Americans. They resented the claim of President Roosevelt that the Monroe Doctrine laid upon the United States the duty of" policing the Americas"; the implied tutelage offended their pride, and they feared his " Big Stick," even though he invited the more advanced of the “sister Republics to help him wield it. They noted with patriotic misgiving the insidious processes of Secretary Philander Knox's "dollar diplomacy," the beginnings of a systematic policy of financial penetration. They were alarmed, above all, by the new "Wilson Doctrine," as applied against President Huerta of Mexico in 1913. In vain did President Wilson protest the purity of his intentions. Even if his own intentions were pure, they knew that Big Business was the power behind his throne, and that the real objection to Huerta was, not that he had failed to have himself elected by the votes of the people " properly expressed and registered," but that he favoured British as against American oil interests. Besides, they had listened to such protestations before. They remembered that, in 1901, President Roosevelt had declared that the United States did not intend to treat the Monroe Doctrine " in any shape or way as an excuse for aggrandisement at the expense of the Republics of the south"; they remembered also, that it was Roosevelt who, in 1903, staged the coup d'état which gave the canal zone to the United States. They pointed out, somewhat unkindly, that it was only a few weeks before the rape of Panama from Colombia that Secretary Hay, in commenting on the Monroe Doctrine, had said: "I think I may say that our Sister Republics in the south are perfectly convinced of the sincerity of our attitude.

*p. 349. †Ib. p. 241.

"The conviction that Huerta was friendly to British oil interests led to a long drawn-out policy of political intrigue, financial strangulation, moral eloquence, and finally armed intervention, the consistent aim of which was to drive Huerta from Mexican politics." ("Dollar Diplomacy," p. 92.)

We no more want their territory than we covet the mountains in the moon.

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Such was the situation on the eve of the World War, so far as the relations of the United States with Latin-America were concerned. The war was bound to exercise an immense influence on these relations. For five years Latin-America was cut off from intercourse with Europe; the inflow of European capital ceased; few European ships could cross the Atlantic; trade with the Old World was practically at a stand-still. The North Americans were swift to seize their opportunity. The war had brought them an immense accession of wealth, and this, together with the paralysis of all competition, enabled them vigorously to pursue their policy of peaceful penetration. In short, North American shipping, trade and finance replaced those of Europe throughout the South American continent.t

The more intimate contact thus established between North and South America had, according to Mr. Inman, some effect in lessening the bitterness of the feeling against the Yanqui, and this change of heart was for a while encouraged by the lofty ideals proclaimed by President Wilson when the United States entered the war. But Mr. Inman's ten years' residence in Mexico and ten years of travel in other Latin-American countries have left him with no illusions as to the all but insuperable obstacles which stand in the way of the realization of that Pan-American ideal which he has at heart. One of these obstructions he finds in the "wide differences in historical inheritance, religion, language, customs and ideals" between the people of the United States and the

*"La Doctrina de Monroe," by Señor Gorostiaga, in the Economista Argentina, December 6, 1913. The present writer, during a six months' tour through the principal South American States in 1912, was much struck by the bitterness everywhere displayed against the Yanquis and the Monroe Doctrine. (See "The New Monroism," in the EDINBURGH REVIEW for January, 1914, Vol. 219, No. 447.) Something was done to mitigate this feeling, but not much, by Wilson's acceptance of the offer of the ABC Powers to mediate in the Mexican question.

†The authors of " Dollar Diplomacy" give impressive figures to illustrate this process. In 1900, American investments in LatinAmerican countries (other than Mexico) were estimated at $55,000,000. In 1924 the Department of Commerce estimated these investments in all Latin-America at $4,040,000,000.

Latin-Americans, and one object of his book is to try to remove the perennial misunderstandings arising from this cause. But another and even more serious obstacle he finds in North American imperialism, the developments of which he traces.

The war, he points out, by throwing the Latin-Americans back largely on their own resources, aroused in them a new spirit of self-reliance. They resented, both as an interference with their discretion and a peril to their independence, an elaboration of the Monroe Doctrine by President Wilson which implied that the United States would in the future not only oppose European territorial acquisition in the Western Hemisphere, but would also oppose concessions to foreign investors. It was in vain that the President assured them that this policy was dictated by consideration for their own best interests. They knew well enough, whether the President knew it or not, that the policy was really dictated by the powerful American oil interests, and they believed the new "economic Monroe Doctrine" to be a moral pretext for making the exploitation of their resources a monopoly of the United States. They knew by experience the accuracy of the American dictum that " the flag follows the trade," and they saw in North American economic penetration the prelude to the attempt to realize the vision of the 'fifties-the vision of the Stars and Stripes floating over both Americas "from the North Pole to the South." The Monroe Doctrine, in short, came to mean for them, not "America for the Americans," but "America for the North Americans."

The feeling thus evoked has found its most eloquent expression in Señor Urgarte's "Destiny of a Continent," a book which has created no little sensation in the United States. It is an impassioned appeal to the Latin-Americans to unite against the Yanqui peril. The impotence of the Latin peoples of America, as opposed to the mighty Federal Republic of the North, its author urges, has been mainly due to the fact that, though one in race, in speech and in culture, they have been divided into a score of mutually jealous sovereignties. It has been due also to their temperament and traditions, which have inclined them to talk rather than to act, to play the caballero, and leave to foreigners the hard, practical task of developing their illimitable resources; and he adjures them to imitate North American virtues in order the better to resist North

"Dollar Diplomacy," p. 267.

American aggression. "Will the Latin-Americans," he asks in conclusion," be capable of this effort, supported by patriotism, the interests of Europe, and the Latin spirit?"

The reference to the interests of Europe reveals the appearance of a new factor in the problem of the relations of the two Americas : the tendency to call in the Old World to redress the balance of the New. Long before the Great War, Latin-Americans had begun to revolt against the idea of the "isolation of the Americas," implied in the Monroe Doctrine. Influential writers pointed out that at least the South American countries were geographically no more remote from Europe than from the United States, while in every other respect their ties with European peoples of Latin culture were far closer than those with the North Americans. As early as the 'fifties there had been tentative advances towards an alliance with Spain.* In view of the threatening developments of monroismo, the idea of cultivating closer relations with Europe now revived, and the ideal of Pan-Americanism began to be replaced by that of Pan-Latinism.

This, according to Mr. Inman, explains why most of the LatinAmerican republics joined the League of Nations. They believed that the United States had departed from the original purpose of the Monroe Doctrine as a doctrine of defence, and that if the whole world were brought into the agreement, they would be protected not only against European aggression, but against that of the United States. But they entered the League only to find that the United States remained outside. They discovered, too, that a new Article (XXI) had been added to the Covenant excluding "such regional understandings as the Monroe Doctrine" from the purview of the League, by which reservation, as Mr. Inman justly observes, "the old situation was continued and made worse." At the Peace Conference the representatives of the Latin-American States in vain adjured the framers of the Covenant to define what was meant by the Monroe Doctrine; the proud authors preferred to leave this, like so much else in that amazing document, "foggy and obscure." The only thing clear was that the United States was left free to interpret the Doctrine as she pleased, and to pursue her manifest destiny unperturbed. For

*Rippy, p. 40. The Correo de España, in 1854, compared "the colossal invader of the North "to Russia," unrestrained by any balance of power."

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