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The Hegemonic Colossus of the North and Its Southern Neighbors
Review by Stephen G. Rabe
*
The Second Century: U.S.-Latin American Relations Since 1889. By Mark T. Gilderhus. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2000. Pp. xvi, 282. $65 cloth, $21.95 paper.)
Gilderhus has prepared a worthy addition to the burgeoning list of textbooks in the field of inter-American relations. In The Second Century, he outlines how, since the late nineteenth century, the United States has established and sought to preserve its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. The author also analyzes how Latin Americans have tried to resist or deflect U.S. power.
In the 1970s and 1980s, college instructors had difficulty finding a suitable textbook on U.S. relations with Latin America. Their choices were limited to nationalist tomes like Samuel Flagg Bemis's, The Latin American Policy of the United States (1943) or J. Lloyd Mecham's A Survey of United States-Latin American Relations (1965). Other scholars judged such works as being arrogant and chauvinistic. Bemis had famously called the repeated U.S. military interventions in the Caribbean as "short-lived benevolent imperialism" or as "imperialism against imperialism" that "was not really bad." If they did not want their students to read such nonsense, instructors could turn to The United States and Latin America (1974) by British historian Gordon Connell-Smith. But Connell-Smith's presentation also lacked balance. In his view, U.S. hemispheric actions could always be characterized as manipulative and exploitative.
In the past decade or so, the health of the textbook market in the field of inter-American relations has taken a remarkable turn for the better. Lester Langley started the recovery with his America and the Americas (1989). Langley, the general editor of a series of volumes on inter-American relations published by the University of Georgia Press, intended his survey to serve as a companion piece to the bilateral studies. Langley and his authors emphasized the cultural features of inter-American relations. In Talons of the Eagle (1996, 2000), Peter H. Smith placed U.S. policies toward Latin America within the context of international relations theory. Lars Schoultz reminded students that U.S. policymakers and citizens have traditionally shown a lack of respect for Latin American ideas, values, and institutions in his Beneath the United States (1998). Schoultz's history covered the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, with only one chapter analyzing the period after the U.S. intervention in Guatemala in 1954. Don Coerver and Linda Hall, two Latin Americanists, have focused on how U.S. diplomatic policies and consumer products have impacted the lives of Latin Americans in their Tangled Destinies (1999). The latest entry in the textbook market is Kyle Longley's concise, straightforward, and useful narrative, In the Eagle's Shadow (2002).
This sudden abundance of riches can probably be explained as the response by authors and publishers to demographic developments and commercial opportunities. The U.S. Census of 2000 reported that Hispanics comprised about 12 percent of the population and predicted that they would easily surpass black Americans and become the largest minority group in the country. The term "Hispanic" is, of course, amorphous and encompasses people of different backgrounds and outlooks. Nonetheless, the number of Hispanics in colleges and universities is rising. These students are naturally interested in finding out about the land and culture of their parents and grandparents. Enrollments in courses on Latin American history and inter-American relations are growing correspondingly.
Teachers of upper-level undergraduate courses on U.S. foreign relations and inter-American relations would do well by their students if they assigned The Second Century by Mark T. Gilderhus. Gilderhus, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Professor of History at Texas Christian University and the past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, has written distinguished studies on U.S. relations with the Mexico of Venustiano Carranza and on the Pan American visions of Woodrow Wilson. His synthesis of inter-American relations stands apart from the other new textbooks. Unlike other authors, he gives scant attention to the first one hundred years of U.S. relations with Latin America, dating the modern age of inter-American relations to the convening by Secretary of State James G. Blaine of the First International American Conference in 1889. Consumed with continental expansion and the issue of slavery, the Americans gave sporadic attention to the region. But Latin America mattered to the robust, industrializing United States. As such, Gilderhus agrees with historians, like Robert Beisner, Walter LaFeber, and Michael Hunt, who see a major shift in the U.S. approach to the world in the late nineteenth century. U.S. policymakers wanted security and access to Latin American markets and decided the best way to reach those goals was to persuade Latin Americans to emulate U.S. political institutions, to adopt U.S. economic modes of development, and to embrace U.S. values. Throughout the twentieth century, Washington's prescription for Latin America's vitality and health has remained constant. Although cloaked in the rhetoric of "Pan Americanism" or the "Western Hemisphere Ideal," such formulas reflected the U.S. drive for hemispheric hegemony.
Throughout his text, Gilderhus takes time to inform students of the various historiographic debates that have erupted in the field of inter-American relations. He points out the obvious disparities in wealth, power, and influence between the United States and Latin America. By the early twentieth century, the United States had "established, if not an empire, something very much like one" (p. 32). Thereafter, it repeatedly tried to persuade Latin Americans to recognize the advantages of U.S. leadership. If persuasion failed, Washington responded with covert interventions and destabilization campaigns like the one launched against Salvador Allende's Chile. Despite this exercise of overwhelming power, the United States has not always succeeded in casting Latin American societies in a North American mold. Gilderhus agrees with historians like Kyle Longley who have argued that Latin Americans have resolutely resisted U.S. power and pursued, with some limited success, their own aspirations. Students will gain a fair appreciation of Latin American nationalism and the dynamic tensions within inter-American relations from The Second Century.
Organizationally, Gilderhus takes a standard approach to his interpretation of inter-American relations, with chapters, for examples, on Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policies, the onset of the Cold War in Latin America, and the impact of the Cuban Revolution. His last chapter, which covers the period since 1979 and focuses on the U.S. mercenary wars in Central America, probably tries to analyze too much material. With the end of the Cold War, issues such as immigration, international debt, trade, NAFTA, "neo-liberal" economic policies, and narcotics trafficking have taken center stage in inter-American relations. Perhaps in a second edition of this worthy textbook, Gilderhus will have a new, concluding chapter that explores these vital post-Cold War issues in detail.
September 24, 2004
Endnotes
Note *: Stephen G. Rabe is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of numerous books and articles in the field of U.S. foreign relations. He is the author of Debating the Kennedy Presidency (with James Giglio). Rabe is currently working on a study on U. S. intervention in British Guiana, 1953-1966. Back