In his 1933 inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stated: "In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor--the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others." Later that year, he declared, "The definite policy of the United States from now on is one opposed to armed intervention." Why was there a need for Roosevelt to institute the Good Neighbor policy in the Western hemisphere?
McPherson answers this question by looking at the United States' military interventions in Latin America, the longest ever US occupations in the Western hemisphere. In his first book, Alan McPherson examined the roots of anti-Americanism in Latin America during the Cuban Revolution, Panama riots, and US intervention in the Dominican Republic from 1958 to 1966 and delving deeply into the impact of the love-hate ambivalence on US foreign relations. In this new book, he moves backwards in time to explore American occupations of Nicaragua (1912-33), Haiti (1915-34), and the Dominican Republic (1916-24). McPherson proposes not only that opposition to U.S. intervention was more widespread than commonly acknowledged but that anti-imperial movements in the Caribbean basin were primarily responsible for bringing about the end of U.S. occupation, rather than domestic concerns such as the Great Depression or the American public's lack of stamina for overseas imperial ventures. Studying the qualities of the resisters-urban and rural, female and male, peasants and caudillos (local strongmen)-and the US Marines who occupied their countries, McPherson forms nuanced understandings of the movements, as well as the support they received from Mexico, Cuba, France, and the United States-and posits that the strength of the resistance led to the about-face in US foreign policy. He also looks at the massive movements of opposition to occupations within the US, especially after the First World War, highlighting the divisions between expansionists, including the US military and Wall Street, and those who wished to respect the autonomy of small nations, including the NAACP and the State Department.
This broad and nuanced work serves as a much-needed contribution to transnational history, US history, and Latin American history, while shedding historical light on the resistance to US occupations.
