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The "Good Neighbor Policy" in U.S. Politics and Governance

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Richard Cándida Smith January 2023

[email protected]

THE “GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY”

IN U.S. POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE

At the beginning of the 1930s, two successive U.S. presidents, Herbert Hoover

(1929-1933) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945), determined that dollar diplomacy and

military intervention were failed policies undermining the otherwise successful growth of the

Pan American Union. Both declared their intention for the United States to resume the role of

the “good neighbor.” The stock market crash of October 1929 and the subsequent worldwide

economic disaster, the “American Depression” as it was known outside the United States,

derailed Hoover’s effort to improve U.S. relations with Latin America, but Roosevelt declared as

he took office as president that the “Good Neighbor Policy” was one of his highest priorities.

This chapter examines three issues central to the Good Neighbor Policy as a topic for historians

of the United States: (1) the problems in inter-American relations that required official

declarations of an intent to be a “good neighbor”; (2) the features of the Good Neighbor Policy

that distinguished Roosevelt’s approach; (3) the internal political disputes surrounding the Good

Neighbor Policy, disputes that eventually made the policy unsustainable.

The Good Neighbor Policy as pledge of “non-intervention”

In his inaugural address of March 4, 1933, 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—the
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neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a

world of neighbors.”1 The phrasing presents universal platitudes regarding relations with all

countries. Not a single word in Roosevelt’s address was specific to, or even directly mentioned

inter-American relations. The Office of the Historian of the U.S. Department of State likewise

defines the Good Neighbor Policy as a commitment to end intervention without reference to

geography and quotes a later address Roosevelt delivered in December 1933 to identify the

salient feature of his approach: “The definite policy of the United States from now on is one

opposed to armed intervention.”2 When Roosevelt became president the occupations of

Nicaragua (1912-1933) and Haiti (1915-1934) had long been notorious examples of U.S. armed

intervention, but the occupation of the Dominican Republic (1915-1924), and multiple

interventions over the previous three decades in Cuba (1898-1902, 1906-1908, 1917-1922),

Honduras (1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924, 1925), and Mexico (1914, 1916-1917) poisoned

U.S. relations with all other American republics. Roosevelt, like Hoover before him, was

convinced that a declaration pledging a policy of “non-intervention” had become vital to

maintaining U.S. dominance in the western hemisphere.

The phrase “good neighbor” had long been a commonplace in U.S. political rhetoric.

When Henry Clay, Secretary of State from 1825 to 1829, spoke of the newly independent nations

of the western hemisphere living together as good neighbors, his phrase assumed that republics

naturally seek cooperation while dynastic regimes generate imperial competition and a

continuous state of warfare. In the 1860s, the U.S. press described military and financial aid to

the forces of Benito Juárez fighting the French occupation of Mexico as the necessary

obligations of a good neighbor who rejoices in the successes of their friends and helps them get
 3 of 31

through their troubles. In 1881, in the invitation inviting the sovereign states of the western

hemisphere to participate in a pan-American conference to be held in Washington, Secretary of

State James G. Blaine stated, “By enlisting good will and promoting cooperation, the states of

the western hemisphere could actively reject war and settle their disagreements as ‘good

neighbors.’”3

I view the term “good neighbor” as, to use Reinhart Koselleck’s terminology, a “horizon

of expectation” within which the interplay of hopes and fears shaped discussions of policy

options and preparations for action.4 A horizon of expectation is about social relationships and

how to manage them. It motivates a repertoire of responses to the ups and downs of living and

working with others. A horizon of expectation shapes assumptions about what others will do,

while suggesting a range of situation-specific reactions to perform in return. To the degree that

politics is a zone of chaos with perpetually conflicting and often unpredictable forces at play, the

worldview inherent to a horizon of expectations may be the most stable element in a given

historical situation because it provides keywords, protocols, and routines to which busy people

can turn when uncertain about what to do next. The “horizon of expectation” makes visible tacit

assumptions and ambitions motivating policies.

The idea of the “good neighbor” appeared regularly in the speeches and publications of

Elihu Root, Secretary of State from 1904 to 1909 and chief architect of the Pan American Union.

While Root used the term in relation to inter-American relations, the phrase appears more

frequently in discussions of political and economic developments purely internal to the United

States. In Root’s perspective, the historic project of the United States was to put citizens whose

disparate interests were often in conflict into institutional structures whose basic operations
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trained them to be “good neighbors” with each other. From this perspective, the Pan American

Union (PAU) necessarily had a “civilizing mission,” but Root conceived the PAU’s activities as a

shared responsibility that complemented the civilizing mission that each national government,

the United States included, had undertaken to “improve” their countries by pursuing, to use Elihu

Root’s words, “peace and righteousness as the basis for wealth and prosperity, in place of the

policy of force, of plunder, of conquest, as the means of acquiring wealth.”5 Prior to Franklin

Roosevelt, no U.S. leaders had ever advocated a policy of being “good neighbors.” International

cooperation and peaceful resolution of differences were taken for granted as obviously positive

pieties. National leaders and their publics would necessarily have differing opinions about how

best to achieve desired ends. At the same time, of course, the hope to live as “good neighbors”

necessarily provokes constant anxieties about bad neighbors and what to do about them.

Countries failing to operate “reasonably” needed to be returned to a state of good governance—

as defined by U.S. leaders. This had been the rationale for the 1904 “corollary” to the Monroe

Doctrine whereby Theodore Roosevelt asserted a right for the United States to intervene in the

internal disputes of other American countries if necessary to restore “administrative and fiscal

order.”

With the result that in the rst decades of the twentieth century, as Pan American Union

programs grew in size and complexity, the United States simultaneously became a particularly

oppressive neighbor, using its military and economic power to intervene in multiple countries.

Military occupations were costly however and proved ineffective by every possible measure.

They were unpopular inside the United States as well as across Latin America. In 1928, Franklin

Roosevelt published an article in the influential journal Foreign Affairs in which he outlined the
fi
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foreign policy objectives of a future Democratic Party administration. He argued that U.S.

interests in every part of the world required a credible pledge of non-intervention.6 Roosevelt’s

convictions that interventions undermined broader U.S. foreign policy goals were shared by

others, including Republicans Elihu Root, at the time serving as president of the Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace, and Herbert Hoover, a retired mining executive who was

Secretary of Commerce before being elected president of the United States in 1928. One of

Hoover’s first acts after his election was to tour Latin American capitals, where at each stop, he

publicly pledged that the United States would be a “good neighbor” and no longer intervene in

the internal affairs of other countries.7 In a four-point program for improving inter-American

relations, Hoover renounced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine; directed embassies

and consulates that U.S. diplomatic personnel were no longer to give priority to assisting U.S.

enterprises with their commercial activities in Latin America; pledged to renegotiate the U.S.

treaty with Cuba and repeal the Platt Amendment, which restricted Cuba from entering into

treaties with other nations and conceded the United States the right to intervene in Cuban

political affairs; and promised that as soon as the political parties of Haiti and Nicaragua elected

civilian governments, he would transfer governing authority to those governments and withdraw

all U.S. military personnel.

Despite the priority Hoover initially gave to pan-Americanism, the deepening global

depression and a 25 percent unemployment rate in the United States became his most urgent

problems. The passage of a restrictive tariff bill in 1930, intended to stimulate domestic

production by drastically reducing foreign trade, was particularly devastating for the economies

of Latin America, as congressional leaders ignored Hoover’s urgent pleas to exempt Canada and
 6 of 31

the member states of the Pan American Union. As a result, inter-American relations, already

contentious, grew worse during Hoover’s administration. Franklin Roosevelt began his

administration determined to complete the reform of U.S. policy in the western hemisphere that

Hoover had started. He reaffirmed Hoover’s four major goals and achieved all of them in the

first two years of his presidency. From the perspective of Latin American leaders, Roosevelt’s

executive orders exempting member states of the Pan American Union from most tariff

restrictions were equally important steps in improving inter-American relations. With the

passage of the Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934, Roosevelt’s preferential treatment for PAU

countries was consolidated and expanded. The legislation, justified as a measure to increase

employment within the United States, authorized the president to reduce or eliminate tariffs on

products from countries that reduced tariffs on U.S. products or offered equivalent concessions.

Roosevelt’s focus on reopening trade and investment alleviated the economic disasters of the

early 1930s that plagued every country in the PAU, reinforced the good will he had earned from

ending the occupations of Haiti and Nicaragua, and, not incidentally given that European

countries continued to restrict access to their markets, increased U.S. share of trade and

investment in each and every country.

Roosevelt understood that U.S. interventions across the Caribbean basin symbolized but

did not exhaust the problem in the U.S. relationship with other PAU countries. The most

significant irritant in inter-American relations had long been the turmoil that the transition to

closer involvement with the U.S. economy generated. Perhaps because of his faith that market

forces eventually correct all injustices, Hoover was unable to tackle the deeper problems that

frustrated U.S. plans for integration of the western hemisphere into a political, economic, and
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military alliance. Franklin Roosevelt had a better grasp of the relation between economic and

political problems. The Reciprocal Trade Act gave him the tools to negotiate with other

countries to find solutions to the unique difficulties each nation had with the United States. The

Good Neighbor Policy, despite its official focus on foreign military interventions, developed into

an integral part of New Deal economic planning and his administration’s agenda for correcting

the inequities and instabilities in U.S. society that the Great Depression had revealed.

What was distinctive about the Good Neighbor Policy?

Most historians of U.S. foreign relations have agreed that the Latin American policies of

Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt had many more continuities than differences. At the same time,

the connection between the New Deal and Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy was obvious to

observers in the 1930s and 1940s. For those who supported the New Deal, Roosevelt’s Good

Neighbor Policy offered a model for a restructured system of liberal, market-based global

governance, such as took shape at the end of World War II. The earliest studies of Roosevelt’s

inter-American policies stressed their success as a “democratization” of foreign policy.8 An

educational pamphlet that well-known Latin Americanist Lewis Hanke produced for the

American Historical Association started with the vital question of whether intervention or

cooperation more truly characterized U.S. foreign policy, as if the two were necessarily mutually

exclusive. His argument fit wartime ideological imperatives of building an international

coalition to fight Germany and Japan. He concluded that the initial U.S. conception of pan-

Americanism had introduced a new standard of cooperation into international affairs, which

previously had been organized around imperial rivalries and recurrent subordination of smaller

polities to the demands of larger powers. Given its novelty, cooperation proved difficult to
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maintain in practice. The Good Neighbor Policy was a necessary corrective that resumed a

fragile and still uncertain experiment, the success of which was imperative for lasting world

peace.

Hanke’s position predicted the focus of many studies of the Good Neighbor Policy

appearing after World War II. With the Cold War redefining the management of international

conflict, many postwar analyses of the Good Neighbor Policy examined inter-American relations

to gain better understanding of how economic, political, and “security” matters were linked.9

Even the many defenses of the Good Neighbor Policy conceded that the U.S. government had

failed in the goal of building a permanent inter-American alliance as the anchor of the postwar

international system. The explanations of failure, indeed even the basic definition of what had

failed, varied widely. The question of whether U.S. leaders had ever truly renounced

intervention reemerged, in response to the influential arguments of William Appleman Williams

and Gabriel Kolko that U.S. foreign policy was fundamentally imperialistic.10

A parallel but distinct question was determining the relation of corporate and state

interests in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. Bryce Wood’s book The Making of the Good

Neighbor Policy (1961) argued that pan-Americanism initially focused on increasing commercial

exchange. Cultural exchange grew into an increasingly important part of the project, particularly

after 1915, as educational institutions and other elements from civil society became involved in

the PAU. From 1889 to 1929, the U.S. government primarily played a minor coordinating role

for U.S. citizens interested in promoting greater inter-American activity. The government spent

minimal amounts of money on pan-American activities, with U.S. philanthropies providing more

money for PAU projects than all the member state governments together. Bryce associated the
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“Good Neighbor Policy” with both the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, which together, he

claimed expressed in the foreign policy arena the emergence of the U.S. national state as an

autonomous, self-determining social force. During these two administrations, the U.S. national

government came to understand itself as the guardian of “national interest” rather than of the

diverse private interests U.S. citizens pursued. The New Deal and Roosevelt’s formulation of the

Good Neighbor Policy recognized, indeed took for granted, the contradictory nature of private

interest. Because the citizens are seldom if ever being able to agree on any question, a robust

administrative state serves a unified nation by providing practical working definitions of the

common good. The New Deal established the “common good” governing domestic policy, the

Good Neighbor Policy for foreign policy. For this reason, the Good Neighbor Policy, although

grounded in inter-American relations, had to be stated in universal terms; it provided the starting

point for all U.S. international relations. Private interests resented the curtailing of powers and

privileges Roosevelt’s innovations required. The most important U.S. businesses had grown in

size to be world powers stronger than all but a handful of nations. Thebreadth of their resources

threatened democratic institutions, thus they needed to be trained to acquiesce to state

determination of national interest. In exchange, businesses would enjoy increased profits from

the opportunities state policy opened for them. In terms of domestic policy, the New Deal

articulated a revolutionary change in national governance by making government regulation a

structural condition for all personal and private activities, rather than a set of ad hoc tactical

solutions to particular problems. In terms of foreign policy, the transformation involved an even

more radical break with tradition. Although foreign policy, in Bryce’s opinion, always had taken

security issues into account, after the U.S. Civil War U.S. diplomats were primarily dedicated to
 10 of 31

assisting the international operations of U.S. business interests, with federal officials seldom

questioning specific goals set by the individuals seeking new markets or investment

opportunities. Study of the Good Neighbor Policy was thus necessary to understand the process

between 1930 to 1945 by which U.S. officials came to take charge of aspects of international

relations previously handled primarily by businesses and civil society.11

In the 1930s, leaders of the other American states had a more basic question: what did

Roosevelt’s apparent pledge of “non-intervention” actually mean in practice. The first major test

came in September 1933, six months after Roosevelt became president, when a revolutionary

movement in Cuba overthrew the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. U.S. property owners

pressed Roosevelt to invoke the Platt Amendment and send in U.S. military forces to protect

their properties. Roosevelt rejected that request, but as Sumner Welles, assistant secretary of

state for Latin American affairs, quipped, no one ever intended that the pledge of “non-

intervention” should ever stand in the way of a little “interference.” In Cuba, where the

possibility of another U.S. military occupation weighed on everyone, U.S. diplomats

manoeuvered people they trusted into positions of authority in the new government to replace

those they suspected of being so anti-Yanqui they were not ready to sit down and negotiate

differences. In the Roosevelt administration, availability to making a deal quickly became the

litmus test for the Latin American leaders U.S. officials trusted and were willing to help. In the

aftermath of the revolution of 1933, both the U.S. and the new Cuban government needed to

claim that relations between the two countries were being made fair and equal. The two parties

quickly negotiated a new treaty that annulled the odious Platt Amendment.12

The second and considerably more significant test of U.S. commitment to non-
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intervention came in 1938 when President Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico nationalized the

petroleum industry. Roosevelt acknowledged Mexico’s right to nationalize whatever industry it

chose, but asked for fair compensation for U.S. citizens who lost their property. To assure that

the request for compensation be taken seriously, the United States blocked imports of petroleum

from Mexico until the two countries reached a framework for negotiation. As the United States

at the time was the largest oil producer in the world and imported very little in the way of

petroleum products, the step was more symbolic than punitive. The U.S. government agreed

with the Mexican government that the valuations U.S. oil companies claimed were egregiously

inflated. Prolonged negotiations concluded in 1943 with U.S. oil companies receiving 42 cents

for every dollar they claimed they had lost. British oil companies, long the dominant force in

Mexico’s petroleum industry, received not a single penny, for the British government refused

negotiations and attempted to organized an international boycott of Mexican goods, a foolish

policy in the absence of U.S. support.13

The Roosevelt administration also decided not to protest military coups overthrowing the

newly elected civilian governments of Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. The

administration disapproved of these developments and, to show its displeasure with the Somoza

and Trujillo regimes, reduced assistance to both countries. As the likelihood of a new world war

increased and security concerns took greater priority, assistance increased in an effort to make

sure neither dictator was tempted to turn to Germany.14 U.S. policy makers had no intention of

returning as occupiers in order to defend an abstract principle of liberal democracy. The

proponents of the Good Neighbor Policy came to accept that in some countries, perhaps in many

countries, dictatorship was preferable to either “disorder” or U.S. occupation. Dictatorship given
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contending forces within a country might from the perspective of a U.S. preference for “no

surprises” and a relatively stable negotiating partner be the best possible governance available.

Roosevelt’s approach required officials in his administration to listen more attentively to

their counterparts in other American countries, as well as to elites whose attitudes towards the

United States would shape longterm relations; to develop a better understanding of problems,

priorities, and perspectives as seen by a country’s leading citizens; and then to use this

information to explore deals that might be beneficial to the political interests of everyone

involved. Democracy remained an ideal that U.S. leaders invoked rhetorically. The Roosevelt

administration preferred to work with duly elected leaders like Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico or

Pedro Aguirre Cerda in Chile, but found President Getúlio Vargas of Brazil a dictator who was

ready to negotiate, often making difficult demands because Vargas was a “responsible” dictator

with recognizable constituencies he had to satisfy. Nationalism was acceptable and indeed

praise-worthy, as long as no competing foreign powers received “preferential” (or even equal)

treatment.

U.S. leaders took it for granted that they always had something of value they could

exchange with foreign leaders for something U.S. leaders wanted. The distinction between U.S.

policy to Brazil and Argentina in the late 1930s and early 1940s is instructive, given that both

governments were nationalistic and authoritarian. Washington decided that Argentina’s leaders

were perversely resistant to compromise and deal-making.15 As a result, U.S. attitudes towards

Argentina were generally hostile and punitive. During the war, for example, the U.S.

government frequently refused to approve normal commercial export of many U.S. products to

Argentina on the grounds that they were needed elsewhere for the war effort.16 Vargas, on the
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other hand, was a man U.S. leaders could work with, and U.S. leaders strove to respect Brazilian

demands while providing funding for key Brazilian development goals, such as the Volta

Redonda project.17 Products refused to Argentina were regularly approved for shipment to

Brazil. U.S. public officials, particularly those on the ground in Brazil, were under instruction

from Washington that they were to avoid irritating their Brazilian counterparts, while U.S.

officials in Argentina were publicly critical of many decisions that the Argentinean government

made, even if usually staying within the terms of conventional diplomatic language. Mexico

received preferential treatment comparable to Brazil. Support given to PEMEX to stabilize and

upgrade Mexican petroleum production after nationalization proved important for U.S.-Mexico

collaboration during World War II satisfying U.S. expectations. Mexican labor was vital for U.S.

agricultural production. To maintain the “Bracero” agreement that managed a continuous flow

of temporary workers from Mexico into the United States, U.S. officials did not object to

restrictions the Mexican government placed on the operations of the agricultural labor program

in Texas after Mexican officials determined that police and courts in the state routinely

mistreated Mexican citizens.18

A process emphasizing flexibility and negotiation was never seamless. Not all U.S.

agencies had leaders with the requisite patience. Officials were often prickly about the

institutional autonomy of their organizations, believing that as professionals they had a better

grasp of what was happening on the ground than politicians. The U.S. military usually resisted

changing their policies to comply with the deals the White House and the State Department had

negotiated. They strongly opposed Brazilian and Mexican naval forces taking the lead in

patrolling the oceans off their national coastlines. The U.S. Army did not want Brazilian army
 14 of 31

units participating in the Italian campaign or the Mexican air force participating in the

Philippines campaigns, claiming their involvement would distract U.S. forces and slow down the

offensives. President Roosevelt personally overrode his military advisers, who by the end of the

war agreed that Mexican and Brazilian military forces had fought with distinction and their

participation freed up U.S. forces for other tasks. Relations with Mexico and Brazil were

strategically important and in general U.S. officials were determined to resolve problems rather

than insist on compliance with U.S. preferences.

In other countries, for a variety of reasons, U.S. officials at times decided against

supporting an allied leader’s requests.19 Often U.S. domestic political considerations limited

what Roosevelt’s officials were able offer their American partners. The association of sugar

growers in the United States strongly opposed all agreements that would allow foreign-produced

sugar to enter the U.S. market more easily. Tobacco interests opposed agreements making it

easier to import cigarettes and other tobacco products. Almost any trade agreement had potential

opponents as well as beneficiaries within the United States. As in the United States, many Latin

American leaders had to deal with the complications of shifting political alliances. After the

death of Aguirre Cerda, U.S. relations with Chile turned unexpectedly negative. In 1942, Juan

José Ríos, who succeeded Aguirre Cerda as president of Chile, decided the political situation in

Chile required him to maintain his country’s neutrality rather than declare war on Germany and

Japan. His own political base, the center-left Democratic Alliance, was deeply divided on the

question of Chile’s involvement in the war. Chilean conservatives, many sympathetic to Franco

and Mussolini, were strongly opposed to getting involved in a war that socialists, communists,

and labor activists advocated. Sumner Welles traveled to Chile to see what kind of deal he could
 15 of 31

make. Determining that Ríos was not likely to budge on the issues of most importance for

Roosevelt’s war policy, Welles involved himself in the internal politics of the Democratic

Alliance to strengthen the pro-war forces on the left centered around Gabriel González Videla,

who subsequently became the alliance’s leader and was elected president in 1946. At the same

time Welles applied punitive economic measures to show Ríos and Chile’s business leaders that

failure to find a deal would hurt the Chilean economy. The country remained bitterly divided on

the issue, with pro-neutrality advocates increasingly speaking out against U.S. interference in

Chile’s internal affairs. Nonetheless, the balance inside Chile began to shift and when a German

submarine sank a Chilean ship in the Atlantic, Ríos asked the Chilean National Congress to

declare war on Germany. U.S. assistance to Chile increased, but the process had revealed to

everyone the usually submerged, but nonetheless ever-present coercive aspects of the Good

Neighbor Policy.20

Even when relationships between national governments were excellent, deepening U.S.

involvement in local communities often led to U.S. actors entering into conflict with workers and

their trade unions, government agencies with which companies or the U.S. military had to

interact, as well as local religious and cultural leaders who worried about the lax morals of

visiting North Americans, most of whom were increasingly unattached young men with money

to spend. National leaders worked to resolve the many local conflicts that arose without fail in

every country. In Brazil, U.S. authorities admonished their military personnel and business

contractors to avoid behaviors that might be acceptable in the United States but which Brazilians

found offensive.21 Brazilian authorities, for their part, instructed local administrators and law

enforcement officials to ignore, if necessary to cover up, violations of Brazilian laws by U.S.
 16 of 31

personnel or entities.22 Generally, strategic relations managed on a government-to-government

level were positive, though not without annoyances for both sides. Interactions in local

communities were more complicated, but, given so much depended on the personalities and

interests of people meeting each for the first time, were often friendly as well as fraught.

Fredrick Pike noted that the U.S. approach to Latin America during the Good Neighbor

Policy fit well with the clientelism that characterized social and political relations in many Pan

American Union member states. What from one perspective reads as the mutuality of patron-

client relations, from another perspective might well be understood as “deal-cutting,” the most

basic operation of parliamentary democracy. Rather than either/or, both perspectives were

always at play—in both north and south. There was plenty of clientelism within the United

States (and there still is), and there was plenty of “deal-cutting” in Latin American countries that

helped stabilize governing political coalitions, whether duly elected or not.23

Whether considered as a regime of clientelist or of reciprocal relationships (or some mix

of the two), the Good Neighbor Policy did not change decades-old U.S. strategic objectives for

integrating the countries of the western hemisphere into a U.S.-defined economic zone while

limiting or ejecting European competitors from American markets, particularly German and

British interests. After the Nazi takeover of Germany, German interests were increasingly

identified as ipso facto security threats, whether the proprietors were coffee farmers, running a

local transportation service, or were representatives of I. G. Farben or another large business

prospering from its close ties to the German government. British interests were also targeted

when feasible. For U.S. leaders the most positive outcome of Mexico’s nationalization of

petroleum was the ejection of British oil companies from the country. Given the historic ties of
 17 of 31

British, German, and other European businesses with their Latin American counterparts, the U.S.

policy, even when aligned with the priorities of Latin American governments, was bound to

cause recurrent problems that could be managed only with more deals that might make the U.S.

position more acceptable.

The Good Neighbor Policy as political dividing point

For Roosevelt’s agencies implementing the Good Neighbor Policy, the most difficult-to-

manage problem remained back in the United States. Officials constantly worried that members

of the U.S. Congress would discover something done in the name of the Good Neighbor Policy

that Franklin Roosevelt’s political enemies could use to embarrass and/or harass the

administration. This problem intensified whenever opponents of the New Deal controlled one or

both of the houses of the U.S. Congress (1939-1940, 1943-1944, 1947-1948). Republicans in the

U.S. Congress, often supported by conservative Democrats from the U.S. South, repeatedly

belittled U.S. funding for development programs as wasteful, particularly the very expensive

projects in Brazil. To them it was self-evident that market forces could accomplish the goals of

these programs more effectively as well as more cheaply, that is in those cases where

government planning and market forces concurred in the value of a project. Conservatives

predicted most projects would fail because they were politically motivated rather than grounded

in market-driven needs. Opponents of the New Deal claimed that leftists and idealistic “one-

worlders” who worked in government agencies had, with the Good Neighbor Policy, taken over

pan-Americanism to promote socialism abroad and lay the groundwork for the introduction of

socialism at home.24

U.S. race relations were a particularly touchy issue for the Franklin Roosevelt
 18 of 31

administration. Roosevelt needed the support of southern Democrats in Congress for both his

domestic and international initiatives. Southern Democrats increasingly spoke of pan-

Americanism as a once-noble effort that leftists were using to promote racial equality.25 Before

the Second World War ended, southern Democrats and midwestern Republicans in Congress had

formed an effective alliance that succeeded in cutting back economic aid to Latin America and in

ending cultural exchange programs that they claimed promoted ideas contrary to “basic

American values.” Funding for teaching Spanish in all U.S. primary and secondary schools was

zeroed out of the federal budget, as was funding to have more U.S. high school and university

students spend a year studying abroad, a program that in the 1940s was almost entirely confined

to the western hemisphere.26

This political context made it near impossible for the administration to fulfill promises

made in the course of the war for postwar economic assistance to Latin America. The context

also led to the Roosevelt and Truman administrations increasingly shifting programs and aid

away from the Pan American Union into the newly established United Nations Organization and

global groups like the UNESCO or the World Health Organization. An important result of anti-

New Deal rhetoric increasingly shaping the boundaries of U.S. policies in the western

hemisphere was that security assistance remained the aspect of pan-Americanism around which

there was the least contention within U.S. political institutions. Programs to strengthen military

and police forces, also viewed favorably by most Latin American governments, grew in scope

and ambition, while cultural and economic programs faltered.27

To be opposed to the New Deal inevitably meant being equally contemptuous of the

Good Neighbor Policy. For conservatives and free-market ideologues, opposition to both
 19 of 31

remains a fundamental, even existential stance persisting decades after the end of Second World

War to the present moment. In the 1960s, for example, during debates inside the United States

over President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, Wilhelm Röpke, economist and theorist

of what came to be called “neoliberalism,” attacked Kennedy’s Latin American development

assistance as a replay of the “failed” Good Neighbor Policy, which Röpke asserted had been a

vehicle “by which the ideas and methods of collectivist policy were introduced into the world

economy.”28 From Röpke’s perspective, only the free market liberated to operate on its own

terms could address the developmental and social deficiencies of countries with high levels of

poverty. Government’s sole responsibility should be protecting the security of citizens and their

property. Government-planned development was inevitably waste, but spending on the police

and military might create the conditions allowing free markets to increase productivity,

ultimately leading to a higher standard of living. These ideological claims have been

commonplace in the U.S. Congress since the 1930s and 1940s, when Republican senators and

representatives regularly claimed that the primary purpose of the Good Neighbor Policy was to

impose New Deal socialism on the free-market-loving countries of the Americas.29 Republican

Senator Hugh Butler from Nebraska earned many headlines denouncing the Good Neighbor

Policy as a policy promoting international socialism.30 Butler’s reports to the U.S. Senate argued

that Roosevelt’s policies in Latin America had exacerbated political divisions throughout the

continent and had genuine support only from a fringe group of left intellectuals. During his tours

of Latin America, he met many conservatives with whom he and other Republicans forged

longterm alliances with important implications for which leaders in Latin American countries

U.S. officials came to trust most in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution of 1959.
 20 of 31

For most observers outside the United States, the idea that the Good Neighbor Policy

advanced world socialism instead of U.S. hegemonic interests can only be absurd and therefore

easy to dismiss as sheer ideology. The definition of socialism conservative Republicanisms

advanced (and continue to use) has little to do with Marxism but refers to unresolved debates

going back to the mid-nineteenth century over the relation of capital, government, and civil

society in the development of a bureaucratic regulatory state. In this sense, the Good Neighbor

Policy needs examination as a pivotal development for the emergence of neo-liberalism, as well

as a transitional moment in the expansion of U.S. global power, which was never a coherent or

monolithic process given the contention of distinct sectors within the country for control of the

most important national institutions. Every aspect of the New Deal, including the Good

Neighbor Policy, has long been and remains the subject of vitriolic conservative attacks that have

pushed liberals and some progressives into idealizing programs with complicated histories and

confusing legacies.31

Over the last twenty-five years, historical writing on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt

administration has tried to examine the operations of New Deal programs at the local level and

thus avoid the distortions accompanying polemical attack and defense. Historians have found

that the same program implemented in different locations often worked for irreconcilable goals.

A program that promoted racial equality in one city reinforced stricter separation of the races in

another town, not necessarily far away. Like histories of New Deal domestic programs, post-

Cold War literature on the Good Neighbor Policy has moved towards more indepth investigation

of particular programs of the Good Neighbor Policy.32 Digging more deeply into operations,

despite the risks of getting lost in local detail, has led to better understanding of the many distinct
 21 of 31

situations in which the Good Neighbor Policy played out in the dozens of U.S. government

agencies and hundreds of private organizations at work across twenty countries, each with its

own political, economic, and social complexities. A focus on the important but often abstractly

framed questions such as the relation of cooperation and intervention has given way to studying

how pan-Americanism and the Good Neighbor Policy intersected with the social, cultural, and

economic realities of the diverse communities that Good Neighbor Policy programs engaged.

Pablo Palomino’s recent book The Invention of Latin American Music explores how

scholars, cultural entrepreneurs, and music lovers from across the western hemisphere used the

organizational frameworks and funding that the Pan American Union offered between the two

world wars to document musical traditions in the different Latin American nations. While noting

divergences between the types of music played in each nation as well as similarities and the

distinct ways indigenous, African, and immigrant music intersected with criollo Iberian heritage,

the scholars and musicians Palomino discusses framed a common understanding of Latin

American music that could belong to anyone with a radio, a phonograph player, or a musical

instrument. Such work strengthened americanismo by giving conceptions of shared cultural

identity material expression in the form of hemispheric cultural markets that included but did not

depend upon the United States.33 Eric Rutkow’s The Longest Line on the Map examines another

aspect of Pan American Union activity that relied primarily on civil society in his investigation

of the decades’ long effort of geographers and engineers to develop the Pan American

Highway.34 Both Palomino and Rutkow pay attention to the political and economic interests in

the respective PAU projects they study, but both works emphasize that the men and women

whose contributions the PAU mobilized operated with their own goals, usually pursued with
 22 of 31

fervor and obstinacy. Participants in PAU programs often disagreed with each other, as well as

with the governments and agencies whose funding supported their activities. These studies add

to understanding better the diversity of Pan American civil society collaboration, involving a

wide range of discrete topics needing more study. Business groups met under the auspices of the

PAU, as did police officers, forestry officials, and public health planners. The Pan American

Union fostered meetings that in retrospect seem unlikely but were featured prominently in PAU

publications: feminists discussing the state of women’s rights across the continent; trade

unionists discussing how to better coordinate struggles with companies operating in multiple

countries; leaders from African-descent and indigenous communities debating how to improve

their political, economic, and social positions. These activities began before the Good Neighbor

Policy, but they expanded rapidly during the 1930s as the Roosevelt administration sought to

expand and solidify citizen-to-citizen contact by providing more money and more coordination.

This is a picture that only detailed one-by-one examination of pan-American projects can reveal,

rather than general consideration of what pan-Americanism might have been “as such.” Pan-

Americanism in practice was a diverse set of semi-autonomous activities. Its operations on the

ground were always complicated and contradictory, destabilizing any generalizations one might

make.

Rebecca Herman’s book, Cooperating with the Colossus, examines possibly the single

most costly program of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, the development of air bases across

the continent between 1937 and 1945.35 The development of an integrated air transportation

system linking the twenty-one PAU members had long been an important goal for the U.S.

government, but proved elusive as U.S. business interests were reluctant to invest in a market
 23 of 31

that was relatively small and already dominated by European-owned aviation companies.

Entering the market would be difficult and profitable returns unlikely. In 1937, as the Roosevelt

administration determined that a new world war was inevitable, the building of U.S.-controlled

air bases across the western hemisphere became a top priority. The U.S. government provided

secret funding to a consortium of U.S. businesses under the leadership of Pan American Airways

to develop an ostensibly privately owned continental system of airports. All participants

understood that the airports would be turned into U.S. military bases when war came. The

governments of the host countries eagerly supported the project, but given popular opposition to

any form of U.S. military presence, they required that the project be launched with fanfare as a

pan-American-inspired initiative of private enterprise. In 1942, as most Pan American Union

member states joined the U.S.-led coalition against Germany, the airport system quickly

converted into dozens of military bases housing thousands of U.S. military personnel and

civilians. Herman’s study moves beyond the geopolitical determinations that initiated the project

to focus on the many political, legal, social issues that accompanied the construction and

operations of such a large number of U.S. military bases in countries eager for the investments

but equally determined to protect their national sovereignty. Labor protection laws in Brazil, for

example, on the surface were similar to the legal standards U.S. enterprises followed (or evaded)

in the United States. Given distinct national histories, enforcement practices and procedures

varied from country to country. More generally wherever air fields were located, U.S. business

interests penetrated more deeply into the local economies, found business partners with whom

they could work, and assisted in the strategic project of isolating if not eliminating already

established European businesses, including many English, French, and Dutch firms, each of
 24 of 31

which had their own entrenched local partners. Herman shows how in Brazil, Cuba, and

Panamá, the relationship at the local level was sufficiently uncertain that by the end of the war,

U.S. policy planners recommended turning all new military bases over to the host governments.36

Having replaced Britain as the center of the global system, the leaders of the United

States at the end of World War II had returned to the idea that a power is a power only to the

degree that it is prepared to act unilaterally. The idea of the “good neighbor,” to the degree that it

continued to be rhetorically deployed at ceremonial occasions, lingered as a ghost of a moment

that had ended. Effectively the pledge of non-intervention proferred in the 1930s no longer

bound U.S. leaders, even if negotiating differences remained preferable. In the aftermath of the

1954 coup in Guatemala, Érico Veríssimo, at the time serving as director of cultural affairs at the

Pan American Union, noted that in world history the exercise of raw power was nothing new or

unusual, thus no serious observer of international affairs could ever have been surprised that the

United States might organize and fund a plot to overthrow the government of another country.

The new quality that struck him as radically different from his previous fifteen years of closely

observing the United States as a world power was that U.S. representatives no longer felt any

obligation to be apologetic for their actions. They had tried to negotiate with the leaders of

Guatemala. No deal forthcoming, the United States acted decisively.37 Leaders who resisted

U.S. demands, Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, the CIA overthrew.

U.S. strategic priorities following the coups in Iran and Guatemala destabilized and

devastated every part of the world, as internal political and economic conflicts turned more

dangerous and destructive whenever they became a front in the Cold War. The division within

the United States over the disastrous war in Vietnam returned management of international
 25 of 31

relations to the center of U.S. politics. In the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. support for dictatorships

became a political issue as the U.S. Congress systematically voted to end military and economic

assistance to the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. The Reagan administration tried

to reverse the situation while pursuing war in Central America and buttressing support for the

brutal dictatorships of the southern cone as best it could. Because voters generally opposed

supporting dictators, the Reagan administration had to reverse its initial positions and gave

greater priority to the defense of “human rights.” Even if hypocritical and riddled with

contradictions, the shift played a positive role in the restoration of liberal democratic government

in Argentina and Chile, as well as the eventual dismantling of the apartheid regime in South

Africa. In each case, regimes grounded in brutality expected stronger support from the Reagan

and first Bush administrations than they in fact received. Domestic political considerations

overcame the logic driving a particular approach to global governance. Perhaps all “policies”

that governments enunciate with great fanfare usually in execution transform into a stream of

tactical improvisations, filled with inconsistencies and confusions. This was certainly true of the

Good Neighbor Policy.

 26 of 31

1First Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt, online at The Avalon Project: Documents in Labor,
History, and Diplomacy, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/
20th_century/froos1.asp.
2“Good Neighbor Policy,” Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, online at https://
history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/good-neighbor.
3 Foreign Relations of the United States 1881 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1882), 14.
4 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘“Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation,’” in Reinhart Koselleck,
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), 255–275; on rhetorical expressions of the relation between experience and expectation, see
257–258. Paul Ricœur developed a related conceptual framework, in which a term such as “good
neighbor” when applied to foreign policy operates as a “prefiguration” that generates a variety of textual
or performative configurations, many in competition to determine interpretation of a given situation. See
Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), see Chapter 3 in
particular, “Time and Narrative: Threefold Mimesis,” 52-90. The work of Ricœur and Kosseleck help
make visible how relatively abstract principles can, in given situations, become determinative of action by
offering a template for appropriate response. Ricœur’s analysis is limited to consideration of texts. For
historians, Koselleck’s formulation has the advantage of privileging action, which of course frequently
includes the production of a text or other symbolic expression.
5 Elihu Root, “South American Commerce,” in Elihu Root, Latin America and the United States
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), 277. For a particularly clear example of how the
inability of U.S. citizens to be good neighbors with each other interferes with the United States acting as a
good neighbor on the global stage, see Elihu Root, “The Obligations of the United States as to Panama
Canal Tolls,” in Elihu Root, Addresses on International Subjects (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1916; originally published 1912), 207-240.
6 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Our Foreign Policy: The Democratic View,” Foreign Affairs 6 (July 1928),
573-586. In addition to the interventions in Latin America, the administration of Calvin Coolidge
(1923-1929) had also sent military forces into China.
7For a review of Hoover’s Latin American policies, see Alan McPherson, “Herbert Hoover, Occupation
Withdrawal, and the Good Neighbor Policy,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 44 (2014), 623-639; Paul
Kahan, “Herbert Hoover’s Diplomacy Toward Latin America,” in A Companion to Warren G. Harding,
Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, ed. Katherine A. S. Sibley, (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 484-501;
Alexander Deconde, “Herbert Hoover’s Good Will Tour,” Historian 12 (1950), 167-181.
8 For three classic assessments of the Good Neighbor Policy written from liberal U.S. perspectives during
the Franklin Roosevelt administration see, Graham Stuart, “The Results of the Good Neighbor Policy in
Latin America,” World Affairs 102 (1939), 166-170; Philip Leonard Green, Pan American Progress (New
York: Hastings House, 1942); and an educational pamphlet that the American Historical Association
published in 1945, Lewis Hanke, Is the Good Neighbor Policy a Success [on line at https://
www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/gi-roundtable-series/pamphlets/
em-14-is-the-good-neighbor-policy-a-success-(1945)].
 27 of 31

9 Particularly important contributions include Laurence Duggan, The Americas: The Search for
Hemisphere Security (New York: Henry Holt, 1949); Arthur P. Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea:
Its Rise and Decline (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1954); Donald Dozer, Are We Good
Neighbors? Three Decades of Inter-American Relations, 1930–1960 (Gainesville: University of Florida
Press, 1959); Bryce Wood, The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1961); Samuel G. Inman, Inter-American Conferences, 1826–1954 (Washington: U.S. Department
of State, 1965); Samuel Shapiro, ed., Cultural Factors in Inter-American Relations (Notre Dame, Ind.:
Notre Dame University Press, 1968); David Green, The Containment of Latin America: A History of the
Myths and Realities of the Good Neighbor Policy (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971); Dick Steward,
Trade and Hemisphere: The Good Neighbor Policy and Reciprocal Trade (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1975); Irwin F. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy: United States Policies in Latin
America, 1933–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Jules Benjamin, “The
Framework of U.S. Relations with Latin America in the Twentieth Century: An Interpretive Essay,”
Diplomatic History 11 (1987), 91–112; Lester D. Langley, America and the Americas: The United States
in the Western Hemisphere (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989).
10See in particular, William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland: World
Publishing Co., 1959) and The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and
Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York: Random House, 1969); Gabriel
Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Power and Purpose (Boston: Beacon Press,
1969) and Century of War: Politics, Conflicts, and Society since 1914 (New York: New Press, 1988).
11 Wood, The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy, op. cit. David A. Lake in Power, Protection, and Free
Trade: International Sources of U.S. Commercial Strategy, 1887-1939 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1988) reviews the slow process by which the direction of trade policy shifted from business
associations to the national government. For Lake, Roosevelt’s focus on negotiating reciprocal trade
agreements was the determining shift, with twenty-two agreements signed between 1934 and 1941, ten of
which were made with Latin American nations. The most extensive reciprocal trade agreements were
with the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Brazil, all operative by 1936. These agreements made
trade policy a matter of continuous negotiation between the governments of the nations involved,
subordinating market processes to achieving policy goals that satisfied the political leaders of the
countries signing reciprocal trade agreements (204-212). See also, Paul Varg, “The Economic Side of the
Good Neighbor Policy: The Reciprocal Trade Program and South America,” Pacific Historical Review 45
(1976), 47-12, and Dick Steward, Trade and Hemisphere: The Good Neighbor Policy and Reciprocal
Trade (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975).
12 On U.S. “involvement” in the 1933 Cuban revolution, see Justo Carrillo, Cuba 1933: Students, Yankees,
and Soldiers (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994), Ricardo Adam y Silva, La Gran Mentira 4
Septiembre 1933 (Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, 1986), Enrique Ros, La Revolución de 1933 (Miami:
Ediciones Universal, 2005) and Luis E. Aguilar, Cuba 1933: Prologue to Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1972). Correspondence between Sumner Welles and Cordell Hull while Welles was in
Cuba evaluating the situation has been published in The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, eds.
Aviva Chomsky et al. (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 283-287. One of the ironies of the
situation in Cuba was that Ramon San Martín Grau, a man U.S. officials distrusted in 1933 by 1940 was
the Cuban leader they wanted most to be elected president.
 28 of 31

13 On U.S.-Mexico relations during nationalization of the petroleum industry, see Alan Knight, U.S.-
Mexican Relations, 1910-1940: An Interpretation (La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University
of California, San Diego, 1987), Stephen R. Niblo, War, Diplomacy, and Development: United States-
Mexican Relations, 1938-1945 (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1995); Bianca Torres Ramírez,
Historia de la Revolución Mexicana, 1940-1952: Mexico en la segunda guerra mundial (Mexico City: El
Colegio de Mexico, 1979); Lorenzo Myer, “La institucionalización del nuevo régimen,” in Historia
general de México (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2000), 846-863, and Lorenzo Meyer, “De la
estabilidad al cambio,” ibid., 926-932. The U.S. oil companies operating in Mexico were smaller family-
owned businesses whose limited capital holdings rendered their operations uncompetitive in the more
technologically intensive U.S. petroleum market. The owners of these oil companies, probably never
sympathetic to the goals of the New Deal, felt that the Roosevelt administration had sacrificed their
interests to the benefit of Standard Oil and other oil monopolies. Independent oil producers were to play
an important role in the rightward, neoliberal shift of the Republican Party, a shift that included the firm
conviction that the Good Neighbor Policy had promoted socialism.
14See Andrew Crawley, Somoza and Roosevelt: Good Neighbour Diplomacy in Nicaragua, 1933-1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Eric Paul Roorda, The Dictator Next Door: The Good
Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1945 (Durham NC: Duke
University Press, 1998).
15Even though Argentina negotiated a reciprocal trade agreement with the United States in 1941, in large
part as protection against the economic destablization the Second World War was causing.
16On U.S.-Argentina relations in 1930s and 1940s, see Stanley E. Hilton, “Argentine Neutrality,
September 1939-June 1940: A Re-Examination,” The Americas 22 (1966), 227-257; Michael J. Francis,
The Limits of Hegemony: United States Relations with Argentina and Chile during World War II (Notre
Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977); C. A. MacDonald, “The Politics of Intervention: The
United States and Argentina, 1941-1946,” Journal of Latin American Studies 12 (1980), 365-396; Bryce
Wood, The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 1-144;
Joseph S. Tulchin, Argentina and the United States: A Conflicted Relationship (Boston: Twayne, 1990),
Ronald C. Newman, The “Nazi Menace” in Argentina, 1931-1947 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1992); Gisela Cramer, “Argentine Riddle: The Pinedo Plan of 1940 and the Political Economy of
the Early War Years,” Journal of Latin American Studies 30 (1998), 519-550.

17On the intersection of U.S. and Brazilian policymaking between 1938 and 1945, see Stanley E. Hilton,
“Vargas and Brazilian Economic Development, 1930-1945: A Reappraisal of his Attitude Toward
Industrialization and Planning,” Journal of Economic History 35 (1975), 754-778; Stanley E. Hilton,
“Brazilian Diplomacy and the Washington-Rio de Janeiro ‘Axis’ During the World War II Era,” Hispanic
American Historical Review 59 (1979), 201–231; Gerson Moura, Autonomia na Dependência: A Política
Externa Brasileira de 1935 a 1942 (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1980); Frank D. McCann, The
Brazilian-American Alliance, 1937–1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974); Francisco
Luiz Corsi, Estado Novo: Política Externa e Projeto Nacional (São Paulo: Editora Unesp/Fapesp, 1999).
For a broader analysis of U.S. and Latin American priorities 1937-1945, see R. A. Humphreys, Latin
America and the Second World War (London: Athlone, 1981); David Rock, ed., Latin America in the
1940s: War and Postwar Transitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Gerald K. Haines,
“Under the Eagle’s Wing: The Franklin Roosevelt Administration Forges an American Hemisphere,”
Diplomatic History 1 (1977), 373–388.
 29 of 31

18George W. Grayson, The United States and Mexico: Patterns of Influence (New York: Praeger, 1984),
27-35; Jorge I. Domínguez and Rafael Fernández de Castro, The United States and Mexico: Between
Partnership and Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2001). As is well known, U.S. officials supported
Cárdenas’s consolidation of power and decision making and increased restrictions on popular movements
and labor organizing, a shift towards a more institutionalized, bureaucratic, and business-oriented form of
governance that characterized the administration of Manuel Ávila Camacho. Most historians agree that
this shift grew from internal Mexican political dynamics, see, for example, Alan Knight, “The End of the
Mexican Revolution?: From Cárdenas to Ávila Camacho, 1937-1941,” in Dictablanda: Politics, Work,
and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968, eds. Paul Gillingham and Benjamin Smith (Durham NC: Duke
University Press, 2014), 47-69.
19For the complexity of negotiations with Panamá’s government during the Good Neighbor Policy years,
see Lester D. Langley, “The World Crisis and the Good Neighbor Policy in Panama, 1936-1941,” The
Americas 24 (1967), 137-152.
20 An excellent discussion of U.S. pressure on Chile and its longer-term effects, with a focus on U.S.
objectives can be found in Michael J. Francis, The Limits of Hegemony: United States Relations with
Argentina and Chile During World War II (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). For a
Chilean historical perspective, see Hamish Stewart Stokes, La segunda guerra mundial 1939-1945:
Repercusiones internacionales y consecuencias en Chile (Concepción: Stokes, Valdés Urrutia y García
Valenzuela, 1993).

21 See Rebecca Herman, Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of U.S. Military
Bases in World War II Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). Herman finds similar,
but somewhat less successful efforts in Cuba and Panamá of national authorities attempting to manage
local complaints.
22 Herman found that files for wartime labor complaints had to be sent to Rio de Janeiro, where they were
destroyed. Her research benefitted from the discovery of a government archive in Belem that had kept its
files.
23Fredrick B. Pike, The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and
Nature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 137-162. Pike argues that Latin American leaders
distrusted the bureaucratic apparatuses of the U.S. state but trusted Franklin Roosevelt as a man willing to
be in charge, to act as the harmonizing focus of otherwise conflicting individual demands on society by
dispensing or withholding favors. Roosevelt had an “ability to deal commandingly, even peremptorily,
with others without diminishing their sense of dignidad” (137).

24See, as an example of conservative members of Congress presenting a quasi-historical interpretation of

U.S. expenditures in Brazil and other countries, U.S., Congress, House, Hearings, Appropriations
Committee, National War Agencies Appropriation Bill, 1944 (Washington, D.C., 1945), 250ff.
25U.S. agencies funded academic study of race relations in Latin American countries and helped promote
discussion within the United States of “racial democracy” in Brazil and other countries. See Richard
Cándida Smith, Improvised Continent: Pan-Americanism and Cultural Exchange (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 163-168.

26 Liping Bu, “Educational Exchange and Cultural Diplomacy in the Cold War,” Journal of American
Studies 33 (1999), 393–415; Cándida Smith, Improvised Continent, 169-183. The programs most
immune to political interference had constituencies that conservatives were reluctant to attack—on the
one hand, scholarly, scientific, legal, and commercial associations that brought together businessmen and
professionals with similar interests from across the western hemisphere to work on joint projects; on the
other hand, collaborative inter-American military and security projects.
 30 of 31

27 On U.S. efforts to reform Brazilian labor practices along North American lines, see Eduardo José
Affonso, “Para Norte-Americano Ver: Adidos Trabalhistas e Operários Brasileiros (1943/1952),” Ph.D.
dissertation, University of São Paulo, 2011, 80–132; for a more general discussion of U.S. labor policies
in Latin America between 1940 and 1960, see Robert J. Alexander, “Labor and Inter-American
Relations,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 334 (1961), 41–53. On
increases in police programs, see Martha K. Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin
America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998); and Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta, “Modernizing
Repression: USAID and the Brazilian Police,” Revista Brasileira de História 30 (2010), 235–262.
28Wilhelm Röpke, “Washington’s Economics: A German Scholar Sees Nation Moving into Fiscal
Socialism,” Wall Street Journal, April 1, 1963.
29For a general discussion of congressional opposition to the Good Neighbor Policy, see Claude C. Erb,
“Prelude to Point Four: The Institute of Inter-American Affairs,” Diplomatic History 9 (1985), 249-269.
30 Justus F. Paul, “Senator Hugh Butler and Aid to Latin America, 1943-1944,” South Dakota History 8
(Winter 1977): 34-45. The fullest expression of Butler’s subsequently influential position can be found in
Expenditures and commitments by the United States government in or for Latin America. Report by Hon.
Hugh Butler, relative to expenditures by the United States in or for Latin America and the reply to such
report made by Hon. Kenneth McKellar, together with accompanying papers from the heads of
departments verifying same (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943; available online at
HathiTrust). See also reporting on public debate over Butler’s claims in the New York Times, 27
November 1943, p. 51; 13 December 1943, p. 1; 14 December 1943, p. 18; 20 January 1944, p. 5; 21
January 1944, p. 4. Critics of the Good Neighbor Policy have often been lumped with the isolationists
and pro-German sympathizers within the United States. The situation was more complicated as so-called
most “isolationists” were not opposed to U.S. involvement with the world, but argued that the interests of
businesses and private citizens should direct those involvements rather than state interests. Many, like
Senator Butler opposed alliance with the United Kingdom, which they viewed as a commercial and
financial rival. See Geoffrey S. Smith, “Isolationism, the Devil, and the Advent of the Second World
War: Variations on a Theme,” International History Review 4 (1982), 55-89.
31 See the website “The Living New Deal” (https://livingnewdeal.org/) for an overview of efforts to turn
study and commemoration of the New Deal into a springboard for a contemporary progressive
counterattack on neoliberal policies and ideas. Foreign policy has not yet been a subject treated on the
site. A search for “pan-Americanism” yields no entries, the “Good Neighbor Policy” is also missing.
32 Recent additions to the literature in English on the Good Neighbor Policy include: Richard Cándida
Smith, Improvised Continent, op. cit.; Alexandre Busko Valim, Brazil, the United States, and the Good
Neighbor Policy: The Triumph of Persuasion during World War II (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2019); Tizoc Chávez, “The One Bright Spot”: Presidential Personal Diplomacy and the Good Neighbor
Policy,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 51 (2021), 290-326; Adam Ratzlaff, “Birds of a Feather?: Lessons
on U.S. Cultural Diplomacy from Walt Disney during the Good Neighbor Policy,” International Journal
of Cultural Policy (2022), 1-16. See also, discussed below, Pablo Palomino, The Invention of Latin
American Music, Eric Rutkow, The Longest Line on the Map, and Rebecca Herman, Cooperating with the
Colossus.

33Pablo Palomino, The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2020).
Eric Rutkow, The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the
34
Quest to Link the Americas (New York: Scribner’s, 2019).
35 Herman, Cooperating with the Colossus, op. cit.
 31 of 31

36Conflict undoubtedly was a factor in the decision, but we should be careful not to think solely in terms
of antagonism as the default state. In a report on the closing of U.S. facilities in Recife, Life magazine’s
reporters noted that U.S. officials were concerned with how easily U.S. personnel enjoyed life in Brazil,
with an unusually high number choosing to stay rather than return home (“In Recife, Brazil,” Life 30
April 1945).
37 Erico Veríssimo, Solo de clarineta (Porto Alegre: Editora Globo, 1973), 1:273, 292.

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