Latin America’s Wilsonian Moment and the Birth of the Good Neighbor Policy, 1916–33

In 1919, the U.S. consul in Santiago de Cuba warned that the Cuban press consistently held up the occupation of the Dominican Republic as evidence of the insincerity of Washington’s professed “high ideals in regard to democracy and the independence of small nations.” As Emily Rosenberg recently argued, the contrast between the Wilson administration’s legalistic rhetoric and its actions in Latin America provoked a “Wilsonian moment” in the Western Hemisphere which has yet to be “researched in any systematic way.” This paper presents just such an analysis. Using newspapers and archival sources from Washington and nearly a dozen Latin American countries, it reframes the region’s Wilsonian moment as a transnational intellectual and social movement spurred by Latin Americans’ rejection of Washington’s self-proclaimed role as the champion of self-determination. Moreover, it finds that the refusal to recognize Washington’s primacy in refashioning the international system succeeded in influencing U.S. foreign policy and contributed to the adoption of the Good Neighbor Policy.

Even as Wilson unveiled his Fourteen Points in 1918, U.S. Marines occupied Nicaragua and Hispaniola, while Panama and Cuba struggled to exercise their sovereignty in the face of U.S. dominance. Thus, unlike the small countries of Europe, America’s neighbors responded to Wilson’s claim to defend the rights of all nations with scorn and disbelief. After 1920, Latin American writers increasingly pointed out the hypocrisy of U.S. rhetoric and redefined the United States as their “natural enemy.” I argue that the popularity and dissemination of this view in the 1920s succeeded in influencing U.S. policy by raising the specter of Latin American cooperation with extra-hemispheric powers to subvert U.S. regional interests. Ultimately, by connecting Latin America’s Wilsonian moment to the Good Neighbor Policy, I hope to provoke a reassessment of U.S. regional hegemony in the early twentieth century.