Living in the United States: a Thanksgiving Message

“But if you’re asking my opinion, I would argue that a social justice approach should be central to medicine and utilized to be central to public health. This could be very simple: the well should take care of the sick.” ~Paul Farmer

It was from Dr. Paul Farmer that I learned that living in the United States meant privilege, not freedom, or prosperity, or any other idealization that our government and ruling corporations tell us believe about living in the USA.   We are privileged to live here because there is so much abundance of food, medicine, durable goods, and consumer goods– not to mention wealth.  We have these things in the United States in abundance because many other nations have next to nothing, especially when compared to our excess.

This is the simple consequence of the utterly un-Christian and immoral system that is called Capitalism.   Capitalism requires winner and losers: the United States has won big time since the end of World War II and a host of nations around the world have lost big time.   That our (i.e. the USA) time for winning is coming a close should not be anything more than a prosaic observation at this point, but I will save that discussion for another time.

The fact of the matter is that living in the United States as an everyday, moderately financially stable US American citizen remains a privileged position in the world.

An Excerpt from  Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder

“Paul’s face grew serious. ‘I think whenever a people has enormous resources, it is easy for them to call themselves democratic.  I think of myself more as a physician than as an American.  Ludamilla [a Haitian co-worker from the book] and I, we belong to the nation of those who care for the sick.  Americans are lazy democrats [not the political party], and it is my belief, as someone who shares the same nation as Ludamilla, I think that the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not among the rich.’  I thought he was done, but he was only pausing for interpreter to catch up. ‘Look, I’m very proud to be an American.  I have many opportunities because I am an American.  I can travel freely throughout the world, I can start projects, that that’s called privilege, not democracy.’”

Be thankful for this privilege on Thanksgiving, but don’t be thankful for democracy that we do not have, i.e. do not extend, to the poor of the world, or even, increasingly, to the poor of our own nation!  Our contentment in the satisfaction of a stable American middle class lifestyle on the backs of millions of the world’s poor is, in my opinion, an affront to Thanksgiving and the teachings of Jesus Christ.

It was, after all, Jesus who said:  34″Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’”

But, as a nation we steadfastly refuse to do it…

…And here is what Jesus has to say about that:  41″Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

And this part, which is actually at the beginning of this passage, is how Jesus tells us nations will be separated :

31″When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. 32All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.”

More and more I am coming to believe when and if there is a judgment such as is described in this passage attributed to Jesus, the United States of America will be among the goats on the left.  I am, therefore, happy to count myself as an ex-patriot and naturalized citizen into the nation described by Dr. Paul Farmer.

If you have ears, hear what I am telling you friends.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Women of Reform: A Review of Four Articles

Out of an initial attempt to look at the history of the Settlement House movement of the early twentieth century, a volume of literature that addressed female reformers of this period presented itself, making the Settlement Houses per se’ almost secondary to the women leaders themselves.  Having defined the topic of interest in this way, four articles were chosen, from a multitude, for this review paper: one from the Journal of Social History, one from Daedalus, which is an interdisciplinary journal covering “arts, sciences, and the humanities, as well as the full range of professions and public life,” one from the Social Service Review, and finally one from American Quarterly. [1] [2] The selection of these four journals serves to illustrate how the study of the female reformers of this period requires an interdisciplinary approach in order to come near to having the most robust understanding of this history.  In other words, it is not enough to provide a verbatim of the life of Jane Addams short of accounting for the complex matrix of social and cultural upheaval that was taking place in the United States during her lifetime as Victorian sensibilities were stressed and gave way under the strain of the Industrial Revolution.  But the selection of these articles also reflects a deliberate attention to the early development of social work as a profession during this time frame coupled with a desire to somehow work in that definition of “social justice,” well known to the 21^st Century but that was in development in the early 20^th century—perhaps in development at Jane Addams’ Hull House, to be more precise.  Thus the inclusion of the article Mary Richmond an Jane Addams: From Moral Certainty to Rational Inquiry in Social Work Practice by Donna L. Franklin.

Both Mary Richmond and Jane Addams have some stake in being attributed with having started the profession of social work as we know it today (Franklin, 505). Both women were born into the Victorian era of the 19^th Century and both women were, as daughters of their age, deeply committed to the Christian tradition.  It would therefore be a mistake to not give some attention to how the Western theological tradition, i.e. Christianity, or rather more specifically Protestantism, shaped the views and behaviors of these early female social reformers— all four articles in this review do precisely that.

It was (and is) the Protestant work ethic that compounded the social problem of poverty that was being exasperated as the United States moved from a primarily rural society to one of urban centers and wage labor (Franklin, 505).   At the same time, the overwhelming Calvinist consensus that the condition of being in poverty suggested a person was “morally reprehensible” was being undermined by a pragmatic alternative which taught that “individuals who lived in poverty were not necessarily morally reprehensible but were influenced by a macrosystem [sic] that affected social functioning” (Franklin, 507).   These conflicting philosophical positions were the cultural soup from where the profession of social work began to emerge, and it was Jane Addams’ Settlement Houses and Mary Richmond Charity Societies (COS) where social work was first done in a scientific, rational way.   Nevertheless, it is well documented that Mary Richmond and Jane Addams did not agree on how work was to be done: the later felt that those who received aid were to blame for their plight and should be encouraged to work toward “self sufficiency” while the former provided aid and studied the social conditions that caused poverty– this debate continues in social work (Franklin, 510).

Additionally, this review might also help to further illuminate possible reasons why it is mainly middle class, or rather bourgeois women, who were the Progressive Era reformers and why, even today, the profession of social work is fielded by around 79% white, middle class women.[3]
Nevertheless, the commonality in wanting to address the problem of suffering among the poor can be understood in terms of how these women accepted the Victorian female role, almost whole cloth.

Jill Conway, in her article entitled Women Reformers and American Culture, 1870-1930 (1971-1972), noted that the stereotype of femininity, as it was expressed in thirties, forties and fifties, differs very little from the image and expectation placed upon Victorian Age women.   And so Jane Hunter’s Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late-Victorian America (1992) is illuminating on this point, which is crucial in understanding how and why female Progressive Era activists worked for social justice in the way that they did.  Hunter argues that the roots of early 20^th Century activism extends back to the Victorian family. She used diary entries from that era in order to better understand what was going on in the minds and hearts of the Victorian girl (Hunter, 51).    The result is a more robust understanding of what was going on in the internal life of girls, or rather their “…discourse of the self,” as Hunter puts it (Hunter, 52).

These diaries reflected the careful presentation of the self that Victorian girls created in the pages of their diaries, which would be read by their parents (Hunter, 54).  They also serve to illustrate well the complexities of how the fading moralism of Calvinism was giving way to Romantic secularism, and how that cultural transition experienced by Victorian girls, and subsequently the lives of Reformers like Jane Addams and Mary Richmond (Hunter, 54-55).  In an early article entitled Jane Addams: An American Heroine (1064), Jill Conway makes a similar observation about her heroine, namely that “they [women activists] had a total belief that a trained and well stocked mind would fit them for new roles in life” (Conway, 1964, 761).  And this was precisely what the diaries were about more than anything: systemizing priorities , even  as the diary writing evolved and some girls used their diaries as a kind of rebellion against the ideal of the “good girl,” passive and by her mother’s side (Hunter, 56).

But diary writing was just one aspect of the lives of bourgeois girls which was part of a number of activities intended to fill up the idle time that their family’s wealth created for them. Some other activities included piano lessons and a formal education (Hunter, 52).   Curious then it is that Mary Richmond was uneducated and Jane Addam’s family was not wealthy enough to send her to the best schools in the East.  Nevertheless, both Jane Addams and Mary Richmond shared what Conway argues as “total belief that a trained and well-stocked mind would fit them for new roles in life” (Conway, 1964, 761).   These new roles in life were part and parcel of their sense of mission, perhaps also of guilt, that because of the blessings of their lives of leisure, they should be giving something back to the world.  As women, the world of business and politics (as least as a direct path) was cut off to them, and so they chose “careers” that were both available to them and also in keeping with the fact that they believed that women were the “custodians of race morality, were exempt from humans passion, and, because of their maternal instincts, were less prone to violence than men” (Conway, 1964, 762).  Franklin echoes this point, adding that “women did not reject the Victorian notion that women should exude self-sacrifice, purity, and spiritual superiority; rather they moved these  qualities our of the home and into the public world of professional work” (Franklin, 511).

First and foremost, the women accepted the ideal that women were more pure and able to do good in greater measure than men.  As mentioned before in part, Franklin noted that the Victorian women was considered to be more pure than the Victorian man and thus more able to nurture and take care of the needs of the poor (Franklin,  510).  Additionally, Conway (1971-1972) pointed out that there was a “specialized feminine perception of social justice” that female reformers made their claim was worker under. This claim  represented a mix of Calvinism, Liberalism, and Pragmatism.

Protestantism, or more precisely Calvinism, dominated the religious life of the bourgeoisie in the United States in the mid to late nineteenth century.  Calvinism taught that hard work, an orderly life, and prosperity were signs that one was one of the elect and destined for an eternal reward; conversly, Calvinism taught lack of such things as money and property, revealed that a person was not of the elect and was destined for eternal punishment (Franklin, 506).   Liberalism is the political philosophy that teaches that individual freedom is the most important of all political goals while Pragmatism is that philosophical position teaches that practical experiences are a vital component of truth.[5] The “specialized feminine” mix of these elements into the female reformer of the turn of the century is perhaps personified best in the person of Jane Addams.  Her success at Hull House is a testament to how she was able to order her life along these philosophical lines without upsetting the social order with respect to the role of women.  But unlike Mary Richmond, Addams was able to look beyond the Calvinist answer about the cause of poverty a gave a first look at how macro systems, alongside individual problems, contribute.

Today women chose the profession of Social Work in the context of many other career choices and opportunities, not with respect so much to their gender but as a privilege of living in a Liberal society– the same privileged Mary Richmond and Jane Addams enjoyed within the context of “happily” owning the Victorian definition of “women.”

In terms of poverty, far more women of every ethic background find themselves in poverty (with their children) than do men.[6] So in a sense, women continue to work for the improvement of their own lives as a gender, just as they did at the turn of the century.

Works Cited
Conway, Jill (1971).Women Reformers adn American Culture, 1870-1930. Journal of Social History. 5, 164-177.

Conway, Jill (1964).Jane Addams: An American Heroine. Daedalus. 93, 761-780.

Frankin, Donna (1986).Mary Richmon and Jane Addams: From Moral Certainty to Rational Inquiry in Social Work Practice. The Social Service Review. 60, 504-525.

Hunter, Jane H. (1992).Inscribing the Self in the Heart of Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late-   Victorian America. American Quarterly. 44, 51-81.

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[1] http://www.amacad.org/publications/daedalus.aspx

[2] Since two of the articles I used were written by the same author I chose to include a fourth for the review paper.

[3] http://www.socialworkers.org/naswprn/surveyTwo/Datagram2.pdf

[4] Working at Townbe Hall in London and her remarkable conversation with Tolstoy.  From the fotenotes in Franklin.

[5] Elizabeth Anderson. Dewey’s Moral Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[6] Starrels, M. E., & And Others. (1994). The Feminization of Poverty in the United States: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Family Factors. Journal of Family Issues, 15(4), 590-607.

Rosen, R. (2006). The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, Revised Edition (Revised.). Penguin (Non-Classics).

“…one can’t build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.” ~Anne Sexton

Professor Emerita of University of California Davis, Ruth Rosen is a uniquely qualified historian to write a history of the American Feminist movement.  Her qualifications stem from the fact the she was something of a “revolutionary” herself, participating in many of the struggles that she writes about and adding her own anecdotes throughout the text, which is coupled with the fact that she is an historian and social commentator of some distinction. As a journalist for publications like The Nation, Rosen has brought her sense of social justice for women to the forefront, and as a historian she has focused on the experiences of poor and working class women– starting with her dissertation, which was about women and prostitution.[1]

Clearly The World Split Open was written with Dr. Rosen’s “historian hat” on, but it is written in a journalistic style that makes it at once entertaining and interesting. Scrupulously referenced, the book’s notes section is nearly one hundred pages and is followed by a robust glossary of important terms, making it also an excellent textbook for women’s history survey courses. Rosen’s references include books, interviews, newspaper articles, and her personal experiences as a comrade participating in the struggle of the women’s movement.

Rosen tells the story, her story, by starting with an annotated chronology that begins in 1848 and ends with the beginning of the story of the modern women’s movement in the 1950s. It is in this first chapter, that Rosen entitled Dawn of Discontent, where one will see the first striking resemblance to Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique. Clearly, Rosen was heavily influenced by the late Friedan and admits that Friedan’s book “had broken the silence and and begun unmasking the reality of women’s lives”  (8). The motif of The Feminist Mystique permeates her history in The World Split Open.

Nevertheless, Rosen does not end with Friedan’s critique.  Instead, she moves the reader past the early days of gender enlightenment to what she terms the Rebirth of Feminism in section two of the book. This reference to “rebirth” emphasizes the fact that women’s movement issues lay somewhat dormant through the fifties and early sixties.  In this section, Rosen begins by laying out the reasons that Liberal Feminism gave way to the Radical Feminist movement.  She argues that, even though women had not yet put a name to many of their concerns (56), the children of the fifties rejected the “patriotic role” of Cold War mother and to take a more strident stance on issues of patriarchy and systems of power through “bohemian adventures, love affairs, marriage, the civil rights movement, antiwar activities, and the New Left Movement with unarticulated fears of replicating the world of their mothers” (58).

The middle part of the book addresses, in part, how women experienced the “conversion” from the trap of The Feminist Mystique into a new female consciousness.  As an example of this, Rosen uses the experiences of Gloria Steinem and others, who were already older and working when they experienced “conversion” (208).   Younger women, Rosen argues, were experiencing the shift in female consciousness in colleges and in small groups, while women of Steinem’s age were experiencing the conversion in “the struggles,” such as the anti-Vietnam War movement, “La Causa” of Cesar Chazev” and press coverage of feminist events, as in the case of Gloria Steinem (209).

Rosen also describes how the conservative Right in the United States responded to the new female activism.  In her retelling of the story of Sagaris, a feminist institute created at Goddard College in the summer of 1974, Rosen points out the fear that was rampant among traditionalists and the Right, i.e.  that ever-present fear of women rejecting their historic roles and finding new political and economic voices (254).  This fear is also illustrated well in Rosen’s discussion of how the FBI infiltrated women’s groups along side such New Left organizations such as the Students for  a Demoncratic Society (SDS), “the Black Panther Party, the Native American Movement, the Yippies and many other protest groups” (240).

The weakness of the book is that it seems at time one sided toward the experiences of the middle class, white woman.  It doesn’t pay nearly enough attention to the history of female minorities caught up in or on the periphery of the movement, although this might be inevitable since work is just starting to be done in this area.  Another weakness of the book as a history is its ideological leaning.  While no person, historian not, can be 100% non-biased; Rosen seems to not even recognize hers.

The strength of the book is its telling of the story of the modern women’s movement in a journalistic style that is at once educational and entertaining.  Her own experiences as an activist in the movement give it the kind of persuasive power that cannot be learned from books– that is, as hearing the story told by person who was there.   Therefore, Rosen’s book is strongly recommended for all students of women’s history who desire to have a deeper understanding of the modern struggle for women’s rights from the perspective of those who struggled.

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[1] http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Rosen/rosen-con0.html

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. W. W. Norton & Company, 1963.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. W. W. Norton & Company, 1963

In this now classic book, author and founder of the National Organization of Women (NOW), the late Betty Friedan, argued that that there was a problem afflicting post-World War II women which had no name. Friedan dubbed this problem The Feminine Mystique and argued that it was a distinctively American philosophy that women started to embrace following the end of the war 1945 and that by 1949, women were reduced to only one definition: “the housewife- mother” (44). Friedan further argued that this philosophy convinced women that their only value was in the fulfillment of “femininity” found in “sexual passivity, male domination and nurturing maternal love.” (43).[1] It was a philosophy that, as Friedan put it, caused “her limitless world to… [shrink]… to the cozy walls of home” (44).

The first chapters of the book are organized to show evidence for The Feminist Mystique in the media, psychology and counseling, education, and in virtually all American institutions of the early sixties. Following the evidence, Friedan included her estimation of how this problem was affecting the individual women living the philosophy. And finally, Friedan laid out for her female readers a bold strategy for emancipation entitled “A New Life Plan for Women” (338).

Looking at this book through the lens of history, one should note that this was a very influential book to the minds of very many women and was acclaimed as an “excellent sociological study.” [2] Nevertheless, it is easy to disagree on this later point because the book is a far cry from what is typically considered an academically rigorous attempt to establish evidence for a unified sociological theory. Instead, Friedan seems to have used a pre-determined Marxist motif of “power and oppression,” which she layered on top of her evidence.

Furthermore, the evidence that was used to support Friedan’s hypotheses is at best qualitative/appeals to authority and at worst anecdotal evidence drawn from her interviews with middle class housewives. These selective interviews, while poignantly describing the pain felt by some women of the era, are hardly evidence that all American women were/are harmed by the philosophy of The Feminist Mystique.

Another major weakness of this book is that is completely ignores the plight of women who are not in the stable, middle class status of the stereotypical housewife. Nowhere is this omission more palatable (or perhaps offensive to the modern reader) than in Chapter 12 where Friedan analogizes The Feminist Mystique to a “comfortable” concentration camp (283). For Friedan, “the problem” for “women” is not food, clothing, shelter and safety—problems faced by poor women—but only an existential problem: self-fulfillment or “sleep walking” in a “comfortable concentration camp,” and obviously a modern, middle class family home is far removed from a concentration camp (282-283).

The strength of the book is its persuasive appeal to majority class women of the early 1960s. Even now, it gives the reader a glimpse of the passion that the progressive, middle class leaders of the 20^th century women’s movement felt coupled with and the pain that many of American’s upper-middle class women experienced as they lived out the role that was assigned to them after 1949. Another strength of the book is the fact Friedan took the time to give a solution to the “problem with no name,”—a solution that she admitted in the Epilogue was difficult, but might be the best part of the book.

The Feminist Mystique should, of course, be read by any student of gender, women’s history or related academic disciplines, and will still be useful as a therapeutic study for some women in our culture. It would seem that remnants of the 1963 social order still remain in the middle class today and for those women who are still afflicted by the “problem that has no name,” reading The Feminist Mystique might have the power to emancipate, or even save.[3] It might also be appropriate to recommend this book to Hispanic and/or African American women whose families are transitioning from the poor or working class but at still are hanging onto the traditional roles of their culture. And finally, as with all classics, The Feminist Mystique speaks to different readers in different ways. It raises relentless human questions about one half of the species—the half that happens to have had no voice for most of recorded history. In this light, one might further suggest that this book should be read by every living person.

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[1] Freeman, Lucy. “’The Feminine Mystique’.” The New York Times 7 Apr 1963.

[2]Reed, Evelyn. International Socialist Review, Vol. 25, No. 1, No. 166, Winter 1964, pp. 24-27; Review of “The Feminine Mystique,” by Betty Friedan, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1963. 410 pp

[3] In my own work with women as a therapist I have recommended The Feminist Mystique to several women who seemed to me to be an anachronism with regard to how their relationships worked at home. But for the most part, the women that I work with are seeking self-fulfillment in their education and would likely see The Feminine Mystique as anarchistic in many ways.

The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America

Dr. Dorothy Sue Cobble brings an important aspect of women’s history to the forefront in The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America. Her expertise in both labor and women’s studies converge in this history of the women of organized labor from about 1930s until about 1960, which she argues is a movement in between the first wave (suffrage)and second wave (modern women’s movement) of American “feminist” activism (7). It was during this period that women entered wage-labor and unions in large numbers. Using source materials found in union newspapers, conference minutes, etc., along with well-documented secondary sources such as monographs on labor and women’s history, Cobble tells the story of this largely forgotten movement of women who worked for social justice for women within the context of the American Labor movement.

Cobble tells this story in eight chapters. Each chapter deals with one aspect of the struggle for women’s rights as wage laborers. The distinction between women’s rights and women’s equality is made, in varying degrees, in each of these chapters, which deal with subjects like wage justice, the concept of the “double day” (i.e. the fact that most wage laboring women work a second job taking care of children in the home), rights, and the whole idea of “equal rights” in the pursuit of social justice for women.

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)
But the “social justice” that Cobble suggests the women of organized labor were working for was fundamentally different than the “social justice” that the women of the modern feminist movement are well-known for promoting. Social justice for the modern feminist movement mean fulls equality with men while it meant, among other things, gender-based labor protection for working-class, unionized woman. Nowhere is this distinction between the two movements illustrated better than the in section that discusses the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in chapter two of the book (60-66). On the one hand labor leaders like Pauline Newman bitterly opposed the ERA because they felt that the ERA would undermine hard-won gender based state labor laws, while feminists like Alice Paul, who had worked tirelessly for women’s suffrage, believed that the ERA was a natural next step in the emancipation of women and “firmly believed that women should enjoy the same freedoms as men, including ‘freedom of contract’ (62). The debate between the two groups essentially boiled down to this controversy over what “freedom of contract” would mean for working class women. Opponents of the ERA in labor felt that the amendment would shift all of the power towards the side of owners of labor and create even greater inequality for women, especially working-class women. Cobble argues that this debate was essentially a struggle between the working class and the elite, quoting and agreeing with historian Carl Brauer who noted that “the debate over the ERA had distinctly class, interest group and ideological overtones, pitting affluent, business-oriented, and politically conservative women against poor, union-oriented and politically liberal women” (61) .

“Double Day”

Another interesting, and distinctively working class aspect of this struggle, is described by Cobble in chapter five, entitled The Politics of the “Double Day” where she argued that women of the labor movement understood that there had to be a fundamental restructuring of the work world in order for there to be “equality” for women in the workplace. “Double day” is a euphemism for the reality that women who work must also care for children and household and part of their traditional role. “Women of leisure,” as leaders within the labor movement described them, didn’t realize that their reduction of the women’s movement to simply full equality with men in the workplace neglected this fact, which still held true in the homes of working-class women . Therefore, a fundamental restructuring of the workplace, as opposed to full equality, was fought for in order to allow for this gender difference: for instance, a 6 hour work day and on-site company day care facilities– the idea being to “combine wage and family life”(122). In other words, the women of labor struggled for a pragmatic politics of reform that advanced women in workplace without questioning her traditional role in the household.

A major strength of Cobble’s book is a focus on the social justice aspects of the labor movement, or rather, how the woman of labor and the mass unionization movements in general, promoted social justice in the workplace for both women and men. She points out that this other women’s movement was about class struggle as (sometimes literally) opposed individualistic goal of full equality championed by “elite” women on the political Right. Another strength is the thorough among of research and documentation used throughout the book coupled with the pictures from the period. Cobble masterfully integrates the story of the struggle of the women of labor with direct quotes from their leaders and anecdotes that make the story entertaining and educational. If the book has a weakness, it is that Cobble at times seems too critical of the feminism that followed the women’s labor movement, or was in political opposition to it as a contemporary.

But despite this minor concern, the book is an interesting and welcomed addition to the historiography of women’s studies. It gives the student of women’s history an insight into segment of gender studies that has been neglected and pigeoned holed as a period when “nothing much was happening worth writing about,” even though nothing further from the truth can be said. On the contrary, it was a period of expansive migration into labor and social movement for women because of the political power which follows organizing.

A Short Essay on Latin America #9

The end of the Cold War marked another transition in US-Latin American relations. Generally speaking, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Latin America was for a long time strictly a battleground for the promotion of the conflicting ideologies.[1] Once the Soviet Union economically collapsed and began to incorporate some principles of Capitalist free trade, the United States was free to view Latin America in a new light and to begin the process of promote free trade and, sometimes, democracy on a hemispheric and global scale.[2] [3]

Robert A. Pastor, in his The Clinton Administration and the Americas: The Postwar Rhythm and Blues, explains that when President Clinton came to power in 1992, the new President had two issues to tackle with regard to Latin America: namely, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the crisis in the nation of Haiti.[4] Haiti, that perpetually abused nation state in the Caribbean[5][6][7], was enduring yet another national crisis. The first “free and fair” popularly elected President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown by the military with the consent of the traditionally ruling oligarchy.[8] This coup took place in 1991, the United States responded, after about 4 years of political wrangling, by an historic UN sponsored occupation of Haiti and the re-instatement of the democratically elected President and democracy itself—“the first time that the United Nations had authorized the use of force for the purpose of restoring a democracy to a member state.”[9] [10]

The second issue that President Clinton had to deal with was NAFTA. The subject of NAFTA is still a controversial one to this day, especially in Border States. The concept behind NAFTA is rather simple: open up the post-Cold War hemisphere to free trade for the purposes of helping underdeveloped nations to grow, goodwill, and lower cost labor for American industry. Since Mexico proposed (Carlos Salinas) was the first nation to become a part of the NAFTA agreement, other nations were excluded for various political reasons.[11] The consequence of this uncertainty about the inclusion of other Latin American nations in NAFTA has been that excluded nations have began to put together their own trade agreements, the most ambitious and notable being the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR), which “links the economic fortunes of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay.” [12]

In the present century the previous two issues, which represent free trade and the spreading of spreading and safeguarding of democracy, seem to represent the United State’s foreign policy hopes for the Western Hemisphere. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc was an economic setback for some Latin American countries (especially Cuba), but the long period of Cold War US indifference to the social and economic condition of their southern neighbors has contributed to many, if not most, of the devastating social problem present in many Latin American States; Haiti being the most extreme example of neglect and exploitation.

Today we hope the United States will continue to promote and enforce the ideals of democracy, liberty, and equity in the Western Hemisphere. In some part of Latin America, perhaps most notably in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, a resurgence of what appears to be the “Old Left” has joined the island nation of Cuba in its continued resistance of US hegemony, even in the face of no other alternative great power. Although Chavez’s policies have brought the country of Venezuela to the brink of a civil war, his popularity among the poor working classes (58% popular vote in 1998) is a lesson that the United States should learn when dealing with Latin America in this post-Cold War century.[13] He knows that Capitalism fails in the underdeveloped nations because the promise of a better life for the common person is differed while the rich elites continue to become enriched. If, therefore, the United States hopes to integrate itself in into the hemisphere as a leader, spreader of democracy, justice and so on, it must promote also promote the cause of Social Justice for every person, as it has so long struggled for itself in its own borders.

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[1] Tulchin, J. S. (1997). Hemispheric Relations in the 21st Century. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 39(1), 33-43.

[2] Dash, R. C. (1998). Globalization: For Whom and for What. Latin American Perspectives, 25(6), 52-54.

[3] Pastor, R. A. (1996). The Clinton Administration and the Americas: The Postwar Rhythm and Blues. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 38(4), 99-128.

[4] Pastor, 100.

[5] Wisner, G. (1995). Review: Abuses of Haiti. Transition, (66), 38-56.

[6] Farmer, P. (2003). The Uses of Haiti, Updated Edition (2nd ed., p. 350). Common Courage Press.

[7] Kidder, T. (2004). Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (p. 336). Random House Trade Paperbacks.

[8] Pastor, 102.

[9] Pastor, 105.

[10]“ Linz and Stephan noted that ‘when a country is part of an international ideological community where democracy is only one of many strongly contested ideologies, the chances of transitioning to and consolidating democracy is substantially less than if the spirit of the times in one where democratic ideologies have no powerful contenders, (1996:74)’” quoted in O’Loughlin, J., Ward, M. D., Lofdahl, C. L., Cohen, J. S., Brown, D. S., Reilly, D., et al. (1998). The Diffusion of Democracy, 1946-1994. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88(4), 545-574.

[11] Pastor, 101.

[12] Skidmore, T. E., & Smith, P. H. (2005). Modern Latin America, Sixth Edition (6th ed., p. 528). Oxford University Press, USA.

[13] Sylvia, R. D., & Danopoulos, C. P. (2003). The Chávez Phenomenon: Political Change in Venezuela. Third World Quarterly, 24(1), 63-76.

A Short Essay on Latin America #8

The independent Caribbean nation of Cuba was a society of tremendous social and economic inequities. Furthermore, as Skidmore and Smith point out: “The government the Cubans got in the 1920s and 1930s was among the most corrupt and brutal of the republic’s history.”[1] What this meant was that the social and economic situation in Cuba was ripe for some kind of reform and remained so until Castro’s revolution. It is interesting to note that sometimes in the literature author’s put forth that economic and social turmoil was “exploited” in Cuba by Castro and his followers in order to bring Communism to the island.[2] [3] While it is true that Castro did “exploit” these issues (in a way) to gain power, the United States, participated in perpetuating an unjust system that created the context. Therefore, those things “exploited” by the Communist were part and parcel of United States foreign policy, making the United States equally culpable for the rise of Communism on the island.
The United States, before and after the occupation of Cuba, has opposed the recognition of Cuban revolutionaries.[4] President McKinley did so in the revolution again Spain and President Eisenhower did so when Castro came to power. On the other hand, the kind of governments that the United States did recognize in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America, were mostly dictatorial, pro-business, capitalist governments that fit into its imperialistic web.[5] The Cuban military officer General Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar was the case in point that Fidel Castro’s government supplanted. Batista fought in the war of Cuban independence and rose through the ranks of government; he was elected president of Cuba in 1940 and peacefully transferred power to his rival once his term. Nevertheless, when Batista ran for president again a decade later and the polls showed him behind, he staged a coup in Cuba and took power. Once in power he suspended constitutional rights and opened the country further to American business interests, and was especially friendly with American organized crime and gambling on the island. The United States government supported Batista, military dictator and mobster, at the expense of the Cuban people and democracy, which contributed directly to the rise of Communism on the island.[6]
Given that corrupt kleptocracies[7] like Batista’s were the only alternative for the working class in Latin America, it is no wonder that the promise of Socialism appealed to them. At that time, Latin America exports mainly primary resources for industry in other countries.[8] What this meant was that Cuba and many other Latin American countries developed a rural proletariat after the Communist model developed in the Chinese revolution under Mao Zedong. The inherent disparities of global Capitalist system coupled with the gross self-serving political policies of the Latin American ruling elite, therefore, made the Communist model quite appealing to many working class Latin Americans.

Furthermore, It did not help the cause of the “democratic” capitalism that American companies like United Fruit exploited their workers and were assisted by the United States government their workers resisted this exploitation.[9] But the exploitation of Latin American workers (and peasant workers everywhere in the “Third World”) is the status quo’ under the world Capitalist system and has been discussed through a Marxist analysis of inequities called Dependency Theory. This theory posits that poor states are poor and rich states become more enriched because of the way the impoverished states are integrated into the world system. The alternative to this Dependency Theory is the free market theories put forth by Capitalist economists. Free market theories posit that impoverished nation will develop and become less impoverished through free and open trade with developed nations. Certainly Dependency Theory was being put forth by Communist parties in Latin America as the root cause of the poverty in their nations. This ideology coupled with the real poverty experienced by the masses contributed further the appeal of Communism in Latin America.
As Communist was somewhat on the rise in Latin America, punctuated by the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba, so was anti-Communist hysteria in Washington. Soon after Fidel Castro came to power, presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy approved the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which failed and likely led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nevertheless, soon the “threat” of worldwide Communism shifted primarily to the East, as the United States got more and more involved in the Vietnam civil war.

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[1] Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, Sixth Edition, 6th ed. (Oxford University Press, USA, 2005).

[2] William Appleman Williams, “Cuba: Issues and Alternatives,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 351 (January 1964): 72-80.

[3] Nelson de Sousa Sampaio, “Latin America and Neutralism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 362 (November 1965): 62-70.

[4] Williams, W. A. (1964). Cuba: Issues and Alternatives. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 351, 72-80.

[5] Tulchin, J. S. (1988). The United States and Latin America in the 1960s. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 30(1), 1-36.

[6] “Batista had always leaned toward the United States. I don’t think we ever had a better friend. It was regrettable, like all South Americans, that he was known-although I had no absolute knowledge of it-to be getting a cut, I think is the word for it, in almost all the, things that were done. But, on the other hand, he was doing an amazing job.”
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/us-cuba/gardner-smith.htm

[7] Lundahl, M. (1989). History as an Obstacle to Change: The Case of Haiti. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 31(1/2), 1-21.

[8] Skidmore, 269.

[9] Posada-Carbo, E. (1998). Fiction as History: The Bananeras and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Journal of Latin American Studies, 30(2), 395-414.

A Short Essay on Latin America #7

By the time of the Great Depression Latin American exports had become a staple of the various component nations’ economies. The consequences of the many links between the economies of Latin America and the economy of the United States was the as the United States suffered, so did the rest of the Western Hemisphere, and the rest of the world for that matter.¹ In turn, The Great Depression was the economic context for the rise of Fascism in Europe, with concurrent reverberations of extreme rightist political ideology in Latin America.²

In her article The Change in the Discourse of US-Latin American Relations from the End of the Second World War to the Beginning of the Cold War (1995), Margarita Lopez-Maya points out that at the end of World War II there were Latin American countries who still held “unacceptably high pro-Nazi tendencies,” most notably Argentina.³ But the inclination towards Fascism began in Latin America at about the same time that Fascism was on the rise in the rest of the world, perhaps due the fact that Latin American, long the colony of a European power, had often subject to European continental politics.⁴ Nevertheless, as pointed out by Stanley G. Payne, in his monograph entitled A History Fascism, fascism surprisingly never took hold in Latin America to the extent that it did in Europe.⁵

The “surprise” of fascism not taking hold is likely due to the aggressive way that the United States economically and politically intervened in Latin American, turning the tide away from the Fascist ideology where it had hegemonic power.⁶ Nevertheless, the Nazis were trying exceedingly hard to establish their presence in Latin America, as noted by Max Paul Friedman in his Private Memory, Public Records, and Contested Terrain: Weighing Oral Testimony in the Deportation of Germans from Latin America during World War II. According to Friedman, “the Nazi party had created a special unit for the recruitment of German expatriates…” [and], “the members of the…[ unit] …did create the impression of having united the German communities of Latin America solidly behind Hitler.”^{7 8}

Despite the Nazi push for power and influence in Latin America, the United States’ implementation of the “Good Neighbor Policy,” which emphasized “helping” Latin America through financial investments as opposed to armed intervention.⁹ What this meant for Latin America is illustrated well by Mora (1998) in the context of how the United States dealt with the nation of Paraguay. Mora argues that “between 1937 and 1945 Washington had employed foreign aid to ‘purchase’ nominal Paraguayan alignment in its power struggle against Germany.¹⁰ Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, therefore, improved Latin American relations and turned the quelled the small tide of rising Fascism in Latin America.

This fact, that Fascism was a quelled “rising tide” in much of Latin America should sufficiently explain why, after World War II, many high ranking Nazi officers found a temporary refuge in the nations of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay at the end of the war. There was a Nazi underground in each of these nations and there was sympathy for Fascism because of many of the same issues that were affecting the rest of the world during the Great Depression, an economic condition that made an extreme right wing philosophy appealing to many.¹¹ There were many enclaves sympathetic to the “cause” of Nazism at the war’s end, which was perhaps the only weakness of US policy in combating Nazism in Latin America.¹²

1 Skidmore, Thomas E. and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, Oxford University Press, 1997.

2 López-Maya, Margarita. “The Change in the Discourse of US-Latin American Relations from the End of the Second World War to the Beginning of the Cold War.” Review of International Political Economy 2.1 (1995): 135-149.

3 Lopez-Maya, 137.

4 Payne, Stanley G. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, [S.l.] Routledge, 2000.

5 Payne, 340.

6 Mora, Frank O. “The Forgotten Relationship: United States-Paraguay Relations, 1937-89.” Journal of Contemporary History 33.3 (1998): 451-473.

7 Friedman, Max Paul. “Private Memory, Public Records, and Contested Terrain: Weighing Oral Testimony in the Deportation of Germans from Latin America during World War II.” The Oral History Review 27.1 (2000): 1-15.

8 Friedman, Max Paul. “Specter of a Nazi Threat: United States-Colombian Relations, 1939-1945.” The Americas 56.4 (2000): 563-589.

9 “The definite policy of the United States from now on is one opposed to armed intervention.” Edgar B. Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs: Volume I, 559-60.

10 Mora, 455.

11 Friedman, Max Paul. Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign Against the Germans of Latin America in World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

12 Fernandez Artucio, Hugo. The Nazi Underground in South America. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc, 1942.

A Short Essay on Latin America #6

As the United States began to expand its economy on the heels of massive industrialization, the banking institutions and corporations at the heart of the growth were looking for new markets to exploit. The most obvious international markets for the United States were to be found in the developing nations of Latin America. Precedent for corporate expansion into developing (i.e. weaker) nations was set by the European powers of France and Great Britain, who had experienced tremendous growth just before at the beginning of the early industrial period (1830-1870). An early twentieth century article written by Frederic C. Howe explained this “precedent” as “financial imperialism,” that was “not to be confused with international trade of international banking. For trade is a function of the commercial rather than the banking classes.”[1] Howe further elucidates that this “financial imperialism” is:

“the loaning of money to weak nations or to revolutionary governments; in the building of railroads, canals and public-utility enterprises; and in development of mines, plantations and other resources. Only incidentally does trade of commerce enter into the program of imperialistic finance.”[2]

Howe’s definition can be viewed as a summary of the whole enterprise of “Dollar Diplomacy,” which is a mixture of the Monroe Doctrine, the Roosevelt and the Lodge corollaries. The Monroe Doctrine (1823) should be seen as the “soup” or overall context for how the United States dealt with both Latin American countries and emerging European great powers seeking practice financial imperialism in the western hemisphere during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The doctrine states that Europeans powers were no longer at liberty to colonize or to interfere in the affairs of the emerging or newly independent states of the Americas.[3] President Monroe did not, however, go as far as to say that the United States held the sole responsibility to preemptively interfere in the affairs of Latin American states, that “right” or “responsibility” would be indoctrinated by President Teddy Roosevelt 81 years later in what is now known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1903). While the United States had already established a history of expansion into Latin America by 1903, the Roosevelt Corollary made this expansionary stance foreign policy.

It is debatable whether or not Senator Lodge’s “corollary” further defined the Monroe doctrine. [4] Unlike the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary the Lodge Corollary was a Senate Resolution, which did not require the signature of the President, and in fact, did not have it.[5] It follows then that since the President is in charge of foreign policy, the Lodge Corollary did not carry the weight of the other two doctrines, and was seen by many at the time of unnecessary and redundant. Nevertheless, the principle (foreign policy or not) of the Lodge Corollary was certainly part and parcel of United States foreign policy during the age of Dollar Diplomacy.

Dollar Diplomacy policy was therefore threefold in practice: first, it was the aggressive investment by United States banking institutions into the infrastructure of developing nations in Latin America; second, the enforcement of debt service, both to the United States and to foreign powers, by use of the U.S. Marines; and third, the active political discouragement of foreign powers establishing bases in the Americas or of taking action similar that which was reserved for the United States in Latin American nations. This aggressive policy in the United States developed, at least according to Cyrus Veeser in his fascinating article entitled Inventing Dollar Diplomacy: The Gilded-Age of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, because of “the creation of a world class navy after 1890, the growing importance of New York as a world financial center, the desire to end social conflict at home through trade expansion abroad, and the emergence of the United States as a colonial power after the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898.”[6] [7]

Therefore, it should not be surprising that the Latin American nations began to view the United States as an aggressor nation. Norman A. Bailey in his The United States as Caudillo outlines many of the reasons that this transition from good neighbor to aggressor took place. Bailey argues that the problem of the United States with regard to Latin America was not simply that it inherited the position of caudillo from the British, but that the new caudillo was expected to be both strong and benevolent.[8] Clearly, the historical record indicates that on many occasions the “benevolence” of the United States did not extend to the Latin American people, but instead focused on ruler and financial institutions that were essential for the promotion of the capitalist system in the region. Bailey goes onto to argue that further damage to the Latin American image of the United States as caudillo was done by the way the US policy towards their southern neighbors vacillates “between direct intervention and absolute indifference, between power politics and idealism.”[9]

An excellent example of this United States foreign policy is contained nicely in the story of the nation of El Salvador. From Skidmore and Smith’s (1997) brief synopsis of the history of El Salvador one gets the impression that the status quo of the las cortorce (i.e. a 14 family oligarchy) was perfectly acceptable to the United States Realpolitik for the nation despite the fact that it was well known in political circles that there were major economic disparities between the ruling families and the peasants.[10] These disparities, which were gross even when mitigated by their cultural context and era, led to an uprising in 1932.

The United States’ response to the 1931 revolution and the 1932 uprising is illustrative of how it undermines its own ideals (i.e. liberty, equality, justice) and contributes to the negative impressions (e.g. aggressive) that the common people of Latin American have with regard to it. In 1931 a popularly elected Salvadoran president was deposed by a military coup. After the coup, the US State department began a long process of trying to determine whether or not it would recognize the new government.[11] During this process, the people revolted against the government in 1932. The United States nearly intervened during this uprising, stopping short landing marines, as had been the common practice with such events previously during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. But stopping short in this case meant that the peasant population was brutally put down by the military government in what has become known as the Mantanza and the New York Times reported that the military government had “gained ‘popular favor’ by surpressing the ‘Communist outbreak,’ with no mentioned of the human rights issues around slaughtering thousands of desperately poor, innocent civilians.[12]

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[1] Howe, Frederick C., Dollar-Diplomacy and Imperialism, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in the City of New York, vol. 7, no. 3, The Foreign Relations of the United States: Part II, (July, 1917), pp. 73-79.

[2] Howe, 73.

[3] http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/jd/16321.htm

[4] Bailey, Thomas A., The Lodge Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 2 (June, 1933), pp. 220-239.

[5] Bailey, 224.

[6] Veeser, Cyrus, Inventing Dollar Diplomacy, Diplomatic History, vol. 27, no. 3, (Jun 2003).

[7] Munro, Dana G., “Dollar Diplomacy in Nicaragua”, The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 38, no. 2 (May, 1958), pp. 209-234. (the interworking of the “elements” I attribute to Dollar Diplomacy are all present in the Nicaraguan crisis [1909-1913])

[8] Bailey, Norman A., The United States as Caudillo, Journal of Inter-American Studies, vol. 5, no.3 (Jul, 1963), pp. 313-324.

[9]Bailey, 315.

[10] Skidmore, Thomas E. and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 264.

[11] Dur, Philip F., US Diplomacy and the Salvadorean Revolution of 1931, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 30, no. 1 (Feb, 1998), pp. 95-119.

[12] Dur, 113.

A Short Essay on Latin America #5

According to Walter LaFeber’s The Background of Cleveland’s Venezuelan Policy: A Reinterpretation (1961), the United States government was seeking foreign markets where they could expand trade and reinvigorate the economy, which had been going through a recession. The once great colonial power of Spain was in decline and many of its colonies in the Western hemisphere were either in or on the eve of revolution. Spanish colonial proximity to the United States coupled with the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine probably meant that, as the United States rose to the level of “great power” and sought to expand its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, conflict between the two powers was inevitable. In fact Patterson (1996) argues that “the war against Spain in 1898…” was, “in regional context… the latest [i.e. the culminations of many] decision to oust Europe from the Western Hemisphere—a Europe, said one American leader, that ‘is old and vile and rotten and mean and cruel and false.’”[1] But whether or not Europe was in fact “vile, etc.” was secondary to the reality that the “rising powers” (Germany, Japan) and “declining powers” (Britain, France, and Spain) of the world were in competition for the emerging markets of Latin America—and this was competition that the United States government would not abide.[2] [3] [4]

President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt earned fame as the commander of the historic “Rough Rider” regiment on the battlefield of Cuba during the Spanish American War (1998), but it was his corollary to the Monroe doctrine which would articulate into doctrine how the United States’ turn of the century policy with regard to Latin America. According to President Teddy Roosevelt, it was responsibility of the United States government to ensure the stability of North and South America by exercising “police powers” in order to guarantee that Western Hemisphere nations acted responsibly with regard to the European powers.[5] This doctrine was part and parcel of Teddy Roosevelt’s aggressive personality but also a philosophy born out of his experience in dealing with the Venezuelan Crisis of 1902, where a combined force of British, German and French ships blockaded the Venezuelan coast in response to monetary losses incurred after the nation’s civil war.[6] [7]

Therefore, the Spanish American War can be seen in the context of at least two elements. First, the United States was on the rise as a great power and was looking to expand its enterprise into foreign markets.[8] The consensus at that time was that “the United States industrial system needed more Latin American markets,” which leads nicely into the second element that led to the war with Spain, namely, the feeling that “any expansion of European (especially British) influence in the area [the Western Hemisphere] endangered not only America’s security, but also its economic and political well-being.”[9] These two elements in tandem led to the Spanish American war of 1898. After the war, the “spirit” of United States hegemonic control of the Western Hemisphere was indoctrinated in the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe doctrine and a period of intense intervention in Latin American affairs continued until the late 1930s.

The question of whether or not the United States should have gotten involved in the affairs of the emerging Latin American republics is possibly beside the point. It is perhaps more accurate to understand United States intervention as inevitable. The European powers were expanding into new markets during this period of Western imperialism and the Latin American countries were going to be dominated by some great power. It is perhaps best the Latin American countries were assisted in some cases with their revolutions at the hands of an Imperial United States as opposed to one of the European powers. This is indeed what the leadership in the United States seemed to believe with regard to Latin America.[10]

Teddy Roosevelt certainly felt that the United States had the right to intervene in Latin America because the United States was a “civilized” nation and the nations of Latin America were full of “wrongdoers” i.e. uncivilized and in occasional need of the discipline from the stronger nation.[11] Nevertheless, there were critics of what many considered to be “American Imperialism.” According to Fred H. Harrington in his article entitled The Anti-Imperialist Movement in the United States, 1898-1900, the whole weight of the anti imperialist position rested on political principle. Or in other words, the anti-imperialist movement was not essentially a question of right vs. wrong but born out of the principle that the United States was “formed for the express purpose of creating in a new world a new government,” and that it was a “self evident truth, that governments derive their just powers, not from superior force, but from consent of the governed…”[12] On this political principles such notables as Mark Twain, Henry B. Fuller and a host of other politicians, educators, reformers, businessmen and the like, but they were a small minority in a sea of political will in favor of expansionism.

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[1] Patterson, Thomas, G. United States Intervention in Cuba. 1898: Interpretations of the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War, The History Teacher, vol. 29, No. 3, (May, 1996), pp. 341-361.

[2] Patterson, 343.

[3] Skidmore, Thomas E. and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 264.

[4] Mitchener, Kris James and Marc Weidenmier, Empire, Public Good, and the Roosevelt Corollary, The Journal of Economic History, vol. 65, no. 3 (September, 20085).

[5] Mitchener, 662-663.

[6] Ibid, 661.

[7] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/venezuela1902.htm

[8] Spalding, Hobart A. Jr., U.S. and Latin American Labor: The Dynamics of Imperialist Control, Latin American Perspectives, vol/ 3, no. 1 (Winder, 1976), pp. 45-69.

[9] Lafeber, 995.

[10] Holbo, Paul S., Presidential Leadership in Foreign Affairs: William McKinley and the Turpie-Foraker, vol. 72, no. 4, American Historical Association, (July, 1967) pp. 1321-1335.

[11] Mitchener, 662-663.

[12] Harrington, Fred H., Anti-Imperialist Movement in the United States, 1898-1900, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (September, 1935), 211-230.