Roosevelt Corollary

11 Key excerpts on "Roosevelt Corollary"

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  Theodore and Woodrow

  • Andrew P. Napolitano(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Thomas Nelson

    (Publisher)

  24 These men and women didn’t stand a chance. Roosevelt’s political career was on the rise, and with it their voices would be quashed by his larger-than-life persona.

  The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine

  Roosevelt’s influences during the Spanish-American War were only the beginning of his career in turning America into an imperialistic country. Once he became president in 1901, following the assassination of President William McKinley, Roosevelt was able to put his imperialistic plans in full swing.

  To this end, Roosevelt added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Originally, the purpose of the Monroe Doctrine was to help countries in Latin America become independent by stopping any further European colonization in the Americas. While the United States threatened to take action against any European country that interfered in the Western Hemisphere, this did not mean that the United States would get involved in their affairs instead. Rather, the intention was that the Latin American countries would be left alone.

  However, while Roosevelt was president, a situation was brewing in Venezuela that caught his attention. Under the current leader, Cipriano Castro, the country was frequently in revolt, and money was being spent that the government didn’t have. Therefore, the Venezuelan government was defaulting on its debts to European countries, such as England, Germany, and Italy. Roosevelt feared that these conditions would encourage the European countries to invade Venezuela, thus establishing a presence in the Western Hemisphere. His concern escalated when the British, Germans, and Italians actually set up blockades of Venezuela’s five major ports, demanding that Venezuela pay off the debts it owed them.

  Roosevelt sent word to the European nations that were surrounding Venezuela that he was on the brink of enforcing the Monroe Doctrine to get them out. Even though the European countries eventually did back down, Roosevelt was unsettled by the implications of this event.

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  Nineteenth Century America in the Society of States

  Reluctant Power

  • Cornelia Navari, Yannis A. Stivachtis(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  von Glahn, 1986 ). The idea that the Monroe Doctrine might be invoked by others to get the United States to fulfill its hemispheric responsibilities posed a difficult challenge for the Americans. At first, Roosevelt argued that the doctrine did not apply as the European powers were not seeking territory. Indeed, as Vice-President, he had previously said that “if any South American state misbehaves towards any European country, let the Europeans spank it.” The important thing was that standards were set, maintained, and enforced. He soon shifted, however, fearing, according to DeConde, that such a state of affairs would encourage and privilege those who were prepared to use force to recover their money. Instead, in 1904, Roosevelt offered what became known as his eponymous “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. He declared that,

  In the Western Hemisphere, the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence to the exercise of international police power.

  (DeConde, 1963 )

  However, Roosevelt’s Corollary was not framed in terms of the importance of keeping the Europeans out of the hemisphere. It was framed in terms of justifying why the United States had to act in upholding broader international society standards in the hemisphere. If the Americans intended “to say ‘Hands Off’ to the powers of Europe” exercising those responsibilities, they could scarcely do nothing themselves when the need arose. Framed thus, he argued that Britain’s and Germany’s willingness to submit their argument with Venezuela to arbitration at the suggestion of the United States, indicated their explicit recognition of the Monroe Doctrine. Indeed, Britain’s Prime Minister, Lord Balfour, seemed to offer such recognition in the House of Commons when he said he believed that

  it would be a great gain to civilization if the United States of America were more actively to interest themselves in making arrangements by which these constantly reoccurring difficulties between European powers and certain states of South America could be avoided.

  (DeConde, 1963 )

  Whatever he may have been recognizing, however, it was not the doctrine of Monroe. Far from keeping the Europeans and their international society of despots out of the Western Hemisphere, it was a claim to the right to import a conception of that international society which increasingly bore the stamp of American preferences into the countries of South and Central America. As for the concurrent Panama dispute, Colombia, complying with the spirit of the times, suggested arbitration. The United States government declined the offer. Not only had Panama’s independence been justified by the interests of “collective civilization,” Roosevelt maintained, but to submit to arbitration would be inconsistent with America’s national honor (DeConde, 1967). The U.S. government did eventually agree to pay Columbia a substantial sum of money, although the U.S. Senate prevented the payment from being accompanied by an expression of the United States’ regret for its role in the episode.

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  US Foreign Policy and Democracy Promotion

  From Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama

  • Michael Cox, Timothy J. Lynch, Nicolas Bouchet(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  24 But he was acutely aware that this action on his part had created a moral hazard. If the United States was determined to uphold the Monroe Doctrine, which prohibited European intervention against states in the Americas, did this not provide those nations with every incentive to run up bad debts under cover of a blanket American guarantee of protection against the consequences? In the Venezuelan case, the heat of crisis had allowed the United States to corral the government into arbitration to resolve the original dispute. But what of future such cases?

  It was the need to resolve this dilemma that gave rise to Roosevelt’s well-known ‘corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine, which expanded the doctrine into the inter-ventionist’s charter that the term conjures today. The Roosevelt Corollary stated that since the United States was to be expected to defend Latin American states against European intervention in a crisis, it must be entitled to act preventively against any actions on their part that might provoke such a turn of events. This ideological quid pro quo served – from the American perspective, at least – to legitimize interventions on the part of the United States, including if necessary the use of force and the seizure of parts of a state’s financial apparatus, to ensure ‘sound’ management. This was the principle that underwrote what would become a pattern of recurring regional interventionism unfolding under Roosevelt and his successors, including interventions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

  Roosevelt’s conception of ‘civilization’, and his understanding of it as a progressive phenomenon in which some peoples were more advanced than others, played an important part in legitimizing this framework for hemispheric relations. The corollary was based on the idea that more advanced nations had a duty to monitor and educate those less developed. Under conditions where ‘chronic wrongdoing, or … impotence … results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society’, Roosevelt argued, ‘intervention by some civilized nation’ would be entirely justified, and perhaps morally required. Within the area covered by the Monroe Doctrine this meant the ‘exercise of an international police power’ by the United States, ‘however reluctantly’. He was naturally eager to disavow any ‘land hunger’ on the part of the United States, insisting that any American intervention should be understood as serving the long-term interests of the nations affected. ‘All that this country desires is to see the neighbouring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous’, he professed.25 So long as ‘the reign of law and justice’ held sway within their borders and they obeyed ‘the primary laws of civilized society’, no Latin American state need fear interference.26

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  U.S. Foreign Policy

  A Documentary and Reference Guide

  • Akis Kalaitzidis, Gregory W. Streich(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Ever since the end of World War I, Wilsonian foreign policy has become synonymous with idealism, and sometimes even with pacifism. But the truth is that apart from the European theater, the United States did not change its behavior regarding its southern sphere of influence, nor did the United States stop meddling in the domestic affairs of other states. During the Wilson administration, the United States intervened in Latin America with greater frequency, invading Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Panama. In the case of Haiti, the United States forces intervened to establish a president that Wilson himself had chosen for the Caribbean country. Wilson also set the early tone of the rivalry between the United States and what would become the Soviet Union when, in 1917, after the Bolshevik Revolution (also known as the October Revolution), he sent troops to fight on the side of the czarist forces and then for the Kerensky government in order to prevent the Bolsheviks from seizing and consolidating power. Over 1,000 troops died fighting the Soviet Communists, and the U.S. forces remained in Russia until 1920.

  • Document: President Theodore Roosevelt’s Address to Congress, December 6, 1904: The Roosevelt Corollary

  • Date: December 6, 1904

  • Significance: The Roosevelt Corollary is the culmination of American expansionism in Central America and the Caribbean. It is the start of a long history of interventions and imperial relations between the United States and its southern neighbors.

  • Source: John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online]. Santa Barbara, CA. Available from World Wide Web: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29545.

  In treating of our foreign policy and of the attitude that this great Nation should assume in the world at large, it is absolutely necessary to consider the Army and the Navy, and the Congress, through which the thought of the Nation finds its expression, should keep ever vividly in mind the fundamental fact that it is impossible to treat our foreign policy, whether this policy takes shape in the effort to secure justice for others or justice for ourselves, save as conditioned upon the attitude we are willing to take toward our Army, and especially toward our Navy. It is not merely unwise, it is contemptible, for a nation, as for an individual, to use high-sounding language to proclaim its purposes, or to take positions which are ridiculous if unsupported by potential force, and then to refuse to provide this force. If there is no intention of providing and keeping the force necessary to back up a strong attitude, then it is far better not to assume such an attitude.

  The steady aim of this Nation, as of all enlightened nations, should be to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail throughout the world the peace of justice. There are kinds of peace which are highly undesirable, which are in the long run as destructive as any war. Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace. Many times peoples who were slothful or timid or shortsighted, who had been enervated by ease or by luxury, or misled by false teachings, have shrunk in unmanly fashion from doing duty that was stern and that needed self-sacrifice, and have sought to hide from their own minds their shortcomings, their ignoble motives, by calling them love of peace. The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war. The goal to set before us as a nation, the goal which should be set before all mankind, is the attainment of the peace of justice, of the peace which comes when each nation is not merely safe-guarded in its own rights, but scrupulously recognizes and performs its duty toward others. Generally peace tells for righteousness; but if there is conflict between the two, then our fealty is due first to the cause of righteousness. Unrighteous wars are common, and unrighteous peace is rare; but both should be shunned. The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise of that right can not be divorced. One of our great poets has well and finely said that freedom is not a gift that tarries long in the hands of cowards. Neither does it tarry long in the hands of those too slothful, too dishonest, or too unintelligent to exercise it. The eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty must be exercised, sometimes to guard against outside foes; although of course far more often to guard against our own selfish or thoughtless shortcomings.

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  Princeton Studies in International History and Politics

  The Unusual Origins of America's World Role

  • Fareed Zakaria(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  119 This Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, as it became known, made the United States the sole arbiter for both the Europeans and the countries of the region. The United States was asserting the right of intervention to maintain order in its vast backyard. Two years later, when the Guatemalan civil war spread into Honduras and El Salvador, the United States and Mexico intervened and brokered a peace settlement. The United States even established a Central American Court of Justice, like the court in The Hague, to arbitrate disputes among Central American republics.

  The Roosevelt Corollary and its application to the case of Santo Domingo was presented by both admirers and detractors as an alternative to annexation. 120 Roosevelt sent the Santo Domingo treaty to the Senate for approval, but the Senate saw it as too great an expansion of American interests in the Caribbean and decided to reject it. But the president of the United States would not be thwarted. Roosevelt signed an executive agreement with the government of Santo Domingo, which did not require any Senate action. Roosevelt's agents took control of the island, and the agents of the major New York banks assisted in its daily administration. Debts to all parties, European and American, were repaid. This episode completed the process by which the United States turned the Monroe Doctrine on its head. Formulated when the United States was a weak nation, still surrounded in North America by great European powers, the doctrine originally espoused nonintervention and support for revolutionary movements. With the growth of the United States into the dominant regional power and a world power, the doctrine had been reinterpreted to sanction American intervention against Latin American revolutions. 121 Santo Domingo was also a clear example of a previously rare practice that Theodore Roosevelt made into a normal presidential tool: the executive agreement. Roosevelt used this device often to bypass Congress in the making of foreign policy. Unlike a treaty, this understanding between two governments is honored only for the life of the administration; in essence, it is a personal promise from the president. "But Roosevelt judged (correctly) that future presidents would uphold his agreements—in part because they would want their successors to uphold their deals." 122

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  From Isolation to Leadership, Revised

  A Review of American Foreign Policy

  • John Holladay Latané(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  Prior to the Roosevelt administration the Monroe Doctrine was regarded by the Latin-American states as solely a protective policy. The United States did not undertake to control the financial administration or the foreign policy of any of these republics. It was only after their misconduct had gotten them into difficulty and some foreign power, or group of foreign powers, was on the point of demanding reparation by force that the United States stepped in and undertook to see to it that foreign intervention did not take the form of occupation of territory or interference in internal politics. The Monroe Doctrine has always been in principle a policy of American intervention for the purpose of preventing European intervention, but American intervention always awaited the threat of immediate action on the part of some European power. President Roosevelt concluded that it would be wiser to restrain the reckless conduct of the smaller American republics before disorders or public debts should reach a point which gave European powers an excuse for intervening. In a message to Congress in 1904 he laid down this new doctrine, which soon became famous as the Big Stick policy. He said: "If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power." In other words, since we could not permit European powers to restrain or punish American states in cases of wrongdoing, we must ourselves undertake that task. As long as the Monroe Doctrine was merely a policy of benevolent protection which Latin-American states could invoke after their unwise or evil conduct had brought European powers to the point of demanding just retribution, it was regarded with favor and no objection was raised to it; but the Roosevelt doctrine, that if we were to continue to protect Latin-American states against European intervention, we had a right to demand that they should refrain from conduct which was likely to provoke such intervention, was quite a different thing, and raised a storm of criticism and opposition.

  The Roosevelt application of the Monroe Doctrine was undoubtedly a perfectly logical step. It was endorsed by the Taft administration and further extended by the Wilson administration and made one of our most important policies in regard to the zone of the Caribbean. President Roosevelt was right in drawing the conclusion that we had arrived at a point where we had either to abandon the Monroe Doctrine or to extend its application so as to cover the constantly increasing number of disputes arising from the reckless creation of public debts and loose financial administration. It was absurd for us to stand quietly by and witness the utterly irresponsible creation of financial obligations that would inevitably lead to European intervention and then undertake to fix the bounds and limits of that intervention. It is interesting to note that President Wilson did not hesitate to carry the new policy to its logical conclusion, and that he went so far as to warn Latin-American countries against granting to foreign corporations concessions which, on account of their extended character, would be certain to give rise to foreign claims which would, in turn, give an excuse for European intervention. In discussing our Latin-American policy shortly after the beginning of his administration, President Wilson said: "You hear of 'concessions' to foreign capitalists in Latin America. You do not hear of concessions to foreign capitalists in the United States. They are not granted concessions. They are invited to make investments. The work is ours, though they are welcome to invest in it. We do not ask them to supply the capital and do the work. It is an invitation, not a privilege; and states that are obliged, because their territory does not lie within the main field of modern enterprise and action, to grant concessions are in this condition, that foreign interests are apt to dominate their domestic affairs—a condition of affairs always dangerous and apt to become intolerable. . . . What these states are going to seek, therefore, is an emancipation from the subordination, which has been inevitable, to foreign enterprise and an assertion of the splendid character which, in spite of these difficulties, they have again and again been able to demonstrate."

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  A Companion to Theodore Roosevelt

  • Serge Ricard(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Beyond enhancing international commerce and the march of progress, TR further believed he had served the cause of international justice. His “most important action” included detaching the province of Panama from the South American nation of Colombia. As TR put it, “we gave to the people of Panama self-government, and freed them from subjection to alien oppressors” (Sánchez 2007, 50). Contemporary critics and modern historians do not accept TR’s claim that he had defended the principle of national self-determination in his dealings with Panama and Colombia. Instead, they see a president who bolstered the power of the United States by trampling on the sovereign rights of Latin Americans. As exemplified by his pronouncement in 1904 of the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, President Roosevelt defined Latin America, and especially the Caribbean Basin, as a preserve of the United States. The United States would exercise “international police power” in the region.

  President Roosevelt’s policies toward Colombia, Panama, and the other Latin American nations in the first years of the twentieth century have always evoked strong, conflicting assessments. For some US citizens, TR represented the United States at its finest. Exercising boldness and vision in his drive to build an inter-oceanic canal, TR had demonstrated how the application of US power could lead the world to a better day. That the Panama Canal proved a technological marvel only enhanced the reputations of both TR and his country. To others, particularly Latin Americans, TR’s policies smacked of imperialism and colonialism. Roosevelt was a bully, who used superior US power to force Latin Americans into accepting the US domination of the region. The president justified his seizure of power by disdaining Latin Americans, judging them culturally and racially backward.

  “The Center of the Universe”

  Columbus and subsequent European explorers did not find the passage to the Orient. But Spain, Columbus’s benefactor, would establish a mighty empire in the 1500s in the aftermath of the conquests of the Aztec and Inca civilizations. Gold and silver from Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru underwrote Spanish power and glory and Catholic Spain’s futile wars against European Protestants. With imperial holdings in both the Atlantic and Pacific regions, the Spanish built a “royal highway” (camino real

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  Manifest Destiny

  A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in America

  • Albert Katz Weinberg(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Barakaldo Books

    (Publisher)

  {1715} In 1904 the Dominican Republic, unable to pay its at least partially just obligations, faced possible intervention of three European powers eager to reimburse themselves from its customs. Such was the situation which led President Roosevelt in his annual message of 1904 to enunciate his famous doctrine of America’s exercise of international police power. The passage containing the doctrine speaks softly at the beginning but leads finally to a flourish of the big stick:

  It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.

  {1716}

  Its declaration of disinterested motive does not prevent Roosevelt’s declaration from being one of the most extreme modern affirmations of the right of intervention. The far-reaching character of Roosevelt’s interventionism is apparent in three of its features. In the first place, Roosevelt did not limit intervention to legal self-protective measures, but made it coextensive with a “police power” embracing any remedy short of deprivation of independence. In the second place, he did not restrict intervention to legally recognized occasions, but used broad moral criteria which, as one of Roosevelt’s contemporary critics pointed out, permit interference with any act or condition disapproved.{1717} Roosevelt condemned even something which today is practiced by most of the best peoples and tolerated by the rest—not paying international debts. In the third place, what Roosevelt euphemistically called “international” police power amounted really to exercise of police power by one nation which demanded a monopoly of such power in half the globe. With some justice the Providence Journal declared that Roosevelt’s doctrine tended toward “an essential suzerainty, latent if not always active, of the United States over all the countries to the south of us.”{1718}

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  The Monroe Doctrine and United States National Security in the Early Twentieth Century

  • Alex Bryne(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Puck , September 28, 1898 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. As Uncle Sam welcomes the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Ladrones Islands [Guam] into a carriage representing the United States, an anti-imperialist questions whether there is enough room for the new children. Hawaii has already come aboard. The anti-imperialist wears colonial-era clothing and has “Monroe Doctrine” emblazoned upon his tricorne hat)

  President Roosevelt had begun to reconsider the nature of the Monroe Doctrine before entering the White House and had concluded that it ought to be considered a fluid policy rather than a rigid set of guidelines. In 1896 during the aftermath of the Venezuelan boundary dispute , Roosevelt authored an article in which he conceptualised the doctrine as “a broad, general principle of living policy,” in other words, a policy that needed to adapt to the changing conditions the United States encountered.56 Throughout his presidency, Roosevelt would continue to voice this interpretation more frequently to justify his own corollary to the doctrine, arguing that it could not “remain fossilized while the nation grows,” either it had to be abandoned or “modified to meet the changing needs of national life.”57 Historian Albert Bushnell Hart , who would go on to write a detailed history of the doctrine, echoed these remarks, claiming that a whole host of changed conditions warranted a modification of the doctrine.58 Alfred Mahan, a former United States Admiral and renowned naval expert, held a similar opinion. To Mahan, the doctrine possessed “an inherent principle of life, which adapts itself with the flexibility of a growing plant to the successive conditions it encounters.” Without the ability to adapt to the “national necessities” of the United States, the doctrine would no doubt “die deservedly.”59 Mahan did not fear the militarisation of the United States like Andrew Carnegie and believed that strengthening the nation’s armed forces, particularly the navy , would empower United States influence. Rather than inviting threats, he had argued since the 1890s that the United States would reinforce national security through territorial expansion, bolstering the navy, and projecting the nation’s power.60

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  International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond

  • Antony Best, Jussi M. Hanhimäki, Joseph A. Maiolo, Kirsten E. Schulze(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth Century America (New York, 2012).

  The classic account of Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy is Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore, MD, 1956); for different interpretations see Richard Collin and Theodore Roosevelt, Culture, Diplomacy, and Expansion (Baton Rouge, LA, 1985), Thomas Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, LA, 1980) and William H. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic (New York, 1999). Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are contrasted in John M. Cooper’s The Warrior and the Priest (Cambridge, MA, 1983), while Wilson himself is analysed in Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson, Revolution, War, and Peace (Arlington Heights, IL, 1979), Lloyd Gardner, Safe for Democracy (New York, 1984) and Fredrick S. Calhoun, Power and Principle: Armed Intervention in Wilsonian Foreign Policy (Kent, OH, 1986). The Wilson administration’s intervention in Mexico is detailed in Mark T. Gilderhus, Diplomacy and Revolution (Tucson, AZ, 1977), Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico (Chicago, 1981) and Ramon Ruiz, The Great Rebellion (New York, 1980). On Wilson’s failed efforts to bring about a ‘new world order’, see Arthur Walworth, Wilson and the Peacemakers (New York, 1986) and Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2009). The myth of a German threat to US dominance in Central America is effectively exposed in Nancy Mitchell, The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America (Chapel Hill, 1999).

  Gunboat diplomacy and the ‘Good Neighbor’ policy in the Caribbean are detailed in Irwin F. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy (Baltimore, MD, 1979), Michael Grow, The Good Neighbor Policy in Paraguay (Lawrence, KS, 1981), Stephen J. Randall, The Diplomacy of Modernization: Colombian–American Relations, 1920–1940 (Toronto, 1977), Dana G. Munro, The United States and the Caribbean Republics, 1921–1933 (Princeton, NJ, 1974), G. Pope Atkins and Larman C. Wilson, The United States and the Trujillo Regime

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  Encyclopedia of U.S. Military Interventions in Latin America

  [2 volumes]

  • Alan McPherson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  U.S. Statutes at Large 471 (1811).

  2. Monroe Doctrine (1823)

  The Monroe Doctrine was included in President James Monroe’s seventh annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. Drafted by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Monroe’s message—it was not known as a “doctrine” until decades later—was a response to Latin America’s newfound independence from Spain. U.S. policymakers wanted to encourage such republicanism but without appearing to interfere in European affairs, just as it warned European powers to stay out of the affairs of independent American nations. By the end of the 19th century, this defensive principle for the continent became an offensive one, justifying to some the use of U.S. military intervention to keep the Americas from any behavior that might bring about European intervention

  .

  . . . . The political system of the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. . . . We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere, but with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.

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