This is a long book, essentially about the United States’s treatment of the Caribbean during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. Its core is a section of 211 pages on Panama, which might have made a book in itself, but that is followed by sections on the Dominican Republic and on Cuba. It is vigorously written, and Richard Collin supplies extensive bibliographical footnotes, properly placed by his publishers at the foot of each page. There are excellent points, well made—see, for example, the paragraph on the Monroe Doctrine (p. 413)·It is not a criticism to say that the book is firmly based on secondary sources, nor even that, in spite of Collin’s subtitle, his work on Latin America is derivative. In modern history, where we are all drowning in sources, there is plenty of scope for works of new synthesis, of which this is one.
But the length of the book is worrying, and for two reasons. The first is lack of self-discipline on the author’s part. Personality sketches of the same figures appear several times, yet of José Manuel Marroquín, the Colombian leader, for example, he can still say, “If one views Marroquín as a political leader of a national state, his performance was abysmal” (p. 316) and that Marroquín “should be recognized as an effective political leader as well as a determined ideologue” (p. 336). Collin would defend both judgments, and with good will one can see how, but the reader should not be subjected to such tests. Moreover, though the “context” with which he is concerned is that of the first decade of the twentieth century, he does not refrain from long disquisitions on the history of the region, going back to the discovery. That does blur his main theme.
The more fundamental failing of the book, however, and reason for its length, is that Collin has set up a straw man to oppose. “This is a book about contexts, he begins, and he proposes to move his U.S. diplomacy “to its own time and away from its current position as an appendage to post-World War II American history” (ix). Here one must protest. There are polemicists and charlatans in the great army of North American historians, of course, but most have been putting diplomacy or anything else in context all their lives. This reviewer for one believes that he has, but without any sense of being exceptional or of swimming against a tide. Collin’s strength is narrative history, but at this length he often fails to notice that he has contradicted himself, or that, like Roosevelt’s Aristides, “he has really delivered his message and . . . has a tendency to repeat it over and over again” (cit. p. 409). A final warning: the author’s citations are not always to be uncritically relied on. Thus he writes baldly, “Castro could have defended Caracas with twenty thousand troops” (p. 96). Here he cites F. W. Marks’s book, Velvet on Iron, but what Marks actually wrote (and that citing a newspaper guess) was that Castro’s opponents might have needed twenty thousand men or more to capture the town.
