The proposition of this treatise is clearly and bluntly presented in the prologue. It is that President Lyndon Johnson sent American troops into the Dominican Republic in 1965, not to protect the lives of American citizens in the Republic but to control the destinies of the Dominican people and suppress their right to self-government. Further, the treatise attempts to show that this action, called the “Johnson Doctrine,” was similar to and consistent with the whole history of relations between the United States and Latin America. It does not matter, according to the author’s thesis, whether policies were formulated by Jefferson, Monroe, Polk, Cleveland, Theodore or Franklin Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, or Truman. The bases were the same—the desire and determination to impose the imperial sway of the United States on Latin America and to prevent the development there of social and economic reforms.
To demonstrate the alleged truth of this interpretation, the author makes a survey of the relations between the United States and Latin America, beginning with the Monroe Doctrine. While the narrative refers to well-known events, the arrangement of data, the selection of excerpts from both North and Latin American writers, and the interpretation placed on the acts and policies of American statesmen are all drawn up to defend the announced thesis. No North American statesman from Jefferson to Lyndon Johnson is credited with concern for Latin American security, welfare, or independence. Thus the author holds that the United States prevented Cuba and Puerto Rico from securing independence at an early date, and the Mexican War was simply North American aggression. After the Civil War, when territorial expansion was no longer the dominant interest of the United States, Americans developed industrial and financial monopolies and attempted to extend commercial and financial dominance— economic imperialism—over Latin America. As might be expected in line with this analysis, virtually all acts of the United States in the Caribbean area were “invasions.” While it is acknowledged that Wilson advocated freedom and independence for Latin American nations, his actions belied his words; and although the Good Neighbor policy had some admirable features, it was primarily a reaction to German influence in Latin America and did not end North American imperialism. President Truman abandoned the Good Neighbor policy, used the atomic bomb in Japan to impose American imperialism on the world, and supported Fascist influences in Greece and Western Europe. The narrative, therefore, is broadened to show that the United States extended its imperialistic policies outside the Hemisphere, and in this connection the author asserts that Communist China was only defending its independence in aiding North Korea, and that the Caracas Resolution was directed, not against Communism but against democracy in Guatemala.
It is not very difficult for the author to point an accusing finger at the United States for the miserable Bay of Pigs fiasco, but it takes some doing to present the Alliance for Progress as an instrument of American imperialism. Yet a writer who can convert Woodrow Wilson into an imperialist can do almost anything. Obviously the work has no value as a scholarly examination of its subject. It may have value as source material for the study of one element in current Latin American thought about the United States, but its significance would depend on the extent of its representative character.
