Between the Spanish American War and World War I the current of United States-Latin American relations ran so close to the mainstream of United States diplomacy that almost anything written on the larger subject has interest for Latin Americanists. Like the book of D. C. M. Platt noted above, these two represent the latest thinking of mature scholars, although they rest less obviously on weighty scholarship.
May’s essay, a byproduct of the research which produced his earlier Imperial Democracy (1961), does not deal explicitly with Latin America at all, but sets forth the thesis that the Spanish American War and subsequent United States ventures into empirebuilding represented imitation of European models or at least response to European influences and suggestions, intentional or not. Although by no means new, this is an illuminating idea as May develops it and might be worth applying to United States policy in Latin America during the early twentieth century.
Perkins is best known for three thoroughly researched monographs on Anglo-American diplomacy of about a century earlier, leading up to and through the War of 1812. His present work grew out of the Commonwealth Fund Lectures, which he delivered in 1965, and like much lecture-based writing it is more fluent than exhaustive. Anglo-American relations for this period have already been well covered by half a dozen other recent scholars, but Perkins has returned to the original sources enough to turn up new facts and ideas. The book will be just right for undergraduate collateral reading.
In The Great Rapproachment U.S.-British-Latin American relations are confined to two chapters entitled “America’s Hemisphere.” The principal topics are quite predictable: the Panama Canal, the Venezuelan Crisis of 1902, the Roosevelt Corollary, and Wilson’s relations with Huerta. Only on the last subject does Perkins penetrate beneath the surface. He agrees with Platt that although Wilson thought he smelled oil in British diplomacy, it was only his imagination. However, Perkins traces the Anglo-American imbroglio with a little more urbanity.
“English statesmen deserved high marks for their accomplishments,” declares Perkins as he leaves Latin American problems (p. 208). The Commonweath Fund audience must have liked that.