A Golden Age of archival publications seems upon us, now that the United States government has committed itself to bringing out modern presidential papers, and nearly every major university press has singled out some Founding Father or nineteenth-century paladin for similar attentions. Under these circumstances it was only a matter of time before the army of editors breached the walls at Hyde Park and began to parcel out the treasures of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s voluminous archives, which individual scholars have already been ransacking for years. The Hyde Park librarians and the Archivist of the United States, who are jointly supervising operations, have sensibly divided FDR’s activities into major subject units, allotting foreign affairs to Edgar B. Nixon.
In these three volumes Nixon covers Roosevelt’s first administration. He has defined foreign affairs broadly, including many items which pertain primarily to the domestic background of these affairs. Nearly all material is published for the first time, and copious cross references are made to Samuel L. Rosenman’s collection of Roosevelt papers, to Foreign Relations, and to other published collections of the period. The Hyde Park papers are arranged chronologically, with an index of names and topics and useful annotations. Nixon has done a solid job of conventional editing, with no startling innovations and no obvious errors or shortcomings.
Although the Good Neighbor Policy has been one of the most highly publicized international programs of FDR’s first administration, it does not bulk especially large in this collection. Aside from a few major questions, such as the Cuban revolutionary crisis of 1933, the Montevideo and Buenos Aires conferences, Josephus Daniels’ passing involvement in the Mexican religious controversy, and one or two others, the Latin American entries are confined to routine matters or to isolated letters or memoranda. It goes without saying that scholars, even undergraduates working on term papers, will have to supplement the materials presented here with the other standard sources. Many specialists will still have to make the pilgrimage to Hyde Park.
Nevertheless, one may get a remarkably varied set of impressions and sidelights from these papers, to amplify more official documents available elsewhere. In the case of the Cuban crisis, for example, the volumes offer private reports by Ambassador Sumner Welles, memoranda by such as Charles W. Taussig (the Undersecretary of State), a letter from Roosevelt to the retiring president of Cuba, Gerardo Machado, and, of course, transcripts of press conference after press conference during the crisis. In these the elusive president told newsmen only what he wanted to and very occasionally gave the historian an insight into his labyrinthine mind. For an example of FDR’s technique one might cite a brief exchange on January 19, 1934, in which he delicately suggested what sort of government the United States might like to see in Cuba and how he would go about recognizing the new regime of Carlos Mendieta (I, 593).
All in all, while the volumes do not add a major source of information to the Latin Americanist, they should provide one more stopping place in the university library for any scholar interested in the Good Neighbor Policy.
