Lumping these four books together might be a reviewer's nightmare. To put them into a single analytical category probably would require an essay of my own on U.S. imperialism. Let me deal with them seriatim.
The Glauert and Langley reader combines interpretative essays by historians with, as the editors put it, “contemporaneous judgments, often those of policymakers, in an effort to illustrate the ideas that shaped the U.S. role in the hemisphere” (p. 1). There are no surprises in the book; the selection of documents is undistinguished and throws little light on the Latin American side of the picture. As a result it should be most useful as supplementary reading in courses on U.S. diplomatic history.
By contrast, Federico Gil’s book should find its way into a wide variety of courses; it is a little gem. The author’s perceptive judgments are expressed with an admirable economy of language which does not preclude comprehensive coverage. The traditional chronological framework is stretched to include consideration of such themes as “The Latin American Scene,” “The Panama Canal and United States Diplomacy,” “Social Revolution in the 1960’s.” Each of the nine chapters is preceded by a valuable chronology and followed by a selected bibliography. That Latin America is placed before the U.S. in the title is significant. Professor Gil has an uncanny ability to present both sides of every issue. The traditional U.S. point of view is set forth with calm and objectivity; the Latin American side is given without rancor or special pleading, but with sufficient point to give students pause. The result is a volume with enough factual information to serve as a text in courses on Inter-American Relations while at the same time providing the necessary elements for discussion of very sensitive issues.
Harry Magdoff is not concerned with presenting both sides of the issues. His style, while measured, is more emphatic. He is a proselytist. He, too, gives his readers pause. This book is comprised of articles which appeared in Monthly Review between 1966 and 1968, collected here with a new introduction. His basic argument is disarmingly simple: capitalism is by its very nature expansionist and imperialist, and the U.S. as the leader of the capitalist world is the most rapacious and imperialist nation of all. Since World War II we have entered a phase he calls the new imperialism, whose principal features are: a shift away from competition for new territories to a struggle against contraction of the imperialist system; assumption of leadership by the U.S.; and increased importance of technology in the international economy. Anyone who is familiar with Latin American social science literature will acknowledge the merit of Magdoff's description of the multinational corporation and the international financial network. This is presented without anger. There is no accusation because there is no choice—that’s the way capitalism is. The case is built upon a solid foundation of hard data and empirical observation. Economists may cavil at some of his calculations, such as the importance of capital exports or the import of strategic materials but this strikes me as an empty debate. Whether exports are considered as 40% of all movable goods or a much smaller percentage of GNP is beside the point. Are those exports a critical factor in national security considerations? Magdoff insists that they are. He has a lot of evidence on his side. That trade and investments are components of national security will come as no surprise to students of foreign policy. Accepting this does not, however, prove the a priori assertion that capitalism and the imperialist system are synonymous nor the implied corollary, that non-capitalist systems are not imperialistic. Magdoff is on stronger ground when he describes economic phenomena. His explanations of those phenomena are marred by what the Sovietologists call “citationism.”
Historians have spilled a great deal of ink over the question of how important is—or was—the trade component of U.S. imperialism. Professor Healy considers the question, but shies away from attempting an answer on the very sound ground that “to separate [the components] is in one sense arbitrary, for they were but differing aspects of an integrated body of assumptions . . . all were mutually reenforcing, and can be completely understood only in terms of their mutual relationships” (p. 5). To demonstrate these relationships, Healy offers a series of case studies of publicists for expansion—Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, James Harrison Wilson, Charles Denby, Charles A. Conant, the missionaries and the NAM lobby—which will be useful to students of American expansion. On balance, this is a sound, commendable book. My criticisms are two. First, in his concern for establishing the “mutual relationships” of causes in the writings of each man or group there is considerable repetition from one chapter to another, which results in a melange. After a while it is hard to keep straight the relationships among the players and even harder to make any judgment at all about the process of causation. Second, Healy does not achieve his most ambitious objective: to explain the expansionist surge at the end of the century which caused Mahan to marvel at “the almost instantaneous readiness with which a seed of thought germinates when it falls upon mental soil prepared already to receive it” (p. 67), by studying the publicists who “prepared the soil.” The link is never firmly established between the thoughts of certain individuals and the formation of a national consensus or of policy during the crucial decade. Root and Roosevelt, for example, may have been expansionists before 1898, but they acted out their beliefs only after 1898. Nor is it clear how Conant, Denby, or Wilson altered the thinking of other Americans or influenced the policy of the government.
