This wonderfully personal and provocative book follows the methodological lead of Fredrick Pike’s earlier work, The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature (1992). It connects diplomatic behavior with larger cultural patterns and national belief systems. Pike’s arguments sometimes rely on freewheeling speculation and conjecture. Liberal-minded historians will think he goes too far; others will appreciate his imaginative insights.
Pike depicts the Good Neighbor Policy as a consequence of distinctive circumstances during the 1930s and of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s political style —thereby opposing scholars who find the policy’s origins in the Hoover administration. He begins by asking Donald Dozer’s question, Are we good neighbors? In response he says, “no better than we had to be.” To Pike, “that seems the most one could expect”; and “we might. . . have been a good deal worse” (p. xi). He then surveys the historiography, remarking on works by David Green and Lloyd Gardner, who employ economic interpretations; and others, such as Samuel Flagg Bemis and J. Lloyd Mecham, who emphasize security issues. Rejecting each, Pike affirms his own view that foreign policy incorporates core national values, including both economic and security interests.
Pike’s main argument relies on two central themes. The first intriguingly asserts that the Good Neighbor Policy was possible only during the age of the Great Depression, when North Americans became more like Latin Americans. During the Roosevelt presidency, as Pike persuasively explains, “an economic calamity” forced “a people of plenty. . . to call into question the way in which they and their ancestors had believed and acted” (p. 13). Consequently, the plight of hoboes and beggars in Chicago and Detroit, recalling similar conditions in Lima and Mexico City, accentuated the difficulty of attributing poverty to shiftlessness and moral shortcomings. A larger measure of empathy undergirded the Good Neighbor Policy, casting Latin America in the context of Great American West mythologies as an extension of the frontier; in this instance, perceived as a region of opportunity for both peoples.
The other theme centers on Franklin Roosevelt. Somewhat more dubiously. Pike describes FDR as “a gringo in the Latin mold, a man they could understand. . . as a projection of their own political and social style” (p. 137). He was aristocratic, “patronalistic,” and personalistic (pp. 141-43). As a “populist,” supposedly he could intuit the people’s will. As a “trickster” —Pike’s term—he sought to reconcile opposites (pp. 145, 156). Pike correctly sees nonintervention as a central achievement. By abandoning intervention, Roosevelt surrendered “obsolete” powers but retained those “still vital to national interests” (p. 174). Nevertheless, Latin Americans understood the affable man in the White House. When Roosevelt died, the Good Neighbor Policy passed away with him. Harry Truman, an “archetypical gringo” (p. 275), possessed none of the skills and sensitivities necessary to perpetuate the policy into the era of the Cold War.
