A study of how and why US-Latin American relations changed in the 1930s: “Brilliant . . . [A] charming and perceptive work.” ―Foreign Affairs During the 1930s, the United States began to look more favorably on its southern neighbors. Latin America offered expanded markets to an economy crippled by the Great Depression, while threats of war abroad nurtured in many Americans isolationist tendencies and a desire for improved hemispheric relations. One of these Americans was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the primary author of America’s Good Neighbor Policy. In this thought-provoking book, Bolton Prize winner Fredrick Pike takes a wide-ranging look at FDR’s motives for pursuing the Good Neighbor Policy, how he implemented it, and how its themes played out up to the mid-1990s. Pike’s investigation goes far beyond standard studies of foreign and economic policy. He explores how FDR’s personality and Eleanor Roosevelt’s social activism made them uniquely simpático to Latin Americans. He also demonstrates how Latin culture flowed north to influence U.S. literature, film, and opera. This book is essential reading for everyone interested in hemispheric relations.

A diplomatic history of the Dominican Republic and the successes and failures of the Good Neighbor Policy.

The Second Century: U.S.-Latin American Relations since 1889 focuses on U.S. relations with Latin America during the second century, a period bounded by the advent of the New Diplomacy late in the nineteenth century and the end of the Cold War about one hundred years later. This text provides a balanced perspective as it presents both the United States's view that the Western Hemisphere needed to unite under a common democratic, capitalistic society, and the Latin American countries' response to U.S. attempts to impose these goals on their southern neighbors. This book examines the reciprocal interactions between the two regions, each with distinctive purposes, outlooks, interests, and cultures. It also places U.S.-Latin American relations within the larger context of global politics and economics. The Second Century is an excellent text for courses in Latin American history and diplomatic history.

The Good Neighbor Policy was unique: a great power obligated itself not to use force in its dealings with twenty smaller powers and not to interfere in their domestic politics. It was a policy that lasted, with some perturbations, for twenty years: instituted by President Roosevelt in 1933 and carried out effectively from 1933 to 1943 by word and action, maintained during the Second World War largely as a result of British concern for continuance of Argentine beef exports, codified in the Charter of the Organization of American States in 1948, and reasserted by Truman and Acheson in 1950–51, it was covertly repudiated in Guatemala in 1954 by Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers, and not so secretly by Kennedy in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. Openly shattered in the Dominican Republic by Johnson in 1965, it has since been completely abandoned in favor of the usual relationships between large and small powers. Working with documents from the Public Records Office in London and the National Archives, with recently released materials from the U.S. Department of State, and with secondary sources, Bryce Wood describes the temptations laid before the leaders of one powerful state by its occasionally recalcitrant neighbors, and the ways of reacting that were found. Having told half the story in his The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy, Wood now concludes it in the present volume. One of the chief casualties is shown to be the Organization of American States, which since 1954 has found itself badly crippled in its work to promote harmony and continued cooperation among the member states.

"In this thoughtful, thoroughly researched, balanced, and unorthodox analysis, Pike decides US noninterventionist orientation was based on Rooseveltian realism eschewing pressures on Latin Americans to accept US values (he assumed they would eventually co