Synopses & Reviews
In his 1933 inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stated: "In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor--the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others." Later that year, he declared, "The definite policy of the United States from now on is one opposed to armed intervention." Why was there a need for Roosevelt to institute the Good Neighbor policy in the Western hemisphere?
McPherson answers this question by looking at the United States' military interventions in Latin America, the longest ever US occupations in the Western hemisphere. In his first book, Alan McPherson examined the roots of anti-Americanism in Latin America during the Cuban Revolution, Panama riots, and US intervention in the Dominican Republic from 1958 to 1966 and delving deeply into the impact of the love-hate ambivalence on US foreign relations. In this new book, he moves backwards in time to explore American occupations of Nicaragua (1912-33), Haiti (1915-34), and the Dominican Republic (1916-24). McPherson proposes not only that opposition to U.S. intervention was more widespread than commonly acknowledged but that anti-imperial movements in the Caribbean basin were primarily responsible for bringing about the end of U.S. occupation, rather than domestic concerns such as the Great Depression or the American public's lack of stamina for overseas imperial ventures. Studying the qualities of the resisters-urban and rural, female and male, peasants and caudillos (local strongmen)-and the US Marines who occupied their countries, McPherson forms nuanced understandings of the movements, as well as the support they received from Mexico, Cuba, France, and the United States-and posits that the strength of the resistance led to the about-face in US foreign policy. He also looks at the massive movements of opposition to occupations within the US, especially after the First World War, highlighting the divisions between expansionists, including the US military and Wall Street, and those who wished to respect the autonomy of small nations, including the NAACP and the State Department.
This broad and nuanced work serves as a much-needed contribution to transnational history, US history, and Latin American history, while shedding historical light on the resistance to US occupations.
Review
"The research for The Invaded is impressive in scope and depth. ... [McPherson] mined [archives, oral history collections, and various primary and seconday] sources for information, participant anecdotes, and colorful perspectives. ... This book will enlighten scholars and students looking to understand US involvement in the Caribbean area." --Hispanic American Historical Review
"Successive generations of scholars from different fields have written on the U.S. interventions and occupation in the Caribbean and Central America in the heyday of U.S. empire in the early twentieth century. Alan McPherson's contribution to this genre stands far above the rest. Using a broad array of sources, McPherson has given us a model study of three occupations from the era, in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, and brings to center stage the story of the motives, makeup, and successes of who resisted these occupations." --Lester D. Langley, author of The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898-1934
"The Invaded offers a careful, sophisticated, and relevant analysis of American occupation efforts in the Western Hemisphere during the first half of the twentieth century. Alan McPherson shows that native resistance aimed at preserving independence undermined American ambitions, forcing the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers. This is a book that everyone interested in modern warfare, diplomacy, and counterinsurgency should read. Twenty-first century American experiences in the Middle East echo this compelling history of Latin America a century earlier." --Jeremi Suri, author of 'Libertys Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama
"Alan McPherson's outstanding new book does much more than chart the sweeping impact of the major U.S. occupations in the Caribbean. It also does more than remind us vividly and in greater detail of some of what we already knew about the conduct of those occupations... McPherson's book is not merely a breathtaking compendium of evidence about the sordid nature of the occupations drawn from sources from five countries in three languages. It also benefits from his rare ability to engage in historical comparison through multinational research and deep knowledge of more than one country." --Max Paul Friedman, ReVista
Synopsis
In 1912 the United States sent troops into a Nicaraguan civil war, solidifying a decades-long era of military occupations in Latin America driven by the desire to rewrite the political rules of the hemisphere. In this definitive account of the resistance to the three longest occupations-in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic-Alan McPherson analyzes these events from the perspective of the invaded themselves, showing why people resisted and why the troops eventually left.
Confronting the assumption that nationalism primarily drove resistance, McPherson finds more concrete-yet also more passionate-motivations: hatred for the brutality of the marines, fear of losing land, outrage at cultural impositions, and thirst for political power. These motivations blended into a potent mix of anger and resentment among both rural and urban occupied populations. Rejecting the view that Washington withdrew from Latin American occupations for moral reasons, McPherson details how the invaded forced the Yankees to leave, underscoring day-to-day resistance and the transnational network that linked New York, Havana, Mexico City, and other cities. Political culture, he argues, mattered more than military or economic motives, as U.S. marines were determined to transform political values and occupied peoples fought to conserve them. Occupiers tried to speed up the modernization and centralization of these poor, rural societies and, ironically, to build nationalism where they found it lacking.
Based on rarely seen documents in three languages and five countries, this lively narrative recasts the very nature of occupation as a colossal tragedy, doomed from the outset to fail. In doing so, it offers broad lessons for today's invaders and invaded.
About the Author
Alan McPherson is Professor of International and Area Studies, ConocoPhillips Petroleum Chair in Latin American Studies, and Director of the Center for the Americas, University of Oklahoma. He is the author of the prizewinning
Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations and of
Intimate Ties, Bitter Struggles: The United States and Latin America since 1945, and editor of
Anti-Americanism in Latin America and the Caribbean, co-editor of
The Anti-American Century, and editor of
The Encyclopedia of US Military Interventions in Latin America. Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Occupation: Why Fight It?
Part I: Intervention Resistance
1. Nicaragua, 1912
2. Haiti, 1915
3. The Dominican Republic, 1916
Part II: Occupation Resistance
4. Nicaragua, 1913-1925
5. Haiti, 1916-1920
6. The Dominican Republic, 1917-1921
7. Nicaragua, 1927-1929
8. Brambles and Thorns
Part III: The Stakes
9. Cultures of Resistance
10. Politics of Resistance
Part IV: Transnational Networks and U.S. Withdrawals
11. U.S. Responses, Haitian Setbacks, and Dominican Withdrawal, 1919-1924
12. The Americas against Occupation, 1927-1932
13. Nicaraguan Withdrawals, 1925-1934
14. Haitian Withdrawal, 1929-1934
Conclusion: Lessons of Occupation
Notes
Bibliography
Index