Tracy High Honors

A Historian Defends U.S. Policy

Samuel Flagg Bemis

Often referred to as the "dean" of diplomatic historians and particularly of the history of U.S.-
Latin American relations, Samuel Flagg Bemis (1891-1973) was a professor at Yale University
from 1935 until his retirement in 1960. Though he was considered a pioneer in the methodology
of multiarchival research, his work was later criticized for being overly nationalistic. As an
isolationist until the United States entered World War II, Bemis later became a strong partisan
of the U.S. policy of containment and was resolutely hostile to the Cuban Revolution of 1959.
Excerpted below are the conclusions of his The Latin American Policy of the United States
(1943), perhaps Bemis's most widely known work. The book was reprinted in four editions and
served as a standard textbook for undergraduate courses on U.S.-Latin American relations for
many years.

From the Era of Emancipation to the Second World War, the Latin American policy of the
United States has reflected constantly the vital necessities of national security and idealism of the
American people. Of these two elements, national security has always been uppermost. It is
natural and understandable that this should be so, for without national security there could be no
American idealism, no so-called "American mission." . . .

The very existence of the Continental Republic created a bulwark against imperialism in the
Western Hemisphere. It made possible a power capable of protecting the republican New World
against the imperialism of the Old in today's great time of trial. Had it not been for the
development of the Continental Republic and the preservation of its united nationhood, North
America would have been South-Americanized, so to speak, divided up into a number of small
and feeble independent states that would be easy prey to any aggression from Europe or Asia. . . .

That the United States has been an imperialistic power since 1898 there is no doubt, although
that comparatively mild imperialism was tapered off after 1921 and is fully liquidated now. A
careful and conscientious appraisal of United States imperialism shows, I am convinced, that it
was never deep-rooted in the character of the people, that it was essentially a protective
imperialism, designed to protect, first the security of the Continental Republic, next the security
of the entire New World, against intervention by the imperialistic powers of the Old World. It
was, if you will, an imperialism against imperialism. It did not last long and it was not really
bad. . . .
On the Isthmian question, on the Panama Canal, was based the strategic imperialism of the first
two decades of the twentieth century. Without the existence of the Panama Canal under the
unchallengeable control of the United States there would be no strength in the solidarity of the
Union of American Republics. It would be a limp and flaccid organization. . . . Any President
who had frustrated the Manifest Destiny of continental expansion, any President who had
permitted an intrusion of European power in the Caribbean to neutralize the effectiveness of
the Panama Canal, would not have deserved well of his country, indeed would not have
deserved well of the New World, or of humanity today.
This picture does not justify the methods by which Theodore Roosevelt "took" the Canal
Zone. . . . It was an act for which reparation has since been paid, and we may hope that the
rancor that it caused lies wholly buried today in the grave of the rough-riding statesman who
was responsible for it. The canal itself was and is an indispensable necessity to the defense and
liberty of the New World as well as of the United States, and to the liberation of the United
Nations today. . . .
Today the gyroscope of Pan Americanism is the Good Neighbor Policy. The fundamentals of
that policy are the Doctrine of Nonintervention and the Monroe Doctrine, including the No-
Transfer principle. Thus developed and formulated, the Latin American policy of the United
States has become identified in our times with the security of the whole Western Hemisphere.
It has built up the policy of one for all and all for one which so promptly met its supreme test
in the Second World War. It has been further baptized and galvanized by the American
mission.

Although national and continental (in the hemispheric sense of the word) security is the real
watchword of the Latin American policy of the United States today, there is more to it than that.
From the beginning it has had an ideological and missionary background, originally derived
from Protestant Christianity, now resting also on the gospel of progress. The political reflection
of this was popular sovereignty and republican government as opposed to monarchy and
totalitarianism. It has received a missionary impulse to save peoples not only from political
tyranny, but also from political instability, from ignorance, from disease, from poverty, all of
which the Latin American countries have possessed in varying measure. In the past
missionary endeavor has not served to curb imperialism or political intervention; on the
contrary. Today it has inspired the Good Neighbor of the North, working loyally within the
diplomaticframework of Pan American collaboration, to fortify the political independence and
territorial integrity of the nations of the New World by increasing their economic and
sociological well-being in order to further a general advance in civilization. . . .

Source: Excerpt from The Latin American Policy of the United States: An Historical Interpretation pp. 384-393.
Copyright 1943 and renewed 1973 by Samuel Flagg Bemis, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.