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ID:
132007
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Publication |
2014.
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Summary/Abstract |
William Eleroy Curtis was central to the creation of the Pan-American movement in the United States. As a lobbyist and bureaucrat, he helped organize the first Inter-American Conference in 1889-1890. As a journalist he became a leading "expert" on Latin America. This article uses Curtis to explore the relationship between Pan-Americanism and empire. Before 1898, Curtis sought only expanded trade, not territory for the United States. However, to explain why the country would "naturally" come to dominate Latin American markets, he depicted Latin Americans as backward yet capable of uplift through the infusion of U.S. knowledge and capital. He thus justified hemispheric control and helped U.S. Americans envision empire as a tutelary imperative. When Curtis supported territorial expansion in 1898 he did so in the language of civilizing mission rather than market aggrandizement. In combining narratives of difference and equality, Pan-Americanism served Curtis as a transitional imperial ideology.
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2 |
ID:
137373
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Summary/Abstract |
This analysis draws lessons about the failure of Wilsonian Pan–Americanism from an examination of the American occupation of Chiriquí, Panama, an event long neglected by historians. It argues that the Woodrow Wilson Administration missed an opportunity to demonstrate to Panamanians, and Latin Americans more generally, the benefits to be gained by accepting its tutelage and leadership in inter-American affairs. Rather than collaborate with a sympathetic Liberal regime in Panama City, Washington embarked on a unilateral mission to re-make a part of Panama in its image. The result was a surge of nationalist resistance that threatened the overthrow of the government in Panama City and hastened the end of the occupation. Chiriquí is representative of American efforts in the region before the 1930s and helps to explain Wilson’s failure to build a “new world order” in the Western Hemisphere.
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