Book Review

Canada and the United States

A book of some 500 pages on American policy toward Central America between 1913 and 1915 must cause astonishment, but Ralph Dietl has a far more ambitious agenda than his title suggests. Though he limits himself to policies toward four countries around the Caribbean, he seeks nothing less than to refurbish William Jennings Bryan's reputation as a statesman by portraying him as the principal architect of the missionary diplomacy generally associated with Woodrow Wilson.

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He begins with an overview of conflicting perceptions of America's world role that are traceable to Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson and shows how these were played out during the Manifest Destiny years of western expansion and found their expression in the Spanish-American War and the national debate over imperialism that followed it. Bryan, who had come to prominence as the Populist champion of the cause of free silver, emerged during that debate as a dedicated anti-imperialist. His opposition to further American expansion rested squarely on his domestic views and led him to favor an optimistic, utopian, and moralistic foreign policy designed to promote democracy in other countries and to foster not foreign investments by "special interests," but trade in products produced by American farmers and workers. By the time he was named secretary of state in 1913, Bryan had become a dedicated opponent of the prevailing dollar diplomacy and "undemocratic means" such as armed intervention and, according to Dietl, had a clear agenda to revise American foreign policy toward Latin America, and to some extent also toward the world at large.

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