| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David Healy. James G. Blaine and Latin America. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2001. Pp. vii, 278. $39.95.

David Healy, a distinguished historian of U.S. foreign relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has written a "conventional diplomatic history" highlighting the "formal relations between sovereign states." In such interactions, he asserts, "someone must act or react, and it makes a difference who that someone is" (pp. 1–2). By focusing on James G. Blaine, the most important figure in Gilded Age public life, Healy explores the importance of an individual policy maker. He has crafted a carefully researched, cogent, and balanced assessment of Blaine's Latin American diplomacy, but facets of that diplomacy could be more satisfactorily explained. 1

Healy concentrates on Blaine's two terms as secretary of state: the first in 1881, the second from March 1889 through June 1891. He locates Blaine's foreign policy contributions in the Plumed Knight's style, innovative understanding of diplomatic instruments, and grand vision of the United States as a great power. Blaine brought an energy and verve to the office that contrasted sharply with his somnolent Gilded Age predecessors and foreshadowed his more activist twentieth-century successors. Similarly, he exhibited a prescient understanding of the diplomatic utility of such devices as arbitration treaties, tariff reciprocity, and U.S. administration of Latin American customs houses. Finally, he foresaw and helped prepare the nation for its role as a great power exercising hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. In each of these areas, Blaine was appreciably ahead of his time. . . .

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