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Review
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Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture
of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930, by Emily S. Rosenberg. Durham,
North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003. 352 pages, $22.95 paper
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Originally published in 1999, Emily Rosenberg's Financial Missionaries
to the World is a pioneering effort to apply postmodern cultural
analysis to American economic and diplomatic history. As a mark
of its worth, it won the Robert H Ferrell Book Prize awarded by
the Society for Historians of American Relations to the most distinguished
book of the year in its field. In her analysis of Dollar Diplomacy,
Rosenberg describes the attempts by American policymakers, investment
bankers, and professional economists to spread the gospel of standardized
monetary and financial arrangements to less developed nations. By
offering loans in exchange for the right to manage other nations'
customs, taxation, investment, and foreign trade policies according
to the dictates of "scientific" gold standard economics,
private bankers, with the encouragement of the U.S. government,
sought to bring these nations more fully into a rational, predictable,
and growing global market economy. The administrations of Theodore
Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson regarded such
financial management as an alternative to imperialism. It was believed
that Dollar Diplomacy would bring prosperity, good government, and
pro-American policies to less developed nations and thus avoid the
chaos or threat of European interventions that might lead the United
States to intervene militarily itself.
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1
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The economics and politics of Dollar
Diplomacy have been well known and much debated for years. Rosenberg's
primary contribution to this knowledge is her cultural analysis
of the assumptions and arguments behind both the practice of Dollar
Diplomacy and the contemporary political critique of it, an analysis
in post-modernist terms, the discourse of Dollar Diplomacy and the
anti-banking/anti-imperialist discourse that opposed it. She argues
convincingly that Dollar Diplomacy was acceptable to the American
public because its discourse played to common assumptions that the
public held regarding imperialism, the nature of civilization, gender,
and race. While Americans generally opposed military intervention
and blatant colonialism, they also regarded themselves as superior
to less developed and more "primitive" nations and assumed
that both national interest and the obligations of "civilization"
required the United States to take at least some role in stabilizing
and civilizing such countries. Thus, Theodore Roosevelt, who had
no qualms himself about outright imperialism but believed that the
American electorate would not accept long-term rule over other nations,
proposed that progress could come about alternatively by American
experts helping other nations to stabilize their markets and monetary
exchange policies through the scientific application of economic
laws.
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American beliefs about progress through
professional management and scientific rationality interfaced with
other assumptions about gender and race. Men had "natural"
claims to authority as a consequence of their unique propensity
to self-control, rationality, and ability to both control the environment
and plan for the future. These virtues of manhood also imposed obligations
to protect and guide those who were weaker, self-indulgent, and
less rational: women, children and those of nonwhite races. Rosenberg
illustrates beautifully how the American advisers who went to the
Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, China, and Liberia
to teach the "natives" good economics, believed and embodied
this Victorian ideal.
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After World War I and especially
during the Great Depression, an anti-banking/anti-imperialist discourse
emerged to challenge the government-banker cooperation that was
supposed to bring stability, peace, and progress to the developing
world. In many Latin American nations, Dollar Diplomacy had led
to U.S. military intervention to suppress opposition to the financial
arrangements and loan repayments that America's financial missionaries
had brought to them. Even in nations where American military intervention
did not take place, tales of corruption, bankruptcy, and oppression
led opponents of Dollar Diplomacy to equate it with imperialism
rather than see it as a beneficent alternative. African Americans
identified American practices in Haiti and Liberia with the lynching
they endured at home and attacked the implicit racism of the Dollar
Diplomacy discourse. The rising feminist movement also attacked
the faltering image of Dollar Diplomacy as the benevolent supervision
of weaker peoples. Socialist and labor movements identified the
class elements of Dollar Diplomacy with the supposed conspiracy
of international bankers which they believed had drawn the United
States into World War I to protect loans to the Allies. Ultimately
the United States did pull back to some degree from Dollar Diplomacy
in adopting the Good Neighbor policy toward Latin America, but the
debate soon morphed into the internationalist/isolationist argument
over World War II and its aftermath, a debate that included elements
of the Dollar Diplomacy and anti-banking/anti-imperialist discourse
on both sides.
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Rosenberg's book is well-written
and accessible to advanced undergraduate students. The book is well
suited for supplementary reading in courses dealing with American
economic and diplomatic history and it can serve as an excellent
example of the "new" postmodern diplomatic history in
courses emphasizing historiography.
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5
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San Francisco State University
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Jerald Combs
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