The ‘20s: Culture, Consumption, and Crash 163the foreign countries receiving the loans could, as Dulles pointed out, use
those dollars to buy American goods. The U.S. would gain more political
power by turning its allies into debtor nations that would have to abide by
American decisions. As we have seen in the Dawes and Young Plans, loans
could promote recovery from the Great War. Government-backed lending
could help U.S. banks accumulate capital by allowing them to sell subscrip-
tions [the sale of bonds and securities by banks as investments to individuals
which would be part of a foreign loan package]. And for agriculture, loans
would bail out farmers by providing funds to buy surplus commodities and
enable people to retain land in rural areas. That combination of economic
policies and the economic surge of the 1920s created great wealth, certainly
not indicative of a time of isolation. Between 1914 and 1929, overall exports
more than doubled, to $5.4 billion, while private investment abroad soared,
from $3.5 billion to over $17 billion. Ford, GM, and American Telephone and
Telegraph [AT&T], to name just a few companies, were heavily invested in
Europe. “Extractive” industries—those that took raw materials out of the
ground such as oil, copper, ores, or even water—were deeply invested, and
involved, in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. American Capitalism
was working just as theorists predicted, and maybe in no area as effectively as
Latin America.
Those countries to the south of the United States had long been subject
to U.S. desires, from the Monroe Doctrine onward at least. By the early 20th
Century, U.S. control over the southern Americas was overwhelming. Direct
U.S. investment, $1.26 billion in 1914, rose to $3.52 billion in 1929, as
American electricity, construction, fruit, sugar, oil, copper, and mineral invest-
ments just kept growing [as the depression hit, they declined, but not pre-
cipitously—by 1936 investments were down to $2.77 billion]. American
exports to Latin America tripled in the 1920s, and accounted for 20 percent
of all U.S. exports by the end of the decade. In Chile, American investments
in nitrites and copper doubled, from $200 million to $400 million in the 1920-
1928 period. By 1929, American companies were producing half of Venezuela’s
oil while International Telephone and Telegraph [ITT] owned the communi-
cations industry of Cuba. Everyone, everywhere, drank Coca-Cola.
Meanwhile, to make sure the economy kept moving at a brisk pace and prof-
its flowed back to U.S. companies, experts who were called “money doctors,”
economists and public sector specialists, usually from Ivy League or other elite