AN ERA OF INTERVENTION ★^739America, President Jimmy Carter negotiated treaties that led to turning over
the canal’s operation and control of the Canal Zone to Panama in the year 2000
(see Chapter 26).
The Roosevelt Corollary
Roosevelt’s actions in Panama anticipated the full- fledged implementation
of a principle that came to be called the Roo se velt Corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine. This held that the United States had the right to exercise “an inter-
national police power” in the Western Hemisphere— a significant expansion
of Monroe’s pledge to defend the hemisphere against European intervention.
Early in Roosevelt’s administration, British, Italian, and German naval forces
blockaded Venezuela to ensure the payment of debts to European bankers.
Roosevelt persuaded them to withdraw, but the incident convinced him that
financial instability in the New World would invite intervention from the Old.
In 1904, Roosevelt ordered American forces to seize the customs houses of the
Dominican Republic to ensure payment of that country’s debts to European
and American investors. He soon arranged an “executive agreement” giving
a group of American banks control over Dominican finances. In 1906, he dis-
patched troops to Cuba to oversee a disputed election; they remained in the
country until 1909. Roosevelt also encouraged investment by American corpo-
rations like the United Fruit Company, whose huge banana plantations soon
dominated the economies of Honduras and Costa Rica.
Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, landed marines in Nicaragua to
protect a government friendly to American economic interests. In general, how-
ever, Taft emphasized economic investment and loans from American banks,
rather than direct military intervention, as the best way to spread American
influence. As a result, his foreign policy became known as Dollar Diplomacy.
In Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and even Liberia— the West
African nation established in 1816 as a home for freed American slaves— Taft
pressed for more efficient revenue collection, stable government, and access to
land and labor by American companies.
Moral Imperialism
The son of a Presbyterian minister, Woodrow Wilson brought to the presi-
dency a missionary zeal and a sense of his own and the nation’s moral righ-
teousness. He appointed as secretary of state William Jennings Bryan, a strong
anti- imperialist. Wilson repudiated Dollar Diplomacy and promised a new for-
eign policy that would respect Latin America’s independence and free it from
foreign economic domination. But Wilson could not abandon the conviction
that the United States had a responsibility to teach other peoples the lessons of
democracy. Moreover, he believed, the export of American manufactured goods
In what ways did the Progressive presidents promote the expansion
of American power overseas?