Once again, this week’s readings, particularly Emily Rosenberg’s Financial Missionaries to the World, overlapped to some extent with the periods/topics I teach. In this case, I spent the last week teaching the topic of American populism to my students and so addressed to a great extent the rise of the progressive movement and the policy changes implemented under Presidents T. Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson in response to the Gilded Age’s income and wealth inequality. That the first years of Rosenberg’s book coincides with this period raised my first major question about her subject matter: What was the relationship between the progressive impulse under these three presidents and the introduction of dollar diplomacy? Rosenberg discusses anti-banker sentiment among populists (notably Bryan, whose “Cross of Gold” speech I include among my course readings) in the early pages of the book and includes Robert Lafollette’s opposition during the 1920s, but there is a lacuna in between.
The two readings by William A. Williams were quite interesting from an historiographic perspective. In “Imperial Colonialism,” he makes a cogent argument for the role of the Open Door policy in American extracontinental expansion beginning in the 1890s. The material here dovetails nicely with Drew McCoy’s account in Elusive Republic of the role of continental expansion in republican stability for the new republic. Williams’s response to Turner in “The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy” brought back my training in literary analysis. I first encountered Turner frontier hypothesis in a course on the American novel between 1900 and 1950 in graduate school. Later, in reading for my dissertation, I became one the rare contemporary readers of Brooks Adams’s Law of Civilization and Decay. Here, a question that arose for me is why Williams seems to omit any discussion of the “law” of which Adams’s title speaks, i.e., the tendency for the center of gravity for economic supremacy to move from east to west over the course of history. Williams acknowledges the theory (p. 94) but not the underlying reason for the movement of centers of culture, which Adams saw (if I correctly recall) as cultural disintegration. Perhaps Williams engages Adams’s theory at greater length beyond the excerpt including in our readings.
Finally, Catherine LeGrand’s essay “Living in Macondo,” about United Fruit’s company town in Colombia challenges the “conventional wisdom” on U.S. corporate interference in Latin American affairs, including the version of this story told by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In short, LeGrand strikes a familiar chord for historians, which is that the actual record in Macondo was neither as terrible as we might have been led to believe nor as sanitary as United Fruit might have portrayed it to be. Here, while I imagine that it was beyond the scope of what LeGrand hoped to address in her article, I found myself desiring a comparative approach in contrasting the history of Macondo and Colombia generally with that in Guatemala, on which the established historical record is significantly worse, although the key player is the same. What were the factors that contributed to United Fruit’s enterprise in Guatemala resulting in an U.S.-backed coup in the 1950s, while it seems the mailed fist of American military strength remained in check in Colombia. Obviously, there is the matter of geography, but clearly political matters were also a factor. Colombia seems to have a lacked a figure like Jacobo Arbenz and/or a political movement like his to both challenge and be defeated by U.S. military intervention.
Inevitable Historicity 