Herbert Hoover, Occupation Withdrawal, and the Good Neighbor Policy

A vast historiography is devoted to arguing which U.S. president was most responsible for devising the Good Neighbor Policy (GNP), the seminal policy shift toward the Western Hemisphere of the first half of the twentieth century, and the query is worthwhile. Overall, historians have been generous to Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). (1) FDR certainly gave his policy the winning name of "good neighbor" and announced it during his first inaugural address. Though most suspected that he meant the "far east" at the time because he failed to mention Latin America, he did speak of the region explicitly before the Pan American Union on April 12, 1933 (Coleman 1951, 76-78). More important, in 1934 Roosevelt pulled U.S. troops out of Haiti and rescinded the Platt Amendment that gave it the right of intervention, among other things, over Cuba, and in 1936 he ended the U.S. protectorate over Panama in the Arias-Roosevelt Treaty. That same administration formally accepted the principle of nonintervention at the Seventh Inter-American Conference in Montevideo in 1933. And after Republican administrations had raised tariffs, Roosevelt's State Department instead penned reciprocal trade agreements that lowered tariffs for Latin American nations (Gellman 1979, 7, 45; Pike 1995, 208). Finally, Roosevelt deepened what would be Washington's acquiescence to dictatorship in Latin America, also a crucial element of the GNP. Support for strongmen such as Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Fulgencio Batista of Cuba outsourced the dirty work of keeping peace and order in the Caribbean area after the marines withdrew. (2) But many have argued that, despite these signal achievements, Herbert Hoover was the true author of the policy of good neighborliness. (3) A consensus of sorts exists that Hoover, and to a lesser extent his two Republican predecessors, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, at least initiated the central tenet of GNP, the pledge of nonintervention, while Roosevelt expanded and formalized the relationship (Gellman 1979, 3). Challenging the champions of Hoover, historian Earl Curry asserted that "Roosevelt was prepared to commit the United States to nonintervention; Hoover was not. And therein lay the difference" (1979, 9). Yet Hoover did repeatedly commit to nonintervention, both in word and deed. It was Hoover who made the decision to exit Haiti and his administration that negotiated the end of the Nicaraguan intervention. After Hoover, it became practically impossible to begin another intervention. Merely showing Hoover's GNP precedents to FDR is not enough. Missing in almost all debates over which president midwifed the GNP is the role of Latin American and U.S. critics. (4) Historian Anne Regis Winkler-Morey noted that most historians "have neglected to explore the role of popular movements in Latin America and the United States" in ending occupations, seeing the GNP as an "effort to drown out and co-opt the voices of popular internationalism" (2001, 214). Hoover presided over an era of rising protests against intervention, and he responded by taking them seriously and implementing substantive policy changes. True, Hoover initiated little beyond the withdrawal of U.S. troops, but that component of the GNP was by far the most important to foreign critics of intervention. Trade treaties drew little comment from Latin Americans, and direct financial oversight, such as in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, continued for years after troop withdrawal without much opposition. So on the basis of listening to Latin Americans and articulating and implementing a rejection of U.S. occupation in line with the hemisphere's wishes, Hoover took more momentous steps than did FDR, and this against significant dawdling by the U.S. military and even the State Department. (5) This tale of withdrawal from occupation offers a case in which a president, stirred by his own beliefs and his willingness to pay heed to foreign public opinion, wore down the rest of the executive branch and cleared the way for the next president's full normalization of inter-American relations. …