Mt. Carmel High School

GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY

The Good Neighbor policy refers to the Hoover-Roosevelt policy of refraining from armed intervention in Latin America. Franklin D. Roosevelt is usually credited with setting the policy, but President Herbert Hoover coined the phrase and put the policy into practice.

When Hoover was elected in 1928, U.S. relations with Latin America were at a low point. At the Sixth Pan-American Conference in Havana that year, Latin Americans angrily criticized the Coolidge administration's armed interventions in Haiti and Nicaragua. To mend relations, Hoover after the elections immediately set out on a goodwill trip to Latin American capitals. In Honduras he announced, "We have a desire to maintain not only the cordial relations of governments with each other but also the relations of good neighbors."

Relations further improved with other Hoover administration policies. In the Clark Memorandum of 1930, the State Department repudiated Theodore Roosevelt's Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The Corollary had declared that only the United States could enforce collections of debts owed to foreigners by countries in the Western Hemisphere. (The Clark Memorandum, however, did not repudiate the right to intervention itself.) The Hoover administration's withdrawal of troops from Nicaragua and a planned withdrawal from Haiti also helped ease tensions between Latin America and the United States.

When Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency, he adopted the Good Neighbor rhetoric, but his intentions were unclear at first. In 1933 his administration pointedly refrained from sending troops to shore up the conservative Machado regime in Cuba. But when the leftist government of Ramón Grau San Martín took power, Washington helped topple it by stationing warships offshore and withholding recognition.

The Good Neighbor policy came into its own, however, in a series of measures taken during the thirties. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, in a surprise move, voted for a nonintervention resolution at the Seventh Pan-American Conference held at Montevideo in December 1933. Hull's low-tariff policy also eased relations with countries whose exports had been hurt by the protective Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. In 1934 the Platt Amendment, which gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuba, was repealed, and in 1936 the Panama Canal Treaty was renegotiated. The United States' restraint when Mexico nationalized its oil industry in 1938 also helped improve relations.

As World War II approached, the United States found itself competing for influence with Germany in Latin America. Just before and during the war the administration went to great lengths to ensure Latin American cooperation in the war effort, both to keep strategic raw materials flowing and to deny the Axis any base of operation against the Panama Canal or the United States itself. With the notable exception of Argentina, the United States was successful—the Good Neighbor policy had borne fruit.