From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (91 page)

Chile and especially Argentina held out for much of the war. With a deeply divided government and a long, indefensible coastline, Chile refused to break relations until early 1943. Far removed from the war zones, Argentina did not share U.S. preoccupation with the Axis threat. It had a large German and Italian population and Axis sympathizers within its officer corps. Traditionally, Argentines had looked more to Europe than to the United States. During the 1930s, they had repeatedly challenged U.S. leadership and resisted North American cultural hegemony. Engaged in an all-out war with enemies deemed the epitome of evil, U.S. leaders, on the other hand, had little patience with Argentina's independence, which they blamed on pro-Nazi sympathies rather than nationalism. Hull and Roosevelt resented Argentina's challenge to U.S. leadership. In Hull's mind, the dispute remained tied to the despised Welles and thus often took the form of a Tennessee mountain feud. A military takeover by Col. Juan Perón in 1944 heightened U.S. fears of fascism in Latin America. With Welles gone, Hull escalated the rhetorical warfare against Argentina and recalled his ambassador. Only Hull's retirement in late 1944 and Argentina's last-minute leap onto the Allied victory bandwagon brought a
short-term resolution to the ongoing crisis. Argentina declared war just in time to secure an invitation to the 1945 United Nations conference at San Francisco.
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The United States mounted a multifaceted effort to eliminate Axis influence in the Western Hemisphere, build up defenses against the external threat, and promote hemispheric cooperation. The administration insisted that U.S. companies operating in Latin America fire German employees and cancel contracts with German agents. It blacklisted and imposed boycotts on Latin firms run by and employing Germans. With government support, U.S. businesses set out to replace the German and Italian firms driven out of business.
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The United States sent FBI agents to assist local police in tracking subversives and create counterespionage services.
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Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs funded a program to combat diseases such as malaria, dysentery, and tuberculosis, especially in regions that produced critical raw materials or where U.S. troops might be stationed. Building on programs initiated by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Institute for Inter-American Affairs worked with local health ministries to improve sanitation and sewage, develop preventive medicine programs, and build hospitals and public health centers. This precursor to the Cold War Point Four program reflected the idealistic—as well as pragmatic—side of the wartime Good Neighbor policy. It won some goodwill for the United States in the hemisphere.
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With a $38 million budget by 1942, the CIAA also expanded the propaganda barrage set off before Pearl Harbor. It used various means to drive Axis influence off the radio and out of the newspapers and mounted an intensive, broad-based "Sell America" campaign. In cooperation with Latin governments, it used a blacklist of Axis films to secure for the United States a near monopoly on movies shown in Latin America. It arranged
for goodwill tours by Hollywood stars such as the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and the glamorous Dorothy Lamour. Under the watchful eyes of CIAA censors, Hollywood films continued to present favorable images of North Americans to Latin America and of Latin Americans to the United States. Walt Disney's cartoon "Saludos Amigos" featured a humanized Chilean aircraft that courageously carried the mail over the Andes, and a colorful parrot, José Carioca, who outtalked and outwitted the clever and acerbic Donald Duck.
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The United States used military aid and advisory programs to eliminate European military influence and increase its own. Seeking to convert the Latin American military to U.S. weapons, the administration provided more than $300 million in military equipment. Lend-lease supplies helped equip Mexican and Brazilian units that actually fought in the war and provided assorted weapons to other hemispheric nations. In cases like tiny Ecuador, where military aid could not be justified, the U.S. Army creatively displayed its newest hardware in a "Hall of American Weapons" in the national military academy.
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Fearing coups by pro-Axis military officers, the United States before Pearl Harbor began to use a carrot-and-stick approach to replacing Axis military advisers with its own. United States officials also hoped that close military ties would inculcate their own military values and thereby promote the Good Neighbor ideal and political stability. Responding to U.S. pressures, most Latin governments eased out European military missions. By Pearl Harbor, the United States had advisers in every Latin nation. Senior officers came to the United States on goodwill tours; Latin Americans attended U.S. military educational institutions, including the service academies—the sons of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and his Dominican counterpart, Rafael Trujillo, attended West Point.
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From the standpoint of U.S. interests, wartime policies succeeded splendidly. With Europe out of the picture, trade skyrocketed. The United States purchased huge quantities of critical raw materials, which, along with Export-Import Bank loans, helped stabilize Latin economies. At the height of the war, Latin America sent 50 percent of its exports to and received 60 percent of its imports from the United States. After 1942, active
military collaboration became less crucial. Latin America's main role was to furnish air and naval bases and provide raw materials. Indeed, the U.S. military spurned full-fledged cooperation because of the demands that might result. Still, Mexico provided an air squadron to fight in the Pacific. Even more important, 250,000 Mexicans served in the U.S. armed forces, and Mexico provided a majority of the more than three hundred thousand
braceros
workers who helped meet an acute labor shortage in the United States. Brazil sent forces to fight in Italy and made available bases for the United States on its protruding northeast corner—the "bulge" of Brazil—a critical stopping point for U.S. ships and aircraft en route to North Africa.
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By war's end, the United States had achieved hegemony in the hemisphere without imposing its will by force.

In terms of advancing the Good Neighbor ideal, wartime policies were less successful. In an ethereal sense, so much of that spirit was tied to the charismatic persona of Franklin Roosevelt, and the spirit—and policy—barely survived his death. Once the Axis threat eased, Latin America became a lesser priority for the United States. Unfulfilled expectations led to disappointment and frustration. United States officials resented Latin displays of independence and sometimes complained that they received only a small return on their considerable investment. Latin Americans expressed disappointment at what they considered meager U.S. aid. Although they profited from wartime trade, Latin nations also suffered from chronic shortages and high inflation and worried about their growing economic dependence on the United States.
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Close contact between North Americans and Latin Americans often raised tensions. In implementing the blacklists, U.S. officials made clear they did not trust governments they considered inferior to effectively root out Axis influence. They acted unilaterally and with a heavy hand to counter a threat they grossly exaggerated. In targeting people and firms to be blacklisted, they often acted on hearsay and rumor. Latins deeply resented the infringements on their sovereignty. The Colombian foreign minister denounced the blacklist as "economic excommunication" and compared it to the Spanish Inquisition.
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In the British Caribbean nations put under U.S. control by the 1940 destroyers-bases deal, the people originally welcomed the North American presence as a means to achieve
independence and prosperity. But the demeanor of superiority manifested by the occupiers and especially their efforts to impose racial segregation quickly brought disillusionment. "Maybe the American military authorities have forgotten they are not in Alabama," a Guyanese complained.
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Good Neighbor propaganda relentlessly promoted favorable mutual images but worked no more than limited changes. While generally acceding to its wishes, Latin Americans continued to resent and fear the United States; North Americans clung doggedly to old stereotypes.
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Despite the rhetoric of republicanism, U.S. wartime policies actually strengthened dictatorships and heightened oppression in many countries. Repressive governments exploited the counterespionage programs the FBI helped establish in Brazil and Guatemala to stifle internal dissent.
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The refusal to intervene that was basic to the Good Neighbor policy made it expedient to tolerate dictatorships in the name of order. Clever tyrants like Trujillo hired professional lobbyists to promote their cause in Washington and skillfully exploited the Axis threat and U.S. preference for stability to increase their military power and enhance their personal power. The military aid and advisory programs helped expand the military's power in Latin American politics. Sharing a common "military culture" that favored order at the expense of democracy, U.S. officers sometimes formed close connections with their Latin counterparts and helped buffer dictators like Trujillo against internal foes and State Department critics. Salvadorean dictator Maximiliano Martinez's bloody suppression of a 1943 internal revolt made plain the tragic human consequences of a "spoonful" of U.S. weapons—six tanks and five thousand old rifles.
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Trujillo used U.S. military aircraft and rifles to terrorize his own people and destabilize Central America. Friends of liberty in the region were "puzzled and discouraged," a State Department official reported, that the United States while fighting dictators abroad was supporting them in the hemisphere. The United States, Latin critics complained, had become a "good neighbor of tyrants."
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Concern for the hemisphere also produced renewed interest and limited wartime commitments in Liberia, a country founded by freed American
slaves. West Africa's proximity to the "bulge" on the east coast of Brazil and rising Nazi influence there brought Liberia to U.S. attention before Pearl Harbor. The loss of Southeast Asian rubber heightened the importance of the enormous Firestone plantations. The invasion of North Africa increased the value of the Brazil–West Africa air route. FDR's brief post-Casablanca visit to Liberia and his flight from there to Brazil gave presidential impetus to plans already under consideration in the government. During the war, the United States began to construct an airfield in Liberia and drew up plans for a modern port at Monrovia. To sweeten the deal, it provided Liberia a $1 million grant. To promote economic development, it dispatched technical missions to evaluate Liberia's mineral resources, increase its agricultural productivity, and improve medical facilities. Deeply concerned at the Amero-Liberian elite's exploitation of the native population, FDR was prepared to insist on reforms as a condition for further U.S. aid. He even contemplated some form of trusteeship to ensure the right kind of progress. His plans were incomplete when he died in April 1945.
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While solidifying its position close to home, the United States also took the first fateful steps toward entanglement in the Middle East, a complex and volatile region that would entice and frustrate Americans for the rest of the century and beyond. Some officials naively believed that the United States had earned the goodwill of Middle Eastern people, as Hull put it, from a "century of . . . missionary, education, and philanthropic efforts . . . never tarnished by any material motives or interests."
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As Hull's remark suggests, the region was not entirely terra incognita to Americans. Missionaries had been there since the 1820s, working mainly with Christian minorities but also establishing schools and hospitals open to Muslims. Missionaries and educators founded Robert College in Turkey and the American University in Beirut. They spearheaded Near East Relief, which mounted a heroic effort to ease the vast human suffering from World War I and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and has been called "one of the most notable chapters in the annals of American philanthropy abroad."
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Good intentions notwithstanding, most Americans placed Arab and Jew alike near the bottom of their racial hierarchy, viewing them as backward, superstitious, and desperately in need of
Westernization.
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Material interests rather than ideals drove the wartime push into the Middle East. American merchants and businessmen had long been active in the region—in the twentieth century, oilmen especially so—and by 1940 U.S. firms had acquired oil concessions in Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The growing importance of economic interests produced a diplomatic presence. The significance of Middle Eastern oil plus increasingly insistent demands on the part of Jewish-Americans for U.S. recognition of Zionist proposals for a Jewish homeland in Palestine brought together before World War II the conflicting forces that would dominate and bedevil U.S. Middle East policy to the present.

Early in the war, the United States deferred to the British. The Middle East had traditionally been a British sphere of influence, and as long as the region was in peril militarily Americans were not disposed to challenge their ally. When the British brutally suppressed a nationalist revolt in Egypt in February 1942, the Roosevelt administration said nothing.
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It permitted Britain to distribute American lend-lease supplies to Middle Eastern nations. Even in Saudi Arabia, where U.S. oilmen hit a gusher in 1938, FDR allowed Churchill to take the lead. "This is a little far afield for us," he conceded to one of his advisers in 1941.
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United States policy changed dramatically in 1943. By this time the region was relatively secure, and the focus of war had shifted to new theaters, freeing Americans to challenge British colonialism. Exporters feared that Britain's domination of the region would close off vital postwar markets and insisted that the United States must liberate itself from British control. Critics like Roosevelt's personal emissary, the flamboyant and sometimes clownish former secretary of war Patrick Hurley—who also had close ties to U.S. oil interests—charged that Britain and the Soviet Union were using American supplies to curry favor with Middle Eastern nations. In response, the administration in 1943 took over distribution of lend-lease and marked all supplies with the U.S. flag and the words "Gift of the U.S.A." to make clear the source and thereby presumably gain full political benefit.
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