Andrew Crawley's new book on the USA'S relationship with the regime of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt sets out to make a bold new statement about that relationship and the Good Neighbor Policy as a whole. Despite its strengths, however, the book fails to make a convincing case largely due to the inadequacy of the research conducted in both primary and secondary sources.
The author's main thesis revolves around several interconnected ideas. First, the Good Neighbor Policy was in large part a response to what Crawley refers to as the overwhelming demand from the US population for a ‘return to isolationism’. It was, therefore, a policy built on non-intervention and non-involvement in Latin American affairs. Second, far from being a cohesive and coherent statement of US attitudes toward the nations of Latin America, it was vague, inconsistent, and rife with contradictions. Third, Crawley argues that, when all of this is taken into consideration, the theories that have abounded in the literature dealing with the United States and Somoza – which suggest that the dictator's rise to power was a carefully calculated effort to ensure stability in Nicaragua following the departure of US Marines in 1933 – are simply mistaken. US inaction concerning the volatile and unstable political situation in Nicaragua in the early- to mid-1930s is the primary culprit for the rise of Somoza. In Crawley's analysis the Good Neighbor Policy's emphasis on non-intervention actually prevented the US government from exercising any sort of influence on the political battles in Nicaragua, thus allowing Somoza to utilise his power base within the Guardia Nacional, push aside opponents, and cement his own position as the unquestioned ruler of the Central American nation.
While Crawley states his argument clearly and consistently and his writing is sometimes lively and engaging, the study unfortunately resembles what US diplomatic history looked like 20 or more years ago. He follows a strictly chronological approach, with each chapter covering a year or two and the narrative proceeding month by month, and often day by day. The focus is on the views of officials in the Department of State and the writing is the familiar ‘memo to memo ‘ style in which the author simply summarises the messages going to the US embassy in Nicaragua, the messages coming from the US embassy in Nicaragua, then restarting the cycle with the messages coming from Washington responding back to Nicaragua. The narrative rarely moves far beyond the outlooks of the US ambassador and a handful of officials back in Washington. Other forces at work – US business concerns, non-governmental actors, racism, culture, and so on – are virtually ignored. This is hardly surprising when one considers the primary sources utilised for the study. Aside from a few scattered references to other record groups at the National Archives, perhaps as much as eighty percent or more of the author's notes come from one source: the decimal files of Record Group 59, almost entirely comprised of materials taken from the 817.00 file that deals with the political situation in Nicaragua.
The author's telescopic focus on US relations with Nicaragua means that the broader implications (and applications) of the Good Neighbor Policy are generally ignored. There are a few mentions of the Martínez regime in El Salvador and the Ubico dictatorship in Guatemala, but the rest of Latin America is absent from the discussions. This all gives the impression that US policy toward Nicaragua was happening in a virtual vacuum, leaving the reader to wonder about the overall hemispheric and world contexts in which policy toward the Somoza regime was made.
As for any larger contexts for his analysis, Crawley employs constant references to the ‘overwhelming isolationism’ of the United States after the First World War, which caused the nation to virtually withdraw from international affairs. This interpretation would come as a rather astounding conclusion to authors such as Emily Rosenberg, Frank Costigliola, Melvyn Leffler, Akira Iriye, Warren Cohen, and many others who have detailed the extremely active (albeit not always entirely successful) US diplomacy of the 1920s and early-1930s. None of their works, however, is noted in Crawley's sparse bibliography. In addition to the absence of these broader studies, the list of works consulted is surprising by the omission of such works as David Green's The Containment of Latin America; Lloyd Gardner's Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy; and David Schmitz's important 1999 work, Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965. Finally, the secondary sources are extraordinarily dated. For a book published in 2007, the latest work cited in the bibliography is from 1995, one of perhaps half a dozen sources from the 1990s. Thus, fascinating studies such as Frederick Pike's 1995 work, FDR's Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos are nowhere to be found.
Of more concern is the narrowness of the primary research. Despite the fact that Franklin Roosevelt figures prominently in the book's title, no work was undertaken at the Roosevelt Presidential Library. The papers of Cordell Hull in the Library of Congress are also untouched. And although the decimal files for Nicaragua are scoured with some enthusiasm, other collections such as the Records of the Office of American Republic Affairs, 1918–47, Records of the Deputy Assistant Secretaries of State for Inter-American Affairs, and other rich sources in Record Group 59 are ignored. The complete lack of sources from the Nicaraguan side is also troubling, since much of Crawley's thesis rests on the notion that Nicaraguan politicians and parties were highly influenced by the United States' action (or inaction).
Andrew Crawley has produced a fairly well written book with some interesting ideas. The serious gaps in both the primary and secondary research undertaken by the author, however, seriously compromise the main thesis and reduce the monograph's overall contributions to the field.
