Description

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During the 1930s, the United States began to look more favorably on its southern neighbors. Latin America offered expanded markets to an economy crippled by the Great Depression, while threats of war abroad nurtured in many Americans isolationist tendencies and a desire for improved hemispheric relations.

One of these Americans was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the primary author of America's Good Neighbor Policy. In this thought-provoking book, Fredrick Pike takes a wide-ranging look at FDR's motives for pursuing the Good Neighbor Policy, at how he implemented it, and at how its themes have played out up to the mid-1990s.

Pike's investigation goes far beyond standard studies of foreign and economic policy. He explores how FDR's personality and Eleanor Roosevelt's social activism made them uniquely simpático to Latin Americans. He also demonstrates how Latin culture flowed north to influence U.S. literature, film, and opera. The book will be essential reading for everyone interested in hemispheric relations.

About the Author

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Fredrick B. Pike, winner of the American Historical Association's 1963 Bolton Prize, holds a distinguished graduate award from the University of Texas Institute of Latin American Studies.

Praise For…

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A brilliant though unorthodox treatment of the cultural and intellectual developments that lay behind the policy of the Good Neighbor. The influence of culture on foreign policy is a theme open to absurd generalizations and pointless anecdotes and is often dealt with poorly. Pike does it superbly, with successive chapters that illuminate how the Great Depression profoundly altered the way in which many norteamericanos and Latin Americans conceived of their mutual relations.... This charming and perceptive work deserves a wide readership among students of hemispheric relations.
— Foreign Affairs