Sumner’s denunciation infuriated President Grant and helped defeat the plan, sparking much acrimony. The frustrated president would walk through Lafayette Park to shake his fist at Sumner’s house and declare, “that man who lives up there has abused me in a way which I never suffered from any other man living.” Grant had some measure of revenge when Sumner lost the chairship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Interestingly enough, nearly one hundred years later, similar battles exploded over the Dominican Republic between the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the president.

As the Sumner episode demonstrates, U.S. policymakers have focused on the Dominican Republic for many years. Its proximity to the United States, strategic location, and raw materials and markets have guaranteed U.S. involvement in the nation’s domestic affairs, leading to near annexation and two major military interventions. While U.S. interest in the Dominican Republic has peaked and subsided throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the last two years, Sammy Sosa, Hurricane Mitch, and the tourist industry have revived attention.

As the interest in the Dominican Republic has increased, new books have appeared. The first here under review, The Dominican Republic and the United States: From Imperialism to Transnationalism, provides a good overview of the relationship. This work is part of the series, “The United States and the Americas,” edited by Lester Langley and published by the University of Georgia Press. It is the second major collaboration by G. Pope Atkins and Larman C. Wilson, who coauthored The United States and the Trujillo Regime in 1972. Their many years of observation, analysis, and writing on the subject help them craft a good survey of the bilateral U.S.-Dominican Republic relationship.

In the introduction, Atkins and Wilson outline their ideas about the relationship. They describe the “U.S. relationship as one of ‘supersovereignty’ and the Dominican Republic as an ‘unsovereign state”’(p. 5). In this context, the authors argue that U.S.-Dominican Republic relations have evolved from imperialism to a modern transnationalism focused on issues of the debt, the illegal drug trade, and Dominican migration to the United States.

For the U.S. role, they emphasize that Washington has sought to exclude foreign competition and maintain stability in the Caribbean. In the Dominican Republic, the fundamental themes of U.S. involvement have been built on the “rise and fall of the Dominican Republic’s strategic importance, the legacy of military intervention and occupation, the problem of Dominican dictatorship and instability, and vacillating U.S. efforts to ‘democratize’ the country” (p. 1). To accomplish these goals, the United States has employed policies that were “coercive and cooperative, and unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral” (p. 1).

On the Dominican side, Atkins and Wilson stress the Dominicans’ strategies of resistance and accommodation. These include “foreign policy ends and means adopted from a position of relative weakness, ambivalent love-hate views toward the United States, emphasis on economic interests and the movements of Dominicans between the two countries, international political isolation, the adversarial relationship with neighboring Haiti, the legacy of dictatorship, and the uneven evolution of a Dominican-style democratic system” (p. 2). In response to U.S. policies, especially during interventions, the “Dominicans reacted with a combination of harsh criticism, xenophobia, and appeals to international law” (p. 3). Nevertheless, Atkins and Wilson conclude that “most Dominican governments, however, found it necessary to accommodate the economic and political realities of their U.S. relations,” although they proved “adept at manipulating the United States” (p. 3).

Atkins and Wilson focus primarily on relations in the period after World War II, with only one-third of their book covering the period before 1945. They review major issues such as attempted annexation, military occupations, Trujillo’s dictatorship, and modern efforts to create a viable democracy. Throughout the text, they fully incorporate the best secondary literature in English and Spanish, including works by Bruce Calder, Abraham Lowenthal, Bernardo Vega, Juan Bosch, and Lester Langley. The presence of detailed notes and a very good historiographic essay at the end of the book highlight the existing literature on the Dominican Republic and its relationship with the United States.

While Atkins and Wilson focus on telling the story, they often provide analysis of important issues in U.S.-Dominican Republic relations. An example is their discussion of the U.S. responsibility for the rise of Rafael Trujillo. They take a very moderate position, underscoring that the United States “was at least indirectly responsible for Trujillo” by its creation of the National Guard (p. 62). Yet, they note that President Horacio Vásquez promoted Trujillo and that many Dominicans accepted his rule in exchange for stability and order. Atkins and Wilson argue that the United States “did not intend for the Dominican armed forces to be used as an instrument for overthrowing constituted government or for maintaining a military dictatorship” (p. 63). Such analysis adds to the presentation and challenges readers with thought provoking analysis.

The text is readable and comparatively well organized, although a tendency to incorporate thematic sections within chapters slows the reading of the book and provides for an uneven approach at certain junctures. It would serve as a good core textbook for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students interested in U.S.-Latin American relations. Scholars with an interest in the region and the U.S. role will find the book very useful for providing a succinct overview of the relationship between the United States and the Dominican Republic.

A reader changes pace and style with Eric Roorda’s The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945. Part of the Duke University Press series, “American Encounters/Global Interactions,” edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg, it is a good case study of the relationship between the United States and the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo during the Good Neighbor era. Roorda has constructed a well-written and conceptually stimulating book.

In the introduction, Roorda argues that the “formation of the Trujillo regime showed that a foreign policy based on the principles of national sovereignty and self-determination, the Geist of the Good Neighbor policy, meant having to accept as gracefully as possible the nearby existence of regimes antithetical to the principles of peace and democracy” (p. 1). “The Good Neighbor policy demonstrated to a generation of Caribbean dictators,” Roorda adds, “that they were free to run their countries however they pleased, so long as they maintained common enemies with the United States” (p. 1).

Roorda begins the book with an overview of the U.S. relationship with the Dominican Republic from the nineteenth century through the U.S. military occupation, 1916–1924. He then moves into the origins of the Good Neighbor policy under Herbert Hoover and its implementation under Franklin Roosevelt. From there he develops the often tenuous relationship between Trujillo and the new administration. By the mid-1930s, however, the United States maneuvered closer to the dictator in response to the fascist threat. During the war, relations improved, although as the war ended, anti-dictatorial diplomats in the State Department renewed opposition to Trujillo. But this mattered little as by that time, Trujillo firmly held control.

In detail, Roorda fully develops the paradoxes of the Good Neighbor policy in the Dominican Republic. One of the most interesting areas was the conflict between various U.S. groups. He argues that “upon close examination of ‘bilateral’ relations between the countries, the appearance of a unified ‘policy’ on the part of the United States begins to blur, and multiple sources of influence instead come into focus. All of these together constitute the full relationship, and it is confusing and contradictory” (p. 3). The cast of public characters included U.S. diplomats, Navy and Marine officers, and congressmen. Private citizens, including bankers, journalists, lobbyists, and businessmen, rounded out the ensemble. All these groups interacted to influence U.S. relations with Trujillo, although rarely in a consolidated fashion.

One of Roorda’s most interesting themes revolves around the conflict between government agencies. The State Department, with a few exceptions, consistently opposed Trujillo. Men such as U.S. minister Charles B. Curtis and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, whom Roorda calls the men in the “striped pants,” despised the dictator and often tried to undermine his rule. On the other hand, Trujillo made many friends with military officers, whom Roorda dubs the men with the “gold braid.” The dictator curried the latter’s favor with private jobs, homes, and extravagant parties. In the long term, the military and its allies typically emerged victorious in the bureaucratic battle. This type of competition between the civilians and military officers would be replayed throughout Latin America during the Good Neighbor period.

An important contribution of the book is Roorda’s focus on the agency of Trujillo. He contends that Trujillo’s control ensured a domestic stability rarely found in the Dominican Republic before the 1930s. Nevertheless, the “regime’s foreign and domestic policies did not coincide with U.S. interests in several important regards. The Dominican Republic became a difficult place to do business, a querulous participant in negotiations, and a major cause of Caribbean disquiet, including genocide, war scares, and assassinations” (p. 2). Despite the problems, Trujillo typically obtained U.S. support. Roorda provides several explanations. They include the dictator’s mimicry of Roosevelt’s favorite hobbies such as stamp collecting and the employment of prominent Americans such as Joseph Davies and Representative Hamilton Fish to lobby the U.S. government. From these actions, Roorda concludes that “Trujillo directed his government’s foreign and domestic affairs with self-conscious autonomy and brutal efficiency” while “giving the lie to the prevailing notion that he was a pliable client of the United States” (p. 3).

There are many interesting subjects covered throughout the book. They include Trujillo’s attempts to win international support for resettling Jewish expatriates from Europe at the Sousa Refugee Settlement. He also focuses on the massacre of Haitians by Trujillo’s forces in 1937 as well as economic topics including the role of the Foreign Bondholders Protective Council. Finally, the author incorporates the films and documentaries relating to the Caribbean of the era, some specifically focusing on the Dominican Republic, to develop the importance of the media in public international relations. Ultimately, the author leaves the reader wanting to know more about the individual subjects and giving graduate students searching for a dissertation or thesis topic a wonderful starting point.

While an excellent study, there are a couple of areas where I would recommend changes. On an organizational level, the author’s topical approach interspersed with a chronological narrative creates some unevenness in the presentation. Transitions are sometimes rough, and at too many points, the author inserts parenthetical references, such as (see Chapter 5), that disrupt the flow of the book and send the reader scurrying through the text looking for the material.

The area that needs the most development is the role of Dominican culture in the development of Trujillo and the responses of the Dominican Republic to the United States. While Roorda provides an overview of the history of the United States and the Dominican Republic, there is little analysis of the influence of the Dominican political, social, and economic structure on the relations between the two countries outside elite channels. While race appears in relation to the Haitians, this important factor rarely appears elsewhere. Also, what role did the antagonism of the classes play? Did religion have any significant impact? How did the political culture of the Dominican Republic allow Trujillo to succeed even in the face of opposition? More emphasis on the history and culture of the Dominican Republic would have helped the author further contextualize the importance of cultural factors on the relationship.

These areas in no way limit the overall appraisal of this book as a fine piece of scholarship. Roorda has made a significant contribution to the historiography of U.S.-Dominican Republic relations and the “Good Neighbor” policy. He provides a good example of the new international history developing strongly within the field of U.S. foreign relations that incorporates foreign archives and provides agency to weaker nations. It is a good model for future works and an important book for anyone interested in U.S.-Latin American relations.

The two works reviewed here provide good insights into the relationship between the United States and the Dominican Republic. This relatively understudied story, especially when taken outside the body of work on military interventions, is an important one. There are many more books to be written on this subject, including some specialized monographs on the nineteenth century and other more contemporary issues such as immigration and the drug trade. More work appears likely as the Dominican Republic’s strategic as well as cultural significance in the United States will only increase into the next century.