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Book Review: The Literary Construction of the Monroe Doctrine

The Monroe Doctrine in its 1823 version contained a double proposition. It presented an anticolonial message addressed to European powers and it proclaimed solidarity with the emerging republics of Spanish America. How can an anticolonialist proposition become an instrument of U.S. hegemony in Latin America? This is the central question that Hemispheric Imaginings tries to answer. The Monroe Doctrine, the author argues, was constituted at the intersection of literary and journalistic discourses about the nation's role in the world. Narrative texts played a crucial role in transforming the Monroe Doctrine from a foreign-policy principle into a compelling national ideology. By locating the transformations in the doctrine's meaning in relation to public debates and popular anxieties, the book offers a novel and insightful perspective into a traditional topic of diplomatic history.

To historians, this book offers an interesting example of the interplay among literature, foreign policy, and the construction of national imaginings. Literary texts, Murphy argues, help to make sense of national imaginings. They negotiate bonds of affiliation for peoples of different race, class, and gender and articulate the tensions posed by foreign-policy initiatives. Murphy's most interesting interpretive move is to situate the Monroe Doctrine in the sphere of public debate and national consciousness. Rather than an invention of John Quincy Adams, the Monroe Doctrine appears as an articulation of U.S. public sentiments and ideas already present in literature and journalism. The author's argument about the embeddedness of the Monroe Doctrine in U.S. political discourse and literary consciousness is quite persuasive. Rather than a foreign-policy principle, the doctrine appears as a master-narrative containing multiple arguments about national identity and imperial ambition, whose function was to suppress the tensions between its anticolonialist and its imperialist positions.

In Chapter 1, the author compares Adams's 1822 address with Lydia Maria Child's 1824 novel Hobomok. Both Adams's speech and Child's novel try to reconcile the territorial expansion of the United States with the policy of salutary "domestic isolation." The politician and the novelist resort to the same family metaphors to explain the position of the United States as a lonely defender of republican government in the New World. Rather than prefiguring the Monroe Doctrine, these texts tried to address contemporary anxieties about the nation's identity and its place in the world. Both narratives located the United States in the Western Hemisphere, justifying further westward expansion as part of nation building. This was part of a broader discussion about the United States' alleged cultural dependence from Great Britain. Both Adams and Child were responding to British criticism about the "lack of literature" in "America" and about Britain's primacy in the "invention" of civil government. Adams's speech presented "republican government" as an "American" invention, while Child's novel re-enforced the view that "American literature" should deal with the American Indian and the land he/she inhabited.

In the second chapter, the author contrasts the narrative of Commodore Matthew Perry's expedition to Japan with Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851). While the former tries to persuade the American public of the possibility of a U.S. commercial empire outside of the Western Hemisphere, the latter narrates the escape from an aristocratic family to a more democratic social milieu in the countryside. Through these narratives, Murphy underscores the tensions between the project of westward continental expansion and the creation of a maritime empire in the Pacific. Unable to articulate the major anxieties of the nation, Francis L. Hawks's Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan (1856) failed to rewrite the Monroe Doctrine into a theory of global empire. Conversely, by relocating these problems into the more solid terrain of domesticity and bourgeois self-fashioning, The House of the Seven Gables was more successful in affirming the notion of U.S. exceptionalism.

The Monroe Doctrine, already quite popular in the 1850s, suppressed the alternative of a Pacific commercial empire. The national mandate was to protect "democracy" and "freedom" in the hemisphere, not the incorporation of racial others as colonial subjects. The fear of the "racial debasement" of U.S. democracy, already present in the congressional debates about the incorporation of Texas and Mexico, [1]reappeared with new intensity with the mention of Asian constituencies. The social and political context contributed to the persistent popularity of the doctrine of domestic isolation. In contrast to Perry's legitimating account of the expedition, Hawthorne's novel dealt with the national anxieties about modernization within the familiar context of the critique of aristocracy, the discourse of domesticity, and the tension between rootedness and mobility.

Chapter 3 examines two late nineteenth-century narratives, oppositional to empire: José Martí's writings about Nuestra América (1890) and María Ruiz de Burton's novel Who Would Have Thought It (1872). Both narratives reject the U.S. gesture to appropriate the Western Hemisphere as its own locus of enunciation and influence. Burton challenged the binary New-Old World by imagining a trans-Atlantic community of the learned, united by bonds of class, upbringing, and race. She painted the Mexican elite as immersed in European codes of conduct and cultural competence, and Mexico as a fertile ground for monarchy. Martí's essays raised concerns about the threat posed by the Colossus of the North, underscoring its arrogant ignorance of southern neighbors. The Cuban poet exposed the duplicity of U.S. claims to protect hemispheric freedom, noticing its imperial ambitions. Both Burton and Martí embraced a cosmopolitanism that rejected the doctrine of salutary isolation and U.S. hegemonic designs toward Latin America. To that extent, these narratives echoed domestic public debates. Burton's novel addressed the question of whether or not the United States should intervene to liberate Mexico from the French occupation. Martí's essays were a reply to Secretary James G. Blaine's call for a union of the Americas under U.S. guidance.

Chapter 4 studies popular repercussions of the "Venezuelan affair" through the writings of journalist Richard Harding Davis. In 1895, President Grover Cleveland invoked the Monroe Doctrine to prevent British intervention in Venezuela. The doctrine had been an issue in the recent presidential campaign and the press had used it in order to stir up public support for the cause of "Cuba Libre." These debates reactivated an old myth that associated the United States with the struggle against colonialism. Davis's travelogue Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America (1896) addressed public concerns about the United States becoming a hemispheric hegemon. Davis agreed with President Cleveland: the British should not be allowed to influence Latin American politics. He argued that the United States should pursue its own national interest but, at the same time, protect weaker nations in the Americas.

Davis's novel, Soldiers of Fortune (1897), deals with an imaginary nation on the northwest coast of South America, in which there is a plot to unseat the elected government. The novel's hero, a U.S. mining engineer, saves the country from dictatorship by organizing a Creole revolutionary army. Thus, an emblem of technological modernization turns into a vehicle for liberty, hence continuing the labors of Washington and Bolivar. The narrative reconciles two interpretations of U.S. continental hegemony: one emphasizing economic interconnectedness, the other articulated around the idea of New World democracy. U.S. modernity promises a new hegemony in the continent through the cooperation between business and scientific-professional knowledge. The new role of the engineer-manager is to uphold democratic government and modern production in South America, a mission that clearly goes beyond the original meaning attributed to the Monroe Doctrine.

By the time of Richard Olney's letter to Lord Salisbury (1895), the Monroe Doctrine in its older interpretation was becoming obsolete-although it remained quite popular. Transportation improvements had outmoded the claim of American isolation based upon geographical distance. The partial democratization of European politics had rendered inadequate the description of Europe as the home of aristocratic government. A renewed Anglo-Saxonism and the increasing use of race as synonymous with civilization brought the U.S. cultural elite closer to its European counterpart. The intense flow of ideas across the North Atlantic made the notion of hemispheric isolation an anachronism.

This book is a welcome contribution to the field of transnational studies of the United States, as presented by the "New Americanists." [2] Typical of this new historiography is the close reading of cultural texts as a starting point to analyze racial, gender, or political ideologies. At the beginning, Murphy focuses on a 1912 cartoon that presents Uncle Sam teaching unruly Latin American school children. This cartoon makes explicit the popularity of the idea of "America" as master/teacher of self-government in the Western Hemisphere. Like this cartoon, she speculates, other representations of the U.S. role in the world made the Monroe Doctrine popular, at the expense of stretching to the limit the tension between its contradictory elements: the anticolonial and the imperial postures.

This book takes away part of the originality of the Monroe Doctrine, placing the 1823 declaration within the context of literary and political discourses about U.S. national identity and imperial destiny. This undermines the traditional story of the presidential message as a belated response to the threat posed by the European Holy Alliance. The nature of the doctrine is also affected. Murphy presents it as a sort of meta-narrative about U.S. identity and about the U.S. role in world politics. Displaced to the terrain of "discursive formations," the transformed Monroe Doctrine can become the subject of literary readings. What is gained by this exercise? Much, I think.

Hemispheric Imaginings provides historians of international relations new propositions to reflect upon. One of them states that the Monroe Doctrine was a flexible construct that allowed the coexistence of contradictory foreign-policy goals: isolation together with expansionism, and the control as well as the protection of other nations. Also insightful is the argument that the context of enunciation, rather than circumscribed to foreign-policy circles, was immersed into broader public understandings about the nation's stand. As a public-embedded ideology, the doctrine evolved with the changing perceptions of what constituted "America" (the United States). A discourse deeply rooted in the notion of U.S. exceptionalism, the Monroe Doctrine endured the passage of time. It became outmoded, only to be rescued later by a more transnational project.

Although rich in the domestic, cultural resonance of foreign-policy ideas, the book does not deal with reactions from other writers and representations in the other Americas. [3] J. Q. Adams was not alone in seeing in the "American Indian" a unique resource to distill nationhood. The political and cultural elites of the newly formed republics of South America did the same. In their patriotic parades and theater representations, an idealized Inca called for the independence of the nation. Similarly, when the winds of positivism and the ideology of progress permeated the language and the politics of elites in the Southern Cone, they built a national identity predicated upon the American/European divide. They claimed to be "Europeans in the Americas" but at the same time different to the economically and technologically superior "Norte-América." The "sister republics" responded with a mixture of indignation and relief to news of the U.S. victory over Spain in 1898. This collective (and diverse) response should perhaps be part of the reflection about the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine.

The literary constitution of a foreign-policy principle is, undoubtedly, an appealing idea but one that poses important methodological risks. To begin with, there is the danger of slippage between "literature" and "culture." [4] Historians are suspicious of some of the selective strategies of literary critics. Which text can be said to best represent a given climate of opinion or serve as a synthesis of cultural anxieties? (Why Lydia Child and not Washington Irving?) Why privilege some literary, journalistic, and political texts over others? Then there is the danger of confusing "popular opinion" with the mass media. Do newspapers articulate as completely as it would be desirable the moods of popular culture? Perhaps other forms of popular expressions (responses to the representation of Shakespeare plays, Buffalo Bill performances, or world exhibitions) represent better these modes and sentiments than literary texts.

This book presents a temporality that is fragmented by crucial events in the nation's history. This history seems to respect the conventional climactic moments in U.S. history: the postrevolutionary moment, the years preceding the Civil War, the Reconstruction period, and the imperial moment after 1898. Joining the criticism of native American historians and new-West historians, I would like to suggest that the time framework to study colonialism or imperial cultures should be much longer. To understand the geopolitics of knowledge embedded in the notion of a "Hemisphere Apart," one needs to go back to the sixteenth century, when the "idea of America" emerged in tension with the worldviews of indigenous peoples. [5] A true genealogy of the particular location of the United States in the Western Hemisphere as a patron, father, invader, and benefactor must deal with the long-term transition from Spanish colonialism to U.S. hemispheric supremacy.

Other nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts contain explicit references to the U.S. displacement of the Spanish empire. The turn-of-the-century "Columbus mania" triggered multiple celebrations of Hispanic influences in the United States. 1898 brought to the American viewer photographic images of U.S. military power, policing, and educational activities. World exhibitions contributed to underscoring the importance and meaning of Spanish America. The Spanish ex-colonies figured prominently in the rearticulation of U.S. foreign-policy principles and the production of imaginings about "America." For these reasons, the other Americas deserve to have a more important place in the analysis of the cultural construction of the Monroe Doctrine.

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[1]Reginal Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981). On the cultural impact of the U.S. war against Mexico (1846-1848), see Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley, CA, 2002).

[2]A pioneer text in this direction was Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC, 1993). Amy Kaplan's The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2002) continues this trajectory. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman's collection of essays, The Futures of American Studies (Durham, NC, 2002), argues for "comparativist," "differentialist," and "counter-hegemonic" American studies. For more recent pronouncements about the need for "transnational American studies," see Amy Kaplan, "Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today," American Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2004); Richard Ellis, Paul Giles, and Jane Desmond, "Editorial," Comparative American Studies 1, no. 1 (2003); and Shelley F. Fishkin, "Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies," American Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2004).

[3]For a "hemispheric approach" to the study of cultural and intellectual flows in the Americas, see Erika Lee, "Orientalism in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to Asian American History," Journal of Asian American Studies 8, no. 3 (2005).

[4]This confusion of borders between literature and culture is clear in Thomas Peyser, Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism (Durham, NC, 1998).

[5]See Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (London, 2005).

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