Harvard University Press
Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America
Key Metrics
- Lars Schoultz
- Harvard University Press
- Paperback
- 9780674922761
- 9.28 X 6.12 X 1.29 inches
- 1.24 pounds
- Political Science > International Relations - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
In this sweeping history of United States policy toward Latin America, Lars Schoultz shows that the United States has always perceived Latin America as a fundamentally inferior neighbor, unable to manage its affairs and stubbornly underdeveloped.
This perception of inferiority was apparent from the beginning. John Quincy Adams, who first established diplomatic relations with Latin America, believed that Hispanics were lazy, dirty, nasty...a parcel of hogs. In the early nineteenth century, ex-President John Adams declared that any effort to implant democracy in Latin America was as absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts, and fishes.
Drawing on extraordinarily rich archival sources, Schoultz, one of the country's foremost Latin America scholars, shows how these core beliefs have not changed for two centuries. We have combined self-interest with a civilizing mission--a self-abnegating effort by a superior people to help a substandard civilization overcome its defects. William Howard Taft felt the way to accomplish this task was to knock their heads together until they should maintain peace, while in 1959 CIA Director Allen Dulles warned that the new Cuban officials had to be treated more or less like children. Schoultz shows that the policies pursued reflected these deeply held convictions.
While political correctness censors the expression of such sentiments today, the actions of the United States continue to assume the political and cultural inferiority of Latin America. Schoultz demonstrates that not until the United States perceives its southern neighbors as equals can it anticipate a constructive hemispheric alliance.
Author Bio
Lars Schoultz, William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Political Science, received his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from UNC. His area of special interest is inter-American relations. He has held a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Buenos Aires to study Argentine electoral behavior, two postdoctoral research grants from the Social Science Research Council to study United States policy toward Latin America, and a Ford Foundation grant to study U.S. immigration policy.
He has been a MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security and held residential fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the National Humanities Center. Schoultz is the recipient of the Tanner Award (1982), the Class of 1994 Award (1994), and the William Friday Award(2006), all for teaching excellence, and he is a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece and the Order of the Grail/Valkyries, both student honoraries.
He is the author of Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America ( Princeton, 1981), The Populist Challenge:Argentine Electoral Behavior in the Postwar Era (UNC, 1983), National Security and United States Policy Toward Latin America (Princeton, 1987), Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Harvard, 1998), That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (UNC, 2009), and In Their Own Best Interests: A History of the U.S. Effort to Improve Latin Americans (Harvard, 2018). His single-authored articles have appeared in The American Political Science Review,
The American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Organization, The Journal of Politics, The Journal of Latin American Studies, The Latin American Research Review, and Political Science Quarterly. He is a past president of the Latin American Studies Association, which in 2019 honored him with the Kalman Silvert Award.
Source: Department of Political Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Videos
No Videos
Community reviews
Write a ReviewNo Community reviews