The Legal Battle and Spiritual War against the Native People
The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
Theodore Roosevelt's Annual Message to Congress
December 6, 1904
| (Foreign intervention in Latin American resurfaced as an issue in U.S. foreign policy at the turn of the century as European governments began to use force to pressure several Latin American countries to repay their debts.. For example, British, German, and Italian gunboats blockaded Venezuela's ports in 1902 when the Venezuelan government defaulted on its debts to foreign bondholders. Many Americans worried that European intervention in Latin America would undermine their country's traditional dominance in the region. As part of his annual address to Congress in 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt stated that in keeping with the Monroe Doctrine the United States was justified in exercising |
"To the Senate and House of Representatives:
The Nation continues to enjoy noteworthy prosperity. Such prosperity is
of course primarily due to the high individual average of our citizenship,
taken together with our great natural resources; but an important factor
therein is the working of our long-continued governmental policies. The
people have emphatically expressed their approval of the principles underlying
these policies, and their desire that these principles be kept substantially
unchanged, although of course applied in a progressive spirit to meet
changing conditions.
Foreign Policy
In treating of our foreign policy and of the attitude that this great
Nation should assume in the world at large, it is absolutely necessary
to consider the Army and the Navy, and the Congress, through which the
thought of the Nation finds its expression, should keep ever vividly in
mind the fundamental fact that it is impossible to treat our foreign policy,
whether this policy takes shape in the effort to secure justice for others
or justice for ourselves, save as conditioned upon the attitude we are
willing to take toward our Army, and especially toward our Navy. It is
not merely unwise, it is contemptible, for a nation, as for an individual,
to use high-sounding language to proclaim its purposes, or to take positions
which are ridiculous if unsupported by potential force, and then to refuse
to provide this force. If there is no intention of providing and keeping
the force necessary to back up a strong attitude, then it is far better
not to assume such an attitude.
The steady aim of this Nation, as of all enlightened nations, should be
to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail throughout
the world the peace of justice. There are kinds of peace which are highly
undesirable, which are in the long run as destructive as any war. Tyrants
and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace.
Many times peoples who were slothful or timid or shortsighted, who had
been enervated by ease or by luxury, or misled by false teachings, have
shrunk in unmanly fashion from doing duty that was stern and that needed
self-sacrifice, and have sought to hide from their own minds their shortcomings,
their ignoble motives, by calling them love of peace. The peace of tyrannous
terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these
should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war. The goal to set before us
as a nation, the goal which should be set before all mankind, is the attainment
of the peace of justice, of the peace which comes when each nation is
not merely safe-guarded in its own rights, but scrupulously recognizes
and performs its duty toward others. Generally peace tells for righteousness;
but if there is conflict between the two, then our fealty is due first
to the cause of righteousness. Unrighteous wars are common, and unrighteous
peace is rare; but both should be shunned. The right of freedom and the
responsibility for the exercise of that right can not be divorced. One
of our great poets has well and finely said that freedom is not a gift
that tarries long in the hands of cowards. Neither does it tarry long
in the hands of those too slothful, too dishonest, or too unintelligent
to exercise it. The eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty must
be exercised, sometimes to guard against outside foes; although of course
far more often to guard against our own selfish or thoughtless shortcomings.
If these self-evident truths are kept before us, and only if they are
so kept before us, we shall have a clear idea of what our foreign policy
in its larger aspects should be. It is our duty to remember that a nation
has no more right to do injustice to another nation, strong or weak, than
an individual has to do injustice to another individual; that the same
moral law applies in one case as in the other. But we must also remember
that it is as much the duty of the Nation to guard its own rights and
its own interests as it is the duty of the individual so to do. Within
the Nation the individual has now delegated this right to the State, that
is, to the representative of all the individuals, and it is a maxim of
the law that for every wrong there is a remedy. But in international law
we have not advanced by any means as far as we have advanced in municipal
law. There is as yet no judicial way of enforcing a right in international
law. When one nation wrongs another or wrongs many others, there is no
tribunal before which the wrongdoer can be brought. Either it is necessary
supinely to acquiesce in the wrong, and thus put a premium upon brutality
and aggression, or else it is necessary for the aggrieved nation valiantly
to stand up for its rights. Until some method is devised by which there
shall be a degree of international control over offending nations, it
would be a wicked thing for the most civilized powers, for those with
most sense of international obligations and with keenest and most generous
appreciation of the difference between right and wrong, to disarm. If
the great civilized nations of the present day should completely disarm,
the result would mean an immediate recrudescence of barbarism in one form
or another. Under any circumstances a sufficient armament would have to
be kept up to serve the purposes of international police; and until international
cohesion and the sense of international duties and rights are far more
advanced than at present, a nation desirous both of securing respect for
itself and of doing good to others must have a force adequate for the
work which it feels is allotted to it as its part of the general world
duty. Therefore it follows that a self-respecting, just, and far-seeing
nation should on the one hand endeavor by every means to aid in the development
of the various movements which tend to provide substitutes for war, which
tend to render nations in their actions toward one another, and indeed
toward their own peoples, more responsive to the general sentiment of
humane and civilized mankind; and on the other hand that it should keep
prepared, while scrupulously avoiding wrongdoing itself, to repel any
wrong, and in exceptional cases to take action which in a more advanced
stage of international relations would come under the head of the exercise
of the international police. A great free people owes it to itself and
to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil.
Arbitration Treaties--Second Hague Conference
We are in every way endeavoring to help on, with cordial good will, every
movement which will tend to bring us into more friendly relations with
the rest of mankind. In pursuance of this policy I shall shortly lay before
the Senate treaties of arbitration with all powers which are willing to
enter into these treaties with us. It is not possible at this period of
the world's development to agree to arbitrate all matters, but there are
many matters of possible difference between us and other nations which
can be thus arbitrated. Furthermore, at the request of the Interparliamentary
Union, an eminent body composed of practical statesmen from all countries,
I have asked the Powers to join with this Government in a second Hague
conference, at which it is hoped that the work already so happily begun
at The Hague may be carried some steps further toward completion. This
carries out the desire expressed by the first Hague conference itself.
Policy Toward Other Nations of the Western Hemisphere
It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains
any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save
such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see
the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country
whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship.
If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency
and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays
its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States.
Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening
of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately
require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere
the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the
United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing
or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If every
country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable
and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt Amendment Cuba has
shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics
in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all question
of interference by this Nation with their affairs would be at an end.
Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical.
They have great natural riches, and if within their borders the reign
of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure to come to them. While
they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured
that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy.
We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if
it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice
at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had
invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American
nations. It is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America
or anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence,
must ultimately realize that the right of such independence can not be
separated from the responsibility of making good use of it.
In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken
in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to circumscribe
the theater of war in the Far East, and to secure the open door in China,
we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity
at large. There are, however, cases in which, while our own interests
are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made to our sympathies. Ordinarily
it is very much wiser and more useful for us to concern ourselves with
striving for our own moral and material betterment here at home than to
concern ourselves with trying to better the condition of things in other
nations. We have plenty of sins of our own to war against, and under ordinary
circumstances we can do more for the general uplifting of humanity by
striving with heart and soul to put a stop to civic corruption, to brutal
lawlessness and violent race prejudices here at home than by passing resolutions
and wrongdoing elsewhere. Nevertheless there are occasional crimes committed
on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror as to make us doubt whether
it is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval
of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The cases
must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There must be no
effort made to remove the mote from our brother's eye if we refuse to
remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable
and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances
of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power
to remedy it. The cases in which we could interfere by force of arms as
we interfered to put a stop to intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily
very few. Yet it is not to be expected that a people like ours, which
in spite of certain very obvious shortcomings, nevertheless as a whole
shows by its consistent practice its belief in the principles of civil
and religious liberty and of orderly freedom, a people among whom even
the worst crime, like the crime of lynching, is never more than sporadic,
so that individuals and not classes are molested in their fundamental
rights--it is inevitable that such a nation should desire eagerly to give
expression to its horror on an occasion like that of the massacre of the
Jews in Kishenef, or when it witnesses such systematic and long-extended
cruelty and oppression as the cruelty and oppression of which the Armenians
have been the victims, and which have won for them the indignant pity
of the civilized world."
Theodore Roosevelt