Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule by Michel Gobat Max Paul Friedman Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule. By Michel Gobat. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Call it the Nicaraguan Paradox: why was the most Americanized country in Central America, whose inhabitants went so far as to prefer baseball to soccer, home to two of Latin America’s most successful anti-American revolutionary movements of the twentieth century? Michel Gobat finds the answer in the impact of the longest U.S. military occupation in history (1912–33): the paradox explains itself, as Americanization bred resistance. But the story that emerges from Gobat’s deep research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives is far more complex. Nicaraguan Conservatives among the planter class who saw the United States as a “model republic” joined forces with Augusto Sandino, the leftist rebel who fought the Marines to a standstill in the 1920s, and their elite descendants linked up with the Sandinistas, socialist revolutionaries of the 1970s. Gobat applies the tools of political economy and cultural history in a rich study that offers surprises for those familiar with Nicaraguan history, and a useful case for those interested in the shifting spectrum of collaboration and resistance to colonial rule. The ironies begin early. Gobat opens with the first U.S. occupation, when filibuster William Walker and his band of mercenaries took over the country in 1855. Nationalist folklore to the contrary, Walker was invited in by Liberal Party leaders who hoped that the North Americans would bring liberty and progress, while serving as a counterweight to British influence in Central America. Their enthusiasm faded when Walker confiscated land, imposed dictatorial rule and instituted slavery, and he was chased out by a coalition of Central American armies. But rather than increasing anti-Americanism, “the Walker fiasco only strengthened the will of elite Nicaraguans to replicate the U.S. road to modernity.” (41) Whether this was a pro-U.S. stance is open to debate. Certainly the United States loomed as the most influential model, and upper-class Nicaraguans traveled there in growing numbers. But Nicaraguan elites whom Gobat sees, or who saw themselves, as “emulating the United States” (49) by creating an independent press and civic associations, were participating in the institutionalization of a bourgeois public sphere that took place in many countries around the world in the long nineteenth century, accompanying such structural changes as the growth of urban elites and stratified political parties. Gobat moves forward to the U.S. occupation of 1912 to 1933, run by Marines and U.S. bankers. An example of Dollar Diplomacy, U.S. control of Nicaragua was supposed to bring stability and democracy to the country. Instead, it wound up fostering civil war and dictatorship—not, Gobat argues, because U.S. policies failed, but because of their success. In the summer of 1912, when drought led to widespread food shortages, fiscally conservative U.S. administrators refused to import emergency grain supplies, sparking violent uprisings. Panicked elites again invited the United States in, this time to quash an incipient social revolution. The Marines came and stayed. In a brilliant exploitation of little-used archives of patrician Granada, Gobat demonstrates the multifaceted impact of the U.S. occupation that ultimately turned the country’s most pro-U.S. sectors into opponents of the United States. In the economic field, Gobat uses mortgage records to show that U.S. bankers restricted credit to the largest landowners, inadvertently enabling a new class of small landholders to prosper at their expense. Protestant missionaries from the United States threatened the power of the Catholic Church, whose adherents were already scandalized by the behavior of the “modern woman” whose independent ways seemed to draw inspiration from the North. As the Marines supervised elections in the 1920s, they were so successful in democratizing access to the ballot box that they undermined the rule of traditional caudillos in rural areas, and their creation of a National Guard gave birth to a new actor that became the most powerful political force in the countryside. The Guardia Nacional thoroughly militarized Nicaraguan society and opened the way to a lasting...