Ellen D. Tillman. Dollar Diplomacy by Force: Nation-Building and Resistance in the Dominican Republic.

Abstract

In President Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic reflected concerns that European creditors would push their respective governments to take military action to collect their debts. This resulted first in the U.S. taking charge of Dominican customs houses in 1907. Greater financial control led to political supervision starting in 1913, when a president of Washington’s choosing was appointed. The Dominicans chafed at the greater control, and the U.S. eventually sent in the Marines and declared martial law in 1916. The occupation would continue another eight years until 1924. This occupation from 1916 to 1924 is the main focus of Ellen Tillman’s Dollar Diplomacy by Force: Nation-Building and Resistance in the Dominican Republic, one where the U.S. attempted to, in her words, “create the institutional means by which [Dominican] regional differences would be managed, thereby ameliorating longstanding regional tensions through the creation of new governmental and military structures” (3). U.S. naval officers who saw themselves as the vanguard for implementing the Taft-Wilson variant of Roosevelt’s Corollary, better known as “Dollar Diplomacy,” would supervise the building of these structures. With policymakers in Washington, D.C., focused on the European war and probable entry, the latitude for action for these naval officers to politically experiment in the Dominican Republic was quite wide.