One of the frustrations of studying Pan-Americanism is trying to comprehend the implications of the term. Depending upon the historian's understanding, the causes and consequences of the phenomenon will appear quite different. For some, it implies a system of partnership and cooperation within the Western Hemisphere; for others, a means of hegemony and exploitation.1 Whether a strong, stable state can in any sense relate as an equal to nearby, weak, disorganized ones is an open question. Just what the leaders of the United States intended, and what they effected, will set scholars at odds for some time. Pan-Americanism first became an issue during the age of independence, when various advocates and partisans in the United States, such as Henry Clay, affirmed the existence of a common body of interest and aspiration with the people of Latin America. Usually they defined this special affinity, “the Western Hemisphere idea” in Arthur P. Whitaker's phrase, as the outgrowth of a shared history and geography, the common experience of republicans in the New World rebelling against the monarchists of the Old.2 Yet, this vague notion always connoted different things to different people. In the United States, it suggested the desirability of creating more intimate political and economic ties, usually justified on grounds of advancing the collective welfare. For Latin Americans, in contrast, a degree of ambivalence prevailed because closer relations with “the northern colossus” could result in submergence. As Secretary of State James G. Blaine discovered at the First International American Conference in Washington in 1889, U.S. concerns and convictions were not necessarily the same as those of Latin America.3