Abstract
Of the various incidents in global affairs that confronted Grover Cleveland in his second presidential term, three in particular have acquired a prominent place in the historiography of the presidency. Two of these—the revolutions in Hawaii and Cuba—bookended this presidency, but the third reached its climax almost exactly at the midpoint of Cleveland’s term. The Venezuelan Border Dispute was a major event in the history of American foreign relations in the late nineteenth century and, while it has suffered in recent years from the same neglect that has seen the events in Hawaii and Cuba come to be overwhelmed by the War of 1898 in most textbooks, it has been credited as forming a turning point in U.S. foreign policy in a variety of ways. At different times it has been suggested that the Venezuelan dispute brought the United States close to war with Great Britain, that it can be seen as the beginning of the “special relationship” between the American and British governments, and that it reinvigorated—and even reinvented—the Monroe Doctrine.1 Such claims, while sometimes overstated, are not without merit, and it can reasonably be argued that the Venezuelan Border Dispute is deserving of restoration to greater prominence in the larger narrative of American foreign relations.
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Notes
Wilfrid Hardy Callcott, The Caribbean Policy of the United States, 1890–1920 (New York: Octagon Books, 1966);
Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt, Culture, Diplomacy, and Expansion: A New View of American Imperialism (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 158;
George B. Young, “Intervention Under the Monroe Doctrine: The Olney Corollary,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 57, No. 2 (June, 1942), 247.
Gerald G. Eggert, Richard Olney: Evolution of a Statesman (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974), 119.
Richard E. Welch, The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 150.
Almont Lindsey, The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labour Upheaval (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1964), 150;
Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement of the United States, vol. II: From the Founding of the American Federation of Labor to the Emergence of American Imperialism, 2nd Edition (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 266–267.
Worth Robert Miller, “Farmers and Third Party Politics,” The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, 2nd Edition, Ed. Charles W. Calhoun (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Ltd., 2007), 298–299.
Charles W. Calhoun, Gilded Age Cato: The Life of Walter Q. Gresham (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 204.
Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), 220–221.
Walter LaFeber, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. II: The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 123.
Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World (New York: Routledge, 2002), 82–83.
Joseph A. Fry, “John Tyler Morgan’s Southern Expansionism,” Diplomatic History, vol. 9, No. 4 (1985) 330.
Calhoun, Gilded Age Cato, 209; Charles S. Campbell, The Transformation of American Foreign Policy: 1865–1900 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 224–228. Campbell notes that Cleveland signed the bill that had incorporated the Maritime Canal Company in 1889, but suggests this was a matter of routine rather than an indication of support.
Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (1932, reprint New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1966), 549.
It has been suggested that Cleveland was unaware that this dispatch was not passed to the British government, and that this might go some way to explaining his frustration with British reluctance to accept American involvement in the dispute (see Callcott, Caribbean Policy of the United States, 57). This explanation is supported by the fact that Cleveland mentions the dispatch in Presidential Problems, but makes no reference to the fact it was not transmitted to Lord Salisbury. It would seem doubtful, however, that Cleveland’s actions in 1895 were noticeably altered by his belief that a moderately stern declaration of American concern had been ignored more than seven years previously. Grover Cleveland, Presidential Problems (New York: The Century Company, 1904, reprint Boston: Elibron Classics, 2005), 243–244.
Dexter Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine, 1867–1907 (Johns Hopkins Press, 1937, reprint Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966), 143.
Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 640–641; Campbell, Transformation of American Foreign Policy, 208; George F. Parker, Recollections of Grover Cleveland (New York: The Century Co., 1909), 197.
Richard Watson Gilder, Grover Cleveland: A Record of Friendship (New York: The Century Co., 1910), 201–202.
Joseph J. Mathews, “Informal Diplomacy in the Venezuelan Crisis of 1896,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 52, No. 2 (1963), 197.
Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 208–209.
Henry Cabot Lodge, “England, Venezuela, and the Monroe Doctrine,” The North American Review, vol. 160, Issue 463 (June, 1895), 651–658.
Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 16–17.
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© 2014 Nick Cleaver
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Cleaver, N. (2014). Nicaragua, Venezuela, and the Monroe Doctrine. In: Grover Cleveland’s New Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448491_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448491_4
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