Historical coverage concerning how the League of Nations affected U.S.-Latin American relations has been lacking. Typically, historians have only concentrated on the reasons why the U.S. Senate refused to join the League in 1919 and 1920, but they do not discuss how that organization affected U.S. foreign policy throughout the decade of the 1920s. This study begins to fill this gap in the historical literature. Through the use of primary sources from multiple archives and papers from the U.S. State Department, this study examines the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations’ efforts to convince Latin Americans to accept an alternative peace plan to the League of Nations that was based on legal-internationalist principles. Understanding Republican efforts to establishing an international legal system to replace the traditional anarchist nationalistic international system sheds light upon the foreign policy objectives of the period that historians have heretofore largely ignored.
This study focuses on the Republican efforts to create an alternative system to the newly established League of Nations. Republican leaders held that the collective security clauses of the League of Nations would fail to prevent future wars because they did not fundamentally alter humanity’s mindset concerning war. Alternatively, the Republicans sought to get the world to adopt their envisioned pax-Americana international system based on legal internationalist principles. To create such a system, the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations adopted a soft paternalistic approach that was designed to gain humanity’s acceptance of the American vision for peace. U.S. efforts were largely focused on Latin America to begin the process of reforming the regional international system in the Western Hemisphere. As this study makes clear, the United States was able to create an alternative peace machinery in the Western Hemisphere, but the Republican refusal to reject the “right” of the United States to intervene into Latin America doomed the movement to ultimate failure. This study concludes that the Republican goal of reforming the world system failed to lessen the chances of the outbreak of war, as clearly demonstrated by the world beginning to descend into crisis by the early 1930s.