Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine

About the Author

Theodore Roosevelt was forty-six in December 1904. He was born in New York City in 1858, and he entered politics in 1881 after graduation from Harvard University. During the next twenty years, he became one of the rising stars of the Republican Party. He served in the New York legislature, spent six years on the United States Civil Service Commission, and was a New York Police Commissioner in the mid-1890s. President William McKinley appointed him as assistant secretary of the navy in 1897, a post he held until the outbreak of the war with Spain in 1898. He raised a regiment called the “Rough Riders” and fought in Cuba at the battle of San Juan Hill. The Republicans nominated him for governor of New York in the fall of 1898, and he won a narrow victory. In 1900 the Republican National Convention selected him as McKinley's vice presidential candidate, and the ticket won the general election in November 1900. Following McKinley's assassination in 1901, Roosevelt assumed the presidency. He won the 1904 presidential election, serving until 1909. He died in 1919.

In foreign policy, Roosevelt operated from a number of well-defined ideas. He believed that power politics determined how a nation fared in the world. As a result, the United States must have a strong army and navy to defend itself. He quoted an African phrase that his country must “speak softly and carry a big stick” (Roosevelt, 1904, p. 121). At the same time, he knew that American public opinion did not want overseas adventures. Despite his reputation for warlike rhetoric, Roosevelt was not reckless in seeking intervention abroad in the affairs of other nations.

As far as Latin America was concerned, however, Roosevelt believed that the United States had a responsibility to guide and tutor the unruly countries south of the border. Elements of racism entered his thinking on such issues. In his mind, peoples of Latin blood and temperament lacked the stability and sense of law and order that the Anglo-Saxons possessed. It was, therefore, the duty of civilized peoples to set a good example that Hispanic countries might follow. That the objects of his solicitude might resent his condescension never entered Roosevelt's thinking.

Believing, as he did, that the presidency offered him a platform for moral instruction, Roosevelt saw his annual message in 1904 as an excellent time to enunciate the principles of foreign policy that should govern American relations with Latin America. He framed several paragraphs that addressed the issues of national responsibility that the conduct of the Dominican Republic had raised. One paragraph, in particular, set forth the president's elaboration of the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine.