Mike LaSusa

SIS-653-010, Brenner
02-11-2015
How the Roosevelt Corollary Evolved from the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny
In a 1904 address to congress, President Theodore Roosevelt explicitly references the
doctrine proclaimed by President James Monroe in 1823, which stated that the United States
would abide no interference from European powers in the affairs of the newly-independent
republics of the Americas. Roosevelt added that, adherence of the United States to the Monroe
Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly...to the exercise of an international
police power. Despite the obvious continuity, Roosevelt did not merely reiterate Monroes
Doctrine in his speech. Roosevelts proclamation reformulated the old policy to fit a new
national and global context in which the United States sought not to acquire new territory to
secure its empire, but rather shifted its focus to opening and maintaining international markets
for American business, by force if necessary.
By 1823, many Latin American nations had declared their independence from their
Spanish colonial masters and the U.S had entered into a kind of dtente with Great Britain. The
1817 Bush-Bagot pact with Britain had demilitarized the Great Lakes and the Convention of
1818 had established the U.S.-Canada border as far west as the Rocky Mountains, shutting off
British access to the Northern Mississippi and leaving Oregon open to American exploration and
settlement. As Walter Lafeber writes in The American Age, a delicious part of the [Monroe
Doctrine] policy was that the British, for their own interest, would actually help keep other
Europeans out of the New World while the United States developed its own strength (Lafeber,
p. 83).
However, territorial and ideological questions still tore at the unity of the young nation.

As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote in 1820, The greatest danger of this Union was
the overgrown extent of its territory, combing with the slavery question (Quoted in Lafeber, p.
81). Nevertheless, as Michael Paul Rogin explains in Liberal Society and the Indian Question,
seizing America from the Indians is our central, mythical, formative experience...White greed
for Indian land dominated White-Indian relations. The Indian removals under President Andrew
Jackson set the stage for further westward expansion by American settlers in subsequent years.
In his 1845 essay Annexation, John OSullivan coined the term Manifest Destiny,
which in the words of historian Odd Arne Westad expressed as myth what in reality was a
rather concrete imperialist program (Westad, p. 12). OSullivan calls for Americans to take a
stronger stance against unauthorized, insolent and hostile interference by England and France,
referring to disputes over the Canadian border and the Oregon territory. It is now time for the
opposition to the Annexation of Texas to cease, he wrote, inveighling against perceived
interference by other nations for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering
our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to
overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly
multiplying millions (OSullivan).
As Westad wrote, President James Polk had called the war [against Mexico in 1848]
merely a defensive response to a Mexican attack, but in reality he wanted a war for conquest.
Polk even reiterated the Monroe Doctrine in his 1845 address to congress, later confiding that in
so doing he had California and the fine bay of San Francisco as much in view as Oregon
(quoted in Lafeber, p. 115). By 1853, through immigration and war, the United States had
obtained a vast new continental empire in which to fulfill the destiny prophesied by OSullivan
in 1845. Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon [the West], armed with the

plough and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative
halls, mills and meeting-houses, wrote OSullivan. A population will soon be in actual
occupation of California, over which it will be idle for Mexico to dream of dominion.
While America had established a transcontinental empire by 1853, racist notions about
the ungovernability of non-whites and concerns about the capacity of the central government to
effectively govern overseas territories limited its territorial expansion. Additionally, the
American Civil War effectively eliminated the nations capacity and appetite for imperial
territorial acquisition.
Yet in the antebellum era, America became territorially and politically consolidated as it
had never been before, through railroads and new communications technologies. Manifest
Destiny took on a meaning more analogous to the victorious northern conception than the
defeated southern one. For most southerners, this destiny involved the acquisition of physical
territory for the expansion of their slave-based agricultural economy. For northerners, the spread
of markets for the products of their manufacturing industry and free-labor farming system in
addition to their maintenance of the preponderance of national political power was the goal.
As Secretary of State James Blaine said in 1865, the United States has reached a point
where one of its highest duties is to enlarge the area of its foreign trade. (quoted in Westad, p.
175). This era in American foreign policy marked the beginning of the evolution punctuated by
Roosevelts Corollary. American victories in the war against Spain in the Caribbean and Pacific
and its successful support for Panamanian independence near the turn of the century helped
bolster its claim to hemispheric hegemony. As Westad writes, Control became the favored
method for extending Americas aims beyond the seas, to where liberty as yet was not an
option. (Westad, p. 13). As early as 1895, Secretary of State Richard Olney had declared that

to-day the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the
subjects to which it confines its interposition. (quoted in Rabe, p. XXXX)
Roosevelt said in his 1904 speech, It is not true that the United States feels any land
hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save
such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries
stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count
upon our hearty friendshipWe would interfere with them only in the last resort.
By stability and order, Roosevelt was not referring to stable (friendly) relations with
the United States and conformity with the order established under the hegemony of American
capitalism. It is for this reason that our group argued that the Roosevelt Corollary evolved
from Monroe Doctrine. The continuity lies in the underlying ideology of Manifest Destiny as an
impetus toward empire, while the change is found in the conception of that empire from a
geographical one under the Monroe Doctrine to a commercial one under Roosevelts Corollary.

Bibliography
John O'Sullivan, "Annexation," United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17, no.1 (JulyAugust 1845): 5-10
Hietala, Thomas R. (2006). Empire by Design, Not Destiny. In Dennis Merrill and Thomas G.
Paterson (Eds.), Major Problems in American Foreign Relations. Boston: Cengage Learning.
LaFeber, Walter. (1994). The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad,
1750 to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Rabe, Stephen G. (2012). The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin
America. Oxford University Press.
Rogin, Michael Paul. (1971). Liberal Society and the Indian Question. Politics & Society, June
1971, 269-312.
Westad, Odd Arne. (2007). The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of
Our Times. Cambridge University Press.