Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule (review)

Although U.S. intervention in Nicaragua has been the subject of numerous studies, few offer the insight of Confronting the American Dream. This superb book examines not only the goals of American policy but also the complex Nicaraguan responses to U.S. imperial rule. Drawing upon a broad range of U.S. and Nicaraguan sources, Michel Gobat reveals how Nicaraguan dreams of building a modern nation, premised on the construction of an interoceanic canal, ran headlong into the U.S. drive to dominate the hemisphere.

Gobat begins by exploring the crucial 1849–57 period, during which Nicaragua experienced both a flood of California-bound gold prospectors and William Walker's brief, but devastating, conquest. Surprisingly, Nicaraguan leaders emerged from these traumatic events convinced they could maintain their sovereignty only by replicating "the U.S. road to modernity" (p. 41). Indeed, they looked to the United States not only for canal construction but to satisfy cultural and consumer tastes. But Washington's 1909 overthrow of President José Santos Zelaya, followed by the 1912–33 military occupation, began a process by which these most Americanized of Nicaraguans turned against the United States.

Gobat traces this shift by focusing on elites in the city of Granada, stronghold of the Conservative Party. Despite serving as Washington's closest allies, these men found themselves weakened by American rule. In particular, U.S. occupiers' tight fiscal policies and rural democratization campaigns unintentionally eroded the economic and political foundations of elite power. At the same time, U.S. Protestant missionary efforts and the spread of American cultural trends, such as the "modern woman" movements, seemed to threaten the religious and moral bases of Nicaraguan society. By the late 1920s, these same elite Conservatives who had cooperated so closely with the United States turned against its democratization efforts. According to Gobat, many "claimed that political democracy, and electoral competition, in particular, produced the divisions within the body politic that so gravely threatened Nicaraguan sovereignty" (p. 222). At the same time, the U.S. marines' 1927–33 war against nationalist rebel Augusto Sandino militarized the countryside and swelled the power of the U.S.-trained Guardia Nacional. "In the end," Gobat notes, "U.S. efforts to impose democracy not only failed to produce deep and durable democratization, they actually paved the way for authoritarian rule"—in the person of Anastacio Somoza (p. 206). He closes with an insightful epilogue that connects Conservatives' anti-American turn to the broad elite support enjoyed by the 1979 Sandinista revolution.

Although lacking analysis of Nicaragua's Atlantic coast, where U.S. corporate influence was most solidly established, Confronting the American Dream succeeds admirably in its goal of using local sources to "illuminate the experiences and views of those subjected to imperial rule" (p. 14). Gobat's close examination of elite Conservatives results in a powerful reinterpretation of American occupation. Although readers interested in the military aspects of the intervention should consult other works, such as Neil Macaulay's The Sandino Affair, Confronting the American Dream is a well-written and original piece of scholarship that will appeal especially to students of U.S. foreign relations, imperialism, and Latin American history.