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

This superbly crafted study represents a landmark reinterpretation of Nicaraguan history in the age of U.S. empire-building in the Caribbean and Central America. Indispensable for Nicaraguanists, it is also a model of historical scholarship from which students of imperial muscle-flexing around the world, from Asia to the Middle East to Latin America, could greatly profit. Focusing on Nicaragua's Granada-based conservative elite, Gobat probes the contradictions and paradoxes of U.S. interventions in the most intervened-in country in Latin America, from the William Walker debacle of the 1850s to the acme of imperialist meddling in the first third of the twentieth century. His account convincingly demonstrates that, in this case, the unintended consequences of U.S. "liberal imperialism" far outweighed their intended results: In the end, "blowback" triumphed over the most forceful impositions of imperial will. The comparative implications here are deep and wide-ranging.

At the heart of the book lies a tale of squandered opportunities and unimagined consequences—of the U.S. imperial bull in the Nicaraguan china shop. From the mid-nineteenth century, and despite the Walker disaster, Granada's conservative elite evinced a profound pro-Americanism, enthusiastically embracing U.S. modernity and power, and more broadly, the "American way of life." Beginning in 1902, with the decision to build the trans-oceanic canal not in Nicaragua but in Panama, a string of U.S. administrations launched a series of policies predicated on simplistic and ideologically driven conceptions of the country's complex social and political life. These interventions in turn facilitated the intrusion of diverse features of U.S. culture, including consumerism, sports, film and other media, notions of the "new woman," and Protestant missionizing. Combined with the unintended effects of dollar diplomacy on rural class relations, these cultural and political shifts heightened elite anxieties, generated a crisis of elite masculinity, and sparked a powerful ideological backlash. The Granada elites' encounter with the "American Dream," in short, transformed their enthusiastic embrace into something very close to its opposite. By the final U.S. military withdrawal in 1933, the most prominent members of what had been Latin America's most pro-American oligarchy were its most implacably anti-American; the United States, and the project of modernity it embodied, was no longer revered but reviled.

Weaving together extensive research in Granada's municipal archives with newspaper accounts, diplomatic and military records, memoirs, novels, and other sources, and frequently in dialogue with broader literatures, Gobat deftly traces each step along this path, from Walker's filibustering and the post-Walker elite convergence to the ideological affinities between Sandino's utopian nationalism and the Granada oligarchs' proto-fascist corporatism. Some of the most important findings concern the social-revolutionary character of the crisis of 1912 and the internecine violence among Granada elites in that year's civil war; the differential effects of dollar diplomacy, which inadvertently "democratized" coffee production by favoring small and medium growers; and, by the early 1930s, the Granada oligarchy's ideological embrace of Sandino's campesino-based, anti-Yankee nationalist rebellion.

Throughout, Gobat melds subtle cultural analyses with abiding attention to political economy. Here the "linguistic turn" circles back to relations of power and class, which find themselves once more, as in the real world, entwined with culture. Along the way he overturns many longstanding interpretations of various episodes in U.S.-Nicaraguan relations; the sparingly-used phrase "[c]ontrary to conventional wisdom" (p. 57) befits most every page. The sheer scope of the book tends to limit its treatment of some topics; one would like to see, for instance, a more comprehensive analysis of the divisions among Granada's oligarchs with respect to Sandino's nationalism. Yet the book's overall coherence is such that addressing this concern principally would entail rounding out the details. Similarly, while the book might have cast a broader comparative net, those interested in how the Nicaraguan...