In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 9 5 It seems unlikely to me that there could be any other region of the earth in which nature and human behavior could have combined to produce a more unhappy and hopeless background for the conduct of human life than in Latin America. George F. Kennan, Counselor to the State Department, March 29, 1950 If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot. President Harry S. Truman, Washington Post, February 18, 1947 Despite the many surveys, questionnaires, and interviews conducted by the CIAA during the Good Neighbor years, despite all the reviews, commentaries, and letters by Latin American intellectuals or political figures who witnessed the effects of the program, and despite the extraordinarily ambitious range of cultural and educational events that the program either sponsored or influenced , we have no way of producing a neat balance sheet of the CIAA’s accomplishments and failings and no way to scientifically measure the impact of specific films, radio broadcasts, news magazines, literary translations, museum exhibits, and educational initiatives. Here at the conclusion of our story, however, it might be useful to compare the diplomacy I have been describing in detail in the previous chapters with a few generalizations about the broad outline of U.S. foreign policy that emerged after the war. This will at least show what was lost when the CIAA closed its operation and what happened to some of its key players. In my own view it cannot help but make reasonable people feel a certain nostalgia for Good Neighbor policies. In November 1944, as World War II was drawing to a close, FDR nominated Nelson Rockefeller to be assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs; and after a bumpy Senate confirmation involving Rockefeller and five other nominees for cabinet seats, including Archibald MacLeish as assistant secretary for public and cultural affairs, Rockefeller assumed the new post. Writing for Political Science Review, Walter Laves, who, as we have seen, was an imporAF TERMATH 1 9 6 A m e R I C A N S A l l tant observer at the Sleepy Lagoon trial and became a consultant to the Bureau of the Budget, together with his co-author, Francis Wilcox, applauded the creation of the Latin American and cultural affairs positions, noting that FDR was giving inter-American relations a uniquely high priority (313). In December, Rockefeller appointed Wallace K. Harrison as deputy coordinator of inter-American affairs and granted him full power to exercise the duties and functions carried out by the coordinator.1 On March 23, 1945, FDR changed the name of the CIAA to the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) and appointed Harrison as its director. But soon after FDR’s death and one month after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the Japanese surrender all but official, the new president, Harry S. Truman, submitted an order for the transfer of all OIAA and OWI informational functions performed abroad to an Interim International Information Service in the State Department . Less than a year after his cabinet appointment, Rockefeller resigned and temporarily returned to public life. On April 10, 1946, Truman signed the order to close the former CIAA, and the agency officially ended operations on May 20, 1946.2 The U.S. focus on “universal” or “international” as opposed to “regional” interests—meaning the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe and the cold war policies designed to contain the spread of international communism— now overshadowed Good Neighbor diplomatic relations. The United States remained sufficiently interested in economic relations with Latin America to ensure the continued flow of vital resources, but its major “regional” concern was Soviet influence. As historian R. A. Humphreys has noted, by mid-1946, three-quarters of Latin America’s nations had established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, a situation that increasingly preoccupied the U.S. government and ultimately transformed what had been a friendly attitude into one of oscillating indifference and aggression (229). In the 1946 elections the Republicans took control of the U.S. Congress, and the political climate changed. Despite having departed the State Department , Rockefeller encouraged Truman to fund the Point Four Program, which would continue the work of the Institute for Inter-American Affairs—the only CIAA-related program to survive the immediate postwar period. A CIAA subsidiary , the institute promoted health education in Latin America through investments in medical facilities, technical training, and personnel exchanges as well as providing support for agricultural development. Truman supported the Point Four Program as...

Share