"La Enojosa Cuestión de Emery": The Emery Claim in Nicaragua and American Foreign Policy, c. 1880-1910

This article will argue that a seemingly trivial dispute between the Nicaraguan government and an American lumber company operating on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast escalated to become a major source of tension between the U.S. State Department and Nicaragua, as well as a catalyst that drew U.S. banks into Nicaragua. Despite its significance, the convoluted story of this dispute has attracted little scholarly attention. The importance of the Emery claim was widely acknowledged at the time, however. Stories about it appeared in contemporary newspapers and magazines, and it became a topic worthy of discussion by a U.S. Senate hearing. The claim was also connected to José Santos Zelaya's resignation as president of Nicaragua in the autumn of 1909, a gesture that came shortly after he had agreed to settle the Emery claim.

The following pages describe the various events that made up the Emery claim, from the first disputes involving Emery and the Mosquito Coast's mahogany in the 1890s, to the payment of a significant sum of money in 1917 to a New York bank (Brown Brothers), perhaps the final chapter in this convoluted narrative. In tracing the story, we identify competing interpretations of significant events—the reincorporation of the Mosquito coast, the state of the Emery concession, the unruliness of Zelaya, the disposition of the Emery debt, the control of Nicaraguan finances by U.S. bankers, and the debate in America over the purpose of U.S. intervention in Nicaraguan affairs—to demonstrate how struggles over meaning informed political debates and decisions. The controversy surrounding the Emery dispute reverberated through various international networks: commercial, journalistic, financial, diplomatic, military and personal. Business entrepreneurs, state actors, reporters, elites, and even bit players in the Emery case all tended to characterize Zelaya as a threat to the region and consequently endorsed the need for a strong American hand over Nicaraguan affairs. Such perceptions encouraged Americans to visualize Latino peoples and spaces in ways that legitimated American imperialism.

The Emery claim's resolution was difficult; indeed, such was its complexity that the claim continued to affect events even after the death of Emery and even after the issues in the dispute had been resolved. By then the case had broadened to include such things as regional and national sovereignty, geopolitics, international finance and fiscal policy, and much else besides. Our aim here is to delve into this convoluted story, interrogating the language and metaphors used by the chief actors, to see what readings of the dispute are possible. We conclude that interpretations favoring the U.S. national project have come to dominate even professional knowledge and historiography in North America, silencing alternative understandings of the Emery Claim and the larger issue of U.S.-Nicaraguan political relations between 1880 and 1920.

But the story began with a dispute over the right to log mahogany on the Mosquito Coast.

Mahogany Logging on the Mosquito Coast

Mahogany is to the American, what the teak wood is to the Chinese. Everybody who can have it wants it. Parlor cars are finished in it. Private houses are paneled and wainscoted with it. Hotels, offices, drug stores and bars are finished in it. All furniture dealers carry heavy lines of goods made from it. Yachts are fitted with it in their cabins—it is everywhere, this wood of luxury—until the American public has what would seem to be a surfeit of it.¹

George D. Emery, founder of the company that bore his name, spent his working life engaged in the lumber industry. This began in 1849 when the fifteen year-old Emery found work as a tally boy in an upstate New York lumberyard. By the 1870s, he had his own saw mill in Indianapolis specializing in black walnut. Although he achieved a degree of prominence—the American Lumberman described Emery as "the largest producer in the country"—the exhaustion of readily available black walnut encouraged him to seek other sources of timber. Emery subsequently became interested in the tropical woods of Central...