Dollar Diplomacy by Force: Nation-Building and Resistance in the Dominican Republic by Ellen D. Tillman (review)

Ellen Tillman reconfigures our understanding of how US military intervention and Dominican tensions ushered in the rise of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. In a literature that has centered on the US State Department’s goals, or more narrowly on the formal US occupation from 1916 to 1924, Tillman finds that US military officers throughout the first years of the twentieth century applied numerous centralist policies to reshape Dominican society. Such efforts collided not only with Dominican nationalist opposition against such foreign intrusions but with historic regionalism and sectionalism. These conflicts and the resulting negotiations, for Tillman, became the very means by which an insignificant but politically astute lieutenant favored by US marines could take power for the next decades. Consequently, her focus on the interplay between US military policies and local resistance makes her research a vital contribution to the history of the Dominican Republic.

The US Navy saw weak governments and frequent disruptions as evidence of Dominican racial inferiority rather than byproducts of regional autonomy and local conflicts. The United States insisted that greater force was the solution, even as the populace openly despised the US-controlled customs houses and frontier guard. In fact, Tillman highlights how civil wars frequently pitted rather reluctant Dominicans working with US institutions or resources against those who saw such maneuverings as illustrative of growing US imperialism in the Caribbean Basin.

As the State Department aimed its energies on the First World War, US officers in the Dominican Republic were left to their own devices to tackle nationalist protests and guerrilla uprisings. Thus, during the occupation, the US Navy immediately implemented a constabulary and disarmament initiatives in hopes of directing Dominican society away from caudillo politics and regional divisions. Even as the Dominican elite and nationalist groups cursed those who worked with US policies, there were those who believed negotiations with the military government would be the best remedy to end the occupation quickly. In the face of anti-imperialist fervor in both the United States and the Dominican Republic, US marines and Dominicans compromised on a withdrawal that kept in place the constabulary-turned-Policía Nacional, with its US advisors and Lieutenant Trujillo.

Tillman’s taking up the negotiations between nationalist, regionalist Dominicans and centralizing US policy is an invaluable addition to the literature, perfectly complementing the work of Bernardo Vega, Eric Paul Roorda, Lauren Derby, Valentina Peguero, and others who stress the militarist yet compromising aspects behind Trujillo’s dictatorship. Her research adeptly uses Dominican documents and US military records to meticulously detail the nuances surrounding the impact of US policies, the constabulary’s evolution, and the population’s reactions.

However, this focus does leave the book speaking to a rather narrow audience of Dominicanists and military historians. The book focuses not on Trujillo but on the institution that became his springboard to power. General readers will wish Tillman had cut back on some occupation-era details, as she did when quickly summarizing the last two years of the intervention, in order to expand her analysis further along through the dictator’s trajectory. The author could have considered how the centralist and regionalist tensions played into the negotiations and compromises between Trujillo and such figures as Desiderio Arias who appear frequently in the book, or the links between anti-US nationalism during the occupation and later anti-Trujillista sentiments in Puerto Plata and elsewhere. Similarly, Tillman could have stressed her work’s import to world history and especially US-Latin American relations as it relates to how US policies abroad modernized and radicalized the tools of surveillance and communication. Doing so would have placed her work in dialogue with that of Robert Holden, Greg Grandin, Jeremy Kuzmarov, and others. Of course, all this is merely proof that her transnational study of U.S.-Dominican relations, spanning multiple archives, offers vital...