Memorandum on the Monroe Doctrine; Publications of the Department of State December 17, 1928
Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1930. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Wraps. xxv, 235, [3] pages. Footnotes. Pencil marks noted. Part of margin on pages xiii/xiv missing but text complete. Cover, had been taped to the spine but is currently separated but present. Cover worn, has notations on it. Consider an as is copy. Main work is worn but intact. J. Reuben Clark was the Undersecretary of State. Joshua Reuben Clark Jr. (September 1, 1871 – October 6, 1961) was an American attorney, civil servant, and a prominent leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Born in Grantsville, Utah Territory, Clark was a prominent attorney in the Department of State, and Undersecretary of State for U.S. President Calvin Coolidge. In 1930, Clark was appointed United States Ambassador to Mexico. Clark received a bachelor's degree from the University of Utah, where he was valedictorian and student-body president. Clark received a law degree from Columbia University, where he also became a member of Phi Delta Phi, a prominent international legal fraternity in which he remained active throughout his life. Clark later became an associate professor at George Washington University. In 1928, as Undersecretary of State to Secretary of State Frank Kellogg in the Coolidge administration, Clark wrote the "Clark Memorandum on the Monroe Doctrine", which repudiated the idea that the United States could arbitrarily use military force in Latin America. The Memorandum was a treatise exploring every nuance of the US's philosophy of hemispherical guardianship. It was published as an official State Department document and partially reprinted in textbooks for years. The Clark Memorandum on the Monroe Doctrine or Clark Memorandum, written on December 17, 1928 by Calvin Coolidge's undersecretary of state J. Reuben Clark, concerned the United States' use of military force to intervene in Latin American nations. This memorandum was officially released in 1930 by the Herbert Hoover administration. The Clark memorandum rejected the view that the Roosevelt Corollary was based on the Monroe Doctrine. However, it was not a complete repudiation of the Roosevelt Corollary but was rather a statement that any intervention by the U.S. was not sanctioned by the Monroe Doctrine but rather was the right of America as a state. This separated the Roosevelt Corollary from the Monroe Doctrine by noting that the Monroe Doctrine only applied to situations involving European countries. One main point in the Clark Memorandum was to note that the Monroe Doctrine was based on conflicts of interest only between the United States and European nations, rather than between the United States and Latin American nations. During the late 1920s, a number of American foreign policy leaders started to argue for a softer tone in US relations with Latin American nations, which had been chafing under decades of intervention by the United States. Undersecretary of State, and later Ambassador to Mexico, J. Reuben Clark (1871–1961) held these conciliatory views and completed work on the Memorandum late in the Coolidge administration. Clark argued the following:
Every nation, including the United States, has the right of "self-preservation"; The principle of self-preservation underlies the Monroe Doctrine; The United States alone makes the decision about when to intervene on behalf of Latin American nations; The Monroe Doctrine was not concerned with the relationship between the United States and other nations in the Americas, except when European interference in those nations threatened the security of the United States; The Doctrine relates to the relationship of the United States and Latin America on one side versus Europe on the other side, not of the United States on one side versus Latin America on the other side; The primary purpose of the Doctrine was to protect Latin American nations from intervention by European powers, not to victimize or oppress Latin American nations; The Roosevelt Corollary was not part of the Monroe Doctrine; The application of the Monroe Doctrine by the United States was beneficial to Latin American states.
Clark was simply advancing the view that the corollary was separate from the Monroe Doctrine and that American intervention in Latin America, when necessary, was sanctioned by U.S. rights as a sovereign nation, not by the Monroe Doctrine. Clark's views were not made public until March 1930 during the Hoover administration, when Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson was guiding American diplomacy toward the beginning of a Good Neighbor Policy with its Latin American neighbors. The memorandum also used the term "national security" in its first known usage. Condition: Fair.
Keywords: Monroe Doctrine, National Security, International Relations, International Law, Intervention, Theodore Roosevelt, Roosevelt Corollary, Latin America, Subversion, South America, Coaling Stations
[Book #82132]
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