For capital or country: financiers, anti-monopoly politics, and U.S. foreign enterprise, 1905-1929
Embargo Date
2026-10-31
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
The United States emerged as a guardian of global economic integration between 1905 and 1929. As U.S. entrepreneurs established enterprises in the circum-Caribbean during the late nineteenth century, they participated in a highly integrated flow of capital extending from Europe to the peripheries of the capitalist world. However, the default crisis that swept the region between 1890 and 1910 shook European investor confidence and vaulted financiers from the United States to the center of U.S. reform efforts. Whereas the U.S. State Department proposed financial receiverships in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua in order to combat the destabilizing influence of a previous generation of international financiers, it also turned to U.S. banking houses in order to repair Central American bond markets in the eyes of investors from the United States and Europe. These efforts stirred conflict abroad and political controversy at home. For Capital or Country demonstrates why the international capital dynamics that underlay U.S. economic development abroad are vital to understanding key U.S. foreign policy disputes during the early 20th century. It recovers the central role that international financiers played in advancing U.S. diplomacy in this period and explains why anti-monopoly reformers in Congress targeted the practices of financiers in their prolonged revolt against foreign economic entanglements.
Chapter 1 explores the international financial conditions that shaped President Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. During the Dominican receivership, which began in 1905, U.S. policymakers sought to reform an inequitable system of concessions that a U.S. company had used to control the Dominican Republic, with the goal of facilitating the peaceful integration of U.S. and European capital investments throughout the region. Chapter 2 examines how the United Fruit Company leveraged political power and debt crises to thwart other U.S. financiers’ efforts to build railways in Central America. Chapter 3 explains how financiers of the Mexican Revolution ignited backlash among anti-monopolists in Congress, who wanted to disentangle their government from protecting capital investments abroad. Chapter 4 considers how J.P. Morgan & Company’s efforts to mobilize credit and munitions manufacturing for the Allies during World War I influenced preparedness and postwar reconstruction debates in Congress. Chapter 5 explains how Senator Robert La Follette’s independent Progressive campaign for President in 1924 arose in opposition to U.S. financiers’ efforts to restore global economic interdependence after World War I and shaped anti-monopoly views on foreign affairs in the late 1920s. By reframing the conventional dichotomy in U.S. political history between “internationalists” and “isolationists” in the context of global finance and anti-monopoly politics, this dissertation shows how financiers and international finance influenced debates and policies concerning the United States’ role in the world during the early 20th century.