Books at Duke University Press

Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule
Michel Gobat

392 pages (November 2005)
26 illus., 3 tables, 5 maps

Cloth - $89.95	0-8223-3634-0
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3634-1]

Paperback - $24.95	0-8223-3647-2
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3647-1]

Michel Gobat deftly interweaves political, economic, cultural, and diplomatic history to analyze the reactions of Nicaraguans to U.S. intervention in their country from the heyday of Manifest Destiny in the mid–nineteenth century through the U.S. occupation of 1912–33. Drawing on extensive research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, Gobat accounts for two seeming paradoxes that have long eluded historians of Latin America: that Nicaraguans so strongly embraced U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms to defend their own nationality against U.S. imposition and that the country’s wealthiest and most Americanized elites were transformed from leading supporters of U.S. imperial rule into some of its greatest opponents.

Gobat focuses primarily on the reactions of the elites to Americanization, because the power and identity of these Nicaraguans were the most significantly affected by U.S. imperial rule. He describes their adoption of aspects of “the American way of life” in the mid–nineteenth century as strategic rather than wholesale. Chronicling the U.S. occupation of 1912–33, he argues that the anti-American turn of Nicaragua’s most Americanized oligarchs stemmed largely from the efforts of U.S. bankers, marines, and missionaries to spread their own version of the American dream. In part, the oligarchs’ reversal reflected their anguish over the 1920s rise of Protestantism, the “modern woman,” and other “vices of modernity” emanating from the United States. But it also responded to the unintended ways that U.S. modernization efforts enabled peasants to weaken landlord power. Gobat demonstrates that the U.S. occupation so profoundly affected Nicaragua that it helped engender the Sandino Rebellion of 1927–33, the Somoza dictatorship of 1936–79, and the Sandinista Revolution of 1979–90.

“This is a beautifully argued and researched book—one of the most important and revealing case studies we have in U.S.–Latin American relations. But it goes far beyond that. Without ever significantly moving past the 1930s, Michel Gobat has provided an indictment of the early-twenty-first-century embrace of ‘American empire’ and, in a model of scholarship, provided stunning insights into the ironies—and tragedies—of the misuse of U.S. power.”—Walter LaFeber, author of America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2002

“Extraordinarily engaging, Confronting the American Dream is far and away the best work ever written on the convoluted path of elite/Conservative disenchantment with the U.S. imperial project in Nicaragua. Its relevance to broader historical and contemporary phenomena throughout Latin America and well beyond is really quite remarkable.”— Lowell Gudmundson, coauthor of Central America, 1821–1871: Liberalism before Liberal Reform

Michel Gobat is Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa.

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Table of Contents

Illustrations
Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I: Manifest Destinies, 1849-1910
1. Americanization through Violence: Nicaragua under Walker
2. Americanization from Within: Forging a Cosmopolitan Nationality

Part II: Restoration, 1910-1912
3. Challenging Imperial Exclusions: Nicaragua under the Dawson Pact
4. Bourgeois Revolution Denied: U.S. Military Intervention in the Civil War of 1912

Part III: Dollar Diplomacy, 1912-1927
5.Economic Nationalism: Resisting Wall Street’s “Feudal” Regime
6. Anxious Landlords, Resilient Peasants: Dollar Diplomacy’s Socioeconomic Impact
7. Cultural Anit-Americanism: The Caballeros Catolicos’ Crusade against U.S. Missionaries, the “Modern Woman,” and the “Bourgeois Spirit”

Part IV: Revolution, 1927-1933
8. Militarization via Democratization: The U.S. Attack on Caudillismo and the Rise of Authoritarian Corporatism
9. Revolutionary Nationalism: Elite Conservatives, Sandino, and the Struggle for a De-Americanized Nicaragua

Epilogue: Imperial Legacies:Dictatorship and Revolution

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index