The United States and Latin America. By John Holladay Latané, Ph.D., Professor of American History and Dean of the College Faculty in the Johns Hopkins University. Doubleday, Page and Company, New York, 1920. Pp. 346.
This book is a study in modern diplomacy based upon the former work of the author entitled The Diplomatic Relations of the United States and Spanish America. In response to the demand for this work which is out of print, the author has herein set forth the same facts in a revised and an enlarged volume. There is added to this work much new matter relating to the events of the last twenty years.
The book begins with a discussion of the revolt of the Spanish-American colonies, followed by an account of the recognition of the Spanish-American republics by the leading nations of the world. It becomes more interesting in that portion dealing with the diplomacy of the United States in regard to Cuba, although the author does not frankly state the case from an impartial point of view. He does not bluntly express the truth that the diplomacy centering around the relations between Cuba and the United States resulted from a systematic effort at the expansion of slavery on the part of the slaveholding class controlling this country from 1800 to 1860. The discussion of the history of the Panama Canal is interesting in view of its subsequent development as is also the chapters on French intervention in Mexico. The two Venezuelan episodes, the difficulties of the United States in the Caribbean, tendencies toward Pan-Americanism and the Monroe Doctrine are extensively treated.
The work as a whole, moreover, does not give important facts with regard to Cuba and Haiti. There is no effort on the part of the author to show the imperialistic tendencies of the United States in extending its authority over weak republics at the time that it is professing to be laboring in the interest of the self-determination of smaller nations. The inside cover of the foreign policy of the United States toward Cuba, therefore, cannot be seen in reading this book. There does not appear in this work sufficient treatment of our relations with the Spanish American Republics to show that because of serious tilts in our diplomacy, the relations between the United States and Latin America have become strained.
No better example of the shortcomings of this book can be cited than the very meager reference to the Haitian Republic, which, contrary to international law and the principles of government which we profess to foster in the United States, has been occupied by United States marines, who according to official reports have instituted a regime of murder supported by the Wilson and Harding administrations. Professor Latané should have treated this phase of the question with the same detail with which he treated other aspects of it and his failure to do so identifies his book with that of many others written in the interest of a special class or to promote a special cause.
Creole Families of New Orleans. By Grace King. Macmillan Company, New York, 1921. Pp. 465.
This book, according to the author, "comes in response to a long-felt wish of an humble student of Louisiana history to know more about the early actors in it, to go back of the printed names in the pages of Gayarré and Martin, and peep, if possible, into the personality of the men who followed Bienville to found a city upon the Mississippi, and who, remaining on the spot, continued their good work by founding families that have carried on their work and their good names." The families chosen are such as Marigny de Mandeville, the Dreux family, De Pontalba, Rouer De Villeray, De la Chaise, Lafrénière, Labedoyère, Huchet de Kernion and a score or more of others. The work is well illustrated with scenes bearing on the life of the pioneer aristocracy of that commonwealth. The aim of the author evidently is to publish those records bearing witness to their good blood, their "maintenances de noblesse," which they considered as much a family necessity as a house and furniture. From the records of their baptisms, marriages and deaths, from bits of old furniture, jewelry, glass, old miniatures, portraits, scraps of silk and brocade, flimsy fragments and the like, the author has made an interesting story and well illustrated it. There is a regret that some of these achievements of the past are so deeply hidden for the lack of records to throw light thereupon that a definitive account of some of these families cannot be obtained.