Emily S. Rosenberg
     .         
Presidential Address
Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy:
Narratives of Money and Manliness*
Over the past several years, I have been investigating the politics of America’s
early-twentieth-century foreign lending, with an eye toward Joan Scott’s challenge to “theorize the political.” I have researched in records related to the
lending policies that William Howard Taft called “dollar diplomacy” and, at
the same time, have tried to come to terms with the challenges that a variety
of recent critical theories pose for the kind of conventional, positivist history
that has dominated our field. I would like here to reflect on this process of doing,
while also trying to critique, a fairly traditional topic in foreign relations history.
What have been the major challenges of a diverse body of recent critical
theories for the study of foreign relations? Critical theory has emphasized the
slippery nature of language, the contested nature of rhetorical structures, and
the contingent nature of meanings. It suggests that knowledge can be neither
universal nor objective because both disciplines and authors are culturally
constructed within their own time and circumstance. When both historical
scholarship and historians themselves must become historicized and contextualized, many of the standard assumptions of historical research and narrative
come into question. Upholding the positivist code of “objectivity,” assuming
the self-evidentiary nature of “evidence,” and invoking the authority of both
“experience” (as revealed in documents, interviews, reports) and of “expertise
and training” (provided by the historian) can all be construed as acts of
hegemony masked within the discourse of a search for truth. All historical texts,
both those we use and those we write, are invariably structured representations
that, like literary texts, both silence as well as reveal, encode as well as decode,
assign voice and authority to some and deny it to others. Meanings of categories
and categories of meanings – conveyed by constructs such as nation, gender,
race, ethnicity, foreign, domestic, and temporal and spacial designations – need
to be interrogated, not simply assumed. Historians, of course, often invoke
* SHAFR Presidential Address delivered at Seattle,  January . The author wishes to thank
Norman L. Rosenberg and Frank Costigliola for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.
Portions of this address are adapted from Dollar Diplomacy and the Emergence of America’s Global
Financial Power, forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, ).
D H, Vol. , No.  (Spring ). ©  The Society for Historians of American
Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishers,  Main Street, Malden, MA,
, USA and  Cowley Road, Oxford, OX JF, UK.
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categories in doing their work, but they should try to avoid uncritically
replicating the assumptions that should, in fact, be under study.
Perhaps most troubling to those historians who are accustomed to calling
for synthesis and complete pictures, critical theory sees claims to universality
and to total visions as deceptive. As meanings and realities are themselves
constructed from variable positions and vantages, to discipline this multiplicity
through synthesis may suppress, not accommodate, difference. If both the past
and its representation (through history) are to be understood as sites of
contestation, struggle, and multiplicity, “truth” must be situated within, rather
than imagined to stand outside, the ever changing formations of language and
discourse.
This critical challenge, which I have presented in only the crudest and
briefest of terms, has created considerable ferment in the field called U.S.
foreign relations, as conversations on H-DIPLO and every recent annual
meeting of SHAFR will attest. The trinity of objectivity, evidence, and eventual
synthesis has held reign in graduate schools and professional meetings for so
long that even a modest ripple of critique can provoke a countervailing tidal
wave of defensive response.
. These challenges to history are well summarized in Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great
Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA, ). Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The
“Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, ) sees “objectivity” as a
function of hegemony and essays in Allan Megill, ed., Rethinking Objectivity (Durham, ) see
“objectivity” as a function of hegemony and subjectivity. Essays in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural
History (Berkeley, ), and Thomas Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York, ) are
also instructive. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New
York, ) may be useful but misleads by confusing postmodern approaches with “relativism.”
Historians of U.S. foreign relations may find particular bodies of critical inquiry most relevant
to their concerns. These bodies of inquiry, which can only be skimmed here, come from many
directions: anthropology, feminism, literary theory, postcolonial studies, and political science.
Particularly influential works from anthropology include Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of
Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, ); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge, ), The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, ), and In
Other Words: Essays toward a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, ); Victor
Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, ) and Anthropology
of Performance (New York, ); Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, ); Renato Rosaldo,
Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, ); and James Clifford, The Predicament
of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnology, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA, ).
From feminist criticism see especially Scott, Gender and the Politics of History; essays in Judith
Butler and Joan Wallach Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York, ); Joan Wallach
Scott, ed., Feminism and History (Oxford, ); and Christine Sylvester, “The Contributions of
Feminist Theory to International Relations,” in International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, ed. Steve
Smith, Ken Booth et al. (Cambridge, ), –.
Literary theory has come into historical studies from a variety of sources. See especially
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, )
and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, ), which emphasize a more
structuralist approach; and Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, ), which is
influenced by Derrida and Foucault and points in more poststructuralist directions.
In postcolonial studies, influential collections include Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and
Helen Tiffin, eds., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London,
) and Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A
Reader (London, ). Critical examinations of the term “postcolonial” and its implications are
Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy : 
Robert Berkhofer’s recent book, Beyond the Great Story, provides considerable
insight into the dilemmas posed by the “postmodernist challenge.” Berkhofer
does not entirely reject the positivist historical tradition that has generally
shaped our profession over the past century. There is good reason to insist that
historical claims – about genocides, about global warming, about the origins of
the Korean War, and about whatever else – be supported with evidence. Yet
Berkhofer also insists on taking seriously the question of what counts as
evidence and other concerns raised by postmodern theory: of seeing histories
and historical sources as representational rather than referential; of critiquing
essentialist and foundational understandings as being historically contingent;
of building reflexivity (that is, the textual inscription of the medium into the
message) into historical scholarship; of highlighting multiple positions and a
diversity of voices; of seeing that notions of evidence may be shaped through
categories (such as gender and race) that are textually invisible because they
are assumed to be natural. Historians of international relations may also profit
by considering such critiques of the kinds of processes by which they arrange
their perceptions of the past into text (the process of textualization).
The dilemma, in this sense, is to try to present a historical text that includes
a sense of embeddedness in time and place while also imparting a sense of the
multiplicity of ways in which that history might be arranged, rhetorically
structured, and received. Berkhofer believes “that modernist and postmodernist outlooks ought to be in creative tension,” and he suggests that historians
can draw strength, rather than despair, from the clash. History needs “to show
consciousness of its own creation” (reflexivity); to offer “texts not as new truths
and authoritative works but only, presumably, as further moves in continuing
conversations.” Although many critics have equated postmodern critical theory with relativism, nihilism, and even the end of history, Berkhofer takes a
different tack by suggesting accommodation rather than apocalypse. Even the
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, ),
– and Patrick Wolfe, “History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, From Marx to Postcolonialism,” American Historical Review  (April ): –. Although “postcolonial studies” has
arisen largely within the context of European imperial history, its concerns are beginning to be
explored in the context of U.S. empire. See especially Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds.,
Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, ) and Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand,
and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of the Imperial Kind (Durham, forthcoming in ).
Nearly all of these cultural studies of international encounters explore race and gender as
important categories of analysis.
Postmodern influences have also begun to reshape the discipline of international relations in
political science. For examination of influential works see Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics:
A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations (Boulder, ) and Regina U. Gramer, “On
Poststructuralisms, Revisionisms, and Cold Wars,” Diplomatic History  (Summer ): –.
. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story.
. Ibid., xi, , .
. Critical views may be found in Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of
Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, ); Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the
Truth about History, –; and Frank Ninkovich, “Interests and Discourse in Diplomatic History,”
Diplomatic History  (Spring ): –.
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most traditional historian admits a sensitivity to constructedness, to the historian’s role in selection, and to ongoing interpretive revision; might not these
familiar sensitivities provide avenues toward grappling more seriously with
critical theory?
Borrowing from Berkhofer’s insights and invoking his notion of “creative
tension,” I would like to offer some historical analysis that builds upon works
by different groups of historians who may not now be addressing each other
because of divergent discursive conventions. International economic historians,
for example, write almost completely within a positivist, modernist idiom;
cultural historians increasingly construct their histories from a postmodernist,
critical stance. Works such as Barry Eichengreen’s Golden Fetters and Amy
Kaplan and Donald Pease’s Cultures of United States Imperialism seem to inhabit
different planets, even though they both focus on America’s international
history in the early twentieth century. It is my contention that histories of
America’s international relationships should be situated at the crossroads of all
kinds of discursive traditions and thus may be an ideal place within which
“creative tension” can come alive. Perhaps history writing at this particular
moment requires living and working within the simultaneity of modernity and
postmodernity (which, in itself, is the postmodern condition). If such a condition highlights inconsistencies and contradiction within our works and sparks
contentiousness in our field, then so much the better; hybridity, incongruity,
and contested meanings are the healthy hallmarks of this age.
In this short essay I will try to evoke such “creative tension” in the context
of a particular topic: American international lending and financial advising in
the early twentieth century – more specifically, the practice that President Taft
called “dollar diplomacy.” I will not use the term “dollar diplomacy” to signify
some sinister collusion between government and private interests or some
broad expansion of both direct and portfolio investment abroad, although the
term often has come to imply those meanings. Rather, the term to me connotes
a set of constantly changing historical arrangements that President Taft explicitly championed and on which several of his successors built: arrangements
through which “risky” foreign governments gained access to U.S. private bank
loans by accepting external (U.S.) financial advisers.
During the first three decades of the twentieth century, U.S. investment
bankers came to play important roles in international lending. Governments
of countries that they perceived as stable and relatively well incorporated into
the world financial system, of course, could readily attract capital, and a large
number of U.S. private bank loans went during the first three decades of the
twentieth century to countries such as Canada, Australia, most nations in
. Barry J. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, – (New
York, ); Kaplan and Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism.
. Cleona Lewis, America’s Stake in International Investments (Washington, ); Barbara Stallings, Banker to the Third World: U.S. Portfolio Investment in Latin America, – (Berkeley, ).
Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy : 
Western Europe, Japan, and some of the wealthier countries of Latin America.
But the countries that were not attractive to U.S. investment bankers became
the sites of dollar diplomacy – that is, the process of arranging loans in exchange
for some kind of financial supervision. Dollar diplomacy involved cooperation
among three groups in the United States: private bankers would extend loans
to risky foreign governments; financial experts, formally or informally connected to the loan process, would assume tasks of fiscal reorganization and
administrative management in the borrowing country; and government officials
would orchestrate these private sector involvements (loans and supervision by
bankers and economic experts) on behalf of what they considered to be the
national and international interest in furthering global economic integration
and strategic alliances. The advisers were to try to introduce certain fiscal
changes that were promoted as “modern” and “scientific”: gold-standard currency stabilization, “scientific” tax reform, and administrative rationalization,
all presumably to minimize the danger of default and to secure integration into
U.S. economic and strategic systems.
There is no systematic historical account of the rise and fall of these
loan-for-supervision arrangements before the Great Depression. Another related foreign policy tenet from the same era – the open door – has been
examined intensively, and under the influence of William Appleman Williams
even come to signify an entire interpretation of American history. But Americans’ pursuit of financial advisory relationships, designed to create the rationalized infrastructure that would make the open door possible, has had little
sustained attention. When considered at all, it is usually presented as a particular and episodic, rather than ongoing, phenomenon. My concern here will be
with raising some theoretical issues involved in textualizing these loan-forsupervision relationships as history.
While drawing on many of the conventions of our field, I wish to concentrate
on examining the meanings attached in this era to the concepts of “loans” and
“supervision.” Specifically, I wish to explore, first, some of the prominent
cultural narratives about money and moneylending and, second, international
financial supervision as a performative confirmation of manliness. In doing so,
I hope to suggest the possibility of subjecting international politics and economics to a cultural, constructivist critique. More important, I want to reshape
. For general background on the emergence of “corporatist” forms see James Weinstein, The
Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, – (Boston, ); Jerry Israel, ed., Building the Organizational
Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modern America (New York, ); Louis P. Galambos, “The
Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 
(): –; Ellis Hawley, “The Discovery and Study of a ‘Corporate Liberalism’,” ibid.  (Fall
): –; Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural
Expansion, – (New York, ); Thomas J. McCormick, “Drift or Mastery? A Corporatist
Synthesis for American Diplomatic History,” Reviews in American History  (December ): –;
and Michael J. Hogan, “Corporatism: A Positive Appraisal,” Diplomatic History  (Fall ): –.
. Lloyd C. Gardner, ed., Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William
Appleman Williams (Corvallis, OR, ); Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin, William Appleman
Williams: The Tragedy of Empire (New York, ).
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the question I am frequently asked – “how can one incorporate cultural analysis
into the politics of American foreign relations?” – into a new question – “how
can one ignore the cultural constructedness of international politics or economic relationships?”
     
During the era in which the United States first began to exercise global
financial power, from  to the late s, loan-for-supervision arrangements – or dollars attached to diplomatic purposes – characterized much of
U.S. financial diplomacy. The “realities” of these financial relationships, however, have been understood through very different discursive traditions related
to the diverse cultural meanings of money.
The architects of dollar diplomacy – foreign policymakers, investment
bankers, and professional economists – tended to equate the spread of American bank loans and financial expertise with the spread of “civilization” generally. Cooperation among these groups first emerged in U.S. foreign policy after
the Spanish-American War, when economic and political elites sought to
spread a dollar-based gold standard as a means of addressing more general fiscal
and cultural issues in Spain’s “backward” colonies. Under Theodore Roosevelt
and Taft, this fiscal supervision began to suggest an alternative to formal
acquisition of territory. Both presidents called on the newly powerful sector
of investment banking to help arrange loan contracts, conditional upon U.S.
fiscal supervision, in the Dominican Republic, Liberia, and Nicaragua, all areas
in which the U.S. government sought to enlarge its economic and strategic
presence by measures short of outright colonialism.
. Although he devotes too little analysis to their gendered and racialized codings, Frank
Ninkovich traces civilizationist discourses in Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in
the Twentieth Century (Chicago, ).
. Jacob Hollander, “The Finances of Porto Rico,” Political Science Quarterly  (): –;
Edwin W. Kemmerer, Modern Currency Reforms (New York, ). For overviews of scholarship on
late-nineteenth-century diplomacy see Edward P. Crapol, “Coming to Terms with Empire: The
Historiography of Late-Nineteeth-Century American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 
(Fall ): –; and Joseph A. Fry, “From Open Door to World Systems: Economic Interpretations of Late Nineteenth Century American Foreign Relations,” Pacific Historical Review  (May
): –.
. Dana G. Munro, Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in the Caribbean, – (Princeton, ).
David Healy, Drive to Hegemony: The United States in the Caribbean, – (Madison, ); Walter
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, – (Cambridge, ), –; Walter V. Scholes
and Marie V. Scholes, The Foreign Policies of the Taft Administration (Columbia, MO, ); Richard
Challener, Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy (Princeton, ). An overview of historiography is Richard H. Collin, “Symbiosis versus Hegemony: New Directions in the Foreign
Relations Historiography of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft,” Diplomatic History
 (Summer ): –.
. See, for example, Francis M. Huntington-Wilson, Memoirs of an Ex-Diplomat (Boston, );
Cyrus Adler, Jacob H. Schiff, His Life and Letters (Garden City, NY, ), vol. ; Vincent C. Carosso,
The Morgans: Private International Bankers, – (Cambridge, ), –. In addition to the
more general works listed in footnote , on the Dominican Republic throughout the period of
dollar diplomacy see especially Melvin M. Knight, The Americans in Santo Domingo (New York,
Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy : 
Taft labeled such loan-for-supervision arrangements “dollar diplomacy,” a
term that updated a long-standing American discourse that posited territorial
colonialism as atavistic while presenting “modern” diplomacy as commercial
in nature. By the end of World War I Woodrow Wilson brought a similar loan
and supervisory regime to Haiti and greatly tightened and expanded financial
supervision over all four of these dollar diplomacy dependencies (as well as
over the more formalized protectorates of Panama and Cuba). Wilson also
worked throughout , unsuccessfully, to introduce American financial supervision through private bank loans into Mexico and China. Like the domestic
corporate receiverships that had become common during the depression of the
s, supervised loans seemed to Taft and Wilson to provide ways by which
bankers and professional managers could exercise leverage, even management,
over insolvent or highly risky entities; they would provide the “visible hand”
that spread rationalized and progressive forms of bureaucratized expertise.
). On Liberia see especially Nnamdi Azikiwe, Liberia in World Politics (London, ); Raymond
Buell, The Native Problem in Africa (New York, ); George W. Brown, The Economic History of
Liberia (Washington, ); I. K. Sundiata, Black Scandal: America and the Liberian Labor Crisis, –
(Philadelphia: ); and Emily S. Rosenberg, “The Invisible Protectorate: The United States,
Liberia, and the Evolution of Neocolonialism, –,” Diplomatic History  (Summer ):
–. On Nicaragua see especially Karl Bermann, Under the Big Stick: Nicaragua and the United
States since  (Boston, ), –; Lester Langley, The Banana Wars: An Inner History of American
Empire, – (Lexington, KY, ); Ivan Musicant, The Banana Wars: A History of United States
Military Intervention in Latin America from the Spanish-American War to the Invasion of Panama (New
York, ), –; Thomas Leonard, Central America and the United States: The Search for Stability
(Athens, GA, ), –; Thomas D. Schoonover, The United States in Central America, –:
Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System (Durham, ), –; and Lester
Langley and Thomas Schoonover, The Banana Men: American Mercenaries and Entrepreneurs in Central
America, – (Lexington, KY, ). Older, but highly useful, treatments are Harold N. Denny,
Dollars for Bullets, the Story of American Rule in Nicaragua (New York, ), –; and Henry L.
Stimson, American Policy in Nicaragua (New York, ).
. This tradition of distinguishing between “old” (power politics) diplomacy and “new”
(commerical) relationships reaches back to the beginning of the republic. See, for example, David
Fitzsimons, “Tom Paine’s New World Order,” Diplomatic History  (Fall ): –.
. The U.S. occupation and governance of Haiti are discussed specifically in Arthur C.
Millspaugh, Haiti under American Control, – (Boston, ); Hans Schmidt, The United States
Occupation of Haiti, – (New Brunswick, ); David F. Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson
Era: The U.S. Navy in Haiti, – (Madison, ); Robert and Nancy Heinl, Written in Blood: The
Story of the Haitian People, – (Boston, ); and Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the Great
Powers, – (Baton Rouge, ).
For general assessments of Wilson’s relationship to international bankers see Carl Parrini, Heir
to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy, – (Pittsburgh, ); and Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe
for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, – (New York, ).
. Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, ); Vincent Carosso, Investment Banking in America: A History (Cambridge, MA, ),
–. Broad studies of the United States’s changing political economy at the turn of the century
and the growing role of “expertise” and governmental activism include Robert H. Wiebe, Search
for Order, – (New York, ); Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth
Century America (Cambridge, MA, ); Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern
Order (New York, ); John W. Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era,
– (New York, ); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the
Gilded Age (New York, ); Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of
National Administrative Capacities, – (New York, ); Eugene Nelson White, The Regulation
 :                 
As the United States became the world’s most important center of new
capital lending after World War I, the goal of using bank loans to build overseas
markets and leverage the spread of U.S. economic expertise reached its peak.
(Herbert Feis called the foreign policy of this era the “diplomacy of the
dollar.”) During –, the State Department’s new Office of the Economic
Advisor, under Arthur N. Young, worked closely with bankers to devise “stabilization” and supervisory plans for many countries, especially in Latin America,
where U.S. policymakers hoped to solidify a sphere of interest. Under these
plans, governmental officials would help arrange “controlled loans” extended
by private American banks. The loan contracts and prospectuses would specifically stipulate that American financial advisers had been engaged to establish a gold-exchange standard currency, a centralized banking system, a
“scientific” tax and accounting system, and some kind of supervision over
customs and/or budgets. El Salvador and Bolivia received controlled loans in
this period, and the State Department and bankers worked diligently, but
ultimately unsuccessfully, to effect controlled loans in Guatemala, Honduras,
Colombia, Peru, and Chile as well.
Although governmental officials gradually, after about , began to retreat
from playing such a direct and visible role in arranging economic “stabilization”
missions in exchange for private bank loans, they continued behind the scenes
to encourage bankers and financial advisers to do so. Supported by the Republican administrations of the s, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in
cooperation with Western European central banks put together stabilization/advisorship programs for several Eastern European states and played a
major role in introducing Parker Gilbert’s advisorship to Germany under the
Dawes Plan of . At the same time, a slightly less formalized, professionaland Reform of the American Banking System, – (Princeton, ); Guy Alchon, The Invisible Hand
of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science, and the State in the s (Princeton, ); Naomi R. Lamoreaux,
The Great Merger Movement in American Business, – (Cambridge, ); James Livingston,
Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, – (Ithaca, );
Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, –
(Cambridge, ); Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, –
(Cambridge, ) and The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive
Era and the s (New York, ); and William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise
of New American Culture (New York, ).
. Herbert Feis, The Diplomacy of the Dollar: First Era, – (Baltimore, ). Joseph Tulchin,
The Aftermath of War: World War I and U.S. Policy toward Latin America (New York, ); Joan Hoff
Wilson, American Business and Foreign Policy, – (Lexington, KY, ), –; Ronald W.
Pruessen, John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power (New York, ), –. Priscilla Roberts, “The
Anglo-American Theme: American Visions of an Atlantic Alliance, –,” Diplomatic History
 (Summer ): –, emphasize the interest policymakers and bankers had in global economic
stabilization.
. Emily S. Rosenberg and Norman L. Rosenberg, “From Colonialism to Professionalism:
The Public-Private Dynamic in United States Foreign Financial Advising, –,” Journal of
American History  (June ): –.
. On post-World War I economic stabilization in Europe see Stephen V. O. Clarke, Central
Bank Cooperation, – (New York, ); Richard H. Meyer, Bankers’ Diplomacy: Monetary Stabilization in the s (New York, ); Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France,
Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy : 
ized phase of dollar diplomacy was exemplified by Edward Kemmerer’s wellpublicized missions, which reorganized the financial systems of Colombia,
Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Poland and helped convince South Africa to
adopt a gold standard. Beyond Europe and Latin America, the U.S. government supported and closely followed the extended financial mission of exTreasury official Arthur Millspaugh in Persia, a mission that also represented
an attempt to link financial modernization to the possibility of U.S. bank loans.
In all of these cases, U.S. government and banking elites pushed gold-standard
currency stabilization, along with other fiscal reforms, to promote the outflow
of U.S. capital, generate markets for U.S. exports, and spread “civilized” and
“scientific” methods of fiscal administration. Governments in host countries
also facilitated “stabilization” overseen by U.S. experts (or at least its illusion)
because the presence of external experts helped to attract U.S. bank loans and
improve the international marketability of their bonds.
The spread of financial advisory missions, of course, slowed along with the
retreat of investment capital that accompanied the economic crisis called the
Great Depression. The Taft-era formula, linking private bank loans to fiscal
supervision, effectively ended in the late s and was not reconstituted until
the advent of International Monetary Fund conditionalities in the post-Bretton
Woods environment (though then in different forms).
Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, ); Michael J. Hogan, Informal Entente:
The Private Structure of Cooperation in Anglo-American Economic Diplomacy, – (Columbia, MO,
); Stephen A. Schuker, The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis of  and
the Adoption of the Dawes Plan (Chapel Hill, ); Walter MacDougall, France’s Rhineland Diplomacy,
– (Princeton, ); Melvyn P. Leffler, The Elusive Quest: The American Pursuit of European
Stability and French Security, – (Chapel Hill, ); Marc Trachtenberg, Reparations in World
Politics: France and European Economic Diplomacy, – (New York, ); Dan Silverman, Reconstructing Europe after the Great War (Cambridge, MA, ); Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion:
American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, – (Ithaca, ); Harold James
et al., eds., The Role of Banks in the Interwar Economy (New York, ); and Eichengreen, Golden Fetters.
. Paul W. Drake, The Money Doctor in the Andes: The Kemmerer Missions, –, (Durham, ),
–; Barry Eichengreen, “House Calls of the Money Doctor: The Kemmerer Missions to Latin
America, –,” in Money Doctors, Foreign Debts, and Economic Reforms in Latin America from the s
to the Present, ed. Paul W. Drake (Wilmington, DE, ), –. On South Africa see Bruce
Dalgaard, South Africa’s Impact on Britain’s Return to Gold,  (New York, ).
. For background on the earlier U.S. financial advisory mission to Persia, led by William M.
Shuster, see William M. Shuster, The Strangling of Persia (New York, ) and Robert A. McDaniel,
The Shuster Mission and the Persian Constitutional Revolution (Minneapolis, ). On the Millspaugh
mission see Millspaugh’s The Financial and Economic Situation of Persia (Boston, ), The American
Task in Persia (New York, ), and Americans in Persia (Washington, ); and Douglas Smith,
“The Millspaugh Mission and American Corporate Diplomacy in Persia, –,” Southern
Quarterly  (January ): –.
. Stallings, Banker to the Third World, emphasizes the reciprocal nature (the “push”/“pull”)
of lending and borrowing relationships.
. Charles P. Kindleberger, World in Depression, – (London, ); Eichengreen, Golden
Fetters.
. Irving S. Friedman, “Private Bank Conditionality: Comparison with the IMF and the
World Bank,” in IMF Conditionality, ed. John Williamson (Washington, ), –; Sidney S. Dell,
On Being Grandmotherly (Princeton, ).
 :                 
The meanings attached by economists, bankers, and government officials to
this spread of U.S. loans and supervision from  to , however, did not go
unchallenged. Discourses of moneylending were highly contested, and it will
not do to allow the assumptions of policymaking elites alone to construct the
discursive structures of history. The following vignette will begin to illustrate
the complicated problem of doing a history of international lending.
In  the prestigious journal The Atlantic Monthly, edited by Ellery Sedgwick, published two articles describing the state of U.S. relations with Latin
America. The first, “Imperialistic America,” was by Samuel Guy Inman, a
Texas-born missionary who had recently toured the Caribbean area. “North
America’s imperialism in the Caribbean may shock some readers,” Inman
warned in his opening sentence. He then presented a tour, as it were, of the
states dominated by what he called an “American imperialism” exercised
through financial experts and economic controls. He claimed that U.S. citizens
were generally unaware of this situation, but he reminded his readers that
control “always brings resentment and enmity.” He warned that “the United
States cannot go on destroying with impunity the sovereignty of other peoples,
however weak, cutting across the principles for which our fathers fought. . . .
[T]he continuation of this dollar diplomacy, with its combination of bonds and
battleships, means the destruction of our nation just as surely as it meant the
destruction of Egypt and Rome and Spain and Germany and all the other
nations who came to measure their greatness by their material possessions
rather than by their passion for justice.” Inman thus charted a narrative of
decline. U.S. foreign relations were a “dark picture” and a “rotten mess” that
would bring the nation’s “destruction.”
Inman’s article set off an uproar. State Department officials privately called
him a “parlor bolshevist type, a leader of teachers and preachers,” and a
“subversive.” Representatives of many business interests, the head of the Pan
American Union Leo Rowe, and officials in some Latin American countries
were outraged. The most detailed and public response came in the form of a
rebuttal written from the State Department itself by Sumner Welles.
Welles’s Atlantic Monthly article – titled “Is America Imperialistic?” – adopted
and restated the civilizationist discourses upon which these policies had been
built. After a slashing attack on “propagandists” and “discontented agitators,”
he emphasized that many small nations to the South lacked a “firm tradition of
orderly, constitutional government.” He then discussed the “altruism” and
“great benefits” that North American financial advice had brought. U.S. policy
was substituting the benefits of civilization for the cycles of self-serving revolutions and the anarchy that had long prevailed. Commercial relations, he
insisted, were, by definition, mutually advantageous. “It is almost axiomatic,”
. Samuel Guy Inman, “Imperialist America,” The Atlantic Monthly  (July ): –.
. Kenneth Woods, “ ‘Imperialistic America’: A Landmark in the Development of U.S. Policy
toward Latin America,” Inter-American Economic Affairs  (Winter ): , .
Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy : 
he wrote, “that development of commercial relations between countries brings
about a better understanding and a clearer perception of their mutual advantages and common needs. . . . Commercial development, however, cannot be
considered economic domination. . . . South of the Rio Grande faith is increasing, notwithstanding the occasional difficulty of the Latin to comprehend the
Anglo-Saxon mentality, that our Government is responsive solely to the desire
to promote good understanding and to remove discord, using its powerful
influence at all times on the side of right and justice.” In contrast to Inman’s
jeremiad, Welles charted a narrative of progress and uplift for all.
The Inman-Welles debate was not an isolated exchange. It exemplified two
pervasive, contradictory discourses of moneylending.
How might a historian confront such differing versions of international
relationships? As a recent article by Sarah Maza has discussed, many cultural
historians have been increasingly interested in seeing diverse stories about the
past as “cultural narratives” – a term that avoids both the connotations of
“mythology” or “fiction,” on the one hand, and the connotations of “fact” or
“reality,” on the other. Attention to cultural narratives has mostly focused on
bodies of literary or judicial sources – folk tales, journalism, judicial briefs,
pleas, and hearings – and have provided ways of understanding the histories of
fairly inarticulate folks. But political debates – the most traditional of historical
topics often carried on by the most traditional of historical actors – may also
be worth revisiting in new ways. By viewing these debates as cultural narratives,
we may ask new questions about the structures, assumptions, plots, authors,
and performativity of historical stories. We may ask not “which stories about
moneylending are true and which are false” but “what are the stories told about
moneylending” and what are their historical settings and meanings.
Interrogating the debates over international moneylending in the s as
cultural narratives helps place them within two distinctive discursive traditions
about the social consequences of monetary exchange. One, associated with
what I call the “antibank bloc,” signifies distrust of banks and globalized
financial interests; the other, associated with what I call the “professional
managerial bloc,” extolls the benefits of rationalizing the world financial system
through lending and financial advising. These two discursive traditions shaped
very different cultural narratives, which, as the Inman-Welles debate suggests,
had different plots, different heros and villains, and different views of the future.
By the use of the term “blocs,” I mean to signify neither political parties nor
clear associations nor small cabals of elites nor “classes” in the classical Marxist
formulation. Rather, I use the term in the sense, borrowing from both Antonio
Gramsci and Michel Foucault, of loose and shifting discursive formulations
. Sumner Welles, “Is America Imperialistic?” The Atlantic Monthly  (September ):
–.
. Sarah Maza, “Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European
History,” American Historical Review  (December ): –.
 :                 
that marshaled symbols and representations to contend for hegemony. Let us
look more closely at the two discursive traditions.
Many different critiques of marketplaces and their social arrangements
circulated in the nineteenth-century United States. At mid-century, the white,
Southern defense of slavery included an attack upon industrial “wage slavery.”
George Fitzhugh, for example, decried the depersonalization of money-based
economies and associated wage work with uncaring exploitation and the
commodification, even cannibalization, of people-as-laborers. In the same era,
Northerners such as Herman Melville and Henry David Thoreau developed
different critiques that nonetheless also stressed the soulless materialism that
accompanied the pursuit of money. Later, Thorstein Veblen’s sharp exploration
of growing materialism and “conspicuous consumption” provided a particularly American sociology of the consequences of a modernity marked primarily
by the monetary purchase of things. And Biblically oriented groups, such as
the Populists, drew from Christian traditions that had equated interest (usury)
with “outsiders” (Jews) and immorality. William “Coin” Harvey’s financial
primer, popular in the s, taught that “primary money” (representing simply
an exchange of goods produced by labor) was necessary but that “credit money”
(promises to exchange products of labor in the future that were used to pledge
or store labor value) was insidious. “Primary money” supported republicanism,
whereas “credit money” contributed to inequality, antirepublican concentrations of power, and imperialism. And the influence of Karl Marx’s work at about
the same time augmented the discourses of critique. By anchoring the concept
of real value to the actual productive task, Marx’s labor theory of value
positioned bankers as the most insidious representatives of capitalism – the
ultimate expropriators of surplus value.
As the American economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries came to be held together by impersonal financial empires and
symbolic instruments, there seems to have been an upsurgence of these
discursive traditions that constructed money and marketplaces as chains that
degraded people and even bound them to servitude. To those who felt victimized by abstract economic forces, the very concepts of “finance” and “money”
often became tinged with an anti-grass roots, anti-common sense, even antiAmerican character. Anti-Semitic discourses could easily augment this strain
of American antibanking thought.
Gretchen Ritter’s recent book, Goldbugs and Greenbacks, which examines the
history of the antimonopoly tradition in terms of “narration and representation,” argues that this distrust of the “money power” reached its zenith at
the turn of the century and then declined. But I see an antibanking bloc not
only continuing very strongly after , but shifting its focus to international
. George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters (Cambridge, MA, ).
. Gretchen Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance
in America (New York, ).
Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy : 
financial issues. Historic antibank sentiment, for example, fed suspicions that
bankers had led the United States into World War I. In the post-World War I
period, critics worried about bankers’ involvement in Mexican policy and
sparked congressional investigations of U.S. financial receiverships in Haiti and
the Dominican Republic. And by the mid-s vigorous criticism also raged
against the Dawes Plan and bank-led “American imperialism” generally. The
U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua, culminating in a highly controversial
war in the late s, was widely denounced as a bailout of bankers, and the
congressional cutoff of funds for this war reflected the surge of antibanking
sentiment that preceded the full-fledged flood of anger against banks that came
with the onset of the Depression. During the s, the “anti-imperialists,” as
they called themselves, consisted of old anti-imperialist voices such as The
Nation, working with newer organizations such as the WILPF and the Garland
Fund, and with congressional insurgents and an emerging cadre of critical
writers and intellectuals. This antibank bloc brought together shifting and
disparate elements – from Bible-belt social conservatives to socialist radicals –
and cannot be positioned as a single political or class movement. As exemplified
by Samuel Inman’s article, the narratives constructed from antibanking discourses portrayed moneylenders as generally evil and equated moneylending
with the spread of greed, oppression, inequality, and conflict.
The discourses of the “professional managerial bloc,” by contrast, championed the global spread of market exchange. This bloc subscribed to a very
different, no less American, script about banking. Celebrants of marketplace
liberalism in the tradition of Adam Smith, they saw monetary exchange as
facilitating the economic specialization that would enrich all participants in a
free-trade environment. Markets were moralizing agents that improved, rather
. U. S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, Inquiry into the
Occupation and Administration of Haiti and Santo Domingo: Hearings, th Cong., st and d sess. ().
For broader background see especially Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti; Bruce Calder,
The Impact of Intervention: The Dominican Republic during the U.S. Occupation of – (Austin, );
and Langley, The Banana Wars.
. Antibanking, “antiimperialist” discourses shaped works such as Scott Nearing and Joseph
Freeman, Dollar Diplomacy (New York, ), and Emily Balch, ed., Occupied Haiti (New York, ).
This tradition is examined in Emily S. Rosenberg, “Economic Interest and United States Foreign
Policy,” in American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, –, ed. Gordon Martel (New York, ),
–. Anti-imperialist views during this period are covered in Eugenia Meyer, “Contracorriente:
Hacia una historiografia norteamericana antimperialista,” Plural  (October ): –; Helen
Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico,
– (Tuscaloosa, ); Fredrick B. Pike, The United States and Latin America: Myths and
Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature (Austin, ); John A. Britton, Revolution and Ideology: Images of
the Mexican Revolution in the United States (Lexington, KY, ); Merle Curti, “Subsidizing Radicalism: The American Fund for Public Service, –,” Social Service Review  (September ):
–; Stephen J. Whitfield, Scott Nearing: Apostle of American Radicalism (New York, ), –;
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, –
(New Brunswick, ), –; and (on congressional anti-imperialist insurgents) Robert David
Johnson, The Peace Progessives and American Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA, ).
 :                 
than degraded, individual character. In America, this tradition was championed in the writings of Charles Cooley and Edwin Kemmerer and implemented, as we have seen, by the architects of dollar diplomacy. To them, the
market instilled discipline, regularity, responsibility. A money economy taught
thrifty accumulation through delayed gratification and elevated individual
choice to a preeminent social good. It imparted both responsibility and freedom. In this discourse, interest from moneylending was the reward for virtue,
and banks – if properly run – were the very custodians of civic progress and
individual morality.
Many of the leading proponents of free-market views at the turn of the
century looked with alarm upon the condition of American life. Denouncing
price fluctuation, cycles of boom and bust, excessive avarice, and spreading
social disorder, they sought a new role for economic regulation to preserve the
market and its moralizing force. “Scientific” managerial expertise, both in
government and in the private sector, would be called upon to arrest economic
and social decline. “Sound money” (gold standard), “scientific banking,” and
the global expansion of solid and credible credit markets topped their reform
agenda. Supporters of these views came not just from a narrow, Eastern-based
business and professional elite but also from small-town main streets, upwardly
mobile African-American leaders, mid-level managers, and aspiring professionals throughout the country. The idea that social progress depended upon
expertly administered fiscal stabilization marked a broad cultural movement
that, as James Livingston has shown, came to assume a hegemonic position
within the apparatus of the newly bureaucratized state. In the cultural narrative constructed from this view of money, as Sumner Welles’s arguments
exemplified, modern bankers and experts were benevolent agents of free
markets and social uplift; international lending was part of a great nation’s
civilizing mission.
These kinds of contests over the meanings of moneylending appeared not
just in the United States. With localized variations conditioned by various
political and cultural differences, pro- and anti-banking blocs also appeared
within countries receiving financial missions and bank loans. In each of the
countries that hosted American economic advisory missions, the dynamics of
local contests for power shaped analogous blocs that often then allied with
like-minded, external interests. In Germany, a broad cultural debate over the
. Albert O. Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays (New York, ),
– and The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton,
). U.S. perspectives on economic relationships with Latin America are examined in James
William Park, Latin American Underdevelopment: A History of Perspectives in the United States, –
(Baton Rouge, ).
. Carl P. Parrini and Martin Sklar, “New Thinking about the Market, –: Some
American Economists on Investment and the Theory of Surplus Capital,” Journal of Economic
History  (September ): –.
. Livingston, The Origins of the Federal Reserve System, –.
Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy : 
spread of “Fordism” – the Americanized process of industrial production and
its social consequences – knitted into controversies over the Dawes Plan and
the role of the American agent general, Parker Gilbert. In Poland, particularly
acrimonious domestic disputes over housing and social welfare policies became
refracted through controversies regarding the U.S. financial adviser and the
loans that he was supposed to try to facilitate. In Central America and the
Caribbean, as some groups accentuated the importance of attracting U.S.
capital, their opponents championed an “anti-imperialist” movement that
denounced U.S. intervention in Nicaragua as the product of Wall Street
bankers’ controls. In some countries of South America, groups that stood for
greater centralization and “modernization,” such as the military, worked to
attract U.S. capital and advisers, while more regionally based elites warned
against the influx of foreign influence. In Persia, attitudes toward the U.S.
financial mission and possible U.S. loans were enmeshed in the complicated
geopolitical rivalries arising from competition between England and the Soviet
Union and in the ambitions of and oppositions to the regime of the new shah.
Perceptions of international lending and financial advising in this period,
therefore, are conditioned not simply by relations of acceptance and resistance
between states but also by the intricacies of domestic contests and, in some cases,
by emerging transnational alignments. International lending relationships were
not just international affairs but were manifestations of transnational politics
and cultural movements. National boundaries must be both recognized and
simultaneously erased in mapping histories of international lending.
. On the cultural dimensions of this debate over economic organization and the symbolic
role that “America” played as a metaphor for economic disputations see Mary Nolan, Visions of
Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York, ). For more politically
oriented discussions of the German controversies over American bank loans see Werner Link, Die
amerikanische stabilisierungspolitik in Deutschland (Dusseldorf, ), –; William C. McNeil,
American Money and the Weimar Republic: Economics and Politics on the Eve of the Great Depression (New
York, ); Steven B. Webb, Hyperinflation and Stabilization in Weimar Germany (New York, );
and Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economy, and Society in the German Inflation, –
(New York, ), –.
. Neal Pease, Poland, the United States, and the Stabilization of Europe, – (New York, );
Zbigniew Landau, “Poland and America: The Economic Connection, –,” Polish American
Studies  (Autumn ): –; Frank Costigliola, “American Foreign Policy in the ‘Nut Cracker’:
The United States and Poland in the s,” Pacific Historical Review  (February ): –.
. Richard V. Salisbury, Anti-Imperialism and International Competition in Central America,
– (Wilmington, DE, ). See also Jeffrey L. Gould, To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and
Political Consciouness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, – (Chapel Hill, ). The way in which
discourses about international relations become shaped by domestic political agendas is developed, in a different but related context, in Laura E. Hein, “Free-Floating Anxieties on the Pacific:
Japan and the West Revisited,” Diplomatic History  (Summer ): –.
. Drake, The Money Doctor in the Andes.
. A call for “transnational” history is Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of
International History,” American Historical Review  (October ): –. Akira Iriye has long
advocated approaches that stress transnational cultural connections; see, for example, “The
Internationalization of History,” American Historical Review  (February ): –, “Culture and
International History,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan
and Thomas G. Paterson (New York, ), –, and Cultural Internationalism and World Order
 :                 
The various interpretations of dollar diplomacy at the time and the subsequent histories of these economic relationships have been shaped generally
within the cultural narratives of the antibanking bloc and the professionalmanagerial bloc. Within one diverse but related set of discourses, dollar
diplomacy may be constructed as imperialism: an exploitative, marketplace
successor (or alternative) to territorial colonialism; a system of international
hierarchy; a lopsided division of labor, wealth, and power that was increasingly
privatized and organized within the financial marketplace (by “natural” laws of
economics) under the name of professional expertise. Within the other set of
discourses, dollar diplomacy could be construed as a prologue to processes of
modernization, facilitating the advent of both more professionally organized
states (thus enhancing, not undermining, the nationhood of weak states) and
rationalized, integrated global marketplaces. The (hi)stories told about lending
by both groups often have the attributes of folk tales: the structural continuities
over time, the cautionary qualities that come from a severe and committed
delineation of “good” and “evil” forces, the rich accretion of symbolism. And
the cultural symbolism surrounding money goes well beyond political debate
over particular issues to permeate all kinds of cultural representations: for
example, allusions to “crosses of gold” and “Wall Street” and visual representations of workers’ power in proletarian art, on the one hand; and marbleencrusted, neoclassical banking architecture and republican coinage motifs, on
the other. The meanings of money, conveyed through the popular media, policy
debates, and historical accounts are cultural and multiple.
These cultural narratives not only have deep historic roots that reach back
to the birth of monetary economies but they also project forward into recent
time, shaping both the “dependency” school so popular in the analysis of
U.S.-Latin American relations during the s–s and the “modernization”
and “neoliberal” schools so influential in the s–s and, with variations,
the s. In short, I would suggest that histories of international lending offer
neither stable sets of meanings nor determined relationships but that they
provide a shifting field of contested representations and practices that have
been shaped through differing cultural narratives about the meanings of money.
(Baltimore, ). See also Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,”
American Historical Review  (October ): –; and Jane C. Desmond and Virginia R.
Domínguez, “Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism,” American Quarterly 
(September ): –. John G. Clark, “Making Environmental Diplomacy an Integral Part of
Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History  (Summer ): –, examines a variety of discursive
traditions about economics and transnational environmental issues.
Postmodern conceptions of “nations” and “nationalism” are especially indebted to Eric
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York, ) and Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, ). On
nationality and globalization see also Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization (Minneapolis, ).
. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World
(Princeton, ), presents a critical, postmodernist examination of discourses of development
after World War II.
Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy : 
International lending was certainly a real phenomenon that existed in the past,
but its representation at the time and through later histories, including this one,
must invariably be discursive. To acknowledge that histories of international
lending relationships might be constructed in a variety of ways, depending
upon the narrator’s own positions and cultural conditioning, takes the history
of foreign relations one stride “beyond the great story” and recognizes that
history is invariably textualized through discourse. (In the present case, of
course, the history is being textualized within a discourse of multiplicity that
postmodern understandings have helped construct.)
:     
Seeing the process of lending as embedded within “cultural narratives”
suggests exploring the ways in which these narratives were “performed.”
Cultural narratives have plots that occur over and over; they present “social
dramas” in which their formulators can become part of the performance.
Social dramas, as anthropologist Victor Turner suggests, can provide the
matrices through which individuals and societies proceed from a perceived
crisis to a resolution that can help to reassert or transform their values. Although
space will not here allow an extensive discussion of how the idea of “performativity” might illuminate historical studies of international relationships, I
would like at least to note that, although all aspects of life have a performative
dimension, international encounters are often overtly structured as performances. Appearances and behavior carry exaggerated importance in intercultural
contexts; emphasis on display and presentation in diplomatic exchange is one
indication of the heightened sensitivity that international actors have toward
both performance and spectatorship.
Both gender and race provide powerful categories, though certainly not the
only ones, whose meanings are constructed through performance. As Gail
Bederman’s work suggests, at the turn of the century whiteness helped construct “manliness” and vice versa; that is, “whiteness” was one of the cultural
codings necessary to be truly “manly,” and “manly races” were invariably coded
as white. While implying these interrelated significations between race and
. Relevant scholarship exploring performativity includes Victor Turner, Anthropology of
Performance; Maza, “Stories in History,” –; and Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives
(Stanford, ). Performance of sex and gender is specifically addressed in Judith Butler, Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, ).
. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United
States, – (Chicago, ). On connections among gender, race, and empire, mostly within
the British context, see Ann Laura Stoler and others in Micaela di Leonardo, ed., Gender at the
Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (Berkeley, ); Nupur Chaudhuri
and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington,
); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London, ); McClintock,
Imperial Leather; Bram Dijkstra, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood
(New York, ), –; and especially Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham,
).
 :                 
gender, here I will address primarily the role of gender – that is, of (white)
manliness. I wish very briefly to sketch the argument that supervisory missions
emerged in discursive association with the performance of early twentieth
century bourgeois notions of (white) manliness. The cultural meanings of
supervision and expertise, like the meanings of moneylending, may be interrogated in examining dollar diplomacy.
All of the rising new professions connected with turn-of-the-century international finance – economics, accounting, banking, etc. – were highly gendered.
All were comprised nearly exclusively by men and enforced that exclusivity
through the growing power of professional schools, credentials, and associations. The international financial system afforded these men a highly visible
arena in which overlapping significations of manliness and supervisory capability were worked out through performance. For these new professionals,
manliness (like finance) involved supervisory powers and specialized skills. Just
as manhood in family life implied restraint, self-mastery, and supervision over
dependents in the private bourgeois household, the same concepts were important to financial reformers internationally. (The ideal of bourgeois marriage, it might be argued, was a mini domain of dollar diplomacy – that is, the
provision of money in exchange for the right of supervision.) To develop links
between gender performance and international financial supervision, I would
like to focus on the premier financial adviser of the era, Edwin Kemmerer, the
. Works examining the rise of professionalism include Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and
Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, – (Lexington, KY, );
Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher
Education in America (New York, ); Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science
(Urbana, IL, ); Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley,
); and Thomas L. Haskell, ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington, ). Discussions of the gendering of public life and public authority include Kathleen
B. Jones, Compassionate Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women (New York, ); and
Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth
Century,” in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks et
al. (Princeton, ), –. Bonnie Smith, “Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The
Seminar and Archival Research in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 
(October ): –, examines the gendered nature of professionalism in history. On gender
and the professions of economics and accounting, see especially Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted:
A New Feminist Economics (New York, ); and David Chioni Moore, “Feminist Accounting
Theory as a Critique of What’s ‘Natural’ in Economics,” in Natural Images in Economic Thought:
“Markets Read in Tooth and Claw”, ed. Philip Mirowski (New York ), –.
. On definitions of manliness in the early twentieth century see David I. Macleod, Building
Character in the American Boy (Madison, ); Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self, d ed. (Baltimore, ),
–; John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(New York, ), –; J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class
Masculinity in Britain and America, – (New York, ); Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire:
The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the s,” American
Literary History  (Winter ): –; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations
in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, ), –; Bederman, Manliness
and Civilization.; and Arnoldo Testi, “The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the
Culture of Masculinity,” Journal of American History  (March ): –.
. Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, ); Viviana Zelizer, The Social Meaning of
Money (New York, ).
Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy : 
famed international “money doctor” who held the first chair of International
Economics at Princeton in the s and served as a mentor to many of the
financial professionals who were hired around the world in the early s.
Kemmerer first built his reputation as an international financial adviser on
a dramatic act that became his distinguishing heroic narrative. In  he led a
five-person team of advisers to Colombia. As they proceeded with their plans
for currency and banking reform, a crisis suddenly developed: a rush on the
banks threatened to bring monetary chaos before their plan became operational. Boldly, as the story goes, Kemmerer interrupted this crisis. Although his
team of experts had planned to open the new Central Bank several months
later, Kemmerer rushed through the preparations in a single weekend and
opened the bank on Monday morning, stanching the flow of withdrawals and
restoring credibility and stability to Colombia’s financial system. This crisis
narrative was punctuated by Kemmerer’s own personal endangerment, as he
nearly lost his life during a river crossing. The ability to assume such professional and personal risks, and then to triumph against almost impossible odds,
were clearly the markers of a manly man who was committed to ministering to
a disorderly country. And the aftermath of this near-miraculous stabilization
was only slightly less remarkable. Kemmerer’s subsequent promotion of Colombian bonds helped make their prices soar, and a huge wave of lending from
U.S. banks ensued. Kemmerer, who became sought after as an adviser by dozens
of capital-starved governments throughout the world, escalated his consulting
fees and honed his reputation as a “money doctor” (effectively invoking the
therapeutic language of another emerging profession that had also became
gendered male as it professionalized).
A major proponent of the quantity theory of money, Kemmerer held a
life-long obsession with fighting inflation. His moral prescriptions about manliness were, in every way, inscribed in his economic “science.” Because inflation
penalized hard work and savings, he believed that it impaired a man’s ability
to provide for his family and save for its future. By contrast, eroding currency
values rewarded the careless and profligate man who made no provisions for
the future and felt no responsibility toward the family that was his ward.
Civilized men conserved value by maintaining hard currencies. (It may be
worth noting that “manly” orientations toward sexual relations and money
shared discursive links; there was a quantity theory in both of these realms of
performance that emphasized self-restraint and cautioned against excess.)
This need to perform according to gendered codes – to devise systems that
instilled duty, regularity, self-restraint, and responsibility – helped shape not
only a powerful set of discourses about the superiority of (white) manhood and
. Drake, The Money Doctor in the Andes, –.
. E. W. Kemmerer, “Inflation,” American Economic Review  (June ): –, “Economic
Advisory Work for Governments,” American Economic Review  (March ): –, and The ABC of
Inflation (New York, ).
 :                 
its natural destiny to supervise lesser beings. It also helped shape the emerging
institutions of the global financial order: gold-exchange standard currencies,
central banks, scientific tariffs, regularized accounting procedures brought by
manly men. Not surprisingly, Kemmerer explicitly framed his economic advising work in terms of the way that he constructed – and performed – the ideal
of manliness. Often the only specific qualification he gave when seeking to hire
a member of his financial missions was that they be “manly.” He consistently
called advising work a “man size job.” “Stabilizing the Poles,” he wrote, “seems
to be a man size job and a perpetual one.”
The “money doctor’s” reputation, as he cultivated it, became synonymous
with hard work, impartiality, neutral expertise, service to others, and scientific
“laws” undergirded by a strong moral sense – that is, all the qualities that
Kemmerer signified with the word “manly.” Although it is clear that the State
Department and the banking house of Dillon Read often privately encouraged
and helped arrange Kemmerer’s advisory missions and subsequently asked for
his advice, he publicly assumed an impartial stance, positioning himself above
politics as a disinterested interpreter of scientific economic laws. His long
working hours, his team of financial specialists, his refusal to visit the U.S.
embassy in the countries he advised, his insistent denial of bank sponsorship,
his fatherly letters of advice to those disciples who tried to implement his
reforms once he left – all fulfilled his designation of himself as a professional
“man of science” who was doing “a man size job.” And those in host countries
who championed his economic program and desired access to the borrowing
it might open up also facilitated his performance. A Colombian newspaper
described Kemmerer’s team: “they did not descend to the stage in which
ignorance and self interest were debated, they simply kept working with a
splendid isolation. . . . When they were publicly charged with being the paid
agents of Wall Street, these men . . . were not obliged even to smile because
such strong men of the North do not cultivate irony but action. . . . A beautiful
lesson of labor, of simplicity, of austerity, and of efficiency is that which the
Financial Commission has given us.” In some countries during the s
crowds thronged to welcome Kemmerer as a hero; he became an icon of order
and progress who emblemized manly professionalism. (In the s, oppositional parties that formed around antibanking discourses turned his image
. Edwin W. Kemmerer to William Hand,  April , quoted in Pease, Poland, the United
States, . Similar comments exist throughout Kemmerer’s extensive correspondence; for example,
Kemmerer to Samuel Evans,  June , EWK Papers, letters, April, –June, , Mudd
Manuscript Library, Princeton University.
. Kemmerer, “Economic Advisory Work for Governments”; and Bruce R. Dalgaard, “E. W.
Kemmerer: The Origins and Impact of the Money Doctor’s Monetary Economics,” in Variations
in Business and Economic History: Essays in Honor of Donald L. Kemmerer, ed. Bruce R. Dalgaard and
Richard Vedder (Greenwich, CT, ), – describe his work.
. El Espectador (Bogota),  August , EWK Papers, box , “Colombia, : Public Credit.”
. Drake, The Money Doctor in the Andes, –.
Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy : 
around, portraying him as just another Wall-Street, Yankee imperialist, in a
competing cultural narrative that must for now be set aside.)
International lending and financial advising cast manly men, who were
supervising those less competent, as the heroic subjects in a global social drama.
The performance of financial supervision shaped notions of (white) manliness,
just as manliness shaped definitions of professionalism and control within the
world economy. International economic advising (along with the entire profession of economics) became so intricately and seamlessly laced with a
male-dominated performance that both supervision and its gendered discourses came to seem almost natural.

The modernist historical project of recovering the “realities” of the past and
compressing them into a “synthesis” that strives to narrow the grounds of
dissent is increasingly being challenged by projects of cultural critique. Drawing from Berkhofer, I have tried to evoke a “creative tension” between modernist
assumptions and postmodernist interrogations that are sensitive to issues of
construction, representation, and subjectivity. I have sought to examine a
topic that is usually presented in the objectivitist tropes of political and
economic history by exploring the cultural meanings of those very categories.
In considering the meanings of “loans” and “supervision,” I have emphasized
opposing cultural narratives about the impact of American lending and financial advising and also suggested that there are overlapping performative associations between manliness and supervision. In far too brief a fashion, I have
tried to argue that many of the concerns of recent critical theory have relevance
to the history of U.S. international relations: attention to cultural narrative, the
analytical decentering of states, performativity and social drama, gender and
racial codings.
. Overlapping discourses between manliness and world leadership have been explored for
the Cold War period in some detail. Some works include my “ ‘Foreign Affairs’ after World War
II: Connecting Sexual and International Politics,” Diplomatic History  (Winter ): –; Elaine
Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, ); Geoffrey S.
Smith, “National Security and Personal Isolation: Sex, Gender, and Disease in the Cold-War
United States,” International History Review  (May ): –; Michelle Mart, “Tough Guys and
American Cold War Policy: Images of Israel, –,” Diplomatic History  (Summer ):
–; Andrew J. Rotter, “Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia,
–,” Journal of American History  (September ): –; Alan Nadel, Containment Culture:
American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, ); Frank Costigliola, “The
Nuclear Family: Tropes of Gender and Pathology in the Western Alliance,” Diplomatic History 
(Spring ): – and “ ‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion
in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” Journal of American History  (March ):
–; and Robert Dean, “Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics
of Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History  (Winter ): – and his Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and
the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst, MA, forthcoming).
. For a discussion of “subjectivity” in history see Carrol Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering
the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ –,” Journal of American History 
(December ): –.
 :                 
Some past presidential addresses have suggested that the agendas and
specialized languages of postmodern scholarship, cultural studies, gender
analysis, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and other signifiers of recent
critical methodologies are simply distracting “us” from what “we” really do.
But who is the “we” and who gets to define what “our” questions of the past
should be? I envision international history as a meeting ground, a place of
difference and listening and assertion and contestation. This essay has suggested that doing international history should begin with the recognition of the
representational nature of history itself and of the ongoing constructedness of
the world and its diverse subjects. For my part, I wish to applaud, not to
marginalize, methodological and theoretical innovation for contributing to a
healthy “creative tension” in the field.
. In his  SHAFR presidential address, Melvyn Leffler calls for “synthesis,” makes the
claim – preposterous to postmodernists – that postmodern approaches do not deal with “power,”
and then states that “we should all welcome arguments that take note of new categories and
configurations and demonstrate why the older ones remain more persuasive” (emphasis added).
Melvyn P. Leffler, “New Approaches, Old Interpretations, and Prospective Reconfigurations,” in
America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since , ed. Michael J. Hogan
(New York, ), –, quote . Recent addresses by John Lewis Gaddis and Warren Kimball
have also viewed the “cultural turn” with skepticism. Other historians have applauded and
contributed to the cultural turn. For convenient summaries of these positions and the literature
on this issue see Michael J. Hogan, “State of the Art: An Introduction,” in ibid., – and various
contributions by Gaddis, Bruce Cumings, Leffler, and Michael H. Hunt. See also Emily S.
Rosenberg, “Turning to Culture,” in Joseph, LeGrand, and Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of the
Imperial Kind.
. These are also some of the themes in the “new” western history and in the history of the
early republic, both of which are really branches of international history. See, for example,
William Cronon et al., eds, Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York, );
and my introduction to the “Roundtable on Early U.S. Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 
(Winter ): –.