Historians today continue to explore the maintenance of the U.S. Empire in the Third World. Some argue that coercion was the driving force. Others suggest that consent played a role. Settling this debate is difficult given the unbalanced state of the historiography, which is overloaded with analyses of interventions. Analyzing U.S.-Ecuadorian relations offers an instructive addition to the literature. Negotiation and compromise, not coercion, were central to these interactions. The Ecuadorians who shaped these relations the most typically shared some core assumptions with their U.S. counterparts. Policymakers in Washington therefore developed educational exchange programs to expand this pool of pro-U.S. Latin Americans. Using documents from archives in the United States and Ecuador, this study explores how policymakers used diplomacy and education to maintain the U.S. Empire in the Third World from 1933 to 1963. This process began with the Roosevelt Administration’s Good Neighbor Policy. Ecuadorian threats to nationalize U.S. businesses operating in Ecuador, however, challenged the rhetoric of cooperation championed by Roosevelt. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor halted these challenges. Two days after the attack, policymakers in Washington accepted Ecuadorian offers to establish bases in Ecuador. This marked the solidification of hemispheric solidarity, and a more robust U.S. hegemony in Latin America. A growing number of Ecuadorian students and intellectuals studying in the United States under scholarships awarded by their government strengthened this solidarity. The U.S. government soon began funding both these exchanges as well as American Schools throughout Latin America in the hopes of maintaining this unity in the future. Beginning in 1950, disputes over fisheries threatened the wartime cohesion. Ecuador attempted to force Washington to accept a 200-mile limit on territorial waters. Negotiations failed to resolve the issue. The discontent evident throughout Latin America continued to build, until, in 1962, President John F. Kennedy discovered that the government of Ecuador would not support his administration’s plan to exclude Cuba from the Organization of American States. Despite these setbacks, policymakers continued to promote educational exchange through the Foreign Leader Program and the Fulbright Program. They hoped above all else to expand consent to U.S. hegemony. / text

This dissertation provides a detailed examination of the influence of Thomas Clifton Mann on the Latin American policy of the United States of America. A Foreign Service Officer from 1942, Mann eventually rose to the position of Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, and was President Lyndon Johnson’s most valued adviser on inter-American policy until his retirement from government service in May 1966. Commonly portrayed as highly conservative, insensitive to Latin American needs, and opposed to U.S. aid programs, Mann was a far more complex character than his critics have allowed. During the Eisenhower administration Mann’s influence was vital in reorienting policy priorities in Washington, emphasising the need for price stabilisation measures and limited development aid. During the Kennedy administration he opposed the Bay of Pigs invasion, before serving as Ambassador to Mexico where he successfully resolved the nation’s longest running border dispute. Most influential under Lyndon Johnson, Mann sought to place U.S. policy on a stable and sustainable path, reining in unrealistic expectations while fending off attacks from fiscal conservatives opposed to aid measures of any kind. In studying Mann’s career, much is revealed regarding the nature of U.S.-Latin American relations during a crucial period of history. While U.S. goals remained largely consistent, the nature of the challenges faced and the tactics used to counter them did not. Mann’s career saw the Cold War come to Latin America, and was met with both aid and military intervention, often in the form of counterinsurgency training and operations. Mann’s role in developing those polices reveals the contrasts and, more often, consistencies between the administrations he served, and undermines claims that the transition from Kennedy to Johnson witnessed a radical policy overhaul. Studying Mann’s career also illuminates divisive internal debates over the nature and meaning of inter-American relations, and the role and influence of an individual within Washington’s policymaking bureaucracy.

The United States is, and always has been, an empire. A host of recently published works expound the inseparable link between imperialism and the development of the United States and of its global standing. This dissertation aims to further this trend by examining U.S. imperialism in its key possession—the Isthmus of Panama. Few studies have explored the connections between the U.S. presence in the Canal Zone and growing U.S. control over the ostensibly sovereign Republic of Panama. Consequently, many consider Panama an atypical example of empire. Through multinational archival research, this dissertation offers a corrective. I examine how U.S. state and nonstate actors effectively made the Republic of Panama—and not just the Canal Zone—a U.S. colonial space, and, more specifically, a space typical of settler colonialism practiced around the globe. Through a process I call “spillover,” U.S. citizens settled and meddled throughout the isthmus, yet continued to take advantage of the Americanized institutions of the Canal Zone. Missionaries, soldiers, U.S. law enforcement personnel, agriculturalists, diplomats, and pleasure seekers expanded the imperial project set in Washington yet frequently relied upon U.S. government protection and interference. In this way, my actors on the isthmus closely reflect those agents of empire who conquered the “American West” or built colonies in the British and Japanese empires. My dissertation will, ultimately, show how U.S. citizens, through their “spillover colonialism,” set the tone for U.S.-Panamanian tensions during the mid-twentieth century and ushered in a new course for U.S. hegemony in the Greater Caribbean. I focus exclusively on the years between 1912 and 1936—after the construction of the canal but while Panama was still a U.S. protectorate. During this period, the United States learned new ways to impose its will abroad as empire, with all its costs and unpopular headlines, grew ever more cumbersome. Panama became the nursery for a brand of empire, rooted in my concept of spillover, where the United States could create colonies and control territory without going to war or planting the flag. My actors in Panama carried out all the hallmarks of imperialism, from occupying provinces to undermining Panamanian sovereignty with near impunity. At times, Panamanians pushed back, opting to resist U.S. incursions through diplomacy or more informal channels. U.S. imperial agents, therefore, learned how to apply their hegemony in ways that allowed them to sell their intentions as protecting U.S. lives and investments (such as the canal) and claim to observe the sovereignty of Panama. In so doing, U.S. colonialists in Panama effectively controlled a country of immense strategic value without having to wage the same campaigns that their countrymen had done in Haiti, Nicaragua, or the Philippines. These lessons bore fruit when, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt curtailed U.S. incursions in Panama in 1936, North Americans selectively spilled their cultural, economic, military, and political influence over the Atlantic-Caribbean territories that neighbored the bases, ports, and stations acquired from Great Britain in 1940. My project, carefully crafted into six chapters, brings Panama into the scholarly conversation on the typicality of U.S. imperial power abroad—something historians often use Puerto Rico or the Philippines to argue. / History