Pan-Americanism
PAN-AMERICANISM
Pan-Americanism was a transnational movement ad-
vanced by prominent entrepreneurs, political leaders,
and diplomats from throughout the Americas. It was
firstly a US-led policy promoting hemispheric economic
integration, and secondarily a forum before 1880, then
again after 1930, for the criticism of US imperialism by
Latin American diplomats. Its legacy persists in institu-
tions like the Pan American Health Organization, the Pan
American Institute of Geography and History, and the
Pan American Games. Even so, the movement’s signifi-
cance diminished quickly after World War II (1939–
1945) with the de facto replacement of the Pan American
Union by the Organization of American States (OAS) as
the Washington-based, hemisphere-wide cooperative
governance body.
THE FACE OF US DOMINANCE IN THE AMERICAS
Pan-Americanism was conceived in the late nineteenth
century as a project to organize the republics of the
Western Hemisphere into cooperative bodies—the Pan
American Union and its affiliates. Though imagined and
developed as a multilateral organization, in practice the
Pan American Union was financed and dominated by
American political leaders and bureaucrats. While cast as a
movement for the promotion of international cooperation
and cultural exchange, Pan-Americanism was always
defined by an American agenda for US-led political,
strategic, and particularly commercial and financial
stability in the hemisphere. From the 1880s through
1948, Pan-Americanism was the friendly face of US
dominance in the Americas and a movement whose first
objective was hemispheric economic calm. The latter was
to dovetail with new opportunities for US business and
financial expansion in the region, facilitated in part by
economic stability in the United States after 1895 and by
Progressive Era regulations that permitted expanded
international roles for American banks.
The Monroe Doctrine and the Congress of Panama
(1826) were precursors of Pan-Americanism, as were a
series of nineteenth-century meetings of Latin American
diplomats. The latter often incorporated an anti-US
organizing theme; at the Congress of Santiago (1856),
for example, Peru, Chile, and Ecuador signed a defense
pact anticipating possible US military action. In 1881
US secretary of state James G. Blaine (1830–1893)
began to characterize Pan-Americanism as the facilitation
of inter-American trade and cultural cooperation. He
proposed the First Conference of American States
(1889–1890), whose objectives integrated ambiguous
notions of peace and cooperation with more sharply
defined goals for the standardization and simplification
of inter-American trade terms. The latter would form the
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COPYRIGHT 2016 Charles Scribner?s Sons, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning WCN 02-200-210
backdrop for Pan-Americanism through World War II.
The dichotomy between lofty ideals of peace and a
workaday agenda for the elimination of trade and
financial barriers caught the eye of Latin American
nationalists, including José Martí (1853–1895), who
attacked Pan-Americanism as a smoke screen for US
imperial expansion.
The First Conference created the Commercial Bureau
of American States (later renamed the Pan American
Union). Latin American delegates made the Second
(1901–1902) and Third (1906) Conferences of American
States forums for criticizing US military intervention in
the region, but stopped short of any action against
Washington. Seeking distance from President William
Howard Taft’s (1857–1930) dollar diplomacy, the
administration of President Woodrow Wilson (1856–
1924) revived Blaine’s association of benign cultural ties
with commercial cooperation in a Pan-American ideal. In
the end, though, Pan-Americanism and the US-funded
Pan American Union, which oversaw the conferences of
American states and other inter-American meetings,
including the First Pan American Financial Conference,
continued to stress the normalization and stabilization of
economic relations in the hemisphere.
LEO STANTON ROWE
From 1920 to 1946, Leo Stanton Rowe (1871–1946), a
former US assistant secretary of the treasury, loomed large
in shaping Pan-Americanism as director of the Pan
American Union. His ideas dovetailed with the growing
tendency of the US government to trumpet Pan-American
cooperation while stressing a more subtle emphasis on
economic cooperation. Rowe found Latin America
backward and saw Pan-Americanism as a means to
modernize the region. Rowe’s vision for the Americas
was at once culturally sensitive, ethnocentric, a reflection
of US Progressive Era ideals, and a program of US
investment in Latin America toward what he believed
would be economic development throughout the hemi-
sphere. He had a missionary faith in Pan-Americanism
that highlighted a shared commitment to US democratic
values.
PEACE AND SECURITY
The Clark Memorandum (1928) and the Good
Neighbor Policy made priorities in US foreign relations
of the cooperation and peace components of Pan-
Americanism values. They helped prompt several key
Pan-American achievements in the 1930s, including the
nonintervention resolution passed at the Seventh
Conference of American States (1933) criticizing the
interference of one state in the internal affairs of a
second. Anticipating both World War II and the 1947
AMERICA IN THE WORLD, 1776 TO THE PRESENT

Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, a
bulwark of the US-led Cold War alliance in the
Americas, diplomats at the Eighth Conference of
American States (1938) declared continental solidarity
in the event of war. At the same time, the new emphasis
on mutual defence agreements between 1938 and 1945
under the umbrella of Pan-Americanism, along with the
1947–1948 founding of the OAS as a security-based
alliance, helped marginalize Pan-Americanism in US
foreign policy, which became more concerned with
global strategy, warfare, and the purported communist
menace.
POST-1950
After 1950, Pan-Americanism survived as a more cul-
turally and socially oriented remnant of Blaine’s original
ideal, at some distance from the commercial, financial,
and political priorities in US foreign relations. The
Inter-American Indian Institute was a pioneer in
advancing first peoples’ rights. The Pan American
Health Organization played a crucial role in the control
of malaria, Chagas, and other infectious diseases.
Perhaps the most important element of late twentieth-
century Pan-Americanism was the work of the Inter-
American Court of Human Rights and the Inter-
American Human Rights Commission. Each reflected
the emergence of human rights as a US foreign policy
priority after 1975, while remaining outside the
influence of US foreign policy makers and breaking
new ground in the investigation and prosecution of
human rights violators from periods of dictatorial rule.
These bodies helped make international pariahs of brutal
military officers and offered legal precedent for the
prosecution of Latin American human rights violators in
US federal courts.
SEE ALSO Mexico; Monroe Doctrine (1823); South America
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berger, Mark T. “‘Toward Our Common American Destiny?’
Hemispheric History and Pan American Politics in the
Twentieth Century.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American
Research 8, 1 (2002): 57–88.
Coates, Benjamin A. “The Pan-American Lobbyist: William
Eleroy Curtis and U.S. Empire, 1884–1899.” Diplomatic
History 38, 1 (2014): 22–48.
González, Robert Alexander. Designing Pan-America: U.S. Archi-
tectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere. Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2011.
Sheinin, David M. K., ed. Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in
Inter-American Affairs. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000.
Spellacy, Amy. “Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor:
Geography, Globalism, and Pan-Americanism during the
1940s.” American Studies 47, 2 (2006): 39–66.
AMERICA IN THE WORLD, 1776 TO THE PRESENT
COPYRIGHT 2016 Charles Scribner?s Sons, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning WCN 02-200-210
Paris Peace Conference (1919)
Weis, W. Michael. “The Twilight of Pan-Americanism: The
Alliance for Progress, Neo-colonialism, and Non-alignment in
Brazil, 1961–1964.” International History Review 23, 2 (2001):
322–344.
David M. K. Sheinin
Professor
Trent University
PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE (1919)
On January 18, 1919, representatives of more than
twenty-five nations convened in Paris for a peace
conference. Charged with bringing an end to World
War I, the conference represented the greatest diplomatic
assembly in world history. At the conference, national
delegates wrote the treaties that restored peace, most
notably the Treaty of Versailles, and for the first time,
recognized the entire planet as one interconnected space.
In doing so, the Paris Peace Conference set forth many of
the themes that would shape world history during the
twentieth century.
Although representatives from many countries
attended, the conference was dominated by the “Big
Four”: Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States.
Although all four wanted to create a durable peace while
also punishing Germany for starting the war, they did not
see eye to eye in all matters. The European powers, and
French prime minister Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
in particular, wanted to deal with Germany harshly.
France had suffered two German invasions in the last half-
century and wanted to make sure Germany could not
threaten France again. The Europeans blamed the war’s
tremendous devastation, both human and material, on the
Germans, arguing that Berlin was obligated to make good
the damage it had caused. The European powers also
wanted to fulfill diplomatic plans outlined in a series of
secret treaties made before and during the war, such as the
Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), which divided the Otto-
man Empire between Britain and France.
The Americans, in contrast, tended to take a more
idealistic view of the peace. In his “Fourteen Points”
speech, President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) em-
phasized peace and reconciliation rather than victory and
revenge, and he called for the global application of
democratic principles and popular sovereignty. European
leaders like David Lloyd George (1863–1945) of Britain,
Vittorio Orlando (1860–1952) of Italy, and especially
Clemenceau considered Wilson naive, and they fought for
concrete gains at Germany’s expense. Wilson’s message
was tremendously popular in Europe and elsewhere in the
world, however. Many considered it a clarion call for
peace and liberty.
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