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Updated: May 11, 2025
If Pan-Americanism had ever involved the idea of political cooperation among the nations of the New World, it broke down just when it might have served the greatest of purposes. Even the "A B C" combination itself had apparently been shattered. A century and more had now passed since the Spanish and Portuguese peoples of the New World had achieved their independence.
The Mexican situation put the principles of the new Pan-Americanism to a severe test. On February 18, 1913, Francisco Madero was seized and imprisoned as the result of a conspiracy formed by one of his generals, Victoriano Huerta, who forthwith proclaimed himself dictator. Four days later Madero was murdered while in the custody of Huerta's troops.
This is Pan-Americanism. It has none of the spirit of empire in it. It is the embodiment, the effectual embodiment, of the spirit of law and independence and liberty and mutual service.
The policy here outlined, and elaborated a few months later in an address before the Southern Commercial Congress at Mobile, Alabama, has been termed the New Pan-Americanism. The Pan-American ideal is an old one, dating back in fact to the Panama Congress of 1826.
The movement of Pan-Americanism has missed achieving the full hopes of its supporters owing not so much to a difference of fundamental ideas and interests as to suspicion and national pride. The chief powers of southern South America Argentina, Brazil, and Chili had by the end of the nineteenth century in large measure successfully worked out their own problems.
What form this national development would take was, however, still uncertain, and some great event was obviously required to fix its character. Blaine's Pan-Americanism had proved insufficient and, though the baiting of Great Britain was welcome to a vociferous minority, the forces making for peace were stronger than those in favor of war.
The Caribbean is but a portion of the whole international problem of the Americas, and the methods used by the United States in solving its problems seemed likely to postpone that sympathetic union of the whole to which it has been looking forward for a century. Yet this country has not been unappreciative of the larger aspects of Pan-Americanism.
With this attitude of the public mind, it is not strange that the Hispanic republics at large should have been inclined to look with scant favor upon proposals made by the United States, in 1916, to render the spirit of Pan-Americanism more precise in its operation.
In American affairs he opposed not only the annexation of Hawaii but also the development of the spirit of Pan-Americanism. He was, however, no more disposed than was Blaine to permit infractions of that negative side of the Monroe Doctrine which forbade European interference in America.
The only possible foundation of Pan-Americanism is an ideal democratic purpose which, when translated into terms of international relations, demands, in the first place, the establishment of a pacific system of public law in the two Americas, and in the second place, an alliance with the pacific European Powers, just in so far as a similar system has become in that continent one of the possibilities of practical politics.
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