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History of the United States II / Unit 7   USH2 0928 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds

Monroe and Roosevelt

Captions available

The idea

The Monroe Doctrine of eighteen twenty-three warned European powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt's corollary kept that warning and added a claim of its own: in cases of chronic wrongdoing, the United States itself would intervene as an international police power. Digital History counts some twenty American interventions over the next quarter century, in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama.

In practice

One doctrine telling Europe to keep out, and its corollary sending American marines in.

Where people slip

The confusion to avoid is treating the corollary as a restatement of Monroe. The subject changed. Monroe restrained Europe; the corollary licensed the United States. Same hemisphere, opposite subject, and the interventions that followed are the corollary in practice. Unit ten's Clark Memorandum later repudiated it.

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