Clark Memorandum
Clark Memorandum
Clark Memorandum (1930), a statement written by Undersecretary of State Joshua Reuben Clark during the administration of Herbert Hoover. The Clark Memorandum was a restatement of the Monroe Doctrine made necessary by rising Latin American criticism of U.S. interventionist policy, especially in Nicaragua, in the 1920s. Theodore Roosevelt had expanded the scope of the Monroe Doctrine in the Roosevelt Corollary (1904), justifying U.S. intervention in Latin America in order to protect the region from European interference. Latin American governments had condemned this interpretation as self-serving. The Clark Memorandum did not repudiate intervention but declared that the United States had the right to safeguard its national security under international law, and thus did not require the Roosevelt Corollary. Nonetheless, scholars contend that the memorandum helped to lay the groundwork for the non-interventionist declaration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
See alsoBig Stick Policy; Good Neighbor Policy; United States-Latin American Relations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander De Conde, Herbert Hoover's Latin American Policy (1951).
Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine, rev. ed. (1963).
Additional Bibliography
Gilderhus, Mark T. The Second Century: U.S.—Latin American Relations Since 1889. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000.
Schmitz, David F. Thank God They're on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
Lester D. Langley