The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean,
1898-1934 offers a sweeping panorama of America's tropical empire in
the age spanned by the two Roosevelts and a detailed narrative of U.S.
military intervention in the Caribbean and Mexico. In this new edition,
Professor Langley provides an updated introduction, placing the
scholarship in current historical context.
From the perspective of the Americans involved, the empire carved out by
the banana warriors was a domain of bickering Latin American
politicians, warring tropical countries, and lawless societies that the
American military had been dispatched to police and tutor. Beginning
with the Cuban experience, Langley examines the motives and consequences
of two military occupations and the impact of those interventions on a
professedly antimilitaristic American government and on its colonial
agents in the Caribbean, the American military. The result of the Cuban
experience, Langley argues, was reinforcement of the view that the
American people did not readily accept prolonged military occupation of
Caribbean countries.
In Nicaragua and Mexico, from 1909 to 1915, where economic and
diplomatic pressures failed to bring the results desired in Washington,
the American military became the political arbiters; in Hispaniola,
bluejackets and marines took on the task of civilizing the tropics. In
the late 1920s, with an imperial force largely of marines, the American
military waged its last banana war in Nicaragua against a guerrilla
leader named Augusto C. Sandino.
Langley not only narrates the history of America's tropical empire, but
fleshes out the personalities of this imperial era, including Leonard
Wood and Fred Funston, U.S. Army, who left their mark on Cuba and Vera
Cruz; William F. Fullam and William Banks Caperton, U.S. Navy, who
carried out their missions imbued with old-school beliefs about their
role as policemen in disorderly places; Smedley Butler and L.W.T.
Waller, Sr., U.S.M.C., who left the most lasting imprint of A
