In 1823 in response to the long-anticipated successes of the Spanish-American independence movements, U.S. president James Monroe announced a hemispheric policy that later came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. Penned principally by secretary of state and future president John Quincy Adams, the doctrine forbade subsequent European colonization in the Western Hemisphere. “The American continents,” Monroe proclaimed, “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”

The doctrine further implied that the United States would oppose strategic or political alliances between European powers and Latin American nations: “We could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing [the newly independent nations], or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as a manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.” An expression of an emergent muscular foreign policy following the victorious War of 1812 with Great Britain, the doctrine applied to all European powers but was aimed specifically at Britain, which had designs on Cuba, and at France, one of Spain’s most important allies in the early 1820s.

The doctrine had important precedent in the thinking of U.S. policy makers. In 1808 Thomas Jefferson, pondering the probable emergence of new nations in the wake of Spain’s collapse, wrote that “We consider [the new Latin American nations’] interests and ours as the same, and that the object of both must be to exclude all European influence from this hemisphere.” The United States provided substantial material aid to the Latin American revolutionaries, despite a formal proclamation of neutrality in 1815.

The year before Monroe announced his hemispheric doctrine, the United States extended diplomatic recognition to the newly independent Latin American nationstates of La Plata (later Argentina), Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, and the not-yet-independent nation of Peru.

The first open defiance of the doctrine came in the early and mid 1860s. With the United States embroiled in its own Civil War, France under Napoleon III launched an invasion and occupation of Mexico. After the defeat of the Confederacy in April 1865, the administration of President Andrew Johnson demanded French withdrawal, and Napoleon soon complied. The Caribbean presented a more nettlesome situation, with every island a European colony (save Hispaniola, divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic). In the 1880s and 1890s, as U.S. aspirations for hemispheric domination grew, policymakers sought not only to keep European powers out but to establish a positive U.S. right to intervene if warranted. This came in 1904, with President Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

While the 1823 Monroe Doctrine did not explicitly proclaim U.S. domination of the hemisphere or include any U.S. right to intervene militarily in Latin American affairs, many Latin Americans denounced the doctrine as a fundamental violation of the principle of national sovereignty. A vast polemical literature from south of the U.S. border decries the Monroe Doctrine as a signal expression of Yankee imperialism.

Bibliography: Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005; Smith, Peter H. Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Mormonism

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was established in 1830, shortly after The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ was published. The church was “restored” by the prophet Joseph Smith. At 14, Joseph, born in Vermont but living in Palmyra, New York, claimed to have had a vision, in which God informed him of his mission to restore the true religion.

At 17, Joseph reported that an angel named Moroni directed him to a hidden manuscript preserved on golden plates and written in an unknown language. Smith’s translation narrates the story of how Middle Eastern exiles, associated with the so-called Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, came to America in 600 b.c.e., how the resurrected Jesus later had preached to these now native American tribes, and how one tribe of Christian converts, the Nephites, were reduced by wars to only Mormon and his son, Moroni.

Before their deaths, they buried this narration in 384 c.e., to be recovered in a “latter day” when their spiritual descendants would restore the true faith. Smith’s community, identifying itself as the restoration of this ancient faith (authentic Christianity), was forced by harassment to leave New York and move first to Kirtland, Ohio (1832), and then to Independence, Missouri (1838).

They eventually settled in Illinois on the Mississippi and built the city of Nauvoo, which would become in the early 1840s the largest city in the state. Smith, who began taking many other wives in addition to his first wife Emma Hale, advanced the general practice of polygamy as an ordinance of the church.

Despite his enormous popularity and prosperity, such that he was able to mount a viable candidacy for the U.S. presidency, Smith’s practice of polygamy led disillusioned ex-members to establish a newspaper designed to expose him as a fraud and suppress his political ambitions. Eventually, a riot led to the burning of the newspaper office, and Joseph and his brother, Hyrum, were arrested. While detained in a Carthage jail, a lynch mob murdered both men.

After Smith’s death, the church split. The largest group, following their new leader Brigham Young, migrated in 1847 to Salt Lake City, Utah. This group withdrew support for polygamy in 1890. The second group, now known as the Community of Christ (Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), followed Smith’s wife Emma back to its current home in Independence, Missouri. They rejected polygamy immediately and have attempted to maintain a theology closer to mainstream Christian thought.

The Book of Mormon, read by literary critics as an early American romance based on Bible stories, is for the Utah church merely the first of many revelations, which early on included Smith’s Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price. The doctrines of progressive revelation (in which leaders are divinely inspired with teachings for a developing community) and progressive spirituality (in which believers are destined to become divine beings) form the framework of Mormon theology.

However, the most contentious point with critics is the secrecy of Mormon Temple practices. Clearly, church membership has not been hindered by such clandestine behavior. In 1947, the community reached the million mark and today it has risen to over 12 million. By the beginning of the 21st century, this aggressive missionary church could boast 200 million members worldwide.

Bibliography:

Bushman, R. L. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005;
Ostling, R. N. Mormon America: The Power and the Promise. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000;
Southerton, S. G. Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2004;
Stark, R. The Rise of Mormonism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

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