Four President's effects on American Isolationism during the 20th Century.
On September 6, 1904 Teddy Roosevelt made the most future altering decision of the twentieth century. It was on this day that America, a long time domestic animal, went into the ocean and discovered salt. Teddy, a man who had publicly supported such internationalist concepts as the Panama Canal and sending the United States Navy to protect Venezuela in an 1895 conflict with Germany, renounced a long respected doctrine set out by James Monroe in 1823. The doctrine declared that the United States would stay out of European affairs and also warned the Europeans not tomeddle? in the affairs of America. Monroe made it very clear that any European interference with the western hemisphere wouldimpinge upon the rights and interests of this nation.? However, Teddy Roosevelt strongly disagreed.If any nation in the western hemisphere acts wrongly and in a fashion that might incite foreign intervention in its affairs, the United States will act to prevent such an occurrence,? he said. With those words a century of American internationalism was born; a century whose people, politics, and overall advancement was shaped by America's entanglements with the rest of the world. .
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When Franklin Roosevelt went into office, in 1933, he was determined to stay out of world affairs. In fact in his inaugural address he told the nation that he would develop agood neighbor? policy. The phrasegood neighbor? meant in practice that the United States would no longer intervene in Latin American conflicts. President Roosevelt's policies seemed at first to be almost isolationist, in spite of his background. He did agree to go ahead with U.S. participation in the World Economic Conference, scheduled to take place in London in the summer of 1933. President Hoover had promised U.S. attendance. However, Roosevelt did not have much faith in the ability of the conference to agree on measures to stabilize the value of the dollar.