ROOSEVELT COROLLARY

This was Theodore Roosevelt's "amendment" to the Monroe Doctrine. In 1904, the government of the Dominican Republic was bankrupt, and Roosevelt feared that foreign nations, especially Germany, might intervene forcibly to collect their debts. To keep other powers out and ensure financial solvency, Roosevelt issued his corollary: "Chronic wrongdoing ... may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation," he announced in his annual message to Congress in December 1904, "and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power." Roosevelt tied his policy to the Monroe Doctrine to win public acceptance.

The Dominicans then "invited" American help. The United States took over customs collections and used the money to pay Santo Domingo's foreign debts. Roosevelt and later presidents cited the corollary to justify intervention in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Haiti. In 1934, however, Franklin D. Roosevelt renounced interventionism and established his Good Neighbor policy, prompting one commentator to say, "A Roosevelt gave and a Roosevelt hath taken away."

See also Dollar Diplomacy; Latin America-U.S. Relations; Monroe Doctrine.