Logo: cartoon - emerging U.S.

Question SA-9. Here is the text reference (p. 159/5):

After Reconstruction and economic recovery the U.S. sought markets for its expanding industrial production and began to look southward. In 1889 the first Inter-American Conference was held in Washington, primarily responding to the U.S. agenda of stimulating trade and commerce. Fittingly, the permanent secretariat set up after the meeting was called "The Commercial Bureau of the American Republics".

Towards the end of the Century there was a strong current of thought in the U.S. that stressed social Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest, and Spencerian notions of superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and European races of the mid-latitudes. Building upon the earlier notions of the U.S. as a chosen people with a manifest destiny to become a great power, they were to provide the ideological basis for U.S. policies in Latin America and the Caribbean for an extended period. These ideas were coupled to the geopolitical theories of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan to justify the expansion of a superior nation into the weaker and inferior nations of Latin America (and especially the Caribbean Basin). To be taken seriously as a major actor on the world stage, the argument went, it was essential that the U.S. control its own "back yard" of the Caribbean, which was frequently called "the American (U.S.) Mediterranean". This in turn meant controlling the proposed inter-oceanic canal and several key islands of the Caribbean.