A Matter of Faith: North America's Religion and South America's Independence

Abstract

For the last several decades, scholars concerned with America's foreign relations have paid increasing attention to public opinion, to national images, to the ties between domestic politics and international events. And because contemporary American diplomacy seems entangled in webs of mass behavior, the same wisdom has been applied to earlier times to investigate the way foreign policy has sometimes been an extension of passions and forces from the country's street corners, kitchen tables, and church pews. In this regard, great attention has lately been paid to American stereotypes of the Orient, as sages attempt to find in age-old popular attitudes the reasons for enduring problems of statecraft. Inasmuch as public interest shifts from one area of crisis to the next with each morning's headlines, it should be useful to examine, for areas other than the Far East, how the methods and goals of American diplomacy have been influenced or shaped, sometimes thwarted or transformed, by a kind of people's diplomacy growing out of the limited knowledge and unrestrained emotions of the man in the street.