Radical Journalists, Generalist, Intellectuals, and U.S. - Latin American Relations

This is a prosopography of five non-mainstream intellectuals who attempted to re-shape the way Latin America was perceived by the United States during the first six decades of the 20th century. The works of the alternative intellectuals are an important component of the literature, but much of their work has been relegated to obscurity because they were educated generalists who crossed disciplinary boundaries and disciplines. They anticipated the scholarship of the 1960s-70s in which questions arose about Latin American dependency and revolutionary nationalism, and wrote about the more subtle forms of imperialism – indirect control through economic means – long before most American scholars of Latin America followed suit. Individuals examined are Herschel Brickell, Samuel Guy Inman, Carleton Beals, Waldo Frank, and Frank Tannenbaum.