Last Year's Lesson: Monroe Doctrine - Dec. 2, 1823

The Monroe Doctrine was articulated in an address to Congress on this day in 1823.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, history fans, if you want a double dose of history,
here's a rerun for today, brought to you by Tracy V. Wilson.
We hope it makes previous episodes for this date easier
to find in the feed. Welcome to this day in
History Class from how Stuff Works dot com and from
the desk of Stuff you Missed in History Class. It's
the show where we explore the past one day at

(00:20):
a time with a quick look at what happened today
in history. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. It's December two.
The Monroe Doctrine was issued on this day in eighteen
twenty three. That makes it sound like somebody published a
document that said the Monroe Doctrine up at the top,

(00:42):
and it was a published piece of writing. Really, it
was that President James Monroe gave his annual address to Congress,
and in that address he described some foreign policy decisions,
and that came to be called the Monroe Doctrine. These
policy decisions were also heavily influenced by Secretary of State

(01:04):
John Quincy Adams, who advocated not only for what these
policies said, but also for them to exist at all.
This whole thing grew out of Europe's colonization of the Americas,
which is where the United States came from. A lot
of these American colonies had then become independent from Europe,
so the United States was independent from Britain. A whole

(01:29):
collection of Latin American colonies had become independent from Spain,
and the years leading up to this, France had sold
a lot of its North American territory to the United
States and so on. At the time, the Russian Empire
still controlled what's now Alaska, and there were worries that
Russia would try to take over more territory outside what

(01:50):
it already controlled. So the United States was concerned concerned
about Russia, concerned about European nations recolonizing the America's. Britain
actually had a lot of the same worries as the
United States did about Russia, Spain, and France, and initially
Britain had proposed that Britain in the United States issue

(02:12):
a joint statement, and that's one of the ways that
John Quincy Adams played a part in all of this.
He thought that a joint statement would make the United
States look like a hanger on, with Great Britain being
the one doing all the work and making all the decisions,
and the United States just going along with whatever it was.
So in this address before Congress, James Monroe articulated three

(02:34):
main ideas. The first was that the world had two
spheres of influence. The America's were their own sphere outside
of the European sphere of influence. The America's were also
not up for further colonization by European powers, and the
United States would not interfere in the internal matters of

(02:54):
other nations, including maintaining neutrality when it came to wars
in Europe. The Monroe Doctrine did not, though, include anything
to deter the United States westward expansion through North America.
When Monroe made this speech, though, the United States didn't
really have the military might to enforce what the Monroe

(03:15):
Doctrine was saying, and while other nations didn't really try
to test it, the response from some of the world's
other leaders was somewhere between dismissive and annoyed because the
United States was basically saying you're not welcome here without
actually having the means to keep other people out. The

(03:35):
points articulated in this address became known as the Monroe
Doctrine by the eighteen fifties, and they continued to influence
American foreign policy for decades after that. President Theodore Roosevelt
further built on the Monroe Doctrine and his annual messages
to Congress in nineteen o four and nineteen o five,
saying that it wasn't just that the America's were not

(03:58):
open to colonization by Europe, that also the United States
had a responsibility to defend those nations of the Western Hemisphere.
Thanks to eve's Jeff Cote for her research work on
Today's show, and the Casey Pigram and Chandler Maze for
their audio work, you can subscribe to This Day in
History Class on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, the I Heart

(04:19):
Radio app, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Tune
in tomorrow for a trial that some places describe as
political but others describe as criminal. Depends on who you ask.