What Was the Initial Reaction to the Monroe Doctrine?

The vast majority of U.S. newspapers recorded positive responses to Monroe’s address—and his doctrine, in particular—according to a 1955 article in the journal The Americas. “The president’s words, noted the Portland Eastern Argus, had ‘been received throughout the country with a warm and universal burst of applause,’” the article’s author, Stanley L. Falk, wrote.

Baltimore’s Federal Gazette speculated both houses of Congress would express “unanimous” gratitude. (Indeed, according to The American Presidency Project, Congress viewed the address positively.) Trenton, New Jersey’s True American, meanwhile, reported that Monroe’s message to the Old World powers, including Spain, Portugal and Greece, “will especially meet a hearty assent from every true Patriot and friend of Liberty.”

However, according to Falk, there were some dissenters, including the New York Albion, which called the idea of the U.S. “regulating matters in the South American States” preposterous.

Newly independent nations in the Western Hemisphere recognized that the U.S. lacked naval power to enforce Monroe’s declaration. Yet the reaction was still positive, if not seen as largely symbolic. “Monroe’s statement was highly praised by [Simón] Bolívar and other Latin American liberators and gave some, not yet victorious, a long-awaited boost,” wrote Thomas E. McNamara, a career diplomat and former Colombian ambassador, in the online journal American Diplomacy.

In an 1824 speech, Argentine general and politician Juan Gregorio de las Heras acknowledged the obligation his country felt toward the U.S. for recognizing its independence. “At the same time,” he said, the U.S. “has made an appeal to our national honor by supposing us capable of struggling singlehanded with the power of Spain” even as the Monroe Doctrine’s nonintervention principles also prevented Spain from seeking a European ally.

This sentiment was briefly shared throughout much of Latin America, according to former history professor Roy Clark Hanaway’s 1926 article in the journal Social Science. Resentment against the U.S. began taking root after the doctrine was violated when Britain helped broker the 1828 treaty that established the Republic of Uruguay and again when Britain reclaimed control of the Falkland Islands in 1833.

Criticism grew louder from the mid-19th century on as the U.S. involved itself in various Latin American disputes. This was especially true after the Spanish-American War in 1898 and during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency when, Hanaway wrote, “Uncalled for interference in [Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador] caused the Latin Americans to look with suspicion upon the Monroe Doctrine.”

European reactions ranged from quiet approval to outrage.

The British wanted to protect trade opportunities by keeping rival empires out of Latin America, leading British and American interests to be “pretty publicly aligned,” according to Allan Stam, a political scientist and professor of public policy and politics at the University of Virginia. Britain’s acceptance of the Monroe Doctrine was not a shock to those who knew British Foreign Minister George Canning had told France his country was opposed to Spain recolonizing Latin America. Furthermore, Canning had approached the U.S. about issuing a joint nonintervention declaration months before Monroe’s address.

Britain went so far as to serve as the de facto enforcer of the doctrine. So, Stam adds, what looked like U.S. resolve was, in practice, British naval power.

Most other European leaders balked at “what they saw as Monroe’s audacity,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations. “Austria dismissed his message as ‘an indecent declaration.’ Russia said the U.S. position ‘merits only the most profound contempt.’”

However, Monroe’s words, co-authored by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, ultimately held up. Europe was primarily focused on a series of revolutions at home and cleaning up the wreckage of the Napoleonic Wars. In light of that, Monroe’s address went unchallenged.