Santo Domingo

   The eastern two-thirds of a Caribbean island shared with Haiti and a target for European penetration dating to the arrival of Christopher Columbus under a Spanish flag in 1492. Santo Domingo became the first permanent European settlement in Western Hemisphere and the base for the Spanish conquest of the Americas, but in 1697 Spain nevertheless recognized French dominion over Haiti. After gaining independence from France in 1804, Haiti invaded Santo Domingo and ruled it until 1844. Between 1861 and 1863, Santo Domingo returned to Spanish rule but threw it off and gained full independence in 1865. That year also marked the end of the American Civil War and the beginning of the increasing interest of the United States in the Caribbean.

   The Grant administration sought to annex Santo Domingo to secure a naval base at Samaná Bay, but the Senate rejected the annexation treaty. When in 1904 Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic, fell into bankruptcy and civil war, fear of European intervention moved President Theodore Roosevelt to declare the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Annexation, however, was out of the question. “I have about the same desire to annex it,” Roosevelt note, “as a gorged boa constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to.” Still, in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson sent the United States Marines to the Dominican Republic, and United States Marines occupied and administered it directly until 1924.

   See also <>; <>.

   FURTHER READING:

    Cooper, John Milton, Jr. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt . Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1983;

    McDougall, Walter A. Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

   CARL CAVANAGH HODGE