As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week Jonathan remembers how another president responded to a crisis in Venezuela more than a century ago. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors
The Rough Rider Way
The Venezuelan leader’s “outrageous treatment of foreigners who had made investments in Venezuela and his refusal to pay their just claims had led the governments to institute a blockade of Venezuelan ports.” Easy as it is to imagine a U.S. president saying those words, the surprise is which one actually said them: not Donald Trump in 2026, but Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago.
With Trump’s intervention in Venezuela being dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine”—Donroe instead of Monroe, get it?—it’s worth recalling a forgotten crisis that engulfed Venezuela 123 years ago this winter and that ultimately inspired Roosevelt to put his own spin on the famous Monroe Doctrine with the so-called Roosevelt Corollary.
Between December 1902 and February 1903, it was not American ships blockading Venezuela but German and British ones that their governments had sent to collect debts that the South American country owed. With the self-enriching Venezuelan dictator Cipriano Castro (no relation; it’s just a common name) refusing to meet conditions for payment, Americans worried that the British and especially the upstart Germans would seek compensation through alternative means: seizing territory. If allowed to carve up Venezuela, the European powers would make a mockery of the Monroe Doctrine.
