Clark Memorandum

The Clark Memorandum, written in 1928 by Calvin Coolidge’s undersecretary of state J. Reuben Clark, stated that the United States has no right to use military force to intervene in Latin American nations. This memorandum was officially released in 1930 by the Herbert Hoover administration.

It was not a outright repudiation of the Roosevelt Corollary but was rather Clark stating that any intervention by the U.S. was not sanctioned by the Monroe Doctrine but rather was the right of America as a civilized nation. This separated the Roosevelt Corollary from the Monroe Doctrine to ensure that the doctrine only applied to European Countries. Its primary point was that the Monroe Doctrine was based on conflicts of interest between the United States and European nations, rather than between the United States and Latin American nations.