The Good Neighbor Fleet: Selections from the Gift of Thomas C. Ragan

June 1–December 15, 2012
The Wolfsonian–FIU @ 1001 Washington Avenue

During his March 1933 inaugural speech, Franklin D. Roosevelt promised Americans a New Deal, while also pledging to initiate a Good Neighbor Policy with Latin America. Departing from the interventionist “gunboat diplomacy” of his distant cousin, the former President Theodore Roosevelt, FDR encouraged the expansion of trade and tourism as the key to U.S. relations with its neighbors to the South.

Founded by Albert V. Moore and Emmet J. McCormack in New York in 1913, the Moore-McCormack Company benefitted from FDR’s advocacy for American commercial shipping and from government subsidies for steamship lines servicing Latin-American destinations. In the late 1930s, the company marketed three of its ships—the SS Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay—as the Good Neighbor Fleet, a conscious echo of the president’s inaugural pledge. Organized by The Wolfsonian Library, this installation presented menus, pamphlets, photographic prints, deck plans, brochures, postcards, and more, to shed light on the steamships’ trajectory from luxury liners, to their use by the military during the Second World War, and back to commercial passenger and cargo service with a slew of new post-war tourism competitors.