ABSTRACT
The outpouring of friendship from the hemisphere's southernmost nation that for a century had cast itself as Washington's rival for leadership in the hemisphere was a measure of the change in the nature of inter-American relations that occurred even before Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term had ended. The hemispheric relationship was turning upside down. During his four terms in office—including the darkest moments of the war—Roosevelt gave the American republics a status both inside and outside the United States that they never enjoyed before. For Roosevelt the Good Neighbor policy was more than a political device, it was a personal mission. Good-neighborliness to him was a practical application of the Golden Rule. Roosevelt's personal magnetism is what projected the Good Neighbor policy beyond the confines of government offices and the high-level rhetoric of inter-American conferences to become practically a mass movement of continental dimensions.
