From the perspective of Venezuela, which had been using the figure of Bolívar since the 1870s and 1880s as a state icon, the ceremony organized to celebrate the unveiling could not have been a bigger success. US American Sally Farnham, who won the commission from the Venezuelan government in 1901, sculpted the statue over a period of 20 years. It was the third equestrian statue of Bolívar to be given to the city by Venezuela and to sit in a northwestern section of Central Park near 83rd Street known then as Bolívar Hill, the first two having met with the displeasure of the Central Park Commission. But if this, the third statue, was grander than the first two, the ceremony that was the unveiling was certainly worthy of that fact, used as it was as the occasion for the first speech of the recently inaugurated US President Warren G. Harding. In that speech Harding celebrated the figures of Bolívar and Washington in the context of his call for a renewed defense of the Monroe Doctrine.1 For a brand-new administration in search of an identity for its new super-power status in the aftermath of the Great War, promoting the Doctrine without mention of the Roosevelt Corollary, that is, as if the only document that was in effect and that existed were Monroe’s 1823 Address, was tantamount to presenting a new national project to the US public. The American public was being redirected “south,” far away from Europe, in search of commerce and peace.
“Ready to Fight For Monroe Doctrine, Plans to Invite World Disarmament Says Harding at Bolívar Unveiling,” reads the New York Times headline of April 21, 1921.2 Harding used the event as an opportunity to whitewash the corollary established by Roosevelt and Taft, presenting the United States as a protector of Latin America from a bellicose Europe, prepared to sacrifice itself for that cause, but also as an “equal” partner in commerce at a time when US Corporations like United Fruit and the US State Department and military were mired in Honduran and Nicaraguan politics, never mind the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), with the corollary authorizing these acts. To that end, he portrayed Bolívar and Washington, the two whose busts stood opposite each other in the Gallery of the Patriots at the Pan American Union, as the mirror image of each other, using the pair to produce a vision of a hemisphere in which north and south shared the same political, social, and economic agenda.
Latin America was not the virgin, primitive territory to be “uplifted” or peoples who were racially inferior or backward, truer images of US views on the vast and diverse region at the time whose cultural differences Rowe emphasizes in his early scholarship and that would show up in works of Pan Americanists, but so many individual nations with economic and cultural interests similar to those of the United States. US corporations had been investing heavily in Latin America since the 1880s, particularly in commodities like copper and silver and such infrastructure items as roads and railroads, all this mostly in export zones in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, Peru, and Chile. As business historian Thomas F. O’Brien tells us, in Central America the discipline of US corporate culture saw a semi-proletarianization of peasants, with the seeds created for labor movements which would eventually involve the fruit companies, with their multiple operations and close alliances with local governments. In Nicaragua, revolutionary leader Augusto César Sandino, politicized by his own experience of working for US mining corporations in Mexico and Nicaragua, would recruit from a mix of new Nicaraguan wage earners eager to join his rebellion (1927–1933).3
Harding’s words do, though, reflect in part an economic and political reality that placed “north” and “south” on the same playing field. US manufacturers were establishing branch factories in the so-called ABC countries—a term coined in 1914 in the moment Argentina, Brazil, and Chile (ABC) conducted a mediation of the Mexico-US conflict at Niagara Falls, Canada—in an effort to respond more successfully to consumer markets there and particularly in Argentina, as Dudley Phelps writes in his 1936 Migration of Industry to South America.4 Others who delivered speeches at the unveiling included the New York City (NYC) mayor, the New York governor, and the Venezuelan foreign minister, who later that same day echoed Harding’s Central Park address at a dinner at the Hotel Biltmore. Curiously, though, it was a Mexican-American intellectual Guillermo A. Sherwell who in 1921 published his Simón Bolívar (The Liberator): Patriot, Warrior, Statesman, Father of Five Nations; A Sketch of his Life and his Work, creating a version of Bolívar that reflected US geo-political interests.5
Sherwell had participated in the early years of the Mexican Revolution, a member of the intellectual literary elite. Then, in 1915, escaping a death sentence handed to him by the revolutionary leader Venustiano Carranza, he fled to the United States. His Mexican mother and US American father had registered him at a US consulate when he was born. Settling first in NYC, Sherwell in just three years gained entry to State Department circles as an advisor of sorts for Latin American affairs, with duties that included writing for the Pan American Union bulletin.6 He also found his way into the world of the US academy, securing a position as professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. One article from a 1920 Pan American Union bulletin stands out, a piece in which Sherwell exhorts US businessmen to make a concerted effort to understand and accept Latin American customs so as to increase the likelihood that they would continue to secure contracts for their products. For with German, French, and British businesses returning to Latin American markets they had dominated before the War, Sherwell warned US Americans not to be complacent, reminding them that their superior position in the region was due not to US business talent and savvy but to the momentary absence of European competitors.7
In Sherwell’s book on Bolívar, published shortly after the dedication of Sally Farnham’s bronze creation as a companion piece, Sherwell introduces the US American public to Bolívar, explaining why he should be understood as a world leader comparable in importance to Washington, Lincoln, and Napoleon. He also introduces the public to Latin American culture and history, providing information on the region’s racial make-up using the categories of creole and mestizo while implicitly constructing US subjectivity as white. The narrative he fashions is hemispheric. To perform Bolívar in this manner, he uses the dyad of Bolívar and San Martín, placing San Martín as second to Bolívar while depicting Bolívar as the one and only father of Latin American independence. Guayaquil, so important in the Argentine tradition, was a case in point. Sherwell characterizes the race to Guayaquil in 1822 as one bearing on the ideological future of the region. The possibility that the monarchist San Martín would unite Peru and Guayaquil made Bolívar “hasten there to avoid any such compromise.”8 Here perhaps was the most significant point of difference on which Sherwell capitalized to align Bolívar with US interests. Bolívar was a republican through and through, though he could be dictatorial; San Martín was a monarchist, just as were many of the Argentine figures of independence, Sherwell tells his readers.9 Sherwell , who does not qualify the word by stating that San Martín was a constitutional monarchist, was playing to a US public uninterested in distinctions. Finally, in what is a culmination of sorts in the argument, he adds that Argentina sent a group of representatives to Potosí, Bolivia, in 1825 to express gratitude to Bolívar for liberating Latin America. By sending these envoys, Argentines in effect were acknowledging that Bolívar was the more important of the two figures.10
No less significant is the manner in which Sherwell portrays Bolívar as a leader. Sherwell presents Bolívar as a founder of civil society, able to recognize and celebrate the generals under him, to preside over political, economic, and educational affairs when acting as protector of Peru in 1825 and 1826 (not as dictator, the status accorded him by the Peruvian legislature, but protector, the status bestowed on San Martín) and able to consider the possibility of liberating Cuba and Puerto Rico. An essentially democratic figure, Bolívar is reluctant, we are told repeatedly, to hold power, doing so only after ceding his authority to bodies, juntas, and councils greater than he, and who as a result of his willingness to submit to such authorities can be seen as being worthy of the power that time and again is invested in him. As for the Ocaña Convention, Bolívar is characterized as an innocent who was concerned only with defending the integrity of Colombia: that his deputies left the congress to prevent a quorum that would have allowed the majority Santander delegates to win the day, and that the failure of the congress led to the conditions that saw Bolívar declare a provisional dictatorship go unmentioned. To the contrary, Sherwell presents Bolívar as generous, having no choice but to declare a provisional dictatorship in the absence of a constitution, the Cúcuta Constitution having been abrogated. And the individuals he appointed as ministers for his dictatorship? Bolívar is extolled for his wisdom, including the appointments from New Granada and for appointing Santander ambassador to Washington, D.C., generous acts for which—if one could believe this—he was repaid with the assassination attempt on his life, led—Sherwell was certain of this—by Santander.11 Finally, in an attempt to ground the comparison of Washington to Bolívar in US American history, Sherwell highlights Lafayette’s conveying of a Washington miniature to Bolívar and creates a timeline in which to understand the “northern” liberation process as one that was continuous with the “southern.”12 Bolívar is presented not only as having won over the two parts of South America, but also as having brought to a conclusion a process of liberation begun in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775.13 At the same time, as he states at the end of his biography, San Martín had to be respected as a figure. In contrast to San Martín, who represented the old European model of constitutional monarchy, Bolívar signified a modernity that could link a region to the United States. Finally, he was rejected at the end of his life, but he was generous like Lincoln, forgiving his detractors.
Sherwell was responding to a geo-political situation in the hemisphere in which two distinct spheres of real and perceived influence had long been in the making: that of the United States and that of Argentina. Although Argentina had been an important supplier to the United States during World War I and never given up its membership in the Pan American Union when it flirted with membership in the League of Nations, the United States could hardly count on the southern nation to support its hemispheric goals. Tensions, in fact, in US-Argentina relations dated back to the first conference of American States, as Harold F. Peterson details in his exhaustive diplomatic history of the two nations.14 They could also be seen more recently in President Yrigoyen’s stance of neutrality in the Great War as well as in commentary by certain Argentine intellectuals, most notably Manuel Ugarte, who had long been critiquing the United States for its imperial actions in Latin America.
Publishing The Destiny of Latin America in 1911, just after the announcement of the secretariat’s new identity at the Fourth International Conference of American States in Buenos Aires in 1910, Ugarte explicitly questions the right of the United States to lead the hemisphere. In addition to republishing excerpts from US bulletins showing US trade with Latin America—the trade, he underlines, between Europe and Latin America being much more significant—he argues that the heritage of Argentina and other Latin American republics was Spanish, and furthermore, that the foundation for them had been laid long ago, in the north by Bolívar and in the south by San Martín, with the two united in their goals.15 Ugarte was playing the role of hemispheric protector, a role that some actors in Latin American nations were assigning Argentina, among them particularly those living the effects of dollar diplomacy in the Caribbean and Central America, such as the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, for whom the southern nation represented nothing less than an ideological bulwark against US interests and power.
The 1920s would see US capitalism go into full gear. Corporations, backed by the US military, were already dominant in the production, distribution, and sale of fruit, but new corporations that would control other areas were emerging such that by decade’s end the United States, having made inroads throughout Latin America, would far exceed all European nations in market share except Great Britain. Indeed, with Harding and then Coolidge in the presidency and with Hoover as the secretary of commerce for both of their administrations, business and corporations could not have been more supported than they were. In fact, Hoover, upon making his famous trip to Latin America as president elect the fall of 1928, was quoted by a New York Times reporter as saying that he felt completely at home in the region precisely because he had spent so much of his time in his cabinet minister role promoting US business there. As cars, then planes caught the imagination of Pan American enthusiasts and ideologues, Hoover during these years celebrated the building of so-called automobile roads that could be traveled on by US-made vehicles. Sales in cement mixers for road construction in Latin America, particularly in regions in the US military and immediate industrial orbit such as Panama and Mexico, skyrocketed. Among other initiatives, Hoover helped create copyright law and standardize criteria for determining product weights, all in the belief that Latin American countries held the promise of becoming the United States’ most important trading partners. As for the vast think tank that was Pan America, the political theorizing that fueled it kept apace, with some among the faithful speculating in scholarly articles that the building of roads would be not just the answer to the matter of the region’s development but the solution to political instability as well,16 a vision ironized brilliantly by the Argentine novelist César Aira in his novel about the Panama port city of Colón in the 1920s, Varamo.17
In a Panama with massive unemployment and severe poverty, the canal project having come to any end in 1914, Aira has the state use its new roads and the automobiles that have come with them to stage road races in which the objective is to travel at a constant speed, with those who go too fast, accelerating in a non-constant manner, revealing themselves to be its enemies, the so-called anarchists behind the social unrest and attempts at unionization.
In the Panama of that decade, Bolívar’s new hemispheric currency was not lost on the country’s elites who, intrigued no doubt, by the Venezuela-sponsored 1921 dedication in NYC, convened in 1926 in Panama City a Bolivarian Conference with the support of the Pan American Union. The purpose was twofold: to dedicate a statue of the Liberator at the site of his legendary, though unsuccessful, Panama Congress of 1826, Panama City, and also to announce a project for a new university to be called the Universidad Panamericana, a project that in the end never got any further than the planning stages. If this centenary celebration was supposed to bring prestige to the 23-year-old state and to stand as a statement of Panama’s place of centrality in the new Pan American order, it did not come off as its organizers had hoped. Tensions between “north” and “south” quickly made themselves manifest.
The United States may have yielded on the matter of its secretary of state being permanent chair of the Pan American Union’s governing board at the meeting of American States in 1923, but it had still done nothing to shed its imperial garb, occupying, as it continued to, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and intervening with its marines in Honduras and Nicaragua. As reported by Edward E. Curtis, a journalist for The Nation, the speeches at the meeting were acerbic and accusatory, with the Honduran delegate, Dr. Alfredo Trejo Castillo, warning of the “colossus of the north” and the 18 Latin American delegates voicing their agreement, obliging “him to rise and bow three times.” That was not all. The greatest desire of the American States, according to Trejo Castillo, was that Puerto Rico be granted independence, a statement that was quickly transmitted to the president of the Independentist Party in Puerto Rico, who cabled to the congress to urge it to support the resolution, but which did not, thereby “shelving the whole business as containing too much dynamite.” When it was the turn of the delegate from Nicaragua, Dr. Daniel Gutiérrez Navas, he proposed that the headquarters of the Pan American Union be transferred from Washington to Panama. “At once the fat was in the fire,” wrote Curtis. “Everyone realized that Dr. Navas was expressing a feeling widespread throughout Latin America that the Pan American Union as at present located is too much under the thumb of the State Department.” The only individual, we are told, who defended the United States, insisting that the United States did not have any power designs on his nation, was the president of Panama, Rodolfo Chiari, who had a loan for his country pending at the National City Bank, the clearest sign, as Curtis wanted his readers to see, of the enmeshment of the Latin American republics with Wall Street in the era of dollar diplomacy.18
To read versions of the event other than the one by The Nation is not only to get a different view of what occurred, but also to see the increasing power of a tradition in formation. Carlos Castañeda, a US-based historian who wrote about the centenary ahead of its celebration, obviously could not report on the event itself, although had he penned his article after it occurred, he may have foregone mention of the criticisms of the United States expressed there, as others did. For Castañeda, here was the latest in a distinguished series of meetings beginning with the Panama Congress of 1826 and including thereafter congresses and conferences that took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most importantly the 1889 Pan American Conference in Washington, D.C., as well as, of course, the conferences of American States that followed.19
Sherwell’s book was republished at distinct moments in history. The first, as we saw, was just months after the Venezuelan government officially donated the statue of Bolívar to the city of New York, at the Byron S. Adams Press in D.C. The second was on the occasion of the December 17, 1930, centenary celebration of Bolívar’s death, observed with great fanfare in both Washington, D.C. and New York City as part of Hoover’s Good Neighbor initiative.20
Front and center at this moment was the Pan American Union and the multiple Pan American societies. In Washington, D.C., at the Pan American Union Building, Secretary of State Stimson, speaking in his capacity as governor general of the Union and on behalf of Herbert Hoover, declared that Bolívar was the true father of Pan Americanism. In New York City the main ceremony occurred at Bolívar Hill and included diplomats from throughout Latin America, with the exception of Argentina. There were also many VIPs in attendance, including Juan Trippe, founder and president of Pan American Airways. Not missing an opportunity for publicity for his brand-new company, Trippe, as reported by the New York Times, had a wreath sent by plane to Santa Marta, Colombia, the location of the historic house where Bolívar spent his final days and where heads of state from the six Bolivarian nations (Panama now presenting itself as part of that distinguished club of nations, the country’s story of independence neatly displaced back to 1821 as if to whitewash US involvement in the 1902 revolution) were gathered to celebrate the father of their nations and to make a commitment to unity. The celebration of the centenary of Bolívar’s death was an opportunity for Colombia’s Liberal Party, which had just defeated the Conservative Party, to regale.21 For its part, the Pan American Society, which organized the Central Park ceremony, afterwards held a dinner at The Bolívar, a hotel erected just four years earlier in 1926 on Central Park West and 83rd Street, across from Bolívar Hill, and, since 1984, a residential co-op.22 Also worthy of note was the special mass, arranged by the Colombian consulate, celebrated in Bolívar’s honor at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.23
The third time Sherwell’s book came out was in 1951, by commission of the Bolivarian Society of Venezuela in Caracas,24 the year the Venezuelan state contributed $218,400 to the city of New York for the Bolívar statue to be moved from the western interior promenade of Central Park at 83rd Street, where it had stood for 30 years, to its present location at the top of 6th Avenue or Avenue of the Americas,25 as it has alternatively been called since 1945 when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, seeking to transform New York City into a center for Pan Americanism while revitalizing an avenue that under his tenure had been a commercial failure, created the new identity for the thoroughfare. The title page of the third edition reads, “Commemorative edition of the moving of the statue.” The book represented when it appeared in 1921 a new beginning, the first book-length rendering of Bolívar in the United States since Ducoudray-Holstein’s scathing 1829 critique.26 Pan Americanism was not only represented, then, by US figures like Leo Rowe, director general of the Pan American Union from 1920 to 1946, but also by Latin American figures like Guillermo A. Sherwell, eager to participate in expanding the Pan American imagination using Venezuelan sources.
Sherwell’s 1921 book prepared the way for a series of publications, almost all produced in the context of the centenary celebration of Bolívar’s death and Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. In addition to the republication of Sherwell’s own work, there was T. R. (Thomas Russell) Ibarra’s 1929 Bolívar, The Passionate Warrior;27 Hildegarde Angell’s 1930 Simón Bolívar, South American Liberator;28 Senator Hiram Bingham’s address before the US Congress on Bolívar;29 Percy Alvin Martin’s 1930 Stanford lecture, Simón Bolívar, The Liberator, where Martin celebrates Bolívar as the first Pan Americanist, a great military leader, and as the founder and president of the admirable Gran Colombia, his Federation of the Andes said to be a mistake;30 the December issue of the Pan American Union bulletin dedicated exclusively to Bolívar;31 and a few years later Phyllis Marshall’s and John Crane’s 1933 children’s novel The Dauntless Liberator.32 Soon thereafter there was also Víctor Andrés Belaúnde’s 1938 Bolívar and the Political Thought of the Spanish American Revolution;33 Thomas Rourke’s 1939 Man of Glory: Simón Bolívar;34 subsequent to World War II, Gerard Masur’s 1948 Simón Bolívar;35 and Waldo Frank’s 1951 Birth of a World: Bolívar in Terms of His Peoples.36
Expanding the Audience
How foreign texts become part of a national market is complex. By 1929 a French text published the previous year was already circulating in the United States in translation. The author was Michel Vaucaire, who in anticipation of the French-American Institute’s plans to receive a statue of Bolívar from Venezuela as part of the 1930 centenary celebration and pay tribute to the heroes of the Americas with busts had published in 1928 a juvenile biography, Bolivar, el Libertador.37 If Sherwell, as we have said, establishes an important Pan American interpretive line, Vaucaire, in the context of an audience that was a subset of a larger adult one, expresses the claims of France, which up until World War I had had important business interests across the Atlantic and whose literary and cultural figures had been a source of great prestige for the Latin American intelligentsia and upper classes, from Émile Zola to Charles Baudelaire to Auguste Comte, between the period of roughly 1880 and 1910.
Writing for a teenage audience, Vaucaire considers Bolívar from the perspective of moral challenges faced and overcome. The issue Vaucaire focuses on, and upon which he elaborates with strong Rousseauian overtones, is the matter of material wealth and the nation. The novel begins in Europe with a Bolívar who is depressed and sickly but who is then uplifted when he learns of his vast inheritance from his tutor, Simón Rodríguez. Money, however, as Rousseau would have it, corrupts; and in Paris, we see Bolívar as he enters the dissolute life and then miraculously escapes it. The reader has occasion to view Bolívar in the salon of his “cousin” and confidante Fanny, where he purportedly meets Humboldt who has just returned from Caracas. Mention is also made of Humboldt’s alleged stay with Bolívar’s family, which is said to have provided the German naturalist with evidence of culture and cultivation in Latin America, not the barbarism that the European public might expect. In accordance with Rousseauian themes, we subsequently see Bolívar as he and Rodríguez make their pilgrimage across the French countryside to Rome where Bolívar will purportedly make his famous vow to liberate Latin America.
Each of the scenes of Bolívar’s life and of independence is made to revolve around the matter of morality, nation and wealth. When departing from Le Havre, Bolívar is described as missing his “cousin” Fanny in Paris and wanting to be with her but understanding that it is less than moral to remain in a land that is not one’s own. With regard to questions involving money, we see a Bolívar who at the end of his life is completely indifferent to it, shown in fact giving up what he possesses either to friends or to soldiers. When it comes to his landed wealth, we also see Bolívar in the role of victim, dispossessed of his estates, now at the hands of the Spanish in 1815, now at the hands of Venezuelans in 1830.
Interestingly, a section is devoted to Antonio Nariño, who was imprisoned by the Spanish for publishing The Declaration of the Rights of Man. Here was a Latin American hero who would resonate with a French public, a figure in fact whose first act of martyrdom was the consequence of the publication of a French document of world historic importance. But as Vaucaire emphasizes, Nariño’s martyrdoms continued until the end of his life when this “national hero,” the first person to be named vice-president of the Gran Colombia, suffers the greatest of indignities: impeachment for corruption charges. Vaucaire uses this situation to dramatize Nariño’s unparalleled self-sacrifice to the nation. In this, his last act of martyrdom, we hear Nariño tell the Congress of Cúcuta of all the suffering that had been brought upon him by his commitment to the world of ideas. In Vaucaire’s rendering, Naríño is the “first victim to party jealousy,” a reference to the rivalry of the Liberal and Conservative Parties that would define Colombian national politics.38
This was not the only juvenile biography about Bolívar to be produced in the moment. The Venezuelan-American T.R. (Thomas Russell) Ibarra in 1929 published a children’s biography of his own, Bolívar, The Passionate Warrior. Ibarra, who was born in Caracas in 1880, in the United States became a professional English-language writer, authoring Young Man of Caracas in 1941, a memoir about the city in which he lived before moving to Boston. Ibarra tells how his family fell victim to the caprices of the country’s dictator and modernizer, Guzmán Blanco. As for his 1929 piece, he presents Bolívar from the perspective of his intended readers, opposing the so-called young Bolívar to the older Miranda and further appealing to the imagination of his readers by speaking of his illustrious career as having unfolded unexpectedly, his future one that could never have been anticipated:
Anybody seeing the two on that day in 1810, and asked to guess which was destined to greatness would have guessed beyond a doubt that fate was reserving its laurels for that older man, grizzled, reserved, noble in brow and carriage, listening gravely to the unbridled utterances of the youth by his side—seeming no better than the spoutings of a demagogue, a dreamer.39
In the epilogue, Ibarra speaks of the future and promise of Latin America as being that of Pan Americanism, defined by him as the large-scale enterprise of road construction within and among individual nations, an enterprise correcting deficiencies in communication that had been in existence since independence.40 Connecting Latin America to its different parts through roads, the obsession of the twenties, now defines the spirit of Bolívar’s dream of unity, along with his 1826 Panama Congress.
For their part, Phyllis Marschall and John Crane, with their 1933 juvenile biography, The Dauntless Liberator: Simón Bolívar, seek to find in Bolívar’s life “American” morality to teach to their adolescent audience. If Vaucaire’s text taught French values right on Pan American soil, now there was a US American text that, along with Ibarra’s, could clearly carry forth the US agenda. When Bolívar, for instance, asks Miranda, without the approval of the junta, to return with him to Venezuela to lead the military action against the Spanish, Bolívar relies on good-old American self-reliance, the same trait, the authors tell their young readers, that propelled Bolívar throughout his career:
He utterly disregarded the wishes and orders of his superiors. Not only at this time, but always in the years to come, whenever his own ideas went beyond the sight of those who had a right to command him. If he could see a purpose beyond their vision he went ahead, and the accomplishment always justified his disobedience. His self-reliance was throughout his life a dominant characteristic.41
Marschall and Crane’s explanation of Bolívar’s responsibility for the loss of Puerto Cabello is also telling. They state that Bolívar had been derelict in his duties when he was a young man but emphasize that the loss of the fort did not have to result in the collapse of the First Republic, that the fault was entirely Miranda’s, inasmuch as “he had five thousand soldiers at his command as he sat there dejectedly on the step, but he did not lift his hand or voice to order them to the relief of Puerto Cabello, scarcely sixty miles away.” Was he bribed by the Spanish, asks the narrator? 42 It is not just that Bolívar is to be seen as Latin America’s counterpart to Washington, but that US Pan Americanists are now digging into Bolívar to assimilate him to US values. Bolívar is no longer simply the Latin American equivalent of Washington, an exemplary figure to be consumed by the public, serving as a mirror of the US conception of its “national” morality. Indeed, Hoover’s words mourning Bolívar’s death and raising him to the status of hemispheric icon were foundational.43
Víctor Andrés Belaúnde and the Search for a Legal Tradition
Who would have thought that the person who would end up writing the definitive treatise of the times in English on the political thought of Bolívar would hail from a country like Peru where Bolívar had been assigned the title of dictator, having been appointed as such twice by the Peruvian Congress, and where, San Martín, the other hero of Peruvian independence, had been assigned the title of protector? But such is the case. Scholar and statesman Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, in exile in the United States in the 1920s, the period when the rival of his family, Augusto Leguía, was in power as president, published in 1938 Bolívar and the Political Thought of the Spanish American Revolution at the Johns Hopkins Press, a work based in part on lectures he gave over several years at the Sorbonne, the University of Miami, and Johns Hopkins University.44 Belaúnde had been drawing on Bolívar’s writings and acts to support the liberal political ideas he presented in books, essays, and addresses in Peru, a part of a generation that had rediscovered Bolívar’s figure at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the United States, Belaúnde would be able to draw on his deep knowledge of Bolívar as he engaged with the phenomenon of interest he had occasion to witness in Washington, D.C., and New York City. The Pan American movement had paved the way for Sherwell to make his way into public life in the United States; and it did the same for Belaúnde, giving him entrée to academic posts and to the lecture podium in the 1920s. In 1930 Belaúnde contributed an article to the Pan American Union bulletin’s final quarterly issue celebrating the centenary of the Liberator’s death and gave the prestigious Albert Shaw Lecture in Diplomatic History at Johns Hopkins University.45 During these years he also had before him the Latin American cultural program instituted by Hoover between 1928 and 1932, continued and capitalized upon by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR).
Most symbolic of that program was Pan American Day, approved by Hoover in 1930 and celebrated for the first time in 1931. Occurring on April 14, the day on which the Pan American Union was founded, it marked the beginning of a month-long slate of activities expressing inter-hemispheric awareness, with the executive of each “sovereign nation” giving the order on April 14 of each year that such activities commence. In 1943 a how-to book on Pan American Day for the benefit of chairmen and chairwomen of Pan American clubs and schoolteachers was brought out by Hilah Paulmier and Robert Haven Schauffler as part of a series that included Thanksgiving, Christmas, Mother’s Day, and so on. The book includes texts, ideas, and projects to use to celebrate the holiday.46 It was given good reviews, though with one criticism, namely that the author, perhaps, had gone too far by providing instructions for how to add the stars and stripes to a pageant representing Bolívar’s vow on the Sacro Monte in Rome.47
In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Pan American Day was celebrated widely in the United States and Latin America. Today, it is no longer on US school calendars and is completely unfamiliar, then, to the US public. It remains, nevertheless, a tradition within the world of inter-state protocol. In fact, over the past decades US presidents have issued the same order that Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower once did but with the important difference that the White House has forgone having it communicated to schools and civic organizations, content to let it die a quick death in press releases intended for foreign consumption. That order, which President Barack Obama dutifully read on the April 14 of the last year of his presidency, was that all organizations, beginning with the schools, commit to learning about the historical figures of importance in the “south.”48 The order has continued to be issued.
Coming from a Peru in which socialists José Carlos Mariátegui and Victor de la Haya of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) Party had emerged as major national voices, the one the architect of a Bolshevik-inspired modernity built around Peru’s majority indigenous populations, the other a visionary for trade unions, Belaúnde saw Pan Americanism with its focus on independence as an opportunity to promote his conception of a modern Peru and to defeat a prejudice that had taken root in the United States, namely that Latin America was incapable of producing lawful leadership because of its colonial heritage. Belaúnde, thus, was working on more than one front. If Pan American writers had been busy since the late 1920s constructing a Bolívar representative of US political and cultural values, in his Bolívar and the Political Thought of the Spanish American Revolution he takes the opportunity to present Bolívar as being part of a tradition of Latin American and Spanish figures—writers, philosophers, and scientists—a Bolívar who came to understand modernity through the Hispanic world, and particularly, through Spanish-language sources. Reconstructing the colonial period, Belaúnde argues that at the end of what was a centuries-long process, there emerged in the individual regions of Latin America clear evidence of nationalist sentiment such that if class interests were an important factor in the moment of independence, they were not definitive. To the contrary, he insists, it was not simply creoles who drove independence but “nations” in a stage of emergence. That stage of emergence came out of Latin America’s own colonial institutions, from the cabildo or town hall to the audiencia to the intendancy to the viceroyalty, all of which contributed to creating the conditions for the modern ideas that would grip the new republics. Belaúnde, in a sense, was not that distant in his view of colonial institutions from Rodríguez O., of whom we spoke in Chap. 1, but Belaúnde did not see the Cortes as having any positive value for the formation of republican government.49
This is not the first time that Belaúnde speaks in the name of the Latin American republics, as we will see in Chap. 16, but at a time when the ideological value of independence was being questioned in Peru, particularly by the deceased though still eminently influential Mariátegui, and when Pan Americanists were presenting Latin American independence as representing a break from a backward Catholic culture, Belaúnde seeks to get around the issue of class, social agency, and prejudice by locating Peru in a continental or hemispheric intellectual tradition rooted in Spain, Europe, and the United States. The Peru he imagines is rich with all the elements it needed, integrated in such a way as to make the powerful Left politics he opposed unnecessary and to stand firm against Pan American interlopers.
The issue was the Left, but also then, US perceptions of Latin America. Belaúnde presents the Bolívar of the Jamaica Letter and the Angostura Address as the true figure committed to democratic government and to rational reflection on political system. The later Bolívar who authored the Bolivian Constitution, who refused to recognize the authority of local elites, who stood against the notion of reform within the law, unable to wait for the Constitutional Convention of 1831, is made to represent a deviation from this, the essential figure. How does Belaúnde explain the change between the two Bolívars? The latter figure, he says, has been corrupted by his own success but most importantly by the flattery of the generals and staff who surrounded him, many of whom were concerned about the position they would occupy following his exit from power or his death. He is like Napoleon in this respect, Belaúnde maintains.50 The so-called deviation was produced by good-old human frailty, something to which anyone from any culture could fall prey. It is not because of the Hispanic tradition.
But in presenting a lawful Bolívar who stands for what he defines as a pragmatic, technical relationship to government, Belaúnde is placing Bolívar in and against a colonial intellectual tradition defined, to be more precise, as essentially reformist, one that by the late eighteenth century had reconciled Enlightenment values with Catholicism, purportedly following in this way the example of the Spanish, Latin America itself is not to be understood against Spain or against Europe. The Spanish legacy is not to be seen according to the thesis of the black legend (anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda) promoted by Bolívar in the Jamaica Letter . Colonial societies had advanced and gained a sense of themselves as nations within the context of the Spanish traditions with which they dialogued and which they in fact changed. The Latin American elites only gave up on Spain, he asserts, after the imperial state failed to comply with long-established laws—particularly those requiring that creoles be given the same opportunity as the Spaniards for employment at the highest administrative levels—but also when the Cortes was replaced by absolute monarchy.51 Eighteenth-century Europe as represented by the encyclopedists in this way plays an important role in his narrative. The thought of these actors had penetrated Spain, and through thinkers such as writer, statesman, and law specialist Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos had found its way to Latin America.
Indeed, Belaúnde’s project is to construct a Spain that independent of Fernando VII is European and modern, a Spain that cannot be reduced to the particular political embodiment against which the Latin American elites rebelled. More to the point, Bolívar, as the consummate antagonist of Spain, is, Belaúnde wants us to think, then, not to be regarded as the beginning of Latin America’s project of modernity. A process of political development or maturity took root across the continent in the eighteenth century in Lima, Charcas, Mexico City, Bogotá, and elsewhere, he submits. At this time, important fields of study were either invented or reinvigorated—the law and sociology being particularly important in this regard. But if the elites of Latin America had for decades reflected upon their circumstances in dialogue with Europe and Spain, this fact had been misrepresented by those who, stepping outside that tradition, quoted directly from the already assimilated works of French or English figures from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Standing out among them is Bolívar who, says Belaúnde, cites these authors not because he did not already have access to them, filtered through tradition, but to claim them as his own in an effort to legitimize himself before the reading public. Moderation, patience, process, deliberation, legality—here are the values that Belaúnde is at pains to establish as he constructs a Latin American scholarly and legal tradition that, as he would have it, has been eclipsed from view by those who have gone directly to the Enlightenment sources, the modernity those sources represent in themselves standing in contrast to the tradition in which they found their place. In the end, Belaúnde gives to the world a Bolívar who takes from intellectual traditions already part of American society, and republics that emerge from the viceroyalty political system.
Belaúnde is presenting Spain, Europe, and the United States not as antagonists but as bearers of the distinct traditions with which Latin America intellectuals have long dialogued in their quest to establish their own. At the same time, he makes certain that no single individual stands out in his story. Instead, a large cadre of figures are followed and celebrated. Outside influences are discussed in detail, yet it is not one model that takes hold but many. And when these models do take hold at a more popular level, as in the case of Rousseau, as he asserts, Latin American intellectuals are shown to be prudent and dispassionate readers. At the same time, as part of Belaúnde’s integrationist politics to tear down the binaries that would divide, in particular, Peruvian society, he draws upon the church, presenting it as a modernizing institution, responsible for the education of mestizos.
If Belaúnde uses the Pan American Bolívar to defend an imagined liberal tradition for Peru, one without fissures of any kind, the US American Daniel Joseph Clinton whose penname was Thomas Rourke avails himself of Bolívar in an entirely different manner. Rourke produced two notable books, both beautifully written. Gómez, Tyrant of the Andes, published in 1936, documents the violent, authoritarian regime of the country’s leader, Juan Vicente Gómez, with whom the United States had been doing business since roughly 1918, and from whom it had accepted, among other things, as we know, the statue of Bolívar located in Central Park: Gómez’s brutality; his legendary prisons; his exiles; his women and illegitimate children; and his wealth. All of this is highlighted in a narrative that tells the story of the courage of his enemies, many intellectuals, writers, and journalists who dared to speak against him and who as a result suffered and died horrible, brutal deaths in his three prisons. Interestingly, Rourke is careful to preserve the Bolívar legacy on his own terms, showing how Gómez claims and uses that legacy to his benefit, but makes sure not to identify him with it. Instead, he presents Gómez as proof of the prophecy Bolívar made at the end of his life, namely, that the destiny of Latin America was that of a region to be ruled by little tyrants. And he takes that prophecy one step further, describing this particular tyrant as a usurper of the Bolívar legacy, which in Venezuela, as we know, had been fashioned into an important symbolic element of the state by Guzmán Blanco in the 1870s.
How horrible was civilian life in Caracas? Rourke tells us that Gómez was so brutal and cynical as to have guards at the infamous prison, the Rotunda, open fire on protesters who had amassed there, having heard rumors that on this day, the centenary of Bolívar’s passing, December 17, 1930, the young men detained since the 1928 protests would be released.52 Among the five people killed were mothers of the detained. Rourke was bringing to the attention of the world a new meaning for the year of the Simón Bolívar centenary that saw celebrations throughout the Americas.
In his 1939 biography, Man of Glory: Simón Bolívar, Rourke changes direction, dialoguing with Venezuelan authorities on Bolívar, most importantly constitutional historian Gil Fortoul (the one of 1930), to reassert US prerogative with regard to Latin America. To do this, Rourke distances himself from the concept of a democratic, liberal Bolívar, the figure promoted by Sherwell and more generally, the entire Pan American movement in the United States. Instead, he presents Bolívar as a benevolent charismatic leader who had the good fortune of being surrounded and supported by British advisors and militia in a milieu that tended toward authoritarianism by virtue of the Hispanic legacy. At a time of deep concern about fascism and the specific influence of Germany in Latin American republics, particularly Mexico, Chile, and Paraguay, Rourke presents the British and their allies, the United States, as protectors of Latin America. The investment in Latin America by other foreign powers and cultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, specifically the German, is neatly erased from Rourke’s account.
Rourke , in fact, tells the story of independence from the perspective of British and US involvement, giving the two states a role in the narratives of independence and the Gran Colombia he constructs. As for the United States, it did not send troops, ships, or money, but did recognize the new Latin American states. For example, on March 28, 1822, in the days before Bolívar’s victory at Bomboná, which occurred on April 7, 1822, the United States recognized the Gran Colombia, “the nation he had created.”53 There is no connection between that act and the ongoing independence process but it is as if there were, with the narrator telling us that Bolívar did not know of the US decision at the time but that he would. Rourke quickly turns his attention back to Bolívar and his troops as they approach Bomboná but not before adding a sentence to inform the reader that the decision by the United States had long been in the works, the product of the advocacy of Senator Henry Clay, who “had labored constantly in the interest of the struggling colonies of South America.”54
In addressing Páez in his narrative, Rourke similarly inserts into his account of this major military leader and future president of the republic details identifying him with the United States. He writes: “In the United States he was entertained by the President, acclaimed by the public everywhere as only few foreign rulers have been acclaimed, and was honored with a huge parade on Broadway. He died in New York in 1873 at 83 years.”55
It is as if Páez’s affection for the United States and the US affection for him were being made to stand in for the US absence from the independence process. But if the message was that Páez is one of us and we are Páez, left out of that portrait is the fact that Páez was not always welcome in the United States. As Judith Ewell tells us, during Páez’s second exile, after having failed to defeat Liberals in the Federal War, he was received almost as persona non grata, admonished by President Andrew Johnson for having fought against the elected government of Monagas.56 For the United States, Venezuela’s Federal War was nothing but a chain of events brought about by a series of military uprisings against an elected government. These were the uprisings in which Páez figured importantly, establishing himself as dictator for one year.
Constructing British connections to the War of Independence was a far easier task. Thousands of British men fought for Bolívar beginning in 1817, though without official support from the British government. Without diminishing in any way the valor and heroism of Bolívar, Rourke submits that independence was in part won with the support of the British legionnaires, a statement that is not completely inaccurate but that interests us on account of its discursive value. In the chapter Rourke dedicates to the Irish and English who fought under Bolívar, he focuses on James Rooke, an Irish military officer whom Bolívar made commander of the Anglo-Venezuelan unit and whom Rourke praises for his protagonism in Bolívar’s second crossing of the Andes into Boyacá in 1819. Rourke describes his heroic death, calling him a patriot to liberty, but also has Bolívar state both Venezuela’s and his own indebtedness to him. Interestingly, Rourke refers to Bolívar as president of Venezuela rather than as military general. He was both:
To Rooke I owe all my good fortune in New Granada, and Venezuela is indebted to him for the preservation of its president and will hereafter have to attribute her liberty mainly to him.57
Similarly, we are also told that Sucre could not have won the battle of Pichincha on May 23, 1822, without the assistance of the British Albion battalion.58
Rourke also takes pains to describe the tremendous hardship experienced by those who journeyed from the United Kingdom to join Bolívar’s forces. On the one hand, he details the go-betweens in London who profited from selling stashes of never-used British uniforms left over from the Napoleonic War to jobless soldiers and who also profited from selling commissions to them. On the other hand, he goes on to relate the horrible fates that the legionnaires together with their families suffered. We are told that many died en route with their loved ones or after being abandoned by their ships’ captains on Caribbean islands. And we are also informed that the reduced number who did make it to Angostura discovered that Bolívar had no money to pay them for their services and as a result, in some cases, found themselves having to barter their uniforms to indigenous patriot soldiers in order to survive.
Finally, in the introduction, Rourke speaks of having traveled to Caracas shortly after the transition from the strongman Gómez to the liberal and former Gómez general, López Contreras, only to witness the municipal government’s killing of protesters, and as he perceived it, the acceptance of this violence by the people, whether aristocrat or “peon,” a view of the moment quite different from the one provided by the Venezuelan Picón Salas that we have already seen. If in his previous work, Gómez is the source of the violence in the polis—the embodiment of a particular political form, the tyrant—in this work the cause is purported to be culture, as shown by the acceptance by the Venezuelan people of the continued killings. The issue was not changing the political system, then, but understanding that here was a culture that was essentially violent.
Thus it was to be during all the remaining years of the Liberator’s struggle in the interests of the task he had put himself to. Only in his presence, under his own inspiring and dominating leadership, was there unity of purpose and harmony in action. Immediately his back was turned, the dissensions spread and all that had been achieved fell away into dust. No one knew that fact better than he. No one saw better the disruptive tendencies in his comrades and the fatal weakness of his people—the dependence upon and the psychic need for a dominant, forceful personality to hold them together. That need is deep in the character of the Spaniard and is augmented in the Spanish American by a sense of weakness. The torero must dominate the bull, man must dominate woman, the leader must dominate his men. Bolívar recognized that trait in his people consistently in his political doctrines, and sought to satisfy it in the strongly centralized form of government, which he always advocated.59
The problem, as Rourke states it, was that Bolívar could exercise this authority only when he was physically present. There is some truth to this notion, which underlies Gil Fortoul’s revised 1930 Historia Constitucional de Venezuela, but one would have to attend to individual moments to account for what was at stake, particularly in the political period of 1825–1830. What for Rourke was nothing but disruption and disorder was from another perspective, in fact that of Gil Fortoul, local elites organizing to protect their regional and national interests.
Bolívar was being stretched in different directions as interpreters sought to make him speak for a United States embattled ideologically with dictatorship in Europe. On October 6, 1941, two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US radio show, Radio Cavalcade, ran a program entitled Bolívar, the Liberator with Paul Muni in the starring role just as he had played Benito Juárez in the 1939 Warner Bros. film. The fragmented story of Bolívar jumps from one period in his life to the next, and paints him as a republican figure with a dictatorial streak. Rourke’s hero, Rooke, is a central character with the major moment being the 1819 crossing of the Andes. Bolívar is presented as speaking the words of Churchill and FDR. The radio show ends with his exile, which is presented not as one imposed upon him but one that he willed for himself in order to repent for his dictatorship of 1828–1830.60 Bolívar is still a usable icon, a figure of the Americas presenting lessons on liberalism and its opposites to a US public that has been watching London being bombed and that is about to plunge into another world war.