The immediate post-war period saw several major works produced on the subject of Bolívar: Gerhard Masur’s 1948 Simón Bolívar; Waldo Frank’s 1951 Birth of a World: Bolívar in Terms of His Peoples; and Salvador de Madariaga’s 1951 Bolívar. We spoke of Madariaga’s hefty volume in Chap. 7, underlining how it tears into Bolivarian writing in the Americas, in particular into the Venezuelan Bolivarian machine. All three biographies achieved wide readerships. In this chapter, we address the volumes of Masur and Frank.
Both authors engaged with the US Pan Americanist agenda, namely modernization through inculcation of so-called US democratic values. But they differed as to the ways they understood the applicability and relevance of those values. Masur, who had already written on the German historian Leopold von Ranke, the father of modern historical writing, used this new moment in his life—an émigré in the United States—to put Ranke’s method into action.
Ranke, in his lectures and the prefaces to the histories he wrote, including the famous one he penned for his History of the Popes, explains that to write history he has taken advantage of materials found in state and private collections that had previously been ignored—the insights they could provide not appreciated—including government documents, memoirs, diaries, personal and formal missives, and diplomatic dispatches.1 He also explains that he has evaluated those sources and used them to produce a narrative that both recreates the historical period and goes beyond that period. Ranke was speaking about the scope and nature of one’s subject of inquiry, which should be seen not only as part of a process occurring over the centuries, as German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argues it should, but also as the product of the historical moment. Less philosophy and reason, and more art, Ranke famously stated as he instructed his students to search out archives and allow those archives to tell of their moment, though through the accomplished voice of the historian as narrator.2
Declaring that the biographies of Bolívar were no longer adequate and seeing only “sources” scattered about the Americas waiting for a person such as himself to examine, evaluate, and incorporate, Masur threw himself into writing. His goal was not only to bring Bolívar’s figure forth in the context of Bolívar’s milieu by going directly to the archives,3 but also to do so in the light of major figures of world history, who included Napoleon as well as one who came after Bolívar. That person was Winston Churchill. In Masur’s view of history as restoration, Churchill represents the higher plane which Bolívar had not been able to reach. As the intellectual historian Hayden White explains with regard to Ranke’s vision of history in the nineteenth century: liberal forces that are powerful in an early moment such as in that of revolution (read: the French and 1848 revolutions) but are then sidelined by forces of reaction, re-emerge at a later point in time to assume their proper form in a changed world, one that has produced a new international order.4 Bolívar comes forth in that new order as a modern leader who laid the groundwork for Pan American unification. It is a matter of stating where he went wrong so that his vision can be resurrected.
Waldo Frank, who was inspired by Masur, also produced a biography of epic dimension, one in which he similarly conceives of Bolívar as both the product of a cultural reality and as an agent of world history. Frank fashions his Bolívar epic in accordance with the hermeneutic through which he produced his previous tomes on Latin America—one that celebrates the Hispanic world. Different though they were, Masur and Frank both stuck close to the Venezuelan-centered narrative established by earlier interpreters in the US Pan American tradition. In accordance with Ranke’s dictum, the two works were artful.
Masur’s book was funded with a Rockefeller Foundation grant, translated from German into English, and brought out through the University of New Mexico Press. In the preface, Masur tells of having been received at the Colombian embassy in Geneva in the moment of his flight from Germany in 1935 and of having seen on the wall of the embassy a portrait of Bolívar. It was in this moment, he states, that he made the decision that he would write Bolívar’s biography, beginning that labor in 1941 with the assistance of a grant from Columbia University for foreign scholars.
To construct his Rankian-inspired narrative, he drew on an array of materials, ranging from Lecuna’s military histories of the 1920s to US Pan Americanist narratives to the Ecclesiastical and Civil History of New Granada by José Manuel Groot published in Bogotá in 18895 to words of a “hitherto unpublished document that well deserves to be called his political will” that dated from 1829, printed in a Venezuelan newspaper in 1851 and located by him in Vicente Lecuna’s Bolívar Archive.6
The Bolivarian traditions of Latin America that we are examining in this book were not of interest to Masur, who sees not established traditions but untapped sources. Those purportedly untapped sources lie in what is taken to be a chaotic intellectual world that has produced unreliable interpretations of Bolívar—a Bolívar who in the later years of his life was misunderstood and hated but who after his death became an object of adulation—one extreme replaced by another. With regard to that adulation that Masur describes as having been dominant since the return of his remains to Venezuela in 1842, he describes it as characteristic of young nations untrained in seeing their own histories critically and correctly.7 Masur is discarding writing about Bolívar in Latin America and particularly in Venezuela to make claims for the superiority of his biography. The North-South binary is what provides him with that sense of authority. In fact, he ascribes his ability to see Bolívar objectively as opposed to how he is seen in Latin America to the subject position he enjoys as one who lives in the United States. To the US American public, he will make Bolívar known, the first, he alleges at the end of his narration, to do so.8 He will explain in particular Bolívar’s final years, still not adequately comprehended by Latin American historiography.
It is a matter of new beginnings, of placing his figure in the context of Western culture. Presenting Bolívar in the first lines of his work as resembling Odysseus, he characterizes him as a romantic epic hero using a universal critical language defined by the binaries of selfishness and generosity, private and public, politics and military power. Bolívar is of his historical moment, but also ahead of it, one who stands for revolution but who at the same time is held back by his own imperfections, rejected for good reason by the new national constituencies and republics. Bolívar is all too human. His principal imperfection is his inability to understand both the historical reality of the distinct regions of Latin America and what Masur calls nationalism. Masur explains the genesis of nationalism. It is the result of the dissolution of the Spanish imperial system and the reaction to that system. But there is more. Masur asserts, just as Madariaga would three years later, that Latin America was not ready to be independent when Napoleon made independence possible.
What greater source of tension for his drama of Western culture than this! Bolívar boldly and intelligently seeks to impose a structure on a reality that is averse to unions of the kind he promotes, but that at the same time does not have the institutions necessary to produce societies with good government. Noble but flawed, he is adamant about building a super-state, a term Masur invents and deploys along with Bolívar’s Andean Federation. Masur is using his discovered source—purported words of Bolívar from 1829 printed in a newspaper in 1851 and located by him in Lecuna’s Archivo del Libertador that reveal Bolívar’s political desire to bring north and south together. Here is the real Bolívar, the hemispheric one. Through his massive state and what Masur calls his educational dictatorship, he aimed to uplift a purportedly immature people. But Masur tells us that his undertaking did not make sense given the geographical expanse of the region he wanted to preside over. Even so, he should be respected because Bolívar thought in a manner that was ethically and rationally based. Furthermore, he also faced an intractable problem that no one during his time could solve.
His resignation and the disintegration of Greater Colombia coincide and condition each other. Bolívar’s rule was never aimed at the satisfaction of selfish desire, nor did it pander to a hollow lust for power. He had hoped to carry out a political conception; and when he saw that he had failed, he surrendered—with hesitation and reluctantly it is true, but without resorting to the force which was at his disposal. This is the great difference between Bolívar and Napoleon and between Bolívar and all the great dictators of the twentieth century.9
In the age of totalitarianism, dictatorship is the issue. Masur is locating Bolívar squarely on the axis that is republicanism and dictatorship, finessing his 1828–1830 dictatorship and then the fact that he does not leave power in one clean and definitive move. But, in the context of Pan Americanism in which he is writing, he wants Bolívar to be a usable figure, one whose attempt at creating a state to uplift and unite the peoples of Latin America can serve to authorize the unification that will come later. Bolívar is both a subject and a vehicle. In the Cavalcade of America’s radio drama, Bolívar, the Liberator of October 6, 1941, Paul Muni as Bolívar exiles himself to repent for his dictatorship. Here Bolívar resigns, allowing for a new government to be formed.10
There is much in the context of world history for which Napoleon should be praised, we are told throughout the narrative. Masur submits that his continental vision was superior to the monarchies of Europe, monarchies that the US public would have looked down upon and that Napoleon either chased from Europe or subordinated to his will and his 1804 codes. Without speaking of the period of the restoration, that is, of Napoleon’s defeat and the new Europe that comes into being, Masur writes that Napoleon put an end to the monarchic system, opening a path to modernity. He even has words of praise for his continental system above and beyond his vision of its role in leveling the old order. He describes it as efficient and rational, telling us that Bolívar’s vision of a large state was comparable to that of Napoleon. When it comes to military matters, throughout his narrative that presents Bolívar as a revolutionary who is up against his enemies—monarchists or royalists when they are identified—Bolívar is described as having a military genius similar to Napoleon’s, his genius the reason he prevailed over those who opposed him.
There is more that Masur does with his figure as he calls on Napoleon as a friendly counterpoint to draw Bolívar’s character. To understand the Venezuelan leader is to see a great warrior who like Napoleon has no formal training, who writes not poetry but letters of literary merit, who like Napoleon believes in the continent (Napoleon, the European; Bolívar, the South American) as the proper space in which to understand modernization, who seizes dictatorial power for the good of the people, and who cares about the masses and the impoverished.
It is also to understand differences. Napoleon presided over troops numbering in the hundreds of thousands; Bolívar presided over only a slim fraction of that. Napoleon drew up his battle plans using maps, Bolívar did not, there being no maps in existence, and thus having no choice but to base his decisions on his personal knowledge of Latin America’s geography. Napoleon trailed his troops into battle, surrounded by advisors; Bolívar was in the vanguard, unprotected.
Masur is taking advantage of Napoleon in a new way in the European and the US American traditions, his figure available differently in the immediate wake of World War II. Napoleon had been an important point of comparison for biographers but he was usually praised only as a great military leader, his legacy as a statesman when he ruled France and much of Europe not addressed for the reason that three million to six million died in his wars, “his threat to representative government assumed.”11 Bolívar is not Napoleon but Napoleon is not Hitler, Mussolini or Franco.
Masur’s biography, the endnotes telling of a figure thoroughly researched, is also driven by another comparison, that of Bolívar to Francisco de Miranda. This is clear to view in the episode he constructs around the matter of how Bolívar’s actions in Puerto Cabello in 1812 should be regarded. He assumes as his own the binary established by Robertson, then handed down to Marshall and Crane, and finally, to Rourke. He tells us that Bolívar had, indeed, made a mistake in not having taken proper precautions to protect the Puerto Cabello fort against the possibility of being seized through bribery or another means by the important Spanish military prisoners it held. He goes on to speak of how Bolívar learned from that experience for his future decisions while he castigates Miranda who, he says, should have gone with his troops to attempt to retake the site even if that meant risking his life, something that a real leader would have done.12 Throughout his narrative, Masur contrasts Bolívar with Miranda, describing Bolívar as the epic hero who risks his own person while never giving up hope. Miranda is the opposite, carefully considering the possibilities for military success, and as in the case of the loss of the fort, unwilling to put his life on the line when his reason has him lose faith. Heroes do not act only in accordance with what is sensible and rational. On the subject of the negotiated armistice, he states that Miranda’s haste in leaving for Europe was proof that the leader did not trust the Spanish to honor the settlement, namely to apply the laws of the new constitution of Cádiz to the region and not imprison or execute the First Republic’s leaders.13 In comparison, Bolívar is the brave and true hero.
Masur’s interest in Europe was hardly limited to Napoleon. European references, particularly German and French, run through Masur’s narrative, used to heighten Bolívar’s importance for a United States whose educated classes are well versed in the European canon and to bring him forth in the light of World War II. Masur distinguishes between what is French and German, on the one hand, and what is British, on the other.
Masur is centering Bolívar in a new world history. Monarchy, which Napoleon sought to bring to an end, represents the past, liberalism the future. With this as his narrative fulcrum, he asks whether Bolívar was, in fact, a monarchist, bringing attention to the accusations of Bolívar’s detractors from the late 1820s, namely that Bolívar wanted Latin America to be part of the British Empire. As if he were resolving the matter once and for all and as if the question itself were the one that was prominent for the different national traditions of the Americas where Bolívar was an important axis for intellectual and political debate, Masur delivers in dramatic fashion his verdict. Simply put, Bolívar was not a monarchist. But far from presenting Bolívar as a good US liberal, Masur characterizes him as a figure influenced by European culture, particularly as represented by eighteenth-century France. Rousseau is key, made to stand in the context of the French Revolution. Masur, who would go on to write a book on totalitarianism, brings the Genevan thinker forth in the post-war terms that would define the debate about his figure for many, as we saw earlier in our discussion of the US political scientist Judith Schlar, the Venezuelan philosopher Luis Castro Leiva, and David Lay Williams, author of Rousseau’s Social Contract: An Introduction. In what is a vision of active transformation, Masur writes about Bolívar: “Having once adopted the ideologies of the French Revolution, Bolívar completed his break with the absolute traditions of Spain. At that point he was a Jacobin in word and thought.”14
The new, de-Hispanized Bolívar, Masur continues, was a materialist, a skeptic, and a centralist who believed in top-down notions of social change through legislation and culture. As a Jacobin (the radicals behind the Reign of Terror), inspired, we are to think, by Rousseau, Bolívar never veered from his belief that the model of Latin American states should be a centralized one.15 Even in his Jamaica Letter, where he considers and disavows the idea of a massive state, Bolívar, Masur tells us, displays a fascination with a large state organization. But most importantly, for Masur, if Bolívar is like no other figure before him in Latin America, this is because he had no traditions upon which to draw and was obligated then to create his state out of whole cloth. We see Bolívar as a cosmopolitan figure incongruously developing his political vision in tiny remote towns that are tropical. One such town, he wants us to see, was the famous Angostura. Bolívar, writing from the blank slate that is the tropics, is Cartesian, with Latin America nothing but a chaotic world which would require many decades to move forward and reach maturation, a world which, therefore, was all too vulnerable to the fancies of the intellectual demiurge.
But there is another cultural force acting on Bolívar. This is the Anglo-Saxon. We are told that Bolívar allows the “parliament” to reassemble in Angostura in 1819. What Masur is calling the parliament is the group of legislators from Venezuela’s First Republic. There are also the 7000 Irish and English soldiers and officers who go to serve under Bolívar and to whom Masur dedicates a chapter. For a US American public that is familiar with the British parliament and its storied war-time leader Winston Churchill, the use of the term to construct an autochthonous legislative tradition that runs parallel to Bolívar’s military acts and of which he is also a part is effective. Parliament and the military must always work together with the former ensuring the protection of republican government. Furthermore, Masur tells of Bolívar’s Angostura Address with its proposal for a constitution for the Gran Colombia modeled on the British though without a king. There is no mention of Venezuela’s 1811 constitution.
Masur’s analysis of the 1815 Jamaica Letter is fascinating in regard to the new, French-intellectual being the author assigns Bolívar. The Rousseauian allusions from the Social Contract are strong, and the matter of social inequality paramount. Masur presents Bolívar in this moment as an exile who has gone from aristocrat to beggar, shedding the social being into which he was born. If we now see Bolívar—who does find himself without money at the end of his life—as the ideal student of Rousseau, circumstance allowing him to understand the concept of equality, what is emphasized here, as throughout Masur’s narration, is Bolívar’s spirit and identification with French culture. Bolívar is writing his Jamaica Letter as if he were writing Rousseau’s Social Contract, it would seem, a figure who was not only a man of the sword, but also a man of letters—the latter in a way now conceivable to a US American public as they see him symbolically reproduce a text they are familiar with through the European canon. For Masur, the Rousseauian Bolívar stands for liberty and equality, the same values that Britain and the United States represent. From the heights of his ethical vision, Bolívar seeks to bring a people into modernity.
Masur, as we are seeing, raises up the French cultural and intellectual tradition while denigrating the Spanish, which he sees as no more than a reflection of imperial Spain. It is a tradition from which Bolívar liberates himself. Here was a view of the transatlantic Hispanic cultural world that was in direct opposition to that of Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, whose work we discussed in Chap. 10.16 Masur also addresses aspects of the new political culture that emerged in Latin America. Latin American independence, he writes, gave rise to the caudillo. Bolívar, who starts off as a caudillo, separates himself from that figure by becoming a universal leader. He accomplishes this by shedding one national intellectual skin to adopt another, the same logic of active transformation serving as an explanation. That is, to state the specifics of that transformation again, he trades the intellectual tradition of imperial Spain for the French, imperfect though the French tradition is, tending toward totalitarianism as now understood in the immediate post-war. But the French tradition exists in him along with the Anglo-Saxon, Masur submits: “He sought a constitution for America which would give form to its manifold and diverse elements. An Anglo-Saxon realism within him combined with the French radicalism of Rousseau.”17 What we can conclude is that Bolívar would have been a tyrannical agent of equality had it not been for the tempering effect of Anglo-Saxon values.
Bolívar anchored his vision in cultural and political concepts whose philosophical orientation was top down, if not, in some cases, Masur emphasizes throughout his tome, proto-fascist, the adjective he uses to describe the Gran Colombia and the Andean Federation at the end of his text. But in the twentieth century the peoples of Latin America and of the world have changed. On the one hand, Latin America has developed. On the other, the United States has emerged definitively as a world power, and with its commitment to democratic ideals and to Latin America, can be counted upon to bring about the change in the hemisphere Bolívar could not.
The world, too, in a sense, has caught up with Bolívar, as evidenced by the League of Nations, doomed though it was by US unwillingness to become a signatory nation, but which represents for Masur the most actual ideal of a world organization at a time when the United Nations is only in its infancy, the expression of Bolívar’s 1826 Panama Congress. For Masur, humanity is only as good as the ideological models that prevail in the moment. Bolívar, who was also flawed, as all heroes are, did his best with what was available to him. He was fortunate to have come into contact with the Anglo-Saxon world. It was, Masur is saying, the salvation not only of a world that had been under siege from fascism, but also of Bolívar who, had he not resigned in the moment he did, allowing himself to be guided by Anglo-Saxon parliamentarianism and pragmatism, would have gone down in history as another Napoleon. Bolívar teetered on the republican/dictatorial axis, just as humanity did in the 1930s and 1940s.
Let us now turn to Waldo Frank. If Masur provides US readers with a non-Hispanic European Bolívar who participates in the Anglo-Saxon world, the US intellectual, Waldo Frank, with his 1951 biography, Birth of a World: Bolívar in Terms of His Peoples, sought, among other things, to contest that vision. Frank, though, was a lot like Masur and previous writers from the 1920s forward in the United States, following as he did the Venezuelan version of Bolívar’s life and career. Indeed, as we have seen, Pan Americanism in the 1930s and 1940s had become linked with the iconic figure of Bolívar. But just as Masur did not acknowledge previous renderings of Bolívar, or recognize the intellectual traditions of the Americas in which his figure played a vital role, neither did Frank. Frank had always presented himself as enjoying a privileged relationship to Latin America through his alleged mastery of its archives and his purported understanding of its peoples. Not surprisingly then, Frank says nothing of his Pan American predecessors, mentioning neither Thomas Rourke, nor Percy Alvin Martin, nor the Mexican Guillermo Sherwell, nor the Peruvian Víctor Andrés Belaúnde. Instead, he presents himself as following directly in the footsteps of Vicente Lecuna, who we focused on in Chap. 7, Venezuela’s renowned twentieth-century archivist and historian who prided himself on producing a truthful historical record of the actions of the leaders of independence.
But Lecuna is not the only important Venezuelan figure for Frank. The other is Rómulo Betancourt, one of the leaders of Acción Democrática (AD) which came to power in a 1945 coup and which in 1948 held presidential elections, Venezuela’s first. The biography, Frank explains to his readers, was written at the request of Betancourt, who had already asked Lecuna to prepare a deluxe edition of Bolívar’s writings, as we saw earlier, and who now wanted, on the occasion of the inauguration of the writer-turned-politician Rómulo Gallegos, the event Frank had come to Caracas to attend, a new English-language biography of Bolívar to carry word north and eventually south—assuming it would be translated, as all Frank’s previous works had been—of the new democratic Venezuela. Frank’s Birth of a World was to be a tribute, then, to Betancourt, the AD, the writer-turned-politician Gallegos, and to Pan Americanism, to which the AD had dedicated several cultural events at the inauguration. But by the time Birth of a World was finished and came out in the United States, indeed, by the time Frank had even had a chance to begin the project, there had been a radical change in Venezuela. Only ten months after the February 1948 inauguration of Gallegos, the same military leaders who had established an alliance with Betancourt and the AD, wanting civilian government, staged a coup that sent both Gallegos and Betancourt into exile. As we learn in Frank’s forward, the fact of the coup, however, did not diminish his resolve to write a book on Bolívar. For if his original hope had been to support Venezuela’s turn to democracy as represented by the election of Gallegos—an election that signified for him at the time nothing less than the enfranchisement of the Venezuelan people—his new hope was to help illuminate Gallegos’s overthrow.
This illumination is the subject we will take up. Frank, interestingly, does not argue for democracy or the AD. To the contrary, the argument he makes is that Latin American nations need strong, benevolent leaders like the humanistic military and dictatorial Bolívar he imagines. Still, Frank never targets Gallegos and the AD directly, even though the vision of leadership he outlines in Birth of a World was intended as a corrective to the ideal of a Latin American nation run by political parties.
Fernando Coronil explains in The Magical State that the AD helped create the conditions for the coup by failing to present democratization as the triumph of the people and not simply of the party. A sign of this, comments Coronil, is the fact that the coup occurred amid absolute calm, as no sector of society protested.18 Frank’s analysis is quite different. For he would seem to celebrate Venezuela precisely for not protesting, for not descending into violence, if you like, as Bogotá had in reaction that same year to the assassination of the populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Indeed, it is the experience of the famous citywide day of violence known as the bogotazo , commented on at length at the end of his 400-page tome that is at the heart of his reflection. On the basis of the two experiences of 1948, the riot in Bogotá and the coup in Venezuela, Frank will propose to his readers two governmental models: dictatorship and stability as represented by the Venezuelan tradition; party politics and instability as represented by the Colombian.19
Whatever conclusions we may draw in regard to the connection between the overthrow of Gallegos and the AD, and Frank’s construction of a Bolívar identified with humanistic or ethical dictatorial leadership (a new version of the enlightened despot), it is important to understand that Frank’s approach to the Americas at this point in his career is different from his approach prior to World War II. During the 1930s Frank had been a socialist who saw in the aesthetic the hope of a moral world that would rise above the atomizing forces of modernity, who argued, furthermore, that north and south, the United States and Latin America, would one day fuse, the former contributing its institutions, the latter its artistic, Catholic and indigenous spirit. But in the wake of World War II, with the United States having emerged as the premier world power, with certain Latin American nations having supported the axis powers and with the Pan American Union having come to an end, Frank redefines the critical terms of his romantic discourse. Jettisoning his hemispheric Marxist-inspired vision that subsumed the United States and his America Hispana—the latter the title of an earlier work—into one totalizing process, Frank now presents the nations of the hemisphere as distinct entities with their own traditions and turns to race and Freudianism for a kind of universal hermeneutic. He continues to subscribe to the idea of radical cultural difference between the Anglo Protestant north and the Hispanic Catholic South, but he presents his humanistic Bolívar who stood for centralism as an alternative to democracy at a moment in which the United States, he asserts, needed to understand the Latin American nations as having political traditions different from one another. As we have seen, Pan Americanism also provided a space for Latin Americans to advocate for interests at odds with the official positions of the United States. Frank’s Pan Americanism, which now stood against the liberal, constitutional Bolívar promoted by figures like Guillermo Sherwell, represents an attempt at updating that tradition for a United States that was openly supporting the Latin American military. Frank will continue to be interested in social classes but what he argues for now is cohesion of those classes. As for one of Bolívar’s most important influences, the Geneva philosopher Jacques Rousseau, he will keep a distance. In the opening pages of his history, he attributes the rise of communism to Rousseau’s idea of natural man.20
Considering Frank’s new understanding of Latin America and also his project to educate the US public on the region, one cannot underestimate the significance that Freudianism had for him. For here was a critical language that was fast being internalized by his readership and that offered the possibility, when applied to individuals from another culture, of making them seem less remote and foreign. Indeed, Freudian categories allowed Frank the possibility of comparing cultures and individuals according to a universal language. The self, the ego, and the nuclear family are deployed. For instance, where Frank perceives that his “Anglo-Saxon” reader may disapprove of Bolívar’s conduct, as when Bolívar allegedly conceitedly praises Santander by comparing him to himself, he tells his reader that Catholic culture allows for confessionals, meaning exhibitions of the self.21 Similarly, sexual desire, a central topic for Freud, must also be understood, not against a strict moral standard, but as a practice that satisfies a need in the context of “the fatigue of a hard day, in the saddle.” Frank speaks of how Bolívar relaxes by throwing himself into his intellectual labors and also by giving himself up to dancing, and how a frail-bodied Bolívar who did not smoke and who drank “at most a glass of wine at dinner” unwound by other means. “Probably his brief hours with women were his best respite from the pain and tension that never left him.”22 Bolívar’s sexual behavior was not morally compromised, but to be understood in the context of rational needs familiar to a 1950s US audience. Masur presents Bolívar as a don Juan. He was not that.
Freudianism permeates Frank’s text in other ways. An important instance may be seen in how Frank finesses Bolívar’s association with Napoleon. Masur makes much of that association. Frank would have to overcome that identification in order to define the figure he imagines in terms of the Hispanic/US Anglo-Saxon binary that informed his writings. To invent a Hispanic Bolívar with dictatorial power—an enlightened despot—Frank submits that in spite of all that Bolívar said against Spain, in spite of his statements celebrating French rationalism and Anglo parliamentary government, he unconsciously embodied not only that which was Spanish, but also, in particular, the Spanish theocratic will suppressed by the modern secular state following the reign of Felipe II. As Frank explains it, Bolívar’s military and political quest for unity, his desire to overcome the geographical and political fragmentation of the Spanish colonies mirrors Castilla’s quest to overcome the fragmentation of Iberia. But Frank, in presenting Bolívar as being in his psychological make-up of the crusades, drawing on a mythical construction of Spain’s past used by the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco (1939–1975), a Spain defined at the same time by the multiple cultural heritages spoken of by the twentieth-century Spanish historian Américo Castro, also situates Bolívar alongside the Spanish colonist-turned-friar and historian Bartolomé de Las Casas and Cervantes, individuals glorified as being true to their ideals just as Bolívar was to his.23 To the US public it was thus to be made clear that Bolívar understood the value not only of arms, but also of letters. He was a sophisticated man of culture.
Frank’s use of Freudian categories to locate Bolívar in the Spanish tradition is similarly in evidence in his commentary on Bolívar’s aide-de-camp Luis Peru de Lacroix’s “Diario de Bucaramanga” (“Diary of Bucaramanga”), a document frequently referenced to attest to the Francophile Bolívar and also used by Masur. In an ingenious reflection on the limits of philology, Frank problematizes the value of the diary as a source, stating that the text itself is no more than the product of the peculiar intersection of Lacroix’s and Bolívar’s knowledge bases. If in their encounter, made famous by the text, Bolívar expounds on French rationalism, this is not because, Frank argues, Bolívar prefers French culture to Spanish, but rather because the French tradition is what the aide-de-camp and Bolívar shared as a cultural reference and what permitted them to exchange their views. Indeed, had Lacroix’s cultural competence been different, had he possessed knowledge of the Spanish tradition, Bolívar then would have steered their conversations in this direction, with the result being a different “Diario de Bucaramanga.” As for the playful, light-hearted man Lacroix also portrays, Frank directly attacks the author as a shallow interpreter of human beings, faulting him for his inability to perceive the psychological Bolívar, the figure who in this, the later part of his life was given to Freudian hysteria:
A deeper man than Lacroix would have observed the hysterical mask in his gaiety, the emotional defense in his denial of the forces that created him, his thirst for shallow waters as the sea he had released roared at his head. A man more widely read than Lacroix would have guessed the relation between Bolívar and Cervantes, who also saved himself from the bitter fire of his love for mankind by the invention of a ridiculous figure.24
Bolívar was on an impossible mission like Don Quijote: to create a unity that had never existed, seeking to overcome Hispano American forces that tended toward fragmentation. But, interestingly, as we see in other examples too, Frank never names Freud. To a US readership that was accustomed to using Freudian categories including Freudian hysteria as a matter of course, the anachronism that was the proposition that Lacroix was unable to see a Bolívar overcome may well have gone unnoticed.
If Freudian interpretive categories allowed Frank to claim Bolívar as part of a Hispanic tradition that included Bartolomé de las Casas and Miguel de Cervantes, they also permitted him the possibility of defining Latin America as unwhole psychologically and as requiring for this reason strong leadership. The idea of Latin America as an aesthetic utopia that would fuse with the United States, overcoming industrialization and fragmentation, was no more. Frank now speaks of internal divisions in Latin America that were racial, social, cultural, political, and geographic. The dictator Bolívar, by virtue of his Spanish heritage, stood above these divisions for most of his career, showing himself to be able to marshal his generals, enter and conquer the Orinoco, win the respect of the Roosevelt-like “roughrider” Páez, and prove himself to be indifferent to wealth and blind to race.
The case of the general Manuel Píar is especially deserving of our attention. Frank, rather than question Bolívar’s decision to execute the pardo Píar (referred to as mulatto ) for insubordination, explains this act as necessary to the consolidation of Bolívar’s authority. He states that Bolívar could have also executed the creole Santiago Mariño but that for strategic reasons he elected not to do so. But Frank makes Bolívar’s decision into something more than an act of expediency. He also finds in it evidence of a leader who like US President Abraham Lincoln, a popular international icon in the 1930s and 1940s and a figure to whom he compares Bolívar at the end of the history, is not racist. In fact, Frank eliminates race as providing an explanation for the motivation of either party. He writes that Píar did not see Bolívar through that filter but through that of the family, particularly the relationship between father and son. His letters, we are told, reveal that Píar was not planning a social revolution. Píar was testing Bolívar to see if Bolívar’s love for him was unconditional. Sadly, he finds out that Bolívar’s love was not. Píar dies not as a result of organizing the pardo community but as a result of testing the father.25 Freud’s concept of the family provides the interpretive framework.
Bolívar does not see race, we are supposed to think, but when it comes to those who are below Bolívar in Frank’s racial hierarchy, they are prevented from seeing Bolívar correctly by virtue of who they are racially. Freudianism, as we have just seen, is an interpretive pillar for Frank’s new race thinking, which is informed by the Jim Crow United States in which he lived. Frank’s Latin America is like the United States of his time, a region in which white is white and black is black with everything else standing for non-being. Bolívar, he states, was a mantuano who was secure in his ego; those who were bi- or multi-racial, “born of mixed races,” as he states, were not. “The American world,” he writes, “was too unwieldy; the mixture of bloods blurred each traditional code of conduct; the children of Spain and America felt themselves abandoned by the bonds of either world.”26 This is not all. Frank also speaks of the so-called dark races.
Since the people’s mixed bloods made them suspect to themselves, Bolívar had to be the ‘world’s greatest warrior,’ the ‘world’s greatest statesman, the world’s greatest lover’. His black legend flourished, too. To the ‘little nation’ men, to egos hurt by his own, to the libertarian fanatics, he was the satanic tyrant, the fraudulent soldier who never won a battle.27
Central to Frank’s race-based reconstruction of Bolívar as an enlightened, theocratic leader is the debate involving Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander. Indeed, Frank was familiar with the defences of Bołvar as well as the critiques, the latter as seen in Martí’s 1893 address, in Belaúnde’s 1938 treatise, and in the Colombian tradition. The controversy between the two concerns Bolívar who in his political battle with Santander declared a dictatorship, executed would-be assassins, exiled Santander, thought to be behind the assassination attempt on him, and continued to defend his state using military force. Previous to the crisis of authority, Bolívar had undermined Santander who had long been acting president of the Gran Colombia, setting off the conflict between the two. He conceived of a new state to take the place of the Gran Colombia, and supported Páez in his dispute with Santander. Frank concedes Bolívar’s guilt, presenting him as standing against the law, Santander, and the union of the Gran Colombia. Yet he also comes back to defend Bolívar, as in fact figures like Belaúnde do, as an individual essentially heroic whose positions from 1825 on were lapses, prompted by human weaknesses, most notably the vanity encouraged by an overindulging, mothering Manuela Sáenz, and by the Liberator’s distance from the people of the Gran Colombia.
One important way in which Frank defends Bolívar is by questioning the basis of a view of Santander and Bolívar constructed, as we will see in the following chapter, by Liberals in the Colombia of the 1930s and 1940s. What of Santander as the statesman who embodies the law and Bolívar as the military leader who flouts procedure? Frank argues that this view was conceived negatively, on the basis of allegedly illegal acts performed by Bolívar, rather than “legal” ones performed by Santander, who at an earlier moment had in fact agreed with Bolívar that a greater good lay in the strong executive privilege afforded by Act 128 of the Cúcuta Constitution granting the executive extraordinary measures as circumstances might require with the consent of the congress or on his own if the congress is not in session.28 Against Colombian Liberals’ newly idealized law-bearing Santander, Frank recuperates a familiar image of Santander that his recent champions had sought to shunt aside, that of the figure portrayed by Bolívar, that is, the leader who is master of party politics. To build up this image of him for his Pan American public, he likens Santander to the leaders of Tammany Hall, the name given to the Democratic machine that dominated New York City politics from the 1850s through the 1940s, Santander a forerunner of the proverbial politician of modern industrial democracies gone amuck. Santander panders to the people, we are told, offering the roads and administration they want rather than the unity they need and can only obtain through sacrifice. In contrast, Bolívar, visionary that he purportedly is, having a commitment to the greater union that was Colombia and beyond, never gives up on his concept of a unified Latin America, refusing to curry favor with a “public” that is only able to see and understand those things that are immediate. Here, in a gesture typical of the modernist intellectual for whom politics is a lowly activity, Frank defines Bolívar as transcendent, alleging that he rose above the political, while he defines Santander as “mundane.” It is accepted that during his dictatorship Bolívar played politics with Catholicism, banning from the university curriculum the secularist Bentham whom he, in fact, admired. But for Frank, Bolívar makes no concessions to the political or material, remaining true to his vision of “spiritual” unity, a vision that increased his stature for posterity but decreased it for his contemporaries. Freud continues to be important as he uses the category of the ego to describe Santander and Bolívar. Contrasting the two figures, he presents Bolívar’s ego as being housed within a tradition—the Hispanic—whereas he describes Santander’s ego as existing alone, there being no, let us say, cultural superego to which it is subordinated or that it must mediate.
Frank’s Bolívar, as we are seeing, was the bearer, then, not of Enlightenment ideas, or of modern democracy, as Rómulo Betancourt hoped it would when he invited Frank to produce the work, but rather of a Hispanic Catholic theocratic tradition predating the secular state. Other writers and intellectuals, in using the Bolivarian legacy, had spoken of the rivalry of Bolívar and Santander with regard to the nature and viability of the Gran Colombia. Frank, as we have seen, was doing something different. As he explicitly states at the end of his narrative, he sees in the two the destiny of Latin America. This would be a Latin America defined by the battle of civilization and barbarism, with either Venezuela or Colombia prevailing.
As we said at the beginning of this discussion, it was all about 1948, the year of the military coup in Venezuela against Gallegos and of the bogotazo in Colombia which occurred in reaction to the assassination of the populist Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, just days after the start of the Ninth International Conference of American States at which US Secretary of State George Marshall gave the opening speech. Never mind Gaitán, Frank interprets this event, which initiated the ten-year period in Colombian history known as La Violencia—a period that would establish the conditions of polarization that would be in evidence in Colombia for decades ahead—as a sign of a Colombia that was essentially barbaric. What is more, Frank represents it as part of a tradition clearly identifiable with Santander, the result not only of what he sees as Colombia’s modern-day factionalist political structure, but also when seen historically from within his Pan Americanist frame, of, to be sure, the Tammany Hall-like political apparatus that had allegedly been put in place by Santander a good century before, in the 1820s and 1830s. Santander, as Frank writes, had sent Colombia on a course quite different from the one purportedly followed by the rest of Latin America, above all Venezuela, where leadership and the so-called volk had not drifted apart, still tied together by a common Catholic and aesthetic spirit. Frank describes Juan Vicente Gómez as having had a connection to that common spirit, just as he does certain Venezuelan writers. Herein, precisely in the distance between the nation’s elites and the volk or masses, lay the reason for the political factionalism and civil war that had wreaked havoc on Colombia.
Frank was not alone in deploying Santander in this way, as Masur similarly used him as a straw man to formulate his iteration of Bolívar. Masur, borrowing the title from Vallenilla Lanz’s 1919 work, describes Bolívar’s 1828–1830 dictatorship as a form of democratic Caesarism, presenting his authority as emanating from military leaders and from parts of the bureaucracy. He goes on to characterize the individuals behind the assassination attempt as Jacobins, some having come directly from France even. And Santander, in his role as Colombian ambassador to the United States, was one who had the legal duty, never mind the moral one, to report what he knew to Bolívar. Santander confessed, Masur states, that he did in fact have knowledge of the assassination plans.29 As for Bolívar, Masur celebrates him for commuting the execution sentence handed down by the military court, presenting his decision as a reflection of Bolívar’s ability to overcome the human desire for revenge and as an example of reason vanquishing passion, though also stating that there was a practical end—avoiding an uprising among the people.
The two drew from both the Venezuelan and Colombian traditions, where the Bolívar-Santander binary had long existed as a major critical axis for national politics. Writing when they were, though, they were following the Venezuelan interpretive line that goes through Vallenilla Lanz and all the way to Hugo Chávez, who in the early years of his presidency compared the then president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, to Santander.30 As Chávez had it, both Uribe and Santander were guilty of betraying Latin America to the United States: Santander, when he invited US representatives to attend the 1826 conference organized by Bolívar in Panama; Uribe, in his support of Plan Colombia. This program signed by Bill Clinton and Andrés Pastrana in 1999 and after 2015 known as Peace Colombia has had as its stated goal terminating coca cultivation and providing military training to the Colombia armed forces to end armed conflict.
Finally, to formally pose the question whose answer may already be obvious, what of Rómulo Betancourt? How would he have regarded Frank’s biography? Betancourt, who, as we know, found himself in exile (in Washington, New York, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico), embattled with Pérez Jiménez and also with the Venezuelan Communist Party, which saw him as a sell-out, would have hardly been pleased. To the contrary, he would have felt betrayed, having invited Frank to assist in the construction of a democratic Venezuela based on political parties only to see him follow the lead of the generals who ousted him from power, producing a Pan American Bolívar who stood for dynastic law and attacking, through his narrative about Colombia and Santander, democracy as a viable system in Latin America. His positive statement about Juan Vicente Gómez as representing a principle of stability would have been particularly disturbing. Venezuela, in Frank’s account, was to lead the way in the hemisphere still, but hardly in the manner hoped for by this major Venezuelan politician who returned to Venezuela to win the 1959 elections—after the military coup ousting Pérez Jiménez in 1958 had cleared the way for them. As we will see in the next chapter, Frank’s tome did not go unanswered.