III.2.2 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 832526
In this essay, Waldo Frank (1889–1967) offers his perspective on what he essentially considers to be two faces of the same coin: Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic America. Indeed, they are half-worlds, according to Frank, who proposes Latin America’s collectivism as a remedy for the alienation felt by the individual surrounded by industrial capitalism in the United States—or what he refers to in caustic terms as an—“exteriorized Jungle.” At the same time, the author’s viewpoint reflects some romantic notions upheld by his contemporaries, including the belief that Latin Americans—compared to North Americans—enjoy a closer relationship with nature as well as possess a heightened spirituality. Frank proposes a dichotomous frame-work—“Order Lacking Life” (North America) versus “Life Lacking Order” (Latin America)—to explain the divergent characteristics of the “half-worlds” he describes. The author included this text in America Hispana: A Portrait and a Prospect [(New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), 317–41], which was published two years after his 1929 tour of Latin America [SEE DOCUMENT I.4.3, HIS “FIRST MESSAGE TO HISPANIC AMERICA,” A SPEECH DELIVERED IN BUENOS AIRES].
Behind the symbols of gold and the machine stand two concepts of the person; and the fulfillment of these concepts is the America—Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic—in which men live today. In the North, the person, more separatistic and more wholly released from the Christian values of medieval Europe, destroyed what did not conform and created a world almost purely in his own image. Moreover, a temperate America, inhabited largely by wandering tribes, offered small resistance. From Mexico to Peru the case was otherwise. The egoistic dynamism of the Spaniard was bound by Church formula and checked by Church idealism in its universalistic phase. The Spaniard was less atomic, and vastly more receptive. And the human America he encountered was more potent, his physical America was a tumult of snow and fire, an infinite of plain and forest.1 He fused with this world, rather than destroyed it; and the world he created—although also a fragment—was more complex than that of the men in the North, his enemies the English.
In order to return more clearly to the ultimate problems of America Hispana, we dwell for a while with the North.
There is no doubt that Protestantism was earlier in the English colonies than Capitalism. There is no doubt that the concept of the primacy of the individual person, which had been lodged in Britain since [the time of the late-thirteenth-century theologian] Duns Scotus and which divergently flowered in the Protestant creeds, appears as well in Capitalism. And there is no doubt that Capitalism has adumbrated from the Protestant countries. From this series of juxtapositions, the attempt has been made to explain Capitalism as a fruit of the Protestant religion.2 It seems more precise to regard both Protestantism and Capitalism (and Democratism also) as coeval tendencies of the European soul released from the Synthesis of the Catholic Republic.
All are rationalized and sophistical forms, on different levels, of that state of heart and state of mind that we have discovered at the break of Medieval Europe. All, intricately merged, appear together throughout the dissolving fabric of feudal Europe; and not alone in the “Protestant-Capitalistic-Democratic” countries. . . . Indeed, the Enlightenment of eighteenth-century [Catholic] France shares equally with German Protestant idealism and British liberalism the honor of creating the modern capitalist and democratic era. In the south of Europe the Catholic form prevailed, and these tendencies that debouched elsewhere in Protestantism–Capitalism–Democratism, although they did not die, remained subjective.
The essence of all three terms, regarded not as institutions but as dynamic attitudes of man, has a double aspect: they are the ultimate fruit of the great Culture whose high summer was Holy Rome, and they represent, as energy, the destructive virus within that Culture. This virus worked more swiftly and directly, but not more finally, in England than in Italy and Spain. The active principle in this virus is the discrete ego, whose tendency is to be aggressive, materialistic, and rationalistic. . . .
The world that the pioneer created with his Democratized fusion of Capitalism and Protestantism is the machine culture of the twentieth-century United States. Its critical portrait has been drawn.3 Here, we can merely darken those lines which converge into the prospect of America Hispana. The chief physical and economic feature of this world is of course the machine, which was the symbol of its founders’ spirit three centuries ago. Its chief psychological feature is that the machine is master. The reason is that life in the United States, adumbrated from a false concept of the person, lacks true persons. Therefore its individuals are the victims of their dominant will as atomic and separatistic creatures. This will, embodied and rationalized by the machine, and wondrously propagated, creates a kind of exteriorized Jungle4 that is the American environment. Through this aggressive Jungle, the North American hazardously wanders in a state essentially barbaric as the state of the savage in the Brazilian Forest.
Like those other savages in the South, the North American has a religion—the first authentic religion of the United States. This religion has a vague name: Pragmatism, and a high priest, John Dewey, whom posterity may call the dominant American of the first four twentieth-century decades.
Pragmatism takes the social structure that the machine has woven, as matrix of man, chief forming agent of his destiny. This structure is, itself, an exteriorized form of certain subjective tendencies; but Pragmatism accepts it as the sole real Norm. The individual’s activity within this industrial Norm, Pragmatism would confine to processes of adjustment for survival. This principle of adjustment it calls the intelligence which at the same time it defines as a mere function of survival and adjustment within the environment. Virtually, then, Pragmatism treats this machine nature as an absolute: an absolute that is external and superior to man’s essence; and of his spirit and mind it makes a series of contingencies whose business it is to propitiate, by fitting in, this nature. Pragmatism is thus revealed as a rationale of submission to the industrial Jungle, against which it illogically asserts for man no weapon save those that the Jungle itself graciously delivers.5
Now, if we recall again that the Machine-world is an embodiment of certain impulses in man, we see why it is accurate to call Pragmatism a religion. Primitive man hypostasizes his personal will in external objects in which he worships it as absolute and prior to himself. This is called animism. And Pragmatism in its essence is an animistic religion. Thus, the civilized citizen of the United States . . . [does not only have] his Jungle, but [also has] a religion to go with it. In place of tree or totem, in which the savage worships his vital forces, the Pragmatist adores his separatistic will in machine and machine-society, believing it prior to himself, and making it truly dominant by his submission. And this will, unlike the vital forces of the savage, is not an unconscious expression of totality, but a fragment whose effect is humanly destructive. . . .
The North American is removed by his false premise of the person not alone from his soul but from his soil. His driving will cannot know self since it exploits the energy of self for fragmentary separatistic ends: and cannot know earth for the same reason. Here, too, the ravening heart has its symbol in the machine which digs into earth, and leaps it, and levels it, and weighs it; but cannot know it. Man, to achieve that conscious share in life which marks him from the sleep of the brute, needs contact of both self and soil. Contact with his true self, because self is the single source by which he can know. . . .
In the United States, the inherited forms of relationship between men, between man and woman, between parent and child, between ruler and ruled, between artist and public, between pastor and flock, have virtually disappeared. They are disappearing in Europe and America Hispana. They must disappear, since in all these worlds, from England to Chile, they are cluttered with traditional assumptions no longer valid. The arts and styles of the United States are therefore welcome, as aids in the elimination of refuse. Moreover, man will no longer accept starvation. Misery and disease that could be the norm of the masses in slave worlds and in a Christian world that bilked the problem of slavery by making Heaven democratic, is unacceptable today. Already, eighteenth-century France had learned what the Hebrew prophets knew: that the man whose body is gray with squalor cannot be bright with spirit. North America has moved at least part way toward a new high level of physical welfare, and has contributed immortally to the human spirit in universalizing the will, if not the fact, of health. This is a great strength in the eyes of the world and makes the attraction of North American values —since the admirer seldom judges—universal.
And finally, in place of the defunct moralities, Industrial Democratism in the United States has morale. Morale may be defined as a common temper or spirit rising from a people’s accepted and functioning ideals. The United States has ideals and works by them. They are not the professed ideals of any church—and the churches lack morale. They are not the ideals of scattered intellectuals and artists, who also largely lack morale. They are, however, implicit in the Constitution. They set up and move American society as a herd organized for the business of personal gain and comfort, and led by humanitarians with a devout eye on Property. . . .
Other peoples have ideals; but largely they are formed by traditional and theological words no longer valid, and speak confusedly to the folk. The folk is attached to certain values, yet sees that in their irrelevant form they do not work. Hence, its morale is shattered. There are only two nations in the world today in which common activity is adjusted to common values—only two nations with morale. They are Russia and the United States. And these are the two most influential nations, not because their ideals are accepted by the world, but because morale is invasive.
The Spaniard came to America with his lust for gold, his absolute State and his Church. His Christian charity was arrogant and brutal, but it did not destroy the world he conquered. Inquisition and sword were not such perfect instruments as the nonconformist will of the North. The wilderness he found remained, and [so did] the Indian who fulfilled it. The Spaniard merged with this America on a double level: below his creed as a beast in rut, and above his creed, as a man in love with the world that dwelt within the womb of his Indian woman.
On both these levels, he soon ceased to be a Spaniard and became American. Not of course a clear American like the Indian; but an American confused and prophetic like the Mestizo. Meantime, the State and the Church acted upon the ferment chiefly as a principle of suspension. They stopped any premature crystallization of the Mestizo; they held the Indian back from returning altogether to his secret past. The Monarchy was remote from the Colonial, yet for three centuries it forbade any experiment in native government.6 The dogmas of the Church were never real in the pampa and the Andes, but they preserved both Indian and Colonial from the chaos of the sects. Rome, although its body was inadequate to America Hispana, kept alive its spirit in all the colonial world: Universal brotherhood, the will to wholeness in thought and deed, the service to earth through the making of beauty and to Heaven through the making of justice, were assuredly not the immediate concern of the folk; but at least they never became words by which an opposite will was carried into effect. They were a presence, haunting and disembodied, throughout America Hispana: an unsubstantiated energy that took the form of the folk’s mood. Thus, while the people was devout, these ideals were the emotions of the Church. And when French and North American principles prevailed, they became the emotions of the Republic.
Only in this way can these Republics be understood. Institutionally, they are irrelevant to their world. But so were the Monarchy of Spain and the theology of Rome. As a form of ideal sentiment, they caught the vagrant Christian spirit of the people that the Church could not contain. Might not the Republic bespeak the brotherhood of men better than the Diocese? Thus, the ideal energy of the Church, since the Church body was shrunk, begat in America Hispana these ironic Republics, remote from the economic and political structure of the nations, but naïvely articulate of the romantic Christian spirit. In the United States, the Republic so perfectly configures the business of the people that its ideal sources can be forgotten. It is a working programme: an instrument of the land’s possessors. In America Hispana, the Republic as a political fact does not exist; and therefore it can still serve as an ideal gesture. In this unformed state, it holds potential values, inherited from Church tradition, which might yet make it an instrument of the folk’s regeneration.
This is conjecture: by its practice, the Republic in America Hispana7 symbolizes a discontinuity between the people’s ideals and life, which goes far deeper than politics. This discontinuity accounts for America Hispana’s want of morale. At his lowest, the Criollo or Mestizo (for reasons we have understood) lives for soft sensual enjoyment; and since his world is usually a hard one, he lives thwarted and lacks morale. More evolved, he may have the ideals of his Church. But these ideals have no enactment, and he knows it. His Church has been swept aside by the historic stream: its culture dwindles, its art is mean, its laws are shattered by science. The great world rushes on, to whatever end, despite its existence. He is humiliated in his loyalty to a spirit whose body he knows to be archaic. He is insecure and afraid. Perhaps, he believes in the Republic; then his ideal will be the romantic one of [Thomas] Jefferson and [Simón] Bolivar, and here, too, he feels the poignant discrepancy between the theory of his state and its actual motives and fulfillments. He will feel impotent as a citizen. . . . If the man of America Hispana is a Mestizo, the abyss between his spirit and his life is vast. He knows his soul; there is no place for it in Republic or Church. He knows his land; as it prevails in his race, it has no rights in the laws of the Nation. And if the man is a mestizo, the conflict between ideals and world is raised fourfold by the confusions within each.
In summary, the Hispano-American of whatever nation and whatever caste, peasant or intellectual, is devoted to ideals that have come to him in a traditional and archaic body, and the body is broken, and he has made no channel whereby its spirit, to which he is still loyal, can be brought into the modern world and re-embodied in terms of existence. He longs so greatly for actualization of his ideals—a double need, since he is the child of both Indian and Spaniard (races that need no word for cant), that he feels dispossessed in the modern world, impotent despite his high capacity, and inferior to any nation, whatever its ideals be, which has found for its spirit a form and habitation. In consequence, as a social being the Hispano-American is at his worst. Distrusting himself, he distrusts his fellows. Fear or despair or some desperate hope will be the motives of his public action. As a citizen, he is without morale.
The actionable forms of his ideals in the open world are wanting. But his spirit has its own inward body, frail though it be. As an individual, he has morale—although imperfectly, since the true person acts as a social being. The Hispano-American, unable to fulfill himself in the public body, intensifies his family devotion and comes together with harmonious-minded persons. And this is the cause of the rich group life of these countries—not alone in the Indian, but among intellectuals and cowboys, laborers and farmers. The final inadequacy of these groups when they issue into public action, perhaps by following some caudillo or by revolution, is of course due to the social formlessness of their ideals.
There are many kinds of persons in America Hispana. The cold pines of southern Chile do not harbor the same man as the palms of Cuba: the humid Amazonian air is breathed into different lungs from the thin ozone of the Andes and the wide winds of the pampa. Yet there are essential harmonies between the peoples. First of all this harmony of pathos, rising from the want and need of a morale: the common loyalty to values whose traditional forms are dispossessed by the modern world, and to the task of re-creation. . . . A harmony of birth: culturally burdened, these peoples are nationally empty, being citizens of a deliberate nation in contrast to the European who is born in a nation that is the ripened fruit of long organic culture. This willful way of birth also has its pathos, being a burden to the instinctive man. . . . A harmony of physical outlook: every Hispano-American beholds a world whose natural exuberance is overwhelming. He has made no mark on it; and this brings into his eyes another pathos of human incompletion. . . . A harmony of cultural outlook: every man of America Hispana must look forward; the Mestizo, because he has lost everything; the mestizo, because he has won nothing, and because a retrospect leads him into the pitfalls of tradition from which he must emerge. Yet neither Spain nor aboriginal America has prepared him to look forward. (Both Spaniard and Indian, we have seen, are men of the immediate and the eternal.) He is forced, by his young and deliberate world, to live in time to which he is essentially alien. This harmony of outlook leads, again, to pathos—the pathos of the man abiding forever in strangeness. All these affinities have, then, a minor key: all have lostness or longing or tragedy within them.8
But there are more positive relations linking the man of the pampa to the man of the Mexican meseta [plateau]. Whatever his condition, the Hispano-American has direct contact with his soul and his soil. (They are correlative, and go together.) If he has remained the simple Indian or Negro, the contact is intense, and can become almost maniacal with oppression. The Negro’s experience may be an instinctive indwelling as of sleep in forest and self, the Indian’s may be his archaic self-awareness as an integer of the clan whose body is the communal acre. However elementary and arrested, it is a seed of creation against the coming of some spiritual Spring which shall warm it and make it grow. Nor has this contact died in the urban classes; for the towns—even the great cities like Buenos Aires and Rio and Mexico—are immersed in their land-side, quickened by it, tuned to the economy of agriculture; and the bleakest mining village of the Andes is not cut off from its mountain, since it has not emotionally surrendered to the machine. The Church, insofar as it functions, fosters the contact both with soil and self. Christian Platonism could not live in America Hispana: the piety that leads to Heaven long since was transformed into a piety of the flesh as the visible grail of the soul. Asceticism in the North grew worldly; the cult of sacrament in the South grew earthy. The Catholic of America Hispana knows his soul as of the earth, feels them together, and enjoys them together. And the student has this intimate contact. His University, daughter of the Synthesis of Saint Thomas, is universal: which is to say, that it professes the tradition of the Whole and teaches the unity of life as an organic Sum. The intellectual, freed of the Catholic dogma, changes the focus of his vision, in most cases loses focus altogether. Yet, while he gropes for a new one, these primordial contacts and the tradition of the Whole save him from tile despair of specialization: they direct him to a creative interest in politics and economics, they make him proof against false arts lacking in the aesthetic essence, they suffuse his sense of self so as to make him receptive to philosophic and religious values.
America Hispana, even more than the United States, is a half-world. With striking symmetry it has what the North lacks and lacks what the North has made for itself. In its Indian and Catholic traditions, it has an adequate base from which to build cultural substance for intellectual, proletarian and peasant. But this transforming work it has not yet done; unlike the United States, that from the poorer base of its traditions (a Christianity splintered into sects and shriveled by false doctrines) has distilled the energy and forms of an aggressive civilization and of a working morale. The United States has achieved a public opinion potent enough to permit dissent, liberal channels of communication, stable government and commerce, leaders who reflect the popular values, and the rhythm of a folk engaged in the pursuit of its more conscious wishes. And these, in America Hispana, are lacking. Although it is full of the themes of a magnificent music, it has as yet no rhythm, which means that it is not organically living.
The United States is in danger of catastrophe, because although its speed is great its aim is poor, because the nurture of its creative life is being weakened while the proliferation of its material life which only the creative spirit can control continues; and because its morale rests on a premise of values which human experience reveals as false and sterile, so that the more it accelerates its present progress the more, certain it is to reach disaster. But America Hispana, lacking leadership and morale, is in danger of miscarriage.
The American continents present two faces of a single problem. The need of the United States is a new germinal value. From its inadequate cultural base, it has built up a solid body that is unwieldy to human intelligence and inexpressive of human spirit. Within this body, it must lodge the seed that will take unto itself the energy of the body, and burst it in transfiguration. This seed must be the fresh experience of life in its wholeness: a revelation of human fate, tragic and divine, by whose light the folk will know its present ways as false and tawdry. This revelation must be made manifest through leaders as a destiny which all the people can harmoniously gather to fulfill (the folk is always ready). It will be a change of attitude so deep and intense as to approximate in modern terms what the Saints called conversion.
To America Hispana came a rigid order instinct with a great spirit; and the order grew more rigid, and shrank, and did not hold the spirit. The people’s values have no body, and their institutional bodies—religious, political, economic—have no value. The problem, seemingly so different, is the same as that of the United States. In one place, there is order that lacks life; in the other, there is life that lacks order. But a dead order is not organic, and a disembodied life is not alive. In America Hispana there must come, by way of leaders and of leading groups, the nuclear revelation of a social form (humbly beginning) that can contain the ideals of the folk, so that the folk—made strong by it—shall feed it with energy and number. This growth in America Hispana will not, however, be conversion so much as evolution, since the old forms—Indian, Catholic, Republican—in contrast to the body of the United States, are so decrepit that any moving spirit will blow their dust away.
The North, in Industrial Democratism, has a body inadequate in base but strong in surface, that must be disrupted, probably with the aid of violent revolution. It has a tradition of wholeness which has never died, from Roger Williams to Walt Whitman, but which is weak. It is weak because in the eighteenth century, when the nation was founded, the tradition of life as an Organism had already sundered. America Hispana has no body at all. This is an advantage, perhaps, over a hard-armored body that must be broken. And America Hispana has a strong tradition of life as an organic Whole. In the Indian, the Catholic, the Spaniard, it is strong. This tradition is manifest today in the will of the Hispanic youth. The material upon which this will must work is an enormous chaos. But the way is open.
The problem in the United States is to free its impulse toward a fresh creative beginning: in America Hispana, it is to find the means to fulfillment. The problem in the North is one of religion—where the South folk are strong: the problem of the South is one of discipline, technique and method, where the North is strong. . . .
1
The English, when they reached America, settled down: it took them two and a half centuries to reach the Pacific. In fifty years, the Spaniards had explored from Chile to the Hudson River. Why this difference? The Spaniards were looking for gold: also, they wanted a world to incorporate into the Catholic Body. Therefore they pushed to its peripheries. Their religion was global; that of the English was atomic. And the English were men of work. They wanted not a cosmic body but a compact and separate colony to exploit. Nonetheless, their concept of the person was far more active and mobile than the Catholic Spaniard’s: the machine flows faster than gold. Therefore, in the long run, the pioneer went farthest and it was the Spaniard who most substantially settled down.
2
See above all the works of German [sociologist and economist] Max Weber.
3
See inter al. the works of Herbert Croly, Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, Walter Lippmann, Thomas Beer, and Lewis Mumford; and Our America and The Rediscovery of America.
4
The jungle is “exterior” not merely because it consists of objective machines and of objective machine-made institutions and machine-made arts, but also in the sense that the machine—representing the separatist will of man—is, in its effect, alien and hostile to man’s total nature that has a unifying and not a separating will. But more deeply, the jungle is “interior,” since it is a representation of a part of man. This problem of the machine and the American Jungle, etc., is detailedly analyzed in The Rediscovery of America.
5
Dewey writes: “The sense of wholeness which is urged as the sense of religion can be built up and sustained only through membership in a society which has attained a degree of unity. The attempt to cultivate it first in individuals, and then extend it to form an organically unified society, is fantasy. . . . Indulgence in this fantasy marks a manner of yearning and not a principle of construction.”
6
An exception was the Missions of the Jesuits; and the Jesuits—chiefly because of them—were ousted.
7
There may be one or two partial exceptions: Argentina, Costa Rica, Uruguay, for instance.
8
Many Hispano-American critics are beginning to analyze these affinities; and this is a good sign, since heretofore the writers have been content to feel them. I have before me an admirable book by Carlos Alberto Erro, critic of Buenos Aires: La Medida del Criollismo that has helped me in my enumeration. But there is scarcely an issue of the leading continental magazines without a contribution to this critical synthesis.