Reclaiming Americanism, the Spirit of the Land

Note: All credit for historical references to Greg Grandin and his latest book, America, América: A New History of the New World. All quotes are from that book.

Amidst the hype and mixed emotions associated with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, let’s use the opportunity for something constructive. As an antidote to efforts to cancel out history in favor of remythologizing, I continue to be interested in learning history and unmythologizing the American story. Why? So that I can better understand the present insanity, loosen my own sense of entitlement, and be in deeper solidarity with all of humanity.

Reflecting on the anniversary opens up a lot of territory. In accepting the challenge, I’m going to explore a rather large topic I can’t do full justice to in a short post, so be forewarned. Despite the present insanity and the polarization, I’d like to suggest that there is still something we can think of as Americanism. It’s an underlying spirit, a possibility, a potential. Two hundred and fifty years ago the whole of the New World was colonized, contested ground. Liberation movements were everywhere and that energy was not epitomized by “founding fathers” and other colonists, but by those opposing colonization.

The most dedicated and sincere freedom fighters on this continent were the Native Americans themselves, the enslaved Africans and African-Americans, and, the focus of this piece, the leaders of Latin American independence.

The Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian Greg Grandin has a knack of contrasting Latin America’s revolutionary leaders with their U.S. counterparts. In his latest book, America, América: A New History of the New World, he includes the story of the First International Conference of American States, held from late 1889 to early 1890 in Washington, D.C. It’s clear in the full context leading up to the gathering, as well as at the meeting itself, that the leaders of the new Latin American republics were interested in forging a new path, one not based on conquest and domination. They were interested in America, the whole of the continent, representing a new approach to international relations. They wanted the recognition, not only of national sovereignty, but of equality among nations, irrespective of size and military and economic power.

At a time when existing international law legitimized “the right of conquest,” and the United States had used it liberally to justify its settler-colonialism, the Latin Americans came to Washington to demand an outright renunciation of its legality and legitimacy. Freedom, for them, meant freedom for all, irrespective of race, and by 1850, all the former Spanish colonies had abolished slavery.

Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Origins of Universalism

It was, after all, in the New World where Europe was first confronted with the oneness of humanity and the devastating contradictions inherent in colonialism. That confrontation traces back to the indigenous peoples themselves of course—their innate humanity, their attempts at negotiation and peacemaking, and their resistance, let us never forget that!

It also traces back to people like the Spanish priest, Bartolomé de las Casas, who, in 1512 accompanied a Spanish expedition to deepen the domination of Cuba. Along the way he witnessed massacre after massacre, and it was the sight of mass death, suffering, and spilled entrails that hastened his conversion into one the earliest and most well-known European critics of the Spanish Empire. Fueling his scathing criticism was the understanding that, very contrary to the accepted beliefs of the day, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were human beings just like himself.

Las Casas’s famous account of the Spanish Conquest, A Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies, was written in 1542, and upon publication, was quickly translated into English, French, German, Dutch, and Italian. Despite living in the midst of one of the most violent periods of Old World history, with wars that lasted a hundred years, with systemic mass murder and torture, las Casas believed the violence being perpetrated in the New World was worse: “The Spanish came like starving wolves, tigers, and lions, and for four decades have done nothing other than commit outrages, slay, afflict, torment, and destroy.”

According to Grandin’s sources, there were at least thirty-seven editions of the book printed in England between the late 1500s and the middle of the 1600s. The word was out: “Only someone who despises God and was an enemy of nature would dare to write that the great mass of people who lived on the other side of the ocean were barbarians, savages, lacking reason.” And in a later work, “all the things that have been done so far in the Indies…such as the subjection and bondage of the inhabitants, have been a violation of natural law and human law, as well as divine law.” The entire Conquest “is unjust…tyrannical, and worthy of the fires of hell.”

Of interest to anyone today supporting reparations and restorative justice, las Casas “pushed for atonement…as a collective ritual…focused on the empire’s greatest crimes against humanity,” with the failure to make reparations a mortal sin. “As early as the 1520s, las Casas had also rejected all excuses for depriving Africans of their freedom.”

Las Casas was a force to be reckoned with, and well beyond his death in 1556, his writings were widely read across the political spectrum. Imperialists throughout Europe read him to defend against and discredit him. Spanish authorities destroyed his books and executed his followers. The idea of restitution and reparation was especially galling. Future American revolutionaries of all stripes were certainly familiar with his work. For Latin Americans, with their emancipatory universalism, the resonance is clear. One must wonder, however, what the future North Americans were left with when confronted with the prospect of granting full humanity and rights to native peoples?

Viva la Revolución

From las Casas, we fast forward over 200 years to Venezuela and the revolutionary spirit of Francisco de Miranda, an early instigator of South America’s liberation from Spain who fought on the side of the revolutionaries in the U.S. Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, and the Spanish American wars of independence. For his fighting spirit and vision of a united, independent post-colonial Spanish America, he’s been called “the Great Universal American.”

In 1783 Miranda fled to the U.S. to avoid Spanish persecution. While he spent most of his time in exile in London, he traveled widely in the U.S., studying the new republic—its democratic framework, society, and landscapes—all the while building networks in support of the liberation of Spanish America. Miranda not only wanted U.S. support for overthrowing the Spanish Empire, he wanted George Washington to lead the charge. To that end, he plotted with Alexander Hamilton, sent John Adams a lengthy proposal, and met with Thomas Jefferson. In the end, the North Americans were unwilling to formally sponsor an expedition but allowed Miranda to raise funds and recruit from private sources. He set sail out of New York Harbor on February 2, 1806 with only a small force, and upon landing in Venezuela, nearly all his men were captured by Spanish troops. Miranda himself managed to escape back to London.

In 1805, about the time Miranda was lobbying Jefferson for revolutionary support, Simón Bolívar was pledging himself to the full liberation of Spanish America. In 1810, at the age of twenty-seven, Bolívar sailed to London to convince the sixty-year-old to Miranda to rejoin the fight against a now weakened Spain. Their return to Venezuela was a turning point in this phase of the revolution, resulting in the creation of the First Republic of Venezuela and the region’s first Declaration of Independence on July 5, 1811.

The Spanish imperialists were far from done however, and but for the tenacity of Simón Bolívar, history may have turned out quite differently. Born in Venezuela to a family with roots in American soil going back centuries, the man known throughout Latin America as The Liberator, was, like las Casas, a force to be reckoned with. With Miranda as a mentor, and inspired by his grand vision, Bolívar committed himself to the fight for a united post-colonial America, and to that end, he waged bloody “war to the death” with Spain and its homegrown royalists. Bolívar, widely considered one of the most daring and consequential revolutionaries in history, along with his allies, went on to defeat the Spanish conclusively in present day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela, Peru, and Bolivia. Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama were later merged into the Republic of Colombia (Gran Colombia), with Bolívar as president there, as well as in Peru and Bolivia (1).

The Americans Meet

Now, with a little more revolutionary context, we return to 1889 and the First International Conference of American States. The Latin American delegates arrived believing that the whole of the New World had a providential role to play in history, and they were determined to continue their long battle for liberation. They dared to imagine a world organized around a “community of nations enjoying equal rights and protections.”

They fought bloody wars to win independence—wars with death tolls far exceeding those of the U.S. war of independence—and in the aftermath assumed control over devastated populations and economies. Their countries faced widespread domestic turmoil, much of it associated with colonialism’s legacy. Like Bolívar before them, “they dreamed that domestic politics might be stabilized if only the hemispheric order could be stabilized.” To that end, they came to D.C. “carrying arguments gleaned from decades of thinking about international law and what an American system should look like,” and they dared to call their set of ideals American International Law.

They were not naive. In the early days of revolution, Latin American leaders held out hope that the United States would prove itself a strong anti-colonial ally. But experience had already taught, that while the Latin Americans valued personal freedom combined with social solidarity, for the North Americans, freedom was individualistic on the domestic level and equally self-centered internationally. In part based on the unrestrained and cutthroat nature of U.S. territorial and economic expansion, the Latin Americans clearly understood that they needed regional solidarity in order to remain free, not so much from Europe any longer, but from the United States.

Still, they came with their call for universalism. In the words of Argentinian delegate Roque Sáenz Peña, “Sea la América para la humanidad!” (Let America be for humanity!). Ecuador’s José Plácido Caamaño, pointed out that international law had taught us how to “make war on each other.” Have “we Americans not the right” to teach ourselves how to make peace?

It’s clear that with the Monroe Doctrine already projecting hemispheric supremacy for 75 years, and poised as it was to move from western expansion to overseas empire, the U.S. was not about to repudiate conquest and join in the call for solidarity. As Grandin quips, “Thus began a long tradition of Washington standing against the majority in multi-lateral meetings.”

In 1898, not long after this conference, the U.S. opened up the throttle on its imperialism, declaring, and in short order winning, a war on Spain, taking its island colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Cuba was granted “nominal independence,” under a system of racial segregation, and with a clause granting the U.S. “the right to intervene in the nation’s affairs at will.” From there, imperialism morphed into global hegemony and the nation’s elite have never looked back.

In the end, the world was left with what seemed to be two Americas.

America of the South is called

To defend the true liberty,

The new idea, the divine morality,

The holy law of love and charity.

The world lies prostrate in deep darkness

In Europe, despotism dominates

In America of the North, selfishness,

Thirst for gold, and hypocritical piety.

— José María Torres Caicedo, Colombian poet, 1857

The Chilean Francisco Bilbao, wrote that Latin Americans love “everything that unites. We prefer the social over the individual, beauty over wealth, justice over power, art over calculation, duty over interest.” Bilbao, who devoted the last decade of his life to fighting U.S. imperialism, lamented, that the birth of the United States had “caused rejoicing on the part of a sorrowing humanity”…, but now “the Yankee has replaced the American… and self-interest has supplanted justice.”

Simón Bolívar’s view, summed up already in an 1829 letter to a British diplomat, was prophetic, The United States “seem destined by Providence to plague America with torments in the name of liberty” (2).

Grandin concludes the theme by writing, “what has often been taken for ‘anti-Americanism’ in Latin America is better thought of as a competing version of Americanism.”

Reclaiming the Promise

Latin America, born in opposition to empire, grew up and had its adolescence, despite its desire for neighborliness, in opposition to the United States.

The values inherent in that opposition have, in turn, influenced the United States, and indeed the world. This is manifested in the eventual creation of, for example, the Organization of American States, the League of Nations, and the United Nations, where, as the largest voting block at the time, Latin Americans championed regional security, multilateralism, and human rights.

In the lead up to the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, let us remember that America can still mean the entire continent—there is no natural dividing line and there is a long history that links us politically, economically, psychologically, and spiritually.

Let us remember the beauty of the earlier vision, “The New World will be the synthesis of all the old worlds that came before, the meeting place of all the elements of humanity, north and south, east and west, the Black, the Indian, the White” (Francisco Bilbao).

While this can seem like pie in the sky in the MAGA era, let’s remember that the current insanity can’t last. However long imperialism’s arc, it does not represent the future. The jury has been in on that since at least the 1500s with Bartolomé de las Casas. Reality is radically interconnected and one way or another, reality will have the last word. If there is to be a future worth living it will be one of peace, justice, and solidarity.

There is still the promise, still the voices of the ancestors, still the spirit of the land.

Notes

1. I highly recommend Marie Arana’s captivating biography, Bolívar: American Liberator.

2. Venezuela has long been a thorn in the side of U.S.imperialism. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez evoked the legacy of Simón Bolívar when first elected president of the country in 1998 and throughout his three full terms. For Chávez, continuing the Bolivarian Revolution was a guiding programmatic principle that sought to implement state-led economic policies, build social welfare programs to benefit the country’s impoverished majority, and promote inter-American cooperation and anti-imperialism.