Have you ever learned something in your older years that was briefly touched on in your early school years, yet you were hearing an entirely different point of view about that particular "something" that was being discussed?
Or, have you ever talked with an individual from a different country and learn just how much different your life is from theirs?
Have you ever felt ashamed when you've met somebody new, or from a different country, who is totally confused by what we are saying or they are seeing?
I answered YES to all of the above questions. I had learned in my own life... But I had learned so much more just by reading the Introduction to this new book, which, hopefully, will become a textbook for public schools in the United Stats... I knew it before, but I'm saying it here, the United States has become and is becoming even more so, such an insulated nation, that we are becoming what we never wantd to be...
The type of countries that we, or our ancestors, had left, to come to a free land where we would have all that we had lost under tyrannical or authoritarian country leaders...
This new book is just out.
Hopefully this will be a new beginning for a North America AND a South America...
Yes, we worked to earn a reputation of being a free nation, welcoming the immigrants, responding to needs...but, in reality, there has always been an underbelly of unease... Those who lived it, wondered why it was... Or how did we get here? Or why we never heard at least a basic overview of issues in our public schools... I quickly want to say that it certainly was not the teachers who did not do their job... Let's begin by just reminding everybody that banning books has been a part of the issues for as long as I can remember. And that's a long time! Why is it that the United States, even while moving forward in so many ways, yet lack stability--that united front--that has never been totally accepted, or at least acknowledged, as a known accepted basis of Truth for the nation?
I'm not going to comment on this excerpt, other than to highlight what I learned... You will see that I had to acknowledge that I had never thought about the fact that we refer, naturally, to South America on a global basis...but, that, we never really understood what that meant to the people living there, versus, those who live in North America... At first, that was accepted, even while many things done by our early settlers, especially against the indigenous natives, was totally unacceptable... But, what it seems to have happened is that, whatever reason that drove people to leave their homes and move to North America, never really was forgotten. Rather those individual grievances and fears festered underneath or out in the open... We may have claimed our land and built our homes...
But we never really accepted that our (MY!) land was part of YOUR land as well...
As you read, begin to consider who you are as you consider who and where you live...
Introduction: On the Utility of Magpies
The traveler sat silently in Quaker meetings for hours during the day and visited brothels at night. In Philadelphia, he watched a raucous crowd welcome the arrival of George Washington, with men, women, and children as ecstatic as if “the redeemer had entered Jerusalem.” General Washington, the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda wrote in his journal, was magnificent in his bearing and grace. He embodied virtue, and focused all the New World’s desires for independence into a single flame—a flame, Miranda said, that belonged to all America.[1] Miranda, as a colonel in the Royal Spanish Army, had already fought on the side of the North American rebel colonists during the bloody siege of Pensacola. He would later go on to defend the French Revolution and lead one of Spanish America’s first independence movements.
Now, in the middle of 1783, he was beginning a yearlong tour of the new United States. Miranda wanted to see how the world’s first modern republic fared. He spoke with tradesmen, farmers, and Revolutionary War veterans. In New York’s Hudson Valley, he waxed lyrical about the sweet “grasses of the field” and mistakenly assumed the Catskills were North America’s highest point. He dined in gentry estates even as he noticed much hardship amid the wealth. Many of New York’s Dutch-speaking farmers couldn’t afford shoes, while the well-off, men and women alike, adorned themselves with silks, perfumes, pomades, and powders. The money spent on such “vanity,” he noted, would cover a year’s interest on the new country’s war debt. New York’s politicians and preachers professed abolition, Miranda noted, yet slavery still existed in the state. “The number of Negroes is large.”
In Boston, he was introduced to Phillis Wheatley, a formerly enslaved West African woman who had won her freedom and became a celebrated poet only to die penniless. Miranda cited Wheatley as proof that all humans, regardless of color or sex, were rational beings. Miranda’s family in Caracas owned slaves, as did Miranda himself. They lugged around his famous library, many bundles of papers and an ever growing number of books. While in Philadelphia, he purchased the indenture of a Scottish boy who had arrived in port on a ship carrying over three hundred shackled Africans. But Miranda would soon embrace the abolitionist cause, as part of a broader belief that all the subjugated peoples of the Americas should be liberated, including Native Americans. When the New World was finally free, Miranda suggested, it might be called Columbia, with the English-language u instead of the Spanish o (as in Colombia), a spelling he picked up from Wheatley’s ode to Washington: “Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light, Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.”[2] The Venezuelan thought both Native Americans and women were more oppressed in the new English-speaking republic than in colonial Spanish America. In the United States, the wives of revolutionary leaders were forced into a “monastic seclusion, and such submission to their husbands as I have never seen.” Boston’s General John Sullivan, who gained fame pacifying the British-allied Iroquois, kept “his wife and numerous children completely segregated from society and without giving the latter formal education.” Miranda, his journal pages full of detailed sexual encounters, was appalled when a Shelter Island parson refused to baptize a baby conceived prior to wedlock.[3] In New Haven, Yale’s president, Ezra Stiles, gave him a tour of the university. Miranda sat in on a Hebrew lesson, which he enjoyed, and was pleased that Optics and Algebra were taught “simply and naturally.” He was shocked, though, that the university offered no modern-language instruction, a bad omen for educating modern citizens, thought Miranda (who spoke English, French, and Italian, and read Greek and Latin). Nor was he impressed by Yale’s library: “nothing special.” He read Cotton Mather’s history of New England as “curious evidence of fanaticism.” And kept himself busy in Sunday New England with a pack of playing cards and flute practice, which violated strict Sabbath restrictions. No kite flying either. Stiles, in his own journal, called Miranda a “flaming son of liberty.”[4] Miranda took in the full variety of the new republic. He was welcomed everywhere he went, though he was often mistakenly introduced as a Mexican. Most men were polite but also, he thought, “unsocial,” or huraño, that is, aloof and disinterested in the wider world. Some of the people he met did ask questions about Spain’s American empire. Others proved stubbornly ignorant. In Providence, Miranda visited the estate of Esek Hopkins, who had commanded the rebel navy during the Revolution. Miranda made mention of Mexico City and was surprised to hear Commodore Hopkins respond by saying that there was no such place. A century earlier, New England Puritans had been entranced by Mexico City, the command center of New World popery, with its wide cobbled streets, many horses, and fine carriages. Now, when Miranda tried to correct Hopkins, the Commodore refused to believe him. “Very vulgar,” Miranda wrote in his journal of the encounter. He found most of the university presidents he met to be equally provincial and pedantic. Miranda admired the United States, its dynamism, and early steam power. He liked the psalm singing of Methodists and the organ playing of Episcopalians but was taken aback at how strictly religious most people were. He thought river baptisms absurd, that they indicated a stubborn literal-mindedness. There was too much pulpit “braying” of hatred directed at Jews, Catholics, and Muslims. Miranda singled out one parson for praise, James “Redemption” Murray, who preached that there was no such thing as damnation. “Salvation was universal,” Murray said, which Miranda found refreshing compared to Catholic and Protestant brimstone. Miranda was catching the first notes of the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival movement that went in many directions. There was the harshness Miranda criticized, but also a passion for political reform, for making the United States a vital, healthy, democratic, and energetic nation. He was repulsed by the return of Cotton-Matherism, but compelled by the energy, by the expectation, the scent of something new on the morning wind. And he shared with many of the leading figures in the Awakening the conviction that America, which for him meant all of America, was history’s redeemer.[5] One gets a sense from Miranda’s diary that he hoped the new United States would overcome the problems he recorded: poverty, slavery, the subordination of women, a tendency toward antisociability, and an occasional flash of unflattering self-regard. The diary also makes clear that Miranda wasn’t sure that it could. — “South America will be to North America,” declared the North American Review early in the 1800s, “what Asia and Africa are to Europe.”[6] Not quite. Europe’s liberal capitalist powers—Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands—would rule over culturally and religiously distinct peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. British travelers to India made much of the impenetrability of Hinduism, with its jumble of noises, colors, deities. “There is no dignity,” said E. M. Forster after entering a temple to witness a celebration of the birth of Krishna, “no taste,” in what Indians call ritual. Only chaos. Forster was overcome by India’s mulligatawny metaphysics, the barrage of chants, ecstatic dancing, and indecipherable music. “I am very much muddled in my own mind about it,” he wrote. Forster worked the experience into his novel A Passage to India, writing that nothing the worshippers did seemed “dramatically correct” to the non-Hindu observer. It was, he thought, a jumble, a “frustration of reason and form.”[7] There was no frustration, not of reason nor form, when English and Spanish Europeans, Protestants and Catholics, engaged with one another in the New World. Miranda saw the differences separating Boston and Caracas society, but they didn’t muddle his mind. An indifferent Catholic, he didn’t like Protestant braying. But as a Christian, he understood the theology of the brayer. The republican insurgents who broke from Great Britain defined their system of liberties against what became known as the Black Legend, a compound of negative stereotypes that held the Catholic Spanish Empire to be especially cruel and corrupt. The Legend, though, was legible, emerging from Europe’s political rivalries and religious schisms, its scientific revolutions, renaissances, and enlightenments. When on one Sunday in 1774, future presidents George Washington and John Adams wandered into Philadelphia’s new Catholic Cathedral, they appreciated the priest’s sermon on the duty of parents to care for the spiritual and temporal well-being of their children. Adams, though, in a letter posted to his wife, Abigail, said that he was dismayed at the servility of the congregants, as they fingered their beads, crossed themselves with holy water, and chanted Latin incantations. A painting of “our Savior” in his “agonies,” blood streaming from his wounds, appalled him. So did the Church’s dominion over the senses: “Everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear, and imagination”—organ music, Latin prayers, stained glass, velvet and gold cloth covering the pulpit, the lace of priests’ vestments, candles, crucifixes, and statues of the saints—combine to “bewitch the simple and ignorant.” “I wonder how,” he wrote to Abigail, “Luther ever broke the spell.”[8] The freethinker Adams’s contempt for Catholic superstition mirrored the freethinker Miranda’s for Protestant fanaticism, and later, when Adams searched for some way to describe Francisco Miranda’s revolutionary enthusiasms, he reached for a satire that all literate people in the Americas, of a certain class, had read, either in its original Spanish or its many English translation editions: Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The Venezuelan, Adams said, was “as delirious as his immortal countryman, the ancient hero of La Mancha.”[9] There was an intimacy to such disdain, with both disdainer and disdained living in the same ideological village, sharing the same Savior, the same republican patois, reading each other’s books. Adams might have thought Miranda, and other Spanish Americans of his generation, foolish. But they were not inscrutable. They were not the incomprehensibles Forster found in Krishna’s temple. American insurgents, whether they spoke English or Spanish, inherited a set of common assumptions related to the dominance of Christianity and the fight against monarchism. They were mostly all republicans. Some were loosely deists, in one fashion or another, and most were Freemasons, some more anticlerical than others. And they all believed that the right to govern required the consent of the governed, even if that consent needed to be overseen by a caste of elites schooled in the virtues of civic republicanism. The men who would topple the Spanish Empire in the Americas felt they had a kindred spirit with their English-speaking counterparts. They looked to the North American revolution for inspiration, hoping that once Spain was thrown off they might replicate its system of liberties, representative government, and equality under the law. In any case, they shared a faith in the redeeming power of the New World, that America was more an ideal than a place. Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson could at times sound as if they had fallen into a cataleptic trance as they prophesized the future. “It is impossible not to look forward to distant times,” Jefferson wrote, when the United States will “cover the whole Northern, if not the Southern continent with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms.” Bolívar imagined himself flying “across the years” to a moment when America had united the world under a system of rational laws, with the Isthmus of Panama a planetary capital, binding north and south, linking east and west. Greece and Rome had its laws and philosophies, but, really, asked Bolívar, what was “the Isthmus of Corinth compared with that of Panama?”
Miranda conspired with Alexander Hamilton to liberate all South America, believing their escapades would “save the whole world, which is oscillating on the brink of an abyss.” And yet. When Jefferson and Adams used the word America, they were referring to the United States. When Bolívar, Miranda, and other Spanish American republicans used the word America, they meant all the Americas. “Our dear Country America, from the North to the South,”
Miranda wrote Hamilton. — Who is an American? And what is America? These questions go back a long way. “I that am an American,” affirmed Cotton Mather in the early 1700s. In 1821, the radical Catholic priest Servando Teresa de Mier—born in northern Mexico to a family that traced its lineage back centuries to the first dukes of Granada—also thought himself an American. Having escaped the dungeons of the Inquisition, Mier had set up a printing house in Philadelphia to publish books banned by Spain. He complained, in a letter he sent to a revolutionary compatriot, about the way English speakers used the word America. There were two problems, actually. The first was the constant equation of Spanish American with South America. Mier was tired of pointing out to his English-speaking acquaintances that North America was also Spanish America—that there were more Spanish speakers in Mexico (which at that point ran well into what is today the United States’ Southwest) than in all South America.[10] The second problem was that each European empire used the word America to refer only to their colonial or former colonial possessions. Great Britain called the United States America, Spain called its colonies America, Portugal referred to Brazil as America, France and the Dutch did the same for their Caribbean islands. It is as if, Father Mier said, “there is no other America other than the one they dominate.” “A thousand errors,” he said, lamenting how America was fractured by such usage. All the New World is America. Confusion was natural. America, for Anglo settlers before their revolution, was both the entire New World and their sliver of that world—both their narrow dominion of a thin slip of land between the Alleghenies and the sea and all the land west of those mountains.
In 1777, the Articles of Confederation named the new country the United States of America, but also referred to it as just America. Europeans liked to point out that the “United States” wasn’t really a “proper name” but rather an adjective attached to a generic noun. Washington Irving agreed. Irving wanted “an appellation” of his own to ensure that he wasn’t confused with a Mexican who by rights could also call himself an American. He wanted a name that would identify him as “of the Anglo-Saxon race which founded this Anglo-Saxon empire in the wilderness.” He suggested Appalachian or Alleghanian. The New England social activist Orestes Brownson thought such ideas rubbish. The “name of the country is America,” he wrote in 1865, “that of the people is Americans. Speak of Americans simply and nobody understands you to mean the people of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, but everybody understands you to mean the people of the United States.”[11] Brownson was right at least about royal Canadians, who tended not to call themselves Americans to distinguish themselves from their English-speaking republican neighbors. But Mexicans, Brazilians, Peruvians, Chileans, and Paraguayans all thought themselves Americans, as did the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda. Nosotros los Americanos—We, the Americans—was how early Mexican nationalists called themselves. Somos da América e queremos ser americanos, said Brazil’s republican leaders, who wanted to overthrow their monarch: We are from America and want to be Americans.[12] Proprietary claims to America became politicized over time, serving as stand-ins for struggles about more substantive issues. “We’ve lost the right to call ourselves Americans,” the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano wrote in 1971. “Today, for the rest of the world, America means nothing but the United States. We inhabit at best a Sub-America, a second-class America of confused identity.” “We are more American,” goes a song by the Mexican norteño band Los Tigres de Norte “than the sons of the Anglo-Saxons.” Los Tigres are a favorite of migrant and borderland workers, suggesting the matter is not just a concern of literate elites.
In 1943, the diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis struggled to decide what adjective he should use to refer to the United States, reluctantly settling on American. It sounds better, Bemis wrote, than “the less euphonious adjective United States.” Latin Americans will occasionally refer to the United States as América del Norte, but generally use Estados Unidos and estadounidense, which in Spanish with all its rolling vowels is euphonious, mellifluent even.[13]
— I’ve written this book not to fuss over names but rather to explore the New World’s long history of ideological and ethical contestation. Philosophers use the phrase immanent critique to describe a form of dissent in which challengers don’t dismiss the legitimacy of their rivals’ worldview but rather accuse them of not living up to their own stated ideals. It’s a useful method for considering the Western Hemisphere, for Latin America gave the United States what other empires, be they formal or informal, lacked: its own magpie, an irrepressible critic. Over the course of two centuries, when Latin American politicians, activists, intellectuals, priests, poets, and balladeers—all the many men and women who came after Miranda—judged the United States, they did so from a shared first premise: America was a redeemer continent, and its historical mission was to strengthen the ideal of human equality. One can’t fully understand the history of English-speaking North America without also understanding the history of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America. And by that history, I mean all of it: from the Spanish Conquest and Puritan settlement to the founding of the United States, from Indian Removal and Manifest Destiny to the taking of the West, from chattel slavery, abolition, and the Civil War to the rise of a nation of extraordinary power—from the First World War to the Second, from the Monroe Doctrine to the League of Nations and the United Nations and beyond. And the reverse is true. You can’t tell the story of the South without the North. But America, América is more than a history of the Western Hemisphere. It’s a history of the modern world, an inquiry into how centuries of American bloodshed and diplomacy didn’t just shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also gave rise to global governance—the liberal international order that today, many believe, is in terminal crisis. The book starts with the Conquest. The astonishing brutality that Spain, in the first decades of the 1500s, visited on the people of the New World shocked the Catholic realm—Europe’s realm—leading to a reformation within Catholicism, a dissent as consequential as Luther’s. The Catholic Church claimed to be universal, the agent of human history and bearer of humanitas, all the world’s wisdom. And what had that wisdom wrought? Carnage unprecedented. The slaughter, which inaugurated what scholars place among the greatest mortality events in human history, forced theologians to consider Catholic claims to universalism with new attention. Many of these clerics wound up defending Spanish rule, not so much dehumanizing America’s native peoples as refusing to admit they were human at all. Those who died by the Spanish lance, or by European diseases, were of a lesser kind than those people who lived in Europe—defective, not touched by the divine, but rising from the muck and mire. Their dispossession and enslavement were allowed.[14] Others dissented—first among them Father Bartolomé de las Casas—realizing that what had previously been called universal was but provincial, that Europe was just a farrago of fiefdoms whose princes and priests knew nothing about the fullness of the world, nothing of its hitherto undisclosed millions. The dissent of these theologians and jurists has rung down the centuries. Protestant England paid attention to the interminable Spanish debates, to the Catholic friars who insisted on the humanity of the New World’s people, and wondered if they might secure their settlements, in Jamestown and Plymouth, on more defensible principles. They couldn’t. They opted for evasion.[15] Then came the Age of Revolutions, when the New World broke free from the Old. The United States did so first—a republic alone, as many of its leaders imagined, an “Anglo-Saxon empire in the wilderness.” Spanish American nations, in contrast, came into being collectively, an assemblage of republics, an already constituted league of nations. They had to learn to live together if they were to survive. And they largely did so, with their intellectuals, lawyers, and statesmen elaborating a unique body of international law: doctrines, precedents, and protocols geared not toward regulating but outlawing war, not adjudicating conquests but ending conquest altogether. But how to contain the United States? The hemisphere’s first republic seemed more a force of nature than a political entity. More than one of its founders said they could see no limits to its growth, that once they drove the natives beyond the stony mountains they’d soon fill both North and South America with Saxons. What to do with a kinetic nation that believed itself to be as universal as Christianity, as embodying the marching spirit of world history? What Spanish and Portuguese Americans did was update the criticisms aimed earlier at Spain during the Conquest and directed them at the United States. In so doing they sparked a revolution in international law. The triumph of liberal multilateralism after the Allied victory in World War II (especially the nullification of the right of conquest, the prohibition of aggressive war, and the recognition of the sovereign equality of all nations) is often narrated as a transatlantic story, a fortuitous evolution of ideas. Concepts in their infancy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries grew stronger in the nineteenth, matured in the twentieth century’s cataclysmic wars, and then found their moment in a series of meetings in the last years of World War II: Moscow, Tehran, Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta—onward to the establishment of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 and the UN’s ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Most scholars ignore, or pass quickly over, Latin America when considering the founding of the League of Nations, and then the United Nations. It’s a curious indifference, for the English-speaking statesmen involved in founding global governance, along with those who laid prior groundwork for such an effort—Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Carnegie, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Wallace, Sumner Welles, and Winston Churchill, among others—openly and repeatedly held up the New World as what the whole world should look like. Wilson often said that Latin America was the model for what he had hoped to accomplish in Paris. FDR told Stalin that Pan-Americanism would be a good template for a postfascist Eastern Europe.[16] America, América argues that the New World’s magpie rivalry, its immanent critique, played a vital role in the creation of the modern world, shaping its economics, politics, and moralities. The Protestant settlers who colonized, followed by the republicans who revolutionized, North America looked to Spanish America not as an alien other but as a competitor, a contender in an epic struggle to define a set of nominally shared but actually contested ideals: Christianity, freedom, law, sovereignty, property, equality, liberalism, democracy, and, above all, the very meaning of America.
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