Do the Americas have a common History ?

Comparative Lecture, January 2011, Dr Guy Thomson

g.p.c.thomson@warwick.ac.uk

Introduction• CAS’s uniqueness:

• continental scope, inter-disciplinary approach (History, Film, Literature, Language)

• Yet, even CAS syllabus admits limitations in what can be practically covered: due to immense geographical and temporal scale, staff and students’ reading time, but, above all, limitations of the literature....

Warwick Syllabus• US Specialists generally keep within the US• Tim Lockley: Colonial Anglo Am and Slavery in the South• R Fagge: US Social History & McCarthy to Elvis (1950s)• T Burnard: Atlantic History & N.Am Revolutions of Independence• Jennifer Smyth: Film in the US• US Lit people also keep within US and Britain: Shapiro, Lawrence, Katz,

Dennis• • LA specialists stray sometimes across cultural boundaries:• A M.cF.: Pre-Columb. & Col. Spanish America & Independence

Revolutions in Spanish America• G Thomson: Mexico and the US Imagination – inter-cultural &

transcultural, Indians 1750-Present Pampas/Plains• Broader comparisons more practicable using thematic and cultural

approaches: R Earle’s courses on Food & Gender(Wenches & Machos), and J King’s Comp. Lit of the Ams.

Parochialism

• Historians now mostly research on regions: New England, Middle Colonies, the West, the South Mexico, Colombia

• Even “regional history” is generally based upon “local history” / “micro-history”

• Lockley: Georgia• Thomson: Puebla (Mexico) and Eastern

Andalucia• Burnard: Chesapeake & Kingston, Jamaica

Exceptionalism and Oppositionism Parochialism is also evident when viewing the wider picture. Each area defines itself by exaggerated sense of difference from the “other”:

US :“exceptionalism”......model republic, paragon of modernity, end-game for everyone else....Why bother to learn about the rest of the world. ? As for your own “back yard” ...forget it ! Black Legend about Spanish and Latin American History…….

Latin America : contempt for US materialism, lack of “history” and hypocrisy – imperialism masquerading as democracy. 1890s: Hispanismo – honour, chivalry, humanism, Catholicism -, “arielismo” versus Caliban of the North,

Yet the Hemisphere, obviously, does have a common history.....

Common History • Pre-Conquest migrations...

• Conquest and relations with Amerindians....

• European colonisation, Christianisation, Europeanisation...

• African Slavery...

• Revolution, Republicanism & Nationalism, ....

Common History• 19th Progress and Modernity ..• Indian Wars and rebellions....• Mass immigration...• .Suffrage, elections and boss rule....• Anarchism and Socialism....• Industrialisation and urbanisation....

• yet, apart from slavery and immigration, v. little comparative history or hemispheric “American” history Why ?

Travellers• Europeans made and experienced vastness of

the Americas separately and competitively....Spanish America shut off even from parts of Spain until later 18th C . Brazil & Anglo-America also unknown to each other. Hence European stereotypes endured disguising common experience and history.

• Even in 19th C travellers rarely crossed cultural boundaries.

• Anthony Trollope in 1861 just travelled within the US.

Travellers• Alexis De Tocqueville in 1830 travelled through

French and English North America but fixed always on the differences he believed to be the result of separate European legal traditions (Montesquieu):

• centralised Roman tradition versus decentralised Anglo-Saxon common law...

• contrast Anglo Americans with France....The Norman Conquest rendered England more uniform....but the environment of America allowed for reversion to form….

• “The American is the Englishmen left to himself”

Difference from Europe: sameness within America

• Sameness: “The man who you left in the streets of New York you find again in the solitude of the Far West: the same dress, the same tone of mind, the same language, the same habits, the same amusements”

• Less difference between the 1000s of miles between regions in the US than between the 10s of miles between regions in France....

Difference from Europe: sameness within America

• Yet, De Tocqueville would have found the same to be the case in Spanish America: Spanish “sameness” from Florida to Santiago de Chile !

• Different from the US, but sharing the same cultural sameness over space.....as well as its difference from Europe.

• Alan Macfarlane, The Riddle of the Modern World Of Liberty, Wealth and Equality St Martin’s, 2000

Frances Calderon de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 1843

• Scottish born, New England wife of Spain’s 1st Minister to independent Mexico, Fanny Calderon experienced both sides of the cultural divide…

• concluded that cultural differences would likely resulting in US absorbing Mexico.

• Described a “typical” town from each side of the divide

• Frances Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico (1843), Letter 37

New England Town, 1840• “If any one wishes to try the effect of strong contrast,

let him come direct from the United States to this country ….it is in the villages that the contrast is most striking. Travelling in New England…we arrive at a small and flourishing village. We see four new churches, proclaiming four different sects; religion suited to all customers… wooden…painted white, or perhaps a bright red. Hard by is a tavern with a green paling, as clean and new as the churches, and there are also various smart stores and neat dwelling houses

New England Town, 1840

• …all new, all wooden, all clean, and all ornamented with slight Grecian pillars...The whole has a cheerful, trim, and flourishing aspect. Houses, churches, stores, and taverns, all are of a piece...they will never make fine ruins. Everything proclaims prosperity, equality, consistency; the past forgotten, the present all in all, and the future taking care of itself. No delicate attention to posterity, who can never pay its debts. No beggars. If a man has even a hole in his coat, he must be lately from the Emerald Isle.” (p.355-7)

San Angel, town near Mexico City, 1840

• “Transport yourself in imagination from this New England village to… (one)… not far from Mexico (City)…The Indian huts, with their half-naked inmates, and little gardens full of flowers; the huts themselves built of clay, or the half-ruined beaux restes of some stone building. At a little distance an hacienda, like a deserted palace, built of solid masonry, with its inner patio surrounded by thick stone pillars, with great wall and iron-barred windows that might stand as siege….

San Angel, town near Mexico City, 1840

• Here a ruined arch and cross…There…the church, grey and ancient, but strong as if designed for eternity; with its saints and virgins, and martyrs and relics, its gold and silver and precious stones, whose value would buy up all the spare lots in the New England village; the lépero with scarce a rag to cover him, kneeling on the marble pavement. Leave the enclosure of the church. Observe the stone wall that bounds the road for more than a mile; the fruit trees overtopping it… with their loaded branches.

San Angel, town near Mexico City, 1840

• This is the convent orchard…the reverend old prior riding slowly from under the arched gate up the village lanes, the Indians coming from their huts to do him lowly reverence as he passes. Here everything reminds us of the past…It is the present that seems like a dream, a pale reflection of the past. All is decaying and growing fainter, and men seem trusting to some unknown future which they may never see. ” (p.355-7)

Frances Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico (1843), Letter 37

Fanny Calderon cautioned “beware lest half a century later, they be awakened from their delusion, and find the cathedral turned into a meeting house, and all painted white; the railings melted down; the silver transformed into dollars; the Virgin’s jewels sold to the highest bidder; the floor washed (which would do it no harm), and round the whole, a nice new wooden paling, freshly done in green – and all this performed by some of the artists from the wide-awake republic farther north.”

Frances Calderon de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 1843

• Anglo Americans came in 5 years, soldiers – the “new Bernal Diaz” - bearing copies of William Prescott’s Conquest of New Spain, (1843)

• Robert Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas The Mexican War in the American Imagination Oxford, 1985

“New England Village”, Jose Clemente Orozco, Library Mural, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (1930)

Modern Industry: La Constancia Mexicana (f.1830) Puebla, Mexico

Modern Industry: Lowell (Mass.) 1845

Guy Thomson, Puebla de los Angeles, Industry and Society in a Mexican City, 1700-1850, (1989)

• So, is the wider vision - comparisons across the cultural divides of the Americas - entirely left up to you ?

• fortunately, there is a wider literature of hemispheric approaches.... topic to be explored today

Rebecca Earle: The Return of the Native

Anthony McFarlane, The British in America

The Depression and Greater America

• Wall Street crash and the Great Depression prompted much reflection in US and interest in seemingly less exposed economies – and happier societies – “South of the Border” (James Oles)

• In 1930 Progressive economist Stuart Chase travelled throughout Central and Southern Mexico, publishing best-seller Mexico, A Study of Two Americas 1931

Stuart Chase, Mexico, A Study of Two Americas 1931

Stuart Chase, Mexico, A Study of Two Americas 1931

• Book contrasts active, happy, neurosis free, “machine-less man” in agricultural Tepoztlan in 1930, with the mass unemployment of neurotic “modern man” in depression-ravaged steel town of Muncie, Indiana....

• Chase advises Mexico to plan its modernisation carefully ….along decentralised lines retaining the ethic of “machineless man” of Tepoztlan..

The Bolton Thesis

• In 1932 U.Cal. historian Herbert Bolton published “The Epic of Greater America” : pleaded for historians of the American “Borderlands” to write an “epic of Greater America” on the premise that the Americas shared a common History.

• (see Bolton’s essay in Lewis Hanke, ed. Do the Americas Have a Common History ?: a critique of the Bolton theory NY, 1964 E18.H2)

The Bolton Thesis

• Bolton was reacting to US “exceptionalism”, especially to Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis”.

• In “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (AHA lecture in 1893 delivered on eve of US emergence as a global power) Turner had argued that the experience of the frontier lay at the core of the US psyche : spirit of fearless enterprise, individualism,.....

The Bolton Thesis

• Bolton asserted that the conquest of the Plains and SW was as much a consequence of Hispanic expansion starting in 16th C as it was a heroic movement of Anglo settlers coming from East. Hence, to understand the US plains and Far West it was essential to appreciate influences from the South; the encounter between Hispanics and Indians, long before Anglos arrived on the scene....

Borderlands history• Bolton presided over a boom in SW US “borderlands

history” during the 1930s and 40s. Still a rich a area: David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America New Haven, 1992, F799.W3Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (Cambridge, 2005)Yet beyond the borderlands, Bolton’s plea fell largely on deaf ears....except at Warwick ! Alistair Hennessy, Frontier in Latin American History London, 1978, F 1410.5.H3

Herbert Bolton, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, 1939

British Hispanists influenced by Bolton (1)

• Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Americas The History of a Hemisphere (2003) E 18.F3

• J.H Elliott, “ Empires of the Atlantic World Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Yale, 2006 E 18.82.E44

Professor Felipe Fernandez- Armesto, Oxford & Princeton

Atlanta police manhandle Tufts professor (Fernandez Armesto) for jaywalking

• recount story of Felipe’s arrest for disagreeing with a bus driver en route for Warwick in 1994

F-Armesto The Americas The History of a Hemisphere

• Brief (170 page) & daring overview of five centuries with great insights and demolishes many stereotypes.

• Do North Americans epitomise individualism ? No

• “People in the United States are cloyingly gregarious, profoundly communitarian, boringly conformist. They get glutinously embedded in any community they can, outside their own families: the workplace, high school and college alumni associations, the neighbourhood, the city, the church...

• …the innumerable ‘membership associations’ they all seem to belong to. Membership is treated as a religious obligation; it doesn’t matter what you belong to as long as you belong to something....Civic mindedness, not individualism, is what makes ‘America’ great.”

• As for Spanish individualism ? Look at the Conquest ! Violent bands of self-seekers...

Civic-mindedeness

• Civic-mindedeness, not individualism, was what gave the US political strength in the early republic. In Spanish America civic-mindedeness existed but across a plurality of ethnically and socially divided communities, hence the region’s political weakness.

• In US civic-mindedeness was what passed for “national identity” during this early republican period, fuelling ideas of “manifest Destiny”

• Mexico in 1846-8 was conquered by mobilised US civic communities/factories/voluntary associations (such as firemen)

US civic-mindedeness = US civic nationalism ?

• Gary Gerstle in “Race and Nation in the United States, Mexico and Cuba, 1880-1940” (Don Doyle, ed., Nationalism in the New World (2006),  JB 2441.N2)

• distinguishes between two consecutive nationalisms in the US:

American Nationalism

• “civic nationalism” rooted in the colonial and early republican period

• - “racial nationalism” (racially exclusionist) that prevailed from the Civil War until very recently (a more pluralistic nationalism emerging with Barack Obama seemed possible three year ago !)

American Nationalism

• Gerstle explores two other versions of “American” nationalism alongside US “racial nationalism”:

• Mexico’s post-revolutionary cult of mestizaje: “Raza Cósmica” of Jose Vasconcelos, Min of Edication, 1920-24.

• Cuba’s emphasis on “racelessness”, developed in 1890s by Cuban patriot, Jose Marti, adopted later by Fidel Castro

American Nationalism• US “racial nationalism” and Mexico’s cult of mestizaje

shared common characteristics:

• - racially essentialist

• - emphasis upon homogeneity

• - civilising mission

• - Cuba’s cult of “racelessness” betrayed a fear of the Afro-Cuban population...national unity could only be achieved through overcoming the legacy of race, not by positing some new racial panacea such as mestizaje

“Racial Nationalism” in the South

• Barbara Weinstein compares early “racial nationalism” in the US South with Brazil before abolition.

• In 19th Brazil, in spite of slavery lasting longer than anywhere else, there was never any moral defence of slavery.

• By contrast the US South was the only part of the Americas “where the architects of national identity were able to construct, in tandem, a potent nationalism and a strong pro-slavery argument”

• Barbara Weinstein, “Slavery, Citizenship and National Identity in Brazil and the US South” in Don Doyle, ed., Nationalism in the New World

Brazilian Nationalism and Racial Democracy

• After a period of eugenic anxiety in Brazil following Abolition of Slavery in 1889...elite dreamt of “whitening” Brazil via mass European immigration…

• Yet in the end Brazilians settled in 1930s on the idea of “racial democracy” (different from Cuba’s “racelessness”).

• Influence of Gilberto Freyre’s, The Masters and the Slaves (Casa Grande e Senzala) 1933 which put a positive gloss on Brazil’s legacy of slavery and race mixture

Racial Democracy

• Frank Tannenbaum reviewing The Masters and the Slaves in 1933:

• “The only other country where a similar development (a cult of “mestizaje”) has taken place is Mexico. But there it required a bloody revolution, untold suffering and the loss of a million lives. In Brazil was accomplished by one man and one book”

British Hispanists influenced by Bolton (2)

• J.H Elliott, “Do the Americas have a common history? : an address”, John Carter Brown Library, 1996, E 18.E5

• Ideas developed in depth in magisterial:• J.H Elliott, “ Empires of the Atlantic World

Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Yale, 2006 E 18.82.E44

J.H.Elliott, Regius Professor of History, Oxford

John Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World

• In his hemispheric/Atlanticist approach, Elliott avoids tight thematic compartments and listing of similarities and differences, seeking instead:

• “by constantly comparing, juxtaposing and interweaving the two stories...to reassemble a fragmented history and display the development of these two great New World Civilizations over the course of three centuries, in the hope that light focussed on one of them at a given moment will simultaneously cast a secondary beam over the history of the other”.

John Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World

• analogy of the of accordion:• “The movements involved in writing comparative

history are not unlike those involved in playing the accordion. The two societies under comparison are pushed together, but only to be pulled apart again. Resemblances prove after all to be not as close as they look at first sight; differences are discovered which at first lay concealed. Comparison is therefore a constantly fluctuating process, which may seem on closer inspection to offer less than it promises...(yet)... Even imperfect comparisons can help to shake historians out of their provincialisms, by provoking new questions and offering new perspectives.”

John Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World

• Elliott sees differences in Spanish and English treatment of Indians and Blacks as a key to understanding later developments:

• “Although their (Anglo-American) refusal to include Indians and Africans within the boundaries of their imagined communities would store up a terrible legacy for future generations, it also gave the English colonists more freedom of manoevre to make reality conform to the constructs of their imagination….

John Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World

• ....Without the impulsion to integrate the indigenous population into the new colonial societies, there was less need for compromises that their Spanish American counterparts found themselves compelled to accept. Similarly, there was less need for the external mechanisms of control through imperial government adopted by the Spaniards in order to bring stability and social cohesion to racially divided societies.” (p.410)

John Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World

Hence, habits of social exclusion though race and “small government” created a legacy of a leaner state and a “simpler” republican political project in the US during the 19th C…..

“Spaniards possessed both the advantage and the disadvantages commonly associated with the role of the pioneer...” (p.405)

Read the Introd. and Epilogue

Other recent hemispheric approaches

• James Dunkerley, Americana The Americas in the World around 1850 London, 2000

• A daring look at the American continent in one moment – 1850 - : the Mexican defeat, the California Gold rush, the onset of the steam ship and the telegraph...

• avoids national contexts or even customary comparative themes , such as slavery or immigration...

• favour the dramas of every day life, court cases, etc..

James Dunkerley QMC (London)

James Dunkerley Americana

• “offers a vision of an Atlantic world developing into its recognizably modern form. The book is filled with multitudes of voices that emerge with great immediacy. Often it's as if Dunkerley had finally given these nineteenth-centuries voices a platform on which to hold forth.... There are familiar friends, such as Walt Whitman....

James Dunkerley Americana

• There are notable and notorious figures, from Karl Marx to William Walker, the US mercenary who declared himself emperor of Nicaragua. There are also more obscure yet no less fascinating characters whom Dunkerley has encountered in his archival forays, such as Francisco Burdett O'Connor the Irish soldier who became an independence fighter under Bolivar and who eventually settled down as a prefect in the Bolivian region of Tarija.”

Guy Thomson, The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Americas (2002)

Charles Jones, American Civilization London: ISA, 2007

Charles Jones, Centre of International Studies, Cambridge

• American Civilization was inspired by two post-cold war books by distinguished Harvard political scientist, Samuel Huntington

• The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order New York, 1993

• predicted a New World Order characterised by a clash of cultures (especially religions) rather than ideologies

• These cultures would be the “West” (meaning the US, Canada and Europe) versus the rest.

• Latin America was left out of the “West”.• Huntington regarded Latin America as a distinct

civilization alongside the other main civilizations “Western, Islamic, Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and African”

• Who are We ? America’s Great Debate New York, 2004

• Here “Hispanics” in the US were presented as a threat to - and will ultimately have to be absorbed by – “America’s” core Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture.

Samuel Huntington in San Francisco Sentinel

Samuel Huntington

Charles Jones, American Civilisation (2007)

• Jones’s aim in writing the book: “to re-establish the fact of a common American history”

• observes paradox that the “naturalisation of the Latin/Anglo distinction...a process more or less complete by 1890” coincided with period when Brazil and Sp Am emerged from period of relative stagnation to share similar features to the US: high growth rates, mass European immigration, political stability......

Charles Jones, American Civilisation (2007)

• Hence, in 1890s

• “America might have been thought of as constituting a relatively homogeneous and distinctive realm”,

• much as had been wished and expected after 1776 by nation builders: Jefferson, Adams, Miranda, Bolivar, Belgrano, Morelos, etc..

Huntington’s exclusion of Latin America from West

• Latin America’s “difference” for Huntington lay in legacy of:

• Catholicism (v. West’s combination of Cath/Prot. culture)

• Corporatism (v. US Individualism)

• Incorporation of indigenous cultures (vs. US - lamentable – displacement of Native Americans)

• Jones goes on to qualify/demolish “Six pillars of US exceptionalism”

Jones’ “Six pillars of US Exceptionalism” (why the US continued to see itself as different from the rest of the

Americas):

• i) French cultivation of Pan-Latin Identity from 1860s• (French invented the term “Latin America” to coincide with

French Empire in Mexico....Spanish American kept it due to late 19th C Hispanismo accompanying the Spanish-US War of 1898)

• ii) Black Legend (from 16th C)• iii) Perpetuation of the Black Legend during Romantic period:

e.g Fanny Calderon de la Barca’s Life in Mexico (1843) (takes the form of letters from Fanny to Harvard historian William Prescott )

• iv) Myth of the Protestant work ethic (absent in Latin America)• v) Scientific racism• vi) Discourse of US post-Imperialism (democratic imperative

and war on terror)

Charles Jones, American Civilisation (2007)

• Jones asks: “What marks off the Americas and only the Americas ?”

• Splitting the concept of the “West”, Jones distinguishes 4 key features of the Americas that distinguishe them from Europe

• - historical imperative to embrace modernity: ongoing colonising projects, opening and occupying “empty” space....

• -Religiosity: US an LA as one of the most religious parts of the world

• -Ethnic diversity and the “racialisation of minorities”

• -Violent crime and social violence (riots, rebellions, lynchings, assassinations, death squads, etc.)

Charles Jones, American Civilisation (2007)

• Jones demonstrates that, far from being a unique entity, “the United States is the most American of nations”.

• Estadunidenses share with their neighbours to the South an aspiration for equal opportunities and freedoms in a society both defined and divided by race.

Charles Jones, American Civilisation (2007)

• the United States is distinguished from its neighbours chiefly by the greater material capabilities it has been able to apply to this historic task

• Although it regards itself as very model of “Western”, Jones shows how United States differs from Western Europe: from distinctive levels and styles of religiosity, to public violence, to respect for law, to prime concern with material accumulation....

Charles Jones, American Civilisation (2007)

• These traits, far from constituting a claim to exceptionality, bind the U.S. firmly to the rest of the American hemisphere.

• In fact, Jones argues, US was separated only by the strange accident of historiography that created a "Latin" America little more than a century ago.

• He projects that these perceived differences between the United States and its southern neighbours will fade in the near future, and looks forward to a truly inclusive America.