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José Martí’s Immanent Critique of American Imperialism Joshua Simon [email protected] “We are not yet American enough.”1 On March 16th, 1889, the Philadelphia Manufacturer printed an editorial under the headline, “Do We Want Cuba?” The question was occasioned by President Benjamin Harrison’s appointment of James G. Blaine as Secretary of State. Blaine was famous for his efforts to expand U.S. influence throughout independent Spanish America, and for supporting plans to actually add Cuba—one of the last remnants of the Spanish Empire in the Americas—to the United States. The editorial’s author acknowledged that there were many reasons for the United States to consider acquiring “the most splendid island in the Antilles”. Positioned between the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba “dominat[ed] a vast expanse of water.” Whoever held Cuba could control access to the Mississippi, and gain “almost exclusive dominion over the approaches to any of the interocean waterways” that engineers proposed to build through Central America. What was more, Cuba’s “productive capacity [was] unexcelled by any other land on the globe.” After acquiring Cuba, the borders of the United States would contain every important agricultural climate, reducing its dependence on imported goods: “There would be almost no fruit grown anywhere on earth … that could not be produced within our dominions.”2 The attraction Cuba exerted on the North American imagination went beyond grand strategy and economic independence, though, approaching something like destiny. As our editorialist noted, the island “is so close to Florida that Nature seems to indicate her affiliation with the dominant nation on this continent.” Once in charge, the United States could rescue Cuba from the economic stagnation Spanish tyranny had induced, allowing the island realize its potential: “American energy, … with a free government under the rule of law and order, with security for life and property, … would make Cuba what she once was, a José Martí, “Proyecto de Instrucción Pública”, Revista Universal, 26 October 1875, From José Martí Obras Completas (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1991) 26 vols. [hereafter JMOC] VI, 352. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Spanish are my own. 2 The Manufacturer editorial was translated into Spanish and reprinted as part of a pamphlet titled “Cuba y los Estados Unidos” New York, 3 April 1889, from JMOC, I, 232-4. 1 producer of marvelous riches and power and productiveness.” In an era of reinvigorated imperial activity by the great powers of Europe, Cuba offered the United States an arena in which to pursue its own civilizing missions.3 Against these manifold advantages and enticing prospects, the Manufacturer’s editorial weighed a singular concern: “What would be the result of attempts to incorporate into our political community a population such as Cuba’s?” Each stratum of the island’s social hierarchy presented particular problems. Having presided over a colonial government that combined “fanaticism with tyranny, swaggering arrogance with abysmal corruption,” the Spanish inhabitants of Cuba had proven themselves “less prepared for American citizenship than … the men of any other white race.” Meanwhile, the island-born “Cubans of Spanish origin” were worse yet, evincing all “the defects of [their] paternal race” as well as an “effeminacy and an aversion to all effort, truly to the extent of an illness,” which the Manufacturer attributed to their tropical upbringing and openness to miscegenation. The deficiencies of Cuba’s Creoles had been well demonstrated in their “pitifully ineffective” attempts to gain independence from Spain. Finally, Cuba’s large population of former slaves and free men of color were “clearly at the level of barbarity”—less capable of discharging the duties of American citizenship, in the Manufacturer’s analysis, than the “most degraded Negro in Georgia” was prepared to assume the presidency. Taken together, the Cuban population was entirely unfit for life under a republican government. “To invest such men with the responsibility of directing this government, and giving them the same degree of power as that possessed by the free citizens of our northern states, would be to call upon them to perform duties for which they have not the slightest ability.” The editorial’s author indicated that he might be prepared to acquire Cuba if the island and its inhabitants could be permanently relegated to some inferior status short of statehood, but alas, the Constitution of the United States “leaves no room for bodies of Americans who are not citizens, or who cannot aspire to be.” As such, he argued against annexation, warning that “we could saddle ourselves with Cuba at a very low cost, and still pay dearly.”4 The Manufacturer’s arguments against annexation were so compelling that even its political opponents at the New York Evening Post reprinted them a week later, alongside an 3 4 Ibid., 232-4. Ibid., 232-4. “emphatic endorse[ment]” of the author’s concerns regarding the Cuban population’s readiness for republican citizenship. This caught the attention of José Martí, a Cuban patriot living in exile in New York. Martí made his living writing regular dispatches on American history, culture, and politics for newspapers throughout Spanish America. The reprinted Manufacturer editorial, however, inspired him to send “A Vindication of Cuba”, in English, to the Evening Post. While acknowledging that some of his compatriots had, with “honorable motives”, supported or even proposed plans for incorporating Cuba into the United States, Martí insisted that “no self-respecting Cuban would like to see his country annexed to a nation where the leaders of opinion share towards him prejudices excusable only to vulgar jingoism or rampant ignorance.” Both sins seemed operative in the Manufacturer’s editorial. Far from quietly submitting to Spanish tyranny, Cubans had “fought like men, sometimes like giants, to be freemen,” and they had done so in the face of active opposition from the supposed beacon of liberty to their north. “We deserve in our misfortune the respect of those who did not help us in our need,” Martí argued. “We had no Hessians and no Frenchmen, no Lafayette or Steuben, no monarchical rivals to help us; we had but one neighbor who confessedly ‘stretched the limits of his power and acted against the will of the people’ to help the foes of those who were fighting for the same Charter of Liberties on which he built his independence.” In these adverse circumstances, far from displaying the vices attributed to them by the Manufacturer, Cubans had developed “a capacity for free government so natural to him that he established it, even to the excess of its practices, in the midst of the war”. Even while facing defeat, Cubans had resisted the temptations of emergency dictatorship, “snatch[ing] the sabre, without fear of consideration, from the hands of every military pretender, however glorious,” who arose within the patriot ranks. Beyond the battlefield, Martí added, Cubans had proven neither effeminate nor indolent, but demonstrated both inventiveness and industry in exile, building profitable cigar-making enclaves in New York, Tampa, and Key West, serving as mechanics, clerks, physicians, and contractors throughout Central America, and helping to design and develop rail and river transportation infrastructure in Colombia and Venezuela.5 Moving past the insulting arguments of the Manufacturer, Martí indicted the United States’ entire conduct of foreign policy toward Cuba, reserving especial ire for the supporters 5 Ibid., 236-41. of annexation. “It is not to be expected, for the honor of mankind, that the nation that was rocked in freedom, and received for three centuries the best blood of liberty-loving men, will employ the power thus acquired in depriving a less fortunate neighbor of its liberty.” For Martí, the annexationist movement indicated that avarice and ambition, racism and jingoism, had finally eclipsed the noble ideals expressed in the course of the American independence movement—ideals that Cuban patriots ardently embraced: They admire this nation, the greatest ever built by liberty, but they dislike the evil conditions that, like worms in the heart, have begun in this mighty republic their work of destruction. They have made the heroes of this country their own heroes, and look to the success of the American commonwealth as the crowning glory of mankind; but they cannot honestly believe that excessive individualism, reverence for wealth, and the protracted exultation of a terrible victory are preparing the United States to be the typical nation of liberty, where no opinion is to be based in greed, and no triumph or acquisition reached against charity and justice. We love the country of Lincoln as much as we fear the country of Cutting.6 Pairing the Great Emancipator with Colonel Francis Cutting, a founder of the American Annexationist League and President of the Company for the Occupation and Development of Northern Mexico, Martí effectively captured the two, contradictory sides of the United States that, by the closing decade of the nineteenth century, Latin Americans had come to know all too well. An exemplar of colonial revolution whose republican constitution had inspired imitation throughout the hemisphere, in 1822 the United States became the first nation in the world to recognize the independence of Spain’s mainland American colonies, pledging a year later to oppose any European attempt to reconquer New World territories. But in subsequent decades the U.S. itself conquered half of neighboring Mexico, recognized the government of a rogue filibuster in Nicaragua, provoked a civil war in order to seize a strategic peninsula in Haiti, and consistently opposed Cubans’ aspirations for independence, in hopes that the island might one day be annexed. If Lincoln’s expansive reading of the Declaration of Independence seemed to open a path toward racial reconciliation in the 6 Ibid., 237. Americas, the racially-charged ideology that expansionists like Cutting invoked to justify the United States’ incipient hegemony within the hemisphere indicated just how far North Americans remained from realizing the ideal of equality expressed in their founding document. What makes Martí’s critique of the emerging American Empire notable is its immanence. Martí did not reject the political ideals and progressive philosophy of history, rooted in the ideology of the American independence movement, that were invoked in order to justify the United States’ serial expansions and interventions in Spanish America. To the contrary, and like other Spanish American patriots before him, he embraced these ideas wholeheartedly, proudly insisting that the republics of the New World stood in the vanguard of global civilization, forging republican political institutions and liberal modes of social organization decisively superior to those of monarchical, mercantilist Europe. He appealed to precisely these ideals and this progressive philosophy of history in denouncing the poverty and racism that marred the United States’ democracy at home, and the expansionist impulse that deformed its conduct of foreign policy abroad. Ultimately, Martí became convinced that the “worms in the heart” of the United States could not be extracted, but he did not renounce his commitment to distinctively American ideals of domestic and international politics. Rather, he argued that that the nations of what he famously called “Our America”, that is, Latin America, should build political institutions capable of resisting North American influence and realizing the shared ideals of the American independence movements more fully than the United States itself had done. In this essay, I examine the role of one such shared ideal—the union as a means of organizing relations between sovereign states—in José Martí’s imminent critique of the emerging American Empire. I show how the ideal of the union emerged in the political thought of both the British and Spanish American independence movements as an alternative to the “balance of powers” system that regulated inter-state relations in Europe, and framed early interactions between the American republics emerging from British and Spanish rule. I chart the gradual eclipse of unionism in the foreign policy of the United States and its replacement by an aggressive expansionism organized under the institutional form of the protectorate, noting the influence of the rising ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy in this important transition. I then describe Martí’s interventions in debates on interAmerican relations at the high-point of his intellectual and political career in the late 1880s and early 1890s, devoting particular attention to his essays on the first “Pan-American” Congress, convened in Washington in 1889 by Secretary of State Blaine. I argue that Martí’s forceful rejection of this U.S.-led effort to integrate the Americas was not premised on a rejection of the union as an ideal mode of organizing hemispheric and international relations, but rather an unmasking of the new imperial aims the U.S. sought to justify using the old language of unionism, and a call for the nations of Spanish America to defend the original unionist ideal against the increasingly predatory United States. Martí attacked the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy that underpinned U.S. expansionism and interventionism directly, insisting that Spanish Americans should embrace the distinctive racial heterogeneity of their societies in order to overcome the contradictions that constrained the United States’ advance toward a fuller realization of the hemisphere’s shared ideals. American Systems The independence movements of both British and Spanish America originated in American-born colonists’ insistence upon their own fundamental equality with the metropolitan subjects of their respective monarchs. Inequities in the empires’ systems of political representation and judicial review, imbalances of trans-Atlantic trade, and what the colonists regarded as excessive commercial regulation and taxation were all regarded as evidence of Europeans’ intent to deprive American colonists of the political, economic, and social rights they deserved. Eventually, metropolitan intransigence in response to demands for reform convinced colonists that only separation from Europe could secure the Americas’ equal standing in the world. It was in the course of their struggles to achieve independence that both British and Spanish Americans alighted upon a new idea: the New World was not merely equal to the old, but superior. The conflicts underway were not mere independence movements, but revolutions. American patriots sought not just an end to European rule, but to usher in a new era of human civilization. Before independence had even been declared, Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet Common Sense inspired British North Americans to believe that they “had the power to begin the world over again,” to tear down the crumbling edifices of colonial rule and create “an asylum for mankind” in America.7 Half a world away and half a century later, the Chilean patriot Bernardo O’Higgins expressed similar sentiments: It is evident that the Republics of the New World bear the vanguard of the freedom of the whole world, and that destiny is leading them on to break the chains of the human race; for in the example of America may be found the most encouraging hopes of the philosopher and the patriot. The centuries of oppression have passed; the human spirit yearns for its freedom; and now there shines the dawn of a complete re-ordering of civil society through the irresistible progress of opinion and enlightenment.8 O’Higgins confident forecast of his hemisphere’s destiny offers an early formulation of what the historian Arthur P. Whitaker called the “Western Hemisphere Idea”: “the proposition that the peoples of the Western Hemisphere are united in a special relationship to one another that sets them apart from the rest of the world; [and] above all, apart from Europe.”9 Scholarship on the political thought of the American independence movements has usually emphasized how innovations in the design of domestic political institutions— written constitutions, federalism, bicameralism and the separation of powers, charters of basic rights, and so on—distinguished the early American republics from the monarchies of Europe, but a growing literature has shown that the leaders of the American revolutions were as focused on advancing beyond European accomplishments in the organization of international relations. Here, the most decisive American innovation aimed not only to set the New World apart from the Old, but to actually bring it together under the auspices of expansive and expanding unions of formerly sovereign states.10 7 Thomas Paine, “Common Sense”, 1776. In Bruce Kucklick, ed., Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 44. 8 Cited in Collier, Chilean Independence, 240. 9 Arthur P. Whitaker, “The Origin of the Western Hemisphere Idea”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 98, No. 5 (October, 1954), 323. See also Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954). 10 See especially: Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776-1814 (Madison: Madison House Publishers, 1993); Daniel H. Deudney, “The Philadelphian System: Sovereignty, Arms Control, and Balance of Power in the American States-Union, circa 1787–1861,” International Organization, Vol. 49, No. 2 (March 1995), 191 – 228; James E. Lewis, Jr., The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003). The literature on the idea of union, specifically, and on foreign policy thinking, more generally, in the Spanish American foundings is much thinner, but see: Germán A. de la Reza, La invención de la paz: de la República Cristiana del Duque de Sully a la Sociedad de Naciones de Simón Bolívar (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2009), for an excellent discussion of the theme. The idea of the union as a superior means of organizing inter-American relations is closely related to the Americas’ more familiar innovations in the design of domestic political institutions. The political theorists that directed both British and Spanish America’s independence movements recognized that the “balance of powers” system that governed interactions amongst Europe’s sovereign states was incompatible with the prosperous republics they aimed to establish in the Americas. An ever-present threat of invasion had forced European states to sustain high levels of military spending, and, as a consequence, to impose heavy taxes upon their populations, often adopting tyrannical means of enforcing these extractions. Europe’s history contained innumerable instances of weak states that sought safety in an alliance with stronger ones and ended up compromising their independence. Uncertain lines of succession, commercial competition, and overseas expansion constantly threatened to tip the system’s tenuous balance from peace to war, with disastrous consequences for personal and political freedoms, and for economic, scientific, and artistic development. Though the Americas’ trans-Atlantic isolation afforded a temporary respite, political thinkers throughout the hemisphere believed that if they remained fully sovereign, the states emerging from imperial rule would eventually either become entangled in conflicting European alliances, or replicate Europe’s destructive history of inter-state conflict and warfare on the American continents. The unions forged out of former colonies, first in the United States, then in the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (comprising present-day Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and, Bolivia), “Gran” Colombia (comprising present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador), the first republic of Mexico (comprising present-day Mexico and most of the western United States), and the United Provinces of Central America (comprising present-day Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) were created in order to prevent the Americas’ regression to a European pattern. These unions joined states that might one day come into conflict under common governments invested with some portion of their members’ sovereignty, allowing them to arbitrate inter-state territorial disputes, conduct a unified foreign policy, and regulate interstate commerce. While they could not erase the differences in climate, population, and history that invested different parts of the Americas with divergent interests, the founders of these unions argued that common governments would discourage members’ resort to arms or to foreign alliances in their disagreements with other members, and, at the same time, encourage the Americas’ economic independence from Europe by erasing customs and regulatory barriers to trade between the hemisphere’s complimentary economies. Unified, Americans would also exert more leverage in their negotiations for recognition and trade with Europe, and could call on greater resources in their efforts to incorporate indigenous territories on their frontiers.11 The unionist ideal presided over the United States’ approach to westward expansion. Both the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Enabling Act of 1802 commanded that territories ceded to the U.S. by Britain and France, respectively, should eventually be admitted to the union as equal states, equally subject to the terms of the Constitution, equally represented in Congress, and equally protected by the full panoply of personal and political rights enjoyed by the citizens of the original thirteen states.12 Unionism also informed early interactions between the U.S. and the Spanish American colonies that began their struggle for independence in the first and second decades of the nineteenth century. In the eleventh Federalist, written well before Spanish Americans had begun their wars of independence, Alexander Hamilton exhorted his readers to view the union contemplated in the proposed Constitution as the first step toward “erecting one great American system, superior to the controul of all trans-atlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!”13 Of course, some North Americans were more skeptical of their southern neighbors than Hamilton, expressing particular doubts about the influence that Roman Catholicism might exert in Spanish American politics even after independence. In a letter to Alexander von Humboldt, written shortly after news of the first Spanish American independence movements had reached the United States, Thomas Jefferson noted unhappily that “History … furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.” Still, he insisted that In whatever governments they end they will be American governments, no longer to be involved in the never-ceasing broils of Europe. The European nations constitute 11 I describe the economic importance of the Americas’ early unions in Joshua Simon, “The Americas’ More Perfect Unions: New Institutional Insights from Comparative Political Theory” Perspectives on Politics, vol. 12, no. 4 (December, 2014), 808-828. 12 Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman, The Constitution of Empire: Territorial Expansion and American Legal History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 17-85; David Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789-1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 25-67. 13 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist with Letters of “Brutus”, Terence Ball, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 52. a separate division of the globe; their localities make them part of a distinct system; they have a set of interests of their own in which it is our business never to engage ourselves. America has a hemisphere to itself. It must have its separate system of interests, which must not be subordinated to those of Europe. Jefferson thought that with time and ample tutelage, Spanish Americans might overcome their religious disadvantages and learn to live by the “principles” embodied in the political institutions of the United States, “concur[ring] with us in the maintenance of the same system,” on a hemispheric scale.14 The idea of a hemisphere-wide “American system”, geographically distant from Europe and regulated by a distinctive set of principles and institutions that would prevent its degeneration into European-style infighting, gained support as patriotic forces in Spanish America made progress in their wars against Spain, and as Europe’s Great Powers met in Vienna to restore the monarchical order challenged by the French Revolution and Napoleon I’s conquests. Fearing that the “Holy Alliance” might take up Spain’s cause in the Americas, Spanish Americans appealed to the United States for aid and for recognition of the independence they had already established on the ground. These appeals met with disfavor amongst politicians committed to maintaining the U.S.’s neutrality, but found champions as well. The influential Kentucky Congressman Henry Clay passionately invoked the unionist ideal adumbrated by Hamilton and Jefferson in his calls for recognition and support of Spanish America’s struggle: There can not be a doubt that Spanish America, once independent, whatever may be the form of government established in its several parts, these governments will be animated by an American feeling, and guided by an American policy. They will obey the laws of the system of the new world, of which they will compose a part, in contradistinction to that of Europe. … all America will be interested in maintaining and enforcing such a system. The independence of Spanish America, then, is an interest of primary consideration.15 Clay’s “American System” is now usually remembered as a legislative program to stimulate industrialization and growth through the chartering of a national bank, higher tariff rates, Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, 6 December 1813, from Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 12 vols. (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1904-5), XI, 351. 15 Henry Clay, Speech in the House of Representatives, 24 March 1818, Annals of Congress, 15th cong., 1st sess., 1482. 14 and federal funding for the improvement of domestic transportation and communications infrastructure. But for Clay himself, the political and economic integration of the Americas formed a key part of the United States’ path to global preeminence. Spanish America, freed of restrictive imperial commercial regulations, would provide a market for North American manufactures, sending scarce raw materials, foodstuffs, and precious metals north in return, allowing the United States to perform a role in the hemisphere analogous to the one that “the people of New England [had performed] for the rest of the United States.”16 While the domestic portions of Clay’s American System were enacted in the late 1810s, recognition of and support for Spanish American independence were delayed by the opposition of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who shared Jefferson’s misgivings about Catholic Spanish Americans’ capacity for self-government, but not his optimistic outlook on the region’s future. Adams dismissed Clay’s vision of a hemispheric “American System”, arguing that “we [already] have it—we constitute the whole of it … there is no community of interests between North and South America … no basis for any such system.” In his famous Fourth of July speech in 1821, addressing the same topic, Adams insisted that while the United States was “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all”, she should be “the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Despite these seemingly firm convictions, less than a year later Adams became one of the principle proponents of the United States’ path-breaking decision to recognize the independent Spanish American republics, and then, less than a year after that, one of the principle authors of the approach to inter-American relations outlined in President James Monroe’s 1823 State of the Union Address, which committed the United States to the defense of independent Spanish America against European reconquest. Adams’ conversion to the cause of recognition, and the formulation of what came to be called the “Monroe Doctrine” both reflect the influence of the unionist ideal. As the Spanish American independence movements finally achieved some stable success in the early 1820s, the prospect that the New World might recapitulate the history of the Old, tearing itself apart in inter-state conflicts and ultimately stalling its advance toward political liberty and economic prosperity, arose once again and with new force. Left in the full possession of their sovereignty, the new states of Spanish America might enter alliances Cited in Lewis, The American Union, 141. See also Randolph B. Campbell, “The Spanish American Aspect of Henry Clay's American System” The Americas, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jul., 1967), 3-17. 16 with conflicting European powers, or initiate conflicts amongst themselves, leading to wars that would threaten the expanding borders of the United States. The problem was brought dramatically home in April 1823 when the restored monarchy of France intervened in Spain to suppress a constitutionalist rebellion and restore Fernando VII to the throne. Leaders in the United States now joined their Spanish American colleagues in expressing concern that the American republics would be next on the Holy Allies’ agenda. Brazil’s emergence as an independent, but monarchical Empire, at war with Buenos Aires, and Mexico’s flirtation with legitimist solutions to its interminable internal disorders seemed to offer the Allies footholds on the American continents from which to launch a reconquest. The Monroe Doctrine, outlined in President James Monroe’s 1823 Address to Congress, marked a return to the idea of a separate American System ordered by the unionist ideal developed by Hamilton, Jefferson, and Clay. In the closing paragraphs of his Address, Monroe took up the Allies’ intervention in Spain, noting that while “the citizens of the United States cherish sentiments the most friendly in favor of the liberty and happiness of their fellow men on that side of the Atlantic,” they considered it inappropriate to take sides in European conflicts. “But,” he insisted, “in regard to [the Americas] circumstances are eminently and conspicuously different. It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent without endangering our peace and happiness.” The unionist ideal informing the organization of the United States had facilitated in a short time an “improvement in all the important circumstances which constitute the happiness of a nation” unexampled in previous human history. The country’s population had more than tripled, its territories had more than doubled, with both increases “eminently augment[ing] our resources and add[ing] to our strength and respectability.” “It is manifest,” Monroe argued, that by enlarging the basis of our system and increasing the number of States the system itself has been greatly strengthened …. Consolidation and disunion have thereby been rendered equally impracticable. Each Government, confiding in its own strength, has less to apprehend from the other, and in consequence each, enjoying a greater freedom of action, is rendered more efficient for all the purposes for which it was instituted. With its neat division of the globe into separate halves defined by rival political systems, both foreign and domestic, its invocation of the manifold advantages an expansive and expanding union had brought to the United States, and its vision of a closely integrated future for the Americas, the original statement of the Monroe Doctrine represented a major advance of the unionist ideal toward a truly hemispheric American System. It met with howls of protest from Europeans like British foreign minister George Canning, who declared that “the great danger of the time” was “a division of the world into European and American, Republican and Monarchical; a league of worn-out Govts on the one hand, and of youthful and stirring Nations, with the Un[ited] States at their head, on the other.” 17 Spanish Americans, by contrast, enthusiastically greeted Monroe’s message and what appeared to them to be its promise to place the arms and resources of the hemisphere’s greatest power between their fragile sovereignty and a concert of European monarchs contemplating reconquest. However, the original statement of the Monroe Doctrine turned out to be a highpoint for the unionist ideal and the idea of an American System. Representatives of the Spanish American republics in Washington immediately began asking for clarification of how the commitments made in Monroe’s Address ideas would be implemented. The message inspired the Foreign Minister of Colombia invite the United States to send representatives to a Congress of the American republics in Panama. The invitation was warmly received by now-President John Quincy Adams and his Secretary of State, Henry Clay, but Adams and Clay ran into unexpected opposition in Congress when they moved to appropriate funds to finance their delegates’ trip. Congressional representatives from the slave states, in particular, decried any effort to bind the United States more closely to Spanish American republics that had abolished slavery after independence, and that might object to their plans to build a slaveholding empire throughout the Caribbean.18 Opponents of U.S. participation in the Panama Congress tended to make their case in terms that superficially resembled Jefferson and Adams misgivings about Spanish Americans’ political capacities, but which departed signally from these earlier arguments by locating the source of Spanish Americans’ deficiencies in their race rather than their religion. Both the southern European origins of the region’s colonists and the relative preponderance of African and Cited in Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 63-4. 18 Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973). 17 Native Americans within its population were discussed as obstacles to the emergence of republican government in Spanish America and as reasons for the United States to avoid any entangling alliances with their neighbors.19 The fate of the island of Cuba presented another important sticking point in negotiations over the Panama Congress. Representatives from Colombia and Mexico suggested that the Congress should form plans for a joint American force to liberate the island and its neighbor Puerto Rice from Spanish rule and integrate them into one or another of the regional unions that had emerged from the wars of independence. This proposal was emphatically rejected in the United States, not only by southerners concerned that yet another outpost of slavery might fall to the abolitionist onslaught, but also by northerners who worried that the move might excite a response from the Holy Allies, or that Britain might seize upon the resulting chaos as an opportunity to establish a naval base on the strategically-located island, advancing its capacity to influence U.S. shipping and commerce. After overcoming southern opposition to attending, Adams and Clay instructed their representatives in Panama to inform Colombia and Mexico that if an attempt to liberate Cuba resulted in a war with any European power, “the United States, … might find themselves, contrary to their inclination, reluctantly drawn by a current of events to their [that is, the European] side.” Ultimately, Adams and Clay’s instructions directed their representatives to draw a firm line against the most ambitious prospects for the Panama Congress: All notion is rejected of an amphictyonic council, invested with power finally to decide controversies between the American States or to regulate in any respect their conduct. Such a council might have been well enough adapted to a number of small contracted States, whose united territory would fall short of the extent of that of the smallest of the American powers. The complicated and various interests which appertain to the nations of this vast continent cannot be safely confided to the superintendence of one legislative authority. We should almost as soon expect to see an amphictyonic council to regulate the affairs of the whole globe. It would be difficult to find a more succinct and total rejection of the unionist ideal cherished by earlier generations of American statesmen and political thinkers, or of the idea 19 See, for the rise of “racial Anglo-Saxonism” in the United States, and its consequences for U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), passim. of an American System that Adams and, especially, Clay had done so much to develop. The Cuban controversy even moved Clay to take up the arguments of his domestic political opponents, breaking decisively with his earlier sympathies with Spanish Americans’ aspirations for independence to declare that the “population itself, of the Islands, is incompetent at present from its composition and its amount to maintain self-government”.20 The ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy implicit in Clay’s comment and explicit in the arguments of his southern opponents formed the basis for a new, latitudinal line of division between North and South America that would ultimately undermine and replace the longitudinal division between the Old and New Worlds central to the unionist ideal and the idea of an American system. Indeed, succeeding decades would see the United States become more and more European in its outlook on and approach to the western hemisphere. As this transition progressed, the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine shifted dramatically, changing from a statement of inter-American solidarity into an assertion of the United States’ hegemony within a sphere of influence co-extensive with the Americas. In his 1845 State of the Union Address, President James K. Polk invoked “Monroe’s doctrine” in order to justify the annexation of Texas, a breakaway province of neighboring Mexico. Like earlier exponents of the unionist ideal, Polk argued that the addition of new states to the union would forestall European attempts to establish a “balance of power” on the North American continent.21 Unlike his predecessors, however, Polk’s alternative to the European system of inter-state relations was a continental empire established by the unilateral assertion of the United States’ military power, rather than an agreement amongst sovereign states to form a union. Ultimately, the annexation of Texas triggered a war with Mexico that ended in a treaty transferring half of Mexico’s territory to the United States. The complex effects of the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy can be seen in the settlement of the Mexican-American War as well. As U.S. Army troops occupied Mexico City, the fringe “All of Mexico” movement was defeated by the advocates of a more limited annexation, who argued that Mexicans were unfit for U.S. citizenship, and thus sought a border further to the north that would add only sparsely-populated areas of Mexico to the United States.22 Again, while the decision not to incorporate the entirety of Mexico into the United States might be read in retrospect as a victory for the opponents of imperialism, the Cited in Sexton, Monroe Doctrine, 71. First Annual Message to Congress, 2 December 1845. 22 See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 229-48. 20 21 racist arguments that underpinned it demonstrate how far policy makers and political thinkers in the United States had retreated from the unionist ideal and the idea of an American System. As the Manufacturer editorial described at this essay’s outset demonstrates, this racist, anti-expansionist position still held sway at the end of the nineteenth century, when the problem it pointed to was solved by the advent of the “protectorate” as a category of international law. Though the term protectorate had a long and varied historical usage prior to nineteenth century, it was “introduced into international relations” only in the 1885 “General Act of the Conference of Berlin Concerning the Congo”, to which the United States was, along with the Ottoman Empire and the major powers of Europe, a signatory. The Act defined the rights and responsibilities of the states to which it conceded “sovereignty or influence” over parts of Africa, in order that they might increase the “moral and material well being of the indigenous populations.” 23 As the European powers scrambled for Africa throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States asserted its control over parts of Spanish America and the Caribbean, establishing temporary protectorates in Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, and a more enduring relationship with Puerto Rico. These instances of territorial expansion without any prospect of statehood, equal representation in Congress, or equal protection of inhabitants’ personal and political freedoms bear witness to the complete collapse of the unionist ideal as a regulative principle of U.S. foreign policy. It was within the context of this collapse that José Martí forged his immanent critique of the emerging American empire. There Are No Races José Martí was born in 1853 on an island dominated, in more than one sense, by the institution of slavery. Slaves made up over a third of Cuba’s population at mid-century, and new conscripts continued to arrive from Africa in large numbers until British pressure put an end to the trade in 1867. On the strength of this workforce, Cuba became the world’s largest exporter of sugar, and sugar plantations and refineries spread across the island, replacing “General Act of the Conference of Berlin Concerning the Congo,” 26 February 1885, Republished in The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 3, No. 1 (January, 1909), 7-25. 23 farms producing diverse foodstuffs using paid, if still very poor, labor, with monoculture manned by slaves. The centrality of slavery to the Cuban economy also contributed to the exceptional longevity of its submission to Spain. While the European-descended, American-born Creoles of mainland Spanish America fought for their independence throughout the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Cuba’s Creoles cooperated with the metropole to suppress insurgent activities on their island, fearing that winning their own freedom would entail abolition, or worse, excite a slave insurrection like the one that consumed the near-by French colony of St. Domingue. Spanish administrators actively stoked these fears, recognizing how effectively the Haitian sword of Damocles kept its profitable Caribbean possession within the imperial fold. Newspapers reported frequently on plots by Cuban slaves to escape their chains and annihilate their masters, suggesting in no uncertain terms that Cuba “would either be Spanish or it would be African.”24 Cuban patriots eventually came to understand that they could only achieve independence by attracting the island’s slaves and free people of color to the cause, but they faced a formidable challenge in their attempts to do so without completely alienating influential Creoles. The centrality of concerns with race and racism in Martí’s political thought originates in his efforts to address this challenge, but, as I shall show below, during his time in exile Martí also forged a powerful, immanent critique of racial inequality within the United States, and of the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy that underpinned the U.S.’s newly imperial approach to inter-American relations. In 1868 a sugar plantation owner on the poorer, eastern side of the island of Cuba, frustrated with the slow pace of reform in the Spanish Empire’s commercial regulations, and suffering from new restrictions placed on exports to the United States, freed his slaves and invited them to join him and a small circle of conspirators fighting for Cuban independence. Spanish authorities underestimated the depth of nationalist sentiments amongst eastern planters, and failed to respond quickly to the insurgency as it gained strength and occupied a larger and larger portion of the island. A recognized prodigy from a young age, Martí was at this time still a student at an elite academy in Havana, the largest city on Cuba’s wealthier, and loyalist, west side. But, under the tutelage of a politically radical headmaster, he had Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 2. 24 already become a convinced proponent of Cuban independence. As the insurgency grew, Martí contributed to a covert propaganda campaign, writing and publishing a patriotic newsletter. A street confrontation led the police to search the home of a close friend and coconspirator, where they found a letter signed by Martí, haranguing another classmate who had enlisted in the Spanish Army. Martí was arrested and sentenced to six years of hard labor. After serving four months in a quarry, shackled 24 hours a day, he developed a serious skin infection on his ankle and became very ill. His father, a former policeman himself, appealed to his colleagues in the colonial administration and won a commutation of Martí’s sentence, contingent upon his moving to Spain to pursue his education. Thus began a life lived almost entirely in exile. Martí earned degrees in philosophy and law in Zaragoza, before moving to Mexico City, where he began his career in journalism, writing for the country’s most prominent liberal newspaper. His critical articles on the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz forced Martí to flee Mexico for Guatemala, where he remained for a time, teaching in a university and continuing to write. In Guatemala, Martí had the opportunity for the first time to observe at close range the poor conditions in which Indigenous Spanish Americans continued to live after independence, and the often fractious relations they maintained with determinedly reformist, liberal governments. In one of his first long-form writings, a book titled Guatemala, Martí enthusiastically described efforts to build schools in Indigenous communities, and to integrate Indigenous farmers into the national and global agricultural economies, but he also began to develop a theme that would reappear in his later, more famous works, calling upon the Guatemalan government to adapt its policies to the conditions that actually existed in the country, rather than blindly applying a European model that could only deepen divisions and slow progress. “Today,” he conceded, the resistance Indigenous Guatemalans presented to reform efforts was “a terrible punishment” for the country’s leaders, but “tomorrow they will be the great masses who will move the young nation forward … They are intelligent, resigned, tireless, artistic by nature. What a great nation can be made out of them!”25 In 1878, after ten years of fighting, Spanish and Cuban forces brokered a tenuous peace treaty, which offered amnesty to former rebels in exile and abolished slavery, while offering slaveowners compensation in the form of obligatory labor at low wages from their former slaves. Martí returned home, now with his wife and young family, to Havana, but he 25 Guatemala, Mexico City, 1878, from JMOC VII, 157-8. refusing to renounce the patriotic cause. After a Spanish spy overheard a fiery speech he delivered at a social club, he was arrested again and transported in chains back to Spain. While awaiting transfer to a prison on the Mediterranean island of Ceuta, Martí escaped from prison in murky circumstances that are not well described anywhere in his writings. He made his way out of Spain, back across the Atlantic to New York, where, apart from short trips to Venezuela, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, he would live until his final, tragic return to Cuba. It was in New York that Martí fully developed his distinctive style of non-fiction writing, known to students of Spanish literature as the crónica. Written and published as long letters to the editors of influential newspapers throughout Spanish America, Martí’s crónicas would typically begin by describing some recent event in politics, economics, art, literature, sport, or popular culture, using this as a point of departure for extensive editorializing, abstract philosophical, political, and social theorizing, and bursts of poetry. Though they treat every subject imaginable, race relations in the United States form a frequent focus of Martí’s crónicas. He was particularly concerned to refute the ascendant “scientific” racism, which tied negative behaviors by non-white Americans to features of their genetics or cranial anatomy in order to justify the disenfranchisement, exclusion, exploitation, and murder of former slaves and Native Americans in the United States. If African Americans were more likely to be illiterate than white Americans, or if Native Americans were prone to drunkenness, it was not, Martí argued, because these were inborn characteristics of their respective races, but rather the result of a long history of persecution that continued in the present day. “In these sons of fathers impoverished by slavery, the character and intelligence of the free man shines brightly. Reparation for the offense is due them, most assuredly, … [but] instead of raising them from the wretchedness imposed upon them, taking away the miserable and disagreeable appearance so criminally given them, we make use of it to refuse them association with mankind.”26 Inverting the common, and related rhetoric of civilization and savagery, Martí denounced the expropriation of indigenous lands in the North American west as “a violent act resented by every civilized nation”, and called for the abolition of the “unfair and corrupting reservation system”. As in Spanish America, he favored the gradual privatization of lands controlled by the federal government with large grants for both former slaves and Native Americans. Freed from persecution and in possession of the material 26 La Nación, Buenos Aires, 16 August 1887 from JMOC XI, 237-8. requisites for dignity and self-respect, Martí looked forward to the integration of African and Native American into the American citizenry on equal terms.27 Martí often paired his critiques of racism in the United States with complimentary portraits of its political and social life, describing an annual commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation in New York, for example, before noting the rising number of lynchings in the south.28 He could be quite effusive in his praise of his adoptive country, and particularly of its founding ideals. In a column on the presidential election of 1884, he declared that if he could he would “sculpt in porphyry statues of the extraordinary men who forged the Constitution of the United States, … opening a wide marble road” to allow pilgrims from throughout the hemisphere to come and pay periodic homage. It was not the large, and growing size of the country that impressed him, nor the already impressive, and still rapidly multiplying wealth of its citizens, but its democratic political institutions: When one sees the majesty of the vote, this new nobility of every living man, whether vagabond or propertied, this monarch made up of many heads, … when one attends this unanimous exercise of will by ten million men, one feels as if he were mounted on a steed of light, spurring on winged hooves, leaving behind an old world in ruins to pass through open gates into a universe of dignity.29 Here, again, the echoes of Whitaker’s Western Hemisphere Idea are strong; like his predecessors in the Americas’ first wave of independence movements, Martí saw the end of European rule in the Americas as a step forward for all of mankind. But he was quick to point out that the political freedom the founders of the United States had forged was a “selfish and unjust freedom, wobbling on the shoulders of an enslaved race of men.”30 He noted how the persistence of slavery after independence had destabilized the republican institutions of the United States and nearly brought it crashing to the ground. Martí did not think that it was impossible for the United States to overcome the racial inequality that still marred and weakened its democracy, but he was not certain that it would. His overall depiction of the country was of a society at war with itself, still harboring within the opposed tendencies of its original settlement: “the pilgrim, who refused to tolerate La Nación, Buenos Aires, 4 December 1885 from JMOC X, 321-7. La Nación, Buenos Aires, 10 November 1889 from JMOC XII, 334-43. 29 La Nación, Buenos Aires, 9 May 1885 from JMOC X, 183-4. 30 “Discurso Pronunciado en la Sociedad Literaria Hispanoamericana”, 19 December 1889 from JMOC VI, 135. 27 28 a master above him or a servant below him, or any conquest other than those made by the grain in the earth and by love in the heart, and the shrewd and grasping adventurer, born to acquire and to move forward in the forests, who knows no law but that of his own desires and no limits but the reach of his arm, a solitary and dreaded companion of leopards and eagles.” These two figures, he thought, were “fighting for predominance in the republic and in the world.”31 He could not say which would prevail. It was for this reason that Martí thought it important that Spanish Americans “study the people [of the United States], the ways they sin, the ways they err, the ways they founder, so as not to founder like them.”32 Eliminating the persistent racism that he attributed to Spanish America’s colonial history was, in his mind, the key to consolidating Cuba’s independence in the present, and to advancing beyond the stalled and partial progress toward a truly civilized society the United States had achieved. New York also provided the site for Martí’s political maturation and rise to leadership within the Cuban independence movement. The latter entailed delicate diplomacy with the former field generals of the failed insurgency, also in exile, who thought that a temporary military dictatorship might help assure stability on the island during future efforts to secure independence. Martí built his alternative, determinedly liberal and democratic movement on a new base, speaking frequently to groups of mostly Black and mixed-race Cuban workers in exile, who had formed profitable cigar-making enclaves in New York, Tampa, and Key West. With Martí’s encouragement, these workers provided a more reliable source of funding for the movement than their bosses, whose allegiances tended to waver with their financial interests. In 1892, he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party, an umbrella organization joining local clubs of patriotic Cuban exiles in the U.S. and throughout the Caribbean with the island’s remaining insurgents. The Party’s platform emphasized the connections between Cuba’s independence and that of the rest of the Americas, presenting the island as a geographically indispensible bulwark of independence in the New World. It also insisted that the organization would not “work directly for the present or future predominance of any one class,” but, “in conformity with democratic methods,” establish a “just and frank republic, unified in territory, laws, work, and cordiality, 31 32 Ibid., 135. La Nación, Buenos Aires, 22 October 1885 from JMOC X, 299. built by all for the benefit of all.”33 Martí’s success as a spokesman for Cuban independence depended critically on his ability to address the persistent racial question without alienating either former slaves or former slaveowners. Soon after the formation of the Party, Martí began publishing Patria, an official newspaper for the revolution. This provided him with a forum in which to fully develop his ideas on race and racism in Cuba and the Americas. He began one column by declaring that, A man has no special rights because he belongs to one race or another: simply by being a man he is entitled to all of man’s rights. … Anything that divides men, anything that specifies them, separates them, corrals them, is a sin against humanity. … To insist upon racial divisions, on racial differences, within an already divided people, creates obstacles to both public and individual well-being, which is achieved by bringing together elements that have to cooperate.34 In the course of the column, and in others that followed, Martí criticized both white Cubans who shrunk away from the revolution because they feared it would lead to a race war, and black Cubans who, in his evaluation, gave white Cubans grounds for their fears by presenting the independence movement as a war for racial justice. For Martí, the abolition of slavery was the “purest and most transcendent accomplishment of the Cuban revolution”, and “uprooting” the discriminatory “social relations” that had grown under slavery and survived its abolition was essential to winning and consolidating independence, 35 but he insisted framing these accomplishments in terms of their universal value: the progress that they would represent for humanity in general. In his most famous essay, published in 1891, Martí argued that Spanish America was destined, by dint of its history, to make this progress on behalf of humanity. Echoing, and again, inverting, the Anglo-Saxon supremacists who attacked the idea of a united New World by drawing a sharp line between North and South America, Martí distinguished between “Nuestra América, or “Our America”, meaning Spanish America, and the “other” America, the United States. He acknowledged that, enjoying unique advantages derived from its citizens’ broader experience with representative political institutions under British rule, the U.S. had been better positioned than the countries of Spanish America to build stable republican government and achieve economic growth after independence. But he “Bases del Partido Revolucionario Cubano”, 5 January 1892, from JMOC I, 279-80. “Mi Raza”, Patria, New York, 22 April 1893, from JMOC II, 298. 35 “El Plato de Lentejas”, Patria, New York, 5 January 1894, from JMOC III, 26-7. 33 34 emphasized the advantages, and especially the potential for civilizational progress, that Spanish America derived from its unique racial diversity, a potential that persistent discrimination and genocide had put out of reach for the United States. “Our America,” he wrote, “will be saved by its Indians and is growing better,” while “North America drowns its Indians in blood and is growing worse.”36 The difficulties Spanish Americans had encountered after winning their independence, the endemic civil wars and economic stagnation, were not caused by the new nations’ racially-mixed populations, as racists in both Spanish America and the United States alleged, but by their founders’ attempts to impose institutions imported from Europe and North America—institutions that perpetuated colonial exclusions and hierarchies within independent countries, destabilizing their fragile republics. We were a masquerader in English breeches, Parisian vest, North American jacket and Spanish cap. The Indian, silent, circled our perimeter, and went off to the mountain, to the top of the mountain, to baptize his children. The Negro, scorned, sang his heart out in the night, alone and unknown amongst the waves and wild animals. The peasant, the creator, turned in blind indignation against the disdainful city, against his own creature. We wore epaulets and judges’ robes in countries that came into the world wearing hemp sandals on their feet and headbands on their heads. A genius, with care in his heart and the daring of a founding father, would have joined the headband to the robe; would have freed the Indian and made a place for the competent Negro; would have fit liberty to the body of those who rose up and conquered it. The failures of Spanish America’s first generation of leaders were real, but the struggles they produced had not been fought in vain. Martí viewed Cuba’s fight for independence as an integral part of a second independence movement that would sweep the entire region, eliminating internal sources of discord and freeing Spanish America from external restraints imposed by economic dependence and foreign interventions.37 Already, young patriots were Rolling up their sleeves, digging their hands into the dough, and making it rise with the sweat of their brows. They realize that creation holds the key to salvation. ‘Create’ is the password of this generation. The wine is made from plantain, but even “Nuestra América” Philip S. Foner, “Introduction” from Foner, ed., Our America: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 24-5. 36 37 if it turns sour, it is our own wine! That a country’s form of government must be in keeping with its natural elements is a foregone conclusion. … If a republic refuses to open its arms to all, and move ahead with all, it dies. The tiger within sneaks in through the crack; so does the tiger from without. Amongst the proponents of this second independence movement, “there can be no racial animosity, because there are no races.” Black, white, and mixed-race, slave and free, Cuban patriots would demonstrate that it was possible to throw off colonial rule and its racial vestiges all at once, fighting side by side and then governing themselves under equal laws and representative institutions. But in order to sustain this freedom, in the face of old and new threats alike, Cubans would require the support of their fellow Americans. For this, Martí argued, they had to return to and revitalize the ideal of union. A Union in the Continental Spirit “Our America” appeared in 1891, at the end of a series of twelve articles Martí wrote on the First Conference of American States, known popularly as the “Pan-American Congress”, held in Washington D.C. from the autumn of 1889 to the spring of 1890. Following the Panama Congress of 1826, the nations of Spanish America had convened conferences in Lima, Peru, in 1847, in Santiago, Chile, in 1856, and in Lima again, in 1864. The United States was absent from all three, having by this time adopted a determinedly unilateralist and expansionist approach to its hemisphere, largely under the leadership of a Democratic party that had opposed U.S. participation at Panama. The first Lima Congress was held as U.S. troops occupied Mexico City, and imposed a treaty transferring half of Mexico’s territory to the United States. The Santiago Congress followed closely on President Pierce’s decision to recognize the regime established by the filibuster William Walker in Nicaragua, whose conquest of the chronically unstable Central American state was widely hailed in the U.S. as a striking demonstration of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. The second Lima Congress occurred as the U.S. declined to offer anything more than rhetorical opposition to a French occupation of Mexico and the installation of a member of the Hapsburg family as Emperor of its southern neighbor. In this context, the idea of an American System, joining the New World’s republics in peaceful and prosperous union, while insulating them from the corrupting influence of the Old World’s unstable balance of powers, became increasingly remote. But Latin American statesmen did not abandon the unionist ideal their forebears had cherished. Instead, they rose at each Congress to call for cooperation amongst what they now often referred to as the “Latin” American states in resisting both the old imperialism of Europe and the new imperialism of the United States. By adopting this modifier, a term of derision amongst Anglo-Saxon supremacists, Latin American political thinkers sought to forge a common identity for the citizens of the union they hoped to build.38 José Martí’s articles on the PanAmerican Congress, culminating in his famous “Our America” essay, continued these efforts, deploying an immanent critique of the emerging North American empire as the intellectual basis for a Latin American union intended to defend members’ political and economic independence while spreading liberal, democratic institutions and combatting racism throughout the hemisphere. The Pan-American Congress of 1889 was the brainchild of James G. Blaine, who first proposed the idea during his first term as Secretary of State in 1881. Blaine developed the idea in response to the War of the Pacific—a conflict between Chile and an alliance of Bolivia and Peru over the mineral-rich deserts in what was then the southern coast of Bolivia. With superior land and naval forces, Chile quickly took control of the contested areas, refusing all offers of mediation that might have forced them to return territory to Bolivia. Blaine became concerned that European powers would take sides in the conflict, using it as a wedge to increase their political influence and economic access to South America’s Pacific coast. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, he convinced Congress to appropriate funds for a Conference of American States in Washington, where he hoped to forge a resolution to the conflict and to establish a compulsory system of arbitration for all future inter-American conflicts, while further expanding the United States’ diplomatic presence in the hemisphere. Though the Conference found some support amongst North American businessmen interested in new markets, and amongst Spanish Americans outside Chile, it fell apart after the assassination of President Garfield, whose successor removed Blaine from office and abandoned his foreign policy initiatives.39 See Michel Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race”, American Historical Review, vol. 118, no. 5 (December 2013), 1345-1375. 39 For Blaine’s diplomatic career, see: Edward P. Crapol, James G. Blaine: Architect of Empire (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2000); and David Healy, James G. Blaine and Latin America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001). 38 Still, the idea of a “Pan-American” Conference lived on, gaining momentum through the 1880s as economic recession gripped the United States and politicians in both parties came to view the expansion of exports to Latin America as a means of alleviating chronic overproduction and turning back the tide of European influence in the area. Impressed by the positive results that Germans had reaped from the Zollverein customs union established in 1833, and by the lobbying of American industrial concerns, in 1888 a joint House-Senate conference approved the McCreary-Frye Act, instructing the president to invite the governments of Latin America to a conference in Washington, in order to discuss establishing an inter-American customs union, stimulating greater steamship and railroad communication and travel, a common system of weights and measures, a common silver coin, and intellectual property laws. When Blaine returned to the office of Secretary of State under President James Buchanan in 1889, he added his original ambition to establish an inter-American system of conflict arbitration to the Conference agenda.40 As delegates from seventeen Latin American nations assembled in Washington in October 1889, Martí reported from New York for La Nación, an Argentinian newspaper. An early article established what he believed were the stakes of the meeting: “Never in America, since independence, has a matter arisen requiring better judgment and closer vigilance.” To properly form an opinion of the Conference, and of the ambitious program it was to pursue, Martí wrote, it was necessary that one “examine” the nation that instigated it, “at its roots … so as not to be deceived by sudden shifts of policy, or by the cohabitation of lofty virtues with rapacious desires” that, for Martí, defined its national character. The United States was a “nation that saw no crime in leaving a mass of men enslaved to others who refused to be slaves themselves.” It was a nation that, even when it “saw at its gates an epic race fighting a stirring war for the very principles of decency in whose name it had raised the banner against the English” refused to extend aid or offer recognition until Spanish American independence was a fait accompli. It was a nation that, “with lips that had just proclaimed that no European monarch could have slaves in America, demanded that the armies of the South abandon their plans to go and redeem the American islands of the Gulf from enslavement to a European monarchy.” A nation that, “having just united thirteen states, with no less difficulty than the hybrid colonies of the South, prevented the latter from 40 Joseph Smith, “The First Conference of American States (1889-1890) and the Early Pan American Policy of the United States”, from David Sheinin, ed., Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in Inter-American Affairs (Westport: Praeger, 2000), 19-32. fortifying, as they could have fortified and could still, an essential union of southern peoples.” A nation that, rather than fostering union, “launched a war against a neighboring country, and carved a coveted region out of its live flesh.” This was the nation that had initiated the Conference, inviting the nations of Latin America to Washington, Martí wrote, to “form a confederacy for purposes of controlling them.” 41 Martí’s serial pairings of political ideals with hypocritical actions is not only rhetorically effective, but philosophically compelling: the racism that still deeply structured North American society, and the United States’ imperial turn were problematic, he argued, because it contradicted the ideas upon which the nation was founded, ideas shared with the very peoples that suffered the worst consequences of its foreign aggression. Martí argued forcefully that the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy that marred North American democracy at home also lay behind the new imperial approach the United States took abroad. He packed his articles on the Pan-American Congress with translated quotations from North American newspapers, revealing the derisive terms in which North Americans of all political persuasions discussed the inhabitants of their sister nations to the south. He warned his readers that the battle for the United States’ soul, fought between contradictory commitments to democracy and empire, equality and racial hierarchy, was being won by “the element which consumed the native race, fomented and lived from the slavery of another race,” and now had turned to “robbing neighboring countries.” They believe in the invincible superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race over the Latin. They believe in the inferiority of the Negroes whom they enslaved yesterday and are criticizing today, and of the Indians whom they are exterminating. They believe that the Spanish American nations are formed principally of Indians and Negroes. As long as the United States knows no more about Spanish America, and respects it no more…can this country invite Spanish America to an alliance that would be honest and useful to our Spanish American nations?42 With this depiction of the United States in the background, Martí turned to the proposals the Conference’s delegates would consider. He favored the idea of common weights and measures, and a common exchange rate for gold and silver currency. “All legal tender in the world should be standardized. It shall be. Everything primitive, such as coinage differences, “El Congreso de Washington”, La Nación, Buenos Aires, 19 December 1889, from JMOC VI, 47-48. “La Conferencia Monetaria de las Repúblicas de América”, La Revista Illustrada, New York, May 1890, from JMOC, VI, 159-60. 41 42 will disappear when there are no longer any primitive nations.” He also favored the proposals to improve railroad and steamship transportation and communication throughout the hemisphere, and indeed, the world. “All that brings man closer together and makes life more moral and tolerable must be desired and helped to become a reality. All that brings nations together must be realized.” These were economic components of the original ideal of union the founders of the Americas had developed in common. The proposed interAmerican customs union represented the very pinnacle of their liberal commercial philosophy—the idea that states bound by dense relations of interdependence and a sturdy political union would enjoy peace and prosperity unavailable within a competitive balance of powers. But Martí argued that the United States no longer pursued these policies in service of that original unionist ideal, but its opposite. North American rivalry with Europe was no longer based in their opposed political systems, or the threat Europe posed to the new ideas emerging from the Americas, but in barren commercial competition. The United States’ interest in Latin America was no longer that of a sister nation engaged in a common effort to advance human civilization, but a scramble for markets that might help clear its clogged warehouses, and establish parity for its preferred precious metal. A Pan-American union established in these circumstances would not consolidate Latin America’s political independence or hasten its economic development, but assure its permanent subordination to the hemisphere’s hegemonic power. As to Blaine’s cherished proposal for a permanent court of arbitration for interAmerican disputes, Martí argued that “Arbitration would be an excellent thing if it could be hoped that in the fullness of its power this still adolescent republic … would yield its own appetites to arbitration.” He saw no indication, though, in its recent conduct of foreign policy, that the U.S. would ever allow a court to decide controversies to which it was a party or in which it had an interest. He described in close detail the day of the Conference on which the arbitration proposal was discussed, noting with particular relish an amendment offered by the Argentinian delegation: The Conference resolves: that conquest shall be eliminated for ever from American public law; that territorial cessions shall be null if they are made under the threat of war or the pressure of an armed force; that the nation which makes such treaties shall always have the right to recur to arbitration to invalidate them; that the renunciation of the right to recur to arbitration shall lack value and efficacy, in whatever conditions it was made.43 In Martí’s telling, the reading of the conquest amendment sparked a heated exchange between Blaine and an Argentinian delegate. The United States refused to support the amendment, and eventually succeeded in having it struck from the proposed arbitration resolution, though at the cost of several countries’ support. The resolution was eventually adopted, though never ratified by any member state. Ultimately, the first Conference of American States closed without accomplishing any of its proponents’ ambitions, an outcome that Martí regarded as an important victory. Martí’s forceful opposition to the Pan-American conference could be read as a rejection of the ideal of union that occupied such a central place in American and Latin American political thought prior to the emergence of the United States as an imperial power. But his critique of Blaine’s attempt to employ the language and institutions of union to project the United States influence throughout the hemisphere must be read in concert with his positive proposals for organizing Latin America’s resistance to North American hegemony within the hemisphere. These appear in his essay on “Our America”. After discussing the importance of racial diversity in the Americas’ history, the different policies that the United States and the nations of Spanish America adopted in relation to their Indigenous and African populations, and the de-stabilizing effects that efforts to maintain colonial social hierarchies after independence had on both continents, Martí turns to interAmerican relations. “Our America is running another risk,” he wrote, “that does not come from itself but from the difference in origins, methods, and interests between the two halves of the continent. The time is near at hand when an enterprising and vigorous people who scorn or ignore Our America will even so approach it and demand a close relationship.” The same ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy that North Americans employed to justify the continued domestic inequalities and injustices felt by indigenous and African Americans now increasingly served to justify interventions in and annexations of Latin American territories. Latin Americans, then, had to assume that efforts to effect a diplomatic rapprochement like the one seemingly on offer at the Pan-American Conference were actually continuous with efforts to dominate the hemisphere economically and militarily. 43 “La Conferencia de Washington”, La Nación, Buenos Aires, 31 May 1890, from JMOC VI, 88. In the face of this threat, Latin Americans could not afford to retreat into their local communities, or seek separate accommodation for their individual states within a hemisphere structured by North American hegemony. “We can no longer be a people of leaves living in the air, our foliage heavy with blooms and crackling or humming at the whim of the sun’s caress, or buffeted and tossed by the storms. The trees must form ranks to keep the giant with seven-league boots from passing.” The institutional form Martí recommended was one with deep roots in American political thought: “immediate union in the continental spirit.” “The pressing need of Our America,” he wrote, “is to show itself as it is, one and spirit and intent, the swift conqueror of a suffocating past, stained only by enriching blood drawn from hands that struggled to clear away the ruins” of colonial rule. Unified, Latin Americans would not only force the United States to “remove its hands out of respect”, but could begin to turn their northern neighbor away from the imperialist path it had begun to travel. “With a single voice the hymn is already being sung. The present generation is carrying industrious America along the road enriched by their sublime fathers.” The formation of Latin American union, then, would be an accomplishment of global importance, redeeming the common ideals of the Americas’ founding, cleansing them of their contradictions, and providing an example to be emulated by oppressed peoples throughout the world. Implications In April, 1895, José Martí returned to Cuba to join the independence movement that he had organized from New York. Though he was not a soldier, and had no expertise in military strategy, he felt that it was important that he be physically present to continue coordinating the movement’s at-times discordant factions, and to directly confront any military leader who might try to turn the movement away from the liberal and democratic future he envisioned for Cuba. Martí spent a month in the island’s eastern backcountry, moving with troops led by Máximo Gómez, a veteran of earlier efforts to win independence. Then, during a skirmish with Spanish troops, he was shot and killed, his career as a statesman and, possibly, the founder of a new nation were cut tragically short. The insurgency continued to gain ground without its “apostle”, as Martí came to be known, but, at the moment when victory seemed probable, the United States intervened in the conflict, declaring war on Spain in April 1898. The Spanish-American war lasted only a few months, and left U.S. troops occupying not only Spain’s Caribbean possessions, Cuba and Puerto Rico, but also the Pacific islands of Guam and the Philippines. All four former colonies would, in one way or another, come under the direct control of the United States government—Cuba and the Philippines as protectorates, Puerto Rico and Guam as “unincorporated territories”—but none were added to the union. In this sense, Martí’s deepest concerns regarding the United States’ intentions were realized even more dramatically than he ever anticipated. Despite this immediate political ineffectiveness, Martí’s ideas exerted a lasting influence in Latin American political thought. His immanent critique of the American empire only beginning to emerge in his own time inspired later generations of Latin American critics, who have continued to denounce yanquí aggression as a contradiction of the ideals the United States purports to uphold in the world. His proposals for a Latin American union, though never realized to the extent he hoped, have been cited repeatedly by the proponents of political and economic integration from his time to the present. Perhaps most importantly, Martí stands at the head of a school of Latin American political and legal theorists, who developed the concept of “American International Law”—a vision of interstate relations governed by legal principles of non-aggression and sovereign equality. Latin American proposals at the first Pan-American Congress also influenced Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism and the League of Nations Treaty, and Latin Americans formed an important voting block at the founding of the United Nations, lending their united weight to proposals that enshrined human rights and non-aggression in international law. These long-term and hemisphere-wide echoes of Martí’s thought signal one important implication of the present study, showing that American and Latin American political thought have not evolved in isolation from one another, or existed in a onedirectional relationship of imitation or reaction. Rather, Americans and Latin American political thinkers have long been in dialogue with one another, working out in different ways the meanings of ideals they have shared since their independence movements. In order to understand either tradition properly, it is important to understand this important history of interaction. A second, related implication concerns these shared ideals themselves. In the large and growing literature on imperialism and the history of political thought, scholars have shown that dominant traditions of political thinking in Europe and North America, and particularly the liberal tradition, have evolved in close relation to projects of conquest and colonization, and that these traditions’ ideals—individual and collective freedom, progress, and equality—have routinely been invoked in order to justify European and North American aggression abroad. Similar connections have been demonstrated between the construction of international political, legal, and economic institutions and the persistence of European and North American global hegemony beyond decolonization and up to the present day. The historical association of liberalism, republicanism, international law, and international institutions with imperialism has led some scholars to reject the value of these traditions and institutions entirely, arguing that the imperial urge is “internal” to their ideals, that conquest and colonization follow as a matter of logical entailment from their first principles and original purposes. Alongside a few other recent works,44 this study of José Martí and the ideal of union demonstrates that the traditions of liberalism and republicanism can be effectively mobilized in immanent critiques of imperialism, and that international institutions, if properly designed, might serve to constrain economically and militarily powerful nations in their relations with the world. This leads to a final, methodological implication. Scholars working in the emerging subfield of Comparative Political Theory have called for political theorists to pay greater attention to traditions of political thought traditionally excluded from the Western canon, arguing that the dominance of European and North American political thinkers within academic study both reflects and serves to perpetuate the dominant position of Europe and the United States in the world. Studying East and South Asian, Islamic, or African political thought, these scholars suggest, will reveal the contingency of principles that are taken for granted within the European and North American tradition. This study shows, however, that comparative political theorists might also search for compelling critiques of the Western canon in traditions of political thought that depart from similar first principles, but which have evolved in contexts different from those prevailing in Europe and North America. From the period of the independence movements forward, Latin American political thinkers like José Martí shared many political and philosophical commitments with their North American counterparts, but as the United States evolved into first a hemispheric and then a 44 C. A. Bayly “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30” Modern Intellectual History, vol., no. 1 (April 2007), 25 – 41; Jennifer Pitts, “Liberalism and Empire an a Nineteenth Century Algerian Mirror” Modern Intellectual History,Vol. 6 No. 2 (August 2009), 287 – 313. global hegemon, they mobilized these commitments to criticize the domestic inequalities and foreign aggression they saw and experienced, forging an alternative tradition of thinking about freedom, democracy, and international relations. These alternative traditions, though intimately connected to the Western canon, should form an important area of focus for comparative political theory.