Much of the history of 20th Century in Latin America has been characterized by political instability and turmoil. Nonetheless, some political trends may still be recognized. In Central America, oligarchic systems of governance prevailed at the end of the 19th Century. The first quarter of the 20th Century was maked by political unrest and multiple changes in government. And in the Caribbean, most islands were administered by European countries and the United States until well after World War II.
The collapse of the stock market in 1929 and the subsequent world wide economic crisis also had political effects throughout Central and South America, and as in Europe there were many regime changes including the installation of authoritarian systems. After WWII there was a move toward more democratic forms of governance and multi-party states. Colonies gained independence or were absorbed fully into the mother country.
The political atmosphere changed again in the 1960s when military and dictatorial regimes predominated. During the 1980s there was a shift toward more democratic systems with multi-party elections, and almost all colonies had become either self-governing or independent. The final frame shows that multi-party states predominate as the most common political regime at the turn of the 21st Century.
Historians today differ in their opinions about why this trend toward more democratic forms of political systems emerged in Latin America at the end of the 20th Century. Many believe that the explanation for this expansion of multi-party forms of governments is the result of the West emerging from the Cold War as the model for countries with higher levels of living standards and political stability. Others believe that rising global prosperity, the growing integration of world economies, and the increasing influence of the United States and Europe in South America have contributed to this growth of multi-party systems in the region. In contrast, Marxist historians would argue that these changes are superficial and that what we call a "multi-party" state is a euphemism for the traditional oligarchic state.
The new Latin American politics strains the comprehension of both policy-maker and historian. In a region notorious for its instability this polities combines a bewildering variety of trends: powerful government action, economic nationalism, mass participation, and labor and agrar ian reform. One should not be surprised that students of the new politics have sought to interpret it by tracing the emergence of new social classes in the hope that these classes will explain the development of the new politics and facilitate both analysis of its present condition and project toward its future. This interpretation has gained influence. But influence does not always indicate real ability to explain. Sometimes it results from fashion or simplicity of application. Certainly the time has come to look carefully at social-class explanations and at the relationship between class and polities in twentieth-century Latin America.
It is best to begin with a summary statement of most commonly shared views about the emergence of new social classes. The process began in the 1870s and 1880s when strong governments overcame the dissensions which had divided the nations since Independence. This was the era of the Porfirian peace in Mexico, the victory of Buenos Aires over the Argentine provinces, and Guzmán Blanco’s domination in Venezuela. The stability produced by such governments as these coincided with a renewed foreign economic interest in Latin America. Industrialized Europe and the United States needed raw materials—traditional Latin American exports like sugar, coffee, and hides, as well as new ones such as base metals, meat, wheat, and later petroleum. To produce these materials substantial foreign capital was invested, frequently tied to direct foreign ownership. To move these materials to the ports railroads were built, again under foreign ownership. In the resultant prosperity, cities were modernized and grew rapidly, attracting immigration to southern South America and internal migration everywhere.
In the new cities, which now had modern public utilities, electricity, and tramways, new industry developed, partly the processing of exports and partly the manufacture of consumer goods. A new urban labor class formed and also a new middle class, made up of the new industrialists, the professionals who serviced the new activities, public employees, university professors, and a variety of small businessmen. Most analysts agree that these trends occurred in this manner, but they disagree on the makeup of the new middle class and the extent of its cohesion. Some analysts prefer to use other terminology, but in essence they concede that this new middle class had enough in common to act in its own interest, as did the new urban working class.
There is little disagreement in defining the interest of the middle and working classes. Both wanted more education and more industrialization. Both saw the benefits of economic nationalism; both wanted more public building and infrastructure; and both recognized that control of government was the way to accomplish these aims. To secure the political support of labor in the increasingly important elections, the middle class sponsored pension, wage, and union legislation.
The process which began in the 1870s and 1880s produced, in the view of this interpretation, its first political victories for the new social classes around World War I. The process was speeded by both world wars and by the economic nationalism and industrialization resulting from the Great Depression. It has rapidly accelerated in the years of tremendous urban growth since World War II.1
At this point students of class evolution begin to disagree. One group of analysts in Latin America and the United States, regarding labor as the key class, expect the process to move out into the country-side among rural workers, peasants, and Indians. Because the interests of middle and working groups are increasingly inimical, however, this group predicts a resulting series of lower-class revolutions. A second group expects the lower classes to bring about a new alliance between themselves and the middle class. A third group, which sees the middle class as the determinants, recognizes the possibility that the process has created a Frankenstein’s monster for this class. They believe, however, that the middle class can continue to guide the nations toward progressive maturity, if it remains pragmatic, gives labor its decent due, and has a little luck and outside assistance—for example, from the Alliance for Progress.2
This brief summary should make clear the attractions of this middle- and working-class analysis of twentieth-century Latin American politics. Such an analysis combines economic, social, political, and even intellectual and ideological history to explain what has happened and to suggest several versions of what is going to happen in the future. Nevertheless, this analysis presents problems. To begin with, it applies to Latin America an explanation of what happened in nineteenth-century Europe under the effects of industrialization. Are the two eases actually parallel?3
Several circumstances suggest that they may not be. For one thing, in the non-European world outside of Latin America the politics of economic nationalism and powerful government are evident, and it is doubtful that they can be explained on the basis of middle classworking class coalitions. For another thing, ever since World War II, Latin American economists have been denying the similarity of European and Latin American industrialization. Historical pasts, social structures, and resources were different; also industry developed first elsewhere. For these reasons, they argue, Latin America has been peripheral to world industrial centers, producing raw materials for these centers.4 As a result, Latin America has never been able to develop the capital to finance a fully industrial economy. Urbanization has not resulted from industrial growth, and reduced markets have limited consumer goods industries. Even though the process of tying Latin America to the industrial world has gone on for eighty years, its results are far different from what happened in Europe.
These objections are reinforced by the difficulties that present-day politics pose for class analysis. Castro’s revolution was expected to produce lower-class revolutions elsewhere by imitation, but it has not done so. Belief in an influential, class-conscious, industrial work force is deflated when statistics put industrial labor at no more than ten or fifteen percent of the population, even in more advanced countries. Factory workers are a still smaller part. Expectations of proletarian solidarity are further weakened by anthropological studies which indicate that the members of the new urban lower class, rather than being a political tinder box, have rural values of dependence and a little political awareness.5
Analysts who explain Latin American politics in terms of the middle classes have equally serious difficulties in accounting for what is going on. To be sure, the middle classes are growing. Using data from around 1950—the figures should be higher today—John P. Gillin estimated that “for Latin America as a whole, the middle strata constitute just under 20 percent of the national society (exclusive of Indians).”6 Argentina usually is considered to have the largest middle class, somewhere from 35 to 40 percent of the population. But it must be remembered that these are only estimates based on types of employment by which sociologists define “middle class.” The statistics do not prove that the people so employed recognize common class interests or operate together in politics.7 Also analysts are embarrassed by the variety of political patterns in those countries where the middle class is presumed to be dominant, from Chilean Christian Democracy, which combines religion with social welfare concepts, to military governments in Brazil, Peru, and Argentina.
One may explain these military governments on the grounds that the new middle class has become frightened at the danger of a lower-class takeover and turned for protection to the military, whose social origins are now middle class. But the difficulties which the military governments are facing suggest that the middle classes are far from united in support or opposition. Recently observers have gone so far as to urge members of the Latin American middle class to settle down and work together.8 In short, neither the cohesion within the middle and lower classes nor the alliance between these two classes has developed in the manner predicted. One must conclude that this kind of class analysis does not satisfactorily explain present Latin American politics.
If that is the case today, when the process is supposedly well advanced, it is also questionable that the new classes had as much political influence earlier in the century as many have assumed. Examination of a sample case will strengthen this conclusion. The election of José Batlle y Ordóñez in 1911 to a second term as president of Uruguay has been considered the first clearcut example in Latin America of the political domination of the new classes. What happened in Uruguay did not necessarily determine the course of events elsewhere. But if it is possible to explain what happened in Uruguay by a different kind of analysis, then obviously this kind of analysis deserves to be tested in other Latin American countries.
In 1903, Batlle had been narrowly elected president of Uruguay by the legislature. His victory over the opposition Nationalists in the Civil War of 1904 removed the greatest threat which the Colorado Party had faced since assuming power in 1865 and made him the Colorado hero. Batlle quickly solidified his control with general elections. In these his loyal lieutenants ran all the interior departments, and voting was public, so that only those who were not afraid of the consequences took part. The result was a Colorado landslide, over 60 percent of the 45,000 votes cast, and overwhelming Colorado majorities in the legislature. Battle could practice the one-party government which he preached. Although the constitution denied a president immediate réélection, he would be able to pick his successor.9
With the political situation secure and both party and government in safe hands, Battle could now introduce long-planned reforms: the end of the death penalty, anti-church divorce legislation, police neutrality in strikes, an eight-hour day, and measures to control the operations of foreign enterprises. These daring reforms antagonized what were then called the conservative classes—the term middle classes was mfrequently used—banking, commercial, and industrial circles, both Uruguayan and foreign, whose economic importance everyone recognized. When it came time to choose a successor, Battle avoided anyone who could be expected to continue his program of innovations. Instead he selected a non-politician, Claudio Williman, his Minister of Government and ex-rector of the university. Williman had stood by Battle in the War of 1904 and shared his one-party government views. But as attorney for the British railroads, Williman was highly acceptable to the conservative classes, and not entirely sympathetic with Battle’s innovating views. In 1907, to the relief of the conservative classes and the Nationalists, Battle left for Europe, where he could avoid conflicts with the new president. He was careful, however, to leave the Colorado Party organization in the hands of his admirers, who were already planning to bring him back in 1911 for an unprecedented second term.
The years of stable peace after 1904 were prosperous. Livestock and foreign trade reached new heights; annual budget surpluses made governing easy. Williman provided what everyone wanted public works, greatly expanded primary education, and improved administration. In this way he showed himself as sympathetic to new ideas as most educated Uruguayans of his day. Unlike Battle, however Williman was careful not to push so far as to arouse strong opposition.
In particular, Williman distrusted Uruguay’s anarchist-led labor unions. His police harassed radicals, and his government broke the railroad strike of 1908, the major labor disturbance of his administration. This anti-union policy greatly disturbed the editor of Battle's own newspaper El Día, Domingo Arena, who had instructions to support Williman in everything. Battle, then in Europe, was under no illusions about what would happen if the Batllistas broke with Williman to support labor. As he reminded Arena: “Ideas in favor of protection of the working classes are far from generalized among us. Besides, the power of the president is almost insuperable.” Later he repeated this advice: “Except for you, me, and a few others, nobody in the country gets heated up over these questions.”10
Just as Batlle knew that it would be fantastic to attempt a return to power as a labor candidate, so also he realized that his economic nationalism was unpopular with business. In a letter to his confidants, he urged the necessity of stopping the gold outflow caused by the operations of foreign companies. “It is necessary to react against the ideas reigning in Montevideo,” he said. “The thinking and calculating elements of our city, those who make public opinion in money matters . . . have been the businessmen, the representatives of European houses, whose products they sell. The newspapers have depended on them, . . . and the lawyers to whom they give their business have also lived off them.”11
When the presidential campaign began in 1910, Battle’s chances were excellent. His organization remained in control of the Colorado Party, and Williman gave no indication of wanting to challenge it and so complicate his government’s problems. Though the Nationalists bitterly opposed Battle’s return, they were divided between revolution and electoral opposition. The conservative classes did not relish Battle’s return. But even more they feared a Nationalist revolution against his return, realizing that revolution might be disastrous for the nation’s prosperity. They formed a Peace League for political improvement through “peaceful and orderly evolution.”12 Subscription lists were available for signing at the Stock Exchange, Chamber of Commerce, Manufacturers Association, the Rural Association, and the Center of Retail Storekeepers. These groups, the prototypes of modern interest groups, warned potential Nationalist revolutionaries not to count on any assistance from them.
Revolution presented the only threat to Battle’s candidacy, for even an unsuccessful uprising might produce a movement to substitute for Batlle a candidate who could bring peace. To counteract this threat, the Colorado leaders mounted a campaign throughout the country which would demonstrate that their candidate was too strong to be stopped by a revolution. They called for “a great movement of opinion in which members of all parties and all social classes would participate.” Colorado youth responded: “Batlle synthesizes our program .. . . Batlle is good and he is strong. Therefore he is necessary.”13 The campaign leaders, however, were unable to form a businessmen’s committee for their candidate ; business was antirevolution, not pro-Batlle.
A few individuals called on class-conscious labor to support Batlle, but the anarchist union leaders refused. They met and passed a resolution: “The workers will not vote.. . . We do not combat a specific person or government; we shall always be against the government, whatever its political color.. . .”14 Baffle’s campaign leaders made no effort to enlist labor support. They had the votes already; their need was to calm the opposition, rather than arousing fears of radicalism. Instead, they worked hard to present the image of a new and mature Batlle, who would return from Europe ready to conciliate the Nationalists and cease dividing Uruguay with startling projects. During Battle's first administration José Enrique Rodó, the country’s most famous essayist, had opposed the president’s war and religious policies. Now, however, Rodó was enlisted in the “mature” Batlle campaign, and he told readers of the official campaign newspaper that “absence and time have interposed their regenerative influence.”15
Meanwhile Batlle was forced to remain in Europe because Williman feared that his return would expose Williman’s own political weakness. In absentia Batlle generally cooperated with the campaign of “maturity,” although he distrusted the Peace League and privately restated his one-party government position. Thus he allowed a correspondent from the conservative newspaper El Siglo to come away from an interview saying that Batlle recognized no urgent agrarian problem in Uruguay or a labor problem as serious as that in Europe. His own program was skilfully phrased. If read carefully it indicated that he planned in 1911 to begin where he had left off in 1907. But it was also general enough to seem conciliatory to those who wanted no more innovations.16
The increasing certainty of Battle’s victory goaded the Nationalist revolutionary wing into action. In October 1910, they grasped at promises of support from dissident army and Colorado factions and revolted. But Colorado supporters stood firm; and moderate Nationalists refused to join in. Unable to assemble a real army, the revolutionaries were soon asking Williman for peace. The abortive uprising assured Battle’s election, for it demonstrated the solid support which the Colorado party enjoyed in the government and army and among its own members. Likewise it proved that there was no widespread support for revolution—thanks in part to the “mature” Batlle campaign.
The moderate Nationalists who had refused to revolt recognized that their party now was so badly divided that it would make a dismal electoral showing. They set out to reunite the party by abstaining in the elections, along with the recent revolutionaries. Nationalist abstention created a small crisis. To allow non-Colorados a voice in the legislature, Williman proposed that eleven distinguished members of the conservative classes be given legislative seats. These men met and by a majority vote declined the offer, for they were unwilling to be window dressing for Batlle. After all this maneuvering the election itself was an anticlimax. Even without an opposition to excite interest, the Colorados turned out a bigger vote than they had in 1905. In March 1911, Battle was unanimously elected by the legislature to a second term as president of the Republic.
The new president quickly shattered the “mature” image which his campaigners had fabricated. He restated his belief in one-party government and his abhorrence for coalition politics. He pushed through a group of reforms—labor and old age pension projects, state-owned banking and business enterprises, and the economic development of the interior. And he tried to lay the basis for a progressive land tax. Battle’s central problem was how to maintain the continuity of this program in the absence of strong class support for it. His solution was ingenious—a plural executive, which would prevent a strong president from overthrowing the system. Unfortunately the very strangeness of the plural executive provided an issue which all of Batlle’s opponents could use to attack him. Since Batlle’s time controversy over this issue has acted both as a unifying and dividing factor in Uruguay.
Batlle’s second election was very different from the clearcut victory of a middle class-lower class coalition conforming to the model offered by the class analysts. Classes played a part in the political process, so that their interests could not be neglected by those involved in the election or by later researchers, but in this case political control worked on class. Battle owed his election to effective organization all over the nation by his subordinates, to the support of Colorados who considered him their hero, and to a skillful political campaign.
Against their will, the conservative classes were obliged by the situation facing them to accept Batlle. Class conscious labor was a negligible, even a negative factor in his victory. Batlle returned to power as Colorado leader, not as representative of a class coalition. His greatest single stroke in assuring his reelection was his enormously shrewd choice of Williman as his successor. Williman was strong enough to stand up to the opposition, yet loyal to his own party’s leader.
If Batlle’s second election cannot be described as a new class victory without distorting events, can other so-called first victories of the new classes—the elections of Hipólito Yrigoyen and Arturo Alessandri—be so explained?17 The type of analysis used in this article suggests even more general questions than this. We have argued that the cohesion and coalitions postulated by the class-analysis model are not now in operation. Examination of a crucial episode of the past, Batlle’s second election, suggests that they were not then in operation. The difficulty in squaring the model with events calls for reconsideration of the relationships between politics and class in all Latin America during the twentieth century.
Analysts have already begun this reconsideration. They realize that middle class-lower class coalitions are not functioning as expected, and they are disappointed at the slow, irregular rise of living standards in Latin America. For these frustrations they blame the middle class, accusing it of favoring the aristocracy and of neglecting reform. According to these analysts, the middle class came to power with the support of the lower class, only to desert their allies, adopt upper class values, and resist any significant change. These critics emphasize the failure of the new politics, but cannot seem to explain its successes. Beyond that, their analysis closely approaches the reformist middle-class views which they criticize, for they are satisfied with the reformist position that the new politics emerged as a response to new classes and, like the reformists, they postulate only one pattern of middle-class political action.18
This points up one evident need. Writers are addicted to cautious qualifying phrases such as “the middle classes are amorphous” or “we are talking about middle strata not a middle class.” Very little has been done, though, to distinguish the component groups of the middle class and the extent to which these component groups share or dispute political values. For example, in the United States bank employees are considered members of the middle class and difficult to unionize, while in Latin America they are among the most militant unionists. To the extent that their employment determines their polities they are at odds with other middle-class groups. We must define interest groups and establish the importance of membership in such groups for determining political values. Until this is done the only thing that we can confidently say about the Latin American middle class is who does not belong to it.
In addition, we need to distinguish between the polemical and interpretive value of analyzing Latin American polities as a struggle between traditional and new classes. Landowners are generally regarded as traditionalists, but they were directly involved in the new economics of raw material exports which began in the late nineteenth century. Rural associations sprang up before unions; modern land-owners have shown themselves quite able to operate as an interest group.19 Enthusiasm for economic development is probably as great today among the upper classes as in other sectors of society.
The ties between social origins and ideology are not foreordained. Even if we can demonstrate that Latin American military officers have middle-class backgrounds or that political leaders belong overwhelmingly to the upper and middle classes, we have not proved an invariable connection. The social origins of practicing Latin American politicians in any party are not very different; their programs and appeals are. If one compared members of Castro’s and Batista’s governments as to social background, one would probably be surprised at the sharply different ideological positions of the two. Fidel Castro himself, whatever his personal history, is the lawyer son of a land-owner.
Finally, one of the central insights of those who have analyzed peasant revolutions elsewhere is the political unawareness of the lower class. In Latin America, however, political unawareness, both urban and rural, appears further up in the social scale. An expanding bureaucracy is frequently cited as a response to middle-class growth. But even more it is the means of obtaining support from those who are otherwise politically indifferent.
These points can be put as three propositions. First, political unawareness, recognized as widespread among the lower classes, actually extends upward into what is usually considered the middle class. Second, primary identification with a limited component group, rather than with a broad class, makes for intense concern only with political issues which have direct personal effect. Third, ideological values are not tightly related to class.
These propositions argue for a very different relationship between politics and class than that posited by any of the contending schools of class analysis. Objections to class analysis of politics are scarcely new. Historians have always been skeptical of such analysis because they recognize that politics—the way men struggle to achieve and maintain power and use government to solve community problems— necessarily influences human life. Especially in twentieth-century Latin America the social structure is characterized by political unawareness, narrow concerns, and ideological values not tightly tied to class. Because of the problems presented by the great changes in this area, powerful government has grown ahead of politically conscious new classes.
This interpretation assigns vital importance to the means of creating political support, which might be taken largely for granted if one could assume strong cohesive classes. In Latin America’s recent history political organization has probably been the single most underestimated causal factor. The growth of railroads and then roads, the increasing integration of populations, rising literacy, radio, the funds at the disposition of governments, and political parties facing widespread political unawareness—all these factors have made political organization and the political use of government tremendously important in building support and channeling opinions. The political clubs which one sees even in the smallest places, the continuing campaigning, even after elections, are ways of building support; so are the political use of government, patronage, and the support of unions as an implement of political leaders.
Leadership has always been difficult for class analysis to categorize. Those who stress such analysis still tend to set up models in which leaders fundamentally respond to class interests. While these observers recognize the leader’s visibility, they limit his action to bringing out latent class tendencies or, at most, to organizing class coalitions. In practice, however, leadership is very different. Even in the Communist world, where Marxism was not prepared for it, men such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao created systems and exercised enormous influence. One wing of the Latin American revolutionary left has even reversed this process and now seeks new Castros.20 All over twentieth-century Latin America leaders have come to power in as different ways as military coups, elections, and revolutions and have moved their countries in new directions. Without Batlle and the Uruguayan political tradition it is impossible to explain why Uruguay, whose social structure and economic activities are similar to those of Argentina, has had such a different history. Those who try to explain why Cuba went Communist may consider the Cuban social structure and the history of Cuban-American relations, but Castro is still the crucial element in any explanation.
Political traditions like those of Uruguay and Colombia, which permit new political doctrines to rationalize deep and old emotions, are unusual in Latin America. It is more common, however, to find the conscious building of traditions, the use of modern myths to break through political unawareness and to force all classes to recognize that an irreversible “political great change” has occurred. These devices are an important part of the political process. The effective use of the Epic Revolution in Mexico, Perón’s apotheosis of the 18th of October, Castro’s 26th of July movement, all are modern myths designed to produce acceptance and enthusiasm.
Great changes which affect the whole people, such as inflation, internal migration, and urbanization, are striking in contemporary Latin America. Although they create problems, some of these suggest their own solutions. Thus huge urban agglomerations forcefully demonstrate the inadequacy of municipal services and schools. Most perceived problems, for example, inflation or land tenure, inspire a variety of proposed solutions; and both the perception of problems and their solutions are deeply influenced by world conditions and by ideologies developed abroad.21
It is tempting to believe that each class has “appropriate” responses to problems and that the adoption of a particular solution always indicates the political domination of a particular class or class cluster—for example, that expropriation of foreign utilities is an infallible sign of middle-class political domination. In this instance, however, expropriation is generally applauded, being by now part of what Voltaire called the Spirit of the Age. To be sure, some interest groups maintain distinctive positions. Thus landowners resist programs which would raise agricultural production by land redistribution, although they respond very differently to programs which would accomplish this through incentives to their own group. At the other extreme, programs and ideas not previously in vogue or identified with specific interest groups become possible, reasonable, or even inevitable when sponsored by someone in a position to carry them through. Above all, when ideology combines an appealing solution to a problem with the justification for achieving or extending political power, it becomes a potent force.
To sum up, this article argues for an approach which recognizes the limits of class influences and the importance of political influences in Latin America’s recent past. Without pretending to be exhaustive or to engage in model-making, it has found such influences in organization, government operations, leadership, modern myths, and ideology. More broadly, the article argues that political history is a process in which class plays a part, rather than the mirror reflection of economic and social history. Such an approach is less simple than the relegating of political history to its usual superficial role. With all its complexities, however, this interpretation of politics has one great recommendation. It does not have to be forced upon historical events. Instead it emerges logically from Latin America’s recent past.
1
Research interest in Latin America’s middle classes was spurred by Materiales para el estudio de la clase media en la América Latina, studies—varying from empirical to impressionistic—by 27 contributors on all the Latin American nations except Peru and Guatemala, published in six mimeographed volumes by the Pan American Union, Oficina de Ciencias Sociales (Washington, 1950-1951) under the editorship of Theo R. Crevenna. The impact of John J. Johnson’s important Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors (Stanford, 1958), can be seen by its four reprints from 1961 to 1965. The most general study of labor, Robert J. Alexander, Organized Labor in Latin America (New York, 1965), accepts the middle class-working class coalition concept. An unambiguous Marxist explanation is Julio César Jobet, Ensayo crítico del desarrollo económico-social de Chile (Santiago de Chile, 1955). The sociological literature is surveyed by Sugiyama Iutaka, “Social Stratification Research in Latin America,” Latin American Research Review, I (Fall 1965), 7-34.
2
See Irving Louis Horowitz, Revolution in Brazil: Politics and Society in a Developing Nation (New York, 1964), 223; Toreuato S. Di Tella, El sistema político argentino y la clase obrera (Buenos Aires, 1964), 118-121; and Richard N. Adams, “Social Change in Guatemala and U. S. Policy” in Richard N. Adams et al., Social Change in Latin America Today: Its Implications for United States Policy (New York, 1960), 276.
3
Difficulties with European explanations applied outside Europe in turn raise questions about how well these explanations describe what happened in Europe. Eor example, see W. F. Wertheim, “Religion, Bureaucracy, and Economic Growth,” in Transactions of the Fifth World Congress of Sociology, III, 85.
4
Raúl Prebisch’s by now classic statement of the argument that the terms of trade favor the center over the periphery appeared in United Nations, Department of Economic Affairs, The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems (New York, 1950), and has occasioned an active debate among economists. For current thinking by Latin American economists on this problem see United Nations, Economic Commission for Latin America, The Economic Development of Latin America in the Post War Period (New York, 1964). The inapplicability of European models to explaining Latin American development is one of the unifying themes in the two symposia edited by Claudio Véliz, Obstacles to Change in Latin America (London, 1965) and The Politics of Conformity in Latin America (London, 1967).
5
Frank Bonilla, “The Industrial Worker,” in John J. Johnson (ed.), Continuity and Change in Latin America (Stanford, 1964), 186-205.
6
John P. Gillin, “Some Signposts for Policy,” in Richard N. Adams et al., Social Change, 25.
7
The uncertainties of the quantitative analysis of Latin American social structure are evident in Gino Germani, Política y sociedad en una época de transición: de la sociedad tradicional a la sociedad de masas (Buenos Aires, 1965), 163-169. Another uncertainty in quantitative analysis is that the preferred sociological model greatly alters the percentage estimate of classes. For Uruguay, see Carlos Rama, Las clases sociales en el Uruguay; estructura-morfología (Montevideo, 1960), 105-108.
8
For example, Charles Wagley ends “The Dilemma of the Latin American Middle Classes,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, XXVII (May, 1964) 10: “The Latin American middle class must actively promote a social and economic revolution in its own image or face a left-wing revolution that may well liquidate it. Cuba has done just this in the last three years. The middle class can no longer depend upon military police force to bring about temporary stability.”
9
Battle’s first presidency is described in Milton I. Vaneer José Batlle „ Ordóñez of Uruguay: The Creator of His Times, 1902-1907 (Cambridge, 1963).
10
Batlle to Domingo Arena, April 17 and May 11, 1908, Batlle Archive, Batlle Pacheco family, Montevideo.
11
Batlle to Domingo Arena and Pedro Manini Ríos, January 29, 1908, Batlle Archive.
12
“La Liga de la Paz,” El Siglo, April 21, 1910.
13
“La cuestión presidencial,” El Día, May 24, 1910; Héctor Miranda, “Batlle,” El Día, May 27, 1910.
14
Carlos M. Rama, “Batlle y el movimiento obrero y social,” in Jorge Batlle (ed.) Batlle, su obra y su vida (Montevideo, 1956), 46.
15
“De José Enrique Rodó,” El País, June 1, 1910.
16
“Batlle y sus obras,” El Siglo, July 31, 1910; “La respuesta del Sr. Batlle a la Convención Colorada,” El Día, September 28, 1910.
17
The beginnings of a reappraisal of Yrigoyen’s election can be seen in Ezequiel Gallo (H.) and Silvia Sigal, “La formación de los partidos políticos contemporáneos: La U.C.R. (1890-191,6),” in Torcuato S. Di Telia et al., Argentina, sociedad de masas (Buenos Aires, 1965), 124-176.
18
See Claudio Véliz (ed.), Obstacles to Change in Latin America (London, 1965), 2; Juan José Sebrelli, Buenos Aires, vida cotidiana y alienación (Buenos Aires, 1965); and Rex Hopper, “Research on Latin America in Sociology,” in Charles Wagley (ed.), Social Science Research on Latin America; Report and Papers (New York, 1964).
19
Warren Dean has emphasized the adaptive ability of São Paulo coffee growers in “The Planter as Entrepreneur: The Case of São Paulo,” HAHR, XLVI (May 1966), 138-152.
20
James O’Connor, “Stalemate in Latin America,” Studies on the Left, IV (Fall 1964), 26.
21
See Albert O. Hirschman, Journeys Toward Progress: Studies of Economic Policy-Making in Latin America (New York, 1965), 219.
*
The author is Associate Professor of History at Brandeis University. This article is a revised version of a paper read December 29, 1966 at the American Historical Association meeting in New York.
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This commemorative edition of Bartolomé de las Casas’ Apologética historia sumaria, published four hundred years after his death, is an event of signal importance for Las Casian studies. Edited by Edmundo O’Gorman with the assistance of several students in his seminar, the complete text is in fact the third edition of Las Casas’ immense treatise.1 The care and precision taken in the preparation of this text amply justify a third edition. The O’Gorman version is based not only on the Serrano Sanz edition, but also on the original manuscript in the Real Academia de Historia. Though O’Gorman has followed the punctuation and the spelling of Serrano Sanz, and the paragraphing is identical with the Pérez de Tudela edition, he has made significant innovations.
In accordance with his interpretation of the work, O’Gorman has divided the treatise into three distinct books and an epilogue, while preserving the original chapter numbers. Inasmuch as Las Casas did not entitle his chapters, Pérez de Tudela followed the practice of Serrano Sanz, who attached chapter headings in presumed sixteenth-century terms without indicating explicitly what he was doing. O’Gorman has modernized the chapter headings, but he has put them in parentheses. He has included and clarified those references which Las Casas failed to complete and also the erasures which the previous editors had omitted. Not the least valuable features of the present text are analytical indices and six appendices.
While the new edition is in itself a major contribution, more important still is the editor’s brilliant introductory essay. O’Gorman has brooded and written about Las Casas’ thought for over two decades, and he clashes with many interpretations of another illustrious Las Casian, Lewis Hanke. For example, O’Gorman rejects Hanke’s view of the origin and purpose of the Apologética historia. According to Hanke, this work, begun on Española around 1527, was finished twenty years later in time to be used as one of the author’s principal weapons in the Valladolid debate with Sepúlveda (1550-1551). The late Manuel Giménez Fernández and Pérez de Tudela share Hanke’s interpretation. Marcel Bataillon does not.
O’Gorman argues that the bulk of the Apologética historia was written after Valladolid, and that it is not a polemical work. He points out that it contains no references either to Sepúlveda or to his other opponents, in sharp contrast to the polemical character of the Historia de las Indias. Its spirit and tone are theoretical, for its central purpose was to incorporate the Indian into the Aristotelian-Christian scheme of human nature on the highest level of philosophical abstraction. This theoretical approach of the Apologética historia, says O ’Gorman, was Las Casas’ reaction to his polemical failure at Valladolid.
Until 1552 Las Casas did not clearly perceive that the Historia and the Apologética historia were two different works, the former a polemical chronicle of Spanish activity in the Indies and the latter an abstract treatise on the human nature of the Indians. In contrast to Hanke, O’Gorman feels that the Apologética historia, which Las Casas originally conceived as a part of the Historia, was begun in Valladolid as a separate work between 1555 and 1556, when Las Casas was eighty-one, and finished between 1556 and 1559. This challenging hypothesis is only a probability and not a certainty. O’Gorman’s evidence is indirect and based on an interpretation of fragmentary textual evidence. Certainly, however, O’Gorman has constructed a hypothesis sufficiently plausible and cogently reasoned to deserve serious consideration.
O’Gorman divides the Apologética historia into four sections: 1) the preamble or the Argument; 2) a two-part demonstration of the Indians’ rationality; and 3) an epilogue dealing with definitions of barbarism. After considering the physical environment of the New World (Chapters 1-22), Las Casas develops his a priori argument in Chapters 23-29. This section contains two parts—a discussion of the physical or natural conditions which must exist in order for human beings to enjoy full intellectual capacity and a demonstration that the Indians possess these physical qualities.
Las Casas’ post a priori argument (chapters 40-263) was a comparative historical approach in which he analyzes the preconquest cultures and compares them with each other and with the pre-Christian civilizations of the Old World. In so doing Las Casas may have been the first Westerner to write world history. He derived his philosophical framework from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom identified rationality with prudence. Prudence was divided into three kinds: 1) monastic or rational control of one’s self; 2) domestic or the family regime; and 3) political or social organization. Las Casas went to great pains to demonstrate that Indian societies possessed the six classes that Aristotle identified as being necessary for a rational political life—farmers, artisans, warriors, rich men, priests, and magistrates.
Aristotle argued that some degree of urbanization was necessary in order for men to lead the good life. Hence Las Casas had to explain the existence of very isolated groups in the Indies. In so doing he formulated his definition of man, which in O’Gorman’s opinion is the fundamental premise upon which the Apologética historic rests. Las Casas’ ontology went back to Greco-Roman antiquity and in particular to Cicero: “All the peoples of the world are men, and there is only one definition for all men and for each man, and that is that they are rational.” Not only is rationality the essence of humanness, characterizing the whole human species, but also it is fully actualized and exemplified by the same inalterable traits in each member of the human race. A corollary to the ontological unity of the human species is that there are no races of monstrously deformed men; for at the most only a few isolated individuals fall into this category.
In stressing the inalterable and uniform character of human nature through all time, Las Casas was minimizing historical and cultural differences, however much attention he paid to these matters. His extensive historical comparisons rested on the supposition that, in the last analysis, the historical life of New World Indians was of the same quality as the historical existence of the peoples in the Old World. Whatever cultural difference might exist among peoples, he implied, was simply a greater degree of perfection of the human mind. The essence of man’s being, however, was unchangeable. History was accidental to man in that history could not change the central core of his being, which is his rationality.
Las Casas’ universalism rested on two traditions—a Greco-Roman ontological definition of man and the medieval ideal of Christian equality. Whatever differences there may be in the historical destinies of various peoples, there is a supranatural equality of all men deriving from a common origin and a common end. All men are each others’ neighbors and brothers. Hence each people in the world should be left alone to exercise their own sovereignty. More fortunate peoples, who possess the Christian gospel, may lend spiritual assistance to less fortunate pagans by sending out missionaries. But the Spaniards must respect the political sovereignties and the property rights that the Indians enjoyed by virtue of their membership in the world community of peoples. Las Casas envisaged the sovereignty that the Spanish kings might exercise in the New World as supranatural in character, deriving exclusively from missionary enterprise. This supranatural jurisdiction complemented but did not erase the political sovereignties of the Indian nations founded in natural law and in the law of nations.2
Las Casas pleaded that no matter how isolated the Indians might have been for centuries without any knowledge of the Christian faith, and no matter how barbarous some of their customs might appear to the Spaniards, the Spaniard face to face with the Indian was in the presence of his neighbor, his fellow man. Thus Las Casas sought to incorporate the Indians on a conceptual basis of equality into the universal framework of the Christian community.
According to a long-standing argument of O’Gorman, none of Las Casas’ opponents asserted that the Indians were brutes and not human beings—least of all Sepúlveda, who regarded the Indians as grossly inferior human beings, but never denied that they possessed some rationality. Instead Sepúlveda seemed to be implying that there were gradations in human rationality. Las Casas himself never confronted the question as to whether there were such gradations. He did not even suspect that this was the implicit view of his adversary. Indeed, by defining the essence of human being as an unchangeable and uniform rationality, he excluded gradations. Las Casas’ logic was impeccable, but it is difficult for us to accept his view that history is exclusively a logical process.
Sepúlveda’s task was more complicated than that of Las Casas. Though he shared with Las Casas the view about the unity of mankind, he was an ardent Spanish nationalist who regarded the physical and human nature of the New World as something strange and forbidding—“rareza,” to use O’Gorman’s term—because it seemed to be different from that of Europe. Sepúlveda had to defend both the new nationalist doctrine that Christian and pagan peoples were unequal and at the same time salvage the antique-medieval universalism and egalitarianism. Although he preserved the fraternal notion of a Christian community, he stressed Aristotle’s doctrine that the more perfect should rule the less perfect. All men are ontologically equal. Yes, but some men (the Christians) are more equal than other groups (the pagans).
Only the “virtuous, prudent, and learned” (the Christians) can fully understand the meaning of natural law. Sepúlveda’s novelty was his assertion that all peoples do not possess the sovereign right to pursue the common destiny of man on their account. Some groups lack the fullness of rational capacity to discern the norms by which this common destiny can be reached. The histories of these “inferior” peoples lack meaning and, indeed, they can be said to enter history only when a “superior” people impose themselves on them. Hence Sepulveda argues that civilized peoples have the right and the obligation not only to render spiritual assistance to barbarian peoples, but also to impose their own superior culture upon them by force. Las Casas agreed with the first proposition but not with the second.
O’Gorman argues that Las Casas has been misinterpreted by his posterity, who have made him into a “kind of Woodrow Wilson in a Dominican habit.” He should not be regarded as a precursor of democratic liberal pacifism and modern egalitarianism. He should be viewed for what he was, a late medieval theologian who had no understanding of or sympathy for the rising current of nationalism.
At the Valladolid debate Las Casas and Sepúlveda were mutually incomprehensible—Las Casas a Scholastic philosopher working for the universal interests of the Christian commonwealth and Sepúlveda a Renaissance Aristotelian serving the political interests of Spanish nationalism. Both men shared the Aristotelian view that the more perfect should rule the less perfect. To Las Casas this proposition meant spiritual assistance to pagan peoples by converting them rationally and peacefully to Christianity. To Sepúlveda this Aristotelian principle meant the abrogation of pagan peoples’ sovereignty and their conquest by force. Las Casas expressed the ancient-medieval ideal of the brotherhood of man linked together by a common supranatural destiny. Sepúlveda spoke for the more modern ideal of the fraternity of all men belonging to one nation that was destined to include all humanity. Only in this context can one understand how Las Casas might accuse his opponents of being unchristian, and they in turn denounce him for being unpatriotic.
The Apologética historia is indeed a major work in the corpus of Las Casas’ thought. The central premise of all his voluminous writings is that the missionary enterprise is the only justification for Spanish activity in the Indies. In Del único modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religión Las Casas formulated his missionary method, conversion by means of persuasion and reason. In the Seville treatises he defined the supranatural character of Spanish sovereignty in the New World. In the Apologética historia he developed his ontology of man. The Historia de las Indias was a historical demonstration of how the Spaniards had violated the abstract principles enunciated in the previously mentioned works. And, of course, the Brevísima relación was a propaganda broadside taken from the Historia.
In the on-going debate about the thought of Bartolomé de las Casas Edmundo O’Gorman has indeed made a notable contribution. For some time to come we shall be discussing the questions he has posed in this edition of the Apologética historia.
1
The first edition was edited by Manuel Serrano Sanz in Madrid, 1909 in the thirteenth volume of the Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles. The second edition was edited by Juan Pérez de Tudela in Madrid, 1958 in volumes 105 and 106 of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles. Pérez de Tuleda’s introductory essay in volume 95 in which he surveys all of Las Casas’ thought, is a notable contribution. O’Gorman has also edited a paperback volume, which includes only those sections of the Apologética historia-sumaria dealing with Mexico: Fr. Bartolomé de las Casas, Los Indios de México y Nueva España (México, 1966).
2
See my “Problems of Conflicting Spanish Imperial Ideologies in the Sixteenth Century,” in Fredrick Pike (ed.), Select Problems in Latin American History (New York, 1968).
*
The author is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin.
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Book Review| February 01 1969