Imagining 'America' in late Nineteenth Century Spain

Kate Ferris

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137352798
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137352804
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book examines the processes of production, circulation and reception of images of America in late nineteenth century Spain. When late nineteenth century Spaniards looked at the United States, they, like Tocqueville, 'saw more than America'.  What did they see? Between the 'glorious' liberal revolution of 1868 and the run-up to the 1898 war with the US that would end Spain's New World empire, Spanish liberal and democratic reformers imagined the USA as a place where they could preview the 'modern way of life', as a political and social model (or anti-model) to emulate, appropriate or reject, and above all as a 100 year experiment of republicanism, democracy and liberty in practice. Through their writings and discussions of the USA, these Spaniards debated and constructed their own modernity and imagined the place of their nation in the modern world.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Kate FerrisImagining 'America' in late Nineteenth Century Spain10.1057/978-1-137-35280-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Imagining ‘America’, Imagining ‘Spain’

Kate Ferris¹

(1)

School of History, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, UK

End Abstract

In early 1893, Rafael Puig y Valls left his native Catalonia and took ‘the direct train from Paris to New York’ (via La Havre) to take up his position as Spain’s Industry Commissioner at the Chicago World’s Fair.¹ The staging of the final Universal Exposition of the century in the North American ‘mushroom city’—so called because it seemed to have sprung up into an imposing and bustling metropolis virtually overnight—afforded the United States the opportunity to showcase its latest inventions, its wealth and its way of life.² Honoured by the designation of Spain as guest of honour—this was the ‘Columbine’ exhibition, to mark the 400-year anniversary of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas—Puig y Valls was eager to take up his post and learn more about the ‘great North American republic’. On arrival in Chicago, however, he felt suddenly overwhelmed. Having been ‘enchanted’ by New York, its Central Park, lively streets and even some of its looming towers, which remained somehow reminiscent of the Old World, Chicago now struck him as all-American and entirely alien.

I am so entranced and off-balance that it sometimes seems to me that I am living on a planet, which is not the Earth, and that all my preconceptions, ideas and sentiments are in perpetual rebellion in my brain, fighting against currents of varied forces. I do not know how to resolve this no matter how avidly I search for the truth, and for the direction that this highly novel and, perhaps badly termed, American civilisation is taking.³

Puig y Valls’ uncertainty about ‘American civilisation’ connected to a broader disquiet about processes of ‘becoming modern’ both in the United States and at home. In signalling anxiety around modernity, Puig y Valls was hardly unique. Indeed, the inner angst he articulated on his arrival in Chicago links him to the generation of Spanish intellectuals and politicians preoccupied by national ‘regeneration’ and finding an appropriate path to modernity for Spain in the years before and, especially, after the loss of Spain’s last New World colonies in 1898.⁴ However, Puig y Valls’ identification of the United States with a ‘highly novel’ way of life was not simply a feature of end-of-the-century anxieties about the future; since at least the mid-century Spaniards had been observing and studying the history, contemporary institutions, politics, society and culture of the USA as a means to better understand ‘the times we are living in’.⁵

This book starts from two principal premises. The first is that, as historian James Epstein noted, America was ‘a place to be imagined’ in the late nineteenth century (as today).⁶ The USA was a key imaginary site for late century Europeans, invoked in contemporary debates on questions of constitution and political institutions, democratic practice, economic development, international relations, technological innovation and social reform. Most powerfully, the USA or, as it was often put simply, ‘America’, was dreamed by Europeans of all social classes and political persuasions as the most modern iteration of civilisation and the embodiment of their own future, for good or ill. Just as the ‘Orient’ was largely a construct of Western minds and the ‘West’ at least in part the product of non-Western ideas, so too a good deal of the meaning behind the signifier ‘America’ was created outside its expanding borders.⁷ This book examines the images of America that circulated in Spain in the second half of the nineteenth century, understanding these as cultural artifacts and products that were at one and the same time constructions of domestic imagination and shaped through creative processes of projection, transfer and exchange that spanned the Atlantic.⁸

The second premise is that, in the words of Claus Offe during his 2004 Adorno lecture, ‘we cannot describe America without describing us as America—be it as more or less similar variants of the “Western” civilisation, be it as the configuration of contrasts’.⁹ If the USA was a cipher for modernity, the processes of imagining its modernity provided ‘an occasion for reflection and self-interpretation’.¹⁰ The images of America produced in Spain were refracted through the lenses of domestic concerns about nation and empire. This book is interested in the production, circulation and re-configuration of images of the United States not for what they might (or might not) tell us about the USA, but for what they tell us about how Spaniards took stock of themselves, their political system, their empire, their society and the processes involved in ‘becoming modern’. Spanish liberals, whose worldviews form the core of this book, hailed the ‘model republic’ as worthy of serious study, if not always blind emulation; conservatives damned its ‘example [as] too horrible to stir any desire for imitation in Europe’.¹¹

If, in the late nineteenth century, the United States was key to understanding the ‘times we are living in’, for many Spaniards it was also crucial to understanding their own future: in this reading, the United States appeared as the future, made present. The accolade of modern cultural capital may have gone to Paris, and England may have continued to be hailed as the originator of political liberty, but in its political institutions and practices, religious pluralism, commercial priorities, technological inventions and social relationships it was the country across the Atlantic ‘whose present is the dreamed of future to which many nations aspire’.¹² As such, the ‘true fictional space’ of America was not only a space on which to draw Europe’s ‘radical other’, everything that Europe was not, but also an opportunity for Europeans to ‘preview’ their own future; both kinds of visions, America as other and America as the future previewed, incited an admixture of satisfaction and fear.¹³

Images and Approaches

The development of Spain as a modern nation and state has been the subject of considerable historiographical interest in recent decades. Early interpretations subscribed to the common contemporary view of nineteenth-century Spain as a country lagging woefully behind other western European nations and the United States in terms of political, socio-economic and urban development.¹⁴ Understanding Spanish history through a ‘paradigm of backwardness’ formed part of the historiographical mapping of a kind of Spanish sonderweg, in which the ‘failures’ and ‘absences’ of social democracy and republicanism in the twentieth century were traced back through the supposed failures and absences of bourgeois liberalism and republicanism in the nineteenth (and even back to the Ancien Régime).¹⁵ Over the past twenty years, however, historians have broken down the discourse of Spain’s failure to modernise according to an idealised blueprint laid down by Britain, France or the USA, replacing it with a ‘normalising’¹⁶ historiography that has sought to situate the particularities of Spanish industrialisation, urbanisation, growth of a middle class, extension and bureaucratisation of the state, relations between church and state, nationalism and development of liberal, republican and socialist ideals and political institutions within the context of the modernising processes of other contemporary European nation-states.¹⁷

Of course, the ‘nation’ is only one possible scale of experience according to which identities, even national ones, are shaped and articulated. Regional nationalisms (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Valencian), emergent in modern form towards the end of the nineteenth century, posed challenges to the integrity of Spain as a nation-state, but the region and locality were also key units of experience of the nation, state and government, as the notion of the patria chica illustrates.¹⁸ One’s local place and local affinities did not always detract from a sense of national belonging, but could form essential building blocks of national identity; the familiarity of the smaller unit of experience could make the abstract and intangible idea of the nation in turn more familiar and more real.

Equally, national ‘imagined communities’ were formed at scales larger than the nation.¹⁹ The rising interest in transnational history in the last decade or so offers another space and mode of identity formation to better understand identities ostensibly confined by national boundaries. As well as being constructed in smaller units (village, town, city, region), national imagined communities were also shaped outside the nation, through the experience of travel and through imaginative processes in direct relation to one or more other countries and/or in relation to supra-national spheres or spaces that ‘transcended’ the nation. Examples of the latter include the idea and physical expression of ‘Europe’ or of the ‘Americas’ or the binary designations of ‘Latin’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ races. Encounters, both formal and informal, with other national communities and with individuals, communities and organisations whose ‘spaces of experience’, identities and practices were associated with different national or multinational contexts were vital reference points in the creation of one’s own national identity. These could be configured as one’s Other, that is, conceived of in relation to what we (think we) are not (or what we hope we are not or think that other people are), as well as what we are²⁰—as in the case of Jean Baudrillard’s late-twentieth century writing of America as Europe’s ‘radical other’²¹—but they could also (and simultaneously) be used to mark out elements of similarity and shared history, culture and practice. Identified differences and similarities at individual, local, national and transnational scales feed into processes of self-fashioning to produce (and continually reproduce) identities at the individual level as well as imagined communities at local, national, trans- and supra-national levels, and indeed in other group designations.²²

Thus, despite late nineteenth-century Europe’s obsession with the nation, and in spite of the continued preference for plotting national histories, which still prevails in our universities, schools and government, we must recognise that the processes of fashioning national identities took place in international and transnational spaces as well as in localities. Ideas and practices from abroad influenced, migrated, were selected, accepted, adapted, modified and rejected as individuals and groups constructed and imagined themselves. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Imagining ‘America’, Imagining ‘Spain’
• 2. A Model Republic? The United States, the Constitutional Question and Political Practice in Spain
• 3. Abolition, Emancipation and War: The United States in Spanish Political Culture and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba
• 4. ‘Liberty’ or ‘License’? Images of Women in the United States and the ‘Woman Question’ in Spain
• 5. Patents and Profit: The Image of the USA as the World’s Pioneer in Technology, Engineering, Communications and Urban Planning
• 6. Race, Religion, Progress and Decline: Imagining Difference Between the United States and Spain
• 7. Conclusion
• Backmatter