Improvised Continent

Pan-Americanism and Cultural Exchange

Richard Cándida Smith

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780812249422
  9780812249422
• eBook ISBN:
  9780812294651
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

How does a country in the process of becoming a world power prepare its citizens for the responsibilities of global leadership? In Improvised Continent, Richard Cándida Smith answers this question by illuminating the forgotten story of how, over the course of the twentieth century, cultural exchange programs, some run by the government and others by philanthropies and major cultural institutions, brought many of the most important artists and writers of Latin America to live and work in the United States. Improvised Continent is the first book to focus on cultural exchange inside the United States and how Americans responded to Latin American writers and artists. Moving masterfully between the history of ideas, biography, institutional history and politics, and international relations, and engaging works in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, Cándida Smith synthesizes over seventy years of Pan-American cultural activity in the United States.The stories behind Diego Rivera's murals, the movies of Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, the photography of Genevieve Naylor, and the novels of Carlos Fuentes—these works and artists, along with many others, challenged U.S. citizens about their place in the world and about the kind of global relations the country's interests could allow. Improvised Continent provides a profoundly compassionate portrayal of the Latin American artists and writers who believed their practices might create a more humane world.

Chapter 1

Pan-American Culture

In the autumn of 1889, delegates representing the independent republics of America assembled in Washington, D.C., to discuss proposals from the Congress of the United States to establish a hemispheric customs union and a permanent arbitration court for settling inter-American disputes. Both ideas were controversial, and the twenty delegations agreed only to form the International Bureau of the American Republics, a small office headquartered in Washington charged with coordinating exchange of information between the member countries. The bureau connected politicians, businessmen, journalists, and intellectuals from throughout the Americas who were interested in closer interaction with the United States, establishing in the most practical terms that if there were to be a greater American union, the United States would be its hub. From 1890 until the late 1930s, the population of the United States was greater than that of all other American nations combined.¹ While deep poverty characterized the South and other primarily rural areas, in general the U.S. population enjoyed considerably higher median incomes, along with greater levels of literacy and property ownership, than the citizens of any other member of the Pan American Union. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Argentina had per capita income levels comparable to the United States, but with higher levels of income inequality and political disenfranchisement. To a degree, the centrality of the United States to the Pan American Union grew from its development as a manufacturing nation with technologically advanced if high-cost finished goods to exchange for agricultural products and natural resources. The dollar value of U.S. exports to the rest of the hemisphere rose quickly through the 1890s and the first decades of the twentieth century. As an aid to communication, the bureau published directories for each of the American countries with names and addresses of government officials, leading bankers, and owners and managers of import-export firms, as well as other prominent figures in agriculture, business, and the professions.²

The guiding principle underlying the bureau’s activities was that private initiative could best determine which inter-American connections were beneficial. That the purposes of the bureau were nebulous was inevitable for it had no models to follow. The International Bureau of the American Republics was the first of the many regional and global organizations that would develop across the twentieth century, providing a new structure for international governance. The responsibilities of the bureau grew, and in 1910 the member states meeting in Buenos Aires replaced the bureau with a new organization with enhanced responsibilities, the Pan American Union. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, personally committed to developing international government, funded the construction of an imposing neoclassical palace in Washington to serve as the organization’s headquarters.³

In addition to its diplomatic and commercial functions, the Pan American Union sponsored conferences addressing a broad range of topics, financial, political, and cultural. In December 1908, the first Pan-American Scientific Congress convened in Santiago, Chile, bringing together over four hundred scholars from the United States and Latin America.⁴ The congress ended with a resolution calling for an ongoing bibliography of books published in each country. The delegates also urged that the governments of the hemisphere establish a translation fund in order that the most important works written in the American nations would be equally available in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Expanded cultural exchange remained on the agenda in December 1915, when 2,566 delegates assembled in Washington for the Pan American Union’s Second Scientific Conference. War in Europe added an unexpected political face to a conference with sessions discussing agronomy, particle physics, the principles of international law, telephone exchange and relay systems, the effects of tax policy on economic growth, and preservation of Native American languages, among many, many other topics featured in several hundred sessions. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson accentuated the political overtones when he welcomed conference delegates with a speech outlining his proposal for an American collective security agreement, which he dubbed the “Pan-American Peace Pact.”⁵ Planning for the congress had started well before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, but the war increased its symbolic importance. The American nations were suddenly on their own, not only the heirs of “Western civilization” but also its caretakers by default, or so many speakers at the congress proclaimed. Throughout the hemisphere, the press gave close attention to the proceedings, particularly debates over how the American nations might best preserve their neutrality while working for an end to the European war.

Jane Addams (1860–1935), speaking at a session organized by the Women’s Auxiliary of the Pan American Union, argued that internationalism in the hands of diplomats stymied meaningful ties between the citizens of different nations. For the previous generation, conference after conference had gathered together the leaders of Europe, but good intentions failed to prevent the outbreak of the continent’s most brutal war ever. The vision of international cooperation, she insisted, had been entirely formalistic: “People would say, ‘Come together, let us be international,’ and then they would pass resolutions and found a constitution, and so forth and so on.” If the Pan American Union were to succeed where Europe had failed, a dramatically different understanding of global governance was needed to replace a system based on balance of power. Leadership had to come directly from the people and not from governments. To those who thought this was naïve idealism, Addams protested that in her hometown of Chicago, people of many different national backgrounds, speaking dozens of languages at home, worshipping in many different ways, regularly worked together to solve the city’s problems. She was certain that similar collaboration was found in any large city in the hemisphere, São Paulo no less than Chicago: “These immigrants, as we call them, who have lived all over the world, find it quite possible to make friends with each other. They find it quite possible after a few months, and better still after a few years, to understand each other and to live together, not only in amenity, but with mutual interest and mutual undertakings [of] people who become international through this perfectly natural and spontaneous process.”⁶

Addams was deeply skeptical that the Pan American Union, bound by the political needs of the member governments, could develop citizen-to-citizen communication. If there were to be a breakthrough it would have to come from groups like the Women’s Auxiliary of the Pan American Union. Women, divorced from power in all nations, she asserted, had little stake in concepts such as “national honor.” Women more readily understood what she had learned in the slums of Chicago: put people who are worrying about the same problems into close contact, get them talking and listening to each other, and they will overcome their differences to develop a community of interest. She did not speculate on how the face-to-face contact experienced in a densely packed urban neighborhood might be replicated on a continental level, much less across the globe.

The larger goal of the Pan American Union’s conferences was the building of a common culture among the educated elites of the continent; their conversations both technical and general could be the foundation for a shared inter-American “public opinion.”⁷ Addams’s question whether the Pan American Union could create a space across national borders for meaningful, effective debate confronted the asymmetry between the United States, with its industrialized dissemination of opinion through the mass media, and many Latin American countries, where low literacy rates kept the market for books and magazines small.⁸

After the congress’s conclusion, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace organized a tour around the United States for several prominent Latin American participants to speak at universities, civic and women’s clubs, and business groups.⁹ The delegates invited included a vocal critic of the United States, Manuel Ugarte of Argentina, who had previously declared that Pan American Union congresses were nothing more than gatherings “of mice chaired by a cat.”¹⁰ The speaker most in demand after the congress concluded was Ernesto Quesada (1858–1934), rector of the University of Buenos Aires and head of the Argentinean delegation. Quesada, having spent part of his childhood in the United States, was fluent in colloquial American English, and he knew the U.S. education system firsthand as a student and a teacher.

The standard talk that Quesada gave on his tour began with the proposition that, since independence, the idea of the continent forming a political union was deeply rooted in the American imagination, perhaps inherited from the ambition of each of the colonial empires to eliminate its rivals and seize control of the entire hemisphere.¹¹ Nonetheless, he argued that pan-Americanism rested on a fiction that peoples living close to each other shared the same ideals, and thus it was easily turned to serving the narrow interests of the biggest member states, a polite way of suggesting as Ugarte did that the organization primarily served U.S. political and economic domination of the hemisphere. Quesada warned that, as a concept, pan-Americanism was idealistic but divorced from the historical realities of each nation. In normal political situations, this would be a fatal weakness, but with Europe in crisis, the potential idealism of pan-Americanism offered an alternative to the tragic realities of history. Because the pan-American ideal existed in a realm apart from everyday life in any country, it provoked Americans to think about how they might live in new, possibly better ways. Pan-American unity was therefore, he concluded, a concept most at home in universities and other cultural institutions. Academics and students had the responsibility of demonstrating to their fellow citizens how the creation of a hemispheric body superior to national governments might actually improve their lives.

Quesada asserted that any future world community was likely to begin in the Americas precisely because each nation had been a laboratory for how people of radically different backgrounds could live together productively. Not always in peace, he acknowledged, but more so than in any other part of the world. In its most idealistic aspect, pan-Americanism was the most important experiment yet tried preparing the way for world unity. The responsibility of scholars in America’s universities was to synthesize the experience and determine what was productive and what proved to be an obstacle to progress. He concluded his presentation by reporting that the major achievement of the scientific congress had been the formation of a new organization for coordinating exchange between universities, libraries, and museums across the hemisphere. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace provided the new group’s start-up funds. The war might be uppermost on everybody’s mind, forcing all to think about the organization of the world in new ways. Long-term results, however, looked past the war to ask how people in many walks of life could more regularly collaborate with similarly situated people in other nations.

From the arguments already in motion by 1915, we can see a singular, even strange phenomenon developing: national leaders were encouraging a utopian vision of the future relations of the world’s peoples, a vision distinctly in conflict with the historical concept of the nation as the most natural, indivisible source of collective identity. As soon as citizens were growing accustomed to the proposition that they did in fact belong, as if naturally, to the nations where they had been born or immigrated, the increasingly horrific carnage attending conflict between modern nations suggested that nation-states could not in fact provide the security they promised. Additional connections were needed that went beyond nationalism, connections that, if people-to-people communication and international decision making were central to the process, logically led to curtailing national sovereignty. The conflict between national identity and a desire for a more far-reaching union of peoples and cultures was a powerful theme recurring in the poetry of Rubén Darío (1867–1916), arguably the most important Spanish-language American poet of the early twentieth century. For many North Americans, his most famous poem, perhaps the only poem by Darío that they might have encountered, remains “A Roosevelt” (“To Roosevelt”), an angry protest against President Theodore Roosevelt’s theft of Panama from Colombia in 1903.

Eres los Estados Unidos,

eres el futuro invasor. . . .

Crees que la vida es incendio,

que el progreso es erupción;

en donde pones la bala

el porvenir pones. . . .

Se necesitaría, Roosevelt, ser por Dios mismo,

el Riflero terrible y el fuerte Cazador,

para poder tenernos en vuestras férreas garras.

You are the United States,

you are the future invader. . . .

You believe that life is fire,

that progress is eruption;

that wherever you put a bullet

you make the future. . . .

Roosevelt, for you to hold us in your iron claws,

you will need God Himself to make you

the terrible Rifleman and the mighty Hunter.

Because God stands by the faithful, Darío believed his “naïve” America of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry could defeat an enemy reemerging in new guise out of the ancient, bitter conflicts between Catholic faith and Protestant heresy, between law-bringing Spain and piratical England.¹² A prominent figure in the growing cultural nationalism sweeping Latin American intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, Darío, only two years later, tentatively shifted his thinking about the future of inter-American relations after he heard U.S. secretary of state Elihu Root address a conference of the hemisphere’s political leaders, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1906. Root affirmed that he and President Roosevelt desired a hemisphere where all nations, big and small, were equal. He pledged that the U.S. road to prosperity was not to profit from the ruin of others but “to help all friends to a common prosperity and growth.”¹³ Root’s speech received a standing ovation and inspired Darío, attending the conference as the head of the Nicaraguan delegation, to write “Salutación al águila” (“Greetings to the Eagle”), which reversed the caustic criticisms he had made two years earlier in “A Roosevelt.” Darío began his new poem,

Bien vengas, mágica Águila de alas enormes y fuertes

a extender sobre el Sur tu gran sombra continental,

a traer en tus garras, anilladas de rojos brillantes,

una palma de Gloria, del color de la inmensa esperanza,

y en tu pico la oliva de una vasta y fecunda paz.¹⁴

Welcome, magical Eagle with enormous and powerful wings

as you spread your great continental shadow across the South,

carrying in your ruby-ringed claws,

a palm leaf of Glory, the color of unlimited hope,

and in your beak the olive branch of a long and prosperous peace.

The phrase E pluribus unum provided the explanation for the extraordinary success of the United States, Darío declared. He predicted that the miracle of uniting the one and the many would be the secret of the future greatness of America, as the races of the hemisphere shared their respective secrets of industry and of poetry. If the United States remained committed to the pluralist but universal vision that Root presented to his listeners in Rio, Darío concluded, the country would truly become the instrument of God’s beneficence for the modern world, a genuine miracle showing how complex were God’s plans because the world’s largest Protestant country would accomplish the unity of humanity that the universal Catholic church had sought for two millennia but failed to achieve. Even the figure of Theodore Roosevelt merited revision in 1907, when in the preface to a new book of poems, El canto errante (“The Wandering Song”), Darío observed that he had read an essay on poetry that Roosevelt had written and found it to be among the most intelligent, sensitive discussions of the social functions of poetry that Darío had ever encountered. He concluded, “For this, you must grant that the terrible hunter is a wise man.”¹⁵

The unexpected brutality of the European war shattered the world in which American elites had lived comfortably for several generations. The war proved how illusory had been the hallowe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Pan-American Culture
• Chapter 2. National Ways of Looking
• Chapter 3. “In the American Grain”
• Chapter 4. The Muralists Arrive
• Chapter 5. Responding to Global Crisis
• Chapter 6. Making Latin American Allies Visible
• Chapter 7. “Black Cat on a Field of Snow”
• Chapter 8. On the Road for the Good Neighbor Policy
• Chapter 9. Postwar Transitions: From “Exchange” to “Information”
• Chapter 10. Taking Sides in the Cold War
• Chapter 11. The New Latin American Novel in the United States
• Chapter 12. “I Now Believe That American Imperialism Is Real”
• Chapter 13. Exiting Pan-Americanism
• Chapter 14. A Twenty-First-Century American Epiphany
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments