Beneath the United States

A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America

Lars Schoultz

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9780674256040
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this sweeping history of United States policy toward Latin America, Lars Schoultz shows that the United States has always perceived Latin America as a fundamentally inferior neighbor, unable to manage its affairs and stubbornly underdeveloped.This perception of inferiority was apparent from the beginning. John Quincy Adams, who first established diplomatic relations with Latin America, believed that Hispanics were "lazy, dirty, nasty...a parcel of hogs." In the early nineteenth century, ex-President John Adams declared that any effort to implant democracy in Latin America was "as absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts, and fishes."Drawing on extraordinarily rich archival sources, Schoultz, one of the country's foremost Latin America scholars, shows how these core beliefs have not changed for two centuries. We have combined self-interest with a "civilizing mission"--a self-abnegating effort by a superior people to help a substandard civilization overcome its defects. William Howard Taft felt the way to accomplish this task was "to knock their heads together until they should maintain peace, " while in 1959 CIA Director Allen Dulles warned that "the new Cuban officials had to be treated more or less like children." Schoultz shows that the policies pursued reflected these deeply held convictions.While political correctness censors the expression of such sentiments today, the actions of the United States continue to assume the political and cultural inferiority of Latin America. Schoultz demonstrates that not until the United States perceives its southern neighbors as equals can it anticipate a constructive hemispheric alliance.

Chapter 1

Encountering Latin America

They are lazy, dirty, nasty and in short I can compare them to nothing but a parcel of hogs.

John Quincy Adams, age 12

It took a direct order from President Monroe to make Secretary of State John Quincy Adams recognize the newly independent countries of Latin America. In 1820, when Henry Clay had urged recognition, Adams had scoffed at the idea of developing a cooperative relationship with the people of the region, writing in his diary that “there is no community of interests or of principles between North and South America.”¹ But Adams and his generation were acutely aware that the United States and Latin America shared, at a minimum, an interest in evicting Europe from the Western Hemisphere. When the Latin American wars of independence had erupted a decade earlier, this interest had prompted President Madison to treat the rebels with what he called a spirit of “enlarged philanthropy,” meaning that he would permit U.S. merchants to sell them arms. Always less oblique, Congress simply blurted out its “friendly interest” in Latin American independence, and soon Secretary of State James Monroe notified the European powers that the United States had “an interest in the independence of the Spanish provinces.”²

Since it made little sense to suggest that the United States shared no interests with its neighbors, John Quincy Adams’s comment probably reflected the belief, common among his contemporaries, that any relationship with Latin Americans would be difficult, because differing principles governed their behavior. He meant them no insult; he simply was pointing out that Latin Americans were Hispanics, and that his people were Anglos. To Adams and his generation, that made all the difference in the world.

Anglo-America was expanding rapidly at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Adams embarked upon a half century of public service. The united states now numbered sixteen, and their five million citizens were pushing vigorously into land claimed by others. To the south and southwest, they shared a border with the colonies of Spain, one that only moved further west after Spain’s transfer of the continent’s midsection to France and Napoleon’s quick resale to the United States in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase was but the first of several major nineteenth-century land transactions in North America, virtually all of them favorable to the United States, and by mid-century the nation spanned the continent, thirty-one states with over twenty-three million citizens.

Eighteen new nations were created in Latin America during this same half century. In much of the region the bloody struggle for independence was significantly more disruptive than that of the United States, and, once free of colonial control, Latin American republicans were clearly unable to weave effective states from the war-weakened threads of fragmented civil societies. Visitors to these new republics, including an early U.S. chargé in Colombia, were dismayed by the challenge of forging nations out of “twenty millions of people spread over a pathless continent, separated from each other by immense tracts of uninhabited region, without concert, without resources, and totally ignorant of civil government.” Many agreed with Bolívar’s deathbed lament when, looking back at his life’s labor, the Liberator concluded that republican Latin America had reverted to “primeval chaos.”³

It was during this half century that officials in Washington began to create the mind-set that continues to influence U.S. policy toward Latin America. Initially it was shaped by an urgent security interest: as the War of 1812 approached, officials in Washington worried that England might take possession of Spanish Florida, an ideal base for harassing U.S. commerce and for launching military attacks.⁴ Since 1808 the British had been fighting alongside the Spanish to oust Napoleon from Iberia in the vicious Peninsular War—the conflict in which Spanish irregulars perfected a new form of combat and, in the process, added the term guerrilla warfare to our vocabulary. As the struggle dragged on, the Spanish became increasingly reliant upon British aid, and the English probably could have obtained Florida for the asking. In mid-1810 Secretary of State Robert Smith warned the British to stay out of Florida; then, in September, Congress passed its first formal statement of U.S. policy toward Latin America, the No-Transfer Resolution: “the United States, under the peculiar circumstances of the existing crisis, cannot, without serious inquietude, see any part of [East Florida] pass into the hands of any foreign power; and that a due regard to their own safety compels them to provide, under certain contingencies, for the temporary occupation of the said territory.”⁵

Officials in Washington continued to worry about Spanish Florida when U.S. expansion resumed after the War of 1812. “East Florida in itself is comparatively nothing,” argued Secretary of State Monroe in 1815, “but as a post, in the hands of Great-Britain, it is of the highest importance. Commanding the Gulph of Mexico, and all its waters, including the Mississippi with its branches, and the streams emptying into the Mobile, a vast proportion of the most fertile and productive parts of this Union, on which the navigation and commerce so essentially depend, would be subject to its annoyance.”⁶ Florida was seen by Monroe exactly as many of his successors would see other parts of Latin America—as pieces of unattractive land that nonhemispheric adversaries might use as a base to attack the United States.

A policy of excluding these adversaries seemed increasingly appropriate as the third decade of the nineteenth century unfolded. Under the leadership of Austrian Prince Metternich, in 1821 the Holy Alliance approved the principle of counterrevolutionary intervention to stifle republicanism: “States which have undergone a change in Government due to revolution, the results of which threaten other states, ipso facto cease to be members of the European Alliance,” reads the Troppau Protocol. “If, owing to such alteration, immediate danger threatens other states, the Powers bind themselves, by peaceful means, or if need be by arms, to bring back the guilty state into the bosom of the Great Alliance.” Shortly thereafter, the Austrian army was used to squelch republican revolutions in Naples and the Italian Piedmont, and at Verona in 1822 the Alliance authorized France to destroy Spanish constitutionalism and restore Ferdinand’s absolute monarchy. With Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and his colleagues worried that Spain’s rebellious New World colonies were next in line to be brought back into the bosom of the Great Alliance, in late 1823 President Monroe announced his seminal doctrine in a message to Congress; and for nearly two centuries that doctrine has remained the bedrock principle of U.S. foreign policy.

But national security was not the only Latin American interest of John Quincy Adams’s generation, for the region also contained products for U.S. consumers and markets for U.S. producers. Despite restrictive Spanish mercantile policies, trade between colonial Latin America and the United States had blossomed in the second half of the eighteenth century, and in 1781 the Continental Congress had appointed Robert Smith as its first special agent in Latin America “to reside at Havanna, to manage the occasional concerns of Congress, to assist the American traders with his advice, and to solicit their affairs with the Spanish Government.”⁷ At the same time, New England and mid-Atlantic merchants were developing markets at the farthest reaches of the hemisphere, especially after the Napoleonic wars swept European traders out of Latin American markets. By the turn of the nineteenth century, nearly one-third of all U.S. exports went to Europe’s colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean; then, when the wars of Latin American independence erupted, this trade mushroomed. It did not take long for Yankee merchants from politically powerful port cities to become accustomed to serving markets that had often been closed by Spain’s restrictive trade policies, and they turned to their government for help in keeping the markets open. “The situation of these Countries has thrown them open to commercial intercourse with other nations, and among the rest with these United-States,” wrote John Quincy Adams in 1818; shortly thereafter, he informed the counterrevolutionary Holy Alliance that “we can neither accede to nor approve of any interference to restore any part of the Spanish supremacy, in any of the South-American Provinces.”⁸

Seeking, then, to protect the nation’s security and to promote its economic interests, officials in Washington set out to establish relations with newly independent Latin America. They knew (or thought they knew) much about the basic character of the people who inhabited the region, and no one was more confident of his knowledge than the most influential U.S. foreign policy official of the era of Latin American independence, John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State from 1817 to 1825 and President from 1825 to 1829. Just before initiating the process of diplomatic recognition, Adams told Henry Clay that Latin Americans “have not the first elements of good or free government. Arbitrary power, military and ecclesiastical, was stamped upon their education, upon their habits, and upon all their institutions. Civil dissension was infused into all their seminal principles. War and mutual destruction was in every member of their organization, moral, political, and physical.”⁹

Adams’s opinions had their origin in his eighteenth-century New England upbringing and, in particular, in the views of his father, who felt nothing but disdain for all Hispanics. At almost the exact time that his son was talking with Clay, the senior Adams, now eighty-five years old, wrote Jefferson that “a free government and the Roman Catholick religion can never exist together in any nation or Country, and consequently that all projects for reconciling them in old Spain or new are Eutopian, Platonick, and Chimerical. I have seen such a prostration and prostitution of Human Nature to the Priesthood in old Spain as settled my judgment long ago, and I understand that in new Spain it is still worse, if that is possible.”¹⁰ Adams’s reference to “long ago” was a midwinter trip across northern Spain in 1779–1780—a trip so trying that, upon crossing the border into France, he wrote, “never was a Captive escaped from Prison more delighted than I was, for every Thing here was clean, sweet and comfortable in Comparison of any Thing We had found in any part of Spain.” In combination with his anti-Catholic upbringing, John Adams’s singularly unpleasant experience in Spain clearly influenced his attitude toward Latin America. Thereafter he met few Hispanics and virtually no residents of Latin America, but the die was cast: three decades after his unfortunate trip, the senior Adams wrote that “the people of South America are the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom”; as a result, attempts to establish democratic governments in the newly independent region were “as absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts, and fishes.”¹¹

Young John Quincy Adams accompanied his father on the ill-starred trip across northern Spain. The twelve-year-old John Quincy’s diary emphasizes that country’s brutish population (“they are lazy, dirty, nasty and in short I can compare them to nothing but a parcel of hogs”); its grinding poverty; its filthy lodgings (“they never wash nor sweep their floors”); and especially its repressive Catholicism. “Poor creatures, they are eat up by their priests. Near three quarters of what they earn goes to the Priests and with the other quarter they must live as they can. Thus is the whole of this kingdom deceived and deluded by their religion. I thank Almighty God that I was born in a country where anybody may get a good living if they please.”¹²

John Quincy was also influenced by another towering figure of his father’s generation, Thomas Jefferson, with whom he developed a friendship in Paris in 1784 and 1785. One day’s diary entry notes, “spent the evening with Mr. Jefferson whom I love to be with, because he is a man of very extensive learning, and pleasing manners.”¹³ Jefferson’s exceptionally inquisitive mind regularly included the exploration of subjects related to Latin America—he told the younger Adams that he had learned Spanish during a nineteen-day sea voyage; he met with revolutionaries from Brazil and Mexico while in Europe during the 1780s; and in 1787 he commissioned the U.S. chargé in Madrid to purchase books for his library, indicating his interest in Spanish volumes about the New World and, if possible, information about the idea of a canal across Panama. These early contacts led Jefferson to a pessimistic evaluation in the late 1780s: “The glimmerings which reach us from South America enable us only to see that its inhabitants are held under the accumulated pressure of slavery, superstition, and ignorance.”¹⁴

Jefferson’s knowledge about Latin America was subsequently enlarged by contact with others who had firsthand knowledge of the region. The American Philosophical Society (of which Jefferson was the presiding officer from 1797 to 1814) established relations with intellectuals in Mexico and Cuba, and Jefferson was on familiar terms with the Abbé José Francisco Correia da Serra, a Portuguese naturalist who was named the Portuguese-Brazilian minister to Washington in 1816. The Abbé was such a regular visitor to Monticello that Jefferson’s granddaughter referred to one first-floor bedroom as “the Abbé Correa’s room”; and although Jefferson did not meet Francisco de Miranda when the Venezuelan patriot spent nineteen months in the United States from mid-1783 until late 1784, the two men did talk when Miranda stopped in Washington on his way home from Europe in late 1805. Perhaps the acquaintance who most influenced Jefferson’s view of Latin America was the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who passed through the United States on his return to Europe after five years of exploring Spanish America. The two men quickly formed an easy friendship, and in mid-1808 von Humboldt sent Jefferson a copy of his Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne.¹⁵

The information gained from these acquaintances led Jefferson to conclude that partial independence would be best for Latin America—“an accord with Spain, under the guarantee of France, Russia, Holland, and the United States, allowing to Spain a nominal supremacy, with authority only to keep the peace among them, leaving them otherwise all the powers of self-government until their experience in them, their emancipation from their priests, and advancement in information, shall prepare them for complete independence.”¹⁶

In addition to Jefferson’s views of Latin America, John Quincy Adams was influenced by reports from early U.S. agents in Latin America, the most interesting of whom was Joel Roberts Poinsett, a remarkably cosmopolitan Southerner who is best remembered for bringing the Mexican Christmas flower, nochebuena, to the United States, where he renamed it the poinsettia. In early 1811, a decade before his assignment to Mexico, Poinsett was sent by President Madison to ...