CHAPTER 1

Establishing the Need for Improvement

In taking them cordially by the hand we may lead them upward.
—William Churchwell, Special Agent to Mexico, 1859
NO ONE KNOWS exactly when the United States began to think about improving Latin Americans. There was no hint of uplifting in 1781, when the Continental Congress sent its first envoy to the region—a consul assigned to colonial Havana and instructed simply “to assist American traders with his advice, and to solicit their affairs with the Spanish government.”1 Nor did leaders of the following generation have an interest in uplifting Latin Americans; instead, early nineteenth-century Washington was concerned about protecting a modest handful of whalers and traders who were having difficulty coping with the region’s newly independent governments, many of which were not yet in full control of their territories, some of which were predatory, and several of which were unfamiliar with the norms governing international commerce. A few were all of the above. And so in 1817 President James Monroe ordered the U.S. Navy to patrol the west coast of South America, and soon additional cruisers were stationed along the continent’s east coast and in the Caribbean, sailing from port to port, discouraging piracy and suggesting there was a price to be paid for mistreating U.S. citizens and their property.2
The reports of these first few Navy officers, consuls, and special agents established Latin Americans’ need for improvement. None could equal the lyrical talent of Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote that the seas of pre-European Latin America “sparkled with the fires of the tropics; for the first time the extraordinary transparency of the water disclosed the ocean’s depths to the navigators. Here and there little scented islands float like baskets of flowers on the calm sea. Everything seen in these enchanted islands seems devised to meet man’s needs or serve his pleasures.” Then came the Spanish, and several centuries of colonial mismanagement had left Latin America in disarray. “May not revolution be the most natural state for the Spaniards of South America?” Tocqueville wondered. “The people dwelling in this beautiful half continent seem obdurately determined to tear out each other’s guts; nothing can divert them from that objective.” His summary judgment: “There are no nations on earth more miserable than those of South America.”3
Tocqueville had never set foot in Latin America. His views were largely based on a series of lengthy conversations in the United States with Joel Poinsett, an early U.S. envoy to both the Southern Cone and Mexico who softened his legendary pessimism by suggesting to Tocqueville (who in turn suggested to his readers) that “one must not judge the Spaniards of the New World too severely. When the Revolution caught them, they were still living in the sixteenth century [and] you could not imagine a more complete unawareness of all the discoveries of modern civilization.”4
Most early envoys shared Poinsett’s appraisal. “They call this a Republic,” reported a consul in Buenos Aires. “I assure you there is not on earth a more despotic Monarchy,” which was also a view of the U.S. chargĂ© in Lima: “The Supreme power is generally in the hands of some military chief, who, looking only to his personal aggrandisement, tramples upon the rights of all.” That was also the message from Caracas, where there was “a breaking up of all the foundations of law and order—all guaranties for civil liberty and personal security—a letting down of all hope of future progress in civilization and material prosperity.”5
Many of these early envoys found it difficult to withhold their comments from the people they were criticizing, and that posed a problem: diplomats are posted abroad in order to protect and promote the interests of their country, a task that can be rendered more difficult by commenting upon the shortcomings of one’s hosts, especially if this criticism is accompanied, as it often was, by suggestions regarding the steps needed for improvement. These earliest offers of advice were strongly discouraged by John Quincy Adams, secretary of state during the years when much of Latin America was becoming independent: “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”6
This was repeated four years later, in 1825, when Spanish authorities were largely gone and a U.S. minister reported that he was having difficulty convincing Chileans to change their ways—“very much opinionated, it is difficult to administer them, any salutary advice.” At that time there were so many similar dispatches coming from the rest of Latin America that Adams’s successor, Henry Clay, issued a general order: “All expressions of contempt for their habits, civil or religious, all intimations of incompetency on the part of their population, for self Government, should be sedulously avoided.”7
This policy continued into the next generation, with a typical mid-nineteenth-century secretary of state, James Buchanan, warning a typical U.S. envoy, this one in Lima, that “it is impossible that you can reform either the morals or the politics of Peru, and as this is no part of your mission, prudence requires that you should not condemn them in public conversations. You ought to take its institutions and its people just as you find them and endeavor to make the best of them for the benefit of your own country.”8
But unlike secretaries Adams and Clay in the 1820s, the generation taking over in the late 1840s encouraged U.S. envoys to point out “the example of our own country where all controversies are decided at the ballot box.”9 This was probably nothing more than State Department boilerplate, sanctified by the City-on-a-Hill pedigree, but some mid-nineteenth-century envoys followed this “ballot box” instruction, only to find their hosts uninterested in the U.S. example. Often miffed, these envoys then began suggesting that Latin Americans’ incessant squabbling “should be restrained by the strong hand of a great civilized nation,” or that Washington should “force these Spanish American Republics to keep the peace.”10
Meanwhile the United States had seized the northern half of Mexico, and a series of envoys to what was left of that country was convinced that “the present Government of Mexico, is as useless for any good to the country, and as vicious & tyrannical as it is possible to conceive.” So reported U.S. minister John Forsyth, who appears to have been the first to suggest providing Latin Americans with military assistance—in this case, a “thousand Americans, picked, true, well paid and ably officered, and to be distributed throughout the Corps of the Mexican Army.”
Washington refused to consider the idea, and eventually Forsyth threw in the towel, allowing Secretary of State Lewis Cass to send Mexico a less-demanding diplomat who recommended patience: “In taking them cordially by the hand we may lead them upward.”11
IN ASSESSING THIS pre–Civil War era, it is only fair to recognize the difficulties faced by Washington’s early envoys, who found themselves among an unfamiliar people, few of whom seemed capable of speaking or even listening in English. In 1831 one such early envoy to Mexico confessed to being “totally unacquainted with the language of the people amongst whom my duties were to be discharged,” while another in Argentina wrote about needing an aide to translate any document before he could read it, and a late nineteenth-century U.S. envoy to Chile reported this when his ship stopped en route at Callao: “The government’s tugboat came off to the steamer and a gorgeously arrayed official presented himself at my cabin, addressing me in Spanish, with profound bows and great deference. I returned the bows in kind and even amplified their impressiveness. But I was totally unable to understand the gentleman and therefore totally unable to respond.”12
These early emissaries reported what they saw, with their vision filtered, as it always will be, through their own cultural lens. In this case the lens was masculine, white, Anglo, and consistently Protestant. Looking at Latin America, they saw Catholic societies mired in deep poverty, plagued by weak economies, led by corrupt warlords, and still suffering from a hangover of the Inquisition. In general, the longer they stayed at a post, the more these emissaries found to criticize.13
Now, still in the 1850s at the tail end of the era of Manifest Destiny, many U.S. envoys saw acquisition as the ideal form of uplifting, and they were often encouraged by Washington. “It is beyond question the destiny of our race to spread themselves over the continent of North America,” President James Buchanan told the Senate in 1858, and that no longer meant westward: “The tide of emigrants will flow to the south, and nothing can eventually arrest its progress.” Eager to add slave states, a few Southerners were already taking independent action with filibustering expeditions, but most simply urged Washington to act. Seize control of the fledgling Central American confederation, insisted one member of the House of Representatives, a Southern sympathizer, and “wave upon wave of immigration will roll in upon that country, until, ere long, its internal wars, ignorance, superstition, and anarchy, will be supplanted by peace, knowledge, Christianity, and our own Heaven-born institutions.”14
Then the South fired on Fort Sumter, and for a season there was little thought of Latin America.
THE POST–CIVIL WAR decade saw some continuation of the debate about acquiring nearby territory—particularly the Dominican Republic, whose leaders had petitioned Washington for annexation—but the soldiers who had shed their uniforms in 1865 were not interested in expansion. Instead they turned inward, modernizing and expanding agriculture, developing heavy industry, building the world’s most extensive transportation infrastructure, centered upon railroads, and replacing small workshops with large factories. Commenting upon two decades of astounding growth, in 1885 steel magnate Andrew Carnegie boasted that “America already leads the civilized world.”15
A quite different assessment came from the less-lofty reaches of the economic pyramid, where the trickle down had been modest and where a series of deep recessions had turned dreams into nightmares. “We have had no steady growth and prosperity,” observed a Gilded Age economist during one of the several post–Civil War downturns; “no immunity from industrial ills, but rather a constant succession of heats and chills, industrial convulsions, strikes, combinations, suspensions of industry, and irritation between classes.”16
“Overproduction” was the most common explanation for these ups and downs: basically, the nation’s ever-more-efficient factories were churning out more widgets than the domestic market could absorb, triggering layoffs until inventories had been reduced. As in industry, even more so in agriculture, where the 1862 Homestead Act had opened up some of the planet’s most productive acreage, and it was not long before another economist was pointing out what every farmer already knew: “There is no sufficient market for our surplus agricultural products except a foreign market.”17
As is to be expected in any agrarian democracy, the concern of these farmers quickly led to meetings in Washington, most of them on the floors of Congress, where a senator from flour-exporting Minnesota told his colleagues, “We will be compelled to seek new markets for the surplus or close our factories and let a portion of our harvests rot upon the ground.”18
As Congress was taking that under consideration, U.S. envoys were submitting reports similar to one from Lima, which conformed to pre–Civil War assessments (“annexation would be hailed with delight”) but now added a new enticement: once Peru had been annexed, “large markets would be opened to our productions and manufactures.”19 Soon a presidential commission was on its way to explore these markets. Its 1885 report recommended “that our representatives to these Republics be charged to respond to that feeling that is so often expressed by them as that of a child to a mother.”20
Understandably offended, a sarcastic Argentine journalist complained that the commission had been sent to inform the local residents that they “might be thankful to be allowed to exist at all on the same hemisphere as the star-spangled Republic.” The fact that the commission had spent only forty-eight hours in Buenos Aires (and one of those two days a Sunday) simply confirmed that “the people of the United States know little about us and care no more. They have a vague notion that we are a cross between Indians, whites and wild horses and that when we hear that an American Drummer comes the natives line the shore in scant costume loaded with crude gold waiting for Yankee notions.” His conclusion: “So long as Europe comes here with its millions and Americans come here ...