América: A New History of Empire and Resistance

The most common way to tell the history of the United States is to frame it as a series of important times, like Colonial America, the American Revolution, the Age of Expansion, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age, among other times. With the exception of looking to Europe and England, this is the manner in which US history is typically taught in high schools and survey courses at colleges. These courses typically present the country's historical self-understanding and founding political identity in a rather self-contained manner. In América: A New History of the New World, the historian Greg Grandin challenges this approach to US history. It provides a ground-breaking 500-year history of how Latin America was "indelibly stamped by the looming colossus to the North," and how the United States' identity and historical self-understanding are inextricably linked to those of Latin America. To put it another way, Grandin argues that a hemispheric perspective of their long and complicated relationship from the beginning of the New World is necessary for truly comprehending the history of North and South America. A hemispheric perspective on the Spanish conquest, the Age of Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Monroe Doctrine, the World Wars, and the coups and revolutions of the 20th century are exactly what this book provides. He also shows how the current crisis of democracy in the United States can be better understood from a broader hemispheric perspective and how the history of Latin American resistance movements against authoritarianism offers solutions for the authoritarian era. The Nation spoke with Grandin about his approach to North and South American history, as it specifically concerns the legacy of the Spanish conquest, the differences between the revolutions for independence in the US and Latin America, how pan-Americanism inspired the League of Nations and the United Nations, the threat of fascist movements throughout the Western Hemisphere, both in the past and in the present, and what history teaches us about how they can be overcome. The interview has been edited to be shorter and more clear.

—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Why don't we begin with your book's title, America, America? What specifically are you referring to? How does it relate to not only the hemispheric history you wish to tell but also the global history of the modern world?

Greg Grandin: "Greater America" was the working title, a play on a well-known 1930s essay about what a New World history might look like. But then one day on the subway someone started humming “America the Beautiful,” which got stuck in my head. It occurred to me later on. America, also known as America The book's scope—the history of the English- and Spanish-speaking Americas from their conquest to the present—is nicely reflected in the title, which has a nice mirror effect. And the discussion itself. I spend some time discussing the politicization of the name "America" and how English-speaking revolutionaries acquired the name for themselves, despite Latin Americans' assertion that "America" encompasses the entire hemisphere. But I care more about understanding how five centuries of New World rivalry over morality, religion, politics, law, and economics shaped the international system and its problems—first between Spanish Catholic America and English Protestant America and then Latin America and the United States.

DSJ: At the outset, you provide a vivid historical account of the appalling Spanish conquest of the New World beginning in the late 15th century. As you point out, scholars have dubbed the conquest, which resulted in the deaths of 85 to 95% of the population within a century, "the greatest mortality event in human history." You then explain how the New World broke away from the Old World during the Age of Revolution, which occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries. In your opinion, how were the Spanish American wars of independence distinct from the Anglo-American Revolution against Britain?

GG: Those insurgents who led the break from imperial Spain had a more robust understanding of history, and they understood their liberation movement as an atonement for the horrors of the Spanish conquest. Many of them, including Simón Bolvar, the most well-known of them all, had a powerful intellectual and moral critique of the conquest: that it was unfair, that Native Americans and African Americans should not have been enslaved, and that the colonial system was, in Bolvar's words, a horrible combination of ancient and modern despotisms. The first Venezuelan Declaration of Independence describes the Spanish as "wild animals" who brought Europe's entire "history of bloodshed and perversity" with them when they arrived. In addition, the insurgent leaders realized that they were the byproducts of such spoliation and that, at least in theory, citizenship would be granted to all inhabitants. “We are,” Bolívar said in 1819, “a sort of middle species between the legitimate owners of this land and the Spanish usurpers.”During the American Revolution, no such historical awareness existed. For John Adams, America was “discovered,” not “conquered.” Settlement was the name of colonialism, and there was nothing about it to be condemned. No consideration was given to including people of color in a common community, as Bolvar did, and grief remained focused on what London did to the settlers. As you say, the horrors of the conquest were incalculable and sparked both a profound moral crisis and a philosophical revolution within Spanish Catholicism. The conquest continued unabated, but there emerged a coherent critique that was the beginning of modern political theory. Bartolomé de las Casas, the most formidable of the jurists, theologians, and priests who advocated for these novel ideas were, to be sure, in the minority, but they were influential in helping to advance what one scholar has referred to as the slow creation of humanity. They insisted that the doctrine of conquest was no longer valid, that slavery in all its forms was illegal, and that everyone in the world was equal and possessed equal rights regardless of religion, custom, or skin color. Some people argued to the point of pacifism, while others gave a very detailed description of social life, arguing that people needed other people to survive and that society came first. Latin Americans, on the other hand, had to contend with an assertive United States that moved west like a whirligig, taking Native Americans' and Mexicans' land after the Americas' independence. So the problem that confronted Latin American independence leaders and their successors was how to contain the United States, The hemisphere’s first republic seemed more a force of nature than a new nation, possessed, as the Brazilian diplomat Felipe José Pereira Leal put it, by the “dizzying spirit of conquest.” Several of the founders of the United States claimed that once they drove the natives out of the Stony Mountains, they would soon have Saxons in both North and South America. What to do with a nation that believed itself to be as universal as Christianity, as embodying the marching spirit of world history?

The criticisms that were previously directed at Spain during the conquest were updated and directed at the United States by Spanish and Portuguese Americans. They did this by starting a new era in international law.

DSJ: The extent to which the FDR administration in the 1930s feared a Nazi takeover of Latin America surprised me.

GG: Many thought so, in Berlin, Rome, Madrid, London, and Washington. During the Roosevelt administration, many people believed that Germany would try to annex Uruguay, Argentina, or Paraguay. “The danger of delay cannot be overdrawn,” Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins was certain that if London fell, Germany would turn to Latin America before attacking the Soviet Union with tanks. From Mexico down, Latin America is loaded with dynamite. German colonies in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Uruguay considered Germany to be their true government. Swastika armband-wearing students filled their schools, where German racial theory was taught. Berlin, according to the left-wing popular front group the Committee for Pan-American Democracy, had plans to annex what it called “Antarctica Germanica,” which included the white majority government of South Africa and the Southern Cone governments of Latin America. The expression "Unser Land Is a Piece of Germany!" ("Our Country Is a Part of Germany!") began appearing on signs in shop windows and graffitied on factory walls in Uruguay and Argentina. The Auslands-Organisation, the Nazis' overseas outreach organization, coordinated the activities of thousands of Nazi and fascist parties in southern South America. Fascists were gaining influence in the region's military and police, and German economic power was expanding. Peru’s government appointed an Italian general to head the Lima Police Department, who had previously worked with Italy’s counterpart to the German Gestapo.

Others pointed out the sociological similarities between Spain and Latin America—both regions dominated by large, landed estates dependent on servile labor threatened by militant peasant and labor movements—and feared that the Spanish Civil War would spread throughout Latin America. In the Americas, the cleavages that Franco used to launch his revolt existed, albeit on a continental scale. The Mexican Revolution, which was constantly besieged by Catholic counterinsurgencies of the ultranationalist variety, one of which was supported by William F. The Spanish Civil War was also compared to Buckley Sr. "Spain has been the first big trench in the battle for our own continent," said journalist Carlton Beals at the time.

DSJ: What prevented it from happening?

GG: In the years prior to Pearl Harbor, fascism or, at the very least, a politicized right-wing authoritarianism similar to Franco's could have swept through Latin America and isolated the United States. But one thing that America, América is interested in is looking into the deep humanist, universal current of Latin American society. This current has been in opposition to the darker side of the Spanish Catholic Empire for a long time and is what led to the first codification of what we now call social and economic rights in Mexico's revolutionary 1917 Constitution. To put it another way, social democracy. Latin Americans are nationalists who are committed to the concept of sovereignty. However, their nationalism is not typically the harmful kind that feeds fascism; rather, it is viewed as a stepping stone toward a more general humanist universalism. This emancipationist tradition, which we might connect with the radical Enlightenment but also had deep roots in Catholic universalism, sharpened its opposition to the United States, its foreign-policy aggression, its Anglo-Saxon dominance, and its territorial expansion for a century. However, after FDR's election in the US at the beginning of the 1930s, opposition and contestation gave way to convergence as the US gave up its right to intervene and began to tentatively collaborate with the region's democrats and leftists. Some, like Henry Wallace, FDR's vice president, envisioned creating a continental New Deal. After the war ended and the Cold War began, that policy abruptly changed direction, but over a decade, the hemisphere experienced a social-democratic alignment. FDR's close ties to revolutionary Mexico and to Vargas' Brazil were particularly significant.

DSJ: Can you elaborate on your claim that Wilson’s vision of the League of Nations has as its inspiration Latin America, and that FDR’s thinking about a United Nations is rooted in his prior thinking about Pan-Americanism?

GG: When Latin America broke off from Spain at the beginning of the 1800s, it was already a league or community of nations and had to learn to live together. The US had revived the doctrine of conquest as a justification for its expansion across the continent, but its politicians opposed it. Additionally, they rejected Europe's "balance of power," believing that it would always result in war. Instead, they developed a brand-new framework for international relations that held that nations were bound together not by inherent competition but rather by shared interests. Within a short time, the region’s jurists had elaborated all the basic principles that would later go into the founding of the League of Nations and the United Nations: a rejection of doctrines of discovery and conquest; insistence on formal equality of nations despite their size; nonintervention; an outlawing of wars of aggression; and an insistence on impartial arbitration to settle disputes. Wilson repeatedly stated that, in its most idealistic form, what he hoped to accomplish at Versailles was modeled after Pan-Americanism.

DSJ: Your book provides an insightful political and economic account of the early Cold War origins of dependency theory in Latin America. Dependency theory is the idea that economic underdevelopment is caused by the global economy being structured in a way that benefits the wealthy core nations and exploits the poor for their resources. I was surprised to read that dependency theory is inseparable from liberation theology—namely, a Catholic social teaching that suggests that God has “a preferential option for the poor.” What exact connections do these two have?

GG: Among others, Friedrich von Hayek believed that the Salamanca School, a group of Spanish theologians who questioned the legitimacy of Spanish dominance in the Americas, was the source of libertarian economics. On the other hand, John Maynard Keynes believed that the Salamanca School's emphasis on "moral law" provided a significant extra-economic customary check on accumulation. In any case, the intersection of liberation theology and dependency theory occurred more in terms of politics and social relations than in terms of ideas.Latin American revolutionaries were influenced by Christian socialist thinkers in the 19th century, many of whom came from France. Catholic modernizers in the 20th century sought to do more than just minister charity. They attempted to explain why poverty persists. The arrival in Colombia of several anti-fascist Dominican priests associated with a Catholic renewal group called Economy and Humanism, which had been founded in Marseille in 1941 and was dedicated to the belief that the economy should serve humans, not humans the economy, marked an important step in the formalization of what would later become known as liberation theology. Economy and Humanism was dedicated to the belief that the economy should serve humans, not humans the economy. While ministering in Breton fishing villages on France's north coast, one of these Dominicans became interested in political economy in the 1930s. The villages were poor because they couldn't compete with a fishing industry that was becoming more consolidated and technologically advanced. Lebret extrapolated a larger global economics from his experiences, one very similar to ideas later expanded on by Argentina’s Raúl Prebisch.

In the later part of the 1960s, a lot of Catholic intellectuals set up study centers to look into questions about exploitation. Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, who is credited with inventing the term "liberation theology," wrote, "Dependence and liberation are correlative terms." "One attempts to escape from the situation of dependence after an analysis of it." When Phillip Berryman first heard a critical economist argue that the overdevelopment of Europe and the United States depended on the underdevelopment of the poorer regions of the globe, he was thunderstruck. Berryman was a Roman Catholic priest who lived in the poor Afro-Panamanian neighborhood of El Chorrillo in Panama City in the 1960s. Berryman stated that it "clicked right away—once you see it, it clicks." The mixture was potent. The belief that capitalism was a system devoid of virtue and that God's children deserved a life of dignity rather than one subject to the punishments, plunder, and rewards of the so-called free market was based on faith, moral fire, theorems, and data. It was not commerce that made one a more benevolent human, as some of the West’s moral philosophers would have it. Rather, insisted the theologians, psychologists, playwrights, and pedagogues of liberation, it was through politics—and especially through political dissent and struggle—that one became a more defined and empathetic individual, that one cultivated sympathies and solidarities, that one got a sense of one’s self in time and space, in history and the world.

DSJ: The so-called Chicago Boys, a group of Chilean economists trained in neoliberalism and responsible for the brutal austerity measures implemented during Pinochet's dictatorship, have received a lot of attention. However, how does a hemispheric perspective help us better comprehend Chile's neoliberal revolution and its legacy?

GG: To dispel the idea that neoliberalism originated in the minds of a small group of Austrian economists and those who followed them, a long hemispheric perspective helps us escape the prison of ideas. In some countries, such as Peru, the Truman administration and its business backers attempted to implement neoliberalism as early as 1948. However, the robust vision of social democracy discussed earlier, which had been centuries in the making, prevented them from doing so.

DSJ: You suggest that the political crisis that the US is currently experiencing might be tantamount to what the Idaho Senator Frank Church warned of when he spoke of the “Latin Americanization of the United States.” What specifically do you mean by the term, and how does it apply now?

GG: Church didn’t mean the phrase in a reactionary way, as it’s often used, to suggest that the country was losing its WASP identity and becoming mongrelized, or that plebeians were falling for strongman populism and lining up behind Latin American–like strongman caudillos. Rather, Senator Church, writing in 1975, two years after the overthrow of Allende in Chile, was worried that the United States was adopting a similar set of economic policies that were then being imposed on Latin America, what we now call neoliberalism. Some economists identify 1973 as the most economically egalitarian year in US history, with the smallest gap separating the rich and poor. But just two years later, the senator was warning about the regressive upward distribution of income, the strengthening of corporate power, and the inability of states to control and discipline capital. It is pertinent because this restructuring is the source of our current malady, the most immediate origins of Trumpism, the destruction of the New Deal social contract, and the substitution of political hegemony with right-wing conspiracism, as the psychological war the US waged on other countries for decades was brought home. Church was foresighted because the restructuring of the United States would not be fully carried out until later, under Reagan and Clinton. In the last decades of the 20th century, every industrial, high-GDP nation reorganized their economies in response to rising energy costs, inflation, unemployment, and international competition. Yet no other wealthy nation deregulated, outsourced, deindustrialized, and imposed austerity as gleefully as did the United States. And few did so while also gutting the institutions—welfare, unions, housing, farm communities, hospitals, mental-health care—that might have softened the blow. Clinton especially, during a period of unheralded economic expansion, with no contending challenger on the horizon of near comparable might—the Soviet Union was gone, wiped off the face of the map—ramped up police and prison spending and began targeting undocumented laborers. The United States’ political class treated the country as occupied territory and its citizenry as belligerents. Church, imitating Cassandra, was advising against that.

DSJ: Is it just a coincidence that Miami is becoming what you call the "headquarters of a new World Right"? Or are there more fundamental historical reasons for the radicalization of the right in Florida and in this city in particular?

GG: You should know that Texas' history as a slave state and its prominence in right-wing oil politics provide a window into the national psyche, and we frequently consider Texas to be emblematic of the nation's trajectory. However, Florida is a threat. It entered the Union as the result of a rampage by Andrew Jackson, who cut a swath of terror through communities, killing Seminoles, refugee Creeks, and escaped slaves. Jackson's primary goal was to placate opponents of his massive land grab during the War of 1812, when he took millions of acres from the Creeks. Steve Inskeep, a journalist, says that Jackson "both created and scored in the greatest real estate bubble in the history of the United States up to that time" with that grab. Jackson made a fortune, as Creek tribal land was turned into Alabama slave plantations. In the book, I go into more detail about this incident, but there are deeper historical explanations that are connected to criminal activity, corruption, bootlegging, and land swindling. Think of Nixon's bagman, the shady real estate developer Bebe Rebozo, or the CIA training Cuban and other anti-communist mercenaries in the state's swamplands. In her book Miami, Joan Didion stated that the arrival of anti-Castro exiles transformed the state into one of "occult enchantment," a fertile "complex of resentments and revenges and idealizations and taboos." Anthony Lewis, a columnist for the New York Times, described it as a place of "morbidity, paranoia, and fantasy." Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, the command center of a hemispheric Trumpism, is currently the epicenter of that enchantment, as well as of those resentments and fantasies of retribution.

DSJ: You frequently talk about the social-democratic ideal's persistence in Latin America. How do you explain that stubbornness?

It's a paradox, GG. Or a contradiction. When one considers the deep currents of reaction and dehumanization that exist in the region, how do we account for the opposite, the endurance of a profound humanism and sociality? One version of the slogan says, "Humanism or barbarism," but in Latin America, it has been humanism and barbarism, with one being a reaction to the other. I believe that the fact that the moral crisis of Spanish colonialism came early with the conquest is one reason for the persistence of a humanist, social-democratic left that is receptive to demands regarding gender, race, and sexuality. Even though they didn't always act on that understanding, many of those who led that movement understood "emancipation" in its full sense, which included potentially at least all forms of oppression when independence from Spain finally came. The critique that was launched by dissenters was frontal and all-encompassing. Then there was the Spanish Catholic Empire itself, which established a colonial regime based on the administration of difference while claiming to be universal. That reconciliation, of universalism and difference, both as an idea and a social reality, is, I think, the foundation of Latin American social democracy.

Different was the Anglo experience. The hallmarks of the English settlement were evasion and denial. remained that way for centuries. The extermination of the indigenous people of the continent posed no moral quandary. Black-skin bonding was conceptualized as a singular, exceptional evil when a moral crisis over chattel slavery finally emerged in the 1800s. As historian David Brion Davis wrote 50 years ago, this had the "great virtue" of providing an "ideal" and "clear-cut" model of evil. This helped abolitionists fight it, but later historians and activists had trouble connecting it to the persistence of "other species of barbarity and oppression," as Davis put it. The democrats in Latin America have been more open to seeing connections and incorporating "other species" into a broader perspective on conflict—though not all of them.

DSJ: It's hard to recall a time when the Democratic Party was in such a weak and ineffective position. For instance, you claim, "Wilson imagined a world without war." FDR envisioned a world devoid of need or fear. The political class of today has no thoughts, as if they do not anticipate that the guns will ever cease to fire. As the Democrats are searching for a way out of the current darkness, how might the history you offer in America, América provide some much-needed light and inspiration? GG: In the latter part of the 1940s, Chile's ambassador to the United Nations, Hernán Santa Cruz, who worked on Eleanor Roosevelt's draft of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, insisted that for democracy to be more than just a slogan, it needed to address issues of political economy. He stated, "In my mind, democracy—political, social, and economic—comprises an inseparable whole." Recent elections and polls indicate that, despite the best efforts of the Chicago Boys and their death squad, the majority of Latin Americans still view democracy as social democracy. Latin American democrats of all stripes have long fought authoritarianism, and their success or failure depended on a number of factors, including whether Washington supported them like it did in the 1930s or opposed them like it did during the Cold War. However, one thing that has remained constant and something we can learn from Latin America is that you cannot defeat autocrats by complaining about their autocracy. You beat them, just like the hemisphere did in the 1930s and 1940s, by promising to improve people's material conditions and tying liberalism to a ferocious social rights agenda. For instance, nearly every nation in Latin America has enshrined the right to healthcare in their constitutions. This is a straightforward, popular goal that Democrats in the United States should make the center of a campaign to make society more humane.

GG: In the latter part of the 1940s, Chile's ambassador to the United Nations, Hernán Santa Cruz, who worked on Eleanor Roosevelt's draft of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, insisted that for democracy to be more than just a slogan, it needed to address issues of political economy. He stated, "In my mind, democracy—political, social, and economic—comprises an inseparable whole." Recent elections and polls indicate that, despite the best efforts of the Chicago Boys and their death squad, the majority of Latin Americans still view democracy as social democracy. Latin American democrats of all stripes have long fought authoritarianism, and their success or failure depended on a number of factors, including whether Washington supported them like it did in the 1930s or opposed them like it did during the Cold War. However, one thing that has remained constant and something we can learn from Latin America is that you cannot defeat autocrats by complaining about their autocracy. You beat them, just like the hemisphere did in the 1930s and 1940s, by promising to improve people's material conditions and tying liberalism to a ferocious social rights agenda. For instance, nearly every nation in Latin America has enshrined the right to healthcare in their constitutions. This is a straightforward, popular goal that Democrats in the United States should make the center of a campaign to make society more humane.

WRITTED BY ME