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Pan-Americanism

A Brief History of Pan-Americanism (1826-1930)

The PAAC carried in its name a political buzzword of the day, “Pan-American,” aligning itself with a political ideology. James Monroe proclaimed on December 2, 1823 that the United States would not tolerate European interference in the affairs of American republics, viewing such action as hostile. Theodore Roosevelt created an amendment in 1904 that asserted the right of the U.S. to intervene to stabilize the economic affairs of smaller nations that were unable to pay their international debt. The term “Pan-American” both evokes solidarity and establishes difference between the American republics. Its first recorded use dates to 1826, when the celebrated South American revolutionary and statesman Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) called the first Pan-American Conference to be held in Panama.[1] The U.S. government later appropriated the term “Pan-American” in the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904. Several U.S. presidents used the corollary to justify the invasion of Cuba (1906-10), Nicaragua (1909-11, 1912-25, and 1926-33), Haiti (1915-34) and the Dominican Republic (1916-24). In 1928 Calvin Coolidge’s undersecretary of state J. Reuben Clark reversed the Roosevelt Corollary in the Clark Memorandum, stating that the Monroe Doctrine did not entitle the United States to intervene in Latin American affairs unless a European power directly threatened the Americas.[2] The Clark Memorandum thus paved the way for later New Deal policies.

In the decade that followed, a new political landscape was wrought in the United States as a result of the widespread economic depression. The U.S. economy was flattened, making it more closely aligned with those of many Latin American countries. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s foreign policy adapted to this change in economic topography. In striking contrast to Theodore Roosevelt’s American Exceptionalism were notions about Good Neighborliness from the F.D.R. administration. These ideas were spurred in part by a rising tide of fascism in Western Europe, a situation that dramatically increased Latin America’s importance as a trading partner.

Negative feeling between the U.S. and its Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking neighbors intensified in the second half of the nineteenth century, beginning with the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-48). As the first war to be fought by the U.S. on foreign soil, this was also the first major political event that drew Latin America into the national consciousness of the United States. Technological innovations made print media production easier and cheaper, and newspapers like the New York Sun dropped their prices to one cent in 1833. Suddenly, their publications were available to everyone. The U.S.-Mexican War was thus the first war to receive mass media coverage. For many U.S. Americans the conflict became a window to customs and attitudes largely alien to their own, and they believed their country would never be the same. They were correct; this war more than any other set the United States on its trajectory to prosperity and established it as a major power in the western hemisphere. Control over the California gold mines, as well as over water resources and, therefore, agricultural potential in the west, is responsible for much of the subsequent wealth of the United States. The redistribution of land between Mexico and the U.S. also opened trade routes to Asia and gained the U.S. Santa Fe, which had in the previous century become a major trade center. Although many U.S. citizens have forgotten the details and the lasting consequences of this war, their Mexican neighbors have not.

While the U.S.-Mexican War had won the United States half a million square miles of new territory, the Spanish-American War half a century later had an even larger impact on the United States’s awareness of its Latin American neighbors, and vice versa. The circumstances surrounding the beginning of the conflict are still debated. The mysterious sinking of the USS Maine in February 1898 led William Randolph Hearst and other journalists immediately to conclude that Spanish officials in Cuba were to blame, though analysis of evidence decades later found that assumption unverifiable. The resulting furor in the months following the explosion (as exemplified by the cry Remember the Maine, To Hell with Spain!) pressured President McKinley to ask Congress on April 11 to send American forces to Cuba to demand Spanish withdrawal. A peace treaty signed in August 1898 gave the United States control of the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. Called a “splendid little war” by Secretary of State John Hay, the Spanish-American conflict trumpeted America’s entry into world affairs and officially established the United States as an imperialist nation. Not surprisingly, the Pan-Latin school of thought was strengthened by the U.S. war with Spain in the decade that followed, and several prominent writers became very active in promoting opposition to the United States.[3]

From a U.S. perspective, however, the Spanish-American War has not yet been fully considered as a site of cultural exchange with regard to the resulting era of political Pan-Americanism. After demonstrating its new military might in 1898, the United States proudly displayed its intentions to establish widespread inter-American trade in the Pan-American Exposition held in Buffalo, New York, from May 1 through November 2, 1901. The official logo for the exposition, designed by artist Raphael Beck (1848-1957) and used on stationery and commemorative coins, shows two women whose respective garments overlay both North and South America. North America’s representative is blonde and fair-skinned; she extends her hand down to Ms. South America, who is noticeably darker in complexion.

Though familiarity bred through trade agreements may have provided one catalyst for Pan-American activities, anxiety about the future of U.S. culture began to reinforce the country’s interest in Latin America. By 1930 many U.S. citizens began to view Western ideals of progress as chimerical. They also witnessed their once vast western frontier rapidly being plowed over by mechanized agricultural implements. The imminent loss of Nature’s/God’s seemingly limitless bounty that had gratified generations of U.S. Americans in response to European urbanity caused many in the Anglo-American cultural elite to revalue native and Hispanic cultures and religions as alternatives to a modernity that was increasingly driven by materialism. Hundreds of artists and intellectuals began pouring into the desert southwest of the United States. Taos, New Mexico, and especially the home there of Mabel Dodge Luhan, became a favorite destination for many city-worn artists. D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O’Keefe, Ansel Adams, Martha Graham, Carl Jung, and Willa Cather, among many others, stayed at Luhan’s estate.

Many of the novels, paintings and photographs created there show Anglo-Americans’ softening attitudes toward the Spanish-speaking and Native American inhabitants of the southwest. Willa Cather’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), which presents a Catholic Bishop and priest attempting to establish a diocese in New Mexican territory, portrays Hopi, Navajo, and Mexicans sympathetically. In certain moments Cather’s French clergymen seem to realize the futility of imposing an alien religion on millennia-old belief systems, as evident in the Bishop’s reaction to his Indian guide: “The Bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn’t think it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him.”[4]