Robert Jackson Alexander (1918 – 2010)

When I first entered the crowded Rutgers office of Robert Jackson Alexander a quarter-century ago, I had no idea what to expect from the man, officially an economist, whose books were required starting points for any scholar interested in the key forces and episodes of South American politics after World War II. I knew him as a prolific author who wrote the first books in English on numerous topics including Perón (The Perón Era, 1951), Latin American communism (Communism in Latin America, 1957), the 1952 Bolivian Revolution (The Bolivian National Revolution, 1958), and organized labor in the ABC countries (Organized Labor in Latin America, 1965). I was uncomfortable due to the distance between my own outlook and my host’s openly anticommunist social democratic politics and alignment with US foreign policy. His archival holdings, which I had come to exploit, proved far richer...