December 28-30, 1966
JOHN J. FINAN
On the morning of the opening day of the American Historical Association meetings in the New York Hilton, December 28, was the session dealing with “The Spanish Republic and Its Critics: Prelude to Civil War,” with Juan Marichal, Harvard University, as Chairman. Gabriel Jackson, University of California, San Diego, in discussing “The Black Legend of the Republic, a Rebuttal,” addressed himself to claims that the leaders of the Republic neglected national traditions, misunderstood national problems, and were well intentioned but incompetent. The achievements of Republican leaders, in accord with their objectives, included the elimination of all press censorship and academic restraints, the reduction of the size of the army, increased self-government for Catalonia, vast construction of schools, greater separation of church and state, agrarian reform (discussed by Edward Malefakis below), and large-scale irrigation works. “In such matters as land reclamation, electrification, school-building university and foreign scholarship development,” Jackson said, “The Republic was expanding, in an intelligent and undogmatic spirit, the best work of previous royal governments. In the handling of economic problems connected with the world depression, it applied ad hoc solutions which gave greater weight to human needs than to financial orthodoxy. In the instances of regional autonomy, and separation of church and state, it did not fully anticipate the problems of inexperience, dislocation, and long-repressed emotions which would be generated by its actions.”
Stanley Payne, University of California, Los Angeles, in his paper, “The Spanish Military Rebellion of 1936,” presented a descriptive account of that military conspiracy. The Spanish officer corps of 1936 had no distinct political ideology. A secret organization, the “Unión de Militares Españoles” (UME), had been organized to preserve Spanish government from leftist revolution but was not a coherently organized conspiratorial group. The leader of the rebellion, Brigadier Emilio Mola, envisioned a purely military movement in which the conservative political parties would at first be allowed no direct influence. The new Republic would be corporative, technocratic, and quasi-authoritarian with the army having a special veto over governmental actions. The only civilian groups seriously considered for participation in the revolt were the Falangists and the Carlists, who were in a position to offer organized paramilitary assistance. The army itself was severely disunited, and only 14 of the 58 army garrisons in Spain supported the revolt that began on July 17, 1936. The rebellion was supported by the greater part of the middle classes, however, and this backing contributed importantly to the ultimate victory.
Edward Malefakis, Columbia University, discussed “The Agrarian Problem and the Republic.” The provisional government of the Second Spanish Republic promised agrarian reform in April 1931, but because of the immensity of the agrarian problem, the lack of finances for compensation to landowners, and lack of will on the part of bourgeois Republicans, an agrarian reform law was not passed until September 1932. The law contained many serious errors, and the administration of it was inept. When the Radicals came to power in November 1933, they continued application of the reform rather than challenging it; more land was redistributed during the first ten months of Radical rule than during the preceding year. But the Municipal Labor Decree was revoked, allowing again the superior economic power of the landowners to be used against the workers. Offsetting this power were strong peasant unions in most of Spain which were crushed, however, when the Socialists lost their gamble on the effectiveness of a strike of the 500,000-peasant federation in July 1934. As the balance of power in parliament shifted to the Right, a new agrarian law was passed in 1935 allowing the settlement of no more than two or three thousand peasants annually. Rural wages fell to their pre-Republican levels. In the face of peasant invasions of lands in the spring of 1936, the Popular Front government, which came to power in February, yielded to peasant demands. In March and April more than 500,000 hectares were transferred to peasants. But with the military insurrection of July the struggle for dominance within the Republic was decided.
At the Conference Luncheon on December 28, Chairman Harry Bernstein announced that the featured speaker, Dr. Victor Volsky, Director of the Latin American Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, had not arrived in the U.S. as scheduled, because of technical visa difficulties. (He came later, however, and made a three-week visit to various universities.) Bernstein reviewed the work of the Conference during 1966, mentioning particularly the growth in graduate student membership and the special session for graduate students which was planned during the meetings. Bernstein called on Prize Committee Chairmen to announce the 1966 awards: Herbert Eugene Bolton Memorial Prize, Winner, Robert N. Burr, By Reason or Force—Chile and the Balancing of Power in South America, 1830-1905, University of California Press, Berkeley; Honorable Mention, William J. Griffith, Empires in the Wilderness—Foreign Colonization and Development in Guatemala, 1834-1844, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. Conference on Latin American History Prize, Winner, Howard F. Cline, “The Oztoticpac Lands Map of Texcoco, 1540,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, April 1966; Honorable Mention, Posthumous, George Baker, “The Wilson Administration and Nicaragua, 1913-1921,” The Americas, April 1966; Special Mention, Lyle N. McAlister, “Recent Research and Writings on the Role of the Military in Latin America,” Latin American Research Review, Fall 1966. James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize, Winner, Warren Dean, “The Planter as Enterpreneur: The Case of São Paulo,” Hispanic American Historical Review, May 1966; Honorable Mention, David M. Davidson, “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1650,” HAHR, August 1966, and Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., “Economic and Social Origins of the Guatemalan Political Parties (1773-1823),” HAHR, November 1965. In a brief address Howard Cline reviewed the goals and work to date of the Latin American Studies Association which was organized in May 1966. He urged CLAH members to join the new association.
The meeting on the afternoon of December 28 was devoted to “The City in Spanish and Portuguese History” and was chaired by J. H. Parry, Harvard University. In his paper, “Late Medieval Lisbon,” A. H. de Oliveira Marquês, University of Florida, reviewed the origins and early development of Lisbon, first as a probable Iberian foundation, next as a Roman provincial dependency and Christian bishopric, then under barbarian domination until its conquest in 714 by Moslems who built its first ring of walls. It increased in importance under Moslem control and was surrounded by several small dependent villages, famous today for their fruit and vegetable production. Regained finally by the Christians in 1147, Lisbon was a middle-sized town with a population of about 5000. In face of the danger of Muslim pirates, a second wall was built in the late thirteenth century. A university was created in 1290. A third wall was constructed in 1375-78 to protect the city against Castillian attack. The topographic structure of medieval Lisbon is Moslem, the reconquista effecting few changes. The growth of Lisbon took place mostly in the thirteenth century, but medieval Lisbon was hardly a commercial or an industrial center in the sense of Venice or Bruges. Lisbon’s land in the late Middle Ages was roughly divided into three great parts, one belonging to the king, another to the Church, and a third to wealthy bourgeois or nobles, most of it granted in emphyteusis. The king, the royal family, and the court were at the top of Lisbon’s social hierarchy. Most nobles, living outside the city, had only a temporary social status in Lisbon. Non-noble rural landowners formed the largest part of the patriciate in control of the city government. The importance of craftsmen increased gradually until by the fifteenth century they were in control of the city government. The activities of the lower classes are still relatively unknown. Jews as well as most foreigners were distributed between the patriciate and the middle classes.
Ruth Pike, Hunter College, examined “Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century: Slaves and Freedmen.” During that century, Negro, Moorish, and Morisco slaves made up a large proportion of the population of Seville; in 1565, for example, there was one slave for every fourteen inhabitants. Negro slavery had been a part of the city’s life for many centuries. The discovery of America increased the demand for a source of cheap labor, and the city became one of the most important slave centers in Western Europe, second only to Lisbon. During the first decade of the sixteenth century, the average price paid for a slave in Seville was about 20 ducats, rising with inflation in succeeding decades to 100 ducats or more. In the wealthier homes of the city, slaves were considered a necessity, but all classes owned them.
The existence of a large slave population created security problems for the municipal government, and restrictions were imposed forbidding, except under certain conditions, the carrying of arms by slaves and their assembly in public places. Slaveholders could be as arbitrary as they chose with their slave property. The right of manumission lay entirely with the owner, and masters usually included provisions in their wills for enfranchisement of their slaves. Besides domestic slavery, exploitation of servile labor for profit was common, and slaves became a part of the city’s large unskilled working force. Sevillian guilds prohibited both slaves and freedmen from entering their ranks, but they could be employed by master craftsmen in their shops. Several slaves were employed as business agents in America. The slaves in Seville working at outside jobs lived in the poorer sections, such as the parishes of San Bernardo, San Ildefonso, and San Roque; others lived in Triana with most of the seafaring population.
Seville contained also a sizable free Negro population. Freedmen remained on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, and competition for jobs strained relations between freedmen and the Sevillian proletariate. On the individual level, however, Negroes and Sevillians mixed freely and amicably. Among the servant class miscegenation was common, and mixed marriages were not unknown. Many freedmen sought to improve their status by emigrating to the New World.
In his comments, C. J. Bishko, University of Virginia, applauded both papers as substantial, informative, and at many points markedly original. With specific reference to Oliveira Marquês’s paper, he raised questions about continuity and discontinuity in Lisbon’s history, about some aspects of its topography, and about the dating of the prominence of artisans in the city’s society and economy. Bishko felt that Pike’s paper called for a more detailed study of Negro-Morisco relations in Seville, of industrial slavery there, and of figures on the proportion of slaves to the free population.
In the lively morning session December 29 on “The Interpretation of Twentieth-Century Latin American Political History,” Milton Vanger, Brandeis University, boldly questioned the widely held position that Latin American history since about 1870 may be viewed most fruitfully in terms of the appearance of new social classes and a maturing class structure in which middle and lower classes show cohesion and cooperation. This model of social classes, he argued in “The Need for Political Focus: A Critique of Social Class Explanations,” is only an uncritical adaptation of the European pattern of social structure and change via industrialization which fails to explain current instability. “Analysts of the middle and lower classes have exaggerated the political cohesiveness and inter-class relations of these groups,” he said. From an analysis of the political career of Batlle of Uruguay, Vanger concluded that what is decisive in Latin American polities is independently operating leadership, which created ideological myths and political supporters, for governments in Latin America have “grown before and ahead of politically conscious new classes.” He closed with an appeal for the analysis of “political history as a political process, not as the reflection of economic and social history.”
The four commentators took issue with his analysis and conclusions. Lyle McAlister, University of Florida, observed that Vanger substituted one monism for another. Herbert Klein, University of Chicago, noted that classes have at least two major components, relationship to sources of production and class consciousness, the latter especially weak in Latin America. There the numerically small middle classes identify their interests with those of the upper classes and in general prefer reform to revolution. Batlle ’s radicalism was only an attempt to ward off the contagion of Argentine socialism. Kalman Silvert, Dartmouth College, agreed on the need for a more sophisticated model of class analysis if prediction were to be possible. More than narrowly determined class interests shape the political action of social groups. To the element of class, he proposed additional factors of status, power, and ideology. Castro, he argued, could not be explained satisfactorily as a leader operating in a vacuum for he both responded to and created the conditions of the Cuban Revolution. The final commentator, Theodore Draper, Hoover Institution, offered the view that the Latin American middle class may reflect the interests of “too many classes” to be cohesive. Yet he cautioned that it would be erroneous to conclude that Castro’s successive appeals to different sectors of Cuban society at decisive moments indicate that as a leader he has enjoyed political independence. Rather, Castro “could not do without some kind of class base,” he said. The consensus of the commentators was that rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater, class analysis of Latin American political history must mirror Latin American, not European conditions. One final comment from Vanger summed up the session: “A bullfight is stimulating, especially to the bull.”
The subject of the session on the afternoon of Thursday, December 29, was “Politics in Republican Brazil,” chaired by Bailey W. Diffie, the City College of New York. In the first paper, “Feudalism and Federalism: the Politics of the Northeastern Sertão in the First Republic,” Neill Macaulay of the University of Florida explained that during the period of the First Republic a feudalistic system prevailed in the Northeastern sertão. Sertanejo “feudalism” was based not on large landholding but on the reciprocal military ties between lord and vassal: jagunço and coronel, coronel and state governor, and state governor and president of the Republic. This system was made possible by the decentralization of governmental power under the federal constitution of 1891. The system came into full flower in the first decade of the twentieth century, was challenged by the “rescue” efforts of the army during the administration of President Hermes da Fonseca, but survived until the Revolution of 1930.
The coroneis of the Northeastern sertáo wielded significant power in the First Republic, he said. This power, which was based on the application of military force at the lowest level in a decentralized system, was greatly diminished by the disarmament of the sertão in 1930.
The paper presented by Ralph della Cava of Columbia University, “Brazilian Messianism and National Institutions: A Comparison of Canudos and Joaseiro, ” examined two popular religious movements—classified by recent scholarship as “messianic.” They arose in the Brazilian Northeast during the last two decades of the Empire and continued to evolve under the “Old Republic” (1889-1930). The first was led by Antonio Conselheiro in Canudos and the second by the suspended priest, Padre Cicero Romão Batista, in Joaseiro. Neither movement was the consequence of purely local circumstances, geographical isolation, cultural backwardness, or religious “fanaticism.” But they were intimately tied to the power structures, ecclesiastical and political, of empirical and republican Brazil and to the dynamic changes which were taking place within the Brazilian national economy between 1877 and 1920.
Richard M. Morse of Yale University, opening the discussion of the two papers, questioned the use of the term “feudalism.” Perhaps coronelismo, still vigorous today, belongs to a patrimonial system instead and represents the degeneration of the use of private power rather than the flowering of feudalism. A patrimonial leader exercises his control as a personal right, he said. A feudalistic system, on the other hand, is a contract between free men. He believed that patrimonialism deserves attention in the study of Brazilian national integration in the twentieth century.
In his comments, Rollie Poppino of the University of California at Davis emphasized that coronelismo in the Northeast was not characteristic of the Old Republic alone. Because there had been a strong tendency toward it in other periods, the high level of political fanaticism after the establishment of the Republic cannot be entirely accounted for by the federal system of government. Only in the sertão could feudalism and messianism have developed such strength. For a variety of reasons they could never have flourished in the coastal cities. The two phenomena are examples of the continuing clash between urban and rural Brazil and the weakness of the coastal power centers between 1889 and 1930.
“New Approaches to Latin American Periodization: The Case for an Eighteenth-Century Watershed” was the topic of the session on the afternoon of December 30, with Charles Griffin, Vassar College, in the chair. With reference to the Mexican experience, Howard F. Cline, Hispanic Foundation, Library of Congress, proposed to consider 1760-1860 as a single “neo-colonial period” of Mexican history. In summary fashion he noted general problems of periodization in Latin American history: lack of agreed criteria for any period, taxonomic difficulties which group scientists into “lumpers” or “splitters,” and the inherited teleological approach of Latin American historians that overcontrasts colonial, independence, and national eras as a function of local nationalism. He gave samples and illustrations of “neo-colonial” patterns from historical political geography (intendancies to Mexican states, 1768-1869). These were followed by economic patterns (general trade, mining, textile industry) and social changes. Intellectual trends reveal the “neo-colonial” period to have involved various facets of the Enlightenment, whose influence long preceded and went beyond the independence era. Cline concluded that outside the very narrow framework of political history a “neo-colonial period,” beginning at mid-eighteenth century and persisting about a century thereafter, can be discerned in Mexican history.
John TePaske, Ohio State University, maintained in his paper that the advent of the Bourbons to the throne of Spain marked the beginning of a new era in the viceroyalty of Peru. The new dynasty began to reshape the colonial regime by attempting to break down the privileges and to withdraw the wide powers enjoyed by favored colonial groups such as the consulado, regular and secular clergy, Inquisition, mine owners and operators, and corregidores. Driving for efficiency and profitability in the colonial realm, Bourbon reforms were partially successful in increasing revenues and achieving administrative improvements; but in the long run these efforts hardened the colonials against the crown and created a favorable atmosphere for independence. In fact, protection of traditional colonial privileges ultimately became more important than creole-peninsular antagonisms in bringing about the Wars of Independence, he said. The independence movement in Peru reaffirmed the traditional vested-interest groups, while the postindependence period preserved the continuity of colonial patterns. If the advent of the Bourbons had set in motion a dialectical process of the forces of modernity, reason, efficiency, and control against those of tradition and privilege, the Wars of Independence tipped the balance back in favor of the colonial power structure. In Peru Independence slowed the pace of change, muting if not obliterating the attempt to eliminate colonial patrimonial privileges. Unlike Mexico where the struggle between change and tradition continued stridently into the nineteenth century and culminated in the Juárez Reform, Peru saw the persistence of colonial patterns with only faint glimmerings of the eighteenth-century conflict. The Reform in Mexico constitutes the synthesis of the dialectical process set in motion by the Bourbons, but Peru encountered no such resolution to its conflict. Ramón Castilla gave some hope as Juárez did in Mexico, said TePaske, but his program was transitory and never became a part of the mainstream of Peruvian life.
According to David Bushnell, University of Florida, the area of Gran Colombia does not provide a clear-cut case either for or against the proposed substitution of an “eighteenth-century watershed” for the traditional division of Latin American history at the Independence movements of the early nineteenth century. The history of Ecuador, where the Bourbon commercial reforms of the eighteenth century had a major impact and where the Independence movement itself was curiously inconclusive, probably can be understood more clearly if one takes the suggested 1760-1860 period as a coherent unit whose continuities are more important than any break or breaks in development resulting from Independence per se. The same can be said concerning intellectual history in the entire Gran Colombian area, in which the ideology of the independence movement and of the immediate postIndependence decades had clear roots in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In political and administrative history, except for the special case of Ecuador, the traditional periodization seems more suitable. The administrative reforms of the late colonial period, such as the Bourbon intendant system, had less effect in the viceroyalty of New Granada than in Spanish America as a whole, while the Independence movement had important effects on political institutions and behavior. Economically, the effects of Independence were less pronounced, and the 1760-1860 framework is perhaps more meaningful though still not wholly satisfactory for Venezuela and Colombia as well. But in social relationships, at least in those two countries, Independence had a larger impact (e.g., through the abolition of caste distinctions) than either eighteenth-century reforms or mid-nineteenth-century developments. In the last analysis, since periodization is purely a matter of convenience to the historian, it is better to retain the traditional scheme until an alternative has been clearly shown to be superior, and for the Gran Colombian area this has not yet been done.
