LATIN AMERICAN AND RELATED SESSIONS AT THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION MEETINGS
December 28-30, 1969, Washington, D.C.
“Discovering the Discoverers” was the subject of a session on the first morning of the meetings, with J. H. Parry, Harvard University, as chairman. In his paper on “Pre-Columbian Contacts with the New World,” Vincent H. Cassidy, University of Akron, argued that Pre-Columbian discovery is a valid area for research and blamed neglect of the subject by professionals for “amateur” and “crackpot” domination of it. He suggested that “amateurs” are frequently more professional than their critics and pointed to the increasing number of useful publications on the subject.
David B. Quinn, University of Liverpool, discussed “European Access to North America in the Sixteenth Century,” examining conditions impeding exploration and settlement of the continent. Among the inhibiting factors he cited climate—winter cold in the far north and summer heat in the south; disease, especially scurvy, malaria, and dysentery; economic uncertainties, particularly the difficulties in growing foodstuffs; and finally, the widely held early view that North America was not valuable for its own sake but an area to be got through or around on the route to the Par East.
The paper of Bruce B. Solnick, State University of New York at Albany, entitled “After Columbus: Castile in the Caribbean,” traced Spanish explorations in the Caribbean from about 1496 to about 1519. While most of the lands and islands of the Caribbean had been discovered by the Spanish by 1519, it was concluded that permanent settlement there was conditioned on the availability of gold, pearls, and other forms of wealth.
On the same morning, a session was devoted to “The U.S. and Latin America: Recognition as a Weapon of Diplomacy.” C. Neale Ronning, New School for Social Research, examined the recognition experience of the administrations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Reviewing several cases beginning with the Grau San Martín government in Cuba in 1933, and ending with the Argentine situation of 1944 and 1945, he concluded that the Roosevelt administration generally sought to avoid the use of recognition as a political weapon and resorted to it only in very serious circumstances. The traditional recognition requirement that a government have effective control over its population and territory was deemed in practice to be fulfilled if there were no organized or effective opposition; and the other prerequisite—ability and willingness to honor international obligations—was also interpreted generally by the State Department in a conventional manner. In another paper at this session, the Honorable James I. Loeb, former Ambassador to Peru, held that a rapid recognition policy is not possible or desirable because of the varying causes of golpes. The real question, he argued, is not one of recognition but of aid. Granting that significant social change is a valid objective of U.S. policy in Latin American, even at the temporary expense of political democracy, he expressed skepticism at the notion that the military could be the great hope of achieving radical social change. He favored greater consideration of multilateral decision-making in terms both of recognition and of aid.
Also on the morning of December 28 was a session on “Ethnoeentrism : The Response of Mexico and Canada to the United States,” chaired by David M. Pletcher, Indiana University. Gene M. Brack, New Mexico State University, in a paper on “Mexican Opinion, American Racism, and the War of 1846,” argued that Mexican awareness of racism in the United States contributed to the creation of a public opinion in Mexico that forced her into a war that she was not likely to win. Michel Brunet, University of Montreal, did not appear at the session, and his paper, “British, American, and ‘Canadien’ Attitudes toward the U.S. in the Early Nineteenth Century,” was read by the chairman. The paper noted that the British Americans, to legitimate their separateness in North America, pretended that they maintained a set of values which the Republican Americans had betrayed. Canadien leaders, on the other hand, trying to persuade the British government that they formed a bulwark against Yankee imperialism, compared the people of the U.S. to “barbarians.” After the War of 1812, he said, both Canadiens and British Americans changed their attitudes toward their southern neighbors, whose prosperity and dynamism could not be denied.
At the annual luncheon meeting of the Conference on Latin American History (with Howard F. Cline presiding in the absence of Chairman Richard Morse, who was snowbound in Quebec) the winners of the Conference’s annual prizes were announced. The Bolton Prize went to Richard Graham for Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil, 1850-1914 (Cambridge University Press) and to A. J. R. Russell-Wood for Fidalgos and Philanthropists: The Santa Casa de Misericórdia of Bahia, 1550-1755 (University of California Press). The Robertson Prize went to Kenneth R. Maxwell for “Pombal and the Nationalization of the Luso-Brazilian Economy,” HAHR (November 1968).
The luncheon speaker, Eugene D. Genovese, University of Rochester, discussed “The Comparative Focus in Latin American History.” Such an approach, he said, is important because of the need to maximize control of historical generalizations and to chronicle the process of development of a single world community since the sixteenth century. He reviewed progress in the comparative study of slavery and race relations and concluded that the closing of the African slave trade and the beginning of commercial specialization in the slave economies affected the treatment of slaves according to a definite pattern. He pointed to pitfalls in and limits of the comparative approach with particular reference to recent studies of Cuban slave society, but defended its usefulness—not necessarily in the form of comparative studies—in enriching national, regional, and topical histories and, as in a synthetic history of modern capitalism, in integrating Latin American into world history.
“Spain in the Golden Age” was the subject of a session in the afternoon of the same day with De Lamar Jensen, Brigham Young University, as chairman. In his paper, “The Aristocracy : Honor and Faith,” John E. Long-hurst, University of Kansas, argued that religious militancy did not become identified by the Establishment with country and honor until the unification of Spain under the Catholic Kings. He cited as illustration the case of the murder in 1546 of the Lutheran Juan Diaz, arranged by his Catholic brother to preserve family honor. Ruth Pike, Hunter College, described “The Moriscos of Seville,” a group comprising about 6,000 in 1580. Their rigid endogamy, high rate of population increase, retention of their own language, and traditional customs contributed to tensions with old Christians. Fears, rumors, and some evidence of Morisco conspiracies abetting invasion by outside forces led in 1610 to their expulsion from Spain. Although Sevillan economic life was only temporarily affected by the Moriscos’ departure, the demographic impact was permanent and irreversible. “Universities and the State in Hapsburg Spain” was the topic of the paper of Richard L. Kagan, Indiana University. Increasing manpower needs of Church and State in the sixteenth century caused universities in Castile to grow rapidly and to shift away from theology and the humanities toward the law. However, the practice of the Crown in favoring with appointments graduates of six Colegios Mayores within the three major universities created disillusionment among the students and this, together with economic decay and the overproduction of legal graduates, contributed to university decline after 1640.
A panel session devoted to John Womack, Jrs.’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution was on the same afternoon, with John J. Johnson, Stanford University, in the Chair. Michael Maccoby, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D.C., who had spent five years studying social character in a village in Morelos, described two types of campesinos there. The first, similar to those who joined Zapata in the revolution in Morelos, is of a productive-hoarding character—independent, conservative, suspicious, and frugal. These traits are adapted to the condition of a peasant who owns his plot of land and is prepared to defend it with his life, as was done in the face of encroachments by sugar haciendas in Morelos at the time of Zapata’s revolt. The second type of campesino, of a passive-receptive character, has traits similar to those of the hacienda peons who played no part in the Zapata revolution: submissive without initiative or pride, obsequiously loyal to a hierarchical superior.
The second panelist, Mark Mancali, Stanford University, said that Womack, while eschewing in his volume analysis and definition, had implicit a Populist model of society and a Utopian theory of history. The volume, Mancali pointed out, makes clear the differing concept of legitimacy—ideological and legalistic—of the Porfiristas and the Maderistas on the one hand, and the Zapatistas on the other, for whom legitimacy lay in time and history, rather than in law. As the revolutionaries in Morelos did not want to seize power on a national scale but only to be left alone, he believed the model of a civil war may be more useful in the Mexican case.
Neither paper was available to Womack before the session, so that he was forced to reply extemporaneously. Commenting upon panelists’ remarks, he accepted Maccoby’s distinction between the free villagers and the hacienda peons and their differing behavior patterns, but said that he considered economic and political factors more important than those that were psychological. He said further that the populist model discerned by Mancali came out of the material itself—the village was a pueblo, a people, more or less unified against the pressures on it. Other aspects of the Revolution, he emphasized, would not necessarily lend themselves to a populist interpretation.
“The Uses of History by the Social Sciences’’ was the subject of a joint session on the morning of December 29, with Lyle N. McAlister, University of Florida, as Chairman. Anthony P. Maingot, Departments of History and Sociology, Tale University, in his paper “Towards an Operational Definition of Caudillismo. A Historical Approach to Latin American Social Structure and Leadership,” examined the behavior of Colombian leaders in 1854 and in the decade 1920-1930, and pointed to the discrepancy between their gentlemanly style of leadership and the widely accepted concept of a caudillo as one who uses violence to maintain personal power. Holding that Latin American leadership depends on a network of personal relationships grounded in the social structure, Maingot defined the caudillo as having a leadership style valued by the group bringing him to power. Gilbert W. Merkx, Department of Sociology, University of New Mexico, presented a paper entitled “Brickbats or Bedfellows: History and Sociology as Related Endeavors,” with the basic assumption that the two fields will be thrust into increasing competition as their intellectual complementarity becomes recognized. The key issue separating history and sociology, he argued, is methodology, i.e. the relationship between ideas and research designs. Historians generate more interesting ideas but are not as effective as sociologists in assessing their soundness. Merkx called for the placing of historians and sociologists together in the same university departments to encourage their working together.
