Unaccountably, the death of J. Fred Rippy 11 years ago failed to receive notice in this journal. Since HAHR aims to be the journal of record for the field of Latin American history in this country, and since Rippy was one of the pioneers of the field, even a belated tribute is clearly better than none. Rippy was born a few years too late to form part of what Howard Cline dubbed the “first pioneering generation,” that in the opening years of this century gave Latin American history an established place in U.S. universities. But he did not miss it by much. He joined the faculty of the Department of History of the University of Chicago in 1920, and, except for a decade at Duke University from 1926 to 1936, he remained at Chicago until his retirement from teaching in 1958. He did not then retire from scholarship, however, and in due course he became the author of 14 books and over 200 scholarly articles, which gained him recognition as one of the country’s leading experts on Latin America.
Rippy’s path to a career as professional historian began in rural central Tennessee, where he was literally born in a log house. He studied at Southwestern University in Texas and at Vanderbilt before finally obtaining his doctorate at Berkeley under the direction of Herbert E. Bolton. In his own teaching career, he had the opportunity to instruct large numbers of both undergraduate and graduate students, and he summed up one of his chief preoccupations in the title of the address he delivered on the occasion of his triumphant return to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater, Southwestern University, in 1961: “The Urgent Need for Mass Intelligence.” Nevertheless, Rippy did not make his mark primarily as a teacher, and neither was he always an easy person for departmental colleagues to get along with, being a man of strong opinions and even prejudices. Instead, he is chiefly remembered as an author, whose published works include two general texts of Latin American history, a charming autobiography entitled Bygones I Cannot Help Remembering: The Memoirs of a Mobile Scholar (1966), and above all a staggering number of monographic books and articles devoted to exploring the complex and controversial history of foreign economic penetration of the Latin American republics.
Though many of Rippy’s works continue to be mined by historians of Latin America, possibly the two that have had the most lasting influence are Latin America and the Industrial Age (1944, reprinted in 1971) and The Capitalists and Colombia (1931). The first of these is quintessential Rippy: a series of brief, fact-crammed yet readable sketches of the introduction of distinct technological innovations to the Latin American scene. The Colombian study was published just three years after he toured much of that country, acquired (he later said) a great quantity of amoebas, but also attended a presidential banquet, met with cabinet ministers, and came away with a very favorable impression of Colombia as a land where scholars enjoyed as much public esteem as high political or military figures. In The Capitalists and Colombia Rippy readily accepted that foreign capital had a valid role to play in Latin American development, but he made it clear that the capitalists themselves were guided by other than altruistic motives, and while he was at it he took some swipes at the hypocrisy of the U.S. government concerning the secession of Panama. The book was well received in Colombia, where a Spanish translation under the title El capital norteamericano y la penetración imperialista en Colombia had two editions with two different publishers (1971 and 1981). Since neither Colombian publisher could quite comprehend the curious North American custom of substituting a mere initial for the first of two given names, the author was featured both times as Fred J. Rippy, and the first Colombian edition had a cover design in which Scrooge McDuck is seen furiously pumping gold coins from a well that obviously stands for Colombia. This design (omitted from the next edition) somewhat overstated the message of the author himself, who was certainly no radical. He was simply a pioneer.
