An Interview with Lewis Hanke

Lewis Hanke is one of the figures to whom the cliché about “needing no introduction” can be most literally applied, at least among Latin Americanists. Sometimes facetiously referred to as the twentieth-century reincarnation of Bartolomé de Las Casas, because of his special identification with research on the great Spanish Dominican, his scholarly production in fact ranges widely over the field of Latin American history, and lie has taught several generations of undergraduate and graduate students. He had already won recognition as a historian of Latin America in the years between the wars; he maintains the same pace of scholarly activity today, even though—as professor emeritus of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst since 1975—he is technically retired from university service. For these reasons, it was essential that HAHR make room for him in its series of interviews with distinguished historians. On March 24, 1988, in Gainesville, Florida, the long-awaited interview took place.

Unfortunately, there were some technical difficulties in the interviewing session, so that much of the tape turned out to be unusable. Fortunately, HAHR had had the foresight to ask Professor Hanke to prepare written responses in advance to certain of the questions that automatically come up in such interviews, and this he had done. Also, during his visit to Gainesville, he delivered an address at the University of Florida entitled “The Development of Latin American History in the United States, 1923–1988: Reminiscences, Reflections, and Recommendations.” He did not speak simply from a written text, but he did have a text with him, which he left with us. It thus became possible to replace many of the lost portions of the interview by drawing on that text, which, for the most part, dealt with the same issues. Still other lost portions have been reconstructed, in effect, from memory. The interview that follows is therefore not literally an “interview” in the strictest sense; indeed, much of it has been assembled by cut-and-paste technology from the written text of the talk that Professor Hanke gave.

We jointly conducted the interview, but questions are attributed simply to HAHR, since several of them have had to be reconstituted ex post facto. It also seemed unnecessary to try to label which segments of Professor Hanke’s replies were on the tape and which were to be found only in the written text. In any case, he vouches for the accuracy of his remarks, even if we, on our part, do not wholly vouch for the conventionality of the method used in putting them back together.

HAHR: Could you first tell us something about your personal background, and how you became involved in the study of Latin American history?

lewis hanke : I was born in an Oregon village so small that births were not recorded, and when the State Department issued my first passport years later, it was on the basis of an affidavit by my mother. But even in my birthplace in 1905 the centennial commemoration of the exploration of Oregon by President Thomas Jefferson’s emissaries Meriwether Lewis and William Clark was noticed, and therefore on baptism my given names were Lewis Ulysses. My father always waxed indignant when my first name was spelled in the more usual French manner, and he explained that it had nothing to do with those decadent kings in Paris. My middle name also had historical connotations, for my father was the son of an immigrant, a member of the Wendish minority in Germany, who had arrived in the United States during the presidency of Grant. He became a patriotic American, so that when his first son, my father, was born in Massachusetts he gave him as a middle name Ulysses.

My mother’s family, the Stevensons, were Scottish immigrants who first came to Connecticut in the late eighteenth century, probably from Northern Ireland, for my mother had strongly Protestant inclinations all her life. Her grandparents had pushed on to California in the middle of the nineteenth century. None of these immigrants or their descendants apparently thought much about education, though my father, who became a textile manufacturer, had been sent to Germany for a year or so for technical work in that field. He made a point of returning to Massachusetts before he became 21, so as to avoid being hustled into the emperor’s army. One of my mother’s grandfathers became well-to-do in California in the construction business, but his gift to each of his children was a well-built home—not higher education.

My own family, therefore, must have been very surprised when as a high school senior in a small Ohio town, I manifested a desire to attend Yale. Inasmuch as my father was a faithful Republican, he was not alarmed by this idea, for he knew that William Howard Taft had been a professor there. However, I failed the mathematics entrance exam and went instead to Northwestern University, which had the virtue in my mother’s eyes of being a Methodist institution but whose attraction for me was that it then had a winning football team. At Northwestern there was also one of the few U.S. professors of Latin American history, a pioneer named Isaac Joslin Cox. In 1924, at the age of 19, I became the first descendant of those Scottish and German immigrants to receive a university degree. Since by this time I had met a student named Kate Gilbert in an English composition class conducted by a young charismatic instructor named Bernard DeVoto, I decided to stay around for a Master of Art degree and prepared a thesis at the ripe age of 20 on the Venezuelan Libertador Simón Bolívar. These university years also saw the beginning of my professional relations, for, as a senior, I attended the annual meeting of the. American Historical Association in 1923 in Columbus, Ohio, and there met Herbert Eugene Bolton.

AHA meetings were then modest affairs, and even undergraduate students could mix and mingle with the outstanding professors present. Charles E. Chapman was in Columbus, too, a younger scholar from California who had been instrumental in the establishment of the Hispanic American Historical Review a few years before. He had prevailed on John Franklin Jameson, the famed editor of the American Historical Review, to persuade President Woodrow Wilson to send a special letter for publication in the first issue of HAHR when it appeared in 1918. Wilson expressed the hope, which must have seemed a quaint idea to some, that such a historical review would lead to better relations between the United States and our neighbors to the south.

During the summer of 1925, I was in Washington working in the State Department archives on material relating to Bolivar. During this experience, Cox took me to call on Jameson and also invited me to lunch with James Alexander Robertson, then managing editor of HAHR in its early critical years—so difficult that the review had to cease operations for a time. Robertson, an accomplished scholar who had edited a large body of papers on the Philippines, kindly asked me whether I had some paper to submit for the review. I was too astonished to reply, but Cox wisely remarked for me that in time this might be possible.

The 1925 annual meeting of the AHA at the University of Michigan was even more significant, in my view. For now I had completed a master’s degree at Northwestern and, due to a lucky fluke, was permitted to deliver a paper on “The Congress of Panama in 1826.” Perhaps I should add that since 1925 I had never delivered a formal paper at the AHA until my presidential discurso in 1974. Fortunately for my reputation this feeble effort at Ann Arbor has never been published, but it did make possible a job interview for a position at the University of California at Los Angeles. The interviewer seemed to be interested perhaps because I had not studied at Berkeley. But, on learning that I had only a master’s degree, he explained that the instructor they were to appoint had to have completed the doctorate, as Berkeley was skeptical of the newly founded branch and would be sure to object to anything less.

After the interview, I had just enough money to spend the winter quarter of 1926 at the University of Chicago. Then, after a few months in the deep South as a Chautauqua publicity agent, I was lucky enough to get a summer appointment at Chicago, because the university needed someone to teach Latin American history for the summer session which began in a few days. They called me in and inquired whether I could substitute for Charles W. Hackett of the University of Texas who had suddenly and unexpectedly resigned. I was told that it was too late to find a suitable replacement, and Chicago felt it important to have the course offered because their Harris Lectures that summer were on Mexico, a country the United States was then having difficulties with. Being young and brash I accepted the offer, and spent a hectic but exhilarating period hastily assembling notes for the course during the next few weeks.

My next appointment, at the University of Hawaii, was just as unexpected as the summer job. In the spring of 1926 at Chicago I came to know J. Fred Rippy, a Berkeley Ph.D. under Bolton. Another Bolton graduate, a professor at Hawaii, needed an inexpensive substitute for a year and the old boy network prevailed. On the strength of this appointment, Kate Gilbert and I were married in August and sailed for Honolulu. Now that such arrangements are sometimes somewhat differently accomplished, let me say that we are still married and in a few months will have our 62nd wedding anniversary.¹

HAHR: As a scholar, instead of continuing along the lines of your M.A. thesis and first AHA paper to become an expert on the period of Latin American independence, you turned to the study of Las Casas, which rightly or wrongly is what most people think of whenever your name comes up. How did you get started on this—and, incidentally, is there anything at all that by now has not already been said, several times over, on the subject of Las Casas?

LH: I had discovered as a graduate student in 1930 at Harvard, where I went for my doctorate, that Las Casas had been in the forefront of those Spaniards who attempted to have their conquest of the New World carried on by “just” methods. After completing course work in 1932, I went to Spain with my family to search for documentation that would make possible a dissertation and hoped particularly to locate the mass of books and manuscripts that surrounded Las Casas during the last years of his life in San Gregorio monastery in Valladolid. At the time he died, the material he had collected and received from correspondents in many parts of America was so great, we are told, that it was difficult to get in or out of his double cell. I still remember the sharp sense of defeat I felt in 1932 when I could not find this material in Spanish archives or libraries.

After some months of doubts and desperation, and after consultations with such outstanding scholars as Rafael Altamira and Fernando de los Ríos in Madrid and Emilio Ravignani in Buenos Aires, I stumbled on the truth that the contributions by Las Casas could be largely portrayed from his own copious writings. Great visions come to young students when they first begin to work in Spanish archives, particularly the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. As I examined bundle after bundle of manuscripts there, it gradually dawned on me that Spain had been the only European power that carried on its conquests amidst public doubts and disagreements of its people concerning the justice of the conquest. Las Casas was only one of the noble and erudite band of political thinkers and doers who distinguished sixteenth-century Spain.

But was this a suitable topic for research? Earl Hamilton of Duke University was then ransacking European collections for his fundamental investigations on the rise of prices in Europe caused by the Spanish conquest, and he saw no virtue whatsoever in my topic. He urged me to drop Las Casas, and to turn to some more important subject. However, soon I was so overwhelmed by the richness of the material in Seville that I could not stop, and after 18 months in Spain returned to Harvard with enough documentation to write the kind of history I had in mind. In 1936, the dissertation, with the bland title “Theoretical Aspects of the Spanish Conquest of America,” was accepted. Fortunately, I did not attempt to publish this academic exercise, though I did draw off some of the more significant parts and was able to get them into print in order to indicate the trends of my research. The First Social Experiments in America [1935] came out in a series sponsored by the Harvard History Department and “Pope Paul III and the American Indians” [1937] in the Harvard Theological Review.²

Other duties kept me busy, particularly during World War II, but I found it impossible to forget about Las Casas. While on shipboard en route to Brazil in 1941, I completed the introduction for the first publication of one of his principal treatises, on the need to preach the Christian faith by peaceful means alone. In 1943, the Carnegie Endowment helped make possible the publication in Mexico of a volume of manuscript treatises by other sixteenth-century Spaniards on the same topics that had occupied Las Casas. After World War II, I was able to clarify and refine my views on these issues by conversations with historians in Europe and America, and eventually prepared a large text on “The Struggle for Justice in the Spanish Conquest of America.” Flushed with enthusiasm, I submitted it for a generous prize offered by Scribners for interpretive works. It failed to win the prize, but one of the judges was Dumas Malone, who wrote me a letter which was greatly appreciated. Then a friend at the University of Chicago Press recommended that I try there. In due course, an assistant editor wrote one of those bittersweet letters authors sometimes receive. It was an excellent manuscript, he said, and he predicted that it would be published. But not by the University of Chicago Press, because an important member of their faculty had been so critical of the work the press could not accept it. This reader saw no usefulness in a work on the struggle for justice in sixteenth-century Spanish America.

Still hopeful, I then sent the manuscript to the American Historical Association in competition for the Albert J. Beveridge Award, and it won the prize in 1947. The committee insisted that my manuscript be reduced in size, but by this time I was happy to comply, especially since the original and much larger version had been accepted for publication in Spanish by Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires. Both editions appeared in 1949. French, Japanese, and Spanish versions of the Beveridge Award study have been published, and this year the Sudamericana edition will come out in Spain with some additions to help commemorate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America.

I spent much of 1949 in Mexico on behalf of the Library of Congress. This period enabled me to complete a study on “Las Casas: Historian” that served as introduction for the edition of Las Casas’s Historia de las Indias [1951] and was soon published as a monograph in English by the University of Florida Press [1952]. Those months in Mexico, largely free of daily library duties and with the stimulus of various Mexican scholars, made possible more research and writing on Las Casas, and prepared the way for later lectures in Havana, the University of Virginia, and University of Pennsylvania. I remember the Havana experience well, because at the end of my last lecture there an angry and deeply offended Spanish priest rose up to challenge me to a public disputation on Las Casas which he felt should take several days.

The Rosenbach Lectures in Philadelphia, published in 1952, were launched with poems, in the fashion so popular in seventeenth-century Spain, by the Pulitzer Prize poet Leonard Bacon, my wife Kate, and our son Peter. The year before, I had moved from the Library of Congress to the University of Texas, and found myself very busy with students and adjusting to the realities of academic life. There was no opportunity for further research, so that I considered my life as a Lascasista had ended, and I even announced in the introduction to the Rosenbach Lectures on Bartolomé de Las Casas: Bookman, Scholar, and Propagandist that their preparation had “stimulated me to set down my final thoughts on Bartolomé de Las Casas, for these lectures terminate my researches and reflections on his great and controversial life.” After so many years focused on this magnetic figure, the time had arrived for me to study other aspects of Latin American history. My wife and I knew that our friend Wilmarth Lewis of Yale had worked on eighteenth-century Horace Walpole so long and so exclusively that at one time he thought he was Horace Walpole, and we wanted to escape a similar fate for me with Las Casas.

Thirty-three years after bidding that definitive farewell to Las Casas, I attended a conference on “Las Casas Lives Today” in Berkeley. And in all these years, it has been impossible to ignore him. This may be explained in part by the polemical nature of his writings and because few Lascasistas have been able to avoid controversy. Not one of them appears to be fully in agreement with colleagues devoted to Fray Bartolomé. Many of them appear to select from his writings what most appeals to them, a fact emphasized by the young Finnish historian Julia Pekka Helminen in his contribution to a meeting in Madrid,³ where I spoke on “My Life with Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1930-1985” [1986].

For me the one treatise by Las Casas that holds a special meaning for us today is a manuscript that lay hidden in the National Library in Paris for centuries. Entitled “Defense Against the Persecutors and the Slanderers of the People of the New World Discovered Across the Seas,” it is an attack Las Casas prepared against the Spanish Renaissance scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda who maintained that the Indians were inferior beings who could be conquered justly by the superior Spaniards. This treatise was first known to the world through an English translation of the Latin original by Stafford Poole which was published by Northern Illinois University Press and accompanied by my study All Mankind Is One [1974].

This fundamental work of Las Casas has made him a more universal figure than ever before and should help the world to understand him, particularly in the light of the drastic changes that have occurred in the period since my “discovery” of Las Casas in 1930. The United States was then in the midst of an economic depression that was also felt throughout the world. Then came World War II that shook up the people of the world in many ways and called attention to the lack of economic justice and political liberty afflicting millions of people in many countries. This was followed by the decolonizing movement in Africa and elsewhere, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement in the United States. More people than ever before became acutely conscious of the inequalities and injustices in the world, and the need for change. Today, as we look back on the total encounter of Spaniards and Indians, we see that the doctrines Las Casas advanced in the sixteenth century have a decidedly contemporary ring about them. Two aspects hold a special interest for us, living as we do in a world society whose multiplicity of cultures daily becomes more evident. For the first time in history, one nation—Spain—paid serious attention to the nature of the peoples it met; and, perhaps most striking of all, the controversies that proliferated in sixteenth-century Spain over the just method of treating the Indians led to a fundamental consideration of the nature of humanity.

Over 30 years ago, during a visit to Brazil, I was surprised to learn that General Cândido Rondon [1865-1958] knew about Las Casas’s views on peaceful preaching to the Indians. Rondon put these ideas into practical effect during his exploration of the vast region of Matto Grosso. His injunction to his soldiers, “Die if you must, but never kill,” became the motto of the Brazilian Indian Protective Service created under his direction in 1910. In the interview I had with him shortly before he died, he spoke of the impact Las Casas had on his work. Another example of how far Las Casas’s doctrines have spread may be seen from the publications by Hidefuji Someda of Kyoto and from the article of Ishihara Yasunori entitled “Las Casas on the Conception of World History,” selected as one of the best Japanese publications in 1980.⁴

The most dramatic example of the continuing vitality of Las Casas’s views came a few years ago when the Canadian jurist Thomas R. Berger invited me to participate in a discussion of the rights of Alaskan natives. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference, an international organization of Eskimos from Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, had commissioned him in 1983 to review the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. For two years, Judge Berger traveled far and wide to obtain the opinions of Alaska’s natives—Eskimos, Indians, and Aleuts. He has a wide-ranging mind, and he already had been familiar enough with the Las Casas-Sepúlveda argument at Valladolid in 1550 to publish a summary of it. This explains how I came to browse in fields hitherto unknown to me, which resulted in a paper delivered in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1985, as part of a larger examination of the place of native peoples in the Western world.⁵ Just last week, at the meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in New Orleans, there were two sessions on Las Casas bringing new material on his life and works and new insights on his theology by Helen Rand Parish of Berkeley and Gustavo Gutiérrez of Peru. Padre Gutiérrez, of course, is one of the leading exponents of liberation theology, and it is certainly worth noting that this movement in the contemporary church finds many of its concepts already anticipated in the work of Las Casas.

Finally, to return to your earlier question, in which I detect a whiff of skepticism, “Is there anything at all that by now has not already been said, several times over, on the subject of Las Casas?” Yes, new documentation has been found, and the interpretation of his life and significance has greatly increased in subtlety. Controversy remains, as may be seen from the longest article I ever published in HAHR, “More Heat and Some Light on the Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America” [1964], which required a summer to prepare. Indeed, so much fresh material has come out since 1930 that there is an urgent need for an annotated and evaluative analysis of everything he wrote, and of everything substantial written about him. For those who are not specialists on Las Casas, and who have neither the time nor the desire to search among the pages written about him in many languages, there should be prepared a selection of materials on his life and doctrines. What better way to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America?

HAHR: After Las Casas, your next major project teas the history of Potosí, where Las Casas had never trod. It was a very different kind of subject, almost as though you were finally admitting that Earl Hamilton had been right. What was the origin of this project?

LH: Hamilton was trying to tell me what I should study, and I have always opposed doing that. I never try to prescribe to my own students what they should study, and most have not chosen topics related to my own interests. Actually, my interest in Potosí goes back almost as far as my interest in Las Casas, to an exciting day when, in the course of searching in Spain for new materials on Las Casas, I happened to find in the royal library in Madrid an extensive two-volume manuscript history of Potosí.

The Spanish Republic had just been established and had opened this rich and then largely unknown collection to researchers. The late France V. Scholes and I were privileged to be among the first historians permitted in the palace library. Though it was the depth of the depression; though my principal concern was Las Casas; and though my wife, two small sons, and I were all trying to exist in Spain on a fellowship designed to keep one thin graduate student alive, I managed to buy a microfilm copy of the manuscript.

A few years later, on the way to Sucre, Bolivia, in 1935 to study some Las Casas manuscripts in a monastery there, I visited Potosí, went down in the mines, and began to realize how little the world knew about its history. While working on the struggle for justice in Spanish America I could not forget that many battles on this subject had been waged in Potosí. So, after bidding farewell to Las Casas in 1952, I began to think about the Villa Imperial de Potosí. In 1954, I published in Sucre a brief volume in Spanish which later came out in English as The Imperial City of Potosí: An Unwritten Chapter in the History of Spanish America [1956].

In that preliminary essay, I concluded that the truly unique aspects of Potosí were its size and dramatic history. Other mining centers existed in the empire and developed somewhat similar societies and sets of institutions. But Potosí came to exhibit those common characteristics of all mining societies in such a theatrical way that it became symbolic of the process that was going on everywhere. Perhaps here lies the real justification for assigning to Potosí a long and significant chapter in the history of Spain in America. Just as the vociferous and learned Bartolomé de Las Casas, although not the only defender of the Indians, most persistently captured the imagination of his contemporaries and later generations, so Potosí exemplified, in the gaudiest and most memorable colors, the passion for wealth that drew many Spaniards to the New World.

Convinced of the historical significance of Potosí, I began to search for relevant manuscripts. There turned up in the apparently inexhaustible archive in Seville a report by a Spaniard named Luis Capoche. It was not a formal history, but rather a description of the discovery of Potosí in 1545 and its enormous immediate development, as well as an account of its economic and social life up to 1589. After publishing this report in 1959 in Spain, I began an unsuccessful but pleasant search in Portuguese archives for a history supposedly written in the sixteenth century by a Portuguese miner Antonio de Acosta. This investigation resulted in my article on “The Portuguese in Spanish America with Special Reference to the Villa Imperial de Potosí” [1961]. These studies led me to look again at the manuscript obtained years before in Madrid, which had been written in Potosí in the early eighteenth century by Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela. It was grandiloquently entitled “The Imperial City of Potosí: The Incomparable Wealth of Its Famous Mountain, The Greatness of its Generous Citizens, Its Civil Wars and Other Memorable Events.” This history was finally published in its entirety, thanks to the support of the Bicentennial Committee of Brown University and the cooperation of my friend and colleague Gunnar Mendoza, director of the National Library and National Archives in Sucre, Bolivia.⁶ We labored together for almost five years in complete harmony on the task of editing it.

Few visitors go to Potosí these days—because of the cost, the inconvenience, and the cold—but those who do see there the great mountain that contained the silver ore, rising to some 15,000 feet over a plain and seemingly sterile land. Below the mountain there still may be seen impressive churches, the enormous mint, and many other signs of departed glory. But there are still no printed collections of the many basic sources available on the history of Potosí, many of them in the National Archives in nearby Sucre meticulously organized and administered by Mendoza. Some scholars have recently produced monographs on Potosí, but much remains to be done before the world will fully understand the significance of this great mining center—one of the most important urban concentrations in the history of the Americas.

Let me say, too, that Potosí has helped mold the character of those who study its history. During the years of preparing Arzáns’s History, Mendoza and I had dreamed of the possibility of an international conference on the history of Potosí, but nothing came of this project. When the three-volume work was finally published in 1965, however, the citizens of Potosí were appropriately grateful. Mendoza and I were made Honorary Citizens of Potosí, and there was a ceremonial meeting at which lofty speeches were made. A local choir sang the Bolivian national anthem in Quechua, and the band played the Star Spangled Banner—probably for the first, and last, time in Bolivia. A formal dinner was organized by the municipality of Potosí, at which we all wore our overcoats because of the intense cold. There was, however, a lively and heated discussion of the English historian Arnold Toynbee, because he had written something that offended the Potosinos, who are still as proud of their city as Arzáns was in the eighteenth century.

HAHR: The study of Potosí, we assume, led directly to your work on viceregal documentation.

LH: The history of Potosí naturally has to be studied as part of the Spanish Empire, which means the viceregal system established by Spain to govern its vast holdings in America. The sixteenth-century viceroy in Peru, Francisco de Toledo, had also interested me early on, because of his strong desire to make certain that Spain’s title to the New World was just and legal. But only after the Arzáns history of Potosí was published, did I turn my attention toward a systematic study of viceregal history.

The viceregal documentation available in Seville and elsewhere must be seen to be believed. Bundle after bundle of minutely detailed letters on all aspects of colonial administration have been available for centuries, often accompanied by extensive reports on matters referred to in the letters—Indian tributes, silver production, reports on foreign corsairs in the empire, Negro uprisings, lists of persons who should be considered for appointment, and friction with ecclesiastics. Few of these letters or reports have been published. The judges who carried on the formal investigations of each viceroy at the end of his rule also collected information of great value to historians. One such visitador, Alonso Fernández de Bonilla, spent the years 1590-1600 examining the record of Viceroy Conde del Villar in Peru and required 43,601 sheets of paper for his report! This officer was such a supreme procrastinator that I published in 1975 an analysis of his unique career and the formidable documentation he produced.

Here too I discovered controversy over Spain’s role. Some historians considered viceroys unimportant, and that they left little behind them except paintings of themselves in elegant robes. The revolutionary wars that began in 1810 and ended in 1825 with Bolivar in Potosí stirred up much anti-Spanish spirit, and historians since have shown little interest in viceroys and their administrations. Despite meetings in Texas and later at Columbia University, I was unable to arouse any enthusiasm for the study of viceroys, partly because there was so much else to be done and also because of a generally unfavorable attitude toward Spain and her colonial administration.

Toward the end of my teaching career and the beginning of a blessed retirement period, I decided to work on the project again, and was fortunate enough to obtain financial support as well as the cooperation of an active and competent associate editor, Celso Rodríguez. We focused on the Hapsburg period, 1535-1700. With the sponsorship of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles assured through its director, Ciríaco Pérez Bustamante, 12 volumes of documents and bibliographical information gradually appeared in this series [1976-80] during my retirement years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A detailed three-volume description of additional viceregal sources in Spain came out in Germany [1977], and a final volume was devoted to viceregal sources in Spanish America [1980]. This last volume contains a notable description and analysis of material in the National Archives in Sucre, Bolivia, by Mendoza.

HAHR: One thing that impressed us in your talk the other day was the attention you gave to your experiences in or relating to Brazil One is also struck by the number of Brazilianists you have trained. Would it be fair to include Brazilian history as still another of your specialties?

LH: I have never had a major research project on Brazil, but I have never failed to recognize that country’s enormous importance. My personal acquaintance goes back to the period after I received my doctorate. For a while, a part-time tutorship at Harvard and research assistance from the Carnegie Institution helped keep the family alive. Then, for 18 months in 1937-38, a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Science Research Council enabled me to broaden my horizons by studying cultural anthropology with Robert Redfield and human geography with Preston James. It was a generous and imaginative fellowship which also permitted me to travel widely in Mexico, Central America, and Brazil. Thereafter the interdisciplinary approach to Latin American history seemed to me natural, even obvious. The SSRC grant made possible a period of several weeks in Agua Escondida in Guatemala observing Redfield as he studied this Guatemala village; a trip up the Amazon and a stay at the rubber plantation established there by Ford; an exciting encounter with many Brazilian intellectuals, particularly Gilberto Freyre; and journeys across the great expanses of western Brazil in the company of James, who then settled down in Corumbá on the Bolivian border to pursue his researches in urbanization while we discussed human geography.

On my return to the United States, a job finally appeared in the Library of Congress, where in July 1939 I became the first director of the Hispanic Foundation. The Handbook of Latin American Studies, which I began editing in 1936, moved its editorial offices to the library, where they remain today; and volume 3 of the Handbook, which appeared in 1939, reflected my discovery during the SSRC fellowship of the richness and variety of Brazilian history, for it included many special articles in commemoration of the centennial of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro. The Revista Hispánica Moderna at Columbia University published in the same year my “Gilberto Freyre, vida y obra: Bibliografía-antología.” This was one of the first descriptions of the ideas of this influential Brazilian historian. During my years at Texas, Donald Cooper, Richard Graham, and David Hall Stauffer began to work on Brazilian topics. While I was at Columbia, Stanley Stein as an occasional visiting professor helped stimulate an interest in this field, as the work of E. Bradford Burns, Robert Conrad, Ralph Della Cava, Joseph L. Love, Stuart B. Schwartz, and others testifies. Michael M. Hall and the late Peter Eisenberg decided to teach at a Brazilian university, and continued their research there.

Earlier, with the strong support and leadership of Francis M. Rogers of Harvard, we were able to organize the first Colloquium on Luso-Brazilian Studies at the Library of Congress in 1950. The six meetings of this unique gathering of scholars concerned with Brazil and Portugal provided an opportunity for Luso-Brazilianists, many of whom were historians, to meet and exchange ideas. Scholars from Brazil, Portugal, the United States, and several other countries—such as Charles R. Boxer, the English historian—made these meetings memorable events.⁷

HAHR: We know you have strong feelings on teaching, have written a good number of articles⁸and given a good number of talks on that subject. What can you say here about your experiences as a teacher?

LH: Teaching was a subject no one mentioned in my graduate courses at Northwestern and Harvard. In that first unexpected summer job at the University of Chicago in 1926 and the following year at the University of Hawaii, my pressing task was to bring together enough information to last during the lecture period, not how to teach effectively.

The same situation prevailed in my years at the American University of Beirut, in Syria [1927-1930], though I do remember corresponding with Carl Becker of Cornell on possible approaches to teaching and methodology. During my 12 years as director of the Hispanic Foundation [1939-1951] there was no focus on teaching. At the University of Texas from 1951 to 1961 I cannot remember any discussion with my colleagues on how to teach. But this experience did convince me that anyone attempting to teach Latin American history was hampered by the lack of adequate teaching materials. Students had almost no knowledge of Latin America, and many of them lacked a reading knowledge of Portuguese or Spanish.

Not until I arrived at Columbia University in 1961 did questions on teaching and teaching materials seriously enter my life, and this was instigated by that imaginative publisher and friend of historians, the late Alfred A. Knopf. He thought it would be a good idea to start a new series, the Borzoi Books on Latin America, to help teachers by providing carefully edited collections of documents and interpretations on significant topics. It proved to be a valuable learning experience for me to select the authors and then ride herd on them until the 30 volumes of the series were in press.⁹ Whenever possible, I scheduled before publication a meeting of my Columbia seminar with the authors, which usually led to frank discussions and probing questions by the graduate students who were happy to have an opportunity to exercise their critical faculties. Also, shortly before I left Columbia for Irvine, California, Little, Brown and Co. published my two-volume collection designed for university students History of Latin American Civilization: Sources and Interpretations [1967].¹⁰

A particularly valuable event for me was the special summer session for about 30 high school teachers at the end of my Columbia period. These lively teachers from many parts of the country had an unusual opportunity to study Latin American history under the aegis of a veterano, Charles Nowell, and a younger scholar, E. Bradford Burns. A collection of several hundred paperbacks was assembled as a kind of private library, and at the end of the session the students took home the volumes of interest to them. The art historian Pál Kelemen and Richard Morse were among the outside scholars who presented stimulating lectures. It was a wonderful summer for all of us, and encouraged me once again to think about suitable materials for teaching. One result was that Van Nostrand Co. brought out a two-volume selection of articles from the HAHR [1966], since our students were becoming sophisticated enough to profit from such solid material, as well as a volume of text and documents entitled Contemporary Latin America [1968]. Since practically all of my research had concentrated on the colonial period, these experiences inevitably broadened and deepened my own views on the nature of Latin American history, and how to teach.

During my final years of teaching at the University of Massachusetts [1969-1975], my colleague Jane Loy and I regularly discussed problems of teaching, and she prepared an innovative report on music and films.¹¹ About this time, the American Historical Association received funds for attempts to use feature films for teaching purposes, which enabled me to produce an edited version of Paul Muni’s film depicting the life of Benito Juárez.

HAHR: Your work with teaching materials was mainly, not exclusively, directed to undergraduate teaching. Could you also offer some observations on your experience in graduate teaching?

LH: Let me first pose a question that is difficult if not impossible to answer: what effect do students have on teachers? I say this because the “ecumenicity” of my students has surprised even me. My long concern to ensure a balanced treatment of Brazilian history was due to experiences during the SSRC fellowship, and in this instance I like to believe that I may have influenced some students to agree, though this is speculation. But none followed my research interests, nor did I encourage them to. None of them has worked on Las Casas, and not one has worked on Potosí. Not one has worked on viceroys. And I liked that. My motto was that of Walter Bagehot: a teacher has the right to be consulted and the right to warn students. Otherwise they are on their own. Of course, they learned from each other and from ideas swirling about among historians. It thus seemed to me particularly appropriate that two of my students, Richard Graham and Peter Smith, conspired with others to bring out a volume of essays of new approaches to Latin American history, which included fresh treatments of old problems and even concerned such subjects as prosopography and psychoanalysis.¹² Certainly discussions over the years with my students broadened and deepened my own views.

As I mentioned before, some of my students at Texas began to specialize in Brazilian history, but there was also a retired Chilean air officer, a couple of Jesuits, two Protestants who were concerned with missions in Latin America, and an unusual youngster with a Harvard undergraduate double major in mathematics and Spanish who prepared a master’s thesis on Bolton and then went on to have a career in computers.

At Columbia there was a flood of able students who are now out in the world performing in different ways. Many are teaching in institutions large and small, one is a United Press International editor in South America, one is editor of the U. S. Naval History Publications, and another is the Roman Catholic chaplain connected with the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Outstanding women students began to appear in my classes, and they have participated actively in the development of women’s history, as well as in other aspects of Latin American history. One of them edited the basic Encyclopedia of Latin America. Another completed a dissertation on colonial Peru and later became an activist in Roman Catholic circles. Both women and men have found administrative positions in U.S. government cultural organizations. Two neither teach nor administer, but continue to publish. Some have chosen to teach abroad, in Brazil, Israel, and the Netherlands.

Foreign students were a regular part of the Columbia scene. A Spanish Jesuit came from Japan, and a Panamanian young woman who agreed under pressure to write a master’s thesis on a non-Panamanian topic. I was even able to persuade a Mexican to prepare a master’s thesis on a topic in Brazilian intellectual history, after which he entered the Mexican diplomatic service. An English student came across the Atlantic and produced an unusual master’s thesis on transportation in colonial Argentina.

My experience at the University of California, Irvine, after I left Columbia, was brief, and I taught only undergraduates. But one Swiss student later went on to graduate school and became the director of the Ethnographic Museum in Geneva. Another became an activist, and some years later I ran across him in Paraguay where he was an undercover agent for Amnesty International.

During my last teaching period, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, my students were mostly undergraduates but there were some graduate students. One now teaches at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, and another is in the cultural section of the Organization of American States in Washington.

HAHR: What changes have you seen in the place occupied by Latin American history in U.S. universities?

LH: The influence of parochialism in the writing and study of history is so widespread that it should not surprise us that some of our historians have displayed what has been called a certain “condescension toward Latin America.” I first encountered this attitude in Texas. Though the University of Texas had recognized the importance of Latin America long before I arrived there in 1951, this was not always so. In the early years of this century, Bolton had begun his career there after completing a dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania on “The Free Negro in Pennsylvania before the Civil War.” In Austin he studied Spanish, and traveled into Mexico. When he proposed that he be allowed to give a course at Texas on Mexico, the long-time chairman George P. Garrison is supposed to have replied: “Young man there never has been, and never will be, such a course at this university as long as I am chairman of the History Department.”

So Bolton went on to Stanford, and shortly thereafter to the University of California at Berkeley, where he soon had more than a thousand students in the course that he offered for many years on “History of the Americas.” In addition, Bolton attracted so many graduate students that two festschrifts were published for him over the years, probably a world record. This background helps explain why, on reaching the University of Texas, I had a thoughtful graduate student prepare a master’s essay on Bolton, and why later on I brought out a volume on Do the Americas Have a Common History?: A Critique of the Bolton Theory [1964]. During my ten years in Texas, I took a peculiar pleasure in going to my office in Garrison Hall, named in honor of the chairman who vowed never to have a course on Latin America in his department.

Later on, other events occurred to convince me that the AHA, or some members of it, were still somewhat parochial. Once, as a member of the committee to nominate the next president, I knew enough not to propose Arthur P. Whitaker to lead the AHA as he was a Latin Americanist, but I did put forward the name of John King Fairbank because of his distinguished work in Chinese history. Our chairman, a Europeanist, politely listened to this and other suggestions and then concluded by remarking that inasmuch as a historian of the United States was the last president, the next one should be in European history (or vice versa). And so it was done.

HAHR: But eventually you were chosen president of AHA yourself.

LH: So was Charles Gibson, a few years later, and fresh winds are blowing in many directions in the AHA itself.

HAHR: To what extent has this increased recognition resulted from changes in our own corner of the discipline?

LH: I believe that there has occurred a revolution in both teaching and research in Latin American history since my first appearance at the AHA in 1923. The Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) has become one of the largest and certainly one of the most active groups in the AHA. The materials available for the study of Latin American history in this country have increased enormously in size and quality. The HAHR has likewise steadily improved in quality as well as coverage, not a mean achievement. It is a reservoir of valuable information, and much of it actually readable. I can personally testify to these developments on the basis of my watch as managing editor of the review during the years from 1954 to 1960. An editor matures very rapidly while confronting the circumstances large and small that make up the daily experiences with members of the Advisory Board, book reviewers, would-be authors, and staff members. If my own experience is any guide, editing our flagship review provides a unique overview of the field and may lead to a kind of mild hubris.

HAHR: Unique overview yes, hubris we hope not yet.

LH: The annual meetings of CLAH have also become increasingly comprehensive, and give our members an opportunity to participate in professional discussions of a wide variety of topics. CLAH has also sponsored a number of solid publications, such as Howard F. Cline’s two-volume collection on Latin American History: Essays on its Study and Teaching [1976]. But improvements can still be made. Belatively little has appeared in the HAHR on art history, the history of literature, or on religious topics. We do have a kind of new theology in the recent emphasis on dependency theory and quantitative methods, though nothing on liberation theology despite its sixteenth-century origins.

HAHR: What would be your agenda for the future?

LH: We should not be complacent, for there are still frontiers to be crossed. Two specific needs seem to me particularly important: (1) professional scrutiny of textbooks and teaching materials, and (2) an annual report on developments outside the United States in teaching and research.

Evaluation of teaching materials in historical reviews is long overdue. James Axtell of William and Mary has recently broken new ground by publishing in the American Historical Review some penetrating comments on “Europeans, Indians, and the Age of Discovery in American History Textbooks,” which stimulated lively comments by readers and a response by the author. Axtell produced another valuable statement on “Forked Tongues: Moral Judgments in Indian History” for the section of “Teaching Innovations” in AHA Perspectives.¹³

The HAHR has not adopted a policy of reviewing regularly textbooks and teaching materials in Latin American history. It did once notice a textbook that devoted more space to Honduras than to Colombia, but this was an exception. Has not the time arrived for the HAHR or the CLAH Newsletter to review such materials regularly? If so, it would be well to consider enlisting the advice of students, who are the consumers. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. of the University of Michigan reported that his experiment of having students write reviews of assigned books produced evaluations “better than most of the reviews that appear in professional journals.”¹⁴ We certainly should not abdicate the responsibility of evaluating these developments and teaching materials to interested publishers who are always ready to advertise their wares with complimentary blurbs. I am happy to see that the CLAH Committee on Teaching and Teaching Materials is gradually becoming more and more active.

The second need seems to me equally pressing. Much more could be done to acquaint our colleagues with activities outside the United States. Latin American history is now cultivated in Australia, China, Japan, and the Soviet Union, to mention only some of the larger countries. Much goes on in both eastern and western Europe that we hear little about. The same may be said even of Latin America. The preparation and publication of a carefully designed report on current developments outside the United States of interest to historians concerned with Latin America would be a unique contribution which CLAH is in an excellent position to make.

These international connections would surely involve political considerations, as I first became aware at the end of my period as managing editor, when I arranged to have translated a Soviet analysis and criticism of the HAHR for the November 1960 issue. By the time protests were made by some of our readers there was a new editor, Donald Worcester, who had to deal with the situation. The political problem was still present after my first visit to Moscow and Leningrad in 1971. Several of the Soviet Latin Americanists were then invited to visit our Latin American centers by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), but none was able to accept. Glasnost may well make a difference. However, much remains to be done to make historians concerned with Latin America aware of contributions to the field outside this country, and obviously not just those by Soviet scholars.

The same may be said for historical source material on Latin American history scattered in many countries. This is particularly true for sources produced after 1900, and I am encouraged to learn that Celso Rodríguez of the Organization of American States is hoping to remedy this lack. Many teachers and many researchers today concentrate their attention on this period, and probably will continue to do so. Yet many of the basic sources for an understanding of Latin American history since 1900 remain locked up in archives unavailable for study and in many cases unorganized, whether in Latin America or elsewhere. Rodriguez would at least lessen the difficulties by preparing a preliminary guide to these materials.

HAHR : Some final remarks?

LH: In looking back at developments since I first attended a meeting of the AHA 65 years ago, it is clear that the study of Latin American history has been solidly established in the United States. Is it not a sign of our maturity that we recognize that our sources can never be wholly complete, that our linguistic capabilities are too narrow, our literary styles too inadequate, and our prejudices and other limitations too evident, for any of us to be satisfied?

But Latin Americanists in the United States are particularly fortunate because it has been our custom to associate professionally with historians and other scholars in Latin America, Spain, and elsewhere. Since 1949 there have been regular meetings with Mexican historians. The 47 volumes of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, largely developed by historians, have been a spectacular demonstration of the interdisciplinary approach and how impossible it is to study Latin America without taking into account sources and interpretations written in many languages.

Our students of U.S. history do not enjoy such advantages. Notable contributions have been made to our history by foreign scholars, as may be easily seen in the Guide to Studies on United States History Outside the U.S., 1945-1980 (published in five volumes).¹⁵ But much still remains to be done before our historians make adequate use of these contributions, many of which are published in languages they do not know. The need for greater awareness of what historians in other countries are doing is one message which will certainly be heard during the forthcoming quincentennial. About a decade ago, I argued in a lecture in Japan that the discovery of America was the true beginning of the modern world, because for the first time in history serious attention was paid to people of other languages, other religions, other colors, and other cultures, so well exemplified by the magnificent anthropological contributions of the sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún in Mexico. Thus was born, in my opinion, the world we call modern.

One of the best ways historians can learn about other peoples is to know how they interpret their own history. The Conference on Latin American History not only therefore has an opportunity to improve the teaching of Latin American history in the United States, but also to report on the way it is taught and studied elsewhere. And we may take satisfaction in the steady development since 1918 of the Hispanic American Historical Review. There exists a healthy variety of opinions among us. Many topics await serious study, and many sources need to be made better known. What more can any historian in any field ask for?