Lewis Hanke, for many years the dean of North American Latin Americanists, died in Amherst, Massachusetts, March 26, 1993, after a long illness. His death came eight days after that of his wife, Kate Gilbert Hanke, la Querida Compañera de Mi Vida to whom he dedicated his most important work, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949). A gifted poet, she shared her husband’s scholarly interests and wrote a moving poem on Las Casas’ dispute with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda over the capacity of the Indians.
From a historiographic perspective, Hanke was a leading figure of that twentieth-century revisionist school of U.S. writing on colonial Latin America that undertook to correct the errors of the so-called Black Legend literature of the past. Hanke and two other pioneers, Irving A. Leonard and John T. Lanning, created a revisionist intellectual history that stressed the beneficent, forward-looking aspects of Spanish colonial rule. Hanke, focusing on “the Spanish struggle for justice in the conquest of America” and the role of Bartolomé de Las Casas in that struggle, made a major contribution to this revisionist historiography. Before Hanke began his research, the prevailing view, at least in the English-speaking world, portrayed Las Casas as a well-meaning but naive pro-Indian enthusiast who was dominated by a single idea and whose violently partisan writing had distorted the history of the Spanish conquest. The publication of Hanke’s writings, offering a solidly documented assessment of Las Casas’ work as a political activist, historian, political theorist, and anthropologist, demolished those ancient stereotypes. Hanke’s studies also established that Las Casas was not the lonely apostle waging a solitary struggle in defense of the Indian portrayed by the traditional accounts, but the principal spokesman and ideologist of a reformist Spanish movement that sought to prevent “the destruction of the Indies.”
Hanke had a rich and varied professional career. He left Harvard, where he studied under Clarence H. Haring, in 1936 with what he calls in a reminiscence a “Depression doctorate” in history, for Latin American history was then a “fringe subject” and no jobs were available. But in 1939 he was appointed director of the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress, where he remained for 12 years. He reentered the academic world in 1951 and taught successively at the University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University, and the University of California at Irvine. In 1969 he accepted a teaching post at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he continued to live after his retirement in 1975.
The fascination Las Casas exerted on Hanke from the start to the finish of his scholarly career undoubtedly reflected Hanke’s own world outlook, his Jeffersonian liberalism and idealism, and particularly his aversion to racial prejudice. That sensitivity to racism was reinforced by his experiences and observations in Latin America and the United States. In a lively paper, “Indians and Spaniards in the New World: A Personal View,” Hanke recalled the profound impression he received during a visit to Bolivia in 1935, when the Chaco War was in progress, from the experience of seeing a Bolivian army officer viciously kicking Indian recruits and calling them dogs. In the same paper Hanke recalled his reaction to the events of the early civil rights struggle of the 1950s, which he observed firsthand in Washington and Texas. That struggle, he wrote, reinforced his conviction that the Spanish struggle for justice for the Indians had “a more universal significance.” “The sixteenth century,” he added, “seemed to me to be steadily drawing closer to our own time.”
In 1935 Hanke published the first fruits of his research, Las teorías políticas de Bartolomé de Las Casas and The First Social Experiments in America: A Study of the Development of Spanish Indian Policy in the Sixteenth Century. The reference to “social experiments” reflected Hanke’s vision of Spain’s colonial policy as a conscientious trial-and-error effort to find solutions that would be just to Spaniards and Indians alike. Almost 15 years elapsed before the publication of his most influential work, The Spanish Struggle, a revised version of his doctoral dissertation. Hanke sets the tone of the book at the very outset: “The purpose of this work is to demonstrate that the Spanish conquest of America was far more than a remarkable military and political exploit; that it was also one of the greatest attempts the world has seen to make Christian precepts prevail in the relations between peoples.” The book reflected Hanke’s idealism and evolutionary optimism in its claim that the failure of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s ideas to prevail in the famous debate with Las Casas at Valladolid, 1550–1551, was “a crucial event in the history of humanity,” for “one more painful and faltering step was thus taken along the road of justice for all races in a world of many races….” Hanke reaffirmed that conclusion in a small book with an intriguing title, Aristotle and the American Indian: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (1959)—a reference to Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery.
Hanke’s interests were not limited to Las Casas and “the Spanish struggle for justice,” for his publications, too numerous to list here, cover a broad span of subjects, ranging from “the Imperial City of Potosí” to the Good Neighbor policy. He also made notable contributions to the inventory of research and teaching aids for Latin Americanists. In 1936, while at Harvard, he was a founder and the first editor of the indispensable Handbook of Latin American Studies. He also inspired and was general editor of the valuable Borzoi series of books on Latin America, produced a widely used History of Latin American Civilization: Sources and Interpretations (1973), and edited a multivolume collection of viceregal records.
Hanke was the recipient of many honors, including his election in 1974 as chairman of the American Historical Association, the first Latin Americanist to gain that distinction; he also received the Kalman Silvert Award from the Latin American Studies Association in 1989 and the Antonio de Nebrija Fifth Centenary Special Prize from the University of Salamanca in 1992.
Hanke’s immense energy, kindness, and genial temper made a powerful and lasting impression on his students and colleagues. On hearing of his death, one said, “His death empties my world.” Hanke’s untiring zeal for organizing scholarly projects, especially one that had to do with his beloved Las Casas, continued almost to the last. Shortly before he suffered an incapacitating stroke, Hanke, then aged 84, wrote to a group of colleagues seeking their assistance in the preparation of a volume on “The Fundamental Ideas and Convictions of Bartolomé de Las Casas,” and even projected translations of the volume into French, German, Japanese, Russian, and other languages!
Hanke crossed swords with more than one scholar in the course of his career, but in debate he always conducted himself with grace and good humor, never allowing differences of opinion to impair his friendly, comradely relations with his colleagues. His passing, the passing of a great scholar and an impressive personality, impoverishes the world of learning.
