El Imperio de Calibán

“Allende was assassinated for nationalizing the . . . wealth of Chilean subsoil,” Pablo Neruda wrote on September 14, 1973. Neruda was lamenting the overthrow and death of his friend, Chilean President Salvador Allende, a week before he himself succumbed to cancer. “From the salt-peter deserts, the underwater coal mines, and the terrible heights where copper is extracted through inhuman work by the hands of my people, a liberating movement of great magnitude arose,” he continued. “This movement led a man named Salvador Allende to the presidency of Chile, to undertake reforms and measures of justice that could not be postponed, to rescue our national wealth from foreign clutches.” Unfortunately, Allende’s flirtation with economic nationalization ran up against the country’s multinational business interests, particularly those that had support from the U.S. government. His socialist reforms were also ill timed; the U.S. government’s ideological view towards the global economy tended towards the Manichean.

So what was the American role in Allende’s overthrow?

The Chilean coup, as such a vivid moment of crisis, continues to occupy a murky and ambiguous position on the moving line that divides the past and the present. And owing to the release of new material, the episode has received a good deal of renewed coverage in the past half-decade. In particular, the recent publication of volumes on U.S. foreign policy toward Chile between 1969 and 1973 by the Historian’s Office of the U.S. State Department and the National Security Archive at George Washington University have led to a flurry of new studies.

Earlier this month, self-described CIA “spymaster” Jack Devine stirred the pot again with a Foreign Affairs article entitled “What Really Happened in Chile.” Based on his personal experience in Chile at the time, Devine explains “how the U.S. government learned of the coup in Chile” only two days before it happened. Although admitting that the CIA supported an earlier coup attempt against Allende in 1970, Devine takes great pains to shift the blame away from Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. He instead argues that the U.S. government did not plot with the Chilean military in the successful overthrow of Allende; what the U.S. government did do was attempt to reduce support for Allende and exacerbate the political opposition he already faced “from not only the wealthy but the middle and working classes as well.” Accusations that the Nixon administration played a greater role, Devine concludes, do little more than “muddy the waters.”

In this interpretation, Devine follows the likes of historian Mark Falcoff, Nixon’s secretary of state, William Rogers, and Kissinger himself, who have sought to exculpate the Nixon administration. Duke University professor Hal Brands controversially expanded upon this line of argument in Latin America’s Cold War in 2012. If a major historical trend in the past generation has been an emphasis on agency from below, Brands asks, why haven’t historians sought interpretations of Latin American insecurity and violence that move U.S. foreign policy from the center to the periphery of analysis? In other words, shouldn’t Latin American leaders be held accountable for their own actions in their own nations? In this reading, left-wing extremism led to right-wing extremism, or vice-versa, in a vicious circle. Both were part of “a larger cycle of radicalism and reaction” that was largely indigenous.

But others have found damning evidence that points to a more important role for the Nixon administration. Most vocal among them is Peter Kornbluh, who in 2013 released a revised edition of his award-winning book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. Kornbluh has long held that the policies of Henry Kissinger made a singular contribution “to the denouement of democracy and rise of dictatorship in Chile.” In particular, Kissinger spearheaded a Nixon administration campaign that fed money to opposition groups in politics and civil society, escalated aid to the military, financed dissenting journals and newspapers, and advocated other policies designed to weaken the government. In making these claims about immorality and interventionism, Kornbluh is joined by historians Stephen Rabe, Jonathan Haslam, Kristian Gustafson, Lubna Qureshi, the journalist Stephen Kinzer, and most famously, the late leftist intellectual Christopher Hitchens.

Nevertheless, the story is more complicated than what London School of Economics historian Tanya Harmer calls “the blame-game.” In her authoritative 2012 international history of the coup, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, she asks the crucial question: If not directly responsible for the events of September 1973, what role did the United States play? The answer Harmer provides suggests that the Nixon administration decided to undertake close consultation with like-minded governments in South America, in particular Brazil, to coordinate efforts to not only oppose Allende but also to improve the relations with friendly military leaders in the hemisphere. Like Kornbluh, Harmer argues that the United States helped frame and apply a campaign to subvert Allende’s government from the moment of his election. But Kissinger and Nixon did not direct events. Rather, they worked closely with the military regime of General Emílio Garrastazu Médici in Brazil, who became the most powerful campaigner for regime change in Chile. At the same time, disagreements between Allende and Cuban president Fidel Castro pointed to a great degree of variation in leftist policies in the region.

Transforming the Third World Economic Order

Harmer thus explores what New York University historian Greg Grandin has called “a metaphysics of Allende-hating” in terms of an inter-American Cold War of many itineraries. For Grandin, though, the driving cause of the Nixon administration’s concern about Chile built upon, and went beyond, standard Cold War arguments of “national security and economics.” He is right, but divergent understandings of the past and future of the global economy drove that metaphysics. In other words, the problem was not that Allende was an avowed Marxist or even that he pushed through a constitutional amendment nationalizing the huge copper investments of Cerro, Anaconda, and Kennecott on July 16, 1971. Nor was it the threat that a socialist Chile, along with new nationalist governments in Bolivia and Peru, would provide a toe-hold for Cuba and the Soviet Union in the region. (In fact, the intransigence the White House felt towards Chile contrasted markedly with the easing of relations with the Soviet Union and the opening up of China at the same time.)

Nixon and Kissinger were less concerned about those problems than about the example Allende would set in Latin America and beyond. “Everyone agrees,” Kissinger wrote in 1969, that Allende would seek a socialist and Marxist state that would line up ideologically and politically with the USSR and Cuba. The consolidation of Allende in power would thus “pose some very serious threats to our interests and position in the hemisphere and . . . elsewhere in the world.” Nixon felt the same way. “Our main concern,” he told the National Security Council on November 5, 1970, “is the prospect that he can consolidate himself and the picture projected to the world will be his success.”

More than anything, these quotes remind us that the stakes of Allende’s success or failure were global. Actors in Chile certainly took on a perspective that looked beyond their borders. One of Allende’s spokesmen recalled the recent “liquidation of the left in Indonesia” to dramatize the danger of counterrevolution. Allende himself became a vocal proponent of the Third World’s broader challenge to the international economy, which was directed through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Group of 77, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Since the end of the Second World War, groups from Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa had discussed the problem of imperial continuity in the international economy.

Theirs was a widely shared moral and political stance of concise logic; decolonization entailed more than political independence from a colonial master, and nowhere did imperial power exert itself with greater vigor than in the material worlds of law and economics. This Third World challenge also held a particular policy prescription designed to end economic domination — if the “poor lands” remained ensconced in the shadow of empire, the use of national legal power offered an escape. In this context, the CIA reported in January 1969, “further steps toward greater government participation in or even outright nationalization of” the holdings of multinational corporations in Chile were “inevitable.”

Based on the guiding principal of permanent sovereignty, advanced in the previous two decades as part of a new international law in the UN General Assembly and Economic and Social Council, developing nations held the right to “rebalance” the international economy. Upon nationalizing the major copper mines in Chile, Allende pushed to host the third ministerial meeting of the UN Conference on Trade and Development in 1972. When he gave a stirring address welcoming the diplomats to Santiago, he was followed to the podium by Raúl Prebisch, who by that time was considered the father of the Third World critique of global economic inequality. Prebisch thanked Allende for hosting the conference, and began his speech. The joint problem of the poor nations was “above all to achieve sovereignty in a full sense,” he said. The poor nations needed “to establish it on solid foundations and then pass from the present relationship of dependence—which is unacceptable in the light of the political maturity of our peoples—to interdependent relationships which involve new forms of cooperation.”

One can see the thrust of this position in any number of the meetings that preceded the 1974 UN Declaration of a New International Economic Order, which was the culmination of the Third Worldist program of “economic emancipation.” For example, the 59 foreign ministers of the Non-Aligned Movement regrouped in Guyana months after the Santiago meeting. There, they signed the 1972 Georgetown Declaration, which gave “full support” to Allende and other leaders that “in the exercise of their sovereign rights over the natural resources of their countries [had] nationalized the interests of powerful foreign monopolies.” As in Santiago, the ministers turned directly to the expression of sovereignty as a legitimate and moral international stance. “[I]t is fundamentally important to stress that the full exercise of their sovereignty over natural resources is essential for economic independence,” the foreign ministers wrote. Moreover, economic emancipation was “closely linked to political independence, and that the latter is consolidated by strengthening the former.”

If the imperial past required correction, there was clearly space within that argument for more nuanced, less dialectical national policies. For example, Allende did not see the July 16, 1971 constitutional amendment nationalizing Chilean copper investments as contradictory to his stated policy of utilizing access to investment capital in the “Western financial system” to develop the national economy.

In fact, U.S. Ambassador Edward M. Korry had negotiated with Allende and other government leaders a compromise by which the Constitutional Amendment was modified to provide compensation to the affected multinational companies. (To the great ire of Korry, the Nixon administration, and corporate executives, Allende deftly used the compromise to insist that “excess profits” from the past be deducted from the settlement.)

At the same time, Allende had already concluded sales agreements for nationalized copper with other multinational corporations, including RCA, Bethlehem Steel, and Bank of America. What the State Department called the “Chilean propaganda attack” on two firms, Anaconda and Kennecott, was thus more of an attempt to isolate the larger and more controversial businesses from other U.S. investors than to attack foreign capital investment writ large.

Linking Neoliberalism to Its Imperial Past

But the position linking global capitalism to the imperial past remained widespread, and not only among Allende, Prebisch, and other leaders of the developing world. In 1973, two special subcommittees of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, both headed by Idaho senator Frank Church, began investigations of multinational corporations, intelligence activities, and U.S. foreign policy. Although U.S. involvement in Chile was only one subject of the investigations, the reports condemned the Nixon administration for using the powerful position of U.S. firms in Chile to “make the economy scream” during Allende’s period as president.

Such outbursts of outrage were relatively scarce, though. Most actors in the United States and Western Europe recoiled at the Third World demands for a New International Economic Order in 1974 and after, and warned that “economic emancipation” would further disrupt a fragile global economy, which already stood on shaky foundations in the early 1970s because of skyrocketing oil prices, runaway inflation, and the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system. Above all, nationalization programs like Chile’s were viewed as serious hindrances to private capital flows.

The gravitas of that ideological battle was dramatized in a 1972 conversation between Allende and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, George Herbert Walker Bush, who sought to set Allende straight regarding recent public statements in which he labelled U.S. foreign policy imperialist. “I told him that we did not consider ourselves “imperialists,” Bush reported.

[T]hat we did not recognize that people were correctly identifying us when we were termed imperialists, and that we still had a deep conviction that our free enterprise system was not selfish but was the best system—certainly for us, though we had no intention to insist on it for others. And when it went abroad it did not “bleed” other people.”

When Allende responded that his speeches had clearly differentiated “between the government of the United States, the people of the United States, and multinational corporations,” Bush had an easy answer: “because of our deep conviction in the free enterprise system, the people, the government, and the system were all interlocked.”

That was exactly the implication that Neruda and a generation of Third World intellectuals were left with after the 1973 coup. A month later, an “energy crisis” gave multinational companies and their supporters in the U.S. government an opening to exploit the convergence that Bush described. When the oil producers also invoked the international law of sovereignty as a means to legitimize their four-fold increase in the global price of oil, the response was ready-made.

Neoliberal diplomacy, in particular U.S. government protection of foreign investments, became the basis of a new foreign policy for the 1970s and beyond.

Nowhere was that neoliberal policy more evident than in Chile, where Milton Friedman’s “Los Chicago Boys” applied a series of policies designed to “open up” the Chilean market. At the same time, the United States strengthened the new military regime of Augusto Pinochet, providing both economic and military support.

General Pinochet meeting with Milton Friedman.

Whether or not the neoliberal policies of Chile promoted development or, more broadly, societal well-being is an open question. It is certain, though, that the Chilean trajectory gave credence to a generation of critics who would link U.S. foreign policy and the “free-market” basis of contemporary globalization to the concept of imperialism.

The World Peace Council, meeting in the newly independent nation of Guinea Bissau, saw the connection in 1975. Not only had the U.S. Gulf Oil Corporation financed the founding of a separatist organization that challenged the government. It was also “significant” that members of the Brazilian “Death Squad,” who the Peace Council believed were involved in the “CIA-engineered overthrow of the Allende Government,” have been spotted in Pinochet’s Chile. Algerian president Houari Boumedienne called the rise of Pinochet “a tragic scene,” part of a longer-running “imperialist plot…stirred up through the multinational companies.”

For the Algerian jurist Mohammed Bedjaoui, a long-time civil servant at the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, the lesson was more optimistic, but only slightly so. The acts of men like Allende, and the broad movement they represented, had deprived imperialism of legitimacy for all time. “[T]he major revolution of our time that began with decolonization” had not ended, he wrote in a 1976 tract on the Non-Aligned Movement and international law, funded by the Carnegie Foundation. The process of self-assertion, begun in the United Nations and continued in the Non-Aligned Movement and elsewhere, instead was a first step that “enriched the content of cardinal notions like that of sovereignty.” Yet he dedicated the work to Salvador Allende. The dedication used a phrase coined by Régis Debray in his martyr’s tribute—mort dans sa loi, or “dead by his own law.” The fall of Allende came not just at the hand of military traitors or multinational corporations, but because of a system of western interests that had a greater meaning.

Voices across the world joined Neruda, Bedjaoui, and Boumedienne in celebrating the sovereignty of Chile, decrying the fall of Allende, and blaming the United States for his overthrow and death. Months later, Gabriel García Márquez wrote that the overthrow may have taken place in Chile “to the greater woe of Chileans, but it will pass into history as something that has happened to us all, children of this age, and it will remain in our lives forever.”

The role of the United States in the coup, as well as its bloody aftermath, remains an important one. But the findings will do little to overthrow Allende’s global Third World legacy, especially in an era in which market-based national economic policies remain prominent in the global economic system.

Chris Dietrich is Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University. His first book monograph analyzes the rise and fall of anti-colonial law and economics in the twentieth century. His second project is a psychoanalysis of American neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s.

Follow on Twitter @C_R_W_Dietrich

Publicado en Chile, Imperialismo norteamericano | Etiquetado Augusto Pinochet, Greg Grandin, Hal Brands, Henry Kissinger, Peter Kornbluh, Richard Nixon, Salvador Allende, Tanya Harmer | 1 Comment »

The Warren Court Decisions Earl Warren Said Were the Most Important … «One Person, One Vote»

18 junio 2014 por Norberto Barreto Velázquez

The Warren Court Decisions Earl Warren Said Were the Most Important … «One Person, One Vote»

by J. Douglas Smith

HNN June 18, 2014

In an age of increasingly sophisticated, computer driven gerrymandering, an imagined, but non-existent, epidemic of voter fraud that has led to a profusion of voter identification laws, and an infusion of corporate money into the electoral system, we as Americans continue to wrestle with basic notions of fair representation. As we struggle to make our political system more truly democratic, we ought to consider the bold and historic actions taken by the Supreme Court of the United States fifty years ago this month.

On June 15, 1964, just four days after the United States Senate brought an end to the filibuster against the Civil Rights Act, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a series of decisions that established the principle of “one person, one vote” in all state legislatures. For the remainder of his life, Chief Justice Earl Warren maintained that these decisions trumped all others made during his tenure, including the segregation decisions, in terms of their importance to American democracy.

Prior to the reapportionment rulings, American democracy was a deliberately misshapen enterprise. In a U.S. version of “rotten boroughs,” district boundaries in almost every state were readily drawn to give some citizens a far greater voice than others. In California in 1960, for example, a state senator from the Eastern Sierra had a mere 14,000 constituents, while a peer from Los Angeles represented more than six million.

Like Jim Crow, this practice seemed to defy the most elementary notions of democracy as a system of popular self-rule – and yet it had many defenders. Malapportionment circumscribed the political power of labor and civil rights advocates and promoted a pro-business, anti-labor agenda of low taxes, limited government spending, and minimal regulation. In the American South, malapportionment served as a cornerstone of white supremacy, ensuring the overrepresentation of the most ardent segregationists and thus further delaying the realization of civil and voting rights for African Americans. As the 20th century proceeded, urban and suburban populations swelled dramatically while legislative districts remained roughly the same. As a result, minority rule intensified.

After World War II, individual citizens, municipal officials, and civic organizations began to seek relief, but repeatedly failed, thwarted by a conspiracy of inaction among lawmakers and judges.

Finally, in 1962, the Supreme Court decided the time had come to intervene. In Baker v. Carr, a majority of the Warren Court ignored the angry dissent of Felix Frankfurter and ruled that federal courts did have jurisdiction to consider whether or not legislative malapportionment violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Deliberations in Baker proved so exacting that they contributed to the physical decline and ultimate resignation of Frankfurter and one of his colleagues.

Baker v. Carr did not establish a standard for states to follow in drawing legislative districts, but the decision did open the doors of the federal courts to litigants to challenge malapportionment. Within two years, attorneys and plaintiffs in more than three-dozen states had done just that.

During a tumultuous term that began in October 1963 and was tragically interrupted by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments and issued full opinions in seven of these cases. In February 1964, the Court announced that each state’s districts for the U.S. House of Representatives must contain, as nearly as possible, the same number of people. What came next proved far more controversial.

On June15, 1964, Warren delivered the Court’s opinion in Reynolds v. Sims. Declaring that “legislators represent people, not trees or acres,” he announced that the Equal Protection Clause required both chambers in a state’s bicameral legislature to be apportioned according to the principle of “one person, one vote.”

Although less well-known than Reynolds, a companion case, Lucas v. Forty-Fourth General Assembly of Colorado, turned out to be the most important decision handed down that day. In it, the Court made clear that its ruling in Reynolds left no room for states to deviate from straight population equality in either branch of a bicameral legislature, even if a state’s voters supported a less rigorous standard in a referendum. In one broad stroke , the Court effectively rendered unconstitutional almost every state legislature in the nation. By the end of the decade, the Court had determined that apportionments for all elective municipal and county offices—including city councils, boards of supervisors, and school boards, among others—must adhere to the same standard.

Proponents of reapportionment hailed the decisions as “magnificently liberating,” a step “toward establishing democracy in the United States,” while opponents denounced them as the most significant “usurpation of power by the judicial branch” in American history. Opposition to the decisions of June 15, 1964, soon coalesced around Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Republican Minority Leader who enjoyed close ties with national business organizations. Dirksen championed a constitutional amendment that would have allowed state legislatures to apportion one branch of a bicameral legislature on factors other than population. When this approach failed to draw enough support in the Senate, he and others took a more radical step. In order to overturn the court’s decision, they sought to hold the first Constitutional Convention since the founding convention of the 1780s. Over the course of five years, from 1964 to 1969, thirty-three states, just one short of the constitutional threshold, petitioned for such a convention.

Ultimately, time proved the most important ally of the pro-reapportionment forces. The principal of “one person, one vote” soon became the norm in every state and led to a profound transformation in American democracy. In many states, the stranglehold of rural voters was broken, as residents of the burgeoning suburbs exerted more influence.

As the essence of majority rule confronts new challenges, most especially from a profusion of corporate money into the electoral process and a frightening retreat from the massive achievements of the Voting Rights Act, we would do well to remember the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s and its reminder of the need for constant vigilance against counter-majoratarian impulses in our democracy.

J. Douglas Smith is the author of On Democracy’s Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought “One Person, One Vote” to the United States, published by Hill & Wang, June 10, 2014.

Publicado en Derechos civiles | Etiquetado Chief Justice Earl Warren, Civil rights, Felix Frankfurter, Warren Court | Leave a Comment »

No End of a Lesson – Unlearned

17 junio 2014 por Norberto Barreto Velázquez

No End of a lesson- Unlearned

William R. Polk

HNN June 15, 2014

America appears once again to be on the brink of a war. This time the war is likely to be in Syria and/or in Iraq. If we jump into one or both of these wars, they will join, by my count since our independence, about 200 significant military operations (not all of which were legally «wars») as well as countless «proactive» interventions, regime-change undertakings, covert action schemes and search-and-destroy missions. In addition the United States has provided weapons, training and funding for a variety of non-American military and quasi-military forces throughout the world. Within recent months we have added five new African countries. History and contemporary events show that we Americans are a warring people.

So we should ask: what have we learned about ourselves, our adversaries and the process in which we have engaged?

The short answer appears to be «very little.»

As both a historian and a former policy planner for the American government, I will very briefly here (as I have mentioned in a previous essay, I am in the final stages of a book to be called A Warring People, on these issues), illustrate what I mean by «very little.»

I begin with us, the American people. There is overwhelming historical evidence that war is popular with us. Politicians from our earliest days as a republic, indeed even before when we were British colonies, could nearly always count on gaining popularity by demonstrating our valor. Few successful politicians were pacifists.

Even supposed pacifists found reasons to engage in the use of force. Take the man most often cited as a peacemaker or at least a peaceseeker, Woodrow Wilson. He promised to «keep us out of war,» by which he meant keeping us out of big, expensive European war. Before becoming president, however, he approved the American conquest of Cuba and the Philippines and described himself as an imperialist; then, as president, he occupied Haiti, sent the Marines into the Dominican Republic and ordered the Cavalry into Mexico. In 1918, he also put American troops into Russia. Not only sending soldiers: his administration carried out naval blockades, economic sanctions, covert operations — one of which, allegedly, involved an assassination attempt on a foreign leader — and furnished large-scale arms supplies to insurgents in on-going wars.

The purpose, and explanation, of our wars varied. I think most of us would agree that our Revolution, the First World War and the Second World War were completely justified. Probably Korea was also. The United States had no choice on the Civil war or, perhaps, on the War of 1812. Many, particularly those against the Native Americans would today be classified as war crimes. It is the middle range that seem to me to be the most important to understand. I see them like this.

Some military ventures were really misadventures in the sense that they were based on misunderstandings or deliberate misinformation. I think that most students of history would put the Spanish-American, Vietnamese, Iraqi and a few other conflicts in this category. Our government lied to us — the Spaniards did not blow up the Maine; the Gulf of Tonkin was not a dastardly attack on our innocent ships and Iraq was not about to attack us with a nuclear weapon, which it did not have.

But we citizens listened uncritically. We did not demand the facts. It is hard to avoid the charge that we were either complicit, lazy or ignorant. We did not hold our government to account.

Several war and other forms of intervention were for supposed local or regional requirements of the Cold War. We knowingly told one another that the «domino theory» was reality: so a hint of Communist subversion or even criticism of us sent us racing off to protect almost any form of political association that pretended to be on our side. And we believed or feared that even countries that had little or no connections with one another would topple at the touch — or even before their neighbors appeared to be in trouble. Therefore, regardless of their domestic political style, monarchy, dictatorship. democracy., it mattered not, they had to be protected. Our protection often included threats of invasion, actual intervention, paramilitary operations, subversion and/or bribery, justified by our proclaimed intent to keep them free. Or at least free from Soviet control. Included among them were Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil, Chile, Italy, Greece, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam and various African countries.

Some interventions were for acquisition of their resources or protection of our economic assets. Guatemala, Chile, Iraq, Iran and Indonesia come to mind.

Few, if any, were to establish the basis of peace or even to bring about ceasefires. Those tasks we usually left to the United Nations or regional associations.

The costs have been high. Just counting recent interventions, they have cost us well over a hundred thousand casualties and some multiple of that in wounded; they have cost «the others» — both our enemies and our friends — large multiples of those numbers. The monetary cost is perhaps beyond counting both to them and to us. Figures range upward from $10 trillion.

The rate of success of these aspects of our foreign policy, even in the Nineteenth century, was low. Failure to accomplish the desired or professed outcome is shown by the fact that within a few years of the American intervention, the condition that had led to the intervention recurred. The rate of failure has dramatically increased in recent years. This is because we are operating in a world that is increasingly politically sensitive. Today even poor, weak, uneducated and corrupt nations become focused by the actions of foreigners. Whereas before, a few members of the native elite made the decisions, today we face «fronts.» parties, tribes and independent opinion leaders. So the «window of opportunity» for foreign intervention, once at least occasionally partly open, is now often shut.

Delta Force of Task Force 20 alongside troops of 3rd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, at Uday Hussain and Qusay Hussein’s hideout (Wikipedia)

I will briefly focus on five aspects of this transformation:

First, nationalism has been and remains the predominant way of political thought of most of the world’s people. Its power has long been strong (even when we called it by other names) but it began to be amplified and focused by Communism in the late Nineteenth century. Today, nationalism in Africa, much of Asia and parts of Europe is increasingly magnified by the rebirth of Islam in the salafiyah movement.

Attempts to crush these nationalist-ideological-religious-cultural movements militarily have generally failed. Even when, or indeed especially when, foreigners arrive on the scene, natives put aside their mutual hostilities to unite against them. We saw this particularly vividly and painfully in Somalia. The Russians saw it in Çeçnaya and the Chinese, among the Uyghur peoples of Xinjiang (former Chinese Turkistan).

Second, outside intervention has usually weakened moderate or conservative forces or tendencies within each movement. Those espousing the most extreme positions are less likely to be suborned or defeated than the moderates. Thus particularly in a protracted hostilities, are more likely to take charge than their rivals. We have seen this tendency in each of the guerrilla wars in which we got involved; for the situation today, look at the insurgent movements in Syria and Iraq. (For my analysis of the philosophy and strategy of the Muslim extremists, see my essay «Sayyid Qutub’s Fundamentalism and Abu Bakr Naji’s Jihadism» on my website.)

What is true of the movements is even more evident in the effects on civic institutions and practices within an embattled society. In times of acute national danger, the «center» does not hold. Centrists get caught between the insurgents and the regimes. Insurgents have to destroy their relationship to society and government if they are to «win.» Thus, in Vietnam for example, doctors and teachers, who interfaced between government and the general population were prime targets for the Vietminh in the 1950s.

And, as the leaders of governments against whom the insurgents are fighting become more desperate, they suppress those of their perceived rivals or critics they can reach. By default, these people are civilians who are active in the political parties, the media and the judiciary . And, as their hold on power erodes and «victory» becomes less likely, regimes also seek to create for themselves safe havens by stealing money and sending it abroad. Thus, the institutions of government are weakened and the range of enemies widens. We have witnessed these two aspects of «corruption» — both political and economic — in a number of countries. Recent examples are Vietnam and Afghanistan.

In Vietnam at least by 1962 the senior members of the regime had essentially given up the fight. Even then they were preparing to bolt the country. And the army commanders were focused on earning money that they sold the bullets and guns we gave them to the Vietminh. In Afghanistan, the regime’s involvement in the drug trade, its draining of the national treasury into foreign private bank accounts (as even Mr. Karzai admitted) and in «pickpocketing» hundreds of millions of dollars from aid projects is well documented. (See the monthly reports of the American Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction.)

Third, our institutional memory of programs, events and trends is shallow. I suggest that it usually is no longer than a decade. Thus, we repeat policies even when the record clearly shows that they did not work when previously tried. And we address each challenge as though it is unprecedented. We forget the American folk saying that when you find yourself in a hole, the best course of action is to stop digging. it isn’t only that our government (and the thousands of «experts,» tacticians and strategists it hires) do not «remember» but also that they have at hand only one convenient tool — the shovel. What did we learn from Vietnam? Get a bigger, sharper shovel.

Fourth, despite or perhaps in part because of our immigrant origins, we are a profoundly insular people. Few of us have much appreciation of non-American cultures and even less fellow feeling for them. Within a generation or so, few immigrants can even speak the language of their grand parents. Many of us are ashamed of our ethnic origins.

Thus, for example, at the end of the Second World War, despite many of us being of German or Italian or Japanese cultural background, we were markedly deficient in people who could help implement our policies in those countries. We literally threw away the language and culture of grandparents. A few years later, when I began to study Arabic, there were said to be only five Americans not of Arab origin who knew the language. Beyond language, grasp of the broader range of culture petered off to near zero. Today, after the expenditure of significant government subsidies to universities (in the National Defense Education Act) to teach «strategic» languages, the situation should be better. But, while we now know much more, I doubt that we understand other peoples much better.

If this is true of language, it is more true of more complex aspects of cultural heritage. Take Somalia as an example. Somalia was not, as the media put it, a «failed state»; it was and is a «non-state.» That is, the Somalis do not base their effective identify as members of a nation state. Like almost everyone in the world did before recent centuries, they thought of themselves as members of clans, tribes, ethnic or religious assemblies or territories. It is we, not they, who have redefined political identity. We forget that the nation-state is a concept that was born in Europe only a few centuries ago and became accepted only late in the Nineteenth century in Germany and Italy. For the Somalis, it is still an alien construct. So, not surprisingly, our attempt to force them or entice them to shape up and act within our definition of statehood has not worked. And Somalia is not alone. And not only in Africa. Former Yugoslavia is a prime example: to be ‘balkanized’ has entered our language. And, if we peek under the flags of Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Congo, Mali, the Sudan and other nation-states we find powerful forces of separate ethnic nationalisms.

The effects of relations among many of the peoples of Asia and Africa and some of the Latin Americans have created new political and social configurations and imbalances within and among them. With European and American help the governments with which we deal have acquired more effective tools of repression. They can usually defeat the challenges of traditional groups. But, not always. Where they do not acquire legitimacy in the eyes of significant groups — «nations» — states risk debilitating, long-term struggles. These struggles are, in part, the result of the long years of imperial rule and colonial settlement. Since Roman times, foreign rulers have sought to cut expenses by governing through local proxies. Thus, the British turned over to the Copts the unpopular task of colleting Egyptian taxes and to the Assyrians the assignment of controlling the Iraqi Sunnis. The echo of these years is what we observe in much of the «Third World» today. Ethnic, religious and economic jealousies abound and the wounds of imperialism and colonialism have rarely completely healed. We may not be sensitive to them, but to natives they may remain painful. Americans may be the «new boys on the block,» but these memories have often been transferred to us.

Finally, fifth, as the preeminent nation-state America has a vast reach. There is practically no area of the world in which we do not have one sort of interest or another. We have over a thousand military bases in more than a hundred countries; we trade, buy and sell, manufacture or give away goods and money all over Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe. We train, equip and subsidize dozens of armies and even more paramilitary or «Special» forces. This diversity is, obviously, a source of strength and richness, but, less obviously, it generates conflicts between what we wish to accomplish in one country and what we think we need to accomplish in another. At the very least, handling or balancing our diverse aims within acceptable means and at a reasonable cost is a challenge.

It is a challenge that we seem less and less able to meet.

Take Iraq as an example. As a corollary of our hostility to Saddam Husain, we essentially turned Iraq over to his enemies, the Iraqi Shia Muslim. (I deal with this in my Understanding Iraq, New York: HarperCollins, 2005, 171 ff.) There was some justification for this policy. The Shia community has long been Iraq’s majority and because they were Saddam’s enemies, some «experts» naively thought they would become our friends. But immediately two negative aspects of our policy became evident: non-specialists: first, the Shiis took vengeance on the Sunni Muslim community and so threw the country into a vicious civil war. What we called pacification amounted to ethnic cleansing. And, second, the Shia Iraqi leaders (the marjiaah) made common cause with coreligionist Iranians with whom we were nearly at war all during the second Bush administration. Had war with Iran eventuated, our troops in Iraq would have been more hostages than occupiers. At several points, we had the opportunity to form a more coherent, moral and safer policy. I don’t see evidence that our government or our occupation civil and military authorities even grasped the problem; certainly they did not find ways to work toward a solution. Whatever else may be said about it, our policy was dysfunctional.

I deserve to be challenged on this statement: I am measuring (with perhaps now somewhat weakened hindsight) recent failures against what we tried to do in the Policy Planning Council in the early 1960s. If our objective is, as we identify it, to make the world at least safe, even if not safe for democracy, we are much worse off today than we were then. We policy planners surely then made many significant mistakes (and were often not heeded), but I would argue that we worked within a more coherent framework than our government does today. Increasingly, it seems to me that we are in a mode of leaping from one crisis to the next without having understood the first or anticipating the second. I see no strategic concept; only tactical jumps and jabs.

So what to do?

At the time of the writing of the American Constitution, one of our Founding Fathers, Gouverneur Morris, remarked that part of the task he and others of the authors put it, was “to save the people from their most dangerous enemy, themselves.” Translated to our times, this is to guard against our being «gun slingers.» All the delegates were frightened by militarism and sought to do the absolute minimum required to protect the country from attack. They refused the government permission to engage in armed actions against foreigners except in defense. I believe they would have been horrified, if they could have conceived it, by the national security state we have become. They certainly did not look to the military to solve problems of policy. They would have agreed, I feel sure, that very few of the problem we face in the world today could be solved by military means So, even when we decide to employ military means, we need to consider not only the immediate but the long-term effects of our actions. We have, at least, the experience and the intellectual tools to do so. So why have we not?

We have been frequently misled by the success of our postwar policies toward both Germany and Japan. We successfully helped those two countries to embark upon a new era. And, during the employment of the Truman Doctrine in Greece, the civil war there ended. There were special reasons for all three being exceptions. Perhaps consequent to those successes, when we decided to destroy the regimes of Saddam Husain and Muammar Qaddafi, we gave little thought of what would follow. We more or less just assumed that things would get better. They did not. The societies imploded. Had we similarly gone into Iran, the results would have been a moral, legal and economic disaster. Now we know — or should know — that unless the risk is justified, as our Constitution demands it be by an imminent armed attack on the United States, we should not make proactive war on foreign nations. We have sworn not to do so in the treaty by which we joined the United Nations. In short, we need to be law abiding, and we should look before we leap.

Our ability to do any of these things will depend on several decisions.

The first is to be realistic: there is no switch we can flip to change our capacities. To look for quick and easy solutions is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The second is a matter of will and the costs and penalties that attach to it. We would be more careful in foreign adventures if we had to pay for them in both blood and treasure as they occurred. That is, «in real time.» We now avoid this by borrowing money abroad and by inducing or bribing vulnerable members of our society and foreigners to fight for us.. All our young men and women should know that they will be obliged to serve if we get into war, and we should not be able to defer to future generations the costs of our ventures. We should agree to pay for them through immediate taxes rather than foreign loans.

The third is to demand accountability. Our government should be legally obligated to tell us the truth. If it does not, the responsible officials should be prosecuted in our courts and, if they violate our treaties or international law, they should have to come before the World Court of Justice. We now let them off scot-free. The only «culprits» are those who carry out their orders.

Fourth, in the longer term, the only answer to the desire for better policy is better public education. For a democracy to function, its citizens must be engaged. They cannot be usefully engaged if they are not informed. Yet few Americans know even our own laws on our role in world affairs. Probably even fewer know the history of our actions abroad — that is, what we have done in the past with what results and at what cost.

And as a people we are woefully ignorant about other peoples and countries. Polls indicate that few Americans even know the locations of other nations. The saying that God created war to teach Americans geography is sacrilegious. If this was God’s purpose, He failed. And beyond geography, concerning other people’s politics, cultures and traditions, there is a nearly blank page. Isn’t it time we picked up the attempt made by such men as Sumner Wells (with his An Intelligent American’s Guide to the Peace and his American Foreign Policy Library), Robert Hutchins, James Conant and others (with the General Education programs in colleges and universities) and various other failed efforts to make us a part of humanity?

On the surface, at least, resurrecting these programs is just a matter of (a small amount of) money. But results won’t come overnight. Our education system is stogy, our teachers are poorly trained and poorly paid, and we, the consumers, are distracted by quicker, easier gratifications than learning about world affairs. I had hoped that we would learn from the «real schools» of Vietnam and other failures, but we did not. The snippets of information which pass over our heads each day do not and cannot make a coherent pattern. Absent a matrix into which to place «news,» it is meaningless. I have suggested in a previous essay that we are in a situation like a computer without a program. We get the noise, but without a means to «read» it, it is just gibberish.

Our biggest challenge therefore comes down to us: unless or until we find a better system of teaching, of becoming aware that we need to learn and a desire to acquire the tools of citizenship, we cannot hope to move toward a safer, more enriching future.

This is a long-term task.

We had better get started.

William R. Polk was a professor of history at the University of Chicago. During the Kennedy and part of the Johnson administrations, he was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Among his books are «Understanding Iraq, Violent Politics and Understanding Iran.» He is vice chairman of the W.P. Carey Foundation

Publicado en Guerra de Irak, Guerra de Vietnam, Imperialismo norteamericano | Etiquetado American government, Barack Obama, economic sanctions, George, George W. Bush, Iraq War, Vietnam War | Leave a Comment »

The Surprising Evidence hat Woodrow Wilson Was Suffering from a Brain Malfunction Before the Stroke that Crippled Him

16 junio 2014 por Norberto Barreto Velázquez

The Surprising Evidence hat Woodrow Wilson Was Suffering from a Brain Malfunction Before the Stroke that Crippled Him

Richard Striner

HNN June 15, 2014

This is part three of a three-part series distilling the thesis of Richard Striner’s new book, Woodrow Wilson and World War One: A Burden Too Great to Bear, published by Rowman & Littlefield in April 2014. (Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.) Mr. Striner is a professor of history at Washington College. His other books include Father Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery and Lincoln’s Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power. – See more at: http://hnn.us/article/155787#sthash.W5bIvaw3.dpuf

Almost everyone who knows anything about Woodrow Wilson agrees he was a tragic figure. But the admirers and detractors of Wilson have differed sharply down the years as to whether Wilson’s tragedy was essentially his own fault. One critical fact about the tragedy was obviously not his fault: the stroke that he suffered on October 2, 1919. And due to the underlying condition of arteriosclerosis (diagnosed as early as 1906), distinguished medical observers have theorized that Wilson suffered from a progressive cerebro-vascular deterioration resulting in episodic dementia as early as 1917.

As one studies the historical record in detail — a record set forth in magnificent abundance by the editorial team led by the late Arthur S. Link that produced the 69-volume Papers of Woodrow Wilson — there is much to support the belief that he was hampered by his medical condition.

Wilson’s judgment seemed grossly impaired by the war years. He was extraordinarily petulant and irrational by 1918, and contemporaneous observers who were in a position to know commented often on his strange and quirky ways.

In 1919, Wilson’s pre-existing medical and mental conditions arguably led to a breakdown months before his paralytic stroke, which occurred on October 2. The nature of this breakdown could be seen as early as February, in a series of words and actions that prefigured his behavior of November and December, at which point he was clearly out of his mind.

When Wilson sailed to Europe aboard the USS George Washington, he had — typically — no substantive strategy for preventing the kind of vindictive peace that he had warned against in his 1917 “Peace Without Victory” speech. One of the advisers recruited for the U.S. peace delegation, Yale historian Charles Seymour, recalled that Wilson turned to him during the voyage and asked, “What means, Mr. Seymour, can be utilized to bring pressure upon these people in the interest of justice?” It was very late indeed for Wilson to be thinking in these terms, especially after the many missed opportunities in 1917 and 1918 to build the political pre-conditions for “peace without victory.”

John Maynard Keynes, at that time serving as an adviser to David Lloyd George, argued in his best-selling book The Economic Consequences of the Peace that Wilson could have come to Europe with a formidable basis for pressuring the allies. Keynes wrote that “Europe was in complete dependence on the food supplies of the United States; and financially she was even more absolutely at their mercy. Europe not only already owed the United States more than she could pay; but only a large measure of further assistance could save her from starvation and bankruptcy.” Referring to Wilson, Keynes wrote that “never had a philosopher held such weapons wherewith to bind the princes of this world.”

If Wilson had explored the possibility of offering a debt moratorium to the allies, the reparations that the British and the French would inflict upon the Germans might have been far less severe. But Wilson never seriously considered that option in 1918 or 1919, as the historical record demonstrates.

The negotiations over reparations and territorial settlements were grueling, but Wilson consoled himself with the fact that the League of Nations won general approval at the Paris Peace Conference in January, though the task of hammering out the details of its overall plan and structure was difficult. Wilson returned briefly to the United States in late February to sign legislation that the lame-duck Congress had passed in its final session. Here was an opportunity to test and adjust the domestic politics regarding both the League and the overall treaty.

Wilson’s behavior in February and early March shows clearly that a mental breakdown was beginning. Some of his behavior, to be sure, was quintessentially Wilsonian: his proclamations, for instance, that pure idealism had won the war and that power politics had nothing to do with the outcome were symptomatic of the escapism that was intermittently a factor in his thinking. In Boston, he delivered the following incantation: “In the name of the people of the United States I have uttered as the objects of this great war ideals, and nothing but ideals, and the war has been won by that inspiration.” He had engaged in this sort of hyperbole many times and it had rendered him largely incapable of strategic thinking since the war began. But some other episodes during this visit showed a new and shocking deterioration.

At the suggestion of Col. House, he sponsored a dinner at the White House to explain the preliminary terms of the League covenant to select members of Congress. The results of this meeting showed clearly that the League was in trouble on Capitol Hill. Several worried Democrats suggested that Republican feedback should supply the basis for revisions that Wilson could bring with him when he returned to Paris. But Wilson refused to consider this.

Two days later, Henry Cabot Lodge made a powerful and persuasive speech on the floor of the Senate denouncing the preliminary structure of the League. Wilson’s response was appallingly simple: he threw a public temper tantrum. In remarks at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, he proclaimed that all who opposed the preliminary plans for the League were imbeciles. Listen to him: “Of all the blind and little provincial people, they are the littlest and most contemptible . . . . They have not even got good working imitations of minds. They remind me of a man with a head that is not a head but is just a knot providentially put there to keep him from raveling out . . . . They are going to have the most conspicuously contemptible names in history. The gibbets that they are going to be erected on by future historians will scrape the heavens, they will be so high.”

Just before Wilson returned to Paris, Lodge circulated in the Senate a document in which the signatories declared that they would under no circumstances vote for the League in its existing form. Lodge obtained more than enough signatures to show Wilson he was beaten unless he made revisions to the League.

Wilson did so when he returned to Paris, and these new deliberations were as grueling as the earlier ones had been. But Wilson refused to have any contact with Lodge and his supporters, which meant that all of his work was a waste of time, for Lodge was engaging in a simple game of payback, an exercise for the fun of it to make Wilson humble himself and give Republicans a “piece of the action.” Surely at some level Wilson sensed what was going on, but his vanity, his stubbornness, and his indignation were becoming more severe.

Wilson’s signature in 1913

His health began to give way in recurrent bouts of illness. But something drastic seemed to happen to him on April 28 — something that did not come to light until many years later, when historian Arthur S. Link was editing the Wilson documents from 1919. Let Link and his editorial colleagues tell the story: “It became obvious to us while going through the documents from late April to about mid-May 1919 that Wilson was undergoing some kind of a crisis in his health . . . . Whatever happened to Wilson seems to have occurred when he was signing letters in the morning of April 28” when his handwriting changed and became almost bizarre.

Wilson’s signature in spring 1919

The editors continue: “Wilson’s handwriting continued to deteriorate even further. It grew increasingly awkward, was more and more heavily inked, and became almost grotesque.” Link summoned some medical specialists who told him that in their own opinion there was simply no doubt about it: Wilson had suffered a stroke on the morning of April 28.

And then he threw away yet another opportunity to strike a blow for “peace without victory.” When the terms of the Versailles treaty were made public there was widespread outrage regarding their severity. David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, was stricken, and he called the British delegation together on June 1. Their decision was unanimous: the terms of the treaty should be softened.

But when Wilson was approached, he declared that the severe terms were perfectly appropriate. According to one account, he proclaimed that “if the Germans won’t sign the treaty as we have written it, then we must renew the war.”

When he returned to the United States, his mental decline proceeded rapidly. He seemed to be more and more convinced that a religious drama was being enacted, a drama that he could understand more than others. When he presented the treaty to the Senate on July 10, he declared that “the stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision.” A Democrat, Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst, reacted to the speech as follows: “Wilson’s speech was as if the head of a great Corporation, after committing his company to enormous undertakings, when called upon to render a statement as to the meanings and extent of the obligations he had incurred, should arise before the Board of Directors and tonefully read Longfellow’s Psalm of Life.” Republican responses to the speech were even less charitable.

In August Wilson came to his senses and began to engage in discussions with congressional opponents, including some Republicans known as “mild reservationists” who supported the treaty but insisted on some clarifications to the League covenant, especially in regard to the issue of military force. But on August 11, his mood changed abruptly, and he made his fateful decision to appeal to the American people on a speaking tour that would take him to the West Coast and back.

Before he left, however, he made a significant (if private) concession: he gave his preliminary assent to some secret text for a possible “reservation” to the League covenant that was drafted by Democratic Senator Gilbert Hitchcock.

The speaking tour broke his health permanently, and after falling ill in Pueblo, Colorado, he returned to Washington, where the paralytic stroke occurred on October 2. After a medical team diagnosed the stroke, Wilson’s wife made the very bad decision to conceal the diagnosis from the public. Wilson could and should have been relieved of his presidential duties. As an invalid who had suffered a severe brain injury, he became more irrational and petulant than ever before.

The preliminary showdown in Congress over the Versailles treaty and its League covenant happened in November. Lodge had drafted a series of reservations, the most important of which concerned Article 10, which pertained to collective security and the use of military force under League auspices. Lodge’s text was negative and grudging: it declared that the United States would never participate in collective security actions as recommended by the League unless Congress approved through its constitutional prerogative to declare war. As Arthur Link noted years ago, the Lodge reservation was essentially the same as the Hitchcock reservation that Wilson had secretly approved, though the tone of Lodge’s reservation was of course nasty and negative. But both of them said essentially the same thing: the United States could never be drawn into war against the opposition of the people’s elected representatives.

Wilson, however, was convinced that the Lodge reservation “cuts the very heart out of the treaty.” A caucus of Democratic senators had voted to obey the president’s wishes, so bipartisan discussions with Republican “mild reservationists” were called off. The treaty went down to defeat on November 19.

The reaction was one of bipartisan shock, especially with Republicans such as former President William Howard Taft, who supported the League and who declared that the Lodge reservation “does not modify the original article nearly so much as a good many people have supposed it did.”

So bipartisan discussions resumed in January 1920. Success was approaching as more and more Democrats rebelled against Wilson’s delusional position. Wilson ranted that he would never tolerate “disloyalty,” and he did his best to use party discipline to force recalcitrant Democrats into line. When the treaty was considered again on March 19, twenty-two Democrats broke with Wilson and voted for the treaty with the Lodge reservations attached. But that was seven votes shy of the necessary two-thirds majority. The treaty of Versailles was rejected once and for all on that spring day in 1920. And the blame must be placed where it belongs: at the bedside of Woodrow Wilson.

In the opinion of John Milton Cooper, Jr., one of Wilson’s greatest admirers among academic historians, “in the first three months of 1920” Wilson seemed to be in the grip of “mental instability, if not insanity . . . . He should not have remained in office.”

As this series has attempted to argue — and as my book Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Burden Too Great to Bear seeks to demonstrate at length — the catastrophe of Wilson’s wartime leadership started long before his madness. For a long time, qualified medical observers have theorized that Wilson suffered from a cerebro-vascular condition that warped his judgment for several years before the stroke. To the extent that these theories are justified, Wilson was not to blame for the blunders and follies that characterized his behavior during World War I. On the other hand, if his mistakes — especially his earlier mistakes when his mind was more lucid, the mistakes that resulted from aversion to strategic thinking — sprang from character flaws that can afflict any one of us, the judgment of history must be severe.

But one thing seems certain to me after studying the record in detail: Woodrow Wilson was not the right leader for the United States during World War I.

Richard Striner (Washington College) is a historian focused on political and presidential history.

Publicado en Primera guerra mundial | Etiquetado August Wilson, David Lloyd George, George Washington, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, World War One | Leave a Comment »

Las Abejeras del Capital en Porto Rico

14 junio 2014 por Norberto Barreto Velázquez

Las Abejeras del Capital en Porto Rico

Jose Anazagasty Rodríguez

80 grados 13 de junio de 2014

Después de la guerra hispanoamericana varias casas publicadoras, revistas, y periódicos divulgaron numerosos textos que recogían las experiencias y observaciones de las visitas de diversos viajeros estadounidenses a Puerto Rico. Estos viajeros articularon a través de sus narrativas el discurso colonial de la era inicial del imperialismo transcontinental estadounidense. Son por ello un objeto de estudio imprescindible de la “historia de lo imaginario” propuesta por Arcadio Díaz. Fue Díaz quien precisamente afirmó la necesidad de examinar diversas “zonas oscuras” del ’98, entre las que incluyo las relaciones con el espacio, y por supuesto, con la naturaleza.

La inspección y descripción absoluta y detallada de la colonia y su gente, incluyendo el paisaje, fue el propósito fundamental de esas narrativas de viaje. Sus descripciones, aunque enmarcadas en el realismo descriptivo, produjeron una visión estética de la naturaleza isleña articulada a través de varios significados que puntualizaron su riqueza simbólica y material. Puesto que esas representaciones iban dirigidas a la audiencia estadounidense requirieron que sus autores integraran el paisaje tropical de Puerto Rico, raro y confuso para muchos estadounidenses, al ámbito de su cultura. Para ello los autores movilizaron tropos conocidos por sus lectores en Estados Unidos, entre ellos la figura retórica del Edén. Muchos de esos escritores representaron la Isla como un jardín edénico, recurriendo a lo que Carolyn Merchant llamó la “narrativa de la restauración del Edén,” una narrativa familiar a los estadounidenses.

Aparte de convertir el paisaje de la recién adquirida colonia en un objeto familiar el tropo justificó, apelando a la jardinería, la colonización de la naturaleza isleña y sus habitantes. Efectivamente, la etimología de la palabra colonizar traza una conexión a las palabras colonus y colere, labrador y cultivar, respectivamente. La jardinería representaba para el nuevo colonus, los estadounidenses, el conjunto de técnicas necesarias para el control y manejo de los recursos naturales de la nueva colonia. Era la alegoría ajustada a la práctica de cultivar, de culturar la naturaleza apropiada y expropiada, es decir, colonizada.

La jardinería incluye la construcción de un espacio, de un jardín. La narrativa edénica de los textos estadounidenses produjo, en efecto, y a través de varias “geografías imaginativas,” espacios, el ordenamiento territorial y colonial del paisaje puertorriqueño. Pero se trataba ya en el 98 de lo que Henri Lefebvre llamó la producción capitalista del espacio. Pero, la producción del espacio es siempre corolario de la producción de la naturaleza. Y como he planteado en otros contextos existe una conexión entre la narrativa de la recuperación del Edén y lo que Neil Smith llamó la producción capitalista de la naturaleza. En los textos americanos, la conversión de la naturaleza isleña en recursos, el inventario textual y prospección económica de los mismos, así como su valuación monetaria, todo presente en varios textos estadounidenses, contribuyeron a instituir las formas en que la naturaleza sería alterada, capitalizada, circulada, intercambiada y consumida, material e ideológicamente, como bien material en términos de la lógica abstracta de su valor de intercambio en el mercado capitalista. En otras palabras la alegoría edénica movilizada por varios textos estadounidenses animó y justificó la intervención y ordenación capitalista-colonialista de la explotación y manejo de los recursos naturales de la Isla.

La producción capitalista de la naturaleza envuelve la subsunción formal y real de la naturaleza a las redes del capitalismo. Los textos estadounidenses que de una forma u otra escribieron sobre la naturaleza en Puerto Rico contribuyeron a ello, principalmente a la subsunción formal de la misma, aparte de sentar las bases para su prevista subsunción real a las abarcadoras redes del capital. Esto apunta a que la problemática de los estadounidenses, en adición a la delineación de la administración política a seguir en Puerto Rico, ya expuesto en detalle por Lanny Thompson, incluía además prescribir e instituir las formas de explotar y administrar los recursos naturales de la nueva colonia. Sus descripciones del entorno natural puertorriqueño participaron de la apropiación y la organización de su explotación comercial. Contribuyeron así a la ampliación de la subsunción formal, funcionando, naturalmente, como una estrategia primaria del capital para la apropiación y subordinación expresa, precisa y determinada de los recursos naturales.

Los estudiosos del tema, entre ellos Manuel Valdés Pizzini, Mario R. Cancel, José Anazagasty, José E. Martínez y Carlos I Hernández, entre otros, ya han conectado las prácticas de significación de varios de los textos estadounidenses con las prácticas económicas del capitalismo colonial, incluyendo su manejo de los recursos naturales de la isla.Estos textos, más allá de delinear la forma de administración política de lo que muchos llamaron Porto Rico también mostraron, proyectaron y justificaron la expansión económica del capital estadounidense en la Isla. Para ello detallaron el potencial económico de la colonia, incluyendo las posibilidades de invertir capital allí, la disponibilidad de materia prima y recursos naturales, la infraestructura adecuada y la reserva de trabajadores, entre otras cosas. Uno de los propósitos de muchos de estos textos y sus proyecciones económicas fue seducir a los inversionistas y comerciantes potenciales, interesarlos en las posibilidades agrícolas, comerciales e industriales de la isla.

La prospección de la isla también fue científica; Puerto Rico fue objeto de las observaciones y prácticas científicas estadounidenses realizadas por varios científicos de ese país alrededor de la Isla. Muchos de estos científicos, a través de diversos textos, también participaron de la producción capitalista de la naturaleza. Se esperaba que los científicos, particularmente aquellos al servicio del Estado, ayudaran a manejar el ambiente y sus recursos de forma racional. Por ejemplo, y como demostró Manuel Valdés Pizzini, diversos procesos ideológicos y discursivos ligados a la ciencia participaron del diseño de estrategias para el manejo estadounidense de los bosques después de la Guerra Hispanoamericana. Los estadounidenses, a la vez que devaluaron el manejo español de los bosques, recurrieron a discursos particulares de la dasonomía y la silvicultura—la racionalidad científica—para legitimar su ordenamiento y manejo particular—colonial—de los bosques puertorriqueños.

Pero en la mayoría de los casos la problemática, ahora científica, no era únicamente determinar la forma racional de manejar los recursos naturales de la colonia caribeña sino también detectar los recursos rentables y prescribir su explotación lucrativa, lo que requirió, como explica J.R. Mcneill en Colonial Crucible, la institucionalización de una ciencia ambiental. Esa ciencia, también ideológica y discursiva, participó de la producción capitalista de la naturaleza y el manejo de los recursos naturales.

La Estación Experimental de Puerto Rico, ubicada en Mayagüez, fue una importante manifestación de la institucionalización del manejo científico y racional de los recursos naturales, particularmente en el ámbito de la agricultura. Los investigadores afiliados a esa estación dirigieron muchas de sus investigaciones no solo al estudio de fenómenos naturales sino además a la “mejor” explotación y comercialización de diversos recursos naturales y agrícolas. Muchos de los hallazgos y recomendaciones económicas de esas investigaciones fueron publicados en diversas revistas y periódicos, incluyendo Porto Rico Progress. Un buen ejemplo es el artículo “Bees in Porto Rico,” publicado en 1910 justamente en esa revista. Este fue escrito por W.V. Tower, un entomólogo especialista en abejas afiliado a la mencionada estación y fue publicado tanto en inglés como en español.

Tower comenzó su artículo con algunos detalles sobre la introducción de las abejas a Puerto Rico, indicando que las mismas fueron introducidas posiblemente por un tal Mr. Filippi, quien ubicó colmenas de abejas italianas en la finca Juanita en Las Marías. También señaló que la mayoría de esas colmenas fueron destruidas por un huracán en 1899 pero que las abejas sobrevivientes produjeron colmenas silvestres en Las Marías. Tower afirmó esto último fundamentado en las anécdotas de los “vecinos” de Las Marías, quienes le comentaron haberse topado varias veces con colmenas de abejas silvestres. Para el entomólogo la descripción de aquellas abejas silvestres por parte de los vecinos apuntaba a que se trataba de abejas italianas, las sobrevivientes de las colmenas de Filippi.

Tower, desde la Estación Experimental de Puerto Rico, promovía el avance de “apiarios comerciales.” Destacaba en su ensayo que en apenas dos años desde que comenzó el proyecto ya habían enviado abejas a unas cincuenta personas. El entomólogo procedió entonces a confirmar el potencial lucrativo de los apiarios: “Desde que me encargue de esta obra, he estado siempre en busca de plantas apropiadas para abejas, y soy de opinión que Puerto Rico tiene gran cantidad de plantas melíferas, y dudo que exista una localidad en donde las abejas no resulten un buen negocio.”

Caja de abejas. Foto en “Rearing Queen Bees in Porto Rico”, publicado en 1918.

Su apoyo a la producción comercial de miel fue seguido por una serie de recomendaciones dirigidas a maximizar la productividad y potencial comercial de los apiarios, de la producción comercial de miel. Primero, recomendó localizar los apiarios en las faldas de los cerros y en las tierras dedicadas al cultivo del café, y aquellos lugares con varias plantas melíferas. Segundo, ofreció un inventario cabal de plantas melíferas: guamá, palma real, cocotero, moca, jobo, palo blanco, grosellas, higüerillo, y guara. Tercero, subrayó la importancia de las abejas en la fertilización de flores, como las de naranjo, lo que aumentaría las cosechas de frutas. De hecho, señaló que la presencia de más abejas hubiese evitado la escasez de flores de naranjo ese año, 1910, lo que pudo haber garantizado una mejor cosecha de naranjas. Cuarto, Tower recomendó aglutinar los esfuerzos hacia la producción de miel de extracción, objetando la producción de los panales y las secciones de a libra, los que según explicaba eran difíciles de embarcar y distribuir en los mercados, aunque la miel puertorriqueña solo se exportaba a Estados Unidos y en ocasiones a Alemania.

Tower, aunque afirmaba que la producción de los panales y las secciones de a libra podían explotarse para el consumo local, favorecía que los principiantes recurrieran la producción de miel de extracción, por ser este un método más fácil de manejar. Además, la producción de miel de extracción era, afirmaba el entomólogo, menos trabajosa para las abejas, pues evitaba que estas tuvieran que producir panales nuevos constantemente. Añadió también que la producción de miel de extracción facilitaba dominar las abejas porque reducía la tendencia de estas a formar enjambres, lo que no sucedía con los otros modos de producción de miel. Para él, la producción de enjambres disminuía la “fuerza productora de la colmena,” y con ello el potencial comercial de la apicultura. Finalmente, ese modo de producción de miel de extracción, el “método artificial,” permitía producir cera con menos miel, lo que se traducía, explicaba él, en ganancias monetarias, dependiendo claro está del precio de la miel vis-a-vis la cera en los mercados. Finalmente, recomendó seguir usando abejas italianas, porque aunque estas eran las más difíciles de subyugar eran muy buenas defendiéndose de las polillas de cera.

Tower, vaticinaba, si se seguían sus recomendaciones, y gracias a las favorables condiciones ambientales de la Isla, como la presencia de diversas plantas melíferas y la presencia de abejas italianas saludables, un buen éxito económico para la apicultura comercial en Puerto Rico: “El porvenir de los apicultores puertorriqueños es brillantísimo. No se conocen enfermedades que molesten a las abejas. La putrefacción de la cría—terrible enfermedad que puede estudiarse en una de las islas vecinas así como en los Estados Unidos—no ha sido introducida en Puerto Rico.”

Tower, y muchos científicos como él, participando de la subsunción formal de la naturaleza, de las abejeras y su miel en su caso, contribuyeron a la marcha de la naturaleza como estrategia de acumulación capitalista en Puerto Rico. Los científicos asistieron el “imperialismo ecológico”, el control capitalista-estadounidense del flujo de recursos naturales procedentes de la isla. Los estadounidenses, claro está, no fueron los únicos en proyectar y explotar los recursos naturales de la Isla o de convertirlos en bienes lucrativos formal y realmente. Los españoles y los puertorriqueños mismos hicieron lo suyo. Además, la Estación Experimental de Puerto Rico promovió la participación de apicultores locales, inclusive enviándoles abejas y entrenándolos. No promovió, como ocurrió con otros recursos, el control absoluto del capital estadounidense sobre la producción de miel. Pero el proyecto colonial-capitalista de los estadounidenses extendió e intensificó la producción capitalista de la naturaleza, particularmente de su integración formal, como nunca antes, y con la racionalidad científica de su parte.

José Anazagasty Rodríguez

José Anazagasty Rodríguez es Catedrático Asociado en el programa de Sociología del Departamento de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto Universitario de Mayagüez. Es especialista en sociología ambiental, estudios americanos y teoría social, y ha realizado investigaciones en la retórica imperialista estadounidense y la producción capitalista de la naturaleza en Puerto Rico. Es co-editor, con Mario R. Cancel, de los libros «We the people: la representación americana de los puertorriqueños 1898-1926 (2008)» y «Porto Rico: hecho en Estados Unidos (2011)».

Publicado en Guerra hispanoamericana, Imperialismo norteamericano, Puerto Rico | Etiquetado Porto Rico, Puerto Rico, Spanish-American War | Leave a Comment »

River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands

13 junio 2014 por Norberto Barreto Velázquez

River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands

Marshall Poe

New Books in History June 12, 2014

Omar Valerio Jiménez

Historically speaking, who you were depended on who your rulers were and the ethnic identity (including language, religion, and folkways) of “your” people. In the era of nation-states–that is, our era–these two characteristics have, for most people, been fused. Ethnic Germans live in Germany, ethnic Chinese live in China, ethnic Egyptians live in Egypt. The exceptions to this rule are two: ethnic minorities (e.g., Jews, Kurds, Uyghers, etc.) residing in nation-states and people who live in the shifting borderlands between nation-states.

Omar Valerio-Jiménez‘s fascinating book River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (Duke University Press, 2013) is about identity in one particularly interesting shifting borderland, that found in the Rio Grande region between New Spain/Mexico and the United States. Valerio-Jiménez shows that the people of the Rio Grande were, ethnically speaking, many: a variety of native Americans, Spanish soldiers and colonists, Mexican and American immigrants of every stripe. The border shifted back and forth; the river and its people for the most part remained, adapting to new regimes and new conditions. Just “who” they were at any given time depended on a whole variety of factors, all of which are expertly explored by Valerio-Jiménez. Listen in to our fascinating discussion.

Interview with Omar Valerio-Jiménez [ 1:00:44 ]

Publicado en Inmigración | Etiquetado Ethnic identity, Ethnic minorities, Mexican-Americans, nation-states, Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Rio Grande Borderlands | Leave a Comment »

The Invasion of America

13 junio 2014 por Norberto Barreto Velázquez

The Invasion of America

Este mapa interactivo del desarrollo del expansionismo continental estadounidense, examina la adquisisicón de territorios a través de los tratados y órdenes ejecutivas relacionadas con las llamadas naciones indias. En otras palabras, ilustra el proceso de despojo de las tierras de los pobladores norteamericanos originales por parte del gobierno federal norteamericano entre 1776 y 1876. También contiene vínculos a los textos de los tratados en cuestión y un video, los que podrían resultar herramientas muy útiles para educadores.

El mapa esta accesible aquí.

Publicado en Expansionismo, Imperialismo norteamericano | Etiquetado American expansionism, Indian nations | Leave a Comment »

I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Er

10 junio 2014 por Norberto Barreto Velázquez

I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era

Marshall Poe

New Books in History June 5, 2014

David Williams

Lincoln was very clear–at least in public–that the Civil War was not fought over slavery: it was, he said, for the preservation of the Union first and foremost. So it’s not surprising that when the conflict started he had no firm plan to emancipate the slaves in the borderland or Southern states. He also knew that such a move might prove very unpopular in the North.

So why did he issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863? There are many reasons. According to David Williams‘ fascinating new book I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era (Cambridge University Press, 2014), an important and neglected one has to do with African American self-emancipation. After the war began, masses of slaves began to leave the South and head for the Northern lines. The Union forces received them as “contraband” seized from the enemy during wartime. As such, their status was uncertain. Many wanted to fight or at least serve as auxiliaries in the Union armies like freemen, but they were still seen as property. As Williams points out, the North certainly needed their manpower–as Lincoln knew better than anyone. Bearing this in mind, the President felt the time was propitious to do what he thought was right all along–free the slaves. Listen in.

Interview with David Williams [ 57:32 ]

Publicado en Abolicionismo, Esclavitud, Guerra civil norteamericana | Etiquetado African Americans History, American Civil War, David Williams, Emancipation, Emancipation Proclamation, Self-Emancipation, Slavery | 1 Comment »

The Political War

9 junio 2014 por Norberto Barreto Velázquez

The Political War

Allen C. Guelzo

The New York Times June 5, 2014

A Union artillery battery at Cold Harbor. Library of <Congress

Pity Abraham Lincoln. Everything that should have gone right for the Union cause in the spring of 1864 had, in just a few weeks, gone defiantly and disastrously wrong.

For two years, the 16th president had toiled uphill against the secession of the Confederate states, against the incompetence of his luckless generals and against his howling critics from both sides of the congressional aisle. Finally, in the summer and fall of 1863, the course of the war had begun to turn his way. Two great victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg staggered the Confederates, and those were followed by a knockdown blow delivered at Chattanooga by the man who was fast becoming Lincoln’s favorite general, Ulysses S. Grant. “The signs look better,” Lincoln rejoiced, “Peace does not appear so distant as it did.”

Peace was not the only thing that would be brought closer by victory. The presidential election of 1864 was looming, and if Lincoln had any desire for a second term, a victorious end to the war was the surest way to secure it. He had never seriously considered taking what appeared to some people as an obvious shortcut to remaining in office – declaring the war to be a national emergency and suspending elections for the duration, though two Union governors, in Indiana and Illinois, had done what amounted to that on the state level. That only made the need for military victory all the more urgent, and so Lincoln installed Grant as general in chief of all the Union armies in March 1864, and Grant obliged him with a comprehensive strategic plan that united Union assaults in Georgia, Alabama and, under his own direct command, in Virginia.

None of it worked, and the place where it seemed to work the least was under Grant’s own nose. Crossing the Rapidan River on May 4, 1864, Grant’s army entered at once into a series of head-to-head contests with Robert E. Lee’s fabled Army of Northern Virginia. Fighting three pitched battles – at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House and the North Anna River – and enduring numerous smaller collisions, Grant worked his way down toward the Confederate capital at Richmond, which he got within 10 miles of by the end of the month. But the fighting had cost a colossal total of 40,000 dead, wounded and missing, and Lincoln gloomily understood that the Northern public “hold me responsible.”

They weren’t the only ones. Radicals within Lincoln’s own Republican Party in Congress had long been convinced that Lincoln’s preference for a soft postwar Reconstruction was dis-heartening the Republican base. They were further angered when the Republican national committee, headed by Lincoln’s ally Edwin D. Morgan, met in late February 1864 and announced that the party would hold its presidential nominating convention in Baltimore in June, not as “Republicans,” but as the “National Union Convention.” As Grant’s campaign in Virginia ground agonizingly forward, the most vehement of the Radicals – led by Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips and Horace Greeley – staged a protest convention in Cleveland’s Cosmopolitan Hall, and on June 4 nominated the Radical darling, John Charles Fremont.

If ever there was a moment when Lincoln needed good news from the battlefield, it was now, and Grant wanted to deliver it. The staggering blows he had dealt the rebels convinced him a little too easily that the Confederates were “really whipped,” that “our men feel they have gained morale over the enemy and attack with confidence,” and that with one more blow, “success over Lee’s army is already assured.” On June 1, Grant launched a hasty strike at Cold Harbor, before the bulk of his army could get into action. Even so, the attack cracked the Confederate defenses on the Cold Harbor road and forced them to fall back. With another good push, Grant might just be able “crush Lee’s army on the north side of the James, with the prospect in case of success of driving him into Richmond, capturing the city perhaps without a siege, and putting the Confederate government to flight” – not to mention providing a rousing military endorsement for Lincoln’s renomination.

But Grant, in his eagerness, had badly misread the Confederates, and when he launched a full-dress attack at Cold Harbor on June 3, it resembled (as one Confederate general put it) “not war but murder.” Well-prepared Confederate infantrymen mowed down federal at-tackers. Grant’s army sustained 3,500 casualties in the main attack and another 2,500 in related actions that day, and the armies settled into a miserable standoff.

Yet Grant carefully limited his report of the Cold Harbor debacle to four terse sentences, including the claim that “our loss was not severe.” And in the official report of the campaign he filed after the war, Cold Harbor consumed just three sentences in 51 pages. For years afterward, Grant’s doubters wondered whether he had deliberately soft-pedaled the failure at Cold Harbor in order to limit political damage to Lincoln on the eve of the Baltimore convention. There is no direct evidence of such collusion; still, Grant’s dismissal of his losses as “not severe” is peculiar.

Even more peculiar, newspaper reporting from the field was shut down by the War Department because of “a violent storm.” The New York Times (whose editor, Henry Raymond, was the new chairman of the National Union Party’s national Committee) did not publish an ac-count of the June 3 attack for three more days, and even then, merely observed that “losses were inconsiderable.”

Strangest of all, however, was Grant’s refusal to propose a truce to recover the wounded from the battlefield until June 7. Military tradition dictated that only the loser of an engagement asked for such a truce. Even though there could not have been much debate about who had won and who had lost at Cold Harbor, Grant delayed the truce agreement (and any public admission of defeat) for four days, while men suffered and died from thirst, blood loss and exposure.

By June 7, however, any anxiety that bad news from Cold Harbor would endanger Lincoln’s nomination was past. That same day, the Union National Convention opened at the Front Street Theater in Baltimore, with Robert J. Breckinridge asking triumphantly, “Does any one doubt that this convention intends to say that Abraham Lincoln shall be the nominee?” They did not, and the next day, undisturbed by any news of Cold Harbor, Lincoln – described by one state delegation as “the second savior of the world” – was unanimously renominated by the convention.

Given how diligently the National Union Party’s staff had worked to ensure Lincoln’s renomination in the months before the Baltimore assembly, even the freshest news from Cold Harbor might not have made much difference. But keeping the ill wind at bay certainly did not hurt. Nor was it uncommon in this war for the impact of bad military news to be blunted by creative hesitation. One of Grant’s corps commanders was overheard telling a staffer not to report actual casualty figures: “It will never do, Locke, to make a showing of such heavy losses.” After that, wrote the officer who overheard him, “I always doubted reports of casualties.” It irked one Philadelphia newspaper on June 9 to admit that “we can scarcely find out that there was fought one of the bloodiest battles of the war, yet, until yesterday, no one knew its result.” This was, in the end, a highly political war, in which military decisions frequently turned before the winds of politics. And in the coming months, Lincoln would find far greater political challenges in the path of re-election than the ones presented by Cold Harbor.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

Sources: R.P. Basler, ed., “Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln”; Larry T. Balsamo, “’We Cannot Have Free Government without Elections’: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1864,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 94 (Summer 2001); Gordon C. Rhea, “Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26-June 3, 1864”; Ralph Morris Goldman, “The National Party Chairmen and Committees: Factionalism at the Top”; Andrew F. Rolle, “John Charles Fremont: Character As Destiny”; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series One, 37 (pt 1); Gordon C. Rhea, “The Overland Campaign,” Hallowed Ground 15 (Spring 2014); The New York Times, June 6 and 8, 1864; Ernest B. Furgurson, “Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor, 1864”; D.F. Murphy, “Proceedings of the National Union Convention Held in Baltimore, Md., June 7th and 8th, 1864”; Morris Schaff, “The Battle of the Wilderness”; David E. Long, “Cover-up at Cold Harbor,” Civil War Times Illustrated 36 (June 1997).

Allen C. Guelzo, professor of the Civil War era at Gettysburg College, is the author, most recently, of “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion.”

Publicado en Guerra civil norteamericana | Etiquetado Abraham Lincoln, American Civil War, Confederate, Radicals, Reconstruction, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant | Leave a Comment »

Who Was Jim Crow

9 junio 2014 por Norberto Barreto Velázquez

Who Was Jim Crow?

HNN Staff October 31, 2011

Cover to an early edition of «Jump Jim Crow» sheet music (c 1832) — Wikipedia

Jim Crow laws, as most Americans should (hopefully) know, were the racist segregation laws which cemented white supremacy over African Americans throughout the United States from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the civil rights movement’s victories in the mid-1960s.

But who the heck was Jim Crow, and why did his name grace some of the most odious laws in American history?

Jim Crow was not actually a person—the name comes from an 1828 show by Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice. Rice, in a proto-minstrel act, would put on blackface and sing “Jump Jim Crow,” with the refrain:

Wheel about, an’ turn about, an’ do jis so;
Eb’ry time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.

The song was quite popular in the early half of the 1800s, and “Jim Crow” quickly became a disparaging term for blacks, but it wasn’t until toward the end of the century that the name was applied to the various post-Reconstruction “black codes” in the South (the New York Times referred to Louisiana’s “‘Jim Crow’ Law” as early as 1892).

The song was quite popular in the early half of the 1800s, and “Jim Crow” quickly became a disparaging term for blacks, but it wasn’t until toward the end of the century that the name was applied to the various post-Reconstruction “black codes” in the South (the New York Times referred to Louisiana’s “‘Jim Crow’ Law” as early as 1892). – See more at: http://hnn.us/article/142719#sthash.iswHNd5D.dpuf

But who the heck was Jim Crow, and why did his name grace some of the most odious laws in American history?

Wheel about, an’ turn about, an’ do jis so;
Eb’ry time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.

The song was quite popular in the early half of the 1800s, and “Jim Crow” quickly became a disparaging term for blacks, but it wasn’t until toward the end of the century that the name was applied to the various post-Reconstruction “black codes” in the South (the New York Times referred to Louisiana’s “‘Jim Crow’ Law” as early as 1892).

– See more at: http://hnn.us/article/142719#sthash.iswHNd5D.dpuf

Cover to an early edition of «Jump Jim Crow» sheet music (c 1832) — Wikipedia

But who the heck was Jim Crow, and why did his name grace some of the most odious laws in American history?

Wheel about, an’ turn about, an’ do jis so;
Eb’ry time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.

The song was quite popular in the early half of the 1800s, and “Jim Crow” quickly became a disparaging term for blacks, but it wasn’t until toward the end of the century that the name was applied to the various post-Reconstruction “black codes” in the South (the New York Times referred to Louisiana’s “‘Jim Crow’ Law” as early as 1892).

– See more at: http://hnn.us/article/142719#sthash.iswHNd5D.dpuf

Publicado en Segregación | Etiquetado Jim Crow, Segregation | Leave a Comment »

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El Imperio de Calibán

El objetivo de este blog es fomentar el estudio de la historia de los Estados Unidos y analizar las prácticas, instituciones y discursos del imperialismo estadounidense.

Allende, the Third World, and Neoliberal Imperialism

Allende, the Third World, and Neoliberal Imperialism

Chris Dietrich

Imperial & Global Forum June 18, 2014

The Warren Court Decisions Earl Warren Said Were the Most Important … «One Person, One Vote»

The Warren Court Decisions Earl Warren Said Were the Most Important … «One Person, One Vote»

by J. Douglas Smith

HNN June 18, 2014

No End of a Lesson – Unlearned

No End of a lesson- Unlearned

William R. Polk

HNN June 15, 2014

The Surprising Evidence hat Woodrow Wilson Was Suffering from a Brain Malfunction Before the Stroke that Crippled Him

The Surprising Evidence hat Woodrow Wilson Was Suffering from a Brain Malfunction Before the Stroke that Crippled Him

Richard Striner

HNN June 15, 2014

Las Abejeras del Capital en Porto Rico

Las Abejeras del Capital en Porto Rico

Jose Anazagasty Rodríguez

80 grados 13 de junio de 2014

River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands

River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands

Marshall Poe

New Books in History June 12, 2014

The Invasion of America

I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Er

I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era

Marshall Poe

The Political War

The Political War

Allen C. Guelzo

The New York Times June 5, 2014

Who Was Jim Crow

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