Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

In recent years, new interpretations of the history of the United States have stirred controversy far beyond the academy, as scholars, journalists, and opportunistic political figures have debated and even attempted to legislate how to interpret our collective past. Into this foray comes the historian Greg Grandin’s new book, America, América—a sweeping revision of U.S. history that argues we can’t understand the history of the United States without understanding its long engagement with its neighbors to the south, in Latin America.

The book begins with the conquest, turning the historical “black legend”—the notion, created and disseminated by British imperial interests, that Spanish colonization was uniquely barbaric and cruel—on its head. Instead, Grandin argues, the long tradition of internal critique of Spanish colonial barbarity that began with Catholic theologians in the sixteenth century informed the legal and ideological basis for the new Latin American nations that emerged three centuries later. These nations, in turn, mounted a continuous challenge to the attempts of the United States to legitimate itself, from the founding through the New Deal and beyond, pressuring the rising hegemon to live up to its own professed ideals. But the United States that emerges in Grandin’s telling is an empire of evasion, outrunning and therefore continually revising its own justificatory apparatus in conversation, comparison, and contest with the Latin American republics.

America, América is the culmination of two decades of rethinking the role of the United States in the world and the importance of Latin America to that place. It’s a provocative revision, with lessons not only for students of history but those seeking to understand how our politics has come to look the way it does today. I conducted this interview with Grandin, my friend and colleague (and advisor of my PhD thesis a decade ago) over Zoom in early May and continued it over email in the following weeks. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

—Christy Thornton

Christy Thornton: We’re in a moment where the questions of the lessons of U.S. history have become deeply politicized, as the Trump administration seeks to eradicate the teaching of any history that’s not venerative of our founding myths. I think of both this new book as well as your previous book, The End of the Myth, as directly confronting this ascendant revanchist reading of our history. How do you think about your own rewriting of U.S. history in this context, and what you hope these books do in this moment?

Greg Grandin: I try to challenge both celebratory and revanchist readings of U.S. history, going back at least to Empire’s Workshop. But my work is also an effort to force the left to think deeper, to move beyond simple moral outrage. The history of U.S. intervention so dominates the Latin American experience. Even those who defend the projection of U.S. power in the world admit that Washington policy in the region has been, um, unhelpful. For them, Latin America is a kind of a geopolitical confessional, where they concentrate their contrition. Colin Powell apologized, sort of, for U.S. involvement in Chile’s 1973 coup. Bill Clinton apologized for Guatemala and for Haiti. Forgive me, Father, for I have overthrown.

One motive for writing a book like The End of the Myth was frustration with critical interpretations of Trumpism, which seemed trapped by monocausal arguments. Was it racism? Was it economic anxiety? The left used to know that those two questions aren’t antagonistic. They must be taken up as mutually constitutive. To get back to your question about revanchism—it’s a revanchism mostly focused on liberal interpretations of U.S. history. So much of the fightback against revanchism takes place on liberal terrain, with its various investments in U.S. nationalism, a vision of the United States as a force for good in the world. But even as we fight this rearguard action, we can try to hold on to the insights of critical theory.

CT: One of the key contentions in this book is that you can’t actually understand U.S. history without putting it in the context of its long engagement with the rest of the hemisphere—that a kind of comparative compulsion with Latin America has structured the way that U.S. leaders have thought about not just the role of the United States in the world but, in fact, about what the United States is and should be as a nation. How did you come to understand the United States in this way?

GG:  It’s impossible to spend much time thinking about Latin America and not realize how the United States has structured the region. Harder is the reverse: to think about the way Latin America has shaped the United States, because of its unprecedented power. Latin America’s influence takes many expressions, but one line of argument that runs through my work is the centrality of Latin America in U.S. coalition formation. I’m influenced by political scientists who see U.S. history as a progression of governing coalitions, a progression that for the most part, apart from the U.S. Civil War, has contained political conflict and class alignments within the bounds of a two-party system. In this view, big-tent governing coalitions run through various regime cycles. They rise; consolidate; decompose; and give way to the next, new coalition.

As far as I know, foreign policy doesn’t much figure into this framework, but I think it essential. In a nation like the United States, which for centuries presumed limitlessness, foreign policy has long been the venue where hegemony—moral notions of how to organize society—has been forged. It was through foreign policy where potential conflicts between different consistencies within a coalition were defused, where alliances solidified, where potentially antagonistic normative notions of how the world should work were reconciled.

In this, Latin America has been indispensable. Empire’s Workshop focused on the New Deal and the New Right, but America, América broadens the argument, starting the Monroe Doctrine as an ur-reconciler: of John Quincy Adams’ unilateralism, of Thomas Jefferson’s expansionism, of Henry Clay’s mercantilism. Then, after the founders’ coalition begins to unravel, what becomes the Jacksonian coalition is jolted into being in reaction to Simón Bolívar’s invitation to attend his Panama Congress.  

In terms of the present, our new age of limits: Well, what happens when aborning governing coalitions can no longer rely on foreign policy to congeal? To define themselves? To smooth out their contradictions? It is too early to tell, but that does seem to be where we are at, a moment of perpetual polarization, where neither party can use Latin America—or the world more broadly—to regroup, to gather its forces and its vision and establish legitimacy for any length of time.

CT: How do you think we lost this centrality of Latin America to U.S. history, that we came to an understanding of the United States as though that wasn’t the case? When do you think we start narrating our history in this way to write Latin America out of the story?

GG: It never was in the story, not in any real way. The provincialism of the United States is profound. John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary, in response to Henry Clay’s vision of the Western Hemisphere as forming a great “American System,” that we already have an “American system” and it had a name: the United States. “We constitute the whole of it,” he wrote, “there is no community of interests or principles between North and South America.”

CT: To get a bit into the content of the book, you write evocatively of Spanish Catholic theologians like Bartolomé de las Casas grappling with the horrors that he witnessed during the conquest, while his counterparts in English colonies a century later only proffered “evasion and denial” of the essential humanity of the peoples that they encountered. But in the end, do these distinctions really matter? That one empire was anguished and another triumphant? Given the brutality of colonization in both contexts, why and how does that justification strategy that you trace so well come to matter for the way these histories subsequently unfold?

GG: This goes the heart of how one thinks about the past, and particularly the relationship between ideas, politics, material interests, and actions. Ideology matters, and for an ideology to be vital it needs to be able to incorporate hypocrisy. I think historians underrate hypocrisy as a category of analysis. The gap between the ideal and the real, between what should be and what is, is fertile ground, a place where ideas about the future might gestate, where potentialities take root and maybe, through political action, manifest.

To speak more concretely: the genocide associated with Spanish Conquest took place at the founding of the Spanish Empire. Because Catholicism insisted on defining itself as universal, as the agent of world history and the bearer of history’s wisdom, the terror inflicted by Spain’s conquistadors couldn’t just be ignored or evaded. It had to be debated, and debated it was, endlessly, by theologians and jurists, many of whom came to challenge the legitimacy of the doctrine of conquest, to question Spain’s claim to title to the New World, to argue that all humans were equal, and to narrow to a sliver the criteria in which war could ever be considered just. Of course, the Conquest continued, but the colonial system that emerged from the Conquest, which also proclaimed its universalism, organized itself around the recognition of difference. Native Americans, and then Africans, were the center of the empire. They not only extracted the New World’s wealth, but they stood at the center of great legitimating edifice.

I compare this with British settlement in North America, on land that was largely already depopulated due to European diseases. The Protestant Conquest lent itself to evasion. Indigenous peoples played only bit parts in the stories Puritans told of themselves, important only to the degree they provided clues to help decipher God’s judgment. Except for a few moralists, Indians remained shadow dancers, flickering around the fringes of the settler imagination.

CT: Can you say more about this distinction?

GG: This distinction I’m drawing didn’t happen only in the psychic or ideational realm but was conditioned by the social and political histories of the Spanish and English colonial projects, by demography, environment, and other variables, which I go into in the book. It matters when in time your settler-colonial genocide happens—whether at the beginning of the project, as with Spain, or as a centuries-long phenomena, as occurs in English-speaking North America. The first lent itself to atonement; the idea was held by more than one Spanish independent leader that a break from Spain would redress the horrors inflicted by the conquerors. The second lends itself more toward evasion, with U.S. independence leaders believing the original settlement was more than just, it was providential. John Adams said that North America was “settled,” not “conquered.” But once the United States came into existence, its leaders revitalized the doctrine of conquest, using it to justify taking Indian and Mexican lands. The right to conquest was upheld by the Supreme Court and taught to law students well into the twentieth century.

The new leaders of Latin America, on the other hand, repudiated the doctrine. They had to—they had to learn to live with each other, for they governed seven new nations on a crowded continent. If they adhered to a U.S. version of international law, what would have stopped Argentina from conquering Chile the way the United States conquered the Creeks and the Mexicans? The result would have been endless war. And so, the region’s jurists and other intellectuals drew from earlier Catholic criticisms of Spain’s subjugation of the New World to disavow conquest. In its place, they cobbled together a new framework of international relations that, I argue, becomes the template for both the League of Nations and the United Nations.

CT: Another key distinction between the Latin American republics and the United States that emerges in the national period is the question of property and the codification of property rights. What are these different understandings of property, and to what ends do the Latin American jurists and diplomats and political figures in the book try to put them?

GG: Historians sometimes cite the Peace of Westphalia or the Congress of Vienna as establishing the first association of sovereign nation-states. But those arrangements grouped together dynastic monarchies that, anyway, were empires, not bounded nations. Modern sovereignty, understood as a quality of an autonomous, non-imperial nation, was essentially invented in Latin America.

As decades went by, and foreign debt piled up, and foreign creditors and investors began to increasingly intervene in domestic politics, Latin American jurists began to expand the notion of sovereignty into the economic realm. We see it in a series of “doctrines” they put forward that sought to limit the ability of investors to call on their home countries to collect debt and so on. These new diplomatic ideas related to economic sovereignty dovetailed with Catholic and feudal notions of property rights. After independence, every Latin American nation accepted the right of private property, but with significant restrictions. Haiti’s constitutions and legal codes had long prohibited foreigners from owning land. Colombia in 1913 passed a law stating that the “nation should reserve the proprietorship over all petroleum beneath the public lands of Colombia.” In 1916, Bolivia issued a decree that established the nation as the owner of all surface and subsurface petroleum. In Europe, in Red Vienna and ever insurgent Paris, intellectuals had promoted the idea of the right to private property being limited according to its “social function,” an idea that spread rapidly in Latin America.

These ideas culminated in Mexico’s 1917 revolutionary constitution. Mexico stood at the center of New World extractive capitalism, the heartland of oil production and silver mining, which were deeply integrated into the U.S. economy. So it was a shock to those who presided over that economy when Article 27 of Mexico’s new constitution declared that private property was a right conferred by the state and that all subsoil resources belonged to the nation. This principle was broadcast back through Latin America, and soon every country came to claim the right to expropriate property for the public good. This is the foundation of the region’s strong social rights tradition, the idea that it is the state’s responsibility not just to protect individual freedom but to ensure the collective good, through the provision of health care, education, and so on.

CT: One of the things your book demonstrates as it moves into the twentieth century is that, under both Wilson and FDR, the United States hinged its some of its legitimacy on the cultivation of Pan-Americanism, having been pushed to live up to some of its professed ideals vis-à-vis Latin America. Can you talk about the surprising ways that Latin America was so key to the legitimacy of the whole New Deal project?

GG: The key moment is the 1933 Montevideo Pan-American Conference, which you’ve written about as well. These conferences had always been a venue where Latin Americans inevitably demanded Washington give up the right to intervention, while Washington’s envoys inevitably ignored such demands. This time, though, things were different. FDR sent Cordell Hull, his secretary of state, to represent the United States. Hull was a free trader who had come to see non-intervention as the political equivalent of laissez-faire. There are many reasons why he makes this equation, but in Montevideo, he basically completely capitulates to Latin America’s vision of international law, both giving up the U.S. right of intervention—which for Latin Americans means voiding the doctrine of conquest—and recognizing the absolute sovereignty of all nations no matter their size. The goodwill that Hull generates with this turnaround can’t be underestimated. I go into it in the book, but Hull is hailed as the “unconquering” hero upon his return to the United States, with FDR pushing through legislation giving Hull the power to negotiate reciprocal tariff treaties.

At this point, the New Deal was under siege. FDR was still popular, but the first phase reforms had stalled, and the hard, corporate-funded right was mobilizing, including the quasi-fascist Liberty Leagues. There’s a surge in anti-labor violence and the spread of extremist voices on the new technology of radio. It’s difficult to quantify, but Hull’s ability to lower tariffs and open Latin American markets wins back many of the economic elites that FDR had lost. And there begins—and here I’m building on the work of the sociologist Thomas Ferguson—the coalescing of a corporate bloc that didn’t mind domestic reform as long as it was accompanied by the opening of foreign markets. The corporate core of the Republican Party was disintegrating, with some stalwart industries, such as oil, chemicals (though not the DuPonts), and banking (though not J. P. Morgan) defecting to the Democrats. Newer financial houses run by Jewish bankers, such as Lehman Brothers, threw in with FDR, in the hope of breaking the hold the Protestant banking establishment had over the financial system. These industries were swayed by Roosevelt’s and Hull’s promise to build the kind of legal infrastructure that would allow their expansion overseas.

Hull’s trade policies, made possible by his actions in Latin America, also helped tie back together Roosevelt’s fraying coalition of elite supporters. James Warburg, a German-born banker and early ad­viser to FDR, had broken with the president over monetary policy and published Hell Bent for Election, a scorcher of a book that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and decried the country’s drift toward tyranny and socialism. “Almost anyone would be better than Roosevelt,” Warburg wrote. His criticisms were unrelenting, and Hearst papers seemed to run them in every edition. Unrelenting until he relented. In October 1936, Warburg wrote a long trade policy love letter to Hull, announcing that he was, after all, voting for Roosevelt.

At the same time, we all know the phrase “Good Neighbor” as it applies to Latin America. Less well known is that FDR used that phrase to organize his get-out-the-vote campaign for reelection. Good Neighbor Leagues were deployed as the antithesis of the Saxon-supremacist Liberty Leagues; they became the venue in which the New Deal could put forth a new, more tolerant Americanism. Good Neighbor League events organized Native Americans in Arizona, Latinos in New Mexico, African Americans in the North and South, and Catholics and Jews in the cities. The acceptance of diversity within the hemisphere was equal to the acceptance of diversity within the nation. “Your Americanism and mine,” as FDR put it. Hundreds of Good Neighbor Clubs were organized around the country and charged to “translate the Good Neighbor ideals into reality through votes.”

Over twenty-seven million citizens cast their ballot for Roosevelt that November, who held off a protofascist backlash on the unlikely policy combine of nonintervention, labor rights, social security, free trade, and good-neighbor humanism. And an equally unlikely alliance of foreign-market-oriented corporations with an expanded coalition of urban white workers, farmers, poor Southerners, European immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and African Americans. He had won more votes than any other candidate that had ever stood for election in history—not just in the United States, but anywhere. That he won them on a program of socialized democracy makes the achievement that much more remarkable. And you want to know the first thing he did after the election?

CT: What?

GG: He took a victory lap, in Brazil and Argentina, beginning to build the inter-American coalition to confront world fascism.

CT: Readers might be somewhat surprised to find the climax of the book in 1948, with the killing of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Bogotá—not a household name in the United States by any means. Why Gaitán?

GG: Yes, the book doesn’t end with Gaitán, but it does climax with his death, which in a way makes America, América something of a half-a-millennium “chronicle of a death foretold.” I won’t give much away here, since his murder is something of a mystery. But Gaitán was a remarkable historical figure, who in many ways compressed all the social democratic hopes of mid-century Latin America. I take his murder, and the decades of Colombian bloodshed that followed, as symbolic of the start of the Latin American Cold War. Everybody was in Bogotá for the founding of the Organization of American States when the killing took place in April 1948. And so, in a way, Latin America’s Cold War begins like a science fiction movie, whose assorted characters, each for their own reasons, each not knowing what the others were doing, converge on a certain place at a certain time.

The cast included Gabriel García Márquez, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, Fidel Castro, Rómulo Betancourt (recent president of Venezuela), Camilo Torres Restrepo (then a friend of García Márquez, who would become, to many, Liberation Theology’s first martyr), along with a legion of other students, writers, communists, socialists, soldiers, death-squaders, lawyers, and economists. Many would take opposing sides in the Cold War. One of the Somoza brothers, whose father ruled Nicaragua and had murdered the peasant revolutionary Augusto Sandino, was there. So was Tomás Borges, a founder of the Sandinista guerrillas who would go on, in 1979, to lead the overthrow the Somoza dynasty. In the wings were several new “attachés” who had recently arrived at the United States embassy—spies—as the recently created CIA was just then taking over the work that had been done the FBI in Latin America.

I use the killing, its ongoing mystery, and its aftermath to trace out the lines of the rest of the book: the rise of heterodox economics and dependency theory; the spread of liberation theology; the United States switching from a policy of anti-fascism to one of anti-communism; and the imposition of neoliberalism.

CT: I’m glad you brought up neoliberalism, because the book raises the question of how we should think about its chronology, given the long history of struggle in the region over the role of the state in the economy. How do you think the history that you’ve chronicled here should inform the way we understand neoliberalism, and what do you think we should learn from the region’s ongoing struggles for economic and social rights today?

GG: Well, I definitely wanted to move beyond an understanding of neoliberalism as sprouting from the heads of a handful of European intellectuals. I wanted to root it in the long social history of capitalism, but also specifically in Latin America. Of course, neoliberalism has multiple global sources of origins, as does what it opposes, be it the welfare state, social democracy, or more radical heterodox economics. But there’s a coherence to the history of neoliberalism in Latin America that is vivid: the consolidation of “liberal” export-oriented states in the 1800s, which were increasingly confronted by challengers—be they social liberals like Gaitán, economic nationalists, or more radical antagonists, like Salvador Allende—and then the rollback of these challenges. We can say the rollback started with the overthrow of Allende in 1973, and that’s certainly a helpful heuristic way of indexing history. But U.S. economic elites essentially wanted Harry Truman and George Marshall to impose what we would later call neoliberalism immediately after the war, after FDR’s death in 1945.

Latin Americans were early adopters of the term neoliberalism. I first heard it in Guatemala in the middle of 1990s and was taught its meaning by a Guatemalan friend. To the degree that neoliberalism began as a sharpened, self-aware ideological project (as opposed to, say, a bunch of free-market policies that Truman and Marshall wanted Latin America to adopt) aimed at rooting out the idea that social rights and economic rights are mutually dependent, or that social democracy completes political democracy—that project is very clear in Latin America. I don’t know if there is any region in the world where the advancement of individual rights depended on first securing social rights. Chilean radicals in the early 1800s, for instance, weren’t interested in the vote, which they felt would just be manipulated by large landholders. They argued that land reform and the expansion of a social state that gave citizens some independence from their overlords was needed before casting a ballot would be meaningful.

As for today, there are strong continuities. The whole book, from the Conquest forward, is a history of dehumanization and humanization, occurring simultaneously, the second a reaction to the horrors of the first. Every year, more environmentalist activists are killed in Latin America than any other region in the world. Perhaps, I’m not sure, you can say the same thing about trade unionists, or trans activists, or feminists. In any case, the violence is acute. Yet they stand unbowed, on the frontlines, fighting for land, for clean water, for better pay, for dignity. Obviously, there are many other places of enormous courage—Palestine and especially Gaza first among them—but the long history of Latin America’s commitment to universal ideals is quite striking.

Social scientists like to ask: Why is democracy in Latin America so weak? But I think that question, particularly when we look at the commitments of people on the ground, gets it backward. We should ask: How has it stayed so strong? Latin Americans have been fighting fascism since World War II, and the lessons they offer is that you don’t beat fascism by calling fascists fascists. You beat it by welding democratic liberalism to a commitment to social rights and social justice. That is one clear lesson we could learn from this history.