The Origin of the Western Hemisphere Idea Author(S): Arthur P. Whitaker Source: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol

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The Origin of the Western Hemisphere Idea Author(s): Arthur P. Whitaker Source: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 98, No. 5 (Oct. 15, 1954), pp. 323-326 Published by: American Philosophical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3143911 . Accessed: 19/08/2011 12:56

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http://www.jstor.org THE ORIGIN OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE IDEA

ARTHUR P. WHITAKER Professorof Latin American History, University of Pennsylvania (Read April 23, 1954)

THE core of the Western Hemisphere idea is United States and Latin America, and even spread the proposition that the peoples of the Western to Canada. About 1940, however, there was a Hemisphere are united in a special relationship to widespread revolt against what the rebels called 4 one another that sets them apart from the rest the "Western Hemisphere complex." How suc- of the world; above all, apart from Europe. cessful the revolt has been, at least in this coun- Around this core there gathered at an early date try, is illustrated by the fact that today the United a large cluster of related ideas, social and cultural States is tied to Western Europe in an organiza- as well as politico-geographical, and mystical as tion, NATO, which is irreconcilable with the well as rational. Thus, already in 1813 Thomas classical Western Hemisphere idea, since an es- Jefferson was saying, in a famous letter to sential component of that idea was the separation Alexander von Humboldt which gave the idea its of America from Europe. first complete expression, that America has (not Paradoxically, the roots of this anti-European is but has) a hemisphere of its own, and that the idea lie deep in America's European past, for it unity of its peoples extended to all their "modes grew out of the conception of America as a New of existence." 2 World. Wholly European in its origin, this The Western Hemisphere.idea soon spread conception remained largely European in its de- from the United States to Latin America. It velopment down to the eighteenth century. The has subsequently found political expression in a European origin of the whole "New World" idea variety of important forms, each different from is obvious the moment one breaks the idea down the others and all imperfect in one way or another, into its two component parts, which are the new- such as the unilateral Monroe Doctrine of 1823, ness of America and the congruity of its several the multilateral corollary to the Monroe Doctrine parts. The idea that America was new bore the proposed by Argentine Foreign Minister Drago "made in Europe" label on its face, for the "wild in 1902, and the evolving Pan American move- surmise" with which Cortes and his contempo- ment since 1889. The vitality of the idea was raries viewed America and its adjacent waters maintained and even increased well on into the was surely not shared by the native Americans, present century. In 1916 young John Foster the Indians. To them, the New World was Dulles (now Secretary of State) based an im- Europe. Dr. Samuel Johnson put the case in a portant public address 3 on the assumption that nutshell when he said that Columbus "gave a new the nations of the Western Hemisphere have, as world to European curiosity."5 Likewise, the he put it, "a common personality, distinguishing idea of the congruity of the several parts of them from the other nations of the world" and "an America was one which, until the Europeans orbit absolutely detached" from the orbit of Eu- invented it and propagated it with their maps, had rope, Africa, and Asia. never occurred to anyone in all the agglomeration the 1930's this idea throve in the Through of indigenous societies sprinkled over America 1 This paper is a condensationof parts of the series of from Alaska to the Tierra del Fuego. To this CommonwealthLectures given by the author at Univer- sity College, London, in 1953. These lectures are to be 4A notable product of the revolt was the article by published in the autumn of 1954 by the Cornell Univer- Eugene Staley, The myth of the continents, Foreign sity Press under the title The Western Hemisphere Affairs 19: 481-494, 1941, which used the term "Western idea: its rise and decline. Hemisphere complex." This article was reprinted in 2 Quoted in Laura Bornholt, The Abbe de Pradt and Hamilton Fish Armstrong, ed., The foreign affairs the Monroe Doctrine, Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev. 24: 220, reader, 318-333, New York, Harper, 1947. 1944. 6 Quoted in Pedro Henriquez-Urefia, Literary currents 3 Second Pan American Scientific Congress, Pro- in Hispanic America, 4, Cambridge, Harvard Univ. ceedings 7: 687-692, Washington, Govt. Print. Off., 1917. Press, 1945. The italics are mine.

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, VOL. 98, NO. 5, OCTOBER, 1954 323 324 ARTHUR P. WHITAKER [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.

day the surviving remnants of those societies to the formulation of the Western Hemisphere have never accepted the idea; to them, Pan Ameri- idea. canism is gibberish. The intellectual revolution was accomplished The domestication of the New World idea in l)y the spread of the Enlightenment from Europe America and its development into the Western to all the countries across the Atlantic, first to the Hemisphere idea was a slow process, which re- United States, and somewhat later to Latin quired more than two centuries for its completion. America. In both it fell on fertile soil. Ameri- It took place in two stages: first the provincial cans, both North and South, were attracted some- and then the continental stage, or, in terms that what by the "completely original form of philo- apply to a later date, first the national and then sophic thought" which it produced, but still more the inter-American stage. For a long time dur- by its gospel of reform and progress through the ing its provincial stage the development seemed promotion of useful knowledge. to be in the opposite direction from the one Among the most important agencies in spread- leading to the Western Hemisphere idea, for its ing the Enlightenment, in America as in Europe, first result was a proliferation of parochialism. were the academies or learned societies which Sooner or later, the American descendants of sprang up in both areas in the course of the Europeans began to think of themselves as Ameri- eighteenth century. The first such body in the cans and no longer as Europeans-in-America; New World, and one of the most important, was but their sense of Americanism was localized in founded at Philadelphia in 1743. Its name, "The Brazil or New Granada or Peru or Virginia- American Philosophical Society. .. for Promoting 8 there was nothing continental about it. Even in Useful Knowledge," left no room for doubt British North America as late as 1765, a new about its being an offspring of the Enlightenment. note was struck when one of the delegates to the Similar societies began to be organized in Spanish Stamp Act Congress, Christopher Gadsden, ex- America about 1790.9 They were numerous, for horted his colleagues: "There ought to be no they enjoyed the royal government's good will and New England man, no New Yorker, known on at times its active support. The oldest of them, the Continent, but all of us Americans." 6 Yet the "Sociedad de Amigos del Pais," of Havana, is, even Gadsden meant, not the whole American like its Philadelphia counterpart, still very much continent, the whole Western Hemisphere, but alive today. The names given them were similar only that fragment of it, British America, which to those of their prototypes that had appeared in was to become the United States. Consequently, many parts of Spain since about 1760. such as the provincial stage resulted first in a fragmenta- "Patriotic Society," or "Society of Friends of tion of America through the development of local Their Country," with perhaps the prefix "Eco- loyalties which signified a weakening of ties with nomic"' but these old names soon acquired a new Europe but did not bind the fragments together significance in America. in a new synthesis. Through these societies and other channels, This synthesis was achieved in a second and the Enlightenment contributed to the growth of quite different stage and under a stimulus pro- the Western Hemisphere idea in three ways. vided mainly by Europe. The stimulus came First, it stimulated Americanism: throughout the from three eighteenth-century revolutions: the in- Americas its leading exponents took the patriot tellectual, the commercial, and the political. Since side in the struggles for independence from Eu- time is limited, I shall confine the rest of my my 7 two are stressed in Ernst remarks to the intellectual revolution, for These aspects respectively mainly The philosophy of the Enlightenment, Prince- it the two would never have led Cassirer, without other ton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1951, and Carl Becker, The heazenly city the philosophers, 6 Quoted in S. E. Morison and H. S. Commager, The of eighteenth-centzury Yale Univ. 1932. of the American republic, 29, New York, Oxford New Haven, Press, growth 8 when the was defini- Univ. 1937. the many evidences of an This name was adopted Society Press, Among A brief earlier of the same sort of Americanism in tively organized in 1768: Edwin G. Conklin, development Year Latin America one may note, for Brazil, Pedro Calmon, history of the American Philosophical Society, 1954. Historia de la civilizacion brasilena, 77-78, Buenos Book Amer. Philos. Soc. for 1953: 11, Phila., 9 Latin 4America and the Aires, Ministerio de Justicia e Instrucci6n P6blica, Arthur P. Whitaker, ed., 1938, and, for what is now Colombia, Juan Friede, El Enlightenment, 13-15, New York, Appleton-Century, is arraigo hist6rico del espiritu de independencia en el 1942. Dr. Robert Shafer of Syracuse University pre- in Nuevo Reino de Granada, Revista de Historia de paring a comprehensive study of these societies Spain America 33: 95-104, 1952. and Spanish America. V'OL. 98, NO. 5, 1954] ORIGIN OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE IDEA 325 rope in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth the hopeful philosophers of that age looked for- centuries. Second, it created for the first time ward to when they spoke of the international a basic kinship of ideas between the two Americas, "Republic of Letters" and called themselves "citi- bridging the gap opened between Protestants and zens of the world." Not until the Atlantic com- Catholics just when America was colonized. The munity was split in twain in the early nineteenth rapprochement was aided by the fusion of the En- century were international-minded Americans lightenment in Spanish America with the older fully converted to the view that they were citizens liberal Spanish-Catholic tradition, which was re- of only half a world. vived at this time.10 Third, the Enlightenment In the meanwhile, however, one other develop- gave the Americas for the first time a reciprocal ment arising out of the Enlightenment had com- interest in, and some knowledge about, each other's pleted the preparation of American minds for the culture. new hemispheric orientation. This was the elabo- At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the ration by European writers of what we may call attitude of both Americas is typified by Cotton an anti-American thesis, and the defensive reac- Mather, whose only interest in Spanish America tion which this thesis not unnaturally provoked was a missionary one-to convert the papists to among the victims of their denigration.13 Protestantism. The new attitude which both The anti-American thesis may be summed up sides were beginning to take as the century came in the proposition that the New World was in- to a close is illustrated by the fact that, even in ferior to the old in every respect, as to both man the wilds of Venezuela, Alexander von Humboldt and nature. This proposition betokened a new encountered a Spanish American scientist who attitude towards America on the part of Europe was familiar with the works of Benjamin Franklin. which was clearly a by-product of the Enlighten- By 1800 the American Philosophical Society had ment. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries established relations with scientists in Mexico European writers had made no such generalized and Cuba, and in 1801 and 1802 the Ga2eta de comparison, either favorable or unfavorable, be- Guatemala took extensive notice of medical studies tween America and Europe. To them, the new- recently published by Drs. Benjamin Rush and ness of the New World did not give it either Benjamin Smith Barton of Philadelphia. In 1808 uniqueness or unity; rather, as Henriquez-Urefia the Peruvian Jose Hipolito Unanue published a has pointed out,14 they considered it in terms of book on the climate of Lima (El clima de Lima) a problem which was universal and which the which contains several references to the New European mind of the Renaissance was already York periodical Medical Repository.1 debating when America was discovered, namely, To be sure, the Enlightenment's spread at first "the age-old contrast between nature and culture." produced the opposite effect, for it stunted the The results of the inquiry were mixed, for if it growth of the isolationist Western Hemisphere produced the cult of the noble savage, it also idea by fostering a feeling of fellowship among produced the cult of the ignoble savage; and in enlightened people in all the countries on both both cases the American savage was judged not sides of the Atlantic.12 This was the kind of thing as an American but as a savage. Nor was such im- 10 On the revival of this tradition, see especially any generalized comparison Camilo Barcia Trelles, Doctrina de Monroe y coopera- plicit in the tendency of Europeans of that earlier ci6n internacional, in Academie de Droit International, period to think of America in utopian terms. Sir Receeil des cours, 1930 2: 391-605, Paris, 1931; Manuel Gimenez Fernandez, Las doctrinas populistas en la triangle, in Ensayos sobre la historia del Nuevo Mundo, independencia de Hispano-America, Sevilla, Escuela de 69-96, Mexico City, Instituto Panamericano de Geo- Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1947; and Silvio Zavala, grafia e Historia, 1951. On the European intellectual La filosofia politica en la conquista de America, Mexico background, see Paul Hazard, La pensee europeene au City, Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 1947. XVIIIeme siecle, Paris, Boivin, 1946, and, on the aspect 11 Harry Bernstein, Some Inter-American aspects of indicated, Gilbert Chinard, Eighteenth century theories the Enlightenment, in Whitaker, ed., Latin America and on America as a human habitat, Proc. Amer. Philos. the Enlightenment (cited above, n. 9), 53-69. See also Soc. 91 (1): 27-57, 1947. the same author's Origins of Inter-American interest, 13Antonello Gerbi, Viejas polemicas sobre el nuevo Phila., Univ. of Penna. Press, 1945. mzundo, Lima, Banco de Credito del Per6, 3rd ed., 1946, 12 The growth of this feeling is discussed in broad and Leopoldo Zea, America como conciencia, 109-120, terms in Michael Kraus, The Atlantic civilization: Chap. VII, "Nacimiento de una conciencia americana," eighteenth-century, Ithaca, Cornell Univ. Press, 1949 Mexico City, Cuadernos Americanos, 1953. and Arthur P. Whitaker, The Americas in the Atlantic 14 Henriquez-Urefia, op. cit., 14. 326 ARTHUR P. WHITAKER [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.

Thomas More and Tomaso Campanella chose stimulated its growth by creating a wholly new America as the locus of their utopias, and about nexus of trade and communications which pro- 1540 the Spanish-born Bishop Vasco de Quiroga vided for the first time the means of political and actually established two utopian communities in cultural intercourse between the Americas.17 The Mexico.15 It would be a great mistake, how- final stimulus came from the political revolutions ever, to regard these utopias as inverting the that swept the Atlantic world in the half century eighteenth-century judgment and exalting America after 1775, and above all from the Spanish Ameri- above Europe. The utopians merely believed can revolutions that began in 1810. that America provided a more favorable environ- The latter were the catalytic agent which ire- ment for the application of ideas that were thor- cipitated the formulation of the Western Hemi- oughly European. When they thought about the sphere idea. In the vast area stretching from native peoples of America at all, they were sure California to Cape Horn, Spanish American that these stood quite as sorely in need of reform patriots started a struggle for independence which as did the peoples of Europe. This conviction quickened the sense of hemispheric solidarity by was strongly stressed by Vasco de Quiroga, the its apparent analogy to the recent struggle of the only one of the three who either saw America United States against another European power, with his own eyes or actually tried to put Utopia Great Britain. The Spanish American struggle into practice. In short, the sixteenth and seven- was hardly well begun when there emerged in teenth centuries did not produce the antithesis Europe that Concert of the great powers, com- "Europe versus America." monly called the Holy Alliance, whose leaders Eighteenth-century Europe did produce it, in soon took a stand hostile to the very principles the form of that denigration of America to which on which the independence of every American reference has already been made. Begun on a nation was based, and to their whole political way large scale by the French scientist-philosopher of life-to the right of revolution, popular Buffon in 1750, this denigration reached its climax sovereignty, constitutional and representative gov- in de Pauw's Recherches philosophiques sur les ernments, and personal liberty. That Britain, one Aimericains (1768), according to which every- of the members of the European Concert, did not thing in America was "either degenerate or mon- underwrite this program, was not clear to Ameri- strous," its men cowardly and impotent, its iron cans until after the catalytic agent had already unfit even for making nails, and its dogs unable done its work. The antithesis was completed to bark. Indignant rejoinders on behalf of the when the concert of despotic Europe provoked a New World's dogs and its other forms of life concert of the free Western Hemisphere. poured forth from both North and South America That typical child of the Enlightenment, Ben- in the next generation-from the pens of Fathers jamin Franklin, had prayed that "a thorough Molina and Clavigero, Thomas Jefferson, Philip knowledge of the Rights of Man may pervade all Freneau, Joel Barlow, Alexander Hamilton, Ben- nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set jamin Smith Barton, and many others.16 To his foot anywhere on its surface and say 'This is them, of course, America was superior to Europe. my country.' " Early in the nineteenth century This was something new, for previously Ameri- many Americans came to feel that the Western cans had never made a generalized comparison of Hemisphere was the only part of the world which the two. It was from European writers that could answer Franklin's prayer.s8 When they Americans learned to think in terms of an antithe- did so, the formulation of the \Western Hemi- sis between America and Europe. sphere idea was complete. and revolutions The commercial political gave 17Arthur P. Whitaker, The United States and the the antithesis currency and a focus in the Western independenceof LatinAmerica, 1800-1830, 1-38, Chapter Hemisphere idea. The commercial revolution One, "Opening the Door to Latin America," Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1941. 15 Silvio Zavala, La Utopia de Tomas More en la 18 How this situation, by quickening the sense of the Nueva Espaniay otros estudios, Mexico City, Colegio de newness of the New World, also stimulated the develop- Mexico, 1937. ment of Manifest Destiny is pointed out in Albert K. 16The European attack and the American rejoinder Weinberg, The idea of Manifest Destiny, 134-135, Balti- are discussed in the two works cited above, n. 13. more, Johns Hopkins Press, 1935.