Latest / The Nation Podcasts / A New History of the Americas, Pt. 2 w/ Greg Grandin | American Prestige

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A New History of the Americas, Pt. 2 w/ Greg Grandin | American Prestige · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello, prestige heads and welcome to American prestige.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Danny Bessner here, as always with my friend in Comrade Derek Davis, and I'm very excited to welcome back to the podcast that day to discuss his new book, Greg Grandon, you already know, but Greg is the Peter V in C. Van Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, and we're talking about his new book, America America, a new history of the new world.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Greg, thanks for joining us again.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me back.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we left off last time, kind of the the the the the eve of the Civil War and I know the Civil Wars and a major focus of the book, but how do how does Latin America, US relations transform over the second half of the 19th century, of course culminating in the war that has a million names, the Spanish American War, the War of 1898, the Spanish American Cuban War, the Spanish American Cuban Filipino War.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: of 1898.
• 1:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And why is that such a key moment?
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I, I, I, I, I, and then we're going to really focus on the 20th century, but I think we should sort of close out the 19th.
• 1:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well, I think it's a turning point in the sense that's a transition from, you know, Matthew copyrights about how the Democratic Party and the slaves were in the command of foreign policy and imperialist policy in the Americas.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, so it was very much, in the minds of many Latin American diplomats and politicians, you know, the aggression and interventionism and annexationism that the United States said,
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: had pursued throughout the first half of the 19th century for the Civil War was very much associated with the South, with slavours, with expansionists, with settlers.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there was a sense that the Republican Party was different, and they certainly applauded Abraham Lincoln.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you know, this book does,
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: does go into the way Lincoln Imagine Central America and Haiti as a place to export for people of color to solve the race question.
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in terms of Latin Americans, they felt that Lincoln was a
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: incredible moment of good will.
• 2:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Latin America had abolished slavery without a civil war.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think that's the big thing.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: The emancipation didn't happen immediately with Spanish American independence, but there was a presumption that independence would bring about emancipation to the point where depending on the local politics, some countries like Chile,
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: much later, but they, but they saw the United States' civil war as a continuation of this, you know, of the revolutionary promise, and they saw Lincoln, you know, on as an equal it's him on Bolivar.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so the civil war was a turnip, but then, of course, the Republican Party,
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, within there in the cockpit, become the agents of expansion and imperialism, right?
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: They, you know, they, they continue the policy of kind of the conquest of the West in many ways.
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Civil War winning the Civil War was predicated on that expansion.
• 3:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it didn't take long for Latin Americans to notice and to read just their opinion of back to the United States as an agent of expansion and a threat to be contained.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so that, I think, obviously, is really, there's this turn in the late 19th early 20th century.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that this has become a problem for American historians, because this is the moment when the United States acts the most, like a typical great power of Europe with the seizure of various protectors and territories.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And unincorporated, I think, is the legal definition that the Congress eventually develops.
• 4:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: with basically the seizure of formal colonies and though we still have those colonies over the course of the 20th century American imperialism would function quite differently.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So could we talk a little bit about the Spanish American war and how you understand this American move to the seizure of colonies and particularly how it related to what was going on in Latin America right before the Mexican Revolution which we'll talk about in the minute.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well, yes, in some ways that was the terminus of all this expansion, right, the continuation of the war, the frontier across the Pacific and down into the Caribbean.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there is a kind of transformation in the rhetoric in which the United States justifies its imperialism.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I approached the war of 1898 by focusing on Jose Mati and Jose Mati's involvement in the Pan American movement, which, you know, the first Pan American conference is held in 1890 and, and Mati is constantly worried
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, he wants independence for Cuba, but he any wants the United States to support independence and to recognize the legitimacy of the insurgents in Cuba that had been fighting effectively since 1868, you know, with ads and flows in terms of the intensity of the war, but but he won the United States to recognize the insurgents, but he also knew the danger of that recognition could also bring about the potential of annexation.
• 5:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Cuba is this weird island that's kind of,
• 5:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: early in the 19th century was described the equivalent of kind of, you know, was constantly always about to fall into the hands, either, get bread hit and want necks to go or Columbia or the United States.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the United States' intervention was in the war of 1898.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: the way I talk about in the book is is the Republicans who led that they didn't understand it as as necessarily imperialism.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: They understood it in much more idealist terms.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: They understood it as
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: uh, a kind of expansion of the rule of law, you know, they really tried it out a lot of the tropes of the black legend, you know, the expulsion of Spanish brutality.
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the first time the phrase human rights was used to justify an intervention was, was in Cuba, where Spain was carrying out a very brutal
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the war of 1898, at least from the point of view of Latin America, this is understood as a kind of combination of what they understood as an expansionist, yeah, it says, but within the United States, they saw it as a moment of a consolidation of an international legal regime.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, at the same time that the United States is expanding and taking these informal colonies, it's also tentatively building out the beginnings of an international order that is supposedly defined by the rule of law.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: The second-haired conference takes place in 1907, where it puts into place a lot of the things that we'll see with the late legumations, presidents like Theodore Roosevelt, you know, Latin America itself is putting forward doctrines at the Drago doctrine, the Calvo doctrine, which was supposed to limit the ability of European nations or the United States to use gunboats in order to enforce debt collection.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, the United States is caught between and betwicks this.
• 7:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: They don't, you know, they don't mind citing those doctrines in order to keep Europe out of the Caribbean, but they don't necessarily want to be held down by those doctrines themselves.
• 8:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so there's a going back and forth, right, that you, you know, whether the United States is going to submit and support.
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: this new legal regime.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think the United States very quickly realizes that it can can support this legal regime and it doesn't necessarily lead to a diminution of a US power, but more rationalization of power.
• 8:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think you see that in certainly in the Roosevelt
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: and the Secretary of State route, they support this.
• 8:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Even as they're sending in gunboats to put down, you know, it would down to sell crises in the Dominican Republic.
• 8:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not contradiction really comes to the fore after 1898, where the United States has to figure out whether it's just going to be a policeman for US's private interest, or it's going to act
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: as a kind of gyroscope to kind of stabilize a broader environment in which capital investment could take place.
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the United States goes back and forth between the two, right?
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's torn between, you know, between, between.
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you see, you see it in the individual, you see this runs through up to Wilson where Wilson is, imagines a, a rural, a world rule of law at the same time
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: the Marines into Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, it's an interesting moment and it's an important moment in the evolution of U.S.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: power.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Greg, maybe we should move now to the Mexican Revolution.
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you talk about this in the book as sort of,
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: the shock that it presented to American capitalists with all the money that was invested in Mexico and all the sort of, you know, all that was at risk from this revolution and the decision to, you know, how that affected the U.S.
• 10:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: response.
• 10:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So talk a bit about the Mexican Revolution and the U.S.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: reaction to it.
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, the Mexican Revolution, you can't really talk about the Mexican Revolution outside of its real broader context.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, in Mexico really is the axis on which so much of US history turns, even to this day when you're trying to make sense of Trumpism, you can go back and you look at the, you know, you look at the Texas session and you look at the Mexico.
• 10:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: We talked about this in the last, in the last episode, but I want to stress that it was real
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nativeist nationalism, a kind of Anglo-Saxonism, defined, forged in war, defined against Spanish-American nations, particularly Mexico, because of driving force of US nationalism, or a certain kind of US nationalism.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I mean, you know, we have all of these people want to take all of Mexico.
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: They want to take all of Central America.
• 11:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: They want to turn the whole, all of the Americas were not all the Americas, at least the Northern, Northern continent, into a homeland, in Anglo-Saxons, you know, which are clear in the rhetoric.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's a through line.
• 11:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then Mexico, Mexico becomes after the Civil War,
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: basically the United States' first nation-building project, liberal night when which capital from New York and these coasts from Boston, Philadelphia flow into Mexico and basically remake the peasant economy into an agro-industrial,
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: maybe not industrial, but agro-exporting nation in which all, you know, all of its resource extractionism, its mining, its ranching, its wheat fields, sugar plantations, all held by U.S.
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: capital.
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it was also all of the infrastructure of the developing nation that
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: electrical companies, the trolley companies, the railroads, you know, Mexico is basically a subsidiary of U.S.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: capital and obviously it's ruled at the time by Profio Dias, one of these classic liberal or liberal Latin American liberals in which liberalism has become basic modernizers.
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, modernism, modernism, modernism, modernism.
• 12:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And consolidating central control, United States goes back and forth in Latin America.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is another way in which Latin America becomes a kind of workshop between supporting federalists.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: So decentralizes when they don't like, you know, when they have somebody up.
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: that opposes US interests in power.
• 12:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And but when there's somebody in power that supports US capitalist expansion, their all of the United States is totally fine with centralization of power.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And portfolio deas, of course, creates a very modern repressive state in which the railroads and the police and the federal allies and all of that is put to basically protecting property rights.
• 13:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And 1910 is the, you know, I mean that we're not to take anything away from the Haitian revolution, which of course is, you know, an agrarian revolution, you know, planted up plant, you know, a revolution against the sugar plantation, the political economy.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the Mexican revolution is the first third world revolution against industrial capitalism, and it's enabling myths.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: anybody's guess.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know what it consolidates may be.
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: 17 or 20 right those are the two years usually.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: 18, 17 or 21.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Great the con is revolution.
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Con is is creation later on.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Work for the pre and creating solidity state but also enacting the land reform.
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the Mexican Revolution kind of
• 14:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: We don't know if we have time to get into the weeds with this, but Wilson Woodrow Wilson gets all caught up in the Mexican Revolution.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And one of the, I'll just say, briefly without going into the details that you really can't understand the League of Nations and Wilson's actions and little League of Nations without understanding Mexico.
• 14:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: and Wilson's, you know, the way Wilson threw himself into the Mexican Revolution.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: In ways that were not necessarily bad, like, you know, what didn't things I was surprised about, because I grew up thinking of Wilson, we'll teach him at Latin Americans, and we'll let good men.
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Mexican Revolution was an ideological challenge for Wilson.
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: It really, it really
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: forced him to confront some of this premises and for a short window of time, he imagined himself as ideologically sympathetic and allied with, with, with, with, bunch of via, with the, you know, we thought he was the, the sort of the Mexican Revolution.
• 15:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think he used the word, and he liked via for a while.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, but that's probably too much detail to go into what really happens in 1917 is the is the elaboration of the world's first social democratic constitution.
• 15:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, predates bymod predates, you know, the constitutions in India and elsewhere that that elaborated social rights, you know, the, you know, the constitution.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: it had all of the kind of negative rights that we associate with the US Constitution or rights which restrain the state, but then it had a full palette of what we think of social economic or active rights.
• 15:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, um, positive rights in which that requires the state to take action to ensure a dignified life.
• 15:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I see this as the kind of fulfillment of a lot of the ideological currents that had been at played from the conquest forward.
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, and in and in many ways,
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: The drafter of its most radical provision, Article 17, I'm sorry, Article 27, the Constitution was passed in 1917, ratified 1917, acknowledged the legitimacy of private property, but said that it was the state's prerogative that the right came from the state and that the state,
• 16:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: own all subsoil resources.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now what I've been saying this for quite a long time, but what was so radical about that is one thing that challenged liberal property rights and the presumptions that undergird them from the radical Bolshevik perspective, which you could just dismiss out of hand.
• 16:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's another thing when you're undermining liberalism from within, as the Mexican Revolution is doing by taking the presumptions of liberalism and extending them into the economic realm.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's basically what the Mexico River, and the person who drafted that was a country lawyer, he was in the Bahia region, that
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: that the region that the Chantartino talks about is the epicenter of a certain kind of capitalism, and he saw the dispossession.
• 17:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: He saw the massive land loss, and he and the committee had drafted Article 27 understood what they were doing as going backwards in order to go forward.
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: that they were rejecting modern notions of property and going back to more colonial forms of the idea of entailments and corporate rights and built into Article 27, not just the right of the state to expropriate land and redistributed to peasants which becomes an element to strut of
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: of everything from the radical left to modernization bureaus by the time you get to the 1960s, and incorporate into Article 27 the right to reconstitute peasant comments on the notes that called a hilos.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this article drove the United States and you know, different agents of the United States business interests, particularly the oil industry, but also associated property holders, you know, lawyers.
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's just, it was the equivalent of, you know, of basically mum Donnie just winning them.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: the New York primary.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: They thought it was like, you know, they just didn't know how to deal with it and and they demanded that the article be struck from the Constitution and of course it wasn't.
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't enacted so much.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, presidents gradually eased into it by in terms of
• 18:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: for the first time ever regulating, say, the petroleum industry, or forcing petroleum companies to register their properties, to pay taxes, to pay tariffs.
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: But by the time you get to 1930s with the election of Lazaro Caudinus, he's the first person to fully apply Article 27.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: and just to just to give one quick example of one of the things that he did and compare some of the United States.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: He basically allowed the reconstitution of the Yaki calm.
• 19:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yaki Native Americans would.
• 19:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you think about them as the Cherokee, they would dispossess, they would slave, they were removed, you know, their home lands were destroyed.
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, by the end of the 1930s, they had an enormous amount of land restored to them.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: It would have been the equivalent of giving back half of Tennessee to the Cherokees.
• 19:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what the Mexican Revolution did.
• 19:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I want to come back to something we talked about last time the Monroe Doctrine because there is this debate over what the Monroe Doctrine means at the end of the Mexican revolution at the end of World War I as the discussions are happening about the League of Nations.
• 19:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: You write about this Wilson is sort of really he's a little bit all over the place about Monroe Doctrine but he views it as this kind of basis for some of the things that he wants
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Teddy Roosevelt who's still hanging around at this point who wants to turn Mexico into the Balkans of the United States and just police it and that's to him what the Monroe doctrine means and so there's this debate back and forth and one of the arguments I thought was morbidly funny I guess was the the Illinois senator I can't remember his name who said
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, it was, you know, arguing against the League of Nations and this argument was like, what if we have to go to war with Mexico?
• 20:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: What are we going to do?
• 20:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, do we have to go to the League of Nations?
• 20:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why can't we just do it ourselves?
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's so, of Lord's Sherman.
• 20:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was his name.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, it's, it's, it's, talk about how this, this, been, the Monroe Doctor kind of plays into the larger themes here in the debate that's going on.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's impossible to define, but if you remember the number of, and it's most fundamental level is two different ways of thinking among a doctor.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can see their doctorate of anti-colonialism.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Europe, keep out, no part of the Americas that is independent could be reconquered.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Latin Americans like that part.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: They saw it as an analog to their own revision of international law, which I talked about earlier, that basically set the stage for League of Nations and the United
• 21:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: and, you know, a vocation of the doctrine of conquest, acceptance of burdens, and end of aggressive war, all of that.
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Or it's a standing police warrant, and for the United States to basically go out and do whatever it needs to do, whenever it wants to do it.
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's two different ways of thinking about the moderate doctrine.
• 21:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Wilson, this goes back to what I just planned to add earlier, Wilson, at first,
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, basically he dedicated his first two cabinemen meetings just talking about Latin America, not even the Mexican crisis.
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's just Latin American general, and I have the United States.
• 21:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a bit aggressive.
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, has been humbled if we understand what we've done in Latin America.
• 21:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: We understand why they don't like us.
• 21:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he really had a, and he basically
• 22:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: in many ways, the Latin American version of the Monroe doctrine, as a doctrine of law, as a doctrine of a doctrine of sovereign equality, as an anti-colonial doctrine.
• 22:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: So he starts, he starts to go back to the League of Nations,
• 22:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: When he starts talking about the League of Nations in its early idealistic form, before it becomes the reactionary thing that actually was put into place, he's citing the Monroe Doctrine as Latin American cited.
• 22:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you want to know what we want to say, if you want to know what we want to do, League of Nations look at a spirit and an Americanism.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Look at the Monroe Doctrine.
• 22:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now of course,
• 22:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: as Wilson's vision problem idealism crumbles under its own hypocrisy and the restraints he was operating under, whatever, as League of Nations gradually evolves into the mandatory justification for ongoing colonialism.
• 23:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nationalist in the United States wanna know, well what about the Monroe doctrine?
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: What do you mean it's the Monroe doctrine?
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: What do you mean the League of Nations is the globalization of the Monroe doctrine?
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: the Monroe Doctrine, just like it is, just for us, for our MSVAT, granting us mandatory power in Latin America.
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, Wilson has to cave into that.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, in the last final days of right in the covenant, he basically says, look, we need another article in the chart of in the covenant.
• 23:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: We need an article affirming the legitimacy of the Monroe Doctrine.
• 23:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And by that time, it wasn't the Monroe Doctrine, the anti-colonial Monroe Doctrine.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was the Monroe Doctrine that basically gave the United States authority to go in Latin America whenever one.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was an appeasement.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was an attempt to appease the nationalist back home.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, Britain was fine with that.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: They were like, yeah, that sounds good.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can have your Monroe Doctrine.
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe we'll have a Monroe Doctrine for Africa.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Japanese said,
• 24:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: China was horrified like what does this mean?
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because they knew what is Japan?
• 24:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Japan would later go on and say, you know, what does we have a Monroe doctrine phrase?
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, and what it's hilarious that you say it's funny parts of the debate when you read the
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: the debate where whether other delegates in the draft and the drafting committee that will send Chad, they kept on asking him to define it.
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Can you define them on word doctrine?
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Can you define them on word doctrine?
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he could it because, you know, in his heart to give him the benefit of doubt, the Monroe doctrine is this doctrine of proceduralism and anti-colonialism and
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was what he was saying, what the Monroe Doctrine that he was insisting that the that the that the that the League of Nations explicitly affirm the legitimacy of was not that Monroe Doctrine was the Monroe Doctrine of Teddy Roosevelt.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: and all of the other nationalists.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so you had the French delicate, can we, can we at least have a footnote?
• 25:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for waiting in what the mother of doctors.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And like, of course, there's no footnote.
• 25:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the League of Nations article, I think it's maybe article 17.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't remember exactly.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, basically affirms nothing in this covenant, you know, kind of, you know, something like the language is another is coming in, you know, denies illegitimacy of the Monroe doctor.
• 25:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: But even having accomplished that, the U.S.
• 25:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: still didn't ratify the legumations in joy.
• 25:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Wilson and also the Republican administrations of hearting and coolage also remain quite active in Latin America with various invasions and occupations over the course of the teens and the 20s something that Americans just basically learn nothing about that the United States occupied all of these these territories so I'm just
• 26:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before we get to FDR and his quote unquote good neighbor policy, maybe you could set up that policy and explain what was going on in the teens in the 20s and how do you think this relates to this social democratic impulse because ultimately like you gestured toward earlier the Mexican constitution super progressive and
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's these other things going on and one might argue that reaction wound up eventually triumphant.
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let's talk about those occupations.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about the outcome of the Mexican revolution into the pre and then maybe the talk about FDRs good neighbor problems.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, the occupations start under Wilson.
• 26:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Wilson, you know, as he's wrestling with the
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: and understanding the need for revolution and imagining yourself allowing with the revolutionaries, you know, that's not Haiti in the Dominican Republic.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: So he's the, you know, so when this, you know, when this crisis caused by, you know, US finance, corporations or loans or, you know, or other other investments in Haiti and the Dominican Republic courses, courses, political turmoil, Wilson sent troops in and led to,
• 27:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, many occupations of the Dominican Republic of Haiti and then later of Nicaragua, of course, with San Dino, you know, fighting, San Dino, launching his insurgency against marine occupation in 1927.
• 27:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And those are all the occupations that basically are inherited by FDR, what is elected in 1932.
• 27:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, and it's the equivalent of, you know, I, I like, you know, when I teach, I, I say, the, you know, Central American, the Caribbean, we're kind of like the equivalent of the Middle East, the more the US projected military hard power, the more it needed military and hard power to pacify the crisis these causes by military, it hard power.
• 28:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know um uh yeah so so it was a period it wasn't a period of isolation you know in diplomatic history there's a there's a tendency despite all of the hard work that William happened when William was dead in the 1950s and 60s to insist that there was never a period of isolation as a many night states I know I know in in in in in the common sense of diplomatic some
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: strands of diplomatic history, there's this idea that the United States was isolation is before Roosevelt, but that was not the case.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: In terms of Latin America, the United States was all over Latin America.
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Wilson passed the federal reserve act, and that act allowed banks like, you know,
• 29:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: what becomes city bank to basically ease out one in finance and London capital and biggest take court take over Latin America's banking sector.
• 29:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, that internationalized U.S.
• 29:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: finance, the federal reserve act, and that was passed under Wilson.
• 29:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's not isolationism.
• 29:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: To answer your question about Mexico, I mean, you know, a lot of this depends, you know, to talk about, this is what makes Mexico such a, such a fascinating place.
• 29:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: When did it become reaction?
• 29:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Every when was the revolution over, you know, was it the creation of a one party
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: all of the crises and sectarianism that would lead periodically more than periodically, every other day it seemed that the assassination of a president and incorporated into a party that was able to kind of work to broker all of those differences, you know, different.
• 30:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: different tendencies and interests and constituencies, and created one of the most stable, largest middle classes in the third world for a long time, right?
• 30:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't start
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, and, and, and all of that, but, you know, um, you know, the Mexican revolution is just shot through with paradoxes and contradictions that are debatable, uh, when it, and when we're high-longed radical phase and continues, when it's mature, at what point, the its promises betrayed is a parade.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, I really, really, I really, I really, really, I really, really, I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really,
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, with the Revolution of the Trade is a great book by Adolfo Gilly, and Adolfo was a trot.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I mean, I'm using wonderful scholar, wonderful historian, but he had a very clear understanding of what a revolution was, and certainly the creation of an authority.
• 31:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: You could see it in this historiography, right?
• 31:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because in the historiography of the Mexican Revolution, that was this moment in the 1930 and 40 where you at US historians, like Frank Tannenbaum, they talked about the pop, you know, they talked about the Mexican Revolution as this great democratic.
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, a rock ship.
• 31:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then, you know, by the time you get and even John Walmax is a partner and, you know, in 1968, it's a partner in the Mexican Revolution, there's still a lot of that in that book.
• 31:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: But by the time you get to the 1970s and 1980s, you have, you know, John Walmax himself,
• 31:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: thinking that the revolution did nothing but create all the buy at the state and really was just a civil war.
• 32:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, John Womack has this line in a famous revisionist, I say, it was a civil war between different factions of the bourgeoisie and, you know, the peasants paid the price, you know, so you went from this kind of Frank Tantan in Bomb, the O.
• 32:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: the revolutionized this populist eruption to, you know, the revolution did nothing but create a Leviathan state.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then the next phase of that is historians going into the weeds with social history and looking at, you know, how nationalism resonated among peasants, among non-elite actors,
• 32:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: and how, you know, kind of grumpy and political, his political, history, political culture and in state formation.
• 32:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: That was the kind of exit out of that, you know, that, you know, in-pass between, is it a populist revolution or did it do nothing but create a BMA, you know, the, you know, an oppressive bureaucratic state, yet, you had this turn to kind of grumpy and political culture.
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's still ha ha ha.
• 33:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, for sure.
• 33:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then people try to explain why did the pre like give up its rule peacefully and all those things, but that's that's a different episode.
• 33:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's return to FDR and how did how did US Latin Americans proceed over the 30s and then into World War?
• 33:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: to.
• 33:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this good neighbor policy transforms, of course, the moment when the United States really steps on this global stage as the hedgemon.
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: How does Latin American play into that process and how does Latin American sort of social democratic impulses react to the U.S.
• 33:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: becoming the superpower.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so this was a big push from Latin America throughout the 19th century for what they call American international law, you know, they understood themselves, you know, there was any given country was perennial in crisis, but that they did develop a foreign policy cadre, you know, across the hemisphere, Pan American foreign policy cadre, that understood themselves.
• 34:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: They basically felt like the best way to stabilize domestic politics was to reform the international system.
• 34:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so you had people like Louis Drago in Argentina and Carlos Calvo and all of these people that promoted what was intentionally called American International Law, and they've tried to force the United States to submit to that.
• 34:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the United States kept on saying, they can't be an American international law.
• 34:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: They can only be international law.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: International or as universal, and Latin Americans said, okay, we'll drop the adjective.
• 34:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll just call it international law, but but at the foundation was a recognition of sovereignty, right?
• 34:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: That was a foundational premise, an end aggressive war, an end to colonialism, an end to imperialism, and an end in the case of the United States, the word that would use most often, an end to interventionism.
• 34:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: and certainly an end to annexation and the United States, you know, refused and all of these pan-American meetings that they would have starting in the 1890s, 1, 2, 3, 4, would up to Havana in 1928, you know, pretty much rehearsed the same arguments, you know, will you commit to being an initiative, giving up the right of intervention and, you know,
• 35:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, and nothing would really, but at the same time, the kind of technograph were building the infrastructure of pan-Americanism.
• 35:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: They were standardizing postal codes and telegraph, you know, whatever, you know, standards and weights and measures.
• 35:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there was a kind of pan-Americanism of the materiality of it, as it supported the expansion of other hemispheric capitalism taking place,
• 35:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: So then the depression happens, FDR is elected, FDR has this too failed international conferences in Europe, you know, he wants to be a world leader, but the world isn't really responding, you know, Europe's going to fast, you know, Europe's going fascist, Asia's going militarist, and so Latin America on the docket is a Pan-American conference scheduled
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he tells Cordellol, his secretary of state, one of you go down there, rather than the rather than the assistant secretary of state, and deal with the Latin Americans.
• 36:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the whole at first didn't want to go because the U.S.
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: was at that moment in negotiations to recognize the Soviet Union and a whole wanted to be a part of that, but he went, he thought,
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: How was an odd duck at the beginning of the new deal?
• 36:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was from Tennessee.
• 36:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: He understood himself as a jackstoneian.
• 36:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: His father was a Confederate soldier.
• 36:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, after the war spent decades searching down, somebody who blinded him to the exact revenge, but could help was more of a kind of reforming jackstoneian.
• 37:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was open to the world and he was a free trader.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he happened to have with him on that delegation going down to Montevideo Ernest Gruning, who was an editor of the nation.
• 37:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was a radical anti-communist.
• 37:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was Jewish.
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: He came for a big, large, wealthy Jewish family.
• 37:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: He had four radical sisters that were involved in all the kind of Bohemian left and, you know, fighting racism and class struggling and
• 37:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: became famous for his opposition to the U.S.
• 37:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: occupation of Haiti, compared it.
• 37:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: He said it was functional, the functional equivalent of what Belgium must do, what Belgium must do in the Congo.
• 37:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, and, and because FDR,
• 37:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, it was, it was a different moment in the U.S.
• 37:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: in the trajectory of foreign history of foreign policy.
• 38:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, so after you always more open to having somebody like a radical like rooming go down with hull and grooming bundled hull on the way down and basically said you have to accept the ride, you know, you have to give up the ride of a dimension and accept the absolute sovereignty of Latin American nations.
• 38:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's, that's the way to go.
• 38:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's the thing.
• 38:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And hull is like,
• 38:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: What am I going to, you know, the Hearst Papers will, you know, what are we going to do when Latin American revolutions break out and, you know, they start burning and maraudering and then Groening said that usually happens after we intervene.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and Groening was, and, and also in the whole's mind, there was a kind of analog on relationship between free trade and non-interventionism.
• 38:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, he began to see that there was a political, you know, a equivalent between lazy, fair economics and non-intervening in the political realm.
• 39:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's how he came to, when he showed up in Montevideo and Latin Americans made the demand, he said, okay.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: in the United States recognizes the absolute sovereignty of all Latin American nations, no matter how big or small, in the internal and external affairs of all nations, and we reject the right intervention.
• 39:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, he was hailed as an unconquering hero.
• 39:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the headline, the New York Times was the age of imperialism is over.
• 39:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, after you all sent hold down there and told not to make any commitments, the basically just give them some airplane, you know, airport landing lights so they could land their planes and night.
• 39:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And yet hold this radical turnaround that, you know, that change the course of
• 39:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: of the New Deal and basically it saved the New Deal and it's set the United States up nicely, a prepare for World War II and then to fight fascism.
• 40:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: The way it saved the New Deal is Hulk comes back and he's able to convince Roosevelt to allow him to sign these non-reciprocal free trade agreements.
• 40:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, this was an early in the new deal where the, you know, the left wing of the brave FDRs brain trust was not very big on free trade, but Roosevelt saw the success in Latin America and and and and and and and and a whole within it within a short period of time saw something like 11 free trade agreements with Latin America and what that did was that one
• 40:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: thinking, you know, broke with the mold of that RA, broke with them over a number of things.
• 40:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it consolidated a kind of high-tech capital intensive corporate block that wasn't as reactionary as the reactionaries, that were backing things like the Liberty League and the fascists.
• 41:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, like the DuPans, and, you know, even though DuPans were chemicals and technically, by the class interest, they should have supported open markets and Latin America.
• 41:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Anyway.
• 41:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: but hold becomes this agent of opening markets to the world and that creates the kind of corporate ballast for the new deal to move forward and consolidate itself and per Roosevelt's reelection in in 1936.
• 41:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: The other thing that's fascinating is
• 41:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, we know the phrase could, could neighbor policy.
• 41:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think on the United States of the neighbor policy, it's become a little bit of cliche under Roosevelt.
• 41:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: It did have some content and then recognizing the sovereignty of every nation, but it also became a domestic phrase.
• 41:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was the Roosevelt set up all these good neighbor leagues or the people supported who ran Roosevelt's reelection campaign.
• 41:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the good neighborhoods were consciously set up as an alternative to the liberty leagues to the Saxons supremacy of the liberty leagues, the white supremacy of the liberty leagues.
• 42:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: The good neighborhoods promoted cultural pluralism, right?
• 42:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: So they organized blacks in the south that in Chicago and New York.
• 42:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: they organized ethnic, you know, Catholics and, you know, in New York and Chicago, they organized Native Americans in the Southwest and Latinos in California.
• 42:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: They became the venue in which a kind of new, kind of social social,
• 42:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know citizenship, tolerant, right?
• 42:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there was a quivalence between Roosevelt's tolerance of Latin American nationalism, the Roosevelt gave a speech after whole success.
• 42:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: He says, you're Americanism and mine, you know, it was a kind of an acceptance that Americanism didn't have to be, you know, the equivalent of Anglo-Saxon supremacy that was a kind of a tolerance and a pluralism.
• 42:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And through these good neighborhoods, they promoted the same
• 43:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, they were supported by business.
• 43:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hall was able to use them to put forward his vision of free trade.
• 43:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Roosevelt wins the selection, you know, as the writers rising, as the liberty leagues are organizing, as, you know, as unionists of being killed and whatnot and beating down in the streets of Detroit.
• 43:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Roosevelt wins in 1936 election, which 27 million votes, you know, in the one more votes and any other human being in the history of the world.
• 43:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he did so on a kind of social liberal project.
• 43:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the first thing that he does,
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, two weeks after winning the election is he goes to Buenos Aires.
• 43:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: He goes to Latin America.
• 43:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: It does a tour of Latin America.
• 43:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And for me, that symbolizes how important one, this vision of good neighborliness and creating a hemispheric, uniting foreign and domestic policy in this new kind of ideology, a new, ethic, a new morality.
• 44:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: and then also how Latin America becomes central in what comes next.
• 44:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I can keep going.
• 44:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can say what comes next.
• 44:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, uh, I think we actually have to jump ahead just to call.
• 44:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
• 44:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: they didn't think they were just fighting against fascism, they thought they were fighting for social democracy and they understood what the new deal as a corollary to the democratic socialism that was gaining ground and the reason why Latin America didn't become Spain, which it could have because it had all of the sociological
• 45:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, variables that led to the rise of a Christian Praetorian nationalism, Catholic Praetorian nationalism in Spain, the worst case scenario of geopolitical strategists, and if you always thought that would happen in all of Latin America, and then Latin America would be allied with the axis, was the reason that didn't happen is because after you are tilted to the left, and people like Henry Wallace and Rex Tugwell, and the left wing of the New Deal that was involved in Latin America,
• 45:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's okay, you could take Rockefeller's oil field and say Mexico, you know, God, he could take her first, you know, William Randolph, her sister's ranch, God, you know, and basically that's the reason Latin America didn't go fascist, one of the reasons, I'm giving you the bridge person, but the key takeaway is that they didn't think they were just fighting against fascism,
• 46:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yet, as the things turn out differently, so we get into the Cold War.
• 46:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: World War II, and as we get into the Cold War, there is this surge of social democracy in Latin America that runs headlong into a United States that has turned on a dime from social democracy to anti-communism.
• 46:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 46:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So talk about that abrupt shift and how it was received by folks in leaders in Latin America.
• 46:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: You talk about, you know, for example, Salvador, and in 1945 saying, thankfully, the United States of today is not the United States of yesterday.
• 46:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: At the same time that Afidel Castro is taking a much different lesson from what he's seeing the United States do.
• 46:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 46:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And particularly maybe we could talk a bit about the decision
• 46:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: not to broaden the Marshall Plan out from Europe to say, we're going to re-industrialize Europe and prevent it from going communist by showering it with money, but Latin America is just going to remain in this subservient position.
• 47:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're not going to do the same thing for that part of the world.
• 47:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I'll start with that.
• 47:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you know, Henry Wallace, basically promised them a Marshall plan.
• 47:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Henry Wallace did an enormous successful tour of Latin America in 1943.
• 47:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was very involved in that as the chair of the ECONOM Bureau of Economic Warfare and he wrote into the procurement contracts of resources from Latin America, labor clauses.
• 47:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: but it's insisted on no racial discrimination of providing decent housing and a living wage.
• 47:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you imagine these labor courses as a kind of foundation for a kind of post-war social democratic order.
• 47:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And while I was thought that Latin America had to industrialize and had to pay, he's understanding of fascism, he said, we're gonna be fascism on the battlefield, but that's not where fascism thrives, fascism thrives,
• 48:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: in places where people are paid a living wage.
• 48:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And his understanding was that we had to, they had to equalize the wage system of the, you know, to cover all of the world.
• 48:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so Latin Americans fully expected a Marshall Plan.
• 48:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that was one strut of the radicalization of the post-war generation when they didn't get it.
• 48:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: The point of the Marshall Plan was that it would provide
• 48:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: public capital to industries that wouldn't necessarily attract private capital because they, you know, they weren't profitable, private capital went to the fields, they went and went to the mines, and if Europe was getting billions of dollars in free capital, there was going to be a
• 48:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: So those industries would be more profitable and Latin America wouldn't be able to create value added industries unless it had something like the Marshall Plan as Henry Wallace said it would.
• 49:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't called the Marshall Plan, but but Wallace said the United States would be there.
• 49:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And of course, we know what happened to Henry Wallace after that tour of Latin America.
• 49:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: in which he was held at the Latin Americans didn't know that that Roosevelt was going to run for a fourth term.
• 49:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: They thought they were speaking to the president elect effectively.
• 49:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: They thought Henry Wildes was going to be the, you know, was going to be elected president in 1944.
• 49:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: So they were calling him Mr. President during that tour.
• 49:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, I make the argument in a book that that's that's
• 49:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's one of the things that turned, you know, the demographic body against him, the last thing that they wanted was when they saw how popular Wallace was in Latin America and what he was promising them.
• 49:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: In any case, not getting a Latin, not getting a Marshall plan created the, what we might call the structural dynamics for, for postwork.
• 49:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Cold War polarization, you know, in Europe because this private capital, public capital through the Marshall Plan, you could allow anti-communist social democratic parties to build a welfare state, right?
• 50:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: You didn't have to pacify the labor force in order to track private capital in Europe.
• 50:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: In Latin America, you know, the CIA, the State Department could
• 50:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the fact of the matter is if elites were told, and it's they were explicitly told, but none other than George Marshall himself, when he went to Bogotá in 1948, that there won't be a Marshall plan, and you have to attract private capital.
• 50:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you have unions in the street demanding greater wages, you have, you know, citizens demand an expansion of the wealth estate, that's not exactly conducive to attracting private capital.
• 50:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there was an incentive building for elites to go after, not just the communist left.
• 50:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: but any kind of economic nationalist across the spectrum.
• 51:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's the foundational kind of structural dynamic that leads to waves of polarization, integrated polarization, leading to the anti-communist states.
• 51:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you asked about the generational difference between somebody like Salvador, again, day, and Fidel Castro.
• 51:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a good example.
• 51:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And day, again, day, obviously, you know,
• 51:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: he came around to see me and I'd say it's a threat, but at a slower pace than somebody who was young, like something like Castro, who was already, you know, what the United States was doing in Panama, or, you know, they were more tuned to the turn.
• 51:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the turn was on a dime in many ways.
• 51:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was in 1947, the State Department issues a memo of saying basically, we are no longer understanding democracy and development as mutually constitutive.
• 51:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: What's mutually constitutive is stability.
• 51:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: and development.
• 51:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that is basically a green light during World War II, the United States invested enormous repressive power in all of these states.
• 52:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, in Chile, for example, to stay with the end day, Chile elects a popular front government in 1946, you know, running on, you know,
• 52:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: and the president terms on them.
• 52:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he, as a disposal, an enormous army, an enormous navy may possible by Latin America's land, land lease program.
• 52:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he basically unleashes a military occupation of the minus strikes, Northern Chile, not the Chileans put on lockdown.
• 52:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the person leading that operation is none other than the young lieutenant, named Augusto Pinesche.
• 52:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: and using basically the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the
• 53:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: the story that captures, that plug gets played out in one country after another.
• 53:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And of course, as the Cold War develops, the United States invest more and more in the repressive capacity of Latin American terms of its intelligence agency in terms of its security forces, its ability to respond to domestic threats becomes much more quicker.
• 53:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that hastens the polarization that I talked about earlier and it gives rise to these
• 53:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's the Cold War.
• 53:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, it sounds like you would say it's a function of the Cold War that the Cold War is this overriding logic that reshapes the United States is relationship to Latin America and Latin America, sorry.
• 53:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we're an absent the Cold War things would have been different.
• 53:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, and no.
• 53:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Eric, all of them says if the Soviet Union didn't exist, basically the post world was settlement would have been varieties of authoritarian states in Europe.
• 54:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, I don't know if the Soviet Union didn't exist the United States probably would have let Latin American elites do what they wanted to do anyway, right?
• 54:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I don't know.
• 54:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, certainly the Cold War provided a sort of kind of logic and moral framework and the terms of justification and ability to fund, I mean, obviously the Cold War was determined it from many things.
• 54:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean,
• 54:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right, Truman embraces the Cold War as a way to have both guns and butter, right?
• 54:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can have the New Deal at home and you can have, you know, the military canteenism.
• 54:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you can have, you know, take on these international commitments and, and, and, and, and Truman, if the Soviet Union did not exist, we would have to invent it.
• 54:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a good question, right?
• 55:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: What, what, what the United States would have supported?
• 55:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Certainly it would have, you know, certainly the United States is use of internationalism to induce domestic reform at home, wouldn't have, wouldn't have them.
• 55:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: wouldn't have had the same power capacity, I think.
• 55:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, but yeah, it's an interesting how to patrol.
• 55:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Greg, I think we're gonna have to make another big time jump and talk about where things stand today.
• 55:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, again, we urge people to buy the book and fill in all these blanks.
• 55:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: But let's talk about the relationship between the United States and Latin America as it is in the post-Cold War.
• 55:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Post now, you in a polar moment with countries, you know, some, some could gravitate into our China, the United States trying to hang on to this region, not really through any positive reinforcement as far as I can tell, but you just sort of take us to the present day and, you know, kind of how it reflects what you're talking about in your book.
• 56:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: As I've tried in this book and in an empire's workshop, Latin America really is the place in which you rest rehearses certain.
• 56:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And obviously it's the place where it wouldn't.
• 56:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: for a casual term, neoliberalism gets played out for the first time and an economic restructure.
• 56:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this different ways of looking at it, you could the contemporary nature of what the U.S.
• 56:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: was doing in Chile in 1975 and what the United States was doing in New York in 1975.
• 56:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you could find a bowl of these connections.
• 56:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: But Latin America really was the place in which
• 56:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's not, you know, but don't just end neoliberalism, you really do have to understand Latin America.
• 57:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I first learned the word neoliberalism from Guatemala, and Latin America was the place where liberals, like Pofirio Diaz, are the archetypes of what neolibros are of neos of the return of, right?
• 57:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the idea of a strong state.
• 57:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: that, you know, it's neoliberal, there isn't the recession of the state of the smuggling the state, it's the reorientation of the state to enforce certain economic policies or austerity, weakening labor laws, you know, enforcement of debt.
• 57:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, we know the whole, you know, ending tariffs and things subsidies and solidifying property, right?
• 57:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: So all of that stuff takes place, you know, we know it's chilly, Argentina, Mexico, land America becomes the, the, the, the, and then of course the lessons learned in land America then get applied to Russia.
• 58:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: after the Soviet Union collapse and the book looks at that circuit right the high Latin America was was in many ways the the the the the workshop for the the the economic restructuring of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union but then I also look at how the United States
• 58:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: imposes a neoliberalism on itself.
• 58:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Bill Clinton comes to power in 1993 and, you know, there's no, there's no enemy in sight.
• 58:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: The United States is the wealthiest empire in world history, and Clinton begins to treat a
• 58:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: the United States as an occupied country, and it's citizens' belittian, right?
• 58:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: He starts to be petty, he focuses on terrorism, focuses on crime, focusing on immigration.
• 58:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's, you know, many of the laws that Trump is now putting into place were first put on the books by Clinton.
• 58:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the ones that allow the denatralization of people, you know, with natural eye citizens because they committed a crime.
• 59:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's Clinton.
• 59:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: other countries in the world other wealthy countries had to restructure because of changing changes in the post-war global economy in 1970 was not the same as 1950s, right?
• 59:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: There was the third world had come online, there was competition from Japan, but no other country liked the United
• 59:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Restructured economy while simultaneously launching an assault on the institutions that could have buffed that restructure.
• 59:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the destruction of unions, the dismantling of welfare and the assault on rural communities through to its agricultural policies.
• 59:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, this is what makes the United States unique, not just every country, Germany and France and Great Britain, they all restructured.
• 1:00:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the United States simultaneously wants an assault on all the institutions that could have cushioned that restructuring.
• 1:00:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that that explains to a large degree how we wind up here mal and the creation of maybe 30 percent of the population that benefits from that economic globalization and 70 percent of the population that doesn't benefit from it.
• 1:00:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: But Latin America is key because also key is is the influx of cheap labor from Latin America I mean really cheap labor the right you know that we're middle class people can now have people cleaning the houses you know and you know that becomes the thing in the 1980s.
• 1:00:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: The theme in Latin America means I'm a little bit all over the place because the book, you know, does come up to the present is despite all of this, right, despite the violence or the Cold War, despite the depravity of neoliberalism and the hardships imposed by economic globalization and free trade.
• 1:01:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Latin, what's unique about Latin America, and this is the kind of takeaway from the book, is that it doesn't embrace, for the most part, the kind of toxic nationalism, or anti-globalist conspiracism that we see in other countries, be it Russia, be it the United States, be it Turkey, be it the Philippines.
• 1:01:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Latin American Nationalism still to this day is a stepping stone to internationalism.
• 1:01:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: They understand nationalism is a building block to universalism to a kind of humanism.
• 1:01:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've said this before, but I'll say it again because it's a good way of social scientists.
• 1:01:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've spent decades asking variations of one question, what accounts for the weakness of democracy in Latin America.
• 1:01:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: The real question is what it counts for the endurance of democracy, what counts for the endurance of a kind of social democratic ideal, despite the violence.
• 1:02:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is a method that logical strut of the book, the relationship of dehumanization and humanization, that the out of the Catholic Church, the world's greatest totalitarian organization, according to Sidney Hook, comes liberation theology.
• 1:02:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: out of Catholic colonialism comes social democracy, what's the relationship between the two?
• 1:02:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it continues to this day, Latin America, inequality in Latin America is off the charts.
• 1:02:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: More environmentalist activists are killed in Latin America every year that any other comparable region of the world and yet environmentalists continue to fight, more
• 1:02:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I'm sure you could probably, this, I mean, I, I don't know the exactly, but trade unions, trans activists, feminists.
• 1:02:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: They are assaulted and murdered and tortured at will and yet the social movements continue to grow.
• 1:02:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: The world's largest social movement is the, the, the, the, the landless, the landless movement in, in Brazil, it, it, in ministers land that it has confiscated the size of Switzerland.
• 1:03:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, in a country that teed is back and forth between some cautious version of socialize democracy and Bolsonaro fascism.
• 1:03:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: On the ground, these activists continue to believe that democracy means social democracy.
• 1:03:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's, it's amazing.
• 1:03:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Even in countries like Guatemala, which you know, you would think there'd be no hope whatsoever.
• 1:03:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: People continue to fight
• 1:03:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: People say, well, there's Bukaly and El Salvador and there's the election in Ecuador that just passed, but it's amazing that that isn't, it's amazing that Bukaly isn't everywhere in Latin America, considering the corruption, considering the crime, considering the violence, most of which is an effect of U.S.
• 1:03:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: policy, free trade policy, it's Trump policy, it's migration policy.
• 1:04:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: of neoliberalism and dispossession and extractivism in Latin America, that accounts for the my mass of migration and displacement that has led to the crisis in the border and the rise of need ofism in the United States.
• 1:04:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And yet still the left indoors and not just on a kind of
• 1:04:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Easily way, but you know in some country, I mean, look in Mexico, Claudia shine, I mean, if any country should embrace buccalias, it should be Mexico, I mean, it cocktails the corruption, the billionaires, and yet, more than the party, first of all, I'm low, and then with Claudia shine, bomb, have managed to reclaim, I mean, they don't see themselves as going back to the Mexican Revolution, they call themselves the fourth transformation, it's the next step in the
• 1:04:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: there's limits and restraints on what they can do and what not and you know and and you know right now there's a teacher strike I don't know what the resolution of that is but
• 1:05:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is shine bomb?
• 1:05:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: A Jewish daughter of granddaughter of refuted communist refugees has 85% approval.
• 1:05:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because the, and this is where I'll just end with this.
• 1:05:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, this is, I know you guys will agree with this.
• 1:05:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think we're all on the same page.
• 1:05:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you don't fight fascism by calling somebody a fascism.
• 1:05:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: You don't fight ideology by saying you don't have ideology.
• 1:05:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: You create ideology, if not,
• 1:05:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: the right has been so effective at creating this conspiratorial world building.
• 1:05:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, we talked about Q before we started Q and on.
• 1:05:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's a kind of a gemony.
• 1:05:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's a kind of world building that has filled the void of a social democratic ideology.
• 1:05:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the right, and the left needs something to counter that.
• 1:06:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And an example of that is somebody like,
• 1:06:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: shine bomb in in in Mexico 85% approval rate and you know talking about you know not major radical reforms but talking about the dignity of the work in class and and and and and you know despite all of you know you know there's lots to criticize but you know it's it's it's it's it's a miracle so it's a miracle really is when you think about it
• 1:06:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: On that note, I think that's a good place to end.
• 1:06:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's happier than most of the interviews, most of the ways we end our interviews around here.
• 1:06:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Greg, I want to thank you again for coming on the program.
• 1:06:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Folks, the book is America, America, the new history of the new world, pick it up.
• 1:06:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's absolutely, it's worth a force, wonderful book.
• 1:06:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much, Greg.
• 1:06:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much, Derek.
• 1:06:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much, Danny.
• 1:07:10
  [UNKNOWN]: You