LETTER TO MR. FRANK ALTSCHUL FROM ALLEN W. DULLES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01731R000400700007-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 21
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 18, 2012
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: June 9, 1958
• Content Type: LETTER

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i
.:Fear Frank:
Many thanks for your note of June 1958, with
the information about ~'Ariel," I had heard of 't- and plan
to get hold of d copy as I was very much interested in the
summary that you so kindly sent me.
June 12, 1:'58
New York 19, New York
Mr. Frank Altschul !
sincerely,
Executive Registry
AWD:at
Distribution:
Orig - Addressee
1 cc - DCI
1 cc - ER w/basic
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Dear Allen,
?
June 9, 1958
Just in case the text of the book Ariel,
from which you will find extensive quotations on
pages 8-16, has not come to your attention, I think
that the enclosed document might be of interest to
you. It certainly interested me as I felt there was
a good deal we could learn from this Latin American
critique.
With friendliest messages, I am
Yours sincerely,
Washington 13, D.C.
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61 1
URUGUAY
KHS-6-'S8
AMERICAN
UNIVERSITIES
FIELDSTAFF
522 FIFTH AVENUE NEW NURK36,NY
The publication in these pages is one of a
continuing series from AMERICAN UNI-
VERSITIES FIELD STAFF correspondents
on current developments in world affairs.
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home in it, and has combined personal ob-
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The letters are copyrighted and must
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Faculty members of colleges and univer-
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Letters and reports issued by the
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are not selected to accord with an editorial
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letters and reports rests solely with the
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PHILLIPS TALBOT
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
12
IIL`e:T
C?C 1 .
WELCOME TO THE FOLD, MR. NIXON
or
ARIEL AND THE DILEMMA OF THE INTELLECTUALS
A Letter from K. H. Silvert
Buenos Aires, Argentina
May 1, 1958
When Vice President Nixon passed
through Montevideo several days ago, the
university students extended a warm wel-
come. Some of them called him "murderer,"
chanted "Death to Yankee Imperialism," and
even invited him to visit the Law School
so that a student leader could didactically
explain how the United States is destroy-
ing Latin American economies and fomenting
dictatorship in the hemisphere. Tchah,
Mr. Nixon, don't be upset. It happens
to all of us in Uruguay, self-appointed
conscience of the Americas. Mr. Jose Mora,
a Uruguayan who is also secretary general
of the Organization of American States,
wasn't even allowed to finish a scheduled
speech on his last visit to his homeland.
One of the milder epithets one of the
students applied to me was "incompetent
boob" when I got caught giving a short
course in the Montevideo summer school last
March. I don't mean to put myself in the
same class as Messrs. Mora and Nixon, ex-
cept for the purpose of saying that no
man's competence, integrity, or motives
are taken for granted if he is in Uruguay
on an American passport.
But do not lose your patience,
Mr. Nixon, for remember that under that
wooly exterior beats a heart of meat.
Sheep and cows are Uruguay's two major
sources of foreign exchange, and a crisis
in their production and sale has caused
great strain in that country's relations
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KHS-6-'S8
with the United States. It is to be hoped
that an economic alleviation will not
blunt the indignation of Uruguay's intel-
lectuals, causing the Americas to lose their
throbbing superego, the country everybody
loves, the kind of nation no continent
should be without at least one of if not
more.
"'Uruguay is the Switzerland of Amer-
ica.' Sometimes it is made the Den-
mark, or the Belgium, or even the New
Zealand of the New World. But those
who are intent on comparisons all
fall short of the mark...
"Uruguay is Uruguay. Most people
probably mean it as a compliment to
the South American country to call it
the Switzerland -- or the Denmark or
Belgium or New Zealand -- of the
Western hemisphere, but those European
and Pacific countries could consider
themselves complimented by the com-
parison. Let us not forget that...
"Spend a little time in Uruguay -- it
need not be a long while -- and you
gradually get an impression of na-
tional well-being, a sense of maturity,
a feeling of adjustment. It is fluid,
invisible, and highly subtle. It is
not something you can put your finger
on; it is simply there in the air you breathe, in the social radiations and
emanations from city and countryside. as,
Spend a little time in thinking about
the matter, after it gradually ob-
trudes itself from the subconscious
into the conscious, and you almost
inevitably come to the conclusion
that it is to be explained on the
ground that Uru ua is an integrated
eountr ."1 The underlining is not
mine.
British and American attitudes
toward Uruguay are very generally this kind
9p
1 Russell H. Fitzgibbon, Uruguay: Portrait
of a Democracy, London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1956, pp. 264-5.
e. ~ a
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of panegyric. And indeed, Uruguay is very refreshing in its
free press, in its abundant civil liberties in general, in its
political militancy when it comes to dictatorships at home and in
the Western hemisphere. Latin American attitudes, however, are
not so glowing toward Uruguay as Anglo-Saxon ones, even though the
same justified belief in the abundant freedom of the country is
not lacking. Argentines like to think of Uruguay, the "eastern
coast" of the Plata, as a wayward province, rather economically re-
tarded and localistic in sentiment. They are grateful for the aid
extended to the democratic movement in Argentina if they happen to
be anti-Peronists, but think that Uruguayans tend to be rather sim-
plistic in their politics, inclined to glossy generalizations and
a lack of realism. Argentines enjoy referring to Uruguayan dem-
ocracy as an arranged affair, an elaborate game of make-believe in
which the entire nation conspires. This judgment to my mind is
unfair, even though the formal play of Uruguay's democracy can be so
explained, for it neglects the real amount of daily freedom which
Uruguayans have and fully exercise, even if the result is some-
times rudeness to guests of the nation or the university.
My own experience in Uruguay is particularly revealing
of these attitudes of other Latin Americans concerning the coun-
try. The university ran an " international" summer session in
which Argentine and Chilean professors joined. It was by ac-
cident that I was invited to fill a gap left by a Venezuelan who
did not meet his engagement because the fall of Perez Jimenez in
Caracas allowed him to return from a New York exile to his na-
tive land. Briefly, a group of anti-imperialist students cover-
ing a wide range of political parties joined in making my life
thoroughly miserable. Although this was not the first time in
Latin America that I had been called an agent of imperialism and
a State Department spy, it did mark the first time that the ac-
cusations transcended these levels to become entirely personal.
But the Uruguayans were only saying out loud what a lot of Latin
Americans think and keep to themselves. What is socially in-
triguing is why Uruguayans break the normal rules of hospitality
to speak up so, and the reaction of other Latin Americans to
such conduct.
Four Chileans were teaching in the summer school; na-
turally each one represented a different political party. The
Conservative, when he heard of the manner in which I was being
treated, said, "Barbarians," and then took revenge by publicly
accusing a Uruguayan professor of being a bore. The Liberal
squared his jaw and went off to the director of the summer session
to protest such an outrageous lack of courtesy. The Popular
Socialist blew off a supercharged head of steam before a small
group of Uruguayans, arguing that, "Your country is a continental
disgrace. In Chile we have always thought that if we just had
enough for everybody to eat and wear, we could then worry about
the amenities of life. Here you have one car for every seventeen
persons, a life expectancy after the first year as high as that
of the United States, summer houses for almost half the population
of the country, and food to burn. And what have you managed to
make of yourselves with all of this?" The Christian Democrat,
obviously an anticlerical, was the most personally outraged.
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He took me aside to console me, and asked whether I had not
learned anything from the experience. In the heat of my anger,
I was not about to admit that I could learn anything by such
goings-on. But he ordered another round of coffee, and argued,
"Well, I've learned a lot. Nobody will ever sell me a bill of
goods about Uruguayan democracy again. What they have is formal-
istic and ritualistic; it is not fundamental. They refuse to
accept scientific method or use objective appreciations in poli-
tics, and so they'll never get off their turn-of-the-century
backs." He was referring to the fact that Uruguay is still
juridically living off the social and legal reforms introduced
by their great president, Jose Batlle y Ordonez, in the early
years of this century.
A very pleasing part of Latin American character was
revealed in the defense offered me by my Chilean and Argentine
colleagues. It is not that they all agreed with what I had to
say; on the contrary. But the solidarity of the union had been
threatened, the issue joined. Can any worthy man hesitate in
such an extremity?
Perhaps all the non-Uruguayans overdramatized the in-
cident because of the harshness of the words used. Every Latin
American country is in greater or lesser degree different from
every other one, and despite the fact that Montevideo is just
across the river from Buenos Aires, there are notable charactero-
logical variations between the two cities. Uruguayans are famed
for talking right up in direct and unmistakable fashion, and
indeed pride themselves on doing so. Their respect must be
earned by hard work; the accused is considered despicable unless
proved worthy of dignity. I should like to spin a dubious hy-
pothesis to explain this phenomenon. Uruguay is a small country,
and one with a large middle group. According to recent estimates,
there are only 2,200,000 Uruguayans, and to boot about 40 per
cent of them live in the capital city. Uruguay is more a city-
state than a nation-state. The institution of the Uruguayan
plural presidency is not so politically strange in this context,
for it can be almost directly compared to an American council
form of city government with a weak mayor. The family is small,
quarrelsome, and stubborn. The rector of the University of
Montevideo told me a most revealing story about Uruguayan poli-
tical stubbornness. He was born in a small town in the hinter-
land into a family of White political persuasion. (There are
also Reds, the major opposition to the Whites, and reds who are
Communists, and Socialists, or Trotskyists, and several major
splits in the Reds and Whites themselves.) When the rector as a
young man went to Montevideo to attend medical school, he went
through a political transformation and became a Socialist. Now
it seems that in Uruguay one simply does not change his party,
but accepts his politics as a birthright. So, on a visit home,
the rector was pointedly spurned by one of his favorite aunts,
who said to him when she learned of his new Socialist affilia-
tion, "Ahal So you sold outs" (This kind of thing is unnerving
to a Chilean, who spends his political life sampling the wares of
one party after another.)
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Uruguay, then, struck me as one huge family fight, with
all the openness and bitterness and freedom of expression that
such quarrels normally have. Everybody knows the fate of the un-
wary stranger who stumbles into a family disagreement. But
withal, it is a nice family in many respects and one well worth
knowing, even though a psychiatrist in residence would do it no
harm at all.
ANTI-IMPERIALISM AND ANTI-AMERICANISM
Opinions conflict as to whether Uruguay is generally
for or against the United States. Because Uruguay early and
decisively aided the Allied cause in World War II while Chile
and Argentina dragged their heels until the closing days of the
conflict, and even then entered grudgingly, Uruguay is thought to
be the most pro-U.S. of the three. But it can also be held that
the country has one of Latin America's richest anti-American
literatures and a long history of practical and polemical anti-
imperialism, both based on the early emergence of nationalist
and separatist attitudes. Uruguay's participation in the war is
solid evidence for that time at least that she was much more
strongly prodemocratic than anti-U.S.
But this particular moment is an especially bad one
for Americans in Uruguay because of an acrimonious debate over
the closing down of the Swift and Armour packing plants in De-
cember of 1957. I have no intention of going into the unpleasant
and long history of the controversy, but the matter is extremely
intense, involving as it does basic clashes of interest and
system. The crystallized truth of the matter from the viewpoint
of the companies is that they had to close d own because they can
no longer make as much money in Uruguay as they can in other
meat exporting countries. The land has about the same number of
head of cattle now as fifty years ago, while the population has
more than doubled.2 Worse, the Uruguayans have,a great and
seemingly increasing appetite for meat, and lead the world in
consumption per capita according to available figures, such as
they are.
2 According to Guillermo Bernhard,22. cit. in text above, the
number of head of livestock is as follows:
Year Cattle Sheep Pigs
1 0..........3, 30,000......1,990,OOO...... 59651
1900..........6,820,000.....18,600,000.....23,900
1908..........8,190,000.....26,280,000....180,100
1924.......... 8,430,000.....l1;,44O9OOO....251,200
1946.......... 6,820,000.....19,560,000....274,400
1956.... ......7,305,462.....22,954,230.... ---
From p. 14.
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CONSUMPTION OF MEAT PER CAPITA--SELECTED COUNTRIES
Country Kilos per cap. Year of data
Uruguay. .....................122.....................19 2
Argentina ....................11!4.....................19148
New Zealand. .................110.....................1951
Australia ....................105.....................l952
United States.. ...............76.....................1952
Canada ........................614.....................1952
France ........................56.....................1952
Denmark .......................514.....................l952
Sweden. .......................50.....................1952
Switzerland ...................148.....................1952
Great Britain .................147.....................1952
Brazil ........................39.....................19148
Chile .........................38.....................19148
Cuba ..........................35.....................19149
Italy .........................16.....................1952
Greece ........................13.....................1952
Japan..... .....................2.....................1952
India ..........................1.....................1952
Source: Figures from Economics and Statistics Section of the
Ministry of Cattle and Agriculture, Government of
Uruguay, as quoted in Guillermo Bernhard, Comercio de
Carnes en el Uruguay, Montevideo: Aguilar ? Irazabel,
1~ , p. 289 Note: a Kilo is 2.2 lbs.
The shortage of cattle restricted the companies' opera-
tions, and so in their last years in Uruguay they squeezed as
much work into two or three months as they could, and the plants
lay idle during the remainder of the year. The Uruguayan side
of the argument is that the past profitable operations of the
companies produced a national vested interest in their continued
existence, for not only are foreign exchange needs satisfied by
the meat exports, but in addition thirty thousand persons live
directly off the plants' operations. This figure is derived by
taking the five thousand workers of the packing plants and adding
in their families, plus the tradesmen (and their dependents) who
live directly off the meat packers. The government argues that
just because things are bad at the moment is no excuse not to
hold out and help the country to recover. Simple expropriation
of the private holdings is not an easy matter, not only because
of a lack of money and expertise, but also because the withdrawal
of the companies implies a related lack of the necessary re-
frigerator ships to transport to overseas markets whatever meat
may be produced by a nationalized company or a co-operative.
Aside from this disagreement, at the very heart of
matters commercially ideological, there is a constellation of
second-level irritations. The companies and the union have been
at loggerheads for years. Armour and Swift accuse the Uruguayan
Government of partiality, and the Government charges the company
officials with cunning, deceit, and worse. The problem has been
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at crisis pitch for almost six months now, so it is small wonder
that there is widespread anti-American feeling.
But anti-imperialism has long been an imperative in
daily Uruguayan political expression, a symbolic necessity with
the weight of history and the influence of powerfully prestigious
hero figures behind it. Batlle himself was a violent antagonist
of the imperialists and of the United States in particular well
over half a century ago. Although the U.S. is the long-standing
and favored object of Uruguayan nationalists, England too comes
in for its share of opprobrium, for the British have been in-
volved in the Plata region for much longer than the Americans,
and even made two forceful attempts to colonize at the beginning
of the 19th century. The United Kingdom is still the largest
buyer from Argentina and Uruguay, although the U.S. has moved
into the favored supplier position. Railroads, banks, commercial
houses, generating plants, and packing houses have all demonstrated
the long and vital British interest in the area, so extended as
to give rise to the popular saying about Argentina that it is
"a British colony in which a lot of Italians talk bad Spanish."
And yet the British are not nearly so harshly attacked as the
Americans. In a long citation quoted below from a famous Uruguayan
tract, a cultural rationalization is advanced for this phenomenon.
In truth, the matter is not so easily explained, and would be an
excellent subject for a doctoral dissertation on "Objects of
Anti-Imperialist Hatred Compared."
For all practical contemporary purposes, anti-imperial-
ism in Uruguay is largely the generalization derived from anti-
Americanism. Eudocio Ravines, author of the well-known The Yenan
Warr, in another work says the following on the subject:
"Notwithstanding the profound change which has been better-
ing the relations between the two Americas, it is a massive
and tangible fact that Latin American political and social
life as it develops is being shot through with an attitude
which goes from resistance to non-collaboration and from
antipathy to hostility with respect to the United States.
The rich diversity of feelings derived from this sentiment
goes under the general name of anti-imperialism. A Latin
American anti-imperialist will always be antiyanqui, ac-
tively or potentially, and to distinguish one from the other
would be to embark on a sea of subtleties through which it
would be easy to anchor on all possible sophisms.
"One could argue a great deal about the existence, the in-
existence, or the survivals of imperialism, but what does
not allow for discussion is the operative and militant ex-
istence of Yankee anti-imperialism as a real sociological
category, as a political current, with incessant and multiple
activities in all the countries without exception.3
3 Am6rica Latina: Un continente en eru cion, Buenos Aires:
Editorial Claridad, 19, p. 151,
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The cries of "Asesino" directed against Mr. Nixon,
then, had their basis in an immediate controversy concerning
meat, and also in a general attitude expressed in popular song,
in novel and poem, in wry joke, shrug of the shoulder, and wink
of the eye. The particular lack of courtesy exhibited may be
simply an Uruguayan family trait, as I have suggested. But there
is yet another element, and that is the conscious, intellectual
statement of anti-Americanism as anti-imperialism, the doctrine
as expressed in the written word to serve as the platform for the
thinking of the future university students and other carriers of
the dogma.
ANTI-IMPERIALISM AS DOCTRINE
Latin America's most famous literary and quasi-philo-
sophical attack against American utilitarianism was written by a
Uruguayan, Jose Enrique Rod6, in 1900.b Ariel, as this short
book is called, takes the form of an address by Prospero to his
students after the conclusion of the year's studies. In elevated
language and sophisticated thought, Rod6 urges his readers to
the life of reason and spirit, the rejection of irrationality
and materialism. He exhorts youth to develop the integrity of the
being, to be "unmutilated examples of humanity, in which no noble
faculty of the spirit is obliterated and no higher interest...
should lost its...virtue." Rejecting an egalitarian notion of
democracy, he argues that the truly democratic state must grant
equality of opportunity in order to make possible the unequal
development of each individual according to his capacity and will.
The end of such selection must be a higher capacity for love.
"Fortunately, so long as there exists in the world the
possibility of arranging two pieces of wood in the form of
a cross -- that is to say, always -- humanity will go on
believing that love is the foundation of any stable order
and that hierarchical superiority in such an order cannot
be other than a higher capacity for loving."
To the spirit of Ariel which he sees as compatible with
the Latin appreciation of life's values, he opposes the Caliban
of the utilitarian United States. With great acuity and much
insight, he launches into a devastating attack on "The American
Way of Life." The conclusion is an impassioned plea to Latin
Rod6 was born in Montevideo on July 15, 1872. He became a pro-
fessor of literature in the University of Montevideo and also a
member of Congress, although a political career held little at-
traction for him. A very popular lecturer, he was the object of
an impressive public demonstration of affection when he left
Montevideo in 1916 for Europe as a foreign correspondent for a
local review. The following year he died in Palermo, Italy.
Ariel and his Motivos de Proteo (1909) are considered his most
important literary works.
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youth to reject facile imitation of North American manners and
standards, to remain faithful to humanistic traditions, disin-
terested love for the things of the spirit, art, science, re-
ligious sincerity, and idealistic politics.
Fresh editions of Ariel appear regularly. The book,
still widely viewed in Latin America as an accurate portrayal of
American democracy, is also a required part of any discussion of
Latin American political thought.5 I am going to quote exten-
sively from the last third of Ariel, so that the reader may see
some of Rode's thinking in depth, and taste his style.6
"Their [American] culture, which is far from being refined
or spiritual, has an admirable efficiency so long as it
directs itself practically toward realizing an immediate
end. They have not incorporated within the acquisitions of
science a single general law, a single principle; but they
have made science a wizard through the marvels of their
applications, they have made it a giant in the realms of
utility, and they have given to the world in the steam boiler
and the electric generator billions of invisible slaves who
multiply by hundreds the power of the magic lantern to
serve the human Aladdin... Puritan liberty, which sent them
its light from the past, joined to that light the heat of
a piety which still lasts. Hard by the factory and the school
their strong hands have also raised the temples from which
spread the public prayers of many millions of free consciences.
They have known how to preserve, amidst the shipwreck of all
ideals, the highest ideal, keeping alive the tradition of a
religious sentiment which, if it does not fly on the wings
of a delicate and profound spiritualism, still partly holds
to the firm kingdom of moral sense amidst the rough and
tumble of utilitarian tumult.--In the midst of the refine-
ments of civilized life, they have also known how to main-
tain the mark of a certain primitive robustness. They have
the pagan cult of health, of skill, of strength; in their
muscles they temper and sharpen the precious instrument of
the will; and obliged by their insatiable urge for domination
to cultivate the strength of all human activities, they model
the torso of the athlete for the heart of the free man.
And from the concert of their civilization, from the co-
ordinated movement of their culture surges a dominant note
of optimism, of confidence, of faith, which fills their
hearts, pushing them into the future under the suggestion
of a hard and arrogant promise...
See, for example, Rex Crawford, A Century of Latin American
Thought, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1944*
6 The edition I have used here was published by Imprenta Balmes
in Buenos Aires in 1947. This edition also includes other criti-
cal essays. The translation runs from p. 95 passim to the end
on p. 121...
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"...you see that although I do not love them, I admire
them. I admire them, first of all, for their formidable
capacity to want, and I bow before the 'school of will and
work' which...they have instituted...
"...If anything saves them collectively from vulgarity, it
is that extraordinary show of energy they carry everywhere
and with which they impress a certain character of epic
grandeur even on struggles for material interest...
"With the sincere recognition of how much is shining and
grand in the spirit of that powerful nation, and so having
earned the right to completing a just appreciation with re-
spect to it, a question charged with interest asks to be
put.--Is that society carrying out, or at least tending to
carry out, the ideal of rational conduct which fulfills the
legitimate demands of the spirit, of the intellectual and
moral dignity of our civilization?--Is it there where we
must go to point out the approach to our 'perfect city'?--
That feverish inquietude whose embrace seems to multiply
the movement and the intensity of life, does it have an ob-
ject which merits it and a stimulus sufficient to justify
it?
"Herbert Spencer, extending his salute to American democracy
with noble sincerity in a banquet in New York, pointed out
the fundamental trait of American life as that same un-
contained inquietude which manifests itself in an infinite
passion for work and relentless material expansion in all
its forms. And he then observed that in such an exclusive
rule of activity subordinated to the material ends of util-
ity there was revealed a conception of life, tolerable,
without doubt, as a provisional character for a civiliza-
tion, but one which now demanded rectification, since it
tended to convert utilitarian labor into the end and the
supreme object of life, when in no case can it rationally
signify anything other than the mere accumulation of elements
serving to make possible the total and harmonious develop-
ment of our being...
"American life effectively describes that vicious circle
pointed out by Pascal in the grasping pursuit of welfare
when this pursuit does not have its end outside itself.
Its prosperity is as great as its impossibility of satis-
fying a mediocre concept of human destiny. A titanic work
because of the enormous demonstration of will it represents,
and because of its unheard of triumphs in all spheres of
material aggrandizement, it is undeniable that that civiliza-
tion produces, in its totality, a singular impression of
insufficiency and emptiness. And so it is that if, exer-
cising the right conferred by thirty centuries of the history
of evolution presided over by the dignity of the classical
and the Christian spirits, one asks what is the guiding prin-
ciple, what is the ideal substractum, what is the purpose
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behind the immediate preoccupation for positive interests
which shape that formidable mass, one finds only, as the
formula for the definitive ideal, the same absolute pre-
occupation with material victory...that people have not
known how to substitute idealism inspired by the past with
a high and disinterested conception of the future. It lives
for the immediate reality, the present, and for it subor-
dinates all its activity to the egoism of personal and col-
lective welfare.--Of the sum of the elements of its wealth
and power, it may be said...that it is a pile of timber to
which no one has found a way of setting fire. What is miss-
ing is the effective spark to make the flame of a vivifying
and restless ideal arise from the abundant fuel. Not even
national pride, failing higher impulses, not even exclusivism
and pride in race, which are those which in antiquity trans-
figured and glorified the prosaic hardness of Roman life,
can have glimmerings of idealism and beauty in a people
where cosmopolitan confusion and the atomism of a badly
understood democracy impede the formation of a true national
consciousness.
it might be said that the productive positivism of the
Metropolis has suffered, on being transmitted to its eman-
cipated sons in America, a distillation depriving it of all
those elements of idealism which tempered it, reducing it
in truth to the crudeness which in the exaggerations of
passion or satire has been attributed to the positivism of
England.--The English spirit, under the harsh coat of utili-
tarianism, under mercantile indifference, under Puritan
severity hides--it cannot be doubted--a select poetic aware-
ness., and a profound veneration for sensitivity which re-
veal...that the original basis, the Germanic basis of that
race, later 'modified by the passion for conquest and the
habit of commercial activity, was an extraordinary exalta-
tion of the senses. The American spirit has not received
in inheritance that ancestral poetic instinct...The English
people have in the institution of their aristocracy--no
matter how anachronistic and unjust it may be from the point
of view of political rights--a high and impregnable bulwark
to oppose to the mercantilism 'round about and to the in-
vading dullness...In the situation of American democracy,
the spirit of vulgarity does not find before itself heights
inaccessible to its power to rise, and it extends and propa-
gates itself as though over the flats of an infinite plain.
"Sensitivity, intelligence, customs--all are characterized
in that enormous people by a radical ineptitude for selec-
tion which, alongside the mechanical order of their material
activity and of their political life makes for a profound
disorder in everything pertaining to the world of idealistic
arts.--It is easy to follow the manifestations of that
ineptitude, starting with the most superficial and apparent,
then going on to others more essential and intimate.--
Prodigal with his riches...the American has succeeded in
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KHS-6-'56 . -12- ? '
in acquiring fully with them the satisfaction for and the
ostentation of sumptuary magnificence; but he has not suc-
ceeded in acquiring the select note of good taste. True
art has been able to exist in such surroundings only as a
result of individual rebellion. Emerson and Poe there are
like examples of fauna expelled from their real medium by
the force of a geologic catastrophe...
"The ideal of beauty does not move the decendant of the
austere Puritans. Nor is he moved by the ideal of truth.
He depreciates all exercise of thought lacking an immediate
finality as being vain and unfruitful. He does not bring
to science a disinterested desire for truth, nor has he ever
manifested himself in any case as loving it for itself.
Research is for him only the preparation for utilitarian ap-
plication.--His glorious efforts to spread the benefits of pub-
lic education are inspired in the noble purpose of communicating
the fundamental elements of knowledge to the greatest number;
but they do not reveal that...there is care taken to select
and elevate such education to aid the effort of the superior
ones who have the desire to rise above the general mediocrity.
The result, thus, of their stubborn war on ignorance has been
universal semiculture and a profound languishing of higher
culture...Here is the reason for the history of their think-
ing activity being a decreasing progression of brilliance
and originality. While in the period of the Revolution and
their [national] organization there arose many illustrious
names to represent the thinking as well as the will of
that people, a half century later Tocqueville could observe...
that the gods are going. When Tocqueville wrote his master
work, there still irradiated, nevertheless, from Boston,
the Puritan citadel, the city of the learned traditions, a
glorious galaxy possessing...universality in the intellectual
history of that century.--Who, later, has picked up the
heritage of Channing, of Emerson, or Poe?--Mesocratic level-
ling, hurrying its desolating work, tends to dissipate the
little character which still remained to that precarious
intellectuality. It is a long time since their books have
been borne to the heights where it would be universally
possible to recognize them. And today, the most genuine rep-
resentation of American taste, so far as letters go, is in
the dirty linen of newspapering which does not remind us of
what once The Federalist Papers gave us.
"With respect to moral sentiments, the mechanical push of
utilitarianism has come up against the moderating force of
a strong religious tradition. But one should not therefore
believe that the guidance of conduct has been subordinated
to a real principle of disinterest.- -The religiosity of the
Americans...is nothing more than an auxiliary aid to crimi-
nal law...The highest point of their morals is that of
Franklins a philosophy of conduct which finds its end in
what is mediocre about honesty, in the utility of prudence;
from whose womb never will arise saintliness or heroism...
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-13-
"Public life is, of course, not exempt from the consequences
of the growth of that germ of disorganization which that
society carries in its entrails. Any ordinary observer of
their political customs will tell you of how the obsession
for utilitarian interest progressively tends to ennervate
and wither the sense of right in their hearts. Civic vir-
tue, the old virtue of the Hamiltonians, is a steel sheet
which is rusting, always more forgotten among the cobwebs
of tradition. Venality, which begins with the public vote,
is propagating itself to all institutional areas...Democracy..o
has always tended among them to the abominable brutality of
numbers, minimizing the greatest moral benefits of liberty
and annulling...respect for the dignity of others. Today,
furthermore, a formidable force is raising itself to coun-
teract the absolutism of numbers in the worst possible man-
ner. The political influence of a plutocracy represented
by the all-powerful allies of the trusts, monopolizers of
production and masters of economic life, is, without doubt,
one of the traits most worthy of interest in the present
configuration of that great people. The formation of this
plutocracy has forced one to think, and probably very cor-
rectly, of the rise of that enriched and haughty class which,
in the last era of the Roman Republic, was one of the visible
antecedents of the ruination of liberty and of the tyranny
of the Caesars...
"...it is in that West, growing formidable before the old
states of the Atlantic and demanding hegemony in the im-
mediate future, where one finds the clearest representation
of American life at the present moment of its evolution...
Utilitarianism empty of any idealistic content, cosmopolitan
vagueness, and the levelling of bastard democracy will there...
arrive at their ultimate triumph.--Every noble element of
that civilization, everything which links it with generous
remembrances and buttresses its historic dignity--the legacy
of the crewmen of the Mayflower, the memory of the Virginia
patricians and the gentlemen of New England, the spirit of
the citizenry and the legislators of emancipation--will stay
within the old states where Boston and Philadelphia still
maintain, as has been expressively said, 'the palladium of
the Washingtonian tradition.' Chicago is preparing itself
to reign...
"In the same measure as the utilitarian genius of that
civilization thus is assuming more defined, franker, and
narrower characteristics, there increases with the intoxi-
cation of material prosperity the impatience of its sons to
propagate it and attribute to it the predestination of a
Roman rule.--Today,they openly aspire to first rank in uni-
versal culture, to the leadership in ideas, and they con-
sider themselves the forgers of a type of civilization which
will prevail...Underneath their declared spirit of rivalry
with Europe is an ingenuous disdain and also the profound
conviction that they are soon destined to overshadow Europe's
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.... -14
0
spiritual superiority and its glory, thus complying once
more, in the evolution of human civilization, with the hard
law of the ancient mysteries in which the initiated killed
the initiator...It would be useless to try to convince them
that the works carried out by the persevering genius of the
European Ariel for the last three thousand years...can not
be equated with the formula Washington plus Edison. They
aspire to revise Genesis so they can occupy the first page.--
But in addition to the relative insufficiency of the part
which has been given them to carry out in the education of
humanity, their very character denies them the possibility
of hegemony.--Nature has not conceded them a genius for
propaganda nor an apostolic vocation. They lack that superior
gift of amiabiltiy--in the highest sense--of that extra-
ordinary power of sympathy with which the races blessed with
a providential trust of education have been able to make of
their culture something similar to the beauty of classic
Hellene, in which everyone imagines he can recognize traces
of his own.
"And take note that when, in the name of the rights of the
spirit, I deny to American utilitarianism that typical
character with which it would like to impose itself on us
as the sum and model of civilization, it is not my purpose
to affirm that the work realized by it has been entirely
lost with relation to what we might call the interests of
the soul...The work of American positivism will serve the
cause of Ariel, in the last analysis. What that people of
cyclops have directly conquered for material well-being with
their sense of the useful and their admirable aptitude for
mechanical invention, other peoples will convert, or they
themselves may do so in the future, into efficacious elements
of selectivity...
" ...Let us hope that the spirit of that titanic social
organism, which up to now has been solely will and utility,
may also some day be intelligence, sentiment, idealism...
"...A great civilization, a great people--in the meaning
which has value for history--are those which, when they dis-
appear materially in time, leave vibrant forever after the
melancholy arising from their spirit and make persist into
posterity their imperishable legacy--as Carlyle said of the
souls of his 'heroes'--as a new and divine portion of the
sum of thing...
"A definitively organized society which limits its idea of
civilization to accumulating abundant elements of prosperity,
and its idea of justice to distributing them equitably among
the partners, will not make of the cities it inhabits any-
thing which can be distinguished, essentially, from the
anthill or the beehive...thus the quantitative grandeur of
the population as well as the material grandeur of its in-
struments, of its arms, of its houses are only means of the
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.
~ -15- ? KHS-6-'58
civilizing spirit, and in no case results which one may
content himself with.--Of the stones which composed Carthage,
not a particle remained transfigured into spirit and light...
"Great...is the city when the suburbs of its spirit reach
beyond the heights and the seas and when, its name evoked,
there illuminates itself for posterity an entire period of
human history, a whole horizon of time. The city is strong
and beautiful when its days are something more than the
invariable repetition of the same echo...when there is some-
thing in it which floats above the crowd; when among the
lights which are lit during its nights is the lamp which
accompanies the solitude of the vigil made restless by thought
and in which is incubated the idea which is to bloom in the
light of the next day converted into the cry which gathers
the force to lead souls.
"Only then can the material extension and grandeur of a city
give the measure to calculate the intensity of its civiliza-
tion...
"There now exist in our Latin America cities whose material
grandeur and whose sum of apparent civilization push them
with accelerated pace to share in the first level of the
world. It is necessary to fear that the serene thought
which is about to break upon the fatuous externals, as on a
sealed bronze vessel, will evoke the disheartening noise of
emptiness. It is necessary to fear, for example, that the
cities whose names were a glorious symbol in America, who
had Moreno, Rivadavia, Sarmiento, who took the initiative
in immortal Revolution; cities which made the glory of their
heroes and the words of their tribunes lengthen throughout
the extension of a continent, as in the harmonious unfolding
of the concentric circles raised by the stroke of a stone
on still water--can end in Sidon, in Tyre, in Carthage.
"It falls to your generation to prevent it; to the youth
which is coming, blood and muscle and nerve of the future...
"...not like Hartmann, in the name of death, but rather in
that of life and hope themselves, I ask you a part of your
soul for the work of the future.--To ask it of you, I have
wanted to take inspiration in the sweet and serene image of
my Ariel...Ariel is reason and higher sentiment. Ariel is
that sublime instinct for perfectibility, for whose virtue
that human clay by the side of which his light lives,is
magnified and converted into the center of things...Ariel
triumphant signifies idealism and order in life, noble in-
spiration in thought, disinterest in morals, good taste in
art, heroism in action, delicacy in customs...
"While the crowd passes, I observe that although it does not
look to the sky, the sky looks down upon it. Upon its in-
different and obscure mass, as upon plowed land, something
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KHS.-6-,58
descends from on high. The vibration of the stars is like
the movements of the hands of a sower."
For its time Ariel was obviously very advanced. To
use it as a model half a century later is of doubtful validity.
A grateful pastiche of Comte, Carlyle, Nietzsche, humanism,
Gallican Catholicism, and the Latin American cult of youth, Rodo's
comments nevertheless have their appealing side. But he is typi-
cal of the Phil` osoph, of the pensador, the man who could be in-
flamed, who could meld the ideas of others and propagate them,
but who could not pass into the truly creative stage of putting
systematized questions to his materials and thus proposing their
possible answers within a system of method and not of yearning.
Time has long since passed by much of his political commentary,
but "Rodonism" and arielismo remain important parts of the mys-
tique of Latin youth.-whether they have read this work or not.
The point is that Rodo still touches chords of sympathy and de-
sire in Latin America.
There is something sad in the construction of a stero-
type which doesn't quite come off. The essence of a stereotype
is that it is partly true; therefore, it is also partly false.
His belief that the Germans would help to solve the cultural
deficiencies of the Americans demonstrates the wellsprings of
his kind of idealism, as well as the pitfalls of sterotypical
views.
"An illustrious thinker who compared the slaves of ancient
societies to particles undigested by the social organizm
might perhaps find a similar comparison to characterize the
situation of that strong colony of German ancestry who,
established in the states of the Mid- and the Far West con-
serve intact in their nature, their sociability, and in
their customs the imprint of the Germanic spirit which, in
many of its most profound and vigorous characteristic con-
ditions must be considered a true antithesis of the American
genius." (From page 111 of the edition cited.)
Rodo's half-truth is the Germany of Goethe, Hegel,
Beethoven, and Schiller. How unfortunate it is that the half-
falsity should have so well obscured for Rod'o that Germany which
gave rise to Hitler and Goebbels. But still his largely unre-
vised rendering of the United States remains the stock in trade
of the Latin American idealistic and intellectual nationalist.
I do not deny the right of Latin American intellectuals
to attack the United States or any other country as
they
will.
But two things must be insisted on if their opinions
are
to be
respected; accuracy of commentary and observation,
and
covert
motives at the same level of generosity as their avowed
ideals.
My purpose is not to belabor Rodo for his generalizations or to
point out the factual failings of other Latin Americans as they
construct their views of the U.S. Nor is my purpose to accomplish
the same attack through the back door, condemning Latin America's
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? -17- ? KHS-E-+,8
thinkers by making selective and invidious comparisons with
their counterparts in the United States.
The tragedy of the Latin American intellectual is his
necessary constriction by the context within which he lives. He
desperately wants to be what he cannot be--a universalist--in
societies just learning to be national. He complains about the
United States from the posture of the Greek Stoic, and not from
that of the contemporary man trying to get at least some of his
view of the present from forecast. The clamoring demands through-
out Latin America for the useful and potentially liberating
claptrap of modern civilization have made Rod6's Hellenic yearn-
ings obsolete. The tragedy is that their contextual obsolescence
is not even yet recognized by the Latin intellectuals who can
support their yearning for the contemplative and spiritual life
as they define it.only at the cost of a Greek-like social or-
ganization, slaves and all. And yet they are dedicating their
lives--and some do so with great abnegation--precisely in order
to combat social inequities as they see them.
I am reminded here of a biting New Yorker cartoon
showing an analyst jumping up and shouting at his patient,
"Dammit, you are inferiors' My desire at this point is to jump
up and say to the arielistas, "But dammit, seViores, you are un-
derdeveloped!" Americans overseas have been carefully taught
that the term "underdeveloped area" refers only to economic mat-
ters, and not at all to cultural and intellectual attainments.
But of course the term has something at least inferential to say
about intellectual and artistic matters. An economically poor
country cannot support symphony orchestras, cannot build and
maintain an adequate library system, cannot provide competent
university training to qualified persons, and cannot pay for the
research necessary to the kind of contemplation this century de-
mands.
Even more hampering to the Latin American intellectual
is that to be economically underdeveloped is also almost in-
variably to be non-national in culture. As a result the thinkers
of underdeveloped areas find it difficult to compete on the in-
ternational market of ideas and aret, for their expressions often
lack the limited kind of universality understandable within the
world of the citizen of the nation-state. The Latin American
ensador, with his pull toward the great outer world, is an ef-
fective instrument for the absorption of European trends and
their translation into the terms of his homeland. But when it
comes time for him to return what he has borrowed with the in-
terest of his country's special cultural point of view, he finds
that nobody is listening because what he has to say is either
not significant or not fresh in a different cultural context.
It is not that "fault" lies wholly with one side or the other;
it is basically that there is a break in the complete circuit
of communications. This is caused in part by the representative
of the economically industrialized area, who--with his different
outlook--finds it hard to understand what the man from the
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underdeveloped area is saying.
The major exceptions to my statements come out of
Mexico and Brazil, where the nationalism which has seized on
large parts of the population has been fed its distinctive flavor
by a new ethnic amalgam expressed within intriguing (for the rest
of the national world) physical surroundings. The other major
area of exception is in the general field of literature, but
again, the few Latin American novels, for example, which have had
the widest circulation are of the genre of the novel of protest,
an area of obvious universalistic appeal both in function and,
usually, in description of the clash of cultures and of desires.
It hardly needs to be added that nation-state status
will not automatically produce hordes of creative Ariels. The
factors of the accident of the individual and then his training
and his stimuli are still to be taken into account. There is
little doubt that Uruguay has national attitudes in ample measure,
but playing against it is its smallness, its overreadiness to
ingest European ideas, and its physical isolation from the main-
streams.
The frustration of the anti-imperialistic intellectual
here is a sorry thing to behold, and his brusqueness must be
understood in terms of this frustration.
It is very often said that anti-imperialist movements
must not be confused with democratic ones, as witness so many
cases in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In the short run, I
suppose the argument is correct; in the longer run, the usual
way of looking at the matter has been to say that democracy can-
not flourish except in conditions of national independence. But
is it possible that misdirected anti-imperialism may not also
make the development of broadening democratic institutions more
remote? It is convenient and easy to direct frustrations to
the outside, but one inevitable result is to create a climate
of fear and impotence with respect to local problems truly
subject to solution from within. If anvi-imperialism serves to
paralyze the will and thus reduces the area of possible action,
it is at the very least antisocial. My feeling is that what I
have seen of the Uruguayan anti-imperialists puts them into the
category of the self-destructive ones, at least for the time
being. They would be shocked to hear it said, but if their ra-
tionale is still arielismo and their effect is to limit choice,
then they are, of course, reactionary in the truest sense of the
word.
But Uruguay remains fortunate in the depth of its
traditions and in the complexity of its society. And if we iso-
late and describe a certain kind of intellectual, it does not
by any means follow that we have described the entire society.
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? -19- ? KHS-6-158
But even if it is true that a solid majority of Uruguayans ob-
jects to American policy and to American society, objection is
not enough. Anti-imperialism which is not mere antiyanquismo,
Third Positionism which also is not mere antiyanquismo, attitudes
with an affirmative content, selected and expressed with respect
for data--these are what Latin American politics sorely need.
The politicalized Latin American intellectual has his task
clearly presented to him. If he is to justify the goodly measure
of leadership and respect he now has, he must begin to speak in
terms of specific wants, specific programs, and specific capa-
bilities. To do so he must learn techniques of research to find
out what is possible to satisfy what he thinks is desirable.
He must leave his ivory tower and dirty his intellectual hands,
finding solutions within himself and within his society.
In answer to this argument about the necessity for
techniques and data in order to solve pressing public problems,
an Argentine told me, "No, no, social knowledge reveals itself."
Speaking of Greeks, I wonder what Aristotle would have replied
to such a comment.
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