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Disciplinary Conquest

U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900â"1945

Duke University Press

South America as a Field of Inquiry

To U.S. businessmen and diplomats, South America had been a land of curiosity since the 1790s. Interest grew after the 1823 proclamation by President Monroe that the Americas should remain a continent free from European colonialism and should be governed by republican institutions. Early U.S. Hispanists (William H. Prescott, Henry W. Longfellow, George Ticknor, Washington Irving, and Mary T. Peabody Mann) expressed interest in the region, its history, languages, and literature. But they failed to develop stable institutions for the study of Hispanic America. After 1873, stimulated by the effects of the economic depression, industrialists, statesmen, and naval strategists started to think of South America as a possible outlet for the overproduction of American industrial goods. Yet, before the first Pan-American Conference in Washington (1889–1890), many U.S. scholars and citizens considered South America a "terra incognita." Here was a mass of territory containing important potential markets for U.S. commodities, as well as sources of valuable raw materials, a land about which little was known. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War (1898), new scholarship began to question the cultural similarities between Spain and Spanish America, calling for a separate study of the latter. Starting in the early 1900s, the International Bureau of the American Republics contributed new information — chiefly statistics and maps — to make the region appealing to U.S. investors and traders. Yet professional study of the region took time to develop.

Between the Spanish-American War (1898) and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's declaration of the Good Neighbor Policy (1933), South America became the object of scholarly interest and study in the United States. Historians have characterized this period as preparatory for a professional "Latin Americanism," itself part of an emergent area studies complex. Rather than clumsy preparatory steps, these U.S. disciplinary interventions were comprehensive and enduring intellectual visions in themselves. From the first decade of the twentieth century, U.S. scholars visited, observed, and measured the subcontinent, raising crucial questions for future research. Geographers, archaeologists, sociologists, historians, and political scientists, among others, turned South America from a land of curiosities into a "field of inquiry," a virtual territory of science. Distinct individuals working within different disciplines collaborated to create a more intimate, profound, and reliable knowledge of the region's nature, problems, and possibilities of development. Theirs was not just a search for information about the societies south of Panama, but the beginning of an enduring academic engagement with South America, the branching southward of U.S. research disciplines.

In this chapter I start with a curious diplomatic exchange indicative of the extent to which scientific inquiry and diplomacy were intertwined. The incident reveals a persistent presupposition of U.S. scholars: that South America was a treasure of information waiting to be claimed by U.S. disciplinary knowledge. Next, I discuss the importance of knowledge in the period's business and diplomatic discourse, in particular in relation to cultural engagement. Then I turn to scholars' rhetorical interventions in favor of a comprehensive disciplinary study of the subcontinent. I close with a brief analysis of the relationship among scholarship, foreign policy, and the early origins of Latin American studies.

A Diplomat's Curious Proposal

In December 1940 the State Department received a curious proposal from Boaz W. Long, U.S. ambassador in Ecuador. In a memorandum entitled "Possibilities of Ecuador as a Field for Advanced Academic Studies," Long explained how U.S. researchers could take Ecuador as their field of study. To the ambassador, Ecuador was a territory virgin to scientific inquiry, a land overflowing with intriguing questions and research possibilities. The language of his memorandum replicated the rhetoric of early promoters of inter-American economic cooperation with the promise of expanding knowledge rather than commerce and investment.

Specifically, Long argued that Ecuador should interest U.S. scholars in several fields of inquiry: archaeology, ethnology, geography, economics, and sociology. To students of archaeology, the country offered almost unlimited research possibilities. The School of American Research's latest survey had found many unexplored sites in the country, and since the cost of excavation was low, almost any graduate student could afford to set up camp. Scholars might even investigate the connection between the great pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica and the Andes (Long 1941, 3–6). The student of ethnology could expect to find indigenous groups relatively untouched by Spanish colonization. Though much had been written about the Jívaros, other groups remained unstudied, including the Capayas, the Colorados, the Otavalos, and the Salasacas (ibid., 9). Each of Ecuador's three major regions — the Pacific coastland, the Andean highlands, and the Amazonian jungle — afforded researchers many opportunities to study indigenous textiles, folk music, and traditional medicine.

To the geographer, said Long, Ecuador was a "gold mine": a country with a diversity of climates, vegetation, and landscapes that remained almost unmapped and relatively unexplored. Its jungles, páramos, and highlands presented opportunities to investigate different types of land use, the effect of climate on agriculture, and the altitude at which farmers tilled the land. Those interested in economics would find in Ecuador backwardness in its most "virulent form." Here was an underdeveloped agrarian economy with a preponderance of indigenous peasants. A racially divided society with three distinct standards of living (white, black, Indian) would be appealing to the student of economics. The sociologist could find in Ecuador examples of inbred cultures and sociabilities developing at the margins of Western law and civilization. On the coast, a peasant mestizo society (the Montuvio) had developed on the fringes of Hispanic civilization, whereas in the Esmeraldas, African traditions seemed to have remained intact. In Ecuador's marginal and backward agrarian societies, Long argued, U.S. sociologists and economists could begin to untangle the mysteries of underdevelopment.

It was Long's intention to alert U.S. universities and scholars to the possibilities open in Ecuador. Pressing for further research in South America's least-noticed country, Long replicated an assumption typical of U.S. diplomacy in the Good Neighbor years: that a better understanding between the United States and South America depended on the production of cross-disciplinary knowledge. He viewed the small Andean country as a vast deposit of evidence useful for validating theories in the social and human sciences. Scientific inquiry in Ecuador itself was an underdeveloped field, and it was up to the United States to deploy U.S. intellectual capital to exploit all existing research possibilities. In short, Ecuador was a field ripe for the model of cross-disciplinary research pioneered by the leaders of the "university movement" in the United States (James B. Conant, Daniel Coit Gilman, William R. Harper, among others). Long wrote, "Here is a rich interplay of the material introduced in departments of History, Anthropology, Sociology, Economics, Linguistics, and Political Economy. Moreover these studies have the two advantages, first, of being human, living studies, and second, of being of immense value to the development of the Western Hemisphere" (1941, 19). U.S. specialized academic communities could help to complete the work of explorers who had pioneered the study of the Andes, the Amazon, and the Pampas. Long's proposal was clearly informed by the area-studies perspective, in which a group of disciplines, acting in conjunction, could better understand a region's peoples and problems. Though the area-studies complex is supposed to have emerged as a knowledge auxiliary to Cold War politics, it is clear that several departments of U.S. universities had established the bases for Oriental and Latin American studies much before 1947. In fact, by 1940, the State Department was aware of the need to promote economic development in the hemisphere. And several of the key promoters of this idea — among them, none other than Nelson Rockefeller, the coordinator of Inter-American Affairs — believed that such assistance could not be extended without further knowledge of the region's history, economies, societies, and politics.

Why Promote Regional Knowledge?

A diplomat with a long expertise in Central America and the Caribbean, Long ended up advocating knowledge as the key mode of U.S. engagement with Ecuador. Early on in his career, Long had favored direct intervention and Dollar Diplomacy. In 1913, after ten years of traveling as a diplomat in Mexico, Central America, and Cuba, he was appointed head of the Latin American division of the State Department. In this role, he supported new loans to Nicaragua to expedite the U.S. acquisition of canal rights. Indeed, in Mexico and Central America, Long sustained a position close to Dollar Diplomacy: where direct intervention proved neither possible nor desirable, the United States could exert influence and oversight through bank loans. Long's 1914 report on Honduras was typical of U.S. imperial views and policies in Central America: he argued that high illiteracy, substandard diets, and alcoholism provided the structural conditions for "chronic revolution." To overcome Hondurans' impulse to anarchy, the United States should assist the country's economic recovery with loans and technology. To this end, Long supported the railroad-and-loans scheme designed by agents of Minor Keith and the United Fruit Company (Baker 1964, 5). In 1918, at the time of a crisis in U.S.-Mexican relations, Long argued that the United States should loan money to Mexico in order to secure control over Mexican oil fields.

While serving in Central America and the Caribbean, Long maintained his imperialist view of the region. In 1919, he was appointed U.S. minister in Cuba. In response to his reports on civil disorder and labor strikes in Havana that year, the United States sent the marines to the island. Long was the one who requested that a small corps of marines remain in Camagüey until 1922 (Schoultz 1998, 233). After Cuba, he served in Nicaragua, during 1936 and 1937. Next, he was appointed U.S. minister in Ecuador, where he became interested in archaeology and ethnology, gathering a rich collection of native rugs and artifacts. In 1943, after his memorandum on Ecuador, he was named ambassador to Guatemala. Retiring in 1946, he went to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he assumed the directorship of the Museum of New Mexico.

In Ecuador, Long learned to appreciate the importance of indigenous cultures to the country's social and cultural make-up and, in time, he became a collector and an amateur archaeologist. At the time, as the United States weighed whether to join the European war, education and scholarly exchange became the new frontier in the cultural war between American "democracy" and German "dictatorship." To counter German propaganda in Ecuador, Long cooperated with Galo Plaza to establish the American College of Quito.

Beyond a response to the new international conjuncture, Long's 1940 memorandum was an assertion of the quest for hemispheric knowledge that accompanied the expansion of U.S. economic interests in South America. His gesture could be seen as a continuation of the scientific conquest pioneered by U.S. scholars between 1900 and 1930, in which the United States sought to affirm its supremacy over South America in science and education, and to learn to interact with its southern neighbors on the terrain of culture. In the heyday of the Good Neighbor Policy, scholars and politicians alike considered knowledge of the societies and cultures of South America to be crucial to American diplomacy.

Knowing South America Better

During the period 1900–1918, calls for enhancing knowledge of the region abounded; business prospectors, economic analysts, and diplomatic reformers all hungered to know more. For U.S. businessmen concerned with winning an increased share of the South American trade, opening trade and investment opportunities in South America required a better knowledge of the region. Such demands were instrumental. To capture these markets from traditional European traders, their sales representatives, diplomatic agents, and other commercial travelers had to be acquainted with the languages, traditions, and habits of South Americans.

Their demands for enhanced cultural competency were part of a more general discourse about how to gain South American markets, a discourse deployed in books of advice to merchants and manufacturers, in expert articles about U.S. trade and shipping, and in promotional literature published by the International Bureau of the American Republics. This discourse emphasized the need to establish U.S. banks in the region, the convenience of direct shipping lines to South American ports, and the urgency of improving how exporters conducted their business. Attention to better packaging, greater information about customs practices, and a more nuanced knowledge of consumers' preferences completed the list of concerns of South American trade as construed by business rhetoric.

At first, business prospectors did not require academic knowledge to achieve their ends. They took on themselves the task of discovering the "real South America," advising traders on the practical obstacles they would face in the region. On occasion, business writers protested the "superficial knowledge" dispensed by travel writers and the unrealistic optimism of local consuls and Washington officials. Often their main concern was that commercial travelers and agents lacked adequate training in languages and local culture. So they demanded that commerce schools and colleges do better at teaching Spanish. As for learning "people's wants and tastes," they considered this to be their own mandate and were not ready to relinquish this to anthropologists, historians, or geographers.

Occasionally, business experts entered into the discussion of U.S. commercial policy in relation to cultural awareness. In 1907 James Van Cleave took on the argument that German and British traders were well ahead of Americans in their linguistic training and cultural sensitivity. If this was so, he said, a bit of cultural immersion in Hispanic America and better language training would help U.S. businesses win those coveted South American markets. But the competition for informal empire, Van Cleave argued, was chiefly a contest of productive forces among industrial nations. In the short-term, sales persuasion might require agents to possess some cultural background knowledge and good language skills, but in the long run, U.S. manufacturers would have to outcompete European firms in product cost, quality, design, and convenience.

The business community increasingly sought cultural knowledge as the 1920s began. In 1920, the National Convention in Foreign Trade (gathered in San Francisco) recommended equipping US business agents with "accurate knowledge of foreign markets, with practical knowledge of foreign languages and with a wide knowledge of the economic, social and political conditions prevailing in overseas markets" (Lord 1921, 167). Universities and colleges had taken on the challenge of training men in foreign trade, they argued, but the curriculum was too practical and lacked content in the humanities. Greater training in the history and literatures of the world was required.

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Excerpted from Disciplinary Conquest by Ricardo D. Salvatore. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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