The Americas: A History of Two Moral Visions

With Professor Greg Grandin

This week, I spoke with one of my favorite authors, Professor Greg Grandin. In his new book, America, América: A New History of the New World, Professor Grandin dives into what ties the Americas together and drives us apart.

We explored how radical opposition to conquest in Latin America guided independence leaders toward a pursuit of harmony, while denial and evasion pushed the U.S. toward conquest. The history of the Americas is, in many ways, a tension between those two fundamentally different, still-unfolding paths. It’s also a history of the rise of social rights—and of what follows when genocide is acknowledged, or too long ignored.

Greg is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale. He’s the author of eight books, including The End of the Myth, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2020. He has published widely, including in The Nation, where he’s a member of the editorial board, and he’s a regular guest on Democracy Now! His new book, America, América, is a New York Times bestseller.

Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity. We covered history from the 1400s through the New Deal. I hope Professor Grandin and I can round out the conversation later on! You can also listen to us on the Skipped History podcast:

Trying to cleanse our palates of Thomas Jefferson

Ben: Let’s begin with the Spanish Conquest. Why start your history of the New World there?

GG: Over the last decade or so, I've been interested in how Latin America's contribution to the history of social and economic rights has been ignored. If you go back to how the Conquest of the New World led to a radicalization within Catholic thought, you begin to see the rise of ideas that went on to be enormously influential, if not still overlooked.

I look at the brutality of the Spanish Conquest: the arrival of the conquistadors in what’s now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and then outward towards Mexico and the Andes, and what demographers call history’s “largest human mortality event in proportion to the global population.” Within a century, they estimate that a population of a hundred million people was reduced by 90%.

Ben: “The greatest genocide in human history,” wrote the historian Tzvetan Todorov.

GG: The reduction took place in waves. The first wave was warfare and conquest and enslavement, as well as dislocation and famine. The second wave was mostly epidemics due to vulnerability to European diseases. It wasn't until a century later that the population began to recover.

A small group of Catholics, like Bartolomé de las Casas, put forward very, very radical challenges to the legitimacy of the Spanish Conquest. The Spanish empire justified the conquistadors’ brutality by saying that Native Americans were a kind of animal, or some subset of humans. Las Casas turned that argument around and said it was the conquistadors who dehumanized themselves by acting without any moral restraint; by acting as pure individualist greed machines. They “came like starving wolves, tigers, and lions,” he wrote.

Other Catholic figures like Francisco de Vitoria, a scholar in the tradition of Saint Thomas Aquinas, questioned the legal legitimacy of the Conquest. He narrowed the terms of when you're allowed to wage war almost to a sliver and gave a number of lectures that many cite as the foundation of international law. And then you had other people condemning slavery and servitude of all kinds. In their mind, the reality of the New World proved that all humanity is one. Native Americans had rights.

Ben: “Spanish colonialism’s moral crisis came early with the Conquest,” you write. “The Anglo experience was different.”

GG: Yes, one way to think about it is it matters when your settler colonial project has its genocide: whether it has its genocide at the beginning of the project and you have to acknowledge it, or as with the British and the Anglos, if your genocide was ongoing and took place over centuries and didn’t become a moral problem until much later.

When British settlement began in North America, the Atlantic coast was already devastated by European plagues. Ninety percent of the population was gone. The British showed up, and they're like, "Oh, where is everybody? It's an empty paradise.” What they were arriving at was basically a killing field.

There's a document in America, América, that recounts a meeting held by members of the Virginia Company in 1607. They say, "Should we issue some kind of public justification for what we want to do in Jamestown and later in Plymouth?" They'd read all the Spaniards: Las Casas, Vitoria, and more. They knew that the Spanish couldn’t find a way to justify their conquest, much less the enslavement of people. So they concluded, “It's better that we don't say anything at all.”

So from the beginning, inherent in the British Anglo-Saxon settler colonial project was denial and evasion.

Ben: Thomas Jefferson created a legal framework out of that denial and evasion. A “white nation settling down,” he said, has the right to defend its interests.

I will say, there are certain points in this book where you need to warn the reader to wear a bib, because the vomit in the mouth can overflow and distract from the text.

GG: Ha, I understand. The big picture is that the founders of the U.S. believed—I mean, they didn’t really believe it—but they imagined that the continent was empty, or empty enough. They knew there were Spanish holdings, they knew there were Native Americans, but they also knew that they would be at the Pacific within a couple of generations—and they were, by 1848.

To justify the expansion, they revived the doctrine of conquest, a Roman law doctrine that basically didn't question your right to wage war and legitimized whatever land you took. North American leaders, people like Jefferson and John Adams, didn't think that English-speaking settlers were doing anything wrong.

Ben: If you're out picnicking, they sound like they’d put their blankets down right on top of yours and say, “Sorry, this looked open to me,” before Jefferson cited some obscure Roman legal doctrine and John wrote a letter to Abigail.

GG: Ha!

Ben: In Spanish America, a different doctrine—uti possidetis—allowed Indigenous peoples to stay put. Can you elaborate on that approach?

GG: A way to think about it is Latin America essentially came into the world as a League of Nations, or a United Nations. They came into being on a continent that was already filled up: seven independent republics, plus Brazil, which was a monarchy. There was no area that was imagined to have lacked sovereignty. They had to learn how to live with each other.

Latin American independence leaders, like Simón Bolívar, inherited Las Casas’ critique of the Spanish Conquest. They thought Spanish colonialism was an abomination, and they saw independence as an atonement for the conquest. They wanted to make the New World a place of redemption. So they came up with a couple of things.

One was uti possidetis, meaning “as you possess, so shall you possess.” This idea was originally in itself a doctrine of war, meaning anything you grab in war, it's yours. But Bolívar and his foreign minister, Pedro Gual, turned it into a doctrine of peace, saying, “Look, we might not like the colonial boundaries, but we have to respect them as they are.” Of course, they didn't always do that: there were skirmishes and all-out wars over land. But every one of those wars appealed to the doctrine of uti possidetis, to this idea that country lines were fixed and Indigenous peoples could stay put.

Ben: I love the section where you're talking about Venezuela's first constitution, written in 1811. There was overlap with the United States Constitution, but Venezuela's constitution makes mention of the word social nine times and society fifteen times. The document makes a concerted effort to protect the community against “the dangerous right to unlimited freedom.” There are “other, sweeter and more peaceful rights,” it says, that come from living in harmony with others.

Wow. Nice constitution!

GG: Ha, I mean, independence leaders understood that they were inheritors of Las Casas’ vision. Yes, they wanted to celebrate and protect individual freedom and liberty like the U.S., but they knew individualism can destroy society, so you have to find a balance.

I argue that this is the origin of social rights; that the origins of conceptions of citizenship include a set of rights demanding the state step back and allow people to speak, assemble, believe whatever they want—but they also include a set of rights that the state tax surplus wealth and redistribute it in the form of a social wage through education and healthcare. The Mexican Constitution, enacted in 1824, was the world's first constitution that had social rights embedded in it.

And Latin Americans were doing all of this, of course, as the United States was expanding chattel slavery, ethnic cleansing Native Americans, and invading Mexico, annexing 55% of its population while taking Texas. Over and over, the U.S. reaffirmed the legitimacy of the doctrine of conquest: through Supreme Court rulings, pronouncements of the presidents, and law books that taught the legality of the doctrine of conquest up until the 1920s.

Meanwhile, Latin Americans took the earlier critique of Spain, applied it to the U.S., and kept on putting forward a different vision of international law.

Ben: You write, “It is a maxim in both electrical engineering and international relations theory that power needs a ground. For many years, Latin America was that to the lightning-like United States,” through its “persistent opposition to intervention and conquest.”

This restraining function, you add, “served the United States well, especially so in the lead-up to World War II.” What happened then?

GG: In the book, I tell it through the story of Cordell Hull, FDR's Secretary of State. FDR sent him down to Montevideo, Uruguay, for the Seventh Pan-American Conference, held in late 1933.

The world was in crisis. Extremism was spreading. The economy was sputtering. The New Deal was trying this and that, but in many ways spinning its wheels. The right was on the rise in the U.S. Roosevelt told Hull, Do whatever you want. Give the Latin Americans lights so they can land planes at night, but don't give in to any of their legal demands.

Hull was kind of on the right wing of the New Deal. He was a free trader from Tennessee; his dad was a Confederate soldier. But Hull was also a reformer, and he began to see an analogy between free trade and non-intervention—a kind of laissez-faire recognition of sovereignty. Hull also had a number of anti-imperialists traveling with him. And he basically accepted every Latin American demand for sovereignty.

To his surprise, he was celebrated. He was hailed as an unconquering hero. The New York Times runs a headline, “The Age of Imperialism Is Over.” Hull thought FDR would chastise him, but FDR knew a good about-face when he saw one, and he embraced Hull and the goodwill that he generated in Latin America. The development of the noninterventionist “Good Neighbor” policy was enormously important in uniting the Americas in the run-up to World War II.

At the same time, the change in policy bolstered the New Deal. FDR was first elected in '32. His re-election was in '36. He tried a lot of things during his first term in what historians call the First New Deal. A lot of them didn’t work or were ruled unconstitutional. But in 1936, FDR's campaign created Good Neighbor Leagues—basically, a get-out-the-vote apparatus. And through these Good Neighbor Leagues, his administration was able to put forward a different vision of social citizenship, one that united foreign with the domestic: a tolerance of sovereignty and diversity at home and abroad.

Good Neighbor Leagues were organized on Indian reservations and among Latinos in the Southeast, Black citizens in the South and northern cities, and other ethnic groups in urban areas. They put forward a vision of pluralism. Roosevelt won the 1936 election with 27 million votes—more votes than any human being had ever won in any election in history. It was an enormous landslide.

Ben: You say, “Not only would the decisions made in Montevideo help save the New Deal, but by galvanizing the forces that would defeat Nazism, help save the world”—which is a pretty profound impact. But then, of course, came the Cold War, when the U.S. relationship with Latin America transformed again.

GG: Right. We know the history of the Cold War. The U.S. turned from allying with the left in Latin America against the right to allying with the right against the left. I make a big deal in the book about how the United States emerged from the war unbelievably strong, unbelievably wealthy, not an enemy in sight. And yet it began to treat itself as if its population were belligerents and as if the United States were an occupied country.

Ben: A timely conclusion. “War-bred militancy was brought home,” you write, “and so was the psychological warfare that the U.S. had been waging on large parts of the world.”

Not by coincidence—and I hate to stop here, but we have to for time—you discuss how the U.S. “shook off Latin America as a restraint.” I hope we can talk about more of that history soon.

GG: Absolutely. It’s wonderful to hear that you find the book useful.