venezuela | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

By the Way • September 28, 2014

James vs. Roosevelt: Letters to the Crimson

Jackson Lears has dramatized the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and William James, but evidence of that conversation is actually hard to find. We turned up one interesting chapter in the conversation turning around the Venezuelan Crisis of 1895, and playing out in the pages of the Harvard Crimson.

By Max Larkin

If you have forgotten the particulars of the Venezuelan Crisis of 1895, or never knew them (as I didn’t and still don’t), know only that Lord Salisbury’s government had hoped to reclaim as part of British Guyana territory on the other side of what was known as the Schomburgk Line — territory that was also considered part of sovereign Venezuela. President Grover Cleveland, in his second term, forbade the British claim from going forward, threatening war and toughening the Monroe Doctrine in the process. It was part of the long story of the United States expanding its interests, toward becoming the global police force that it is today.

The decision was well-received in Venezuela, according to a report filed in The Independent by the journalist Kate Foote Coe. She described a warm reception of American intervention that present-day presidents can only dream of:

Mr. Beurres, who is the son of the Venezuelan Minister to Washington, mounted on a chair, read a very excellent little speech in good, clear English… “La Gran Republica del Norte,” which had bought its liberty with a struggle in years past, proud and prosperous now, was yet magnanimous enough to look with friendly eyes upon its sister Republics. Through President Cleveland it had spoken, and they the people were there to express to the full their appreciation of this act…

The news of Cleveland’s warlike posture against the British was not as well received in Cambridge as in Caracas. A Crimson opinion enumerated problems with the plan: it amounted to imperial meddling to stop imperial meddling, it promised dangerous and entangling protectorates, and it misunderstood Monroe, among others.

This amounted to too much mollycoddle for Theodore Roosevelt, distinguished alumnus and soon to be Secretary of the Navy. On January 7, 1896, he wrote the Crimson in protest, blaming “stock-jobbing timidity, the Baboo kind of statesmanship” for inevitably bringing about a worse war later on. (A similar criticism resounds today of President Obama’s decision not to arm Syrian rebels years ago.)

Two days later, William James, Roosevelt’s old anatomy professor and the father of American pragmatism, replied.

There was history here: according to the historian P. K. Dooley, when James was teaching and Roosevelt, a student, stood to speak, he “realizing that little would be gained in a debate, responded by ‘settling back in his chair, in a broad grin… and waiting for T.R. to finish.’” But here James is chastising Roosevelt more harshly, particularly for daring to imply that President Cleveland’s course should not be questioned.

Embedded in the rebuke is a beautiful depiction of the political university:

May I express a hope that in this University, if no where else on the continent, we shall be patriotic enough not to remain passive whilst the destinies of our country are being settle by surprise. Let us be for our against; and if against, then against by every means in our power, when a policy is taking shape that is bound to alter all the national ideals that we have cultivated hitherto.

Today, Cleveland’s tough stance is applauded as smart foreign policy. In retrospect James looks like a crank, or overcautious. It raises the question: more than a century later, with the ‘crisis’ long forgotten, are we still more sympathetic to the upstart Roosevelt, and his fear of unmanly dissent, than to his teacher, the one who taught America good sense? And why?

Thanks to the staff of the Harvard Crimson for allowing us to review these letters as they originally appeared.

Podcast • February 14, 2008

In the Neo-Liberal Ruins: Why Venezuela Matters

Jeffrey Sachs had the wit to foresee the doom in his own economic remedies for Bolivia in the mid-1980s. The crisis then was hyper-inflation. “If you’re bold,” he remembers telling Bolivians in power, “you could turn a poor, land-locked, hyper-inflated country into a poor, land-locked country with stable prices.” The problem that free markets, free trade and foreign direct investment didn’t solve over the next twenty years was majority poverty in a pigmentocracy, as Sachs put it on Open Source two years ago. Bolivia was “a society of division, a society of conquest,” in which the 10-percent elite of white skin and European blood had never been impelled to invest in the impoverished Indian masses.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Julia Buxton here (20 minutes, 9 mb mp3)

Julia Buxton, Bradford University

With a bit of a vengeance, Julia Buxton here picks up the history of the unraveling of the so-called “Washington consensus” of free-market cures for Latin economies. Inequality in fact widened in most of Latin America under the investment rules of the 1990s. The rules had to change “because the model wasn’t working,” she says. But it was homegrown politics — “this constituency of resistance,” as Julia Buxton calls it — that drove the undoing of policy: in Venezuela (which elected Hugo Chavez president in 1998), Bolivia (where the neo-socialist and “cocalero” Evo Morales won election in 2005) and Ecuador (where Rafael Correa took power in 2006). Venezuela remains for Professor Buxton the world model of the post-Washington development reality: the regeneration of community politics and economic development go ever hand-in-hand; and the Washington connection is discounted, if not unplugged.

Julia Buxton teaches at Bradford University in the U.K. She writes on openDemocracy. And she cleared the air at Brown’s “Changes in the Andes” conference with a PowerPoint stemwinder that triggered this conversation.

Podcast • December 5, 2007

Chavismo with some new brakes on it

The Nobel fictionist Gabriel Garcia Marquez left a brilliant double-exposure of Hugo Chavez after they shared a plane ride not long after Chavez took power in Venezuela in 1999: Hugo Chavez “While he moved off ...

The Nobel fictionist Gabriel Garcia Marquez left a brilliant double-exposure of Hugo Chavez after they shared a plane ride not long after Chavez took power in Venezuela in 1999:

Hugo Chavez

“While he moved off among his military escort and old friends,” remembered Garcia Marquez, “I shuddered at the thrill of having gladly traveled and talked with two contrary men. One to whom inveterate luck has offered the opportunity to save his country. And the other, a conjurer who could go down in history as one more despot.”

The near-tie vote Sunday against the Chavez’s idea of constitutional “reform” for Venezula confirms the sense of Chavez as a man on the edge, in a dangerous conflict of self and ideals, a character out a Garcia Marquez novel, in a “headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams.” Is this the story? Does the characterization of the demagog who would be dictator come any closer than the cartoons to explaining why the “Bolivarian revolution” is still so magnetic in much of Latin America and so scary in New York as well as Washington.

So I’ve been asking square-one sorts of questions about Chavismo : about his ideas of “participatory democracy” (is it democracy at all?), about “21st Century Socialism,” which may be quite different from the 19th and 20th Century versions; about the populist economic nationalism that Chavez has thrown up against the “neo-liberalism” of the “Washington consensus” on free markets, free trade, and multinational investments.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Julia Buxton, Jennifer McCloy and James Green here (36 minutes, 17 MB MP3)

Our guests here are: Julia Buxton of the University of Bradford in the UK. She writes extensively (and sympathetically) about Chavez and Chavismo on openDemocracy. Jennifer McCoy of Georgia State Universty and the Carter Center, both in Atlanta. And James Green, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Brown University.