Bolivar: American Liberator

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you well good afternoon everybody I am Carolyn Brown I direct the office of scholarly programs and the John W Kluge Center here at the library and it's a great pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon for a celebration we love celebrations and we are celebrating the publication of Maria Ronnie's book Simone Bolivar american liberator mr. Rana I wrote this spent many months at the Kluge Center it was about ten two different periods working on the book doing research and Hispanic division in other parts of the library the book is done as you all know and we are here to celebrate it but before we do that if you would if you have a cell phone or other electronic instrument that might go off beep interfere with the speaker if you would please turn it off the program as I know it is sponsored by the John W Kluge Center which was established in the year 2000 through a very generous donation by John W Kluge to provide a venue on Capitol Hill with the world of ideas and the world of affairs where the thinkers and the doers might have opportunities to come together for informal conversations we also support scholars to spend its space and time and those of you who do scholarship know that time is one of the rarest commodities of all when you're trying to do scholarship space and uninterrupted time to conduct research we have residents in two levels at the very senior level which of course is the level at which Murray was here but we also have in our community generation of the most promising rising scholars many of whom are clustered over here on the left side of the room and we look to the forward to the day I won't be here I don't think but forward to the day when some of our junior fellows they'll return as senior scholars might take them 20 years or more but the center also does lectures and small conferences if you'd like to know more about us and sign up for alerts about what's going on you can do so at the back of the room after the event I think Marie Arana is probably known to everybody in this room just about in some capacity but maybe not all the same capacity because she wears multiple hats and wears them all superbly some of you will know her as an author she has several books to her credit Lima Knights and cellophane and her memoir American chica two worlds one childhood which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award and the Penn Memorial memoir award others know her in another capacity as a literary critic she was the editor-in-chief of book world from 1999 to 2008 which you will remember as the literary section of the Washington Post for which she still serves as writer at large but I couldn't help saying many of us lament the disappearance of book world which was part of our Sunday morning and even many years later we might complain quietly about it but another hat those of us at the library also know her as a senior consultant on Latin American fare affairs to the librarian and as a key advisor to a library's annual National Book Festival I think I could call her our secret weapon on that project in addition so here's another hat she's a member of the library scholars Council and beyond our wall she serves on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle national is see asian Hispanic Journalists and I could go on a while one of the joys of my position as director of the Kluge Center is that sometimes I get to watch a project unfold and I remember very early conversation I had with Marie about this project and she told me that it was really meant to be initially as just a small quick book of not remember something like a hundred pages for either a young audience or a general audience or something but you know seemed on Billy Bulevar had been it seemed was well known and had been well researched and what more was there to say so 100 pages plus 500 great deal more to say and life has many surprises and it's so it's very interesting if you look at the the blurb like reading book blurbs sometimes the very first line says it is astonishing that Simone Bulevar the great liberator of South America is not better known in the United States well I would submit ladies and gentlemen that he is about to be better known in the United States please welcome Marie Arana thank you so much Thank You Carolyn I owe so much to Carolyn and to the Kluge Center I am don't think I could have written this book without the Kluge Center and I want to thank everybody on your staff Carolyn and especially for your support personal support which was so important to me but your wonderful staff Maryanne recur and Joanne Kitching and everybody else and I want to thank georgette Dorn where are you georgette for all the support over the years and for co-hosting this function I'm very grateful to you and of course I want to thank dr. James Billington for his really truly visionary leadership in this what I call mecca of scholarship I got to know the Library of Congress as as Carolyn said through the National Book Festival twelve years of working on the National Book Festival with John Cole and Guillem Allen ara and then over the years coming to two Kluge allowed me a more intimate view of the institution and now I'm really very fortunate to be sitting in the librarians office and working for dr. Billington and who is really as you all know a man who cares deeply about the culture of the book and the creative and intellectual life of this country and the knowledge and wisdom that is required in a true democracy so thank you Carolyn and dr. Billington and the deputy librarian Bob dizer for your support - and all my friends here thank you so much for this opportunity I'd like to start by telling you how I came to the subject of believer how it was that as Carolyn described me a person of too many hats books editor memoirist novelist former book publishing executive and otherwise happily promiscuous intellectual dilettante came to want to plumb every detail of one life and how that life over the years came to represent for me something very important about Latin American identity it began truth be told as some scholarly pursuits can as a form of punishment when I was a child in Lima Peru I was made to atone for my very naughty behavior by being forced to sit alone on a stool in my grandparents living room it was a dark forbidding room airless shuttered against the fog and the Sun of Lima and there were books in glass bookcases and there was an ornately carved piano and there were inlaid tables and a marble bust of a beguiling African princess and three ancestral portraits painted more than a hundred years before I was born and one portrait was of an imposing brigadier general named Hawking grouping they say leise who was my great-great-great grandfather and he was the first Spaniard to charge and the first to fall in the Battle of Ayacucho which was the defining battle the Yorktown or Waterloo if you will of the Latin American wars of Independence the wistful wrong beauty who stared at him from the other wall was the daughter he never knew Trinidad Grubin this Elly's she was born a few weeks after he was killed sixteen years later at the age of sixteen Trinidad married the man in the third portrait my great-great-grandfather Pedro Cisneros Torres and Pedro Cisneros had fought in bolivars army under Antonio Jose de Sucre in other words Pedro was one of the rebels who had stormed down the and ease on that crisp December day in 1824 eager to slay his future wife's father so you see I had been told to sit there and think about my badness and my not eNOS but all I could think of was the wickedness of all that the glories of rebellion people trying to kill their future father-in-law's you know that's awful and then how I was the logical result of all that anger it sort of made me happy but decades later remembering that family history and trying to parse what it is that makes Latin Americans the way we are I began to be fascinated by the man at the crucible of that American moment Simon Bolivar now there's no shortage of books on believer here in the Library of Congress alone the last time I checked there are two thousand six hundred and eighty three volumes most of them are in Spanish dozens are in believers own words or written by his contemporaries and a great many more were written after he was dead and gone and they're filled with hagiography or vitriol he was a controversial man but researching his life I soon learned that there's a very big difference in reading Bolivar and reading about Boulevard works about believer can be surprisingly tendentious depending on the nationality of the writer Venezuelans of course tend to idolize him Spaniards are earthed by his burning hatred of Spain Colombians revere him although they also managed to simultaneously Revere his enemies including those who tried to assassinate him Bolivians tend to favor believer because of course he favored them Ecuadorians are grumpy that his letters show them such a bad light and Peruvians above all despise believer because the Peru that Bolivar left behind was a fragment of what it once had been after the revolution Peru which was the heart of the Spanish Empire in South America its medulla of power the richest Viceroyalty of them all became just another Republic not any bigger or better than any of its neighbors so you can imagine when I a Peruvian American would tell people that I was writing a book about Bolivar they would say oh ha I know exactly what you're going to write the challenge was to ignore a sea of opinion and get it the man in the primary documents and what riches of primary documentation I was able to find here at the Library of Congress let me just tell you about a few of them Bolivar zone writing of course when there are 32 volumes of letters collected by daniele florencio Leary which were then re-edited by Vicente lacunae and so you have this tremendous richness of vibrant vivid language that Bolivar would write and he would write sort of willy-nilly he loved to write he said he wrote best in the middle of a ball it ballroom dancing and he said and all that sort of dancing would get him thinking even as he was careening around the floor and he would dash off to the side and dictate three letters at a time four letters at a time very much the way that Julius Caesar and Napoleon used to do to his adjutant and then - back to the ballroom and dance some more uh his writing was quite amazing then the court documents which I found extraordinary from the 18th century that I found here documents from seventeen ah 1795 97 which are here in the Library of Congress and they tell for instance of a case which was brought against the family the families of Simon Bolivar because Bolivar was an orphan he was orphaned very young in life by his mother and then by his father he was traded between because he was as a little boy very rich Venezuelan he had been given a tremendous inheritance by a very wealthy priest who was his uncle and so this little boy was fought over in the courts and you could see you know his running away and that his being brought back by the archbishop to the house where he belonged and all of this is here in court documentation in the library maps of the old streets of Caracas I found myself staring at maps and the longer I stared the more I saw things that I hadn't read anywhere before for instance bolivars father was a terrible sexual predator he was so terrible that the bishop was after him all the time he was accosting women in houses he was a costume women in public places he was trying to rape his maids and he was being brought before the archbishop all the time and of course the archbishop said I'm going to pretend I'm not believing these stories but if you don't straighten up you know I don't know what I'm gonna have to do and eventually believer his father decided he had to marry in fact the archbishop said you better get married at the age of about 46 he got married and he married a fourteen-year-old girl well looking at the maps I could see that believers house where Levi's father's house excuse me gone one be sent his house was property was contiguous to the house where this little girl that he married 14 years old he was 46 lived so you can imagine he had fought in the same alien with this little girl's father in Puerto Cabello so you can imagine and I could imagine it with you because and I didn't see it I hadn't read it anywhere else but there you know there are contiguous properties there is this man there's a his his war buddy who lives next door and there's this little girl growing up and that's the one he marries and that's the one that's believers mother I also found a long fold-out graphic that some very obsessed Venezuelan had done of every kilometer that Bolivar had ever traveled in his go in his comings and goings and in these little zigzags that you know fold out and you could see where he'd gone back and forth across the seas or whatever an amazing sort of visual aid to a biographer you can imagine and then of course their chronicles by his generals his mercenaries his soldiers by travelers who were by chance witness to the revolution and the writing was often vibrant brimming with observations and full of color reviewers have commented that my book reads like a novel which you know you don't want about if you read like a novel exactly at least not when you have been a novelist and you're trying to be a biographer you know so so but it pleases me but it's not because of my vivid imagination I really did find all the color that I needed in those primary documents bolivars Bolivar zone writing as I said is brisk lively full of passion full of drama and where his words weren't enough I had the chronicles of his contemporaries one of those chronicles featured on the very first page of my book is a description of believer by one of his soldiers a very talented young painter named Jose Maria Espinosa who went on to produce some of the most famous portraits of Bolivar he had followed Bulova into battle as a teenager sat with him traced his features and chatted with him and when in 1876 this soldier published his memoir of the revolution which was called memoria de un alhamdulillah he included a cameo description of a marvelous moment downright cinematic at a critical junction in bolivars career the scene takes place immediately after the Battle of Oaxaca which was the conflict in 1819 that turned the tide for Bolivar and it's a sort of jewel that turns up now and then in primary documents that makes a biographers heart pound the painter describes a sweltering afternoon the sweltering afternoon of the Battle of boyacá when he and two other rebel soldiers are standing on a roadside just off the main road actually to balata suddenly they hear the sound of galloping hooves as they watch the rider emerge from the distance they can barely make out the figure crouched over a magnificent white horse the figure is small thin gaunt his long hair is whipping in the wind he is shirtless his chest is bare under his raggedy blue jacket a black cape is fluttering around his shoulders at first they think he's a Spaniard they run into the road and shout for him to stop one even threatens him with his Lance but the rider gallops ahead and ignores them when he gets close enough to render his features unmistakable he turns to glare at the soldier who is menacing him and he says so y'all it's I don't be a dumb son-of-a-bitch now does it get better than that I couldn't have dreamed that up it took a painter with a vivid sort of colorful eye to bring it to me and I stumbled on that description in an ancient little volume 1867 in the Magnificent Spanish language collection of this library believed odd was 36 years old at the Battle of Oaxaca and although he would die of tuberculosis eleven years and many dozens of battles later he seemed at that moment vibrant and strong and filled with a boundless energy for all his physical slightness he was only five foot six and a hundred and thirty pounds there was an undeniable intensity about the man his eyes were piercing black his gaze was penetrating his forehead was deeply lined his cheekbones were high chiseled his teeth perfect white his smile surprising and radiant he didn't smoke he didn't drink he bathed twice sometimes three times a day official portraits show a less than imposing man the meagre chest the impossibly thin legs the hands that look like a woman but when believed I entered a room his power was palpable when he spoke his voice was galvanizing he had a magnetism that seemed to dwarf sturdier men he enjoyed good cuisine but could endure days even weeks of punishing hunger he spent back-breaking hours in grueling campaigns by the end he had traveled seventy five thousand miles on horseback now lat that's like going from Anchorage Alaska to Tierra del Fuego five times his stamina in the saddle was legendary even the yang narrows the Cowboys the riders the plains in Venezuela called him with all admiration iron ass but he was equally comfortable in a ballroom or at the Opera he was a superb dancer a spirited conversationalist a cultivated man of the world and he could read he read widely and could quote in many many languages including Rousseau in French and Caesar in Latin he was a widower at the age of 19 and a sworn bachelor and he was also an insatiable womanizer by the time Bolivar was galloping toward Bogota in the scene that I've just described his name was already known around the world in Washington John Quincy Adams and James Monroe agonized over whether the fledgling Republic of the United States in which a slave trade was booming the slave trade was the largest GNP item in the American agenda whether this country with all its investment in the slave economy should support a patriot army whose ranks were populated by liberated slaves blacks part of the most latina Indians in London out-of-work veterans who had just left the Napoleonic Wars and were out of money decided to sign on to the Patriot cause to the believers cause you can imagine these soldiers coming from these Irish and Englishmen who were being sent off with great sort of bands playing in London in full regalia with hats and feathers and you know brass studded uniforms going off to fight a war in which the soldiers they would join were barefoot carrying sticks but there would be many more years of horrifying violence before Spain was thrust from the South American shores in the battlefields of Venezuela alone there were more dead than in the North American Revolution and the Civil War combined at the end of that chastening war one man would be credited with single-handedly conceiving organizing and leading the liberation of Six Nations a population one-and-a-half times the size of North America a land mass the size of modern Europe the odds against which he fought a formidable established world power vast areas of untracked wilderness splintered royalties loyalties sorry of many races would have proved daunting for the ablest of generals with strong armies at his command but believe I had never been a soldier he had no formal military training yet with little more than will and a genius for leadership he freed much of Spanish America and laid out his dream for a unified continent and yet and yet he was a highly imperfect man he could be impulsive headstrong filled with contradictions he spoke eloquently about justice but he wasn't always able to meet it out in the chaos of revolution his romantic life had a way of spilling out sloppily into the public realm he had trouble accepting criticism he had no patience for disagreements he was totally incapable of losing a game of cards it's hardly surprising that over the years Latin Americans have learned how to accept human imperfections in their leaders Bolivar taught them how as years passed he became known as the George Washington of South America actually general Lafayette gave him that moniker there were good reasons why both he and Washington came from rich influential families both were defenders of freedom both were heroic in war but apprehensive about marshalling the peace both resisted efforts to make them Kings both claimed to want to return to private lives but were called instead to shape governments both were accused of undue ambition and their the similarities end bolivars military action lasted more than twice as long as Washington's the territory he covered was seven times as large and spanned an astonishing geographic diversity from crocodile infested jungles to the snow-capped reaches of the Andes there's nothing as dramatic as that climb over the Andes in the middle of it was terribly terrible freezing temperatures losing all his men all his cattle most of his horses as he went much of his ammunition and then tumbling down the other side to surprise the spaniards where they least expected him to come it was an astonishing feat but he couldn't unlike Washington's war bolivar cannot have won his war without the aid of black and indian troops his success in rallying all the races became a turning point in the wars for independence it's fair to say that he simultaneously fought a revolution and a civil war but perhaps what distinguishes Washington and Bolivar above all can be seen most clearly in their written works Washington's words were measured dignified the product of a cautious mind believed our speech and correspondence on the other hand or fiery passionate they represent some of the greatest writing I think in Latin America although much was produced in haste you can imagine as I said on the ballroom in the battlefield on the run the prose is lyrical stately clever historically grounded electric deeply wise it's no exaggeration to say I that believer changed the Spanish language the old dusty Castilian of his time with all of its ornate flourishes and all its sort of cumbersome locations in his voice and his pen became another language entirely it became urgent vibrant and young I urge you to read his manifesto got the henna or any of his letters any one of his letters and that there's yet another important difference unlike Washington's glory bolivars did not last until unto the grave in time the politics in the countries that Bolivar had created grew ever more fractious his detractors were ever more vehement eventually he became he came to believe that Latin Americans were actually not ready for democracy they were not ready for a democratic government they were abject ignorant suspicious they didn't understand how to govern themselves having been systematically deprived of that experience by their colonial masters what they needed in his eyes eventually was a strong hand and a strict executive he began making unilateral decisions he installed a dictator in Venezuela he wrote into the Bolivian Constitution a president for life by the time he was 41 his wisdom began to be doubted by everyone every functionary in his did the Republic's that he had freed and founded his deputies became jealous and weary of his extraordinary power truly extraordinary power and they declared that they no longer wanted to support his dream of a unified America regionalisms emerged followed by boarder squabbles and civil wars and in Bolivar zone halls cloak-and-dagger betrayals and trumped in the end he had no choice but to renounce his command his 47th and final year ended in poverty illness and exile he had been born rich - perhaps one of the richest families in all of South America but having given away the sum total of his personal fortune to the Revolution he died a poor and ravaged man few heroes in history have been dealt so much honor so much power and so much ingratitude and few have survived that utter humiliation to go on to be so revered I found believe ours life to be one of history's most dramatic Candice's it's a colossal narrative replete with adventure and disaster some of his campaigns were disastrous literally disastrous more were victorious his Wars of Independence took 14 years in the course of an absolutely devastating violence he was beaten often exiled twice but he always came back more fierce for his failures as he himself once said the art of victory is learned in defeat it was while he was in exile that he decided that the only way to achieve his goals was to engage all the races he engaged the helps the help of blacks of Indians of mulattoes mestizos he got help from the English and Dutch merchants from the newly free of the blacks of Haiti from the Pirates of the Caribbean from the wild planesman of the a booting from invalids in hospitals where he went and recruited soldiers from boys as young as 12 whom he recruited to his ranks to populate his armies he freed slaves a full half century before the Emancipation Proclamation some historians say that there are more similarities than differences between the histories of North and South America's that English and Spanish colonizers quote dreamed comparable dreams and shared common nightmares unquote some claim that there is a Pan American narrative in which the Puritan and Catholic experiences on either side of the hemisphere are actually very similar well I respectfully disagree what I learned in the course of writing this book is that a fundamental character emerged from the Spanish American experience a character akin to C one believe I was very different from North America's it's centers on the question of Spanish colonialism which comes down ultimately to the questions of power and race even though by bolivars time the Spanish colonies had gone through 300 years of racial mixing and according to Bolivar by the way no one with deep ancestral roots in South America knows what race to which race he truly belongs even so in the 18th century when the revolutionary movement began Spain was still registering the differences counting births by the baby's color imposing penalties on the darker castes as I said until Bolivar won the colored races to his side the revolution floundered he could not have succeeded without their participation independence depended on that fleeting window of interracial cooperation it is a very very different narrative from the one that defines the United States of America race was not South America's only challenge other colonial legacies left indelible marks on the continent under Spain apart from Catholic conversion education was routinely denied the masses this great rift in education was bolivars greatest worry the reason he began to doubt that democracy u.s. style could ever work among South Americans the reason he began to believe in a strong executive there were other and abiding influences Spain's control of books of news of every aspect of communication it's strict prohibition of manufacturing its policy to keep colonies apart see one believe I understood these difficult legacies he understood that being a colony of Spain was fundamentally different from being a colony of England Spain had been at once crueler and more humane whereas Spain's laws of the Indies were tyrannical the colonists had actually married an inter bred with a colonized a mestizo population began to emerge right after the conquistadors arrived not one founder of the United States travelled a similar circuit not one undertook to bring democratic principles to such a complicated mosaic of humanity nor did any American founder fall so precipitously from grace the difference I think is revealing the Swift unraveling of a hero is a story that is played out again and again in contemporary Latin American politics we've seen it in Juan Peron Alberto Fujimori I with the be no jet Anastasio Somoza and countless others who have risen to glory arrogated supreme power then met with the plummeting demise the cycle is mythic by now and it is totally Bolivarian with time Bolivar became the heart of the South American story certainly his type is deeply embedded in the region's psyche it's an image that is all too easily bent to every purpose as Garcia Marquez once said when I write about Bolivar I'm writing about myself perhaps every Latin American feels that to some degree we ensure his immortality by recur meeting him again and again and irony is that he is used by followers and detractors alike by extreme left by extreme right as the American historian Lester Langley once said will the real believer please stand up dead Bolivar became a symbol his failures as a politician receded his successes as a liberator took center stage indeed the accomplishments were irrefutable it was he who had disseminated the spirit of enlightenment brought the promise of democracy to the hinterlands opened the minds and hearts of Latin Americans to what they could become it was he who with a higher moral instinct even than Washington or Jefferson saw the absurdity of embarking on a war for liberty without first emancipating his own slaves it was he who had led the armies slept on the ground with his soldiers fretted about their horses their bullets their maps their blankets inspired men to unimaginable victories never before in the history of the Americas had one man's will transformed so much territory united so many races never had Latin America dreamed so large but in the course of forging a new world compromises were made more than once Bolivar found himself tossing the ideals by the wayside as he rode through the roiling hell of a brutal war through the abbatoirs of improvised Military Justice he made questionable decisions bolivars critics are quick to cite them and let me cite them for you the decreed award the decree of war to the death llegará and were--they for instance in which were a period of several months all followers of the Spanish crown were condemned to extermination there was more that didn't quite fit the model of an enlightened society his execution of his own general Manuel PR a young ambitious mulatto patriot who believed our suspect was trying to incite a race war under his very nose the massacre of 800 Spanish prisoners at Puerto Cabello because a prison uprising was feared and there were not enough guards to control them Bolivar had been scuttled by a prison uprising in his early career and so he wasn't about to let it happen again the betrayal of his aging fellow Liberator Francisco Miranda who Bolivar felt had capitulated too easily surrendered the Patriot cause and sold out the revolution to Spain Bolivar himself took his old mentor turned him in and Miranda was sent to die in a prison just outside of Cadiz last and certainly not least was the fact that Bolivar had taken on dictatorial powers no less than three times he had great arguments for all of it there was to begin a countenance staggering ignorance there was also the Swift very Swift draconian response of Spain when it learned that a revolution was afoot after the Napoleonic Wars the madre podría emerged fierce more terrible more sharpened by combat than Patriots could have imagined you know Miranda himself thought he could he could prosecute the Revolution very easily without shedding any blood it was impossible violence was met by more violence and soon escalation became the only rule of war the result was a bloody conflict that wiped whole cities from the map reduced civilian populations by 1/3 and virtually obliterated Spain's expeditionary forces in the course of liberating so much of South America Bolivar became a master of improvisation a military commander who could outwit outride and outfight a vastly more powerful enemy but that very malleability that yes for moving swiftly from strategy to strategy for rebounding quickly for making decisions on the fly had its liabilities in times of peace it's difficult to build a democracy on a wartime model it was why after the wars were done he made hasty decisions last-ditch promises political blunders it was why he tried to patch his way through the political process saying different things to different man but for all his flaws there was never any doubt about his power to convince his splendid rhetoric his human impulses his deeply held principles of liberty and justice as years went by and South Americans remembered that greatness they understood that their Liberator had been well before his time leaders who followed seemed wanting in comparison dwarfed by his shadow of a colossus the countries he liberated began to revive the legend cities and provinces started taking his name public plazas were raised as monuments to his victories in marble or in bronze bolivars flesh took on a serenity it never had in life the Restless fevered liberator became the benevolent father the devoted teacher the Good Shepherd striving to build a better flock as the legend grew each one building on the last the man took on a protein quality politicians used him to defend their positions priests quoted him in righteous sermons poets lionized him in ecstatic verse history texts wound over his exploits and teachers pointed to his brilliance and father said son be like believer in time historians too took up the glorification whole institutions and scholarly apparatus 'as were put in place to defend him and defend him they would for the debunkers would be many those who preferred to glorify San martín Spaniards who felt obliged to defend the Madre patria mercenaries who never did get paid even the vociferous Karl Marx who called believer a bully and a blaggard but all that would come later by the time the 100th anniversary of Oliver's birth came around the myth was in place augmented with surprising flourishes the intervening centuries had made believer a good Catholic which he never was a moral exemplar an unwavering Democrat none of which he'd ever been during his life the story had less to do with him than with a romantic ideal he was our better angel our Prince Valiant even the imperfections the dozens of mistresses that take no prisoners bravado the penchant for dictatorship were seen as natural parts of the Latin American persona what every young Latino should aspire to be as the writer Jose Marti so famously wrote a believer nothing is more beautiful than that craggy 4head those cavernous eyes that cape flapping against him on the back of a winged horse from Sun to Sun for as long as America shall live the echo of his name will resound in our manly hearts and indeed over time bolivars name has prevailed to this day his legacy is very much alive there are political parties throughout South America whole ideologies even a republic dedicated to his name there's nothing quite like it in the rest of the world there is no George Washington party in the United States there's no Jeffersonian Republic of America there are no people who shout Napoleon's name today in the streets of Paris but in Latin America today believe I lives on as a galvanizing force a lightning rod for political action perhaps it's because in many ways the revolution is still afoot in Latin America although bolivars name has been conjured by every ISM that succeeded him his ideals were lost in the ensuing political chaos principles of the Enlightenment were cast aside as the white aristoi see scrambled to appropriate the wealth and power the Spanish overlords had left behind equality which Bolivar had insisted was the linchpin of justice was quickly replaced by a virulent racism and a hierarchy as rigid as the colonial system ever had been the rule of law indispensable to a free people was abandoned as one dictator after another rewrote laws according to his caprices democracy equality these have been slow to come to South America unity which Bolivar believed would have made the continent a mighty force was never realized and yet his legend lives on perhaps this is because believe Aras life has always spoken so clearly to the Latin American people here is an all too imperfect man who with a keen mind an ardent heart and admirable disinterest carried a revolution to far corners of the continent here is a leader whom fate presented with one opportunity and a glut of insuperable hurdles a general betrayed by his own officers a strategist who had no equals on whom he could rely a head of state who oversaw nothing that resembled a vigorous unified team of rivals with a stamina that is probably unmatched in history he prosecuted a seemingly unwinnable war over a harsh terrain to shock the formidable banner of Pesaro from the Caribbean coast all the way down to the heart of the continent in potosi there was little that stopped him it is and I hope you agree a great American story thank you so much thanks very much I'd love to taste take some questions if you have them questions are always the best part yes did believer have any principles that he thought the government's he was striving to create should follow did whether he express them did he actually try to bring them about what did he think about a legal system oh yes genomics what what kind of yes he had do he tried uh he had very much in mind to reproduce the English system he liked the English system very much he thought it was actually work much better at the very beginning he was not a man of the desk he had built institutions he if you go through South America you you see the universities that he built you could see the legal the court system that he built and yet every time he left a town or a city behind things would fall apart behind him he had a very clear vision of what he wanted but he had very little help in actually executing what he had in mind and you have to you have to understand that after fourteen years of violent warfare there was the people were tired people were people people had very little will left left in them and there were there was a great deal of a kind of factionalism that was fighting any kind of unified decision so there were million things working against it but yes he had very very distinct notions of how the the democratic principle should be put into action thank you about two months ago your uh politics and prose burning your book and I asked you why Bulevar wouldn't work with San martín and your answer which I'm going to try and summarize was that Bulevar had said if I had agreed to let him serve under me he would had the moral edge on me and that would have been more and I could have handled that summarize it approximately I'm sorry I somehow I didn't get the whole question okay it was a question I had asked you why Bulevar refused to work with san martín when they met me already in the meeting of guaçu yeah and your answer was to the effect that Bulevar had said that if i had agreed to let him serve under me he would have had the moral edge yes and that's more than I could have handled right satellite summary that's a good summary yes you did read the book yes why didn't you include the book uh it was it was a fascinating moment which was thank you for reading the book and thank you for quoting it back to me my goodness it's somehow the words seemed alien and strange the the moment in Guayaquil when bolivar sat down and met with some a teen was not witnessed by anybody but those two men and the only way that we have any understanding of what happened is in is in correspondence after the fact and in letters Bolivar began to say what actually happened san martín was begging for support he was he would have been able to liberate the city of Lima but he had not been able to liberate all of Peru and he his army was scattered and demoralized he had a great enemies among the Peruvians who were trying to depose him and he was very sick he had been sick for a long time and was addicted to opium and was getting weaker by the day and he needed bolivars help he came to Guayaquil and begged for it believe our understanding that it was a matter of a territorial right was demurred wasn't sure whether he wanted to help son san martín and son Martine said I will serve under you at least this is what Bolivar reported and believers later said that he knew that for son Martin to say that he was going to serve under believe I would give believer would give son Martine the moral edge he would become the hero who stepped aside and of course that's exactly what happened in history at least in Peru san martín is the glorified hero because he had the grace to step aside and you go to Lima and Bolivar is you know his statue is off to his side inside somewhere but son Martine is in the middle of the great plaza because Santa Marta team was more the there's honor in in that stepping aside and Bolivar saw it from the very beginning he knew that that was going to happen why isn't that in the book all we did very much is no no no read the part where Bolivar actually it's it's it's there believe me yes dr. Billington one of the attractive features of the exhibit we had of Jefferson and the way it was mounted was that you could take all the key phrases that conveyed what he wanted to get across in the Declaration of Independence and you could find trace the origins back almost literally to some book that he had read now they were mostly from the British and French traditions a combination of a Scottish French enlightenment and so forth now what is there a comparable way you can take the characteristic phrases that Bulevar use and there's in his career tubes to a distinctive cohort of Spanish thinkers or activists or people that can help us kind of understand what was at the core of his formation that's the first question and then the second question if you take him as a kind of leader of people which he's clearly was and diverse peoples at that the terminology that was invented in the resistance to Napoleon which began with the Peninsular war in Spain was of course Gouveia the guerrilla the little war and the second term that originated during that period to describe the resistance was partisan which was Russian the Russian contribution they were the two conflicts that defeated fundamentally defeated Napoleon on the ground where he had to ultimately be defeated now is there a comparable term that was invented or a set of terms or image that is characteristic of the extraordinary resistance he made to an even greater and more diverse Empire that that was that he led really he led that led to its dismemberment much more effectively than anything in Spain itself so there's sort of two questions that are perhaps trying to figure out is they're not are they similar you establish the differences in the uniqueness of boulevard but the other things you can tell us who are not real well versed those of us not well versed in the Hispanic sources that emerge from your unique immersion in this world wonderful questions you know it's it's it's striking and I and I try to go in to this somewhat in the book dr. Billington the the inspirations for Bolivar were not from Spanish literature or from Spanish philosophers at all if they were truly he was inspired by the Enlightenment he was inspired by Rousseau he was inspired by the rights of man he was inspired by Montesquieu and those and he actually he was far broader in a sense than Deeping dipping into his own roots he was he was very his antennae were out in the world and he had as a child I mean wonderful teachers he had Andres boyo who was a great became a great literary figure in Latin America so he was very aware of the the literary legacy of a spanish-speaking population but he chose to go with the the the real the writers of the Enlightenment those who were very much on the tongues of people at the time and Montesquieu had said at one point you know there you get to a point where the the what did he call that the the I think it was the accouterment is actually more important than the figure that is wearing it and that image so took believer and because he knew that the colonies which were the accouterment were really had become far more important and form and potentially more powerful than Spain itself which was withering on the vine so those images those French that French enlightenment thought was very very persuasive to believer and he took it lock stock and barrel and as for your second question about whether there's a kind of term like partisan I'd be in you know at the time you read you read the letters of the time and they talk and you talk of themselves is but three OTS you know they're the rebels they talk of themselves as as Patriots and rebels and they're usually they're using terms really from the French and American Revolution when you think about it and these had seeped in to the population at large because at that point information about those two revolutions had become pretty widespread but I don't I can't think you know I have to think about and come back to you I'll come knock on your door if I think if I think of a term that actually um that actually arose the original term that arose from the Revolution well I'll tell you what I what I what I think did emerge which is that it was in the military that these races fused and it was in the military and it's you know it's true in this country as well but it was true in Latin America way before it began to be in this country the the military became the symbol of a kind of racial fusion and a way for but very quickly the and we're talking about you know the early 1800s the people of different races races were coming up in the military the military I think is the image that is that was unifying and it's pretend it's the image that's very very hard to get out of the Latin American model because the Latin American countries are inclined to say well you know the the military is the solution because at one time it so clearly was yes what did Bolivar think of Napoleon oh very very divided opinion uh he was quite interested in Napoleon and he was in France at the time that Napoleon was in power and he was in Paris at the time that Napoleon put the crown on his own head so he didn't like that part of it I think he you know he was he he writes about it quite a bit and he and people who Chronicle Bolivar write about his obsession with Napoleon he admired the way that Napoleon could he was so effective and so quickly powerful and so charismatic he admired that but that that impulse to to be an emperor to be he he was very very much against it he also admired Napoleon he saw Napoleon in Italy at one point reviewing the troops and he saw that Napoleon was not dressed up in ermine but he had his little cap and he was very very modestly dressed and believed I took that to heart he began I mean I think very early on in his command to be quite humble in his clothing because of that image he remembered that and Napoleon but he actually was very divided admired his the efficacy of Napoleon's sort of command but he didn't he didn't like that impulse to to to glory although believer had plenty of that impulse himself one more one more question Lamoni um since the Spanish conquered the the Americas every ten to twenty years that had been an uprising so over three hundred years maybe two dozen uprising what had changed or what did bowl of our brain or both that allowed him to succeed where so many others had failed um absolute will to victory I mean he would he could not be stopped he was as I say he was he kept getting destroyed at every turn he kept getting thrown out and there was a it got to the point where he understood that his he had to engage by virtue of charm by virtue of of getting the population on his side he was able to do that right away and I think that even me tanga you know we couldn't the population didn't trust him there was a point where me Ronnie and I tried to come in in 1806 and they laughed at him you know he came in with his troops to liberate Latin America and they just you know I said who is that crazy guy but with Bolivar he was persuasive he was a extraordinarily persuasive by virtue of I think his his command verbal command but he he was in able to inspire trust at least in the beginning thank you for the question as much as we hate to do so I think it's probably time to draw this wonderful conversation to a close but really to a different format I would say because we have books in the back that for Murray to sign we have a reception and so please continue on the informal conversation but before we do that lets thank Murray around one this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 21,361

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Keywords: Library of Congress, Simon Bolivar, Simón Bolívar (Author)

Id: P2jdX5PAdjM

Length: 67min 47sec (4067 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2013