The Southern Cone and the Origins of Pan America, 1888-1933

By Mark J. Petersen

This book traces the history of Argentine and Chilean pan-Americanism and asks why pan-Americanism came to define inter-American relations in the twentieth century.

The Southern Cone and the Origins of Pan America, 1888–1933 offers new perspectives on the origins of the inter-American system and the history of international cooperation in the Americas. Mark J. Petersen chronicles the story of pan-Americanism, a form of regionalism launched by the United States in the 1880s and long associated with U.S. imperial pretensions in the Western hemisphere. The story begins and ends in the Río de la Plata, with Southern Cone actors and Southern Cone agendas at the fore. Incorporating multiple strands of pan-American history, Petersen draws inspiration from interdisciplinary analysis of recent regionalisms and weaves together research from archives in Argentina, Chile, the United States, and Uruguay. The result is a nuanced and comprehensive account of how Southern Cone policy makers used pan-American cooperation as a vehicle for various agendas—personal, national, regional, hemispheric, and global—transforming pan-Americanism from a tool of U.S. interests to a framework for multilateral cooperation that persists to this day. Petersen decenters the story of pan-Americanism and orients the conversation on pan-Americanism toward a more complete understanding of hemispheric cooperation. The book will appeal to students and scholars of inter-American relations, Latin American (especially Chile and Argentina) and U.S. history, Latin American studies, and international relations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780268202002

Mark J. Petersen

Mark J. Petersen is associate professor of history at the University of Dallas.

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The Southern Cone and the Origins of Pan America, 1888–1933

The Southern Cone and

the Origins of Pan America,

1888–1933

MARK J. PETERSEN

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949119

ISBN: 978-0-268-20201-9 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20203-3 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20200-2 (Epub

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

To my parents, Carlen and Grant

PAN AMERICANISM

A vital question for this continent, about which voluminous essays have been written and much bitter controversy waged.

—The South American: A Journal for All Interested in Latin American Affairs, 1919

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Roque Sáenz Peña, 1889 18

Figure 2. Trade card. Chile at the Pan American Exposition 59 of 1901

Figure 3. Portraits of Eduardo Poirier and Estanislao Zeballos, 101 1916

Figure 4. Agency for the Bulletin of the Pan American Union 125 in Punta Arenas, Chile, 1916

Figure 5. Luncheon for Gabriela Mistral at the Pan American 171 Union, 1924

Figure 6. Honorio Pueyrredón, 1925 201

Figure 7. Carlos Saavedra Lamas at the International Labour 219 Conference, 1928

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was many years in the making and involved the contributions of many people to whom I am deeply indebted. The project began while I was a graduate student in Oxford University under the guidance of Alan Knight and Jay Sexton. Their encouragement and feedback were invaluable, and both offered crucial help in securing funding for my research. Their mentoring has continued to shape me as a scholar since then. I also had the fortune of working with Eduardo Posada Carbó, whose kindness and dedication to supporting junior scholars is exemplary. Patience Schell and Eduardo read the thesis that provided a foundation for this book and offered important suggestions. While in Oxford, I greatly benefited from conversations with scholars in various disciplines. Many of these took place within the Latin American Centre (LAC) based in St. Antony’s College and the Rothermere American Institute. The LAC’s weekly Latin American History seminars, and the convivial dinners in Jericho that followed them, were a highlight of my time in Oxford. I offer special thanks to Dawn Alexandrea Berry, Nigel Bowles, Louise Fawcett, Graciela Iglesias-Rogers, Hal Jones, Leigh Payne, Timothy Power, and Diego Sánchez-Ancochea. Carsten Schulz, whom I met while in Oxford, has been a good friend, collaborator on multiple projects, and valuable source of help on international relations questions. I also thank the staff of the LAC, including Elvira Ryan and librarian Frank Egerton, for helping with the logistics of my research.

Many others beyond Oxford deserve my gratitude. While researching in Chile, I benefited immensely from the insights and generosity of J. Ricardo Couyoumdjian, Joaquín Fermandois, Iván Jaksic, René Millar, and Juan Luis Ossa. On the other side of the cordillera, in Buenos Aires, Martín Castro, Klaus Gallo, Sebastián Rodríguez, and Eduardo Zimmermann offered me their time, thoughts, and encouragement. Conversations and conference panels with Juan Pablo Scarfi have been crucial to my understanding of pan-American cooperation. So, too, have conversations with David Sheinin. David kindly read an early draft of this work; his feedback was fundamental in clarifying and reorganizing my analysis. I am also thankful for the chats about inter-American history at conferences, via email, and over coffee or beer with Teresa Davis, Rolando de la Guardia Wald, Geneviève Dorais, Juliette Dumont, Caitlin Fitz, Teresa Huhle, Tom Long, David Longhurst-Jones, Andrei Mamolea, Corrine Pernet, and Monica Rankin. In Dallas, I am fortunate to have a network of supportive colleagues and fellow historians. They include the University of Dallas (UD) Latin American Studies faculty, José Espericueta, Néfer Muñoz Solano, and Carla Pezzia; the UD History faculty, especially Susan Hanssen and Charlie Sullivan; Sally Hicks; and the members of the Dallas Area Society of Historians, especially coordinator Stephanie Cole. I thank the staff at the various archives and libraries listed in the bibliography and send special thanks to Noelia Herrera, Roberto Mercado, Karin Schmutzer, and Sandra Riveros.

My research would not have been possible without generous funding from several sources. My early research was supported by grants from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the History Faculty at Oxford, the Rothermere American Institute, and the Santander Academic Travel Fund. In recent years, funds for research have come from UD King/ Haggar Scholar Awards, the Dean of Constantin College (UD), and the UD Undergraduate Research Fund. That final source of funding allowed me to bring on Patrick Gomez and David Morales as research assistants for a related project on the Bulletin of the Pan American Union. Their work was useful to this project as well.

I am profoundly grateful to Eli Bortz at the University of Notre Dame Press for his support, encouragement, and help in bringing the manuscript to publication. Thanks, also, to Tom Long and Max Paul Friedman for their valuable suggestions for revision.

There are also many friends who have been blessings to me throughout the process of researching and writing. Some of them even read drafts! My thanks go to David and Kathi Bubb, María Eva Bustos, Victoria Cárcamo, Rosa García, Sophia Kerridge, the denizens of Londres 88, Julie Maher, Sue Matthew, Phil Ng, Rosa Peralta, Hugh Reid, Raúl Rojas, Jim Robinson, Ralph Stevens, Mauricio Soldavino, Carolina Suáznabar, Blair Thompson-White and Adam White, Mara van der Lugt, and members of Catedral Anglicana de San Juan Bautista (Buenos Aires), Grace UMC Dallas (especially the Wednesday Night Small Group), Santiago Community Church, and Wesley Memorial Church (Oxford).

A special thought goes to my family. Their love and encouragement played a major role in shaping my work and me. My parents, Carlen and Grant, have supported me in countless ways and instilled in me a love of learning and history. I thank them, along with Andrew and Jacquelyn Petersen, Matt and Heather Petersen, Lisa Den Besten, and John Ericson. Finally, to my talented wife, Janet: thank you for your patience, your suggestions, your willingness to listen, and your ability in all situations to remind me of greater blessings.

ABBREVIATIONS

ABC Argentina, Brazil, and Chile

AIIL American Institute of International Law

FPA Foreign Policy Analysis

IACI Inter-American Children’s Institute

IACW Inter-American Commission of Women

ICAS International Conference of American States

ICCA Inter-American Commission on Commercial Aviation

IHC International High Commission

ILO International Labour Organization

IR International Relations

IRC Intercontinental Railway Commission

IUAR International Union of American Republics

PAAAW Pan American Association for the Advancement of Women

PAIGH Pan American Institute of Geography and History

PAN Partido Autonomista Nacional

PASB Pan American Sanitary Bureau

PAU Pan American Union

SRA Sociedad Rural de Argentina

TAN Transnational Advocacy Network

UCR Unión Cívica Radical

Introduction

On March 15, 1890, Argentine diplomat and statesman, Roque Sáenz Peña, rose to address representatives from across the Americas assembled in the heart of the US capital. The occasion was the First International Conference of American States, an event nearly a decade in the making and notable for the number and range of governments attending. Almost all of the independent nation-states of the Americas had sent delegates at the invitation of the United States. By March, the delegates had been discussing matters of commerce, exchange, and arbitration for several weeks. Most of the Latin American delegations had been in the United States since the previous October. Surely tired from the conference proceedings, Sáenz Peña was nonetheless prepared to tackle the agenda for that day: responses to a proposal, submitted by the United States, for a hemispheric customs union inspired by the German Zollverein. Such an agreement would accomplish one of the host government’s goals for the conference and for the US-launched version of hemispheric cooperation known as pan-Americanism: increased inter-American commerce. Sáenz Peña and the government he represented disagreed with the idea of a customs union. After introducing a brief formal report cosigned by his Chilean counterpart, the Argentine launched into a wide-ranging rebuttal that invoked statistics, the ideal of free trade, and the Americas’ destiny in global affairs. He ended his speech with a rhetorical crescendo, rejecting implicitly the America for Americans program of the United States by exclaiming, Let America be for humanity! The phrase sent a shock wave through the congregated delegates. The Cuban poet José Martí, at the conference as a correspondent for an Argentine newspaper, described the scene: Everyone rose to their feet in gratitude, understanding what was left unsaid, and offered him their hands.¹

For Martí and others, Sáenz Peña’s speech was a declaration of resistance to regional cooperation for the sole benefit of the United States. They were not alone in this interpretation; as one historian of Argentine diplomacy later noted, Sáenz Peña’s culminating phrase was to echo through the Pan American corridors for decades as a challenge to US hegemonic aspirations in the Americas.² After observing and participating in pan-American events from 1889 to 1891, Martí raised the alarm against pan-Americanism more explicitly in several reports from Washington that circulated throughout the hemisphere, among them the now-famous essay Our America. Cooperation, according to the Cuban revolutionary, was not bad; the US intentions for cooperation, however, were suspect.³ He feared that pan-Americanism, though couched in appeals of harmony, would serve to open Latin America to US imperialism. The region’s destiny was in the balance. In response, Martí called for Latin American unity and warned of the pitfalls of mutual misunderstanding and Latin American short-sightedness.

Although it seems that Sáenz Peña and Martí were cut from the same cloth, their critiques of pan-Americanism were quite different. Where Martí saw a potentially existential threat to Latin American independence, Sáenz Peña saw a potential challenge to his country’s economic growth and geopolitical ambitions, including Argentina’s own aspirations for regional hegemony. The latter was more indicative of concerns over pan-Americanism in Argentina and Chile—here referred to as the Southern Cone. Indeed, the governments there were interested in cooperating with the United States and were willing to work within pan-Americanism, so long as it fit their own policy agendas and ideas of regionalism. Rather than merely another tool of US imperialism for Latin Americans to resist, pan-Americanism was a broad, multifaceted set of movements that attracted a wide range of Latin American responses, from derision to devotion. In fact, in the decades following Sáenz Peña’s speech, Southern Cone societies produced both some of the most ardent supporters and many of the most vocal critics of pan-Americanism. Southern Cone governments, meanwhile, sought a middle ground between US-defined Pan America and Martí’s Our America. They gradually accepted pan-American cooperation as both viable and useful and sought to shape the emerging field of internationalism to suit their purposes. In the process, they made pan-American cooperation more Latin American and fashioned a tool to negotiate competing hegemonic aspirations in the hemisphere. Overall, they advanced their own ideas of pan-Americanism—what an Argentine statesman in 1934 would call our pan-Americanism—in ways that had enduring implications for hemispheric affairs.⁴ Why they chose this path, and how they pursued it across five decades, is the focus of this book. Its goal is to retell the pan-American story, beginning and ending not in Washington but in Montevideo, in order to offer a more complete picture of the foundations for the inter-American system that exists today.

STUDYING PAN-AMERICANISM presents the historian with multiple challenges. First among them is conceptual ambiguity. As John Edwin Fagg noted, pan-Americanism has had a bewildering range of meanings: a movement, a cause, a sentiment, a dream, a spiritual union, an advocacy, an aspiration, or a quasi-legal embodiment of a fraternity of the nations of the Western Hemisphere.⁵ The simplest definition is this: a form of cooperation involving states from all the Americas (hence, pan-America) that began in the United States in the 1880s. The term itself began as a descriptor of Senator, and later Secretary of State, James G. Blaine’s proposals for a conference of American states, a project closely tied to rising hegemonic aspirations of the United States in the Americas. The pillars of Blaine’s idea—a hemispheric customs union and arbitration treaty—clearly aimed to reduce European (especially British) influence in Latin America and bolster US interests there.⁶ In the decades that followed, however, use of the term pan-Americanism far exceeded this narrow scope. Its usage proliferated as individuals and groups around the hemisphere invoked the label in ways that Blaine could never have imagined. Two events in 1910 emphasized the diversity that had come to define pan-American cooperation within two decades of the Washington conference. In that year, US president William Taft dedicated before assembled dignitaries an opulent building for the newly established Pan American Union (PAU), the institutional home for pan-Americanism. Located in Washington, DC, just a block from the White House, this event displayed the official, intergovernmental dimension of pan-American cooperation. Meanwhile, in Chillán, Chile, the schoolmistress and women’s rights advocate María Espindola de Muñoz inaugurated, with no pomp and circumstance, the Pan-American Feminine Federation. Her ephemeral federation pointed to a less official, transnational form of hemispheric cooperation. Thousands of miles apart and distinct in scope and circumstance, both occasions claimed the pan-American mantle.

By the 1930s, the pan-American universe included initiatives to coordinate education policies, eradicate childhood diseases, regulate commercial aviation, and promote architectural aesthetics. When the Peruvian journalist and diplomat Arturo Sayán de Vidaurre described pan-Americanism in a series of essays in 1935, he drew his readers’ attention not only to the seven diplomatic conferences, held since 1889, but also to the eighty special and technical conferences of Pan-American character.⁷ The book itself—written by a Peruvian and printed in Chile, with prologues by Ecuadoran, Argentine, and US diplomats— was a testament to the collaborative, transnational process that bolstered intergovernmental pan-Americanism in the early twentieth century. Though advocates of pan-Americanism took to print and (later) radio to define True Pan Americanism and rout out false apostles, the term and ideas behind it remained contested and malleable.⁸ That pan-American gained such traction in the hemisphere as a descriptor spoke both to widespread acceptance of hemispheric cooperation that included the United States and to the fact that pan-Americanism often served the interests of actors beyond Washington, DC, and outside the halls of power.

These themes have shaped a proliferation of research on the multiple forms of pan-Americanism before World War II in the past quarter century.⁹ Such work draws inspiration from broader trends in the history of US empire, in international history, and in the transnational turn.¹⁰ Historians of pan-Americanism have also borrowed methods from other subfields, such as gender history, and approached the topic indirectly via studies of international law, music, public health, architecture, and more. The result has been a considerable shift from the scholarship of the mid-twentieth century, which had confined pan-Americanism to US diplomatic history narratives, polemical accounts of US influence in Latin America, or US-focused hemispheric histories.¹¹ Far from being a generally thwarted ideal, the pan-Americanism revealed in more recent scholarship was a flourishing field of cooperation, though one rife with internal contradictions and conflicts.¹² The cast of characters in this story has expanded to include non-state activists, academics, artists, technical experts, and others, complicating any effort to define pan-Americanism while broadening the horizons for historians of international relations in the Americas.¹³

Historians of pan-Americanism have generally focused on its multiplicity, drawing out the stories of one or two strands of cooperation at a time. With some notable exceptions, few works have attempted to take in the entire pan-American picture.¹⁴ While daunting, an effort to capture the whole is important. The multiple forms of pan-American cooperation had more in common than an epithet; they often shared participants, strategies, goals, and spaces. Many figures involved in pan-American cooperation viewed the many forms of pan-Americanism as parts of a whole. Leo S. Rowe, director general of the PAU from 1920 to 1946 and one of pan-American cooperation’s biggest boosters, often spoke about the larger aspects of Pan-Americanism as essential to a successful geopolitical project of cooperation.¹⁵ Ernesto Quesada—Argentine intellectual, magistrate, delegate to the 1915–16 Second Pan-American Scientific Congress, and first professor of pan-American legislation at the University of Buenos Aires— argued that pan-Americanism comprised congresses of all types and institutions: some political[,] . . . others scientific.¹⁶ Influential Argentine diplomat, foreign minister, and Nobel laureate, Carlos Saavedra Lamas, spoke in 1933 of the different faces of Pan-Americanism: juridical, moral, artistic, cultural, . . . communications, etc.¹⁷ Governments throughout the Americas held a wide view of pan-American cooperation. They were involved in most aspects of that cooperation, even those dominated by non-state actors. Their various ministries served as tools to facilitate internationalism, providing communication between groups in different countries, logistical support, and, perhaps most important, legitimacy through state approval. Some governmental participants in pan-Americanism tried to insulate certain initiatives, especially when divisive geopolitical questions seemed to threaten intergovernmental cooperation via diplomatic channels. Others embraced the connections with the idea that international cooperation in one area could help attain policy objectives in others.

As the examples above suggest, those discussing pan-Americanism in the early twentieth century employed various descriptors to distinguish the components of the whole: political, apolitical, practical, constructive, cultural, scientific, technical, and so on. I have suggested elsewhere that historians can make this jumble of typologies more intelligible to modern readers by using the language of two dimensions when discussing complementary pan-Americanism.¹⁸ One dimension involved efforts at top-down, political and economic integration: efforts to regulate international relations through treaties and law and to promote greater inter-American trade through common commercial policies. The other included efforts at cooperation in technical, scientific, cultural, and social fields. Both dimensions involved political and practical considerations, and both included state and non-state actors, though the first dimension was generally more international and the second more transnational. While the first dimension was beset by geopolitical controversies, the second was more resistant to them.

Another defining feature of pan-American cooperation, from its earliest years, was institutionalization.¹⁹ Unlike previous efforts of regional cooperation, pan-Americanism produced a host of institutions. The oldest, and arguably most important, was the International Union of American Republics (IUAR) established at the 1889–90 Washington Conference. The original permanent body of the IUAR was the Commercial Bureau of American Republics. This entity evolved into the International Bureau of American Republics and eventually the PAU. From this framework, the modern inter-American system centered on the Organization of American States emerged. The Bureau-turned-Union was not alone on the inter-American scene. By the 1930s, there were permanent institutions to address public health, monetary policy, international law, architecture, women’s rights, children’s issues, history and geography, transportation, and more. Some were clearly more successful and significant than others; some had formal institutional relations with the PAU, and some were more independent. Together they demonstrate a penchant for institutionalization that helped sustain cooperation.

Although pan-American cooperation was unique in its scope, its range of participants, and its institutions, it was not entirely novel or unfamiliar to governments in the Americas. It was, in fact, another form of international cooperation in a hemisphere with a long history of regionalisms. Participation in regional cooperation had been part of Latin American foreign policy repertoires since the independence movements of the 1810s.²⁰ After independence, attempts at regional congresses periodically emerged, from Simón Bolívar’s Congress of Panama in 1826—where the Liberator’s dream of Spanish-American cooperation quickly foundered on the reefs of political divisions—to congresses in Lima (1847), Santiago (1856), and again in Lima (1864). By the 1880s, smaller-scale efforts at cooperation included sanitation conferences and meetings to codify international law. The relationship between pan-Americanism and other efforts at regional cooperation was complex and dynamic.

Pan-American cooperation was also part of a broader, global trend toward internationalism. Increased globalization of communications and trade, in a context of rapidly accelerating imperialism, facilitated international cooperation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.²¹ As Daniel Gorman notes, internationalism and international cooperation did not entail every cross-border interaction but rather ongoing, organized, and collaborative interactions between groups of people in different countries that frequently underwent regularization via state action.²² The range of initiatives and institutions that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century was diverse, from international scientific congresses and women’s rights conventions to the International Olympic Committee and the League of Nations.

Latin Americans, both inside and outside state organizations, were participants in and progenitors of internationalist efforts of various stripes. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, Latin Americans at the vanguard of a diverse range of fields—from anti-imperialist feminism to international law to modern architecture—hoped to shape global discussions and norms via internationalism.²³ The pan-American framework was one viable means to pursue such projects. Although initially defined by the United States and in many ways connected to US hegemonic aspirations (see below), pan-Americanism drew on existing strands of Latin American regionalism and proved a malleable framework. Pan-Americanism thus seemed primed to advance Latin American leadership and Latin American agendas. Other reasons that Latin Americans chose pan-Americanism were more mundane. Invoking pan-Americanism carried the promise of attracting US attention and participation. This brought US ideas, models, and resources into Latin American conversations and provided an opportunity for Latin Americans to transmit their ideas and models northward. Pan-American meetings, especially after 1900, were more likely to take place in Latin America, making the logistics of participation easier in some scenarios.²⁴ Moreover, many European internationalisms marginalized or ignored Latin America before the 1920s; pan-American cooperation frequently focused on issues relevant to the region and offered opportunities for leadership. Finally, pan-Americanism appealed to what Arthur Whitaker called the Western Hemisphere idea, or a set of positive attributes that distinguished the Americas from the Old World.²⁵ Among them were republicanism and, in the twentieth century, peace, in comparison to the continental bloodletting of World War I. Supporters of the hemispheric ideal were not restricted to the United States; in fact, the Southern Cone produced some of its truest believers.²⁶

PAN-AMERICANISM, then, was a broad field of international cooperation based in the Americas with both formal intergovernmental initiatives—most of them connected to the IUAR and the Bureau/Pan American Union—and diverse, interrelated movements of internationalism dominated by non-state actors. With this complex universe of initiatives and institutions, historians face a daunting task when explaining the rise and persistence of pan-Americanism. Understanding how governments approached pan-Americanism as a matter of policy is equally challenging. Fortunately, scholars working to capture such a complex reality in the expanding field of Latin American regionalisms since the 1980s offer illustrative models.²⁷ In a 2005 volume on regional governance in the western hemisphere, for example, Louise Fawcett and Mónica Serrano advocate methodological pluralism.²⁸ In other words, multidimensional regionalism requires multiple analytical approaches at the same time. Olivier Dabène, in his 2009 book on regional integration in the Americas, argues much the same. This book takes inspiration from such works, among others.²⁹ The starting point and dominant disciplinary framework here is historical. I aim to reconstruct the narrative of pan-American cooperation from the point of view of Southern Cone governments based on the sources they left behind. Ideas borrowed from other disciplines, especially international relations (IR), help select the appropriate analytical lenses and choose what information is most relevant to understanding the decisions made and policies pursued. The five lenses set out below are, then, the means to understand the trajectory of pan-American policies and are interwoven in the narrative, each one sometimes moving to the forefront and sometimes fading into the background. None alone can account fully for Southern Cone pan-American policies.

The first, and perhaps most obvious, lens to use is that of regional power dynamics, especially relating to hegemony and imperialism. Pan-Americanism was, after all, the friendly face of U.S. imperialism.³⁰ Major pan-American institutions, including the PAU, were based in Washington and under the guidance of officials who advocated US leadership in the hemisphere.³¹ US policy makers consistently believed pan-American cooperation would help entrench their country’s influence in the Americas. Even the seemingly apolitical aspects of pan-Americanism, such as scientific cooperation or technological exchange, could be vehicles for advancing US hegemony.³² Like Sáenz Peña and Martí, many Latin American observers recognized political agendas hidden behind the curtain of fraternal ideals. Warnings of Washington’s ulterior motives were a constant feature of Latin American discourse on pan-Americanism, and such reactions have long been part of the history of Latin American resistance to US hegemony. The enduring perception that US hegemony defined the twentieth-century inter-American system that emerged from pan-Americanism is evident in the tendency of many IR scholars to label Latin American regionalism outside of that system since the mid-1990s post-hegemonic.³³

Pan-American cooperation, through this lens, could be understood as a form of soft (i.e., noncoercive) power for the United States.³⁴ Or we can point to pan-Americanism as serving the interests of the United States as a dominant state in a hegemonic system in the sense that Andrew Hurrell has suggested. For such states, cooperation is useful for legitimizing claims to leadership and facilitating the consolidation of norms benefiting the hegemon.³⁵ This tool was especially important in the early twentieth century, when US hegemony in the hemisphere was still aspirational. In the circum-Caribbean, the United States could—and did—back up claims of dominance with direct intervention. Farther south, however, US presence was more tentative. The United States enjoyed superior military capacity by the 1900s, yet was hesitant to employ it south of the equator for various reasons: distance, complexities of South American geography and international politics, limits on US resources and willingness to embrace intervention, and growing naval capacity in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile—known at the time as the ABC powers. US naval operations in the region were limited to occasional patrols and observation during episodes of civil unrest. These facts do not deny the existence of power asymmetry between the ABC and the United States; South American gunboats did not patrol US coasts, for example, and capital investment flowed toward Chile and Argentina more than from them.³⁶ US financial and cultural influence in the Southern Cone expanded in the 1920s, increasing Washington’s leverage over governments there; nonetheless, Argentina and Chile were not subordinate to the United States.

Recent work has complicated the narrative of US hegemony via cooperation, however. As in the historiography of Latin America’s Cold War experience, research on early twentieth-century inter-American relations has challenged simplistic renderings of hemispheric power dynamics, recognizing Latin American agency even in the context of power asymmetry.³⁷ Pan-Americanism was not only a vehicle of US soft power; it was also a tool of soft balancing of power for Latin American participants, as Max Paul Friedman, Tom Long, and others have argued.³⁸ Latin American actors manipulated and appropriated cooperation to manage rising US influence and bend it to their interests. Such behavior is common among subordinate states in a hegemonic system, according to Hurrell. Common actions of subordinate states include reforming regional institutions, developing networks of experts that give smaller states better representation, and organizing conferences in order to set the agenda of cooperation.

US hegemony, and Latin American management of it, was not the only question of power in pan-Americanism. Multiple overlapping hegemonic projects existed in the western hemisphere from the 1880s to the 1930s. European powers, most important Britain, pursued and— to an extent—achieved informal empire in South America until World War I, if not later.³⁹ Other American states, meanwhile, held onto hopes for regional dominance based on their own histories. Chile and Argentina were among the most active, a fact that almost brought the neighbors to blows at the end of the nineteenth century. Mexico and Brazil also staked claims for regional leadership in the early twentieth century. These other hegemonic aspirations have been part of the pan-American story, usually as a source of obstruction and frustration for Washington’s hemispheric vision. Few works—notable among them David Sheinin’s Searching for Authority—have fully considered another possibility: pan-American cooperation could serve more than one hegemonic project.⁴⁰ Such cooperation was a useful framework to address issues not directly involving the United States, from boundary disputes to intellectual exchange.⁴¹ Indeed, policy makers in Buenos Aires and Santiago engaged pan-American cooperation with the strategies of both dominant and subordinate states. The change from one status to the other was neither linear nor entirely complete.

The second lens to better understand pan-American policies is that of ideas. As Louise Fawcett noted in a 2005 essay, Ideas matter in the history of regionalism.⁴² How policy makers responded to geopolitical and economic concerns depended on how they understood a variety of interrelated topics: the nature of international relations, the meaning of regional cooperation, the roles that the state played in society and that their government played in foreign affairs, and their notions of a diplomat’s or bureaucrat’s duty.⁴³ While policy makers worked within their individual matrix of ideas, they also held common ideals honed in diplomatic training, preserved in ministerial archives, and enforced through civil service reforms. For example, Southern Cone foreign ministries emphasized the importance of diplomacy as a means to maintain certain standards of civilization, drawn partly from European models and adapted to Latin American circumstances.⁴⁴ They also schooled their diplomats in a historically defined tradition of foreign policy that included regional cooperation.

The implications of the national or regional tradition of cooperation for pan-Americanism were ambiguous. Some Latin Americans evoked longer histories of cooperation to contest and compete with pan-Americanism. After the 1880s, these efforts carried labels including Latin-Americanism, pan-Hispanoamericanism, and Hispanism. Others, however, saw more compatibility than conflict between the ideals of cooperation. They argued that pan-Americanism was a continuation of the old tradition, even applying the label pan-American anachronistically to the pre-1880s period. These arguments for compatibility had a practical significance. On the one hand, they played into US hegemonic aspirations, as Latin Americans subordinated their distinct culture of regionalism to that offered by the United States. On the other hand, the appropriation of pan-Americanism furthered projects to make hemispheric cooperation more amenable to Latin America. Latin American participants recast pan-American cooperation in the image of their own traditions, opening the door to more Latin American participants: a virtuous cycle. Pan-Americanism’s persistence enhanced its legitimacy as a form of cooperation, encouraging Latin American actors to identify with it. By the 1930s, the longevity and expanding institutional framework of pan-Americanism gave it a sense of inertia even in the midst of global economic crisis.

The third lens is related to the transmission of ideas among diplomats: the organization of policy making and the regulation of access to policy discussions provided important context to pan-American policies. Diplomatic historians have always studied who sat at the policy-making table and who implemented policy decisions, with variation in emphasis on specific individuals, institutions, and bureaucracies. Some analysts of foreign policy, following the seminal work of Graham Allison, suggest that organization and bureaucratic politics help determine the scope of policy options and the strength of policy preferences.⁴⁵ The lack of documentation and the nature of bureaucracies in the past limit the insights that such analysis can bring to many historical cases. Yet it is still relevant. Pan-American cooperation emerged in the midst of state modernization programs throughout the hemisphere. Reform of bureaucracies opened policy making to new actors and made foreign policy responsive to new demands. International developments—including new standards defining the civilized state, the legalization of international relations, and the consolidation of modern internationalism—pushed foreign ministries to accommodate new norms. Another virtuous cycle emerged: as bureaucracies added actors to address new norms, those actors became advocates for the norms’ further consolidation. As this book shows, that cycle had an important role in perpetuating pan-American cooperation even in times of tense hemispheric relations.

The fourth lens shifts our attention outside state institutions. As noted previously, a diverse cast of actors sought to influence the fate of pan-Americanism. Those opposed to US influence in Latin America after 1898 were especially vocal, decrying pan-Americanism as a Trojan horse for US empire. Yet these were merely one group engaging pan-Americanism. Others emerged that saw in pan-Americanism an opportunity to advance personal, professional, or ideological interests. Non-state actors used pan-Americanism to build movements, often on foundations of existing networks. These actors’ efforts have notable similarities to more recent transnational movements, such as those studied by Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink. As Keck and Sikkink observe, non-state actors can use transnationalism to affect initiatives at home. By launching an issue into the transnational arena, they can accrue international legitimacy and support, occasionally with sustained institutional backing. That pressures national governments to act—a process Keck and Sikkink call the boomerang effect.⁴⁶ Historians, especially of women’s rights movements in the early twentieth century, have already demonstrated that pan-American cooperation served this purpose.⁴⁷

Non-state actors also affected policy making through direct contact with policy makers and the indirect appeal of public opinion. Policy makers regularly referred to public opinion and were acutely aware of their public audience. The press modernized and political participation gradually expanded through democratization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, granting the general population new channels for expressing their opinion. As Daniel Hucker argues, however, how policy makers understood public opinion mattered more than what the public actually thought.⁴⁸ Policy makers cared about their public image for a variety of reasons. Some genuinely believed that serving national interests meant listening to the public, though definitions of who constituted the public varied considerably. For others, their concern vis-à-vis public opinion was a matter of accruing prestige or legitimacy—for the nation,