Bolívar: American Liberator

"We read this book for a meeting last spring and our actual meeting date was May 5, which is Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican holiday. It’s not actually Mexico’s Independence Day, it’s when they beat the French at Puebla, which has somehow turned out to be a bigger holiday. It’s very popular in the US, because as I used to tell my students, if you want your cultural holiday to become a holiday in the United States, there’d better be a lot of drinking involved—think St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo. For that meeting, I wanted something to do with Latin America and we’d not read any Latin American history . Many American students can tell you that Simon Bolívar was the George Washington of Latin America. But that’s literally all they know and they’re not even entirely sure what it means. So it was like, ‘Okay, let’s fill this in.’ And even though Spanish was my second field—I did a lot of history in Spanish and the history of Mexico and the Borderlands—I didn’t know much about South America or about Bolívar, either. He truly was this larger-than-life character. He had 37 mistresses—that we know about. There are things in the book that are like, ‘Okay, they’ve got to make this into a movie.’ One of his mistresses defended him with a sword, while he jumped out a window, before he could be killed. It’s also a Shakespearean tragedy, because he was the most famous and admired man of his age and, when he dies, he’s a pauper in exile, reviled and mired in scandal. “It’s okay to skim history. History is not great literature” Marie Arana, who writes the book, is herself Argentinian, and descended on one side of the family from the rebel, and from the other side of the family from the Spaniards. She wanted to write the book to not only tell Bolívar’s story, but also because it turns out that in the Library of Congress there are enormous amounts of material on him that had never been translated from Spanish. So she had lots to work with. The other thing that she wanted to do, very similar to the Pomfret book, is myth-busting. Arana said that the problem is Americans don’t understand South America. Our experiences are different. And while a lot of Americans ‘get’ Mexico, they don’t really get Central or South America. So that was another reason for writing the book: to show how very different we are. For example, she talks about the fact that race is hugely important in Latin America. The Spanish made it very much a racial hierarchy, where you were literally separated out by how light or dark you are: it wasn’t just black and white, it was shades of brown. It was a rigid hierarchy that was enforced and part of getting rid of the Spanish was about recognizing that. I think it was Jose Vasconcelos, the Mexican philosopher, who said that people in Latin America were ‘the cosmic race’ because they are African, Asian, European, indigenous—and then everything in between. Part of Bolívar’s genius was that he saw that. He was himself mixed race, although he came from the upper class (though not the top). He recognized that there could never be true independence for South America unless it included the Black and indigenous people. He needed to get the mestizos and the mulattos, the mixed race, who had the background and experience and had never been able to adequately use them. He brought all of them together for the very first time and used this common enemy as a way to knit them together. That was part of his genius, that for the very first time everybody had a place and it was important. The other part of his genius—and this was a real eye-opener for my group—was that in 1816 Bolívar said that you cannot have true liberty if you have slavery. So he abolished slavery in 1816. That was radical, even for South America. He said it was all or nothing: either everyone is free, or no one is free, it’s as simple as that. And nobody in the US would have said that in 1816. That is his other importance. So this book develops those two themes. Everybody in the group loved the stories, that was their main comment. It’s not just one movie—you can make multiple movies about everything that he did. His going across the Andes makes Hannibal’s Italy trip seem like no big deal. He rode thousands of miles; I think 7000 altogether. His troops called him ‘iron ass’ because he could stay on a horse all day long. And you learn about South America, and how South Americans see themselves. Arana is trying to get us, as North Americans, to rethink how we see South Americans. Don’t think they’re like you because they’re not, it’s a whole different experience and so democracy there is going to look different from democracy in the US. They’re going to make some different choices. We in the US need to quit being ‘disappointed’ and just see that they’re different. Yes, the Spanish had already treated them as different areas, but they eventually became five different countries. You’re exactly right: it was the George Washington idea to unite them together. He was extremely well-read and traveled and recognized that there were tremendous geographical differences in the United States. And, yet, we managed to knit together more or less successfully as a country, though obviously we weren’t that far from falling apart in 1860. So it wasn’t unrealistic to think they could do the same thing—except it did turn out to be unrealistic. One reason his reputation suffered is because, by the end, he had come to believe that the only way for South America to survive—because they had the same fear that the US did in the early years, that the Spanish would just come back in and conquer them again, or somebody would, probably the British—was to be together. He went from liberator to a firm believer in authoritarian rules. That’s what destroyed his reputation, because he ruled like an authoritarian the last time that he was president. And it wasn’t just that, but he was a bad authoritarian ruler. He could maybe have gotten away with it if he’d been good at it. He was a bad authoritarian ruler, and that was the reason he ended up exiled, stripped of all of his land, all of his titles, and reviled. You’re so kind! It’s called The Butchering Art and it’s about Lister . It’s written by an American historian but she resides in Britain and does a whole broadcast, Lindsey Fitzharris. That was the other one I would have put on, the group loved that book. It is. That’s in general. We’ve read several books, but the big three over the past five years, I would say, would be that one and The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson , which is about cholera. Several of the group suggested that book to me. A handful of the group had read it, the rest hadn’t. That was the first one we read, and then they were like, ‘more medicine!’ One of the biggest groups we’ve had was a book on polio, Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky . I think that’s partly the age of the group, they’re mostly 50 and above. The polio vaccine came along when I was in second grade, and some of the group were even older. But we all knew people that had polio. And we all had experienced our parents not letting us go swimming in the summer. And Scottish Rite, which was a major hospital for children with polio is here in Dallas. So among the people that came to the group were quite a few people who had had polio, or had been at Scottish Rite. They knew about it. I started by asking them, ‘So, tell me your story.’ It was wonderful. So those were the three books on the history of medicine. It really surprised me how much they liked those books. Now we do live in a big medical community here in Dallas, so that may be part of it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . For anyone starting a group, the other thing I’m going to tell you, which you may or may not find useful, is that I did not start with the Tuchman book. The very first book that we did, five years ago, was Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton . It’s a big book and the head of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture —which is the home of our history reading group—told me, ‘This is a bad idea.’ We were at the height of Alexander Hamilton mania, and I said, ‘No, trust me.’ We had 80 people at the meeting, they had to keep bringing in chairs! I knew they wouldn’t be back. They were mostly there because it was Hamilton. But I got 80 people in the door for the first meeting, to introduce them to it. I don’t think that many of them had read the book. That would be my advice to anyone starting this, you want to find something that’s going to bring a big group in. Find something that’s very appealing, that’s going to bring people in. It is. And as I said, we really are living in the golden age of history writing. We’re so fortunate because there is so much good stuff, I mean, really good stuff out there. It would have been harder in 1950-something to have found that many good books. Now it’s an embarrassment of riches. Correct. We do four in the fall, and then four in the spring. I have a group that’s been pretty much with me over the whole five years that we’ve done this. We average 25-30 in a group, even on Zoom, as we’ve had to do during COVID. We’ve had 185 people all told over the five-year period, because people will drop in because a specific book interests them, or a teacher will drop in because they’d like to know more about a particular topic. Then we may never see them again or not see them for three years. That’s the other thing to keep in mind, that people are coming and going. I want them to be free to do that. I do because the group always has questions. I’m assuming that they’ve read the book, or part of it. So I don’t want to just rehash the book. I want to give them room to say, ‘What led up to this?’ or to reference something they didn’t know and didn’t have time to look up. A lot of them—bless them—will do a little reading on their own, but many others don’t, and they depend upon me to place this moment in history, or to explain why this big arc, as opposed to other big arcs, is important. That’s what you can bring to it. That’s the kind of background that you need a history person for. Someone who’s read widely and is very familiar with history. Also, to judge books. I read the book, I read a lot of critical reviews to see what people are saying about it, and so forth. Again, you need to bring that experience of having read a lot of history in order to be able to select books that are good. Any general reader will be good at finding a book that readers will enjoy. Our purpose is not to become academics on the Civil War. Our purpose is to read widely about the Civil War and, particularly in this day and time, to do some myth-busting. To go back and look, now that we have multiple people’s views. That’s another reason you need a history person, so that you can work your way through what’s good history, where you’re getting someone who may be very passionate (and hopefully is) about the subject but has a historian’s objectivity—as opposed to what’s political, where somebody is just riding their hobbyhorse. Not that that’s required, by the way, for a good history book, but that’s something that you should pick and choose on your own. I want a good discussion and the group is very keen to learn, for example, ‘What do I not know about the Black experience in the US?’ But I try to avoid controversy. I want us to be able to talk without emotions coming into it. I don’t mind a good discussion, and I don’t mind a slightly heated discussion, but I don’t want emotions."