Max Paul Friedman

Simulacrobama: The Mediated Election of 2008

Scholars and progressives outside the academy alike are watching with fascination to see what meaning the Obama presidency will acquire as the theatrical phase of the election yields to the terrestrial act of governing. There is no denying the tangible impact an Obama presidency can have upon the United States and the world. Yet both the election and the presidency emerge from a combination of acts and their representation. With a nation and a world taking an interest in these events, most of the several billion people who ‘‘experienced ’’ the election campaign did so, necessarily, across the bridge and the barrier of the media that connect individuals to meta-events. Those media, old and new, shaped the election in complex ways that are now yielding to a simplified portrayal of the triumph of American exceptionalism over its darkest past, with Obama fulfilling what Abraham Lincoln allegedly began. Obama himself may be the most active participant in the media’s formulation of that story. Jean Baudrillard tells us that postmodern societies are marked by simulacra or representations that precede reality, artificially producing a mediated world masquerading as authenticity. This may be a useful concept for making sense of the election of 2008 : we have witnessed the ‘‘precession of simulacra. ’’

Fracas in Caracas: Latin American Diplomatic Resistance to United States Intervention in Guatemala in 1954

The Eisenhower Administration claimed a diplomatic triumph—and a mandate to overthrow the elected government of Guatemala—after the Tenth Inter-American Conference held in Caracas, Venezuela, in March 1954, when 17 nations voted for an American resolution condemning international Communism. This article disputes the official story and some recent scholarly depictions of the conference. Caracas was the scene of intense Latin American opposition to the American agenda. Vote-buying was rampant as Washington made hundreds of millions of dollars worth of concessions to individual countries. Nonetheless, amendments pushed through by Latin American diplomats transformed the interventionist American resolution into a strong statement against intervention. The American “triumph” was actually a fiasco that called into sharp relief the difference between United States and Latin American understandings of the inter-American system, demonstrating Latin American diplomatic resistance to intervention and the limits of diplomacys potential to constrain the actions of the most powerful American state.

Introduction: History in Politics

The novelist William Faulkner once observed, “The past is not dead; it is not even past.” Events that took place years or centuries ago directly affect the present by setting the conditions in which today’s events unfold. Moreover, the way we tell stories about the past can sway our thinking about the present. Consider two interpretations of the same event: “The Vietnam War was a disastrous mistake, never to be repeated”; “The Vietnam War was a noble cause; next time we must have the will to win.” These two versions of the same past represent competing histories and have very different implications for the present. Thus history, the meaning we assign to the past, can influence such momentous decisions as whether or not to go to war.

Specter of a Nazi Threat: United States-Colombian Relations, 1939-1945

On 11 September 1941, U..S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took to the airwaves to warn his country that “Hitlers advance guards” were readying “footholds, bridgeheads in the New World, to be used as soon as he has gained control of the oceans.” The most recent sign that the Nazis were coming, the president told his rapt national audience, was the discovery of “secret airlanding fields in Colombia, within easy range of the Panama Canal.” In Bogotá, the response was pandemonium. U.S. ambassador Spruille Braden, astonished that “the President has gone out on a limb with this statement,” sent his staff scrambling across German-owned farms and rice fields to try to produce evidence for the assertion ex post facto. Colombian President Eduardo Santos scoffed at Roosevelts claim, telling Braden, “in the final analysis all of Colombia is a great potential airport.” A resentful Colombian Senate voted unanimously that no such airfields existed (that Colombia had fulfilled its responsibility to defend against the Axis menace). In Washington, Secretary of State Cordell Hull was forced to call in Colombias Ambassador Gabriel Turbay to express “the very deep regret of the President, of myself and of our Government” for the “unintentional reference.”

Reciprocity in Mexican Relations with the United States: Past Indicators of Future Dilemmas

This note assesses the lessons for future Mexican relations with the United States of past episodes of conflict over border issues and U.S. intervention in Latin America. The author argues that Mexican officials have and should continue to present Mexican views and assert Mexican national interests in disputes with the United States without concern for the historically frequent tendency of U.S. officials and commentators to ascribe such positions to Mexican “anti-Americanism.”

ÉMIGRÉS AS TRANSMITTERS OF AMERICAN PROTEST CULTURE

This essay challenges scholarly claims that the German student movement represented the emergence of latent fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies, especially when its target was the US war in Vietnam. Instead, the author argues that Jewish voices were prominent in the German Sixties through the writings of émigré intellectuals such as Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, as well as the poet Erich Fried, who inspired student activists even as they took disparate positions on the war. Moreover, Jewish Americans who were strongly represented in the American New Left groups served as a model for German student activists. Rather than anti-Semitism, we see cosmopolitanism at work in 1968.

Online Roundtable: Hal Brands' Latin America's Cold War Hal Brands, Latin America's Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, £21·80). Pp. 385. isbn 978 0 674 05528 5.

Latin America, Hal Brands tells us, has been twice the Cold War’s victim. Much Latin American blood was spilled during the ColdWar itself, frequently in internecine wars that make the adjective “civil” inappropriate. But with the passage of time, Brands suggests, Latin America has become a victim of historical condescension too. Denuded of agency, Latin Americans have become Cold War innocents, buffeted by interventions for which the United States was largely responsible. Apart from the military officers, reactionaries, and “master architects of evil” who aligned themselves with Washington’s Cold War agenda, Latin Americans, for too many historians, played bit parts in their own tragedy (). To correct this bias in the historiography, as he characterizes it, is among Hal Brands’s central purposes. By rebalancing our understanding of agency and by revealing the complexity of causation, Brands proposes to rescue Latin America’s Cold War from the genre of morality tale and to enrich our understanding. This is a tall task, and it is a measure of his accomplishment that he substantially succeeds. Hal Brands has, in my view, written a most impressive book. Latin America’s Cold War is not without its shortcomings, but these are in many cases the limits of the historiographical genre – international history – within which he works. I imagine that some historians who focus on the national histories that Brands engages may find points of disagreement in his handling of particular episodes, crises, and personalities. Not being a specialist, I will not engage Brands on these grounds. I will instead consider some of the methodological issues that the book raises and its implications for Cold War historiography and the international history of the twentieth century more broadly construed. First off, the methodological issues. Brands approaches Latin America as an international historian working in breadth. Even by the standards of the field, Journal of American Studies,  (), e.

A Review of “American Foreign Relations since 1898: A Documentary Reader”

Heather Cox Richardson’s work provides a solid analysis of the link between national politics and the Wounded Knee Massacre. Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, convincingly argues that President Benjamin Harrison’s political machinations created a bureaucratic tinderbox in the Dakota territories. Feuding politicians and military men, along with diverse Lakota interests, including the Ghost Dance, added to the flammable mixture. Corruption, mismanagement, power jockeying, and the desire for western lands finally ignited on that cold December day in 1890. In the critical midterm election year of 1890, Richardson explains, Harrison “liked the patronage opportunities afforded by Indian agencies,” but the impoverished and suffering Lakota “were never of much interest to Harrison’s men except as an obstacle to clear out of the way of economic growth” (306). Richardson makes the connection between patronage and bad Indian policy clear with the example of Daniel F. Royer, the agent assigned to the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1890. Lakotas referred to Royer as “Man Afraid of Indians” (170); Richardson describes him as a Republican Party hack and “a failed medical man” with a possible drug addiction (175). Scholars have been writing about Wounded Knee for the past fifty years. There are a handful of fairly recent works dedicated to the subject. Among them, Jeffrey Ostler’s The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Richard E. Jensen’s Eyewitness at Wounded Knee (University of Nebraska Press, 1991) stand out. Ostler’s account provides an interpretation of the massacre set against the larger backdrop of American colonialism, and Jensen’s work offers a compelling collection of photographs and three essays dedicated to the massacre. Richardson’s work, however, is the first to systematically connect the dots between the Harrison political machine and the massacre. The book begins with the buoyant optimism of American business at the outset of the corporate revolution. Richardson deftly traces the emergence of a corporate-federal alliance through its principal architect, Senator John Sherman. Sherman and his brother William Tecumseh appear frequently in the early chapters, and their niece’s husband, General Nelson Miles, moves to center stage as the book progresses. Richardson provides a cogent and definitive interpretation of Miles’s often disputed role in the massacre. The early chapters also offer glimpses into the lives of Lakota leaders such as Red Cloud and Sitting Bull, as well as giving due attention to the rapidly changing world of the Lakota in the late nineteenth century. Readers become familiar with Lakota politics, frustrations with the United States, and involvement in the Treaty of 1868. The book dedicates significant space to the complicated political maneuvering before the midterm elections of 1890, specifically focusing on Republican attempts to make an unpopular tariff palatable amidst a swell of western populism. The narrative unfolds in a clear, chronological fashion as Richardson skillfully manages to weave the stories of US politics and the Lakota experience together. Richardson does not cast the Lakota as helpless victims; rather, she carefully examines their internal disputes and the decisions they made as they struggled to protect their lands, families, and customs. Her work sheds light on the emerging divide between traditionalists and progressives among the Lakota bands. Richardson points to the land cession of 1889 as an exacerbating factor increasing the distance between the two groups. The land cession precipitated a period of pronounced corruption and neglect that added to the burdens of the already struggling Lakota. The true strength of this work comes from its critical study of party politics and their effect on Indian policy. A collection of photographs, along with a few well-placed maps, enhance the book. The endnotes present an admirable mix of primary and secondary sources. Regrettably brief suggestions for further reading take the place of a comprehensive bibliography, which likely represents the will of the press, rather than the author. Despite the tragic, often horrific history being told, Richardson invites readers in with engaging prose, and her interpretation establishes a benchmark for historians trying to understand the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Of Sartre, race, and rabies: “Anti-Americanism” and the transatlantic politics of intellectual engagement

Abstract Jean-Paul Sartre has been called “the most prominent anti-American” in France, and his critiques of US society and foreign policy have been attributed to his ingrained anti-Americanism. This article questions the utility of this concept in understanding Sartres political engagements, for he does not fit into standard definitions of anti-Americanism that emphasize special hostility and general resentment toward the United States. Instead, Sartres writings about the United States reveal an enthusiastic embrace of contemporary American culture, while his sharpest critiques focused on two issues that were lifelong concerns of his, regardless of national context: racial discrimination and the arbitrary exercise of power. Despite his period of fellow traveling that made him sympathetic to the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, Sartres political biography shows that he was much more interested in the deficiencies of French society and foreign policy than he was in Americas failings. The article concludes that Sartre can be better understood as a member of a multiracial, transatlantic community of engaged intellectuals who struggled, and sometimes failed, to find an activist Marxism that was compatible with individual integrity.