Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule
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Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule
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Overview
Gobat focuses primarily on the reactions of the elites to Americanization, because the power and identity of these Nicaraguans were the most significantly affected by U.S. imperial rule. He describes their adoption of aspects of “the American way of life” in the mid–nineteenth century as strategic rather than wholesale. Chronicling the U.S. occupation of 1912–33, he argues that the anti-American turn of Nicaragua’s most Americanized oligarchs stemmed largely from the efforts of U.S. bankers, marines, and missionaries to spread their own version of the American dream. In part, the oligarchs’ reversal reflected their anguish over the 1920s rise of Protestantism, the “modern woman,” and other “vices of modernity” emanating from the United States. But it also responded to the unintended ways that U.S. modernization efforts enabled peasants to weaken landlord power. Gobat demonstrates that the U.S. occupation so profoundly affected Nicaragua that it helped engender the Sandino Rebellion of 1927–33, the Somoza dictatorship of 1936–79, and the Sandinista Revolution of 1979–90.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822387183 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/27/2005 |
| Series: | American Encounters/Global Interactions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| Sales rank: | 724,756 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Michel Gobat is Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa.
Read an Excerpt
Confronting the American Dream
NICARAGUA UNDER U.S. IMPERIAL RULEBy Michel Gobat
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2005 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3634-1
Chapter One
Americanization through ViolenceNicaragua under Walker
LEADERS OF NICARAGUA'S LIBERAL PARTY enthusiastically greeted William Walker and his band of fifty-seven U.S. mercenaries when they sailed into the Pacific port of Realejo on 16 June 1855. Months earlier the Liberal Party had sent emissaries to San Francisco, California, to contract Walker's services. In exchange for land and money, this well-known soldier of fortune was to help Liberals overthrow the Conservative government based in Granada. From Realejo, the Liberal delegates accompanied Walker and his men to Chinandega (see map 3). All along the fifteen-mile dirt road, rural dwellers came out of their straw-hatched huts to salute the U.S. adventurers; in Chinandega, townspeople enthusiastically greeted them with loud church bells. From Chinandega, Walker's Nicaraguan hosts took him to nearby León, then the country's largest city and the seat of the Liberal Party. There the Liberal chieftain Francisco Castellón cordially received Walker and gave him free reign to fight the Conservatives in the name of "liberty" and "progress."
The spirited welcome extended to Walker by the local populace stands in profoundcontrast to the way latter-day Nicaraguans have remembered his brief but fateful rule. To them, Walker and his men were nothing but brutal invaders who tried to enslave their ancestors and destroy their culture. Walker and his men certainly brought unprecedented violence to Nicaragua in their efforts to create a new, slaveholding U.S. empire. But these U.S. expansionists were not invaders: they had been invited by prominent Nicaraguans to their country-not just to wage war but to help "civilize" Nicaragua. In particular, elite Liberals hoped that Walker's men would settle down as agricultural colonists and help Nicaragua replicate the U.S. path to political and economic modernity. Nor was Walker's band solely backed by a handful of misguided Liberal patriarchs, as some scholars would argue. Poorer Nicaraguans also welcomed the North Americans as "liberators." Many continued to support Walker even after he became the country's strongman and attracted up to ten thousand additional (male and female) U.S. colonists to his cause. In fact, the Nicaraguan masses tended to stay aloof from the now mythical "National War" that led to the expulsion of Walker and his U.S. followers in May 1857.
Today, Nicaraguans' warm embrace of Walker in 1855 seems perplexing, for we know the devastation he wrought. But perhaps the greater puzzle is why U.S. expansionism under the banner of Manifest Destiny did not push elite Nicaraguans to join other Central Americans in repudiating U.S. military-colonists like Walker. Central Americans had become especially wary of U.S. expansionism after the United States conquered the northern half of Mexico in the war of 1846-48. Yet this U.S. conquest hardly perturbed elite Nicaraguans, thus leading a Spanish-born diplomat of the era to wonder why Nicaragua could not imagine "that in throwing herself into the arms of American citizens ... a day would arrive when she would be strangled in those very arms which were so spontaneously open to receive her"? As we will see, the key to this puzzle lies not just in the tragic way Nicaragua's own sense of manifest destiny-the interoceanic canal-became entangled with U.S. expansionism. It also stems from Nicaraguans' expectation that Walker's colonists would embody the same entrepreneurial values as the thousands of California-bound adventurers who had crossed the isthmus since the gold rush began in 1848.
To Nicaraguans' grave misfortune, Walker's military-colonists introduced Nicaraguans to a very different kind of Americanization project than the gold rushers who transited their country. With the transit business, Nicaraguans eagerly adopted a wide array of new U.S. goods and cultural practices as well as U.S. ideals of technological progress and enterprise. In Walker's followers, by contrast, Nicaraguans encountered a highly exclusionary and bellicose strand of U.S. Manifest Destiny that claimed Latin Americans could not be Americanized through the "civilizing" force of U.S. culture and trade but had to be violently subordinated if not physically exterminated. As Walker famously stated in his book The War in Nicaragua, "The history of the world presents no such Utopian vision as that of an inferior race yielding meekly and peacefully to the controlling influence of a superior people. Whenever barbarism and civilization ... meet face to face, the result must be war." But as their enthusiastic reception of Walker's band evinces, many Nicaraguans initially believed in such a "Utopian vision." And it was this faith that Walker and his men would brutally betray.
The Initial Encounter
Ever since the United States started expanding westward in the early nineteenth century, its government and citizens strove to exploit Nicaragua's ideal location for an interoceanic route. But only with the California gold rush of 1848-49 did U.S. entrepreneurs establish a transisthmian route through Nicaragua. Until the U.S. transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, the Nicaraguan transit and its Panamanian counterpart (established in 1848) were the fastest and most secure pathways between both coasts of the United States. So essential were these transits to the United States that they secured by far the largest foreign investments made by U.S. citizens prior to their country's civil war of 1861-65.
The U.S.-operated transit across Nicaragua followed a route that local residents had been using since well before the Spanish conquest of 1523. Its Atlantic terminus was the sleepy port of San Juan del Norte, where steamers carrying hundreds of gold seekers arrived from New York and New Orleans. There, passengers transferred to smaller dugouts that took them through deep jungle 122 miles up the San Juan River to Lake Nicaragua. After crossing the shark-infested lake to Granada, the travelers rode another 134 miles through the country's most populated areas before boarding San Francisco-bound steamers at the old Pacific port of El Realejo. This 375-mile journey across Nicaragua took about twenty days to complete. In 1851, the travel time dropped dramatically after the U.S. shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt opened a transit route about half as long that required only a twelve-mile land journey between Lake Nicaragua (La Virgen) and the Pacific (San Juan del Sur). Vanderbilt's Accessory Transit Company also made key technological improvements, such as replacing Nicaraguan dugouts with U.S. steamboats and macadamizing dirt paths so that they would no longer become mud trenches whenever it rained. These changes enabled gold-hungry adventurers to cross the isthmus in as little as two days, thus shortening their travel time between New York and San Francisco to about twenty-two days. The Nicaraguan transit route became so popular that, until its closure by warfare in 1856, it carried nearly two thousand travelers a month-a mighty flow for a country of about 250,000 inhabitants.
For better or for worse, the transit business represented the first major U.S. intervention in Nicaragua. Politically, U.S. agents of the Accessory Transit Company alienated native elites by meddling in their country's internal affairs. They even instigated the first major U.S. military action in Nicaragua-the 1854 bombardment of San Juan del Norte-in order to resolve a conflict with local boatmen and authorities. The company also refused to pay the Nicaraguan government the 10 percent royalty on its annual profits stipulated by the original contract. Finally, its agents antagonized native elites by helping rural communities defend their autonomy against the encroaching central state. In particular, they hindered state authorities from pressing peasants into military service; in exchange, the company gained privileged access to much-needed laborers. If elites railed at the company's high-handedness, poorer Nicaraguans living along the transit route often welcomed its intervention.
Even more contradictory was the transit's economic impact. To the dismay of many Nicaraguans, the transit business significantly increased U.S. control over their economy. North Americans not only owned the transit's main means of transport and monopolized the sale of wood needed to fuel the steamboats, they also operated many of the hotels and taverns that catered to the foreign adventurers. In creating this quasi-enclave economy, U.S. entrepreneurs displaced various local businesses, especially boatmen who had long carried most of the country's transisthmian commerce. Yet the transit also brought a whiff of prosperity to Nicaragua. For local laborers, U.S. entrepreneurs offered more secure employment and higher wages. Further, Vanderbilt's modernization of the transport system produced, as a local observer stressed, "a favorable revolution" in the country's commercial sector. Nowhere was this impact more strongly felt than in the rural economy. In addition to facilitating the export of Nicaraguan corn to California, the new transit benefited the many peasants and petty merchants who sold food and liquor to the thousands of gold rushers crossing their country.
This massive flow also produced the first U.S. cultural intervention in Nicaragua. A diverse group, the transients-californios in local parlance-introduced a wide variety of U.S. consumption and leisure patterns, including distinct styles of dress and unfamiliar dances. The gold rushers and U.S. transit operators fascinated some Nicaraguans with their entrepreneurial spirit. Native elites, in particular, favorably contrasted the foreigners' "spirit of progress" with the antientrepreneurial attitudes they claimed many of their compatriots had inherited from the Spanish colonizers. No doubt, the closer Nicaraguans lived to the transit route the more they adopted the ways of the transients, a process which native elites often equated with becoming more "civilized." As the prefect of Granada noted in 1850, the "good taste of [the city's] inhabitants, its culture, and civilization [was] being daily enhanced by ... the influx of foreigners." Yet the Nicaraguans whose lifestyles probably changed the most were the hundreds who worked for the transit company in various capacities, for they had to adapt to a U.S.-based labor regime.
Culturally and otherwise, then, Nicaragua was notably changed by its encounter with the transit company and the californios. Yet such changes paled next to the havoc wreaked by William Walker and his band of U.S. expansionists, who advanced, as a U.S. resident in Granada put it, "the grand idea of the Americanization of the entire region of Central America."
Embracing Walker's Filibusters
When Walker's men arrived in Nicaragua, the country was already anything but peaceful. As elsewhere in Latin America, Nicaragua's 1821 independence from Spain had ushered in a long period of upheaval, as competing groups fought to forge a new political community on the ruins of the Spanish colonial state. This conflict certainly had an ideological dimension, for it essentially pitted elite Conservatives, who sought to uphold the colonial order, against elite Liberals, who favored a new order based on liberal principles, such as free trade, the secularization of society, more democratic forms of government, and the privatization of land owned by corporate entities (especially the Catholic Church and indigenous communities). But, as in much of Central America, Nicaraguan Liberals and Conservatives waged war "more for power than principle." And in Nicaragua the battle over the nation-state was especially protracted, as the country possessed two equally powerful regional elites: one based in the Liberal stronghold of León, the other in the Conservative bastion of Granada. If in some parts of Latin America the center had come to control the provinces by the mid-nineteenth century, in Nicaragua the elites of León and Granada-both composed of cattle barons, indigo and cacao planters, and merchants-remained locked in a bloody struggle for power.
Complicating matters, elite conflicts fueled the rise of peasant movements that posed grave challenges to the existing social order. The strength of such movements was especially evident in the rural revolts that rocked Nicaragua in the late 1840s. These revolts sprang largely from popular wrath over efforts of the nascent state to expand its power over the lower classes by imposing new taxes, regulating the commercialization of common goods, increasing demands for labor, and curbing the political autonomy of rural communities. Centered in the Pacific zone, the popular revolts drove Nicaragua's warring elites to join forces for the very first time. Thanks to this unprecedented alliance, elites were able to crush what they deemed "communist" movements. Shortly thereafter, however, elites resumed their internecine war.
It was against this violent backdrop that leaders of the Liberal Party hired Walker and his men to help overthrow the ruling Conservatives. They knew little about Walker other than that he was a political liberal willing to lead U.S. military adventurers against Conservative regimes in Latin America. Their favorable image of Walker, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer-journalist born in Tennessee, stemmed from the well-publicized military expedition he had led in Baja California and Sonora from November 1853 to May 1854. Although unsuccessful, Walker had impressed Nicaraguan Liberals with his ability to wage war against Mexico's Conservative government.
But Nicaragua's hard-pressed Liberals also contracted Walker's services because of their positive experiences with previous U.S. mercenaries. Since the end of the U.S. war against Mexico in 1848, Nicaragua and the rest of the Caribbean Basin had experienced a rise in U.S. military incursions. The participants of such private military adventures came to be known as filibusters, a word derived from the French term for the pirates who had pillaged the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean Basin (flibustiers). Like Walker, some filibusters were invited by embattled native elites. Others were outright invaders. None enjoyed the U.S. government's explicit sanction.
Filibusters were agents of U.S. Manifest Destiny, and they saw themselves, to quote Walker, as "the advance guard of American civilization." Still, their personal goals could vary considerably. In the case of Walker's men, some were unemployed veterans of the U.S.-Mexican war enticed by good pay. Others were outlaws on the run who believed that gold-rich Nicaragua was not only a fine refuge but the new "El Dorado." Many more were farmers lured by the promise of land bonanzas. A few others saw their main goal as the evangelization of the "godforsaken" (i.e., Catholic) natives. A significant number joined Walker principally for political reasons. For example, many Southerners went to Nicaragua to defend the institution of slavery in the United States. Others claimed to be political liberals fighting the international battle against the forces of "reaction." This was especially the case of Walker's French and German soldiers, many of whom had emigrated penniless to the United States after participating in the failed European revolutions of 1848. Diverse motivations drove thousands of young men from all parts of the United States to enlist in Walker's filibuster army. Yet no matter how varied a crowd, most apparently supported their leader's main goal: to "Americanize" Nicaragua via the import of U.S. colonists and U.S. institutions.
This goal was partly shared by the Nicaraguan Liberals who hired Walker's filibuster gang and offered each of the mercenaries a farm of 250 acres at the close of the military campaign. Their offer was not simply a ploy to circumvent U.S. laws that prohibited the departure of private military expeditions from U.S. ports but did not restrict U.S. settler-colonists from setting sail for Latin America. Instead, the offer was a genuine attempt to create a U.S. farming colony in Nicaragua's vast stretches of undeveloped land. It thus reflected the ongoing efforts of native elites to replicate the political and economic development of the United States by promoting the massive immigration of U.S. settlers to Nicaragua. Liberals and Conservatives alike considered this matter so important that the contracts their governments signed with Vanderbilt's transit company obliged the latter to establish U.S. agricultural colonies along the transit route.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Illustrations ixTables x
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part I: Manifest Destinies, 1849–1910 19
1. Americanization through Violence: Nicaragua under Walker 21
2. Americanization from Within: Forging a Cosmopolitan Nationality 42
Part II: Restoration, 1910–1912 73
3. Challenging Imperial Exclusions: Nicaragua under the Dawson Pact 75
4. Bourgeois Revolution Denied: U.S. Military Intervention in the Civil War of 1912 100
Part III: Dollar Diplomacy, 1912–1927 123
5. Economic Nationalism: Resisting Wall Street’s “Feudal” Regime 125
6. Anxious Landlords, Resilient Peasants: Dollar Diplomacy’s Socioeconomic Impact 150
7. Cultural Anit-Americanism: The Caballeros Catolicos’ Crusade against U.S. Missionaries, the “Modern Woman,” and the “Bourgeois Spirit” 175
Part IV: Revolution, 1927–1933 203
8. Militarization via Democratization: The U.S. Attack on Caudillismo and the Rise of Authoritarian Corporatism 205
9. Revolutionary Nationalism: Elite Conservatives, Sandino, and the Struggle for a De-Americanized Nicaragua 232
Epilogue: Imperial Legacies: Dictatorship and Revolution 267
Notes 281
Selected Bibliography 325
Index 351