Understanding South America

Front matter

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Preface

EDITH WHARTON, speaking of the French nation, has given, to my thinking, a most excellent rule for those who attempt to write of nations other than their own:

There are only two ways of judging the character of a people: either, if one is of them, by finding the clue to their idiosyncrasies in one's self and one's antecedents; or, if one is a stranger, by seeking it in the contrasts between the aspirations and the results of the race one is studying and those of one's own people.

He who writes about foreign people, saves himself from ineptitude, if not from downright impertinence, by the use of sympathetic imagination. Dogmatism, provincial opinion and sweeping generalisations are ruled out on the start for him who brings eyes for really seeing alien nationalities. Convictions of course are possible and necessary; providing the observer has acquainted himself with the historical background of a country, and stayed long enough, and not too long, in the land to meet a wide circle of diverse populations, bringing to his experience some knowledge of men and a trained observation.

Yet there are various ways of expressing personal convictions relative to a foreign people. The German who styled the Latin Americans in general as "thinly veiled Indians," and the man who visited the viii PREFACE

West Coast hurriedly during the South American winter and returned to his homeland to write of his experiences under the title, "To Hell and Back," were not in either case exactly fitting examples of the way to express conclusions about our neighbours to the south.

On the other hand, it is a mistake to believe that foreign peoples are averse to being written about, providing they are not ridiculed or held up to caricature. It is quite generally recognised that the observation of a foreigner fixes upon certain facts and traits unregarded or seemingly insignificant to the native inhabitants. These trifling details to which the dweller in a country has become too accustomed to note, often throw the needed light upon a nation's characteristics. The unfamiliarity of the alien observer with the people and section studied, fits him for his task.

In these times, furthermore, it is not only the historian and trade expert who are impelled to study the character and acts of other nationals. The war has dissolved territorial and geographical barriers and stirred social and national conditions so deeply that the average reader is startled out of his isolation and localism. He is made to realise the world at large in which every man with any pretension to citizenship or patriotism forms an integral, vital part. A nation is coming to be considered something more than an animated business machine. When millions of men are laying down their lives for an ideal, there is necessarily a growing necessity to understand the underlying nature of the nations with whom we are fighting or having relationships — their traits, their traditions, their history, their institutions, and even their prejudices

PREFACE ix

begin to loom larger and larger. National idealism becomes the fountain head of national industrialism. The dreams of a people secure a place alongside of their accomplishments; the soul becomes the measure of national manhood and the index to national action. At Chicago in 1916 President Wilson said:

America has no reason for being unless her destiny and duty be ideal. It is her incumbent privilege to declare and stand for the rights of men. Nothing else is worth fighting for and nothing else is worth sacrificing for.

It has been in order to reveal certain of the principles actuating the men of South America, as well as to describe the tendencies and conditions of their lives and country that this book has been written. It is still too literally true that Americans in general are blissfully ignorant of the real motives that actuate our southern neighbours. We have been too accustomed to think of South Americans from what we have been pleased to consider a higher plane. As a rule we have not realised that in many respects South Americans are superior to North Americans, both as to their ideals and the manner of life in general. One meets frequently with foreigners, who know well these people, from whom the opinion is gained that the educated classes are better educated and are sounder in their whole view of life than are our own inhabitants.

It has been too common also to judge foreign nations according to our own standard and to consider that our standards, both ethical and commercial, are absolute ones. It is easy to overlook the fact that each nation has its own standards of morality, as well

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as its own rule of commercial ethics, possessing a form of wit and culture, and general estimate of life, as distinct as is its language and its history. It is impossible to begin to understand foreign people until we have made some progress in learning their historical background, the things that seem good in their eyes, their language and their modes of doing business.

In our trade relations, also, with the South Americans we have been too inclined at times simply to sell goods to them, and as one South American put it, "to forget that we must sell goods and service together," if permanent trade is to be maintained. After the war we shall have the greatest opportunity ever afforded us to prove our ability to compete with Europeans in South American trade. Unless we are most alert and reveal, not only by the price and quality of our goods, but also by our mental attitude to Latin Americans that we really wish to do business with them, our capable European competitors will take away from us even that which we have gained. Undoubtedly the chief and underlying commercial needs at present are American banking facilities in South America and better transportation arrangements between the two sections. However, unless we as a people can show ourselves capable of securing the point of view, so different from our own, of our southern neighbours, we shall find advance difficult.

A prominent Brazilian, writing recently concerning what he considered the fundamental necessity for securing better relationships of all kinds between North and South America, said:

"You people of the North must learn to trust Latin

PREFACE xi

Americans as you trust and have confidence in your brother Americans. You must learn to realise that we are worthy of your confidence, and that in point of honour we do not take second place to any other nation."

In the following pages I have tried to point out some of the leading characteristics and tendencies of the South Americans who represent many diverse types and sections. The German "penetration" has been studied; and the South American institutions and industries. I have tried to give some inkling of the national background and the natural resources, of the methods of doing business, the place that Americans and other foreigners have gained in trade, as well as indicating certain results of study and contact with many representatives of the Southern Republics concerning present day requirements.

Clayton Sedgwick Cooper.

New York City.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I GETTING ACQUAINTED 19

II THE ORIENTAL SOUTH AMERICAN . . . . . 3 1

Chapter I

The happiness of the world, as well as its peace, will be pnx moted when men learn to look at world problems not from the viewpoint of their own nation alone, but from that of other nations as well. — Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler.

IT has been said with good reason that the portrait that one nation paints of another is likely to appear a libel or a caricature to the sitter. This applies with peculiar force to the two Americas.

Neither of the Americas have had a square deal, the one from the other. Far too much ignorance, ridicule and national prejudice have been mixed with the colours to get a clear picture.

We have never really known each other. I once knew an Englishman who took a peculiar and inveterate dislike to another Englishman. A friend of the two men contrived to bring them to the same club in London one day, and taking my English acquaintance

aside said, "I want you to meet Mr. whom you

dislike."

My friend replied, "I absolutely refuse to know him, — Why, how do you suppose I can hate him if I get acquainted with him?"

It has struck me as significant that the North Americans who really know best our neighbours to the south usually like them. They are often enthusiastic in their praise of the Latin Americans, and even when they point out their faults, it is with something of the attitude with which your real friend knows all about you and still loves you.

During a recent year south of the Rio Grande, I noted repeatedly a similar tendency among the South Americans who had visited or lived for some time in the United States. I have never heard the natural-born "boomer" of our great West rhapsodise over his particular state as some Latin Americans now glorify everything made in North America. I even met a Chilean of an old family in Valparaiso, who on returning recently from New York, brought along an entire steam-heating plant which he installed in his house ! This fact impressed me as most promising toward better inter-American relationships, since this was the only house on the whole West Coast in which I was able to keep warm enough to really enjoy life. The gentle reader may think this is a joke. It is not. I never was so continuously cold in all my life as during the months spent travelling about this particular section during the Peruvian and Chilean winter. Even though it has taken several centuries, more or less, for one open minded and sensible Chilean to have been raised up by a divine Providence to visit the United States and get his hands and feet warm, and determine to pass on this comfortable sensation to generations yet unborn, no one has the right to lose confidence in the influence of international contact.

Yet, important as it may seen to be to the man from the "States" that he duplicate as far as possible the living conditions he left behind him in a steam-heated apartment, it's not the house, the furnace, the stucco work on the front of the building, or the existence or absence of the patio in the middle of it, that is primal and vital to mutual understanding. It is the man who lives in the house that counts. What he is and why he is it, what he thinks and why, what are his ideals and ambitions and how he is forging toward them in his particular environment — these are of first moment — these were the things I tried to find out in my visit to the South Americans.

This kind of knowledge is harder to get than statistics of birth rates and trade balances; the men who have succeeded best in doing business with Latin Americans tell me that these are also more important for any permanent progress in commercial dealing. To study the characteristics of the kind of men who inhabit South America is also of quite as much consequence as to study the country itself. In fact a traveller who may be able to tell you the length of every river, the height of every mountain and every climatic and geographical detail from Para to Patagonia, may still be as ignorant of the inner motives and springs of action of this diverse people, as he was before he set his foot on South American soil.

And this for the simple reason that, through the working of forces over which humanity seems to have slight control, the Latin Americans do not seem to belong logically to the country in which fate has placed them. In Japan the land and the sky and water seem to be at once the suitable setting for a race of men such as we find there. The country appears to be made to order for them. The one is reflected in the other; if you found any people about Miajima, Nikko, or anywhere in the long graceful shadows of Fuji who were not artistic, romantic, beauty-loving and patriotic, you would feel the anachronism.

How unlike is the condition in Latin America ! Here are seventy millions or more of people, in whose veins flows the original mixed blood of Latin and Moor, naturally a race of thinkers, poets, politicians, theorists, inapt for scientific or agricultural or industrial pursuits, set down in a vast unconquered continent of physical opportunity. With an early settlement made by a promiscuous lot of adventurers, freebooters, and spendthrifts, who never did any work at home and came to South America to loot and to kill, carrying away everything they could transport, these young republics had no inheritance of colonisation or self government worth mentioning. Yet they were called upon suddenly to control and govern unfused and diverse populations, whose inheritance had been bureaucracy, office-seeking and living as easily as possible on favouritism.

With huge mountains to tunnel and thick forests and jungles to subdue, with arid lands to irrigate, and pestilential and fever-stricken tropical areas to cleanse, with a country of natural resources second to none on the planet, requiring miners, and manufacturers, foresters and farmers of the first grade, here is a fateful anomaly of residents who inherited the strong feeling that manual work was for slaves and coolies only, that a polite profession, like law and literature or politics, was the only vocation for a* gentleman. These people regarded commerce, industry and agriculture, while necessary, as undesirable as they were distasteful to temperaments, in which the practical, the utilitarian, and the scientific had received little or no attention for generations.

It is a wonder that with a country, seemingly as unfitted as it well could be, in its needs, to the traits and faculties of the people who were responsible for its subjugation and development, the Latin Americans have been able as quickly as they have, to make such beginning of governments and institutions.

It is fair to state that among the means which have been pre-eminent in acquainting the two Americas with each other has been the Pan American Union in Washington. It has not been an easy task nor has it been altogether a popular one that Mr. John Barrett and his excellent staff have had before them in their endeavour to bring together in knowledge and co-operajion the United States and Latin America; yet since the first Pan-American conference held in Washington in the winter of 1889 and 1890, when Secretary of State James G. Blaine presided, there has been a continuous and ever enlarging service rendered by this Union having the comprehensive purpose of "developing commerce, intercourse, friendship and peace," among the republics of the Western Continent.

The Pan American Union with its official organisation of twenty-one American republics, maintained by their joint quotas based upon population, is controlled by a Governing Board which is composed of the Secretary of State of the United States, who is Chairman ex-officio, and the Diplomatic Representatives of Latin America in Washington. The Union is administered by a Director General elected by that Board, who, in turn, is assisted by a staff of experts in Pan American matters and subjects. The value of the service which it renders is signified by the fact that the daily list of visitors averages between 500 and 1000, and its yearly correspondence of letters, periodicals and circulars reaches the total of 100,000 to 500,000. All those desiring information and seeking a better acquaintance with these people would do well to keep in mind this Union which is devoted so thoroughly to the cause of more perfect relationship between the United States and the States in the Southern hemisphere.

When we inquire as to the kind of people South Americans are, their success at making nations, their place in trade and commerce, and their future, we are brought to consider the racial history and present relationships of varied nationalities in South America. No doubt in the southern half of this continent there is being attempted at present a melting together of races such as is not found in any other part of the civilised world. At the bottom of this melting pot we find the pure Indian, constituting approximately nine millions of the forty-five millions of the inhabitants of the South American republics. In Brazil and especially in the republics bordering on the Caribbean

Sea, the negro may be placed also alongside the Indian. These are the workers of the soil, the diggers in the mines, the "hewers of wood and the drawers of water" in this vast southern continental area.

While there are exceptions, of course, it may be said in general that these races in the substratum of society, by reason of lack of education or personal initiative, are without a voice either in the making of laws or the formation of opinion. To be sure, civil rights are theirs, on the statute books, but they have not as yet claimed their rights. In some cases tropically indolent, in others crushed in spirit by the domination and practices of their conquerors, the Indian and Negro of these regions may be eliminated from the body of intelligent nationmakers. Economically they are at present indispensable, in countries like Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, but education and training in responsible citizenship has not reached them as yet to any appreciable extent. In certain places the Indians are less advanced than in the days before the Spanish conquerors wrested from their hands the great Andean plateaus. Like the populations generally, their religion is nominally Catholic, but their forms of worship are tinged highly with the magic and the superstitious rites and ceremonies handed down from their distant ancestry.

The next layer in the melting pot is that of the mestizo, or the mixture of European blood with the South American Indian or the African Negro. This mixture is of many degrees, and it may be roughly estimated as composing thirteen or fourteen millions of the total population, though it is of all things difficult here in these countries to say precisely where the demarcation lies between the mestizo and the pure white populations. In this middle layer of racial society, much of the national evolution and racial characteristic of the inhabitants is now in process of development. It is here that the old Spanish and Portuguese strain of blood, mingled with the Aborigines particularly, is revealing the distinctive traits of a new race evolving under peculiar historical, racial and geographical conditions. This class of population cannot be considered in the category of the half-caste or Eurasian of the East, for many of the enlightened and cultured leaders of South America point with pride to the racial link binding them to Indian ancestry.

One of the most honoured of Brazilian judges said to me with no evidence of aught but pride, "I am a caboclo!" This tincture of Indian blood flowing in his veins is held by him as by many another, a sign of strength and not of weakness.

The upper layer of white racial stock may be said to comprise about fifteen millions of the inhabitants, though if we estimate the racial conditions by separate countries, the results would be quite different. Uruguay and Argentina, for example, show almost an entire white population save for the Argentine Indians in the North of the big republic, while the sturdy Araucanian Indians of Chile have ceased largely from being a factor in the racial intermixture of the country, being isolated somewhat as were the Indians of the United States. In Bolivia and Peru, on the other hand, there are at least three and a half million Indians, and one and a half million of mestizos, out of a population of six millions.

Paraguay is even more an Indian republic. The Guarani Indian language is the most common tongue, and throughout the long stretch of the Andean tablelands and lofty altitudes from Ecuador to Chile and Argentina, it is stated that less than one fifth of the Indians are able to speak Spanish, but retain their mother tongues of Quichua, Aymara or local Indian dialects.

It is only as one holds in mind these racial facts that any worth while judgments and analysis of South Americans can be attempted. It is apparent that a civilisation that possesses at the top peoples of the highest culture and standards of life, bearing comparison with those of any other part of the world, and at the bottom so large a population still sunk in ignorance, and in some cases for considerable areas in abject savagery, is difficult of generalisation. There is far more dissimilarity between populations in various South American republics, and in some cases between the peoples of the same republic, than is found between many European countries; there is far more of difference than between the most diverse of the population of North American states.

Yet there are several lines of characteristic running through all of the social and political life of these southern republics, marking off the section as a whole from other parts of the world.

One of these is the virtual absence of prejudice against colour. The distinctions among South Americans are those of rank or class, not of the colour of a man's skin. A South American of the upper classes who might marry an Indian, would probably lose something of his standing, very much as an American might by intermarrying, making a mesalliance, with his serving woman. But his case in no wise would be aggravated by reason of marrying a woman of colour other than his own. South America is particularly free of racial antagonisms because of the colour question. Indians and negroes are treated differently socially than almost anywhere else in the civilised world to-day. The man of half blood, or even the fullblooded Indian or the Negro, is given rank according to his accomplishments or degree of intelligence. I have met negroes in the Academy of Letters among the Forty Immortals of Brazil, and I have seen in many other countries men in public life highly honoured and revered, whose facial lines bore the distinct marks of their Indian ancestry. Another sign of the absence of colour distinctions, as we feel these here in the north, is the tendency in South America to count all persons usually denominated as mestizos among the white populations.

It is furthermore a mixed Latin and Oriental culture, one finds in these regions. The attitude of the Latin American to the saving or use of time, for example, could be amply illustrated by any observant business traveller or visitor in these southern republics. We have met many Latin Americans who have reminded us of Stevenson's wish that heaven would be a place where he would not have to keep any hours. The North American's time-saving habits are a puzzle to many people residing in Eastern or South American latitudes. The President of a certain South American republic visited a large industrial plant not long ago, which enterprise was being carried on by an American. During his inspection he had reason to call attention to a matter needing attention in order to comply with the country's laws.

The industrial manager said he would attend to the business, but sometime afterwards the President called his secretary and inquired as to whether the required changes had been made. The secretary responded:

"Surely they have been made. Did not Senor say

he would do it? He is an American, and Americans always tell the truth."

The President was thoughtful for a few minutes, and then said, half to himself, "I have it now. The Americans tell the truth in order to save time. If you don't tell the truth you always, sooner or later, lose a lot of time in explaining things. Americans like most to save time, therefore they tell the truth."

One soon learns that, among Latin Americans, the more leisurely and courteously one does a thing the sooner and more pleasantly will it be accomplished. Save in the largest business centres, there is an absence of strain and stress such as characterise life in northern latitudes. Pleasure, friendship, family-life, and formalities bulk larger. Business is more effective among the South Americans than we are led at times to suppose, but one does not receive the impression that it occupies the front of the stage, so politely and graciously is it carried along. More than one northern trader who has tasted the free and happy hospitality of a South American home, or has learned here that quality of life and accomplishments as well as quantity, counts in the long run, has returned home with some, regret to his usual strenuous routine,

"That vain low strife Which makes men mad, the tug for wealth and power, The passion and the cares that wither life And waste its little hour."

The South American, with his quieter and more leisured existence, doubtless has turned his attention too completely to politics, literature and the arts in the environment of culture, copying the flowering of Old World foundations, forgetting at times that the practical bases of his agricultural and industrial empire are not yet securely laid. It is to be hoped that in the present widespread awakening to commercial and economic matters, he will not inherit the slavery along with the efficiency.

Chapter II

We have been misjudged, we have been misrepresented at all times. And all because our critics have failed to look into our early histories and ascertain the why and wherefore of the present state of affairs. — Senor Don Frederico A. Pezet, former Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States from Peru.

SOUTH AMERICANS are at heart as chivalrous as the Japanese. Their patriarchal customs, home life, gift-making, and treatment of the elder members of the family, remind one of China. Their love of colour and romance is quite East Indian, while the semi-seclusion of women, found especially on the West Coast, is evidently a vestige of those customs with which a Moorish culture marked the Iberian Peninsula for several centuries.

The climate of many portions of the southern Western hemisphere also suggests the East. One finds a pageantry of beauty and radiant warmth of sun and air germane only to tropical skies. The balmy nights beneath the Southern Cross may not be more wonderful than those under the more sombre, elevated northern skies; yet they belong to one's feeling more than to one's reason. To many a nature and temperament, these lands of sunshine and palms speak directly to the heart and to the emotions; they associate themselves easily with subtle and remote things — age, mystery, imagination, and all things antipodal to the pushing practical life of the North and West. The tropics are for dreams as other places are for work.

The mental endowments of the Latin Americans are also more in line with Oriental than with Occidental characteristics.

The South American is theoretical rather than practical. In his indirect and round-about approach to a subject, he is like the Oriental, as he is unlike the man of the Occident. He seeks the prettiest road rather than the shortest one to a given point. He loves display, and has a penchant for the literary and artistic, rather than the industrial and scientific. There is an ingrained love of politics throughout South America, and the men are talented in oratorical and rhetorical matters, while in literature and languages they easily surpass in their aptitudes the men of the business civilisation of the United States.

As devotees to form and to the courteous at all times, the South American is proverbially correct. I knew of a large manufacturing house in the "States" which lost recently a very large order for goods because the agent, sent down to deliver the order, forgot the usual politeness of taking off his hat when he entered the Latin American's office, calling the dignified Latin American, "Old Man," and whacking him familiarly on the back, with true Middle West fervour.

The Oriental trait of saying the pleasant thing is very common. The South American believes and works on the principle stated by St. Francis de Sales :

"It is better to hold back a truth than to speak it ungraciously." It is a land of compliment, ofttimes of polite flattery, and handshaking, embracing, and inquiries as to your friend's health, family, and social matters are seldom forgotten as preludes to the most important and pressing business. In dealing with any one south of the Rio Grande, it is well to recall the old motto of William of Wyckham — "Manners maketh the man."

No East Indian or Egyptian is more eager to secure a position with the Government than is the South American. The predominance of law schools over any other branch of training reveals the tendency. Politics is a gentleman's vocation, and officialdom holds a place of eminence that North Americans have never given it. It is natural that favouritism should follow in the train of such inclinations. One of the foes to progress in South America to-day is the overloading of Government positions, and the abnormal place that friendship holds as a key to securing office, regardless often of suitable personal qualifications. When it comes to a knowledge of law, especially a thorough acquaintance with historical background and the theory of politics, the Latin American is noteworthy. Here, as in most other places, there is need of men of unselfish devotion to execute the laws, and even a greater need of unification and co-ordination of political measures, as between states and the federal governments. In Brazil, for instance, where the export duties vary widely in different states, and in Peru, where taxation of foreign business is inclined to follow somewhat capriciously the prosperity of the business, modern stability of trade is handicapped and frequently unsettled.