It is essential that our America knows the truth about the United States. Nor should its faults be exaggerated, out of a desire to deny it any virtue, nor should its faults be hidden or touted as virtues. There are no races: there are only different modifications of man, in the details of habit and form that do not change what is identical and essential, according to the conditions of climate and history in which he lives. It is men of prologue and superficiality—who have not sunk their arms into the human entrails, who do not see from an impartial height the nations boiling in the same furnace, who do not find in the egg and tissue of all of them the same permanent duel of constructive disinterest and iniquitous hatred— the entertainment of finding substantial variety between the selfish Saxon and the selfish Latin, the generous Saxon or the generous Latin, the bureaucratic Latin or the bureaucratic Saxon: Latins and Saxons are equally capable of virtues and defects. What varies is the peculiar consequence of the different historical grouping (…).
It is supine ignorance, and childish and punishable levity, to speak of the United States, and of the real or apparent conquests of one of its regions or group of regions, as of a total and equal nation, of unanimous freedom and definitive conquests: such a United States is an illusion, or a deception. From the caves of Dakota, and the nation that is rising there, barbaric and virile, there is a whole world to the cities of the East, sprawling, privileged, entrenched, sensual, unjust. There is a world, with its stone houses and stately freedom, from North Schenectady to the stilted and gloomy station in South Petersburg, from the clean and interested town in the North to the shop of idlers, sitting on a choir of barrels, in the angry, poverty-stricken, shabby, sour, gray towns of the South. What the honest man must observe is precisely that not only have the elements of diverse origin and tendency with which the United States was created failed to merge in three centuries of common life, or one of political occupation, but that the forced community exacerbates and accentuates their primary differences, and turns the unnatural federation into a harsh state of violent conquest. It is the work of petty people, and of incapable and gnawing envy, to pick holes in obvious greatness and deny it outright because of one or another blemish, or to stand in its way like a prophet of doom, like someone who removes a speck from the sun. But it does not augur, it certifies, that which observes how in the United States, instead of the causes of union being tightened, they are loosened; instead of solving the problems of humanity, they are reproduced; instead of amalgamating localities in national politics, they divide and embitter them; instead of strengthening democracy and saving it from the hatred and misery of monarchies, democracy is corrupted and diminished, and hatred and misery are reborn, threatening. And it is not those who remain silent who fail in their duty, but those who speak out. They fail in their duty as human beings to know the truth and spread it; they fail in their duty as good Americans, who see the glory and peace of the continent as secure only in the free and open development of its various natural entities; nor with his duty as a son of our America, so that through ignorance, or dazzlement, or impatience, the peoples of Spanish descent do not fall, at the counsel of the prim toga and fearful interest, into the immoral and enervating servitude of a damaged and alien civilization. It is necessary that the truth about the United States be known in our America.
We must detest evil, even if it is ours; and even if it is not. Good things should not be disliked simply because they are not ours. But it is an irrational and futile aspiration, a cowardly aspiration of second-rate and ineffective people, to achieve the stability of a foreign people by means other than those that led to security and order in the envied people: through their own efforts and through the adaptation of human freedom to the forms required by the particular constitution of the country. In some, excessive love for the North is the understandable and imprudent expression of a desire for progress so lively and fiery that it fails to see that ideas, like trees, must come from deep roots and be of kindred soil in order to take root and prosper, and that the newborn is not given the season of maturity because the mustache and sideburns of old age hang on its soft face: monsters are created in this way, not peoples: one must live on one’s own and sweat out the fever. In others, Yankee mania is the innocent fruit of one or another leap of pleasure, like someone who judges the bowels of a house, and the souls that pray or die in it, by the smile and luxury of the reception room, or by the champagne and carnations on the banquet table:– suffer; lack; work; love, and in vain; study, with courage and freedom; mourn with the poor; weep with the miserable; hate the brutality of wealth; live, in the palace and in the citadel, in the school hall and in the hallways, in the theater box, of jasper and gold, and in the wings, cold and bare: and thus one can opine, with glimpses of reason, on the authoritarian and greedy republic, and the growing sensuality, of the United States.
In others, weak posthumous followers of the literary dandyism of the Second Empire, or false skeptics under whose mask of indifference a heart of gold usually beats, the fashion is disdain, and more, for the native; and they see no greater elegance than to drink the foreigner’s pants and ideas and go through the world upright, like a pampered lapdog, with the pompom of its tail. In others, it is like a subtle aristocracy, with which, loving blondness in public as their own and natural, they try to conceal their mixed and humble origins, without seeing that it has always been a sign of bastardy among men to brand others with it, and there is no surer denunciation of a woman’s sin than to flaunt contempt for sinners. Whatever the cause—impatience with freedom or fear of it, moral laziness or laughable aristocracy, political idealism or newly arrived naivety—it is certain that it is advisable, and even urgent, to present our America with the whole American truth, both Saxon and Latin, so that excessive faith in the virtue of others does not weaken us, in our founding era, with unmotivated and disastrous distrust of our own. In a single war, the Civil War, which was more about the North and South disputing dominance in the republic than about abolishing slavery, the United States, the offspring of three centuries of republican practice in a country with less hostile elements than any other, lost more men than all the Spanish republics of America, with the same number of inhabitants, lost together in the naturally slow and, from Mexico to Chile, victorious work of bringing the new world to fruition, without any further impetus. and with the same number of inhabitants, have lost together all the Spanish republics of America, in the naturally slow work, and from Mexico to Chile victorious, of bringing to the surface of the new world, with no other impetus than the rhetorical apostolate of a glorious minority and the popular instinct, the remote peoples, of distant nuclei and adverse races, where Spanish rule left all the rage and hypocrisy of theocracy, and the apathy and suspicion of prolonged servitude. And it is only fair, and legitimate social science, to recognize that, in relation to the facilities of one and the obstacles of the other, the American character has declined since independence, and is today less human and virile, while the Hispanic American, by all accounts, is superior today, despite its confusion and fatigue, to what it was when it began to emerge from the revolted mass of opportunistic clergy, inept ideologues, and ignorant or savage Indians.
And to help raise awareness of the political reality in America, and to accompany or correct, with the calm force of fact, the unquestioning—and, when excessive, pernicious—praise of American political life and character, Patria is inaugurating, in today’s issue, a permanent section entitled “Notes on the United States,” where, strictly translated from the country’s leading newspapers, and without commentary or editorial changes, we will publish those events that reveal, not the crime or accidental fault—found in all possible peoples—in which only the petty spirit finds bait and contentment, but those qualities of constitution which, by their constancy and authority, demonstrate the two truths useful to our America: the crude, unequal, and decadent character of the United States – and the continued existence there of all the violence, discord, immorality, and disorder for which the Spanish American peoples are blamed.