The Cause of South American Revolutions

SOUTH AMERICAN revolutions have long furnished copy to our comic periodicals, been the butt of the wit of many a newspaper reporter, and done service on the melodramatic stage of modern fiction and light opera. Repeated cable reports from South American centres assure us that the crop is perennial, and we have come to look on certain countries as in a normal state only when engaged in civil war. However lightly we may receive these reports of isolated disturbances, their conjunctive or successive occurrence and reoccurrence throughout a large and contiguous group of republics presents a distinct phenomenon which is undoubtedly based on some common cause.

Those who give the matter any serious thought are accustomed to assume that this cause is merely a racial tendency and characteristic of the Latin peoples; and to the casual student of the ups and downs of the world’s republics this assumption seems justified by history. The present writer does not ignore the importance of the racial factor in national economics; at the same time, long acquaintance and intercourse with the Latin races leads him to doubt whether this factor can be considered even as one of the fundamental causes of South American revolutions. If, indeed, revolt were in the blood of the Latin, then the situation would continue indefinitely to create turmoil among the Latins, and abroad, increasing perplexity as to the remedy. It is the purpose of this article to show that such is not the case, but that South American revolutions are a very natural outcome of the present social system and the economic conditions of the different countries, and that the causes are really transient relatively to the development of the several states.

This subject is by no means foreign to our national interests, and will not be until official interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine has limited the application of that troublesome tenet to America north of the Canal Zone. Even should our imposed suzerainty over South America be thus withdrawn, our commercial interests in the hitherto neglected markets of the southern continent will gradually demand a sane appreciation of the real state of things in Latin America, based on something more substantial than cartoons and the comic stage.

A rapid consideration of the assumption that revolutions are an emanation of racial tendency will show that it is based entirely upon the fact that the United States and Switzerland have been free from revolutions, while none of the other republics has. Since all the other republics are Latin, the conclusion has been drawn and accepted that they are unstable and eruptive because they are Latin.

In opposition to this hypothesis I present a statement apparently equally supposititious, but in reality sustained by historical evidence of a circumstantial nature. It is this: that the instability of republics has been in the ratio of their social and economic centralization. To illustrate this point take three representative republics: the United States, France, and Brazil. Stability of government in Brazil bears the same relation to that in France as does the latter to that in the United States. To form the United States of America thirteen sovereignties more or less equally developed agreed to restricted amalgamation. From the start there were widely distributed interests which created what might be termed a centrifugal force that has ever since tended to decentralize power, economically speaking. In other words, at no time in our history have the arteries of our body-politic been sapped for the sustenance of an abnormally developed head, and the great consequence for us has been stability of government with symmetry in economic development.

In France of to-day, however, we have a state still liable to the ills of predominant centralization. Any one who will recall the trying days of an event so recent as the Dreyfus case will hardly challenge this statement. Speculation as to the ability of the government to cope with the situation was universal, and the general relief at the escape of France from civil war, at a time when disaffection was practically restricted to Paris, shows that to-day, as in the days of her many turnings, Paris is France. To say as much for the relations of any city to the United States would be to put forward a patent absurdity. We cannot imagine New York, much less Washington, as possessing an overwhelming, practically national, balance of power. And the measure of the absurdity is simply the preponderance of our homogeneity over that of France.

The primal cause of stability I have already stated; but as potent corollaries due credit must be given to our systems of education and internal communication, our constant expansion, normal in that it has not taxed the power of assimilation, and our national mania for reading. In this regard the intricate network of our railroads eloquently portrays how complete is that communication, the first adjunct of civic education. These are all disseminating forces. They are the factors that go to eliminate peasantry with its time-honored characteristics of ignorance and apathy.

Not least among the memorable utterances of Jefferson was the statement that “ it is safer to have a whole people respectably enlightened than a few in a high state of science and the rest in ignorance.” We are the “whole people respectably enlightened;” and what follows, “a few in a high state of science and the rest in ignorance,” is so descriptive of actual France, and to a greater degree of Brazil, and the South American republics in general, that one driven to picture these states with a stroke of the pen could choose no words more fitting. Go to the most retiring of New England villages, or to the latest group of shacks in the new West, and you wall find in each individual a sense of identity in a whole, — a consciousness of governing and being governed. Make an equally impartial inspection of the nooks of France, and you will find whole communities which, barring officialdom, know nothing more of the government under which they exist than they did before its conception.

All that has been said regarding France, and more, is true of Brazil, by far the largest, most powerful, and most conservative of the South American states. To the American who is under the impression that all South America is continually in the throes of one or another revolution it wall come as a surprise to learn that this vast district, comprising one half the territory and almost two thirds the population of the whole continent, has known no revolution since the founding of the Republic. The revolts of 1893, 1897, and 1904, menacing in varying degree, were outbursts fostered by a centralization of national vitality which inspired the belief in each insurrectionist that it was but necessary to strike the head, — the body would lie dormant. The justification of this belief lay in the historical fact that the vast majority of successful revolts throughout South America have consisted merely in coups d’état. The masses have lain dormant, and the fighting, if any, has generally come after the somersault.

The revolt of November of last year in Brazil was so typical of South American revolutions, and so elementary, that it affords a lucid illustration. Owing to the prompt and efficient measures taken by the government to suppress true reports of the disturbance, and owing, too, to its signal failure, this revolt was scarcely mentioned by the American press. Nevertheless, it missed by little causing international commotion, and an account from an eye-witness may prove of value.

A great epidemic of smallpox led the government to require of Congress a law making vaccination compulsory. Long and heated debate on the constitutionality of the measure went on, while the epidemic assumed alarming proportions. The Executive’s patience being worn out, arbitrary pressure was brought to bear, and the law passed. This intervention brought down the general censure of the press, and the opposition seized the handle with disproportionate avidity. On the eleventh of November a mass meeting was held in one of the central squares of Rio Janeiro. The crowd assembled was by no means representative, being composed for the most part of riff-raff and curious shop clerks. The mounted police broke up the meeting with the flat of the sword: no lives were lost. On the following day the scene was duplicated, several people injured, and a life lost. By night riots had broken out in various parts of the city; the exceptionally large and lawless mass of stevedores went on strike and forcibly stopped all traffic; street-cars were overturned and burned amid fusillades between rioters and troops; and several non-participants, including women and children, were shot during the following day. The flood of suburbanites, ignorant of the gravity of the disturbances, entered the city as usual, only to beat a hasty retreat. At sundown the rioters swept along the streets, opening manholes, ripping off drain covers, tearing down gas fixtures of every description, and throwing the débris into the streets to embarrass cavalry charges. Within a few hours there was not a street-lamp intact throughout the city.

Up to the fourteenth of November, revolution was not even rumored. However, on this day the riots became so general that the government deemed wise the postponement of the great military review which was to have taken place on the fifteenth, the anniversary of the Republic. Toward evening city and government were genuinely surprised by the news that General Travassos, who was to have commanded a battalion in the review, immediately upon the announcement of its postponement had proceeded to the Military Academy on the outskirts of the city, and, before the student body, had demanded of the officer in charge transfer of his command. Frightened by the attitude of the cadets, the commanding officer made a puerile protest, and surrendered. He and his staff were allowed to withdraw, and carried the news of the revolt to the city. It was soon confirmed: the cadets were advancing on the President’s palace, under the leadership of General Travassos, Lauro Sodre, a popular, young Federal senator, and Deputy Alfredo Varella, leader of the opposition in the lower House.

The shortest line of march was along the bay front, and to repulse the attack were sent by land a battalion of the line reinforced by police, and by sea two gunboats under the play of searchlights from an armored cruiser. The cadets marched under the assurance that no soldier of the line would fire on them, as the army was back of the movement. They were led, not along the water front, but around a stone quarry into a street which debouched half a mile down the bay. In this street they were met by an armed force, indistinguishable owing to the destruction of all the lamps by rioters. The force was the advancing battalion, and it is generally believed that it fired on the cadets, mistaking them for the returning body of police which had followed the water front. Brisk fighting ensued, when suddenly the cry arose among the cadets that they had been betrayed, and were attacked by soldiers of the line. They broke and made a disorderly retreat to the Academy. Almost simultaneously the soldiers learned their mistake, and that they had opposed a commanding officer ; and they turned in precipitous flight. General Travassos was mortally wounded in the engagement. Senator Sodre escaped, wounded, to give himself up a day or two later, and Deputy Varella disappeared.

Meanwhile the detachment of police dispatched from the city had advanced along the bay front to the stone quarry, where they awaited the rebels. Drawn up at this spot under close formation, they were mistaken by the gunboats for the cadets, and were made the target of a disastrous hail of bullets from quick-firing guns. Their retreat also was precipitous.

Such was the comedy of errors which will be known as the Revolt of 1904. Its net results were a rude but salutary recall of the government to watchfulness; added prestige abroad for the government, vouched by a rise in its bonds; and, most significant of all, spontaneous and immediate support of the Chief Executive from neighboring states. And yet the credit was not due to the government, which avowedly had been caught napping, but to the Goddess of Chance, the arbiter of every coup d’état.

In the light of subsequent events the plan of the opposition was patent. At the grand review on the 15th, General Travassos at the head of his battalion was to have imprisoned the President , and declared the popular senator, Lauro Sodre, dictator. Later investigation showed that he would have been supported by many in high places. Because the riots inspired by the opposition assumed alarming proprotions, the parade was abandoned. A new plan, centring in the Military Academy, was rapidly improvised, and because the lights in a side street had been wiped out by the same indefatigable rioters, it also proved a fiasco, and the day was lost irretrievably.

This example is given in full, as it follows the elementary, conventional lines of a South American revolt. Its chances of success were based upon three fundamental conditions: concentration of national vitality in the capital city, apathy of the masses, isolation. The case thus diagnosed, the simplicity of the antidote is evident. Merely normal development along the channels that have made us in reality the United States of America: popular education, and free communication, more explicitly defined in the one word “railroads.”

The Republic of Brazil is in its sixteenth year, a mere child in our great family, and yet I venture the assertion that it has so far advanced along these lines that the coup d’état revolt is no longer a serious menace. The assertion, it must be admitted, is based mainly on the fact that upon the first news of revolt the state government of S. Paulo spontaneously rushed a battalion down the Central Railway to the support of the Executive.

Of the Spanish republics, the Argentine and Chile can be placed in the same category as Brazil, but to get a clear idea of the causes of ever-recurrent revolts in Spanish America one must look back— and not so very far back — to the days of San Martin and Bolivar, with their host of terrible lieutenants. To our shame be it said that the American schoolboy and college man knows far more of the Crusades of the Middle Ages than of this tremendous crusade for liberty, in which two men, starting from the extremities of a continent, fought their forces through five thousand miles of the enemy’s territory, — their battleground the Andes Mountains! ¹

The problem of construction which confronted the survivors of the expulsion of Spain from her South American provinces was by no means a parallel to that which taxed the genius of the liberators of the Thirteen Colonies. On one side we have a compact and leavened mass slowly spreading into the wilderness like a drop of oil on water. On the other, a Creole aristocracy scattered over a strip of territory five thousand miles long, and dominating a diversity of tribes. That there should be division was inevitable; Bolivar fell from the pinnacle of genius the day he dreamed of unity. And that mysterious patriot and soldier, San Martin! History gives us no clue, but we may conjecture that it was prophetic vision of the turmoil which must rend his beloved continent that drove him to self-effacement and exile. For a patriot among patriots the sword could be but the symbol of fratricide. And such it proved; for, once division became the rule, who should set its limits ?

Like the builder of the French Empire, Bolivar and San Martin had bestowed kingdoms upon their lieutenants; but the lieutenants outnumbered the kingdoms, and so began the rush for power. The lieutenants out of the way, each soldier of the patriot armies became a candidate for the great prize, and arbitrary boundaries fancifully laid shifted before the onslaught of every Creole sword. But underlying this inevitable outburst we have a lasting condition: the aristocracy, or an enlightened few, and the mass, pledged to a hundred chiefs, as loyally but as personally as ever serf to feudal lord. To this mass civic impulse is of the future. Under the so-called revolutions that sweep over it, as a mass, it lies dormant.

Let us liken the South American governments in the hands of a warring few to the weather-vane on a great barn; the vane swerves with every puff of wind, but the barn stands firm and unmoved, even unconscious, awaiting the hurricane. The Latin masses are by nature peaceable, long-suffering, law-abiding, public opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. Revolution is not their normal diet. The South American republics are young, and when education, sane enterprise, and all the great forces which go for homogeneity have done their work, history will know the revolutionary period as a transition.