The Robert J. Alexander Interview Collection

Bibliographic Data

ID2840786
AuthorsJohn D French (0000-0002-5797-1305, corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume84
Issue2
Pages315-326
Publication date2004-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-84-2-315
OpenAlexW2165831587
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited15

Pioneering Latin Americanist Robert Jackson Alexander (1918–) was a central player in U.S.–Latin American labor, political, and scholarly affairs after World War II. For some five decades starting in 1946, Professor Alexander traveled extensively as an engaged witness to, and active participant in, many major political events in Latin America and the Caribbean. The unique documentation Alexander created and assembled (the largest and most important private archive of its sort) is deposited with the Special Collections and University Archives of Rutgers University.1 The crown jewel of this remarkable collection are his contemporaneous notes on over ten thousand interviews he conducted with presidents, politicians, trade unionists, businessmen, government officials, military men, diplomats, and scholars. Although specialists knew of these interviews, few historians have realized the scope of this comprehensive multinational resource, which documents modern Latin America’s tumultuous political and diplomatic history.Born in 1918 in Canton, Ohio, and raised in New Jersey, Robert J. Alexander was the son of a university professor. His life trajectory was rooted in the tumultuous years of the Great Depression (the “Red Decade,” as it came to be called), when he served as a leader of the Young People’s Socialist League at his high school.2 Like many of his generation, Alexander’s strongly held social-democratic beliefs were shaped by a loss of faith in free enterprise, a rejection of laissez-faire, and a strong belief in the positive contribution of organized labor to the cause of New Deal–style social reform.The origin of Alexander’s life-long involvement with Latin America stemmed from his exposure, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, to the charismatic teaching of Austrian-born Frank Tannenbaum (1893–1969). An important, if heterodox, Latin Americanist, Tannenbaum would be widely recognized for laying the foundations of scholarship on the Mexican Revolution, as well as for helping to create the field of comparative slavery and race relations in the Americas.3 Under Tannenbaum’s influence, Alexander completed his masters’ thesis on labor in Latin America in 1941. He then discovered, as he says wryly, that he was now “‘an expert’ on Latin American labor for the simple reason that no one knew anything” about the subject. During the war, he spent a brief stint at the Labor Relations Division of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs run by Nelson Rockefeller, spending 1943– 45 in England with the U.S. Army Air Force, where he sought out and interviewed Labor Party leaders and activists.4His wartime experience also shaped his larger political outlook. Having left the prewar Socialist Party because of its pacifist position, Alexander became convinced that the transcendent issues involved in international politics (democracy versus totalitarianism) were inseparable from the domestic political conflicts within countries. World War II also strengthened his belief in the essential decency of the policies of the U.S. government, whatever its mistakes. His strong identification with the “American mission” in the world and his anticommunist social-democratic politics would lead Alexander to decisively align himself, as did so many liberals, with the U.S. side of the emerging cold war after 1946.Alexander returned to Columbia University after the war to work with Tannenbaum on a doctoral thesis in economics entitled “Organized Labor in Chile.” With a grant from the State Department, he conducted fieldwork in 1947– 48, which included a national industrial relations survey that served as the basis of his still useful but unpublished 1950 dissertation. During these six months he also recorded extensive notes on 349 interviews, conducted during a period of intense political and tradeunion ferment under the Communist-backed government of González Videla, who would turn on his leftist allies in 1947.5During this initial trip to South America, Alexander also stopped in Brazil and Argentina, nations that were each experiencing remarkable periods of mass political mobilization.6 In Argentina, in particular, Juan Perón’s rise to the presidency in 1946 opened an entirely new historical epoch in Latin America, which scholars have come to call the Populist Era. A sui generis figure, Juan Perón and his regime were vigorously and publicly opposed as fascist by the U.S. government, as well as by social democratic and communist groups in Argentina and abroad. Given these concerns, Alexander would make the phenomenon the subject of his first book, The Perón Era (1951). This oft-reprinted volume would remain the only treatment in English for the next decade. Although hostile to Perón, Alexander’s book displayed the virtues that grew out of his emerging research methodology based on extensive interviews of people of all political perspectives and from all walks of life. Reviewers would often comment on Alexander’s unique ability to connect with individuals, establish a degree of trust, and then ask the questions that would generate the richest replies.7Joining the faculty at Rutgers University in 1947, Alexander traveled to Latin America hundreds of times over the next 35 years (and continued to do so, but more sporadically, through the early 1990s). His travels included not only all the mainland Latin American countries but also almost all the countries and colonial dependencies in the Caribbean. Yet this breadth of exposure was not achieved at the expense of sustained and concentrated research. Throughout his career, he specialized in six major Latin American countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Peru—which together make up more than half of the region’s total population and account for 13 of his 25 major monographs.Alexander’s sustained engagement with Latin America began at a unique moment in the history of the region and of the United States. The United States’ emergence as a truly global economic, military, and political superpower in the mid–twentieth century had a mixed impact on the study of Latin America in the United States. As Mark Berger has shown, the “Good Neighbor” policy of the 1930s and the strategic demands of World War II enhanced government and academic interest in Latin America, but this “growth and disciplinary diversification” quickly dissipated after the end of the war. This relative decline in academic interest would continue until the wake-up call of the Cuban Revolution, which was followed by increased funding, heightened interest, and the institutionalization of Latin American studies in North American universities.8The post–World War II neglect of the region had occurred at a moment when Latin America was experiencing social, economic, and political transformations. During these decades, the region’s largest countries embarked on an unprecedented process of industrialization, with a rapid expansion of the urban working and middle classes. This was accompanied by the emergence of the popular sectors, particularly organized labor, as a factor in national political life and the flourishing of new political and ideological currents. With acute insight and surprising tact, Robert Alexander established a place for himself as a witness in a historical epoch that included the rise and fall of Perón, the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, the overthrowing of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship in Venezuela in 1958, the rise to power of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and the turbulent years of Eduardo Frei’s Christian Democratic government (1964–70) and the left-wing Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende in Chile.9Alexander’s extensive travels within Latin America were undertaken under a number of auspices and for various purposes.10 His 1962 book on organized labor grew out a 1956 grant from the Ford Foundation’s Inter-University Study of Labor Problems in Economic Development. And his yearly trips to Bolivia in the 1950s, the subject of his third book (The Bolivian National Revolution), were funded in part by consultantships with the U.S. aid program to that country. Given his extensive knowledge and contacts, Alexander was also an active participant in the U.S. government policy debate about Latin America during the Kennedy administration. Although he did publish a book on the region with a U.S. congressman, Berger likely exaggerates when he calls Alexander “a major figure behind the Alliance for Progress.”11Yet many of Alexander’s most important early trips were not strictly academic at all. As he freely revealed to his readers, in the 1950s he was a combative opponent of both communism and Peronism and their fellow travelers. Throughout his career, his scholarly activities were informed by a clear political agenda: to build support for mass-based reformist parties that would fight the communists “on their own grounds and among the groups from whom they especially drew support.” Yet not all such noncommunist reformist political movements and leaders would win Alexander’s favor, precisely because many tended to be highly nationalistic and resentful of U.S. predominance and influence. The groups that Alexander and U.S. policy makers favored were those that combined social reform commitments with a reliable policy of collaboration with the United States in the struggle against the Soviet Bloc and the communist threat within their own countries.12As a prolabor U.S. anticommunist, Robert Alexander cultivated friendships with many of the key Latin American political personalities of the “Democratic Left,” such as Haya de la Torre, José Figueres, Rómulo Betancourt, and Víctor Paz Estenssoro. Thus, he was particularly well placed to gain special access, at the highest level, to the leadership of the major center-left political parties of Venezuela, Peru, and Bolivia (AD, APRA, and MNR). Originating in the student, labor, and popular insurgencies of the 1930s, these anti–status quo parties had briefly risen to power after World War II, but they were subsequently ousted and persecuted by rightist military regimes. When they did return to national prominence, their chastened leaders served as dependable allies of the United States in its struggle against the Cuban Revolution.Thus Alexander was, in every sense, an intellectual engagé and a direct participant in the bitter political struggles that marked interhemispheric political and labor affairs. Going back to 1948, he had worked closely with the American Federation of Labor’s regional representative, Serafino Romauldi, an anticommunist Italian immigrant. He also collaborated closely for many years with the notorious eminence gris of the cold war, the one-time communist Jay Love-stone, who headed the International Department of the AFL and later AFL-CIO.13 Indeed, at least eight of his trips to Latin America between 1952 and 1959 were made with funds received through Lovestone, from both government and CIA sources. Whether in spite of, or precisely because of, his political militancy, Alexander actively crossed ideological divides to interview those active in organizations and movements he bitterly opposed, such as communists. Indeed, his reports to Lovestone about his travels contained detailed and frank assessments of the strategic and tactical issues facing their political camp in the different Latin American countries.As a leading cold-war operative, Alexander gained the opprobrium of critics of the United States. To one Soviet scholar, this “reactionary American historian” was “an apologist for the aggressive policies of U.S. monopolists.”14 Another Soviet analyst particularly objected to his pioneering monographs on labor and communism: “Alexander is noted for his works which distort the history of the labor movement in Latin America. Sponsored by A.F.L. money, he carried on ‘research’ in various Latin American countries, establishing contacts with renegade and opportunistic elements ousted from communist parties. Notes on talks with these renegades serve as the main source of Alexander’s ‘works.’”15Alexander’s political alignments were equally suspect in some conservative U.S. and Latin American circles in the 1950s, especially given the dubious and often “communist” origin of many of his favored political parties, with their past record of revolutionary-sounding rhetoric. In 1963, for example, ultraconservative U.S. scholar J. Fred Rippy criticized him for his “slanted views of U.S. policy,” while describing Alexander as a man who was “well known by members of his profession as a champion of radical causes and of public contributions to them.”16 After the 1958 ouster of Venezuela’s Pérez Jiménez, the military dictator’s U.S. supporters issued a Red-baiting report that condemned the new AD president, Rómulo Betancourt, as a crypto-communist. In classic McCarthyite fashion, they profiled the subversive background of his U.S. supporters, including Alexander and other members of the Inter-American Foundation for Democracy and Freedom, an “extreme leftwing group” they deemed full of “Communists, pro-Communists, fellow travelers, Socialists, and left wing liberals.”17As Latin American studies flowered in the late 1960s, the new generation of scholars had little patience for the cold-war liberalism that had led Alexander to support the 1954 coup against democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala or to oppose Fidel Castro as early as 1959 (after which point he was barred from travel to the island). Faced with the leftward shift in the political climate in both Latin America and the United States, Alexander’s anticommunist politics left him unswayed even by the bloody 1973 military coup that overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende. The Popular Unity (UP) coalition, as he reminded readers of his 1978 book The Tragedy of Chile, had used “democratic means to achieve a totalitarian society,” and he discounted the CIA’s complicity in Allende’s destabilization as documented by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in its famous 1977 “Church Committee report”: “Whatever the ITT did or did not do, whatever the CIA did or did not do, whatever certain U.S. military personnel did or did not do, whatever economic policies the United States followed or did not follow with regard to Chile—all of these factors had only the most marginal impact in generating the economic and political crisis of the Allende regime in its final months. And they had nothing to do with the Chilean military leaders’ decision to oust the Unidad Popular Regime.”18Not surprisingly, such tough-minded views won Alexander few friends among the new generation of Latin Americanists. His work was increasingly criticized for its openly partisan political commitments and absence of scholarly rigor, which had become the norm with the professionalization of Latin Americanist research and scholarship. In 1979, young Chileanist historian Peter Winn criticized Alexander’s 1965 monograph on labor for its “frequently tendentious interpretations [based] upon a slender body of research.” Other labor studies scholars criticized his embrace of the “anti-Communist line of both the United States government and the AFL-CIO,” with their simplistic stories of “good guys (i.e. ‘democrats’) and bad guys (i.e. ‘totalitarians’).” While rejecting Alexander’s “cold war anti-Communist perspective,” these young critics nonetheless recognized that his books were often “rich in information drawn from interviews and newspapers.”19The 1980s would witness a greater appreciation for Alexander’s assessments of the sociopolitical affairs of the countries he visited. In 1986 Charles Bergquist praised him as the only one of his generation of scholars, whether North or Latin American, who “consistently stressed the importance of organized labor in the modern historical development of the region.”20 And Alexander was one of “a few relatively isolated figures,” observed Thomas Skidmore, who had cultivated the study of labor, “a curiously neglected field” prior to the 1970s.21 Indeed, “without his immense work would not account of the development of the various Latin American labor the of his scholarly and the of his political was not made clear until the in of an of his and Alexander has almost major of Latin American documents by Rómulo and Haya de la Torre, and served as the major for works on political parties and in Latin America. In he had by the early almost book and of a book and and his career, have often criticized Alexander’s books for and from the scholarly Yet these the and breadth of his while on the of achieved through his of such Yet these scholarly to Alexander’s field interviews were from the in his Although known for other scholars with to his most were of their scope and the and in which he documented the interviews and that so informed his And most would be to that Alexander had notes for an ten to thousand five Indeed, it is precisely as a that Alexander have made his most scholarly contribution to the study of Latin America and the not given to Alexander a interview methodology over have used a or for he in because he that it with the of people to to an and as to simple as Alexander also from notes during the only would he notes in a of sui generis of all of which only as as have to to have these in a of an in third of has by the in from one to five or six Alexander’s interview notes a unique breadth of information and on all of Latin American and During his Latin America, as well as in and travel the Alexander contemporaneous notes on his with from all walks of whether with a a a a trade a government a U.S. scholar, a national congressman, or a or is precisely from these of that Alexander his for Latin American labor and in a from Alexander’s unique interview collection the and of an immense of from the to the of every and in the with especially for Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and The among interviewed by Alexander generation, and social interviewed the and well hundreds of including and as well as a of U.S. officials, U.S. and U.S. and Yet Alexander was also particularly to the views of the mass of the such as and while for an a of the total interview his Alexander’s interviews are often and more than interview by diplomatic and during these he often the in and these documented the they within national that to their and Having widely during given Alexander’s notes also to within a given moment in of and knowledge within political parties, labor and even collection not field interviews, Alexander also recorded notes on with and talks given by and Latin whether under in Latin American or the on Relations in New which he was a Thus, each interview also a body of notes on the of but not North which different Latin American countries came to be and by a of in the interview notes are organized by and and politicians, businessmen, trade unionists, government officials, and military and with a full identification of the including about their or in to the place and of the The of those interviewed be often and at times as they their to this and In some the notes almost of he while a trade or a political those who have worked in his the most surprising is the they the about both and In Alexander’s the of to such an that the at the or at the Alexander it is that he a high degree of in even those with whom he in Alexander’s interview and the extensive archive of which it is a be a for all those in the development of modern Latin America and the

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