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Past Tense Graduate Review of History

Volume 6, Issue 1 | Spring 2018

Copyright © 2018 by the AuthorsAll rights reserved

First Published April 2018Typeface Herr Von Muellerhoff and Minion Pro

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Past Tense Graduate Review of History is published online by the Graduate History Society at the University of Toronto at www.pasttensejournal.com.

Past Tense Graduate Review of History

Volume 6, Issue 1Spring 2018

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Table of Contents

Letter from the Editors............................................................................................vi

For a Global Liberation: International Anti-Colonialism and the Construction of Québécois National Identity in Parti pris, 1963-1968..................................................8

Sarah K. MilesWinner of the 13th Annual Graduate History Symposium Best Paper Prize, University of Toronto, 2017

Edible Identities: Shaping Spanish and Creole Palates in Early Colonial Lima and Cuzco.....................................................................................28

Valeria Mantilla

Monographs on the Universe: Americans Respond to Ernst Haeckel’s Evolutionary Science and Theology, 1866–1883.........................................................51

Daniel Halverson

Review of Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of the Antebellum South........................................................................................71

Andrea L. Spencer

Review of Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America........................................................................73

Andrina Tran

Review of James Ross, Henry VI: A Good, Simple and Innocent Man....................75Samuel Lane

Editorial BoardEditorsKatie Davis

Spirit Waite

Associate EditorsSusan Colbourn

Erica Toffoli

Layout EditorCathleen Clark

Special ThanksLaurie Drake, Former Editor

The Editorial Board would like to thank the following for their contributions to the production of this issue of

Past Tense Graduate Review of History:

Thomas BlampiedTajdeep Brar

Maria DawsonJoel Dickau

Bronwyn EvansKelsey Kilgore

Sienna Lee-CoughlinKimberly Main

Ariel MontanaEric Pecile

Nisrine RahalNastasha SartoreAndrew Stewart

Bello TaiwoJeff Yu

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In addition to the thought-provoking research findings presented in our featured research articles, the book reviews included in this edition broaden the range of topics to include insights on recently published scholarly monographs treating the past and future of United States poli-tics, written by Andrea L. Spencer and Andrina Tran, and the medieval English monarchy, written by Samuel Lane.

In producing this issue, we are greatly indebted to the work of former Editor Laurie Drake. Her vision for the future of Past Tense has ad-vanced the journal’s intellectual contributions to the field of history and to teaching graduate students about the journal-making process. We are also excited to announce Spirit Waite as our new Editor, and are look-ing forward to her contributions to Past Tense in the coming year. We would also like to thank Associate Editors Susan Colbourn and Erica Toffoli, and to welcome Layout Editor Cathleen Clark to our team. The entire editorial team would like to thank the many peer reviewers, fac-ulty reviewers, copy editors, and proofreaders from both the University of Toronto and universities all over the world. We are enormously grate-ful for your volunteered time and dedication. In many ways, you make Past Tense possible.

We hope that the innovative research presented in this issue encourages you to consider new directions in your own work. Thank you for sup-porting graduate research in history, and please enjoy the latest issue of Past Tense Graduate Review of History.

Sincerely,

Katie Davis Spirit Waite

Editors, Past Tense Graduate Review of History Toronto, Canada

Dear Readers,We are excited to share our sixth volume of Past Tense Graduate Re-view of History. This year we welcomed a new editor and honed journal production processes that will ensure the longevity of Past Tense across editorships.

Volume 6 features three academic articles written by graduate students from across North America. Sarah Miles’ award-winning article ex-plores the adoption of global radical revolutionary ideas by 1960s leftist Québécois nationalists. Drawing on the leftist magazine Parti pris, Miles examines how Québécois nationalists borrowed examples and concepts from Algeria, Cuba, and the Black Power movement to develop their political philosophies.

Valeria Mantilla’s article demonstrates ways in which the foods of colo-nized peoples in Lima and Cuzco influenced the diets of Spanish colo-nizers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mantilla shows how maize, potato, and chicha became staple foods for Spanish colonizers, replacing their conventional trifecta of meat, wheat, and wine. By cen-tering food and eating habits in a colonized space, Mantilla shows that colonization is always a multi-directional process in which colonized cultures also exert influence over those of the colonizers - albeit in an unequal power relationship.

Daniel Halverson’s article explores the doomed reception of the “pan-theistic-evolutionary theology” of a now-forgotten nineteenth-century German theorist in the United States. Using newly expanded reposito-ries of digitized books, Halverson applies a bottom-up lens to consider the reception of Ernst Haeckel’s scientific theology in the United States. Halverson finds that Haeckel’s determination to wed science and the-ology was profoundly off-putting in the contemporary United States, where he came under attack from journalists, ministers, and scientists alike, to the detriment of his legacy as a scientist/theologian.

Despite this breadth of variety in historical subjects, each article selected for this edition highlights the importance of studying local and regional histories within transnational and global contexts, and underscores the significance of bottom-up approaches to studying history.

From the Editors

For A Global Liberation Sarah K. MilesPa

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For a Global Liberation: International Anti-Colonialism and the Construction of Québécois National Identity in Parti pris, 1963-1968

Research Article

Sarah K. MilesUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Sarah Miles explores the influence of international examples on the development of Québécois nationalism through the lens of the radical leftist magazine Parti pris. She argues that this new generation of nationalists relied heavily on the example of other revolutionary or radical movements around the world as a means of creating a coherent vision for the independent nation they hoped to establish. The authors of Parti pris, which was published between 1963 and 1968 in Montreal, saw in Alge-ria an example of how to structure socialist political parties, in Cuba an example of effective agricultural policy, and in the Black Power movement an example of how to combine cultural independence with political independence. Miles argues that these examples provided the authors of Parti pris a means of envisioning a nation which could be socialist, independent, and internationalist.

In 1963, Georges Schoeters wrote a letter to the people of Quebec while awaiting trial in a Montreal prison.

Smuggled to the editors of the radical socialist magazine Parti pris, whose first edition had appeared earlier that year, Schoeters scrawled in the margins of the paper that his letter should be translated and sent to “socialist Christian unions, the socialists in Belgium, the C.G.T.—the French unions; the newspapers in all the countries of the world and all the university federations of Latin America…in particular in Mexico.”1 He signed the letter, like so many revolutionaries of the 1960s, “Independence or death, Georges Schoeters.”2 A member of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) arrested for planting a bomb in Montreal earlier that year, Schoeters was clearly aware of the international arena in which his movement operated. While advocating for national liberation, Schoeters and the other authors of the radical magazine Parti pris, famous for initiating the idea of the decolonization of Quebec, relied heavily on international examples and internationalist language to articulate their vision of a new, independent nation Québécoise.3

Parti pris was first published in October 1963, led by an editorial board of approximately ten men alongside a rotating cast of close to a dozen regular contributors and a number of sporadically contributing authors.4

From their first issue, the partipristes, as they were called, highlighted their leftist credentials through a sustained critique of Quebec’s position as a colony within British Canada, inspired by international anti-colonial struggles.5 The partipristes believed that establishing a new nation

would resolve their colonized condition. “We will soon liberate ourselves from this alienation, as the Québécois society has entered a revolutionary period,” they wrote in their first publication.6 The liberation of Quebec, for them, required its decolonization. They had a clear vision of Quebec’s political, social, and economic problems and of how to solve these to liberate their people.

In conceiving Quebec as a colonized territory, the authors of Parti pris were inspired by the examples of anti-colonial revolutionaries around the world. They drew on these to develop a cohesive vision for their ideal independent Quebec. First, the partipristes believed that their new, decolonized nation needed to be politically independent, undertaking its own foreign affairs. For this, they drew largely from the example of revolutionary Algeria. Second, the partipristes’ imagined nation would rely on broad socialist economic programs, based largely on the reforms of Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba. These two events in particular were seen as moments of “great transformation” and as “models” for their own work.7

Finally, these men believed that they needed to cultivate a distinct Québécois culture that could withstand the “foreign culture” of anglophones. Here, they were chiefly inspired by the American Black Power movement’s emphasis on cultural production as a means to liberation.

The authors of Parti pris were inspired by other anti-colonial movements to vocalize their political positions and imagine a coherent construction of their nation, and so viewed themselves as but one part of a global anti-colonial undertaking. Understanding the influence of global anti-colonialism and

Winner of the 13th Annual Graduate History SymposiumBest Paper Prize, University of Toronto, 2017


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psyche to the colonized economy, from the material context to cultural degeneration.... they recited their poetry on the street, wrote it on the walls… until it became an arm for the oppressed against their oppressors.”13 Reid argued that this was a wedge between separatist ideology and separatist action. The partipristes, in their own view, were different because they were willing to take ideas into the street; they believed they were providing a more concrete analysis of everyday oppression in the province than progressives writing in Cité libre. Many of the authors of the magazine undertook direct action along with writing. For example, Jean-Marc Piotte, one of the founders of the magazine, took a summer sojourn in the rural territories of the lower St. Lawrence in an attempt to convince the peasantry of Quebec to revolt.14

Though unsuccessful, emphasis on this type of direct action distinguished Parti pris from previous separatist journals. Articles in Parti pris addressed issues that would have been familiar to earlier generations of nationalists — laicity, territorial sovereignty — but the magazine took these a step further by recognizing them in the movements they observed around the world.

The political project outlined in Parti pris was largely delegitimized after the October Crisis, but the authors’ self-conscious attempt to imagine a nation distinct from that of previous generations of separatists in Quebec and the historical context in which they developed these ideas led them to search for a different, international perspective from which to articulate their goals for liberation.15 In this unique moment between 1963 and 1968 when Parti

pris was published and individuals undertook revolutionary action in Quebec, these men found inspiration in the actions of oppressed groups around the world. They articulated a new vision of independence based on the images of Algeria, Cuba, and Black Power to imagine a nation that would be politically, economically, and culturally independent.

The FLN and FLQ: Algeria and the Idea of Socialist Decolonization in Quebec

In the partipristes’ imagination of a new Quebec, securing political

power was central. More than just words, they argued Quebec’s “Independence cannot be reduced to a declaration of territorial sovereignty. The revolution… will only be social if it aims to destroy the powers of oppression which alienates the majority of the nation.”16 Political power without an independent government appeared useless to these radicals. Instead, they saw full-scale decolonization as a primary facet of their struggle, one that would require separating themselves from the Canadian metropole and creating a socialist government, and thus mirroring the path taken by revolutionaries in Algeria.

Algeria’s success was inspirational for the French-speaking population of Canada from the late 1950s, leading them to view their own political situation in colonial terms. They used the socialist revolution taking place across the Atlantic to argue that socialist decolonization would be necessary to free Quebec. In her study of the Québécois media’s portrayal

revolutionary thought on these radicals provides insight into how the nation was imagined during the Quiet Revolution and challenges an established scholarly portrayal of Quebec nationalism as an insular project. Instead, radicals embraced international movements in their nation-building project.8 Through the examination of writing in Parti pris, I detail how radicals in Quebec were not just inspired by, but borrowed directly from revolutionary struggles across the globe to construct a model for a new nation. Anti-colonialism thus appears not as a vague utopian idea, but as a coherent and pragmatic political project. The goal of this essay is to demonstrate the complex ways that the Quebec nation was dreamed, written, and constructed.

While Parti pris has been noted as a representation of the radicalism of the 1960s in Quebec, the vital role international examples played for these authors has not yet been discussed.9

Placing Quebec’s Quiet Revolution in the timeline of global anti-colonial projects in the 1960s demonstrates how currents of global liberation and nationalism flowed together in this time.10 This research thus contributes to a better understanding of the most radical strands of activism in Sixties Montreal, while also weighing in on the

importance of leftist internationalism to radical networks acting in a variety of contexts.

The partipristes’ “internationalist nationalism” was by no means the first iteration of nationalism among French-Canadians. An older generation of intellectuals in Quebec — René Lévesque, André Laurendeau, and Raymond Barbeau — fought for progressive reform, but did not link their political aims to a wider international struggle.11 These earlier progressives emphasized the importance of democratic processes, appealing to a broad electoral base rather than emphasizing direct action, and worked with organized labor to increase the power of the francophone working class. With the rise of the Parti Québécois after 1968 and the disavowal of the radical left after the 1970 October Crisis, this progressive political platform would reemerge as dominant in the 1970s. However, Lévesque and other union leaders drew on many of the nationalist narratives that more radical figures like the authors of Parti pris had articulated over the course of the 1960s.

The men of Parti pris were raised on news of the Algerian War and found inspiration in global anti-colonial movements; their affiliation with these revolutionaries distinguished their politics from those of their forefathers, from Cité libre or even from La revue socialiste.12 Malcolm Reid, an Ontario journalist who befriended many of the partipristes in Montreal, summarized their break from Quebec’s political left, writing, “The difference is that [Pierre] Maheu and his comrades pushed the analysis further, from the schoolroom to manufacturing, from the colonized

The liberation of Quebec

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of the Algerian War, Magali Deleuze notes that “on the eve of the Quiet Revolution, nationalists were on the hunt for examples.” Though Deleuze details Canadians’ interest in Algeria prior to the 1960s, she argues that “the internationalization of this nationalist discourse” of revolution led individuals to “the comparison between other countries or world events like the Algerian war to develop in Quebec.”17 The Algerian War provided Québécois separatists with the terminology and intellectual paradigms necessary to develop an idea of independence based on socialist internationalism, political unification, and following the lead of committed intellectuals.

Witnessing the revolutionary Algerian organization the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and the actions of the independent Algerian state, the authors of Parti pris believed that an official revolutionary organization was necessary for both the demystification of alien colonial structures and to lead the people to revolution. Intellectuals of the FLN, both before and after it gained power in Algeria, saw themselves as serving to “situate facts in their contexts,” to better underscore the reality of their struggle while also taking “part in the action and commit[ting] [themselves] body and soul to the national struggle.”18 The partipristes believed themselves similarly situated and prepared to combine intellectual production with political action: “the effort of analysis and demystification which we have initiated would lose all significance if it was not… combined with a revolutionary praxis.”19 Based on the example of Algerian intellectuals, they believed they could agitate for

revolution and demystify their own colonial situation. Just as the FLN saw their role as that of a vanguard party in Algeria, so too did Parti pris believe that they and their allies in the Front de Libération du Québéc (FLQ) “took up arms to make evident to the people their revolutionary role… the revolutionary youth (including the team at Parti pris), is ready to agitate at the heart of a party.”20 The intellectual’s role in promoting the revolution in order to create a new nation was but the first of many political ideas that the partipristes borrowed from Algeria.

Drawing on the example of political action from Algeria, the partipristes were heavily influenced by writers active in the FLN’s struggle, such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Jacques Berque. Robert Major, an early member of Parti pris’ editorial staff, noted, “At the moment the journal was founded (or just after), all the participants had read Memmi, Fanon, and Berque.”21 Fanon in particular loomed large for Parti pris. Fanon and other anti-colonial thinkers like Memmi eschewed the division between the nation and socialism that is so prominent in traditional Marxism; in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon describes the importance of national culture and of revolutionary intellectuals in producing such a culture. After reading his writings on the struggle of revolutionary Algerians, “All of a sudden, it was possible to be at the same time socialist and separatist without feeling torn.”22

This synthesis of nationalism and internationalism would be central to the ideology of Parti pris. In 1966, Jan Depocas wrote in the magazine: “A little bit of internationalism removes one

from the nation, a lot of it brings one back.”23 Determining how much of each — nationalism and internationalism — was appropriate for this context was a role the men of Parti pris understood for themselves, as a self-fashioned Fanonian group of revolutionary intellectuals advocating for their nation. The connection Fanon provided between socialism, independence, and nationalism was invaluable. In addition to his connection between nationalism and socialism, Fanon argued for oppressed people’s right to advocate for political independence with violent resistance due to the inherently violent nature of colonial oppression. Jean-

Marc Piotte argued that Fanon was important for many “because he saw the liberatory effect of violence,” meaning that his writings allowed for the sort of direct action with which the authors of Parti pris were so enamored.24

Taking Fanon’s writing as instructional, the authors were determined to apply it to their own contexts: “Quebec,” Paul Chamberland admitted, “is not like Algeria.... but we are transforming ourselves, applying [these examples] to our situation.”25 As historian Sean Mills notes, Fanon’s ability to form a general theory of colonialism out of the particularities of the Algerian example made his work particularly appealing to other liberation movements.26 Instead of

simply reading Fanon as an account of decolonization, the magazine’s authors wanted to “‘fanonize’ and decolonize” themselves, actively applying international ideas to the political situation in Quebec.27 Through Fanon, then, the partipristes could argue that socialist internationalism could be based on political independence rather than being contradicted by the creation of independent nation-states. An early emblem of Third World intellectual writing about Algeria, Fanon and other radical theorists served the partipristes as they articulated their own political ideology and, perhaps more cynically, drew “lines between themselves and

more mainstream nationalists,” to garner credibility.28

The authors of Parti pris were also concerned with how political parties could provide a base for the establishment of an independent socialist state yet remain revolutionary. For this, Algeria again seemed to provide a solution. “President Ben Bella… has shown how the unity of the FLN was maintained at all costs, this unification of forces… having facilitated the struggle at the national level and accelerated the movement for liberation.”29 Debates raged in the journal about the differences between the Rassemblement pour l’Indépendence Nationale (RIN), the Parti Socialiste du Québec (PSQ), or various other political parties.30 They

The Algerian War provided Québécois separatists with paradigms to develop

an idea of independence


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argued that the province’s inability to support a fairly unified ideological doctrine was part of why their position remained marginal. Piotte wrote of the Québécois political scene: “the impatience and the tendency towards improvisation of the FLQ reflects… the incoherence of existing political parties.”31 Piotte and other authors, frustrated by a lack of political success, looked to Algerian revolutionaries’ ability to come together behind a single party as an example for their own case. “Algeria,” the editorial board wrote in 1965, “has become in our eyes a revolutionary model by those who knew how to adapt doctrine to their own reality by modifying necessary elements to enable the application of a malleable, yet firm socialism.”32 Highlighting the importance of unifying behind a revolutionary party, the partipristes took to heart the FLN’s example of revolutionary political struggle, as they would the example of Algeria’s actions

as an independent state after the War. During the Algerian War,

revolutionaries appealed to the international community to bring international pressure to bear on France.33 Afterwards, the Algerian state aimed to support the liberation of oppressed peoples around the world through the power of national sovereignty. In a 1965 edition of the journal, the authors rejoiced in the fact that Algeria affirmed “its solidarity with those countries which are fighting against all forms of foreign domination.”34 The authors of Parti pris dreamed that they might be able to do the same. “It is important for us to participate, according to our being, to the ‘planetization’ of the Earth,” which they saw as an important part of the “global revolutionary present which is constituted by the triumph of the laboring classes over capitalist society and the emancipation of oppressed peoples.”35 The partipristes believed that their political independence would provide the opportunity to support anti-colonial movements around the world. The independent Algerian state’s commitment to global liberation provided the partipristes with an ideal of how they might operate their own nation. Algerians’ emphasis on international diplomacy, Fanon and the FLN’s emphasis on nationalism and socialism, and Algeria’s government policies as an independent nation provided the authors of Parti pris with a framework for their own political goals. From the Algerian example, the authors drew a distinct language of international solidarity and imagined how a national government might actually facilitate and expand a socialist, internationalist

ideological program. The case of revolutionary Algeria

illuminated a coherent political ideology for the partipristes, providing an example of radical political organization and demonstrating the role nationalist revolutionary intellectuals could play in promoting both nationalism and internationalism in an independence movement. Intellectual and radical action during the Algerian War, and the ideas that emerged from independent Algeria in the 1960s, established language Québécois radicals could use to describe their own political desires.

Fighting the Yankees: Economic Independence and the Cuban Example

For the partipristes, political independence would be useless

without simultaneous economic independence from anglophone imperialism. Only a few years before Parti pris began publishing, Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement took power in Cuba. Though little in the way of formal economic policy came out of the immediate aftermath of their 1959 victory, Castro embarked on a tour of North America, coming as far as Montreal to speak about the possibilities inherent in a socialist uprising. The global revolutionary left, at least in these early years, celebrated Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and saw in them a vital example of national resistance to American capitalism.36 By their relative physical proximity to the Caribbean island and intellectual affiliation with its geopolitical situation, it is unsurprising that the authors of Parti pris looked to Cuba for guidance in the nationalist economic policy

they desired for Quebec, to say little of the revolution’s inherent resistance to foreign national economic domination.

Castro’s success and Cuba’s eventual economic endeavors loomed large for the partipristes, who went so far as to title their December-January 1968 edition, “Québec Si, Yankee No!” mirroring the common call heard during the Cuban Revolution.37 The partipristes’ dream of a new nation was predicated on significant economic reforms and they relied heavily on the Cuban example, which appeared more similar to their own situation than the experience of more formally colonized territories. Cuba’s nationalization of industry, the establishment of autogestion — a form of workers’ self-management — and agrarian reform appeared to Parti pris as essential policies for resisting neo-imperialist control once they secured their own political sovereignty.

The Cuban people’s ability, in the eyes of the authors of Parti pris, to throw off the yoke of American corporate and neo-imperialist influence was particularly inspiring. Indeed, the Cuban critiques of American policy in Latin America, though they often sounded political, were generally economic in nature, centering on critiques of capitalism and the tactics American politicians used to suppress economic self-development in the global south. In the fall of 1967, the partipristes reproduced the full text of Guevara’s “One, Two, Many Vietnams” speech.38 This was placed after a full page photo of the bearded revolutionary and a few choice citations, including Guevara’s claim that “one must remember that imperialism is a global system, the final stage of capitalism, and that it must be

Their political independence would provide the opportunty

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beaten through a great global struggle.”39 Just as Fanon provided intellectual inspiration for radicals in Montreal, so too did the Cuban revolutionaries who fought for economic liberation from the United States and Europe. The partipristes’ reliance on the example of the Cuban Revolution would grow as they developed a more coherent idea of how to organize an independent political state — based on the idea of Algeria — and moved on to the need to develop an independent, socialist economy.

From some of their earliest writings, the authors of Parti pris took Cuba as a prime example of how to minimize the influence of American corporations. The revolutionary state was recognized for crafting economic policies that defended “against an external danger, the deathly menace of counterrevolution from European and American imperialism.”40 Parti pris discussed the importance of Cuban student organizing and unionizing to support the Revolution, and compared their activities with student actions at the Université de Montréal, pointing to the problems inherent in the “global situation of student syndicalism.”41 Their critique of syndicated students at the Université perhaps neglected to acknowledge that a group of about a dozen of its students in fact traveled to the island in 1959 to examine recent revolutionary activity. Ironically, the partipristes invoked examples of Cuban student movements and student unions in order to critique students who were, at least partially, sympathetic to the island as well. Regardless, Cuban students’ example appeared valuable for the partipristes who saw solutions to the

dilemmas they were facing in Quebec. In addition to students’

participation in economic and political reform, Parti pris was interested in the agrarian reforms undertaken by the Castro regime. The magazine dedicated significant space to the means and successes of Cuban agrarian movements, which they felt were instructive for Quebec given the province’s similar economic base in small-scale rural production. The role of agricultural laborers in Quebec was a significant concern to these radicals. In a 1965 edition dedicated to the question of unions in the province, Michael Draper spent almost a dozen pages discussing the problems and solutions of agricultural unionization and critiquing prior leftists in Quebec for ignoring the issues of this portion of the population.42 Cuban leaders had promoted massive increases in the state’s agricultural production by nationalizing large land holdings immediately after the revolution. They were themselves sympathetic to Quebec’s own rural struggle.43 In 1959, the aforementioned dozen students from the Université de Montréal had been specifically invited to visit Cuba by the newly established National Institute for Agrarian Reform. George Schoeters — the FLQ member whose letter was transcribed in Parti pris in 1963 — was among those students.44

In reference to these Cuban agrarian reforms, the revolutionaries in Quebec believed they could find a model for their own agricultural laborers.45 “By the light of the Cuban example,” Lise Rochon wrote in her discussion of Cuban agrarian reform, “the Québécois government’s disinterest in resolving the problems posed by agriculture is

evident. What an under-developed country managed to achieve for its agriculturalists, Quebec, a much more prosperous nation, has not achieved.”46 When they looked at Cuba, the partipristes saw a variety of similarities in their reliance on agriculture — though the Québécois were perhaps slightly luckier in their possession of natural resources. These radicals turned to Cuba’s innovations in autogestion and agricultural reforms for ideas about how to bolster a revolutionary economy against neo-imperial forces.

More broadly, the partipristes celebrated Cuba’s socialist reforms — though how effective they were on the ground the partipristes may not have known. Regardless, the journal regularly pointed out the economic achievements of the Cuban government and people:

To abolish private property from the means of production, the accumulation of capital, of profit, etc. all the things that characterize capitalist exploitation of man by man, the people must come together; only their cooperation, in absolute equality, will permit them to build a new society, a society which is not simply a capitalist planned economy…! A society finally founded on man and not on capital.47

Socialist doctrine, as has been previously discussed, was extremely important for the partipristes’ imagination of political and economic independence from the Canadian federal government and anglophone economic domination. Allying themselves strongly with the new Castro regime, Québécois radicals

argued that the fight against American economic neo-imperialism undertaken by the Cubans was inseparable from their own fight against American capitalism. Pierre Vallières, a periodic contributor to Parti pris and a member of the FLQ, concluded in his article on the Cuban Revolution that the struggle in which both the Québécois and the Cubans fought was fundamentally anti-capitalist as well as anti-imperialist. “All revolutionaries, particularly in the Americas, must stand at the ready to defend Cuba” both politically and economically, he wrote.48 Not only was association with Cuba useful as an example of anti-American socialist behavior, but standing with Cuba was seen as an important way for the Quebec radicals to legitimate their politics on the world stage.

The partipristes saw Cuba as a partner and ally in the struggle against anglophone domination but also as an example of how to achieve economic independence from American neo-

The fight against American economic

neo-imperialism undertaken by the Cubans was

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imperialism. They were inspired by the student and youth mobilization, through effective syndicalism, and by the radical agricultural reforms of the revolutionary Cuban government. This, the partipristes believed, was an ideal model for economic reform in their own territory. The perceived similarities between Cuba and Quebec — the size of their territory relative to their oppressors’, the specter of informal empire, and the reliance on agricultural production — allowed the authors of Parti pris to draw convincing lessons from this small, Caribbean island.

Joual, Nègres blancs, and Black Power: Cultural Independence and the African-American Example

Perhaps most famous among the associations between African-

Americans in the Black Power movement in the United States and revolutionaries in Quebec is Pierre Vallières’ 1968 work Les Nègres blancs d’Amérique, republished in English in 1971 as The White Niggers of America.49 In this work, originally published by Parti pris’ edition house, Vallières argued that the economic, cultural, and political circumstances in which the French of Quebec found themselves could be equated to the situation in which the African-American population of the United States was placed for most of their history. While it grossly over-exaggerates the similarity of these two struggles, Vallières’ work was rooted in a real association between these two groups. Various partipristes would travel to the United States and communicate with Black Panthers by the late 1960s.50 Indeed, Vallières spoke

periodically with Stokely Carmichael and claimed that his book was supported by the Black Panthers and other Black Power organizations.51 After Vallières’ publication of Nègres blancs, Michèle Lalonde penned her famous poem, “Speak White,” which articulated how for the francophone population of Quebec, “the French language was their blackness.”52 Lalonde wrote:

Speak white Tell us again about Freedom and Democracy Nous savons que liberté est un mot noir comme la misère est nègre et comme le sang se mêle à la poussière des rues d’Alger ou de Little Rock.53

Comparisons, then, between African-American civil rights movements, the idea of blackness, and the struggle of Quebec were important to radicals in the late 1960s and 1970s. Yet Vallières did not draw his famed comparison lightly; the authors of Parti pris were deeply inspired by African-American radicals and the Black Power movement long before the publication of Nègres blancs. The Black Power movement helped the partipristes articulate their vision of the cultural oppression of the francophone population of Quebec, based on a comparison of linguistic differences and cultural production as a means of liberation.

Unlike other nationalists in Quebec who had lamented the supposedly poor state of the French language spoken in their province, the authors of Parti pris chose to celebrate this quasi-creole by publishing Québécois poetry and literature in the magazine and production house of Parti pris.

Emphasizing the “polluted culture” of Quebec in language similar to that used by African-American poets who wished to retrace their roots to “our Black family,” the partipristes published poetry and fiction in an effort to provide such a purified version of French-Canadian culture to their readers.54 Language was thus a central tenant of the liberation of the people in the eyes of these authors. Gaston Miron, the famed Québécois poet, wrote in 1965: “language is fundamentally the same as the existence of the people, because it reflects the totality of its culture in signs, signified, and signifiers.”55 Drawing language from French linguistic theory, Miron demonstrates the importance of understanding and using one’s language to articulate the culture of a people. The attention these authors placed on language and on cultural expression through language was thus both unique to their historical experience as a linguistic minority in Quebec, but reflected in many ways the sentiment expressed by many Black Power activists that African-Americans possessed a distinct culture and means of expression which deserved to be celebrated and spread.

Parti pris affirmed and advanced the movement to celebrate joual, an effort to reclaim domestic cultural expression. Joual was previously understood to be a pejorative name for the manner in which the urban poor of Montreal spoke, but the partipristes reappropriated the term, lauding their compatriots’ language. As a means of justifying this celebration, the authors compared joual to the distinct linguistic expression of blacks in the United States.56 African-Americans “also have a ‘joual’,” Gérald Godin, a

novelist, poet, and regular contributor to Parti pris, wrote. “More politicized than us, it has become a reflex among [blacks in America] to try and confuse the white man… by using ‘jive-talk.’ Our use of ‘joual’ is but the repetition of a mechanism that has worked for them for a long time.”57 The authors of Parti pris compared their efforts to the African-Americans’ cultural revolt against white America long before Vallières published his seminal work, though the two are certainly linked. The unique linguistic expression of African-Americans and the Black Power movement helped the partipristes to articulate their own rejection of anglophone culture.

Many partipristes were fixated on cultural production’s role in securing liberation. Laurent Girouard, for example, critiqued the so-called colonial literature which had long been produced in Quebec, saying that they must “think to create the conditions of emancipated literature,” by “talking with bombs.”58 Instead of reflecting their oppressed state, the partipristes believed that literature and art were “expressions of being,” and thus were necessary for human liberation.59 Just as the Black Power movement regularly critiqued the forms of art created as a form of oppression, and instead supported the Black Arts Movement (BLAM), so too did the authors of Parti pris use their platform to promote domestic, liberated art and literature.60 In particular, the partipristes saw jazz music as a form of uniquely liberated cultural production. Reflecting the idea that art should express a form of free human existence, based in some ways on the Cuban idea of the new socialist man, Patrick Straram wrote in 1964 that jazz “is a re-creation


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of the world, and the most elementary of examination permits one to understand the similarity between this recreation and the efforts of Marxists, the re-creation of a world which is this time made by men for men.”61 The partipristes were fascinated by the example of black artistic production in America as a means of liberation distinctly linked to political projects — like the art of Emory Douglas which adorned the cover of most editions of the Black Panther Newspaper.62

Despite the more commonly cited influence of the Algerian or Cuban examples for Parti pris, these writers had much more consistent contact with black radicals in the United States. In 1968, Straram, a partipriste, writer, and renowned oddball, found himself in “forced exile in California,” writing an article for Parti pris from Sausalito. Straram traveled to California several times through the decades, spending time in San Franscisco and Berkeley in particular, both hotbeds of Sixties radicalism and home to the Black Panthers in California. Straram compared the role of himself and his

fellow radicals in Quebec with that of blacks in the United States, saying, “Socialism? Without an independent Quebec, impossible. And has socialism ever been possible in the United States without first the revolts of blacks, Black Power, the Black Panther Party?”63 Not only did Straram consider the Black Panthers a vanguard party in the United States, similar to the FLQ and Parti pris in Quebec, but he fostered similar conceptions of the role of art in revolutionary movements. Straram argued:

Art is no longer considered a simple aesthetic activity external to praxis, but on the contrary ethical material, a means of investigation and elucidation of a re-discovered reality and…permits all people of a group to feel solidarity with one another in service of the need to affirm and live out an identity. (Think about rock’n’roll and jazz, without which Carmichael, Newton, Brown, Cleaver, Seale would not be so immediately understood by black Americans…) How would we live, otherwise?64

Emory Douglas, the Black Panthers’ Minister of Culture and an activist in San Francisco, expressed similar ideas about the value of art in revolutionary activity. “The art is a language, communicating with the community.”65 The art he produced, Douglas argued, “was a collective interpretation and expression from our community.”66 For Douglas, Straram, and the partipristes, art in all of its forms was a means of revealing the reality of their situation and expressing it both to other members of the community and around the world.

Québécois radicals continued to see California as a place where they could speak out their rebellion. Note, for example, the oft-forgotten Vaillancourt Fountain, designed and created by radical Québécois separatist Armand Vaillancourt, which stands to this day in downtown San Francisco. When the sculpture was first opened in 1971, Vaillancourt stenciled the words, “Québec Libre” in blazing orange along its concrete twists and turns—and re-painted them when city officials erased his writing.67 That a legendary Québécois artist nestled this 40-foot tall sculpture in amongst the hippies and Black Panthers of San Francisco is no coincidence. Rather, it represents a continuation of the associations and alliances made between black American radicals and partipristes a decade before. This association was important for black radicals as well, though the relationship was occasionally fraught. Gilles Bourque, a contributor to Parti pris from 1965 to 1968 told of an interview held with a Black Panther during Montreal’s Expo ’67. While the Panther’s representative eventually came to sympathize with the Quebec

radicals, he was at first startled by the cheers from the crowd, yelling, “Nègres blancs, nègres blancs!” (in reference to Vallières’ work) at the presenter before him. “He had to be told that this was a compliment,” Bourque said. “He thought it was some sort of racial epithet.”68 However, the fact that the 1968 Congress of Black Writers — featuring the likes of C.L.R. James, Stokely Carmichael, and Walter Rodney — was held in Montreal is a testament to the lasting associations between these two groups.69

The revolution of black Americans against the internal imperialism of the United States was both symbolic and inspirational for leftists in Quebec. While the Black Panthers were only established in 1966, the Black Power movement in combination with this organization remained a significant inspiration for the partipristes. Black Power helped these radicals in Quebec to articulate their desire for distinct cultural life as a facet of political and economic independence. The work of American radicals was symbolically important, and the alliances built with these groups helped to strengthen the Québécois movement. “Our struggle for… decolonization is integrated into the internal struggle undertaken by the peoples of North America.... we must link our combat with that brought by black Americans… supporting Black Power… is a must for all Québécois,” the editorial board wrote in 1968. Though the Black Power movement was gaining strength as Parti pris’ influence was waning, its role was vital in developing radical conceptions of cultural production in Quebec.

Québécois radicals borrowed from the Black Power movement to articulate

how francophones...

...could liberate their minds and bodies through reflection on and

celebration of their distinct culture


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Parti pris closed its doors in 1968, its members divided over

whether or not to support the Parti Québécois and its dramatic rise in popularity.70 The final edition of the magazine was released in the summer of 1968 and detailed some of the student movements that exploded across the world in the summer of that year. Yet the ideology they promoted lived on into the early 1970s. Montreal remained an astonishingly internationalist city, garnering increasing attention after the famous Expo ’67 and the Congress of Black Writers in 1968. Even the networks built by the partipristes are visible in the movements of the early 1970s. When the FLQ kidnapped Pierre Laporte and James Cross, murdering the former and bringing martial law to the province, they relied heavily on the new ideology put forth by radicals from Parti pris to describe to the world why they had undertaken such a radical act. Though Parti pris and the FLQ were, for the most part, not overlapping organizations, many of the ex-authors of Parti pris were arrested under the War Measures Act of October 1970 under suspicion of collaborating with the FLQ.71 Most of these men were released, and in December 1970, four members of the FLQ negotiated their release to Cuba, securing a plane and flying into Havana to the welcome of the Cuban government.72

None of the examples discussed here negate the domestic context that led to the establishment of Parti pris and their distinct revolutionary ideology. The men behind this journal believed that they were liberating their people through revolutionary struggle; they were committed to the idea of a

Québécois nation and to the domestic revolution they felt was approaching. However, this relatively small number of radicals in urban Quebec used the examples of other revolutionaries to articulate their vision of a nation and to tie themselves to successful movements being undertaken around the world. Without a clear precedent for revolutionary action in their context, the partipristes looked to other anti-colonial movements for inspiration and the symbolic power of association. The Algerian example helped the authors to develop rhetoric portraying Quebec as colonized—and thus the belief that the province could be decolonized through an independent socialist government. They looked to Cuba to understand how they could destabilize American neo-imperialism and re-create new, socialist economic structures in the country they wanted to build. And, looking to what they saw as a similar case of internal colonization, Québécois radicals borrowed from the Black Power movement in the United States to articulate how francophones could liberate their minds along with their bodies through reflection on and celebration of their distinct culture. More than a passive symbol, international anti-colonialism was a tool that Parti pris used to create a pragmatic political agenda for the future and to explain their own experiences. Domestic political and social contexts were central to the imagination of Parti pris, certainly, but international movements helped the authors find the language necessary to dream, write, and work towards a new independent nation. ◆

Endnotes

1 Schoeters was Belgian but became a founding member of the Front de la Libération du Québec; he was arrested for a bombing in the spring of 1963. See Georges Schoeters, “Lettre de Georges Schoeters,” reprinted in Parti pris (November 1963): 8. Schoeters had, in fact, met Fidel Castro when the Cuban leader came to Montreal in 1959 and drew self-consciously from Third World Marxism. See Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 44.2 Ibid., 6. 3 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.4 Some of the more important contributors to Parti pris include: André Brochu, Paul Chamberland, André Major, Jean-Marc Piotte, Pierre Maheu, Jacques Ferron, Patrick Straram, Laurent Girouard, Gerald Godin, and Luc Racine. Brochu was a 21–year old poet from a suburb of Montreal; Chamberland, also from Montreal, was 24 in 1963; Major was 21 years old and also worked for La Presse and Le Devoir; Piotte was 23 and would go on to teach at UQAM. Straram was a French citizen involved in the Situationist International. He came to Quebec in 1958. 5 Quebec as a colony was an idea first proposed by a mentor to the partipristes, Raoul Roy, who edited La Revue socialiste. Whether he provided the idea for the partipristes or they for him is unclear, but it furthered his idea and fully articulated a theory of Quebec’s colonization (Mills, The Empire Within, 39–43).6 “Présentation,” Parti pris 1 (October 1963): 3.7 Jean-Marc Piotte, interview with the author, July 29, 2017, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.8 I borrow the idea of the “imagined nation” from Benedict Anderson. See Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (New York: Verso Books, 1991).9 Sean Mills discusses, to some extent, the international scene in Montreal in this period but does not focus on radical publishing in The Empire Within. David Austin, in his work on black radicalism in Montreal, notes that Parti pris published the work of Haitian and Martiniquan writers but does not explore the partipristes’ radicalism more. See Austin, Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2013). A few studies specifically of the magazine exist but are primarily written by ex-partipristes. See, for example, Robert Major, Parti pris : idéologies et littérature (Quebec: Hurtuboise HMH, 1979) or Paul Chamberland, Parti pris anthropologique (Montreal: Parti pris, 1983). 10 For a history of separatism in Quebec, see William D. Coleman, The Independence Movement in Quebec, 1945–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984) or Susan Mann, The Dream of a Nation, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).11 Nineteenth-century nationalism in Quebec focused on achieving political power at the federal level and emphasized what was seen as the natural traits of French-Canadians: their Catholicism, culture, institutions, and laws. Parti pris was part of a more radical, leftist nationalism that developed during the Quiet Revolution and emphasized secularism, socialism, and separatism. Arthur Buies’ anticlerical nationalism was one of the few exceptions to this trend. For more on these changes, see Gilles Gougeon, A History of Quebec Nationalism, trans. Louisa Blair, Robert Chodos, and Jane Ubertino (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1994) or Ramsay Cook, Canada, Quebec, and the Uses of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, Inc., 1995).


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12 The partipristes were aware of and frustrated by this lack of radicalism by their elders. In the opening piece of the October 1963 edition of the journal, they wrote, “the intellectuals of the generation which precedes us, by taking the path of ‘objectivity’, play the role of the impartial spectator; they situate themselves… outside of… reality, and thus condemn themselves… to never change, substituting…the concrete struggle between men with the abstract futility of dialogue and discussion.” See “Présentation,” Parti pris 1 (October 1963): 2. 13 Malcolm Reid, Notre parti est pris : Un jeune reporter chez les écrivains révolutionnaires du Québec, 1963–1970, trans. Héloïse Duhaime (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2009), 33.14 Jean-Marc Piotte, interview with author, July 29, 2017.15 Matthieu Lavigne has done interesting work on the development of a Third-Worldist discourse in Quebec at this time. For more on this point, see Lavigne’s thesis, “L’idée de décolonisation Québécoise : le discours tiers-mondiste au Quebec et sa quête identitaire (1963–1968)” (MA thesis, Université de Montréal, May 2007). 16 Paul Chamberland, “Aliénation culturelle et révolution nationale,” Parti pris 1 (October 1963): 16.17 Magali Deleuze, L’une et l’autre indépendance, 1954–1964 : les médias au Québec et la guerre d’Algérie (Quebec: Point de Fuite, 2001), 100.18 This quote is taken from La Révolution Africaine, the state-sponsored organ of the independent Algerian government. It is demonstrative of the attitude taken by the FLN long before this editorial was published. See “Éditorial : Espérances et réalisation,” La Révolution Africaine, 153 (January 1–7, 1966): 3; and Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York City: Grove Press, 2004), 167.19 Paul Chamberland, “Nous avons choisi la Révolution,” Parti pris 1, no. 5 (February 1964): 2–5. 20 Jean-Marc Piotte, “Parti pris, le R.I.N. et la révolution,” Parti pris 1, no. 3 (December 1963): 3–4.21 Major, Parti pris : Idéologies et littérature, 42–43.22 Reid, Notre parti est pris, 22. 23 Jan Depocas, “Beatniks, Vietniks—Quebecniks : gauchisme a gogo?” Parti pris 3, no. 9 (April 1966): 13. 24 Jean-Marc Piotte, interview with author, July 29, 2017. Piotte himself suggests that he was not as strong of a believer in the ideas of Fanon, though many in the journal were. Piotte instead was particularly interested in the writings of Memmi and Jacques Berque.25 Paul Chamberland, “De la damnation à la liberté,” Parti pris 9–11 (Summer 1964): 53.26 Mills, The Empire Within, 33–34.27 Jan Depocas, “Le Complexe à Maria Chapdelaine,” Parti pris 9–11 (Summer 1964): 37. 28 Mills, The Empire Within, 34.29 “Une Cause célèbre: l’Angola,” Parti pris 2, no. 7 (March 1965): 50.30 The major figures of Parti pris generally fell behind the RIN, but there were analyses and debates about the nature of the RIN’s political programs and the benefits and drawbacks of other political parties in the journal.31 Piotte, “Parti pris, le R.I.N., et la Révolution,” 2–6.32 “La Décolonisation : Algérie, an III,” Parti pris 2, no. 9 (May 1965): 58–59.33 For an analysis of the importance of international affairs in the Algerian War, see Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

34 “La Décolonisation : L’Algérie an III,” 58–59.35 Chamberland, “De la damnation à la liberté,” 84–88.36 Mills, The Empire Within, 66–68.37 Parti pris 5, no. 4 (December–January 1968). This was also the title of a song by Colombian revolutionary Alejandro Gomez Roa, “Cuba Si, Yanquis No!” Though the superimposition of the song over images was done later, see this video for a recording of Roa’s song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odWx8sQQACU. 38 Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Créer deux, trois…de nombreux Vietnam, voilà le mot d’ordre!” Parti pris 5, no. 2–3 (October–November 1967): 38–46.39 “Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara,” Parti pris 5, no. 2–3 (October–November, 1967): 37.40 P.c., “La Révolution, c’est le peuple,” Parti pris 8 (May 1964): 2. 41 Michael McAndrew, “Le syndicalisme étudiant Quebecois,” Parti pris 2, no. 6 (February 1965): 27.42 Michael Draper, “Les Cultivateurs s’organisent,” Parti pris 2, no. 6 (February 1965): 29–40. 43 Marc Frank, “Cuba grants land to thousands of new farmers,” Reuters, February 2, 2009, accessed May 8, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-reform-agriculture-idUSTRE5113IY20090202.44 Louis Fournier, F.L.Q. The Anatomy of an Underground Movement, trans. Edward Baxter (Toronto: NC Press Limited, 1984), 29.45 “Contestation étudiante,” Parti pris 5, no. 8–9 (Summer 1968), 5–6; Lise Rochon, “La réforme agraire à Cuba,” Parti pris 4, no. 5–6 (January–February 1967), 63–70.46 Rochon, “La réforme agraire à Cuba,” 69–70.47 Pierre Vallières, “Cuba Révolutionnaire,” Parti pris 5, no. 1 (September 1967): 24.48 Ibid., 24.49 Pierre Vallières, Les Nègres blancs d’Amérique, French edition (Montreal: Les Éditions Parti pris, 1968), translated by Joan Pinkham into English as The White Niggers of America (New York: Monthly Review Press and McClelland and Stewart, 1971). 50 In one striking example of this, Patrick Straram, one of the more radical partipristes, wrote an article for the final edition of Parti pris from Sausalito, California. Straram, “A la santé de Rudi Dutschke et quelques autres folk-rock mirabellenwasser,” Parti pris 5, no. 8–9 (Summer 1968): 66–72.51 Austin, Fear of a Black Nation, 65; Mills, The Empire Within, 80. Both Austin and Mills have done significant work in examining the associations and discussions amongst black Americans and French-Canadian radicals.52 Mills, The Empire Within, 82.53 Quoted in Mills, The Empire Within, 82. I find it important not to translate Lalonde’s poem as the original text combines both French and English intentionally. The text in French reads as follows: “We know that liberty is a black word / just like misery is black / and as blood mixes with dust in the streets of Algiers / and Little Rock.” 54 Gaston Miron, “Le non-poème et le poème,” Parti pris 2, no. 10–11 (June–July, 1965): 90. This recalls much of the early franco-black negritude movement but was more self-evidently drawn in this case on the language of the Black Atlantic provided by African-Americans. This particular citation is from Amiri Baraka’s poem “Ka’Ba,” though the examples of this sort of language in 1960s poetry written by African-Americans are plentiful. Bakara, “Ka’Ba,” from “Amiri Bakara: Online Poems,” Modern American Poetry, accessed January 12, 2018, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/baraka/onlinepoems.htm.55 Miron, “Le non-poème et le poème,” 90.56 Paul Laurendeau, “Joual,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, updated January 27, 2016, accessed


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April 21, 2017, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/joual. For more on the so-called “joual debate” which took place between 1960 and 1975, see Paul Laurendeau’s work, especially his article “Socio-historicité des ‘français non conventionnels’: le cas du joual (Quebec 1960–1975),” in Grammaire des fautes et français non conventionnels (Paris: Presse de l’École Normale Supérieure, 1992), 279–296.57 Gérald Godin, “Le joual politique,” Parti pris 2, no. 7 (March 1965): 59.58 Laurent Girouard, “Notre littérature de colonie,” Parti pris 3 (December 1963): 33. 59 André Brochu, “L’œuvre littéraire et la critique,” Parti pris 2 (November 1963): 26–27.60 For more on the Black Arts (or Black Aesthetics) Movement, see James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).61 Patrick Straram, “Les Divertissements 3: Jazz dans la vie quotidienne,” Parti pris 5 (February 1964): 53.62 The Freedom Archives have digitized most covers of “The Black Panther Black Community News Service,” the periodical the organization produced from 1969 to 1982. They can be consulted online: https://search.freedomarchives.org/search.php?view_collection=90&page=1. 63 Straram, “A la santé de Rudi Dutschke,” 67.64 Ibid., 69.65 Emory Douglas quoted in Angelica McKinley and Giovanni Russonello, “Fifty Years Later, Black Panthers’ Art Still Resonates,” The New York Times, October 15, 2016, accessed September 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/arts/fifty-years-later-black-panthers-art-still-resonates.html?mcubz=0&_r=0. 66 Emory Douglas, interview by Courtney Yoshimura, Art Forum, November 11, 2016, accessed September 22, 2017, https://www.artforum.com/words/id=64411. For more on this topic, see Mary Duncan, “The Language of Liberation: Emory Douglas and the art of the Black Panther Party” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Michigan, 2005). 67 Charles Desmarais, “Vaillancourt Fountain deserves respect—and water,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 5, 2017, accessed September 22, 2017, http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Vaillancourt-Fountain-deserves-respect-and-11735554.php. 68 Gilles Bourque, interview with the author, July 5, 2017.69 For more on this association, see Austin, Fear of a Black Nation. 70 There is debate about why the magazine closed. Jean-Marc Piotte, who was in Europe undertaking doctoral work by 1968, said that the magazine closed for lack of funds, but Gilles Bourque, who was still writing for the magazine to the final edition, argued that they could have maintained production if the will had existed to do so. Instead, he argues that political divisions led to the abandonment of the project. I tend to believe Bourque’s interpretation. Jean-Marc Piotte and Gilles Bourque, interviews with the authors, summer 2017.71 “The October Crisis,” CBC Learning, accessed April 22, 2017, http://www.cbc.ca/history/EPISCONTENTSE1EP16CH1PA4LE.html. 72 Huguette Laprise and Lucien Rivard, “James Cross est à l’hôpital, ses ravisseurs sont à Cuba,” La Presse, December 4, 1971.

Sarah K. Miles is a graduate student in the history department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC) where she studies Modern France and the francophone radical left in the 1960s and 1970s. She received a B.A. in history from the University of Oklahoma and a Master’s in history from UNC in 2018. Her dissertation examines intellectuals, institutions, and reciprocal exchanges between Quebec, France, Algeria, and Lebanon in the late twentieth century.

Edible Identities Valeria MantillaPa

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Edible Identities: Shaping Spanish and Creole Palates in Early Colonial Lima and Cuzco

Research Article

Valeria MantillaUniversity of Toronto

In the urban centres of Lima and Cuzco, the foods that entered the colonial body, from the Old World and the New, informed immigrants’ understanding of their emerging society. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, popular spheres of multiethnic sharing led Spaniards, and their Creole offspring, to develop a gut for maize and potato, and also to develop a thirsty demand for chicha (ancestral Inca maize beverage). The evolving cuisine that became gradually distanced from the trinity of Hispanic staples — meat, wheat, and wine — reflects an elasticity characteristic of bodies in migration, and speaks to processes of identity formation. Fluidity and flexibility ingrained within food choices eventually became present in the way colonizers and settlers detached from Peninsular Spanish identities and characters, turning them progressively a bit more Andean, a bit more Creole, and increasingly Latin American. Existing among an extensive body of studies focused on the indigenous experience of the conquest and colonization of the region, this research reminds that confluence is a two-way road. It locates temporal shifts in identities from the angle of first and second-generation Spanish populations. The objective is to present an understanding of the conception of a raison d’être and distinctly Hispanic-American character.

In his 1615 text, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala

described Lima as a “land of much food and wealth,” while Cuzco was, unfortunately, a city with a “lack of food, wine, and meat.”1 In these two urban centres within the Viceroyalty of Peru, food and edibility proved key to the colonial endeavour. Indeed, edibles and cuisines became essential markers — and makers — of identity within these cities during the periods of conquest and colonization. This research focuses on the period of Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, from 1532, and moves temporally to the end of the 1600s, using sources such as chronicles, Jesuit records, and Diderot’s Encyclopedia.2 During this time, the foods that entered the colonial body, from the Old World and the New, seasoned the inhabitants’ understanding of their emerging colonial society. The present article takes Lima and Cuzco as centres of reference, as they were centres for major ongoing interactions between native and Spanish bodies, and they reflect larger dynamics of food as markers of culture and identities within the viceroyalty. The aim is to engage with popular food choices and contributions from both Spanish and native populations.3 In this manner, it is possible to trace mechanisms of change and locate processes of identity formations.4 It is also the aim of this article to reimagine these colonial urban centres as places for active confluence and visceral negotiations of culinary behaviours and choices. In this way, this study doubles as a response to existent scholarship treating the subjects of food and colonization as narratives of vanquished and vanquisher, and bodily

degeneration and regeneration.5 Although religious popular culture,

histories of intermarriage, and visual art forms allow access into processes of identity formation, food and daily dietary choices allow a better grasp of the idiosyncratic, and sometimes unspectacular, features of local life.6 This inquiry into quotidian choices also decreases — though it does not eliminate — the degree to which official documents inform historical colonial narratives. To this end, the study first engages in examination of the diversity already existent among Spanish settlers, and explore their awareness of the alimentary necessities natural to the colonial enterprise. Moving temporally, the article will then assess the settlers’ natural yearning for Old World staples and comfort foods, which guided their interactions with New World edibles during the initial stages of colonization. Finally, to aid the colouring of early colonial realities, it is essential to look into the multiethnic socialization in popular public spaces that served a variety of Andean and European food and drinks, with particular attention to the popularity of chicha and grape wine in colonial Andean society.7 These aspects of colonial life and identity formation demonstrate that food was “not simply the cultural icing on the colonial cake,” and that what the colonial body ingested and digested speaks to the fluidity present within the early modern colonial body.8 Fluidity and flexibility ingrained within food choices eventually became present in the way colonizers and settlers detached from Peninsular Spanish identities and characters, turning them gradually into a bit more Andean, and a bit more Creole.9


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ethnic differentiation and separation.18 This was the case in abounding mercados de plaza, chicherías, tambos (wayside inns), and other vibrant public spaces. Rigidity, from the outset, was not a main feature of daily colonial life because all of its members, natives and settlers alike, were active creators and partakers of multiethnic endeavours, including food ingestion. This was a challenge to both religious and secular authorities’ imposition of strict separation of spheres of sociability and ethnic mixing, an imposition that has informed scholarship of colonial Latin America at large.19

Colonial Separation: “república de españoles” and “república de indios”

Regardless of the realities of daily life, it is accurate to point out

that authorities relentlessly upheld the division of imperial subjects into two republics — “república de españoles” (republic of Spaniards) and “república de indios” (republic of Indians) — each with separate residential settlements, customs, legal status, and political administration.20 In the attempted establishment of these dynamics, authorities displayed what colonial historian Susan Ramírez terms an “ethnocentric myopia,” out of tune with the difficulties inherent to the colonial enterprise, fed by delusions of upholding a structure within the greatest social experiment of the early modern world — the American colonies.21

Naturally, this attempt at absolute separation projected itself onto spheres of food consumption. Settlers, according to ideas of the body, needed the typical foodstuffs of their Iberian diet, initially absent in the New World: fresh meat from Old World animals, raisins, sugar,

honey, almonds, wheat flour and, of course, grape wine.22 The insistence on availability of Iberian edibles was present from the moment of arrival, and persevered into the seventeenth century. In Lima and Cuzco, there were assumptions and expectations about orbits of food and drink ingestion, even production. Colonial authorities counted on these expectations to create and perpetuate social labels of race and hierarchies, and yearned for these structures to govern daily life and commerce in multiethnic Andean cities.23 As part of this effort, pulperías (dry-goods stores) emerged to dispense Hispanic food and drinks in a way similar to Spain, offering bread, wine, oils, and other eminently Mediterranean consumables.24 Nevertheless, even the pulpería could not stand to the more complex realities of social and economic activities of the growing plebeian sectors in Lima and Cuzco.25

Colonial authorities, including religious ones, were acutely aware of the power of food in dynamics of socialization and solidarity. They also detested any form of fraternization between groups, such as between Native Andeans and Afro-Peruvians and “worse still, between those groups and the less privileged members of Hispanic society — poor Spaniards and mestizos.”26 Fraternization among these groups represented, to the authorities, a degradation of imposed class divisions and ethnic boundaries.27 Such scenarios were best exemplified in public spaces where self-regulating dynamics of interaction and commerce took place — for instance, the market. A letter from a Jesuit missionary in Lima to Rome in 1603 asked what was to be

“Spaniards,” “Spanish Bodies,” and the New World

To begin to grasp the Spanish colonizers’ interactions with foods

in the New World from the outset of colonization onwards, it is vital to have a cultural and political understanding of these peoples’ places of origin. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Habsburgs who ruled Spain embraced cultural diversity in exchange for political subjection and formal integration into the empire.10 This dynamic translated to the New World, and informed the settlers’ perception of the environment, its food, and its people. After all, cultural diversity was already ingrained within the Spanish Peninsulars themselves. Rather than understanding these settlers as belonging to a homogenous group, it is crucial to understand that they themselves were carriers of cultural diversity.

Whereas for convention’s sake the conquerors and settlers of Peru are termed “Spaniards,” “Spain” was not in their time a permanent reality. Instead, “Spain” was a series of distinctive regions with peculiar geographies in central and eastern Iberia.11 Emigrants from this region arrived to the New World, all with their individual social organizations, histories, even personalities and languages, and they left their homes after only first glimpses of unification of Catholic Spain.12 Hence, what Iberian

immigrants found in the Americas, in terms of dietary diversity and cultural difference, was not altogether alien to them. One also needs a reminder that the Spaniards of the fifteenth century engaged in things other than “war, booty, and the oppression of non Christians,” and that very few were fully professional soldiers.13 In the invasion of Peru, many of these Spaniards were artisans, merchants, accountants, or notaries.14 This knowledge offers a picture of colonization that frames relationships with newfound crops in a more nuanced manner than the static binary of distaste for New World food and relentless attachment to Old World food can suggest.

Anatomical perceptions, based largely on the popular theory of humours, also informed Spanish views on the comestibles they encountered.15

To many, Indian and European bodies — mutable and porous according to common belief — were critically open to the influences of food, giving ingestion and digestion a central place within the new society.16 This mutable nature also meant that categories of race and identity were often unclear, and arguably just as mutable.17 Therefore, it was natural that, from the Spanish invasion in the 1530s to the 1600s, there were already mature multiethnic centres where consumption of particular foods and drinks gave room to altogether new dynamics and rules of interethnic sharing, sociability, and also

Natives and settlers alike were active creators and partakers of multiethnic endeavours, including food ingestion


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done about the sale of their produce at the market square. According to the Jesuit author, the market square was the most common venue for the sale of produce and lack of alternative spaces meant they were unable to profit from their harvests otherwise.28 A peremptory response arrived from Rome, urging the Jesuit author from Lima to find another way to sell the produce, “because the one now used does not seem decent to us (emphasis added).”29 In this response, there is an observation that the market was an indecent environment according to Jesuit religious authorities, a space from which it was unfit for members of a religious order to profit. Generally, there was also something socially, racially, and gender transgressive in market interactions that paints the market as a sphere suspended from authoritative expectations, religious and secular.30 The market even challenged official structures through mere multiethnic transactions of products, including comestibles.

The market possessed a persevering autonomy also found in pulperías and chicherías.31 These places, in both Lima and Cuzco, sometimes threatened public order because, in their autonomy, they could become favourable spaces for “clandestine meetings and potential conflict.”32 Additionally, there was constant official struggle to keep the owners of these establishments from offering Hispanic staples. The commercialization of varied products within a given establishment caused the intermingling of castes, and their patterns of consumption could be altered in the process. This was unfavourable to the strict ideals of separate republics and spheres of socialization.33

Ultimately, however, New World

experimentation and deliberate cultural borrowing denied the success of the colonial government’s divisions. This multiethnic experimentation also disagreed with European naturalists who denied New World crops, like maize, of a good reputation.34 It also contradicted narratives such as that of Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdova, a Peruvian Franciscan vicar who was only too ready to exalt the success of Spanish colonialism through his alleged abundance of wheat and wine in Lima, while confining chicha and guarapo (sugar cane alcohol) to indigenous peoples, zambo (offspring of a black parent and an indigenous parent), and mestizo consumption.35 Nevertheless, despite initial caution and suspicion, Spaniards and Creoles in the Andes drank more than wine, and ate more than wheat bread. Similarly, indigenous peoples, mestizos, and zambos developed a taste for more than chicha, guarapo, and maize.

Old World Cravings and New World Substitutions

The conquistadors, naturally, held anxiety and fear of living in an

altogether new environment. The notion of living in unfamiliar surroundings, among unfamiliar peoples, and the belief that this might alter the traditions as well as the very body of the Spaniard was a real sentiment in the initial stages of colonization.36 Nevertheless, the first Spaniards to arrive carried with themselves a fair degree of flexibility and pragmatism in the face of this new environment.37 They were, from early on, “irrevocably committed to the new situation, devising [their] own solutions

on the spot, beginning to build up [their] own traditions and techniques even if these were originally but variants of European models.”38 This attitude also accompanied the inescapable necessities associated with exploration and conquest of the unfamiliar new world.

The mestizo chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega narrated that in the year 1547, when there was still an absence of wheat bread in Cuzco — but wheat was already available in the viceroyalty — Garcilaso’s parents offered shelter to the city’s Dominican bishop, Juan Solano, and his fourteen or fifteen Spanish companions, who escaped from the battle of Huarina.39 Garcilaso’s mother, an Inca noblewoman, fed maize bread to the group, and they were so starved that they also took handfuls of raw maize kernels, some of which they fed to their horses, and some of which they ate as if they were “candied almonds.”40 Starvation and extreme circumstances allowed little room for pickiness, and maize could at times indeed become candied almonds to starved bodies.

The state of being in an altogether new environment, previously unexplored, meant that necessity pushed conquerors and settlers into the consumption of aliments alien to them. Despite hope that “the men who are born [in Europe] and who begin to occupy those regions, whether their parents are Spanish or of different nations, do not in obedience to the heavens degenerate to the point of adopting the customs of the Indians,” the reality of the situation left them little choice but to risk degeneration through nutrition.41 Nicolás de Ribera, one of the thirteen conquistadors who accompanied Francisco Pizarro in the conquest of the Inca Empire, recounted

the predicaments encountered in search for food provisions. Given the extreme lack of food, and the equally extreme necessity, the group wandered through mangroves and swamps eight or nine days until they discovered a rancho where they found some maize, and they eventually reached other towns where they spent many days searching for rations for the company and their horses.42 For these conquistadors in their quest, food did not equate maintenance or violation of culture, and it did not equate the future degeneration of their Spanish bodies. On the contrary, any comestible — whether back in the Peninsula it would have been deemed a comestible at all — equated provisions and, therefore, survival. The encounter with equatorial swamps and the vertiginous nature of the Andes left little space for choosy Spanish palates. To this, it must be added that indigenous help and conditional protection was oftentimes the only venue for survival. Without this help, Spaniards felt overwhelmed by the landscape, the suffering, and the possibility of attack and robbery at the hands of unknown indigenous groups.43 Although indigenous consumption of native comestibles was contemptible in European eyes, Spanish consumption of these same products was a matter of necessity.

This environment, which proved many times hostile to foreign presence, also presented a difficulty when it came to reproducing European cuisine after the initial wave of conquest. Eating maize was an emergency measure at best, as had been the case earlier for Nicolás de Ribera, and the production of European meat, fruits, vegetables, and grains became important elements


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of the economy and the maintenance of cultural and religious observances as settlements were established.44 However, need, want, and the inability to entirely reproduce the European alimentary landscape in the New World compelled colonizers to make do with American substitutions.45 It was this process of necessity that first introduced Spanish newcomers to American flavours, and although initially reluctant, they would come to develop a taste and identity around these products.

Nutritional hardship was a common feature of the colonial enterprise. Not only in the Peruvian Andes, but also in the rest of the New World, exploration begged for accommodation of many comestibles that the colonizers found culturally unpalatable and nutritionally lacking. However, some comestibles rose in prominence through time and became popular among the colonial population despite initial abhorrence. Such was the case for maize and other New World starches. Although settlers had initially held suspicion for these starches, it was impossible for most of them to avoid them altogether.46 Chroniclers described increase in consumption of local maize-derived foods and drinks such as atole, pinole, as well as other delicacies like “scalded plantains, butter of the cacao, puddings made of Indian maize, with a bit of fowl or fresh pork in them seasoned with much red biting chili.”47 This increasing regard for maize and other New World foods extended itself to the Spanish peninsula by the sixteenth century, though authorities did not always find them tasteful or nutritious enough for European digestion. English herbalist John Gerard authored the Herbal Compendium in 1597, and

included a less-than-flattering entry on maize, declaring the following:

Corn nourishes much less than wheat, barley, or oats. Bread made from corn is as hard and dry as a biscuit…, causes violent indigestion, offers little or no nutrition to the body, is digested slowly, and constipates the stomach. We still lack certain proof and experience regarding the virtues of this grain, even though the barbaric Indians, who don’t know any better and are limited to the “virtue of necessity,” believe that it is a good food. We can easily assess that it nourishes little, that it is hard, and that it is digested poorly, a food more suitable for pigs than for men.48

According to Gerard, neither in taste, texture, nor nutrition could maize compete with its European grain equivalents, seemingly only fit for animals, and doing more harm than good to anyone who consumed it. This was discordant with popular reception in Europe which was the mirror contrast of its adoption in the Americas.

Maize was not the only food to enjoy increased presence in Europe. Maize and potato were the most expansively accepted, but already in the sixteenth century, other items such as tomatoes, peppers, cacao, squash, peanuts, and vanilla had also been tasted and accepted in Europe to varying degrees and for different reasons.49 With regards to potato, authorities perceived it in a somewhat better, but still contemptible, light. The comments of Diderot’s Encyclopedia on poor farmers’ labour included a mention of the value of their crops:

The fruit of his labors consists of barley, oats, buckwheat, potatoes, maize, and other low-priced products. Such is the food he obtains, such is the food on which he raises his children. These foodstuffs scarcely keep men alive while they ruin them physically, and they cause many to die in childhood (emphasis added).50

Whereas reception of New World foodstuffs varied, and authorities oftentimes frowned upon their adoption, the regular populace was more focused on their virtues, and when local Spaniards took interest in an indigenous product, the interest translated to Europe.51 In many cases, however, adoption of these foodstuffs had rather practical reasons, and did not always reflect on taste. Introduction of New World crops to Europe meant that — mostly poor — Europeans could now benefit from maize and potato because these were crops with higher productivity, which favoured the substitutions of millet and sorghum, which had formerly been more traditional crops.52

By nature, the settlers who arrived in the New World expressed yearning and need for their Old World environments and foodstuffs, being unfamiliar with the new. Even when the new became

familiar to them, this yearning and sense of necessity lingered during early stages of colonization. Due to these sentiments, settlers attempted to “Europeanize” their new landscape, which included introduction of European flora and fauna.53 Garcilaso de la Vega narrated an episode of one such attempt at Europeanization. He told of a noble lady from Trujillo in Spain, named María de Escobar, who was allegedly the first individual to bring wheat to the viceroyalty.54 Garcilaso added that in gratitude for “the act of benefaction this valiant woman did for Peru, and for the services of her conquistador husband [Sir Diego de Chaves], they received a share of Indians.”55 The yearning for wheat, an Old World staple, placed its availability in the New World in high regards. Availability of wheat meant proximity with the familiar, a translation of traditional alimentary culture to the new environment, and the maintenance of a higher status within the colonial sphere through connection to Europe.

Whenever direct availability of a particular product was impossible, Spanish settlers took it upon themselves to attempt reproduction of European products in the viceroyalty, as was the initial case for wine. In Cuzco, Garcilaso de la Vega wrote about how

Need, want, and the inability to entirely reproduce the European alimentary landscape in the New

World compelled colonizers to make do with American substitutions


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an inquisitive Spaniard made a resin paste out of grapes from Spain, and weak little stems grew from surviving grape seeds in the paste. This Spaniard took delicate care of the paste for three or four years, until the stems became strong enough to be planted and to give grapes, although the wine produced from it was not exactly like Spain’s.56 In any case, the Spanish wish to have products from their ancestral land transplanted to the Americas was so intense that “no work or hazard has been so great to keep them from fulfilling their desires.”57 Although Garcilaso knew of this episode through word of mouth, from an apparently reliable source, it remains safe to assert that the yearning for the Old World bounties was a reality, based on the amount of products that eventually traveled over or were reproduced in the region.58 This speaks to a sentiment of migration that was to be expected, much in the way that is expected today. This very sentiment, however, was one necessary for the process of transculturation that eventually gave birth to the Peruvian Creole.

In any case, what predominated in the New World was the palate and experience of the common people, and they displayed more openness to the new products than could initially meet the eye. For instance, Garcilaso de la Vega chronicled how the Spaniards in Cuzco experimented with maize for medicinal purposes, and claimed that this was “partly because of advice the Indians have given them… and partly because the Spaniards themselves have philosophized about this based on observation.”59 In this manner, in tune with the epoch’s scientific spirit of empiricism, they found that maize, beside its nutritional

value, also relieved kidney conditions, urine retention, bladder and intestinal pains, and other ailments, none of which indigenous peoples were said to suffer thanks to a beverage derived from this grain plant.60 In its entry about maize, Diderot’s Encyclopedia commended the plant’s medicinal benefits, as it remarked that “Mexican doctors take medicinal tea with the Indian corn for their patients, and this idea is not at all bad, because this grain has much in common with barley.”61 Although in the Encyclopedia benefits are commended because the grain had apparent commonalities with barley, in the New World, the only point of reference was indigenous peoples’ use of it. This sufficed for the Spaniards, who began to exploit its curative properties as well, according to Garcilaso de la Vega. It is essential to note that his narrative must be taken with a grain of salt, since his historical enterprise sought to exalt the worth and greatness of the Andean colony and its peoples. Nonetheless, the role of maize throughout the centuries, in both Europe and the Americas, has been well-documented to attest to its gradual ascension as a well-regarded, inexpensive, and nutritious staple for the general population.62

The initial perceptions that linked maintenance of the European body to exclusive food choices, and the initial idea that consumption of certain foods determined an individual’s complexion, did not hold ground to curiosity in the presence of New World comestibles. The fear that careless food selections could easily “turn proud, bearded Spaniards into timid, beardless Indians” became fickle in time.63 Garcilaso de la Vega once more served to inform that there were very inquisitive Spaniards (he does not

specify where in the viceroyalty) who experimented with plants. According to him, they grafted the branches from Spanish trees on to native trees in order to obtain “two, three, four kinds of wonderful fruits in a year.”64 Of course, there may be a hint of exaggeration, and the veracity of this account cannot be confirmed, but in it there is evidence of a form of transculturation through agricultural testing that had little regard for theories and expectations of the body and food consumption.

Andean Ingredients, Creole Palates, and Public Spaces

Soon enough, in addition to the eventual availability of the trinity of

Hispanic staples — wheat, meat, and wine — Lima’s residents also became fond of native vegetables and Andean fruits to the degree that they began to grow them in their own valleys and house gardens alongside European produce.65 Although Spanish bodies initially differed from indigenous bodies due to their diets, the differences were transient, and a translation of Amerindian foodstuff to the colonial table attests to a gradual divorce from traditional Spanish diets, and the emergence of a Creole cuisine.

In the streets of Lima and Cuzco, in public establishments, indigenous women fed the populace distinctly Andean dishes and other dishes with European elements, such as “thick stews (locros) of corn or llama meat seasoned with ají [chili pepper]; trout and boiled or toasted beans (especially on Catholic fast days); cooked potatoes and jerked llama and mutton seasoned with Andean pepper.”66 The willingness to experiment in the fields, to receive

indigenous cooking within homes, and the popularity of transcultured Andean foods — and general curiosity to try characteristically Andean ones — attests to what Leo Garofalo describes as a “multi-ethnic plebeian solidarity” that showed gradually decreasing concern for “Spanishness” and Spanish patterns of nutrition, and instead began to claim Creole identity, and of a particular kind, too: a Peruvian Creole identity.67

Eating and drinking, then, were essential markers and makers of identity from the early decades of colonization due to the presence of both Old and New World items. In this milieu, certain diets were thought to create the anatomical differences that made Europeans and Amerindians distinct from one another, and indeed, initial Spanish thirst for grape wine speaks for a yearning to exercise Spanishness.68 This gave wine, for instance, a particularly Spanish association, while other foods were closely linked with other cultural identities exclusively, such as indigenous,

A translation of Amerindian foodstuff to the

colonial table attests to a gradual divorce

from traditional Spanish diets, and the emergence of a

Creole cuisine


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as was the case for cuy [guinea pig] in the Andes.69 Cuy managed to remain a predominantly Amerindian specialty food, prepared for sacrifices, religious festivals, and special feasts.70 In this manner, there is a display of subtle and layered engagement with food and drink in the viceroyalty. Certain foods were associated exclusively with one social group and not another, like wine and wheat in the early days of the viceroyalty. However, long-term exposure to these varieties of edibles and drinks alongside each other somewhat blurred and morphed lines of self, producing new ones. The environments and experiences that were initially unfamiliar, carrying no reminders of the traditional, soon evolved into new dynamics. These dynamics produced, through interplays of food, cuisine, and alcohol consumption, an identity gradually apart from Spanishness, but also not possibly fully indigenous, yet completely new in colour and inventiveness.

Nowhere was the casting of identities better exemplified than through the consumption of New World goods in public spaces. In the Viceroyalty of Peru, in theory and official belief, Spanish and indigenous bodies were different

because of their diets, but there was awareness that “bodies could be altered just as easily as could diets,” at least in a figurative sense.71 Taverns and spaces of different kinds, including colonial tambos (wayside inns), chicherías, pulperías, and market squares supplied Lima and Cuzco’s citizens with a variety of drinks and food. Due to this ability to provide a wide variety of goods, they proved fit establishments for this figurative alteration of the body through ingestion and digestion. It was in these public spaces that Spanish plebeians, servants of all ethnic extractions, and other members of colonial society gathered and mingled.72 The public spaces, and the local populace’s demands for their goods, sculpted the emerging identities in the viceroyalty.

These were spaces where multiethnic sharing and socialization — even social resistance — could take place, which made them causes of concern for colonial authorities, chroniclers, and certain elite members of society. Andean nobleman Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala expressed alarm for the interactions that took place within these environments, as he claimed that they bred detrimental influences upon different members of colonial society.73 Guaman Poma de Ayala projected a greater official anxiety that these autonomous spaces engendered and displayed “uncontrollable appetite and exchange for goods and bodies, rather than the dissemination of moral values and salvation.”74 This concern was aggravated when it came to interactions within the walls of these establishments, such as taverns. Some of this concern originated in official necessity to maintain official structures when it came to caste identities, cultures, and

social separations. Anxiety surrounding public establishments, too, came from a pre-existing concern for the influences the different castes had upon one another. For instance, at the dawn of the seventeenth century, Viceroy Juan de Mendoza y Luna expressed a general belief that mestizos and mulattoes were a pernicious influence on the indigenous peoples because of the “dastardly customs [indigenous peoples] learn in their company,” so that communication and communal living among these groups was prohibited.75 On the surface, there was a worry for the well-being of the colony. In a paternalistic fashion, colonial authorities deemed it necessary to keep these groups apart, each inhabiting their own spaces and socializing in their own exclusive establishments.76 However, this emphasis on division is suggestive of a Spanish fear over these groups cooperating to rebel against their common malady —Spanish officials. However, it mattered little how much emphasis colonial authorities placed on social and racial separation. Ultimately, there was vibrant participation of different social and racial groups in public life, along with exchange and exposure to different cultural concepts and organizations. Migration of indigenous groups and other cultural groups to and from cities fueled exchanges and exposure, which nourished cultural trades and social cohesion in urban centres like Lima and Cuzco, making new independent identities in the process.77

Cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch asserts that to visit a pub is to visit another realm, ungoverned by the rules of the outside world.78 The same can be said of the markets, taverns, and other

public spaces popular in the Viceroyalty of Peru. For instance, in Lima and Cuzco’s markets, gateras (street sellers) and other types of sellers and establishment owners created an independent space of socialization around food and beverages, where individuals could enjoy “the flurry of activity and parade of edible delights,” and even in some cases engage in illicit activities and transactions.79 It was this type of multiethnic plebeian environment that formed identities with characteristically colonial shades. These worlds, resistant to the grip of the official government, gave room for cultural creativity and became points of reference for individual and collective identities based on the kind of reciprocity the outside officials frowned upon.80

The variety of foods obtainable in these establishments demonstrates the kind of culinary reciprocity commonly present. Guaman Poma de Ayala offered a description of what Spanish as well as indigenous peoples consumed in these settings, with specific reference to the tambo (wayside inn). He described owners selling Spaniards edibles such as maize, potatoes, ají (chili pepper), cocoba (a dish prepared with white freeze-dried potato), chochoca (half-boiled and sundried maize), quinoa, chiche (small fried fish), stews, and chicha.81 The constant references to tambos speak to their popularity, indicating that Spaniards, indigenous peoples, and other members of society presented demand for the edibles offered in these spaces. Selling of a variety of maize dishes and drinks reveal that Spaniards had taste and demand for them, and they also had much taste and demand for New World spices.

Owners of these establishments

These were spaces where multiethnic

sharing and socialization could

take place


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did not always burden themselves with preparation and selling of different foods according to ethnic bubbles, the way authorities expected. Owners offered European, Amerindian, and African foodstuffs and recipes side by side, and these items quickly became a part of a shared taste, despite their original prestige or associations.82 The realities of colonial life transformed public spaces into sites of exchange between men and women of different ethnic and social standing. Despite contradicting royal and municipal laws, plebeians, artisans, merchants, and servants of various ethnicities met and fraternized in these spaces.83 It is difficult to establish whether these multiethnic social interactions overstepped the boundaries of these spaces to any significant degree. Yet, they bred identities distanced from the official Spanish colonial project. Eventually, in the viceroyalty, “Indian ethnic chiefs (kurakas) dressed and lived as Spaniards, toasted with wine in Dutch goblets, and married non-Indians,” while Spaniards and Creoles had a gut for maize, drank chicha, conjured with coca, and lived alongside peoples of different ethnic origins.84

Toasting with Chicha and “True Wine”

Alcohol consumption in the viceroyalty of Peru was another

decisive marker of identities in the Andean world. After all, “definitions attach to the drink even before it reaches the lips,” and several definitions and meanings emerged around alcohol consumption from the onset of colonial Lima and Cuzco.85 This was especially the case for chicha, although it was also the case for guarapo and grape wine

after colonial introduction. During the first half of the seventeenth century, Jesuit scholar Bernabé Cobo provided knowledge of chicha, guarapo, and other prominent alcohols in the region. He listed some of the ingredients that went into them, such as quinoa seeds, oca roots, and berries of the molle tree, but asserted that indigenous peoples had no previous knowledge of what he calls “true wine” made from grapes.86 Prior to the arrival of Spanish colonizers, indigenous peoples from a variety of regions had already possessed ancestral gusto for chicha and other fermented beverages made from their natural resources, and they used it for festivities, sacrifices, and religious occasions.87

What is remarkable, however, is that even after the introduction and presence of “true wine,” Spaniards and Creoles developed great fondness for chicha so that it managed to flourish as a form of sustenance after the 1550s, a little over twenty years after the initial Spanish invasion of the region.88 Chicha in the colony provided refreshment, nutrition, and most importantly, strengthened collective selfhood through communal drinking in public spaces, despite official social structures and divisions.89 Spaniards and Creoles soon developed their own local varieties of chicha — such as the chicha de siete semillas (seven seeds chicha), a colonial invention involving Old World ingredients — though never abandoning chicha’s traditional ingredients, thus further consolidating local identities.90 Due to chicha’s booming popularity, colonial authorities frowned on its consumption and sought its prohibition and regulation, as well as other local beverages ingrained with Incan associations.

The Incas had been consuming chicha and other beverages made from maize and other sources for centuries, and made it an essential element in ritual, social, and political exchanges.91 However, during the colonial period, chicha and other indigenous beverages earned negative reputations when associated with indigenous consumption and drunkenness, a product of a long tradition of Catholic condemnation of drunkenness and lack of self-control. Father Bernabé Cobo claimed the Amerindians were “so addicted to these chichas that drinking is the height of their glory, and they do not consider it a disgrace to get drunk.”92 For the Incas, chicha had formed part and even upheld their social, economic, and political structure.93 For colonial authorities, chicha was a destroyer of these same structures. Under colonial rule, officials considered chicha consumption to be linked to idleness, and also associated to idolatrous practices in religion.94 Francisco de Toledo, Viceroy of Peru during the late sixteenth century, acted upon this constructed colonial stereotype, prohibiting sales in Lima, and relentlessly closing chicha-selling businesses, although these businesses resurfaced time and again due to popular demand.95

If definitions attached to the drink before it reached the lips, authorities were much more keenly aware of what happened when the drink finally trespassed the boundaries of the lips. For them, the perceived drunkenness hindered the progress of the conquest, and interfered with control of indigenous labour and life.96 But in quotidian comings and goings, the production and ingestion of maize beer

gave currency to Andean mentalities within the viceroyalty’s dynamics, and most importantly, it fostered non-Spanish customs, memories, and group union.97 For authorities, chicha-drinking jeopardized the social order officially established. As a result, they were quick to create an “idleness-drunkenness-idolatry complex” to demonize the ingestion of maize beer, a notion so solid that it resurfaced in a twentieth century campaign to link maize beer consumption to imbecility and violence.98 In truth, chicha consumption gave room for a kind of inter-ethnic socialization that the authorities were unable to police, and the popularity of the drink did not wane despite demonizing campaigns.

Franciscan Friar Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdova authored one of the most detailed memorias of the Andean world, and he did not neglect to include figures on alcohol production per year. According to his narrative, in Lima and its surrounding areas alone, unspecified consumers had ingested 200,000 large jugs of wine, while indigenous peoples, mestizos, blacks, zambos, and mulattoes had consumed 100,000 jugs of chicha and guarapo.99 Although there is no reason to completely rely on Salina y Córdova’s numbers to obtain a picture of alcohol consumption in Lima and the Andean world, it is possible to detect a narrative within these figures. He neglected to identify the consumers of wine, but he did specify what sectors of the population consumed chicha and guarapo. This breakdown of consumers could lead to the erroneous conclusion that Spaniards and Creoles consumed wine, while the rest of the population consumed the other, bastardized, alcoholic beverages — they were, after all, not true wine.


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This idealistic division of consumption denied the influence of other ethnicities on Spaniards and Creoles, exalting the alleged successes of colonization. Yet, the realities of daily life in Lima demonstrate that its inhabitants drank something more than wine, and emphasize the degree of cultural influence that was often glossed over but ultimately shaped Creole culture and thought.100

The changes chicha experienced after conquest and settlement of the Andean world also reinforced the discrepancy between Buenaventura’s numbers and reality. In its simplest form, chicha was a “wine-like liquor, and can be distilled into a fiery spirit,” but Spaniards were quick to make their own contributions to the concoction.101 Significant changes to the drink included the addition of Old World cereals, like oats, barley, and wheat, and the addition of cane sugar — itself a product introduced after the conquest — to increase alcohol levels and sweetness.102 Although these contributions also included the decline in native variations of maize, chicha remained chicha, sold in the popular chicherías, and could never become wine.

Chicha retained its native Andean meanings, while also absorbing the new ingredients that agreed with the Creole palate, which in itself, placed in the New World, became a palate with a gusto for mixture, blends, and multiethnic flavours. Overall, the flow of alcohol in a society can create tension within a social structure, but can also fashion agencies capable of creating identities, and channeling the kinds of societal power capable of firing social change, as chicha exemplifies.103 In its production, consumption, and the environment for said consumption, the workings of this

identity construction, power, and social change are in place. In spite of theoretical separation of castes in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, colonized individuals and Spanish plebeians all frequented chicherías, and partook of the production and distillation process of the drink.104

Other interesting dynamics are uncovered about chicha consumption when the body is emphasized as a visceral and historical body. Schivelbusch contributes some grounds for thought when he contends the following:

A person who consumes and incorporates things becomes their master. But on the other hand, he thereby delivers himself up to them, in a sense succumbs to them. For things have lives of their own. The plants and animals a person eats (aside from cannibalism) continue to have an effect within him, indeed work either with or against him, depending on whether they are well or ill disposed toward him.105

This relates to the interactions with nourishment in the New World. The effect the plants and animals had on the settlers was one of identity formation. In a way, the settlers did succumb to that which they consumed. This was the particular case for chicha, so embedded with native Andean ritualistic meanings, yet almost immediately appealing to Spaniards and their Creole offspring. It delivered them viscerally to a sphere away from Spain, where a new composite nature emerged through transculturation and taste. On the other hand, indigenous Andeans, even when grape wine became widely available and inexpensive, did not develop a particular taste for it,

and they remained content with their ancient beverage made from maize.106 Indigenous Andeans retained their taste for chicha and successfully installed it in Lima without removal of its ethnic significance while Spaniards and Creoles rapidly embraced the drink even in the presence of wine.107 Although Spaniards did avoid openly producing and selling chicha, they nevertheless consumed it, and in consumption there is digestion of meanings.108 Not only does this grant a degree of agency to the “conquered” but speaks to a degree of openness in colonial plebeian culture that is often overlooked in favour of the rigid narrative of conqueror versus conquered.

Overall, colonial life developed around the reality that wine never remained in a purely Spanish world, and chicha and guarapo were multiethnically shared as well.109 Various groups succumbed themselves to the drinks, but also in the process, contributed additions

that impressed their identity onto them. For one, various versions of chicha and guarapo emerged, and wine also varied in qualities and strengths to cater to differing palates.110 Like individuals in colonial Peru, alcoholic beverages carried fluctuating cultural and political significance.

From the onset of the colonial enterprise, food choice contained

daily performances of self-identification.111 This was the case in situations when necessity compelled colonizers to settle for native foodstuffs upon their arrival, and it remained the case after the establishment of the viceroyalty, when colonial tastes created demand and engaged with new edible fusions in public spaces. The New World allowed room for flexibility already existent within the colonial body. The New Wold was too vast, with a dynamic too peculiar to agree with the unrealistic rigidity the colonial authorities intended to impose.112 The Americas were not simply a space where European cultural systems were transplanted.113 Race, as well as culture and identity were, from the outset, a “question of digestion,” and humans experienced these concepts through the body and food consumption.114 Through daily alimentary choices, as well as social interactions, the república de indios and the república de españoles became in actuality inadequate divisions, “so mixed are these nations that one can hardly speak of one by itself.”115 Food and the colonial palate, in short, fuelled the formation of Andean and Creole identities. ◆

Race, as well as culture and identity

were, from the outset, a “question

of digestion,” and humans

experienced these concepts through the body and food

consumption


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Endnotes

1 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno, 1615, from Det Kongelige Bibliotek, The Guaman Poma Website, 1032, 1052, accessed April 9, 2018, http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/frontpage.htm.2 Please note that the article mentions specific dates whenever available. However, colonial food history can be elusive at times, and dates when groups start or stop consuming certain goods are difficult to trace with consistent levels of specificity. 3 It is critical to mention that African groups were also responsible for numerous and essential contributions to the emerging Peruvian diet. The greatness and permanence of their contributions, and their interactions with Spanish and native groups, are beyond the scope of this present research, and will be the subject of future studies.4 Jesús Contreras, “Food Exchanges Between the Old and New Worlds,” Food & History 7 (2009): 145.5 Some remarkable historiography treating the subject of food, colonization, and creolization includes Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, eds., Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Leo Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants: The making of race in colonial Lima and Cuzco,” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2001); David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492-1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru Through Indian Eyes, 1530-1570, trans. Ben Reynolds and Sian Reynolds (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977).6 These traditional factors to study identity formation are the subjects of texts such as Fernando Cervantes and Nicholas Griffiths, Spiritual Encounters: Interactions Between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 1999); Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cusco, Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); David Cahill, “Popular Religion and Appropriation: The Example of Corpus Christi in Eighteenth-century Cuzco,” Latin American Research Review 31 (1996): 67-110; Karen Spalding, Huarochirí, an Andean Society Under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984).7 Chicha is the name given to a variety of Andean beverages derived from maize. Here, chicha will refer to fermented varieties of the drink.8 Rebecca Earle, “‘If You Eat Their Food…’: Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America,” The American Historical Review 115 (2010): 690, 713.9 Historian Karen Graubart discusses practices of identity in daily life during the colonial period, and asserts that the category of Creole is a product of acculturation, and not a marker of birthplace. See Karen Graubart, “Creolization of the New World: Local Forms of Identification in Urban Colonial Peru, 1560–1940,” Hispanic American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (2009): 490.10 Bauer and Mazzotti, Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas, 40. 11 Harry Jr. Tschopik, “On the Identification of the Indian in Peru,” in Acculturation in the

Americas: Proceedings and Selected Papers, ed. Sol Tax (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1967), 293; William D. Phillips Jr. and Carla Rahn Phillips, “Spain in the Fifteenth Century,” in Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century, eds. Rolena Adorno and Kenneth Andrien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 11.12 Tschopik, “On the Identification of the Indian in Peru,” 293; Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, 6. 13 Phillips and Phillips, “Spain in the Fifteenth Century,” 15.14 Ibid.15 This theory largely informed the Spaniards’ perceptions of foreign bodies and their own. This aspect of European classical medicine, and its transference to the New World, deserves its own study. Some initial readings on the subject include Hippocrates and Galen’s foundational texts on humouralism. Particularly enlightening is Aelius Galenus, On the Elements According to Hippocrates, ed. Phillip de Lacy (Boston: Walter de Gruyter Inc., 1996); George M. Foster, “Relationships Between Spanish and Spanish-American Folk Medicine,” The Journal of American Folklore 66 (1953): 201-217.16 Earle, “If You Eat Their Food…,” 713.17 Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, 6.18 Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 9.19 For some remarkable examples, refer to Brading, The First America; Serge Grunzinski and Berta Ares Queija, Entre dos mundos: Fronteras culturales y agentes mediadores (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1997).20 Refer to discussions of the two republics in Don Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú: Obra escrita en el siglo XVI (Buenos Aires: Compañía Sud-Americana de Billetes de Banco, 1910), particularly chapters XXIV and XXV; Bauer and Mazzotti, Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas, 22; Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 46. 21 Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, The World Upside Down: Cross-Cultural Contact and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Peru (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 158. 22 Christopher Columbus, Los cuatro viajes del almirante y su testamento, ed. Ignacio B. Anzoátegui (Madrid: Espasa, 1971), 158; Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, 1. Garofalo uses the term “Trinity of Hispanic Staples,” meaning meat, wheat, and wine, in “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 189. 23 Leo Garofalo, “La sociabilidad plebeya en las pulperías y tabernas de Lima y el Cuzco, 1600-1690,” in Más allá de la dominación y la resistencia: Estudios de historia peruana, siglos XVI-XX, ed. Paulo Drinot and Leo Garofalo (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005), 107.24 Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 187.25 Garofalo, “La sociabilidad plebeya,” 107.26 Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 141.27 Ibid.28 Antonio de Egaña, ed. Monumenta Peruana, vol. VIII (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1954), 132.29 “Búsquese otro modo de vender las cosas que en el memorial se apuntan, porque el que ahí se usa no nos parece decente,” Fernandez, Monumenta Peruana, vol. VIII, 132.


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30 Although gender relations within colonial spheres is a subject apart from the present study, scholarship for those seeking introduction to women’s cultural and economic contributions, as well as gender relations among castes include Karen Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550-1700 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Tamara J. Walker, “‘Blanconas Sucias’ and ‘Putas Putonas’: White Women, Cross Caste Conflict and the Power of Words in Late‐Colonial Lima, Peru,” Gender and History 27 (2015): 131-150.31 Chicherías are establishments for the selling of chicha. Pulperías, chicherías, and other public spaces are discussed later in the article. 32 Garofalo, “La sociabilidad plebeya,” 115.33 Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 186. 34 Contreras, “Food Exchanges Between the Old and New Worlds,” 150.35 Although there is much to say about guarapo, a drink derived from sugar cane, production and consumption was closely associated with African groups, a subject beyond the scope of this article. For some mention and introduction to the drink, refer to a 1603 or 1604 letter by Jesuit priest Diego Torres, found in Quintín Aldea Vaquero, ed., El indio peruano y la defensa de sus derechos (1596-1630) (Lima: Pontífica Universidad Católica del Perú, 1993), 452; Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdova, Memorial de las historias del nuevo mundo Perú: Méritos y excelencias de la ciudad de los reyes, Lima (Lima: Gerónimo de Contreras, 1630), from Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, Biblioteca Nacional de España, 244–245, accessed May 16, 2016, http://bdh.bne.es/bnesearch/detalle/bdh0000092550. Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdova also spent much of chapter V providing other information of this nature. 36 Earle, “If You Eat Their Food…,” 688.37 James Lockhart, “Trunk Lines and Feeder Lines: The Spanish Reaction to American Resources,” in Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Rolena Adorno and Kenneth Andrien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 90.38 Lockhart, “Trunk Lines and Feeder Lines,” 90.39 Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios Reales: El orígen de los Incas, ed. María Montserrat Martí Brugueras (Barcelona: Editorial Bruguera, 1968), 744.40 Ibid.41 Francisco Hernandez, Antigüedades de la Nueva España, ed. Ascención de León-Portilla (Madrid: Historia 16, 1986), ch. 23.42 Heidi V. Scott, “Más allá del texto: Recuperando las influencias indígenas en las experiencias españolas del Perú,” in Más allá de la dominación y la resistencia: Estudios de historia peruana, siglos XVI-XX, ed. Paulo Drinot and Leo Garofalo (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005), 33.43 Ibid., 42. 44 Lockhart, “Trunk Lines and Feeder Lines,” 102. 45 Contreras, “Food Exchanges Between the Old and New Worlds,” 152.46 Earle, “If You Eat Their Food…,” 704.47 Thomas Gage, The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies, 1648, ed. A. P. Newton (Guatemala City, 1946), 280. 48 Cited in Contreras, “Food Exchanges Between the Old and New Worlds,” 151.

49 On European reception of New World foodstuff, there seems to be mixed commentaries. Some scholarship asserts positive receptions, while others assert the opposite. Some conversations on this include Arturo Warman, Corn & Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance, trans. Nancy L. Westrate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Redcliffe Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Contreras, “Food Exchanges Between the Old and New Worlds,” 144, 150–153. Contreras outlined the agricultural advantages that a crop like maize had for the European poor, justifying the emergence of maize dishes in the continent such as porridges, polenta, mamaliga, puchas, gachas, and farinetes.50 Note that this French encyclopedia, published between 1751 and 1772, serves the purpose of a primary source in this research. See The Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert: A Translation Project, s.v., “farmers,” accessed May 15, 2016, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.147.51 Lockhart, “Trunk Lines and Feeder Lines,” 106.52 Contreras, “Food Exchanges Between the Old and New Worlds,” 145.53 “Europeanization” is a term popularized in Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Earle, “If You Eat Their Food…,” 702.54 Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales, 743.55 Ibid.56 Ibid., 745.57 “ningún trabajo ni peligro se les ha hecho grande para dejar de intentar el efecto de su deseo,” Ibid.58 Although it is beyond the breadth of the present discussion, there is also a significant religious aspect related to the yearning, presence, and eventual abundance of wheat and wine in Colonial Peru, since these were essential items in Catholic rites. Some notable discussions of this aspect are found in Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, particularly in chapters 3 and 4, and in Prudence M. Rice, “Wine and Brandy Production in Colonial Peru: A Historical and Archaeological Investigation,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27 (1997): 455–479.59 Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales, 188.60 Ibid.61 The Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert: A Translation Project, s.v., “maize,” accessed May 15, 2016, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0002.667.62 Analytical works on this subject include Warman, Corn & Capitalism; Jeffrey Pilcher, Food in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006), especially the introduction, and his chapter, “Columbian Exchange.”63 Earle, “If You Eat Their Food…,” 690.64 Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales, 752. 65 Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 193. 66 Ibid., 73. 67 Garofalo, “La sociabilidad plebeya,” 117. 68 Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, 8. 69 Ibid.


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70 Christina Zendt, “Marcos Zapata’s ‘Last Supper’: A Feast of European Religion and Andean Culture,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 10 (2010): 10; Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 189; Francisco Avila, Frank Salomon, and George Urioste, eds., The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 364, and also chapter 28.71 Earle, “If You Eat Their Food…,” 690. 72 Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 187. 73 Mónica Morales, Reading Inebriation in Early Colonial Peru (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 12.74 Ibid.75 Ricardo Beltrán y Rózpide and Angel Altolaguirre y Duvale, eds., Colección de las memorias o relaciones que escribieron los virreyes del Perú acerca del estado en que dejaban las cosas generales del reino (Madrid: Imprenta del Asilo de Huérfanos del S.C. de Jesús, 1921–1930), 168. 76 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno, 965. Guaman also speaks against the proliferation of mestizos and the corruption of indigenous peoples as degradation of the social hierarchies and divisions in chapter 31. Other discussions on the subject of demographics and imperial, social, and ethnic separation are found in John Fisher, Bourbon Peru, 1750-1824 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), 55-56; Andrew Fisher and Matthew O’Hara, Imperial Subject: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 77 Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 8.78 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 167.79 Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 73. 80 Garofalo, “La sociabilidad plebeya,” 106.81 Cited in Contreras, “Food Exchanges Between the Old and New Worlds,” 156.82 Graubart, “The Creolization of the New World,” 495; Jane Mangan, Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 91-92.83 Garofalo, “La sociabilidad plebeya,” 110.84 Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 17. 85 David Mandelbaum, “Alcohol and Culture,” Current Anthropology 6 (1965): 282. 86 Bernabé Cobo, History of the Inca Empire: An Account of the Indians’ Customs and their Origin, Together with a Treatise on Inca Legends, History, and Social Institutions, trans. Roland Hamilton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 29.87 Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 66–69.88 Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 109.89 Frances M. Hayashida, “Ancient Beer and Modern Brewers: Ethnoarchaeological Observations of Chicha Production in Two Regions of the North Coast of Peru,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 27 (2008): 161. 90 Brenda Bowser and Justin Jennings, eds., Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 13.

91 Hayashida, “Ancient Beer and Modern Brewers,” 162. 92 Cobo, History of the Inca Empire, 28.93 For a good, short introduction to the political and economic functions of maize beer, refer to Iván R. Reyna, “La chicha y Atahualpa: el encuentro de Cajamarca en la Suma y Narración de los Incas de Juan Diez de Betanzos,” Perífrasis: Revista de Literatura, Teoría y Crítica 1 (2010): 22–36.94 Ibid., 26. 95 Morales, Reading Inebriation in Early Colonial Peru, 56–57. In these pages, Morales also mentions repeated decrees for the closing of taverns in 1572 and again 1595, showing the popularity of the establishments and how the “system had gone renegade.”96 Ibid., 42. 97 Ibid., 56.98 “complejo ocio-embriaguez-idolatría,” Thierry Saignes, comp., Borrachera y memoria: La experiencia de lo sagrado en los Andes (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 1993), 48; Bowser and Jennings, Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes, 13.99 Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdova, Memorial de las historias del nuevo mundo Perú, 125. 100 Garofalo, “La sociabilidad plebeya,” 106.101 The Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert: A Translation Project, s.v., “maize.”102 Bowser and Jennings, Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes, 13; Hayashida, “Ancient Beer and Modern Brewers,” 163. 103 Bowser and Jennings, Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes, 2.104 Garofalo, “La sociabilidad plebeya,” 108. 105 Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise, 168. 106 “Los indios, aunque ya por este tiempo vale barato el vino, lo apetecen poco, porque se contentan con su antiguo brebaje hecho de zara y agua,” Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios Reales, 745.107 Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 118108 Ibid., 125. 109 Garofalo, “La sociabilidad plebeya,” 107. 110 Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants,” 4.111 Ibid., 74.112 Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise, 13.113 Scott, “Más allá del texto,” 25. 114 Earle, “If You Eat Their Food,” 697; Heidi Scott highlights the idea of humans as “seres corpóreos,” an essential notion to keep in mind in studies of food consumption and history, Scott, “Más allá del texto,” 25.115 “Tan mezcladas estas naciones que dificultosamente se puede hablar de la una sola,” words from Juan de Mendoza y Luna, Viceroy of Peru 1607-1615, Beltrán y Rózpide and Angel Altolaguirre y Duvale, Colección de las memorias o relaciones, 156.

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Valeria Mantilla is a PhD student at the University of Toronto researching the early cultural history, emergence, and negotiation of Hispanic identities in the New World, with particular focus on urban centres in the Kingdom of New Granada during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She expects to graduate in 2022, under the supervision of Dr. Jeffrey Pilcher.

Monographs on the Universe: Americans Respond to Ernst Haeckel’s Evolutionary Science and Theology, 1866–1883

Research Article

Daniel HalversonCase Western Reserve University

Ernst Haeckel was one of the nineteenth century’s most famous and influential sci-entists and science popularizers. According to one historian of biology, he was “the chief source of the world’s knowledge of Darwinism” in his time.1 At the same time, he endeavored to set up his own pantheistic-evolutionary theology in the place of Christianity. This study makes use of new information technologies to gather docu-ments which have been largely unavailable to historians until recently. Halverson finds that Haeckel’s ideas met with a poor reception in the United States because American journalists, ministers, and scientists insisted on maintaining a sharp separation between science and theology, while Haeckel was intent on merging the two under an evolutionary-pantheistic framework. Although often regarded as an advocate of the “conflict thesis,” on his own terms he was a deeply religious man who wanted to reform, rather than abolish, theology.

Daniel Halverson

Daniel HalversonMonographs on the UniversePa

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Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent scientists and

science popularizers.2 He was a specialist in marine invertebrate zoology who undertook detailed studies of medusae, radiolarians, and sponges, proposed the first phylogenetic histories, predicted the discovery of “Java Man,” and proposed the “biogenetic law” in embryology. He was also a gifted artist, whose paintings of sea creatures and other animals continue to amaze for both their beauty and detail. But it was not his work as a zoologist or as an artist that earned him a place in the public imagination — it was his tireless advocacy of all things Darwinian. He was one of the first scientists in Germany to embrace Darwin’s Origin of Species and, for 50 years, he was one of its leading public advocates, both in Germany and throughout the world.3

Haeckel was not content with spreading the good news that Darwin had forever changed natural history. He insisted on revolutionizing theology as well. Scientific progress, Haeckel argued, had exposed Christian theology as utterly absurd. It would have to give way before the pantheistic theology of Bruno, Spinoza, and Goethe, which alone was truly rational. Haeckel called it “monism,” as opposed to the “dualism” of Christian theology. As the name suggests, the principal theme of monism was unity. Haeckel argued that there were not two separate substances, realms, or areas of knowledge: one the province of the mental, the spiritual, the supernatural, and the other of crude, lifeless matter. On the contrary, mind and matter were but different aspects of the same underlying substance, which

was all there ever had been, or would be. In its totality, it was God.

Haeckel saw himself as another Martin Luther, bringing a second, scientific Reformation to the public.4 His enormously popular science books presented their readers with a heady mix of Darwinian biology, pantheistic theology, and anti-Christian polemics. In German-speaking Europe, Haeckel’s monism was not a very radical idea. Similar arguments had been made in the previous generation by Jacob Moleschott, David Friedrich Strauss, and Ludwig Büchner.5

In the English-speaking world, however, it was radical, and it transgressed a long-standing boundary between science and Christian theology. For where science was the ascertainment of certain fact on the basis of empirical evidence, theology was the ascertainment of transcendent and eternal truth on the basis of divine revelation. The skepticism of American readers towards Haeckel’s attempt to merge the two can be fairly summarized in the words of one contributor to the National Quarterly Review, who ridiculed his latest offering as a “monograph on the universe.”6 By juxtaposing the limited and specialist character of a “monograph” with the vast comprehensiveness of “the universe,” this contributor reinforced the boundary that Haeckel was intent on transgressing.

His comments were characteristic of the more general reception of Haeckel’s science-theology in the United States. Between the years 1876 and 1883, American journalists, ministers, and scientists overwhelmingly rejected Haeckel’s bid to unite evolutionary

biology with pantheistic theology. They attacked both poles of his thought: his science as undisciplined speculation, and his theology as impious atheism, thereby reinforcing the boundary which, in their view, was supposed to separate science and theology. I will show that it was their insistence on maintaining the boundary that Haeckel was intent on effacing which primarily accounts for the failure of his ideas to win a substantial following in the United States during these years. In their view, his synthesis failed as both science and theology.

Historiography and Method

As Mario Di Gregorio has observed, despite his great fame in

his own lifetime, Haeckel “would have been very surprised probably to find that very soon he was to be completely forgotten by the public.”7 Indeed, it is remarkable how little scholarly attention this important intellectual has received until quite recently. What attention he had previously received was largely from Daniel Gasman in his book, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism. Gasman’s portrait of Haeckel was quite disparaging.8 In his view, “Haeckel’s prophetic synthesis of romantically-

inclined Volkism with evolution and science…provided an ideological basis for National Socialism.”9 Gasman’s view of Haeckel’s science was equally negative: “Although he considered himself to be a close follower of Darwin, there was, in fact, little similarity between them.... [Haeckel] ultimately helped to deny Germany a true Darwinian revolution.”10 Despite the mixed reviews his book received when it was published, Gasman’s Scientific Origins had considerable influence on a generation of scholarship.11 Modern scholarship unites, however, in rejecting his thesis, on the grounds that it is monocausal, anachronistic, and based on insufficient evidence.12

In The Tragic Sense of Life, Robert Richards is concerned with rescuing Haeckel’s reputation from Gasman, as well as from other scholars who have been highly critical. In Richards’ view, Haeckel was “Darwin’s authentic intellectual heir,” and, “undeniably, a scientific and even an artistic genius.”13

When evaluated fairly, Richards argues, the depth of Haeckel’s intellect and accomplishments cannot be denied.14 Associations with National Socialism, however, are entirely spurious, and have their roots in fundamentalism, opposition to evolutionary biology,

Haeckel was the great, unacknowledged, unjustly-

besmirched genius of the nineteenth century


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careless scholarship, and other vices.15 Rightly understood, Richards maintains, Haeckel was the great, unacknowledged, unjustly-besmirched genius of the nineteenth century, whose merit lay not only in his advocacy of evolutionary biology, or in his own artistic and scientific fecundity, but in his opposition to all things clerical and ignorant.16 Richards’ biography is fiery in spirit and rich in detail, but its efforts to rehabilitate its hero are not entirely successful. Haeckel may have been vindicated from the charge of having been a “proto-Nazi,” but it is a long way from “not a proto-Nazi” to “scientific genius,” and the distance is not traversed by the argument and evidence Richards offers.

In From Here to Eternity, Mario Di Gregorio has steered a middle course, understanding Haeckel as neither a proto-Nazi nor “Darwin’s authentic intellectual heir,” but a scientist with a very shaky grasp on what Darwin actually advocated, and who was principally interested in Darwin’s views, and science more generally, as a springboard for his own monistic religion.17 Haeckel may have presented himself as a second Martin Luther, leading a scientific Reformation, but beneath his aggressive rhetoric, Gregorio argues, lurked a profoundly conservative program.18 Haeckel did not want to reshape the society he lived in, but to give it a new, Darwinian rationale. The Christian clergy was to be shown the door, certainly, and scientists set up in their place, but everything else was to carry on more or less as before.19

Gregorio’s argument is thoroughly researched and persuasively reasoned.

Prior scholarship on Haeckel has

tended to acknowledge his interest in theology but to focus on his science. Haeckel, however, viewed his work as a scientist as preparation for a larger synthesis, which, read on its own terms, was emphatically theological. Haeckel believed that empirical science was the sure foundation on which the new, scientific, rational theology would be based. This study follows Haeckel in considering his science and his theology as a whole. It also strives to place his work in a transnational context which has received little attention in the past.

In Haeckel’s time, the invention of high-powered microscopes opened new avenues for scientific discovery. A world of tiny organisms became available for inspection for the first time, and the new science of microscopy flourished. In a similar way, recent technological developments have opened new avenues for historical discovery. Until quite recently, it has been difficult to write intellectual history from any other perspective than the top-down — which is to say, from the perspective of the intellectuals themselves. The reason has been the arrangement of the archival material. To locate the books written by or about Ernst Haeckel is quite feasible. But to locate all the chapters, magazine articles, book reviews, lectures, encyclopedia entries, and other sources written about him in his own lifetime, would have made impossible demands on the time of even the most dedicated researcher. Haeckel himself could not have known everything that was being written about him. Today, however, a much more accurate and complete view is available. According to court documents produced during a legal dispute between Google and

the Author’s Guild, between 2004 and 2013, Google Books digitized more than 20 million volumes — or, in other words, about one-seventh of the world’s total.20 Among these are compendia of periodicals, edited and published under the periodicals’ own names within several years of their original publication, and preserved on library shelves to this day. Often, they have been rendered in formats which allow for keyword searches, thus making it possible to bring the perspectives of once-obscure historical actors to light. As a result, a bottom-up perspective has become possible. In this respect, the positions of the Victorian microscopist and the modern electronic researcher are similar. The object of our study was present all along, but it has only become accessible with the advent of new technology. This study takes advantage of new information technology to render such a perspective on one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent scientists and science popularizers.

Haeckel’s Evolutionary Science and Pantheistic Theology

In 1870, Haeckel’s native Prussia led the North German Confederation

to victory over Napoleon III’s Second Empire. Their victory was crushing: the main Imperial army was surrounded at Sedan, the Emperor taken prisoner, and his regime left to collapse. Otto von Bismarck, who had engineered the war for just this purpose, used the exhilaration of the moment to have his sovereign promoted from King of Prussia to Emperor of Germany and his nation from the “Germanies” to the German Empire. The French were forced

to pay a huge indemnity, to surrender the border province of Alsace-Lorraine, and to endure the humiliation of having the German Empire proclaimed in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors. Many Germans concluded, understandably, that war was both noble and profitable. This experience of the war lent an aura of intrinsic plausibility to the argument on which Haeckel, and not a few of his contemporaries, were to stake their reputations: that struggle was the good and necessary path to improvement for the individual, the nation, and the race.21 Indeed, Darwin had shown it was true. Life was not characterized by the degradation of sin and the hope of salvation, as Christian theology taught, and it certainly was not ruled over by a wise and benevolent providence. On the contrary, Haeckel explained:

If we contemplate the common life and the mutual relations between plants and animals (man included), we shall find everywhere, and at all times, the very opposite of that kindly and peaceful social life which the goodness of the Creator ought to have prepared for his creatures — we shall rather find everywhere a pitiless, most embittered, Struggle of All Against All. Nowhere in nature, no matter wherever we turn our eyes, does that idyllic peace, celebrated by the poets, exist; we find everywhere a struggle and a striving to annihilate neighbors and competitors. Passion and selfishness — conscious or unconscious — is everywhere the motive force of life.22

Christian theology, beginning from the premise of an omnipotent and benevolent Creator, could not but


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regard evil and suffering as an anomaly. They presented for Christian theology a problem to be explained. But if, as John Hedley Brooke has commented, “one can see why it has been said that the theologian’s problem had become Darwin’s solution” the converse can also be said: the theologian’s “problem of evil” became the Darwinian’s “problem of altruism.”23 For how, if nature was a continual storm of ruthless violence, could the existence of selflessness and cooperation be accounted for? The good and all-powerful God of Christianity, for whom the existence of evil was an affront, became, as Haeckel’s comments show, the malevolent and all-powerful “god” of Nature, for whom the existence of altruism became an affront. In both cases, considerable theoretical sophistication had to be deployed in order to reconcile the cohabitation of seemingly incompatible principles beneath the same general, explanatory framework.

Haeckel leaned heavily on the optimism which saturated the Victorian era in order to address this problem. Struggle and suffering were good, he taught, because they lead to progress.24 After all, anyone who was acquainted with the facts of biology, as Charles Darwin had revealed them, could see that the struggle of various creatures for their existence produced the highest and most exalted type of organism: humans in general, and Northern-European, male, professional scientists like Ernst Haeckel in particular. And anyone could see that the struggle of science against Christianity was also beneficent, since, according to Haeckel, it was leading to the general recognition that science provided the most credible answers to

the most important questions, where Christian theology could offer nothing but obfuscation and oppression. That was why, he argued, evolutionary biology was sure to encounter such stiff clerical opposition. Because Christianity thrived on ignorance, and science on knowledge, how could they help but come into conflict? Left implicit in his argument, any German could see that the recent struggle against France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1869–1870 led to long-desired national unification in the declaration of the German Empire. It was easier to make the case for the beneficence of struggle, and more intuitive to affirm it, against the backdrop of such an event. Thus Haeckel’s “most embittered struggle” recreated in nature what Bismarck’s “blood and iron” approach had already created in national politics.

In both the German Empire and in the United States, the dislocations produced by industrialization were keenly felt. In both, it propelled business owners and professionals to positions of power once occupied by the agrarian aristocracy — the “Junkers” in Germany, and the “Planters” in the United States. Haeckel believed that evolutionary biology demonstrated the existence of a “law of progress,” whereby higher forms of life must arise from lower.25 By presenting evolutionary biology as a story of progress, Haeckel was, in effect, presenting himself to the new industrial elite as a spokesman, someone who could legitimate their aspirations to prestige and power in terms at once scientific and theological.26 The rise of the higher organisms from the lower, according to Haeckel’s “law of progress,” recreated in nature the story of the industrial

elite’s own rise to power in society, as did the rise of evolutionary biology against other types of explanation in the scientific community.27

Thus, rapid political and economic changes conspired with the tremendous impact of Darwin’s Origin to call into doubt the intellectual authority of the Protestant and Catholic clergies who had presided over a world so recently thrown into confusion. This was part of the circumstance that the “social Darwinists” — T. H. Huxley, Francis Galton, William Graham Sumner, John Fiske, Ernst Haeckel, and others, but, above all, Herbert Spencer — exploited. Evolutionary biology would legitimate the new society as theology had the old.

It is not surprising, in light of these developments, to discover a hardening of positions all around. On the Catholic side of Christian theology, the First Vatican Council met in the years 1869–1870, and formulated the doctrine of papal infallibility in order to bolster the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The announcement was met with disgust and anger by both the Protestant clergy and secular intellectuals who wanted to

see science displace theology — even as they advanced their own competing and equally uncompromising claims to primacy. On the Protestant side, B. B. Warfield, the student and successor of Darwin’s opponent, the Presbyterian theologian Charles Hodge, developed his doctrine of plenary inspiration, which powerfully informs Protestant fundamentalist theology to this day. According to this view, the Bible is the word-by-word, line-by-line autograph of the Almighty, and therefore cannot be in error.28 Combined with a reassertion of the traditional Protestant emphasis on the “plain meaning” of the text, plenary inspiration amounted to an uncompromising declaration of primacy on the part of the Protestant clergy or, at any rate, those of the Protestant clergy who adopted it.

Secular, scientifically-inclined intellectuals, too, often hardened their outlook during these years. In 1874, the chemist and future president of the American Chemical Society John William Draper published his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science — a highly polemical attack on Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular. He argued that the Catholic clergy had always feared the advance of knowledge and had done everything in its power to suppress it.29 Hence, Christianity and science represented polar extremes in the quest for knowledge — the one an enemy, the other a hero, locked in a cataclysmic struggle for the fate of humanity. Draper’s book bears approximately the same relation to the history of religion and science as George McReady Price’s Outlines of Modern Christianity and Modern

Christianity thrived on ignorance, and science on

knowledge, so how could they help but come into

conflict?


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Science does to the history of life and the earth.30 The pseudohistorical “conflict thesis” launched by Draper’s book, and the pseudoscientific “flood geology” launched by Price’s, have served similar functions for the contending parties of extremists. Both propagate a mythology which pits their own champions against a benighted tyranny of “experts” — clerical or scientific, their role in the drama is the same — with nothing less than the survival of truth as the prize to be secured.

Haeckel, writing from a similar point of view, made ample use of conflict mythology in his books. His strategy was to direct his volleys primarily at the Catholic Church but to argue in such a way that a committed Protestant could hardly fail to understand that their own faith was under attack. It is, indeed, difficult to overstate Haeckel’s bitterness on this point. As Mario Di Gregorio has explained, “it often seems as if Haeckel took events as personal offences from the personal God of the Christian tradition.”31 Gregorio and Richards agree that the roots of his animosity lay in the death of his beloved wife, Anna Sethe, at about the same time he became convinced of the omni-explanatory power of evolutionary biology.32 Lonely, embittered, protected by a powerful patron (the Duke of Weimar), and conscious that he was on the cutting edge of scientific discovery, Haeckel saw little reason to restrain himself. He asked, in a characteristic passage:

How do matters stand with regard to the morality of the priests who announce themselves as the ministers of God’s Word, and whose duty is therefore above all others to

carry out the saving doctrines of Christianity in their own lives? The long, unbroken, and horrible series of crimes of every kind which is offered by the history of the Roman Popes is the best answer to this question. And just as these “Vicars of God on earth” did, so did their subordinates and accomplices, so, too, have the orthodox priests of other sects done; never failing to set the practice of their own course of life in the strongest possible contrast to those noble doctrines of Christian love which were constantly on their lips. And as with Christianity so it is with every other religious and moral doctrine.33

Christians also insulted God with their “low dualistic conception” which “corresponds with a low animal stage of development of the human organism.” He wrote:

The more developed man of the present day is capable of, and justified in, conceiving that infinitely nobler and subtler idea of God which alone is compatible with the monistic conception of the universe, and which recognizes God’s spirit and power in all phenomena without exception.... By it we arrive at the sublime idea of the Unity of God and Nature.34

Haeckel was thus, by his own account, a pantheist in the line of Bruno, Spinoza, and Goethe — more, not less, religious than his theological opponents — and dedicated to all-out war against the Christian clergy.35 But it has always been a challenge for pantheists to clarify the question of wherein their doctrine

differs from atheism. After all, a person who can put God in the place of Nature, and speak enthusiastically of the identity of the divine with the mundane, can just as easily put Nature in the place of God, and never speak of the divine at all. The “sublime idea of the Unity of God and Nature” logically precluded any differentiation between the two and could be difficult to distinguish from atheism. But it would have been difficult for Haeckel to openly declare himself an atheist, for in the Victorian era the value and importance of some form of religion was generally agreed upon. As a practical matter, pantheism served to deflect charges of atheism, which, as we will see, were not slow in coming. But this is not to say that it was insincere. According to Gregorio, Haeckel was “deeply religious, and thought it important to understand, and then expose to the public, the kind of meaning science could give to human life.”36 He seems, like Robert Boyle in the seventeenth century, to have thought of himself as a priest of nature. Hence if God and Nature were a unity, so too were theologians and scientists, and so too theology and science — so thorough was Haeckel’s evolutionary monism.

On this conception of science, conflict with the Christian clergy was both inevitable and right. Indeed, what could have been more Darwinian? In the “most embittered” struggle for their existence, only the fittest theologians would survive. It was a contest, Haeckel declared, between the “more developed man of the present day,” with his “infinitely nobler and sublimer idea of God,” and those still in a “low animal stage of development,” with their “low dualistic conception of God.”37 “The

history of evolution,” he wrote, “is the heavy artillery in the struggle for truth,” before which “whole ranks of dualistic sophisms fall … as before the chain shot of artillery.” It was for just this purpose, Haeckel declared, that he wrote, for “the chief value of [scientists’] hard-won knowledge of details lies in the general results which more comprehensive minds will one day derive from them.”38

Reception of Haeckel’s Science and Theology in the United States39

It is no wonder, then, that his work met with such a hostile reception

in the United States. Journalists and ministers frequently attacked him as an atheist attempting to hijack science for his own purposes. “In the beginning was the nebula, and all things came out of the nebula,” a journalist working for the New Outlook wrote with disgust, dismissing Haeckel’s arguments.40 “It gives a painful idea of the intellectual and moral status of a people [i.e., Germans, especially German intellectuals such as Haeckel],” the North American Review commented, “when the prospect of destroying the faith of mankind in a God is received with cheerful enthusiasm; and it is evident that we have here a reaction against bigotry which is as morbid and unnatural as was the ecclesiastical superstition it attacked.”41 The International Review complained, “While he can see nothing inconceivable in the idea of eternal and immutable laws, on the other hand he sees nothing in the possible work of a creator except what is arbitrary, capricious, or miraculous.”42 Haeckel was often represented in the periodical press as a person on the outermost


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extremes of reasonable discussion, at least when it came to religious topics, because he saw science and revealed religion as irreconcilable opponents.

Ministers were occasionally amiable, as in the Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine, which — though regretting his polemics and dismissing much of Haeckel’s argument as speculation — found that “there are no real facts which Haeckel presents of which any liberal theologian need be afraid.”43 But the response of Charles Hodge, a very prominent Presbyterian theologian, was more typical. He devoted a sub-chapter of his book, What is Darwinism?, to Haeckel. “Haeckel says,” he wrote, “that Darwin’s theory of evolution leads inevitably to Atheism and Materialism. In this we think he is correct.”44 The American Church Review also objected to Haeckel’s presumed atheism, writing that “this supposed consequence of the Darwinian philosophy is over and over again presented as the crowning merit of the author, and as the grandest achievement of the age, or of any age.”45 The Methodist Quarterly Review was more representative, however, thundering that “Atheism plus Darwinism equals Brutalism: the beastliest philosophy to ever nightmare the human soul.”46 Although Haeckel

was, on his own terms, a pantheist rather than an atheist, for American ministers this was a distinction without a difference. As Haeckel himself had written, “Where faith commences, science ends.”47

Charges of atheism were not as frequent in scientific publications. From a technical point of view, such charges would have been irrelevant, and would have simply replicated Haeckel’s original sin of transgressing the boundaries between science with theology. As we will see, however, scientists found other grounds on which to contest his views. In sum, accusations of atheism presented a major hindrance to the dissemination of Haeckel’s ideas in the United States. His claim to stand for true, scientific religion was routinely and angrily rejected.

In his History of Creation, Haeckel noted that “the reproach which is oftenest made against the Descent Theory [i.e., Darwinian biology] is that it is not securely founded, not sufficiently proven,” and pointed these critics to his recent study of sponge physiology for their answer.48 Darwin was indeed reproached frequently with having transgressed established canons of scientific rationality. The situation in Darwin’s time can be usefully, if

anachronistically, compared to that of string theory in our own. String theory offers a powerful explanatory framework for physics, with the potential to unify quantum mechanics and relativity, and has enthusiastic advocates. For all anyone knows, it could be true. But it also has critics who reject it as speculative and unempirical, and hence not “real” science.49 If string theory gains sufficient support within the physics community to become established as the “theory of everything” — the “holy grail” which scientist-popularizers such as Stephen Hawking have been promising for decades — then a similar adjustment to the canons of scientific rationality might follow. In that case, criticisms which are now being offered by string theory’s opponents could easily be made to seem — in hindsight, and by the eventual victors in the debate — rigid, dogmatic, perhaps even personally-motivated or dishonest. It would become challenging to think oneself back into the frame of mind from which those criticisms originated. Something very much like this seems to have occurred in the case of evolutionary biology, only magnified many times over, since it involved not only scientific questions, but also political and theological inquiries.

Such debates about acceptable methods have higher stakes than the success of any particular theory. The preeminence of science — as not just a body of good guesses, but of established knowledge, which are entitled to an extraordinary degree of deference from both the public and other intellectual communities — depends on claims to methodological rigor. Therefore, contests over disciplinary boundaries are implicitly contests about the credibility

of science as a whole. On the one hand, scientists must be free to go where the evidence takes them, otherwise they are followers of an arbitrary creed. On the other hand, if just any sort of theory can pass for science, then the claim to methodological rigor is compromised, and again the enterprise can be made to seem arbitrary. The paradox is not easily resolved, for to assert either methodological rigor or explanatory freedom too strongly is to open science to external attack.

In Darwin’s time, the need for methodological rigor tended to receive the greater emphasis. As James R. Moore has explained, “the standard of proof in scientific explanation remained, in Darwin’s day, one of full and final certainty.”50 Newton’s hypothesis non fingo set the tone for an age which regarded the truth of his theories as permanently established, and, like Euclid’s geometric axioms, closed to future revision.51 The scientist’s freedom to follow where the evidence led was thus secured by his reciprocal obligation to report, not speculation, but certain knowledge. But Darwin admitted in his correspondence that he had not done that. He wrote:

The manner in which I wish to approach the whole subject & in which it seems to me may fairly be approached, I can best illustrate by the case of Light.— The Ether [sic] is hypothetical, as are its undulations; but as the undulatory hypothesis groups together & explains a multitude of phenomena, it is universally now admitted as the true theory. The undulations in the ether are considered in some

The roots of his animosity lay in the death of his beloved wife at about the

same time he became convinced...

...of the omni-explanatory power of evolutionary biology


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degree probable, because sound is produced by undulations in air. So natural selection, I look at as in some degree probable, or possible, because we know what artificial selection can do.— But I believe in Nat[ural] Selection [sic], not because, I can prove in any single case that it has changed one species into another, but because it groups & explains well (as it seems to me) a host of facts in classification, embryology, morphology, rudimentary organs, geological succession & Distribution [sic].52

Thus the explanatory virtue of fruitfulness was to take the place of that of certainty as the most important criteria of evaluation.53

If Darwin’s views were controversial by the canons of scientific rationality current in his time, Haeckel’s science-theology was clearly out of bounds. He was easily pilloried as an undisciplined speculator, and, in view of his aggressive handling of scientific evidence, the charge stuck. His polemical style only compounded the perception. Haeckel wrote with the authority of a Newton — a person who “framed no hypotheses” — but did so in favor of a Darwinian science which was exactly that, whose author did not pretend otherwise, and which was continually exposed to attack for precisely this reason. He was claiming more certainty, and doing so on a less certain basis, than the norms of his time permitted.

Scribner’s Monthly reprimanded him for his “overweening positiveness respecting many matters upon which there is fair ground for a difference of opinion.” Turning the tables on his

anti-clerical polemics, this contributor argued that “he would have done well to say less concerning the odium theologicum and display less of the odium scientificum.”54 The International Review warned that “the reader needs… to be on his guard against assumptions of what should be proved, and vague reasonings from analogy.”55 The point was also taken up in a “letter to the editor,” written to the Nation:

To read some of the writers on the Darwinian theory, one would imagine we were on the eve of another Inquisition; the imaginary martyrdom suffered by Haeckel must be nearly intolerable.... But are we not more in danger of the opposite extreme? Is not religious intolerance in a fair way of being replaced by scientific intolerance?56

Haeckel’s dogmatic and polemical style was frequently criticized in the American periodical press.

Ministers, who had much more to take offense at in Haeckel’s work, and whose territory Haeckel was invading, were correspondingly more severe in their criticism. “The lofty and repeated shrieks of Herr Haeckel are not so much science as atheism struggling to ensconce itself under a scientific structure,” the Methodist Quarterly Review warned.57 “He invents groups of ‘ancestors’ which nobody ever saw,” the Churchman complained, “of whose existence there is no trace or phenomenal proof.... Who accepts the original postulate, and swallows all the subsequent guesses, will write Q. E. D. after the infallible conclusion.”58 The American Church Review was equally caustic: “Mr. Haeckel’s book may be described as a

collection of mistakes and confusion in two volumes.... such a labored mass of pretensions and inconsequence we have seldom seen.”59 Less irately, but in the same vein, Bibliotheca Sacra commented that “Schmidt and Haeckel are too ready to reason upon the subject from a priori principles, and are offensively dogmatic.”60 It is noteworthy that the most persistent line of defense employed by these ministers was not that Darwin’s views, or Haeckel’s, were incompatible with revelation, but that they were incompatible with the principles of science.

Criticisms of Haeckel, on the grounds that he was an undisciplined speculator, were hardly confined to journalists or ministers. They were also made by the scientists for whom Haeckel claimed to speak. They frequently accused him of mishandling his evidence. “Haeckel’s work is inaccurate to a startling extent,” Charles Sedgwick Minot, writing for the American Naturalist, noted, for “He figures in detail things he cannot have seen, because they do not exist, and he describes phenomena that do not occur.… [I]t is unsafe to quote his writings as authorities in matters of fact.” Minot further regretted that Haeckel

was regarded “with almost unqualified admiration” by some of his younger colleagues.61 Elsewhere, Minot wrote that Haeckel had “resigned his right to be reckoned an equal in the circle of serious investigators,” through his mishandling of scientific evidence, and listed, in support, numerous researchers who had criticized Haeckel.62 In Popular Science Monthly, his fellow materialist and popular science writer, Karl Vogt, dismissed Haeckel as “the zoological pope,” and chastised “the brusqueness with which he has striven and still strives to impose his exceedingly poetic fancies upon others.”63 They could hardly have been more clear, or unequivocal, in their condemnation.

His most consistent opponent within the scientific community, by far, was Alexander Agassiz. He was the son of Darwin’s old nemesis, Louis Agassiz, and, like Haeckel, a specialist in marine invertebrate zoology. Haeckel frequently used Alexander’s father as a prop in his attacks on defenders of the “low dualistic conception” of God, and the “Creation theory” which went with it. The enmity must have been deeply personal for Haeckel, for he was still denouncing Louis Agassiz in 1904 — more than three decades after

Haeckel was a panthiest, more, not less, religious than his

theological opponents and dedicated to an all-out war against

the Christian clergy


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his death.64 Louis Agassiz held Haeckel in a similarly low regard, as Stephen Jay Gould — who discovered the old naturalist’s copy of Haeckel’s Natural History of Creation, complete with marginalia, in the Harvard library — has shown.65 Alexander Agassiz, who adored his father, wrote scathingly about Haeckel in the American Journal of Science and Arts:

A man so skilled in coarse invective, who has risen to such a height of intolerance, is proof against anything so tame as fact or argument.... absurd claims to omniscience… deliberately falsifies facts… manufactures with names and figures an archetype which never existed… all the bitterness of his bigotry and dogmatism… with scientific productions like these we have no concern.... Haeckel’s claim to be recognized as a true and devoted student of nature will be forgotten. In its place he will gain, what he seems to seek, the front rank amongst scientific demagogues.66

The Boston Society of Natural History commented that his drawings were “wholly diagrammatic and could not have been drawn from either actual or optical sections,” while the American Journal of Microscopy observed that his “misrepresentations necessarily justify more than the customary precaution in accepting as facts his evidence in other directions, wherever room is left for the slightest reasonable doubt.”67 Haeckel did not seem to have many defenders in the American scientific establishment, though his quieter contributions to the physiology of marine invertebrates were discussed on much the same terms as

those of any researcher. American journalists, ministers,

and scientists occasionally complained about Haeckel’s materialism as well. “Man and beast and potatoes are put on the same level,” wrote Irenaeus Prime for the New York Observer and Chronicle, “having no functions except the corporeal, and with no principle of life which survives the dissolution of the corpus.”68 Another journalist, writing for the International Review, complained “that while… no power is admitted outside of matter itself, we are required to assume, without any cause, the existence of matter and its potencies and tendencies, the whole of which are coolly taken for granted and reasoned on.”69 Observing German-American communities, a journalist for The Atlantic wrote that “the minds that form theirs are German; they read Büchner, Vogt, and Haeckel. The German radical or the German materialist is not as fair-minded as the American who entertains the same views. It were hard to find any one more positive or more impatient of contradiction.”70 American journalists often rejected Haeckel’s materialism as speculative and superficial.

Ministers also objected to Haeckel’s materialism. The American Church Review thought it obvious that living things were designed on an ideal plan, for:

what would be the value… of the materials of a ship, or of a locomotive, without the spirit-power that contrived and adjusted the several parts, and ordered their relations to one another? Of what value would the wood and the iron used in these grand achievements

of human genius be, without the spiritual intelligence that conceived and adjusted the relations of these materials, and foresaw and ordered the result of those relations?71

The Methodist Quarterly Review ridiculed Haeckel’s materialism: “Spinoza, Haeckel, with pantheist and atheists generally, boast of reducing all things to a single primal substance. Is it not a poor, tame, groveling boast?”72 In a more analytic vein, the Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review devoted a lengthy article, in which Haeckel featured prominently, to criticizing “Materialism in Germany.”73

American scientists were divided on the question of Haeckel’s materialism. The American Journal of Microscopy reported of a conference: “it was generally agreed that the theory of evolution includes the origin of life by natural processes from inorganic matter, and that such an origin is no more improbable than any other tenet of evolution.”74 The American Naturalist affirmed that “the essential elements of the problem [i.e. of life] are undoubtedly to be expressed in terms of matter and force without respect to what the nature of that matter may be.”75 But The Popular Science Monthly dismissed Haeckel’s materialism, writing that it was “quite in the spirit of the false philosophy… which has been so pernicious to German science.”76 Materialism was, in sum, frequently rejected on the grounds that it was speculative, superficial, and contrary to common sense, though Haeckel was hardly alone, among scientists, in defending it.

American journalists, ministers, and scientists accused Haeckel of

violating norms of scientific rationality by indulging in undisciplined speculation and dogmatic polemics. They rejected his claim to represent empirical, fact-driven science, and also genuine theology. Though, by his own lights, he was a pantheist, and more, not less, pious than Christian theologians, he seemed to most American journalists and ministers an atheist and a materialist, and hence representative of the very antithesis of genuine piety. American scientists were also severe in their criticism of his larger, synthetic project. They attacked his credibility as a scientist on the grounds that he falsified and mishandled evidence. They tended to abstain from commenting on his pantheism, however, and to return mixed results concerning his materialism. When they did evaluate his materialism, it was as a scientific, not a theological, proposition.

As we have seen, Haeckel’s American readers were aware that science, as they conceived it, was not Haeckel’s main concern. He said, and they agreed, that his principal motive for pursuing it was to further a larger project, for “the chief value of [scientists’] hard-won knowledge of details lies in the general results which more comprehensive minds will one day derive from them.”77 In his view, this was the unification of true science with true theology; from the standpoint of American commentators, it was a speculative and unworthy product, packaged in


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Endnotes

1 Erik Nordenskiöld, The History of Biology: A Survey, trans. Leonard Bucknall Eyre (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929), 515.2 Mario A. Di Gregorio, From Here to Eternity: Ernst Haeckel and Scientific Faith (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 17; Nick Hopwood, Haeckel’s Embryos: Evolution, Images, and Fraud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3; Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2.3 Richards, Tragic Sense of Life, 2, 94.4 Gregorio, From Here to Eternity, 574.5 Described in Frederick Gregory, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Dordrecht,Holland: Springer, 1977), passim.6 Edward I. Sears, ed., “The Cell-Theory and some of its Relations,” The National Quarterly Review, 30 (1875): 325, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/iau.31858045492257.7 Gregorio, From Here to Eternity, 544.8 Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) has also discussed Ernst Haeckel, but it is almost exclusively concerned with one aspect of Haeckel’s work, his “biogenetic law,” and reliant on Gasman’s Scientific Origins for biographical and contextual information.9 Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: Macdonald & Co., 1971), xxxviii.10 Gasman, Scientific Origins, 10–11.11 C. A. Culotta, “Review of The Scientific Origins of National Socialism. Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, by Daniel Gasman,” Isis 63, no. 4 (Dec. 1972): 587–588; Ralph H. Bowen, “The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League by Daniel Gasman,” The American Historical Review 78, no. 3 (Jun. 1973): 711–712.12 Gregorio, From Here to Eternity, 561; Richards, Tragic Sense of Life, 448–453; Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 70.13 Richards, Tragic Sense of Life, 8, 376, 439.14 Ibid., xviii, 108, 166, 439.15 Ibid., 448–453.

16 Ibid., xviii, 398–403, 500–503.17 Gregorio, From Here to Eternity, 200–201, 364–376, 570–574.18 Ibid., 21, 574. 19 Ibid., 21–25, 27–29, 560–563.20 That is to say that the total number of unique editions of books which appear in library records, not of individual physical copies. Thus one English edition of Haeckel’s Natural History of Creation, printed 20,000 times, would count as one book, not 20,000. Authors Guild, Inc. vs. Google, Inc., 1 (S.D. N.Y. 2013), accessed April 15, 2018, https://www.scribd.com/document/184162035/Google-Books-ruling-on-fair-use-pdf; “Books of the World, Stand Up and be Counted! All 129,864,880 of You,” Google Book Search, August 5, 2010, accessed April 15, 2018, http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/ books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html.21 Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 137.22 Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation, or, The Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes, 2 vols., trans. E. Ray Lankester (New York: D. Appleton, 1876), v. 1: 20, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/chi.27459469. Italics in the original. See also Hopwood, Haeckel’s Embryos, 63.23 John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, Canto classics edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 431.24 Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 135.25 Haeckel, History of Creation, v. 1: 16. There has been some controversy over the question of whether Haeckel should be considered a “Darwinian” in the sense of having faithfully communicated Charles Darwin’s own views, or some reasonably cogent interpretation thereof. According to Mario Di Gregorio and Peter Bowler, Haeckel misunderstood Darwin and should not be counted a “Darwinian.” According to Robert Richards, Haeckel was Darwin’s “authentic intellectual heir.” Certainly, this is how Haeckel understood himself. “There is no doubt,” he wrote, referring to Darwin’s work in Origin, “that this immense extension of our intellectual horizon must be looked upon as by far the most important, and rich in results, among all the numerous and grand advances which natural science has made in our day.” In order to avoid entering into the question, the term “evolutionary biology” has been preferred to “Darwinian biology” throughout. Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, 25th anniversary ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 187, 190–93, 240; Gregorio, From Here to Eternity, 19; Richards, Tragic Sense of Life, 376; Haeckel, History of Creation, v. 1: 1.26 Bowler identified this as a more general strategy of the Darwinian and social Darwinian intellectuals. As he has insisted, following Robert M. Young, “Darwinism is social.” Bowler, Evolution, 97–98, 144; Gregorio, From Here to Eternity, 26.27 Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 143–144.28 Christopher Ben Simpson, Modern Christian Theology (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 155–57.29 John Draper, History of the Conflict between Science and Religion (New York: Appleton, 1874).30 George McReady Price, Outline of Modern Christianity and Modern Science (Oakland,

offensively dogmatic language. Thus, Haeckel’s “monographs on the universe” could not be accepted, either as genuine science or genuine theology..78 In the fluid situation which resulted from the publication of Origin, the boundaries of science as a whole were being redrawn

— a development which could not but concern theologians, involving as it did the nature of God, the authority of scripture, and the goodness of creation. In this respect, Haeckel’s unification of science and theology represents a road not taken. ◆


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CA: Pacific, 1902).31 Gregorio, From Here to Eternity, 546.32 Ibid.; Richards, Tragic Sense of Life, 105–106.33 Ernst Haeckel, Freedom in Science and Teaching: From the German of Ernst Haeckel (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1879), 97–98.34 Haeckel, History of Creation, v. 1: 70–71.35 Gregorio, From Here to Eternity, 45–46; Hopwood, Haeckel’s Embryos, 66.36 Gregorio, From Here to Eternity, 573.37 Haeckel, History of Creation, v. 1: 70. See also Hopwood, Haeckel’s Embryos, 66.38 Ibid., 79–80.39 For the sake of analytic clarity, this section has been organized into three sub-sections, each of which discusses a frequently-recurring argument against Haeckel’s views — that they were atheistic, that they were dogmatic/speculative/unreliable, and that they were materialistic. Each subsection has been divided by the type of publication in which the argument occurs — journalistic, theological, and scientific.40 Taylor Lewis, “Uppermost Topics: An Impersonal God,” New Outlook 40 (Jan.-June 1875): 146, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.31924066372271.41 “Carl Vogt,” The North American Review (1821–1940) 110, no. 227 (Apr. 1870): 284.42 “Recent English Books: History of Creation,” International Review (Jul. 1876): 537.43 S. J. Barrows, “Ernst Haeckel and His Theory of Development,” The Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine 6 (July-Dec. 1876): 293, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/iau.31858032670311.44 Charles Hodge, What is Darwinism? (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Company, 1874), 95.45 “The Infallibilities,” The Churchman 39 (Jan.-Jun. 1879): 5, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015086588673.46 “Quarterly Book Table,” The Methodist Quarterly Review 59 (1877): 102, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951d003199172.47 Haeckel, History of Creation, v. 1: 9. Italics in the original.48 Ibid., xiv.49 See, for instance, Natalie Wolchover, “A Fight for the Soul of Science,” Quanta (December 16, 2015), accessed April 15, 2018, https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundaries-of-science-20151216.50 James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 195.51 Hypothesis non fingo: “I frame no hypotheses.”52 Darwin to Cuthbert Collingwood, March 14, 1861, Darwin Correspondence Project, accessed April 15, 2018, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-3088.xml;query=14%20march%201861;brand=default.53 Moore, Controversies, 194–205.54 “Haeckel’s Evolution of Man,” Scribner’s Monthly 19 (Nov. 1879–Apr. 1880): 149.55 “Recent English Books: History of Creation,” 537.56 J. H. Richards, ed., The Nation: A Weekly Journal Devoted to Politics, Literature, Science,

and Art 23 (Jul. 1–Dec. 31, 1876): 286, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b000550405.57 D.D. Whedon, ed., “English Reviews,” The Methodist Quarterly Review 61, fourth series, vol. 31, (1879): 753, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433081737920.58 “The Infallibilities,” The Churchman 39 (Jan.-Jun. 1879): 5, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015086588673.59 James Craik, “The Revived Materialism,” The American Church Review 32 (1880): 429, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.ah68tw.60 George F. Weight, “Recent Works Bearing on the Relation of Science to Religion,” The Bibliotheca Sacra, vol. 33, eds. Edwards A. Park, George E. Day, J. P. Thompson, and D. W. Simon (Andover: Warren F. Draper, 1876), 453, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433081752416.61 Charles Sedgwick Minot, “A Sketch of Comparative Embryology,” The American Naturalist: An Illustrated Magazine of Natural History 14 (1880): 249, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015000399777.62 Charles Sedgwick Minot, “Criticisms of Haeckel,” The American Naturalist: An Illustrated Magazine of Natural History 11 (1877): 368–371, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015000399504. They were: the German physiologists Victor Hensen and Theodor Bischoff, the German zoologists Carl Semper, Robby Kossmann, and Eduard Oscar Schmidt, the German Chemist F. E. Schulze, the British morphologist Francis Balfour, the Russian zoologist Elias Mecznikow, the young French zoologist Jule Barrois, as well as the already-mentioned American zoologist, Alexander Agassiz.63 Karl Vogt, “Pope and anti-Pope,” The Popular Science Monthly 14 (Nov. 1878–Apr. 1879): 321.64 Ernst Haeckel, The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1905), 352.65 Stephen Jay Gould, “Agassiz’ Later, Private Thoughts on Evolution: His Marginalia in Haeckel’s Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868),” in Two Hundred Years of Geology in America: Proceedings of the New Hampshire Bicentennial Conference on the History of Geology, ed. Cecil J. Schannder (Hanover, NH: Univ. Press of New England, 1979), 277–282.66 Alexander Agassiz, “Botany and Zoology,” The American Journal of Science and Arts 11, whole no. 111 (Jan.–Jun. 1876): 74, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044102904091.67 J. S. Kingsley and H. W. Conn, “Some Observations on the Embryology of the Teleosts,” in Memoirs Read before the Boston Society of Natural History: Being a New Series of the Boston Journal of Natural History, vol. 3 (Boston: Boston Society of Natural History, 1878–1894), 198. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015035552648. Nordenskiöld has concurred in their assessment, see History of Biology, 517; “Transactions of Societies,” The American Journal of Microscopy and Popular Science, 5 (1880): 39, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044081507246.68 Samuel Irenaeus Prime, “Made Without a Maker,” in Irenaeus Letters: Originally Published in the New York Observer (New York: The New York Observer, 1881), 335, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015010794108.

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69 “Recent English Books: History of Creation,” 537.70 F. F. Lalor, “The Germans in the West,” The Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics 32 (1873): 459–470.71 James Craik, “The Revived Materialism,” The American Church Review 32 (1880): 428–447, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.ah68tw.72 Borden P. Bowne, “Studies in Theism,” The Methodist Quarterly Review 61, fourth series, vol. 31 (1879): 775–778, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433081737920.73 “Materialism in Germany,” Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review, New Series 4 (1875): 273–305, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.319510028071579.74 “Transactions of Societies,” The American Journal of Microscopy and Popular Science 3 (1878): 263, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044081507253.75 John A. Ryder, “The Gemmule vs. the Plastidule as the Ultimate Physical Unit of Living Matter,” The American Naturalist: An Illustrated Magazine of Natural History 13 (1879): 17, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433007813425.76 Emil du Bois-Reymond, “The Seven World-Problems,” The Popular Science Monthly 20 (Nov. 1881–Apr. 1882): 435, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101010904744.77 Haeckel, History of Creation, 79–80.78 “The Cell-Theory and some of its Relations,” The National Quarterly Review 30 (1874): 325, accessed April 15, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/iau.31858045492257.

Daniel Halverson is a graduate student concentrating in the history of biology, c. 1850–1950. He earned his B.A. in history from Florida Atlantic University, and his M.A. in history from Case Western Reserve University. He is interested in cross-fertilization between science, theology, and skepticism, strategies of science popularization, and epistemic questions lying at the intersection between science, history, and philosophy. An earlier version of this paper won the Melvin Kranzberg Prize from Case Western Reserve University for the best master’s thesis in history.

Book ReviewsMatthew Karp. This Vast South-ern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

In 2005, Edward Ayers argued that American historians have become too familiar with the Civil War so that we know the outcome too well. This clouds our interpretation of sources and our understanding of the war. Eleven years later, Matthew Karp seeks to remedy this familiarity by examining old sources in a refreshing way that does not let his modern perspective tint his analysis. In This Vast Southern Empire, Karp places proslavery statesmen in a new light, showing how “these men organized U.S. foreign relations around what might fairly be called a foreign policy of slavery” that was “international in aspiration” but “profoundly national in operation” (7, 5). By reevaluating familiar sources, Karp shows that, using the strength of the federal government, prominent slaveholders sought to protect and even expand “hemispheric slavery” to defend their own peculiar institution and place America on the global stage as a proslavery force.

Karp distinctly diverges from

Eugene Genovese’s argument that the slave South was falling behind the rest of the country and the world, which led to secession. Instead, he shows that prominent slaveholders and the leaders of the Confederacy believed in an “arrogant arithmetic of King Cotton” that posited slavery and its products as “the political and economic fulcrum of that larger world” (238, 239). Karp argues that the slave South actually had an unerring confidence in their social and economic institutions’ ability to give their new Confederacy a prestigious place in the global political sphere.

Throughout his work, Karp constantly rejects a teleological interpretation of slaveholders’ intentions and devotion to slavery in the Antebellum period. He makes the compelling point that it is imperative not to let modern perspectives cloud historical analysis. Prominent slaveholders had the utmost confidence in the power of American Southern slavery and their federal government’s international clout. Slaveholders’ “convictions cannot be dismissed because they were overtaken by later events or refuted by later investigations” (133). In fact, this argument is so crucial to Karp that he

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poignantly closes his book by saying, “We can be grateful that slaveholders never gained the world they craved, but we achieve nothing by failing to take the true measure of its dimensions” (256). Karp takes his own advice and truly immerses himself in the contemporary context of his sources to reap a richer analysis.

The effectiveness of Karp’s argument is primarily in his careful framework and efficient composition. In his first chapter, he shows how slaveholders understood the importance of using American national power to stand against British antislavery to lend context before discussing the Southern impetus to build up both the army and navy to protect hemispheric slavery. Beginning with the importance of a “foreign policy of slavery” lays the ground for the rest of his argument; he goes on to assert that proslavery statesmen were exceedingly confident in a global reliance on slavery and were driven to use federal foreign policy to protect the institution (31). In nearly every chapter, Karp harkens back to a previous chapter’s point to help the reader craft a deep and persuasive understanding of his position. He carefully builds his argument layer by layer, thereby crafting a cogent line of reasoning.

To construct and support his argument, Karp uses the speeches, correspondence, and diaries of his major players: John C. Calhoun, Duff Green, Abel Upshur, Lieutenant Matthew Maury, J.D.B. De Bow, and Presidents Tyler, Polk, and Taylor. He also relies on political organs like the Madisonian and the Charleston Mercury and popular writers like Louisa McCord and William J. Grayson to

show the Southern public’s reaction to and understanding of their politicians’ actions. Karp does not restrict himself to well-known sources, examining less popular writings like William Henry Trescot’s 1849 A Few Thoughts on the Foreign Policy of the United States. This work stems from his dissertation, so it is exhaustively researched despite it being his first book.

More importantly, Karp believes the sources he uses. He quotes historian Frederick Cooper’s insistence on the need to stop translating historical sources into “‘modern, antimodern, or postmodern discourses’” and instead “‘listen to what is being said” (153). Karp takes this advice to heart. He does his best not to project his modern view and teleological knowledge of the Civil War onto his sources. When slaveholding politicians profess their confidence in the global power of slavery or their anxiety over an emancipated Cuba, Karp accepts their convictions as genuine. Though Karp unfortunately does not always name those historians he disagrees with, he does frequently acknowledge differing historiographical views that present a view of braggadocious slaveholders floundering in a global context. He always refutes these arguments with his careful, contextual reading of sources.

Karp makes a convincing argument. His fluency in the sources, his confidence in going against the historiographical grain, and his penchant for making an evenhanded, nuanced argument that addresses remaining historical questions strengthen his enterprise. Moreover, his careful and skillful way of building upon his own argument creates a nearly airtight logic that

decidedly convinces the reader. On top of his adept historical work, Karp is also an adroit writer whose prose brings his characters to life and never lets his point get lost in the research. Because of his skillful ability to build a clear line of logic and his artful writing, Karp’s work is equally valuable to Civil War scholars and foreign policy academics as it is to the dilettante history buff.

Andrea L. SpencerVillanova University

Nancy MacLean. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York: Viking, 2017.

Soon after its publication, Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains ignited a firestorm, with supporters lauding its bold discoveries and critics blasting these same discoveries as falsehoods. In online forums, libertarians have torn apart the book and its footnotes; some have even demanded MacLean’s firing from Duke University. Meanwhile, MacLean and her backers have stood firm, dismissing the angry reaction as further proof of the Right’s fanaticism. Amid this chorus of praise and condemnation, it is tempting to allow present political divisions to overshadow what MacLean seeks to reveal about the past.

But then, MacLean herself has encouraged this partisan and presentist response. As seen in the book's subtitle, Democracy in Chains aims to be an exposé of the sinister route to our anti-democratic era. In the opening pages, MacLean vows to offer the key to understanding “the true origin story

of today’s well-heeled radical right” (xviii). With this hyperbolic claim, her narrative unfolds methodically from the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to the Age of Trump. While “the rest of us” failed to notice, MacLean writes, libertarians used subterfuge to crush unions, suppress voting rights, privatize public resources, and deny climate change.

The villain of MacLean’s drama is James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who founded “public choice economics,” a school of thought conceptualizing political behavior in terms similar to market behavior. At the University of Virginia in 1956, Buchanan convinced president Colgate Darden to establish the Thomas Jefferson Center, which provided the philosophical basis for safeguarding states’ rights after Brown. Later at George Mason University, Buchanan increasingly emphasized the need to impose constitutional “manacles” on democracy in order to prevent a majority from limiting economic freedom with “collectivist” programs like Social Security, Medicare, and public education (117). He further argued that because their preferred policies could never be passed democratically, libertarians needed to enact piecemeal reforms that cumulatively would fulfill a hidden agenda. By the 1970s, billionaire Charles Koch discovered in this strategy the puzzle piece “he had been seeking for at least a quarter century” (xx). Coupling Koch’s think tank network with Buchanan’s intellectual foresight, the libertarian cadre ultimately executed its nefarious “master plan” to save capitalism from democratic governance.

The book’s strengths arise from

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the selection, if not the interpretation, of its subject. MacLean draws upon unexamined sources, including confidential letters verifying Koch’s multi-million dollar investment in the Center for the Study of Public Choice. She also restores the importance of Buchanan, who deeply influenced contemporary views on markets and regulation but has received little sustained attention aside from S.M. Amadae’s Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy (2003).1 Furthermore, while most scholars have followed Lisa McGirr in focusing on the Sunbelt, MacLean returns to the South, putting her book in conversation with studies of racial politics like Joseph Crespino’s Strom Thurmond’s America (2012).

But MacLean’s conspiratorial tone tends to dilute the book’s nuances. Positing the existence of a “fifth column,” chapter one links Buchanan to segregationist senator John Calhoun on the hazy grounds that both sought “to concentrate vast wealth, so as to deny elementary fairness and freedom to the many” (234). This Calhoun parallel foreshadows MacLean’s case study connecting Buchanan to Chile’s authoritarian constitution under Pinochet, an example she views as a scheme to entrench the “capitalist class”

1 Historians like Jennifer Burns and Angus Burgin illustrate the tendency to focus on a trio of figures: Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. See Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2009); Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

(155). In a Hartzian vein, she even generalizes that without the “wicked” and “diabolical” Buchanan, the radical Right would be just “another dead-end fantasy” (xviii).

Ironically, however, MacLean divulges a broader lesson in these reductionist flaws. Her teleological narrative exaggerates two dominant historiographical trends: portraying libertarianism as an elite, intellectual maneuver and, in Reagan’s words, as the “heart and soul of conservatism.”2

MacLean’s work falls victim to both these weaknesses by claiming to be an ideas-driven counterpart to Jane Mayer’s Dark Money (2016), which focused on the organizational networks erected by the ultra-rich to control America’s political system. Indeed, MacLean pushes Mayer’s tale even further, demonstrating that conservatism no longer stands as the “orphan” of historical scholarship largely because libertarianism has become its synecdoche.3

In this sense, she follows in the footsteps of numerous other historians of the Right who still take George Nash’s foundational 1976 study The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 as their starting point. It was Nash who began the Whiggish tendency of subsuming libertarianism under conservatism and depicting fringe thinkers emerging from exile, themes that are central to the assumptions undergirding MacLean’s

2 “Inside Ronald Reagan: A Reason Inter-view,” Reason, May 1978, 47.3 Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” The American Historical Re-view, Vol. 99, No. 2 (April 1994): 409-429.

own triumphalist work. What MacLean ignores, however, are the more subtle interventions made by works such as Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) and Daniel Rodgers’ Age of Fracture (2011), both of which imply a crucially under-examined point: that libertarianism was not only a right-wing coalition partner but also a magnet for leftist politics. In sum, a fairer story likely hides within MacLean’s stark extremes; she inadvertently invites us to keep searching for it.

Andrina TranYale University

James Ross. Henry VI: A Good, Simple and Innocent Man. London: Allen Lane, 2016.

Writing a biography of Henry VI is an unenviable task. As K.B. McFarlane observed, himself one of the greatest historians of the fifteenth century, penning a biography of any medieval figure is beset with challenges. The surviving sources are often insufficient to penetrate through bald narrative to reveal the personalities, characters, and motivations which lurk beneath events. These difficulties are even more pronounced with Henry VI, since the formal records of his reign are peculiarly open to question. Debates continue as to whether he was an active monarch or a mere cipher for others — controlled by them, and obediently assenting to their decisions. Were the words written in his name his own? Were the documents he signed his work? Were his decisions truly his? Or was his entire kingship — and its records — dictated, inspired, and contrived by those around him: his wife,

ministers, and household servants? Tackling these evidential problems, over a reign which lasted forty years and saw the collapse of the Lancastrian empire in France, the largest popular rising for seven decades, and the beginning of the Wars of the Roses is no mean feat. It is small wonder that existing biographies of the king have tended to be substantial affairs: Betram Wolffe’s Henry VI runs for 400 pages; Ralph Griffiths’ definitive The Reign of Henry VI for 968; and David Grummitt’s Henry VI for 261. By contrast, James Ross endeavours here to get to grips with Henry in just 117 pages.

Ross’ achievement is significant. That his essentially narrative account covers Henry’s life from his ascension to the throne in 1422 to his murder in 1471 in such confined space is, in and of itself, a skilful exercise in concision. Ross also writes with considerable elegance, and has an eye for telling quotations that enrich his text, as with his deployment of Abbott Whetehamstede’s comment that Henry was “half-witted in affairs of state” (21). This is enabled by the formidable breadth of research upon which this study is founded, with Ross drawing on a wealth of primary sources—both printed and manuscript—as well as all the major secondary literature, from McFarlane’s classic work of the mid-20th century to Katherine Lewis’ recent gendered analysis of Henry’s kingship. Yet most impressive is Ross’ general portrait of Henry, and his involvement in government, before he fell into madness in 1453. Covering a range of evidence, from John Rous’ chronicle to John Blacman’s pious life of the king, and from Henry’s instructions regarding the construction of Eton to

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the judicial records of Thomas Kerver’s trial in 1444, Ross builds a picture of a king who did occasionally intervene in the administration of his realm, but who “was not as active in government… as might have been expected.” Henry VI instead relied “on a chosen few to run his realm” and failed “to lead his desperate subjects in war,” which led to “domestic chaos and foreign defeat” by the 1450s (43). Steering a course between Bertram Wolffe’s depiction of Henry as an active and vindictive monarch, and John Watts’ image of him as a nonentity, this is perhaps the most balanced, nuanced, and compelling assessment of the king.

However, there are issues with Ross’ account. There are a small number of factual concerns. For instance, his claim that the value of William Aiscough’s goods seized by rebels in 1450 was £4000 is likely mistaken (57). Although his losses were valued at £4000 in 1452, a year earlier they were valued at just £128 and half a mark, so this figure seems to

represent retrospective exaggeration. There are also a number of points—perhaps inevitably, given the brevity of the text—where one feels like Ross could have said a little more, and that his treatment is just too fleeting. This is the case, for example, regarding Cade’s rebellion in 1450 (60–61), Henry’s clash with the Duke of York at Dartford in 1452 (63), and the Battle of Barnet in 1471 (96). Nonetheless, these minor drawbacks are insignificant next to the book’s many strengths. Ross’ biography — replete with zest, perceptiveness, and insight, in spite of its short length — forms a marked contrast with his subject’s life, which was marked by ineptitude, inability, and insanity, and dragged out for nearly half a century. As by far the shortest scholarly biography of Henry VI, this is a worthy introduction to a fascinating figure.

Samuel LaneChirst Church, University of Oxford

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