Chapter 8
Civilizations That Are Imperiled Through Contact With Colored Races: Latin America

"A single half-caste race, with here the Negro and there the Indian predominating over the conquering Spaniard, obtains from the Atlantic to the Pacific..from the frontier of the United States to the southern limits of the continent...American Indians, Negroes, Orientals, and Europeans of different origin, are creating the race of the future in homes in which mixed blood is the rule...The Negroes of the Congo have mingled equally with the Spaniard and the Indian. The African woman satisfied the ardor of the conquerors: she has darkened the skin of the race... The Negro is a formidable influence in America (Latin America). But they are revenged for their enslavement in that there blood is mingled with that of their masters...The black race is doing its work and the continent is returning to its primitive barbarism. This retrogression constitutes a very serious menace. In South America civilization is dependent upon the numerical predominance of the victorious Spaniard, on the triumph of the white over the mulatto, the Negro and the Indian." (Latin American: Its Rise and Its Progress, by F. Garcia Calderon, with Preface by Raymond Poincare' of the French Academy, now Prime Minister of the French Republic. Calderon is a Peruvian diplomat. His work published in 1913 is of great importance in that the author sees that it is miscegenation that is working the ruin of Latin America.)

Holland and England; Teutonic America! Portugal and Spain; Latin America! The first transform a wilderness into a mighty civilization; the second conquer a continent, implant a culture and preside over its decay.

In North America the Caucasian, after three centuries of contact with colored races, constitutes ninety percent of the population. In Latin America the Caucasian constitutes less than ten percent of the population. The remaining ten percent of the inhabitants of North America are divided between the black and red races and the mongrel offspring of these rases mixed with each and with the white. The remaining ninety percent of the inhabitants of Latin America are likewise divided between black and red and their mongrel offspring resulting from their unions with each other and with the white. North America is nine-tenths white; Latin America in nine-tenths colored. North America possesses a vigorous, expanding, self-sustaining civilization; South America, a puny restricted, dependent culture which, apart from the extreme south of the continent, is receding before a "terrible hybridism."

Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil possess the whitest populations, and this fact, together with recent immigration and capital from Europe, accounts for their relative advancement. These countries are the strength and hope of the continent. They link it in a racial and cultural way with civilization.

We cannot understand North America without knowing England, nor South America without knowing Spain. We may say that England kept the northern continent white and that Spain mongrelized the southern. The one sought homes for race and civilization; the other, by failing to furnish white wives for her colonists, inaugurated the most colossal example of miscegenation that the world has known. In a lecture at Clark University in 1913, Senor Pezet, Minister from Peru, contrasting the racial history of the two Americas said:

"Your men formed an unmixed mass...they came determined to settle down and so they brought their families with them...Our men did not bring their women and families until many years after the conquest, and, in consequence, the Spaniards from the very commencement took unto themselves Indian women and the offspring became the Mestizos,' a mixed race that the haughty, pure Castilian in Spain never countenanced, although they were of their own flesh and blood...This mixing of the races; white and Indian, after a time was not frowned upon by the haughty Spanish monarchy; on the contrary, it was encouraged, it being considered the best possible means of establishing a uniform race."

With the coming of Negro slaves from Africa to the Latin colonies there was added another racial element to be incorporated into the "uniform race." The encouraging of the colonial white to intermarry with the colored races in the colonies was not confined to Spain. With this end in view, efforts more or less successful have been made by Portugal, France, Holland, Great Britain, the United States, Belgium and Germany, as well as by Spain.

The desire of the whites who live away from the colored to encourage the whites to live with the colored to marry the colored is a startling phenomenon, terrible in its results which may be traced through centuries of race contact. As late as 1911, the Belgian government sought to promote unions between whites and Negroes in the Belgian Congo, while in the year following the combined vote of the clerics and socialists in the German Reichstag passed a resolution praying the government to repeal the laws forbidding intermarriage between blacks and whites and leave the races free to mix in the German colonies.

England implanted a race and culture in the New World; Spain, a culture. English culture adhered to the English race, Spanish culture was ephemeral, subsiding as a result of miscegenation.

Let us understand the Spain that conquered South America. It is the sixteenth century. Spain is possessed of a remarkable history. Its original inhabitants were small brunets (Mediterraneans), but Nordic Gauls conquered the country about 500 B.C., and introduced the Aryan speech. The Gauls quickly mixed with the natives and the inhabitants were known to the Romans as Celtiberians. Before the Roman times, Phoenicians and Carthagenians had formed trading posts along its shores. Then came the Romans, who remained for seven centuries. Roman domination reached far inland, everywhere except in the northern mountains. When the Roman Empire was being overrun by Germanic tribes, Spain was occupied, in whole or in part, by Alan, Suevi, Vandal, and Goth (Visgoth). The invaders were at no time a numerically great host. The Vandls, when leaving Spain for conquest in North Africa, numbered but 80,000, old and young men, women, children and slaves. The invaders were few, but formed in Spain, as elsewhere, a conquering aristocracy. The Gothic line of rulers began in Spain in 531 A.D. In the norther there were a Caucasian people, unmixed with colored blood, the Basques, whom neither the Germans nor their Roman predecessors could fully subdue. These people are to play an important part in the civilizing of South America. Chile, that is, white Chile, is Basque and Gothic.

The German tribes, supported by Spanish factions, engaged in generations of warfare with each other. Gothic supremacy was attained, and then came the great Muhammadan invasion from North Africa. The Arab-Berber-Negro hosts came to stay for centuries.

Early inhabitants of the Spanish Peninsula offered many physical similarities to the whites and near-whites of North Africa. In North Africa, and in Spain as well, Negro blood had left its impress prior to the conquest by the Moslems (Muhammadans). Not upon all, but it was unmistakably there, and was to be greatly augmented in later centuries, first by the large Negroid element marshaled under the Crescent, and even more so at a later date when Spain and Portugal entered upon the African Negro slave trade. Negro blood has qualified materially the race type of large numbers of Spanish (in Spain as well as in the Spanish colones), and this alien element in the Spanish race is not to be overlooked. What Negro blood did to the Spanish immigrants of the New World, it did also to the Spanish of the south of the peninsula; lowered them in the racial and cultural scale.

It required more than seven centuries to rid Spain of the powerful Muhammadans. Teutonic armies had arrested the advance of the Muhammadans in Europe as they had previously crushed the Hun, who threatened to subjugate white Europe beneath the heel of the mixbreeds of Asia.

The German feuds of Spain were finally healed through the intermarriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, "red haired Goths." These great rulers expelled the Moors (Muhammadans), but their reign is marked by a much great event.

The Lombards, another Germanic tribe, had conquered and settled in North Italy. They retained race and institutions for centuries. The so-called Italian Renaissance" was in reality a Lombard or Nordic renaissance. From Nordic Italy there came to the Nordic court of Spain a blond wanderer who believed the world to be round, and that by sailing west a new route to India might be discovered. Snorted at as a visionary, he was denied aid. For a period of eighteen years he urged the possibility of a western passage. A woman listened and believed, and the New World sprang into existence. How much the Latin world owes to Isabella and how much the Teutonic world owes to Elizabeth! These women believed men who were called "visionaries," and supported their ambitions.

But Spain was a mongrel, not a Gothic country. The Goths were ever a minority, and the centuries intervening from the Gothic conquest to the present have eliminated the pure Goth, apart from the nobility, by process of miscegenation. ("The Gothic and hereditary nobility is foreign to the evolution of the Peninsula." (Calderon.)) From mongrel Spain, presided over by a Teutonic aristocracy, came swarms of adventurers to the New World. The Muhammadans had been expelled, but not until their blood had been indissolubly mixed with that of the south Spaniards. A mongrel people with dissimilar aptitudes and race traits transferred to the Western World would not lose their ethnic tendencies, and this fact should make the understanding of Latin American history an easier matter. Add to this the varying degree of blood mixture of the spanish conquerors with the Indians, whom the Spanish found in possession of the continent and with the Negroes whom they imported from Africa, and you will have the racial background which constitutes the fundamental viewpoint in interpreting history.

England sent Saxons. Spain Basques and mongrels ruled by a Gothic aristocracy. The Saxon settlers in North America slowly extended their boundaries, moving before them the savage and barbarian tribes with whom they were in contact. The Spaniard, instead of removing the aborigines and implanting his race in their stead, conquered and ruled over them, marrying their women. In Central America and the northern part of south America, the European conquerors were in contact with the relatively advanced cultures of Mexico, Colombia and Peru. These barbarian civilizations were in process of decay and were possessed of great riches, the results of centuries of accumulation. The riches were a powerful factor in determining the disaster which has attended the white race in Latin America. The Spanish sought the treasures of the new World and, to retain rule with ease, the conquistadors married the Indian aristocracy; the soldiers and other adventurers formed unions with the lesser nobility and the wealthier middle class. The history of colonial control will establish that such alliances promote peace between conquerors and conquered; promote peace for a period, but beyond this is revolution and anarchy.

It was the half-castes of Haiti who fomented the murder of the whites. The mixbreeds of Haiti, as the mixbreeds elsewhere, turned to the blacks when refused equality with the whites. The Indian and the Negro give but little trouble to the whites; the agent of unrest is the disgruntled and touchy mixbreed Grant the mixbreed equalization with the white and he becomes a cruel oppressor of the black. This was true in South and Central America, in Africa, and notably true in the united States prior to 1865, where an increasing number of mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons were slave owners and had become the fieriest upholders of slavery.

Deny the partly black full and unrestricted access to the white man's homes and daughters and you transform him into the bitterest enemy of the white man. Were it not for the super-sensitive mongrels of North America, there would be no clamor for "equality" of races; nor would there be any eminent "Negroes." Booker Washington was a mulatto, Frederick Douglas was a mulatto. Bruce, Turner, DuBois, Miller; these are not Negroes! Were they white men they would be obscure, but by social custom and by law they are recognized to be Negroes, and as such they stand at the head of their race.

Imagine the mulattoes and the nearer whites of the United States to be greatly augmented in numbers. Suppose they constitute two-thirds of the population. They possess the ballot. The white one-third of the population is the cultural aristocracy, but is divided into factions. Let us say that the Democratic Party, in order to make its ascendency sure, lays special claim to the Negro and mixbreed vote, promising full social and political equality. The Democrats would secure the support of the Negroids and control the nation. Caucasian ideals would assert a dwindling influence in politics, economics, and social aims. No white could hold high office without mongrel support, and the prospective officer holder could not obtain such support without special concessions to the mixbreed element. White politicians would vie with each other in making promises which sooner or later would have to be fulfilled. Eventually the nation would cease to reflect Caucasian ideals and cease to represent Caucasian culture. The pall of Africanism would settle upon the land. Mulatto senators! Revolutions! Creative ingenuity gone, the arts and industries would decay, sky-scrapers would crumble, plantations would be weedgrown, as they are in Haiti. The halls of the national capitol, once familiar to the noblest of the Saxons, would echo to the tread of mulattoes, and a mixbreed would sit as President. This picture is repugnant and we refuse to visualize it, but Egypt knew it in all its essentials; and India, and what is more Germanic at this point Latin America.

The history of Latin America countries shows a steady rise of the mixbreed to power. Ofttimes the residue of whites in the various Latin American governments was divided into factions. The whites in their bitter enmity would seek aid from the mixbreeds. White or near-white leaders led the mixbreed to ascendency. The white influence became less and less and Latin America fell lower and lower in the cultural scale in keeping with concomitant loss in the racial scale.

There are many North Americans who are not aware that the African Negro was enslaved in Latin America a century before his arrival at Jamestown. The Caucasian of the southern continent has had more than a hundred years longer in which to interbreed with the Negro than the Caucasian of the northern continent. The Spanish and Portuguese brought Negro slaves to their colonies in 1502. The Latin American Negroes came from Africa, as did those of North America. Between 1759 and 1903, 642,000 Negroes entered Brazil, and between 1792 and 1810 Cuba received 89,000. There are eleven million Negroes and Negroids in the united States at the present time, but there is still greater number in the Latin American countries.

Apart from the numbers of African Negroes whose destination was Brazil and Cuba, tens of thousands more were distributed throughout northern South America dn Central America. Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, at the south of the continent, received but few, but with such numbers as they did receive they interred. As a pure black, the Negro does not exist in these latter countries. However, the race types of these states are only slightly modified by the Negro, but rather by the Indian. There are pure whites in the south who are descended from the early colonials. To these whites there have come large additions of the European born which has served to augment the Caucasic element. In Central America the inhabitants of Costa Rica are more nearly white, hardly influenced by the Negro, and not hopelessly so by the Indian.

In spite of the mistakes of the past, Latin America is not hopeless. The country is sparsely populated, and there is room for millions of immigrants. Around the nucleus of whites now there, others from Europe and North America will come, and parts of the continent will be saved for the Caucasian. Ever closer relations of the parts hopelessly mongrelized are to be maintained with the white world, and these portions, such as Mexico, Central America. Cuba, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Venezuela, Columbia, Peru and northern Brazil are destined to possess a culture above their race ability. It will be an imposed culture, but it will be permanent.

Brazil, in its northeastern provinces, possesses a race mixture distinctly more African than European in composition. South Brazil has the whiter of the Portuguese and is further strengthened by the presence of nearly half a million Germans, Swiss and other Nordic elements. Of this number the Germans constitute possibly 250,000. The Germans "are established in southern Brazil, when they rule the municipalities, enjoy rights of self government, despite the Negroes and half castes, and live in aristocratic isolation." (Calderon) The German colonial, true to the instinct of the Teutonic breed, avoids intermarriage with the Negroes and mixbreeds, but he does marry the Portuguese, who in turn marry Negroes readily, and it would seem that miscegenation would thus reduce the German increase, though it should not succeed at an early date in eliminating the Teutonic type.

The Germans, together with the white Portuguese and newly arrived Europeans, constitute the sole progressive element of Brazil, though they form less than half of the population of some twenty-six million. Agassiz, when traveling in Brazil shortly after the American Civil War, warned his countrymen to be content with freeing the blacks and not to interbreed with them, as did the Brazilians. Later travelers have told us that Brazil was a country in which whites and blacks were interbreeding, and that the prosperity of Brazil was substantial recognition that miscegenation was not injuring the nation. The advocates of miscegenation overlook the fact that white Brazil is both a geographical and racial fact, and that it is visibly distinct from black Brazil. White Brazil (south Brazil) is the source and center of Brazilian progress. Such writers might as well credit the mixbreeds of the United States with American advancement as to assert that Negroid Brazil is responsible for Brazilian prosperity. Such progress as there is arises from the whites of the south and from the large influx of European immigration and capital.

Latin America is an extraordinarily rich country. Its created wealth and natural resources in the hands of its present inhabitants incite European cupidity in much the same way and to the same extent as did its wealth of four centuries ago. The Monroe Doctrine protects its political independence. The Monroe Doctrine has prevented the continent from being peopled by an able race. From this viewpoint the United States may be said to have stood between Latin America and civilization.

In Latin America there are twenty nations. If you read their federal constitutions, you will find that they have modeled their governments after that of the United States. Nearer our borders are the Central American states which, in common with the rest of the Latin American states, have copied, with but little modification, the Constitution of the United States. But "Industry, commerce, and agriculture are in a state of decay, and the unruly imagination of the Creole expends itself in constitutions, programmes, and lyrical discourses; in these regions anarchy is sovereign mistress...The double and inevitable influence of tradition and race cannot be destroyed by means of improvised laws. Central America borrowed from the United States their mode of suffrage, the federal system, the organization of the jury, and the Code of Louisiana. But popular agitation condemned the institution of the jury; the codes borrowed from the United States did not annihilate barbarism, and the federal system was powerless to enforce unity." (Calderon).

There is a tradition among Saxons that they are not as the Latins, who readily intermarry with colored peoples. The Saxon seems to believe that his race pride alone will preserve his race when he is in contact with the colored. This sense of security is unwarranted. The Saxon ideal does not extent in practical application to all the members of the Saxon race. The Saxon does not intermarry readily with the Negro and other colored races; not readily, but he does intermarry. Hollanders in South America and in the East Indies; British subjects in the West Indies and in South Africa; Americans in the Philippines, Hawaii, and in the United States when the laws will permit; Germans, in all countries other than the former German colonies, have established that the Saxon's reliance upon s sense of race superiority is an illusion.

The author listened to a remarkable series of incriminations and counter incriminations among Northernborn and Southernborn Americans in manila. While discussing the "squaw men" of the Philippines, the Northernborn Americans affirmed that it was the Southernborn Americas who took unto themselves the greater number of colored wives. This assertion was hotly denied by the Southerners. Then followed a mentioning of numerous Americans by name who had married colored women. Most of them were proved to be of Southern birth; one was the son of a Kentucky judge, two or three were from the author's native state, Tennessee. The Southerners said that they were not prepared to enumerate the offenders, but were sure that the balance was on the other side. The Saxon ideal has certainly not proved so successful elsewhere as in the Southern States. The color line is there after three centuries of contact with the Negro. But the residence of many individual Southerners in the Philippines, and the intermarriage of not a few of their number with colored women, seems to imply that the South has been saved by legal prohibition of intermarriage with the colored rather than by a sense of race superiority.

While the Saxon has sinned but little against race and institutions through the legal ceremony of marriage between blacks and whites, he has sinned much by illegal intermixture. The mixbreed, whether by marriage or by concubinage, offers the same social problem and in the end the same social danger.

The German colonial government and certain of the states within the American Union were aware that race pride is not sufficient to preserve the race, and they instituted laws to control the sub-normal whites who gravitate Negroward, but with these exceptions the Saxon peoples have been content to rely upon race pride rather than legal prohibition. The Boers of the Transvaal and the Free State had a legal color line, but in South Africa the Boer ideal of race purity, never unkindly applied, has been greatly weakened by the British domination of the country. The German colonies having passed to Britain and France, it remains to be seen whether the color line will be maintained.

One great value of the legal prohibition of interracial marriage lies in the fact that through illegal unions the mixbreeds are accredited to the black race, whereas through legal unions the mixbreeds find entrance to white circles. Legal unions blacken the white race; illegal union whiten the black race. Marriages between the whites and the blacks destroy the color line. Illegal unions between the whites and blacks create an element of perpetual danger, but the mixbreeds may not immediately imperial the color line. The white race, if Saxon, will remain white for centuries if interracial marriage is made unlawful. Such prohibition would also lengthen the purity of the Latin peoples, who everywhere interbred with colored races.

It should not be overlooked by North Americans that the aggressive dominating, conquering "Latins" who extend civilization to much of the Western World were, in reality, Nordic in origin, men of the North European breed. It was the Gothic aristocracy of Spain and Portugal who sent the explorers. It was France, as yet dominated by Teutonic (Frank) blood and ideals, which first disputed Spain's supremacy in America; and the first colonists of the French islands were "Normans, Bretons and people from the west of France; Flemings and Picards, later on Rhenish Germans and Alsatians; men and women of the Nordic race." (The Negro in the New World, p. 132, Sir Harry Johnston.) The same race stock that peopled North America discovered and dominated South America. Possibly the sole reason for the difference in the cultures of the two continents lies in the fact that the Nordic element among the Latins was an aristocracy only, numerically weak. The Nordic element in the Latins was not of sufficient volume to clear the forests, remove the aborigines, and perpetuate European race and culture. From this let us learn that Teutonic people, in adverse environment, may be unable to stem the agencies of devolution which invariably accompany race contact. Races in contact will eventually mix.

The Nordic element in Latin America was not protected by laws forbidding intermarriage. Rather the haughty Goth and compelled by Portugal, Spain and France to interbreed with the Negro and the Indian. The whites in Europe dominated the whites in the colonies. The whites in Europe ruled selfishly for personal profit. Latin Europe decreed that Lain America become mongrel in order that Latin American might be more easily controlled. Blind Europe legalized miscegenation; for the sake of a temporary peace, bartered the prospect of a permanent civilization.

What of the future in Latin America? A future possessed not merely of cultures, such as those of Argentina, southern Brazil, Uruguay and Chile, but the establishment of conditions whereby the entire continent shall have a civilization self-sustained and progressive. South and Central America have richness of soil, timber, certain ores, and precious stones; great variety of climate, differences in degree of rainfall, and a larger proportion of land susceptible to agricultural pursuits than has North America. There is less desert region in the southern continent than in the northern; and while much of the southern continent is tropical or semi-tropical, the experiments at panama and elsewhere in the tropics have demonstrated the possibility of Europeans living permanently in these regions. We have been told that, far from the white man being unable to work in the tropics, he cannot live there without the exercise which work entails. (The press reported the late Surgeon-General William C. Gorgas, U.S. Army, to this effect.) Strenuous activity is essential to health near the equator, even more so than in temperate climates.

Both Central and South America abound in mountains and plateaus. The West Indies, Haiti in particular, and the south of the continent, have delightful climates, to which the European is readily adjusted.

The disappearing school of ethnologists who have laid stress upon environment, rather than race, as the essential factor in the development of civilizations, and have urged euthenics rather than eugenics as the agency to promote progress, have before them in Latin America, southern, eastern, and northern Africa; in south and southeastern Europe; in portions of Asia and Oceania, situations which they have not been able to explain. In these countries, civilization is advanced or is backward in proportion tot he influence or lack of influence of Caucasian peoples, whatever their climates or other natural environment. Egypt is retrogressive, dependent upon white nations for civilized culture. Yet Egypt, when white, possessed a civilization for thirty centuries. The environment (natural) of Italy, Greece and India has not changed since the days of their great cultures. There has been no essential change in environment, but there has been radical change in race stock.

The Western World shows that, regardless of environment, the more Caucasian the people the more civilized the country.

"One may say that the admixture of the prevailing strains with black blood has been disastrous to these democracies (Latin American). In applying John Stuart Mills' law of concomitant variations to the development of Spanish America, one may determine a necessary relation between the numerical proportion of Negroes and the intensity of civilization. Wealth increases and internal order is greater in the Argentine, Uruguay, and Chile, and it is precisely in these countries that the proportion of Negroes has been low...In Cuba, Santo Domingo and some of the republics of Central America, and certain of the states of the Brazilian Confederation, where the children of slaves constitute the greater portion of the population, internal disorders are continual. A black republic, Haiti, demonstrates by its revolutionary history the political incapacity of the Negro race." (Calderon).

This writer sees in the mulatto the evil result "of inferior elements of the races that unite," and states that "the mixbreed is weak in character and body and is given to gross passion."

From the Northern American viewpoint it will readily be admitted that the white man, and the white man only, can develop Latin America. When North America and Europe begin to act upon this conviction they will find a residue of whites in this great area of miscegenation who will readily welcome the coming of North Americans and Europeans, who will by the increase of their numbers finally redeem Latin America from its mongrelization. "Only a plentiful immigration can establish the shattered equilibrium of the American races." (Calderon). Let us give all honor to the whites who have withstood four centuries of hybridization. They constitute, together with later immigrants, but ten per cent of the population, but they and their kind are the hope of the future, the nucleus of the Caucasian population that shall eventually fill the continent.