The tangled legacies of two Americas

Summary

History Extra Podcast — “The Tangled Legacies of Two Americas”
Date: August 17, 2025
Host: Eleanor Evans
Guest: Professor Greg Grandin

---

Episode Overview

This episode of the History Extra podcast features a deep conversation between host Eleanor Evans and historian Greg Grandin, discussing his new book America America. The discussion traverses the complex, intertwined histories of Latin America and the United States, from the brutal Spanish conquests to the modern day. Grandin explores how these regions have at times mirrored, influenced, and defined themselves against each other, shaping pivotal concepts like conquest, liberty, nationhood, and international order. The episode sheds light on how these interactions fostered diverging principles—such as individual vs. social rights—and shaped modern geopolitics.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Mutual Influence and Name Politics

• Grandin’s Thesis:
  • The two Americas continuously shaped and defined each other's development—not only politically and economically, but in fundamental ideas about nationhood, empire, and identity.
  • “These are two ways of thinking about the New World that are very similar, except for one accent mark.” (Grandin, 04:12)
• Name Usage and Identity:
  • "America" means different things in the North and Latin America—US residents often equate “America” with the USA, while Latin Americans use it to refer to the whole continent.
  • Grandin highlights cultural and political resentment over the US “taking” the name, emphasizing how such underlying tensions run deep.
    • "[Naming] is deeply embedded in Latin American political culture." (Grandin, 06:03)

2. Spanish & English Conquests: Brutality & Self-Justification

• Brutality of Spanish Conquest:
  • The arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century led to what some call “the greatest human mortality event in world history,” with roughly 90% of the 90 million indigenous people dying within a century.
    • “[The] Spanish conquest was brutal beyond comprehension.” (Grandin, 06:22)
• Emergence of Self-Critique in Catholicism:
  • Figures like Bartolomé de Las Casas challenged the morality of conquest, sowing seeds for universal political rights and interrogating the justifications of colonial violence.
    • “Las Casas was one of the first people to say that all human beings are equal.” (Grandin, 09:18)
• English Conquest and Evasion:
  • English colonizers, arriving after epidemics decimated indigenous populations, rationalized their expansion as divinely sanctioned and sidestepped overt acknowledgment of atrocity—fueling a theme of “moral evasion.”

3. Foundations for Liberty and International Order

• From Conquest to Concepts of Liberty:
  • The revolutionary periods in both Americas drew from and responded to the moral crises of their colonial pasts.
  • Latin American critique of the US, particularly about conquest, drew on frameworks developed during the anti-Spanish struggle.
    • “Latin America's critique of the United States is so consequential and so enduring...because it was first directed at Spain.” (Grandin, 12:43)
• Contrasting State-Building:
  • The US envisioned itself as a single republic on a “blank” continent, reviving conquest doctrines.
  • Latin America, emerging as several nations, championed interstate cooperation—prophesying future institutions like the League of Nations and UN.
    • “Latin America came up with the principle that the first order of international law should be that nations have interests in common and cooperation should be the guiding principle.” (Grandin, 15:22)

4. Simón Bolívar and the Quest for Social Rights

• Bolívar’s Unique Legacy:
  • Revered as Latin America’s George Washington—yet more existentially anguished over whether independence could truly atone for the conquest’s injustices.
    • “He understood independence as an atonement for the conquest, and he wasn't sure that the atonement would be redeemed.” (Grandin, 19:26)
  • Bolivar and other leaders embedded the abolition of servitude and the expansion of social rights into the foundation of new republics.
• Emergence of Social Rights:
  • Unlike US “hysterical Lockeanism” (Grandin quoting Louis Hartz), Latin America fused individual rights with social rights (education, healthcare, etc.), influencing constitutions continent-wide.
    • “The world's very first social democratic constitution…was in Mexico as a result of the Mexican Revolution in 1917…[It] predated Weimar.” (Grandin, 22:01)

5. Contrasting Doctrines: Monroe Doctrine vs. Cooperative Principles

• Origins and Ambiguity of Monroe Doctrine:
  • Initially embraced by Latin America for its anti-colonial message, but its “right to intervene” clause became justification for repeated US interventions as informal empire.
    • “Monroe Doctrine became a kind of urtext…a statement of informal empire.” (Grandin, 25:04)
• Pan-Americanism and Birth of International Institutions:
  • Latin American principles at the heart of Pan-Americanism informed both the League of Nations and later the UN, even if ultimately overshadowed by US assertions of dominance and compromise.
    • “The very idea of nations cooperating together…comes out of Latin America.” (Grandin, 26:17)

6. The Cold War and Its Aftermath

• Cold War, Intervention, and the Monroe Doctrine:
  • Monroe Doctrine invoked to support repressive regimes and anti-communist militaries, rationalizing US-backed violence as protection from “foreign” ideologies.
    • “Communism itself was seen as a foreign ideology, and Monroe Doctrine was invoked as a way to justify putting it down.” (Grandin, 28:36)
• 1930s-40s Convergence and Hope:
  • In the 1930s-40s, FDR’s New Deal sensibilities aligned with Latin American social democracy, fostering a brief period of reformist convergence during WWII.
    • “By 1945, pretty much every Latin American country was formally social democratic.” (Grandin, 32:08)

7. Contemporary Lessons and Present Tensions

• Learning from Latin America:
  • The persistent thread: Latin America continues to champion social democratic principles, fusing liberalism and material guarantees—contrasted with the US’s recurring turn to toxic nationalism or culture wars.
    • “Latin America…is one of the last regions in the world that takes the promise of the Enlightenment at its word.” (Grandin, 34:13)
• Export of US Culture Wars:
  • Recent years have witnessed US-style “culture wars” and reactionary politics seeping into Latin American politics, sometimes undermining its humanist legacies.
    • “The danger about US brand of culture wars is that because it's never about any one thing…there's no way of ending it.” (Grandin, 35:04)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Competing Meanings of ‘America’:

  “America refers to all of the Americas. For most people...in the United States, America means their particular country...these naming practices, this kind of resentment that the United States stole our name, is deeply embedded.”
  — Greg Grandin, (04:12–06:03)

• On Brutality and Critique:

  “90 million people lived in the Americas at the time that Columbus arrived...within a century, 90% of them were gone...it spurred a critique within Catholicism...Las Casas was one of the first people to say that all human beings are equal.”
  — Greg Grandin, (06:22–10:02)

• On Foundational Differences:

  “The United States came into the world a single republic on what their founders imagined…was an empty continent. Spanish America came in already a League of nations...what emerged was the idea that the interstate system should be organized around principles of cooperation and shared interest rather than competition.”
  — Greg Grandin, (14:29–15:22)

• On Social Rights:

  “The state...should stand up and capture surplus wealth and redistribute it in the form of education, health care, old age, pensions and what not. The world’s very first social democratic constitution...was in Mexico as a result of the Mexican Revolution in 1917.”
  — Greg Grandin, (22:13–22:41)

• On the Monroe Doctrine's Twisted Application:

  “It's like other nations have laws, the United States has doctrines...the Monroe Doctrine was invoked as part of this idea that communism was a foreign, non organic ideology...and Monroe Doctrine was invoked as a way to justify putting it down.”
  — Greg Grandin, (28:36)

• On Contemporary Nationalism:

  “Latin Americans didn’t respond to the dislocations of neoliberalism and globalization by turning to a kind of nasty, toxic nationalism…their nationalism was always a stepping stone to a greater universalism.”
  — Greg Grandin, (33:41)

• On ‘Gulf of America’ Proposal:

  “Of course it's ridiculous. Nobody’s going to call the Gulf of Mexico…the Gulf of America except people who are ideologically committed to Trump...they could put an accent on the E...of course, nobody in the United States would understand that was a compromise...”
  — Greg Grandin, (36:42)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:28] — Overview of book’s central thesis and concepts
• [06:22] — Spanish conquest: demographic impact; emergence of critique
• [12:43] — Formation of liberty and critique of conquest in revolutionary era
• [18:13] — Simón Bolívar; origins of social rights in Latin America
• [23:55] — The Monroe Doctrine: origins and evolving interpretations
• [26:17] — Latin American influence on League of Nations and UN
• [28:36] — Cold War interventions; Monroe Doctrine invoked to justify repression
• [30:14] — Divergence and lessons from the 20th century; enduring social democratic ideals
• [34:37] — Modern politics: culture wars, nationalism, erosion of social ideals
• [36:42] — Responding to the ‘Gulf of America’ naming controversy

---

Conclusion

This episode offers a sweeping yet insightful tour of five centuries of inter-American relations, unpacking how the United States and Latin America, often in tension and dialogue, have forged distinct yet profoundly connected political traditions. Grandin, through both scholarly rigor and vivid narrative, traces how the legacies of conquest, revolution, and doctrine continue to shape both continents' destinies—and challenges listeners to rethink what “America” truly means.

Transcript

[Podcast Sponsor Announcer]

This episode is brought to you by JCPenney. Yes, JCPenney. And if you've been there recently, you know it's the place to go for jaw dropping looks at brag worthy prices. They've got something special for every style and budget. Not to mention rewards and deals that make finding those hidden gems even sweeter. If you already shop JCPenney, you're already in on the secret. But if not, it's time to ask. Wait, am I sleeping on JCPenney? Shop jcpenney.com yes jcpenney support for this.

[America's Navy Advertiser]

Podcast and the following message comes from America's Navy the Navy offers new graduates hands on training and experience in careers like computer science, aviation and medicine, plus education and sign on bonuses. Parents help your grads start their career [e-mail] youm say you'll never join the.

Navy, never climb Mount Fuji on a port visit, or break the sound barrier. Joining the Navy sounds crazy. Saying never actually is. Learn [e-mail], america's Navy forged by the sea. You say you'll never join the Navy, that you'd never track storms brewing in the Atlantic and skydiving could never be part of your commute. You'd never climb Mount Fuji on a port visit or fly so fast you.

[Greg Grandin]

Break the sound barrier.

[America's Navy Advertiser]

Joining the Navy sounds crazy. Saying never actually is. Start your [e-mail], america's Navy forged by the sea.

[Eleanor Evans]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. How have political, economic and ideological ideas flowed between Latin America and the United States over the centuries? And how have these two powers looked to each other to define themselves? That's the subject of a sweeping new book by Professor Greg Grandin that begins with the brutal 16th century Spanish conquest of South America and tracks the two hemispheres relationships up until the present day. Ellen Evans speaks to Grandin to find out more about how the two Americas have influenced, mirrored and reacted to one another over time.

Your central thread is looking at how south and North America have looked to each other and learned from each other and defined themselves against each other through their respective histories. If that's a fair representation of your argument, can you explain what motivated you in this approach?

[Greg Grandin]

Well, it is a fair representation of the argument. I would go a little bit further and say it was also an attempt to kind of think about how the interstate, the modern liberal order that emerged after World War II in the United nations and all the legal fundamentals that underwrote the United nations, how that largely emerged out of the experience of the New World from conquest through World War II. There's a through line that starts with the Spanish conquest and climaxes in many ways with the first fight against fascism, the World War II. And then there's a considerable aftermath, the Cold War, and then economic restructuring. But from Cortez to Hitler, in some ways, the book runs, you know, and fights over the doctrine of conquest. So the book is about how the US And Latin America shaped each other, but it's also about these larger questions that have to do with modern history.

[Eleanor Evans]

Mm. We are going to dig into some of these big questions as we talk through this sweeping history. I want to pick up, before we go a little bit further, your title. The idea that we have America and America, and they're so primarily used or associated with the usa. I wonder, are you hoping to give people pause when using that term to speak about the USA or to think about it differently, or is that just too big a battle?

[Greg Grandin]

I think that's too big a battle. I didn't write the book to fuss over names. Obviously, the name America, America is a nice mirroring effect that states the thesis. Right. These are two ways of thinking about the New World that are very similar, except for one accent. Mark. Yes. The word America, and I go into it in the book, both in the introduction and then later on. America refers to all of the Americas. For most people live in the Americas, most Latin Americans. For people in the United States, America means their particular country. And this is not a new thing. You can go back to the founders of the U.S. they both understood America, to their new republic that we. That we took from you guys. This thin strip of land between the Atlantic and the Mississippi as the western border. And America, meaning the whole continent, which some of those founders thought would eventually become part of America, the nation America, the republic. And obviously a good chunk of it did as the United States moved west. But Latin Americans, of course, call themselves Americans. There was a. It's a politicized kind of name, I like to point out. There's a Nortegno band, a kind of ballad band, who's very popular, enormously popular among migrant workers in Mexico called Los Tigres del Norte, the Tigers of the North. And they have a song, Somos mas Americanos. We are more American. So even it's not just a concern of the literati and the intelligentsia. These naming practices, this kind of resentment that the United States stole our name, stole the name of. Not our name, stole the name of the whole continent, is deeply embedded in Latin American political culture.

[Eleanor Evans]

So we're going to look at the very start of this, and if we can. If we can go straight back to where your account sort of begins, and it's the Spanish arrival in this new world, I'm sure a lot of our listeners will be familiar. But to bring us into it, can you just describe a little of how brutal this conquest was?

[Greg Grandin]

Well, the Spanish conquest was brutal beyond comprehension. Some demographers call it the greatest human mortality event in world history. They estimate that maybe 90 million people lived in the Americas at the time that Columbus arrived at Hispaniola, the island that now comprises the Dominican Republic in Haiti. And within a century, 90% of them were gone. The first wave was in the Caribbean due to violence, due to wars of conquest, due to the enslavement of native Americans, forcing them to work in mines and fields, to dive for pearls, the dislocations that went with that. Then, of course, in subsequent decades, that was repeated in Mexico and in Peru. But then towards the end of the century, it was mostly epidemics, European epidemics, that led to the emptying out of the hemisphere. So it was brutal beyond belief. And it spurred, if I could just jump ahead, it spurred a critique within Catholicism. The conquerors were Catholic. They. They represented the Vatican, they represented Catholic Spain. They represented world Catholicism at a time when world Catholicism was coming under challenge. The Protestant Reformation was around the corner in 1515, and the violence that was unleashed in the Americas caused a crisis within religion that presumed to be universal, that presumed to embody world history, universal world history, to carry forward all of the world's wisdom. And one of the main prominent critics that I focus on is De Las Casas. Some of your listeners might know him. He is somebody who spoke out against the atrocities, and then he was quickly translated into English. And he became a key kind of example of what became the Black legend, the way the British and the English kind of measured themselves against the Spanish. Where Spanish Catholics were superstitious and brutal and medieval and bloody and. And everything that went with Catholicism. The English were moderate and they were modern and they were commercial and they were rational. And, you know, a lot of the Black legend was a way of forming British nationalism, British identity. But De Las Casas was more than that. He was a profound critic and kind of agent for change within the Catholic Church. Now, the conquest went on and colonialism went on and. And the brutality went on, but there emerged around Las Casas and other people within the Dominican order. He was a Dominican, but Franciscans, and. And then later on, Jesuits began to question Some of the premises of what we are doing, what are we doing here and there emerged from that critique. I argued the basic foundations of modern political theory. Las Casas was one of the first people to say that all human beings are equal. That, you know, he spent time among Native Americans in a new world. They could reason, they laughed when they were happy, they cried when they, their loved ones, they could possess property, they did possess property. They organized themselves in society. There was absolutely no difference between them and Europeans. And, you know, that was a very radical proposition. And from there he goes on to question the idea of natural slavery, slavery in all forms. And then others question the right of war and question the doctrine and right of conquest. By what right does Spain have to rule over these people? Now, none of that stopped the conquest, but it did raise questions that were unanswerable. And it was that critique that took hold and had repercussions in various different forms in one direction. When the British wanted to get in the game and they wanted to colonize North America, they asked themselves, this isn't. I'm not, I'm not just paraphrasing or making this up. There's the minutes of the London Company, but the Virginia Company in 1607 where they said, should we issue a manifesto justifying what we hope to do in North America? And they had a long debate about it. And the debate largely revolved around what they knew about the Spanish debate. And they decided, you know, that Spanish Catholics have been debating this for a century and they can't come up with a good answer. Maybe it's better we don't say anything at all. So that's a big part of the book is Catholicism's confrontation with the moral crisis of conquest and the English speaking world's evasion of the consequences of conquest. Right. And, and that plays out in social history as well. The Spaniards arrived and there's no. They couldn't deny that there were millions and millions of people there. They knew they were ruling over people. The English arrive a century later in Plymouth and like, where is everybody? There's nobody here. Isn't this great? They left us houses and fields because epidemics that swept through and wiped out the population. So they can imag. And then later on they could justify it as God sending a pestilence to clear the land of Native Americans, to give it to the Puritans. So that tension is foundational in the book between a kind of moral confrontation with the horrors of the conquest, no matter how hypocritical, no matter how ineffectual and a kind of moral evasion with the horrors of the conquest that happened in the north and among English speaking settlers.

[Eleanor Evans]

Yes, a hugely significant example of that mutual influence there. And to skip us on, you know, just a mere couple of centuries in this, this idea, as well as these differing ideas and justification of conquest, there's also a formation of ideas of liberty. And once these nations are becoming more established, they're looking towards de la casas arguments that then, aren't they? Can you talk us a little bit more about this phenomenon in sort of the late 18th century?

[Greg Grandin]

Yeah. So to just jump ahead to the early 1800s where Spanish America is about to break free of Spain, just like the United States broke free from Great Britain in the 1770s. And the founders of Spanish America, having successfully broken free of one empire, immediately had to confront another one. And that was the United States. That was the United States as it was moving west and the United States was reviving the doctrine of conquest literally. I mean, the Supreme Court ruled that the doctrine of conquest was valid as it dispossessed Native Americans as it invaded Mexico, as it moved to the Pacific and took Texas and then took Florida. And so what happened is that Spanish Americans had at their disposal a whole intellectual framework that previously had been applied to Spain, criticizing conquest and criticizing, looking for more egalitarian ways to imagine dominion and social relations. And they had it at the ready to apply to the United States. And hence why Latin America's critique of the United States is so consequential and so enduring and so deeply rooted in social and intellectual history. Because it was a critique that was first directed at Spain and then it was ready made to apply to the United States. The way that I think about it is United States came into the world a single republic on what their founders imagined or said was an empty continent. Of course, it wasn't empty. There were Native Americans, there were the remnants of the Spanish empire that soon there'd be Mexico. But they imagined that it was an empty continent that was theirs for the taking. And they revived the doctrine of conquest. In order to do that. Spanish America came into the world already a League of nations, seven republics, already a kind of United Nations. They had to learn how to live with each other. They couldn't revive the doctrine of conquest. I mean, if they did, what happened? I mean, I suppose Argentina could have said, well, you know, we want the Pacific too. The United States is going to the Pacific. Why shouldn't Buenos Aires take the Pacific? Well, Chile's there. This wasn't the kind of Westphalian empires of the 1600s that learned to kind of, you know, recognize each other. Those were empires they were already setting, sending out their gunboats in order to establish colonies. These Spanish America really was a continent of nation states, bounded, that had to recognize their borders and recognize the sovereignty. And what emerged from that was the idea that the interstate system should be organized around principles of cooperation and shared interest rather than competition. Right. They also had a not only did they have a critique of the revival of the doctrine of conquest, they had a critique of Europe's balance of power notion that empires pressing against each other, pursuing their own interests, create a sort of stasis or stability. People like Simon Boulevard and others thought that if you didn't have a transcendent purpose, that kind of balance of power, realpolitik will always lead to war because it's easy to upturn the whole system, as we're seeing today. And so Latin America came up with the principle that the first order of international law should be that nations have interests in common and cooperation should be the guiding principle, not competition. And again, that foreshadows the League of Nations and it foreshadows the United Nations. And that's a major argument of the book as well.

[Progressive Insurance Advertiser]

You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies so you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose these. Best rate for you. Give it a try after this [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.

[Disney Plus Hulu HBO Max Advertiser]

The Disney Plus Hulu HBO Max bundle plants starting at just $16.99 a month.

[Greg Grandin]

No one will ever break us apart.

[Disney Plus Hulu HBO Max Advertiser]

Catch Marvel Studios Thunderbolts the New Avengers on Disney.

[Greg Grandin]

You can't escape the past.

[Disney Plus Hulu HBO Max Advertiser]

Alien Earth on Hulu this Ship Collected Monsters and Final Destination Bloodlines on HBO Max.

[Eleanor Evans]

Death is coming for our family.

[Disney Plus Hulu HBO Max Advertiser]

The Disney Hulu HBO Max Bundle plans starting at $16.99 a month. All these and more streaming soon. Visit Disney Hulu HBOMaxBundle.com for details.

[Home Depot Advertiser]

Right now at the Home Depot, you'll find storage solutions made to fit your needs. Grab an HDX Tuff Tote to protect your tools, or keep your sports equipment contained with reinforced Snap Fit lids. Or stack up and make better use of your space with bins and totes built to last. Whatever your story, we've got the gear to keep it organized and protected at the Home Depot. How doers get more done.

[Eleanor Evans]

A key figure in this foreshadowing, you've already mentioned him, is Ursimon de Bolivar. Can you go into for listeners who might not have encountered his story before, what is he trying to do? What is his legacy today?

[Greg Grandin]

Well, his legacy is he's obviously he's revered among Latin Americans the way George Washington is in the United States as the founder of independence of the the Spanish American wars for independence were longer, they were bloodier, they were deadlier, they were more destructive than the dust up the colonists had with King George in, you know, in the 1770s. It was, you know, these were decade long wars and which Spain sent massive numbers of troops to pacify the rebellion. And Bolivar was one of many independence leaders that you could say. There were three kind of main focal areas of the independence movies. There was Mexico, there was Colombia and Venezuela where Bolivar operated and then there was Chile and Argentina. But Bolivar came to symbolize the founder of all of Latin America. And not only was he persistent and he learned as he fought, he led, as I said, a nearly two decade long civil war. Climbed the Andes twice. He emancipated slaves as his troops went rode through plantations. So emancipation was built into the republic. And this is a kind of another idea the way that even, you know, slavery ended at different points in Spanish America. And it's a complicated story, we don't have time to get into the weeds. But there was a presumption that emancipation of all kinds, not just of chattel slavery but of Indian tribute, of all sorts of servitude would be abolished with independence. And Bolivar was somebody who was much more existentially anguished than we think of as George Washington or John Adams or certainly Thomas Jefferson. You know, he had more of a sense and appreciation of history and it goes back to some of the things that we were talking about earlier. He understood independence as an atonement for the conquest and he wasn't sure that the atonement would be redeemed. He wasn't sure that it would be successful. I mean he was sure that he would lead a successful war of independence, but he didn't know what would come after. Whereas the founders of the United States were quite sure of themselves and confident and optimistic that they were creating something new and wonderful in the world. At times Bolivar did too. But at other times he thought that the social base of republicanism in Latin America, America, Spanish America was too narrow. There were too many, too much wealth concentrated in too few hands in the form of land and too many servile. You know, he freed his slaves on his plantation, but they stayed, you know, they stayed on his plantation. They continued to look at their feet when the administrator walked by. You know, so freedom is, you know, what kind of freedom. Bolivar was one of these people that saw the conquest as creating something unjustifiable. Now, you compare that to John Adams, where John Adams says, well, the British settlers didn't conquer anything. We settled. And there was no sense that the revolution that they led was an atonement for anything that the settlers did, you know, preceded them. Right. All the grievances were laid at King George's feet. If we take Bolivar as a proxy for a larger body of thought of independence, leaders thought there was a sense that independence had to atone for the conquest and the colonial society that was created. And that led to a much more activist state. A state, and this is one of another argument of the book, that social rights, what we think of as, you know, the United States is famous for individual rights. The state should restrict itself to the greatest possible extent and allow people the greatest area of liberty to talk, dissemble, to believe, some say to own guns. Whereas Latin America had that. Spanish American Republicans believed all of those things that should be. But they also believed that the state should stand up and capture surplus wealth and redistribute it in the form of education, health care, old age, pensions and whatnot. So the world's very first social democratic constitution, a constitution that embodied both individual rights and social rights, was in Mexico as a result of the Mexican Revolution in 1917. It predated Weimar, which I think was the first European state to have a constitution that explicitly elaborated social rights. And that has had a huge influence on this tension between Latin America and the United States, where the United States still holds almost. Louis Hart's called it a kind of a hysterical Lockeanism, you know, a kind of like a. Like almost a juvenile adolescent lockeanism. It's fetish for individual rights where every other, you know, liberal nation in the world evolves into social liberalism. You know, thinks that the state actually has some responsibility for making the world good for people. The United States holds onto this notion of individual rights, and look what we have. The state has turned into an apex predator for many people here, but that's another question. But in Latin America, the idea of social rights spread throughout the hemisphere. And every republic, every constitution, has provisions for social rights in it.

[Eleanor Evans]

So this conception of social rights is at the heart of much of the conversation in Latin America, in contrast, because it does seem that way to me. We have this sense of expansionism. And particularly I wanted to talk about the Monroe Doctrine. And for listeners who haven't come across this, what it seeks to do and what has been used to justify what comes later.

[Greg Grandin]

Well, it's hard to talk about the Monroe Doctrine because as Woodrow Wilson put it in 1919, he said, you know, every time I tried to define the Monroe Doctrine, it explained escapes definition. And Monroe Doctrine was really just about three paragraphs in a very long State of the Union address that was given by President Monroe in 1823. And it sought to kind of position the United States for the inevitable independence of Spanish America from Spain. And one of the things that it did was that it announced that if the United States would recognize any established republic and that it would not permit the recolonization of of the New World by the Old World. Now, Latin Americans read that and they saw in it an affirmation of their own anti colonialism. They cheered it. They thought, this is an affirmation of what we've been talking about. Monroe Doctrine, also in another paragraph, non contiguous paragraph in the same address says that the United States has a right to intervene as it deems necessary if its interests are threatened. And that's the element of the Monroe Doctrine that kind of floated to the top, if you will. And over the years it became associated not with the doctrine of sympathetic anti colonialism, but a doctrine of a kind of informal mandatory powers that the United States claimed to police. Latin America became a kind of urtext, a kind of metatext, of a statement of informal empire. The United States wasn't claiming Latin America as the British would eventually claim India or say, but it was claiming the right to intervene there if it felt its interests were threatened. And over the years it broadened that out. One of the most famous examples is Theodore Roosevelt's corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in which he imagined the world as a kind of Alfred Lord Tennyson imagined the world as a giant parliament. He imagined the world as a giant police station, with the United States basically the headquarters. And obviously Roosevelt sent the gunboats in many times.

[Eleanor Evans]

And again, in further contrast, we have the League of Nations. Can you talk more about the formation there and Latin America's role?

[Greg Grandin]

Yeah, well, both the League of Nations and the United. As I mentioned, the very idea of nations cooperating together on interests of shared concern comes out of Latin America. And it formalized in what became known as Pan Americanism, a series of conferences that the United States was participated in since the 1890s. And Woodrow Wilson was very clear there's a League of nations that he wanted, the more idealistic one that would do away with colonialism, that would recognize the sovereign equality of member nations. And those League of Nations that we got, which the United States wasn't even a part of, that affirmed the mandatory powers of France and Great Britain in the Middle east and elsewhere. And the more idealistic one, Wilson pointed and said, if you want to know what we hope to accomplish at the end of the world, look at Pan Americanism. And Wilson renounced the United States past intervention in Latin America. Even as he intervened himself, he rhetorically renounced it. Now, what's interesting about all of this is that he often invoked the Monroe Doctrine in its more idealistic form. He went back to the old anti colonial proviso within the Monroe Doctrine and said, this is what we want. We want an anti colonial world of equal nations. But as nationalists in the United States began to gather force for a backlash against Wilson's version of the League of Nations, Wilson himself, and I go into this in great detail, changes his position when he starts invoking the Monroe Doctrine from the more idealistic version that I mentioned earlier to the one that represents informal empire and mandatory power. And he had a statement inserted in the final covenant of the League of Nations that League of Nations would not invalidate the Monroe Doctrine. He did that to make the nationalists and isolationists within his own country happy. But of course it didn't work because they voted down the treaty anyway.

[Eleanor Evans]

So a sense of it really being used to browbeat America into its own role in the world.

[Greg Grandin]

Yeah, exactly.

[Eleanor Evans]

In terms of how the Monroe Doctrine informs USA involvement in Latin America in the 1960s and beyond, can you give us just a few milestones there?

[Greg Grandin]

Yeah, well, you know, it's invoked. It's like other nations have laws, the United States has doctrines. And in the 60s and 70s, during the cold War, when the United States amped up its repressive alliances with anti communist militaries within Latin America, during the height of the kind of death squad terror and saw hundreds of thousands of people disappeared or killed, hundreds of thousands massacred in countries like Guatemala and El Salvador and Nicaragua and Argentina and Chile, the Monroe Doctrine was invoked as part of this idea that that communism was a foreign, non organic ideology alien to the new world, that it was coming from the old world. And therefore the United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine as justifying a strong hand and squashing communism, even if that communism was organically rooted in any given country. Right. Even if we're talking about indigenous peasants in Guatemala or copper miners in Chile, even if they were communists. Communism itself was seen as a foreign ideology, and Monroe Doctrine was invoked as a way to justify putting it down.

[Eleanor Evans]

You've given us a sense then of these five centuries. They are looking to each other, but they're also evolving in accordance with their own ideals. I wonder if, as far as we're able to regard them with a homogenous lens, Thinking of them today, we. What do you feel is the most urgent thing to understand about what these two places mean to each other in North America and Latin America?

[Greg Grandin]

Well, we didn't really have time to go into the way in which in the 1930s there was a convergence and an affinity between Latin America's vision of a kind of social democratic world order and the United States New Deal under FDR. Throughout the 1930s, the United States repeatedly sided. I mean, Latin America, they were grand strategists within the United States that imagined Latin America as one giant Spain. And with the possibility of a right wing kind of Falangist civil war movement emerging and gripping the continent and handing the continent over to Germany or Italy, this was the worst fear. Some people read the Mexican Revolution as the Spanish Civil War. This was constantly being assaulted by Christian Falangists and fascists. But that didn't happen. What happened was that fdr, for a number of reasons, the Great Depression, the looming war, his own political sensibilities, and the larger New Deal brain trust, to put it as simple as possible, sided with the left against the right in Latin America and tipped the field to the left. And by 1945, pretty much every Latin American country was formally social democratic. And they had all lined up behind the United States in World War II. It was remarkable. And it was, you know, the United States didn't have to fight one war for resources in World War II because they had Latin America. The amount of material that went into Europe via North Africa, via that bulge in Brazil was extremely important. Roosevelt called it the Atlantic trampoline. Planes took off from Natal nonstop in Brazil and into North Africa and getting materials into Europe. And Latin Americans on the whole, thought they weren't just fighting against fascism, but they were fighting for social democracy. And of course, that's not what happened. We don't really have time to rehearse the Cold War. But the United States, you know, Roosevelt dies, Truman comes to power, the United states policy changes 180 degrees, and the United States is now not supporting the left against the right, but supporting the right against the left, as we already talked about. But that, that 15 years of convergence was really remarkable. It really was a time of great hope. And I guess if there's one thing we can take from Latin America, the political environments and context in which reformers in the US and reformers in Latin America operate are very different. So they can't just copy Latin Americans. But the way that Latin American reformers understand that liberalism has to be welded onto a robust program of social rights and promises to improve the material conditions of people's lives in order to fight fascism, that you don't fight fascists just by calling them fascists, you fight fascists by offering them an alternative. This is what I think the United States and other countries could learn. Things aren't great in Latin America, and many countries are on the knife edge. There's a lot of corruption, there's a lot of crime, there's a lot of concentrated wealth. And a lot of the destruction is the consequences of the economic policies forced on Latin America in the last years of the Cold War and after the Cold War. But there still remains, in countries like Mexico and in Chile and in Brazil, very strong tradition of the social democratic, humanist tradition that I talked about. And even nationalists. Latin Americans didn't respond to the dislocations of neoliberalism and globalization by turning to a kind of nasty, toxic nationalism that we see in Hungary or the Philippines or, you know, in many countries. What it did was its nationalism was always humanist. It was always a stepping stone to a greater universalism. And I think that just coming to terms with that, coming to terms that Latin America in some ways is one of the last regions in the world that takes the promise of the Enlightenment at its word, is a lesson that can be helpful as we confront these.

[Eleanor Evans]

Dark times and remembering that consensus as well. I wonder if you think there's any possibility of reaching that consensus again, whether on the left or otherwise.

[Greg Grandin]

The way I think about it is the left, coming out of the Cold War, particularly in the first decade of the 20th century, was very good at establishing electoral and rhetorical hegemony as a legitimate. Hegemony being the word that academics like to use to talk about legitimacy. Right. They fought back against George Bush's war and Tony Blair's war on global terror, and they had an alternative. Now the right doesn't so much seek hegemony or legitimacy. It's putting forward a kind of world making conspiracism in which it's like something like out of Harry Potter or something. It's like the Ministry of Magic or something. I don't know what the culture wars are. Dark. Is it dark? Dark. And the danger about US brand of culture wars is that because it's never about any one thing, right? Whatever is being fought over can always just be shifted from guns to plastic straws to, you know, to whatever. So there's no way of ending it. It just escalates and escalates because it's always about nothing. And that's what's dangerous. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is that this kind of politics has been exported into Latin America in recent years, and we're seeing its effect in countries like Ecuador, like Argentina and El Salvador, where Bukele, a young Bitcoin descendant of Christian Palestine, of all people, has turned his country into an offshore penal colony of the United States. It's really depressing and it's a violation of everything that I've been talking about in terms of what Latin America has historically stood for.

[Eleanor Evans]

Very interesting times indeed. And just. Greg, as a final point of contention to pick up on, which I think our listeners might, might be interested in, your thoughts on, at a time when leaders like President Trump are placing significance on the name of the Gulf of Mexico, suggesting it's renamed to the Gulf of America, for example, I think this brings us back to the title of your book and the significance of America in this space and what it's doing. What were your thoughts on this recent statement from President Trump?

[Greg Grandin]

Well, of course it's ridiculous. Nobody's going to call the Gulf of Mexico since the 1550s, and nobody's going to call it the Gulf of America except people who are ideologically committed to Trump. And that might last a long time, but it's not going to last forever. They could put an accent on the E. They could compromise and call it Gulf of America. But of course, nobody in the United States would understand that that was a compromise, because they don't understand other people call themselves Americans. So I imagine it'll go back to being called generally the Gulf of Mexico.

[Eleanor Evans]

That was Greg Grandin, professor of history at Yale University and the author of America America. He was speaking to Eleanor Evans.

Mmm. Mmm.

[Greg Grandin]

Oh. Whatcha eating? The new banana split cookie from AM pm. All freshly baked with real butter with banana, chocolate and strawberry flavor.

[Eleanor Evans]

Ah, that sounds amazing.

[Greg Grandin]

Can I have a bite? I'm sorry, but no.

[America's Navy Advertiser]

But you can't split the banana split.

[Eleanor Evans]

Not even a little.

[Greg Grandin]

Not even a crumb. What if. No, please, mine.

[Disney Plus Hulu HBO Max Advertiser]

When it's too legit to split. That's cravenience. Get a 3 pack for 99 cents with our app ampm. Too much good stuff. Plus tax where applicable. Prices and participation may vary in terms of conditions apply.

[VRBO Advertiser]

How do you make an Airbnb a vrbo? Picture a vacation rental with a host who's showing you every room like you've never seen a house before. Now get rid of them. There you go. No host ever. Now it's a vrbo. Make it a vrbove.