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José Martí, |
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JOSÉ MARTÍ AND THE AMERICAN FOUNDING FATHERS "The Apostles of Philadelphia" Strident partisanship has in recent years brought to the fore those writings in which Martí portrayed the defects and errors of the United States he knew. His harsh indictments of the sectors of this nation debased by arrogance and the abuse of power are quoted often and with unwholesome satisfaction. In this oblique campaign to chastise the guilty, the accusers would obscure that Martí's anger was aroused rather by the guilt itself. For Martí, wrong was universally to be censured and deplored, and his words were ultimately intended to instill and encourage the principles and practice of human decency. What Martí abhorred in this country is quintessential today in some adversaries of this country: nothing here he criticized more severely than the assault on liberty and justice. Martí admired this nation which, "with imperturbable generosity opened its arms ... to the unfortunate and industrious of the earth," but he did not love it; his love went out to the South, to the peoples who compose what he piously called Mother America. He saw the hopeful looks cast North by the inexperienced republics in search of guidance, and he feared, correctly, that imitation would lead them astray and that awe would lay open their frontiers to the greed of the very country at which they marveled. And so he used no reserve in uncovering to them "the truth about the United States" and in insisting: "It is necessary to study the way this nation sins, the way it errs, the way it founders, so as not to founder as it does." Exiled because of his activities in favor of Cuban independence, Martí arrived in New York for the first time at the beginning of 1875, at the age of twenty-two. Seven years earlier, Spanish officials had sentenced him to hard labor and then banished him from Cuba. Then in Spain he studied at and graduated from the University of Saragossa, whereupon he fled to Mexico, stopping briefly in New York. In Mexico he worked as a journalist until, chagrined at the excesses of those in power, he left for Guatemala, where he began a career as a teacher, only to abandon this country too, shortly after, for similar reasons. It was his second expulsion from Cuba that again brought Martí to the United States, in 1880. Here he lived until 1895, carrying on the struggle to which he had dedicated his life and which led him to his death on May 19 of that year, at the outset of the independence war he had organized. His first employment in New York was as a journalist, and in some of the earliest articles he wrote for The Hour, a magazine devoted to the arts and letters, he left his impressions as a newcomer who had only recently ended years of instability and wanderings: "I am, at last, in a country where everyone looks like his own master. One can breathe freely, freedom being here the foundation, the shield, the essence of life." Like no other Hispanic writer of his time, during his fifteen years in this country, Martí came to know and understand the ways and complex problems of U.S. society: the difficulties and the promise created by immigration; the racial prejudice; the burgeoning labor movement; the corruption in politics. For the newspapers of Central and South America he wrote magnificent chronicles on these and other topics as well as portraits of great Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Longfellow; Courtlandt Palmer, the "millionaire socialist"; Henry Garnet, the Black orator "who hated hate"; Peter Cooper, "the friend of man"; Wendell Phillips, "the ardent knight of human dignity." Martí described the important events he witnessed and everything that in some way could contribute to an accurate and vivid image of the United States, a country that inspired in him both admiration and anxiety. "We love the land of Lincoln, just as we fear the land of Cutting," he said, summarizing his attitude. In the "sublime offspring of the lowly" he found the embodiment of nobility; in the "shameless reporter and adventurer" who maligned Mexico and espoused annexation of Cuba to the United States, the embodiment of conceit and malice. When Martí took pen in hand, it was to enhance his subject, especially when the subject itself was adorned by virtue; and when he wrote in censure, it was with compassion and the sole purpose of bettering the world, never with hate, for few have been so apprehensive as he of that passion he called a poison and a crime. He held at his fingertips every device language and literature offered, and when these were insufficient, he created new and surprising ones, through sheer genius and without the slightest hint of effort or fatigue. And so, through his art were revealed to Spanish America myriad pictures of the United States as a land where the people performed feats worthy of giants but in their hurry seemed a swarm of ants; and through his insight was captured the nation's spirit in the strength of a hero or the smile of a child. The aged Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who at the peak of his fame had Martí's "North American Scenes" read to him so that he could savor their inexhaustible expressive wealth, said: "In Spanish, there is nothing that compares with the swell and roar of Martí's prose, nor has anything comparable to his metallic resonance come out of France since Victor Hugo." While totalitarian regimes are continually making Martí's works available to their people in their native tongues, falsifying through hushed censorship and abridgement their meaning and intent, only a handful of Martí's works has been properly translated into English. The integrity of the texts must be restored and their translation encouraged; as Emil Ludwig has said, were they accessible to readers throughout the world, "they alone would suffice to make of Martí a source of leadership and guidance for our times." For the United States, Martí's writings have the added significance of providing, through an astute outsider's eyes, a critique of past errors and still ingrained flaws, and a reminder of the treasures that must be appreciated and safeguarded. "The Apostles of Philadelphia" Martí engraved in his memory every turn that history made, and he applied its lessons to the plight of Cuba. His first printed words about the revolutionary period were written in Mexico during the centennial of the American Declaration of Independence. There, news reached him of the celebrations in New York, where many of his compatriots lived, like him refugees from Spanish tyranny. On July 4, they marched with the Cuban flag, and their gesture was hailed by sympathetic American observers. Martí took note of the occurrence in an article for Revista Universal -"As the symbol of the heroic Antillean island was carried on the long parade, it was greeted not with applause, but with ovations. Does the blood shed valiantly by a people seeking freedom deserve less from a sister nation than cheers of affection and love? What nation, itself the offspring of oppression, is not moved and made proud by the exalted emblem of an energetic and revered people in whose glory are mirrored its own past glories?" In the United States Martí found the cradle of liberty in the Americas, so he set himself to studying it. He inquired how and why the throne of freedom had been built and secured here, for he wanted to enthrone freedom in his native land. "Freedom is the Mother of the earth," "the essence of life ... .. the definitive religion," he said, and he sought to understand the progeny, the doctrines, and the rituals that made freedom flourish. But beside it, he found slavery: "In 1620 the Mayflower carried the pilgrims to Plymouth, and in 1619 a Dutch ship carried twenty African slaves to Virginia." And so he was careful in his analysis to separate the two seeds, to set apart the Declaration of Independence from the federal Constitution. The former was for Martí "the genuine expression of the lofty spirit that moved the heroes and the preachers of liberty, that did battle in Bunker Hill and triumphed in Yorktown." But in the pacts of 1787 among the states, along with the precepts to ensure liberty, he saw guaranteed the iniquitous institution of bondage. In his evocations of the revolutionary period, Martí captured the excitement awakened by Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the animation created in Philadelphia by the arrival of the delegates to the Second Continental Congress, from Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, New York, and the rest of the thirteen colonies. He portrayed with equal measures of humanity and immortality the outstanding figures of the moment. Franklin was the "humble man," the "austere ambassador" to the French court "who entered the king's palace dressed in the modest garb of democracy, and spoke and triumphed with the language of liberty." He described Jefferson, "who had sworn eternal hostility to all forms of slavery," drawing up the draft of the Declaration, his tiny script "that of a soul contracted in its labors to strike in the hearts of men, like a flagstaff at its base, the ideas with which nations should be formed." He drew attention to the words so carefully chosen to convey those principles: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Never before had such brilliant thoughts been pronounced upon the foundation of government among men. As Samuel Eliot Morison has rightly said: "These words are more revolutionary than anything written by Robespierre, Marx, or Lenin, more explosive than the atom, a continual challenge to ourselves, as well as an inspiration to the oppressed of all the world." Martí studied the Constitution through the two-volume History by George Bancroft, whom he admired as an historian but reproached as the secretary of the navy when the Polk administration took California from Mexico. In an article he wrote for the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación in 1877, Martí borrowed from Bancroft's account to render his own of the lively debates at the convention and of the conflicting interests that had to be reconciled for the federation to be formed: the South's differences with the North, the farmers' with the industrialists, the big states' with the small, the slave states' with the free. And with a few details he characterized the delegates: Hamilton, "the impetuous aristocrat"; Madison, "precise and forthright," "learned in letters and a scholar of history"; Governor Morris, "a graduate from Kings College" and "creator of felicitous phrases"; William Paterson, of New Jersey, "a firm advocate of states' rights"; and Edmund Randolph, "the dramatic and attractive" Virginian "who defended centralism" and was "quicker to declaim than to think"; Nathaniel Gorham, the wealthy businessman who was "a choleric enemy of slavery"; James Wilson, "on whose arm Franklin leaned." But before all the founders Martí placed Washington. In him Martí saw incarnate the virtues that lent security to the American republic in its origins, and his praise was exuberant: Washington's steadfastness, his selflessness, his demeanor, all drew applause. Martí's Washington is more radiant after the hostilities ceased than before Newburgh, because he had learned in war the sobriety required to rule his countrymen. Fresh from his victories, he is described arriving in Philadelphia for the convention, his path strewn with flowers by women as he passed by. His most difficult battle was there: "The dissension Washington came to quiet was harsh at the time. The pernicious vociferators, the turbid spume that all revolutions arouse, appeared and took control, calling themselves progressive liberals. Others, preoccupied with instituting freedom, forgot to talk of freedom . . . . and there were few heroes of the war whose ambitions for emoluments and sinecures did not tarnish their deeds." Martí knew that a grandiose portrayal of the forging of the Constitution might cause in the reader a mistaken, idealized impression of the men who framed it. "Corn and beef speak the same tongue," he cautioned: "The fair-haired hates, deceives, and boasts the same as the dark-haired. The North-American becomes fanatical, angry, rebellious, confused, and corrupt just like the Spanish-American. One had only to witness the convention!" Nevertheless, Martí, fair in his judgments, also knew that freedom presided over that contest; from the open and spontaneous arguments, he drew conclusions profitable to Spanish America: "That debate, natural in the political circumstances that produced it, was as fruitful as it was forceful. Sincerity is not to be feared; only what is kept hidden is ominous. The public welfare requires the kind of combat that teaches respect; the kind of blaze that fires good ideas and consumes the useless ones; the kind of breeze that clears away the clouds, exposing in the light of day both the apostles and the rascals." Martí has been criticized for not formulating a systematic body of doctrines, an outline for a constitution to direct the future of Cuba. His essays on the experience of Philadelphia reveal the reason for his silence: he understood a constitution to be "a living and practical law that cannot be structured with ideological components." The factors that might be comprised in the republic after independence had been won were unforeseeable, and it would have been artificial and inopportune to try to write codes of law on thin air, anticipating the outcome. The Constitution of 1789, he said, "radiated the sunlight that, even with all the dark spots, seemed to Franklin the dawn." It was a compromise, a document that answered the specific needs of the nation and that should only be imitated if similar circumstances prevailed, and then not in the criminal concessions that blemished it. But despite its transigence with slavery, that document, in its vitality, proved what Martí proclaimed time and again: "Only those forms of government that are native to nations take root in them." Still, following what he knew of the U.S. Constitution, with its failings and strengths, as well as what he knew of the failings and strengths the rest of the world had developed through a century of social and political ferment, he did clearly indicate in the program of the Cuban Revolutionary Party the route to follow once independence was achieved: "To found on the free and honest exercise of the legitimate faculties of mankind a new and sincerely democratic people capable of overcoming, through authority sustained by real labors and by the equilibrium of the social forces, the dangers attendant upon sudden liberty in a society organized for slavery." Martí truly appreciated the merits of the founders of the United States when in 1884 he saw this country liberate itself from the rule of ineffectual and venal politicians of the Republican Party through the exercise of the vote. The electoral fraud and arbitrary acts perpetrated by the government cast serious doubts on the system created in Philadelphia, but without disorder or bloodshed, the American people reclaimed its mandate from those who had betrayed it once in power. For Martí, the elections of that year were vindication and proof of the foresight and wisdom of the Convention of 1787. In the postbellum era the Republican Party had decayed in its successive terms in high office, while its opposition had weakened. Martí perceived that "as victory rotted, it brought after it disintegration. The manifesto of human freedom was turned into a shelter for money-changers." The same had happened earlier with the Democrats, he commented, as he described the period preceding the Civil War. "Freedom must be a constant practice else it degenerate into a banal formula. The very soil that produces a garden, produces nettles. All power widely and prolongedly held degenerates.... The Democratic Party governed for so long in the past that the Constitution finally became in its hands a mere pile of wrinkled paper." Living during that period of Republican control under which existed, as Martí said, an immoral consortium of "the magnates of politics" and "the potentates of the banks," he decried the situation: "The vehicle of suffrage was rolling on golden axles." There was also administrative irresponsibility: "Sure of their governmental machinery, and confusing the honest clamor of a tired nation with the shouting of a hungry people, the politicians reached shoulder deep into the coffers and foolishly squandered the treasury, even the huge surplus, in plans of obscure origin." He watched with interest as dissension grew within the party: the Mugwumps split with the Stalwarts at the nominating convention over the Blaine-Logan slate. The former was accused of having used public office for personal gain and of having turned the U.S. role as mediator in the War of the Pacific to favor his friends and supporters. Martí was repulsed by both the imperialist leanings and the intrigues and unscrupulous maneuvers associated with James G. He was the leader of what Martí called ultraaguilismo ("ultraeaglism") -the policy of "extending over much of the earth the wings of the American eagle." As Martí saw it, Blaine and his followers maintained that the Constitution was "a moth-eaten cape, a remnant from another time, and that an enterprising people needs roadways along which to expand, not a constable to tie its hands." The Mugwumps, the rebellious Republicans who rejected the party ticket, were, in contrast, "listening to the solemn dictates of Webster, following the heroic spirit of the sacred apostles of Philadelphia." They wanted "freedom -simple, respectful, magnanimous, and pure, and they repeated in the press and in their speeches clear, honest words that sounded like those of titans come to sit among men, as in the sublime days when Washington made the peace, Madison, plans, and Hamilton, provisions; Franklin counseled, Jefferson urged forward." The ideals and acts of the founding fathers were always Martí's yardstick in appraising the course of the nation and its leaders. He was filled with enthusiasm by the popular reaction against corrupt and incompetent government and by the proper use of the franchise to channel that reaction:
During the campaign for the presidential election of 1884, such a man was Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate, who then appeared to Martí "a man of reason and integrity" and "the reformer that the times required." The reaction had become evident with the numerous Democratic victories in the midterm elections of 1882. Martí wrote of them early the following year: "What a splendid agitation in this country two or three months ago! It is like a sleeping giant that, certain of the strength it will need in time of trial, does not hasten to rise; but when it does rise, it wields its enormous hammer, crushes the enemy or the obstacle in its way, and sleeps again. . . . With the majestic and serene show of the magnificent force of peace, the people gave the nation's vote to the new men of the Democratic Party. The weary nation turned its back on the heroes and corrupt advisers. Ah! It was grand; it made one rejoice in belonging to the human race." Then he described the Democrats who called for reform and change as indignant apostles "brandishing like swords in the face of the vote sellers the texts of Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson." In the national election, Martí's hopes that the Republicans would be defeated were fulfilled: Blaine was beaten by Cleveland. Martí mused over the event, which he interpreted idealistically as a sign of moral rebirth for the country:
Martí asked himself where that strength came from, that marvelous power to rescue from spurious leaders the government of the nation, and to dissolve the immoral pact of government and selfish interests that prospered in democracy's shadow. Inspired by the events he had witnessed, he discerned the answer in the organization of the country provided for by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which safeguarded the law and, more than a century after they had been penned, guaranteed the rights and liberties their authors had fought to secure. Nothing Martí wrote in praise of the United States is more fervent or eloquent than this passage he devoted to the memory of the founding fathers when he saw in the Democratic triumph that of the system, and in Cleveland's victory, that of America's apostles of Philadelphia:
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