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Latin American perspectives a program of comment and analysis about current Latin American problems and their historical setting. The commentator for these programs is Dr. C. Harvey Gardner research professor of history at Southern Illinois University. Here now is Dr. Gardner When a thinking man goes traveling. His reaction to scenes and people is something more than a superficial thing. When a thinking historian goes traveling his reaction to countries and nations is something more than a passing thing. And so it is. When thinking historian Arnold Toynbee puts pen to paper to produce his latest travel book which bears the title between will and Amazon a recent publication of Oxford University Press model I might add is a small river in Chile. I will not bother to identify the Amazon. Professor Toynbee is well
known for his numerous books. Indeed he is world famous for his multi-volume study of history. He has a capacity for looking at the big issues the long periods of time but in the last decade and he is now in his advanced 70s he has taken to junketing about the world in a fashion that he had not here to floor and he has given us the benefit of his observations in numerous travel books. One of them was untitled between two rivers in Asia. Another was between Niger and Nile two rivers in Africa. And now he picks on a dimension of the landscape between two rivers in South America. Indeed one suspects that Professor Toynbee has an affection for rivers and some of this stems from the fact that river basins have oft times served as primary seeds for important civilisations. This volume is
largely based upon travels as recent as one thousand sixty six. And obviously he would here again demonstrate his nature that which finds it possible for him to look at the immediate and see an added significance to see something that is beneath the surface. As far as the average observer is concerned I illustrate this by reading a brief passage from his reaction to the new capital city of Brazil. The city of Brasilia which you may recall has been built 600 miles in the interior of the country from the coast he writes. What was the Brazilian national need an aspiration that President Cuba Shek divined when he set the building up in motion. The question is answered by the story of a Scottish Knight who was carrying Robert Bruce's heart to be buried in Jerusalem when the night was passing through Spain. He stopped to help his fellow Christians in a battle with the
Moors. When the issue hung in the balance the Scot hurled the casket containing the precious heart deep into the enemy's ranks and then battled so furiously to recover it. That at the cost of his life he routed the enemy and made the Christian masters of the field. But checks act was one of comparable bravado coups Shek hurled the capital of Brazil from the coast deep into the interior. His intention and expectation was that the Brazilian people would then follow up the migration of the capital and would consequently take possession at last of the huge hinterland in order to draw the attention of the nation in this direction. Some such dramatic act was needed for in Brazil the conquest of the interior is a formidable task. The mineral treasures of miniature ice and the agricultural riches of Sol Paulo HAD IT IS TRUE been exploited long since. But these
two states are not very far from the coast. As Brazilian distances go check for Saw. But when once a new capital has been set up in Brazilian the heart of the Brazilian plateau the empty spaces began to fill up here than you have in typical Toynbee fashion. The relation of something new and something old that gives us an added awareness of contemporary activity. Sometimes as he looks in this matter of the new and the old it with more than a little regret. In fact sometimes there's verbal castigation for someone. Here is a selection dealing with a town in Brazil close upon the mouth of the Amazon. The city of Bell lamb and the relationship of the British to it. This relationship a one time thing in the past. The debris of the short lived rubber boom. He writes is not the only economic shipwreck that one sees it but today a
sad sight here for a British visitor. Is the ship wreck of the local British commercial interests. There was a time when every public utility in the lamb was British made and British owned and when Britain was the source of all consumer goods that were imported to meet the city's needs today. But lambs consumer goods are mainly produced inside Brazil. At Sol pollo. But the section of the market that is still left for foreign enterprise is no longer held by Britain. She has been supplanted by the United States and Germany and Japan the United States had the advantage of coming late into both world wars and continuing to do business almost as usual even after she had become a belligerent. But why should Britain have allowed Germany and Japan to take her place. Germany in both wars and Japan in the second war were as deeply involved as Britain herself. So why have these two countries more than recovered their place in the
affairs of the Lamb. The fault lies in ourselves the Britisher says speaking of fellow Britons and it would be a salutary lesson for slovenly British business managements and restrictive minded British industrial workers to visit this lost market that was once there's been them is not just one last British market. It is a symbol of hundreds of others scattered all over the face of the globe. Britain's 19th century prosperity was based on British markets in a thousand eleven. Here then you have the dimension of today's life in Brazil against yesterday's life for Britain. And this as we plainly see to the castigation of what has happened to the British out of Brazil into Argentina the traveler went and so did his writing there.
He treats among other things the Falkland Islands a pinpoint of land with a population of about 2000 off the southeast coast of Argentina. The land which has been contested between Argentina and Great Britain ever since the 1830s when Britain seized it land which has two names on two maps. An Argentine map calls the islands the Malvinas the British call them the Falklands. It disturbed and caused me to wonder about the amount of deep passionate feeling that the Argentines have about the loss of the mildness to Britain he writes. The Psychological Fact is unquestionable its political importance is obvious but the cause is not self evident. Why does the issue over the political status of these islands excite emotion on the Argentine side the economic and strategic value of the islands is virtually nil and they're very remote from the Argentine mainland. Indeed the islands of Saint-Pierre and make along like close to Canada and Canada does nothing to take them from France
and the Channel Islands owned by England like close to France. But France does nothing to take them from England. Why does a foreign flag in the distant Falklands so irritate the people of Argentina. The clue to the psychological puzzle may lie in a difference of psychological atmosphere which struck 20 as he crossed from Brazil into Argentina. Indeed he insists that the Brazilians and the Argentinians take their nationalism in very different spirits. The Brazilian nationalism is ironic and light hearted. That of the Argentines is romantic and intense. What is the origin of this in this difference of emotional attitude to be then developed to the point that whereas Brazil peacefully separated from Portugal Argentina separated from Spain in a long bloodbath. And this is the problem of secession has created heroes and liberators heroes on horseback and in
bronze dressed in uniforms which has nurtured a national consciousness a feeling that calls all the more far humiliation as the Argentines see the British in the islands that they covet. To this very day. In time the English traveler got north of the Amazon River in fact to make a small book bigger. He visited Venezuela and there he discussed the irony of those who search for wealth in quick fashion and those in our own day have gone at it a little more slowly. There is an irony he writes about the fate of greedy people who tread on potential wealth without suspecting its presence underfoot. The city of Maracaibo Venezuela commanding the entrance to the huge lake that bears its name and the City of Angostura at the head of oceanic navigation up the coast of the river Orinoco where early Spanish
foundations and almost as early the objectives of English heretical enterprise Drake sacked Maracaibo and Sir Walter Raleigh tried failed to sack Angostura in his desperate search for Eldorado. What would Drake have made of Lake my kibo is mineral oil. If the god Poseidon with a tritone stroke had made a gusher spout up from the lake like the blowing of a whale. And what would Raleigh have said if you had been told that the metallic wealth of the country that he was unsuccessfully invading consisted not of romantic gold but of prosaic ired. It was left to our century to discover the stupendous Venezuelan mineral treasures and to exploit them. The traveller moved farther north to Yucatan to Mexico.
Indeed he moves into Puerto Rico and finally comes to the concluding statement which finds him summarising not just a trip in the 1950s but repeated trips of the 1950s as he reminds himself he has visited no fewer than 11 Latin American countries and reaches the conclusion that since they have achieved their independence the Latin American republics have been growing farther and farther apart from each other. This has been an editable result of separate sovereign independence something that they have indeed deliberately cultivated. He advocates the throwing of all statues of heroes into the sea. This would perhaps deflate some of their present tendencies to be so belligerent in their thinking. For some time the 20 writings on foreign affairs have now come
to embrace the travel account for all their satisfactions in the broad and meaningful comparisons of his speculative thought. Indeed it is the thought that invites more your own thinking. Even now one suspects that the man fast approaching his 80th birthday is off somewhere travelling between two more rivers sharpening his awareness of the general and the specific the old and the new. This was a Latin American perspectives with Dr. C. Harvey Gardner research professor of history at Southern Illinois University. Join us for our next program when Dr. Gardner will examine another aspect of life in Latin America. Latin American perspective is produced and recorded by station WFIU FM at Southern Illinois University and distributed by the national educational radio network.
Series
Latin American perspectives
Episode
Travels through Latin America
Producing Organization
WSIU 8 (Television station : Carbondale, Ill.)
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Contributing Organization
University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/500-3t9d8s2z
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Description
Episode Description
This program focuses on a trip through Latin America.
Series Description
A series of comment and analysis about current affairs in Latin American countries.
Date
1968-01-15
Topics
Global Affairs
Media type
Sound
Duration
00:13:42
Embed Code
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Credits
Host: Gardiner, C. Harvey (Clinton Harvey)
Producing Organization: WSIU 8 (Television station : Carbondale, Ill.)
Producing Organization: Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
AAPB Contributor Holdings
University of Maryland
Identifier: 68-3-7 (National Association of Educational Broadcasters)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Duration: 00:13:37
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Citations
Chicago: “Latin American perspectives; Travels through Latin America,” 1968-01-15, University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 28, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-3t9d8s2z.
MLA: “Latin American perspectives; Travels through Latin America.” 1968-01-15. University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 28, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-3t9d8s2z>.
APA: Latin American perspectives; Travels through Latin America. Boston, MA: University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-3t9d8s2z