Gisela Cramer/Ursula Prutsch (eds.)
¡Américas unidas!
Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office
of Inter-American Affairs (1940-46)
Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office
of Inter-American Affairs (1940-46)
IBEROAMERICANA · VERVUERT · 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
¡Américas unidas! : Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940- 46) / Gisela Cramer, Ursula Prutsch (eds.).
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-936353-08-8 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978-8484896746 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978-3-86527-719-0 (alk. paper)
1. United States. Office of Inter-American Affairs–History. 2. Latin America–Foreign relations–United States. 3. United States–Foreign relations–Latin America. 4. Rockefeller, Nelson A. (Nelson Aldrich), 1908-1979. 5. World War, 1939-1945–Diplomatic history I. Cramer, Gisela. II. Prutsch, Ursula.
F1418.A565 2012
327.8073–dc23
2012022627
© Iberoamericana, 2012
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ISBN 978-84-8489-674-6 (Iberoamericana)
ISBN 978-3-86527-719-0 (Vervuert)
ISBN 978-1-936353-08-8 (Iberoamericana Vervuert Publishing Corp.)
e-ISBN 978-3-95487-011-0
Depósito Legal:
Frontispiece: Las Américas unidas para la victoria y el progreso humano (Calendar sheet, produced by the United States Office of Inter-American Affairs), depicting a U.S.- American and a Latin American soldier shaking hands over a seated woman and two children. The background has a globe and military equipment. The border contains images of Catholic symbols and saints. Courtesy of Hennepin County Library, Kittleson World War II Collection, MPW00444.
Cover design: Marcela López Parada
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
in memory of Friedrich Katz
In lieu of a preface: Friedrich Katz – an Austrian Obituary
Gerhard Drekonja-Kornat
Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs and the Quest for Pan-American Unity: An Introductory Essay
Gisela Cramer and Ursula Prutsch
Chapter 1
Playing the Cultural Game: The United States and the Nazi Threat to Latin America
Uwe Lübken
Chapter 2
“There’s Only One America Now”: The OIAA Film Programs in the United States
Pennee Bender
Chapter 3
Dual-Engined Diplomacy: Walt Disney, Orson Welles, and Pan-American Film Policy during World War II
Catherine L. Benamou
Chapter 4
Soft Power: The Art of Diplomacy in US-Mexican Relations, 1940-1946
Catha Paquette
Chapter 5
Fighting for the Soul of the Mexican Press: Axis and Allied Activities during the Second World War
José Luis Ortiz Garza
Chapter 6
The Word War at the River Plate: The Office of Inter-American Affairs and the Argentine Airwaves, 1940-46
Gisela Cramer
Chapter 7
Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs in Brazil
Ursula Prutsch
Chapter 8
The OIAA in Central America: The Coordination Committees at Work
Thomas M. Leonard
The Editors and Contributors
On October 16, 2010, the Austro-American historian Friedrich Katz died. As a professor at the University of Chicago for nearly four decades, he helped shape Latin American studies as an international field of research and learning. At one stage he nearly returned to his native Austria to take up a professorship in Latin American history, but then decided to remain in the United States. It seems that the wounds inflicted during the National Socialist era were too deep for his family to be able to return permanently to a country that, despite widely-held notions to the contrary, had not simply been a victim of German aggression.
In any case, Austria began rather late to officially remember the scholars and scientists who had been forced to emigrate. And it was not until 1990, when the University of Vienna established a chair for Latin American studies, that we recalled all those exiles whose work had focused on Latin America. By then, most of them had been forgotten in their former home country.
Friedrich Katz, however, was well-known at least among historians. He had achieved recognition in and well beyond Chicago. Yet the University of Vienna had so far failed to bestow an honorary degree on him. We therefore approached the University of Vienna’s rector and started a persistent campaign in favor of a distinction for Katz. An honorary degree had just been bestowed upon him by Berlin’s Free University. Had Katz not completed his Ph.D. in 1954 in Vienna? Surely, the fifty-year anniversary of his doctoral degree would provide a suitable occasion to bestow a Golden Diploma for his lifetime academic achievements. The Rector and Dean finally agreed and the Municipality of Vienna not only backed the project, but helped to defray the travel expenses. This is why the ceremony would take place in Vienna’s City Hall and not at the university.
On March 23, 2004, the great day had finally come. We, the organizers, met Friedrich Katz and his wife Jana in the City Hall’s “Red Room” and, while waiting for the celebration to begin, found ourselves sitting in front of a larger-than-life portrait of Karl Lueger, Vienna’s great mayor – and great anti-Semite. It was in the anti-Semitic environment of Lueger’s turn-of-the-century Vienna that Adolf Hitler had conjured up his visions of the Jews as the eternal enemies. Now Friedrich Katz, a Vienna Jew, looked up to the mayor and muttered impishly: “Da schaust Du, dass ich jetzt als Ehrengast dasitze!” (“Now you are surprised to see me sitting here as the guest of honor.”) That said, we relaxed and the ceremony could begin. I had the privilege of delivering the laudation.
My first encounter with Friedrich Katz as a person was mediated through photos. As happens to anyone who investigates the history of Germanspeaking anti-fascists who had found refuge in Mexico, the first things that sprang to my attention when doing research over there were photos; for example, a picture of the Austrian Katz family with Friedrich, then still a young boy, positioned at the periphery of the family picture. The photo focused rather on his father Leo, who would merit a homage of his own. One of the most exciting figures in Europe’s anti-fascist resistance during the 1930s, Leo Katz was involved in a series of daring activities such as the smuggling of weapons for the Spanish Republic, activities that one would not easily associate with an editor and man of letters. Not surprisingly, his dissertation on Jewish theology was ordered to be removed from Vienna University’s Library by the Nazis in 1938. Indeed, Leo Katz and his family epitomized what the Nazis hated most: they were part of an immensely talented and culturally avant-garde Jewish intelligentsia that had flourished in Vienna and Berlin and that was now being stamped out violently.
Father Katz was left with no choice but to flee. The early life of his son Friedrich therefore was to be a rather turbulent one. The family fled from Europe to the United States and, with anti-fascist support and solidarity, finally found a safe haven in Mexico, where they continued to engage in a wide range of political and literary activities and to work towards a future free Austria.
Quite naturally, Friedrich Katz turned into an aficionado of the country that had helped him and his family to survive. After the war, the Katz family returned to Vienna where he continued to study Mexican history. His doctoral dissertation on the socio-economic relations of the Aztecs sketched out a potential academic career. Yet, 1950s-Vienna lacked an intellectually stimulating climate and, above all, an established Latin American studies program. Friedrich Katz therefore left for East Berlin where Humboldt University offered him the possibility to continue with a habilitation in the History of Diplomacy. In 1964, his habilitation thesis matured into a book. Entitled Deutschland, Diaz und die Mexikanische Revolution: die deutsche Politik in Mexiko 1870 bis 1920 (Germany, Diaz, and the Mexican Revolution: German Policies in Mexico, 1870-1920), it dealt with the classic era of European colonial imperialism. That there also had been German imperialism was something that was then being rediscovered by historians not only in the German Democratic Republic, but also in the capitalist West. However, the GDR’s contention that declared the Federal Republic to be the lone heir to Germany’s fascist past was a polemic stance that ran counter to academic integrity. The violent suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 did the rest.
Katz left the GDR to continue his cosmopolitan life, accepting visiting professorships at various universities on the American continent before settling down permanently in Chicago. At the prestigious University of Chicago he finally found an environment where non-orthodox thinking was allowed to bear fruit. It was here that he developed into a leading Mexicanist with studies on indigenous peasant revolts, great power rivalries during the Mexican Revolution, and analyses of Latin America’s national-revolutionary situation, again with frequent recourses to pre-Columbian civilizations. In 1998, culminating twenty years of research in every possible archive, he presented the nearly 1,000-page opus The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, a biography of the second great figure of the Mexican Revolution, after Emiliano Zapata.
But is it still appropriate for us to write biographies, younger historians may ask? Without a doubt, our discipline has changed enormously over the last 25 years and has broadened in scope: it has left behind a history narrowly-conceived as events made by “great men;” it has turned to social structures and to everyday life; it has discovered the value of oral sources; and it has incorporated the perspectives of women, who did their part in demolishing the great male heroes. Last but not least, subaltern studies have made their debut in Latin American studies and elsewhere, ventilating the question of who is permitted to write about the so-called Third World.
Is Friedrich Katz, then, a man of the past, an outdated model of a historian? Not at all! The Life and Times of Pancho Villa is more than a book about a male hero. It is a lively and multifarious account and social history of the Mexican Revolution as it unfolds in the Northwest, in a frontier region where “la frontera” does not refer to a border or spatial boundary, but to a space defined by anarchic regional autonomy. An enigmatic concept that pervades the historical narratives of both the United States and Latin America, “la frontera” does not fit into European categories as The Life and Times of Pancho Villa makes abundantly clear. And despite all the concerns raised by subaltern studies, it seems to me that Mexicans of both the “país formal” and the “país real” have had no qualms about Katz producing a biography of their revolutionary hero. Nor did Mexican feminists, although they would have good reasons to be disenchanted with Katz’s protagonist: there is no denying that Pancho Villa was a supreme macho. He smashed the local oligarchy, but did nothing to further women’s rights.
Katz’s hero also challenges us for another reason. All of the great social revolutionaries of the past century –Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro– were intellectuals. Pancho Villa was born into a poor peasant family and did not even complete his school education. He cannot be categorized as a socialist theorist. He rarely participated in ideological debates. If Villa trusted someone versed in theory, it was, according to Katz, the soldier and intellectual Felipe Ángeles, who must have told him about Austrian socialism. After falling into the hands of the Carrancistas and before being mercilessly executed, Ángeles defended himself with a speech that, at one point in his trial, drew applause when he referred to Austria. I quote: “An Austrian communist has proven that if all men in the world would only work three hours per day, there would be much more wealth.” Alas, if only we would follow such sound advice!
Pancho Villa is sprinkled with witty references to Austria, which inspired some epigones to further pursue the Austrian connection. Thus, Rubén Osorio set out to prove that Pancho Villa was really an illegitimate son of Luis Ferman, a Mexican hacendado of imperial Austrian descent.
But let us set aside such counterfactual speculation. The really delicious anecdote relating Pancho Villa to Katz’s native Austria was provided by the author himself. In a contribution to a conference on political exiles in Mexico, he recounts meeting Austria’s Chancellor Bruno Kreisky in Chicago. To make polite conversation, Kreisky asked him what he was currently working on, and Katz replied that he was writing a biography about a man Kreisky would certainly not know about, Pancho Villa. “I most certainly do know about Pancho Villa,” answered Kreisky, “he played a most exciting role for us young socialists in Vienna! In 1935, the Kreuz theater in Vienna exhibited the Hollywood movie Viva Villa. As socialists we were banned in Austria’s corporate state and we decided to meet at the cinema. And every time Pancho Villa in the film appealed to the exploited rural laborers to rise up against the oppressors and to shout ‘Viva la Revolución,’ we rose from our seats to shout ‘Down with the Corporate State!’ and ‘Long live democracy!’”
We should not forget that Austria’s historiography on Mexico used to center on the Habsburg Maximilian, who for three years governed the “Segundo Imperio” and who paid with his life for this ill-conceived adventure undertaken on behalf of France. It must be the cunning of history that some hundred years later another Austrian, Friedrich Katz, delivered the authoritative biography on a very different kind of historical protagonist, the Mexican revolutionary hero Pancho Villa.
Friedrich Katz had meant to write the foreword to this volume, but fell ill before he could complete this task. The editors dedicate this book to him.