Spain: A Unique History (2 page)

The most positive evaluation seems to have been made from the opposite end of Europe. The elite of Catholic Poland, on the extreme eastern frontier of Western civilization, facing Muscovy and also sometimes the Turkish empire, developed some sense of affinity with a Catholic Spain on the borderlands of Christendom far to the west and south. Polish leaders who intervened in Russia during its early seventeenth-century "Time of Troubles" likened themselves to Spanish conquistadores extending the frontiers of Catholicism and European civilization.
²
Later, in a manner partially parallel with the decline of Spain, the large Polish-Lithuanian empire in eastern Europe would falter, then eventually disappear from the map altogether. By the early nineteenth century the historian Jan Lelewel would develop a broad comparative and parallel history of Poland and of Spain from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
³
Even in the twenty-first century, Polish commentators are the least likely to engage in "politically correct" criticism and commentary on developments in Spain.

Broadly speaking, the content of foreign images and stereotypes of Spain has changed its terms and emphases in different historical eras.
⁴
These may be roughly categorized as (1) the classic Black Legend stereotype of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; (2) "enlightened" criticism of the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; (3) the "romantic Spain" myth of the nineteenth century; and (4) the composite stereotypes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which revived aspects of each of the foregoing versions, sometimes adding to them contemporary political content that often created new myths and stereotypes. What they all have in common is the penchant for stereotyping, simplification, and Manicheanism, with little or no concern for the diversity of Spain, not merely in term of its regions but also with regard to varying political values or projects, cultural attitudes, and practices, and even differences in religious emphasis. At the same time, we should recognize that much of the content in these images and stereotypes was first developed by the Spanish themselves, beginning with Fray Bartolomé de las Casas in the sixteenth century. In more recent times, particularly, nearly all the most absurd and exaggerated statements about Spanish culture and history have been made by Spaniards themselves.

The Black Legend viewed the Spanish as cruel, bloodthirsty, sadistic, powerhungry, and monstrously destructive, while "enlightened" attitudes from the late seventeenth century on described a militarily weakened Spain as no longer cruel or dangerously destructive, but as a land inhabited by proud, lazy, ignorant, and unproductive people, dominated by hollow vanity and spiritual benightedness.
⁵
Spaniards were no longer to be hated and feared, but rather to be pitied and scorned.

The early nineteenth century became a time of "paradigm shift," with a new emphasis placed on the romantic and the picturesque, increasingly interpreted in terms more favorable to the Spanish. Foreigner travelers had often found elements of the exotic and picturesque in the country, but in earlier times evaluated such aspects in a negative manner as typical features of a strange and rather hostile land. The French, British, and American travelers and writers, who forged the "romantic Spain" myth in the first half of the nineteenth century, focused on certain stereotypes that they interpreted as the enchanting reflection of a distinct premodern, pre-industrial culture possessing positive features, which, if not superior (or even equal) to those of their own countries, were at least worthy of esteem. The formerly fanatical Spanish were now seen as people of faith and ardent commitment who spurned the crass materialism of northern countries. What was once called ignorance was now viewed as a sense of honor disappearing from the commercial society of other lands. Behavior once denounced as violent now betokened courage and the capacity for self-sacrifice. The rudeness and egalitarianism of the lower classes was no longer evaluated as a Spanish grotesquerie of the uncouth but as the survival of a sense of authentic and individual personality no longer found in the humdrum world of London and Paris.
⁶

"Romantic Spain" was no more real than the Black Legend, to which it was related, and was not by any means uniformly positive in its evaluation but gave a new twist to the old stereotypes. From the early nineteenth century the two visions often coexisted in the images of Spain held in other western lands, being vaguely combined in modified forms by many observers and commentators. The comparatively slow rate of modernization during the nineteenth century served only to perpetuate these stereotypes, as did the political and military failures of the period. The romantic Spain motif was so firmly established as late as the midtwentieth century that the tourist program of the Franco regime even co-opted certain aspects of it in the commercially successful "Spain is Different" tourist promotions of the 1950s.
⁷

All this did nothing, however, to incorporate the history of Spain into the broader history of Europe, for it meant that Spain continued to be seen as an exception, a kind of Other. Aside from its success in occupying much of the Western Hemisphere, the place of Spain within broader European and Western history from the fifteenth century on continued to be viewed as either negative and destructive or passive, relatively nonparticipatory, and irrelevant. The partial exception was medieval Spanish history, which was seen to play a certain role in Europe's development. A deeper, more comprehensive and objective treatment of Spanish history by scholars abroad would emerge with the great expansion of historical studies in the 1960s and afterwards. Even then, progress at first would be limited, for some of the foreign scholars writing about contemporary Spain in the second half of the twentieth century had only a limited grasp of Spanish history as a whole, and so in their comments on earlier periods would either consciously or unconsciously repeat certain standard tropes drawn from the myths of romantic Spain or the Black Legend, or both.
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Only the completion of socioeconomic and educational modernization during the later years of Franco, followed by the success of the democratic Transition, would finally put an end to most of these stereotypes, at least with regard to contemporary Spain. There, by the end of the century, the old myths would, as J. N. Hillgarth puts it, "be replaced by an even more misleading generalization, that Spain is a European country with a historical trajectory exactly like any other."
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The work of the historian is never done.

The study of Spain is rather unique among scholarly enterprises in having become an "ism" — "Hispanism." Scholarly activity is normally recognized as an "ism" only when it pertains to a very broad field of study, as in "classicism" and "orientalism," not with regard to a single country. Foreign scholars who study Germany or Russia are sometimes described as Germanists or Russianists, but the term "Germanism" or "Russianism" is not normally applied. The word "hispanista" was originally used in Spain during the late nineteenth century in two different senses, one of them being equivalent to panhispanista or hispanoamericanista, applied to those who sought closer ties among all Spanish-speaking countries, the second referring to foreign scholars who dedicated themselves to studying Spanish themes. During the first half of the twentieth century, the second sense of the term came to predominate.

Hispanism originated during the nineteenth century, parallel to the estheticism of the "romantic Spain" concept developed primarily by the writers and artists of France and England. As distinct from the latter, however, scholarly Hispanism developed at the same time as the expansion of the universities, even though it was vitally assisted by independent scholars and philanthropists. Although individual Hispanists might be found throughout western Europe, their work appeared especially in French and English, and to a lesser degree in German, during the course of the nineteenth century, developing rapidly in the United States. By 1909 Martin Hume, perhaps the leading British Hispanist of his generation, would declare that the North American academic world "now stands absolutely pre-eminent in this branch of learning." Three years later, in a lecture in Salamanca, Miguel de Unamuno expressed much the same judgment.
¹

The origins of Hispanism in the United States are complex.
²
Hume referred to what he termed an "instinctive mutual attraction" between Spain and the United States, but that is probably an exaggeration. The remote origins of the United States lie in Elizabethan England, for whom Spain was the major enemy and which sedulously cultivated what more than three centuries later would be termed the "Black Legend," certainly not a promising beginning. Moreover, during the eighteenth century, the government of Spain was generally aligned with France, the principal enemy of Great Britain, and the attitudes of the Black Legend continued to inform American attitudes during the nineteenth century, and to some extent during the first half of the twentieth century as well.

Spain was much more important for the United States during the early years of the American republic than it would be later. The empire reached its all-time greatest geographical extent just as the United States was being born in the 1770s, and the revival of the Spanish navy meant that it continued to be a European power of some significance. The intervention of Spain on behalf of the thirteen colonies in their war of independence against Great Britain was of some importance in the American victory, while imperial Spain would continue to be the southern neighbor of the United States throughout the first generation of its existence.
³
The fledgling American republic initially established only three full-scale embassies (as distinct from more modest legations) abroad, in London, Paris, and Madrid, relations with Spain being surpassed in importance only by those with Britain and France. Even after most of America was lost to the Spanish crown, two of the three territories closest to the United States-Cuba and Puerto Rico-were retained, so that Spain would remain an important neighbor throughout the nineteenth century a relationship that reached a violent climax in 1898. After that, connections with Spain dwindled, though they became more important again during the Second World War and the Cold War.

Interest in Spain among American scholars seems to have stemmed from three sources: (1) the importance of classical Spanish literature, which always enjoyed respect in the English-speaking world, facilitated by the fact that Spanish is not a difficult language for English-speaking people to learn to read; (2) the importance of relations with Spain during the nineteenth century; and (3) the sense of Spain and of Spanish culture as fundamental to the greater Western Hemisphere, and therefore of greater importance to the United States than these would be to most European countries.

Its scholarly origins stem from the second quarter of the nineteenth century. George Erving, chargé d'affaires of the Madrid embassy during the 1820s, may be considered the first American Hispanist scholar, publishing the first book to appear in English on the language and culture of the Basques. American writers of the same generation also helped to develop the myth of romantic Spain. Washington Irving (in this regard the earliest ancestor of Ernest Hemingway) published the longest-lived of all American books on Spain,
Tales from the Alhambra
(1831), which remains in print after nearly two centuries. A considerable number of travel books and historical works published by Americans during the nineteenth century continued in this vein. The first major work of erudite Hispanism was George Ticknor's
History of Spanish Literature
(1849), followed by the widely read works of the historian William Hickling Prescott.
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Prescott was, in fact, the first major American historian of any European country; thus, at least in serious American historiography, Hispanism initially led the way. Not for another half century would subsequent American historians of Europe rise to Prescott's level in terms of primary research and interpretative synthesis, and his achievement was all the more notable in that he was nearly blind.

It may have been Prescott, even more than Irving, who set the tone. He was the greatest Hispanist historian of his era in any country, but Prescott provided a sort of canonical statement of the Black Legend during the nineteenth century, defining what Richard Kagan has termed the "Prescott paradigm," which would long dominate attitudes toward Spain. This interpretation made of Spain the very opposite of the United States, its intrinsic antithesis. "America was the future — republican, entrepreneurial, rational; while Spain — monarchist, indolent, fanatical represented the past."
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This vision — vision more than analysis — would be repeated in a series of books on Spain, the American Southwest, and Latin America during the nineteenth century, and would resonate on a broader, more popular level during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

There was, however, from the mid-nineteenth century on a minority current within American writing about Spain that was less negative and rather more objective toward the country's problems. Its first major exponent was the Baltimore lawyer and sometime diplomat Severn T. Wallis, who published two judicious and well-balanced books between 1849 and 1853 about contemporary Spanish problems.
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Wallis did not find Spain to be hopelessly deformed by history, culture, or national character, but to be suffering from a series of problems and flawed policies, which were amenable to reform and need not permanently handicap the country.
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This minority current, however, would not completely come to the fore until the beginning of the full flowering of a later Anglo-North American Hispanism in the field of history during the 1960s.

Somewhat ironically, the Spanish-American War more or less coincided with the initial flourishing of American Hispanism at a high scholarly level, the product of the expansion of American universities during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The next century would bring the opening of the privately funded Hispanic Society of America in New York, and then completion of the classic study of the Inquisition by Henry Charles Lea. Despite the major work of historians such as Prescott and Lea (and later Robert B. Merriman), American Hispanism would focus heavily on the esthetic, with the proliferation of "Spanish departments" in American colleges and universities, departments dedicated almost exclusively to the study and teaching of language and literature.
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During the first half of the twentieth century, Spanish history (by comparison, at least) probably received less attention than it had earlier, and more often than not was entirely missing from history curricula, although the study of Latin American history slowly and steadily expanded. As it was, the study of Spanish history was nearly nonexistent when I entered graduate school in 1955.