When the Fourth of July Embraced Latin America Too In the 1800s, Americans cheered their neighbors’ drive for independence, inspired by the cosmopolitan founding vision of the U.S. By Caitlin Fitz

Posted By on July 4th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-fourth-of-july-embraced-latin-america-too-1467315697

The sun blazed down on Norfolk’s old-fashioned fife-and-drum parade on July Fourth of 1822, but the weather deteriorated for the afternoon picnic. The skies of coastal Virginia turned heavy and black; the rain fell in sheets. Some guests ran for cover, while the rest dined on soggy food, sang above the howling wind and drank a toast to…Latin America?

Before the party started, the hosts had carefully hung the flags of Peru, Argentina, Chile and Colombia alongside the Stars and Stripes. The Mexican flag was probably there too, whipping and snapping in the wind.

There was nothing unusual about this interest in our hemispheric neighbors. Newspapers of the era printed long transcripts of holiday toasts every summer in the weeks after Independence Day. A sample of several hundred indicates that well over half of July Fourth gatherings in the decade following the War of 1812 raised their glasses to Latin America.

Why, on their most patriotic of holidays, were so many Americans looking south of the border, speaking not of walls but of brotherhood?

The answer lies in the cosmopolitan vision of the American founding. The audacity of the Revolution lay not simply in the fact that 13 disparate colonies had defied the mighty British Empire but in the conviction of Americans that the rest of the world should care. When Parisians stormed the Bastille in the summer of 1789, Americans exulted, thrilled to think that such a powerful country was following in their footsteps. (The ardor soon cooled as bloodied heads toppled in the streets of Paris and a slave rebellion erupted in Haiti.)

When another wave of rebellion swept across Latin America from 1810 to 1825, Americans erupted with joy once again. By the 50th anniversary of the U.S., most of the western hemisphere was independent, from the U.S. and Mexico to Venezuela and Brazil. It was a “jubilee of nations,” a Kentucky congressman crowed, “the birth-day of a hemisphere redeemed.” U.S. patriots hailed Latin America’s wars of independence as thrilling equatorial reprises of 1776.

The international ardor rang loudest on July Fourth, but it reverberated year-round. Appalachian farmers read poetry about Andean independence. Sailors wore cockades for revolutionary Montevideo. Parents even named their sons Bolivar, after Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan political and military leader sometimes called the “ George Washington of South America.”

During the 1824 presidential election, Andrew Jackson named his prized “stud colt” Bolivar, after the Americas’ other premier general. And when the citizens of Steubenville, Ohio, gathered to commemorate the nation’s 50th-year “jubilee” on July 4, 1826, the star of their parade was a prizewinning ram also named Bolivar.

Sometimes this grass-roots enthusiasm translated into concrete support. Around 3,000 privateers from the U.S. swashbuckled under Latin American flags, and American merchants became one of the rebels’ primary firearms suppliers. In 1822, the U.S. became the first country in the world to extend diplomatic recognition to Peru, Chile, Argentina, Mexico and Colombia (which itself also included modern-day Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama).

If North and South America were republican soul mates, however, it was usually just in spirit. Bolívar himself grumbled about the neutrality of the U.S. The sprawling northern republic was all business, he sighed, ready to sell guns, not to give them. The U.S. popular excitement for Latin America was more about feel-good patriotism than hard-nosed diplomacy. CONTINUE AT SITE

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