BOLIVAR—Emit Ludwig—Alliance ($3.50).
Few books are better suited than this one (written at the request of the Venezuelan Government) to help North Americans to understand Latin Americans. Simon Bolivar freed almost a third of South America in the name of democracy. He was driven out as a dictator when he tried to give orderly government to the region he had freed. His was the pioneer vision of Latin-American unity and hemispheric solidarity. (He was never able to achieve either.) Both his stupendous successes and his stupendous failures shed light on much that Americans find strange in the problems of Latin-American democracy.
The book is important in another respect. One bar to understanding Latin America has been the failure of the U.S. imagination before the sheer physical bulk and vastness of the southern continent. The mind recoils from the cold massiveness of the Cordilleras, bogs down in tropical swamps half as big as the U.S., is lost on Rivers of Doubt 3,000 miles long. What has been needed is a sympathetic human figure on a scale and of a piece with the continent, and embodying something of its volcanic fierceness. Such a figure is Simon Bolivar.
Liberation. He was born of a wealthy family in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1783. As a young traveler in Rome, where he refused to kiss the Pope's slipper, he had his first vision of a free South America. Rising one day from the base of a column, he cried: "On my life and honor, I swear not to rest until I have liberated America from her tyrants!"
An earthquake made him a political leader. It came during the first Venezuelan revolt, and destroyed a quarter of the citizens of Caracas and their property in a few moments. In the main plaza, Bolivar found a priest, shouting: "Sodom and Gomorrha! To your knees! . . . God's arm has fallen on your heads in punishment!" Bolivar pushed the monk away, drew his sword and shouted: "Nature has joined forces with tyranny! She is trying to stand in our way. Forward! We will force her to obey us!"
Not long afterwards he was banished from Venezuela, for the first of four times. From his exile in New Granada (now Colombia) he determined to reliberate his native land. Around Christmas of 1812 he led some 200 "half-caste Negroes and Indios" down the Magdalena River. Their first success gave them guns and made them a legend. Soon there were 500 of them, with 1,400 rifles and four guns. As they approached, 3,000 Spaniards fled. By August Bolivar was in Caracas.
His first act was to call a congress. He took no political title for himself except that of Liberator, El Libertador, given him by the people. Again the revolutionists began to squabble. Again the Spaniards came back. Again Bolivar was an exile, this time in British Jamaica.