It is enough to say that Hanke’s exploration of Las Casas’ varied career as humanist, historian, and anthropologist amounted to a re-discovery of the man. This is not the place for a detailed assessment of Hanke’s numerous studies of Las Casas and the intellectual history of the Conquest. In this time of reaction against Las Casas, Lewis Hanke began (1930) his study of the Dominican and his role in the struggle over Spain’s Indian policy. Chapman, who announced in his popular text, Colonial Hispanic America (1933), that “no one has given a sounder judgment with respect to Spanish ‘cruelty’ than Simpson.” 7 Examples of such anti-Lascasian fervor could be multiplied. John Tate Lanning, in his review of Simpson’s book in the HAHR, found that its high point was “the penetrating and brilliantly written analysis of the unmerited influence of Las Casas upon historians of the Indies.” 6 Simpson’s book also met with an enthusiastic response from Charles E. The anti-Lascasian seeds sown by Bourne and Simpson fell on fertile ground. “It is idle to deny,” he wrote, “that Las Casas, more than any one person, fomented the introduction of Negro slavery in America” 5-a curious statement for a social historian who should have been aware of the impersonal economic forces that generated modern plantation slavery! Bourne used the introduction to his work for a vitriolic attack on Las Casas, declaring that the whole social history of the Spanish colonies must be rewritten “because the violent partisanship of the Las Casas tract has had a vicious effect upon the historians of the Spanish conquest.” Simpson even revived the ancient canard linking Las Casas to the beginnings of the African slave trade to America. Bourne deplored the fact that Las Casas’ Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies with “its pictures of terrible inhumanity, its impassioned denunciations of the conquerors, and its indictment of the colonial officials became the stock material of generations of historical writers.” 4 A disciple of Bourne’s, Lesley Byrd Simpson, elaborated this theme in The Encomienda in New Spain (1929), a book that helped to shape the thinking of a generation of United States specialists in Latin American history. What lends a certain irony to Hanke’s reliance on Bourne is that Bourne’s work, almost immediately become a classic, gave a large impetus to the movement to discredit Las Casas as a source of historical information. #Modest eyes indian fullNoting that Bourne had initiated a scholarly reaction in the United States against the Black Legend, I asked whether the wheel had not turned full circle, “whether a leyenda blanca, a ‘white legend’ of Spanish altruism and tolerance, is not beginning to emerge from the writings of such scholars as Lewis Hanke.” 3 It cannot be doubted that the new imperialist climate of opinion, America’s new status as a colonial power, influenced Bourne’s historical judgments and disposed him to view with greater sympathy the Spanish colonial process. In my introduction to a new edition of his work (1962), I wrote thatīourne’s time also saw the rise, amid great public debate, of an American empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific, attended, in the case of the Philippines, by violent suppression by the United States of native rebels unwilling to accept her rule. A very gifted historian, Bourne achieved a landmark of revisionist historiography with his Spain in America (1904). Hanke correctly notes in passing that I, like other writers, have praised Bourne. Bourne that has Philip II stretching out his long arm “to protect the weak and the helpless from oppression and error.” Neither statement has much probative value. In support of his claim he cites another generalization by Edward G. Although he advises writers on the Spanish Conquest to stop striking off generalizations and to enter the archives for further research, he repeats his own large generalization concerning the uniqueness of the Spanish struggle for justice. On the contrary, it sharpens the paradox, for it moves him closer to an outright White Legend position. Hanke’s extended comment 2 on my note does not dispel the ambiguity to which I referred. Yet Hanke’s views on Spain’s colonial policies have a striking affinity with the attitudes of Las Casas’ foes, who championed a ‘white legend’ of Spanish altruism and tolerance.” I proceeded to document this point by reference to several of Hanke’s studies. “The central figure in Hanke’s studies on intellectual history,” I wrote, “the figure whose greatness as a humanist, historian, and anthropologist he has so ably and amply documented, is Las Casas, the supposed source of the Black Legend. I n a recent note on the Black Legend 1 I called attention to a certain paradox in the writings of Lewis Hanke.
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