When I first entered the crowded Rutgers office of Robert Jackson Alexander a quarter-century ago, I had no idea what to expect from the man, officially an economist, whose books were required starting points for any scholar interested in the key forces and episodes of South American politics after World War II. I knew him as a prolific author who wrote the first books in English on numerous topics including Perón (The Perón Era, 1951), Latin American communism (Communism in Latin America, 1957), the 1952 Bolivian Revolution (The Bolivian National Revolution, 1958), and organized labor in the ABC countries (Organized Labor in Latin America, 1965). I was uncomfortable due to the distance between my own outlook and my host’s openly anticommunist social democratic politics and alignment with US foreign policy. His archival holdings, which I had come to exploit, proved far richer than I ever imagined, but I was most surprised when he skipped initial pleasantries to size me up by launching into a good-natured discussion of his relationship with Jay Lovestone, the éminence grise of the AFL and AFL-CIO foreign policy during the Cold War. A preeminently political man, Bob Alexander won me over precisely by addressing the political fissure that stood between us; he really hadn’t known, he said, that money for his trips in the 1950s came from the CIA, while he admitted with honesty that it likely wouldn’t have bothered him if he had known at the time.I think back to this first exchange — notes on what I had to say about labor in Brazil were typed up and dropped into his ever-growing folders of interviews — for what it taught me about a man whose career was characterized by center-left activist convictions and sincere belief in the essential good faith of the US mission in Latin America. Bob’s ability to reach across lines of difference without hiding his own dispositions was crucial to the intelligence he gathered through the ten thousand or so interviews he recorded with Latin Americans, Latin Americanists, and others across 60 years of travel to all of the countries of the region. At the same time, his reports to Lovestone and the political narrative that filled his books spoke to his shrewd ability to assess the political field of play without self-serving illusions even about his own allies and their (often) inconvenient friends.Born in Canton, Ohio, in 1918, Bob Alexander passed away on April 27, 2010. He lived 88 of his 92 years in New Jersey, where he grew up while his father taught at Columbia. His first exposure to Latin America came through Frank Tannenbaum at Columbia, where he received a BA in 1940 and an MA in 1941. After service in the Air Force during World War II, he first traveled to Latin America in 1946 to carry out dissertation research on Chilean labor relations. He received his PhD in economics from Columbia in 1950 and took a position in the Economics Department at Rutgers University, where he remained until his retirement in 1989. Following an interdisciplinary approach, his research, interviews, and writing focused on the social and political forces at play in rapidly modernizing societies that were being transformed by the advent of mass politics. As he would observe with humor about his early start, “I became an ‘expert’ on Latin America precisely because no one knew anything about it.”As a longtime activist in the US Socialist Party and its descendents, Bob played an active political role within the United States as a citizen, a Democrat, a unionized college professor, and an advisor — in the halcyon days leading up to the Alliance for Progress — in the halls of Washington. Within Latin America, he maintained a wide circle of friends and contacts and served as both a student of, an informal advisor to, and a key propagandist for such central political figures of mid-century South America as Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre (Aprismo: The Ideas and Doctrines of Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, 1973) and Rómulo Betan-court (The Venezuelan Democratic Revolution: A Profile of the Regime of Rómulo Betancourt, 1964; Rómulo Betancourt and the Transformation of Venezuela, 1982). Despite his preferences, it was not at all out of character that in 1959 he was in Havana to conduct an interview with Ernesto “Ché” Guevara, nor that he turned against the revolution as communist shortly thereafter. It was this reach, and his enormous energy as a collector and documentarian, that produced the splendid archive at Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives, the full potential and impact of which will be increasingly felt over the coming decades. (Many of his interviews and pamphlets are available or soon to be published in microfilm; please consult the collection guide at http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/ead/manuscripts/alexanderf.html.)
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Dec 6, 2022
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