The Undying Flame
Garwood, Ellen
THE UNDYING FLAME Ellen Garwood/The American Studies Center/$14.95 Reid Buckley A ny book written by a pen of the pered, yet there is no mention of the female persuasion bearing such a man under...
...of La Representacion de los HacenWell, this is indeed a hagiographic dados ("Landowners' Petition"), in life of a remarkable patriot, and there which landmark essay Moreno set are passages—egregiously, there are forth lucid and powerful arguments mannerisms of style, such as Mrs...
...It was probably lucky Moreno died when he did...
...Had Adam Smith, Rousseau (there are good you heard of Mariano Moreno...
...One recalls with irony the alleged last words attributed half a century later of the half-mad, patriot Paraguayan dictator, Francisco Lopez, who, drawing his sword as the Brazilian lancers ran their steel through him, is supposed to have cried, Muero con mi patria!--i'l die with my country...
...B y December of 1810, Moreno was burned out...
...He fell ill, dying on the high seas in the arms of his worshipful brother Manuel...
...Before his fall he betrayed that nascent pride, inflexibility, intolerance, paranoia, and ruthlessness that curse so many South American heroes and leaders, who as they grow old in power grow worse in vice...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 47...
...The Latin penchant for melodrama makes us Anglos squirm...
...Moreno deserves to be remembered for his personal honor and his intellectual sagacity...
...He read also Jovellanos and Campomanes, the Spanish liberals...
...Which was some part of the truth, the man's hubris having brought Paraguay almost to extinction in the course of the most brutal and sanguinary conflict the New World has known...
...of the Buckley School of Public Speak- Disciplined, intelligent, possessing ing in Camden, South Carolina...
...Under "Moreno, Mariano," there writing is sure to be embarrassingly are two hundred unilluminating words amateurish, effusive, and adoring of its that briefly allude to the essay in subject: Mariano Moreno, the Argen- economics for which he became fa-tine patriot who was the driving force mous...
...ing by the province of Buenos Aires Incredibly, no mention at all is made against Spain...
...With the 1809 publication of La Representacion de los Hacendados, he achieved notoriety...
...Maybe the most important influence on him—I conjecture—was Garcilasso de La Vega's Royal Commentaries of the Incas, which is fascinating to this day, and from which Moreno may have conceived his sympathy for their wretched descendants...
...His were the orders that doomed rebels against the junta's authority to the firing squad, including the French-born commander who had been the hero in the resistance to the British...
...and James Madison of his country...
...He was himself conserBut this is not the point to make vative in all inclinations, religious, about the book...
...By 1805 he was back in BuenosAires, a hardworking barrister who dared to challenge church and state on behalf of his clients...
...Moreno was nevertheless, exceptionally, incorruptible...
...He had read Without him Argentina's bid for in- and admired Jefferson's writings, and dependence never would have pros- he liked to quote from Fenelon's Telemachus, "to love your family better 'The word signifies one's anguish over the than yourself, your country better than fool that someone else is making of himself...
...Manuel Moreno records that Mariano expired with the words, "Even though I die, may my patria live...
...He founded the national library...
...vironment...
...Spain is extinguished," declared Moreno with the succinctness for which he was renowned...
...When the junta voted over his objections to admit into its body members from the old Cabildo, he resigned, accepting from President Saavedra (a faint heart and an enemy) a trade mission to England, embarking in January of 1811...
...It's a good a conventional and very Catholic enjob...
...Through the Gaceta de Buenos Aires, a bulletin of affairs of state that he also founded—a kind of Congressional Record—he ridiculed opponents and promulgated a whole set of civil laws whose compass would have done Lycurgus proud, doing his best at the same time to fend off retrogade schisms within the junta...
...what Mrs...
...111111 \V , \\\\%\\NI...
...His family wanted Mariano to become a priest, to which end he was enrolled in the University of San Francisco Xavier, far off across the Andes...
...In my Columbia Encyclopaedia, behind the successful May 1810 upris- a shameful 161 words are meted him...
...The freedom from Spain's mercantilism that he sacrificed his health to was soon abandoned as an economic principle...
...and the anti-clerical ex-Jesuit Guillaume Thomas Raynal (History of the Indies...
...He did not covet power for its own sake...
...He was thirty-one at the time, searched study that evokes the political a lawyer with a reputation for defend-life of Buenos Aires at the turn of the ing the interests of the underdog...
...tempt to simulate historical immediacy The Representacion was published in —that will cause readers to wince: 1809, one year before Moreno joined despite which, the book strikes this the junta that was to oust the Spanish reader as being a meticulously re- Viceroy...
...THE UNDYING FLAME Ellen Garwood/The American Studies Center/$14.95 Reid Buckley A ny book written by a pen of the pered, yet there is no mention of the female persuasion bearing such a man under the general heading of title as this at once brings on flushes Argentina in the Encyclopaedia Britanof what in Spain is called alipori.1 The nica...
...We know so little social, and political, but he had read about our neighbors to the south...
...Appointed legal adviser to the Cabildo, the municipal council, his influence grew...
...Officiallyhe was just one of two secretaries, but he ran the show...
...Hidalgo, Simon Bolivar, San which one tends to forget in this age Martin, but . . . Moreno...
...your family, and humanity best of all...
...He abandoned the idea of entering the priesthood, reading law instead...
...Born nineteenth century with a fine eye for into a lower middle-class Creole famithe vivid detail, chronicling the con- ly of pure Spanish descent (his father voluted dramatic events of that precar- was a petty bureaucrat), he grew up in ious revolution with verve...
...He lived this romantic creed—never Reid Buckley is a novelist and founder mind our twentieth-century cynicism...
...I things to be said about Rousseau, hadn't...
...Eight trial issues of The American Spectator only $16...
...Yet the freedom of American commerce has not been prohibited as an . . . evil, but has been ordered as a sacrifice by the colonies for the benefit of the mother country," warning, "It was not the excess of riches . . . but rather the excess of oppression which made the English colonies revolt . . ." Eight months later he was to help form a junta that took over the government of Buenos Aires disingenuously in the name of Ferdinand VII, the Napoleon-deposed King of Spain, but that scarcely bothered to conceal its true intent...
...Argentina, like Peru...
...Fleury...
...Bossuet...
...H istory, he became aware, had not begun with the Conquest...
...He could be when the influence of his thought has described as, rolled into one, the Tdm been mostly baleful), Filangieri, Paine, Patrick Henry, John Randolph, Bacon, Locke, and, according to Mrs...
...Garwood would describe as 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 an "ardent" temperament, he was lucky to capture the attention of Brother Cayetano Rodriguez, a perspicacious Franciscan who helped cultivate in the young scholar generosity of spirit and the notion that he was marked by Destiny...
...There are some truths so evident that one insults reason with the pretense of demonstrating them," he wrote, demanding an end to economic exploitation...
...Moreno joined the Club of Seven, a close, semi-subversive group of firebrands whose passion was free trade...
...Garwood, Montesquieu...
...Well, maybe he did saythat...
...like Venezuela...
...like Mexico, went from one species of economic imperialism to several others, corporate, plutocratic, and fascist...
...He planned the strategy and organized the military defense of the beleaguered new state...
...The long perspective applied to South American history, when contrasted against the idealism and high hopes that attended Independence, disheartens...
...Gar- against the mercantilism that was pracwood's frequent and abrupt shifts from ticed by Spain to the disadvantage of past to present tense, in a clumsy at- her American colonies...
...If Business Reply Card is missing please call 1-800-341-1522 to subscribe...
...Meanwhile, two British invasions of Buenos Aires, in 1805 and 1806, were repulsed, nourishing in the Creole population a spirit of nationhood...
...He did not steal...
...It was there that he consumed the works of the French Encyclopaedists, most of which were forbidden by the Inquisition, but to which he was given access under the indulgence of Canon Don Mathias Terrazas, a friend of Brother Rodriguez, with whom Moreno put up...
Vol. 20 • February 1987 • No. 2
