Part #162: Hail The New Presidente!
Q. “You attack the Unionists, Señor Sanchez, do you then support the Adamantines?”
A. “Imagine a man is locked inside a crate and then the crate is placed in a locked prison cell. If the man is a Unionist, why, he loudly proclaims that he is free and remains hunched over in the crate. If he is an Adamantian, on the other hand, he realises that he is trapped and manages to force open the lock on the crate. He steps out into the cell and
then loudly proclaims that he is free. I fear that there are as yet no potential leaders who might think to look out of the cell’s barred window and wonder if something lies beyond—much less actually plot to escape and thus know true freedom”.
– Pablo Sanchez’s response to a journalist’s question about the 1843 presidential election; quoted in “Fever Dreams: Sanchez the Parablist” by Agnes Scrope (1976)
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From: “Golden Sun and Silver Torch: A History of the United Provinces of South America” by Benito Carlucci (1976)—
The United Provinces of South America’s presidential election in 1843 is not only one of the most important for the history of that country and its successor regimes, but also for the world. It is fair to say that if the results had gone differently, the word we now live in would be unrecognisable. We would not be in the grips of a Quiet War between Eye and Rainbow, and there might still be a President-General instead of a Zonal Rej in a city still named Cordoba by its rulers. The question of where Societism truly ‘began’ is one that has vexed biographers and political historians since the world awoke to the ideology’s importance at the turn of this century, with many proponents of old Whig theories suggesting that Sanchez was inevitably destined to create his belief system; others attributing the blame to his brutal experiences during the Jacobin Wars at the hands of revolting Catalans; still others to his voyages around the world during the Watchful Peace or his confrontation of the Spanish loyalist rioters in 1828. Yet despite all these events, it is entirely possible to imagine that this man, having turned his back on the Old World and settled in the New, might still have turned aside from his depressing thoughts about the nature of society and died in the 1860s as a well-liked by his students but otherwise obscure history lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires. But it was not to be.
In 1843, the Adamantine Party seemed undefeatable. Indeed, in 1838 the political scientist Jorge Vélaz published
On the State of Governance of the United Provinces at the Present Time, a treatise in which he argued that the party had moulded itself to the political system in such a way that it would prove nigh-impossible to dislodge from power. When President Velasco had created his coalition across the argentus, he had inherited a sufficient base of patrons, campaign activists and voters with personal loyalty that he had been able to build an organisation with a good chance of always making it to the second round of the then-new two-round presidential election system. If the Adamantines could always manage this, they would then become undefeatable: if the cobrist Colorados were eliminated in the first round, then their voters would go over to the Adamantines to keep the doradist Amarillos out, and vice versa. By being the lesser of two evils to both of the other parties’ voters, the Adamantines became the automatic preferred choice for both in the event of their own candidates not being on the ballot. The value of the two-round system to the Adamantines was made evident by a constitutional amendment passed that same year of 1838 (immediately obsoleting Vélaz’s book, much to his annoyance) which changed the Cortes elections from straight first-past-the-post to a two-round system as well. The ensuing Cortes election of 1839 indeed returned a continued Adamantine majority. Yet this success largely blinded the party to the problems that had started to emerge, cracks spreading at the edges of their invincibility, which otherwise might have been noticed.
President Velasco had won the presidential election of 1825 as a Colorado, later building the coalition that would become the Adamantines after breaking with them in 1829. ‘True’ Adamantine candidate Riquelme had then won in 1831, followed by Almada in 1837. The fact that Riquelme had been more to the cobrist end of the spectrum and Almada (formerly leader of the Amarillos) more to the doradist end was reflected in the results of those elections, with the Amarillos coming in second and the Colorados in third for 1831, but the positions being reversed in 1837, when Almada managed to win in the first round. The latter defeat and humiliation for the Amarillo Party at the hands of their traitorous former leader led to a period of self-reflection in the party and realisation that reform and new ideas were needed, while the Colorados remained somewhat more complacent due to their better position in the results.
The Adamantine Party’s leadership of the country had resulted in the great victories of the Brazilian War, making the party seen as competent and popular—in the short term. After Almada’s success in 1837, the realities of the new South America of the Democratic Experiment era began to sink in. The UPSA had obtained a vast swathe of the interior of Portuguese Brazil in the war, though at this point it was more often used for bragging rights than actually possessing much in the way of practical use for the country. The real gains for the UPSA were not this direct territorial expansion, but the creation of three republics tied to the country as economic vassals. These were the Cisplatine Republic and Riograndense Republic in the south of former Brazil, and the Pernambucano Republic in the north. The first two states were more closely tied to the UPSA, being part of its pre-war trade sphere in any case and with good transport links, while Pernambuco was run more like a distant colony. Both the rulers of the two nearer republics and the Adamantine Party leadership sought to have them directly join the UPSA as provinces as soon as possible, though it was decided to make this a fairly cautious process to allow the republics to first make reforms to harmonise their laws with the Meridian Constitution in preparation, and also to avoid stirring up trouble again with the remnant of Brazil (though in the short term the Portuguese were unlikely to be capable of much). Pernambuco on the other hand was allowed to maintain laws that would have been unacceptable in the UPSA as a whole, such as the institution of slavery, and was treated as a subordinate trade partner alone with no prospect of accession to the United Provinces.
This meant that Cisplatina and Rio Grande were stuck in a strange position of legal limbo, possessing some but not all of the laws and status of the UPSA. People being people, this was swiftly exploited. Buenos Aires and its rapidly industrialising hinterland needed cheap workers. The workers who already lived in the city and province benefited from the Rights of Man legislation that had been passed by President Castelli decades before—anaemic compared to the workers’ rights that would be won in some countries as a result of the Popular Wars and Democratic Experiment, but nonetheless awkward for the industrialists. Fortuitously, right across the River Plate basin lay Montevideo: not easily accessible by road, but by ship was another matter. It was Enrique Franco, a shipping competitor to the more famous Félix Ocampo (inventor of the Standard Crate) who first operated a mass-transit, low-comfort steamboat line between the two cities. In cramped and often filthy conditions, in ships that often transported bulk cargo instead of people, masses of poor Cisplatine workers would be brought across to Buenos Aires to work in the factories (or occasionally on the farms), their lack of Meridian citizenship and the ensuing protection meaning that their employers were free to exploit them with lower wages and longer hours. Yet the workers kept coming, for this was still often better than what they could get in the ramshackle, incoherent and corruptly governed Cisplatine Republic. At least there was always guaranteed work in the booming UPSA. And many of them either naively hoped they could gain Meridian citizenship, or else plotted to escape and obtain some forged papers—as indeed some did. The workers were typically housed in shanty-towns of miserable little Lisieux-style Utilitarian Planned Replacement houses which grew up around the suburbs of Buenos Aires and eventually other cities too: their employers tended to move the workers deeper into the interior to exploit other booming cities, ignoring questions about when the workers might be returned to Cisplatina. Words like ‘temporary’ and ‘transient’ were quietly dropped from documents.
At the same time, the UPSA was experiencing a very different kind of immigration: from the German states. Previously, those Germans fleeing oppression or looking for a better life had typically emigrated to the ENA, with its existing German population and history of settlement and available land. Things had changed, though. To some extent this had come in with the upsurge in patriotism in the mid to late 18th century, with francophobia providing an excuse for other xenophobia and even longstanding German immigrants such as the Mühlenbergs having to anglicise their name to ‘Mullenburgh’ in order to be considered sufficiently ‘American’. However, this was not the major issue that put off new German immigrants. Rather, it was the Virginia Crisis, the sense that the east coast of America was no longer a place where men and their families could settle in the hope of being safe and removed from war and conflict. Overly lurid tales of slave rebellion depredations were also spreading through Europe in florin bloodies and sequents (many of them, but not all, from Carolinian printing presses) which tended to put off the more credulous immigrants. The UPSA, on the other hand, had a good reputation: the last time it had been attacked on its own soil was the Third Platinean War, and in the Popular Wars it had successfully manipulated other powers into taking a position of power and gaining new lands for settlement without spending much blood. Accounts of the political debates in the Cortes also circulated throughout Europe and encouraged many with radical sympathies that, though their views were not always holding power in the UPSA, at least they could be openly debated and published without you being locked up. Many of the disconsolate Schmidtist rebels in particular viewed the UPSA as a place where at least the radical side of their views, if not the German nationalist-side, might see fruition. Most famous of the Schmidtist immigrants was, of course, Manfred Landau, who had escaped from the Low Countries with Admiral Forgues’ help in 1834. In the early years, there was little control of immigration to the UPSA and even potentially politically dangerous men like Landau were waved through without a glance.
German immigration, especially German radical immigration, proved to be contentious. At first this may seem surprising. The UPSA was a country in which immigrants had always played a role from the start. Defectors from the Duke of Noailles’ army in the Second Platinean War, including Jean-Charles Pichegru and Noailles’ own son, were vital in the early history of the nation as soldiers and politicians. Yet, of course, the Linnaeanism of President-General Castelli (himself descended from Italians) had promoted the idea of Latin solidarity, so the French were less threatening. Still, immigrants from unquestionably non-Latin backgrounds such as Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley had been welcomed as well. The point was that they came in small numbers and were educated men. The new wave of Germans was different: some were intellectuals discontented with the failure of Schmidtism, but many more were poor men and women simply seeking a better life. Although they mostly obtained Meridian citizenship unlike the Cisplatine migrants, the Germans’ worse-off station meant that they too were often willing to work lower wages and longer hours than Meridian workers, putting more people out of work in what was on paper an economic boom time. And this resulted in popular anger. The first recorded riot of unemployed Meridian workers was in Quilmes[1] in 1838, but they rapidly spread across the whole of the southeastern provinces, where most of the immigrants had settled. And of course the riots turned ugly: most of the out-of-work Meridians blamed not the employers who had taken advantage of the German immigrants and brought in the Cisplatineans themselves, but the poor immigrants and the government for not stopping them coming in. The cheap shantytowns that the immigrants lived in proved rather easy to set alight, as remembered in the famous sardonic Brazilian political cartoon “Torch of Liberty”, in which grotesquely-portrayed rioters use the UPSA’s titular symbol to burn down a house full of Cisplatineans, including mothers with wailing babies. The Meridian dream of a better life and no class divisions was becoming tarnished on both sides...
From – “Pablo Sanchez as a Man” by Étienne Dubois (1978) –
It was probably the wave of anti-immigrant violence which brought Pablo Sanchez back to the here and now after a few years of more esoteric interests (or so they seemed at the time). Sanchez had arrived in the UPSA in 1837, being somewhat surprised to find that many people avidly listened to his reluctant eyewitness accounts of the Popular Wars in Spain. Sanchez was already a minor celebrity by the time he applied to become a history lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires, and he was readily accepted despite his rather unusual circumstances (having effectively transitioned from being a student to a professor at the University of Salamanca without ever actually graduating). Sanchez quickly remedied this by putting out sufficient work in two years to be recognised by his new institution and formally granted the degree that men had viewed as being invisibly present anyway.
Sanchez rapidly became a popular man at the University among both students and some of his colleagues (though others found him to be an upstart). He was a charismatic speaker who could bring history to life, and whose personal adventures around the world working for the Portuguese East India Company granted him insights that those whose knowledge was purely theoretical could not possess. His lecture series ‘On the Parallelism of Noble Titles in Europe and the Chinese Empire’, later published as a compilation of essays, is considered by some to be his first ‘Societist’ work, though to some extent this represents modern authors looking for what they want to see; the lectures simply observed that there was a correlation and a possible universality rather than elaborating on whether this was desirable or not. They did, however, form the basis for his later book
Unity Through Society, to which he added personal commentary on how he viewed this as a hint to the way forward—hence why Combine writers commonly state that that book was written in 1841, a misconception that has even been propagated elsewhere. The core of the book may be based on those lectures and essays, but the version incorporating Sanchez’s own ideas about the future would not be written and published until 1844, as a consequence of the effects that the 1843 presidential election had on Sanchez’s character and ambition.
Sanchez continued to have contact with his great friend Luis Carlos Cruz, the writer and former trader, and even used one of his books—an account of his travels to Goa and the practices he had observed there—as part of his students’ reading list. It was through Sanchez and Cruz’s discussions of India that they first met Guillaume Laurent, a Frenchman with the same background in trade who had settled in the UPSA after striking it lucky in an incident with a maharajah and a bag of diamonds. Laurent’s interests lay not in history per se, but in linguistics. He had learned English just to read Sir William Jones’ book on Sanskrit: the British lawyer and philologist had observed correlations between the Indian language and the equally old European ones of Latin and Ancient Greek. He had further suggested that they might all be descended from a common tongue.[2] It was a powerful, emotive idea, for it brought to mind the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible and repeated in many other writings across the Middle East. Although the original primordial language (later dubbed ‘Old Eurasian’[3]) predated writing and thus no traces of it could be found today, Laurent was one of many historical linguists working at the time who thought that it could be back-derived by making comparisons between different recorded languages old and new and working out the timescale of how they had diverged.
Laurent viewed this task as something worth doing for the pursuit of knowledge alone, but—as in many cases—Sanchez saw a bigger picture. He had already made the observation, integral to the eventual ideology of Societism, that all human societies inclined towards the same hierarchism—and in the case of his comparison between European and Chinese nobility, sometimes an improbably similar manifestation of such. This, to his mind, suggested that the drive to form a societal hierarchy was biologically, psychologically, spiritually inherent to the human race and a common trait to all humans. Laurent had given him another piece of the puzzle, another facet of the sparkling gemstone he searched for: language. Language itself, to speak
any language, was also a universal trait: Laurent told Sanchez and Cruz of the recently published work of the Virginian doctor and social reformer Alexander Disney, who in 1834 had come across an asylum which had been left largely abandoned for several years due to the Virginia Crisis. Most of the inmates with more serious conditions had either died or vanished, but there was a group of young deaf children—whose treatment in that part of Virginia at the time was rather unenlightened—who had been left to fend for themselves and had been hiding out in a local wood, ‘living as savages’ as Disney put it. The ‘Disney Children’ were of great interest to those studying anthropology and the history of civilisation, including of course Sanchez himself, in how they had formed a hierarchy among themselves while isolated from any possible outside influences. Yet what was of even more interest was that they had formed their own unique sign language to communicate with, which bore no resemblance to any of the existing sign languages used in North America or elsewhere.[4] With no prior exposure to language either spoken or signed, the children had independently developed a means of communication. To Sanchez, it was clear that the drive to develop language was an inherent and definitive quality to the human race, just like the drive to develop hierarchy.
William Jones’ work on the common ancestry of many (perhaps all?) languages further suggested to Sanchez that if this original primordial language could indeed be derived, it could be used as a universal human language. This was in itself far from a new idea: a century earlier, the works of Gottfried Leibniz had promoted the notion of a single perfect universal human language (something that had in turn been criticised by Voltaire through the character of ‘Dr Pangloss’, a parody of Leibniz, in
Candide). Leibniz had the idea that mathematics were already a kind of universal language and that they could form the basis for a true lingua franca: his notion of the ‘alphabet of human thought’, also proposed by René Descartes, was that all complex ideas could be broken down into simple components, which would form the basis of the language. (It has been observed that this somewhat resembles how the Chinese language works, perhaps reflecting Leibniz’s own Sinophilia). Sanchez read Leibniz’s works but dismissed his core concept of how a universal language would work: “Language is more than simply expressing ideas”, he wrote, “it is about awakening raw, primordial feelings in the heart.
Mathematically there is no difference between ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’ and ‘Shall I commit suicide or not?’ yet to the heart there is a chasm greater than the void between the stars – or ‘a really big hole’ as Herr Leibniz’s perfect language would have it.”[5]
It was because of this that Sanchez rejected the idea of a
constructed universal language. “It would be dead, of less worth than any incomprehensible hieroglyphs from the Egyptian pyramids.[6] Language needs idiom, and idiom needs myth, legend, famous people, famous events to draw upon.[7] Equally, if the language of one so-called nation was imposed upon the whole world, it would fail to work because people outside that region do not have the same background of knowledge to work with and the idioms would become meaningless. But if the same language was
once spoken by all the peoples of the world and its original idioms could be revived...” Thus came the idea of Habla Humana, the universal Human Speech that would be derived from a reconstruction of Old Eurasian plus carefully calculated enhancements to allow for modern technologies and so forth. Yet it was obvious to Sanchez that such a speech would require endless linguistic study and archaeological work across the world, and he would likely not live to see it. So, despite his dismissive attitude towards Leibniz, he did adopt one of the great man’s ideas: that until a true universal language became possible, a rationalised and modernised version of Latin would function as a temporary stopgap—Latin was well known and understood by many and at least called back to a time before the modern nations of Europe were divided.
Despite this, it is entirely possible that Sanchez’s work with Laurent and Cruz on what would become Novalatina would have remained nothing more than the weekend hobby of a dilettante, that Sanchez’s writings on the subject of human universality might have remained obscure. The observation of George Gascoyne that ‘Sanchez didn’t say anything new; lots of people had said similar things; the difference was, people listened’ is correct, but people would not have listened without Sanchez’s drive and charisma, and he would not have thrown that drive and charisma into his work without his experiences of the 1843 presidential election...
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From: “Golden Sun and Silver Torch: A History of the United Provinces of South America” by Benito Carlucci (1976)—
The signs of Colorado trouble were there for those to see. The large number of German radicals—some intellectuals, some not, but all of them fairly poor—who had immigrated to the country viewed the Colorado Party as their natural spiritual home. Manfred Landau got himself elected to the Cortes in 1839 as one of Parana’s deputies and became notorious in
La Lupa de Cordoba’s accounts of proceedings in the chamber, which accurately recorded his halting Spanish and gave him a phonetic German accent. The whole matter was viewed with some alarm by a large faction of the party, which viewed the party’s raison d’etre as representing the very workingmen who were losing their jobs due to German immigration. Ugly scenes were fought out in the Solidarity Club between that faction and those who viewed the Germans as a valuable addition of experienced radical theorists. Linnaeus once again became an issue, with the first faction calling back to the Jacobin ideas of the Castelli era and demanding the recognition of the superiority of the Latin race over the Germans (though, of course, this did not account for the fact that they also hated the equally Latin Cisplatineans). The fight between Neo-Jacobins and Germanophiles helped dent the Colorados’ chances for the 1839 election fought under the two-round system, in turn helping keep the Adamantines’ majority intact, but as of yet much of the danger still remained hidden below the surface like an iceberg.
The Amarillos, on the other hand, were shaping their strategy around the same issues. Following their embarrassing 1837 presidential defeat, the party reformed itself under the name Unionist Party and started looking for new issues on which to attack the Adamantines. Immigration rapidly proved to be such an area. It did not matter that many of the Unionists’ rich supporters were the same employers who had benefited from that immigration. It was a line of attack that let the Unionists reach across the political divide and appeal to poor Meridians who felt ignored by the Adamantines and viewed the Colorados’ infighting with concern. The Unionists’ opposition leader in the Cortes, ‘President of Asturias’ Rodrigo del Prado, made continuous attacks on how ‘the Adamantines boasted of their creation of a Meridian empire: now we see it is only a way for them to rob the Meridian people of their birthright. In twenty years’ time, will it be Meridian workers begging for a crust in the gutters of rich Montevideo?’ That the attack was absurd did not matter: it was emotive and it was powerful. Del Prado turned the Adamantines’ diamond symbolism (intended to portray purity and lack of corruption) back on them, painting them as being cold, hard and indifferent. The political landscape became poisoned with bitter partisanship, with the Unionists grandstanding by, for example, filibustering a bill creating a new government railway company unless it contained clauses about requiring a certain percentage of the workers to be not only Meridian citizens, but also natural born ones. All these moves failed, as they were intended to—after all, many prominent Unionists had interest in those railway companies and had no intention of employing the more expensive Meridian workers—but they created an image of the party in the popular imagination.
In 1841 the Unionists also exploited the leaking of secret government negotiations with the Guyana Republic, in which the UPSA sought to sell some of its gains in the interior of Brazil to that ramshackle state and lease a larger portion in the Amazon watershed. This reflected that the former Brazilian territory in this region was functionally useless to the UPSA as it was far more easily accessed from the north, as well as establishing closer relations with Guyana for future economic cooperation (read exploitation), but when suitably presented to the voters by del Prado’s acid tongue, represented a shameful backing down from all the audacious rhetoric of victory that the Adamantines had indulged in. Of course, the Adamantines had not intended the negotiations to become public until after the election, but President Almada chose to stick to his guns and hurry the negotiations so that the land cession was completed by 1842. While Almada did succeed in at least making his government look confident and decisive again, the damage was done.
For the 1843 presidential election, the Adamantines selected Emilio Trejo, a deputy from Potosí province who was the serving Foreign Minister. This selection reflects the Adamantines’ view of the political landscape and a failure to recognise the dangers that had been unleashed: it was intended to reinforce memories of the victories of the Brazilian War and the new settlement with the client states in South America, and also to try and shore up the vote in the northwest, where miners’ trade unions (legalised by President Castelli many years earlier) tended to deliver big votes for the Colorados—who, based on the 1837 results, were still considered a bigger threat.
The Colorados themselves, after a bitter convention that included several walk-outs, selected Eduardo Alemán, a deputy from Santa Fe province who was of the Germanophile faction and spoke of the common needs of all workers. He advocated the immediate accession of the Cisplatine and Riograndense republics, thus making all their poor workers citizens and bringing them under the protection of Meridian law. This would make sense for solving the employment problem...if voters were ultra-rational automata. As it was, this was rapidly condemned as ‘special treatment for the invaders and a spit in the face of our own people’ and several prominent Colorado deputies refused to back or campaign for Alemán.
The Unionists’ candidate was obvious: Rodrigo del Prado. The party therefore pulled the rug out from under everyone’s assumptions when del Prado declined the nomination and instead proposed a candidate who was accepted by acclamation—obviously a long-planned ploy. The choice of the new candidate was astonishing and radical for the Meridian political landscape: his name was Manuel Vinay and he was the Intendant of the Province of Chile. He was not a sitting deputy (though he had served as one in the past) like almost every other presidential candidate in the country’s sixty-year history. The Intendants, an inherited relic of the Bourbon system, were effectively appointed governors for the provinces who liaised with the elected local Cortes Provinciales for each province. They did not have much power, reflecting the Meridian unitarian consensus that would only become challenged in the next few years, and were usually viewed as almost apolitical and above electoral politics. Vinay was a bit different due to having served as a deputy in the past, but it was still a shocking move and one to which the Adamantines were uncertain of their response to. But, unlike many Intendants, Vinay was very popular across Chile Province—which was also the UPSA’s most populated province and one which the Adamantine Party had won the support of in the last two elections.[8] The Adamantines had expected del Prado’s immigration scaremongering to only play well in the eastern provinces, where immigration had been felt the strongest, and to turn off voters in the west. But a popular Chilean as candidate blew that assumption out of the water. Too late to reconfigure the campaign.
United Provinces of South America presidential election, 1843 (First round) results:
Emilio Trejo (Adamantine): 37%
Manuel Vinay (Unionist): 36%
Eduardo Alemán (Colorado): 21%
Others*: 6%
*Includes three different ‘Real Colorado’ Neo-Jacobin candidates, who refused to cooperate and thus split the vote uselessly
The vote was a shock, both because of how well the Unionists had done (to those who had previously dismissed their campaign) and how badly the Colorados had done. For the month of campaigning separating the two rounds, the Adamantines pulled out all the stops and even sought endorsement from Alemán, who refused but informally stated that he viewed them as the lesser of two evils. Many prominent Colorados, however, instead said that at least the Unionists recognised the danger of the immigrants and reluctantly endorsed Vinay, something which no-one (least of all theorists like Jorge Vélaz) had expected. It was in this phase of the campaign that a certain academic rose to the fore...
From – “Pablo Sanchez as a Man” by Étienne Dubois (1978) –
Sanchez had not been following the election in detail. His views on democracy, which became solidified as a result of this election, appear to have been fairly vague and amorphous prior to this time and it is uncertain whether he voted in the 1839 legislative elections after obtaining his Meridian citizenship, and if so, for whom. However, the Unionists’ success was a wake-up call for Sanchez, shocked at how such blatant lies could have gained such popular support. As a result—together with Cruz, who had some misgivings—Sanchez spoke at several political gatherings, giving the Unionists a counterblast as fiery as anything that del Prado had come up with. However, as he stated in his famous reply to a journalist, he refused to endorse the Adamantines and did not speak at their events: he simply attacked the Unionists, calling them liars and hypocrites, pointing out their leaders’ own interest in the status quo. This might have worked, except Sanchez kept calling back to his views about how the Meridian workers should show solidarity with those from other nations, pointing out that many of them were themselves the descendants of fairly recent immigrants. This was a message too theoretical for many and, on a good day, prompted them to walk away...on a bad day, they started throwing things at Sanchez. But he had seen worse in Madrid during the run-up to the Popular Wars. It only reinforced the attitudes that had formed on the day he tried to talk down the mob there.[9]
Cruz had expected this. But, to his surprise, a minority of the people there—mostly intellectuals and bourgeoisie, but some workers too—did listen to Sanchez. His charisma came out even when he was talking about such apparently unimportant and theoretical matters. He was almost like a prophet. Men—and a few women—were intrigued by Sanchez’s ideas of a universal brotherhood and an end to war.
Not enough to swing an election, nowhere near, of course. But though Sanchez read the second round election results (and the following legislative elections that rewarded the same party) with bitterness, suddenly, he had people listening to him...
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From: “Golden Sun and Silver Torch: A History of the United Provinces of South America” by Benito Carlucci (1976)—
United Provinces of South America presidential election, 1843 (Second round) results:
Manuel Vinay (Unionist): 53%
Emilio Trejo (Adamantine): 47%
United Provinces of South America legislative election, 1844[10] (after second round where necessary) results:
353 seats, 177 needed for majority
Unionist Party: 180 seats
Adamantine Party: 102 seats
Colorado Party: 69 seats
Independents: 2 seats
Unionist majority of 7
[1]A city south of Buenos Aires originally founded as a reservation for displaced natives from much further north; in OTL now being swallowed up by Buenos Aires’ built-up area.
[2] Sir William Jones made the same observations in OTL.
[3] Known in OTL as Proto-Indo-European.
[4] Sign languages are a very old idea, but until recently every village with a large percentage of deaf people (usually for genetic reasons) had its own unique one, rather than the much larger ones for widespread communication that we see today. What Disney has seen is similar (albeit on a smaller scale) to the OTL development of Nicaraguan Sign Language by deaf children in the 1970s and 80s.
[5] NB the author has rendered this using a famous English quote—the original Spanish writing by Sanchez used a line from
Don Quixote.
[6] Reflecting the fact that without the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt, in TTL the Rosetta Stone was not found and Egyptian hieroglyphs thus far remain as incomprehensible in TTL as Linear A.
[7] This is similar to the criticism that J. R. R. Tolkien made of Esperanto in OTL.
[8] NB this is not like the USA’s electoral college, it’s not that you get something for topping the polls in Chile, but it’s such a big chunk of the population that to a certain extent ‘who carries Chile carries the nation’ even though it’s based on national popular vote.
[9] See Parts #60 and #121.
[10] This should really be in 1843 to fit the cycle, but it was delayed a few months as the constitution forbids legislative elections being held at the same time as presidential ones.
).
