Miranda: World Citizen

352 Pages·1952·6.331 MB·English

by  Joseph Francis Thorning

IRANDA:
WORLD CITIZEN
IRANDA
INTRODUCTION BY GALO PLAZA
FOREWORD BY SUMNER WELLES
WORLD CITIZEN
Joseph F. Thorning
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA PRESS
GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA * 1952
A UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA PRESS BOOK
DESIGNED BY H. S. HAINES
opyright, 1952, by the University of Florida. All rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form, except by a re­
viewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or
newspaper.
First Printing, May, IQ52
Second Printing, December, IÇ$2
PRINTED BY THE RECORD PRESS. INC.. ST. AUGUSTINE. FLORIDA
DEDICATION
s a tribute of esteem, admiration, and affection, this
book is dedicated to the Honorable Thurmond Chatham, M.C.,
member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States
House of Representatives, and to his wife, Patricia Firestone
Chatham.

INTRODUCTION BY HIS EXCELLENCY,
A GALO PLAZA, PRESIDENT OF THE
REPUBLIC OF ECUADOR
t a time when interest in world organization is at
high tide, it is heartening to find that a freedom-loving son of
South America, Don Francisco de Miranda, can be described, in
the happy phrase of Dr. Joseph F. Thorning of North America,
as “an advance agent of the United Nations.”
Throughout the Bolivarian Republics, the ideal of reason and
law, dominating violence, is one that has a mighty appeal for the
people. Although patriotic citizens of their own countries, they
recognize that, in the line of social progress, they all have a paral­
lel, if not deeper, loyalty to the human race. South Americans
owe this vision, in no small part, to the inspiration they derived
from the career and principles of the Liberator Simón Bolívar.
With the intuition bom of genius, Bolivar thought in terms of
continents $ from the snow-dad mountain peaks of the Andean
range his eyes saw the unifying possibilities of two oceans. Neither
the Atlantic nor the Pacific was a barrier to his quest for a peace­
ful brotherhood based on order and liberty.
Not the least merit of this new volume, Miranda: World
Citizen, is the author’s clear demonstration that order and liberty,
as the basis of American democracy and world peace, were ideals
that illuminated the life of the Precursor as they subsequently
served as beacon lights for the Liberator. Both Miranda and Boli­
var, although generalissimos of the armed forces, were, in a higher
sense, heroes of peace.

FOREWORD BY THE HONORABLE SUMNER WELLES,
I
FORMER UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE
n the months before he became President, while the essen­
tial principles of what was later called the Good Neighbor Policy
were being formulated, Franklin Roosevelt once said to me that
in his study of the men who played a leading part in winning
the independence of the peoples of the New World, Francisco
de Miranda, as a man, represented to him the most puzzling
problem of them all. He thought him an insoluble enigma.
It is easy to understand the reasons for the President’s perplexi­
ty. For Miranda was a true adventurer in the great tradition, if
there ever was one; an opportunist who lived by his wits; an
amoralist who was conspicuously unscrupulous in his personal re­
lations and devoid of any regard for even those laxer standards
of financial integrity that prevailed in his day; a man who died
under the shadow of the charges of treason, cowardice, and cor­
ruption brought against him by Bolivar.
Yet at the same time here was a man who for thirty-two years
sought tirelessly to further the attainment of the great vision of
freedom which he had seen before it had been vouchsafed to his
compatriots, and which he described in these words: “In the year
1784 in the City of New York I formed a project for the liberty
and independence of the entire Spanish-American Continent with
the cooperation of England.”
By that vision Miranda was thereafter dominated and to that
ideal his great abilities were wholeheartedly dedicated. Had it
not been for the skill and persistence of the “Precursor”—as he
is well named by the historians of his own lands—the independ­
ence of the Spanish-American peoples must inevitably have been
delayed.
Here was an American liberator who from the outset saw the
whole rather than the part, and who spurned the parochial view
that some of the Spanish Colonies could enjoy an assured free­
dom even though others remained slave; who as early as Decem­
ber 22, 1797, signed an agreement with de Salas of Chile and del
Pozo of Peru for mutual assistance in bringing about the inde­
pendence of all of South America; and who as gladly served the
cause of independence in Mexico, Peru, Buenos Aires, and the
Miranda: world citizen X
West Indies as he served the cause of liberty in his native Vene­
zuela.
Here was a son of the New World who, at a moment when
Britain’s help for the independence movement in South America
was desperately needed, indignantly rejected the suggestion that
this assistance might be given in return for the establishment of
a British naval base at La Guaira, and declared he would have no
part in a scheme that was “hostile to the country’s sovereignty’^
and here was an architect of the first Latin-American constitution
who had studied democracy at its source in France, Switzerland,
England, and the United States, who held that “No people with­
out philosophy and education can preserve its liberty,” and who
asked, “Without a Constitution can life be tolerable?”
Here was a man who could convince two such grotesquely dis­
parate witnesses as Napoleon Bonaparte and the Reverend Dr.
Ezra Stiles, President of Yale, of the sincerity of his faith. Na­
poleon said of him, “In his heart a sacred fire burns.” To Presi­
dent Stiles he was “This flaming Son of Liberty.”
In an era when, in Osbert Sitwell’s phrase, we seem to consider
the ant a paragon, it is refreshing to look back to those decades
at the turn of the eighteenth century—that amazing age when
the times were propitious for the development in every field of
endeavor of the most brilliant galaxy of truly notable individuals
to be found in any equivalent period in modern history. Even in
this assemblage of contemporaries by whose thought, writing,
artistic achievement, statesmanship, or military skill the course
of mankind is still so profoundly influenced, Francisco de Miranda
is without doubt exceptional.
Like most of the salient figures of his day, Miranda was domi­
nated by an unquenchable intellectual curiosity. There was no
aspect of human activity in which he was not interested and there
were few in which he did not achieve proficiency. As a military
leader, a statesman, and a diplomatist he excelled. As a propa­
gandist for the cause of freedom in the New World he showed
true genius.
In a period when genius was to be seen on every side and when
the romantic, the colorful, and the distinguished were the rule
rather than the exception, Miranda was never overshadowed.