“Europe is sinking! America is the hope of the world!” John A. Mackay, a Protestant missionary envoy to Peru, declared to an assembly of fellow missionaries in 1925. As the ashes of the First World War slowly settled, a constellation of missionaries, Christian pacifists, and internationalists reflected with dread upon the state of human civilization. Enlightened modernity had betrayed Western hopes. Instead of promises of universal brotherhood, it had wrought massive destruction and the experience of collective trauma. The lead up to war, the war itself, and the postwar crisis throughout the world generated a profound questioning of the very meanings of “civilization” and “progress.” The Enlightenment narratives that dominated much of global politics since the late eighteenth century led to barbarism and war on an unprecedented scale. As a consequence, by 1918, the aspiration to find a path to a more civilized future provided the impetus for people throughout the world to create new political and social projects.

The notion of Latin American unity, and that of a political project rooted in a continental imagined community rather than in nationalist sentiments, gained new energy in North and South America alike. For a number of liberal- minded Christians from the US and Europe, who like Mackay were deeply affected in their worldviews by the global existential crisis, the Americas rose as a visionary geography where peace and universal brotherhood might bloom.Footnote ¹ This conviction was in itself nothing new. It fed into a long tradition dating back to colonial times in both South and North America in which the land west of the Atlantic was perceived as a geography where utopian dreams came true. But, as of 1918, the moral crisis that had rocked Latin America in the early decades of the twentieth century also resulted, on the other hand, in drastic revisions of its governing liberal-conservative order.Footnote ² From the cycle of independences in early nineteenth century to the end of the First World war, clashes between liberal and conservative political factions had dictated the pace of nation-state formation in Latin American republics, leading to profoundly unequal societies. Oligarchic minorities, in alliance with foreign capital, had ruled their respective countries to serve their unique interests. As a result, by the beginning of the interwar period, a new generation of middle-class intellectuals and university students came of age in Latin America, joining forces to oppose national oligarchic power and imperialism and to find solutions to the evils that plagued their region.

Chapter 1 traces the common ideological grounds that made possible the formation of an alliance in the 1920s between this Peruvian vanguard and Christian missionaries and religious pacifists. This chapter begins by locating the origins of the anti-imperialist American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) in the Latin American student movement and its opposition to oligarchic rule in Peru. It likewise details how Reform-minded students in Peru engaged with the tradition of continental nationalism particular to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin America as a way to oppose the prevailing liberal-conservative order of the Republican era. These students, many of whom formed the APRA movement shortly afterward, saw continental solidarity as a remedy to the crises erupting around them. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, the Peruvian Reform-minded students and the radical poets who founded the APRA movement did not ponder the future of their nation and of their collective identity as americanos exclusively amongst Peruvians or Latin Americans.Footnote ³ On the contrary, they read and enthusiastically debated with US and European actors who were also concerned with projects, if inchoate and fledgling, of hemispheric unity and with questions of continental realities and utopian identities in the Americas. Whereas they often disagreed on the means to the end, still these actors agreed on which end to pursue. For all of them, in effect, the Americas provided a foil for the wrongs of Western civilization. In projects of hemispheric unity seemed to lay the promise of better days ahead. Once reinvented, the Reform-minded students and radical poets in Peru thought, alongside a number of Christian pacifists, that this utopian geography would be able to shepherd the world toward better days.

Concurrently, Chapter 1 shows that many Christian pacifists – like the Scottish Reverend John A. Mackay and the US internationalist Anna Melissa Graves – saw in nationalism a malign force that led only to war and catastrophe. The references to the Bolivarian ideal of a united America they saw in the Peruvian student reform movement were inspiring. Mackay and Graves’ interest in this young generation of idealist Latin Americans stemmed from the widespread belief in postwar religious and pacifist circles that Western civilization was on the brink of implosion.Footnote ⁴ In the early 1920s, I argue, Mackay and Graves came to view the young Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre as a spiritual prophet who would fulfill the spiritual revolution they deemed underway in Latin America. This conviction that the young Haya de la Torre was a harbinger of moral regeneration in the Western Hemisphere, due as much to his intellectual affinities with anti-materialism and Christian pacifism as to his political capacities, explains why Graves and Mackay established a mentoring relationship with him: they wanted this prodigy to serve their respective agendas in the region.

Doing so, these Christian allies tapped into a fundamental tension that lies at the heart of national continentalism between nationalist sentiments and internationalist beliefs. While Latin American student activists searched continental identities and lo americano for a way to oppose Eurocentric modernity, their main reason for this was to find a model of national development for their countries that affirmed the rights and demands of the oppressed. Thinking about what it meant to be Latin American and what it meant to be Peruvian, in other words, were two sides of the same coin. Graves and Mackay sensed this tension early on. They entered the fray head-on, determined to persuade future Apristas to relinquish nationalism, too prone in their view to chauvinist and bellicose positions, in favour of ideals of peace and internationalist cooperation as the basis for opposing creole oligarchies and foreign imperialism.

Whereas other historians have acknowledged APRA’s alliances with foreign allies, the development of these relationships has yet to be drawn out as a constitutive element of APRA’s budding anti-imperialist and populist project. Thus, this first chapter foregrounds in global perspectives the origins of the lasting and complicated friendships between APRA and these Christian allies who played a crucial part in shaping APRA’s political agenda in the 1920s–1930s and, as we shall see in following chapters, in assessing the leadership of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in this movement.

Latin American Student Reform Movement

Many scholars locate the origins of the Peruvian APRA party in the Latin American student movement. Often referred to as La Reforma, this movement started in July 1918 with a student strike at the University of Córdoba, Argentina. Demands to modernize higher education motivated the strike. The Argentine movement snowballed across the continent and led to the creation of organized student movements in many other Latin American countries. Reform-minded students knitted their academic demands with outward political and social vindications, pursuing their goals through struggles both inside the classroom and outside. According to them, the democracy they strove for in their classrooms also had to expand to society as a whole.Footnote ⁵ What started as a protest against a system that kept universities disconnected from students’ concerns, then, soon turned into an overt battle against the prevailing social order.Footnote ⁶ Reform-minded students deemed the Republican order of the past hundred years decrepit and immoral. In addition to demanding democracy, and in countries like Peru attacking the political might of the Catholic Church, Reform-minded students forcefully opposed national oligarchic power as well as dominant positivist philosophies. They proposed in their stead models of continental community, in which beauty, morals, and anti-materialism constituted the mainstay of modernity and future hemispheric unity.Footnote ⁷

This theme of hemispheric unity was particularly important to Reform-minded students. They saw in continental solidarity a remedy to the moral crises they sensed around them. By uniting the young generations of the Americas, student leaders believed they would be better equipped to free Latin America both spiritually, from mental colonialism, and politically, from the neocolonial order they blamed for the social and racial inequities pervading the region. The university youth of Córdoba tellingly titled its reform manifesto “La juventud argentina de Córdoba a los hombres libres de sud América.” The authors claimed to set forth “una hora americana” and invited the “compañeros de la América toda” to become involved in the work of freedom (obra de libertad) they were initiating.Footnote ⁸ Latin American student federations responded enthusiastically to this plea of continental solidarity. Indeed, Reform-minded students sensed that returning to the Bolivarian ideal of a united Latin America might help them imagine solutions to the problems that afflicted not only Latin American nations, they thought, but also Western civilization more broadly. This coming-of-age generation hoped to find in these American utopias political alternatives that could transform the social fabric of their societies.Footnote ⁹

In Peru, the student reform movement that began in 1919 reflected the same ideals. Like their peers, Peruvian Reform-minded students were imbued with a sense of social responsibility. Historian Jeffrey L. Klaiber remarks that they were wary of only improving “certain aspects of the lives of lower classes,” demanding instead transformation for society as a whole. Student leaders in Peru, who like Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre participated in the foundation of the APRA shortly thereafter, “came to realize that the social regeneration of Peru could only be effected through a total transformation of all of society itself.”Footnote ¹⁰ One way to advance social change in their country was to help raise the social awareness of the workers of Peru. To that effect, university students created in 1921 the González Prada Popular Universities in Lima and Vitarte. Other Popular Universities opened in Peru and elsewhere in Latin America shortly thereafter. These cultural centres, run by students, offered night classes to the poor and uneducated. They federated other community spaces as well – such as libraries and medical centres – in which further associations between students and workers took place.Footnote ¹¹

In harmony with Reform-minded students elsewhere in the region, another important issue for the Peruvian student federation was that of continental solidarity. To be sure, Indo-América as APRA’s political project had yet to be formulated, let alone conceived. But the content of this generation’s socio-political and cultural publications already reflected in the early 1920s its firm commitment to rethinking the nation in light of shared continental realities. For example, the official organ of the Reform-minded students in Peru, Claridad, took pains to reproduce in its pages internationalist discourses by famous intellectuals who declared obsolete the concept of nationality or who claimed, like José Vasconcelos did, to be dreaming of a “bandera iberoamericana flotando una misma en el Brasil y en Méjico, en el Perú y la Argentina, en Chile y el Ecuador.”Footnote ¹² Likewise, the editorial committee celebrated the work that Latin American and US intellectuals were doing at the time for what they called “la nueva América.”

Concern about political projects in Peru wasn’t simply the focus of students or the press; Peru’s poets also mused over the matter. Future APRA leaders and Peruvian poets Magda Portal and Serafin Delmar took part in debates in important and innovative ways. Not only did this generation of artists move closer to the workers and the masses of Peru, they also engaged in political struggle and were willing and ready to place their art at the service of collective endeavours. Portal remembered in hindsight the effervescent thirst for creation and active participation particular to the early 1920s in Peru and elsewhere in the continent: “America, its youth, searched for action, not contemplation. It desired to demonstrate its active presence, its desire to intervene in the happenings of History not just as simple spectators, but instead as participants in the great tasks of the intelligentsia.”Footnote ¹³ The literary magazine Flechas, which Portal and Delmar helped found in 1924, demonstrates their resolve to originally reflect upon new continental identities. Flechas was committed to assisting the instigation of spiritual renovation in Peru. It publicized in its pages “los nuevos valores que surgen en América,” using art produced in Peru and in Latin America as a means to unlock avenues of creation and avant-garde imaginations.Footnote ¹⁴ In aesthetics lay regenerative power, thought Portal and Delmar. In them, they stressed, also lay the potential for unity and closer cooperation between the youth of Peru and the rest of Hispano-America.Footnote ¹⁵

Reform-minded students in Peru repeatedly called for social change, political dissent, and moral purification.Footnote ¹⁶ However, before the late 1920s, when their initial intuitions began crystallizing into political proposals, notably with the consolidation of the APRA movement in exile, student leaders found it hard to express clearly what they wanted beyond a vague, if romantic “revolution of the spirits.” This explains why the nature of the “new America” they kept referring to remained largely unspecified. To be sure, they knew very well what they did not want. Anything that had to do with the old order and forms of authority must be destroyed, they stressed over and over again. Still, what these actors opposed was much more clearly stated than the solutions they aspired to bring forth to replace this old order. In the early to mid-1920s, more work of creation was necessary to better define the global utopias they sought through the replacement of Western modernity.

Between 1918 and the mid-1920s, the declarations made by Reform-minded students in Peru and elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere made clear that the revolutionary proposal they championed would bear continental dimensions or would not exist at all. They also agreed that the social change they wanted for their respective societies would first occur through a spiritual regeneration of the Latin American people. The consensus surrounding their revival of American utopias, however, stopped here. Student leaders and artists agreed their revolution must be rooted in American ideals, but the specific content of their continental revolution was left up for grabs. What constituted the essence of what they called, after the famous Cuban poet José Marti, “Nuestra América”? Was it a set of cultural and moral values specific to the region, as Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó described in his appraisal of Hispanic América?Footnote ¹⁷ Or was this continental body a political imperative in the making – an instrument of defence against US expansionism, as Argentine José Ingenieros’ latino-americanismo suggested?Footnote ¹⁸ How to imagine projects of hemispheric unity truly original in form and content? Which type of continental design would concurrently challenge oligarchic powers from within and imperialist threats from without? To find answers to these questions, Reform-minded students in Peru collaborated with Latin American peers. They were also ready to engage and debate with a group of Christian US actors who were taking great interest in the Latin American student reform movement, particularly in its vow of moral and spiritual regeneration for the hemisphere.

Saving Civilization with Jesus and Latin American Students

“Aunque escocés por nacimiento y educación, merece muy bien, como él modestamente se llama, ser apellido ciudadano espiritualmente naturalizado del continente americano.”Footnote ¹⁹ This statement, made in 1927 by one of Mackay’s peers, encapsulates the legacy of this influential missionary leader to Latin America and staunch advocate of inter-cultural dialogue between North and South America. Reverend John A. Mackay (1889–1983) was a Scot by birth, but his early commitment to a life of Christian religious vocation led him to travel and take residency in a variety of countries in the Americas for most of his lifetime. Mackay’s lifelong journey to the other side of the Atlantic began in 1913. Then, aged twenty-four, Mackay left his homeland to study at the Princeton Seminary, in the state of New Jersey, US. He attended and read lectures by Robert E. Speer, an influential Presbyterian missionary leader who appeared in the 1910s as a lone wolf advocating the organization of missionary work in Latin America – a region profoundly Christian, in his view, but problematically still very much under the sway of the Catholic Church. The young Mackay was deeply struck by Speer’s lessons and resolved to walk in his footsteps. He embarked on a six-month missionary tour to South America in May–September 1915 to report on the spiritual needs of the region to the Free Church of Scotland, a Presbyterian and reformed denomination formed in the mid-nineteenth century to which Mackay belonged.

These first experiences in the Americas were conclusive for Mackay: he would devote the rest of his life to advancing the spiritual betterment of the Western Hemisphere. He did this through the missionary work he accomplished in Peru between 1916 and 1925, and during his tours to South America on behalf of the YMCA in 1922 and again from 1925 through 1932. He also occupied prestigious executive positions in a number of religious institutions in the United States, including the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions and the Princeton Theological Seminary, where he served as president from 1937 through 1959, and collaborated with the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America and wrote in its mouthpiece publication, La Nueva Democracia, for more than thirty years.Footnote ²⁰ To this day, Mackay is renowned in the Presbyterian community for his contributions to the development of a world Christian movement.Footnote ²¹

Many Latin American Protestants, in turn, highlight the important theological legacy that Mackay left to the region, insisting on the respect and the interest he showed for Latin American culture and traditions.Footnote ²² Mackay believed that “The first step toward exercising a spiritual influence upon a people is to understand its life,” which explains why he took pains to learn as much as he could about the countries he visited in Latin America and to befriend the local populations. This evangelizing style, based on dialogue, reflected the turnabout that a handful of missionary leaders, regrouped in the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America (CCLA) – a forum established in 1913 in New York City by representatives of the National Evangelical Churches and the Mission Boards working in Latin America – were trying to push in the Christian missionary movement worldwide. From the early 1920s, Mackay and his peers from the CCLA advocated the importance “for the fulfillment of the spiritual task in which missionaries are engaged that they should have an adequate and sympathetic comprehension of the people who are the object of their solicitude.”Footnote ²³ This, they thought, might help increase cooperation and mutual understanding between North and South Americans, and as a result, improve inter-American relations during a time period characterized by heavy tensions in US–Latin American relations.Footnote ²⁴ More importantly, taking interest in the very people they wanted to sway helped them to bolster the legitimacy and influence of their missionary work abroad.

In Peru, historians recall Mackay more specifically for the friendships that he established in the 1920s with a number of Reform-minded students, and particularly with future APRA leaders, including Haya de la Torre, José Carlos Mariátegui, Raúl Porras Barrenechea, and Oscar Herrera.Footnote ²⁵ The story of their friendship began in August 1916, when the Free Church of Scotland selected Mackay, then a young graduate from the Princeton Theological Seminary (1915), to set up a mission in Peru. The Free Church’s decision to open this institution in Peru was in line with recent developments in the Christian missionary movement that advocated that Protestants challenge the clout of the Catholic Church in Latin America.Footnote ²⁶ In Peru, “Christ is absent, but the cross is present everywhere,” concluded a 1924 report of the Free Church Foreign Mission Committee.Footnote ²⁷ Mackay’s peers advanced that Peruvians needed to be saved because their country was immersed in “spiritual ignorance” – not so much despite the presence of the Catholic Church in the region, but precisely because of it.Footnote ²⁸

The ascendancy of the Roman Catholic Church was still very strong in Peru in the early 1920s. Though the Catholic Church had begun to lose influence with the liberal elites following the end of the colonial era, its authority remained largely unchallenged by the popular classes for most of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁹ When Mackay set foot in the Peruvian capital, this state of affairs was beginning to change and Protestant missionaries played an important role in accelerating this change. During Leguia’s Oncenio, they actively participated in the process of modernization from below that was gripping Peru at that time, taking pains, for instance, to develop relationships with liberal and progressive elites as well as with several social movements. Protestantism, in fact, recruited most of its membership between 1915 and 1930 from emerging popular sectors, such as artisans, miners, rural workers, and university students. The impetus for individual regeneration drove the social work of their missions. So did the wish to foster state secularization and religious pluralism in Peru.Footnote ³⁰

Within a few months of arriving in Lima, Mackay and his wife, Jane Logan Well, took over the primary school established a few years earlier by Scottish missionary John Ritchie and founded in its stead, on June 3, 1917, the Colegio Anglo-Peruano.Footnote ³¹ The school grew rapidly. By 1922, the number of students had increased tenfold since its foundation, increasing from thirty to 387 enrollments in only five years.Footnote ³² The Colegio Anglo-Peruano offered primary and secondary school instruction for the educated classes of Peru, aiming to form those they viewed as the leaders of tomorrow. The number of staff members increased, too, as enrollments rose. By 1923, the Free Church of Scotland had recruited additional teachers to partake in its mission to Peru, including V. R. Browne, Reverend J. Calvin Mackay, Miss Netta Kemp, Miss Mary Hutchison, Miss Christina Mackay, and L. J. Cutbill. Mackay, for his part, had hired Peruvian student leaders to work in his missionary school. Raúl Porras Barrenechea, Oscar Herrera, Jorge Guillermo Leguía, and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, to name but a few, were among those he recruited to teach Spanish and history classes at the Colegio Anglo-Peruano.Footnote ³³

The missionaries who worked at the Anglo-Peruvian College went to great lengths to distance themselves from the English and Scottish community in Lima. They claimed they wanted to stay as close as possible to the national culture of Peru and to learn as much as they could about Peru and its people. Mackay took special pride, for example, in establishing Spanish rather than English as the chief language of the Anglo-Peruvian College, an initiative no other Protestant institution in Peru had ever taken before.Footnote ³⁴ He also made it a point to mix with, and learn about, the Peruvian youth. To do so, Mackay studied and taught philosophy classes at the San Marcos University, Peru’s leading university. There, he debated and exchanged with leaders of the Peruvian student reform movement; he also attended the weekly reunions of the Limean bohemia, where students, artists, and intellectuals convened to discuss literature and politics.Footnote ³⁵ Mackay collaborated with the student’s mouthpiece publication Claridad and invited student leaders to write about the current social problems of Peru in La Nueva DemocraciaFootnote ³⁶.

Why did Mackay, a Scottish Presbyterian, concern himself with the urges and dreams of Peruvian student leaders? Historians stress the Latin American student reform movement’s anti-clericalism – specifically the fight that the Federation of Peruvian Students (FEP) led for the secularization of university education from 1919 onward – to explain why Mackay so closely supported and mixed with student leaders. To be sure, like many Protestant missionaries at the time, Mackay identified in the liberal and progressive elites of Peru valuable allies in the pursuit of state secularization and religious pluralism.Footnote ³⁷ Yet Mackay’s support of student leaders went far beyond anti-clerical considerations. During his stay at San Marcos University, Mackay had become closely acquainted with the anti-materialist currents that were rocking Peruvian youth. He praised the student movement for rejecting positivist philosophies and for seeing in José Enrique Rodó, an influential Uruguayan writer who commended the spiritual aesthetics of the Hispanic American culture, an alternative to excessive materialism. Mackay’s rejection of materialism was in accordance with a growing cohort of Christian missionaries who felt the onus was on them to oppose not only the papal system in Latin America, but also the rise of materialist philosophies, mainly in the form of capitalism and communism, across the continent.Footnote ³⁸

Mackay voiced his admiration for the work of Peruvian students whenever he could. “These young men and the great masses of workmen with whom they are in contact and whose spiritual leaders they are,” he remarked to his peers in the 1925 Montevideo missionary conference, “are strong internationalists, are opposed to militarism and refuse to have anything to do with professional politicians.”Footnote ³⁹ For Christian pacifists who, like Mackay, opposed nationalist warmongering, the references they saw in the student’s paper Claridad and in other avant-garde publications to the Bolivarian ideal of a united America were enticing. This was especially the case for his peers from the CCLA, who championed a Pan Americanism based on democratic principles and cooperation. There was in Peru “a new sense of the glorious destiny that awaits America,” rejoiced Mackay. “Narrow nationalism” was propitiously “giving place to internationalism”Footnote ⁴⁰

In addition to praising their political, if inchoate, designs for hemispheric unity, Mackay celebrated the students he met in Peru for a number of deserving personal features he believed they had and which Anglo-Saxons lacked. The Peruvians’ eagerness to learn was impressive and commendable, noted Mackay.Footnote ⁴¹ So was their opening to the world: “Their conversation on modern literature is a veritable education,” he claimed, “and the breadth of their acquaintanceship with foreign authors often makes one feel ashamed of his ignorance.”Footnote ⁴² Mackay’s comments echoed the critique widely adopted by the Latin American modernists, that of scorning Anglo-Saxon America for being superficial and overly materialist and praising in contradistinction the high cultural and moral values of Hispanic or Latin America.Footnote ⁴³

There was no doubt in Mackay’s mind that the key to ending nationalist wars and racial discrimination in the Americas – and to working toward the spiritual revival of the Western world – rested in building alliances with these Latin American student leaders. In his reflections upon the role that intellectuals had to play in the face of decaying and non-Christian civilization, Mackay positioned both evangelical Christians and university students from the growing middle class in Latin America as agents of social change.Footnote ⁴⁴ It was their common responsibility, he believed, to eradicate the “destructive forces” of nationalism and racism from the face of the earth.Footnote ⁴⁵

Mackay came to view in the student reform movement not only a potent source of anti-Catholic opposition in Latin America, but also a harbinger of moral and spiritual regeneration in the Western Hemisphere. Postwar Latin America looked ripe for receiving spiritual and social change. Moreover, a growing number of Christian missionaries in fact believed that it would lead the way for all the Americas. According to reports and speeches that Mackay authored between 1918 and the mid-to-late 1920s, this southern geography offered a world of opportunities to help salvage spiritual truth and work against rising materialist forces worldwide.Footnote ⁴⁶ The lingering disaster in European affairs, he pointed out, let alone the absence of satisfying proposals coming from Europe to deal with the postwar reconstruction, had produced in his view a new sense of destiny and of responsibility in the republics of South America.Footnote ⁴⁷ “South American thinkers and scientists have discovered a new confidence in their own powers,” stressed Mackay, correctly so. “Europe has lost a great deal of its traditional prestige and South American intellectuals have taken themselves out of their classic sense of inferiority, and have the feeling that in some spheres of life and thought, they are even called upon to give the world a lead.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Many missionary leaders in Latin America, particularly religious leaders active in the CCLA, concurred with Mackay. “Above all, the spiritual awakening among all classes [in Latin America], especially among university students, offers great opportunities for helpful guidance,” confirmed a 1925 report authored by the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America.Footnote ⁴⁹ Samuel G. Inman, the director of La Nueva Democracia, likewise saw the Western Hemisphere as the bellwether of world peace.Footnote ⁵⁰ While detailing the historical mission that befell the Americas to save the world from a degenerate Europe, Inman liked to remind his audience of the pacifist lessons brought forth by Latin Americans – “by nature a peaceful people,” whose “statesmen have advocated the peaceful solution of all international problems” ever “since the days of Bolivar.”Footnote ⁵¹ For Reverend W. Stanley Rycroft, Mackay’s peer from the Anglo-Peruvian College, the Peruvian student movement merited attention for its capacity to hinder the progress of communism in the region. “May God’s blessing rest on the work among the youth of Peru,” Rycroft reported in 1923 in the Free Church’s periodical, “may the day not be distant when the leaders of the movement towards liberty and freedom and a better order of things come to acknowledge the true Christ as their Saviour and save Peru from the fate of Russia.”Footnote ⁵²

By the early 1920s, following the rise to power of the Bolshevik Party in Russia (1917) and the foundation of the Third International in 1919, the Christian missionaries who established relationships with the Peruvian vanguard and future Apristas were especially worried about the surge of world communism. The first Peruvian socialist party would not be created until 1928, under the guise of the Peruvian Marxist intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui. And when it was created, it remained fairly independent from Moscow’s leadership.Footnote ⁵³ But, even though communism remained absent from Peru for most of the 1920s, the Free Church feared the attraction it might exert on the students and workers of Peru. They hated class wars as much as they hated nationalism and racism. One flyer prepared by the Free Church Foreign Mission Committee in 1924 explained the matter in blunt terms to their Scottish parishioners.Footnote ⁵⁴ While Peru’s educated classes’ rejection of traditional authorities boded well for the advance of Protestantism in the region, the Mission Committee stressed that this rejection of traditional authorities also risked devolving into an open war against all religions. The surge of anti-religious sentiment in Peru, reasoned the flyer, therefore could potentially result in a breeding ground for the worst materialist doctrine of all – Russian communism.Footnote ⁵⁵ These missionaries’ worst-case scenario was in short that a revolt against the Catholic Church would devolve into an all-out opposition to all religions, including Protestantism. State secularism and anti-religious feelings, they insisted, were quite different things.

Nevertheless, their rejection of communism did not mean that the Christian missionaries who worked at the Colegio Anglo-Peruano were opposed to social change or reluctant to change the social order. To the contrary, these historical actors favourably viewed the advent of a social revolution in Peru, and in Latin America more broadly. By the turn of the century, the influence of the Social Gospel movement in US Protestantism had extended to both sides of the Atlantic, convincing leaders of the Free Church of Scotland to address the social consequences of brutal capitalism. These religious leaders championed solidarity with the British labour movement and summoned their followers to oppose social inequities. “[The Christian] may, or may not, be a Socialist,” thundered one Church leader in 1910, “but a defender of this social order he cannot be.”Footnote ⁵⁶ This Christian doctrine of social transformation likewise encouraged the Free Church’s missionaries to actively address the social ills that plagued the Americas rather than focusing their attention exclusively on individual redemption.Footnote ⁵⁷ But there was one condition to their support. They believed it was of paramount importance to first achieve a spiritual revolution in the Americas before the social revolution could begin. Otherwise, they advanced, the new social order was doomed to failure; only the right set of Christian ethics and morals would prevent the world from relapsing into the dreadful dead-end then facing Western civilization.

This is why Mackay warned Peruvian students against the threats that “un proletario inculto e inescrupuloso” were then posing to Western civilization. Proletarian rule led nowhere constructive, he explained to them: “El poder a todo costo, a sangre, a fuego y a engaño, he allí el lema del nuevo imperialismo proletario, según su vocero más autorizado, el propio Lenin.”Footnote ⁵⁸ This is also why Mackay enthused about the prospect of an alliance between his Christian missionary peers and Reform-minded students in Peru. One way to prevent the surge of communism in Peru while fomenting social change, he trusted, was to build alliances with young student leaders, who like Haya de la Torre and future Apristas, were ready to reject the Catholic Church without, however, altogether denying God.

These views, disseminated by Mackay and leaders of the CCLA in their respective homelands, contributed toward building up a certain level of attention from Europe and the United States directed at student leaders in Peru. The favourable reviews of the Peruvian student reform movement that members of the Colegio Anglo-Peruano published in foreign publications and their church’s periodicals confirms this acclaim for students’ anti-clericalism. Perhaps never was this embrace clearer than in May 1923, when the crisis between Peruvian state authorities and Reform-minded students reached a climax.Footnote ⁵⁹ In response to Leguía’s attempt to consecrate Peru to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which would augment the symbolic power of the Catholic Church, student activists, in collaboration with union leaders, spearheaded a mass protest in the streets of Lima to oppose this measure.Footnote ⁶⁰ Violence against protestors ensued, resulting in two deaths and many more injured. The clash ended in a bitter victory for the protestors: Leguía ultimately balked and halted the project, but the price to pay came in the form of arbitrary arrests and deportations of students and workers.

The Christian community revolving around the Anglo-Peruvian College mobilized quickly to assist the movement. Members of the Colegio Anglo-Peruano offered enthusiastic first-hand reports of the student revolt they had witnessed in Peru. In the August 1923 issue, The Monthly Record of the Free Church published a report by William Stanley Rycroft which extolled the student upheaval that had just rocked the Peruvian capital: “Last week was one of the most remarkable in the history of the Peruvian people,” stated Rycroft in reference to the student protest on May 1923. Rycroft’s story enthusiastically chronicled how the Peruvian student movement led “a violent attack on the whole religious system” of Peru, where a greedy government and a despotic Catholic Church were to blame, the article highlighted, for the social and political ills that afflicted the country.Footnote ⁶¹

The editorial board of The Nation, a US leftist magazine, ran a story on April 9, 1924, on the student upheaval in Peru which quoted extensively from Rycroft’s piece. The Nation in fact replicated most of Rycroft’s argument. As a result, it disseminated among its progressive US readership a story that equated persecuted Peruvian students and intellectuals with pacifism and Christian values. Similar to Rycroft’s piece, this article focused on the Peruvian student leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. It introduced him to The Nation’s subscribers as an impassioned Christian pacifist, “absolutely opposed to violence of any kind.”Footnote ⁶² This journal was not the only press media in the United States to give favourable attention to the Peruvian student movement. Likewise, in March 1924, the New Student enthusiastically portrayed the student protests that had been rocking Peru the year before. Under the auspices of the New Student Forum, a moderate antiwar student body in the United States, this US bi-monthly publication congratulated the students of the “University of Lima” who had risked their “necks” and “fortunes” to oppose the consecration of Peru to the “Sacred Heart of Jesus” – an act, it was esteemed, that would have culminated in the subjugation of the Peruvian state to the Catholic juggernaut.Footnote ⁶³ Student leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre received particular attention.Footnote ⁶⁴ This “pleasant fellow,” the editorial read, had sailed above the fray with courage and dignity, inspiring his fellow students to withstand governmental repression without violence or demeaning actions. “The attack of the government had stirred the people, and the report is that only the pacifism of de la Torre prevented retaliation by them,” the New Student claimed in its March issue.Footnote ⁶⁵ The New Leader, a weekly publication dedicated to questions of interest for socialist groups and labour movements, ran an article on April 26, 1924, that similarly sang the praises of Peruvian student leader Haya de la Torre. “When [Haya de la Torre] became president of the Student Federation of Peru,” wrote the author, “... immediately a new spirit—a searching for light—became manifest among the students and his approach to social questions has always been that of one who desired to make the people see that more light and more sweetness should be their aim rather than more rights only.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The plotlines of these articles, if slightly different in form, share a common denominator. They all presented the Peruvian student reform movement as an inspiring model of moderate radicalism and Christian integrity – a roadmap for bringing students and workers together in the fight for social justice and political rights while eschewing violence.Footnote ⁶⁷ Significantly, in these narratives, the Peruvian student leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre stood as a symbol of advisable leadership in the face of unfair persecution. The articles all stressed how much approval Haya de la Torre was attracting in Peru because of his alleged religious values and absolute pacifism. They disseminated abroad the promise of a rising Latin American youth ready to take the commands of a moral regenerative movement in the Americas.

Heading South with Graves: Pacifism and World Citizenship

In addition to the Christian missionaries who revolved around the Anglo- Peruvian College, Anna Melissa Graves, a Christian pacifist and self-proclaimed internationalist, is another influential figure in the early history of the APRA movement. Graves is a rather strange character. She belongs to the past of the APRA the way a prized actress plays a secondary role: the story is not meant to be about the character she personifies, but her presence on the screen is so remarkable that she steals the show regardless. It is indeed surprising that historians of APRA have granted so little attention to this historical figure; Graves is literally everywhere in the early history of this movement. The archives disclose how, through a combination of grassroots organizing and sustained correspondence between religious leaders and peace activists in Europe and the Americas, Graves, assisted by Mackay and other pacifist peers, helped weave a large web of solidarity networks that would assist the work of Reform-minded student leaders and the APRA movement shortly thereafter. Certainly, the history of this anti-imperialist movement would not have been the same had Graves not showed interest in the endeavours of the Peruvian Reform-minded students and avant-garde artists she met in Peru in 1922. Whereas Mackay connected future APRA leaders in Peru with Christian missionaries who aspired to advance cooperation and mutual understanding between the people of the Americas, Graves offered them international connections to religious pacifist organizations, such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), in both Europe and the Americas.

Graves’ motivations for contacting Reform-minded students and avant-garde artists in Peru in the early 1920s (such as the student leader Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, with whom she became especially close) originated in a short but traumatic stay in Europe at the end the First World War. In the essay “I Have Tried to Think,” Graves recounts the path that led her to choose absolute pacifism as a form of political activism. She arrived on the Old Continent in 1917, at the age of thirty-two, to serve as a social worker with the war-disabled.Footnote ⁶⁸ What she witnessed in wartime Europe, she explains, induced life-altering changes in her worldview. Confronted first-hand with the horrors of the war, Graves came to view differences based on racial or national character as deceptive illusions that needed to be fought and brought down. Hence began for her a lifelong quest against national divides and racial discrimination and in defence of world peace.Footnote ⁶⁹ She left Europe in the summer of 1919 with the resolve, she wrote, to “devote the rest of my life to doing all that I could to prevent war.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Between 1922 and 1934, Graves travelled the world hoping to collect evidence through direct observation of the universality of the human condition. “If the knowledge that [racial and national differences] did not exist,” she reasoned, “if this knowledge could become universal, could the people be so easily stampeded into phobias? Would not the propagandists have much greater difficulty in producing these phobias? And hence greater difficulty in making men kill their brothers?”Footnote ⁷¹ Like Mackay, Graves opposed nationalist sentiments for being inherently belligerent, and thereby unfit for the cause of absolute pacifism she defended so adamantly. The countries that Graves visited in the Americas after leaving Europe were, in chronological order, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Mexico.Footnote ⁷² During these early travels to Latin America, Graves pursued militant activities and worked to recruit allies committed to absolute pacifism.Footnote ⁷³ By 1923, Graves had become an active member of a number of pacifist organizations, including the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the Peace Society, the Union of Democratic Control, and the US branch of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). The extensive correspondence that she maintained with Latin American pacifists and leftwing activists throughout the interwar period reveals how much she contributed in the early 1920s to establishing local branches of these pacifist organizations in the region south of the Río Grande.Footnote ⁷⁴

Graves passed most of 1922 in Peru. In Lima, she taught English classes at the North American Institute, a Methodist college originally founded in 1906 by the Methodist Women’s Foreign Missionary Society.Footnote ⁷⁵ Teaching was for Graves a source of income as she travelled the world, but most importantly, in Peru, it also provided the ground for mixing with the small but active community of Christian missionaries present in the capital city. Through her connection with Reverend John A. Mackay, W. Stanley Rycroft, and Margaret Robb, all staff members at the Colegio Anglo-Peruano, a protestant missionary school in Lima, Graves developed friendships with Peruvian students and artists who, like her, insisted on the need to include moral and spiritual incentives in revolutionary endeavours.

Graves took pain to maintain her correspondence with the Peruvian youth she met in Peru because doing so presented the opportunity to influence them. The epistolary exchanges that she developed with several of them after she left Peru indeed points to her lasting influence in these circles. For example, the Peruvian artist Julia Codesido enjoyed reading the books on pacifism and the Christian US magazines that Graves forwarded to her even after she left Peru. Codesido was then studying at the School of Fine Arts under José Sabogal, a prominent Indigenist muralist who had recently returned from Revolutionary Mexico. Codesido tellingly disagreed with José Sabogal’s embrace of Mexican nationalism, for according to a letter she wrote to Graves, she believed that “perfect beauty can’t exist in nationalism.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Edwin Elmore, on the other hand, shared Graves’ commitment to organizing the spiritual forces of the American continent as a necessary springboard toward the union of all spiritual forces of the world.Footnote ⁷⁷ He furthermore confessed to her respecting very much the work that foreign pacifist institutions, such as the FOR or the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), were then conducting to help redress what Elmore found to be “false” and “vapid” in “Western culture and civilization.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Of all Peruvians she met during her short stay, none impacted her as much as Haya de la Torre did. “The Señor Haya de la Torre of Lima, Peru is, I believe, the most selfless man I have ever met anywhere in the world,” wrote Graves to a peer pacifist in September 1923.Footnote ⁷⁹ Upon meeting him through Mackay in late 1922, Graves rapidly understood Haya de la Torre’s potential as a powerful political leader. She was particularly impressed with his stamina and resolve in helping the workers of Peru achieve a better education, something she had witnessed in his work with the Popular Universities.Footnote ⁸⁰ Articles and letters she authored celebrated his charisma and intelligence. Above all, Graves liked to compare this young student leader to the figure of Tolstoy as a paragon of Christian faith and pacifism.Footnote ⁸¹ “He has the spirit of Tolstoy,” she wrote in 1924 in the US socialist journal The New Leader, “in that he looks straight into the soul of every man and finds God.”Footnote ⁸² Similarly to Mackay, who saw in Haya de la Torre a powerful spiritual leader for the Americas, Graves pledged to assist Haya de la Torre in his political training. Latin America, she thought, needed leaders like him who were committed to pacifism and internationalism. And she wanted to make sure that in his budding political coming of age, she would stay close to him intellectually to assert her authority on his ideas.

From her travels to Latin America, Graves observed that Latin Americans could be divided into three main categories. The first category comprised those who were neither “nationalists nor internationalists,” but whom according to Graves were ready to “play either game, if they think […] that one or the other will further their interests.” She abhorred this category of Latin Americans for worshipping “material progress” and for being “willing to borrow any amount of money from the capitalists of the United States, or any other country, in order that their field and forest and mines may be exploited.”Footnote ⁸³ The “Nationalists” constituted the second category. Graves understood the Nationalists in Latin America as “earnest” and “sincere” political actors. She respected these actors, but she did not support their cause. Graves had indeed observed how many Latin American nationalists believed, in her view candidly so, that their nationalism was “creative” and “for the good of the world.” She explained in 1923 to her pacifist peer Romain Rolland that nationalists trusted “that the trouble with Latin America countries is that they have never realized that they were nations, that a burning consciousness of a national soul is necessary step in development.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Graves was correct in her assessment. For many nationalists in the 1920s, the spiritual freedom of their people went hand in hand with rejection of the cultural, economic, and political sway of external powers, notably those of the United States. For many of them, nationalist pride became a weapon against mental colonialism and economic domination.Footnote ⁸⁵

Nevertheless, like Mackay, Graves ultimately opposed nationalist sentiments for being inherently belligerent. She considered them unfit for the cause of absolute pacifism, which she defended so adamantly. This explains why Graves did not enthuse about the revolutionary process underway in Mexico as so many foreign actors did.Footnote ⁸⁶ She had witnessed with anguish a wave of nationalism sweep revolutionary Mexico in the early 1920s.Footnote ⁸⁷ This phenomenon was “partly due to the feeling against the United States, which Mexico thinks forced it to give up its revolution,” Graves explained; but in her view, it was also “partly due to contagion from the wave of nationalism which is taking possession of the world.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Graves disapproved all types of nationalism, whether it supported imperialist projects or fed anti-colonial struggles. She situated instead in a third category of Latin American actors the harbingers of moral and spiritual regeneration in the Western Hemisphere. Graves called this third group “the forerunners.” In them, she thought, lay the possible salvation of Western civilization. These forerunners were, according to Graves, men and women “who realize that any idea, any sentiment which develops separateness is not creative.” She billed these Latin Americans, like Peruvian Julia Codesido, Edwin Elmore or Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, “world citizens” and urged pacifist activists in Europe and the Americas to encourage them and support their growing, if inchoate, internationalism. It’s important to understand that, in the early to mid-1920s, Graves did not embrace projects of hemispheric unity per se. Yet her internationalism dovetailed with the Latin American reform students’ dismissal of the nation-state as a proper form of political organization. “Latin America has before her the possibility of continental development without the causes of separateness embedded in every other continent,” she stressed in 1923. “She can be saved [from] the evils inherent in nationalism if she is made to see that they are inherent.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Like Mackay, Graves found inspiration in their discourses of continental unity. She admired their determination to engage seriously in political philosophies that sought to highlight what Latin American countries had in common rather than emphasize their differences. This, thought Graves, was a first and exemplary step toward world peace.

Latin America was at a historical crossroad, thought Graves. She trusted the onus was on pacifist activists to make sure that Latin American internationalists did not fall prey to nationalist sentiments. “Latin America is worthy of Faith,” she told one peer pacifist in 1923, “but an encouraged nationalism in each one of these countries will make of this Continent the waste of carnage and agony which it has made of Europe.”Footnote ⁹⁰ There was still hope, thought Graves. She was convinced that, with the right allies and a careful process of persuasion, the progression of pacifism in the region would follow its right course. She held that belief because, according to her, nationalism was not yet rooted deeply enough in Latin America to cause the ravages it had wrought in Europe. More encouraging still were the budding pacifist and internationalist forces indigenous to the Americas which promised to counter Mexican nationalism. According to Graves, the Latin American student reform movement, and particularly the forces that she had witnessed coalesce in Peru around the Anglo-Peruvian College and the Limean bohemia that Mackay had befriended, was one of them.

In sum, Graves shared with Mackay the same animosity toward nationalist and materialist philosophies. According to them, none of these philosophies could help achieve world peace. Graves argued that internationalism provided an attractive alternative model of socio-political organization precisely because it forewent the nation-state. Internationalism, she stressed, promised to eliminate frontiers from world maps, the corollary of which was a world without divisions or discord – a world, in short, made for peace. To be sure, the subject of internationalism in Latin America was not black and white. The budding critiques of empire in Latin America often conceived the road to liberation in steps, including a nationalist period before the march toward universal peace and freedom could resume. As a result,many in Latin America approached nationalism and internationalism as two sides of the same coin. In contrast, these two concepts were for Graves two distinct and absolutely irreconcilable philosophies. Nationalism, she thought, belligerent by nature, inevitably subsumed the pacifism of internationalism.Footnote ⁹¹ According to her, true pacifists were de facto internationalists. To achieve this feat, however, Graves knew she needed help in orienting the Peruvian youth.

Conclusion

Understanding the transnational history of APRA exposes the fundamental forces of exile and state persecution in shaping the growth and evolution of this major populist movement in Peru. Exile and persecution forced APRA leaders to build vital political and emotional ties with non-Latin American allies in order to ensure the survival of their political movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 reveals how APRA leaders’ connections with foreign allies began even prior to the foundation of the APRA movement in the mid-to-late 1920s. The social and political ideals of the Peruvian student movement, which advocated hemispheric unity, and aesthetic and spiritual revolution in addition to social change in Latin America, cracked open space for the possibility of exchange and dialogue with a number of Christian missionaries and pacifists who took interest in their work. John A. Mackay and his peers from the Free Church of Scotland were primarily drawn to this Peruvian vanguard for their bulwark against communism and materialism in the Western Hemisphere. Anna Melissa Graves, a staunch advocate of internationalism and absolute pacifism, praised above all their pancontinental visions. Both saw in these Peruvian actors the allies they needed to advance their respective and converging agendas in Latin America.

That the period in which these alliances took place was one of rapid changes in Peru and deep trauma worldwide facilitated these exchanges. The global existential crisis that prevailed during the interwar period, in effect, convinced many European and US actors to look to the region south of the Río Grande to find solutions to the evils of their times. The postwar crisis and the rise of radical political projects, such as different kinds of socialism and anarchism, compelled these actors from the North to rethink in dialogue with Latin Americans their ideas about what social justice meant and what proselytizing and missionary activity should entail. Meanwhile, as the Peruvian vanguard had more questions than answers about how to salvage their country and challenge Eurocentric modernity, they remained open to collaboration with liberal minded Christians who not only opposed oligarchic power in the region, but who similarly placed their hopes of regeneration for mankind in projects of hemispheric unity in the Americas. The global existential crisis that prevailed during the interwar period, then, threw people together who might otherwise have never communicated with each other. Their common search for a new path toward new dreams of civilization and progress brought them into dialogue.

Underscoring the prevalence of these global connections in defining APRA’s future challenges a predominant and incorrect narrative in the history of the anti-imperialist APRA. Alliances between Apristas and North Americans were not the result of later betrayals, as often suggested by those who left the party. Rather, they were an inherent part of the inception of this Latin American anti-imperialist movement. Global connections between the Peruvian vanguard and Europeans and North Americans contributed to defining the worldviews and aspirations of future Apristas even prior to their coming of age as anti-imperialist and Indo-Américan advocates. What began as a peculiar friendship between foreign Christian actors and young university students would have important consequences for the leadership of APRA down the road. These non-Latin American allies repeatedly tapped into their own networks of peer activists to assist student leaders and future APRA leaders during their early years in exile in the 1920s and beyond, with important consequences for the growth of their movement. The next chapter turns to this lived experience of exile and to the ways in which Mackay and Graves, by supporting and trying to influence the young Haya de la Torre, contributed to the genesis of the APRA movement and to the rise of a new hemispheric consciousness. Apristas hoped such consciousness would be strong enough to limit European dominance over the region’s identity.