A Model Republic

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century the United States of America was habitually invoked by an epithet: in Spain it was the gran república or repúblicamodelo; in Britain, the “great Republic of the West”; in Spanish America, la gran república del Norte. This image—of the United States as the model republic—was one of the most widely circulated in Europe and Latin America in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Constitution, the institutions, and the democratic practices of the United States lay at the core of contemporaries’ understandings of what that country represented in its modernity. When outside observers debated aspects of the United States, whether it was the issue of slavery, the state of the economy, or striking railroad workers, more often than not the underlying subtext of these discussions was the opportunity that they provided for either lauding or discrediting the United States as a model or anti-model republic.

I say that we can affirm that all that is fundamental and effective that has been achieved in the Republic of the United States is the work of man; and therefore I say that all can be attempted and realized among other peoples, within the sense, currents, ideas and compromises of the contemporary Era, taking into account, as to how it is applied, the singular elements and very particular conditions of the locality, the environment and the exigencies of History.

Rafael María de Labra, La Reptública de los Estados Unidos de América, 1897