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61 Pol. Sci. Q. 1 (1946)

handle is hein.journals/pclscceqry61 and id is 1 raw text is: Volume L XI] POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY THE DESTINY OF THE NEGRO IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE T HE settling of the western hemisphere by peoples coming from Europe and Africa was an adventure on a grand scale, involving diverse peoples, varying cultures, mil- lions of human beings, and hundreds of years. The common element was the New World. Its physical features and cultural types were strangely dissimilar, but the student discerns many an analogous design, patterned by the newcomers as they estab- lished themselves in the strange and unexplored regions. It is natural, therefore, for Gilberto Freyre to draw revealing sim- ilarities between the history of Brazil and the United States.' Like everything that he writes, this volume has a freshness and a lucidity that endow the reader with insight and understanding of the complex instrumentalities for life and labor contrived by man in his new world. Freyre finds in the development of Brazil, for example, the impact of the frontier and the dominion of the plantation so typical of our own South. The disparity, implied rather than expressed in the study, is the divergent posi- tion of the Negro within the two areas. For the Negro-and especially the Mulatto-had an access to the culture in Brazil, and a r6le in social life, unknown in the United States. In poli- tics, in the arts and in society, the Mulatto found the door ajar even if not fully open, and a markedly different social milieu has come into being. Even under the Empire, the Negro and the Mulatto-and, socially, the attractive Mulatto women- found an acceptance unthinkable in the North American scene. Freyre quotes from Ewbank this revealing picture: 1 Gilberto Freyre, Brazil: An Interpretation. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1945. vii, 179, ix pp. $2.00. (1) [Number r March 1946