Robert Jackson Alexander Papers

Early Life Robert Jackson Alexander was born on November 26, 1918 in Canton, Ohio. He was the son of Ralph S. Alexander, an instructor and graduate student in economics, and Ruth Jackson Alexander. In 1922, the family moved to Leonia, New Jersey, five miles from New York City where R.S. Alexander had attained a teaching position at Columbia. A daughter, Margaret, was born the following year. R.S. Alexander served as a professor at Columbia's School of Business for thirty-nine years, the last ten of which as Chairman of the Marketing Department.(1) Robert Alexander attended the public schools in Leonia, graduating from high school in 1936. Like many of his contemporaries, he became politicized during the difficult years of the Depression, joining the Young People's Socialist League in 1934. In the summer of 1936, he traveled to Europe on a graduation trip, making an unauthorized detour to Spain, at that time in the beginning stages of civil war. This expedition was the seed of a lifetime interest in Spain and opposition to Francisco Franco's dictatorship. Upon his return, Alexander matriculated at Columbia University, receiving a B.A. in 1940. As an undergraduate, he was introduced to Latin America, writing a term paper on organized labor in Argentina as a student of the economist Frank Tannenbaum, who would become his mentor and advisor. Alexander stayed at Columbia another year, completing a Master of Arts degree under Tannenbaum's supervision. In 1941, Alexander got his first job as a wire control clerk at the Aluminum Company of America plant in Edgewater, New Jersey. In January 1942, he joined the Board of Economic Warfare as a junior economist, until April when he was drafted into the United States Air Force. In 1943, Alexander was sent to Great Britain as a group operations clerk with the 95th Bomb Group (H). He remained there for about 25 months, during which time he had the opportunity to travel throughout the country. During this period, Alexander spoke to many trade unionists and took notes on their conversations, a foreshadowing of what would become his trademark interview method of research. Alexander later recorded his experiences in an unpublished manuscript "A Yank's Eye View of Britain." He published a pamphlet entitled What Do You Know About British Labor? in 1946. Upon demobilization in 1945, Alexander was hired by the Labor Division of the Office of Inter American Affairs as a junior economist. In 1946, he received a grant from the Office of International Exchange of Persons of the State Department that allowed him to spend from July 1946 to August 1947 in South America, collecting material for his Ph.D. dissertation on labor relations in Chile. During this period, he visited virtually all the major factories in the country and conducted hundreds of interviews. Alexander's interview method was unusual in that he asked open-ended questions, essentially letting the subject talk, and that he did not record or take notes during the interview, but wrote and typed it up directly afterwards.(2)Based on this research, Alexander was awarded a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia in 1950. While in Chile, Alexander obtained a post as an instructor in economics at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Alexander would spend his whole career at Rutgers; he was promoted to assistant professor in 1950, associate professor in 1956, and full professor in 1961. He retired at the rank of Professor II in 1989. In 1949, Alexander married Joan O. Powell, who was also from Leonia and was a graduate of Barnard College. The couple lived first in New Brunswick and then in Piscataway across the river from Rutgers' main campus. They had two children: Anthony, born in 1957, and Margaret in 1960. Research Robert Alexander's long career has many aspects–he excelled as a scholar, teacher, writer, documentarian and activist. His research interests can be divided into three areas: the politics, economics and labor relations of Latin America (which he broadly defines as all of the Western Hemisphere south of the United States); Spain, particularly the opposition to Franco; and international radical movements, especially the dissident Right and Left opposition to the Stalinist Comintern and its successors.(3)Robert Alexander's work was interdisciplinary before the term became common. His interests were extremely wide-ranging; within Latin America, he wrote about practically every country at some point. When he started his research in the 1940s, there was little secondary literature about Latin America in English. As well as conducting interviews, Alexander worked to collect as much material as possible on what became his yearly trips to the southern hemisphere. Alexander assembled this material, which included pamphlets, broadsides, periodicals, newspapers, labor contracts, union constitutions, unpublished papers, and other documents into a personal library which, along with his over 10,000 interviews, he made freely available to students and scholars.(4) This collection, particularly the interviews, became the basis of many of Alexander's scholarly publications. He is the author of thirty-eight books; some of which have gone through several editions and been translated into foreign languages; approximately fifty book chapters, and articles too numerous to count. A complete list of his publications, as of 1991, can be found in John D. French's Robert J. Alexander: The Complete Bibliography of a Pioneering Latin Americanist. Alexander's first book, The Peron Era, was published in 1951. Like his other early books, such as Communism in Latin America (1957), and The Bolivian National Revolution (1958), it was widely reviewed in both the academic and popular press, being extremely timely in a period when Latin America had become one of the battlegrounds of the Cold War. In 1957, the Hon. Charles O. Porter of Oregon called attention to Communism in Latin America in the U.S. Congress, as showing "the need for our Government to foster democracy in Latin America and give the cold shoulder to the dictatorships."(5) Alexander's fourth book, The Struggle for Democracy in Latin America, was written with Porter. Indeed Alexander's early work clearly expresses the politics of the democratic left: although opposed to communism, he condemned U.S. military intervention in Latin America and support for dictatorships, while advocating measures to improve economic and social conditions in the southern part of the hemisphere. In the 1960s, Alexander wrote Organized Labor in Latin America (1965), which became the standard work in the field; two monographs on Venezuela, and several textbooks. Alexander's work in the 1970s focused more on politics, including Latin American Political Parties (Praeger, 1973) and Aprismo: The Ideas and Doctrines of Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre (Kent State University Press, 1973); as well as publishing biographies of Chilean president Arturo Alessandri (whom Alexander had first met in 1947) and Juan Perón. In 1981, Alexander published a biography of his old friend, Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt, who died shortly before the book's publication. Betancourt, who had first met Alexander in Caracas in 1948, described him as "almost an Adéco" (a member of Betancourt's party, Acción Democrática).(6)Alexander published his interviews and correspondence with Betancourt in 1990. During the 1980s, Alexander was editor and major contributor to two reference books, Political Parties of the Americas, published by the Greenwood Press in 1982, and Biographical Dictionary of Latin American and Caribbean Political Leaders, also by published by Greenwood. In the 1990s, Alexander returned to his earlier interests in international radical movements and Spain, with International Trotskyism (Duke University Press, 1991), International Maoism in the Developing World (1991) and Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War (1999). Five volumes of Alexander's interviews and correspondence with Latin American and Caribbean presidents and prime ministers have also been published. Robert Alexander's research has been published in academic journals, including Social Research, the Journal of International Affairs, Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Economic History, Labor History, and many others. Beginning in the 1940s, he was a regular contributor on Latin American affairs, Spain, and the labor movement to a variety of newspapers and magazines, including New Leader, The Economist, Canadian Forum, Socialist Call, the Inter American Labor Bulletin (in both English and Spanish), International Free Trade Union News, Socialist International Information, New America (the organ of the Socialist Party/Social Democratic Federation), Freedom at Issue, and Hemispherica (the organ of the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom). Alexander served on the editorial boards of New Politics and Iberica. His articles appeared in translation in La Revue Socialiste (Paris), Die Zukunft (Vienna), and many others. Alexander also frequently contributed articles to the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and other national newspapers, as well as numerous letters to the editor on Latin American affairs. The breadth of Alexander's journalistic endeavor reflects his clear, accessible writing style, and his desire to educate the public about Latin America. As of 1991, Alexander had published over 250 book reviews, several hundred contributions to yearbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias, and eight pamphlets, the earliest of which was a description of the Chicago World's Fair written in 1933. Alexander collected material for his research through his yearly trips to Latin America. From 1952 to 1959, Alexander traveled under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor and the AFL-CIO, reporting on labor conditions in the countries he visited. Alexander was a supporter of the AFL-CIO's efforts to encourage "democratic," as opposed to communist-influenced trade unions in Latin America. He believed that, overall, the AFL-CIO had a positive impact on labor in the region; for example, by conducting training programs for union leaders and aiding union members who were being persecuted by their governments. (7)In 1957, he spent one month in Bolivia with the Foreign Economic Administration. He also received grants from the State Department, the Ford Foundation, and the Rutgers University Research Council, and served several times as a consultant for the Agency for International Development (AID). Alexander spent the year 1965-1966 doing research in Brazil, visiting 21 of Brazil's 22 states. Through his travels and other connections, Alexander developed a web of contacts which enabled him to interview numerous prominent figures, including the heads of state of many countries in the region. Alexander occasionally found himself caught in the middle of violent upheavals. When revolution broke out in Cuba in 1959, he made a flying trip to Havana during the Rutgers examination period to see what was going on. In 1962, he witnessed a short-lived revolt in the Dominican Republic, where Armed Forces Secretary Pedro Ramón Rodríguez Echeverría attempted to set up a military dictatorship. As he recounted afterward to a local newspaper, "when the shooting started in the main plaza, I happened to be there." During the 48 hours that the military junta was in power, Alexander roamed the streets observing. As he remarked, "The streets were deserted and I walked close to the buildings so I could duck in if anything happened."(8) Teaching In addition to his research interests, Robert Alexander played an active role as a faculty member at Rutgers University. Although a member of the department of economics, he also taught courses in history, political science and labor studies, and supervised numerous M.A. and Ph.D. students in all these subjects. From 1959 to 1961, Alexander participated in a special economics seminar for Argentine students, and in a United States Labor Department program to bring Latin American trade unionists to the U.S., in conjunction with the Institute of Management-Labor Relations at Rutgers. An early advocate of study abroad and exchange programs, Alexander was a founder in 1968 of the Latin American Institute, an interdisciplinary program which included a junior year abroad and a Christmas trip to Mexico.(9)Alexander served the university and his college of affiliation, Rutgers College, on numerous committees. Notably, in 1952-1953, he was a member of the Emergency Committee of Rutgers Faculty which opposed the Rutgers' Trustees decision to dismiss two faculty members who had refused to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security on questions related to Communist Party affiliation. In 1962, Alexander was nominated to the American Civil Liberties Union Academic Freedom Committee. He was a member of the Council for Educational Development, which proposed innovation in the curriculum as a way to respond to student unrest on campus; the Military Education Committee, which considered the future of ROTC at Rutgers College; and the Ad Hoc Committee to Study the Reorganization of the Rutgers University Colleges in New Brunswick. He also served on the University Senate, and in 1979-1981 was a non-voting faculty representative to the Board of Governors. In 1984, he was presented with the Outstanding Teacher Award by the Parents Association of Rutgers College. Robert Alexander was also active in campus politics, particularly as an advocate of academic freedom and faculty rights. In the 1950s, he was one of the founders and an officer of the first faculty union at Rutgers, a local branch of the American Federation of Teachers. In 1968, Alexander was part of an Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the Right to Teach, which protested the firing of ten teachers in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville District in New York and supported the teachers strike.(10)Although he initially supported the Vietnam War and was critical of the more extreme manifestations of student protest, he began to participate in teach-ins against the war in 1970. In the 1970s, Alexander led protests by the Rutgers College faculty against university president Edward Bloustein's attempt to centralize power in the university administration, citing Bloustein for his contempt of faculty, students, and his attacks on the tenure system.(11) In addition to teaching at Rutgers, Alexander taught part-time at several other universities. He was a visiting professor of political science at Columbia from 1962 to 1963, and at the New School of Social Research in 1964. He taught summer school at Atlanta University in 1949, at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras in 1958, 1959, 1962 and 1964, and at the Foreign Service Institute, Department of State in the early 1970s. Professional Activities and Activism As well as teaching and doing research, Robert Alexander played an active role in the developing professional academic speciality of Latin American Studies. He served on the Steering Committee of the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, a part of the Latin American Studies Association, and on the Latin American Selection Committee of the Foreign Area Fellowship Program and the Economics Selection Committee of the Fulbright Program. From 1989 to 1990, he was president of the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies, and established its annual periodical, Latin American Essays. Alexander was a frequent speaker at Latin American Studies Association conferences, as well as at those of the American Economics Association, the Southern Economic Association and the American Historical Association. He often took notes on talks by conference participants which he incorporated into his interview files. Notably, Alexander was a member of the Council of Foreign Relations from 1960 onward. His notes on off-the-record meetings provide a valuable record of discussions not published elsewhere. Robert Alexander's professional activities went far beyond the academic sphere, however. He was what John French has called an "intellectual engagé; a social democratic intellectual convinced, as are others today, that our ideas must speak directly to current problems."(12) As has been seen, since his teen years Alexander was a member of the Socialist Party, serving on its National Executive Committee from 1957 to 1966. He remained a member of its successor, Social Democrats, U.S.A., until 1980, when he left in disillusionment over its increasingly conservative direction. Alexander also served on the Board of Directors of the Rand School of Social Science from 1952 until it closed in 1956. He served on the League of Industrial Democracy's National Council for several years, and was active in Americans for Democratic Action as a delegate to several of its national conventions. Through these activities, Alexander became acquainted with some of the prominent figures of the left, such as Norman Thomas, Max Shachtman, Bayard Rustin, and Michael Harrington. Robert Alexander was also actively involved in the movement to encourage democracy and condemn U.S. support of totalitarian regimes in Latin America. In the 1960 campaign, Alexander served as a consultant to John F. Kennedy on Latin America problems. In 1961, he was named by president-elect Kennedy to the Task Force on Latin America, which recommended the establishment of the Alliance for Progress. Alexander strongly supported the Alliance's position that economic development and amelioration of poverty were the best means of diffusing communist influence in the hemisphere. In 1950, Alexander was one of the founders of the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, which also espoused these principles, serving as a member of its North American Committee, and as Chairman of that committee until the organization's demise in 1985. From 1958 to 1966, Alexander served on the Board of Directors of Norman Thomas' Institute for International Labor Research, a research and educational organization which sponsored a political training institute in Central America. (13) Robert Alexander was frequently consulted by the local newspapers for his views on Latin America. In 1954, he criticized the U.S. intervention in Guatemala, and in 1965, was one of a large group of Latin American specialists to sign a petition condemning U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic. In 1976, he visited Paraguay as part of an International League for Human Rights mission, and testified in front of the Committee on International Relations of the House of Representatives on human rights abuses in that country. Alexander was determined to educate the American public on Latin America, giving frequent talks to women's clubs and college groups, and writing in the popular press. As well as giving public lectures, he was a regular speaker on the Rutgers Report on World Affairs, where he gave fifteen minute radio commentaries which were broadcast over seventeen stations across the state. Alexander was honored in Latin America for his work. He was a special invité to inaugurations of presidents in Venezuela, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Professor Alexander's greatest honor was received in 1963, when President Victor Paz Estenssoro of Bolivia named him to the Order of the Condor of the Andes, based on his book The Bolivian National Revolution, which explained the Bolivian revolution of 1952 to the American people. Robert J. Alexander died on April 27, 2010. NOTES: (1) Robert J. Alexander, Four Alexander Families of Wayne County Ohio.(New Brunswick., N.J., 1975), p. 151-162. (2) Robert J. Alexander, "Reflections on the Use of Interviews as Primary Sources,"Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries 49:1 (June 1987), p. 40-42. (3) Ibid., p. 40. (4) John D. French,Introduction toRobert J. Alexander: The Complete Bibliography of a Pioneering Latin Americanist (Miami, 1995). (5) Congressional Record Appendix(July 1, 1957). (6) Sunday Sentinel.East Brunswick, N.J. (February 7, 1982). (7) Interview in French, p. 6. (8) New Brunswick Home News(February 4, 1962). (9) Rutgers Targum(February 25, 1976). (10) New York Times(September 18, 1968). (11) Rutgers Targum(November 16, 1977). (12) French, p. 1. (13) W.A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist.(New York, 1976), p. 429-451.

Robert Jackson Alexander was born on November 26, 1918 in Canton, Ohio. He was the son of Ralph S. Alexander, an instructor and graduate student in economics, and Ruth Jackson Alexander. In 1922, the family moved to Leonia, New Jersey, five miles from New York City where R.S. Alexander had attained a teaching position at Columbia. A daughter, Margaret, was born the following year. R.S. Alexander served as a professor at Columbia's School of Business for thirty-nine years, the last ten of which as Chairman of the Marketing Department.(1) Robert Alexander attended the public schools in Leonia, graduating from high school in 1936. Like many of his contemporaries, he became politicized during the difficult years of the Depression, joining the Young People's Socialist League in 1934. In the summer of 1936, he traveled to Europe on a graduation trip, making an unauthorized detour to Spain, at that time in the beginning stages of civil war. This expedition was the seed of a lifetime interest in Spain and opposition to Francisco Franco's dictatorship. Upon his return, Alexander matriculated at Columbia University, receiving a B.A. in 1940. As an undergraduate, he was introduced to Latin America, writing a term paper on organized labor in Argentina as a student of the economist Frank Tannenbaum, who would become his mentor and advisor. Alexander stayed at Columbia another year, completing a Master of Arts degree under Tannenbaum's supervision. In 1941, Alexander got his first job as a wire control clerk at the Aluminum Company of America plant in Edgewater, New Jersey. In January 1942, he joined the Board of Economic Warfare as a junior economist, until April when he was drafted into the United States Air Force. In 1943, Alexander was sent to Great Britain as a group operations clerk with the 95th Bomb Group (H). He remained there for about 25 months, during which time he had the opportunity to travel throughout the country. During this period, Alexander spoke to many trade unionists and took notes on their conversations, a foreshadowing of what would become his trademark interview method of research. Alexander later recorded his experiences in an unpublished manuscript "A Yank's Eye View of Britain." He published a pamphlet entitled What Do You Know About British Labor? in 1946. Upon demobilization in 1945, Alexander was hired by the Labor Division of the Office of Inter American Affairs as a junior economist. In 1946, he received a grant from the Office of International Exchange of Persons of the State Department that allowed him to spend from July 1946 to August 1947 in South America, collecting material for his Ph.D. dissertation on labor relations in Chile. During this period, he visited virtually all the major factories in the country and conducted hundreds of interviews. Alexander's interview method was unusual in that he asked open-ended questions, essentially letting the subject talk, and that he did not record or take notes during the interview, but wrote and typed it up directly afterwards.(2)Based on this research, Alexander was awarded a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia in 1950. While in Chile, Alexander obtained a post as an instructor in economics at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Alexander would spend his whole career at Rutgers; he was promoted to assistant professor in 1950, associate professor in 1956, and full professor in 1961. He retired at the rank of Professor II in 1989. In 1949, Alexander married Joan O. Powell, who was also from Leonia and was a graduate of Barnard College. The couple lived first in New Brunswick and then in Piscataway across the river from Rutgers' main campus. They had two children: Anthony, born in 1957, and Margaret in 1960.

Robert Alexander's long career has many aspects–he excelled as a scholar, teacher, writer, documentarian and activist. His research interests can be divided into three areas: the politics, economics and labor relations of Latin America (which he broadly defines as all of the Western Hemisphere south of the United States); Spain, particularly the opposition to Franco; and international radical movements, especially the dissident Right and Left opposition to the Stalinist Comintern and its successors.(3)Robert Alexander's work was interdisciplinary before the term became common. His interests were extremely wide-ranging; within Latin America, he wrote about practically every country at some point. When he started his research in the 1940s, there was little secondary literature about Latin America in English. As well as conducting interviews, Alexander worked to collect as much material as possible on what became his yearly trips to the southern hemisphere. Alexander assembled this material, which included pamphlets, broadsides, periodicals, newspapers, labor contracts, union constitutions, unpublished papers, and other documents into a personal library which, along with his over 10,000 interviews, he made freely available to students and scholars.(4) This collection, particularly the interviews, became the basis of many of Alexander's scholarly publications. He is the author of thirty-eight books; some of which have gone through several editions and been translated into foreign languages; approximately fifty book chapters, and articles too numerous to count. A complete list of his publications, as of 1991, can be found in John D. French's Robert J. Alexander: The Complete Bibliography of a Pioneering Latin Americanist. Alexander's first book, The Peron Era, was published in 1951. Like his other early books, such as Communism in Latin America (1957), and The Bolivian National Revolution (1958), it was widely reviewed in both the academic and popular press, being extremely timely in a period when Latin America had become one of the battlegrounds of the Cold War. In 1957, the Hon. Charles O. Porter of Oregon called attention to Communism in Latin America in the U.S. Congress, as showing "the need for our Government to foster democracy in Latin America and give the cold shoulder to the dictatorships."(5) Alexander's fourth book, The Struggle for Democracy in Latin America, was written with Porter. Indeed Alexander's early work clearly expresses the politics of the democratic left: although opposed to communism, he condemned U.S. military intervention in Latin America and support for dictatorships, while advocating measures to improve economic and social conditions in the southern part of the hemisphere. In the 1960s, Alexander wrote Organized Labor in Latin America (1965), which became the standard work in the field; two monographs on Venezuela, and several textbooks. Alexander's work in the 1970s focused more on politics, including Latin American Political Parties (Praeger, 1973) and Aprismo: The Ideas and Doctrines of Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre (Kent State University Press, 1973); as well as publishing biographies of Chilean president Arturo Alessandri (whom Alexander had first met in 1947) and Juan Perón. In 1981, Alexander published a biography of his old friend, Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt, who died shortly before the book's publication. Betancourt, who had first met Alexander in Caracas in 1948, described him as "almost an Adéco" (a member of Betancourt's party, Acción Democrática).(6)Alexander published his interviews and correspondence with Betancourt in 1990. During the 1980s, Alexander was editor and major contributor to two reference books, Political Parties of the Americas, published by the Greenwood Press in 1982, and Biographical Dictionary of Latin American and Caribbean Political Leaders, also by published by Greenwood. In the 1990s, Alexander returned to his earlier interests in international radical movements and Spain, with International Trotskyism (Duke University Press, 1991), International Maoism in the Developing World (1991) and Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War (1999). Five volumes of Alexander's interviews and correspondence with Latin American and Caribbean presidents and prime ministers have also been published. Robert Alexander's research has been published in academic journals, including Social Research, the Journal of International Affairs, Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Economic History, Labor History, and many others. Beginning in the 1940s, he was a regular contributor on Latin American affairs, Spain, and the labor movement to a variety of newspapers and magazines, including New Leader, The Economist, Canadian Forum, Socialist Call, the Inter American Labor Bulletin (in both English and Spanish), International Free Trade Union News, Socialist International Information, New America (the organ of the Socialist Party/Social Democratic Federation), Freedom at Issue, and Hemispherica (the organ of the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom). Alexander served on the editorial boards of New Politics and Iberica. His articles appeared in translation in La Revue Socialiste (Paris), Die Zukunft (Vienna), and many others. Alexander also frequently contributed articles to the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and other national newspapers, as well as numerous letters to the editor on Latin American affairs. The breadth of Alexander's journalistic endeavor reflects his clear, accessible writing style, and his desire to educate the public about Latin America. As of 1991, Alexander had published over 250 book reviews, several hundred contributions to yearbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias, and eight pamphlets, the earliest of which was a description of the Chicago World's Fair written in 1933. Alexander collected material for his research through his yearly trips to Latin America. From 1952 to 1959, Alexander traveled under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor and the AFL-CIO, reporting on labor conditions in the countries he visited. Alexander was a supporter of the AFL-CIO's efforts to encourage "democratic," as opposed to communist-influenced trade unions in Latin America. He believed that, overall, the AFL-CIO had a positive impact on labor in the region; for example, by conducting training programs for union leaders and aiding union members who were being persecuted by their governments. (7)In 1957, he spent one month in Bolivia with the Foreign Economic Administration. He also received grants from the State Department, the Ford Foundation, and the Rutgers University Research Council, and served several times as a consultant for the Agency for International Development (AID). Alexander spent the year 1965-1966 doing research in Brazil, visiting 21 of Brazil's 22 states. Through his travels and other connections, Alexander developed a web of contacts which enabled him to interview numerous prominent figures, including the heads of state of many countries in the region. Alexander occasionally found himself caught in the middle of violent upheavals. When revolution broke out in Cuba in 1959, he made a flying trip to Havana during the Rutgers examination period to see what was going on. In 1962, he witnessed a short-lived revolt in the Dominican Republic, where Armed Forces Secretary Pedro Ramón Rodríguez Echeverría attempted to set up a military dictatorship. As he recounted afterward to a local newspaper, "when the shooting started in the main plaza, I happened to be there." During the 48 hours that the military junta was in power, Alexander roamed the streets observing. As he remarked, "The streets were deserted and I walked close to the buildings so I could duck in if anything happened."(8)

In addition to his research interests, Robert Alexander played an active role as a faculty member at Rutgers University. Although a member of the department of economics, he also taught courses in history, political science and labor studies, and supervised numerous M.A. and Ph.D. students in all these subjects. From 1959 to 1961, Alexander participated in a special economics seminar for Argentine students, and in a United States Labor Department program to bring Latin American trade unionists to the U.S., in conjunction with the Institute of Management-Labor Relations at Rutgers. An early advocate of study abroad and exchange programs, Alexander was a founder in 1968 of the Latin American Institute, an interdisciplinary program which included a junior year abroad and a Christmas trip to Mexico.(9)Alexander served the university and his college of affiliation, Rutgers College, on numerous committees. Notably, in 1952-1953, he was a member of the Emergency Committee of Rutgers Faculty which opposed the Rutgers' Trustees decision to dismiss two faculty members who had refused to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security on questions related to Communist Party affiliation. In 1962, Alexander was nominated to the American Civil Liberties Union Academic Freedom Committee. He was a member of the Council for Educational Development, which proposed innovation in the curriculum as a way to respond to student unrest on campus; the Military Education Committee, which considered the future of ROTC at Rutgers College; and the Ad Hoc Committee to Study the Reorganization of the Rutgers University Colleges in New Brunswick. He also served on the University Senate, and in 1979-1981 was a non-voting faculty representative to the Board of Governors. In 1984, he was presented with the Outstanding Teacher Award by the Parents Association of Rutgers College. Robert Alexander was also active in campus politics, particularly as an advocate of academic freedom and faculty rights. In the 1950s, he was one of the founders and an officer of the first faculty union at Rutgers, a local branch of the American Federation of Teachers. In 1968, Alexander was part of an Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the Right to Teach, which protested the firing of ten teachers in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville District in New York and supported the teachers strike.(10)Although he initially supported the Vietnam War and was critical of the more extreme manifestations of student protest, he began to participate in teach-ins against the war in 1970. In the 1970s, Alexander led protests by the Rutgers College faculty against university president Edward Bloustein's attempt to centralize power in the university administration, citing Bloustein for his contempt of faculty, students, and his attacks on the tenure system.(11) In addition to teaching at Rutgers, Alexander taught part-time at several other universities. He was a visiting professor of political science at Columbia from 1962 to 1963, and at the New School of Social Research in 1964. He taught summer school at Atlanta University in 1949, at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras in 1958, 1959, 1962 and 1964, and at the Foreign Service Institute, Department of State in the early 1970s.

As well as teaching and doing research, Robert Alexander played an active role in the developing professional academic speciality of Latin American Studies. He served on the Steering Committee of the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, a part of the Latin American Studies Association, and on the Latin American Selection Committee of the Foreign Area Fellowship Program and the Economics Selection Committee of the Fulbright Program. From 1989 to 1990, he was president of the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies, and established its annual periodical, Latin American Essays. Alexander was a frequent speaker at Latin American Studies Association conferences, as well as at those of the American Economics Association, the Southern Economic Association and the American Historical Association. He often took notes on talks by conference participants which he incorporated into his interview files. Notably, Alexander was a member of the Council of Foreign Relations from 1960 onward. His notes on off-the-record meetings provide a valuable record of discussions not published elsewhere. Robert Alexander's professional activities went far beyond the academic sphere, however. He was what John French has called an "intellectual engagé; a social democratic intellectual convinced, as are others today, that our ideas must speak directly to current problems."(12) As has been seen, since his teen years Alexander was a member of the Socialist Party, serving on its National Executive Committee from 1957 to 1966. He remained a member of its successor, Social Democrats, U.S.A., until 1980, when he left in disillusionment over its increasingly conservative direction. Alexander also served on the Board of Directors of the Rand School of Social Science from 1952 until it closed in 1956. He served on the League of Industrial Democracy's National Council for several years, and was active in Americans for Democratic Action as a delegate to several of its national conventions. Through these activities, Alexander became acquainted with some of the prominent figures of the left, such as Norman Thomas, Max Shachtman, Bayard Rustin, and Michael Harrington. Robert Alexander was also actively involved in the movement to encourage democracy and condemn U.S. support of totalitarian regimes in Latin America. In the 1960 campaign, Alexander served as a consultant to John F. Kennedy on Latin America problems. In 1961, he was named by president-elect Kennedy to the Task Force on Latin America, which recommended the establishment of the Alliance for Progress. Alexander strongly supported the Alliance's position that economic development and amelioration of poverty were the best means of diffusing communist influence in the hemisphere. In 1950, Alexander was one of the founders of the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, which also espoused these principles, serving as a member of its North American Committee, and as Chairman of that committee until the organization's demise in 1985. From 1958 to 1966, Alexander served on the Board of Directors of Norman Thomas' Institute for International Labor Research, a research and educational organization which sponsored a political training institute in Central America. (13) Robert Alexander was frequently consulted by the local newspapers for his views on Latin America. In 1954, he criticized the U.S. intervention in Guatemala, and in 1965, was one of a large group of Latin American specialists to sign a petition condemning U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic. In 1976, he visited Paraguay as part of an International League for Human Rights mission, and testified in front of the Committee on International Relations of the House of Representatives on human rights abuses in that country. Alexander was determined to educate the American public on Latin America, giving frequent talks to women's clubs and college groups, and writing in the popular press. As well as giving public lectures, he was a regular speaker on the Rutgers Report on World Affairs, where he gave fifteen minute radio commentaries which were broadcast over seventeen stations across the state. Alexander was honored in Latin America for his work. He was a special invité to inaugurations of presidents in Venezuela, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Professor Alexander's greatest honor was received in 1963, when President Victor Paz Estenssoro of Bolivia named him to the Order of the Condor of the Andes, based on his book The Bolivian National Revolution, which explained the Bolivian revolution of 1952 to the American people. Robert J. Alexander died on April 27, 2010.

Robert Jackson Alexander was born on November 26, 1918 in Canton, Ohio. He was the son of Ralph S. Alexander, an instructor and graduate student in economics, and Ruth Jackson Alexander. In 1922, the family moved to Leonia, New Jersey, five miles from New York City where R.S. Alexander had attained a teaching position at Columbia. A daughter, Margaret, was born the following year. R.S. Alexander served as a professor at Columbia's School of Business for thirty-nine years, the last ten of which as Chairman of the Marketing Department.(1)

Robert Alexander attended the public schools in Leonia, graduating from high school in 1936. Like many of his contemporaries, he became politicized during the difficult years of the Depression, joining the Young People's Socialist League in 1934. In the summer of 1936, he traveled to Europe on a graduation trip, making an unauthorized detour to Spain, at that time in the beginning stages of civil war. This expedition was the seed of a lifetime interest in Spain and opposition to Francisco Franco's dictatorship.

Upon his return, Alexander matriculated at Columbia University, receiving a B.A. in 1940. As an undergraduate, he was introduced to Latin America, writing a term paper on organized labor in Argentina as a student of the economist Frank Tannenbaum, who would become his mentor and advisor. Alexander stayed at Columbia another year, completing a Master of Arts degree under Tannenbaum's supervision. In 1941, Alexander got his first job as a wire control clerk at the Aluminum Company of America plant in Edgewater, New Jersey. In January 1942, he joined the Board of Economic Warfare as a junior economist, until April when he was drafted into the United States Air Force. In 1943, Alexander was sent to Great Britain as a group operations clerk with the 95th Bomb Group (H). He remained there for about 25 months, during which time he had the opportunity to travel throughout the country. During this period, Alexander spoke to many trade unionists and took notes on their conversations, a foreshadowing of what would become his trademark interview method of research. Alexander later recorded his experiences in an unpublished manuscript "A Yank's Eye View of Britain." He published a pamphlet entitled What Do You Know About British Labor? in 1946.

Upon demobilization in 1945, Alexander was hired by the Labor Division of the Office of Inter American Affairs as a junior economist. In 1946, he received a grant from the Office of International Exchange of Persons of the State Department that allowed him to spend from July 1946 to August 1947 in South America, collecting material for his Ph.D. dissertation on labor relations in Chile. During this period, he visited virtually all the major factories in the country and conducted hundreds of interviews. Alexander's interview method was unusual in that he asked open-ended questions, essentially letting the subject talk, and that he did not record or take notes during the interview, but wrote and typed it up directly afterwards.(2)Based on this research, Alexander was awarded a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia in 1950.

While in Chile, Alexander obtained a post as an instructor in economics at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Alexander would spend his whole career at Rutgers; he was promoted to assistant professor in 1950, associate professor in 1956, and full professor in 1961. He retired at the rank of Professor II in 1989. In 1949, Alexander married Joan O. Powell, who was also from Leonia and was a graduate of Barnard College. The couple lived first in New Brunswick and then in Piscataway across the river from Rutgers' main campus. They had two children: Anthony, born in 1957, and Margaret in 1960.

Robert Alexander's long career has many aspects–he excelled as a scholar, teacher, writer, documentarian and activist. His research interests can be divided into three areas: the politics, economics and labor relations of Latin America (which he broadly defines as all of the Western Hemisphere south of the United States); Spain, particularly the opposition to Franco; and international radical movements, especially the dissident Right and Left opposition to the Stalinist Comintern and its successors.(3)Robert Alexander's work was interdisciplinary before the term became common. His interests were extremely wide-ranging; within Latin America, he wrote about practically every country at some point. When he started his research in the 1940s, there was little secondary literature about Latin America in English. As well as conducting interviews, Alexander worked to collect as much material as possible on what became his yearly trips to the southern hemisphere. Alexander assembled this material, which included pamphlets, broadsides, periodicals, newspapers, labor contracts, union constitutions, unpublished papers, and other documents into a personal library which, along with his over 10,000 interviews, he made freely available to students and scholars.(4)

This collection, particularly the interviews, became the basis of many of Alexander's scholarly publications. He is the author of thirty-eight books; some of which have gone through several editions and been translated into foreign languages; approximately fifty book chapters, and articles too numerous to count. A complete list of his publications, as of 1991, can be found in John D. French's Robert J. Alexander: The Complete Bibliography of a Pioneering Latin Americanist. Alexander's first book, The Peron Era, was published in 1951. Like his other early books, such as Communism in Latin America (1957), and The Bolivian National Revolution (1958), it was widely reviewed in both the academic and popular press, being extremely timely in a period when Latin America had become one of the battlegrounds of the Cold War. In 1957, the Hon. Charles O. Porter of Oregon called attention to Communism in Latin America in the U.S. Congress, as showing "the need for our Government to foster democracy in Latin America and give the cold shoulder to the dictatorships."(5) Alexander's fourth book, The Struggle for Democracy in Latin America, was written with Porter. Indeed Alexander's early work clearly expresses the politics of the democratic left: although opposed to communism, he condemned U.S. military intervention in Latin America and support for dictatorships, while advocating measures to improve economic and social conditions in the southern part of the hemisphere.

In the 1960s, Alexander wrote Organized Labor in Latin America (1965), which became the standard work in the field; two monographs on Venezuela, and several textbooks. Alexander's work in the 1970s focused more on politics, including Latin American Political Parties (Praeger, 1973) and Aprismo: The Ideas and Doctrines of Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre (Kent State University Press, 1973); as well as publishing biographies of Chilean president Arturo Alessandri (whom Alexander had first met in 1947) and Juan Perón. In 1981, Alexander published a biography of his old friend, Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt, who died shortly before the book's publication. Betancourt, who had first met Alexander in Caracas in 1948, described him as "almost an Adéco" (a member of Betancourt's party, Acción Democrática).(6)Alexander published his interviews and correspondence with Betancourt in 1990.

During the 1980s, Alexander was editor and major contributor to two reference books, Political Parties of the Americas, published by the Greenwood Press in 1982, and Biographical Dictionary of Latin American and Caribbean Political Leaders, also by published by Greenwood. In the 1990s, Alexander returned to his earlier interests in international radical movements and Spain, with International Trotskyism (Duke University Press, 1991), International Maoism in the Developing World (1991) and Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War (1999). Five volumes of Alexander's interviews and correspondence with Latin American and Caribbean presidents and prime ministers have also been published.

Robert Alexander's research has been published in academic journals, including Social Research, the Journal of International Affairs, Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Economic History, Labor History, and many others. Beginning in the 1940s, he was a regular contributor on Latin American affairs, Spain, and the labor movement to a variety of newspapers and magazines, including New Leader, The Economist, Canadian Forum, Socialist Call, the Inter American Labor Bulletin (in both English and Spanish), International Free Trade Union News, Socialist International Information, New America (the organ of the Socialist Party/Social Democratic Federation), Freedom at Issue, and Hemispherica (the organ of the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom). Alexander served on the editorial boards of New Politics and Iberica. His articles appeared in translation in La Revue Socialiste (Paris), Die Zukunft (Vienna), and many others. Alexander also frequently contributed articles to the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and other national newspapers, as well as numerous letters to the editor on Latin American affairs. The breadth of Alexander's journalistic endeavor reflects his clear, accessible writing style, and his desire to educate the public about Latin America. As of 1991, Alexander had published over 250 book reviews, several hundred contributions to yearbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias, and eight pamphlets, the earliest of which was a description of the Chicago World's Fair written in 1933.

Alexander collected material for his research through his yearly trips to Latin America. From 1952 to 1959, Alexander traveled under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor and the AFL-CIO, reporting on labor conditions in the countries he visited. Alexander was a supporter of the AFL-CIO's efforts to encourage "democratic," as opposed to communist-influenced trade unions in Latin America. He believed that, overall, the AFL-CIO had a positive impact on labor in the region; for example, by conducting training programs for union leaders and aiding union members who were being persecuted by their governments. (7)In 1957, he spent one month in Bolivia with the Foreign Economic Administration. He also received grants from the State Department, the Ford Foundation, and the Rutgers University Research Council, and served several times as a consultant for the Agency for International Development (AID). Alexander spent the year 1965-1966 doing research in Brazil, visiting 21 of Brazil's 22 states. Through his travels and other connections, Alexander developed a web of contacts which enabled him to interview numerous prominent figures, including the heads of state of many countries in the region. Alexander occasionally found himself caught in the middle of violent upheavals. When revolution broke out in Cuba in 1959, he made a flying trip to Havana during the Rutgers examination period to see what was going on. In 1962, he witnessed a short-lived revolt in the Dominican Republic, where Armed Forces Secretary Pedro Ramón Rodríguez Echeverría attempted to set up a military dictatorship. As he recounted afterward to a local newspaper, "when the shooting started in the main plaza, I happened to be there." During the 48 hours that the military junta was in power, Alexander roamed the streets observing. As he remarked, "The streets were deserted and I walked close to the buildings so I could duck in if anything happened."(8)

In addition to his research interests, Robert Alexander played an active role as a faculty member at Rutgers University. Although a member of the department of economics, he also taught courses in history, political science and labor studies, and supervised numerous M.A. and Ph.D. students in all these subjects. From 1959 to 1961, Alexander participated in a special economics seminar for Argentine students, and in a United States Labor Department program to bring Latin American trade unionists to the U.S., in conjunction with the Institute of Management-Labor Relations at Rutgers. An early advocate of study abroad and exchange programs, Alexander was a founder in 1968 of the Latin American Institute, an interdisciplinary program which included a junior year abroad and a Christmas trip to Mexico.(9)Alexander served the university and his college of affiliation, Rutgers College, on numerous committees. Notably, in 1952-1953, he was a member of the Emergency Committee of Rutgers Faculty which opposed the Rutgers' Trustees decision to dismiss two faculty members who had refused to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security on questions related to Communist Party affiliation. In 1962, Alexander was nominated to the American Civil Liberties Union Academic Freedom Committee. He was a member of the Council for Educational Development, which proposed innovation in the curriculum as a way to respond to student unrest on campus; the Military Education Committee, which considered the future of ROTC at Rutgers College; and the Ad Hoc Committee to Study the Reorganization of the Rutgers University Colleges in New Brunswick. He also served on the University Senate, and in 1979-1981 was a non-voting faculty representative to the Board of Governors. In 1984, he was presented with the Outstanding Teacher Award by the Parents Association of Rutgers College.

Robert Alexander was also active in campus politics, particularly as an advocate of academic freedom and faculty rights. In the 1950s, he was one of the founders and an officer of the first faculty union at Rutgers, a local branch of the American Federation of Teachers. In 1968, Alexander was part of an Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the Right to Teach, which protested the firing of ten teachers in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville District in New York and supported the teachers strike.(10)Although he initially supported the Vietnam War and was critical of the more extreme manifestations of student protest, he began to participate in teach-ins against the war in 1970. In the 1970s, Alexander led protests by the Rutgers College faculty against university president Edward Bloustein's attempt to centralize power in the university administration, citing Bloustein for his contempt of faculty, students, and his attacks on the tenure system.(11)

In addition to teaching at Rutgers, Alexander taught part-time at several other universities. He was a visiting professor of political science at Columbia from 1962 to 1963, and at the New School of Social Research in 1964. He taught summer school at Atlanta University in 1949, at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras in 1958, 1959, 1962 and 1964, and at the Foreign Service Institute, Department of State in the early 1970s.

As well as teaching and doing research, Robert Alexander played an active role in the developing professional academic speciality of Latin American Studies. He served on the Steering Committee of the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, a part of the Latin American Studies Association, and on the Latin American Selection Committee of the Foreign Area Fellowship Program and the Economics Selection Committee of the Fulbright Program. From 1989 to 1990, he was president of the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies, and established its annual periodical, Latin American Essays. Alexander was a frequent speaker at Latin American Studies Association conferences, as well as at those of the American Economics Association, the Southern Economic Association and the American Historical Association. He often took notes on talks by conference participants which he incorporated into his interview files. Notably, Alexander was a member of the Council of Foreign Relations from 1960 onward. His notes on off-the-record meetings provide a valuable record of discussions not published elsewhere.

Robert Alexander's professional activities went far beyond the academic sphere, however. He was what John French has called an "intellectual engagé; a social democratic intellectual convinced, as are others today, that our ideas must speak directly to current problems."(12) As has been seen, since his teen years Alexander was a member of the Socialist Party, serving on its National Executive Committee from 1957 to 1966. He remained a member of its successor, Social Democrats, U.S.A., until 1980, when he left in disillusionment over its increasingly conservative direction. Alexander also served on the Board of Directors of the Rand School of Social Science from 1952 until it closed in 1956. He served on the League of Industrial Democracy's National Council for several years, and was active in Americans for Democratic Action as a delegate to several of its national conventions. Through these activities, Alexander became acquainted with some of the prominent figures of the left, such as Norman Thomas, Max Shachtman, Bayard Rustin, and Michael Harrington.

Robert Alexander was also actively involved in the movement to encourage democracy and condemn U.S. support of totalitarian regimes in Latin America. In the 1960 campaign, Alexander served as a consultant to John F. Kennedy on Latin America problems. In 1961, he was named by president-elect Kennedy to the Task Force on Latin America, which recommended the establishment of the Alliance for Progress. Alexander strongly supported the Alliance's position that economic development and amelioration of poverty were the best means of diffusing communist influence in the hemisphere. In 1950, Alexander was one of the founders of the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, which also espoused these principles, serving as a member of its North American Committee, and as Chairman of that committee until the organization's demise in 1985. From 1958 to 1966, Alexander served on the Board of Directors of Norman Thomas' Institute for International Labor Research, a research and educational organization which sponsored a political training institute in Central America. (13)

Robert Alexander was frequently consulted by the local newspapers for his views on Latin America. In 1954, he criticized the U.S. intervention in Guatemala, and in 1965, was one of a large group of Latin American specialists to sign a petition condemning U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic. In 1976, he visited Paraguay as part of an International League for Human Rights mission, and testified in front of the Committee on International Relations of the House of Representatives on human rights abuses in that country. Alexander was determined to educate the American public on Latin America, giving frequent talks to women's clubs and college groups, and writing in the popular press. As well as giving public lectures, he was a regular speaker on the Rutgers Report on World Affairs, where he gave fifteen minute radio commentaries which were broadcast over seventeen stations across the state.

Alexander was honored in Latin America for his work. He was a special invité to inaugurations of presidents in Venezuela, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Professor Alexander's greatest honor was received in 1963, when President Victor Paz Estenssoro of Bolivia named him to the Order of the Condor of the Andes, based on his book The Bolivian National Revolution, which explained the Bolivian revolution of 1952 to the American people.

Robert J. Alexander died on April 27, 2010.