The troubled history of the Radical Party has long eluded the analytical talents of Argentine historians. For here we have a curious paradox: a popularly-based mass movement which succeeds in replacing a government of entrenched privilege through the ballot box in 1916—only to lose its hold in a matter of a few hours through a military coup fourteen years later. Since 1930 it has been common among students of Argentine history to explain the brevity of the Radical interregnum in terms of that party’s inability (or unwillingness) to change the fundamental structures of society—its preference to reign instead of rule. In this light the Radical period of Argentine history appears as but a mask for the continued rule of the oligarchy.
The problem with such explanations, as Professor Peter Winn once cogently pointed out in the pages of this journal, was that they failed to answer the question of why the Sáenz Peña Law “didn’t. . . lead to the political ascendancy of urban middle and lower class interests,” and even more poignantly, it begged the question as to “why . . . these urban sectors continue[d] to vote, through the 1920s, for leaders and parties that didn’t promote their interests.”
Professor Rock’s monograph goes a long way towards answering both of these questions, and several more as well, thanks to exhaustive scholarship, a sensitive (and imaginative) use of materials, and a clear understanding of the peculiarities of Argentine society.
The author describes his book as an analysis of the “political interrelationship between different social classes in Argentina during the mature phase of the primary export economy in the forty years up to 1930” (p. vii). The key words here are “political interrelationship” and “export economy,” for the book is largely about a growing conflict between the two beneficiaries of Argentina’s transatlantic trade in foodstuffs—the landowning oligarchy of the humid pampa (especially the province of Buenos Aires), and the urban middle class.
Rock answers the first of Professor Winn’s caveats straightaway by establishing that the original intention of President Sáenz Peña in widening suffrage in 1912 was not, as has often been thought, to facilitate a peaceful transition to Radical rule, but to make possible the creation of an “organic party,” a kind of Tory movement which would have brought popular support. Sáenz Peña’s vision was never realized because, as Rock explains, the peculiar kind of socioeconomic structure spawned by an agro-export economy simply did not provide sufficient opportunities for the large, urban middle class which it (and immigration) had created; oligarchical patterns of land ownership likewise made it difficult to transfer pressures for social mobility to the land. Through a combination of charismatic leadership, tireless organization, and a studied vagueness on programmatic matters, the Radicals came closer to creating the party Sáenz Peña had originally envisioned. But once in power, predictably, they found it difficult to reconcile the divergent interests of their constituency.
In any event, their victory in 1916 had been extremely tentative. President Hipólito Yrigoyen failed to receive a numerical majority of the popular vote, and Congress remained in opposition hands. The Radicals attempted at first to redress this lack by broadening their base to encompass sections of the urban working class. These efforts were largely unsuccessful, but they did manage to unite domestic and foreign capital against them in the tumultuous year 1919, during which the opposition mobilized a successful counter-movement (the Patriotic League) and forced Yrigoyen down from an obrerista position by veiled threat of a military coup.
By 1920 the Radicals had lost whatever reforming zeal they once had displayed, and their movement became largely an exercise in the distribution of patronage. During the middle and late ’twenties there was an attempt to utilize economic nationalism (particularly directed against the United States) as a mystique to reach across class boundaries and produce the majority which had been denied them ten years earlier. At the same time, the Radicals resumed their efforts to win control of at least a portion of the labor movement. As Rock shows, by the late ’twenties “workingmen’s committees” were reasonably successful among the port and railroad workers, and bid fair to expand into other industries as well. Rock suggests that both of these efforts—economic nationalism and state-supported trade unionism— might indeed have led to the creation of the one-party state of which Yrigoyen dreamed (something along the line of the PRI in Mexico), had not the crash of 1929 come along to destroy the financial basis of his regime.
Rock’s book might well be subtitled “The Search for a Viable Majority,” for this in effect is what both Conservatives and Radicals originally had sought. After 1930 the latter doggedly continued their quest, but the Conservatives, who were always more realistic, enlisted the aid of the Army to oust Yrigoyen and establish a regime which was constitutional in name only—“the patriotic fraud.” Only when Argentina’s industrial development had proceeded sufficiently to produce new employment opportunities for the urban middle class would the preconditions for a successful radical government be realized. But by then the party was divided and demoralized—and upstaged by Perón. But even in their heyday the Radicals never fully succeeded in holding on to their urban middle-class following; defections were constant—to the Socialists, the right-wing Patriotic League, the schismatic Antipersonalists. Thus Professor Winn’s second question can be answered simply—many did not continue to vote “for leaders and parties that didn’t promote their interests.” That, indeed, was the essence of the Radical dilemma.
Inevitably, a book of this sort must draw upon a wide range of secondary materials, many of which will already be familiar to specialists. Yet there is much here which is new, particularly the chapters dealing with Radical approaches to the labor movement. To this enormously complex subject Professor Rock brings admirable lucidity; he is the first historian to explain satisfactorily, at least to this reviewer, the meaning of Argentine anarchism; and in his treatment of syndicalism he shows that the roots of Peronist trade unionism run deeper than many of us had suspected.
Likewise, his treatment of the Army and the Patriotic League establish traditions of right-wing militarism at least a decade prior to that in many other studies. The sections on Radical techniques of leadership, particularly the role of Yrigoyen, rehearse topics which have received treatment elsewhere, but they do so with a freshness of vision and an insight which is provocative and stimulating.
Apart from its impressive scholarship, perhaps the peculiar strength of this work is the understanding of its author that the contradictions of Argentine development need not be resolved to be understood; Professor Rock has contented himself with exploring those contradictions and explaining their ramifications. It seems a modest undertaking, but the result is meaningful indeed.
