Intellectual Precursors of Conservative Nationalism in Argentina, 1900-1927

“Social justice, political sovereignty, economic independence”: the Peronist slogan captured the central aspirations of Argentine nationalism as it matured during the late 1940s. At that point, as nationalist goals fused with the pursuit of industrialization and the advancement of popular welfare and power, Argentina developed the modern brand of nationalism that in 1945 E. H. Carr called “the socialization of the nation, [and] the nationalization of economic policy.”¹ Peronism synthesized two hitherto disparate nationalist strands: a “democratic” nationalism whose roots lay in Yrigoyenista Radicalism and the FORJA,² and conservative nationalism, or “nacionalismo,” a complex species of Catholic corporatism that was partly influenced by fascism.³

The latter movement, on which this paper focuses, developed in two main stages, before and after 1927. That year saw the creation of La Nueva República, the first press organ to lead a sustained effort to disseminate the nacionalistas’ antiliberal, authoritarian, and militarist dogmas. At this point, too, the nacionalistas began to emerge as contenders for political power, and to create organized pressure groups.⁴ Before 1927, however, nacionalismo underwent a long precursory, formative phase beginning around the turn of the century. Frequently such “prenacionalismo,” or “traditionalism” as I shall call it, consisted of little more than the scattered writings of a handful of poets, novelists, and essayists whose works gained at best intermittent public attention. Yet these writers, and the politicians who began to echo their opinions after about 1916, raised many of the issues that the nacionalistas later developed into a political ideology and into concrete programs. An examination of the leading “traditionalists” and their intellectual world thus forms a necessary prelude to a discussion of nacionalismo itself; to the latter’s contribution to “nationalism” in its modern forms; and to the relics of nacionalismo that have persisted among such power groups as the army.⁵ The same discussion illustrates that the early nationalist writers extracted many of their ideas, subjects, and analytical techniques from Europe, particularly from France and Spain. But the discussion may also demonstrate some of nationalism’s indigenous historical roots, since both traditionalism and nacionalismo drew substantially on nineteenth-century Argentine federalism.

This essay is divided into three parts. The first examines the chief substances and ingredients in the writings of leading traditionalists, and explores their main sources. The second details Catholic influences on the social and political attitudes of the traditionalists and public figures around the time of World War I, a period of acute political unrest. The third section seeks to depict the growing politicization of the traditionalists after 1916, as they shifted into open opposition to popular democracy, and, in doing so, set the stage for the rise of nacionalismo.

The Antipositivists

Traditionalism began around the turn of the century as a challenge against positivism. In Argentina, pensadores had begun to employ the term “positivist” from around the middle of the nineteenth century to denote “whatever is objective, real, natural, and whatever means progress in the sphere of society and politics.. . . The ‘positive’ is conceived as a function of social progress, progress also bereft of any need of the metaphysical.”⁶

Positivism, or “cientificismo,” was constructed on the nineteenth-century revolution in natural sciences. Florentino Ameghino, the leading científico in Argentina, a self-taught disciple of Herbert Spencer, sought to refute the Catholic metaphysical version of the creation with the results of his research in paleontology which demonstrated, he contended, the material, nondivine and evolutionary origins of humanity. The writings of Ameghino and others proclaimed the organic interdependence between the material and the cognitive. They linked psychology with biology, and personality with natural selection. By 1900, positivism embraced and directed the host of new ideas that were emerging in Argentina, relating not only to science, but also to art, philosophy, sociology, and politics. Positivism became the chief philosophical pillar of liberalism, and of liberalism’s derivatives such as popular democracy. Positivism “made itself felt in every domain of the spirit.”⁷ In this age, as one of positivism’s youthful adherents later recalled, “We had absolute faith in science, in the sociology of the time, in indefinite progress to be achieved by advances in technique that would bring contentment to the peoples.”⁸

Yet as the hundreds of thousands of immigrants, and the millions of pounds sterling, inundated and transformed the country, a small group of observers discerned some threatening and undesirable aspects in the great tide of progress. In Argentina, as elsewhere in Latin America, the first persistent assault on the positivist conspectus began in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Spain’s swift and shattering defeat declaimed the vast industrial and military power of the United States, and provoked numerous reflections among Latin Americans on the nature of American society. From such reflections sprang the question of where progress, as the positivists conceived it, would lead, and whether the Latin Americans wished to erect a civilization akin to that of the United States. The war thus provoked condemnations of “materialism,” which to these observers the United States embodied, along with renewed sympathy and a sense of fraternity with Spain, sentiments that found expression in defensive proclamations of “Hispanic” and “spiritual,” as opposed to “Anglo-Saxon” and “material,” values.⁹

The Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó became the best-known Latin American writer at the turn of the century to express such attitudes, although the work of French conservatives, mainly Ernest Renan’s Caliban, suite de la conquête inspired Rodó’s Ariel (1900), rather than the war of 1898. Rodó adopted Renan’s dictum that “democracy” stood at odds with “God’s design,” and, like Renan, he depicted the world as a contest between “utilitarian democracy” and “spiritual values”: “Serious concern for the ideal is completely opposed to the spirit of democracy.. . . Whoever says democracy . . . [says] progressive development of individualism and the decline of culture.”¹⁰ Despite its religious resonances, Rodó’s conception of the “spiritual” sprang largely from modernism: humanity’s highest faculty was esthetic; beauty shaped morality; the perception of beauty belonged to a select minority.¹¹ He contrasted these ideas with the “utilitarian conception” and held that imposing equality established “the mediocre as the norm.”¹² To Rodó the United States was “the incarnation of the word utilitarian,” and in private writings he defined the “salient and characteristic feature” of the United States as “[the] absence of any sense of the ideal, [where] force substitutes reason, quantity substitutes quality, [where] democracy consists of the equality of all in common vulgarity.”¹³

In 1901, a small band of law students in Buenos Aires led by the aspiring novelist, Manuel Gálvez, created a literary periodical, Ideas, which became the first organ of traditionalism and antipositivism in Argentina. The Ideas group, as Gálvez later recalled, constituted itself in deliberate opposition to the overwhelming majority of law students who were “materialists,” “who made one god of Spencer and another of Comte.” “We,” by contrast, “were nearly all upholders of the spiritual (espiritualistas),” devoted to “a heroic struggle against the prevailing ambience of discredited materialism.”¹⁴ The group’s core remained little more than a dozen strong, and its members customarily gathered in the evening in one of the best-known coffee houses of the Avenida Corrientes in Buenos Aires. The company was entirely male. “Women remained completely absent from our meetings, hidden away under vows of chastity that would seem incomprehensible today. In those days there was scarcely a single woman writer. Women were absent, even from our conversations.”¹⁵

The Ideas group emerged in the shadow of modernism, partly under Rodó’s influence, but still more so of the Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío. Darío’s influence derived principally from some of his semipolitical writings in which he had attacked the United States from the standpoint of pan-Latin nationalism, depicting the contest between the Latin and Anglo-Saxon peoples as a continuation of the wars of the Reformation.¹⁶ Strong Spanish influences on the Ideas group were also evident, for Gálvez defined its “mission” as the same as “that in Spain assumed by the generation of ideologues that emerged after the disaster [of 1898]: Ganivet, Macías Picavea, Costa, Unamuno.”¹⁷ A piece published in Ideas in 1904 captured the combined influences of the war of 1898 and Rodó’s writings on the group. “Despite my inclinations to the contrary,” declared Belisario J. Montero:

From these attitudes sprang nativism as a second pronounced feature of the Ideas group. Gálvez conceived his “heroic struggle” not only in defense of “intellectual and spiritual values,” but also against what he called a “foreign atmosphere (ambiente extranjerizante) that shows contempt for things Argentine.”¹⁹ During the early years of the century, the alleged “foreign atmosphere” that depreciated “things Argentine” was associated chiefly with the immigrants, of whom a proportionately larger number now dwelt in Argentina than in the United States.²⁰ In many segments of Argentine society, immigration engendered a sense of profound, irreversible change that threatened to overwhelm the native population—its culture, institutions, and language.²¹ Xenophobic impulses had recurrently surfaced in Argentina throughout the nineteenth century, attaining special virulence in rural areas in the 1870s. In 1881, Domingo F. Sarmiento, who along with Juan Bautista Alberdi had championed immigration as the midwife of progress and civilization, complained against what he perceived as the immigrants’ narrow concern with material self-advancement and their resistance to assimilation. As examples of such resistance, Sarmiento cited the burgeoning foreign schools in Buenos Aires and other cities that perpetuated the use of foreign languages, and, as he saw it, foreign and inappropriate methods of teaching.²²

After 1900 complaints against immigration emanated from all sectors of native Argentine society, but became particularly strong among the antipositivists. In an expression borrowed from Baudelaire, Rodó had condemned immigration for producing a “zoocracy.”²³ He, and the Argentine antipositivists, held that immigration typified the false positivist or Spencerian assumption that the random mixing of nationalities would yield “progress.” The antipositivists countered that progress in this guise meant, at best, material progress alone, and at the price of corrupting and debasing the national community. Gálvez, for example, deplored the Italians, “who have come to America seeking gold and nothing else.. . . For [them] nothing more exists than material values.”²⁴ In a contribution to Ideas in 1903, Arturo Reynal O’Connor lamented that “the Argentine people (raza), especially the porteños,” were disappearing, “on account of the flood of immigrants. And our people are our nationality, and our nationality our country. ”²³ Similar themes appeared still more strongly in the writings of Emilio Becher, whom Gálvez described as “the Argentine Ernest Renan.”²⁶ In 1906, Becher urged his countrymen

Despite the great flood of immigrants, Becher continued, “our civilization has not changed at its core,” and he urged the country to reaffirm “the indestructible soul of its Hispanic ancestry.”²⁸

The antipositivists commonly portrayed the relationship between Buenos Aires and the provinces in the light of their antinomies between “materialism” or “Spencerian notions of progress” on one hand, and “the spiritual” or “tradition” on the other: they perceived Buenos Aires as the symbol of the former, and the provinces as emblematic of the latter. This theme identified traditionalism as an atavism of federalism. As Gálvez noted, the leading members of the Ideas group had provincial upper-class backgrounds and family roots in preimmigrant creole Argentina. Gálvez himself, for example, originated in Entre Ríos, and Becher was from Rosario.²⁹ The former drew great pride from his connections with the “ancient city” of Santa Fe, and the descent he claimed from an aristocracy “rooted among the conquerors and the first Spanish colonizers.”³⁰ He lamented Santa Fe’s demise as the small frontier village it had remained from its sixteenth-century origins until scarcely more than a generation before.³¹ As he extolled the rustic provincial communities that had existed before the coming of the railroads and the immigrants, Gálvez contrasted this way of life with the corruption and decadence he perceived in the capital. In his novel Nacha Regules, which told the story of a prostitute and her eventual redemption, he denounced the white-slave traffic, whose epicenter was Buenos Aires.

In a less sensationalist vein, Ricardo Oliver, another contributor to Ideas, regretted that Buenos Aires had never revealed

Among the early traditionalists, Gálvez and the Santiagueño Ricardo Rojas, an intermittent associate of the Ideas group, emerged as the most prominent figures. A visit to Spain in 1906, a religious reawakening in 1907, and a lengthy journey through the far interior as an inspector of schools in 1910 induced in Gálvez the sensation of having become not only a “true Argentine,” but also “a Spaniard and a Christian.”³⁴ In his El diario de Gabriel Quiroga of 1910, Gálvez pleaded for a return to the “spiritual” past, which he saw as “Hispanic,” “Christian,” and “nationalist.”

Gálvez reflected ironically on the effects of European influences. At the instigation of Sarmiento and Alberdi

Gálvez discerned numerous contemporary survivals of the early nineteenth-century conflicts between liberal unitarism and conservative federalism: the latter he regarded as expressing the country’s traditional and “real” features. The “spirit” of the two factions remained “latent,” he declared. The unitarists were liberal, pro-European, and anti-Spanish, but

The modern revival of “tradition,” and by implication the revival of federalism and the suppression of liberal unitarism, together signified “nationalism.”

Ricardo Rojas’s La restauración nacionalista was designed as a contribution to an ongoing debate on education, which Rojas and others viewed as the chief instrument to achieve the assimilation of the immigrants. As it attacked “destructive individualism” or “cosmopolitanism,” the book reiterated many of the themes of the Ideas group. “Cosmopolitanism,” Rojas declared, had destroyed the country’s “moral unity,” producing an unstable society because its population remained “rootless.” To rebuild a sense of community, “[w]e must,” he proclaimed, “renew our history, cultivate our own legends, revive an awareness of tradition,” because “from a sense of its past a people develops a more powerful commitment to its self-perpetuation.”³⁹ Equally,

Rojas expressed the same animosities toward Buenos Aires as Gálvez, but in attacking its “corrupting ideas and sentiments,” he argued further that the “cosmopolitanism of men and capital submits us to economic subjection.”⁴¹ Rojas saw Buenos Aires as an instrument of external control. “Economic policy,” he declared, “has given the capital, rich and populous as it is, an excessive influence over the rest of the country, in such a way that the fourteen provinces subsist upon its ebb and flow (viven de su ritmo).” At the same time,

The coming generation, Rojas continued, “will have to decide between those who want progress at the price of civilization, those willing to hand themselves over to the foreigner without a fight, and those who want progress along with the content of our own civilization which can only develop upon the substance of our traditions.”⁴³ Rojas too conflated “national character” with federalism and its political leaders. That age of “barbarism,” he declared—referring to Sarmiento’s antithesis, “Civilization and Barbarism”—that “has been so reviled by our historians . . . was the most genuine source of our character.. . . There were far greater affinities between Rosas and the pampas or between ‘Facundo’ and his mountains than there ever were between Rivadavia or [Manuel] García and the country they sought to govern.”⁴⁴

In a later work, Eurindia, Rojas deprecated the derivative character of the arts and literature in Argentina, urging a quest for “spiritual autonomy,” the creation of an independent national culture.

All of this writing proclaimed the existence of an indigenous tradition, synonymous with a state of Arcadian “spirituality.” On the other hand, its practitioners condemned “cosmopolitanism,” a constantly shifting melange of ills whose meanings ranged from the theory of evolution to immigrant life-styles in Buenos Aires. The traditionalists shared a concern to forestall what they perceived as the debasement of the Spanish language in the wake of mass immigration, an intimation of the linguistic nationalism that had numerous European counterparts. They often cast a jaundiced eye on local politics, riddled as it was with corruption and rigged elections. Except for Rojas’s inferences of economic nationalism in La restauración nacionalista, cultural and quasiphilosophical concerns dominated nationalist writings of this era.

Another figure of this period, Carlos Ibarguren, who was prominent in both literary and political circles, typified other features of the traditionalists. Ibarguren belonged to a leading family in Salta, and like Gálvez he claimed descent from “among the first conquerors.. . . the encomenderos of that region.”⁴⁶ He was also related by descent and by marriage with the Rosas clan of Buenos Aires, which in Juan Manuel de Rosas had personified Argentine federalism. Like Gálvez’s nostalgia for old Santa Fe, Ibarguren’s childhood memories of Salta seemed a deliberately contrived contrast to the clamor of Buenos Aires. In his memoirs he recalled a now lost world that had stretched far back into the past:

To Ibarguren, the church embodied continuity, stability, and order. Ibarguren recalled the stories recounted to him as a child, about the montonero rebel Felipe Varela, who had invaded and pillaged Salta in 1867. Among Varela’s numerous misdeeds, that to which Ibarguren objected most was his attack on the city’s leading citizens, its personas distinguidas,⁴⁸ Ibarguren admired above all the qualities that represented the ideals of a traditional aristocracy. Commenting on some of the leading public figures he had known during his career, he praised Roque Sáenz Peña for his “deep filial sentiments, his lofty spirit, the noble firmness of his character.”⁴⁹ In Indalecio Gómez, Ibarguren saw “talent, an exquisite breeding, finely tuned eloquence.” Gómez was “a superior spirit.. . . The nobility of his physique lay in concord with the natural harmony of his movements.”⁵⁰ In his kinsman and fellow Salteño, General José F. Uriburu, Ibarguren discerned a “patriot and a gentleman.” He praised Uriburu’s “disinterestedness, his sense of honor,” lauding him for having lived “religiously dedicated to the army.”⁵¹

Common to all these writers stood the memories of their native provincial communities. The Salteño Ibarguren rekindled this image in its most clerical and elitist posture. An education in the ancient Greek classics appeared to color the same general outlook in some of Rojas’s writings. In charging that “cosmopolitanism,” for example, bred “an indifference to public affairs,” Rojas echoed the Greek idea that all members of the polis should participate in its activities, and that “indifference” spelled its demise.⁵² In Gálvez’s writings, contemporary influences appeared more prominent. The French nationalist Maurice Barrès’s vision of Lorraine largely inspired Gálvez’s sometimes pantheistic cult of rural provincial landscapes. The writings of the traditionalists also betrayed Spanish influences, as already noted. Like the Spanish “Generation of 1898,” declared Gálvez, “we have to teach incessantly love of country, for our landscapes, our writers, our great men.”⁵³ Expressions and phrasing commonly used by the Argentine writers derived directly from Spaniards: the “spiritualizing (espiritualización) of the national conscience,” “collective idealism, “the national soul,” the “territorial spirit,” the country’s “real constitution.” The work of Francisco Giner de los Ríos, head of the famed Instituto de la Enseñanza Libre in Madrid, heavily influenced Rojas’s proposals for educational reform.⁵⁴

Spanish influences, however, were largely absent from the earlier nationalist writings of Leopoldo Lugones, traditionalism’s most eloquent and controversial figure. Lugones, another provinciano, who felt himself “a life-long foreigner in Buenos Aires,” was “a son of Córdoba. From Córdoba he received his first impulses toward intellectual activities, and to Córdoba he always returned.”⁵⁵ Lugones’s works bore some traces of romanticism, and occupied a central position in Latin American modernism. But the ancient Greeks provided the chief inspiration for his major prose writings. In Prometeo, published in 1910, he tersely announced that he had abandoned the “naturalistic materialism” of his earlier years, when he had also evinced sympathies for anarcho-syndicalism, and had “decided to stay with Plato.”⁵⁶ In this essay, he depicted Argentina as “a new land suitable for the growing of any seed,” but the seed, he contended, should be the ideals and the systems of the Greeks, which would “spiritualize” the country. The Greek lacked the sense of “unease” (inquietud), “that terrible modern illness” that he saw as the distinctive trait of modern society corrupted by “materialism,”

Prometeo continued: “If our present civilization does not wish to die in the shame of mercantilism, that Plato and Aristotle believed the labor of slaves, or in a servile philosophy [i.e., evolution] that purports to show the links between men and beasts, it will have to reach a similar synthesis [as the Greeks].”⁵⁸

To Lugones, “spirituality” meant pagan polytheism, a religion like the Greek, but in Argentina erected on “three gigantic entities”: the pampa, the Río de la Plata, and the Andes.⁵⁹ Throughout Prometeo, he scorned Christianity as the source of individualism and therefore materialism. But from its very different, militantly pagan perspective, Prometeo’s chief target remained liberal-positivism. Lugones dismissed the positivist thesis that “morality was a physical science”; he condemned the liberal assumption that “egoism [lay at the] foundation of all civilized societies”; “democracy” in its modern liberal guise he derided as “rule by irresponsible mobs.”⁶⁰

In El payador (1916), Lugones explored what he perceived as the legacies of Greco-Roman civilization in Argentina’s national culture, among them the gaucho songs as they had been performed by itinerant troubadours or payadores. The payadores, he claimed, “were the most significant personages in the creation of our people.” In inventing a “new language,” “another form of Castilian” derived from Latin, the payadores “established the foundation of the nation.” In the music of the payadores, Lugones discerned features similar, in technical structure and instrumentation, to those of classical antiquity. Moreover music, he declared, constituted “el verbo inicial de toda civilización.”⁶¹

Lugones’s other major theme in this essay was the gaucho, whom he regarded as the very prototype of the Argentine people. The latter embodied gaucho traits of physical bravery and introspective pessimism, and disinterest in material wealth: all that was “properly national” derived from the gaucho.⁶² Much of El payador was thus devoted to a critical appreciation of Martín Fierro, José Hernandez’s epic poem in praise of the gaucho, published in the 1870s. Lugones regarded this epic as the foremost concrete affirmation of the existence of an “Argentine people” (la raza argentina). The epic form illustrated the unique style in which each “people struggles for justice and liberty”; it explored the “formation of a people and the secret of its destiny”; the epic represented a “certificate” of a people’s “vitality” (aptitud vital) and its “heroic life.” The epic was another classical form the Argentine people had inherited, and Martín Fierro was a Herculean hero who fell victim to “politics,” “the national scourge” as Lugones dismissed it. “Everything in this country that means backwardness, wretchedness stems from [politics].”⁶³ Some years later, in his Nuevos estudios helénicos, Lugones returned to some of the central themes of El payador. “We, on account of our Latin blood, that the coming of the Italians has strengthened, belong to the peoples of beauty (a las razas de belleza), and we therefore descend in a straight line from the Greeks, beauty’s progenitors.”⁶⁴

Lugones initially delivered segments of El payador as public lectures in Buenos Aires in 1913, his slights against popular democracy provoking a public furor.⁶⁵ When the essay appeared in 1916, it rapidly went through eight editions and 48,000 copies. Earlier, Rojas had won a substantial reading public for La restauración nacionalista. But most of the traditionalist writings after 1900 had little immediate impact. Gálvez, for example, sold only 500 copies of the first edition of El diario de Gabriel Quiroga, and he established his reputation not as a polemicist but as a novelist. Throughout the period before 1914, liberal-positivist ideas remained dominant, and nearly all political or philosophical debate pivoted around them. The writings of the traditionalists themselves contained numerous liberal-positivist remnants. Despite his paean to the gaucho, for example, Lugones echoed biological evolutionism when he predicted the gaucho’s disappearance on account of his “inferior element of Indian blood.”⁶⁶ In Nacha Regules, Gálvez appeared to contradict the sympathies he had expressed for the federalist tradition, and he evoked Sarmiento as he attacked men “of good name” (apellido notorio) who travel through Europe

Although several of the traditionalists manifested Spanish influences, as yet these remained relatively superficial. The traditionalists lacked the obsession with what Spaniards called “national renewal,” which in Spain followed a century of progressive decline ending in the disaster of 1898. Gálvez’s memoirs captured the atmosphere of pre-1914 Argentina, at least as it appeared to members of his own class, and in doing so expressed the limits and ambiguities of the protest he had sought to lead. “The only thing wrong with that age,” he recalled, “which was perhaps a result of the prevailing well-being, was materialism.”⁶⁸

Catholicism and Class

Except the church, and a few other prenineteenth century survivals like the University of Córdoba, very few institutions existed in Argentina dissociated from liberal-positivism. One such institution, however, was the “Workers’ Circles” (Círculos Obreros), church-sponsored associations that invoked the principle of the preindustrial guilds in an effort to “unite” workers and employers. The first círculo appeared in Argentina in 1892, and by 1912 their numbers had grown to 74. In that year, they claimed almost 23,000 members, although this figure amounted to only a small fraction of the total urban working-class population, 2-3 percent at most.⁶⁹

The Workers’ Circles typified the church’s quest for “class harmony,” and their beginnings in the early 1890s followed the promulgation of Rerum Novarum, the papal encyclical of 1891. Rerum Novarum confronted the consequences of industrialism from a conservative Catholic perspective that rejected liberalism and modern socialist doctrines of class conflict. The encyclical thus attacked capitalists as “a small number of very rich people [who] have been able to lay upon the masses of the poor a yoke little better than slavery itself.”⁷⁰ It also condemned “socialists” as “crafty agitators [who] pervert men’s judgments and . . . stir up the people to sedition.”⁷¹ By denying private property, socialists “confiscate wages,” because property is merely wages “in another form.”⁷² Property, moreover, conforms with the law of nature that endows people with the “reason” to prepare for the future.⁷³ Inequality was also “natural.” “[T]he great mistake is to believe that class is naturally hostile to class; that rich and poor are intended by nature to live at war with one another. So irrational and false is this view, that the exact opposite is the case.”⁷⁴ The social classes should therefore maintain “bonds of friendship.”⁷⁵

Although on balance Rerum Novarum attacked socialist ideas more vehemently than it derided liberal precepts, its concept of the functions of government stood closer in practice to socialist interventionism than liberal laissez-faire. The encyclical called on the state to “promote public well-being and private prosperity.”⁷⁶ The state should curb the accumulation of excessive wealth, and seek “distributive justice.”⁷⁷ On the other hand, government was fully entitled to act against those “imbued with bad principles, [who] are anxious for revolutionary changes.. . . The state should intervene [against] these disturbers, to save the workmen from their seditious acts, and to protect lawful owners from spoliation.”⁷⁸ In the passage that inspired the Workers’ Circles, the encyclical asserted the right to association, a right inherent to “natural sociability.” Government should promote and protect such associations.⁷⁹

Rerum Novarum thus wove an ambiguous synthesis of reactionary and outwardly progressive prescriptions. In Argentina, the Workers’ Circles asserted the “natural right” to association, but functioned primarily as indoctrination centers to combat the appeal of socialism or the equally pernicious doctrines of anarchism. At the same time, they periodically petitioned Congress for social reforms: a Sunday rest law, the regulation of womens and children's labor, insurance protection against work-related accidents, compulsory arbitration of strikes, and the construction of cheap workers’ houses.⁸⁰ The program of a Christian Democratic League, founded in Santa Fe in 1902, expressed the general philosophical premises on which all the Catholic organizations, including the Workers’ Circles, functioned. The league, it declared:

The Catholic position was thus antiliberal and antisocialist; Catholics aspired to revive the guilds, “adapted to the requirements of progress,” as mediating institutions between individuals and society at large, and to fulfill the Catholic view of humanity, that the church derived from Aristotle, as “naturally social.” During the early twentieth century, Argentine Catholics were beginning to develop an organic vision of the nation as an aggregation of “corporations.” Catholics upheld “class harmony” and “distributive justice,” in which both “harmony” and “justice” bore their original Greek connotations of balance, measure, or proportion. Catholics rejected the laissez-faire state in favor of a modernized and idealized facsimile of the ancien régime: interventionist government that in pursuit of “justice” would promote social reform.

Several of the traditionalist writers who had attacked positivism embraced the cause of social reform in this conservative and explicitly antiliberal guise. By 1913, Manuel Gálvez had become an active supporter of the labor legislation sponsored by the Workers’ Circles.⁸² As a minister in the Sáenz Peña government of 1910-14, Carlos Ibarguren proposed, although unsuccessfully, labor legislation that he later claimed would have produced the nucleus of a social security system.⁸³ The economist Alejandro E. Bunge used the resources at his disposal as a government statistician to collect data on wages, rents, and housing in Buenos Aires to support the efforts of Congressman Juan E. Cafferata to obtain government funding for a plan to construct cheap workers’ housing—the Casas Baratas project.⁸⁴ These men, all devout Catholics except the apostate Lugones, perceived social reform as a necessary part of their efforts to “spiritualize” a society corrupted by materialism, and as an instrument to serve their goal of constructing a national community.

Social reform projects, however, fell victim to the great liberal consensus that prevailed among the power brokers of Argentine society. Businessmen flatly opposed such reform, whether on doctrinaire liberal grounds that forbade any meddling with market forces, in fear of rising costs and falling profits, or out of distaste for bureaucracy. Politicians and the press supported their views, subscribing to the ideal that Argentina remained a land of unfettered opportunity in which fortunes lay at hand for all. “In our country,” declared La Prensa:

But while liberal Argentina rejected the call for social reform that the 1891 encyclical proposed, it rapidly assimilated its uncompromising defense of property rights, its legitimation of unrestricted force to defend them, and its facile willingness to attribute symptoms of class conflict to “crafty agitators.” Events after 1900 repetitiously illustrated how entrenched such attitudes were becoming, as they fused with nativist animosities toward the immigrants. On numerous occasions, particularly before 1911, the police forcibly broke strikes, led brutal cavalry charges against worker-demonstrators, and arrested and sometimes deported trade union activists, branding them “agitators."⁸⁶ Violent class conflict abated for several years following the economic depression of 1913 and the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, but then recurred in still more acute forms in the wake of war-induced inflation after 1916.⁸⁷ As strikes mounted in frequency and intensity, so too did the habit of blaming them on “foreign” or “revolutionary agitators.” Thus, a senior railroad official dismissed a rail strike in November 1917 as

Some months later a conservative congressman denounced a workers’ demonstration he had witnessed in Buenos Aires. His comments illustrated the now instinctive decipherment of working-class protest as alien-inspired revolution, which by this point meant Bolshevik revolution.

In early 1919, class and ethnic tensions finally erupted in violence. In the Semana Trágica workers rose first in a mass spontaneous general strike, and then self-styled “patriot” vigilante bands countermobilized against them. Swiftly arming themselves, the gangs began scouring the streets of Buenos Aires in search of “agitators.” The “agitators” they found, many of whom were summarily murdered, were often neither workers nor even trade union leaders, but innocent Russian Jews.⁹⁰

The anti-Semitic outburst of January 1919 expressed a panic reaction to the Russian Revolution and the rumor that Jews, orchestrated by Trotsky from Moscow, were plotting world-wide revolution. Yet anti-Semitism also had much deeper roots: Jews ostensibly incarnated “cosmopolitanism,” “materialism,” or “individualism.” Among the traditionalist writers a decade before, the educational reformers led by Rojas had often singled out Jewish schools teaching in Yiddish or Hebrew as leading examples of foreign institutions that resisted incorporation or assimilation.⁹¹ Gálvez had complained occasionally against Jews, suggesting, for example, that Jews entering the urban professions narrowed opportunities for natives.⁹² In 1909, a Russian Jew, Simon Radowitsky, had assassinated the chief of police in Buenos Aires, an act that provoked reprisals against the Russian-Jewish community.⁹³ Mistrust against the Jews also sprang from Catholicism. The vicious reaction to the general strike in January 1919 stemmed in part from an impulse to defend the church, of which the “maximalist” revolutionaries, led by Jews, were the sworn enemies. “Why,” asked one speaker in congress, referring to some of the incidents reported during the general strike, “are they burning the churches? . . . They represent the cross that has civilized the world. . .. They attack, stone, and burn the churches because they teach men to know and respect God; and such respect and knowledge are the firm base of order, peace, and harmony among men.”⁹⁴ In an echo of both Rerum Novarum and some of the writings of the traditionalists, the speaker continued: “Without God morality means selfish caprice and the utilitarian principle, [and in a world] of uncontrolled ambition, the doors are open for crime, dynamite, and the dagger. In such moral chaos . . . societies slide into anarchy, symptomizing their illnesses in events like this revolutionary strike.”⁹⁵ The solution, he declared, was to return to “Christian morality.”

“Moral reform,” intended to undercut Jewish or other alleged “corrupting influences” and to stifle the “agitators,” emerged as the chief response among native Argentines to the general strike of 1919. In this and subsequent years, the Argentine Patriotic League, a paramilitary body created immediately after the Semana Trágica as a strike-breaking force, led the campaign. Its prescriptions differed very little from proposals made a decade or more before. The league revived in slightly different guise several of the activities of the Workers’ Circles, creating a few controlled unions, or “workers’ brigades,” and some “workshop schools” (talleres-escueLs) staffed by upper-class women.⁹⁷

The league betrayed several other traditionalist and Catholic influences. Its slogan “¡Salvemos la orden y la tradición nacional!” followed writers like Gálvez in coupling political “order’’ with “tradition.” Conservative Catholic influences appeared in its implicit associations between a lack of religious faith, the sinful covetousness it regarded as an inherent condition of urban dwellers, and liberal individualism that fostered such covetousness. “A soul without faith,” declared Manuel Cariés, the league’s president, “easily becomes the victim of anxiety, just as a heart without patriotism becomes a prisoner of rebellion. Anxiety is the mal-de-siècle of the large cities; it springs from an imagination that covets luxury.”⁹⁸ Nevertheless, the league remained ideologically heterogeneous, a compound of Catholic, traditionalist but also liberal-positivist influences. Thus, while Carlés’s speeches betrayed Catholic influences, his attempts to rehut doctrines of class struggle drew heavily from the locally entrenched liberal myth that viewed class conflict as proper to “old Europe” alone, inappropriate and “artificial” in the American “Eden.”

The Assault on Popular Democracy

In public lectures in mid-1919, Carlos Ibarguren discussed the writings of recent European prophets of a “new order,” a society organized collectively, purged of the vices of liberal individualism. The war, he declared, had effected a “revolution of values” on a scale that paralleled the destruction of paganism in second-century Rome.

He predicted a new age of “spirituality” springing from the “formidable spiritual exaltation that has swept through all the peoples who have been at war.” On this foundation, he declared, society would cast aside the conditions in which

Manuel Gálvez’s postwar writings continued to develop his earlier themes, but in notably more forceful and direct language. Gálvez now depicted himself and other writers who took his view, as “nationalist evangelists.”

We must teach love of country maniacally. . .. We must plumb (desentrañar) the idealism and originality of our past.¹⁰²

Spain, where “life has stopped three centuries ago,” embodied the “spiritual” qualities Gálvez wished to revive in Argentina.¹⁰³ His nonfictional writings now abounded with references to Maurice Barrès, on whose authority he depicted the spirituality of Spain: Toledo “as Barrès has said . . . is a true home for the soul.”¹⁰⁴ Like Barrès, Gálvez would attempt to stir nationalism and the “spiritualizing of the country . . . by evoking the atmosphere of those provincial cities, in which unlike Buenos Aires, the old national spirit, the patriotic sentiment, the spiritual awareness of national identity and that ingenuous, dreamy, romantic air of the old Argentine villages still endure.”¹⁰⁵

As Ibarguren began to dream of the “new order, ” and Gálvez steeped himself in pastoralist nostalgia, Leopoldo Lugones embraced xenophobia and anticommunism with near-fanatical zeal. The “foreign influences” he now denounced so vehemently took on the role of an invisible, surreptitious malignity that attacked the “spirit” or the “conscience”; he attacked strikes as “acts of rebellion,” harbingers of Bolshevism; the measures he proposed against foreigners invoked allusions to war, and metaphors of cleansing and purification. “We have sought to fulfill the mandate of our fathers, making this country . . . a great concordance. Those from abroad have brought us to discord. . .. We have recently witnessed two strikes . . . acts of rebellion, supported by . . . foreigners, and [favoring] Russian Bolshevism.”¹⁰⁶ There could be “no civil war with foreigners, because all wars with foreigners are national wars.” Citizenship meant dominion, an exclusive right to rule.

By 1923, what Lugones called “national” rarely denoted abstractions like “spirit,” “language,” or “communities,” but now meant people: most of all, the native rural population, the human remnants of a “national” past. Equally, “nationalism” had begun to imply a measure of economic redistribution, striving to achieve the native population's physical betterment. “Many rich people,” Lugones complained, “have made donations to feed the hungry in Russia, when our own rural people (nuestra peonada obrajera) are dying of hunger, want, and disease without any of this moving the rich in the least.”¹⁰⁸

The sharp transition from the almost exclusively literary and cultural prewar cast of traditionalism to its highly political postwar expressions symptomized the great upheavals at home and abroad that followed 1914. Yet the new militancy that led Ibarguren in 1919 to predict a future of “force, virile action, glory, heroism, and sacrifice,”¹⁰⁹ and Lugones into his xenophobic diatribes, did not diminish as labor unrest subsided. Soon after the war, the Argentine Radicals and liberal democracy replaced the “agitators” and “Bolshevism” as the targets. Radicalism, under its leader Hipólito Yrigoyen, had gained power in 1916, four years after the Sáenz Peña law had instituted liberal democracy.

Radicalism, or “yrigoyenismo," however, did not represent an easy target to its potential detractors among the traditionalists. Subtly interwoven with its commitments to liberalism and popular democracy lay some of the currents of preliberai and Catholic thought that had influenced the traditionalists. Yrigoyen, for example, always refused to define Radicalism as a “party.” Echoing the old conservative organic tradition, he referred to it as a “movement” that represented not merely a “part” of society but society as a whole, committed to society’s “general good’’ rather than to partisan interests. Yrigoyen viewed the state in similar terms as Rerum Novarum, as an active arbiter between competing interests or classes, whose task was to promote “distributive justice.” His ideas bore traces of Krausism, a doctrine first popular among Spanish liberals in the midnineteenth century that had spread to Argentina around the 1870s.¹¹⁰ Krausism was in essence Catholicism without the church, a body of ideas that had enabled the Spanish liberals to reject the conservative and absolutist Spanish church while maintaining close contact with the rooted Catholic mentality of Spanish society.

Krausists shared with Catholics such ideas as that society develops toward divinelike perfection, or that freedom consists of will governed by moral purpose.¹¹¹ Krausists viewed society like the Catholics as an organic hierarchy, and judged institutions not by the liberal Benthamite standard of “utility,” but by their capacity to promote the “common good.” Krausists agreed with Catholics that moral concerns shaped every facet of human action, except they claimed, following Kant, that man was selfdirecting, subject to the “laws of morality he finds in himself,” rather than to metaphysical laws imposed by divine command. Even so, these higher ethical constraints occupied much the same position as natural law in Catholic thought, since Krausists perceived them as a superordinate framework to which all specific enactments, that the Catholics denoted “human law,” fell subject. For the Krausists, the state also existed to promote the ethical objectives that Catholics called the “common good,” i.e., the good of “all the parts that constitute the living organism.”¹¹²

Yrigoyen’s political writings contained an eclectic and usually chaotic blend of liberal, Krausist, and Catholic elements. Like the liberal democrats, he contended that popular democracy and free elections were necessary to “fulfill” the liberal Constitution of 1853. “I have said that public opinion demands nothing more than honest, guaranteed elections . . . as the indispensable condition for the exercise of [political] rights.”¹¹³ Then, following the Krausists, he would link “national character” with “public morality.” “A people . . . ought first to maintain and develop its national character in the form of public morality, because only by virtue of such morality does a people make itself respected.”¹¹⁴ Finally, in Catholic organicist style, he would invoke the “common good,” and anthropomorphize “the nation,” investing it with the physical propensities of a human being: “drowning,” “breathing,” “vitality.” “[With honest elections] we shall see the differences between a Nation drowned in competing pressures, and a Nation breathing in the fullness of its being, spreading its immense vitality for the common good.”¹¹⁵

Yrigoyen’s language abounded in Christian imagery: “purification,” “martyrdom,” the “national soul.” Radicalism became “the Cause,” its adherents “believers”; Yrigoyen’s own career was an “apostolate.” “We have consecrated our life,’’ he declared, “our repose, our well-being, our possessions, while refusing every temptation a thousand times, in return for the cruelest proscriptions and sacrifices."¹¹⁶ Referring to Radicalism, he proclaimed that “[t]he majesty of its mission is sublime. . . . Its labors will endure, powerful are its forces (esfuerzos). It is constantly strengthened and revitalized by the purest currents of opinion. It is a school for the coming generations. . .."¹¹⁷

Ideological ambivalence and syncretism enabled Yrigoyen and the Radicals to compete for support among numerous different constituencies, while identifying themselves with the various nationalist themes raised by the traditionalists. Thus Yrigoyen claimed that Radicalism embodied the “nation” and “patriotism.’’ During his early years as president, he was a stubborn, principled defender of wartime neutrality. He adopted anti-U.S. or anti-British stances closely resembling those taken earlier by the traditionalists, as they criticized “materialism” and the nations they felt exemplified it. To a British diplomat in 1919

The Radicals’ claim to “be" the nation; Yrigoyen’s conduct of foreign affairs; and his idiosyncratic, often almost messianic style of popular leadership, made Radicalism increasingly popular among several of the traditionalist writers, notably Gálvez and Ricardo Rojas.¹¹⁹ Yet by the early 1920s, an enormous and irreparable gulf had appeared between yrigoyenismo and the more politically active and increasingly ultraconservative traditionalists like Ibarguren and Lugones. Roth had opposed the Radicals before 1916, the former as a leader of the opposition conservative party, and the latter as an increasingly aggressive opponent of popular democracy, but hostilities rapidly deepened and intensified after 1916. Yrigoyen’s handling of the labor unrest that peaked in early 1919 became the most critical issue.

Unlike his predecessors to whom coercion offered a simple and expedient response to working-class issues, Yrigoyen conceived labor policy in the light of “distributive justice.” During his presidency, government would remain “equidistant from both sides. . .. [T]he freedom to strike will not be violated at the point of the bayonet or the blow of the saber.”¹²⁰ But to much of the Argentine upper classes, “equidistance” imperiled public order, and from around mid-1917 they unceasingly opposed it: the government gave free rein to violence, “agitators,” and revolutionary conspiracies; it could not maintain “order,” thus opening the way to “anarchy”; and, as in Russia, “democracy” would collapse into Bolshevik tyranny. In early 1919, the “patriots” mobilized against the general strike partly in the belief that “equidistance” would again prevent the government from taking any action. Conservatives at large blamed the strike on

The Semana Trágica illustrated the extreme fragility of popular democracy and the strong preference among leading power groups for order, regardless of its cost to liberty. Events also converted Yrigoyen into the personification of disorder and the target of those like Ibarguren or Lugones, who now began to espouse a government of order and authority. Further, the Semana Trágica signaled a major shift in the political role of the army, since on the outbreak of the general strike the army had intervened on its own initiative to repress it, and then helped to arm and organize the “patriots.”¹²² From this time on, the army became a central actor in Argentine politics. During subsequent years, the army first led the infamous campaign against the striking shepherds of Patagonia; it then sought and obtained a directive role in the exploitation of state oil; by 1927, the army had embarked on military-related manufacturing activities.¹²³ World War I, which had demonstrated the vital role the armed forces played in a world of competing nation-states, underlay this transition. A fully professional officer corps, trained years before by German or French instructors, now occupied the most senior military ranks.¹²⁴

Leopoldo Lugones stood out among the civilian intellectuals who apprehended this transition and realized its potential consequences. In 1924, Lugones began urging the army to seize power, overthrow democracy, and become the architect of a new political order. Like many of the prewar traditionalist writings, Lugones’s “Hour of the Sword” speech of 1924 sought to attack liberalism and popular democracy by treating the past as the prototype for the future. His address thus hailed the army as the agent of national independence, the very source of “all we have achieved till today.” The army, too, represented the single surviving preliberai institution of civil society, and it therefore constituted the physical and moral nucleus of the new political order to which Lugones aspired. “The army is the last aristocracy, the last hierarchical organism that has escaped destruction at the hands of demagogy. At this historic moment only military virtue represents the superior existence.”¹²⁵ The “nineteenth century constitutional system is dead,” Lugones continued, and the army’s mission was to refashion society as a macrocosm of its own hierarchical structure. The army must “impose the necessary order, implant an adherence to hierarchy, which democracy has undermined,” because democracy’s “natural consequence [is] either demagogy or socialism.’’¹²⁶ “Hour of the Sword” concluded by lauding dictatorship, and “the predestined leader, the man who commands on account of his innate superiority, lawfully or not, because law, an expression of power, becomes conjoined with his will,”¹²⁷ Lugones now viewed “life itself as a state of force,” and life meant “four words: arms, combat, command, instruction."¹²⁸

The “Hour of the Sword’’ marked the conclusion of Lugones’s long intellectual plunge from the anarchistic libertarianism of his youth, when he had also been an outstanding poet, into the pit of militarism and the incipient fascism of his later middle age. Yet his became only the wildest voice in a now increasingly implacable opposition to Yrigoyenista popular democracy. The charge of “demagogy” that Lugones and many others now hurled constantly against the Yrigoyenistas sprang largely from Yrigoyen’s growing reliance on a spoils system, organized around his party committees, to protect his popular support, and from his habit of promoting low-born committee bosses to elevated positions in Congress and the public administration.¹²⁹ Yrigoyen’s opponents thus attacked his favors to the “inept,” whose habitats were “cockfights, bars, and brothels.”¹³⁰ The Yrigoyenistas were “owners of gambling houses and brothels . . . Arabs, Turks, Russians, and other detritus thrown out of their own countries.”¹³¹ To Mannel Cariés, president of the Argentine Patriotic League, the Yrigoyenista committees harbored “the abnormal, the rootless, the ignorant, the disreputable element of our people."¹³² To yet another hostile observer, yrigoyenismo spelled “the death of justice, dignity, duty, and patriotism in this country. . .. Today this country has become a paradise for cowards and delinquents.”¹³³ Yet more than yrigoyenismo alone, the democratic, representative system itself was falling rapidly into discredit. Already by mid-1927, some discerned a “grave crisis in our Parliament,” as a result of “the destruction wrought by yrigoyenismo in every branch of government and public affairs. . . . If the Parliament cannot improve itself in time, it will be overthrown by antidemocratic forces which regard the coup d’état as a necessary curative."¹³⁴

Indeed, by this point, the revolution that in September 1930 shattered Argentina’s incipient democracy stood scarcely three years in the future. Mid-1927 marked the creation of La Nueva República and the appearance of a new generation of right-wing zealots pursuing a “New Democracy” founded on military rule and corporate representation: they effected the final transition from “traditionalism” to “nacionalismo.” Traditionalism itself had passed through two main stages. Before 1914, the movement developed as an extremely fluid mix of federalist nostalgia, “hispanismo,” ultramontane Catholicism, and literary modernism. In traditionalism, both the ancient Greeks and the ancien régime lived on. During this period, the traditionalists often made a virtue of apoliticism, dismissing politics in Lugones’s phrase as “the national scourge.” For the most part, they broached political issues elliptically, probing for a “national identity,” uncontaminated by “materialism” or “cosmopolitanism,” through the pursuit of an idealized past. The early traditionalists made language, music, and folk arts subjects of their quest for a national culture, and history into the proselytizing tool that eventually became “historical revisionism.” If they remained unable to emancipate themselves completely from liberal-positivism, they laid the foundations for the attack on liberalism that the more political age following them built on and extended.

Even before 1914, however, the peculiar nature of the “social question” in Argentina, as an interlacing of class conflict with the discords provoked by immigration, had begun to draw the traditionalists into formal politics. Clerical influence implanted among them a sympathy for social reform, as it also strengthened their antipathies to liberalism and socialism. From the church, the traditionalists gained a familiarity with the corporatist doctrines that became a major ingredient of nacionalismo.

Postwar traditionalism, shaped by war and revolution abroad, and by events like the Semana Trágica in Argentina, betrayed a far more overt political character. If at this point the movement appeared to subsist largely on negatives—anticommunism, anti-Semitism, antiyrigoyenismo—its adherents were also assimilating the principles of the “New Order” that produced the cult of militarism. By 1924, Lugones had discerned the possibility for an alliance between the traditionalist intellectuals and the army, the alliance the nacionalistas were to pursue for the next 20 years. In establishing this focus, however, Lugones also bequeathed to the nacionalistas the narrowly sectarian, conspiratorial role that later proved their great limitation. Thus the nacionalistas, like the traditionalists, remained an intelligentsia rather than a true political elite, capable of shaping a political ideology but incapable of leading an organized political movement. As one of their later Peronista critics remarked, with few exceptions traditionalists and nacionalistas alike displayed “conciencia nacional, sin amor al pueblo”¹³⁵: they were nationalists but never, despite a sentimental regard for the rural creoles, “popular” nationalists.

Author notes