20th century Argentina

[excerpts from Luis Alberto Romero's A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century, tr. James P. Brennan, Pennsylvania State, 1994]

According to an 1884 law, education was to be secular, free, and mandatory. Replacing both the Catholic Church and immigrant associations, both of which had advanced greatly in this area, the state assumed all responsibility for education. Literacy ensured a basic education for everyone and at the same time the integration and nationalization of immigrants' children who, if in their homes they traced their past to some region of Italy or Spain, in school learned that the past dated from the founding fathers, Bernardino Rivadavia and Manuel Belgrano.

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Hipólito Yrigoyen served as president from 1916 to 1922, the year that Marcelo T. deAlvear succeeded him in the presidency. In 1928, Yrigoyen was reelected, only to be deposed by a military revolt on September 6, 1930. It would be another sixty-one years before an elected president would peacefully transfer power to his successor. Thus, these twelve years in which democratic institutions began to function normally turned out to be an exceptional period in the long run.

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The nationalists . . . finished fashioning their discourse . . . To the traditional criticisms of democracy were added a vigorous anti-Communism and an attack on liberalism, regarded as the root of all of society's evils. Typical for the period, they reduced all of their enemies to one: high finances and imperialism combined with the Communists, the foreigners responsible for national disintegration, and also the Jews, all united in a sinister conspiracy. They demanded the return to a hierarchical society such as had existed in the colonial period, uncontaminated by liberalism, organized by a corporatist state, and cemented by an integral Catholicism. . . . the nationalists demanded the establishment of a new governing elite that was national and not beholden to foreign interests. They believed they would find such an elite among the military.

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Three important essays expressed profound intuitions about the "national soul" and set the tone for a broad collective reflection.

Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz

In 1931, Scalabrini Ortiz published The Man Who Is Alone and Waits: Scalabrini Ortiz's man of "Corrientes and Esmerelda" streets, who embodied the different traditions of an immigrant country and who was defined by his impulses, intuitions, and feelings. This "man" preferred his impulses to any ruminations or rational calculations and – reminiscent of Ortega y Gasset – constructed them with an image of himself and what he could become, which he judged more valuable than the social reality surrounding him.

Eduardo Mallea

For Eduardo Mallea, and amalgam was of doubtful worth. Mallea observed the crisis in the feeling of being Argentine, particularly among the elites, won over to comfortable living, idleness, and appearances, renouncing spirituality and more profound concerns about the nation's destiny. In his History of an Argentine Passion, published in 1935, Mallea contrasted that "visible Argentina" with another "invisible" one in which the new elites, at first hidden, were creating "an extreme exaltation of life."

Ezequiel Martínez Estrada

Ezequiel Martínez Estrada was more radically pessimistic and saw the Argentine community as prisoner of a fatal destiny, with its origins in the Spanish conquest. In X-Ray of the Pampa, published in 1933, he noted the rift between the unruly masses, heirs to the resentment stemming from their status as mixed bloods, and certain Europhile elites incapable of understanding this society or of inculcating in it a system of norms and principles upheld by collective beliefs. These efforts to unmask the nature of "the Argentine soul," inquiring in ontological fashion into essential and singular qualities of Argentine society and culture, though reflecting common concerns throughout the Western world, were undoubtedly the intellectual expression of this new common restlessness to understand, defend, or construct "the national."

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The military government that assumed power on June 4, 1943 . . . was initially headed by General Rawson, who resigned before being sworn in and was replaced by General Pedro Pablo Ramirez, a cabinet minister in the previous constitutional government. The episode is revealing of the multiple tendencies existing in the revolutionary group and of the uncertainty of the road they would follow, beyond the shared conviction that the constitutional order was finished and that the proclaimed candidacy of [Rubustiano] Patrón Costas [sugar magnate from Salta] would not fill the void in power. . . .

The military members of the government agreed on the necessity of silencing political unrest and social protest; the Communists were outlawed, the unions persecuted, and the CGT (General Confederation of Labor) – then divided into two factions – was interdicted. In addition, they disbanded Acción Argentina (Argentine Action), which included those who supported breaking off relations with the Axis. The government later did the same with the political parties, as well interdicting the universities, dismissing a vast number of professors who were members of the opposition, and eventually establishing obligatory religious instruction in the public schools. In these actions, the country's new military leaders counted on the collaboration of a cast of nationalists and Catholic integralists, some of them with a long-standing political involvement that went back to the Uriburu years, who set the tone for the military regime: authoritarian, antiliberal, messianic, obsessed with establishing a new social order, and avoiding the chaos of Communism that, they thought, was an inevitable consequence of the war. It was not difficult for the democratic opposition to identify the military government with Nazism. . . .

the trade agreement with Great Britain was maintained. The United States, on the other hand, attacked with increasing fury one of the only governments in the hemisphere reluctant to accompany its war effort against the Axis, one suspected of harboring Nazis. The State Department launched a crusade against the military government, unconcerned about the political consequences of its actions and ignoring conciliatory gestures on the part of Argentina. This campaign allowed the staunchest supporters of neutrality to gain ground, and the conflict thus unfolded at an escalating pace. . . .

for Argentina it was a matter of principle not to accept the diktat of the State Department. . . . In March 1945, with the end of the war at hand, Argentina accepted the U.S. demand – where a new leadership in the State Department promised better relations – and declared war against the Axis, the condition for being admitted to the United Nations, then in the process of being established.

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In 1948, the Marshall Plan was launched, but the United States prohibited the dollars provided to Europe from being used for imports from Argentina. Then from 1949 onward as the European economies began to recover, the United States flooded markets with subsidized grains, and Argentina's participation declined drastically.