Ideological Tensions in the Foundational Decade of “Modern Argentina”: The Political Debates of the 1880s

Abstract

Standard historiography states that between 1880 and 1916, Argentina underwent a profound social and economic transformation led by a hegemonic political party, the Partido Autonomista Nacional (PAN). This transformation has been portrayed as the achievement of a generation of public men, the Generation of Eighty, who envisioned a project that would integrate Argentina into the social and economic changes occurring in the transatlantic world. The 1880s — with record levels of immigration, foreign investment, the triumph of the PAN, and the strengthening of the state — have generally been characterized as a crucial decade in consolidating the main hallmarks of “Modern Argentina.”1Along with unquestionable economic and social growth, as well as the PAN’s unfailing presidential victories, there are other significant reasons why this period has been perceived in this way. The first two presidents of this period, Julio A. Roca (1880 – 86) and Miguel Juárez Celman (1886 – 90), spoke of an abrupt break with the past followed by a promising future. In this rhetoric, 1880 marked the first page in the history of modern Argentina, forged with the promise that the country would never return to the previous dark times of tyranny and war.2 This perception of 1880 as a new beginning, with no connection to the past, was crafted by the party in power and repeated by later analysts with few exceptions. The idea that the Generation of Eighty envisioned a modernizing project was first ensconced over time in the historiography and then entered into public debates as one of the main explanations for the country’s fate.3 The possession of a project — like the Generation of Eighty — or the lack of one has been used ever since as a yardstick to measure the quality of Argentina’s leaders and their chances of success. The notion that the Generation of Eighty conceived of a plan for the country went hand in hand with the idea that the period was characterized by ideological consensus, in contrast with both prior and later times.4While the general public continues to accept the concept of the Generation of Eighty and their project, recent studies have documented ideological contentions, not only between government and opposition groups but also among politicians, intellectuals, and the scientific community.5 Most of this research has concentrated on the period after 1890, when opposition groups organized against the government, and particularly between 1900 and 1916, when political and intellectual circles grappled with the social question and the need for political reform.6 The 1880s have, in contrast, received relatively little attention in this reexamination. Historians have generally viewed increasing Catholic opposition to liberal reform during this decade as a minor disturbance to the ideological consensus of the time.7 A few works have posited that the ideological division between the 1880s and previous times was less sharp that once thought and have also suggested that the decade was not free from debate, evidenced particularly in the debates over the federalization of the city of Buenos Aires in August and September of 1880.8Building on this historiographic trend, I here analyze the ideological contentions between different political parties in the 1880s, using the party press as the main source for the “dialogue of the parties.”9 This dialogue was highly confrontational, given that attempting to impose one’s particular vision of society and government over other alternatives is a fundamental form of political struggle.10 This avenue for debate became particularly important during the 1880s, a decade that witnessed an unusual degree of political demobilization following the dispersion of the old opposition parties and the ascendance of the PAN. The party in government encountered little opposition at the polls, but countervailing political groups took their struggle to the pages of their dailies. Until now, this latter form of politics has been overlooked. Indeed, the demobilized political world of the 1880s has been cast either as a period in which all groups consented to the main trends of the new ideological climate or in which the ideological homogeneity was so strong that the isolated voices of discordant groups could not undermine it.My research indicates that public debate during the 1880s primarily took place in, and was constructed by, the party press. After the fall of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829 – 52), the Buenos Aires press became one of the main protagonists of an effervescent republican life.11 Almost one hundred periodicals and newspapers were published in Buenos Aires in 1872, a number that continued to rise dramatically in the following years. Among them, the political press — half a dozen dailies whose content and format was a hybrid between pamphlets and modern newspapers — played a crucial role.12 Previously, the press mainly echoed and expanded on the disputes between strong individuals, but during the 1880s it became the chorus that dominated the public domain.13 These newspapers, created and financed by the political parties and factions, represented a kind of journalism that did not survive into the twentieth century, when they were gradually replaced by self-financed enterprises claiming to follow modern standards of objectivity in presenting an independent source of information and not just opinion.14 In nineteenth-century Argentina, as elsewhere at that time, the party press had none of the characteristics of its successors. The editors and staff worked for the party and strove to provide not the latest news but rather the party’s opinions. Through these papers political organizations spread their ideas, fought their adversaries, defended themselves from attacks, and created their own identities.These newspapers played an important role in each party’s search for legitimacy. As we will see, presidents Julio A. Roca and Miguel Juárez Celman employed La Tribuna Nacional and Sud-América, respectively, to propose and defend a set of ideas they hoped would generate legitimacy for their presidencies. During this process, both appealed to the idea of progress but employed the word with different meanings, objectives, and, ultimately, results. Both presidents primarily targeted the newspapers of the two main opposition parties: the old Liberal Party (known by then as the Nationalist Party) and the porteño Autonomists. As the mouthpiece of Bartolomé Mitre’s Nationalist Party and the most respected newspaper in the country, La Nación became the main adversary to La Tribuna Nacional. Mitre had unsuccessfully supported Carlos Tejedor, then governor of Buenos Aires Province, in the 1880 election. After this electoral defeat, and their subsequent defeat on the battlefield two months later, the Nationalists disbanded their loose party structure and opted to abstain from electoral participation in protest against the government. Mitre and his followers entrenched themselves behind La Nación, one of the largest and most respected daily newspapers in the country.The other opposition group, the porteño Autonomists, joined the PAN in August 1880 but split again in 1883. Once back in the opposition, they also abstained from participating in elections and instead turned El Nacional — the second-most-important political daily after La Nación — into one of the most implacable opponents of the government. Catholic groups also organized themselves as an opposition party (the Catholic Union) after a series of anticlerical laws were passed in 1884, but they avoided electoral contests.15 These opposition parties organized a coalition (Partidos Unidos) for the presidential election of 1886, which then disbanded after its defeat. They would meet again in 1889 to organize the revolution against President Juárez that would be carried out the following year. As we can see, the PAN faced little electoral challenge in the 1880s but met with strong opposition in other forums of public debate, especially from these two papers.The debates between these papers occurred within “a common climate of political ideas,” but this did not negate existing tensions created by different dialects within the language of liberalism.16 Liberalism in Argentina, as elsewhere, has proved to be “capacious”; its inherently expansive character made room for, and even generated, ideological conflict.17 I define ideology here as a loose association of ideas intended to gain support, to construct shared beliefs, to generate enthusiasm, and to inspire action. Ideologies define roles, rank values, and create identities for the organizations grouped around them.18I seek to place these debates of the 1880s within the broader ideological landscape of late-nineteenth-century Argentina. Although the ideological tensions of the 1880s have their own peculiarities, they were linked to earlier debates that survived into the decade. Similar tensions can also be traced, again with some modifications, after the 1890 revolution. Rather than characterizing the 1880s as an exceptional decade of ideological consensus or upholding 1880 as watershed year when romanticism gave way to positivism, I argue that the 1880s can indeed be connected with the political and ideological worlds of the preceding and subsequent periods.I will first analyze the political discourse of the two presidential administrations of the 1880s, as expressed in their party papers. While the discourses of La Tribuna Nacional and Sud-América were symptomatic of the new climate of ideas, they were far from identical; indeed, when we pay attention to each paper’s reformulation of key political concepts, we note significant differences in meanings. I then reconstruct oppositional discourses launched in La Nación and El Nacional. While these discourses shared common ground, they also differed in the primary target of their attacks, as well as in the different content they used to address similar topics. Although the Mitristas and Autonomists found themselves together on the side of the opposition in the 1880s, they had been electoral rivals in the previous decade; this history revealed itself in differences of discourse, strategy, and language in their papers. Finally, I will reflect on the implications of these debates in the political context of the 1880s, as well as in the wider ideological landscape of fin de siècle Argentina.President Julio A. Roca launched La Tribuna Nacional a few days before assuming office in October 1880. It had a press run of five thousand copies and was financially supported by subscriptions from the national and provincial governments, as well as through credit from the National Bank and the usual system of individual subscriptions from friends and sympathizers.19 By launching his own newspaper, Roca showed that he had quickly learned from the mistakes of his predecessor (and fellow Tucumán native), Nicolás Avellaneda (1874 – 80), an outsider who enjoyed little support in Buenos Aires. Newspapers were essential tools of political propaganda at the time, and, given the circumstances that surrounded Roca’s election, La Tribuna Nacional became one of the most important instruments of his presidency. He took office just four months after the governor of Buenos Aires Province, Carlos Tejedor, had led the most violent revolution of the last quarter of the century against the national government in an attempt to prevent him from assuming power. Roca now had to rule from a city he did not know well, where he had no friends and few acquaintances, with the local support of new political allies whom he did not entirely trust, and from a building that stood near the site where 20,000 men had raised arms against him a few months earlier. More significantly, he had to rule from a city where public opinion could not be ignored and whose political parties either bitterly opposed him or only reluctantly accepted him.20Two of the most prestigious and successful papers of the time — La Nación and El Nacional — belonged to Roca’s opposition. Roca could not ignore the opinion of the country’s new capital, as expressed through their dailies, not only because the political practices of the port city demanded it but also because his opponents were still too powerful. True, their strength had been gradually eroding. But although the Nationalist Party was in disarray after the defeats of 1874 and 1880, La Nación still commanded respect, and its influence required attention. And while as a political paper El Nacional was relatively less fearsome, the Autonomists enjoyed a political clout that the president needed to counteract if he wished to retain control of national politics. The Autonomists were ready to give battle in the 1886 presidential elections, and they stood a good chance of success.21Under these circumstances, La Tribuna Nacional became one of Roca’s most important political instruments, the president’s voice in a political world where he was a relative outsider. Through it Roca created his identity, promoted his goals, explained his values, and attempted to shield himself from the attacks of his rivals. The paper was the main instrument he used to legitimate his rule. That is, it was the site of those activities in which all governments and political parties engage to justify their actions, define their public image, and make claims to authority.22La Tribuna Nacional purported that it was not the official government paper and that its aim was not to inform on policies, decrees, or laws; when Roca or his ministers published in it, they did not sign their columns. La Tribuna Nacional claimed time and again that it was the voice of the PAN, not the government, and that it intended to enter the field of public debate on par with other party papers. Naturally, the distinction between a party paper and the official paper of the government was not clear-cut; in the public imagination, La Tribuna Nacional was known as the newspaper of the president.Roca used La Tribuna Nacional to promote the idea that his administration represented political change and a rupture with the past, portraying 1880 as the beginning of a new era that signaled the arrival of progress. In Argentina, the notion of progress was prominent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as it was elsewhere.23 However, the meaning and popularity of progress varied widely from country to country, as well as among contesting voices within each country. In Argentina, different sectors of the elite used the term with different connotations. And though it was once thought that the ubiquity of the term progress in public discourse was a sign of the triumph of positivism over liberalism, we now know that — far from being hegemonic — positivism in Argentina manifested itself in weak, fragmented, and vague terms within both the scientific professions and (even more so, I argue) the political groups.24 Although we can detect traces of what Charles Hale labeled “scientific politics,” particularly in the second half of the 1880s, this language was sporadic and unintentional; that is, it was employed without any explicit awareness of its theoretical implications and without reference to the theoretical works that had stronger impact in other Latin American countries, particularly Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela.25When La Tribuna Nacional employed the language of progress, it stressed that it should not be reduced to material development, roads and bridges, immigrants and credit, or railways. Instead, by progress it referred to the moral development of the people. Progress went well beyond material gain: it fostered an individual work ethic, respect for the law, and love of peace, thus strengthening society’s conservative feelings for leading an orderly life.26 Progress also had positive political consequences, reflected in the institutions that individuals built for themselves: modern societies developed the wisdom to implement good laws and in this way distinguished themselves from backward countries through their capacity for reflection and through government accountability.27La Tribuna Nacional proceeded from a view of human nature that was by then well established: that men are internally torn between passions and interests. The effects of progress — on individuals, societies, and institutions — arose from the disciplining effect of economic development on men’s passions.28La Tribuna Nacional insisted that these passions represented men’s dark destructive tendencies — negative impulses that expressed themselves through politics and were channeled through the political parties. Politics was responsible for destruction, hatred, and war. La Tribuna Nacional argued that the current government was successful because it sustained that the destructive political passions could only be tamed by developing society’s conservative interests. Moral progress would be brought about through material progress and not the other way around; it was through economic development that civilizations were built.29According to La Tribuna Nacional, this far-reaching impact of economic progress began to be felt in Argentina in 1880. Previously, politics had consisted of violence, intolerance, and disorder; every attempt to build good and stable institutions had perished in the flames of political passion fanned by the parties.30 However, only two years after Roca had assumed the presidency, La Tribuna Nacional confidently announced that an inalterable peace prevailed throughout the country; governors, senators, and deputies were regularly elected in all provinces without violence and coercion. The old politics of intolerance and hatred had given way to mutual acceptance and understanding. “[E]ach passing day, intransigence disappears, tensions are dissolved, and resistance is eliminated.” By fostering commerce and industry, the government had eradicated the foundations for anarchy and put an end to “politics as drama. . . . There are no more idle multitudes plotting revolts.”31In the government’s public discourse, progress not only brought peace and civilization but also fostered civil and political liberties. Modern economists, La Tribuna Nacional argued, taught that freedom and the rule of law were the result of economic progress. It was not the case that economic development could take place only when the law and civil and political liberties were respected; in fact, it was love of work and caring for one’s enterprise that led people to appreciate the advantages of order, good government, and personal freedom. “[G]reater guarantees and liberty exist among the people where work habits are more developed and where the fruits of industry are more abundant,” while “these values are more precarious . . . where the revitalizing currents of progress have not yet penetrated.”32 Thus, in the PAN’s discourse, the meaning of progress was broad and its effects far reaching. Progress contributed to the development of people’s work habits, fostered love of order, helped to establish good governments with just laws, and brought about peace and liberty.Naturally, La Tribuna Nacional’s discourse hailed Roca as singularly responsible for the arrival of progress. Roca had “given national activity a new and fertile direction in the glorious and peaceful feats of work and progress, converting the energies that used to be wasted on bloody destructive struggles into an element of life and reproduction.”33 These achievements were all the more impressive, La Tribuna Nacional insisted, when viewed against conditions between independence and 1880. The newspaper proclaimed its own vision of Argentina’s history, beginning with an appalling colonial legacy that “left us with neither political education, orderly habits, regular institutions of government, a proper legislative system, love for work, commerce, nor industry,” followed by repeated attempts at state building, each of which had been immolated in the flames of political passions, “a history of infighting, misfortunes, and martyrs” that led the country from the horrors of anarchy to the clutches of tyranny.34 Even when most basic problems appeared to have been resolved with the adoption of the 1853 constitution, years of potential progress were wasted as bloody revolutions erupted, inaugurating a period of misfortunes that reached its peak in the confrontation of 1880.Fortunately, the last of Argentina’s great problems had found a permanent solution, and the generous sentiment of nationalism triumphed over malicious localism. This happy ending to Argentina’s tortured tale was, according to La Tribuna Nacional, authored by General Roca. Thanks to Roca and his party, the country had left behind the “age of inexperience” and successfully reached “the age of reflection and calm . . . which eliminates chimerical abstractions, which runs from dangerous illusions and seeks practical solutions.”35 The country had entered a stage similar to that of mighty nations that had made the great leap from the Middle Ages into modern times.In La Tribuna Nacional’s version, Argentine history was marked by a series of peculiar characteristics. It was not a story of state building in which a group of men fought against adversity to construct a nation, as we see in the narrative of the U.S. Founding Fathers. Instead, the central protagonist was Progress itself, struggling to clear a path against the obstacle of political passion. La Tribuna Nacional’s historical vision served many purposes. The most obvious was to highlight the Roca administration’s achievements each day through a detailed list of the fruits of progress purportedly enjoyed since the first day of his presidency. This discourse of a Roca-led period of greatness, honor, and triumph in contrast with a dark past demonstrates, above all, the urgent need to legitimize the new government. Roca’s reputation would be built on a disjuncture between past and present. In this discourse, Roca did not intend to build on the work of his predecessors or improve upon any enterprise in process before he came to power. The newspaper did not present the PAN as a party with a prestigious lineage and roots in previous presidencies. On the contrary, it was heralded as a completely new and modern organization, founded at the beginning of 1880 with no contact with the past. The past was portrayed as at once near and distant — chronologically near but distanced by the breach between backwardness and progress.The discourse La Tribuna Nacional unfurled to legitimate the Roca presidency was not limited to saluting the arrival of progress and recounting its effects, however. It also sought to build the president’s reputation based on his strict compliance with the constitution in his exercise of power, a strategy developed in response to opposition attacks.36 As we shall later see, La Nación rejected the PAN’s ideas on progress and questioned Roca’s legitimacy, while El Nacional charged that his administration had violated the spirit of the constitution. La Tribuna Nacional’s constitutionalist rhetoric centered on three key features of the institutional system that the opposition had targeted: (i) the principle of representation, (ii) the role of political parties, and (iii) the federal system of government.37(i) One of La Nación’s main criticisms of the Roca administration was that, from the moment of his election, Roca had violated the principle of representation. According to the paper, Roca’s candidacy had been imposed by a League of Governors over the will of the people, and since entering office, he had used fraud to manipulate the electoral system. In order to avoid reopening wounds that Roca preferred to let heal, La Tribuna Nacional’s defense of the president sidestepped the circumstances surrounding the 1880 election. And although it did not deny the existence of electoral fraud, La Tribuna Nacional insisted that such irregularities had been a constant aspect of the electoral process. The paper asked, “[A]re we to be told that there used to be an old and sound, established education in politics, a tradition of clean suffrage that was lost with the country’s moral and political development?”38 If La Nación challenged the government on the grounds of electoral fraud, La Tribuna Nacional contended, it was only to justify Mitre’s decision to abstain from the polls, a stance devised to mask the disarray within his own party ranks. The paper reprinted complaints of fraud from previous elections, as well as similar accusations made in the United States, England, and Spain, to support the claim that fraud was pervasive and unexceptional.39While the opposition blamed Roca for the electoral wrongdoings, La Tribuna Nacional instead blamed an uneducated populace, ripe for exploitation by the parties themselves. Under Argentina’s system of universal male suffrage, La Tribuna Nacional estimated that 75 percent of the electorate was illiterate, a situation the parties exploited to their own ends. After long and repetitive editorials on the subject, La Tribuna Nacional concluded that the solution was not to change electoral laws or restrict the vote but rather to educate the electorate. Roca’s administration, it claimed, was doing more to improve the situation than previous governments, opening the gates to progress that would enable the necessary gradual improvements.40Elections in Argentina were necessary but not yet sufficient to legitimate the victorious candidate and did not provide a framework for the consensual transfer of power from subjects to rulers.41 Thus, La Tribuna Nacional sought to legitimate Roca’s presidency by appealing to the constitutionality of his exercise of power. “The Constitution,” the paper stressed, “guarantees freedom of thought, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of industry, freedom of government, etc. Is any one of these liberties suspended or suppressed in the Republic?”42 Time and again, La Tribuna Nacional appealed to the “inverted principle of representation” by which the sovereignty of the people is guaranteed through the exercise, and not the source, of a government’s power. “Legislation, government initiatives, congressional debate, and the relentless work of the executive are not elements produced by tyrannies, imported to the country like manufactured goods, or the product of imaginary visions, but the expression of the public sovereignty in whose name we rule. This is the representative system from the point of view of universal doctrine and from the point of view of our organization.”43(ii) La Tribuna Nacional also sought to teach citizens and opposition parties that old political practices were incompatible with the new, “Modern” Argentina. The country had set out on the road to progress in 1880, and politics should function to smooth out that road by preempting potential factional conflicts. Those who viewed politics as a dispute between the “truth and error, between good and bad,” had been confused by “one of the most absurd sophisms invented by political passion.”44 The opposition mistakenly thought that public agitation was synonymous with political freedom. On the contrary, public agitation “interrupts the course of the economic and moral interests of the country, ends stability and safety, and suspends all legal safeguards.”45 Instead, it was necessary “to humanize the political struggle and the impatience of the political parties, and to spread more rational and practical concepts.”46 Since politics existed to resolve practical questions, political parties were to have a more limited role. The PAN defined them as “associations of an incidental kind,” necessary only to support electoral campaigns. After the election, political parties should be dissolved until the next election “in order to return peace to society . . . which cannot withstand the unnecessary strain for very long.”47However, while La Tribuna Nacional envisioned a more modest role for political parties in the new era, it also held that they did have a central role to play in the republican form of government.48 Political parties, “far from being an evil or a symptom of weakness, are a prime condition of freedom . . . the same way that uniformity and public indifference are signs of oppression.”49 The models for what political parties should look like were to be found abroad, in England and the United States. There, La Tribuna Nacional claimed, parties forced governments to be accountable and contributed to the political debates of their times. La Tribuna Nacional begged Argentine political parties to transform themselves from vehicles for personal passions and tools of destruction into prime elements of republican government and tools of institution building in the country.50(iii) La Tribuna Nacional examined the federal system in detail, mainly in response to its opponents.51 As we shall see, El Nacional decried that the provinces had increasingly lost their autonomy under a system of one-party rule and as a result of the centralization policy that Roca had pursued. Against this charge, La Tribuna Nacional insisted that Roca showed the utmost respect for the principle of “self-government” in the provinces, pointing to the relatively small number of federal interventions that had taken place under his administration.52 However, La Tribuna Nacional also hurried to explain that this did not mean that the president restrained himself from exercising influence in the internal affairs of the provinces — only that he chose to do this by other means he considered more legitimate. He provided personal advice to his friends in the provinces, and, in cases of serious conflict, his policy was to seek a solution outside the institutional arena. For example, when a revolt broke out to overthrow the governor of Corrientes Province in 1882, Roca went personally to see to the matter and mediated an agr