Sowing “Seeds of Goodness” in Depression-Era Chile: Politics, the “Social Question,” and the Labor Ministry's Cultural Extension Department

Abstract

A contributor to La Lei, the journalistic mouthpiece of Chile's reformist Radical Party, attended a peculiar cultural event on a mild spring evening in 1909 that evidently made quite an impression. Workers with their spouses and children, all donning their best suits and dresses, had gathered in one of the capital's dance halls to enjoy what the onlooker grasped as an evening of “aesthetic enjoyment without ostentation.” As the writer noted, “For three hours I was enchanted by the order, by the discretion, by the culture of the dancers. [The cultured worker] is a natural friend of order, he does not let himself be convinced by high-sounding words, nor does he accept subversive ideas; the revolutionary preaching of the Utopians and those without spirits repulse him. He loves tranquillity and has a profound respect for republican laws. A man of this nature is not only a pillar of our democracy but also an unceasing producer of wealth and social well being.” What the writer recognized as “culture” evidently was conducive to the perpetuation of liberal democracy, the defense of the economic order, and the preservation of social peace during the so-called Parliamentary Republic (1891-1925). Indeed, if workers were culturally educated, if they properly understood, imitated, and enjoyed a “mainstream” culture, they would be less apt to engage in disruptive political endeavors, or so it was suggested in La Lei.