In the Shadow of Batlle: Workers, State Officials, and the Creation of the Welfare State in Uruguay, 1900-1916
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IN THE SHADOW OF BATLLE: WORKERS, STATE OFFICIALS, AND THE CREATION OF THE WELFARE STATE IN URUGUAY, 1900-1916 by Lars Edward Peterson B.A. History, B.A. Spanish, University of Arizona, 2004 M.A. History, University of Pittsburgh, 2006 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2014i UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Lars Edward Peterson It was defended on March 31, 2014 and approved by George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of History Patrick Manning, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History, Department of History John Markoff, Distinguished Professor, Department of Sociology Richard Oestreicher, Associate Professor, Department of History ii Copyright © by Lars Edward Peterson 2014 iii IN THE SHADOW OF BATLLE: WORKERS, STATE OFFICIALS, AND THE CREATION OF THE WELFARE STATE IN URUGUAY, 1900-1916 Lars Edward Peterson, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2014 The welfare state, and expanded social provision by national governments, is one of the most important political, social, and economic phenomena of the twentieth century. Uruguay was the first country in the Americas to establish a welfare state and among the first in the world to do so. This dissertation will argue that workers had a deep impact on Uruguayan politics in the early twentieth century. As their power increased, politicians responded to labor’s demands while attempting to channel workers into an orderly political process. I highlight the growth of workers’ power in many different ways. First, I show how workers developed their many critiques of modern industrial life–in essence, how they articulated demands. Second, this dissertation charts the development of Uruguay’s earliest labor bills—a process for which social Catholic militancy deserves credit. Third, I describe anarchism—the ascendant ideology among workers at the turn of the twentieth century in Uruguay—and its partial accommodation to welfare state- building through populist politics. Finally, this study analyses parliamentary discourse to show the increase of politicians’ fear of labor’s power, their legislative responses, and their other motivations for establishing a welfare state. Workers’ impact on the course of reform legislation reached a peak in 1916 when they initiated a series of strikes to correct the inadequacies of one of the country’s first labor laws: the eight-hour workday. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................... viii CHAPTER ONE: URUGUAY’S WELFARE STATE: BATLLISTA POLITICS, WORKER POLITICS ...................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER TWO: REGENERACIÓN SOCIAL: RELIGION, FAMILY, VICE, AND THE MAKINGS OF A JUST SOCIETY IN URUGUAY .......................................... 24 CHAPTER THREE: SEMBRANDO UNA SEMILLA, LANZADA UNA SEMILLA: SOCIAL CATHOLICISM AND EARLY LABOR LEGISLATION ........................ 61 CHAPTER FOUR: FROM ANARCHISTS TO ‘ANARCO-BATLLISTAS’: POPULISM AND LABOR LEGISLATION IN URUGUAY ................................... 105 CHAPTER FIVE: “ENCAUZANDO” “EL PRINCIPIO DE LA SOLIDARIDAD”: LABOR LAW’S DISCOURSE, PASSAGE, AND PRACTICE ............................... 139 APPENDIX A ................................................................................................................ 184 APPENDIX B ................................................................................................................ 185 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 186 v LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Roxlo and de Herrera Labor Bill (February 1905) (Blanco Party) ................................110 Table 2. Roxlo and de Herrera “Revised” Labor Bill (June 1905) (Blanco Party) .....................112 Table 3. Uruguayan Labor Legislation: A Timeline, 1903-1916 ................................................184 Table 4. Labor Bills Introduced in the Chamber of Representatives, 1917-1919 .......................185 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 ......................................................................................................................................... 54 Figure 2 ......................................................................................................................................... 55 Figure 3 ......................................................................................................................................... 56 Figure 4 ......................................................................................................................................... 57 Figure 5 ......................................................................................................................................... 58 Figure 6 ......................................................................................................................................... 59 Figure 7 ......................................................................................................................................... 60 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks are in order for making this dissertation possible. I am grateful to my committee for their mentorship over the years: Patrick Manning, Richard Oestreicher, John Markoff, and especially my committee chair, George Reid Andrews. A special thanks to Patricia Vargas, the rest of the staff at the Fulbright office in Uruguay, and for my fellow researchers, Kate Mallula and Flora Lindsay-Herrera. While doing research I benefited from the help of Carlos Zubillaga and Ana Frega at the Universidad de la República, and of Universindo Rodrígruez Díaz, librarian at the Uruguayan National Library. I will always be indebted to the many fellow graduate students I have met and collaborated with through my studies. These include (but are not limited to) Suset Laboy Perez, Kavin Paulraj, Matt Casey, Isaac Curtis, Roland Clark, Keyon Zimmer, Natalie Kimball, Oscar de la Torre, and Alyssa Ribeiro. Thanks to my parents, Grant and Stella Peterson, and to my great uncle and great aunt Walter and Ponjita González for all of their help. I must also thank the many friends and a few significant others without whose support I could not have completed this dissertation: Karen Oen Balensiefer, Jared Ondvchk, Jesse Hanley, Daniel Hatfield, Hillary Lazar, Hatem Hassan, Marie Skoczylas, Matthew Rutherford, Parker Shaw, Amorette Coral Sherwood, Maryann Ullman, and Shamon Ecung. viii CHAPTER ONE Uruguay’s Welfare State: Batllista Politics, Worker Politics The welfare state, and expanded social provision by national governments, is one of the most important political, social, and economic phenomena of the twentieth century. During the first half of the 1900s, state officials around the world dramatically shifted the function of states to include the role of caretaker. States, of course, continued to be guarantors of internal order and dispensers of discipline. But a host of political forces empowered them with the additional role of managing and facilitating the health and wellbeing of citizens. State structures began to recognize an ever-expanding list of rights that legislators, bureaucrats, and the police were meant to safeguard. Some of the first rights recognized by states were those asserted by workers. These included rights to sufficient rest, to equitable pay, to organize, and to safer working conditions. This dissertation examines the origins of the welfare state in Uruguay, the first country in Latin America to undertake comprehensive social and labor reform and one of the first in the world outside of Europe to do so. Uruguay provides an ideal test case to answer a basic question about the rise of such states: were they created primarily as the result of initiatives by political and state elites, of pressure from employers, of demands by workers and their unions, or through some combination thereof? The Rise of the Welfare State. An extensive literature suggests that welfare states develop in response to the challenges posed by economic modernization. Examining the cases of Germany and England, E. P. Hennock finds that 1 the State became a welfare state because it increasingly dealt with the social consequences of the way in which modern industrial capitalism was established. These consequences, often described as ‘externalities’, resulted from the narrow definition of the legal obligations of capitalist entrepreneurs, which contrasted with the obligations imposed on entrepreneurs in the older corporatist economy. This emancipation of the entrepreneur was a deliberate act of State, undertaken in the interest of increasing ‘the wealth of nations’ and therefore the power of states over other states.1 As Patrick Manning and Aiqun Hu argue, the idea of social insurance—which arose in Germany in the 1880s—quickly attracted the attention of state officials in other countries, including Uruguay. Following World War I, and especially after World War II, most countries around the world implemented systems of social insurance (most followed the German model while some favored the Soviet one). But while ideas for these new programs spread quickly, it was national dynamics that determined the timing of their implementation.2 Daniel Rodgers similarly found that in