Reinventing the Nation: The Generation of the Centenary and the Rise of Nationalism in Argentina By William S. Janover Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts In the Department of History at Brown University Thesis Advisor: James N. Green April 3, 2015 Acknowledgments This thesis would not exist without the help of people from people as far away as Buenos Aires and as close as down the hall. In Argentina, Hernán Camarero, Daniel Mazzei, Miguel Galante, my professors at the University of Buenos Aires, first taught me about their country’s complex, dynamic history. Soledad Zapiola and Mario Goloboff of the Museo Casa de Ricardo Rojas were instrumental to my primary research in Argentina. In the United States, Professor Ethan Pollock has not only been an excellent leader of the Brown History Department’s honors program, but he also has helped build a community of thesis writers for which I am very grateful. Both the History Department and the Dean of the College’s office provided essential funding for my work in Buenos Aires this past February. I also want to thank Professor James Green for his work as my advisor. Every Brown student should be lucky enough to have such an involved mentor; it is remarkable what can come from a professor taking a little interest in a wide-eyed first-year. Lastly, I want to thank my friends, family, and all those who supported this thesis in the smallest, yet most important ways. Your kind words of encouragement or interest kept me writing even when the task before me seemed insurmountable. Introduction: An Underappreciated Generation A hundredth birthday is always a momentous occasion. For a person, it is a time of reflection and appreciation: reflection on all one has seen in a century of life, and appreciation for having been blessed with such good health. Almost without exception, such an event is cause for celebration. But how does a nation celebrate its hundredth birthday? When the United States honored its centenary in 1876, it received the Statue of Liberty as a gift from France. The country hosted a World’s Fair, the Centennial Exposition, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was a self-congratulatory look at the progress the United States had made since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Exposition’s Main Hall was full of industrial marvels, including a Corliss steam engine from Providence, Rhode Island that generated enough electricity to power the entire fair.1 An entire section of the Exposition was called Machinery Hall.2 The most popular and most important exhibitions were technological marvels the likes of which the general public had never seen before. The United States had turned the city of Philadelphia into a giant telescope into the future. The Centennial Exposition was the symbolic announcement of the country’s arrival on the global stage. Historical Context But not all nations’ centennials become causes for such boisterous celebration. Argentina celebrated this milestone in 1910, the anniversary of the May Revolution. On May 25, 1810, prominent lawyers, businessmen, and soldiers in Buenos Aires voted to remove Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros, the head of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata and representative of the Spanish 1 Michael Vorenberg, “‘The American Civil War’ Lecture” (Providence, RI, December 1, 2014). 2 J.S. Ingram, The Centennial Exposition Described and Illustrated (Philadelphia, PA: Hubbard Bros., 1876), 601. 1 Empire, from power.3 Argentina’s inaugural domestic government, the First Junta, replaced him. Two years later, an Argentine general named José de San Martín led an army across his homeland and into Chile and Peru, winning a string of victories against the Spanish armies that were supposed to keep order in the colonies. In 1816, Argentina officially declared its independence at the Congress of Tucumán. By 1822, San Martín had liberated all three countries that he had marched through in partnership with Simón Bolívar. The story of Argentina’s independence is as unlikely and inspiring as the United States’ victory over the British Empire. What happened after independence in the two countries, however, could not be more different. Whereas the United States established a republican government less than a decade after the Revolutionary War ended, Argentina limped through a series of civil wars as the old Viceroyalty broke apart and upstart generals sought to carve out their own personal fiefdoms. Though the country would eventually consolidate itself and begin to develop economically in the 1850s and 1860s, the founding of Argentina still represents a sort of historical trauma to many. In the wake of this turbulent beginning, Argentina’s leaders in the second half of the nineteenth century obsessed over the need to modernize the country. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Juan Bautista Alberdi, and Bartolomé Mitre dedicated their lives to turning Argentina into a world power modeled on the great empires of Western Europe and North America. They would become known as the Generation of 1837. They helped write the country’s first constitution and established the political culture that would predominate there for the next half century. The Constitution of 1853 institutionalized liberal values modeled on those of the United States, and Argentina’s presidents dedicated significant resources to attracting immigrants and investment from Europe. Only with new sources of labor and capital, so it was argued, could the 3 Though the May Revolution took place in Buenos Aires, the Viceroyalty included parts of contemporary Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil. 2 country develop quickly. The vast majority of these new resources became concentrated in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, much to the chagrin of residents of the provinces of the interior. Nevertheless, the liberal development model seemed to be working. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Argentina was receiving immigrants at annual rates that only the United States and Australia could match, and the country’s impressive exports of meat and grain had brought it immense wealth.4 In the span of just a few decades, Buenos Aires had transformed from an only-barely-post-colonial backwater to a proud emulator of the architectural and cultural customs of Europe’s great cosmopolitan capitals. The city now hosted some of the Argentina’s first factories. One could hear Arabic, Russian, Italian, and Yiddish on streets that, just a few decades earlier, only Spanish-speakers (and some English-speakers) used to call home. This rapid modernization was cause for celebration in 1910. Argentina’s government even mimicked the United States in putting on a centennial exposition. The International Centenary Exposition opened on the anniversary of the May Revolution and ran through November of that year. Argentina received numerous distinguished visitors from abroad, including Isabel, Princess of Asturias of Spain and Chilean president Pedro Montt.5 The Exposition was to symbolize a new era of international cooperation for Argentina. On April 5, the first trans-Andean rail tunnel opened, making travel and trade to often-rival Chile much easier.6 When Princess Isabel arrived in Buenos Aires, crowds greeted her with shouts of support for the embattled Spanish monarchy: “Long live Spain! Long live the Republic of Argentina! Long live King Alfonso XIII! Long live the Spanish Army!”7 For the Exposition, the 4 David Rock, Argentina, 1516-1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 167. 5 Horacio Salas, El Centenario: La Argentina en su Hora Más Gloriosa (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Planeta Argentina, 1996), 95-101. 6 Ibid., 76. 7 Ibid., 100. 3 government built four massive pavilions celebrating the country’s fine arts, hygiene, railroads, and agriculture respectively. Together, these pavilions symbolized the great progress Argentina had made in the past hundred years. Its agriculture and railroads represented the country’s astonishing economic growth in recent decades. Its hygiene pavilion was an emblem for its civilized, clean citizenry. For a city that had weathered a devastating yellow fever outbreak in 1871, this pavilion in particular was to represent the dramatic progress the country had made in such a short time.8 Its fine arts pavilion was to be proof that Argentina had constructed a well- rounded, cultured nation. The International Centenary Exposition ushered in a new sense of patriotism and pride in Argentina’s history. Not all Argentines, however, were pleased with the state of their country. Labor unions from the country’s nascent industrial sectors, led by anarcho-syndicalists who were mostly European immigrants, used the International Centenary Exposition as a global stage on which to air their grievances. Following a major suppression of union activity the prior year and the passage of a Residency Law in 1902 that gave the federal government wide authority to deport “undesirable” immigrants without due process, workers were especially agitated and desperate for a victory.9 During the Exposition, one of Argentina’s largest unions declared: “The only celebration we can have in the centennial parties” is one that “will be commemorated with the conquest of more freedom.”10 Workers planned a general strike for May 18, just a week before the centenary itself, unless the government revoked the Residency Law. With the eyes of the world fixed on him, Argentina’s president, José Figueroa Alcorta, cracked down on the 8 David Rock, Argentina, 143. 9 David Rock, Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History, and Its Impact (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 58. 10 Salas, El Centenario, 85. 4 protestors. He declared a state of siege on May 14 and threw countless workers in jail.11 Just over a week before the celebration of Argentina’s freedom from Spain, the country’s government had violated the freedom of many of its poorest citizens, the vast majority of them immigrants.