The Coming Crisis
This notion of Crítica as an expression of the collective citizenship of the urban popular classes represented a particular—and particularly lucrative—solution to a fundamental dissonance that the industrialization of the press and the concomitant expansion of political participation had created: by the 1920s what the press was had shifted dramatically; notions of what the press should be had changed little. On the one hand, the set of relationships between journalists, newspapers, and public had become increasingly mediated by commercial exchange rather than participation and representation, while the very scale and capital-intensive nature of the Buenos Aires newspaper industry exceeded what nineteenth-century Argentine liberals might have conceived. On the other, the underlying ideological and juridical bases of journalism practice had remained centered upon a conception of the press as the privileged forum for the public expression of opinion. How could Argentines exercise their rights of expression through the press in a socially meaningful way if the means to do so remained beyond their reach? Could the affective bonds between Crítica and its audience and the supposedly rational link between the so-called serious press and its public effectively create a truly representative public sphere? Did the rights of citizenship in relation to the press rest solely upon the right to consume accurate information? In short, who embodied the rights of the press: journalists, proprietors, or members of the public?
Yet self-proclamations of Botana’s paper as the collective voice of Argentine workers rested on more than the pervasive use of the underworld lunfardo dialect in the pages of the paper, the distribution of sewing machines from the newspaper’s offices, or Crítica campaigns in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti or striking news vendors. No less than the more explicitly liberal journalistic philosophy behind La Prensa, La Nación, and the Círculo de la Prensa, Crítica’s claims also rested upon the continued viability of a broad consensus around the utopian notions of egalitarian, democratic representation that they invoked. Ironically, it would be Crítica itself that would figure among the chief instigators of the 1930 constitutional rupture that put that consensus to the test.
Indeed, the multiple crises of the 1930s would witness a serious erosion of the political and economic liberalism upon which the entire spectrum of the Buenos Aires commercial press rested. Although the industrialization of the Argentine press had created a newspaper industry whose economic complexity and internal divisions surpassed anything imaginable by the drafters of the 1853 constitution, these contradictions remained largely latent in the 1920s. As competing conceptions of the proper relations between state and civil society gained ground in the following decade, however, the liberal ideological hegemony that undergirded traditional press relations with the national state came under concerted and direct attack from powerful sectors of Argentine society. At the same time, growing class tensions within the journalism profession—a manifestation at once of the press’s industrial transformation as well as of the more general elevation of social conflict in Argentine society—would ultimately prove difficult to contain within the logic of a mutual aid society model that did not differentiate between newspaper proprietors and working journalists. The entire network of relationships that constituted the “fourth estate” underwent a profound transformation in the first decades of the twentieth century; the political and ideological maelstrom of the 1930s would only begin to lay bare the deep fissures in those relationships that this process had engendered.
2
JOURNALISM AND POWER IN THE IMPOSSIBLE REPUBLIC
The appearance of a newspaper should be an occurrence of interest in society … precisely because a newspaper forms part of nothing less than the “power of the state,” of those tacit powers of the state.
—Senator Matías Sánchez Sorondo, June 7, 1934
Journalism can never be a function of the state.
—La Nación, October 7, 1933
The military movement that ended the presidency of Hipólito Yrigoyen rode a broad wave of support. For months the Yrigoyen government had failed to respond to the first devastating moments of a world economic crisis that threatened to undermine the foundation of the political opening that had brought his party to power fourteen years earlier. At best, the agonizing disarray of the administration only seemed to confirm the dangerous ineptitude of the Radical Party’s Yrigoyenist wing; at worst, it signaled the ultimate consequences of an inherently decadent political liberalism that right-wing Argentine Nationalists had denounced since the 1910s.1 Sectors of the military, Nationalists, Anti-Personalist Radicals, Conservatives, rival factions of Socialists, and, perhaps most vocally, Natalio Botana and Crítica, formed a common front for the ouster of the aging president. On September 6, 1930, the first military coup in modern Argentina met little resistance.
The breadth of the political convergence that toppled Yrigoyen, however, belied the depth of agreement surrounding the goals of the “September Revolution.” For de facto president General José F. Uriburu and his closest allies, the movement was to be more than a simple change of administration. They viewed the chaos of the final year of Yrigoyen’s government as the disastrous but logical culmination of the 1912 Sáenz Peña Law’s expansion of suffrage and thus as an indication of the need to transform Argentina’s “individualist democracy” into a corporatist-inspired “functional democracy.”2 Convinced of the inevitability of their own victory, the de facto authorities held elections in the province of Buenos Aires in April 1931, only to find far too many Argentines unprepared to jettison constitutional liberalism in favor of the corporatist vision advocated by Uriburu. Even worse, provincial voters seemed unwilling to abandon en masse the party of Yrigoyen. The electoral defeat quickly and publicly splintered the anti-Yrigoyen alliance that had brought the military to power. Having revealed their own lack of public support, the de facto authorities called national elections, and, in February 1932, Uriburu passed the presidential baton to his rival, General Augustín P. Justo, a coconspirator in September 1930.3
The failure of the Ubriburu experiment reveals that if, as Mariano Plotkin and others have shown, a prolonged crisis of liberalism had permeated the country since the late 1920s, that crisis was as ambiguous as it was profound.4 The shattering of a liberal consensus that had buoyed Argentine political and economic life since the 1880s did little, in itself, to establish the legitimacy of competing projects like that of Uriburu and his allies. In addition, the stubborn refusal of the Radical Party and its popular base to accept the fall of Yrigoyen as a terminal defeat collided with the equally determined coalition of forces united by little more than a shared resolve to block the Radical’s full resurgence. This impasse found a curious solution: a liberal democracy sustained through thinly veiled and repeated electoral fraud.5 By 1935, even the defeated Radicals had resigned themselves to participation in what Tulio Halperín has called an “impossible republic”: one whose political order, for its own continuity, “saw itself obliged to systematically violate the principles invoked as its source of legitimacy.”6
The survival of constitutional liberalism as the normative basis for the Argentine political order after 1930, however, owes as much to the ideological breathing room ceded by liberalism’s own malleability as it does to the failure of rival political projects. Indeed, core conceptions of liberalism retained their broad appeal and political utility not despite, but because of their sustained modification by a set of basic pressures: government attempts to generate popular acquiescence to authoritarian and semiauthoritarian rule; the increasing appeal of expanding state power as a pragmatic response to the world economic crisis; repeated attempts by the political Right to forge an alternative project; and the heightened class tensions that accompanied the country’s