1913 Read online

  A newly arrived Briton in Buenos Aires, though a member of a British community which numbered only in the tens of thousands, could find corners of the city where he or she was quite at home. On Calle San Martín, the Phoenix Hotel declared itself ‘The English Hotel of Buenos Aires’.22 The suburb of Belgrano was colonised by wealthy British families. In the docks, the majority of ships bore the British flag, and were manned by British sailors – to which locals ascribed the disproportionate number of arrests of Ingleses for public drunkenness.23 Elsewhere around the city, on dates fixed months in advance, British businessmen, clerks and doctors met discreetly in one of Buenos Aires’ seventeen Freemasons’ lodges, which bore names such as Albion, King Edward VII, Victoria and Star of the South. Buenos Aires boasted a few dozen British schools, a British hospital – believed by the British, of course, to be the best in the city – and an English Club. The Buenos Aires branch of Harrods department store, combining convenience with British style, was operated, the English-language Buenos Aires Herald noted, ‘as at home … the absence of petty molestations at the hands of shop assistants greatly appreciated’.24 Empire Day celebrations in 1913 confirmed to a local English reporter that ‘sentiment towards the Motherland and the Empire is truly alive in Buenos Aires’.25

  Remarkably for such a small community, British influence on the sporting life of Buenos Aires was considerable. Quite apart from cricket – which was sufficiently popular in the city to lure the most famous cricket team in the world, that of the Marylebone Cricket Club, on a tour there in 1912 – the Argentine Football Association was in 1913 presided over by a Briton, Hugo Wilson. A series of English football teams had visited in recent years: Southampton in 1904, Nottingham Forest in 1905, Tottenham Hotspur and Everton in 1909. In 1912, Swindon Town beat San Isidro Athletic Club, the Argentine national champions, 4–1. On the water, the British Buenos Aires Rowing Club dominated, having beaten the German R. V. Teutonia in the HM German Emperor’s Cup three years in a row. The Hurlingham Club, home of Argentinean polo, opened its doors in 1889 and benefited for a while from its own railway station. It set the tone for a combination of British sport and sociability.

  Outside the sports clubs, the banks and the railway companies, however, it was Latin-accented influences which prevailed in Buenos Aires. Upper class Porteños, renowned for their sartorial splendour, tended to be Spanish-speaking Argentineans of long standing, a small elite of a few thousand families who lived in the centre of the city, around the Plaza de Mayo, as they always had – and increasingly in the Barrio Norte a few blocks away. These, along with the fabled rural gaucho, were the carriers of Argentinean tradition, from the European settlement of the country in the sixteenth century to the wars of independence under Belgrano and San Martín and the celebrations of Argentina’s centenary in 1910. They were also the country’s major landowners and conservative political elite. Their social preserve was the Jockey Club – founded by a future President of Argentina in 1882 – where the wealthy men of the city would dine at widely spaced tables covered with sparkling white linen table cloths and gleaming silver cutlery, while discussing the country’s political and economic future, which by and large they felt was theirs to determine.26 Argentina, as they saw it, was by right their country; Buenos Aires was their city.

  The British population was negligible compared to the communities from other European countries, which comprised by far the larger part of the foreign-born residents of the city, half of the city’s overall population and two-thirds of its working-age men.27 One and a half million Italians, as well as over one million Spaniards, had streamed over the Atlantic to Argentina over the past quarter-century. Though a number returned home within a few years, disappointed with the reality of economic opportunities for workers (as opposed to investors) in Argentina, many stayed, living in the houses by the Buenos Aires waterfront or in the tightly packed tenements (conventillos) in the centre, or in more outlying low-rise barrios. These areas were a constantly changing patchwork of Piedmontese and Neapolitan, Castilian and Andalucian, where the dialect spoken varied from street to street. On carnival week, when the local and Latin immigrant population took to the streets with gusto, the British drew down the shutters. In 1913 the Buenos Aires Herald criticised the carnival festivities for their ‘rowdyness’ and ‘disorder’, launching a broadside against the licentiousness of the Venetian-style masked ball held at the Tigre Hotel.28 The Standard was similarly scathing of events elsewhere:

  The Argentine newspapers refer with satisfaction to the ‘enthusiasm’ which prevailed, but, unfortunately, this degenerated into disorder in some parts of the city, particularly in Calle Independencia at the corner of Catamarca, where two men persisted in throwing water on passers-by (formerly a general custom during Carnival); the police interfered, the delinquents were supported by a crowd of people, revolvers were used, and two policemen and numerous other persons were wounded, the unfortunate policeman mortally it is feared.29

  Such things would not happen in a British city, the newspaper implied. Latin passion had got the better of the crowd.

  In its grander parts, the feel of the city recalled the influence of France. This was most obvious in the fondness for official buildings in the French Beaux-Arts style, though Clemenceau noted a more recent ‘epidemic of Italian architecture’, highly decorative, with ‘astragals and florets amid terrible complications of interlaced lines’.30 The statuary of the city – hastily erected over the past quarter-century in order to provide Buenos Aires with a suitably noble-looking set of heroes – was mostly in the French style, soaking up the surplus sculptors of the French Republic, and adorning the city’s numerous parks. Buenos Aires’ cafés brought to mind those of the Grands Boulevards, its bookshops were stocked with the latest French literature, and its department stores with the latest French fashions. Each morning, as part of her toilette, a leisured Porteña might apply to her neck a few dabs of French perfume – more heavily taxed than in the past, noted angry newspaper columns – before breakfasting on medias lunas (croissants).31 No wonder Buenos Aires was proverbially known as the ‘Paris of Latin America’. Some went further. Playing to the crowd, a visiting American, James Logan, vice-president of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, put things somewhat differently: ‘Paris’, he told an appreciative after-dinner audience, ‘is the Buenos Aires of Europe’.32

  It was gratifying for Porteños to hear the praise of European or American visitors. It was just as gratifying for European visitors from countries such as France to find in Argentina such a dynamic Latin-dominated country. Here lay the Latin world’s future, and a reservoir of influence on which the older Latin countries could perhaps draw in the future. Georges Clemenceau noted that ‘we French have allowed ourselves to be outstripped in economic affairs’ in Argentina as elsewhere. But, he comforted himself, the French still had ‘a patrimony of moral authority’.33 The original emblem of the Argentine Republic had borne a Phrygian cap, the symbol of the French revolution. Giving a lecture, in French, on the subject of democracy, the publisher of Zola’s J’Accuse found that the Porteños understood him perfectly. ‘By the grace of winged words’, he wrote, ‘the mind of France has flown across the ocean, and we may rejoice in the fact and found great hopes for the future on it.’34

  If France could not outstrip British investment, it could nonetheless endeavour to convince Argentineans of France’s cultural authority, a claim to leadership through aesthetics rather than through money. In 1910, the French Ambassador had penned letters back to the foreign ministry in Paris recounting his attempts to influence an Argentinean jury to choose a French entry in a competition for a new centrepiece monument to the Argentinean revolution of 1810, to stand in the middle of the Plaza de Mayo – the heart of the city, the centre of national attention. A French sculpture, it was felt in Paris, would not only confirm the supremacy of French art, but act as a permanent reminder of Argentina’s political inheritance, much as the Statue of Liberty in New York was intended to remind Amer
icans of what they owed France in their own War of Independence.35 The French foreign ministry trembled at the thought of a German victory in the competition.

  In the end, after much prevarication, and an extension of the shortlist from five to seven, the Argentinean jury selected an Italian entry designed by Gaetano Moretti. This was acceptable, thought the French; it was a Latin victory, after all. An alternative Franco-Argentinean monument was erected on the Plaza Francia, a Marianne-like figure representing France bearing a torch of liberty, leading two girls and a young boy towards the republican enlightenment which France still claimed to embody.

  Moretti’s obelisk, meanwhile, was delayed year to year. Three years after the centenary had passed, in 1913, it amounted to no more than some foundations in the middle of the Plaza de Mayo and special reinforcements of the subway tunnel below.36

  Perhaps an unfinished sculpture more eloquently described the Argentine nation in 1913 than a completed project would have done. What was the Argentine nation, after all? Who was the Argentine nation? Many Argentineans were indubitably proud of their country, both of its past and, more particularly, what they deemed to be its inevitably bright future. Travelling the country, Clemenceau remarked upon the ‘rabid Argentinism’ he found there, and the ‘inherent jingoism’ of the country’s people.37 There was the perennial rivalry with Chile to stoke feelings of nationalism, as well as competition with Uruguay and Brazil. British ownership of the Falkland Islands was hotly contested. A particular state-sponsored reading of Argentine history was evident in Buenos Aires’ statues, and in the textbooks of the country’s schools. ‘There is a stereotyped ideal of Argentine History which must be adhered to … to depart from this is regarded as an educational crime’, editorialised the Buenos Aires Herald, ‘it would be an actual crime if any Argentine personage … were to be represented as other than a whole-hearted patriot and a hero’.38

  Yet having thought it through, many new residents of the country chose not to become Argentine citizens, preferring to remain legally French, Italian, Spanish or German. Their affiliation to the Argentinean state was muted. Unlike in the United States, where the acquisition of citizenship was considered a mark of success, opening the way to greater opportunities ahead, foreigners felt they had little to gain from Argentinean citizenship. They already had the right to own land, and to travel freely. To many, citizenship simply conferred the dubious right to be conscripted into the Argentinean army. And although some nationalists railed against the failure of immigrants to be naturalised as Argentineans – periodically suggesting enforced naturalisation and Spanish classes to remedy the matter – the arrangements ultimately suited many conservatives. Why needlessly introduce a new element into the country’s political system through the grant of citizenship, by which men (but not women) would acquire the right to vote? Foreigners could remain foreigners if they wanted. The political status quo would be retained.

  As it was, though elections were held in Argentina, the process of voting in public meant that those in power were in a strong position to ensure that the voters followed their line. ‘The Government is republican in name’, wrote Lloyd in 1910, ‘but the elective principle is largely farcical, and the executive power is as autocratic as that of Central Europe’.39 Politics continued to be dominated by the elite, with political bosses – caudillos – running the show in the provinces. For those in charge, the system seemed just fine. Argentina should be led from above, by the old Argentinean elite. Why change?

  But the pressures on the country’s political system were increasing. Opposition demands for reform were accompanied by occasional bouts of political unrest, as in 1892 and 1905, sometimes with the support of sections of the army. As conservatives saw it, dangerous political ideas – including socialism and anarchism – were being imported from Europe alongside much-needed labour. Labour unrest, culminating in the first Argentinean general strike of 1902, had brought the fear of violent social revolution to the River Plate, and the question of how to prevent it.

  Initially, the preferred strategy of the government was one of concerted oppression, imposing martial law and closing down the opposition press, both socialist and anarchist. In 1902, the Law of Residence allowed the state to deport foreigners it deemed troublemakers. But strikes and protests continued. In 1907, tenants of 1,000 Buenos Aires conventillos refused to pay their rent. May Day demonstrations drew large crowds. In 1909 the chief of police in Buenos Aires, Ramón Falcón, was assassinated. In 1910, the celebrations of the centenary of the Argentinean revolution were disrupted by strikes. Clemenceau was in Buenos Aires when a bomb was thrown into the Teatro Colón. This kind of thing was bad for business, potentially frightening off investors. In an attempt to split off relatively moderate leftist opposition from more intransigent anarchists who opposed voting on the basis that it legitimated the state, President Roque Sáenz Peña proposed and pushed through a new law in 1912 allowing for universal male suffrage, obligatory voting and a secret ballot. It was a historic reform. Now, perhaps, the Argentinean nation could begin to be built not from the top down, but from the bottom up.

  There were still deeper questions lurking behind the grand façades of Buenos Aires in 1913: for whom was the country really run? The great mass of Argentineans or foreign investors? ‘Is Argentina as bright as it is painted?’ asked the Herald of its readers in October.40

  Americans in 1913 worried about the overweening power of a money trust of Wall Street squeezing out Main Street in favour of large companies controlled by the banks. In Argentina, locals complained about a meat trust, driving down the price of meat sold abroad to win market share, and driving up the price of meat sold in Buenos Aires. ‘Small wonder that we unfortunates who dwell in this land of plenty have to thank our stars if Bones the Butcher can let us have a bit of scraggy cow beef, miscalled steak, at the paltry price of $1 to $1.50 the kilo’, wrote one journalist.41 What was good for the average consumer in Europe, it turned out, was not necessarily good for the locals in Argentina.

  And while the very name ‘Argentina’ suggested silvery wealth, many who lived in Argentina were struggling, unable to realise their dreams. ‘The poor immigrant has an enormous struggle to raise himself above the condition of a serf’, wrote John Foster Fraser, having continued his travels from Australia to Argentina.42 Another writer, an English engineer travelling around Latin America, noted the same phenomenon, blaming ‘land monopoly, reckless finance … [and] the unscrupulous use of the country’s credit for promoting schemes for the benefit of monopolists or private companies, rather than the public’.43 In the countryside, most of the best land was already taken by large private landowners. Unlike immigrants to Canada, most immigrants to Argentina ended up working the land for others, or trying their luck in Buenos Aires. In the city, working class Porteños made a habit of dressing smartly to keep up appearances of affluence, wearing frock coats and ties as they rode the tram to work at five or six in the morning. But such attire, aspiring to middle-class gentility, was quickly abandoned at the docks or the railway yards, where grubby overalls were more suited to the ten hours of underpaid back-breaking labour ahead. May Day demonstrations in Buenos Aires were not simply the creation of foreign agitators, as some conservatives seemed to think; they were also the product of an unequal society, a society which seemed stuck. The national lottery, avidly played by poorer Porteños, was perhaps the best substitute for the aspirations of advancement slowly eroded by the reality of Argentinean economic life on the ground.

  ‘Sir –’, wrote Harry Jenkings to the Herald, ‘I have often wondered when I have read in your columns the extravagant encomiums lavished upon this country by exalted personages … whether those exalted personages have entirely forgotten the warning … “All is not gold that glitters”’.44 While it was certainly important to keep Argentina shining in the minds of foreign investors so as to keep their money flowing in, the glare of the elite’s conspicuous wealth, on display in the grander streets of Buenos Aires, could bli
nd outsiders to a worrying catalogue of unresolved problems:

  To those of us who have lived in Argentina a few years it is irritating to read, for example, that the Lord Knoosoo, after being whirled round the Port of Buenos Aires has expressed unbounded admiration of all that he has seen at a time when the mercantile community have been clamouring at the delays suffered by shipping through local mal-administration and when Insurance Companies have declined to accept responsibility for goods deposited in the Customs Houses owing to a succession of fires attributed to interested incendiaries. It is equally painful to hear Her Grace the Duchess of Timbucto declare after a motor tour extending from the Avenida de Mayo to the Hippodrome at Palermo that there is no crime, no poverty, and in short nothing undesirable in this modern El Dorado.

  A closer look at the newspapers revealed a popular obsession with violence and petty crime. For immigrants, life in Argentina was tougher than many anticipated. Disappointment could be in store for investors, too, warned Jenkings: ‘I believe that Argentina has reached its climax, that its “phenomenal progress” is a thing of the past … and that henceforth its advance will be by arithmetical, not geometrical, progression’.45 Perhaps Argentina’s destiny as a wealthy, powerful nation – like Moretti’s monument – was to be delayed after all.