organized, engaged in and won a great battle for the cause of democracy…. The need to walk five or ten kms. to keep an appointment with their own honor as citizens didn’t scare away men and women determined to much more than that….”21 The newspaper La Prensa observed that the streets of Buenos Aires had never witnessed such a large crowd. 17 October was going to rival this crowd as in a contest. Both crowds fought for freedom, but freedom meant different things to the two social groupings. The middle class wanted freedom of speech, an end to the state of siege, and the restoration of civil liberties. The freedom of the working class was emancipatory, observed Luna, “to look upon the foreman as an equal, to feel protected by the union representative, not to hear every moment the bark of misery….”22 17 October was thus an outpouring of feelings of oppression by the working class in rivalry with the middle class.
How did the participants experience 17 October as a crowd? Canetti has suggested that, “It is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it.”23 17 October was not by chance both a celebration and a riot. Just like in carnival, it became a ritual reversal of hierarchy and an expression of equality. Working-class people appropriated a public space that had been the privilege of “decent people,” the gente decente who had demonstrated on 19 September. They did so in defiance of established codes of dress and conduct as they danced in the streets in their working clothes, and refreshed themselves in the fountain of the Plaza de Mayo.24 Seen from Canetti’s perspective, the mixture of violence and elation is therefore not as contradictory as it might seem. The 17 October crowd was not one homogeneous mass but was comprised of several crowds with several causes and objectives. Many celebrated the freeing of Perón, others experienced a sense of personal dignity, while still others turned with violence on the symbols of oppression. The violence was an expression of anger directed at the sources of subjugation. The euphoria came from the removal of the stings of command, and the sense of equality that was experienced in the crowd. These feelings became inscribed in people’s crowd memory and touched each following Peronist crowd with its mythic unity and aggrandizement.
Why did the founding myth of Peronism as a spontaneous movement in search of Perón become hegemonic, despite many indications to the contrary? Belief in a spontaneous mobilization is most attractive from a political perspective and most persuasive emotionally. It invokes effervescence and feelings of equality which only derive from the crowd itself, not from external forces. Understandably, the evocation of the spontaneity and equality of 17 October gave way to nostalgia when the political fortunes of the Peronist movement turned, when demands were no longer met, and the overall living conditions of the working class worsened. Peronists of succeeding generations continued to long for another 17 October of fraternization, hope, and dignity that became so indispensable to the Peronist identity.
Politically, the myth was attractive because it could accommodate various interpretations that suited Peronist leaders, supporters, and opponents alike. Each party to the event cherished its own account of the mobilization. Union workers considered the demonstration as the purest expression of the popular will. The rank and file recognized themselves in the throngs of ordinary people accompanying them to the Plaza de Mayo. In turn, Peronist union leaders saw 17 October as legitimizing their pivotal role in the Peronist movement by channeling the feelings of discontent into an organized protest. Perón himself stated that the Day of Loyalty took place because he had prepared the Argentine working class for his leadership. The spontaneous mobilization was his harvest.25 Surprisingly, the Peronist founding myth was also embraced by anti-Peronists. For the opposition, the protest was ominous evidence that a political movement could either turn into tyranny or mob rule. This hostility to Peronism was fed by a fear that popular crowds were driven by deep-seated irrational and violent instincts. Perón’s opponents portrayed the 17 October crowd as irrational, primitive, and moved by bestial outbursts.26 In sum, 17 October 1945 could readily be interpreted in different ways. Competitive versions of crowd conceptions must be examined further because the post-World War II crowds became such formidable players in Argentine politics from then on.
The Fear of Popular Crowds
The perception of the crowd as either a mass of people ruled by a strong leader or a mob threatening the established order has been common among political philosophers since antiquity.27 This fear was given a theoretical foundation during the late nineteenth century, when mass psychologists like Tarde and Le Bon reflected on the political significance of the riots and insurrections of their times. Their ideas about the irrational and violent nature of popular crowds found willing ears in a turn-of-the-century Argentina where labor unrest was growing rapidly, and combative unions were being formed. In 1899 the physician José María Ramos Mejía published his book The Argentine Crowds. Ramos Mejía relied heavily on Le Bon. He drew an analogy between the individual and society, comparing the crowd with the body and the elite with the brain. In addition, he associated the crowd with madness and the elite with reason, concluding that “the day when the rabble is hungry, the organized socialist crowd will be relentless, and the leading agitators will be the perfect example of this virulent mob that will contaminate everything.”28
These ideas pervaded Argentine police and justice departments. The image of a violent and culturally regressive crowd threatened to become reality as Argentine workers were becoming a distinct, class-conscious sector of society. Argentina was modernizing rapidly, attracting many European immigrants between 1865 and 1880. Exiles from the Paris Commune established an Argentine branch of the First International in 1872, and workers began organizing themselves in unions, boosting their demands with strikes and street protests. Anarchists and socialists multiplied during the last decade of the nineteenth century, and raised the class consciousness and combativeness of the workers.
A second immigration wave between 1900 and 1908 brought nearly two million people to the shores of the River Plate. These impoverished Europeans added social ferment to the labor movement. They had fled economic exploitation, and arrived in Buenos Aires with high hopes, only to find a sprawling capital in which workers received no better treatment than in their homeland. Political agitation and street protest were forms of resistance familiar from the old country.29 The working class was coming of age, and popular crowds had become such a force in twentieth-century Argentine politics that Hilda Sabato talks of a “culture of mobilization” among disenfranchised Argentines. The streets and squares of Buenos Aires became “an arena of mediation between certain sectors of civil society and political power, through which relatively large numbers of people were involved in various forms of politically consequential public action.”30
These mobilizations did not arise exclusively from a disaffected working class but were also organized by the middle class demanding universal suffrage for all men. This right was finally gained in 1912. In other words, there existed among the ruling elite a great suspicion of crowds in general, but of working class crowds in particular because of their revolutionary potential. Confrontations with the guardians of order were just a matter of time as the police began to fight strikes and protests with increasing force.
The first major strike was in 1902. The repression of the 1909 May Day celebrations led to the death of a dozen workers, and renewed protests in 1910 made the authorities declare a state of siege in Buenos Aires.31 The police repression of striking metal workers in January 1919 cost the lives of four men. The confrontation by army and police of the protesters accompanying the funeral killed around thirty workers during what became called the Tragic Week (Semana Trágica).32 At this time, workers were already carrying banners which demanded “dignity,” a slogan that became Perón’s rallying cry.
It was the fear of either mob rule or the manipulation of the masses by a dictator that frightened the middle and upper classes most, only months after the Allied victory over fascism in Europe. Thus, the 17 October 1945 protest did not come unexpected, while the ideas of Le Bon and Ramos Mejía about the irrationality of crowds provided a scientific framework to explain the events. The panicked reaction by some cabinet members on 17 October,
