Navy Minister Admiral Vernengo Lima ordered an army captain to shoot at the crowd, but War Minister Avalos refused to ratify the order. General Avalos believed that the people would disperse quietly once word was out that Perón had been released.33
The negotiations between Colonel Perón and General Avalos during the late-afternoon of 17 October are unknown but possibly they agreed that only Perón’s able manipulation of the crowd might avoid street violence and prevent a radicalization of the working class. The military’s fear of a violent crowd taking revenge for Perón’s political death was greater than the price of his reinstallation. Their belief in the likelihood of a social revolution had already been exploited by Perón in 1944 when he explained to Argentine industrialists how his aggressive policy of unionization had rescued the working class from the clutches of communist agitators.34 Still, however opportune the temporary alliance with Perón might have been on 17 October 1945, the fear that some day he might incite these workers against the established conservative forces, or that the masses would disentangle themselves from his control, kept feeding the mistrust of Peronism among the elite and the majority of conservative military officers. Their understanding of crowds convinced them that this fear was justified when Perón tightened his grip on Argentine society, and the violence surrounding his fall from power in 1955 made them feel that their suspicion had been right all along.
Perón and the Masses
Perón’s appearance at the balcony of the presidential palace at the Plaza de Mayo on 17 October 1945 was certainly one of the greatest political comebacks in Argentine history. His political career had begun three years earlier after a sojourn in Italy as a military attaché to the Argentine embassy in 1939 and 1940. Upon his return to Argentina in December 1940, he became a military instructor in Mendoza, and was assigned in March 1942 to the inspectorate of mountain troops in Buenos Aires.35 Once in the capital, Perón founded a secret military society called the United Officers Group (Grupo de Oficiales Unidos). It consisted of twenty officers who were strongly anticommunist, wanted Argentina to remain neutral in the Second World War, and were appalled by the fraudulent politics of President Ramón Castillo. The Castillo government was overthrown in the coup of 4 June 1943, that would be the springboard for Perón’s rise to prominence.36
Perón’s leading role in the military lodge and his support for General Farrell as Minister of War in the new cabinet of General Ramírez resulted in his 7 June 1943 appointment as Undersecretary at the War Ministry. However, it was his appointment on 27 October as head of the National Labor Department that would bring Perón his greatest political windfall. He transformed the regulatory agency into the Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare, and won the trust of the unions by taking their demands seriously. Farrell replaced Ramírez in February 1944 as Argentina’s president. Perón became the new Minister of War, and was appointed as Farrell’s vice-president in July 1944.37 His sympathy among the working class and the political support from the labor unions were to be decisive when oppositional forces succeeded in ousting him from power on 9 October 1945.
Perón’s rise from army instructor in 1941 to president-to-be in 1945 was meteoric. How much of the military instructor was still in him when he assumed power? How did he perceive his role as a national leader, and what was his relation to the working class? These questions are important to understand the Peronist movement, the suspicion of his control of the working class among his opponents, and the factional struggle that would lead three decades later to an incipient civil war.
Perón’s acquaintance with fascism during his 1939–1940 stay in Europe has often been mentioned as a formative influence on his political style and ideology.38 Perón was proud of his alleged contact with Mussolini, and may have even heard of his admiration for the French mass psychologist Le Bon. The sight of Mussolini’s rallies must have convinced Perón of the transformative power of crowds.39 Even after his fall from power in 1955, Perón’s faith in the historical destiny of the masses remained firm. He wrote on 14 September 1956 from his exile in Caracas: “The Russian Revolution, Mussolini, and Hitler demonstrated to the world that the people and especially the organized masses are the politics of the future with which they buried the political parties that the countries still preserve as a vice from the twentieth century.”40 The crowd was for Perón the acme of the masses, and became a crucial weapon at decisive moments in his political career.
Perón saw it as his mission to prevent the radicalization of the Argentine working class. He rejected communism but also capitalism. Perón pursued a Third Position (Tercera Posición) that opposed class conflict and pursued social justice through a pact of capital and labor. His stay in Europe had made him realize that the political emancipation of the working class was an historical inevitability, and that unions were playing a growing role in achieving social demands. The simultaneous rise of fascism and communism taught him the important lesson that organization superseded ideology in mobilizing the masses. After all, both movements had equally drawn on the working class. As Perón wrote: “Le Bon anticipated us quite some time ago: ‘The age we are entering will truly be the “age of the crowds.’” ‘The destiny of nations is not created through the advice of princes but in the soul of crowds.’ ‘The divine right of crowds will replace the divine right of kings’, etc.”41
Le Bon’s crowd theory had a great influence on Perón, whereas the works by Ramos Mejía and Taine were widely read in the nationalist circles of the 1930s that influenced Perón.42 Like Le Bon and Ramos Mejía, Perón believed that the popular masses would turn violent without a leader, especially when they formed a crowd. “When a mass does not have any sense of leadership and one abandons it, it is not capable of going on by itself, and great political cataclysms will follow.”43 This view is consistent with his 1944 warning that an unorganized, inorganic mass is a dangerous mass. Since masses are by nature impulsive and destructive, they need to be educated to become organized masses. This education is the task of a leader, “because the masses do not think; the masses feel and have reactions that are more or less intuitive or organized.”44 When he became Secretary of Labor in 1943, Perón set himself the task to curb the potential violence of the masses and use their force to achieve long-term objectives. The spontaneous crowd had to be domesticated and harnessed into the mold of the Peronist hierarchy. Perón perfected his mass control upon his political rebirth on 17 October 1945.
Perón drew on his military experience for political leadership, and perceived a structural similarity between the army and the organized masses.45 He emphasized qualities like discipline, obedience, loyalty, camaraderie, and modesty, also found in the military, but set these in an emotional frame that exalted the honor and dignity of the Argentine worker. Part of his appeal came from tapping into and voicing the hidden injuries and injustices, resentment and exploitation of the Argentine working class.46
Perón did not want to instill workers with a combative class consciousness but to inculcate a leader-crowd model that stimulated their personal identification with him as their leader. “The first thing one has to do,” Perón said, “is to awaken the sense of leadership in the masses. People can be better led when they are willing and prepared to be led.”47 Perón set out to disseminate his political doctrine among the Argentine workers and inculcate his ideas during crowd assemblies.
The complexity of Perón’s political philosophy consists of his emphasis on both the equality of all Peronists—and by extension all Argentines—and on their fundamental hierarchical dependence on Perón and the party structure through unquestioned loyalty and discipline. Perón wanted to create an organization in which “there is nothing better for one Peronist than another Peronist.” He tried to tie followers to him as their leader, while at the same time presenting himself as one of them, very much as a commander calls himself above all a soldier. The refrain of the Peronist march sums it up best: “Perón, Perón, How great you are. My General, how valuable you are. Perón, Perón, how great you are. You are the first worker.” As a general, a soldier, and a worker, Perón institutionalized the
