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 rapid economic reorientation. A wounded liberalism staggered on as the dominant language of the political sphere and the republic’s guiding political philosophy, owing much of its resilience to its own rearticulation, equivocal transformation, and regular transgression in practice.
These convulsions of the social order with which the Argentine commercial press was linked from birth sent shock waves throughout the press’s entire network of relationships. The rapid expansion of the Buenos Aires press in the previous decades had placed the newspaper industry at the heart of social communication and the generation of public consent, while the shattered political consensus and disintegrating party structures of the 1930s made the press increasingly valuable as an instrument in factional disputes. Yet changes in public attitudes toward the relative legitimacy of journalism, together with a generalized—and well-founded—public suspicion of the political process, precluded a simple resurrection of the factional press. The power of the commercial press as a shaper of public consciousness, unlike that of its nineteenth-century counterpart, rested in good measure on its perceived autonomy from specific factional struggles. Nonetheless, by the late 1920s, the consolidation of the commercial press had created the conditions for a new and potentially more effective model of factional journalism: now, instead of politicians delivering a convinced public to a newspaper on the basis of shared partisanship, powerful commercial dailies could deliver a reading public—convinced or not—to politicians. As a result, when sections of the mass commercial press became tightly linked to specific political factions in the impossible republic, the links were on a far grander scale than those of the previous century’s factional press, and based on a markedly different network of relationships between journalists, newspaper proprietors, public, and politicians.
For the press as a whole, the growing acceptance from across the political spectrum for an expansion of state power to meet the multiple crises of the 1930s clashed with key elements of the traditional consensus around press rights and prerogatives. The brief experience of corporatist dictatorship under General Uriburu brought a sudden imposition of an unexpected, if temporary, level of state restrictions on the commercial press. The replacement of that dictatorship by a sham democracy did little to guard the press’s underlying juridical principles from constant threat. At the same time, the continued periodic invocation of the state of siege, with its suspension of constitutional guarantees, made official censorship a factor in the newsrooms of all the major Buenos Aires dailies.7 While these states of siege were, by definition, exceptional and temporary responses to immediate crises, moves to permanently alter the juridical foundations of state-press relations also emerged in the course of the 1930s. Although both a legislative attempt by right-wing senator Matías Sánchez Sorondo and an executive decree of President Justo failed in the face of fierce resistance, the implications were clear: the traditional interpretation of the constitutional guarantees regarding the press that had made the Federal Capital so amenable to the emergence of Latin America’s largest commercial newspaper industry faced serious challenges.
Finally, the newspaper industry’s continued expansion placed even greater strain on traditional liberal conceptions of journalism practice and the nature of newspaper institutions. In the course of the 1930s, the growing class divide within the newsroom suddenly emerged into the open just as labor
