The war and post-war period of rapid inflation, which was the most important conditioning factor on politics during Yrigoyen's presidency, ended with the post-war depression in 1921. The economic background to the next six-year presidential term was depression followed by a prolonged phase of recovery which lasted until 1929. Although there was a recession in 1925, foreign trade and exports averaged out over the period as a whole above the levels they had attained immediately before the war. During the 1920s agricultural production did not expand as rapidly as during the pre-war period. There was little land left to bring into production, and there was no major investment programme to increase productivity by any great amount. In part such investment was discouraged by signs of changing patterns of world demand for agricultural products. Before 1914 the great boom had occurred mainly with cereals. In the affluent 1920s a shift developed towards meat. This meant the gradual replacement of cereal production by cattle farming, and a correspondingly greater prevalence of extensive farming. Although it went largely unperceived at the time, the 1920s was a period of incipient stagnation in the export economy. This began to encourage efforts at economic diversification.

As before 1914, Argentina's imports were generally higher than her exports, and the deficit was covered by new injections of foreign capital. Of this, however, a growing proportion began to come from the United States.

The general course of Argentine politics after 1916 was shaped by the relationship between successive Radical governments and the conservative elite groups which they replaced. The election victory won by the Radicals in 1916 appeared initially a reflection of the capacity of the traditional ruling class for retrenchment and self-preservation. Although the original objective of creating a majoritarian conservative party along the lines laid down by Pellegrini and Sáenz Peña had failed, and direct control over the administration had passed into new hands, there was no reason to believe that the real power of the elite had disappeared or diminished in any significant way. The army and navy had the same commanders as before 1916. The major lobby associations representing the elite's interests, such as the Sociedad Rural, were still intact. Also, powerful members of the elite still retained their positions of close contact with the foreign business groups.

The Radical government in 1916

In many respects the oligarchy appeared to have merely changed its form. In Yrigoyen's first cabinet in 1916, five out of the eight ministers were either cattle-owning landowners in the province of Buenos Aires or closely connected with the export sector. The minister of finance was Domingo E. Salaberry, who was involved in exporting, banking and real estate. The minister of agriculture, who later became minister of foreign affairs, was Honorio Pueyrredón, a major landowner and patrician from the province of Buenos Aires.

The third national census of 1914 contains sufficiently detailed data on occupation and nationality to make possible a number of generalisations on the social and class structure of the city's male population in 1914. There are two principal difficulties which ought to be borne in mind in these calculations. The first is that the census is frequently unreliable. For example, in the listed occupations for the province of Buenos Aires, there appear exactly 500,000 persons described as occupationally ‘unspecified’. The problem does not occur on this scale in the federal capital, though there are undoubtedly some errors. The second difficulty is that the census provides no indication of the class position of each person within each occupation. This has to be done by a process of elimination, and on occasion by rather crude estimates. The principal difficulty lies in estimating the size of white-collar groups. For the industrial sector, which was on average very low-capitalised, the proportion of white-collar workers has been estimated at 15%. For the more highly capitalised transport sector, it has been estimated at 20%. Both these figures may be rather high.

At a glance the employed male population of Buenos Aires falls into six groups. At the top of the social scale were the rentier groups, formed mainly of urban or absentee landlords and their dependants. Next were the professional classes, civil servants, officers of the armed forces, lawyers, doctors, educators, writers and artists.

During the first half of 1919 the tensions between the government and the conservative elite over the strike question produced a number of complex situations in which two major political crises can be discerned. These called into question the whole scheme of representative government introduced by the Sáenz Peña Law in 1912. They brought to a head the issue of the real location of political power, and in doing so they further exposed the weak objective supports for the changes Yrigoyen had tried to implement. For the first time the armed forces were brought directly into politics as arbiters over the fate of a civil administration. Also 1919 saw the emergence of a new popular alliance, the Argentine Patriotic League. This, if not directly or openly antagonistic to Radicalism, was controlled by the conservative elite groups, and in a position to exercise decisive leverage over the government.

On several occasions in 1919 the Radical government was forced to struggle desperately for survival. It finally managed to do so, though it was compelled to abandon the genuinely progressive aspects of its policies. Increasingly, on a whole series of fronts, and most notably in its relations with foreign capital, it was coerced into returning to the established moulds of the past. By the end of the year its attempt to change the position of the unions had almost entirely collapsed. Finally, the government was compelled to make a number of major readjustments to its techniques for dealing with the mass electorate.

The Unión Cívica Radical, the Radical Party, played a key role in pressuring the conservative elite into reform measures in 1912. Four years later, when the party won control of the presidency, a different era began in Argentina politics. Radicalism was the first major national political party in Argentina and among the earliest of the Latin American populist movements. Its central importance stemmed from its role as an agent of political integration, pursuing the broad objectives established by the reformers of 1912. In view of its later relationship with the urban middle class, it is important to see, however, that the party began in the 1890s as a minority splinter group from within the elite. Only later, after the turn of the century, did it develop its populist features when it evolved into a coalition movement between the elite sector and important segments of the middle classes. In the twenty-five years between 1891 and 1916 there were four major stages in the party's development: 1891–6, 1896–1905, 1905–12 and 1912–16. Its growth may be traced during these different periods from a number of separate perspectives: the party's composition and the extent of its popular support, and secondly its organisational features and regional connections.

The origins of Radicalism

During the first period up to 1896, the party was led by Leandro N. Alem. This coincided with the rebellions of the 1890s when a succession of attempts were made to overthrow the national government.

The central theme of this book is the political inter-relationship between different social classes in Argentina during the mature phase of the primary export economy in the forty years up to 1930. I have adopted for analysis four major groups: the landed and commercial elite of the pampas region, foreign capital, as represented mainly by British interests, the urban middle class and the urban working class, both mainly in the city of Buenos Aires. Broadly I have attempted to explore the distribution of political power between them and the mechanics of their political interactions with each other. I have also tried to show why attempts to introduce a stable institutional relationship among them eventually failed.

Secondly, the study analyses the development of the Argentine Radical Party between its foundation in 1891 and the overthrow of the third Radical government in the military coup of 1930. This is an attempt to trace the development of Argentina's first major popular movement, the specific social conditions which underlay its growth, the reasons why the movement gained prominence during this period, and what it meant in terms of the benefits and advantages to specific class and regional groups. I was greatly tempted to employ the term ‘populism’ to describe the structure and appeal of Radicalism. It would have been useful in describing the integrative, polyclasist characters of the movement, its tendency to maintain its unity by focussing attentions onto its leader, Hipólito Yrigoyen, and its use of mass mobilisation techniques of a kind which have become increasingly familiar in Latin American politics.

The term oligarchy refers both to the landed and commercial elite described in the last chapter and to the system of government which prevailed in Argentina up till 1912. The accuracy of the term is greater in the latter sense than in the former. It was certainly ‘government by a few’, though not always the same few were in power. To some extent power rotated among different factions, which represented different interests within the elite. Occasionally such differences were regionally based, at other times they were associated with specialised activities within the elite, for example, commerce, or the two main types of cattle-ranching: breeding and fattening. The term oligarchy is perhaps also misleading in that it suggests a complete homogeneity in the composition of the elite between different periods. This is more true of the period after 1900 than before.

The classic period of oligarchy as an institutional system was during the thirty years after 1880. The concern of the elite for control over the State was dictated by the role of the national government as a major source of credit and as a bridge for lucrative contacts with foreign capital. There was also great concern to maintain political stability, because, as events earlier in the nineteenth century had shown, stability was necessary for the attraction of both capital and labour into the country. The result of this was that the elite itself became very highly politicised, but at the same time it strove to keep other groups out of politics in order to minimise possible destabilising influences.

The early history of the urban working class in Argentina is well documented at the level of the major events in which the workers took part, but there is very little systematic information on the development of working class social conditions. Partial or impressionistic data on wages, factory and housing conditions is readily accessible, but it has never been processed sufficiently to allow for any more than generalisations on the basic questions of workers' standards of living, or the manner in which standards of living evolved in terms of such variables as the economic cycle, immigration, foreign investment and overseas trade. The general picture emerging from this period is that while working class social conditions in Buenos Aires, particularly housing, left much to be desired, average wages compared well with many parts of Western Europe, and there were relatively better opportunities in Argentina for social mobility. On the other hand towards 1910, as the frontier disappeared and land became scarce, opportunities for the immigrants declined markedly. The other major factor to be borne in mind was the high level of aspirations among the immigrants, and the great premium they placed upon social mobility. Although social mobility did occur, there were many signs that it was insufficient to satisfy aspirations fully. One final point is that many of the immigrants were previously peasants, and a part of their behaviour in Buenos Aires may be attributed to the difficulties they encountered in assimilating into an urban capitalist culture.

The presidential elections of 1928 were Yrigoyen's greatest personal triumph. Yet within less than two years, on 6 September 1930 he was ignominiously overthrown by a military coup d'état. The crowds in Buenos Aires which had given him such fervent support in 1928, now ransacked his house and, for a time at least, acclaimed the new revolutionary government. The situation which developed in 1930 was thus in some respects similar to that in 1919. The government's popular support suddenly drained away and shifted towards new structures of mass organisation. As in 1919, too, these were led by the army, with the conservative elite in close attendance. Another common feature between the two years was the temporary character of the shift. By 1920 the Radicals had recovered sufficiently from the threat posed by the Patriotic League to win a strong majority in the congressional elections held that year. In 1931 the same occurred when they won the election for governor in the province of Buenos Aires. The difference was that in 1919 Yrigoyen had managed to forestall a coup d'état, whereas in 1930 he failed completely.

The composition and policies of the new government

In 1928, as a result of the party split of 1924 and the failure to reach agreement with Alvear, yrigoyenista Radicalism pivoted more closely than ever before on the support of the urban middle class groups.

The revolution of 1930 revealed that if Argentina's politics had acquired certain hybrid qualities during the previous forty years, the supremacy of the landed and commercial elite of the pampas had not diminished in any substantial way. The coup swept away the impression that because of the introduction of representative government and the rise of yrigoyenismo, power had passed from the elite into new hands. It restored a close and identifiable relationship between economic power and formal control over the State.

Yet this is only partly the story, and it fails to reflect the central transition which had occurred during the previous forty years. In 1890 there was only one relevant political constituency, the elite itself. During the political struggles of that year segments of the elite in the Unión Cívica may be glimpsed fruitlessly attempting to prod the urban middle classes into political activism in their support. But when the crisis of the 1890s passed, stability was restored by a number of factional covenants exclusively within the elite. In 1919 by contrast, and particularly in 1930, the situation had radically changed. The elite was compelled to weigh the position of the urban middle class very carefully, and seek its support before being able to act against Yrigoyen. Had, for example, Generals Justo and Uriburu attempted to prevent Yrigoyen's reelection in 1928, they could well have been faced with a popular counter-revolution.

In an article on the relations between the Radical government and the major domestic beef interests, Peter H. Smith has strongly stressed the elements of continuity between the pre- and post-1916 periods. He concludes:

Much of this is upheld in Chapter 1: the Radical Party was a coalition of groups which, for both producer and consumer reasons, upheld the primary exporting economy; the character of the country's development precluded the development of the classic land–industry conflict apparent in many of the industrialised countries.