Barr-Melej P. Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class (ENG)

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172 Teaching the ‘‘Nation’’

citizenship. Radicals, associates of the AEN, and other leaders in pedagogy

were principal architects of this campaign for ‘‘nationalist’’ socialization,

which, in the words of AEN president and Radical Party (PR) member Dr.

Carlos Fernández Peña, sought to ‘‘lift up the hearts of our fellow citizens,

inspiring in them a love for our race.’’

∞

From their positions of inﬂuence,

middle-class nationalists lobbied for ‘‘civic education,’’ a subject with na-

tionalist overtones that concentrated on civic duties and rights, both before

and after it was approved as a required course in 1912. By the 1920s, national-

ist teachings had expanded beyond the parameters of civic education classes.

The ﬂow of ministerial directives regarding nationalist instruction reached

its zenith in 1941 with the promulgation of the Plan de Chilenidad, which

was orchestrated by the Radical-led Popular Front (FP).

It is clear that governments of different ideological persuasions from the

late Parliamentary Republic to the FP endorsed nationalist instruction in the

public classroom. Each regime, whether alessandrista, ibañista or frentista, nat-

urally had a vested interest in perpetuating the state’s authority and defer-

ence to its institutions. But because reformers, and Radicals in particular,

nearly monopolized positions of inﬂuence within the pedagogical complex

as teachers, bureaucrats, and administrators, the nationalism imparted in

public schools demonstrated a ‘‘progressive’’ inclination by the end of the

1930s. Progressives and traditionalists agreed that nationalist instruction

served to undermine working-class mobilization, but progressive national-

ists also perceived an antioligarchic dimension in nationalist instruction.

After the promulgation of the Law of Obligatory Primary Instruction in 1920,

youngsters of varying socioeconomic origin—including working-class chil-

dren—were told of their national and racial singularities. Thus, they were dis-

cursively and symbolically included in an imagined community that was cer-

tainly more democratized than the one entertained by the nineteenth- and

early-twentieth-century elite. In essence, reform-minded nationalists in ped-

agogy, like literature’s criollistas, not only sought to redeﬁne the parameters of

culture but also offered a democratized understanding of ‘‘nation.’’ Reform-

ist mesocrats, in education and elsewhere, therefore worked to rupture oli-

garchic power while they strove to build their own hegemonic project.

Civic Education and the New Citizen

Reform-minded nationalists, who saw themselves as social mediators be-

tween elements of revolution and reaction, pushed for civic education dur-

Teaching the ‘‘Nation’’ 173

ing the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century. Their efforts coincided with the

tirades unleashed by antiparliamentary nationalists and criollismo’s emer-

gence as an important literary genre. The scope of this initial campaign for

nationalist instruction was, in general, limited to secondary schooling,

which, at that time, was directed by the University of Chile (under the rector-

ship of Valentín Letelier) and its Public Instruction Council. After the ap-

proval in 1920 of the Law of Obligatory Primary Instruction, which greatly

ampliﬁed the state’s reach in Chilean society, nationalists turned to the

implementation of nationalist instruction at the primary level.

In light of the fact that secondary instruction largely remained within the

purview of upper- and middle-class youngsters during the Parliamentary

Republic, an important question must be posed: Why would the earliest

efforts to instate nationalist teachings concentrate on secondary rather than

primary schools, where most working-class children reached their highest

levels of instruction? Reformers held that achieving at least a semblance of

unity across class lines entailed more than assuaging working-class radical-

ism; it also depended on the proper socialization of more afﬂuent sectors by

way of nationalism. As the reader will recall, many nationalists, especially

those in the PR, contended that Chile’s problems largely stemmed from a

parlamentarismo perpetuated by the country’s highest socioeconomic eche-

lon. Many considered its ‘‘politiquería,’’ for example, a symptom of national-

ism’s debility. In the eyes of many nationalist detractors of parlamentarismo,

the strengthening of nationalism in the public sphere, including its rein-

forcement among young aristocrats, would therefore counteract the sys-

tem’s divisive tendencies and buttress liberal democracy. In addition, Chile’s

liceos rapidly were becoming a bastion of the urban mesocracy during the

Parliamentary Republic and thus became an important space in which re-

formers reproduced their social constituency’s worldview. Consequently,

the effort made by reformers to accentuate civic education was not entirely

altruistic but a component of a developing hegemonic project.

Although no discrete course on civic education existed until 1912, the

subject nonetheless was a component of pedagogy in the nineteenth cen-

tury, albeit in an amorphous and diffuse form. Civic education—the teach-

ing of civic rights and responsibilities, citizenship, and the state’s basic

juridical structure—played an important role in the consolidation of the

postcolonial ruling class by grooming young aristocrats for careers in gov-

ernment as presidents, ministers, ambassadors, congressional representa-

tives, diplomats, and civil servants. In this way, civic education bolstered the

state-based patriotism that permeated the upper class for much of the nine-

174 Teaching the ‘‘Nation’’

teenth century. But nationalists of the Parliamentary Republic imagined a

more ampliﬁed mission for civic education; rather than it persisting as a

contributor to the elite’s power, it was, either directly or indirectly, to be-

come a program of national relevance.

As in the campaign for obligatory primary schooling, the AEN provided

important leadership in the area of civic education and nationalist instruc-

tion. Its mostly middle-class membership, led by Fernández Peña, endorsed

civic education in the reformist press and in the AEN’s Revista de Educación

Nacional, which routinely addressed education’s link to nationalism and the

national spirit. Some of the AEN’s earliest statements regarding nationalist

instruction appeared in the PR’s La Lei, a leading critic of the oligarchy. In

late 1905, Fernández Peña and AEN secretary Guillermo González sent two

letters on behalf of the organization to Antonio Huneeus, minister of justice

and public instruction for President Germán Riesco Errázuriz and member

of the Liberal Party (PL), regarding the issue of nationalism in education.

Both pieces of correspondence, which were reprinted in the same edition of

La Lei, are excellent examples of nationalist sentiments that permeated the

mesocracy during the middle years of the Parliamentary Republic and di-

rectly inﬂuenced the education curriculum.

In one letter, the AEN complains that civic education, like public instruc-

tion in general, had not received the attention it deserved at the highest

levels of government. With a tone similar to that of Enrique Mac-Iver’s, the

Radical leader who drew attention to the nation’s ‘‘moral crisis’’ in his well-

known speech in 1900, the correspondent asserts that ‘‘one of the most

characteristic signs of the moral crisis through which this country passes is,

without a doubt, the debilitation of patriotism, the foundation of the na-

tion’s moral unity. Among many other factors, the negligence with which

the teaching of civic education has been treated in the schools, and above all

else in the liceo, is perhaps one of the most powerful determining causes of

that debilitation.’’

≤

Here, the AEN criticizes the Parliamentary hierarchy

for failing to pursue nationalist instruction in the classroom. Thus, the or-

ganization suggests that oligarchs are partially to blame for the ‘‘moral

crisis’’ that gripped the country (anarchists and communists likely were

considered two of the ‘‘other factors’’ alluded to by the AEN). The organiza-

tion also makes reference to Raza chilena, one of twentieth-century Chilean

nationalism’s seminal works, when criticizing the Parliamentary Republic’s

leadership.

The letter states that Palacios’s popular book, which had been published a

year earlier, exempliﬁes what messages should be imparted through civic

Teaching the ‘‘Nation’’ 175

education. The racial identity elaborated in Raza chilena, as previously dis-

cussed, transcended issues of class and party politics and promoted a radical

way of imagining the national community. The AEN then calls on the minis-

try’s budget commission to set aside funds to acquire copies of Raza chilena

for use in schools and for the book’s inclusion in popular libraries.

≥

The

letter, moreover, mentions an abridged version of Raza chilena that Palacios

apparently was preparing for classroom use, though no such edition is know

to have been completed before the author’s death in 1911. The association’s

proposition demonstrates that reformers understood civic education’s na-

tionalist overtones.

Another letter to the minister opens with a simple request from the AEN’s

general assembly: a government grant of four thousand pesos for the pur-

pose of supplying national ﬂags to schools of the republic. The rationale

behind the organization’s solicitation is then divulged: Chile is in dire need

of nationalism, and schools are the ideal setting for its propagation. As the

AEN explains, ‘‘The school, for the civic education it imparts to transform

the child into a citizen, may be considered a temple dedicated to the cult

of patriotism. That is how the school’s labor has been understood in the

United States, in Japan and, within the last few years, in Argentina, where

salutes to the ﬂag symbolize the cult of its institutions and the national

soul. . . . Today, as doctrines are proposed that tend to destroy patriotism,

that is to say, the nation’s moral unity, the most vital thing a nation has, this

expenditure [for the ﬂags] is necessary, as well as the prohibition of using

[the ﬂag] in any places that dishonor or stain the name of the patria.’’

∂

This

excerpt illustrates the AEN’s faith in the efﬁcacy of education and national-

ism in the creation of citizens untainted by political doctrines or activities

reform-minded mesocrats considered profane. It also indicates that civic

education existed in some form before it was established as an ofﬁcial sub-

ject in 1912, but, in the eyes of nationalist reformers, its expansion was a

pedagogical imperative. In sum, both letters convey a sense of urgency in the

face of perceived threats to Chile’s ‘‘moral unity’’ and ‘‘national soul.’’

As the AEN formulated its grim diagnoses of nationalism’s health, it

began to foster nationalism among schoolchildren without the ofﬁcial par-

ticipation of the state. In September 1905, just weeks before La Lei published

the AEN’s letters to the minister, the association joined with the Society of

Primary Instruction (Sociedad de Instrucción Primaria)—a private associa-

tion of reformist educators that established numerous primary schools

around the country during the nineteenth century—to sponsor a dieciocho

(Independence Day, September 18) celebration for young santiaguinos. This

176 Teaching the ‘‘Nation’’

‘‘ﬁesta escolar’’ was held at the Santa Lucía Theater and drew students en-

rolled in the society’s schools.

∑

It is important to note here that such celebra-

tions of important historical events were not exceptional. The dieciocho and

other festivities marking signiﬁcant episodes, including the so-called Com-

bate Naval de Iquique (a momentous War of the Paciﬁc naval battle between

Chilean and Peruvian warships) of 1879, drew large crowds, which surely

included school-age children, during the nineteenth century.

Aside from publishing the AEN’s opinions regarding civic education and

news of AEN-sponsored activities, the PR’s La Lei independently praised the

concept of nationalist instruction. In October 1907, for example, the news-

paper applauded yet another statement issued by the AEN regarding the

expansion of civic education and blamed the Parliamentary Republic’s polit-

ical climate for negatively affecting nationalism. When discussing national-

ism’s debilitated state, La Lei expressed its gratitude to AEN members for

having ‘‘identiﬁed an enemy that threatens, at its moral base, the soul of our

race [and] the Chilean nation.’’ Civic education, the newspaper explained, is

a measure that ‘‘must be realized in the schools to counteract the work of

those who demolish the ideals of the patria [and] to conserve that group of

elemental ideals and desires that constitute our Chilean soul.’’

∏

A 1909 La Lei editorial reﬂected the opinion shared by reformers that

destroyers of the ‘‘ideals of the patria’’ were not only operating within the

ranks of the working class but also were found in high society. The news-

paper lashed out against parlamentarismo’s aura of elitism, its rampant ‘‘politi-

quería’’ (to which the Radicals certainly contributed), and the absence of

political morality. The editorial explains that ‘‘the lack, or better yet, the

forgetting of the civic spirit among Chileans, which constituted one of most

accentuated and noble qualities of their temperament, has, for many years,

and is today, the cause of great errors and misguided acts. . . . It is the civic

spirit that has disappeared or has become lethargic due to sordid interest in

the fever of business, in pittance, in the joy of obtaining money by any

means, to the point of losing honor or dignity.’’

This assertion is partic-

ularly revealing. It demonstrates the consensus among reformers that an

unchecked capitalism was detrimental to the ‘‘civic spirit,’’ or notions of

unity and collective belonging. In this way, La Lei echoed Radical correli-

gionarios like Valentín Letelier who called for the state’s intervention in social

and economic matters when he promoted a socialismo de Estado at his party’s

convention in 1906. In addition, the newspaper states that ideologues with

narrow political interests, whether revolutionary or reactionary, are respon-

Teaching the ‘‘Nation’’ 177

sible for the troubles vexing Chilean society (reformers, of course, believed

their politics was in the nation’s best interest).

The AEN, with support in the reformist press, remained committed to

civic education as the Parliamentary Republic progressed. In June 1911, less

than a year after the centennial celebrations, the organization once again

complained of nationalism’s sorry state and the importance of fostering

what it called ‘‘civic virtues.’’ An editorial in the AEN’s journal, in a way

reminiscent of the letters the association sent to Minister Antonio Huneeus

in 1909, underscores the nationalism-education nexus. It explains that ‘‘if

the cult of patriotism and the qualities of citizenship somewhere have an

altar, that place must be, without a doubt, the school’’ and that the class-

room is where ‘‘the souls and minds of future citizens are shaped.’’

∫

The

tireless efforts of the AEN and other reformers ﬁnally paid off in 1912,

when the Public Instruction Council, the University of Chile’s committee in

charge of secondary schooling, approved civic education as a required course

in all public secondary schools.

Ω

It allotted two hours of civic education per

week for students in their ﬁfth and sixth years of secondary-level study

(equivalent to high school juniors and seniors in the United States). When

compared with the other core subjects, civic education was granted a signiﬁ-

cant portion of the ﬁfth- and sixth-year curricula. The natural sciences,

physics, chemistry, and philosophy, for example, were assigned two hours

each, while history and geography, foreign languages, Spanish, and mathe-

matics were each taught three hours per week.

∞≠

The measure became popu-

lar enough by 1917 to warrant the establishment of civic education as a

required course in private secondary schools as well.

The original civic education curriculum approved in 1912 by the council

was considered a nationalist project by its architects. It established outlines

for teaching the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, the constitutional

and institutional underpinnings of the republic, and the legal system.

∞∞

Domingo Amunátegui Solar, a historian and Liberal who succeeded Valen-

tín Letelier as rector of the University of Chile, later recognized the national-

ist values that were imparted to students during the early years of the civic

education program. Civic education, Amunátegui explained, combated ‘‘the

disturbing work of books, magazines, newspapers, and agitators adverse to

patriotic sentiments, which have thrown public opinion into convulsions,

not only among us, but throughout the civilized world, as a result of the

displeasing happenings of the Great War.’’

∞≤

The council immediately went about the task of training teachers to wage

178 Teaching the ‘‘Nation’’

such a war against elements ‘‘adverse to patriotic sentiments.’’ Since the

Pedagogical Institute did not offer civic education as an area of specializa-

tion before 1912, there were no teachers with special training in that subject to

ﬁll the new positions in the liceos immediately. Thus, the council drew from

a pool of social science teachers and instructors with legal backgrounds

who had graduated from the institute. One such teacher was Pedro Aguirre

Cerda, who accepted a teaching position in civic education in 1913.

∞≥

The

Pedagogical Institute, and its single faculty member assigned to civic educa-

tion, expeditiously began training specialists after the subject’s implementa-

tion (civic education constituted a ﬁeld of specialization within the ‘‘human-

ities’’ subject area, and civic education instructors received bachelor’s degrees

in humanidades rather than civic education). In 1919, a second faculty member

was added to the institute’s civic education ﬁeld.

∞∂

One of the earliest and most widely used texts for civic education, Instruc-

ción cívica, was ﬁrst published in 1917 by Amador Alcayaga and Eliodoro

Flores, both teachers in public schools.

∞∑

It touches on such topics as govern-

mental structures at all levels, the rights of citizenship, and penal pro-

cedures. Aside from explaining the legal conﬁguration of the republic, the

text quotes the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the fundamental state-

ment of the French Revolution of 1789, and the Magna Carta, which estab-

lished legal restrictions on monarchical power in thirteenth-century En-

gland. The inclusion of these texts (especially the Declaration) strongly

suggests that Alcayaga and Flores entertained a liberal sensibility—one that

saturated the largely middle-class teachers corps during the Parliamentary

Republic—that they believed should be imparted in the liceos.

∞∏

It may be

noted here that many Chilean reformers (Radicals and Masons in particular)

also fancied themselves as Latin American cousins of nineteenth-century

French Radicals.

Guidebooks for civic education teachers accompanied texts for children.

In 1920, the year in which the Congress passed the Law of Obligatory Pri-

mary Instruction, Malaquías Concha, the leader of the Democratic Party

and consistent ally of the Radical cause, published a new edition of his

Cartilla de educación cívica, which sought to inform teachers as to the subject’s

pedagogical and national value. In his introduction to the book, which ap-

parently was endorsed by the Riesco administration in 1904 (when civic

education was not a separate subject), Concha explains that ‘‘love for the

patria and of liberty, the self-sacriﬁce for the family and for fellow citizens,

the respect for law and justice, and the ardent desire to contribute to the

public good’’ are among the highest qualities any citizen may possess.

∞π

Teaching the ‘‘Nation’’ 179

Accordingly, he considered civic education a means of inculcating those

qualities in students.

The idea of patria is highlighted in the book’s ﬁrst chapter, which reads as

if it were a lecture to students (sample questions conclude the chapter). One

passage explains: ‘‘One of the sweetest and most powerful sentiments that

has always made the human heart resonate is love for the patria.’’ Another

states that ‘‘a good citizen owes all to the patria. . . . The patria has a right

to all our abnegation.’’ Concha goes on to suggest that ‘‘cosmopolitans’’

endeavor to ‘‘erase the frontiers of nations, to only love humanity as a

whole. . . . Cosmopolitanism is the indifference in matters of nationality

[and] the suppression of nationality very much goes against progress just as

the suppression of the family would as well.’’

∞∫

What follows are chapters on

national sovereignty; forms of government (democracy gets preferential sta-

tus); liberty, equality, and fraternity (again, the French Revolution is an

important theme); the constitution; the separation of powers; constitu-

tional history; and labor, which exposes Concha’s very positive appraisal of

unions.

The campaigns for civic education and obligatory primary instruction

during the ﬁrst two decades of the twentieth century should be considered

tandem elements of a nationalist mesocratic reform movement. Reformers,

in essence, recognized the link between culture, politics, and nationalism

and sought to exploit it for the purposes of ‘‘order,’’ ‘‘progress,’’ liberal de-

mocracy, and the building of hegemony. Civic education represented the

ﬁrst stage, though a somewhat limited one, of what became a substantial

program to disseminate nationalism in Chilean schools. That program,

which expanded far beyond civic education classes by the end of the Parlia-

mentary Republic, was propelled, in large part, by Alessandri’s ﬁrst admin-

istration in response to ongoing class-based tensions. But before exploring

decrees and protocols designed to enhance nationalism, we must cast our

eyes upon the streets of Santiago in mid-1920, when civil unrest reached a

fevered pitch. Amid anarchist-led demonstrations, protests by university

students, and the rumblings of reactionaries, many complained of national-

ism’s debility, and some sought a pedagogical solution to Chile’s social co-

nundrum. Civic education at the secondary level, it seemed, had not helped

stem the tide of social discord. Thus, as the Ministry of Justice and Public

Instruction began to implement the Law of Obligatory Primary Instruction,

nationalists no longer would rely on civic education as a subtle conduit of

ideology. They began to formulate measures to stimulate nationalism more

overtly at both the primary and secondary levels. All told, the campaign for

180 Teaching the ‘‘Nation’’

the ampliﬁcation of civic education undoubtedly contributed to the even-

tual development of decrees and protocols that ﬁrmly established national-

ism’s formal place in a pedagogical environment commanded by middle-

class reformers.

A Call to Arms

Hearing cries of ‘‘Viva Chile!’’ and the melody of the national hymn, the army

regiments of Buin and Pudeto, both based in the capital’s metropolitan area,

marched by cheering crowds on July 20, 1920, as the units made their way

through Santiago to the Estación Yungay train depot. The two detachments

later boarded rail cars bound for the Peruvian and Bolivian borders in the

arid Norte Grande, as had numerous other units throughout the country.

∞Ω

Only days before, Bolivian revolutionaries had seized control of La Paz,

ousted President Gutiérrez Guerra, and allegedly issued threats (supposedly

echoed by their Peruvian allies) regarding the ‘‘recovery’’ of the nitrate- and

copper-rich desert region taken by Chilean troops during the War of the

Paciﬁc.

≤≠

‘‘Natural and spontaneous’’ patriotic celebrations, as one Santiago

newspaper described them, drew thousands throughout the country despite

rumors that fears of an imminent invasion were largely unfounded.

≤∞

Scut-

tlebutt circulated that war minister Ladislao Errázuriz Lazcano, a tradi-

tionalist Liberal and a conspicuous member of the Parliamentary Republic

oligarchy, was personally proﬁting from sales of war provisions to the gov-

ernment and was purposefully dramatizing and inﬂating the Bolivian situa-

tion. A political game was afoot. Just two weeks before troops were mobi-

lized by Errázuriz, Liberal Alliance (AL) candidate Alessandri had gained a

majority of the electoral college in the presidential election but had gar-

nered slightly fewer popular votes than Barros Borgoño of the Unión Nacio-

nal (UN). Thus, as a Tribunal of Honor deliberated the ﬁnal outcome of

the contest, Errázuriz and his UN partners wisely shipped Santiago’s regi-

ments—along with their alessandrista sympathies—to a faraway place. For

these reasons the deployment became known as ‘‘Don Ladislao’s War.’’

In the end, Peruvian, Bolivian, and Chilean soldiers did not ﬁre a single

shot during the supposed standoff in the north. A different confrontation,

however, began to rage in Chile’s capital. Violence erupted in Santiago at the

height of Don Ladislao’s War when progovernment conservative youths,

revolutionary activists, and antiwar protesters with leftist sympathies (in-

Teaching the ‘‘Nation’’ 181

cluding university students) occupied the downtown area. Responses to

the events of mid-1920 expressed in the Santiago press by UNistas and

reformers—nationalists of differing stripes—reﬂected the chasm separating

political blocs and the continuing importance given to nationalism as a

pedagogical tool. Thus, the social violence of July, which included the highly

publicized deaths of two young students, serves us as yet another access

point into the realm of cultural politics and nationalist ideas of early-

twentieth-century Chile and beckons substantive attention here.

Passing through the downtown area after attending a pro-troop lunch-

time rally at a nearby train station on July 21, a group of young, rightist

Chileans—most in their late teens and twenties, apparently—paused in front

of the headquarters of the Chilean Federation of Students (FECh), the coun-

try’s largest student union with ties to the Communist-led Chilean Workers

Federation (FOCh). Aware of the union’s politics, its participation in anti-

war protests that same week, and its decidedly paciﬁstic stance toward the

Bolivia-Peru situation, they proceeded to harass the FECh members inside.

≤≤

According to police reports, the pro-‘‘war’’ youths attempted to enter the

establishment with the peaceful intent of chanting of ‘‘Viva Chile!’’ A handful

of students responded by throwing bottles. One FECh leader, Pedro Gan-

dulfo Guerra, apparently resorted to a more serious measure; he ﬁred three

shots from a pistol toward the clamoring crowd outside. No one was in-

jured. (Gandulfo eventually was captured, arrested, and jailed on charges of

ﬁring his weapon and trespassing after he leaped onto the roof of a neigh-

boring house owned by Arturo Lyon of the Lyon clan, a wealthy family of

French descent.)

≤≥

Angered by the FECh members’ actions, the defenders of Don Ladislao’s

War stormed the locale. Furniture, books, and other items were thrown into

the street before police arrived. It was reported in El Mercurio, which had

criticized the FECh on previous occasions, that two portraits—one of the

Peruvian president, the other of Leon Trotsky—had been found inside the

headquarters after police ended the brouhaha, demonstrating in an unam-

biguous manner the FECh’s negative intentions.

≤∂

FECh members later

complained that certain important books were intentionally destroyed. Al-

fredo De María, the federation’s president, reﬂected on the incident days

later in a statement to union members: ‘‘What does the material death of the

federation matter if its idealist spirit survives among you, my beloved com-

rades? What does the persecution, the calamity, the injustice and jail matter

to us, the students, while we can count on the conﬁdence of the prole-