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

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12 Introduction

an elevated status in the pedagogical bureaucracy to manipulate the con-

struction of a collective identity. E. J. Hobsbawm, in his widely read book on

nationalism, calls such manipulation ‘‘ideological engineering.’’ Its success,

he explains, is directly related to the capability of the state’s bureaucracy to

touch the lives of all or most citizens in a uniform manner.

≤≤

A Historiographical Path Less Traveled

How middle-class reformers interlaced cultural politics and nationalism for

hegemonic ends is a complex issue that has gone without investigation.

More broadly speaking, scholarship on Chile’s mesocracy, its cultural his-

tory, and nationalist impulse is scant. Notable non-Chilean historians have,

in general, devoted their intellectual energies to subjects other than the

middle class since Chile’s history began drawing considerable academic in-

terest in the 1950s and 1960s, and Chilean scholars also have applied their

intellectual energies elsewhere owing, in large part, to changing sociopoliti-

cal circumstances during the course of the twentieth century. All the while,

the study of Chilean nationalism has taken a course that, it may be argued,

diminishes the utility of ‘‘nationalism’’ as an analytical category.

John Johnson’s 1958 study Political Change in Latin America identiﬁed, for

what may be the ﬁrst time in ‘‘foreign’’ scholarship on the region, the pres-

ence of powerful middle sectors whose constituents expressed and executed

far-reaching progressive agendas based on principles of democratization

and inclusion. Johnson credits middle-class movements for promoting do-

mestic economic development, fostering literacy by expanding public educa-

tion systems, and pursuing the construction of modern welfare states. His

positive assessment of twentieth-century Latin America’s middle layers did

not go unchallenged. Frederick Pike, in his article on class relations in Chile

published in 1963, essentially argues that the middle class was but an appen-

dage of the elite, was bereft of its own cultural attributes, and shared high

society’s opprobrious view of the lower classes.

≤≥

Pike reached this conclu-

sion by identifying members of a nineteenth-century ‘‘middle class’’ who,

after striking it rich as mining entrepreneurs, merged socially, politically,

and culturally with Liberal and Conservative aristocrats. These nouveaux

riches, he further explains, were the same ‘‘middle class’’ people who, in the

early twentieth century, demonstrated the ‘‘tendency to shun the lower mass

and embrace the aristocracy’’ while developing ‘‘very little consciousness of

themselves as members of a distinct class.’’ In fact, Pike found it ‘‘extremely

Introduction 13

difﬁcult to detect opinions, customs, and value judgments in Chile that are

demonstrably middle class.’’

≤∂

It will become clear that Pike’s ‘‘middle class,’’

quite simply, is not necessarily the same middle class explored in the follow-

ing chapters, though some offspring of the nineteenth century’s social

climbers, including notable educators and a prominent criollista, contributed

to the mesocracy’s hegemonic project. The present study seeks to demon-

strate that middle-class reformers were fundamentally antioligarchic with-

out breaching the parameters of democratic demeanor; they successfully

expanded a recognizably mesocratic cultural domain, forged a nationalist

discourse that celebrated the lower class, and, at least symbolically, included

Chileans of lesser status in an imagined community.

Pike’s skepticism of middle-class dynamism was soon shared by a genera-

tion of Marxist historians of Latin America inﬂuenced by the emergent

dependentista paradigm who believed that fundamental change could only be

realized through social revolution, and certainly not by way of middle-class

liberalism. As David Parker explains, moreover, very different portraits of

Latin America’s middle layers were painted by the 1970s. Aside from those

like Pike, who viewed mesocrats as consorts of the elite, some argued that

middle sectors demonstrated both progressive and traditionalist tendencies

over extended periods—progressivism in their struggles against oligarchies

(good) and traditionalism when they sought to consolidate their hard-won

sociopolitical gains (bad).

≤∑

Yet another group of scholars more convincingly

explained such an apparent duality by arguing that older, established middle

sectors gravitated toward authoritarian principles, while emergent middle

layers maintained a decidedly progressive mentality.

≤∏

One gathers from

such investigations that, despite their progressivism and discourses of de-

mocratization, Latin America’s middle classes were either incapable or un-

willing to enact wide-ranging and long-lasting change in their respective

societies; democracy faltered, and poverty and injustice persisted either by

defeat, design, or default.

Aside from Pike’s article, historians interested in Chile have not explored

these and other important issues related to the mesocracy. When appraising

the body of literature published by non-Chilean scholars, we ﬁnd important

studies on the political and intellectual foundations of the nation-state;

works related to economic issues, especially themes associated with develop-

ment; valuable contributions to our understanding of rural society; signiﬁ-

cant studies on the working class; and other examinations that do not di-

rectly address the middle class’s pivotal role in modern Chilean history.

It may very well be the case that an overriding sense of Chile’s historical

14 Introduction

exceptionalism—probably shared by more non-Chilean than Chilean schol-

ars—accounts for this historiographical lapse. The country’s unusually sta-

ble political system in the nineteenth century, the prevalence of a thor-

oughly integrated landed aristocracy, its world-renowned nitrate boom, and

the dramatic (and ultimately tragic) course of its particularly successful

working-class movement are lightning rods for academic interest, over-

shadowing the urban mesocracy and its signiﬁcant place in Chilean society

and history. Another factor, however, may be more consequential when as-

sessing why the Chilean middle class (and other Latin American middle

classes) continues to receive little attention: a latent contempt for liberalism.

To Pike and other historians, middle-class liberals, by virtue of ties to the

liberal elite, simply buttressed an ideology that, when practiced in Latin

America, was a pillar of aristocratic power and a sham. In sum, it remains

clear that the middle class—a decisive social, political, economic, and cul-

tural presence in national affairs since the Parliamentary Republic—has not

received the historiographical attention it warrants among historians out-

side Chile.

A similar problem characterizes the scholarship of important Chilean

historians of the mid- and late twentieth century, whose works have largely

steered clear of society’s middle stratum. During the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, historical investigation was in the hands of upper-class

Chileans who wove grand narratives about colonial society, the struggle for

independence, and the country’s unique experience with ‘‘constitutional

authoritarianism’’ during the Portalian Republic.

≤π

Great men, politics, and

international and civil wars dominated the thematic stage. The revered his-

torian Diego Barros Arana, for example, expressed little interest in matters

outside of elite politics.

≤∫

This is completely understandable given that poli-

tics was almost exclusively in the elite’s hands until the late nineteenth

century. By midcentury, however, important sociopolitical and cultural de-

velopments, including the democratization of public education, had trans-

formed the composition of the country’s academy and, in turn, Chilean

historiography. ‘‘History’’ changed from being an elite’s avocation to a pro-

fession of trained scholars, many of them from the middle class.

There emerged from outside the elite such scholars as Jorge Barría Serón,

Julio César Jobet, and Hernán Ramírez Necochea, three of Chile’s leading

Marxist historians, who burst onto the academic scene in the 1950s and

1960s as university professors with interests related to the evolution of the

working class and its sociopolitical institutions. Their inﬂuential books on

the radicalized labor movement shifted, to a certain degree, the locus of

Introduction 15

Chilean historiography from the elite to workers, thereby leapfrogging the

middle class as an object of historical study.

≤Ω

It must be stated here that

these and other leftist historians also harbored suspicions of liberal democ-

racy, the political expression of capitalism. This translated into their less-

than-positive opinions of a notably liberal democratic middle class, though

some Marxists scholars—especially those with ties to UP—held more favor-

able, or at least tolerant, views of political liberalism. In the years leading up

to the election of UP candidate Salvador Allende in 1970, then, Chilean

historiography took on a somewhat Marxist hue.

≥≠

After the 1973 military

coup that toppled Allende and the ‘‘vía chilena al socialismo,’’ an inﬂuential

cadre of younger Chilean historians on the left found little purpose in con-

tinuing to write blow-by-blow narratives of a defeated working-class politi-

cal project. Scholars such as Gabriel Salazar judged the works of Barría,

Jobet, and Ramírez as reductionist and unable to relay the compound expe-

riences of ‘‘el bajo pueblo.’’ They sought to escape the constraints of a ‘‘top-

down’’ analysis by focusing on the day-to-day lives—the social history—of

the popular sectors.

≥∞

They, too, sidestepped the mesocracy. In short, when

assessing the long-term trajectory of Chilean historiography, we see that

while thematic and methodological perspectives shifted within the acad-

emy, the middle class largely remained in the dusty corners of historical

inquiry.

Studies of Chilean nationalism, like those on the middle class, are few.

Ernst Halperin and Carl Solberg offered two of the earliest assessments of it

in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Halperin approached the topic in his Na-

tionalism and Communism in Chile (1965) by looking at economic policy and

issues related to development. Chilean nationalism, Halperin explained, was

developmentalist and anti-imperialist; it could be detected in the public

policy of the Popular Front (a Radical-led coalition of the Center and Left)

in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Christian Democrat administration of

Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–70), and the program of the Left’s Popular

Action Front (Frente de Acción Popular, or FRAP). Halperin, therefore, es-

sentially conﬁned his investigation of Chilean nationalism to the economic

realm.

≥≤

The analysis offered by Solberg examines the relationships between

immigration and nationalism in both Chile and Argentina between 1890

and 1914. His 1970 study, though certainly more elaborate than Halperin’s,

nevertheless echoes Nationalism and Communism in Chile by asserting that

Chilean nationalism ‘‘concentrated primarily on economic problems.’’

≥≥

Al-

though Solberg focused on reactions to immigration that emerged from so-

ciety’s middle strata, his study’s temporal span ends exactly when middle-

16 Introduction

class Chileans asserted themselves in national affairs to a greater degree. Sol-

berg, therefore, missed the era in which nationalist ideas rapidly matured.

Moreover, Solberg did not consider the existence of competing nationalisms

within each country and chose instead to formulate a comparative exercise

involving two seemingly uniform nationalisms, one ‘‘Chilean’’ and the other

‘‘Argentine.’’ Nationalism’s rich complexity is, therefore, largely left un-

tapped, though his study certainly provides a more robust analysis than

Halperin’s.

In more recent years, Chile’s experience with military dictatorship has led

historians in and of that country strictly to equate nationalism with authori-

tarianism, thereby denying the existence of alternative nationalisms.

≥∂

I am

suggesting here that recent scholarship on Chile recognizes nationalism as a

singularly elitist and fundamentally antidemocratic sensibility, which justi-

ﬁes chauvinism, belligerence, and intolerance on the grounds of national

salvation and renovation. One gathers, furthermore, that Chilean national-

ism’s historical trajectory may be traced from Jorge González von Marées’s

National Socialist Movement (Movimiento Nacional Socialista, or Nazi

Party) of the 1930s to the horriﬁc Directorate of National Intelligence (Direc-

ción de Inteligencia Nacional, or DINA) of the 1970s and is best symbolized

by the stern look on General Augusto Pinochet’s face.

≥∑

To be sure, this

describes a nationalism that was especially real to the many thousands who

faced the atrocities of dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. It does not, how-

ever, describe all species of Chilean nationalism. Historians have not ven-

tured to ask if a criollo variant of what Hobsbawm has called ‘‘democratic-

revolutionary nationalism’’ developed in Chile’s crowded ideological arena.

≥∏

Was Chilean nationalism naturally bereft of the Enlightenment’s liberal

commandments? Is it possible to identify an early-century ‘‘progressive’’ na-

tionalism—an alternative nationalism that challenged the oligarchy’s power,

offered a democratized vision of the imagined community, and defended the

precepts of liberal democracy?

This book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 examines urban social trans-

formations brought on by the export economy and the early phases of indus-

trialization, the ampliﬁcation of electoral politics and sociopolitical con-

testation, the rise of middle-class reformism, and the cultural practices of

the elite during the Parliamentary Republic. It seeks to orient the reader

within the changing environment of Chile’s troubled belle epoque. Chapter

2 presents a schematic history of Chilean patriotism and nationalism and

then embarks on an interpretation of early-twentieth-century national-

Introduction 17

ism(s) in that country. Keeping in mind class interests and the malleability

of nationalist discourse, it explores the articulation of two strains of na-

tionalism and, in general, seeks to orient the reader within the densely

wooded and somewhat foggy forest of Chilean nationalism.

Chapter 3 opens this book’s discussion of middle-class literary culture,

nationalism, and cultural politics by focusing on the ﬁrst generation of

criollistas (ca. 1900–1920), its rewriting of what may be called the ‘‘national

narrative,’’ and the accompanying phenomenon of rural aestheticism in

Chile’s urban space. Chapter 4 examines the historical trajectory of criollismo

and the steady diffusion of criollista ideas in the public sphere from about

1920 to the Aguirre Cerda presidency. It argues that nativist imagery had

become an important component of opposing political discourses by the

1930s and that the Radical-directed Popular Front was particularly attracted

to the national narrative introduced by literary criollismo’s progenitors.

The subsequent three chapters look at middle-class cultural politics and

nationalism from a different angle: public education. Chapter 5 explores the

motives and aims of Parliamentary Republic reformers who endeavored to

democratize culture by way of obligatory primary education, and Chapter 6

examines the development of nationalist teachings in Chile’s newly ampli-

ﬁed pedagogical complex. The latter chapter emphasizes the central role

played by reformers in the promulgation of decrees and protocols that were

designed to foster nationalism in public schools and by extension realize

middle-class hegemony. Chapter 7 demonstrates how reformers, seeking to

build consensus among fellow Chileans regarding concepts such as patria,

raza, and citizenship, relayed their ideas by way of ministry-approved text-

books that were assembled for all levels of state-directed schooling. Con-

cluding this study is an epilogue in which the ramiﬁcations of middle-class

reformism, its cultural politics, and its nationalism are assessed.

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Un viento de revolución soplaba en el país.

alberto edwards, La fronda aristocrática, 1928

A Troubled Belle Epoque ∞

The Parliamentary Republic, like the deity Janus, bared more than one face.

It was an era of long-term economic growth based on incipient industrializa-

tion and the geologic exploitation of northern Chile’s arid expanses. Party

politics operated relatively unfettered when compared with other Latin

American nations, and aristocrats sipped imported tea in salons while con-

versing about issues of the day and the latest Parisian publications. The

wealthy enjoyed trips to the Old World, department stores showcased the

latest European fashions for men and women, and, by the 1920s, the growing

middle class began expanding its barrios in Santiago and other cities. It was

not uncommon for the elite to boast about their ﬁne country. One conserva-

tive newspaper, for example, claimed in 1908 that Chileans—especially afﬂu-

ent and demure women—were recognized throughout the world for their

‘‘morality’’ and elegant wardrobe.

∞

But all was not well in the republic. The

century’s early years saw bloody confrontations between workers and the

state, abject squalor in working-class neighborhoods and mining commu-

nities, one of the world’s highest infant mortality rates, a ravaging plague of

tuberculosis, short-term economic crises, and legislative, ministerial, and

administrative inaction that hampered the development of initiatives to

deal with profound socioeconomic and demographic transformations. A

critic in the reformist newspaper La Lei captured the darker side of the

Parliamentary Republic on Independence Day in 1903: ‘‘The decline of the

nation is clear in politics, in administration, in wealth, and morality in

20 A Troubled Belle Epoque

general.’’

≤

Contrasting accounts of the period are littered throughout the

press and other chronicles of public life. While the oligarchy praised itself

for having created a criollo belle epoque, reformers of the mesocracy pointed

to the upper class’s ineptitude and a pressing social question that, if left

unaddressed, eventually would lead to revolution.

This chapter examines sociopolitical tensions associated with economic

modernization as well as the Chilean elite’s cultural practices between the

1890s and the 1920s to establish a context for subsequent discussions of the

reformist movement’s mission to displace oligarchic power and mitigate

the social question through the democratization of culture and the propa-

gation of an alternative nationalism. It does so in a general, schematic way by

discussing the republic’s political environment; the rise of the Radical Party

(PR) as a potent political player; the social question’s emergence in urban

society; and the elite’s cultural tastes and habits. Throughout this chapter, a

narrative fabric is woven that connects many lines of analysis, varying issues,

and a diverse assortment of actors to offer a tapestry of political, social, and

cultural patterns.

The Portalian Project, José Manuel Balmaceda, and Civil War

After achieving independence in 1818, Chileans experienced more than a

decade of the intraelite political turmoil common to nearly every nascent

Latin American republic. General Bernardo O’Higgins, the illegitimate son

of an Irish-born bureaucrat who governed colonial Chile in the late eigh-

teenth century, assumed the reigns of the new government after the cessa-

tion of hostilities. At ﬁrst, the bulk of the elite accepted O’Higgins’s mix of

liberal notions and authoritarian practices, but his ouster came in 1823 when

supporters grew weary of his quasi-dictatorial demeanor. The presidencies

of O’Higgins (1817–23), the genuinely liberal Ramón Freire (1823–27), and

Francisco Antonio Pinto (1827–29)—a span during which the country had

four constitutions—caused a great deal of frustration among conservatives.

The early republic lacked the conﬁdence of many members of the new repub-

lican political aristocracy and informed citizens who considered the infant

state dysfunctional. News of civil war in Argentina, moreover, fed fears of

chaos and anarchy in Chile. Using a dispute over the vice presidential elec-

tions of 1829 to their advantage, conservative interests (known collectively as

the pelucones, or ‘‘big wigs’’) headed by Valparaíso businessman Diego Por-

tales launched a revolt that ended the liberal regime in April 1830, termi-

A Troubled Belle Epoque 21

nating the project initiated by O’Higgins. Portales’s hand-picked nominee

for president, Joaquín Prieto, took power in 1831, thus beginning the so-

called Portalian Republic. The constitution of 1833, which swept away the

liberal constitution of 1828, was then promulgated.

Centralized executive authority formed the basis of the new constitu-

tion. Political might ﬂowed from Santiago, and the executive possessed

emergency powers to govern the nation whenever he deemed it necessary.

However, it should not be inferred that executives of the Portalian period

matched the brutality of Argentine caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas or other

similar characters. Simon Collier explains that ‘‘Chile managed to put a stop

to disorder without accepting a personal tyranny. By creating a strong but

impersonal authority, the Chileans were able to pave the way for later consti-

tutional government and the establishment of a genuinely democratic tradi-

tion.’’

≥

While the power brokers of the Portalian system recurrently dis-

regarded the political principles of liberalism (jailing opponents was not

extraordinary), they oversaw a steady growth in foreign trade—an ingredient

of economic liberalism—from the 1820s to the 1870s. The value of external

trade in 1825, for example, stood at $7.5 million. The ﬁgure increased to $74

million by 1875. Led by the bustling and economically critical port of Val-

paraíso, Chile’s prolonged economic expansion would not have occurred

without advances in infrastructure. The government and private Chilean in-

vestors, for instance, together ﬁnanced the important Santiago–Valparaíso

railroad line built by North American Henry Meiggs. Foreign investment,

however, remained meager before the nitrate era.

Sturdy but adaptive, Portales’s constitutional system weathered the as-

sassination of its master builder (Portales was shot in 1837), a protracted

international conﬂict in the 1830s, and two civil wars in the 1850s but even-

tually succumbed to intraelite discord over the distribution of political

power. By the late 1880s, as the spoils of victory in the War of the Paciﬁc

began paying their ﬁnancial dividends to the treasury, conﬂict mounted

between the Portalian system’s defenders and a section of the political hier-

archy that wanted to limit presidential authority and expand legislative

inﬂuence. After the hard-fought election of Chile’s ﬁrst Liberal president in

1861, Liberal and Conservative notables maintained an arrangement regard-

ing presidential succession that propelled members of each party to the

presidential palace. This Liberal-Conservative amalgam contributed to po-

litical stability for much of the second half of the nineteenth century,

though presidential elections did not go without heated political ﬁreﬁghts.

Tensions were especially acute during the presidency of José Manuel Bal-