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In-Depth Information
class, who in turn were casting a majority of their votes at the time
for the Socialist Party.
Politicians who appealed to the labor vote trod a very fine line. As
the urban working class grew along with economy, the workers became
increasingly aware of their second-class citizenship. Even immigrant
workers did not accept this status. Many of them had brought with
them syndicalist traditions from the old country, advocating labor
organizing to defend workers' interest. As early as the 1890s, skilled
laborers introduced labor unions and strikes. Anarchist labor leaders,
who threatened working-class violence if necessary, many of them
foreign-born, mounted the first general strike in 1902 and succeeded in
shutting down the city. Also in 1902, a radical attempted to assassinate
President Roca. The government responded by passing the Residency
Law by which foreign-born “troublemakers” could be summarily
expelled from the country.
Working-class violence was frightening to both the oligarchy and
the emerging middle class. Their nightmares seemed to come alive in
1909 when an anarchist succeeded in assassinating the federal chief of
police in Buenos Aires. Moreover, rapid urbanization and growth of the
urban working class gave new visibility to women laborers. Their pres-
ence in the streets and newfound economic independence provoked
men to equate poor working women with prostitutes and, thus, threats
to public health and the traditional Catholic family. Nervous elites
had another issue to debate: social control through the regulation of
legalized prostitution. Despite the fearsome ideology of international
anarchism, however, Argentine labor leaders actually preferred collabo-
rating with government officials rather than “smashing the state” and
challenging capitalism. Many voted for Yrigoyen in 1916. The Radicals
in power, therefore, chose to negotiate with organized labor.
The economic crisis of World War I put the state-labor alliance to the
test. Suffering from layoffs, falling wages, and rising prices, workers in
the larger industries staged numerous strikes in 1917 and 1918. They
demanded job security and wage increases to compensate for the price
inflation. For the most part, the Radical government intervened in these
strikes. The politicians coerced foreign employers in the port works and
railways to give in to labor demands and ordered the police to protect
the picket lines rather than repress them as the PAN governments had
previously done.
Many of the foreign interests whose striking workers received
government support protested to no avail. One editor responded in
1917, saying that “[the British railway managers] accuse [Yrigoyen]
