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C H A P T E R
Economic and Social
12
Upheaval in the Americas
From the 1910s through the 1930s, the Western Hemisphere was largely spared the
horrors of total war—except for Mexico, which became engulfed in the vast social
convulsion of the Mexican Revolution, whose shock waves reverberated through the
Americas well into the 1920s and after. The United States not only escaped the destruction of World War I but profited immensely from it, emerging from Europe’s cataclysm as the world’s preeminent economic and military power. “America at the close
of the Great War was a Cinderella magically clothed in the most stunning dress
at the ball,” writes one historian, “a ball to which Cinderella had not even been invited;
immense gains with no visible price tag seemed to be the American destiny.”1 But
in the Western Hemisphere, such dominance did carry a price. By the late 1920s
anti-Yankee sentiment mushroomed throughout Latin America, compelling the United
States to retreat from its policy of direct military intervention in the Caribbean basin
(see map in Chapter 5).
While the 1920s brought the appearance of permanently rising prosperity, the
1930s shattered the illusion, plunging the hemisphere into the economic nightmare
of the Great Depression. As exports plummeted and unemployment soared, many
Latin American economies turned inward, becoming more self-sufficient and internally integrated. Populist politics turned more dictatorial, as a new generation of leaders fanned the flames of economic nationalism and gained the support of urban groups
with nationalist rhetoric and government patronage. In this age of global economic
crisis and the antiliberal, antidemocratic ideologies of fascism and communism, leaders throughout the hemisphere gravitated rightward toward fascism, leftward toward
socialism, or borrowed from both, with strong executives directing social welfare
states. Most of the Americas came under the rule of dictatorships. The United States
and Canada moved slightly left, Mexico even more so, developing far more activist
and interventionist governments.
1
Ann Douglass, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Noonday Press, 1996), p. 4.
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THE UNITED STATES IN THE INTERWAR YEARS:
BUST TO BOOM TO BUST
The U.S. Senate Rejects the Treaty of Versailles
When President Wilson returned from the Paris Peace Conference, he saw the League
of Nations as his administration’s crowning achievement. But many in the U.S. Senate
opposed Article 10 of the Treaty of Versailles, which obliged members of the League
of Nations to repel aggression against other League members by means “the Council
shall advise.” To preserve U.S. freedom of action in world affairs, many senators
insisted that reservations be added to the treaty, particularly that Congress must
approve any U.S. involvement in League-sponsored actions to curb aggression.
But President Wilson refused to compromise. Feverishly working to mobilize
support for the League, in September 1919 he suffered a debilitating stroke. When
the treaty came up for a vote in November, its Senate supporters failed to muster the
constitutional two-thirds majority. Although in 1921 the United States did sign a separate treaty with Germany that ratified most of the Versailles treaty’s provisions, it
never joined the League of Nations. Without U.S. membership, that body would prove
to be a toothless tiger.
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL
UNREST
THE FIRST RED SCARE
Postwar Labor Unrest, Recession, and Racial Discord
Even before the Senate rejected the Versailles treaty, raging postwar inflation had
wiped out the modest gains workers had made during the war, leading in 1919 to a
wave of labor unrest. In January a general strike virtually shut down Seattle. In
September, Boston police walked out because the city refused to recognize their union.
But the biggest strike, beginning in September, was among 350,000 steelworkers in
the Northeast and Midwest, who demanded an 8-hour day (down from 12 hours a
day, 7 days a week, the industry standard) and the right to bargain collectively. The
strike, which failed, dragged on until early 1920. Altogether some 4 million workers—roughly one-fifth of the nation’s labor force, including some 400,000 miners
across the coalfields of Appalachia—participated in strikes in 1919. Unrelated to these
strikes were a small number of bombings in the spring of 1919, and the Post Office’s
interception of several dozen bomb-laden packages addressed to leading businessmen
and politicians.
This was only two years after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia, and
the same year that the Soviet government established the Communist International
(or Comintern). The Bolshevik Revolution provided a convenient pretext for the U.S.
government’s intolerance of workers’ demands for collective rights. Beginning in early
1920, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his ambitious young assistant
J. Edgar Hoover orchestrated a “Red Scare,” arresting more than 6,000 suspected communists and anarchists and summarily deporting some 500 non-U.S. citizens. In
1921, two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were convicted
of robbery and murder and sentenced to death. Until their execution in Boston in
August 1927, their case proved a cause célèbre throughout much of the Atlantic world.
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In late 1920 the inflationary spiral came to a screeching halt, as consumer
demand shriveled and unemployment skyrocketed. In 1920–1921, some 5 million
U.S. workers lost their jobs, 100,000 businesses went belly-up, and the national economy shrank by 10 percent. Recovery was slow, but after another smaller recession in
1923, the manufacturing economy picked up steam, led by the steel and automobile
industries. The year 1920 also marked a demographic watershed, with urban dwellers
outnumbering rural dwellers for the first time in U.S. history.
The postwar economic hard times exacerbated racism against African Americans,
half a million of whom had migrated to cities in the North, South, and West during
and after the war. During the “red summer” of 1919 (called “red” not for communism but for all the blood that was spilled), more than 250 blacks were killed by
white mobs, and more than 70 blacks, some returning war veterans, were lynched in
the South. In 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the deadliest race riot in U.S. history, rampaging mobs killed 300 blacks and left 10,000 homeless. One response to the relentless assertion of white supremacy was a brand of black nationalism called Garveyism,
led by the Jamaican immigrant Marcus Garvey. His Universal Negro Improvement
Association called for blacks to reject assimilation into white society and to cultivate
racial and cultural pride. In the early 1920s the movement grew rapidly, but declined
after its leader was charged with business fraud and deported in 1925, though its
legacy endured.
In response to the massive influx of southern and eastern Europeans and the
Great Migration of African Americans, nativist U.S. citizens pressured Congress to
restrict immigration of “undesirable” populations. They succeeded in 1921 and
again in 1924. The National Origins Act of 1924 banned all immigrants from East
Asia. It also capped European immigrants at 150,000 per year and imposed annual
quotas on European immigrants amounting to 2 percent of each nationality in the
United States in 1890—a time when there were far fewer people from southern and
eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. The law did not address immigration from
the Western Hemisphere, leading to continued large influxes of Latin Americans and
Canadians.
This period also saw the meteoric resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, partly
inspired by D. W. Griffith’s landmark and blatantly racist film, The Birth of a Nation
(1915), which hailed the Klan as the savior of the Union and southern white
womanhood. The Klan’s slogan, “100% Americanism,” expressed its antiblack, antiMexican, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and antiforeign version of patriotism. At its peak
in 1924–1925, with over 4.5 million members nationwide, the Klan vied for control
of the Democratic Party and staged a massive march on the nation’s capital before collapsing from scandals and internal squabbles. Prohibition, established in 1919 by the
18th Amendment, also reflected the wide cultural divide between immigrants and city
dwellers, who tended to be “wet” (opposed Prohibition) and the native-born in small
towns and rural areas, who tended to be “dry” (supported Prohibition) and to defend
fundamentalist Protestant values.
The role of women in U.S. society was also changing. With the ratification of
the 19th Amendment in 1920 granting women the right to vote, women’s growing
independence became closely linked to their rising participation in the workforce, the
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ECONOMIC DOWNTURN
WHITE VIOLENCE AND
BLACK RESPONSES
IMMIGRATION
RESTRICTIONS
CONSERVATIVE
ASCENDENCY
CHANGES FOR WOMEN
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emergence of mass consumer culture, and the growing availability of contraception. In
1920 women comprised 20 percent of the labor force and 77 percent of single women
worked outside the home, in a labor market that remained heavily segregated by gender.
Fertility rates also fell, from an average of 3.6 children in 1900 to 2.5 in 1930.
A MASS CONSUMER
SOCIETY
STRUCTURAL
ECONOMIC
WEAKNESSES
From the Roaring Twenties to the Great Depression
After 1923, the U.S. industrial economy entered a period of sustained growth.
Manufacturing output rose by an average of 10 percent per year, inflation dipped to
near zero, and the middle class expanded. Automobiles became integral to the U.S.
economy and culture, while a vast array of new consumer goods—from washing
machines and radios to telephones, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators, many bought
on credit—found their way into millions of homes. Three Republican administrations
under Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover rejected
the Progressive emphasis on activist government to pursue a program of minimal business regulation, low taxes, and high tariffs. As Coolidge remarked, “The chief business
of the American people is business.” The Wall Street Journal aptly noted, “Never before,
here or anywhere else, has a government been so completely fused with business,”
while one stockbroker later recalled, “God, J. P. Morgan, and the Republican Party
were going to keep everything going forever.”
Despite the apparent prosperity, the U.S. economy exhibited some severe structural weaknesses. Many workers faced wage cuts and layoffs in the depressed railroad, textile, and coal industries. Only workers in skilled trades benefited from
unionization, a fraction of the total workforce. In the South, women and children
labored in textile mills for up to 60 hours a week for only a few cents per hour. The
nation’s farmers were in deep trouble, with high mortgages, low crop prices, and
increased global competition. Some large landowners mechanized to save money, but
many tenants and sharecroppers lost their livelihoods and small farmers their farms.
But the biggest long-term structural problem was that production far exceeded
consumption. In a nutshell, companies did not pay workers enough money to buy
all the goods the economy produced, leading to huge inventory pileups and an overreliance on credit. For each individual company, keeping workers’ wages as low as
possible maximized profits and thus made good economic sense. For all companies
in general, and the economy as a whole, it was a recipe for disaster. By the late 1920s,
most families had no savings, with 4 out of 10 living in poverty. Meanwhile, the
wealthiest 1 percent received nearly 20 percent of all income, while the wealthiest
5 percent took home more than the bottom 60 percent—and the gaps were widening.
The overdependence on credit extended to the stock market. No laws controlled
the amount of stock—essentially a chunk of a company—that could be bought on
credit. Brokers and speculators often bought stock “on the margin,” paying 10 percent
or less of the stock’s market value and putting the remaining 90 percent on credit.
If stock prices suddenly dropped, stock owners could easily owe huge sums of money
they did not have. The whole structure resembled a house of cards, but few
seemed worried. “Stocks have reached a permanently high plateau,” commented one
distinguished professor of economics on October 17, 1929.
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A week later, on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, the Wall Street stock market
began to collapse, sending the United States headlong into a full-fledged crisis. There
was a panic to sell, but no one to buy. Within hours most speculators were ruined.
Although the stock market crash did not cause the Great Depression in the United
States, it was its main short-term trigger. For the next three years, despite repeated
assurances from President Hoover, the economy experienced a devastating downward
spiral of bankruptcies, bank failures, and mass unemployment—25 percent by the
most conservative estimates. The federal government’s response under Hoover’s leadership was to grant tax cuts to the wealthy and increase tariffs, policies that made a
catastrophic situation even worse.
The New Deal
In the 1932 presidential campaign, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) ran
on a platform he called “a New Deal for the American people.” He was not exactly
sure what he meant by the phrase, and neither were the nearly 23 million men and
women—nearly 58 percent of voters—who swept him into office. But he had an ebullience of spirit and a willingness to innovate that meshed with the dire situation the
nation confronted. Roosevelt was a reformer, not a revolutionary, who wished to tame
and restrain capitalism in order to save it. “The only thing we have to fear is fear
itself,” he boldly announced to an anxious nation on taking office, and it was just what
most U.S. citizens wanted and needed to hear.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt projects a cheerful image during the New Deal.
THE GREAT STOCK
MARKET CRASH
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THE FIRST NEW DEAL
ECONOMIC
DEVASTATION
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RESURGENT LABOR AND
THE WAGNER ACT
Never in U.S. history has the federal government so quickly and so dramatically
expanded its role in the everyday lives of ordinary people. “Our greatest primary task
is to put people to work,” declared Roosevelt, and his administration was willing to
run up huge budget deficits to do it. His administration’s first 100 days saw the passage of a dizzying array of government programs designed to put money into people’s
pockets and rekindle their sense of dignity and self-worth. Two days after taking office
FDR announced a four-day “bank holiday,” assuring his radio listeners that banks would
be safe when they reopened. They were. Soon after reforming the banking system and
stock market he created the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to improve wages
and working conditions and protect consumers. Hastily written and often benefiting
big business, the NRA codes were later struck down by the Supreme Court.
Opposed in principle to the dole—handing out money to people in need—
Roosevelt instead created a series of public works programs, most prominently the
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Public Works Administration (PWA), later
replaced by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Thousands of New Deal–era
parks, bridges, water towers, and other public works can still be found across the
United States. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) paid farmers not to produce—
which made good economic sense, going to the root of the problem of overproduction that had long plagued farmers. But the payments were earmarked for landowners
only, encouraging the eviction of thousands of tenants and sharecroppers.
Some programs combined public works with regional planning, most prominently the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Spanning seven of the nation’s poorest
states, the TVA built a series of flood control and hydroelectric dams along the Tennessee River, providing abundant work and bountiful cheap electricity. Conservatives
blocked its more ambitious social development programs and denounced the government’s new role as a public utility and regional planner. Environmentalists later
decried the ecological damage wrought by the TVA dams. When analyzed closely, virtually all New Deal programs can be seen to have positive and negative outcomes.
Roosevelt was a pragmatist, not a theoretician. If a policy or program seemed to work,
he built on it. If it did not, he abandoned it and tried something else.
Despite the vast expansion of the federal government’s power and spending, the
First New Deal barely dented the nation’s mass unemployment. Social conditions
worsened, as hunger and destitution ravaged the country. Emblematic of the nation’s
downward spiral was the Dust Bowl in the nation’s southern midsection. Poor land
management and a severe drought caused massive dust storms and displaced more
than a million farmers, an out-migration poignantly captured in John Steinbeck’s novel
The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Meanwhile, opposition to many New Deal programs
mounted, as a conservative Supreme Court struck down many provisions and programs as overextensions of executive branch power. By 1934, the First New Deal was
sputtering to a halt. At this point a powerful impetus for change emerged from a very
different quarter: the millions of U.S. workers in major mass production industries.
In what has been called “labor’s great upheaval,” workers in the automobile, steel,
and other industries demanded not only higher wages and safer working conditions,
but a fundamentally new relationship with management—one that guaranteed workers’
civil rights, a fair slice of the economic pie, and, especially, their right to bargain
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collectively. Leading the fight were John L. Lewis and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Viewing the AFL as too beholden to industry and disinterested in the
plight of noncraft workers, the CIO and its offshoots, the United Auto Workers (UAW)
and Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), were given a huge boost by the
1935 Wagner Act, which finally enshrined into federal law the right of workers to form
unions and bargain collectively. Autoworkers’ 1936 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan,
still ranks among organized labor’s most stunning successes. In its wake, hundreds of
thousands of other workers, from rubber workers to waitresses, unionized and struck,
not only for higher wages and better working conditions, but for dignity.
Emboldened by Democratic victories in the 1934 midterm elections, FDR
launched a Second New Deal. Its focus was economic security, its centerpiece the
Social Security Act of 1935. A hybrid federal and local program of unemployment
insurance, aid to families with dependent children, and old-age pensions, Social
Security represented an abrupt departure from traditional views about the proper role
of the federal government in society. Many still consider Social Security the most
important and successful of all New Deal programs.
After his landslide 1936 reelection, FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court with
New Deal supporters. He failed, but afterward the Court was much more willing to
uphold key New Deal provisions. In 1937, in response to an economic uptick, he
slashed spending for many programs, with disastrous results. Unemployment shot up
again, compelling Roosevelt to ask for billions more in appropriations. The idea of
deficit spending to “prime the pump” and lead an economy out of depression found
theoretical support in British economist John Maynard Keynes’s landmark 1936 book,
General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. FDR followed this recipe until the
outbreak of World War II in Europe, but employment still increased only very gradually. In the end it was not so much the New Deal as the conflagration of world war
that pulled the U.S. economy out of the depression.
The Great Depression and New Deal left a lasting legacy. The realignment of the
Democratic Party—a coalition of white southerners and northern ethnics, African
Americans, union labor, farmers, and urban dwellers—made it the majority party for
the next half century. The resulting welfare state, partial and patchwork by European
standards, was a far cry from socialism, yet greatly expanded the role of the federal
government in the life of the nation. In the larger context, the people of the United
States had affirmed their historic democratic experience. Confronted with near-total
economic collapse, they worked out their problems inside the traditional democratic
system, rejecting the extremist solutions of both the far Right and the far Left.
LATIN AMERICA FROM THE 1910s TO THE 1930s
Revolution and Its Aftermath in Mexico
Just as unrestrained capitalist development helped cause the Great Depression, similar
developments fueled the twin engines of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920).
As capitalism expanded from the 1850s, a new middle class of professionals and small
business owners emerged. Many wanted not only economic prosperity but a political
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THE SECOND NEW DEAL
LEGACY OF THE
NEW DEAL
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TWIN ENGINES
OF REVOLUTION
THE REVOLUTION
BEGINS
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THE CONSTITUTION
OF 1917
voice and the rights of citizenship. But the dictatorial regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910)
essentially shut this emerging middle class out of politics. Díaz and his cronies controlled the government with an iron fist, refusing to share power or grant political
freedoms or civil rights. Under the banner “Order and Progress,” the regime stifled
free speech and either bought off or crushed organized opposition.
This was one engine of revolution—an emergent middle class that had been
shut out of politics for more than a third of a century. But there was a second
engine of revolution, also rooted in the previous decades of capitalist development, that gave the Mexican Revolution its genuinely radical, popular character.
From the 1870s, large landowners, or hacendados, had been gobbling up the land
of small farmers, villages, and Indian communities. By the early 1900s, millions of
rural Mexicans had lost their land. People were compelled to either migrate to
cities, find work in the rapidly expanding U.S.-dominated mining sector, or toil
for pennies per day on land that used to be theirs. Hunger and destitution spread
throughout the countryside, and the grievances of the landless and poverty-stricken
sharpened and grew.
This steep rise in landlessness and poverty among the rural majority was a
second engine of revolution. Thus, what began as a middle-class revolt against Díaz
soon escalated into a massive social conflagration. The short-term trigger came in
1910, when a wealthy reformer named Francisco Madero ran for president on a platform calling for “no re-election.” Díaz jailed him and easily won reelection. After
his release, Madero proclaimed a rebellion. Hoping to topple Díaz and install a
moderate reformist government, Madero instead ignited a social explosion, as the poor
and marginalized exploited the opportunity opened up by squabbles among the elite.
Independent revolts began springing up all over Mexico. In the north, Pancho Villa
and Pascual Orozco commanded thousands of miners, cowboys, and railroad workers. Far to the south, in the mostly Indian state of Morelos, Emiliano Zapata led an
army of thousands of dispossessed dirt farmers under the banner “Land and Liberty.”
Dozens of lesser-known leaders added to the confusion and tumult, as did two U.S.
interventions—one in 1914 in the port city of Veracruz, and the second in 1917 in
the northern deserts.
For nearly 10 years Mexico was set ablaze. By the best estimates, in 1910
Mexico’s population was 15 million. Ten years later, in 1920, it stood at 14 million—
from 1 to 2 million people dead, and at least 250,000 having migrated north into the
United States to escape the endless bouts of bloodshed. Mariano Azuela’s novel
The Underdogs powerfully conveys a sense of the era’s confusion and chaos. At the
end of the story, the protagonist is asked why he keeps fighting. He tosses a stone
down a canyon and stares “pensively into the abyss,” remarking, “Look at that stone,
how it keeps going. . . .” The violence seemed endless.
The social charter that finally emerged from this chaos was the Constitution of
1917, which still governs Mexico today. A strongly nationalist and remarkably
progressive document for the era, it basically represented the victory of the rising
middle class, personified in the “Constitutionalist” leader Venustiano Carranza. The
Constitution called for major land reform, and forbade foreigners from owning
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Chapter 12 Economic and Social Upheaval in the Americas
A brief moment of unity in the Mexican Revolution: Pancho Villa (center) sits in the
presidential chair with Emiliano Zapata beside him (right).
Mexican land or subsoil. In the next decades this provision became a major point of
contention with the United States, especially regarding oil. The Constitution also
established a bill of rights for labor, granting workers the right to bargain collectively
and mandating minimum wages and benefits regardless of gender. It established free
universal public education, and sought to secularize the government by subordinating the church to the state—requiring all priests to be native-born, and forbidding
priests from voting or criticizing the government from the pulpit. Despite a rising
feminist movement, the Constitution did not enfranchise women.
The Mexican Revolution left an enduring legacy. Perhaps most important, it
instilled a sense of pride and self-worth among Mexico’s poor and indigenous population, as captured in the revolutionary murals of Diego Rivera that still grace the
walls of prominent public buildings in Mexico City and elsewhere. A new racialist
ideology, indigenismo, valorized Mexico’s Indian past and glorified the mestizo as
humanity’s most advanced racial mixture—the “Cosmic Race,” in one famous formulation—in a radical departure from the previous four centuries of anti-Indian
racism. Similar racialist ideologies emerged in Peru, Brazil, Nicaragua, and other
nations with a strong Indian presence, influenced by Mexico but developing from
local conditions.
LEGACIES OF
REVOLUTION
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THE CÁRDENAS
REFORMS
SANDINO REBELLION
IN NICARAGUA
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THE GOOD NEIGHBOR
POLICY
The Revolution symbolized the promise of dignity and rights for the country’s
downtrodden, but in practice many of those promises went unfulfilled. After 1917,
national leaders interpreted the Constitution differently, so that implementation of
its provisions waxed and waned. In the mid-1920s the Catholic Church, enraged by
the Constitution, promoted a rebellion among the faithful, the Cristero Revolt, that
cost upwards of 80,000 lives before it was suppressed. By the late 1920s, the national
government coalesced into a single governing party, which went by different names
but eventually became the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI, which dominated
Mexican politics in a “one-party democracy” for the next six decades.
With the onset of the Great Depression, mass unemployment and disaffection
with the government’s tepid land reform led to the 1934 election of Mexico’s most
popular twentieth-century president, Lázaro Cárdenas. During his six years in office
Cárdenas distributed 49 million acres to Mexico’s land-hungry populace, twice the
amount of all his predecessors combined. By 1940, roughly one in three Mexicans
had received land under agrarian reform, dramatically curtailing the popular clamor
for land. His administration refined the revolutionary government’s authoritariancorporatist structure, bringing state-dominated labor unions more firmly under the
umbrella of the national government. Cárdenas was also an economic nationalist,
epitomized in his dramatic 1938 nationalization of the Mexican oil industry. The
expropriation infuriated U.S. and European oil companies, which claimed they had
lost $200 million in property, though it proved immensely popular among Mexicans
and Latin Americans.
Anti-Imperialist Groundswell and the Good Neighbor Policy
By the late 1920s, three decades of U.S. military intervention in the Caribbean basin
had generated a groundswell of anti-imperialist sentiment across Latin America. “PanAmericanism means submission to the yoke of Wall Street,” proclaimed the AllAmerican Anti-Imperialist League in 1928, reflecting a widely held view. Particularly
nettlesome was the situation in Nicaragua, where thousands of U.S. Marines were sent
to suppress an anti-imperialist rebellion led by the nationalist leader Augusto Sandino.
From 1927 until his assassination in 1934, Sandino led an army of peasants and
Indians in a fight to restore Nicaraguan national sovereignty. Portrayed throughout
much of the Atlantic world as a heroic David fighting the mighty Goliath of U.S.
imperialism, Sandino became for many a symbol of defiant resistance against the
“Colossus of the North.”
Inside the United States, too, opposition was rising to U.S. military meddling
in Latin America. In 1933, with the U.S. economy reeling, President Roosevelt
announced a major policy shift. “I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the
Good Neighbor,” he declared in his inaugural address, a vague formulation that soon
solidified into an outright retreat from military intervention. U.S. troops were withdrawn from Nicaragua, Haiti, and elsewhere, but U.S.-supported dictators remained,
not coincidentally, in those countries where the United States had most actively intervened: Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and Rafael Trujillo
in the Dominican Republic. The Good Neighbor policy did not end U.S. economic
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B
I O G R A P H Y
The Right to Be Free, and to Establish Justice
The official seal of the Defending Army
of Nicaraguan National Sovereignty, led
by Augusto C. Sandino against the U.S.
Marines from 1927 to 1934. Depicting a
Sandinista rebel poised to slay a “Yankee”
marine invader, the seal conveys the hostility
many Latin Americans felt toward the
United States for its interventions in Latin
American affairs.
To the Nicaraguans, the Central Americans,
and the Indo-Hispanic Race: The man who
does not ask his country for even a handful of
earth for his grave deserves to be heard, and
not only to be heard but also believed. I am
Nicaraguan and I am proud because in my
veins flows above all else the blood of the
Indian race, which by some atavism embraces the mystery of being patriotic, loyal,
and sincere. . . . I am an artisan, but my idealism is based on a broad horizon of internationalism, which represents the right to be
free and to establish justice, even though to
accomplish this it may be necessary to establish it upon a foundation of blood. . . . Pessimists will say that we are very small to
undertake a task of this magnitude, but. . .
our pride and our patriotism are very great.
For that reason, before the Homeland and
before history, I swear that my sword will
defend the nation’s honor and redeem the
oppressed.
...
In this manifesto of July 1927, Augusto Sandino
announced his decision to resist by force of arms
the U.S. military occupation of his homeland of
Nicaragua. For nearly six years, Sandino and his
tiny Army in Defense of the National Sovereignty
of Nicaragua waged guerrilla war against thousands of U.S. Marines. A year after the final U.S.
troop withdrawal of January 1933, the head of
the U.S.-created National Guard, Anastasio Somoza, ordered Sandino assassinated. Nationalist
movements like Sandino’s forced the United
States to abandon its policy of direct military
intervention in Latin America. The memory of
Sandino’s struggle endured in Nicaragua and beyond, inspiring a new generation of Nicaraguan
revolutionaries who took Sandino’s name—calling
themselves Sandinistas—and overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, more than 50 years
after Sandino penned these lines.
*From Crítica, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 9 January 1930, in
United States Department of State, Records Relating to
Internal Affairs of Nicaragua, 817.00/6540. Translated by
Michael Schroeder.
or political intervention. In many ways the policy was meant to prolong U.S.
domination of the region through more subtle, indirect means. As the fiery Peruvian
reformer Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre sardonically quipped, FDR had made the United
States “the Good Neighbor of tyrants.”
183
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Part II The Era of Revolution and War
MOUNTING POPULAR
DISCONTENT
DEPRESSION AND
DICTATORSHIP
CONFIRMING PAGES
VARGAS REGIME
IN BRAZIL
Labor Unrest, Populist Dictatorships,
and Economic Nationalism
By the 1910s, urbanization and capitalist development had dramatically transformed
many Latin American nations. As urban working and middle classes grew, so did a
host of accompanying social tensions. Just as in the United States and Mexico, workers demanded the right to bargain collectively, while all urban groups demanded a
greater political voice. In 1919, hundreds of thousands of workers in Santiago,
Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Lima, and elsewhere launched massive demonstrations and
general strikes. These movements were not directly linked, but all were rooted in
similar processes of capitalist development. As in the United States, government and
big business crushed these efforts of workers and middle sectors to wrest greater
economic and political rights. For most of the 1920s, organized labor remained weak
and its successes few. Still, the dominant classes could not wholly ignore workers’
or middle classes’ discontent or rely solely on brute force to retain power. Instead,
governments developed elaborate mixtures of patronage and coercion to defuse,
deflect, and divide opposition.
With the coming of the Great Depression, unemployment soared and labor
unions expanded and radicalized, toppling governments and unintentionally
prompting military takeovers. To give a measure of legitimacy to their rule, and to
wean their countries from economic dependency on more advanced nations, many
dictatorial regimes relied on rhetoric and policies of economic nationalism. Statedirected policies of “import substitution” in agriculture and industry aimed to
replace long-standing dependence on imported foodstuffs and manufactures, while
governments granted workers and middle classes substantially more economic
security.
Brazil exemplifies these trends. The largest nation in Latin America, with
abundant natural resources and an intricate racial and class structure, Brazil in the
first decades of the twentieth century remained overwhelmingly rural. The southeastern coastal cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Pôrto Alegre saw rapid growth,
with coffee exports from those cities’ hinterlands being the country’s main economic
strength. Under the Old Republic (1889–1930), the national government was
weak and the political system decentralized, with individual states enjoying great
autonomy. Corrupt political machines governed states almost as if they were separate
countries. As coastal cities grew and new social classes emerged, criticism of the political system mounted. After a bout of postwar labor unrest, in 1922–1924 a series of
revolts erupted among young army officers who called for fair elections and honest
government. The Tenente (Lieutenant) Revolts were violently repressed, with one column of rebels holding out for more than two years in a 15,000-mile trek through the
Brazilian backlands.
The Great Depression, which hit Brazil’s coffee-dependent economy like a
sledgehammer, spelled the demise of the Old Republic. The army under Getúlio
Vargas, a former governor, seized power in the Revolution of 1930. Imposing a dictatorship to squelch a revolt in São Paulo and rising labor unrest sparked by mass
unemployment, Vargas called for a national assembly to write a new constitution. The
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UNITED
CONFIRMING PAGES
STATES
South America
before World War II
ATLANTIC OCEAN
Gulf of Mexico
0
300
600 Miles
Caribbean Sea
Caracas
B R I T I S H G UI AN A
VENEZUELA
D UT CH G UI AN A
FR E N CH G UI AN A
Bogotá
COLOMBIA
Quito
ECUADOR
Am
azon R .
PERU
B
R
A
Z
I
L
Lima
La Paz
PACIFIC OCEAN
BOLIVIA
Sucre
PA
RA
G
CHILE
Buenos Aires
Rio de Janeiro
Y
Santiago
UA
Asuncion
URUGUAY
Montevideo
ARGENTINA
Falkland Islands (Br.)
Claimed by Argentina as
Islas Malvinas
185
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Part II The Era of Revolution and War
ALESSANDRI REGIME
IN CHILE
Constitution of 1934 reduced the political autonomy of states, granted universal suffrage, and granted labor the right to organize and bargain collectively. In 1934–1935
the mass political mobilizations became ferocious, with fascists and communists
waging pitched battles in the streets of the major cities. In response to an abortive
communist-led revolt in late 1935, Vargas again imposed himself as dictator, and two
years later, in 1937, announced a new constitution and, literally, a new state—the
Estado Novo.
Brazil under Vargas’s Estado Novo pursued an aggressive policy of economic
nationalism under an authoritarian, fascist-influenced government, implementing a
series of social reforms that by the end of World War II had changed society in important ways. The state became a major player in the national economy, with extensive
government investment in steel, oil, chemicals, transport, and other major industries.
Its basic strategy of rule was to buy off urban workers through extensive labor reforms,
government-dominated unions, and strongly nationalist rhetoric. The Labor Code of
1943, an elaborate social security system, and a powerful national army defused opposition from both the Right and the Left. Like FDR in the United States, Vargas deftly
exploited the new communications medium of radio to disseminate his populist
message to millions of listeners.
Chile followed a similar trajectory, despite its very different history. Similar to
Brazil in its stark inequalities and strong military, Chile was very different in its relatively homogeneous, mostly European-descended population and long history of
parliamentary democracy. Like Brazil, Chile also saw economic distress lead to labor
unrest, political upheaval, dictatorial populism, and economic nationalism. The Chilean
economy, highly dependent on exports of nitrates and copper, declined rapidly after
the boom caused by World War I. As the elite and military crushed strikes and
protests, the energetic populist reformer Arturo Alessandri reached out to workers
and middle sectors. His victory in the 1920 elections marked a transition from traditional elite politicking to mass political mobilizing. His program was progressive,
calling for separation of church and state, a uniform labor code, universal suffrage, and
a greater role for government in society. Finding his reforms blocked by conservatives
and the military, Alessandri was ousted in a 1924 military coup.
When the Great Depression hit in 1930, the export sector collapsed and the
government essentially fell apart. In 1932, a conservative coalition helped reelect
Alessandri. By now he had abandoned his reformist edge. Like Vargas an admirer
of Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Alessandri stifled labor agitation, filled the jails with dissidents, dissolved Congress, and embarked on a program of state-directed industrialization. He could not wholly ignore the demands of workers and middle sectors,
however. Like Vargas, his regime expanded public education, social security, and other
social programs among a populace polarized between left-wing socialists and communists and right-wing Nazi sympathizers. In the 1930s the bureaucracy expanded
dramatically, as a series of governments spearheaded a program of state-directed
industrialization. Financing these initiatives through foreign loans and credits, mostly
from the U.S. government, the Chilean economy became increasingly dependent on
U.S. capital and beholden to U.S. interests, especially in U.S.-dominated copper,
nitrate, and oil industries.
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Chapter 12 Economic and Social Upheaval in the Americas
In countries with less developed capitalist economies, the Great Depression
ushered in U.S.-supported dictatorial regimes that ruled with little regard for the
opinions or support of the populace: the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic
(1930–1961), Batista in Cuba (1933–1959), and the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua
(1936–1979). As brutal as these dictators were, their violence pales in comparison
to that of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who seized power in El Salvador in
1932. In response to an uprising planned by workers and peasants, the Martínez
regime slaughtered upwards of 30,000 people in what has come to be known simply
as La Matanza (The Massacre). In later years Martínez was dubbed El Brujo (The
Sorcerer) due to his fascination with the occult. Classic Latin American dictators like
Martínez and Trujillo are brilliantly portrayed in the novels of Nobel laureates Miguel
Angel Asturias, The President (1946), and Gabriel García Márquez, Autumn of the
Patriarch (1975).
CANADA IN THE INTERWAR YEARS
Cars and radios were among the new consumer goods that Canadians rapidly
embraced in the years after World War I. In the vast Dominion, these new devices
rendered prairie farms, fishing villages, and lumber camps less isolated and fostered
a stronger sense of national belonging. Canadians not only bought these goods, they
produced them, usually at branch plants U.S. firms had built across its northern border. Canada’s proximity to the United States made the Dominion feel a deep tie to its
neighbor, a kinship that in many cases was real—by 1940 hundreds of thousands of
Canadians had immigrated to the United States, attracted mainly by greater economic
opportunities. On the other hand, living next door to the powerful United States
helped to foster a sense of Canadian national distinctiveness. This nationalism was
expressed through institutions like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; through
the championing of the Canadian landscape in painting and literature; and in popular culture, from women’s magazines like MacLean’s to the sport of ice hockey.
Hard times also brought many Canadians together, sometimes in opposition to
those in power. The depression came early to rural areas, prompting many foreclosures. The wave of prosperity in the late 1920s, an economic bubble based mostly
on speculation, passed rapidly. When the crash came in 1929, unemployment lines
soon snaked along city streets. Once-thriving agricultural settlements were abandoned,
leaving only grain elevators standing next to unused railroad tracks. Mines, mills, and
shops closed, while immigration, a boon to businesses in city and countryside,
virtually ended. The federal government’s response under the Conservative Party
came too late for most voters, who in 1935 turned to the Liberals, the other major
political party.
By this time leaders of both parties had realized that the New Deal of U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt could be adapted to Canadian conditions, building
on homegrown patterns of cooperation and social welfare, and might stem the rising
tide of political disaffection. Leftist groups, Communists and especially Socialists,
attracted wide followings in their call for an overhaul of a free market capitalism that
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U.S.-SUPPORTED
DICTATORSHIPS
CANADIAN
NATIONALISM GROWS
DEPRESSION AND
REFORM
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Part II The Era of Revolution and War
CANADA IN
WORLD WAR II
had left too many Canadians bereft of even a meager livelihood. In addition, varied
regionally based political movements—in Quebec (the majority French-speaking
province), in Alberta (where drought and financial hardship had ruined farmers’ fortunes), and in Nova Scotia (home to farmers, fishing families, and miners, all hardhit)—put forth platforms to upend the status quo, each making serious political
inroads. Many Canadians thought that the national government had failed them, and
looked to their hometowns and provinces for solutions to their ills.
The advent of World War II refocused Canadians’ vision on the Dominion
and their nation’s place in the world. Canada joined the war in September 1939,
just days after the German invasion of Poland, becoming the first nation in the
Western Hemisphere to do so. Canada’s economy quickly recovered, supplying manufacturing and agricultural goods to the Allies. Canada also became a source of
troops, most for the European theater, with more than 40,000 Canadians losing
their lives in the conflict. At war’s end, Canada, which unlike the United States had
belonged to the League of Nations, became a charter member of a new international
body, the United Nations.
SUMMARY
Across the Americas, the interwar years saw profound upheaval and change. Capitalist
development deepened, while most governments became far more powerful and more
directly involved in national economies and cultures. In the United States, a decade
of conservative dominance and apparent economic prosperity in the 1920s was
followed by the economic cataclysm of the Great Depression and the reforms of the
New Deal. By the late 1930s, the United States had developed a rudimentary welfare
state and engineered a partial economic recovery. Similar processes unfolded in
Canada. In Mexico, a third of a century of economic liberalism (capitalism) without
an expansion of political liberalism (rights of citizenship) led to a social explosion and
a decade of violent social revolution and civil war. The tumult generated a new social
charter in the Constitution of 1917, a new sense of national identity, and, by the late
1930s, the institutionalization of a stable one-party government.
In response to mounting opposition at home and abroad, in the early 1930s the
United States modified its policy of military intervention in the Caribbean basin. Instead
of troops it used more indirect ways to dominate Latin American governments and
economies. Throughout Latin America, capitalist development sparked the growth of
cities, industrial enclaves, and the formation of new social classes that demanded political and economic rights. Movies, radio, and mass circulation newspapers created new
cultural communities and brought different parts of the hemisphere into increasing contact with one another. In general, Latin American countries with more developed capitalist economies saw dictatorial regimes combine heavy-handed repression, populist
reforms meant to stem revolutionary impulses among workers, and state-directed economic nationalism. In less developed countries, the Great Depression ushered in an era
of long-reigning dictators who violently suppressed political opposition and remained in
power long after the economic and political crises that had given rise to their regimes
had ended.
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Chapter 12 Economic and Social Upheaval in the Americas
Everywhere, as states became more powerful, capitalism proved both extremely
volatile and virtually unstoppable. As hemispheric integration intensified, people
across the Americas absorbed, transformed, and often combined elements of communism, fascism, anarchism, liberalism, nationalism, racialism, and others in creative
response to the profound economic, political, and cultural challenges they confronted.
SUGGESTED
SOURCES
Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: America in the Twenties. 1995. Readable and insightful.*
Garraty, John A. The Great Depression. 1986. An excellent survey.*
Katz, Friedrich. Pancho Villa. 1998. Expansive and engrossing.*
Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945.
1999. A Pulitzer Prize–winning work.*
Kessler-Harris, Alice. In Pursuit of Equity: Men, Women, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in
Twentieth-Century America. 2001. Brilliant and provocative.*
Klubock, Thomas Miller. Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente
Copper Mine, 1904–1951. 1998. First-rate labor history.*
Knight, Alan. The Mexican Revolution (2 vols.). 1986. The Revolution as a genuinely radical
mass movement; lucid and informed.*
Levine, Robert M., and John J. Crocitti, eds. The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics. 1999.
A fresh and broad-ranging collection.*
Maclean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. 1994.
A superb and chilling account.*
Nugent, Daniel. Spent Cartridges of Revolution: An Anthropological History of Namiquipa,
Chihuahua. 1993. Superb study of revolutionary change in an Indian village.*
Strong-Boag, Veronica. The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada,
1919–1939. 1988. Excellent description and analysis of cultural change in the interwar
years.*
Womack, John, Jr. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. 1972. An outstanding study and read.*
WEB
SOURCES
www.memory.loc.gov/ammem/coolhtml/coolhome.html. This Library of Congress site has links
to source materials from the 1920s on the U.S. transition to a mass consumer society.
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/Slouch_Crash14.html. A good introduction with graphs to
the Great Depression in the United States and elsewhere by a University of California
economics professor.
www.newdeal.feri.org. Information and links on the New Deal from the Franklin and Eleanor
Roosevelt Institute (FERI).
www.historicaltextarchive.com/links.php?op=viewslink&sid=224. Provides many excellent links
to materials on the Mexican Revolution.
*Paperback available.
189