Introduction
In Siam on the morning of 24 June 1932 the 150-year old Thai absolute monarchy quickly and unceremoniously ended. The ‘People's Party’—a small, secretive coalition of commoner civil servants and military officers—deposed the absolute king, and quickly enshrined popular sovereignty, legal equality, and citizens’ rights in the country's first constitution drafted a few days later.
People's Party members and supporters designated the quick strike against the king as a ‘revolution’ that emancipated the Thai people from autocracy and subordination. In contrast, the group's opponents attacked the move against the monarchy as merely a coup d’état against legitimate authority that liberated no one and instead subjected the Thai people to a tyranny culminating in military dictatorship during the Second World War. The debate continues over the importance of 1932, and the interpretations are usually bound up with the bitter partisanship that has accompanied the crooked history of Thai democracy. Excepting the first few years after the event, morally and politically negative interpretations have dominated views of 1932.Footnote 1
This article re-examines the People's Party revolution by focusing on the dissemination of state democratic ideology as the main method in the Party's drive for hegemony in the first years after the event. Ideology is an unsavoury word implying abstract and impractical ideas that powerful groups use to control ignorant people.Footnote 2 People's Party critics have viewed the Party's democratic rhetoric this way, and have assigned one or both of two attributes to the group's motivations: the People's Party were impressionistic young men excited by the foreign concept of democracy, which they adopted without understanding it, and/or they used it as a sham device to mask a cynical grab for power among an uncomprehending population.Footnote 3 I use democratic ideology here however in a neutral sense as a product of a new consciousness arising in the bureaucratic commoner class who felt that social and economic transformations had made the absolute kingship an anachronism. Democracy was their solution to the contradiction between socio-economic change and autocratic inertia. When explained in tandem with hegemony, another threatening term often taken to mean a relationship of total dominance by the rulers and complete submission by the ruled, ideology in this neutral sense is needed to explain the People's Party project. Following Gramsci I would define People's Party hegemony as their attempt at political domination through a new moral and intellectual leadership that appealed to the public.Footnote 4 Democracy became the core political concept after 1932 and was the ground from which the People's Party launched their attempt at a new hegemony. Furthermore the process produced a method of leadership in Siam that still resonates, which I will call democratic paternalism—democratic for the justification of the revolution by reference to popular rule, individual rights, and legal equality, and paternalist because the new system restricted the political role and responsibility of ordinary people whom the Party regarded as naive.Footnote 5 A kindly and controlling father-leader was an old regime bestowal on the People's Party, but the commoner bureaucratic class consciously transformed the concept as they strove to implement a new political system.
Democratic paternalism as the new attempt at moral/political leadership had limited and mixed results. In particular, the weakness of state power—the inability to reach most people in a poorly integrated state—restricted the influence of the new power and created differences between two broad categories of the ‘people’, the clumpish term in whose name the revolution was staged. The first category comprised the always remote and largely illiterate peasantry, five out of six Siamese people at the time,Footnote 6 who were ostensible subjects of the new regime but for whom state projects were likely irrelevant to their lives or incomprehensible. The second category of ‘people’ encompassed a growing but still very small middle class intelligentsiaFootnote 7 whom the regime frequently tasked with relaying democratic ideology to the first group. The intelligentsia—among whom we will focus on schoolteachers and parliamentary representatives—found democratic rhetoric inspiring and welcomed the introduction of official democracy. They also however were frustrated by the political restraints imposed by the People's Party on those outside the jealously preserved circle of Party elites.
The reception of state democracy in this first phase of Thai constitutionalism needs more investigation. We know almost nothing about the peasant reaction to state politics. For the intelligentsia, using the work of William Roseberry and E. P. Thompson, it is useful to conceive of the new order's democratic ideology as producing an arena of contestation instead of blanket and thoroughgoing consensus.Footnote 8 There was no all-embracing effect of the attempts at People's Party hegemony. Returning to the opposed claims of 1932's social effect raised at the beginning of this article, the event was thus neither the dawn of a new freedom nor the onset of a tyrannical dark age, but was instead a more complex and unevenly successful attempt to impose leadership and inculcate new political values.
The diffusion of the democratic ideals of popular rule via elected representatives, individual autonomy, and equality formed the core of the People's Party's ideological work, and they introduced these ideals via a reformed educational curriculum and propaganda campaigns. In these state projects we see the main goal of democratic paternalism: promotion of democracy by paradoxically depoliticizing the citizenry. Also we will see the key aspects of a counter democracy devised by the new intelligentsia to create a more inclusive society: a system of meritocracy instead of personal favouritism; rural empowerment; the assertion of youthful élan against the enervation of age; and free thought superseding customary obedience. Party democracy was circumscribed and legalistic; the new intelligentsia's ‘thicker’ and less tidy interpretation aimed at a transformation of social values.
Education: Turning subjects into citizens
The People's Party made the introduction of modern, universal education central to their plans for the realization of Thai democracy.Footnote 9 In the context of Thai history this was an ambitious and novel programme, since the 1932 constitutionalists inherited a political system that didn't offer modern education for the vast majority of the population whose lives were tied to the agricultural cycle. The absolute monarchy, after considerable debate and opposition, introduced universal primary education in 1921 but ten years later it still relied on a fragmented Buddhist temple system that taught basic letters. Additionally, manners and morals constituted a key aspect of education under the old regime, and reinforced a concern with proper deference to social superiors and refined behaviour that ensured social harmony. At a higher level, the old regime used education primarily to expand the civil service while also preserving the political pre-eminence of the ruling class. To train the elite, it developed a technical education favouring certain useful areas of knowledge that facilitated state power.Footnote 10 Both the ethics-based and highly restricted technical education excluded politics, a modern subject that the elite regarded as dangerous and potentially inflammatory in a society unfamiliar—so they thought or hoped—with ethics of individuality.
By contrast, the new order advocated politics as participatory and for all people. The abrupt discursive transition however masks a deeper continuity in official attitudes. The paternalist view of democracy shaped how it should be taught, and education borrowed from old regime ethics, in the sense that a very few qualified people spoke legitimately about politics and instructed the people accordingly. Official mentalities perhaps changed more slowly than political circumstances, and in education we can see democratic paternalism as the conscious addition of new ideas to an intellectual life and social attitudes inherited from the past.
The People's Party pledged a fast track to popular enlightenment. A new education act (1935) and additions to it (1938) followed plans made in 1932,Footnote 11 with the result that access to schooling grew markedly throughout the 1930s. As with the first decade of compulsory schooling in the 1920s, the most dramatic changes took place at the primary level. According to government figures, the total number of schools nearly doubled between 1930 and 1939, with about 11,500 by the end of the decade. Over the same period, student enrolment rose from nearly 678,000 to nearly 1.446 million. The teaching ranks more than doubled to more than 32,000.Footnote 12
By 1937 according to the education ministry some type of schooling was available everywhere, although what ‘everywhere’ meant is not clear and truancy or simply an inability to reach a school kept many children away. In 1934–35, for example, the government calculated that about 1.75 million primary school-age children should have been in school; about one million actually attended. The government's ambitious plan to have at least half the population educated at the primary level remained out of reach. One district officer in 1937 estimated that 10 per cent of children had achieved this, while a high-ranking government official estimated the figure at one-third.Footnote 13
Young people of an age that democracy could inspire remained tied to the land and did not attend school. About three-quarters did not study beyond the first two primary school grades, and numbers fell off drastically at the higher levels. Of the one million-plus children in school in 1934–35, just under 45,000 attended secondary school.Footnote 14 Few graduated from high school six, which was considered to be a largely complete education. For 1939, the ministry's research department calculated that about 5,400 people graduated at this level.Footnote 15
While weak national integration limited the spread of the People's Party programme, paternalism shaped the meaning of what got through to people in the countryside. Primary and secondary education relied on a pre-existing curriculum inherited from the old regime with an added a depoliticized democratic message. The curricula continued to employ ChaophrayaFootnote 16 Thammasakmontri's Thammacariya (Ethics) textbooks as the foundation of instruction. Thammasakmontri was a central figure in old regime education, and also became education minister for a period after 1932 at the request of the People's Party.Footnote 17 Thammasakmontri wrote six volumes for this series, beginning in the fifth reign (1868–1910), intending them to be taught over six years of schooling. Two aspects stand out in the texts: submission to authority and the importance of consensus, both founded on a sense of community that subsumed the individual. People's Party education added democratic ethics to these foundational values in terms that reinforced deference and promoted obedience.
In 1932 and 1933, a series of classroom manuals and guides for teachers circulated in the government. These texts give us the main insight into the government's democratic project. The lessons mix morals and manners training, Buddhist-inspired teachings on mental independence, which were popular because of their adaptability to notions of the rational democratic subject, and Abraham Lincoln-esque platitudes about popular sovereignty. Most striking is the close reliance of a good political system, that is, a socially harmonious one, on individual realization of the obligations entailed by different social positions.Footnote 18
Secondary school attendees were the prime targets of the new democratic education, and their indoctrination largely revolved around ethics instruction that expanded on Buddhist principles inculcated at the primary level to include key aspects of modern citizenship. The budding democratic subject is inscribed over the Buddhist personality, and both discourses highlighted duty to others and self-control. Upper secondary education, for those who made it that far, offered further training in the social graces. The virtues of a gentleman are stressed, with diligence in giving up vice and maintaining virtue core principles. Virtue is linked to a more developed ‘understanding of worldly dhamma,’ which refers to a righteous political system that will flow from the virtuous setting proper examples for others.Footnote 19 In the final curricular plan adopted by the new government in 1937, the ‘duties and ethics of citizenship’ included explanations of the constitutional system, the parliament, elections, and the importance of national holidays to social unity (secular and religious, Constitution Day, and Visakha Puja, for example).Footnote 20
The manuals explained something new in Thai society: how people should evaluate their assembly representatives. But while the notion of political representation was new, the standards by which candidates should be judged relied on older interpretations of power. Ethics and comportment were to guide the people in their selection of representatives as much as their qualifications. People were advised to choose candidates with graceful manners, good will, and the qualities of ‘manliness’.Footnote 21 The latter included warm-heartedness, the just treatment of others, and self-control. Additionally, the ideal representative worked for the interests of society and sacrificed for the common good. While these values would have resonated because of their long association with a type of Southeast Asian strongman or ‘man of prowess’Footnote 22 whose character attracted followers, the texts advised people to free themselves from the bonds of patronage. They should not feel compelled to choose village heads, district leaders or provincial governors as their representatives.
The People's Party pledged to make democracy a new social value that superseded all prior custom. But the worldly dhamma that described democracy borrowed from pre-existing social ethics, and the primacy of moral exemplars as guarantors of a righteous political order could have been taken straight from the Thammacariya series. Graceful, mannered people should become the new moral elite via representation, for example, and democracy should establish social harmony, not lead to the assertion of particular interests. The state advised people to independently choose their democratic representatives, but according to state-imposed notions of virtue. Moreover, the Party's tutelage model contained the doubtful proposition that the mentors of democracy would willingly acquiesce in their political extinction. After being instructed in the new philosophy by Party and bureaucratic spokesmen, the people would perhaps vote these patrons out of office.Footnote 23
State officers wrote the ethics manuals for teachers, on whom the People's Party relied to spread the democratic message. The authorities however frequently remarked on their naiveté. Educational inspectors who travelled upcountry lamented the instructors’ meagre learning, which isn't surprising given the low secondary school enrolment and graduation numbers, and also the fact that most teachers were only slightly older than their charges.Footnote 24 This reality reinforced an often-expressed belief of new regime officers that not only the peasantry but also members of the new intelligentsia were too immature for democracy and must be led.
The teaching guidelines reveal the instructional dimension of democratic paternalism; a teacher's revolt in 1933 shows the authoritarianism of the hierarchy. When challenged by young upcountry teachers, the authorities responded by using the immaturity argument. Democratic discourse in this case, as in others in the 1930s, encouraged the intelligentsia to speak out, but once they did their voices were stifled by the new paternalism.
About a year after the revolution, activists in the nationwide Teachers Association—founded under the old regime by Thammasakmontri as the largest, official group of teachers in the country—argued that the education ministry was failing the Party's pledge to enfranchise and enlighten ordinary people in the transition to full democracy. Instead, they claimed the new regime allowed old has-beens, incompetents, and bullies to teach and administer. Organic or rhythmic metaphors were popular at the time in social descriptions; in this case, the teachers used a pendulum to make their point. The drag or the dead weight of fossils from a bygone age retarded the natural movement of education towards democracy.Footnote 25 The rebellious teachers were young and idealistic, and to them the new democracy should consist of a new meritocracy, a level playing field, and the necessity for the individual to speak and think independently of established authority.
In August 1933, teachers at a school in Lopburi province—around 100 miles from Bangkok—submitted a letter to the government criticizing the provincial education head: Wichakam Piset was a man of low learning who ‘doesn't want to express his opinions for fear of making mistakes’. Footnote 26 He only attained his position, they contended, because of his friendship with Prince Dhani Nivas, the last education minister under the old regime. In addition to his ignorance, Wichakam's laziness and disinterest limited educational advancement in the province. Education in Lopburi, they asserted, was no better than it was under the old regime; in other words, it remained poor. His example discouraged independent initiative and encouraged flattery and kowtowing, the petitioners said, a model completely unsuited for the democratic age.
Teachers in the northern province of Pichit reported similar problems with their local masters. In July 1933, a group there followed up on a letter that they had written to Bangkok the previous August about the Pitsanulok circleFootnote 27 education head, Phra Sawat.Footnote 28 As with the Lopburi case, the accused in Pichit was said to be of dubious morals. Phra Sawat only liked flatterers and he harassed his subordinates, especially if they crossed him. The group portrayed Sawat as an autocrat governing his fiefdom with impunity. In a later letter to the government, the group claimed that a senior civil servant before 1932 knew what was going on with Sawat but important men spun a tight web of influence.Footnote 29
Additional, high-level education officers became targets of these campaigns against malpractice and the cases gained national attention. At the beginning of September, the Chalerm Prades newspaper published a list of the accused and its correspondent wrote that the teacher's group truly represented the democratic spirit.Footnote 30 A 187-member teacher's group explained in a letter to the prime minister around the same time as the provincial revolts that five senior figures in the ministry were old, useless, and stood in the way of democracy.Footnote 31 Democratic enthusiasts often rhetorically attacked old regime bureaucrats and the elder generation in the early years of the People's Party, and many like the teachers associated youth with democratic thinking, in direct rebuttal of the immaturity argument. An additional, grievous charge labelled one senior officer as an enemy of democracy: PhrayaFootnote 32 Wisetsuphawat, head of the common education department, allegedly convened a meeting of students to protest against the People's Party takeover in June 1932.
Unfortunately for the activist teachers, none of their complaints—the first public criticism of the new regime's paternalist educational system—were taken seriously. Thammasakmontri, education minister at the time, read the news reports with contempt. In August, after the storm broke, he wrote to Prime Minister Phahon that the Teachers Association couldn't be taken seriously; the malcontents were young and easily led astray by troublemakers with an axe to grind.Footnote 33 Thammasakmontri regarded their suggestions for replacements as completely unsuitable. Regarding one, he wrote that the ‘world will only laugh, and look down on us; in Thailand is education only worth a pittance?’Footnote 34
The government deferred to Thammasakmontri's judgement and none of the accused officials lost their positions. Paternalism governed pedagogy and the administrative structure that managed a new intelligentsia meant to act as democratic messengers. The state advised people not to bow to authority when choosing representatives, as we saw above with the teaching manuals. Then, in a particular case where young teachers used democratic discourse offensively, it branded the activists as troublemakers. People's Party discourse frequently reiterated that independent judgement of merit, not birth or connections, determined status in a democracy. But people were advised in one case to trust their judgement and in another that they were too young to make a decision. The wise men alone, it seems, had the legitimate interpretation of democracy.Footnote 35
Propaganda: Democratic paternalism on tour and on air
Given the country's poor infrastructure and limited education, the People's Party eagerly adopted new methods and technologies to disseminate democratic ideology. The state used rural lecture tours and radio broadcasts, in particular, as the primary accompaniments to the educational system for advancement of the new message and creation of an imagined community of equals.
New regime spokesmen clearly articulated the inherited problems of exclusivity and elitism in Thai politics, even as their paternalism privileged a select few. Ronasit Pichai, an army officer and chief propagandist after 1932, insisted that in the new era: ‘It is necessary that common people's knowledge expand to include the entire country and for provincial people to feel as if they are one, and not left out of the commonality as before.’Footnote 36 But as with education, paternalism framed the ideology and the People's Party sought to control how democracy could be conceived.
In a programme very similar to the Japanese Meiji model, lecturers toured the countryside throughout the 1930s to spread the constitutional democratic message.Footnote 37 They commonly travelled for several months in the dry season, giving talks throughout a particular region. In a 63-day tour on the eastern seaboard provinces at the end of the decade, for example, a committee visited nearly 55,500 people in 44 places. Officials distributed 1,500 pictures of the Constitution and an equal number of copies of the document, handed out 2,000 printed lectures, and 1,500 collections of the prime minister's speeches.Footnote 38
Finding, unsurprisingly, that most people didn't understand constitutional democracy, the government advised that for maximum impact the quality of listeners mattered more than the quantity. It counselled that only people with a minimum of four years’ primary education be allowed to attend. Children and old women were ostensibly banned.Footnote 39 The educated middle strata of society—civil servants, monks, the rural bourgeoisie, and teachers—formed the core audience, and the idea was that the intelligentsia would return to their villages to spread the new democratic gospel.
What did the publicists discuss? Initially, officials scrambled to give a clear answer. Rural experience, and particularly the peasantry's not always polite reception of the new ideology, provided an important impetus to the government's publicity drive. An MP for Petchabun province informed the government that he tried to explain the new order to local people but quickly found they didn't understand him, and that perhaps the problem was that he himself didn't know what he was talking about. Others found themselves confronted by uncomprehending or hostile crowds who were more interested in hearing solutions to their economic problems than listening to political abstractions. An MP for the northern province of Lamphun, for example, garbled an explanation of tax obligations in a democracy and found local tobacco farmers refusing to pay the tax at all.Footnote 40 This irritated the interior ministry, which wanted civil servants to stick to an approved script.Footnote 41 In 1934 in Nakhon Pathom—a central province near Bangkok—lecturers found local people, who like the Lamphun peasantry interpreted the new freedom under democracy as a licence to ignore authority, had seized land from wealthy landowners and were capitalizing on its rental. The lecturers instructed local officials that any further Soviet-style land expropriation could not be allowed. Soon after these cases, the Publicity Bureau sought message consistency on the lecture circuit and a focus on the new political principles. Lecturers most often promoted the new order by discussing two topics particularly: popular sovereignty and rights of the citizenry.
In brief, the state expected speakers to explain that the people before 1932 had no role in the administration of the country. In one explanation, rights and power were almost entirely one-sided; an elite class had them, the masses did not.Footnote 42 In another, what rights the people had were never explained to them.Footnote 43 Post-1932, the government advised, the people should be informed that masters and servants no longer existed.Footnote 44
Individual rights, ostensible hallmarks of the new age, were divided into equality and liberty.Footnote 45 Most importantly, legal equality for the first time in Thai history obviated the privileges of ranks, titles, and class that buttressed the aristocratic social hierarchy. Speakers were cautioned to make clear that equality before the law did not entail material equality or wealth redistribution, given the problems mentioned above. With judicial equality, the courts judged the disputes of all citizens equally (the military formed an exception, as the forces had their own courts); class and family were deemed as legally irrelevant. Spokesmen described personal liberty as a fundamental condition of modern society, and speakers explained that progressive countries—which now included Siam since it was a democracy and not an autocracy—are those that do not allow slavery or the loss of autonomy, which is ‘very similar to the state of a savage beast’. Furthermore popular sovereignty meant ‘we don't live in a savage country’.Footnote 46
As in the case of the activist upcountry teachers discussed above, some regional civil servants wanted to realize the rhetoric of popular politics in practice. Given the limited resources of the government, provincial MPs, who emerged as a new class of political advocates after the first elections in 1933, often gave lectures on the new order. But this new class among the rural intelligentsia—most of whom were very young—challenged the state's democracy-from-above model and took seriously the rights in the constitution just enumerated. In the northeast, the poorest region of the country where popular democracy became a powerful force, publicity officials in 1935 criticized provincial MPs who spent more time tackling local problems than following the official message that the state democracy was a tremendous boon for all. The activism of Thong-in Phuriphat, an Ubon province representative, gives the best example of the new class's contribution to democracy and their impatience with the pace of change under the People's Party.
Thong-in—two weeks shy of his twenty-sixth birthday when the People's Party deposed the absolute monarchy—became an Ubon MP in 1933 when the first elections were held. A skilled boxer, secondary school teacher, barrister, and district officer, Thong-in's independent streak irked the government.Footnote 47 He appeared to state officials as stubbornly resistant to their directives, and also competed with other local politicians. While competition was perhaps an inevitable part of the incipient democracy, the government sought consensual relations, between the centre as master and the periphery as docile apprentice. Thong-in had his own ideas about the relationship. He resented the presence in his area of Pairoj Chaiyanam, a leading Bangkok official sent upcountry to lecture in 1934. Thong-in apparently said that Pairoj shouldn't speak about democracy since he gained an education under the old regime and thus was politically suspect, and in any case didn't understand northeastern affairs. State officers disliked Thong-in's attitude, and viewed his independence as treason; Pairoj thought Thong-in dangerous because he refused to stand up for a toast to the People's Party at a civil servant's association dinner given one night.Footnote 48
Thong-in relentlessly criticized the government over its restraints on democracy, and he condemned the hijacking of the new order by cliques and factions. To his impatient young mind, any compromise with authoritarianism—even or especially in the form of the People's Party—threatened to strangle Thai democracy in its cradle. Late in the decade he wrote in a newspaper article, arguing that the protection of sovereignty and nationalism had to be popular movements, and people should mistrust any group that claimed to stand for the nation as a whole.Footnote 49
Thong-in's conflict with Bangkok's paternalist democracy shows the limits to People's Party hegemony, and especially the challenge posed by a new class of rural leaders who spoke independently to their constituents. Radio, the wireless ‘magic device’ that presented an exciting new option for publicity, accompanied lectures as an additional but more closely controlled forum in which the contest occurred. While more easily policed than rural lectures, radio programming similarly reached a limited audience. Sakon Voravan, a People's Party advocate from an aristocratic family, estimated in 1933 that there were 16,000 radios in the country; the following year Ronasit Pichai figured there were 25,000, with most in Bangkok. The 50 per cent+ increase in a year is impressive, but Ronasit estimated that this represented only 2.5 per cent of what was needed to reach people.Footnote 50 Transmission capacity and staffing posed additional problems. In the early 1930s, Phraya Thai station in Bangkok was the only transmitting station, had power for only two or three hours of programming a day, and the ten-kilowatt signal often disappeared outside of the Bangkok area. By one estimate, the signal travelled well for about 300 kilometres. Receiver quality upcountry was another issue; many of the cheapest sets, that is, those within the financial reach of country people, had only intermittent reception.Footnote 51
The state censored all content prior to airing. While the government, on the one hand, created a participatory environment and encouraged educated people to contribute to certain radio programmes, as we’ll see below, when it came to state affairs and the meaning of democracy only certain government officers were permitted to speak. Moreover, such discussion meant following the approved script from the Publicity Bureau that focused on administrative topics and constitutional nuts and bolts only, and not debates on the practice or philosophy of politics.
Even so the regime couldn't completely control the discourse, especially when parliamentarians, given the minimal staff of the Publicity Bureau, were drafted to speak about their provinces. Some, for example a Chiang Mai provincial representative in 1934, related glowingly their people's loyalty to the new regime and how happy everyone was in their villages.Footnote 52 Undoubtedly this would have pleased the Publicity Bureau. But others, akin to Thong-in in Ubon, had a more active interpretation of democracy as the right of commoners to air their grievances and empower them to take charge of their affairs. Many spoke forthrightly about the problems they faced at home. The MP for the northern province of Pitsanulok, for example, opined on radio that government indifference to the lives of people in his province had reduced the place to the status of ‘an unwanted child of a minor wife’.Footnote 53 The central province of Chaiyaphum's representative claimed that urban people would have trouble understanding local conditions, which were ‘more different to Bangkok than the palaces of the gods are to the huts of the destitute’.Footnote 54 Liang Chaiyakul, another Ubon MP, remarked that traditional state policy towards the provinces consisted of only one strategy: ‘collect as much tax and other revenue from the people as possible.’ The northeast as a result still suffered from neglect.Footnote 55
Parliamentarians were not the only extra-bureaucratic voices. As Ronasit Pichai explained, the People's Party quickly discovered it didn't have enough qualified people to speak on additional broadcast topics that were intended to create a more informed and socially engaged citizenry. The new regime thus allowed suitable people of any class or background to deliver lectures in their areas of expertise, provided however that politics didn't form part of the agenda. In the mid-1930s, such topics included: health, provincial history, sports, hobbies such as photography or music, and morals. Like the educational system, radio broadcasts frequently described moral rectitude as fundamental to social welfare. The ethics espoused to produce social harmony relied on traditional religion, and the state invited well-educated Buddhist monks to the radio programmes.Footnote 56 Like young teachers and rural MPS, many young monks were excited by the empowering promises of democracy.Footnote 57 The government stated explicitly however that politics could not be broached in Sangha affairs, monks on radio could not criticize people or groups, and sermons could not cover worldly topics. Instead, the government suggested monks focus on the old standbys of religious and moral education: the Sangha administration, the history of Buddha images or particular temples, and the morals espoused in the tales of the Buddha's prior lives (jatakas).Footnote 58
While homilies or temple histories were staid and old-fashioned, the state's public relations innovations introduced a new type of discourse: public debates. The government frequently reiterated free speech as important to democracy, and the new forum allowed people to practise oratory and persuasion. In the mid-1930s, the government's Fine Arts Department sponsored a range of debates, broadcast on the airwaves, which quickly became popular with listeners.Footnote 59 Hundreds of people attended the exchanges and applied to participate, and the recounting of debates featured in daily newspapers.
The government banned from the exchanges not only discussions of political philosophy, but also any discussion of government policy. Such urgent issues as the need for agricultural improvement in an economy dominated by peasant smallholders, or social problems like prostitution were also off limits.Footnote 60 Instead people were invited to show their skill in debating things like: heat is better than cold for health, cigarette smoking is better than betel chewing, strength is more effective than virtue, women of old were better than those today, or beauty contests do more good than harm. Despite the vagueness of these topics, speakers were reigned in if the discussion veered too near sensitive issues.Footnote 61 The aim, then, was a-political, intelligent, and polite speech.Footnote 62
Conclusion
The introduction of democracy in 1930s Siam is a centrally important event in modern Thai history. I have described it as the Party's attempt to impose a new moral and intellectual leadership over two broad categories of ‘people’—the peasantry and a new generation of intelligentsia. I’ve termed the method ‘democratic paternalism’, since the Party predicated its efforts on the assumption that society was politically immature, with both classes of people in need of guidance along the democratic path. The hegemonic effect of democratic paternalism was uneven because of material limits to state power, but also because many educated people who came of age in the 1930s were frustrated at the boundaries imposed by the Party's paternalist attitudes and wanted a more active democracy.
I have discussed the most important communication methods that the Party used to broadcast its ideas, and hope that the democratic paternalist frame is useful for other scholars to examine further the state-society relationship in this first stage of Thai democratic history. Further study of the landmark introduction of constitutionalism in 1932 is needed both for a better understanding of the statist democracy of the People's Party era and also for a better appreciation of, and tolerance for, popular democratic aspirations in modern Thai history. Given the general imbalance in Thai history writing, with the field tilted towards studies of the state and its elites, I would argue that the second project is the more important next step in a scholarly reappraisal of modern Thai politics. The revolution of 1932 was ‘passive’ in Antonio Gramsci's sense of a significant, state-imposed political transformation that was accomplished without popular backing. This characterization is not meant to belittle the importance of the revolution: as I would assert, and which further writing on the topic should substantiate, the enthusiasm for the new democracy among middle class society especially demonstrates that citizens actively sought to grow the democracy from its modest beginnings in a secretive cabal of civil and military officers. In this early phase, democracy arguably worked most powerfully among educated people as an inspiring and broad conception of new social and political possibilities. Further, once democracy entered the political vocabulary, the 1932 revolution became a referent to an unfinished process of social emancipation from tutelage and the event unleashed more than its stagers anticipated.Footnote 63 While there would be different paternalist ‘revolutions’ in the second half of the century, the powerful impulse to popular sovereignty never disappeared. Thus, further study can and must explore how the original ‘passive’ revolution allows us to write better about the social dimension of Thai political history, and transcend history in the passive voice.
