In 1918 an anonymous conscript writing to La Protesta, an anarchist paper known for its anti-militarism, complained about life in the Argentine navy. The military was a “school of vice” where everyone was reduced to a number and was subject to the most cruel and random subordination. The conscript fumed, “You even lose control of your hair.”Footnote 1
The young man's description of the humiliations to body and psyche reflected widely held beliefs, especially among the urban working classes, about obligatory military service. Such views, however, ran contrary to those of government officials, the bourgeois press, and the middle class and elites, who since the late nineteenth century had embraced military service, alongside national education, the promotion of national holidays and symbols, and later, obligatory voting, as crucial instruments to contain, guide, and instruct what they viewed as an unruly and unassimilated mass of foreign and native-born men.Footnote 2 Argentina's state reformers envisioned conscription as a crucial tool, not only for military defense but also for the geographic, social, and political integration of the republic.Footnote 3
This essay explores how military conscription functioned in Argentina and how different sectors of society accepted, interpreted, and debated it during the first three decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 4 Massive immigration that commenced in the 1880s drove policy makers to take quick action to modernize conscription (systems of both obligatory and voluntary military service had existed since colonial times) into a tool to integrate the sons and grandsons of immigrants into the national fabric by fostering a common social and political understanding of what it meant to be Argentine (argentinidad).Footnote 5 Extremely low rates of naturalization by immigrants, around 2 percent in 1914, and the parallel rise of anarcho-syndicalism as an essential feature of working-class life, added urgency to this project.Footnote 6 Indeed, as Omar Acha notes, the golden years of anarchism coincided with the “unfolding of a nationalizing strategy by the state.”Footnote 7
The 1901 conscription law, rendered more effective by 1911 registration legislation, developed into one of Argentina's most vivid, widespread, and concrete manifestations of nation-building. It envisioned an inextricable connection between body, psyche, sexuality, morality, normative gender roles, and the family as building blocks of the nation. The goal of conscription was to nationalize the male population through policies, practices, and propaganda that bound national identity and patriotism to a specific definition of normative masculinity that celebrated the “principles of order and hierarchy.”Footnote 8 Conscription fit into a larger pattern of both formal state projects and non-state endeavors, which by the late nineteenth century had recognized that “the definition of the male was decisive to establishing the representative type of the Argentine nationality.”Footnote 9 Notably, this vast array of projects, stimulated by massive immigration, unfolded during a period in which “the construction of the ‘tipo argentino’ was still developing.”Footnote 10 Similarly, as historian Pablo Ben has noted for Buenos Aires, many elites were anxious that the constant arrival of foreigners had disrupted plebian masculinity's connection to family and kinship, and that the popular classes were impervious to the influence of bourgeois norms.Footnote 11
For state functionaries and their allies, a modern and efficient conscription system would promote loyalty to the social, political, and economic order, in part through a compelling rhetoric of hegemonic masculinity in which men of low social status were promised domination over women in exchange for fealty to the state and the social order.Footnote 12 Argentine officers, civilian functionaries, and elected officials recognized, as Judith Allen has observed, that “modern masculinity symbolized virtue, order, and the hopes and ideals of society.”Footnote 13 The project to reshape men complemented a parallel set of practices and policies, overwhelmingly coercive and predicated on “tradition,” to contain and control women's bodies, behaviors, and economic activity.Footnote 14 The post-1901 conscription project also represented one of the most comprehensive efforts in Argentina to deploy the theories of race betterment and eugenics to the general population, but especially to men.Footnote 15
Argentina's social and political conditions, however, generated high levels of opposition against conscription and military service. First and foremost, Argentina, especially in its urban and export sector zones, was home to a diverse and mobilized left that shared a general opposition to the armed forces and their influence on civil society. Italian and Spanish immigrants had introduced anarchism to Argentina during the 1880s and it gained widespread support among the urban immigrant working class. Anarchists formed unions, newspapers, and cultural organizations that argued that the alliance of state, church, and capital exploited working-class women and men. Anarchists rejected electoral politics and were philosophically opposed to any cooperation with the state.
By the early twentieth century, roughly 5 percent of porteños belonged to the principal anarchist union, the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina. As anarchism's influence waned after 1910, syndicalism emerged as another major force on the left. Syndicalists also rejected electoral politics but saw unions, especially in key sectors of the economy like railroads and ports, as the most important vehicle to improving the lives of their membership. Syndicalists were more disposed than anarchists toward cooperation and compromise with the state and capital. Their membership tended to have a higher percentage of native-born and they were much more heavily male. Argentina was also home to the oldest Socialist party in Latin America, which represented a coalition of urban professionals, members of the middle class, and unionized skilled workers. Argentine Socialists, who had limited representation in Congress after 1904, sought to ameliorate the ills of capitalism through the establishment of a welfare state but also embraced elements of capitalism, like free trade, if they saw a potential benefit to the working class. Low rates of naturalization of immigrants in part explain their relatively weak appeal to the urban working class. After World War I, a faction of the Socialists splintered and formed the small Argentine Communist Party, which had only a weak presence in subsequent decades.Footnote 16
The domestic and international context in which the Argentine armed forces operated also contributed to popular resistance to conscription. Unlike its European counterparts, who the Argentine military hierarchy studied and often admired, Argentina had faced no recent wars, nor were there wars then impending from which to forge a militarized cult of national manhood.Footnote 17 It is true that Chile was considered a viable threat by military and political elites, but the two countries had no history of open conflict, much of the border region was of little strategic or economic importance, and both countries' major population centers were distant from national frontiers.Footnote 18 At the same time, civilian governments in Argentina, both before and after the advent of popular democracy, frequently sent the armed forces to police the same popular classes, especially workers and indigenous groups, that conscription was supposed to help incorporate into the national body. Such practices fed into widespread, though far from universal, distrust of the military, especially in immigrant communities where escape from conscription was often cited as a reason for coming to Argentina in the first place.Footnote 19 There was also extensive native-born mistrust of military service, dating back to the colonial era levies but amplified during the disastrous Paraguay War.Footnote 20
These factors contributed to the emergence of a robust anti-militarist tradition that was evident in both the leftist press and also in a more generalized acceptance of draft dodging across all classes. All groups on the left rejected Argentine “militarism,” a term that encompassed both conscription and military service, but also what they believed was the excessive influence of the military on civil society. Unlike their European counterparts, they rarely invoked fear of wars against foreign foes, but there were important distinctions in how different sectors of the left viewed conscription. Anarchists and syndicalists unequivocally rejected all forms of obligation to the state, including military service and voting. Socialists took a softer position: they sought to reduce the length of obligatory service and repeatedly proposed that the standing army be replaced with a militia.Footnote 21 All of the groups condemned the use of the armed forces against organized labor. Although rumors to the effect occasionally circulated in the bourgeois press, there was no evidence that any of these groups advocated infiltrating the barracks in order to stage a revolution.Footnote 22
Argentine anti-militarists, and especially the anarchists and syndicalists who are the primary focus of this essay, strategically deployed gender, sexuality, and class to attack the military's relationship to nationalism and capitalism by connecting the personal (the body) with the social.Footnote 23 They argued that military life was fraught with tensions that undermined its supposed relationship to masculinity and threatened men's bodies and psyches. Far from creating virile patriots, a year in barracks or aboard ship corrupted young men's noble and honest instincts, degraded the value of dignified work, prevented men from earning a decent wage for the period of service, encouraged sexual immorality, and subjected men to the arbitrary authority of others. At its core, the unequal power dynamics inherent in the military hierarchy led to the physical and even sexual degradation of the recruit at the hands of superiors. The nature of military service therefore undermined both working class male values and the military's own masculinizing goals. For these reasons, anarchists saw evasion as consistent with working class interests but also masculinity. Anarchist propaganda also challenged elite depictions of the popular classes as effeminate by generating stereotypes of non-commissioned military and officers as homosexuals who preyed upon the very men who they were supposed to guide toward proper national manhood.Footnote 24
This essay also examines the response of the military and their civilian allies to anti-militarism. The passage of obligatory male suffrage (1912), the subsequent victory of the populist Unión Cívica Radical party in the presidential elections of 1916, anxiety about the Russian Revolution (1917), the university reform movement (1918), and the uptick in labor mobilizations and their violent repression (1919–1922) prompted the emergence of powerful strains of anti-liberal authoritarian nationalism. With strong ties to the military hierarchy, these groups aspired to reclaim the nation from what were deemed foreign and subversive elements, threats both domestic and international.Footnote 25 The Argentine military developed a concerted campaign that blended incentive and coercion to convince young men that military service was a singular path to full male citizenship and upward social mobility and was therefore beneficial to conscripts. It was a campaign that consciously countered the actions and propaganda of its foes. Conscription would endow the male population with the ideal physical and moral characteristics of manliness while erasing divisions of class and national origin through a shared and exclusively male rite of passage into adulthood.Footnote 26 In the eyes of military supporters, anti-militarists were an internal threat that surpassed any foreign army but, paradoxically, they were also characterized as cowardly, effeminate and childish men, prone to suggestibility, hysteria, and seduction by charismatic leaders.Footnote 27 Pro-military writers made little distinction between different ideological tendencies among the left and employed terms like “anarchist,” “socialist,” “communist,” and “Bolshevik” interchangeably. Strikingly, like the left, military boosters also promoted an ideal masculine that privileged financial and personal autonomy, work for a dignified wage, and heterosexuality.Footnote 28
By the 1930s, the ideological and technical apparatus had been laid by the state to gain acceptance by much of the populace for conscription and military service as a legitimate instrument of national integration along lines that exalted a particular vision of masculinity. The project's relative success also benefited from broader national trends, especially increased policing of male sexuality, the emergence of popular print media and radio, and other market and social changes that reinforced the link between nation and masculinity.Footnote 29 That process would be cemented during the first Peronist government (1946-55). Thanks to additional outlays to improve living quarters, health, and education for soldiers, and increasing the percentage of men who were conscripted, military service's imprint on society had become generalized. By then, the year of military service, popularly known as ‘colimba’ (possibly short hand for correr-limpiar-barrer, run-clean-sweep) had become, as historian Valeria Manzano notes, “naturalized in the public milieu.”Footnote 30
This study of the debates surrounding conscription highlights critical dimensions of the civil-military dynamic during the first three decades of the twentieth century Argentina. During that period, a distinctive military tradition took hold in Argentina in which national defense from foreign armies became secondary to internal security. The armed forces' internal security functions included not only the familiar role of policing labor and radical activists, but perhaps equally important, disciplining and indoctrinating young men through the republic's elaborate system of registration, conscription, and military service. The military hierarchy's rhetorical battle against a well-formed anti-militarism that rejected the notion that military service was affirming of the masculine was a central feature of this effort.
It was through this work, especially in the barracks, that the military emerged as a key player in helping the state to foment a nationalized masculinity in which loyalty to Argentina was synonymous with being a full-fledged man. The relative success of the military's project stemmed from several factors. By targeting anti-militarism as an internal threat to national security on the basis of its perceived links to foreign-inspired leftist movements, the military was able to justify the inherently military nature of its own efforts. Likewise, the military and the police developed increasingly efficient means to coerce men into serving and to monitor actions inside the barracks. After 1930, increased military budgets, a slowing of immigration, Peronism's success in creating a connection between working class masculinity and nationalism, and the gradual decline of autonomous radical labor organizations resulted in the lessening of challenges to the legitimacy of military service as a pathway to full male citizenship, at least until the 1960s. Thus, the military's efforts to transform the social and political worldview of men predated the direct military interventions into the political process that commenced in 1930 and that are the subject of most of the historiography on the Argentine military. In sum, it was countless small scale interventions into the lives of individual conscripted men, and by extension their families, that helped to shift attitudes about family, work, politics, and the nation.
Creating the Draft
Prior to the reforms of the early twentieth century, conscription was a nakedly coercive affair and as a result soldiers, even volunteers, were often equated with criminals and vagabonds.Footnote 31 Those who served were divided into two categories, neither of which fit comfortably into modern notions of a conscript army. Destinados were convicts, including men who had failed to register for National Guard duty, or men whose jail sentences had been removed in exchange for service. Enganchados were volunteers who signed up for four years and were paid a bounty in installments. Argentina's robust labor market, when factored with the army's reputation for horrible living conditions, irregular pay, brutal corporal punishment, and difficult postings hampered efforts to attract and retain suitable volunteers.Footnote 32 Interest in regularizing conscription initially focused on stabilizing the rural social order in the aftermath of the disastrous War of the Triple Alliance in 1870.Footnote 33 At center was how to replace the brutal leva (the forcible enlistment of poor men and convicts) with a system that included all eligible men regardless of background or wealth.
In December 1901, President Julio Roca signed Law Number 4031, titled Organization of the Army. A key proponent of the reform measures was the newly appointed minister of war, Colonel Pablo Ricchieri. Since his appointment in 1900, Ricchieri had already spent several years in Europe as head of Argentina's European arms procurement mission. His interest in reforming the military had the backing of the recently reelected president, who recognized that Argentina's delicate political balance was imperiled by corruption, weak civic virtue, and the absence of a coherent national identity.Footnote 34 While the law stipulated that “military service was obligatory for all male Argentine citizens of 20 years of age,” only a small fraction of eligible men in fact entered the service because of fluctuations in national budget from one year to the next and an inefficient system for tracking conscription-eligible men. Neither the 1901 law nor the subsequent reform of conscription in 1905 proved satisfactory to lawmakers or the military because their systems of identification and registration were not adequately integrated into a matrix that would allow government officials to monitor and apprehend draft-dodgers.Footnote 35 Significantly, during this same period Congress passed the Law of Residence (1902) and the Law of Social Defense (1910) in order to impose control over resident aliens involved in Argentina's combative and highly organized anarchist labor movements, and facilitate their deportation.Footnote 36
In 1911, Congress passed two laws that radically transformed and militarized male citizenship. The first mandated the creation of a reliable list of available conscripts and distribution of photo-identity cards (libretas de enrolamiento). In effect, this law made viable earlier conscription laws that critics claimed had too many loopholes, especially for young men of means. Two weeks later, Congress passed legislation mandating that voter rolls be drawn from these military enrollment lists.Footnote 37 All adult male Argentine citizens were to enroll, regardless of age, and be issued the abovementioned identification document.
After 1911, government officials used the libretas to monitor military service and proof of having voted. The federal budget dictated how many men were called up each year and a lottery determined who served, and in which branch of the military. Typically, until the 1930s, no more than 20 percent of the total eligible population served. A network of military district offices, which eventually expanded to cover the entire republic, enforced the law at the local level.Footnote 38 The elaborate system of identification and enrollment enjoyed international acclaim for its advanced use of the latest technologies, including photography and fingerprinting.Footnote 39
The debate on the 1911 law focused on how best to render effective earlier conscription legislation and how to reform corrupt electoral practices, but it also reflected the high level of consensus and trust between the political classes and the military.Footnote 40 Likewise, many in the armed forces embraced military service as good for the republic's democratic experiment, believing that it fostered a common national ethos based on equality among men. Some even saw it as superior to the system of public education in this regard. General Rafael María Aguirre, former minister of war (1906-10) and after 1914, a national deputy to Congress, observed that Argentine youth suffered from “anarchistic and egotistical instincts: the tendency to enjoy life today at the cost of suffering tomorrow.”Footnote 41 Because life in the schools was bereft of “intellectual, physical, or moral discipline,” a year in the barracks would instill in Argentina's future generation “an invaluable factor in character development,” and especially “habits of order and discipline.”Footnote 42 Thus, the barracks was a school of nationalization that “receives children but returns men.”Footnote 43
Libreta de enrolamiento, circa 1915
Army colonel Augusto Maligné, a Socialist who had been involved in the 1901 reforms, argued for conscription: “Today, only general obligatory service is acceptable, because other nations have it. . . because, with the abundance of work opportunities, fit men live easily and refuse to voluntarily sign up, and finally, because it is the only possible system that is just and equal.”Footnote 44 He continued, applauding military service as “the creator of national unity and patriotism.”Footnote 45 Similarly, the Argentine military attaché to Washington, DC, Colonel Eduardo Raybaud, believed that universal military service brought benefit to all men regardless of national origin, religion, or class. “The educated people learn that money is not enough in life, and, as for the lower classes, they also learn many things that when they come back to their homes they are very pleased to teach their folks. In consequence, everybody gets something out of the service.”Footnote 46
Such democratic goals fit with the widely accepted belief that the two enrollment laws were also essential preludes to the Saénz-Peña Law of February 1912, which made male suffrage obligatory, and secret. Indeed, military service and obligatory suffrage complemented each other. Both reforms represented efforts by the ruling Partido de Acción Nacional to maintain its increasingly fragile political dominance by recognizing the massive social and economic transformation that had occurred since the 1870s. Rather than representing surrender “in the face of defeat,” the law was viewed as a way to re-establish control of a society that had been transformed through the ruling elites' own policies.Footnote 47 It rendered voting obligatory and secret in an attempt to resolve the problems of both low rates of electoral participation and fraud. This was also an effort to compel men to participate in the system.Footnote 48 By making voting obligatory and secret, the ballot box would become a “school of citizenship.”Footnote 49 Many reformers believed that the success of the project in forging a compliant and patriotic male population would hinge to a certain degree on elevating men's civic status at the expense of women. A centerpiece of the argument against female suffrage, for example, was that military service, the requisite for active citizenship after 1911, could not be performed by women.Footnote 50
Propaganda Wars
The question of the legitimacy of military service was hardly settled in the law's first few decades and there was a robust debate over its meaning between the diverse anarcho-syndicalist and Socialist press of Buenos Aires and official publications of the armed forces and their supporters in the civilian press.Footnote 51 I use the term ‘debate’ because the advocates of these opposite positions were well versed in each other's arguments, and at times seemed to be directly responding to each other's propaganda. They read each other's publications and perhaps more importantly, they spied on each other. Working class soldiers and sailors wrote letters to the radical press to report on conditions in the barracks.Footnote 52 The police frequently spied on, raided, and shuttered the offices of many of these publications.Footnote 53
Leftist newspapers, especially those published by anarchists and syndicalists, provide an invaluable source on working-class attitudes toward conscription, and the military more generally. Their newspapers sought to mobilize the working class and also to educate a broader readership in matters dealing with a diverse array of contemporary issues. Their readership extended beyond labor militants, and likewise, the working class read other newspapers with more conservative ideological perspectives.Footnote 54 In papers such as the anarchist FORA's (Federación Obrera Regional de Argentina), La Protesta, the syndicalist La Acción Obrera, and a range of smaller, ephemeral publications that focused exclusively on anti-militarism, editors and writers frequently addressed military matters, including conscription.Footnote 55 There is scant information on many of the smaller anti-military papers and the organizations that supported them. Most of their writers appear to have used pen names, likely to protect themselves from police harassment or deportation.
By the late 1910s, the military began to respond to these publications out of a belief that anti-militarism threatened national defense in the classic sense, but also because they were thought to reflect and encourage moral and even physical decay. In 1918, the Estado Mayor (the army's General Staff) inaugurated the Revista del Suboficial, a magazine for non-commissioned officers, to aid in their professionalization and indoctrination. Three years later, in 1921, in the midst of significant labor mobilization and military repression, the Army introduced the publication El Soldado Argentino (The Argentine Soldier) for distribution to conscripts.
Both publications, which came out twice a month, deployed a moralistic and patriotic rhetoric that framed citizenship around ideas of duties, but not of rights. Suffrage received only occasional mention. Neither publication was ever mentioned in ministry of war publications, so there is no data on their circulation. Civilian politicians, and most notably President Hipólito Yrigoyen (1916-22, 1928–30), did not appear in the magazines, which reduced the Argentine past to its military history. The two magazines also appealed to soldiers' self-interest by touting the material and social benefits of a clean service record. These varied threads emphasized the masculine nature of military service while implying that the armed forces were the ideological and spiritual anchor of the nation.Footnote 56
The magazines' ideological orientation and rhetoric reflected the influence of emerging anti-liberal nationalism, and especially the Liga Patriótica Argentina.Footnote 57 While the scholarship on the Argentine right has focused on its middle- and upper-class supporters, El Soldado Argentino exemplifies the ways in which its message was delivered to men of the popular classes. In 1919, an alliance of military officers, police, and sectors of the middle and upper classes created the Liga with a platform that was anti-immigrant, anti-left, and anti-Semitic and rejected anti-militarism and pacifism. It coalesced around anxiety that Argentina was poised to become the next battleground of the Russian Revolution because of unregulated immigration and the weakness, opportunism, and corruption of the Radical Party, which ruled Argentina from 1916 until the coup of 1930.Footnote 58 In the Liga's view, the armed forces were not only the defenders of the nation, but its perfect embodiment. As one of its founders noted in a book published by the Army's in-house press: “The army is respected for its cultural work, the barracks is considered a school of virility and uplift of the citizen, officers are valued for their lofty work as teachers of the youth and of a noble national obligation, no one can doubt that the completion of the obligation [to serve] which elevates, and the people and the army are one towards the supreme goal of their destinies: national greatness.”Footnote 59
A central public relations challenge for these publications, and the military and its supporters more generally, was explaining the deployment of soldiers against civilians. In this respect, the military publications took their cues from the bourgeois press.Footnote 60 During the military operations ordered by the democratically elected President Yrigoyen to suppress the rural labor movement in Santa Cruz territory (1921-22), for example, El Soldado Argentino framed the conflict as a military engagement worthy of the term “war.” Their position was made easier by decades of saber-rattling with Chile over the southern region, where the majority of the population was foreign born.Footnote 61 As the publication noted in 1922, the soldiers were defending the nation against a threat that was at once internal and foreign. And as in a traditional war, the experience of active duty fostered camaraderie among the enlisted.
[A] nucleus of men who were born under the shelter of the Argentine canopy and thus our brothers, marched toward Santa Cruz, and while marching carried with them the most honorable mission that a citizen can have which was to insure the tranquility, to bring peace, and to impose order in this sparsely populated region, which a band of adventurers inspired by insidious communism had sought to disrupt.Footnote 62
This text employs a common trope of military propaganda: the notion that soldiers form a bond of loyalty and obligation, essential to the wider project of developing a coherent and lasting sense of national pride.Footnote 63 Most striking here is that the military does not hide its domestic military operations but rather celebrates them by turning mostly foreign-born workers into enemies of the nation.
The death of conscript Fisher (different documents list his first name as Pablo or Fernando) during the Santa Cruz operation provided El Soldado Argentino with a martyr in the struggle against “communists and anarchists imported to our territories.” Footnote 64 Such language mirrored right wing practices of using martyrdom to generate association between masculinity and the nation.Footnote 65 Eulogies for the young man emphasized the paradox that the foreign threat against Argentina was an internal one. One article, for example, explained that of the nine million inhabitants in 1922, five million were foreign-born: “There is no doubt. . . there are four million Argentines, but we must recognize that our race has degenerated to the point that, we lack Argentine fiber, thought, and heart.”Footnote 66 Such language fit well with the eugenics-inspired idea of using military service to forge virile, healthy, and productive men, yet it also reflected the fading of the optimistic vision of military service as a force of positive integration so prevalent in the earlier decade.
Fisher's death occurred during mobilizations on behalf of the Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in the United States, whose cause Argentine anarcho-syndicalist groups had adopted.
We can only hope that the same orators who three months ago felt their hearts stir for the possible death of two foreigners of bad reputation and who were prejudicial to society, will rise up to mourn and protest for the death of their brother Fernando Fisher, killed while fulfilling the most important duty of all.Footnote 67
Military propagandists contrasted the anti-nationalist left to Fisher, who despite his non-Hispanic surname, was the ideal Argentine; a native-born man who had performed his military service.Footnote 68
Similarly, El Soldado Argentino celebrated the lopsided and violent armed encounters with Argentina's remaining indigenous populations. These were masculine-affirming experiences where soldiers could “hacer patria” (a double meaning, either to “build the nation” or “to engage in a patriotic act”) by taming what they saw as a savage landscape and converting the indigenous population into loyal Argentines, both important to the development of a national infrastructure.Footnote 69 In a first-person story in El Soldado Argentino, titled “My conscription,” a possibly fictitious urban conscript details life on the Chaco frontier as “an intense and fertile life that taught me to overcome impossible challenges with my own force,” while also ridiculing anti-militarist propaganda.Footnote 70 Shared sacrifice and suffering at the margins of the nation would, it was hoped, reinforce bonds of loyalty from unit and cohort up through the service branch, and finally the nation as a whole.Footnote 71 Similar concepts were deployed to describe life in the penal brigades. The armed forces claimed that these isolated units, where soldiers convicted in military courts served their sentences, were places to reflect on misdeeds, away from the debilitating effects of “perfumed and false women.” The work was difficult, but it was not “brutalizing, but rather dignifying, moralizing, and healthy. . . . Here is a place to become a man.”Footnote 72
In stark contrast to its capitalist counterparts, the anti-militarist press saw nothing ennobling or manly in the violent repression of fellow workers, whether Argentine or immigrant. These actions exposed a set of contradictions in the association between the institution and masculinity. Anti-militarist writers deployed stereotypes of officers and non-commissioned officers as bloodthirsty, sexually deviant, and infantile in order to emphasize the unequal class relations inherent in the military hierarchy. Anarchists and syndicalists avoided the question of whether military service might be a viable path to upward class mobility.
Although anarcho-syndicalism's relationship to violence was complex, and the mainstream press associated them with terrorism, the majority of anarchists viewed killing as alien to the movement's philosophy.Footnote 73 The most notable exception to their general adherence to pacifism was the celebration of anarchists who had avenged the killing of large numbers of workers, such as the case of Simón Radowitzky, assassin of retired-Army Colonel Falcón.Footnote 74 Falcón, as Chief of the Federal police, had commanded police during the violent repression of anarchist led-strikes in 1909.
The left was quick to challenge the masculinity of soldiers who fired on workers. During the repression of workers in southern Argentina in 1921–22, the anarchist press portrayed the army as drunken and disorderly.Footnote 75 Military service distorted men's values and rational instincts and rendered them unthinking.Footnote 76 Along similar lines, anti-militarists ridiculed officers who terrorized fellow Argentines as tin soldiers. In a 1909 cartoon, Colonel Falcón, mentioned earlier, rides a toy horse while giving the sexually suggestive order “Draw your sabers and thrust, boys!” Footnote 77
The theme of the tin soldier was also invoked when reporting on the annual, and very costly, military maneuvers. The conservative press celebrated the exercises, which often featured foreign observers, as symbols of Argentine national greatness. But for anti-militarists, including Socialists, these pointless operations only highlighted officers' delusions, like Falcón's, that they were in a real army. The frequency of reports about conscripts being killed or wounded in accidents during these operations suggests that perhaps they were even more dangerous for soldiers than repressing strikes.Footnote 78 Anarchists and syndicalists, though notably not Socialists, also openly celebrated men who refused to bear arms against comrades. Those who either disobeyed orders or dodged the draft displayed heroism in the name of working class solidarity.Footnote 79 While such incidents were relatively rare, considering the brutal punishment that awaited a soldier who committed even a minor offense, officers grew increasingly worried about mutiny in the wake of the Russian Revolution and believed, despite little evidence of viable plots save calls to disobey in anti-militarist papers, that such actions posed a real danger to national security.Footnote 80
Conscripts were far more likely to experience violence and humiliation at the hands of a superior officer than from a foreign enemy or a domestic “subversive.” To the disgust of the military high command, porteño newspapers from across the political spectrum—the Socialist La Vanguardia was the most consistent in this regard—frequently reported on the physical abuse of soldiers at the hands of their superior officers and the harsh sentences handed down by military courts for seemingly trivial offenses.Footnote 81 Soldiers who denounced or confronted abusive superior officers could expect physical punishments and long jail sentences. And soldiers' testimony was often dismissed by military judges as ‘unreliable,’ as if they were children.”Footnote 82 Such attitudes about the military were likely widely held, since these stories appeared in newspapers across the ideological spectrum; indeed, abuse of conscripts was an issue that united distinct political groups.
Anti-militarists also emphasized the emasculating and humiliating nature of life in the barracks. Military service, which fell heavily to the working class, degraded the proletariat conscript by forcing him to perform irrational and undignified work for a miserable salary. Moreover, the year of service represented the physical and economic subordination of men to the state.Footnote 83 The Socialists argued, and anarchists and syndicalists agreed, that because the pay was so poor, conscription hurt the household income of working and poor families.Footnote 84 Thus, military service weakened young men's status as supporters and defenders of the household.Footnote 85
Critics also observed, with some reason, that the military saw submission to authority as an intrinsically valuable exercise for conscripts. La Acción Obrera, a syndicalist publication, concluded in 1913 that “the barracks cannot produce good fruit [because of] infectious diseases, as well as moral and physical ones, despotism, and crushing of dignity.”Footnote 86 More starkly, a 1930 cartoon in the anti-military Bandera Negra the bi-weekly publication of the Argentine Anti-military Association, illustrated a boy's transition to soldier. By the last frame, he is pulled over a drum with his pants down and two officers are beating him. Thus, the magazine argued, soldiers experienced simultaneous class exploitation and emasculation.Footnote 87 The humiliations inherent to barracks life simply highlighted the way in which military discipline operated as a system of the powerful dominating the weak. And it was a system that mirrored and reinforced similar problems in the civilian world.Footnote 88
Anarcho-syndicalists also argued that the military disguised submission, punishment, and humiliation as discipline. But many on the left in particular understood discipline as a set of practices that derived not from obligation but from free will and self-control (parallels are seen in their campaigns to abstain from alcohol). Emblematic of this critique was the satirical cartoon “Instructions,” in which an officer tells the conscripts “‘Soldiers, when you arrive at this wall, you will stop because I tell you to stop, and not because it is a wall. Do I make myself clear?’ This is how they demand discipline.” Footnote 89 The military, like state schools, did not teach men discipline but rather imposed control upon them, often in a brutal and mindless manner.Footnote 90
Questions of discipline, autonomy, and conscripts' bodies led anarchists and syndicalists to address the relationship of military service to sexuality. A commonplace in the anti-military press was that officers were not only effeminate, but were occasionally sexual predators. Such attitudes, which were held across the social spectrum, emerged in part because of several highly publicized scandals involving officers and conscripts that appeared in newspapers around the country.Footnote 91 A 1922 article went so far as to characterize a commanding officer, not named so we cannot verify or deny, as an ‘oficialito pederasta’ (little pederast officer).Footnote 92 Similarly, in the sarcastically titled article “Fruits of the Barracks,” La Acción Obrera reported that an army captain, also unnamed, had recently been detained for requiring from his subordinates “caricias masculinas” (masculine caresses). The paper reported that he imposed harsh punishments on those who refused his advances.Footnote 93
Military anxiety about these rumors generated additional scandal: officers in distant provincial units since at least 1923 had facilitated the establishment of brothels to “service” soldiers, in order to prevent homosexuality, masturbation, and, ironically, to protect the local female population.Footnote 94 Ironically, while military boosters promoted service as a way to honor and defend Argentine women, the barracks became a place that reinforced and promoted patriarchal attitudes. The anarcho-syndicalist and socialist press argued that prostitution was symptomatic of the failure of capitalism and a logical consequence of a system based on class exploitation.Footnote 95 Nowhere was the issue more directly addressed than in a photograph published by the anarchist Bandera Negra just a month before the 1930 military coup. The picture shows two soldiers in the company of bare-breasted women, presumably sex workers. The caption reads: “The apologists of murderers of the Argentine people say that War possesses a moralizing virtue. But war and prostitution always hold hands and the soldier who does not return riddled with bullets, returns with syphilis.”Footnote 96
The bitter commentary and the stark photograph lay out an argument that both prostitutes and common soldiers share a common fate of exploitation and disease. Moreover, the article challenges the idea that working-class men should feel the right to exploit women. The military deceives young men into feeling that their domination of women is a right, conferred upon them because they are doing their service.Footnote 97
Like their critics, military propagandists deployed gendered language to make their own case. They characterized anti-militarism as an effeminate leftist cosmopolitanism that imperiled the individual, family, and nation. Homogenizing its ideological diversity, they cast leftists as a danger to the nation, accusing them of being excessively emotional, irrational, sickly, and unable to sustain family or community.Footnote 98 Unlike their leftist foes, the military addressed sexuality obliquely, through either discussions of the ideal family or promotion of stereotypes that cast anti-militarists as effeminate.Footnote 99 Furthermore, they rarely mentioned life in the barracks, most likely because many of the military's installations were as insalubrious as the left claimed they were.Footnote 100
In “The Man Without a Fatherland,” which appeared in El Soldado Argentino in 1921, an imprisoned young anarchist comes off as an immature and sickly child. “This terrorist, accused of three or four attacks in Europe; this ferocious beast, always thirsty for blood; the orangutan, the monster—was simply a pale, skinny and stooped boy with an air of sadness and fatigue.”Footnote 101 According to the author, these “children” display characteristics antithetical to the national masculine ideal and represented in vivid terms the threat posed by degeneration.Footnote 102 But the young “terrorist” then admits, “I do not have and have never had a Fatherland.” Baffled by this statement, the narrator responds:
For me it is as strange to hear that a man does not have a Fatherland, as for him to say that he never had parents,. . . that he was born from the air or the earth. Every man, for the mere fact of having been born, has or had parents, and, for the fact of living, has or had, a Fatherland, of birth or adoption.Footnote 103
By the story's end, the young anarchist, thanks to the patience of the narrator, has come to love the nation. The narrator's conclusion that “to teach others to love the fatherland is to make men happy” echoes the ideological purpose of military service.Footnote 104 The idea that the young anarchist needs to be taught how to love the nation was connected to a broader critique issued by military propaganda against the idea of class as a meaningful category; the ruling class was all Argentine male citizens and universal obligatory male suffrage was the evidence.Footnote 105
Military service's supporters claimed that it was not only good for the spiritual and civic well-being of young men but also offered them material benefits. Under the flag, young men received quality medical attention and a basic education.Footnote 106 The establishment press embraced these concepts and openly acknowledged that military service was about much more than national defense; it was in effect a social service directed to the physical and moral uplift of poor Argentine men.Footnote 107 The material benefits extended beyond the year of service. Military propagandists promised that a clean military service record was the passport to formal sector employment and adulthood. By contrast, bad conduct could result not in just additional time in military service but in lifelong negative consequences. A 1921 story in El Soldado Argentino warned:
Take note of these healthy and correct reflections, in order to later in life have the right to walk with your head held high and to knock on the doors of any workshop or business with the firm knowledge of presenting faultless conduct and with the serenity of knowing that you are worthy of the position that you request. Conscripts! The possession of a record of good conduct is to always have in your pocket for your whole life the best and most honorable recommendation.Footnote 108
The claim that the libreta was the key to becoming an independent man may have had some basis in fact. After all, to the disgust of many in the military, the Argentine congress frequently debated, and sometimes granted, amnesties for men who had either evaded service or failed to vote. In most cases, politicians were responding to popular pressure from the families of conscription-age men who worried that their loved one's legal and employment status was imperiled by not having up-to-date official documents.Footnote 109
Despite the supposed material, moral, and social benefits of doing military service, it is apparent that many Argentine men evaded conscription.Footnote 110 As mentioned earlier, anarcho-syndicalists forcefully argued that working-class men should evade service, in no small measure because it was middle- and upper-class men, referred to as “Daddy's boys,” who most easily and successfully got out of draft and often did so with no legal repercussions. There was widespread acceptance of this interpretation, even among some in the military, reinforced by the fact that membership in a ‘shooting club’ was grounds for a legal exemption.Footnote 111 A 1909 cartoon in the short-lived anti-military El Cuartel sums up the attitude. It depicts a smiling naked man (with his hands covering his genitalia), captioned “The exempted.” Below the image is the line “Exempted for being. . . the son of his daddy.”Footnote 112 The structural unfairness of who was drafted, then, served to expose middle- and upper-class men as not being fully masculine because of their dependence upon their parents. Paradoxically, such critiques fit into the working class press's tradition of associating propertied men with effeminacy, the very label placed on draft dodgers by the military.
Although most evasion was probably apolitical and motivated by practical considerations, or youthful rebellion, it served the military's interest to associate draft-dodging with the corrupting influence of a supposedly foreign dominated, effete, and vaguely defined anti-national left.Footnote 113 The existence of a fairly well developed network to aid men who evaded service by fleeing to Montevideo, for example, was a frequent topic of discussion in military circles.Footnote 114 In “Los incapaces,” El Soldado Argentino took aim at men who feigned disability in order to avoid service and also attacked anti-militarist propaganda. Prone to excessive and unbridled passions, a willingness to acquire without effort, and of a weak and dishonest spirit, evaders and deserters were a weight around the neck of the nation. “He hides his incapacidad (incapacity means both physical weakness and is also associated with having received an exemption) for the struggle of life, covering himself in the cloak of hypocrisy; they call one another ‘comrade” and 'martyrs for a new cause.’" Like the fictional imprisoned anarchist mentioned earlier, they have “neither Fatherland nor God, they do not work, but have the talent of living off others' work. Their sickness weakens the nation as a whole.”Footnote 115 Thus, soldiers must learn that “the good desire should have a limit and this limit lies within our own capacities.” Footnote 116 Young men would learn to self-regulate through the externally imposed discipline of the military and in turn will become true Argentine men, purified of physical and moral illnesses.
For the transformation to occur, men needed the guidance of a patriarchal figure. In “The Desertion of Pedro” (El Soldado Argentino), a deserter returns home but is rebuffed by his father who reminds the “coward” that he comes from a long line of military men. During his days of wandering, Pedro hears children singing: “Yapeyú [birthplace of national hero San Martín] will be the emblem of the Argentine Army and those who desert will have to walk in its path when they decide to redeem themselves of their impudence.” The nation had won. Pedro returns to his unit and writes a letter of apology to his father.Footnote 117 The connection between filial loyalty and patriotism was further illustrated in a story entitled “Obedient Children,” which concluded with the admonition to “be obedient children if you want to become successful men.”Footnote 118 Here, military propaganda tried to cement a bond between manliness, a work ethic, acceptance of subordination, and some notion of moral fiber.
Stories about rural male conscripts played into the national myth of the provinces as the source of national masculine identity.Footnote 119 Provincial conscripts may also have been more receptive to propaganda about military service, given that they came from regions with less access to the social services that the military offered.Footnote 120 The serialized story “Paco Gutiérrez,” which appeared in El Soldado Argentino, introduced a group of provincial conscripts whose experiences illustrated the tangible and emotional rewards of loyal service, including the chance to transition from boyhood to manhood.Footnote 121 First, there was the camaraderie of the “class.” Men from each year of service carried this designation forward throughout life. El Soldado Argentino was not the only medium to encourage the collective identities of each cohort of conscripts. The army, for example, issued yearbooks to “graduating” conscripts in an effort to forge a collective identity, and by extension a deeper sense of civic and national belonging.Footnote 122
Subsequent installments of this story focused on life after service. One character returns to his mother after his honorable discharge and reflects on how his taste in clothing has changed.Footnote 123 The character notes that the outfit that he had left home with was “as obnoxious today, as it had seemed stylish to him before entering the service, and he felt an immense desire to change his outward appearance just as his thinking and soul had changed.”Footnote 124 Another returning conscript refutes the commonly held view that conscripts were mistreated and ill-fed. He asks after the “poisonous Galician” who had mocked military service.Footnote 125 To his amusement, he learns that the one-time anarchist “had changed,” and was now the most-tight fisted of merchants, shamelessly raising the flag on national holidays. Years later, thanks to the discipline and training of military service, this same conscript replaces the English-born mayordomo and moves himself and his sisters into a proper house.
Thus the military presented service as a reciprocal relationship between the state and loyal citizens.Footnote 126 Conscripts returned home with skills that would allow them to prosper, support their families, and have greater possibilities to marry and have children.Footnote 127 But more than job training, military service turned boys, undisciplined and prone to suggestion, into disciplined and hard-working men, who could become paterfamilias in their own right. By implication, the patriotic head of household, economically self-sufficient, would bind the smallest unit of the nation to the wider national fabric.
Conclusion
Almost a year after the 1930 coup that deposed President Yrigoyen, a cartoon in El soldado argentino poked fun at the idea of women performing military service. Its argument echoed long-standing claims that since women could not bear arms for the state they should not vote.Footnote 128 The cartoon was emblematic of the deeply gendered meanings of military service. By the 1930s, military service and voting developed into deeply “gendered and gendering” projects that played on normative masculine roles and ideals but also sought to inculcate a national masculine ethos into society.Footnote 129 From passage of the 1901 and 1911 laws and the waves of militant labor action that rose after 1917, to the emergence of right-wing political movements, the goals of national defense and civic education faded and were supplanted by the job of guarding and fighting against dangerous ideas, practices, and ideologies from within.Footnote 130 At the same time, once-private activities like marriage, procreation, employment, and the honor and respect that they were supposed to confer, acquired a political importance that foreshadowed the policies of Cold War era governments.Footnote 131
These shifts coincided with a marked decline in the optimistic conviction that military service and obligatory voting would create active and responsible democratic male citizens. In the decade following the 1911 registration law, the prominent nationalist Leopoldo Lugones proclaimed that Argentina needed to “confront with virility the task of cleaning the country.” The war to be fought was an internal one.Footnote 132 In another speech, “Hour of the Sword,” he trumpeted that military service, and the armed forces “constitute a more genuine form of representation than any other.”Footnote 133 Democracy was to be distrusted and the armed forces were an invaluable ally, a generator of a new kind of Argentine, less citizen, more subject.
The conservative nationalist program to nationalize masculinity through military service probably enjoyed some success, in significant part because propaganda was not the only tool at the disposal of the armed forces. During the period under consideration, the armed forces heightened its internal security of the barracks.Footnote 134 Furthermore, disciplinary action against conscripts and lower-rank soldiers increased markedly starting in the 1920s.Footnote 135 The military and police also employed counterintelligence efforts to exaggerate and even fabricate the size, number, and nature of revolutionary movements that supposedly threatened military discipline and national security.Footnote 136 This is all the more striking, because anarchist revolutionary manhood did not depend, except in vague rhetorical ways, on the idea of armed revolution. Indeed, Argentine anti-militarism continued to reject the idea that the armed path to revolution was legitimate. A 1922 anti-militarist publication noted that “a disciplined anti-militarism is a contradiction”Footnote 137 And it is striking that despite military and rightwing concern about the corrosive effects of draft dodging, desertion, and refusal to obey orders, anti-militarists sometimes admitted that their efforts had not been as successful as they had hoped.Footnote 138
While draft dodging and evasion undoubtedly continued beyond 1930, anti-militarism was likely weakened by a number of forces. First, anarcho-syndicalism faltered and its unions were eventually appropriated or co-opted by what became the populist Peronist movement. That movement synthesized labor, nationalism, and a patriarchal masculinity.Footnote 139 While further study is needed in this area, preliminary evidence would suggest that Peronism rejected the tension between working class origins and military service. With the decline of anarcho-syndicalism and also Socialism, whose doctrines were infused with anti-militarism, the diffuse movements against the draft likely faltered in the short term.
The military may have also enjoyed increasing success in fostering the idea of military service's practical benefits, especially as the country's economy cooled during the 1930s. The massive rural-to-urban migration that commenced during the same period, moreover, may have provided a population interested in military service as a pathway to upward mobility and integration.Footnote 140 Similarly, increasing numbers of men did in fact vote, no doubt in part because it was, like military registration, compulsory. This trend was also shaped by the growing percentage of citizens among the total male population.Footnote 141
Resistance to conscription was further curbed by the impositions made by a series of authoritarian governments after 1930. The military government of General José F. Uriburu and the fraudulently elected government of retired General Agustín P. Justo placed the armed forces at the center of state policy and ideology while increasing domestic surveillance of both civilians and the military personnel, including more systemic persecution of homosexuals.Footnote 142 Propaganda in El Soldado Argentino after the 1930 coup urged loyalty to the new government in ways that it had never done during democracy.Footnote 143 Moreover, the Catholic Church formally joined the process of indoctrinating conscripts.Footnote 144 Those efforts were complemented by the increasing use by the 1930s of criollismo—the celebration of Argentina's rural folkways—to cement a national myth of the timeless and masculine nation.Footnote 145 And as military budgets expanded during the 1930s, the “Infamous Decade,” so too did the number of men who were annually selected from the conscription lottery.Footnote 146 The class of 1942 was almost double that of 1933.Footnote 147 The 1943–45 military government further cracked down on evasion, took steps towards conscripting all eligible men. By 1944, the government had passed a pre-conscription order that called for military training in schools. The following year, Colonel Juan D. Perón, the minister of war, ordered the first draft of all able-bodied men.Footnote 148
During his tenure, the armed forces began to invest in more sophisticated internal propaganda of conscripts through the creation of the Dirección General de Propaganda.Footnote 149 Some of these same nationalist officers were also motivated to use military service to improve the physical well-being of young Argentine men after learning first hand of the poor health of rural recruits.Footnote 150 Finally, during the first Perón government (1946-55), the government invested in programs aimed at fostering the loyalty of the lower ranks, including better housing and recreation. If conscripts' well-being had been an afterthought in the early decades, the first Peronist period saw that they were courted by the government.Footnote 151 And such a project squared with the government's efforts to develop a national cult of masculinity around the person of Juan Domingo Perón.Footnote 152
The decades-long effort to win over young men evidently enjoyed a degree of success. By the 1950s, military service had become a rite of passage for many Argentine men Footnote 153 Moreover, the military hierarchy continued to believe in its mission of turning boys into patriotic men. But the social ferment of the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a shift in attitudes and a significant portion of Argentines, including the parents of draft-eligible men, began to challenge the legitimacy of that project.Footnote 154 Opposition to conscription increased in the aftermath of the disastrous Malvinas War and was finally abolished in 1994 after the widely publicized murder of a conscript by his superior officers.Footnote 155
