Hipólito Yrigoyen

Hipólito Yrigoyen
Photograph of Hipólito Yrigoyen.
President of Argentina
In office October 12, 1928 – September 6, 1930
Preceded by	Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear
Succeeded by	José Félix Uriburu (de facto)
In office October 12, 1916 – October 12, 1922
Preceded by	Victorino de la Plaza
Succeeded by	Marcelo T. de Alvear
Deputy of the Province of Buenos Aires
In office October 12, 1878 – September 20, 1880
President	Nicolás Avellaneda
3rd President of the National Committee of the Radical Civic Union Delegate for the City of Buenos Aires
In office 1897–1931
Preceded by	Bernardo de Irigoyen
Succeeded by	Marcelo T. de Alvear
Personal details
Born	Juan Hipólito del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Yrigoyen (1852-07-12)July 12, 1852 Buenos Aires, Argentine Confederation
Died	July 3, 1933(1933-07-03) (aged 80) Buenos Aires, Argentina
Party	Radical Civic Union
Domestic partner(s)	Antonia Pavón (1871–1874), Dominga Campos (1877–1890) and Luisa Bacichi (1897–1924)
Children	Helena Yrigoyen Pavón Hipólito Yrigoyen Pavón María Luisa Yrigoyen Campos Dominga Yrigoyen Campos Hipólito Yrigoyen Campos Eduardo Abel Yrigoyen Campos Sara Dominga Yrigoyen Campos Luis Hernán Yrigoyen Bacichi
Education	Lawyer
Profession	Police commissioner, rancher and teacher
Signature

Juan Hipólito del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Yrigoyen (Buenos Aires, July 12, 1852 – ibidem, July 3, 1933), known as Hipólito Yrigoyen, was an Argentine politician, twice President of the Argentine Nation and a prominent figure within the Radical Civic Union. He was the first Argentine president elected by means of secret and compulsory male suffrage (women's suffrage was introduced in 1951) under the Sáenz Peña Law of 1912.

His first term began in 1916, marking the start of the period known as the first Radical presidencies, and he was elected again in 1928, without completing his term, which was cut short by the coup d'état of 1930, the first of these anti-democratic movements in Argentina.

He was the nephew of Leandro N. Alem, founding leader of the Radical Civic Union, whom he admired but also strongly criticized. He was police commissioner of the Balvanera neighborhood and took part in the Revolution of 1874, led by Bartolomé Mitre. He worked as a teacher, and Domingo Sarmiento appointed him President of the School Council of Balvanera. He was elected provincial deputy on two occasions, for the 1878–1880 term and for the 1880–1882 term, the latter interrupted by the federalization of Buenos Aires. He took part in the failed revolutions of 1890 and 1893 against the Roquista regime. He was one of the founders of the Civic Union in 1890 and of the Radical Civic Union in 1893, under Alem's leadership. In the face of electoral fraud he maintained a policy of electoral abstention, and in 1905 he led a third armed uprising, which was again defeated. In 1910 he negotiated with President Roque Sáenz Peña the law of secret and compulsory male suffrage, under whose rules he was elected President of the Nation in 1916.

His presidency put an end to a conservative hegemony of more than 40 years and meant the access to political power of the sociocultural sectors known as the middle class. He was also the first to adopt a nationalist line. He enacted regulations to protect farmworkers and created pension funds for public employees. He issued measures so that Argentina would control its transport, its energy deposits and its own currency. He regulated the fares of the railways operated by British capital, while state railway lines were being created. In 1922 he founded Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), a state company intended to exploit the country's oil wealth. The outbreak in 1918 of the University Reform student movement was supported by his government, which took a series of measures in favor of the reformists. Despite the initiatives that favored working-class and middle sectors, his term was stained by the largest massacres of workers in Argentine history: the Tragic Week, the La Forestal massacre and Rebel Patagonia, with thousands of workers killed by the security forces, to which he gave the order to repress, and by far-right parapolice groups whose leaders included members of the governing party, against which the government took no measures to stop them. In foreign policy, Yrigoyen maintained a neutral position toward the First World War and, once it had ended, advocated equality between victorious and defeated nations, while defending the principle of non-intervention.

Yrigoyen was questioned by members of his own party for exercising a "personalist" leadership. He was succeeded in the presidency by fellow Radical Marcelo T. de Alvear, during whose term the UCR split into two parties, one grouping the Yrigoyenists and the other the anti-personalists. The presidential election of 1928 was polarized between two Radical parties: on one side the Radical Civic Union headed by Yrigoyen, and on the other the Anti-Personalist Radical Civic Union (a more conservative faction of the same party) with the candidacy of Leopoldo Melo. Yrigoyen won for the second time by a wide majority in elections that came to be known as "the plebiscite". During his second term the Crash of 1929 took place, the most serious worldwide financial crisis up to that time. The government was unable to react to the crisis and steadily lost support. On September 6, 1930, he was overthrown by a coup d'état led by General José Félix Uriburu. Shortly before his overthrow, his government had come close to achieving the nationalization of oil, a fact considered one of the causes of the coup.

After the coup, he was stripped of his wealth as a rancher and confined to Martín García Island, where he shared imprisonment with several political prisoners. He died on July 3, 1933. His funeral was one of the largest and most surprising spontaneous demonstrations in Argentine history, proceeding to the pantheon of those fallen in the Revolution of the Park, where he has remained ever since. The political orientation of Yrigoyen's government gave rise to "Yrigoyenism" as an ideological current within Argentine Radicalism. Many Yrigoyenist leaders later joined the ranks of Peronism in the 1940s.

Biography

Childhood and youth

The Plaza Constitución station in 1920. Yrigoyen lived on Avenida Brasil, very close to this station, until his death in 1933. Years later his house was demolished to build the Frondizi Expressway.

Juan Hipólito del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Yrigoyen was born, according to his baptismal certificate, on July 12, 1852, a few months after the Battle of Caseros, although Félix Luna maintains that this date may be erroneous and that the day of his birth would have been July 13. He was baptized four years later, on October 19, 1856, in the church of Nuestra Señora de la Piedad. His father, Martín Yrigoyen Dodagaray, was a French Basque immigrant who in 1847 married Marcelina Alen Ponce, the daughter of his employer Leandro Antonio Alén (also the father of Leandro N. Alem), a Rosista mazorquero who would be shot and hanged in the Plaza de Mayo.

During his childhood Yrigoyen lived in a house in the Balvanera neighborhood and had four siblings: Roque, Martín, Amalia and Marcelina. In 1861, at the age of nine, he entered the Colegio San José of Buenos Aires, run by the Bayonne Fathers, but continued his studies at the Colegio de la América del Sud, where his uncle Leandro N. Alem was a professor of philosophy. Yrigoyen was not an outstanding student among the others, although he showed an introspective personality. At first he had an inclination toward priestly studies, but he soon left them to pursue law. For some time Yrigoyen and Alem shared the same home, and the latter tried to introduce his nephew into Freemasonry.

At fifteen, Yrigoyen interrupted his studies to help his father, who had acquired a fleet of carts to work at the port. He worked for a short time in a shop and also had a job on the tram. At his young age he had already had extensive work experience, although always marked by dispersion. In 1867 he began working in the law office shared by Leandro Alem and Aristóbulo del Valle.

According to the research of Roberto Etchepareborda, his original surname—unlike that of Bernardo de Irigoyen—was Hirigoyen, meaning "city on high". In the French Basque Country the "h" is aspirated as in English, while in the Spanish Basque Country it is not pronounced; therefore the surname Hirigoyen probably originates in France, while its variants Yrigoyen and Irigoyen originate in Spain. In 1965, following Etchepareborda's research, the National Academy of History ruled in favor of naming Yrigoyen with the initial "Y".

The Radical leader used "Yrigoyen" and "Irigoyen" interchangeably. The use of "Yrigoyen" was a political usage of the fourth decade of the 20th century: Gabriel del Mazo, a leader of FORJA, recommended using "Yrigoyen" in contrast to the "Irigoyen" used by the sectors that answered to Marcelo T. de Alvear.

Political career

Yrigoyen in 1893.

When he finished secondary school in 1869, he and his uncle Leandro N. Alem began their political lives as members of the Autonomist Party, led by Adolfo Alsina, a party with a popular base opposed to the National Party of Bartolomé Mitre. In his participation in the Electoral Club he called for free suffrage, division of rural property and reform of the judiciary, among other measures.

In 1870 he entered public administration as a clerk of the General Accounting Office in the Office of Balances and Information, but he did not remain long in that post. Two years later, when Alem was elected provincial deputy, Yrigoyen, at twenty, was appointed commissioner of Balvanera thanks to the influence of his uncle Leandro N. Alem, and took charge of the 14th precinct. At the same time he continued his law studies and in March 1874 completed the fourth year; in parallel, he took part in the revolution that took place that same year, led by Bartolomé Mitre.

In 1877 Alem, Aristóbulo del Valle and Yrigoyen, dissenting from Adolfo Alsina's rapprochement with Mitrism, formed the Republican Party, which put forward Aristóbulo del Valle himself as its candidate and maintained an attitude of intransigent opposition to the agreements between Alsinist and Mitrist leaders. The internal confrontation ended with Yrigoyen's dismissal from his police duties in 1877. In 1878, at the age of 25, he was elected provincial deputy for the Republican Party and served on the Budget Committee, but his term ended in 1880 as a result of the federalization of Buenos Aires. That year he was appointed general administrator of Stamps and Patents, but he did not remain long in this job either. When Buenos Aires was federalized and Julio A. Roca arrived at the presidency, Alem resigned his seat as deputy in protest against the federalization and abandoned politics, while Yrigoyen, who did not oppose the new law, was elected national deputy. It was the first disagreement that arose between the two. In 1878 he finished taking his course examinations, but he never wrote his thesis. Three years later a law was passed that allowed the title of lawyer to be obtained without writing a thesis, so Yrigoyen applied for and obtained his degree.

Deeds of the Los Médanos property belonging to Hipólito Yrigoyen.

He began working as a teacher of Argentine history, civic education and philosophy in 1880, at the Normal School for Teachers, having previously been appointed president of the School Council of Balvanera by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, then president of the National Council of Education. He taught those subjects for nearly twenty-four years, until he was dismissed by order of President Manuel Quintana as a result of the revolution of 1905, led by Yrigoyen. He donated his salary of 150 pesos to the Children's Hospital and the Asylum for Destitute Children, even though his economic situation was not favorable. Testimonies of the period criticize his teaching method, by which he placed responsibility for the classes on his own students while he acted as observer and moderator. Decades later this didactic approach would become known as "student-centered teaching". By 1882 Yrigoyen had completed the theoretical courses of the Law degree at the University of Buenos Aires, with only the practical examinations remaining. At that time, and through the Spanish Krausists Julián Sanz del Río and Francisco Giner de los Ríos, he discovered the philosophical principles of Karl Krause, which considerably influenced his thinking.

Plaque on the lot in the Constitución neighborhood where Yrigoyen's house stood.

During the 1880s Yrigoyen devoted himself to agricultural and livestock activity, from which he obtained significant income; he bought and leased land in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Córdoba and San Luis, devoting himself to fattening cattle for sale to the meatpacking plants. In total his properties amounted to almost 25 leagues of land. Among other lands, he owned the El Trigo estancia, near Las Flores, Buenos Aires Province, one of the best grazing areas in the country; La Seña in Anchorena, San Luis Province; and El Quemado near General Alvear, Buenos Aires Province, in addition to leasing the Santa María and Santa Isabel properties in the partido of 9 de Julio, in Buenos Aires. Thanks to this business experience Yrigoyen had direct contact with rural people, criollos or gringos, and came to know their problems and sensibilities. In a few years Yrigoyen went from receiving a modest income to possessing a considerable fortune, which he would devote to his political projects.

He never received people or friends at his estancias. He spent his time working in the fields alongside his laborers, and in his free hours he used to walk or read. When he became a more popular political figure, he would withdraw to one of his estancias as a form of rest. He advised his laborers to buy small properties to support themselves in old age. The workers on Yrigoyen's estancias received higher wages than was usual at the time, and in addition received a share of the profits obtained, according to the work and responsibility of each employee. He habitually gave garments and clothing to his laborers and, on returning from his trips to the city, also brought back items his employees had requested. Yrigoyen amassed a fortune of several million pesos, which he used almost entirely in political activity, to the point that, at the time of his death, his estate showed a deficit.

The 1880s marked the consolidation of a landowning and commercial elite bound together in an equilibrium guaranteed by Julio Argentino Roca, first from the government and later from outside it. The power-sharing agreements among different dominant sectors resulted in the exclusion of any organized opposition. In this context, the opposition gathered in a new party: after the Civic Union of the Youth dissolved, it regrouped in the new Civic Union formed in 1890, which emerged as a heterogeneous movement whose main ideology was suffragism and the struggle against the Roquista regime. After the success of the meeting held at the Jardín Florida on September 1, 1889—a gathering that helped popularize among the youth of Buenos Aires Leandro N. Alem, who had been retired from political life since the 1880s—it also served as the starting point for organizing the Revolution of the Park.

Yrigoyen at first hesitated to join the movement, since he maintained that the struggle was not against one person, President Miguel Juárez Celman, but against an entire system. But in view of the events of the Revolution of '90, he hastened to join and was quickly appointed chief of Police of the provisional government, although the movement would be quickly suppressed by the government, and the pacts between the most conservative sectors of the Civic Union and the government ended up plunging the party into a deep internal crisis. Thus, the pacts with the conservatives would lead to the split of the Civic Union, with two new parties formed on June 26, 1891: the National Civic Union headed by Bartolomé Mitre, in favor of negotiating with Roquism, and on the other side the Radical Civic Union headed by Alem, in favor of radical opposition to Roquism. During that year he was anointed head of the Radical Committee of the Province of Buenos Aires. In March 1881 he was appointed holder of the chairs of Argentine History and Civic Education at the Normal School for Women Teachers. Holding that chair over the course of five lustrums influenced him notably, since the study and exposition of the history of his country gave him a global vision of his nation's problems.

In 1889, Yrigoyen moved into his own house, opposite what is today the Plaza Congreso in the City of Buenos Aires, on the street that now bears his name, at number 1600. Shortly before moving, his brother Roque died after suffering a long illness. This event caused him to withdraw even further into his silence, and he went through a religious crisis. Little more is known about this owing to the reserved nature of his life. During his brother's illness he struck up a certain friendship with two of his brother's friends, Carlos Pellegrini and Roque Sáenz Peña, who would have much to do with the institutional changes that ended up bringing Hipólito Yrigoyen to the Presidency of the Nation.

The armed struggle

Hipólito Yrigoyen, revolutionary leader in 1893. Drawing by Demócrito (Eduardo Sojo), published in the magazine Don Quijote.

On April 10, 1892, presidential elections were held, which brought Luis Sáenz Peña to the presidency. A week earlier President Carlos Pellegrini had decreed a state of siege and, on the pretext of a Radical conspiracy, had Leandro N. Alem imprisoned, and practically all the Radical leaders were jailed for two months, with the exception of Yrigoyen. In November of that year the National Convention of the Radical Civic Union met, at which Alem read a report and Yrigoyen issued a declaration calling for an armed uprising against the regime. The Convention thus approved a manifesto describing the government as "born of fraud and violence". Immediately afterward, on November 17, the party charter was adopted, the first document of its kind in the party's history.

In this year the successive events began that led to a new Radical revolution. On July 29, 1893, the government of San Luis was deposed by Juan Sáa, and on the 31st, after a day of bloody fighting, Rosario was taken. Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, Yrigoyen decided to put his plan into practice. Several leaders left the city to head for the interior of the province, each of them assigned a precise task in carrying out the new rebellion. He gathered at his estancia "El Trigo" (near Las Flores) his friends and some of his laborers, some sixty people in all, and they headed for the police station of Las Flores, which they took without resistance.

He arrived at Temperley on the morning of August 3 with 1,200 men and there set up the general headquarters of the revolution, directed and organized by Marcelo T. de Alvear. The camp came to hold 2,800 armed citizens, who arrived in columns coming from taking neighboring towns. On August 4 the leader of the rebellion created several battalions to defend his position in Temperley, whose forces amounted to 4,500 men divided into eighteen battalions. In view of this situation, the governor resigned that same day. Two days later the Provincial Committee was formed, chaired by Yrigoyen, which met in Lomas de Zamora with some sixty members present. Domingo Demaría asked that Yrigoyen be the provisional governor of the province, but he flatly refused, considering that he had taken part in the revolution to put an end to an illegal government, not to install another. In the face of his fellow party members' insistence, he said: "Neither the provisional, nor the definitive."

Members of the Revolution of the Park (left to right): Marcelo T. de Alvear, José Crotto, Enrique Pérez, Luis Basaíl, Tomás Valleé and Mariano de la Riestra. The Radical revolutions produced profound political changes by the end of the century.

After a crisis in the cabinet that led to the resignation of several officials, on July 3, 1893, Luis Sáenz Peña called on Aristóbulo del Valle—who had withdrawn from political life after the split of the Civic Union—to reorganize it. Del Valle first tried to invite the UCR Committee to take part in the new cabinet, without any success. He then tried to call on some Radical figures to fill some of the ministries, but all of them flatly rejected the offer. He sent a bill to disarm the paramilitary forces that existed in some provinces and which the governors used to retain their power there. He also sent Congress a series of interventions in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and San Luis, the provinces where power was mostly controlled by the oligarchy. Given his position close to the government, del Valle could have staged a coup d'état against the government, as Alem asked him to, but his legal convictions prevented him from undertaking such an action, even though it meant the failure of the revolution.

On August 8 a train set out from Temperley to take La Plata. Colonel Martín Yrigoyen (Hipólito's brother) led three thousand five hundred civilians who, after some military actions, ousted Governor Carlos Costa and took the city of La Plata. The men of Colonel Yrigoyen were joined by the reinforcements commanded by his brother, and some 4,500 people paraded through the streets at 13 and 44. Martín and Hipólito marched at the head of the revolutionary troops, who were cheered by the people of La Plata. They decided to use the racecourse near the train station as a camp. Thus ended the taking of La Plata, which took place peacefully. That same day the Provincial Committee met in Lomas de Zamora to elect the provisional governor, and Juan Carlos Belgrano was appointed; he chose Marcelo T. de Alvear to head the Ministry of Public Works. The provisional government would last only nine days. When the national government sent troops to intervene, Belgrano offered no resistance and handed power over to the federal intervenor Eduardo Olivera.

The national government appointed Manuel Quintana Minister of the Interior, and he sent a powerful military force in order to crush the revolution. On August 25 the Provincial Committee issued a manifesto in which it laid down its arms. Alem insisted on ordering a new uprising throughout the country, but Yrigoyen refused, since he thought that Quintana would use any means to drown the revolution. And this is where the relationship between the two leaders began to deteriorate. By October the revolution had been completely defeated. An emissary warned Yrigoyen that he was going to be arrested and, as he was leaving his house in the early hours of the morning, a police detail detained him. Thus he was imprisoned for the first time in his life. He was taken to an old warship and then to a somewhat flooded pontoon where several Radical prisoners were held; there he suffered from dizziness due to the poor sanitary conditions. Shortly afterward the prisoners were deported to Montevideo, a city where he remained until December and which would be the only foreign land he knew in his entire life, and he would return to it many years later when he was overthrown.

Leandro N. Alem was Yrigoyen's uncle and the model he followed. In 1896, after his uncle's suicide, he began to adopt his characteristic reserved personality.

It was on the eve of this revolution that Yrigoyen met Alvear, more precisely when a chief of police was being sought for the City of Buenos Aires. Aristóbulo del Valle proposed a relative of Alem who had been a police commissioner. Thus he came into contact with Alvear and other figures of the Civic movement such as Le Breton, Apellániz and Senillosa. Alvear and Yrigoyen continued to see each other at the Café de París and at committee meetings. He would always retain a special regard for Alvear, even in the last years of the caudillo's life, when for years the two Radical leaders had been at odds.

As an anecdote involving both leaders, it may be mentioned that in 1897 Lisandro de la Torre challenged Yrigoyen to a fencing duel. Alvear had a few days to teach his friend some basic aspects of fencing, since the latter knew nothing of that discipline while de la Torre was an expert. The duel took place on September 6, and Yrigoyen inflicted several cuts on de la Torre's face and emerged victorious. During his presidency he continued to practice fencing, a pastime he would not give up even as a septuagenarian. Precisely in 1897 he joined the Jockey Club and went there a few times, but from 1900 on he never set foot in the institution again, though he remained a member until his death.

On July 1, 1896, Leandro Alem committed suicide in the middle of the street. Aristóbulo del Valle had died prematurely in January of that same year, so the leadership of the party fell even more on Yrigoyen. But, during the night of Alem's wake, he announced that the loss was too serious to be able to think about new projects, and asked those present to return to their home provinces until further notice.

When the National Convention of the UCR adopted on September 6, 1897, the so-called policy of the parallels to run in elections together with the Mitrists, after a meeting of the UCR provincial committee on September 29 at Alvear's house, a vote was taken to dissolve that body in order to thwart the strategy of the Bernardistas. From then on, Radicalism would enter a state of disorganization until the party's reorganization in 1904.

He expressed profound disagreement with the pact with Mitrism imposed by the President of the National Committee, Bernardo de Irigoyen, as a tactic to confront Julio Argentino Roca, when the latter was heading toward his second presidency in 1898.

Revolution of 1905

The first days of February 1905 had been set for the start of the new Radical revolution, and at the end of January the delegates left for their destinations to begin the revolt. But both the Government and the police suspected that conspiratorial plans existed, so they raided several buildings and, when the civilians went to collect weapons, they ended up arrested by the police. Alerted, General Smith went alone to the war arsenal and entered through the 10th Infantry Regiment; he quickly took command of the unit, fortifying it with machine guns against the possible revolutionary threat. Thirty-five unarmed people entered the barracks at 4 in the morning; when they asked for Martín Yrigoyen they were detained. The failure to take the arsenal ruined any revolutionary attempt, since that was where the civilians were going to obtain weapons. Even so, the revolution ran its course: some 70 buildings were taken to turn them into strongpoints, and some withstood many attacks, to the point that, for example, the one at Bolívar and Brasil surrendered only when threatened with cannons.

At 3:45 President Manuel Quintana arrived at Government House to convene the cabinet with the utmost urgency, and a state of siege was declared throughout the country. While there were uprisings in Bahía Blanca, Mendoza, Córdoba and Rosario, the capital was being successfully controlled by the government. In the interior the revolution had succeeded: in Mendoza the garrison, the 1st Artillery, the 1st Cavalry and the depot of the 2nd Chasseurs gave arms to the civilian groups. It was at Government House that the heaviest fighting took place, since the soldiers defending the governor held out under heavy gunfire in the building until past midday. When the governor laid down his arms, after being threatened with the cannons of the 1st Artillery, José Néstor Lencinas, head of the Revolutionary Junta, took charge of the provisional government. In Córdoba the 8th Infantry had attacked the Police Department; after a fierce assault a provisional government was installed. In the province, Delfor Del Valle—on special assignment from the Junta—had detained Vice President José Figueroa Alcorta, Roca's son and several government leaders who happened to be in Córdoba. Del Valle tried to capture Roca, but he managed to escape to Santiago del Estero. In La Plata there was a series of suspicious movements, but the revolution never broke out. Several leaders escaped to Chile or Uruguay, but some, like Del Valle, were captured while trying to leave the country, and others turned themselves in. The civilian prisoners were confined on a navy transport called Santa Cruz, totaling some seventy prisoners, crowded together and poorly fed. As a means of distraction the detainees produced two newspapers: El prisionero and Don Hipólito. On March 5 the Executive Branch extended the state of siege for seventy more days; the military prisoners were swiftly tried, with sentences of up to eight years in prison, and on May 2 they were taken aboard the transport Patria bound for Ushuaia.

Yrigoyen had remained in hiding during the last weeks of the uprising. It was announced that at the end of February he would present himself at the Federal Court. On February 28 a large crowd awaited him there, under a heavy police presence, but he did not appear, and the Government ended up dismissing him "for reasons of better service". Yrigoyen helped the exiles financially through the subdivision and sale of his estancias. A few months after the revolution ended, a civic association called the "May Association" appeared and launched a pro-amnesty movement that had the support of the National Party of Uruguay. Yrigoyen began efforts to have the imprisoned freed, but ran up against Quintana's inflexibility. But in March 1906 Quintana died and José Figueroa Alcorta, belonging to the modernist current of the PAN, assumed the presidency; he promulgated an amnesty law, proposed among others by former president Carlos Pellegrini. Yrigoyen then met with President Figueroa Alcorta in 1907 and 1908 to urge him to promote clean elections, but with little success. Yrigoyen revealed these conversations at the Convention of 1909.

For the presidential elections of 1910 the National Autonomist Party chose as its presidential candidate the leader of the modernist current, Roque Sáenz Peña. Sáenz Peña was in favor of establishing an electoral system that would prevent fraud, and he was not only a friend of Yrigoyen, but thirty years earlier both had been part of the group that founded the short-lived Republican Party.

Road to electoral reform

The beginning of the long-postponed political change came with the arrival in the presidency of Roque Sáenz Peña, an internal opponent within the National Autonomist Party. He centered his entire administration on passing a law to guarantee secret, universal and compulsory elections for all citizens. After overcoming the resistance of the conservatives most opposed to the exercise of full democracy, his bill became the so-called Sáenz Peña Law. The problem of suffrage was addressed with three laws: No. 4161 of December 29, 1902, which enabled the Socialist Party to obtain its first representation; No. 4578 of July 24, 1905, intended to calm the revolution of that year; and the famous Sáenz Peña Law (No. 8871), promulgated on February 10, 1912. Although this was predictable, the attitude of President Roque Sáenz Peña is noteworthy, as he attended to popular demands even knowing that this seriously affected the conservative hegemony. However, it should be noted that the new law only covered elections for national offices, that is, for president and vice president, national deputies and national senators for the Federal Capital. All other elections continued to be held under provincial laws. Nevertheless, in 1912 there was a federal intervention in Santa Fe Province, and the intervenor organized the elections for governor and legislators in accordance with the new electoral reform. The UCR decided to participate and achieved victory. It thus brought Manuel Menchaca to the governorship, the first governor elected under the law of secret elections.

One of the first photographs taken of Yrigoyen in public, leaving a UCR Convention at the Salón Príncipe Jorge in the City of Buenos Aires, in 1909.

In early March 1916 the National Committee of the Radical Civic Union met in order to convene a Convention, which took place on March 20 at the Casa Suiza with 138 delegates in attendance. The session ended with the appointment of a committee made up of the delegates Vicente Gallo, José Camilo Crotto, Pelagio Luna, José Saravia and Isaías Amado. At the same time another committee was appointed, made up of Eudoro Vargas Gómez, Crotto, Luna and Marcelo T. de Alvear, to meet with President Victorino de la Plaza in order to demand a clean and free election. The following day, while the first committee was debating putting the Constitution into force after years of institutional disorder, the committee that went to meet De la Plaza did not return with encouraging news. This ended up dividing opinions within the body of delegates, so the session was adjourned to be continued on March 22 at the Teatro Onrubia, where in addition the candidates for president and vice president were to be chosen.

From eight in the morning the theater was packed with people and nervousness reigned because, although it was known that Yrigoyen would win by unanimous support, the delegates knew that he would decline the candidacy. With respect to the vice presidency, there were demands from the "blue" group to be part of the ticket, and finally Pelagio Luna of La Rioja was designated as candidate for vice president. At 10:30 in the morning the voting began; Yrigoyen obtained one hundred fifty votes, Leopoldo Melo two, and Alvear, Crotto and Gallo one each. Crotto rejected the vote he had been given, affirming that only Yrigoyen could be the right candidate. Then the election of the vice-presidential candidate proceeded, and Luna was elected with 81 votes against 59 for Gallo, while Joaquín Castellanos and Melo obtained one each. A recess was called to await the acceptance of the candidacies and, in the meantime, a demonstration gathered at Yrigoyen's house, but there were no signs that anyone was inside. Yrigoyen had gone to receive the Executive Board of the Convention at Dr. Crotto's law office on Avenida de Mayo, and there he stated his intention to decline his candidacy. Crotto then proposed forming a committee to meet with Yrigoyen in order to convince him to accept the candidacy. The designated delegates Guido and Oyhanarte therefore went to the residence at Brasil 1039 and told Yrigoyen that, should he decline the candidacy, the struggle would be considered over. Horacio Oyhanarte, present during that episode, relates that:

In that brief interval of time, every brow grew pale, and over the shielded hearts there passed, like a pilgrimage of lights and shadows, all our history... We were there, in the small room like a back room, as in the hut of Tucumán; as in the ancient colonial Cabildo, as in the agora of Paraná; we were there deciding the future destinies of the Republic. And when, over the emotion of every spirit, shining moist upon the eyelids, there resounded the phrase that is to endure and that was the sure foretaste of triumph: 'do with me what you will', the boundaries of two eras had just been marked out, the great contest was decided, and the sacred banner, raised by the arm of the strongest, emboldened every breast, and in its august fluttering was serenity over the fraternal graves.

— Horacio Oyhanarte.

At half past seven in the evening the caudillo accepted. The news drew a crowd in front of the house at Brasil 1039.

Presidential elections of 1916

Main article: 1916 Argentine presidential election

President Hipólito Yrigoyen in the presidential carriage travels along Avenida de Mayo during his inauguration.

First ballot box used in the elections of 1916, on display at the Bicentennial Museum.

The presidential elections of April 2, 1916, were the first in Argentine history to apply the Sáenz Peña Law, which guaranteed secret and compulsory voting for men, which is why it is considered the first democratic government in Argentine history, with the clarification that the first fully democratic government was the second presidency of Juan Domingo Perón in 1951, when women were able to exercise their right to vote and to be elected.

The first effects of the law were surprising for the reformists: Radicals, Socialists and members of the League prevailed in almost the entire modern belt of the country, with the sole exception of the Province of Buenos Aires, tightly controlled by the traditional political machine. The grouped provincial parties that controlled the old regime failed in their attempt to build a modern conservative political force. For the moment the new rule did not introduce spectacular changes, either in electoral participation or in campaigns or debates, while the new electoral practices coexisted with old norms. The electoral result was ambiguous, since the composition of the Electoral College did not yield an indisputable winner when it met in 1916. The historian Luis Alberto Romero notes that something had truly changed when "some 100,000 people accompanied the new president on his route from Congress to Government House. The opponents were scandalized by the presence of the 'rabble in espadrilles', a prejudice, certainly, but one that bore witness to the beginning of a new era of democracy".

The Hipólito Yrigoyen–Pelagio Luna ticket prevailed, defeating the Conservative Party ticket (Ángel Rojas–Juan Eugenio Serú) with 339,332 votes against 153,406 for the Conservative Party. He also won in the electoral college with 152 votes. After taking the oath before the Legislative Assembly, the new president was literally carried by a flood of people to the Casa Rosada, without any kind of personal guard. When thirteen electors were still lacking to confirm the Radical victory, the conservatives went to Santa Fe to try to persuade the electors who were at odds with the party authorities. When consulted about this, Yrigoyen uttered the famous phrase: "Let a thousand governments be lost rather than violate our principles." Congress was made up of 45 Radicals and 70 opposition members in the Chamber of Deputies, while in the Senate there were only 4 Radicals and 26 opposition members. A total of eleven provinces were still represented by members of the previous regime.

The Ambassador of Spain to Argentina attended on behalf of his country and wrote the following lines for the newspaper La Época:

In my diplomatic career I have attended famous celebrations at various European courts; I have witnessed the accession of a president in France and of a king of England; I have seen many popular spectacles extraordinary for their size and enthusiasm. But I do not recall anything comparable to that masterful scene of a head of state who surrenders himself into the arms of his people, carried amid the swaying of the electrified crowd, to the high seat of the first magistracy of his homeland (...). But all of that was to pale before the reality of the immense square, of the human ocean maddened with joy; of the man who was president, given over body and soul to the expressions of his people, without guards, without army, without policemen.

Yrigoyen had at the time suggested to President Figueroa Alcorta the intervention of fourteen federal states where fraud still prevailed, a practice still in force following the creation of the League of Governors, whose main architects were Miguel Juárez Celman and Julio Argentino Roca. The federal interventions, called interventions of "civic hygiene", were carried out gradually by executive decrees during legislative recesses. With the exception of the provinces governed by Radicals, who had obtained power legitimately, all the others were intervened. The purpose of the intervention was to call legal elections, and whatever the result, the winner would obtain the governorship. In many districts Radicalism triumphed; nevertheless, in provinces such as Corrientes and San Luis the conservatives prevailed, and in those cases the popular decision was respected. The provinces of Santa Fe, Buenos Aires and Jujuy had not been intervened either.

The electoral triumph meant that, for the first time, a broad social sector hitherto excluded from leading public posts came to direct various areas of the state. These were middle sectors, without great economic resources or connections with the upper classes. The presence of officials "without a family name" was one of the favorite subjects of jokes in the conservative press. During the first years of his government, Yrigoyen governed by means of decrees, since many of the initiatives he sent to Congress did not prosper because of the conservative majority that still prevailed. Only after the legislative elections of 1918 did Radicalism obtain a majority in the lower house.

During Yrigoyen's first government, Radicalism was in the minority in Congress: in the Chamber of Deputies 101 members were Radicals and 129 opposition, while in the Senate of 58 members only 2 were Radicals. Even in the minority, Yrigoyen maintained an attitude little inclined to dialogue and negotiation, not only with the traditional conservative parties that controlled the Senate, but also with the new popular parties that gained prominence with the secret ballot: the Socialist Party and the Progressive Democratic Party. He conceived of Radicalism as a "redeeming religion" for "Argentine liberation"; he did not see himself as a chief but as an "apostle", and he thought that the Radical Civic Union was not just another party but "the homeland itself":

I have guided everyone, and no one guided me, at any moment or in any circumstance. That is why I was able to give the Radical C.U., that is, the homeland itself, a spirit and an energetic conduct and the sure direction of its path.

— Hipólito Yrigoyen, Mi vida y mi doctrina.

Legislative elections of 1918 and 1920

In 1918 the UCR obtained 367,263 votes, and in 1920 338,723. Although the UCR won a considerable number of seats in the national legislature, the constitutional slowness of the renewal of the upper house prevented it from reflecting what the electorate had chosen. The death in June 1919 of Pelagio Luna, who exercised notable influence in that body, and the fact that several Radical senators were not in line with the government were some of the factors that caused several government initiatives to stall in the Senate.

First presidency (1916–1922)

Yrigoyen at the window of a railway car (trip to Santa Fe during the 1926 electoral campaign).

He was the first president to maintain a nationalist line, convinced that the country had to manage its own currency and its credit, and, above all, had to have control of its transportation and of its energy networks and oil exploitation. To that end he planned a state-owned Central Bank in order to nationalize foreign trade, which was handled by the grain exporters; he founded YPF; and he imposed controls on the concessions of the foreign companies that ran the railways. The historian of Radicalism Gabriel del Mazo says that the Yrigoyen government was characterized by its "Land and Oil Plan". In addition to the defense of the national patrimony, Yrigoyen sought to contain the expansionism of the large foreign economic groups operating in the country. In the face of the aggressive interventionist policy of the United States in Latin America, he defended the principle of non-intervention, going so far in one case as to order Argentine warships to salute the flag of the Dominican Republic and not that of the United States, which had raised its own on the island in the context of the 1916 invasion.

In railway matters, strict controls were imposed on the railways in British hands, above all with regard to tariffs and the setting of capital accounts. Impetus was also given to the work of the State Railways, seeking an outlet to the Pacific in order to facilitate the transport of the production of the northwest and southwest (center) of the country so that it could reach Peru, Chile and Bolivia.

The initial momentum of the conquest of democratic rights was held back, since the UCR controlled neither the Senate nor the governorships of many of the provinces. Yrigoyen resorted in several cases to federal intervention, which deepened the confrontation with the conservative sectors. During his first presidency there were twenty interventions in provinces; only five of them were by law, and ten of the interventions were in provinces governed by Radicals. The government argued that those provinces whose governments had been elected in elections held before the electoral reform had an illegitimate government.

Economic policy

The economic expansion that Argentina experienced during the period known as the Radical republic (1916–1930), with an average annual expansion of 8.1%, remains to this day one of the cycles of greatest economic growth in Argentine history. However, Yrigoyen had to face in Argentina the problems arising from the First World War. His policy was to maintain neutrality, which in economic terms meant continuing to supply the Allies, who were traditional customers. The nations at war demanded cheap foodstuffs, as well as some industrial articles such as blankets and canned meat, whose exports tripled during the period from 1914 to 1920. On the other hand, exports of corn and chilled meat (of better quality than the canned) stagnated. At the same time, imports of industrial manufactures that had previously been produced in Europe came to a halt, since the countries taking part in the conflict concentrated their resources on the war industry. This led to the emergence of industries to produce those goods that had previously been imported. Between 1914 and 1921 trade with the United States grew, since England and the other European countries had nothing to offer Argentina.

When the Great War began, President Victorino de la Plaza ordered the suspension of the delivery of gold in exchange for banknotes that the Conversion Office had been carrying out since 1889, as a palliative for the "banking panic" and to prevent capital flight. This allowed the Argentine currency to maintain a fixed backing with respect to gold. Fourteen million pesos in gold were repatriated from the legations in Paris and London, where it had been deposited as payment that European merchants delivered in the name of Argentine exporters. Thanks to this, the Argentine peso came to have 80% gold backing by the end of Yrigoyen's first government. The government tried unsuccessfully in 1917 to create the Banco de la República, a financial institution whose purpose would be to regulate the national economy and finances. During the five-year term no debt securities were issued, and the external debt was reduced to 225,000,000 pesos, for which purpose several public posts were left vacant in order to reduce public expenditure. Congress never passed the income tax, whose enactment the government requested in 1919. In that same year a regulation on the conciliation and arbitration of labor disputes was sent to Congress, which established a board chaired by the head of the National Department of Labor and also made up of one representative of each party to the dispute, in order to bring workers and employers to a workable understanding. Also in 1919 a law was brought before Congress regulating work in the obrajes (logging camps) and yerbatales (yerba mate plantations), since the conditions of the workers were inhuman. Law No. 11,728 was thus approved during the following Radical administration in 1925, but it would end up being vetoed by Marcelo T. de Alvear at the insistence of Congress.

International market prices began to fall very slowly from 1914 onward, while the manufactured goods that Argentina imported began to cost more in relation to the price of grain. Thus an increasingly difficult situation was created that led to a general crisis of the economy, whose greatest exponent was the year 1929, in step with the international crisis. A poorly developed industry, created during the First World War but compressed afterward, a fiscal organization that obtained almost all of its resources through customs duties, and a budget that was almost routinely in deficit characterized, together with other aspects, the Argentine economy during the Radical period from 1916 to 1930.

Railways

During the period of the conservative hegemony, the concessions to the British railways were in many cases abusive, since many directors of these companies were important politicians and legislators. Concessions for 40 years were even agreed secretly in London.

In railway matters, strict controls were imposed on the railways in British hands, above all with regard to tariffs and the setting of capital accounts, since these companies kept false accounts that allowed them to declare low profits and high costs. In addition, impetus was given to the work of the State Railways, seeking an outlet to the Pacific in order to facilitate the transport of the production of the northwest and southwest (center) of the country so that it could reach Peru, Chile and Bolivia. The concession was annulled in ;km of tracks under construction. As a result of the railway workers' strike of 1917, the employers advised Yrigoyen to replace the workers with navy engine drivers, but the president refused.

The railway businessmen decided to carry out a parliamentary maneuver so as not to lose part of their interests, and that initiative was the creation of a mixed railway company.

Education

University students taken away by the police, Córdoba, 1918.

The arrival of a democratically elected government instilled in the student body the idea that the old structures of the existing universities would be reformed in accordance with the new democratic spirit that now presided over the country. The manifestos of the Biblioteca Córdoba and of the Colegio Novecentista de Buenos Aires, and the severe criticisms formulated from 1916 onward by the Ateneo Universitario de Buenos Aires against the prevailing state of the university, gradually gave rise to a nascent reformist movement, which finally broke out in Córdoba with the university reform. Thus, on June 15 a group of people, who had already been organized in the University Federation of Córdoba since May, cleared out the assembly of professors, proclaimed a general strike, occupied the university and launched the "manifesto to the free men of South America", which was written by Deodoro Roca and which announced the breaking of the last chain of colonial bondage, the last mental servitude of America.

The climate of student agitation soon spread to other institutions of learning. The Argentine University Federation (FUA), founded on April 11, 1918, convened the first National Congress of University Students, which deliberated in Córdoba from July 20 to 31. In support of the Córdoba movement a student strike was held throughout the country. In August, at the request of the University Federation of Córdoba and the Argentine University Federation, the Executive Power intervened the University of Córdoba, the intervenor being the Minister of Public Instruction. The movement was supported by figures such as José Ingenieros, Alejandro Korn, Alfredo Palacios and Ricardo Rojas. And so, with the pressure in the air, the Superior Council of the University of Buenos Aires carried out certain reforms that satisfied the aspirations of the reformist movement, albeit relatively. On July 31 Yrigoyen sent Congress a bill for an organic law on Public Instruction, in which the universities were placed "within the new spirit". In September the students once again took over the House of Trejo in protest at the Executive Power's delay in enacting the new reformist rules. A month later Yrigoyen decreed the reform of the Córdoba statutes. At the University of La Plata the process was more tedious; by June 1920 the students' demands had still not been resolved, and there were some violent episodes as a consequence of the resistance of its authorities to the reform. It is worth noting that the new statutes were drafted by the presidents of the University Federation of La Plata (FULP) and the Argentine University Federation, and were adopted practically word for word by the Executive Power.

In 1919, on the president's initiative, Law 10,861 was passed creating the National University of the Littoral, responding to a long-held aspiration of the young people who wished to be educated in that area. The statutes were written in consultation with the student centers and were approved in April 1922; for this reason, this new University of the Littoral was known as the "university of the reform". In Tucumán the weak provincial institution was nationalized by means of Law 11,027 in 1920 at the request of the Argentine University Federation, which thereby fulfilled a resolution of the Congress of Córdoba. The founding charter of the northern University was signed by the students, and a young reformist was appointed to head it; shortly afterward, statutes similar to those of the University of the Littoral were approved for its governance. The movement also spread to some universities in the Americas.

The Reform was the starting point of an American generation that, under that banner, was able to feel strong enough to create a cultural order that would listen attentively to the land, opening the university to the people and understanding the need to resist the oppression of imperialism and dictatorships in order to promote social structures free of injustice [...] The youth born in the heat of the Reform was the vanguard of the American peoples against the dictatorships that infested our America at that time.

— Félix Luna.

But despite the measures promoted by the government aimed at favoring the student sectors, the reformists continued to view Yrigoyen's popular government with suspicion, and even contributed to its fall in 1930.

On June 23, 1918, at the University of Córdoba, the legislator Alfredo Palacios led a mobilization of ten thousand students called by the University Federation of Córdoba, which demanded changes in the curricula, the resignation of teachers, the modernization of the university system and a tripartite government composed of professors, students and graduates, a movement known as the university reform, to which the University of La Plata soon adhered. Yrigoyen viewed this movement with sympathy, and for this reason he created new institutions of learning so that the middle classes would have greater access to the university. The reform implemented student co-government to prevent abuses by the authorities. On April 11, 1918, the Argentine University Federation (FUA) was created, made up of students from cities such as Tucumán, Santa Fe, Córdoba, La Plata and Buenos Aires, and that same day Yrigoyen received the delegation of representatives elected by the students. As Gabriel del Mazo explains:

His government belonged to the new spirit, which identified itself with the just aspirations of the students, and the University had to bring itself level with the state of consciousness reached by the Republic.

— Gabriel del Mazo.

The President appointed José Nicolás Matienzo as intervenor; he took charge of transforming the statutes of the University of Córdoba and established the election of new authorities. However, Dr. Nores, who was opposed to the reform, won, which provoked the opposition of the students, and, given the failure of Matienzo's intervention, the students resolved that the strike would be indefinite. On June 21, 1918, a manifesto entitled The Argentine youth of Córdoba to the free men of South America was circulated. In July 1918 the Radical government sent the National Congress a law establishing the three levels of instruction. The University of the Littoral was created at the request of the National Congress of University Students, and that of Tucumán was nationalized.

The university reform was projected onto other countries of Latin America. Specifically, in mid-1920 Gabriel del Mazo, who presided over the FUA, signed an agreement with his counterpart of the Students' Federation of Peru in which they committed themselves to fight for the support of the popular universities, and the same happened in Mexico and Chile.

In the city of Buenos Aires thirty-seven secondary schools and twelve institutes of arts and trades were founded. In addition, 3,126 primary schools were built throughout Argentine territory. During the six years of government, school enrollment increased by more than four hundred thousand children. Illiteracy was reduced from 20% to 4%. The night bachillerato (secondary diploma program) was introduced, with large attendance from the working class. In this period the white smock was introduced in order to make the student body socially equal.

Oil policy

When the First World War ended in 1918, an expansive period began for the nascent Argentine oil industry. Peace made it possible to normalize international commercial and financial relations; thus greater availability of materials, equipment, freight and capital could be achieved. At that time the internal combustion engine appeared, which brought about a second industrial revolution and increased the demand for fuels. The spread of automobiles as a means of transport foretold a sustained demand for petroleum products, mainly fuels, oils and greases. In that period American and European companies also began to expand in search of reserves; these actions were backed by their governments, concerned with securing the much-needed strategic mineral.

General Enrique Mosconi was appointed by the following Radical government, that of Marcelo T. de Alvear.

The government of Hipólito Yrigoyen announced the Land and Oil Plan, through which an attempt was made for the State to reserve for itself a decisive interventionist role. During his government, in 1922, the largest company devoted to exploiting and marketing petroleum was created: YPF (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales), and the newly elected president Marcelo T. de Alvear offered the leadership of this new company to the general and engineer Enrique Mosconi, who held the direction of YPF between 1922 and 1930 and promoted the idea that "Ownership of the subsoil is an inalienable right of the country". Mosconi resolved to break with the trusts when, while heading the Army Aeronautical Service in 1922, West India Oil (a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey) asked him to pay in advance for aviation gasoline. Some towns such as Comodoro Rivadavia, in Chubut, Plaza Huincul, in Neuquén, and Las Heras, Cañadón Seco and Caleta Olivia, in Santa Cruz, were settled owing to the proximity of the oil fields.

Two months after taking office, the government requested authorization from Congress to raise a loan of one hundred billion pesos intended for various measures, among them promoting YPF's operations. In 1919 the President sent Congress a thirteen-chapter bill detailing the legal, technical, economic and financial regime for petroleum. The bill had as its aim the principle of state ownership of the oil fields. Days later, another bill was added to this one declaring all the elements necessary for the exploitation of petroleum to be of public utility. But these initiatives would remain stalled in Congress for some time. In 1921 the Executive Power sent a message to Congress insisting that the aforementioned bills be passed, but the message had no result. In view of this, Yrigoyen issued a decree creating the General Directorate of YPF as a dependency of the Ministry of Agriculture. Despite his notable oil work, Yrigoyen did not manage to nationalize hydrocarbons, but he laid the foundations for avoiding agreements that would negatively affect local economic independence.

In 1919 the following address of the president was read in Congress:

There is therefore reserved for the state, by reason of the incorporation of these oil mines into its private domain, the right to oversee all exploitation of this source of public wealth, in order to prevent private interest from squandering it, ignorance or haste from harming it, or negligence or economic incapacity from leaving it unproductive, for which purpose provisions are adopted in the bill that set and guarantee a minimum of work and the appropriate ways of carrying it out. With the same concept, obstacles are placed in the way of the possible disruptive action of the great monopolies.

— Hipólito Yrigoyen, to the National Congress, 1919.

By 1914, fuel filling stations were divided mostly between the companies Energina and Wico, English and American respectively, and in that same year the first pump was installed in Plaza Lorea. The installation of these foreign companies was authorized by an ordinance of December 1915, which prohibited two pumps from being placed less than four hundred meters apart. However, by 1917 there was a monopoly of the American company West India Oil Company (WICO), which sold 95% of the kerosene and 80% of the gasoline, in addition to holding the monopoly on supplying the pumps in the city of Buenos Aires.

Social policy

The trade union organizations, persecuted under the previous regime, were now given standing and collaborated with the authorities to resolve workers' grievances. Yrigoyen did not accept the Marxist concept of class struggle, but rather believed that the classes could work together for the good of the Nation. In most cases strikes were respected and not repressed, and in many cases the demands of the protesters were satisfied. When the railway workers' strike of 1917 took place, the employers advised the President to replace the workers with navy engine drivers, but the President refused and accepted the right to strike. He promoted the enactment of labor laws and in 1921 sent Congress a bill for a Labor Code, in a sense coinciding with the demands that the socialists and the labor movement had been making for decades. He also acted as mediator in numerous labor disputes, promoting the negotiation of agreements based on social justice. But, on the other hand, he maintained very conflictive relations with the Socialist Party, which had significant parliamentary representation, and with the majority sector of the labor movement, which he denied the right to represent Argentine workers at the founding of the ILO in 1919, for which the Argentine government was seriously reprimanded by the international body.

In 1920 the workers' confederations, especially the Argentine Regional Workers' Federation of the IX [Congress], sent delegates to conciliation commissions and helped to defuse tension in certain strikes at the request of the authorities. This approach of the FORA gained it the support of the working class; in 1915 it had 51 unions and 20,000 pesos in annual contributions, a figure that by 1920 had risen to 734 unions with contributions of 700,000 pesos. Agricultural workers were organized by the FORA, which in 1920 held an event in solidarity with the Argentine Agrarian Federation. The workers of the yerba plantations, who were victims of exploitation, carried out their first strikes between 1918 and 1919, and managed to obtain labor improvements such as the 8-hour day and Sunday rest. The labor reforms of the first Radical government brought about an improvement in the average wage, which in 1916 was 3.60 pesos and by 1921 had increased to 6.75. The working day, which in 1916 was almost 9 hours, was reduced in 1921 to eight hours. The total of compensation payments for workplace accidents was 282,000,000 in 1916, and 1,328,000,000 in 1921. Likewise, while insured workers numbered 200,000 in 1916, this figure reached 465,000 in 1921.

During the first Radical administration, membership in unions increased exponentially. While in 1916 there were only 70 unions, four years later the number had risen to 750; as for members, from the 40,000 there were at the start of Yrigoyen's government the figure rose to 700,000 in 1920. From 1915 the FORA of the Ninth Congress and the FORA of the Fifth Congress dominated the workers' organizations. Between 1914 and 1918 the number of emigrants was greater than that of immigrants, since many returned to their lands of origin to fight in the First World War. By 1919 many of those people who had gone to Europe returned to the country. The enormous influx of agricultural colonies, the proliferation of farms, the intensification of cultivation through the sharecropper system, and the urban location of commerce and of incipient industries made it necessary to address various interlinked rural and urban problems: agrarian reform and labor matters.

The Ministry of Agriculture reorganized the administration of public land, and several studies were begun of the concessions of large areas of land made by previous governments. Technical agronomists were hired who traveled and examined the national territory, checking property titles and cataloguing the possibilities for exploiting each plot. As a result of this study, by 1921 concessions covering almost eight million hectares had been revoked. By means of a decree, those who had obtained land illegally were required to vacate it within a non-extendable period of two years, in addition to having to pay a fee for the period during which they had illegally enjoyed the use of the land.

In certain sectors there were shortages as a consequence of commercial speculation. For this reason the government sent Congress a regulation to expropriate 200,000 tons of sugar from hoarders, with the aim of distributing it to the population at normal prices. The law was approved in the Senate after arduous debates.

Pension funds were created for workers and employees of public services such as gas, electric power, telegraph and telephone, as well as for railway workers, and by means of Law No. 11,110 the pension regime for employees and workers of private public-service companies was regulated. In 1921, thanks to Law No. 11,156, the Civil Code was amended with respect to the leasing of property, better known as the "Rent Law", which meant that for the first time attention was paid to the social function of private property in general. With Law 10,505, passed in 1918, home-based work was regulated, while Law No. 10,903 created the Board of Guardianship of Minors and the regime for the protection of minors. In 1917 Law No. 10,284 on the regime of protection of the family, better known as homestead, was passed; it establishes the exemption from seizure of the goods and work tools indispensable for ensuring the subsistence of the family.

Although he tried unsuccessfully to promote a series of agrarian reforms (as was the case with the Agricultural Bank), some notable policies were in fact carried out. Public lands had been the greatest desire of the Argentine oligarchic class. The owners of railways had benefited from the acquisition of lands around their tracks thanks to a law of 1862, and had then resold them at higher prices to land companies that were nothing more than parallel enterprises. Yrigoyen opposed the continued sale of state lands, since he wanted to safeguard this source of wealth for the State. Thus the government obliged the owners who had illegally occupied lands to return them, in addition to paying a fee for the time during which they had enjoyed their use. The Agricultural Bank was created to safeguard the interests of farmers, but the initiative did not prosper; instead, the interests of farmers were placed in the charge of the National Mortgage Bank, which achieved an unusual development. The branches of the National Mortgage Bank grew from twenty-two branches and four agencies at the beginning of the government to forty branches and forty-one branches by the end of Yrigoyen's government. The deputies Francisco Beiró and Carlos J. Rodríguez presented a bill known as the Idle Lands Law, which would cause the loss of rights over lands that had not been used in fifteen years, in order to prevent the upper classes from holding large estates in their possession for a long time. But this regulation did not prosper either. Also passed in 1921 was Law No. 11,170 on the regime of rural leases, based on the amendments introduced into the Civil Code by Law No. 11,156. This regime would be modified in 1933 to ensure the protection of the tenant.

Shortly after Yrigoyen's first government began, the socialist revolution broke out in Russia, and this historic event had a great effect on the working-class sectors, which saw the prospect of a worldwide transformation of the relations between capital and labor. Strikes began to occur with greater frequency, owing to the layoffs that took place in industrial sectors because of the compression of the industries that had emerged during the First World War. The strike of the workers of Patagonia, harshly repressed by Héctor Varela, made an impression on the working classes, despite the scant news that arrived through the newspapers. Another general strike that broke out in Buenos Aires in 1919 shook the country because of the unusual gravity of the events. The strike, carried out by metalworkers, was harshly suppressed by police forces and extreme right-wing groups such as the Argentine Patriotic League and the Labor Association, events known as the Tragic Week. Real wages fell until 1918, which caused the number of strikes to increase, rising from 80 in 1916 to 367 the following year, before falling to 206 in 1920. The number of strikers was 24,000 in 1916, while in 1919 it reached 308,000 and fell to 134,000 in 1920.

During Yrigoyen's five-year term, public liberties as well as the freedom of public opinion as an expression of the citizenry were never infringed. Thus the newspapers, although most of them were opposition papers (and critical of the president), never suffered acts of censorship or defamation. Ricardo Balbín would say of this: "Sometimes I reread them and I shudder to think that a citizen could say, under his own signature, in the newspapers of the Republic, things against the president, without being persecuted or accused".

Massacres of workers

Tragic Week

Cannons on the corner of the Congress during the Tragic Week, 1919.

Main article: Tragic Week

The economic consequences of the First World War produced hundreds of strikes and violent clashes during Yrigoyen's government. A series of long stoppages affected the national economy, above all in the railway, port and metalworking sectors. In 1919, at the Vasena metalworks, one of the bloodiest clashes in history took place, the so-called Tragic Week, after a strike over wage demands and working hours had begun in December.

Scene of the Tragic Week.

On December 3, 1918, a strike was declared at the metalworking company Talleres Vasena, the largest in the country. The employers' intransigence in negotiating with the union and the union's combativeness extended the strike for several weeks, with a large number of armed clashes between strikers and strikebreakers. Many of its adherents were immigrants returning from Europe after the First World War.

On January 7, 1919, the police repressed the strikers at the corner of Pepirí and Amancio Alcorta, killing five people and triggering the popular uprising known as the Tragic Week. The following day the FORA of the Fifth Congress declared a general strike for January 9, in order to attend the burial of the dead, with the adherence of unions of both confederations and of the Socialist Party.

On January 9 the funeral procession of the dead took place, from the premises in Nueva Pompeya where they had been laid out for the wake to the Chacarita Cemetery. At several points along the route there were bloody clashes between workers, police and parapolice agents of the National Labor Association. During the clashes, the Radical leader Elpidio González, appointed by Yrigoyen two days earlier as Chief of Police, tried to talk personally with a group of strikers, who responded by making him get out of his vehicle and setting his automobile on fire. At the cemetery a platoon of soldiers and police had been posted, which fired on the crowd, preventing the burial from taking place. Sources estimated the dead of that day at several dozen, with no casualties among the security forces. That same afternoon Yrigoyen appointed General Luis Dellepiane as military governor of the City of Buenos Aires. The government announced that it had discovered a conspiracy directed entirely by foreigners described as "extremists", who intended to seize the government and which was led by the Jewish journalist Pinie Wald, who was savagely tortured. It would later be discovered that the government's announcement was false. The government also applied the Residence Law in the name of "social defense", and enforcement of Law No. 7029 was tightened.

That day, in order to repress the strikers, Radical and military leaders organized an extreme right-wing parapolice shock force, made up of upper-class young men, which over the following days would adopt the name of Argentine Patriotic League and which, protected by the police and military forces, persecuted workers and Jews, murdering, raping and setting homes on fire. There was looting of gun shops, destruction of churches and seizure of workshops. General Dellepiane commanded the troops to repel the rebellion, which lasted until January 14. In the course of the repression, the security and parapolice forces carried out in the Once neighborhood the only pogrom (massacre of Jews) carried out on the American continent.

According to the government, there were around 65 civilian dead and 4 from the armed forces, although it never presented the list of them. According to the opposition and the historians who investigated the event, more than 700 people were killed, there were several dozen disappeared, among them several children, and tens of thousands of detainees. It all ended when on January 14 the FORA decided to lift the strike, following the government's decision to free the prisoners and reopen the union premises, and the owners of Talleres Vasena accepted the union's list of demands.

Rebel Patagonia

Main article: Rebel Patagonia

Workers on strike during the Rebel Patagonia.

Another event of extreme violence is known as the Rebel Patagonia, when, in a rebellion in the province of Santa Cruz, Argentine Patagonia, between 1920 and 1921, a strike was organized against the exploitation of the workers by their employers, in order to demand labor improvements. In November 1920 the Workers' Society of Río Gallegos, under the leadership of the anarchist Antonio Soto (influenced by the Russian Revolution of 1917), declared a strike for improvements in wages and housing for the rural laborers. Shortly afterward, the strike spread to the whole province of Santa Cruz. The lands were occupied by activists, who took their employers hostage, without the use of violence, although pitched battles were fought with the police. In this context, the government sent Lieutenant Colonel Héctor Benigno Varela at the head of the regiment to try to ease the conflict. Héctor Benigno Varela spoke with the workers to reach an agreement, which normalized the situation. However, at the end of 1921 there was a sharp fall in the price of wool, which caused a significant amount of accumulated stock and brought about a major decrease in the price of the product. The greatest problem was that the workers had an upcoming shearing, which worsened the situation. To prevent this, the workers again took over the ranches, once more cautiously and without violence. Some owners even joined the demand, considering it just. But the strike ended up being repressed by the army under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Varela at the head of two cavalry regiments.

Varela captured ten Chilean carabineros who were fighting alongside the strikers and firing on the Argentine soldiers; it should be noted that Patagonia was largely occupied by Chilean citizens. Varela demanded that the strikers return to their activities, promising improvements for them and their families; if they did not do so within one day, Varela said that they would be forced to and that he would shoot anyone who fired on his troops, and he issued a resolution stating that any armed worker would be shot without further ado. After the workers' negative response, hundreds of workers were shot, partly because Varela had not received precise instructions from the government. Hundreds of other workers were captured and imprisoned.

Dr. Viñas met with the President to tell him what had happened in Patagonia and to ask him to prosecute those responsible. But Yrigoyen did not want to do so, since he believed that it would bring discredit upon the armed forces and that the people's faith in the institutions had to be preserved even at the cost of the impunity of some of the guilty.

International policy

Yrigoyen, in front of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral, receives the homage of a representative of the Kingdom of Italy, 1920.

Yrigoyen's international policy was the cause of heated discussions, even within Radicalism. His policy basically defended the self-determination and equality of nations in the face of the great powers. He followed the line of Victorino de la Plaza by maintaining neutrality in the First World War, but with protests to the belligerent countries of both sides. When the steamer Curamalan was captured in Cardiff, he lodged a protest with the French authorities, and the same happened when German ships and submarines damaged or even sank Argentine ships. Yrigoyen tried to convince other countries of Latin America not to break relations with other nations without an important reason. For this reason he convened a conference of nations, held in 1917, so that they would declare themselves in favor of neutrality. But American opposition, added to the fact that Brazil had already broken relations with Berlin, made the attempt fail. Only Mexico and Colombia accepted the Argentine government's call.

Yrigoyen sent a bill to forgive the debt that Paraguay had carried since the War of the Triple Alliance, but it did not prosper. The following Radical government would take up the matter again.

In 1917, a group of demonstrators attacked and wrecked the German Club, the German Delegation and the German Transatlantic Electricity Company. These events, added to the news that the German minister in Buenos Aires, Karl von Luxburg, had sent secret telegrams in which he recommended sinking Argentine ships "without leaving a trace" and in which he included insulting phrases toward the Foreign Minister Honorio Pueyrredón, led public opinion, as well as many Radical leaders, to pressure Yrigoyen to break diplomatic relations with Germany. But the president upheld neutrality. When German submarines sank the freighter Toro, near Gibraltar, and the merchant ship Monte Protegido, the socialist deputies voted in Congress for Argentina to enter the war, but Yrigoyen remained inflexible.

Regarding the Treaty of Versailles and the creation of the League of Nations, the Argentine position was to maintain the separation between the two acts: the Treaty was a matter that should be limited to the countries that had fought, whereas the League of Nations, on the contrary, should be an egalitarian and voluntary association of all the nations of the world. In addition, Yrigoyen commissioned the Argentine representatives to the League of Nations to request that both victorious and defeated nations be treated with equity, despite the opposition of some members of the League, such as Marcelo T. de Alvear and Fernando Pérez. The rejection of the Argentine position, fundamentally driven by the European imperial nations, at a time when the peoples of Africa and Asia still remained subject to European colonialism, led to the withdrawal of the Argentine delegation from the League.

Yrigoyen sought to contain the expansionism of the large foreign economic groups operating in the country. In the face of the aggressive interventionist policy of the United States in Latin America, he defended the principle of non-intervention; he even went so far as to order Argentine warships to salute the flag of the Dominican Republic and not that of the United States, which had raised its own on the island in the context of the 1916 invasion.

1922 elections and activities after the first presidency

Yrigoyen and Alvear in conversation.

When the question arose of the name for the 1922 presidential election, and the list of names within the party was already becoming too long, Yrigoyen decided to give his support to Marcelo T. de Alvear. The choice did not arouse major resistance within the party. Although Alvear had shown "rebellious" attitudes in the past, such as the episode in Geneva, Yrigoyen always showed esteem for Alvear; moreover, the latter had shown great personal commitment in the Radical revolutions of the past, contributing his effort and fortune to the Radical cause.

In February 1922 the National Committee was formed, arising from the reorganization carried out during the previous year. David Luna, national senator for La Rioja, was elected president; the former governor of Córdoba, Eufrasio Loza, first vice president; Eudoro Bargas Gómez, second vice president; Santiago Corvalán and Jacinto Fernández, secretaries; and Luis Catalá as treasurer. It was resolved to convene the National Convention for March 10 in order to proceed to the selection of the presidential ticket that the party would support in the elections of April 2. In the interval between the meeting of the National Committee and the National Convention, a dissident faction took shape that declared itself anti-Yrigoyenist.

On March 10, 1922, the National Convention of the UCR met at the Casa Suiza under the provisional chairmanship of David Luna. The following day the vote was held at the Teatro Nuevo before an enthusiastic crowd. The first place on the presidential ticket brought no major surprises, but there was some uncertainty regarding the second. The final count gave 139 votes to Alvear over Fernando Saguier, who had 18. The vice presidency was won by Elpidio González with 102 votes against 28 for Ramón Gómez. Alvear was immediately informed of the results of the vote by telegram, since he was serving as ambassador in Paris. The presidential elections were held on April 2, 1922, with a sweeping victory for the Radical candidate with 406,000 votes, against 123,000 votes for the conservative candidate.

On October 12 Yrigoyen handed the sash and the baton to Alvear at the Casa Rosada, with the support in person of a great crowd gathered in the Plaza de Mayo. Yrigoyen wished the new ruler success and then, accompanied by his ministers and some friends, left for his house on Brasil Street. Another great crowd of people appeared at his home to await him, making it somewhat difficult for him to get out of his car and reach his house. In the evening he was visited by Alvear. Alvear conducted a government with a political content different from that of Yrigoyen, both politically and administratively: Alvear gave more freedom to his ministers, in an attempt to run a government "in the European manner". In some specific cases he took measures opposed to those of his predecessor Hipólito Yrigoyen, and he appointed as ministers several of the principal anti-Yrigoyenist leaders, although he also maintained his autonomy when the anti-personalist Radicals repeatedly asked him to intervene Buenos Aires in order to win in 1928, and Alvear rejected the proposal.

In 1930 Alvear would justify the coup d'état that overthrew Yrigoyen, which interrupted the constitutional order after almost 70 years of institutional stability and installed the first of a series of civic-military dictatorships that would prevent the consolidation of democracy in Argentina until the last decade of the 20th century. During the first sessions of the Senate in 1923, the Radical senators Leopoldo Melo, Vicente Gallo, Martín Torino, Fernando Saguier, Pedro Larlús and Ramón Paz Posse presented a proposal to amend the rules of the body, by which the power to appoint the members of the internal committees was taken away from the president of the body. This office was held by Elpidio González, the Vice President of the Nation, who was linked to Yrigoyen, a measure that reduced the power of an official close to the caudillo. This episode unleashed a long confrontation within the chamber. The Yrigoyenist senators refused to provide a quorum. These were the first signs of the split.

During 1923 Yrigoyen did not take an active part in the political events of the country; instead he decided to travel to his estates to reorganize his assets, which had been neglected during the five years of his government. He did not frequent his most devoted group, and he communicated with Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear through Delfor del Valle, while Elpidio González kept him up to date on the events taking place in Congress. Even so, he decided to keep a low profile and avoided appearing in public. The schism within Radicalism deepened in 1924, when Yrigoyen began to receive countless accusations from his friends against Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear; Yrigoyen tried to defend him, attributing the direction the new government was taking to the latter's ministers. From 1924 onward Yrigoyen returned to an actively political life as he had done before being president, being frequently visited by his most esoteric inner circle: Elpidio González, Diego Luis Molinari, Delfor del Valle, Víctor Juan Guillot, Atilio Larco, David Luna and Carlos Borzani.

The first contest between Yrigoyenist and anti-personalist Radicals was the legislative elections of 1926. In San Juan and Mendoza the Radicals abstained, alleging a "lack of guarantees"; in the latter province lencinismo had triumphed. In the Federal Capital the UCR carried out a great campaign, in which Yrigoyen took part by attending some rallies. The final count gave victory to the UCR in the city of Buenos Aires, the province of Buenos Aires and La Rioja, while the UCRA had triumphed in Santiago del Estero, Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, Jujuy, San Juan and Mendoza, and the conservatives in Corrientes, Córdoba, Salta and Tucumán. The final vote count gave a total of 337,898 for the UCR, 126,441 for a coalition of conservative forces, 97,880 for the Socialist Party and 96,502 for the anti-personalist Radicals. Pressure to intervene Buenos Aires became more frequent after this electoral contest. In addition to the usual pressure from Vicente Gallo, Leopoldo Melo and Agustín Justo, the socialists led by Juan B. Justo also joined in, going so far as to present a bill to intervene Buenos Aires, but they withdrew it in June 1927. Between December 1927 and April 1928 elections were held in which the governorships of Salta, Tucumán, Santa Fe and Córdoba were renewed; the Radicals won all of them, including Córdoba for the first time in ten years. Given Alvear's refusal toward his Minister of the Interior, Vicente Gallo, who insisted on intervening Buenos Aires, the Minister resigned from his post on August 5, 1925, and the president swore in José P. Tamborini, who adhered to Alvear's legalism.

Cabinet

Ministries of the Government of Hipólito Yrigoyen
Portfolio	Officeholder	Term
Ministry of the Interior	Ramón Gómez Francisco Beiró	October 12, 1916 – April 10, 1922 April 11, 1922 – October 12, 1922
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship	Carlos A. Becú Honorio Pueyrredón	October 12, 1916 – January 30, 1917 January 30, 1917 – October 12, 1922
Ministry of Finance	Domingo Salaberry	October 12, 1916 – October 12, 1922
Ministry of Justice and Public Instruction	José Santos Salinas	October 12, 1916 – October 12, 1922
Ministry of Agriculture	Honorio Pueyrredón Alfredo Demarchi Eudoro Vargas Gómez Carlos J. Rodríguez	October 12, 1916 – September 13, 1917 September 13, 1917 – March 6, 1922 April 11, 1922 – August 9, 1922 August 9, 1922 – October 12, 1922
Ministry of Public Works	Pablo Torello	October 12, 1916 – October 12, 1922
Ministry of War	Elpidio González Julio Moreno	October 12, 1916 – September 14, 1918 September 14, 1918 – October 12, 1922
Ministry of the Navy	Federico Álvarez de Toledo Tomás Zurueta	October 12, 1916 – February 1921 February 1921 – October 12, 1922

Presidential elections of 1928 and legislative elections of 1930

On March 24, 1928, the National Committee, at its new premises at Avenida de Mayo 1228, again designated Yrigoyen as candidate for the presidency of the Nation by "popular acclamation", while Francisco Beiró was designated candidate for the vice presidency with 142 votes against 25. Finally, on April 1 the elections were held; on August 12, 1928, the 245 electors ratified the verdict, against 74 for all the other candidates, to bring Yrigoyen to the presidency for a second time, which drew criticism because he was acceding to the presidency at 76 years of age. The elections gave the Radicals a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, but not in the Senate, where only eight were Radicals, while nineteen were from the opposition.

For the legislative elections of 1930 a great campaign was carried out, of a kind seldom seen before in the history of Argentine democracy since 1916. The organization "Tribuna Radical" publicized the government's works and the country's economic problems in lectures. Films were shown about the Huaytiquina railway and the work of YPF, and lectures on the subject of the nationalization of oil were broadcast. The Yrigoyenist Radicals were unable to hold their closing campaign rally, since on March 2 it rained torrentially. In the elections, in several provinces the general count showed an overall decline in the Radical vote. The great blow was in the Capital, where the independent socialists won with 100,000 votes against 84,000 for the socialists, followed in third place by the Yrigoyenist Radicals with 83,000, a clear sign that Yrigoyen's political strength had fallen considerably. Although in total the UCR had obtained 655,000 votes throughout the country against 695,000 for the opposition, the results in the Capital would bode poorly for the future. In the elections in Entre Ríos the anti-personalists won with 48,000 votes against 44,000 for the Yrigoyenists.

Second presidency (1928–1930)

Main articles: History of the Radical Civic Union (1916–1930) § The second government of Hipólito Yrigoyen (1928–1930), Second government of Yrigoyen, 1928 Argentine presidential election, and First Radical presidencies (Argentina) § Second government of Hipólito Yrigoyen (1928–1930)

Yrigoyen on taking office in 1928.

Yrigoyen was elected President again in 1928, for a term that was to have been 1928–1934, after defeating a coalition of conservatives and anti-personalist Radicals.

Yrigoyen had several plans for his second presidency that were not taken up in the Senate because of the fierce opposition of conservatives and anti-personalist Radicals. Among them were, among others, the project to nationalize oil, road development, the Merchant Marine, the creation of the Banco de la República and the labor laws.

Economic policy

In 1929 the Great Depression occurred, which drastically affected the entire world. The Radicalism led by Hipólito Yrigoyen was unable to respond to the effects of the crisis. In the midst of economic and political crisis, and with four years still remaining until the presidential elections, the weakness of Yrigoyen's government became critical. Radicalism was completely divided and the government had no dialogue with the opposition.

By decree the Conversion Office was closed in 1929, in order to prevent speculation in gold and the reduction of metallic exchange. The National Fund for Bank Pensions was regulated. By decree the tariffs in force in 1911 were imposed on the Puerto Rosario company. The installation and operation of radio stations was regulated. Airmail service was authorized between Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and also between Buenos Aires and Washington, D.C. The Institute of Nutrition, the Cancer Institute and the Petroleum Institute were created. There was an ambitious public works plan for the construction of roads, railways and drinking water networks amounting to 4 billion; in 1929 the ministry began the studies for such projects, but the serious economic situation that led to the coup d'état cut short every project.

By 1929, 450 banks had failed in the United States, and another 2,500 did so in 1930. Nations took protectionist measures and isolated their economies. In mid-January Yrigoyen sent a message to the Senate protesting its "ineffectiveness" and pleading for the approval of six measures that only lacked a vote in that body to enter into force. Among the rules to be considered, first was the law nationalizing oil, approved by the Chamber of Deputies in 1928.

Interventions and relations with the opposition

The Socialist Party under the leadership of Juan B. Justo maintained its popular prestige in the Federal Capital, reflected in the rise from the 42,000 votes obtained in 1916 to 60,000 in 1922, which secured it the seats of the metropolitan minority in the Chamber of Deputies, thus being the most implacable opposition to Radicalism; paradoxically, on many occasions they served the interests of the old conservative regime, refusing to accompany the Radicals in many progressive initiatives. The power of conservatism gradually diminished: in addition to the loss of the top national position with the arrival of the new president, there were the successive interventions in its provincial strongholds, where on some occasions free elections were called so that their authorities could be chosen cleanly. Yrigoyen did not attack conservative power head-on, but he did take it upon himself to dismantle much of its machinery that prevented the provinces from being able to choose their rulers by free popular expression. Nevertheless, in some provinces the regime was still powerful, especially Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Corrientes and Salta. The intervention in the leading Argentine state, decreed in 1917, was a great blow to conservatism.

He intervened the provinces of Mendoza and San Juan, governed by opponents: lencinismo in the former, and the bloquismo of the Cantonis in the latter. On November 10, 1929, the opposition senator from Mendoza Carlos Washington Lencinas was murdered by a Yrigoyenist group, although for personal motives. The crime caused shock in the country and Yrigoyen was falsely accused of having ordered it, although it is unlikely that this happened. Carlos Lencinas was in head-on confrontation with Yrigoyen, who had intervened Mendoza, and he had just been excluded from the Senate by the Yrigoyenist majority. Even before Lencinas's murder, the accusations against the government on the part of both the press and the opposition were taking on a more hostile tone. According to the historian Félix Luna, "some invisible director was ordering the disorder. Someone was scientifically synchronizing those discordant noises". For Luna, "the murder of Lencinas was a symptom of the atmosphere of the Republic". This event was exploited by the opposition to the detriment of Yrigoyen's image. A large crowd attended Lencinas's burial; in Buenos Aires an event was held organized by the Republican League and the Action Committee. The Senate approved an interpellation of the Minister of the Interior, which the Vice President (head of the body) refused to transmit. This event and the tension with the leaders of Mendoza provoked new manifestos, new rallies and new attacks. Despite the events of great political tension, in 1928 gubernatorial elections were held in Buenos Aires and the Radical Civic Union won with 175,000 votes against 128,000, Nereo Crovetto being elected governor. By the end of 1929 the Senate had still not managed to approve the 1930 budget.

On December 24, 1929, at 11:30, an anarchist attack against Yrigoyen took place as he left his residence on his way to the Casa Rosada. The perpetrator of the attack was an Italian anarchist named Gualterio Marinelli, who was in the entrance hall of a hotel; he burst out onto the sidewalk and fired five shots at the automobile in which the President was traveling, hitting the car but not his target, and the attacker ended up shot down by the presidential guard. The President ordered the car to stop and got out half a block away to see the site of the attack, but the curious public and the investigative agents prevented him, so he had to return to his vehicle. Public opinion began to view Yrigoyen's new administration negatively; some time earlier he had walked through the streets without an escort, whereas now his guards had killed a person.

The year 1930 began with the murder of an opponent in a province intervened by the government, the bloquista lawyer Manuel Ignacio Castellano. On March 2 the parliamentary elections were held, in which the Radical Civic Union lost resoundingly in the City of Buenos Aires: against the 100,000 votes obtained by the Independent Socialist Party, followed by the original Socialist Party with 84,000, the Radicals obtained only 83,000 votes. Throughout the country, the UCR lost ground in its electoral strength and obtained only 655,000 votes, while the opposition reached 695,000. In that year Yrigoyen signed the pardon of the anarchist Simón Radowitzky, something he had promised during his first presidency. However, the government deported him to Uruguay.

Oil policy

Yrigoyen tried to implement a policy that would secure oil management for the State, but this was frowned upon by the feudal oligarchies that still governed some provinces. Added to this were foreign interests, which even reached into the Senate and which prevented the law nationalizing oil from being passed. On August 1, 1930, the state oil company YPF decided to intervene in the oil market to set the price and break the trusts, but the coup d'état of 1930 ended up cutting short any possibility of nationalizing the resource. One of the motives of that conspiracy was the Radical government's decision to nationalize hydrocarbons. Yrigoyen stated in his message to Congress:

The national mining laws, coinciding with principles of civil law adopted by our code, were enacted at a time when the economic value and social importance that mineral oils or hydrocarbons, industrialized and placed on the market, would acquire in the future could not be suspected. Hence no exception was introduced within the legal regime adopted for the natural substances existing in the subsoil, which distributes their ownership between the Nation and the provinces in accordance with their political sovereignty, which means handing over the direction of the enormous interests of every kind related to oil to the multiple, changing and frequently contradictory administrative criteria of fourteen jurisdictions, in addition to the federal jurisdiction (...) It is enough to set out this state of affairs to verify its serious drawbacks and even its dangers, already made evident in the hasty alienation of concessions by some provincial governments, whose ill-considered measures gave rise to such justified concerns and which, later revoked by the change of thinking arising from the renewal of the local authorities, have left behind them a trail of disputes, currently submitted to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation.

— Message of Yrigoyen to Congress, 1929.

During the short span of Yrigoyen's second presidency, the eight-hour working day was regulated thanks to Laws No. 11,544 and No. 11,570 setting rules for the application of labor legislation.

Legislative elections of 1930

The campaign for the legislative elections of 1930 was marked by several acts of violence. From February onward, incidents became practically daily. In the Buenos Aires Province town of Lincoln there was a shootout between conservatives and Radicals, with two dead and three wounded. A few days later there were more incidents, such as in Toledos and in Olmos (Córdoba); in the latter there were shootouts between Democrats and the police. In Godoy Cruz (Mendoza) the clashes led to the arrest of José Hipólito Lencinas. In the Federal Capital a Radical committee was shot at from three unidentified automobiles.

Overthrow

Police guard the door of Yrigoyen's house, at Brasil Street 1039, after it had been looted.

Main article: 1930 Argentine coup d'état

Thirty-seven days after intervening in the oil market, on September 6, 1930, he was deposed by the first coup d'état of the constitutional era, supported by the major press of the oligarchic families, the army and the opposition of the conservative elites. The middle class, key to his arrival in power, had stopped backing him after the economic catastrophe. During the 1930s Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz argued that the American company Standard Oil had played an important role in the preparations for the 1930 coup. In his thesis he asserts the existence of a conspiracy to remove Yrigoyen from power and block any possibility of nationalizing the sources of energy. One sign of this was that Matías Sánchez Sorondo, legal adviser to Standard Oil, was appointed Minister of the Interior; in addition, Ernesto Bosch, Octavio Pico and Horacio Varela had held positions in British oil companies.

Yrigoyen fought the purposes of the United States. Washington expects greater cooperation from the new political regime. The Argentine president refused to appoint a representative here. He fought against the Monroe Doctrine.

— The New York Times, September 7, 1930.

In the course of the coup d'état, mobs of demonstrators entered Yrigoyen's house to loot it. General José Félix Uriburu left power two years later to allow the arrival of a new government with General Agustín Pedro Justo as President and Julio Argentino Pascual Roca as Vice President. The ticket was elected amid elections vitiated by the virtual proscription of Radicalism, and with this began the so-called "Infamous Decade", characterized by brazen electoral fraud.

General Enrique Mosconi, who presided over YPF, submitted his resignation four days after the coup d'état took place, not wishing to be part of a coup government.

The historian José Luis Romero summarizes the overthrow of Yrigoyen (and consequently the end of the Radical republic) thus:

The triumph of the revolution closed the period of the Radical republic, without Yrigoyen being able to understand the causes of the fickleness of his people, who not long before had acclaimed him to the point of hysteria and now abandoned him into the hands of his enemies of the oligarchy. His old house on Brasil Street (which his opponents called 'the armadillo's den') was looted, with no regard for the indisputable personal dignity of a man whose only fault had been to come to power when the country had already become incomprehensible to him.

Cabinet

Ministries of the Government of Hipólito Yrigoyen
Portfolio	Officeholder	Term
Ministry of the Interior	Elpidio González	October 12, 1928 – September 6, 1930
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship	Horacio Oyhanarte	October 12, 1928 – September 6, 1930
Ministry of Finance	Enrique Pérez Colman	October 12, 1928 – September 6, 1930
Ministry of Justice and Public Instruction	Juan de la Campa	October 12, 1928 – September 6, 1930
Ministry of Agriculture	Juan B. Fleitas	October 12, 1928 – September 6, 1930
Ministry of Public Works	José Benjamín Ábalos	October 12, 1928 – September 6, 1930
Ministry of War	Luis Dellepiane	October 12, 1928 – September 3, 1930
Ministry of the Navy	Tomás Zurueta	October 12, 1928 – September 6, 1930

After the presidency

Yrigoyen returns to Buenos Aires after his imprisonment on Martín García Island.

The military coup of 1930 that overthrew President Hipólito Yrigoyen caused the Radical Civic Union to return to the conspiratorial state it had maintained from its origins until the Sáenz Peña law of 1912. Both in Buenos Aires and in the provinces (all of them intervened), the Army and the Police kept close watch over the leaders of that party.

A multitude of people carried the coffin to the cemetery.

On August 27, 1931, a Radical conspiracy was discovered in Tucumán. According to the Ministry of the Interior, its ringleaders had tried to implicate "some military elements", who denounced them. The head of the movement was the former national senator Dr. Alberto Aybar Augier, who was arrested. There was a new attempt on August 31, when another Radical leader, Dr. José Lozano Muñoz, tried unsuccessfully to raise the Police and the Fire Brigade in revolt, and ended up arrested together with others involved. Both Aybar Augier and Lozano Muñoz were placed at the disposal of the National Executive Power and sent to Buenos Aires. Two years later, in January 1933, the National Government (by then headed by General Agustín Pedro Justo, after the elections that the UCR denounced as fraudulent) carried out another roundup of alleged Radical conspirators. It detained the former presidents Hipólito Yrigoyen and Marcelo T. de Alvear and sent them to Martín García Island. They also arrested Honorio Pueyrredón, José P. Tamborini, Carlos Noel, Manuel Ruiz Moreno, Miguel Tanco and Alberto Aybar Augier, and the government ordered them confined in the remote town of San Julián, in Santa Cruz. They were transported by ship and remained there from January 26 until May 4, 1933.

In 1932 the National Congress of Argentina approved organic Law No. 11,668, which placed YPF under the same conditions as private companies, but in addition, and more seriously still, it was not permitted to import oil. Mosconi had warned of the importance of YPF being able to import crude freely, since in the event that the maneuvers of the private companies acted against the interests of the country, YPF could respond to possible demand by increasing its reserves through purchasing foreign oil. Yrigoyen submitted a brief to the Supreme Court of Justice denouncing the sell-out attitude in oil matters.

In his last years Yrigoyen and Alvear had repaired their relationship and saw each other more frequently. During Alvear's presidency they had only crossed paths on the occasion of the inauguration in 1925 of the Bajada de Maipú and the Paseo de Julio.

In February 1932, Yrigoyen returned from his imprisonment on Martín García Island.

In the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, at Sarmiento Street 948, attached to one of the granite columns supporting the current fourteen-story building, there is a bronze plaque that reads: "On this site on July 3, 1933, Don Hipólito Yrigoyen died...", declared a Historic Site by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires.

A similar plaque is located at the intersection of Brasil and Bernardo de Irigoyen streets, where until the mid-1970s stood the building in which Yrigoyen lived during his presidency (Brasil 1039). With the construction of the Autopista 9 de Julio Sur, the entire block was demolished, and today a public square occupies the site of the president's former house.

In 2016, the group Movimiento Nacional Alfonsinista celebrated the 100th anniversary of Hipólito Yrigoyen's first government at an event held in the Atlanta mini-stadium. Taking part in the tribute were the leading members of that group, Leopoldo Moreau, Gustavo López, Sergio Palazzo and Leandro Santoro. In addition, the closing was given by the Peronist former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The Radical current of Kirchnerism considers Hipólito Yrigoyen the first popular president in the country's history.

Personality

Yrigoyen giving his characteristic greeting to the people.

Hipólito Yrigoyen's personality is one of his most distinctive and remembered traits. He was inspired by the philosophy of Krausism, which in politics championed universal suffrage and in personal life called for greater austerity and philanthropy. Yrigoyen followed these precepts: he advocated democratization and adopted a personal style so sober it bordered on severe. His social habits also changed. He did not attend parties or banquets, did not go to the theater, did not drink or smoke, and never took up the custom of other powerful men of traveling to Europe, a continent he never visited in his life. Very few records exist of public speeches he gave. He disliked appearing in public, and on the rare occasions he attended events he left quickly. He did not like being photographed (only a few photographic portraits from his youth exist). He was criticized for not going to Congress to read his annual messages, which was taken as a sign of "contempt for public representation." He was also reproached for his scarce public presence, since he spent much of his time secluded in his house on Brasil Street. Despite all this, Yrigoyen was one of the Argentine political figures with the greatest impact on the masses.

Throughout his life he carried out many charitable acts even when his own finances were not very sound, such as donating his salaries to the Children's Hospital or giving his tailor-made suits to people in need. When he was proclaimed presidential candidate, he gave up the salaries that came with the office and donated them to the Sociedad de Beneficencia (Charitable Society), and he did the same again in 1928.

His austerity led him to live in humble neighborhoods, as David Rock says:

This habit and the seclusion in which he lived earned him the nickname El Peludo ("the Armadillo").

The nickname also came from his habit of taking long walks around the city, usually at night and often with a fellow party member such as Marcelo T. Alvear, Delfor del Valle or José Camilo Crotto, with whom he would talk politics. He did not drink or smoke, except for half a bottle of champagne, which he drank because the carbon dioxide helped his digestion. Even after becoming a successful rancher, he kept living in the same house on Brasil Street with his daughter Elena and his secretary. His home had no heating or luxurious furniture, and he turned down properties offered to him when he took his first post as a legislator. He was always addressed by his surname. Only a few very close friends, such as Marcelo T. de Alvear and Fernando Saguier, called him by his first name, and even they did not use the familiar tú with him. He did not speak ill of other people (not even in political terms), and when someone else did, he stayed out of the conversation. If for some reason he disliked someone, he did not dismiss that person publicly with harsh remarks. He simply stopped receiving them, or mispronounced their surname in public.

When he was a teacher, he used to buy the books that his students could not afford. Once, when a female teacher had to miss several months because of illness, Yrigoyen paid her salary for those months. He always did such things anonymously; in this case he lent money to the school so that it could pay the teacher's wages. During his presidencies, the residence's entertainment expenses never exceeded a thousand pesos a day, and to get around he used only two old carriages already kept at the Government House. He also went on living in his house on Brasil Avenue, "luxurious only in books and sunlight," and refused any residence offered to him because of his title as president. On taking office, he ordered the removal of the portraits bearing his effigy that decorated some public offices. The expenses of the Presidency as an office were minimal. As a personal habit, he used no fan, heater or telephone. In his office, visitors were not offered cigarettes, liquor or coffee, as had been the custom before. The only gift he accepted from visitors or admirers was flowers, and red roses were his favorite.

Yrigoyen had an intense love life, though always marked by his characteristic reserve. He never acknowledged having other children, although it is known that he had many more, at least six. According to the research presented in Araceli Bellota's Los amores de Yrigoyen, he would have had five children. The eldest was Elena, daughter of Antonia Pavón, the maid of his aunt Tomasa Alem, who lived for a period in the family home. The next three were Sara Dominga, a son who died soon after birth, and Eduardo Abel, all with Dominga Campos. She was the daughter of Commander Pedro Campos, who had accompanied Roca in the Conquest of the Desert and who disapproved of his daughter being the partner of the caudillo. His last child was Luis Hernán, born on March 7, 1897, from his relationship with Luisa Bacichi. Although Yrigoyen never married and never even lived with Antonia or Dominga, he opposed the divorce law, since he held that the family was the foundation that sustained the country. It has also been suggested that he may have had relationships with female teachers and students. But he never married.

In popular culture

The Italian-Argentine filmmaker and animator Quirino Cristiani produced two animated feature films satirizing Yrigoyen, which were also the first of their kind in the world: El apóstol (1917) and Peludópolis (1931). Both films are now lost.

There is a legend, denied by some sectors of Radicalism, that during his second presidency a person was in charge of reading the newspaper to the President but skipped over the criticism of his administration and of the critical situation the country was going through because of the 1929 crisis. Other versions claim that the President's inner circle had fake newspapers printed so that the President would read only "good news."

It has been suggested that the rumor may have been invented by Natalio Botana, founder of the newspaper Crítica and a fierce opponent of Yrigoyen's government. In a talk at the opening of the Hipólito Yrigoyen open chair at the National University of La Plata, Hipólito Solari Yrigoyen refuted the legend with two arguments. First, the story said that the President read (or had read to him) a "revised" version of La Prensa, when in fact he read La Nación. Second, at that time newspapers were printed with typesetting, and it was impossible for two newspapers to have the same one.

From another perspective, Teresa Sandoz suggests that when some journalists cite Yrigoyen's newspaper, they are sometimes using a metaphor for when a leader's inner circle keeps him isolated from news that might bother him.

In 2013, El Diario del Peludo premiered. It was a play performed by Fito Yanelli and Victorio D' Alessandro and directed by Gonzalo Demaría.

Legacy

His pro-labor profile and his policies on workers' rights set a course for the national economy. In addition, his resistance to intervention by the great powers in the austere Argentine economy was extremely important for the Republic's later diplomatic development. So was his government's neutrality during World War I, a policy inherited from Victorino de la Plaza. Various groups and movements within most Argentine political parties have claimed Hipólito Yrigoyen's political legacy, in a spectrum known as Yrigoyenism. Count Hermann Graf Keyserling described him as the "leader of a bloodless revolution that had fundamentally changed the moral physiognomy of his people," and attributed this to "the magnanimity of the depths of the Argentine soul" and to "the evangelical makeup as a reformer of its chief." Enrique Gómez Carrillo had said: "if I had the honor of being Argentine, I probably would not be a Radical, but I would surely be a supporter of Yrigoyen." Gonzalo Bulnes saw him as "a great American figure, the greatest of his time."

These groups include FORJA, founded in 1935, and the Intransigent and Renewal Movement of the UCR, founded in 1945. Juan Domingo Perón himself claimed more than once a popular line running from Rosas to Yrigoyen to Perón. His legacy was also claimed by some socialists, such as Guillermo Estévez Boero and Hermes Binner, and by communists such as Rodolfo Puiggrós, among others.

In 2005, through Law No. 26,040, the Argentine government of Néstor Kirchner created the National Yrigoyenean Institute. This legal entity continued an institution created in 1948, and its president is former Argentine Vice President Víctor Martínez.

Yrigoyen's poncho, walking stick and bowler hat at the Bicentennial Museum.

Yrigoyen's phaeton carriage at the Bicentennial Museum

The educational policy carried out during Hipólito Yrigoyen's presidencies restored a democratic outlook on schooling, transformed pedagogical relationships and revised the concept of childhood.

Great changes took place during those periods:

• More than 50 schools were created, among them national, industrial, commercial, and arts and trades schools.
• The illiteracy rate fell considerably.
• Technical, trade and adult schools began to receive attention, with the ideal of achieving an education for work.
• Education was imbued with the new movement known as the New School, which sought to change the traditional rituals and teaching methods used until then.

Along these lines, there was a major reform in primary schools known as the Rezzano Reform. While respecting Law No. 1420 on Common Education and following some ideological lines of the New School, it placed the child and the child's interests at the center of the educational process, and it established teaching through lived experience and experimentation. Based on Pestalozzian concepts, content was organized according to its naturalness, and play was given a privileged place in the teaching-learning process.

In higher education, great changes came with the so-called University Reform. It began in Córdoba in 1918 (home of the most traditional and oldest university) and established momentous changes, explained very simply below:

University autonomy: from then on, the internal policies of the University would be completely independent of the governments of the day, and the University would govern itself.

Academic freedom: the content and curriculum of each subject or area would be respected, but each professor could choose how to approach the topics and which authors would be consulted.

Co-governance: decision-making would no longer belong solely to the authorities. Students, teachers and non-teaching staff would also take part in it. This way of operating was created and implemented here in Argentina, and it would later be copied by several countries in Latin America.

However, Yrigoyen did not manage to consolidate his educational project. This was largely because he lacked the support of a large number of teachers, who, despite this government's advances, still had several unmet demands. Nor could he prevail against the oligarchic class that owned the land. Rooted in the agro-export economic model of the time, that class was not willing to lose power or wealth by supporting the education of its workers.

Thus, education in this period was caught between positivism and traditionalism, which were then bitter opposites, but it did not lose its foundations. It attempted to change the relationship between education and work, but in the end the two remained on separate paths.

Descendants

Source.

• Juan Hipólito del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús (13/07/1852-03/07/1933) formed a couple with Antonia Pavón (26/02/1852); they had two children:

1. Helena (02/09/1872-05/07/1945)
2. Hipólito (1874-22/04/1880)

• Juan Hipólito del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Yrigoyen formed a couple with Dominga Campos (29/11/1859-14/11/1890); they had five children:

1. María Luisa (09/1877-189?)
2. Dominga (24/11/1878-23/06/1879)
3. Hipólito (15/11/1879-1880)
4. Eduardo Abel (27/10/1880-03/08/1945)
5. Sara Dominga (26/01/1882-16/06/1970)

• Juan Hipólito del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Yrigoyen formed a couple with Luisa Bacichi (11/03/1855-12/07/1924); they had one son:

1. Luis Irigoyen (7/03/1897-10/03/1977) married María Paula Kurth (1899-1989); they had one son:

• • Raúl Hipólito (1919-1994) married Anne Marie Simpson (07/07/1921-06/09/1973); they had two children:
    • Juan Carlos Hipólito (05/09/1949) married Beatriz Estela Sidders (13/05/1949); they had two children:
      • María Agustina (24/08/1982)
      • Juan Hipólito (10/06/1984)
    • María Mercedes (18/01/1952) married Colin Munro Campbell (05/05/1951); they had three children:
      • Colin (1976) married Lorena Gonzáles.
      • Rodrigo (1978) married María Guadalupe López
      • Alejandra (1980) married Ezequiel Bettatis (1977); they had two children:
        • Justina (2003)
        • Federica (2005)
      • Alejandra Campbell formed another family with Sebastián Grandinetti (1975); they had two children:
        • Mora (2009)
        • Lara (2013)

See also

• History of Argentina
• Radical Civic Union
• Rufina Cambaceres
• Leandro N. Alem
• Luis Irigoyen

Bibliography

• Luna, Félix (1986). Yrigoyen (in español). Hyspamerica. ISBN 950-614-361-7.
• Luna, Félix (2005). Breve historia de los argentinos (in español). Planeta. ISBN 987-1144-85-7.
• Herrera de Noble, Ernestina (dir.) (2011a). Clarín (ed.). Yrigoyen gana con la nueva ley 1916. Historia de las elecciones argentinas (in español). Vol. 3. Buenos Aires: Artes Gráficas Rioplatenses. ISBN 978-987-07-1392-0. (complete work ISBN 978-987-07-1389-0). {{cite book}}: |format= requires |url= (help)
• Herrera de Noble, Ernestina (dir.) (2011b). Clarín (ed.). La gran victoria de Yrigoyen 1928. Historia de las elecciones argentinas (in español). Vol. 5. Buenos Aires: Artes Gráficas Rioplatenses. ISBN 978-987-07-1394-4. (complete work ISBN 978-987-07-1389-0). {{cite book}}: |format= requires |url= (help)
• Titto, Ricardo de (director and compiler); López, Germán (foreword) (2010). El pensamiento del radicalismo. Claves del Bicentenario (in español). Buenos Aires: Editorial El Ateneo. ISBN 978-950-02-0491-0.
• Gallo, Claudio Rodolfo (2014). Claroscuros de la Historia Argentina (in español). Editorial Dunken. ISBN 978-987-02-7621-0.
• Gálvez, Manuel (1939). Vida de Hipólito Yrigoyen (in español). Buenos Aires: El elefante blanco.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Oyanharte, Horacio Bernardo (1934). El hombre (in español). Buenos Aires: Tor.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Felisatti, Antonio (1984). Hipólito Yrigoyen (in español).
• Zanini, Eduardo (2003). Hipólito Yrigoyen, a 150 de su nacimiento (biografía) (in español). Quintana Ediciones.
• Rock, David (1988). Argentina, 1516-1987. Desde la colonización española hasta Alfonsín (in español). Buenos Aires: Alianza.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Romero, José Luis (1991). Breve historia de la argentina (in español). Abril. ISBN 950-10-0072-9.
• Herrera de Noble, Ernestina (2010). Hipólito Yrigoyen. Grandes biografías de los 200 años (in español). Buenos Aires: Sol 90. ISBN 978-987-07-0844-5.
• Luna, Félix (1999). Alvear (in español). Editorial Sudamericana. ISBN 950-07-1522-8.
• Cattaruzza, Alejandro (1997). Los nombres del poder: Marcelo T. de Alvear (in español). Fondo de Cultura Económica. ISBN 950-557-230-1.
• Kirschbaum, Ricardo (general editor); De Noble, Ernestina (director) (April 2010). Fernando Muñoz Pace (ed.). Los años dorados de la democracia (1920-1929) (in español). Vol. 12. Clarín. ISBN 978-987-07-0872-8. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
• Amuchástegui, Antonio (1972). Mentalidades argentinas 1860-1930 (in español). Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires.
• Bernal, Federico (2005). Petróleo, estado y soberanía: hacia la empresa multiestatal latinoamericana de hidrocarburos (in español). Biblios. ISBN 950-557-248-4.

External links

• Works by Hipólito Yrigoyen on Spanish Wikisource
• Law 26,040 creating the National Yrigoyenean Institute (digitized documents) on Spanish Wikisource