False Economy - Alan Beattie [6]
Thus was privilege reinforced. A small number of wealthy and powerful landowning families controlled vast amounts of sparsely populated pasture. Argentina's land conquests did little to change its nature. European emigrants to Argentina had escaped a landowning aristocracy at home only to re-create it in the New World. The similarities were more than superficial. In the early decades of agricultural commercialization—the 1860s and 1870s—the landowners regarded rural life and the actual practice of agriculture with disdain. Many lived refined, deracinated lives in the cities, spending their time immersed in European literature and music in cloistered salons rather than bothering to run their farm estates themselves. And even when a number of new immigrants made it into the elite, they acted as though their blood had always been blue. The closest they came to celebrating country life was elevating polo, an aristocratized version of a rural pursuit, to a symbol of Argentine athletic elegance. Even then, it assumed an elite and exclusive form: the famous Jockey Club of Buenos Aires, founded in the 1880s. It worked, too; by the end of the nineteenth century some were sending sons to Eton, a prep school at the apex of British aristocratic privilege. A few were even accorded the ultimate goal of being permitted to marry into titled European nobility.
Though it regarded what it termed the "manifest destiny" of expansion with imperious, and almost imperial, ambition, America's move westward was nevertheless more democratic. The government deliberately encouraged a system of smaller family holdings. Even when it did sell off large tracts of land, the potential for a powerful landowning class to emerge was limited. Squatters who seized family-sized patches of soil had their claims acknowledged, news of which created an incentive for other westward emigrants to follow en masse. Its cattle ranchers did not spend much time boning up on the entrance requirements of elite English schools. And in addition to cattle, the western settlers ran higher-productivity farms than their Argentine counterparts, growing wheat and corn. The massive westward move of America created a vacuum in the coastal east of the country, which soon filled up with new emigrants sucked in from the poverty and desperation of Europe. By the 1850s, the United States was importing a quarter of a million immigrants a year.
Immigrants came to Argentina as well, and later made up a bigger proportion of the population there than in the United States. But they came later, and with fewer skills. Even from across the Atlantic, the wages offered for lowly farm laborers did not always look enticing. Low productivity meant low wages, for which, generally, only the poorer and less well-educated Europeans were prepared to emigrate in large numbers. The surge of immigrants into Argentina, largely low-skilled Italians and Irish, came in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. In 1914, a third of Argentina's population was still illiterate.
The European migrants to Argentina had been pushed as much as pulled. A rising population and inefficient farming in their home countries—where the local economies were, appropriately enough, undercut by cheap agricultural produce exported by the United States and Argentina—drove Italians off the land, while the Irish were escaping the famine of