False Economy - Alan Beattie [7]
Nor were many immigrants gripped by an Argentine version of the American dream. Many of the immigrants were "swallows" (golondrinas) who came from Italy or Spain for the harvest season and then returned home. Between 1850 and 1930, only 5 percent of immigrants even became Argentine citizens. Italy won the 1934 World Cup with three Argentine players on its squad. Since they were of Italian descent, Italy considered them to be, essentially, Italians and simply poached them ahead of the tournament, to the fury of Argentina's football (soccer) fans. It is hard to imagine England getting away with requisitioning American athletes of British descent.
Still, America's openness to immigration was not a given, any more than it is now. The Plymouth Colony founded by the Pilgrim emigrants of the seventeenth century was intended not to extend freedom and democracy but to give a dissenting denomination the ability to impose its own religious purity. America's low-church Protestants had left Catholicism and its near neighbor, Anglicanism, in Europe. Many had no wish to let them follow on behind.
Associations of American-born workers arose to oppose successive waves of immigration. With an unconscious gift for self-satire, one powerful political movement of the mid-nineteenth century styled itself the "Know-Nothings," after the response they were required to give when asked about their half-secret gatherings. The Know-Nothings wanted Catholics and foreigners banned from public office. There were riots in New York against the newcomers. But in the end the exigencies of economic growth won out. There was no point fighting over shares of the pie when it became evident just how rapidly it was growing. America was not a zero-sum game.
Meanwhile Argentina was heading down the wrong track. It had more land than it could efficiently work, and too few homegrown or imported laborers to work it. But it was well into the twentieth century before the rot in the foundations became apparent. Its faults were for a long while masked by a great and unearned gift.
Hyperbole about the "unprecedented" nature of the twenty-first-century globalized economy is misplaced. There was huge integration in markets for goods, capital, and (particularly) people during the first "Golden Age" of globalization, roughly dating from 1880 to 1914. Peace in Europe coincided with the growth of cities, and with them urban consumers. A global trading system developed with astonishing speed.
Transport costs dropped sharply. In the mid-nineteenth century, wheat cost more than twice as much at destination in London than it did at source in Chicago. By 1913 they cost about the same. Most leading countries fixed their currencies to the price of gold, in order to be sure how much their export earnings would be worth.
It was a great time to be a New World farmer. American and Argentine farming had a big competitive advantage (relative to other countries) and a big comparative advantage (relative to other industries). A canning industry already existed, boosted by the American Civil War. Soldiers, especially of the Southern armies, had had to fight a long way from reliable sources of fresh food. Fray Bentos, long famous in Britain as a brand of tinned glutinous meat pie, is named after a meatpacking town in Uruguay near the Argentine border. Canning was now supplanted by new industrial processes invented elsewhere, such as freezing and refrigerating meat. American and Argentine farmers saw the markets of Europe open up, wide and clear, before them. This, after all, was the way specialization