Jorge Newbery - Historical Context

Historical Context

Jorge Newbery was in the public eye between the 1890s and the first fifteen years of the 20th century, a very important time for Argentina which was characterised by an enormous immigration of primarily Europeans which multiplied the country’s demographic importance by a factor of five, and the expansion of an economy of agricultural export which increased the GDP per capita from $334 in 1875 to $1,151 in 1913.

At the same time, an anti-democratic oligarchic regime had been consolidated within Argentina, under the complete control of the National Autonomist Party (PAN) headed by General Julio Argentino Roca. In response, a new middle class had emerged with the revolution of 1890 and founded the Radical Civic Union, which had adopted a strategy of insurrection. insurreccional. The working class showed a growing sense of organisation with trade unions and two national centres, with predominantly anarchist, syndicalist and socialist ideologies, which would start to be harshly persecuted from 1902 onwards.

The climax of this stage in history was the “Centenary Year”, in 1910, of the May Revolution which began the process of independence from Spain.

In 1912, immense public pressure secured the approval of the Sáenz Peña Law which established the secret ballot and universal suffrage for men, which would open the path to the 1916 victory of the first democratic president, Hipolito Yrigoyen, of the Radical Civic Union. Two years previously, in the same year as Newbery’s death, the First World War had started and marked the end of the Argentinian agricultural export model.

The Newbery years were years of unshakeable faith in the possibilities of Argentina, when Rubén Darío wrote in his famous Canto a la Argentina y otros poemas: “Argentina, your day has come!” These years saw the appearance of tango, Vaslav Nijinsky dancing in the Teatro Colón, the opening of the Buenos Aires Metro, the arrival of Guglielmo Marconi in Argentina in order to carry out the first radio-telephonic communication with Ireland and Canada, the estancieros of Argentina “throwing butter on the ceiling” in Paris, and the first appearances of popular idols of sport and art. Buenos Aires ceased to be the “Great Village” and became the “Paris of South America”. There are few people who expressed this moment in Argentina’s history like Jorge Newbery.