1. Like the rest of Europe, Spain had a passion for opera at the end of the nineteenth century. Its own contribution was to the genre of light opera, the zarzuelas which caught the spirit of the common people of the cities. Of the zarzuelas, the most popular was La Verbena de la Paloma, a joyous and witty tale of the old quarter of Madrid composed in 1894 by Tomas Breton. In the opening scene Don Hilarión, the elderly pharmacist whose passion for attractive young Madrileñas is the spice of the tale, tells of the latest medical discoveries:

As the twentieth century advanced, the people of Madrid, along with their counterparts throughout the cities of Spain and the rest of Europe, could well agree with Don Hilarión that it was barbarous how science was advancing. They were familiar with the latest inventions: streetcars, automobiles, electric lights, telephones. By the second decade buses began to complement the railroad network to tie the cities together, slowly replacing the stagecoaches of an earlier era.

Spain was keeping abreast of modern civilization in other ways. Although ornate Easter processions symbolized the unity of church and state, religious freedom existed. There was virtually no censorship of public expression. In Madrid the quality of newspapers rose with the appearance in 1910 of El Debate, a liberal Catholic journal edited in the spirit of Pope Leo XIII, and in 1917 of the moderate El Sol, [134] which rapidly provided the most reliable political news in Spain. A new generation of writers, educators, and artists was becoming famous throughout the West: the novelists Ram6n del Valle-Inclan and Vicente Blasco Ibanez, the historians Rafael Altamira and Ramon Menendez Pidal, the genre painters Joaquín Sorolla and Ignacio Zuloaga, the cubists Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, and the composers Enrique Granados and Manuel de Falla.

Progress still ended at the city's edge, however. The railroad had commercialized large-scale agriculture, but virtually all peasants lived without benefit of Don Hilarion's scientific advances. They still plowed with a Roman plow, cooked over open fireplaces, and never dreamed of using a telephone or electric light. A well-to-do peasant's kitchen was a veritable museum of ceramic pots and handwrought brass and copper pans. The peasants enjoyed their traditional songs and dances. They wore the dress of their ancestors, the woolen calza (breeches that stopped below the knees) and stockings or polainas (woolen leggings worn above the shoes tied on the outside of the leg). The major regions had their variations on this basic costume. For market days the peasants put on their best dress, which differed from the clothes worn daily in the fields only in being newer. As they walked around the market towns, they could tell which villages the other farmers had come from by the shape of their hats, the color of ribbon on their legs, or other distinguishing features. Joaquín Sorolla preserved for later generations the beauty and uniqueness of Spain's regional costumes in a series of paintings commissioned in 1911 by the Hispanic Society of America in New York.

In the nineteenth century, when peasants had migrated to the cities, they had kept their rural dress. This habit had died out around the turn of the century, and the city proletariat had put on the gorra (cap) and blusa (smock). In the Sunday promenades in the cities one could still recognize the members of the different trades by their dress-- masons by their fresh white jackets, butchers by their striped aprons-- but rural costumes no longer appeared. As Unamuno put it, "Between the city and the countryside, there is more distance than between the most different climes."⁽¹⁾

Such in brief was Spain when Europe went confidently to war in 1914. Slowly as the war dragged on, Europeans began to realize that it might be destroying their nineteenth-century order, that progress toward a stable middle-class society and parliamentary government might not be so inevitable as they had believed. The war ate up their carefully accumulated capital and stimulated violent political movements which [135] threatened constitutional democracy. Spain remained neutral, yet the effects of the war also destroyed its established order.

From the outset, news of the fighting and propaganda spread by agents of the two sides polarized Spain. By and large, the entrenched groups were sympathetic to the Central Powers. The liberal intellectuals, the Republicans, and the workers favored the Allies. The division of sympathies followed also a geographic line: most Catalans and Basques, regardless of social class, were "aliadofilos"; Castile outside of Madrid was generally "germanofilo." The ideological impact of the conflict culminated in 1917, the year in which the United States entered the war to make the world safe for democracy and two Russian revolutions overthrew the tsar and brought Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power. Spanish partisans of both causes--parliamentary democracy and revolutionary socialism--believed their hour had come.

The war had a strong effect on Spain's working classes. Foreign demand for Spanish goods drew rural workers into industries and coal mines and encouraged farmers to plant marginal lands. Some Spaniards went to France to replace Frenchmen mobilized for war. When they returned, they brought new ideas and customs. In place of the gorra and blusa the Spanish proletariat began to don blue overalls and black berets, the mono and boina. Cheaper and more practical, the new costume was to become the trademark of the urban working class in the next decade. As the effects of war multiplied the number of industrial workers and pushed up their wages, the syndicates of the UGT and CNT attracted many more members. Their leaders became more belligerent, strikes were frequent, and the organizations began to call jointly for a general strike.

Strikes had been common ever since the Tragic Week, but the army had always been available to restore order. Now, however, the virus of reform had infected the officer corps. The junior infantry and cavalry officers were angered by the level of their salaries, made proportionately lower by wartime inflation, and by the revival of battle promotions in Morocco, which disadvantaged those who stayed home with their families. In December 1916 the officers in Barcelona below the rank of general formed an association to further their demands, and early in 1917 similar officers' groups were established throughout Spain, known as Juntas Militares de Defensa. In May 1917 the minister of war ordered the members of the Barcelona junta arrested. The other juntas replied with threats of an armed rising. After releasing the prisoners and agreeing to negotiate, the ministry resigned. The king selected the Conservative leader Eduardo Dato to head the next ministry. His first act was to recognize the statutes of the infantry juntas, apparently giving in to the threat of force.

The press magnified the crisis, reminding Spaniards that the [136] defection of the Russian army had precipitated the fall of the tsar. The discontented groups became excited. Noncommissioned officers and public servants also formed juntas to air their grievances. Political leaders and labor groups began to agitate. In June Socialists, Republicans, and Catalan nationalists demanded the convocation of constituent cortes, and the syndicates threatened a nationwide general strike. When Dato refused to bring the issue of reform before the Cortes, the Catalan Lliga invited dissident deputies to a parliamentary assembly in Barcelona. Seventy-one deputies met on July 19, 1917 representing the gamut of the opposition, from industralist Lliga under Cambo, through Republicans and Lerroux Radicals, to Socialists. Their common cry was "!Renovation!" The assembly barely had time to back the call for constituent cortes when the police arrived and put the deputies briefly under arrest. Nonetheless, the assembly excited wide expectations. Ayuntamientos from all parts of Spain, as in times past, voiced their support. The moment was critical, for Institucionista intellectuals, regionalists, employers, workers, and army officers were all calling for "renovation," although they did not all agree on what it meant.

Almost immediately the parliamentarians lost control of the movement. Strikes were spreading among dockers, railroad employees, and metalworkers. The socialist and anarchist syndicates joined efforts, each fearful of dropping behind. Among the Socialists, a dynamic young figure, Francisco Largo Caballero, took the initiative away from the aging Iglesias and proclaimed a nationwide general strike in favor of a socialist republic on August 10, a few days before the assembly of opposition deputies was to reconvene in Madrid. The UGT and CNT together paralyzed the industrial districts of the north, east, and south. Trains stopped running, food shortages threatened in the cities.

At this point the army proved the decisive factor. The Juntas de Defensa had never intended to achieve more than an end to the grievances of army officers. Now, frightened by the specter of a proletarian rising, the officers gave their support to the government. Under their command the soldiers turned machine guns on the workers, killing about One hundred in various cities and arresting their leaders, including Largo Caballero. In three days the general strike was broken. Unlike the Russian army, the Spanish had not been ravaged by war and maintained discipline in a crisis. Neither Madrid nor Barcelona was to be Saint Petersburg.

Although the army had killed a revolution, the Juntas de Defensa continued to issue manifestoes demanding reform. The parliamentary assembly of opposition deputies finally met again in Madrid on October 30, 1917 and again called for constituent cortes to establish a workable democracy. This time, however, the opposition was no longer united. The general strike had scared the Catalan Lliga Regionalista. When Alfonso XIII on November 1 named a coalition ministry drawn from [137] all loyal parties to face the threat, it was headed by a Liberal, Manuel Garcia Prieto, and included representatives of both Conservatives and the Lliga. The social crisis had brought out the essential conservatism of both the Liberals and Lliga. The Catalan manufacturers preferred to deal with Madrid than with their workers. In Andalusia, the growing wave of strikes drove Liberal and Conservative clubs to coalesce into "Círculos de la Union," united in the face of the restless lower classes.⁽²⁾ The prolonged crisis of 1917 was Spain's best opportunity to replace the Moderado system with effective parliamentary democracy. It failed, as nineteenth-century revolutions had failed, because parliamentarians and revolutionary workers did not have common methods or objectives. The ruling groups had once again drawn together and saved the order.

2. A few days after Alfonso XIII and the loyal politicians had finally outmaneuvered the reformers, in Russia the November 1917 Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power. The news aroused Spanish workers and revolutionaries, for Russia was a backward country like Spain. A year later, the end of the First World War caused the collapse of Spain's economic boom. Foreign orders for foodstuffs and manufactured goods dried up, and British coal flowed back into Spain, hurting the newly opened Asturian mines. Unemployed farm laborers flocked to the cities just as manufacturers dismissed many workers in an effort to keep solvent. Prior to the war emigration had offered an outlet for the under-employed, but the American nations now restricted this movement. In 1912 195,000 Spaniards had emigrated; only 20,000 did in 1918 and 62,000 in 1921. Conditions were ripe for a social upheaval.

The defeat of July 1917 caused only a brief letup in proletarian agitation. Since before the war anarchist organizers had been strengthening the agricultural syndicates of the south. Excited by reports from Russia, all through 1918 the landless workers of Andalusia, Valencia, and Murcia staged strikes, now in one town, now in another. Swept up in the movement, artisans and landowning peasants supported them. By the end of the year, the wave of strikes culminated in provincewide general strikes. Many landlords fled in terror, while the braver and wiser ones conceded wage increases and other workers' demands. In May 1919 the government at last responded to the pleas of the landowners and sent in the army and Civil Guard. The strike movement collapsed like a burst balloon, and order was restored.

[138] Catalonia was the next scene of labor turmoil. In July 1918 the anarchists Salvador Seguí and Angel Pestaña got a regional congress of the CNT of Catalonia to restructure its syndicates into "single" or vertical syndicates, grouping together all the different workers in each branch of industry. The objective was more effective strikes. The first test came in February 1919, when the workers of the Catalan electric power company, the "Canadiense," struck to force the reinstatement of some employees, higher wages, and an eight-hour day. The strike was spectacular; it threw Barcelona into darkness, forced factories to close, and brought thousands of idle workers out into the streets. Though a mediator from Madrid got the company to concede most demands, the captain general of Catalonia refused to release the strike leaders he had imprisoned. The CNT countered with a general strike at the end of March, which lasted two weeks and was broken only when the captain general declared martial law, ignoring the authority of the civil government. During the rest of the year the manufacturers and military forces cooperated to fight the syndicates, oblivious of the cabinet in Madrid.

By the end of 1919 the established order had survived two waves of attack typical of Europe in these years: the democratic offensive, encouraged by President Wilson, which had introduced or strengthened constitutional democracy in both victorious and vanquished nations, and the revolutionary socialist offensive which had triumphed in Russia and terrified propertied classes in Germany, Hungary, Italy, and elsewhere. By keeping Spain out of the war, the conservative forces had saved themselves.

Yet the days of the constitutional monarchy were numbered. Elections in February 1918 did not return a majority for either Liberals or Conservatives, and the number of opposition deputies rose from 55 to 89, including four Socialists who were in prison for leading the general strike of 1917. Only another coalition government, which brought together Conservatives, Liberals, and Lliga, was able to win a parliamentary majority and keep the army satisfied. Even this ministry lasted only until November 1918. Stable government was no longer possible. The average length of ministries in the next five years was five months, half what it had been from Alfonso XIII's coming of age until 1917. Caciquismo had collapsed, and in its place the only sure arm of the established order was the army. But the officers were disdainful of parliament and felt their first loyalty to the king, who used the agitation of the Juntas Militares to flaunt his concern for the army.

Although Spain's proletarian leaders admired the Russian Revolution, with few exceptions they did not become Communists. While large sectors of the French and Italian Socialist parties voted to join the Communist International, in Spain the Socialist party, after much debate, rejected this course by a sizable majority at a congress in 1921. [139] A few dissidents broke off and founded the Spanish Communist party. The following year the CNT also voted against affiliation with Moscow, remaining loyal to anarchist doctrines. Again a minority left to join the Communists. They included Andres Nin and Joaquín Maurin, who were to become the leading figures of Spain's minuscule Communist party. In Spain the anarchists already offered an allegiance for the kind of revolutionary workers who became Communists elsewhere.

After the war the relative harmony that existed between the UGT and CNT in 1917-18 disappeared, the former reverting to evolutionary tactics, the latter more uncompromising than ever. The possibility of proletarian revolution dwindled, but middle-class fears continued, because as the syndicates became weaker, labor violence increased, particularly in Catalonia. After 1919 Catalan industrialists were out to destroy the CNT. They refused all concessions, used the lockout, and hired gangs of pistoleros or gunmen to assassinate syndicalist leaders. They encouraged the growth of rival Catholic Free Syndicates, which had been founded in 1916. From 1920 to 1922 they had a cooperative general as civil governor, Severiano Martinez Anido, who looked the other way when the army or Civil Guard shot anarchist prisoners "while trying to escape." The CNT hired its own pistoleros, not only to terrorize employers but to fight the Free Syndicates. The wave of assassinations rose until, in sixteen months in 1922-23, 230 persons were murdered in the streets of Barcelona.⁽³⁾ The prime minister Dato was killed in Madrid in May 1922. In March 1923 it was the turn of the syndicalist leader Seguí, and the anarchists replied by shooting the reputedly reactionary archbishop of Zaragoza. To Catalan manufacturers the Madrid government seemed powerless and the army the only force that could save them. General Martinez Anido ruled Catalonia as an independent proconsul, scorning directives from Madrid but finding favor with Cambo and the Lliga.

When the Lliga called the parliamentary assembly of 1917, one of its hopes was to strengthen Catalan self-government. Wilson's ideals included autonomy for subject nationalities, and Catalans felt they deserved it as much as Czechs and Poles. The tensions of the postwar years revealed Cambo to be more concerned in preserving order by cooperating with Madrid and the army than achieving a satisfactory solution to the regional problem. Catalan nationalists among the intellectuals and lower-middle class became disenchanted with the Lliga. In 1921 a fiery Catalan in his sixties, Francesc Macia, founded a separatist movement, Estat Catala. A year later others formed Acci6 Catalana. They rejected the parliamentary monarchy and believed only a federal republic could solve Catalonia's problems, reverting in effect [140] to the ideal of 1873. This revival of militant Catalan nationalism and the labor warfare made Catalonia the gravest problem for the monarchy at the beginning of the 1920's.

In the end, however, it was not the radical and revolutionary opponents of the system that succeeded in destroying it, but the king and the army. Neither believed in the supremacy of parliament. Alfonso XIII itched to exert authority, feeling that he, not the Cortes, was the true sovereign. He had frequently used his constitutional authority of choosing ministers and dissolving the Cortes to interfere with the normal functioning of the parliamentary system, to the distress of his loyal parliamentarians. He took literally the wording of the constitution that he was supreme commander of the armed forces; he kept in close touch with the generals, and trusted them more than the politicians to protect the throne from Republicans and Socialists. The officers responded by appealing to him against parliamentary and popular criticism.

Events in Morocco triggered the outcome. Since 1909 the Spanish army had struggled to pacify the Moorish tribes in Spain's sector of the protectorate. In 1921 a reckless advance led to a bloody and shameful defeat at Annual, with thousands of casualties. It seemed like 1898 all over again. The opposition groups jumped at the chance to discredit the regime and called for an investigation to determine responsibility. After a year of probing, the general entrusted with the task drew up a report indicating corruption among the officers and by implication involving Alfonso, who had egged on the generals against his ministers' advice. The contents of the report were secret, to be presented to the Cortes when they reopened on September 17, 1923.

On September 13, the captain general of Catalonia, Miguel Primo de Rivera, with the connivance of Alfonso XIII, pronounced against the government. While other military commanders vacillated, Alfonso assured the success of the pronunciamiento by naming Primo de Rivera prime minister. Four days later Primo appointed a "directory" under himself of eight brigadier-generals and a rear admiral and established local military delegates to rule the country. He proclaimed martial law, dismissed the provincial civil governors, abolished the ayuntamientos, and dissolved the Cortes. The presidents of the two houses of the Cortes went to Alfonso to remind him that the constitution required that elections be held within three months. The king dismissed them and Primo suspended the constitution; briefly, he assured everyone, pending return to normality.

The pattern of events was not unique. Threats to parliamentary government from the right and the left were general in Europe in the postwar years. The governments of Germany and Italy withstood serious attacks from the left, but the middle classes and manufacturers had been frightened, just as they were in Spain, encouraging [141] right-wing militants to overthrow liberal democracy. Germany had a strong enough government to put down the militarist Kapp Putsch in 1920. In Italy, however, antiparliamentary and antiproletarian forces found a gifted leader in Benito Mussolini, recent founder of the Fascist party. After a wave of political assassinations reminiscent of Barcelona's and bloody street battles between the Fascists and the Italian Socialists, Mussolini demanded power to restore order. The king made him prime minister in October 1922, and a cowed parliament voted unlimited powers to him, which he used to terrorize his enemies, win the next elections, and abolish civil liberties. By an ostensibly legal process he established a dictatorship.

Primo de Rivera's pronunciamiento had many similarities. It too responded to a fear of proletarian revolution and established a dictatorship in place of a parliamentary government that was unable to curb disorder. Like Mussolini, Primo was patronized by a compliant king, ready to sacrifice parliament to save his throne. But Mussolini headed an organized party and had the craft to cloak his rule in parliamentary legality. Primo represented no civilian party, and his first move was to suspend the constitution. Reminiscent of the generals who had made nineteenth-century pronunciamientos, he justified his rebellion, or "technical indiscipline" as he called it in his manifesto, by the "true discipline owed to our dogma and the love of our country."⁽⁴⁾ He was acting in a Spanish tradition that in the end was his undoing.

3. General Primo de Rivera was fifty-three years old at the time of his pronunciamiento. He came from an Andalusian army family and had been a career officer all his life, having served in Cuba, the Philippines, and Morocco. A bluff and open widower with six children, he had a reputation for enjoying life, especially wine, women, and flamenco music. He was proud of his literary style and angered when intellectuals mocked his flowery prose. Although a firm leader, he was not cruel and could not bear a grudge for long, a strange figure for a twentieth-century dictator.

Unlike Mussolini, Primo had to face little active hostility. Because they had failed to obtain reform, the opponents of the former regime had no tears to shed for it. Its beneficiaries welcomed a strong hand that would offer them more protection than the Cortes had. Primo's manifesto ordered the army to occupy Communist and revolutionary centers, and the Catalan Lliga Regionalista welcomed his advent. Ortega y Gasset, who in 1921 had condemned Spain's lack of authority [142] in his Invertebrate Spain, called the directory "those magnanimous generals, who generously and disinterestedly have realized the half-century-old aspirations of twenty million Spaniards without its costing the Spanish people any effort whatsoever."⁽⁵⁾ Primo pictured himself as the "surgeon of iron" whom Joaquín Costa had prayed for. Hoping to ride the crest of the spirit of '98, he called to his banner all those who "loving our country, see no other salvation for it than to save it from professional politicians, the men who for one reason or another have displayed to us the sight of misfortunes and corruption which began in the year '98 and threaten Spain with an imminent end, tragic and dishonorable."⁽⁶⁾

His popularity continued for three years. Prosperity had returned to Europe after the postwar collapse, calming angry spirits. Primo de Rivera's greatest triumph was to end the war in Morocco, which had been draining Spain's energies since shortly after '98. He enjoyed better luck than the parliamentarians. Having withstood the Spanish forces, the Moorish insurgents made the error of attacking the French sector of Morocco. This led to a joint Franco-Spanish offensive in 1925 that quickly routed the tribesmen. Primo took personal command of the Spanish troops. In December 1925 he announced to a grateful nation that the African cancer had been excised.

From the outset the provisional nature of his rule posed difficulties for the dictator. He had suspended the constitution of 1876, not abolished it, and stated that the Directory was to be a "brief parenthesis" in the political life of Spain, at most ninety days, until honest civilians could come forward to restore constituional government. The days turned into years, however, without Primo's discovering the civilians to replace him. By what right did he rule? He pledged himself to his country, he called to his side all patriotic Spaniards, he had the approval of the king; but his rule, like that of every government, had eventually to be justified by commonly accepted principles. Since the defeat of the Carlists in the 1830's, sovereignty clearly resided with the Spanish people, not the king, and European events of 1917-18 had made popular sovereignty a universal dogma. But how to give the people sovereignty and keep them from exercising it? The dilemma had brought down the parliamentary regime. It faced all twentieth-century authoritarian rulers. Lenin and Mussolini had already met it, so Primo de Rivera was not entirely on his own.

Italy and Russia had outlawed all political parties except the one of the regime. Primo de Rivera from the start voiced a desire to replace Spain's parties with a new organization, an "apolitical party" that [143] would attract selfless, patriotic Spaniards to serve the state. He termed the organization the Union Patriótica (UP). It held meetings in various cities from 1923 on, but was slow in taking shape. In 1924 Primo spoke vaguely of an association of all Spaniards who accepted the Constitution of 1876 as the basis of a new order, in which the intrigue, squabbling, and corruption of political parties would disappear. Those who joined the UP had to state: "I detest all sectarian or partisan politics because I wish to serve my country with a comprehensive ideology and personal independence without owing to any influence which represents favoritism the justice which is mine by right."⁽⁷⁾ Civil servants, school teachers, politicians who had been unsuccessful under the parliamentary monarchy, indeed anyone who desired favors or a job from the government was likely to be found in the party. Despite Primo's intentions, incorruptibility was not its major characteristic. Neither was enthusiasm. Without achieving the emotional appeal of Fascism or adopting its strong-arm tactics, Primo nevertheless followed its concept of a one-party state.

Late in 1925, flushed with his Moroccan triumph, Primo de Rivera at last decided to legitimize his rule. He dismissed the military directory on December 3 and replaced it with a civilian directory, whose members held regular cabinet posts. (The generals had had no individual responsibility or authority.) The following September he conducted a national plebiscite. The Union Patriótica ran the affair, its first major undertaking. It set up tables throughout all Spain, where citizens could sign a statement indicating their approval of the government. There was no way to indicate disapproval except by abstaining. Seven and a half million signatures were thus collected, almost two-thirds of the total adult population, male and female. The people had spoken, presumably spontaneously, and henceforth Primo could claim that his regime had a democratic base.

Nevertheless it still lacked a building over the base. Return to normality proved far more difficult than Primo de Rivera had imagined, for his capable, uncorrupted civilians failed to materialize. Only the old political leaders were present, urging the king to end the extraordinary rule. In the face of their protests, Primo convoked a National Assembly which Alfonso XIII opened on October 10, 1927. It met in the chambers of the Cortes to give advice to the dictator. Most of its four hundred members were appointed: local chiefs of the UP and representatives of administrative bodies. The public sessions were carefully regulated to provide efficient discussion. Members were allotted twenty minutes for speeches and ten for replies, and they could not call the ministry to account. It met again in 1928 and 1929, but no legislation ever emanated from it.

[144] A commission of the National Assembly drew up the draft of a new constitution, which it finally completed in 1929. The proposal reflected Primo de Rivera's views. It provided for a one-house Cortes elected by universal male and female suffrage. (Primo was the first ruler of Spain to give women the vote, on the assumption that they were less revolutionary than men.) The king and his ministers retained authority, however, for the Cortes could not overthrow the ministry. At first Primo planned to submit the project to the Cortes for ratification, but as political leaders, intellectuals, and professionals made their opposition patent, he decided to use instead another plebiscite. It was planned for 1930, but before the scheduled date Primo had resigned and the project disappeared with him. He never found his fig leaf of legality.

4. If Primo de Rivera failed to create a permanent political order, he had more success in effecting economic development. Since the beginning of the century reform and progress had been shibboleths of government and opposition alike. Joaquín Costa, with his cry for agrarian reform and irrigation, was the prophet, but others had worked at the practical day-to-day level. The government established the Institute of Social Reforms in 1903 to investigate labor conditions and recommend social legislation. Its governing board included representatives of agriculture, industry, and labor. In 1902 the government adopted a plan for irrigation drawn up by the minister of public works Rafael Gasset, uncle of Ortega y Gasset, and in the next decades began the construction of dams in Aragon and Castile. There had been plenty of plans but no government permanent or strong enough to carry them out effectively. Primo de Rivera pushed forward their realization, fulfilling dreams of the men of '98.

Irrigation and roads were his major achievements. To direct the former he appointed a brilliant engineer, Manuel Lorenzo Pardo, who rationalized Gasset's uncoordinated plans. Gasset had selected areas for irrigation indiscriminately. Lorenzo Pardo focused on three regions most likely to benefit from irrigation: the lower valleys of the Ebro and Guadiana Rivers (the latter near Badajoz), and the plains of Valencia, where water could be piped across the divide from the upper Tajo basin. Under Primo de Rivera much of the Ebro River complex of dams was completed, augmenting both the acreage under irrigation and the output of electricity. The other plans remained for future regimes to take up.

Although there were some automobiles in Spain before his time, Primo de Rivera introduced the age of motorized transport. He undertook to build a network of all-weather highways, many of them paved [145] with blocks of granite, which followed the familiar pattern of a star radiating from Madrid. His regime built or improved 7000 kilometers of roads. The rural bus, the coche de lined, became a familiar sight, driving out the last of the stagecoaches. When Primo de Rivera fell, Spain had one of the best highway networks in Europe, but it hardly grew in the next twenty years because of economic restrictions and war.

In opening Spain to motor traffic, Primo set in motion a slow revolution in the countryside whose full effects have only been felt in the last decade. Gradually rural Spain was feeling the influence of urban civilization, a fundamental social development of the twentieth century which has been little studied. First to be affected was the regional dress. The heavy woolen cloth of the small Castilian factories could no longer compete in price with the products of Catalan mills, and the younger generation of peasants welcomed a change that would make them less conspicuous when they went to the towns. Men began to put on pants and a sleeveless jacket (chaleco) of brown or black corduroy (pana), which they wore with a wool waistband (faja.) and cotton shirt. The women made themselves cotton skirts and petticoats (refajos) and over them put on an apron (mandil) and scarf (pañuelo). By the 1930s, in the typical Sunday promenades of the small towns, girls could even be seen in homemade versions of the latest city fashions. Not only the peasant dress suffered. Radio made its appearance in the twenties and reached as far as there was electricity. The larger towns began to hear popular modern music and their young people began to dance cheek to cheek, "agarrados." The old songs and dances retreated to remoter regions.

The transformation was gradual, spreading like grease stains from the provincial capitals and cabezas de partido. In the twenties and thirties vast regions could still be found, in Extremadura, for instance, or Cuenca, which still did not know the train, the automobile, the electric light, or the radio; and their dress and customs remained unchanged. Aware of what was going on, some artists, musicians, and teachers, who shared the admiration of the popular culture that the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and the Generation of '98 had inspired, went to remote towns to record the disappearing folklore. As the peasants gave up their ways to ape the cities, these intellectuals made it a labor of love to preserve and exhalt "lo típico."

The vast building programs of Primo de Rivera which accelerated these changes were only possible because of worldwide prosperity and because he dared use unorthodox fiscal policies. Construction was paid for out of loans, on the assumption that the resulting economic growth would more than repay the outlay. The government established special banks and credit agencies to finance industrial expansion, agricultural improvement, municipal public works, and railroad modernization.

[146] Traditional politicians and conservative economic thinkers shook their heads as the public debt rose by a third. They pointed to the recent devaluation of the French franc and the collapse of the German mark brought on by the cost of the First World War and reconstruction.

Many of the dictator's economic policies originated with an intelligent but reckless young man whom he made minister of finance in his civilian directory, Jose Calvo Sotelo. Calvo Sotelo embarked on a concerted program of economic nationalism. The European nations that had suffered from the war were attempting to protect their economies by creating domestic self-sufficiency. They multiplied tariff walls and exchange restrictions, belying the rosy economic picture of the twenties. Under Primo de Rivera, Spain was in the forefront of the movement. It raised tariffs on both agricultural and industrial products and after 1926 virtually prohibited the importation of foodstuffs that competed with Spanish crops. The government set up a Banco Exterior de España to encourage exports and investments in Latin America, where Spanish capital had followed immigrants since the turn of the century. At the same time the regime sought to prevent foreign economic exploitation of Spain. In 1927 Calvo Sotelo established a state monopoly of the sale of petroleum products, on the pattern of the tobacco monopoly in existence since the seventeenth century. The state chartered a corporation to distribute petroleum called Compañía Arrendataria del Monopolio de Petróleos, S.A., or CAMPSA for short, which is still the only legal outlet for gasoline. This was economic nationalism but not socialism, for CAMPSA's stock and dividends went to private investors. When the international petroleum companies boycotted Spain in reprisal, Primo de Rivera obtained supplies from Russia. But it was dangerous to anger and frighten foreign investors, as Calvo Sotelo did with fiery speeches as well as acts, and they did not come to save Primo de Rivera when he ran into fiscal trouble.

Progress did not spread through the private sectors of the economy. Although iron and steel production continued to grow, textile manufacture and agriculture were stagnant. Beyond offering cheap credit and protecting inefficient production with high tariffs, the regime had no clear program for private enterprise. World agricultural prices steadily declined in the twenties, and declining profits, added to the difficulty of emigrating, slowly were creating an explosive situation in the areas of latifundia. Primo de Rivera in 1926 set up a Bank of Agrarian Credit, which could help the latifundistas but hardly anyone else. The dictator was sympathetic to the exploited rural laborers, but to have attempted serious reform would have meant an attack on the rural oligarchy, and Primo was not one to awaken sleeping dogs, especially if they were big.

Until the world depression of 1929, however, his regime was able to ride the wave of prosperity. He climaxed the decade with showy and [147] expensive international expositions in 1929 in Barcelona and Seville. The latter was devoted to the Hispanic world and aimed at boosting Spain's cultural and diplomatic influence among its former colonies. Primo de Rivera was one of the first active prophets of Hispanidad. The expositions proved to be the swan song of the dictatorship, for at this very time the peseta, weakened by a decade of unbalanced budgets and capital exports, fell 30 percent on the world market, its lowest point since 1898. The dictator's economic policies were as discredited as his political ones, and his critics recalled their warnings.

5. Since Primo de Rivera came in with a promise to end the threat of labor strife, the problem of the proletariat was the most urgent domestic issue facing him. To solve it he created institutions whose inspiration came partly from Italian Fascism and partly from domestic reformers. Mussolini had forced the Italian manufacturers and workers into state-controlled vertical "corporations" which had sole authority to negotiate labor agreements. In 1926 Primo set up twenty-seven similar corporations for various industries and professions. At its lowest level each corporation consisted of a number of comités paritarios or arbitration committees empowered to negotiate labor conflicts on wages, hours, and other conditions. Conceived by the Institute of Social Reforms, the committees consisted of equal numbers of delegates from employers and workers (hence their name), with a chairman appointed by the government. Each corporation had a governing council representing employers and the committees, and each council sent an employer and a worker as representatives to a Delegated Commission of Councils. This last was the only nationwide representative body actually to function under the dictatorship.

The comités paritarios posed to the leaders of the proletariat the question of their attitude toward the dictatorship. For the anarchists of the CNT this was no problem. One of their dogmas was a refusal to cooperate with organs of the state, since they believed only direct action could lead to social revolution. Moreover, to Primo de Rivera they represented the forces of disorder that he had come to quell. He declared the CNT illegal and used the power of the state and the army to crush it. Driven underground, the anarchist leaders split. In the face of possible extermination by the government and loss of their followers to the Socialists and Communists, the more radical in 1927 created a centralized secret society, the Federation Anarquista Ibérica (FAI). FAI was a group of militants devoted to upholding the doctrines of direct action and revolutionary anarchism within the CNT.

Determined to destroy the anarchists, yet in need of the support of labor for the success of his corporations, Primo de Rivera appealed [148] to the Socialists to cooperate with his regime. For the Socialists the invitation posed a real dilemma. Pablo Iglesias, the grand old man of Spanish socialism, died in 1925. For some time the younger leaders had been divided in their policies. After Iglesias' death, the conflict became more acute. The democratic spirit of moderation that he had championed now found voice in Indalecio Prieto, who had built up the Socialist following in Bilbao. He would have nothing to do with the dictatorship and convinced the party not to accept Primo's invitation to send delegates to the National Assembly.

The other strand of thought was embodied by Francisco Largo Caballero, who had come to prominence in the general strike of 1917. After the death of Iglesias, he took over the leadership of the UGT. Sensing the possibility of destroying the anarchist threat to the Socialist unions, he led the UGT to cooperate in the choice of worker members of the comités paritarios and he accepted a position of councilor of state in the government. The move brought momentary advantage to the UGT, but it left Largo Caballero with a stigma to live down, for the anarchists painted him and his followers as traitors to the working class.

If labor felt ill at ease in its new role as a pillar of the established order, for the church such a position had become almost second nature. From the outset Primo de Rivera courted clerical support. The motto of the Union Patriótica was "Country, Religion, Monarchy." To some Carlists this must have sounded nostalgically like their old cry, "God, Country, and King," for among Primo's most committed supporters were Carlists, who found themselves in the strange position of cheering the man who had come to protect the king they called illegitimate. Republicans and Socialists had long opposed the article in the Constitution of 1876 which declared Catholicism to be the religion of the state. Primo de Rivera's draft constitution preserved the article with its guarantee of state support for the church. From the 1850's on, however, the real key to every regime's position on the church was its education policy. Under pressure from the Liberals and Republicans, in its last decades the constitutional monarchy had relaxed the requirement of religious instruction in public schools. Primo de Rivera cooperated closely with the church in this field. He enforced religious instruction and required teachers to go to mass, whether or not they were believers.

6. Primo de Rivera's clericalism was one of various policies that led him into conflict with the intellectuals. The cultural rebirth which occurred before the First World War was now coming to fruition. Gathered around the tables of the cafes in Madrid and other cities,[149] politicians, writers, journalists, teachers, artists, and their associates discussed eagerly the latest world developments in all areas. At the Resi-dencia de Estudiantes the young Andalusian poet Federico Garcia Lorca exchanged inspirations with the Catalan surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and the fledgling movie maker Luis Buñuel. New monthly periodicals joined the daily newspapers in providing a vehicle for writers. The most famous of these was the Revista de Occidente, founded by Ortega y Gasset in 1923 to uphold a liberal political and intellectual outlook. Thanks to the spirit of '98 and more specifically to the activities of the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios, by the twenties remarkable men were to be found in university chairs. Unamuno was rector of the University of Salamanca; at Madrid Ortega was a professor of philosophy, Menendez Pidal of philology, Americo Castro of history of the Spanish language, and Claudio Sanchez Albornoz of Spanish history; and in Barcelona Pere Bosch Gimpera held the chair of ancient history. Ramon y Cajal retired from the faculty of medicine of Madrid in 1922, but his young follower Gregorio Marañon was already adding luster to the school. These figures could rival those on any faculty in the world.

Such active intellectual ferment rapidly proved to be a greater threat to the dictatorship than the revolutionary forces from which it had set out to save Spain. Since Primo de Rivera's coup was timed to prevent the exposure of the Moroccan situation, he at once established censorship of the press. He continued to protect his government from adverse criticism, requiring the press to submit all copy to official censors before publication, and closing for a time the Ateneo de Madrid, the leading extra-university center of intellectual activity. Nor was he content to keep Spain silent. In 1924 an Argentine newspaper published a private letter of Unamuno sarcastically critical of the dictator. As punishment, Unamuno was exiled to the Canary Islands. Faced with a worldwide protest of intellectuals, among them Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, Primo de Rivera allowed his enemy to escape to France. Unamuno settled just over the frontier in Hendaye, near his native Basque Provinces, and proceeded to direct clandestine propaganda into Spain. His was but the most dramatic case of the violation of academic freedom. Various other professors were arrested at one time or another, and several resigned.

Behind the professors, or even ahead of them, were many university students, especially in Madrid. They lampooned the dictator with insults scribbled on walls and circulated seditious leaflets. To protect the university system against his attacks, in January 1927 they organized a nationwide student association, the Federation Universitaria Escolar (FUE). Beginning in that year the students took to the streets in demonstrations against the regime, and all the efforts of the forces of order proved unable to control them. The student protest[150] reached out from Madrid and embraced all the universities of Spain. In Catalonia the students were angered by Primo de Rivera's attacks on Catalan regionalism. The FUE took up their cause, bringing together into one movement a new generation of liberal Castilians and nationalist Catalans. It thus revived the alliance behind the First Republic which the Generation of '98, oriented strongly toward Castile, had neglected.

Next to the unrest of the working classes, Catalonia was the most obvious sore that Primo de Rivera had come in to heal. The postwar years had left Catalan nationalism in a state of flux. Cambo's participation in ministries had discredited the Lliga Regionalista with the committed nationalists, and the Lliga had made the further mistake of welcoming Primo de Rivera's coup because he promised to put down proletarian disorders. A few days later he prohibited the official use of the Catalan language and the display of the Catalan flag. He stopped the teaching of Catalan in schools and forbade the regional dance, the sardana. In 1925 he abolished the Mancomunitat, the modest regional government conceded to Catalonia in 1914. The army was unitary in outlook, and Primo de Rivera shared its spirit. Since even the country's prosperity seemed to avoid Catalonia, Catalans sullenly bore his insults and awaited the day of deliverance. Macia, the founder of the Estat Catala, had gone to Paris, and from there he carried on an international propaganda campaign in favor of Catalan independence. In 1926 he made a comic-opera attempt to invade and liberate Catalonia with an army of 130 men. It ended with the participants in French prisons, but it achieved worldwide publicity for his cause. In 1927 Cambo publicly appealed to Alfonso XIII to lead a rapprochement between Castile and Catalonia. When he received no answer, Catalans of all classes, from anarchist workers to Lliga industrialists, had become the enemies of the dictator.

Primo de Rivera's destruction of the parliamentary system also lined up against him the leaders of the political parties. In 1926 Count of Romanones, who had headed the Liberal party, led a conspiracy which aimed to overthrow the government by a kind of civilian pronuncia-miento. It included several disgruntled generals, intellectuals like Maranon, Republicans, and even syndicalist leaders. Only the Conservatives, regionalists, and Socialists stayed out of this weird alliance. Primo learned of the plot, arrested its leaders, and treated them with contempt by releasing them with heavy fines adjusted to their means. Without prison sentences or executions, the plotters became butts of satire rather than martyrs.

But this year was the apex of Primo de Rivera's career. The politicians nursed their grudge and awaited better times. So far Jose Sanchez Guerra, leader of the Conservative party, had stuck by Alfonso, hoping he would dismiss Primo. When Primo convoked the National [151] Assembly, Sanchez Guerra lost faith in the king. He protested by going into exile in Paris. With his defection the remnants of both old established parties had entered active opposition.

Still Primo de Rivera had on his side the church and the army, and he knew Alfonso would not dare dismiss him. From the king down, however, his partisans felt more and more ensnared in a trap and they resented his autocratic airs. They tolerated him while he was successful, but as soon as his popularity began to wane, they hastened to disassociate themselves from him, like the proverbial rats of the shipwreck. As a result, he fell as rapidly and disappeared as unlamented as the constitutional monarchy had.

The agony of his dictatorship began in the spring of 1928, when he attacked the universities directly. Since the eighteenth century, the government had strictly controlled higher education. In the 1860's and 1870's, its restrictions on the content of lectures had led to faculty protests and eventually to Giner de los Rios' founding of the Insti-tuci6n Libre. But as part of state control, the universities had a monopoly of examinations leading to degrees and thus to professional careers, a monopoly resented by certain religious orders which offered independent higher education. In 1928, under pressure from the Jesuits, Primo agreed to permit the Jesuit college of Deusto to set up its own board of examiners consisting of two members of its faculty and one of a state university.

To faculties and students of the state universities this was the final violation of civil education in favor of the church. Several professors resigned, including Ortega y Gasset, and students began demonstrations, not only in Madrid but at virtually all provincial universities. The FUE was the moving force behind the protests. In Madrid students stoned the residence of Primo de Rivera, derailed streetcars, and fought the police. Primo closed the universities and prevented the giving of examinations, but the official censorship could not hide the disorders or disguise his growing unpopularity.

Student demonstrations continued into the next year, encouraging other groups to come out against Primo. Wise heads in the clergy worried about being caught in a collapse of the regime and began to shy away. Sanchez Guerra, the Conservative leader in exile in Paris, plotted a pronunciamiento that included Republicans and various generals. He landed in Valencia in January 1929, but he had been betrayed and the generals failed to back him up. He was arrested and tried at the end of the year by a military court, which acquitted him, a verdict that revealed serious disenchantment with Primo within the army.

Faced with desertion of the leading social groups, Primo fought to keep popular support by issuing the draft of his constitution. But he spoiled its effect by refusing to submit it to elected cortes. The peseta had collapsed, and Cambo publicly excoriated Calvo Sotelo's fiscal [152] policies. The Wall Street crash of October 1929 destroyed all hope of reestablishing the government's credit. Alfonso XIII at last awoke to the danger to the monarchy of Primo's unpopularity. His one remaining prerogative was to dismiss his ministers. When Primo became aware that he was no longer welcome at the palace, in January 1930 he asked the captains general of Spain and Africa to declare their continued support of him. Their replies were evasive, pledging support to the monarchy but not to Primo. Demoralized and in bad health, Primo de Rivera resigned on January 28. He went to Paris, where so many had fled before him, and there he died within two months.

7. Thus ended Spain's first taste of modern dictatorship. Primo de Rivera had promised to restore constitutional rule and step down as soon as he had eliminated corruption. Only slowly did people realize that his pronunciamiento marked the end of the parliamentary monarchy. The order founded by the Moderados in the 1840's was dead. For eighty years, with brief interruptions, an alliance of the economically strongest groups had ruled under a cloak of parliamentary government. As a generation which had grown up under universal suffrage came of age after 1900, it proved no longer willing to vote according to the dictates of those in power but began to follow the critics of the regime, the intellectuals, the regionalists, and the proletarian leaders. After the First World War, caciquismo ceased to be a viable alternative to the parliamentary democracy advocated by Republicans and revisionist Socialists. Though the opposition never approached a parliamentary majority, the strains of the war and postwar years revealed the incapacity of the ministries to run the country. The cry for reform was becoming irresistible. Control was rapidly slipping from the parties of the established order; and the king and the army, who also had vested interests in the order, rushed in to grab control before it fell into the hands of the opposition.

The established groups were frightened enough to welcome an autocratic dictatorship disguised by a contrived plebiscite, even if in the process they lost the power to govern. They suffered attacks on their prerogatives but they were shielded from revolution. Having displaced the established groups, and unable to resuscitate the political structure inherited from the nineteenth century, Primo de Rivera ruled the country by relying on the institutions the Moderados had painfully tied to their order: the army, the church, and the crown. The army was essential. In the age of mass politics, if those in power could not keep the loyalty of the citizens, the only alternative to loss of power was to control their bodies. Control of their pocketbooks was [153] no longer enough, for the people were learning not to vote according to the wishes of those who exploited them.

Ruling groups in other countries were finding similar answers to the dilemma of democracy. But the fascist dictatorships, though more cruel and violent, catered directly to the ideology of mass democracy, whipping up popular emotion, paying lip service to constitutional forms, and ruling through a single political party. Primo de Rivera's essay into mass politics, the Union Patriótica, never roused enthusiasm, and he could not live down his unconstitutional advent. He offered Spain a pronunciamiento, not a nationalist ideology. He was misled by a Spanish tradition which the education of the electorate had outdated. In the nineteenth century pronunciamientos had been followed by constituent cortes; now freely elected cortes were precisely what Primo had come in to avoid. Unable to solve the dilemma, he watched the groups that had welcomed him drop away one by one, until at the end the defection of Alfonso XIII and his fellow generals left him defenseless. As an alternative to popular democracy his dictatorship had also failed.

Primo de Rivera also lacked the personal qualities needed for a modern dictator. He was too easygoing to be a match for Mussolini, much less Hitler. Although his rule was harsher than any Spain had had since Narvaez, he never executed an opponent. This is why, when Spaniards experienced an infinitely fiercer dictatorship, the dictadura of Franco, they came to call the regime of Primo de Rivera, though in many ways the forerunner of Franco's, the dicta-blanda--the gentle dictatorship--by contrast to the later dicta-dura--the hard dictatorship.

1. Quoted in Carmelo Lison-Tolosana, Belmonte de los Caballeros, a Sociological Study of a Spanish Town (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 15.

2. J. A. Pitt-Rivers, The People of the Sierra (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 135.

3. Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), p. 73.

4. Manifesto dated Sept. 12, 1923, in Miguel Primo de Rivera, El Pensamiento de Primo de Rivera, ed. J. M. Peman (Madrid, Saez Hermanos, 1929), p. 24.

5. Quoted in Dillwyn F. Ratcliff, Prelude to Franco: Political Aspects of the Dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (New York: Las Americas Pub. Co., 1957), p. 38.

6. Manifesto of September 12, 1923, loc. cit., p. 19.

7. Quoted in Ratcliff, p. 60.