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Streetcar Workers and the Transformation of Montevideo: The General Strike of May 19111

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Anton Rosenthal
Anton Rosenthal*
Affiliation:
The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
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Extract

The first general strike in Uruguayan history, which completely paralyzed Montevideo for three days in May 1911, provides a useful vantage point from which to view the transformation of the third largest capital in South America from a sleepy “Belle Epoque” horse town into a modern, cosmopolitan city. Coming many years after general strikes in Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the 1911 Montevideo conflict appeared to erupt virtually overnight, at a moment when the labor movement itself was in some disarray, and caught the city by surprise. Merchants closed their doors, transport ground to a halt, and theaters and cinemas remained dark as the city became strangely quiet. An estimated 50,000-60,000 workers in 37 unions left their jobs in factories, breweries, frigoríficos, stores, and newspapers. In the words of a journalist for a conservative daily paper, “every sign of activity vanished from the city as completely as if it had been stricken by a pestilence—as in truth it was.” The anarchist labor confederation, which organized the mass strike, took over control of the streets and the food supply, and vehicles were only allowed to run with its authorization, thus inverting the city's power structure, at least temporarily.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , April 1995 , pp. 471 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1995

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Footnotes

1

Research support for this article was provided by a Fulbright Faculty Abroad Award, the Social Science Research Council, a faculty travel grant from the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas and a new faculty grant from the University of Kansas. The author would also like to thank Angel Kwolek-Folland, David Katzman and members of the Social and Economic History Seminar at the University of Kansas for their comments on an earlier draft.

References

2 The estimate of the number of strikers comes from the first issue of the trolley workers’ newspaper, El Tranvía, I: l,June 10, 1911, 4 and Rodríguez, Héctor, Nuestros Sindicatos (1865–1965) (Montevideo: Centro Estudiantes de Derecho, 2nd edition, 1966), p. 18.Google Scholar The number of unions comes from The Uruguay Weekly News, May 28, 1911, p. 3

3 The Montevideo Times, May 27, 1911, 1.

4 For examples of political treatments of the strike see Barrán, José Pedro and Nahum, Benjamín, Battle, Los Estancieros y el Imperio Británico: Las Primeras Reformas, 1911–1913, vol. 4 (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1983) pp. 61–64 Google Scholar and Vanger, Milton, The Model Country (Hanover, NH and London: Brandeis University Press, 1980), pp. 122–132.Google Scholar Carlos M. Rama, writing about the history of social conflict in Uruguay, misrecords the date of the strike and then discusses it primarily in terms of how Batlle responded to it in “La ‘Cuestión Social’,” Cuadernos de Marcha, No. 22, February 1969, 71. Oddone, Juan fails to mention it in his survey of the period, “The Formation of Modern Uruguay, c. 1870–1930” in the Cambridge History of Latin America, c. 1870 to 1930, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 453–474.Google Scholar

5 See for example D’Elia, German and Miraldi, Armando, Historia del movimiento obrero en el Uruguay: Desde sus orígenes hasta 1930 (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1985), pp. 99–104.Google Scholar H. Rodríguez, p. 18 misrecords it as occurring in 1913 and devotes only a paragraph to it. Pintos, Franciso R., Historia del movimiento obrero del Uruguay (Montevideo: Suplemento de “Gaceta de Cultura”, 1960) p. 95,Google Scholar points to an explosion of strikes in late 1911 and 1912 as an indication of the impact of the May 1911 conflict on the wider labor movement. D’Alesandro, F. Lopez, Historia de la izquierda uruguaya, vol. 2, second part, 1911–1918 (Montevideo: Ediciones del Nuevo Mundo, 1991), pp. 14–19 Google Scholar is concerned with how socialists and anarchists viewed the strike. de Touron, Lucía Sala and Landinelli, Jorge E., “50 años del movimiento obrero uruguayo” in Casanova, Pablo González, ed., Historia del movimiento obrero en américa latina (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1984), p. 256 Google Scholar also devote only a paragraph to it and see its importance within the context of the struggle for the 8-hour day.

6 El Día, May 15, 1911, “La Gran Huelga”. Alternatively this slogan was given as “a little more bread and a little more respect”.

7 For details on this event and the debates it unleashed see Rosenthal, Anton, “The Arrival of the Electric Streetcar and the Conflict over Progress in Early 20th Century Montevideo”, Journal of Latin American Studies, forthcoming in May, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 The Department (or province) of Montevideo had a total population of 309,231 in 1908 and an estimated 338,175 on December 31, 1911. Lenzi, Ricardo Alvarez et al., El Montevideo de la expansión (1868–1915), (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1986), p. 18;Google Scholar Anuario Estadístico de la República Oriental de Uruguay, 1911–1912, (Montevideo: Tipografía Moderna, 1915), p. 14. Rial, Juan, “Estadísticas históricas del Uruguay, 1850–1930” (mimeo, Montevideo: CIESU, 1980) p. 108,Google Scholar notes that in 1908 the population of the city proper was just under 300,000 and constituted 25 percent of the nation's population, but gradually rose to a proportion greater than one-third. Scobie, James R., “The Growth of Latin American Cities, 1870–1930” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, volume 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 245 and 249,Google Scholar writes that by 1930, Montevideo was the premier primary city in all of Latin America, at 33.0 percent of the national population, compared with 18.3 percent for Buenos Aires and 16.5 percent for Havana.

9 La Democracia (all newspapers published in Montevideo unless otherwise noted), December 7, 1906, 7.

10 Koebel, W.H., Uruguay (London: T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., 1911), p. 307.Google Scholar

11 Ministry of Industries, Uruguay in 1915 (Montevideo: A. Barreiro y Ramos, 1915), p. 204.

12 Maeso, Carlos M., El Uruguay a través de un siglo (Montevideo: Tip. y Lit. Moderna, 1910), p. 46.Google Scholar

13 Azaróla Gil, Luis Enrique, Ayer, 1882–1952 (Lausanne, Switzerland: Imprimeries Réunies S.A., 1953), p. 158;Google Scholar El Día, May 15, 1911, “La huelga”.

14 Maeso, , Uruguay p. 51.Google Scholar

15 Acevedo, Eduardo, Anales Históricos del Uruguay, tomo V (Montevideo: Casa A. Barreiro y Ramos, 1934), p. 458 and Banco de la República Oriental del Uruguay, Sinopsis económica y financiera del Uruguay, (Montevideo: Impresora Uruguaya S.A., 1933) p. 11.Google Scholar

16 Koebel, W. H., Uruguay, p. 161;Google Scholar Michelena, Alejandro, Rincones de Montevideo (Montevideo: Area, 1991), p. 94.Google Scholar

17 Uruguay Weekly News, February 28, 1909, 4.

18 An industrial census in 1913 records the existence of 2 breweries, 2 match factories, 13 mills, 5 chocolate factories, 2 phone companies, a gas company and an electric company which operated alongside 109 bakeries, 40 brick factories, 80 furniture workshops, 46 shoe factories and 96 blacksmith shops. Boletín de la Oficina del Trabajo, No. 5, January 15, 1914 (Montevideo: Ministerio de Hacienda, Tall. Graf. “Escalante”), 153–159.

19 The horse-drawn cars and horses were sold off by the major trolley companies almost immediately after electrification, but one tram line remained under horse traction until 1925. This was the Norte Tranvía which was owned by the Ferrocarril del Norte and served only a small section of the city with 25 cars. Boletín Mensual de Estadística Municipal, Montevideo, Año IX: Nos. 89–100, January-December, 1911, 7.

20 Torres, Máximo (Carlos Maeso), Divigando…, (Montevideo: Imp. y Lit. de “La Razón”, 1895), p. 38.Google Scholar

21 A telling filler run in the trolley workers’ newspaper after the 1911 strike reads: “A worker without a stomach, genitals or brain, who does not eat, nor think, nor feel the sweet affections of love; an automatic worker, artificial, made ‘of steel”, who works without rest mechanically: such would be the preferred worker, dreamt by the vampires in their desire for profits.” El Tranvía, 1:7, July 29, 1911, 2.

22 La Transatlántica Compañía de Tranvías Eléctricos, Reglamento (Montevideo, no date), pp. 3–4. There are no statistics on the numbers of horse-tram personnel who moved into jobs on the new electric lines, but references in the daily and worker press (in stories on strikes, accidents, firings and retirements) to long-term employees who served prior to 1906 suggests that the percentage was not insignificant. See for example La Razón, May 16, 1911,8 and June 21, 1911, 1. The battle over uniforms, the collars of which had to be kept buttoned even in the summer, lasted until the 1940s when traffic personnel finally attained a lighter summer uniform. Gil Soja, Omar M., 18 y 41 (Montevideo: Arca, 1993) p. 87.Google Scholar

23 Administrativa, Junta E., Reglamento de Tranvías Eléctricos (Montevideo, 1910);Google Scholar La Democracia, May 17, 1911, 1–2.

24 El Tranvía, 1:13, September 13, 1911, 1.

25 El Día, May 12, 1911, “La huelga del día” and La Razón, May 12, 1911, 2. Motormen were suspended for bringing their cars into the stations even a few minutes early. El Tranvía, 1:14, November 15, 1911, 4.

26 La Razón, May 12, 1911, 2.

27 El Socialista, April 16, 1911, 6.

28 La Razón, May 15, 1911, 8. The peso was roughly at parity with the U.S. dollar at this time, Lloyd, Reginald, Impresiones de la República del Uruguay en el Siglo Veinte, (London: Lloyds Greater Britain Publishing Co., Ltd., 1912), unnumbered page.Google Scholar

29 La Democracia, February 3, 1906, 4 and February 6, 1906, 3.

30 La Democracia, February 6, 1906, 1; Strikes occurred on the horse tram lines in 1895 and 1901, involving limited violence, see Carlos Zubillaga and Jorge Balbis, “Dossier de documentos sobre el movimento obrero uruguayo” (typescript, CLAEH) volume I, document 42 and volume II, document 85.

31 El Día, May 17, 1911, “La Gran huelga”; Anuario Estadístico de la República Oriental del Uruguay, 1911–12, pp. 43–51.

32 La Democracia, December 29, 1906, 4.

33 La Tribuna Popular, June 19, 1907, 4, June 21, 1907, 2, June 22, 1907, 1, June 23, 1907, 4.

34 La Razón, February 6, 1907, 1.

35 El Tranvía, 1:14, November 15, 1911, 5.

36 El Combate, 1:1, June 1, 1910, 1.

37 El Combate, 1:1, June 1, 1910, 2.

38 La Democracia, May 17, 1911, 1–2. Crew personnel were paid by the hour and they had no guarantees of how long they would be employed in a given two-week period. Pay was reduced as much as 40 percent by fines and subject to interruptions for sickness and time spent in jail after accidents. For these latter causes, as well as for funerals and marriages, workers organized mutual aid collections on paydays in the stations, El Tranvía, 1:8, August 15, 1911, 5 and 1:15, November 30, 1911, 3–4. Individual responses included moonlighting as chauffeurs, coachmen and painters. La Razón, May 16, 1911, 8.

39 Uruguay Weekly News, January 6, 1907, 2.

40 El Día, May 17, 1911, “La gran huelga”.

41 El Día, May 13, 1911, “La gran huelga”.

42 El País, January 9, 1920, 8; Soliño, Víctor, Crónica de los años locos (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1983), pp. 79–81.Google Scholar

43 Maeso, , Uruguay, pp. 206–208.Google Scholar

44 Boletín de la Oficina del Trabajo., No. 5, January 15, 1914, 153–157.

45 Díaz, Universindo Rodríguez, Los sectores populares en el Uruguay del novecientos, primera parte (1907–1911), (Montevideo: Editorial Compañero, 1989), p. 39.Google Scholar

46 Rodríguez, , Los sectores, pp. 39–40;Google Scholar La Democracia, May 9, 1911, 4.

47 La Razón, May 12, 1911, 2.

48 La Razón, May 2, 1911, 3.

49 La Razón, May 2, 1911, 3, 8.

50 La Democracia, May 9, 1911, 4; La Razón, May 3, 1911, 7.

51 El Tranvía, 1:1, June 10, 1911, 1.

52 La Razón, May 11, 1911, 2.

53 La Razón, May 11, 1911, 8.

54 Jacob, Raúl, “Crisis y mercado de trabajo: Una aproximación a la problemática de los años veinte y treinta”, Serie Investigaciones Número 16, (Montevideo: Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Sobre El Desarrollo/Uruguay, no date), p. 42.Google Scholar

55 Uruguay Weekly News, May 14, 1911, 7; this view was echoed after the strike by the workers, El Tranvía, 1:11, September 30, 1911, 2.

56 La Razón, May 20, 1911, 10

57 El Combate, 1:1, June 1, 1910, 2.

58 El Tranvía, 1:4, July 8, 1911, 1-2.

59 El Tranvía, 1:1, June 10, 1911, 1.

60 La Razón, May 11, 1911, 2.

61 La Razón, May 12, 1911, 2.

62 El Socialista, 1:9, May 14, 1911, 2-3.

63 La Razón, June 23, 1911, 2.

64 The Montevideo Times, May 14, 1911, 1.

65 The Montevideo Times, May 19, 1911, 1 and May 20, 1911, 1; La Razón, May 12, 1911, 2.

66 La Razón, May 16, 1911, 2, May 17, 1911, 2, May 19, 1911, 8 and May 20, 1911, 3, 5 and 10; El Día, May 13, 1911, “La Gran Huelga”

67 La Razón, May 17, 1911, 2; El Día, May 15, 1911, “La Gran Huelga”.

68 El Día, May 15, 1911, “La Gran Huelga”.

69 El Día, May 13, 1911, “La Gran Huelga”.

70 La Prensa (Buenos Aires), May 15, 1911, 8.

71 El Día, May 15, 1911, “La Gran Huelga”.

72 El Día, May 16, 1911, “Asamblea de Huelguistas”.

73 El Día, May 15, 1911, “La Gran Huelga”.

74 Great Britain, Public Record Office, FO 371/1276/23908. “Pueblo Todo de Montevideo”.

75 La Razón, May 13, 1911, 2.

76 La Razón, May 13, 1911, 2.

77 The Montevideo Times, May 16, 1911, 1.

78 Uruguay Weekly News, May 21, 1911, 2. Traffic jumped from 10,616 passengers on May 11 to 18,814 on May 12 and remained high throughout the strike, garnering high returns for the company. La Razón, May 20, 1911, 3. Overall traffic for the entire month of May decreased by over 2 million, but increased by nearly 100,000 riders over April for the Tranvía del Norte, a 42 percent rise. Traffic in the same period declined by 39 percent on La Transatlantica and by 38 percent on La Comercial. Boletín mensual de estadística municipal del departamento de Montevideo, IX:92 and 93, April and May, 1911, 7. Electric trolley workers did not at first ask the horse-tram personnel to join their strike, since they worked for different companies and did not share the same economic grievances. This changed during the general strike as the Tranvía del Norte also closed down as an act of solidarity.

79 El Tranvía, 1:1, June 10, 1911, 3.

80 La Prensa (Buenos Aires), May 22, 1911, 10; El Tranvía, 1:1, June 10, 1911, 3; The Montevideo Times, May 23, 1911, 1.

81 It should be noted that the correspondent of La Prensa alone foresaw this as a temporary truce which left the main grievances of the workers unanswered, May 23, 1911, 10.

82 In 1910 the company reported that revenues increased by 18 percent while expenses decreased by 2 percent. South American Journal, June 17, 1911, 724.

83 The Montevideo Times, May 23, 1911, 1.

84 D’Elia, and Miraldi, , Movimiento obrero p. 101.Google Scholar

85 La Democracia, May 27, 1911, 2; The Montevideo Times, May 23, 1911, 1.

86 Uruguay Weekly News, May 28, 1911, 3.

87 Vanger, , Model Country, p. 127.Google Scholar

88 La Razón, May 26, 1911, 4.

89 La Razón, May 26, 1911, 4.

90 Barrán, and Nahum, , Batlle, pp. 61–63.Google Scholar

91 La Democracia, May 27, 1911, 2.

92 La Democracia, May 27, 1911, 2.

93 Carlo Umiltá quoted in Oddone, Juan Antonio, Una perspectiva europea del Uruguay (Montevideo: Universidad de la República Oriental del Uruguay, 1965), p. 91.Google Scholar

94 Barrán, and Nahum, , Batlle, p. 60;Google Scholar The Montevideo Times, May 27, 1911, 1.

95 Oddone, , Una perspectiva, p. 91.Google Scholar

96 El Tranvía, 1:10, September 15, 1911, 5, 1:15, November 30, 1911, 1; La Razón, June 6, 1911, 2 and June 7, 1911, 5 and 7.

97 La Razón, June 21, 1911, 1.

98 See for example Bergquist, Charles, Labor in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

99 Barrán, and Nahum, , Batlle, p. 60.Google Scholar

100 Kaplan, Temma, Red City, Blue Period, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).Google Scholar