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After the rebellion of 1852, which ousted Rosas, the country began to grow in strength and in wisdom, until it forged far ahead of other South American countries of its time. The Presidency of General Julio A. Roca (1880-86) was the golden age of Argentina. Railways doubled their length, and wherever the railroad went it multiplied tenfold the value of the fabulously fertile land. Wider and wider tracts of the southern plains were opened to pasture and to tillage. Foreign trade almost doubled. British capital poured in. Improved steam navigation brought Europe nearer; exports of grain increased year after year and the export of meat began.
During those six years nearly 500,000 Spanish and Italian immigrants came in, and every year thousands of Italians traveled 6,000 miles to reap the harvest and carry home their pay in golden coins to squander in Calabria and Sicily. The Argentines called them golondrinas, after the migrating swallow.
But Argentina never realized the great promise of her golden age. After Roca there was a period of political corruption, speculation, overexpansion and bitter boundary disputes with Brazil and Chile. Against the power of the upper-class landowners a rising middle class and the masses united in a Radical Party, and though both Conservatives and Radicals have split into many factions, this-fundamental political cleavage has continued. It has torn the country internally and prevented it from achieving the destiny it dreamed of.
One of Argentina's best friends and severest critics, Spanish Philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, wrote of the Argentine predicament: "A nation may plan for itself a mediocre existence or a soaring ascent. Argentina is not satisfied with being run of the mill. She lays claim to a superb future, a history studded with triumphs; she is resolved to rule. . . . But so lofty a project entails certain inconveniences. . . . When ... by dint of focusing on the project we forget that it is not yet accomplished, we may easily end by believing ourselves already in the state of perfection. And the worst of this is not that we are mistaken, but that it prevents our actual progress, there being no more unfailing way of not progressing than regarding one's self as perfect. . . . Something of this sort, I fear, is happening in the Argentine nation."
Whether or not this appraisal is sound, through five Pan-American Conferences sponsored by Good Neighbor Roosevelt and his Apostle to the Latins, Cordell Hull, Argentina has not felt that it was to her best interests to go the way the U.S. and the majority of the other American republics wanted to go. Though her reasons have been modeled on juridical correctness and advanced with logical precision, shrewd observers have suspected that another reason was prestige, that Argentina was naturally determined, if there must be a caudillo in hemisphere affairs, the caudillo would be Argentina. Against this caudillo principle the U.S. has advanced the principle of cooperation as equals, but realistic Argentines never believed in it. Still less did they believe in it when last year the U.S. tried to get naval and air bases in next-door Uruguay.