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1 The Dialectics of Public Life Public life is not solely political, but equally and primarily, intellectual, moral, economic , religious; it comprises all our collective habits, including our fashions both of dress and of amusement. Jose Ortega y Casset (1930) It just so happens that politics is the only intellectual activity in our country. Politics is an intellectual minimum, and all of us who would have preferred a humanistic career go into it. ... Whether victors or vanquished, we Colombian intellectuals cannot live outside politics. Juan Lozano y Lozano (1944) Liberal politician and intellectual The Rise to Power Alfonso Lopez rose slowly. Standing before his Liberal colleagues, he declared that in just one hundred days, on February 9, 1930, one of their own would be president of Colombia.1 Bemused, the older statesmen of the party must have recalled their own naivete and the brash statements of their younger years. They had been out of power since before they lost the War of the Thousand Days (1899-1902), the last of the nineteenth-century civil wars between Liberals and Conservatives, and had been unable to unseat the Conservatives in five elections of the ensuing peace. The Conservative Republic had been in place since 1885, before Lopez was born. But the younger Liberals listened expectantly. They felt the stirrings of change. To a man they believed that they would orchestrate the nation's first enduring peaceful transfer of power. The civil wars were a thing of the past. Even many young Conservatives shared their ideals. The generation that had not made the wars felt that it would at last bring progress and democracy to Colombia. Its members would serve their nation as no others had done before. In neither war nor peace had politics been democratic. It rested on a wide cultural chasm between leaders and followers. It had been, traditionally, a sporadic affair. Since the origins in the 1830s and 1840s of two political parties, leading Liberals and Conservatives had successfully mobilized large 13 14 The Dialectics of Public Life numbers of their followers for only limited periods of time. More often in the nineteenth than in the twentieth century, these affairs revolved around military campaigns called by the leaders of one party against those of the other. Temporary resolution of these civil wars, or exhaustion, brought a measure of peace, a calmingof the party mistica, the fervor among the masses that fueled the wars, and a return to an atmosphere of statesmanlike conciliation among the leaders. These interludes were all-important, for they allowed the leaders to measure their distance from their followers and bring each affair to an end. Periods of military quiescence were filled with political activity. Although the electoral campaigns, which were more the norm in the twentieth century than they ever were in the nineteenth, were often as passionately contested as the wars themselves, they were less costlyand convulsive. In war and in peace, the parties tied entire regions, towns, and hamlets to their large, multiclass, and long-distance clientelistic networks, bringing Colombians of all walks of life into their folds. More than ideology, the life and livelihood of individuals was at stake. In war the victorious side found protection, and in peace small and large local political positions, credit facilities, and even land could come to those who lived in areas defended by their party. The party that won the presidency in Bogota enhanced the position of its followers throughout the land, for they could easily recognize their party's accession to national power as the moment to obtain their own. At times they were encouraged by the leaders, who saw their own strength reflected in their followers.2 Lopez was the son of a rich man, don Pedro A. Lopez, who had built a huge commercial entrepot in Honda, on the Magdalena River near Bogota, and was the founder of one of the nation's first banks, the Banco Lopez. Throughout his rise to riches he groomed his eldest son to follow in his footsteps. Some of the leading Conservative and Liberal thinkers of the age became his tutors; he was sent to England to study at Brighton and later attended the Packard School in New York.3 In 1904, at eighteen, he became the director of Pedro A. Lopez y Cia. Ten years later he resigned because of disputes with his three younger brothers. Without a job, Lopez turned to politics and ended up in Congress in 1915, where he struck up a...

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