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1 the politics of state economic intervention from the revolution to the great depression With the full force of economic depression bearing down on Mexico by 1931, officials implored producers to do their part to salvage the Mexican economy and ensure national welfare. They even imagined a manifesto targeting the business community: ‘‘When managers realize that it is necessary to employ virility, courage, energy, and intelligence to lead their businesses , then we will save our national industry.’’1 These were to be a new generation of revolutionary businessmen—brave, virile, energetic, smart— whose superior aptitudes and masculine attributes privileged their role in national reconstruction. This rhetoric recalled the competences conferred on Porfirian elites by positivists in the late nineteenth century, who saw it as their right to lead the nation to Progress. However, in its 1930s guise, this right had been supplanted by a responsibility of industry and commerce to fulfill the revolutionary goals of economic development and national welfare. After the Revolution, the growing weight of collective welfare and the incorporation of labor and agrarian groups into national politics reverberated in debates between business and the state over the latter’s intervention in the economy. Among those who challenged the rise of mass politics were Porfirian-era merchant-financiers, who correctly perceived the threat it presented to their historic influence over economic and fiscal policy. In some ways, these merchant-financiers were successful in recapturing their prerevolutionary status and wealth in the 1920s. As scholars have shown, in 1. ‘‘Como deben proceder los hombres de negocios ante la crisis,’’ Boletı́n Semanal, no. 103, SICT, Dirección de Publicaciones y Propaganda, July 27, 1931, Fondo Dependencia Federal (DF)/ Serie Secretarı́a de Industria, Comercio, y Trabajo (SSICT)/Archivo General del Estado de Nuevo León (AGENL), c. 5. politics of state economic intervention 兩 25 this period, the state, often more preoccupied with political than economic concerns, looked on as a sort of ‘‘neo-Porfirian’’ crony capitalism reestablished itself.2 An alliance of the revolutionary victors with the surviving Porfirian business aristocracy dominated this new revolutionary capitalism. Seeking to consolidate their hold over the state—including by pacifying parvenu revolutionary generals with financial incentives—Presidents Álvaro Obregón (1920–24) and Plutarco Elı́as Calles supported these arrangements with tariffs, subsidies, and other guarantees.3 According to some scholars, the creation of the National Revolutionary Party (Partido Nacional Revolucionario , PNR) in 1929 secured these arrangements by enabling Calles and his backers to funnel favors to party loyalists, laying the foundations for a one-party state dominated by rent-seeking party insiders.4 This version of business-state relations attributes a remarkable amount of political coherence, authority, and intent to the clique from Sonora who controlled the state. But, as other scholars have amply demonstrated, the 1920s state faced pressures as diverse as the revolutionary factions themselves , including from agraristas, labor leaders, regional caudillos, the United States, foreign companies, the Church, and a range of political aspirants. Moreover, this version of business-state relations portrays industrialization in relatively narrow, homogeneous, and politically pacific ways.5 Yet, in reality, Mexico’s national bourgeoisie in the 1920s was ‘‘a strangely schizoid class’’ divided by disparate sectoral, political, ideological, and religious interests .6 The shift from traditional export-oriented production to more dynamic forms of commercial agriculture and industry in the 1920s fed this heterogeneity. Along with commercial agriculture and mining, manufacturing was buoyant through much of the decade, with manufacturing production growing by 71 percent between 1921 and 1927.7 A disproportionate share of that growth was due to a small cohort of large-scale industrialists. In 1930, although industries whose production value exceeded Mex$100,000 2. Knight, ‘‘Political Economy,’’ 300. 3. Haber, Maurer, and Razo, ‘‘Sustaining Economic Performance,’’ 35; Haber, Razo, and Maurer, Politics of Property Rights. 4. Examples include Cockcroft, Mexico’s Hope, 111–14; J. Meyer, Estado y sociedad con Calles, 283–90; Brandenburg, Making of Modern Mexico; Hansen, Politics of Mexican Development, 158–62, 165–71. 5. Similarly, Thomas Passananti argues that the concept of crony capitalism fails to capture the complexity of early Porfirian economic policy making. Passananti, ‘‘ ‘Nada de Papeluchos!’’’ 6. Knight, ‘‘Political Economy,’’ 299. 7. The percentage of growth refers to the volume of manufacturing production. Cárdenas, ‘‘Process of Accelerated Industrialization,’’ 178–82; Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment, 150–56; FitzGerald, ‘‘Restructuring through the Depression,’’ 214–17; Zebadúa, Banqueros y revolucionarios, 335; Bortz, Revolution...

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