Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

President of Argentina (1868-1874)

• Born: February 14, 1811
• Birthplace: San Juan, Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata (now in Argentina)
• Died: September 11, 1888
• Place of death: Asunción, Paraguay

While he was president of Argentina, Sarmiento emphasized the importance of public education for national development and integration. He was an acute observer of his own society and wrote a penetrating study of the political and cultural roots of Argentina that revealed the forces underlying the national tendency toward authoritarian government.

Early Life

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (Doh-MEEN-goh Fows-TEEN-oh Sahr-mee-YEHN-to) was born when Argentina was still a dominion of Spain known as the Viceroyalty of La Plata. He was raised in a home of sparse means in the province of San Juan, a mountainous northwestern territory of Argentina that during colonial times had been part of Chile. Through self-instruction and the support of a clerical relative, he was able to obtain an elementary education and by mid-adolescence was already helping to teach classes.

Meanwhile, in 1816, when Sarmiento was only five years old, Argentina became the first South American country to achieve independence. However, a fragmenting period of civil strife soon followed. Out of the chaos emerged regional political strongmen, known as caudillos. The chief among these men were Juan Facundo Quiroga and Juan Manuel de Rosas. The former consolidated control over the country’s northern interior provinces from the late 1820’s until his assassination in 1835. The latter, and the most powerful of the caudillos, ruled over the country’s richest province, Buenos Aires, from 1835 to 1852. The caudillos advocated a federal government in which Argentina would comprise an association of sovereign provinces. They were opposed by unitarists, who hoped to modernize the country by incorporating its vast and disparate provinces into a nation consolidated under a strong central government.

As Sarmiento grew up, he joined the political debate opposed to caudillos and rose to captain in the local militia trying to fend off Quiroga’s advance into San Juan. Quiroga’s victory forced Sarmiento to flee into exile in Chile in 1831, and he did not return to Argentina until 1836, after Quiroga died, by which time he was twenty-five years old.

Life’s Work

Throughout Argentina the Generation of 1837 arose, the first group of Argentine leaders to come of age since the nation’s independence. They were moved by Romantic literary appeals to revolutionary social change as they confronted the abyss of anarchy and the morass of caudillo repression into which the young Argentine nation had sunk. Sarmiento became part of this movement in San Juan. Advocating the importance of education of all in forming a new Argentina, he founded a school for girls in 1839. During that same year, he also founded a literary periodical, El Zonda (hot wind), whose acerbic political criticism brought down government reprisals that again forced him into Chilean exile in 1840. He did not return until 1852.

During his years of exile, Sarmiento developed as both a writer and educator. He worked for several Chilean newspapers, including the noted El Mercurio, and continued his interest in politics. He also published his most noted books. In 1845, the most famous book appeared, Civilización y barbarie: vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga, y aspecto físico, costumbres, y hábitos de la República Argentina (1845; Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants: Or, Civilization and Barbarism ). Ostensibly a biography of Quiroga, the book was essentially a denunciation of the Rosas dictatorship at the height of its power and also presented a critique of the elite socioeconomic system that created arbitrary and ultimately unstable governments.

In 1849, Sarmiento published De la educacion popular , a book emphasizing the value of mass public education as a means of modernizing and stabilizing a country. The following year appeared Arjirópolis , a plan for reorganizing Argentina in a Confederated States of the Rio de la Plata.

Supported and admired by the Chilean government, Sarmiento was made head of that country’s first teacher-training school. He traveled widely in Europe and the Americas, making contacts in the United States with the American educational pioneers Horace and Mary Peabody Mann. Horace Mann greatly influenced how Sarmiento would formulate public education in Chile and Argentina, and Mann’s wife late translated Facundo into English and maintained an extensive correspondence with Sarmiento.

Events in Argentina during the 1850’s brought Sarmiento back to his home country, where he then played his most decisive political role. He joined military forces that were being organized in Uruguay to overthrow Rosas. Rosas was ousted in 1852, and a new constitution was written the following year. The constitution was progressively amended so that by 1862 a relatively stable government under the presidency of Bartolomé Mitre emerged. As an ally of Mitre, Sarmiento became governor of San Juan in 1862 and instituted educational, administrative, and electoral reforms. In 1864, he was appointed ambassador to the United States. While he was abroad in 1868, Argentina elected him to succeed Mitre. He returned home and assumed the presidency in October.

As president, Sarmiento put into effect on a national scale the ideas and projects that had long distinguished him. Building on the policies of Mitre, he continued to encourage immigration, welcoming waves of new European settlers. When he conducted the first national census in 1869, he was disturbed to find that nearly three of every four Argentines were illiterate. He then quadrupled the number of children in elementary schools, to well over 100,000, and established many specialized schools, following American and European models.

Pursuing the ideal of a modernized, integrated Argentina, Sarmiento increased the number of railway and telegraph lines, roads, and bridges and welcomed British investment capital. The expanding infrastructure reached ever farther into the fertile interior of the country, which would eventually produce a cornucopia of cereals and meat for export to industrializing Europe. In 1870, he ended a war with Paraguay that had begun in 1865 and in which his son Dominguito had died. (Sarmiento had been estranged from his wife, Benita Martínez, since 1860.)

In 1874, Sarmiento was succeeded in the presidency by his duly elected successor, Nicolas Avellaneda, who continued his and Mitre’s national development policies. After Sarmiento left the presidency, he became a senator from San Juan and served as a minister in the Avellaneda government, as director of schools in Buenos Aires, and as director of national education. He was eventually promoted to the rank of general and had his collected writings published in a set of fifty-two volumes. For reasons of health he moved to Asunción, Paraguay, in 1887. He died there on September 11, 1888, at the age of seventy-seven.

Significance

Sarmiento is a monumental figure in Argentine history. In one person, he constituted a composite of historic figures. Like the American president Abraham Lincoln—of whom he wrote a biography—and the Mexican president Benito Juárez, Sarmiento rose from humble origins to play a decisive role in his country’s formation. Like the American educator Horace Mann, he was a key figure in forging the rationale and structure of public education in Argentina and Chile. Like the French essayist Alexis de Tocqueville, who famously wrote on the nature of the American character, Sarmiento described with keen insight the nature of the Argentine character. Together with Mitre and Avellaneda, he formed the precedent of stable presidential succession.

Constitutional and electoral stability in Argentina endured into the early twentieth century. However, the extraordinary expansion of the Argentine economy and development of its society during the late nineteenth century occurred within a framework of vastly unequal land ownership and distribution of wealth. Such socio-economic chasms eventually destabilized Argentina, resulting in the rise of a modern caudillo, Juan Perón, during the late 1940’s. Perón was followed by alternating military and civilian regimes that aggravated political instability, and the educational policies and accomplishments of Sarmiento and his colleagues were not sufficient to overcome this imbalance. His legacy is to have helped create a population that is articulate in expressing its sociopolitical stresses but economically hampered in reversing them.

Bibliography

Bravo, Héctor Félix. “Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, 1811-88.” Prospects: Quarterly Review of Comparative Education 24, no. 3/4 (1994): 487-500. Synopsis of the origin, development, and nature of Sarmiento’s ideas on education together with a bibliography of his principal works on the subject.

Bunkley, Allison Williams. Life of Sarmiento. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952. Most detailed, scholarly biography of Sarmiento in English, with illustrations and an extensive bibliography.

Criscenti, Joseph, ed. Sarmiento and His Argentina. Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner, 1993. Collection of articles by scholars covering Sarmiento’s policies on topics ranging from immigration and Indians to women, education, and modernization.

Halperín Donghi, Tulio, ed. Sarmiento, Author of a Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Edited by a noted specialist in Argentine history, this collection of articles by various scholars examines literary and political aspects of Sarmiento’s life.

Katra, William H. The Argentine Generation of 1837: Echeverría, Alberdi, Sarmiento, Mitre. Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Detailed study of debate that occurred in shadow and the aftermath of the Rosas dictatorship among four of the leading intellectual and political leaders forging the Argentine nation.

Patton, Elva Clayton. Sarmiento in the United States. Evansville, Ind.: University of Evansville Press, 1976. Study of the periods when Sarmiento lived and traveled in the United States, reviewing his reactions to American culture and examining the influence on him of nineteenth century American public education movement.

Shumway, Nicholas. The Invention of Argentina. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Insightful study of Argentine intellectual life in the nineteenth century, examining the ideas of Sarmiento and others in forging his country’s identity.

Sorensen, Diana.“Facundo” and the Construction of Argentine Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Examines Sarmiento’s book Civilización y barbarie: vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga for its contributions to Argentine intellectual life, seeing its often contradictory readings as themselves constituting a composite cultural construct.