ABSTRACT
In order to understand the paradox of Juan Domingo Peron one must start by knowing something about Argentina as it existed before Peron strode across its political stage. A federal republic with jurisdiction over most of the national territory laid the groundwork for Argentina's rapid economic development during the decades surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century. By the early 1940s, Argentina was notoriously backward among the Latin American countries in terms of labor and social legislation. The larger or smaller corps of Socialist legislators who sat in Congress during that period carried on a continuous fight for social and labor legislation. By the outbreak of World War I, Argentina had gone about as far as it could go in terms of economic development based on the expansion of meat and grain exports. Until 1916, the government was completely in the hands of political elements allied with the large landowners, whose economic well-being was completely associated with the export trade.
