Intellectuals in the Colombian Press in the First Half of the 20th Century
The twentieth century represented for the Colombian press the entry into modernity, which meant leaving behind the use of the newspaper as a purely doctrinaire and partisan medium to begin to report on national and foreign current affairs, as well as to discuss issues of interest in everyday life. In a word, the press began to occupy a place within the country’s emerging cultural and entertainment industry. To this end, the still incipient profession of the journalist began to make use of genres that included an agile language and easy access to all audiences, such as news, light chronicles, portraits, and reports, among others.
The panorama of the press as a purely ideological vehicle had already begun an important transformation during the conservative period called La Regeneración. In this period the conservatives managed to occupy the government between 1886 and 1903, seeking to reduce the liberal policies that had been established in the country after the Constitution of 1863. Once in power, the main conservative newspapers sought to leave political journalism behind and through certain newspapers such as El Papel periódico Ilustrado they established an informative journalism without political affiliation. Likewise, the publications printed an artistic, historical and literary character to avoid political agitations, although always framed in conservative values, which managed to gather participants and readers from both the conservative and liberal parties.
The combination of political, cultural and informative sections left a blurred image of the Colombian journalist that teetered between literary and political. This situation presupposes at least two basic ideas: first, it is possible to affirm that the great press writers of the twentieth century managed to alternate at the same time the positions of editor-in-chief and their political positions, as well as the writing of books. Secondly, Colombian newspapers welcomed those writers who could have been novelists, essayists or poets, but who, due to the aforementioned problems of illiteracy in the country, did not manage to be accepted by the public. Thus, the still ambiguous profession of journalist was the refuge for such men of letters who filled the judicial, sports and cultural sections with their prose.
This context showed the image of an « intellectual » press, with an elitist character and with journalists who oscillated between philosophy, jurisprudence and literature, with aesthetic and literary concepts that sometimes failed to reach the public and whose reception was received in an intellectual aristocracy. Nevertheless, in the midst of the press and the cultural and current debates, the figure of the intellectual was formed, capable of addressing different topics and putting them in relation to their historical moment. All of which opens the question about the figure of the twentieth century intellectual and his influence on the Colombian press of the time.
When we refer to intellectuals, we refer in the first place to a social category of « public subjects » who create and disseminate knowledge, reflecting on the relationship between power, the State and institutions and defining their responsibility in relation to the historical moment in which they live[1]. On the other hand, there are also historical specificities for intellectuals, based on the characteristic forms of each historical moment and the type of society in which they intervene[2]. Furthermore, the intellectual, as a social category, belongs particularly to modern societies and is characterized by his influence on the consciousness of his time.
In Colombia, at the beginning of the 20th century, the figure of the intellectual was represented by lawyers, grammarians and poets, as well as by the professors of the liberal Republic (period between 1930 and 1946). Later, during the second half of the century, it was social scientists, philosophers, political scientists, sociologists and historians who embodied this role. And finally, during the era of globalization of the present century, it was mainly economists[3].
The figure of the intellectual is defined by his or her location in the economic or cultural field and its historical forms are established in the relationship between intellectuals and power. According to Bordieu, the cultural field is constituted in opposition to the economic field and seeks its autonomy from it, so that the figure of the intellectual is defined in the measure of his resistance or passivity[4]. However, in Latin American countries, there has been a close relationship between certain families and the formation of nations, which has produced the concentration of certain surnames in the political and economic powers and in turn has led these same families to concentrate cultural power.
In general, intellectuals in Colombia during most of the twentieth century were framed in the bipartisan confrontation that caused in a first moment the subordination of intellectuals to the parties and their political projects and, in a second moment, the rupture with partisanship and the creation of the cultural field tending to autonomy.
At the beginning of the 20th century in Colombia, the dominant intellectuals were grammarians and poets, since, to a certain extent, the study of language allowed the continuation of the values of the elite in a mostly illiterate country. Similarly, the aforementioned Regeneration sought to position the Church within the cultural field, through the creation of institutions, control over teaching, creation of school textbooks, establishment of censorship, and as a source of social cohesion. For the time, the church functioned as a regime of truth production that the intellectuals of the time legitimized[5].
Conservative intellectuals such as Miguel Antonio Caro, Rafael María Carrasquilla and Mario Valenzuela, to name a few, were part of the political project of the State, explicitly defining clerical moral conceptions, which reflects an image of religious practitioners rather than modern thinkers. Meanwhile, in the artistic field, authors such as Guillermo Valencia showed an adherence to conservative assumptions and expressed a provincial and reactionary vision. Meanwhile, liberal intellectuals sought to create academic spaces to disseminate their conceptions, an idea that led to the founding of the Universidad Republicana and the Universidad Libre, with the aim of obtaining spaces that did not have state interference.
During the 1920s, some dissident intellectuals emerged within the traditional parties who criticized their functioning and sought a modernization of politics. This new generation of young people was led in liberalism by Rafael Uribe Uribe, Alfonso López Pumarejo and Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, and in conservatism by Laureano Gómez. However, in the thirties, the bipartisan conflict worsened in what was called the period of La Violencia[6]. This led intellectuals, particularly professors, to be immersed in the war confrontations because they were considered members of the opposing party.
The thirties brought some more radical intellectual currents in the midst of the consolidation of communist and socialist groups, such as the communist poet Luis Vidales. In these years capitalism was also consolidated in Colombia and with it came new aesthetic currents with a strong impact on artists and writers, some examples were: León de Greiff, Porfirio Barba Jacob, Fernando González, César Uribe Piedrahita, Eduardo Caballero Calderón, José Antonio Osorio Lizarazo, Luis López de Mesa and Germán Arciniegas.
During the decade of the thirties, certain intellectuals were incorporated into the state apparatus where they managed to promote cultural institutions. In some cases, as in the case of Jorge Zalamea, they served in the Ministry of Education and contributed to educational reforms. Also at this time there was a considerable increase in the formation of groups of intellectuals, especially around magazines, where cultural and political discussions proliferated. The great majority of the literary publications of the 20th century emerged in the midst of the country’s literary generations, such as the centenaristas, those of the Gruta Simbólica, the panidas, the Nuevos, the piedracielistas, the cuadernícolas, those of the Mito, those of the Cueva, the nadaístas, etc. Although such exponents wrote for specialized magazines, they also wrote for the daily press, since they knew that they would reach a larger audience there (p. 122).
Certainly, the press in Colombia during the first half of the 20th century owes its style and impulse to the literary generations of the Centenario and the Nuevos. The Centenario was born within the modernist literature current in Colombia and owes its name to the fact that the first publications of its members were published during the celebration of the first centenary of the country’s Independence, in 1910. The main representatives of this group were Eduardo Santos, Luis and Gabriel Cano, Alfonso López Pumarejo, Laureano Gómez, Alfonso Villegas Restrepo, Enrique Olaya Herrera, Ricardo Tirado Macías, Armando Solano, Baldomero Sanín Cano, Luis Eduardo Nieto Caballero, Carlos E. Restrepo, Ismael Enrique Arciniegas, Víctor M. Londoño, Joaquín Quijano Mantilla, Clímaco Soto Borda, Max Grillo, among others.
The members of this group served as an articulation after the Thousand Days War (1899-1902), since they understood that their mission was to peacefully build national democracy. Thus, in 1909 they came to have full control of the State and some served as intellectual leaders of the republican movement. Once the aforementioned Liberal Republic began, certain members returned to the opposition, while those who remained governed with the help of the movement of the New , which were the most promising pupils. Regarding literature, this group appeared on the national scene as a reaction to the modernist and centenary expressions. Although ideologically they were still folded to the generation of the Centennial, at the aesthetic level they introduced vanguardism in the environment and propitiated a certain irreverence in relation to the academic and provincial tradition of the time[7].
The generation of the Nuevos, dominated the literary and cultural scene between the twenties and seventies, with names such as Luis Tejada, Alberto and Felipe Lleras, Jorge Zalamea, Luis Vidales, Germán Arciniegas, Alejandro Vallejo and José Mar, who were directly involved in journalism. The group announced its appearance under the name of the Arquilókidas in 1922 with an irreverent section in the newspaper La República. By this time Felipe Lleras was the director in charge and had his friends write in the newspaper. Publications by Luis Tejada, León de Greiff, Ricardo Rendón, Hernando de la Calle, Rafael Maya, Silvio Villegas, José Umaña Bernal, José Camacho Carreño, Juan Lozano y Lozano and Luis Vidales appeared[8].
This first issue of the group was announced as a passionate, irrational and unfair work, whose objective was to demystify the idols of national literature. In their view, a certain sacrilege was necessary to overthrow certain ideas of the intellectual environment of the time, and to this end they satirized the untouchable figures of the Centennial generation, criticizing the literary works of Marco Fidel Suárez, Joaquín Quijano Mantilla, Tomás Rueda Vargas, Guillermo Camacho Carrizosa and Luis Cano.
In June 1925, the Lleras Camargo brothers published the magazine Los Nuevos, with the aim of disseminating their manifesto, however, the publication would only reach three issues. In September of the same year, El Espectador began publishing the column El Glosario de los Nuevos, also in charge of the Lleras Camargo brothers. From there they made important annotations on the possibility of a socialist state, based on the ideas of José Mar and the political ideology of General Uribe Uribe Uribe. Their publications were the breeding ground for discussing new ideas through the dissemination of European doctrines, mostly French, from which they tried to overcome the country’s colonial past.
Meanwhile, in the ranks of conservative politicians, certain young people reacted to the leftist ideas of the Nuevos through columns also published by La República, in which they criticized the nascent workers’ movement. Among these we find Silvio Villegas, Augusto Ramírez Moreno, Eliseo Arango and José Camacho Carreño. However, after the conservative student uprisings, the Leopardos group belonging to the Nuevos took distance and started their own publications in the press. From the beginning they wrote in El Nuevo Tiempo, of Ismael Enrique Arciniegas, and in La Crónica, of Camacho Carrioza. Of this group, it was Silvio Villegas who came to prominence after directing the newspapers El Nuevo Tiempo, La Patria and El Debate.
The group Los Leopardos, disseminated the nationalist ideas in the Colombian press of some totalitarian movements in Europe. Their objective was to provide new conceptions that would dynamize the conservative party, which in their view was impregnated with Centennial ideas. In this way, they adopted the theses of the French journalist and nationalist essayist Charles Maurras.
Although Los Nuevos and Los Leopardos fought for their political affiliations in their journalistic tribunes and columns, by 1929 both groups met in the squares united with the objective of putting an end to the conservative hegemony that had been in government since 1886. Although this generation was described as iconoclastic, cheerful, irrational and to some extent destructive, it was also recognized for its political achievements, such as having made President Marco Fidel Suarez resign from the press in 1921 due to the mercantile scandal.
On a literary level, the Centenario group and the Nuevos declared themselves followers of Ortega y Gasset, Azorín, Pío Baroja and the general group of writers, essayists and poets of the Generation of ’98. They were also strongly influenced by French literature, such as Montaigne, Daudet, Anatole France, Mauriac, among others. Their publications in the press were characterized by their Latinist, classicist and Gallicist studies. Likewise, it must be recognized that they handled an expressive literary style, with which they tried to replicate the Golden Age, all of which enriched the national press, giving them recognition in the rest of America.
A major turning point for the history of intellectuals and the press in Colombia, and in general for the entire history of the country, was the period of violence mentioned above. The traumatic experience at all levels of Colombian society meant that it took intellectuals several decades to analyze and represent what had happened. It was undoubtedly thanks to the development of the social sciences in Colombia that it was possible to have conceptual and methodological tools that allowed an objective and critical approach, inspired mainly by Marxism. Thus, the figure of the intellectual in the first half of the century gradually became that of the social scientist[9].
Both the social scientist and the committed writer were the ones who gave a new orientation to Colombian social thought. In the first place, they took a distance with respect to the State and partisanship, and they were inclined towards a social utopia, so that in many cases they were militant in social and military organizations of the left that were consolidated towards the sixties. Secondly, it was these new intellectuals who offered an alternative vision of the country’s history, taking as a starting point the development of capitalism and its effects on society, in order to define the foundations for social revolution. Likewise, this situation was manifested in the creation of publishing houses and the dissemination of magazines and newspapers also linked to leftist organizations.
It could be said that the transition from partisan intellectual to social scientist and committed writer occurred firstly for institutional reasons and secondly because of certain fundamental characters. On the one hand, after the conservative hegemony came to an end, ascribed to the National University of Colombia was founded the Faculty of Education, which in 1936 would be relieved by the Escuela Normal Superior. There began the formation and professionalization of new scientific communities in the country, such as anthropologists, sociologists and historians.
This School was conceived as a cultural enterprise capable of democratizing culture, to form citizens with a national conscience and capable of responding to the economic and social development of the country. The general objective for the decade of the thirties and forties was the construction of a State capable of including the cultural, ethnic and social pluralism of the country, making use of intellectuals as mediators of this construction. Hence, the great themes of the intellectual debate for these years were the peasant, worker and indigenous issues. In this sense, the Escuela Normal Superior sought to professionalize the social disciplines to the point that they would be able to respond to the needs of the country. For its part, professionalization meant, in a broad sense, the qualification of knowledge, but also its monopolization and segregation[10].
On the other hand, as for the fundamental figures of education, we should mention the Harvard-trained humanist Luis López de Mesa, who wrote several scientific studies, historical essays and historical research. Germán Arciniegas, who of the writers of the time was the one who moved the most in international environments to the point of teaching at Columbia University during the fifties. Pedagogue Agustín Nieto Caballero was also an influential thinker, founder of the prestigious school Gimnasio Moderno in Bogota, where he introduced the Swiss educational model of the New School. He was also founder of the magazine Cultura. Luis Eduardo Nieto Arteta was another influential essayist who would be rediscovered by historians and Marxist economists during the sixties and seventies.
There was also a group of foreign thinkers who not only influenced, but formed the next generation of social scientists. Most of them came from Europe fleeing Nazism, fascism and Francoism. Such is the case of the Spanish historian María Ots Capdequí, who was versed in the history of the Spanish state. Likewise, the ethnologist and founder of the Museum of Man in Paris, Paul Rivet, who was persecuted by the Gestapo and settled in Colombia in 1941. The German geographer Ernesto Guhl also played a fundamental role in introducing geography as a social discipline in the country. The British-Jamaican professor Howard Rochester brought innovative studies of English literature.
This generation of professors and intellectuals were the trainers and teachers of a new group of social scientists who were decisive for the history of Colombian thought. In this group of new thinkers we find, in the first place, the historian Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, considered the most important in Colombia due to his contributions to the professionalization of the discipline. For his part, Darío Mesa occupied a privileged position in the scientific panorama by introducing theoretical currents of world philosophical theoretical thought. The linguist Luis Flórez would also become a specialist in dialectology and linguistic geography of Spanish and would research in different North American universities to later return to the country and join the Caro y Cuervo Institute, he also wrote several columns in El Tiempo. Also of this generation was the anthropologist Virginia Gutiérrez, who is considered a pioneer in family studies and medical anthropology in Colombia.
Certainly, another group of thinkers trained in other countries also ended up being part of the panorama of social scientists in the country. This was the case of philosophers Rafael Carrillo and Danilo Cruz Vélez. The former had traveled to Germany to study philosophy, a subject in which he made important contributions in the country, especially in relation to the philosophy of law. The latter also studied in Germany and absorbed the debates around philosophical anthropology, cultural philosophy and German metaphysics with authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich von Schiller and Martin Heidegger. Others trained in different countries were the historians Guillermo Hernández Rodríguez and Luis Ospina Vásquez, the archaeologist Gonzalo Correal and the economist Antonio García.
This group of figures mentioned above were characterized by being elusive to politics and their fundamental concerns were scientific inquiry and secularization. As a result of this effort, the most important schools and institutes of social sciences were born in the country. Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi (1935), Instituto de Etnología Nacional (1941), Instituto Caro y Cuervo (1942), Instituto Indigenista Colombiano (1943), Instituto de Economía (1945), Instituto de Filosofía (1946), Instituto Colombiano de Antropología (1951) and Instituto Colombiano de Sociología (1951)[11].
During the 1950s, the effects of the events of the Bogotazo were experienced, as this led to the closure of several centers of intellectual debate and of some magazines and publications such as the Revista de Indias and the biweekly Critica directed by Jorge Zalamea. This generalized violence also caused the exile of men of letters such as Zalamea himself and Germán Arciniegas, as well as the return to their countries of origin of some foreign professors who had settled in Colombia in previous decades. The Balance of the fifties for the intellectuals could be summarized in a lack of historical location and a perplexity that led them to remain silent. Except in some cases such as that of the magazine Mito in which the intellectuals declared themselves in the face of the 1957 general strike that caused the fall of President Rojas.
In summary, the intellectuality of the first half of the 20th century in Colombia was torn between the partisan struggle, the relationship between Church and State, the creation of literary groups and, towards the end, the construction of an autonomous field of social scientific research. The press and literary and cultural publications were the means through which Colombian society kept abreast of the debates and new currents of national and foreign thought. Likewise, the dominance of a literate and cultivated elite in the intellectual panorama of the country was democratized through the creation of institutions, which although they did not solve the problem of illiteracy in the country, they did make great contributions to the evolution of the university and education in Colombia.
[1] Le Goff, J. (1986). Los intelectuales en la Edad Media, Madrid, Gedisa,
[2] Sánchez, G. (1998). “Intelectuales… poder… y… cultura nacional”. Análisis Político,34. 115 y ss.
[3] Urrego Ardila, M. (2002). Introducción In : Intelectuales, Estado y Nación en Colombia : De la guerra de los Mil Días a la constitución de 1991 [en ligne]. Bogotá : Siglo del Hombre Editores, (généré le 06 septembre 2021). Disponible sur Internet : <http://books.openedition.org/sdh/266>. ISBN : 9782821879751. DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/books.sdh.266.
[4] Bourdieu, P. (1989). La Noblesse d’État. Grandes Écoles et Sprit de Corps, París, Les Editions De Minuit. p. 376.
[5] A clear example of this type of intellectual is Guillermo Valencia, pioneer poet of the modernist movement, with a strong influence of French symbolism and Rubén Darío. He was also a conservative politician who held various diplomatic posts and became director of the Colombian Conservative Party. His son Guillermo León Valencia became president in 1962 and his granddaughter is the current Colombian senator of the Democratic Center party.
[6] The period between 1925 and 1958 is known as La Violencia, when armed confrontations between supporters of the Liberal and Conservative parties took place. This period was characterized for having been extremely violent, amid persecutions, massacres and terrorist attacks. The assassination of political and liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitán on April 9, 1948, produced a rebound of violence and a strong revolt in what was called El Bogotazo.
[7] Vallejo, M. (2006). P. 27
[8] Ibid. P. 28
[9] Sánchez, G. (1998). P. 129
[10] Ibid. P. 130.
[11] Ibid. P. 130