of the railway owners would force the UGT to raise the stakes with a general strike in solidarity with the railway workers. His hope was that this would split off the Juntas and the Lliga from the reform movement. Accordingly, blindly confident of the backing of the Juntas and the Assembly, the UGT leadership optimistically decided three days later to support the railway workers with a nationwide strike. The instinctive politics of the military saw army officers – both peninsulares and Africanistas – happy to defend the established order.43
The manifesto for the strike that broke out on 10 August 1917 could hardly have been more moderate. Drafted by the PSOE Vice-President, the professor of logic Julián Besteiro, it echoed the demands of the Assembly and instructed the strikers to refrain from violence of any kind. Nevertheless, the government presented the strikers as bloodthirsty revolutionaries. With the UGT forced to act precipitately in support of the railway workers, the strike was poorly prepared, did not extend to the peasantry and was met with savage military repression. In Barcelona, the stoppage was total and artillery was used against the anarchists, who suffered thirty-seven dead. It lasted longest in Asturias where it was supported by Melquíades Álvarez who had been chosen to head the provisional government. It was easily crushed in Asturias and the Basque Country, two of the Socialists’ major strongholds – the third being Madrid. Bilbao was occupied by troops who, on the orders of General José Souza, unleashed indiscriminate attacks on the population. In Asturias, the Military Governor General Ricardo Burguete y Lana declared martial law on 13 August. He accused the strike organizers of being the paid agents of foreign powers. Announcing that he would hunt down the strikers ‘like wild beasts’, he sent columns of regular troops and Civil Guards into the mining valleys where they unleashed an orgy of rape, looting, beatings and torture. With eighty dead, 152 wounded and 2,000 arrested, the failure of the strike was guaranteed.44
Manuel Llaneza, the moderate leader of the Asturian mineworkers’ union, wrote of the ‘odio africano’ during an action in which one of Burguete’s columns was under the command of the young Major Francisco Franco. The implication was that the Africanistas treated the proletariat in exactly the way they treated the colonial population in Morocco. In Madrid, Jóvenes Mauristas acted as auxiliary police and workers armed only with stones were fired on by soldiers with machine guns. Dato’s ploy had secured a short-term success but at the cost of intensifying the hatred between the military and the proletariat and the hostility to his cabinet of both. In this way he inflicted fatal damage on both his government and the system.45
In contravention of his status as a parliamentary deputy, Marcelino Domingo was arrested and mistreated by Civil Guards, who were ready to execute him.46 The UGT’s four-man national strike committee, consisting of Besteiro, the UGT Vice-President, Francisco Largo Caballero, Andrés Saborit, leader of the printers’ union and editor of the PSOE newspaper El Socialista, and Daniel Anguiano, the railway workers’ leader, was arrested in a flat in Madrid. Having failed to take adequate security measures, they were blithely having dinner. To discredit them, the Minister of the Interior, José Sánchez Guerra, mendaciously announced that they were hiding – one in a wardrobe, another under a bed, and two others inside large flowerpots – and that vast amounts of Spanish and foreign currency were found in their belongings. Very nearly subjected to summary execution, from their insanitary cells they could hear the gallows being built. All four were tried by court martial. The Juntas demanded that they receive the death penalty, although they were finally sentenced to life imprisonment. In the event, they spent only some months in jail. Dato’s failure to stand up to the Juntas severely damaged his reputation, just as their participation in the repression killed off the popularity that they had gained in previous months. After a nationwide amnesty campaign, the four members of the strike committee were freed when they were elected to the Cortes in the general elections of 24 February 1918 – Besteiro for Madrid, Saborit for Oviedo, Anguiano for Valencia and Largo Caballero for Barcelona. The entire experience was to have a damaging effect on the subsequent trajectory of all four. In general, the Socialist leadership, particularly the UGT bureaucracy, was traumatized, seeing the movement’s role in 1917 as senseless adventurism.47 The defeat of the strike put an end, for some time, to the possibility of reform from below. Nevertheless, it had demonstrated that the challenge of mass politics was something that the dynastic parties could resist only by recourse to the army. In the words of Francisco Romero, ‘the army had stopped the revolution but who was going to stop the army?’48
Realizing that their role in the repression had fatally damaged their public image as a progressive element, the Juntas implausibly denied responsibility for the brutality meted out to civilians. They issued a statement, claiming that they had been put in an impossible position by the government.49 On 26 October, despite Dato’s efforts to ingratiate himself with the Juntas, they sent the King a note denouncing the incapacity of the present system and urging him to form a new national government. In fact, a wide spectrum of public opinion concurred that the turno system had to be replaced.50 Despite defeating the strike, Dato had not resolved any of the social problems facing him prior to August. Alfonso XIII sacked him and shortly afterwards said to him, ‘Teddy, I’ve been a scoundrel with you.’ Despite his humiliation, Dato tried to protect the King, telling reporters that his resignation had not been precipitated by the Juntas’ ultimatum. Romanones declared that the entire episode constituted the end of the turno. Cambó wrote in the press: ‘I firmly believe that this is not the fall of a government but rather the defeat, the collapse of the system of revolving parties.’51 It certainly marked the end of the credibility of Alfonso XIII as a moderating force and confirmed that the real power in the land was the army.
In the midst of the subsequent crisis which saw Spain without a government for eight days, the Assembly met in the Ateneo de Madrid, on 30 October, to demand a new constitution. In the middle of its deliberations, Cambó was invited to an audience with the King. The members of the Assembly believed that their movement had triumphed but Cambó was actually being bought off. To the consternation of the Assembly’s more liberal and left-wing members, Cambó withdrew from the movement when the King offered the Lliga participation in a new coalition government. Negotiations over its composition were complicated by the Juntas’ demand that they be represented, as Minister of War, by La Cierva, who was opposed by the left and the Assembly. Eventually, in return for the inclusion of two Catalan ministers, Joan Ventosa in Finance and Felip Rodés in Education, Cambó dropped the idea of a Constituent Cortes and on 1 November accepted the formation of a national coalition under García Prieto. To his furious critics in the Assembly, Cambó claimed, implausibly, that he was going to be able to reform the system from within, ensuring that Catalonia would be the Prussia of a regenerated Spain. However, already disliked by many for his brusque and imperious manner, he was widely regarded as having betrayed the forces committed to reform. What he had done was to ally the Lliga with the agrarian oligarchy and the army and had therefore put an end to any kind of legal reform of the system. He was convinced that, after the next elections, the Lliga would have between seventy and eighty deputies and he would be made Prime Minister. In the meantime, he boasted to colleagues that he could control García Prieto through Ventosa. However, the Prime Minister ran rings around the inexperienced Ventosa and Rodés. It was not long before Cambó came to believe that he had been deceived and to regret bitterly that he had not joined the government himself.52
In fact, the coalition had no agreed objectives and each of its components pursued their own agendas. Moreover, it would be opposed by every section of the left. According to Romanones, the legacy of the mistakes made by Dato rendered it an impossible enterprise.53 The Juntas’ representative, La Cierva, did everything possible to thwart the reforming intentions of the two Catalan ministers. The elections held on 24 February 1918 were among the most corrupt and venal of the entire Restoration period and demonstrated that the oligarchy’s capacity to fix results was anything but neutralized. There were urban areas where the elections were relatively clean but the power of rural caciquismo remained solid. Thus Cambó’s Lliga, although victorious in Catalonia, was a long way from gaining the number of seats necessary to permit him to implement a thoroughgoing reform. No party had an overall majority. Dato’s Conservatives secured the most seats, but the combined Liberal groups under Romananones and García Prieto had more. Nevertheless, the results produced a deadlock, with the Cortes split into a number of factions. Moreover, a so-called Alianza de