Culture at war The First World War and the librarian action of the national State in Argentina (1914-1921)

The consequences of the First World War were not limited to the territory directly involved in the confrontation, but had a global reach that, as recent historiography has pointed out, did not exclude Latin American nations. This work explores the effects of this contest on the reconfiguration of relations between the Argentine State and cultural institutions, paying particular attention to the action taken by the national government in favor of popular libraries between 1914 and 1921, year in which the internal functioning of the national Commission for the Protection of Popular Libraries level was regulated. Thus, we demonstrate that the conflict constituted a key moment in the debate on the forms and scope that state participation should assume in the matter, as well as in the design of agencies, norms and mechanisms of regulation of the sector. Through official documentation, the paper reconstructs the economic conditions to which the entities were subjected due to the crisis, the discussions that took place around the budget participation that should be granted to culture, and, finally, the attempts to create a bureaucratic organization and legal regulations in response to the limitations of the system evidenced during those years.