by Baker Chris
The financial war is a very hard one indeed. Even experts contradict one another until they become hoarse…I have never experienced such a hardship; therefore if I have made a mistake I really deserve to be excused by the officials and people of Siam.32
Resentment spread to senior levels of the bureaucracy. The government reacted by drafting an anti-Bolshevik bill, but then modifying it to combat a wider range of dissident opinions. Serious offences incurred the death penalty. More papers were closed. Some journalists were intimidated with threats or violence. Immigration laws were used to deport many critics.
By early 1932, the government was bombarded with petitions from farmers and businessmen demanding new economic policies; the press and magazines were full of articles discussing reasons for the progress and decline of nations; and the coffee houses hummed with rumours of a political coup. A royal relative and minister suggested the king should adapt Mussolini’s plan of pro-Fascism education to rebuild support for absolutism, but Prajadhipok counselled that ‘fathers of schoolchildren now like badmouthing the king so much it has become a habit’, with the result that ‘the former popularity and credibility of the king is, I think, beyond revival’.33
By June 1932, the People’s Party had around a hundred members, just over half in the military. In the space of three hours on the morning of 24 June 1932, this small group of conspirators captured the commander of the royal guard, arrested about 40 members of the royal family and their aides, and announced that the absolute monarchy had been overthrown. The extent of resentment against absolutism ensured the coup’s success. People queued up to join the People’s Party. Business and labour groups welcomed the event. Messages of support flooded in from the provinces. Opposition was insignificant. There was only one minor shooting incident and no deaths. Pridi circulated a manifesto, which justified the revolution on the grounds of economic nationalism, social justice, humanism, and the rule of law:
The King maintains his power above the law as before. He appoints court relatives and toadies without merit or knowledge to important positions, without listening to the voice of the people. He allows officials to use the power of their office dishonestly, taking bribes in government construction and purchasing…He elevates those of royal blood (phuak jao) to have special rights more than the people. He governs without principle…The government of the King above the law is unable to find solutions and bring about recovery…The government of the King has treated the people as slaves…and as animals. It has not considered them as human beings.34
The Cabinet of princes was dismissed. Around a hundred royal family members and royalists were purged from the military and senior bureaucracy. On 27 June, the People’s Party promulgated a constitution that began, ‘The supreme power in the country belongs to the people’, and which created government by an assembly and a ‘committee of the people’.
The apparent ease of the takeover was deceptive. On the night of 24 June, the king and his entourage debated ‘whether to agree to the demands of the People’s Party or resist’.35 Military members of the entourage wanted to bring upcountry troops to besiege the city. The king vetoed any action that might cause bloodshed and decided to cooperate with the People’s Party. But the royalists also founded an organization dedicated to regaining control. They spread rumours that the revolution was a ‘communist’ plot. They visited western legations to petition for foreign powers to intervene against this ‘communist’ menace. The former police chief funded rickshaw drivers to strike and create disorder in the capital.
The People’s Party barricaded their office, took to carrying side arms, and proceeded cautiously. They apologized to the king for the demagoguery of Pridi’s manifesto. They agreed to the king’s suggestion that the constitution was only provisional and that he should participate in drafting a permanent version. They included 25 senior officials in the 70-member provisional Assembly and invited eight senior officials to form the first government. As its head they chose Phraya Manopakon (Mano) Nithithada, who had been one of the few non-royal members of the Privy Council, and whose wife had been a lady-in-waiting to the queen. The ‘permanent’ constitution appeared to grant more power to the king, and its promulgation on 10 December 1932 was stage-managed as a gift from the throne.
Behind this façade, the following three years saw a protracted struggle between the old order and the new. This struggle revolved around two related issues: property and the constitutional power of the king.
The Bangkok press claimed that ‘the property of each and every member of our royalty exceeds the capital stock of Siam’.36 It urged the new government to strip the royal and other aristocratic families of their land, and use this wealth to bail out the depressed economy. The government did not follow this suggestion, but prepared a bill for estate and death duties, while Pridi drafted an ‘Outline Economic Plan’ whose main proposal was a voluntary nationalization of all land.
These moves frightened the royal family. Prajadhipok wrote to a relative: ‘I’d like to have a real go at them (the People’s Party) but I’m somewhat afraid the princes would come off badly…We’re thinking of so many different plans of action’.37 The king responded to Pridi’s Outline Economic Plan with a long, dismissive essay equating Pridi with Stalin. During the drafting of the ‘permanent’ constitution, the king insisted that the monarch should appoint half the Assembly and have a veto over legislation, but Pridi successfully resisted these proposals. The king then worked on Mano and the other senior officials in the government to break with the coup group. Mano persuaded the Cabinet to reject Pridi’s plan, and sent troops to intimidate the Assembly to do likewise. When the Assembly refused to comply, Mano dismissed it on grounds that the plan betrayed ‘a communistic tendency…contrary to the Thai tradition’.38 Pridi was hustled into exile, and his supporters removed from the Cabinet. Two royalist generals were elevated to senior posts, and young People’s Party military officers were dispersed to the provinces. An anti-communist Act was rapidly passed, defining communism as any theory that ‘rests upon the total or partial abolition of private property’.
But Mano’s victory was short-lived. A month later, in June 1933, the young military officers in the People’s Party staged another coup, dismissed the Mano government, and purged several more royalists from the army. They again drafted senior officials into a new Cabinet, but chose with more care. They recalled Pridi from exile. The royalists again spread rumours of social disorder and foreign intervention. In October, a group of royalist officers, several of whom had been purged from the army by the People’s Party a few months earlier, staged an armed counter-revolt under the leadership of Prince Boworadet, Prajadhipok’s cousin and a pre-1932 minister of war. The group aimed to bring nine upcountry garrisons to besiege the city, but only three moved to the city’s northern outskirts while the others prevaricated. The city garrisons held firm to the People’s Party. Businesses and organizations offered money and volunteer services to help the defence.
Neither side much wanted a shooting war, and most of the salvoes were propaganda. The People’s Party put out radio broadcasts and leaflets damning the Boworadet forces as ‘rebels’ and ‘bandits’. In reply, the besiegers dropped leaflets on the city from aeroplanes, accusing the People’s Party of restraining the king. After an artillery exchange, the besiegers retreated to Khorat. A few days later, the leaders fled, mostly to Saigon. Twenty-three lives had been lost. The People’s Party arrested the stragglers and eventually jailed 230 people. Two retired senior military officers were tried and executed. A royal prince was sentenced to life imprisonment. Over the next two years, there were two more attempted counter-coups. After the first, two royal family members and 13 others were jailed.
The king sailed to the south as the Boworadet Revolt began. He gave no open support, but in the aftermath called for an amnesty. The People’s Party believed he helped in both planning and financing. Memoirs written later revealed this was true. After long negotiations, the king agreed to return to
Bangkok, but left within three months on the pretext of seeking medical treatment in Europe. While abroad, he refused to sign legislation passed by the government, including a bill that he believed would transfer control of the Privy Purse to the government, and subject the king to inheritance tax and a new penal code that reduced the royal prerogative. In response to entreaties for his return, he demanded large changes in the constitution to enhance the power of the throne, including a legislative veto. In March 1935, while still in Europe, he announced his abdication. The government decided that the legitimate successor was one of Prajadhipok’s nephews, the 10-year-old Prince Ananda Mahidol, then at school in Switzerland. For the next 16 years, Thailand had no resident, reigning monarch.
Progress and legitimacy
The defeat of the Boworadet revolt ended the period of open struggle. The People’s Party now had to demonstrate that its post-absolutist order could satisfy the aspirations of a changing society.
Over the 1930s the People’s Party divided into two groups, roughly identified with the civilian and military members and their respective leaders, Pridi Banomyong and Plaek Phibunsongkhram (Phibun). The two groups had different views on the role and purpose of the state that they had wrestled from the royalist grip.
Pridi’s thinking was formed by the French liberal tradition with a tinge of European socialism. The role of the state was to provide a framework within which individuals could ‘develop to their utmost capability’. That required the rule of law, a judicial system, help for the economy, and systems for education and health. Pridi attracted support among businessmen, labour leaders, and upcountry politicians who had high expectations of a more liberal state. Phibun and the military group, by contrast, tended to see the state as an expression of the popular will, with the duty to change the individual by education, legal enactments, and cultural management. Despite this contrast, the two groups cooperated reasonably well, in common fear of a royalist counter-revolution, until the Second World War.
For the Pridi group, the ‘progress’ that the state had a responsibility to achieve included economic progress. Against the background of the depression, traders, entrepreneurs, and farmers bombarded the new government with petitions for help. Governments around the world were drawn to intervene in their economies to combat the depression. Over the next few years, seven full economic plans were drafted and submitted to the new government, and several other proposals presented in the press.
The Outline Economic Plan that Pridi presented in 1933 had two main proposals. First, land would be sold to the state, which would raise its productivity by applying better technology, while all farmers would become salaried civil servants. Second, the state would start industrial and commercial enterprises to replace imports, using capital raised through taxation and through loans from a new national bank. These measures would meet the aspirations for Siam to ‘progress’ economically and draw the mass of the people out of poverty. They would also undermine the economic base that the royal family and some aristocratic allies had created over the past generation by using political power to acquire land and by using tax revenues to fund capital investments.
After the political crisis of 1933, this plan was quietly forgotten. Following Prajadhipok’s abdication in 1935, the Privy Purse was divided into Prajadhipok’s personal property and the Crown Property Bureau, which was taken under the Finance Ministry. But proposals to seize, purchase, or deplete aristocratic assets by taxation were shelved. Through the mid-1930s, economic ministers proposed schemes to help peasants survive the depression by forming cooperatives and promoting new sources of employment. But the political will and administrative machinery to implement such schemes were lacking.
The Pridi group concentrated on other forms of progress. Pridi completed the preparation of a modern law code, a project begun in the early 1900s but constantly delayed. The new code removed legal bases of aristocratic privilege, withdrew legal recognition of polygamy, and cancelled the requirement for parental consent of marriage partners. The People’s Party government increased investment in education, raising the number of primary school pupils from 0.7 to 1.7 million over 1931–39. Pridi spearheaded the foundation of a second university, named the University of Moral and Political Sciences (Thammasat), designed to train a new kind of bureaucrat for the post-absolutist age. The government also expanded local government, and increased spending on roads, hospitals, and electricity generation.
In 1935, Pridi travelled to London to negotiate lower interest rates for Siam’s foreign loans, and to initiate talks to renegotiate the mid-19th-century treaties that restricted Siam’s fiscal autonomy and granted extraterritorial rights to western nations. All these treaties were revised over 1937–38, after which Siam increased tariffs to protect local industries.
Pridi’s civilian wing thus made modest steps towards its new definition of ‘progress’. But its attempts to legitimize the new regime through popular representation were much shakier. Under the ‘permanent’ constitution promulgated in December 1932, half of the single-chamber Assembly was elected and the other half appointed. The Cabinet was theoretically responsible to this Assembly but could always dominate by manipulating the appointed half. In early 1933, a royalist group attempted to form a political party, but the king refused permission and attempted to outlaw all political parties, including the People’s Party. Later, MPs tabled several bills to allow political parties, but the government blocked them in fear that they would facilitate a royalist comeback. On the eve of the 1932 coup, the People’s Party leaders had sworn an oath of solidarity and, despite internal factionalism, negotiated each of nine changes of leadership between then and 1941 by internal debate behind closed doors.
Many groups that had enthusiastically supported the 1932 revolution became disappointed. Some businessmen were appointed to the Assembly and won the right to form a Board of Trade, but failed to convince the government to give more solid support to domestic entrepreneurs. Leaders of the Chinese community were distressed by signs of Thai ethnic nationalism, including regulations to restrict Chinese schools. Labour leaders were allowed to form the first labour associations, but when they lent support to a strike in the rice mills, the leaders were arrested and the associations suppressed. Dissident journalists who had helped to nurture the political atmosphere in which the 1932 revolution took place fared little better. Between June and December 1932, 10 newspapers were closed by government order, and more closures followed in 1933 and 1934, while government funds were used to support papers friendly to the People’s Party. In 1933, about 2000 monks from 12 provinces supported a petition for Sangha reform, but leaders of the movement were accused of rebellion and forcibly disrobed. In the wake of the Boworadet Revolt, the government passed an Act for the Preservation of the Constitution under which suspected dissidents could be imprisoned or exiled to the provinces without trial.
Pridi hoped to make nation and constitution a new focus of public loyalty. He spoke on radio, urging people to love the nation and preserve the constitution because it ‘fuses us all together as one unity’.39 A Constitution Association was formed in late 1933. Monks and teachers were recruited to explain the importance of the constitution to the people. Miniatures of the constitution were distributed to all provinces and honoured on the newly designated Constitution Day (10 December) in the same manner as a Buddhist image. Constitution Day was gradually elevated into the premier national holiday of the year, with parades, art contests, dances, and a Miss Siam national beauty contest organized by the Interior Ministry to find ‘a symbol of the goodness of our race’.40 In 1939, a Constitution Monument was completed. It was conspicuously the largest monument in the city, designed with symbols of Thai tradition, and placed in the middle of Chulalongkorn’s ‘royal way’.
Rise of the military
The young military officers who controlled the firepower gradually came to dominate the People’s Party. The original revolution, the second coup of June 1933, and the suppression of the Bowora
det Revolt depended on the ability of a small group of officers commanding the city’s battalions. After the Boworadet Revolt, the minister of defence argued that ‘keeping the peace’ had become the ‘single most important problem’ and hence soldiers ‘who existed for the nation alone’ had to be at the centre of politics.41 Despite financial stringency, the military demanded increased funds, secured 26 per cent of the national budget from 1933 to 1937, and doubled the number of military personnel.
Within this young military group, Phibun emerged as the leader and became minister of defence in early 1934. He argued that Siam possessed four basic political institutions – monarchy, parliament, bureaucracy, and military – of which only the military was ‘abiding and permanent’. The parliament, by contrast, could be ‘abolished through various events and causes’.42 The army set up its own radio stations, which broadcast Phibun’s slogan: ‘Your country is your house, the army is its fence’. Without the military, Phibun stated, Siam would be ‘effaced from the world’. His Defence Ministry commissioned a cinema film, Luat thahan Thai (Blood of the Thai Military, 1935), in which Siam is attacked by an anonymous foreign power, and the heroes and heroines abandon their romances to defend the nation.
Phibun and his group were attracted to other states that were rising on the basis of a strong, militarized version of nationalism. In 1933, Phibun had contacted the Japanese legation for assistance in the event the western powers intervened in Siam. Over subsequent years, this contact developed into broader sympathy and cooperation. In 1935, a Japan–Siam Association was formed, including several of Phibun’s group. In 1934, he inaugurated Yuwachon, a militarized youth movement modelled on the officer training corps found in the UK and USA. After he had sent one of his group who was half-German and German-trained to study the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, Yuwachon became more like the Hitler Youth.