No it's not misleading, Argentina began the 20th century as one of the most promising economic development cases and one of the wealthiest countries in the world per capita but ended up being one of the biggest disappointments of the entire century.

It had a large influx of immigrants from Europe in the late 1800s, rapidly increasing literacy rates as result of government programs, rapidly developing infrastructure. It had an agricultural export based economy closely tied to world markets which brought a great deal of prosperity to the country due to its vast, productive agricultural lands. The expectation in the 1900s was for Argentina to become the Latin American United States.

However a combination of bad luck and bad policies led Argentina to undershoot its expectations (though despite instability it is still one of the better of countries in the world). WWI and the Great depression led to protectionism which greatly disrupted international trade and therefore the agricultural economy Argentina depended on.

What followed was an attempt to industrialize the country through import substitution methods, which was carried out starting in the 1930s started to run out of steam in the 50s and 60s. High levels of protectionism limited competition and caused domestic industries to become noncompetitive and inefficient, leading to a situation by the 1980s in which industrial subsidies to prop them up had reached double digits as percentage of GDP.

The Argentine state was quite weak and proved itself unable to tame the three great national interest groups driving economic policies: the national bourgeois which sought continual protectionism to protect their own industries, the agricultural landlords which fought for greater integration with the world economy and against land reforms, and labor unions which sought higher wages. But the tug of war between those groups meant that the Argentinian state, which experiences frequent change in governments, was unable to articulate a rational, consistent economic policy. Oftentimes it swerved back and forth between different administrations within a matter of years.

In fact it often tried to pursue self-contradictory policy agendas, for instance at one point: it tried to pursue international competitiveness and reigning in inflation simultaneously despite the fact that lowering inflation rates meant revaluating the Argentine currency which led to less competitiveness. Argentina was never able to develop a competitive industrial sector and thus its economy fell behind that of many other countries which started out poorer than itself.

For a while Argentina was able to paper over the contradiction with foreign loans: but even then much of the loans was squander by the political and economic elite who often re-invested the money abroad for personal gains rather than in Argentina's own economy. This finally led up to Argentina becoming a major part of the Latin America debt crisis, its eventually default, implementation of IMF structural adjustment programs and ongoing economic crisis today.

Argentina is a good example of why resource endowment and "starting point" in the 20th century was less important than the strength of institutions and good government policy. A good contrast with Argentina would be South Korea: which had poor resource endowments and low starting point but much better institutions and government policies and ended up far more successful.

The other answers here are very good. I think something to remember is every country in 1913 had a much lower standard of living than developed countries enjoy today. In terms of poverty, post secondary education, access to health care or life expectancy no country from 1913 would be considered developed by our standards. Thus Argentina was one of the richest per capita countries in 1913 but every country was poor compared to today.