Brazil
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On the other hand, increasing state intervention meant there were more people employed in the government administration. Government workers abounded. The authors Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto – both civil servants themselves – described them satirically. Lima Barreto was highly critical of such sinecures:
On my first day of work at the ministry, I realized that all of us had been born to be civil servants […] I adapted so quickly that I thought myself destined to work for the State, with my limited grammar and terrible writing, in its mission to administer the progress and activities of the nation …82
It is significant that during the First Republic the agricultural export economy was not affected by the growth of the cities. On the contrary, the connection of the government with the system of coronelismo and the so-called ‘cattle vote’ (the rural population who voted according to instructions from the local coronel) neutralized the political voice of the new urban classes and allowed the government to continue to control the elections. It was difficult to be autonomous in this land of favours, of give and take. The system was far from liberal, there was no sense of collectivity even – perhaps especially – with regard to abolition. And certainly the idea that the Republic had been born of the citizenry was nonexistent. Political action was still highly dependent on the relationships between those in power. It was a system that can only be referred to as cronyism.
However, even prior to the First World War, autonomous groups, with no connection to agricultural interests, began to organize. There were several middle-class movements expressing discontent: florianismo, the 1909 campanha civilista (civilian campaign), protests against shortages, which spread from town to town, and the 1920s lieutenants’ uprisings, which took place all over Brazil. These revolts further destabilized the already fragile First Republic. In 1920 most army officers were of lower rank – 65.1 per cent were first lieutenants or second lieutenants and 21.3 per cent were captains.83 They had one foot in the army and one foot in society. The lieutenants, as they came to be known, believed Brazil needed a strong central government to intervene in the economy in order to develop natural resources, promote industry, and protect the country from foreign exploitation. They saw regionalism and corruption as the root of all the country’s ills. They were liberal on social issues, but authoritarian in politics. And in public, they behaved like military men, prepared to protect the country and destroy the power of the regional oligarchies. They also wanted to reduce social inequality and end illiteracy – but they did not know how to achieve their goals, nor how to create the country of their dreams.
And so they set out, virtually alone, to confront the government. The actions known as the ‘Copacabana fort eighteen revolt’ broke out in Rio de Janeiro on 5 July 1922. It was the lieutenants’ first uprising. And there were some dramatic moments: at the end of the rebellion in the fort,84 twenty-eight officers continued the revolt and, in hopes of immortalizing their protest, they marched along Avenida Atlântica to confront the government troops. This great avenue runs along Copacabana beach to this day. Ten of them abandoned the group along the way, leaving just the eighteen, who continued marching towards the gunfire. Only two rebel lieutenants survived – Siqueira Campos and Eduardo Gomes. The second revolt, the 1924 Paulista revolution, was the largest military confrontation that São Paulo had ever seen. Beginning on 5 July (the second anniversary of the ‘Copacabana fort eighteen revolt’), the military rebels occupied the city for twenty-one days.
In 1924 the revolt known as the Manaus commune broke out and spread as far as the region of Óbidos in the state of Pará. The region was destabilized as a result of a fall in the price of rubber, and there were widespread accusations of corruption in the administration. In an attempt to solve the crisis, the federal government offered more credit, which only increased the general level of indebtedness. The troops from the garrison in Manaus organized an uprising in the capital against the ‘constituted powers of the republic’. Like the other lieutenants, they saw themselves as the legitimate leaders of the people and demanded a reversal of the political and economic situation.
However, the lieutenants’ uprising with the greatest repercussion by far was the Coluna Prestes/Miguel Costa (Column of Luís Carlos Prestes/Miguel Costa), which swept the country between 1925 and 1927.85 Although the initial goal was to overthrow President Arthur Bernardes’s government, the movement had more far-reaching demands. Members of the movement demanded secret ballots, state school reform, compulsory primary education and the moralization of politics. They also denounced the exploitation and the wretched living conditions of the poor. The column was the union between the group of Paulista lieutenants (linked to Miguel Costa) and the mutinous troops from Rio Grande do Sul, under the command of Luís Carlos Prestes. Lieutenant Prestes symbolized the spirit of change that incentivized the lieutenants. He galvanized the support of the urban middle classes and became known as the Knight of Hope. Volunteers from all over the country flocked to join the ranks of the column. Over the course of two years and five months the column travelled 25,000 kilometres, crossing twelve Brazilian states. It had a fixed nucleus of around 200 men that grew to as many as 1,500 at certain points of the journey. In the cities where the column stopped, the reaction was mixed. While some people greeted them and saw them as saviours, others resented their arbitrary practices such as seizing horses and cattle without the owners’ consent and confiscating medicines, bandages and food in the small towns and villages.
The column avoided any confrontation with government troops by moving quickly. This was indeed its purpose: to maintain the movement as a kind of armed protest that appeared invincible. And the strategy was a success: they crossed the country from Mato Grosso to Maranhão and then returned by the same path, taking refuge in Bolivia in 1927. In the army, admiration for the rebels began to grow among the officers and the troops. Years later General Dutra86 recalled how the troops who were sent to combat the column would say to each other, ‘Let them through’.
THE REPUBLIC THAT WASN’T ‘OLD’
By the end of the 1920s, the First Republic was fragile and its achievements were mixed. On the one hand it would be remembered as the time of a boom in urban growth, industrialization and immigration. The first steps towards creating republican institutions were taken and the struggle for better working conditions began. On the other hand, it was a period of repression, of every kind of political fraud, of racist measures, and of the expulsion of the poor to the outskirts of the cities. With so many ambiguities, the Republic had become the scene of endless conflicts; cities were now considered centres for the activities of the ‘dangerous classes’ and for uprisings of the ‘lower orders’.87
The positive went along with the negative. These were the circumstances in the early phases of the institutionalization of the republican state and the struggle for better working conditions. Furthermore, to emphasize solely the process of social exclusion, which certainly occurred, would be merely to mirror the vision of the governing elites of the time. They considered anyone involved in rebellious behaviour as ‘anarchic hordes’. In fact, there were associations of very different types, frequently acting in an orderly fashion, collecting signatures and mounting public campaigns and organized protests. Perhaps this is the reason why the period is referred to as the Old Republic, a pejorative term created after the 1930 revolution. There are actually many reasons for the soubriquet and why it is still in use today.
The many political and social shortcomings of the regime partly caused the name to stick. But it is equally true that a process of democratization of Brazilian customs and institutions had begun to take shape. During the First Republic, various governing powers emerged, new electoral processes were developed, and early plans for full citizen participation in government were discussed. Thus, although the period was witness to many conflicts, to authoritarian governments that maintained their power by force, to states of siege and racial policies based on eugenics, it was also the period that
inaugurated the transformation of the cities into spaces where citizens could protest and debate.
This was by no means the first time that politicians and intellectuals of a new movement have claimed all the merits of the new system and relegated the old regime to backward anonymity. New movements tend to suffer from myopia when looking at the past, selectively choosing one point of view: their own. This was certainly the case of the 1930 revolution, and of the state that was immediately designated as ‘new’: the Estado Novo. According to this point of view, the true res publica was yet to come, as was a genuinely modern, moral and political society.
Although the country had welcomed the Republic as the harbinger of modernity, by the end of the 1920s many were disappointed, longing to discover true ‘Brazilian-ness’, to examine the country’s past and forge a new future. The literary critic Roberto Schwarz has commented that in Brazil everything seems to ‘start again from zero’ and that the nation is constructed by a process of subtraction.88 In other words, each context creates new ways of envisioning the country and attempts to eliminate those that existed before. The time had now come to discover what precisely defined Brazil, to search for models of national identity and to sow new seeds. And certainly the country’s attitude towards the mixed-race population needed to shift from a biological to a cultural perspective. The Brazil that emerged from early twentieth-century modernist projects was an ambivalent place. The past coexisted with the present; popular songs with classical music; folk literature with academic literature; modern methods of transport with donkey-drawn carts; an urbanized country with the vastness of the interior; social exclusion with the first moves towards social inclusion; cronyism with hitherto unknown processes for the creation of political and social institutions. Indeed, the men of the first generation of the Republic, who were born between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, began to rediscover the Brazil of the interior. Musicologists such as Mário de Andrade and Villa-Lobos, Indianists like Cândido Rondon, essayists, sociologists and historians like Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, sanitarians such as Carlos Chagas and Belisário Pena, soldiers like the lieutenants in the Coluna Prestes, all formed part of a movement that questioned and transformed attitudes, concepts and political behaviour. There was a movement built around the idea of ‘incorporating the sertões’. This meant embracing the Brazilians of the interior – so frequently represented as isolated, abandoned, ill, nomadic, backward, resistant to change, without any land of their own, but who are at the heart of the constant rediscovery of Brazil.
The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his book La Penseé sauvage, affirms that man is a classifying animal. First he classifies a phenomenon and then gives it a meaning and finds a use for it. ‘Old Republic’ was the name that stuck. It reveals how the Estado Novo politicians saw themselves in relation to their predecessors. Like Narcissus, they thought everything they could not see in the mirror was ugly. They did not see that this period, albeit controversial and ambiguous, was a positive experience insofar as there were struggles for rights, a new distinction between public and private spheres, and progress towards the recognition of citizenship. The street came to the fore in a bustling display of fashion, social life, newspaper boys, striking workers, political protests and manifestations of popular culture. First Republic is a more appropriate name than Old Republic. ‘First’ because, for better or worse, the Republic preceded the new state. And ‘First’ because, for the first time, exercising rights to citizenship came to the fore.
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Samba, Malandragem,1 Authoritarianism: The Birth of Modern Brazil
THROUGH THE VOTE, OR THROUGH ARMED CONFRONTATION: THE FIRST REPUBLIC WILL COME TO AN END
On 1 March 1930, on a carnival weekend, those Brazilians who could read and write went out to elect the next president of the Republic and the new federal deputies. This was to be the twelfth presidential election of the Brazilian Republic. The small number of voters – they were required to be adult, male and literate, amounting to just 5.6 per cent of the population – did not prevent the election from being as gripping and closely run as when Rui Barbosa had run against Hermes da Fonseca in 1910, twenty years earlier.2 Although Brazil had changed a great deal in the interim, and the candidates were new, the 1930 elections were in some ways reminiscent of that earlier dispute. The campaign took to the streets, spread throughout the states, and mobilized the country at political rallies – or ‘meetings’ as they were referred to at the time, in English. The popular engagement had brought two major issues to the fore: the rules and procedures for presidential succession and the policies of the republican government regarding social equality and citizens’ rights.
The elections of 1930 had all the feeling of the end of an era. The last president of the First Republic, Washington Luís, had abandoned the ‘governors’ policy’, endangering the tacit agreement between regional elites and the federal government. But no one expected him to interrupt the alternation of power between Minas Gerais and São Paulo by choosing the president of São Paulo, Júlio Prestes, as his successor.3 Washington Luís did not believe a republic was really governed by elections and votes; he thought governing required strict control of regional political forces. Until Júlio Prestes’s candidacy was launched in 1929, it had been business as usual: the regional elites controlled the state executives and, at federal level, power was distributed between the federal government and the states.
Washington Luís’s presidency had been uneventful, especially when compared to that of his predecessor, Artur Bernardes, who had governed for four years under a state of siege. The strong-armed tactics employed by the police against urban workers throughout the 1920s had reduced the number of strikes and weakened the trade unions. The ferocious opposition from the tenentes also seemed to have lost steam after 1927, when the last remaining participants in the Coluna Prestes/Miguel Costa, after crisscrossing almost the entire country, took refuge from the Brazilian troops in Bolivia and Paraguay.4
Washington Luís delayed the announcement of the official candidate for as long as he could. Throughout the First Republic, the unspoken agreement between the Union and the states meant that the winner of the presidential elections was a foregone conclusion: the president of the Republic nominated the official candidate, who received the full backing of the oligarchies throughout the country, making an electoral defeat all but impossible.
The presidential succession had become a ritual for the transference of power. It included a degree of political instability, but only while necessary adjustments were negotiated between Minas Gerais and São Paulo. The wheelings and dealings between these two states took place every four years amid a good deal of intrigue and tension. Yet it was precisely this arrangement that guaranteed stability. Between 1894 and 1906 the Paulistas had controlled the government, and between 1906 and 1918 the Mineiros had taken charge. Between 1919 and 1929 power alternated between the two states. In 1926, due to the instability during Artur Bernardes’s presidency, the Mineiros duly nominated Washington Luís to succeed to the presidency. Although born in Rio de Janeiro, he was a legitimate representative of the interests of São Paulo. And, just to be on the safe side, they appointed one of their own, Mineiro Fernando de Melo Viana, as candidate for vice-president.5 In 1929 the Mineiros awaited the return of the favour, meanwhile preparing to occupy the Palácio do Catete once again.6
Historians still debate why Washington Luís decided to risk everything by confronting the state of Minas Gerais. The president was a typical product of the system he helped to destroy. He was authoritarian, vain and averse to negotiation. He believed politics should be left to the restricted elite that controlled the electoral system and ran the country. ‘Listen? That was something he never did’, former deputy Gilberto Amado7 wrote in his memoirs. And he continued: ‘He had a complete lack of consideration for the effect of his words and actions on others. It never occurred to him that those he repelled and rejected could be hurt, resentful
, or react.’8
Although Washington Luís was undoubtedly arrogant, he may have had the best interests of the country in mind. He probably believed Júlio Prestes was the right man to carry out the plans for economic stability he had implemented during his government. The two main goals of the plan were to stabilize the exchange rate with the pound – at the time the standard reference for the international market – and to protect Brazil’s most essential commodity – coffee from São Paulo – from being constantly affected by fluctuations.
Washington Luis’s second consideration may well have been that, because São Paulo had become the richest state in the confederation, it should rule the country. He had a great deal of confidence in the dynamic economics of Paulista coffee production, as well as in the control of the Paulista coffee producers over state politics. And there was a third consideration: the potential conflict between the Mineiro and Paulista coffee producers over the policy for increasing the commodity’s value.9 Taking all of these factors into consideration, coupled with his having built a career as a statesman in São Paulo, Washington Luís may well have believed he could dispense with the agreement between the two states. After all, by then coffee production in Minas Gerais was on a much smaller scale than in São Paulo, where there had been significant economic growth. It no longer seemed reasonable to submit the interests of São Paulo, for a period of four years, to the wishes of an elite from a state that was more fragile, both economically and politically.
In May 1928 the president of Minas Gerais, Antônio Carlos Ribeiro de Andrada, immaculately turned out in top hat and tails, arrived for the inauguration ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro–São Paulo highway, a high point for the Washington Luís administration. He mounted the platform and took his seat beside the president of the Republic. The president’s inaugural speech left him aghast: with a complete lack of tact, Washington Luís welcomed Júlio Prestes (then president of São Paulo) as the ‘future president of the Republic’. Antônio Carlos Ribeiro de Andrada saw himself as an aristocrat, his family had fought for independence against the Portuguese, he was a direct descendant of José Bonifácio – and his reaction was typically Mineiro. He had understood everything, and said nothing. He returned to Belo Horizonte and began to conspire.10 A year later, when Washington Luís officially announced Júlio Prestes’s candidacy, Antônio Carlos Ribeiro de Andrada sent him a message informing him the Mineiros were already committed to another candidate – from the opposition.