The Historiography of Brazil, 1889-1964: Part I

Modern Brazilian history has been the subject of a flood of publication in the last fifteen years.¹ Clearly it is too soon to make a comprehensive evaluation of this vast literature in the context of the previous bibliography.² What has been attempted here is an interim report on the principal historiographical trends evident in the recent study of the seventy-five year era between the fall of the Empire in 1889 and the military-civilian coup of 1964.

Principal emphasis will be given to the political and economic aspects of Republican history. Several important subject areas, such as social history and intellectual history, receive no separate treatment, not because they have failed to produce new interpretations, but because space limitations preclude any pretense of comprehensive coverage.³ Work on economic history, on the other hand, merits treatment in detail, both because of its exceptionally rapid growth and because of the implications of the new findings for all other aspects of Republican history. This article is divided into two parts. Part I, which follows, begins with a discussion of ideologies and assumptions. It then surveys political history, with separate sections devoted to the birth of the Republic, the “Old Republic” (1889-1930), and the periods from 1930 to 1945, and from 1945 to 1964. Part II, to be published in a subsequent issue, will cover state and local politics, labor and the Left, economic history, and foreign relations.

When the military conspirators and their Republican collaborators deposed Emperor Dom Pedro II in 1889, history writing was still in the hands of the amateurs. Although often talented, they lacked the opportunity to gain professional historical training. Equally important, most of their readers viewed history primarily as a literary exercise. Since the 1870s Capistrano de Abreu, Brazil’s first “modern” historian, had been pointing the way toward a more critical and conceptually sophisticated historiography, which he amply demonstrated in his pioneering publications on the colonial era. His example bore fruit only slowly, as institutional and cultural factors gradually promoted the professionalization of history writing during the course of the twentieth century.

The process was closely linked to the growth of a sense of national identity among the elite. It was an intense search for the essence of Brazilianness, which necessarily led to a reexamination of Brazilian history. One of the clearest expressions of this cultural ferment was the Modernist movement, usually dated from the São Paulo Modern Art Week of 1922. The exuberant Modernist leaders sought new artistic motifs in their country’s popular culture and past, and their iconoclastic attitude toward the established culture helped to reinforce the younger intellectuals’ attack on the style and assumptions of the prevailing historiography. Finally, in the 1930s, the emergence of formally organized universities began to give Brazil the institutional base for the training and support of professional historians.⁴

Much of the important bibliography on the Republic written since 1945 has come from economists, sociologists, and political scientists. Brazilian social scientists, as pioneers in their disciplines within Brazil, have often begun by investigating historical topics, in order to better understand institutions and social phenomena in the contemporary era. Since 1964 the personal and political risk incurred by any Brazilian probing contemporary socioeconomic and political phenomena has also tended to steer Brazilian social scientists toward historical topics, considered less likely to arouse the interest of the security authorities. Historians, in turn, have frequently adopted concepts and methodologies from the social sciences. The result has been a fruitful exchange between social scientists and historians, both Brazilian and foreign.⁵

An equally important development for historians in recent years has been increased access to document collections. By the 1960s a growing number of researchers were permitted to consult unpublished sources on post-1889 history in the Arquivo Nacional and the Arquivo do Ministério das Relações Exteriores (Itamaraty), although regulations for their use have sometimes been inconsistent. Private archives containing the papers of such important figures as Getúlio Vargas, Oswaldo Aranha, and Prudente de Morais have also been opened. Any substantially new understanding of Republican Brazil must rest on careful research in these documentary collections, a labor which is just beginning.

Finally, since the late 1950s, foreign researchers, especially from the United States, have contributed heavily to the scholarly analysis of Brazilian history.⁶ This development has perturbed some Brazilians, who fear that they may lose control over the writing of their own history. Yet most Brazilians have remained notably receptive, in spite of their understandable concern over the extraordinary degree of foreign interest.⁷

Studies of the historiography on the Republic have varied widely in coverage and depth. The process leading to the creation of the Republic is covered in Stanley Stein’s admirable study of the historiography of the Empire, which is essential reading for any student of the early Republic. In his Conciliagao e reforma no Brasil, José Honório Rodrigues, Brazil’s premier historiographer, argues that throughout Brazilian history the dominant classes have skillfully prevented or minimized any significant socioeconomic reforms—a feat continued through the Republic. At work was “a tradition of determined yet intelligent conservatism,” in the words of Stanley Stein. In a survey highly critical of modern trends in Brazilian historiography Rodrigues described the dominant motifs of Brazilian history as “conservatism and compromise, liberalism and conspiracy.” Recent surveys of modern Brazilian historiography by two younger Brazilians, Carlos Guilherme Mota and Roberto Amaral Lapa, stress the great influence on historians of contemporary events such as the sudden political turns in the coups of 1937 and 1964.⁸

Ideologies and Assumptions

Brazilian writing about the Republic has been shaped by the prevailing ideological assumptions in Brazil, which in turn have been closely linked to elite political views about the viability of the Republic itself. From the time of its founding in 1889, the Republic aroused sharply conflicting emotions. The most immediate battle was between Republicans and Monarchists. The latter included many talented intellectuals who directed a steady fire of criticism at the foundering Republic during the first decade after Dom Pedro II’s ouster. They argued that under the Empire difficult national problems (such as ending slavery and maintaining a strong credit rating in London) were finding peaceful yet successful solutions. In their campaign to discredit Republicanism and pave the way for a restoration of the house of Braganza, the Monarchists presented the portrait of a civilized monarch presiding over a harmonious society where order was maintained without repression. This picture stood in vivid contrast to the new regime, which they described as inept, selfish, and dangerously unBrazilian. Although their restorationist hopes had faded significantly by 1900, their nostalgic view of the Empire had an important influence on subsequent historiography. One of the clearest examples was Affonso Celso’s portrait of the magnanimous Emperor serenely accepting expulsion from the country he had served for almost fifty years.⁹

Despite the passage of many decades, the influence of this interpretation persists. Neither Dom Pedro II, nor his historical role within the politico-constitutional imperial system, have escaped the sentimentalized portrait that proved so appealing in the strife-filled early years of the Republic.¹⁰ Other monarchist polemics have had a similar influence. Eduardo Prado’s devastating attack on the first Republican government’s pro-United States policy set the tone for subsequent nationalist critiques of an “alienated” elite’s uncritical imitation of North American institutions and its resulting failure to protect Brazil’s vital economic interests.¹¹ Prado, along with Afonso Arinos, Carlos de Laet, Visconde de Ouro Preto and Affonso Celso, all represented a respectable precedent for later critics who agonized over Brazil’s failure to develop more rapidly as a strong and independent nation.

Comtian philosophy was another ideological influence on the interpretation of the early Republic. Although the direct influence of Positivism within the new Republican government was short-lived, it continued to permeate the ranks of Army officers. The “official” Positivist account of the Republic’s birth is found in the biography of Benjamin Constant, the officer-professor at the Rio de Janeiro Military Academy who helped convert so many army cadets to Positivism. The continuing influence of this doctrine among leading Army officers and the persistence of a Positivist historiography of the Republic can be seen respectively in the careers and biographies of General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, the explorer of the Brazilian interior and founder of the Serviço de Proteção aos Indios, and of General Tasso Fragoso, leader of the junta that delivered power to Getúlio Vargas in 1930.¹²

Although the Republic looked more stable after 1898, doubt about it remained the hallmark of commentary. At one end of the spectrum of criticism were liberal reformists, who believed Brazil could and should be governed through liberal democratic institutions.¹³ But from the early years of the 1890s, when regional revolts and urban agitation threatened the very unity of the country, liberals realized that changes were needed. The political reformers among them looked on the instability of the Republic—the regional revolts of the 1890s and the later federal interventions in state politics during 1910-1914— as evidence of the need for adjustments in political institutions. Extending the franchise or adopting a parliamentary system in place of the U.S.-style presidential one were among the more frequent suggestions. When the Revolution of 1930 ended the “Old Republic,” liberal reformists continued as an important force, but they faced increasing competition from the anti-liberals.¹⁴

The moral reformers, the other clearly identifiable reformist group, cast their critique in terms of values—personal and collective. They agreed that liberal democratic institutions could only work if the elite achieved a true leadership role in promoting the common good. Ruy Barbosa, the towering but flawed orator-politician, was the liberal moralist par excellence. It was a position that appealed greatly to the expanding urban middle sector, strongest in São Paulo.¹⁵ The moralist streak also influenced the rebellious younger military officers (the tenentes), whose vague political ideas often came down to an appeal for the traditional elite to rededicate itself and its heirs (presumably including the officers) to a more modern leadership role. Not surprisingly, many spokesmen endorsed the liberal reformist viewpoint in both its political and moral forms.

By the 1920s liberal reformers faced a growing challenge from other critics, who argued that liberal democracy was an alien system whose malfunction was dangerously weakening the country. These “anti-liberal nationalists” extended from the extreme of nationalist authoritarians on the Right to social revolutionaries on the Left.¹⁶ The Rightist wing proved stronger. It included many of the political and economic elite who feared possible popular mobilization in the fast-growing economic centers such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The most important pre-World War I precursor of Rightist authoritarianism was Alberto Tôrres, the disillusioned Republican politician-jurist, who advocated the adoption of some corporatist innovations while still speaking from within the liberal democratic school. But the tone of Tôrres’s criticism of Republican political incompetence, coupled with his attack on foreign economic interests, made him a bridge to the outright anti-liberalism of his younger followers, of whom Oliveira Vianna was the most articulate and widely read. Jackson de Figueiredo and Azevedo Amaral were other prominent anti-liberal intellectuals of great influence.¹⁷

The rightist position got its systematic formulation in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Its advocates moved toward authoritarianism out of a fear that liberal democratic institutions could never give Brazil the strong government needed to direct its development. Even worse, those institutions might fall under the control of “Bolshevik” leaders commanding a mass following. The more farsighted bankers, lawyers, merchants, military officers, and industrialists realized that the survival of their rule required a dual strategy of material concessions for the organizable urban workers (minimum wages, health care, retirement pensions), and repression for the dissenters and their few followers.¹⁸ The intellectual foundation of this strategy depended on the anti-liberal historiography that had undermined the legitimacy of liberal democratic principles and thereby prepared the way for acceptance of authoritarian methods.¹⁹

After the Revolution of 1930 the Rightist anti-liberals grew bolder in translating their historical views into political action. Oliveira Vianna became an important policy maker who helped draft the laws on labor union regulation and social welfare programs. In the mid-1930s the militantly anti-liberal Integralist movement gained wide support among the middle and upper sectors. The logical climax to the loss of faith in liberalism was the coup of November 1937 and the authoritarian Estado Novo which followed.²⁰

The other extreme of anti-liberalism was the radical nationalist attack from the Left, although it was far less influential before 1945 than the ideas of the Rightist anti-liberals. During the Old Republic systematic critique from the Left was limited to a handful of figures, such as Anarchist professor of law Joaquim Pimenta and the sardonic civil rights lawyer Maurício de Lacerda. Only after 1945 did Marxism become a significant influence on Brazilian historiography, although Marxian ideas, as well as Communist organizational efforts, were gaining influence among the elite in the 1930-1945 era.²¹

With the end of the Estado Nôvo in 1945 there was a rapid growth in writing on the history of the Republic. As the military withdrew support for the Vargas regime in 1944-1945, the representatives of democratic liberalism reentered the political arena. The Constitution of 1946 was their new conquest, as Brazil swung from the highly centralized Estado Nôvo back toward the federal model of the first Republican constitution. Not surprisingly, liberal reformist assumptions once again prevailed in historical writing on the Republic, while the authoritarian Rightist theoreticians virtually disappeared. But the most notable post-1945 trend in ideological influence on history writing about the Republic was the spread of radical nationalist ideas among the elite. They predominated in most of the Brazilian attempts at a systematic analysis of the 1889-1945 period, such as those of Nelson Werneck Sodré, Leoncio Basbaum, and Edgard Carone, although the Marxian influence has been far less evident in the monographic literature. During the same years the social sciences, especially economics, political science, and sociology, have grown rapidly in Brazil. Scholars trained in these disciplines have developed new methodological approaches and are no longer forced to choose between the traditional political historiography (essentially liberal reformist) and the rigid application of Marxism. On the other hand, their works sometimes betray an uncritical faith in functionalist assumptions, especially in those of scholars most influenced by the U.S. academic ethos. A recent antidote to that naiveté has come in the form of the “dependency” model, which Brazilian social scientists such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Hélio Jaguaribe, and Theotonio dos Santos have been leaders in elaborating. The application of the dependency model to the analysis of Brazilian history has thus far proved disappointing, however, seldom going beyond a highly schematic set of assertions.²²

Political History: General

The political history of the Republic is usually divided into three principal periods: 1889-1930 (the “Old Republic”), 1930-1945, and 1945-1964. Relatively few attempts have been made at a single interpretation of the entire 1889-1964 era. One is the four-volume work by Leoncio Basbaum, a political activist who was purged from the Central Committee of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) in 1934.²³ His skepticism about the PCB gives his third and fourth volumes an interesting perspective, although his analysis often suffers from a mechanical application of Marxist class analysis. He sees the Empire as incorporating the rule of sugar planters, who then ceded power to the coffee planters, the dominant sector of the “Old Republic,” who in turn lost power vis-à-vis the industrial bourgeoisie after 1930. The proletariat is seen as having been diverted from political power by repression, preemptive social welfare concessions, and the incompetent “sectarianism” of the Communist Party. Basbaum finds constant pressure on Brazil exerted by the foreign capitalist powers—first England and then the U.S. Nelson Werneck Sodré, another heterodox Marxist, has published two widely read survey histories that cover the Republic. His approach suffers from a similar rigidity, although his História da burguesia brasileira, a more detailed work on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offers much statistical data and bibliography.²⁴

The most widely consulted general history of the Republic is that of José Maria Bello, who had been an active politician during the Old Republic.²⁵ The coup of 1930 prevented his inauguration as governor of Pernambuco and ended his political career. Bello’s historical approach was largely limited to a description of politics on the federal level. His own views were clearly liberal reformist, and he often reverted to an analysis of personalities (Pinheiro Machado, Ruy Barbosa, Getúlio Vargas) to explain historical turning points. Bello’s História remains useful as a reference work on political history, although its explanatory value has been steadily diminished by the rapid growth of more detailed works that probe the social and economic bases of Republican history. Other attempts to interpret the entire era, from 1889 to 1964, have come in one-volume histories of Brazil by U.S. scholars, designed for use in North American college classes. Researchers will find the volumes by Rollie Poppino, E. Bradford Bums, and Donald Worcester valuable largely for the manner in which the authors choose to link institutional changes, especially political ones, with long-term economic and social forces.²⁶

From Empire to Republic

The persistence of a romanticized interpretation of the Empire can be explained in part as a reaction to Republican exaggeration of the Emperor’s power. The Republicans had been able to organize easily, while the Crown showed little resistance to the military conspiracy. The imperial political system had been neither as oppressive as the Republicans charged, nor as benevolent as the Monarchists claimed. Why, then, did the Empire fall? Until recently the conventional explanation centered on three issues that had shaken the Empire during its last two decades—slavery, military indiscipline, and church-state strife. Conflict over each was said to have undermined the Crown’s support among the planters, military officers, and clergy.²⁷

Since the early 1960s a strongly revisionist campaign has been underway in the interpretation of 1889. In his detailed two-volume study of the Empire’s demise, Heitor Lyra downplayed the supposed alienation of the planters and clergy, while giving great weight to the military opposition. George Boehrer pointed to the evidence that had already rendered the traditional interpretation dubious, building upon his own research on the Republican Party from 1870 to 1889, the church from 1840 to 1889, and the church’s putative role in the overthrow of the monarchy.²⁸ In two important articles Emilia Viotti da Costa gave her explanation of the kind of data needed to document the structural “contradictions” apparent in the late imperial politico-economic system. She noted that the emerging revisionist interpretation would perforce stress socioeconomic forces, especially the growth of an urban middle class, as had been emphasized in the earlier pioneering studies by San Tiago Dantas and Aliomar Baleeiro. Richard Graham has contributed notably to the revisionist interpretation by hypothesizing, on the basis of preliminary evidence, that the landowners embraced the Republic “to avoid what seemed to them an even greater disaster than abolition: land reform.”²⁹

An obvious consensus exists on the need to revise the traditional interpretation of the Empire’s replacement by the Republic. There is no shortage of hypotheses, but none can be confirmed without extensive research in primary sources. It is all the more fortunate, therefore, that a subtle and superbly written synthesis on the Empire from 1861 to 1889 by Sergio Buarque de Holanda has recently appeared. His account also stresses the central role of the military. It would appear that the revisionist analysis of the Empire’s fall may lead back to an examination of the institutional basis of military politics, as well as the social and economic forces at work. The prerequisite for further progress in understanding the late Empire will be a new and thoroughly documented investigation of the imperial system as it was consolidated after Dom Pedro II’s accession in 1840.³⁰

The “Old Republic”: 1889-1930

In 1889 the victorious Republicans set about the task of decentralizing government and increasing the political power of the electorate. Their work yielded unexpected results over the next four decades, as Brazil began to undergo industrialization fueled by the profits of the rapidly growing coffee economy. The relationship between this economic development, with its attendant social transformation, and accompanying political change is the most important and yet incompletely explained aspect of the Old Republic.

Edgard Carone has made the most valuable contribution toward an explanation. His strengths are an impressive grasp of the printed sources and a continuous effort to understand the economic and social forces at work. Analysis of these has been given in a separate volume, with sections devoted to the economy, social classes, the military, and political and constitutional institutions. Carone earlier published a collection of documents from each of these subject areas, thus furnishing scholars and students a readily accessible entrée to the era. Political history has been separated from Carone’s treatment of economic and institutional developments, thus leaving the integration of the two largely up to the reader. The author’s adherence to a Marxian and, often, dualist approach takes him into areas of class analysis where he poses important questions for further research.³¹

Soon after the Revolution of 1930 there appeared two essentially narrative surveys of political history during the Old Republic. Sertorio de Castro, a journalist, produced a lively chronicle of national politics, with frequent quotations from contemporary politicians, while Dormund Martins, a medical doctor and a former Carioca government official, emphasized how the armed rebellions had steadily eroded the legitimacy of the Republic since 1914.³² Two other works of the early 1930s analyzed the Old Republic from sharply differing political perspectives. In a work written just after the coup of October 1930, José Maria dos Santos offered a passionate defense of the “liberal monarchy,” which had been replaced by “republican tyranny.” Santos denied that Brazil had experienced a revolution in 1930. Rather, it was merely an alteration in the method of political succession, an inevitable result of having adopted the presidential system in a country for which it was ill-suited. Maurício de Lacerda agreed that Brazil had not yet experienced a social revolution. He spoke from experience, since he had been one of the few Congressmen prepared to consider revolution. An outspoken defender of civil liberties during the Old Republic, Lacerda warned against the “two extremisms of the century—fascism and communism,” and argued for “a joining of the social and political lefts” in order to prevent the liberals or the conservatives from perverting the Revolution of 1930 to their own purposes. Lacerda’s analysis of the political options Brazil faced in 1930 stands as a prophetic historical document.³³

Our understanding of the operation of political institutions during the Old Republic is very incomplete. What was the relationship between political participation and political parties? How did important interest groups, such as the coffee growers, bring influence to bear on state and federal government? How much power did the national Congress or the federal Supreme Court wield? Recent research has helped begin to answer these questions but much remains to be done.³⁴

The years between 1889 and 1902 were critical for the new Republic, yet their study by Histórians has been rather scant.³⁵ The Republican strategy behind the elections for the Constituent Assembly of 1890-1891 and the first decade of Republican politics has to be deduced primarily from the memoirs of leading Republican politicians, such as Campos Salles, or the biographies of others, such as Prudente de Morais or Bernardino de Campos. The key role of Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca, father of the coup of November 15 and first president of the Republic, is clearly depicted in Raymundo Magalhães Júnior’s carefully documented biography.³⁶ Yet we lack a comparable work on Marshal Floriano Peixoto, the “Iron Marshal,” who succeeded Deodoro in 1891. Monarchist critics quickly charged that this military government would degenerate into caudilhismo, but Floriano gave the lie to that prediction when he presided over the election and inauguration of Prudente de Morais, the first civilian president.³⁷ The new political system was consolidated by a de facto consensus among the leaders of the Republican political machines in the most important states—Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco. The Republican machines of each state (which varied greatly in their local strength and leadership) were tacitly given carte blanche internally, in return for supporting the President on questions of national politics.

The years between 1902 and 1909 have usually been seen as the high period of the Old Republic. Political stability prevailed (meaning, in effect, that the state Republican party machines faced few serious challenges) and Rio de Janeiro was given the urban facelifting which Brazil’s elite hoped would make it comparable to the prosperous Europeanized facades of Buenos Aires and Mexico City. The political leaders who earned credit for these changes were Rodrigues Alves and Afonso Pena, leaders of the Republican forces in São Paulo and Minas Gerais.³⁸

In 1909 the “politics of the governors” began to malfunction seriously, as the state leaders failed to reach agreement on the presidential succession. Minas Gerais Governor João Pinheiro, the consensus candidate for the 1910 presidential election, died in 1908. Incumbent President Pena’s own death the following year cut short his attempt to arrange the nomination of another mineiro, Finance Minister Daví Campista. Instead, Pena’s own War Minister, General Hermes da Fonseca, finally emerged as the official candidate and was duly elected. He was opposed in the election campaign by Ruy Barbosa, the Bahian Senator who attempted to tap the discontent of the liberal reformist voters, especially in the major cities.³⁹ The best analysis of Hermes da Fonseca’s turbulent presidential term is given in Chapter Six of Joseph Love’s skillfully architected monograph on Rio Grande do Sul’s role in national politics from 1882 to 1930. By focusing on Pinheiro Machado, leader of the Riograndense Congressional delegation in Rio, and Borges de Medeiros, the autocratic governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Love explains quite effectively the functioning of the national political system.⁴⁰

The question of how Brazil reacted to World War I and how she adjusted to the immediate postwar years has gotten more attention from the economic Historians (discussed in Part II of this article) than the students of political change. For 1914-1918, the presidency of Wenceslau Braz, the bibliography is limited either to contemporary apologias or the superficial study by Darcy Bessone.⁴¹ For Epitácio Pessôa’s term (1919-1922), the situation is almost as bleak, despite the great importance of the period. Pessôa was the first President from the Northeast, and he used his power to launch the first large-scale federal program to alleviate the catastrophic effects of drought in that region.⁴²

The military proved to be the most devisive force during Pessôa’s term. Army revolts punctuated the entire decade of the 1920s and merit a separate, if brief, discussion here. Officer discontent burst into the open when rebels launched a mutiny at Copacabana Fort in Rio de Janeiro on July 5, 1922. Histórians have often tried to discern a single program of the military rebels, tenentismo, but in fact there was no monolithic position.⁴³ The revolts—Copacabana Fort in 1922, Rio Grande do Sul in 1923-1924, São Paulo in 1924, and the epic march of the “Prestes Column” from 1924 to 1927— have generated a large body of memoirs and polemical pamphlets. In his excellent study of the “Prestes Column,” Neill Macaulay has made use of a wide range of sources to convey the flavor of back-country guerrilla adventures. Macaulay argues convincingly that “in 1927 Brazil wanted heroes but not a revolution.” Genuinely radical leaders, such as Luís Carlos Prestes and Miguel Costa, made little headway among their fellow officers or with the Brazilian bourgeoisie. Tenentismo was never a unified movement, and the fate of its leaders over the next four decades must be seen in the light of their widely divergent ideological goals. Most were satisfied to trim their ideas in return for positions of power within elitist regimes after 1930.⁴⁴

There has been little attempt to explain the institutional background of the military dissension that wrecked the Old Republic. A starting point for scholars will be a careful study of the memoirs of officers. An important contribution toward the analysis of military politics has come from José Murilo de Carvalho, who carefully examines the evolution of the federal army’s strength vis-à-vis the state militia. The first two volumes of Hélio Silva’s ambitious history of “the Vargas era” contain important documentary material on political conflict of the 1920s, including the military, but offer little interpretation.⁴⁵

As for other aspects of Epitácio Pessôa’s presidential term, one significant development was the eruption of an emotional nationalist campaign, often directed against Portugal, and the influence of Portuguese merchants in most of Brazil’s largest cities. Since these nationalists, such as Alcibíades Deiamare and Jackson de Figueiredo, were contributors to the influential rightist authoritarianism described earlier, we need to know more about their relationship to the Pessôa presidency and its brand of nationalism. The same could be said of domestic social policy and the response to working-class organization when Brazil, like Argentina and Chile, suffered a series of strikes in 1917-1919 which were unprecedented in their scope and militancy.⁴⁶

Repression became the hallmark of the presidency of Arthur Bernardes (1922-1926), whose term began in the shadow of the tumult created by the publication of the notorious forged letters, purportedly containing threats by Bemardes against the military. The election campaign of 1922, poisoned by increasingly ugly distrust between military and civilians, had deepened the divisions among the national political leaders. For the second time since the civilians assumed power in 1894 (the first had been in 1910), the official nominee was opposed by a dissident group, now calling itself a reação republicana. An understanding of the divisions within the established political elite of the Old Republic is essential for understanding the Revolution of 1930 and the political alignments of the three decades which followed. Analysis has unfortunately been restricted either to general accounts, of which one of the clearest and most informative is by Carone, or to biographies of such leading figures as Bemardes and Pessôa.⁴⁷

The bitterness generated by the government reaction to the military rebels has heavily influenced the historiography about the 1920s, which has been dominated by liberal reformist critics of the Old Republic. Contemporary defenses of Bemardes, pamphletic in style, have been followed by other favorable studies based on the president’s papers.⁴⁸ Bernardes’s successor, Washington Luiz, was nominated and elected in an atmosphere of deceptive calm in 1926. The persistent political divisions became evident in São Paulo, where the founding of the Partido Democrático in 1926 signalled growing opposition to the established Paulista party (PRP).⁴⁰ Most conspicuously lacking in the historiography of the later Old Republic is any well-documented research on the socioeconomic bases of the political divisions that made possible the Revolution of 1930.

1930-1945

The era between 1930 and 1945 has come to be known, conveniently and misleadingly, as the “era of Vargas.” Yet an undue concentration on Getúlio’s personality and supposed motives can produce a distorted and imbalanced picture. The tumultuous years from the Provisional Government of 1930 to the authoritarian coup of 1937 have received increasing attention, although a well balanced synthesis must await further research in unpublished sources. An excellent overview, covering economics, social classes, and politics, is offered in Carone’s A República nova (1930-1937). Carone has also published a collection of documents with cogent introductory notes. It is done in the same format as his A Primeria República, which covered 1889-1930. Hélio Silva’s successive volumes on the years between 1930 and 1937 include a wealth of detail that awaits digestion and intelligent use by other Histórians. The best-documented study of the political radicalization, which helped end the liberal reformist hopes (as incarnated in the Constitution of 1934), is Robert Levine’s The Vargas Regime: The Critical Years. Although Levine had access to unpublished personal papers—such as those of Vargas and Oswaldo Aranha—and access to records of DOPS (political police) in Rio de Janeiro, additional documentation on this complex and important period will undoubtedly be forthcoming from other research.⁵⁰

The Revolution of 1930 impressed its contemporaries as a seminal event, and the outpouring of analysis and memoir literature was appropriately vast. Among the most profound was that of Barbosa Lima Sobrinho. An important guide to the historiography of the Revolution of 1930 is given in the incisive volume of Boris Fausto, who argues convincingly that when the coffee growers lost their politico-economic dominance in 1930, the initial result was a power vacuum. Since the “industrial bourgeoisie” was far from ready to assume power, what emerged was an ideologically hybrid state. The largely abortive efforts at revolutionary mobilization in 1930 have been little studied, with the exception of Peter Flynn’s account of the “Revolutionary Legion” in Minas Gerais. An interesting attempt to specify the political data that would be needed to verify or deny the best-known interpretations of the 1930 Revolution has been given in a cogent article coauthored by Celina do Amaral Peixoto Moreira Franco.⁵¹

In-depth analysis of the struggles among the disparate elements that had so recently united against Washington Luiz and his would-be successor, Júlio Prestes, must await research in government and private archives. The most dramatic clash was in São Paulo, where the Provisional Government in Rio accomplished the impressive feat of uniting against it the several warring elements of the Paulista elite, whose regionalist amour propre erupted in the “Constitutionalist Revolution” of 1932. Most writing on 1932 came from Paulista liberal reformers who sought to legitimize São Paulo’s rebellion by proving that Vargas had betrayed the Revolution of 1930 and was bent on humiliating São Paulo.⁵²

After the end of the São Paulo revolt in September 1932, major national movements emerged on the left and right. Most important on the right was Integralism, insightfully analyzed by Helgio Trinidade, who incorporated into his monograph much biographical information gathered in personal interviews with surviving Integralistas. Other research has shown the significant support given the Integralists by high church figures who saw the movement as a possible means of strengthening the church.⁵³

Mobilization on the Left culminated in the Aliança Nacional Libertadora (ANL), in which the best organized force was the Brazilian Communist Party. The federal government’s repression of the ANL in 1935 was followed by the disastrously unsuccessful military revolt of November 1935, engineered by the PCB. I have related the story of the revolt and Ronald H. Chilcote’s excellent history of the PCB puts it into the perspective of party history. Robert Levine has made the most satisfactory attempt to present an overall view of the political radicalization of the mid 1930s.⁵⁴

The history of the authoritarian Estado Nôvo, launched in November 1937, has yet to be written. One of the most incisive works on the period was by Karl Loewenstein, who concluded that the regime, although authoritarian, was neither totalitarian nor fascist. Since Loewenstein’s coverage extended only to 1941, his work is of no help in understanding the important policy innovations of the 1942-1943 period.⁵⁵

To analyze this Brazilian era is perforce to answer many fundamental questions about twentieth-century Brazil. Is a democratic participatory system or an authoritarian dirigista system more compatible with Brazil’s political tradition? What social and economic forces lay behind the coup that began the Estado Novo? And the coup of 1945 that ended it? Did the latter merely restore a liberal patina, while the semi-corporatist structure, created after 1930, continued functioning? I stressed the discontinuities in Politics in Brazil, while Philippe Schmitter has argued that there may have existed “some elective affinity between Brazil’s delayed-dependent developmental context and authoritarian rule in the 1930-1945 period.” His logic leads to seeing the 1945-1964 period as an interlude before outright authoritarian government became necessary again in the mid-1960s.⁵⁶

A wealth of unpublished source material awaits the researcher who focuses on the 1930-1945 era. The need for caution in reaching conclusions after an incomplete search of the sources is highlighted by the revision to which John Wirth’s study of trade and steel policy has been subjected by Stanley Hilton. In two of his three case studies (trade and steel; the third was on oil) Wirth pictured the higher military as a principal lobbying force behind the creation of a Brazilian steel plant, and as relatively disinterested in trade policy. Both theses have been modified, as Wirth acknowledges, in the light of Hilton’s detailed documentation from unpublished sources.⁵⁷

Much investigation of institution building during the Estado Novo remains to be done. Lawrence S. Graham has shown how Vargas used authoritarian powers to create a merit-oriented federal civil service (DASP), which suffered a loss of professionalism at the hands of the patronage-hungry politicians who came to power after Vargas’s ouster in 1945. Hélio Silva’s volumes on the Estado Nôvo, not yet complete, are closer to a documentary collection than an interpretive history.⁵⁸

The interpretation of Vargas’s role is as difficult as interpretation of the Estado Nôvo. His career in national politics spanned almost four decades, and his repertoire of roles was startlingly large. It included positions as Finance Minister in the Washington Luíz government, Governor of Rio Grande de Sul, Provisional President of Brazil, President elected by the Constituent Assembly of 1933-1934, self-appointed president from 1937 to 1945, then elected senator for five years before his final return to Catete Palace in 1951 as the popularly elected President. Only Getúlio’s last presidential term was gained by a direct popular election. Vargas had moved from the role of a promising young product of a political machine during the Old Republic to a populist in the 1950s. He was a supremely political personality with an extraordinary ability to adapt his ideas and leadership style to the era. Significantly, however, Vargas had neither the charisma nor the vanity of a Perón; his suicide in 1954 left a country divided, but less deeply embittered than Argentina after Perón’s ouster in 1955.

The only scholarly biography of Vargas, by J. W. F. Dulles, is a useful reference work based largely on printed sources and supplemented by interviews with surviving contemporaries. The approach is that of a chronicle, and there is little effort to relate Vargas’s turbulent career to the economic and social forces of his era. The personal memoirs of the president’s former aide, Luiz Vergara, and talented daughter, Alzira Vargas do Amaral Peixoto, give only enough biographical detail to tantalize the reader.⁵⁹ A balanced, in-depth portrait of Vargas must await careful research in the Vargas archive and the private papers of his more prominent collaborators, such as Oswaldo Aranha, Artur de Souza Costa, and Góes Monteiro, as well as the extensive government archives. In the meantime, historical judgments about the Vargas era will continue to depend on the memoirs of Getulio’s contemporaries. Among them none played a more critical role than General Góes Monteiro, whose dictated recollections give only a hint of what historians may hope to find in his personal papers. Other memoirs include those of João Neves da Fontoura, the gaúcho who also gave detailed background on pre-1930 politics in Rio Grande do Sul and the formation of the Aliança Liberal, General Pantaleão Pessôa, Chief of the Army General Staff in the mid-1930s and João Café Filho, Getúlio’s vice-presidential running mate in 1951, whose role in the conspiracy to depose Vargas in 1954 has remained much disputed.⁶⁰

One of the least studied but most important features of the Estado Nôvo was the system of political police and censorship. It was a natural target for the liberal reformists, who hoped to discredit Vargas by associating his methods with European fascism. The organization and coordination of the police, state militias, and federal military, for example, must be analyzed in order to understand how social control was maintained. Documentation in this area is obviously difficult to obtain, but until it is explored we are likely to underestimate the importance of police terror and harassment in maintaining the façade of public order.

1945-1964

The “democratic era” of 1945-1964 is closer to our own day and is correspondingly more difficult to place in historical perspective. Most Brazilian opinion-makers, since they identified themselves with liberal reformism, have regarded 1945 as the moment of return to the quest for a viable participatory democracy, although the Constitution of 1946 excluded half of the adult Brazilian population by attaching a literacy requirement to the franchise. The confrontation between Vargas and his liberal reformist enemies in 1944—1945 had more long-term significance than Histórians have yet succeeded in explaining.⁶¹ Brazilians have produced relatively few detailed historical analyses of the entire 1945-1964 era, hardly surprising in view of the closeness of the period, complexity of the events, practical difficulties of research and political sensitivity of the subject. Among the attempts are the essays by Octávio Ianni and L. C. Bresser Pereira, who stress the virtual inevitability of a political crisis because of the incapacity of the economic model to maintain itself.⁶²

The 1945-1964 period saw a deepening struggle between the “populist” politicians, whose opportunities were enlarged by the rapidly expanding political participation after 1945, and military officers, who feared that popular mobilization might come under the control of revolutionary leaders. To analyze that process requires considerable attention both to the constant economic pressure resulting from rising domestic inflation and to an increasingly unmanageable schedule for repaying the foreign debt. Emphasis must also be given to the radicalization of views among the “middle sectors,” who in the early 1960s grew increasingly fearful of the revolutionary potential of the urban lower classes.

Their fear was reflected in the reaction to Vargas’s return to power in 1951. He was still seen as the “ex-dictator” by the liberal reformists typified by the UDN party leadership and O Estado de São Paulo, the leading conservative newspaper. In truth, Vargas had skillfully adapted to the new electoral system by combining support from the PSD and the PTB, the two major parties he had helped to found in 1945. The Vargas presidency from 1951 to 1954 proved turbulent as Getúlio sought to maintain an uneasy equilibrium between orthodoxy and nationalism in economic policy, the most important and also the most complex aspect of his government.

The historical interpretation of Vargas’s final presidency and the crisis leading to his suicide in 1954 is a key to an interpretation of the entire 1945-1964 era.⁶³ To what extent was Getúlio an early “populist?” How did interest groups influence his attempt to accelerate industrialization under the leadership of a dynamic state sector? How did foreign creditors, customers, and investors constrain Brazilian choices? What forces were at work among the military? What role did military officers play in setting limits to civilian political behavior? Were the political parties capable of representing group interests and at the same time maintaining coherence of action?

These and many more questions arise. They are all relevant to the entire post-1945 era, yet a careful look at the literature on the 1951-1954 presidency shows how few have received detailed analysis. Did the particular circumstances of Vargas’s exit in 1954 merely postpone the political showdown for another decade? If so, a close examination of the period from 1945 to 1954 should have first priority.

Because political parties lacked a clear ideological focus and exhibited lax party discipline, observers have tended to overstate the importance of individual leaders. In fact, analysis of electoral data and congressional behavior of the parties can reveal much about how the widely differing levels of economic development were reflected in politics. The sources for the study of the three major parties are copious, as can be seen in the case of the UDN. The “equilibrating” role of the PSD has been analyzed by Lúcia M. Lippi de Oliveira, who gained valuable insights from interviews with former party leaders.⁶⁴ Excellent analysis of the connection between voting patterns and such variables as region and socioeconomic stratification has been done by Gláucio Ary Dillon Soares. One of the most difficult patterns to interpret was the practice of electoral alliances that often seemed to unite political enemies.⁶⁵ Recent studies have also shown that between 1945 and 1964 the federal legislature played a central role in government, a fact often given too little weight in analyses concentrating on the president’s powers.⁶⁶ No discussion of the 1945-1964 period would be complete without reference to “populism.” Adhemar de Barros, governor of São Paulo and the leader of a personalistic party (PSP), which made him a power on the national scene, has often been seen as an archetypical “populist” leader and obviously deserves further study.⁶⁷

Students of modern Brazil have differed over the relative importance of interest groups in the political process. Philippe Schmitter concluded that the formally constituted “representational associations” have little direct influence on the formulation of government policy, although their weight is sometimes felt when laws or regulations are applied.⁶⁸ Yet surprisingly little research has been done in the form of historical case studies. One exception is the struggle in 1951-1953 to create Petrobrás, the state oil-drilling monopoly. Another exception is the building of Brasília, one of the best-known accomplishments of the Kubitschek presidency. The planned new capital was accompanied by the rapid growth of unplanned “squatments,” which added an air of unexpected reality to the futuristic site.⁶⁹

Other important groups in the political process include peasants, the church, and the military. The increasing political mobilization of the rural population, which proved to be an important factor in the polarization that culminated in the coup of 1964, has been the subject of extensive analysis.⁷⁰ The same is true for the church, whose role in modern Brazilian politics had been little studied until recently. Notable contributions are Eul-Soo Pang’s survey of the role of priests in Northeastern politics, from 1889 to 1964, and Margaret Todaro Williams’s work on the Liga Eleitoral Católica. In analyzing the changes forced on the church by its reactions to the political crises since 1950, Thomas Bruneau has traced Brazil’s departure from the close church-state relations created in the 1930s. Since the 1950s the radical wing of the church has gained the most attention. The Catholic Left’s brief taste of power in the early 1960s was followed by a dark era of repression that revealed how the institutional weaknesses of the contemporary church greatly limit any effort at promoting social change.⁷¹

The military before 1945, like the church, has seldom been analyzed from the standpoint of its institutional evolution. Murilo de Carvalho’s excellent study on the “destabilizing power” of the military during the Old Republic is, therefore, a pioneering and important work. In his influential monograph on the evolution of the military’s political role from the “moderating pattern” of 1945-1964 to the military government as it was consolidated after 1964, Alfred Stepan has paid special attention to how officers were influenced by, inter alia, service in the Brazilian Expeditionary Force in World War II (FEB), the ideas promoted by the Higher War College (ESG), and the frustrations suffered during successive military interventions between 1945 and 1964. Only by a careful analysis of such factors will it be possible to understand the central role that the military played in the postwar world.⁷²

(Part Two of this article, to be published in a subsequent issue, will draw on other areas in which recent research has been extensive. A brief sampling of work on state and local politics will be followed by more extensive surveys of writing on labor and the Left, economic history, and foreign relations.)

Author notes