This excellent analysis, based on 170 volumes of trial records, affords a clearer understanding of the tenentes than anything that has appeared up to now. The author, who has also absorbed practically everything available in print—police reports, congressional debates, memoirs, newspapers—provides important insights into the political and social reality of São Paulo in the 1920s.
The tenentes, it appears, were wretchedly unprepared ideologically. They shared some middle-class ideas of moralization, and constitutionality, but were unable to express any substantive program of reform beyond the secret ballot, even when their adversaries asked them for their maximum demands. The officers, constrained by their sense of purifying mission, never conveyed their intentions to potential civilian supporters, who remained for the most part bewildered bystanders. Although the rebels spoke often of “Popular Sovereignty,” they intended some kind of dictatorial government to last at least until corruption could be eradicated from public office.
The rebels were in no sense opposed to the existing relations of class and property. Their sympathies were so profoundly elitist that they were willing to permit business as usual in the besieged city, the retention in office of local municipal politicians, and even long distance phone calls to Rio to permit bank clearances. Their opening of the warehouses to looting by the lower class was nothing more than an unthinking error, for which they were repaid by some scattered collaboration among the workers, and by the massive rejection of the rebellion by industrialists and merchants. The rebels clearly regretted the latter and actively restrained the former.
The identity of the rebels, in sociological terms, is not made clear. Indeed posting and location within the chain of command may have determined as much as anything else which officers adhered and which remained loyal. There are indications that the clearest civilian support for the movement came from white collar workers, professionals and middling functionaries. The selection of São Paulo was shrewd—the government’s secret police were most active in Rio, and earlier rebellions had been put down by forces originating in São Paulo. The plan was therefore to seize the Paulista capital quickly and move on to Rio. But the timetable could not be met and loyalist commanders proved at least as bright and energetic as the rebels. The ensuing bombardment of the city, a horrible example of the elitist authoritarianism of the Old Republic, caused 500 deaths and forced many adherents to the rebel side.
The author draws important conclusions from this inglorious raw material. The rebels were agonized by the clear inability of civilian politicians to carry out the spirit of the Constitution of 1891. Contradictorily charged by that Constitution with its defense, as well as the defense of the status quo, the army finally came to express violently the conflicts that rent the civilian establishment. Trapped within their shallow, merely tactical outlook, they could not accomplish a transformation they could hardly conceptualize. A more complete failure, tied to the crash of 1929, was necessary to engage elements of the civilian political order in a reformation of the political system.
