This book is a study of the ideology of the Paulista oligarchy from 1926 to 1932, that is, from the founding of the Partido Democrático and Vargas’s appointment as finance minister under Washington Luís to the eve of the “Constitutionalist Revolution,” which pitted São Paulo against the Vargas dictatorship in Brazil’s only twentieth-century civil war. Ideology is defined as “a representation of reality that the Paulista oligarchy wished to impose as an absolute truth, in order to maintain its hegemony and privileges” (p. 32). That Antonio Gramsci’s work provides the theoretical underpinnings will be no surprise. “Oligarchy” is defined with respect to the latifundium-based coffee-export complex, though the author correctly notes that it is difficult to make distinctions between its urban and rural sectors, so heavily overlapping were the family ties and assets.
The problem—to study the oligarchy’s ideology through its changing views of Getúlio Vargas—is made operational by examining the editorials and other commentaries of three “oligarchic” newspapers—the Correio Paulistano, organ of the Partido Republicano Paulista, the ruling party in São Paulo during the Old Republic; the Diário Nacional, organ of the PD, the well-financed opposition party in the state; and the Mesquita family’s Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo’s leading newspaper and a strong supporter of the PD.
Pacheco Borges discovers that Vargas had a good press in São Paulo from his brief tenure as finance minister at least through the early months of 1931. Of course, the Correio’s plant was destroyed in the Revolution of 1930 and the PRP was banned from public activity; and O Estado preferred to criticize Vargas’s interventors in São Paulo, in the hope of influencing the policies of the dictator in Rio. The author does show, however, that the oligarchic press wanted to believe in Vargas in these years: the Correio blamed Governor Antonio Carlos of Minas Gerais, not Governor Vargas of Rio Grande do Sul, for the succession crisis of 1929-30, and O Estado blamed Interventor João Alberto, not the dictator, for failing to succor the fazendeiros in 1931.
In her discussion of the struggle to control coffee policy in that year, the author notes that the Diário began to attack the government most stridently when the PD failed to take over the Coffee Institute. Of the three papers, the Diário was apparently most ardent in its support of coffee. In 1931, the PD organ echoed coffee growers in condemning any state aid to manufacturers, and this fact supports Boris Fausto’s thesis that the PD lacked interest in industrial development. O Estado was less fulsomely procoffee, censuring only “artificial” industries, which in the era meant those for which raw materials had to be imported. The Correio was proindustry (and of course procoffee) in the late 1920s, but we cannot know how hard it would have come down on coffee’s side in the worst months of the 1931 crisis.
The study concludes with the resurrection of the PRP and its “fusion” with the PD in a united front against Vargas in February 1932. For the author, this turn of events, brought about in part by the fear of communism and fascism within São Paulo, establishes “the central thesis” that “the Paulista oligarchy was divided only at the level of political struggle: it was based on the same ideology and had the same interests”(p. 183). Wasn’t this, however, the premise as well as the conclusion?
