José Honório Rodrigues has contributed much to history and historians in the course of a brilliant career. Prominent in the list of his extensive publications are the works of historiography, a field José Honório pioneered in Brazil and for which he is perhaps best known to the historical profession worldwide. Also important are the edited collections of documents, which developed from Professor Rodrigues’s life-long concern for making the sources of Brazilian history available in order to improve teaching and research. Starting with his early, prize-winning study of the Dutch in Brazil, his historical writings touch on important topics in the nineteenth century, especially imperial institutions. His writings also include extended essays on the Brazilian national character, international relations, and a number of polemical works in which his extensive journalistic pieces, political essays, and commentaries are anthologized. Prolific, broadly influential, and engagé are words that capture something of the style of a Brazilian intellectual who has long been at the forefront of his profession as well as engaged in public discourse on important issues of the day.
This interview results from two days of conversation with José Honório on November 7 and 8, 1982, in his library at the apartment on Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro. This locale, where so many of his friends and students have been received over the years, is home base for a man who values his early training abroad and his many international contacts, but who is also profoundly attached to Brazil. In the interview he reveals a strong sense of place. Indeed, this Brazilianness, in such marked contrast to the cosmopolitan styles of some leading Spanish American historians profiled in the HAHR, is a source of inspiration to him as well as a key to understanding his work and the quality of his imagination.
In the interview, one senses his conviction about the central importance of history to policy formation and public life in a country now coming up for air after a long infatuation with technocracy. When José Honório began his career in the 1940s it was still the conventional wisdom that Brazil had no history or, if it did, that foreigners would write it better than Brazilians. As the father of Brazilian historiography, José Honório more than anyone has laid this old prejudice to rest. As academic administrator, on the lecture circuit, and in the press, he has tried to make history accessible to the literate public as well as to the specialist. That history is not only relevant, but vital, to understanding Brazil and the Americas is a conviction he has worked to apply, whether lecturing at the Brazilian Foreign Office, or collaborating on the História de la América project in Mexico, or teaching on one of his frequent visiting appointments in the United States.
In sum, his is a large career, accessible through a bibliography impressive in range, scope, and quality, and presented here in a most stimulating interview.
John D. Wirth: To begin, we would like to know something about your origins, your family, and your training; and then to move to your professional activities as researcher, writer, archivist, and professor.
José Honório Rodrigues: I was born in Rio de Janeiro on the Rua do Catete, which was one of the main streets, close to the (then) presidential palace, the Law Faculty, where I received my degree, and not far from the Clube de Regatas do Flamengo. My uncle was a great booster of the club, where I rowed and swam and became a fan of the Flamengo soccer team. With the exception of the beach, which I dearly love, to tell the truth, to this day nothing holds me like soccer by Flamengo.
I am very much a Carioca. On my maternal side, I am descended from the Telles de Menezes, founders of the city, a family that during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and the early nineteenth centuries enjoyed a certain prominence in Rio. The townhouses of the Telles family were located in what is today the Praça 15 de Novembro, near the royal palace. One of these housed the Senado do Câmara, which would correspond to the Câmara de Vereadores. The municipal archives were kept there. Today, all you can see that dates from this era is the Arco do Telles; everything else has been torn down. But in this respect, I am very much a part of the city, and from my father’s side as well. I was named Honório because all of us, my father as well as my brother, were called Honório in homage to Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão, the Marquês of Paraná. This makes me somewhat of a Mineiro, doesn’t it? A little Mineiro, though I feel much more and above all a Carioca.
The family thereafter was middle class. My father was a businessman and had no interest in the intellectual life: he left that to me, and I made my own career. At that time there was no faculty of history, only the professional schools of law, medicine, and engineering. I enjoyed history in secondary school and at the Law School I studied history much more than the law: only enough of law to pass the exams! What really intrigued me were the social sciences, and history most of all. Fortunately, I had professors with broad cultural backgrounds who encouraged studies beyond the field of law, studies of culture in general or of history. One such professor was Edgardo de Castro Rebelo, who is still revered as a great teacher. Completing my degree in 1937, I received a prize from the Academy of Letters for my historical study of the Dutch in Brazil. This was further encouragement to continue my historical researches.
In 1942 I went to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship arranged by the Assistant Director for Humanities, William Berrien, whom I had met here in Rio. Still today I feel indebted to Berrien for this opportunity to train as a professional historian at Columbia University, and doing research in Washington, D.C., Chicago, at Harvard University, and in Providence, Rhode Island. This training in the United States has marked my intellectual development ever since. At the time the dominant influence on Brazilian historians was French, and this was as true in Rio as it was in São Paulo. When the first Faculty of Philosophy was inaugurated in Rio, I attended several courses given by French professors, including the historian Henri Hauser. William Berrien chose three Brazilians for training in the United States; Matoso Camara, who became a major philologist in Brazil; José do Prado Valadares, a museum specialist who died tragically a few years later in the same air disaster that claimed the life of the historian Octavio Tarquínio de Souza; and myself. We three left together at the height of World War II.
I think my experience in the United States during 1943-44 was decisive in consolidating my vocation as a historian. At Columbia I trained under Frank Tannenbaum and was exposed to North American research methodology. When I was studying in Rio, there were courses in Ancient History, Medieval History, Modern and Contemporary History, the History of Brazil and America, but nothing on questions of methodology, theory, the philosophy of history, or research techniques. No one at the Law School did research. At Columbia I audited courses and was surprised by the emphasis on historiography, woven as it was into the course work and lectures; this had a great impact on me. I also followed Tannenbaum’s advice. He told me I was already a historian, with a clear calling; that what I needed was not to study history but to research and write it.
JDW: So, your interest in historiography really began in New York.
JHR: Yes. That is to say, in New York I was exposed to all of the approaches that I can now say, without false modesty, I was the first to introduce in Brazil; again, this is thanks to my United States training. In the United States, I also made a survey of the most important libraries that specialized in Latin America. I visited all the big collections—the Newberry Library in Chicago, for example—and became familiar with all the Brazilian materials, especially colonial, in United States repositories. All told, I spent one academic semester at Columbia and another on the road visiting libraries. This was the essence of my training.
When I visited archives and libraries in Europe later, I could really see the difference. From then on I always told my students: If you don’t know the United States’ libraries and archives, then you don’t know libraries and archives, because Europe only has caricatures of what archives and libraries should be.” It is organization and efficiency, not a question of resources, in which Europe is, of course, very rich. It happens that they are not as well organized and classified as those I visited and worked in, in the United States.
Later, in 1950, I received a fellowship from the British Council to go to England, where I visited Oxford, Cambridge, the University of London, the London Institute for Historical Research, and the British Museum. Thus my education—and I would like to emphasize this was an Anglo-American education. This was so different from the training of other Brazilian professors of my generation, the great majority of whom were under strong French influence, when they were not directly trained by the French.
JDW: Perhaps another difference is that most historians in your generation began as journalists, whereas you really started as a professional historian.
JHR: You could say this, although I have always enjoyed journalism. Upon returning to Brazil, I wrote articles for Assis Chateaubriand’s O Jornal, vigorously advocating the establishment of modern teaching slots, for courses in methodology, research, and historiography. To my surprise, I found that Argentine universities already had such a chair, with a course called Introduction to the Study of History. Rómulo Carbia’s Historia crítica de la historiografía argentina had appeared in 1939. This enabled me to argue that Brazil was behind the times, and in several journalistic pieces I began actively to espouse advanced training in historical studies. My campaign bore fruit: disciplines essential to the training of professors were established in Brazil.
When I returned from the United States, I went to work for Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, director of the publications division of the Instituto Nacional do Livro, in the building of the National Library. He had a great influence on me, not only because of the Brazilian and foreign works he urged me to read, but also because of my prolonged contact with him. A few years older than I, he was a veritable walking classroom. Because he was a very introspective person, Sérgio never felt entirely comfortable in a formal teaching situation—when lecturing, for example. But he was truly inspired in less formal settings—in conversations one-on-one; and in the bar, with a drink in hand, he relaxed and became the master he was.
From Sérgio I learned to be an unconditional admirer of Capistrano de Abreu. Capítulos de Historia Colonial was in fact the first Brazilian study to go beyond what the French call évènement, to achieve an interpretive approach unbounded by facts, using only those strictly necessary to locate important developments. He also explored aspects of social history that simply did not exist in the Brazilian histories of the time—the formation of the family, the daily life of ordinary people. I also admired old Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, as well. In fact, I have always considered Varnhagen and Capistrano the two great masters of Brazilian historiography. As for myself, I preferred the colonial period, having been influenced by reading Varnhagen and Capistrano, but also by my contacts with Dr. Rodolfo Garcia, then director of the National Library (INL), a working historian who knew a great deal about colonial history.
Years later, when I was putting together the first history of the Council of State, and drawing upon very rich and hitherto unexploited documents for the Imperial Parliament, it occurred to me that it was Capistrano, in a few key passages, who also set the agenda for the writing of parliamentary history in this country. Not only his great history, but also his correspondence (three volumes of which I published) taught me a great deal. In his voluminous correspondence, he was always engaged in research, asking colleagues in Europe for documents, discussing research problems. The whole programática of Brazilian research is set forth in these three volumes.
At the INL it was not only Sérgio who influenced me, but also other scholars who were publishing historical studies, including Padre Serafim Leite, whom I came to know intimately and who had a direct influence on me. Padre Serafim was full of good advice. He told me something that I have never forgotten, and I pass it along always to my students. “When a scholar reaches the point in his researches where he believes he should stop, then that is where he must stop, and start to write. If he doesn’t start to write then, he may never start; instead he will become dominated by the material. When understanding of these materials has matured sufficiently, the investigator must start writing, even though he might make errors. After all, others will come along to cover whatever gaps and mistakes may exist.” This was a truth I always follow. I have never allowed the documents to dominate me; instead, when I reach that particular point of understanding, I put pen to paper. This explains my productivity. I also owe much to Portuguese historiography: Fernão Lopes (the great cronista), Diogo do Couto, and Alexandre Herculano were the three Portuguese historians who influenced me most.
In 1946, Sérgio left the INL for São Paulo to direct the Museu Paulista. I myself left the INL for a short time, but soon returned to take up Sérgio’s post, as director of the Division of Rare Books and Publications, which included manuscripts and iconography. So I became conversant with the research section of the National Library—with the manuscripts, rare books, microfilm section, iconography, map collection, and so forth. From there I moved to direct the National Archive, in 1958.
JDW: Can we say that your interest in preserving documents and in publishing documentary collections began at the National Library?
JHR: Certainly. I stayed on as one of the directors of the National Library until 1958, when I received two job offers. This was a decisive juncture in my life. Oliveira França, who was Director of the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo, asked me to inaugurate a new chair with a course called “Introduction to Historical Studies.” With Sérgio now at the USP, I was very interested, but Oliveira França made the offer in a curious way that I will never forget, and in a way that was typical of Brazilian culture at that time. We chatted a bit, and then he turned to me and said: “We do want to start a course on historical methodology, to be called ‘Introduction to Historical Studies.’ But what we wanted was a French professor. Since we can’t get one, we’ll invite the best Brazilian, and that’s you.” It was really incredible! In the same breath, he was both praising me and tearing me down; that is to say, he considered a Frenchman the best, but since he couldn’t get the best, he would settle for the prata da casa, for the national, for me.
At just that moment Victor Nunes Leal, Head of the Civil Household for President Kubitschek and a close friend of mine, invited me to head the National Archive. My wife, Lêda Boechat Rodrigues, was working at the Supreme Court, nearby. (Her pioneer study of the Brazilian Supreme Court is still the best and only one we have.) I was really torn between the two opportunities, and couldn’t make up my mind. I went to São Paulo several times, and Professor Oliveira França offered every inducement. Finally, I opted to stay in Rio, and I directed the National Archive almost until the military coup in 1964. (Actually, it was João Goulart who fired me.) This more or less accounts for my professional development during the years of public service, and I published a great deal. These duties never impeded my own research, nor did they prevent my writing several books.
JDW: Did you have other options during your career?
JHR: Yes. During the 1960s I received almost every year invitations to lecture, to conduct seminars, or to give courses in universities of the United States, and I was Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 1903–64 and 1966, and at Columbia University in 1970. I used to say to Lêda, my wife, that the North American universities and North American government were preparing future Brazilianists and that in the future the invitations would not come so easily because they would have their own specialists. In 1966, at the close of my course in Texas, I received by telephone in one morning two invitations. One was from SUNY-Stony Brook: to be a full professor, with tenure, at a salary of US$ 22,000. When in the afternoon I told my students about this invitation, one of them, a captain in the army, exclaimed: “Ouch, Professor. This is the salary of a four-star general in the United States.” I refused because I thought that as a Brazilian historian I should live in my own country, believing that only in this way would I be able to understand my country and all its developments. What I could not know, and did not consider, was that Brazil had started in 1964 a military dictatorship that has lasted almost twenty years. Had I been aware of this possibility, I would never have hesitated to accept a full professorship in the United States. Still, in my house in Rio, almost every night I received North American students and professors, some of them friends of mine and others entirely unknown to me. As Lewis Hanke wrote me in 1965: “Certainly the result will be an improvement in the writing of the history of Brazil by non-Brazilians.”
JDW: Your career as a historian has seen many phases, beginning with the books on the colonial period, followed by, first, studies of historiography, and, second, books of essays on issues of public policy. We would like to know a bit more about these phases of your intellectual life.
JHR: Well, when I returned from the United States in 1944, I was still very young, not yet thirty, but I had three books in my head. It is scarcely believable, but you know I still haven’t finished all those projects. I had already published A Ciυilização Holandesa no Brasil. At this time I was still concentrating on colonial history, and I put together A Historiografía e Bibliografía do Domínio Holandés. That is to say, I began monographically. After my United States sojourn, however, I wanted to write a methodology of Brazilian history, of which there was none available. I hesitated a good deal about the title, finally settling on Teoría da Historia do Brasil. Introdução Metodológica. Today this work is in its fifth edition, having had some influence on the initiation of methodology courses in our universities.
In 1953 I wrote a very small book called Brasil. Período colonial, which Silvio Zavala published in Mexico. It was very well received in the United States and France. Zavala then invited me to write something on historiography, and I produced a historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, published only in Spanish. Notice that I was already making a combination, on the one hand, of disciplines not yet taught in Brazil, and, on the other hand, of historical research, starting with the premise that studying the colonial period is of utmost importance for understanding Brazil.
Consider that the United States was born a century after Brazil, and achieved its independence fully fifty years earlier. Brazil, therefore, had a very long colonial experience, a time of serving others and not ourselves, something most prejudicial to the national interest. It is what Fernand Braudel calls the “longue durée.” Yet few of the Brazilianists [foreign scholars working on Brazil] and still fewer Brazilians research the colonial period today. You can’t just will away 322 years of history, years that still weigh heavily on the nation. You don’t sense this in the United States; and the Southern Cone nations—Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile—are not as marked by the colonial experience as is Brazil.
Immersed in scholarly research and publishing, in 1955 I was invited to take the course at the Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG), and this—like my studies in the United States and England—became a very important factor in my intellectual development. For the first time, I realized that I was not just studying the colonial period; I was also making a contribution to the country, a country with enormous social and economic problems. Despite what one might assume, the ESG at that time had a very open scholarly environment. All opinions were heard. There I listened to Dorn Helder Câmara speak on the problems of the church. In short, I learned about all Brazil’s contemporary social problems at the ESG. This was at once something new for me and a renewal: I learned that history cannot chronicle the dead; it must serve the living and it must be so written.
JDW: And it was at the ESG that your important book Aspirações Nacionais was born. The ESG was a sort of national elite seminar in which you participated, and the book came out of it.
JHR: Exactly. That is, Aspirações Nacionais appeared as well as Conciliação e Reforma. The first is a book of lectures, since in my second year at the ESG I was invited to stay on as a lecturer. Thus I entered a new phase of my career, in which I tried to use history to meet the needs of the present. As the philosopher Ernst Cassirer put it, all depends on the questioner. How you ask the question determines how the documents will respond. It is the aspirations, the problems, the disturbances, the concerns, the preoccupations of the present that require history to be rewritten. And history is reinterpreted in response to the new questions being raised. I saw how necessary it was to ask new questions of the nation’s problems. And from this point on appeared such books as Conciliação e Reforma-, Interesse Nacional e Política Externa; Brasil e Africa; and Vida e História. With respect to all these problems, I wanted to show how history ought to, and can be made to, contribute toward constructing the present.
JDW: What historians had the most influence on the development of your thinking at this time?
JHR: I was greatly struck by Geoffrey Barraclough’s History in a Changing World (1955) when it came out, because he was moving on the same course—in his case, from medieval to contemporary history. This was a problem I was grappling with: how to leave the colonial period without abandoning it, to make this history serve the present. Who can really maintain that the only way to serve the present is to study working-class movements, for example, in the early 1900s? This is not so. Choose a colonial problem that still persists today, whose effects continue to prejudice the country’s development, and you can explain many of the bad things that are holding us up.
I met Arnold Toynbee when I was in London in 1950. I was introduced to him by the wife of Robin Humphreys, who worked with Toynbee at Chatham House. Toynbee was another important influence on me since he was preoccupied with this same problem of historical relevance. He told me: “I would never have written A Study of History had I not already written the Survey of International Affairs. I have to connect my studies of the past with the concerns of the present. Thus I can study Greek Hellenism and the present, and make the links.” Toynbee, even more than Barraclough, made me want to tie past to present. And from this perspective, I really wanted my books in the field of Brazilian history to raise contemporary problems and to study these problems at their historical roots.
JDW: Speaking of historical themes, do you think Brazil has the elements of a liberal tradition? One thinks of the great figures in modern history, about José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, José Maria da Silva Paranhos (Barão do Rio Branco), Getúlio Dornelles Vargas, and certainly of the generals of today; and it might seem that the conservative tradition is stronger. We are on the eve of very important national elections. How does one make a balance between the liberal and the conservative traditions? And how do the people enter history?
JHR: Of course, there have always been two currents, liberal and conservative. José Bonifácio himself was a conservative, though we might call him a liberal conservative. The two tendencies coexisted during the empire, with Dorn Pedro II acting as a moderating force. He performed this balancing act many times—making and unmaking governments. The liberals and the conservatives never grasped the fact, and I mention this many times in my books, that they were, in effect, a unified group.
Brazil’s great defect does not lie with its people. Over and over again, the Brazilian people have demonstrated a sense of tolerance, humanity, and Christianity. They are a great people, without pretensions. The great defect is found in Brazil’s leadership. Note the historical differences here between the United States and Brazil. The United States had great leadership in constructing the nation; Brazil had only Jose Bonifácio. From the standpoint of leadership, the empire was a period of lost opportunities; likewise the republic. The liberals always complained about Dom Pedro, but in reality he helped them to share power with the conservatives, evening the political score.
All of Brazil’s social revolutions were met with an iron fist and fire. All were destroyed. Not that attempts at conciliation were not made when the fighting started. Consider my Conciliação e Reforma. But whenever there was a great falling out, the iron circle of power was opened only to individuals who could be useful to the government; the people were excluded, although they always received something. This traditional pattern of conciliation broke in 1964. There would be no more conciliation: adversaries were no longer adversaries but mortal enemies, to be treated not as dissidents but as foreign enemies. The same thing happened in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay. A Brazilian could no longer profess a different view without being considered as an external enemy. This is the essential point.
JDW: This is the doctrine of internal war.
JHR: Exactly, and this doctrine came from the United States. The security doctrine really perverted the Latin American nations, put them on the wrong track, at least in the Southern Cone. Brazil was the first, and the rest followed suit.
JDW: As a historian, do you think Brazil is entering a democratic phase based on the new civil society everyone is talking about, and is this civil society based strongly enough to compel, or at least to influence, a new politics?
JHR: I believe so. We seem to be entering a phase of conciliation between the military and the new sociopolitical forces coming out of the cities, from the workers and other groups. Many new social forces have appeared in the last nineteen years. Thus, there has to be a conciliation. Yet the essential difference from the old conciliation about which I have written and the new is that the military, the conservatives, now must make much larger concessions. Consider the studies of Padre Fernando Bastos de Avila and the books of Rubens Vaz da Costa, who created the new slogan “social debt.” Brazil’s main problem is this social debt, not the foreign debt. We must face up to the great national problems—education, health, housing, poverty. To do this, much greater concessions must be made to the people, that is, by opening the circle of power, than were made during the empire and the republic. This may well be the path of conciliation between the generals and the opposition forces, with a greater concession to the Brazilian people, especially to the new social forces.
JDW: We are interested in your current publications, as well as your long-range projects. What are you doing at this time?
JHR: I am pleased to see Brasil e Africa appearing now in its third edition. I just finished an introduction to Discursos Parlamentares de Carlos Lacerda, another introduction to a book commemorating the centenary of Senator Cândido Mendes, and still another introduction to a biography of Guilherme Guinle, the industrialist. Aside from these, Conciliação e Reforma has just come out in a second edition, and I have also published a series of journalistic essays entitled História Combatenŧe. Included in this collection is my piece on “generalismo presidencial,” an article that was banned a decade ago, or should I say that the Folha de São Paulo lacked the courage to print during the censorship? I included also a banned article on the role of chance in the historical process. In fact, this was a critique of Antonio Delfim Neto, the all-powerful minister of planning, who tried to eliminate the role of chance. Another piece in this category is my essay “Presidente, a Tropa e a Nação,” which concerns the period of Pedro I. My goal here was to demonstrate that the military must always be subject to civilian authority. The Senate has published my book called O Parlamento e a Evolução Nacional (one volume of introduction by me and seven volumes of texts), followed by my O Parlamento e a Consolidação do Imperio, volumes in the series I started with that book on the Council of State.
JDW: Given the range of your recent publications, could it be said that you are entering a new phase, or are you instead making a summation of all your work?
JHR: No, I’m not sure that I am completing or entering a new phase. You will recall that I returned from the United States in 1944 wanting to write three books. Two of these projects I have completed: A Teoria da História do Brasil, which was my introduction to methodology, and A Pesquisa Histórica no Brasil. But I have yet to finish my third project, A História da História, although I am almost through the second volume. When you reach my age, you begin to see your goals contract, realizing that you must reduce your projects. I intend first to finish my book on Brazilian historiography. I want to say that I have been most stimulated by a very close historian friend of mine, Francisco Iglésias, one of our best minds. Iglésias always insists: “Zé Honório, you must finish that book on historiography.” And so I will work on this A História da História project full time. It will probably run to four or five volumes. The second volume will be called A Historiografía Conservadora; the third will focus on liberalism; the fourth on positivist historiography; and the final volume will deal with realism and socialism. I consider Euclydes da Cunha and Capistrano de Abreu to fit the category of realist historians. The socialists include many of my contemporaries, like Caio Prado Júnior and Nelson Werneck Sodré, a good many of whom, though not all, are Marxists. Here, then, is the plan of this work. Carrying it through is one of my goals.
Another project is to publish a collection of selected documents for teachers of Brazilian history, along the lines of the collections I saw at Columbia University years ago. This could run to five or seven volumes, divided into colonial, monarchical, and republican history, with other volumes on economic, diplomatic, and social history. The texts would be made readily available so that teachers, in preparing for class, would have the basic documents at hand.
The third project that I want to work on is a diplomatic history, because for many years I gave a course for diplomats at the Itamaraty, just as I gave it for generals at the ESG. In short, my plan of work is to complete A História da História, along with the documentary collection; to review and complete also A História Diplomática; and, finally, to write a modern history of Brazil, a survey.
JDW: Let’s turn, now, to speak about history in general, the development and the role of historians. Do you have any feelings about the directions that the field is moving or any suggestions about how you would prefer to see the field develop?
JHR: Referring more to Brazilian history, when I returned from the United States, I saw the necessity to create here an institute for historical research. Thirty years ago in A Pesquisa Histórica no Brasil I urged the creation of such an institute, like those I had seen in the United States, England, and France. True, we do have the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, which, though not an anachronism, is still largely honorific, like all the academies based on the Spanish model. The American Historical Association, by contrast, has more than an honorific role: anyone who is interested in history may join. Our Instituto is full of colonels, generals, admirals, and physicians—people with little serious interest in history. In Rio we now have two specialized research centers for the study of Ruy Barbosa and Getúlio Vargas and their times, but we still lack a true center for historical research. This has been a great frustration of my life, because I am sure we should have a research center like yours, whether within the university or outside does not matter.
JDW: Another problem for historians, and possibly this is not a problem, is the influence of the social sciences on history: something that has been strong in Brazil since the 1930s and that stems from French and, to some extent, United States’ influences.
JHR: Well, I do believe that the social science influence is beneficial, because historical science must be interdisciplinary. History always looks to other disciplines for elements necessary to widen its own scope. Social science is so much the rage in Brazil, however, that Brazilian history has been eliminated from primary and secondary schools’ curricula. Today they teach social studies, not the history of Brazil; today they teach communication, not the Portuguese language. All of this is a great mistake. There is also no job market for historians in Brazil. How different this is from the United States, a country I have visited more than twenty-five times and in which I have seen so many government offices, all of which have departments of history. Even the Pentagon and the State Department have their staffs of professional historians.
In Brazil the diplomats write history. Recently they tried to explain our empire’s policy toward the Falklands in 1833, with ludicrous results, so much so that I felt obliged to write three articles in the press just to refute these arguments that arose from sheer ignorance of Brazilian historical conditions. Brazil does not pay sufficient attention to serious historical research. Untrained people are writing history in the various ministries, including army and navy officers, when what is needed are professional staffs of historians to do serious work. The ministries not only do not do research, they do not call on historians to do it. The upshot is a most restricted job market for historians.
JDW: Therefore, what is really needed is to have historians writing history, to have jobs for historians, to locate historians in the heart of society, in official circles as well as in universities. This is a major problem, in your opinion.
JHR: I believe that the great crisis facing Brazilian historiography is precisely this. Opportunities for historians need to be generalized throughout society, reaching the point at which I could say: I would like to study the bandeirantes, all aspects, with funding and a research center to do so.” But I don’t have it. Research that is not technical or scientific does not merit government support. Instead, history has less and less prestige, whereas that of economics abounds—and this field, which so bedevils us today, is no science whatsoever. It is politics, pure and simple, and it has bought out Brazil. History, which provides the tools to know the past, and hence the present, is neglected.
But let me mention some of my greatest satisfactions. I am almost seventy years old and during all my years of teaching, I’ve been pleased to count many successes among my students. A good many graduates of my diplomatic history course have gone on to distinguish themselves in the career diplomatic service. Others have obtained high positions in the universities, including those in the United States. Another pleasure is to have received so many friends and colleagues at my apartment, in my library.
Why don’t we call a conference of Brazilian and United States professors to discuss mutual problems? The Latin Americans and North Americans could meet, say, once a year as the AHA does in December, or perhaps every two years. This would benefit both groups, bringing us closer together and promoting the development of research and a research agenda. Just having such meetings in the United States is not enough. I think they should be held throughout the Americas, meeting once in Rio de Janeiro, then in Colombia, and so on.
JDW: Your career has been marked by your studies and travels abroad, by this type of interchange. You think we have a community of scholars and researchers, but that we need to promote interchange of whatever kind.
JHR: Yes. We should encourage all interchange, everything that brings us together, because our interests are one and the same. We all should want to promote a general understanding of Brazilian history, and of the history of all the Americas.
JDW: They say that North Americans are bracing for the arrival of Brazilian researchers in the United States to ask new questions of our history, to fill in gaps in our historiography. But are the Brazilians ready to come?
JHR: No! Absolutely not! We must give priority to our own history, so much of which remains to be written. United States historiography is so well developed; I must say, much more so than Brazilian historiography. We need to overcome all the deficiencies mentioned above, and, additionally, to do fundamental research. All of us should contribute to this end, to a development that is, after all is said and done, a force for peace in the Americas.
Translation of the interview was made possible by a grant from the Tinker Foundation of New York. Thomas Lyle Whigham assisted with the translation.
