The Formative Period of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Army Thought, 1900-1922

In the first decades of this century, army officers debated the role their institution was to play in Brazilian society. They envisioned the army as the central institution in preserving and deepening Brazilian national unity. Army spokesmen laid the weight of Brazil’s future on their fellow officers’ shoulders. The examples of Germany, France, Japan, the United States, and even Argentina indicated to them that national greatness was linked to military preparedness, which in turn depended upon the country’s economic development. Military weakness was an invitation, they thought, to live under the “humiliating tutelage of the strong.”¹

At the crossroads where their fears and dreams met, they saw a small, ill-trained, and ill-equipped army that was unequal to its tasks. Their mounting frustration led Brazilian officers to examine their country’s economic, social, and political systems, its international status, the nature of its population, and their own role in society in terms of the constitutional responsibilities, which called upon the armed forces to defend the nation against both external and internal threats. In the process, which continued fitfully over several decades and involved at least three military generations, they developed a critique of the army and of the nation that would lead to a vision of the Brazil they thought necessary to sustain the army of their dreams. The argument here is that these observations, commentaries, and ideas provided the intellectual base upon which the doctrines of the Revolution of 1964, summed up in the phrase “Security and Development” were built. The material has been drawn from officers’ writings in military journals, official reports, and books. A relatively small number of men, about 5 percent of the officer corps, did most of the writing, but given the hierarchical nature of the military organization, the number of leaders a spokesman could hope to influence was also small.²

It is possible to suggest a division of the years 1900 to 1964 into four periods. The first, from 1900 to 1922, saw reform debates and action focusing internally, on the army itself; 1922 to 1937 saw attention turning to the remaking of the political system as a means of reform; 1937 to 1945 found the army working through a civilian dictator to remodel the society and the army simultaneously. The difficulties in mobilizing an expeditionary force in World War II demonstrated the weakness of that effort and led to the fourth period, 1945 to 1964, when the long-sought key to military stability was pursued through a democratic form of government. The mounting frustrations, the accumulation of ideas and attitudes over several decades culminated in the army’s taking control of the government in the Revolution of 1964. Some broad themes that recur in military writings, to be examined herein, include the army’s view of Brazil, its institutional self-image, national power and prestige, political and national integration, and industrial development. These themes will be related to the beginning of the so-called tenentes’ (lieutenants’) reform movement.³

The army’s view of the country, its own self-image, and its mission were often interwoven. In the first year of the republic, an army publication indicated the official view of the events of 1889 and the army’s relationship to the new situation. The “sword displaced the royal power” without anarchy, disorder, or abuses, “without Caesars, Praetorians or Janissaries.” Indeed, the revolution, it said, released pent-up energies that accelerated the country’s progress. Thus, the army’s enemies had been proved wrong; the army was capable of fulfilling its mission and “of presiding over the remaking of the Motherland.” Its force would be used only for the “good of law and order.” The “predominance of the sword,” the writer prophesied, was “inevitable and indispensable, as long as time and the natural evolution of things” did not produce “a just balance” among the different classes that made up Brazilian society. “The army’s education of the people is,” it concluded, “one of the factors of this equilibrium,” because the soldier was “nothing more than the people in arms.”⁴ This view of the army as being of the people, while at the same time moderating, leading, and educating them, would become central to military mythology. The people would be in need of remaking for a long time.

The political and military turmoil of the 1890s⁵ prevented adequate modernizing of the army’s structure, cost it manpower and equipment, and forced its leaders to turn power over to civilians and to seek a disengagement from politics. The attempt to establish a general staff (1896) was sidetracked in the confusion of the Canudos crisis (1897), while the 1898 effort to reform military education was subsequently rejected because it failed to balance theory with practice. By the turn of the century, the institutional mood was bleak.

The minister of war’s annual report in 1900 admitted that the army did not have a national character and urged making service in the state-based national guard compulsory, transferring it from the Ministry of Justice to army control, and using newly retired army officers to train guardsmen. By absorbing the guard, the army would, the minister argued, obtain “a truly national image, with all the qualities peculiar to the character of the people.”⁶ The national guard accepted only men of regular and substantial income, leaving the poor and the working class for the army and navy. As guardsmen, the sons of elite families avoided barracks life and close contact with army recruits from less-privileged social and economic societal strata. José Murilo de Carvalho has commented that the guard represented “a true divorce between the army and the dominant civilian groups.” Much of the criticism officers aimed at those groups related to the officers’ belief that the civilian elites rejected and deprecated them.⁷ The gap would begin to be bridged by obligatory military service (1916) and consequent abolition of the guard (1918). In the meantime, as officers searched for formulae that would give them an army capable of fulfilling its mission and worthy of the country, they would move from an examination of the existing armed forces (and what was theoretically required) to analyzing Brazil and Brazilians. The officers’ ideas on army and country were intertwined.

In 1901, Sergio Ferreira Armando Duval, who was on his way to becoming an influential military spokesman, published Reorganisaćão do Exército to support Minister of War João N. de Medeiros Mallet’s proposals on restructuring the army.⁸ Noting that past reforms had failed because they were partial and not carried through, Duval bluntly observed that Brazil did “not have an army, in the true sense of the word.”⁹ He reviewed Japan’s efforts to build its military power and recommended following its example. He noted that neighboring countries were developing their armies and, whether baseless or not, “almost daily we receive news of North American intentions toward the Latin American nations.” Regardless of the reality of a North American threat, Duval declared that “we must be strong” to protect “our colossal riches, our huge territory.” Indeed, he thought that “we haven’t the right to long for progress unless we are a strong nation.”¹⁰

But to be strong it would not be enough to expand the existing forces, which, he noted, had more officers and fewer soldiers than legally authorized.¹¹ Since the Franco-Prussian War, it had been obvious that wars would be fought with citizen rather than professional armies. Such forces required universal obligatory military training and the formation of reserves. The Mallet project, based on this notion, called for a small professional force that would act as a training cadre to prepare the reserves and as a ready core for mobilization. The idea of the nation-in-arms (nação armada) was not new to the Brazilian army; it had been used to raise volunteer units in the Paraguayan War (1865-70) and underlay the rationale for the never-implemented 1874 obligatory service bill. But it was not until the first decade of this century that it became one of the central objectives of military policy. Once the idea took hold, it forced military thinkers to take a hard look at the human material, as they called it, that they would have to turn into soldiers, and at the factors in the social and political systems that would either aid or impede their efforts. If there was one single idea that ultimately led to the enhancement of military power in Brazil it was that of the nation-in-arms.

Duval spoke of the Brazilian nation as “not being perfectly defined,” and later writers would echo the theme. With 80 percent of the population illiterate, and with the necessity of improving the quality of barracks life to attract young men of increased quality, the army was led to remodel its preparation of officers and to present the barracks as a schoolhouse where basic education would be given to those who needed it, and heavy doses of civics and military training would be given to all. Such a plan could have been revolutionary for Brazil, if vigorously carried out, but from the outset military planners recognized certain social and political limitations. While they talked about universal service, what they really meant was a functional draft in every state; they did not mean that every male would be subject to call-up. They sought to avoid clashing with the rural oligarchies by exempting peons from military service. The enlistment boards would be set up only in the state capitals and “populous centers.”¹²

This new national army would have regional recruitment and training. With such a system, army planners hoped to keep transportation and housing costs low. The army would have to move only its officers and non-commissioned officers, while the draftees would be trained in barracks near their homes, allowing some to live with their families. At the conclusion of their training, the released soldiers would be the reserve for the local unit, which in time of war would be the nucleus around which the reserves would form.¹³ Such a system could provide a strong army, Duval argued, if the National Guard were transferred from the control of the Ministry of Justice to the Ministry of War, if the officers were able to provide adequate training and enthusiastic example, if the draft functioned, if training units were scattered evenly throughout the country, and if the politicians left the army alone.¹⁴

That there was less than complete political support for army reforms can be noted in the fact that it took until 1908 to get the obligatory service bill through the Congress and then another eight years to get it enforced. The literature from 1900 to 1916 is replete with pleas for obligatory service as the keystone to the entire reform.¹⁵ It should be said that under the Mallet plan army units in each of the seven military regions would be concentrated in order to lower costs while facilitating training and mobilization. This ability to mobilize, however, would have increased the army’s ability to act as an agent of federal power, which was contrary to the interests of the autonomy-minded state oligarchies.

From 1899 to 1910, when it ceased publication, the general staff’s Revista Militar preached reform while keeping army officers abreast of military developments elsewhere. After a shaky start, its circulation rose from 1,500 in 1903 to 3,000 in 1908 to 6,800 in 1910. It published articles on a wide range of subjects, from employment of rapid-fire field artillery and aviation to obligatory service in Portugal and organization of the Mexican cavalry. The Spanish-American, Russo-Japanese, and Boer Wars received coverage, but major attention was focused on the German army, which would be the model for the Brazilian forces until the end of World War I.¹⁶

In 1900 a Revista editorial stated that instruction was an army’s strength,¹⁷ an idea that would motivate repeated alterations in military education. The 1898 regulations on instruction had overemphasized the study of theory; 1904 saw the publication of Brigadier General Luiz Mendes de Morais’s Reforma do Ensino, in which, observing that the army was obsolete, he called on his colleagues to pull themselves out of their “apathy and indifference,” which, he said, was weakening and discrediting them. Moreover, because the “destinies” of Brazil were “intimately bound” to those of the army, its proper organization was a “question of life or death” for both. It would, he argued, act as “a regenerating agent of the first order, … retempering the physical and moral faculties of the people … [giving them] the stamp of virility, a sense of discipline, and an admiration for civic virtues.” For Mendes de Morais, the essential step was to remodel professional education, which he regarded as the “sinew” of the system.¹⁸

A colleague in the artillery, Augusto Sá, was more critical and wide-ranging in his recommendations. “Is it necessary to reform the army?” he asked rhetorically. “What army?” It was a euphemism to speak of “reforming or reorganizing a thing that [did] not exist.” “No one,” he said, “believes in our army. Everyone knows that it doesn’t exist, that it never had form, that it never had organization, and that, therefore, it is rather soon for it to be reformed. What we need to take care of now, with urgency and tenacity, is its first organization.” The image he traced was indeed dismal. The combination of “our sad Lusitanian disposition and our great defects in education” made building an army in Brazil nearly impossible. Because of the “great moral and intellectual vacuum in which we live militarily … we do not have professionalism; we do not have the will to do anything; we lack preseverance,” qualified personnel, and military spirit. “Our army,” he charged, “is a composite of the intractable and the disillusioned.” Repeating Duval’s charge, he noted that the army was undermanned with soldiers and overstaffed with officers, and, as a consequence, was costing too much. He dismissed its offensive capability, observing that that was “dependent upon its mobility,” which in turn depended on nonexistent matériel.

His indictment of the officer corps was cutting. He divided it into military school graduates and nongraduates. The former were known in army slang as “perfect philosophers,” whose attitudes were completely “incompatible with military discipline.” They were only interested in a staff job far from the troops, where they could keep an old uniform for use during duty hours, while leading the bourgeois life of a public employee. The nongraduates were the chronicos,¹⁹ whose soldierly qualities were such that with practical foreign instructors they could be “officers as good as the best of Europe.”²⁰

Sá obviously thought that too many of his fellow officers had entered the military school for a free education and not for any love of the military profession, which he regarded as so “elevated and noble” that it should not be lucrative. “The officers of the army are nobles, and, as such, should have resources for their own subsistence.” To become an army officer was “to be consecrated, to take a vow of unselfish dedication” to the interests of the profession in order to learn to suffer and to die for the Motherland. With officers such as these the army would be the nation’s seedbed of moral strength and would provide “historic and organic continuity” for the people. To ensure high standards, he argued, it was “indispensable that study and competitive examinations become the norm of the profession” ending the “systematic” entrenchment of “the ignorant and inept” who were “reducing the profession to simple public employment.”²¹ None of this would be possible, however, unless there were obligatory public education to stimulate a sense of dignity and national pride in the population, iron discipline to segregate the military from political involvement, and suitable laws to regulate active and reserve duty.²²

The last was essential. The ranks of the army of 1905 were “composed of illiterate, stupid soldiers, incapable of understanding discipline except by fear or dread of violent punishments.…”²³ In such an army, Sá lamented, true discipline was impossible because the officers could not respect the men they commanded. He argued that it would be possible to have a “true army five or six times [the size of] the present one” at the same cost. He proposed a five-part solution: first, there should be continuity of leadership in the commander-in-chief; second, there should be obligatory public education; third, a large number of German and Italian officers should be brought into the army; fourth, professionalism should be increased because, instead of the twenty or thirty highly competent professionals that it had, the army needed two or three thousand; fifth, the state police forces should be placed under army command. In Sá’s view, then, the army’s redemption would come from consistency, social uplift, imported know-how, professionalism, and monopoly of force.²⁴

In 1906, political expression was given to the army’s internal discussion with the introduction of an obligatory military service bill in the Chamber of Deputies. After some fifteen months of discussions, delays, and amendments, the bill was finally passed, along with legislation authorizing a reorganization. The new minister of war, Hermes da Fonseca, had “a vast program” to give Brazil “invincible” defenses against whatever “plans [foreign] avarice could plot against the integrity of the country.”²⁵ Admitting frankly that the army was not prepared for war, he said that the general staff, set up in 1899, was tied into bureaucratic knots, that the “army was not effectively commanded” with the scattered units “living independent[ly],” and that there were so many officers that it could take twelve years to reach first lieutenant or captain. He proposed eliminating repeated reenlistments below the rank of corporal to make room for the draftees; posting units in each state to facilitate training conscripts; developing the arsenals, powder, and cartridge works, complete with teams of apprenticed orphans trained into a specialized work force; creating large tactical units ready for immediate mobilization; lessening the general staff’s responsibility for day-to-day administration in order to free it for broader efforts; building strategic highways, railroads, and fortifications to protect the frontiers; completing the detailed mapping of the country; remodeling the promotion system; imposing regular field exercises; and sending selected officers to Europe to expand their military knowledge.²⁶

Of this impressive list, the proposal that was most important, if the intellectual development of the army was to continue, was the practice of sending officers to study in Europe. In 1905, Foreign Minister Rio Branco and War Minister Argollo had arranged to send a group of six junior officers to serve for two years in German units. In 1908, Hermes visited Germany, where he attended maneuvers in Alsace, visited the Krupp works, talked with Chief of Staff Count Helmuth Johannes Ludwig Graf von Moltke, and was entertained by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Hermes arranged to send two more groups of Brazilian junior officers to Germany. By 1912 approximately thirty officers had gained first-hand experience with what was generally considered the world’s finest army. Hermes also negotiated for a German military mission, but opposition in Brazil prevented execution of the agreement.²⁷

The Brazil the officers left behind seemed suddenly aglow with patriotic fervor. Militarized shooting clubs, commonly known as Tiros, sprouted around the country so rapidly that by mid-1910 there were more than 10,000 members; excited officers regarded the uniformed marksmen as reservists. Many secondary schools had requested army instructors, while short-term volunteers signed up for field maneuvers. Even the little-heard national anthem was sung in public! In their enthusiasm, officers perhaps missed the obvious: the Tiros, military instruction in the schools, and volunteering for field exercises were ways, under the obligatory service law, of avoiding being called up for a year of training. Brazilians had not suddenly become fascinated with things military; rather, they were seeking a way (jeito) to avoid the more onerous experience of the barracks. Once the public realized that the law would not be enforced beyond the compilation of lists of eligible men, the Tiro societies began to decline and the volunteer rate fell sharply.²⁸

Moreover, the Congress was reluctant to provide the 30,500 men that the army said it needed to carry through the reforms. In 1910 Minister of War Jose Bernardino Bormann complained that it was “impossible to reorganize the army with the limited number of personnel that the Congress has provided in the law setting the force level.” Even if the arsenals were filled with arms, the army could not function without men. “All of our small army,” he complained, “does not equal a single division of the armies of the European military powers.”²⁹ The following year his successor observed that units would not even meet their budgeted effective strength because volunteers were not coming forward.³⁰

Clearly Brazilians would not serve unless forced. They displayed a persistent antimilitary sentiment that would continually confound dreams of a strong army. The tradition of forced recruitment of lower-class men and the harsh life of the soldiers created a lasting image of a distasteful institution that the “better” families wanted their sons to avoid. Though the middle and upper classes would periodically get swept up in patriotic fervor, they tended to express it militarily through membership in the national guard, the Tiros, short-term maneuver volunteer units, and patriotic battalions raised in emergencies. All of these were essentially militarized, civilian organizations, which demanded a temporary commitment and carried a degree of social prestige because nearly all the participants were from the acceptable classes; that is, white, educated, professional, and financially secure.³¹

The lack of success in imposing the draft law is especially striking considering that Sá’s consistency requirement would seem to have been more than met when Marshal Hermes was elected president in 1910. Hermes’s unhappy presidency, however, contributed to the decline in whatever martial spirit had been generated in the population. He was elected after a bitter antimilitarist campaign waged by his opponent, famed jurist and Senator Rui Barbosa, whose warnings of caudilhismo and Caesarism helped alienate those urban middle sectors that the army wished to attract. In a complicated series of events, local army commanders aided in the often violent substitution of state oligarchic regimes in what is known in Brazilian history as the Salvationist movement (salvações). In the most sickening incident of violence, the senior general in Bahia ordered bombardment of the city (1912).³² Though Hermes recalled the general, and Chief of Staff José Caetano de Faria spoke out against military involvement in politics, the reformists’ image of a professional, politically aloof office corps was tarnished.

It was at this point that the officers Hermes had sent to Europe returned, filled with energy and ideas. They had measured themselves against the world’s best officers and they were determined to mold what they had learned to fit the Brazilian situation. As Frederick Nunn has pointed out, the German training gave them “a grasp of what defense and security meant.”³³ Aside from providing a vivid example for their fellow officers, their most immediate and most durable contribution was the founding of the monthly review A Defeza Nacional, which first appeared in October 1913. It provided Brazilian officers with a remarkable forum in which to discuss the latest military innovations, current army affairs, and their dreams for Brazil’s future. Unlike the Revista Militar, it was not an official publication in the sense of being published by the general staff. Its founders used their own funds to put out the first issue and paid for continued publication with subscriptions. They organized an extensive network of representatives in units throughout the army, who looked after collection of subscription payments and distribution of the magazine, and sought out potential contributors and news items. It was remarkably independent and often critical of official policy, which led to some disciplinary measures against its editors. Throughout its history, many of its regular contributors and members of its editorial board rose to the highest ranks of the army, and two board members, Eúrico Dutra and Humberto de Castello Branco, became presidents.³⁴

The first editorial in the new journal stressed ideas that would echo down the years and become part of army thought. The army was to be “the prime factor of political-social transformation” and the principal instrument of external defense. It also had an educative and organizing function to exercise over the citizenry. A good army was “a school of hierarchial discipline, work, sacrifice, and patriotism” that paved the way for “social discipline.” A well-organized army was “one of the most perfect creations of the human spirit,” because in it “narrow individual interests” must be abandoned “in the name of the great collective interests,” men must put aside their egotism and be “transfigured in the abstraction duty,” and be ready to sacrifice their lives for the patria. Such an institution, A Defeza National’s editors asserted, necessarily exercised a “salutary influence over the development of individuals and societies.” If such influence could be noted in the old, cultured societies of Europe, “in a country like Brazil it will be an even more powerful factor in the … modification of a retarded and shapeless society.” Therefore, the necessity of building “an army that corresponds to our legitimate aspirations for development and progress, is above all discussion.” The army would be the school of citizenship, it would demonstrate the superiority of collective over individual good, and it would be an example of total sacrifice for the Motherland.³⁵

A Defeza National published this editorial at a time when, according to Gilberto Freyre, the cult of Mary was being “transformed from the Catholic Church to the altar of the Nation.” The republic was a “protective goddess who, on rare occasions, might herself be in need of protection.” Brazil “the Nation, the Republic, [was] the mystical venerated Super-Mother of us all.” The reciprocity of devotion was captured in a patriotic song: “We are faithful soldiers of the Motherland we love and which loves us also.”³⁶

The officer corps in its structure, language, and attitudes toward service—at least as depicted by its intellectuals in journal articles and books—recalls a religious order. Its socialization process and graduated educational system, with its approved doctrines taught in the Colegios Militares to young teens, the Escola Militar to late teens, and the Escola de Estado-Maior to mature men, recall the Catholic church’s minor and major seminaries and schools of theology. Both the Brazilian church and army of the turn-of-the-century had those who wanted to develop local models,³⁷ but both institutions tended to follow dogma from abroad; indeed, both sent its bright men to study in Europe. In the same period, the army, with its avowed secularism—it had abolished the chaplains corps—was beginning to develop rituals as great acts of public veneration of the Motherland. One can almost speak of the formation of a military liturgy of the cult of the Motherland.³⁸

The first Defeza Nacional editorial went on to assert that in “nascent nationalities like ours,” formed in a rapid process of fusion of competing elements, “the army—the one truly organized force in the midst of a tumultuous, convulsive mass—at times goes a bit beyond its professional duties to become, in certain moments, a decisive factor in political transformation or social stabilization. Our short history … is full of demonstrative examples of this affirmation.”³⁹ Any liberal protest against military intervention in the “social evolution of peoples” was useless because, the editors confided, it was “a historical fact that nascent societies needed the military to assist in their formation and development, and that only on obtaining a high degree of civilization could they free themselves from the tutelage of the military, which then withdraws and limits itself to its true function.”

“Without wishing,” the editorial went on, “the unjustified incursion of the military elements in the internal business of the country, the army needs, however, to be prepared for its conservative and stabilizing function over the social elements in motion—and prepared to correct the internal disturbances so common in the tumultuous life of societies in formation.”⁴⁰ The idea that the Brazilian people composed an unruly, incomplete nationality in need of strong guidance, and that it was the duty of the army to go beyond its normal tasks to guide it, became part of the intellectual baggage of the officer corps.⁴¹

Though this internal function would consume considerable energy in later decades, the army also had an external defense role, and A Defeza Nacional’s statement of it would be repeated in substance in later years. To the editors, Brazil was a “vast, fertile, opulent, and beautiful country” open to incursions on its long, exposed coastline or its extensive land frontiers; and so it “would not be absurd to consider the possibility that Brazil would one day encounter a serious obstacle to its natural aspirations for integral development.” On that day, Brazil would only be able to count on its own military strength.

Such exalted responsibility required a finely tuned armed force, but past attempts “to organize a regular army … unhappily [had] met with only partial success.” Between 1889 and 1913, the government spent approximately 1,500,000 contos in two general reorganizations and some partial ones; the military schools’ regulations had been rewritten four times (twice giving greater importance to theoretical over practical studies and twice in the opposite direction); the regulations of the various arms had been changed several times (infantry soldiers, for example, saw four sets of regulations over a twenty-year period); and the uniforms seemed to change with the winds of fashion. Though “we have worked,” lamented A Defeza Nacional editors, the general conviction was “that the present army does not correspond at all to our needs, and that the country is completely defenseless” (italics in original).⁴² The editors and their disciples would write, argue, teach, and even rebel in pursuit of their reforms.

The officers’ self-image was edged with frustration. Estevão Leitão de Carvalho complained that the troops were the leavings of society, that the economy left only the weaklings for the army, that it was “exceptional” to encounter a “robust and healthy man” among the recruits, and that “the defense of the Motherland should not weigh on such weak shoulders.…”⁴³ The troops had the “abandoned appearance of colonial police” or “provincial militia,” which A Defeza Nacional’s editors considered humiliating, though they admitted that the officers, too, were below European standards.⁴⁴ Indeed, many officers may not even have been aware that their troops were poorly fed and clothed because they rarely entered their company areas or squad rooms, instead spending their hours playing backgammon or dominoes in a staff room. Such officers could be found on the night before payday, when some units held their only exercises, “trying to memorize the numerous commands, which, in the various evolutions, would have to be given to the soldiers.”⁴⁵ How could such officers provide soldiers with one of the “coefficients” for victory, namely, the conviction of “our superiority over all the peoples of the earth?”⁴⁶ If that was the situation in the units, it appears that it was not much better in army headquarters, where one general complained that more than the equivalent of a full complement of light infantry was engaged as orderlies!⁴⁷

In this condition the army was faced with a second Canudos in the interior of Santa Catarina—the Contestado. This campaign would eventually involve the commitment of some 5,000 troops. It resulted from complex causes involving territory in dispute with Argentina until 1895 and then in litigation between Santa Catarina and Paraná, where local fazendeiros were fanning the armed rebellion of adherents of a messianic cult. The army was called in after so-called fanatics defeated the state police. The under-strength army units had to “borrow” men, horses, and equipment and suffered repeated losses before finally overwhelming these simple country people. In this inglorious struggle against fellow Brazilians, the army showed that it was simply not prepared and as a consequence it lost “precious lives” and “prestige.”⁴⁸ The Contestado had revealed, A Defeza Nacional editorialized, the passivity with which the army had accepted political and administrative decisions affecting its combat capability. While the army was being blamed for the Contestado fiasco, the politicians were abdicating responsibility, saying that large sums had been spent on the military.⁴⁹

With this experience behind them, army reformers worried about involvement in the World War. After losing some ships to German torpedoes, and in solidarity with the United States, Brazil entered World War I, with no apparent intention of committing troops. Even though poet Olavo Bilac and the newly formed National Defense League generated considerable public enthusiasm that led to the obligatory service law finally going into operation, the Congress was reluctant to expand the army. A Defeza National’s editors expressed concern that Brazil would appear ridiculous “in the eyes of the world” if its military apparatus could not back up the “great gestures of its diplomacy.” They blamed “the sordid inspiration of regional interests” for the “trauma of blindness and bad faith” that prevented the federal government from beefing up its forces. What if Brazil were attacked? “Would we ask, in confusion and humiliation, foreigners to come to defend our honor, our homes?” Would the poorly housed, poorly clothed, and sometimes barefoot troops in Rio Grande do Sul be able to stand up to better trained, equipped, and shod opponents? Even the long-sought obligatory service seemed a “joke” without supplies and adequate officers.⁵⁰

The reformists had argued that aloofness from politics and loyalty to the federal government were marks of professionalism. They had assumed that logical arguments would convince national leaders that defense was necessary. Apparently they did not consider that politics were neither neutral nor weighted in favor of the national good; nor did they realize that the elite urged aloofness on them as a way of neutralizing their power. By the end of World War I they came to understand, vaguely at first, that the political system was set against army reform because such reform would endanger that system. While Marshals Deodoro da Fonseca (1889-91) and Floriano Peixoto (1891-94) had established and consolidated the republic, the political system took shape under Presidents Prudente José de Morais e Barros (1894-98) and Manoel Ferraz de Campos Sales (1898-1902), with the Partido Republicano Federal as the sole authorized party. The procedure involved the local oligarchies, who chose the state governors, and which in turn acted as the “grand electors” who selected the president. In exchange for local autonomy and indefinite tenure in office, the state governors had their congressional delegations support the president’s programs. (The populous, powerful, and relatively rich states of Minas Gerais and São Paulo used their economic strength to dominate the system and trade the presidency between them.) The system served to consolidate the state oligarchies, which, for the most part, were composed of families that had been members of the old monarchical parties. The política dos governadores, as the system was often called, replaced the Florianista republic.⁵¹

This anti-Florianista republic and the state oligarchies strengthened the navy and the state police to create a counterbalance to the national army. Initially the army’s reformers seem to have been so distracted with their work that they failed to see that their vision of a modern army was incompatible with both Brazilian society and the political system. Eventually they would reach the conclusion that both society and the system would have to be changed.⁵²

The reformers’ intimate knowledge of the German army, the frustrations of the Contestado, and the attempt after 1916 to make effective use of obligatory service led them to a more careful look at Brazil. Their experience in Germany and the resistance to change that they encountered among fellow officers led them to the conclusion that their arguments would be more persuasive if they had a German military mission to back them. This is not to say that they had not had some success. They managed to have most combat arms’ regulations rewritten on the German model: often, in fact, these were merely adoptions of translations into Portuguese. That success made the officers hunger for a more complete germanization. Their enthusiasm was perhaps embodied in a lieutenant colonel’s speech to a group of Pernambucan Tiros in which he rejoiced in “the new triumphant military spirit” that would carry Brazilians “in the near future, to the same role on the South American continent as the strong and powerful Germans play in Europe.”⁵³ They were confronted, however, with stubborn opposition, even before the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, from those who favored a French mission; the Francophiles argued, with some justice, that Brazilians felt more comfortable with the Latin French. Besides, it was not European experience per se that would be most applicable, but European military techniques applied in a comparable setting, and the French were rich in military experience with mixed populations and “native” troops in Africa and Asia. In addition, it seems that more officers knew French than German, if the movement of books in the army library is any indication: from 1910 to 1918 an annual average of 1,077 books in French were checked out as against 18 in German.⁵⁴ Even Hermes da Fonseca, who admired the Prussian system and who sent junior officers to Germany, conversed in French with German officials during his 1908 visit to Germany.⁵⁵

In May 1914, A Defeza Nacional zealously editorialized that the French army did not have a general staff and that it was adopting German artillery tactics. Because “the French army is germanizing,” the editors did not understand the hesitation between “the original source of the greatest military advances and its timid and indecisive copy, when considering the choice of foreign officers to come to teach us the modern art of war.” They accused Brazilian financial and business interests of wanting to place “a formidable check” on German influences in the army in order to please “French high finance,” and to secure the “fat commissions resulting from future Brazilian government contracts with French equipment and arms manufacturers.”⁵⁶ The Germans’ defeat put the matter to rest, though it did not curb admiration for the German model.

In 1915, the Defeza Nacional staff focused their critical analysis on the country and began to sound almost revolutionary. Major Raimundo Pinto Seidl, shocked at the ignorance of his troops, challenged other units to a contest to see which could eliminate illiteracy the fastest; and he persuaded the president to provide a bronze bust of the Duke of Caxias as first prize. The major declared that, with a national illiteracy rate of 80 percent, the best way to celebrate the coming centenary of independence in 1922 would be to eliminate illiteracy. His challenge went unaccepted.⁵⁷

In 1916 the editors took up Alberto Torres’s theme that Brazil was not a country, nation, or patria but “an exploitation.” They listed the exploiters as the politicians, judges, congressmen, public functionaries, and degree-holders (bachareis), whose positions multiplied as their sons increased, and who protested against “the humiliation of military service.” The exploited were the farm laborers, the industrial workers, the commercial employees, “the people … who struggle, who work, who toil, who pay taxes of sweat and of blood. Only they have the right to give their lives for the patria; the others reserve the right to sponge off it. In this sense there is no doubt—Brazil is an exploitation.” Worse still, the editors lamented, “we are an improvised nation, without roots in the past, of indefinite ethnic formation, and, therefore, easy to break up.” For that reason, while preparing against a possible external enemy, they had to be aware of the more likely internal enemy: “the lack of national cohesion.”⁵⁸

In an editorial entitled “Above All We Should Be Brazilians,” A Defeza Nacional called on Brazilians to wake up to reality; Europe was not falling over in amazement at the feats of Rui Barbosa or Santos Dumont. The self-congratulatory style of the Brazilian press was self-deluding. The people should not be fooled into dangerous complacency; rather, they should recognize their inferiority and work to reach the level of more advanced peoples. The editors asked why the elite did not turn their eyes toward Brazil, and instead of rushing to aid the wounded soldiers and the homeless children of Belgium and France, assist the victims of the Contestado? It was time to wake up, “to demonstrate by deeds that this land that witnessed our birth is ours, very much ours, and that our life is entirely hers, because she is the filter through which takes place the osmosis of life that came from our parents and passes to our children.”⁵⁹

Brazil was passing through a “delicate and decisive phase in its history,” although it was closer than ever to “the road that could lead it to the definitive formation of an indestructible nationality.” It also had never been so close to the “abyss of dissolution and ruin.” “Everything” would depend, the editors observed, “on the action of the ruling classes” [classes dirigentes].” “Energetic and persistent activity, seeking general organization through military organization, could bring happiness to this Motherland,” but “hesitant action, marked by fancy thrusts and acrobatic retreats, with an eye on popularity, will carry us fatally to defeat and dishonor.” To ensure that governmental action would not be in vain, the officers would have to become instructors and educators. The campaign for a national army first had to be conducted in the officer corps. Some officers still thought the idea impractical; others opposed it because of “philosophical smartismo” (sic), or thought it contrary to the “democratic character of the people.”

A more revealing argument against an army based on generalized obligatory service was that Brazil’s conditions were less akin to those of the European metropoles than to their colonies, where professional troops were the order of the day. There were those who feared drawing the lower classes into an active national role: universal obligatory service could weaken the oligarchy’s power over the masses, they said, and so rural workers were excluded from service. A Defeza Nacional’s editors noted that the European metropoles maintained national armies at home to create cohesion; in their colonies they relied on professional troops to avoid awakening sentiments of nationality in the natives. Happily, the editors declared, Brazil’s spokesmen had embraced the idea of a national army as a means to “secure a Motherland for Brazilians.” “Thus, our duty is to march forward, always aiming at the happiness and greatness of the Brazilian nation. The path marked is the only one that can bring us a dignified and tranquil future. Whatever the obstacles that might arise, to retreat would be cowardly.”⁶⁰

By the late 1910s, the task the army reformers set for themselves was nothing less than the creation or “formation of a people worthy of this marvelous Brazil.” A Defeza Nacional’s editors, asserting that the long experience with slavery had weakened the Brazilian backbone, went on to attack “effeminate and hysterical bacharelismo,” which loved “declamatory speeches,” “guitar serenades,” and saw shame in any honest callous-producing work, whether with plow or sword.⁶¹ An editorial lamented that this “immense and dazzling country” was a “Motherland so worthy of better sons.” Instead of the “vacillating and defenseless nation” that it sheltered, Brazil “could nourish at her breast a virile and glorious nation.”⁶²

As the editors considered the “grandiose task” that lay ahead, they were happy to note the flowering of a new generation that was beginning to cultivate the military spirit. Together the reformist officers and the young would make up for the “generations of moral collapse” by providing this “immense and lovely country” with sons worthy of its opulence. “Forward,” the editors urged, “whatever the cost!”⁶³

In a companion article, Mário Travassos lamented the national bent toward pessimism, which he thought corrosive, depressing, and weakening. He asserted that optimism was “the only religion for Brazilians.” Officers had divorced themselves from the Positivist faith and taken shelter “in the sumptuous cathedral that our geographic frontiers form.” The military schools were becoming more efficient. The graduating aspirantes actually knew how to ride, shoot, and conduct war games, instead of merely being masters of abstract theories with a taste for unsolvable questions. Brazil’s war machine was being rebuilt. “The sleeping giant awakens.” A small number of officers of all ranks had aroused the army. Travassos called on the majority to join them because their “unpatriotic indifference” had become “inadmissible,” their “pernicious inertia,” “a crime.” It was no longer the visionary “young Turks” who spoke, he exalted, but the voice of the very nation.⁶⁴

In addition to stimulating the campaign for obligatory service, World War I justified transferring the national guard from the Ministry of Justice to the army and authorizing its remodeling as a second-line force. In 1918, the Ministry of War contentedly remodeled the hated guard out of existence. The previous year the ministry had negotiated agreements with the state governments allowing for incorporation of their militarized police as auxiliary forces. These steps eliminated one historic competitor, the guard, and brought the army closer to dominating the other,⁶⁵ the military police of the states.

By 1920 a number of ideas were fixed in Brazilian army thought. The national territory was a storehouse of untold wealth that needed protection from envious foreign powers until it could be developed. The population was not cohesive. There were tinges of racism, which held that Blacks and mixed-blood caboclos were ignorant and uncivilized and in need of uplifting education. Such attitudes avoided the segregationist path because, aside from traditional racial tolerance, the officers had seen the valor of Black soldiers in the Paraguayan War and had been bested by caboclos at Canudos and in the Contestado. And, as Thomas Skidmore has shown, there was widespread belief in the eventual whitening of the whole population.⁶⁶ The Blacks and mixed-bloods would be uplifted by the moral leadership of the whites. Army ideologues held that the barracks would provide the discipline and civic education required to blend these racial elements. The romanticism involved in this notion is striking; there is no indication that anyone stopped to observe the tremendous discrepancy between the small number of men that passed through army training each year and the steadily increasing population. Between 1900 and 1920 the population grew 76.9 percent, from 17,318,556 to 30,635,605.⁶⁷ Nor was there discussion of opening the officer corps to Blacks and caboclos.

To carry out its educative role, the army would have to expand. It needed to have units in each state to train the annual levies of recruits and, naturally, this required outlays for men, buildings, and equipment. There was some well-founded fear that this physical dispersion would prevent training exercises for large units and make rapid mobilization difficult. It was argued, however, that this was the only way Brazil could afford to build its reserve strength; moreover, the presence of the army in every state would contribute to national cohesion.

The need for equipment and the shut-off of arms from Germany during World War I⁶⁸ convinced officers that domestic production of armaments was necessary. A Defeza Nacional argued for industrial development, hammering away at the protective tariffs, which aided “fictitious parasitical industries” that imported raw materials or parts, a policy it described as “robbing the people to enrich a half dozen …” while “benefiting foreign production and ravishing the national economy.” The editors favored industries that developed native resources.⁶⁹ In July 1916, the inspector general of artillery, General Antonio Ilha Moreira, warned that “we must be strong to be respected” and that after the war, both sides would seek to restore their productive strength and would adopt imperialist policies “that could threaten Brazil.” The nation would have to develop its coal and steel industries to remain “autonomous and independent.”⁷⁰ In 1917 the journal ran a series of articles on the need for a steel industry, saying that even if it could not compete in world trade, at least it could supply the necessities of the internal market and national defense. Moreover, Brazil could not successfully prepare for war without first creating a national steel industry. And the matter could not be left to the private sector. “We believe,” said the editors, “that the government of the republic cannot avoid the definite solution that the great question of the national steel industry demands. ... It is necessary to found the national steel industry.”⁷¹

From the level of debate the question moved to that of policy-making. In his 1919 ministerial report, Brigadier General Alberto Cardoso de Aguiar linked obligatory service and “the absolute independence from foreign material resources” as guarantees of military defense. Without “organized industry,” Brazil would always be dependent on foreign supply, which, as he knew, could easily be shut off during a war situation. Maintenance of Brazilian independence relied, he argued, on the development of a metallurgical industry, centered on steel production. He observed that if Japan, Switzerland, Italy, and Sweden could produce and export metal products when they were poor in coal and iron, then Brazil, which was rich in the last as well as in the other minerals used in producing fine steel, ought to be able to do likewise. The poor quality of Brazilian coal could be overcome by using electrically fired blast furnaces and charcoal; energy needs could be met from Brazil’s tremendous forests, waterfalls, and rivers. The establishment of mills to produce steel “for our tools, our machines, our arms, our munitions, our ships should be the principal objective of the government, because with iron will come the railroad that will open the backlands, carrying progress to the isolated and deserted interior, allowing the rapid transport of merchandise; with iron we will also construct the great transatlantic vessels that will carry our products in their holds in exchange for capital to enlarge our businesses and to give the country economic impetus.”

Obviously, the war minister viewed industrial development in its broadest context. Defense was not only a question of arms; it involved the whole economy. General Cardoso de Aguiar was aware of the links among international economic relationships, dependence, and national defense. “Behind the label of peaceful economic competition,” he commented, “very often are hidden serious rivalries, whose consequences are truly bloody explosions.”⁷²

Of course, development of steel-based industry was a long-range policy. To cover its short-run needs for weaponry, the army purchased matériel and equipment in France and the United States. But it is clear that the high command saw such foreign purchases as temporary expedients to cover army needs until domestic production lines could be put into operation. As Brazilian President Delfim Moreira da Costa Ribeiro declared in his 1919 message to Congress, the difficulties of the war period had strengthened the conviction that “the organization of our military industry” should be one of the government’s “principal objectives,” to be attained “whatever the sacrifices required” in order to “free ourselves gradually from foreign military industry.”⁷³

Military independence would also become a long-range objective; but the gap between policy formation and implementation was often great in Brazil. The unrest and resulting disorganization of the 1920s and 1930s would delay turning plans and talk into effective action. The debate over the nature of the revolts of the 1920s, the so-called tenentista movement, has attracted scholars since Virginio Santa Rosa’s O Sentido do Tenentismo appeared in 1932.⁷⁴ Whether the 1920s’ rebels represented the civilian middle classes I leave to others. Nonetheless, military contacts with civilian society need some comment. The military lived in close proximity to civilians because of the location and physical arrangement of military posts. In the period in question, about half the officer corps was located in the federal district (then Rio de Janeiro). Barracks were located on city streets, with the officers living in private housing throughout the city. Only newer posts, such as Villa Militar, provided some segregated officer housing. Thus, in general, officers’ families used the same streetcar lines, same stores, churches, and schools, and read the same newspapers as civilians’. Given their relatively low pay, officers would have been as sensitive to economic fluctuations as anyone. Moreover, they had an institutional link with some civilians through the nationwide Tiro organization, which in 1921 had 266 companies “in all the principal cities of the country,” comprising some 35,000 men “of the more privileged classes.”⁷⁵

As for ideology, scholars have tended to look for external civilian influences, especially such writers as Alberto Torres and Oliveira Vianna. Torres’s O Problema Nacional Brasileira argued that the country suffered from self-ignorance, false optimism, and regionalism, and lacked nationality and nationhood. Brazil needed organization and strong central government to direct national energies and to protect the Brazilian patrimony from foreign exploitation.⁷⁶A Defeza Nacional’s editorials and articles contained ideas similar to Torres’s, but some themes, such as the population’s undefined nature, the lack of organization and regionalism, had been raised in early army writings, suggesting that some of these ideas originated with officers.⁷⁷ Torres’s ideas probably reached more officers in distilled form through the pages of A Defeza Nacional than directly through his publications. Certainly A Defeza Nacional’s biting analyses of institutional and national problems contributed to the ferment that beset the army in the 1920s. This should not be taken, however, to mean that the editors and staff were prorevolution. They were in favor of change, of reform, but within the system. They seem to have thought that the governmental form was workable, but that it had not been made to work. The editorial board in 1920—Bertoldo Klinger, Pantaleão Pessoa and Maciel da Costa—and contributors Daltro Filho, Estevão Leitão de Carvalho, Newton Cavalcanti, Francisco José Pinto, and Eúrico Dutra were legalists, at least until the 1930s, who opposed military revolt. But to those with less commitment to the ideal of legalism, the ideas expounded in A Defeza Nacional could well have appeared as an indictment of a corrupt system, a justification for revolt.

By mid-1922 the officer corps had begun to divide into legalist and revolutionary currents. Both groups drew intellectual support from the editorials and articles of A Defeza Nacional, but they differed as to solutions. The legalists, or progressives, as some officers referred to themselves, believed that through concentrating on improving the army, making it, in Bilac’s poetic imagery, a school of civics, discipline, and organization, they would gradually form a national mentality conducive to defending the Motherland. The revolutionaries also accepted the army’s central educative role, but saw the intense regionalism and political corruption as impediments to its successful implementation. Once these impediments were swept away, the saving influence of the nation-in-arms’ doctrine would be able to penetrate the farthest recesses of the country.

Analysts have frequently pointed out that the tenentes’ program was weak in that it lacked postvictory plans. It may be that because the tenentes agreed as military men on what Brazil needed, they felt little pressure to formulate a platform as, for example, politicians would. The goal of an organized, self-aware industrialized Brazilian nation naturally called for a strong central government, free compulsory primary education, obligatory military service, and government intervention in the economy to develop natural resources and to industrialize. They had the goals, but they were uncertain as to how to implement them.

In the diagnosis of Brazil’s ills and in the vision of what Brazil was to become, there was little difference between the tenente rebels and the rest of the officer corps; where they differed was in their patience and choice of means to effect solutions. Indeed, who rebelled may well have been determined more by location and opportunity than agreement or disagreement over issues or goals.

The rebellions of the 1922-27 period had much to do with the officers’ dissatisfaction with pay, arms, equipment, and the high command, as well as the frustration with the low esteem in which the public held the army. The repeated and often disconnected army “reforms” also caused frustration. After years of reorganization along German lines, which involved adoption of German armaments, regulations, tactics, and even kitchens, officers were now being pressed into a French mold, under the watchful eyes of a large French military mission, which arrived in late 1919.⁷⁸

The officers who rebelled in 1922 would convert the 1930 regionalist revolt (Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais against São Paulo) into a real revolution by 1932. As Michael Conniff has shown, during the Vargas years (1930-45), the tenentes achieved their goals of “ending extreme regionalism, bringing new urban sectors into the political arena, making the army a truly national institution, and giving the State a pre-eminent role in social and economic policy.”⁷⁹ They would be in the vanguard of those demanding that Brazil fight in World War II, they would see combat with the expeditionary force in Italy, and they would apply the war’s lessons in the postwar army.

Perhaps it is worth observing that the legalist and revolutionary currents were not fixed; although a few officers, such as Leitão de Carvalho, pursued legalism religiously, others associated with A Defeza Nacional departed legalist ranks in later crises. In 1930, the army was so split that even the high command turned against the government. In 1932, “Young Turk” leader Bertoldo Klinger would command São Paulo’s rebel troops. Eúrico Dutra would assume an interventionist stance in 1937 and 1945, while editorial board member Humberto de Castello Branco would head the 1964 coup. Indeed, revolutionists like Klinger and Castello Branco appear to have thought that their interventions were proper, perhaps even legal, because their loyalty was to the Brazilian Motherland rather than to a particular administration. More needs to be done before we will have adequate explanations for the different attitudes of the five president-generals who have governed Brazil since 1964. Given the re-emergence of many early Defeza Nacional ideas in the doctrines of the post–World War II Escola Superior de Guerra, however, it appears that during the Vargas years a synthesis took place that blended those ideas with the tenentes’ revolutionary experience to create the more formal national security ideology.

In their synthetic form, the ideas discussed in the preceding pages became part of the doctrine taught in the two key institutions of the post–World War II era, the Escola de Comando e Estado Maior do Exército and the Escola Superior de Guerra. Together, these schools helped to shape the current officer corps’ self-image and role perception and played key roles in forming the “military republic” of 1964-84. From the perspective of the 1980s, it is clear that the intellectual seedbed of the Brazilian military’s role in society lies in the first two decades of the century. Many of the problems diagnosed then have been resolved, but the patterns established then are still affecting contemporary Brazil.

Author notes