In the great wave of labor conflict that swept Latin America from 1917 to 1920, workers in Brazil took to the streets in unprecedented numbers. By that time, Brazil’s urban workers had almost three decades of labor action behind them, decades marked by often-violent strikes and fierce state repression. Before 1917, in the nation’s industrial heartland of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, immigrant workers filled the factories, elites commonly condemned strikes as the work of foreign agitators, and the state defined the social question as a police question. In July 1917, workers in São Paulo erupted in a massive general strike: they made moderate demands, negotiated indirectly with the state, and won a significant labor victory. Within a month workers in Rio followed suit. Although by September a repressive backlash was in full swing, a reconfiguration of the country’s labor politics was already underway.1
Our understanding of early Brazilian labor history has been based almost exclusively on our knowledge of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where the overwhelming majority of research has been concentrated.2 Such overreliance on the experience of Brazil’s industrial core has limited our vision of the full complexity of that history. This study aims to help broaden our vision by examining a neglected yet significant episode in Brazilian labor history: a pair of major railroad strikes in July and October of 1917 in Brazil’s southern border state of Rio Grande do Sul.3 These strikes against the foreign-owned Compagnie Auxiliaire de Chemins de Fer paralyzed virtually the entire regional rail system and proved extremely costly to commercial interests in Rio Grande do Sul.4 Yet despite the costs, strikers were able to capitalize on widespread public dissatisfaction with abysmal railroad service to win active support that cut across class lines. To accomplish this they represented their strikes not as a revolutionary class weapon, but rather as a practical form of leverage—one that could serve both labor and commerce by bringing pressure to bear on a common foe to win concessions of benefit to both. These were moderate workers, predominately native-born, willing to make full use of nationalism to bring together a multiclass alliance against foreign capital. Elites and the state government gave outright support to their cause. As moderates concerned only with economic gains and willing to work with the Rio Grande do Sul government, the railroad strikers reflect a pattern more commonly associated with workers in Rio de Janeiro than with those in São Paulo, and thus the events in Rio Grande do Sul can help us clarify the meaning of this dichotomy within the history of the Brazilian labor movement. On the one hand, moderate workers who make common cause with other social groups run considerable risk: the broader the alliance, the greater the danger that it may serve others’ interests instead of their own. On the other hand, as this study will show, moderate workers who choose to take this risk could play an important role in shaping state labor policy in Brazil.
If the Riograndense rail strikes serve to remind us of the need to develop more ample and variegated models of national labor history, they also remind us that national histories are only one basis for comparative analysis. Moderate workers in other Latin American countries followed similar strategies in the years before 1930, with similar success. Among the best-known contemporary cases are the de facto alliance between labor and state under the regime of Hipólito Yrigoyen and the Unión Cívica Radical in Argentina and the prolabor politics of José Badie y Ordoñez’s regime in Uruguay.5 While the physical proximity of Rio Grande do Sul to both Argentina and Uruguay suggests that these similarities might be explained simply by influences that spread across a shared border, the same cannot be said for similar cases to be found, for example, among railroad workers in distant Mexico.6 All over Latin America, railroads were most commonly foreign owned and workers who struggled against such companies often took reformist and nationalist positions.7 To explain these similarities we have to look beyond the broad categories of national labor history.
Through a close examination of the Rio Grande do Sul railroad strikes, this study aims to explore some potential answers to several larger questions about the possibilities and limitations of cross-class alliances in early-twentieth-century Latin American labor history. First, under what conditions were workers willing and able to forge cross-class alliances? Second, to what extent could they maintain some degree of independence and influence within such alliances? And finally, did such alliances ultimately serve workers’ interests? In the Brazilian strikes of 1917, the voices of workers are difficult to document, but we can learn a great deal from a close reading of the discourse and conduct of the lead players on both sides. We can discern the reformist politics of the workers indirectly through the discourse and actions of their advocates and negotiators and through the evolution and denouement of the strikes. The complex politics of the Rio Grande do Sul strikes underscores how important careful contextualization can be to understanding the processes by which workers construct their identities over time. We can better appreciate the plasticity of these identities and the contingencies of class formation by probing the complex ways working class experience and elite strategies can interact within concentric circles of local, regional, and national communities. In Rio Grande do Sul, this interaction worked, step-by-step, to inscribe some workers in a gradual process of evolution toward a corporatist political order. A study of this interaction can help us better understand how the emergence of corporatist politics has been shaped by pressures from below as well as by imposition from above.
Forging a Cross-Class Alliance: The First 1917 Railroad Strike (July 30-August 7)
The first railroad strike in Rio Grande do Sul lasted only one week, yet it was in this week that a cross-class alliance first coalesced and that, despite their disparate backgrounds, the participants in the strike first glimpsed their potential power. Viewed from a distance, the strike was not only brief, but unremarkable. Workers struck on July 30, when news reached them of the massive strike movements in São Paulo. The foreign-owned railroad responded with an ultimatum, threatening to fire the strikers if they did not return to work within two days. When the ultimatum expired, federal troops moved in to restart the trains, and within days the strike collapsed. Given this result, the strike has often been dismissed as a straightforward defeat for labor—a case of intransigence by powerful foreign capital, backed by the federal government’s violent repression of labor.8
This view, however, is deceptive. The strike was deeply enmeshed in federal, state, and local politics. The foreign-owned rail company was not strong but weak, and it had to rely on federal intervention because state and local authorities refused to help the company, even when faced with the strike’s damaging effects on the regional economy. The short strike enabled political leaders in Rio Grande do Sul to discover that labor mobilization could be a powerful source of political leverage and labor leaders to learn that allies from outside the ranks of workers could be valuable, though at times unreliable.
While the strike failed to win workers their demands, it had a dramatic impact on the making of policy at the state level, pushing the state government to break with its long-standing policy of nonintervention in the economy.
Politicians, Management, and Merchants
At the heart of the first railroad strike lay fierce contention over the division of federal and regional power. Despite the decentralized federal system of Brazil’s First Republic (1889-1930), the state government had no control over its vital rail system, for the Compagnie Auxiliaire operated independently under a concession from the federal government. In 1917, the deficiencies of the rail system were causing a regional transportation crisis in Rio Grande do Sul, and the federal government was unresponsive to the problem. The state government did not have the political clout necessary to force federal action and thus found its hands tied in a matter critical to regional economic well-being. Labor mobilization proved to be the leverage the state government needed to break the impasse.
The railroad company shared the state government’s frustration with the federal government, but for a very different reason. The company was in deep financial trouble and had repeatedly requested federal permission to raise its rates, but to no avail. Financial difficulties dated back to 1910, when Percival Farquhar’s giant North American holding company, the Brazil Railway, absorbed the Belgian company that originally had operated almost all of Rio Grande’s extensive regional rail system, the Compagnie Auxiliaire de Chemins de Fer. In 1914, Farquhar’s collapse forced the Brazil Railway into receivership, and late in 1916 American representatives of the receivership arrived in Rio Grande do Sul and took over day-to-day management of the Auxiliaire from the Belgians.9 The Auxiliaire then not only inherited the legacy of Farquhar’s financial problems but the anti-Americanism his ambitious enterprises had aroused in Brazil as well.10
The trade disruptions caused by World War I aggravated these problems by stimulating production throughout Rio Grande while making it virtually impossible to import new rolling stock. Goods piled up on sidings, awaiting shipment as the Auxiliaire wrestled unsuccessfully with spiraling costs, falling profits, and a constant shortage of capital. The federal government’s refusal to authorize rate increases left the company without the financial resources to resolve its difficulties.11 Service deteriorated accordingly. Just days before the first strike broke out a French diplomat touring the Auxiliaire system found it in a sorry state: ties badly worn, rolling stock in ill repair, and the population “extremely discontent,” even threatening to burn down the stations. He judged the situation “very dangerous.”12 It was a climate of opinion that would prove sympathetic to the coming strike.
Commercial interests throughout the region were seething with anger at the railroad company. By 1917, their shipments were often held up for weeks on end, and their continual protests to the company brought no relief. They wanted better regional transportation service but were reluctant to accede to the rate increases that the Auxiliaire sought. On the eve of the first strike in July, the state’s leading newspaper reported that a majority of merchants favored recision of the Auxiliaire’s contract.13 Faced with an intolerable situation, many merchants would prove willing to support a strike as a means of bringing economic and moral pressure to bear on the company and the federal government, both of which had shown themselves impervious to all other forms of protest.
Nowhere did feeling against the company run higher than at the hub of the regional rail system, Santa Maria da Boca do Monte. Santa Maria lay at the geographical center of Rio Grande do Sul, where the region’s rail lines converged from the state capital, Porto Alegre, to the east, from Uruguay and Argentina to the southwest, and from São Paulo to the north. In late 1916, when the new American manager, William N. Cartwright, arrived in Santa Maria to take over railroad operations, he found a city of 10,000 that ranked fourth in the state in commercial importance.14 The city’s commercial vitality depended on the railroad, and its merchants depended on the Auxiliaire to bring them business, but they also found its inadequate service intolerable and resented the competition from its consumer cooperative, which functioned like an outsized company store.15
The Auxiliaire’s problems were very much Santa Maria’s problems because the railroad was the city’s largest employer. As of 1912, the company employed some 3,000 people, almost one-third of the city’s population.16 Some of these were white-collar employees, for the city was the administrative headquarters of the Auxiliaire’s regional rail operations. Many of the rest worked in the railroad’s repair shops and warehouses. Still others were trainmen and line workers who settled their families in the city because of its central location within the rail system. Overall, Santa Maria had by far the highest concentration of railroad workers in Rio Grande do Sul. Not only did the first 1917 railroad strike originate there, but Cartwright estimated that some 60 percent of the strikers were from the city’s repair shops and warehouses.17
Over the years, the Auxiliaire’s Belgian management had established close ties with the city’s propertied classes. Gustave Vauthier, who directed the Auxiliaire from 1906 until his ouster by the American receiver in September 1916, was well connected to political interests at the local, as well as state, level. He married a Brazilian and installed his relatives, friends, and political allies in railroad posts. When Cartwright arrived in Rio Grande do Sul to bring “order” to the foundering rail system, he quickly ran afoul of these vested interests. In his eyes, the company was riddled with nepotism, to say nothing of cozy arrangements with local politicians. As he set out to eliminate what he perceived as inefficiencies, he made enemies, and their machinations against him further exacerbated the line’s difficulties.18
Because the Auxiliaire was Santa Maria’s economic mainstay, all the city’s social classes felt the full force of the company’s mounting financial difficulties. Santa Maria had grown with the railroad, but during World War I the increasing inadequacy of railroad service turned urban growth to stagnation. The downturn occurred just as the war heightened nationalist feeling and this, in turn, exacerbated frictions within the city’s ethnically heterogeneous population, which included Germans, Italians, and Lebanese.19 In April 1917, when Germany sank the Brazilian freighter Paraná, a wave of reaction swept the region and anti-German disturbances shook the city. In May, the city intendant reported spontaneous and potentially dangerous patriotic agitation in the município.20 He voiced the elite’s concern with the threat of local social unrest, describing Santa Maria as a “little big city” with serious financial problems and too few police to control its “bad elements.”21 These local social tensions played a significant part in both railroad strikes. Ultimately it was to be Santa Maria’s role as the epicenter of the first strike that helped trigger the greatest threat of all to the community: the Auxiliaire’s devastating decision to move its headquarters out of the city. This threat, in turn, fortified the initial cross-class alliance and triggered the second strike.
In sum, in 1917 the financial problems and anti-Americanism that bedeviled a foreign-owned railroad company, commercial discontent engendered by these problems, and threats to community in the rail hub of Santa Maria amid the economic dislocations and nativist tensions brought about by World War I all combined to create conditions conducive to the formation of a multiclass alliance. And although federal politics created the impasse that called the alliance into being, it remained for regional and local politics to determine the shape the alliance took.
When the first 1917 rail strike began in July, the Auxiliaire’s American manager was both surprised and indignant to discover that the company did not have local and state government authorities on its side. Santa Maria’s intendant and police chief were, in Cartwright’s words, “very active strike sympathizers.” The intendant withdrew his guards from the railroad yards on the first afternoon of the strike and provided no protection for either railroad property or for strikebreakers and scabs. The company’s repeated requests and even its offer to pay the costs of protection were to no avail. To Cartwright’s pleas, the intendant merely responded: “so far no windows have been broken.” What is more, the Auxiliaire’s manager was convinced that local authorities throughout the state “had been given to understand” that the state government “was actively in sympathy with the strikers.” The most the state would do was promise the protection of the Military Brigade should violence erupt.22
Active sympathy for strikers was not a position always taken by the state’s ruling party, the Partido Republicano Riograndense (PRR), nor by longtime party leader Governor Antonio Augusto Borges de Medeiros. After more than two decades in power, the PRR was no stranger to strikes, and, like ruling parties in other Brazilian states, it had often demonstrated its readiness to back capital in its conflicts with labor.23 However, the PRR did not have the same relationship with urban workers as did its counterparts in other states. From its origins in the 1880s, the PRR had proclaimed a strong commitment to its own local version of Comtian positivism, and a central tenet of this ideology was that the proletariat should be “incorporated” into society, not repressed. In theory the party had always recognized the right of workers to strike and had long argued that PRR “defense” of the proletariat set it apart from Brazil’s other republican parties.24 Before July 1917, the PRR’s defense of the proletariat had been more rhetorical than real. A notable departure from this tradition came when a general strike paralyzed Porto Alegre shortly after the rail strike began. The general strike pushed the PRR to grant the labor demands of state workers and to pressure private employers to do the same.25 The PRR then justified its action on the grounds that it was not only incorporating the proletariat but fulfilling a long-standing party mandate to represent the general interests of the region as a whole, above the special interests of any single class or social group.26 This overture to labor, and the use of positivist ideology to justify it, constituted part of the backdrop for the railroad strikes. Nevertheless, in the first rail strike, ideology took a backseat to pragmatic concerns. The state government took the position it did in the first railroad strike in part because Borges, like the region’s commercial leaders, had no understanding of the company’s internal problems, had run out of patience with the crippling effect of what he perceived to be company mismanagement on the regional economy, and was frustrated by his inability to do anything about the complaints that besieged him. Borges and the PRR had little incentive to leap to the aid of the unpopular foreign-owned company. At the same time, the PRR was still far from ready to side publicly with the railroad strikers, as it was to do during the second strike in October.
If the PRR’s distinctive relationship with urban workers was in part a product of its ideology, this relationship was also very much a product of fierce and long-standing bipartisan conflict. Rio Grande do Sul was unique in turn-of-the-century Brazil for the intensely polarized and often violent competition between its two entrenched political parties, a conflict rooted in the bloody civil war that had wracked the state from 1893 to 1895. The opposition Partido Federalista drew its strength from the region’s largest landholders, the great cattle ranchers. It doggedly, if unsuccessfully, contested elections in Rio Grande do Sul. Fierce partisanship prompted both parties to take advantage of every opportunity to broaden their base of support, which included workers.27 The PRR had already acted in defense of rail workers just prior to the removal of the Belgian manager in September 1916, after one hundred workers had been dismissed from the railroad’s shops in the city of Rio Grande. When the workers lodged a protest with Borges, he promptly took up their complaint with the transportation minister, holding upper-level American administrators to blame.28
Santa Maria was a traditional hotbed for this partisan political competition. The municipio had long had a strong and active Federalist opposition. The PRR normally counted on votes from the município’s many colono small farmers of immigrant descent to swell its election totals, and in the months preceding the strike, with elections for governor approaching, a party insider warned that Federalists were intimidating the colonos from registering to vote.29 The local opposition was also challenging PRR control of the judicial system in Santa Maria, causing what the intendant called “anarchy in the courts” that was “hurting the prestige of justice,” compounding the “disorder” and “indiscipline” in the city, and endangering a juiz da comarca, the official charged with registering voters.30 For years Federalists had their own newspaper in Santa Maria, and in 1917 they also received ample and often sympathetic coverage in the new daily, the Correlo da Serra, which professed independence from party politics. The Correio da Serra became a strong backer, and even a promoter, of both railroad strikes and gave them invaluable, in-depth coverage. At the same time, it waged a crusade against Santa Maria’s Republican intendant, Astrogildo Cezar de Azevedo.
Divisions within the ranks of Santa Maria Republicans were also to play a role in both strikes. The origins of these divisions reached back more than a decade to a 1906 party split that led to a heavily contested 1907 race for governor. At that time, the PRR was a minority party in Santa Maria, which was a key center for the opposition campaign, and one of the local opposition leaders was a young lawyer named José Joaquim de Andrade Neves Neto. Ten years later, in July 1917, Neves headed the railroad workers’ prestrike delegation to the Auxiliaire.31 He was only the first of many from outside the ranks of labor who were to figure prominently in the railroad strikes. Partisan politics drove the efforts to build political followings among railroad workers.
Workers
None of these circumstances would have resulted in the formation of a crossclass alliance had it not been for the railroad workers themselves. From the beginning they were active participants in the making of the alliance, and they remained central players in its evolution throughout. Although news of the strikes in São Paulo clearly helped spur them to action, homegrown grievances against the Auxiliaire were their primary motivation. No mere demonstration effect could account for a movement of the magnitude theirs was to achieve.
The workers’ grievances against the railroad were of long standing. The company’s ongoing financial difficulties, deteriorating equipment, and management disarray wreaked havoc on its workforce. Shop forces were inefficiently distributed, inexperienced workers operated locomotives, some sections were understaffed while there was featherbedding in others, train routes were often canceled for lack of personnel, workers were often injured in accidents, and serious derailments occurred almost daily.32 Belgian management had paid workers little and often treated them with contempt and brutality. The accustomed tenor of labor-management relations is evident in Vauthier’s description of his workforce in late 1916 as “120 gangs of men, 40 good, 80 blindmen. We have to teach them, when men disobey orders, ‘A rua!’ [Get out!] but not every day or we would not have men to run the locomotives.” He also said that workers deserved no better pay because “thirty percent of our people in the shops are vagabonds.” His chief engineer was known for imposing large fines on long-time employees for minor infractions and for disciplining or firing workers at will, without explanation. Just before the Americans took over, with no explanation he cut pay and fired experienced workers, replacing them with others who were unqualified.33
The takeover by American management late in 1916 only aggravated workers’ discontent. Cartwright tried to dispel ill will by immediately rehiring as many experienced workers as possible, clearing their records, and reinstating previous pay rates. In early 1917, he announced pay raises for firemen, brakemen, and some locomotive engineers, and reorganized districts so that trainmen who worked more difficult runs received better pay. But he was under intense pressure from the receiver to increase the line’s efficiency in order to put it on firmer financial footing. His efforts to rationalize management, including his introduction of a new classification system for workers, disrupted customary worker practices and expectations. Well aware of the potential for worker resistance, Cartwright ordered that the reorganization of shop workforces proceed very gradually, so as to minimize reactions. In the wake of the changes, he claimed that the accident rate was sharply reduced, schedules better maintained, and worker morale improved.34 Workers, however, saw things differently. Although there was no love lost for the Belgians, workers were distrustful of American management, which was new and alien, and they resisted some of Cartwright’s changes. They also complained that he did nothing to remedy one of the most hated practices of the previous Belgian management: the assignment of irregular and excessively long work shifts. In subsequent months, firemen and engineers, as well as many other rail workers, continued to complain of irregular hours. As one worker put it, they had “more excess work than in prisons” and “their liberty was coerced.”35 At the same time, Brazil’s rapidly escalating cost of living exacerbated their discontent.
Signs of labor activism appeared in the first months of 1917 among locomotive engineers and firemen, the railroad’s most skilled, most highly paid, and most respected workers. In January 1917, some locomotive engineers joined other Santa Maria workers in founding a liga operaría, or workers league.36 In the ensuing weeks, a group of engineers and firemen met secretly in Santa Maria to lay plans to petition the company in demand of shorter hours and higher pay. They stopped short of considering a strike, however, and shifted their meetings to Porto Alegre once their activism had been discovered.37
Although the workers of the Auxiliaire may have shared some of the sense of occupational community characteristic of other rail workers, before 1917 they had had relatively little experience in labor conflict and organization. Seven small strikes can be documented over the railroad’s previous two decades, three of them begun by workers in Santa Maria and all three repressed. None had yielded a lasting union. No rail union had affiliated with the regional labor federation, the Federação de Operários do Rio Grande do Sul (FORGS), so railroad workers remained outsiders to the well-developed regional labor movement. Until 1917, their only lasting organization was a mutualist association, not a labor union, called the Associação dos Empregados da Viação Ferrea, that was formed in 1915.38 Their relative inexperience in labor movements made the Auxiliaire employees something of an anomaly among railroad workers. While Brazil’s early labor movement was weak in comparison to those of some Latin American countries, Brazilian railroad workers had been among the country’s leaders in strike activity during the first decade of the republic.39 Railroaders unions in neighboring Uruguay and Argentina also took a leading role in the labor history of the period.40 Without a strong tradition of independent organization or any established ideological commitments, Auxiliaire workers could be more open to the formation of a cross-class alliance.
The Outbreak of the Strike
When news reached Santa Maria of massive strike movements sweeping São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in July 1917, locomotive engineers took the lead in rounding up support from workers in the locomotive division and the maintenance shops. One crew of Santa Maria activists commandeered a locomotive to spread strike calls along the line north toward the Santa Catarina border. Within days thousands of São Paulo strike bulletins made their way south by rail into the hands of workers in Santa Maria. Local officials confiscated as many as they could, but Santa Maria’s rail workers began distributing bulletins of their own calling on coworkers to strike.41 In a report submitted later to his superiors, Cartwright sought to blame the strike on “agitators from São Paulo” who had whipped up “dissatisfied elements.”42 By downplaying the internal and local origins of the strike he relieved himself of any responsibility, but greatly distorted the reality of the situation. In Santa Maria the news of strikes in São Paulo found ready ears. Paulista news had only to galvanize strike leaders into action and give workers outside the ranks of trainmen the push they needed to join the strike movement.
Ten days before the strike began, labor activists issued a bulletin that established the moderate, nationalist position on which they consistently made their stand against the foreign-owned railroad. The activists were then still meeting in secret and signed their bulletin the União Protectora dos Empregados da Viação Férrea do Rio Grande do Sul. They described themselves as some two to three hundred workers drawn from Santa Maria and a number of other railroad towns, although they also claimed to speak for all the employees of the Auxiliaire. Their demands—for higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions—were pragmatic and moderate. Their prestrike bulletin attacked Auxiliaire managers as foreign exploiters and characterized the conduct of the company as “nabobesque.”43 This nationalist, anticolonial language reflected local needs and feeling. If some workers shared the anarchist ideology common to many Brazilian labor activists of the period, it was not in evidence. Their expressed moderation and nationalism gave them a stance well suited to win sympathy from the company’s many enemies outside the ranks of labor, and these features became central to their appeals for cross-class support in both railroad strikes.
This nationalist position was a more comfortable one for most Auxiliaire workers than it would have been for many workers in the main centers of Brazil’s labor movement in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Auxiliaire workers were preponderantly Brazilian at a time when foreign-born workers predominated in Brazil’s factories, though not necessarily on its railroads.44 The patterns of immigration and ethnicity that had created a labor force dominated by foreign-born workers in Brazil’s south-central industrial core were not duplicated in Rio Grande do Sul, where European immigration, although significant, was much smaller in scale, peaked sooner, and was directed primarily to the settlement of independent small farms. The native birth of most Auxiliaire workers created affinities of language and customs that made it easier for them to make common cause with Riograndenses of other social classes.
Moderation also characterized the written demands that a União delegation presented to Cartwright on July 30. The demands were drafted by locomotive engineers, who again took the lead and dominated the workers’ delegation. The make-up of the delegation reflected the movement’s incorporation of skilled maintenance-shop workers as well.45 The demands called for an eight-hour day, wage hikes of 10 to 35 percent implemented on a sliding scale, double pay for manual workers for night and Sunday work, additional pay for monthly employees for work in months of 31 days, retirement at salary for employees with 25 years service, travel passes to allow fired workers and their families to return home, and improved medical care. These demands were moderate enough for the PRR to sympathize with them, and the ruling party reprinted them in its official party newspaper.46
Even Cartwright was sympathetic to the workers’ grievances. Far from dismissing them peremptorily, as many employers would have done, he readily acknowledged that workers were suffering the compounded effects of the company’s financial problems and the universal rise in the cost of living. He professed himself more than willing to help them in their economic plight, yet unable to do any more than he already had. The company, he told them, was already doing the best it could for its workers; each month over the past year it had raised wages for a different group of employees, including many engineers, brakemen, and firemen, as well as all baggage handlers. He explained that 38 percent of company gross income went to pay labor, while shareholders were not receiving interest or dividend payments, and that despite rising expenses all net income was being reinvested in improving equipment. In his view, both the company and its workforce were trapped between financial strictures beyond their control and the federal government’s rigid refusal to authorize rate increases. Cartwright tried to convince the workers that their interests lay with the company in its struggle against the federal government. He sought, in other words, to redefine the lines of conflict so that labor and management were on the same, not opposing, sides. He readily agreed to the delegation’s request that he put what he had said in writing.47 Had his conciliatory response been published promptly in the press, instead of only after the strike ended, it might have served to dampen public support for the strikers. But labor activists rejected Cartwright’s effort to elide class conflict from the situation. At eleven o’clock that night, they went out on strike. All efforts to stem the growing agitation had proven futile.
The Course of the Strike
Initially, only a limited core of railroad workers supported the strike, and this limited base made outside support critical from the start. On the first morning, engineers and firemen in Santa Maria had to pressure station and train crews off the job, and though by afternoon the strike had idled the repair shops, only some 150 strikers attended a meeting called on the first day of the strike. Skilled trainmen and shop workers had to carry the strike, for they were unable to convince station, traffic, clerical, and unskilled line workers to join them.48 From the outset, the strikers took care to maximize their chances of winning outside support by staying resolutely within the bounds of order. They made no move to damage costly rolling stock, which was already in desperately short supply. Instead they idled the trains by emptying water reservoirs and greasing rails, nonviolent measures that were easily reversible.
Strike leaders lost no time in seeking to bolster their position with support from outside the ranks of labor. Given the widespread hostility toward the company, this was an obvious and sensible strategy. Strike leaders directed their first bulletin at local merchants and explicitly appealed to them to join a mutually beneficial alliance. They called on merchants to reduce their prices in exchange for a share in the strike’s benefits; the strike, they argued, would force the railroad to solve the transport crisis that was victimizing business. This bulletin made no mention at all of labor’s grievances. Instead, it dwelt on the overarching justice of the common cause.49 Strikers also emphasized their respect for the authorities, and reminded sympathizers and the public that workers were only exercising their legitimate right to strike.50
The strategy of building outside support quickly paid off. In Santa Maria many who were not railroad employees took, in Cartwright’s words, “a very decided interest in the strike.”51 Outsiders spoke repeatedly at strike meetings, in the streets, and at strike headquarters. The city’s merchants supplied strikers with food and money, not only out of animus toward the company for poor service, but also in the openly voiced hope that the strike would lead to the closing of the railroad’s cooperative store.52 In other cities along the rail line, local commerce and public opinion were also actively sympathetic. In one, merchants guaranteed strikers up to six months credit should they be replaced by the company, and the official PRR newspaper approved this gesture as one made “with the sympathy the cause inspires.”53
Strikers also made active efforts to win the support of several units of federal army troops headquartered in Santa Maria, but their appeals to patriotism failed to keep the army from coming to the defense of the foreign-owned railroad. Amid all the local and regional antagonism the company faced, it could still count on unqualified federal support. Although patrols from the state Military Brigade had been present at the Santa Maria station and shops on the first day of the strike, it was federal troops who ordered strikers out of the station yard, enforced the order with a cordon of riflemen, and assumed responsibility for protecting railroad property. And while Santa Maria’s intendant did accede to the company’s request to have the city’s few administrative police provide protection for any workers who wanted to return to the job, it was army backing that enabled Cartwright to issue his ultimatum that workers who did not report back on the job by the third day of the strike would be fired.54
Although the state government would not act openly, it twice attempted to intercede on the strikers’ behalf from behind the scenes. In this its main agent was Ildefonso Fontoura, chief engineer of the Ninth Inspection District, who first tried, unsuccessfully, to get the ultimatum revoked. Then, when the strike was threatened by a War Ministry order to move ammunition north by rail to the area affected by the Contestado Rebellion, Fontoura personally assured the commander of the Seventh Military Region of the strikers’ patriotism and announced that they would support the nation’s army by providing the necessary transport train despite the strike. Fontoura accompanied the ammunition transport himself and publicly proclaimed his sympathy with the strike at stops along its route. Not everyone liked the compromise. Some strike supporters feared that the train’s real purpose was to bring more troops to Santa Maria to keep order, and one angry group of strikers set fire to a bridge in an effort to block the train.55
Strikers not only had to deal with federal army backing for the company, but with the problems inevitably created by the region’s intense political rivalries. It proved no easy task to enlist support from outside the ranks of labor without appearing to be the creatures of one political party and thus alienating the other. In one town, for instance, strikers asked a local Republican editor to speak for them during the ammunition train’s stop there and then praised his “brilliant” job, only to have a Federalist paper attack the occasion as “a political orgy.” Clearly recognizing the dangers inherent in having their cause identified with partisan politics, strike leaders hastened to deny alignment with any one party. Instead, they proclaimed “Viva o povo sem politicagem!” (Long live the people without politicking!). That is, they claimed that their cause was the cause of “the people” in general. The official PRR paper ran the story and reprinted the strikers’ bulletin for all to see.56
The strikers even appealed for support directly to the nation’s highest authority, President Wenceslau Brás. A crowd reported to number two thousand gathered in Santa Maria to approve this initiative, and a core group of locomotive engineers then sent the president a long, heavily publicized telegram. The telegram denounced the Auxiliaire for abusing its workers, neglecting the railroad, and disregarding the needs of the region’s commerce. It decried the cruelty of ordering engineers who had just completed a run at midnight to go back out on a new one at three o’clock in the morning without rest. For years, the telegram charged, trains had been late, service poorly administered, and the workforce inadequate; new equipment lay abandoned, broken equipment unrepaired.57 In calling the federal government’s attention to the full range of company sins, strike leaders aligned the class interests of workers with the interests of commerce, region, and nation against a foreign-owned company derelict in its duties. The identity of interests they advanced thus embraced local, regional, and national circles of community.
When the army nonetheless stepped in to restart the trains, some strikers and their supporters remained defiant. In one town some even turned to violence, burning one bridge and blowing up another, while the local intendant made no attempt to stop them.58 The state government then quickly withdrew its tacit support for the strike. Cartwright attributed the PRR’s turnaround to an exchange of telegrams between Borges and Fontoura in which the governor expressed his alarm over reports of German and Federalist involvement in the strike. Cartwright himself gave credence to these reports, informing his superiors that damage to company property in towns along the rail lines had been “absolutely proven” to be the work not of employees but of outsiders, whom he identified as “more or less organized mobs, largely composed at all points of Germans.” Borges most likely reacted to a range of considerations, principally his unwillingness to defy the army but including the outbreak of violence as well as a spreading crisis of supplies. In any case, Chief Engineer Fontoura, always obedient to Borges, overnight changed from a strong opponent of the company to an ally eager to help end the strike.59 He rushed to assist authorities in arresting workers and worked to halt violence and control the crowds. When President Brás responded to the telegram with a request for information on the strikers, Fontoura condemned his erstwhile allies for their aggressive attitudes, their depredations, and their use of threats and force to stop coworkers from reporting to work. He even branded them morally unsuited to seek any measure of government redress. Cartwright later alleged that Fontoura sought a financial reward from the railroad for his help in ending the strike, and, when none was forthcoming, nursed a grudge that motivated his violent personal attacks on the manager during the second strike in October.60
The state government’s defection and the crackdown on the strike were followed by a demonstration of the strength of the cross-class alliance. Once the strike lost PRR support, public backing from communities along the rail lines became all the more critical. Strikers demonstrated their independence of the state and the PRR by continuing to defy the company ultimatum, and for a few days many supporters stood by them. Crowd violence erupted in various towns along the railway lines and continued right up to the strike settlement.61 This violence strained the cross-class alliance, but did not break it. Some prostrike newspapers condemned the violence, arguing that it compromised public sympathy for the strike, but they did not withdraw their support for the strike itself. Meanwhile, peaceful strikers hastened to reassure the authorities that they were not responsible for the depredations of a few. In one town meeting, speakers from outside the ranks of labor continued to attack the company both for its mismanaged operations that were detrimental to the state’s economic development and for its exploitation of workers, whom the speakers referred to as our “fellow countrymen.”62 Such references explicidy linked strikers and their allies across class lines in a common front of nationalist opposition to a foreign company.
In Santa Maria, where community support ran deeper than anywhere else, continued backing for the strike produced a massive march and rally where different components of the cross-class alliance were represented by three speakers from outside the workers’ ranks. One was the PRR intendant’s chief political opponent, Walter Jobim, whose support for the strike reflected the position of local opposition groups that seized on the strike to build support for their own interests. Jobim went on to play an important role in opposing the PRR in the 1920s; subsequently he developed close ties to Vargas and rose to become state governor in 1947.63 Another speaker was a traveling salesman who represented merchant support and led workers on a march that saluted all the seats of established authority in the city. The third was a local dentist named Antenor Moraes, who had already spoken at almost every strike meeting and now spoke from amidst the crowd to attack hoteliers for profiteering during the strike while workers suffered. Moraes was to go on to become the workers’ chief advisor in the second railroad strike.64
The alliance, however, could not long withstand the combined opposition of the federal army and state government; and while some workers were determined to hold out, the financial support of local merchants was still insufficient to enable the majority to carry on. In fact, one lesson activists took away from the first strike was the need to ensure adequate material support—a problem a much-fortified alliance would remedy before the second strike began.
Some strikers held out hopes that the authorities would still come to their rescue. They formed a delegation to reassure Borges of the strike’s goals, which they said were being misrepresented.65 In Santa Maria some three hundred strikers and their families sought out the local intendant at his mansion (palacete). There a committee of the strikers’ wives tearfully pleaded with him to save the families of hundreds of fired railroad workers from utter misery by securing their reinstatement and better pay. Still seeking intercession from remote federal powers, they also asked him to appeal to the transportation minister to end the crisis. But the intendant now clearly had orders to demobilize the strike movement. Speaking from the window of his mansion, he recognized their right to seek redress of grievances as long as they remained within the bounds of order, and he promised to do what he could. But he also informed them in no uncertain terms that he, Fontoura, Cartwright, and the state government were the appropriate parties to find a solution. Very dissatisfied with his response, the workers and their families found they could do little but go home and wait.66
The Strike Outcome
The intendant had made it clear that the strike settlement would be worked out between management and the state government. Neither workers nor their commercial allies would have any say in the outcome. The strike had tested the resolve and power of the alliance, and had shown that it could not succeed without state government backing. However, the strike had also shown that the alliance was no mere creature of the state.
The company now had the upper hand and maneuvered to turn the strike to its advantage, while the PRR sought to refurbish its public image of support for the proletariat. The Auxiliaire sought and won what it wanted most: Borges’s pledge to help press the federal government for permission to raise freight rates. In return, the company agreed to take back all strikers who had not committed criminal acts and promised that some of the revenue from prospective higher rates would go to raise the workers’ wages. In Santa Maria, Intendant Azevedo obtained price reductions of 10 to 20 percent from the Consumer Cooperative to help ease the financial straits of workers. The cooperative also agreed to entertain bids to furnish meat to workers at cost and to create a bakery to provide cheap bread.67 In other towns, local authorities stepped in to mediate and conciliate where workers were not ready to end their strike and to shield returning strikers against company retaliation. In one case, a local intendant responded to continued strike violence by agreeing to strikers’ demands that he press owners of local mills, bakeries, and butcher shops to reduce prices.68 Though strike leaders in Santa Maria thanked the intendant for his good offices and the PRR claimed that it had been on the workers’ side throughout, it was no secret that the party had abandoned them once the strike became a political liability.69 Both labor activists and merchants publicly blamed Fontoura’s “Machiavellian intervention” for the betrayal of their interests, but that was only the thinnest of shields for Borges and the PRR.70 Responsibility for the strike’s defeat rested not just with the army, but also with the party. The workers, for all their outside support, ended up with little more than Cartwright’s initial offer: a vague, open-ended promise of better pay if the federal government approved rate increases. The strike’s principal achievement was securing the state government’s acquiescence to that solution.
Yet even this acquiescence proved problematic, for the end of the strike left Borges with a highly unsatisfactory situation on his hands. The region’s urgent transportation crisis remained unresolved, if not actually worse.71 While rate increases, if approved, might help solve the company’s financial problems and even fund pay hikes for workers, rate increases were hardly what the strikers’ commercial allies had sought to gain from the strike. There was not even a pledge from the company that any new revenue would go to ameliorate the transport crisis. Although the Correio da Serra estimated that the strike had cost the Auxiliaire 480 contos in lost revenues alone, not including damage done to railroad property, if the request for rate increases did go through, the company stood to emerge from this first round of labor conflict the big winner, and regional commerce the big loser.72 And since merchants could be expected to raise retail prices to recoup any increased freight rates, workers would only end up paying higher prices than ever.
Faced with these unpalatable prospects, Borges soon began backing away from his promise. In a carefully worded message to railroad workers just days after the strike’s end, Fontoura cautioned that Borges could only promise to study the question of rate increases, and that this would take time.73 Within weeks Borges abandoned his promise altogether. The railroad workers’ first strike convinced him that the time had come for a radical solution to the transport crisis: the state must take over the railroad. In the course of the strike, the workers had demonstrated their ability to mobilize popular support and command the attention of the inattentive federal government and so had suggested a promising new tactic for winning federal government acquiescence to regional ambitions. In short, the workers’ movement had shown the state government that there could be only one solution to the transport crisis, and that they could be instrumental to achieving it. All that remained was to prepare the ground for the workers’ second mobilization, which followed two months later in October.
Mapping the Power and Limits of the Alliance: The Second Railroad Strike, October 16-31
Genesis of the Second Strike: Strengthening the Alliance
No sooner had the first strike collapsed than activists began preparing for the second. Although strike leaders blamed the collapse primarily on betrayal by the state government and manipulation by Cartwright, they also recognized their own failure to convince traffic and line workers to join the movement, a failure they immediately set out to correct. Disaffection toward the company remained high, and membership in the workers association, previously never more than five hundred, tripled to fifteen hundred by September. Organizers boasted that the association now included employees from the lowest to the highest ranks of the Auxiliaire workforce. Monthly contributions to a strike fund were made mandatory, with workers to contribute 10 percent of their pay to the fund, and delegates were named to collect money in railroad towns all over the state. The Sociedade Beneficente and the Sociedade Protectora claimed they were each ready to contribute roo contos to sustain a strike. Anticipating that the federal army would once more side with the company, the workers association reported that it was expelling unidentified “suspect elements” who might weaken resistance. As organizing advanced, bulletins calling for a new strike began to surface all along the railway lines.74 Cartwright was well aware of the widespread canvassing in the aftermath of the first strike, and complained of intimidation among workers. Yet he maintained that most workers, whether engineers and shop workers (who had formed the core of the first strike) or line and traffic workers (who had remained on the job) showed little interest in renewing the strike.75 At the same time, by doing nothing to keep the promises he had made to workers in the August settlement, he fueled the mounting agitation.
Ironically, management precipitated the second strike by trying to preempt it. In September the company announced its decision to transfer its regional headquarters from Santa Maria to Porto Alegre. The move, according to management, was a long-overdue response to a 1915 internal report. That report described 90 accounting clerks working in Santa Maria in dimly lit, cramped quarters, some in unsanitary “frames” close to cesspools and lavatories. “Common humanity,” the report concluded, “demands sanitary surroundings.”76 “Common humanity,” however, did not prompt action until there was fear of renewed labor unrest. This motive became even more apparent when the company quietly began transferring shop workers out of Santa Maria. The first group of 30 was transferred on October 5, with other contingents scheduled to follow at intervals; by the end of the year the company had planned to reduce the Santa Maria shops to a mere handful of workers—a number adequate to carry out only minor repairs.77 This transfer of offices and shops was an attempt to forestall any recurrence of the local support for labor action in Santa Maria that had proven so dangerous in August. For the city of Santa Maria the transfer represented a major threat to community interests; jobs, business, revenue, and the prestige associated with an urban center would all be lost. Little wonder that city leaders reacted with bitter opposition.78 Faced with this new emergency, local commercial and political interests came to see a second strike as the best available weapon for waging an all-out defense of community against the hostile power of the railroad. By mid-September the city was rife with open talk that a new strike would begin on September 20, the day the company had slated for moving the Auxiliaire offices to Porto Alegre, and, symbolically, the day commemorated by all Riograndenses as marking the beginning of the Farroupilha Revolt (1835-45), a ten-year struggle for independence from an unjust central government.79
This timetable, however, proved premature, for other elements of the alliance had yet to come together. On the very day Auxiliaire offices were to move, leading merchants of the regional Commercial Association met in Porto Alegre to voice their collective opposition to the rate increase that had been proposed in August, set at a daunting 20 percent, and to pressure for state takeover of the railroad. Governor Borges de Medeiros met personally with the merchants’ representatives and reversed his August pledge to support the rate hike. He now declared himself absolutely opposed to higher rates, and, for the first time, he publicly averred that the only definitive solution to the region’s transportation crisis was a state takeover of the railroad. In Cartwright’s view this marked the beginning of the real trouble. Until then, the Auxiliaire manager maintained, a substantial portion of the region’s merchants, including those in the Commercial Association of Porto Alegre, had supported a rate increase, while only a group he characterized as “the political commercial interests” had opposed it.80
Borges predicated his new position on an impending railroad strike, as was made patent in an open letter to the federal Ministry of Transportation from his close political ally Ildefonso Fontoura. In the letter, which was promptly published in the PRR’s official newspaper, Fontoura abandoned his own earlier support of the rate hike in order to align his position with that of Borges, and announced that a second strike would soon begin. With astonishing presumption, he further asserted that not only would state protection for the railroad be withheld, but federal protection as well. Fontoura stood to gain personally from state government takeover of the railroad, for he expected to be appointed director of the line once it was in state hands, an ambition in due course fulfilled. This letter initiated the personal abuse directed toward Cartwright that marked the second strike.81 Most importantly, Fontoura’s open letter made it abundantly clear that Borges stood squarely behind the impending strike and that one of its chief objectives would be to pressure the federal government to authorize takeover of the railroad.
When Borges based his push for the state to take over the railroad on the disruption that a new strike would cause, he had political considerations very much on his mind. His reelection campaign for another term as governor was due to officially open in October, and the party was already gearing up for the March 1918 presidential elections.82 At this juncture, he was intent on countering Federalist activity and securing maximum strength and party unity within the region.83 Given the high visibility of the transportation crisis and merchants’ waning patience with the Auxiliaire, a new rail strike against the unpopular foreign-owned company promised to garner much public sympathy. It could be made an ideal rallying point for the party because support cut across class lines and backers of the strike could invoke a discourse of patriotic unity. In short, this particular strike offered a convenient way of reinforcing what all Riograndenses had in common. And should the strike succeed in winning federal authorization for state takeover of the unpopular railroad, PRR political fortunes could be expected to soar. What is more, the politics of ethnicity further enhanced the strike’s political appeal. The PRR had long banked on solid support from the state’s large German-speaking community. By early July, for example, one German entrepreneur had already assured Borges that his workers were duly registered as PRR voters and requested favors for his company in return.84 By October, however, Brazil was moving ever closer to war with Germany, which, in fact, was declared on October 26, 1917, just ten days into the second strike. Growing anti-German sentiment threatened to upset the region’s established political calculus. In addition, Federalists were actively bidding for support in heavily German-speaking areas.85 In the eyes of voters of German origin, the Auxiliaire represented Germany’s enemies, so party backing for a strike stood to shore up support among these voters.
By the time the second strike began, it was plain for all to see that the nature of the alliance against the railroad had changed dramatically: the PRR had decided to take an open and active role. Cartwright reported that it was common knowledge that Borges and Fontoura had supported the strike from its beginning, that the transfer of railroad headquarters from Santa Maria to Porto Alegre was a primary reason for the strike’s wide range of support, and that the ultimate aim of the protestors was to pressure the federal government to agree to a state takeover of the line.86 On October 15, Santa Maria’s PRR intendant, Astrogildo de Azevedo, returned from a trip to Porto Alegre, where undoubtedly he had met with state party officials, to spread the word that the strike was set to begin the following day. He also promised local interests that the strike would bring the railroad offices back to Santa Maria.
As allies from outside the ranks of labor mobilized, workers readied themselves to strike. The Santa Maria strike committee told the local intendant that it preferred state takeover to Cartwright’s continued control.87 For many workers the final straw had been the Auxiliaire’s failure to meet the September payroll. When labor leaders later explained their reasons for the strike in a telegram to Borges de Medeiros, this complaint was their only addition to the grievances they had previously listed in July.
In contrast to July, though, this time workers had made no contact with the company before the onset of the strike. When the strike broke out, Cartwright was not even in Santa Maria; he was off in Porto Alegre conferring with Borges de Medeiros in the hope of averting the strike. Early in the morning on October 16, the local dentist Antenor Moraes announced the formation of a Comité Patriótico comprised of community opponents to the railroad. That evening, workers distributed both their and the committee’s bulletin to local merchants. Both bulletins called on commercial interests and povo to join in solidarity with the strike, and both denounced Cartwright in stridently nationalist and highly personal language.88
At eleven o’clock that night, as planned, workers in Santa Maria began their strike, this time with violence. A mob estimated at 100 armed strikers and supporters attacked 25 locomotives and other machinery in the railroad repair shops. Gone was the concern they had displayed in July and August to avoid damaging rolling stock; the gloves were now definitely off. Workers held a secret strike meeting that first night, and, with the sole exception of Antenor Moraes, who was an invited speaker, they admitted no outsiders.89
By mid-October, then, labor mobilization against the Auxiliaire had coalesced with community mobilization in Santa Maria, and with commercial and political support across the state, in a renewed and fortified cross-class alliance. When the strike broke out, Intendant Azevedo refused to provide protection for company property, just as Fontoura’s letter had predicted. Cartwright, however, had taken the precaution of securing in advance a guarantee of protection from the federal army commander, who strongly resented Fontoura’s arrogant assurance that the company would receive no federal protection. Federal troops responded quickly to management’s call and put an end to what otherwise could have been far greater damage.90 Thus, as in the first strike, the federal army became the company’s chief ally against a powerful alliance of local and regional interests.
Maintaining Labor Autonomy within the New Alliance
For railroad workers the mobilization of powerful political and commercial interests to back the strike at local and state levels was a double-edged sword; while it greatly enhanced their prospects of success, it also put their independence at risk. And although from the outset the alliance made strikers more optimistic about their prospects, this time they were less naive about how steadfast outside support might prove. One worker interviewed in Santa Maria predicted that with the support of merchants and povo, and “maybe even” of the state government, the strike would quickly be won. His guarded optimism about state government support shows that the memory of the state’s defection in the August strike was still fresh and had left at least some workers wary of depending on that component of the alliance. In fact, much of the strikers’ optimism came from confidence in their own careful organization and preparation. In the words of the same worker: “This time we were not as simple-minded as in the past. Everything was well done and well directed. We will certainly win. We have the resources to last as many days or weeks as needed. Our organization is now perfect. Either they’ll take care of our demands or the trains won’t run.” His reasons for striking were clear in his mind, and the reasons he gave were those advanced by labor, not by merchants or politicians: “Cartwright deceived us with promises that were never kept, and the situation, instead of getting better, has become more painful for the worker. Pay came late, . . . we are forced to fight for a sacred right that no one can deny us. We continue to be overloaded with work, exhausting our strength, [and] compromising our health with long hours.”91
The demands of this worker were also those of labor; in addition to a pay raise, he wanted Cartwright removed, dismissed workers reinstated, and transferred workers returned home to Santa Maria. This time strikers had confidence in the strength of their numbers. The strike directorate met daily in the headquarters of the railroad workers’ Sociedade Beneficente da Viação Férrea do Rio Grande do Sul, and the building was always full of strike supporters. Leaders put the number of local strikers at 1,500, and a supervisor in Santa Maria reported that, except for administrators, the entire workforce had adhered to the strike. The strike core in Santa Maria was confident of support from other railroad workers across the region. Cacequí alone claimed it had some 500 strikers, and telegrams from striking workers in other railroad towns streamed into Santa Maria’s strike headquarters daily, reaffirming that support for the labor stoppage was solid across the system.92
Strikers fell short in their efforts to generalize their movement only in their failure to convince office employees and supervisors to join the protest. Most office employees wanted to stay in Santa Maria, and strikers included the return of Auxiliaire offices to Santa Maria, already of such importance to city interests, among their demands. Yet office employees were still reluctant to put their jobs on the line. In response to initial overtures to join the strike, one said, “No, our class is not involved, and our action does not hurt yours.”93 Such a response reflected the distance white-collar workers characteristically sought to maintain between themselves and manual workers.
Workers had enough strength of their own to maintain some degree of autonomy within the alliance, rather than become mere passive tools of their partners. Labor leaders in fact showed considerable savvy about making the most of opportunities for obtaining any level of outside support and about maneuvering among their heterogeneous allies. As in the first strike, the predominance of native-born workers in the strike leadership facilitated the functioning of the alliance and enabled it to use a nationalist rhetoric to build popular support.94
At the local community level, Santa Maria strikers worked closely with their allies from outside the ranks of labor. Cartwright identified those leading the strike in the city as two engineers, a shop foreman, the intendant, the dentist Antenor Moraes, and the head of the Santa Maria Commercial Association. This group reflected the broad character of the alliance. When Cartwright tried to communicate with the strikers through a visiting reporter, they told him that they knew they should talk directly to the company but could not negotiate without first consulting other parties involved in the action. These included Antenor Moraes, who assumed a high profile in union meetings and in the streets, and local opposition leader Walter Jobim.95
Under the renewed alliance, commercial interests in Santa Maria gave the strike their full support and provided far greater material backing than they had during the first strike. Strike committees had no trouble collecting monetary donations from merchants, which went into a fund used to distribute small sums to needy workers as the strike wore on. Other supporters contributed food: bakers gave bread and butchers meat, while sympathetic restaurant owners served free lunches and dinners to workers on a daily basis. Other merchants sold the workers food at cost. Money continued to flow in throughout the two weeks of the strike.96 This extraordinary level of merchant and business support was instrumental in enabling the strikers to sustain their struggle, instead of quickly running out of funds as they had in August.
Nor were commercial interests the only financial supporters from outside the ranks of labor. The press frequently noted donations by middle- and upper-class residents, such as 120 milreis from one “gentleman.” The local Masonic Lodge contributed, as did the Red Cross and the Italian consul. Then there were the donations from politicians and government officials. Santa Maria’s intendant himself donated 50 milreis, and the police chief helped distribute food to the strikers. Still more contributions—sometimes money, sometimes cattle to feed workers’ families—came from fazendeiros both around Santa Maria and along the railroad line that ran through the state’s northern plateau, or serra. One of the most prominent contributors was Coronel Felippe Portinho, a Federalist party chief in the serra,97
One of the factors that preserved room for workers to maneuver and defend their own autonomy was competition between the PRR and its political rivals for control of popular mobilization during the strike. So popular was this strike that its support crossed not only class lines but political lines as well. Santa Maria’s chief of traffic flatly stated that the strike was “supported very strongly” by “antigovernistas.”98 PRR and Federalist leaders competed by using their support for the strike to curry favor among workers. By jockeying between opposing political factions, strikers could maintain their own voice within an alliance that they were able to use to their own advantage. The key arena for this maneuvering was once again most workers’ home turf in Santa Maria. During the strike, Santa Maria intendant Astrogildo de Azevedo worried about the activity of the political opposition and banned meetings in an effort to deprive his “disagreeable” opponent, Jobim, of the opportunity to agitate in the streets. Nevertheless, Jobim spoke in front of the office of Correio da Serra, where he attacked both the ban and the army’s defense of the company. For his part, the intendant seized every opportunity to address the local populace, emphasizing “the superiority of the solutions” to labor conflict advocated by the PRR in Rio Grande do Sul “over the palliatives the rest of Brazil is debating.”99 With this argument he sought to reinforce the party’s self-identification with enlightened labor policy.
The imperatives of sustaining a cross-class alliance led both strikers and their allies to accentuate the stridently nationalist public discourse of the first rail strike. This discourse set both strikes apart from other contemporary movements in Brazil. Nationalism provided a medium for recasting local and private interests in nobler, more elevated language and established a convenient common denominator for diverse class interests. The workers frequently invoked it in their strike bulletins in order to appeal for the broadest possible support, and local interests in Santa Maria used a nationalist rhetoric to serve the needs of their community. The rail workers’ union repeatedly made patriotism its warrant, and championed its cause “in the name of our liberty, our rights, and our patriotism.”100 It stressed the strikers’ membership in regional and national communities, as when it telegrammed the official PRR paper: “As Riograndenses we hope that A Federação will back the cause of countrymen sacrificed by the Cartwright dictatorship.” Santa Maria’s Comité Patriótico appealed to “Brazilians of spirit,” declaring that Cartwright “wants to reduce us to a colony of slaves,” and that “honor, duty, and patriotism demand that we make common cause with the strikers.”101
The use of nationalism created some apparent contradictions that can best be understood in light of the diverse nature of the alliance. For instance, one of the principal demands of the second strike, specifically ratified by Santa Maria’s Commercial Association, was that Cartwright be dismissed and the Belgian Gustavo Vauthier be restored to his old job as manager.102 Ironically, though the campaign to remove Cartwright was virulently antiforeign, Vauthier was a foreigner too. In the eyes of many in Santa Maria, however, the strong connections to local and state political interests that Vauthier had developed over the years put him in a different category. Beneath the surface of nationalist rhetoric, the issue was less one of Brazilian versus foreigner, than of replacing an outsider (Cartwright) with an old friend (Vauthier), a man who local interests believed could be counted on to keep the city’s concerns uppermost in his mind. In addition, Vauthier had been dismissed by the Americans, and this made him a natural ally of Ildefonso Fontoura. While the ultimate goals of the two men were mutually exclusive, at the outset of the second strike their common interest in discrediting American management led them to collude in feeding misinformation to the press that helped fuel the strike’s anti-Americanism. In short, nationalism served the purposes of Vauthier and his supporters in Santa Maria, as well as those of workers.
The workers’ nationalism also put the army, itself a primary symbol of nationalism, in the incongruous and uncomfortable position of backing a foreign-owned company against a nationalist strike. This incongruity was most apparent in Santa Maria when strikers and their supporters mounted an aggressive civic mobilization that ended in a violent confrontation with the army. The confrontation grew out of a mass meeting on October 20 at which Antenor Moraes called on the crowd to avert “the disgrace” of Cartwright’s reentry into Santa Maria and led a march that threatened to dynamite a local hotel where Cartwright was thought to be.103 An army detachment panicked and fired on the marchers, leaving three people dead and over two dozen wounded. This violence only further whipped up support for the strike, and the local population held the army responsible. Public opinion roundly condemned the officer in charge at the time of the shooting, although the army subsequently commended him for his “correctness in the discharge of his military duties; the aid he gave to the maintenance of public order [and the preservation of] threatened property and liberty; [and for] the judgment, energy and deliberation with which he acted during the strike movement of railroad workers.”104 The episode enabled Borges to distance the PRR from repression and decry the military’s loss of control. Once again, he reassured strike leaders that no coercion would be used against a “peaceful strike.”105 The military violence heightened hostility between the federal army and the state government. The commanding general subsequently defended the army’s conduct during the strike on the grounds that he had been forced to take strong measures because civil authorities had abdicated responsibility for controlling the excesses of “disorderly elements” and protecting federal property.106
Buttressed by the strong backing of the new alliance, strikers escalated the level of sabotage and violence. Violence became a primary means of pushing the strike forward and demonstrating the workers’ own determination and autonomy within the alliance. Property damage was widespread as the strike spread through the system with little opposition: roving bands of strikers tore up tracks and burned railroad ties; disabled and damaged equipment; stoned stations and broke windows; cut telegraph lines; derailed cars and engines; crashed locomotives into each other; attacked repair trolleys; dynamited a viaduct; and destroyed a number of bridges, blowing up one with gunpowder and burning the others. A station agent in Montenegro reported that strikers threatened station employees with the destruction of their machinery unless the employees signed a petition in solidarity with the strike. Another agent complained that no one was willing to take jobs protecting company equipment. At one point strikers armed with revolvers assaulted a locomotive.107
The state government’s remarkable restraint in the face of high levels of strike violence and property destruction is only intelligible in view of the alliance between party and workers. No one prevented the workers from using telegraph lines to maintain contact among strikers in different cities or with the Federação de Operários do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre. Borges himself sympathized actively and openly with the strikers, communicating with intendants with jurisdiction along the rail line to emphasize that he wanted railroad property protected but that the strikers also “must be protected from all aggressive actions on the part of the railway company or its agents.”108 After the first three days of serious strike violence, on October 19 the official PRR paper ran a front-page editorial that sanctioned the strike as “proof of the neglect and injustice with which that company has postponed satisfying . . . proletarian labor with better compensation” and reaffirmed the PRR position that “a strike is always a legitimate recourse to demands when they are just, reasonable, and proportionate to the general conditions of the place and moment.” It added sympathetically that “the deprivations” suffered by Auxiliaire workers were “known to all.” It disapproved of the violence, of course, but chose mild language to caution that “those who lead the strikers . . . must not alter the serene character” of the strike. Repetition of the violence, after all, would “alienate the sympathy of the population.” This editorial was particularly concerned with making it clear that there were limits to the precedent being set: “If a peaceful and justified strike is a legitimate means of defense against injustice, it must be short and rapid, and never repeated frequently, precisely because it is an exceptional recourse . . . [and] strikes that are too long or repeated are always ruinous.” In conclusion it pledged that “government action will not make use of police intervention, either preventive or repressive, except to avoid, repress, and punish abuses and violence.”109
Strikers, for their part, responded with a mixture of determination and defiance, saying they would respect the authorities and the armed forces, but that they would continue to do everything necessary for the strike’s success. And they carried on their violence.110 Only after a full week of violence, on October 23, did the government lose patience with the strikers. A second front-page editorial then reminded them that “since the first strike of last August, [Borges had been] continually an attentive listener to the needs of the railroad workers, as well as of the proletariat of our state, showing himself always ready to respond to the appeal of the working classes and to carry their aspirations to a happy term.” In view of that, it argued:
If the state government, so solicitously, so sincerely, so strenuously uses its prestige and authority to attend to the just protests of the working classes, the best means to see them resolved would be for the strikers to always remain within the reasonable and orderly limits of their right to strike. At the same time as it behooves the authorities to religiously respect the right to strike, good doctrine that is of benefit to the community is that it also behooves them to act to guarantee the freedom to work and the public peace.. . . The authorities have shown complete deference to the strikers, but with violent subversives and agitators the only possible attitude is severe repression.
And in an angry tone the editorial remonstrated:
We find it absurd that the strike movement be perverted by some strikers who, instead of maintaining their stoppage peacefully, like their companions, and directing their protests to the government, are abandoning that course, already used so many times successfully in Rio Grande do Sul, and above all during the August general strike . . . falling into violence and depredations that now have been committed against locomotives, bridges, tracks, [and] railroad equipment, already so scarce and indispensable.
“Never,” it claimed, “has the working class appealed in vain to the state government.”111 Strike violence was thus, in the eyes of the PRR, a violation of the implicit bargain between state and proletariat.
Just two days after the deaths in Santa Maria, Borges made his formal appeal to the federal government to take over the railroad. He chose one of his own as an intermediary, the Riograndense minister of justice Carlos Maximiliano, and made the justice of the workers’ cause the primary justification for the takeover. In a long telegram to Maximiliano, Borges charged that the company had “done nothing to placate and satisfy its workforce, appearing rather to want to subjugate it exclusively by force.” This was hardly an indictment to be expected from a sitting governor in a country where repression of labor was very much the norm. Borges further declared that the strike was legitimate and had “the general sympathy of the Riograndense population.” He argued that it was “urgent to grant the just demands of the workers, especially wage increases and a reduction in hours,” and only then added that there was equal “indignation, in particular among the producing classes, [over the company’s] neglect and indifference.” He thus presented the advancement of worker’s interests as legitimate grounds for a dramatic public policy initiative. He released the full telegram to the press, confident it would be well received in public opinion.112
Management countered with its own request that the federal government settle the strike, but in a decidedly less extreme fashion. The company requested that an official from the Transportation Ministry be sent to Rio Grande do Sul to investigate. Soon a joint commission representing the ministry and the company’s top management in São Paulo headed south. Management even dropped its earlier insistence that no outsiders be involved and notified strikers that they could negotiate with the commission through the intendant of Santa Maria. The strikers, however, asked another, more powerful partisan to negotiate on their behalf: state governor and PRR leader Borges de Medeiros.113 Their choice recognized the wide range of players who had stakes in the settlement. In addition to workers and management, these players included the state and federal governments, the city of Santa Maria, the region’s merchants and producers, and even its consumers. The strikers’ choice marked the culmination of an extraordinary alliance. But once that choice was made, the outcome of the strike was out of the strikers’ hands.
The Strike Settlement: Whose Victory?
As soon as a strike settlement was announced, company, city, party, and labor all claimed victory. Clearly, not all could actually be victors.
The company was jubilant. Management obtained what it wanted most: federal approval for higher freight rates. Merchants and the PRR had to agree to purportedly “temporary” increases of 20 percent in rates on lumber, live cattle, cloth, and iron goods. All of these were commodities that the company, merchants, and the PRR agreed to settle on so that products from the region’s small farms would not suffer the effects of the rate hike.114 In return, the company agreed to use the added revenue to buy new rolling stock and raise pay for its workers. William Nolting, Cartwright’s superior in São Paulo, estimated that the rate increase would bring in an additional 3,300 contos a year, while the wage increase would cost only 800, just one-fourth of the projected gain. Little wonder that the receiver congratulated Nolting on the settlement, calling it the solution to a very difficult problem. Although financial interests in Paris wanted more—judging the rate increases insufficient to cover bond deficits, interest amortization, and other obligations—France’s minister in Brazil considered the settlement “extremely advantageous” to French interests.115 The only distasteful concession the company had to make was the replacement of Cartwright by a Brazilian; personal hostility toward Cartwright ran so high that the company had little choice. Ironically, the final settlement came very close to what Cartwright had initially proposed. The company could take some solace in winning the removal of Fontoura, whom Nolting judged to have “always been a dangerous individual” and whom he held chiefly responsible for inciting the population against Cartwright. What the company’s chief negotiator touted as its greatest victory was Borges’s promise of friendship and “active and hearty” state government support. In management’s eyes, the gains seemed well worth the costs, and despite the two strikes the Auxiliaire reported a profit on its total operations for 1917. On balance, Nolting concluded, the strike put the company in a better position than it had been previously.116
Community leaders in Santa Maria also hailed the settlement as their victory. The city had achieved what it most wanted: the company’s pledge to keep offices and workshops in Santa Maria. Initial word that railroad offices would stay, Cartwright would go, and that workers would get pay hikes, set off rejoicing in the streets. Public credit for the community victory went to Borges and the PRR. Intendant Azevedo extolled the governor’s solutions to the strike as “magnificent,” and reported that the city’s joy overflowed in two days of “extraordinary demonstrations” and “constant agitation” in which “delirious acclamations of Borges de Medeiros” were heard on all sides. Local political dividends were substantial. Azevedo was exultant that his political opponents had been outmaneuvered and that the rejoicing was “without party distinction.” He confided to Borges his relief that “one of the most formidable crises of my administration has passed and ended in the most favorable way possible.” Particularly revealing is the intendant’s approving description of the local scenes. The proletariat, he reported, was “lost” and “diluted” in crowds drawn from all classes, crowds in which “conservative” elements predominated.117 In Azevedo’s eyes workers were safely enveloped in an outpouring of public rejoicing that submerged class differences in the apparent harmony of the common interest. It was a perfect incarnation of PRR precepts. When rumors subsequently spread that only one of the railroad offices would stay in Santa Maria, Azevedo frantically cabled Borges that this left Cartwright’s plan “virtually intact” and “deprived the city of those elements of life [that the railroad offices would provide].” “All the other solutions are only going to help workers,” he protested, given that “the only one that could bring real advantages to the city seems to have disappeared.”118 In his eyes the interests of the “city” and the interests of the workers were apparently distinct, and the workers the least important of the two.
The PRR was also quick to acclaim the settlement as a great victory—and to seize the credit.119 In the state capital, both party and commercial press summed up the October strike as a just cause that had first been proclaimed by the workers but had been championed to victory by the PRR. In these press portrayals, the strike had begun because workers justifiably grew tired of waiting for an exploitative foreign-owned company to fulfill the promises it had made to them in August. In this interpretation the nationalist dimension of the conflict took the foreground, with the appealing theme of betrayal by foreign interests. Despite the strike’s disruptive effects on statewide commerce and the sharp increases it provoked in urban food prices, it was portrayed as a struggle that deserved the sympathy of a general population fed up with the notoriously poor service of a foreign-owned company. Widespread strike violence and the destruction of railroad property, as well as state government patience toward these acts, passed relatively unremarked. The press cast Borges in the role of labor’s champion, one who had graciously acquiesced to appeals from workers and skillfully extracted from the company a resounding victory. The object lesson was clear: workers had been right to place their trust in him and had every reason to be grateful. Overall, press reports of the strike settlement made it appear that Borges had managed the small miracle of making everyone a winner: workers who triumphed against foreign exploitation; commercial, producer and industrial interests that could at last look for the better service new rolling stock would bring; and, not least, Borges and the PRR, which claimed credit for defeating a powerful foreign company.
The distortions in these press representations are revealing. First, in reality the company, far from being the loser, was the strike’s biggest winner. Not only did it succeed in fending off Borges’s bid for a takeover by the state government, but it obtained everything it wanted and more, namely a pledge of support from a hitherto hostile state government. Second, Santa Maria had played a central role that almost vanished in the press accounts of the capital; a city threatened by the loss of benefits it enjoyed as the seat of the railroad headquarters had struck an alliance with workers and, with the help of their strike, partially succeeded in warding off a major threat to community interests. Third, merchants, producers, and consumers had won only the promise of better service to come, and that at the considerable cost of unwanted hikes in freight rates that were sure to drive up prices. Finally, Borges was anything but a worker of miracles; he did not get the state takeover of the railroad for which he had very publicly campaigned. In reality the settlement was simply the best that he and the PRR could do. In view of the virulence of the public campaign against the company and the federal government’s utter unwillingness to consider a takeover, Borges had to put the best face he could on the outcome. Winning the ouster of Cartwright helped, but it was far from enough.
Finally, the strikers also treated the settlement as their victory. And when they celebrated this victory in Santa Maria, the man they paid homage to for leading them to it was local dentist Antenor Moraes. They presented him with his portrait in token of their gratitude.120 But even though the union leaders professed themselves “fully satisfied” and sent Borges their “heartfelt gratitude,” it was far from a complete victory. Lower-paid workers won a 15 percent raise plus a 10 percent increase on overtime pay, although if the new freight rates led to higher retail prices their “gains” would be correspondingly reduced. Higher-paid workers, such as the engineers and firemen who had begun the long labor conflict in July, had to be satisfied with the company’s pledge to review runs so that excessive work hours would be eliminated. Shop-workers won a reduction of their workday to eight and a half hours. The settlement also promised medical care and full pay for work-related accidents, as well as improved administration of the company’s medical assistance and cooperative store.121 In addition, during the strike workers had secured the protection of the state government, and this protection seems to have continued past the strike’s end. After the settlement Borges stood by the strikers to shield them from reprisals. This act underscores both the direct linkage established between party and union as well as Borges’s care to maintain these ties after the period of publicity and crisis had passed. When the company fired some of the strikers, it was to Borges that the union looked for help. It telegrammed him that it was awaiting his “just intervention on behalf of workers” and was “confident” of his aid.122 The governor immediately sought an explanation from the new company manager, who assured him that in fulfillment of the agreement made no employee had been fired simply for striking; only “dangerous individuals” caught by the army destroying railroad property or attacking soldiers had been arrested and fired.123
Strikers and their leaders had good reason to take away from their experience a new sense of their own strength. This was the first time that a strike by the region’s rail workers had not been crushed by repression. In this sense, as Intendant Azevedo had recognized, it was clearly their victory. They had organized a union, formed an effective alliance, maintained their solidarity through a major, statewide strike, and made their voices heard. With the help of their allies, they had succeeded in forcing the dismissal of a hated foreign manager and winning pay raises for those among their ranks who were most in need. In addition, they obtained state protection, and all but those caught perpetrating acts of violence were able to return to their jobs. At least at that time, the workers had reason to take it as their victory. Over the next several years, as the PRR turned to repression of labor conflict all over Rio Grande do Sul, the region’s workers were to learn the limits of such victories.124
Epilogue
The conflict between state and federal governments over control of the railroad dragged on for another three years. Despite the new rate increases, the company’s financial difficulties only mounted, as did its inability to provide service adequate for the region’s transportation needs. In 1920, a National City Bank Report was still citing inadequate rail service as one of the two principal causes for business stagnation in the region.125 Cartwright did not live to see the resolution of the conflict. Less than a year after his dismissal, a suspended employee shot and killed him at his desk in the office of the São Paulo and Rio Grande Railway in Curitiba.126
After World War I, more radical influences took hold among some of the region’s railroad workers and, as the 1920s began, friction developed with the state. In Santa Maria, a number of activists formed the União Ceral do Traballio (UGT), and, between February 1920 and February 1921, no fewer than seven rail strikes broke out in rapid succession in Santa Maria, Bagé, and Rio Grande. In April 1920, arson destroyed three of the railroad’s administrative offices in Santa Maria; police apprehended the alleged arsonist but never revealed his identity. On June 16, 1920, shortly after the fire and in the midst of a year of intense labor conflict, the federal government at last bowed to the PRR and bought out the Auxiliaire—at a very favorable price. Brazil paid 200 million Belgian francs for the buyout, far less than the company calculated it was owed, but Belgian investors, facing ruin by 1920, considered themselves fortunate to salvage what they did from the sale.127 A month later, the state government officially took control, under an agreement that allowed it to rent back the railroad from the federal government. Ironically, one of its first measures was to do what Cartwright had tried to do three years before: move most of Santa Maria’s remaining administrative offices to Porto Alegre, a transfer of some two hundred employees and their families.128
Both political parties continued to compete for railroad workers’ support. On August 1, 1920, six weeks after the takeover of the railroad, a new Círculo Operario de Santa Maria formed, under a Federalist president. But few of the other conditions of 1917 still prevailed. In the last of the rash of strikes, in February 1921, the intendant of Santa Maria made an unsuccessful attempt to mediate, and then the Brigada Militar moved in to crush the strike. Thirty-nine strike leaders were fired and UGT members were barred because they had been “the focus of strikes, disorders, and perturbations of the life of the worker.”129 This time neither the workers’ legitimate right to strike, nor the justice of their economic grievances, nor the party’s unique positivist-inspired labor ideology mattered to Borges and the PRR. The railroad management was now in the hands of the PRR and the state government, not a foreign corporation. State backing for strikers, as had occurred in 1917, no longer made sense.
The economic payoffs that the state anticipated from the railroad takeover proved elusive, but the political payoffs did not. When the state took over the railroad in 1920, it complained that it was inheriting a corpse. Instead of becoming the anticipated boon to the treasury, the railroad proved to be a financial burden. The state soon found itself running an operating deficit on the system, borrowing to make needed improvements, and doubling freight rates—much to the consternation of regional commerce.130 Not until 1928 did it begin to turn a profit.131 The political payoffs of the takeover, in contrast, were not long in coming. Beginning in 1922, the party faced armed revolt that challenged its control of the region.132 Government troops were transported by rail and Borges closely monitored the rail allotments. Command of the railroads, and of worker loyalties, was then of vital military value.133 Along with the military challenge came the greatest political challenge in decades. Railroad workers proved their usefulness to the party as a bloc of support in the heavily contested elections of the 1920s, when one of the PRR’s defenses was to incorporate more workers into its electoral machine. In March 1923, railroad workers were instructed how to register to vote in the imminent elections for federal deputy. In Santa Maria, on February 19, 1924, the local PRR leader founded the Centro Republicano Operario in order to “bring together workers, fight for their interests and aspirations, and take an active part in political struggles.”134 Two years later, in the 1926 elections, almost all Santa Maria voters loyal to Borges were employees of the railroad.135 In 1928, a total of 6,700 railway workers were registered PRR voters, fully 5 percent of all voters in the state and an astounding 10 percent of the total PRR electorate.136
Conclusions
This study set out to explore the conditions under which workers are willing and able to form cross-class alliances, the extent to which they can maintain some independence and influence within them, and the possibility that such alliances can ultimately serve their interests. Railroad workers were not the only Riograndenses who in 1917 had strong grievances against the foreign-owned railway company, and they did not make their strikes alone. They had the power to paralyze most of the state’s rail system and strangle regional trade, but the company had the backing of the federal army. Alone, the workers could not have won their victory. The cross-class alliance brought them effective material and political support from commercial and producer interests, from defenders of community in the city that housed the railroad’s headquarters, from local and state governments, and from the full spectrum of the region’s politicians. Local, regional, and national conditions all contributed to create and sustain this cross-class support. Local interests in the railroad’s hub city, commercial interests across the region, and, most importantly, the state government all came to see a strike as the most effective means of bringing pressure to bear on a distant and unresponsive federal government that controlled the contract of a railroad company that was not meeting their needs. Two entrenched regional political parties were competing for workers’ support on the eve of elections. And strike action pitted native workers against foreign capital at a time when World War I had heightened nationalist feeling, creating a climate in which nationalism could be particularly effective in welding together the alliance. For its part, the company could not win itself a sympathetic hearing because its new American management was estranged from state and local governments and could neither make its financial weakness understood nor effectively counter the widespread misrepresentations of its conduct by labor, government, and press.
Such were the conditions under which railroad workers were able to enter a cross-class alliance in Rio Grande do Sul during 1917. Their willingness to participate was a product of their own moderate and pragmatic labor politics, their focus on immediate economic gains, and the predominance of native-born workers in their ranks. To a significant extent, the rail workers were able to maintain some independence and influence within the alliance. In the course of the strikes they strengthened their organization and made good use of the room for maneuver afforded them by political competition among the various groups competing for their support. They also demonstrated their continued independence and influence through their widespread use of violence, despite the clear disapproval of their allies. In the end, the workers learned that it was possible for a cross-class alliance, at least under circumstances like these, to serve their interests. If the first strike, in which they found themselves abandoned by the state government, collapsed in failure, the second, made with their own stronger organization and with determined support from community as well as commercial and political interests, ended in a labor victory. For the strikers, it was no free or easy victory; to the contrary, it was won only after major effort and sacrifice on their part. But from this time on, the lesson that alliance with other social groups could help achieve material gains was etched into their collective experience.
This neglected episode in Brazilian labor history is significant not only for what it can tell us about the possibilities and limitations of cross-class alliances, but also because it can help us begin to broaden a vision of early Brazilian labor history that has relied too heavily on our knowledge of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Broad support from outside the ranks of labor for a strike movement that was deeply disruptive of an entire regional economy and marked by widespread violence was not at all the norm in Brazil. Yet the railroad strikes in Rio Grande do Sul share some commonalities with the distinctive pattern of labor history in Rio de Janeiro and can help us clarify the meaning of that pattern.
Historians have long noted certain differences between labor history in Rio and São Paulo during the First Republic. While the Left overwhelmingly dominated the labor movement in São Paulo, reformist leadership predominated in Rio de Janeiro. This reformist strength in Rio was the product of two factors. First, Rio had a higher proportion of native Brazilians in its working class than did São Paulo. And second, the unique municipal politics of the Federal District created conditions in which alliances between labor and politicians could take form. Such alliances formed in sectors where native-born workers were concentrated: primarily among railroad, port, and government workers. Workers in these sectors were incorporated into Rio’s electoral politics, and reformist unions pursuing purely economic goals cooperated with the state.137 In São Paulo, where the majority of workers were immigrants and the political system was more closed, such alliances found no such fertile soil.
The 1917 railroad strikes in Rio Grande do Sul suggest that the alliance between reformist workers and politicians in Rio de Janeiro is best understood as a special case of a larger pattern in Brazilian labor history. That pattern could appear wherever a concentration of native workers found politicians who were open to their needs. The critical question is where and how such openings could occur, and this in turn was a function of local and regional politics. One such opening seems to have occurred in Pernambuco in a February 1909 rail strike against the Great Western of Brazil, a British-owned line. Like Rio Grande do Sul, Pernambuco was far removed from the seat of federal power in Rio, and here too the interplay of federal and state politics seems to have given strikers political leverage. As in the Auxiliaire case, local authorities sympathized with strikers while the federal government backed the company, and political parties supported the strike on the eve of an election.138 A decade later, in 1919, workers striking against the same railway line appealed to nationalism and won the support of the state as well as of the public; the governor intervened to pressure the company to grant workers’ demands and the strikers won a victory. As in the Auxiliaire case, national labor confronted foreign capital, and nationalism served to promote outside support, even at a time of widespread repression.139
That these cases occurred among railroad workers should not, of course, suggest that all railroad strikes created the conditions for cross-class alliances. Though Brazil’s railroads often employed native workers and were often foreign-owned, native workers and foreign ownership did not constitute a sufficient catalyst to activate joint action by labor and government when politics militated against alliances between workers and state. Rails carried critical export commodities to port, and strikes were often crushed to protect the export economy, vital to elite power. When railroads were Brazilian-owned, there was even less reason to support strikers. It is little surprise, for instance, that the president of the Companhia Paulista de Estradas de Ferro, Antônio Prado (wealthy planter, businessman, and mayor of São Paulo), had no qualms about using city police, as well as state and federal troops, to suppress a strike in 1906. Nor is it surprising that in 1917, the year of the Auxiliaire strikes, a strike against the federally owned Central do Brasil Railroad collapsed in the face of army intervention.140 Cross-class alliances could not occur when the necessary political conditions were lacking.
In São Paulo in the early decades of the First Republic, state response to labor took two forms: at worst, outright repression; at best, paternalistic mediation.141 Since a majority of the Paulista working class was foreign-born, nationalism better served to undermine and repress strikes than to win them support. For this reason, as well as due to internal ethnic divisions, the heavily immigrant composition of the Paulista labor movement was one factor that led to its weakness and collapse in the 1920s.142 But in the late 1920s, even in São Paulo, as more immigrants developed Brazilian roots a deepening division among the elite began to act to draw labor into electoral politics, as it already had in other parts of Brazil and in other Latin American countries.143
In Rio Grande do Sul, the early origins and intensity of the conflict between the PRR and Federalists enabled the process to begin sooner. Whether, as Miguel Bodea and Alfredo Bosi have argued, the Riograndense experience constitutes a forerunner of the trabalhismo that was to transform Brazilian politics once Rio Grande’s native son Getúlio Vargas rose to national power in 1930, depends on how we understand trabalhismo.144 Some of its most important distinguishing features—notably a labor code, labor courts, and the constitution of unions as consultative organs of the state—played no part in Rio Grande do Sul in 1917; the PRR expressly and fiercely opposed a labor code.145 If trabalhismo is interpreted, as some historians have interpreted it, as an effort to preempt any threat that a growing working class might later pose to the established order by acting to impose state control over workers while labor was weak, then it bears little resemblance to the dynamics of Rio Grande’s 1917 rail strikes. There the initiative came from labor, not the state; labor and elite strategies interacted; and workers succeeded in maintaining considerable independence. Interpretations of Brazilian corporatism as a multiclass alliance dominated by the bourgeoisie bear even less resemblance to the cross-class alliance against the Auxiliaire.
A better fit emerges if, as John French has persuasively argued, Brazilian workers are seen not as the passive victims of trabalhismo imposed from above, but as active agents who took a hand in its making, and did so because they perceived it as serving their own interests. In such an interpretation, the workers chose to exchange acceptance of the prevailing economic order for material benefits, social recognition, and political influence. With this exchange came a new politics of multiclass alliance, cemented by nationalism, and of government intervention in labor relations.146 If trabalhismo is understood in this way, the dynamics of the Riograndense rail strikes of 1917 do suggest some distant kinship.147
To consider such a kinship is not to suggest that the pattern created in the railroad strikes was preplanned or the product of some larger blueprint for the future. Brazil’s future president Getúlio Vargas, then still a young Riograndense deputy, was one of the many passengers stranded by the second railroad strike and so experienced the early days of the strike firsthand. But whether this had any lasting influence on him is unknown.148 What has emerged in this study is precisely the contingent character of this pattern, worked out by the various players as they went along. That is, this pattern emerged organically from an unanticipated process of interaction among all the partners in the alliance, elites and workers alike. The PRR’s official positivist ideology had long held that public services should be run by the state, but alliance imperatives dictated that the time to convert rhetoric into practice, and to target the railroad, had come. State policy, then, was the product less of ideology than of a remarkable cross-class alliance that responded to hard political and economic realities. Only after the alliance took form did Borges decide that a state takeover was the way to get around an unresponsive federal government and resolve the transport crisis. The strike settlement was not the victory of preplanned PRR strategy, but rather a surprisingly successful move to save face, after Borges failed to win federal approval of the takeover he had sought and was forced to swallow rate increases he had strongly opposed. In short, positivist ideology could be used to justify state action after the fact. Though it surely facilitated the taking of that action, it was not its principal cause.149
It is not surprising that over the course of the First Republic the PRR sought to represent its labor policy as evidence of Riograndense exceptionalism and of the party’s superiority within the Brazilian federation. Rather than take its claims at face value, we should see Rio Grande do Sul’s distinctive history as having given rise to one of the various possible sets of conditions in which cross-class alliances could form. The Riograndense case, like that of Rio de Janeiro, is distinctive, but both are subsets of a wider pattern. Neither should be seen as the sole native source for later corporatist labor politics.150
Scholarship on the incorporation of workers into the political arena in modern Latin America has at times focused more on its consequences than on the concrete historical dynamics that brought it about.151 The Riograndense rail strikes, in paving the way for incorporation of railroad workers into the PRR electoral machine during the contested state elections of the 1920s, demonstrate one current, among many, that contributed toward incorporation in Brazil.152 In any future assessment of the relative importance of native and foreign antecedents of corporatist politics, the native wellsprings of such currents should be fully recognized.
If these strikes provided workers an opportunity to deepen class consciousness, developing identities that rested in part on the experience of solidarity with each other as workers, the strike experience also worked to ground them within a series of concentric circles of community: the local community of Santa Maria, the regional community of Rio Grande do Sul, and the national community of Brazil. The historical stage, as the railroad workers encountered it, and as they in their turn shaped it, was not one where labor stood alone facing capital, but rather one crowded with actors—actors who defended a range of distinct, and at times conflicting, interests. If there was reason for some workers to emerge from these strikes with their first experience of what it meant to be members of a working class, such class identity coexisted in uneasy tension with a rudimentary sense of membership in multiple political communities—local, regional, and national. This was because, for them, paradoxically, the process of class formation advanced for a while under the aegis of a cross-class alliance.
But for the great majority of workers in Brazil during the First Republic, loyalties to political community and social class were rarely in phase this way. More often they remained competing claims. Only under the sponsorship of the centralized nationalist state in the 1930s would they come into an uneasy tension for a sustained length of time in Brazil as a whole.
The author would like to thank John D. French, Joel Horowitz, Adhemar Lourenço da Silva Jr., Carol Summers, Hugh West, and three anonymous HAHR reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this work.
Research was made possible by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Richmond Faculty Research Committee. This study is part of a larger research project on labor history in Rio Grande do Sul during Brazil’s First Republic, 1889-1930. It is based in part on material consulted in the following archives: Arquivo Borges de Medeiros, Porto Alegre; Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro; Forbes Collection, Baker Library, Harvard University; National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Brussels; Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris; and Foreign Office, Public Records Office, London (abbreviated hereafter as ABM, AN, FC, NA, AMAE-B, AMAE-P, and FO, respectively).
Michael M. Hall and Hobart A. Spalding Jr., “Urban Labour Movements,” in Latin America: Economy and Society, 1870-1930, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 183-223; John D. French, The Brazilian Workers’ ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern São Paulo (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1992); Joel Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men: Sao Paulo and the Rise of Brazil’s Industrial Working Class, 1900-1955 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1993); Sheldon L. Maram, “The Immigrant and the Brazilian Labor Movement, 1890-1920,” in Essays Concerning the Socioeconomic History of Brazil and Portuguese India, eds. Dauril Alden and Warren Dean (Gainesville, Fla.: Univ. Presses of Florida, 1977), 178-210; Edgar Carone, O Movimento operário no Brasil, 1877-1944 (São Paulo: DIFEL, 1979); Boris Fausto, Trabalho urbano e conflito social: 1890-1920 (São Paulo: DIFEL, 1976); and John W. F. Dulles, Anarchists and Communists in Brazil, 1900-1935 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1973).
An outstanding exception is Eliana Dutra, Caminhos operários nas Minas Gerais: um estudo das práticas operárias em Juiz de Fora e Belo Horizonte na primeira república (São Paulo: HUCITEC-Ed.; Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 1988).
Sul-Riograndense historians have done substantial work on the region’s labor history: Luiza Helena Schmitz Kliemann, “A ferrovia gaúcha nas diretrizes de ordem e progresso,” Estudos Ibero-Americanos (Porto Alegre) 3 (1977): 159-249; Sílvia R. Ferraz Petersen, “As Greves no Rio Grande do Sul (1890-1919),” in RS: economia e política, eds. José Hildebrando Dacanal and Sergius Gonzága (Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto, 1979), 277-327; Miguel Bodea, A greve geral de 1917 e as origens do trabalhismo gaúcho: ensaio sobre 0 pré-ensaio do poder de uma elite política dissidente a nível nacional (Porto Alegre: L&PM Editores, 1978 or 1979); João Batista Marçal, Primeiras lutas operárias no Rio Grande do Sul: origens do sindicalismo rio-grandense (Porto Alegre: Livraria do Globo; Museu do Trabalho, 1985), Comunistas gaúchos: a vida de 31 militantes da classe operária (Porto Alegre: Tché!, 1986), and Os anarquistas no Rio Grande do Sul: anotações biográficas, textos e fotos de velhos militantes da classe operária gaúcha (Porto Alegre: Unidade Editorial, 1995); Sandra Jatahy Pesavento, A burguesia gaúcha: dominação do capital e disciplina do trabalho: Rio Grande do Sul 1889-1930 (Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto, 1988); René E. Gertz, “Operários alemães no Rio Grande do Sul, 1920-1937: ou Friedrich Kniestedt também foi um imigrante alemão,” Revista Brasileira de História 6 (11) (Sept. 1985/Feb. 1986): 75-84; Friedrich Kniestedt, Memórias de um imigrante anarquista (Friedrich Kniestedt), trans., with an introduction, epilogue, and notes by René E. Gertz (Porto Alegre: Escola Superior de Teologia e Espiritualidade Franciscana, 1989); Jorge Luiz Pastoriza Jardim, “Comunicação e militancia: a imprensa operária no RS (1892-1923)” (Dissertação de mestrado, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, 1990); Stella Borges, Italianos: Porto Alegre e Trabalho (Porto Alegre: Escola Superior de Teologia e Espiritualidade Franciscana, 1993); Adhemar Lourenço da Silva Jr., ‘“Povo! Trabalhadores!’: tumultos e movimento operáno (estudo centrado em Porto Alegre 1917)” (Dissertação de mestrado, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 1994), “A Greve geral de 1917 em Porto Alegre,” Anos 90 5 (July 1996): 183-205, and “O bipartidarismo e o movimento operário rio-grandense (188?-1925),”Estudos Ibero-Americanos 22 (Dec. 1996): 5-26; Ligia Ketzer Fagundes et al., eds., Memória da indústria gaúcha das origens à 1930: documentos (Porto Alegre: Ed. da Universidade/Universidade Federai do Rio Grande do Sul, 1987); and Sílvia Regina Ferraz Petersen and Maria Elizabeth Lucas, eds., Antologia do movimento operário gaúcho, 1870–1937 (Porto Aiegre: Ed. da Universidade/Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 1992).
Several historians have seen the strikes as atypical: Petersen for their nationalism; Kliemann for a convergence of interests among labor, commerce, and the ruling party; Bodea as a precursor of the trabalhismo of Getúilo Vargas in the 1930s, a reading rejected by Kliemann and Pesavento. See Luiza Helena Schmitz Kliemann, “1917: Convergência de interesses, governo autoritário e movimentos operários,” Estudos Ibero-Americanos 2 (1980): 235-38.
Joel Horowitz, “Argentina’s Failed General Strike of 1921: A Critical Moment in the Radicals Relations with Unions, HAHR 75 (1995): 58, 60; David Rock, Politics in Argentina, 1890–1930: The Rise and Fall of Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975); Hobart A. Spalding Jr., Organized Labor in Latin America: Historical Case Studies of Workers in Dependent Societies (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1977), 53; Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), 271-88; Milton I. Vanger, The Model Country: José Batlle y Ordoñez of Uruguay, 1907-1915; (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1980), 15-18, 122-28, 274-75; Lucía Sala de Touron and Jorge E. Landinelli, “50 años del movimiento obrero uruguayo,” in Historia del movimiento obrero en América Latina, coord. Pablo González Casanova (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1984-85), 4:251-64.
Jonathan Brown, “Foreign and Native-Born Workers in Porfirian Mexico,” American Historical Review 98 (1993): 787-90, 805, 810-11, 818; William E. French, “Business as Usual: Mexican North Western Railway Managers Confront the Mexican Revolution,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 5 (1989): 221-38; Lorena M. Parlee, “The Impact of United States Railroad Unions on Organized Labor and Government Policy in Mexico, 1880-1911,” HAHR 64 (1984): 443-64, 474-75.
Hall and Spalding, “Urban Labour Movements,” 187.
Bodea, Greve geral, 30.
Jules Godoy and P. Liénart [Belgian Auxiliaire managers] to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Brussels, 1 Apr. 1919, AMAE-B, Correspondance Politico-Commerciale [hereafter CP-C], doss. 2666, pp. 431-638; and Reginald Tower to Sir Edward Grey Bart, Buenos Aires, 24 July 1913, FO, Correspondence of British Legation, Rio de Janeiro, 128/366. The receivership was administered by W. Cameron Forbes, whose receivership papers are preserved in the FC.
Chargé d’Affaires to Raymond Poincaré (President of the Council of the Minister of Foreign Affairs), Petrópolis, 24 Sept. 1912, and 23 Nov. 1912, AMAE-P, Nouvelle Série [hereafter NS], Correspondance Politique et Commerciale, 1897-1918 [hereafter CPC], Brésil, vol. 60, p. 152 and vol. 61, p. 27, respectively.
Forbes to Bradley W. Palmer, New York, 3 Sept. 1916, doc. 3, p. 4; Forbes to Brand Whitlock, New York, 14 Dec. 1916, doc. 8; both in AN, Rio de Janeiro, Percival Farquhar Archive (AP 21), caixa 3; and Vauthier to Geraldo Rocha, Rio de Janeiro, 14 Dec. 1918, p. 3, enclosure in Delcoigne to Hymans (Ministère des Affaires Etrangères-Brussels), Rio de Janeiro, 18 Dec. 1918, AMAE-B, CP-C, doss. 2666, pp. 431-638.
Claudel to A. Ribot, President of the Council, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Rio de Janeiro, 22 Aug. 1917, AMAE-P, NS, CPC, vol. 9, p. 171.
Correio do Povo (Porto Alegre), 24 July 1917, p. 1 and 28 July 1917, p. 5.
Archer, “1909 Commercial Report: Rio Grande do Sul,” FO 128/334, enclosure, Rio Grande do Sul, Repartição de Estetística, Relatório 1917, 187-205; Mark Jefferson, “Pictures from Southern Brazil,” The Geographical Review 16 (1926): 521, 528.
Correlo do Povo, 27 July 1917, p. 2; J. Belém, História do Município de Santa Maria, 1797-1933 (Porto Alegre: Livraria Selbach, 1933), 194-200, 222.
Correlo do Povo, 4 Jan. 1912, p. 8.
“Strikes on the Cie. Auxiliaire,” confidential report, W. N. Cartwright to William T. Nolting, 27 Nov. 1917, [hereafter Cartwright Report], FC, vol. 26, p. 5.
Cartwright Report, 1-8; Royaume de Belgique, Receuil consulaire contenant les rapports commerciaux des agents belges a l’ètranger (Brussels: Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, 1909) 146: 129, 195; and “Confidential Report on Special Investigation of the Compagnie Auxiliaire, September 1916” [hereafter Special Investigation 1916], FC, v. 25, no. 75, exhibit G.
Belém, Santa Maria, 159, 223-231; and Romeu Beltrão, Cronologia histórica de Santa Maria e do extinto município de São Martinho, 1787-1930, 2d ed. (Canoas, Rio Grande do Sul: Ed. La Salle, 1979), 483; Jefferson, “Pictures from Southern Brazil,” 525-26.
Astrogildo [Cezar] de Azevedo to Borges de Medeiros, Santa Maria, 17 May 1917, ABM.
Astrogildo de Azevedo to Borges, Santa Maria, 28 Apr. 1917, ABM, no. 8060.
Cartwright Report, 3-5; and Kliemann, “Ferrovia gaucha,” 185.
Pesavento, Burguesía gaúcha, passim.
Celi Regina J. Pinto, Positivismo: um projeto político alternativo, (RS, 1889-1910) (Porto Alegre: L&PM Editores, 1986).
Borges to Deputy João Vespucio, Porto Aiegre, 4 Aug. 1917, ABM.
Joan L. Bak, “Regional Perspectives on Brazilian Labor History: Labor, State and Ideology in Rio Grande do Sul, 1889-1917,” paper presented at the Eleventh Latin American Labor History Conference, Duke Univ., Apr. 1994, 11-15.
Pinto, Positivismo.
“Confidential Report on the Condition of the Auxiliaire,” 14 Sept. 1916, enclosure to confidential letter, Nolting to Forbes, 25 Sept. 1916, São Paulo, FC, v. 25, no. 75.
Arthur Motta to Borges, Santa Maria, 12 May 1917, ABM.
Azevedo to Borges, Santa Maria, 26 Aug. 1917, ABM, no. 8069.
J. Hewett [British Consul] to Haggard, Porto Alegre, 22 Feb. 1908, FO 128/324; Belém, Historia de Santa Maria, 207; Cartwright Report, 1; Paulo Gilberto Fagundes Vizentini, O Rio Grande do Sul e a política nacional: as oposiçôes civis na crise dos anos 20 e na Revolução de 40 2d ed. (Porto Alegre: Martins Livreiro, 1985), 40; and Joseph L. Love, Rio Grande do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism, 1882-1930, (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1971), 83-86.
Cartwright to Nolting, Santa Maria, 11 Nov. 1916, FC, v. 25.
Special Investigation 1916, exhibit A, pp. 5, 9; Cartwright to Noldng, Santa Maria, 11 Nov. 1916, FC, v. 25.
Cartwright to Nolting, Santa Maria, 11 Nov. 1916; and Nolting to Forbes, São Paulo, 8 Jan. 1917, FC, v. 25.
Interview in Diario do Interior (Santa Maria), 18 Oct. 1917, p. 1.
Beltrão, Santa Maria, 491 ; and Correio da Serra (Santa Maria), 2 Aug. 1917, p. 4.
Diário do Interior, 18 Oct. 1917, p. 1; and Correio da Serra, 1 Aug. 1917, p. 4; 9 Aug., p. 4; 10 Aug., p. 4.
Joel Horowitz, “Occupational Community and the Creation of a Self-Styled Elite: Railroad Workers in Argentina,” The Americas 42 (1985): 55-81; Belträo, Santa Maria, 446, 451, 453, 466, 476, 491; and Gaspar Martins (Santa Maria), 3 Aug. 1917,9. 1 and 3 Nov. 1917, p. 1.
Joseph L. Love, Sao Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 1889-1937 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1980), 230.
Sala de Touron and Landinelli, “50 años del movimiento obrero uruguayo,” 4:256; and Spalding, Organized Labor, 53.
Correio do Povo, 22 July 1917, pp. 4-5; 24 July, p. 4; 20 July, p. 4; and A Federação (Porto Alegre), 26 July 1917, p. 6.
Cartwright Report, 5.
Correio do Povo, 22 July 1917, pp. 4-5; 26 July, p. 4.
Bodea, Greve geral, 26-27; and Correio da Serra, 1 Aug. 1917, p. 4.
Correio da Serra, 9 Aug. 1917, p. 4; Cartwright Report, 1; and Kliemann, “Ferrovia gaúcha,” 186.
A Federação, 3 Aug. 1917, p. 2.
Cartwright Report, 2; and Correio do Povo, 1 Aug. 1917, p. 6; 9 Aug. 1917, p. 1.
Cartwright Report, 6.
Correio da Serra, 2 Aug. 1917, p. 4.
Coireio da Serra, 4 Aug. 1917, pp. 1, 4; 7 Aug., p. 2; 8 Aug., p. 4; and A Federação, 4 Aug. 1917, p. 2.
Cartwright Report, 7.
Ibid., 5.
A Federação, 4 Aug. 1917, p. 2; and Correio do Povo, 1 Aug. 1917, p. 6; 5 Aug., p. 7.
Correio da Serra, 1 Aug. 1917, p. 4; 2 Aug., pp. 2, 4; 3 Aug., p. 4.
Correio da Serra, 3 Aug. 1917, p. 4; A Federação, 3 Aug. 1917, p. 2; 4 Aug., p. 2.
A Federação, 4 Aug. 1917,9. 2.
Correio do Povo, 4 Aug. 1917, p. 7; quoted in Kliemann, “Ferrovia gaúcha,” 185; and Correlo da Serra, 3 Aug. 1917, p. 4.
Correio da Serra, 3 Aug. 1917, p. 4; 4 Aug., p. i; 5 Aug., p. 4; and A Federação, 4 Aug. 1917, p. 2.
Cartwright Report, 5-6.
Ibid., 7; and Correlo da Serra, 23 Aug. 1917, p. 1.
Correio da Serra, 7 Aug. 1917, pp. 2, 4; 9 Aug., p. 6; 10 Aug., p. 4; A Federação, 4 Aug. 1917, p. 2; and Correio do Povo, 5 Aug. 1917, p. 7; 9 Aug., p. 6.
Kliemann, “Convergência de interesses,” 236.
Correio da Serra, 7 Aug. 1917, p. i and 19 Aug., p. 2; Beltrão, Santa Maria, 209, 485; Maria Antonieta Antonacci, RS: as oposiçôes e a revolução de 1923 (Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto, 1981), 82; and Carlos E. Cortés, Gaucho Politics in Brazil: The Politics of Rio Grande do Sul, 1930-1964 (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1974), 123-24.
Beltrão, Santa Maria, 311; and Correio da Serra, 3 Aug. 1917, p. 4; 4 Aug., p. 4.
Correio do Povo, 7 Aug. 1917, p. 1.
Correio do Povo, 8 Aug. 1917, p. 6; and Correio da Serra, 7 Aug. 1917, p. 2.
Correio da Serra, 8 Aug. 1917, p. 4; and A Pederação, 9 Aug. 1917, p. 4.
Correio do Povo, 7 Aug. 1917, p. 7; 8 Aug., pp. 4, 6; 10 Aug., p. 6.
Correio da Serra, 9 Aug. 1917, p. 4.
Correio da Serra, 17 Oct. 1917, p. 1.
Correio do Povo, 26 Aug. 1917, p. 1.
Correio da Serra, 9 Aug. 1917, p. 4.
Correio do Pavo, 14 Aug. 1917, p. 4.
Correlo da Serra, 17 Oct. 1917, p. 1; 18 Oct., p. 4.
Cartwright Report, 9.
Molitor Report, 15 Sept. 1915, FC.
Correio da Serra, 6 Oct. 1917, p. 4; 16 Oct., p. 2.
Astrogildo de Azevedo to Borges, Santa Maria, 6 Oct. 1917, ABM, no. 8073.
Cartwright Report, 9. I am grateful to Adhemar Lourenço da Silva Jr. for drawing the historical symbolism of September 20 to my attention.
Ibid., 9-10; and Fernando Luís Osório, A cidade de Pelotas (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Globo, 1922), 197.
Cartwright Report, 9-10; and Fontoura to Borges, Porto Alegre, 16 Oct. 1917, ABM, no. 6431.
Bodea, Greve geral, 63.
Firmino Paim Filho (Chief of Police) to Coronel Francisco de Paula da Cunha Louzada (Delegado of First District) [confidential], Porto Alegre, 17 Oct. 1917, Arquivo Histórico do Rio Grande do Sul (AHRS) (Porto Alegre), Policía, Chefamra, Correspondência Expedida; Tupy Silveira (Intendant) to Borges, Bagé, 5 Oct. 1917; Executivo do PRR to Borges, Rio Grande, 15 Dec. 1917; and Borges to Arthur Ferreira, Porto Alegre, 11 Feb. 1918, ABM, nos. 327, 7403, and 6457, respectively.
Alberto Krall to Borges, Porto Alegre, 2 July 1917, ABM, no. 6416.
A Federação, 18 Oct. 1917, p. 1.
Cartwright Report, 10, 14.
Correio da Serra, 26 Oct. 1917, p. 3.
Kliemann, “Ferrovia gaucha,” 190-91.
Correio da Serra, 17 Oct., pp. 1, 4.
Cartwright Report, 11-12.
Correio da Serra, 18 Oct. 1917, pp. 1, 4.
Correio da Sara, 17 Oct. 1917, p. 1; 20 Oct., p. 4; 24 Oct., p. 3; 26 Oct., p. 3; and A Federação, 18 Oct. 1917, p. 7.
Correio da Serra, 24 Oct. 1917, pp. 2, 3; 19 Oct., p. 4.
Correio da Serra, 20 Oct. 1917, p. 4; 26 Oct., p. 2.
Cartwright Report, 12-15.
Correio da Serra, 19 Oct. 1917, p. 4; 21 Oct., p. 3; 23 Oct., p. 2; 24 Oct., p. 2; 25 Oct., p. 2; 26 Oct., p. 3.
Correio da Serra, 24 Oct. 1917, p. 2; 25 Oct., p. 2; 26 Oct., p. 2; 28 Oct., p. 2; 7 Nov., p. 3.
A Federação, 19 Oct. 1917, p. 1.
Azevedo to Borges, Santa Maria, 3 Nov. 1917, ABM, no. 8076.
Kliemann, “Ferrovia gaúcha,” 79; and A Federação, 22 Oct. 1917, p. 4.
A Federação, 19 Oct., 1917, p. 1; and Correio do Povo, 24 Oct. 1917, p. 2.
Cartwright Report, 14.
Ibid., 12-15.
Fé de Ofício, Tenente Olympio Antonio dos Santos Rosa, Arquivo Histórico do Exército, III-13-19, p. 22.
A Federação, 22 Oct. 1917, p. 4.
General Mesquita to Maréchal Faria [confidential, urgent], Porto Alegre, 25 Dec. 1917, ABM, no. 6449; and Cartwright Report, 14.
Cotreio da Serra, 18 Oct. 1917, p. 4; 19 Oct., p. 4; 20 Oct., p. 4; and A Federação, 18 Oct. 1917, p. 7; 19 Oct., pp. 1, 2; 20 Oct., p. 1.
Cartwright Report, 10, 14, 16. Quotation comes from a telegram from Borges, cited on p. 16.
A Federação, 19 Oct. 1917, p. 1.
A Federação, 22 Oct. 1917, p. 4.
A Federação, 23 Oct. 1917, p. 1.
Correio do Povo, 24 Oct. 1917, p. 2.
Cartwright Report, 15.
Correio do Povo, 4 Nov. 1917, p. 14; and Kliemann, “Ferrovia gaúcha,” 150.
Nolting to Forbes, 10 Nov. 1917, Forbes to Nolting, 12 Nov.; Brazil Railway to Nolting, Paris, 14 Nov.; all in FC, vol. 9; and Claudel to Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Rio de Janeiro, 19 Nov. 1917, AMAE-P, Série Guerre, 1914-18, Amérique Latine, Brésil, vol. 197, Dossier Générale IV, p. 208.
Nolting to Forbes [private, confidential], São Paulo, 18 May 1918, FC, vol. 26; [Geraldo] Rocha to Comblé, 20 Nov. 1917, FC, vol. 9; Cartwright Report, 17, 18; and William Nolting, “Report on Operations of the Brazil Railway for 1917,” Paris, 28 Feb. 1918, FC, vol. 21.
Azevedo to Borges, Santa Maria, 3 Nov. 1917, ABM, no. 8076.
Azevedo to Borges, Santa Maria, 3 Nov. 1917, ABM, no. 8075.
The following account is based on A Federação and Correio do Povo.
Correio da Serra, 24 Apr. 1918, p.3.
Kliemann, “Ferrovia gaúcha,”151; and Correio do Povo, 4 Nov. 1917, p. 4.
União Protectora to Borges, Santa Maria, 23 Nov. 1917, ABM, no. 6438.
J. R. Gonçalvesjr. to Borges, 23 Nov. 1917, ABM, no. 6438.
Joan L. Bak, “Divergent Patterns in Brazilian Labor History: Labor and the State in Rio Grande do Sul during the First Republic,” paper presented at the Southwestern Historical Association Meeting, New Orleans, Mar. 1993.
“Economic and Financial Conditions in Brazil,” Rio de Janeiro, 1920, Report by National City Bank of New York, p. 2, enclosure in AMAE-B, DP-C, doss. 4398.
Charles L. Hoover (U. S. Consul) to Secretary of State, São Paulo, 21 Jan. 1919, NA, RG 59, 332.111 (24).
Robyns de Schneidauer to Hymans [Minister of Foreign Affairs, Brussels], Rio de Janeiro, 22 June 1920, AMAE-B, CP-C, doss. 2666, pp. 431-638.
Beltrão, Santa Maria, 502.
Beltrão, Santa Maria, 502, 504, 516, 540; and Correlo da Serra, 12 Feb. 1921, p. 1.
[Robyns de] Schneidauer [Belgian Minister to Brazil] to Jaspar [Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brussels], Rio de Janeiro, 3 Mar. 1921, AMAE-B, CP-C, doss. 4398.
Steven Topik, The Political Economy of the Brazilian State, 1889-1930 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1987), 109.
Love, Rio Grande do Sul, 198-215.
Telegrams, Coronel [Firmino] Paim Filho and Pestaña [Director of the Viação Ferrea] to Borges, May 1925, AHRS, unnumbered; cf. Kevin J. Middlebrook, The Paradox of Revolution: Labor, the State and Authoritarianism in Mexico (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995), 122.
Beltrâo, Santa Maria, 520; and O Ferroviario (Porto Alegre) 3:109 (11 Mar. 1923), 1.
Augusto Ribas to Borges, Santa Maria, 6 Mar. 1926, ABM, no. 8131.
Topik, Political Economy, 110.
Angela de Castro Gomes, A invenção do trabalhismo, 2d ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 1994), 95-102; Claudio Henrique de Moraes Batalha, “Uma outra consciencia de classe? O sindicalismo reformista na Primeira República,” Ciencias Sociais Hoje (São Paulo) (1990): 117-27; French, Brazilian Workers’ ABC, 24-25; Wolfe, Working Women, 208; Hall and Spalding, “Urban Labour Movements,” 184, 190, 200; Sheldon Leslie Maram, Anarquistas, imigrantes e 0 movimento operário brasileiro, 1890-1920 (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1979), 103-7, 111_14; Fausto, Trabalho urbano, 41, 60; June E. Hahner, Poverty and Politics: The Urban Poor in Brazil, 1870-1920 (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Prees, 1986), 224; Bodea, Greve geral, 78; and Michael M. Hall and Marco Aurélio Garcia, “Urban Labor,” in Modern Brazil: Elites and Masses in Historical Perspective, eds. Michael L. Conniff and Frank D. McCann (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989), 165, 167.
Consul Hewett to Foreign Office, Pernambuco, 6 Feb. 1909, FO 128/334.
Dulles, Anarchists and Communists, 22, 87, 94-95; Moniz Bandeira, Clovis Melo, and A. T. Andrade, O ano vermelho: a Revolução Russa e sms reflexos no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Civilizaçâo Brasileira, 1967), 194.
Dulce Maria Pompêo de Camargo Leme, Trabalhadoresfetroviários em greve (Campinas: Ed. da Unicamp, 1986); and Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 88.
Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 229.
Maram, “Immigrant and Brazilian Labor.”
Mauricio A. Font, Coffee, Contention, and Change in the Making of Modern Brazil (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 181, 301 ; Charles W. Bergquist, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentinian Venezuela, and Colombia (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986).
Bodea, Greve geral, 63; and Alfredo Bosi, Dialitica da colonização (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992), 273-307.
Love, Rio Grande do Sul, 179.
John D. French, “The Origin of Corporatist State Intervention in Brazilian Industrial Relations, 1930-1934: A Critique of the Literature,” Luso-Brazilian Review 28, no. 2 (1991): 13-26.
A suggestive parallel appears in Brown, “Foreign and Native-Born Workers.”
Correio da Serra, 19 Oct. 1917, p. 4.
Contrast Bodea, Greve geral.
Contrast Bodea, Greve geral, and Fausto, Trabalho urbano.
Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena.
See Joan L. Bak, “Cartels, Cooperatives and Corporatism: Getúlio Vargas in Rio Grande do Sul on the Eve of Brazil’s 1930 Revolution,” HAHR 63 (1983): 255-75.