Carlos Lacerda: The Rise and Fall of a Middle-Class Populist in 1950s Brazil

Abstract

President Getúlio Vargas’s suicide on August 24, 1954, has long been recognized as the pivotal moment of Brazil’s Populist Republic—the tumultuous two decades between the fall of the Estado Novo dictatorship in 1945 and the military coup in 1964. His suicide—clearly as much grand political gesture as personal tragedy—passed almost immediately from current event to popular myth, interpreted in various ways according to fundamentally opposed visions of Brazil and its future. Vargas’s supporters saw the suicide as the martyrdom of a prince, and they saw the famous cartatestamento—Vargas’s disputed suicide note, typed several days in advance of the act—as a call to arms, urging the vigorous defense of Vargas’s legacy. Opponents, on the other hand, saw this as the last, cowardly act of a despicable traitor, a curse guaranteed to further muddy the waters of Brazilian politics for decades to come. The suicide and its fallout have generated extensive academic inquiry, a gripping novel (Rubem Fonseca’s Agosto), a Globo television miniseries based on that novel, a theatrical production, and a permanent museum exhibit. The cartatestamento itself has been studied, dissected, and appropriated, serving as the basis for at least two popular sambas.2In the course of this interpretation and reinterpretation, opposition leader Carlos Lacerda’s role in the crisis of August 1954 has become well known. While Vargas himself spent the last year of his life politically immobilized by scandal and corruption, Lacerda spearheaded the ouster campaign that set in motion the events leading to the suicide. Between 1952 and 1954, Lacerda dedicated enormous energy and talent to the masterful orchestration of a campaign to undermine Vargas, drawing on crucial assistance from well-placed allies in the Brazilian elite. The importance of this campaign to Lacerda’s political career has received considerable attention.3 Analysts, however, have not explored the degree to which, in his drive to destroy Vargas, Lacerda employed the same tactics and acquired the characteristics he criticized in his nemesis.Like Vargas, Lacerda underwent several political transformations in his long career. In the early 1950s, he was a fiery spokesman for middle-class Catholic morality, railing against the corruption and incompetence of the Vargas presidency. He defended a conservative social order, expressed skepticism regarding the political capacities of the poor and the working class, and disdained the politics of patronage. He favored international investment and disparaged state control. These positions corresponded to an increasing hostility on the part of Brazil’s upper and middle classes toward many of Vargas’s actions: his perceived capitulation to the demands of urban labor, his use of the state as a piggy bank for his friends and family, and his restrictions on foreign capital. This groundswell against the tactics and policies of Vargas and his populist imitators might be termed antipopulist.4 It is one of the many ironies of his political career, then, that in his assault on Vargas Lacerda adopted the rhetoric and style of his populist rivals: espousing nationalism to the point of xenophobia, insisting on the enforcement of Estado Novo legislation that benefited his position, and, above all, relentlessly projecting his own charismatic presence as the embodiment of his constituency’s political will. Also like his rivals—but far more effectively—he used broadcasting to reach out to his supporters with previously unimaginable immediacy and power, summoning the members of a previously marginalized sector of the population into the public sphere and encouraging them to imagine themselves as the center of the national body politic. In doing so, he became a populist for the urban middle class.These similarities begin to suggest the pervasive logic of populism and its relationship to broadcasting during the post–Estado Novo Populist Republic. As a result, Lacerda’s rise to prominence in 1953–54 and his near destruction in the wake of Vargas’s suicide shed light on the larger political evolution of the Populist Republic—an evolution that, though haphazard and fragmentary, nonetheless followed certain rules.The emergence of populist politics in Brazil during the Vargas era was inextricably linked to concurrent trends of industrialization and urbanization. During his 1930– 45 presidency, and under the Estado Novo in particular,5 Vargas built a coalition among industrialists, urban labor, and the armed forces. Workers were crucial to this coalition, contributing their labor to industrial development and their bodies and voices to the image of widespread popular support that the regime sought to project. As the fervor of Vargas rallies suggests, that image was not entirely an illusion. Industrial workers often had good reasons to support the Vargas government, which had provided them with more jobs, a higher standard of living, wage and workplace guarantees (however limited), and an expanding network of social services. These concessions, of course, were often secured through arduous labor struggle. In state propaganda, however, they were represented as rewards bestowed by the Father of the Poor on his loyal children. Reflexive nationalism cemented this coalition’s often creaking joints through constant affirmations of the shared glory of the construction of a modern Brazil.6After the collapse of the Estado Novo in 1945 and the return to electoral politics, the urban popular classes (and industrial laborers in particular) maintained their symbolic importance within the political arena, although their votes were now as important as their public demonstrations of support. Suffrage was still limited to literate citizens, but the educational advancements of the Estado Novo—particularly the training of a large cadre of industrial workers with at least minimal literacy—had created vast blocs of eligible voters without traditional electoral allegiances. Politicians courted these votes with what had already become a standard rhetoric of government patronage, developmentalist nationalism, and workers’ rights; those who eschewed this populist rhetoric suffered the consequences.7 This rhetoric, and the attendant construction of public image through strategic use of the media, came to constitute what might be termed a populist grammar.8 The most striking aspect of this grammar is that, to a large extent, its use became imperative not only among Vargas’s populist imitators but also among those who explicitly sought to distance themselves from everything Vargas stood for—Carlos Lacerda foremost among them. Lacerda made crucial adjustments to this grammar in his appeal to middle-class voters, but this was a difference in degree, not in kind.At least since Ernesto Laclau’s work of the mid-1970s, scholars have understood that populism—as a political approach that seeks to mobilize particular sectors of a national population, labeled “the people,” against a corrupt domestic or foreign oligarchy and its clients—can be articulated onto a wide range of ideological premises and pitched to diverse target groups. Precisely because of this flexibility, Laclau pointed out, the adjective “populist” is insufficient to describe any given political movement, yet at the same time difficult to discard entirely.9Even before Laclau, several scholars had noted that industrial growth in Latin America’s largest countries between the 1930s and the 1960s created conditions uniquely favorable to populist movements. These scholars differed in their understanding of populism. Gino Germani, for example, described it as a mutation of the logical progression of modernization born from the growing pains of an inchoate working class thrust into rapid industrialization.10 Otávio Ianni felt it was the inevitable handmaiden of import-substituting industrialization, one that would generate its own eventual crisis as a result of the increasingly irreconcilable demands of competing sectors within the populist coalition.11 More recently, scholars have disagreed on whether this period gave rise to a “classical populism” against which all other Latin American variants should be defined, or whether it merely constituted a particularly favorable juncture, whose characteristics were unique and therefore not normative of all real or true populisms.12 Regardless, it is certainly true that Juan Perón and Getúlio Vargas (to give two ready examples) are among the first figures called to mind by the phrase “Latin American populism.” Since the work of Daniel James on Peronismo and Ángela Castro Gomes on Getulismo (and trabalhismo, “laborism,” more generally) in the 1980s, it has been clear that class formation was a key common element of these movements.13 Industrial laborers began to recognize themselves as a coherent, powerful bloc—indeed, as the definitive citizenry—through their mobilization in populist ranks. While class formation is not a necessary corollary of populism, certainly every populist mobilization depends on the establishment of a group identity, and among successful populisms this group identity tends to endure. Lastly, by the late 1960s, Torcuato di Tella had drawn attention to the link between the rise of radio and populism’s appeal to new industrial laborers.14There is little novelty, then, in suggesting that a populist grammar was pervasive in 1950s Brazil, that it had competing manifestations, and that radio was in some way connected to its currency. What Lacerda’s campaign of 1953– 54 reveals, however, was that the populist grammar was not merely pervasive, but irresistibly seductive—even to would-be antipopulists. Urban, middle-class Brazilians—who disdained the blue-collar rabble they perceived to be overly privileged by the patron state—were not only susceptible to the same kind of nationalist, protectionist rhetoric as these workers but also experienced the same sensation of growing cohesion and power in the midst of mobilization through Lacerdismo. We thus note that genuine political marginalization of the target population is not necessary for a populist movement to gain momentum: merely feeling marginalized is enough. The urban middle class had several political options during the Populist Republic, including Lacerda’s classically liberal União Democrática Nacional (UDN), the Partido Social Demócrato (PSD, the party of machine politics at the state level), and the Communist Party (outlawed after a brief flirtation with legality in 1945– 47 but still attracting some middle-class leftists, among others). It was more important that members of the middle class felt excluded and endangered by Vargas’s second presidency; the vocalization of this shared sensation through Lacerdismo proved pivotal in the crisis of 1954. Middle-class women, especially, experienced Lacerdismo as a political awakening.In addition, is not enough simply to connect the dots between broadcasting and a particular populist movement. As Lacerda understood more readily than any of his competitors, radio was not merely a loudspeaker, but a tool with several functions that could be employed in different ways. His use of call-in shows and on-the-spot reports, and his cohort’s use of news analysis, changed both political operations and broadcasting in Brazil.Lacerda’s rise to national prominence and his sudden loss of prestige in the wake of Vargas’s suicide, then, add complexity to our understanding of populism in Brazil between 1945 and 1964 and in other Latin American nations in a roughly contemporary period. His use of radio reveals the specific strategies available and necessary for transforming the mass appeal typical of populist campaigns into a language and format that catered to middle-class beliefs in the supremacy of domestic order. The trajectory of Lacerdismo in 1953–54 demonstrates the difficult compromises of a middle-class populism that adopted the restoration of morality as its overriding political mission. Finally, Lacerda’s campaign presents a striking comparison with the current situation, when populism (including middle-class variants) once again flourishes in the hemisphere.Carlos Lacerda was the scion of a landowning family, but he renounced his father (like him, a complex, aggressive politician) and embraced communism as a student in the mid-1930s. He was, for a brief period, considered one of the most promising young intellectuals within communist circles, and he considered the Communist Party a second family, although he never officially joined. Instead, like many middle-class leftists, he joined the Aliança Nacional Libertadora (ANL), an organization deeply associated with, and eventually subsumed by, the Communist Party.15 By the late 1930s, however, personal and ideological differences led him to sever his communist ties. In the remaining years of the Estado Novo, he became increasingly allied with elites of classically liberal political views and antipopulist tastes, chafing under the dictatorship’s repression.16Under the Estado Novo, Lacerda worked primarily as a freelance journalist for a wide range of publications, including Diretrizes, an intellectual journal edited by his close friend and fellow ex-communist Samuel Wainer. Both young reporters also wrote for O Jornal, the flagship newspaper of media magnate Assis Chateaubriand. Lacerda’s relationships with Wainer and Chateaubriand were to prove crucial during his attacks on Vargas a decade later. Equally important, perhaps, was Lacerda’s freelance work with a Rio de Janeiro advertising agency, where he learned the public-relations arts of spin and timing. As he put it later, “[I]t was a school for malandragem,” or trickery.17In February 1945, Lacerda conducted an interview with influential statesman and erstwhile Vargas ally José Américo de Almeida, who implicitly urged Vargas to end the dictatorship and return to electoral politics. Almeida’s was perhaps the most influential voice in a rising chorus of opposition, one that found increasing sympathy even within the ranks of the bureaucracy. As the war in Europe wound down and Brazilian soldiers returned home, Vargas found it ever more difficult to justify the Estado Novo’s restrictions of civil rights. Shortly after the Almeida interview, Vargas bowed to this growing demand for democratization, legalizing the formation of political parties and scheduling presidential elections for December of that year. He vowed not to enter as a candidate, promising to step down from office for the first time since seizing power in the Revolution of 1930, returning Brazil to electoral democracy after eight years of the Estado Novo dictatorship.Vargas opponents greeted this promise with much-deserved skepticism. Many of them gravitated toward the fledgling UDN, a hastily organized party espousing classically liberal democracy, individualism, and free markets, but in reality greatly controlled by the traditional landed elite. Lacerda and his patrons, including Almeida, were among the most active members of this new party. Even Estado Novo insiders, many of whom joined the new PSD, worried that Vargas might seek to subvert the electoral process. These fears were heightened when the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (PTB), organized by officials of the Labor Ministry and urban labor leaders, began calling for Vargas to remain in power. This call set off a popular movement—under the slogan “Queremos Getúlio”—which quickly outstripped the PTB. Hugo Borghi, a cotton speculator with a shady financial relationship to Vargas, bankrolled this Queremista (as it quickly became known) campaign.18 Regime opponents, and even some insiders, perceived the movement as a Vargas machination to create the pretext for canceling the elections. In an attempt to cultivate a strong, democratic faction (favorable to U.S. interests, of course) that might guide the country out of the Estado Novo, U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Adolf Berle began inviting a group of young Brazilian intellectuals to weekly discussion groups. Lacerda, whom Berle viewed as a leftist and “a good, honest boy, rather on the poetic side,” was a regular participant. Berle lauded his political engagement, but he worried that Lacerda was too concerned with the overthrow of Vargas and not enough with the construction of new social and economic programs afterward. As an impassioned Roosevelt New Dealer, Berle hoped that Lacerda and his cohort of liberal law students and recent graduates might become a “brain trust for Brazil,” compensating for what he perceived as the opposition’s striking lack of intellectual political vision. By October 1945, however, the ambassador saw no improvement in the political spectrum, and he feared for Brazil’s future.19The Queremista campaign, meanwhile, reached fever pitch, and Vargas’s public pronouncements on the election grew increasingly gnomic. On October 29, an opposition group within the armed forces acted to preclude any potential Vargas maneuver by removing him from power and installing a caretaker government until elections could be held. The coup could not save the UDN, which had failed to build grassroots support. UDN’s Brigadeiro Eduardo Gomes lost to the PSD’s Eurico Dutra—Vargas’s former vice-president, a participant in the October coup, and the ambivalent heir to Vargas’s industrialist mantle. Although he benefited from the political machine created under the Estado Novo, Dutra was uneasy with the political mobilization of working-class Brazilians.Lacerda, a UDN party worker and strong Gomes supporter, emerged from these elections with his faith in democracy badly shaken. During the campaign, he had begun a remarkable transformation from an intellectual “on the poetic side” to a brilliant propagandist with an eye for the spotlight. Late in the campaign, with UDN sponsorship, he began to air aggressive anti-Dutra speeches on Rio de Janeiro radio stations. His tactics were not subtle; in a November 30 speech he declared: “To vote for Dutra is to vote for Hitler’s ghost!”20 His efforts were too late, however. Once in office, Dutra made strategic compromises with his own uneasy allies and prevented the UDN from asserting its own agenda. Vargas, meanwhile, won a seat in the senate with no campaign whatsoever. Over the next four years, however, he avoided the press and the pitfalls of the capital, remaining as much as possible on his ranch in Rio Grande do Sul.The 1945 election was an abomination for Lacerda, but the 1950 election was worse. Vargas returned to center stage as the presidential candidate on the PTB ticket. Lacerda once again took to the airwaves and the press in an attempt to rally the opposition. By this point, his wavering commitment to democratic procedure had already reached the low ebb that would mark his subsequent campaigns. To Lacerda, Vargas’s popularity meant that Brazil was not ready for democracy. As the election approached, he wrote, “Getúlio Vargas should not be a candidate for presidency. As a candidate, he should not be elected. If elected, he should not be sworn in. If he is sworn in, we should resort immediately to revolution to prevent him from governing.”21Vargas was indeed elected, crushing the UDN’s hapless Gomes in a landslide victory.22 This confirmed Lacerda’s growing suspicion that the popular will was a twisted and fickle thing and that almost nothing could be accomplished without appealing to its baser tendencies. In the words of his close ally Ruy Mesquita, Lacerda not only believed that the majority was not always right, but that “in a country with the cultural level of Brazil, completely vulnerable to ideological propaganda and mystification, the majority is almost never right.”23 The only solution, then, was to use the enemy’s populist tactics to lead the majority—or at least a vigorous, ambitious minority—down the correct path.Vargas’s catastrophic second presidency gave Lacerda his opportunity. By 1952 the swell of popular acclaim that had carried Vargas to victory had dissipated. His government was beset on all sides by inflation, financial crisis, military unrest, and social agitation. He had lost much of the insight and energy that marked his earlier career and no longer could avail himself of the Estado Novo’s repressive mechanisms. In June 1952, the Boletim das Classes Dirigentes (Bulletin of the Guiding Classes, a public-opinion newsletter) published the results of a poll demonstrating that a strong majority of the population had lost its trust in Vargas, even among the working class. The editors added, “We have never seen such discouragement.”24As Vargas progressed from deposed dictator to democratically elected president, Lacerda patched together a career as a political journalist with a reputation for courageous and independent reporting. For a brief period during the 1946–50 Dutra presidency, he served as a UDN city councilman in Rio. His broadcast experience in the 1945 campaign had clearly given him an appreciation for the medium, and his most prominent action as councilman was a successful initiative to broadcast council debates on the municipal government’s radio station. Before long, neither the municipal government station (the least popular in the city) nor the city council itself provided a stage large enough for Lacerda. He quit the council in late 1947 and began airing occasional investigative and opinion pieces on the popular Rio station Rádio Mayrink Veiga.25The broadcasts went hand in hand with Lacerda’s fiery columns for the increasingly conservative Correio da Manhã. The regular column he began in 1946, “Na Tribuna da Imprensa [In the Court of the Press],” mercilessly revealed the machinations of Brazil’s economic elite, including Lacerda’s erstwhile allies. By 1949, his fearless candor had cost him his job, and, resolving to strike out on his own, he founded his own paper. Unlike most Rio publishers, Lacerda was not a wealthy man, nor was he directly backed by powerful commercial interests. He instead secured a few loans, found backers of moderate means, and sold thousands of shares in the new venture to supporters more interested in his political opinions than in the commercial success of the paper. This was a radically new approach to the journalistic enterprise in a context where two media magnates—Assis Chateaubriand of the Diários Associadas and Roberto Marinho of O Globo—along with a small cohort of well-funded publishers, controlled the urban market. By December 1949, Lacerda was ready to launch the Tribuna da Imprensa, a paper oriented toward the conservative, Catholic middle class.26Lacerda envisioned a paper that rose above the yellow journalism, knee-jerk nationalism, sloppy reporting, obsession with superficial drama, and exaggerated partisanship that, in his view, characterized his competitors. Ironically, in every regard the Tribuna da Imprensa quickly became one of the worst offenders in Brazilian publishing. Lacerda was a brilliant writer and a good editor, but he was not a capable publisher. The Tribuna was poorly printed, marred by countless typographical errors, and hampered by a bland, forbidding layout. Its news coverage was concerned almost entirely with local events, and its cultural, sports, and social sections were skimpy and poorly written. The publication was more of an engaged journal on a narrow range of issues than a major urban daily. As a result, it rarely sold more than ten thousand copies, making it the least popular daily in the city.27Not long after Vargas took office, another new paper hit the streets of Rio, one that was in most ways the polar opposite of the Tribuna. Última Hora featured a flashy layout, a large sports section, and social and cultural columns oriented toward the lower-middle and working classes. It gave prominent space to melodramatic serial fiction, true-crime reporting, and contests for cash prizes. This also constituted a new approach to journalism in Brazil—an anti-intellectual, explicit appeal to the man in the streets. The two papers, in effect, initially represented antipopulist and populist journalism. Última Hora, in contrast to its competitor, quickly became the most popular newspaper in the city. Lacerda undoubtedly would have disliked the paper regardless of its political stance or it financial foundations, but these made it the object of his virulent antipathy. He soon began a crusade to unmask a putative conspiracy behind Última Hora’s emergence and, in so doing, to reveal the sordid truth about the entire Vargas government.Samuel Wainer, Lacerda’s former friend, was the editor and publisher of Última Hora. Wainer devoted much space to Vargas in his columns for Chateaubriand’s O Jornal during the 1950 presidential campaign, in the process becoming the ex-dictator’s favorite journalist (and earning Lacerda’s disdain). Once elected, Vargas offered Wainer generous loans from the Bank of Brazil in order to start his own newspaper, one that would balance the unfavorable coverage of the opposition papers.28Última Hora became a victim of its own success. Lacerda exposed the truth about Wainer’s loans from the Bank of Brazil, acquired through illegal channels. Such loans were not unusual in Brazilian publishing—Chateaubriand, for example, had benefited from similar terms. But tied as they were to Última Hora’s loyal Vargas line, they smacked of corruption. Lacerda also revealed that the industrialists who purchased lavish advertisements in the paper—Vargas cronies all—paid for them through illegal transfers from their employees’ social service funds. While Lacerda initially concentrated most of his wrath on Wainer and the industrialists, there was never any doubt that the real target of the campaign was the president himself.Limited to the pages of the Tribuna, these revelations would have had minimal repercussions; Lacerda’s paper simply did not have enough readers to threaten the government. But the runaway success of Última Hora alarmed far more influential publishing powers, Chateaubriand and Marinho, who were eager to hinder Wainer’s advance. Lacerda became the most efficient means to undermine the upstart Wainer and spite Vargas in the process. Marinho gave Lacerda virtually unlimited access to his Rádio Globo, which became the spearhead of the campaign against Última Hora and, by extension, Vargas. And by late 1953, Chateaubriand featured Lacerda on his new TV Tupi, Brazil’s first television network. As Lacerda described it years later, “The competition of Última Hora was ruining Globo and the Associadas . . . and so they opened up television and radio for me.” Wainer was helpless before this fearsome array.29The Rádio Globo broadcasts were more than an attempt by Marinho to destroy Wainer and undermine Vargas: they meshed perfectly with Marinho’s strategy for the station’s development. In the immediate aftermath of the Estado Novo, Rádio Globo, a new station, was one of the least popular in the city. Like many other stations, it attempted to imitate the programming model established by Rádio Nacional, the nation’s most popular station, broadcasting a wide range of music, humor, soap operas, and sports. Globo had neither the budget nor the personnel to achieve much success with this format, and it rarely rose above seventh place for any half-hour slot in audience polls, out of 14 stations in the city. Toward the end of the 1940s, Globo began to focus more closely on radio journalism; its programs of investigative reporting and news analysis, the first of their kind on the Brazilian airwaves, began to climb slowly in the ratings.30Marinho entrusted the development of Globo’s news department to the Brunini brothers, Luis and Raul. The Bruninis, both strong UDN sympathizers, created programming designed to show the party in a favorable light.31 Their most ingenious innovation lay in news analysis: following nightly news briefs, they broadcast programs featuring discussion of the latest events. The first and most influential of these programs, Conversa em Família (Family Conversation), featured several reporters playing the roles of members of a family—Raul Brunini, for example, had the role of the nephew. The family gathered around a kitchen table and discussed the events of the day. Each half-hour program featured an invited guest—generally a political figure, but occasionally an entertainer or athlete. The program allowed the Bruninis to present a topic at varying levels of sophistication in an engaging format. A second program, Parlamento em Ação (Parliament in Action), featured pioneering unrehearsed interviews with members of congress, followed by commentary. Both techniques were already common in the United States, where Luis Brunini had apprenticed, but unique in Brazil. Conversa em Família, in particular, translated the international model of news analysis into a language that would be familiar and welcoming to a particular sector of the local audience. It brought politics out of the messy world of the public forum and into the well-ordered, middle-class Brazilian home—the audience that Lacerda would soon make his own.32A 1950 article in the advertising trade journal Publicidade highlighted the success of Globo’s new approach to radio journalism, calling it a new way to educate the masses while entertaining them. The article was somewhat misleading: the new programs were not oriented toward “the masses” in any broad sense. They were sponsored by a manufacturer of large appliances and a real estate firm, and as these sponsorships suggest, they were intended primarily for the middle class—working-class Brazilians were rarely buying refrigerators and property in 1950.33Early in 1953, the Bruninis invited Lacerda to join them on Rádio Globo in order to promote Ajuda Teu Irmão (Help Your Brother), a charity campaign Lacerda had organized to aid the residents of the drought-stricken Northeast. Lacerda remained on the a