Industrial Workers and the Birth of the Populist Republic in Brazil, 1945-1946

Abstract

Brazilian industrial workers played a central role in the political transition of 1945-1946 that ended the Estado Novo dictatorship and opened the era of electoral democracy known as the Brazilian Populist Republic (1946-1964). Unlike studies that emphasize the continuity of a paternalistic and authoritarian relationship between the government and workers, this essay argues that the events of 1945-1946 are best seen as a radical break with the past marked by the dramatic entry of the urban working class into Brazilian political life. Brazil's rapid industrialization since the turn of the century had led to the emergence of an industrial proletariat, numbering over one million in 1945, within a restrictive political system that limited electoral participation and popular inputs. In Brazil, unlike the United States, mass enfranchisement followed rather than preceded the emergence of a wage-earning working class. While the details of the intraelite conflict need not detain us, the faction led by Getulio Vargas was prepared in 1945 to gamble on the political potential of this urban working-class constituency. This article begins by demonstrating that Vargas's 1945 electoral legislation was consciously and successfully designed to alter Brazilian electoral life through effective mass enfranchisement in urban areas. It then examines the nature of grass-roots mobilization in the industrial region of greater Sao Paulo, named ABC after Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo do Campo, and Sao Caetano. As Brazil's fourth largest industrial center with well over 40,000 workers, ABC's socially homogeneous factory districts represented the most dramatic concentration of modern large-scale industrial production in 1945.