Vargas Era Research Articles

Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil. BRYAN McCANN, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Generations of historians have been drawn to Brazil's Vargas Era (1930-1954), not only because of its influence over that country's politics and economy, but also because many of the social, cultural and technological changes that would characterize Brazil's twentieth century took root, flourished and related to each other during that quarter century. In Hello, Hello Brazil, Bryan McCann explores the rise of popular music, radio and advertising during the golden age of radio broadcasting in Brazil, which roughly coincided with Vargas' presence on the national stage (commercial radio legislation was regularized in 1932, and radio began to lose ground to television in the mid-1950s).

O valor social da brancura no pensamento educacional da era Vargas

Este artigo sugere que o pensamento educacional que virou a base dos projectos de reforma durante a era Vargas foram fundamentadas no pensamento eugênico da época, que visava definir e curar a suposta degeneração de brasileiros pobres e de cor. Esse pensamento virou incentivo para a expansão escolar, ao mesmo tempo que dificultava a ascensão social do afrodescendente e das classes populares.

The History of Brazil

The intended audience for this series is students and interested laypeople seeking “up-to-date, concise and analytical histories.” Levine’s many productive years of scholarship, teaching, and writing on Brazilian history made him an excellent choice to author such a work. In fact, with the almost concurrent appearance of The History of Brazil (first publ l ished by Greenwood Press in 1999), his important Brazilian Legacies, The Brazil Reader (with John J. Crocitti), and Father of the Poor? Levine had marked out his place as one of the principal interpreters of modern Brazilian history writing in English. Levine’s skill at synthesizing the field’s growing literature makes The History of Brazil informative, inclusive, and up-to-date, yet accessible in its concision and brisk narrative cohesion. I should point out, however, that the St. Martin’s edition does not cover the period beyond 1998, since Levine’s death precluded further revision. It is also sadly ironic, as Levine’s commitment to democracy and social justice in Brazil surely meant he would have had much to contribute to a new edition on the limits and possibilities of the presidency of Luis Inácio da Silva.After an introductory overview, the book devotes a chapter each to the colonial period, the Empire, the First Republic, the Vargas era, and the post-Vargas period. By design, the post-WWII period receives greater emphasis, bolstered by two final chapters on the political culture and socioeconomic realities of contemporary Brazil. As the series editors sought texts that helped make sense of Brazil’s place in the world at the end of the twentieth century, an implicit larger question guiding much of The History of Brazil is quite presentist: namely, what economic structures, political institutions, and cultural traditions brought Brazil to its present circumstances? Levine answers with his customary critical analysis, balanced by his respect for cultural difference. He has a practiced eye for teasing out the larger significance of political events or economic arrangements without belaboring his point, although on rare occasion his prose can be too succinct and its exact meaning thereby unclear. Levine uses comparisons between nations to good effect, emphasizing both the singularities and commonalities of Brazil’s historical experience, first vis-à-vis Spanish America’s colonial enterprises and later in comparison to the United States.Present throughout the text are themes and topics that have characterized Levine’s writing over the last decade. For example, The History of Brazil routinely emphasizes the poor quality of life suffered by Brazil’s rural poor and urban working classes, as well as the country’s regional and cultural diversity. (Brazilianists will recognize in the last two chapters an emphasis not unlike that of Brazilian Legacies, especially.) Quite inventively, Levine also uses a selective biographic appendix as a vehicle to broaden the representativeness of historical writing on Brazil, including such individuals as favela-dwelling diarist Carolina Maria de Jesus, protofeminist/first lady Nair de Teffe, and nineteenth-century Afro-Brazilian poets Antonio Gonçalves Crespo and João Cruz e Silva. Subjects such as environmental history, the Movimento Sem Terra (Landless Workers’ Movement), and human rights issues also receive scattered attention. The bibliographic essay is a shortened version of the “Suggestions for Further Reading” from The Brazil Reader; while not “comprehensive” as the series editors suggest, it is appropriate for a general readership. There is a lot to recommend this text for undergraduate classroom use, especially for courses outside history departments that demand or expect knowledge of, rather than intend to critically interrogate, Brazil’s historical background. History professors may find the greater detail of Skidmore’s Five Centuries of Change, the Cambridge History volumes edited by Leslie Bethell, or even Boris Fausto’s A Concise History of Brazil more suitable to accompany t l heir lectures. And Levine and Crocitti’s above-mentioned Brazil Reader is more conducive to promoting and engaging critical thinking and classroom discussion relating to Brazil’s past. Yet, if perhaps not the best textbook for classroom use, Brazilianists should be pleased to have the option of recommending this very worthwhile text to friends and acquaintances intending to travel to Brazil or having recently returned and wanting to learn more about the country’s political and economic heritage.

Parties, ideology and social composition

Este artigo discute a formação da cultura brasileira. Como outros países ibero-americanos, o Brasil apresenta a peculiaridade de ser um país nascido de idéias e de projetos. Nasceu de um complexo medieval de motivos que incluiu ganância de riqueza e poder, além de impulsos religiosos, precedendo o capitalismo comercial. Uma sucessão de projetos acompanha a história do país desde os primeiros planos da Coroa para a colonização, vindo depois os dos jesuítas e de Pombal, com a questão central dos índios; no Império, os projetos da formação de um Estado e de um povo (para o "país sem povo"); na Republica Velha se inicia, com Canudos, a descoberta do povo que se realiza, finalmente, na "era de Vargas". As grandes idéias e os projetos de sua história deixaram marcas em sua cultura política.

O debate em torno da nacionalização do ensino na Era Vargas

The article focuses on the debate about the nationalization of education system in Vargas Era. At first, the debate priorized the discussion about educational organization and the capacity of federative Government to promote it. So the question was: What´s State for? During the Authoritary Government, the central question was: education for what? Finally, at 1950 decade, the end of war and democratic context in Brasil, highlights the fundamental question nowadays: public education for whom?

A history of organized labor in Brazil

Preface Introduction Organized Labor Before the 1930 Revolution Organized Labor in the Vargas Era (1930-1945) Unionism in Democratic Interregnum 1945-1964 Part I Unionism in Democratic Interregnum 1945-1964 Part II Unionism During the 1964-1985 Military Dictatorship Organized Labor and the Restoration of Democracy Bibliography Index

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

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

Metamorfoses do Estado brasileiro no final do século XX

O artigo procura reconstruir o processo de crise do Estado varguista e de transição para a forma nova forma de Estado, moderadamente liberal em termos econômicos e democrática em termos políticos, que emergiu nos anos de 1990, ganhou solidez durante sob a presidência de Fernando Henrique Cardoso e foi reiterada com a eleição de Luiz Inácio da Silva. Procura-se explorar a natureza da crise de hegemonia que marcou o início da transição política brasileira, no início dos anos de 1980, e caracterizar a emergência de um novo padrão hegemônico de dominação. Ressalta-se principalmente os dois aspectos principais da transição política a democratização política e a liberalização econômica procurando-se salientar as transformações da sociedade nacional e da ordem mundial em que se inserem.

Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945. DARYLE WILLIAMS: Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2001.

Daryle Williams' Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945 offers a clear picture of the conflict between culture and politics during the Vargas era. Williams begins by placing the term "culture wars" in a Brazilian context, noting that in comparison to the United States, Brazilian culture wars are held on a much smaller scale, mainly restricted to the cultural elite. Within the first few pages of the text, Williams qualifies his use of the term suggesting that, during the Vargas era, culture wars occur in Brazil when there is a dispute over who controls images of national identity. For Williams, the term culture wars embraces a myriad of genres including, but not limited to, fine art, museums, expositions, architecture, literature, radio and film. Under Vargas, these areas become pawns for political players who each want the right to define a modern Brazil. Williams' key argument is that state-sponsored culture took on a new and very complex meaning during the Vargas regime.

Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945

Vargas era elites confronted the same basic question faced by other centralizing political regimes—how to shape Brazil beyond the affairs of Rio de Janeiro (and perhaps even beyond the provincial capitals). Daryle Williams shows how cultural policymakers of the Vargas era confronted the core challenges of political and administrative centralization by looking at the newly created Ministry of Education and Health’s initiatives in art, architecture, and historical memory. These included the creation of a program for protecting—in effect federalizing—historical landmarks, including the city of Ouro Preto; the establishment a network of historical museums that often appropriated regional histories and made them “Brazilian”; the promotion a modern and nationalist vision of Brazil at overseas expositions; and the endorsement of modernist art and architecture as an official symbolic language of brasilidade, or Brazilianness.Culture Wars in Brazil draws the reader into an engaging crossroads in Brazilian history where the politics of a centralizing federal government intersected with the ongoing debate among elites about the nature of national culture. The result is an elegant study of both Brazilian culture in a political context and of Vargas regime politics in a cultural context that should satisfy a broad constituency of readers interested in Brazilian history. Williams’s transparent use of sources for cultural history, the clarity of his narrative, the depth of his characterization of the Vargas regime, and his caution in situating the narrative within broader currents of Brazilian history, all suit this book to undergraduate classroom use.Williams shifts the center of gravity for scholarship on the Vargas era by bringing needed recognition to the importance placed by the regime upon the politics of culture. His analysis reveals not only the ways in which Vargas era cultural politics were embedded in long-standing Brazilian debates about nationhood but also the strategies of state managers who sought to locate the regime within a sympathetic—and often elitist—vision of national history and identity. This is not to suggest that Vargas era culture managers sought to crassly legitimate the regime through appeals to the past. Rather, as the regime courted the participation of artists and intellectuals, it became enmeshed in long-standing cultural, intellectual and aesthetic debates over brasilidade.Culture Wars in Brazil shows us how the recently formed Ministry of Education and Health was envisioned as a “Ministry of Culture” by Gustavo Capanema, the third official to hold the portfolio of minister of education (1934– 45). Capanema became a catalyst linking the Vargas regime’s centralizing tendencies and a simmering debate between aesthetic and intellectual modernists and tradi tionalists about the meaning of Brazilian culture. Within this debate, modernists rejected the Brazil’s traditional adherence to European cultural and artistic trends as well as the sentimental embrace of imagery from the Brazilian colonial past. Largely through Capanema’s involvement in the debate, the modernists succeeded in placing their imprimatur on the major symbolic projects of the Vargas regime, from state expositions to official art, architecture, and the preservation of historical landmarks. Despite the modernists’ ascendancy, traditionalists continued to dominate key institutions which were rendered more prominent by the Vargas regime’s considerable support for cultural projects. While Williams acknowledges that figures such as Oscar Niemeyer, Cándido Portinari, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among many others, were the emerging winners of the debate over national culture, the real weight of Williams’s analysis lies in his examination of the federal government’s choice to become the debate’s sponsor. As Williams explains, “As the debate continues over the ‘revolutionary’ nature of the Revolution of 1930, it is clear that the Vargas era, and most especially the Estado Novo, stood for a time and place in which the federal government established itself as the center of cultural authority” (p. 259).Culture Wars in Brazil fills a conspicuous gap in the English-language historiography of Brazil and points to other crucial areas of study surrounding the Ministry of Education and the politics of culture in Brazil. These include the Ministry’s mainstay initiatives in establishing a federal role over public health and education, the politics of censorship and the press which the Ministry enjoined, as well as the role of the state in mediating popular culture, from radio, music and carnival to cinema, theater and recreation. Williams’s thorough study of the ministry’s cultural politics will serve as a basic reference for future scholarship on Brazilian cultural history. Culture Wars in Brazil convincingly shows that cultural history is not peripheral to the affairs of state traditionally privileged by historians. To the contrary, state managers of the Vargas era, like their counterparts throughout Brazilian history since the arrival of the French artistic mission in 1813, have been firm in their conviction that national culture, and the definition of brasilidade, were crucial areas of state involvement.

Culture wars in Brazil: the first Vargas regime, 1930-1945

In Culture Wars in Brazil Daryle Williams analyzes the contentious politicking over the administration, meaning, and look of Brazilian culture that marked the first regime of president-dictator Getulio Vargas (1883–1954). Examining a series of interconnected battles waged among bureaucrats, artists, intellectuals, critics, and everyday citizens over the state’s power to regulate and consecrate the field of cultural production, Williams argues that the high-stakes struggles over cultural management fought between the Revolution of 1930 and the fall of the Estado Novo dictatorship centered on the bragging rights to brasilidade —an intangible yet highly coveted sense of Brazilianness. Williams draws on a rich selection of textual, pictorial, and architectural sources in his exploration of the dynamic nature of educational film and radio, historical preservation, museum management, painting, public architecture, and national delegations organized for international expositions during the unsettled era in which modern Brazil’s cultural canon took definitive form. In his close reading of the tensions surrounding official policies of cultural management, Williams both updates the research of the pioneer generation of North American Brazilianists, who examined the politics of state building during the Vargas era, and engages today’s generation of Brazilianists, who locate the construction of national identity of modern Brazil in the Vargas era. By integrating Brazil into a growing body of literature on the cultural dimensions of nations and nationalism, Culture Wars in Brazil will be important reading for students and scholars of Latin American history, state formation, modernist art and architecture, and cultural studies.

The Chanchada and Celluloid Visions of Brazilian Identity in the Vargas Era (1930-45)

(2000). The Chanchada and Celluloid Visions of Brazilian Identity in the Vargas Era (1930-45) Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 63-74.

The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics

The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics

Father of the Poor? Vargas and his Era. ROBERT M. LEVINE: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

"Why did Fernando Henrique Cardoso [Brazil's current president] after his election in 1994 announce that his presidential administration would represent 'the end of the Vargas era' in Brazilian history?" -- asks Levine (p. 132). Whatever the reason(s), Cardoso's reference to Vargas on such a solemn occasion, forty years after Vargas's suicide, is emblematic of what Levine himself calls "Vargas as enigma" --the unmatched influence that this elusive man has had on Brazil for most of this century.

Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (review)

174 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 vast majority ofAlgerianJews, who were French nationals, went to France. By the 1970s the AlgerianJewish communityvinually ceased to exist, while the Moroccan and Tunisian Jewish communities continued to exist but in ever diminishing numbers. Peaceful relations between Morocco and Israel, which have been developing since Laskier wrote his book, may give greater legitimacy to Jews remaining in Morocco, and may even encourage a few to return, but it is unlikely that Moroccan Jews in large numbers will leave their "diaspora" in France, Montreal, and Israel for an uncertain future in their native land. Daniel J. Schroeter Department of History University of California, Irvine Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question, by Jeffrey Lesser. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 280 pp. $42.00 (c); $18.00 (P). As one of the New World's largest nations developed by immigration, Brazil has promoted the national image of a racial democracy even though racial and ethnic inequalities exist within its borders. Whether this racial democracy represents political veneer or national ideology,Jeffrey Lesser's historical depiction of Jewish immigration to Brazil after World War I questions this image by arguing that many Brazilian intellectuals and diplomats, especially immigration officials, considered Jews neither white nor prestigious Europeans, but instead Semites who somehow constituted a threat to the State's nationalist project ofconsolidation and homogenization . The contradiction implied in the title of Lesser's cogent study aptly characterizes the ambiguous but insidious modern Brazilian position toward Jews in which denial and acceptance coexist in a context imbued with racial overtones. While New Christian Jews have emigrated to Brazil since the early 1500s, becoming assimilated into the larger population throughout the colonial period, modern Brazilian-Jewish immigration, primarily from Eastern Europe, dates from the nineteenth century, particularly the last decades, as well as the first decades of the twentieth, followed by an intensive period prior to and during World War II. Today, considered to be between 120,000 and 150,000, Brazil's Jewish population for the most part is spread over three major communities in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Porto Alegre. Albeit focusing primarily upon the Vargas regime's Book Reviews 175 immigrant policy from 1937 to 1945, when more than 12,000Jews entered despite strong political and legal impediments, Lesser's admirably documented study also provides a broad picture of the Jewish question throughout Brazil's modern period, suggesting that the policies and actions practiced during the dictatorial Vargas Era may serve as a microcosm for understanding Brazil's attitudes toward "others." Herein lies the originality of this exhaustively researched and historiographically sound study-that race in Brazil cannot be separated from questions of ethnicity, language, nationality, and religion as has been done repeatedly in the past. Lesser's book also illustrates how the Brazilian concept of race goes beyond the question of skin color, Brazil's usual argument for distinguishing between United States and Brazilian race relations. In critically assessing Brazilian nationalism via the ethnic lens, Lesser underscores the importance of including ethnicity as a dynamic social and political reality, especially in regard to perception and expectation involving incidences of cultural stereotyping. This approach should give impetus to more ethnic studies in Brazil and the rest of Latin America because it points to how a national image ofethnic purity can be manipulated for promoting nativism and assimilation as well as xenophobia. In this vein, Lesser employs the term "nationalist authoritarianism" to explain the development of Brazil's national policy toward race, from "whitening" to "Brazilianization," and how ethnicity can become a serious racial matter. For example, Brazilian Jews are perceived as racially distinct yet, as a people, possess the advantage of being able to "pass" as whites. On the other hand, their European country of origin did not afford them the prestigious status accorded to other immigrants from the Old World. During the 1930s and 40s, the cultivation of anti-Jewish images and stereotyping in Brazil, often based upon imagined notions of what constitutes a Jew, served as a resource for elites and government figures to devise policy and to manipulate an official discourse that affected Jewish immigration, negatively as well...

"Order and Progress": A Political History of Brazil.

What is Brazil? monarchical Brazil - colony and empire the first republic the Vargas era the quest for democracy and development, 1946-1960 decay, crises and revolution, 1961-1964 the military as ruler, 1964-1973 the road back the Sarney government - from transition to consolidation Brazil faces the Nineties.

A escultora Adriana Janacópulos

Educated in Europe, Adriana Janacópulos innitiated her carreer as a sculptor in Paris, where she participated in various exhibits during the 20s; she was particularly dedicated to portraits. She returned to Brazil in 1932, taking up residence in Rio de Janeiro. Having received recognition from the innovative cariocas, she executed some important monuments. After the end of the Vargas Era, she concentrated on small sculptures, isolated herself from the artistic world, an was forgotten. Her work, which was modern but connected to figuration and the tradicional practices of her métier, always harmonious and clear, followed a line of structural rigor and of formal and expressive synthesis. Her production that covered a period of thirty years deserves to be brought back into Art History in Brazil.

The Armed Forces and Industrialists in Modern Brazil: The Drive for Military Autonomy (1889-1954)

EFENSE analysts in the late 1970s were increasingly impressed by a surprising phenomenon in the international arms sector: the emergence of Brazil as not only the leading manufacturer of war materiel in the Third World, but a significant exporter of hardware as well. Clearly Brazil is rapidly joining the big league producers ..., one observer aptly commented.' The creation of a complex, one of the striking offshoots of Brazil's remarkable economic development in recent times, was not accidental. Financial considerations naturally were instrumental in the drive for general industrial self-sufficiency that has been a major component of Brazilian national strategy for fifty years, but that drive, along with its complementary campaign for arms autonomy, has deep roots in elite perceptions of national needs and in Brazil's experiences with arms dependence during the turbulent first half of the century. The Old Republic (1889-1930) was an important period in the evolution of Brazil's military-industrial sector primarily because of the formation then of a body of elite opinion that advocated reduced dependence in matters of national security. The real take-off, however, came during the Getu'lio Vargas era (1930-54) when modernization of the armed forces became one of the government's priority goals. Sharing fully the preoccupation of the generals and admirals with Brazil's vulnerabilities in a lawless world, Vargas and his civilian counselors, as well as military leaders, were keenly aware of the critical importance of enhancing national capacity to meet the ominous demands of the era-and the official consensus was that effective military strength required an industrial base that was as independent as possible.

Military Influence on Brazilian Economic Policy, 1930-1945: A Different View

THE COMMONLY HELD VIEW of the military role in Latin American economic development is that the armed forces have ardently championed industrialization, that t-hey have been bearers of modemity as represented by industrialization.l Generally speaking, this thesis is an impressionistic one based largely, perhaps, on reading contemporaly trends into the past. In the absence of case studies, historians have had to accept that thesis essentially on faith. present article, a step in the direction of more empirical studies needed to test such assumptions, is concerned with the impact of military demands on policy-making in tvo key economic issue-areas facing the Get-2lio Vargas government during the period 1930-1945: trade and steel. It is premature to speak of a standard interpretation of military influence on Brazilian economic policy during the Vargas era, yet certainly the view offered by John D. Wirth in his recent study Politics of Brazilian Development has to be considered the prevailing one simply because it is the only extensive published statement on the subject. His argument, moreover, has been accepted in toto by other scholars.2 Wirth's focus is on national policies in the areas of foreign trade, steel, and petroleum, the latter being largely a post-war issue. His thesis is that the military was a modernizing force which exercised great influence on policy at every turn of the political wheel. one exception was trade. Here Wirth finds no connection between the military's requirements and perception of national needs on the one hand, and the commercial program of the government on the other. He *The author is Director of the Centro de Historia Contemporanea at the Arquivo Nacional in Rio de Janeiro and associate professor of histoiy at the Universidade Federal Fluminense. A grant from the Social Science Research Council made possible the research for this article. 1. John J. Johnson, The Latin-American Militaiy as a Politically Competing Group in Transitional Society, Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries (Princeton, 1962), p. 121. 2. For example, Warren K. Dean, book review, American Historical Review, 76 (June 1971), 852-53.

Tenentismo in the Brazilian Revolution of 1930

BRAZIIANS OF THE 1930's agreed that the radical movement of young army officers and politicians known as tenentismo dominated the first two years, or radical phase, of the Vargas era (1930-1945). Whether praised or attacked, the tenentes (lieutenants) were usually assigned central roles in the Revolution of 1930 and in the political and social transformations which followed. Now that the Revolution is attaining historical perspective, and recently published memoirs and biographies have shed new light on the tenentes, it is appropriate to re-examine their program, organization, political tactics, and strategy. This article seeks to establish the relationship of the tenentes to other interest groups, including the entrenched military bureaucracy, and to evaluate their capabilities as officials in the central and state governments that evolved out of the Revolution of 1930. On November 3, 1930, in uniform, wearing a red scarf and a large gaucho hat, Getulio Vargas accepted supreme power as head of a new provisional government. His prospects of success were not auspicious. An unexpected coup d'e'tat by the army had robbed his forces of a clear military mandate while indebting his future administration to the professional soldiers of the armed forces. The frenzied, politically inarticulate crowds which roared their approval of his political victory hardly signified a firm popular basis for his revolution. The makeshift coalition of conservative, liberal, and radical elements called the Liberal Alliance had supported him on his triumphal march to the capital, but it could not be depended upon to provide lasting political support. The nation's shaky financial structure and the threatened total collapse of the international coffee market confronted the new president with another set of potential enemies. Coffee growers, foreign creditors, and the governments supporting them waited impatiently for him to tip his hand. Labor, although still in its formative stage, grew restless as unemployment spread from the cities to the countryside. In this confused situation Vargas,