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Overview
Frank D. McCann has used previously inaccessible Brazilian archival material to discuss the events during the Vargas regime which brought about a close alliance between Brazil and the United States and resulted in Brazil's economic, political, and military dependence on her powerful North American ally. He shows that until 1940 the drive for closer union came largely from Brazil, which wanted to offset the shifting alliances of the Spanish-speaking countries and escape from British economic domination. American interest in Brazil increased during the 1930's as the U.S. turned to Latin America to recoup losses in foreign trade and as Washington began to fear that Nazism and Fascism would spread to South America.
By 1940 the nature of Brazil's relationship with the United States made it impossible for Brazil to remain neutral. Frank McCann's analysis of Brazil's decision to join the Allies affords a view of the diplomatic uses of economic and military aid, which became a feature of diplomacy in the postwar years. It also provides insights into the military's influence on foreign policy, and into the functioning of Vargas' Estado Nôvo.
Originally published in 1974.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691618807 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1520 |
| Pages: | 544 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Brazilian-American Alliance, 1937-1945
By Frank D. McCann Jr.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1973 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05655-5
CHAPTER 1
Vargas' Brazil
After a rain during the night and with a cloudy sky still threatening showers, Wednesday, November 10, 1937, dawned cool and breezy in Rio de Janeiro. The morning newspapers carried no mention of the manifesto read the previous day in the Congress, only a feature story on the new Minister of Justice, Francisco Campos. All appeared normal, and the city was outwardly calm despite the sudden closure of the Congress that morning. The old cog-railway carried its loads of tourists to the top of Corcovado to see the view and to pose for photographs before the statue of Christ, while the tiny streetcars rattled their way from one end of town to the other. The ferryboats scurried back and forth across the bay between Praça Quinze and Niteroi, where the Fluminense soccer club was preparing for its match with Vasco da Gama, scheduled for the evening. The marquees in Cinelândia advertised the latest Hollywood films, starring the Marx brothers, Edward G. Robinson, Robert Young, and Claudette Colbert, and the Municipal Theater featured the opera "Rigoletto." The usual crowds bustled along the mosaic sidewalks of Avenida Rio Branco in the business district. At the General Staff School the director of instruction unveiled portraits of illustrious former professors before a gathering of generals. In the Guanabara Palace the presidential family enjoyed lobster at the mid-day meal; and in the courtyard of the Itamaraty the swans glided over the reflecting pool.
But ferment underlay the placid surface. Rumors of an impending coup had been gaining currency every day. As the president's daughter, Alzira Vargas, recalled: "No one knew for certain how, when, or who would effect it. The tension, the anguish, the expectation was perceptible in the very air one breathed."
The politics of Brazil between 1930 and 1937 was fraught with tension, anguish, and expectation, but the republic presented to the world a calm facade, masking its political squabbles, social problems, and economic change. Always Brazil seems to have appeared outwardly tranquil while seething underneath. Perhaps this is what led Gilberto Freyre to call his country a tropical China — its great size allowed it to absorb shocks that would have crumbled a lesser state. It can appear as unshakable as the ancient crystalline rock that underlies the Brazilian highlands, even when its society is being shaken to its foundations. November 10, 1937, marked the culmination of seven years of political jockeying and the beginning of eight years of dictatorship. Because of the influence of domestic events on foreign policy a look at the Brazil of the 1930's will aid in understanding the processes of policy formation and implementation.
Since coming to power through an armed movement in 1930, Getúlio Dornelles Vargas had sought to construct a regime capable of supporting the changes that he saw as necessary to modernize Brazil; basically this came to mean a strong central government. While the initial provisional regime allowed him to decree some progressive legislation, the factionalism of Vargas' Liberal Alliance, composed of old-time politicians and radical young military officers called tenentes, prevented strong unified effort. The various states balked at surrendering prerogatives that they had exercised since the fall of the monarchy in 1889. Federalism versus centralism, common to the histories of the American republics, produced in Brazil, as elsewhere, discord, violence, and civil war. In 1932 the rich and powerful state of Sao Paulo attempted to form a coalition with Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul, to defend state autonomy and to resolve myriad local issues. Federal forces neutralized rebels in the two latter states and threw a cordon around Sao Paulo. The futile civil war had begun with a flourish of popularity among Paulistas on July 9, 1932. Women gave their golden wedding rings to finance the cause, but generosity could not put experience into the raw recruits who manned Paulista positions. By the end of the first week in October the dismal affair ended with Sao Paulo's surrender.
Vargas shrewdly adopted a policy of conciliation for the sake of Brazilian unity. There were no firing squads, though some two hundred of the rebellion's leaders sailed to exile in Portugal, and there were no harsh indemnities; on the contrary, the national government agreed to redeem the Paulista war bonds. But the problems that had sparked the revolt remained.
The coup d'état of 1930 had ended the "old republic" in a governmental sense, but it was no social revolution. Rather than destroying rural-based oligarchies and their urban business allies, it merely removed their representatives from political control. In the following years Vargas expended much effort absorbing the rural and commercial elites into his power base. He turned these former enemies into supporters — or at least neutrals. Vargas succeeded because he checked the radical tenentes and the authoritarian rightists within his regime, and eventually destroyed the communists and the fascistic Integralistas that threatened it. He showed the elites that they had more to gain from cooperation than from opposition.
Vargas wanted to modernize Brazil but to avoid the sweeping violence that characterized the Mexican and Russian revolutions. He adroitly escaped the embraces of both the extreme left and the extreme right. He proceeded like a Disraeli or a Bismarck, freely borrowing ideas and measures from the extremes in order to blur their authorship and to weaken their potency as rallying-points for radical action. His revolution, though conservative, painfully gradual, and lacking "even the embryo of a precise ideology," nevertheless merited the name revolution, because after 1930 it became obvious that "something profound had been changed in Brazil." The country was at a crossroads in 1930 but, unfortunately, the route which Getiilio Vargas chose, while freeing Brazil from rigidly liberal orthodoxy, produced a situation which eventually resulted in an authoritarian military government.
Getúlio, as he was called by everyone, was one of the most curious figures in Brazilian history. He was a short man with a determined and fatherly face which customarily wore a large and sympathetic smile. He dominated public opinion to a degree previously unknown, he achieved popularity without appearing to cultivate it, and he carefully avoided ostentation. He was a reserved and complex man whose daughter said that he hid his thoughts even from himself. His slow action in resolving controversies suggested discipline and nonpartisanship, as if his movements had mathematical precision. In crises he seemed serene, tranquil, even insensitive, always giving the impression that he had himself and the situation under control. He avoided displays of power, preferring to give at least the appearance of operating according to law. With self-discipline he allowed events to run their course before intervening. While usually attempting to rally a consensus before acting, he did not shrink from removing opponents or taking frank, decisive, even violent action. Whether he did this from temperament, intelligence, or cunning is difficult to say; he puzzled his family, friends, and contemporaries as well as the historian.
Vargas was a master of maneuver. His power rested on the armed forces, yet he was his own man, not subservient to the military; somehow he managed to be the final recourse in military as well as civil disputes. He did not hold grudges; if he needed a man, he used him, even if that man had fought against him in the past. But discard awaited those whose usefulness was spent. He balanced the power of one politician by that of another, one state with a second, one general with his rival. He was careful to see that no member of his administration achieved too much power, position, or popularity.
It might be useful to make some comparisons between Vargas and his contemporary in the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both were sons of traditional families, both squires of small rural towns — Sao Borja, Rio Grande do Sul, and Hyde Park, New York. The people of their native states are energetic and accustomed to assuming leadership in the affairs of their respective nations. Politics permeated the atmospheres in which Vargas and Roosevelt grew up: to them political office was as much a duty as a reward. Both men served apprenticeships in subcabinet or cabinet posts; both rose slowly through the ranks of their state political machines and took control after overcoming the party leadership. Vargas used the governorship of Rio Grande do Sul as a road to the presidency, Roosevelt used the governorship of New York State. Each headed a reform ticket — a violent revolution carried Vargas into power in 1930, and a peaceful one served Roosevelt just as effectively in 1932. In his own fashion each managed to put a reform program into effect. Indeed, in 1936 Roosevelt declared Vargas the co-author of the New Deal.
In governing they showed a remarkable similiarity. A 1937 cartoon depicted Vargas smiling while juggling all the major figures in Brazilian political life. Both Vargas and Roosevelt encouraged, even relished, rivalry among their subordinates. Each man enjoyed politics and the exercise of power, and within limits, each preferred to let problems resolve themselves rather than force a decision. Neither wanted to become involved in foreign affairs and turned attention abroad only when forced by events. They both were effective speakers who understood the value of an artful word or a graceful turn of phrase. Their concern was for their countries' welfare, and each felt that he was the man to solve his nation's problems. Each incurred the contempt of the rich and received the devotion of the common man. Each affected his nation's history, and gave his name to an era.
Vargas' Brazil was a rural nation, in spirit and in reality, that was only beginning to populate its vast 3,287,195 square miles of territory. Over 90 percent of its 41 to 42 million inhabitants clustered within two hundred miles of its 3,517-mile Atlantic coast, from French Guiana to Uruguay. Nearly 70 percent of its population lived in rural areas and only Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo could claim more than a million citizens. Poverty, malnutrition, and disease afflicted an interior dominated by one-crop agriculture — usually coffee, cotton, or cacao. Subsistence agriculture was a way of life for millions. These people and their neighbors on the great fazendas lived under the paternalistic exploitation of the traditional latifundia system. Fazendeiros, like medieval lords, controlled huge areas with hired gunmen.
Rapid population increase, roughly 2.5 percent annually by 1940, caused a rural overflow that spilled into the cities. In addition, 4,190,837 immigrants streamed into Brazil between 1884 and 1943, most of whom settled in urban areas, particularly São Paulo, or in the southern states. Portuguese and Japanese predominated among the immigrants from 1914 to 1943, although German immigration reached its peak between 1924 and World War II; Italian and Spanish migration was heaviest before 1923.
The combined currents of rural and foreign migrants placed severe strains on unprepared urban areas. This was especially true in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Rio Grande do Sul, which accounted for more than half of the national agricultural and industrial production and possessed 50 percent of Brazil's railroads. The rural poor became urban poor squeezed into the stinking favelas of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, untended by government or church organizations.
In Rio de Janeiro of the mid-1930's, the altimeter was "an unfailing index of social position; the higher you lived, the less important you were. Poverty perched on the hill-tops, where the black population lived in rags...." The rich landowner, now an urbanite, was just as impervious to human suffering in the city as he had been in the country. The Catholic Church can best be described as ultraconservative, with its leading cleric, Dom Sebastião Cardinal Leme (1882-1942), more preoccupied with such projects as erecting the famous statue of Christ on Corcôvado mountain than in alleviating the poverty below "The Redeemer's" outstretched arms.
The Catholic Church, devoting itself to the spiritual needs of the rising urban middle class, left the poor blacks and caboclos to ease their lot in the ceremonies of the African cult and the fantasies of the Carnival Samba Schools. The Church did not need to explain its existence; it simply was. Unlike the Church in North America it did not suffer the necessity of changing in order to survive.
Education barely existed in the Brazil of the 1930's. In his lengthy "state of the nation" message to the National Constituent Assembly in November 1933, Getúlio Vargas declared the hard truth that Brazil had never squarely faced the problem of education. He called the mass of illiterates "a dead weight" on national progress, a "disgrace of which we should be ashamed." Out of every 1,000 Brazilians, 513 never entered school. Of the 487 who matriculated, no soon dropped out, 178 attended first grade but did not learn to read well, 85 completed two years attaining superficial literacy, 84 went a bit further but failed to complete their studies, and only thirty finished the three years that comprised the elementary course. Of those thirty, only those from relatively affluent families would be able to continue their education. The secondary schools were private in all but a few cases, acting as a sieve that kept the poor from reaching the universities. The universities themselves were new, formed from the government-sponsored, tuition-free faculdades after the Revolution of 1930. At the recently-founded University of São Paulo, the professors were "wretchedly paid" and forced to work at extra odd jobs to exist. The students, admitted after rigorous entrance examinations, were "hungry for the jobs" which their diplomas would bring. It seemed to Claude Lévi-Strauss, a member of the educational mission which France sent to assist the new university, that the students valued "the novelties of the day" more than serious learning — "for which they had neither the taste nor the methods." Obsessed with the need to prove that they were no longer country bumpkins, they disparaged the image of the Brazilian rustic, the caipira (hick) who made up the majority of Brazil's population. In part this was the normal reaction of the aspiring urbanite, but among the sons of thrifty, hard-working immigrants, especially Italians and Jews, who crowded the university it represented alienation from traditional Brazil. More determined and with more resources than native Brazilians, the immigrants had founded their own secondary schools or sacrificed to send their children to existing ones. Having gotten through the secondary school sieve they saw the University of Sao Paulo as a means of obtaining status and security. Its graduates entered Vargas' new civil service and in time would form a new elite.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Brazil in the 1930's and 1940's was the tremendous gap between living standards in cities like Rio de Janeiro and in the rural interior. The Northeast (Maranhão, Piaui, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraiba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Sergipe, and Bahia) long had staggered under periodic droughts; those of 1930 to 1933 were especially severe. In Ceará, where the situation was the worst, seven refugee camps received some 105,000 persons. Some of these took ship for the Amazonian rubber zone, while others crowded into slums from Fortaleza to São Paulo. Whether they stayed in the dusty, barren towns on the edge of the sertão, or joined the crab hunters in the mud at Recife, or reached the cacao groves of Ilheus exhausted and starving, or gathered boards and tiles to throw up a shack on a Rio de Janeiro hillside, they were disease-ridden, scrawny, dark-skinned reminders that Brazil was not predominantly white, urban, or comfortable. Ragged, barefoot, pot-bellied, dirty children with hacking bronchial coughs and ulcerated sores on their limbs, playing and fighting in the narrow feces-strewn alleys among the favela shacks, were like inhabitants of another world compared to the poised, immaculate, laughing children of the elite singing the traditional playsongs (cantigas de roda) as they whirled in dancing circles, one pink hand holding another under the watchful eyes of the white-uniformed, dark-skinned nursemaids (babás). While Cariocas spoke disdainfully of the rest of Brazil as the interior, the truth was that the interior could be seen on the hillsides and along the low swampy areas of Guanabara Bay.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Brazilian-American Alliance, 1937-1945 by Frank D. McCann Jr.. Copyright © 1973 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Preface, pg. ix
- Abbreviations, pg. xiii
- Introduction, pg. 1
- 1. Vargas' Brazil, pg. 11
- 2. The Course, pg. 49
- 3. Sigma and Swastika, pg. 77
- 4. Security of the Western Hemisphere, pg. 106
- 5. Toward Approximation, pg. 123
- 6. The Open Door, pg. 148
- 7. Crisis and Uncertainty, pg. 176
- 8. Airlines and Bases, pg. 213
- 9. An Uncertain Alliance, pg. 240
- 10. No Turning Back, pg. 259
- 11. Politics and Policy, pg. 291
- 12. The Cobra's Pipe, pg. 343
- 13. War and Development, pg. 378
- 14. The Smoking Cobras, pg. 403
- 15. End of an Era, pg. 443
- Note on Sources and Supplementary Bibliography, pg. 487
- Index, pg. 509