History of Brazil (1889-1930)
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| This article is part of the Brazilian History series. |
| Indigenous peoples |
| Colonial Brazil |
| Empire of Brazil |
| 1889-1930 |
| 1930-1945 |
| 1945-1964 |
| 1964-1985 |
| 1985-present |
| Contents |
The Constitutionalist Revolution
From 1889 to 1930, the government was a constitutional democracy, with the presidency alternating between the dominant states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. This period ended with a military coup that placed Getúlio Vargas, a civilian, in the presidency; Vargas remained as dictator until 1945.
On November 15 1889, Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca declared the Republic, and deposed the emperor, Dom Pedro II, assuming the govern of the country.
The Brazilian republic was not a ideological offspring of the republics born of the French or American revolutions, although the Brazilian regime would attempt to associate itself with both. The republic did not have enough popular support to risk open elections. It was a regime born of a coup d'état that maintained itself by force. The republicans made Deodoro president (1889-1891) and, after a financial crisis, appointed Field Marshal Floriano Vieira Peixoto minister of war to ensure the allegiance of the military.
Old Republic (1889-1930): rule of the landed oligarchies
The history of the republic has been a search for a viable form of government to replace the monarchy. That search has lurched back and forth between state autonomy and centralization. The constitution of 1891, establishing the Republic of the United States of Brazil (República dos Estados Unidos do Brasil), restored autonomy to the provinces, now called States. It recognized that the central government did not rule at the local level, that it exercised control only through the local oligarchies. The Empire of Brazil had not absorbed fully the regional pátrias, and now they reasserted themselves.
Into the 1920s, the federal government in Rio de Janeiro would be dominated and managed by a combination of the more powerful pátrias (São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul. and to a lesser extent Pernambuco and Bahia).
The founders of the Brazilian republic faced a serious question of legitimacy. How could an illegal, treasonous act establish a legal political order? The officers who joined Field Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca in ending the empire were violating solemn oaths to uphold emperor and empire. The officer corps would eventually resolve the contradiction by linking its duty and destiny to Brazil, the motherland, rather than to transitory governments. In addition, the republic was born rather accidentally: Deodoro had intended only to replace the cabinet, but the republicans manipulated him into fathering a republic.
As a result, the history of the republic is also the story of the development of the army as a national institution. The elimination of the monarchy had reduced the number of national institutions to one, the army. Although the Roman Catholic Church continued its presence throughout the country, it was not national but rather international in its personnel, doctrine, liturgy, and purposes. The army assumed this new position almost haphazardly, filling part of the vacuum left by the collapse of the monarchy and gradually acquiring a doctrine and vision to support its de facto role. Although it had more units and men in Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul than elsewhere, its presence was felt throughout the country. Its personnel, its interests, its ideology, and its commitments were national in scope.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the United States, much of Europe, and neighboring Argentina expanded the right to vote. Brazil, however, moved to restrict access to the polls. In 1874, in a population of about 10 million, the franchise was held by about 1 million, but in 1881 this had been cut to 145,296. This reduction was one reason the empire's legitimacy foundered, but the republic did not move to correct the situation. By 1910 there were only 627,000 voters in a population of 22 million. Throughout the 1920s, only between 2.3 percent and 3.4 percent of the total population voted.
The instability and violence of the 1890s were related to the absence of consensus among the elites regarding a governmental model; and the armed forces were divided over their status, relationship to the political regime, and institutional goals. The lack of military unity and the disagreement among civilian elites about the military's role in society explain partially why a long-term military dictatorship was not established, as some officers advocating positivism wanted. However, military men were very active in politics; early in the decade, ten of the twenty state governors were officers. The Constituent Assembly that drew up the constitution of 1891 was a battleground between those seeking to limit executive power, which was dictatorial under President Deodoro da Fonseca, and the Jacobins, radical authoritarians who opposed the paulista coffee oligarchy and who wanted to preserve and intensify presidential authority. The new charter established a federation governed supposedly by a president, a bicameral National Congress (Congresso Nacional; hereafter, Congress), and a judiciary. However, real power was in the regional pátrias and in the hands of local potentates, called "colonels."
There was the constitutional system, and there was the real system of unwritten agreements (coronelismo) among local bosses, the colonels. Coronelismo, which supported state autonomy, was called the "politics of the governors." Under it, the local oligarchies chose the state governors, who in turn selected the president.
This informal but real distribution of power emmerged, the so-called politics of the governors, to take shape as the result of armed struggles and bargaining. The populous and prosperous states of Minas Gerais and São Paulo dominated the system and swapped the presidency between them for many years. The system consolidated the state oligarchies around families that had been members of the old monarchial elite. And to check the nationalizing tendencies of the army, this oligarchic republic and its state components strengthened the navy and the state police. In the larger states, the state police were soon turned into small armies.
The latifundia economies
At the turn of the century, the vast majority of the population lived in communities, though accumulating capitalist surpluses for overseas export, that were essentially semi-feudal in structure. Due to the legacy of Ibero-American slavery, abolished as late as 1888 in Brazil, there was an extreme concentration of such landownership reminiscent of feudal aristocracies: 464 great landowners held more than 270,000 km² of land, while 464,000 small and medium-sized farms occupied only 157,000 km².
But this was agro-capitalism, not feudalism. After the Second Industrial Revolution in the advanced countries, Latin America responded to mounting European and North American demand for primary products and foodstuffs. A few key export products—coffee, sugar, and cotton—thus dominated agriculture. Because of specialization, Brazilian producers neglected domestic consumption, forcing the country to import four-fifths of its grain needs. Like most of Latin America, the economy at the turn of the century, as a result, rested on certain cash crops produced by the fazendeiros, large estate owners exporting primary products overseas who headed their own patriarchal communities. Each typical fazenda (estate) included the owner's chaplain and overseers, his indigent peasants, his sharecroppers, and his indentured servants.
Brazil's dependence on factory-made goods and loans from the technologically, economically, and politically superior North Atlantic retarded its domestic industrial base. Farm equipment was primitive and largely non-mechanized; peasants tilled the land with hoes and cleared the soil through the inefficient slash-and-burn method. Meanwhile, living standards were generally squalid. Malnutrition, parasitic diseases, and lack of medical facilities limited the average life span in 1920 to twenty-eight years. In no open market could Brazilian industry could compete with the comparative advantage of the technologically superior Anglo-American economies.
The middle class was not yet active in political life. The patron-client political machines of the countryside enabled the coffee oligarchs to dominate state structures to their advantage, particularly the weak central state structures that effectively devolved power to local agrarian oligarchies. Known as coronelismo, this was a classic boss system under which the control of patronage was centralized in the hands of a locally dominant oligarch known as a coronel, who would dispense favors in return for loyalty. For details, see the main article coronelismo.
The "politics of the governors," dominated by the latifundias, kept a relative peace until the end of World War I. Urban Brazil, the one foreigners saw from the decks of ships, prospered.
But there was no integrated national economy. Rather, Brazil had a grouping of regional economies that exported their own specialty products to European and North American markets. The absence of overland transportation, except for the mule trains, impeded internal economic integration, political cohesion, and military efficiency. The regions, "the Brazils" as the British called them, moved to their own rhythms. The Northeast exported its surplus cheap labor and saw its political influence decline as its sugar lost foreign markets to Caribbean producers. The wild rubber boom in Amazônia lost its world primacy to efficient Southeast Asian colonial plantations after 1912. The national-oriented market economies of the South were not dramatic, but their growth was steady and by the 1920s allowed Rio Grande do Sul to exercise considerable political leverage. Real power resided in the coffee-growing states of the Southeast—São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro—which produced the most export revenue. Those three and Rio Grande do Sul harvested 60 percent of Brazil's crops, turned out 75 percent of its industrial and meat products, and held 80 percent of its banking resources.
Demographic changes
From 1875 until 1960, about 5 million Europeans emigrated to Brazil, settling mainly in the four southern states of São Paulo, Parana, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. Immigrants have come mainly from Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, Poland, and the Middle East. The largest Japanese community outside Japan is in São Paulo. Despite class distinctions, national identity is strong, and racial friction is a relatively new phenomenon. Indigenous full-blooded Indians, located mainly in the northern and western border regions and in the upper Amazon Basin, constitute less than 1% of the population. Their numbers are declining as contact with the outside world and commercial expansion into the interior increase. Brazilian Government programs to establish reservations and to provide other forms of assistance have existed for years but are controversial and often ineffective. The plurality of Brazilians are of mixed African and European lineage. Immigration would be a strong boost to industrialization and urbanization in Brazil.
Economic, social, and political developments under the Old Republic
Demographic changes and structural shifts in the economy, however, would treaten the primacy of the agrarian oligarchies. Under the Old Republic (1889-1930), the growth of the urban middle sectors, though retarded by dependency and entrenched oligarchy, was eventually strong enough to eventually propel them to forefront of Brazilian political life. In time, growing trade, commerce, and industry in São Paulo would serve to undermine the domination of the republic's politics by the landed gentries of the same state (dominated by the coffee industry) and Minas Gerais (dominated by dairy interests)—known then by observers as the politics of café com leite ("coffee with milk"). For details, see the main article café com leite.
Long before the first revolts of the urban middle classes to seize power from the coffee oligarchs in the 1920s, however, Brazil's intelligentsia, influenced by the tenets of European positivism, along with farsighted agro-capitalists, dreamt of forging a modern, industrialized society—the "world power of the future". This sentiment would later be nurtured throughout the Vargas years and under successive populist governments before the 1964 military junta repudiated Brazilian populism. Although such lofty visionaries were somewhat ineffectual under the Old Republic (1889-1930), the structural changes in the Brazilian economy opened up by the Great War would strengthen these demands.
The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was the turning point for the dynamic urban sectors. Temporarily abating Britain's overseas economic connections with Brazil, the war was an impetus for domestic manufacturing due to the unavailability of British imports. In time, these structural shifts in the Brazilian economy helped to increase the ranks of the new urban middle classes. Meanwhile, the Brazil's manufactures and those employed by them enjoyed these gains at the expense of the agrarian oligarchies. World demand for coffee, a nonessential though habit-forming product (affording it a measure of stability and resilience), declined sharply. The central government, dominated by rural gentries, responded to falling world coffee demand by bailing out the oligarchs, reinstating the soon-to-be disastrous valorization program. Sixteen years later, world coffee demand would plunge even more precipitously with the Great Depression. Valorization, government intervention to maintain coffee prices by withholding stocks from the market or restricting plantings, would then prove unsustainable, incapable of curbing insurmountable decline in coffee prices in world markets. By World War I, the reinstatement of government price supports would just foreshadow the vulnerability of Brazil's coffee oligarchy to the Great Depression.
Paradoxically, economic crisis spurred industrialization and a resultant boost to the urban middle and working classes. The depressed coffee sector freed up the capital and labor needed for manufacturing finished goods. A chronically adverse balance of trade and declining rate of exchange against foreign currencies was also helpful; Brazilian goods were simply cheaper in the Brazilian market. The state of São Paulo, with its relatively large capital-base, large immigrant population from Southern and Eastern Europe, and wealth of natural resources, led the trend, eclipsing Rio de Janeiro as center of Brazilian industry . Industrial production, though concentrated in light industry (food processing, small shops, and textiles) doubled during the war, and the number of enterprises (which stood at about 3,000 in 1908) grew by 5,940 between 1915 and 1918 . The war was also a stimulus for the diversification of agriculture. Growing wartime demand of the Allies for staple products, sugar, beans, and raw materials sparked a new boom for products other than sugar or coffee. Foreign interests, however, continued to control the more capital-intensive industries, distinguishing Brazil's industrial revolution from that of the West.
The struggle for modernization and social reform
With manufacturing on the rise and the coffee oligarchs imperiled, the old order of café com leite and coronelismo would eventually give way to the political aspirations of the new urban groups: professionals, government and white-collar workers, merchants, bankers, and industrialists. As one would expect, increasing support for industrial protectionism marked 1920s Brazilian politics with little support from a central government dominated by the coffee interests. Under considerable middle class pressure, a more activist, centralized state adapted to represent the interests of the new bourgeoisie—one that could utilize a state interventionist policy consisting of tax breaks, lowered duties, and import quotas to potentially expand the domestic capital base—had been demanded for years. After all, manufacturers, white-collar workers, and the urban proletariat alike had earlier enjoyed the respite of world trade associated with World War I. However, the coffee oligarchs, relying on a devolved power structure relegating power to their own patrimonial ruling oligarchies, were certainly not interested in regularizing Brazil's personalistic politics or centralizing power. Getúlio Vargas, leader from 1930 to 1945 and later for a brief period in the 1950s, would later respond to these demands.
During this time period, the state of São Paulo was at the forefront of Brazil's economic, political, and cultural life. Known colloquially as "locomotive pulling the 20 empty boxcars" (a reference to the 20 other states) and still today Brazil's industrial and commercial center, São Paulo led this trend toward industrialization due to the foreign revenues flowing into the coffee industry.
Prosperity contributed to a rapid rise in the population of recent working class Southern and Eastern European immigrants, a population that contributed to the growth of trade unionism, Communism, and socialism. The post-World War I period saw Brazil's first wave of general strikes along with the establishment of the Communist Party in 1922.
Meanwhile, the divergence of interests between the coffee oligarchs—devastated by the Depression—and the burgeoning, dynamic urban sectors was intensifying. According to prominent Latin American historian Benjamin Keen, the task of transforming society "fell to the rapidly growing urban bourgeois groups, and especially to the middle class, which began to voice even more strongly its discontent with the rule of the corrupt rural oligarchies". In contrast, the labor movement remained small and weak (despite a wave of general strikes in the postwar years), lacking ties to the peasantry, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the Brazilian population. As a result, disparate social reform movements would crop up in the 1920s, ultimately cumulating in the Revolution of 1930. The 1920s revolt against the seating of Artur da Silva Bernardes as president signaled the beginning of a struggle by the urban bourgeoisie to seize power from the coffee-producing oligarchy.
This era sparked the failed but famed tenente (lieutenant) rebellion as well. Junior military officers, who had long been active against the ruling coffee oligarchy, staged their own failed revolt in 1922 amid demands for various forms of social modernization, calling for agrarian reform, the formation of cooperatives, and the nationalization of mines. In this historical setting, Getúlio Vargas would emerge as president about a decade later.
| History of Brazil: Timeline & Topics Indians |
Colonial |
Empire |
1889–1930 |
1930–1945 |
1945–1964 |
1964–1985 |
1985–present |