Brazil on the Move (2 page)

The earliest record I know of a political relationship between Brazil and English-speaking America is in Jefferson’s report to John Jay when Jay was handling foreign affairs for the Continental Congress, of a conversation he had at Nîmes with a Brazilian medical student. It was in the spring of 1787. Jefferson was Minister to France. He had managed to break away from the gray drizzle of Paris for a breath of sunlight in the Midi. The Brazilian was named José Joaquim de Mayo. He seems to have been a member of a group in Rio affiliated with Tiradentes and his friends in the province of Minas Gerais. These later became known as the
Inconfidentes
, those disloyal to the King. De Mayo was asking whether the Brazilians could get help from North America if they set up an independent republic.

Jefferson had to tell him that the Confederated States had only been independent for five years, and that they were much too busy with domestic problems—it was only in the coming summer that the forty odd delegates were to shut themselves up in Philadelphia to write the constitution which cemented the Union—to engage in military adventures; and that, besides,
their commercial relations with Portugal were profitable and cordial.

But liberty was still his passion. Jefferson couldn’t help adding that “a successful revolution in Brasil could not be uninteresting to us. that prospects of lucre might possibly draw numbers of individuals to their aid, and purer motives our officers, among whom there are many excellent”; so he reported to Jay. Always the teacher, Jefferson went on to give the young Brazilian a little lesson in civil liberties. He explained that “our citizens being free to leave their own country individually without consent of their governments, are equally free to go to any other.”

Reading over the scanty record of this meeting in the drapery-hung parlor of some stuffy French inn among the Roman ruins of Nîmes, you got the feeling that Jefferson and De Mayo had no need to waste time defining their terms. In spite of their bad French they understood each other. The libertarians of the eighteenth century spoke an international language.

The revolutionary movement of the
Inconfidentes
was crushed. A few years later Brazil attained independence in a quite different way from any other of the American nations.

Instead of being an exploited colony Brazil suddenly found itself the head and front of the Portuguese empire. This was in 1807. Although the British had destroyed French and Spanish seapower at Trafalgar, Napoleon’s armies were sweeping Europe. In Portugal local republicans were greeting them with cheers. When the French advanced on Lisbon the ruling Bragança embarked his whole administration on a fleet said to have been of a thousand sail, and, under the protection of a British squadron, took off for Brazil.

For sixteen years he reigned in Rio as John VI of the Kingdoms of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarve. Brazil developed mightily. The ports were opened to world commerce. European immigrants came in. A university was established. Printing
presses were set up. Exiled French academicians started a school of fine arts. British soldiers and sailors trained the armed services. European investors set up industries. Rio took on a cosmopolitan cast it has never lost. Exports of sugar and forest products soared. Cattleraising flourished. The ranchers and the slaveowning sugar planters ran the country.

When the Braganças were restored to the Portuguese throne after Napoleon’s abdication the Brazilians refused to go back to a colonial status. They set up John VI’s son Dom Pedro I as constitutional emperor of an independent Brazil. When he failed to suit them, they sent him packing off to Portugal, and chose his son Dom Pedro II, still a small boy, to succeed him.

Dom Pedro II grew up to be an extraordinarily able ruler. He had the statesman’s knack. Personally an unassuming man of scholarly tastes, he dedicated his life to developing responsible parliamentary government on the English model. The fifty years of his administration consolidated the Portuguese-speaking settlements spread over such an enormous terrain into a unified nation. It was largely due to Dom Pedro’s foresight and moderation that while Spanish America split up after independence into turbulent and warring regimes, Portuguese America enjoyed comparative internal peace. When he was forced to abdicate in 1889 in favor of a federal republic, he went into exile leaving behind him among his beloved Brazilians habits of compromise and moderation in political affairs quite alien to the violence of the Spanish tradition. He was truly the father of his country.

The transition from monarchy to republic took place virtually without bloodshed. Though the Brazilian republic has suffered its share since then of the uprisings and pronunciamentos and military dictatorships that have until recent years been the rule in Latin America, the Brazilians have retained a respect for the legal way of doing things that seems more English than Mediterranean. Transitions from one regime to
the other have tended to be by compromise instead of by violence. Brazil is a country of gusty oratory, but the bark of the politicians has usually proved worse than their bite.

There was an amusing instance of typically Brazilian moderation several years ago during Secretary of State Dulles’ visit to Rio. The Communists controlled the national students’ organization. Since hatred of the United States is their gospel, the leaders breathed fire and brimstone in an effort to stir up disagreeable incidents. Meanwhile the government and the more moderate factions among university students worked quietly to have everything smooth and rosy. The headquarters of the Communist students’ organization turned out to be on the one road in from the airport. Never would they allow warmonger Dulles to pass their headquarters, they kept proclaiming. When the fateful day came Mr. Dulles was driven without incident past a building draped in black. The Communist students had moved their headquarters to a back street.

Along with this knack for political moderation, Brazil offers a picture of racial tolerance rather unusual in the world. This too is part of the Portuguese inheritance. Although slavery was not abolished there until the 1870s, the history of the relationship between master and slave has been different than among the English-speaking peoples.

The Portuguese were a mixed lot to begin with. Their long intercourse with the Moslems of North Africa resulted in a certain tolerance of polygamy at variance with their Christian faith. During their great expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Portuguese adventurers and navigators established footholds not only in Brazil but on both coasts of Africa, in Abyssinia and Persia and India and China and as far east as Japan, where it was Portuguese priests who introduced the Christian religion.

Though their appetite for expansion was enormous their numbers were few. Portugal was months and years of slow
sailing away from the outposts of empire. They picked up their wives where they could. Indeed the Portuguese adventurers seem to have taken a naïve pride in the acquisition of the greatest possible number of wives and concubines from among the local populations. The Brazilian settlers particularly were family men with a vengeance. Even today it is not uncommon to find a Brazilian supporting several families. Bastards of various hues were considered members of the family.

The Portuguese family was patriarchal in the Biblical sense. In Brazil, as in the Old Testament, the patriarch had power of life and death over every member of the family group. At the same time he was responsible for their welfare. When the scarcity of hands, in the homeland as well as in the colonies, was remedied by the importation of Negro slaves, slaves were considered part of the family, as they are in Arabia today. The master’s mulatto children enjoyed a certain status. Half-breeds, whether of Indian or Negro blood, tended to be drawn into the dominant culture, instead of being discarded into an outcast class as they were in English-speaking America. The social results of this difference in attitude have been tremendous.

There has resulted a society where racial tensions are few. As early as colonial times the Jews discovered so little prejudice against them that they had trouble preserving their cultural identity. After a couple of generations of intermarriage they melted away into the rest of the population. The same thing seems to be happening to the Germans and Italians who colonized the southern states and to recent European immigrants pouring into Rio and São Paulo. There is an amoebalike quality about the mild Portuguese culture which absorbs the most diverse elements.

The growing diversity in the national origins of the Brazilians shows up in public life. One of the leading politicians is ex-President Kubitschek. Oscar Niemeyer is their bestknown
architect. The pioneer in modern architecture at São Paulo was named Warschavchik. Rio’s famous afterluncheon speaker is named Herbert Moses. Particularly in São Paulo you meet families with North American surnames that date back to the southern slaveholders who emigrated to Brazil after the Civil War. There are Smiths who don’t speak a word of English. Even the Japanese, established at first in tightly exclusive colonies, are beginning to melt into the population.

The patriarchal mentality, combining with the humane impulses of the European nineteenth century, produced during the last fifty years an attitude of tenderness towards the Stone Age peoples of the Brazilian forests. In that period Brazil was a leader in the effort to conciliate and preserve primitive peoples.

It’s worth noting that one of Brazil’s great military heroes was Candido Rondón, who died a field marshal at the ripe old age of ninetytwo. Rondón was three fourths Indian. His paternal grandfather was a bandeirante out of São Paulo who settled in Mato Grosso and married a Terena Indian. His mother was a Bororó. From the day he entered a military school back in the days of the empire, throughout his long and successful military career, he devoted his great energies to the gradual civilizing of the forest Indians. Like his bandeirante grandfather Rondón was irresistibly attracted to the rainforests and the jungles. He personally mapped and surveyed more undiscovered territory than any Brazilian of his time. It was Rondón who shepherded Theodore Roosevelt during the exploring trip to the River of Doubt that was nearly the end of T.R.

The Indian Protection Service Rondón set up is unique. He worked out a battery of methods for civilizing the wild tribes without destroying them. At the same time his Boundary Commission to map the disputed frontiers with the Guianas and Venezuela and Colombia accomplished miracles in eliminating international friction. Rondón managed
to replace nationalist fanaticism by a spirit of rational give and take. “Never be the first to shoot,” was his motto.

Along with racial toleration, religious toleration has been the rule. Although Brazil is predominantly Catholic it is one of the few South American countries where Protestant missionaries are not interfered with. The Inquisition never reached Brazil. For a century there religious toleration has been so complete that the average Brazilian city offers today almost as many religious sects as Los Angeles. Alongside of the predominant Catholics you find Episcopalians, evangelistic Protestants of every stripe, Christian Scientists, followers of Auguste Comte, spiritualists, and votaries of various African cults brought over by the slaves. In the thoroughly upto-date city of Pôrto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul we found a half voodoo, half spiritualist group called The White Line of Umbanda announcing its meetings in the newspapers.

As the threat of a Communist-colored dictatorship looms ever larger, the votaries of the most various religious sects tend to draw together. The last time I was in Rio I attended a meeting organized by a league for the defense of civil liberties. A large crowd, made up of the most diverse elements among rich and poor, gathered on the open lawn between the ranks of great trees that form the square behind what is known as Russell Beach on Guanabara Bay. The Catholic archbishop of Niterói, a number of church dignitaries, several Protestant ministers, a positivist, a representative of the spiritualists and a Jewish rabbi spoke from the same platform.

The rabbi’s speech was one of the most touching I have ever heard. He told of the oppressions and miseries of his early life in Russia and Poland, the constant harassment on account of his race and his religion, the agony of the escape and the delight of landing in the new world of Brazil. He had been received with hospitality, and with a sort of inattentive friendliness that could hardly be called toleration, because the
Brazilians saw nothing particular about him that needed to be tolerated. He was a man like themselves. He spoke with pride and gratitude of his Brazilian citizenship. Only in Brazil had he come to understand the meaning of freedom.

I first landed off an airplane in Rio back in 1948 when I was on a South American tour to do some articles for
Life
. Bill and Connie White, who were then running the
Life-Time
bureau in that part of the world, let out that they were starting next morning to drive their Studebaker up into the hinterland of Minas Gerais (the state of “assorted mines”), which lies to the north of the mountain barrier that hems in the city of Rio de Janeiro and the great bay of Guanabara. I snatched at the opportunity to take a peep into the back country before getting tangled up with the capital city. Their faces certainly fell when I asked them if they would mind if I came along. They’d been planning a private expedition on their own. They mumbled a reluctant yes. As it turned out the trip was a success all around. None of us ever laughed so much in our lives.

The roads were rough. The hotels were worse. At a place named Conselheiro Lafaiete the only lodging we could find seemed to be built over a railroad roundhouse. Smoke and steam from the engines occasionally came up through the floor. In one room there was an open manhole that threatened to drop you into some black pit below. We’d barely got settled
round a rickety table in the bare loft and were pouring ourselves out a drink when the electric lights went off. That meant every light in town. The streets were deep in mud. To find the local restaurant we had to grope our way along the walls in the dark.