This book treats several dimensions of the Vargas era (1930–54): politics, including regionalism and civilian-military relations; labour history; social policy; civic culture; and cinema. Getúlio Vargas seized power in 1930 with no clear idea of how to combat the Great Depression. ‘Only in the long-run did Vargas's takeover … prove to be a revolution and a new development model’, writes Hentschke. The dictator himself would ride the waves of change with extraordinary skill.
Both the editor and the first essayist, Gunter Axt, assert the importance of Rio Grande do Sul's peculiar political culture in forming Vargas's approach to politics. Vargas was nurtured in the traditions of Julio de Castilhos, Rio Grande's positivist dictator from 1892 to 1904. Castilhos viewed social problems as resolvable through technological solutions. However, one can acknowledge this tendency in Vargas's later political vision while still attributing Vargas's genius to an opportunistic grasp of changing political and economic situations that required a nod to twentieth-century ideologies. Axt shows that Vargas had financial acumen and experience, for which he is seldom given credit. Axt also considers economic and political alliances within Rio Grande, analysing the structural shifts occurring in the state by the time Vargas became governor (1928–30). Vargas encouraged new economic associations that shifted power away from the commercial interests of the Litoral area to ranchers and industrialists.
James Woodard considers the regional issue that dogged Vargas in the early years of his dictatorship and helped ‘justify’ the unitary Estado Nôvo regime. In Woodard's view, Vargas was more concerned about discontent in São Paulo than challenges from Integralistas and Communists. Most importantly, the loss of hegemony by São Paulo's political and economic elites was the source of Brazil's only twentieth-century civil war (July-September, 1932). Woodard hypothesises that the defence of Paulista identity (as opposed to economic interests) was the main source of the 1932 revolt, but the contention cannot be fully established in the short scope of this article. Woodard believes that Vargas helped provoke the uprising by the Paulista elite in order to establish his authority as a proto-populist, a posture that would benefit him in 1945 and later.
Summarising the material in his book, Soldiers of the Patria (Stanford University Press, 2004), Frank McCann's study of the Estado Nôvo coup provides a close examination of state power at the highest level, and shows how Generals Eurico Dutra and Pedro Goes Monteiro worked closely with Getúlio to shut down Brazilian democracy. According to McCann, the determination of the Vargas-Dutra-Goes troika to suppress democratic institutions was driven by the perceived need to strengthen the army in a world rapidly preparing for war. The three effectively neutralised other generals who might ally with the leaders of powerful states, Flores da Cunha in Rio Grande do Sul and Armando Sales in São Paulo.
Oliver Dinius treats labour's struggle against the political police, and makes extensive use of the DOPS archive in Rio. He studies the state-owned steel complex, the Companhia Siderurgica Nacional, in the years 1940–64, and the period chosen indicates the relativity of the notion of ‘the Vargas era’. Dinius shows that DOPS's penetration of the steelworkers' union was so thorough that in one instance the majority of those attending a union meeting were police informers! He traces the repression which followed the banning of the Communist Party in 1947 and demonstrates the greater autonomy of the union after Getúlio returned to power in 1951. In 1955, workers took over the factory in protest against the annulment of a union election. During the later 1950s, apparently good times continued for workers in the CSN, and a union leader even forced the resignation of the CSN president in 1959. But repression returned in 1964.
John Crocitti examines nutrition during the Estado Nôvo. The health of the population was regarded as an important objective in a nationalist regime, but few resources were forthcoming. Most workers and their families ate little more than starches and beans, Crocitti finds. The government set up a Social Welfare Food Service in 1941, but only for workers participating in official pension institutions in large cities. He develops a measure of what workers could potentially afford, setting a minimum income level four times greater than the cost of a basic food basket. As late as 1950, only 29 per cent qualified.
Daryle Williams and Jerry Davila deal with memory and commemoration for the years Vargas was in power. Williams extends the approach of his Culture Wars in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2001) to show how holidays and the use of public space were redefined by Vargas during his uninterrupted fifteen years in power (1930–45). He notes that Vargas chose the second anniversary of the Communist uprising, 27 November 1937, to symbolically link regionalism (bairrismo) with leftist subversion. On that date, Brazil's state flags were publicly burned to dramatise the monolithic nature of the Estado Nôvo dictatorship. Williams also relates how the Museu da República (the former presidential mansion) has been converted in recent years into a monument to Getúlio, the most salient example of the Estado Nôvo ‘memoryscape’.
In another chapter on Vargas's ‘long shadow over Brazilian history’, Davila offers a related study of myth and memory: He views Vargas's image as the bridge between traditional and modern Brazil, and implicitly between authoritarianism and democracy. The military plotters of 1964 were eager to repudiate the Vargas heritage of populism, and tried to downgrade his image. Yet the argument that Vargas was an aberration, an irruption of Spanish American caudilhismo in Brazil, ‘must have played well with the military’ (p. 262) can hardly be accepted. The assertion implies that gaúchos are somehow foreign. Yet three of the five military dictators after 1964 were also riograndenses !
Davila's treatment of high school textbooks during the Estado Nôvo makes clear that successive texts closely followed Getúlio's changing political orientation in 1930–45. In Davila's view, the mass choral programmes organised by Heitor Villalobos were the counterpart of mammoth parades in fascist Italy.
Lisa Shaw examines the film industry in Brazil from the Estado Nôvo to the end of Vargas's second government. She devotes more space to the private film industry than to those produced by the regime. Shaw spotlights the chanchadas, cheaply produced musical comedies that mocked the pretensions of the upper classes. In fact, these comedies may have ‘subverted’ propaganda films appearing in the same billing.
Thomas Rogers's contribution focusses on a single document, albeit perhaps the most important one in twentieth-century Brazilian politics, Getúlio Vargas's suicide message. One problem lies in the four variant versions of the letter; another is the possibility of co-authors; and a third is the quality of existing translations, given that the letter seems to have deliberate ambiguities. Rogers points out that Vargas's PTB made the letter a sacred text, and this fact probably helped the party in the elections of 1955 and 1960.
This rich collection illustrates the range of transformations occurring in the Vargas years, and deserves a wide readership.
