Brazil on the Move

I MELTING POT OF THE AMERICAS

The Brazilians are great people for telling stories on themselves. One story that was going the rounds a few years ago was about God and an archangel on the third day of creation. When the Lord Jehovah has finished making Brazil he can’t help bragging a little to one of the archangels. He’s planted the greatest forests and laid out the world’s biggest river system and built a magnificent range of mountains with lovely bays and ocean beaches. He’s filled the hills with topaz and aquamarine and sowed the rivers with gold dust and diamonds. He’s arranged a climate free from hurricanes and earthquakes which will grow every conceivable kind of fruit.

“Is it fair, Lord,” asks the archangel, “to give so many benefits to just one country?”

“You wait,” says the Lord Jehovah, “till you see the people I’m going to put there.”

The real point of this story is, of course, that it’s topsyturvy. Ever since the Portuguese founded their first colonies there in the early fifteen hundreds the development of Brazil has been held back by its inconvenient geography. The rivers run the wrong way. The mountains are in the wrong places. The steep coastal range for centuries formed a barrier to penetration of the interior. Though the central and southern uplands are suitable for colonization the rain forests of the Amazon basin in the north offer the sort of climate and terrain that no civilization has yet been able to cope with. The eastern bulge is cursed with perennial droughts. Until the coming of air transportation, which a Brazilian named Santos-Dumont, by the way, did almost as much as the Wright brothers to promote, it literally took months to get from one part of the country to the other. Tropical diseases are still a threat to development. The chief asset of Brazil is the Brazilians.

How did a handful of settlers from tiny Portugal, a country which during the great period of Portuguese colonization numbered at most a couple of million souls, manage to occupy and assimilate one half of the South American continent? How is it that the Brazilians, of all the South American peoples, seem furthest on the way towards producing a civilization of their own?

It is only recently that we have begun to recognize that there is something a little special about the colonial society the Portuguese established in America and Africa and the Orient. “Corrupt and inefficient” was what we were taught about it in school. The Portuguese have had, and continue to have, a bad press.

Perhaps the thread of racial and religious and political tolerance that keeps reappearing in their history has something to do with the success of the Portuguese as colonizers. To begin with Portugal was made up of more various cultural strains than the other colonizing nations of Europe.

The northern Portuguese had a lot of Celt in them. Many of the landowning families were the offspring of blueeyed Visigoths. There was a strong infusion of Burgundian French during the period of the establishment of the monarchy. In the south there was Arab and Berber blood. There, the peasantry, though Christian in religion, retained habits and customs acquired during three centuries of subjection to the Moors. The towns had a large Jewish population, possibly descended as much from Phoenician and Carthaginian colonists whose language and culture were Hebraic, as from the Israelites proper. During Portugal’s formative years, each of these populations intermarried fairly freely with the rest.

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno used to tell an amusing story to illustrate the prevalence of Semitic blood among the Portuguese. When the great King Manoel of Portugal wanted to marry a Spanish princess he was told that he must first purge his kingdom of Jews. He consented, but according to Don Miguel, the chief minister who brought the King the expulsion decree to sign, is supposed to have asked: “Which of us shall leave first, sire, you or me?”

Seafaring peoples tend to get their prejudices rubbed off. Farmland was scarce on the steep Portuguese coast. Its people were forced to find their livelihood in trading and fishing. Their wine trade with England ripened early into a political and commercial alliance which added one more element to their cosmopolitan outlook. Prince Henry the Navigator was a grandson of John of Gaunt. Then, after Vasco da Gama’s rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, African slaves, and all the arts and complexities of India and China and Japan started pouring into Lisbon. Portuguese culture flared up into the sudden brilliance of the poetry of Camões and the surrealist style of the Manueline architects and stonecarvers.

It was at this explosive moment in the year 1500 that Pedro Alvares Cabral, in sailing a westerly course on his passage to India to avoid the calms off Africa that had so baffled Vasco da Gama, found himself, quite by accident, in Brazil.

A certain amount of mystery still hangs over the early exploration of the American coast. It is likely that even before Columbus’s four expeditions opened up the New World to the Spaniards, Portuguese ships had been fetching the red dyewood called brazilwood from the beaches of the eastern bulge of South America. Brazil appeared on early maps as an Atlantic island.

When Cabral’s little fleet sailed into Pôrto Seguro he seems to have taken it for granted that it was this island he was landing on. He celebrated Mass; announced to the Indians lurking about that he was taking possession in the name of Dom Manoel the First, King of Portugal and Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of India, Ethiopia, and Persia; and sailed away to round the Cape of Good Hope in search of the profitable cargoes of spices he was hoping for in the Orient.

For a couple of centuries the authorities in Lisbon considered the settlements which grew up along the Brazilian coast, through the efforts of Jesuit missionaries and of private adventurers, as mere waystations to the East. Left to their own devices, marrying into Indian tribes for lack of Portuguese women, the colonists began to think of themselves as Brazilians.

In the north they raised sugar, and as the Indians were nomadic woodland hunters who couldn’t adapt to agriculture, they imported slaves from Africa to plant and cut the cane.

In the backlands they raised cattle. As the population increased the need for fresh pastures and the perennial quest for gold drove the ranchers of the São Paulo plateau to scour the hinterland. Fighting or absorbing the Indians as they moved, they formed themselves into wandering bands that explored the country south to the La Plata estuary and west through the central uplands into the furthest confines of Mato Grosso. Bandeirantes, flagcarriers they called themselves.

When the Brazilians began to ship home gold and diamonds, the Portuguese kings woke up to the fact that Brazil was a valuable possession. Their oriental empire was falling to pieces. During the eighteenth century it was gold and precious stones from Brazil that supported the court at Lisbon.

The home government did little in return, except to try to keep the Brazilians in their place. After the expulsion of the Jesuits, schools and colleges were discouraged. Printing presses were forbidden, and so was any industry which might compete with the home country. Although British shipmasters already had a share in the Brazilian trade, it all had to be channeled through Lisbon.

When the Brazilians, particularly the prospectors and placerminers of Minas Gerais, heard that the English-speaking colonists in North America had thrown off the European yoke, they were moved to do likewise.

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.