By LINCOLN SECCO*
Getúlio Vargas left answers suspended. His faces were that of an apparently unwilling revolutionary, of a voting loyalist, of an anti-communist dictator, of a sincere labor leader
In 2016, Dilma Rousseff took journalist Lira Neto's biography of Getúlio Vargas to read over the weekend. Whether on purpose or not, the president suggested at that moment an association with the 1954 crisis that led Vargas to suicide.[I]
The commercial strategy itself and the paratexts of the edition that Dilma Rousseff read already made these connections between past and present. The work published by Companhia das Letras has comments on the back cover made by Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC) and Lula.
We know that the moment we read the past changes the idea we have of it, but not what actually happened. And in this regard, it is necessary to employ the most traditional techniques of our craft. Eric Hobsbawm said that we can discuss the causes of the Punic wars (264-146 BC), but not their results. Perry Anderson reminded us that in any serious Marxist approach the past cannot be changed.
Getúlio Vargas was biographed in hundreds of articles, entries and books. From declared enemies such as Afonso Henriques, a former member of the National Liberation Alliance (ANL), to Brazilianists who provided knowledge of Brazil for the elaboration of the US government's strategies such as Foster Dulles.
Edgard Carone, Boris Fausto and many others commented on his career. The biography written by Lira Neto is based on extensive empirical research by the author himself and assistants who provided him with an impressive mass of documents, although most of the information was already known. But it is his credit alone to have managed to elegantly write a book that does not get lost in a pile of facts and that pursues not neutrality, but rather impartiality, the presentation of data that may even contradict his personal inclinations.
Training
His childhood, violence as a constitutive feature of resolving disputes between rival families and even the long romance that Getúlio Vargas maintained with Aimmée, the wife of an assistant in his government, reveal the calculated risks he wished to take in his public career. The habit of, in extreme situations, appearing calm and smiling. Walking down the street without an escort. To resist with the revolver on your waist. From preparing the letter of testament in the face of a dead-end siege, all of this is documented by Lira Neto. In other words, the pragmatic and conciliatory politician also conceives the possibility of definitive rupture. Otherwise he would not have written a suicide note in 1932.
Even so, the excess of details sometimes made the biographer leave through windows that the story opened for him, but which should only serve to glimpse the landscape that surrounded his character. And not to skip them and follow paths that weren't his. The author describes in detail the Paraguayan War, the Federalist Revolt, the first and second Five of July, etc. It was necessary to look for those “universals” in concrete particularities. The context does not illustrate, but integrates the character. Therefore, we finished the first volume with the impression that perhaps the author could have condensed his biography
In fact, the first part is based for large pages on the memories of João Neves da Fontoura. The author knew how to balance the use of memories by Afrânio Mello Franco, João Neves da Fontoura, Goes Monteiro, Eurico Dutra, Benedito Valadares and many more with the documentation from Fundação Getúlio Vargas. He mobilized the correspondence, the diary, the second (unpublished) part of the memoirs of Getúlio Vargas' daughter, the embassy communiqués, the already established historiography and the period newspapers.
The trajectory is that of a convinced anti-liberal, skeptic, non-religious, positivist, Borgist (or chimango). Follower of Julio de Castilhos and head of a family clan on the Rio Grande do Sul border. He married a much younger woman who seemed suitable. He fulfilled the role of opponent of the liberals from Rio Grande do Sul, the federalists or maragatos.
State deputy, representative of the long-lived governor Borges de Medeiros in the state assembly and, later, leading the Gaucho bench in the chamber of deputies, Getúlio Vargas also worked at Washington Luiz's finance ministry and was president of Rio Grande do Sul.
Getúlio Vargas was a reader of Saint-Simon and his secretary, the leading positivist Augusto Comte. But it would be difficult to assess the weight of those readings in the work of a pragmatic politician. After all, positivism was the forma mentis of an era, the architecture and limits of political thought, a terrain of values, methods and ways of reading reality in which different interests clashed. It was the worldview that gave the scientist the role of reflection of objective reality. Therefore, politics should be scientific and rulers should be technocrats free from ideological inclinations. Since society is governed by universal laws just like nature, social problems could be solved scientifically and, therefore, within order. Where there is scientific consensus there cannot be conflict.
Many positivists included social classes in the Order, recognized their rights, but fought the struggle between them. In Getúlio Vargas we will see the perennial search for conciliation, a strong government and a scientific dictatorship, however softened by private interests.
Brazilian October Revolution
À virtù Machiavellian joined fortune: the smile of chance. In 1930 Getúlio betrayed Washington Luiz and took advantage of the dissension between São Paulo and Minas Gerais to join João Pessoa as a candidate for the Liberal Alliance. The defeat would be certain if there had not been the participation of a dissident oligarchy, of a movement capable of supporting the candidacy militarily and of the unexpected: the death of João Pessoa due to local disagreements, however attributed to the federal government, contributed to the lieutenants and wing radical gaúcha (João Neves da Fontoura, Oswaldo Aranha and Batista Luzardo) pushed Vargas into a movement that he avoided or pretended to avoid almost until the end.
Behind this seemingly linear trajectory we see the character’s hesitation. Traits that accompanied him throughout his life and were recorded in many biographical studies show a man who was always reticent, with disconcerting silences and a sinuous smile.
Pragmatic, he knew how to unite the old chimangos and maragatos around him in 1930. When he faced the São Paulo revolt of 1932, personalities from both factions sided with the São Paulo people, but Getúlio Vargas obtained the decisive support of those who commanded the Military Brigade : intervenor Flores da Cunha.
After pacification and when he was already heading towards dictatorship, Getúlio Vargas approached the constitutionalists who had fought against him, whether they were former “worm-eaten” members of the PRP or those from the São Paulo Democratic Party. He appointed them to his ministry (Macedo Soares, Vicente Rao), accepted a civil intervener from São Paulo (Armando Salles de Oliveira) and, later, even attracted Roberto Simonsen, Fiesp's person responsible for industrial mobilization in the 1932 uprising. On the other hand, he persecuted his former allies, even distancing himself from the miners Antonio Carlos and Olegário Maciel to whom he owed his candidacy in 1930 and the decisive support of Minas in 1932. He also abandoned Flores da Cunha.
There are many examples of a tightrope walker, an opportunist always capable of bending to the wind of occasional political changes, of abandoning old friends and incorporating old adversaries. But as historians we imprint a rationality amidst the indecisions that, in the end, are the imponderable part of the story, the most human aspect of the character.
new state
Getúlio did not believe in liberalism. He read the Salazarist Antonio Ferro and Mussolini's interviews with Emil Ludwig after 1930. And before that he had read Oliveira Vianna. Thus, he manipulated politicians because he also held them in low esteem. Not because of their individualities, but because of the tiring and harmful game that, in his eyes, they represented. The antipode of Vargasism has always been liberalism sui generis of Brazil.
Behind the game, there was the perennial belief in an abstract nation that is confused with the totally centralizing State. A people would live there who must be led. And the leadership would not only exercise itself over the working masses, to whom it “granted” rights such as the minimum wage announced in 1930 and regulated in 1940 or the Consolidation of Labor Laws in 1942. It also targeted the employer classes and the economy as a whole. Getúlio Vargas, the candidate of a Liberal Alliance, had read a work that denounced his spirit of the times: Directive economy, scientific economy by Charles Bodin…
It cannot be said that Getúlio Vargas chose the dictatorial path in 1937 simply out of a personal interest in power. Vanity is intrinsic to public man. But Vargas was always Castilhista and a faithful servant of the Borges de Medeiros dictatorship in Rio Grande do Sul. Since 1930 he spoke openly about the need for the dictatorship to complete the work of the 1930 Revolution. And, although deceiving allies and opponents with false electoral promises since who had become a constitutional ruler and indirectly elected by the Constituent Assembly in 1934, he never stopped believing that democratic institutions were just a way of perpetuating republican vices.
Getúlio Vargas manipulated the anti-communist sentiment that grew in the Armed Forces and, simultaneously, cut off the pretensions of civil and military integralists, which would culminate in the strange coup attempt perpetrated by local fascists in 1938. Strange because, as Helio Silva and Edgard tell us, Carone, your life was in danger without military troops being mobilized in time to stop the attack on the Presidential Palace.
Was Getúlio Vargas a fascist? In 1935 he took advantage of the anti-communist wave to ask the Chamber for a state of war, but later allowed the macedada (amnesty for some of the political prisoners from 1935). His promises to Plinio Salgado in 1937 that he would be the minister of education in a dictatorial government based on the integralist doctrine were solemnly abandoned soon after the coup that installed the Estado Novo. Lira Neto began his biography with the reception that Getúlio Vargas gave to Mussolini's representative. Faced with the fascist salute with his hand raised by the visitor, an uncomfortable Getúlio just looked and… smiled… Master of the accommodations? The relationship with fascist gestures could be an index of his always moderate commitment to men, women and ideas.
According to Lira Neto, when he got on the train that would take him from Porto Alegre to take the Palácio do Catete in Rio de Janeiro in 1930, a girl presented him with the red scarf characteristic of his maragato opponents. Getúlio Vargas didn't hesitate to put it around his neck. Likewise, in his personal life he seems to have suffered from the end of the adulterous romance he had with his “beloved” Aimmée Sotto Mayor Sá, then the wife of his presidential assistant. After all, when the talk exposed him to possible confrontation with the conservative and Catholic opinion of his allies, shaking his image as a “father” of the poor, and exposing him to possible reactions from his family and his own assistant, he let the beloved left to live in Paris.
There is nothing new in a history of denials with the United States and Germany in search of the construction of a steel plant and the equipping of the Armed Forces. It was Getúlio's dance. With this he aimed to lay more solid foundations for industrialization and satisfy the demands of the military. Contrary to popular belief, the dictator was not all-powerful and had to balance himself in the face of more than one conspiracy by generals Dutra and Goes Monteiro.
Workers
In 1943 Getúlio Vargas' time began to change. Leaders of the Minas Gerais elite launched the famous manifesto for democracy and law students in São Paulo began resistance against the Estado Novo under strong police repression. Notorious fascists such as Dutra and Goes Monteiro, aware of the turn in World War II in favor of the allies, opportunely converted to democracy and began to link the fight against fascism of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force in Italy to the fall of Vargas.
But Getúlio Vargas had also changed. He had become too close to the workers not to seek their support when he lacked the agreement of the ruling classes. He continued to have loyal businessmen, such as Hugo Borghi who had made money with cotton in the Estado Novo (although he was a veteran constitutionalist from 1932). But it increasingly depended on appealing to workers to remain in power or, at least, have a dignified exit.
Querismo (studied by Michele Reis de Macedo) was a movement that emerged in March 1945 following the Panela Vazia demonstration in São Paulo. From now on, demonstrations by São Paulo students for the return of the constitutional regime were attacked by the workers themselves, accused of being troublemakers and drunks. In May, it was launched as a querist movement in Rio de Janeiro due to the slogan shouted in the streets: “We want Getúlio”.
The Querists demanded that Getúlio Vargas remain in power and a National Constituent Assembly. If there were elections, they would defend Vargas' candidacy, contrary to the wishes of the leadership of the armed forces and liberal politicians from the UDN and other parties. The communists adhered to Querism, supporting the “constituent assembly with Getúlio”. And contrary to what populism theorists (such as Francisco Weffort) claimed, a wave of strikes arose with broad and autonomous participation of working men and women, as demonstrated by historian Fernando Sarti Ferreira.
Modified worldview
Three speeches from different moments show us the consolidation of the axes of its formation: the refusal of ideological extremes, laborism and anti-liberalism.
In 1936, Getúlio Vargas said that “the program proclaimed by the sectarians of communism in Brazil, ignorant of what is going on in the country and empty of valid ideas, included, as an aspiration of the national proletariat, reforms already carried out and in full force. Our workers would have nothing to profit from the Soviet regime. He would, on the contrary, lose the achievements obtained as a spontaneous concession by the established powers, in exchange for submission to forced and collective labor”. In other words, the communist program had already been carried out by him as a concession.
Getúlio Vargas used to write down the central ideas of his speeches. They were then rewritten by assistants and returned to their hands for corrections, within the needs of the theatrical rhetoric of politics. In his speech on May 13, 1938, after the integralist uprising of May 11, he said: “Just as yesterday, in the defense of integrity and national honor, we repelled the extremists of the left, we face, today, without hesitation, the extremists from the right. Both are equivalent in their means and objectives, and find equal repudiation in public opinion.” In a certain passage he reveals which class he is first addressing, and then dilutes it into the idea of people: “I expected a demonstration from the working classes and I received a demonstration from the entire Brazilian people!”
On November 29, 1946, in a speech given at a PTB rally in Porto Alegre, he declared: “The old liberal and capitalist democracy is in clear decline because it is based on inequality. It includes, I repeat, several parties with different labels and the same substance. The other is socialist democracy, workers' democracy. I join this one. (…) And since our activities in public life, by legal imposition, must be oriented within the orbit of the parties, if I can give the people one piece of advice, it is to join the action of the Labor Party.” In other words, party democracy is a legal imposition, therefore, it is not necessarily the best system, but it adapts to this by resorting to workers.
Change? Yes, without a doubt. Approaching the self-organizing working class changes the leader. Continuity? Certainly, since liberal democracy remains its enemy.
Rated democracy (1945-1964)
This is the best-known period in Getúlio Vargas's career. It is the climax of biographies, but without suspense. The founding of the PTB and its leader's adherence to the European social democratic doctrine, evidently devoid of any Marxist references, are recorded; his poor participation in the Senate; the defeats of candidates supported by Vargas in state elections; the growing middle-class opposition to him; and, finally, his return in a triumphant campaign in 1950.
The campaign was very well covered in the memoirs of Samuel Wainer (My Reason for Living), the head of the Getulista newspaper Última Hora. In fact, victim of a Congressional CPI that would discover that he received public funds… as much as other press organizations.
Getúlio appointed a “reactionary ministry”. His minister Horácio Lafer increased income tax and was opposed by the government's own allied base; and the resigned Minister Danton Coelho (the only one from the PTB!) cried out “Let us free Getúlio”, as he would be imprisoned due to his false majority in parliament…
At the end of 1952, Getúlio Vargas made three announcements that highlighted his enemy camp: he ruled out sending troops to the Korean War; increased the minimum wage by 300%; and limited the remittance of profits by foreign companies. The United States began to oppose the Brazilian government, FIESP publicly criticized salary increases and the Armed Forces began to continually threaten legality.
In the case of Petrobras, Almino Afonso's memories reconstruct the climate of the time. Getúlio Vargas was in favor of the state monopoly, but had sent a project without this clause to congress. The company would be a mixed economy (51% from the Union). The left labeled him a “surrender”, but according to Tancredo Neves, then Minister of Justice, the idea was not to confront Congress from the beginning and to leave room for a more advanced proposal to come from a “neutral” deputy. It worked: the UDN itself approved the state monopoly.
In 1952 the Military Club changed directors. The nationalists were defeated by the surrenderers, in tune with the foreign policy of the United States. There were 8.288 votes cast against 4.489. There was a permanent military component to the political crisis and one that can be followed by a captivating book, the Memoirs of a Soldier by Nelson Werneck Sodré.
The 1954 speech, in which the president confirms a new increase in the minimum wage, is an example of radicalization or flight forward by Getúlio Vargas. It pays homage to the “former Minister of Labor João Goulart, tireless friend and defender of workers”, the construction of popular housing, “the well-deserved rest at the age of 55”, the participation of workers’ representatives in the management of social security and the project that extends the precepts of labor legislation to rural employees.
The tone alarmed political, business and military elites and bewildered the left. He showed that his enemies did not have the weapon with which they themselves legitimize their regime: the vote. Furthermore, he called for the union and party organization of workers: “You have no weapons, no treasures, nor do you count on the hidden influences that move great interests. To overcome obstacles and reduce resistance, you need to unite and organize yourselves. Union and Organization must be your motto. There is a right that no one can deprive you of, the right to vote. And by voting you can not only defend your interests but also influence the nation's own destinies. As citizens, your will will weigh at the polls. As a class, you can give your suffrage the decisive force of number. You constitute the majority. Today you are with the government. Tomorrow you will be the government.”
The issue was threatening because Getúlio Vargas had spent his government being accused of defending a unionist Republic and plotting a union with Peron's Argentina. The defense of solidarity as opposed to the idea of charity from the powerful, the absence of religious values in the discourse and the invitation to self-organization were shocking to those at the top and even allies.
The August crisis
According to Jacob Gorender in the opening pages of his combat in the dark Getúlio Vargas' policy assimilated labor and industrialization (this would be a field of common interest between the bourgeoisie and workers). With the crisis of the liberal-oligarchic State, laborism, unwanted by businesspeople, would be the price to be paid for a government that needed the electoral support of the masses and that, at the same time, would support the industrialist project.
It should be added that Getúlio Vargas did not intend to attack the order of exporting farmers, as the country continued to depend on coffee to obtain foreign exchange. Vargas does not balance between two classes (industrial bourgeoisie and proletariat), but between three or four (we must add the rural oligarchy and the mobilized middle class). So much so that he only belatedly proposed the extension of labor legislation to the countryside, without any results. Rural workers, considered by him “uneducated” and who did not have the right to vote, would be passive and could remain outside his project for a long time as the price to pay for maintaining order.
His game, from a positivist perspective, was multiple-sum and not zero-sum, as Jacob Gorender tells us. However, he knew that concessions were necessary, as any alliance had limits when it touched the fundamental interest of the ruling classes: the rate of profit. Thus, when strikes grow, the leader can no longer be the way in which the opposites move without threatening the whole.
In desperation and with the workers themselves on strike, Vargas attacked many fronts: the United States, by not supporting the Korean war and by ending the Brazil-USA joint commission; coffee exporters, as the US imposed restrictions on Brazilian coffee; the electricity companies that criticized the creation of Eletrobrás; the Armed Forces and Fiesp, due to the 100% increase in the minimum wage, etc.
The former Trotskyist intellectual, Mario Pedrosa, associated himself with Carlos Lacerda in attacks on the government. The Communist Party called Getúlio Vargas a surrenderer and had the same opinion as part of the president's own party. Regarding the press, just read the extensive comparative research by Argentine scholar Ariel Goldstein on the behavior of The Globe quality The State of S. Paul in Getúlio Vargas' last term and Lula's first.
On June 19, 1954, the newspaper's editorial The State of S. Paul declared that if Getúlio Vargas “escaped impeachment, thanks to the excessive generosity of the Chamber, he should not escape condemnation for the accounts he presented”. The newspaper said that in the case of impeachment, political interpretation would prevail, as the accounts are either right or they are not. The president would be attacking the nation's political freedoms and finances.
The month of August 1954 is already well known. It is recommended to read the report by José Sette Camara, advisor to Lourival Fontes, minister of Getúlio Vargas, despite the author's recurring dislike for Jango. Lira Neto looked more closely at the attack on Rua Toneleros and brought up the suspicion that Lacerda himself had accidentally shot Major Vaz (since he never presented his revolver to the police) and the inconsistencies in the investigation carried out by the Air Force in what It became known as the Republic of Galeão.
populism
As Angela Castro Gomes demonstrated, populism was a category with a long history in Social Sciences, almost always accentuating a supposed passive character of the working class. After that, many historians demonstrated the capacity for initiative of the working class, such as Paulo Fontes and Murilo Leal about the 1950s.
Laborism was nothing more than the popular national policy of the Latin American left with a social democratic bias corresponding to the periphery of capitalism. Originally, the term designated a Russian theoretical current of 19th century agrarian socialism. In Latin America the term was used to designate the direct relationship between popular leaders and the supposedly disorganized urban masses without the intermediation of parties. As if European leaders maintain a rational and organic relationship with their voters, but we don't...
In Lira Neto's book, workers have an ornamental presence. However, he escaped retrospective journalism, which treats events once chained chronologically as if they had to have happened that way. We witnessed in his work a leader whose charisma was under construction, never being a simple natural gift; whose Machiavellianism in 1930 was made more of opportunity than of the cunning that would only come with time; and whose absolute power after 1937 is colored by unstable military support.
The leader who emerged in 1950 in the arms of the people was certainly different. It retains much of the past, but it was profoundly modified by the “people” themselves, who were at the same time the object and subject of the Vargas Era, suffering and modifying public policies.
The impasse of laborism is that it is an ideology of conciliation that carries conflict in its belly. This works as long as economic growth allows the multiple sum game of its positivist perspective. When the mass of taxable social surplus value narrows, capitalists attack the State, the fiscal crisis sets in, workers increase the number of strikes and the game becomes zero-sum. The latent confrontation explodes and undermines the basis of its ideology: conciliation itself.
Unlike central countries, in the periphery the mass of taxable surplus value (or in political terms, the margin of maneuver for distributing social benefits) is narrow and the duration of unstable labor policy is shorter.
The crisis of August 1954 was halted by the suicide of Getúlio Vargas. But his gesture, an expression of a system incapable of consolidating a participatory democracy, only postponed the definitive solution. This, coming from the barracks, destroyed Brazil's best civilizing potential and left us the country we have.
Getúlio Vargas left answers suspended. His faces were that of an apparently unwilling revolutionary, of a loyalist supported by the vote, of an anti-communist dictator, of a sincere labor leader. A concealment with an enigmatic smile. In view of the work carried out (the construction of a State) it would have been an honest dissimulation[ii]?
* Lincoln Secco He is a professor in the Department of History at USP. Author, among other books, of History of the PT (Studio). [https://amzn.to/3RTS2dB]
Notes
[I] Updated version of article published on the now defunct portal Major Card, 19-10-2015.
[ii] Torquato Accetto (1590/98 — 1640) published his book in Naples Of Honest Dissimulation in 1641. Under Spanish rule and in a society full of simulators he advocated caution and dissimulation. The book was rediscovered by Benedetto Croce during the fascist dictatorship. It is not about producing a lie, but about postponing the embarrassing truth and affirming the reason of state. The 1937 coup was certainly based on the lie of the Cohen Plan, while the denials with the USA and Germany were based on the truth of the national interest. Which prevailed, simulation and deception or honest dissimulation?
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