First Brazilian Republic
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Republic of the United States of Brazil República dos Estados Unidos do Brasil | |||||||||
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1889–1930 | |||||||||
Motto: Ordem e Progresso "Order and Progress" | |||||||||
Anthem: | |||||||||
Capital | Rio de Janeiro | ||||||||
Common languages | Portuguese | ||||||||
Government | Military dictatorship (1889–1894) Oligarchic federal presidential republic (1894–1930) | ||||||||
President | |||||||||
• 1889–1891 | Deodoro da Fonseca (first) | ||||||||
• 1926–1930 | Washington Luís (last) | ||||||||
Legislature | National Congress | ||||||||
Senate | |||||||||
Chamber of Deputies | |||||||||
Historical era | 19th–20th century | ||||||||
15 November 1889 | |||||||||
24 February 1891 | |||||||||
1893–1894 | |||||||||
1893–1895 | |||||||||
• Civilian rule | 15 November 1894 | ||||||||
3 November 1930 | |||||||||
Population | |||||||||
• 1890 | 14,333,915 | ||||||||
• 1900 | 17,438,434 | ||||||||
• 1920 | 30,635,605 | ||||||||
Currency | Real | ||||||||
ISO 3166 code | BR | ||||||||
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The First Brazilian Republic, also referred to as the Old Republic (Portuguese: República Velha Portuguese pronunciation: [ʁeˈpublikɐ ˈvɛʎɐ]), officially the Republic of the United States of Brazil, refers to the period of Brazilian history from 1889 to 1930. The Old Republic began with the deposition of Emperor Pedro II in 1889, and ended with the Brazilian Revolution of 1930 that installed Getúlio Vargas as a new president. During the First Brazilian Republic, Brazil was dominated by a form of machine politics known as coronelism, in which the political and economic spheres were dominated by large landholders. The most powerful of such landholders were the coffee industry of São Paulo and the dairy industry of Minas Gerais. Because of the power of these two industries, the Old Republic's political system has been described as "milk coffee politics."
Overview
On November 15, 1889, Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca deposed Emperor Pedro II, declared Brazil a republic, and reorganized the government.
According to the
The Brazilian republic was not an ideological offspring of the republics born of the
Rule of the landed oligarchies
The officers who joined Field Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca in ending the Empire had made an oath to uphold it. The officer corps would eventually resolve the contradiction by linking its duty to Brazil itself, rather than to transitory governments.[1] The Republic was born rather accidentally: Deodoro had intended only to replace the cabinet, but the republicans manipulated him into founding a republic.[1]
The history of the Old Republic was dominated by a quest for a viable form of government to replace the monarchy. This quest lurched back and forth between state autonomy and centralization. The constitution of 1891, establishing the United States of Brazil (Estados Unidos do Brasil), granted extensive autonomy to the provinces, now called States. A federal system was adopted, and all powers not granted in the Constitution to the Federal Government belonged to the States. It recognized that the central government did not rule at the local level. The Empire of Brazil had not absorbed fully the regional provinces, and now they reasserted themselves.[1] Into the 1920s, the federal government in Rio de Janeiro was dominated and managed by a combination of the more powerful states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, and to a lesser extent Pernambuco and Bahia.[1]
Because the monarchy had been overthrown by the Brazilian military, the history of the outset of republic in Brazil is also the story of the development of the
In the last decades of the 19th 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 one 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% and 3.4% of the total population could vote.[1]
The instability and violence of the 1890s were related to the absence of consensus among the elites regarding a governmental model, as 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. Although the military did not directly control Brazil, military men were very active in politics; early in the decade, ten of the twenty state governors were officers.
This informal but real distribution of power emerged, 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 monarchical 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 Head of the Brazilian army ordered that it would doubled so they could defend them.[1]
Latifúndio economies
Around the start of the 20th century, the vast majority of the population lived in communities that were essentially semi-feudal in structure, though accumulating capitalist surpluses for overseas export. Because of the legacy of Ibero-American
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. As in most of Latin America, the economy around the start of the 20th century therefore 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 and economically superior North Atlantic diminished 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 a lack of medical facilities limited the average life span in 1920 to twenty-eight years. Because of the
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
Thus, high illiteracy rates went hand in hand with the absence of universal suffrage by secret ballot and the demand for a free press, independent from the then dominant economic influence. In regions where there was not even the
During this period, Brazil did not have a significantly 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 a big internal market with 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
Brazil in World War I
Preceding
Following the creation of the republic in 1889, there were many political and social rebellions that had to be subdued by the regime, such as the Two
By 1915 it was also clear that the Brazilian elites were dedicated to making sure Brazil followed a conservative political path; they were unwilling to embark upon courses of action, whether domestically (i.e. adopting the secret ballot and universal suffrage) or in foreign affairs (making alliances or long-term commitments), that could have unpredictable consequences and potentially risk the social, economic, and political power held by the Brazilian elite. This course of conduct would extend throughout the 20th century, an isolationist foreign policy interspersed with sporadic automatic alignments against "disturbing elements of peace and international trade".
Since the end of the 19th century, many immigrants from Europe had arrived, and with them came
Ruy Barbosa was the main opposition leader, campaigning for internal political changes. He also stated that, due to the natural conflict between Brazilian commercial interests and the Central Powers' strategic ones (demonstrated for example in the German submarine campaign as well as in the Ottoman control over the Middle East), Brazilian involvement in the war would be inevitable. So he advised that the most logical way to proceed would be to follow the United States, which was working for a peace agreement but at the same time since the sinking of the RMS Lusitania was also preparing for war.
War
There were two main lines of thought regarding Brazil's joining the war: One, led by Ruy Barbosa, called for joining the Entente;[8] another side was concerned about the bloody and fruitless nature of trench warfare, nurturing critical and pacifist feelings in the urban worker classes. Therefore, Brazil remained neutral in World War I until 1917. However, as denunciations of corruption exacerbated internal problems in the state, President Venceslau Brás began feeling the need to divert public attention from his government; this goal could be accomplished by focusing on an external enemy and thus stoking a sense of unity and patriotism.
During 1917, the German Navy sank Brazilian civilian ships off the French coast, creating such an opportunity. On October 26 the government declared war on the
By that time Brazil had also sent a
During 1918, protests broke out against the military recruitment; this, in conjunction with the news of
Demographic changes
From 1875 until 1960, about 3 million Europeans emigrated to Brazil, settling mainly in the four southern states of
Developments under the Old Republic
In the early twentieth century, demographic changes and structural shifts in the economy threatened the primacy of the agrarian oligarchies. Under the Old Republic, the growth of the urban middle sectors, though slowed by dependency and entrenched oligarchy, was eventually strong enough to propel the middle class into the forefront of Brazilian political life. In time, growing trade, commerce, and industry in
Long before the first revolts of the urban middle classes to seize power from the coffee oligarchs in the 1920s, Brazil's intelligentsia and farsighted agro-capitalists, dreamed of forging a modern, industrialized society inspired by positivism— the "world power of the future". This sentiment was later nurtured throughout the Vargas years and under successive populist governments, before the 1964 military junta repudiated Brazilian populism. While these populist groups were somewhat ineffectual under the Old Republic, the structural changes in the Brazilian economy opened up by the Great War strengthened these demands.
The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was the turning point for the dynamic urban sectors. Wartime conditions prevented Britain from exporting goods to Brazil, thus creating space for Brazil's domestic manufacturing sector to grow. These structural shifts in the Brazilian economy helped to increase the ranks of the new urban middle classes. Meanwhile, Brazil's manufacturers and those employed by them enjoyed these gains at the expense of the agrarian oligarchies. This process was further accelerated by the declining world demand for coffee during World War I. The central government, dominated by rural gentries, responded to falling world coffee demand by bailing out the oligarchs, reinstating the valorization program. Valorization, government intervention to maintain coffee prices by withholding stocks from the market or restricting plantings, had some successes in the short term; however, coffee demand plunged even more precipitously during the Great Depression, creating a decline too steep for valorization to reverse.
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
. Foreign interests, however, continued to control the more capital-intensive industries, distinguishing Brazil's industrial revolution from that of the rest of the West.Struggle for reform
With manufacturing on the rise and the coffee oligarchs imperiled, the old order of
During this time period, the state of São Paulo was at the forefront of Brazil's economic, political, and cultural life. Known colloquially as a "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
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 culminating in the Revolution of 1930. The 1920s revolt against the seating of
This era sparked the
Fall of the Old Republic
The 1930 general election
The Great Depression set off the tensions that had been building in Brazilian society for some time, spurring revolutionary leaders to action.
The elections of 1930 pitted
Together, these disparate groups made up the Liberal Alliance. Support was especially strong in the provinces of Minas Gerais, Paraíba and Rio Grande do Sul, because in nominating another Paulista to succeed himself, outgoing President Washington Luís had violated the traditional alternation between Minas Gerais and São Paulo.[citation needed] Vargas campaigned carefully, needing to please a large range of supporters. He used populist rhetoric and promoted bourgeois concerns. He opposed the primacy of São Paulo, but did not challenge the planters' legitimacy and kept his calls for social reform moderate.
The election itself was plagued by
The Revolution
The 1930 revolution began in Rio Grande do Sul on October 3 at 5:25pm. Osvaldo Aranha telegraphed Juarez Távora to communicate the beginning of the Revolution. It spread quickly through the country. Eight state governments in the northeast of Brazil were deposed by revolutionaries.
On the 10th of October, Vargas launched the manifesto, "Rio Grande standing by Brazil" and left, by rail, towards Rio de Janeiro, the national capital at the time.
It was expected that a major battle would occur in
At 3pm on November 3, 1930, the
Notes
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Hudson, Rex A. Brazil: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1997, pg.22
- ISBN 0-8078-5359-3pages 17–22
- ^ Ibidem - Smallman 2002
- ^ Ignacy Sachs, Jorge Wilheim & Paulo S.Pinheiro; "Brazil: a century of change" University of North Carolina Press 2009 pages 58 & 63
- ^ Smith, Joseph "Brazil and the United States; convergence and divergence" University of Georgia Press 2010, page 39
- ^ Brassey, Thomas Allnutt "The Naval Annual; 1894" Elibron Classics/Adamant Media Corporation 2006, Chapter XI "The Naval Revolt in Brazil"
- ^ a b c pt:Página principal
- ISBN 0-8223-4329-0Page94 2nParagraph
- ^ "Grandes Guerras – Os grandes conflitos do século XX". Archived from the original on 2007-12-20. Retrieved 2007-12-28.
- ^ ": Exército Brasileiro – Braço Forte, Mão Amiga :". Archived from the original on 2007-12-23. Retrieved 2007-12-28.
- ^ Maia, Prado "D.N.O.G. (Divisão Naval em Operações de Guerra), 1917–18: uma página esquecida da história da Marinha Brasileira" (in Portuguese) ("D.N.O.G. - Naval Division in War Operations, 1917–1918: A forgotten page in the history of the Brazilian Navy") [S.l.]: Serviço de Documentação Geral da Marinha, 1961 (General Documentation Service of Brazilian Navy) OCLC 22210405
- ISBN 0-618-31851-8.
Bibliography
- Cardim; Carlos Henrique "A Raiz das Coisas. Rui Barbosa: o Brasil no Mundo" (The Root of Things. Ruy Barbosa: Brazil in the World) (in Portuguese) Civilização Brasileira 2007 ISBN 978-85-200-0835-5
- ISBN 0-8047-3222-1
- Maia, Prado (1961). D.N.O.G. (Divisão Naval em Operações de Guerra), 1914–1918: uma página esquecida da história da Marinha Brasileira. Serviço de Documentação Geral da Marinha. OCLC 22210405. (Portuguese)
- Rex A. Hudson, ed. Brazil: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1997.
- Scheina, Robert L. "Latin America's Wars Vol.II: The Age of the Professional Soldier, 1900–2001" Potomac Books, 2003 ISBN 1-57488-452-2Chapter 5 "World War I and Brazil, 1917–18"
- Vinhosa, Luiz Francisco Teixeira "A diplomacia brasileira e a revolução mexicana, 1913–1915" (Brazilian diplomacy and the Mexican Revolution, 1913–1915) (in Portuguese) FLT 1975 on Google Books
External links
- (Portuguese) site of GrandesGuerras (WorldWars) Magazine
- (Portuguese) Official Site of Brazilian Army
- Frederik Schulze: "Brazil", in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.