Vargas was, in Gramsci's phrase, a "passive revolutionary from above." His revolution was partial, one in which new constituencies and new rules were grafted onto traditional political practices. Although his career spanned three constitutions and enormous changes in the political climate, his pragmatism always prevailed. He always was willing to take risks, a trait that explains not only his political longevity but the miscalculations that led to his ouster in 1945 and that drove him to suicide. He was able to adjust to changes in national and international circumstances but he fundamentally left unaltered much of the fabric of Brazilian life. Some things endured throughout his decades in power, including the readiness of the armed forces to intervene and the elite's tenacious hold on privilege. Brazil's distribution of income remained among the least equal in the world, but Vargas did not perceive this as a problem that needed to be solved.
In 1930, he had stood at the center of forces united in their demand for change and sharply divided over what results they sought. Because of this, Vargas needed to devote almost all of his energy to negotiating among factions and keeping himself in power. Only in 1932, when São Paulo revolted to restore the old system, he showed that he could act decisively and with the use of force. He believed in granting regulated citizenship without disharmony and, therefore, without freedom to dissent. Putting a good face on Vargas's regime in the early 1940s, a visiting political scientist called it "despotism mitigated by sloppiness." Corruption remained a national institution; little could be accomplished without bribes to expedite action, and, "how big businessmen flaunt[ed] the lax laws [was] a story in itself." (1) He was more concerned with staying in power than in holding to any firm purpose.
His assiduous shifting, moreover, produced different revolutionary streams. This was possible because for Vargas practicality came first, and, as such, he was able to play political poker by dealing from different hands. He reorganized civil society, bringing benefits to many (but not all) urban employees and workers although he ignored the countryside. The 1930 Revolution ended the more blatant abuses of the old "politics of the governors" by renewing interventionist powers that the national executive had lost in 1889, but it placed patronage and coercive powers in the hands of his interventors and, after 1945, a hybrid form of backroom brokering involving partisan politics. The regionalist dimension of politics might have survived even more than it did had not the paulistas been pragmatists, suppressing their resistance to Vargas because they agreed with Vargas's social corporatism and his measures to intervene in the economy.(2) In the other outlying states, Vargas's interventors replaced the clans in power before 1930, but in most cases new oligarchic alliances emerged, so that in the decades after Vargas's death prominent local elites continued to dominate state politics in the old ways.
Limited Citizenship
Democracy for the man from Rio Grande do Sul to whom most things had come easy was a luxury he felt Brazil could not afford. For him, the rights of citizenship were not inalienable, but to be awarded in exchange for loyalty and docility. "The right to vote can not stifle hunger," he said in a speech during the Estado Novo, "nor can the right to assemble educate your children."(3) Nor were people his primary goal. Spending for public works outstripped everything else, including the armed forces. During Vargas's final term, Brazil spent less that one-fourth on public health per capita than the United Sates. Public works projects were necessary for economic development, but they did little to address social needs. One obstacle faced by Vargas was that, unlike the United States with its strong traditions of local self-government (and the ability to raise funds through municipal bonds), the Brazilian system limiting the ability of states and localities to raise revenue had to rely almost exclusively upon federal initiative.
The law-and-order side of Vargas's social legislation brought workers under forms of social control unheard of in the industrial democracies. Employers detested Vargas's reforms as much as Republicans hated Roosevelt's New Deal, although Vargas's were far more controlling. All Brazilians under Vargas's labor legislation had to carry a work folder (carteira de trabalho); to obtain one of these, they needed to show a birth certificate and a document from the police stating that they had a clean record. All job records were entered in the folder, including transgressions and firings. Once a worker had a carteira with bad entries he would likely never get a job again. If he threw it away, or simply never registered for identity documents, he would be a nonentity, ineligible for medical treatment or on-the-books employment. Migrants distant from the places of their births and usually illiterate and fearful of bureaucracies found it nearly impossible to get the papers necessary for work.
Vargas's style was rooted in the tradition in which supplicants sought personal intervention from officials to cut through red tape or to bestow favors. An irony of Vargas's legacy, therefore, was that although he championed a merit-based civil service program, the old style of personal favors not only survived in the states but increased at the national level as a result of the government centralization. Brazilian archives are filled with personal requests to cabinet ministers (and to Vargas himself) for jobs for relatives, favorable treatment in granting contracts, overruling regulations—all in violation of what Vargas said he was trying to accomplish. The more government bureaucratized state employment, moreover, the more power individual administrators accumulated, and it was never certain that they would act in the interest of their constituencies. As a result, many of Vargas's reforms ended up—intentionally or not—para inglês ver ("for the English to see"). Vargas's corporatist framework, moreover, encouraged authoritarian decisions, because he believed that otherwise the needy would continue to be ignored.(4)
In making himself the chief of state of all Brazilians, Vargas limited the potential for rivals to emerge. During his first government he logged ninety thousand miles visiting every corner of the country. His fame spread by word of mouth, even through the guileless popular poetry of rural cordel poets.(5) As a result of his unrivaled popularity, after 1945 the communists had to ally with Vargas and the political organizations he left behind but at the same time compete with them.(6) Vargas also confounded his enemies by continually experimenting: during the to-be-dashed 1937 presidential campaign, for example, Labor Ministry officials trucked in workers from government-sponsored unions to political demonstrations.
He did not hide his admiration for persons secure in their wielding of power. Pedro Ludovico recalled an encounter between Vargas and a Carajás chieftain during an excursion to a reservation in Goiás. When the tribesman presented Vargas with a petition, Vargas asked him by what authority he spoke for his people. "Because I have the most power," came the reply. When Vargas asked him, affably, how long he would continue to hold this power, the chief replied "As long as I'm alive." Vargas laughed, because this was his outlook as well.
Brazilians forgave Vargas for delivering less than he promised, in part because they were so grateful for his reaching out to them. Despite his image as father of the poor, well less than half of the adult population in 1945 could read and write, and many more were functionally illiterate. Vargas's personal diaries reveal him as colorless, dutiful to routine, and lacking in curiosity (although they also reveal the tedium of office holding: day after day receiving delegations, "parades of complaining congressmen," and other numbing obligations). He also was personally insensitive. At the height of the wave of arrests carried out under the regime's National Security Law, the day following the imprisonment of Interventor Pedro Ernesto, one of his closest lieutenants and a member of the inner cabinet, Getúlio wrote that his conscience had bothered him when he signed the arrest order, and that he was not convinced of his friend's guilt. But that was the end of it; he quickly turned to writing in his diary about a churrasco (barbecue) he attended in someone's house.(7)
His most far-reaching goal was to modernize the country while preserving its national independence. This aim evaded him, but his achievements in turning Brazil into a more modern country yielded more "revolutionary" change than any other policy. The effort also usurped great resources. Centralizing government centralization was costly: funds for such massive projects as the Paulo Affonso hydroelectric station on the São Francisco River, for example, could never have been raised by states, given their constant bickering and the depleted credit ratings. As a result of the war, just as Vargas and other nationalists had feared, Brazil had become more dependent on the United States and influenced by its culture—through advertising, movies, consumer goods, and the direct influence of the behavior of the thousands of American servicemen stationed at Brazilian bases during the war.
A New Dealer?
Vargas displayed tough-mindedness and tactical skill as head of state. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in a moment of diplomatic flattery had called Vargas one of the inventors of the New Deal, Getúlio was an astute and dexterous political operator, and, also like Roosevelt, a political chameleon. Vargas's and Roosevelt's measures imparted to ordinary citizens, in most cases for the first time, the premise that government cared about them and would defend their interests.(8) The New Deal reached broader sectors of American society than the Estado Novo did in Brazil, but Vargas faced a more daunting task. Vargas was a skilled administrator who understood how to keep his own counsel, how to use delay and flattery, and how, like Roosevelt, to act with guile and sinuousness. Whereas the New Deal was ferociously attacked by business interests, Vargas's legislation drew a mostly passive response. Like Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman, Vargas's values were clear, fixed, and traditional. Both men came from small towns, disliked city glitter, and preferred the company of cronies. Vargas was personally honest, but paradoxically, like Truman, he got his start with the backing of a powerful political machine.(9)
There were great differences between the Vargas regime and the New Deal as well. Vargas, unlike FDR, did not work to synthesize opposites. Unlike the New Deal, Vargas's Estado Novo did not appeal to Brazil's social conscience. Roosevelt attacked "economic royalists" and greedy plutocrats; Vargas stayed silent. The paulistas still held grudges because they considered him an unsophisticated southerner - and his employment of nationalistic and corporatist measures went against the grain of the paulista tradition that considered politics as a tool to further their business interests. Most other Brazilians did not seem to care as much, and over time many became nostalgic for Vargas's paternalism.
In the United States, nationalism during the Roosevelt administration took the form of isolationist feelings in Congress, although most Americans remained neutral in their opinions. During wartime, the United States government created internment camps for citizens of Nisei origin, and some private citizens and small-town officials harassed Americans of German origin. In Brazil, nationalism as well as discrimination against foreign nationals came from the state. For example, the government required all holders of German passports to report weekly to police stations. Some of these were Jews who had fled the Nazis, and the police looked away while the non-Jewish Germans taunted and sometimes physically abused the refugees. The Estado Novo closed foreign-language schools, banned the importation of school books written in foreign languages, and, in 1942, rounded up and sent Axis-country nationals to internment camps in several locations, including a harsh Amazonian penal colony at Tomé-Açu in Pará.
William E. Leuctenburg has termed Roosevelt's New Deal a halfway revolution because although it achieved a more just society by recognizing groups that had been previously unrepresented, it passed over many others, including sharecroppers, slum dwellers, and most non-whites.(10) Vargas's drive for national integration and modernization created an entrenched bureaucracy made up of functionaries and managers, but he refused to give this emerging interest group any political voice. He bypassed them in the 1950s when he addressed his populist slogans to the working class. Relatively well-educated and always upwardly mobile, the urban middle class might have become a source of political support, but Vargas pushed it aside, benefitting the old elite in his actions while appealing to blue-collar workers in his speeches and public statements.
Vargas left many institutions untouched, including Brazil's 1916 Civil Code, a conservative legal document that reinforced patriarchal social relations, declaring husbands the legal head of their households and leaving married women virtually without rights. He left charity work in the hands of the private sector, although he turned them into semi-public agencies by giving them subsidies. During the 1920s, a number of paulista factories had pioneered the concept of the "workers' villages" (the Vila Operária Maria Zélia, for example) in which workers were given housing and provided with a comprehensive program of social benefits, including schools, infant-care centers, chapels, and soccer teams. The archdiocese of São Paulo maintained a Metropolitan Catholic Workers' Central, with local agencies in the working-class neighborhoods of Moóca, Penha, Bras, Barra Funda, Itaquera, Ipiranga, and Lapa. The organization built children's playgrounds, showed, films, and sponsored classes for women in hygiene and domestic skills. The city of São Paulo established a bureaucratic agency responsible for children's recreation; in January 1935 it came under the jurisdiction of the new Department of Culture and Recreation.
Foremost among the traditional institutions was the Santa Casa de Misericordia, long the sole source of medical assistance for the urban poor especially in the cities of the hinterland. By the end of the war, the Santa Casa had become essentially a state charity. Other welfare organizations included the Legião Brasileira de Assistência (LBA), the Serviço Social da Indústria (SESI), and a similar agency for commercial workers (SESC). The last two, established under Dutra in 1946, were funded by a two percent payroll tax levied in employers. Such institutions on such a broad scale would have been inconceivable a generation before. The cost of social legislative programs to employers ranged from 20 to 26% of payroll expenses, not including payment for public holidays and weekly rest days, an additional 22.8%.(11) Even though salaries remained very low by European or North American standards, these percentages still were high. On the other hand, the degree to which employers evaded payment of social security taxes, or diverted funds from pensions and welfare institutes (as happened brazenly during the morally bankrupt Collor administration during the early 1990s), or excluded employees from coverage by one ruse or another, cannot be determined, and likely was high.
The Estado Novo was porous enough to permit some mobilization in the form of private associations. In 1942, for example, neighborhood associations emerged in several São Paulo cities, promoting urban improvements. After 1945, more private groups organized, challenging the notion that only the state could propose change. The newly legal Communist Party established "Democratic Committees" as alternatives to official sindicatos, first in Belém and then in other cities. Worker committees were organized in several industries to sidestep the official unions, which continued to be controlled by the government. The year 1946 saw the creation of the Popular Campaign against Hunger, which published lists of merchants who charged excessive prices for basic food. After Vargas's election in 1950, a wave of strikes, marches, and other protests demanded that the president raise wages and combat inflation and soaring prices. Three hundred thousand workers struck in São Paulo in 1953, and nearly half a million marched in rallies in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In cities people enlisted in the national Campaign Against the High Cost of Living.(12)
Men benefitted more than women under Vargas's legislation. The laws were written by male bureaucrats for the good of male wage earners and their dependents. It was always assumed that men headed families and that families were natural; legislation aimed at helping women who were not part of families, or even who worked to supplement family income, never was considered, although women made up more than three-quarters of teachers and dominated white-collar commercials and retail jobs.(13) Although Vargas's decrees were color blind, persons of mixed race (if not pure blacks) were more likely to gain government employment than in the private sector, where hiring practices openly excluded non-Caucasians. Many citizens of color came to owe their higher economic status to the changes ushered in by Vargas's programs if not to any conscious effort by Vargas to assist persons of color although he became a hero to them. Photographs show that blacks participated in Vargas-era rallies and activities, but typically not in any significant number.
The Estado Novo, as Susan K. Besse shows, borrowed from fascist practice when it empowered the state to mediate between conflicting interests within civil society. After 1937 the regime issued many new laws and decrees governing women in the work force, training, marriage, the family, social security, health, reproduction, and employment.(14) More women than men were employed as textile operatives, and most teachers, retail employees, and semi-skilled workers in most states were women. Women were ignored both by Vargas's official sindicatos and by independent unions both on the left and on the right (although rightist organizations tended to offer auxiliaries and other associations for women, emphasizing the woman's role in the family). When women did express their views collectively, they tended to protest work-related grievances, especially in the factory commissions that bypassed the sindicato system through the early 1950s, and were less political than male unionists and union leaders.
Vargas was the first Brazilian head of state to place women on his political agenda. He gave them the vote, a hollow gesture since there were no direct elections between 1933 and 1945. The DIP paid homage to motherhood and the role of women as homemakers, and Vargas gave the vote to women, but the regime did little to enforce regulations prescribing work conditions for women. The government's lip-service to women and the traditional value system tended to smother impulses to mobilize feminist activities. As a result, Brazil failed to develop a women's movement of any significance. Vargas drew legitimacy from accepted assumptions about the naturalness of social hierarchy and paternal authority embodied by his role as benevolent and dependable father.(15)
Vargas's reforms principally affected people who in the United States or Western Europe would fall into the lower-middle class: salaried employees to whom the government extended, for the first time, job security, pension rights, and better working conditions. This group lived under constant economic pressure, much less economically comfortable than groups above them, and lacking a safety net to keep them from falling, in times of trouble, into the lower-class mass below them. Scorned as lacking taste and old-fashioned—public functionaries and small property owners came in for special mockery - they held on tenaciously to the fact that they were still considered superior to people who worked with their hands. Increased demands for specialized skills, accompanied by higher levels of professionalization across the country, prompted the creation of the civil service, which administered nationwide competitive examinations to fill many job vacancies.
Vargas's social legislation, much of which remained in place in the middle 1990s,(16) was limited in scope and uneven. When the minimum wage was introduced in 1940, eligible workers in Rio de Janeiro received the equivalent of $131 a month. This was a generous amount, although it is telling that workers continued to stay out of officially-sanctioned labor unions, which not only guaranteed the minimum wage but which added benefits. The national monthly minimum wage rose to the equivalent of $252 by 1954 but thereafter went into free fall, bottoming out at $120 a month in 1992.(17) Moreover, a good proportion of the population did not earn the minimum wage, and it was pegged lower outside of the Center-South. On the other hand, Vargas used his wage policies to lessen traditional reliance on the export sector, strengthening the hand of the industrial elite and urban workers. The minimum wage affected both supply and demand in a complementary way.(18)
Employers regularly ignored the rules, claiming that they would have to close if they could not do so. More than anything else, this is why Vargas's sweeping social and labor legislation failed to change very much, although Vargas remained popular among the working-class Brazilians he so ardently courted. They, in turn, became the basis of his successful run for the presidency in 1950. Industrialists and employers did not care whether Vargas's rhetoric was progressive or corporative: they simply intended to block any reform that interfered with their profits. Virtually all of the strikes between 1931 and 1936, from Rio Grande do Sul to Pará, and all of the limited strikes and work stoppages that took place between 1936 and 1940, were to win rights and conditions guaranteed by law but not provided.(19) The Companhia de Tecidos Paulista, in Pernambuco, forced workers - large numbers of them women and children - to work 12-hour days in spite of the 8-hour day legislation. The same was true for many mills in São Paulo, where 14-hour days were not uncommon.(20) There were many ways of getting around regulations. Anthropologist Janice Perlman tells the story of a sixty-year old migrant who waited six months to obtain his folder, only to be told by a manager that he could have the job if the work card not be signed, so that the firm would not have to pay social security benefits, pensions, sick-leave, and overtime rates. The man accepted the job, working a twelve-hour shift, four hours over the legal maximum, at half the minimum wage, and without any worker protection.(21) Those without any papers fared worse. Police regularly stopped busses, raided shantytowns, and otherwise demanded to see documents; those without them were charged with vagrancy.
Vargas's pragmatism allowed him to prevail in situations where others might have floundered. Unlike Mexico's Lázaro Cárdenas, who slapped foreign investors in the face by nationalizing Mexican oil, Vargas courted foreign investment, being very careful to meet debt payments, even in Depression years, because he did not want to prejudice coffee producers. Under Vargas Brazil incorporated a host of corporatist elements rooted in the country's own history, its conservative Roman Catholicism, and guided by the influence of intellectuals such as Francisco José de Oliveira Vianna, who rejected liberal democracy as weak and lacking discipline. Much of the regime's legislation was limited in effectiveness to the federal capital of Rio de Janeiro, directly under the eye of the national government. Rural and distant areas fared the worst: with the exception of public health and other hygienic programs implemented by the Americans as part of the effort to increase wartime rubber production, the lives of Brazilians in the hinterland were touched by Vargas's measures far less than in the populated cities of the coast, and in most cases not at all.
The urban and rural poor comprised about half of the Brazilian population during all of Vargas's tenure as head of state. Lacking skills and unable to work except as menials, they played only marginal roles in Vargas's new Brazil. The rural poor languished at the very bottom of the social ladder, treated in ways much like the untouchable castes in India or the Japanese Burakumin. In 1935, Sir William Seeds the British Ambassador, in a report to London, noted with anger that General Góes Monteiro had said, in his presence, that most of the Brazilian people were "like vegetables" and the rest "given to indiscipline and anarchy."(22) Sociologists contend that only external efforts to equalize the status of such caste-like groups can elevate them to equal status, and clearly this did not occur in Brazil. Rural education lagged, minimum wages were not enforced in the countryside, and economic realities dashed chances for upward mobility.
Most rural Brazilians lived in thatched mud huts without plumbing or electricity. They frequently received wages below the minimum while prices for goods and supplies were high. Rural residents barely participated in the market economy. They were not consumers, and their life expectancy did not exceed four decades. The rural infant mortality rate was among the highest in the world. Insufficient diet and endemic disease, including debilitating parasitic infections, took their toll on physical stamina. The minimum rate of pay fixed by Getúlio Vargas, Stefan Zweig complained, "has not yet been able to penetrate to the interior, into the forests of Matto Grosso and Acre, parts of the world as far removed from a street as they are from a railway."(23) The earlier decades saw a flurry of attention given to rural problems, including such powerful novels as José Américo de Almeida's A Bagaceira and José Lins do Rêgo's Menino de Engenho, about life in the dying sugar cane region of the Northeast, but after the mid-1930s, virtually no new socially-conscious writing appeared.(24)
In the towns and villages of the hinterland, conditions were only marginally better. Pigs wandered the unpaved streets foraging for garbage. Emaciated dogs roamed the streets; dogs as well as bats carried rabies. Buildings rarely exceeded two stories and for the most part were cinder-block shells without glass windows. These towns had small numbers of educated and well-to-do people but rarely if ever a physician or a dentist. Ambitious young men from the "better families" (as they were known) of these towns and small cities often migrated to the state capital or to Rio de Janeiro to pursue their careers. Young women rarely did, because even if they could find housing with distant relatives, a young woman living away from her immediate family in a big city would be considered unsuitable for marriage or worse. Vargas's legislation had little impact in the interior. The regional agencies provided jobs but patronage overshadowed the new civil service apparatus. The lack of opportunities for employment hindered any real progress attributable to government programs. Since there was rarely any industrialization, there were no labor unions. Vargas's biggest outlay of revenue was always for transportation, it could be said that the Vargas-era projects with the biggest impact in most of the hinterland were the roads that permitted families to flee.
Vargas's goals were cautious. His commitment to industrialization was gradual and not without vacillation. By 1942, he had fully committed himself to using state interventionism.(25) Much of the infrastructure change accomplished by 1945 at least was the result of United States aid during the war: modern airfields, rebuilt railroads, mining and port improvements, and the new steel plant at Volta Redonda.(26) Many of Vargas's other programs came up short because he did not commit sufficient resources to carry them out and because he lacked any nationwide plan for implementation. His social legislation, much of which would remain in place through the middle 1990s,(27) was limited in scope and uneven. When the minimum wage was introduced in 1940, eligible workers in Rio de Janeiro received the equivalent of $131 a month. This was a generous amount, although workers continued to stay out of official sindicatos, which not only guaranteed the minimum wage but which added benefits. The national monthly minimum wage rose to the equivalent of $252 by 1954 but thereafter went into free fall, bottoming out at $120 a month in 1992.(28) Moreover, most of the population earned less than this.
Vargas's social and welfare legislation transformed not only the state's role in society but it redefined Brazilian citizenship. The Estado Novo bureaucracy, for example, required that applicants for its new public housing projects for industrial workers had to be "regulated citizens," tax-paying, wage-earning persons with all of their documents in order and approved by the board of the Institute for Retirement and Social Welfare of Industrial Workers (IAPI). These requirements were not unlike the ones set by Henry Ford's screening process for company housing in Dearborn, Michigan, except that Ford's regulations were privately-imposed whereas the IAPI's were set by the state. In the end, Vargas's housing programs yielded a few model apartment complexes here and there but did nothing to ameliorate the critical (and growing) housing shortage that afflicted all of the major cities.
Vargas's regulated citizenship was based on occupational stratification defined by legal norm, and under this system only as wage earners in good standing could workers gain access to their citizenship rights and duties.(29) Pensions, a cornerstone of Vargas's social program, were so eaten away by inflation that by the 1950s in many cases it was not worth it to pensioners to pay the bus fare to go and pick up their retirement checks. Traditional qualifications for voting were bent to accommodate this concept. In 1932, for example, a new ex-officio voter registration system enacted under the auspices of Vargas's first Labor Minister, fellow gaúcho Lindolfo Collor, permitted illiterates to register to vote for the Constituent Assembly if they were members of official sindicatos. Vargas was clearly seeking to create a pliant working class bloc, loyal to the State and especially to his government.
Many of Vargas's initiatives produced little more than paperwork and moral self-congratulation. He lauded public school teachers as the "little, overshadowed heroes of daily life,"(30) but he did little to improve their wages. Almost all teachers were underpaid and underqualified; most lay teachers were paid little more than manual laborers. Their salaries sometimes were paid months late. At the secondary level, Brazil had fewer than a dozen no-tuition secondary schools. Vargas's educational reforms varied enormously from state to state, although Vargas's National Educational Plan, which called for free and semi-mandatory public education, was made part of the 1934 Constitution. In Rio de Janeiro, Anísio Teixeira took dramatic steps to professionalize education, expand matriculations, and to improve schools, but he was fired as being too liberal after the A.N.L. was closed in 1935, with its accompanying wave of anti-intellectualism. São Paulo achieved progress mostly under its own auspices, under the unwritten arrangement its elite had made with Vargas after 1932 to let the state carry out its own programs. The drive to modernize Brazil led Vargas to create free, comprehensive universities, but few non-elite youths who did not attend private secondary schools could hope to pass the rigorous vestibularios (entrance examinations).
The State of Goiás, in the country's central plateau, epitomizes how the rest of Brazil fared. In 1930, illiteracy stood at 83.3%, with many towns having no schools at all. The state government eagerly endorsed Vargas's educational initiatives, hoping that emphasis on education would help integrate Goiás into the national economy. But lacking resources, most of the state's educational reform initiatives took the form of regulations, creating a Potemkin-Village effect. Goiás adopted one of the most rigorous curricula in the nation for secondary schools, for example, but there only a handful of secondary schools in the state. Education was declared to be essential for promoting the mentally and physically robust "new man," and the government published an educational journal; it also provided a list of approved films about Goiás, to be used in the classroom to instill positive values and to show "the blissful and abundant quality of agricultural life." But there were no projectors, and many schools lacked electricity. Goiás's interventor Pedro Ludovico made a heroic try, allocating as much as a quarter of the state budget for education between 1930 and 1937, but to little avail. By 1940, literacy had improved a scant 3.6% from 1920 levels.(31)
At best, Vargas's system created a framework of agencies and institutions that rationalized government services and provided a delivery system for benefits to designated recipients. We have seen that the government reached only so far. In Brazil's immense hinterland, the labor system shared features with Parchman Farm, the Mississippi prison colony created in 1904 to set inmates to work to produce profit.(32) The analogy goes only so far, but wages were so low that most Brazilians lived in austere poverty. Vargas's paternalism was severe, and because of the racial character of Brazilian privation, greater subordination was demanded from non-whites than from whites who were poor, especially immigrants.
Even though it suppressed most forms of public expression, Estado Novo apparatus was porous enough to permit some mobilization in the form of private associations. In 1942, neighborhood associations and shopkeepers' grounds formed in several São Paulo cities, promoting urban improvements. Umbanda practitioners organized to ward off police raids. In 1946 the newly legal Communist Party organized "Democratic Committees," first in Belém and then in other cities. Worker committees formed in several industries to sidestep government sindicatos. Private citizens organized the Popular Campaign against Hunger, and published lists of merchants who charged excessive prices for basic food. After Vargas's election in 1950, a wave of strikes, marches, and other protests confronted the president to raise wages to combat inflation and soaring prices. Three hundred thousand workers struck in São Paulo in 1953, and nearly half a million marched in rallies in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Elsewhere in the country groups affiliated with the new National Campaign Against the High Cost of Living.(33)
The contention that Vargas's reforms actually accomplished little - that programs were shallow and limited in their impact - is borne out by examining the allocation of fiscal resources under Vargas's tenure. Despite his constant and growing emphasis on the need to elevate the condition of the poor, the fact is that while the government claimed to allocate between five and ten percent of the national budget for public education during Vargas's tenure, it is likely that a good portion of the funds were either never delivered to needy school systems or, worse, stolen. Nor did the government encourage individuals to help. There were few taxes on income or on inherited wealth, and charitable philanthropy remained very limited. Nor did the Roman Catholic Church, historically relatively poor and socially very conservative, have a major impact in social relief. Banks never were given incentives to provide credit for small lenders to start businesses or to build housing. The federal government established an independent monetary authority, with limited powers, only in 1946, and Brazil's Central Bank was only fully established in 1964.(34)
Determining to what degree the improvements in the lives of ordinary Brazilians came about from government action rather than evolutionary change is of course elusive. During the 1930s and 1940s, many countries with different kinds of governments acquired social security systems of approximate scope. Vargas never eliminated the role of the states, many of which, especially São Paulo but also Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul, initiated or maintained social programs of their own. In the stagnant municipality of Cunha, in São Paulo's Paraíba Valley, the state built during the 1930s schools, a health service, a pediatric center, an agricultural station, judicial and police facilities, a state bank, statistics and records agencies, and a meteorological station—all entities that affected the lives of its citizens in direct and indirect ways every day.(35) World War II boosted exports, brought in hard currency reserves, and increased the power of industrial labor unionists. Import substitution stimulated manufacturing, although the interruption of shipping made it nearly impossible to obtain needed tools and metals.
What must be kept in mind when evaluating the legacy of the Vargas era is the fact that most reforms were concentrated overwhelmingly in the country's two largest cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. After all, during Vargas's time all other Brazilian cities were commercial and service emporiums, not centers of industry. Brazil had virtually no rural labor unions, for example, until the 1960s. Gains occurred in some places ut not in others. During the 1920s and early 1930s in Minas Gerais, for example, militant workers in Belo Horizonte, the state capital, were constantly defeated when they struck for resolution of their grievances because industrialists and employers worked closely with the police and officials of the state, but in Juiz de Fora, in the same state, the success of industrial workers in allying with service workers and artisans in a common bloc, and their unions' close ties to unions in Rio de Janeiro resulted in important gains.(36)
Analysis of social and economic conditions can reveal unexpected findings. Of 1,000 students entering first grade in 1942 only 155 completed three years of primary school. In 1995, sixty-five years after Vargas swept into power at the head of a victorious coup d'etat that soon declared itself to be revolutionary, and forty-one years after Vargas's death, Brazil's infant mortality rate stood at 51.6 per thousand, almost ten times worse than Spain's, a country surpassed by Brazil a decade earlier in aggregate economic output.(37) That conditions were even worse in preceding decades, when Vargas's social legislation was enacted, hints at the magnitude of the problems faced by government planners and at the shallow impact of the Vargas-era programs. At the end of World War II, life expectancy in southern states was eight years higher than the national average and sixteen years more than in the long-depressed Northeast. Vargas had done little for the poor regions of the country.
