First Brazilian Republic

This article is part of the History of Brazil Series.

Colonial Brazil

Empire of Brazil

History of Brazil (1889-1930)

History of Brazil (1930-1964)

History of Brazil (1964-present)

The Constitutionalist Revolution

From 1889 to 1930, the government was a constitutional democracy, with the presidency alternating between the dominant states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais. This period ended with a military coup that placed Getúlio Vargas, a civilian, in the presidency; Vargas remained as dictator until 1945.

On November 15 1889, the Marechal Deodoro da Fonseca declared the Republic, and deposed the king, Dom Pedro II, assuming the govern of the country. The presidents of this period were:

The rise of the latifundia economy

At the turn of the century, the vast majority of the population lived in communities, though accumulating capitalist surpluses for overseas export, that were essentially semi-feudal in structure. Due to the legacy of Ibero-American slavery, abolished as late as 1888 in Brazil, there was an extreme concentration of such landownership reminiscent of feudal aristocracies: 464 great landowners held more than 27 million hectares of land, while 464,000 small and medium-sized farms occupied only 15.7 million hectares.

But this was agro-capitalism, not feudalism. 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 . Like most of Latin America, the economy at the turn of the century, as a result, 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, economically, and politically superior North Atlantic retarded 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 lack of medical facilities limited the average life span in 1920 to twenty-eight years. In no open market could Brazilian industry could compete with the comparative advantage of the technologically superior Anglo-American economies.

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 week central state structures that effectively devolved power to local agrarian oligarchies. Known as coronelismo, this was a classic boss system under which the control of patronage was centralized in the hands of a locally dominant oligarch known as a coronel, who would dispense favors in return for loyalty.

Demographic changes

From 1875 until 1960, about 5 million Europeans emigrated to Brazil, settling mainly in the four southern states of Sao Paulo, Parana, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. Immigrants have come mainly from Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, Poland, and the Middle East. The largest Japanese community outside Japan is in Sao Paulo. Despite class distinctions, national identity is strong, and racial friction is a relatively new phenomenon. Indigenous full-blooded Indians, located mainly in the northern and western border regions and in the upper Amazon Basin, constitute less than 1% of the population. Their numbers are declining as contact with the outside world and commercial expansion into the interior increase. Brazilian Government programs to establish reservations and to provide other forms of assistance have existed for years but are controversial and often ineffective. The plurality of Brazilians are of mixed African and European lineage. Immigration would be a strong boost to industrialization and urbanization in Brazil.

Economic, social, and political developments under the Old Republic

Demographic changes and structural shifts in the economy, however, would treaten the primacy of the agrarian oligarchies. Under the Old Republic (1889-1930), the growth of the urban middle sectors, though retarded by dependency and entrenched oligarchy, was eventually strong enough to eventually propel them to forefront of Brazilian political life. In time, growing trade, commerce, and industry in São Paulo would serve to undermine the domination of the republic's politics by the landed gentries of the same state (dominated by the coffee industry) and Minas Gerais (dominated by dairy interests)—known then by observers as the politics of café com leite ("coffee with milk").

Long before the first revolts of the urban middle classes to seize power from the coffee oligarchs in the 1920s, however, Brazil's intelligentsia, influenced by the tenets of European positivism, along with farsighted agro-capitalists, dreamt of forging a modern, industrialized society—the "world power of the future". This sentiment would later be nurtured throughout the Vargas years and under successive populist governments before the 1964 military junta repudiated Brazilian populism. As an aside, the most notable manifestation of these nationalistic aspirations was the construction of Brasília, Brazil's ultra-modern, Bauhaus-style capital during the tenure of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961). Although such lofty visionaries were somewhat ineffectual under the Old Republic (1889-1930), the structural changes in the Brazilian economy opened up by the Great War would strengthen these demands.

The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was the turning point for the dynamic urban sectors. Temporarily abating Britain's overseas economic connections with Brazil, the war was an impetus for domestic manufacturing due to the unavailability of British imports. In time, these structural shifts in the Brazilian economy helped to increase the ranks of the new urban middle classes. Meanwhile, the Brazil's manufactures and those employed by them enjoyed these gains at the expense of the agrarian oligarchies. World demand for coffee, a nonessential though habit-forming product (affording it a measure of stability and resilience), declined sharply. The central government, dominated by rural gentries, responded to falling world coffee demand by bailing out the oligarchs, reinstating the soon-to-be disastrous valorization program. Sixteen years later, world coffee demand would plunge even more precipitously with the Great Depression. Valorization, government intervention to maintain coffee prices by withholding stocks from the market or restricting plantings, would then prove unsustainable, incapable of curbing insurmountable decline in coffee prices in world markets. By World War I, the reinstatement of government price supports would just foreshadow the vulnerability of Brazil's coffee oligarchy to the Great Depression.

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 São Paulo, with its relatively large capital-base, large immigrant population from Southern and Eastern Europe, and wealth of natural resources, led the trend, eclipsing Rio de Janeiro as center of Brazilian industry . Industrial production, though concentrated in light industry (food processing, small shops, and textiles) doubled during the war, and the number of enterprises (which stood at about 3,000 in 1908) grew by 5,940 between 1915 and 1918 . The war was also a stimulus for the diversification of agriculture. Growing wartime demand of the Allies for staple products, sugar, beans, and raw materials sparked a new boom for products other than sugar or coffee. Foreign interests, however, continued to control the more capital-intensive industries, distinguishing Brazil's industrial revolution from that of the West.

The struggle for modernization and social reform

With manufacturing on the rise and the coffee oligarchs imperiled, the old order of café com leite and coronelismo would eventually give way to the political aspirations of the new urban groups: professionals, government and white-collar workers, merchants, bankers, and industrialists. As one would expect, increasing support for industrial protectionism marked 1920s Brazilian politics with little support from a central government dominated by the coffee interests. Under considerable bourgeois pressure, a more activist, centralized state adapted to represent the interests of the new bourgeoisie—one that could utilize a state interventionist policy consisting of tax breaks, lowered duties, and import quotas to potentially expand the domestic capital base—had been demanded for years. After all, manufacturers, white-collar workers, and the urban proletariat alike had earlier enjoyed the respite of world trade associated with World War I. However, the coffee oligarchs, relying on a devolved power structure relegating power to their own patrimonial ruling oligarchies, were certainly not interested in regularizing Brazil's personalistic politics or centralizing power. Getúlio Vargas, leader from 1930 to 1945 and later for a brief period in the 1950s, would later respond to these demands.

During this time period, the state of São Paulo was at the forefront of Brazil's economic, political, and cultural life. Known colloquially as “locomotive pulling the 20 empty boxcars” (a reference to the 20 other states) and still today Brazil's industrial and commercial center, Sao 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 trade unionism, Communism, and socialism. The post-World War I period saw Brazil's first wave of general strikes along with the establishment of the Communist Party in 1922.

Meanwhile, the divergence of interests between the coffee oligarchs—devastated by the Depression—and the burgeoning, dynamic urban sectors was intensifying. According to historian and Dependency Theorist 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&#8221. 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 cumulating in the Revolution of 1930. The 1920s revolt against the seating of Artur da Silva as president signaled the beginning of a struggle by the urban bourgeoisie to seize power from the coffee-producing oligarchy. This era sparked the failed but famed tenente (lieutenant) rebellion as well. Junior military officers, who had long been active against the ruling coffee oligarchy, staged their own failed revolt in 1922 amid demands for various forms of social modernization, calling for agrarian reform, the formation of cooperatives, and the nationalization of mines. In this historical setting, Getulio Vargas would emerge as president about a decade later.

Article preceded by: Empire of Brazil

History of Brazil (1889-1930)

Article followed by: History of Brazil (1930-1964)