The Case of Brazil

...The fact is that now, in 1967, long after the reforms and achievements of the Vargas period have been recorded in historical memoirs, Brazil remains a nation requiring massive investment, development, and modernization...

...What is remarkable, and what is left out of Skidmore's account, is the real extent of bland uniformity in U.S...

...history of contemporary Brazilian politics...

...economy and the expansion of its political influence, Brazil, not accidentally, lapsed into an old Latin American condition...

...It is no accident that 1930 is also the year when many revolutionary changes occurred, not only in Brazil but in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile...

...Skidmore's accounts of the various Brazilian administrations are offered with sophistication and smoothness...

...IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ, a professor of sociology at Washington University, wrote "Revolution in Brazil...

...Brazil did not have an experiment in democracy between 1930-1964 but rather an experiment in political legitimacy...

...In other words, what permitted the triumph of the Vargas system was the collapse of the traditional laissez faire economy among the advanced industrial powers, and the attendant period of policy reevaluations...

...representatives...

...The present crisis in the Brazilian economy is not the result of the kind of conspiratorial theory in reverse Skidmore engages in, but is rather due to long-term strains within the economy occasioned by external pressures, especially the pressures of living in a tutelary world controlled by U.S...

...It was the potential for success of the developmentalists, the advocates of structural revolution, and not the failure of civilian politics, as Skidmore suggests, that stimulated the militarist response...

...The case of Brazil lends considerable substance to the hypothesis that the United States, far from being a leader in the revolution of rising expectations, is in fact preventing the continuation THE REVIEWERS RUSSEL B. NYE, a professor of English at Michigan State University, wrote "Midwestern Progressive Politics...

...That evidence is the constant surveillance, if not outright supervision, of Brazilian politics by the military throughout the time his book covers...

...He lived in Peking from 1948 to 1955...

...To speak of Brazil as an "experiment in democracy" is to minimize the fact that between 1930-1964 there was no political revolution, but only a series of dramatic changes highlighted each time by military intervention or military withholding of legitimation from the civilian regime...

...The Case of Brazil Politics in Brazil, 1930-1964: an experiment in democracy, by Thomas E. Skidmore...

...The Brazilian system managed nicely to disguise this ongoing struggle between military and civilian sectors through the thirty-four years covered in Skidmore's book...

...Less than 150,000 people filed an income tax in 1966, and only 5,000 paid as much as $1,000...

...In the Northeast, the average income is thirty cents a day, life expectancy is forty years, and less than half the population has received any schooling whatsoever...

...It is written in a hygienic style befitting the sobriety of the undertaking and the sagacity of post-mortem analysis...

...PETER COLLIER teaches English at the University of California and is a staff writer for Ramparts...

...But whenever reference is made to foreign aspects, particularly to U.S...

...The pivotal years—1930, 1946, 1958, 1961, 1963, and 1964—are noteworthy for the achievements not of parliamentary or, for that matter, even mass democracy...

...As the political life of Brazil becomes linked to an urban base and to industrial classes, to this degree is there an increase in the quantum and intensity of military intervention in Brazilian life...

...parliamentary model and then relates the political life of Brazil as a series of approaches and departures from American norms and policy needs...

...With the revivification of the U.S...

...Skidmore refuses to make plain that it was civilian rule as such, not the Brazilian Left, that was overthrown by the various military coups...

...The critical point is that Brazil is a nation of economic impoverishment rather than political innovation, in which, despite all its experimentation, one per cent of its citizenry owns fifty per cent of the land...

...Reviewed by Irving Louis Horowitz In Thomas E. Skidmore's book we have what amounts to a semi-official U.S...

...The description of the Truman Administration as sympathetic to the financial problems of the developing countries and the Eisenhower Administration as unsympathetic simply omits the basic dilemma—namely, that from a Brazilian viewpoint the difficult economic situation was a constant fact of life in the postwar period...

...There is something rather strange about the subtitle of the book, An Experiment in Democracy, since Skidmore is usually presenting an image of Brazilian democracy as either "collapsing" (as he has it between 1935-1937), or simply "breaking down" (as between 1963-1964...

...The starting point for the book, the Vargas era between 1930-1945, is meaningful...

...To label Goulart as authoritarian and to define his tenure in office as a breakdown in democracy is to violate not only the historical facts, but above all to be blind to the social structure within which Brazilian military power operates, and no less to the conservative impulses within which American foreign policy responds...

...It remains a nation tied to a one-crop one-market economy...

...What gives them their special characteristics is the triadic interplay between the traditional polity and the conventional military, and the popular sectors wedged between them...

...W. ALLYN RICKETT is an associate professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Pennsylvania...

...He is probably correct if one perceives democracy exclusively in terms of a U.S...

...IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University...

...Skidmore knows the facts, and he records them...

...interests, the book lapses into banality...

...This is what gives the book its official quality...

...It was precisely the legitimation process, the instrumentation and implementation of constitutional rules of succession, that Vargas himself shrewdly perceived as necessary for the survival of the New State...

...In short, Goulart represented the "civil-ianization" of Brazil, while both Castel-lo Branco and Costa e Silva represent its militarization...

...However, the fact that, as Skid-more himself indicates, the "revolution" of 1930 was a revolution of the elite indicates that what allowed this particular Vargas revolution an opportunity to succeed was the international crisis of capitalism created by the market crash of 1929 and the consequent tern-porary breakdown of the world capitalist dominion over the international pricing and marketing system...

...Brazil remains a nation in which the United States accounts for seventy per cent or more of all its foreign sales...

...The difficulty with his book is that he does not face up to the implications of his evidence...

...Skidmore suggests that only under the most regimented periods in modern Brazil, particularly under General Dutra in 1946-1950 and General Branco in 1964-1967, did democracy seem to make headway...

...The military understood fully that the real threats of the Goulart regime were not its left-wing propensities, not its vague form of laborite socialism, and not even its pleas for Christian democracy, but the brute fact that Goulart continued a legitimate form of civilian succession...

...His most recent book is "Africa: The Politics of Unity...

...of that kind of industrial development initiated under the New State of Vargas and later in the Labor State of Goulart...

...Brazilian history is written by Skidmore not in terms of internal events but measured in terms of how these domestic affairs compare with, are responded to, or affect the United States...

...economic policy as it affects Brazil...