Brazil today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

The little incident was typical of the wide spread of gentle manners in Brazil; it is here usual enough to see elderly bankers kiss the hands of their parents, but courtesy is not confined to cultured classes. One may in Brazil depend upon a street cleaner as much as upon a senator for chivalrous politeness. A stranger may address any passer-by in a Brazilian street in the most execrable Portuguese and will almost invariably receive serious and kindly attention: it is said that the Brazilian with his agreeably poised attitude to life “laughs at everything except a stranger who is speaking bad Portuguese.”

I do not mean that strangers are treated with special courtesy; good manners are habitual. Brazilian men meeting each other in the street half a dozen times in a day, lift their hats to each other: no one, obliged to step past another closely on a street-car, but will raise his hat and murmur “Com licença!” A woman walking down the narrow streets of the older cities or older parts of the rejuvenated cities will always find her path cleared by men who step aside into the road with hats in their hands. If she happens to be very pretty looks will follow her and whispers may, but in my opinion the ordinary woman with quiet manners is safer in Brazilian towns than in most centres of population in the world, may break all the small rules with impunity and may always depend upon the grave kindness of the Brazilian. People of less punctilious societies are apt to speak with a degree of contempt of “surface politeness,” and to say that they prefer roughness and a good heart; generally this kind of remark is a clumsy apology for boorishness, and as a matter of fact a good heart is quite as likely to exist under a courteous exterior as under a discourteous one; a habit of consideration for others in speech and small actions is without doubt good training for any variety of heart and head. The Brazilian is in his mental attitude an inheritor not only of Latin tradition in general but of French ideas in particular: Paris is his Mecca, French literature and French science and French art the inspirers of his youth; more cosmopolitan than the Portuguese born, because he is in close touch with all Europe as well as with the Americas, quite minus the feeling that makes the Spaniard love bull-fights, the Brazilian has grounds for his claim as the brightest spiritual heir of Latinity. His excellent manners are a part of his heritage.

Apparently, the very considerable additions to the Brazilian population by immigration during the last hundred years have made little difference to Brazilian society; it is true that the Englishman with his tennis and football and his rowing-clubs has introduced and popularized sport, so that today there are thousands of young Brazilians taking part in these pleasures and it is true that the influx of artistic French in the reigns of the two Emperors affected and stimulated sculpture, painting and writing in Brazil; in each case these were entries into Brazilian society, the new element arriving with a recognized status as members of important firms or with a semi-official position. There has been family mingling, many English and French choosing wives from distinguished Brazilian families, and in this way the influence of European ideas frequently has its effect on the education of the children of such unions. To a less noticeable extent almost every nationality is found in Brazilian society, for this is a country which has always welcomed the stranger of distinction, but no race has impressed itself so firmly upon national characteristics as the Franco-Latin. Immigration, properly speaking, the systematic colonization with which São Paulo supplied her coffee lands with labour and Rio Grande and Paraná settled their open spaces, and Minas tried to supplant negro workers, has affected Brazilian social conditions scarcely at all. Generally isolated in wide areas, often with no communication with the outside world except by mule-trail or river until the railway came a few years ago, the organized colonies of Russians, Poles, Basques, Bessarabian Jews, Japanese, Swiss and Germans lived their own lives, retaining perforce the language and customs of the lands from which they came. The Italians, employed on great fazendas, were more in contact with Brazilian life than any other race, and even they keep their own speech together with newly-learned Portuguese, eat Italian food and read Italian-language newspapers printed in Brazil. Not until the development of industry brings the colonies into closer contact with each other and with Brazilian centres of old standing will the Galician and Arab affect any society but of his own race. No attempt has been made, probably wisely, to force these settlers into the Brazilian national communion; they were needed to fill spaces, to bring land into cultivation and develop the wasted resources of an enormous land: they have done Brazil this service, and Brazil in return respects their feelings and traditions. One reason for this lack of interference with the colonies was that Brazil possessed little machinery which could have brought about a marked change: but deliberate policy also entered into the question. It was realized that a change would come about with the passage of years, when the second or third generations grew and mingled in a common society, Brazilians born and bred, and that meanwhile Brazil was too big to fear the effect of these nucleos with their strong retention of foreign loves and habits. Broadminded enough to sympathize with such feelings, the Brazilian knows that no man worth his salt forgets his native land; his idea was expressed by the genial writer, J. M. de Macedo, when, speaking of the French who made fortunes in Brazil and returned with their savings to France, he said: “If it be a sin to love one’s own country better than any other country, then am I a sinner too!” It is in fact because the Brazilian has so keen a devotion to his own beautiful land that he comprehends the home-love of the immigrant.

Class distinction still reigns in Brazil to a certain degree, as may be expected in a land where slavery existed until twenty-eight years ago, and which twenty-seven years ago still had an Emperor and a Court with a retinue of nobles. These nobles retain their titles still, except in cases where formal renunciation was made, but a provision was made at the establishment of the Republic that they should not be inherited. It is an example of the liberal spirit in which the break was made, and the absence of ill-feeling towards the Empire, that Brazil thinks as much of her Commendadores, Conselheiros, Barões, Viscondes and Condes as she does of any newly distinguished bacharel of today. Dom Pedro II gave these titles, very often, in recognition of some special service to Brazilian development, and it is for this reason that, encountering the Conde de Leopoldina, we find him to be an Englishman surnamed Lowndes. When the Princess Isabel (Condessa d’Eu) celebrated her seventieth birthday in the summer of 1916 the Brazilian newspapers printed long notices speaking with appreciation of her regencies over Brazil, and acclaiming her act in freeing the slaves of 1888; a few months previously a monarchical society held meetings in the capital, their sayings and doings were reported in the public press without any excitement, and the trend of editorial comment was, “Well, with the republic in such a muddle, it is no wonder.”

It is needless to say that the restoration of a monarchy in Brazil is quite unthinkable, and that the society’s existence is more interesting than important, but I mention it to show the amused tolerance of the Brazilian towards other people’s opinions. He has a detached, sometimes cynical attitude, believes in frank discussion and the airing of ideas, and together with a markedly democratic habit of life retains a European respect for tradition and authority. In Rio, the intellectual centre of Brazil, the influence of the administration is very strongly felt, and it is the focus of interest and activity: the Brazilian takes a passionate part in politics, criticizes the Government when and where he thinks fit, but will never do anything to undermine the power and prestige of the administration. With but one notable exception the heads of the Brazilian Government have been men of such ability and force of character that they have thoroughly earned the confidence of the thinking classes. From the cultivated caste in Brazil is chiefly drawn the political group: there have been exceptions, as in the case of Pinheiro Machado, but as a rule the reins are in the hands of a distinct social element, descendants of white Portuguese families and frequently men of great intellectual strength. The names of the Visconde de Rio Branco, Conselheiro Rodrigues Alves, João Alfredo and Affonso Penna are but four out of a long list of statesmen of the first rank in Brazil. The ruling classes are almost always great landowners, fazendeiros, and there was a time when sons of such families destined themselves to politics, agriculture or one of the “professions;” today commercial careers are sometimes chosen—perhaps partly because the planter of coffee or sugar is often necessarily a mill owner and shipper as well—as Brazil becomes more industrialized, but although these young men may enter other than the traditional spheres, it is seldom that theirs is invaded from the world of industrialists or commerciantes. The latter are, indeed, largely recruited from the foreign element; shop-keepers as well as commission agents and dealers all down the coast were once largely British and French, but now the energetic Portuguese-born trader, with the keen Italian and Spaniard, and the still more insinuating Syrian, has absorbed a marked proportion of the retail business.

Below the commercial element comes that of labour, stratum of entirely different composition; it differs too in varying localities, from that of the south, where slavery tailed off in São Paulo, never penetrating the more southerly states, and where white labour of immigrant origin performs field work, to the central section where the mestizo (mixed blood) of white and Indian or, about Bahia and Pernambuco, white and negro, blood is the worker; in and near Bahia itself thousands of pure-blood negroes or mulattos form the labouring class, to the almost total exclusion of any other. Farther north the negro element fades out and the Indian mixture predominates in a wiry strain which furnishes all the labour of the Amazon valley.

Upon this great mass of mixed-blood labourers the educational systems of Brazil make a certain if slow impression. Intelligent and apt, docile if conciliated and stubborn if crossed, the mestizo has some excellent qualities; the indolence of which he is often accused is sometimes want of direction, and sometimes the result of ill-health in certain regions, disappearing when the enervating malaria and ankylostomiasis are conquered, exactly as in the South of the United States where the same troubles are common. With better sanitation in the crowded warm regions, and persistence in good schooling, the brasileiro of the labouring classes would not need supplanting with introduced immigrants. Between him and the legislator there is a great gulf fixed; its existence might be dangerous were not the habit of the Brazilian gentle; it can be bridged only by education. “We have no organization for the expression of popular opinion,” declared a Brazilian writer recently. “The statesman, the government official, the legislator, the administrator has to be a kind of powerful Jehovah, capable of creating worlds out of nothing ... unless the bachelor (bacharel—“doctor”) president, the bachelor governor, the bachelor minister or the bachelor deputy should sally forth through Brazil (saiam por esses Brazis afóra), over mountains and valleys, to enquire at the window of every farm, at the door of every store, at the entrance of each factory, in each lacemaker’s shop and at each blacksmith’s forge, what Agriculture, Commerce, Industry and the Proletariat wish for their practical and effective betterment....” At least it can never be said that the faults and lapses of Brazil are not understood and discussed by her own educated classes; there is no country where self-criticism is more hearty. During the early part of 1916 a party of specialists in tropical maladies from the Rockefeller Institute passed through Brazil and made some investigations; one of the weeklies of Rio famous for its cartoons and skits on public affairs remarked that the visitors need not have come to Brazil to study malaria—they would find that in a hundred places: they should study the troubles that were really peculiar to Brazil. It gave an illustrated list: among the items was the “national long tongue”—we talk too much; another was bacharelismo—everyone in Brazil wants to be a “Doctor” of medicine or law or philosophy. It is a disease not altogether limited to Brazil, despite the Malho.

Cartoons in Brazil have a point of interest in addition to their wit, in the presentment of a national figure, “Zé (José) Povo.” Zé Povo is “the people,” quite distinct from the dignified figure of the República, a lady in draperies crowned with the Phrygian cap. Zé is the man in the street who stands by and makes acid comments; he has no counterpart in North American or English journals, but speaks his mind much as “Liborio” does in the Cuban humorous-political papers. No one can say that the press is not free in Brazil.

Industrial expansion in Brazil will be the great amalgamator of the grades and divisions of the population; colonists of foreign origin cannot continue to live in separate nests, commercial fortunes will blend society, and the expansion of agriculture will sooner or later mean the evolution of the sertanejo into a modernized, trading farmer; as the hills are opened for metals and the forests are entered for hardwoods and dyes and latex, the millions of Indians of the interior must be brought into line, or, retreating, eventually die out—the worst solution of his case and probably an unnecessary one. But at the present day there are many distinct types among Brazilian populations, and of them that of the sertanejo, the farmer of the interior, the sertão, is not the least interesting. Here on the wide uplands of the plateau he lives very much as Isaac lived, his world about him, his home, servants and herds his chief interests; simple, philosophic, intensely hospitable although reserved and proud, he makes little money but by his cattle, and wants little. His bodily needs are few, his furnishings of the simplest; his food is mainly the inevitable farinha de mandioca, milk products, beans (feijão) and eggs and carne. He may be the owner of great expanses of land, but he will seldom sell or divide it and there is no other life that he will endure and live. In touch with the open sky, the broad horizon before him, the sertanejo is of a class apart; his is a simple and a dignified figure.

Brought to town, through acquisition of money or the wishes of his womenfolk, the farmer of the interior is a peg for many witticisms of the townsman; he is a “caipira,” a countryman, a hayseed, and endless amusement is obtained at his expense. One of the Rio weeklies, the Careta, once ran a series of illustrated adventures of such a farmer who is supposed to come to Rio de Janeiro on a visit with his wife and pretty daughter, and who takes in the “sights” of the Capital from the countryman’s angle.