Patriarchal Society

     RURAL and patriarchal society in Brazil during the colonial period, from the early sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth, tended to an equilibrium, or rather to what modern sociologists call an "accommodation," between masters and slaves. The plantation house - casa-grande - supplemented by the slave quarters - senzala - was a good example of such an accommodation. It arose, to a large extent, through the fact that many Portuguese settlers came to their Brazilian adventure without white women, taking their mistresses, or even wives, from Indian tribes. In some cases these were princesses, like the Indian wife of Jeronimo de Albuquerque, a Portuguese of noble birth who came to Brazil early in the sixteenth century with his brother-in-law Duarte Coelho, feudal lord of Pernambuco.

     From the end of the colonial period, mulattoes began to appear in the Brazilian social scene as an important element of differentiation. Most of the mulattoes who then became prominent were the sons of Portuguese men of the socially and eugenically best type and of African women of the most attractive kind - culturally and aesthetically. This was because beautiful African women began to compete with Indian women as mistresses or wives of those wealthy or powerful Portuguese settlers, or of their descendants born in Brazil, who were not too strict in their social prejudices.

     The ever-increasing importance of cities in Brazil, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the shrinking of some of the old, isolated plantation houses into suburban buildings, the breaking-up of the slave quarters into huts of freed blacks in the cities and of fugitive slaves in the bush (a phenomenon more widespread later, during the abolition campaign, in the eighties), disrupted the old equilibrium which existed when the plantation master lorded it over all other elements in Brazilian society, even over the viceroys and bishops. And the rise of large towns in Brazil began to make it easier for Brazilians of mixed blood to rise politically.

     Social prestige began to develop around other elements than the plantation lords, who were generally white or quasi-white: elements derived from bourgeois Europe, whence came new habits opposed to those of that rural and patriarchal life most characteristically Brazilian. Among such were liberalism, tea, cabinet government, beer, British shoes, wheat bread, clothes of sombre hue, a taste for the theatre instead of the church. The four-wheel carriage began to displace the horse or the Asiatic sedan chair, the walking-cane and the umbrella to take the place of the military sword of "captains" and "sergeant-majors" - the usual titles of the old rural lords. Such new symbols gradually became the emblems of authority of a new aristocracy or a new nobility: that of the university graduates and lawyers.

     The new values were fully accepted mainly by the young men with academic training, who were legitimate or illegitimate sons of the plantation or sugar-mill owners, and who had returned from Coimbra, Montpellier, Paris, England, Germany, where they had gone to study the liberal arts, law, or medicine through the influence of some liberal and cosmopolitan uncle or other relation. Other university graduates were the sons of the new bourgeoisie of the cities: children or grandchildren of pedlars or small merchants. These youths, given prestige by their European education, returned from Europe to Brazil as the social equals of the sons of the oldest and most powerful families of landowners.

     Like the white youth of humble origin, the mulatto boys educated in Europe proved the intellectual and social equals and superiors of the legitimate sons of the old aristocracy. This was true in part owing to a more complete acceptance of European values, and in part to the peculiar charm that the half-breed often seems to possess for the other sex. Some of them were illegitimate children of great white lords, and had the small hands and aristocratic feet of their fathers. Not a few were the illegitimate descendants not only of aristocratic lords of plantations, or princes of commerce in such important towns of colonial Brazil as Salvador (capital city of Bahia and formerly the capital of colonial Brazil) and Rio de Janeiro, but of equally aristocratic African women. For one should not forget that a considerable number of Muslim Negroes were imported into Brazil - men and women considerably more refined than most black slaves. Indeed, some of these were culturally superior to some of their European and Catholic masters. More than one foreigner was surprised to find that the leading French bookseller of the Empire's capital had among his customers Negroes, ostensibly Christian but actually Muslim, who imported expensive copies of their sacred books for secret study. Some maintained schools, and the Muslim Negroes of Bahia had mutualaid societies, through which a number of slaves were liberated.

     In the province of Minas Geraes, too, the slaves had such mutual-aid societies. The American, Ewbank, while in Brazil (1845-6), once dined with a Bahian planter, who told him that the slaves of Salvador preserved their own language, organised clubs, and nurtured revolutionary schemes which their Pernambuco brethren repeatedly attempted to carry out; also that some Bahian slaves were able to "write Arabic fluently" and were "vastly superior to their masters". I have been fortunate in finding evidence confirming what Ewbank was told and proving that, besides the merely strong slaves good only for field work, many culturally advanced Negroes were brought to Brazil: almost certainly more than in any other American colony. The presence of culturally advanced and aesthetically attractive Negroes from areas influenced by Muslin civilisation explains why in Brazil, probably more commonly than in any other American colony, beautiful Negresses became the mistresses of wealthy and prominent Portuguese merchants in Bahia and Ouro Preto, Rio and Recife. Some of them surpassed their white or Amerindian rivals in prestige. In Minas Geraes more than one became rich, and their daughters married socially important young men, European or Brazilian white. One such was Jacintha de Siqueira, whom I found named in an interesting genealogical document in some family archives of that region. Many a Brazilian, now prominent in political or professional life, has her blood in his veins.

     Negroes are now rapidly disappearing in Brazil, merging into the white stock; in some areas the tendency seems to be towards the stabilisation of mixed-bloods in a new ethnic type, similar to the Polynesian. Though this tendency is usually found among peasants and immigrants, there have been other Jacinthas in the history of aristocratic Brazilian families, though not many. Ewbank wrote, in the book already quoted on Brazil, at the beginning of the reign of Pedro II: "I have passed black ladies in silks and jewellry, with male slaves in livery behind them. To-day one rode past in her carriage, accompanied by a liveried footman and a coachman. Several have white husbands. The first doctor of the city is a coloured man; so is the President of the Province". And he describes the Viscountess of C - as "tinged".

     There has been, and still is, social distance between different groups of the population. But social distance is - more truly today than in the colonial age or during the Empire, when slavery was central in the social structure - the result of class consciousness, rather than of race or colour prejudice. Since the Brazilian attitude is one of large tolerance towards people who have African blood but who can pass as white, nothing is more expressive than the popular saying: "Anyone who escapes being an evident Negro is white". Sir Richard Burton observed in Imperial Brazil that "here, all men, especially free men, who are not black, are white: and often a man is officially white, but naturally almost a Negro. This is directly opposed to the system in the United States, where all men who are not unmixed white are black". Visiting Brazil half a century later Bryce included it among the countries where the distinction between the races is a distinction "of rank or class rather than of colours".

     Even during colonial days, if a person was politically or socially important the fact that his or her ethnic past had direct contact with Africa was robbed of significance by present position: he or she passed for white. I have examined this Brazilian process of sociological "Aryanisation" in more than one book, in which the Brazilian solution of the problems arising from race contact is contrasted with other solutions and is explained in the light of the peculiar social and cultural experience of the Portuguese as a transition people between Europe and Africa.

Cap-and-gown Aristocracy

     The rise of quasi-white or coloured lawyers and doctors educated in Europe was rapid in both social and political circles. The beginning of the reign of Dom Pedro II - 1840 - marks, among other alterations in the social and cultural life of Brazil, the birth of a juridical or legal aristocracy in the country, until then governed more by the common sense of old men than by the juridical science or learning of university men. It is true that with the first Emperor of Brazil, Pedro I - who embodied the traits of a plantation owner's reckless son - the tradition of the "respectable age", or the absolute prestige of the old men, had been, in part, destroyed for the Brazilian. Such a tradition had already been jeopardised by the appointment of colonial governors of scarcely more than twenty years of age, sent to Brazil by the Metropolis to irritate the powerful, but aged, landowners. But it was under Pedro II that the new vogue - that of the young lawyer or university man as the ideal administrator - was systematised.

     The lawyers, university graduates, and doctors of medicine who returned from Coimbra, Paris, England, Germany and, later, those who were educated in Brazil - Olinda, São Paulo, Bahia, where the Brazilian Government established schools of law and medicine - brought to public life, with the relish of their youth, the latest English ideas and the latest French fashions. They undermined the prestige of their fathers and grandfathers and established, by contrast, their superiority over the old country gentlemen. This was done by the white as well as by the quasi-white and coloured new men: cap-and-gown aristocrats. The Emperor Dom Pedro II, a pedantic boy at the time, attracted the sympathy and support of young men returned from abroad with a European education, or educated in those new schools in Brazil. Dom Pedro II delighted in presiding, with an air of European superiority, over cabinets of elderly country gentlemen, who knew only the Latin and Portuguese Classics taught them by priests. Some of these were men of profound good sense, but without any European experience. And it was principally the new French and English culture or learning that gave one prestige.

     But the rise of lawyers and academic men in Brazil did not begin with Pedro II. While the country was still a plantation colony, with Indians, wild-eyed, looking at the priests saying holy mass, with snakes crawling around the settlements, the Jesuits had already given Brazil its first bachelors of art, and its first imitation masters of art.

     During the seventeenth century, thanks to the efforts of the Jesuits and their Latin courses, Brazil had produced bachelors of arts and scholars like Gregorio de Mattos and his brother Eusebio; like Rocha Pitta and Botelho de Oliveira. Some of them, it is true, completed their studies in Europe, but it was in Bahia itself, under the old priests, that they all began the study of the humanities. From the very beginning, indeed, academic learning was a mark of distinction in Brazil. What happened in the latter part of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth was that academic learning, more than before, became the supreme social distinction and gave Brazilians of humble origin, or with African blood, the opportunity to rise socially and politically.

     The lawyer, particularly, began to assert himself in the political and social life of the colony. Gonzaga, Claudio, the two Alvarengas, Basilio da Gama reflect the increasing prestige of this profession in the colonial society of the end of the eighteenth century, and mark the more open intervention of the scholar or of the cleric in Luso-Brazilian politics.

Youth and Social and Political Reform

     Notwithstanding the fact that they were young and prone to sensualism of the body as well as to excesses of the mind, bachelors of arts and lawyers, educated in Europe or according to the new theories and methods, became the censors of their elders' sexual excesses, which in Brazil were a substitute, especially in the plantations, for more refined tastes or interests of an intellectual nature. When these young men turned patriots they became ardent nationalists; and some even laid down their lives in political martyrdom, like the students of a Russian novel. Some were reabsorbed again by the native environment; but the majority, once the feeling of disgust with colonial habits had become spent or attenuated, became a creative element of differentiation and of social and political reform.

     The "Minas Insurrection" was a revolution of university men and liberal Catholic priests. So also were the two revolutions in Pernambuco in 1817 and 1824, and the so-called Tailors' Revolution, in Bahia. In most of those liberal movements the leaders were Brazilian who had been educated under the influence of French or English ideas, and some of the most prominent leaders were mestizos.

     It seems that mestizos felt, more than others, the necessity of a better social adjustment that might offer the new aristocracy greater responsibility in the political management of the country. Very characteristic of this was what Arruda Camara, a Brazilian revolutionary leader of 1817, had to say about race-mixture. He thought that in Brazil there should be no racial or colour discrimination. He never forgot that Brazil was a country already full of mulattoes and brown-skins or mestizos of African and Indian. To him, a break-away from Portugal should not be merely political, but should mean the social reconstruction of Brazilian society, with a better adjustment between masters and oppressed, between white and coloured.

     But white there were graduates of European universities who reconciled their knowledge of European theories with political or social realism, others exaggerated pure theory or doctrine. They were simply theoretical or merely bookish, imagining that they were dealing not with a unique Brazil, vastly differentiated from Europe by its ethnic composition and social structure, but with a European country.

     For such reformers, all that Brazil needed was to import some of the then new liberal European institutions. The realistic ones, however, thought that Brazil, stimulated by liberal Europe and by the United States, should develop her own democratic institutions or styles. One of these should be a racial democracy such as neither Europe nor the United States were then prepared to accept.

     In colonial Brazil there had been a few examples of mulattoes reaching important political or military positions. But those few who had occupied such exalted posts were officially, white and had won their promotions under exceptional circumstances, such as extraordinary courage in action or heroism under fire, during the Brazilian wars against the Dutch invasion. When Koster, a British merchant who travelled in Brazil in the early nineteenth century, was in Pernambuco, he asked a certain captain-major whom he knew if he was a mulatto - which he was, most clearly; instead of being answered in the affirmative he was in turn asked if it was possible for a captain-major to be a mulatto?

     But such were exceptional cases. There were mestizos in colonial Brazil who felt that they were suffering discrimination on account of their colour or race - which helps to explain the presence of intellectual mestizos or mulattoes in revolutionary movements, apparently only political, but really more social than political.

Literature, Art, and Racial Equality

     Even literary romanticism in Brazil had a character of its own on account of this craving for ethnic democracy or racial equality. In some cases it seems to have been less the expression of revolutionary individuals, like the European romantic writers, than that of half-breeds, feeling, like half-sexed individuals, the social, and perhaps also psychological, distance between themselves and the pure race or the sex assertedly masculine. That is also what strikes one on looking at the works of the "Aleijadinho" - the mulatto and crippled dwarf who sculptured some of the churches of Minas, in the interior of Brazil, during the eighteenth century, and who is considered to-day a genius in his art. In him the sense of revolt went farther. It was not only social. It was anti-academic and anti-European. In this ailing mulatto, socially separated from the white ruling class not only by his colour and origin but also by the disease that slowly wasted his body, making him only the sad remnant of a man and of a male, resentment took on an expression of social revolt, the urge of an oppressed sub-race for vengeance, or unsatisfied sex. In the works of this remarkable Brazilian mulatto sculptor of the eighteenth century, the figures of the "whites", of the "masters", of the "Roman captains" which he carved for churches, appear deformed, not so much out of devotion to our Lord Jesus Christ and of religious hatred for His enemies, but rather because of the sculptor's resentful anger for being himself a mulatto and an ailing cripple; his revolt against the white rulers of the colony, one of whom he pictured or rather caricatured as a terribly ugly figure, exaggerating chiefly the nose - the outstanding point of somatic or plastic contrast between oppressor and oppressed. Further evidence of this clearly Brazilian mestizos sentiment during the colonial period is seen in the popular arts of Brazil. Especially in the music. Through the mulatto, Brazilian music has gained an expression of its own and not only academic distinction - according to European conventions - as it did with Gomes, the composer, who was Negroid.

     Similarly, the Brazilian cuisine, so un-European in its more characteristic national dishes, is a product of these same influences. Both music and culinary art contributed to ethnic or racial democracy in Brazil, for African, and to a certain extent Indian, contributions began to be accepted by all Brazilians as Brazilian values, and not as Negro music or African or Indian art.

     Among Brazilians, the mulatto type rose socially very often through the prestige of superior physical beauty or through the sexual and aesthetic attraction felt by white men for the coloured or mixed woman. It was not only a sexual victory of mixed over pure types, but also an aesthetic victory. This aspect of race amalgamation in Brazil should nor be underestimated. It is important.

     One could summarise the various ways through which Negroes and their descendants rose socially and politically in Brazil as follows: (1) as mistresses and, in a few cases, as wives of important sugar planters or sugar merchants, becoming, as such, rivals or social equals of Indian and white ladies; (2) through exceptional military services and remarkable acts of bravery in war against the Dutch and other invaders of colonial Portuguese America; (3) through academic training and distinction as scholars, particularly as lawyers, in a period when there was a transference or change of power from the hands of the old planters and military leaders to a new cap-and-gown aristocracy of lawyers and intellectuals; (4) through exceptional ability and distinction as technicians, engineers, artists, sculptors, painters, musicians, poets.

     What is said here of Negroes and their descendents might be said not only of descendents of Indians - for whom there was always in Brazil a sentimental partiality, as if it were a matter of pride to have in one's veins some of the blood of "noble savages" such as the "real Brazilians"- but of Jews and their descendants. A number of Brazilians with Indian blood became prominent in Brazilian life - like João Alfredo, one of the ablest Prime Ministers during the Empire - more than one Negroid Brazilian attained high position during the Monarchy. After the establishment of the Republic at least one of these became President, having married a white Brazilian lady of aristocratic family. A descendant of Jews was, under the Republic, a competent and highly respected Minister of Finance and almost became President of the Republic. The "almost" was not due to the fact that he had Jewish blood but to mere political circumstances, independent of his ethnic origin.

The Nineteenth Century

     As Italian colonists began to come to Brazil in large numbers during the nineteenth century it was found that the typical Italian immigrant, just as the typical Portuguese immigrant, felt no sexual repugnance for Negro women. On the contrary; they, too, seem to have found in them some peculiar sexual and aesthetic charm. And, what is more important, these women represented considerable economic value, especially those known as "Minas". Highly prized as washerwomen, as cooks, as cake and sweet makers, as makers of rag dolls, they were capable of helping efficiently the poor immigrants in their struggling years. The Portuguese and Italian immigrants, so numerous in Brazilian towns in the nineteenth century, became great breeders of mulattoes. Even the Germans and the English, when residents in large Brazilian cities during the same period, often married coloured girls or took Negresses as their mistresses, thus contributing to race amalgamation.

     The most striking characteristic of the Brazilian social environment of to-day, taken as a whole - for there are areas of almost pure German or Polish or Italian or Japanese immigration - seems to be reciprocity between the different racial elements and cultural values, through amalgamation. The European, the Negro, and the Indian mix their values and their blood. A sort of active give and take - the one does not try to supplant the other violently.

Race Relations in Modern Brazil

     Perhaps in no other country of such size as Brazil will the native of the extreme north - of Para, let us say, where the population is largely Indian, or of Bahia, where Negro blood is prominent - feel so much at home in the extreme south - where the population is predominantly white or quasi-white - or will he find so many facilities for social and political advancement. Hundreds of lawyers and medical doctors from the northern States, many of them light mulattoes or mestizos, have had successful political careers in Rio Grande do Sul , Paraná and São Paulo - States with large German or Italian populations - attaining to the governorship of these States or representing them in Congress, or else becoming the heads of important hospitals, schools, and public services. Perhaps in no other country is it possible for one to rise or pass more rapidly from one class to another, or from one race do another, as in modern Brazil.

     Juliano Moreira, the famous specialist in mental diseases, was the son of a Negress who sold sweets in the street. Luiz Gama was the son of a simple slave woman. The Negro Rebouças, who is said to have danced a quadrille in one of the court balls with the fair Princess Isabel, was also a descendant of Africans.

     Under the monarchial regime, which lasted in Brazil from her political independence in 1822 to 1889, any Brazilian, no matter what his origin, his race, his colour, could become Prime Minister and lead the country; Negroes or mulattoes like Rebouças and Saldanha Marinho, though of humble birth, became prominent in political life. Rebouças was not only a man respected by Caucasian Brazilians for his personal virtues, his honesty, and his intelligence, but became one of the closet friends of the Emperor himself. It was Rebouças who once said that the numerous Brazilian mulattoes had special reasons to support the monarchy, since it gave them as "equality of political rights" that was not to be found in any other Republic of the continent.

     The late Joaquim Nabuco, for some time Brazilian representative in London and later ambassador to Washington, who was for many years after the establishment of the Republic in Brazil a loyal and sincere Monarchist, was asked once - he had been in his youth a leading abolitionist and a champion of the cause of equality of civil rights for all Brazilians - if he thought that it would be possible to harmonise the feeling for equality, so strong among "Brazilians of mixed race ", with devotion for the monarchical form of government. Nabuco - who, by the way, was not a Brazilian of mixed blood (so far as African blood is concerned) but a predominantly Caucasian one and the descendant of an old aristocratic family of Pernambuco - at once made the point that the monarchy in Brazil had been a regime of equal political and social rights for all, the differences of race or colour being entirely, or almost entirely, disregarded in that "crowned democracy". But what about the United States of America? In the United States of America, he pointed out, even if the Negro was a Frederick Douglas he was subject to a series of humiliating restrictions.

     The fact is that Brazil developed a social democracy where there is practically no restriction against a man on account of his birth or his blood; and such a development took place under a monarchical form of government whose tradition has not lost its essential value for thoughtful and sensible Brazilians. By this one means, not that those Brazilians who are thoughtful and sensible are monarchists to-day and wish to have a throne re-established in Rio de Janeiro with a descendant of Dom Pedro II as king or emperor, but that they are sceptical about the form, the mere form of government, as something vital for the social well-being and the guarantee of individual liberty in their country.

     During the Republic - established in Brazil in 1889 - it was perfectly natural for Brazilians to see, a few years, ago, Nilo Peçanha, a mulatto of very humble origin, follow Lauro Müller, the blue-eyed and purely "Aryan" son of a poor German colonist of Santa Catharina (Southern Brazil) as Secretary os State. Some of the most capable political leaders of Brazil since 1889 have been Negroid, though no one thinks of them as being Negroes or Africans but only as Brazilians. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Brazil has no "African minority", but Brazilians are of various origins; in some the European or Indian strain predominates, and in others the African. With the Brazilian mulatto, the quadroon, the octoroon, and with the cafuso these possibilities for social improvement did not permit the development of that consciousness of being a Negro which exists in the United States even in individuals of distant African blood and physical characteristics clearly acceptable do Graeco-Roman and Nordic aesthetic standards. In general the feeling of being a Negro, among us, has been restricted to the Negro who is almost pure-bred, or to the dark mulattoes of physical characteristics most removed form the above-mentioned standards and who; because of their inferior economic situation or education , have remained nearer - at times below - the condition of slaves who existed in Brazil until 1889. Thus they are more conscious of class than of race. They are more a Negro class than a Negro race. This point was a appreciated by James Bryce when he visited Brazil early in the twentieth century. Some of his remarks on race amalgamation among Brazilians were adequate and penetrating and should be read by all modern students of the subject.

     On the other hand one finds whites in Brazil, near-whites, and even blonds, who have gone down in the social scale instead of keeping their original position. They live in African - or Indian - like palm huts like the majority of Negroes, mulattoes, and mestizos; they eat with their fingers out of bowls, like the Negroes and Indians; they go about barefooted and sleep in hammocks or beds made of coconut palm-leaves; their children go about naked; their wives give preference, to red dresses like Indian and Negro women; both men and women prefer to consult the quacks and drink their beverages rather than to take the advice and medicine of doctors; others prefer the African "wizard" to the Catholic priest. All this does not seem to indicate that culture and race are inseparable.

     As I have pointed out elsewhere, the experiment in ethnic and cultural bi-continentalism begun in Portugal centuries ago took a new dimension in Brazil; three races and cultures are fused under conditions which, broadly speaking, are socially democratic, though as yet productive of only a very imperfect social democracy, defective both in its economic basis and in its political forms. All imperfections admitted, however, Brazil stands to-day as a community from whose experiment in miscegenation other communities may profit. Probably in no other complex modern community are problems of race relations being solved in a more democratic or Christian way than in Portuguese America. And Brazil's experiment does not indicate that miscegenation leads to degeneration.

     Professor Charles R. Stockard's conclusions - that "mongrelisation among widely different human stocks has very probable caused the degradation and even the elimination of certain groups"; that "the extinction of several ancient stocks has apparently followed very closely the extensive absorption of alien slaves"; and that "if one considers the histories of some of the South European and Asia Minor countries from a strictly biological and genetic point of view, a very definite correlation between the amalgamation of the whites and the Negroid slaves and the loss of intellectual and social power will be found"- do not obtain their best support in the Luso-Brazilian experience. It is true that Portugal has not to-day the intellectual and social power that it had four centuries ago; but this is also true of "Aryan" Holland and "Aryan" Denmark. According to Professor Stockard's theory, Brazil, where miscegenation proceeded more freely than in Portugal or Spain, should be vastly inferior in intellectual and social power, not only to Portugal, but to quasi-white South American nations like Argentina and Chile. Objective studies of Latin American national or regional variety in achievement and cultural development do not seem to confirm the inferiority of mestizo Brazil to its more "Aryan" neighbours. It is in Brazil and not in the more "Aryan" countries of Latin America that one finds to-day the most vigorously creative group of young architects, young painters, and young composers of Latim America and perhaps of the entire American continent; and in mestizo Brazil are the most creative group of medical scientists engaged in the study of the so-called tropical diseases and of problems peculiar to tropical areas. Brazil is universally known for the work of scientists like Cruz, Chagas, Fontes, Roquette Pinto, Almeida, Silva Mello, Amaral, Vital Brazil, and Lins. The successful experiments of Brazilian investigators (some of them mestizo) with anti-venom serum to nullify the effects of poisonous snakes save many lives in many countries every year.

     Another fact that seems to refute those who emphatically generalise on the social and intellectual effects of what they call "mongrelisation" is that for years the Brazilian areas producing the largest number of political leaders and men of literary, scientific, and artistic talent have been the areas notable for the extension and intensity race amalgamation and cultural interpenetration: the north (including Bahia and Sergipe), Rio de Janeiro, Minas Geraes, and São Paulo. During the Empire, Bahia was known as the "Brazilian Virginia" because most of the Cabinet presidents came from that province. Some of the Cabinet presidents of the Brazilian Empire, though their formal behaviour was like that of members of the British Parliament, were men with Negro blood. And though the qualities of the Brazilian statesmen during the Empire period was imitative rather than creative, some of them were remarkable for their political talent as well as for their tact and ability as diplomats.

     As an Empire, Brazil was a State whose stability and peace contrasted with the turbulent political life of most of the Latin American lands. Even then it was ruled by an aristocracy democratic enough to allow men with Negro blood to become its members, though it remained largely white or quasi-white in its composition. The Republican period, however, has seen the increasing rise to political power, and to intellectual, industrial, and acclesiastical leadership, of Brazilians of African origin. As a political system the Republic established in Brazil in 1889 remained, as the Empire had been, more imitative than creative. Honesty among public men decreased; there was also a decrease in the elegance and dignity that had become characteristic of the Brazilian Parliament in the days of Dom Pedro II. On the other hand, there was an increase in efficiency in practical matters: some of the new political leaders were notable for the ability they displayed in dealing with economic and sanitary problems, which had been somewhat neglected by the Empire. And a few surrounded themselves with scientists and engineers who began to do really creative work.

     It was not until the establishment of the Republic that a series of courageous projects - for harbours and wharves, waterworks, sanitation schemes, and for the paving, draining, and beautifying of cities - began to develop in Brazil, along with plans for a more efficient organisation of coffee production. Brazil fell in love with material progress. In most of these plans one can detect the dynamic impatience of the Brazilians who entered public life with the 1889 Republic: their eagerness to make their country modern, progressive, different from Portugal, different from what it had been in colonial or monarchical days.

     Of the new Republican leaders a considerable number were mixed-bloods, men of modest rather than of aristocratic origin. They seem to have made of the Republican regime an expression of their own eagerness for a new and better social status. This may explain the political importance assumed by the army in the new regime. In contrast to the navy, which took special pride in having as officers only Caucasian whites or Indo-Caucasians and sons of aristocratic or wealthy bourgeois families; and in contrast also to the clergy, which during the Empire was chiefly white and aristocratic or bourgeois, the Brazilian army started developing into a socially and ethnically democratic organisation, with a number of officers of very modest social origin and some with considerable Indian and Negro blood in their veins. These men assumed an active and dynamic part in the nation's political life. When the Brazilian plantation system began to disintegrate, a disintegration that proceeded rapidly after the abolition of slavery (one year before the founding of the Republic in 1889), the army and the Church remained the only two organised groups in the country. Of the two the army was the more liberal, progressive, and democratic; the Church, the more conservative, though seldom illiberal or violently opposed to social reform.

     Not a few of the younger army officers had come under the influence of the Positivism of Comte, and the most enthusiastic of them were convinced that here they had not a solution, but the solution, of all Brazilian problems. Another group of Republican idealists - a civilian one - were just as convinced, on the basis of what political, juridical, and financial knowledge they had gained from their reading of Anglo-American authors, that a federal and democratic constitution copied from that of the United States would solve all Brazilian troubles.

     Between these two groups of extreme ideologues there were Republican leaders whose method was the British one of dealing with each problem as it presented itself, rather than according to a rigid philosophical system. Among this third group of new and realistic leaders there were, as in the two others, Negroid Brazilians remarkable for their eagerness to rise to power as well as for their intellectual ability and personal charm - men like Francisco Glicerio and Nilo Peçanha - just as there were descendants of European non-Portuguese immigrants who had arrived in Brazil as peasants or artisans - men like Lauro Müller, son of a German, and Paulo Frontin, son of a Frenchman. Psychologically and sociologically they were in the same boat: eager to rise socially through a successful political career as leaders of the new regime in Brazil.

     Most Anglo-Saxons who have lived among real Brazilians for a long time have learned to forget their prejudice against Negroes and mestizos. Some have had to come into contact with Brazilian senators or prominent business leaders or professional men not purely white: mixed-blood and Negro, not only white and Amerindian, though the commonest mixture in São Paulo has been the white-Amerindian. This is the dominant mixture at the base of the proud old aristocracy of that State, as well as of other regions of Brazil, where it is still a matter of pride for an old family to have among its ancestors an Indian, generally idealised as a hero of the wars against the French or the Dutch, who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried to conquer parts of Brazil, admired as a fighter against the Portuguese, or honoured as a princess the beautiful daughter of some powerful Indian chief. The first Cardinal of Latin America, Arcoverde, was the descendant of a Pernambuco Indian princess of the sixteenth century: a Brazilian Pocahontas. He was proud of his Amerindian blood and he was also insistent on the need, for Brazil, of a native clergy; that is, of a clergy consisting principally of men born in Brazil or integrated into Brazilian life, instead of one made up entirely of foreign priests and monks.

     Such was the extent of Indianism in Brazil, not only in literature but in daily life, that, when Brazil separated from Portugal and there was widespread feeling against any Portuguese attempt at reconquest, a considerable number of distinguished Brazilian families had their family names changed to Amerindian names.

     On summarising the history and the present situation of race amalgamation in Brazil one might say that democracy and aristocracy have combined in this country to give to individuals of ability or talent, regardless of their racial origin, almost equal opportunities to rise, and, at the same time, to select form individuals of different racial origins those who best embody Brazilian traditions and ideas of "men and women of quality" (or "gentlemen" and "ladies", as an Englishman could say), and to invest them with honour. This explains why Brazil, since the days of the Empire, has had coloured individuals in some of the highest positions, the diplomatic service and the navy being two of the relative exceptions to this rule.

     This tendency to recognise the merit of individuals regardless of race prejudices, which, however, have existed and still exist in Brazil though in a much less violent form than in the United States, was consistently favoured by most of the Portuguese kings and statesmen during the colonial period, and afterwards by Brazilian statesmen and the Emperor Dom Pedro II. There have been "Aryanists" among them, but they have been rare.

     This, in general, is the explanation of the presence not only of Indian blood - a matter of pride and not of shame in Brazil - but of African, in a society at once so democratic and so aristocratic as the Brazilian: in some respects probably the most aristocratic society of the New World, with its monarchical traditions still cultivated in a social or sentimental way by many Brazilians, and with the survivors of the old royal family still living in Rio. It is true that African blood is present or prominent among socially influential Brazilians only in its aesthetically most attractive form. Therefore Brazilian society has been democratic through the possibility of sudden rises to high levels of persons of modest origin or with the blood of the dominated races in their veins, and aristocratic in its form or in its resemblance to the social framework of the monarchy, within some of those very persons were ennobled with the titles of captain-general, baron, viscount, and so on. To be sure, those rises met resistance from colour and race, and particularly class prejudices on the part of most of the oldest and most deeply aristocratic groups. But they were accomplished. The predominant tendency in Brazil, so far as races are concerned, is towards their equality.

     This has made a Brazilian publicist say: "Brazilian nationalism does not foster race prejudice; when it fosters it, it will cease to be Brazilian". And this rule was followed in Brazil even by the quasi-Fascist Vargas regime (1937-45). Only Communist agitators - who probably act independently of their Party - have recently stimulated among Brazilians race hatred or hostility of coloured against white. But so far, the very un-Brazilian activities of these agitators have met with little success.

Race and Education

     More than sixty years ago a distinguished foreigner witnessed the graduation ceremony at one of the most important State schools of Rio de Janeiro. The Emperor, as patron of all kinds of education, was present, and the young graduates received from him - then an old man with a long, patriarchal beard - their diplomas and medals. Two aspects of the ceremony made a particularly deep impression upon the foreign visitor, who may be taken as representative of the orthodox bourgeois conventions then prevailing in Western Europe and the East of the United States. First, the variety of dress among the audience: though the students were uniformly and solemnly dressed for the ceremony, some of the ladies were in ball-dress and attended by gentlemen in full evening dress, while others were in ordinary afternoon costume. But apparently, no one felt embarrassed or out of place.

     Secondly, by the variety of complexion among the same audience: a variety ranging from the "pale white" to "the blackest black of the Negroes". All were mixed together "in terms of the most perfect equality". And this was true of students as well as of their relatives and other persons present, men and women of diverse social rank and ethnic origin.

     All this was even then typical of an audience at a Brazilian school ceremony. For since colonial days Brazilian schools were mixed schools, though more so in regard to the complexion of their students and even of their teachers.

     Foreign travellers also noticed that Indians, browns, mulattoes, and even Negroes were not systematically kept out of schools in Brazil, simply on account of their colour or race. Some were admitted to the clergy - then so socially and intellectually important - and to theological schools, or sent to Portugal do study at Coimbra University, or to Northern Europe to study at French, German, and British schools.

     It is true that there were cases of race discrimination in schools in the seventeenth century; the Jesuits were severely criticised by the King of Portugal himself on account of race discrimination against brown and Negro youths in their schools. There were fashionable schools in Brazil, where prejudices of caste more than of race caused headmasters to keep certain youths from attending classes and mixing with the socially and ethnically select. But such schools were the exception rather than the rule. The tendency in Brazil has been, since remote days, to open secondary and professional education to all intelligent youth and not only to the rich, the socially important, and the purely white, though most of the students in such schools, even to-day, come from the well-to-do part of the population and not from the poor, who are, in their majority, the black or the dark. Economic conditions rather than race prejudice seem to be the explanation for this.

     With the establishment of a Republic, in 1889, the democratic character of is secondary and professional education became even more marked than before, though one should always remember that the Monarchy - or rather Dom Pedro II, who reigned here from 1840 to 1889 - was always particularly sympathetic towards students of promise, no matter what their race or social condition. Dom Pedro was often present during final examinations in schools, and delighted in questioning talented or brilliant students. It is said of him that he though that his real vocation was that of a school teacher: he may in part be responsible for the exceptional prestige attached to professors of official secondary and professional schools in Brazil. Some of the most important Brazilian statesmen during the Monarchy, the early years of the Republic, and even to-day, have been, or are, professors in the traditional Schools of Law of São Paulo and Recife as well as in the Medical Schools of Bahia and Rio or in the old official secondary schools or theological seminaries, like the Seminary of Olinda, now decadent but once one of the most influential seats of learning.

     There is, and has been, very little "colour line" in any of these institutions of secondary instructions or higher learning. But snobbishness is not entirely absent in them.

     There aristocratic character derives from the fact that most of the students of law or medicine for a long time dressed to attend their classes as if they were going to a ball or to a solemn mass: in frock-coat and top hat, carrying a cane and even gloves. This made young men with evident African blood or from very modest social origin feel that, as solemnly dressed students, they had become "white" or "socially important".

     The same fact explains why tailors were frequently the victims of poor students in Brazil. Visiting Recife, many years after he had graduated there in the Law School, Nilo Peçanha, who was a light mulatto and a man of modest social origin but who married a distinguished white lady of Rio de Janeiro - his native province - and reached some of the highest positions in the Brazilian administrations, including the Presidency of the Republic, made it a point to visit his old tailor, to whom he was still in debt for a fine and expensive frock-coat made in his student days. He thought he owed to that tailor much of his political success, probably because his student frock-coat, symbolic, as it was, of a sort of intellectual caste or élite, had given him a strong sense of social security. It made him feel a member of the ruling class. I mention this concrete though apparently insignificant detail because it is characteristic of the fact that professional schools or universities, in Brazil, have been, and are, at once democratic and aristocratic in their nature, being open to individuals of various conditions and of African as well as of purely or predominantly European and Amerindian origin, on the one hand, and, on the other, giving a special social distinction or privilege to those admitted to them.

     It was this social distinction or privilege that was for a long time expressed through the solemn frock-coat and top hat that law and medical students wore in Pernambuco, Bahia, and Rio. All attempts to introduce the Coimbra democratic student gown in Pernambuco failed. Law and medical students insisted on dressing as if they were important personalities and not ordinary youths. Only in the last thirty years has their attitude in this matter been modified. Their dress is to-day ordinary or plain dress, but this development has been parallel to that of the simpler way of dressing of professors, doctors, lawyers, members of Parliament, and Cabinet members.

     Apparently insignificant but, indeed, sociologically significant, details of this sort show that the educational situation in Brazil, as elsewhere, is closely connected with the prevailing social conditions. Education in Brazil has been democratic to the extent that conditions in general have been democratic, both as an inheritance of the Portuguese tendency towards social and ethnic democracy and as a result of circumstances peculiar to Brazil.

     It should be added, however, that more than once the Press has denounced, in recent years, cases of elegant finishing schools for girls in Rio de Janeiro and other cities of Brazil where coloured girls have been denied a place among white or quasi-white girls. Further, more than once the Naval School at Rio has been criticised for not admitting evidently coloured youths as students or candidates to naval officers. Their race or colour is never openly given as the reason for the refusal, but such reasons as poor eyesight or some dates for commissions. Their race or colour is never openly given as prejudice are the exception, rather than the rule, among Brazilians.

     I have referred to the exceptional prestige attached to professors in Brazil. It may be said that an ordinary Brazilian university professor is socially and politically more important than a professor in a United States university. This shows the importance of the fact that a number of coloured individuals have been, or are, professors at Brazilian universities, law, medical, and engineering schools, normal schools, secondary schools, theological seminaries. One such was Tobias Barreto who, somewhat ironically introduced into nineteenth-century Brazil what is known as Germanism, that is, German ideas and methods in the study of law and philosophy. The introducer of English humour and other refinements into Brazilian literature was a mulatto, Machado de Assiz, who, in his old age, became a sort of patriarch of the writers of his country and the president of the Brazilian Academy of Literature. Hardly anyone thinks of them as having been Negroes of Africans or coloured: almost everybody thinks of them as Brazilians. And they thought of themselves, not as Negroes, Africans or coloured, but as Brazilians.

     Another coloured Brazilian, who was also a brilliant literary man, once said, during a public speech: "We, of Latin race..." He was sociologically right, though biologically wrong. Brazilians, whatever their ethnic origin or situation, are fundamentally Brazilian and Latin. This is largely due to the already mentioned Portuguese inheritance of ethnically and socially democratic traditions and dispositions and, also, to the emphasis put by the Catholic Church in its schools, colleges, and churches in Brazil on the Latin cultural heritage which she, more than any other agency, brought to what is known to-day as "Latin America". For centuries Brazilians have grown and been educated under the influence of such Latinism until it has become natural to some of the coloured Brazilians to think of themselves simply as Latins. Education in Brazil, despite all its imperfections and deficiencies, has contributed powerfully to this very significant fact.

     On the other hand, education in Brazil has been deeply affected by the fact that slavery was a dominant factor in Brazilian economic organisation and social life until as recent a date as 1889. As a result, the educational system of even to-day is marked by an excess of bookish or academic teaching. Many youths whose African blood shows that they descend from slaves seem to be particularly inclined to avoid such studies as animal husbandry, scientific farming or agriculture, dentistry, mechanical engineering, and to follow the academic and bookish study of law, medicine, diplomacy, civil engineering. But this is also true of most white or quasi-white youths, possibly under the influence of an old prejudice: that of belonging to a caste to whose members it was a disgrace to use their hands in any activities even remotely connected with slave work. Dentistry and farming are two of these activities, for in colonial Brazil Negro barbers practised the art of pulling out teeth. And practically all agricultural and manual work was done then by Negro slaves.

     The development of "learning by doing", of the use of laboratories in secondary and professional schools, of practical research in medicine and engineering, is a recent development. Another is the fact that youths from socially important families now become students of agriculture, animal husbandry, chemistry, mechanical engineering, dentistry. But their number is so small as to be ridiculous, both in comparison to the number of those who study law and to the national needs is regard to the improvement of agriculture and to the need for a better health service.

     From what has been suggested it is clear that much remains to be done by educators in Brazil. The psychological and sociological survivals of slavery days must be destroyed. The existing educational system is, no the whole, a democratic force and not an obstacle to social and ethnic democracy in this country. Its deficiencies and defects are many and important, but one does not have to be an extreme optimist to proclaim its virtues. They exist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

     It is to be noted that in the article above the author has used some of the material used in his previous essays on the subject, specially Brazil: as Interpretation, published by Alfred Knopf, New York, 1945, with permission from this publisher.

Barbosa, Ruy, Emancipação dos Escravos (Rio, 1884).

Bastide, Roger, Imagens do Nordeste mistico (Rio, 1945).

Fletcher, James C., and Kidder, D. P., Brazil and the Brazilians (London, 1879)

Freyre, Gilberto, Casa-Grande & Senzala (Rio, 1933, 1936, 1938, 1942, 1945. Published in English in 1946 under the title The Masters and the Slaves, tr. by Samuel Putnam).

Freyre, Gilberto, Sobrados e Mucambos (São Paulo, 1936).

Freyre, Gilberto, and others, Estudos Afro-Brasileiros (Rio, 1935), and Novos Estudos Afro-Brasileiros (Rio, 1937).

Freyre, Gilberto, Brazil: an Interpretation (New York, 1945).

Lacerda, J. B., de, Sur les Métis au Brésil (Paris, 1911).

Magalhães, Basilio, O Folclore no Brazil, and ed. (Rio, 1939).

Malheiro, Perdigão, A Escravidão no Brasil (Rio, 1866).

Matta Machado, Aires da, A Negro e o Garimpo em Minas Geraes (Rio, 1945).

Source: FREYRE, Gilberto. Brazil: racial amalgamation and problems. London: [s.n.], 1949. p. 267-285.