Soldiers of the Patria: A History of the Brazilian Army, 1889-1937 (review)

The product of a lifetime of research on the Brazilian army, Soldiers of the Pátria is a detailed narrative history of army politics during the period that McCann has long viewed as crucial to the development of the interventionist and, at times in the second half of the twentieth century, dictatorial army (it held power from 1964 to 1985). Specialists in Brazilian history will learn a great deal about hitherto obscure aspects of internal army politics; battle-history buffs will find the accounts of the Canudos and Contestado campaigns and the 1932 São Paulo civil war compelling reading. McCann brings to life the arcana of weapons procurement and army administration, especially the importance of the changing role of the chief of staff and the impact of the personalities who held it. He skillfully analyzes the culture of conspiracy, revolt, and amnesty that wreaked havoc with sensible and necessary army reforms, and he offers numerous insights into the major political events of these years.

The central theme of this book is the army's inability to deal with "the poor state of its arms and equipment" and to mobilize "sufficient soldiers to have adequate armed forces to defend the country against internal and external enemies" (420). War minister after war minister made the case for reform, and much was accomplished during these years. Brazilian officers studied in Germany between 1905 and 1911, and a French military mission served in Brazil from 1922 to 1939. Obligatory military service was finally instituted in the 1910s, and a massive barracks-construction program in the 1920s improved the army's infrastructure. Educational institutions were reformed and army aviation began (albeit hesitantly) in the 1910s. Yet, repeatedly, such achievements were vitiated by the officers' involvement in politics. The interventions in the states during the presidency of General Hermes da Fonseca (1910–1914) distracted officers from more important tasks. The revolts of junior officers in the 1920s (the so-called Tenentismo) and the 1930 Revolution effectively destroyed the corporation's institutional hierarchy. Not until the Estado Novo dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937–1945) did the duo of War Minister Eurico Gaspar Dutra and Chief of Staff Pedro Aurélio Góes Monteiro succeed in implementing a modernization program and, in Góes's pithy phrase, establishing "politics of the army and not politics in the army" (301). This regime, according to McCann, was a military one, in which the officers controlled the civilian Vargas.

Readers of this journal will likely find Soldiers of the Pátria hard going. Some of the theoretical apparatus presented in the brief preface—notably the distinction between revolutions of "appetite" and "identity"—scarcely reappears in the rest of the book (xix–xx). McCann forcefully argues that the army's role in society and politics cannot be reduced to an expression of class interests as so many Brazilian scholars of the 1960s and 1970s suggested. Those who fail to comprehend the internal workings of the army cannot grasp the full extent of influences on the institution. Class, however, probably has a place in the analysis of army politics; after all, as McCann clearly shows, the army never hesitated to turn its guns on fellow Brazilians (such as the lower-class "fanatics" of the millenarian Contestado and Canudos rebellions) who threatened real social change. Still, in his painstakingly detailed analysis, McCann demonstrates that armies are "different from other social institutions" (xix), and that scholars must pay attention to their internal organization and personnel socialization.

Shorn of its often fascinating detail, the book is an extended exposition of McCann's critique of Stepan's concept of "new professionalism." In 1973, Stepan argued that the reason for Latin American armies' failure to conform to Huntington's ideal type of professional soldier lay in their expansion of the concept (hence, new professionalism) to include fostering economic development and ensuring internal security when faced with the challenges of the...