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  • Father of the Poor?: Vargas and His Era
  • Thomas E. Skidmore
Father of the Poor?: Vargas and His Era. By Robert M. Levine (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 193 pp. $54.95 cloth $15.95 paper

Getulio Vargas was one of the two or three most important political leaders of twentieth-century Latin America, serving as president of Brazil for eighteen years (1930–1945 and 1951–1954). He is also one of the few dictators in modern history who succeeded, after being deposed, in returning to power via a free election—a tribute to both his political skills and the malleability of Brazilian political culture. Vargas also stands out as the mentor of Brazilian industrialization and of the corporatist social structure that characterizes Brazil even today.

Levine has set himself the task of writing a brief portrait of Vargas that is accurate and insightful and still accessible to the uninitiated, since no scholarly biography of Vargas exists in any language. Not surprisingly, the author has not been entirely successful.

The challenge in depicting Vargas is explaining the extraordinary variations among his different periods of rule. How could he go from deposed dictator in 1945 to elected president in 1951? Since Levine insufficiently distinguishes between the 1930–1945 (authoritarian) period and the 1951–1954 (democratic) presidency, we are unable to understand the transition that Vargas underwent.

The analysis is also weak on the conflict about economic policy that contributed greatly to Vargas’ final crisis in 1954. Levine barely mentions import substitution as a strategy of industrialization or the way in which coffee policy was manipulated to benefit this strategy. He also neglects the nationalist option that Vargas adopted in 1953, which led him into direct confrontation with the anti-communists in the military. As this neglect of economic issues indicates, Levine could have widened his perspective from a conventional political history.

How Vargas’ enigmatic personality (which Levine correctly emphasizes) interacted with Brazilian political culture is also insufficiently explained. Levine could have given more emphasis to the highly clientelistic nature of Brazilian society and therefore of Brazilian politics Instead, he makes such conjectures about Vargas as “if he enjoyed power he never admitted it to himself.” How do we know? The ultimate question is how Vargas’ suicide fit in with his psyche. As president, he had often played with the idea of suicide and used it as leverage with his inner circle. He even makes a reference to possible suicide in the 1930 section of his diary (which Levine reprints on page 147), but Levine gives us little further insight.

The text includes a number of factual errors. On page 122, the author states that Brazil met its debt payments “even in depression years.” In fact, Brazil suspended debt payments in 1937. On page 26, the author claims that the new labor legislation of the early 1930s was immediately applied to all workers. The process was actually much slower, hardly even beginning in São Paulo until 1945. Moreover, the statement that [End Page 165] workers in São Paulo had created an independent labor structure “free from government pressure” by 1955 ignores the fact that key features of the government-manipulated corporatist system continue today (85).

Levine provides a good picture of the extension of government social services under Vargas. The volume also has an excellent set of photographs and reprints interesting contemporary documents.

Thomas E. Skidmore
Brown University
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