A Place in Politics: São Paulo, Brazil from Seigneurial Republicanism to Regionalist Revolt (review)

"All politics is local," as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives "Tip" O'Neil famously declared as he described the relationship between national and local politics in the twentieth century United States. In A Place in Politics, James P. Woodward shows us that O'Neil's dictum applies to Brazil as well. This finely tuned discussion of the day-to-day debates and conflicts among the rural and urban voters and politicians in Brazil's São Paulo state from 1889 through the first three decades of the twentieth century takes us inside party politics in rural towns as well as the state capital of Brazil's most economically and politically powerful state. In the process, Woodward makes clear that, for some Paulistas at least, the republican ideals of popular sovereignty were worth fighting for and demonstrates that social class did not determine political ideology. In this São Paulo, reformers rather than revolutionaries or reactionaries hold sway.

The book is divided into six chapters which follow Paulista politics chronologically from 1889 to 1932. Chapter one summarizes São Paulo's history and introduces readers to the state's early twentieth-century political geography. Chapter two, "A Republic of Layers", outlines the various overlapping levels at which politics functioned in São Paulo, from the state to the municipality, to the neighborhood and politicians from the cultured law school professors of the capital to the backcountry political bosses of remote rural areas. A third chapter, in some ways the most interesting, covers Paulista opinions on WWI. Here, we see that despite São Paulo's being home to thousands of Italian-born immigrants, Paulistas supported the allies and argued that Brazil should enter the war in their support. Chapters four through six, covering the 1920s, describe the behavior of the Paulista Republican Party and the growing dissatisfaction with it. This frustration led in 1924 to a short-lived military revolt and exile for the leadership. Some of those leaders joined the "Prestes Column," the rebel army that traversed the Brazilian interior from 1924 to 1927, becoming radicalized in the process. Discontented Paulistas who had managed to escape government reprisals after the uprising formed a new political party, which they labeled the Democratic Party. São Paulo Law School faculty and students seem to have dominated the party, especially at its founding, but its members included coffee planters, industrialists and literate workers. Clearly, membership in this political party did not correspond to social class. Nor did the party membership advocate the radical overthrow of the system. Rather, they hoped to push São Paulo to fulfill republican ideals, and put an end to the Paulista Republican Party's political machine that placed personality and power above popular sovereignty. The PD, in Woodward's view, represented a political party based on ideals, rather than a "bag of cats," as most Brazilian political parties of the twentieth century have been described. That is not to say that Woodward does not recognize that patronage politics played a role in adherence to the party, but that many members of the party left the PRP for the opposition at great personal cost. The power of their ideals led the members of the PDs to support Getúlio Vargas for president in 1930 rather than the political candidate that the PRP machine advocated—a choice that would have been easier and would have provided the PD leadership with access to patronage. Vargas' defeat led the PD to join the revolutionaries who overthrew the federal president in October of that year. Then, ideals took a back seat to jockeying for power in the new regime, and finding ideological differences between PRP and PD members was next to impossible. The result was a regionalist revolt against the Vargas-led federal government in 1932.

Throughout this complex volume, Woodward shows us that Paulistas of all sorts held opinions about...