2025/05/01 by John D. French · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Brazilian cultural history and politics #Sociology and Education in Brazil #Youth, Politics, and Society
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11609853
openalex publication_date 2025/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
As a well-published labor historian, Leal makes extensive use of newspapers—mainstream, communist, and trade union—along with public opinion polls, interviews, and union and political-social police (DOPS) records to study “the electoral behavior of workers of São Paulo (capital) in two distinct conjunctures: the general elections of 1954, after the suicide of [President] Getúlio Vargas, and 1962, the last [elections] before the 1964 coup” (29). This indefatigable researcher’s book, where he generously shares his results, will be of greatest interest to those familiar with the history of labor, the left, and electoral politics in São Paulo and who followed the debates they have occasioned in the Brazilian academy between the early 1960s and the twenty-first century.The book is not an overarching narrative of these two elections and their place in the history of the Populist Republic of 1945–64. It includes sixteen unnumbered chapters divided into two sections, simply titled “1954” and “1962.” These parallel titles suggest the overarching logic through which Leal orders his empirical evidence: workers’ experience, electoral results, rules of the game, electoral context, the relationship of political forces including institutions and “ideologies,” electoral behavior of women, and urban and social structures.Taking institutions and electoral rules into account, the book seeks to understand attempts to intervene in elections by the expanding working class in Brazil’s most urbanized and industrialized city after 1945, Brazil’s first authentically electorally democratic era. How were elections and the vote used to advance workers’ interests by the leaders of the textile and metalworkers’ unions and two neighborhood associations in the eastern and southern zones of the city (648, 33–34)?Strongly identified with Marxism of a Trotskyist orientation, Leal offers a surprisingly appreciative if critical evaluation of São Paulo’s communists, who combined a “powerful [force of] attraction” with a “strong presence . . . in the workers and popular movement” (63). Having won 10 percent of the national presidential vote in 1945, their newly outlawed party had swept São Paulo’s municipal elections in 1947 although their elected representatives were denied the right to serve in 1948. In the 1954 section, Leal highlights the communist-led campaigns of street agitation against the high cost of living (“Panela Vazia,” or “Empty Pots”), which was linked to the famous mass “Strike of the 300,000” of 1953.Leal emphasizes the stubborn commitment by the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB) to mounting electoral campaigns against the odds. Running clandestinely under other party labels (their potential votes were sought by opportunist politicians), the PCB’s candidates were routinely barred from registering their candidacies and, even in cases where they succeeded, were denied the right to take office when they won. This was most notably true of the five communists elected in 1962; this group comprised several communist trade union leaders, including a Black communist dock leader, Geraldo Rodriques dos Santos, who was paired with Mario Schenburg, the famous communist physicist at the University of São Paulo (379–80, 523–28).While Leal is critical of the party, he judges it to have played a fundamental role in giving substance to Brazil’s new democracy by propagating the ideal of active participation in politics by workers (103–4). In discussing political parties of all colorations, Leal addresses the small middle-class Socialist Party and the city’s handful of Trotskyists, neither of which played a significant role in the trade union movement. The PCB, he suggests, could be rightly said to have had “a virtual monopoly” as “the political ‘vanguard’ of the working class” (63). “Paradoxically,” he concludes, “the PCB was most menacing to the status quo when it increased the participation of the popular electorate within the ‘rules of game,’” given the widespread disinterest and distrust of politicians in the popular sectors (104, 107, 139).The attempts to place workers in elected office by the PCB and organized sectors of the working class were stymied by the meteoric electoral success of nonworker politicians like Jânio Quadros. Universally known simply as Jânio, he and the older, more established politician Adhemar de Barros and their like fall into the category of populists, a term considered stigmatizing then. Indeed, even today populism is viewed with suspicion among the highly educated in São Paulo, because the success of such personalist politicians is thought to have supplanted the party-ideological trends, like communism and laborism (trabalhismo), linked to Vargas and his Laborite Party (PTB), which would prove powerful elsewhere in Brazil (e.g., in Rio).In addressing the electoral arena, Leal necessarily engages with Jânio as this key political phenomenon emerged from the electoral cauldron of urbanizing São Paulo. A university-educated former private school teacher, the sui generis Jânio won a surprising victory in a 1953 election for mayor after an explosive campaign. Elected governor in 1954, he swept into office as Brazilian president in 1960 before, a year later, abruptly renouncing in an effort to increase his leverage over opponents by imitating a dramatic gesture like that of Getúlio Vargas in 1954 when he faced down his enemies by killing himself in office.Leal’s book adds further substance to those who have argued, as I did, that the post–World War II era marked “a transition to a populist political system [in São Paulo] that influenced the behavior of all participants” (The Workers’ ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern São Paulo [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992], 281). This was linked, I had argued, to “the radical transformation in the nature of all social classes” and the ways that an expanded and expanding electorate undermined the top-down control of the past by unleashing a new generation of urban-centered politicians capable of independent flights (The Workers’ ABC, 280–81, 262–65). While impacting the dynamics of class alliances at the local level, Bryan Pitts has argued that these developments would have wider repercussions that help explain the coup of 1964 through which the military unsuccessfully sought to dominate and remake Brazil’s political class.This new cohort of professional politicians—dubbed “the generation of 1948” by Leal and discussed by Sylvia Walmsley—rose to office without direct links “to family clans or economic groups, and without meeting [the traditional status] requisites” of “notório saber,” a euphemism supposedly signifying academic distinction in a country with only a tiny university-educated population (177). In creating a new identity for themselves, such politicians developed an insurgent language of popular-oriented politics for the masses that frustrated the aspirations of the organized left and the union movement.