The Revolt of the Whip

Joseph Love

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804783699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

This short book brings to life a unique and spectacular set of events in Latin American history. In November 1910, shortly after the inauguration of Brazilian President Hermes da Fonseca, ordinary sailors killed several officers and seized control of major new combat vessels, including two of the most powerful battleships ever produced, and commenced bombing Rio de Janeiro. The mutineers, led by an Afro-Brazilian and mostly black themselves, demanded greater rights—above all the abolition of flogging in the Brazilian navy, the last Western navy to tolerate it. This form of torture was closely associated in the sailors' minds with slavery, which had only been prohibited in Brazil in 1888. These events and the scandals that followed initiated a sustained debate about the role of race and class in Brazilian society and the extent to which Brazil could claim to be a modern nation. The commemoration of the centenary of the mutiny in 2010 saw the country still divided about the meaning of the Revolt of the Whip.

§1 The Marvelous City and the New Navy

With its granite mountains rising from the sea, its seemingly endless beaches, and its new landscaping, Rio de Janeiro had no rival in tropical splendor during the Belle Époque. Following the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the replacement of the increasingly inert imperial regime by a federal republic in 1889, Brazil’s leaders sought to catch up with Argentina, even surpass it, as a candidate member of the comity of “civilized” nations. Around 1890, Rio had lost its position as the largest city in South America to Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital, and many Cariocas (inhabitants of Rio) admired the metropolis of the Rio de la Plata. General Emídio Dantas Barreto, who plays a role in the narrative below, wrote of the Argentine metropolis in 1906, “Its avenues of luxurious palaces and its monuments, gracefully conceived in every detail, spoke to us of the wealth, taste, and culture of this hardworking and daring people who realized the ideal of progress and civilization in Spanish America.”¹

Other Cariocas imagined their city to be in fierce competition with Buenos Aires: the protagonist of a 1909 novel by Afonso Henriques Lima Barreto, the celebrated bohemian writer and social critic, summed up Cariocas’ envy of the great city on the Rio de la Plata:

We were weary of our mediocrity, our lassitude. The vision of a clean, attractive, and elegant Buenos Aires provoked us and filled us with a mad desire to equal it. In this [emotion] there was a looming matter of national amour-propre and a dimwitted yearning not to allow foreigners, on returning [to their countries] to pour forth criticisms of our city and our civilization. We envied Buenos Aires moronically. [The argument ran:] “Argentina shouldn’t outshine us; Rio de Janeiro couldn´t remain just a coaling station, while Buenos Aires was a genuine European capital: Why didn’t we have broad avenues, carriage drives, formal-dress hotels, and gambling casinos?”²

Yet in many ways the Cariocas’ aspirations were already being met through advances in sanitation, public works, architecture, and the stylish display of wealth. By 1910, Brazil’s capital had become the “Marvelous City” celebrated in the Carnival march of that name.³ Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, a pioneer of preventive medicine for the tropics, had attacked bubonic plague in the city in the late 1890s, vastly reducing the number of cases by 1908, and eliminating the disease altogether in the following decade.⁴ More spectacularly, Cruz had virtually freed Rio from yellow fever during the mosquito eradication campaign of 1907. In 1909 he declared Rio to be free of that illness.

The more salubrious city would attract new inhabitants, and by 1910 it would have 870,000 residents,⁵ though Rio still trailed Buenos Aires. Although it might be said that the beautification of Brazil’s capital dated from 1808, when the exiled Portuguese regent (the future João VI) commissioned the neoclassical Botanical Gardens, the city planners of the new Republic remade the face of the city. During the first years of the new century, Prefect Francisco Pereira Passos and his chief engineer Paulo de Frontin had overseen the redesign of the Brazilian metropolis, including the creation of its sinuous and sensuous Avenida Beira Mar (Seashore Drive). This thoroughfare connected the fashionable districts of Glória, Catete, Flamengo, and Botafogo to the commercial center of the capital, and the New Tunnel linked Copacabana to the established residential areas in 1906. Four years later, 615 licensed automobiles were cruising the city.

In the beachfront districts of Glória, Flamengo, and Botafogo, and soon in Copacabana too, palacetes, palatial multistory homes, were erected on the Beira-Mar in a style that might be called tropical gingerbread. They featured fanciful towers, arcades, and balconies fronting Guanabara Bay. The writer Lima Barreto even refers to a “Botafogo style” of palacetes, surrounded by iron fencing and featuring ornate plaster work and a veranda on the side.⁶ Art Nouveau motifs were frequent.

Official Rio was also showing a new face. When it opened its doors in 1909 Brazil’s premier theater, the Teatro Municipal, inspired by the Paris Opera, offered an adaptation of nineteenth-century French eclecticism coupled with modern ventilation.⁷ The building displayed “a profusion of marble, velvet and gilding.”⁸ It was Brazil’s answer to the great opera house of Buenos Aires, the Teatro Colón, which had opened a year earlier. The Teatro Municipal was situated on the Avenida Central, a motorway cutting a north-south line through the heart of downtown and stretching from today’s Praça (square) de Mauá to the Praia (beach) de Santa Luzia, thus linking two distant points on the bay. City planner Frontin had purposely designed the Avenida Central to be thirty-three meters wide, so that its width would exceed that of the famed Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires by three meters.⁹

But the Teatro Municipal was hardly the only memorable state building erected on the Avenida Central in early years of the new century. Other notable institutions were the National Library, the National School of Fine Arts, and the Naval Club, inaugurated in May 1910 in the presence of President Nilo Peçanha. Designed by the Italian architect Tomasso Bezzi, the Club was richly appointed with marble columns and parquet floors. An official pamphlet describes it as constructed “in an eclectic style with elements of the Italian Renaissance,” having “marine motifs” both inside and out.¹⁰ In the Green Salon one can still see a painting of Brazil´s first great battleships, the Minas Gerais and São Paulo, moving at full steam.

Among the stately new commercial buildings erected, slate-covered turrets and bell-shaped domes, topped with spires, abounded, though “most of the Avenida’s construction involved a Beaux-Arts façade grafted on to a plain, functional building . . . a Brazilian body with a French mask.”¹¹ By 1909, the city also had ten movie theaters, all concentrated on and near the Avenida Central. Meanwhile, the construction of the cable car to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain, the most famous of the Rio’s granite morros, had been initiated in 1908 and would be completed in 1912. Rio’s new port—financed, like so many public works—by foreign loans, opened the city to expanded trade and travel in 1910. At that time, it was the fifteenth most important port in the world in terms of freight handled.¹²

Traversing the Avenida Central was the cultural heart of the capital city, the Rua do Ouvidor, built in the mid-eighteenth century, but recently spruced up by the new premises of the traditional Garnier and Lammert book stores. On the Ouvidor, the city’s most fashionable street, men could be seen in top hats at midday, while upper-class women more sensibly carried parasols. Most of the leading newspaper offices were located on the Ouvidor or the Avenida Central—among them Jornal de Comércio (the most respected daily), O País (the unofficial mouthpiece of the government), Correio da Manhã (the leading opposition paper), Jornal do Brasil, Diário do Rio de Janeiro, and Diário de Notícias. Ouvidor was also the most stylish street for Carnival activities. The modern Carnival had arisen in the early years of the new century, as the samba replaced the entrudo as the leading street dance of Carnival on the Ouvidor and elsewhere in the years around 1910.¹³ On an adjoining street, parallel to the Avenida Central, stood the city’s best restaurant and tearoom, the Confeitaria Colombo, which survives to the present day. Laid out in Art Nouveau style, the Colombo had four floors appointed with countertops of Italian marble, eight three-by-six-meter mirrors set in jacarandá frames, and crystal chandeliers. An oval window of tiffany glass provided additional overhead light.

No one was more concerned with Rio de Janeiro’s new glamour than the Brazilian foreign minister, the baron of Rio Branco, who was eager to display the city to the world. Rio Branco had hosted the third Pan-American Conference there in 1906,¹⁴ making Rio de Janeiro the first city in South America to sponsor the event, ahead of Buenos Aires. The Monroe Palace,¹⁵ a French eclectic extravaganza erected in 1904 to display Brazil’s opulence and grandeur at the St. Louis World’s Fair (Louisiana Purchase Exposition), was dismantled and reconstructed in Rio for the Pan-American Conference.¹⁶ It was placed at the south end of the Avenida Central, where an obelisk was also raised to commemorate the whole complex of new buildings and landscapes associated with the creation of the avenida. In 1908 the Brazilian government put Rio on view again at Brazil’s first National Exposition, commemorating the centenary of the arrival of the Portuguese royal court from Europe, a twelve-year exile that, in effect, had initiated Brazilian independence. (That the Exposition of 1908 would upstage Argentina’s centennial celebration by two years could not have escaped Rio Branco.) An array of gleaming-white palaces, whimsically eclectic in design, was erected by Brazil’s major states for the occasion.¹⁷ Elsewhere, a pile similar to the Monroe Palace—also with imposing columns and slate dome—was raised for the Brussels World’s Fair in 1910. The Argentinians meanwhile hosted their own international exposition in conjunction with their country’s centenary of independence.

The Povo

Rio’s new face could not mask an inconvenient reality: given that some very large share of the population of Rio de Janeiro and Brazil as a whole was nonwhite—perhaps half, though nobody knew for sure—and given that many, perhaps most, politically aware Brazilians tended to believe nonwhite populations were innately incapable of achieving the same level of development as white ones, how could Brazil succeed against Argentina or any other country perceived as white? The most widely accepted “solution” was that Brazil should adopt European ideas about lifestyles and attract European settlers on a massive scale, as Argentina had, and that continued race mixture and displacement over time would result in a benign whitening effect. In the meantime, in Rio poor people could be pushed into the background in the newly Europeanized capital. The same pushing would occur in other cities as well.

To an anonymous British observer of the era, Brazil was a country of “illiterates and doutores” (doctors, that is, university graduates).¹⁸ In fact, in 1910 about three-quarters of the national population could not read. And though the rate of illiteracy was lower in the cities, behind the glittering new facade of Rio de Janeiro lay the city of ...