Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
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For Thine is the Glory: Brazil and Integralism
"...visions of Rio de Janeiro not as the capital of a united nation, but of a colonial master not unlike Portugal in the 18th century. The satire depicted explorers at the Academy of Sciences poring over maps of Brazil like Vasco de Gama uncovering new worlds, preparing reports for merchants of locals in Recife or Salvador as if they were Chinese or Indians who spoke a different tongue entirely. Subtle, it was not; the Brazil of Lima Barreto's works was a disjointed, depressed, and disunited country reeling in the wake of economic crisis and having lost much of a generation of young men to the trenches and swampy diseases of the Mesopotamia.
Of course, there was some irony in the fact that Barreto was himself a lifelong resident of Rio de Janeiro, hardly some provincial rube, and despite his alcoholism one of the country's most esteemed radical authors and social critics. That perhaps made him more dangerous; the fault-line of prewar Brazilian politics had after all been not class or ideology but region, of the peripheral and impoverished provinces of the North pitted against the wealth of Sao Paolo, Minas Gerais, and Rio Grande do Sul. For men of the North, such as Padre Cicero, blaming the South for their capriciousness and arrogance was easy; for the South, Northerners were lazy layabouts who were little better than livestock. As such, despite his writing having been acerbic for years, Barreto's barrage of righteously outraged essays in 1918 struck like a thunderclap - Southern-educated, Southern-born writers simply did not denounce their own kind, and they certainly did not do so as the country mourned its mutilated victory.
What made Barreto's screeds particularly noteworthy was his identification of the Brazilian conservative establishment as the direct cause of the "national humiliation" and the "festering malaise." Though he did not denounce Hermes Fonseca by name, the implications were clear, and stand-ins for the late Pinheiro Machado were easy enough for a reader to see. Even more so, Barreto's portrayal of the "wandering vicar" seemed clear to mean Padre Cicero and other itinerant priests, preachers and healers, and here his work turned ominous: "there is an affliction in the flesh of sitting still and observing nothing," he closed one of his essays with, "to which the antidote is only the wisdom of those who never cease moving, and observe all." What was the meaning behind this? To most readers, it seemed clear to suggest the insularity of the landed aristocracy was now a disease upon Brazil, and the rootlessness of not only those like Padre Cicero but the mass unemployed who often followed him from village to village like he was Christ the Redeemer himself was the cure. Revolution, in other words.
That this language came not from the radical left but from a man whose writings could, at best, be described as bordering upon reactionary and blaming Brazilian people for their own laziness and incuriosity was as much a shock as anything else. Barreto was an ardent nationalist and ferocious opponent of corruption and incompetence; what he suggested was synthesizing this thinking with a new paradigm for the Brazilian people. Had he not been a depressive, abrasive drunk, he indeed have had the brewing of something quite potent on his hands. As it were, his ideas were just that - ideas, meant to inspire debate through easily-digestible satire that could be understood by the masses or at the very least get a chuckle and an understanding nod of familiarity - and hardly a manifesto of doctrine or an outright call to arms. Much as parish priests warned the penitent to avoid Barreto's Brazil in Six Parts, and as newspapers refused to run his polemics, the damage was done - Brazil's establishment had been ridiculed and ravaged, and the ire of the masses pointed in their direction for the first time even if nobody stood at the head.
More importantly, the language of Barreto caught notice of disaffected young intellectuals who shared many of his resentments but had yet to fully synthesize them or make the leap from identifying the cancer to assigning blame for it, such as the young newspaperman in Sao Bento by the name of Plinio Salgado..." [1]
- For Thine is the Glory: Brazil and Integralism
[1] We have of course met Salgado during the war already, but now we're starting to see some of the cultural forces in Brazil at work between Padre Cicero and Barreto's mass appeal. Salgado is, of course, as of yet just some random writer in little Sao Bento. For now.
Of course, there was some irony in the fact that Barreto was himself a lifelong resident of Rio de Janeiro, hardly some provincial rube, and despite his alcoholism one of the country's most esteemed radical authors and social critics. That perhaps made him more dangerous; the fault-line of prewar Brazilian politics had after all been not class or ideology but region, of the peripheral and impoverished provinces of the North pitted against the wealth of Sao Paolo, Minas Gerais, and Rio Grande do Sul. For men of the North, such as Padre Cicero, blaming the South for their capriciousness and arrogance was easy; for the South, Northerners were lazy layabouts who were little better than livestock. As such, despite his writing having been acerbic for years, Barreto's barrage of righteously outraged essays in 1918 struck like a thunderclap - Southern-educated, Southern-born writers simply did not denounce their own kind, and they certainly did not do so as the country mourned its mutilated victory.
What made Barreto's screeds particularly noteworthy was his identification of the Brazilian conservative establishment as the direct cause of the "national humiliation" and the "festering malaise." Though he did not denounce Hermes Fonseca by name, the implications were clear, and stand-ins for the late Pinheiro Machado were easy enough for a reader to see. Even more so, Barreto's portrayal of the "wandering vicar" seemed clear to mean Padre Cicero and other itinerant priests, preachers and healers, and here his work turned ominous: "there is an affliction in the flesh of sitting still and observing nothing," he closed one of his essays with, "to which the antidote is only the wisdom of those who never cease moving, and observe all." What was the meaning behind this? To most readers, it seemed clear to suggest the insularity of the landed aristocracy was now a disease upon Brazil, and the rootlessness of not only those like Padre Cicero but the mass unemployed who often followed him from village to village like he was Christ the Redeemer himself was the cure. Revolution, in other words.
That this language came not from the radical left but from a man whose writings could, at best, be described as bordering upon reactionary and blaming Brazilian people for their own laziness and incuriosity was as much a shock as anything else. Barreto was an ardent nationalist and ferocious opponent of corruption and incompetence; what he suggested was synthesizing this thinking with a new paradigm for the Brazilian people. Had he not been a depressive, abrasive drunk, he indeed have had the brewing of something quite potent on his hands. As it were, his ideas were just that - ideas, meant to inspire debate through easily-digestible satire that could be understood by the masses or at the very least get a chuckle and an understanding nod of familiarity - and hardly a manifesto of doctrine or an outright call to arms. Much as parish priests warned the penitent to avoid Barreto's Brazil in Six Parts, and as newspapers refused to run his polemics, the damage was done - Brazil's establishment had been ridiculed and ravaged, and the ire of the masses pointed in their direction for the first time even if nobody stood at the head.
More importantly, the language of Barreto caught notice of disaffected young intellectuals who shared many of his resentments but had yet to fully synthesize them or make the leap from identifying the cancer to assigning blame for it, such as the young newspaperman in Sao Bento by the name of Plinio Salgado..." [1]
- For Thine is the Glory: Brazil and Integralism
[1] We have of course met Salgado during the war already, but now we're starting to see some of the cultural forces in Brazil at work between Padre Cicero and Barreto's mass appeal. Salgado is, of course, as of yet just some random writer in little Sao Bento. For now.
As a latam resident i always appreciate the stops to brazil! Thanks for this!
One advantage Zhang Zuolin/Chang Tso-lin (I know I'm not being necessarily consistent with the pivot to Wade-Giles rather than Pinyin, but I'm doing my best) has over other members of Anhui/Fengtian in TTL Mukden is that he's actually, ya know, from Manchuria, and his reputation has more man of the people vibes than any of the post-Qing hacks and climbers around Duan
Second Wave: The Postwar Progressive Revolution of 1917-31
"...the moderative-progressive movement within the Liberal Party remained undeterred by the exit stage right of President Hughes and the relative anonymity of figures such as James Garfield within the Root administration; the anti-reactionary current within the party, which saw itself as holding down a broad but brittle middle American point of view as opposed to the gauche Democrats and grouchy conservatives within their own party, had never been a top-down organization, after all. The losses in the state legislatures in 1914 and 1916 had badly damaged that wing, though, and their success in capturing control of state and county party organizations after the disastrous nomination of Samuel Pennypacker against William Randolph Hearst by the conservative bosses had not been entirely undone, but certainly close. The Root era saw the bosses trying to re-assert their dominance a decade after losing it, and the internecine warfare within the Liberals was starting to get ugly, just as the 1918 midterm election loomed on the horizon.
The "progressives" were a pretty diverse sort; there were establishmentarian figures such as Illinois' Richard Yates, who had been Hughes' favored Senate catspaw, as well as traditional good-government reformers like Henry L. Roberts of Connecticut, but also genuine radical thinkers like Ole Hanson of Washington or Hiram Johnson of California. The true north star of anti-reactionary Liberalism, however, was Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, a mercurial personality famed for his wit, his oratory, his temper, and his heterodox ideas and practices that made him a sui generis as far as Senators went. And the looming disaster the Liberals faced at the polls can, in part, be foreseen in the way that his report on wartime profiteering was handled by Boies Penrose.
Though utterly forgotten to the present-day public, Penrose was a widely loathed figure by much of the American polity by the middle of 1918. He was simultaneously viewed as an all-powerful and corrupt party boss straight out of the 19th century and, as Mellon's reputation further diminished in the face of the deepening postwar depression, viewed as "Mellon's man" in the Senate, an irony seeing as how Penrose had lobbied for Mellon to be made Secretary of the Treasury. [1] In March of 1918, rotting vegetables from a market in Philadelphia were thrown at his stately townhome near the site on Fairmount Hill he had personally picked for the massive new Capitol complex by angry protestors; even members of his own party were starting to get restless under his blinkered, stubborn leadership. He was thus also perhaps not the best man to handle somebody as famously prickly as LaFollette, who largely walked to the beat of his own drum.
LaFollette had by 1918 turned into something of a folk hero in his home state of Wisconsin, building a highly personalist machine that cooperated with "Red Milwaukee" and on the backs of German and Scandinavian voters who otherwise may have leaned conservative constructed a progressive example for the rest of the country, with a slew of policies and reforms passed since the turn of the century to make Wisconsin something of a "laboratory of progressivism." His votes in the Senate generally aligned with his own moral compass and he delighted in frustrating a party leadership he felt increasingly alienated by; because of this idiosyncratic style, he had been the obvious choice to head the LaFollette Commission, the panel investigating the procurement of arms during the war.
The structure of the LaFollette Commision was unusual; upon its formation in 1914 it had had six Democrats and three Liberals, with LaFollette as chair, a major concession on the part of Democratic Senate leadership made only because of their total trust in LaFollette's independence and integrity. With Colorado's "Honest John" Shafroth as his co-chair, LaFollette had surprised even his most skeptical detractors by pursuing his mandate not as a high-level Congressional investigator but as a high inquisitor, framing war profiteering and price gouging as a moral outrage to the general public that was making enormous sacrifices. This had, unsurprisingly, made LaFollette a name with the public well beyond Wisconsin, and had also elevated Shafroth's profile a great deal within the Senate Democratic Caucus.
The First LaFollette Report had, in part, helped bring about the Ballinger Affair that took down Hughes' original Secretary of the Navy, and for this reason Penrose was reluctant to see LaFollette continue his work with Liberals now in control of the Senate and the war over. He acquiesced to LaFollette's demands on the condition that the next (and final) report expand upon the work of his original to outline potential future improvements for Army and Navy procurement and, at former War Secretary Henry Stimson's insistence, propose a "readiness standard" for war materiel in a peacetime economy. LaFollette did this with gusto, but also quietly continued his hearings on war profiteering that were reported on widely and in May of 1918 he was ready to submit the Second LaFollette Report, clocking in at over three thousand meticulously researched and written pages.
Penrose did not need to read more than the table of contents to recoil in horror. LaFollette not only expounded upon the methods of war profiteering but named and shamed companies that had done so, calculating their "misbegotten earnings" down to the cent in some cases and including tables and graphs of their companies' shares on the New York Stock Exchange, comparing returns and dividends to firms that did not price gouge. Even some executives were accused directly by name, with recent lavish purchases or vacations being identified and thus heavily implied to be downstream of their gouging; LaFollette also helpfully identified which Senators, from both parties, had taken campaign donations from them.
The outrage that this report was likely to cause with the public, the business community, and the Senate itself was impossible to measure, but easy to predict. Penrose was alarmed in particular at the insinuations that certain Senators were corrupt from having taken donations from "gougers," and he immediately returned the finalized report to LaFollette, who had pointedly not sent him a draft, refusing to countenance releasing it publicly. LaFollette had asked to read it into the Senate record, which Penrose also refused, and the Liberal leader suggested that "the report needs revisions." LaFollette understood exactly what Penrose meant by that, and responded in an in-person meeting between the men, quite tersely, "[that] it may not be wise to make such threats with a majority so narrow and unpredictable." The threat was clear: LaFollette was willing to abandon the Liberal caucus, either to sit as an independent or maybe even as a Democrat, if Penrose did not budge. With a 33-31 majority and frequent absences, Penrose's ability to manage his razor-thin caucus was already difficult enough, especially with his mounting personal unpopularity; despite his stubbornness on policy, Penrose was even more stubborn about clinging to power, and he blinked.
The compromise was that the LaFollette Commission would release its report to all Senators as well as House leadership, the Root administration, and the Philadelphia press; LaFollette would not read anything into the Senate record beyond the Report's opening summary, which itself was close to fifty pages. LaFollette begrudgingly agreed that this was a reasonable solution and more than half a loaf, but as he already disliked and distrusted Penrose's personalism, the damage of the whole episode was done; he would never cease believing that Penrose and his "cabal" were more interested in protecting corrupt oligarchs than actually bettering the ability of the US Army to fight a future war, and the clock on his time left amongst the Liberals was quickly ticking down thereafter. [2] As Penrose predicted, the Report generated a massive public relations backlash that badly damaged the Liberals, and hopes it would blow over by the autumn were ill-founded; even the passage of the Immigration Act of 1918 by massive bipartisan majorities, intended to appeal to nativist concerns and worries of the unemployed, failed to end the perception that had stuck of the Liberals as not only inept and heartless, but hypocrites on the question of public corruption..." [3]
- Second Wave: The Postwar Progressive Revolution of 1917-31
[1] Note that Root is often perceived by the media, at least Liberal-hostile media, as being Mellon's puppet, too. Mellon was not Jewish so this is not an anti-Semitic trope, obviously, but what I'm trying to seed here is a public that sees "bankers" and "Wall Street" as pulling the strings, and Mellon as the personification of that in the public eye.
[2] Congrats, Dan
[3] It's going to take a long wilderness in the 1920s and an inoffensive blank slate candidate like Pershing to repair the damage taken in 1917-20, in other words
The "progressives" were a pretty diverse sort; there were establishmentarian figures such as Illinois' Richard Yates, who had been Hughes' favored Senate catspaw, as well as traditional good-government reformers like Henry L. Roberts of Connecticut, but also genuine radical thinkers like Ole Hanson of Washington or Hiram Johnson of California. The true north star of anti-reactionary Liberalism, however, was Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, a mercurial personality famed for his wit, his oratory, his temper, and his heterodox ideas and practices that made him a sui generis as far as Senators went. And the looming disaster the Liberals faced at the polls can, in part, be foreseen in the way that his report on wartime profiteering was handled by Boies Penrose.
Though utterly forgotten to the present-day public, Penrose was a widely loathed figure by much of the American polity by the middle of 1918. He was simultaneously viewed as an all-powerful and corrupt party boss straight out of the 19th century and, as Mellon's reputation further diminished in the face of the deepening postwar depression, viewed as "Mellon's man" in the Senate, an irony seeing as how Penrose had lobbied for Mellon to be made Secretary of the Treasury. [1] In March of 1918, rotting vegetables from a market in Philadelphia were thrown at his stately townhome near the site on Fairmount Hill he had personally picked for the massive new Capitol complex by angry protestors; even members of his own party were starting to get restless under his blinkered, stubborn leadership. He was thus also perhaps not the best man to handle somebody as famously prickly as LaFollette, who largely walked to the beat of his own drum.
LaFollette had by 1918 turned into something of a folk hero in his home state of Wisconsin, building a highly personalist machine that cooperated with "Red Milwaukee" and on the backs of German and Scandinavian voters who otherwise may have leaned conservative constructed a progressive example for the rest of the country, with a slew of policies and reforms passed since the turn of the century to make Wisconsin something of a "laboratory of progressivism." His votes in the Senate generally aligned with his own moral compass and he delighted in frustrating a party leadership he felt increasingly alienated by; because of this idiosyncratic style, he had been the obvious choice to head the LaFollette Commission, the panel investigating the procurement of arms during the war.
The structure of the LaFollette Commision was unusual; upon its formation in 1914 it had had six Democrats and three Liberals, with LaFollette as chair, a major concession on the part of Democratic Senate leadership made only because of their total trust in LaFollette's independence and integrity. With Colorado's "Honest John" Shafroth as his co-chair, LaFollette had surprised even his most skeptical detractors by pursuing his mandate not as a high-level Congressional investigator but as a high inquisitor, framing war profiteering and price gouging as a moral outrage to the general public that was making enormous sacrifices. This had, unsurprisingly, made LaFollette a name with the public well beyond Wisconsin, and had also elevated Shafroth's profile a great deal within the Senate Democratic Caucus.
The First LaFollette Report had, in part, helped bring about the Ballinger Affair that took down Hughes' original Secretary of the Navy, and for this reason Penrose was reluctant to see LaFollette continue his work with Liberals now in control of the Senate and the war over. He acquiesced to LaFollette's demands on the condition that the next (and final) report expand upon the work of his original to outline potential future improvements for Army and Navy procurement and, at former War Secretary Henry Stimson's insistence, propose a "readiness standard" for war materiel in a peacetime economy. LaFollette did this with gusto, but also quietly continued his hearings on war profiteering that were reported on widely and in May of 1918 he was ready to submit the Second LaFollette Report, clocking in at over three thousand meticulously researched and written pages.
Penrose did not need to read more than the table of contents to recoil in horror. LaFollette not only expounded upon the methods of war profiteering but named and shamed companies that had done so, calculating their "misbegotten earnings" down to the cent in some cases and including tables and graphs of their companies' shares on the New York Stock Exchange, comparing returns and dividends to firms that did not price gouge. Even some executives were accused directly by name, with recent lavish purchases or vacations being identified and thus heavily implied to be downstream of their gouging; LaFollette also helpfully identified which Senators, from both parties, had taken campaign donations from them.
The outrage that this report was likely to cause with the public, the business community, and the Senate itself was impossible to measure, but easy to predict. Penrose was alarmed in particular at the insinuations that certain Senators were corrupt from having taken donations from "gougers," and he immediately returned the finalized report to LaFollette, who had pointedly not sent him a draft, refusing to countenance releasing it publicly. LaFollette had asked to read it into the Senate record, which Penrose also refused, and the Liberal leader suggested that "the report needs revisions." LaFollette understood exactly what Penrose meant by that, and responded in an in-person meeting between the men, quite tersely, "[that] it may not be wise to make such threats with a majority so narrow and unpredictable." The threat was clear: LaFollette was willing to abandon the Liberal caucus, either to sit as an independent or maybe even as a Democrat, if Penrose did not budge. With a 33-31 majority and frequent absences, Penrose's ability to manage his razor-thin caucus was already difficult enough, especially with his mounting personal unpopularity; despite his stubbornness on policy, Penrose was even more stubborn about clinging to power, and he blinked.
The compromise was that the LaFollette Commission would release its report to all Senators as well as House leadership, the Root administration, and the Philadelphia press; LaFollette would not read anything into the Senate record beyond the Report's opening summary, which itself was close to fifty pages. LaFollette begrudgingly agreed that this was a reasonable solution and more than half a loaf, but as he already disliked and distrusted Penrose's personalism, the damage of the whole episode was done; he would never cease believing that Penrose and his "cabal" were more interested in protecting corrupt oligarchs than actually bettering the ability of the US Army to fight a future war, and the clock on his time left amongst the Liberals was quickly ticking down thereafter. [2] As Penrose predicted, the Report generated a massive public relations backlash that badly damaged the Liberals, and hopes it would blow over by the autumn were ill-founded; even the passage of the Immigration Act of 1918 by massive bipartisan majorities, intended to appeal to nativist concerns and worries of the unemployed, failed to end the perception that had stuck of the Liberals as not only inept and heartless, but hypocrites on the question of public corruption..." [3]
- Second Wave: The Postwar Progressive Revolution of 1917-31
[1] Note that Root is often perceived by the media, at least Liberal-hostile media, as being Mellon's puppet, too. Mellon was not Jewish so this is not an anti-Semitic trope, obviously, but what I'm trying to seed here is a public that sees "bankers" and "Wall Street" as pulling the strings, and Mellon as the personification of that in the public eye.
[2] Congrats, Dan
[3] It's going to take a long wilderness in the 1920s and an inoffensive blank slate candidate like Pershing to repair the damage taken in 1917-20, in other words
Thank you!
I wouldn’t go that far, it’ll be more of a New Deal+, with some tweaks to account for it being a product of a postwar Twenties, rather than a mid-Depression ThirtiesAnd a long wilderness means that the Progressives are in the driver's seat for a decade. By the end of this, the *Chileans* are going to be looking at the US as being too progressive.
OK, so everything from women voting to the FDIC, to an OTL 1940s level of limitation on limitation on Children working.
Speaking of which, I look forward to how Henry Wallace is involved iTTL. Can I request that he be the US ambassador to Russia?
Pseudo-FDIC came about in the Hearst years but it’d be strengthened considerably. Lots of McNary-Haugen type stuff to attack ag’s problems before it’s a 1930s-level crisis, too (and taking into consideration the agrarian lobby within TTL’s Democrats)
Haha that’s not a bad idea, though I’ll caveat that with the fact that Henry Wallace’s Russophilia of OTL is… overstated, and I really don’t think he was the rube he’s often portrayed as (even in great works like “The North Star is Red”)
YES! I'd love to see more insights into changing literary and cultural mobements outside the US, specially with the 20s dawning on Brazil.
Though, will he retain his Russophilia in this timeline?
Given that instead of being a communist state, left-wing Wallace can somewhat sympathize with, it is currently resembling a family corporation, with every change in family patriarch also meaning that the higher management of the Romanov Family Enterprises Co. LTD, having to change the course, whether it is to reformism or to reactionary absolutism.
(Also, as I remember Tsar Mikhail does not have any heir, right?
So, who is his heir then?
Grand Duke Kirill?)
I could see some rough copies or original drafts of the report from the LaFollette Commission showing up in some newspapers.
It is indeed a great name, and about 90% of why I picked him as the sacrificial lamb to Hearst ‘08 haha
This’ll definitely pick up more once we’re through the CEW, too.
Yeah the Russophile Wallace would… probably not care for the Tsarist Russia very much.
And that is correct, yes.
Absolutely.