Representing the Good Neighbor: Material For
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“Representing the Good Neighbor: Material for U.S. and Brazilian Relations during World War II” A thesis submitted by Isabel Loyola in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History Tufts University May 2018 Adviser: Peter Winn i Abstract The thesis focuses on U.S. and Brazilian relations during World War II. In an effort against the spread of European fascisms in Latin America, the United States started a mission to secure Brazilian loyalty. For Brazil, to break relations with the Axis, was a difficult choice. Given that it had a well-established trade relation with Germany and a numerous German, Italian, and Japanese immigrant populations. Brazil saw U.S. interest as an opportunity to gain much needed profitable economic agreements that would advance the development of the country into a regional and international power. In this mutually beneficial agreement propaganda played an important role; it crystalized the partnership. Two examples have been chosen to analyze how the campaign reflected wartime representations of Brazil for a U.S. audience: the Brazilian Pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and the wartime films of Carmen Miranda. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my professor Peter Winn and professor David Ekbladh for helping me develop this project, from its beginnings as a final essay to this thesis. I would like to thank the History Department and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for awarding me with the funds needed for my multiple research trips. Thank you for believing in my project. This process would not have been the same without the support of faculty, administrative staff, friends, and family. These last three years of graduate education have been full of sacrifice, challenges, laughter, learning, and dedication. This thesis is the materialization of that. Finally, I would like to dedicate this thesis to my grandmother, mi güeli Mary. Vio que le hice caso y me seguí educando? iii Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1. Context, and Key Concepts and Institutions............................. 13 The Good Neighbor Policy ....................................................................................... 22 Chapter 2. U.S. and Brazilian relations through the sources. ................... 28 Bilateral relations through archival research .................................................... 32 Chapter 3. Brazilian Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair: representations of Brazil for the U.S. ............................................................... 40 The Brazilian Pavilion through written word ..................................................... 44 The Brazilian Pavilion Exhibits .............................................................................. 52 Chapter 4. Carmen Miranda: Entertainment promotes international relations ..................................................................................................................... 74 The films: on and behind the screen ...................................................................... 78 a. On Brazil ...................................................................................................................... 78 b. Beyond Carmen Miranda ..................................................................................... 86 c. On Latin America: a comparison ...................................................................... 89 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 94 Bibliography.............................................................................................................. 98 iv Introduction When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in a President, he announced a new era of relations between the United States and Latin America. An attitude of good neighbors was to rule this new period of intercontinental dynamics. Even though this declaration was not made into official policy until the middle of the 1930s, it still made a profound mark on the history of the Americas. Never before (and arguably not even after the end of World War II) a similar rhetoric fed U.S. foreign policy where collaboration and understanding were over imposed domination. While this change in policy was being developed in the United States, Brazil, Latin America’s biggest country was changing as well. A political and military revolution in 1930 changed the direction in which the country was going. Getulio Vargas, the head of the Brazilian government, came to power in 1930 with the intention to inaugurate a new stage in State development. The created new ministries, new legislation, and a new relationship with the intellectual and cultural movements of the past decade renovated Brazilian nationalism. These changes would prefigure the attitudes that each country was going to have once the world conflicts reached an overwrought point and World War II dominated international relations. The United 1 States had to secure strategic alliances with the American Republics, a challenge that would prove slow and contested by Latin American governments that distrusted, with good reason, the United States. Thirty years of American aggression in Central America and The Caribbean, accompanied by a quickly expanding economic and cultural presence in Latin America, had made “the other Americans” very hesitant to fully ally themselves with the United States. Brazil became one of the most important targets of American diplomacy in the late 1930s. This was because of its military strategic geographic position, its supply of raw materials for the war effort, and because it would be an important sign to the rest of the continent that even a country with an active Nazi party and pro-fascist government would break away from the Axis into the Allied forces. Yet Brazil would not make this transition easy, or cheap. The material we will be analyzing was created to support and encourage a Good Neighbor bilateral relationship that would foster a formal agreement to secure this hemisphere against antagonist international forces. While doing this, it is our purpose to suggest that because it was a Good Neighbor Policy-era relationship the character behind the production of the material was collaborative between the two governments. This implies that the Brazilian government had an important role to play in the construction of such material. Because it was in the best interest of both governments to have popular support when entering wartime negotiations, both sides needed the material to 2 portray Brazil in a positive manner. The main evidence used will be the Brazilian Pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and a selection of the wartime films that feature Brazilian actress and singer Carmen Miranda. The topic of wartime relations between the United States and Brazil is hardly a new one. It represents important efforts by both countries to advance their own national and international agendas. And it is a relationship in which many important historical figures had a role to play; diplomacy alone is just a fraction of all the governmental agencies, and private enterprises and people that got involved. A review of bibliography available on such a topic is necessary to frame the argument we are trying to convey. The spectrum of themes within this topic go from studies centered on Brazil’s context during the 1930s until the end of the war in 1945, to analysis and descriptions of U.S. institutions (both that preceded the war and those created because of the war) in charge of international affairs in the late 1930s – 1940s. Because of the nature of the material selected as evidence to support our argument, the cultural relations aspect of the bilateral relationship are of the greatest importance. The bibliography that analyzes this aspect of the bilateral relation can be organized in at least two groups: the authors that study the impact of U.S. influence in Brazil, and those that study 3 representations of Brazil created by Americans for an American audience. Author Neill Lochery studies in his book Brazil: The Fortunes of War: World War II and the Making of Modern Brazil (2014), how the wartime relationship between the United States and Brazil impacted Brazil’s economic development. As he mentions his interest is to tell a story that has never been fully told, how Brazil went “miraculously” from a “[...] lush but neglected tropical backwater to one of the most dynamic nations in South America, and indeed in the entire world.”1 Lochery’s analysis states that that “miraculous” change started with the beginning of World War II. The development of Brazil into a modern nation is in large part due to the economic-military alliance the country signed with the United States in the early 1940s. This resulted in a new steel mill, new roads and railways, improvements in Brazilian agriculture, and in a transformation of Brazil’s military forces. Lochery also directly connects the U.S-Brazilian alliance as one of the reasons why Getulio Vargas’ regime fell in 1945. A different perspective on how the United States influenced Brazil is the one studied by Lori Hall-Araujo; even though her study is not exclusively centered on wartime relations, it reflects on other ways in which the United States influenced Brazilian reality. The popularization of American mass media, cinema, radio, and publishing (including 1