Freyre in Politics

Freyre’s political views were far from unequivocal. He himself described his political attitudes in different moments as non-party, anarchist, conservative, and even “conservative revolutionary.” He was also often described in the 1940s as a communist, a label Freyre confessed did not offend him, although he was not one. What he was, he argued, was an anti-anti-Communist, since he admired the “men of intelligence and character” who had joined the party in pursuit of a better Brazil and to fight the advance of Nazi-fascism. That Freyre’s supposed Marxism was taken seriously can be seen in the Communist Party’s efforts in the early 1950s to disprove it, requesting the young and talented Marxist Gláucio Veiga—who would later become a celebrated Brazilian jurist—to dismantle Freyre’s work in the press. Veiga used a variety of arguments to discredit Freyre’s scholarship, and he made the point that ideas that may appear to be Marxist, such as Freyre’s attack on the capitalist owners of sugar factories, actually served the traditional social order.⁴ Outside Brazil, the head of the Communist Party in Argentina and a member of the Comintern, who had participated in the Communist Revolt in Brazil in 1935, published a pamphlet in 1951 accusing Freyre of “historical escapism,” nostalgia for feudalism, and “theoretical nihilism.”⁵ An early biography of Freyre presented him as a man of the Left, though not an orthodox one. Younger people on the Left, such as Antonio Candido, admired his opposition to dictatorship during the Estado Novo, and saw him as a “master of radical thought.”⁶ That Freyre grew more conservative, or even reactionary, as he grew older is, of course, impossible to deny, considering his criticism of protests against racial discrimination in the 1940s, his praise for the Portuguese colonial regime in the 1950s, his critique of what he called “Afro-Racism” in the 1960s, and the full support he gave to the military coup of 1964.⁷

At the same time, we have to admit that his political attitudes were never simple, especially in his youth, when he combined elements from the Left and the Right. Freyre’s later references to the perils of communism, the reason for his support to the military regime which claimed to save Brazil from those perils, reveal that for him, communism had become a threat to Brazil’s economic, political, and ideological independence; that is, it was essentially anti-Brazilian. Freyre’s optimism about the military coup of 1964 did not last. In 1981, he admitted in an interview that “the ultracentralizing State” of Brazil might be compared to “Soviet totalitarianism” and that the military regime had “succumbed to the pressures of economic technocrats,” thus losing sight of the interests of the country as a whole. He then stated quite clearly that “1964 was a great revolution that failed. The leaders of the movement had the opportunity to make a real revolution, but they did not take it. They failed because they had too much economism and too little social sensibility.”⁸

As to Freyre’s political activities per se, on different occasions, from the 1930s to the 1960s, there were rumors that Freyre would be appointed Ambassador to France or Mexico, Mayor of Recife or Minister or Education (by General Castelo Branco, the first president of the military government). Whether or not he had a slight flirtation with these positions of power, what is certain is that none of these appointments materialized. His early support for the regime led to a break with friends and scholars and left him isolated. It is also certain that in the two political roles that Freyre effectively performed, he tried to put forward ideas and practices he had defended as a journalist ever since his teenager years. Nevertheless, his role in politics in the strict sense turned out to be modest.

Freyre’s first appointment as an assistant to the Governor of Pernambuco, Estácio Coimbra, was accepted with a good deal of hesitation and only after overcoming the resistance of his closest friends, who tried to dissuade him from getting involved in “the caricature of action that is the public life of Brazil.” In the end, he convinced himself that accepting the position was a way to make his regionalist dreams come true, dreams that he had been defending in the press, assuming that Coimbra could help him to work for the development of the North Eastern culture without despising or destroying its traditions. In short, what counted in his decision was the possibility he saw of fulfilling his early ambition of making a difference in the world by turning his ideas into action. Interested as he was from his early years in urban problems, he did achieve something for the city, following what would now be described as “Green” initiatives: preserving trees, encouraging the planting of local trees and plants in the streets and parks of Recife, and building playgrounds. He also edited a leading newspaper, A Província. In 1927, he had the opportunity to become acquainted with one of the leading French urbanists, Alfred Agache, who was invited to Recife by Coimbra (perhaps at Freyre’s suggestion) to lecture on town planning.⁹

Freyre’s years in local government came to an abrupt end for political reasons. In 1930, a revolt of junior army officers replaced the President of Brazil, Washington Luís, with Getúlio Vargas. Following the “Revolution of 1930,” Freyre lost his job, like his patron Coimbra, and followed him into exile in Portugal, where he returned to the world of scholarship. Three years later, in 1933, after spending nearly a year at Stanford University as a visiting professor, he would publish his masterpiece, Casa-Grande & Senzala (translated into English in 1946 as The Masters and the Slaves). Freyre’s would only occupy his second and last post in politics in the narrow sense in 1946, after the end of the Vargas dictatorship. Meanwhile, after his return to Brazil from exile, and as the Vargas regime developed into the dictatorial Estado Novo of 1937, Freyre had more than one brush with the police. In 1935 he was arrested and interrogated for signing a manifesto against a new Law of National Security. In the same period he was denounced as an “agitator” for writing a manifesto advocating an official inquiry into working conditions in the sugar mills (usinas) of rural Pernambuco. Freyre was opposed to what he called “the plutocracy of the factories” that was replacing the old engenhos with new sugar factories, a process vividly described in the novels of his friend José Lins do Rego. He was once again imprisoned briefly in 1942 following his denunciation of Nazis in Recife, whom he had already provoked in 1940 in a public lecture on “a threatened culture.”¹⁰ Freyre was actively opposed to the policy of Agamenon Magalhães, whom Vargas had appointed as Federal Intervener in Pernambuco, in other words an agent of the dictator in his attempt to reduce the autonomy of the regions. He practiced what Freyre called agamenonismo, a set of political ideas “inspired by the fascist and racist models of Mussolini and Hitler,” leading to a police state. Agamenon’s ideas included being “an enemy of coloured people” and hostile to Carnival and other forms of popular culture. He was also insensitive to the virtues of the vernacular architecture of the mucambos, which were not only beautiful and hygienic, as Freyre argued, but well adapted to the local environment and built from natural, local materials, such as palm fronds.¹¹ Despite Freyre’s efforts to preserve these traditional dwellings, Agamenon founded a “League against the Mucambo” in 1939, and thousands of them were demolished and replaced by cheap new houses.¹²

In spite of his opposition to the Vargas regime, Freyre played a role in its politics of culture, and not only as a member of the opposition (who would be punished for taking a stand against the fascist bent of the government), but also, paradoxically, as someone on the fringe of the cultural management of the regime. As Daryle Williams has rightly argued, even if the strong Vargas regime created more than twenty institutions devoted to human sciences and culture as a political strategy, the cultural politics that emerged were far from monolithic. In fact, there were what Williams called “cultural wars” in Brazil during that period, including internal divisions in the government, a symptom of the limitations of state policy and the complexity of the Vargas regime. The Department of Press and Propaganda (DIP) and the Ministry of Education and Health (MES), the two main centers of cultural production, did not share the same view about “brasilidade,” what the Brazilian essence really meant. The DIP, doctrinaire and repressive, contrasted with the more progressive and anti-totalitarian MES, and these two forces entered into conflict over the control and content of mass media and educational and artistic policies. As a result of its more progressive stand, the MES allowed liberal and left-wing intellectuals to have a role in the development of a national culture.¹³

Thus, alongside the architects Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, the writers Mario de Andrade and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, the artist Candido Portinari, and others, Gilberto Freyre—by then a well-known champion of the importance of African culture in Brazilian development and identity—had a minor if indirect role in the cultural scene of the time. This can be seen in the policy of an institution devoted to the preservation of cultural heritage, SPHAN (Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional), whose founding director, Rodrigo de Mello Franco de Andrade, was a close friend of Freyre, and even his “disciple,” well acquainted with Freyre’s ideas about styles of architecture that draw on colonial tradition.¹⁴ It is no coincidence that in the new organization for the preservation of the historical patrimony Freyre held, for a time, the post of “Technical Assistant, Third Class.”¹⁵ Lucio Costa, the future designer of Brasilia, was also a leading figure in SPHAN linked to Freyre, with whom he shared an interest in the rediscovery of colonial art and traditions. It may seem odd to find a leading modernist architect so involved with the past, but for Costa and Niemeyer, colonial tradition was a means of creating a distinctively Brazilian modern style, in the same way that for William Morris, going back to the Gothic was a guiding principle for creativity. The second indirect role Freyre had in the cultural scene of the Vargas regime was in the articulation of a “new sense of Luso-Brazilianness that came to be known as Luso-tropicalism,” which allowed “the Vargas state to seek value in Brazil’s Luso-cultural heritage.” This was much needed in 1940, on the occasion of the celebration, in Lisbon, of the 800th anniversary of Portuguese nationhood and its “civilizing mission.” Brazil had been invited to this event and the government had to face the difficult problem of how to distance itself from the current Portuguese colonialism in Africa, but at the same time to celebrate the “cultural gifts brought by the Portuguese colonizers” to Brazil.¹⁶

The second political position occupied by Freyre was the result of encouragement he received owing to his stand against the Right. In 1945 he campaigned for election to the Chamber of Deputies of the Constituent Assembly, as a member of the Democratic National Union (União Democrática Nacional or UDN), which supported the candidature of Brigadier Eduardo Gomes as President. It was during a meeting in support of Gomes that a student was shot by the police—apparently by mistake, since the order, as a witness put it, was “to liquidate” Gilberto Freyre.¹⁷ Gomes lost the election but Freyre was elected as a deputy in the Constituent Assembly. As a deputy, his speeches were in favor of the re-democratization of Brazil, agrarian reform, and the creation of museums, and against all forms of race prejudice.¹⁸ The important project he presented successfully, following his longstanding concern with the problems of the North East, was for the foundation of an interdisciplinary institute for studying these problems, to be named the Instituto Joaquim Nabuco, which was inaugurated in 1949.

Freyre the Journalist

Freyre played his first major role in politics in a broad sense as a journalist, a role that proved to be a long-lasting one. From the age of eighteen, when he started his regular series “From the Other America” to the Diário de Pernambuco (while attending Baylor University in Texas), until he was in his sixties, he wrote hundreds of articles for daily newspapers and weeklies with provincial and national readership, as well as for foreign papers such as La Nación in Argentina and The Reporter in the United States. What led him to this role was his desire to change the world for the better and his belief that a journalist could remain independent in a way that a full-time academic or other normal professional could not. This activity was also extremely well suited to someone who was proud to refer to himself not as a person with a restricted specialty, but as a writer, or an amateur in several fields.¹⁹ Always ready to praise intellectuals who were not confined to their narrow specialties, or comfortably established in their ivory towers, Freyre cited Cardinal Newman as an early example of an intellectual who was both a specialist and a man who spoke to all sects and parties of the nation.²⁰ But his highest praise was reserved for William Morris, who was an inspiration for Freyre’s major cultural projects in both regionalism and architecture and also a kind of role model. To his readers, Freyre describes Morris as someone who had not realized that in his decision not to take up a “conventional career or profession lay one of the signs of his genius: a plural genius, with an extraordinary variety of aspects, that demanded everything from him without favouring him with the sweet advantages that make men happy and tranquil.”²¹ The fact that Freyre later described himself as a “Morris from the periphery” (Morris de subúrbio) is revealing of the importance of the Victorian polymath for his intellectual development.²²

Freyre did work as a teacher, but only occasionally and for short periods. He was the first person to occupy the Chair of Sociology in the Escola Normal in Recife, in 1929, where he was a pioneer in guiding students to do field work on “the problem of banditry in the North East,” still a serious problem in the age of Lampião.²³ A few years later, in 1935, he gave a course on “regional sociology” at the Law Faculty of Recife, and in the same year he was invited to teach sociology and anthropology at the new and progressive Universidade do Distrito Federal in Rio de Janeiro, where he remained until 1937, when the newly established Vargas dictatorship was already preparing its extinction, which would formally happen at the beginning of 1939. He also had temporary roles, such as visiting professor at Stanford University in 1931, and at Columbia University for a short while in 1938, with an open invitation from Professor Tannenbaum to come back to teach whenever he wished (which he seems to have done until 1964); and at Indiana University in 1944, where he gave a series of lectures out of which came the 1945 book Brazil, an Interpretation.

Thus, journalism was, so to speak, Freyre’s long-term job, in the sense that for most of his life it was his main and most regular source of income. His royalties from books and his occasional fees for lectures were irregular and more or less precarious, and it was journalism that allowed him to support his family without compromising his position as an independent man of letters who lived, as he once said, “from writing and for writing.” His inspiration for this role came from the much admired “journalist-writers” of the 19th century, as he called them, realizing that those “hybrids” who wanted to intervene in the national life were better able to influence the public with this “less majestic activity” than were writers of books.²⁴ One of his heroes was the author of the periodical O Carapuceiro (1832–1847), Miguel do Sacramento Lopes Gama, who was an enlightened priest, educator, politician, and man of letters whose aim had been to fight “against private and public” vices in a witty and vibrant way through the periodical press.²⁵ In fact, the journalism of Lopes Gama, thanks to its cultural criticism, was an important source for Freyre’s major historical works of the 1930s.

The range of the articles Freyre wrote cover a wide variety of subjects, from football to photography and architecture, from children’s toys to books, from cigars to circuses, and from comics to caipirinha, the Brazilian cocktail that this theorist of racial mixing celebrated for its combination of pinga—the Brazilian rum—lemon and sugar. As a commentator put it, the articles he wrote for the Diário de Pernambuco after he returned from his five years abroad were, “in a way, a social history of Recife.”²⁶ But, more than that, the broad scope of his journalistic work offers a mixture of chronicles, literary and social criticism, and the observations of an attentive traveler and observer of social habits. His articles generally were very well received in his hometown from the very beginning of his career as a journalist. “He does really fine work as arbiter of good taste and champion of culture against cheap modernization,” commented a foreign friend visiting him in 1926.²⁷ The positive reception Freyre enjoyed as a journalist allowed him to exercise power in the broad sense of influencing the attitudes of his readers.

One of Freyre’s objectives as a journalist was to widen the cultural horizons of his readers, telling them about peoples and ideas that they did not know much about, if they knew anything at all. Thus, from the 1920s to the 1950s readers were introduced to discussions of a number of important figures in Brazilian and European history, such as the Baron of Rui Branco, Rui Barbosa, Winston Churchill, Florence Nightingale, and Stafford Crip; discussions of literature in English, including Walter Scott, Robert Browning, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Hardy; in Brazilian literature, discussions of Erico Veríssimo, João Guimarães Rosa, and Euclides da Cunha; and in European and American scholarship, from history to sociology and anthropology, discussions of Jules Michelet, Charles Boxer, Américo Castro, Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Georges Gurvitch.

Freyre’s journalistic work is remarkable for its concision—somewhat surprising for a writer of such long books as The Masters and the Slaves and Order and Progress—as well as for his gift for making connections and for comparing and contrasting peoples, cultures, situations, and ideas, rather than seeing them in isolation. One revealing example of his style, that stands for many, is the article he published on Brazilian football in 1938, on the occasion of the World Cup, in which Brazil unexpectedly defeated Czechoslovakia and reached the semi-finals for the first time. He described the Brazilian style of playing as a “combination of the qualities of surprise . . . cunning, lightness and at the same time of individual brilliance and spontaneity.” Observing the field through an anthropological lens, inspired by Ruth Benedict’s then recent book Patterns of Culture (1935), he contrasts the cool rational Apollo, symbolizing the European style of play, and the warm emotional Dionysus, symbolizing the Brazilian, or more exactly, the mulatto style, comparing football to capoeira. “The Brazilian mulatto de-Europeanized football by giving it curves . . . We dance with the ball.” This description from 1938—which has often been repeated until today—reveals Freyre’s capacity for mediating between cultural worlds, introducing anthropology and football to each other. He would return to these same points over the years, bringing them up to date in the 1970s with a reference to Pelé.²⁸

Freyre as a Cultural Critic

It was as a critical observer of the Brazil in which he was living that Gilberto Freyre’s involvement in the politics of culture is most visible and influential. He plays the role of a cultural critic, both in his journalism, where he denounces what is wrong, and in his activity as organizer of cultural initiatives that were meant to provoke changes more directly. Both media were used, therefore, as weapons of combat. One could say that from the mid-1920s onwards, Freyre acted as a “cultural manager,” occupying a position between state and culture.²⁹

Thus, although Freyre has often been accused of nostalgia, he was very much alert to the world around him, taking a stand on topical issues, whether literary, artistic, ecological, racial, or even hygienic. The testimony of his new friend, the future famous novelist José Lins do Rego, reveals Freyre’s impact on his milieu as early as 1924: “my generation is ready to remake Brazil with you,” Lins states in an open letter to Freyre and to a Catholic thinker, Jackson de Figueiredo.³⁰

Freyre’s many interests allowed him to call the attention of the public to the many aspects of the culture of the North East, and to give support to local novelists and local painters, helping to launch their careers as interpreters of regional life. That was the case with Lins and another novelist, Jorge Amado, for example, whom Freyre described in a review as “historians disguised as novelists,” with an eye for “details full of social significance.”³¹ The painters Cicero Dias and Lula Cardoso Ayres, as well as the ceramic artist Francisco Brennand, were also praised by Freyre for their predilection for local themes, tropical colors, and what he called the “regional light.”³² Freyre’s ambition to guide North Eastern culture in a new and authentic direction can also be seen very early in his life, when in the mid-1920s he attempted to persuade young local artists to abandon the “passively colonial” habit of reproducing motifs and conventions that were distant from the Brazilian past and present. Instead, reminding them that Brazil lacked interpreters of both the national and the local scope, such as Pedro Figari in Uruguay or Diego Rivera in Mexico, he strongly suggested that they search for sources of innovation in regional and local traditions. It is in this context that Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the other Pre-Raphaelites were frequently mentioned by Freyre, who stressed the fact that they had revolutionized British art and subverted the conventions of the Royal Academy by looking back in history for inspiration in despised medieval traditions; they had also used their art to criticize the ugliness and inhumanity of the commercial and industrial civilization of the 19th century. A great admirer of these rebellious British artists, about whom he read a great deal in his twenties, Freyre must have known that Rossetti had learned from his father Gabriele—a Neapolitan poet and scholar who had taken refuge in England for political reasons—that art could have significant political and transforming power.³³ Vicente do Rego Monteiro and Fedora do Rego Monteiro were two exemplary Brazilian painters whose independence and even rebellion were of the Pre-Raphaelite type, Freyre’s readers were told. In the same way that the British artists Millais and Rossetti had gone back to the art before Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo—who were an essential part of the sacred canon of the Royal Academy—to look for inspiration in the simplicity of medieval art, these Brazilian artists knew that one can find sources of innovation by returning to the past.³⁴

In addition to the Pre-Raphaelites, Freyre also received a great deal of inspiration from the Irishman W. B. Yeats and the Englishman William Morris. Both Yeats’s nationalist concerns and Morris’s campaign against the evils of modern capitalist society served as a rich incentive, and even model, for Freyre’s regionalist campaign. Deeply concerned with the liberation of his country from political and cultural domination by England, Yeats appealed to the Irish past, searching among Irish traditions and myths for the means of resisting British imperialism. On the other hand, Morris’s medievalism was inspiring for Freyre because it demonstrated the possibility of looking back to the Brazilian colonial past in order to go forward. As Freyre noted in a review of a biography of Morris, the British critic looked back to the pre-capitalist Gothic world because he saw there “the New World he wanted to create”; in other words, “he was worried about the future, even when he seemed absorbed in the past.” The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, founded by Morris in 1877 as one of the means to regenerate the industrial world, was especially appealing to Freyre. The British reformer had founded it mainly as a means to “awaken a feeling that our ancient buildings are not mere ecclesiastical toys but monuments of national growth and hope,” as Freyre told his newspaper’s readers, quoting Morris in English. Freyre would therefore take Morris as a model in his campaign to educate the public in the importance of the past and the traditions of the region, as a basis for new creations and development—a campaign that, he insisted, should spread to other regions of the country, since, as he put it, “the good Brazilianism is the one which puts together various regionalisms.”³⁵ It was along these lines that, much later, Freyre would criticize those architects who imitated the modern architecture developed in Europe by Le Corbusier and others without adapting it, on both aesthetic and ecological grounds, to local traditions such as the colonial style in Brazil—which, however, should not be the object of slavish imitation either. Freyre’s regionalism, in other words, was a critical one. The point so much emphasized by Morris was not simple conservation or conservatism, but the exploitation of strong points of traditional architecture including the design of parks and gardens, so well adjusted to the Brazilian way of life.³⁶ Following these criteria, the building to house the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro, designed by a team that included Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, and Oscar Niemeyer, was described by Freyre as “a monster.” On the other hand, Freyre praised Costa and Niemeyer for “tropicalizing” the modern style advocated by Le Corbusier, assimilating it to “Moorish and Arabic colours,” drawing on the tradition of colonial architecture and “happily Brazilianizing the excesses of the Swiss rationalist,” which meant, among other things, replacing straight lines with curves.³⁷

Freyre as a Cultural Manager

Freyre’s interests were not confined to high art. He was also concerned to preserve the North Eastern traditions in cuisine, clothing, housing, and furniture. Once again, he defended these traditions not only as a journalist and essay writer, but as a cultural organizer or manager, a role he played more systematically at an early stage of his trajectory, in the 1920s and 1930s.

He co-founded the Centro Regional do Nordeste in 1924; he edited a volume of essays, Livro do Nordeste, on the culture of the North East on the occasion of the centenary of the Diário de Pernambuco in 1925; and he organized in Recife the Primeiro Congresso Regionalista do Nordeste in 1926, to stress the importance of preserving regional cultures in Brazil, from cuisine to native trees and traditional architecture, including vernacular architecture, mucambos, as we saw. Perhaps the most important of all Freyre’s cultural initiatives was the First Congress of Afro-Brazilian Studies held in Recife in 1934, which took place soon after his positive view of Afro-Brazilian culture was presented in The Masters and the Slaves.

The first three initiatives were a response to the “mad modernization” that Freyre encountered in his hometown when he returned from abroad in 1923, and his growing awareness that Brazilians tended to be attracted to what was distant and exotic, while remaining oblivious to the things around them—“the more it is ours, the less it interests us,” he lamented. He had come back to Recife after almost five years abroad “greedy for local colour,” but was faced with a city that was losing its social and architectural character by aping alien ideas, fashions, and habits. The Brazilian frenzy to “modernize,” Europeanize,” and “Americanize” the country, he commented to the readers of the Diário de Pernambuco, made him feel a foreigner in his own land. The inauthenticity of Brazilian culture and the need to search for something more genuine underlay initiatives that turned out to be important steps in the development of the regionalist movement of the 1920s. That was a time when the self-esteem of North Easterners was low after the region, once relatively rich and powerful thanks to its sugar plantations, had declined, while the southern states grew in importance with an economy based on coffee. In this context Freyre helped found the Regionalist Centre of the North East in 1924, bringing together a group of writers, artists, and scholars who defined themselves against a certain kind of modernism. For them, the rejection of the past was not a necessary step on the road to modernization—a process that could and should perfectly well take into account authentic Brazilian or local traditions in architecture, cuisine, and so on. One of the most important activities of this center in 1924 was “Tree Week” (Semana das árvores), which aimed at raising the consciousness of the public concerning the importance of preserving the trees of the region—a concern that was relatively unusual at the time—since these trees were much better adapted to the climate than the ones being imported from abroad. One year later, as editor of the Livro do Nordeste, Freyre brought to the public a volume of essays on the history and traditions of the region, aiming, as he put it, at “economic-social introspection” about the North East. It was for this volume that, at Freyre’s request, Manuel Bandeira wrote what became what is perhaps his most famous poem, “Evocation of Recife,” describing the sights and sounds of his childhood.³⁸

The third initiative, the Regionalist Congress of February 1926, was more ambitious, gathering a diverse group of people of various interests and occupations, but all devoted to defending various aspects of the regional culture—popular culture, rituals, local fruits, trees and plants, traditional architecture, traditional medicine, traditional sweets, and so forth—all of which threatened to disappear as a result of neglect or their replacement by foreign novelties. The participants in the Congress were “public figures or intellectuals, preoccupied with the urban and rural problems of the region”; “men of letters concerned to defend our traditional values”; “scholars interested in giving our education, our university organization and intellectual culture a regional relevance.” In short, all men, Freyre emphasized, who were keen to avoid any political partisanship, united as they were by a sense of regionalism beyond the provincialism of “pernambucidade,” “paraibanidade,” “alagonidade,” and so on. The aim of the Congress was to defend the idea that “the good brasileirism is the one that links regionalisms,” that is, different “cultural zones,” and should never be mistaken for an apologia for “separatism, along with parochialism. With anti-internationalism, anti-universalism.” One of Freyre’s lifelong passions was architecture, as we saw, and he indulged it at the Congress, praising the vernacular architecture of the mucambos of Recife as a simple dwelling “in harmony with the climate . . . with nature, with the palms and mango trees, with the greens and blues of the region” more than any other type of building.”³⁹

Freyre, who was a convinced anglophile, was keen to admit that he owed many of his ideas about the value and universalist dimension of regionalism to Morris, Yeats, and also to Thomas Hardy, a novelist he strongly recommended to José Lins do Rego in the early 1920s, just as his friend was preparing to become one of the leading regionalist writers in Brazilian literature. As Freyre told his newspaper readers and the public of the Congress, no writer was more English than Hardy, more rooted in his region of Dorset, or more involved in its regional themes. Nevertheless, as a regionalist novelist, he was able to produce the most “universally human” English novels of the previous fifty years. That is why Freyre announced on this occasion that in Brazil, riches were awaiting other “Hardys” to discover and interpret them.⁴⁰

The actual results of these cultural initiatives were disappointing. Freyre’s efforts to raise the public’s and the politicians’ awareness of the importance of regional culture and to convince them that the true meaning of regionalism united tradition with modernity and did not exclude the universal or the national were, to his mind, unsuccessful. The modernity that was valued by the Brazilians and Pernambucans, as Freyre lamented, was only what was embedded in material items from abroad—such as railways and water closets made of porcelain—and did not include national or local items and traditions. The movement Freyre had tried to initiate in favor of cultural development that united regionalism with tradition was a disappointment; “it didn’t work” (não pegou), he concluded.⁴¹ In the long term, though, his defense of regionalism bore fruit. The great Brazilian educationalist Anísio Teixeira, who occupied important posts in the system of public education of the country and was responsible for policies at the federal level beginning in the mid-1950s, admitted that he was inspired by Freyre’s ideas of regionalism when creating the important and innovative “Regional Centres for Research into Education” (Centros Regionais de pesquisas educacionais) across Brazil in 1955. Like Freyre, Teixeira had studied at Columbia University in the 1920s, and, perhaps even more than him, wanted to make a difference. Commenting on the importance of Freyre’s regionalist ideas for the concept of these centers (“our centers,” he called them when writing to Freyre), where the social sciences were linked in order to promote schools that were united in their democratic ambitions but regionally diverse, Teixeira wrote that “much of the inspiration for what we are trying to do comes from what we have learned from you and your work.”⁴²

The third cultural initiative, the First Congress of Afro-Brazilian Studies, which took place in Recife in 1934, was organized by Freyre and his cousin, the psychiatrist Ulisses Pernambucano. This was the initiative that proved to have the most impact, both in the short and long term. Freyre’s appreciation of the African tradition in Brazilian culture would have major political implications throughout the years, implications that were foreseen by the enemies of the Congress of 1934.

The purpose of this Congress was to “study problems of race relations in Brazil and to trace African influence in the cultural development of the Brazilian people.” For this, it would include discussion of the “problems of ethnography, folklore, art, sociology and social psychology” as well as exhibitions by artists.⁴³ The event, which Freyre described as “the least solemn of congresses,” took place in the Teatro Santa Isabel in the center of Recife, and brought together writers such as Mário de Andrade and the young Jorge Amado; priestesses (ialorixás) of candomblé; students; women cooking local dishes in the theater lobby; a representative of the “Black Front” (Frente Negra); and scholars such as the folklorist Luis da Câmara Cascudo and the ethnologists and anthropologists Edison Carneiro and Arthur Ramos (another anthropologist Melville Herskovits, a former student of Franz Boas, like Freyre, was unable to come but sent a paper). Papers on art, slavery, resistance, music, dance, marijuana, and popular poetry were delivered and rapidly published, attracting considerable attention in Brazil. The event, unsurprisingly, provoked the anger of some conservatives, who saw it as subversive, as “Bolshevist,” and demanded that the Congress be closed down. After all, it was the long-established and widespread hierarchy of races and the so-called “science of race” that was being undermined by bringing to the forum the issue of the value of African culture in Brazil’s development, continuing the discussion that The Masters and the Slaves had inaugurated a few months earlier. According to Freyre’s later account, some of the participants in the Congress lost their jobs or were even arrested.⁴⁴ It was not only conservatives who were unhappy with Freyre’s attitudes. He was criticized by the black intellectual Edson Carneiro, a young participant in the Congress, for his “paternalistic” manner, and he did not attend the second Congress, which was organized by Carneiro and held in Salvador in 1937.⁴⁵

From Race to Culture

When Freyre was young, he believed, like other middle- and upper-class white Brazilians, that blacks and mulattos were inferior and that in order to progress, Brazil needed to “whiten” its population by encouraging immigration from Europe. In this view, he was no exception among the Brazilian elite and with them he shared a pride in his European ancestors and a deep frustration at being Brazilian. As Rüdiger Bilden—a German friend of Freyre, to whom he owed some of his progressive ideas—reminded his readers in 1929, many Brazilians and foreigners alike agreed that nothing positive could be expected from a country populated by a “mongrel race” and ruled by a “mulatto government,” as the stereotype of Brazil asserted.⁴⁶ As a result of its African and specially mixed population, the country was supposed to suffer from lack of spirit, an inferiority complex, and a certain sadness, which a well-known writer, Paulo Prado, considered part of the Brazilian character. His famous book of 1928, Retrato do Brasil, which refers to the “vices of our mestiço origin,” describes the country as one that does not develop but only grows up like a “sick child.” A letter from Ulisses Freyre to the sixteen-year-old Gilberto is representative of the general feeling among the elite of the time: “Our greatest problem is race . . . If things continue as they are now, at the end of five generations, at the maximum, we’ll be a country of mestiços: not of White and Indian; but African and White.”⁴⁷ In his early thirties, though, after a period in which he thought according to the powerful racist paradigm, Freyre became aware that the racist ideas he had been sharing were nothing more than pseudo-science, nothing more than prejudices disguised as science. That is when Freyre, following the ideas of his Columbia University teacher Franz Boas about the power of culture, was converted to the view that Brazil’s problems were not racial but cultural—a thesis he developed in Casa-Grande & Senzala. There is a virtual consensus, at least among scholars, that the change this book helped to promote was so dramatic that one can say that Brazil was re-invented and that the low national self-esteem that was so deeply ingrained suffered a big blow. Both Freyre’s critics and his admirers talk of him as the “inventor” of Brazil, and he himself once called himself a second Pedro Álvares Cabral, the Portuguese explorer who “discovered” the country in 1500. This description has its merits, for the positive view of race mixing that Freyre is supposed to have inaugurated would have been impossible to find until the early 1930s. In their famous recommendations for rewriting the history of Brazil, the 19th-century German scientists Johann von Spix and Carl von Martius had suggested an emphasis on the interaction of three races (Amerindian, African, and Portuguese). With his focus on the interpenetration of three cultures, which he saw as enriching and powerful, Freyre went further by exploring this interaction. Indeed, his view of the special importance of African traditions in the shaping of Brazilian culture, and of what he describes as the “civilizing mission” of peoples commonly regarded as inferior, shocked part of the Brazilian public. That is why, when the Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934 defended this view, some critics described the event as “Bolshevist.” Of course, such a new view had political implications, since it followed that in order for the country to progress, the government needed to invest in the health and education of poor people of whatever color. As Roquette Pinto and Rüdiger Bilden, the intellectuals who guided Freyre’s conversion to Boas’s ideas, put it, the mixed Brazilian was not a biological problem but an economic and social one. In other words, “the mixed population should be educated, not replaced.”⁴⁸

Two arguments put forward in Freyre’s most famous book, The Masters and the Slaves, also had important political implications. First, he claimed that the Portuguese colonizers were more “plastic,” in other words adaptable, than their European competitors, interbreeding with indigenous and African women and treating slaves better than elsewhere. Second, he replaced the conventional middle-class wisdom that Brazil lacked an identity because it was a mixture of three races, by the argument that mixture defined Brazilian identity.

The implications of the first argument were a gift to the Salazar regime in Portugal, especially in the 1950s, as a defense against anti-colonial movements. Before this time, the regime had not accepted Freyre’s positive view of miscegenation. In 1951, though, Freyre received an official invitation to visit Portugal and its overseas possessions. The invitation was obviously a tempting one for a historian of colonial society, allowing him to visit the Ultramar for the first time and compare and contrast it with Brazil. Freyre hesitated before accepting but decided to go, claiming unconvincingly that the invitation “could not have been more clearly apolitical.” To have refused would have made him a supporter of political purism, as he put it, “a purism that I have never claimed to cultivate.”⁴⁹ In fact, the regime made use of him, with and without his connivance. The speeches he made during his visit were interpreted as a defense of Portuguese colonialism, at a moment of increasingly vocal opposition to the regime. Ironically, the man who had once organized the first conference of Afro-Brazilian studies now told the governor of Angola that the country was “an African Portugal.”

At a more theoretical level, in a speech that he gave in Goa, Freyre sketched what became the theory of “Luso-Tropicalism,” an amplification of the discussion of plasticity in The Masters and the Slaves. The discussion was now placed in a comparative framework in which the Portuguese in India and Africa played the role of good colonizers, in contrast to the British in particular. This idea was obviously going to be exploited by the Portuguese government, which needed such an intellectual defense against the anti-colonial movements of the time. Two of Freyre’s books, Portuguese Integration in the Tropics (1961) and The Portuguese and the Tropics (1961), were actually commissioned by the Salazar government and sent out to embassies in order for representatives of Portugal abroad to make use of their ideas. Luso-Tropicalism was also a major element in courses given at the Institute for Overseas Studies, where future colonial administrators were trained.⁵⁰

As for the second argument, about the positive image of the mixed Brazil, the implications were not missed by the Vargas regime, with its policy of building the nation by fusing local identities. Ironically enough, the regionalist Freyre gave the nationalist regime ammunition, although Freyre’s positive image of the country was controversial, especially because the idea that the “rainbow of colours” that characterizes the population was seen as proof that Brazil is a paradise of race relations—an idea that was challenged in the 1950s by sociologists in São Paulo, notably Florestan Fernandes, who noted the persistence of discrimination against African Brazilians, especially in the south of the country. In fact, the implications of the argument that mixture defined Brazilian identity were not missed by any of the regimes after Vargas either. They took Freyre’s ideas and made them into a semi-official ideology to be propagated whenever it was convenient in public proclamations, schools, and the national media. As one historian puts it, Freyre’s arguments about the positive value of miscegenation were appealing for those who were interested “in creating a Brazilian identity.” They were therefore transformed in “the most fully elaborated object of investment” from the age of Vargas to that of the military regime, “explaining how Brazil should think itself, love itself and describe itself.”⁵¹ A decree of July 1999 by then President Fernando Henrique Cardoso—declaring the year 2000, the centenary of Freyre’s birth, to be the “National Year of Gilberto Freyre”—seemed to represent the peak of Freyre’s fortune, and the confirmation of Brazilian identity as mixed.⁵² Freyre’s argument has also been employed from that day to this to present a good image of Brazil abroad as a rainbow nation. One of the most important examples of this use is President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s bid to host the Olympic Games. From Denmark, speaking to the world as the spokesman of the Brazilian sense of identity, Lula declared: “We are a people in love with sports, in love with life. Our men and women come from every continent: we are all proud of our origins, but even more proud of being Brazilian. We are not only a mixed people, but a people who likes very much to be mixed. That is our identity.”⁵³ By this time, though, this view was being criticized, especially by a vocal minority of black Brazilians, organized in the Movimento Negro. Since then, this criticism has become more frequent. It is a sign of Freyre’s influence on Brazilian culture that the need to demolish his ideas still persists.

Discussion of the Literature

There have been many studies of Freyre, but they generally concentrate on his first forty years and often avoid the complex question of his changing political attitudes. Freyre’s reputation has gone through at least three phases. Casa-Grande & Senzala was generally received with enthusiasm on its publication in Brazil in 1933, and treated as an instant classic, despite occasional complaints that the book gave too much attention to sex and was written in too colloquial a style. The second volume of Freyre’s trilogy on the social and cultural history of Brazil, Sobrados e Mucambos (1936), also received high praise and some scholars continue to consider it the best of the author’s books. An enthusiastic review of both books by the young Fernand Braudel did much for Freyre’s international reputation.⁵⁴

However, the third volume of the trilogy, Ordem e Progresso (1959), was weaker and received a devastating review from the American Brazilianist Thomas Skidmore, who described it as “chaotic” and “lacking in sustained analysis.”⁵⁵ More general criticisms of the whole trilogy included its preference for impressions over statistics and its tendency to take the North East as a paradigm for the whole country. Social historians faulted his emphasis on domestic slaves and consequent neglect of field slaves, while economic historians noted his failure to discuss small estates. In Brazil, it was (ironically enough) after 1964, at the time of the highly conservative military regime, that Freyre’s work was attacked most strongly by Marxists, who accused him of nostalgia for the world of plantations and slavery, patriarchalism, support for colonialism, and propagation of the myth of racial democracy.⁵⁶

A third phase, that of a qualified rehabilitation of Freyre’s work, became visible following the return of democracy in the 1980s. It has been marked by the publication of many essays on Casa Grande, biographies of the author, and a number of more specialized studies.⁵⁷ In the 21st century, there have been signs of a revival of the critique of Freyre in the 1970s, driven this time by the Movimento Negro rather than Marxism, and focusing on his praise of miscegenation and cultural mixture.