Visit from a Friend

One day in 1876, on a flag-draped platform in Philadelphia, a white-bearded man in plug hat and frock coat stood towering over President Ulysses S. Grant. The visitor was Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, who had come north on the British liner Hevelius for the U.S.'s centennial exposition. When a technician explained to him that the newly invented Corliss steam engine in Machinery Hall made some 36 revolutions a minute, Dom Pedro cracked: "That is better than our Latin American republics!"

Americans liked the kindly, unassuming intellectual who was Brazil's Emperor --and he liked them. He sampled Cincinnati's beer, explored Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, compared San Francisco's Golden Gate to Rio's mountain-girt Guanabara Bay. In Boston he had long talks with Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier; when he came back to the Philadelphia exposition, Alexander Graham Bell showed him his newly invented telephone. "My God," said Dom Pedro, "it talks!"

"Mother, God & the U.S." This week, for the first time since Dom Pedro's visit, another Brazilian chief of state was due in the U.S. During his ten-day stay, President Eurico Caspar Dutra, accompanied by his son Antonio Joao Dutra, his daughter-in-law, and his naval aide Raul Reis, will be the guest of Harry Truman, whom he entertained in Rio in 1947. He will address a joint session of Congress, lay a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, spend three days in Manhattan, and fly south to inspect TVA and Vanderbilt University's Institute for Brazilian Studies.

Dutra comes to the U.S. as President of a nation whose friendly relations with the U.S. go back to 1789, when Thomas Jefferson met a group of young Brazilian students in Paris and encouraged their dreams of independence. As a Brazilian foreign officer put it: "We are taught three things in school: believe in mother, God, and the friendship of the U.S."

Friendship was slightly strained in the early part of World War II when many Brazilians, among them Dutra (then Minister of War), were so impressed by the Nazi war machine that they were accused of being pro-Nazi. They shucked such views after Pearl Harbor and for the rest of the war, as in World War I, Brazil stood with the U.S.

In the war the U.S. needed Brazil as a strategic base and as a continuing source of essential minerals (manganese, quartz, mica). Today, Brazil is the cornerstone of the U.S. policy of hemispheric defense. Brazil, which benefited greatly from U.S. wartime expenditures, looks to the U.S. in peacetime for the aid that private and public capital can give to the building of the country. Brazilians want to tap U.S. technical skill for the development of the natural resources that are spread in abundance over the world's fourth largest nation. In area, only the U.S.S.R., China and Canada are larger than Brazil.*

A Lot of Coffee. Brazil has natural riches to match her size. Her great Volta Redonda steel plant--South America's largest--feeds off a quarter of the earth's known iron deposits, heavily concentrated in & around the fabulous "iron mountain" of Itabira. Brazil also has significant deposits of most of the other minerals useful to man. She ranks fourth among the world's independent nations in hydroelectric potential. Geologists estimate that oil-bearing formations lie beneath a quarter of her sparsely settled 3,286,170 square miles of territory.

Since 1521, when the first Portuguese colonists settled on her shores, she has provided much of the world's sugar. The gold and diamonds of Minas Gerais made Portuguese monarchs the envy of Europe. The automotive age rode in on Amazonian rubber, and Brazil's terra roxa (red earth) has produced most of the world's coffee.

A Lot of People. Brazil's 48 million people are the descendants of Portuguese sugar fazendeiros, African slaves, savage Indians and immigrants from around the world. They include the hard-riding gauchos of the temperate Rio Grande do Sul pampas; the sickly Indian rubber-gatherers of the steaming Amazon; the sugar-and cocoa-raising nordestinos of the states of Baia and Pernambuco on the Bulge; the driving industrialists of Sao Paulo.

Through their culture runs the pervasive influence of the Negro and Indian. Brazil draws no color lines. From the 8th to the 11th Century, the Portuguese had lived as subjects of the swarthy, highly cultured Moors, and they had come to look upon dark skin as the mark of beauty. As a result, races intermarried freely. Some of Brazil's greatest statesmen, intellectuals and artists have had Negro blood. Says Brazil's famed Sociologist Gilberto Freyre: the Brazilian "has a certain fondness . . . for honoring differences."

At times, Brazil's easygoing, samba-loving people are also her greatest drawback. Work comes hard in a country warmed over most of its area by a tropical sun. It is easy to procrastinate, or carioca-fashion, to spend the day on a white-sand beach. Until some of the hustle of industrial Sao Paulo can be injected into the rest of Brazil, the country will be the "land of tomorrow." Or, as Rio's Mayor Angelo Mendes de Moraes said recently, "the day after tomorrow--and don't forget the day after tomorrow is a holiday."

The Tight Spitter. Brazil's President lacks the easygoing gaiety of most of his countrymen. His short figure and outsize head have made sobersided Eurico Caspar Dutra a target for Rio cartoonists, who love to picture him as a sleepy owl. But even his harshest critics concede him a rocklike integrity, boundless courage, and an immobile sort of dignity.

Dutra does not smoke and seldom drinks. He is completely without side. On Sundays and on personal outings, he rides in a private car with a civilian license plate. When he was Minister of War, he ordered the police to take away a detective posted for protection at his door. "That man," he said, "is attracting unfavorable attention to my house." One of his first official acts as President was to abolish the presidential bodyguard.

Calvin Coolidge, a kindred soul, might have called Dutra a "tight spitter." Brazil's President speaks, almost grudgingly, out of the corner of his mouth; he has no small talk. Officers of his staff once maneuvered him into a car with a colonel who was his runner-up for the title of the army's most taciturn officer, and asked the chauffeur to keep track of the conversation. Not a word passed between them on the drive from Rio's Catete Palace to Santos Dumont airport. As the car drove through the airport gate, the colonel muttered: "Chegamos" (We have arrived). Grunted Dutra: "E" (It is so).

His fetish for punctuality is a Rio legend. "If the President has an appointment outside the palace for 9 o'clock," says an aide, "his hat must be brushed and on a table beside the door by 7." On a trip to Bolivia last summer the presidential plane was scheduled for a 6 a.m. takeoff.

Forewarned about Dutra's habits, the Bolivian ambassador arrived at the airport at 5:30--to find that the President had been waiting there half an hour.

Early to Bed. The President's 16-hour working day begins at 4 a.m. in his second-floor suite in grey-walled Catete Palace. Since the death of his wife two years ago, he lives with his son and daughter-in-law. He makes his own first cup of coffee as soon as he gets up, then goes through some lively calisthenics. Then, in the early morning silence, he leafs through the newspapers, studies state documents. About 5, his barber enters.* At 6, Dutra breakfasts alone on fruit, coffee and rolls. Half an hour later he is ready to receive his staff at his long, bare table under the heavy chandeliers of the ground-floor Salao dos Ministerios. At noon he lunches with his family. When affairs of state permit it, he also dines with his family, then heads for bed promptly at 8. His only recreation is an occasional horseback ride.

Dutra was born 64 years ago this week in the frontier town of Cuiaba in cattle-raising Mato Grosso. He describes his father as "a small businessman and later a public functionary--but always poor." Young Eurico joined the army at 16 and wangled an appointment to its Preparatory School of Tactics at Porto Alegre. After graduation, he moved on to Rio's Escola Militar, only to be expelled seven months later for his part in a student rebellion against compulsory smallpox vaccination. A government amnesty let him return. Two years after graduation he was a cavalry lieutenant, apparently destined for the usual army career--25 years a captain, then retirement. Then he met & married Dona Carmela Leite de Cintra.

Dona Carmela, the widow of an army captain who had died in Germany while on a government mission, was a woman whose piety and good works later endeared her to Brazilians as "Dona Santinha"--the little saint. She also burned with ambition for her husband. At her urging, Dutra returned to his books and won an appointment to Brazil's General Staff School, where he hung up a scholastic record unequaled before or since.

"Order & Progress." As an army officer, Dutra was part of an institution which has occupied a peculiar position in Brazilian politics. The army has always identified itself with the motto on Brazil's flag: "Order and Progress." This has meant, by & large, an affinity for the democracy which has characterized the country's modern history. It was the army which took over the republican movement from the disgruntled ex-slaveholders and overthrew Dom Pedro II in 1889. The first two Presidents under the republic's U.S.-patterned constitution were army officers. After that, under a long line of civilian Presidents, the army upheld the constitution.

In 1930, the situation changed abruptly. In the turbulent presidential election, Governor Getulio Vargas of Rio Grande do Sul was defeated by Julio Prestes, a protege of the incumbent President, bumbling, liberal Washington Luiz. Flanked by fellow gaucho Oswaldo Aranha and the swashbuckling General Pedro Aurelio de Goes Monteiro, Vargas marched triumphantly on Rio. The army--including Lieut. Colonel Eurico Caspar Dutra--recognized the popular strength of Vargas' movement and backed it.

Vargas, who began his presidency as a social reformer, soon moved toward dictatorship. Before he was through, he was ruling by decree, had established an ironbound press censorship, and jailed his critics. Three times Dutra saved Vargas from overthrow. He got his reward. By 1935, he was a General of Division; the next year, Minister of War.

Ultimately, Vargas made the mistake of underestimating the closemouthed Dutra. In 1945, when Brazil was growing restless under the dictatorship, Goes

Monteiro and Dutra told Vargas that he must hold an election. The dictator called in his Minister of War. "I can resign," he told Dutra, "or I can choose a candidate. I've talked to many people, and your name has constantly recurred . . ." "A great honor," Dutra broke in. Vargas, who had expected reluctance, was caught off balance. Thereafter, while he ostensibly supported Dutra's campaign, he actually sabotaged it behind the scenes.

A month before the election, Vargas suddenly installed his unpopular brother, Benjamin Vargas, as police chief. Dutra and Goes Monteiro decided that Vargas was preparing to cancel the elections. They staged a coup of their own which abruptly ended Vargas' 15-year rule. Chief Justice Jose Linhares became acting President until the election, which Dutra won by just over a million votes.

Timetable. Soon after his inauguration Dutra told an aide: "I shall spend the first two years of my term restoring constitutional government. The remaining three I shall devote to the economic development of the country." In just over three years in office, Dutra has not only restored the constitution but made it the guide for his every act. He takes its description of his limited powers so literally that the press now criticizes him, savagely on occasion, for his "government by inertia." It is a rare occasion when he gets off a message to Congress, as he did three weeks ago, "taking the liberty to insist" that it get along with its work.

Since he came to office, Brazil has had three elections, all of them reasonably free. The only political party which has felt any repression has been the Communist, outlawed in 1947. By & large, the press is free; so are speech and assembly.

Half of a Nation . . . Dutra, no economist, understands that Brazil's economy must be expanded on many fronts at once if the nation is to enjoy economic health. Last summer he got the country's principal parties to back an ambitious ($1 billion) development plan called

SALTE--for Saude (health), Alimentos (food), Transporte (transport) and Energia (power). Brazil's Congress has still to make the plan law.

The Abbink Mission, a joint U.S.Brazilian enterprise headed by John Abbink of McGraw-Hill International Corp., spent five months studying Brazil's economy. It agreed with SALTE's framers that one of Brazil's most pressing needs is stepped-up agricultural production. Last year, Brazil's imported foodstuffs cost her more than $200 million, yet the majority of her 48 million citizens lived on a diet of manioc flour, rice and beans. Half of them suffered from tuberculosis, dysentery or malnutrition. Another alarming fact was that farm production was falling. As a first step toward resolving that problem, the government has set up an impressive farm-education program through its Rural University in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Roads Needed. Even a revolution in farming methods will not feed Brazil adequately until she has a transportation system. In the whole country there are only 500 miles of paved road, only 35,500 kilometers of railroad track, and that of varying gauges. As a result, a ton of Santa Catarina coal delivered in Rio, about 550 miles from the mines, costs more than a ton brought from Britain.

Dutra's urge to see the Tennessee Valley at first hand is based on his awareness of waterpower's importance to Brazil. His country must harness her rivers to irrigate the arid, scrub-covered backlands of the north, and to provide cheap electricity for new industries. She has already made a start in the Sao Francisco Valley project, a small-scale TVA financed jointly by the government and private investors. Making use of the river's spectacular, 275-foot Paulo Afonso Falls, the project is expected to begin serving five northeastern states early in 1953. But Sao Francisco is only a start; Brazilians now consume only 62.4 kw-h per capita annually, compared with 1,990 in the U.S.

The Sao Francisco project is an example of the sort of thing that Brazil can do for herself. It is the kind of development which the Abbink Mission urged upon Brazilians. Point Four of President Truman's inaugural address held out the prospect of U.S. technical help and expanded private investment for undeveloped areas like Brazil. For sound programs, an Export-Import Bank loan might be forthcoming. But by & large, Dutra understands that the U.S. is unlikely to extend any large-scale governmental aid for meeting his country's economic problems.

That means that in the building up of Brazil, U.S. private capital may be increasingly important. To attract it, the Brazilians must overcome some of the hypernationalism which makes life hard for foreign investors. But the U.S. private investor himself must appreciate that the day of old-fashioned economic imperialism is gone. What Brazilians want is not an exploiter but a partner. Such economic partnership might well be the next chapter in the long history of U.S.-Brazilian friendship.

*The continental U.S. is short of Brazil's area by 263,783 square miles. *During Dutra's Washington visit, a barber will sleep in the Brazilian Embassy so that the President can have his customary early-hour shave.

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