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Routledge Studies in US Foreign Policy
FOUNDATIONS, US FOREIGN
POLICY AND ANTI-RACISM
IN BRAZIL
PUSHING RACIAL DEMOCRACY
Gustavo Mesquita obtained his PhD in History at the University of São Paulo
in 2017. Currently, Gustavo works as a post-doctoral fellow at the Brazil-
ian Center for Analysis and Planning and visiting fellow at the University of
Birmingham, UK.
Wanderson Chaves obtained his PhD in History at the University of São Paulo
in 2012, the Master’s degree in Social Sciences, and the Bachelor’s degree in
Anthropology, both at the University of Brasília. Currently, Wanderson is
a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of History of the University of
São Paulo.
Routledge Studies in US Foreign Policy
Series Editors:
Inderjeet Parmar, City University, and John Dumbrell,
Durham University
This new series sets out to publish high-quality works by leading and emerg-
ing scholars critically engaging with United States Foreign Policy. The series
welcomes a variety of approaches to the subject and draws on scholarship
from international relations, security studies, international political econ-
omy, foreign policy analysis, and contemporary international history.
Subjects covered include the role of administrations and institutions, the
media, think tanks, ideologues and intellectuals, elites, transnational cor-
porations, public opinion, and pressure groups in shaping foreign policy,
US relations with individual nations, with global regions and global institu-
tions and America’s evolving strategic and military policies.
The series aims to provide a range of books – from individual research
monographs and edited collections to textbooks and supplemental reading
for scholars, researchers, policy analysts, and students.
Acknowledgementsviii
About the Authorsx
Forewordxi
1 The Cold War, the Social Sciences, and the Race Question:
Brazil as a Lab 14
ELIZABETH CANCELLI
Conclusion 139
ELIZABETH CANCELLI, GUSTAVO MESQUITA, AND WANDERSON CHAVES
Index 143
Acknowledgements
Elizabeth Cancelli
Gustavo Mesquita
Wanderson Chaves
About the Authors
Notes
1 The Tension Project was at first directed by Hadley Cantril and Nathan Leites.
They were chosen by the University of Chicago sociologist and former member
of the Intelligence Section of the Psychological Warfare Division of the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS, precursor to the CIA), Edward Shills. Cantril and Leites
were members of the United States War Information Office (OWI). In 1948, Otto
Klineberg, a Canadian Psychology professor who worked at USP between 1945
and 1947, became the project’s director.
2 An important reference in the world of ideas and social democracy, Alva Myrdal
received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. She was appointed Director of the Social
Sciences Department in 1950, but she effectively took office in 1951 only.
3 In the long run, the Department of Social Sciences would gain several units:
Division of Studies on the Racial Question (1950–1952); Social Sciences Sec-
tion (1947–1948); Division of International Development of Social Sciences
Foreword xv
(1955–1984); Division of International Scientific Collaboration (1953–1954);
Division of Applied Social Sciences (1952–1976); Economic Development
Analysis Unit (1962); Division of Economic Development and Analysis (1962);
Applied Studies Section (1964–1966); Office of Economic Analysis (1963–1965);
Population Division (1974–1987). See UNESCO Archives Atom Catalogues.
UNESCO. Department of Social Sciences. https://atom.archives.unesco.org/
unesco-department-of-social-sciences, accessed on 1 March 2021.
4 Arthur Ramos was fighting to get leave from his position as a professor at the
University of Brazil, in Rio, when he suddenly died.
5 Especially after the defeat of radical black proposals, notably in the United States.
“The inability of the civil rights movement strategies based on nonviolent protest
and victories in the court system to bring about structural political and economic
change to the United States is perhaps the most significant factor contributing to
the (re)emergence of black radicalism in the United States in the middle of the
twentieth century” (Tinson, 2017, p. 5).
References
Rangil, Teresa Tomas. The Politics of Neutrality: UNESCO’s Social Science
Department, 1946-1956. Economix Université de Paris X Ouest Nanterre La
Défense, April 2011. Draft, p. 3. accessed April 27th, 2018. https://www.econstor.
eu/bitstream/10419/155443/1/chope-wp-2011-08.pdf
Tinson, Christopher M. Radical Intellect: Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in
the 1960s. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
UNESCO Archives Atom Catalogues. UNESCO. Department of Social Sciences,
2021. https://atom.archives.unesco.org/unesco-department-of-social-sciences, accessed
on 1 March 2021.
Introduction
Communism, Racism, and
the American Dilemma
Elizabeth Cancelli
In 2005, the historian Tony Judt published what would become known as his
most important book: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. One of the
book’s premises was that World War II was not an interruption of normal-
ity, but the beginning of a political, populational, and territorial revolution.
In that sense, the war was the culmination of a radical transformation that
had already begun in World War I. With the destruction of old Europe, the
advent of World War II brought a radical transformation to the Western
world, especially because it was shaken, during and after the conflict, by
the shocking carnage carried out by soldiers, the annihilation of the civil-
ian population, acts of extreme collective violence, ethnic cleansing, forced
repatriations of huge contingents of population, the collapse of law and of
the rule of law, the annihilation of parts of the elites, the crisis of ethical
values stemming largely from the trauma generated, and the terrifying dis-
covery that much of this incredible reality was accomplished in name of
political reasons.
This crisis in ethical values to which Judt refers also brought a new spec-
trum of struggles between ideologies that proclaimed to the world the
need to create a kind of renewed beginning, a post-trauma political revo-
lution: innovative political postures and the need to construct new human
sensitivities. These struggles demanded changes in the way human beings
should see and administer the world. Demands that would reserve for the
next three decades – the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s – the decades of the Cold
War’s heyday, almost permanent spaces of contestation, of struggles for the
rights of equality and individuality that were added to two areas of combat:
racial discrimination and social injustice.
In the fertile environment of polarised ideas that the Cold War created,
one of the most exciting innovations was the theoretical junction between
racism and totalitarian regimes. It was a thought that attacked not only
what had been accomplished by Nazi Germany in relation to Jews and
Gypsies (races), but also the Soviet Union, since the Soviet regime was asso-
ciated with the issue of racism in two areas: one related to anti-Semitism
and the great population deportations and ethnic cleansing,1 and the other
to the totalitarian character of communism.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178507-1
2 Elizabeth Cancelli
In 1944, in an article published by Review of Politics – which in 1951 was
incorporated in the edition of her book The Totalitarian System – Hannah
Arendt provided an already well-established relationship with the twentieth-
century racist question. In addition to associating racism and imperialism,
Arendt said in this 1944 article that racism and communism were at the
same level: that of ideology (Arendt, 1944). The American historian Arthur
Schlesinger, despite supporting Hannah’s premises about totalitarianism
and the similarities between Nazi and Communist regimes (Arendt, 1978),
believed that imperialism and racism were different. He put himself for-
ward, like other members of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA),2 as
an anti-communist and promoter of the fight for civil rights. At the discur-
sive level, he pointed out that both communism and racism had a destructive
ideological legacy (Mattson, 2005, p. 11). Strongly influenced by Reinhold
Niebuhr’s ideas,3 so precious a current of thought about the role of states in
the world, Schlesinger discredited man’s natural tendency toward goodness
and social progress. Like Niebuhr, he assumed that men are imperfect and,
given their nature, it was necessary to pay attention to moral standards,
from which political principles originate itself. Democracy was thus “a per-
manently valid form of social and political organisation which does justice
to two dimensions of human existence: to man’s spiritual stature and his
social character; to the uniqueness and variety of life, as well as to the com-
mon necessities of all men” (Niebuhr, 2011, p. 3). Democracy was also a
method of finding proximate solutions for problems that cannot be solved,
while the racial problem, in addition to being unjust, was a sin.4
The approach to racism and communism focusing on their similar aspects
of ideological extremism would also become an unprecedented milestone in
the US strategic position against Soviet attacks. Since 1928 and 1930, when
the Comintern Resolutions on the Black National Question in the United
States were published,5 the communist left said that African Americans
consisted of a kind of Black Belt, forming an oppressed nation in the deep
south of the United States, separate from the rest of the country, consist-
ing of significant portions of Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, Texas, South and North Carolina. This Black Belt nation should
have the right to self-determination and to dismember itself from the rest
of the United States.6 They also said that black oppression was caused by
expropriation and the semi-slavery conditions to which blacks had been
relegated, by the still unfinished South agrarian question, and that oppres-
sion was further exacerbated by Ku Klux Klan terror. The Comintern thus
denounced the racial segregation system in the United States and ques-
tioned the legitimacy of a country, which, at the same time, aligned racial
segregation with social segregation and dared to call itself democratic.
Comintern’s posture would affect US policy at home and abroad, since
the US Communist Party and others around the world adopted the black
cause as a front in anti-imperialist and anti-American struggles.7 Even after
Comintern was dissolved in 1943 and Cominform was created in 1947 as
Introduction 3
the coordinator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and Communist
Parties foreign policies, attacks on US racial issues continued. According to
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1988) “as the most appealing social injustice in the
country”, the black problem had attracted the interest of the Communist
Party since its inception (p. 189).
The black problem was a delicate matter and in the 1950s, the State
Department, through the United States Information Agency (USIA),8 began
to systematically conduct opinion polls about the United States’ image
abroad in relation to black issues. In January 1958, USIA produced a report
called Post-Little Rock Opinion on the Treatment of Negroes in the US.9 The
report compared similar surveys the agency made in Great Britain, West
Germany, France, Italy, and Norway in April and November 1957. Another
type of systematic survey expressed the deep concern about the communist
appeal: in December 1962, for example, USIA produced a report named
Communist Exploitation of American Racial Incidents: Moscow Lets US
News Items and Pix Tell Its Story Abroad.10
Communist Party criticism of black American issues were intense inside
and outside the United States. In the United States, the Communist Party
had three main fronts of action: the National Negro Congress, International
Labor Defense, and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties,
founders, in 1946, of the powerful Civil Rights Congress, which ended
in 1956, when the great influence of communists on the American black
movement weakened. With regard to international criticism, the play writ-
ten by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1947, La Putain Respectueuse, edited and per-
formed in Paris in 1948, projected one of the most powerful negative images
of racial segregation in the United States. Sartre’s play, whose links to the
Communist Party had been officially established in 1952,11 was inspired
by the Scottsboro Boys, a scandalous case which started in 1931, when
two white prostitutes accused nine black teenagers of sexually molesting
them on a train trip between Chattanooga and Memphis. The play was to
be made into a film in 1952 and criticised not only segregation, but the
American judicial system. The involvement of intellectuals in what was
called the black question was intense. In 1946, for example, Albert Einstein
had already challenged the fight against racism in the United States when he
published his article “The Negro Question” in Pageant Magazine.12 The US
government reacted strongly to the attack on its democratic image due to
black issues. The black actor, singer, writer, and activist, Paul Robeson, was
refused permission to travel abroad, so that he would not tarnish America’s
democratic reputation.13
While, as Mary Dudziak emphasises in her book, the heart of American
foreign policy in Cold War was to build a democracy that fought communism,
the US international focus on racial problems meant that American image
was being undermined (Dudziak, 2000, p. 12). There was another aggravat-
ing factor to the image of the United States abroad: the spreading of a wave
of violence across the southern states against black World War II veterans.
4 Elizabeth Cancelli
The erosion of the democratic image of the United States and its leader-
ship was not, as USIA polls aptly highlight, restricted to Soviet propaganda.
In 1943, the annual report of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP)14 suggested that racial issues had become a
global matter. Despite the fact President Truman largely included racial
problems on his political agenda through a sophisticated electoral calcu-
lation that would lead him to the presidency of the United States in 1945
(Dudziak, 2000 p. 12),15 the Truman Doctrine itself16 would serve as a kind
of shield, since criticisms were taken as communist threats to the “just and
indisputable” American way of life. But concerns about the negative image
was undoubtedly a subject of state security.
In turn, the connection of racial issues to social justice had two distinct
characteristics. Against the propaganda that claimed that segregation
was linked to the misery of black population in United States, the State
Department postulated as counter propaganda that the counterpoint
to racism was the possibility that the democratic system offered of social
ascension and, ultimately, that the insertion of blacks in class society would
be the great instrument that would enable the end of segregation and the
guarantee of civil rights, i.e., equal treatment and protection under the law.
The highlight of this discussion was the research initiated in 1939 and coor-
dinated by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma:
The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). The project was funded
by Carnegie Corporation and published in 1944. It made an extensive diag-
nosis of racial problems in the United States. Various researchers were
involved in it, examining anthropological, economic, educational, and
social aspects involving racial issues, including public health and adminis-
tration.17 The research resulted in a complex final report around 1,500 pages
long, divided into 11 parts and 45 chapters, in addition to annexes, and a
long list of separate publications. From the diagnosis, the conclusion was
that the United States had a great opportunity to solve a moral dilemma:
integrating blacks in modern democracy.18
Myrdal’s considerations were anchored in some important assumptions.
The first one was that the exclusion of black people was directly and indi-
rectly related to discrimination against them19; the second, that the racial
question had become an international issue and that injustices against
blacks would have high costs.20 Furthermore, the resoluteness of discrim-
ination was related to the defence of democracy against totalitarianism.
World War II was the most evident proof of this reality:
President Truman’s 1947 speech marked the beginning of the Cold War
and laid the foundations of what would be known as the Truman Doctrine.
Addressed to Congress, he gave at the same time the outline of the new
anti-colonial strategy and the foundations to defend the “free world”.23
However, one central question that arose was how to defend the free world
6 Elizabeth Cancelli
and maintain social segregation? In June 1947, Truman made the question
explicit to the Nation:
Notes
1 Deportations were estimated to have reached six million inhabitants under
Stalin’s orders. Between 1941 and 1949, over three million people were
deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. (Boobbyer, 2000, p. 130).
2 ADA is an important liberal lobbying group founded in 1947. Devoutly
anti-communist, ADA can be seen as the most complete version of Cold
War Liberalism, with a constant emphasis on the development policies of the
Marshall Plan and opposed to the policies of military intervention. Eleanor
Roosevelt, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Reuther, Arthur Schlesinger,
and Reinhold Niebuhr were some of the main Democrats among ADA’s
founders. ADA embodied Schlesinger’s “vital centre” concept and became a
fundamental organisation in the struggle for civil rights and liberties in the
United States.
3 A Protestant theologian engaged in public affairs, Niebuhr (1892–1971) was
one of the most important US intellectuals in the twentieth century. He espe-
cially influenced leaders of the US Democratic Party with philosophical prin-
ciples of intercession between politics, religion, and foreign policy. His most
important books are Moral Man and Immoral Society, The Nature and Des-
tiny of Man, and The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. He was
one of the founders of Americans for Democratic Action (the progressive wing
of Democratic Party) and one of the creators of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. His influence on American foreign policy was great and he
subsequently served as an advisor to the State Department.
4 On Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings about racial segregation and racism, see
Kisshauer (2015) and Paeth (2016).
Introduction 9
5 The name refers to the Third International or Communist International
(1919–1943), responsible for the coordination of various communist parties
around the world.
6 The Black Belt’s right to self-determination and the dismemberment thesis
were definitively abandoned in 1959, having been weakened considerably since
1944. Nevertheless, the racial question was used by communists as one of the
main proofs that there was no real freedom in the United States.
7 The 1928 and 1930 Comintern Resolutions on The Black National Question
In the United States, from the original in English: “The great majority of
Negroes in the rural districts of the south are not ‘reserves of capitalist reac-
tion,’ but potential allies of the revolutionary proletariat. Their objective posi-
tion facilitates their transformation into a revolutionary force, which, under the
leadership of the proletariat, will be able to participate in the joint struggle with
all other workers against capitalist exploitation (...). It is the duty of the Negro
workers to organise through the mobilisation of the broad masses of the Negro
population the struggle of the agricultural laborers and tenant farmers against
all forms of semi-feudal oppression. (…) The Negro problem must be part and
parcel of all and every campaign conducted by the Party (1928)”. www.marx2
mao.com/Other/CR75.html, accessed on 12 September 2017. The United States
Communist Party’s (CPUSA) alliance strategies in relation to black issues were
varied: from isolationism to more moderate phases of organisational fronts.
8 USIA (1953–1999) was created as an advertising and information agency.
9 Program and Media Studies/PMS-23-58, RG 306, NACP.
10 Research Reports/R-174-62, RG 306, NACP As an example of other research:
May 1961, “Worldwide Reactions to Racial Incidents in Alabama”, Special
Reports / S-17); May 1961, “Near East and South Asia: Editorial Comments on
U.S. Racial Incidents in Alabama”, Special Reports / S-55-61; February 1964,
“America’s Human Rights Image Abroad”, Special Reports / S-3-64; October
1962, “Racial Prejudice Mars the American Image”, Research Report / R-112-
62, RG 306, NACP; July 1961, “IRI Background Facts: The Negro American”,
Special Reports / S-41-61, RG 306, NACP. In: Heger (1999).
11 He had joined the French Communist Party in 1952.
12 It is a short text, with an appeal to human dignity. Its full text is in the appendix.
13 On US State policies against black left-wing intellectuals in the United States,
see: Washington (2014).
14 NAACP is one of the oldest of the most influential institutions for the defence
of black civil rights in the United States. It was founded in 1910, on Abraham
Lincoln’s centenary birth. In 1954, it had about half a million members.
15 She analyses the purely electoral reasons that led Truman to include civil
rights on his agenda for the presidency and his subsequent defence of this
agenda. She also considers essential the attention that foreign countries have
been giving to the North American racial problem (p. 23 na ff).
16 In his appeal for aid to Greece and Turkey, made to Congress in 1947, the
intertwining of national interests and universal values was advocated. In this
sense, democracy and human rights appeared as the counter-ideology to all
kinds of totalitarianism: an opposition between two different modes of civ-
ilisation and sets of values. One free, the other totalitarian. This led to the
launch of Truman’s Doctrine, a landmark of the Cold War. See Truman’s
complete speech at: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc_large_image.php?
flash=true&doc=81, accessed on 14 September 2020.
17 With different specialities, those who participated in the research included:
Ralph J. Bunche, Guy B. Johnson, Paul H. Norgren, Dorothy S. Thomas,
Doxey A. Wilkerson, M. F. Ashley-Montagu, Margaret Brenman, Ster-
ling Brown, Barbara Burks, Allison Davis, J. G. St. Clair Drake, Harold F.
10 Elizabeth Cancelli
Dorn, G. James Fleming, Lyonel C. Florant, E. Franklin Frazier, Herbert
Goldhamer, Melville J. Herskovits, T. Arnold Hill, Eugene L. Horowitz, Elea-
nor C. Isbell, Charles S. Johnson, Guion G. Johnson, Dudley Kirk, Louise
K. Kiser, Otto Klineberg, Ruth Landes, Gunnar Lange, T. C. McCormick,
Benjamin Malzberg, Gladys Palmer, Arthur Raper, Ira De A. Reid, Edward
Shils, Bernhard J. Stern, Louis Wirth, T. J. Woofter, Jr., Berta Asch, Lloyd
H. Bailer, Louis Boone, Frieda Brim, Vincent Brown, William B. Bryant,
Elwood C. Chisolm, Walter Chivers, Kenneth Clark, Belle Cooper, Lenore
Epstein, Edmonia Grant, Louis O. Harper, James Healy, Mary C. Ingham,
James E. Jackson, Jr., Wilhelmina Jackson, Anne De B. Johnson, Louis W.
Jones, Alan D. Kandel, Simon Marcson, Felix E. Moore, Jr., Rose K. Nelson,
Herbert R. Northrup, Edward N. Palmer, Lemuel A. Penn, Glaucia B. Rob-
erts, Arnold M. Rose, George C. Stoney, Joseph Taylor, Benjamin Tepping,
Harry J. Walker, Richard B. Whitten, Milton Woll, Rowena Wyant, Walter
Wynne, and Rowena Hadsell Saeger, who was Executive Secretary.
18 “If America in actual practice could show the world a progressive trend by
which the Negro became finally integrated into modern democracy” (Myrdal,
1944, p. 1021).
19 “But, again, the concentration of unemployment upon the Negro people is
explainable only as the direct and indirect effects of discrimination” (Myrdal,
1944, p. 998).
20 “What has actually happened within the last few years is not only that the
Negro problem has become national in scope after having been mainly a
Southern worry. It has also acquired tremendous international implications
(…) The situation is actually such that any and all concessions to Negro rights
in this phase of the history of the world will repay the nation many times, while
any and all injustices inflicted upon him will be extremely costly. This is not
yet seen clearly by most Americans, but it will become increasing” (Myrdal,
1944, p. 1015).
21 See in relation to this a 1991 text by Schlesinger explaining this position,
(Schlesinger, 1949).
22 The President’s Committee on Civil Rights was created by Executive Order
9808 and tasked with investigating the status of civil rights. After the report
was released, the Commission was ended.
23 (…) At the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose
between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One
way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free
institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of indi-
vidual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political
oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly
imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled
press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms”.
Truman, Harry. 12 March 1947, “The Truman Doctrine”. See complete speech
in: Miller Center, Presidential Speeches, Harry Truman. https://millercenter.
org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-12-1947-truman-doctrine,
accessed on 22 January 2021.
24 The fear had been expressed by Senator Willian Benton to his fellow congress-
men. The Senator also drew attention to the fact that the racial issue against
the United States was a weapon especially used in the east, India and China.
(Dudziak, 2000, p. 39). William Benton was a Democratic senator from 1949
to 1953. Between 1945 and 1947, he was Assistant Secretary of State for Pub-
lic Affairs, whose main tasks was to consolidate war information of different
agencies for the State Department and launch the main information and US
educational exchange programs abroad during peace times. Benton took an
Introduction 11
active part in the foundation of the UN, in the defence of civil rights, and in the
fight against Senator Joseph McCarthy. He was US ambassador in UNESCO
between 1963 and 1968 and owner and editor of Encyclopedia Britannica from
1943 to 1973. In 1961, he published for Britannica, with Adlai Stevenson, “The
Voice of Latin America”. See: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/
view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.BENTON, accessed on 10 November 2017.
25 Cf.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBZ7GFR_AuA, accessed on 8 Feb-
ruary 2018.
26 It was stated in this video that since 1940, in San Francisco alone, the black
family market had grown 89%. There was also another tremendous appeal:
blacks had 15 billion dollars to spend!
27 In relation to USIA sponsorship and the possibility of black social ascension
according to US propaganda, see Cattai (2017, p. 162 and ff).
28 In spite of FBI Director John Hoover’s wrath towards black leaders. Another
iconic film of the period was The New Girl in The Office (1960), a drama that
intensely linked the perverse discourse of prejudice against the hiring of a
high-level secretary in an industrial plant and the implementation of national
anti-discrimination actions and policies. The drama was produced by the
President’s Government Contracts Committee. Cf.: https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=8jp6ZKSX_nk, accessed on 8 January 2018.
29 Linked to the United Nations, UNESCO was created in London in Novem-
ber 1945, and later based in Paris. UNESCO had the purpose of promot-
ing educational, scientific, and cultural collaboration between nations in
order to increase respect for justice, international law, and human rights.
It succeeded, albeit with many modifications, the League of Nations’ Inter-
national Intellectual Cooperation Committee. In relation to the 1945 Lon-
don meeting, attended by 44 UN delegations, see the video: http://www.
unesco.org/archives/multimedia/?pg=33&s=films_details&id=15, accessed
on 14 October 2017.
30 “(…) proposing and recommending the general adoption of a programme of
dissemination of scientific facts designed to bring about the disappearance of
that which is commonly called race prejudice” (UNESCO, 1950, p. 1).
31 On UNESCO’s trajectory in relation to the racial issue, we recommend Mar-
cos Chor Maio’s work, especially Maio (1997) and Maio (1999a, pp. 141–58).
32 Ernest Beaglehole was known for his anthropological studies of culture in the
Pacific Islands.
33 Juan Comas wrote a fundamental study of Mexican Indigenous peoples and
was a reference in the defence of human rights.
34 One of the leading Brazilian sociologists of his generation, Costa Pinto was
closely tied to Donald Pierson. In 1953, he published O negro no Rio de Janeiro:
relações de raça numa sociedade em mudança (The Negro in Rio de Janeiro:
race relations in a changing society) as the final report on race relations
in research carried out in Rio de Janeiro and funded by UNESCO. In accord-
ance with UNESCO’s guidelines, the survey took into account the economic,
psychological, political, and cultural aspects of race relations which may have
influenced the sense of harmony or disharmony regarding race relations.
35 Franklin Frazier, who was a black man himself, published referential studies
on racial questions in the United States, publishing The Nego Family in Bahia
in 1942.
36 An outstanding British sociologist.
37 Humayun Kabir was an eminent Oxford-educated Indian intellectual and
politician.
38 In 1948 Levi-Strauss, who was a professor at USP between 1935 and 1939, had
already published La Vie familiale et Sociale des Indiens Nambikwara.
12 Elizabeth Cancelli
39 His birth name was Israel Ehrenberg. English by birth, he received a doctorate
from Columbia by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict.
40 A former consultant at the Office of The Coordinator of Inter-American
Affairs during World War II, a social psychologist he worked with David
Rockefeller as a specialist in Latin America matters.
41 A US biologist and morphologist, he was a signatory of the 1939 Eugenic
Manifesto, which denounced Hitler’s racist policy.
42 A Swedish doctor, eugenicist, and morphologist.
43 One of the most outstanding geneticists in the United States.
44 A geneticist at Columbia University.
45 An anthropologist at Princeton University.
46 A prominent English scientist and one of those responsible for the creation of
UNESCO, in 1936, he proposed the use of ethnic group as a substitute for race.
47 Klineberg was a professor at Columbia professor and part of the Franz Boas
circle. He participated in Myrdal’s team for An American Dilemma. Between
1945 and 1947, he was hired by the University of São Paulo as professor and
head of the chair of psychology in the philosophy course.
48 Moore belonged to Talcott Parsons’ first PhD group of students at Harvard
University.
49 Winner of the Nobel Prise in medicine.
50 An embryologist, historian of science, biochemist, and English sinologist.
51 A German Jew and naturalised American, he is known as the refounder of
genetics.
52 Revised versions of the first 1950 Declaration were published in 1951, 1967,
and 1978.
53 The discussion was publicised by this 1952 UNESCO publication.
References
Arendt, Hannah. O sistema totalitário. Lisboa: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1978.
Arendt, Hannah. Race-Thinking before Racism. The Review of Politics, Vol. 6, no. 1,
1944. Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre
Dame du lac on behalf of Review of Politics. Disponível em: http://www.jstor.org/
stable/1404080, accessed April 8th 2011.
Boobbyer, Philip. The Stalin Era. Routledge Sources in History. London: Routledge,
2000.
Cattai, Júlio Barnez Pignata. Guerra Fria e Propaganda: A U.S. Information
Agency no Brasil, 1953-1964. Curitiba: Editora Prismas, 2017.
Dudziak, Mary J. Cold War and Civil Rights: Race and Image of America
Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Heger, Kenneth W. Race Relations in the United States and American Cultural
and Informational Programs in Ghana, 1957-1966. 1999. Www.archives.gov/
publications/prologue/1999/winter/us, accessed in September 12th 2017.
Jensen, Geoffrey W. The Routledge Book of the History of Race and the American
Military. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.
Kisshauer, Cassia. Reinhold Niebuhr: His Perspective on Desegregation as
Influenced by Christian Realism. In: Belmont University, 2015. Www.belmont.
edu/…/History%20-%20Kisshauer%20-%202015, accessed November 14th 2017.
Maio, Marcos Chor. O projeto Unesco e a agenda das Ciências Sociais no Brasil nos
anos 40 e 50. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais. Vol. 14, no. 41. São Paulo, out.
1999, p. 151. Www.sieco/br.ph?Pid, accessed February 13th 2017
Introduction 13
Maio, Marcos Chor; Ventura, Ricardo dos Santos. Antiracism and the uses of sci-
ence in the post World War II: An analysis of Unesco’s first statements on race
(1950 and 1951). Rio de Janeiro, Vibrant, Vol. 12, no. 2, 2015. http://www.scielo.br/
pdf/vb/v12n2/1809-4341-vb-12-02-00001.pdf, accessed February 10th 2018.
Mattson, Kevin. Rethinking the liberal world: towards a history of postwar liberal-
ism in America. The Haverford Journal, Vol. 1, no. I, 2005, p. 11.
Myrdal, Gunnar. With the Assistance of Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose. An
American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. NY/London:
Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A
Vindication of Democracy and a Critique against its Traditional Defense.
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Paeth, Scott. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Complex Legacy on Race. Political Theology.
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on-race-scott-paeth, accessed November 14th 2017.
Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949.
Truman, Henry. Truman Doctrine. Milestone Documents of the National Archives,
1947. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/truman-doctrine#:~:text=
I%20believe%20that%20it%20must,destinies%20in%20their%20own%20way
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000733/073351eo.pdf, accessed February 12th, 2018.
Washington, Mary Helen. The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and
Cultural Left of the 1950s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
1 The Cold War, the Social
Sciences, and the Race Question
Brazil as a Lab
Elizabeth Cancelli
This great republic has a civilisation which has been developed by the
direct contributions of different races. And it suffers less than other
nations from the effects of those prejudices which are at the root of so
many vexatious and cruel measures in countries of similar ethnic com-
position. We are yet ill informed about the factors which brought about
such a favourable and, in many ways, exemplary situation. But in the
present state of the social sciences, general speculations no longer suf-
fice. We must have specialists make searching inquiries in the field. We
must learn from them exactly why and how social, psychological and
economic factors have contributed in varying degrees to make possible
the harmony which exists in Brazil.
(UNESCO, 1950)4
An issue of the Courier contained details of the research and the perspec-
tives of some of the sociologists participating in the project. The Brazilian
research was to be carried out in four metropolitan areas (Rio de Janeiro,
São Paulo, Salvador, and Recife), in communities in Central Brazil, in the
Amazon region, and the north-eastern Sertão, and in large plantations in
Bahia. It was also to include direct contact and case studies of racial prob-
lems and attitudes – particularly regarding blacks and their social posi-
tion.5 In addition to Metraux’s article, Gilberto Freyre, Roger Bastide,6
Luis de Aguiar Costa Pinto, Thales de Azevedo, Harry W. Hutchinson,7
and Charles Wagley,8 coordinator of the investigation in rural Brazil, gave
a general portrait of the racial issue in the country and what UNESCO’s
research leaders had discovered about racial attitudes. Gilberto Freyre, the
best internationally known Brazilian sociologist at that time, wrote pro-
lifically about the history of the place of blacks in Brazil.9 He was born
16 Elizabeth Cancelli
in 1900 in Recife, in a Baptist family, graduated from Baylor University,
and studied under the supervision of Frantz Boas at Columbia University,
but never finished his PhD. By 1948, he had already published 11 books in
Brazil, including his internationally known The Masters and the Slaves. The
other two Brazilians in the group were L. A. da Costa Pinto and Thales de
Azevedo. Thales was born in Salvador in 1904. Originally a medical doctor,
he increasingly concerned himself with anthropology at the University of
Bahia, where he had been since 1943. Costa Pinto was the youngest Brazilian
of the group. He was also born in Salvador, and was working already with
Charles Wagley, Thales de Azevedo, and Harry W. Hutchinson, collecting
data in Bahia after finishing his PhD in Rio de Janeiro in 1944.
Wagley, Marvin Harris, Hutchinson, and Ben Zimmerman10 were in Brazil
working in the Bahia State-Columbia University Social Science Research
Program initiated in 1949.11 This was funded by the Foundation for the
Development of Science of Bahia12 and the Department of Anthropology
at Columbia University, in cooperation with UNESCO. The principal aim
of the group was to compare “traditional” zones with “progressive” com-
munities, in order to picture the dynamics and substantive changes created
through modernisation.
Roger Bastide was in São Paulo, where he had arrived at the age of 39 in
1937 with a group of young French academics hired by the new USP.13 In
1946, he had published the first volume of Estudos Afro-Brasileiros (Afro-
Brazilian Studies). He was supposed to head the UNESCO investigation
in São Paulo by himself, but he invited the young sociologist Florestan
Fernandes to share the responsibility with him.
Indeed, the general idea of the cultural importance of Brazil as a democratic
example mainly came from Gilberto Freyre’s masterpiece, The Masters and
the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilisation, published
in Portuguese in 1933 and first translated into English in 1946 by Alfred A.
Knopf and by Gallimard into French in 1952.14 The book was a tremendous
success15 and its fundamental point was that Brazil had a particular cultural
capacity for melting races without segregation and racism. Freyre gave long
historical explanations emphasising the Catholic, Portuguese, and African
backgrounds that made it possible to form this distinguished civilisation.
In the 1950s, Freyre was the best-known Brazilian sociologist outside the
country and his work had an international impact.
UNESCO’s research and Métraux’s perspective on Brazil came mainly
from what Freyre argued in his book. The head of the Department of
Social Sciences also stated that Brazil was one of the few countries that had
achieved racial democracy.16 He drew attention to the fact that the attitude
of Iberian countries towards slavery was different from those of other colo-
nial powers. Clauses favourable to slaves had always existed in Portuguese
and Spanish laws, reflecting the influence of the Church which, since the sev-
enteenth century, had recognised indigenous people and blacks as human
beings. Furthermore, the contribution of black people to religious, social,
The Cold War, the Social Sciences, and the Race Question 17
and artistic traditions in a country that was demonstrating its originality
could not be denied. Also involved was the emergence of a new civilisation,
in which whites and blacks worked together to create a new social envi-
ronment. Nevertheless, the greatest danger, according to the head of the
UNESCO Social Sciences Division, was the role economic change could
play in the formation of racial prejudice. Métraux argued that the rapid
urbanisation that took place in Brazil intensified relations between whites
and blacks in certain cities and caused serious conflicts (Courier, 1952, p. 6).
In many ways, all articles written in that issue of the Courier corroborated
Métraux’s assumptions.
At that time, without denying Freyre’s assumptions of racial harmony,
the French sociologist Roger Bastide emphasised that relations between
blacks and whites in certain industrialised areas and cities were in open
opposition to status of blacks in the rest of the country. He explained that
the city of São Paulo was going through what American sociologists called
the phenomena of “transition societies”17: the patriarchal way of life was
succumbing to economic competition. Black patriarchal domination and
racial prejudice were being replaced by class prejudice in order to justify the
privileges of whites, although the democratic laws of Brazil and industrial
development, as well as the demand for labour, were helping to improve
position of non-white people as a whole. However, Bastide pointed out that
a union of forces for segregation was increasing in city life.
Thales de Azevedo’s position, unlike Bastide’s and Costa Pinto’s, was even
closer to Gilberto Freyre’s. His perspective was based on previous research
by Charles Wagley, Luis A. da Costa Pinto, and himself. Thales states in his
Courier article that prejudice did not really exist in Bahia, and that Bahia
was undoubtedly the state that most represented black and white relations
in Brazil. For him, while the number of interracial marriages were decreas-
ing, this was much more a consequence of social barriers and feelings of
class, than of colour prejudice. And although the vast majority of mulat-
tos and coloured people were concentrated in the lower social strata and
in the least prestigious occupations, many could be found in the professions
that conferred social prestige. The fact is, says Thales, that even though
there is prejudice, it is kept to a minimum in Bahia, concluding: “The people
of Bahia finally are very proud of their traditions of tolerance and of the
absence among them of any ‘racialism’” (Courier, 1952, p. 6).
Costa Pinto’s position appeared to be unique: in addition to the harsh
criticism that makes it possible to glimpse his position on the interpretation
of culturalism and the black question, he focused his analysis on the social
structure and harshly criticised the naturalisation of the development of a
“black conscience”. In the Courier, Costa Pinto denied that there was no
racial prejudice in Brazil and says that the refusal to recognise prejudice is a
desire to hide the importance of the question of race and colour, whose origin
has several causes. Attentive to the fact that in the extreme forms of racialism,
which exist in several countries in comparison with Brazil, Brazil is made to
18 Elizabeth Cancelli
appear to be a model of tolerance and harmony. If the United States is placed
next to Brazil, he says, we can see that the difference is in degree and not in
nature. What was typical in Brazilian situation was not its complete absence
of prejudice, but the absence of violence in the forms of discrimination. We
must make it clear, he says, that the appearance of a new racial situation,
which can be observed in Rio de Janeiro, is directly related to the influx of
rural immigration towards the country’s capital, caused by the attraction of
rapid industrial development. As for the fact that there were black men who
had reached the highest places on social scale, Costa Pinto says these rep-
resented honourable exceptions that should not give rise to illusions about
the state of the racial situation. The success of men who crossed barriers
imposed by their colour underwent a process of “bleaching”. This new black
elite that has emerged – the symbol of a liberal appearance in a modern
society and its white elites – while wishing for progress, does not give up its
“black c onscience”. In its way, this new black elite group faces prejudices
expressed in stereotypes. In face of these barriers, reactions take the form of
race consciousness. The ideology that black intellectuals built around “black
conscience” is the form of class consciousness imposed by their elites.18
Thus, concludes Costa Pinto, it can be said that the idea of “black con-
science” is not of black origin, but merely a black reflection of ideas that
white men have about themselves and a result of a black conscience of race
that was developed by obstacles blacks faced throughout their lives. It is
necessary to understand, according to him, that this exaltation of a “black
conscience” and the contradictions that are so apparent in the ideological
system are, in fact, expressions, in racial terms, of the aspirations and dis-
appointments of a middle-class group that is trying to ascend socially, not
as a race, but as a social class. Their main objective was to achieve for them-
selves and their peers the type of life of the upper and middle classes, in
other words, the traditional classes of Brazilian society.
Harry W. Hutchinson’s and Charles Wagley’s articles did not differ much
from each other and would not have much impact on future discussions.
They admitted that in the vast country that is Brazil there were extreme dif-
ferences from region to region, as well as between cosmopolitan cities and
small towns and villages: differences in ethnic composition, living stand-
ards, degrees of industrialisation, and receptivity to foreign ideas. It was
therefore difficult to generalise. But some common patterns were uncovered
in the surveys by the group Wagley had led since 1948.
It was observed that the main principle that governed relations between
people in rural Brazil was that of class and not race, although there was
some racial prejudice. Some occasional tensions were present in the upper
class, when other criteria were not decisive. The reason why Charles Wagley
gave relative importance to racial criterion was mainly because the upper-
class groups had a European appearance. People of colour, he argued,
occupy socially and economically inferior positions, not as a result of racial
prejudice, but these causes needed to be observed due to the slowness in
The Cold War, the Social Sciences, and the Race Question 19
which the economic and educational advantages were extended to those
who were third or fourth generation former slaves or descendants of indig-
enous people. The main barrier to social improvement was not racial prej-
udice, but the inherited disadvantage of non-Europeans in terms of wealth
and education.
Wagley concluded that it was of fundamental importance that there was
no institutionalised occupational or educational segregation based only on
“race”. Rural Brazil was not entirely free from prejudice and race-based
discrimination, but, as a whole, race relations in these rural communities
had a rich heritage from which the world has much to learn.
Throughout the 1950s, noting that the conclusions did not necessarily
express the opinion of the organisation, UNESCO ended up publishing a
series of studies on what was generally called the economics, politics, cul-
tural, and psychology determinants of race relations in Brazil. First was
Race and Class in Rural Brazil, organised by Charles Wagley (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1952).19 This was followed by L. A. Costa Pinto,
O negro no Rio de Janeiro: relações de raças numa sociedade em mudança (São
Paulo: Brasiliana, Vol. 276, Companhia Editora Nacional, 1953); Thales de
Azevedo, Les élites de coloeur dans une ville bréliliene (Paris: UNESCO,
1953)20; followed by Relações raciais entre pretos e brancos em São Paulo,
organised by Roger Bastide and Florestan Fernandes (São Paulo: Editora
Anhembi, 1955); Rene Ribeiro, Religião e Relações Raciais (Rio de Janeiro:
Ministério da Educação e Cultura, 1956)21; Cor e Mobilidade Social by
Fernando Henrique and Octávio Ianni (São Paulo: Brasiliana, vol. 307,
Companhia Editora Nacional); Charles Wagley, Amazon Town: A Study of
Man in the Tropics (NY: The Macmillan Company, 1953); Marvin Harris,
Town and Country in Brazil (NY: Columbia University Press, 1956); and
Harry W. Hutchinson, Village and Plantation in Northeastern Brazil (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1957).
The fact is that UNESCO’s work was structured to provide guidance
towards creating public policies that would have a concrete effect on over-
coming the racism and segregation imposed on the black population. In
order to create these policies, which would later be known as “affirmative”,
essential questions had to be debated: the slaveholding history of Brazilian
society, the impacts of social change due to capitalist innovation, and the
identification of colour as an obstacle to social mobility. The challenges to
create public policies and modernisation agendas for transition societies or
transition areas were set.
However, the perspective of the recent past as harmonious among
races still started from precepts established by Gilberto Freyre’s concept
of “Brazilian Civilisation”. As stated previously, in general, the justifica-
tions for UNESCO’s research in Brazil were based on the general lines of
Gilberto Freyre’s argument. It was interesting to see the predominance of a
view about Brazil, especially in its embryonic historical phase, from which
the latter, whose reputation was due above all to his The Masters and the
20 Elizabeth Cancelli
Slaves,22 emphasised the sensitivity of a culture sustained by human kind-
ness or humanism, stemmed from a North-eastern Brazilian perspective,
especially from Pernambuco state and its Catholic and Portuguese past.
In some ways, Freyre’s perspective was an identity-based creation cen-
tred on reference to its opposition, inversely related to Southern Brazil’s
cosmopolitan values and US Northern Protestant values. Giving it a more
universal dimension, it can be said that Freyre’s assumptions were contrary
to the positivity of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, when he praised the
United States in 1835. In his book, Tocqueville (1998) praised the Puritan
values of the North, as opposed to the values of other regions of the conti-
nent, doomed, according to him, to disorder and alien to work and wealth.23
According to Freyre’s precepts in his opposite interpretation of
Tocqueville’s renowned book, the utilitarian pragmatism of Protestantism
was incompatible with the premises that made building a different civili-
sation possible, such as the Brazilian one. Gilberto Freyre assumed that
“Catholic culture was more plastic, more flexible, with a greater capacity
for assimilation, whereas Protestant culture, tougher, more rigorous, more
uncompromising, was less receptive to diversity and less rich in aesthetic
terms” (Siepierski, 2002). This plasticity and the immense capacity for
assimilation would be present whenever Catholic culture had gained space
for penetration, as occurred in an exemplary manner in Northeast Brazil.
Therefore, the true Brazilian spirit was in the Northeast.
Freyre centralised the building of national identity in the past and on
the construction of a specific kind of memory. Identity, therefore, had to
be built in contrast to the ones projected towards the future, notably those
focused on a type of modernity proclaimed in the South of Brazil, espe-
cially in São Paulo. For him, the creed based on a model of modernity and
civilisation coming from the south of the country was some kind of intru-
sive pattern against tradition, extemporaneous to Brazilian cultural iden-
tity, supported by him and his constant search for tradition. Instead, Freyre
proposed a quite different model of civilisation, distant and antagonistic to
the Protestant type of capitalist development he recognised was being intro-
duced in the southern part of the country.
When, in 2005, the former president and sociologist Fernando Henrique
Cardoso wrote the presentation to the 50th Brazilian edition of The Masters
and Slaves (Freyre, 2005), he continued to criticise Freyre’s views. He said
that “Gilberto Freyre opposed the patriarchal tradition to all elements that
could be constitutive of capitalism and democracy: Calvinist puritanism,
Victorian morality, the political modernisation of the state from a liberal
point of view, and everything that was fundamental to a State of Law (indi-
vidualism, contract, and general rules), in a word, modernity” (Cardoso,
2005, p. 27) Fernando Henrique Cardoso was a member of the UNESCO
team at USP leaded by Roger Bastide and Florestan Fernandes.
Freyre’s perspective, it is important to emphasise, was not unique. Like
the Frenchman Tocqueville, who used the United States to think about
The Cold War, the Social Sciences, and the Race Question 21
France, Freyre was inspired by Americans to rethink Brazil, in an exchange
of signals in relation to Tocqueville’s work. Where the Frenchman saw
positivity, Freyre saw negativity. His proposal for civilisation was diverse.
Freyre shared it with a movement that had taken shape especially in the
Southern United States in the early twentieth century.
In 1918, at the age of 18, Gilberto Freyre, arrived to study in Waco, Texas,
at Baylor University, a traditional Baptist higher education institution.24 Two
years later, despite being a Baptist, he would develop a severe criticism of
Protestantism and would become a Catholic and supporter of Iberianism.25
In those years, an intense intellectual agitation was taking place in the
South of the United States. One of this movements was called the New
Poetry. It entered the South and intended to humanise poetry using a fresh
and original language, moving away completely from the traditional types
of verse, differentiating itself from forms established by nineteenth-century
literature. It was an intense search for new plasticities. Freyre was deeply
touched by such new poetry and its use of words.
There was also an intense intellectual movement that criticised segrega-
tion as an attempt to preserve “Old South” ideals and the History made
by “ladies” and by confederate remnants, especially regarding their con-
ceptions of race, politics, and class hierarchy (Cobb, 2007).26 The Southern
Renaissance was openly opposed to segregationist doctrines that were
intensified in the 1880s, gained an echo in the exaltation of the Old South,
and spread through the rest of the nation, particularly after 1915, with the
resounding success of DW Griffith’s movie, The Birth of a Nation. The film
disseminated images of “wild black sexuality” and featured a negative por-
trait of the southern reconstruction period, just when small steps towards
black people citizenship were being taken (Cobb, 2007, pp. 87–8).
The Southern Renaissance was immersed in an attempt to rethink his-
tory, although, as historian James Cobb would point out in 2007, it ended
up bypassing “the delicate issue of slavery, paying tribute to the grace
and gentility of the slaveholding class without addressing the devastating
human and economic impact of the institution that supported them” (Cobb,
2007, p. 104). This intellectual rethinking was accompanied by a profes-
sionalisation of History as a reaction to conservative Old South values. By
1920, for example, there were already about 30 or 40 History of the South
courses being offered in American universities. Gilberto Freyre was in
touch with this instigating intellectual environment either in Waco, where
he lived between 1918 and 1920, or during his time in New York at Columbia
University, between 1920 and 1922, or even perhaps on his return to the
United States in 1926, when he visited Maryland and Virginia.
It was supposedly in Waco, in 1920, that Freyre recorded in his diary
comments about the New Poetry, New Criticism, and New History: “there
are three renewing movements that make today’s literature – or culture – of
the United States one of the most vibrant in modern world”.27 According
to Freyre, in 1921, he came into contact with Henry L. Mencken, which
22 Elizabeth Cancelli
marked him deeply.28 Intellectually very active, Mencken, one of the great-
est American critics of the twentieth century, revalued American culture,
especially in the south.29 He radically defended civil rights, freedom of
thought, and took a stand against Christian puritanism and fundamental-
ism. A famous and influential columnist, founding and editing American
Mercury Magazine in 1924, along with Freyre’s future close friend, Alfred
Knopf, Mencken was also one of the most prominent literary supporters of
the Harlem Renaissance. This movement, which would stir up life in New
York City as well as the rest of the United States soon after World War I,
had flourished in Harlem, Manhattan, revealing a growing number of black
Americans into the world of arts, music, literature, and dance.30 The Harlem
Renaissance proposed to “edify” the black race through the celebration of
a variety of cultural elements that mixed high and low culture mainly with
the experimentation of new literature, poetry, jazz, and poetry forms, in a
kind of hybrid culture exaltation.
Generally speaking, Henry L. Mencken’s position consisted of an acute
critique of Protestantism and Puritanism. All human groups, he believed,
were capable of producing a small number of clearly superior people who
made up an elite, an aristocracy. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
this elite, which could be found among whites or blacks, was being replaced
by the rise of a white ignorant mass who had been taking over the south of
the United States and, consequently, ending with erudition and cordiality
that were part of a lifestyle; a civilisation (Cobb, 2007, p. 108). The same was
said by Freyre about the Northeast of Brazil.
In the American south after the end of World War I, there was deep reflec-
tion on the evils brought about by the War of Secession. The abandonment
of the black population after the end of slavery was seen, written, and read
as a phenomenon caused by the economic and cultural values of industrial
society. In addition, there was a sense of pride in reviving a way of life in
which, according to this view, the divergent values of civilisation questioned
the utilitarianism and pragmatism that dominated the United States. The
time had come – as the poets and teachers of The Fugitives31 movement sug-
gested32 – to provoke a reaction that would be even more radical. This group
was the origin of the Agrarians.33
In 1930, the year Freyre began his research for The Masters and The Slaves,
a group of 12 intellectuals, linked in some way to Vanderbilt University,
published a manifesto “I´ll Take my Stand: The South and the Agrarian
Tradition”.34 It consisted of 12 essays which attacked the civilisation of
modern industrial American society and proclaimed the preservation of
customs and culture of the rural south as an alternative civilisation. The
manifesto was born under inspiration of the poet and student John Crowe
Ransom, whose father had been a missionary in Brazil,35 and poets and
English teachers Donald Davidson and Allen Tate (Murphy, 2001, p. 1).
The Agrarians were concerned with cultural modernism and sought a
reconciliation between tradition and progress, relying as much on the
The Cold War, the Social Sciences, and the Race Question 23
defence of culture and cultural heritage as on Christian humanist religious
values. Therefore, in the reaffirmation of an anti-liberal philosophy, espe-
cially important for them was culture, which built a deep sense of commu-
nity, identity, and family ties (Murphy, 2001, p. 1).
The similarities and coincidences between Freyre’s work and these
American Southerners do not stop here.36 Just as there is an idyllic read-
ing of nineteenth-century Brazil in The Masters and The Slaves,37 the
argumentative power of the essays by the Agrarian group lay precisely
in the strength of their poetic metaphors, since defending a romanticised
South had become a strong tool of affirmative universal values (Murphy,
2001, p. 2). Ultimately, for them, industrialisation was the enemy of reli-
gion, arts, and all the components of the “good life”: leisure, hospitality,
and conversation. This was a view also fully supported by Freyre, who
wrote: “There was leisure, there was luxury, there were slaves and there
was politeness” (Murphy, 2001, p. 2). Some of the Agrarians, notably
Allen Tate, would develop an enormous interest in the Catholic Revival,
due to the criticism of Protestant religiosity. The movement, which had
begun at the end of the nineteenth century and reached its peak between
the end of World War I and the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, was
strongly inspired by literati and clerics who intended to place Catholic
doctrine next to Christian humanism. Added to the criticism of the pop-
ularised Enlightenment idea of the inevitable progress of humanity was
renewed interest in scholasticism and in Saint Thomas Aquinas, accom-
panied by a rather negative image of the modern world driven by the
notion of progress.
On the right, the main representatives of the Catholic Revival were
L’Action Française, later, Opus Dei, led by Charles Maurras – whom Freyre
approached in 1922 when he was in France.38 Maurras’ ideological influ-
ence on the Portuguese dictator Antônio Salazar, whom Freyre would
also approach, is also known.39 Among the Agrarians, some had their rep-
utations damaged during the 1930s, when they joined Seward Collins, an
American fascist intellectual and owner of the American Review.40
Combined with the search for humanist Christian principles, the
Agrarians group would cultivate an acid criticism of the Victorian sensi-
bility. Paul Conkin (2001) argues that when still a member of the Fugitives,
Allen Tate, inspired by T.S. Eliot, would argue that
Only new poetic techniques could serve the cause of the South he came
to admire, a South that once embodied a deeply traditional culture.
The literature of the lost cause, of moonlight and magnolias, or of local
colour, was not only false to the fact and exploitative of the South, but
was a literature produced for Northern markets. The older poetics tech-
niques, tied to Victorian sensibilities, were inadequate for the task of
rescuing the real South.
(p. 25)
24 Elizabeth Cancelli
Ultimately, these new techniques had to denounce modern humanity and its
past alienation. Intellectual reaction to northern bourgeois and philistine
values seems to have worked. In 1925, at Vanderbilt, the most important and
influential university in Southern United States, everyone was concerned
about the South (Conkin, 2001, p. 25). In terms of plasticity, they aban-
doned Victorian sensibility. Freyre followed them.
The Southern Renaissance denial of any structural-functional perspec-
tive highlighted, above all, the spiritual dimension which believed that
direct contact with nature and religiosity would engender the development
and preservation of a series of virtues, such as honour, moral integrity,
sense of community, abundant life, and, ultimately, the spiritual capacity
to give civilisation a sense of belonging and identity. In short, it was the
response to the evil civilisation of industrial world, whose vulgarisation and
lack of plasticity and spirituality put the supreme values of virtue in sus-
pense. Literature, culture, and the Southern “civilisation” were thus con-
structed based on memory and cultural identity: past as opposed to ideas
of future and progress. A different idea of civilisation and a diverse way of
being in the world were proposed. Based on the construction and (re)con-
struction of memory, this civilisation would treat itself and race relations as
a way of life, not exactly as a form of structural relationship of exploitation.
Criticism of Victorian sensibility, it is true, had already been announced
emphatically in the United States by Amy Lowell’s literary circle, the
Imagists, from whom Freyre said he was protected (Larreta and Giucci,
2007, p. 90). Lowell’s circle deeply influenced the Agrarians. In 1912, the
Imagists41 – Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint,
and Amy Lowell were some of their exponents – proposed new poetic stat-
utes that abandoned, they said, Victorian sentimentality, artificiality, and
obscurity. Both T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence were influenced by this
perspective. It was in 1920, therefore four years before Freyre founded the
Regionalist Centre of the Northeast in Recife, that he met Amy Lowell,42
and was influenced by her approach to Freud and Victorian aesthetics and
criticism of the ideals of Protestant modernity.
The Regionalist Centre of the Northeast43 would incorporate the new
aesthetic sense, critical of the nineteenth century and modernity, faithful,
however, to tradition. In a manifesto, supposedly written in 1926,44 but pub-
lished much latter by Freyre, some of his main intellectual concerns were
registered in an exemplary manner:
We try to defend these values and these traditions, that is, from the dan-
ger of being abandoned, such the fury of neophyte leaders who, among
us, pass for advanced and “progressive” because they blindly and una-
bashedly imitate foreign novelty […]
The truth is that there is no region in Brazil that exceeds the Northeast
in wealth of illustrious traditions and in sharpness of character. Several
of its regional values became national after being imposed on other
The Cold War, the Social Sciences, and the Race Question 25
Brazilians less because of the economic superiority that sugar gave to
the northeast for more than a century than because of the moral seduc-
tion by the aesthetic fascination of the same values […]
The northeast has the right to consider itself a region that has already
greatly contributed to give Brazilian culture or civilisation authenticity
and originality and not just sweetness or spices.
(Freyre, 1955, pp. 19–20)
The slave economy, on the one hand, is a wasteful economy by its very
nature, and on the other hand, it is based on the social requirements
26 Elizabeth Cancelli
of production that make it obligatorily and not flexible in the face of
the need for innovation in production techniques. In other words, and
in summary, the slave economy, for reasons that are part of the actual
form of social organisation of work, imposes limits on the process of
production rationalisation and economic calculability. This means
that, after a certain limit, the slavery economy presents itself as a fun-
damental obstacle to capitalist formation.
(p. 217)