It’s safe to say that Jânio Quadros was an odd bird. Although he was born into an upper-middle-class family and educated at the best schools in Curitiba and the University of São Paulo, he made a political career out of being the common man’s champion. After brief stints as a lawyer and a geography teacher, his first foray into politics came in 1947, when the 30-year-old Jânio was one of the people elected to the São Paulo City Council (later rumours had it that he was appointed to replace a purged Communist, but this is probably untrue). This was Brazil’s fastest-growing industrial city, with around two million people, and over the 1950s it would double that number and pass Rio de Janeiro to become the biggest in the country. Because of how new the city was, the traditional institutions were far less entrenched there than they were in Rio — both the elite and the trade unions. The working-class population was extremely multiethnic, with hundreds of thousands of Italian, Portuguese and German immigrants, none of whom especially trusted one another. Only rarely did they come together, such as in the 1953 general strike, and even that failed to build an electoral movement on par with the ones that existed in Rio or the South.
It was the kind of time and place where fortunes are made, and Jânio made sure he was there for it. Not to build a fortune of his own though, at least not a monetary one. Instead, he built his fame on being a ruthless pursuer of those who made their fortunes illegally, especially corrupt politicians. The core of Jânio’s political movement (sometimes known as Janismo) was a kind of populism that focused exclusively on restoring “public morality”, which included promoting a strong work ethic as well as punishing liars, cheaters and thieves in all walks of life. In his public appearances, Jânio would be seen waving around a broom and promising to “sweep out” all the corruption and filth from São Paulo. The image of ruthless moralism was complicated a bit by his own appearance — he didn’t groom himself as well as 1950s society expected of men, his suits were often cheap and rumpled, he spoke strange and old-fashioned Portuguese, and he was often seen messily eating sandwiches immediately before and after his speeches. Still, that only served to humanise him.
And whatever his oddities, his approach clearly worked. In March 1953, São Paulo held direct mayoral elections for the first time since 1925, and Jânio announced his candidacy. He faced Francisco Antônio Cardoso, an associate of PSP boss and former Governor Adhemar de Barros, who also received the support of both the PSD and UDN. In comparison, Jânio could only secure the endorsement of his own PDC (Christian Democratic Party) and the Brazilian Socialist Party (the former left-wing faction of the UDN). But that made him the underdog, which became incredibly valuable as Brazil slid into economic crisis and São Paulo erupted into a general strike. Jânio campaigned under the slogan O tostão contra o milhão (“the dime against the million”), promising to go after the people responsible for the weak cruzeiro and the economic exploitation of the country. It was enough to see him elected by a landslide, winning 66% of the vote to 27% for Cardoso.
While serving as Mayor, Jânio broke with the PDC and joined the absolutely miniscule National Labour Party (Partido Trabalhista Nacional, PTN), which had been founded by Ministry of Labour officials in 1945 and until now mostly consisting of a group around expelled PTB congressman Hugo Borghi. Overall it’s quite hard to figure out anything about what the PTN actually originally stood for, because once Jânio joined, it became a vehicle for his movement. Having a party machine behind him probably helped a great deal when, in October 1954, he stood for Governor of São Paulo state against Adhemar de Barros, who hoped to return for a second non-consecutive term. Barros’ machine was still unbeatable throughout rural São Paulo, but the 1954 race was complicated by the entry of a UDN candidate, the engineer and urban planner Francisco Prestes Maia, who challenged Barros for the rural vote and Jânio for the urban middle classes. The result was a razor-thin margin of victory for Jânio, who moved across town from City Hall to the Palácio dos Campos Elísios (the then-government house) in January 1955.
It was during the 1954 gubernatorial race that Jânio hit upon his simplest and most effective slogan: Jânio Vem Aí — Não Desespere (“Jânio is Coming — Don’t Despair”), which paired with the broom became his most notable political symbol.
Jânio’s four years as Governor were mostly unremarkable, although he was an energetic reformer who earned working-class support for his anti-corruption and developmentalist initiatives, while endearing himself to the established economic forces for doing all this without making the sort of fundamental challenge to capitalism that might be the alternative. São Paulo continued to grow rapidly, as did Brazil, even as the federal government (as discussed in the last update) came under growing scrutiny for alleged corruption. Kubitschek’s actual actions in the presidency were sort of similar to those of Jânio as governor, but even so, Jânio became a focal point for the rising public anger during and after his term. In 1958, as he prepared to leave the Campos Elísios, Jânio found himself elected to Congress representing Paraná (the state where he grew up), but he never attended a session, preferring to travel abroad and build support for a presidential run. This started to materialise when the PTN held its national congress in autumn 1959, nominating Jânio for President by acclamation. The UDN, not having a viable candidate of their own (the tenente generation was beginning to die off, and Lacerda was planning to run for governor of the new state of Guanabara), decided to take a gamble by backing Jânio’s campaign, forcing him to accept one of their own as his running mate. Jânio was far from the sort of candidate the UDN normally liked, but they had just lost three elections in a row, so maybe a bit of rabble-rousing would be a good thing for them.
As mentioned, the PSD decided to nominate Marshal Lott for President, with João Goulart running for a second term as Vice President (for some reason, the vice-presidency, unlike the presidency, wasn’t subject to term limits). This turned out to be a bad tactical error, as Lott was an absolutely awful public speaker and managed to alienate both the PSD elites and the unions by his successive policy statements supporting extending the franchise to illiterates and criticising the then-ongoing revolution in Cuba. The PTB were, at best, lukewarm about the whole Lott campaign, and as 1960 rolled on, more and more union officials and PTB organisers began to voice their support for what was called the “Jan-Jan” ticket, that is, Jânio for President and “Jango” Goulart for Vice President. There were already two different vice-presidential candidates supporting Jânio: his original running mate, Fernando Ferrari, and the UDN’s preferred choice, ex-Governor Milton Campos. Add to that Adhemar de Barros, who was running for President once again without bothering to nominate a running mate, and you’ve got a thoroughly confused picture.
Still, it was always fairly obvious that Jânio would win. His campaign captured genuine popular enthusiasm in a rare way, and the backing of the UDN guaranteed him the middle-class vote. Lott being an awful politician obviously didn’t hurt either. The end result was 5.6 million votes (48.3%) for Jânio, the largest number of votes ever received by a presidential candidate until then, to 3.8 million (32.9%) for Lott and 2.2 million (18.8%) for Barros. The vice-presidential ballot was less decisive, but Goulart narrowly carried it with 4.5 million votes (36.1%) to 4.2 (33.7%) for Campos and 2.1 (17%) for Ferrari. The “Jan-Jan” ticket had won the day, and on 31 January 1961, Jânio Quadros became the first President of Brazil to be inaugurated in the new capital city. The English Wikipedia also claims this was the first handover of power to a member of the opposition in Brazil’s republican history, but I’m not convinced we shouldn’t count the handover from Dutra to Vargas ten years earlier.
The presidency of Jânio Quadros was as strange as it was brief. Having been elected largely (but not entirely) off the back of the UDN’s political machine, once in office Jânio made sure to send a clear message that he was nobody’s puppet. Instead of giving support to the economic measures favoured by Lacerda and his allies, Jânio’s first act in office was to push for a law that banned cockfighting and severely restricted gambling on card games. He also secured a ban on the use of skintight swimsuits in beauty contests and the use of aerosol sprays during Carnival parades. These measures were intended to “moralise” Brazil, sure, but their primary function was to keep Jânio in the headlines and steal attention from both the opposition and the issues plaguing the country. But as he was about to discover, that sort of tactic works better when you’re the mayor of a city than it does when you’re the head of government of a sovereign state. As President, people are going to be talking about you no matter what.
One area where Jânio and his Vice President were mostly in agreement was foreign policy. Jânio was committed to the idea that Brazil should plot its own course on the world stage, free from the influence of either superpower. In April, he met with Argentine President Arturo Frondizi, who held similar views and shared his interest in asserting Latin American independence, and the two presidents signed the Uruguaiana Declaration promising to work together in friendship and harmony. Frondizi was also a social democrat who was suspected of being sympathetic to the Eastern Bloc, and the Congress refused to give Jânio permission to travel abroad to meet with him, so a creative solution was devised: the summit was held on a barge in the middle of the Uruguay River, carefully positioned so that the two presidents could talk without leaving their respective national territories. When news of the Declaration hit, the right wings of both countries were livid, and the Brazilian right’s anger would only heighten. In August, an inter-American conference was held in Punta del Este, Uruguay, at which the United States agreed to give development aid to all signatory Latin American countries in exchange for them please not turning Communist, pretty please. For some reason Cuba sent a delegation to this conference, led by none other than Che Guevara, which obviously turned down the aid and made a big show of opposing it. Che stopped off in Brasília on the way back, and while there, he was feted by Jânio, who presented him with the Order of the Southern Cross. For Jânio, this was just another in a long line of publicity stunts designed to highlight his independence from the UDN, but he seems not to have stopped to consider that giving the highest decoration a Brazilian President can give to a foreign national to a man who helped overthrow another country’s government by force and establish Communism there, er, might not look ideal to the people who already suspect you of being a secret fellow traveller?
It would’ve been one thing if Jânio had simply done a deal with the devil to get elected and then made a turn left once in office. But even as he was signing illicit friendship treaties with socialist foreign leaders and giving medals to guerillas, Jânio pursued an anti-inflationary plan that was essentially borrowed from the UDN’s party platform. The cruzeiro was harshly devalued, the money supply tightened and public spending cut drastically, and the regular minimum wage increases pursued by Kubitschek did not continue. On top of which import subsidies on oil and grain were cut, so the average Brazilian saw fuel and bread prices double. The IMF were applauding, Brazilian debt was getting restructured, and even President Kennedy in Washington was beginning to see Jânio as a viable option for turning the Brazilian working class away from Communism. But then, of course, the Punta del Este Conference happened and Jânio gave Che Guevara a medal. He should probably not have tried to do both of those things at once.
On the 22nd of August, Lacerda, who was now governor of this new thing called Guanabara (essentially the old Federal District, elevated to statehood since Brasília was now the capital), made a strange radio broadcast in which he claimed that Jânio was conspiring to pull off a coup d’état, and that he had tried to invite Lacerda into the plot, being the governor of the state where a lot of the military leadership were still based. Jânio’s Justice Minister, who was supposed to have been the man in charge of the conspiracy, fervently denied that any such thing was on the table, and especially denied inviting o maior boquirroto do pais (“the biggest blowjob in the country”, referring to Lacerda) into the plot. Relations between Jânio and the UDN leadership were now at rock bottom, and the left weren’t returning his calls either. Here was one more challenge of being President that Jânio had not experienced as mayor or governor: governing without a solid base in Congress. Jânio’s response to this was to theatrically offer his resignation, expressing his frustration in trying to govern Brazil even as “terrible occult forces” were working against him. His hope was that Congress would refuse to accept his resignation, and that their inviting him back would strengthen his hand by proving that there was no viable rival for power. This did not go off as planned — Congress simply accepted his resignation, and he left Brasília the next day.
Factoring into both Jânio’s hopes for retaining power and the calculus of the congressional leadership in calling his bluff was João Goulart. Not only was the Vice President a noted trade-union supporter and (probably) socialist, at that very moment he was, in fact, on a formal goodwill visit to Beijing. He had been invited to lead a trade mission there back in June, and had stopped off in Moscow along the way to meet with both Nikita Khrushchev and Yuri Gagarin. In Beijing, he made flowery speeches about the friendship between the Brazilian and Chinese peoples, speeches that were met with concern verging on terror both in Washington, in the military leadership and on the UDN benches in Congress. Chairman Mao even came to visit him in person at his hotel, a totally unprecedented act during what was not a formal state visit. This was certainly not a good look for those who worried about Brazil turning left, and so Jânio may have figured that Congress and/or the military might be extra incentivised to agree with whatever he might demand to avoid what was bound to be a messy presidential succession.
But of course, he was wrong about that. After accepting Jânio’s resignation, Congress appointed the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Paschoal Ranieri Mazzilli, as caretaker President until Goulart could take office. The Army, Navy and Air Force Ministers signed a joint memorandum the same day that declared Goulart a national security risk and ordered border guards to prevent him from entering the country, but several regional military commanders soon came out in support of Goulart, who was after all the legally elected Vice President. Starting from a dispute about state honours, Brazil now found itself on the brink of actual civil war.
