¹ Freyre, Gilberto, The Masters and the Slaves, trans, by Putnam, Samuel, (2nd English-Language Edition, New York, 1956).Google Scholar The first American edition was published in 1946. The first Brazilian edition of Casa-Grande & Senzala was published in Rio de Janeiro in 1933.

² Sobrados e Mucambos, the second volume in the series, was first published in São Paulo in 1936. An extensively revised second edition was published in 1951 and a third edition appeared in 1961. The first edition was subtitled “Decadência do Patriarchado Rural no Brasil”, to which was added in the subtitle of the second edition “e Desenvolvimento do Urbano”. The American edition, The Mansions and the Shanties, was translated and edited by de Onís, Harriet (New York, 1963).Google Scholar Unfortunately, neither the translator-editor nor the publisher indicated whether the second or the third Brazilian edition served as the basis for the translation of the text, which is described on the dust jacket as “somewhat reduced from the Portuguese original” and as having been “read and approved by Senhor Freyre”. Even more unfortunate was the editor's failure to distinguish her explanatory footnotes from her greatly abbreviated version of Freyre's original footnotes.

³ Ordem e Progresso: Processo de Desintegração das Sociedades Patriarchal e Semipatriarchal no Brasil sob o Regime de Trabalho Livre: Aspectos de um Quase Meio Século de Transição do Trabalho Escravo para o Trabalho Livre; e da Monarquia para a República (Rio de Janeiro, 1959).Google Scholar

⁴ An early assessment of Freyre may be found in Hanke, Lewis, “Gilberto Freyre: Brazilian Social Historian”, Quarterly Journal of Inter-American Relations, I (06 1939), 24–44,Google Scholar and in Braudel, Fernand, “A travers un continent d'histoire”, Annales d'Histoire Sociale (1943), 3–20.Google Scholar Unfortunately I learned of the latter article too late to consult it in the preparation of this manuscript.

⁵ Ordem e Progresso, XXIII.

⁶ ibid., XXXI–XXXII.

⁷ There is evidence that Freyre originally planned only one volume on the “formação da familia brasileira sob o regimen de economia patriarchal”, as it was expressed in the subtitle of the first edition of Casa-Grande & Senzala. Freyre's study has now grown to a projected seven volumes, under the general title Introdução à História de Sociedade Patriarchal no Brasil. See the Preface to the Second English-Language Edition, The Masters and the Slaves, liv. The evolution in the subtitles might lead one to speculate that Freyre began by attempting to interpret the history of the family in terms of the social system, and has ended by interpreting Brazilian social history in terms of the family.

⁸ Freyre has explained how he himself had to be liberated from this ethnic inferiority complex about Brazil. Describing bis graduate studies in anthropology at Columbia University in the early 1920's Freyre wrote: “Once upon a time, after three straight years of absence from my country, I caught sight of a group of Brazilian seamen-mulattoes and cafusos-crossing Brooklyn Bridge. I no longer remember whether they were from São Paulo or from Minas, but I know that they impressed me as being the caricatures of men, and there came to mind a phrase from a book on Brazil written by an American traveler: ‘the fearfully mongrel aspect of the population.’ That was the sort of thing to which miscegenation led. I ought to have had some one to tell me then what Roquette Pinto had told the Aryanizers of the Brazilian Eugenics Congress in 1929: that these individuals whom I looked upon as representative of Brazil were not simply mulattoes or cafusos but sickly ones. It was my studies in anthropology under the direction of Professor Boas that first revealed to me the Negro and the mulatto for what they are-with the effects of environment or cultural experience separated from racial characteristics”. The Masters and the Slaves, xxvi–xxvii.

⁹ Costa, João Cruz, Contribuição à História das Idéias no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1956), 440.Google Scholar The extraordinary influence of Casa-Grande & Senzala would have been impossible if Freyre had not been able to cite this scientific evidence. His book therefore had to be based in part on the writings of other Brazilian investigators who had anticipated many of his questions. His accomplishment was to have transformed this evidence into a new approach to Brazilian history. Some recent evaluations of Freyre's influence have tended to neglect the importance of the intellectual movement on whose work he was able to draw. See, for example, Frank Tannenbaum's introduction to The Mansions and the Shanties and his Ten Keys to Latin America (New York, 1962), 123–125.Google Scholar As Brito Broca has pointed out, Gilberto Amado raised his “courageous protest” against Brazil's “absurd feeling of racial inferiority” in Grão de Areia (1917), thus anticipating Freyre by several years. Broca, Brito, A Vida Literária no Brasil-1900, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro, 1960), 107–108.Google Scholar

¹⁰ The twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Casa-Grande & Senzala furnished the occasion for a commemorative volume containing sixty-four essays written in tribute to the book's “influence on the modern culture of Brazil”. Gilberto Freyre: Sua Ciência, Sua Filosofia, Sua Arte. Ensaios sôbre o autor de Casa-Grande & Senzala e sua influência na moderna cultura do Brasil, commemorativos do 25° aniversário da publicação dêsse seu livro (Rio de Janeiro, 1962). Even if one discounts the efforts of some of his more pious admirers to canonize Freyre, these essays offer impressive evidence of the enormous influence which Casa-Grande & Senzala has had on the cultural elite of Brazil. In the words of Willems, Emilio, “Freyre's success has been that of a genuine culture hero”. Review of the eighth edition of Casa-Grande & Senzala, Hispanic American Historical Review, XXV (08. 1955), 411.Google Scholar

¹¹ Freyre also provoked some intemperate dissent in Brazil. In 1939 the right-wing Catholic press labelled him “the Pornographer of Recife”. See Samuel Putnam's article on “Brazilian Literature” in the Handbook of Latin American Studies, 5 (1939), 357.Google Scholar

¹² Brazil was thus able to liberate herself from her “inferiority complex and, at the same time, from her national bovarysm”. João Cruz Costa, Contribuição à História das Idéias, 423.

¹³ The growing success of Freyre's translated works in Europe and North America has been a source of great satisfaction to Brazilians. The anthology of essays commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Casa-Grande & Senzala includes an eight-page listing of laudatory comments from abroad. Gilberto Freyre: Sua Ciência, Sua Filosofia, Sua Arte, 568–576.

¹⁴ Curiously enough, the critical middle decades of the nineteenth century have not been treated systematically by Freyre since his early article, “Social Life in Brazil in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century”, Hispanic American Historical Review, V (1922), 597–630.Google Scholar

¹⁵ The title of volume four has been announced as Jazigos e Covas Rasas: Sepultamento e Commemoração dos Mortos no Brasil Patriarchal e Semi-patriarchal. A jazigo is a tomb and a cova rasa is a shallow grave. The implied contrast between the two will presumably parallel the social contrasts emphasized in the titles of the previous volumes. As announced by Freyre's publisher, volume five will be a collection of manuscripts and documents, volume six a collection of paintings, photographs, maps, and other contemporary illustrative material on “patriarchal and semi-patriarchal society” in Brazil, and volume seven will consist of a general bibliography and indices.

¹⁶ Botsford, Keith, “Conversation in Brazil: With Gilberto Freyre”, Encounter, XIX (11. 1962), 34.Google Scholar

¹⁷ ibid.

¹⁸ See Freyre's preface to Portella, Eduardo, Dimensões (Rio de Janeiro, 1958).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Another writer who has been widely read and discussed in Brazil finds the society of the bandeirantes (the gold, diamond, and slave prospectors who conducted far-ranging expeditions into the Brazilian backlands) a better key to understanding Brazilian history. Moog, Vianna, Bandeirantes e Pioneiros: Paralelo entre duas culturas (Rio de Janeiro, 1955).Google Scholar It is perhaps worth noting that Moog is a native of the sourthernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, while Freyre comes from Pernambuco, center of the area traditionally based on sugar-cane culture.

²⁰ Not all Brazilian historians are willing to grant a central role to the casa-grande even in the colonial era. Caio Prado Júnior states unequivocally: “The formation of Brazil, contrary to what is currently claimed, did not take place, except in a limited way, … among the superior classes of the ‘casa-grande’, in the milieu of the family.” Prado Júnior, Caio, Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo: Colônia, 6th ed. (São Paulo, 1961), 350.Google Scholar A similar, if less extreme criticism may be found in Willems, Emilio, “The structure of the Brazilian Family”, Social Forces, 31 (05 1953), 339.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Even Freyre's treatment of the social life of the slaves in the plantation society has been criticized for its limited coverage. Charles Boxer has called attention to the difference between the lot of Negroes “employed in domestic service” and “the daily life of the greater number who were destined for work in the sugar plantations which formed the basis of the Brazilian economy”. Casa-Grande & Senzala devoted almost exclusive attention to the former. Boxer, C.R., The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750 (Berkeley, 1962), 7.Google Scholar Caio Prado Júnior made the same point earlier. Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo, 276.

²¹ The social history of the poor is admittedly difficult to write. The illiterate leave no written records. In Ordem e Progresso Freyre has tried to meet the problem by including among his autobiographical testimonies the record of oral interviews with illiterates. Historians of other largely illiterate societies might do well to study Freyre's technique.

²² The great Paulista historian Alfonso d'E. Taunay was one of the first to level this criticism at Casa-Grande & Senzala. Freyre's answer is in The Masters and the Slaves, lxvi-lxvii, which includes the earlier reply in Freyre, Gilberto, “A Proposito de un Livro em 3a Edição”, Revista do Brasil, 3a phase, I (Julho 1938), 33–40.Google Scholar Magnus Mörner has recently echoed the criticism in El Mestizaje en la Historia de Ibero-America (Instituto Panamericano de Geografia e Historia. Comisión de Historia, Mexico, D. F., 1961), 22. A long reply by Freyre to the charge of overemphasis on the Northeast may be found in the Introduction to the Second Edition (1951) of Sobrados e Mucambos.

²³ This criticism is necessary because of the extreme claims which Freyre had previously advanced for the usefulness of his patriarchal focus in studying modern Brazil, as in The Masters and the Slaves, lxviii.

²⁴ James, Preston E., Latin America (3rd ed; New York, 1959), 558–559.Google ScholarSmith, T. Lynn, Brazil: People and Institutions, rev. ed. (Rouge, Baton, 1954), 222–226.Google Scholar

²⁵ Ordem e Progresso, CLXVI–CLXVIII; 259.

²⁶ The ambitiousness of Freyre's claims has occasionally been even more striking: “The social history of the Big House is the intimate history of practically every Brazilian: the history of his domestic and conjugal life under a slave-holding and polygamous patriarchal regime; the history of his life as a child; the history of his Christianity, reduced to the form of a family religion and influenced by the superstitions of the slave hut.” The Masters and the Slaves, xliii.

²⁷ Ordem e Progresso, 406–407.

²⁸ A detailed criticism of the regional imbalance in Freyre's treatment may be found in an acerbic review of Ordem e Progresso by de Carvalho, Daniel, “A História e a Geografia na Sociologia Brasileira”, Revista do lnstituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 248 (Julho-Setembro, 1960), 4–56.Google Scholar Despite his bitter polemical tone, Carvalho's review article is the essential starting point for anyone interested in a detailed critique of Freyre's history of patriarchal society in Brazil. Few scholars can play the role of culture hero for as long as Freyre without provoking a critical reaction from their more iconoclastic colleagues. Carvalho's article would seem to indicate that such a reaction has begun in Brazil. Another shorter critique of Freyre's regional imbalance may be found in Guimarães Menegale, J., “Gilberto Freyre e a Sociologia Brasileira”, Leitura, no. 61 (07 1962), 24–25.Google Scholar One Brazilian critic has recently charged Freyre with the ultimate crime: reinforcing the “parochialism” of Brazilian thought. Vieira de Mello, Mario, Desenvolvimento e Cultura: o Problema do Estetismo no Brasil (Sāo Paulo, 1963), 205–207.Google Scholar

²⁹ These questions have received systematic treatment in the closing chapters of an important recent study of slavery and its aftermath in the city of Curitiba, capital of the state of Parana: Ianni, Octavio, As Metamorfoses do Escravo. Apogeu e crise da escravatura no Brasil Meridional (Sao Paulo, 1962).Google Scholar Ianni's study is especially impressive because of its documentation drawn from contemporary institutional sources (such as the reports of police officials and of governmental investigating commissions) and because of the author's careful attention to the definition of social categories. A similar study has been done for Rio Grande do Sul: Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, Capitalismo e Escravidão no Brasil Meridional. O Negro na Sociedade Escravocrata do Rio Grande do Sul (Sao Paulo, 1962).Google Scholar Both works owe their inspiration to the direction of Professor Florestan Fernandes and are part of a larger study of slavery in southern Brazil (defined as including the states of Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul). Cardoso and Ianni have collaborated on another work: Cor e Mobilidade Social em Florianópolis. Aspectos das Relações entre Negros e Brancos numa Communidade de Brasil Meridional (São Paulo, 1960).Google Scholar

³⁰ This is especially true in Casa-Grande & Senzala, where Freyre sometimes assumes, explicitly or implicitly, that evidence about social conditions in one era permits the historian to read those conditions back to earlier eras. In discussing the role of Brazilian women, for example, Freyre quotes a nineteenth-century source and concludes, “This in the nineteenth century. One can imagine what it must have been like in the other centuries, in the sixteenth, the seventeenth, and the eighteenth.” He goes on to give one sixteenth and one eighteenth-century source, but the rest of his evidence is from the nineteenth century. The Masters and the Slaves, 360ff. Grave questions about Freyre's misuse of historical evidence are raised in Carvalho, “A História e a Geografia na Sociologia Brasileira”.

³¹ Within some chapters of Ordem e Progresso Freyre has more successfully captured the historical dynamics than in the two previous volumes. The chapter entitled “The Republic of '89 Twenty Odd Years Later: Considerations on the Dissolution of a Future in the Past” is perhaps the best example of introducing the chronology of change, while the chapter on “The Economic Order” is especially chaotic.

³² Ordem e Progresso, 387. The effectiveness of two recent works which treat this period suggests that attention to chronology may still have its advantages. Furtado, Celso, Formação Economica do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1959)Google Scholar and Luz, Nicia Vilela, A Lnta Pela Industrialização do Brasil, 1808–1930 (Sao Paulo, 1961).Google Scholar

³³ Freyre argues the need for empathy when studying the past in Ordem e Progresso, XXXIII. In American historiography immigration has received this kind of treatment: Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted (Boston, 1951).Google Scholar Perhaps no historian has better fulfilled Freyre's requirement than Bloch, Marc in La société féodale (2 vols., Paris, 1939–1940).Google Scholar

³⁴ Ordem e Progresso, XXXIII.

³⁵ An example of such an achievement in American historiography is Nash Smith's, HenryVirgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1950).Google Scholar

³⁶ A fuller exposition of his views on the relationship of sociology and history mav be found in Freyre's, Sociologica: lntrodução ao Estudo dos Sens Princīpios, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro, 1957), 222–229; 495–532.Google Scholar

³⁷ Freyre earlier noted that “for a knowledge of the social history of Brazil no source is more dependable than the travel books written by foreigners”, although he conceded the necessity of discriminating between “the good and honest ones” and those which are “superficial” or “vitiated by preconceptions”. The Masters and the Slaves, xlviii. Caio Prado Junior's magisterial Formagao do Brasil Contempordneo leaned heavily on travel literature. Freyre has himself edited several of these acounts by foreigners, such as Diário Intimo do Engenheiro Vauthier (Rio de Janeiro, 1940).Google Scholar

³⁸ Magnus Mörner has recently stressed this point, as it concerns the history of miscegenation in Brazil: “It is difficult to believe that one could not find in the archives, although it would be difficult work, additional documentation to form a more secure basis for the historical investigation of miscegenation.” El Mestizaje en la Historia de Ibero-America, 24.

³⁹ The Oral History Project of Columbia University is a more institutionalized attempt to gather the same type of material.

⁴⁰ Ordem e Progresso, LXXXVI. There is a “biographical index” of the 183 Brazilians whose autobiographical statements are used in Ordem e Progresso, LXXXVI–CXVII.

⁴¹ Presumably these autobiographical testimonies are as reliable as any other form of Rememoir. Since they consist of answers to a number of common questions, they have the advantage of being easier to collate than conventional memoir literature. They require, however, careful screening for factual accuracy. For the correction of what would seem to have been unfounded “calumny” against Benjamin Constant in one of the testimonies see Ivan Lins, “Ordem e Progresso: Nota à Margem do de Gilberto Freyre, Livro”, Revista de História, XXIV (01.-03. 1962), 195–199.Google Scholar

⁴² A recent French monograph offers a formidable example of how extensively institutional sources can be used. The documentation of this 696-page study is an eloquent answer to those who sometimes plead the impossibility of working with the records of public authorities in Brazil.Roche, Jean, La Colonisation Allemande et le Rio Grande do Sul (= Travaux et Mémoires de I'Institut des Hautes Études de I'Amérique Latine, III) (Paris, 1959).Google Scholar

⁴³ Freyre's indictment of the Brazilian elite (personified by Ruy Barbosa) for its total failure to recognize, much less attempt to solve, the “social question” suggests that a recent description of Freyre as a “perfervid regionalist who once exhumed the colonial past” and who now seems “enamored of a corpse” was rather premature. Stanley Stein, J., review of New World in the Tropics, Hispanic American Historical Review, XLI (02., 1961), 113.Google Scholar The clearest indictment can be found in Ordem e Progresso, 590–591. Freyre had earlier expressed his admiration for Nabuco in Joaquim Nabuco (Rio de Janeiro, 1948).Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Ordem e Progresso, 502.