The newspaper O Combate has been a source for several important monographs, from Boris Fausto's Trabalho urbano e conflito social to George Reid Andrews’ Blacks and Whites in São Paulo. But even as historians have drawn on O Combate, the newspaper remains little understood, given the divergent labels scholars have attached to it. According to Fausto, O Combate represented ‘social democracy’ and ‘radical democracy’, while Wilson Martins, writing at about the same time, described it as one of São Paulo's ‘conservative organs’. A few years later, Barbara Weinstein identified O Combate with São Paulo's ‘grand press’, made up of ‘large conservative and liberal newspapers … in contrast to the popular press or that of the working class’. A decade on, Andrews grouped it in São Paulo's ‘labour press’, while Joel Wolfe saw it as a ‘leftist newspaper’.Footnote 1
More than confusion or inattention to the substance of a historical source is at issue. O Combate has been difficult for historians to define because, as an artefact of and an agent in São Paulo's public life, it confounds much of the established wisdom shaping the formulation of scholarly work on the politics, society and culture of the 1910s and 1920s.
At once regionally patriotic and cosmopolitan, pro-worker but bourgeois in its sensibilities, streetwise and schoolmasterly, nationalistic but anti-étatiste, civic-minded and scandal-mongering by turn, deeply attached to the symbols and stories of insurgent, pre-1889 republicanism and to the idea of a ‘republicanised republic’ but repulsed by the practices and personalities of the republic that was, O Combate was neither a ‘conservative organ’ nor a ‘labour newspaper’, nor did it represent liberalism or social democracy. Rather, the newspaper's politics were republican in their attachment to a nineteenth-century ideal, radical in their challenge to the existing political order and peculiar to São Paulo in their regional patriotism. Here, in São Paulo in the 1910s and 1920s, was a radical republicanism absent from the scholarship, which holds that ‘the [only] radicals of the republic’ (that is, of 1889–1930) were the xenophobic Jacobins who enjoyed their heyday in Rio de Janeiro in the 1890s.Footnote 2
Given its apparent anomalousness, defining O Combate's radical republicanism requires significant description of the newspaper's first run, from 1915 to 1922, during which it remained under the control of a single family and maintained a consistent editorial line. Such description also provides a broader vista on the history of these years, which in turn offers a second contribution beyond the uncovering of a neglected political tradition.
This contribution concerns O Combate's place in São Paulo's print culture, and that print culture's place in São Paulo's public life. O Combate's circulation never matched that of São Paulo's leading morning newspapers, but it did reach tens of thousands of people, from ‘humble workers’ to ‘the intellectual class’, at a time in which such reach was thought boastworthy.Footnote 3 Nor was O Combate alone in reaching this substantial, socially variegated audience. The newspaper was just one of a number of publications that made up a Paulista ‘yellow press’, a slur O Combate's editors embraced from the beginning.Footnote 4 This yellow press gave voice to some of the concerns of men and women who are often assumed to have had no place in the public life of these years by opening its columns to readers and seeking to interpret and direct ‘public opinion’. The experience of O Combate and similar publications thus belies portrayals of these years which insist that public life was so anaemic that ‘space for spontaneity and creativity [on the part of ] citizens [did] not exist’ and ‘local life went on as if History did not occur there, as if its space was on the margin of History’.Footnote 5 Indeed, the reach and range of O Combate and its sister publications, together with their transcendence of individual readership and their engagement of word-of-mouth communication and public mobilisation, suggest that they may be pointed to as key institutions in the making of a public sphere during years in which the reigning historiographical wisdom has scarcely considered the possibility of such a development.Footnote 6 In this public sphere – ‘a space of mediation between civil society and the state, and for the participation of vast sectors of the population in … public life’, to quote Hilda Sabato – the Paulista ‘little press’ stood with the ‘grand press’ represented by newspapers like O Estado de S. Paulo as an institutional facilitator and fomenter of public agency.Footnote 7
Amid a brief golden age, the success of the editors and writers of O Combate and their yellow-press fellows was such that they attracted allies, imitators and employers whose importance in the unfolding of Brazil's twentieth-century history is widely acknowledged. Among the imitators and employers were the forerunners of today's Folha de S. Paulo and the Paulista outposts of the Diários Associados chain, ‘modern’ newspapers that were midwifed by the experience and expertise of yellow-press veterans. The history of O Combate and the print culture of which it was a part thus offer a third contribution to understandings of twentieth-century Brazil and, in particular, the deep roots of the newspapers that would tower over that century's history.
By the time of the full flourishing of these ‘modern’ newspapers, O Combate and the now-forgotten public sphere within which it had thrived were no more, the former having been overtaken by the new competition, the latter increasingly swamped by ‘publicity work’, more or less as a good Habermasian would expect.Footnote 8 The radical republicanism of O Combate's founders was spent by then also, but not before it had contributed to the making of two regional political traditions of widely acknowledged import, a fourth and final contribution that an accounting of the newspaper's history may make to understandings of twentieth-century Brazil.
‘A Modern-Style Newspaper’, Its Politics and Its Public
O Combate was founded in April 1915 by two brothers, Nereu and Acylino Rangel Pestana, whose late father, Francisco Rangel Pestana, had helped lead São Paulo's late nineteenth-century republican movement. Nereu, born in the city of São Paulo in 1878, received his early education at the Escola Neutralidade, founded by Antônio Silva Jardim and João Köpke as a haven for the children of republicans, positivists and freethinkers. He was subsequently trained in dentistry and orthodontics but appears never to have established a practice, instead alternating between journalism and public service; the latter included an early twentieth-century stint as a propagandist for Brazil in France, where he might have been inspired by the Third Republic's newspaper wars. Eleven years older than Acylino and seven years older than Ludolpho (a third brother, who joined O Combate at some point after 1915), Nereu was the newspaper's director until March 1918, when he stepped down from all editorial responsibilities. Thereafter, he became famous for the send-ups of São Paulo politicians that he published as ‘Ivan Subiroff ’, a selection of which were reprinted in a book entitled A oligarchia paulista. An attempt at stretching this pseudonymous celebrity into a new tabloid, which he dubbed the Jornal do Subiroff, failed, and early 1922 found him living in Rio de Janeiro. Along the way, he joined the quasi-socialist Clarté group, a further indication of the influence of French intellectual life.Footnote 9
Acylino, born in 1889, was Francisco Rangel Pestana's youngest son. He was a graduate of the São Paulo Law School, but journalism rather than the law was his calling. At O Combate's founding, Acylino's formal title was secretary; in 1918, Acylino replaced his brother as director, a position he held until December 1922, when ill health and unspecified financial pressures compelled him to transfer the newspaper's title, offices and print shop to another group of journalists and their deeper-pocketed backers. In 1925 Acylino regained control over O Combate, but his role in this third stage of the newspaper's publishing history was cut short the following year by his untimely death. His funeral procession brought out thousands of local residents.Footnote 10 Ludolpho, born in 1885, joined O Combate in the late 1910s or soon thereafter, although his name would not appear on the masthead until 1925. After Acylino's death, Ludolpho attempted to carry on the family tradition in an increasingly competitive newspaper-publishing environment, at points in cooperation with Nereu, but Acylino was clearly irreplaceable.Footnote 11
Through O Combate's early years, the self-proclaimed ‘modern-style newspaper’ was usually published as a tabloid – a single, double-sided sheet of newsprint, folded once to form four pages, each roughly 48 by 65 centimetres. Subsequent technological improvements made for larger runs, larger pages, multiple daily editions and issues of six or more pages, but a single four-page afternoon edition remained the usual format. Throughout the newspaper's first incarnation, from 24 April 1915 to 5 December 1922, O Combate's masthead bore a simple motto: ‘Independence, Truth, Justice’. The cover also nearly always carried at least one photograph, a reader-friendly feature rarely seen in more traditional newspapers before the advent of the yellow press (in São Paulo as had been the case elsewhere in the world). A single issue cost 100 reais, the same as O Estado de S. Paulo (then the largest-circulation São Paulo newspaper, liberal in politics but traditional in style), but its 12-month and six-month subscriptions were considerably cheaper. As a newspaper dedicated to ‘patriotic propaganda and the defence of the weak and oppressed’, O Combate was also available by monthly subscription, ‘in view of the innumerable and insistent requests of … readers’ who could not afford annual or six-month subscriptions.Footnote 12
The cover of O Combate's debut issue was dominated by a call to arms. Taking a page from Montesquieu (‘The ruin of a republic is the absence of struggle’), the Rangel Pestana brothers declared their desire for a press that would ‘reinforce and purify the voice of [public] opinion, this complex voice made up of the rumour of all of the towns and cities’. ‘It would not be immodest’, they argued, ‘to say that journalism, understood thusly, almost does not exist today in S. Paulo’, with lamentable results:
Without a free press, or more accurately, with a press timidly circumscribed to its industrial [i.e., economic] function, it is not possible for honest government to exist, nor proper administrative management, nor political education of the popular masses, nor a school for continual betterment of our statesmen. How many small abuses would be avoided and how many others would cease to assume the proportions of astonishing, unpunished crimes, if our leaders were accustomed to seeing all of their acts submitted to severe and impartial criticism!Footnote 13
Their call to arms indicated that the Rangel Pestanas aimed to struggle within São Paulo's patriotic, republican tradition rather than against it, with references to such fallen greats as Campos Salles and to their home state as ‘the land of the Andradas’ – two key appeals to regional patriotism – as well as to the constitutional principles ‘so curiously applauded out there [outside of São Paulo] by Paulista politicians’. O Combate's founders also made plain their intention to abstain from the degraded practices overseen by those politicians: none of the newspaper's staffers, it was held, ‘aspire[d] even to be justice of the peace’, a typical starting point for a career in machine politics.Footnote 14
Over the years that followed, the Rangel Pestanas counted on the collaboration of dozens of writers. The most important was Rubens do Amaral, both for his influence on the newspaper and for his importance in the history of Paulista public life. A career newspaperman from the interior who made his start writing for the sales clerks and stock boys of the state capital, he was the first journalist to contribute a signed article to O Combate, a piece that welcomed the newspaper to the field and hailed its mission as a regional sequel to nineteenth-century abolitionism: ‘to liberate morally and politically … the Paulistas of today’. At that point Rubens do Amaral was the director of another newspaper, but soon thereafter he left that job for an editorial position at O Combate, a job he held, save for one interruption, into late 1919. His influence was such that one of O Combate's employees would later remember him as having been a co-founder. As an in-house journalist and an editorial board member, Rubens do Amaral's contributions to O Combate's columns went unsigned, but he was also an avid contributor, under his own name, to São Paulo's greatest publishing sensation of the 1910s: the scandal-mongering magazine O Parafuso, likewise founded to ‘defend the cause of the Paulista People’. The two yellow-press periodicals shared not only a key contributor but also an anti-government outlook and a populist, irreverent style.Footnote 15
Other contributors linked O Combate to political traditions old and new. Carlos de Escobar had been an active republican and abolitionist in the 1880s; in the following decade he was a co-founder of one of Brazil's first avowedly ‘socialist’ groups, though his socialism was eclectic, shot through with Comtean positivism. Nicolau Soares de Couto Esher had served in the field as a young volunteer in defence of the nascent republic against the rebellions of the 1890s; like Escobar, his faith led him to anticlericalism, though he was a Presbyterian rather than a positivist. Benjamin Mota, a key contributor to São Paulo's anticlerical and anti-capitalist press of the turn of the twentieth century, was by the time of his contributions to O Combate drifting away from an anarchist-tinged internationalism and toward re-engagement with republican politics and the nation-state.
The precise number of readers reached by the contributions of Mota, Esher and Escobar – or by any of O Combate's single issues – is impossible to calculate. Newspapers rarely published circulation information during these years, and when they did, such information was often unreliable. Moreover, the number of copies printed was in almost every case smaller than the actual number of readers, as single copies routinely reached more than one reader.
That said, a scouring of the record – including press sources and confidential correspondence – indicates that O Combate quickly became one of São Paulo's leading afternoon newspapers and that this success gave it a financial position that allowed for periodic technological improvements and a sizeable staff. Further extrapolation from this data suggests that around 8,000–9,000 copies of the newspaper were sold each day during O Combate's early years, including to subscribers, with issues reaching runs in the low to mid-10,000s in the late 1910s and early 1920s.Footnote 16
During these years, printed matter frequently changed hands before being consigned to the rubbish bin. In 1915 Monteiro Lobato estimated that the 40,000 copies of each issue of O Estado de S. Paulo reached ‘one hundred thousand readers’, a number that certainly increased as the circulation did.Footnote 17 In 1919 O Parafuso's director addressed his magazine's ‘fifty- or hundred-thousand readers’, a claim suggesting an even greater number of readers per copy.Footnote 18 For their part, O Combate's editors explained that a single newspaper ‘never has just one reader: the one who buys it lends it to someone who hasn't bought it, and you may calculate an average of three readers for every issue’.Footnote 19 Using these estimates and the circulation estimates above, one may make the conservative guess that each issue of O Combate reached between 24,000 and 36,000 people at a time in which there were at most 200,000 literate adults living in the state capital.Footnote 20 Keeping in mind that only 5 per cent of Brazilians were thought to read newspapers regularly during a period that was perhaps the print media's peak, despite much-improved literacy rates, the likely number of readers reached by O Combate as copies of the tabloid changed hands seems somewhat more impressive than it otherwise might.Footnote 21
Much of this reading took place in public spaces. In ‘the drugstores, the barbershops, the cafés, the cultural and recreational associations and clubs’, periodicals were kept on hand for clients and members.Footnote 22 Given its coverage of the city's associational life – along with the press, one of the two institutional poles of the public sphere, in São Paulo as elsewhere – one imagines that O Combate was also on hand in the meeting rooms of the city's working men's groups, the social halls of neighbourhood associations and the lodges of the city's freemasons.
The practice of posting up-to-the-minute notices outside newspapers' offices was a further means by which news was disseminated. As a result of such postings, the streets and squares in front of these offices, including O Combate's, became gathering places and spaces of sociability for the curious and committed alike; when attempts were made to rally the public one way or another, these spaces became sites for speeches and demonstrations.Footnote 23
The city's newspaper boys served to further propagate the news of the day and expand the reach of the press as they traipsed through the city bellowing the headlines. While the precise extent to which newspaper boys brought non-readers or occasional readers into São Paulo's republic of letters is unclear, their commercial importance is illustrated by periodic contests awarding cash prizes to top sellers.Footnote 24
Still more people came into the orbit of O Combate and the yellow press of which it was a part through rumour and word of mouth more broadly. These incompletely understood social networks were both a source for stories and a vehicle for the further extension of the press's influence. As Afonso Schmidt remembered of the cartoonist Lemmo Lemmi, a frequent contributor to the yellow press, ‘his criticisms, published in the newspapers, were repeated in salons, in cafés, on streetcars, on street corners, everywhere’.Footnote 25
‘For the Proletariat’
In their first issue, O Combate's editors explained that given its ‘popular character’ their tabloid ‘could not keep from dedicating one of its sections to the proletariat, as the European newspapers and the most important Carioca dailies do’. This section would provide ‘the workers of S. Paulo’ with news of ‘everything of interest that occurs in working-class life’.Footnote 26
It was a tall order, but O Combate delivered on this commitment. Initially in the column ‘For the Proletariat’ and later throughout the paper, readers received coverage of strikes, meetings and recreational events. Although O Combate's editors, like most of São Paulo's opinion leaders, came to support Brazil's joining the war against the Central Powers, its columns remained open to antiwar Left-labour militants.Footnote 27
Access to the pages of O Combate was not limited to the working men and women of the city of São Paulo; it extended to workers in outlying counties and throughout the state. For example, when the stoneworkers and brick-makers of Ribeirão Pires were subjected to police harassment, they counted on the newspaper to publicise their protests. Similarly, the dismal treatment that workers received at Sorocaba's Votorantim textile factory was the subject of a front-page report in June 1917.Footnote 28
Amid the unprecedented militancy that began the following month and continued, in fits and starts, into the early 1920s, O Combate remained a friend to labour, supporting the demands of strikers in cities and towns throughout São Paulo and lobbying the government for the release and repatriation of leaders who were jailed and exiled. Even in late 1919, by which time public sympathy had begun to ebb, O Combate continued to note the ‘calm and resigned attitude’ of rank-and-file strikers, to publish statements by the editors of the anarchist A Plebe, and to protest the illegal detention and expulsion of workers and working-class leaders. A regular labour column continued to run as long as the Rangel Pestanas controlled the newspaper.Footnote 29
‘To Defend the Rights and Interests of the People’
O Combate's working-class reporting and remonstrations were directed at and issued for wage-earning manual workers (and thus, under ordinary circumstances, would be limited in their intrinsic interest to a well-defined social group), but other materials were designed to appeal to and on behalf of larger but less distinct portions of the population. The newspaper's consistent championing of São Paulo's ‘people’ as consumers of civic services and goods and its support for consumer-based public mobilisation illustrate this aspect of its programme, in which a unitary social category elided distinctions between wage-earning and salaried, manual and non-manual, propertied and unpropertied.
Three months after O Combate's founding, a commission was formed to petition São Paulo's municipal government and the Canadian-owned Tramway, Light and Power Company, known to residents as ‘the Light’, for lower-fare streetcars. When Nereu Rangel Pestana was asked to join the commission, he accepted, explaining that O Combate, ‘made to defend the rights and interests of the people, puts itself at the side of those who will request this measure from the municipal powers-that-be and the Light … It is through insistent propaganda among all social classes that one is able to sway public opinion, forcing rulers to satisfy the aspirations of the people.’Footnote 30
When the city's degree candidates (bacharelandos) sought lower-rate student streetcar passes, they also received the support of O Combate. After police prevented student leaders from addressing crowds gathered in front of other newspapers’ offices, Nereu opened O Combate's offices to a medical student so that he could address the public from a second-floor window. In familiar language, the student decried police interference and argued that it was necessary ‘to continue the protest by all legal means so as to compel the public powers-that-be to protect the rights of the people and not become defenders of the gouging of the Light’. He was followed by a law student who spoke from the street, saluting O Combate and denouncing ‘the actions of the police, persecuting the peaceful people, who come together, unarmed, to demand the carrying out of the laws and the contracts of the Light’. Amid applause, Nereu replied, thanking the student for his tribute and promising that O Combate ‘would always be on the side of the people, counselling calm, order, and persistence in this campaign against the abuses of the Light’. The crowds that these speakers addressed encompassed relatively privileged bacharelandos, manual workers, middle-class types and other urbanites.Footnote 31
The ‘Canadian Octopus’, as the Light (including its power service, its gas subsidiary and, eventually, its telephone company) was also known, was a favourite target of O Combate and the broader yellow press. In October 1915, O Combate claimed that its intervention had compelled the Light to honour its contract with the municipal government and lower its electricity rates. Later in the decade, one of the newspaper's writers charged, ‘The petulance with which the San Paulo Gas Co. treats the public is only equalled by that of the Light, because the one is actually a subsidiary of the other.’Footnote 32
Second only to the Light as a target for the ire of O Combate and other yellow-press periodicals were ‘the monopolists’ who controlled the processing, distribution and sale of basic foodstuffs, the most prominent of whom were the great Italian immigrant capitalists Francisco Matarazzo and Egydio Pinotti Gamba. As the world war dragged on, and with it wartime inflation and shortages, denunciations of the ‘half-dozen speculators’ who were ‘making themselves multi-millionaires’ while starving ‘the Paulista people’ increased in pitch and frequency, and were combined with calls for popular mobilisation and government intervention.Footnote 33
‘Our Arrabaldes’
Outlying working-class and middle-class neighbourhoods, ignored by the big morning newspapers, were accorded a good deal of coverage in O Combate. From the beginning, the newspaper maintained an office in Brás, a largely working-class neighbourhood east of downtown; soon thereafter, it began to dedicate a column to Ipiranga, on what was then the city's south-eastern fringe. Still later, reporting on events in Lapa, a community to the north-west of the city centre, came to be a feature of the newspaper. Purlieus like Lapa, Ipiranga and Brás were identified as ‘our arrabaldes’, where the newspaper's popularity prompted the creation of new distribution networks.Footnote 34
O Combate did not just report on these areas – it opened its pages to their residents, just as it did for the organised working class. This service was free, and thus available to a wider public than the pay-to-print secções livres of the city's morning newspapers. While the epistolary nature of these appeals indicates that some access to literacy was required of contributors, it did not need to be first-hand: nothing stood in the way of the unlettered availing themselves of the services of the literate. Nor, in cases involving petitions, does it seem reasonable to assume that every petitioner possessed the same command of written Portuguese.
An example of the kind of neighbourhood grievance that found its way onto the page is provided by an anonymous denunciation featured in an early issue. Calling for paved, tree-lined streets, Brás residents complained that ‘every street or lane on which a most excellent Sr. Dr. “So and So” lives is soon covered with all kinds of improvements … while streets inhabited by the hard-working classes are, for the most part, destined to abandonment’.Footnote 35
At least one reader from Cambuci, another largely working-class neighbourhood, credited O Combate's efforts with achieving the desired results. It was due to the protests of O Combate – ‘the valiant paladin of popular causes’ – that the municipal government had begun the paving of a local thoroughfare.Footnote 36
Miles from downtown, in Osasco, a local businessman – for honest negociantes were counted among the people also – complained that Continental Products’ fertiliser factory was a ‘focal point of infection’, an inconvenience to travellers on the Sorocabana railway and the cause of much suffering on the part of the district's ‘poor residents’. O Combate's editors dutifully published his letter, adding that the relevant inspector was shirking his responsibilities because of the municipal government's need for ‘American gold’.Footnote 37
Reporting and reclamations from the arrabaldes were not limited to the material conditions of the outlying neighbourhoods; moral concerns could also come into play, as in O Combate's appeal to authorities when an upstanding property owner in Brás was insulted by a police corporal and failed to get satisfaction. Moral concerns were similarly at stake when the newspaper took up a local appeal for a crackdown on illegal gambling.Footnote 38
‘For the Aesthetics of the City … For Hygiene’
O Combate's dedication to the people of the arrabaldes was patent, but this should not be taken to mean that its writers and readers were immune to boosterish zeal for the beautification and development of the city as a whole, including its chic downtown. Rather, these writers and readers sought to ensure that the benefits of progress were shared more equitably, even as they continued to pride themselves on the renovation of the city centre. The resulting campaigns for aesthetic improvements and extended services combined self-conscious civic-mindedness with middle-class moralising and anxiety over dirt and disease, much of it not unreasonable.
The aesthetic improvement of downtown São Paulo was a matter of concern for O Combate's editors and writers from the very beginning. The first issue carried a cover story entitled ‘The Beautification of the Largo de S. Bento’. Under the caption ‘For the Aesthetics of the City’, the article called for the improvement of the square, a ‘monument to neglect’ on the part of city leaders.Footnote 39 Days later, under the same caption, the newspaper called for the levelling of abandoned structures in the city centre, to be ‘transformed into public latrine[s]’.Footnote 40 Similar articles bore the subtitle ‘For Hygiene’.Footnote 41 The caption ‘For Hygiene’ also graced an article written in support of a proposed municipal law, put forward soon after the 1918 influenza epidemic, that would make it a crime to spit on the pavement, in the city's trams or in any building open to the public. Proceeds from fines would be donated to the Paulista Anti-Tuberculosis League.Footnote 42
Even as O Combate endorsed the remaking of downtown São Paulo and the civilising of its citizenry, access to clean water remained a concern for all city inhabitants. In 1917, with rumours flying regarding the potential consequences of Brazilian entry into the First World War, the newspaper proclaimed ‘The Water Is Poisoned!’, with the accompanying captions explaining: ‘By the government, not the Germans’; ‘Two deaths by typhoid last week’. The poor quality of São Paulo's water supply prompted constant criticism of the government's Sanitary Service.Footnote 43
Sanitarily prepared foodstuffs were another concern of O Combate, its readers and the yellow press more broadly. A story of meat that was rejected by the city slaughterhouse but later made into sausages reportedly caused a ‘sensation’ among readers. Cases of food poisoning received prominent coverage, and the newspaper offered to have the purity of any foodstuffs manufactured in the city tested by an independently contracted laboratory. Here, again, were stories and services specifically designed to inform, protect and engage urban consumers (and, of course, to sell newspapers).Footnote 44
Public safety and private property were subjects of similar concern. On occasion, O Combate congratulated the police for their efforts to serve and protect, but it was far more common for the newspaper to contrast the daring of the city's criminal element with the haplessness of the police: ‘Thieves Broke into a Retail-Goods Store’, proclaimed one headline, while ‘[t]he police, as always, slept’.Footnote 45
Civic concern could, and often did, lend itself to middle-class moralising, as in O Combate's periodic campaigns against gambling. It was also clear in a 1917 piece that asked, ‘Which is the Most Moralised Neighbourhood in S. Paulo?’ The answer was to be found, according to O Combate, in each neighbourhood's rate of out-of-wedlock births. In a populist twist, official demographic data was found to indicate that ‘the rate of illegitimacy is lower precisely in the poor neighbourhoods, where workers live’, proving that the working class, comprised largely of immigrants and their descendants, was more ‘moral’ than ‘gold and chauvinismo’ (metonymical representations of idly rich, old-stock aristocrats) would have one believe.Footnote 46
‘Love and Blood’
For all their civic-minded moralising and parish-pump petitioning, the Rangel Pestanas were not above exploiting scandal to sell newspapers. Sensationalism in the form of luridly illustrated stories of violent crimes and horrific accidents was an easy means of attracting public attention and boosting sales.
Beneath the caption ‘Love and Blood’, an early issue of O Combate told the story of a barber who, finding his advances rebuffed by a seamstress, stabbed her and then shot himself. A similarly bloody story made headlines in 1918, when legal-separation proceedings ended in an honour killing in a lawyer's office. Such articles were the newspaper's near-daily bread.Footnote 47
In the case of train wrecks or gruesome workplace accidents, scandalous reporting might reinforce O Combate's established positions in favour of working people and the broader public. One of the darkest examples of this kind of editorial comment accompanied public outcry over the case of an eight-year-old boy who lost the fingers on his right hand in an accident at a Barra Funda workshop: ‘it is regrettable that the yellow press joins together with these whining individuals, at a time in which one should teach children suffering and preparation for death’. This article, following grimly sarcastic references to unanswered calls for better government oversight of child labour, closed with the parting shot: ‘Therefore, do not accuse the government, which, as always, has done its duty.’Footnote 48 The Sorocabana railway, which stretched from the city of São Paulo into the western reaches of the state, was a familiar target. Periodic accidents – ‘the ruin of many people’ – provided opportunities for criticism of working conditions on the railway and the poor quality of the railway's passenger and freight services. Scandalous reporting, in these contexts, not only responded to prurient interest but also formed part of the Rangel Pestanas’ broader campaigns on behalf of São Paulo's ‘people’.Footnote 49
Similarly, scandalous reporting involving priests jibed with the newspaper's republicanism. Stories of lecherous, money-grubbing men of the cloth reinforced the anticlerical rationalism that had informed pre-1889 republicanism and the curriculum at the Escola Neutralidade, and which at that point still lived on among radicals of all stripes, from old republicans like Carlos de Escobar to the anarchist contributors to ‘For the Proletariat’.Footnote 50
‘What the Republic is Good For’
No less scandalous than clerical lechery, in the eyes of these writers and many of their readers, were the practices of São Paulo's politicians. These leaders were ranked alongside the Light and speculators in foodstuffs as enemies of the people in daily accounts of privilege, filthy lucre, electoral fraud and political violence.
An early article entitled ‘What the Republic Is Good For’ made clear whom the Republic was good for: ‘privileged families’. While O Combate's writers, local residents and the city's small businessmen petitioned for improvements, well-paved streets and sidewalks were built for the exclusive benefit of the powerful Rodrigues Alves family. The article ended with the remark: ‘And they still say that the Republic ended highborn privileges and that all are equal before the law!’Footnote 51
In 1917 O Combate pilloried Jorge Tibiriçá, president of the state senate, for his support of a budget that included ‘scandalous measures, to his own personal benefit … at the cost of the money of the people, who are the ones who pay for the comforts and caprices of the grandees’. Two measures that were particularly deserving of censure were pay raises for legislative staff, which typically included ‘a son, a son-in-law or a nephew’ of ‘each of the backwoods lords’, and a subsidy for a limousine that would shuttle Tibiriçá around town, at the public's expense, at a time when ‘the people struggle with the misery that the government causes them, [and] in which taxes are raised barbarously’.Footnote 52
Tibiriçá's case involved the use of power for solely personal and familial gain, but charges of corruption involving sweetheart deals for the ‘trusts’ were also made.Footnote 53 In 1919 O Combate went so far as to allege that the political boss Antônio Lacerda Franco was scheming on behalf of the Light – after all, had the Canadian-owned company not acquired control over the Companhia Telefônica Brasileira, which Lacerda Franco had owned previously and now represented as a native-born figurehead?Footnote 54
Electoral fraud was another frequent complaint. Following a July 1915 city council by-election, O Combate noted that votes for the protest candidate of the city's businessmen were tallied for the ‘official candidate’.Footnote 55 Following another such election in August, O Combate informed readers that falsified electoral bulletins gave the ‘candidate of the government’ three or four times the number of votes actually deposited in the city's electoral urns.Footnote 56
Following the next regularly scheduled election, O Combate commented at length: ‘As a rule, there was no election: some gentlemen amiably took it upon themselves to draw up the reports, after having filled the book [containing the electoral rolls] with hundreds of signatures, without so much as bothering to disguise their handwriting. In the very rare locales in which the polls in fact opened, the ballots absolutely do not represent the popular will.’Footnote 57 The slates of candidates were worked out behind closed doors,
without the slightest consultation of the electorate. These [slates] were supported by the local bosses, who only seek to conquer or maintain themselves in positions of power. They were voted on by … public functionaries, their relatives and dependents, and the innumerable legion of the dependents of the government or the friends of the government. The people did not ever intervene, not in the selection of candidates, not in the farce of the primaries, not in the electoral act.Footnote 58
Rather, the state president and other bigwigs acted ‘for the people … with the assistance of a half dozen lesser lights’.Footnote 59
This combination of fraud and intimidation was the preferred method to manage elections, but there was another means available to establish and maintain power: the ‘savage's politics’ of the hired gun and the ambush. The caption ‘Savage's Politics’, often accompanying a more detailed title, was a ubiquitous presence in the pages of O Combate, one that was meant to conjure up the lamentable backwardness upon which incumbent politics ultimately rested.
Criticism of the state's power holders could cut close to home, with unpleasant circumstances for journalists and their families.Footnote 60 During the war years, O Combate battled official censorship, which went much further than Brazil's war effort warranted and was used as a stick with which to beat the opposition press.Footnote 61 Lawsuits threatened the financial position of the newspaper and its owners; no matter how proud Nereu may have been at being called ‘the most fearless of our journalists’, he and his brothers cannot have enjoyed being dragged into court.Footnote 62 And though Nereu, Acylino, Ludolpho and Rubens do Amaral emerged from O Combate's first eight years unscathed, such was not the case for their colleague Benedicto de Andrade, of O Parafuso, who was shot at, at close range, by the enraged subject of one of his stories. Freakish circumstances allowed him to survive this attempt, but burdened by debt and other personal problems, he went on to finish the job himself.Footnote 63
‘Where Are the Defenders of the Republic?’
O Combate's outrage regarding incumbent politicking did not extend to the republican project. On the contrary, the Rangel Pestana brothers looked back fondly on the republic's founding, and their father's role in it, and sought to make the republic of their day deliver on their dreams, celebrating republicanism as an idea, seeking to rally the public in defence of ‘true’ republicanism, and asking: ‘Is Paulista Civic Virtue Definitively Dead?’ and ‘Where Are the Defenders of the Republic?’ Here were the politics that led them to support all manner of would-be reformers.Footnote 64
In appealing to republicanism as an idea, the Rangel Pestana brothers were participants in a larger effort to create a suitable história pátria. Thus the leaders of the republican movement of the 1870s and 1880s were remembered as ‘brothers in the glory and the ideals’ of the republic, and students and the citizenry at large were called upon to honour them, as national heroes were honoured ‘in every country in which patriotic education is not mere verbiage’.Footnote 65O Combate was guided by ‘an ideal: to republicanise the Republic, to make it the regime promised by the Propaganda [of the nineteenth century], to turn it into the government of the people by the people’.Footnote 66 It was an ideal that was tied to a regionalist reading of Brazilian history peculiar to São Paulo, the ‘most republican of the States’, where ‘[a]ll of the great national movements … had their strongest impulse’: ‘the colonial expansion to the west … Independence … Abolitionism … the Republic’.Footnote 67
O Combate's publication was heralded by an announcement promising that the newspaper would act ‘without commitments to any political party or group’.Footnote 68 In practice, the newspaper and its editors supported any party, group or individual that challenged the existing political machine. Attempts at mobilising businessmen received the same attention as efforts to organise working men. Protest candidates and anti-machine contenders were backed in local, state and national elections. In 1918 O Combate supported Luiz Pereira Barreto when he was recruited to stand in a state senate election against José Valois de Castro, a clergyman deplored by many for his sympathy for the Central Powers in the war recently joined by Brazil. The following year, O Combate backed Ruy Barbosa in his final bid for Brazil's presidency, during which the elder statesman ran his most convincingly anti-machine campaign and announced his tardy conversion to the cause of social reform. In 1921–2, when Nilo Peçanha challenged the establishment presidential candidate, the newspaper made his Republican Reaction movement its cause as well. In these cases, O Combate contributed to election campaigns that brought out more voters than the machine in certain, mostly urban areas across the state, campaigns during which the newspaper depended on the collaboration of its readers in supporting political movements that opposed São Paulo's ruling clique.
O Combate, the ‘Little Press’ and Brazilian Press History
O Combate's editors embraced the epithet ‘yellow press’ from the beginning – but at certain points, they identified O Combate differently. A 1917 story distinguished between ‘the grand press’ and ‘the little press’, placing O Combate in the latter category, made up of ‘newspapers that publish fewer numbers of pages and do not possess circulations as large’ as the more staid O Estado de S. Paulo and Jornal do Comércio.Footnote 69O Combate and like publications were thus distinct in circulation, format and style from the ‘grand’, non-yellow press, but the two types of publication also shared personnel. At the same time, influences from abroad and competition for readers resulted in the two categories of periodical approximating one another.
The quintessential yellow-press magazine, O Parafuso, for example, emerged from O Pirralho, where the former's publisher-to-be did his apprenticeship. At O Pirralho Benedicto de Andrade worked alongside such fortunate sons as Oswald de Andrade, the magazine's founder, churning out a combination of ‘politics, literature, society columns, sporting news’ and ‘[t]ranslations, photos, caricatures; a still-incipient humour about political gossip and everyday life’. The most striking examples of this political and everyday-life humour were the work of the cartoonist Lemmo Lemmi and the satirical prose and verse that Alexandre Marcondes Machado published as ‘Juó Bananere’. When Benedicto de Andrade founded O Parafuso, he brought Lemmo Lemmi with him as the illustrator of the greatest number of the magazine's four-colour covers. O Pirralho, on the other hand, became increasingly arty and elitist, and its founder more so as he drifted into well-paying writing jobs. Meanwhile, O Parafuso was execrated and enjoyed for its outrageously demotic send-ups of the rich and powerful.Footnote 70
Even at its most raucous and irreverent, O Combate maintained a more decorous tone than O Parafuso, which one memoirist described as ‘the worst publicity-driven scourge that the bourgeois society of São Paulo knew’.Footnote 71 In fact, though it identified itself as part of the yellow press, O Combate was hardly anti-‘bourgeois’, and its editors and staff maintained cordial relations with selected representatives of São Paulo's mainstream, ‘grand’ press. In 1915 O Estado de S. Paulo welcomed the ‘well done and interesting’ newspaper to the field.Footnote 72 In 1916 O Combate's editors returned the compliment, identifying themselves and their counterparts at the Estado as the only two newspaper publishing groups that were above the influence of government press subventions.Footnote 73 Two years later, commemorating the Estado's 43rd anniversary, O Combate called it ‘the strongest pensative force of the Republic’, ‘the school in which the country's sound journalism is trained’, and, as far as the press was concerned, ‘the most genuine exponent of [Brazil's] greatness’.Footnote 74 After stepping down from the directorship of O Combate, Nereu chose O Estado de S. Paulo's secção livre as the forum for the anti-government screeds that he published as Ivan Subiroff; his targets in ‘the Paulista oligarchy’, for their part, suspected that a member of the Estado group might be behind the pseudonym, perhaps even the newspaper's publisher, Júlio Mesquita.Footnote 75 Acylino remained in the employ of O Estado de S. Paulo from the beginning of his working life to its end, even as he sacrificed his health on the labour of love that was O Combate.Footnote 76 For his part, Rubens do Amaral contributed to the Revista do Brasil, which had been founded by members of the Estado group.Footnote 77 Another connection came through the oldest of the Rangel Pestana brothers, Paulo, a columnist on economic and educational matters for the Estado whose work was occasionally featured in O Combate, including as the lead story in the newspaper's first commemoration of Brazilian independence – a paean to the ‘political work of José Bonifacio’, the Paulista patriot who forged a ‘vast Brazil, unified and solidary’.Footnote 78
Not only did the ‘grand press’ and O Combate's ‘little’ or ‘yellow’ press share personnel, they also influenced one another in matters of style and substance. In late 1915, for example, with O Parafuso waxing in popularity among ordinary Paulistas and O Pirralho increasingly catering to a belle-lettered upper crust, members of the Estado group launched their own illustrated magazine. Featuring Lemmo Lemmi's caricatures, Juó Bananere's mock Italian argot, and ‘hair-raising criticism’ of São Paulo's political elite, O Queixoso was classed with O Parafuso as one of the new magazines with which ‘the galleries amuse themselves’.Footnote 79
In other cases, the approximation of the grand press and the yellow press resulted from common influences from abroad or the influence of offshoots of the former upon the latter. A month after the founding of O Combate, for example, O Estado de S. Paulo launched an evening edition. Nicknamed the Estadinho, it combined the ‘liberal [editorial] line of the morning edition’ with livelier fare aimed at the city's ever-growing population: ample photographs, enhanced sports coverage, Lemmo Lemmi's caricatures, and Juó Bananere's humorous prose and verse.Footnote 80 It was, a contributor recalled, ‘a lively, unquiet, often irreverent newspaper, capable of stating with a spirited guffaw that which the seriousness and severity of the Estadão's columns did not allow’.Footnote 81 At least part of the two newspapers’ common style stemmed from their founding editors’ admiration for and emulation of the Anglo-American ‘yellow press’ epitomised by Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail.Footnote 82 In matters political, the two newspapers shared a republican lineage that went back to Júlio Mesquita and Francisco Rangel Pestana's nineteenth-century anti-monarchical campaigning. In the case of sports coverage, it appears that the Estado group, via the Estadinho, influenced the editors of O Combate, who bettered their sports reporting in the wake of the Estadinho's success.
In turn, the convergence of São Paulo's older, traditional press and its newer, yellow press resulted in the founding of press outlets that would combine the reach and scale of the grand press and the irreverence and reader-friendly features that were the key to the popularity of newspapers like O Combate and magazines like O Parafuso. The forerunners of the Folha de S. Paulo were among these outlets, as were the São Paulo newspapers of the Diários Associados chain, which added a marketing acumen and a mercenary sensibility that would have been out of place in São Paulo at the time of O Combate's founding. These were not ‘modern-style’ newspapers; they were modern newspapers.Footnote 83
Founded by alumni of the Estadinho in 1921, the Folha da Noite was designed to be a ‘popular newspaper’, with its sports section, middle-class moralising, consumer-interest exposés and beloved cartoon mascot. Among the newspaper's two founding editors was Olival Costa, who years earlier had been sufficiently inspired by the contretemps of São Paulo's yellow press to co-author a play about them. Like O Combate, the Folha da Noite adopted a critical stance vis-à-vis São Paulo's office holders and opened its pages to the complaints of ordinary folks, but its criticisms were delivered in a more family-friendly fashion and its appeals on behalf of city residents were not so cutting as to scare off advertisers. The newspaper was a success, leading its owners to launch a morning counterpart, the Folha da Manhã, in 1925.Footnote 84
A series of attempts to match the success of the Folha da Noite was made at mid-decade by yellow-press veterans, former Folha employees and journalists from the Estado group. Successive editors failed to turn a profit on the Diário da Noite, but relief came through a buyout by Assis Chateaubriand's Diários Associados chain. Having taken control of the newspaper, Chateaubriand (an admirer of Nereu Rangel Pestana's work as Ivan Subiroff) left its day-to-day operations in the hands of the former O Combate contributing editor Rubens do Amaral and the Estado de S. Paulo staffer Plínio Barreto. When Barreto resigned to become the Estado's editor-in-chief in 1927, Rubens do Amaral remained and ‘the Diário da Noite … began to transform itself, little by little, into a popular newspaper … Spectacular crimes warmed the hearts of the Paulista newspaper's editorial staff … the suicide of the actress Nina Sanzi, the public thrashing that the people gave a Japanese elected official who failed to fulfil his campaign promises, the burglary of a safe on Rua São Bento’. Attacks on São Paulo's ruling clique continued, but the Diários Associados’ above-board advertisers got more than they paid for, and under-the-table contributors did even better. Among the former were General Electric and the patent medicine manufacturer Laboratórios Alvim e Freitas; among the latter was the Light, the yellow press's favourite target of yesteryear, singled out by Chateaubriand in a column declaring, ‘Next month will mark another anniversary of Light & Power's activity in Brazil. If our people were of another [more advanced] mental level, it would be a national holiday.’ The success of the Diário da Noite led Chateaubriand to launch his own morning newspaper in São Paulo in 1929 amid a promotional bonanza that borrowed liberally from all that Madison Avenue had to offer. The new Diário de S. Paulo's editor was Rubens do Amaral.Footnote 85
Conclusion and Epilogue
By that point, the yellow press epitomised by dailies like O Combate and weeklies like O Parafuso had been eclipsed by the Folhas and Chateaubriand's Diário da Noite, newspapers that the yellow-press example and experience had helped bring into being. Three attempts to reprise the success of O Parafuso had failed between 1922 and 1927, while O Combate's financial position was such that Ludolpho Rangel Pestana would be compelled to lease the newspaper to other journalists beginning in January 1930. The Paulista yellow press – ‘an institution of the public itself, effective in the manner of a mediator and intensifier of public discussion, no longer a mere organ for the spreading of news but not yet the medium of a consumer culture’ – had enjoyed its heyday as the 1910s became the 1920s.Footnote 86 Ten years later, having contributed to the making of a press immediately recognisable as modern, its moment had passed, and as its outlets disappeared even the terms by which they had been known – ‘the yellow press, the scandal press’ – dropped into disuse or acquired new connotations.Footnote 87
So too with the politics that had animated O Combate in the 1910s and early 1920s, when the Rangel Pestanas, together with Rubens do Amaral, sought to rally their home state around a regionally inflected radical republicanism and set the republic aright through the engagement of ‘conservative, liberal, and radical spirits’ on behalf of ‘political, administrative, social, and economic ideals on which we all agree’: ‘for freedom of conscience, for respect for the law, for administrative morality, for truth at the polls … for the proper use of public monies’, and, last but not least, for ‘the flag of nationalism’.Footnote 88 Within this context they were Jacobin, not in the sense in which the word is customarily used in the Brazilian historiography, but in the classic sense of seeing themselves as on the side of the menu peuple – workers and small businessmen, tradesmen and students – and as rallying and representing them.Footnote 89 At the same time, O Combate's founders, many of its contributors and at least some of its readers expressed this radical republicanism in a regional idiom. Indeed, O Combate was an agent in the rehearsal and elaboration of a regional tradition that held that São Paulo was the once and future ‘model state’, from the epic of the bandeiras (Indian-hunting expeditions that had vastly increased the future territory of the nation) to the independence-era work of José Bonifácio, through the anti-slavery and anti-monarchical campaigning of Carlos de Escobar and Francisco Rangel Pestana, patriotic traditions that could and should be revived through the civic efforts of true Paulista patriots.
South American and North Atlantic exemplars of O Combate's republicanism and raucousness – if not its paulistinidade – may be easily found. In 1913, two years before O Combate's founding, the newspaper Crítica was launched in Buenos Aires as part of what Angel Rama described as ‘a spate of opportunistic and often sensationalistic publications’ serving ‘sectors of the population’ like those reached by São Paulo's yellow press. In Paris, the uproarious Canard Enchaîné began publication in the same year as O Combate. Like Crítica and O Combate, the Canard, notwithstanding its ridicule of the French government and the grafters and fools who infested its every level, remained committed to the republic as an idea and to the ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity … Reason [and] anticlericalism’ of true republicanism. But where Crítica and the Canard Enchaîné are recognised as having played key roles in the making of the print culture and public life of their respective countries, O Combate and its counterparts in São Paulo's yellow press have been forgotten or, worse still, misunderstood by those historians who have drawn on them as sources, despite these publications having contributed to the founding and subsequent success of some of Brazil's most important newspapers.Footnote 90
In looking back at the world from which O Combate sprung and in which it exerted its influence, historians might do well to defer to a giant in the field. Writing as a eulogist, Sergio Buarque de Holanda remembered these years as having been, in São Paulo, ‘the golden age of [Juó] Bananere and also of the scandal sheets, in which the incumbent politicians and the Italian magnates were criticised with the same ferocity. Alliances and conflicts were made and unmade, ceaselessly, in a land still largely provincial, despite everything, [and] naturally liable to be impressed by these clashes.’Footnote 91
By the time Sergio Buarque wrote these words, in 1935 or early 1936, O Combate and its fellow ‘scandal sheets’ had vanished along with the world they described. The journalists of the mid-1930s employed by the Diários Associados and the Folhas did better for themselves than the hard-scrabble types of the old yellow press, who would have marvelled at the technological progress made during the intervening two decades while likely regretting that journalism's ‘industrial function’ was more prominent than ever, that the state's power over society and the press had increased exponentially (rather than vice versa) and that a phenomenon that would be called ‘audience fragmentation’ had rendered the old appeals on behalf of a single, cohesive ‘people’ ever more formulaic and fictive, ever less creative and credible.Footnote 92
Meanwhile, amid the making and unmaking of Sergio Buarque's ‘alliances and conflicts’, elements of O Combate's radical republicanism had been assimilated into newer political traditions. The most noteworthy of these were the democratic radicalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s (colonised by the Communist Party in 1934–5 and subsequently destroyed) and the regionally chauvinistic constitutionalism that defined São Paulo's politics beginning in 1932.Footnote 93
Among the objectives of the men who led Brazil into dictatorship in 1937 was the effacement of these two newer traditions from public memory. They were only partially successful in their efforts, but they were abetted by time in ensuring that a common lineage of the two traditions stretching back through the proudly Paulista radical republicanism of the yellow-press O Combate would be forgotten.Footnote 94
