Augusto Ivan de Freitas Pinheiro e Eliane Canedo
Pesquisa e colaboração: Cristiane Titoneli
Revolution in spaces and customs
In 1904, the federal capital of Brazil’s young Republic was in the second year of the Pereira Passos administration. Sweeping changes were altering the appearance and structure of Rio de Janeiro, with drastic repercussions on the living conditions of its people, particularly in the downtown region, which was viewed as the Gordian knot of this renewal program.
With the improvements introduced by the government, property values began to rise in this region, prompting the need to remove what was viewed as relics of colonial times: whatever was old and dirty had to make way for the new and orderly. Ushered in slowly, the city became picture-perfect, with a modern and civilized appearance that was intended to attract foreign investment capital to Brazil.
The city was buzzing with countless construction and reconstruction projects, all focused on sanitation and embellishment. During the demolition phase, people were evicted from their homes, businesses were removed, and buildings knocked down. The poorest classes were the most severely affected.
In addition to introducing an assortment of taxes and levies to underwrite the loans taken out to finance these urban improvements, the Mayor also decided to intervene in the places and activities of the poorest people, forbidding the sale of raw tripe displayed on rough wooden trays and not allowing cows to be milked publicly in the streets.
Raising poultry and pigs was also forbidden, together with orchards, stables and meadows; dogs were rounded up and killed. Urinating and spitting in the street were also banned, together with flying kites, releasing balloons or setting off fireworks in the street. In the Centro district, everyone had to wear hats and shoes.
In the healthcare field, the Mayor stepped up public health inspections of homes, checking places of residence downtown and in the docklands. With the cause of yellow fever discovered, public health expert Dr. Oswaldo Cruz conducted campaigns and worked on eliminating hotspots of this disease, using legal coercion as a tool.
New behavioral standards appeared during the early XX century, together with much civil construction work that beautified the city, in parallel to the introduction of stringent public health measures. However, there were two major innovations fanning the winds of modernity and dynamism blowing through Rio de Janeiro at that time.
First was the inauguration of the remodeled Port; fitted with new equipment and built on a large landfill on the shore of the Guanabara Bay, it was the largest and most modern shipping facility in South America.
Soon after, a safe and stable electricity distribution system started up operations, implemented by Canada’s Light and Power Company, which held the monopoly over all urban services at that time.
Essentially, these were the investments driving the upsurge in manufacturing activities; in turn, this pumped up the growth of the city’s population.
At the start of the century, small businesses that produced and sold their wares on the same premises began to vanish from the downtown area. With its modern mindset, the city no longer accepted the old living-over-the-shop lifestyle, where workers could sleep where they worked.
This was when medium and large businesses began to appear, particularly in the outlying areas around the Centro (and thus close to the labor force and consumer market), with basic infrastructure already installed: electricity, the Port and the railroad. Indeed, Brazil’s industrial process during the early XX century may be construed as a type of import substitution.
The economy was still dominated by single-crop plantations exporting their output, with a shortage of diversified raw materials that could be fed directly into manufacturing activities. Consequently, most of the factories had to import them, merely giving the finishing touches to the good that they shipped him.
This left industries vulnerable to swings in government policies and foreign-exchange variations. Nevertheless, many of them were able to survive lean times, as they knew their consumers, controlled distribution channels, had access to credit and were skilled in importing and distributing the goods that they produced. [I]
These larger industrial plants employed migrants from all over Brazil, as well as foreign immigrants, who gradually adapted to their new lifestyles, with acquired habits and consumption standards. This new mass of wage-earning urban workers formed a stable market that gradually built up significant political clout in the national context.
However, rapid urbanization resulted in poor urban infrastructure and ramshackle housing that indelibly scarred the physical and social landscapes of the city, with 811,444 inhabitants by 1900. In working class neighborhoods, unrest and uprisings began to occur with some regularity. The most notable of them was the Vaccine Revolt (Revolta da Vacina).
[I]
Set up in a building designed by Antonio Jannuzzi, who was one of the best architects in Rio de Janeiro at that time, the Moinho Fluminense complex was among the earliest modern industrial mills in Brazil, with machinery imported from the Thomas Robinson & Son factory in Rochdale, England. However, its output was not sold directly to the general public, but was instead distributed exclusively by the John Moore & Cia. company, headquartered in downtown Rio at Rua Candelária 92.