The Political Uses of the Past During the Cold War: Conservative Intellectuals and the Military Dictatorship in Brazil

The aim of this paper is to examine how, in the context of the Cold War and Latin America’s National Security dictatorships, conservative Brazilian intellectuals turned to history to demonstrate the country’s ‘incompatibility’ with progressive values and left-wing government. It analyzes a selection of lectures given by acclaimed conservative intellectuals at the National War College during the 1960s and 70s. An examination of these lectures demonstrates that many of the elements chosen to define ‘national identity’ under the ‘Estado Novo’ dictatorship of 1937-45 – such as the valorization of miscegenation, a belief in the docile nature of the Brazilian people, the exaltation of work and the idea of a nation founded on cohesion and cooperation – were revived after 1964. Thus, conservative intellectuals made an important contribution to legitimizing the military dictatorship of 1964-85 by inscribing it within what they believed the Brazilian tradition to be, presenting it as the only regime capable of preserving national unity and culture against the threats posed by Marxism and communism.

the Latin American military is a mere 'ideological puppet' without the ability to create its own myths, doctrines or ideologies. Maud Chirio (2012, p. 27) reminds us that the influences on military thinking developed during the 1950s and 60s were diverse and possessed strong national specificities. The Brazilian specificities have been analyzed by Luís Felipe Miguel (2002), who described how the ESG gave the DSN its own characteristics by using elements of Brazilian tradition and political thought. I have been persuaded that studying the lectures given by conservative intellectuals at the ESG will enable me to broaden the understanding of the ideologies and political ideas of the military dictatorship.
We turn now to the third question, regarding the selection of the intellectuals and lectures that I have analyzed. As mentioned earlier, this paper is part of broader research on the relationship between the conservative intellectualsmore specifically those who were part of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL)and the military dictatorship. The study of the ABL led me towards detailed research on those who occupied the chairs at the ABL during this period. A prosopographical analysis of all the members of the institution between 1961 and 1979 enabled me to sketch out an accurate profile and identify a sector of the Brazilian intelligentsia that has remained neglected by researchers, and thereby forgotten, largely because of the ascendency of the 'cultural hegemony' of the left (SCHWARZ, 1978). This topic will not be delved into within the limits of this paper, si nce it has been the subject of previous publications (CUNHA, 2015). Thus, it is my previous work on the role of conservative intellectuals during the 1960s and 70s that justifies the choice of those being analyzed in this paper. between intellectuals and political power is relatively complex. A wide range of approaches, negotiations and interests may be established between them. In other words, I do not consider that, in the aftermath of the 1964 coup, the military was able to 'coopt' the intelligentsia nor that the latter in turn created ex nihilo a coherent, complete discourse on national identity and Brazilian history for the sole purpose of legitimizing the military dictatorship. These conservative intellectuals had gained respectability and had long careers independent of the military dictatorship. Moreover, they had addressed and reformulated issues considered crucial to Brazilian political thought ever since the 1920s. What occurred in the 1960s and 70s was rather a case of 'pre-established harmony' -to take up Leibniz's expression used by Gisèle Sapiro (1999) in her work on French intellectuals during the German occupation during World War II -between the worldview of conservative intellectuals and that of the military who took power in 1964.
This convergence is attested by studies on the political propaganda of the military dictatorship or on public policies in the area of culture. In the first case, Carlos Fico's (1997) works have demonstrated how political propaganda was grounded in a reading of Brazil, particularly as developed by Gilberto Freyre (FICO, 2003, p. 196, 1997. In the second case, Tatyana Maia (2010) analyzed the experience of the Federal Council of Culture, giving priority to the role of civism and patriotism in drawing up cultural policies between 1967 and 1975.
The hypothesis herein is that conservative intellectuals played an important role in the mechanisms of the post-1964 State legitimation. As Max Weber has already stated (2015), the notion of legitimacy is the key to the problem of political power. According to Maurice Duverger (1962, p. 15), most men believe that power must have a certain nature, based on certain principles, adopt a certain form, and be founded on a certain origin. In this sense, the role of beliefs and values, often originating from a historical construction, are essential in legitimizing political regimes, whether authoritarian or democratic. On the other hand, there is more than one form that legitimation can take. I suggest that the role of conservative intellectuals in producing a conservative discourse based on a certain reading of history and a certain conception of Brazilian culture was one of the instances of legitimization of the Brazilian military regime. With different forms of intervention in the public debate, these intellectuals emphasized the absence of conflict in Brazilian history and addressed such topics as the harmonious formation of the Brazilian people and their cordial and peaceful nature. They also supported the idea of a 'true Brazilian culture' that played a significant role in harmonizing differences and social conflicts, thereby showing a clear connection between their theses and the official discourse of the regime. This thus played a crucial role in building a specific reading of Brazil as a source of legitimacy for the dictatorship.
It must be said that the topic of political thought/conservative intellectuals has been studied predominantly by Brazilian human and social scientists. In political science, the development of these studies was pioneered by Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos in the 1960s and70s (1978;1970;1967) (2000), as well as on the history and historiography of the Estado Novo (1999b).
Since the 1960s, therefore, work on the topic of political thought/conservative intellectuals has been widely developed, ranging from approaches that sought to identify intellectual lineages in the history of Brazil (such as SANTOS (1978,1970,1967), LAMOUNIER (1977), BRANDÃO (2007)  Three points will be emphasized in this analysis of the lectures given by conservative intellectuals at the ESG. The first is the presentation of Brazil's history through the lectures of Pedro Calmon (1980) and Josué Montello (1977).
The second point is divided into two parts. First, the analysis, based on the lectures by Austregésilo de Athayde (1963) andVianna Moog (1971), considers the appreciation of the history of the 'formation of the people as a result of the mixture of the three races' made on the basis of a 'Brazilian culture', the main characteristics of which are cohesion and harmony, followed by an analysis of the definition of the rather vague notion of the 'Brazilian man'. The final point deals with the background to how the academy defined the characteristics and 'psychology' of the Brazilian people based on the lecture delivered by Cândido Motta Filho (1977, 1968.

Pedro Calmon, Josué Montello and the history of Brazil: optimism and the birth of 'national sentiment'
Conservative intellectuals approached the problems related to the 'psychosocial field' of the National Security Doctrine through the history of Brazil. A somewhat linear interpretation of Brazil's history is presented in the lectures given by Pedro Calmon (1980) and Josué Montello (1977 ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 8 This phenomenon was studied by Carlos Fico, who demonstrated the link between a political factthe propaganda of an authoritarian regime that was atypical in the Brazilian case and structured in a broad system -and a long process, namely, the attempt to elaborate an optimistic reading of the history of Brazil; cf. Carlos Fico (1997). 9 The University of Brazil would later become the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. 10 The biographical information on Pedro Calmon was taken from the Dicionário Histórico Biográfico Brasileiro (entry 'Pedro Calmon'. Available at: http://www.fgv.br/cpdoc/busca/Busca/BuscaConsultar.aspx. Viewed on January, 14, 2020) and also from his memoir (CALMON, 1995).
It is the bedazzling confidence in Brazil. Embedded in a further sense of security, of patient optimism, of a generous and gentle certainty, such as that which derives from faith. It is the consolatory prescience of the future. In this state of geographical sufficiency, it is the idea of paradise that mystically prevails; not that which was lost by theologians, but that which was found by travelers; an earthly paradise either in the landscape or in innocence: nature and the wild [...] Thus, from the idyllic assumption that Brazil was the true paradise, thence began the messianic prophecy, that everything was predestined for it to become, if not the fifth empire, at least one of the empires of the world (CALMON, 1974, p. 09).
The Independence of Brazil -the 'Brazilian Revolution of 1822' according to Calmon -was a 'cultural event'. The Empire represented 'the instinctive affirmation of nationality' and reinforced institutions linked to culture, which were its very basis: higher education, the press, the library, the theater. This movement of cultural emancipation -in which romanticism played a decisive role -was superior to that of political life, and finally reached 'cultural maturity' in the nineteenth century through: Comtism, which invaded polytechnic and military education; the sociology, that shook things up in the legal field through to metaphysics, with the 'School of Recife'; soon, cultural anthropology, embedded in the recent patterns of Lombrosian criminology and German psychiatry, with an immediate literary reflex in Sertões, in the prose of the engineer Euclides da Cunha -emerged, imposed itself, and triumphed at a time when the intellectual elite (in open conflict, on the eve of the Republic, with the ruling elite) proclaimed its cultural maturity (CALMON, 1974, p. 12). This awareness of nationality was a theme followed up on by Josué Montello  Montello was a prolific novelist and journalist, writing dozens of novels, and maintaining a weekly column in the 'Jornal do Brasil ' between 1954 and 1990. In his lecture at the ESG, Montello initially stated that language is the most complete cultural expression of nationality and that it is inseparable from literature.
From this point, he proposed an approach vis-à-vis the formation of Brazilian nationality and culture with exclusive reference to literary texts.  Montello (1977) found the first instance of praise of the 'tropical man'. These early documents expressed a precocious nationalism. However, according to Montello (1977), it was only with 'O Uruguai' and 'O Caramuru', published respectively by Basilio da Gama in 1769 and Santa Rita Durão in 1781, that we obtain the first global view of Brazilian nationality before the advent of Romanticism, that literary growth hormone of national sensibility.
As may be observed, in their lectures at the National War College, conservative intellectuals approached the history of Brazil in a very deterministic manner, with a well-defined starting point and an inexorable trajectory towards its destiny as a great power. For Calmon (1980), Brazil 's 'disadvantage' in relation to Europe was surpassed by what the land and geography could offer.
According to him, there was a fundamental difference between Europe and America: if time engendered the Nation in Europe, the State being the result of its maturity, then in America it was the territory that determined the Nation, and the State would be the result of integration (CALMON, 1980, p. 03). 'Integrating' was a key word for the military, an important task they took on as their responsibility. Culture, on the other hand, was to evolve from the outset, which enabled a speedy identification with what they called 'nationality' or 'national sentiment'. This search for the origins of 'national sentiment' seems to have been a goal of great importance: the awareness of a set of common values that provides a feeling of belonging to a nationality. As is well known, the search for the genesis of a national sentiment has long existed and is linked to the desire to constitute a certain image of the Nation.
Thus, for successive generations of intellectuals attempting to understand 'Brazilianness', 'what we are' or 'why the country works or does not work' has been related to the problem of 'national sentiment' (FICO, 1997, p. 28). During the dictatorship, in the second half of the twentieth century, evoking the origins of 'national sentiment' as a way of explaining the greatness of the present was very much in vogue among conservative intellectuals. Finally, the notion of optimism with regard to the fate of Brazil is a crucial aspect that helps us to understand the proximity of worldviews between conservative intellectuals and those in charge of the regime. It was this optimism, in the midst of the dictatorship, that enabled Calmon to conclude his lecture in the following manner: It was not by chance that [Brazil] became organized; nor was it that success was achieved over the negative elements that threatened it. It was built, rebuilt, and was satisfied with those who taught it to be both federatively singular and multiple, intellectually free and creative, morally human and Christian, politically democratic and generous, culturally what in reality it is, the Brazil-Brazilian (as Eça de Queirós wrote to Eduardo Prado) searching for his own reflection in the troubled mirror of the waters, above them the Roman arch of knowledge, on the mossy bed across which the river runs. Allow me to complement this: it has flowed from its former springs, and will flow into the blue seas ... This is to repeat the prediction of those who foresaw the country's dimensions (Grandezas do Brasil, in 1618!) and to imagine that the shallow brook of yesterday will be the ocean of the future! (CALMON, 1974, p. 11).
The 'Gilbertization' of Brazil: the formation of the people, miscegenation, cohesion and harmony 11 The two authors analyzed in the previous section deal only marginally with one aspect of the national history, which has become one of the main issues of intellectual debate since 1930: the problems of the people, their formation and their psychology. The Brazilian Nation could not be constituted without the people, from whom it was hoped that the national identity would be born. Therefore, it was essential to know its origins, its formation, its psychology, and its customs. This paper will not embark upon yet another analysis of the content or importance of this work, nor its impact on the intellectual environment or the mentality of the time, since this has already been undertaken by numerous scholars.
However, it is useful to note the rupture it represents in relation to previous interpretations -especially in relation to the racial problem -before this paper sets out towards its goal, which is to analyze the circulation and diffusion of its interpretation during the 1960s and 1970s. It is also important to stress that Gilberto Freyre's (2013[1933) celebrated work, together with those of Sérgio The three races have come together to form the Brazilian people, creating blood ties that the millennial preparation of the inhabitants of the peninsula made easy, through a long and constant process of miscegenation, with no repugnance on the part of the white man, originating from physical or psychological reasons, towards procreating with the indigenous and the African (ATHAYDE, 1963, p. 38). Matos, but also invoked struggles, such as the 'Emboabas' and 'Mascates' War or the conflict with the Dutch in the seventeenth century. The expulsion of the latter would be, for Athayde, "proof of national sentiment and of the profound unitary instinct which the Portuguese transmitted to their descendants in America" (ATHAYDE, 1963, p. 41). According to Athayde, national unity and solidarity between races was concomitant, the latter being the 'dynamic principle of the unity of nations'. One section perfectly expresses the idea of harmony and the absence of conflict that the conservative political and intellectual elites constantly attempted to present as inscribed in the history of Brazil: The society, which is organized in the south is not so diverse, either in its ethnic composition or in the characteristics of its psychology, as that laying down roots in the North and Northeast. Here we have the presence of the three races, the white, the indigenous and the black, who form a miscegenation in the same spirit of tolerance and sympathy, with no repulsion or prejudice, with the same kindness of treatment given to the slaves that so impressed the travelers of the time, and those who most observed slavery in Brazil, some of whom were mentioned by Gilberto Freyre, are truly astonished at the harmony between masters and slaves, and state that the condition of the black population in Brazilian senzalas is sometimes much higher than that of free workers in England [...]. In the gentle attitude of the masters towards the slaves, in the very amenity of the temperament of the black minas, nagôs, haussás, from Sudan, of the Angolans, the Congolese and Cambindas, and a score of other African races, as well as in the natural sweetness of the indigenous, in the sentimentality and in the mystical penances of the three races, are the roots of Brazilian social democracy (ATAHYDE, 1963, p. 42).
Two distinct moments may be clearly identified in this lecture: the first, force that fed two decades of civil war that finally delivered them into the hands of communism'. For Athayde, if the masses of the lowland culture did not adhere to communism, it was because they "possess in the essence of their minds the same basic stimuli of mixed and Atlantic culture in the temperament of man and in the principles of his moral formation" (ATHAYDE, 1963, p. 48).
According to Athayde, it was the historical constitution of the people and their psychosocial characteristics that prevented their adherence to communism, although the risk was still present. Commonality of language and religion would not be sufficient to guarantee the unity of the country: There is a lot of religiousness, attachment to the religious feelings gathered within the family tradition. One wonders whether this religiosity will suffice as a defense against Marxist ideology, whether we should count on the Catholicism of the people as an element of security against communism. I harbor doubts regarding this [...] Communist propaganda is not based on the denial of dogmas and on attacking religion. Communist agents seek other ways of reaching the spirit of the masses and of taking possession of it, including using the Christian religion in its primitive forms as an argument for the communist ideal [...] Furthermore, the democratic temperament of the people is not a sufficient shield. Religiosity and the political sense of equality and freedom predispose opinion to fight against regimes that harass or suppress the fundamental rights of the human personality and place the Brazilian people in the face of the world conflict between Western democracies and Soviet totalitarianism forthrightly alongside the former, as has already occurred in the two great wars of the century. The national mentality inclined towards sentimentality, sweetness and tolerance, goes against the forms of violence on the part of the state, and will always be a strong guarantee against the implantation of police states and oppressive regimes. Individualism, reluctance to join group activities, aversion to rigid discipline, a natural awareness of American liberty, the spirit of independence that makes man prefer the life of the thin dog of fable, misery and hunger, rather than the satisfaction of the fat dog on the leash, such innate tendencies, linked much more to the ancestral experience of the three races than to acquired ideas, seem to me the most important elements that protect against oppressive regimes. They are virtues and defects with which the Brazilian people have been peacefully carrying out their revolution, reaching the stages of their destiny without bloody struggles, through white revolutions, which have avoided stoking resentments between classes, racial groups or regions (ATHAYDE, 1963, p. 49).
The analysis of Austregésilo de Athayde's lecture illustrates the political use of a certain conception of 'Brazilian culture' defined as democratic, heterogeneous and plural. A 'Brazilian culture' also defined by 'happy miscegenation', a result of the There will surely be many people in our midst who do not like this style and who may have preferred that our independence, for example, had been won in the bloody manner that it was -very prematurely, in my view, by the Spanish-American republics -and not handled at the right moment, neither before nor after, with the aptness, the touch, the magic touch and, at the same time, the firmness of José Bonifácio. There will also be those who deplore the fact that abolition did not cost us a million lives, which is approximately how much the civil war must have cost the American people. It is possible that these same people disapprove of our boundaries demarcated by mixed commissions and international arbitration tribunals, with hand and sight maps, in the style of the great Rio Branco, and not by force, at the will of the winner and forced complacency of the loser. There will be no lack of those who refuse to join the Republic in the manner in which it was proclaimed, and in the 1930 revolution, for the way in which it gave workers what, in the opinion of these patriots, they should have conquered by fire and sword. These patriots will probably continue to mumble, because the structural reforms that Brazil has undergone since the 1964 revolution, especially nowadays, are not being sufficiently cemented with the blood of soldiers, students, workers and peasants, as they the rules of their booklets dictate (MOOG, 1968, p. 20).
At this moment, Vianna Moog made a distinction between two categories of 'Brazilians': the 'real' Brazilians and those who were 'no longer' or 'not as yet' Brazilian, i.e., those who had not lost their citizenship, but rather their 'lusitanity': But these, let's face it, are not yet Brazilian, or are no longer Brazilian. They would still be mazombos or Brazilians who, without losing their citizenship, have lost their ballast of Lusitanity. In both cases, they are archaic. Immersed in Darwin or Karl Marx, two personalities who, each in their own way, always felt dreadfully oppressed by the past, unfamiliar with any style and language other than the jargon that brings forced discourse to expressions such as class struggle, survival of the fittest, labor exploitation, natural selection, economic factor, dialectic materialist or simply dialectic, scientific socialism, alienation, radicalization and pressure, did not realize that the world, with the advent of atomic energy, began to live within another era and this new era converted war, with which all problems were erstwhile simplified, into an impossibility, in which utopia, the political and social philosophies inspired by Darwin and Karl Marx became suddenly anachronistic... (MOOG, 1968, p. 20).
And Moog concluded his lecture in the same mood of optimism and euphoria that marked the first half of the 1970s: "And do you wish to know what the new era came to be? The style, the aspirations and the values of lusitanity, that today find in the Portuguese-Brazilian culture their strongest expression" (MOOG, 1968, p. 21). This is an exemplar of the connection between a particular interpretation of Brazil and of 'Brazilian culture' and the project of the military regime. Between the two, we find the role of the intellectual, a fundamental element of connection. As we have already mentioned, the interpretation was that elaborated by Gilberto Freyre, who, although he preceded the dictatorship by several years, remained hegemonic in the following decades. It is important to note that in the years that followed the publication of 'Casa Grande & Senzala', its author did not cease to reflect on Brazilian culture, which he inserted into a larger whole, which was the  definition. It is at this moment that the lecturer examines the issue of miscegenation.
According to Motta Filho, despite an 'incomplete' definition, it was possible to trace certain singularities from the races that populated the country: The white man with his Western activism, with his mercantile and civilizing spirit, in the discovered land, makes an extraordinary effort, astonishing even, with the help of the indigenous and the imported black ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 16 The biographical information on Cândido Mota Filho was taken from the 'Dicionário Histórico Biográfico Brasileiro' (entry 'Cândido Mota Filho'. Available at <http://www.fgv.br/cpdoc/acervo/dicionarios/verbete-biografico/mota-filho-candido>. Viewed on January, 20, 2020) and also from his memoirs (MOTA FILHO, 1977). population. But this white man comes from Portugal, with its own religion, with its language, its uses and customs, still burdened with the multiplicity of its racial antecedents. Within them cohabit Christians, Arabs, Jews, Goths, who crossed with one another and crossed again in the Peninsula and, with their economic, social and political processes, gave features to the Portuguese man [...] The indigenous almost disappeared in the face of the impetus of exploration. But they persisted in miscegenation, more defeated than convinced, for the caboclo behavior was soon felt, in resistance to foreign innovations [...] And if the Portuguese are multiple, in racial physiognomy, so were the indigenous and the black population [...] The truth is that the physical type of the Brazilian is a product. In it there are different bloods and different souls. Each of us carries commitments to living and extinct races (MOTTA FILHO, 1968, pp. 14-17). However, it is the fourth part of Cândido Motta Filho's lecture that is the most interesting and which brings us to the final part of this analysis. Motta Filho, also a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and a Justice of the Federal Supreme Court during the dictatorship, proposed to define the 'psychology of the Brazilian man'. He stated that if one were able to speak of an individual psychology, one may also speak of the psychology of a people, be it German, American or Portuguese, defined by habitual coexistence, by social institutions, in the process of language or religious beliefs. All this enabled him to capture his 'nature', his 'proper behavior'.
And what would these characteristics be? According to Motta Filho: …extreme sensitivity, large-scale imagination, spontaneous cordiality, predisposed indolence, innate mistrust, rapid comprehension, a certain lightness of mind, to which Alberto Torres has already referred, inconstancy in undertakings, puerility, fondness for novelty, religion without much religiousness, politics without conviction, unmotivated lack of ambition, a certain horror of dogmatism, malice in small calculations, a sensual view of things and the world, fear of hidden things and courage when confronted with visible danger (MOTTA FILHO, 1968, pp. 14-17 Brazilian identity, an archaic one, as one of the poles of the social and political tension of the present, which tended to be surpassed by a society in full revolution. These were the pillars used to construct this problematic identity, fractured and in full development, which Buarque de Holanda proposed to identify. Part of this book was the subject of a controversy that persisted during the following decades, to the point that even the author himself no longer wished to discuss the matter. This was the notion of the 'cordial man', which appeared at the moment when Buarque of Holanda examined the tensions between the traditional forms of sociability, centered on the patriarchal family, and the models of sociability of the modern world. According to Buarque de Holanda, whose focus of interest lay in the consequences of the primacy of the patriarchal model over the functioning of modern social institutions, an individual formed in a patriarchal environment will have difficulty in distinguishing the public sphere from the private. He overcomes distances, isolation, the routine of village life, without occurrences and without history, showing himself to be hospitable, making his house the house of his guests, avoiding ceremony with the joy of offering the best room of his house and the best food on his table [...] The habit of receiving guests, which undoubtedly influences the most sensitive sensibility of the Brazilian -is deeply rooted, as experienced by Eduardo Prado on multiple occasions, when, in Sa o Paulo, he crossed the hinterland to reach Bahia [...] The conflicts that arise, which are filled with violence, the famous struggles between families, studied mainly by Oliveira Vianna, cannot erase the content of cordiality, for cordiality is the rule and conflict is the exception (MOTTA FILHO, 1968, p. 20).
When Cândido Motta Filho referred to the 'cordiality' of the Brazilian, he merely reinforced the idea of common sense, and believed that this notion only identified an alleged civility or courtesy in contrast to a conflicting nature.
'Cordiality' was also appropriated by the official discourse of the military regime; its use being thus removed from the intended meaning of the author of 'Raízes do Brasil'.

Conclusion
This paper has sought to analyze the manner in which conservative intellectuals turned to Brazil's past and to the idea of a 'Brazilian culture' within the context of the Cold War, thus helping to legitimize the Brazilian military dictatorship. My analysis was divided into three parts. First, I demonstrated, through the lectures of Pedro Calmon and Josué Montello, how the conservative intellectuals interpreted the history of Brazil as a succession of linear events, from an origin to a predictable end, to an inescapable destiny as a great power due to geographical conditions -a premonition that was present from the very beginnings of colonization. In addition, everything that distinguishes Brazilians was already present from the sixteenth century, such as the 'national sentiment' [sentimento nacional] present in literary texts, and also the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil, with its singularities, as well as a gradually constituted culture. This reading does not arise 'ex nihilo', on the contrary, it is based on several references: it preceded the coup d'état of 1964 and remained alive during the regime and even after its fall. Marxism and communism. In this sense, according to these intellectuals, the