Brazilian "Sci-Fi" in the 1920s: America Would Try to Elect a Black President Someday!

Rob pointed me to an interesting article Slate ran on a 1926 "sci-fi" book by one of Brazil's more renowned authors and intellectuals, Monteiro Lobato. The novel had remained out of print, but this year's election has made it timely and relevant in Brazil again:

O Presidente Negro envisions the 2228 U.S. presidential election. In that race, the white male incumbent, President Kerlog, finds himself running against Evelyn Astor, a white feminist, and James Roy Wilde, the cultivated and brilliant leader of the Black Association, "a man who is more than just a single man ... what we call a leader of the masses."

I've never read this book (nor any by Monteiro Lobato), but if it did in fact come out during the primaries, when I was still in Brazil, I'm sorry I missed out. The parallels the article draws between Lobato's book, and particularly the way in which McCain picked Palin "hoping, some critics say, that women will vote as a gender bloc, transferring loyalties to whichever party has a woman on the ticket," are fascinating, and it's an interesting article. Certainly, it's a bit unfair to condemn Monteiro Lobato for his view on women from the perspective of today, given that the book came out in 1926 (do we hold Shakespeare, or Cervantes, or Hardy, or Tolstoy, or even early Faulkner, to the same gender standard we have today? Then why hold Monteiro Lobato to it?); you don't have to approve of that view today, but to hold authors of the past up to the gender views of today is anachronistic and useless. Still, overall, the article is an interesting read.


As an interesting historical note, the article mentions the book "predicting the U.S. government's use of eugenics, a racist ideology that had attracted a following in Brazil at the time Lobato was writing (and, later, in Germany)." While this is technically true, it deserves a major clarification. There were generally two schools of thought on eugenics: the Comte-ian school, and the Lamarckian school. In the vein of Comte's positivism, Comte-ian eugenics as it applied in Brazil believed in racial improvement through racial mixing. In other words, Brazilian positivists and eugenic theorists in the first three decades of the twentieth century held that, if enough European blood were "mixed" with the African and indigenous blood in Brazilians, then Brazilian society as a whole would evolutionarily improve.


By contrast, the eugenics used in the United States from the 1910s-1930s and in Germany under Hitler were extreme applications of Lamarckian ideas on evolution. As they were applied in the U.S. and in Germany, this meant the complete removal of "unwanted" elements from the society, rather than the reduction of the unwanted's "negative" characteristics via mixing. Thus, practice of eugenics in the U.S. witnessed things like the forced sterilization of developmentally disabled individuals, and reached its highest, most extreme expression in the Holocaust. This is not to say that Brazil did not have individuals and intellectuals who also promoted Lamarckian eugenics, far and away the current that dominated the rhetoric and theorization of eugenics and "race-improvement" were from the Comte-ian school of thought. Thus, while it is parsing, it's important to point out that the vision of eugenics Monteiro Lobato discusses in O Presidente Negro, in which "white leaders then mastermind the end of the black race in America, using a senseless and tragic sterilization technique," is not indicative of Monteiro Lobato's vision of positivism and eugenics, but of how eugenics in the United States were actually practiced in Monteiro Lobato's time.


So while the article is correct in describing eugenics as a "racist ideology" that had some following in Brazil, it also had followings in the U.S. Acknowledging that eugenics in any form is a pretty abhorrent thing, it took far more sinister characteristics in the U.S., where governments openly prevented "undesireables" from being able to reproduce, versus Brazil, where the goal was more generally to try to racially improve via "race-mixing" with European immigrants, a goal which worked far better in theory than in practice up until the 1930s, when intellectual currents changed and Brazilians found a way to be proud of the indigenous and African elements in their "blood." But that is for another post...