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Dissertation Information for William R. Steiger

NAME:
- William R. Steiger

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1995)

ADVISORS:
- E. Bradford Burns

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Eduardo Jose Wense Dias
- James Lockhart
- Theodore Young

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: What once was desert shall be a world: Getulio Vargas and westward expansion in Brazil, 1930-1945

Abstract: Throughout the twentieth century both civilian and military regimes in Brazil have proclaimed the nation's West a promised land to be carefully guarded and developed. For much of the first three hundred years of Brazilian history, the state did not control the pace or direction of westward expansion, but after 1930 the administration of Getulio Vargas took a more central role in the development of the region. Vargas, guided by an ideology of state-sponsored Manifest Destiny, envisioned the Brazilian West as the key to the future prosperity of the nation. With the "March to the West" campaign of the mid-l930s, Vargas made integration of the frontier a centerpiece of his corporatist restructuring of Brazilian politics and society. The president waged a vast campaign to proclaim the taming of the interior as a panacea for Brazil's economic and social ills and created the first agencies to oversee a comprehensive development plan for the western territories. Through archival sources the dissertation examines the political and economic motivations for the launching of the March to the West, and also discusses the propaganda in various media that the Vargas regime used to promote its agenda of western expansion from 1930-1945. The dissertation concludes that the March to the West was designed to tie the interior of the country into the capitalist market economy of the urbanized Southeast and represented a conservative attempt to forestall an exodus from the countryside and avoid agrarian reform in Brazil. Where once the federal government had allowed the private sector to dominate westward expansion, Vargas' New State and its apologists encouraged peasants and city-dwellers to move West to boost the region's economic productivity, a scheme Vargas called Brazil's internal "imperialism." The March to the West, while largely a failure under Vargas, influenced the policies of succeeding regimes. By the early 1960s, the ideology of Manifest Destiny created by Vargas had become official government policy in Brazil, and the plano piloto of Brasilia points toward the salvation that many still fervently believe lies obscured in the Amazonian wilderness.

MPACT Scores for William R. Steiger

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2009-02-01 20:29:18

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Students under William R. Steiger

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None