Mixed Race Studies

School Hygiene and Eugenics: The Role of Physical Education in Regeneration “The Brazilian Race”

Revista HISTEDBR On-Line
Number 35 (September 2009)
pages 19-28
ISSN: 1676-2584

Karl M. Lorenz, Associate Professor, Director Teacher Certification Programs
Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut

From 1870 to 1930, physicians, writers, anthropologists and educators discussed the relationship between education and the less-privileged segments of the Brazilian population. Among ideas circulating in the late nineteenth century were precepts of School Hygiene, such as physical exercise could promote personal health and, in a broader sense, the total development of the child. In discussions of eugenic themes in the early decades of the twentieth century, Physical Education was further promoted as a corrective measure for the negative effects of miscegenation; that is, the physical, intellectual and moral debilities of the poor and non-white segments of the Brazilian population. This paper examines the nature and effects of the school discipline Physical Education on the less-favored children of Brazil by first introducing its role in School Hygiene and then by focusing on its extended role from the eugenic perspective. In this latter discussion, the racial ideas of Fernando de Azevedo regarding the regenerating effect of Physical Education on the “Brazilian Race” are explored.

During the period known as the First Republic (1889-1930), different segments of Brazilian society sought to define the “Brazilian race.” Their efforts originated from a larger concern about the most efficacious ways to politically and socially modernize the country and create a new model of society. Increasing urbanization, industrialization, abolition, and an expanding school-going populace were important factors that shaped discussions on economic and social issues in the waning years of the Empire (1822-1889) and the first years of the Republic.

The question that perplexed those struggling with these issues was how could a country endowed with vast national resources like Brazil experience such a slow pace of economic and social development? As expected of such a broad question, numerous explanations were offered. Among these, and one that was prominent in influential intellectual circles, was the racial constitution of the Brazilian people. Race, it was argued, was the key determinant of social progress and national development (VECHIA & LORENZ, 2009, p. 58).

The identification of race as a factor in social progress and national development is not surprising given that since the mid 1800s the Brazilians were familiar with racial theories circulating in Europe. The theories first gained prominence with the studies of the British scientist Francis Galton (1822-1911) and the publication of his 1865 article Hereditary Talent and Character and his 1869 book Hereditary Genius. Galton meticulously recorded the physical characteristics of humans and concluded that a large number of physical, mental and moral traits were inherited and that progress could be achieved by the conscious selection and transmission of a population’s hereditary endowments to future generations. Galton coined the word “eugenics” in 1883 in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development to denote the science of the biological improvement of humankind. The eugenics doctrine encouraged the reproduction of superior individuals and races while discouraging the reproduction of those that were inferior…

…Eugenic Discourse in Brazil

In the second half of the nineteenth century racial ideas circulated in Brazil and fixed the notion for many Brazilian intellectuals that the great challenge of nationhood resided in its people. Count Gobineau’s influential text promoting the racial theory of the superiority of the “Aryan race,” Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1854), was one of the first works known to the Brazilian elite. His ideas supported the thesis that the Brazilian race was primarily comprised of the poor and non-white segments of the population and that these were responsible for the social misery of the country and the slow pace of national progress. Other social and scientific texts by Buckle, Kidd, le Bon, Lapouge, and social Darwinists held up Brazil as a prime example of the “degenerative” effects produced by “promiscuous racial miscegenation.” Brazilians found themselves receptive to these writings, especially those that espoused the apparent inequality of races in terms of a hierarchy constituted of “evolved” and “primitive” typologies. Theories of Negro inferiority, mulatto degeneration, tropical decay and their effects at inhibiting progress were accepted by many of the political and social elite (STEPAN, 1990, p. 114).

Questions about the origin and nature of the Brazilian Race were explored in the national literature, often in publications that voiced eugenic themes and employed eugenic terminology. Sílvio Romero, in his 1888 masterpiece Historia da literatura brasileira, discussed the mixing of the white, Indian and Negro peoples in Brazil, estimated a timeframe for the general whitening of the Brazilian people, and even advocated European immigration to hasten the “whitenening” and “homogenizing” process (ROMERO, 1906, p.123). Euclides da Cunha, in his novel Os Sertões, tells of the 1896 rebellion in Canudos, in the backlands of the northeastern tropical state of Bahia. He reflects on its causes and identifies the prejudicial effects of racial mixing on the behavior of the rebellious mestiço sertenejos (mestizos of the backlands) as one of a constellation of causes. The Bahian physician and ethnographer Nina Rodrigues, in Mestiçagem, Degenerescência e Crime (1899), defended the idea of the inferiority of the mestizo and the Negro and suggested they be subjected to their own penal codes. Towards the end of nineteenth century the historian Joaquim Maria de Lacerda decried the “black race” as “much less civilized and intelligent than other races”, and prior to 1930, the novelist Afrânio Peixoto asserted that mestizos were the problematic offspring of the mixing of superior and inferior races.

Most revealing was the racial view of the Brazilian writer Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948) who describes his disagreement with four inhabitants of the sertão (backlands of Brazil) in a letter to his friend Godofredo Rangel. The letter, which was published in the Journal of São Paulo in 1914, collectively referred to these “four lice” as a fictional and symbolic figure named Jeca Tatu—or “Jeca the backwoods hog” (the armadillo)—thus creating one of the best known literary characters of Brazilian culture. Jeca represents the typical country hick—a poor, ignorant, unpleasant and disease-ridden caboclo (an individual of mixed European and native Indian blood). Monteiro writes of his indignation with the apathy and indolence of the sertenejos, who because of miscegenation were a “veritable plague on the earth.” Even though later Lobato revised his thinking and attributed the decadence of the hybrid Jeca Tatu to his poor economic conditions, the image of the degenerate mestizo became deeply etched in the minds of Brazilians (VECHIA; LORENZ, 2009, p. 61-62)…

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