“Guerra às ‘carpideiras’ da finada República”: o Clube 3 de Outubro no Governo Provisório de Getúlio Vargas

Abstract

The Provisional Government of Getúlio Vargas (1930-1934) was marked by confrontations with its opponents, but also by conflicts within its own support base. Among Vargas' heterogeneous allies, two main agendas were contested as the direction to be followed by the new government. The first, with a centralizing and authoritarian tendency, was defended mainly by the "tenentes" and by the traditionally less powerful oligarchies of the North and Northeast; and the second, with a liberal and federalist orientation, was mainly supported by oligarchic groups from the economically and politically stronger states – São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul. As a more organized expression of the centralizing and authoritarian tendency, the Clube 3 de Outubro was inaugurated in May 1931, the subject of this thesis. Composed mostly of middle-class civilians but led by military figures associated with Tenentismo, the group was a support and pressure entity that advocated for the extension of the Provisional Government’s dictatorship to implement organic-corporatist reforms, guided by a nationalist authoritarian political culture. The objective of this research was to investigate the creation, internal organization, political-cultural formation, and activities of its members during the Provisional Government. The main sources used were membership records, statutes, manifestos, public statements, internal documents, programmatic guidelines, correspondence between its main leaders, and newspapers such as Correio da Manhã and Diário Carioca. From the membership records and the application of prosopographical techniques, it was possible to observe the trajectory of the Clube’s growth and decline, the profile of the members in general, and the group that led the entity. On the other hand, considering the analytical category of "political culture" during the analysis of other sources, it was possible to understand its set of values, its interpretations of the past, its conceptions of an ideal society, and its formulations for the Brazilian State, shaped by a nationalist authoritarian political culture, largely derived from the pioneering works of Alberto Torres and Oliveira Vianna between the 1910s and early 1930s. Throughout the thesis, its central hypothesis was confirmed, demonstrating that the Clube 3 de Outubro functioned as a vector of political culture and a space of sociability capable of providing its members with theoretical-doctrinal tools, as well as organizational, relational, and identity resources, sufficient to make its members committed and influential enough to shape the course of the Provisional Government and some aspects of its legislation, such as the 1932 Electoral Code and the Federal Constitution promulgated in 1934.