Brazil was run by a political and military elite from a few coastal cities. The political left saw the masses inland as a potential basis of support and a work around for those entrenched. In the 1950s a visionary leftist President Juscelino Kubitschek, JK, put into practice his gypsy heritage to design a new inland capital Brasilia. more in the image of the Brazil he imagined and where he could control who was there. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This was a clever way to get yourself on a stamp. A stamp from your own country while in office makes you look like a dictator. Panama put out a series of stamps showing Western Hemisphere leaders at a Pan American conference in Panama City. Why not pretend the conference was more than a debating society and have Brazil honor the important meeting and it’s gracious Panamanian hosts and their brilliant stamp designers. That way JK gets a stamp during his term. If not for this stamp, JK would have to wait for the new lefty government in 1986 to get another stamp, 10 years after his death.
Todays stamp is issue A373, a 3.30 Cruzeiro stamp issued by Brazil on October 12th 1956. It was a single stamp issue showing a Panama airmail issue of July 18th. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 30 cents unused. The original Panama stamp is worth 45 cents.
Juscelino Kubitchek, known politically and here as JK), was born into a middle class family in an inland diamond mining town. He was of gypsy heritage and managed to get training as a doctor with several years of travel in Europe thrown in. He was employed as a doctor with the military police but quickly transitioned into left wing politics serving in the Chamber of Deputies, Mayor and as a Governor.
In 1955, JK ran for President under the slogan 50 years of progress in 5. This played well to sensibilities that Brazil was always on the cusp of taking off but never quite getting there. JK offered a program of massive public works combined with opening up to foreign ownership of industry. The centerpiece of the strategy was moving the capital to a newly built city in the inland. The new apartment blocks for the bureaucrats and politicos would be owned by the state and therefore the government could control who moved there and therefore who would man the Bureaucracy. Bet President Trump wishes he had thought of that, but if he can’t build a wall, he couldn’t manage a new city. In his new capital scheme, JK partnered with acclaimed local architect Oscar Niemeyer. The architect was of the shaped concrete brutalist school, but spiced it up with voluptuous shapes he said were inspired by the curves of Brazil’s women and the universe of Einstein. Not bad for a ever soon to be up and coming country.
The really amazing part is that the new capital was partially ready and the capital indeed moved during JK’s five year term. 50 years in 5 delivered. There were also many new roads and much new industry. Plans for liberal progress in healthcare an education were left undone. Naturally the national debt skyrocketed and by the end of JK’s term, 80% GNP growth was accompanied by a 43% inflation rate. One of the keys to JK’s success was avoiding the military coup by having sympathetic leftist officers in the military purge potential coup plotters before he even took office.
There have been controversies since JK left office on how he achieved so much. Time magazine once listed JK as the seventh richest man in the world and of course that lead political rivals to assume he skimmed off the big construction projects. They also point to his lavish life in self imposed exile. When JK died, only modest means were found. Similarly leftists thought that JK and another former lefty President had been assassinated by the then right wing government in 1976 in a scheme called Operation Condor. The recently departed lefty government studied the claim and determined that JK had died in a car wreck, as reported at the time.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour 2 more to toast JK and his partner in architecture Oscar Niemeyer. Oscar had also gone into self imposed exile but the later 80s leftist government funded him to return to Brasilia and design a monument to his late friend. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.