Word: braziller
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...People. Brazil's 48 million people are the descendants of Portuguese sugar fazendeiros, African slaves, savage Indians and immigrants from around the world. They include the hard-riding gaúchos of the temperate Rio Grande do Sul pampas; the sickly Indian rubber-gatherers of the steaming Amazon; the sugar-and cocoa-raising nordestinos of the states of Baía and Pernambuco on the Bulge; the driving industrialists of São Paulo...
Through their culture runs the pervasive influence of the Negro and Indian. Brazil draws no color lines. From the 8th to the 11th Century, the Portuguese had lived as subjects of the swarthy, highly cultured Moors, and they had come to look upon dark skin as the mark of beauty. As a result, races intermarried freely. Some of Brazil's greatest statesmen, intellectuals and artists have had Negro blood. Says Brazil's famed Sociologist Gilberto Freyre: the Brazilian "has a certain fondness . . . for honoring differences...
...times, Brazil's easygoing, samba-loving people are also her greatest drawback. Work comes hard in a country warmed over most of its area by a tropical sun. It is easy to procrastinate, or carioca-fashion, to spend the day on a white-sand beach. Until some of the hustle of industrial São Paulo can be injected into the rest of Brazil, the country will be the "land of tomorrow." Or, as Rio's Mayor Angelo Mendes de Moraes said recently, "the day after tomorrow-and don't forget the day after tomorrow...
...Tight Spitter. Brazil's President lacks the easygoing gaiety of most of his countrymen. His short figure and outsize head have made sobersided Eurico Caspar Dutra a target for Rio cartoonists, who love to picture him as a sleepy owl. But even his harshest critics concede him a rocklike integrity, boundless courage, and an immobile sort of dignity...
Calvin Coolidge, a kindred soul, might have called Dutra a "tight spitter." Brazil's President speaks, almost grudgingly, out of the corner of his mouth; he has no small talk. Officers of his staff once maneuvered him into a car with a colonel who was his runner-up for the title of the army's most taciturn officer, and asked the chauffeur to keep track of the conversation. Not a word passed between them on the drive from Rio's Catete Palace to Santos Dumont airport. As the car drove through the airport gate, the colonel muttered...