A Review of The Brazil Chronicles

The Brazil Chronicles by Stephen G. Bloom (University of Missouri, 2024)

In the late 1970s, a young aspiring journalist Stephen G. Bloom was having trouble finding work at any stateside newspaper. After a stint at his college newspaper, the University of California Daily Californian, Bloom worked as a waiter at a Berkeley eatery, got arrested in Canada with his girlfriend for trying to bring pot across the border, and got turned down for a reporter’s job by a raft of newspapers. The opportunity came up for a vague promise of a job in the Brazilian English-language newspaper the Brazil Herald. Bloom jumped at the chance and literally on a wing and prayer boarded a Pan-Am 747 for Rio de Janeiro with a one-way bargain basement ticket. Nervous over not being sure whether he actually had a job, Bloom took the short flight to São Paulo.

It turned out that he need not have been so nervous as he was welcomed with open arms by the Herald’s executive editor Steve Yolen. The ensuing adventures became the subject of Bloom’s memoir, which is also an insightful look at English-language newspapers in the Americas. Bloom was not alone in being formed by the experience. He joined the staff of like-minded journalists such as Betty Townsend Dyer, who was at the Herald 30 years prior to Bloom, and who along with her husband Dick played a leading role in building the Newspaper Guild in the United States. The Dyers would go on to found the storied The Tico Times in Costa Rica.

Getting to work, Bloom’s first story was about an eccentric and isolated community of descendants of antebellum Confederates who had maintained their Gone-With-the- Wind lifestyle complete with their thick southern drawl and their racist disdain for Brazil’s majority Black population. The story shows how an English-language newspaper can broach a topic in a way that no other medium can approach, explaining the nuances of a uniquely U.S. story to an English-speaking audience.

Bloom goes into considerable detail about the origins and history of the many English-language newspapers that came and went in Brazil, including the Brazilian Immigrant, Brazilian Reflector, Brazilian World and Emigration Reporter. The section is extremely informative, bringing into focus the importance and acceptance in Brazilian society of newer newspapers like the Brazil Herald.

Bloom’s time in Brazil was marked by many important events including the arrival of U.S. Ambassador William Pawley, a Miami millionaire who pushed the United States’ rabidly anti-communist agenda. “Never since the visit of President Dwight D. Eisenhower has this country received such a distinguished American visitor. He will be accorded the honors and given attention which few countries other than this hospitable nation know how to bestow,” gushed the Herald. “Meanwhile, rabid anti-communist Pawley’s tenure of ambassador was a whirlwind, culminating in the summer of 1947 with the Inter-American Defense Conference, a multinational Monroe Doctrine-esque summit that convened in Rio,” writes Bloom, giving astute perspective to the period. “The summit was a public-relations coup that Pawley had employed his ample political profile to successfully pull off.”

The summit brought the visit of none other than U.S. President Harry S. Truman. Truman was given a ticket tape parade in Rio de Janeiro. “The President, riding in an open car, saw a thick and continuous storm of paper and ticker-tape raining down on him,” the Herald enthused in an unbylined page one story with what Bloom describes as a banner headline. “People jammed every window of the tall buildings and as the President passed they broke into enthusiastic, spontaneous applause.”

The anecdote brings to mind the visit in 1981 of U.S. President Ronald Reagan to Costa Rica, which I covered for The Tico Times. Reagan arrived from Colombia where he was given a rocky reception complete with tanks in the street. Perhaps because of that when Reagan’s entourage arrived to Tiquicia, as people fondly call Costa Rica, they came to tense attention on the welcoming platform for the playing of the national anthems, a solid wall of chest-puffed-out suits. The delegation was welcomed by U.S.-flag-waving school children in the Costa Rican tradition. The next day, the delegation returned to the podium considerably more relaxed having received an extremely warm reception in U.S.-phytic Costa Rica. Both the Brazilian and the Costa Rican anecdotes demonstrate that Tio Sam is not shunned everywhere in Latin America.

Both anecdotes also bring to the fore the importance of English-language newspapers in Latin America in covering events related to the United States. The newspapers have the unique opportunity to highlight for their readers the nuances and events related to U.S. policy in Latin America. Bloom does a good job of making this point in various opportunities, especially in talking about the advancement of the U.S. Cold War anti-communism.

Covering politics was not the only challenge faced by the Brazil Herald and other English-language newspapers. Meanwhile, The Herald’s antiquated press was causing the newspaper problems, as recounted in a delightful fashion by Bloom. He is at his best when relaying anecdotes. The paper was chock full of typographical errors. The newspaper ran a story apologizing profusely for the errors in an article that was predictably itself full of typographical errors. The anecdote demonstrates the hazards associated with publishing in Third-World countries where up-to-date technology is sometimes unavailable. But despite the technological challenges, the paper sometimes did get scoops. For instance, when Ambassador Pawley retired to his Miami estate, citing ill health, the newspaper ferreted out that the real reason was the fact that State Department bureaucrats had nixed a wheat deal that Truman himself had promised the Brazilian government. Only an English-language newspaper would have been able to break such a story. Yet newspapers cannot survive on scoops alone, as Bloom deftly points out, quoting Herald founder, John Brown. Although Pawley had provided the Herald with a lifeline of funds, the newspaper seemed perpetually on the brink of folding. “Aside from cards, drink and women, two popular ways to lose money are poultry raising and restaurant operating,” Herald founder John Brown would reflect. English-language newspapers are dependent on advertising to sustain themselves, something that is sometimes hard to come by in countries where the majority of residents are Spanish or Portuguese speakers.

By far, the Herald’s most impressive hire was the brilliant writer Tad Szulc, who later went on to work for the New York Times and to author the groundbreaking, definitive biography of Fidel Castro. The 20-year-old Schultz wrote a weekly column on world affairs that Bloom described as “ponderous and verbose.” Another notable hire was the soon-to-be gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who, though he only worked at the Herald for a few months, honed his outrageous style that would eventually rock the journalistic world. Bloom also stated that Thompson influenced everyone in the Herald newsroom, showing the effect journalistic colleagues can have on one another. The hires demonstrated the attraction maintained by English-language newspapers in Latin America as an incubator for young and talented reporters. In October 1947, John D. Montgomery, “a garrulous and charming publisher;” who owned a chain of newspapers in Florida and Kansas, bought the Brazil Herald for the fire-sale price of $40,000. Montgomery said he bought the Herald, “more as a favor to President Harry Truman,” a statement which Bloom called “journalistic hyperbole.”

“What is not disputed is that U.S. Ambassador Pawley was a friend and business associate of Montgomery’s and that he personally brokered the deal for Montgomery to buy the struggling expat newspaper,” Bloom writes. No sooner did Montgomery take the helm than Pawley demanded the firing of Herald columnist Lee Langley for what apparently was what Pawley found to be anti-American columns written by Langley. Langley, after defending himself in one of his columns, was fired. Bloom helps us see through this incident the sensitivity of the U.S. government to criticism in English-language newspapers abroad and the influence the U.S. government can have over their editorial content and hiring practices.

Another example of the influence was when Brazilian President João Belchoir Marques Goulart was overthrown in 1964 and replaced with what turned out to be successive regimes of right-wing generals. The military police went on a lawless rampage that was supported by the U.S. government and the Herald. The Herald lent the important editorial voice of the English-speaking expat community to a lawless coup that violated Brazil’s democratic norms, although as Bloom aptly points out, many in the newsroom supported civilian rule. The coup was followed by a newspaper strike, part of a labor movement led by a young labor leader Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva, which some in the Herald newsroom saw as an opportunity to bring the country back to civilian rule.

While the Herald editorialized against the strikers, the upstart Latin American Daily Post took the side of the workers. “Brazil’s economic miracle of the early seventies was fading. Most people were increasingly fed up with generals who no longer seemed to have answers to the country’s vast problems: the unsolved legacy of slavery, endless favela slums that had spread around many cities during years of rapid industrialization and urbanization, mounting foreign debts, signs of economic slowdown,” wrote Daily Post staffer Brian Nicholson. Through this, “The generals had promised a snail’s pace return to civilian rule, but civil society was starting to flex muscles. Lula was surging as a dynamic young labor leader among factory workers in the São Paulo industrial belt, addressing huge strike rallies in football stadiums. He was challenging, not just a slew of multinationals, such as Ford, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Chrysler Pirelli, Philips and General Electric that had prospered under the military regime, but also a bureaucratic, corporatists trade union movement that had been largely co-opted by the state.” The anecdote, Bloom demonstrates the healthiness of competition in the newspaper business, one magnified in the world of English-language journalism in Latin America. The competition was short-lived, the Brazil Herald was moved to Rio and consolidated with the Daily Post.

Bloom ends his odyssey in Brazil, returning to the United States and landing a job at the Dallas Morning News. The Brazil Chronicles offers readers an incisive view into the world of Latin American English-language journalism, one that reveals the importance of the U.S. ex- pat voices in far-flung corners of Latin America. It also demonstrates the important attraction English-language newspapers have for young and talented journalists from the United States.

In sum, a lively read, the Brazil Chronicles offers up a delightful view into the important world of ex-pat journalism that any reader will find informative and educational.

John McPhaul is a Costa Rican-American journalist. He worked for many years at Costa Rica’s The Tico Times. He currently lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico where he works for the San Juan Daily Star.