Brazil
Focus – David Fleischer
Special Report June 12 2016
Thomas E. Skidmore
Troy, Ohio (22 July 1932) - Westerly, RI (11 June 2016)
Prof. Thomas E. Skidmore was a
“giant” among American Brazilianists. He
was born in Troy, Ohio on July 22, 1932, but when he was six months old his
family moved to Cincinnati where he grew up and completed Wyoming High
School. In 1954, he completed his BA at
Denison University, majoring in Political Science and Philosophy. He received a Fulbright Scholarship to study
at Magdalen College, Oxford University where he completed a second BA in
Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1956) and his MA (1959). While at Oxford, Skidmore met his future
wife, Felicity – who was employed at The Urban Institute Press in Washington,
DC after they left Madison, Wisconsin in 1986.
He
received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1960) with a dissertation on The
Chancellorship of Caprivi: A Constitutional Study. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, Harvard
awarded Skidmore a three-year post-doctoral fellowship to study the Latin
American country of his choice and he chose Brazil. Tom quipped – “I am one of Castro’s
sons”. This three-year period ended with
the Brazilian military coup that toppled Pres. João Goulart on 31st
March 1964. The product of this research
was a seminal book on Brazil – Politics in Brazil (1930-64): An Experiment
in Democracy. (1967). The Brazilian translation was Brasil
- De Getúlio [Vargas] a Castelo [Branco]. This book became required reading for
students of Brazil and I read this work in my graduate courses at the
University of Florida (Latin American Politics and Brazilian Politics) in the
late 1960s.
In 1966,
Tom Skidmore joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin in Madison with
a major role in its Latin American Studies Program and edited the Luso-Brazilian
Review. In the late 1960s and 1970s,
the university housed the Land Tenure Center that studied the problems of land
ownership in Latin America. Also, the
SDS-Students for a Democratic Society was born at UW-Madison.
I first
met Tom in June 1969 when I participated in a conference at the University of
Wisconsin. He graciously invited me to
his house and we chatted about Brazil for some two hours. I was on my way to Brazil to conduct field
research for my doctoral dissertation based at the DCP-UFMG (1969-1971). Since then, we met on many occasions and
maintained a long and productive relationship.
After 20
years in Madison, in 1986, he moved to Brown University in Providence, RI as
the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of Modern Latin American History and
Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies.
He was Director of Brown’s Center for Latin American Studies until he
retired in 1999. After Fernando Henrique
Cardoso left the Presidency of Brazil in 2003, he spent five years at Brown as
a senior visiting scholar attached to the Watson Institute. In 1989, I visited Brown University at the
invitation of Tom Skidmore and prior to my presentation, he asked the audience
if I should speak in English or Portuguese.
Some 2 or 3 persons said “English” – so my talk was in that language.
Skidmore
became a very well known academic in Brazil.
In 1988, he published his “sequel” on Brazilian Politics – The
Politics of Military Rule in Brazil: 1964-1985 (Oxford University
Press) reviewing the 21-year military regime.
The Brazilian translation
was Brasil:
de Castelo a Tancredo, Paz e Terra.
Tom was a very active founding
member of LASA-Latin American Studies Assn. – a member of the LASA Executive
Board (1968-1973) and President (1972-1973).
He was also a founder of BRASA-Brazilian Studies Assn. in 1994. During
the 8th International BRASA Conference at Vanderbilt University in
October 2006, he received the BRASA Lifetime Contribution Award – complete with
a video of his life, his accomplishments, and contribution to Brazilian
Studies.
He was
very active in organizing academic opposition to Brazil’s military regime. In 1970 (anos de chumbo) along with three
other prominent brazilianists, he drafted an open letter condemning the
imprisonment of leading Marxist historian Caio Prado Junior. He also sponsored a LASA resolution
condemning the military regime’s systematic repression of Brazilian academics. As a result, the Brazilian government denied
him a research visa to teach a seminar at UNICAMP in the summer of 1970. In the late 1970s and early 1980s – the distensão/abertura
final stage of the military regime – Skidmore was granted visas to visit
Brazil. Several times he visited our
University of Brasília and lectured to students and faculty. In 1984, he participated in the Roda
Viva TV interview program where he criticized the military
government. As a result, when he reached
Salvador he was taken to the Federal Police HQ where officers read the
“Foreigners Law” to him and explained that any repetition of such comments
would result in his expulsion from Brazil.
These charges were later dropped after many academics, politicians and
journalists came to his defense.
Later Roda
Viva interviews can be viewed here:
While
visiting one of his three sons in Chicago, their car was hit broadside by
another car that ran a red light and Tom suffered serious injuries – broken
hip, leg and arm and spent several weeks in hospital. As a result, his mobility was impaired and he
was in a wheelchair and later used a cane.
Skidmore
also published other important books on Brazil and Latin America è Black into White: Race and Nationality in
Brazilian Thought (1870-1930), Oxford, 1974; Brazil: Five Centuries of Change,
Oxford, 1999; O Brasil Visto de Fora, Paz e Terra, 2000, Television, Politics, and the
Transition to Democracy in Latin America, Johns Hopkins, 1993 (ed.); and Modern Latin America
(with Peter H. Smith & James Green), Oxford, 1984.
Because
he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, in 2009, Thomas Skidmore was
transferred to an assisted care facility in Westerly, RI where he died on 11th
June 2016 after suffering a heart attack on 9th June. He was 83.
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