"City of Enterprise"

In Brazil, the "land of tomorrow," Sao Paulo is the city of today. Last week in Sao Paulo, Brazil's second city, a filling-station attendant watched a convoy of new trucks rolling down the highway to Rio, straight through a blinding tropical storm. Said he, with matter-of-fact pride: "Paulistas don't stop for anything." High in his 27-story skyscraper, a businessman explained judiciously: "We are Brazil. Without us, what would there be?"

Sao Paulo is the world's fastest-growing major city; since 1890, its population has shot from 65,000 to 2,250,000. Located squarely on the Tropic of Capricorn some 5,000 miles south and east of New York, it is the southern hemisphere's most dynamic community, the economic powerhouse of the vast republic of Brazil. A palm-studded metropolis, exuberantly expanding under the leadership of some of the world's hardest-working, toughest-trading enterprisers, it is a kind of tropical Chicago.

Sao Paulo boasts the most impressive skyline anywhere outside the U.S. Land at its financial core, the bank-packed downtown Triangle, sells for as much as Wall Street real estate. Modern buildings are pulled down to make way for bigger skyscrapers. On the average, a new building is finished every 50 minutes the year round. Air traffic is greater than that of London Airport. Though broad boulevards have been hacked through the city to channel the swelling flow of workers and shoppers, traffic congestion gets worse & worse. Sao Paulo has 15,000 industrial plants and millionaires' mansions such as the U.S. has not seen since the days of Carnegie and Frick. It has burgeoning suburbs of bougainvillea-clad bungalows for the new middle classes, and white-collar workers' cottages along streets that peter out into raw slashes in the red earth.

The Way West. The key to such phenomenal expansion is the individual and collective drive of the Paulistas, who since they built their city on a broad shelf nearly 3,000 ft. above sea level, escape the enervating climate of the tropical lowlands. Drawn by good land and climate, nearly 1,000,000 European immigrants, mainly Italian, surged into Sao Paulo state at the turn of the century, just when the city was ready to get up & go. Out of the melting pot of older Brazilians, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Germans, Levantines and Japanese emerged the Paulista, cockily claiming a spiritual relationship with the swashbuckling bandeirantes (flag bearers) who founded Sao Paulo in 1554. Those hardy adventurers roamed so deep into the backlands, enslaving Indians for coastal sugar planters, that they broke the Pope's line dividing the New World between Portugal and Spain, and carved out half the continent for what is now Brazil.

The modern bandeirantes began to roll in 1867, when the British built a railroad up the beetling cliffs between Sao Paulo and the port of Santos. A coffee boom followed, and for 50 years or so, coffee was the life blood of Sao Paulo. The state of Sao Paulo still has more than a billion coffee trees, one-fourth of the world's total, but its coffee land is playing out; the nearest big plantation is now two hours' drive from the capital.

Even before coffee began to give out, Sao Paulo's industry got a running start from one of the greatest engineering feats on earth. The city stands near the Atlantic brink of a broad plateau whose rivers drain away to the west and finally to the sea 1,000 miles away in Argentina. In 1922, Asa Billings, an Omaha-born, Harvard-educated engineer for Sao Paulo's Canadian-owned power company, got the idea of damming these rivers and guiding their waters back over the 2,400-ft. palisades to the Atlantic. Magnificently successful, Billings' complex of tunnels, pumps, penstocks and turbines at Serra do Mar produced more electricity than any but the world's two or three biggest dams and made possible the industrial prodigies that Paulistas have since accomplished.

Cutting the Pie. Today, the state of Sao Paulo's 34,000 factories and 700.000 industrial workers turn out half of Brazil's industrial goods. The city consumes more electric power per residential customer than Chicago. Nearly half Brazil's foreign trade funnels through the port of Santos. Sao Paulo makes 10 million shirts a year, 1,500,000 tires, 721 elevators, 1,000,000 aluminum automobile pistons.

In the clanging metropolis of lathes, spindles and plentiful credit, fortunes are made in a few years. Most enterprisers expand frenetically, cut the pie in a quick, cold-eyed killing, then move on to bigger things. Declared industrial profits average 18%--but many a Paulista would not touch a deal for less than 100%. Taxes are low, and collection is lax. In an atmosphere as favorable to freewheeling enterprise as the U.S. in President Grant's time, 100% profit is an attainable goal. At least 500 Paulistas have made their million (in terms of U.S. dollars), and 1,000 more are nearing the mark.

Of all Sao Paulo's freewheelers, the biggest and freest is Count Francisco Matarazzo Jr., 51, who may well enjoy the world's largest personal income (after taxes). From his pigskin-paneled countinghouse above Sao Paulo's Viaducto do Cha, the count* runs his 300 enterprises (textiles, cereals, shipping, refining) in the style of a 16th century Florentine prince. Big, bleak and impeccably dressed, the count operates from a deep couch in the corner of his immense office. Across the room is a board with vertical lines of electric buttons. At a sign from the count, an attendant leaps forward, then leaps back to punch whichever button the count indicates. The buzzer-button system calls the count's top executives into his presence. The employee answers the count's question, receives his instructions, then bows his way backward from the count's presence, careful to avoid a pratfall over a wastebasket or another vice president.

A Party for the Bride. The count inherited his empire from his father, a pushcart peddler who emigrated from Italy in 1881, founded a lard-rendering business and then expanded almost as fast as Sao Paulo itself. His son has tripled the empire and is still abuilding. Though his announced net profits last year were $17.5 million, the count is notoriously coy about what he actually makes. His personal fortune tops $100 million. He is building a Roman Catholic cathedral. When his daughter Filomena (Fifi) got married a few years ago, he staged a fabulous reception, with special trains to help haul the 2,000 guests, and gold vanity-case souvenirs for all the ladies.

Sao Paulo's No. 1 political enterpriser is Adhemar de Barros. A big, breezy, bumptious man, Adhemar introduced modern machine politics to Brazil, now refers casually to Getulio Vargas as "the man I elected President." He leaves no doubt that he considers himself Vargas' heir. After eight years as governor, he retired from office temporarily in 1950. Adhemar is one of Brazil's richest men, with large interests in Sao Paulo airlines, textiles and candy manufacture, a fortune well above the $50 million mark.

A Cascade for Baby. Youngest among Sao Paulo's big operators is handsome Francisco ("Baby") Pignatari, 34. Against the granite-faced opposition of his uncle, Count Matarazzo, Baby took over his family's metals plant a few years ago and made it into the largest nonferrous rolling mill in South America. For his redheaded fiancee, Nelita Alves de Lima, Baby is building a million-dollar house in suburban Santo Amaro with two Turkish baths, a shooting gallery, a bowling alley and an outdoor swimming pool. It will also have a 130-ft. indoor swimming pool with a cascade of water 30 ft. wide and 21 ft. high at one end. By swimming through his waterfall, Baby will find himself in a grotto equipped with bar, bath and bed.

Returning from Paris recently, a Paulista friend brought Baby's bride-to-be a Cartier cigarette lighter adorned with a sapphire as big as a robin's egg. The friend was Sao Paulo's fabulous press lord, Assis Chateaubriand, 60, who shares Baby's dislike for Matarazzo and likes to print whole pages of pictures of underpaid Matarazzo workers and their crowded hovels. "Chato's" head office, two of his 28 newspapers and one of his TV stations are in Sao Paulo. So is his new Museu de Arte. In a city of self-made millionaires, Chato is a self-appointed propagandist for the arts and cultural tutor to tycoons. His own taste is excellent, and the museum's collection is a good one (including Rembrandt, El Greco, Portinari).

Catalogues in Bed. Practical to the hilt, Sao Paulo contrasts violently with lethargic Rio. The federal capital's easygoing citizens often spend hours sipping sweet black coffee at sidewalk cafes and watching the girls go by. Paulistas rush through their noisy streets with elbowing brusqueness, gulp their coffee at stand-up counters, and queue up four deep for buses in the square. Matarazzo's father used to rise daily at 5, after waking and reading machinery catalogues in bed for an hour. Present-day Paulistas often hold board meetings at 7 a.m. They scorn Rio's business and professional men, many of whom are just settling down to their desks when Paulistas knock off for lunch at 11:30 or 12.

When they do play, Paulistas play hard. They gamble recklessly at cards and the race track. They dash off for strenuous weekends of swimming at Santos and Guaruja, boating at Lake Santo Amaro, riding in the cool mountains at Campos do Jordao. They flock by the thousands to futebol matches. But for Paulistas, rich and poor, home is still the center of society. Though the richest Paulistas sometimes go out to such spots as the Clube 550 and the tiny Russian L'Hermitage, their real magnificence is reserved for their mansions, where they can entertain in a style to recall the levees of Mrs. Potter Palmer and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Count Matarazzo's Sao Paulo home is a marble palace staffed by 30 servants. Luiz Medici, another multimillionaire industrialist (plastics), has just presented his wife with a new building on their estate consisting of a music room, dining room, bar and private art gallery. The richest Paulista women probably spend more money on their wardrobes than any other women in the world.

Just Like Detroit. American enterprisers love Sao Paulo--the brisk, efficient way things get done; the high-quality labor; the pretty, prosperous suburbs. Said a U.S. businessman: "I can understand this. It's like Detroit. I feel right at home."

Much of Sao Paulo's forward surge has been foreign-financed, with the U.S. lately in the van. General Motors, which assembles cars in a $2,500,000 plant in Sao Paulo, this year plans to turn out 20,000 Frigidaires as well. Ford's new $10 million plant is expected to assemble 30,000 trucks and cars a year. Anderson Clayton, with South America's largest insecticide plant, fertilizer plants, six cottonseed crushing mills and 47 cotton gins, is also Brazil's No. 1 cotton exporter. Sears, Roebuck's huge department store dominates Sao Paulo's retail market. Other blue-chip U.S. firms expanding in Sao Paulo: International Harvester, Firestone, Otis Elevator.

Springtime for Henry. The boom roars on. "We ourselves are astounded," said a Paulista last week. "Last month it was an empty lot. Then I go back and there's a new factory." Another made the point more cannily: "Go out in any direction and buy land--swamp, hillside or anything. That land will be worth ten times what you paid for it before long."

Are there roadblocks ahead for all this expansion? Is it good for the long haul? Sao Paulo's old support, agriculture, is in a decline. Lately, its industry's rate of productivity per worker has also slipped. Most important of all, its costs of production remain inefficiently high. That is mainly because Sao Paulo's economy still operates on a high-profit, low-volume formula based on a haunting suspicion that the golden days might not last and the time to cash in is now. As long as Sao Paulo-made refrigerators sell for at least three times more than U.S. models, the structure of Sao Paulo industry will have serious potential weaknesses.

With its fantastic ambition, prospects and profiteering zest, Sao Paulo stands now about where the U.S. stood at the end of the Gilded Age. The time is ripe for a home-grown Henry Ford to show these new industrialists how to make really big money by paying productive wages, adopting the techniques of mass production, and selling more for less. On its record of communal resourcefulness, Sao Pau'o can and should produce the man to show the way.

* The title was conferred in 1917 by Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, in recognition of Matarazzo family charities.

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