José Carlos Rodrigues

José Carlos Rodrigues (Cantagalo, RJ, Brazil, 19/06/1844 – Paris, France, 28/06/1922) was a Brazilian journalist, financial expert, and philanthropist, with connections to both the United States and Great Britain.

With the aid of a New Yorker in the Amazon rubber business, he started his own monthly magazine O Novo Mundo (New World) which reached a circulation of 8000 in Brazil and informed his countrymen “of American ingenuity and progress in all fields”.

Nevertheless in recognition for José Carlos’ help over the years for relations between Brazil and the US the emperor climbed the stairs to the humble office of O Novo Mondo to thank its editor in person.

José Carlos, as a reporter for the New York World, was part of an American party including the boss and members of the already built Panama Railroad and two army engineers which accompanied him.

But democratic government returned, and José Carlos again became a trusted adviser to the authorities, handling important financial business on his annual trips to London.

The Brazilian Finance Minister wrote in an official report in 1901 “None more competent than he is by reason of his patriotism, his personal honesty, his close community with the financial policy of the Government, his intimate knowledge of the subject, and his acquaintance with the people and ways of his field of action.” Railways in Brazil were still largely financed and indeed owned by the British, and in 1902 José Carlos acted for the Brazilian government in unsuccessful attempts to buy two small railway companies, the Alagoas and the Rio Grande do Sul, from their largely British owners.

In their introduction they announced that “The leading journalist of Brazil, DR. J. C. RODRIGUES, Editor of the Jornal do Comercio, of Rio de Janeiro, has written an admirable letter to precede the Brazilian articles.

Rodrigues was a noted collector of books on colonial Brazil and in 1907 published Bibliotheca Brasiliense, a two volume annotated catalogue so useful that it was reprinted sixty years later, and again a generation on.

In 1912 he published a monograph on the Resurrection of Jesus; in 1918 Considerações Geraes sobre a Biblia –“general considerations about the Bible”; and in 1921 a magisterial two volume study of the Old Testament.

He also used the resources of the Jornal do Comercio to produce in 1918 a collection of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s speeches on the Great War, and in 1921 143 pages of “notes” on the subject of contraband goods in wartime.

He died in Paris in 1923, where his English wife, Jane Sampson, had lived much of her life, and where his nephew João Baptista Lopes was the Brazilian Consul-General.