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At first, the machine kissed him off as "the mad Lincoln from Mato Grosso." But soon he had everybody so mad that one politico rushed up and punched him in the mouth while he was speaking against a giveaway bill. Amid the uproar, the speaker ordered the galleries cleared. "No! No!" shouted Quadros, blood streaming from his lips. "Let the people stay! Let them watch!" By 1950, firmly established as the little citizen at war with graft, a Chaplin with a cause, Quadros won the most votes of all 900 candidates for the state assembly.
In his headlong rush, Quadros accepted help from anyone, including the Communists, who considered him a "useful innocent." But Quadros bragged, "They're not using me—I'm using them." The alliance ended in 1952 when the Reds demanded control of key departments as their price for support in São Paulo's mayoralty election. Quadros turned them down. In their wrath, the Communists tried to tie a capitalist can to Quadros with such epithets as "Wall Street stooge" and "the Esso candidate," did their best—as they have in every election since—to defeat him. Quadros took to the streets, boasting that he owned only one pair of shoes ("Why should any man with only one pair of feet need more than one pair of shoes?"), ran on a platform of honesty and industry, won by the greatest majority in the history of São Paulo.
As mayor, Quadros inherited a city with exactly $2,212 in the bank, $12.5 million in unpaid bills, and a budget deficit of $6,000,000 for 1952. He fired 10% of all functionaries, cut nonessential spending, ended political payoffs, started 200 corruption investigations. In his outer office he hung a sign: "Sr. Jânio Quadros does not provide city jobs. Please don't waste your time and his insisting." He sold off the city fleet of 40 limousines (São Paulo's morticians snapped them up), even banned coffee breaks—in the coffee capital of the world. "If I give a finger," he said, "I lose an arm." Within a year he had balanced the $55 million budget and started building—highways, water mains, electric lines, clinics. As industry flowed in, Jânio stepped up to the governor's mansion 21 months later.
Lincoln & the Americans. Before taking over the governorship in 1955, Quadros made his first trip outside Latin America, a holiday jaunt to Europe and the U.S. with Eloá and his daughter Tutu. In Europe, he fell in love with London ("a man's town"). The U.S. was not so endearing. At New York's Idlewild Airport he had a raging two-hour argument over a lost vaccination certificate; he detested Manhattan's bitter January cold, despite all that U.S. friends such as Nelson Rockefeller could do to thaw him out. He went to Washington to pay homage at the Lincoln Memorial, was ignored by U.S. officialdom. "Lincoln," said Quadros later, "was one of history's greatest men, but Americans are not like him. He was a lonely exception."