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The paper studies the making of a development strategy in Brazil along the 1930's and, particularly, during Estado Novo regime, focusing the reasons which lead Brazilian government to attempt at attracting steel foreign subsidiaries and, failing, to resort to "Pan-American cooperation" in order to obtain resources needed to the first great state industrial investments. The paper also rejects the assumption that a kind of state-oriented nationalistic project which either emphasized autonomous funding of industrial development or dismissed foreign dependence as in so-called "Prussian style" had its coming of age suddenly hindered by local political resistance, for there is no evidence that this kind of national project had been implemented at first. Quite contrary, indications are that Vargas government tried at the start to accompany with foreign funding the limited effort to mobilize local resources, in a historical context plenty of economic and political restrictions to a "Prussian style" development strategy in Brazil.