The São Paulo Law School and the Anti-Vargas Resistance (1938-1945)

Brazil is not one of those nations (such as Portugal, Spain, and the Soviet Union) where authoritarian governments continued to prevail after 1945; nor is it to be classed among those whose dictatorships were terminated with the help of invading forces. The collapse in 1945 of the Brazilian dictatorship, known as the Estado Novo, was an internal affair, determined largely by the widespread discontent that influenced military leaders and persuaded highly placed civilians to abandon plans to retain the authoritarian constitution of November 1937 in modified form.

During the Estado Novo (1937–1945), the voice of resistance was lifted courageously…

The São Paulo Law School, the oldest institution of higher learning in Brazil, is known for the lasting personal relationships and ideas that were developed there, in and outside the classrooms, by a veritable Who’s Who of Brazilian history. It is known also as the cradle of movements that affected that history.

The imposing law school building, which stands four stories high in the heart of a metropolis of skyscrapers, has a history that is much older than that of the law school. It goes back to an authorization, issued in 1624 by the Franciscan Order (the Ordem Seráfica de…

Aureliano Leite has written that the conflict at the arcadas on August 7, 1930, perhaps brought on the revolution of October 1930.¹ That conflict, in fact, was one of many demonstrations stirred up throughout Brazil by Aliança Liberal adherents to protest the assassination of João Pessoa. They built up popular backing for the wellplanned revolution of October, which was so successful that in Rio on October 24 President Washington Luís was overthrown.

The PRP, which had been making effective use of the São Paulo police, lost control of the state capital that day. Law students were at the forefront of…

Late in April 1938 Vargas replaced São Paulo Interventor Cardoso de Melo Neto with Ademar de Barros, an obscure former PRP legislator and holder of a medical degree from Rio de Janeiro. The new interventor quickly suspended the publication of Diário da Noite because it printed the facsimile of a messy note in his handwriting in order to demonstrate his “mental backwardness,” Soon the city was flooded with copies of the facsimile and propaganda against the “almost illiterate” interventor.¹

The administrative changes, which brought César Lacerda de Vergueiro to the post of state secretary of justice, did not augur well…

In August 1939, when campaigning began for the November Centro Onze de Agosto election, the directorship of the dominant Partido Acadêmico Conservador named a slate headed by Francisco de Paula Quintanilha Ribeiro. Quintanilha Ribeiro, a party founder, had shown electoral strength in 1937 and 1938, but his nomination provoked a revolt by a minority of Conservadores, who felt that the party leadership was anything but dynamic in demonstrating resistance to the Vargas dictatorship. Many of these disenchanted Conservadores belonged to the Sociedade Acadêmico Amigos de Rui Barbosa, and some of them had published “folha dobrada” and burned pictures of Vargas….

Four hundred candidates, having completed cursos pré-jurídicos, were given tough written and oral examinations when they sought admission to the 200 available places in the first-year law school class that was to begin its studies in March 1941. Professors Alexandre Correia, Lino de Morais Leme (brother of Ernesto), and Mário Masagão tested their Latin; Professors Honório Monteiro and Antônio Ferreira Gesarino Júnior asked them about philosophical matters; and Professors Noé Azevedo, José Carlos de Ataliba Nogueira, and Cardoso de Melo Neto tested their knowledge of sociology. So difficult were the questions that only 83 applicants were admitted, prompting a São…

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States entered the war against the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan). Foreign ministers of the American republics met in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942 to consider whether all the republics should break diplomatic relations with the Axis. At the São Paulo Law School, Germinal Feijó became the coordinator of a plan whereby a group of students would go to Rio and gain admittance to the gallery during a session of the foreign ministers’ conference in order to call attention to the Brazilian political situation by shouting,…

The first months of the 1943 school year hardly gave the impression that 1943 would become the most memorable year of the anti-Vargas resistance at the São Paulo Law School. Freshman José Bonifácio Coutinho Nogueira, younger son of Paulo Nogueira Filho, wrote late in the year: “We entered the traditional Faculdade de Direito de São Paulo in an epoch in which the national political scene was dominated by the accommodative mentality of those who know how to breathe only in an atmosphere of apathy. … The first six months of the Academia confirmed our gloomy forecast. We lived a whole…

It has been said that “everybody in São Paulo” was at the 1943 Baile das Américas, held at the Esplanada Hotel on the night of October 30–31 (Saturday—Sunday). This was a few days after the appearance of the “manifesto of the Mineiros,” which declared that “a people reduced to silence and deprived of the faculty of thinking or expressing itself is a corroded organism” and that, “if we fight against fascism at the side of the United Nations so that liberty and democracy may be restored to all people, certainly we are not asking too much in demanding…

On the night of November 9, Interventor Fernando Costa received a visit from industrialist Horácio Lafer and three state cabinet secretaries: Abelardo Vergueiro César (Justice), Teotônio Monteiro de Barros Filho (Education), and Luís de Anhaia Melo (Transport). Luís de Anhaia Melo had witnessed the shootings from a window of the office of the Transport Secretaryship, close to the law school. Appalled, he had phoned the interventor from his office.¹

Now the interventor’s visitors insisted on the immediate dismissal of Segurança Secretary Coriolano de Góis; as the interventor did not acquiesce, the three state cabinet members submitted their own resignations. Later…

Luís Arrobas Martins, who joined the law firm of Professor José Soares de Melo late in 1943, applied to the British Council in Rio for a scholarship that would allow him to study at a university in England or Scotland. He wrote that he wanted the chance to study “in a country where democratic principles are practiced,” and that his ambition was to become a professor at the University of São Paulo.¹

On January 26, 1944, soon after the application was mailed, Arrobas received orders to serve in the coastal artillery in Santos. Already in June 1942, his political views…

When approximately 250 Brazilian writers gathered in São Paulo late in January 1945 for the First Writers’ Congress, they passed resolutions calling for democracy and free expression and approved a motion extending greetings to Geraldo Vidigal and other Brazilian writers who were fighting in Italy for the principles that the Writers’ Congress defended in Brazil.¹

Geraldo Vidigal, Rui Pereira de Queiroz, and Celso Braga, who would have graduated were they not in Italy, were remembered in the speechmaking at the commencement exercises on January 10 and at the Clube Comercial on February 7, when a banquet honored the recent graduates…

With the return of Brazil to electoral democracy, veterans of the São Paulo Law School resistência worked for the renovation of the nation in accordance with ideas expressed at the arcadas, and for the defeat of Getulismo at the polls. The attention given to the povo in law student manifestos was inspired by both these objectives. The resistência enthusiasts reasoned that Vargas, maintained in power by the apparatus of a police state, had no great popular support, and this belief appeared to be confirmed by the press once it was freed of censorship. They reflected that the Estado Novo, at…