Guide to the Leonidas Cardoso Archive
The Archive of Leonidas Cardoso (1889-1965), Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s father, contains documents he accumulated from his gymnasium days at the beginning of the 20th century until his death in 1965. There are around 800 items that reflect relevant aspects of his career as a military man and politician, the social and family relationships he cultivated and the historical events he took part in, such as Tenentism, the Oil Campaign and the Empty Pot Movement. The documentation also provides an insight into the institutions to which he belonged, such as the Clube Militar, the Centro de Estudos e Defesa do Petróleo e da Economia Nacional (CEDPEN), the Liga de Emancipação Nacional (LEN) and the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (PTB).
Family and social formation and relations
His correspondence with friends and relatives, whose colloquial tone allows us to identify the nicknames by which they were known, offers interesting and curious aspects of his personality, along with notebooks of poems, portraits and other documents marked by spontaneity. Diplomas and certificates from high school and university courses make up the part of Leonidas Cardoso’s archive related to his education in Curitiba and Rio de Janeiro.
Military and political career
Leonidas Cardoso’s military career is recorded in documents from the time he entered the War School in Porto Alegre in 1905 until the end of his life as a retired divisional general, such as those that evoke the support he gave to the Revolta dos 18 do Forte de Copacabana in 1922, which cost him imprisonment in the Escola de Comando e Estado-Maior do Exército (ECEME) and later transfer to Óbidos and Belém, in Pará, and Manaus, in Amazonas; the 1930 Revolution, which brought Getúlio Vargas to the presidency of the Republic; and the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932. The documentation also shows the period in which, having been promoted to major, he acted as cabinet officer for the Minister of War, Pedro Aurélio de Góis Monteiro.
Transferred in 1940 to São Paulo, he went on to serve at the headquarters of the 2nd Military Region and to devote himself to the defense of national oil. There are some documents that refer to Leonidas Cardoso’s political career as a federal deputy for São Paulo, in the PTB party (1955-1959), and the causes he supported, all marked by the defense of democratic freedoms and exacerbated nationalism.