Populism is not a new subject in Brazilian politics and society. The well-known three waves of populism in Latin America have flooded Brazil in all versions (De La Torre 2000; Hawkins and Kaltwasser 2017, 2019). From the 1940s to the 1960s, the first wave enclosed the democratic period between 1946 and 1964. As labeled by some scholars, this period is known as a populist democracy (Ianni, 1968). Despite significant efforts to make sense of these years and administrations, the notion of populism shared by scholars of the time and their essayistic writing style leads us to question whether Brazilian presidents from 1946 to 1964 were indeed populist (Weffort 1978; Ianni 1968; Ferreira 2001). Therefore, this paper analyzes speeches from six presidents from the period, building our sample following the criteria suggested by Hawkins et al. (2019). We follow the ideational approach to conceptualize populism. From this perspective, populism is a set of ideas that morally divides society and politics into two antagonistic groups - 'the people' and 'the elite' - in a Manichean way. Following a rubric, we use holistic grading to classify the speeches as (1) non-populist, (2) somewhat populist, (3) populist, and (4) very populist, using a continuous index that goes from 0 to 2. Results show that populism was overestimated by Brazilian scholars who analyzed these political leaders and that only two of them could be labeled as somewhat populist: Getúlio Vargas and João Goulart.