Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Mussolini’s dream was a clear one: “The Italian land giving bread to all Italians!”[1] Freeing Italy from the “slavery of foreign grain” was a crucial issue in the political economy of the fascist regime that came to power in 1922.[2] Fascists envisaged Italy as an autarkic economy, able to release itself from dependency on the “plutocratic states” that dominated the world economy: the British Empire and the United States. The closing of the gap with industrialized nations and the building of a Great Italy was to be achieved by a nationalistic development policy promoting domestic industries producing for internal markets and making intensive use of the country’s own resources.[3] Early on, two big steps were taken in this direction: the Battaglia del Grano (Battle of Wheat) in 1925 and the Battaglia della Lira (Battle of the Lira) in 1926. The latter may be summarized as the stabilization of the lira at the high exchange rate of 90 lira to the pound sterling, making it impossible for Italian exports to compete in world markets. Together with the strong lira came an elaborate new system of tariff protection for national industries, with a proliferation of institutes and committees that allowed the state a degree of control over the economy previously unknown.[4] The Battle of Wheat, on the other hand, was supposed to put an end to the foreign-exchange deficit of the post–World War I years, half of it directly caused by grain imports that made Italy the third-largest wheat importer in the world, behind only the United Kingdom and Germany. The victory would be declared the moment Italian fields would produce 15 quintals per hectare (22 bushels per acre), an increase in productivity by one third in comparison to the post–World War I values and well above the productivity of the US for the years 1923–1927 (14½ bushels per acre). This new mythical number, 15 quintals per hectare, in conjunction with quota 90, allegedly would cover the national deficit in wheat without a need to increase the area dedicated to its cultivation.[5]

No historian of fascist Italy ignores the much-publicized images of Mussolini threshing wheat while stripped to the waist and wearing futuristic goggles, simultaneously playing two of his best-known roles: the First Peasant of Italy and the Flying Duce.[6] In 1926, the first summer of the Battle of Wheat, Illustrazione Italiana published photos of the dictator amid tractors, harvesting wheat, or driving a mechanical sowing machine. The appearance in the mass media of images of the leader among agriculture workers would become an annual ritual of fascist Italy that would culminate in the 1938 documentary film Il Duce inizia la trebbiatura del grana nell’Agro Pontino (The Duce Launches the Threshing in the Pontine Ager). After the narrator reminded the audience of the 200,000 quintals of wheat produced that year in the recently reclaimed Pontine Marshes, the camera tracked Mussolini, who was said to have threshed about 11 quintals in just an hour.[7] In typical fascist manner, this cult of the leader was combined with the organization of mass events, such as demonstrations of wheat threshing in Rome’s central squares and the grandiose national exhibitions of grain held in 1927 and 1932. It is no exaggeration to state that the Battle of Wheat was the first mass propaganda act of Mussolini’s regime, mobilizing film directors, photographers, radio speakers, journalists, and even priests to spread the new gospel.[8]