Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

In spite of the consensus around the importance of the Battle of Wheat for the regime’s imagery, the general historiographical verdict about its effects tends to assume a negative tone.[9] The campaign is perceived as the price paid by the National Fascist Party to guarantee support from backward southern landowners who would not survive without generous state subsidies in the form of high duties on foreign cereals.[10] Historians have also identified the modern capitalist landowners of the northern fertile areas of the Po Valley as major beneficiaries of the regime of wheat autarky, making big profits on the backs of underpaid wage laborers. Although the regime promised to defend small landowners and sharecroppers as the backbone of the national community, this middle stratum of Italian peasantry migrated in increasing numbers to urban centers during the fascist years. The campaign was also funded by consumers paying higher prices for bread, for Italian wheat was always more expensive than North American or Argentinean grain sold in international markets. This negatively affected not only the domestic budget of city dwellers, particularly industrial workers, but also that of small farmers inhabiting Italian mountain regions where meager grain production, insufficient for local consumption, required them to buy their bread at climbing prices. The Battle of Wheat is also held responsible for an excessive obsession with wheat production that undermined the previous diversity of Italian agriculture, penalizing fruit, vegetable, and wine production and contributing to accelerate soil erosion through the cultivation of poor thin soils. Ten years after the launching of the Battle of Wheat, Italy produced 40 percent more wheat but had increased its food deficit in other items, especially meat. To summarize, the “mission accomplished” banner heralded by Mussolini in 1933, when productivity rose above 15 quintals per hectare, is seen as another act of propaganda by a regime exaggerating its feats while hiding the many problems caused by its policies.

^{Figure 1.1 Armando Bruni, “Mussolini threshing wheat at the Agro Pontino” (1935).}

^{(Fondo Armando Bruni / Rcs Archive)}

My intention here is not to dispute this historiographical consensus over the many failures of the Battle of Wheat. I am interested, instead, in emphasizing how the campaign constituted one of the first materializations of the fascist regime, with scientists, especially geneticists, playing a major role in the process of building the New State. We can get a first hint of this interaction between science and politics just by looking at the constitution of the Permanent Wheat Committee founded in 1925 to command the battle.[11] The Duce himself headed the new organism formed from a mix of high-ranking state officials (Minister of the National Economy Giuseppe Belluzo, General Director of the Agricultural Services Alessandro Brizi), renowned agricultural scientists (Mario Ferraguti, Tito Poggi, Enrico Fileni, Novello Novelli, Emanuele De Cillis, Nazareno Strampelli), and representatives of farmers syndicates (Antonino Battoli, vice-president of FISA), to be joined later by leaders of fascist peasant unions (Luigi Razza).[12] The meetings of the committee thus were a combination of charismatic leadership, state apparatus, corporatist organizations, and science.[13]

^{Figure 1.2 The Permanent Committee of the Wheat Campaign, 1925. Nazareno Strampelli is seated immediately to the right of Mussolini.}

^{(Il Giornale di Risicoltura 15, no. 8 (1925): 116)}