Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Colonel Henrique Linhares de Lima, having been responsible for organizing the management of supplies of the Portuguese Army in the trenches of World War I, was now to transfer his military expertise to the Wheat Campaign as Minister of Agriculture of the dictatorial regime from 1929 until 1932. Again, it is important to notice these constant transactions between peace and war, with permanent mobilization a hallmark of the new regimes. Linhares de Lima was granted the power to mobilize every engineer and scientist from the Lisbon Agronomy Institute—the main agricultural-sciences establishment in the country—to promote wheat production. He was quick to nominate the institute’s young and promising professor of genetics, António Sousa da Câmara, as the Wheat Campaign’s field marshall.[33] Câmara, when remembering those glorious days, didn’t shy away from the typical epic rhetoric of the fascist era: “The wheat campaign had come. The dawn had arrived! Happy those like us, who started our professional lives under the dawn’s early light and were able from the very first moment to follow a Great Leader and the flame of a new Mystique.”[34] The Great Leader was, of course, António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970), the dictator who headed the Portuguese government from 1932 until 1968, and who had been the finance minister of the dictatorial government since 1928.

^{Figure 2.3 António Sousa da Câmara, 1901–1971.}

^{(Arquivo Histórico Parlamentar)}

The Wheat Campaign was organized in six divisions—Propaganda, Technical Assistance, Financial Assistance, Transportation, Fertilizers, Seeds—with a triangular command made up of a politician named by the Minister of Agriculture, a large landowner, and an agricultural scientist.[35] Mário de Azevedo Gomes, the scientist formerly responsible for the technical services of the Ministry of Agriculture, did not hide his disdain for the new structure of the Central Board for the Wheat Campaign, which he described as an “alien body that represented a State inside the State.”[36] However, for Câmara there was no doubt concerning the need for this new parallel structure that should be filled with young people full of enthusiasm to serve the new leader. In the pages of his campaign diary, he recalled how Linhares de Lima was obsessed with “saving for the Nation the torrents of gold sent abroad to buy our bread. Salazar needs us to win the campaign.… If Salazar does not rest, neither do we have the right to rest.”[37] While Salazar tightened control over public expenditure to free Portugal from foreign dependency, the Wheat Campaign, together with measures increasing protectionism and credit concessions, promoted national production and imports substitution.[38]

Technical brigades consisting of 124 agricultural scientists and engineers were sent into the Portuguese fields to spread ten commandments of wheat farming. By following the first three, a farmer would defend the fatherland by using proper fertilization, mechanized implements, and selected seeds. The fourth and fifth commandments urged a farmer to use sowing machines and to rationally organize his livestock so as to have enough manure at his disposal. Succeeding commandments reminded a farmer of the important role of the technical brigades. The ninth called for a farmer to “reflect on the patriotic accomplishment in Italy,” and the tenth repeated the motto “Our land’s wheat is the border that best defends us.”[39]

In the years 1927–1933, the wheat fields of the Alentejo region in southern Portugal, which alone accounted for about 60 percent of the country’s wheat production, added an area increment of 28 percent, occupying 391,000 hectares.[40] The total annual production of the country grew from 280,000 tons for the years 1925–1929 to about 507,000 tons for the years 1930–1934.[41] The record productions of the years 1934 and 1935, with unprecedented surpluses in domestic grain output, proclaimed the victory of the Wheat Campaign. This was due primarily to the extension of wheat fields into the poor soils of the heaths and the replacement of vineyards by cereal. In 1938, Câmara, the young geneticist who served as the executive head of the campaign, when praising the “golden wheat fields that covered the Portuguese soil over a previously unheard extension,” already recognized, using familiar militarist language, the limitations of the “first raid.”[42] After all, he preferred production increases more through intensification rather than extension.[43] Be that as it may, he had no doubts about the profound effects of the campaign on the landscape: “The attack by men and machines ripped the heaths…. The crimson spot rockrose, the bell heather, the broom, the rosemary, all that scented world, the heath’s soul, slowly disappeared under the turfs lifted by the plough.”[44]