Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

It should be apparent that the main question about science and fascism is not whether scientists were themselves fascist or not. On the one hand, we have a traditional arrangement for state sponsorship of science, with the agencies of the fascist regime supporting scientific research, funding the creation of the National Agricultural Experiment Station (EAN), and supporting some of the EAN’s departments through corporatist agencies. Nothing very surprising there. But, more interestingly, we have scientists and their technoscientific organisms—high-yielding seeds—participating directly in the building of a corporatist state that removed all mechanisms of liberal representation and replaced them with an allegedly organic structure based on “economic solidarities.” The first and one of the main organs of this structure in Portugal, the National Federation of Wheat Producers (FNPT), bought farmers’ production and distributed seeds developed by the breeding department of the EAN. The new strains of wheat weaved together large landowners of the Alentejo region, sharecroppers enlarging the cultivated areas of the large estates, underpaid and oppressed wage laborers cultivating the richer deeper soils of the properties, large chemical factories in the capital city, bread self-sufficiency, and the corporatist tripartite structure of the FNPT, the Farmers’ Guilds, and the Casas do Povo. Here was the fascists’ alternative modernist vision: an organic nation feeding and growing itself by making, distributing, cultivating, and consuming breeders’ technoscientific organisms.

^{Figure 2.6 A bas-relief by Henri Bettencourt of the Portuguese Corporatist New State, carved for Portugal’s pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition, 1937.}

^{(Fundo Mário Novais, Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation)}

Modernism, Genetics, and the New State

In Portugal, as in Italy, there was no contradiction between ruralization and modernization. Whereas Pequito Rebelo had a passion for both aviation and agriculture, and thus could effortless reproduce Mussolini’s futuristic combination of wheat thresher and intrepid aviator, no one would have imagined Salazar wearing goggles. Salazar’s character seems to support the traditionalist interpretation of his regime as a conservative dictatorship, as evidenced by his suspicion of urban life and his praise of modest pastoral virtues. But Salazar himself suggested alternative interpretations.[79] In his 1938 summary of the accomplishments of the regime, he contrasted the “economic and social revolution” that had taken place in Portugal (a “revolution on the march”) with simple “financial reform.”[80] In 1966, the old dictator could still boost that “in our century, we are the only corporatist revolution that triumphs.”[81] Here I want to insist that to perceive the modernist nature of the Portuguese fascist New State one can’t shy away from agriculture. It was through agriculture that the new alternative modernity of Salazar’s fascist corporatist state came into being.

In 1936 new legislation had reorganized the Ministry of Agriculture, recognizing explicitly the role of scientific research in ruralizing the country.[82] The law founded both the Board for Internal Colonization, which was created to plan the settlement of southern Portugal with people from overpopulated areas of the country, and the National Agricultural Experiment Station (EAN), the scientific arm of the ministry.[83] A year later, Câmara, then only 36 years old, was nominated director of the new EAN. Not only was Câmara a distinguished participant in the Wheat Campaign, and of all other production battles that followed; he also had experience in renowned international research institutions. Like many other promising young Portuguese scientists, he had been granted a scholarship by the Board of National Education that had been founded in 1929 by the government to fund the training of the new technical elite by supporting new research groups and by financing stays in internationally respected centers.[84] Câmara spent 1932–33 at Cambridge and Edinburgh and 1936 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Biologie in Berlin.[85] It was after his years in Scotland and England that he started his research in cytogenetics, but it was his Berlin experience that offered him the connections between genetics research and the political economy of fascism and that directly inspired the design of the EAN. It is not incidental that after the strong presence of Italian fascism in Portuguese fields in the early 1930s Nazism had become the main reference point for New State elites.