Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The EAN’s laboratories of genetics, cytology, entomology, and phytopathology stood in clear contrast with the laboratories of the Central Agricultural Station, its institutional predecessor. Câmara maintained that the use of multiple approaches to attack a single research problem was to be the distinctive hallmark of his institution. The Breeding department, for example, when hybridizing wheats to combine productivity, precocity, and cold resistance, had to work with the genetics department to determine the viability of fixing properties in crossings between varieties with different numbers of chromosomes.[97] And in the EAN’s departments, wheat, corn, rice, and apples were put under the scrutiny of genetics, physiology, botany, phytopathology, entomology, chemistry, and soil science, all supported by “technological chemistry, centrifugation, x rays, heating….”[98] Departments were thus sometimes arranged around scientific objects (for example, the pomology department for fruit trees), others (such as the phytopathology department) around a scientific discipline.[99] This was a curious mix of the organizational layout of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Biologie, where departments followed disciplines, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Plant Breeding, where departments were divided according to functions of experimental organisms.[100]

In 1943, only seven years after its founding, the EAN already had 62 researchers. The EAN was the first research institution in Portugal to earn the status of National Laboratory, and Câmara felt compelled to expose its organic nature, echoing the organic corporatist state being put in place by Salazar: “[T]he organizer of an enterprise tries to elaborate its rules as precisely as he can, by establishing the number of organs needed, the way they relate to each other, the hierarchies between them, the performance expected from each of them.… The modern leader is the one who knows how to distribute his power by a system of intelligently divided responsibilities.”[101]

^{Figure 2.7 Artur Pastor, “Measuring Rice at the National Agricultural Experiment Station,” ca. 1950.}

^{(Fundo Artur Pastor, Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa)}

Câmara’s obsession with the organization of scientific work was the main subject of his book On the Way: Guiding a Scientific Enterprise, published in 1943. The book had a preface by Marcelo Caetano, a former member of Pequito Rebelo’s Integralist movement who from 1940 to 1944 was commissioner of the Portuguese Youth (Mocidade Portuguesa)—an organization inspired by the Italian Balilla but also by the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend)—and who would go on to lead the regime after Salazar’s fatal accident in 1968. Caetano recommended the book to every Portuguese who had been called “for a mission of leadership (chefia), of orientating, of directing national life.”[102] Câmara had produced a guide not only for the scientific researcher but also for every leader serving the New State—a guide for those abiding by what Germans called the Führerprinzip, a hierarchy of leaders. According to the text, every young man mobilized to the EAN should have “faith, patriotism, character, intelligence, knowledge and working capacities. Lack of faith leads to the sad petit bourgeois mentality of some supposed scientists…. Petit bourgeois lack the needed enthusiasm…. The religion of the fatherland is the eternal source of energies from where the researcher will get the courage to overcome all difficulties.”[103]

Câmara’s intentions were made manifest in the new facilities of the experiment station built in 1941 on Lisbon’s outskirts. The organic nature of the scientific work undertaken at his institution, always respecting hierarchies, justified his choice of a single building instead of the scattered pavilions characteristic of agricultural experiment stations. Câmara stated that one unique building “not only promotes a more intimate collaboration between the different departments, but the role of the director also becomes easier and more efficient. In such an establishment the authority of a director can’t be dismissed, and it should be felt at every moment and in each activity…. Order must be hard steel.” EAN researchers tinkered with life to sustain the alternative modernity of the fascist regime, and they themselves were expected to experience the scientific life as fascist life: radical nationalism as source of scientific inspiration; interdisciplinary research as organic structure; teamwork as military endeavor; scientific leadership as undisputed authority.