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^{Figure 1.8 The exhibit presented by Strampelli’s National Institute of Genetics at the National Grain Exhibition, 1932.}

^{(Fondo Nazareno Strampelli, Rieti State Archives)}

The campaign for wheat autarky thus mixed a potent set of traits: mass mobilization of Italians in a common national project, replacing other political forms of participation; charismatic leadership, with frequent appearances of the Duce in the media as the “first farmer” of Italy; increased presence of the state infrastructure in the territory; and praise of the Italian soil as a source of national virtues and independence. This combination of mass mobilization, charismatic leadership, state power, and ideology of the land was characteristically fascist. In Italy, before the Battle of Wheat launched in 1925, there had been no comparable initiative able to bring all these features together.

Ardito wheat was expected to perform the same task in peacetime that the human Ardito had performed during wartime: after the human Ardito defended the fatherland’s borders from Austrians and eliminated socialist elements from the national community, Ardito guaranteed national survival and reproduction through bread production. In Mussolini’s inflammatory rhetoric, the new high-yield strains enabled the good old Italian land to sustain newly born Italians, feeding the expansion of the Italian race.[66] In 1932, the National Grain Exhibition confirmed these transitions between humans and nonhumans: a collection of Strampelli’s wheat strains was displayed in bundles—directly evoking the main fascist symbol, the fascio—surrounding a statue of a fully equipped and fierce human Ardito. The Battle of Wheat allegedly mobilized every farmer and peasant in defense of the nation, and the Duce thus named all those involved in the campaign as Arditi.[67] In other words, Strampelli’s Ardito had transformed every Italian involved in bread production into an Ardito.

2 Wheat: The Integral Nation, Genetics, and Salazar’s Corporatist Fascist State

Integral Wheat Fields

In 1934, José Pequito Rebelo (1892–1983), a large landowner from Portugal’s southern region of Alentejo, the country’s breadbasket, could not suppress his joy when entering Rome by the gates of Saint Paul and reading a large poster urging Italian farmers to apply the “Integral Method” to win the Battle of Wheat.[1] The success of one of the first mass mobilizations of Mussolini’s regime depended, according to Pequito Rebelo’s account, on an Italian adaptation of his own Integral Method, developed for growing grain on the thin soils of Alentejo. Its integral character derived from being a combination of several techniques elaborated by French, American, and Russian agronomists for the expansion of wheat cultivation into semiarid regions.[2] Pequito Rebelo had not only integrated all such techniques; he also had made them applicable to conditions in the Mediterranean region, where droughts and rainy winters demanded the drainage of soils by sowing wheat rows above the level of stagnant waters.

The significance of Pequito Rebelo’s proposals is usually ignored in Portuguese historiography, which is much more interested in his role as a prominent member of Luso-Integralism (Integralismo Lusitano),[3] a radical right-wing movement, founded in 1914, that offered much of the ideological basis of the future fascist regime of António de Oliveira Salazar.[4] Integralists shared with many other European reactionaries—particularly the followers of the Action Française of Charles Maurras—a disdain for the abstract republic of individuals and classes, praising instead the organic nation built on families and professional corporations.[5] From 1915 on, Pequito Rebelo and his fellow Luso-Integralists were actively involved, both intellectually and politically, in each and every one of the multiple attempts to bring down the Portuguese republican regime, finally succeeding in the 1926 military coup d’état that inaugurated the authoritarian rule that would last until 1974.[6]

The Italian agricultural propaganda newspaper La Domenica dell’Agricoltore asserted that the Integral Method was the method best suited for the new early wheats developed by Italian geneticists, for their demands were fully satisfied by the continuous and vigilant care taken by adherents of that method.[7] Indeed, such care was the method’s distinctive feature, and it promised to convert wheat extensive cultivation, with its labor peak during harvest, into an intensive activity that nursed the wheat plant at every stage of development. Seeds were to be carefully placed in parallel rows spaced widely enough for peasants to move between them while performing the year-round activities of weeding, fertilizing, and draining. For Pequito Rebelo there was no doubt that the lined fields of the Integral Method would transform extensive properties into gardens demanding the permanent presence of industrious and attentive peasants.

Strong ideas about the national soil were central to Integralists’ visions of the organic nation. António Sardinha (1887–1925), the most famous of the Integralist intellectuals, celebrated sedentary Lusitan tribes that inhabited the Portuguese territory in pre-Roman times and allegedly constituted the core of the Portuguese race in spite of many subsequent “horrendous exotic alluviums.”[8] Sardinha warned against a republican race, produced by the contamination from Jewish and Black elements, responsible for the introduction in the country of a liberal abstract ideology completely detached from national traditions.[9] He exulted instead over a mythical “Atlantic Man” who year after year cultivated the same soil in which his ancestors were buried. For Integralists, the cult of the ancestors and the tilling of the land were deeply connected in a too-familiar mix of blood and land that they adapted directly from Maurice Barrès, the main inspirer of French radical reactionaries and of many fascist movements across Europe. By 1915, Sardinha had published a volume of collected poems titled The Epics of the Plain: Poems of Land and Blood.[10]

Sardinha’s telluric journey led him to the plains of Alentejo. For those familiar with the poet’s biography this was a natural choice, for his home town, Monforte, is located in Alentejo. The local abundance of megalithic funerary monuments from the Neolithic and Bronze Age materialized in the landscape the cult of the ancestors and surely contributed to Sardinha’s sense of communion with “the honorable farmers that have at all times stared at the horizon that I now stare at.”[11] However, for a reader informed about the political economy of Alentejo, with its large estates and their seasonal workforce, the region was a very unlikely setting for national epics.[12] Not only were the vast majority of properties not in peasants’ hands; there also was a consensus about the negative social effects of the divorce between land ownership and agricultural workers. Since the end of the eighteenth century, popular narratives had insisted on the lawlessness of the scarcely populated region and had attributed the extreme levels of burglary and vagrancy, which were among the highest in the country, to weak bonds between the population and the land.[13] Adding to this grim vision, extensive tracts of land, moors, and heaths were kept uncultivated until the first decades of the twentieth century, which justified the metaphor of Alentejo as a sort of Portuguese Wild West.[14]