Integralists had thus no easy task in making Alentejo’s soil the source of virtues of the organic nation. Indeed, most of the myths put in circulation by Portuguese intellectuals at the turn of the century had the northern regions of the country as the birthplace of the Portuguese nation, identifying the south, and Alentejo in particular, with bad influences of Jewish and Arab origin.[15] But although the political trajectories of the members of Luso-Integralism are usually described in terms of an aesthetic option for literary traditionalism that evolved into strong counter-revolutionary nationalism, they employed tools other than just poetry to make the southern lands produce morally upright Portuguese. And here we again stumble into Pequito Rebelo, who was occupied less with poetry than with the invention of new agricultural machinery for the application of his Integral Method for grain production, urging intensive care of each individual plant all year round.[16]
The much-criticized extensive cultivation of cereals over large areas in Alentejo, with its masses of migrant workers hired only for short periods of time, was to be replaced by well-kept “wheat gardens” producing proud farmers who would constitute the backbone of the nation. For Pequito Rebelo, it did not matter that Alentejo shared with other Mediterranean regions, such as the Italian Mezzogiorno, many of the geographical characteristics that made wheat cultivation a taxing activity. Transforming defects into virtues, Pequito Rebelo saw in the use of “refined techniques” to overcome poor natural conditions the possibility to convert extensive cereals cultivation into a “sort of horticulture” that would have “a happy influence on the social type.”[17] The qualities of the national soil were to be measured not only by its productivity but also by its ability to “reveal the virtues of the race…. If cereal cultivation is complex, with plants regularly ordered, continual weeding interventions at each development stage and defense them against natural adversities; if all this is done using perfected tools that praise the inventive qualities of the farmer; then it must influence the social type for the better.”[18] In short, the challenges of Alentejo’s landscape made it possible to sustain a virtuous national community.
A few years before his visit to Italy, Pequito Rebelo had published Farmer’s Primer (1922), in which he had used the ordered fields of the Integral Method as a simple metaphor to help rural people to understand the new social order advocated by Luso-Integralists: “The counter-revolution, the reaction, is the same thing as taking over a poorly governed homestead and giving it order and good habits.”[19] In 1928, already two years into dictatorial rule, in a speech at the students union of the University of Coimbra (the first supplier of high-ranking bureaucrats to the state apparatus), Pequito Rebelo had in mind something more than just metaphors for simple-minded farmers. On that occasion, he argued that applying the Integral Method meant producing the Integral Nation. According to Pequito Rebelo’s political agenda, hard-working farmers and peasants organized in rural syndicates denied the individualistic theories of liberalism and formed the basis of a nation built on authentic corporations and not on artificial class organizations. Therefore, Pequito Rebelo urged “our dictatorial government” to “follow the example of our sister dictatorships and show its agrophile intentions as the fundamental idea of administration.”[20] More emphatically, “the political renaissance of the Latin people goes hand in hand with the apotheosis of Ceres. One just has to watch Mussolini calling himself the agricultural condottiere, designing and commanding the battaglia del grano, and asserting that bisogna ruralizare l’Italia, Italy must be ruralized.”[21] Ruralization was thus to become one of the main features of the recently inaugurated dictatorial regime.
The Portuguese Wheat Campaign: Chemical Fertilizers and Large Estates
In 1929, only three years after the military coup d’état that inaugurated in Portugal the authoritarian regime that would endure until 1974, the dictatorship launched a national mobilization for bread self-sufficiency evoking the enormous weight of wheat in Portugal’s commercial deficit.[22] The campaign was the final result of several initiatives since the mid 1920s to promote wheat production and support wheat protectionism against the menace of cheap foreign grain. These initiatives were undertaken by large landowners and their organizations, such as the Central Association of Portuguese Agriculture, in which Pequito Rebelo was a prominent figure. The Bread Week (1924), the National Congress of Wheat (1929), the Wheat Train (1928), the “best wheat spike” contest (1928), and a series of articles published in O Século, in Diário de Lisboa and in other major national newspapers were all direct precursors of the Wheat Campaign, officially launched in 1929 with explicit reference to the example of fascist Italy and the Battaglia del Grano.[23]
The mobilization for the production of the most basic good—bread—brought together big landowners selling cereal at prices guaranteed by the state, agricultural machine builders, chemical industries producing fertilizers, and masses of sharecroppers reclaiming land.
There is a consensus in the literature that the campaign should not be seen exclusively from the point of view of agriculture.[24] The major reason for this is probably the obvious role played in it by Companhia União Fabril (CUF), which, with its 6,000 workers, was the biggest chemical conglomerate on the Iberian Peninsula at the time. From 1927 until 1934, Portugal’s production of fertilizers more than doubled, which more than justified the CUF’s financing of demonstration fields and other propaganda actions praising the use of its fertilizers to win the Wheat Campaign.[25] Above, I insisted in the importance of the connections between chemical industry and agriculture for Italian fascism established through Strampelli’s Ardito. In looking at the Portuguese Wheat Campaign, I want to go a step further and delve into the ways new wheat strains contributed to the first institutional forms of the Portuguese fascist corporatist state.[26] As we will see, after the campaign an entire new set of corporatist institutions was created, with the National Federation of Wheat Producers (Federação Nacional de Produtores de Trigo) controlling production and commercialization at the national level, Farmers’ Guilds (Grémios da Lavoura) gathering landowners in regional structures, and Houses of People (Casas do Povo) locally undertaking peasant basic welfare initiatives.[27]
15
On the north/south dichotomy and its relation to nationalist discourses, see Sobral, “O Norte, o Sul….”
16
Pequito Rebelo developed an entire set of new agricultural machinery adapted to the application of the Integral Method. For him there was no doubt that artifacts had politics. See José Pequito Rebelo “A evolução da utensilagem do Método Integral,” in Pequito Rebelo,
20
Pequito Rebelo,
21
Ibid., p. 51. Pequito Rebelo uses the Italian expressions “battaglia del grano” and “bisogna ruralizare l’Italia.”
22
The best source of information on the Portuguese Wheat Campaign are still the long two articles by José Machado Pais, Aida Maria Valadas de Lima, José Ferreira Baptista, Maria Fernanda Marques de Jesus, and Maria Margarida Gameiro, “Elementos para a história do fascismo nos campos: A ‘Campanha do Trigo’: 1928–38 (I),”
24
Manuel Lucena, “Salazar e a intervenção no sector primário,”
26
For a similar approach for Franco’s Spain, intertwining the development of corporatist structures with the production and distribution of new rice strains, see Lino Camprubí, “One grain, one nation: Rice genetics and the corporate state in early Francoist Spain (1939–1952),”
27
For an overview of the territorial coverage of the corporatist structure at the beginning of the 1940s, see Luís Quartin Graça,