In spite of the natural lack of phosphorus in the soil, the terras galegas had a rich reserve of nitrogen and organic matter supplied by the shrubs covering the heath. The growing availability of fertilizers from chemical companies like CUF made it possible to correct the phosphorus deficits and to integrate these uncultivated lands into Portugal’s grain economy. As a result of intense use of thin soils in the Wheat Campaign, severe erosion problems and decreased productivities would surface in the 1950s and the 1960s, driving away many of the sharecroppers who had first reclaimed them. But in 1934 and 1935 the fascist New State could boost that for the first time in the country’s long history the national soil gave bread to every Portuguese.
It is hard to underestimate the role of chemical fertilizers in the political economy of the large estates—the latifundia—that dominated Alentejo. While sharecroppers could reclaim thin soils only because of the new availability of phosphates, the deep clay soils explored directly by the landowners under wage labor regime also demanded careful use of fertilizers to correct their very variable mineral composition. This tripartite social structure—landowners, sharecroppers, and wage laborers—found in chemical fertilizers an important material basis not only for its survival but also for its expansion.[48] Against all the reformers who insisted that only division of the latifundia would make settlement of the scarcely populated Alentejo possible, and who were willing to reproduce the model of the country’s northern provinces with rural populations thriving on small and intensely cultivated plots of land, the large landholders, for whom Pequito Rebelo was probably the most eloquent spokesman, argued that the large estate was the organic unit best adapted to the conditions of southern Portugal. Proving their point, the province would experience, as a result of migration from other areas of the country, a sustained increase of population until the 1950s.[49] The migrants didn’t settle as new independent small farmers, instead integrating the latifúndio system. Most of them secured some land, but only very small plots that couldn’t guarantee the sustenance of a household; as a result, they had to work in large estates, either as sharecroppers or, if they didn’t possess animals, as wage laborers. Following Integralists and their corporatist ideas of social harmony, the latifúndio materialized thus in the landscape the encounter between all members of the community, rich and poor, landlord and sharecropper, worker and foreman.
Large landholders in Alentejo have been repeatedly identified among the main supporters of the fascist New State and there is no good reason to contest that. In the Po Valley the paramilitary Blackshirt squads had broken the rural workers’ unions; in Alentejo the landholders were able to mobilize the state National Republican Guard to undertake the same violent job. An oppressed and underpaid workforce was an essential condition for maintaining the profitability of the large estates, and the new regime was happy to provide one. This favoritism toward the oligarchy of Alentejo has served as demonstration of the social conservatism of Oliveira Salazar’s New State, which allegedly lacked the revolutionary character of other fascist regimes. It is thus common in the historiography to underscore the division in the interior of the regime between ruralists and industrialists, with the first dominating clearly the scene until the 1950s. If industrialists supported a development policy based on import substitution, ruralists, allegedly attached to traditional aristocratic values, were suspicious of the virtuous of technology and science and used all their political influence in Salazar’s regime to halt modernization of Portuguese society and to keep timeless social structures in place. Instead of a fascist regime, there would then be no more than a conservative dictatorship willing to “keep life as usual,” as Salazar liked to say.[50]
Such a thesis tends to ignore the technological nature of the large estates.[51] It takes at face value much of the rural rhetoric of the regime itself, and ignores the machines and chemical fertilizers on which the large estates had thrived since the end of the nineteenth century. Strangely, Pequito Rebelo is the figure historians have chosen to embody the ruralist reaction against the regime’s industrialists. They have overlooked the fact that besides owning a large estate in Alentejo he was also an enthusiastic aviator, which might have had put scholars in the unexplored path of the modernism of the ruralists. In Italy, the goggles used by Mussolini while threshing wheat, made it easier for historians to see how futurism could go along with agriculture. Here is one of Pequito Rebelo’s praises of large estates, from one of the many speeches he gave on the subject:
Ladies and gentlemen, I wish to present you the anti-latifundium prejudice. It denies the motherland one of its higher attributes, its freedom to be large and vast and offer itself to the civilizing undertakings that man aspires to. If the land wishes to organize itself as a monument to production, an immense tapestry of wheat fields, forests, orchards, and animal herds, with men in its interior in disciplined and harmonious labor, with vastness and abundance, petty ideas charge against this natural creation sustained in its environment and time. When observing the bustle of Ceres harvesting a vast wheat field, petty men dress her a strait-jacket, retail her august mantle, and bring to agriculture, which single aim is to multiply, the obsession of destruction.[52]
Pequito Rebelo’s Edenic depiction of Alentejo’s large estates equated them with a “monument to production.” This was no going back in time, but a utopian vision of an organic alternative modernity in which productivity and social harmony were not in conflict.[53] A veteran of trench warfare in World War I who also had fought on the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Pequito Rebelo didn’t shy away from calling for violent police repression whenever agricultural workers broke such alleged harmony.[54] But the point here is that technology played a central role in Pequito Rebelo’s integralist celebration of land and blood. While his futurist enthusiasm for speed materialized in the motorcycle he rode while a member of the Portuguese military in World War I or in the airplane he flew on his own initiative to help Franco’s regime exterminate his political enemies, his organic nation materialized in the wheat rows of the integral method, in the new agricultural machines he designed, and in the chemical fertilizers that were used to expand the latifundium.
Ardito in Portugaclass="underline" Plant Breeding and the Fascist Corporatist State
After the discussion of Strampelli’s strains and their resistance to lodging, it doesn’t take much to understand the importance of technoscientific organisms in making plausible the alternative modernity of Portuguese fascism. Large estates maintained and expanded through chemical fertilizers made sense only if there were plants that could profit from them without lodging. And here I’m not making just a comparative formal remark between Italy and Portugal. In fact, the Italian case meant much more than an inspiring example useful for quotations in newspapers and leaflets praising Mussolini and his policies. The soils of both countries, trusted with the burden of feeding the two nations and enhancing the qualities of the Italian and Portuguese populations, were to be related in a much more material way. The Portuguese wheat estates were also cultivated with Strampelli’s “elite races,” Ardito and Mentana.
48
The structure was actually more complicated, integrating migrant labors from other regions of the country hired for the harvests; foremen; and farmers that worked their own land. See Cutileiro,
49
A major factor in such internal migration was the new restrictive policy in tthe United States and in Brazil.
50
See, in particular, Fernando Rosas,
51
Economic historians have in fact provided an alternative version of Alentejo large estate owners, demonstrating not only that they had no prejudice against the employment of technology in their capitalist explorations but that they were instead eager enthusiasts of innovations. Jaime Reis, “Latifúndio e progresso técnico: a difusão da debulha mecânica no Alentejo, 1860–1930,”
52
Mário de Castro,
53
Perhaps the most obvious reason why the wheat campaign didn’t oppose ruralists to industrialists was that the first allies of the large landowners in its promotion was the Portuguese chemical industry, which was growing around the capital city and was willing to create a protected market for its fertilizers. In other words, the organic cell of the large estate also contributed to the organic community at the national scale. Confirming that we shouldn’t take the opposition between ruralists and industrialists at face value, it is important to remember that the largest project of the industrialists was the electrification of the country by means of a network of large dams. The main consumer of the new available electricity was the chemical industry, which used it in the production of fertilizers. See J. Martins Pereira,
54
As was typical of fascist regimes, early supporters such as Pequito Rebelo became fierce critics of the regime for not being revolutionary enough.