Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fascism

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CHAPTER 19: The Cheka — spelled Ceca or Ovra

POWER RESTS ON FEAR AS WELL AS THE CONSENT OF THE Governed. The corner policeman still plays a part in our lives. We, the fortunate who are governed by a President, a Congress or a parliament whom we elect and who are not dictated to by a man in absolute power, frequently may protest actions by the forces of law and order as terroristic, but we cannot, even when we go touring in foreign lands, completely realize the state of fear that exists under a political system which employs terror as an instrument.

Even in time of war, when an enemy occupies a country, the very necessary mass terrorism which frees the rulers from the alternative of appointing one policeman for every inhabitant is mild in comparison to the dictatorial system.

Terrorism is the finest and cheapest weapon of the modern tyrant. But if he wishes to avoid the ignominious fate of a weakling, a Primo de Rivera for example, the tyrant of our day must be ruthless, unsentimental, unswerving; he must have little regard for human life; he must be implacable and he must remain fixed on the idea of survival.

To meet that problem Mussolini found that the methods of his predecessors were useless. After he had dispersed all the organized elements of opposition, from the political parties to the comparatively unimportant Mafia in the south, he realized that he had to employ the same terroristic organizations which the rulers of Russia forced upon Lenin in 1918 when leniency with enemies of the regime resulted in many plots and the attempted assassination of the head of the government.

Mussolini already had his bodyguard, his little group of men who carried out the secret orders. He now began to build a powerful organization. At the same time he made public and press statements denying its existence and one day had the courage to repeat them to the Chamber of Deputies.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I am the one who brings forth in this hall the accusations against myself.

"It has been said that I would have founded a 'Cheka.'

"Where? When? In what way? Nobody is able to say. Russia has executed without trial from 150,000 to 160,000 people, as shown by statistics almost official. There has been a Cheka in Russia which has exercised terror systematically over all the middle classes and over the individual members of those classes, a Cheka which said it was the red sword of revolution. But an Italian Cheka never had a shadow of existence.

"Nobody has ever denied that I am possessed of these three qualities: a discreet intelligence, a lot of courage, and an utter contempt for the lure of money.

"If I had founded a Cheka I would have done it following the lines of reasoning that I have always used in defending one kind of violence that can never be eliminated from history.

"I have always said — and those who have always followed me in these five years of hard struggle can now remember it — that violence, to be useful in settling anything, must be surgical, intelligent, and chivalrous. Now, all the exploits of any so-called Cheka have always been unintelligent, passionate, and stupid.

"Can you really think that I could order — on that day following the anniversary of Christ's birth when all saintly spirits are hovering near — can you think that I could order an assault at ten o'clock in the morning? . . . Please do not think me such an idiot."

Yet despite his calling on all saintly spirits that Christmas day, 'despite his disavowal of violence, a Cheka which, it is true, still had no name or definite organization, was already flourishing in Italy in the Year One, Era Fascista. The Saint-Just of the Italian terror system was that same Rossi who was so prominent in the Matteotti case. He himself was a great admirer of Djerdzinsky of Russia, and commonly among themselves, Mussolini, Rossi, Dumini, and the others referred to their little group as the "Ceca" which in Italian is pronounced Cheka.

Following the threatened uprising in 1924 it was nationalized. According to its chief, "Several days before the Matteotti tragedy, facing the acts, gestures of indisciphne, and nonchalance of Fascist Deputies, such as Rocca and Ravazzola, Mussolini before me and others of the National Directorate, expressed his astonishment that the party police, the famous 'Ceca,' had given no sign of life. On that occasion he said in absolute tranquillity, 'Action against these parliamentary gentlemen cannot be taken by any legal arm; we deplore, we expel, we demand the resignations, but they do not give a darn. . . . There is nothing to do but beat them without mercy. This Ceca, does it function or not?'

"The mother-idea of this Ceca was Mussolini's alone. . . . The necessity of an organ for defense and for vengeance was explained by Mussolini as follows: 'The regime does not yet dispose of legal means for beating its enemies. Laws which exist represent the liberal spirit against which Fascism has arisen. To fill in this gap all governments in a state of transition have need of illegal powers to put their adversaries in place.'

"If as a result, in the activity of the Cheka there were committed acts which were arbitrary and inopportune, this does not diminish the responsibility of its author, Mussolini. To attribute them solely to Rossi and Marinelli is the height of audacity and puerility."

Several years ago, when the Cheka was still a mystery, Paolo Valera made the declaration that this organization was a part of the Ministry of the Interior and "appears to be a society of criminals and assassins. Its chief ... is said to be Cesare Rossi, head of the press bureau of the Ministry. ... Its agents are famous for their crimes." Prezzolini, one of the rare intellectuals who have spoken in favor of the regime, admits that "the Matteotti and preceding crimes force the admission that there existed a veritable criminal association preparing and executing the attacks and destruction inspired by Cesare Rossi."

So long as the censorship flourished and foreign correspondents were afraid to write anything which might offend Mussolini or were covetous of his good will, the Cheka was never mentioned. But on July 13, 1925, came the supreme test for honest journalists. It was on that day that of the 140 members of parliament who had seceded more than 100 signed an indictment against the Cheka. The signatories were not only Socialists who were mourning their secretary-general and leader, but also the representatives of the Catholic, Republican, Democratic, and Liberal Parties. Said this document:

"The conclusion is that the inquiry conducted by the High Court has brought out evidence more than sufficient to show that under the auspices of the Head of the Government (Mussolini), men in confidence sharing the functions if not the real and proper responsibilities of government, organized crimes to punish Deputies for their opposition to the regime; and that for the preparation of these crimes there was a special collective organization (Cheka) of which several members are known."

Journalists who cabled the above became persona non grata with the Fascist government and were expelled.

On the 29th of May, 1923, Misuri, member of parliament, who had quit the Fascist Party and therefore earned the undying hatred of its leader, made a speech of criticism to which the Duce replied by a public threat of punishment. Almost immediately Misuri was attacked by Cheka men and beaten up. In a statement to the press [1] Misuri charged Mussolini with giving orders for the assault to several gangsters, but there was no contradiction to this statement, no libel suit.

"The Misuri incident," reported James Murphy, "is a definite landmark and probably marks the first official operation of the Cheka in its official functioning as a normal organ of the government."

The complete exposure of the Cheka as a murder organization and also as a racket was made before the Senate of Rome by Dr. Donati, editor of the Catholic newspaper Il Popolo, during the trial of General De Bono. The evidence states in part:

"The criminal association — or the Cheka, as it is more commonly called— bound together under a pact of mutual common action in crime the highest leaders of Fascism (Rossi, Marinelli, and so forth), the professional assassins (Dumini, Volpi, and so forth), and the non-official coadjutors (Corriere Italiano, Filippelli, and so forth). It had its headquarters in a government building, the Viminal, where Senator De Bono also had his dual headquarters, as Director-General of Police and Chief of the Militia.

"The Cheka, which had already existed in embryonic form, was endowed with a regular constitution of its own at a meeting held in the private residence of the Premier, in the Via Rasella. Among those present was General De Bono, who had already been appointed Director-General of Police and First Commander-General of the Militia. There is explicit mention of this meeting in the affidavit drawn up by Finzi, which was submitted to three gentlemen who can give evidence as to its contents. These are Signor Schiff Giorgini, Commendatore Guglielmo Emmanuel head of the Roman office of the Corriere della Sera, and the journalist Carlo Silvestri. This is also borne out by the evidence which these gentlemen have already given before the Crown Prosecutor and confirmed by Finzi himself in a recent conversation which he had with Silvestri. Therefore the Cheka represented a constitutional organ of the Fascist Party and the Fascist Government.

"As we shall see, the Cheka was entrusted with a two-fold task: (i) to spy attentively on all movements of political parties and persons opposed to Fascism, also on lukewarm friends and open dissenters; (2) to suppress the more dangerous adversaries by violence in style, [2] under an astute system of protection which ensured the immunity of the assassins and their paymasters.

"The executive of the Cheka is identical with the General Command of the militia. The General Command recruited the hired assassins, furnished the material and financial means, arranged the plans, gathered information, provided — through the office of the Premier's press agency (Cesare Rossi) — for the 'working up' of public opinion, and made arrangements with the police authorities to guarantee the immunity of the direct culprits.

"The Cheka was considered as an instrument necessary for the government of the country, according to the literal expression used by Finzi in his affidavit. To this Cheka organization we are to attribute the well-known acts of violence committed against the Deputies Mazzolani, Misuri, Buffoni, Amendola, Forni, Bergamini, Nitti, and the journalist Giannini; also the murder of Father Giovanni Minzoni at Argenta, the murder of the laborer Antonio Piccinini, Socialist candidate in Reggio Emilia, and the murder of Matteotti."

While the Fascist Senate failed to indict General De Bono for complicity in the murder of Matteotti "for lack of sufficient evidence," it did not deny Donati's charges that there was a Cheka functioning in Italy and even referred to it as "the committee which has been organized against the enemies of Fascism." In corroboration of Donati's charges there were General Balbo's letter about the Minzoni murder, the confessions of Rossi and Filippelli, and other sworn statements, most of which the Senate refused to read. Threatened with immediate death, the Catholic editor fled to France the day the Senate report was issued.

In January, 1926, the French government discovered how vast and international the Fascist Cheka had become when Ricciotti Garibaldi, one of the grandsons of the founder of Italian liberty, who seemingly was active in France in the struggle for restoration of freedom in his native land, was arrested by the police of Nice.

At the trial, in November, testimony was given that there was a conspiracy in southern France to organize two armies, one of Spaniards, the other of Italians, and march against the dictators. Garibaldi had involved Colonel Francesco Macia, the ardent Catalonian patriot (and after the Spanish revolution, governor of Catalonia) in gun-running to Spain, and had furnished the information to Mussolini directly, so that the Italian dictator could retail it to his Spanish colleague De Rivera and thus further their secret treaty of cooperation and good-will. Moreover, Garibaldi had conspired with gunmen in Paris, with leading Freemasons and republicans, and with labor leaders and patriots who saw in him the possible liberator of Italy. So cleverly did he do his work that even Fascist agents were fooled. Thus Luigi Villari at the time wrote that the "neo-Garibaldian movement was being prepared under the leadership of Ricciotti Garibaldi, Junior . . . with the support of Italian and French Freemasonry. The aim was actually to attempt an armed invasion of Italy. . . ."

Villari indignantly reports meetings between the Paris Freemasons, Garibaldi and Torrigiani, head of the Grand Orient of Italy, and connects them all with the conspiracy of Tito Zaniboni to assassinate Mussolini. The fact is that Garibaldi was sent by Mussolini to do several jobs as an agent provocateur, but his main purpose in going to France was twofold: to earn 2,000,000 lire for stealing the documents signed by Mussolini [3] from Signer Fasciolo, one-time secretary to the Duce, and to earn another 2,000,000 if he succeeded in putting Fasciolo "out of circulation." He succeeded in neither of these things, but he did earn 645,000 lire for what he did accomplish.

On November 6th it was reported that "Garibaldi confessed to being an agent provocateur, a stool pigeon in the pay of Mussolini. Mussolini's government is exposed as deliberately fomenting plots; as sending its secret agents to France to play the spy and traitor; as paying 100,000 francs in a single sum for a mean piece of work done on French territory in violation of the French laws." [4]

The official criminal-court record at the Paris trial shows Garibaldi confessing that he had intrigued with a man named Scevoli to go on a mission to Rome; having obtained Scevoli's passport. Garibaldi sent it to Lapolla, chief of the Fascist police, who used it for secret trips between Garibaldi and Mussolini.

Of the 645,000 lire received. Garibaldi confessed, 400,000 came from Federzoni. Papers and letters from Federzoni and from Gino Lucetti, one of the would-be assassins of Mussolini, were introduced and read. At the close of the first day's hearings there was more than a suspicion that Garibaldi might have been involved in a plot to assassinate the Duce for the benefit of dissenting Fascist leaders, of whom the most notable in 1926 was Federzoni, the nationalist and royalist.

The second day's hearings, which coincided with reports from Rome of 100 dead and 1,000 wounded in the three-day riots which the Fascists carried out as reprisals for the Zaniboni shooting, Ricciotti was confronted by Sante Garibaldi.

"There is not one among us who would not have gone blindly to death at the bidding of this man, because of the name he bears," said Sante Garibaldi, pointing at Ricciotti; and then addressing the latter: "If you have the lightest sense of honor left, there is but one thing remaining for you to do. What are you waiting for? Why don't you beat out your brains against a wall?"

"I am a victim of fatality," muttered Garibaldi. He had come to court wearing his monocle and his Legion of Honor ribbon; he had tried for a few minutes to deny and to brave it out, but now he was almost in tears. "It was Mussolini who led me into a trap," he concluded.

"Traitor," shouted Sante Garibaldi; "you have dragged the name of our family, glory, and honor into the mire."

"I am a victim of an awful fatality," mumbled Ricciotti, "I have taken money, it is true, but I have not betrayed the cause of liberty." He fell on his knees, clasped the hand of his young brother to his lips, and asked forgiveness.

Macia and Garibaldi were found guilty. Mussolini apologized to France.

Altogether there were nineteen conspirators on trial. Maitre Torres defended Colonel Macia.

"It is true. I admit," said the Catalonian patriot to the court. "It was my duty as a patriot. When I am free I will begin again." He confessed that the Catalonian arms were shipped as "brooms" to sweep out Catalonia; bayonets were marked "toothpicks," and rifles "flutes."

Garibaldi, Macia, and sixteen others were given short terms in prison for possessing firearms; as the seventeen men came up for sentence, each in turn dramatically walked past Garibaldi, pointed at the chest full of hero medals, and uttered the word "Traitor."

The trial also brought out the following facts:

That there existed in Europe and America a large organization of spies and agents provocateurs in the pay of Fascism.

That acts of violence committed in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and other big Italian centers against Fascists are frequently instigated by Fascist agents themselves for the purpose of furnishing pretexts for prosecutions and protests from the Italian government.

That Italian state functionaries did not hesitate to "sequester" persons, steal documents in foreign countries, and instigate attempts at assassination.

That all such actions were developed with the assistance of the Italian embassies, Ricciotti, for example, received his money and instructions in the diplomatic mail-bag to France.

All the foregoing is legal testimony; the French government has acted upon it, the Italian government has made amends, yet in Mussolini's autobiography there is only this reference: "The maneuver of the former Premiers definitely failed and became ridiculous, just as did other artificial structures attempted about that time. One was a movement inspired by Benelli, under the name of the Italian League, to create secession from Fascism, and another an underhand maneuver by some short-weight grandchildren of Garibaldi." Apparently the employee was not worthy of his hire.

It is of course possible for the head of a government, the founder of a secret police, to remain ignorant of its ramifications, its plottings, and its assassinations. Perhaps Mussolini never knew that the "short-weight grandchildren of Garibaldi" were employees of his own Cheka.

That the consulates abroad have been filled with Fascist squadrist leaders or former racketeers is generally admitted. Some of these young men now occupying diplomatic positions have never been anything but leaders of the "reprisal" gangs which terrorized small towns, administered castor oil, burned, looted, beat up those adversaries pointed out to them by Fascist political leaders. Street fights, political assassinations, and espionage trials have proven that everywhere the Italian embassies and consulates are centers of Fascist intrigue.

Several high Fascist officials were some time ago recalled from Brazil to explain numerous "incidents." There have been demonstrations against the embassy and consulates in which not only anti-Fascisti, but native Brazilians, have taken part as retaliation for Fascist racketeering. In San Paulo the police had to rescue the Fascist consul from an infuriated mob. In Buenos Aires a Fascist consul tried by force to shanghai an anti-Fascist engineer who was visiting an Italian warship; the result was a fist fight and a public scandal; another consul to Brazil was accused of plotting the murder of a rich man in order to marry the widow; in Argentine a Fascist consul was arrested for dealing in obscene post cards. Almost all the consuls were members of the former squadristi.

In a more recent international scandal, in Brussels, it was testified in court that the Fascist agent Menapace, who planted the dynamite, revolver, and incriminating papers in the home and pockets of the anti-Fascist journalist, Cianca, was an employee of the Italian embassy. Menapace was exposed by the liberal paper Le Soir, but the embassy succeeded in helping him to escape the country. Some time later the pro-Fascist newspaper of Switzerland, Suisse, demanded the withdrawal of the Italian consul at St. Gall and eight other Fascist spies, so flagrant had become the racketeering in that canton. The Swiss government easily expelled the eight gangsters, but had to negotiate with the Italian ambassador because the Fascist gangster-consul claimed diplomatic immunity.

After four years of officially denying the existence of a Ceca, or Cheka, Mussolini, by virtue of Article 8 of the law of November 25, 1926, "legalized" the organization by establishing exceptional tribunals "for the defense of the State," a euphemism which the French used during the Commune, and the Soviets in 1918. The law provided that it was to remain active until December 6, 1931, Mussolini expressing the hope that within five years he would extirpate all opposition. Meanwhile a new penal code was written, which went into effect July 1, 1931. But the Fascist Party, realizing that its strength of a little more than 1,500,000 was not enough to intimidate the majority, held a special session of the Grand Council on March 6, 1931, which decided that "political crimes, as comprehended by the new penal code, must be submitted to the special tribunal for the defense of the State, whose functions are prolonged until 1936." The special tribunal is the O. V. R. A., Organizzazione Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo; [5] it is the terroristic arm of Fascism and Mussolini's personal vengeance; it is the old bastard child of Fascism, the Ceca, grown up and legitimatized by its brilliant father.

Today the work of the O. V. R. A. is international; it employs thousands if not several hundred thousand agents; in fact, Bolitho believed that every tenth man in Italy is at least a part-time worker of the organization.

Ever since its emergence from secrecy, the activities of the Cheka have received notice in the official press, usually a few lines like the following:

"The special section O. V. R. A. of the department of public safety, a part of the Ministry of the Interior, has discovered a clandestine organization. . . ."

"The O. V. R. A. has likewise identified a Communist organization in Emilia and has made arrests, denouncing the chiefs to the special tribunal."

"The O. V. R. A. has discovered in Rome an anti-Fascist group developing criminal activity by the clandestine distribution of defamatory literature. The chiefs have been arrested: Mario Vinciguerra, Renzo Rendi, and Madame Widow De Bosis."

Thus, many years after Mussolini had officially denied that in the Ministry of Interior, the Viminale, he had under him a branch of government commonly called Cheka, it is officially announced that the O. V. R. A. of the Viminale Palace, where Mussolini still presides, is functioning excellently.

It was the third of these announcements which interested America because Signora De Bosis was born Lillian Vernon, of Springfield, Missouri. Her father was dean of a college in upper New York State, and her son, Dr. Lauro De Bosis, of Columbia University, was head of the National Alliance which the O. V. R. A., through an agent provocateur, succeeded in crushing. This Alliance had three objectives: to tell the news which the press suppressed, to form a union of the constitutional parties, and to prepare the "men of order" to take over the government when Fascism collapsed and a Bolshevik reaction followed. The Alliance sent out circulars written by Lauro De Bosis; Vinciguerra and Rendi were sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment on the charge that they mailed the circulars. Both are journalists, the former once on the liberal Mondo, the latter occasional and literary correspondent of the New York Evening Post and New York Times.

Another plot netted twenty-four intellectuals. The O. V. R. A. always had an able instrument. From the time of Rossi and Dumini, Mussolini has always had some important, usually quite intelligent, man in his Cheka who carried out personal orders and pursued personal enemies.

This agent was sent by the O. V. R. A. to visit prominent leaders abroad who were Mussolini's enemies. In October, 1929, for example, he came to Brussels to interest Count Sforza in a little dynamiting. He began by asking the former Minister of Foreign Affairs if ideas were enough and whether violence were not better; he had some nice chemical plans for bombs and believed it would be a fine gesture to throw one at the Pope, or at least blow up Saint Peter's, as a sign to the world that there was anti-Fascist activity. Count Sforza asked the agent to leave the house, so the agent went after smaller game.

Returning to Milan, he trafficked with numerous professional men; one of them, the chemist Umberto Ceva, member of the old Republican party, liberal and democrat, he tried to interest in his bomb schemes. Ceva answered he would not care to play the game of violence. However, on leaving the house, he placed a piece of paper with the design for a bomb, on Ceva's table, and it was found in the place indicated to them, by the O. V. R. A. agents and militia who made the arrest the next morning.

Given the third degree in the prison, Ceva, believing the agent an honest if too violent anti-Fascist, refused to admit the origin of the paper with the bomb design. He committed suicide rather than betray the betrayer, A few days later the press officially announced the agent of the O. V. R. A. Ceva's suicide was kept secret by the Fascist government until a protest from groups of British intellectuals asking for a fair trial was sent to Mussolini.

Another of the agent's victims was Mussolini's personal enemy, Ferruccio Parri, who with Carlo Rosselli aided Filippo Turati, for many years head of the anti-Fascist movement in France, to escape from Italy. Parri, major of the general staff during the war, liberal-democrat-republican, was sentenced to a year in prison, then "forced domicile," then to the island of Ponza, then Lipari, and finally, having expiated not only his original crime, but every charge the O. V. R. A. could bring, he returned to Milan. Here the agent attempted to get his consent for a dynamite plot, and despite Parri's being declared not guilty by the Special Tribunal, he was in 1931 sent to an African colony for five years.

Another personal enemy of Mussolini's, Camillo Berneri, professor of philosophy, was the victim of the O. V. R. A. agent Menapace, who placed a false passport and a quantity of an explosive called cheddite in Eerneri's pockets, then informed the Brussels police. As this occurred at the time the Italian Crown Prince was shot at in Belgium, Berneri was arrested, deported, then arrested in France and in Luxembourg and in France again. The professor to this day doesn't know what all the political intrigue is about.

An American journalist of many year's residence in Rome, one who is forced by circumstances to send glowing reports via the daily cables, and one of many who has smuggled true reports to the present writer, thus sums up the situation:

"The Fascist system has given modern Italy the atmosphere in which the Medici and the Borgias would find themselves perfectly at home. After years of Fascist rule and consolidation, the Italian people are still deprived of all liberties. They accept this as a measure of force majeure, silently, but they suffer from a sense of slavery to an oligarchy which does not represent the best elements in Italian life. The right to keep silent is practically the only one left.

"The opposition is watched, tracked down like wild beasts. No one can find out how many unfortunates are imprisoned in the unhealthy isles or in the prisons of the mainland. The special tribunals have condemned wholesale, large groups. One tribunal in one year condemned 400 persons to 2,000 years' imprisonment. . . . All these events are carefully concealed so that no indignation may be aroused abroad. . . . The Duce admits 100,000 professional policemen. There are even more in plainclothes. . . . Amateur spies are daily denouncing persons they suspect according to the best traditions of a reign of terror. Petty and private tyranny takes the most exasperating and minor forms. . . . All this is never felt nor suspected by the visiting tourists. . . .

"All this is accepted supinely and in silence by the Italian people, who are waiting for something to happen which will deliver them from a domination and a fate which they do not think they deserve and from a system which is entirely alien to their civilization and beliefs. ... It would require too much space to recall the incidents revealing the miasma of oppression and repression under which Italians live. . . . The special revolutionary tribunal functions with harshness and ferocity. . . . Families of persons sent to confino (island exile) and of those who are fuorusciti or exiles, are subject to reprisals and held almost as hostages. . . . The secret police and system of national espionage penetrate every corner of Italian life. Persons are careful in talking to anyone. Everyone, accordingly, lives in an atmosphere of submission, without open expression.

"General Capello, hero of Gorizia and friend of the King, is in confino. No one except Mussolini knows how many Italians are there. The estimate is as high as 200,000, but Mussolini put it at 1,500 and the truth is somewhere between these two extremes. With hundreds of persons being sentenced monthly to the islands, the figure is certainly not Mussolini's. Hundreds are in the Mediterranean Siberia without trial.

"The regime has gained little hold on the majority of the upper and educated classes. . . . The surveillance of Benedetto Croce and Professor Ferrero is no longer kept secret. Fascism's hold today is sustained by military dominance of the Black Shirts and the secret police."

No one knows how many persons have been killed by the Fascisti. Labriola, former Minister of Labor, announced that from the time Mussolini went into the employ of the employers' associations in 1920, until he entered Rome in 1922, his squadristi murdered 4,100 non-Fascists of which full case records exist. There are also lists of thousands of victims in the ensuing years of Fascist rule. Mussolini's one reply has been that the Bolsheviki in Russia killed more.

Mussolini defends not only violence as his means to power and means of maintenance in power, but terrorism as well. "In the creation of a new State," he says, "which is authoritarian but not absolutist, hierarchial, and organic — namely, open to the people in all its classes, categories, and interests — lies the revolutionary originality of Fascism, and a teaching, perhaps, for the whole modern world, oscillating between the authority of the State and that of the individual, between the State and the anti-State. Like all other revolutions, the Fascist revolution has had a dramatic development, but this in itself would not suffice to distinguish it. The reign of terror is not a revolution: it is only a necessary instrument in a determined phase of the revolution."

This phase of the Fascist revolution has now officially been extended for almost ten years.

_______________

Notes:

1. Il Popolo, Rome, December 21, 1924.

2. '"Bastonatura in stile" (bastinadoing in style) is the technical phrase used in the orders sent out from the headquarters of the National militia. It stands for a distinct type of cudgeling, and those who are entrusted with the task have been specially trained in the barracks, where they have a dummy figure on which they practise. The weapon used is a specially made bludgeon which is rather heavy towards the end and is somewhat flexible. Most of the blows are inflicted on the lower part of the face, for the purpose of breaking the jawbone and thus laying up the victim for months. Care is taken not to fracture the skull, lest death may ensue.

3. Gobetti telegram, etc., and letters relative to the American oil deal of 1924.

4. New York World, November 6, 1926.

5. Also called Opera Volontaria Repressione Antifascista.

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CHAPTER 20: The Fate of Heroes

IN THE MARCH OF THE FASCIST PARTY FROM A WEAK, opportunistic compromising minority to absolute dictatorship it was necessary to employ methods tested in medieval times, proven invaluable by the Germans when they held enemy Belgium, and more recently used with abundant success by Hitler. Sentimentalists and idealists alone raised horrified hands against the taking of hostages and the shooting of high officials, hut realists and militarists knew only too well that it was impossible for Ludendorff in 1914 to withstand the plotters and the snipers unless he used terrorism.

In Italy Mussolini was ably assisted by his generals. Of the original Quadrumvirate, the Generals De Bono, De Vecchi, Italo Balbo and Michele Bianchi, who more or less led the march on Rome, all but one shared in the work of establishing the necessary Black Terror, and Bianchi died too soon to enjoy its fruits.

Many of the original minor heroes of Fascism have already been mentioned: Dumini, Rossi, Marinelli, Filippelli, Finzi, Volpi. Of the major heroes, the most impressive is Italo Balbo. At the age of twenty-five he was repaid for his devotion to the Duce by being put in command of the Black Shirt militia and given the title of ras, or sub-dictator, of the province of Ferrara. Here in the town of Argenta he found the leading anti-Fascist to be the veteran priest, Minzoni, who remained a follower of Don Sturzo and who preached the old Catholic Party ideas of social-reform. On August 23, 1923, Balbo's militia organized a "punitive expedition" to Argenta, where they burned and destroyed Catholic institutions and murdered the priest. More than a year later public opinion forced the government to stage a public trial of the murderers. It was then testified that all violence in Ferrara was under the direct leadership of Balbo. The charges were so grave that Mussolini asked him to resign. But lieutenants of the Balbo type cannot be replaced easily. A year later he was given a higher position.

During the hearing, in November, the following document was published in the Opposition press. It relates to a trial of several men accused of anti-Fascist activities, but as no evidence, real or falsified, was produced, the Fascist judges were forced to free them. Whereupon Balbo wrote:

"To the commanding general:

"As far as the men acquitted December 2 are concerned, it will be necessary to explain to them that a change of air and establishment in another province is necessary. If they insist on remaining and consequently causing moral discomfort, it will be necessary to beat them — not too much, but as is customary — until they decide to leave.

"Show only this part of my letter to the prefect and say to him in my name that I have sufficient evidence to justify my demand that the ruffians should leave the city and province. The questura will do well to persecute them at least weekly and let the prefect notify the King's procuratore that for a possible beating, which must be in style, a trial is not desired. Read this part of the letter to the consiglio federale. If I write this from Rome it is certain that I know of what I speak. Basta.

"Italo Balbo."

Despite the publication of documents which he could not refute and which accused him of fomenting violence and being implicated in bloodshed, Italo Balbo continued to gain in power. He became the commander of the Italian air forces, and led one squadron to South America and another to the United States.

On the occasion of a luncheon given the hero by the Lord Mayor of London in December, 1930, the latter read a long series of telegrams of congratulations. Among them this one:

"Unable to participate at your luncheon in the flesh, I am present in spirit. Dom Minzoni."

There was a fine burst of British applause, but Balbo went as white as Macbeth on first seeing Banquo's ghost. After his flight to America Balbo was honored with an invitation to the White House and thousands of columns of praise, with no mention of his racketeering past, were published, nor did the press explain the riot in New York or the effigies inscribed "assassino" which greeted the hero on arrival.

But almost immediately upon returning to Rome to receive the congratulations of a proud nation, Balbo was surprised to find every newspaper publishing an official history of his conquest of the Atlantic, a history which gave credit to Mussolini for organizing and directing the entire adventure. This surprise was turned into chagrin a little later when Balbo was sent to Africa as governor of Libya. Again the world understood that there was room for only one Caesar in Rome.

Quadrumvir De Vecchi alone has escaped the Duce's jealous wrath. Shortly after the "capture" of Rome, at a time the Opposition ridiculed the event which the victors called a "revolution," the Fascisti realized that a "blood bath" — to use the exact phrase and proposal which Mussolini once made — was necessary to consolidate the victory. On December 17, 1922, occurred the Massacre of Turin. On that day and the next several hundred anti-Fascists were beaten and at least a score murdered. Several more succumbed later. When, on the first day of the massacre, the Fascist dictator of Turin, Brandimarte, was informed by journalists that only fourteen of the men listed for execution had been found dead, he replied, "The Po will deliver up the remaining bodies." But the glory of this "purge" was not given to Brandimarte. On the 1st of January, 1923, Undersecretary of State De Vecchi said in a public speech:

"Yes, the reaction of a few days ago was necessary; and though I was not there, I accept the responsibility for all that happened."

In Part XXV of his confession Rossi states that "I must in good faith declare that in this case no orders were sent from Rome. The responsibility lay entirely with the group of Turin Fascists gathered by Deputy De Vecchi. . . . [His] assumption of responsibility was easy enough for him, since he enjoyed parliamentary immunity, and justice and the police were in acquiescence."

The extent of the massacre having surpassed all in Fascist history, it caused a tremendous reaction throughout Italy. In Mussolini's cabinet, at the time, there were still several liberals who opposed violence and demanded that the guilty be punished. A commission of inquiry was sent. Gasti, its chief, took testimony which, while convicting Brandimarte of the murders, proved the inspiration of the action was De Vecchi.

Mussolini immediately recalled Gasti and dissolved the commission. The Grand Fascist Council met; instead of expelling De Vecchi as the nation expected, it sent him out of the country — as governor of Somaliland. Later he was named ambassador to the Vatican, and today he is a member of the cabinet.

General De Bono, who actually planned the march on Rome, is now Colonial Minister. On one diplomatic visit to London and Paris he heard the word "assassin" frequently. In Paris thousands of leaflets were distributed and their contents republished in some papers:

"The French government today receives officially the Italian Minister of Colonies, General De Bono. On this occasion we have the duty to faring the following to the knowledge of the French public:

"1. General De Bono is one of the principle accomplices of the assassins of the Deputy Giacomo Matteotti. He aided and favored the assassins and Mussolini, saving them from justice. He was then chief of police and his responsibility is officially shown in the sentence of the Italian Senate, which judged him as a high court.

"2. General De Bono had in his hands the bloody clothing of Matteotti; he hid them and let disappear the traces of the crime which led directly up to the Duce.

"3. On Christmas day, 1923, General De Bono, chief of police, organized the bloody attack against the former liberal minister, Giovanni Amendola, chief of the Opposition parties. . . ."

Farinacci of Cremona, a railroad worker who became the chief exponent of terrorism, surprising Mussolini himself, devoted his home-town newspaper to advocating reprisals, punitive expeditions, "making life unbearable" for his opponents. One day his racketeers rounded up the small Socialist delegation and chased them; the latter found refuge in a barn of a peasant. Petroneschi was felled with one blow and left for dead. In this way he escaped death, but his colleague, Bolderi, president of the workers cooperative of Cremona, was clubbed to death. The chief murderer was Giorgio Passani, aged sixteen. Although Mussolini later deplored the crime, Farinacci declared in an interview with the press of all factions that he accepted "on behalf of Fascism the responsibility of the murder of Bolderi."

Farinacci brilliantly and sadistically conducted the trial of the corpse of Matteotti at Chieti, but immediately afterwards, instead of being rewarded by Mussolini, was permitted to resign his high offices. He accepted a provincial secretaryship. The cause of the downfall was a mystery for many years, but now it is known that Farinacci the sadist was also Farinacci the bank manipulator. He had been pardoned several doubtful banking transactions, but the list had grown too long and important to save him from political disgrace. He did save himself from jail.

Volpi, one of the confessed murderers of Matteotti, had been sentenced previously to fifteen years for killing a man during the Fascist attack on the Socialist club Foro Bonaparte. As Volpi had fled, he did not serve a day. On returning, he was absolved and went to work for the Cheka.

The chief assassin of the Fascist Cheka, Dumini, known everywhere as "The American," according to the regime's press agent, Villari, was "a discredited and disreputable Fascist from Florence, born in the United States, who had been mixed up in various acts of violence and shady transactions. . . ." For all his crimes Dumini had never served time. There are eyewitnesses to a double murder in Carrara on June 2, 1922, when Dumini struck a girl for wearing a red carnation, the symbol of the Socialist Party. The girl's mother and brother protested, in fact struck Dumini with their hands, where- upon he shot and killed them both.

Many of the "punitive expeditions" which Mussolini boasts of in his autobiography, were led by Dumini.

He also had a personal reason for assassinating Matteotti. The Opposition leader had promised that when he had finished exposing the 1924 election frauds in which he claimed 1,500,000 false ballots had been counted by the Fascisti (enough to lose them their majority in parliament if there was a true recount) he would take up the subject of commercial corruption of Fascist officials, predicting he would tell who was to get the graft if the (American) Sinclair Oil Company concession was made, and how a "household friend" of the Duce's was getting rich betraying Italy by smuggling arms to her arch-enemy, Yugoslavia. The smuggler was Dumini.

Various testimony has been given regarding this record-breaking racketeer. Colonel Sacco, ordnance officer and director of the secret police -- he was forced to resign later for telling this— said that just an hour before the kidnapping of Matteotti, Dumini said boastfully "We are about to make a fat expedition; it will be punitive and it is I who will lead it." Signor Giurin, vice-president of the provincial deputation of Milan, pictures Dumini as fatalistically saddened when he declared "I now have twelve murders on my conscience, but they were done under orders and I am chained and in the power of those for whom I am working. Now there is nothing I can do but continue in this work. If I refuse there is nothing left for me but to be crushed, denounced, taken as a galley slave."

Prezzolini, defender of Mussolini, says it is difficult to understand how the Duce could not only tolerate but actually accept with pleasure the friendship of such men as Finzi, Rossi, De Bono and even Dumini, "who have dealt a serious blow to both his own prestige and to that of Fascism. ... He allowed the most intellectually and morally worthless people to group themselves against him. . . . From the day when he formed an exclusive Fascist Ministry began his conflict with Fascism. His most serious troubles, his most insuperable obstacles, his severest threats, have always come from Fascism."

But here again there is a counter-picture. The Fascist press not only at one time lionized Dumini, but one paper wanted to erect a monument to him. Said the Popolo Valtellinese of Sondrio: "It appears to us that Dumini and his co-accused are deserving of a monument because if they themselves are really the murderers of Matteotti they have delivered the nation from a furious calumniator of the fatherland, a sabotageur of the World War, in other words, a traitor."

Another hero, "a Fascist from the first hour" in the Duce's roll of honor, is Dino Grandi, who for many years was called in the popular press the probable inheritor of Mussolini's toga. Grandi began his political career as head of the Bologna squadristi; later he headed the local Cheka branch, and in 1926, when there was a plot in the Fascist ranks to upset Mussolini, it was he who saved the career of his chief.

In the early days of Fascism the Bolognese ras, Baroncini, exposed graft amounting to 300,000,000 lire in the building of the 700,000,000 lire Florence-Bologna railroad tunnel. He accused "the Grandi Gang" of taking the money. Grandi was Baroncini's greatest personal enemy. The so-called Grandi Gang hired a physician to administer disease germs to the ras, but at the critical moment the doctor probably remembered the Hippocratic oath, since he repented, confessed, and published his confession in the local newspaper. Grandi did not sue for libel; instead, he challenged Baroncini to a duel, the latter refusing to cross swords with a man he called a common gangster.

The biggest swindle in Fascist history involved the $30,000,000 loan to the city of Milan which was floated in America by Dillon, Read & Co. Belloni, podesta, or vice-dictator, of Milan, was one of the leaders of Fascism and at one time Italy's representative in the League of Nations. Yet under his rule almost every cent of the thirty millions was stolen. Again the Duce sent a commission of inquiry and again it was disbanded. It obtained evidence not only against Belloni, but against Arnaldo Mussolini, with whom the clever Belloni had made a business alliance. Belloni was sent to the penal islands.

Filippelli, one of the Matteotti assassins who escaped punishment for that crime, met a similar fate. He was caught in a municipal swindle. As long as the gangsters, the former members of the Mafia, the high officials of the party, and the members of Mussolini's household cabinet limited their activities to enemies of the regime they usually escaped all penalties. When, however, they became financial embarrassments instead of political assets, the Duce never hesitated to treat them as common criminals or anti-Fascists.

The fate of heroes pursues the new men as well as Fascists of the first hour. In 1932 the Stefani agency issued a simple announcement: "It is reported from Turin that Signer Augusto Turati, former secretary-general of the Fascist Party and former director of the Stampa, has been interned in a sanitarium." That was all. It was the epitaph on the political grave of the most powerful man in Italy next to the Duce. Three years earlier Turati had renamed Mont Blanc "Monte Mussolini," despite French protests that the peak lies within the French frontiers. The only plausible explanation of the break between Mussolini and Turati is the enmity of Farinacci for the latter, which translated itself in published charges of immorality. The "sanitarium" officially announced as Turati's present residence is generally understood to be an insane asylum.

In August, 1934, Leandro Arpinati, who since the downfall of Turati was known as "Mussolini's right hand," was removed as Undersecretary of the Interior and sentenced to five years in the penal islands. Twenty of Arpinati's Bolognese friends were also dismissed from the party on the charge of "connivance." No explanation has been given.

There is the famous fable of the ruler who sent a messenger to a colleague asking him how to deal with ambitious men within the kingdom. The second ruler, unwilling to commit himself to writing, took the messenger walking in the garden, and during the conversation knocked off the heads of all the taller flowers. So it has been in Fascist Italy. Whatever head has risen above the crowd has invariably fallen. Federzoni, Farinacci, Grandi, Balbo, Turati and Arpinati each in turn became a power second only to the Duce, and each in turn was struck down.

Arpinati is the only leader within Fascism to whom a suspicion of plotting against Mussolini is attached. However, there have been many plots inside and without the party against the existence of the regime and the life of the Duce.

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CHAPTER 21: "'Live Dangerously' Is My Motto'"

AT THE LAUSANNE CONFERENCE THE JOURNALISTS FOUGHT FOR THE first interview with the new dictator. Lincoln Steffens found him with his large eyes sharply scrutinizing everybody and a revolver ready. He asked a pertinent question.

"I was looking for the fellow that is out to shoot me," replied Mussolini.

"Why that, what for?"

"To shoot him first."

"What makes you think you'll be shot?"

"History," replied Mussolini.

"History? — Yes, that's right. History says dictators are apt to be shot. . . ."

"Ah," continued Mussolini, "if a dictator knows history, the dictator can look out and — shoot first."

In the early days of 1923 a report circulated in Rome that one of the guards of the Chigi Palace, then dictatorial headquarters, fired on the Premier. There is the record of the arrest of a guard, no record of a trial, and the fact that the censorship suppressed all cablegrams on the subject.

That same year Mussolini, returning from an excursion in the country, chose to drive his car, placing his chauffeur in his accustomed seat. As the automobile passed the Colosseum and was slowed in traffic an unidentified assassin fired from a window of a neighboring house. The chauffeur was killed.

In September, 1924, Mussolini returned to Rome alone from the Badia San Salvador, but the entire entourage, which he was supposed to lead, followed in the evening. It was fired upon.

No mention of these three attempts on the life of the Duce appears in the world press, but on the 4th of November, 1925, occurred an incident which had tremendous repercussions. It was Armistice Day in Italy, the national celebration of victory and honor for the Unknown Soldier. In the afternoon the foreign journalists were informed by the press department that a certain Signor Zaniboni had been caught with a rifle in his hand standing at a window facing the palace, ready to assassinate the Duce. For once foreign correspondents were told they could go as far as they liked without fear of censorship.

Mussolini himself, after referring to Zaniboni as "a vulgar Socialist," the recipient of "two checks for 150,000 francs each from Czechoslovakian Socialists to lead an anti-Fascist struggle," and "a drug addict," complains that Zaniboni "chose the sacred day of the commemoration of victory. He ambushed himself in the Hotel Dragoni, just in front of the Palazzo Chigi, from the balcony of which I usually review the processions which pass on the way to the altar of the Unknown Soldier to offer their flowers, their vows, and their homage. Having an Austrian rifle with fine sights, the fellow could not miss his aim. ... He was discovered. He had been followed for a long time. A few days before, General Capello had generously given him money and advice. Masonry had made of him its ensign. But by simultaneous action, Zaniboni, General Capello, and various less important personages in the plot were arrested one hour before they planned the attempt."

The journalists, [1] however, did not cable the sensational news as Mussolini himself wrote it. They were too well aware that the underlined sentences belied the truth of the information officially given them. They could not afford to repeat the statement of the supreme journalist of Italy.

Months later an investigation showed that Zaniboni was a Freemason, one who had suffered injury and desired revenge. But he had had no violent intentions until one day he met a man named Quaglia who expressed sympathy and suggested a plan for assassination. For months Quaglia urged Zaniboni on, alternately postponed the date, and finally hired the room in the Hotel Dragoni and supplied the gun.

The reason for the postponement was simply this: Quaglia was a Fascist agent, and the greatest showman in the world wanted the attempted assassination staged on the most patriotic of national holidays so that the sympathy of the world would be stirred more easily, and the political actions he had planned more easily put into practice.

However, to make sure that no accident would occur, the Fascist secret service arrested Zaniboni in his room an hour before Mussolini was scheduled to appear on his balcony for the great oration of the day.

And still another precaution was taken. The would-be assassin's room, which faced Mussolini's office, was just across the street from the Palazzo Colonna, in which, incidentally, was situated the office of the present writer. These three buildings and the open square of the Piazza Colonna complete the scene. Mussolini, as seen frequently by the present writer, had to appear on his balcony facing the square in order to speak to the multitude, whereas the Dragoni faced the other wall of the Chigi. It would therefore have been impossible for an assassin to see Mussolini unless he had, in addition to his Austrian rifle and its fine sights, a new invention which made it possible to fire around a corner.

These stone-wall facts explain why the American reporters of the Zaniboni affair usually referred to it as an "alleged" attempt at assassination.

At his trial Zaniboni testified that Carlo Quaglia had for eight months talked to him about the matter, had lived in his house, had reported almost daily to the police, had arranged everything, and had in fact offered to do the shooting himself. "I swear by my child, the dearest thing I possess," he said, "that you, Quaglia, told me you would like to have the honor of shooting Mussolini."

The Honorable Violet Gibson, sister of Baron Ashbourne, shot Mussolini in the nose just as he emerged from the Congress of Surgeons on the 6th of April, 1926. Mussolini went back to the congress and a piece of sticking-plaster was put across his nostrils. He then stood for the photographers.

The would-be assassin in this case was a recent convert to Catholicism. It was testified by the sister superior at the convent where Miss Gibson lived that the Englishwoman was subject to hysteria. There was also evidence that she was incensed over Mussolini's professed atheism and the treatment given several priests and Catholic institutions by the Fascist squadristi. "A supernatural force entrusted me with a lofty mission," she said.

The Roman mob smashed the windows of the Soviet Embassy in reprisal. The Milan mob smashed and burned the offices of the Avanti and the Unita.

Mussolini ordered an end of violence. "I do not want reprisals," he shouted. "It is my Will."

To the jubilant crowd the dictator said:

"The episode which provoked your magnificent demonstration, whose sincerity I appreciated, has now faded from my memory. If I do think of it, it is with a feeling of annoyance, of boredom, as for foolish things.

"I do not want exaggerations. Mussolini has that in his composition which loves to participate in risk, and although I understand a certain anxiety, I declare I have not the least intention to hide or lose touch with the Fascist masses and the Italian people. ... In no case, under no circumstances, will Fascism soften its program. At this moment everything is prepared. Let it be known at home and abroad, because Fascism will continue to rule the destinies of the Italian people with an iron hand."

To an American journalist the Duce said: "The bullets pass, Mussolini remains."

It was the first time he used the third-person-royal.

Almost immediately afterwards he sailed for Africa at the head of the Italian war fleet. "We are of the Mediterranean and our destiny has been and always will be on the sea," he said to accompanying journalists. The words "Our destiny lies on the sea" appeared in thousands of red, white, and green sheets on all the kiosks and walls of the country. Landing in Tripoli, the conqueror exclaimed, "Rome carried the beacon lamp of strength to the shores of the African sea. No one can stop our inexorable Will."

In Rome, on the nth of September, as Mussolini was motoring to the Chigi Palace, a youth named Gino Lucetti threw a bomb which hit the car, bounced back, and exploded, injuring eight persons. It so happened that this, the third violent attempt of the year, came at a time relations with France were strained and the annual charge that France harbored anti-Fascist emigres was made in the daily press. To the 50,000 Fascisti frantically gathered in the Colonna square Mussolini thundered: "This must end. It would be well for responsible governments to take note of this because otherwise their friendship for the Italian people may be fatally compromised.

"Tell the Americans and the Italians of America that neither pistols, bombs, nor other instruments of death can make me desist from my course. This is the third attempt against me in the brief space of several months, but like the others this one has not disturbed me in the slightest.

"I consider myself a soldier who has specific orders and is ready to confront any risk."

To Percy Winner of the Rome bureau of the Associated Press, who brought him a fifty-pound bundle of American clippings on the Lucetti affair, the Duce said:

"My star protects me as Italy is protected. I shall die a natural death. As I live now there is adventure."

At the same time he asked the death penalty for assassins and would-be assassins. The King of Italy reminded the Premier that his father, King Humbert, had been assassinated and that there had been a popular clamor for the death penalty for regicide to which he, the present King, had refused to listen.

While press and politicians debated the question, still another attempt at assassination occurred.

On October 13, 1926, a triumphant procession of automobiles headed by the Duce was thrown into disorder by a revolver shot. The bullet hit Mussolini's chest but glanced off. Bolitho's report that the Premier was wearing a bullet-proof vest was thereby confirmed. [2] In the next car were high officials of the Fascist Party. Signer Arconovaldo Buonaccorsi slit the throat of the boy accused of the shooting. Signor Italo Balbo fired his revolver twice into the writhing body on the ground. The other notables, amidst terrifying shouts and common frenzy, shot, stabbed, kicked, and rushed at the body in such a fury that two of them were so badly injured they were taken to the hospital. This fact even the Fascist press recorded. And, by a mistake of the censor, the report was also passed that the would-be assassin wore a black shirt. The Associated Press sent to America a completely false report that a Communist plot had been discovered. To this great American news agency the Duce said a little later: "To discredit Fascism certain journalists give proof of an inventive power which would well be used to write a movie scenario. They have not as yet invented — it would be the height of absurdity and ridiculousness — that I purposely invent the attacks on my life, one after another."

To the United Press the Duce said: "I don't know what it is that protects me from assassins. Certainly it is a mystic something."

To his townsfolk he declared, "Nothing will happen to me before my task is done."

But in a public address to the inhabitants of Milan, the reinstated administrative secretary of the Fascist party, Signor Marinelli, who had been sent to jail for the murder of MatteottI and amnestied almost immediately, said that "the first words of the Duce yesterday after the attempted assassination were these: 'Italy and the whole world must know that the criminal has been lynched.'"

The body was identified as that of Anteo Zamboni, fifteen years old, a Fascist belonging to the Balilla. Inasmuch as Mussolini himself had said to his companions that the man who had fired at him "was a man of medium height, in a light suit, who had stepped a pace in front of the protective cordon," and the policeman who had spoiled a second shot by tearing the revolver from the man's hand confirmed Mussolini as to the gray suit, it was quite obvious that the wrong man had been lynched. The Cheka thereupon proceeded to make a case of it by arresting the entire Zamboni family.

As it was impossible to contradict Mussolini, the public prosecutor then declared that apparently two men had fired simultaneously, but the Duce, his four companions, and the policeman had noted only one of them — the one who got away. As for Zamboni, the prosecutor admitted he was a mere boy, "never interested in politics, and his association with the young members of the Balilla would certainly not lead him to think of our Duce as a tyrant." Therefore, it was argued, he had accomplices, and the man in gray must have been Anteo's brother, Ludovico. "The proved innocence of Ludovico would destroy the very basis of the charge," continued the prosecutor, and in the following day Ludovico proved so satisfactorily that he was innocent that the court acquitted him. There was now nothing left for the Fascist prosecutor but to accuse the father and aunt of the two boys — the mother went insane before they could arrest her. It was therefore testified that in 1907 [sic] the aunt had carried a red flag in a funeral procession, and that the father had never been legally married in a church nor had he had his children baptised. The august court thereupon sentenced the father and aunt of the two loyal enthusiastic Fascist boys to thirty years' imprisonment for inciting to assassination and the press was instructed to drop the matter.

On the 9th the Fascist Assembly passed the Duce's law making it a capital crime to attempt to kill Mussolini. The King, opposed to this act, could not do anything about it. In that exciting week the Fascist! invaded the home of the philosopher Croce in Naples and that of Roberto Bracco, the dramatist, in Caligari. They also smashed into the French consulate in Vingtmille and the offices of Nuovo Mondo in New York.

In the two years which followed the passage of the law reinstating capital punishment there were no publicly announced plots against the Duce, although bombs were exploded in various parts of Rome now and then. In June, 1928, the Fascist press made the claim that a bomb which went off in Milan was timed to kill the visiting King. According to Bolitho many enemies of Fascism were arrested, but the authors of the crime were never caught nor were any names ever published. Arnaldo Mussolini used his newspaper to accuse the "intellectuals" generally. Bolitho expressed the opinion the whole affair was a little Fascist scheme to make it appear that the Fascisti had saved the life of the King; to bind the King closer to the party; and at the same time to arrest and imprison the intellectual enemies of the regime.

In November, 1930, there were mass arrests of the former liberal and conservative leaders for an alleged conspiracy with certain military chiefs, royalists, to overthrow the regime. In Trieste, numerous Yugoslavs were imprisoned. The authorities of this former Austrian city announced that one Yugoslav prisoner, on trial for "terrorism," had given the court a written confession of a plot to kill the Premier. Accordingly, four Yugoslav boys were sentenced by General Cristini, head of the military Cheka, to be shot. Throughout Yugoslavia there were mass demonstrations against Mussolini, based on a report that the King of Italy's desire to pardon the youths was negatived by Mussolini.

In 1931 Michele Schirru, a naturalized American citizen who had been a banana-dealer in the Bronx, New York, was found guilty of planning Mussolini's death. There was no evidence that the bombs which Schirru was accused of owning were intended for that purpose, but Schirru promptly was shot. In 1932 Angelo Shardellotto, who, according to the Fascist press, confessed he had come to Rome to avenge Schirru, was killed by a firing-squad. At the same time one Domenico Bovone, accused of being the director of the plot, was also put to death, although the co-accused, his mistress, Margharita Blaha, was sentenced to prison and later reprieved. Bovone, according to the Itahan newspapers, was not an anti-Fascist, but merely an employee of Mussolini's enemies in Paris who had offered $50,000 for the death of the Duce and $5,000 for the death of the Crown Prince. The obvious contradiction — the Crown Prince being notorious for his enmity to Fascism — was not noted in the general press. A Swiss newspaper, answering its Italian colleagues who accused France of harboring and encouraging would-be assassins, said that "what is important is the confirmation that the life of the Duce of the Black Shirts is continually in danger. That is the fate of all tyrants. Zaniboni, Lucetti, Zamboni, Schirru, Shardellotto ... the series of unfortunate terrorists grows longer. But it is oppression which creates the atmosphere of attempted assassinations; it is injustice, atrocities, cruelties of the Fascist regime which they seek to avenge. . . . Perhaps Shardellotto wanted to avenge Schirru. And tomorrow Shardellotto may in turn find an avenger. The executioner shall find justice; it is the destiny of regimes based on violence."

In March, 1934, Leonardo Bucciglioni, Renato Cianca, Claudio Cianca, and Pasquale Capasso were accused of firing a bomb in St. Peter's and, as a Fascist corollary, plotting the life of the Duce. They were not executed. The press was told this was the best proof of the stability of the Fascist regime.

In Italy today it is said, generally, that Mussolini has escaped sixteen attempts on his life. Although the more important were probably more theatrical than real, it cannot be denied that he has lived dangerously. Ever since he had read Nietzsche in Switzerland he had proclaimed the phrase "Live Dangerously" as his motto. And in another way his own words have come home to him — with a vengeance. It was he who said that assassination was the employment hazard of rulers.

But in the time between his Swiss exile and his supreme rule he had learned his Machiavelli well. He had become not only the philosopher of violence, but the brilliant exponent of the political uses to which press-made national hysteria may be put when violence in turn was directed against him.

_______________

Notes:

1. In November, Bolitho wrote, "Zaniboni would have been unable to see him, much less shoot him. . . ."

2. In September, 1935, the New York Times published an interview with the Vienna manufacturer who had sold Mussolini the steel garment.

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CHAPTER 22: The Silent Revolution

PLANNED OR FORTUITOUS, EACH OF THE MANY ATTEMPTS ON THE life of the Duce were with Machiavellian opportunism exploited by him in enforcing a Fascist program on a people whose majority was still frankly anti-Fascist.

If one takes the dates of the passage of the most drastic laws, the so-called "Mussolinian reforms" which completely repealed every individual and collective liberty which Italy had enjoyed since the days of Garibaldi, he will find that they coincide with the days of excitement following an attempted assassination, when the emotions of the masses were deeply stirred, when the calm, calculating leaders could more easily enforce stern decrees. That several of these moments were artificially planned is a conviction shared by most of the foreign correspondents in Rome and not a few diplomats.

"All my adversaries," said Mussolini on one of these exciting occasions, "from the most hateful ones to the most intelligent, from the slyest one to the most fanatical, thought that the only way of destroying Fascism was to destroy its duce. . . .

"A policy of force was absolutely necessary. . . .

"I launched the laws for the defense of the regime. . . .

"I abolished the subversive press whose only function was to inflame the minds of men."

The Fascist "revolution" does not date from the bloodless march on Rome of 1922; it stems from the murder of Matteotti in 1924 and really dates from the time Mussolini, no longer trembling with fear, could make the "sequestration" one of the victories of Fascism. It dates from the era when he could say, truthfully or otherwise:

"In all that time I credit myself with the fact that I never lost my calm nor my sense of balance and justice. Because of the serene judgment that I endeavor to summon to guide my every act, I ordered the guilty arrested. I wanted justice to follow its unwavering course. Now I have fulfilled my task and my duty as a just man. . . ."

At the very moment when that change in the mentality of the trembling leader came about, the real Fascist revolution began. It was to lead to hierarchy, an attempt at a "corporate" state, the "totalitarian" idea, and finally "Italianity" as an international cause, newer, therefore superior to Pan-Slavism, Pan-Islamism and Pan-Germanism.

To achieve "totalitarian" Fascism, it was necessary to destroy the entire edifice of liberty begun by Garibaldi and built by many liberal leaders in half a century. Press, parliament, the Freemasons, and the Liberals all represented the Garibaldian State; to achieve the Fascist State, Mussolini determined to crush them all. Only by this means could he assure himself he would never have to face another Matteotti crisis.

The Fascist revolution's first act was the abolition of the free press.

Of the score of decrees by which the dictatorship established itself, this is the only one issued in 1924, the year of Matteotti's assassination. The others followed, most of them in 1925. But it is important to note how powerful Mussolini, "an old newspaper man himself," considered the power of the press, because the edict of July, 1924, had been prepared by him and signed by the King in 1923 for just such an occasion: a national mutiny against the ruling party. The decree provides for "warnings" — i.e., suppression — "if any newspaper or periodical by false or misleading news causes any interference in the diplomatic action of the government in its foreign relations or hurts the credit of the nation at home or abroad, causing undue alarm among the people, or in any way disturbs the public peace. ... If the newspaper or periodical, by editorial articles, notes, titles, illustrations, or inserts incites to crime or to class hatred or to disobedience of the laws of the established order or upsets the discipline of those engaged in public service or favors the interests of foreign states, groups, or persons as opposed to Italian interests, or insults the nation, the King, the royal family, the Summo Pontifex, the religion, the institutions, or the authority of the State or of other friendly powers.

"Newspapers or other periodicals published in violation of the preceding provisions shall be suppressed. . . ."

(This decree was supplemented on December 31, 1925, with a new censorship law which suppressed all independent publications and forced all journalists into a police docket register. It contained ten points of which the last was:

("Prefects of police are empowered to seize editions of newspapers which attack the government press, or which injure the national cause at home or abroad, or which alarm the people without justification." Any reference to Mussolini and Matteotti was under this decree termed an injury to the nation and resulted in the suppression of the paper.)

Under the press law, the first dictate of absolutism, Mussolini acted slowly but inexorably. Any criticism of himself or Fascism was announced an act of treason, the newspaper confiscated, and frequently, on orders from the Cheka, the editors beaten and the printing-plant destroyed. No other violent decrees were issued until the press had been so completely subjugated that all danger of it causing a serious reaction had passed. Then came laws in quick succession.

At the end of November, 1925, (the Zaniboni affair), decree 2029 abolished the right of public association. Freemasonry in Italy was destroyed.

Actually the law requires all associations, organisms, or institutes functioning in the kingdom or the colonies "to communicate to the authorities of public surety their constitutions, their interior regulations, the complete lists of their membership, their social functions, and all other information relative to their organization, their activity, everything that may be required by the aforementioned authorities, for reasons of public order or surety."

The police and government are given the fullest power of intervention so that they can dispose of the life and functions of all associations. In addition, Article 3 of the municipal and provincial code was interpreted giving the prefects the right to limit and almost to suppress the right of individual citizens to join associations.

The abolition of parliament came next. Again there was no clean direct action, but the first of a series of decrees, each a little stronger, until the present state of parliamentary zero was reached. The first decree, Christmas Eve, 1925, made the Chamber of Deputies merely consultative; it could discuss and ratify, but nothing more. The head of the government (Mussolini) was given the right to initiate laws, the parliament could initiate nothing but could suggest and present only those ideas approved by the Duce; the Premier was responsible only to the King and could no longer be criticized or checked or overruled by the Chamber.

The liberty of teaching and the liberty of the magistracy were abolished the same evening. The decree, No. 2300, declares that "all functionaries, employees, agents of all orders and grades, civil and military, those who are in the administration of the state upon which they depend, who by any manifestation, in and out of service, do not give complete guaranty for the accomplishment of their duties faithfully, or who place themselves in a situation incompatible with the political directives of the government" may be removed.

This law was used almost exclusively to force university teachers to be friendly to Fascism and to force the magistrates of Italy to free Fascists accused of violence and punish anti-Fascists, guilty or not guilty.

Naturally, free speech was next suppressed. The rights of the individual having already been circumscribed in every way, it was hardly necessary to pass a new decree, so one day in conferring more power on the Duce it was announced that anyone criticizing the head of the government was punishable with six to thirty months in prison and a fine of three hundred to three thousand lire. Nor is anyone under this law allowed to criticize the policies or the purposes of Mussolini or his government. It is under this law that from two thousand to six thousand men, mostly intellectuals, were sent to the terror islands in certain years.

Two decrees stripped King Victor Emmanuel III of all his powers. One took the command of the army and navy away from him; this was a mere formality, as the King could not use them in the old days without the approval of parliament and premier, but now the soldiers and sailors of the nation were placed at the disposal of the dictator. The King was denied the right to change Prime Ministers. The second law placed, above parliament and the crown, the Grand Fascist Council as the highest ruling body, a veritable "Comite de Salut Public" of the old French Terror.

Universal suffrage was abolished. It is one of the ironies of history that shortly before this decree was passed Mussolini, after listening for hours to a debate on the question of enfranchising women, banged the table, said, "Basta," enough talk, and ordered parliament to vote as he directed, in favor of the law. The Marquesa Piccolomini, one of the Duce's first women converts, and an ardent suffragist, was in the balcony, beaming upon her hero, who turned his limpid, passionate eyes upon her and passed her law for her. Shortly afterwards, suffrage for men and women was suppressed. Later, by order of the Grand Council, on February 20, 1928, it was decreed that in the future the Fascisti would announce a list of candidates, and everyone, men and women, would have the right to vote "Yes" or "No," but only for these candidates, and woe to the man who dared vote "No."

In turn the law courts were Fascistized. Article 71 of the Statutes, guaranteeing freedom in the courts, was abolished and the clause "there must never be created either special tribunals or extraordinary commissions" was erased, when Decree 2008 of November 25, 1926 (following the Lucetti and Zamboni affairs) was put into force. A special tribunal "for the defense of the state," a tribunal composed with a majority of the Fascist militia, came into being. It denied the last of the human liberties (including habeas corpus), and functioned arbitrarily, sending thousands of persons to the islands, to prison on the mainland, and to confine, or enforced domicile, under police surveillance. The militia tribunal is commonly known as the Fascist Inquisition.

The inviolability of private homes was abolished. Local police authorities, as well as the national militia, were empowered to invade anyone's domicile at will, search and seize, while all the janitors of Italy were registered and made espionage agents of the regime.

The inviolability of private correspondence was abolished. It is very interesting to note that whereas other dictatorships mark letters "censored," the more modern Fascisti employ numerous agents in the main post offices to steam letters open and to seal them as carefully as possible in an effort to hide the fact there is a censorship and to fool as many customers as possible. The present writer not only has many such envelopes, but has proof from three journalistic colleagues still in Rome that letters to all persons on the "list of suspects," which includes several American and British newspaper men, are steamed open and secretly resealed. The government reserves the right to confiscate outgoing and incoming letters, and frequently does so.

The right freely to choose and exercise a business or a profession was abolished. This was done by a series of legislative and ministerial measures dating from the law of April 3, 1926, to the publication of the Labor Charter on April 21, 1927. The order of the questore (chief of police) of Alexandria illustrates this law. When the time came for the new lawyers and students to be registered at the bar, those suspected of not being Fascisti received a legal document to sign. This document reads:

"I, the undersigned, Lawyer , who until now have remained outside the Fascist Party and regime on account of my sectarianism or my views, believe it my duty today to declare:

"1. I disown my past, in as far as it concerns open or secret dissension with the action or regime of the Fascist Party.

"2. That on my own volition I have deemed it necessary to renounce this apostasy as reparation for conduct politically damnable.

"3. That from now, with sincerity and conviction, I will give my adhesion to everything which the party and regime do in carrying out their powers.

"4. That I recognize that Fascism has saved the country and is deserving of that recognition by all Italians.

"5. That from now on I will exercise my profession and develop all my activity, not only without any factious spirit, but with the purpose of collaborating to make of Fascism the sacred religion of every Italian.

"In confirming the authenticity of this declaration I sign it and authorize the Fascist Party to make what use of it it desires."

Free movement was abolished. Two classes were caught by this law, the peasants who frequently moved from province to province, seeking better working conditions, and the victims of the regime who sought freedom in Switzerland and France. The workers, by this law, came under a sort of serfdom, being required to stay in certain localities and work for wages imposed upon them, and under unbearable conditions. As for those seeking liberty, they were chased, fired upon, and in many instances killed by the frontier guards.

Liberty of conscience and religion were curtailed by the laws which favored the Catholic Church as a State Church.

The right of an Italian-born subject to choose another nationality was denied. Before the war only two semi-civilized countries, Russia and Rumania, had such laws; at present Italy is the only country which cannot admit that a man may change his nationality. The Italian law, moreover, provides for the confiscation of property of those abroad who criticize Fascism or change their nationality, and although the law does not provide for this, the families of emigrants are frequently held as hostages, subjected to terrorism or blackmail.

Article 30 of the Statutes, containing the consecration and traditional guarantee that no unjust taxation shall be levied unless passed by the Chambers and sanctioned by the King, was abolished.

Finally, on February 4, 1926, all municipal liberty was suppressed.

On more than one occasion one of these decrees was passed a day or two after one of the attempts on Mussolini's life; on more than one occasion the publication of a decree led to violent reaction by the public and a massacre. Accused of violence, Mussolini in his speech on May 26, 1926, assumed all responsibility.

"It is I," he said, "who have dictated the measures taken: repeal and revision of all passports for foreign countries; the order to shoot without warning anyone trying to cross the frontier secretly; suppression of all anti-Fascist publications, daily and periodical; dissolution of all groups, associations, and organizations which are anti-Fascist or suspected of anti-Fascism; deportation (to the islands) of those who are anti-Fascists or conduct an anti-revolutionary activity; creation of a special police force; creation of secret bureaus of investigation and a special tribunal.

"All the opposition newspapers have been suppressed, all the anti-Fascist parties have been dissolved. The special police already gives signal service. The political bureaus of secret investigation have been created. The Special Tribunal has been created, it functions in a remarkable fashion."

The democratic state was destroyed. The monarchial constitution was broken. The individual was robbed of all liberty.

Violence, which from the day of Fascism's coming into power, in 1922 and throughout 1923 and 1924, had remained actual but illegal, was made legal in 1925.

In 1925 Fascism and the nation became one.

The revolution, which failed to occur in 1922, came about through the passage of decrees in 1925 and 1926. Quietly.

Fascist absolutism was built over the body of Matteotti.

Mussolini's revenge for the Matteotti uprising was complete.

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Part 3: MUSSOLINI VICTORIOUS

CHAPTER 23: Mussolini versus the Pope

THE HISTORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS DIVIDED INTO THREE parts: the Church Persecuted, the Church Militant, and the Church Triumphant. The first refers to the early days, the second includes the centuries of successful establishment and our own times; the third refers to heaven. But with Fascism, as with Communism, the three eras are more condensed and the third stage, Triumphant, refers to the present.

Mussolini Victorious asked the people of Italy to endorse his regime in the plebescite of March, 1929; for this event the Fascist Party published its list of achievements, which may be summarized as follows:

Bolshevism and social disorder have been abolished.

Industry and commerce have been revived.

The trains run on time; magnificent automobile roads have been built; the marshes have been drained.

Employment has increased.

Wages and the cost of living have been balanced.

Order, Discipline, Hierarchy (the Fascist slogan) have been made actual.

The budget has been balanced; the nation's finances have been placed in a state of prosperity despite the abolition of many taxes.

Agriculture is flourishing.

The army, navy and air force have been enlarged and restored to high efficiency.

The prestige of the nation has been restored. Italy is now respected and feared abroad.

It is the purpose of the concluding portion of this book to discuss these and later claims of Fascist achievements. At various times Mussolini has called the creation of the Corporate State, the stabilization of the lire, the increased grain or child production, the victory he prized most, but future historians, who are able to take the long view, will most probably place the settlement of the Roman Question first under the name of the Duce.

And if this truly happens they will have a magnificently ironic caption for their chapter; they could call it "The Atheist who liberated the Pope."

We have already witnessed the struggle between Mussolini and his chief political opponent of 1922, Don Sturzo, the Catholic leader; we have seen the youthful Benito defying God to send a thunderbolt against him, and we have heard him saying bitter things about the popes, the priests, Christianity, and all religions. We know he was born an atheist. In fact, in the province where he was born the majority of the poor and oppressed were Socialists and the majority of Socialists were atheists; all the rebels against the social system were enemies of the Church; Socialism was a sufficient religion for them and they hated equally the rich, the employers, the monarchist politicians, also the priests and the established Church, whom they considered the protectors of all the economic forces against which they fought.

The early struggle between the deeply religious mother and the agnostic father for little Benito's soul ended in easy victory for Papa Alessandro. It was not necessary for him to use his belt or the whip, as he did for other corrective purposes. Had he done so it is likely that the child would have fled to the consoling dogmas of the Church which his mother represented. Atheism, however, was in the air, Benito was nourished on it, it became part of his being, and it has remained there. In vain did the mother drag the child to church where the smell of incense in the vitiated air sickened him; in vain did she send him to the Salesian friars, because their moral and physical beatings served only to increase the boy's disdain for religion and make him swear a revenge against the priests, their Church, and their God.

The Swiss episodes are not the only proof of this vendetta. At the time of the execution of Francisco Ferrer in Spain there was an outbreak of anti-clericalism in Italy also, and in Forli it was Mussolini who led the mob which stormed the central square of the town and destroyed the column surmounted by the Virgin Mary. In the trenches one day the corporal read one of the King's exhortations to the troops which concluded with a call for divine providence to aid the noble Allied war. Mussolini sneered. "We shall conquer without God," he said.

After the war, addressing a convention of veterans one day, he said, "I love a pagan and warlike people, a people which refuses its allegiance to revealed dogma and which is not fooled by miracles." At about the same time he wrote, "There is only one possible revision for the Law of Guarantees [the act that made the Pope the "Prisoner of the Vatican"] and that is, its abolition, followed by a stern invitation to His Holiness to leave Rome, to reenter Avignon, or, in conformity with the taste shown by the Vatican during the war, go to the Boches." [1] Mussolini seemed to have a grudge against the popes. He never forgave Benedict XV for calling the war a "useless massacre"; as late as 1928, in his autobiography, he attacks the memory of Europe's first pacifist, calling his effort to make peace in 1917 "ambiguous conduct," adding that the "Catholic Church had ever been a stranger to wars when she did not provoke them herself." He insulted Pius XI on more than one occasion. In April, 1924, there was a savage attack by the Fascisti upon the Catholic institutions of the district of Brianza which had voted the Catholic ticket. The Pope sent 500,000 lire to restore the buildings and addressed a bitter message against Fascist violence. Mussolini replied by dubbing Pius XI "Papa Brianzolo."

But now we must look at the seeming contradictions in the behavior of the Duce towards the Pope. The sending of emissaries to the Vatican in preparation for the march on Rome was not a sudden impulse; it was penultimate action in a well-thought-out plan. Even before that was done, in June, Mussolini had written that "Fascism has nothing to gain by exiling God from the sky and religion from the earth," and immediately upon taking office the Duce, in the convention of all statesmen and politicians, called upon God to direct his endeavors. Such expressions shocked those atheist Fascist followers who had understood from the original program that among the first actions on gaining power would be a concerted and continual attack on the Catholic Church and the Vatican. But they soon learned of Mussolini's change of program, if not change of heart.

The first climax in the relationship between Mussolini and the Vatican followed the Matteotti affair, when the populace turned against Fascism and the Fascisti took off their black shirts and removed the lictor's emblem from their buttonholes and pretended they had never trafficked with the party which stood accused before the world as one of bloodshed and assassination. Mussolini turned toward the King, whom he had more than once intimidated with the plan to replace him, and toward the Church, which he had spared on entering Rome. The Duce's agents called upon Monsignor Pizzardo, the confident of the Pope, and immediately afterwards there was a campaign against the Socialists and the Popolari launched in certain newspapers. This was the only moral support Mussolini had at the time. But it was important. It helped him emerge from his pose of remorse, his cringing attitude, and assume his old role of superman. It was then that he announced that he was certain the Matteotti affair had something to do with Freemasonry, which was seeking to ruin his authority, and that he would soon settle that matter, too.

The whole history of the negotiations with the Vatican is a record of threats, provocations, and promises. One morning Mussolini would write in his Popolo that the Fascisti would tear down the cross from St. Peter's and replace it with the lictor's ax if the Pope interfered with his regime, and the next day there would be an emissary waiting on a papal representative. In the spring of 1925 Mussolini applauded the production of Pirandello's "Sagra della Nava" in the subsidized art theater, while the Catholic press denounced the Duce, Pirandello, and the theater for producing one of the most subtle and dramatic attacks on the Catholic faith. Then in turn Mussolini would forbid the American Methodists to build the church they had planned on a hill overlooking the Vatican or he would propose a bill for outlawing Masonry.

In July, 1925, and again in August and December, Fascist violence against Catholics was especially intense in Florence and Pisa.

Cardinal Maffi, the leading intellectual of the Church, who had received the second largest number of votes on several ballots at the conclave which elected Pius XI Pope, assumed the leadership of Catholics versus Fascists, And because there was a censorship of the press, Cardinal Maffi issued his anathema of Fascism in the form of a pastoral letter, which called the Duce and his followers the "Race of Cain" and concluded with these words:

"It is said of murderers that they boast of the number of their victories. But the word is merely on the lips, presented rather than pronounced, in a moment of confusion and excitement. Other words come in the night and ring with a different sound, causing fears to arise that are uncontrollable and sometimes even insane. O, Cain! O, Judas! O, all ye who shed the blood of your brothers, you lie when you speak of security; for we know you have it not. Nor could you have it. Do we not see you turn pale and look furtively around, as if seeking some way of escape, at a chance sound that may strike the ear, at a chance light that may strike the eye, even at the murmur of the wind, at the chirping of the birds? . . .

"War had and has its poison-gas, its liquids of destruction; but bear this well in mind: No acid, sulphuric or nitric or prussic and no sublimate is so corrosive as one drop of blood criminally shed. There is no chemical basis that will resist or neutralize it. There are no forces to control it. Armies will not hold it in check. It flows on. It corrodes. It destroys. Woe to the hand that sheds blood. Woe to the feet that trample on the corpse. O, Dynasty of Cain, carry on. But listen to this: where men fail, God is to the rescue — God, who gives no quarter to the culprits but incessantly pursues them, crying out judgment over them: Accursed. Accursed. Accursed in time. Accursed in eternity!"

Following the publication of this pastoral letter, Cardinal Maffi called upon other Catholic leaders to join with him in united and continuous action against Fascism. Mussolini then apologized to the Pope, and Federzoni, strong nationalist and devout Catholic, again made overtures of friendship to the Vatican.

The objective of the Fascisti was the destruction of the power of the Azione Cattolica, the association of elders, and the Catholic Boy Scouts, which enrolled children. Fascism, claiming to be the true leader of youth, in 1926 established the Opera Nationale Balilla for the political and military education of the young of Italy. "The organization," explained the Hon. R. Ricci "requires that its pupils at the time that they will have come of age, will be capable of suitably entering in the higher schools of the army, the navy, and aviation. It will try, above all, to develop the sentiment of absolute devotion to the country in peace time as in time of war. This preparation of young people for military life has properly scandalized faint spirits in certain so-called democratic countries.

"Peace and war are two phases in the life of the people, equally necessary to their development, to their greatness and their growth. Fascism wants only to realize in Italy what the modern states have realized among themselves since the beginning of time, the ability to defend with arms, at all times and against whoever threatened their existence and their prestige." Militarism and nationalism, the ideals of the Balilla, were the exact opposites of the ideals of the Catholic organizations. On January 9, 1927, Mussolini rushed through a royal decree abolishing all existing Catholic Boy Scout organizations in localities of less than 20,000 population. The Pope, in a letter to Cardinal Gasparri, replied by abolishing the entire organization, explaining he did so because he had to yield to force and that the Scouts still remained "the apple of my eye."

The world at that time, however, had only a suspicion that serious negotiations were under way for the settlement of the Roman question. Behind the acts of violence and reprisals there were diplomatic advances. Actually on the 8th of August, 1926 — as the Marquis Francesco Pacelli, brother of Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli and later general counselor of the Vatican State, revealed — Domenico Barone began the definitive negotiations with representatives of the Pope. By autumn of that year there had been considerable progress. Mussolini had asked and received a complete statement of the Vatican's terms for peace. Signer Pacelli, in transmitting them, informed the Duce that there were two questions on which he could cede nothing: the sovereignty of the Pope in a recreated papal state, and the recognition of religious marriage on a par with the civil rite.

In 1927 Mussolini, who had already known that the Pope disapproved of the plan for the Corporate State, announced the Labor Charter. The Pope again showed his displeasure. The official Osservatore Romano said it was "contrary to the Christian conception of the State and individual liberty." This and similar declarations by the Pope and the official organ, by order of the Duce's press department, were not reprinted in Italy.

Early in 1929 the rumor of a treaty was confirmed. And then arose the question, why is Mussolini making peace with the Pope, why is the atheist so anxious to please the head of the Catholic Church, why is he making concessions which were not even demanded of previous Prime Ministers, from Cavour to Nitti?

The reasons were many. First, and most important, Mussolini, who had studied his Machiavelli and followed many of the precepts, had been convinced, in the course of years, that the dictum which he had questioned was, after all, the most logical in Italy: one must rule with the aid of the church. Seven years of conflict had convinced him. But perhaps more important still was the politico-economic situation in which Mussolini found himself in the two years of negotiations. In 1926 it was already apparent that a crisis was imminent: unemployment was increasing, exports were down, emigrant remittances had taken an alarming drop, the officially announced balanced budget was in fact not near an equilibrium and dissatisfaction was spreading.

By 1928, despite the flotation of billions of lire in loans in the United States, the crisis was on. Wage cuts and increased taxation were not the cure. And now the bankers and the large industrialists, the subsidizers and owners of the Fascist party, as well as the general public were aroused against Fascism. While the front of the edifice still glittered with decorations and looked imposing, the foundations were sinking into economic mud.

Mussolini was hard pressed. There was even a possibility that at this point he would actually revert to his original program, the plan for a socialized cooperative State written nine years earlier out of Karl Marx, and give the world the semi-Communist regime which was obviously his original intention. He did, in fact, begin taking over certain industries — those which were in unsolvable financial difficulties— and making the State participate in production and distribution. But again he changed his mind.

Something was needed to restore his prestige, at home and abroad, some newer, greater gesture which would unify the masses again, rally them in his vanguard against the threatening desertion of the business leaders. Politics and economics and Machiavellian opportunism dictated the move; it is a practical masculine world and only feminine naivete, as exhibited by female biographers, has Mussolini, like Saul of Tarsus, seeing the great light on the road to Damascus and becoming a repentant Paul. His was not a gesture of a repentant. It was a politico-economic move.

On February 7, 1929, Cardinal Gasparri, Secretary of State of the Holy See, announced to the diplomats accredited to the Vatican that the temporal power of the Pope had been restored, the Pontiff released from his prison, [2] a new state created.

Behind the present accord stands the figure of Father Tacchi-Venturi, who for years has guided Mussolini in his relations to the Holy See. It was this powerful Jesuit who had planned to have Mussolini make a public confession of faith during the anniversary celebration of St. Francis of Assisi, but there was too much ribald hilarity over the atheist-politician's proposed action to make it profitable. However, the Duce's children— those he so gallantly calls his "first series" — having grown up and noble marriages being proposed, Mussolini permitted himself to be married in the Catholic Church, [3] thereby legalizing their birth, had his "second series" baptized, thereby saving their souls, and allowed himself to be photographed in dark-eyed prayer before the statue of St. Peter in the Cathedral, thereby reaping another harvest of publicity.

Explaining this treaty to the Senate on the 13th of May, Mussolini began with Cavour's formula "a free Church within a free State," adding that the new situation created "a sovereign State within the Kingdom of Italy; the Catholic Church with a certain preeminence loyally and voluntarily recognized; free admission of other religions." To a Senator who proposed "free and sovereign Church, free and sovereign State," Mussolini said:

"This formula might create the belief that there are two sovereignties coexistent, but they do not coexist. One counts as the Vatican City, and one counts as the Kingdom of Italy, which is the Italian State. It must be understood that between the Italian State and the Vatican City there is a distance which can be measured in thousands of miles, even if it requires only five minutes to go and see this State and ten minutes to walk around its confines.

"There are, then, two sovereignties perfectly distinct and well differentiated: perfectly and reciprocally recognized. But within the State the Church is not sovereign and is not even free. It is not sovereign and is not free because in its institutions and its men it is subject to the general laws of the State, and is even subject to the special clauses of the Concordat."

Of Christianity the Duce said, sarcastically, "This religion was born in Palestine but became Catholic in Rome. If it had been confined to Palestine it would in all probability never have been more than one of the numerous sects which flourished in that overheated environment, like that of the Essenes or the Therapeutse. The chances are that it would have perished and left no trace."

After giving flat denials to several of the Pope's statements, Mussolini exclaimed:

"We have buried the temporal power of the popes, not resuscitated it."

"Any other regime than ours," he continued, "may believe it useful to renounce the education of the young generations. In this field I am intractable. Education must be ours. Our children must be educated in our religious faith, but we must round out this education and we need to give our youths a sense of virility and the power of conquest."

The Pope read Mussolini's speech May 14th at eleven in the morning, an hour and a half before the first pilgrimage was to visit him. To the professors and pupils of the College of Mondragone he made the famous reply in which he referred to Mussolini as the devil.

The Pope began by attacking the Fascist Spartan educational principle that children belong to the State. "The State should interest itself in education," said the Pope, "but the State is not made to absorb and annihilate the family, which would be absurd and against nature, for the family comes before society and before the State. The State should perfect the activities of the family in full correspondence with the desires of the father and mother, and it should respect especially the divine right of the Church in education.

"We cannot admit that in its educational activities the State shall try to raise up conquerors or encourage conquests. What one State does in this line all the other States can do. What would happen if all the States educated their people for conquests? Does such education contribute to general world pacification?

"We can never agree with anything which restricts or denies the right which nature and God gave the Church and the family in the field of education. On this point we are not merely intractable, but we are uncompromising. We are uncompromising just as we would be forced to be uncompromising if asked 'How much does two plus two make?' Two plus two makes four and it is not our fault if it does not make five or six or fifty. When it is a question of saving a few souls and impeding the accomplishment of greater damage to souls we feel courage to treat with the devil in person. And it was exactly with the purpose of preventing greater evil that we negotiated with the devil some time ago when the fate of our dear Catholic Scouts was decided."

Although the Pope's reply was suppressed in the Fascist press, some weeks later Mussolini published his speech, retaining all its violent language, misquotations, and insults to the Pontiff. The Pope addressed a letter to Cardinal Gasparri, published June 5th, calling the Duce's words "heretical, and worse than heretical."

Two years after the signing of the peace treaty the Fascisti were again breaking into Catholic clubs and using violence against members; the Pope was reported making plans for leaving Italy, and Mussolini's newspapers were again using language such as this: "If the Duce orders us to shoot all the priests, we shall not hesitate an instant. . . ." [4] In 1931 Mussolini regretted his surrender to the Vatican.

The two years of peace had not been two years of harmony. The Church continued to insist on its right to rule the family and raise the children of Italy; the regime continued to enforce the decrees making the State the supreme power over the individual and especially over youth. A brilliant paragrapher has summed up a situation which whole books might expound. "As we understand the controversy between Church and State in Italy," said Howard Brubaker, "the whole question is who gets the custody of the child." As both the Pope and Mussolini rest the future of their regimes on the education of the coming generations, the conflict was bound to occur, and is bound to occur again and again.

The Concordat was based on ambiguity. The two parties had agreed to collaborate on the following points: nomination of priests, status of the religious Orders, recognition of religious marriage, dogmatic religious instruction in the primary and secondary schools, etc. But the grave problems were not definitely settled; the question of the education of youth, the question of the attributes of the Church and the question of the State control of the individual, remained unanswered.

On these questions Fascism has its own moral thesis completely independent of the Church: the State is absolute, it absorbs the family, the individual, the newborn babe, the future citizen. The thesis of the Church: the family is the original unit, independent and fundamental, where the child is to be raised; the individual is an atom in the mass, but sacred for society, possessing inviolable rights which the State cannot curtail or restrain.

The theses are opposed; the treaty, however, could perhaps be maintained had there been unbounded good will and no political intentions on the Fascist side, because compromises are always possible when politics are concerned, much more difficult when religious and moral issues are disputed. Here the incompatibility was profound and fundamental, ancient Christian doctrine clashed with new Fascist doctrine, and a retreat by one force became inevitable.

Meanwhile Catholic institutions had been making unparalleled progress. Not only were the youth organizations strengthened, but the Azione Cattolica showed from twenty-five to fifty per cent membership increases in a short time. According to the Fascisti the old leaders of the Popolari and their followers were swamping the Catholic organizations for the purpose of using them as political centers.

The Fascist organ, Lavoro Fascista, accused the Catholic League of debating "explicit proposals for supplanting Fascism"; on May 26, 1931, it accused Monsignor Pizzardo, diplomat and chaplain- general, of declaring that "Catholic Action must be strong enough to seize power." "It is time to resort to extreme measures," concluded the official organ. A fortnight of violence throughout Italy, and especially in Rome, followed. Fascists attacked priests, plundered the Catholic dubs, the Jesuit house of the Civilta Cattolica, and invaded the palace of the chancellory, which is protected by extraterritoriality. In the Piazza Colonna, near the Foreign Office, they burned copies of a book The Pope. One group found an oil-painting of the Pontiff in a Catholic club and marched with it through the streets, finally trampling it with cries of "Traitor." A bomb was thrown into the Catholic headquarters at Imola.

The Pope replied, on June 29, 1931, with his encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno. Because of the strict Fascist censorship the Pope himself was forced to smuggle his encyclical. He called in two notable dignitaries, Monsignor F. J. Spellman, who is now assistant to Cardinal O'Connell, archbishop of Boston, and Monsignor Vanneufville, canon of the Lateran and member of the higher council of the Propaganda Fide, also correspondent of the Catholic organ, La Croix, in Paris, and published the encyclical in France.

"They have tried to strike to death all that was and will be always dearest to the heart of Our Father and Pastor of Souls," wrote the Pope in his encyclical, recounting numerous "brutalities and beatings, blows and bloodshed — and all this lamentable accompaniment of disrespect and violence accomplished with such intervention of members of the [Fascist] party in uniform, with such condescension from the authorities and from the forces of public safety, that it is necessary to believe that these decisions came from above." The Pope then denies the official versions sent from Rome, "genuine slander spread by the party press," and the Radio d'Italia; finally the Pope denounces as ridiculous the statement that the Azione had become a "nest" for the Popolari. Of the directors of 250 diocesan organizations, 4,000 sections of Catholic men's clubs, and 5,000 groups of Catholic male youth, only four men were connected with the old Popolari, "and, we must add, that in the four cases in question there are those who are sympathizers with the regime and the party which they look upon favorably."

"And here We find Ourselves," continues Pius XI, "confronted by a mass of authentic affirmations and no less authentic facts which reveal beyond the slightest possibility of doubt the resolve (already in great measure actually put into effect) to monopolize completely the young, from their tenderest years up to manhood and womanhood, for the exclusive advantage of a party and of a regime based on an ideology which clearly resolves itself into a true, a real pagan worship of the State — the Statolatry — which is no less in contrast with the natural rights of the family than it is in contradiction with the supernatural rights of the Church.

"We have seen, in fact, in action a species of religion which rebels against the directions of higher religious authorities, and imposes or encourages the nonobservance of these directions ... a religious sentiment that goes to extremes, and permits others to indulge in insulting words and actions against the person of the Father and of all the faithful, even to cry out 'Down with the Pope and death to him!' This is real teaching of parricide. It is a semblance of religion which cannot in any way be reconciled with Catholic doctrine and practice. . . .

"A conception of the State which makes the young generations belong entirely to it, without any exception from the tenderest years up to adult life, cannot be reconciled by a Catholic with the Catholic doctrine and cannot either be reconciled with the natural right of the family. . . .

"You ask Us, Venerable Brethren, in view of what has taken place, what is to be thought about the formula of an oath [5] which even little boys and girls are obliged to take about executing without discussion orders from an authority which, as we have seen and experienced, can give orders against all truth and justice and in disregard of the rights of the Church and its souls, which are already by their very nature sacred and inviolable, and to have them swear to serve with all their strength, even to the shedding of blood. The cause of a revolution that snatches the youth from the Church and from Jesus Christ and which educates its own young forces to hate, to deeds of violence, and to irreverence, not excluding the person of the Pope himself, as the latest facts have very evidently demonstrated. . . . Such an oath as it stands is unlawful."

This encyclical, suppressed for several days by the Italian press, made a great sensation and won worldwide sympathy for the Pope from Protestants as well as Catholics.

On July 9th Mussolini ordered Fascist! to abandon the Azione Cattolica. The Pope declared Catholicism and Fascism incompatible; Mussolini declared Fascism and Catholicism incompatible. Both are right. After two years of trying to render unto the Duce the things which are the Duce's and unto God the things that are God's, the real crisis had come and both sides realized that there can be no friendship between two opposing ideologies.

On September 3rd the Vatican and the Chigi Palace announced a compromise agreement which made the Azione Cattolica strictly diocesan, dependent on the bishops, aloof from politics, foreign to trade unions. It was considered as a codicil to the Lateran Pacts. The Fascist government restored compatibility between party and Catholic institutions. On the third anniversary of the Vatican treaty Mussolini, accompanied by his ambassador. Count Cesar-Marie de Vecchi di Val Cismon, the same gentleman who voluntarily assumed responsibility for the massacre of Turin and who during the Matteotti uprising proposed "three minutes of shooting to destroy the Opposition," paid a grand ceremonial visit to the Vatican. The Borghi and neighboring quarters were put in a state of siege and several thousand persons were obliged to spend their time in jail until the 13th of February. Mussolini was closeted with the Pope from 10:45 to 11:15, one of the longest interviews ever given a visitor.

Did Mussolini kiss the Pope's slipper ? European diplomatic circles and the whole Catholic world were greatly intrigued by this visit. Le Peuple of Bruxelles, which claims editorially it obtained the description from one "in close touch with 'the eye of the Vatican,'" thus describes the historic occasion:

"A painful silence reigned. . . . Finally Mussolini precipitated himself at the feet of the Pope and kissed the slipper humbly, at the same time giving himself great blows on the chest. With infinite bountifulness the Successor to Saint Peter raised his visitor and said to him:

" 'Repent, repent, my son. All is not yet lost for you.'

"A few minutes later the Pope asked Mussolini what time it was. Mussolini went pale. He quickly caught the significance. He said:

"'I have only a Swiss watch, but it is not the one I placed on the table at the time the police of His Majesty the King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel, did me the honor of tracking me down as my men now track down those who now think as I then did. The cheap nickel watch which I placed on the table in addressing an ultimatum to God was pawned by me when I was outlawed. In this connection I have to confess that I have failed to reimburse those comrades who aided me out of their pocketbooks in those regrettable times.

"'But today I no longer deny God by according him five minutes in which to strike me dead as proof that he exists. I now know why I was not struck by lightning: the Church needed me.'"

Interviewing the Duce some time later, Emil Ludwig asked him whether or not he kissed the Pope's slipper. Mussolini replied:

"In general I do as the Romans do. That is to say, I accept the custom of the country where I am being entertained. At the Vatican I was left to follow my own bent."

Has Mussolini been converted? In the Fascist Catechism he had written "Fascism is not atheistic, but any army of believers. Religion alone makes possible the realization of great human ideals. Science . . . cannot explain all the phenomena of life; there remains always a closed wall on which one word alone should be written: 'God.'" To an American woman admirer he was even more outspoken. "I feel God deeply," he said, lifting his eyes. "While God protects me no human force can stop me. I live dangerously and God protects me." But to the astute Ludwig, whose interviews Mussolini himself corrected and officially stamped, he admitted frankly that he is still a free-thinker. This paragraph, it is not strange to say, was deleted from the second Italian edition.

With considerable irony a Catholic newspaper headlined Mussolini's visit to the Vatican "Caesar and Peter have shaken hands." It had in mind Mussolini's favorite poet, Carducci, who wrote:

Quando porge la mano Cesare a Piero
da quella stretia sangue umano stilla;
quando il bacio si dan Chiesa ed Impero,
un astro di martirio in ciel sfavilla.

[When Caesar shakes hands with Peter, human blood flows; when the Church and the empire embrace, the star of a martyr is lit in the heavens.]

The press of Italy considered the new accord a Fascist victory. It declared that although the encyclical was extremely violent, although the Pope denounced the "Totalitarian" idea of Fascism, the Vatican has come around to the thesis of the regime. Although it need not be admitted that the Catholic Action has been engaged in politics, it is certain that in the future it is pledged never to do so. By the new arrangement, not only must members restrain themselves to religious and spiritual works, but they cannot engage in social action, cannot in any way rival Fascist action, and the youth movement loses all its character which was antagonistic to the Fascist or militarist youth movement.

It marks the end of the plan of a vast Catholic party with a Christian as opposed to a Fascist program.

If the Vatican, through Father Tacchi-Venturi, has obtained assurances that the Totalitarian plan will be changed, that religious teachings of youth will be liberalized, that the incompatibility of Christianity and Fascism will be compromised, these facts are secret. That a tacit understanding of this nature exists has been admitted by La Croix, the official French Catholic publication.

Officially, it must be said, the settlement of the Roman question has been a magnificent example of political opportunism. The old axiom, Religio instrumentum regni, has taken on new life in Italy. "Fascism," in the opinion of the editorial writer of the London Times, "respects pietism, bigotry, and superstition so far as they serve to keep the peasants, particularly in the south, in ignorance and submission, but it does not allow, for instance, the Church to take any part in the education of youth (hence the abolition of the Catholic Boy Scouts), or to take care of the moral and social welfare of the faithful (hence the persecution of the Demo-Christians). The crucifix is in the schools, but several priests are in the prisons."

In the first large engagement, 1929, Mussolini had won a Pyrrhic victory; in the pitched battle of 1931 Mussolini triumphed. According to non-Fascists it was a triumph of desperation made necessary by the growth of the movement within Catholicism against the political regime. It is quite true, as Fascists contend, that all the liberal, democratic, and intelligent minority in Italy, driven under cover, had taken refuge in the Azione Cattolica, the only institution in the country where there was a trace of freedom left. And now the Catholic Action has been emasculated as a political body.

On Mussolini's proud chest today appears, surrounded by the decorations of a military character, the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. Good Catholics ask, can this cross over his heart cover the years of Fascist violence, the assassination of Matteotti, the bombs sent to Cardinal Ferrari with Fascist compliments, the murder of the heroic priest of Argenta, the attacks on the Catholic Scouts, the destruction of Catholic clubs and cooperatives, the dissolution of the Catholic Party, and finally the emasculation of the Azione Cattolica? Good Catholics shake their heads doubtfully.

The Pope, like the King — it is no secret in Rome — remains anti-Fascist, He knows that his adversary is acting a part. He knows also that a dictatorship can disappear as suddenly as it is born and that the Church goes marching on. He watches all the reverences, the kneelings, and the professions of faith of the neophyte as that of an atheist of yesterday and probably of tomorrow. The Pope's own verdict on Fascism is very simple. "Nothing built on violence ever endures," he said. The Totalitarian or Corporative State in the opinion of Pius XI remains "unchristian." The Pope has not changed his mind.

For the time being the victory is Caesar's. But the Kingdom of the Pale Galilean and the Hierarchy of the heretic of Predappio cannot exist forever, morally function, side by side, and one within the other. The eventual triumph lies in the future.

_______________

Notes:

1. Popolo d'Italia. November 18, 1919.

2. On November 1, 1870, the Vatican had announced that "His Holiness declares that he is in a state of imprisonment and that he will not partake with Belial."

3. This is the now generally accepted report, but no official document of marriage to Rachele Guidi has ever been found by investigators.

4. Gazzetta Fascista, quoted by the French writer, Emmanuel Bourcier.

5. "I swear to obey the orders of the Duce without questioning them and to serve the cause of the Fascist Revolution with all my force and if necessary with my blood."

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CHAPTER 24: Diplomacy: Corfu to Ethiopia

IN DIPLOMACY, THE WAGING OF WARS AND THE DIRECTING OF THEIR occasional interruptions, peace, Mussolini's course has been rather helter-skelter: in fact, in this field more than any other he has proven himself a zigzag Caesar.

The record can be divided into three important sections. First there was the flamboyant period with the attack on Greece, defiance for the League of Nations, loud fulminations in praise of violence, demagoguery in international affairs on a par almost with internal affairs, imperialistic gestures without corollary actions, all in all the manifestations of the same youthful spirit which was first in evidence on the Socialist soap-boxes of three countries. The Duce became an international figure at the age of thirty-nine.

But the years of contact, as journalist and colleague, with Lloyd George, Curzon, Chamberlain, Simon, Poincare, Barthou, Stresemann and other professional diplomats of the conventional school, and the fatality of compromises, softened Mussolini in his second phase. He learned quickly and adapted himself to circumstances with the unequaled ability which he had demonstrated throughout his career. This, then, became the period of the great Anglo-Saxon flirtation when the Duce dropped his threats against Britain, whom he never forgave for being the possessor of Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus, and became in turn the chastened follower of Downing Street diplomacy, at the same time espousing the cause of the German people and Germany's allies, the Revisionist nations.

The third, or present, stage of Mussolinism contains many elements of the first: instead of Greece the enemy is Ethiopia, and the army and navy are again on the road to conquest, and again the League of Nations, which Mussolini at one time dominated through the brilliance of his representative, Dino Grandi, is the object of scorn; imperialism again rules his mind, although his utterances lack the reckless defiance of a decade ago, and there is more evidence today that growing desperation of a broken home economy demands foreign recompenses.

The first test of Mussolini's diplomacy followed an incident on the Greek-Albanian border. An Italian general named Tellini and his staff of four were ambushed on August 24, 1923, and assassinated by Albanian bandits in the forest near Janina. Without a moment's hesitation, in which he might have learned on whose soil the murders occurred and the nationality of the murderers, Mussolini, who had yet to wage his first war, sent an ultimatum to Greece. He demanded (l) an official apology; (2) a formal memorial service for the dead; (3) honors for the Italian flag; (4) an inquiry into the affair within five days; (5) capital punishment for the murderers; (6) an indemnity of 50,000,000 lire within five days; (7) military honors for the Italian victims, and (8) a reply within twenty-four hours.

Greece accepted five of these points immediately and asked for a compromise on the others, notably the size of the indemnity, which Greece could not deliver at once. On the advice of the council of ambassadors which was held in Paris on the 30th Greece agreed to meet Italy in a conference.

That same day, however, Mussolini mobilized his fleet with remarkable speed and efficiency. The battleships sailed proudly out of the harbors of Italy and the nation recaptured the hot transcendental feeling of patriotism. At three in the afternoon of the 31st an Italian officer visited the prefect of Corfu to inform him of the imminent capture of the island. The prefect replied that the old fort was not occupied militarily, but was used by refugees. (A later Italian statement claims the officer did not understand this statement.) The prefect said he had no troops, that he had no means of fighting, and that his only course could be passive resistance.

The ultimatum having been delivered, the Italian navy began its bombardment at five o'clock. Shell after shell crashed down on the police barracks and the fort. There was no reply. For an hour the bombardment continued, and at six the victorious Fascisti landed and stormed the silent fort. From its wreckage came the screams of wounded and the groans of the dying. Of the hundred victims, according to Colonel Bowe of the American Near East Relief, there were twenty dead, of whom sixteen were infants, the wards of American charity. [1] Greece appealed to the League of Nations; the American Red Cross buried the dead; in Rome Fascism celebrated its first military victory.

An astonished and indignant world accused Mussolini of a "brutal assault" upon a peaceful and innocent nation. Outside of Italy press and public united in sympathy for Greece. Mussolini sent special cables to many newspapers. In one of them he explained his actions in this way:

"I ordered the Italian navy to occupy Corfu because I know the Greeks and was aware that if I did not take a pledge for their payment of reparation I would get nothing out of them. I have now taken a pledge and I will retain it until there has been a complete and literal fulfillment of the conditions of my ultimatum to them. If the Greeks fulfill these and pay up I will withdraw from Corfu, but they had better pay soon, for next week the price will be higher. These naval operations are expensive. Battleships won't steam on songs. If for any reason Greece does not pay I will remain in Corfu indefinitely. It was Venetian territory for four centuries, anyway. I have no intention of occupying more Greek territory or inflicting other penalties, unless, of course, the Greeks are foolish enough to attack Italian subjects or property. In that case I shall be forced to take immediate military action.

"Italian public opinion does not like the League of Nations, for a very good reason. We respect its aims, but I completely deny its authority to intervene in a matter affecting Italian honor. The present affair does not come under the League Covenant, as there is no danger of war." [2]

But the League thought otherwise. Lord Robert Cecil on the 1st of September informed it there was no doubt whatever of its competency to deal with the conflict nor its duty to do so, and Branting of Sweden demanded action against Italy. The Marquis della Torretta stated to Lord Curzon that the League had no business in the Corfu affair; Lord Curzon replied that the whole weight of British prestige was behind the League, and the press began speaking of an international boycott and joint naval action against Italy.

But bravely Mussolini stuck to his guns. "In case the Council of the League of Nations declares itself competent," he said in an official statement dated the 4th, three days after the Council had already done so, "the question whether to remain or resign from the League of Nations arises in Italy. I have already voted for the second solution."

That week, not for the first and not for the last time, the tension at Geneva reached a breaking-point and the collapse of Woodrow Wilson's foundation seemed imminent. But, as was to be repeated when Japan withdrew, and when Germany withdrew, and when Italy again threatened in the summer of 1935 over the Ethiopian crisis, the directors of the society of peace capitulated before the man of war. As in all diplomacy, a "formula" to save faces had to be found, and in this instance it was decided that, although the League was not to insist on its competency, the council of ambassadors in Paris, consisting of the same set of diplomats, should make the decision. This decision, naturally enough, was on the side of force and possession: the evacuation of Corfu was traded for Greek fulfillment of the ultimatum, the 50,000,000 lire in cash having been provided, according to report, by Sir Basil Zaharoff.

From all points of view, military, political, patriotic, the victory was Mussolini's. His and Italy's prestige rose. Europe sat up and took notice of a new man who would probably have a lot to say in its international affairs in the future. The official report of the mission headed by a British, a French, and a Japanese colonel, which after a month's investigation found that Greece was entirely innocent in the Janina affair, made no impression outside of Athens.

There was, however, one important diplomatic aftermath. "The first anniversary of the occupation of Corfu," writes V. Demetrio in La Politica estera di Mussolini, [3] and neither the Italian nor the British Foreign Office has denied it, "was celebrated by Great Britain, not by Fascist Italy.

"It was exactly twelve months after the ephemeral occupation by the Italians that the British admiralty organized large maneuvers in the Ionian Sea, and it was on this occasion that the British government obtained from the Greek government the permission to debark heavy artillery in Corfu for the purpose of participating in the mock war.

"A similar permission had never before been asked for nor granted.

"This was the reply to Mussolini.

"Unfortunately, on this account, Italy was obliged to watch impotently the making of a wicked precedent on whose account the Mediterranean equilibrium has been, without motive, troubled."

But the Greek adventure, with its sixteen dead children and its indemnity of 50,000,000 lire (the expedition cost 288,000,000, a fact almost successfully hidden in the budget), and its salute for the Italian flag, while not the great military success anticipated, still did lead to something for Mussolini. In Livorno, on the 30th of September, 1926, Mussolini and Sir Austen Chamberlain held a Machiavellian conference, from which came reports that the Italian Premier had promised support for an expedition against Turkish Anatolia, where territory could be seized for both nations, or, should the adventure be canceled, Mussolini would be given a free hand in seizing Albania, provided, however, that he support the British in intimidating the Turks, who were claiming Mosul and preparing a descent upon Bagdad.

Whatever arrangements were made between the two great statesmen is their own affair, and the records, if they exist, remain archive secrets. Historically, however, what happened was that after this famous meeting of Livorno, Chamberlain without a blow drove the Turks from the Iraq frontier and Mussolini without a blow began the complete economic, military, and political penetration of Albania.

The first important nation to adopt Mussolini's brand of Fascism was Spain, and the latest is Germany. The universal Fascism of which Mussolini speaks also embraces Austria, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Esthonia, while in the Far East the government of Chiang Kai-Chek may be termed completely Fascist, while that of Japan the nearest to Fascism of all reactionary governments.

In addition Fascist parties have grown extremely powerful in Ireland, Finland, Rumania, and Spain, and Fascist elements of considerable varying strength have appeared in Portugal, Holland, France, and Greece, and there have been initiations in England, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Cuba, and — although leaders and membership deny and express abhorrence of the name — in the United States.

In Spain, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, and Rumania Mussolini has played a not unimportant part. In September, 1923, General Miguel Prime de Rivera established a Fascist dictatorship with the approval of the king and the aid of the artillery officers, and in November he came to Rome for a consultation. Mussolini laid down the principle of Discipline, Order, and Hierarchy; Primo agreed; together they made a secret military pact against France [4] and a commercial pact against the United States — they agreed to exploit South America together and undermine the influence of Yankee traders — and like two commercial travelers they divided the market for spaghetti, oranges, wine, artificial silk, olive oil, and other products. Commenting on the success of his visit, Dictator Primo uttered these exalted words:

"On Mussolinism has been formed a creed, a doctrine of redemption, which is drawing to it an army of recruits throughout the world."

In 1926, following Mussolini's example of 1924, Primo held a plebiscite to endorse dictatorship, and like his preceptor, he ordered that no opposition votes should be cast. Announcing the resultant great popular victory, the Spanish dictator declared, "I believe with Mussolini that the principle of liberty is pretty as a principle, but is no longer effective as a rule of conduct for a nation and must be replaced by the principle of authority.

"Public opinion must be strictly controlled.

"The masses must not direct the government, but the government the masses. "The parliamentary system has had its day ... it is no longer indispensable; it is harmful.

"My system will last, not for my personal convenience, but for the good of the country.

"Mussolini's actions showed me what I had to do to save my country. Mussolini is a torch which affords light to nations."

Two years later de Rivera supplemented his views. "There are few who can deny," he said, "that from a material point of view dictatorships in Europe have, on the whole, proved profitable.

"I condemn noisy and sterile assemblies. It is true that when nations and their parliaments reach a high degree of culture they escape the peril. Sr. Mussolini has declared that a democratic parliamentary regime is a luxury for rich nations. He is perfectly correct. In rich countries and highly civilized ones, parliament has its uses.

"As for Italy, everyone is aware that chronic strikes have ceased, that the lira has been stabilized, that the provinces of the south are making progress, and that regions formerly unhealthful are now being developed.

"As for my own country, dare anyone deny that the dictatorship has made considerable material progress, manifest in every branch of our economic life?"

The answer to this question was given by the republican government which followed the resignation of de Rivera on January 28, 1930, and the collapse of his successor. General Berenguer, on April 12, 1931: in 1928, it was announced, the economic system of dictatorial Spain had broken down, but was saved by a loan of 25,000,000 pesetas from Wall Street; in 1931 the complete collapse was so imminent that the dictatorship was negotiating with the banking houses of Morgan, Chase, National City, Kuhn Loeb, Guaranty Trust, Dillon Read, and Lee Higginson for $38,000,000 and the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas for an additional $22,000,000.

Tremendous financial scandals were brought to light, proving that the business men and militarists behind Primo had made millions of dollars' profit, while the dictatorship had falsified the budget for years; instead of the officially announced balances there had been expenditures of 4,000,000,000 pesetas and a deficit of a quarter of a billion; the treasury had only 68,000,000 pesetas on hand instead of the officially announced 320,000,000; the Duke of Tetuan blamed the dictatorship for the flight of capital, loss of confidence, financial crisis, dishonest elections, suppression of liberty, unparalleled waste, and the general distrust of the people of Spain.

Niceto Alcala Zamora, emerging from the prison where the dictatorship had placed him, assumed the Presidency, and one of his first actions was to send a cablegram to Italian anti-Fascists to make Spain their home and look upon the republic as their friend. Francesco Macia, once imprisoned in France as a result of a plot by the Fascist agent Ricciotti Garibaldi, was proclaimed President of the Catalonian Republic. The military treaty between de Rivera and Mussolini was denounced.

Thus, if only temporarily, ended the first of the important Fascist dictatorships modeled upon that of Italy.

In February, 1925, the Grand Council of the Fascist Party under the presidency of its duce discussed "Preliminary examination of the possibility of a universal understanding between the Fascist and similar movements." There was little repercussion in the world press. But within the next decade, as Fascism made headway in many parts of Europe, journalists questioned the Duce.

"Fascism is purely Italian," the originator replied to one; "Fascism is not an article for export," he said to a German, and "America has no need for Fascism," he remarked to an American. Then in the spring of 1930 he wrote, signed and sold an article recounting seven years of the achievements of Fascismo, in which he said:

"Fascism is a typically Italian product, as Bolshevism is a typically Russian product. Neither one nor the other can be transplanted and live outside its country of origin." [5]

However, in his tour of northern Italy in May, Mussolini when not rattling the sword, defying France and Yugoslavia, extended an invitation to other nations to follow his successful methods. "Europe, tormented, uneasy and disheartened," he said in Milan, "will not find its salvation except through the coming of Fascism."

(On September 14, 1930, Reichstag elections were held in Germany, giving the Fascists— the still little known National Socialist Labor Party of Adolf Hitler— a considerable victory.)

Celebrating the eighth anniversary of the taking of Rome, il Duce made one of the most important explanations of Fascist diplomacy of his career: he explained the Spring tour of oratory which had offended a large part of the peace-seeking world; announced Italy as the champion of the Revisionist bloc which sought to amend or destroy the peace treaties upon which the Status Quo nations led by France insisted, and announced the universality of Fascism. He said:

"By the year 1950 Italy will be the only country of young people in Europe, while the rest of Europe will be wrinkled and decrepit. People will come from over the frontier to see the phenomenon of this blooming spring of the Italian people. . . .

"Only toward the East can our pacific expansion occur. . . .

"Their phrase [referring to the German press] that 'Fascismo is not an article for export' is not mine. It is too banal. It was adopted for the readers of newspapers who in order to understand anything need to have it translated into terms of commercial jargon. In any case it must now be amended.

"Today I affirm that the idea, doctrine, and spirit of Fascismo are universal. It is Italian in its particular institutions, but it is universal in spirit; nor could it be otherwise, for spirit is universal by its very nature.

"It is therefore possible to foresee a Fascist Europe which will model its institutions on Fascist doctrine and practice, a Europe which will solve in the Fascist way the problems of the modern State of the twentieth century."

Then, in 1932, Mussolini and Ludwig engaged in the series of interviews already mentioned. Ludwig, mindful of the German press report that Mussolini had said, "Fascism is not an article for export," and then said it was not his phrase, since it was so banal, asked:

"Can Fascism be exported to Germany?"

"To no country," replied Mussolini. "It is an Italian growth. . . ."

Thus ended many years of preaching the gospel of Fascism as an indigenous miracle. Up to the end of 1930 Mussolini had had only one important follower, Primo de Rivera of Spain, but in 1933 one of the really great nations of the world was apparently ready to accept the dictatorial, militaristic, big-business State which he had created. The pragmatic politician, therefore, felt he was at liberty not only to deny his signed statement on the impossibility of Fascism to live transplanted in foreign soil, but to ridicule those who had published the manuscript he had sold them.

"Fascism," he announced after Hitler came into power, "is a religion; the twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism"; and celebrating the anniversary of the founding of the party, he said to the Grand Council on March 18, 1934: "Since 1929 . . . Fascism has become universal. . . . One need only look about him to see that the principles of the past century are dead. We admit unreservedly that they had their period of fecundity and grandeur! But it is over.

"Those who would check the course of history, those who would arrest its movement or stem its tide, have been overwhelmed. The political forces of the last century — Democracy, Socialism, Liberalism, Freemasonry — are spent. . . . The trend is toward new forms of civilization, both in politics and in economics. The State is resuming its right and its prestige as the sole and supreme interpreter of the needs of society."

Pending the years of mere protestations of friendship and declarations of the indigenousness or universality of Fascism, Mussolini had more than platonic relations with Fascist minorities in many countries of Europe. He went the Bolsheviki one better. Whereas the Third Internationale had been accused by almost every nation in the world of spending sums which would total many times more billions than the world possesses on propaganda work abroad, the Fascisti engaged in the more practical and paying business of smuggling arms to Fascist parties in Europe.

Thanks to the social consciousness of several Austrian railroad workingmen, Italy was caught black-handed in January, 1928, in a plot to send twenty-two freight-cars loaded with munitions to Rumania and five car-loads of machine-guns, marked for delivery in Poland but intended for sidetracking into Hungary. This became known as the St. Gothard affair.

The League of Nations intervened and reported. The Italian diplomats attempted to have the report suppressed and it might have been but for the astuteness of American journalists. Not only was the 1928 case reported in full, but evidence was obtained from the archives of the League that Italy had been engaged in smuggling arms to Fascist parties from 1922 on. In 1925 the main shipments were to Hungary, Bulgaria, and Adolf Hitler in Bavaria. The sender of the arms was revealed as the Commercio Universale di Ferramenta Ordigni, which Geneva reported a blind under which were hidden the factories under control of the Fascist government and whose stock was held by Fascist generals.

It was found that in December, 1925, eleven freight-cars passed Bozen, Austrian-Italy, for Rosenheim, the military headquarters of the Hitler-Ludendorff movement. The addressee was Marx & Co., a commercial house in Rosenheim, the sender Frumenti, a well-known Fascist vice-duce in Bozen; the contents were small arms, machine-guns and ammunition. Upon seizure by Austrian border authorities, the Fascist Frumenti came to the customs-house, paid a fine of 27,000 lire for false customs declaration, and the next day sent Fascist militiamen to Rosenheim to investigate the report that Italian railroad workers had given away the secret.

The League of Nations in the St. Gothard affair warned Hungary to preserve the evidence intact, but the Hungarians sold the 2,000 machine-guns — a number enough to equip fifty regiments — for junk. Mussolini, although failing to deny Fascist complicity, issued an order to the press to attack the League for interfering with business and to accuse "certain nations" who were afraid of the arming of "defenseless Hungary," as "cowards."

Smuggling continued. Occasionally there was a scandal. Then in January, 1933, came the Hirtenberg affair. Italy, Hungary, and Austrian Fascists were caught in a conspiracy to violate the Trianon and St. Germain treaties in the smuggling of 50,000 rifles and 200 machine-guns to Fascist elements, notably Prince Stahremberg, who with M. Mandl operated the arms factories at Steyr and Hirtenberg. Prince Stahremberg, friend of Hitler, commanded the Austrian Fascists in 1933 with the blessings of Monsignor Seipel, the ex- chancellor who planned to make himself dictator.

Again Socialist workmen exposed the plot, and the Allies, more concerned with Austria than with the shipments to Bulgarians, Hungarians, and Hitlerites, sent an "ultimatum" to Dollfuss which, despite a request for secrecy, was published by the Fascist press bureau. Dollfuss, having to choose between a $40,000,000 loan from the Allies and the support of Stahremberg, was forced to return the shipment. The guns, accordingly, were started for Italy. At this moment Berthold Koenig, head of the Socialist Railway Workers Union of Austria, according to information given by him in the Austrian parliament, was offered 150,000 shillings for the association if the workmen would permit the shipment to take a wrong switch at a point indicated, so that the guns would be delivered at Sopron, in Hungary, where, the arms having been removed, the cases would be sealed officially and sent on to Italy.

Upon exposure of the plot by Julius Deutsch, Socialist leader in parliament, Doll fuss was forced to dismiss Dr. Egon Seefahlner, director of the state railroads, but he did not prosecute the case farther. Koenig testified that Seefahlner, although the author of the bribe offer, had conspired with the Hungarian government for the delivery of the guns and with the Fascist government in furthering this scheme and arranging to accept the empty cases in silence. At this moment Sir John Simon acted. Britain brought such pressure upon Austria that Stahremberg could by no means retain the guns, and in July the British Foreign Minister announced the safe return to Italy.

In France this scandal was followed by another involving the delivery of Italian war planes to Hungary in contravention of the peace treaty: Eighteen Fiat pursuit and thirty two-seaters and twelve Caproni bombers, also twenty tons of gas and twelve tons of aerial bombs. [6] In Prague Mr. Benes informed parliament that "only one or two out of a hundred contraband lots are caught"; he demanded in the name of the Little Entente that the League take action to prevent Fascist smuggling operations in the future.

At this point Mussolini broke his unusual silence. On his instructions to the press there followed a series of articles showing that France, Czechoslovakia, and Britain were shipping about a hundred times as much arms as Italy. There was one point, however, the Fascist press was instructed to overlook: the Allied arms were being shipped to Allies, which was legal, whereas the Fascist arms were being shipped either to ex-enemy countries in violation of the peace treaties, or to extra-legal organizations, in defiance to law and ethics.

In all Mussolini's intrigue in Germany, Austria, the Balkans, and Africa, his proposed union of dictatorships, his alternate defiance and attempted leadership of the League of Nations, the penetration of Albania and the various enterprises in Tangiers, Tunis, and Ethiopia, the visits to Cyrenaca and Tripolitania, and the final declaration of the universality of Fascism, there runs the thread of a dream: the old Roman dream. Charlemagne was the first of the long series of imitation Caesars who attempted to conquer and rule the old empire, and the refugee Wilhelm in Doom is not the last to have that dream. The son of the Forli blacksmith sitting under the bust of Julius cannot escape it.

World empire through Pan-Fascismo seemed a possibility for a little while in 1930, but that dream was torn by shell-fire in the battle of Vienna when the impossibility of cooperating with Hitler was made evident. But before that event and even now there has persisted an idea for a Holy Roman Empire to be divided equally with the Pope, which would embrace the Catholic countries from Italy to the Danube and including the Rhineland, Hungary, Croatia, a part of Yugoslavia, and Bavaria. And a third idea of similar nature was presented to the world in Mussolini's 1932 "Cry of Alarm," published universally, in which he suggested himself as a leader of a coalition of all the European nations in a holy crusade against that Russia which in the face of universal depression was announcing the successful completion of the first Five-Year-Plan in four years.

In one form or another, therefore, the Caesarian idea remains. Either as the commander-in-chief of the Revisionist nations against the Status Quo nations, or as the leader of Europe against the common enemy, the Red Menace, or as the founder of a new African empire, or as the directing head of a Danube confederation or a Catholic bloc, Mussolini's mind can find the right place for himself. When Briand proposed his United States of Europe the loudest advocates of nationalism were not opposed; on the contrary, the Fascist viewpoint as shown by one of the semi-official publications was an approving one — under conditions. If Europe united as one super-nation, "it would be necessary," declared the Roman voice, "to present a new and formidable political idea, a code of life, which could assure the collaboration not only of languages, of nationalities, but also of classes, and provoke a rapid development of equilibrium and economics, and envisage at the same time a wise valorization of all creative possibilities. It will therefore be a Fascist idea because only Fascist Italy has been able to realize that which might serve as a model. In organizing the United States of Europe it will be necessary to name a president, a chief, and a man must be chosen, the most genial, the most celebrated, the strongest and the most respected on the continent. Evidently it will be Benito Mussolini because he combines all these qualities."

The future may bring Mussolini some realization of the hope of world empire; the past can be summed up as follows: Corfu was a failure, but the penetration of Albania a good success; the intrigue with the Bavarian Nazis was at first a success, and now, at least temporarily, a failure; the secret cooperation with the dictator of Spain was a complete failure; the role of patron saint of discontent is no longer applicable, because Germany, chief of the Revisionist nations, has, without Mussolini's aid, destroyed rather than revised the Versailles Treaty, and yet vicariously that success, whether pleasant or not for the Allies and for the world, must go to Mussolini.

He has made Italy an imperialist nation. Whereas that other Caesar of our time said that "Germany, like the spirit of Imperial Rome, must expand and impose itself," the Duce exposed his principal objective in a declaration to a German editor when he said: "We are obliged to fight on our soil, too small for our overpopulation, for the smallest grain of nutritive substance. Despite scientific effort, Italy cannot nourish its people. We must expand or explode. [7] I do not feel myself authorized to believe in the humanitarian idealism of the pacifists."

For the explosion itself Mussolini then named the year 1935. In 1935 Italy was at war in Africa. The admitted overpopulation is a danger to the peace of the world, intensified by both the encouragement of the birth rate and the refusal of the colonial nations to cede rich land to Italy. And more important than all else is the necessity of imperialism to explode because its economic structure makes that, instead of peaceful methods, the one way out of its own dilemmas.

_______________

Notes:

1. U.S. Ambassador R. W. Child, later a Fascist agent, hinted that the Greeks purposely placed the refugees in the fort.

2. New York Herald.

3. Milan, 1925 (before the suppression of the free press), p. 27.

4. The contents of which were published by the Spanish diplomat, Santiago Alba, after his exile to France.

5. New York World, March 2, 1930, magazine section, p. 1.

6. Journal Officiel, March 10, 1933.

7. To Theodore Wolff, editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, January 30, 1930. The Associated Press, whose Rome correspondent was then an Italian, cabled a similar interview with the italicized phrase as "We must expand or suffocate."

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CHAPTER 25: The Corporate State: People under Fascism

ALTHOUGH IN TURN THE BATTLE OF THE LIRA, THE BATTLE OF THE Grain, the Battle of the Babies, and many other triumphs have been announced by Mussolini as the outstanding event of his reign, the Duce is also the author of the statement that his greatest gift to civilization and the harassed modern world, the accomplishment for which he will be remembered forever, is the Corporate State.

"There is one battle which I intend to win — the battle for the economic restoration of Italy," he declared in July, 1926; "I am now giving my earnest attention to the restoration of the balance of trade and the stabilization of the lira." That same day the following decrees were also issued:

Abolition of the eight-hour day.

Abolition of the right to strike.

Limitation of newspapers to six pages; crime news must be diminished.

Luxury hotels, cabarets, and the building of luxurious homes prohibited. Abolition of luxury imports.

Potato-raising must replace spaghetti-making.

A ten-o'clock curfew for tea, coffee, and alcohol.

This was part of a program of "prosperity by edict"; in the press of the United States and the free nations of Europe labor-leaders declared that "Labor's greatest gains in a century of struggle have been wiped out." Almost immediately afterwards Mussolini announced the completed Corporate State.

"For the first time in the history of the world a constructive revolution like ours realizes peacefully, in the field of production and work, incorporation of all the economic and intellectual forces of the nation to direct them today in a common purpose. . . ."

Simultaneously with the establishment of the Corporate State came a series of loans in America and intensification of the propaganda, begun the year before, when the $100,000,000 Morgan loan was floated, that Fascism was the antithesis of Bolshevism, that Mussolini had saved not only Italy, but perhaps all of Europe, from the Red Menace, that the Corporate State was the answer to the universal Utopian urge which elsewhere, notably in Russia, was making itself known in a manner quite unacceptable to the organized profit-making system.

This new phenomenon, therefore, must be judged from three important points: whether it is actually the "salvation" from Communism; whether it actually functions; whether the people under the Corporate State have gone forward or backward.

To begin with, it must be said that despite the best American public-relations counsel employed by the international bankers, despite the newspapers and magazines which voluntarily surrendered to the Fascist propaganda machine, it is a historic fact that the whole Mussolini-Bolshevik story was a pure myth which dates from the time of the foreign loans, and the most important historian who first admitted that the Bolshevism of 1920 (the worst year, the time of the occupation of factories) had disappeared long before the victory of Fascism, wrote in 1921:

"The Italy of 1921 is fundamentally different from that of 1919. It has been said and demonstrated several times. Fascism must not have the air of monopolizing for itself the right of such a profound national change. It is enough to count Fascism among the forces, the most powerful and the most disciplined, which have operated in that direction. After having thus limited our merit, there is no man or party which can attack us.

"To say that the Bolshevik danger still exists in Italy is equivalent to trying to exchange, for reasons of self-interest, fear against the truth. Bolshevism is conquered.

"More than that, it has been disowned by the leaders and by the people."

This editorial is signed by Benito Mussolini. [1]

This same statesman who in 1925 and 1926 informed American journalists that Fascism rose to destroy Bolshevism is the same Mussolini who advocated not only confiscation of wealth, but the lynching of the patriotic body of war profiteers, the confiscation of land and industries, and in short played the part of the devil's or Lenin's advocate in Italy. But in December, 1920, three months after the factory seizures, he had also written in his Popolo:

"It is honest to admit that for the past three months, or precisely after the referendum on the occupation of the factories, and after the return of the mission to Russia [Serratti and others had brought back unfavorable reports on Bolshevism] the psychology of the working-masses has profoundly moderated. The famous wave of disgust and weakness seems conquered. ... It is indisputable that the Italian working-class continues to offer the spectacle of laborious activity and discipline; one cannot refuse them participation more or less vast in the government of the nation."

If Mussolini's statement that Bolshevism had ceased to menace Italy after 1920 needs corroboration, he has had it from modern historians like H. G. Wells and Professor Salvemini. If liberal and anti-Fascist historians are not enough, we have the testimony of Professor Aulard of the Sorbonne, who states that long before the march on Rome "Bolshevism had been conquered, annihilated in Italy by the efforts of the sane democratic elements." Sanford Griffith reported in the conservative Wall Street Journal that "it is a distortion of fact to picture Italian business conditions as in a state of chaos, and the country on the brink of Red terror, when Mussolini and his Fascisti came into power." And Fascism's defender, Prezzolini, wrote that "Fascismo can hardly be called the destroyer of Italian Bolshevism, because when Mussolini's movement assumed the violent forms which gave it such a spectacular history, Bolshevism was already on the decline as a result of discouraging reports brought back by the emissaries from Russia. ... In more than one sense it [Fascismo] is the heir to Italian Bolshevism."

But popular opinion — and the bankers — needed a Saint George and therefore refused to accept Saint George's own admission there was no Bolshevik dragon for him to kill in 1922. Popular opinion, therefore, finds consolation in those American economists, literateurs, and philosophers of the daily press and weeklies which boast readers by the millions. One of these writers [2] states that "Ruin impended. Mussolini took the short and unconstitutional cut which is the dictatorial way. He smashed precedents, turned red terror into white fear, and brought order and — what was even more important — economic revival out of the dust and din of class war and political bicker. In the last analysis, Fascism is not only a political force of historic moment, but It has been the impetus of an impressive commercial renaissance as well." This same political economist precedes this statement with an unqualified declaration that "the traditional parliamentary systems of Europe are failures," and a suggestion that France should join the dictatorships. It is true that the same writer in 1930 ate all his praise of dictatorships, but he remained the agent of the Italian Bolshevik myth. He wrote:

"Sovietization, with its attendant social and fiscal dislocation impended. The workers had seized the factories in all the important productive centers. Chaos loomed. In the darkest hour a strong man rose up and saved the day. The stern will of Mussolini, reinforced by the cohort of Black Shirts, imposed a regime that made for historic rehabilitation. Dictatorship achieved its best."

Another writer, a more flowery one, [3] believes that "everybody who has looked into the Fascist movement in Italy is agreed that it was a greatly needed movement and that it saved the nation from descending into a chaotic whirlpool of Communism and financial disaster that would have made Niagara's whirlpool look like a placid puddle of rain water in comparison." This is incidentally the same historian who glorifies Cesare Rossi as "the hero," who defends the castor-oil treatment, and who tells Americans that "in spite of his [Mussolini's] many changes, there has never been a word uttered against his absolute sincerity and honesty," and that "Mussolini's dictatorship is a good dictatorship."

This version of the Bolshevik myth accepted by such eminent gentlemen as Isaac Marcosson, Sir Percival Phillips, Kenneth L. Roberts, Lord Rothermere, Luigi Villari, Lord Beaverbrook, Otto H. Kahn, Thomas Lament, and Judge Gary of the United States Steel Corporation, eventually was noticed by the superman himself. The clever journalist realized that the world of big business was honoring him for something which he had denied, and he was opportunist enough to seize the tribute. From the time of the American loans onward he has been declaring himself the original Bolshevik-fighter of Europe.

"Adversaries of Fascism," he said in an oration in 1927, "have for a long time past been attempting to deny the revolutionary character of the events which took place towards the end of October, 1922, bringing the following argument in support of their allegations. First, that there was no real resistance, and therefore no conflicts, leading to bloodshed; secondly, that all the anti-Fascist parties withdrew, leaving the road open, because — these commentators of evil faith add — the Bolshevist danger had already disappeared since 1920, when the occupation of the factories ended in a bubble of soap. ... In the face of these untrue assertions aimed at diminishing the generous and bloody effort of the Black Shirts we must never tire in our work of affirming and riveting the facts which led to the Fascist revolution." The Duce concluded by naming his facts: Bolshevik danger existed; the march on Rome was a bloody battle; etc. Forgotten were the signed editorials of another day, forgotten the statement to the King, forgotten everything which the opportunist mind wills to forget.

And so we find Mussolini in 1931 publishing his "Cry of Alarm" in which the world is warned that unless economic remedies are found for the economic collapse "Bolshevism will break through the Vistula"; again he made his bid as the leader of the united nations against Russia, and again he recommended in interviews that Europe adopt his Totalitarian idea in order to prevent the Communist idea from spreading.

What, then, is this new Corporate State, this substitute for Bolshevism which Mussolini has invented and recommends? It is, to begin with, philosophically based on Hegel; from this thinker who also influenced Karl Marx is drawn the first article of the Labor Charter which defines the new Italian nation as "an organism having aims, life, and means of action superior to those of the single or grouped individuals who compose it."

But after Hegel there came d'Annunzio, who in his Carta della Regensa Italians del Carnaro, in his nineteenth article, created ten corporations which were to include all the people of Fiume and its dependencies, as follows: salaried workers of industry, agriculture, commerce, and transportation, etc.; members of technical and administrative bodies of industrial or rural firms; commercial workers who are not laborers; employers; public employees; intellectual flower of the people, studious youth, teachers, sculptors, painters, architects, musicians, etc.; free professions; cooperative societies of production, labor, and consumption; seamen. . . .

D'Annunzio put into noble strophes the ideas of his Prime Minister, De Ambris; Mussolini recooked d'Annunzio's poetry and combined it with the "philosophy" of nationalist-syndicalism of Alfredo Rocco; he was aided in this by Edmondo Rossoni, a former member of the American Industrial Workers of the World, whose habitat had been Brooklyn, New York, and who proposed the syndicalization of workers in vertical unions embracing all parts of an industry. All these gentlemen helped themselves from the writings of Georges Sorel, the French syndicalist.

The most important document of the new State is the Labor Charter, whose first eight articles were written by Mussolini. These provide that:

Labor, intellectual, technical, manual, is a social duty.

Syndicates are organized and controlled by the State.

Collective labor contracts are established.

Labor courts are established; the State intervenes and settles controversies.

Each corporation constitutes the organization of one field of production, nationally.

Private initiative is encouraged.

Wages are paid "as best suited to the needs of employees and the undertaking."

The Labor Charter is a statement of aims, not a series of laws. It does emphasize the Totalitarian State idea, that the State is everything, the individual nothing. Although the workingman is called a "partner" in industry, he has no voice in it. Although lockouts are barred equally with strikes, and although the corporations which consist of employers and employees are entitled to elect the political directors of the Corporate State, it has surprised no one to find that in the hundreds of thousands of cases of labor unrest there are few instances in which the arbitration boards have to deal with lockouts, and politically the corporations are in the control of either the employers or of the Fascist Party.

The best summary of the corporate idea was made by Giuseppe Bottai, who represented it in the Fascist cabinet:

"The Corporate State idea, which Fascism has conceived and enforced, is an absolutely modern idea. The corporations of the Middle Ages were closed institutions; Italian corporativism, on the contrary, is founded essentially on the idea of syndicates, organizations to which access is on the principle freely open to all those who ply the same trade. Italian corporativism preserves the syndical structure likewise in the workers' syndicates as well as the employers' confederations, the two parallel organizations being united in a higher state which is the corporation.

"The directing idea is to integrate the syndical forces within the State, to utilize them. We do not deny the existence of the war of the classes; we do not suppress it; we simply enforce regulations by means of collective contracts of which 9,000 have been made, of which 300 to 400 apply to all of Italy, the other being of provincial character.

"The corporations penetrate all branches of public life. They are represented in the Chamber of Deputies by the Deputies, employers and employees, and equally in the Grand Council of the party. Furthermore, there exists a central committee of corporations.

"The influence of the corporations has produced in Italian industry a concentration whose happy results have been felt in its rationalization." [4]

When the Labor Charter was published, Rocco called it the Bill of Rights of Labor, but Rossoni, admitting it did guarantee minimum rights for the employee, said the employers would take advantage of its vague terms. Rossoni was asked to resign. Labriola and Buozzi, the exiled labor-leaders, said simply it was a charter of slavery. But in February, 1929, Mussolini asked Buozzi, who had been head of the Italian Federation of Labor, to return from France to head the labor syndicates. In his refusal Buozzi said that the Duce's proposal showed that seven years of Fascism had not reconciled labor to the movement; that the workmen still trusted the old leaders; that he had once before refused to sell them out or to compromise his ideals and would not now.

The first practical step in the formation of the Corporate State was the prohibition of strikes under penalty of fines and imprisonment. In confirmation of Buozzi's views came the confession, at the Congress of Fascist Syndicates, June 30, 1929, that labor was not getting a new deal. Arnaldo Fioretti and the Hon. Begnotti, Fascist syndicate leaders, according to the official publication Lavoro Fascista, told the congress that workingmen were not fairly treated by employers, that the new labor contracts were not respected by the captains of industry, that the workingmen had lost faith in the Fascist syndicates, and that the Corporate State cannot be said to exist until the hostility and reprisals of employers against workmen had been removed and unjust dismissals stopped. No newspaper in Italy printed these official statements.

In May, 1930, Mussolini announced that the National Council of Corporations had been inaugurated, "to crown the Corporative State." He called it an economic revolution: not only was peace between capital and labor enforced, but prices would be regulated, and the quantity of production as well. The syndicates were announced as complete: six employers' federations in industry, agriculture, commerce, land transport, sea and air transport, and banking; and six corresponding employees' confederations. In addition there was a federation of all intellectual workers.

"We have thus created a united Italian State," said Mussolini. "Since the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy has never been a unified State. It is the State alone that makes the nation self-conscious."

In the national council there were fifty-two of Mussolini's picked men and thirteen representatives of the corporations.

In 1932 Fascist official figures showed that 4,181,848 Italians out of some seven or eight million workingmen had become members of the syndicates. What is remarkable about this figure is that it is comparatively small because employment in Italy, as in Russia, is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for those who do not join the State organization. But more remarkable is the figure of 995,828 employers who have joined, out of a possible 3,707,893 who come under that classification.

In 1933, despite the fact that the Rome correspondent of the New York Times and the majority of correspondents of the other important newspapers resident in Rome had been announcing from two to seven times, in the course of seven years, that the Corporate State was functioning, Mr. John Strachey made the statement that "No corporations exist except on paper." He was immediately attacked by unbelieving critics and reviewers. Mr. Strachey's declarations seemed stupid in the face of unanimous reports in the daily press.

Shortly afterwards there appeared the first complete volume dealing with the problem. It was written by a Fascist with the cooperation of the officials of the Ministry of Corporations. On page no of this study [5] in a chapter entitled "The Corporations in their actual working" [sic] the author states; "Only a single corporation, viz., that of the stage, has so far been established in Italy."

However, the only important thing for us to consider is whether, functioning or not as a Corporative State, the Fascist system of planned economy, the substitute for the planned economy of Bolshevism, has or has not achieved anything up to date. It is Mussolini who said that the State's ultimate goal is "the well-being of the Italian people"; it must be "judged and measured directly by the masses as instruments through which these masses may improve their standard of living. Some day the worker, the tiller of the soil, will say to himself and to others: 'If today I am better off practically, I owe it to the institutions which the Fascist revolution has created.'"

In just this manner let the following facts pass judgment.

In 1926, when the few untrammeled journalists reported that there was already a crisis in Fascist economics and that the publicly announced balanced budgets were mere jugglery, official figures showed that wages were below 1921 and that the cost of living had gone up 30 per cent. In 1927, with the stabilization of the lira, Mussolini found a much more serious economic crisis. He therefore announced a reduction in rentals, reduction in the price of manufactured goods, and a wage cut throughout the nation of between 5 and 20 per cent. He promised that the cuts ordered in the high cost of living would more than recompense the reductions in salary. At that time the general price index was 670; wages stood at 585; in real wages the workman was 13 per cent worse off than before the war.

That Fascism had proved a failure so far as the working population of Italy is concerned long before the world crisis of 1929-35 is openly admitted in the 1932 report of the Secretary of State for Corporations, who wrote:

"Between June, 1927, and December, 1928, the wages of industrial workers have gone down by about 20 per cent, and a further reduction of 10 per cent was made in 1929; during 1930 there has been a general reduction, varying for the different categories of workers from 18 to 25 per cent. Many other adjustments [sic] have been realized in 1931."

But that is not all. The decree effective December 1, 1930, cut the salaries of those earning more than $3,000 a year by 35 per cent and those below $2,000 by 12 per cent, and wages of 300 lire ($15.70) to 1,000 lire ($52.35) a month 8 per cent, and those above 1,000 lire 10 per cent. This cut affected 1,000,000 laborers in the industrial centers of the north — Milan, Turin, and Genoa. The government announced it "hoped" to reduce prices of commodities accordingly.

Then, on the 1st of April, 1931, Mussolini in another of his great public orations informed Italy that it need fear no more wage reductions. Frankly he admitted that "We have reached a limit in wage cutting; there is danger that the antidote may become a poison. . . . Italy was the first to apply what has now been adopted by almost the whole of Europe. . . . On the whole, certain symptoms of recovery may be seen, but . . . we are still waiting for the factors of recovery — in the first place moral factors — to enter into play simultaneously and collectively."

By 1932, however, an official of the Fascist syndicates [6] figured that the wages of glass-workers had declined between 30 and 40 per cent; signalmen's earnings down 40 per cent; silk-workers, 38 per cent; bricklayers, 30 per cent; miners, 30 per cent; while the cost of living had declined 20 per cent.

In 1933, moreover, despite the Duce's poison-warning, every Italian salary and wage was ordered reduced an average of 10 per cent and Mussolini announced a similar reduction in rents, food, manufactured goods, etc.

And again, on April 14, 1934, "the urgent necessity of lightening the national budget, which shows an annual deficit of between 3,000,000,000 and 4,000,000,000 lire" — the admission is made by Mr. Cortesi of the Times himself — "caused the cabinet council ... to apply a general reduction in the salaries of State employees, effective April i6th." Twenty per cent was removed from the income of high-salaried officials such as cabinet members; 6 per cent, the minimum, was the tax on those making more than 500 lire a month; others were exempt. When it is considered that one man in five works for the government, the size of this, the sixth reduction since 1927, will appear evident. The Fascist apologist, Cortesi, claims that the 1934 cut brings wages down to the pre-Fascist era and says "the general lowering of the cost of living which will ultimately result in the lowering of production costs in industry and agriculture, is deemed necessary by economists. . . ." The facts, however, are that real wages are far below the pre-Fascist era; that living costs have never paralleled the decline in wages; that the buying power of the Italian people has decreased rather than increased, and that while the philo-Fascist journalists continue to find explanations and publish excuses in the New York Times, the official figures of the League of Nations and the statements of Mussolini himself and other lesser enthusiasts for Fascism than the Times correspondent, have admitted the economic degeneration of the Italian people.

To complete the chronicle, it was announced by Mussolini on December 11, 1934, that a nation-wide and simultaneous reduction in salaries and the cost of living was being worked out which directly affected every person in the kingdom, directly and indirectly, the cut being similar to that of October, 1930, and similarly carrying with it a reduction in cost of rent, light, heat, food, and transport of between 10 and 12 per cent.

But instead of mentioning the obvious collapse of the Fascist economy, the American press heralded each of these seven events with an appropriate excuse furnished by the Fascist propaganda department. The headlines, for example, said that the 1927 cut was due to the success of the stabilization on a gold basis; in 1933 Mr. Cortesi of the Times supplied a story which was headed "Italy cuts wages to aid recovery"; the first 1934 reduction was linked with one in Russia and the joint headline read "Russia and Italy slash payrolls in Economy Wave"; the second 1934 cut was reported by the Times as "Italy to slash wages and cost of living to meet competition of non-gold nations."

Before presenting the documentary proofs of failure of Fascist economics, it may be interesting, perhaps, to give another sample of pro-Fascist journalism, typical of some magazines as contrasted with the newspapers. Whereas the daily press is supposed to deal with facts, the monthly journals devote themselves largely to opinion and interpretation. Here, then, are some extracts from the work of Howard R. Marraro [7] of the Italian department of Columbia University:

"In a world whose troubles are at bottom mainly economic, nations are rightly judged according to their success or failure in terms of genuine human welfare. What then has Fascism done to bring about a happier state of affairs in Italy? . . .

"The Italian today is much better fed than he was. . . .

". . . the standards of living of the Italian people have improved from 1913 to the present. This improvement is particularly marked during the twelve years of the Fascist regime, and it has not been interrupted by the world economic crisis. . . .

"Thanks to the labor legislation of the Fascist regime, there has been no important strike or lockout in Italy since 1926. ... Of the 153 strikes which have come before the courts, a considerable number were due to the uncertainties prevailing in the early days as to the interpretation of the act. . . .

". . . the economic and social achievements of Fascism are truly impressive ... a more prosperous and happy nation."

So much for opinion and interpretation. The facts are that under Fascism, from 1923 to 1932, the cost of living was reduced 5 per cent and wages reduced 40 to 50 per cent; if this is not a fact, then the League of Nations has been badly fooled. These statements are from the Bulletin mensuel de statistique, Geneva, February, 1933, page 74. Fascist official figures show a reduction in the cost of living of only 10 per cent as compared with 1914. [8] In other words, six wage cuts averaging 40 to 50 per cent and a cut in living costs of 5 or 10 per cent. The Fascist Carriere della Sera (July 27, 1932) admitted that in four years the wage cuts totaled 50 per cent. The official Lavoro Fascista (November 29, 1931) admitted that in some provinces wages had been reduced from 45 to 60 per cent in 1931.

The International Labor Office of the League of Nations made the following report on real wages, in July, 1930:

United States: 190
Canada: 155
Great Britain: 100
Holland: 82
Germany: 73
Poland: 61
Austria: 48
Jugoslavia: 45
Spain: 40
Italy: 39

The International Labour Review, March, 1932, gives the daily farm labor wage in 1923 as 12.88 lire; 1926, 14.24 lire; 1931, 10.49 lire. Real wages for agricultural workers stood at 107 in 1923, 89 in 1926, and 87 in 1931.

An examination of Fascist official figures shows that the average wage in 1928 was two lire an hour; that it fell to one and three-fourths lire in 1932, and one and a half, or eight cents an hour, in 1933. In other words, labor is worse paid in Italy than in any country in Europe.

Before Fascism arrived it is true that Italy was not among the first of the thirty or more nations which reported to the League, but neither was it the very last. It reached that position in a steady retrogression from 1926 on. Moreover, the Labor Office in its statistics on social welfare of workmen throughout the world also lists Italy last among the important nations of Europe because it spends less per man and because it has not yet (1932) organized a decent system of assurance against unemployment.

If the foregoing facts require an objective interpretation, here is one made by Constantine E. McGuire with the cooperation of the Institute of Economics: [9]

Rents are nearly four times higher than before the war. [10]

The low wages earned by employees and often by professional men frequently render it impossible for them to bring up their offspring according to the pre-war standard.

The deduction may fairly be made that the standard of living of students living in university dormitories has distinctly fallen.

The universities and higher institutions of learning are relatively deserted.

One may gather . . . that those who are students today are likely to have in the life of tomorrow an efficiency below that of those who were students before the war.

It is evident that a condition of this sort can hardly continue without progressive decay of the Italian national organism. At this very moment that organism is in a pathological condition. ... By a pathological condition we mean precisely one which cannot continue without bringing about the breakdown of the organism itself. [11]

When the problem of the high cost of living continues on and on and for a greater or less fraction of the population without any other fraction thereof being able to realize exceptional profits — which is precisely the state of affairs existing in Italy for some time — the conviction that living is costly really signifies that at least for some categories of the population the national income is insufficient to maintain the standard of living which they have accustomed themselves to observe. [12]

So low is the standard of living of the Italian workman that it could not be lower without impairing his productive powers. The wage level ... in Italy ... is the same as in Austria, over whose population the world is in the habit of weeping; and Italy's wage level is actually lower than that of Spain or that of Poland. [13]

The facts are that the standard of living of Italy has fallen dangerously under Fascism; the question is whether or not it has fallen below the subsistence level.

In 1932 Professor Bottazzi, physiologist and member of the Fascist National Academy, published an academic study of this subject. It showed conclusively that the masses were not eating enough to satisfy hunger. In 1929 Mussolini had admitted that "there are communes in Sardinia and in South Italy where for months at a time the inhabitants have to live on wild plants," [14] and the Deputy Zingali had reported to parliament that "I have been collaborating in the preparation of the material concerning the American debt. It was my duty to ascertain the standard of life in Italy, and I arrived at this disturbing conclusion: that the food ration per head and per day amounted to only 3,100 calories — i.e., to 200 calories less than the physiologists consider necessary for adults. Our ration is probably lower than that of any other European country." [15]

And finally, for the benefit of the Cortesis and Marraros, here is the original language of the Discorso of the Duce in the Fascist Chamber of Deputies December 12, 1930:

"Fortunamente il popolo italiano non e ancora ambituato a mangiare molte volte al giorno e, avendo un livello di vita modesto sente di meno la deficiensa e la sofferenza." "Fortunately," said Mussolini, "the Italian people is not yet accustomed to eating several times per day and, having a modest standard of living, feels want and suffering less."

The "modest standard of living" is the lowest standard in Europe, one of the lowest standards in the civilized world; it was reached during the Fascist regime and it is one of the chief results of the Fascist economic program. In the United States, in 1935, there was a serious discussion among the physicians attending their annual national convention, whether or not the amounts paid the unemployed and their food ration were sufficient to keep these millions above the subsistence level. Yet under Fascism not the unemployed on the dole, but the entire working nation, has been reduced to just about or below that level.

And at the same time the burden of taxation has increased. In proportion to income, the Italian people pay more taxes than those of any other important country. In 1914 the taxation as percentage of national income was 13; in 1925 it had already reached 20 per cent, and in other Fascist years it has been higher. Concludes Mr. McGuire: "Even with much more substantial allowances per capita for the minimum of subsistence, it is probable that no other important country would show so great a percentage of income absorbed in taxation. Thus, Italy's appearance of vigor and prosperity [in 1926] cannot cover the fact that from an economic point of view her people are poorer, taken on an average, than they were before the war." [16]

Compared with war time, rents increased from two to three times, according to testimony given to officials by the Home Owners' Association [17] while the purchasing power of money had fallen to one-fifth or one-sixth; taxes, on the other hand, had increased four-fold and various expenses and dues increased an average of sixfold. From these figures the home-owners concluded that the effective income has been reduced to one-half.

In 1932 a study of official figures revealed that taxation had almost doubled under Fascism. The amount was 20,000,000,000 lire a year, or 30 per cent of the national income, as compared with 12,000,000,000 lire or approximately 15 per cent in pre-dictatorial days.

Bread is taxed 1-1/2 cents a pound, sugar 13 cents, salt 3 cents, and other necessities of life in proportion. Returning to his ancestral land, Anthony M. Turano was surprised to have a friend say to him, "You are fortunate you can smoke without counting the puffs. Smoking has become the privilege of the upper classes." Mr. Turano investigated. He found [18] that an assistant stone mason earned one and a quarter lire an hour and the cheapest cigarettes were four lire for twenty; in other words, a man must work three hours to half a day for his cigarette money. Unemployed who for a time are allowed 3.70 lire a day cannot, therefore, buy a packet of cigarettes with their dole.

To Mussolini's declaration, "I am the first to declare that the pressure of taxation has attained the limit" — quoted by Mr. Marraro — Mr. Turano adds that despite this warning "not to tax the taxpayers to death," it continues. Bachelor taxes have been increased, but when the desperate bachelor marries he is told he must pay 25 lire a year as family tax; he is taxed for keeping a hog and he is taxed if he slaughters the hog; and so it goes.

The latest available figures on the subject show that the workingmen of Italy have to contribute 160,448,000 lire for the maintenance of the embryo corporations. The individual worker pays not only his regular dues, but contributes to the unemployment fund, sick benefit fund, summer resorts fund, winter insurance, federal secretariat, Fascist home fund, and to extraordinary levies, a total of somewhat over 216 lire. The American trades-unionist pays about $30 a year; the Italian pays less in dollars, but more in real wages, since the American gives up about one week's pay, whereas the Italian is legally forced to surrender almost one month's pay to the corporations.

It is true that there has not been one first-class strike since 1926. In every instance where workmen threatened or began a strike the Fascist militia has suppressed it with violence and bloodshed. And this is, of course, one of the great achievements of Fascism — from the point of view of the chambers of commerce and industrialist associations. The Labor Charter prohibits strikes. The militia see that the charter is enforced. That is about all there is to the struggle between capital and labor in Italy.

And yet in the reports of Fascist officials there is the proud claim that of the 142,000 labor disputes in 1932, 37,000 were settled in the courts, the balance by the syndicates. The claim to settlement is also an admission that disputes exist. But the Italian press has been ordered, and the foreign correspondents warned, not to emphasize or mention social unrest, labor troubles, tax revolts. Although the Manchester Guardian and London Times have frequently reported such episodes, there has been almost no mention of them in the American press.

In May, 1927, an armed rebellion against the Fascisti was led by Don Galbiati, the parish priest of Inveruno, and there were other uprisings and riots throughout Italy in protest to the wage cut and the increased cost of living. At that time the anti-Fascist press, secretly printed, still had a circulation of 500,000 copies daily. Early in 1931 the weavers of Parabiago and Legnago walked out. Wages had been reduced to 62 cents a day. In the American press this was reported as the first strike since the announcement of the Corporate State; it was, in fact, the first of thousands of strikes which was reported in the foreign press. The Fascist militia soon reduced both the Galbiati uprising and the weavers' strike to silence.

On the 8th of September, 1931, there was a revolt of the peasants of Montenero di Basaccia. The podesta, or vice-duce, of the province had imposed taxes the people could not pay. With cries of, "Death to the podesta," and, "Death to the famine-makers," the populace stormed and sacked the mayor's office, tearing up the pictures of Mussolini and destroying the archives. The officials fled. The Fascist militia deserted.

In the afternoon a commissioner of police arrived from Campobasso with regular police (carabineers). He informed the populace the Fascist officials had been sacked and a better regime would begin, but that night he began arresting the supposed ringleaders. The peasants sounded the alarm. In a battle with the police the latter fired 200 shots, killing three men, Antonio Lonzi, Antonio Suriani (aged over seventy) and Pasquale d'Aulero, and wounding thirteen others.

That same month there was a bloody demonstration of workingmen of Carrara in which the Fascisti killed two and wounded many. On the 27th at Roccacasale in the Abruzzi the angry populace stormed the mayor's palace. At Villa Santa the podesta and the municipal secretary were shot by peasants. At Vereno di Piave, near Treviso, during the Vatican-Fascist conflict over the school regime, the population shouted, "Our hour has come," barricaded the provincial route, and attempted to surround the Fascist barracks.

On January 8, 1933, the Chicago Tribune reported that the militia and carabinieri were sent to the villages to Monte San Giacomo and Sassano to quell disturbances which followed attempts by the authorities to collect taxes. On April 19, 1934, the Associated Press carried a fifty-word report of "a violent outbreak in protest against provincial taxes in which one person was killed and fifteen wounded," at Pratola in central Italy. "Mountaineers chased the collector to the railroad station, cut the telephone and telegraph lines, and damaged public buildings before they were quelled by Fascist militia."

The plebiscite of 1934, according to Robert Briffault, [19] was an indispensable preliminary "to putting into force the drastic reductions of wages and other measures imposing misery and starvation, rendered necessary by the economic bankruptcy of the Fascist State, was attended by a terrorism not excelled at the time of the 'March on Rome,' The balloting was open, and the most violent intimidation was exercised by the State forces. Nevertheless, in Turin the negative votes have been estimated at between 12,000 and 15,000, and those who abstained from voting numbered 40,000. Similar reports were forthcoming from Milan. In Venice the 'plebescite' led to violent riots, which the militia were unable to control before several of the 'Dopolavoro' houses had been wrecked.

"Open opposition to Fascism, despite all measures of terrorism, is assuming ever larger proportions in recent months. Practically the whole of Sicily and Calabria is now manifesting openly its anti-Fascist spirit. At Bistari, Mussolini was burnt in effigy. At Catanzaro, a procession was stopped by masses of rioters shouting anti-Fascist slogans. At Udine, in February, large demonstrations, including women and children, paraded, crying 'Down with Fascism.' Anti-Fascist riots have taken place in Licorno. Everything indicates that the opposition to Fascism, which is in reality almost universal among the working-classes, is daily becoming bolder."

So it is apparent that there is unrest and occasional revolt.

It was said by the late William Bolitho that the Duce's agricultural program in 1928 was making serfs out of Italian farm labor. More recently Professor W. Y. Elliott, of Harvard, summed up the situation as follows: "Fascism has succeeded in depriving the laborer of the weapon of free association and the right to strike, and has reduced him, at least for the time being, to a condition of State-controlled serfdom," and in October, 1934, the secretary of the British Trade Union Congress, Walter M. Citrine, urging the American Federation of Labor to declare war on Fascism, declared:

"The record of Fascism is one of repression, brutality, and terrorism. Personal liberty has been destroyed, trade-unionism has been crushed, and the status of the citizen has been reduced to that of a serf.

"Far from being saved by Fascism, Italy has been brought to the verge of economic bankruptcy. Since 1922 wages have been reduced 40 to 50 per cent and are now the lowest in western Europe. Even Mussolini admits that the living standards of Italian workers can be reduced no lower. American money is helping Mussolini to maintain his power.

"Fascism's record in the constructive sphere is one of failure and futility. It has contributed more than any other factor to the feeling of insecurity which has brought the possibility of widespread war to the forefront."

In 1934 the National Joint Council representing the Trades Union Congress, the Labor Party and the Parliamentary Labor Party of Britain issued "British Labor's Call to the People," an official declaration of war on Fascism, Italian as well as German. On October 13th of the same year the American Federation of Labor declared a boycott of goods made in dictatorial countries, including Italy. In February, 1935, following an investigation of Italian agents' activities against the trade unions, President Green of the A. F. of L. publicly condemned Italian Fascism.

Of course the fact that free labor throughout the world is anti-Fascist — seeing in Italian, German, and other forms of Fascism a return to medieval serfdom — can be interpreted conversely, that Fascism would be highly welcomed by the employers of labor. It was, in fact, by Judge Gary of the United States Steel Corporation. And that leading philosopher and economist of big-business, Mr. Marcosson, glorifying the Corporate State, wrote in 1930 that "under the Fascist trade-union law strikes have been outlawed and compulsory arbitration is enforced. No Mussolini measure was so fraught with constructive possibilities."

In Britain, America, France, and other free countries labor is becoming the chief antagonist to the Fascist movement. After all, it is labor which is hardest hit. One man's Corporate "constructive possibilities" is another man's Helot State.

The evidence is therefore overwhelming that Mussolini did not save Italy from Bolshevism; that the Corporate State, which may or may not be a substitute for Soviet-planned economy, does not function; that the standard of living of Italy has gone down with six or seven wage cuts; that under these circumstances "the well-being of the Italian people" has not materialized, but their misery increased; that, in short, Fascist economy is a failure.

_______________

Notes:

1. Vide Popolo d'Italia, July 2, 1921.

2. Mr. Isaac Marcosson.

3. Mr. Kenneth L. Roberts.

4. Prager Presse, January, 1933.

5. The Italian Corporate State, by Fausto Pitigliani, London, P. S. King & Son.

6. Living Age, May, 1934.

7. Current History, May, 1935.

8. Bolletino dei prezzi, January 12, 1933, p. 44.

9. Italy's International Economic Position (1927).

10. Id., p. 545.

11. Id., p. 547.

12. Id., p. 548.

13. Id., p. 535.

14. Discourse, Chamber of Deputies, June 22, 1929.

15. Parliamentary Reports, Chamber of Deputies, December 5, 1929.

16. McGuire, Italy's International Economic Position, p. 103.

17. Id., p. 535.

18. American Mercury, September, 1934.

19. Forum, October, 1934.

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CHAPTER 26: Fascist Finance

THE CONFESSION THAT FASCIST ECONOMY HAS FAILED IS MADE by Mussolini himself.

Addressing the Chamber on the 18th of December, 1930, the dictator who had stabilized the lira, announced balanced budgets for many years, proclaimed the economic viability of Fascism, and invited other nations to adopt the Corporative instead of the Communist idea of economic planning, informed Italy and the world that: "The situation in Italy was satisfactory until the fall of 1929, when the American market crash exploded suddenly like a bomb. For us poor European provincials it was a great surprise. We remained astonished, like the world at the announcement of the death of Napoleon, because we had been given to understand that America was the country of prosperity, of endless and absolute prosperity, without eclipses. Everyone was rich there.

"Everyone knows the data of American prosperity — there was one motorcar for every eight inhabitants, one radio set for every four, one telephone for every three. Everyone gambled on the stock exchange and since stocks rose incessantly, everyone bought at 20, sold at 100, and pocketed the difference, with which he purchased a motor-car, radio set, and telephone, or made a trip to Europe, paying for it by installments, and built a house in the country. All this was fantastic, and we on this side of the Atlantic had a sense of envy.

"Suddenly the beautiful scene collapsed and we had a series of black days. Stocks lost, 30, 40, and 50 per cent of their value. The crisis grew deeper.

"Black days followed black days, and prosperity was replaced by long lines of unemployed waiting for soup and bread in the great American cities.

"From that day we also were again pushed into the high seas, and from that day navigation has become extremely difficult for us."

The best American comment on this great explanation was made by Howard Brubaker. "Mussolini," he said, "has calmed growling Italians with the information that Wall Street is responsible for their lower salaries, their unemployment, their low returns on farm products. About the only crimes not attributed to Wall Street were the earthquakes of last July."

But shifting the blame on America does not shift the main issue, which is simply this: does Fascism offer the world a new and workable economic system; is it merely part of the universally (outside Russia) accepted system, and has it succeeded in meeting a crisis successfully? By blaming Italy's financial failure on Wall Street's failure Mussolini confesses that his is no new or different or independent system, or, if new and different, it is not a better one because it, too, has broken down.

In fact, the making of the Wall Street scapegoat is one of the master strokes of the modern Machiavelli, because Fascist economy broke down long before Wall Street collapsed. It is the purpose of this chapter to discuss the finances of the years 1922 to 1929 and to show, from official Fascist figures, that the crisis of Fascism began in 1925 and reached an alarming condition in 1927 and 1928. Paradoxically, Mussolini was saved the political consequences when the rest of the world — outside Russia — also joined in the collapse of 1929. The world was now in the same boat, and growing discontent in Italy was therefore stilled.

The first economic victory which Mussolini reported was the stabilization of the lira. It seems that the whole subject of economics first came to his attention in January, 1922, when he as a journalist, preparing to attend the annual peace conference (at Cannes, on the French Riviera), exchanged some money in Milan. For each one-hundred-lira note he was given a fifty-franc note.

"It was a grave symptom. It was a humiliation. It was a blow to the self-respect of a victorious nation, a vexing weather vane; it indicated our progress towards bankruptcy: up leaped the thought that this situation must be cured by the vital strength of Fascism."

This emotion engendered in the patriotic breast was not ephemeral. It took root. It was later to flower in a gold stabilization which was higher than that of France. What is significant is the behavior of "the man of action," the ideas and the procedure of an economist like Mussolini, whose nationalistic egotism, whose Italian pride, is hurt by the financial situation, and who thereupon rules that "Fascism must change all that."

And so, commenting in 1928 on his actions of the past year, Mussolini with pride declares that "in December, 1927, at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, I was able to announce to the Italian people that the lira was back on a gold basis, on a ratio which technicians and profound experts in financial questions have judged sound."

He flatly makes the statement that "today we have a balanced budget. Self-ruling units, the provinces and the communes, have balanced their budgets, too. Exports and imports and their relationship are carried in a precise and definite rhythm — that of our stabilized lira."

He has the pleasant unbelievable surprise of a child which for the first time turns an electric light off and on, when he says that he had "solved a complex and difficult problem of national finance, such a problem as sometimes withdraws itself beyond the will and influence of any political man, and becomes subjected to the tyranny and mechanism of more material relations under the influences of various and infinite factors. Only a profound knowledge of the economic life and structure of a people can reach, in such an insidious field, conclusions which will be able to satisfy the majority."

"I felt the pride of a victor," exclaims Mussolini, and well might any man feel the pride of a victor who has not only marched into Rome, but who had smashed the tyranny of economics, laws which rule world finances, and which no other politician or nation has ever been able to conquer.

It was nothing short of a miracle: the sun of economic fatality stood still in the heavens at the command of the prophet, and the American international bond-floaters sang the epic of the great deed as they issued $600,000,000 in loans to Italy.

Six hundred million American dollars is a sum. It was surely worth the employment of public-relations counsel and the aid of the banking houses in protecting it. Time after time, between 1925 and 1929, the American public dumped the Italian bonds back on the market, and each time the dozen houses which floated them intensified their campaign which created the Mussolini-balanced-budget myth while they threatened the banking and brokerage firms which represented them with cutting them off from participation in future business if they failed to dispose of the Italian goods.

The Duce, of course, has always been party to the financial mythmaking. He declared the stabilization at 19 was approved by "profound experts in financial questions," but it was later proven that Finance Minister Volpi and his good friend, Andrew W. Mellon, had advised against that figure.

It was always the head of the government who struck the note for the orchestra of the press to follow. When the bankers and the press agents and the Italians who wrote for the Associated Press and the American newspapers reported the stabilization at 19 to the dollar a victory, that Bolshevism threatened in 1922, that the budgets had balanced, that the municipalities were out of the "red" literally and figuratively, and that prosperity had crowned the planned economy of Fascism up to 1929, they are but playing variations on the tune which the master musician originated.

This tune, of course, is the only one heard in Italy and America. From his exile in England, however. Count Sforza, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, has issued a statement calling it "an offense to Italy to give the impression abroad that she wants truth to be wrapped in gentle lies." "To pretend today that the present difficult financial situation in Italy is due to the American crisis," he continues, "simply means that the men now in office in Italy do not dare to face their responsibilities, that they slander the brave, thrifty Italian nation by showing her up as a sick person to whom only lies can be administered. . . . The truth is that the specific present Italian crisis has nothing to do with the general world crisis. Indeed, the general world crisis is a crisis of over-capitalization, while that in Italy is one of lack of capital. . . . But there are more direct proofs of my assertion. The Italian crisis began years before the American and general crisis — precisely, between 1924 and 1926."

Count Sforza is one of Mussolini's enemies. But so are the official statistics of the Fascist regime. In 1922 Italy's bankruptcies — commercial failures, personal bankruptcy, does not exist under that country's laws— were 3,858; in 1926, 8,580; in 1929, 11,106. In 1926 there were 181,000 unemployed in Italy, and in 1928, 439,000 or more. In fact, it is estimated, non-officially, that there were 800,000 unemployed, including those kept inside the factories by Fascist orders and those working a day or two a week for their food. Imports in 1925 were 26,000,000,000 lire, and exports 18,000,000,000, while in 1928 imports were 22,000,000,000 and exports 14,000,000,000.

The American commercial attache, H. C. MacLean, reported from Rome on January 16, 1928, that "the outstanding characteristic of Italy's relations with the rest of the world is the large excess of the country's merchandise imports over its merchandise exports, a condition prevailing for many years. To compensate the large adverse trade balance invisible terms (notably remittances from Italians resident abroad and expenditures of foreign tourists in Italy) must be largely depended upon."

The attache then points out an adverse trade balance of almost 5,000,000,000 lire for the first ten months of 1927, adding, "Having accepted 5,000,000,000 as Italy's adverse trade balance and 1,500,000,000 as its net outgo on financial transactions, we have a total of 6,500,000,000 lire, for which compensation must be found on the credit side of the country's international accounts."

He then shows that "emigrants' remittances have sharply declined. Whereas in 1926 the withdrawals from postal saving banks were practically compensated by new deposits, during the first ten months of 1927 such withdrawals exceeded deposits by no less than 570,000,000 lire."

On July 9, 1928, Commercial Attache Mowatt M. Mitchell cabled that "Italian industrial and business conditions continue unsatisfactory and are at present still further depressed by the growing seasonal slack."

The continuation of unsatisfactory conditions was confirmed by the January 14, 1929, report of Mr. Mitchell, who radioed: "Foreign trade suffered from the high stabilization point of the lira. Imports increased and exports decreased, resulting in an adverse trade balance of nearly 7,000,000,000 lire as compared with 5,000,000,000 in 1927."

The American attache was of the opinion, however, that the government finances were in good shape, with large cash reserves, but the Italian treasury report [1] showed that the cash reserves had decreased continually until they were half of 1926: cash reserves, June 30, 1926, 2,841,000,000; June, 1928, 1,706,000,000; November 30, 1928, 1,389,000,000. In fact it is Mussolini's first economic triumph, the boasted stabilization of the lira, which marks the intensification of the Fascist economic crisis. It must be remembered that the Italian, as well as the French, money had been guaranteed by the Allies during the war. When the guarantees were removed both fell; the lira was 8 to the dollar in the first half of 1919, and reached its just value somewhere above 20; its lowest was 23.91 in the second half of 1920, those fatal days of the so-called Bolshevik occupation of the factories, after which it improved generally so long as the democratic government existed. The lira was back to 20.15 just before Fascism in 1922. When, then, did the "humiliation," this "progress toward bankruptcy," occur? Under Fascism the lira dropped consistently, semester after semester, until it reached 30.53 under the miracle-working Duce in August, 1926. These are official figures. (Yet lady biographers of the Duce [2] can state without hesitation that "under the new government the lira ceased its downward trend.")

Mussolini stabilized at 19 plus, and the American commercial attaches immediately reported bad results, although "experts" writing for the million-circulation weeklies applauded. Mr. Marcosson of the Saturday Evening Post had to confess in 1930 that "much of the disruption is traceable to the stabilization of the lira at too high a price. Despite the advice of the best banking brains of the country, Mussolini, with a characteristic imperialistic gesture, decreed the figure at 19 to the dollar, which was out of proportion to the exigencies of the situation. All experts agreed that the lira should have been anchored to stability with the French franc ... at 25 to the dollar. Instead, the will that has dominated every other activity had its way here, and with the result that industry, because of high price of raw materials and inability to meet competition in the world markets, has been increasingly handicapped."

In 1925 the first reports were sent from Rome that jugglery, trickery, and distorted official figures and statements have marked Fascist finance. The Irish journalist and farmer diplomatic attache in Rome, James Murphy, has published in the German, French, British, and American magazines numerous articles charging fraud which have never been challenged. He states, for instance, that the Fascisti, to maintain confidence and good will abroad, especially among banking interests, have organized a system of propaganda about their economic position, have given to the public "a state budget which has little or nor relation to the real financial condition. It is simply a piece of propaganda. I should not make such a statement without being in a position to bring forward proof. Take De Stefani's budget for 1923-24. For that year I find that under one heading alone there was an expenditure of fourteen billion of lire ($700,000,000) not a cent of which is debited in the State budget. The expenditure was officially announced in the official gazette. [3] It figures in the treasury accounts, but it is carefully kept out of the budget that has been published. That sum alone would practically consume the whole income from taxation for the same year. Therefore De Stefani's first budget had really a much heavier deficit than those of his predecessors, even if we confine the deficit to the above expenditure and say nothing of other treasury debts incurred. To keep all such questions dark, the press is muzzled and foreign journalists are watched and persecuted lest they begin to pry into the question of Italy's finances. By such means and by the expenditure of huge sums for propaganda abroad, the Fascists think that they will be able to stave off the day when their real economic and financial position may become known to foreign bankers and foreign industrialists."

Mr. Murphy likewise questions both Mussolini and American bankers on the subject of balanced budget by the municipalities. "One of the immediate purposes of the dictatorship obtaining control of the municipalities," he declares, "is the facilitation of Fascism's shady finance. It is well known that a favorite trick practiced since Mussolini got control of things is to falsify the State budget by transferring State expenses to the municipal budgets. All the municipal budgets show a deficit; but this does not appear in public. And there will be no chance of its coming into the light now when there will be no local supervisors appointed by the people. The system will be understood if we imagine all the municipalities as subordinate corporations grouped under the one parent corporation, which is the State. The balance sheets of the subordinate corporations are being thrown more and more into a state of insolvency in order to make the parent balance sheet look healthy. Yet the parent corporation is solely dependent on the solvency of all the subordinated corporations taken together.

"American financiers who have visited Italy have been too simple-minded to spot this trick. They have also been too simple-minded to ask for the treasury accounts and collate them with the budget. And so the Fascist financial bluff has gone ahead triumphantly. Mussolini wants to show the unwary Yankee how splendidly everything is going in Italy, so that he can raise loans in the United States."

To such general statements must be added the official figures from the Fascist government's publications. The debts of the provinces as of January i, 1925, are 954,000,000 and January 1, 1928, 1,326,000,000, while the debts of the capital cities of the provinces are as follows:

January 1, 1925: 3,066,000,000
January 1, 1928: 5,481,000,000
Increase in debt: 2,415,000,000

which somehow does not agree with Mussolini's statement that "the provinces and the communes have balanced their budgets too."

Fascist Italy, say European economists, is the only country in the world which announces balanced budgets while showing deficits in the treasury.

Strange things have happened. For instance, Mussolini with his annual pride announced a credit balance of 2,200,000,000 lire in 1925-26, but the announcement of the treasury-audits court added that "from this surplus 1,800,000,000 were deducted in order to provide for expenses in connection with the economic reconstruction of the country for the period of the same fiscal year 1925-26." Only Fascist finance has provided this minor miracle of eating one's surplus and having it too.

When Count Volpi and Mussolini quarreled about this ultra-modern way of dictating to the economic system, the former was dismissed and the latter declared that "from now on the data of the budget will be of crystalline cleanness." Immediately afterwards 1,211,000,000 lire were canceled from the cash items of the treasury account published the following month, July 31, 1928. It was declared that it represented a sum "not liable to be spent." Apparently Mussolini was trying to show Volpi was making a slight error of a little more than a billion. But the next year the treasury account announced that the fiscal year had closed on June 30th with a surplus of 2,352,000,000 lire, while a supplement published a month afterwards showed a slight correction necessary, a reduction of 2,845,000,000, with an explanation of "crystalline clearness": "reduction of the cash fund for operations to be credited to the preceding fiscal year." Next month there was another correction of 83,000,000, so that two months after Mussolini had informed the world and particularly the American bond holders he had more than two billion credit, there was a deficit of 574,000,000 lire.

In 1930 the budget showed a cash surplus of 2,261,000,000. The supplementary account, published a month later, brought a correction of 1,581,000,000, which reduced the surplus to 680,000,000, and there was no explanation, crystalline or otherwise.

One billion lire of national bonds, due the Vatican under the Lateran treaty, was taken from the "Cassa depositi e prestiti" under agreement to return it in ten years, [4] but the Cassa enters in its assets this billion which the treasury owes it, while the nonchalant treasury, which should enter a corresponding liability, enters only the annual installment of 85,000,000 and the interest on the rest of the principal.

Although the Bank of Italy lists assets of 1,801,000,000 gold it claims is deposited abroad, due to it from the State, in the treasury account no mention is found among the liabilities of this State debt. The treasury explains that it means to return to the Bank of Italy the gold deposited with the Bank of England. Economists, however, declare that while the State debt is real, the gold in London is a security which will be returned "if and when" Italy pays the fifty-eight annuities still due of the sixty-two (or about 30,000,000,000 lire) under the Volpi settlement.

The Bank of Italy reserve just before stabilization was 12,516,000,000 lire, but in April, 1929, only 10,004,000,000, at which figure it fluctuates only slightly, and this loss of about two and a half billion is claimed to be due to the stabilization at 19 instead of a reasonable, logical 25.

Although Count Volpi announced that the new silver currency which replaced a billion and a half of small paper notes "have their counter-value in pure metal," the value in silver is about one-sixth legal value.

A search through official Fascist figures reveals that in the year 1928-29 State receipts were 19,447,000,000 lire and payments 22,741,000,000, or a deficit of 3,294,000,000. More recently the regime issued several series of statistics, an explanation of the 1928-29 budget, the finance Minister Mosconi's revelations to the Chamber of Deputies [5] which neutral economists declare "render equally unintelligible the real financial situation in Italy." It is said that the actual state of the budget cannot be determined from all these figures, but the movement of cash reserves (page 33) shows that the treasury revenue for 1928-29 was 23,015,000,000 lire and expenditures 25,960,000,000, making a deficit of 2,945,000,000.

Minister Mosconi then attempted by various statements to reduce this deficit to 575,000,000 lire, claiming there were important credits abroad, but on page 51 mentions a credit of 6,358,000,000 and a debit of 11,829,000,000 in the budget.

On page 73 the Minister speaks of the extreme gravity in the local financial situation, but having admitted a rotten state of affairs, concludes with an oration: "The government of Benito Mussolini does not dissimulate the difficulties of the present time, but one must not doubt that he has unshakable confidence and profound force, which continues with a will of iron, with, a lively energy, with an obstinate passion, to march towards the future."

The apparent fraud of the official announcements of balanced budgets, the apparent paradox of tremendous increase in national works expenditures without increased public debt and increased national income, which was first discovered and reported in 1925 to 1928 by Messrs. Motherwell, Murphy, and Bolitho, has now been completely substantiated and explained by Professor Gaetano Salvemini, former professor of history of Florence University and more recently of Harvard. The time for the expose was extremely appropriate. The United States in 1935 was keenly interested in substitute systems of national economy; it was watching both the Fascist and Communist governmental planning; the American government was engaging in public works expenditures totaling many billions and the national debt was rising proportionally. How then was Mussolini able to produce balanced budgets while great land reclamation projects were going forward successfully, magnificent public buildings were being erected, express auto roads were being completed, new ships for commerce and war were built, a modern army equipped, the military budget doubled, and a vast list of minor Fascist achievements — all costing millions if not billions — were announced to a despondent and jealous world?

The Fascist mystery and miracle play was not easy to explain. Italy's budget is unlike Anglo-American budgets, which are integral and clear; the Italian consists of two, one showing revenues and expenditures legally assessed, the other as they actually resulted. Moreover, Professor Salvemini points out [6] "one set of official figures for the four years from July 1, 1928, to June 30, 1932, gives yearly deficits of, respectively, 2,576 millions, 507 millions, 288 millions, and 2,300 millions, a total deficit of 5,671 millions. [7] Another set of official figures for the same four years gives, respectively, surpluses of 555 millions and 170 millions and deficits of 504 millions and 3,867 millions. [8] The difference between the figures amounts to 2,025 million lire."

Professor Salvemini examines the infallible index to the nation's financial status, the national debt, using the official Fascist statistics, the parliamentary reports, and the annual reports of the finance ministers. And here he discovers the magnificent modern contribution the Duce has made to national economy; the government instead of paying for its activities out of current revenue and borrowing from the public as other nations do, has issued promises to pay in installments, ranging from ten to fifty years. The list of annuities and dates contracted for are: March 29, 1924, 6,546,000,000 lire; end of 1928, 26,219,000,000 lire; December 31, 1930, 65,390,000,000 lire; March 31, 1932, 75,118,000,000 lire and February 28, 1933, 74,315,000,000 lire. [9]

This vast indebtedness incurred from 1924 to 1933. which has been hidden from the Italian people and the world, aggregates an increase of more than sixty-seven billion lire, as the parliamentary finance committee reports show. In plain words Fascism has taken up the installment idea somewhat like the American people who bought their furniture, cars, radios, and electric refrigerators in the boom days, mortgaging their futures at a time salaries were good and prospects grand. "One of the remarkable features of this situation," continues Professor Salvemini, "is the fact that out of the 74.315 million lire of annuities outstanding as of February 28, 1933, nearly two-thirds, or 51,243 millions, were for ordinary expenses, and only one third, or 23,072 millions, for extraordinary expenses."

Inasmuch as the 74,315.000,000 lire is to be paid out in installments up to 1986-87. Professor Salvemini has taken the present capital value of the debt, which is 35,000,000,000 lire and added that, instead of a sum more than double, to the national debt, which he has compared with the last pre-Fascist statistics. Here follows the result:



Fascist apologists bring up the fact that the liberal regime which preceded them raised the national debt by 37 billion lire from July, 1919, to June, 1922, and while these statistics are a fact, the national budgets also show that between 1919 and 1922 the liberal regime paid out a war debt of 55 billion lire; it paid out 20 billion in 1921-1922 and left the Fascists to pay only 6 billion in the next fiscal year, 5 billion in 1923-24 and about a billion and a third in future years. In other words, the pre-Fascist deficit and enormous budget increase was the result of the World War; the Fascist deficit is the result of Fascist economics. It is the equivalent of waging a war. Only in the latter instance it is a war against the Italian people.

Naturally enough, the Fascist innovation in hiding the bankruptcy of its finances has been termed a fraud by leading economists the world over. Fascist apologists, however, have tried explanations. The leading business magazine of the United States, Fortune, devoting an entire Issue [10] to the glorification of the Duce and Fascism, had this to say of the social-economic-financial system:

"Fascist accounts are not faked: they are merely divided or delayed — on the general principle that solemn news is accepted more easily if delivered in parts, and that no news is commonly accepted as good news. Thus the Fascists delay payments on budgeted expenses up to the legal limit, and delay the charge-off of those expenses to the same limit. . . . But these annuities are not reflected in the regular public-debt statement. We have seen how 40 billions of these annuities help to raise the regular debt statement of 98 billions to the actual debt figure of some 170 billions.

"And still 170 billions fails to tell the whole story. . . .

"A great question remains: does Fascist finance pay dividends to the Italian people? The long-established poverty of the Italian masses has been emphasized elsewhere. . . . Like the Japanese, the Italians have for centuries been used to living on next-to-nothing with a smile. In recent years that next-to-nothing has been reduced. The average wage of Italian agricultural and industrial workers has fallen perhaps 25 per cent in the last five years. The last published figure is 1.5 lire (eight cents) per hour. The masses are struck at every turn by the indirect tax policy of the State, Unemployment has been slowly increasing, with a January official estimate of 1,160,000. The standard of living of Italian labor has been estimated as the lowest of any country in Europe. An indication of the effects of Fascist economy of middle-class levels is provided by the gradual increase of bankruptcies from 1,800 in 1921 to 14,000 in 1933. The conclusion seems inescapable that if Fascism has paid dividends to the Italian people, they have been paid in the coinage of patriotic excitement. . . . Fascism has paid its people no cash dividends. . . ."

We can now arrive at objective conclusions: Mussolini announces that the budget for many years was balanced: Fortune, typical of the apologists for Fascism, states that the budgets are not "faked"; American bankers, on behalf of finance capital, declare that the budgets were balanced; official statistics show that annuities totaling 74 billion lire and having a present capital value of 35 billion have been kept out of the budget and from the knowledge of the people; the official Italian national debt has been announced annually as hovering in the neighborhood of 90 billion lire, only a fractional increase from the pre-Fascist figure. It is obvious, therefore, that the question revolves about a euphemism. If the budget has not been "faked" it has been "tricked" and "juggled," and these are the very words used by Messrs. Motherwell, Murphy, Bolitho, and the present writer in reporting on Italy from 1925 to date.

"Since 1925," concludes Salvemini, "the Italian budget has never been balanced. The Italian national debt in the last ten years has increased, on the average, by a yearly amount of over 5 billion lire, even though the war claims had been reduced to negligible proportions. . . . The government is concealing from the public at large the true composition and size of the national debt."

On the 8th of July, 1935, the ace of Fascist apologists [11] was permitted by the Fascist censorship to report that "The public debt, which has increased considerably, now stands at 105 billion lire, against 102 billion in May, 1934, and 97 billion in 1933." Apparently Mussolini at last has decided to show at least a part of the 148 billion lire burden which the Italian people, its children and grandchildren, must pay. It means increased taxation, a still lower standard of living, and resultant misery and degeneration.

_______________

Notes:

1. Conto del Tesoro, November 30, 1928.

2. Mme. Jeanne Bordeux, Mussolini the Man.

3. Gazzetta Ufficiale, June 27, 1924, p. 16.

4. Decree 851, May 27, 1929.

5. Exposizione finanziaria fatta all Camera dei deputati nella seduta del 31 Maggio 1930-VIII.

6. Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, April, 1935.

7. Cf. Rendiconti Generali Consuntivi.

8. Bolletino Mensile di Statistica, August, 1934. p. 746.

9. These figures are from the Conto del Tesoro, Gazzetta Ufficiale. March 29, 1924. No. 76; the Parliamentary Report on the Budget of 1927-28. Camera del Deputati, No. 30A, and the Reports of the Senate Finance Committee for the years 1931-32, 1932-33 and 1933-34.

10. July, 1934.

11. The Rome correspondent of the New York Times.

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CHAPTER 27: A Journalist Suppresses the Free Press

IN THE CHRONOLOGY OF FASCIST PROGRESS THERE HAVE ALREADY been references to Mussolini's decrees and methods dealing with the free press of Italy. Here, for once, the dictator has been consistent and logical.

The foundation of all free, democratic, enlightened States is liberty, and the bulwark of liberty is the free press. Axioms, even platitudes, these statements are nevertheless true, and were as well known to the Duce as they are to us. But whereas we do little or nothing to safeguard the freedom of the press, permitting that phrase to be made into a slogan by certain publishers who want to keep wages down and their men from organizing for their economic and moral freedom, the Duce, who regarded liberty as a "rotten carcass" over which Fascism had to pass, devoted a large part of his time to destroying the first and last bulwark of the Italian people.

It must be admitted, of course, that the press of Italy, as that of practically all continental Europe, with a few notable exceptions in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Holland, has never been nor is it today a news press. There are thousands of journals, almost no newspapers. The journals are expressions of opinion, the policies of special interests which range all the way from the Catholic Church to the munitions-makers. There are the publications of capitalist organizations and parties, Communist, Socialist and labor organizations and parties, personal organs of bankers, politicians, and other men seeking or holding political, social, and economic power.

In Italy, with the exception of the Corriere delta Sera and two or three smaller liberal journals, there were no real newspapers, in the Anglo-American sense; the task for Mussolini was, therefore, the easier. He had simply to order the suppression of all the organs of the Opposition, of unfriendly bankers, industrialists, politicians, and parties, and encourage the journals of the banks, the industrial associations, and the rich individuals who supported Fascism.

In many respects Mussolini followed the methods of other dictators. Lenin had been editor of the Iskra; Trotsky practiced journalism in Siberia, Switzerland, and Second Avenue, New York, while Stalin undermined the Kerensky regime when he edited the Petrograd Pravda. Pilsudki was once a Socialist editor of the Rabotnik, The Worker, Kemal Pasha also published a paper to further his aims, and Hitler for years raged in his Voelkischer Beobachter. A large number of leading dictators gained by experience in journalism the knowledge of the power of the press, and all in turn knew enough to abolish opposition newspapers as the first and probably most important act to insure stability of a regime. Dictatorship and a free press can never co-exist.

The difference between the radical and reactionary dictatorships is this; the Bolsheviki have promised Russia a Utopian era of unlimited freedom once the various five-year-plans have been successful, the nation is economically independent, and the danger of invasion from Germany and Japan and perhaps a coalition, of European nations, is over. They consider themselves in a state of war with the capitalistic world. In war time everyone agrees censorship and suppression of opposition opinion are necessary. In Moscow, therefore, there is a censor functioning publicly.

In Rome, however, Mussolini makes no such admission. Foreign correspondents who seek to send true news out of Italy are either bribed or intimidated, flattered or censored; if they are honest they make the best of things, trim their sails, smuggle out a little news when possible, indulge in almost daily compromises. Numerous correspondents have been arrested, imprisoned, or expelled. Meanwhile, with perhaps humorous cynicism Mussolini makes the statement that "The press of Italy is free, freer than the press of any other country, so long as it supports the regime." He denies publicly that he has instituted a censorship, but orders the telegraph office to hold up all doubtful cables, submit them to the foreign office, and frequently "lose them through bureaucratic carelessness." There is no censorship; the moment a journalist sends news which is factual but which offends the Duce or the regime, he is sent an official warning; the second time he is deported.

In the journalistic situation in Italy control of the Italian press is the most important feature for two reasons: because it has succeeded in a totalitarian way in making the newspapers the propaganda organ of the regime while completely destroying the possibility of getting true news to the Italian people, and because, after all, the newspapers and the government press bureaus which supply them are the main source of news for the rest of the world.

Mussolini himself, his official press bureau, the local governors, and the police departments of cities and provinces give instructions to the nation's editors. Here is a verbatim example as set down by an editor who has since escaped to Switzerland. The telephone in his sanctum rang and the following conversation followed:

"To whom am I speaking?"

"The director of the paper."

"Bene. This is the civil governor."

"I am Editor Fulano."

"Very well, Editor Fulano, take note that by order of the Chief of the Government (Mussolini) you are prohibited from mentioning the failure of Bank X. . . ."

"All right."

"Take note that you are prohibited from mentioning the fact that the family of Mussolini is visiting in Rome."

"Very well."

"Note that you are not to mention the aviation disaster of yesterday."

"Of course not."

"By order of the secretary of the party you are not to mention the violence which occurred yesterday in Savona."

"All right."

"And one more thing, refrain from republishing any article from yesterday's Osservatore Romano."

And so it goes day by day.

Another editor kept a record of the important orders of suppression received during four months:

August 5: It is prohibited to publish any news of the interview Rabindranath Tagore gave the Neue Frei Press in Vienna in which he denies that he expressed himself as an admirer of Fascism as reported in the Italian press.

August 20: The President of the Council orders that the press refrain from discussion of the return of the gold standard, whether favorable or critical.

August 25: It is prohibited to reproduce the manifesto of a group of intellectuals in London against conscription.

It is prohibited to mention that between Rome and Sant'Ilario an automobile in Mussolini's suite upset a wagon.

August 30: It is prohibited to publish any information about war materials purchased in Italy by foreign countries.

September 3: It is prohibited to mention details of the swindle of 200,000 lire from the saving bank of Milan.

September 4: No allusion must be made to the incident in the Eden theater (Fascisti invaded the theater and prevented the showing of a French revue).

September 12: It is prohibited to mention incidents which followed the Lucetti attentat and especially the hostile demonstration against the French consulate.

September 15: The prefect recommends the greatest prudence in the publication of foreign articles, especially on the subject of differences between France and Italy.

September 16: The order is given by the President (Mussolini) that all polemics with the French press cease immediately. September 21: It is prohibited to mention the visit to Rome of the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs for the settlement of the Zarabub question.

September 23: By order of the President (Mussolini)

1. No mention must be made of the inquest on the death of the Fascist Luporini and the anti-Fascist Becciolini in Florence.

2. It is prohibited to speak of the economic, financial and political penetration of Albania.

September 24: No mention must be made of the voyages of Mussolini.

October 1: No mention must be made of the Greek book by Jewos on "The Dodecanese Question." October 9: No mention must be made of the visit of the King to Trani last Sunday.

October 13: It is prohibited to publish anything about the thefts committed by Italian soldiers in the hotels of Merano.

November 6; All discussion of Franco-Italian rapports is prohibited. It is also prohibited to mention the difficulties of the Pordenone Bank.

November 9: It is prohibited to publish news of the destruction of political clubs following the Zaniboni attentat, or the arrest of deputies.

The range of these prohibitions is all the way from the ludicrous and trivial to the influence of international diplomatic relations. But even those which appear of no importance may have a bearing on world reaction to Fascism. Thus Tagore's visit to Rome was exploited by the Fascist press; naturally British, American, and other foreign correspondents, some of whom at times like to do the Duce a good turn, sent out columns of praise of Fascism and Mussolini, quoting from local papers. But Tagore was not the author of the statements attributed to him; guileless philosopher, he did not know what was happening, and when he found out it was too late to obtain satisfaction from the Fascist press. In Vienna, however, he explained his horror of Fascism and Mussolini, denounced the Italian press, denied the reports sent to foreign newspapers, and concluded with words which of course never found their way into Italy, perhaps not even to London or New York.

"It is absurd," said Tagore, "to imagine that I could ever support a movement which ruthlessly suppresses freedom of expression, enforces observances that are against individual consciences, and walks through a blood-stained path of violence and stealthy crime." This is Tagore's true opinion. Yet the Fascist reports of his praise linger in the public mind. Thus are explained the beauties of the censorship, the making of international opinion, and the astuteness of a dictator, himself a journalist, who knows how to rule the press.

As proof of the assertion that many Fascist editors are really anti-Fascists at heart is the frequent appearance of Mussolini's secret orders in the anti-Fascist press. In 1932 an Italian editor brought to Paris the following illuminating dossier of Mussolini's "Notes and recommendations":

"It is necessary directors and editors-in-chief of the newspapers attentively review the articles and all that is eventually to be published, in order to avoid the appearance in the dailies and the reviews, paragraphs or correspondences and articles that are in opposition to the interests of Italy and the action of the regime.

"During the course of the past few days, there appeared, for example; In the Resto del Carlino an article on the fight against flies. In the Mattino an article on the damage to the harvest of nearly one thousand million, caused by the rotting of the wheat. In the Tribuna, finally an article entitled: "Are the Summer Climatic Cures Really Useful?"

"But it will have been enough that the director, or at least the person in charge of the newspaper, had considered the things that we are going to enumerate from the political point of view, to be persuaded that they should not in any way allow these things to be printed which are in obvious and evident contradiction with the action of the regime in the same way as they are with the interests of our country. . . .

"The journals are also formally asked to abstain from all propaganda in favor of spas and thermal resorts of foreign tourism."

("Note— Recommendation" by Mussolini, July 25):

"(1) The papers are asked to support the summer cruise which will go into effect beginning the 28th of August on the steamer Giulio Cesare.

"(2) The papers are asked to recall the general strike in Italy the 30th and 31st of July, 1922, the principal references to be the transmission of the powers on the part of the central Committee of the Workers Alliance to a secret committee, the threats of Filippo Turati, the revolutionary manifesto: in order to prove one more time an evident historic truth, namely that the march on Rome has only been the counter blow to destructive forces."

In a "note" of July 27, 1932, the papers are asked "to write an article on the return to the land," calling attention to how the regime has since 1922 made an eminently rural policy; "to emphasize the words spoken by Gorguloff during the course of his questioning and in which he says: 'All my sympathies go to the socialists' which proves once more that those who attribute the quality of Fascism to Gorguloff lie with impudence."

(Service order of July 29, 1932):

"(1) One calls attention to the newspapers of the necessity of applying in the strongest possible fashion, the dispositions already given to avoid publication in papers and periodicals of pictures of thin women. The phenomenon of the slim woman has no other significance than the reduction of the birth rate.

"In Italy, also, one owes it to the decrease in the birth rate that our enemies have not failed to emphasize with apparent pleasure.

"Now it is absolutely necessary to avoid all that which gives, pleasure to our enemies. To this end, the papers should with a great deal of tact deplore the phenomenon of the decrease in births, by remarking, for example, that it has already been the object of satisfaction to our enemies."

(Service order of August 1, 1932):

"(1) The newspapers are asked to make no mention of the automobile accident which unexpectedly happened to the Minister Di Crellalanza, near Montefiascone.

"(2) They are asked to prominently place the dispatch of the Duce for the aqueduct of Monferrate and to do the same for the message of Sidky Pacha.

"(3) They are asked to make outstanding the noticeable affluence of travelers in the popular trains in calling attention to the fact that a similar initiative has never been realized by past governments and that abroad like facilities for the benefit of the working classes do not exist to such an extent.

"(4) Concerning the German elections, they are asked to bring out the defeat of the Weimar coalition and the victory of the Hitlerites.

"August 4: (1) Play up on the first page that one hundred battleships will participate in the naval maneuvers, and the same holds true for thirty submarines.

"(2) Always, apropos of the next naval maneuver, take into consideration that, although aviation also participates at the maneuvers, the important role is held by the navy.

"That the papers take account of this fact and that they do not make the mistake of a Rome paper, which in a headline gave the most prominence to the airplane manifestations.

"It is further recalled to the papers that, being given the dispositions in power, it is absolutely forbidden to speak of eventual trips of the King. This prohibition holds equally for the next naval maneuver.

"August 6, 1932: The big naval maneuvers will be placed in the most prominent place possible and on the front page. Publish the most extensive reports and each day the photographs of ships and submarines. Furthermore, make note of the fact that the Italian war navy is equipped according to the most modern technique and that it has been entirely renovated and modernized by the Will of the Duce during the course of the ten years of his regime."

It must be noted that one of the first powerful groups to be thoroughly Fascisticized by Mussolini was composed of editors, reporters, and publishers; nevertheless these confidential instructions from the Duce, which are sent with the utmost secrecy to the responsible editors of Italian newspapers, all of which support the regime, are always being betrayed to the outside world. In December, 1933, La Stampa Libera, an Italian-language paper published in New York, was able to obtain still another of Mussolini's list of do's and don't's by which he rules journalism:

August 4, 1933. Anno XI (Era Fascista):

The greatest prominence should be given tomorrow to the inauguration of the township of Sabaudia. Meantime, on the first page a long article should be published today on the ceremonies to be performed tomorrow.

It is earnestly requested that no mistake shall be made in the spelling of the name of the Hungarian Secretary of Commerce.

By the use of large type, great prominence should be given on the first page to the orders issued by Il Duce for the celebration of the Mother and Child's Day.

Warning is hereby given to abstain from using the words "supreme hierarchies," as the party has only one: Il Duce.

In announcing the celebration to be performed on the arrival of the Atlantic fliers in Rome, the Carlino made use, in yesterday's number, the word "apotheosis." This adjective [sic] is too extravagant, because the arrival of the fliers is several days off and also because up to that date the event must be kept within reasonable bounds.

August 7, 1933.

Small space should be devoted to the preparation for the arrival of the fliers in the Azores; great prominence, instead, should be given to the reports of their take-off for America.

All correspondence appearing in foreign papers on the visit of Il Duce to the Pontine Reclaimed Land should be quoted at length.

With regard to the step taken by France and England in Berlin, too much stress should not be laid upon it.

Do not advertise the success of the loan in the United States and do not speak of America's inflation policy.

Feature the acclamations to Il Duce by the 2,800 teachers of the Opera Nazionale Balilla.

By an adequate use of italics, stress should be laid upon the importance of their teaching in the education of the youth.

Some papers have announced the creation of the new province of Littoria in 1936. The news should not be reproduced, for nothing has been resolved yet and all decision is reserved to II Duce. The following line appeared in the Corriere della Sera: "Instruction by H. E. Rossini on motherland and childhood." Bear in mind that all circulars by under-secretaries are issued not on their personal initiative, but by Il Duce's order, and that at any rate they are an emanation from the regime, not from individuals. This instruction should serve as a guide for the future as well.

August 8, 1933:

Of course, the take-off and the arrival at the Azores of the flying squad are the most important events of the day, and all news bearing on them should be given the most prominent place in the papers under headlines running across the page.

Reprint from this morning's Popolo d'Italia the Duce's Day and add a comment to it.

Feature: (a) the meeting of the wheat standing committee; (b) the reports of the Commanders of the Avanguardista Legions; (c) the statistical report on circulation.

Do not make up the paper in such a way as to have all the reports of accidents and crimes follow one another, for it is not desirable to fill half pages with catastrophic news.

Your attention is called once more to the fact that for no reason whatever mention should be made of region and regionalism, for the policy of the regime is solely unitarian and anti-regionalistic.

Some papers in their outside editions have extravagantly praised prefects and hierarchs on account of certain orders issued by them. Such a mistake should never be repeated, for they are but executors of orders issuing from the center.

August 9, 1933:

Feature, avoiding all exaggeration, under a two-column headline, the visit paid by II Duce to camp Sandro Mussolini.

Reproduce extensively the comments of the foreign press calling attention to the rightness of the course followed by Italy.

In the out-of-town editions of the Popolo di Roma there appeared some accounts of the military maneuvers. You are reminded of the order forbidding the publication of news on the subject, unless an official communique is issued.

An article study on the depression has appeared in the Regime. It is not timely. The papers should rather concern themselves with the signs of recovery. The depression will be examined and studied when it has disappeared.

August 10, 1933:

Today, too, the news of Balbo's flight and the comments of the foreign press should be given the greatest prominence on the first page.

With regard to the news success of the foreign policy of Il Duce all news appearing in foreign papers on the subject should be reprinted without, however, undue exaggeration in the headlines and in commenting. No surprise is to be shown at this recognition by foreigners, as this is not the first time Il Duce has embarked on the right course.

The Ambrosiano had yesterday a headline on the increase of monetary circulation. In this regard it will be advisable to abstain from commenting on the constant increase of the gold reserve in order to avoid drawing to it the attention of foreign financiers. Emphasize the soundness of the lira as a political-social element, but avoid all technical discussion.

August 17, 1933:

The comments by foreign papers on the record set by the Rex, and also on those that eventually may be set by Balbo's squad, should be given prominent display.

Recall by an article the famous speech made by Il Duce at Pesaro, August 14, 1926, setting forth its great results in the way of stabilizing the lira, which is a mainstay of the social and economic policy of the regime, but do not enter into details on the gold reserve, the increase of gold, etc.

Reprint from The Daily Mail the article, "Will France Go Fascist?" by Huddleston.

Feature the telegrams sent by Il Duce to Balbo in the course of the flight, but do not reprint integrally the article published by the Popolo d'Italia.

September 4, 1933:

Give great prominence, by a suitable typographical display, to the text of the Italo-Sovietic pact and have it followed by a comment.

Have a large service ready for the Eastern Fair at Bari, which is to be opened September 6. It is better still to send a special correspondent.

In an interview with Acerbo published yesterday by the Corriere delta Sera there appeared under a showy headline a statement to the effect that the wheat will always be sold at a profit; this statement is too bold; no paper can make such unqualified pledges. . . .

With great frequency the Duce, with his old-time insouciance, reverses himself in his dictates to the press. Thus, for instance, in July, 1928, he gave the example to the press for the glorification of Nobile, the unfortunate explorer who had been driven by the impatience of the Fascist press to fly over the North Pole on a day his experts warned him was meteorologically dangerous. Nobile flew, dropped a gigantic crucifix, the Italian flag, the Fascist insignia, and nevertheless was wrecked. When the Russians saved the Nobile expedition, two stories, one rumor and the other fact, appeared in the world press: Nobile, the captain, had been the first rescued — that was the fact; two of his associates had committed cannibalism, the victim being the Swedish scientist Malmgren — that was the rumor. But fact or rumor, it was obvious to every nation except that controlled by the Duce's press that the expedition had been a sad failure and that the only heroism was Bolshevik.

"The greatest polar explorer in the history of the world." Thus the Fascist press under Mussolini's orders. It was a Fascist achievement of the first rank. Mussolini struck the note; the whole Italian press responded as a helot orchestra. Meanwhile the press of the rest of the civilized world without instructions or censorship poured criticism, ridicule, and abuse upon this great Fascist triumph. The bitterness of the French press wrecked treaty negotiations and led to challenges from Roman journalists to duels. The French government made an official protest asking the Duce to stop the flow of billingsgate in the Roman papers. But from the Brenner Pass to Milan, from Milan to Rome, the people met Nobile with rejoicings ordered by Mussolini and with their hymns of praise were mingled the shouts, "Down with the jackal anti-Fascist press of the world."

Three months later Mussolini ordered the newspapers of Italy never to mention the name of Nobile again and threatened the arrest of those who went to interview him or those who printed his apology or explanation of the North Pole fiasco. (Nobile found refuge in Russia until 1935.)

Similarly with a matter of great political importance. We have already seen Mussolini order the press to play up Hitlerite victories; in 1933 the reward was close cooperation between the two Fascist regimes, and in July 1934, when Hitler again went Mussolini one better and instead of the Italian slow method of "purgation" resorted to two days and nights of murder and assassination of men and women, the Italian press chief again ordered support for his colleague. "The ability to put an end to such a situation is an excellent example of power," said the keynote article in Mussolini's Popolo d'Italia, . . . "The right to execute traitors and enemies is not a new discovery. It is the most legitimate revolutionary reality that exists." Courts and trial by jury were all right at times, but there are "exceptional occasions when the individual servant of revolution has the right to administer justice with his trigger finger." (Never had Bolshevism, at the time the Allies were invading from all sides and traitors in its own ranks were selling their country to the enemy, dared make such an open declaration for bloody violence.) The press of the world accused Hitler of murder; Mussolini alone supported him.

But a few weeks later Nazi terrorism broke loose in Austria. Dollfuss, who had approved the machine-gun killing of hundreds of workingmen, was in turn assassinated. He was the ally of Mussolini and his murderers were Hitlerites. Mussolini immediately gave the order to the Fascist press to join the universal chorus of disgust and repudiation of the Hitler regime. Expediency, opportunism, as usual dictated the dictates of the Duce. The Italian people were, as usual, merely the huge woodwork of the piano upon whose keys, the newspapers, the Hierarch was playing his own international tune.

The chief instrument for the control of public opinion in Italy is the official press bureau, Stefani. In the old liberal days this organization, which ranked with the American Associated Press, England's Reuters and Germany's Wolff, gave its subscribers the news with only a natural nationalist tinge; it did not resort to perversion, censorship, and falsehood, nor was it ever corrupted by the money of a foreign power, as was proven in the case of France's Havas when the Russian archives were opened. [1]

Fascism has changed all that. That the Stefani issued nothing but Fascist propaganda and pro-Fascist news after 1922 is of course true, because it had orders from the regime which it could not disobey. But from 1925 on Stefani began to take liberties with the news. Here is an example of how news was changed in the Stefani office:

The Official Stefani Agency:

Lloyd George declared that after the war Socialism in Italy had a disastrous effect on industry. The nation in desperation accepted Fascist succor.

"I recall the joy with which the Liberal Party approved the Fascist revolution, its admiration for the Fascist movement, and its powerful chief, the honorable Mussolini ..." said Lloyd George

Official Record of Speech

I recall how the Fascist revolution has caused and is still causing in the ranks of the Conservative Party, admiration and adulation for the Fascist movement and for its powerful chief. Italy, a terrestrial paradise where the snake of anarchy was chased out by cherubim clad in Black Shirts who guarded the garden against a return of the reptile! That was the picture of a year ago.

You can see for yourself what there is now: Liberty is entirely suppressed. Repression, menace, arson, confiscation, assassination have become the instrument of government ... (Lloyd George).

And here is another example of how the Fascist press rewrites criticism of Mussolini to make it into flattery:

Statement by Bernard Shaw:

Mussolini has done for Italy what Napoleon did for France, except that for the Duc d'Enghien [who was murdered by order of Napoleon] you must read Matteotti.

The Same in the Italian Press:

Mussolini, without Napoleon's military prestige, has done for Italy just what Napoleon did for France. (From the Gazzetta del Popolo, October 12, 1927, page 1, col. 6.)

But while it must be admitted that Mussolini has had a complete success with the press at home, his efforts to influence international opinion have not rewarded him as fully. This is due largely to the fact that foreign correspondents from free nations, led by the Anglo-American group, are the real upholders of freedom of the press in Europe. Frequently these journalists, some of whom represent papers friendly to Fascism and other dictatorships, have had opportunities to show Mussolini just where they stand.

A notable example is the Locarno Conference of 1925. When that "peace" congress was drawing to an end Mussolini burst into the scene in his usual sensational manner — racing motor-car breaking all traffic laws and endangering himself and pedestrians, racing motorboat from Stresa to Lake Maggiore to Locarno, shouting and bustling entourage, clearing the road for the victor.

The day after his arrival Mussolini summoned the world press for a conference in the Palace Hotel where all the delegations were staying. It was hinted by the Fascist attaches that a world-shattering pronunciamento was about to be delivered. It behooved every journalist, and there were between two and four hundred of them at each of the peace conferences, to be present.

But the time was just after the most flagrant suppressions of journalistic liberty in Italy and the expulsion of a British, a German, and an American newspaper man, all of whom wrote for liberal newspapers. In the lobby of the hotel these facts were discussed. A Frenchman, a German, and an Englishman, George Slocombe, representative of the London Herald, mouthpiece of the Labor Party and Ramsay MacDonald, determined not to assist at the Fascist conference. Within a few minutes the word went the round of the hotel and other press meeting-places and a spontaneous boycott of Mussolini occurred. Slocombe relates the incident:

"Mussolini descended the stairs of the hotel, swept like Caesar at the head of a Roman legion across the hall into the press room, followed by Fascist officials and Fascist journalists. In the conference-room there was consternation written large on the faces of the Fascists. Only a handful of correspondents, some of them servile, a few friendly, to hear Mussolini. The others were with me filling the lounge of the hotel. Even the great news agency men boycotted the conference.

"In the almost empty large conference room, I was told afterwards, Mussolini asked a Frenchman if all the journalists were there. The Frenchman, embarrassed, replied that he thought there must be some kind of demonstration elsewhere. But Mussolini sensed the boycott. He said with his usual jeer, snarl, or sneer, or whatever it is:

'"If they have a protest to make I have a waste-paper basket ready.'

"But he was visibly annoyed. He read abruptly a short statement of his policy, refused to entertain any questions, stalked out. When he appeared at the entrance of the lobby of the hotel he saw me standing at the other end and walked haughtily towards me — afterwards he gave out that he had approached me in the most friendly manner since we were old friends from the Cannes conference before the Fascist coup d'etat, when I met him for the first time. Anyhow, he stalked up to me, followed by his Roman cohort, and when he was within a few inches of me said:

'"Eh bien est ce que le communisme marche toujours?' ('Well, how is Communism getting along?') I do not know why he should have taken me for a Communist unless it was because we had discussed Communism, Socialism, and Sorel's philosophy of violence on the Cannes occasion.

"I stared at him coldly, keeping my hands in my pockets, although he had put out his hand, and said, 'Je ne saurais pas vous dire' ('I am not able to tell you.')

"'Eh bien pourquoi?' he asked.

"'Parce que je ne suis pas communiste' ('Because I am not a Communist.')

"''Alors,' he replied, 'je me trompe' ('Well, I've made a mistake.')

"'Oui,' I replied, looking him in the eyes, 'vous vous trompez' ('Yes, you make a mistake.')

"Then a Dutch journalist who was standing at my elbow made the really devastating remark.

"'Ca vous arrive souvent,' he said ('That happens often to you.')

"With that Mussolini almost broke a blood vessel. He looked at us speechlessly for a moment and then said 'Peut-etre' ('Perhaps,') in a theatrical voice, and stalked away, followed by his trembling satellites.

"The Fascist headquarters announced later in the day that I had misunderstood the attitude of the Duce and that he had meant to be friendly, but there was no mistaking the unfriendly nature of our boycott. I think really he had approached me in order to let me know he had remarked our abstention from attendance at his press conference, but did not intend a little thing like that to affect his superb disdain or to affect our own personal relations or ironic semi-affectionate understanding. However, we never met again and I have heard since that I am on the Fascist blacklist."

The second important episode occurred in Washington in 1928 when the board of governors of the National Press Club approved Mussolini's application for non-resident membership and the president committed "an impulsive mistake" by sending the Duce a cablegram congratulating him on his election and expressing "the pleasure of the members of the club in having him as a member."

A protest was organized. Those who signed a paper against Mussolini were Charles Ross of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Laurence Todd of the Federated Press, Leo Sack of the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance, Mark Thistlethwaite of the Indianapolis News, Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star, F. W. Wile, H. C. Bryant of the New York World and Robert Allen of the Christian Science Monitor.

The board held another meeting. President J. Fred Essary of the Baltimore Sun, and Edgar Markham of the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press moved and seconded the following resolution, which was unanimously adopted:

"Resolved, that a constitutional protest of more than ten active members, assigning reasonable cause, having been filed against the nomination of Benito Mussolini for non-resident membership, his name is hereby withdrawn from further consideration in accordance with the by-laws of the club."

It is unnecessary here to recount the stormy session of the club when the leading Washington correspondents denounced Mussolini as "the archenemy of a free press in our time, and perhaps all time." Naturally enough, the party press of Italy which printed columns of eulogy of the Washington club and congratulated everyone on the election of the Duce, emphasizing particularly the supposed fact that American journalists are not inimical to the Italian situation, but are, they said, really supporters and lovers of Fascism, printed not a word about the Duce's expulsion a few days later.

At this point the reader may ask how it has come to pass that Fascism has enjoyed a tremendous popularity in America and other countries when it is evident that the foreign journalists in Rome are almost unanimously opposed to the movement and its Fuehrer. There are many answers.

First and most important is the fact that the chief propaganda agency of Fascism, the aforementioned Stefani bureau, had and still has an exclusive contract with the Associated Press of America. And, although this may appear unbelievable to laymen, the Associated Press correspondent for the entire first decade of Fascism was an Italian journalist who loved Fascism, hated the Opposition, and (upon the authority of his American assistants) refused even to read the Opposition press, let alone send out Opposition views. If the Associated Press had employed Karl Radek, No. 1 Bolshevik propagandist in Moscow, the situation would have been paralleled.

The New York Times, the most powerful and influential newspaper in the United States, employed from the beginning of Fascism, and still employs today, an Italian journalist who has become a greater apologist for the Duce and his regime than any of the public-relations counsel hired in America. And there are other Italians who represent or have represented foreign newspapers, notably the London Daily Mail and Reuters. Thus, if one takes the correspondence of the Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, and the London Daily Mail, all friendly to Fascism, it is apparent that a body of public opinion in the two countries has been formed which the rest of the journalists working (and censored) in Rome cannot possibly change.

By the Fascist decree of February 20, 1928, Article 1, a roll of professional journalists was created and no Italian is permitted to practice journalism unless his name appears on the list. "Professional journalist, apprentices, and publicists are minutely controlled. Every applicant for admission to the roll must give ample proof of good moral and political standing, the latter being judged not only by the officials in charge of the roll, but also by the prefects of the provinces. Foreigners may practice the profession of journalist provided they fulfill the same requirements." [2] In other words every Italian journalist must be a Fascist; if a foreigner he must be pro-Fascist. "The Agenzia Stefani, a press agency similar to the Associated Press in America and Havas in France, is still intact and furnishes national and international news. . . . By means of this agency it is obviously easy to supply uniform, censored, and official approved political news to all Italian papers. Official announcements and news favorable to Fascism are continually issued by Stefani both at home and abroad." [3] The journalists' syndicate, according to an official of the press bureau, Amicucci, has been made into "an instrument uniquely political, at the orders of the Duce and the Fascist Party."

One distinction must be made: the foreign correspondent, who is forced into almost daily compromises, will suffer merely deportation if he offends the government, whereas the Italian who represents foreign newspapers faces five years imprisonment on the penal islands if he writes news unfavorable to Fascism.

And yet, under these circumstances, the Associated Press, which still claims it is the most honest and truthful organization in America, employed an Italian for ten years in Rome, and the New York Times, for all its declarations of "All the news that's fit to print," is still printing news out of Italy which gives only the Fascist viewpoint. For years the house organ of American publishers. Editor & Publisher, the liberal weeklies. The Nation and The New Republic, and also the weeklies Time and Newsweek and the unique New Yorker, have remarked upon this amazing situation. It grew even more so when a special writer for the New York Times, an American, in July, 1935, published an uncensored article which made odious comparisons inevitable:

Extracts from cables from the "Times" regular correspondent, Signor Arnaldo Cortesi:

The people have become accustomed to the idea that war is not only inevitable, but also necessary for a solution of some of Italy's most pressing problems.

Nobody who watched the troops leave the cities for embarkation points en route to East Africa could doubt that they were keen and happy to go.

The present Italian public opinion was shown during Mr. Mussolini's recent trip to Sardinia. The population of that proud, warlike island, which supplied the army's best divisions during the world conflict, gave overwhelming approval to the course he has followed.

The Sardinians were roused to great patriotic fervor ...

With public opinion in its present mood, Mr. Mussolini's truculent policy has the support of all Italians ....

Extract from wireless from the "Times" special correspondent, Anne O'Hare M'Cormick:

... Mr. Mussolini has not gone out of his way to make unnecessary enemies. Yet he faces the most difficult time since the killing of Giacomo Matteotti, Socialist deputy, by Fascisti.

In many years this correspondent has not heard such widespread open grumbling, particularly among the peasants. The war boom and active building operations keep money circulating in the cities, but privation pinches in the rural districts. The people everywhere are restive under the tightening of political, economic, and financial restrictions.

The Cortesi item is dated July 5th and the M'Cormick item July 2nd; on June 13th Mussolini had ordered the expulsion of the Chicago Tribune correspondent, David Darrah, who arrived in Italy to take the present writer's place almost ten years ago. For ten years Mr. Darrah had honestly tried to cable all the news about Italy, stopping short of facts which he knew would lead to his expulsion, and waiting, as most correspondents in Rome wait, for a story important enough to risk that eventuality. It came in the Ethiopian crisis.

In the Cortesi cable it will be noted that Sardinia is the happiest of all Italian provinces over the prospects of the bloodshed in Africa. In the Darrah correspondence, for which he was deported, a different story is told. On the Saturday before his expulsion from Italy Darrah had "a story commenting on the situation of a quasi 'revolt in Sardinia culminating in the sending of the cruiser Zara to Cagliari to impress the population with Il Duce's visit and his distribution of largesse to the suffering Sardinians. He also sent another story pointing out the catastrophic conditions to which thirteen years of Fascism had brought the Italian public finances, with an incredible increase in the national debt." [4] Darrah had also cabled that there were mass arrests in Italy, a fact which the Manchester Guardian had published weeks earlier, and a report that the King and several high officials were opposed to adventure in Ethiopia.

The foregoing episode is the latest in a thirteen-year series of deadly parallels which have been [5] or might be made between the cables from Signor Cortesi and his father, Salvatore Cortesi, who was recently retired by the Associated Press, and the cables of the majority of the journalists in Rome. For these two gentlemen point 8 of the Fascist catechism, "Mussolini is always right," has apparently been the complete code of the ethics of journalism.

There are three types of correspondents in Rome: the volunteer unpaid propagandists, the bribed, the mental lackeys, and the Italians; the majority, fundamentally honest, who are realistic enough to trim sails and make necessary compromises until a situation arises which makes a decision imperative; and the few who defy the censorship, smuggle news across the frontier, fight the dictatorship, and accept deportation as part of the game.

The commonest form of bribery is the gift of free use of the Italian cables or wireless up to 5,000 words a month. Practically all the pro-Fascist press in the United States and other countries apply for or accept this bribe. When the present writer took over the Chicago Tribune bureau in 1925 he was almost immediately threatened with the loss of this Fascist gift if he failed to support the Duce. Needless to say the owner of the Tribune knew nothing about this bribe, but the business manager of the Paris edition of the paper not only knew about it, but wrote to my successor suggesting that he try to get the free cable restored.

A handshake from Mussolini has been found to work wonders in emotional reaction from leading democrats and self-announced exponents of freedom of the press. The only explanation members of the New York Times staff have been able to give for the continued use of pro-Fascist correspondence is that the late and famous owner, Adolph S. Ochs, never got over a visit his representative arranged to the Chigi Palace and the handshake which resulted. There are also many American editors and correspondents who take the commendatore ribbon as seriously as the ubiquitous French Legion d'honneur. And there is of course the annual 5,000,000-lire propaganda fund for press propaganda abroad.

All in all, as has been said, Fascism has been a great success in the world press, and credit is due almost entirely to the journalist who is dictator. Thanks to his efforts, the vast majority of newspaper readers throughout the world believe that he led the march on Rome, that he saved Italy from Bolshevism, that he balanced the budget, that Fascism economy was a success until Wall Street crashed in 1929, and that Fascism is a social philosophy worth serious consideration among desperate nations.

The world may also have been told that freedom of the press exists in Italy. In January, 1927, the Duce said to a congress of journalists: "You express an error if you suppose I have suppressed liberty of the press." On May 26, 1927, he admitted that "all the journals of the Opposition have been suppressed," but in 1930 he wrote and signed and sold an article in which he stated:

"Italian journalism is free because it serves only a Cause and a regime; it is free because it can, and does, exercise functions of control, criticism, and propulsion, within the compass of the laws of the regime. I deny absolutely in the most absolute manner that the Italian press lives in the realm of dullness and uniformity." [6]

When Marmontel, author of Les Contes Moraux, was a prisoner in the Bastille he complained about it to the governor. The governor replied: "It is true you are not allowed to go out of here, but inside the Bastille you are as free as any man in the world."

_______________

Notes:

1. L'Abominable Venalite de la Presse.

2. Summary of Articles 5, 6, and 7. From Making Fascists by Herbert W. Schneider and Shepherd B. Clough.

3. Idem.

4. Cable from Paris to Chicago Daily News, from Edgar Ansel Mowrer.

5. Cf. "You Can't Print That" (1929) and "Freedom of the Press' (1935).

6. New York World, March 2, 1930, first page, magazine section.

[admin]

CHAPTER 28: Let There Be Culture!

Without Art there is no civilisation. I believe that Art marks the dawn of every Civilisation. . . .
-- (Mussolini, address, Accademia delle belle Arti, 1926.)

EVENTUALLY THE NECESSITY OF EXHIBITING TO THE WORLD AN advance in culture as well as in patriotism and the train schedule, impressed itself upon the fulminating mind of the dictator.

Himself a novelist, essayist, student of philosophy, violinist, and associate of the Futurist artist Marinetti, Mussolini in the years of relative peace which followed the silent revolution felt himself competent to direct the seven great arts and censor the seven lively arts.

In politics he had accepted as his hero Machiavelli's prince, who was Borgia; he had proclaimed himself a modern "enlightened tyrant," but in the arts he thought of other tyrants, one contemporary with his hero, Lorenzo the Magnificent, the great patron, and another who long before Italy gave birth to the Renaissance ruled an era of grandeur in Athens.

The age of Pericles and Plato, the golden age of Greece when creative mind reached unequalled fruition, when art and science flourished, when even everyday workers, stone masons who cut the steles for the tombs of the dead, were possessed of a feeling of beauty such as has never been felt by a race or a people before or after, followed, it is true, closely upon victories at sea and on land, Marathon and Salamis. But Athens then did not become, as Kaiser Wilhelm once hoped or Mussolini now desires his people to become, swollen with military glory, dominating other peoples and spreading kultur to all lands considered inferior. All that Athens had after her wars was a feeling of safety and freedom: the enemy no longer threatened its gates and the wolf no longer skulked at the doors of men who felt the creative instinct.

Mussolini, writing of tyrants, compliments his predecessor, Pericles. The Greek was considerably a demagogue and somewhat a tyrant, the true enlightened tyrant whom Mussolini once called the best of governors and whom he wished to emulate. Pericles had the breadth of mind of a statesman, a prince, and an artist. Under him Athens rallied to rebuild the ravages of war and to make life a finer, nobler thing; under the modern tyrant all life becomes a struggle for survival, a battle for food and clothing and shelter, and while the tyrant rebuilds the army there is no rebuilding of the human spirit. Pericles emptied the war chests for remaking and ennobling his city-empire; Mussolini spent the national wealth upon maintaining himself in power, by creating a private militia, doubling the strength of the army, preparing the nation for war.

Pericles, innately an artist, gathered about him the leaders in sculpture, architecture, philosophy, science, art, and learning, while he who calls himself an enlightened tyrant today, followed the example by creating a national academy, subsidizing its members, and organizing art exhibitions where the painters are given Fascist propaganda themes before they are allowed to put brush to canvas.

In April, 1929, when the thirty members of the first Fascist Academy were announced, the great men of Italy were conspicuous by their absence. D'Annunzio, Croce, Ferrero, Papini, Ugo Ojetti, Sem Benelli and Grazia Deledda had either refused membership or had not been asked to join. Croce the philosopher and Ferrero the historian were not asked because they were living under police surveillance since they were admitted, although inactive, anti-Fascists, and Signora Deledda, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1927, had two failings — she was not a Fascist and she was disqualified by her sex. The absence of d'Annunzio was the most remarked. In 1930 he had occasion to explain the mystery. He had replied to Mussolini's invitation with a short note.

"A thoroughbred horse," wrote d'Annunzio, "should not mix with jackasses. This is not an insult, but an eugenic-artistic fact."

Notable members of the Academy are Pirandello, Marinetti, and Guglielmo Marconi. On accepting the presidency, the inventor of the wireless said: "Italy's soul is growing as its body grows. Arts never were on a higher plane. Intellectual freedom never was so prevalent." (That same month seven professors in almost as many universities were arrested for insisting on academic freedom.)

For the new academicians MussoHni established a new uniform consisting of a three-cornered hat reminiscent of the war of 1812, a coat similar to that worn by officers of the colored branch of the Knights of Pythias, with frogs, epaulets, and gold braid, and trousers like those worn by the Louisiana Zouaves in the Civil War but in the color of the French spahis; polo boots, a sword, spurs, and sidearms. The Academy was instructed to combat every foreign influence in art, notably American motion-picture films, German architecture, and French literary style. No artistic work was to receive approval unless 100 per cent Italian in style and inspiration.

The education of youth was entrusted to the only philosopher who has accepted Fascism, Gentile, whose first occupation was the reformation of the entire public-school system. The now famous Gentile reform is "based on the principle that the State should aim at a formative rather than a practical education, seeking to educate in the original sense of the word rather than to instruct; a humanist education would achieve this end." [1]

In practice the system has not been carried out completely; it has come into conflict with the Catholic Church, and it has been thoroughly corrupted by the militarization of youth which Mussolini later insisted must be injected into it.

Gentile aimed at humanitarianism; Mussolini established rifle practice in the high schools and machine-gun shooting in the universities of Italy. The one aimed at the ennobling of the character of youth, the latter made class hatred an absolute part of the intellectual life of the nation's fountains of learning and enlightenment. Mussolini has had all the textbooks rewritten so that today there is an actual perversion of the facts of world history, and he has banned from the public schools and from the universities all those who are not adherents of his party or who refuse to remain at least silent and docile followers of the course of instruction set down for them by the political party of which he is the hierarch.

It would indeed be difficult for the Anglo-American mind or even the Latin mind in those nations living in a tradition of freedom, to comprehend the situation in Italy. It would require an American citizen, for example, to imagine such a situation: The Democratic Party, let us say, having organized a secret militia and obtained arms through conspiracy with the Secretary of War, marches into Washington and establishes a party dictatorship. Having pacified the country, it proceeds, in due time, to appoint presidents of universities who are judged more by their enthusiasm for the party than on pedagogical merits, orders every public-school teacher to become a politician or quit, then rewrites the history of the nation and gives orders regarding painting and science and general culture, all of which, in the future, must have a political party bias.

Under this new regime, then, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, having been classified as Republicans, are pronounced inferior to say James J. Whiffletree, the man who led the "march on Washington," and the Battle of Gettysburg is placed second to that event. Eventually the Whiffletree-Democratic Party announces that it is the element which won the World War. It is so written in the new school books. Militarism is exalted as the rule for success and the defeatist words "First in peace" are erased from the remaining statues of Washington while "First in war" are underlined. Jefferson, the Garibaldi of his time, is erased from history books because of having been a "radical, traitor, and Bolshevik." Under the new regime whatever Whiffletree decrees is art, is Art.

This is just what Fascist education has done or aims to do. Going from the ridiculous to the actual, here is an instance: The government has published a series of "unique" textbooks, one for each grade, which are obligatory in private as well as public schools. In the reader for the fourth form there is given the life of the greatest man who ever lived in Italy, Benito Mussolini, paraphrased like the life of Jesus Christ, from the time of birth in the house of his poor parents in Nazareth-Predappio, until that day when his spirit conquers Rome. In this book the martyrdom of Christian saints is replaced by the history of "Fascist Martyrs," the young men who, despite being armed with guns and clubs, sometimes met their death in, battles with their usually unarmed and outnumbered opponents. "One can hardly believe that human barbarity had reached such depths," comments the textbook. The Fascist militia is exalted in many pages and children are taught it is their duty "to love at the same time, the book and the gun, the two arms of knowledge."

In geography, astronomy, and history, Fascist teachers have to acknowledge that there is a universe and that a few but less important nations exist, but practically all the teachings relate to Rome and Italy, to the Caesars who built the past empire and their successor who just as capably rules the present.

The second greatest event in recent history is the World War and it was won almost single-handed, too, by the Fascisti. I myself am not a military genius nor a superpatriot but with some pride I have heard from the lips of two men, Hindenburg and Foch, calculated statements that the 10 or 20 per cent advantage in troops which America had at the front broke the stalemate which the French and British, outnumbered and outgunned, had succeeded in maintaining, and won the war — it is not only historically but militarily true— but in Italy some millions of children repeat in the Coue fashion, over and over, "At the battle of Vittorio Veneto the Italian nation won the World War;— at the battle of Vittorio Veneto the Italian nation won the World War." The Italian nation, as every well-brought-up child ought to know, was the Fascist nation. Mussolini, single-handed, had forced the country into the war. He had reorganized the nation after Caporetto. It is true there were other nations involved, but they were merely allies of Italy.

But in all history the greatest event is the conquest of Rome in 1922. Much more important to world civilization than the war. Because here it was that Mussolini capitalized the war victory and gave the victors, the Fascisti, their reward, the rule of the nation. Their heirs and assigns, the children-readers of this textbook must drink deep of the fountain of militarism. They must repeat:

"Italy, a hundred years ago divided and enslaved, is today one of the greatest powers of the world, presenting an admirable spectacle of discipline, work, and faith. The heroes and the martyrs of the Risorgimento, of the Great War, and the Fascist Revolution have made our country free, united, prosperous, and strong. It is now your turn to grow up healthy in mind and body, to continue the work, so that Italy may once more be a splendid lighthouse of civilization. You must be ready, as were your fathers and grandfathers, if the country calls you, to fly to arms and die serenely should the safety and greatness of your country exact from you this supreme sacrifice."

In intellectual centers, today, there is no longer any protest. It is the accepted order. A critical date in the history of Italian cultural degeneration is March 28, 1926, when the universities held their national congress of philosophy in Milan. The subject for discussion the opening day was "Culture and Liberty." Both items scared the mayor of the city. He ordered the dissolution of the congress the very afternoon of the opening day, and the congress closed after voting a protest "against an act of violence which pretends, but in vain, to limit the domain of philosophy and the thoughtful life."

But the university men guessed wrong. It is neither a pretension nor is it in vain; it is a very real fact that from 1926 to the present day the minor inquisition of the universities has brought about their complete Fascistization. Today no professor may teach in the higher schools unless approved by the Fascist Party and given a card of legitimation or tessera. He must declare himself an adherent of Mussolini's. As first assistant to the Duce, Augusto Turati, had declared that "In my capacity as secretary of the party I assume the direct organization of the professors, lecturers, and assistant instructors of Fascist universities, the most important category of studies efficaciously operating in the kingdom, with the definite intention of giving them a solid and harmonic organization according to the principles of the necessity of Fascism. . . . [Outside the universities] in the Fascist federation, the university professors will bring the precious contribution of their wisdom. . . ."

Every day the Fascist press brings news of how things go under this "totalitarian" system which is making Italy a Fascist Utopian cultural state. As for example: [2]

Revocation.

The Professor Livio Prati is dismissed from the chair of psychiatry and neuropathology on account of incompatibility with the general political directives of the Government. (D.M. 14 July 1930.)

Professor Joseph Rensi, who for many years had the chair of philosophy at the University of Genoa and who is considered one of the leading intellects of the kingdom, was arrested, imprisoned, dismissed, because the post-office censor found some remarks derogatory to Mussolini in a letter which Rensi's wife sent him.

In November, 1930, the new secretary-general of the Fascist Party addressed a circular to the university students of Italy, asking them to spy on their professors and instructors; it was not only their right, it was their duty to do so. They could show their fidelity to the party best by denouncing their teachers if the latter at any time said or did anything offensive to Fascism. "Your judgment," said Giuriati's circular, "towards your professors must be free and dictated by the surest Fascist intransigence; it must not depend on the kindness or the severity of the professor." Students are asked to be the instruments, "the most vigorous will of the battle of Fascism against the old world of democratico-liberals" with which there could be no relations in common.

And so it goes.

First to see that culture would die under a political party's control of the universities was — Matteotti. He declared there was an internal police system at work in the universities, watching both students and professors and reporting to the Fascist Cheka on all liberal thought and action. Matteotti said: "With the imposition . . . of a State philosophy in the secondary schools and with the political oath imposed on all teachers, even in the universities, the education system has completely lost its lay quality ... the teachers' organizations have been rendered valueless ... the decrees promulgated by the Fascist Minister of Education, profiting by the plenary powers of the government, have thrown the education system of the country into confusion."

Education, that is, pure education, has ceased to exist. In Italy as in Russia it is now class education, in Russia Communist education, in Italy Fascist education, which aims to give a political propaganda bias to everything, succeeds in history completely, somewhat in geography and philosophy and other branches, in almost everything, in fact, but mathematics. (It is only in Germany, the present great stronghold of anti-Semitism that the universities and their students have rejected Einstein, not because they understand or fail to understand the theory of relativity, but because they know that after all its exponent is nothing but a "sau Jude".)

In Italy, as in Germany, the chief purpose of the ultra-nationalist movement is military superiority. The schools are merely primary grades for the Fascist militia and the army of the future. Militarism, inculcated in youth, will make easy the militarization of the whole country. Moreover, the first education in army training is distinctly Fascist, as distinguished from royal, or belonging to the King, and the spirit of the warrior is a party spirit, which the school-teachers are ordered to prepare.

Every Sunday and every holiday at least 400,000 youths aged eighteen to twenty, all too young to be called for the obligatory eighteen months' army service — a shorter term, it may be mentioned, than the three-year period which the Duce himself escaped by going to Switzerland when he reached the age of conscription — are lined up on all the army parade-grounds of Italy, which for those days become an armed camp, when officers give the first instructions. Anyone failing to attend is severely punished. Fearing a protest from the Pope, the Fascisti announced that "field masses" would be held and the blessing of God called down upon those preparing for future bloodshed.

"The dawn of life," "The hope of the nation," "The army of tomorrow," Mussolini calls his Balillas, or militarized youth movement. Each boy is given a rifle to mark his entrance into full Fascist membership. He is promised it in the Balilla booklet: "Youthful conscripts of the Fascist revolution receive the rifle as the youth of ancient Rome received the toga of virility. It is one of the most beautiful celebrations of the party and most significant."

At the age of eight Italian boys are taken into the Balilla and militarized until the age of fourteen, when the Avanguardisti take them up to eighteen. It was to fill the gap 18 to 20 that the Fascist Grand Council made its 1930 law which begins army training on Sundays and holidays for that period. The official figures for Balilla vary from 800,000 to 950,000; Avanguardisti from 300,000 to 400,000; there are, in short, more than a million of them being militarized and a little less than a million girls and young women, in two similar organizations, Piccole Italiane and Giovani Italiane, who also receive some military training.

Having thus militarized the national culture of the future, the "enlightened tyrant-Prince" with one of those grandiose gestures for which he is now famous, one day devoted his thoughts to culture. Contributing to L'Arte Fascista, he wrote this manifesto: "Let us not waste the patrimony that has come down to us from the past, and let us further and create a new patrimony which shall be the peer of that past. Let us create a new art, an art of our own, a Fascist art."

He then placed the future of painting in the hands of his companion in early prisons and his colleague in the original fascio, that same rebel artist Marinetti who in writing the Futurist Manifesto, began with these revolutionary words:

We intend to destroy the museums and burn the libraries!

We hate unto death vulgarity, academic mediocrity, pedantry, and the cult of antique and worm-eaten art!

We intend to raise love to the sphere of danger!

We shall sing the songs of war!

In 1930 Fascism was ready to show the world what it had accomplished: it held its first exposition in Paris, where a hundred canvases, reeking with paint in cubes and circles, with words written across them, were shown an expectant art world: the show was a decided black eye for perspective, a swift kick to harmony in colors, and a "morte" for composition, a thumbed nose to significant form, altogether a dizzying spectacle, a cry for Fascist freedom.

It was also a complete return to the modern art — of the spring of 1914. It was Marinetti's Futurists back to the very day they dropped art for war. On the canvases the Futurist corpse of 1914 was stretched gaudily dead, with the signatures and dates of the living moment.

In 1933 modern Fascist art repeated its show in the Kronprinzenpalast in Berlin. The noted critic, Walter Mehring, saw nothing modern nor Fascist in it. "Severini, who once painted a turbulent chef-d'oeuvre in his 'Bal Tabarin,'" he reported, "shows us today a still life in the pure French tradition of Braque. Carra, co-founder of the Valori plastici and Futurism, has returned to Impressionism, and the canvases of Montarini have nothing modern about them but the date 1932. Chirico, in the portrait of his. brother, 'The Black Shirt,' alone recalls Fascism in its effect on color. This canvas was painted in . . . 1910! Chirico, Carra, Funi have become first in Italy in the tradition of classicism. I repeat: the first in Italy. Because modern Italian painting has done nothing but imitate Picasso, the pioneer in all new styles and also in neo-classicism. 'Ils pissent sur mes talons,' he says of all his young imitators. And, in fact, it is he who has revolutionized classicism."

But in Italy laws, decrees, orders can be issued regulating art. Painters, sculptors, architects, in order to participate in exhibitions, work on government orders, and produce statues for the cemeteries, the important lucrative outlet for the sculptors, must belong to a Fascist syndicate and must therefore imbibe Fascist politics and culture, translate them into their work. At the Venice International and the Monza decorative arts salons Fascisti are given the prominent place and almost all the prizes, and the only pictures and statues taken by the government are those of syndicate members. The jury in all cases receives orders from Rome; the commission of the ministries likewise sees to it that only members of the Fascist Academy and the party organization are honored by prizes and purchase.

But the Duce's latest stroke of genius concerned the 1930 Venice exposition when he gave the order that all the painters must symbolize Fascism in some manner if only by the title to their canvas. Most of the pictures were illustrations; many were symbolic concoctions of the spirit of Fascism; there were numerous military scenes — the Black Shirts charging — could it have been unarmed civilians? — with the bayonet, or Mussolini on a white or black or red horse, riding into Rome. (Somehow no one thought of painting him entering the Eternal City in a Pullman sleeper.)

In defense, the authorities offer the fact that from primitives to present-day portrait painters, artists took orders from popes, princes. and patrons; Titian and Michelangelo and the greatest painter of all time, El Greco, not excepted. They also hint that the Soviets influence writers and painters, but it is nevertheless true that the enforcement of politics upon esthetics in Italy is unique in the history of the world. Up to now the results, too, are unique. They are mostly propaganda and make nice railroad posters.

Of the making of books there is no end: Fascist books dealing with party politics and party philosophy, if such a term can be used; the fiction produced in the past thirteen years outside of the works of the old writers have not been worth while translating or reading. The leaders of the march on Rome, De Bono, De Vecchi, and Italo Balbo, two of whom have the upbringing and training of men of violence, have written prefaces to books on poetry, and one of the new authors, Virgilio Fiorentino of Florence, is called the equal of Virgil and Homer, the master of Milton.

His great Fascist epic is called Le 27 Cantate delta Rivoluzione, the twenty-seven songs of the revolution, in twenty-seven volumes, each illustrated in modern art, each bound in sumptuous leather, the total costing some $600. Once a month the lucky subscriber receives this reminder of Fascist creative genius, richer and thicker than has yet come from the mind of mortal man.

This is the story in Fiorentino's masterpiece: At the beginning there is a divine intervention of the Trinity against Satan, who is seeking to destroy Holy Rome by means of Russian Bolshevism. The Unknown Soldier, Dante, and the Virgin Mary appear before Almighty God — this writer has no intention of being sacrilegious, he is merely reporting the facts — and ask for aid. God decides to invest Benito Mussolini with supernatural power and in consequence sends the Archangel Gabriel to visit the offices of the Popolo d'Italia in Milan, to present to the future Duce the lictor's emblem, the fascio, as a symbol of Divine Will.

Hell becomes alarmed and Satan sends one of his worst devils to the Versailles Peace Conference, the devil enters into the soul of President Woodrow Wilson, takes on the body of Wilson, and sends Wilson to the infernal regions. At Versailles, the devil, replacing Wilson, persuades the plenipotentiaries to steal the Roman goddess of victory and to deliver her enchained to Yugoslavia.

This action infuriates Mussolini, who immediately forms the Fascist Party and burns the Socialist newspapers of Milan; then begins a continual battle with the radical forces, which, however, at the general elections of 1919 are able to capture the goddess of victory and place her on a rock in Dalmatia, for delivery to Lenin!

In nick of time d'Annunzio, with the eagles of his aviation, flies to the aid of Mussolini and even Satan cannot stop him, although he has the aid of Premier Giolitti. Nevertheless, God believes that the goddess of victory is still in danger and sends the angels to save her and to place her, for permanent safety, in the offices of Benito Mussolini in Milan. Mussolini, in a noble strophe, then swears to protect her with his life and until his death and to transport her to Rome, where she will rest eternally as the defender of the grandeur of Latinity.

There follows a bloody battle, the angels of the Lord and the Black Shirts on one side, the devils and the Communists on the other, and as the former begin to scent victory, Mussolini, like Saint Paul, is carried to heaven by the angels, where God points out the beautiful future of Fascism.

In the last chant the doors of the Popolo d'Italia are burst open by the heavenly host and the goddess of victory, alive and in resplendent armor, is led by the Duce into the Eternal City. God descends from his throne to contemplate the spectacle, as the chief of the Black Shirts presents the goddess to the King. The gates of Saint Peter's open and the Sovereign Pontiff advances to bless the goddess, and the epic poem terminates with a touching scene in which the Pope, the King, and the Duce embrace each other fraternally.

The author, being poet and politician, does not miss an opportunity to say nasty things about America, Britain, Protestantism, and ex-Premier Nitti. The great work was chosen from several hundred submitted in response to an appeal addressed to "the poets of Fascist Italy." Fiorentino compares his style to that of the "Chanson de Roland"; he has written 20,000 verses and expressed his purpose as aiding in the love feast of the Roman Catholic Church and the Fascist Party. (But that was before the break with the Vatican of the summer of 1931.)

The censorship of books was established with the following order: "From now on the publishing-houses are invited to submit the proofs of all works which have a political character or content, to the Fascist federations, in order to permit a close censorship. In case of doubt, uncertainty, or controversy, the federations must transmit the proofs to the press office of the National Fascist Party, whose decision shall be final." [3] In addition, an index expurgatorius is sent to all book-dealers. Italy alone among civilized nations banned All Quiet on the Western Front. This book was considered dangerous to the spirit of militarism.

Under the circumstances, therefore, of censorship and supernationalism which Mussolini thought would create an atmosphere similar to that in Athens in the time of Plato, culture, instead of prospering in Italy, has, in the opinion of most foreign critics, gone to its grave. Even Italians admit it is moribund. Similar to the Nazi leader's declaration, "When I hear talk about culture, I want to draw my revolver," is the explanation the noted theoretician of Fascism, Signor Ugo Ojetti, makes for the decrease in book publication in Italy. "Reader," he says in his newspaper, "let not the small number of books under review amaze you. Ours is an era of action, when not books but deeds matter. Instead of reading superfluous books, read rather — and reread — the speeches of the leaders."

Ernest Boyd, reviewing the London Times 1935 special Italian number literary supplement, calls it "a frank confession of intellectual sterility; no name of any original distinction is mentioned belonging to a newcomer. Many fine writers are ignored, others are mentioned and praised in the precise degree of their acceptance of Fascism. . . . Italian culture, under Fascism, has nothing to offer the world. This may, as everyone assures us, make the trains run on time, but it does not interest those of us who heard of Italy before Mussolini invented this expensive way of advertising that not altogether obscure country."

In the preparation of the new Italian Encyclopaedia the two Senators in charge reported that there was not a single savant among the Fascisti, not a single man of letters, not a single intellectual capable of carrying on the great work, so they employed non- or anti-Fascist talent.

When the party press discovered this act of treason it let loose its polemical tirades. Senators replied there would be no encyclopaedia unless the right men were employed regardless of politics. The semiofficial Il Tevere answered that "if there is penury of competence in the Fascist camp, if Fascism has little in common with culture, it is of no great matter. The Fascisti have done and are doing more important things than making encyclopaedias. The matter might just as well be dropped."

At the end of the first half-decade of Fascism the Under Secretary of State, Giuseppe Bottai, admitted that "the sympathies of all those who in the academic field still occupy the first places are neutral or opposed to us."

As the years went on and the leaders of Italian culture still refused to accept dictatorship, the regime tightened its laws and decrees and deported a larger number of intellectuals to the Liparian Islands, On May 15, 1935, mass arrests of intellectuals took place in Turin, Milan, and other cities. Among the victims are noted university professors, including Professors Martinetti, Solari, Cosmo, Salvatorelli, and Giua, the scientist, whose wife also is in prison. The crime of the Giuas, however, is not intellectual opposition to Fascism, but being the parents of a political enemy. [4]

Returning from a visit to Italy, Anthony M. Turano wrote that "The atmosphere itself is so depressing that no outstanding writer has arisen here since the advent of the Dark Age of Fascism. Even the novelist is inevitably cramped and self-conscious, for fear he picture contemporary life in a manner unsuitable to the Fascist idea. The consequence might be imprisonment or exile. . . . Further- more, the psychological emphasis has been so completely switched to patriotic stupidities, that there is no longer a reading public in the older sense. There is only the State and its trembling subjects." [5]

Angel Flores found that the young Fascist intellectuals have at last got around to transcendental quarrels over Form versus Content, furious hunts for the mot juste, and an attempt to surpass "the perfect beauty of their idol, the fairy-like Wilde," while the "revolutionary" writers in 1935 discovered James Joyce and immediately issued books with interior monologue as the feature. Critics ballyhooed Ettori Settani's Who Killed Giovanni Bandone? as a Fascist triumph. It is one of history's present ironies that the only important novel out of Italy under Fascism is an anti-Fascist novel. Of Fontaniara, by Ignazio Silone, one of the large group of intellectuals either in prison or exile, Clifton Fadiman says it is Italy's most valuable export in some years and adds that Fascism has "destroyed the simple, deep-rooted, and organic culture of agricultural Italy."

The collapse or death of culture under Fascism is probably a great surprise to Mussolini. He has willed otherwise. Early in his dictatorial career he made the following prediction: "The Italian school will again take its deserved place in the world. From our university chairs true scientists and poets will again illuminate Italian thought. . . . I have willed that in collaboration with the universities, departments of Fascist economics, of corporative law, and a whole series of fruitful institutes of Fascist culture, should be created. Thus a purely scholastic and academic world is being permeated by Fascism, which is creating a new culture through the fervid and complex activity of real, of theoretical, and of spiritual experiences."

But there is an apparent discrepancy between the will and the deed. Mussolini wills art, he wills Fascist economics, he brilliantly recognizes that civilization perishes without art, and in practice his assistants militarize and stultify, to use redundancy, the national mind. To the Duce's glittering generalities must be added the more practical expression of the president of the National Fascist Confederation of Intellectuals, who announced a goal for the membership: "Of journalists and writers we have requested that they engage in what may be called 'spiritual imperialism,' in the theater, the book, the newspaper, and by means of lectures."

The figurative donning of the black shirt by Italian culture was literally exemplified in November, 1934, when the corps of teachers of the nation, by order of the Ministry of Education, put itself into Fascist Balilla or Fascist militia uniforms consisting of black top boots, riding-breeches, tunic, black shirt, black fez. At the same time (November 7th) army officers in uniform took the places of the professors of the country and began in high schools and colleges the compulsory military culture courses announced two months earlier by Mussolini. No high school or college student can now pass from grade to grade unless he has a qualifying mark in militarism.

Under these circumstances the "liberation of the spirit" has no future in Italy; the present is best summed up by Professor Horace M. Kallen, who made a study of cultural conditions in Italy and reported that "What I saw and heard and read there left me with the feeling that where art and thought are concerned, Fascist Italy is not alive, but drugged and dead. ... In the world of art nothing is happening: only the Futurists whipping a dead horse and calling him Pegasus."

_______________

Notes:

1. Prezzolini.

2. Bulletin of the Italian Institute of Bio-Chemistry, Milan, September 15, 1930, p. 432.

3. January 29, 1929. Circular issued by the Fascist National Party, signed by Augusto Turati.

4. Manchester Guardian, June 7, 1935. Arrest of intellectuals was apparently not of enough importance for the American press.

5. American Mercury.